Talk:Baruch Spinoza

While at school he developed a lifelong passion for philosophy and in particular the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), which was overridingly concerned with the idea of God's existence. Spinoza was Jewish but was excommunicated as a heretic as a result of his work, and Christians also denounced him as an atheist. At school Lacan hung a diagram of the 'atheist' Spinoza's posthumously published Ethics on his bedroom wall - a clearly subversive act in light of his middleclass Catholic upbringing and a move often interpreted as an early indication of his attitude towards institutions and authority.

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In the history of psychoanalysis, several philosophers became subjects of a privileged confrontation with Freud. One such philosopher was Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). From the 1920s intellectuals noted correspondences between Freudian thought and Spinoza's philosophy (Smith, 1924; Alexander, 1927). This discussion continues to more recent times (Bodei, 1991; Ogilvie, 1993).

Freud himself rarely spoke of Spinoza. Although he referred to Spinoza in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910c), he did not explicitly mention Spinoza anyplace else. In the work of Jacques Lacan, Spinoza is often present in the background and occasionally cited. For instance, proposition 57 of part 3 of Spinoza's Ethics appears as an epigraph to Lacan's medical dissertation (1932).

Authors who have tried to situate Spinoza vis-à-vis psychoanalysis have pondered several different kinds of questions. W. Aron (1977) asked about the overall influence of Spinoza on Freud's thought. C. Rathbun (1934) noted that the libido, a fundamental concept of psychoanalysis, is adumbrated in Spinoza's concept of conatus, an inborn drive that leads to striving and persisting. On Walter Bernard's reading (1946), it is perhaps closer to eros or desire. But what, according to these authors, were Spinoza's therapeutic principles? These works today appear dated, indicative as much of the intellectual state of psychoanalysis, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, as of a poorly informed reading of Spinoza. Some authors, such as Abraham Kaplan (1977) recall that Spinoza's philosophy was not a proto-psychoanalytic science, but a very knowledgeable metaphysics. Francis Pasche (1981) discusses the idea of "practical psychoanalysis." Gilles Deleuze's work on Spinoza, Expression in Philosophy (1992), has opened the way toward a confrontation between Spinozistic and psychoanalytic ethics. Finally, several psychoanalytic authors (Bertrand, 1984; Ogilvie, 1993; Burbage and Chouchan, 1993) have discovered unconscious implications in Spinoza's philosophy.

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The influence of Spinoza

Introduction One of Lacan's achievements is that he has linked psychoanalysis with philosophy, linguistics and literature, and has, at th& same time, stressed its status as a science. Let us begin by looking at some of the interconnections between Lacan and philosophy. Freud disliked the speculations of philosophy but this did not prevent him from advancing his own speculative hypotheses. They are, however, subject to subsequent modifications and revisions. Freud's empiricism implies a high degree of conceptualisation. He believed that advances in knowledge are impossible without the constant renewal and enrichment of the work of conceptualisation. This is what Lacan has tried to do in his own work. Like Freud before him, Lacan objects strongly to the totalising ambitions of philosophy, its tendency to see itself as the primary form of explanation, and to its claims to being able to tell the whole truth. But whereas Freud chooses to identify his work with the slow, halting march of science, Lacan opposes philosophical totalisation on the ground that it is simply not possible to tell the ~ WhOle truth. The words that might allow one to do so are simply not there. - Among psychoanalysts, Lacan's interest in philosophy and his willingness to enter into theoretical controversy are the exception to the rule. He is constantly referring, for example, to St Augustine, Descartes,• Hegel, Kierkegaard, Malebranche, La Rochefoucauld, Spinoza and many others. Philosophy provides Lacan with an arsenal of references and allusions which can be used to make illustrative or pedagogic points. Lacan's career spans fifty years of French intellectual life, and it is only to be expected that it should reflect many of the cultural 28 ,.., I.

When we read Lacan's work we become aware of certain underlying assumptions about the nature of life, and the objects that we love. These assumptions owe a great deal to his study of Spinoza's Ethics.l The first thing to understand about Spinoza is that he was a determinist and believed that all things which come to pass, come to pass according to the eternal order and fixed laws of nature. He thought that all our actions are determined by our past experience, our physical and mental constitution, and by the state of the laws of nature. Second, we should note that he was a relativist. He held that nothing is good or bad in itself, but is so only in relation to someone. Since the same thing may at different times affect the same person differently, the goodness or badness of such a thing cannot be considered as an inherent property of it, but only as a property which comes into existence depending upon what relation it has to a human being at a specific historical moment. Given, therefore, the two facts that all events are determined by natural laws so that human subjects are not free, and also that things are not good or bad in themselves, then in what does the good life for human beings consist? For Spinoza, such a life consists in the possession of a certain attitude towards the world. This attitude is in part emotional and in part rational. The rational part of it consists in the recognition of the truth that all events are determined, the emotional part in an acceptance of this fact. Spinoza maintains that the idea that human beings have free will is false, an illusion engendered by not knowing what the causes of our actions are. On the other hand, he says, there is such a thing as human servitude or bondage. Human bondage consists in being induced to act by some causes rather than others. There are some causes - passive emotions such as fear, anger and hatred - which are 30 Jacques Lacan generated in us by the frustrating influence of the parts of the world that are outside us. But as well as these, he believes, we have active emotions, those generated by an understanding of our circumstances in the world, a knowledge of what is really going on. The more our activities are caused by active emotions and the less by passive ones, the less we are in bondage, the more we are ourselves. Spinoza believed that if there was confusion in the mind there was pain in the body. In passion, we are being acted upon (passivity). Clear ideas create the possibility of acting, the opposite of passion (activity). His view is that by the exercise of the intellect in gaining an understanding, we can make the passive emotions fade away so that their place comes to be occupied by the active emotions. Spinoza's philosophy offers guidance to people which, if followed, will enable them to avoid fear, anxiety and unhappiness. These arise only when we become slaves to our emotions; a person who does not take the broad view is a person 'in human bondage'. In short, people can liberate themselves by understanding that the course ofnatl!re is predestined and also by understanding that 'nothing is good'Q-f bad in itself, but that it only becomes good or bad depending upon how it affects us. To put it in another way, Spinoza is arguing that human beings will be happy when they come to understand that there are limits to human power; by understanding that everything which happens must happen necessarily, people will no longer dissipate their energy in struggling against these events. By looking at every event as part of a larger system ('in the context of eternity', to use his phrase), one will no longer be upset and frightened by the events that occur in life. Spinoza is important because he stresses the, idea that discovering what the hidden sources of your feelings and actions are will in some way be liberating, even though it does not literally increase ~ your freedom. It frees you from the frustration induced by being at the mercy of forces you do not understand. This thought is, of curse, central to the ideas of Freud and Lacan. Drawing on Spinoza, Lacan suggests that we should analyse and develop clear ideas, and that patients (analysands) should learn to act (but this, of course, is different from 'acting out'). Though we cannot avoid being subjects we can have some understanding of the processes involved. Lacan thinks that at the end of analysis

The uses of philosophy 31 there is a conclusion; people can come to a conclusion about their desire. Rather than be victims of their passion, analysands can act. It seems to me that Lacan has been influenced by Spinoza's determinism, his relativism and his view of the importance of understanding 'the passions'. The precise interconnections between their thought will become apparent as I explain Lacan's constantly evolving and dialectical 'syste~' in succeeding chapters.

See Also

• Althusser, Louis
• Breuer, Josef
• Determinism
• Doubt
• German romanticism and psychoanalysis
• Goethe and psychoanalysis
• Kantianism and psychoanalysis
• Oceanic feeling
• Philosophy and psychoanalysis
• Pleasure in thinking
• Rolland, Romain Edme Paul-Émile

References

1. Deleuze, Gilles. (1992). Expression in philosophy: Spinoza. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books.
2. Freud, Sigmund. (1910c). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. SE, 11: 57-137.
3. Lacan, Jacques. (1932). De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité. Paris: Le François.

Spinoza 3, 41, 49, 275 Seminar XI