XCII Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the others’ death, dead in the others’ life.
(71)1
XCIII The same . . .: living and dead, and the waking and the sleeping, and young and old. For these transposed are those, and those transposed again are these. (71)
CII For souls it is death to become water, for wa-ter it is death to become earth; out of earth wawa-ter arises, out of water soul. (75)
XLI The death of fire is birth for air, and the death of air is birth for water. (47) (Fragments of Heraclitus)
Transitus ergo de hac vita mortali in aliam vitam immortalem, hoc est enim de morte ad vitam, in passione et in resurrectione Domini commen-datur.2
My decisive impulse to reflect upon Spinoza’s thoughts on life and death came from Piet Steenbakkers, who presented and argued for his far-reaching emendation of caput V in the appendix to Book 4 of the Ethics. In the emended version the text reads as follows:
Nulla igitur vita vitalis3 est sine intelligentia, & res eatenus tantum bonae sunt, quatenus hominem juvant, ut Mentis vita fruatur, quae intelligentia definitur.
Quae autem contra impediunt, quominus homo rationem perficere, & rationali vita frui possit, eas solummodo malas esse dicimus.
1 When quoting Heraclitus I will refer to the page numbers of Heraclitus 2004.
2 Augustine: Epistola 55, in http://www.augustinus.it/latino/lettere/lettera_055_testo.htm (15/03/2017).
3 Vita vitalis instead of vita rationalis.
If we modify correspondingly Edwin Curley’s rendering, we have the following translation:
V. No life, then, is worth living / lived in an eminent way without understanding, and things are good only insofar as they aid man to enjoy the life of the Mind, which is defined by understanding. On the other hand, those that prevent man from being able to perfect his reason and enjoy the rational life, those only we say are evil (Spinoza 1988, 589).
Piet Steenbakkers provided the community of Spinozists with an explanation of the emen-dation in his talk in London on the biannual meeting of ESEMP. The fundamental idea of my understanding of the whole issue appeared to me already during his talk, and this commencement of a kind of maturation process was furthered by the respective lectures of Ursula Renz and Olivér Tóth4 during the same meeting. When I mentioned my idea to Piet he was far from being as enthusiastic as I was, so I decided to write this paper in order to convince him.
Regarding the perennial big questions of life and death, the views differ as irreconcil-ably as in all fundamental questions in which the age-old debate within European thought manifests itself: the debate between the ascetic and the hedonistic style of thinking. We are all familiar with the bold Platonic formula maintaining philosophy as a preparation for death and dying. However, the Epicurean formula, according to which nothing touches us less than death, is at least as universally known as the Platonic one. The Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman culture of Europe has never really overcome this fundamental debate in any of its phases; in a number of respects it is closer, no doubt, to the ascetic views but in a number of other respects it has always been influenced considerably by hedonistic ones.
Abelard asserts famously in his Ethics concerning the appropriate behavior of a servant lethally threatened by his master that he ought to have resigned himself to being killed, instead of killing the former for no other reason than saving his own life. In the Christian view exemplified here by Abelard’s text, no concern for our own individual survival can legitimize the transgressing of the categorical commandment of “Thou shalt not kill!”.
When we speak about philosophy’s new beginning in the 17th century, however, we mean precisely the reversal of the perspectives and of the attitudes of the time. The new philosophy was built on the concept of an almost invincible striving to persevere in one’s proper life, although this philosophy itself was also rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition, of which Descartes’ metaphor of a tree is a reliable witness. As all parts of a tree are nourished and kept in existence by what they absorb through the roots from the soil, all parts of the newly formed system are permeated by the new philosophy’s Christian-metaphysical con-cept of God which I referred to as “philotheist” in a recent article.5
The influence of both these theses – being attracted by a type of asceticism permeated by a metaphysical concept of God, and being based on the concept of a striving to persevere
4 See chapter X in this volume.
5 Cf. Boros 2016, 365–377, esp. 366 sq.
in the finite entity’s proper being, linked to an at least moderately hedonistic attitude – can even more be maintained of Spinoza. His philosophy is rooted deeply in Jewish, Greco-Roman and Christian thinking, at the same time leading to a system that can be regarded as one of the first great accomplishments of modern European secular thought.
P7: The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.
P8: The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being involves no finite time, but an indefinite time (E3 P7 & 8, Spinoza 1988, 499).
The absolute dominance of the striving to persevere in the individual’s proper being could hardly be expressed less ambiguously; from this perspective, viewed from Spinoza’s meta-physical ontology of essences there is scarcely any place left for death. Death, on the other side of the divide, is a phenomenon that can be well-grasped physically, expressing itself in the physical beings’ inexorable falling apart. This is an obligatory ingredient of any epicurean physics, such as teaching on the bodies, Spinoza’s physics included. From this physical perspective, survival proves to be atopical, as it were. The ever-stable life has no place in Spinoza’s physics.
By singular things I understand things that are finite and have a determinate exist-ence. And if a number of Individuals so concur in one action that together they are all the cause of one effect, I consider them all, to that extent, as one singular thing (E2 Def7, Spinoza 1988, 447).
I. The human Body is composed of a great many individuals of different natures, each of which is highly composite.
[…]
III. The individuals composing the human Body, and consequently, the human Body itself, are affected by external bodies in very many ways.
[…]
VI. The human Body can move and dispose external bodies in a great many ways (E2 Post 1, 3, 6, Spinoza 1988, 462).
There is no singular thing in nature than which there is not another more power-ful and stronger. Whatever one is given, there is another more powerpower-ful by which the first can be destroyed.
[…]
P3: The force by which a man perseveres in existing is limited, and infinitely sur-passed by the power of external causes.
[…]
P4: It is impossible that a man should not be a part of Nature, and that he should be able to undergo no changes except those which can be understood through his own nature alone, and of which he is the adequate cause (E4 Ax, P3 & 4, Spinoza 1988, 548).
Given these intrinsic and apparently opposing tendencies – asceticism and hedonism, eternal essence and corruptible existence – one of the most important tasks of Spinoza’s philosophy is to explain how the metaphysical ontology-based concept of life can be main-tained in a system together with the physics-based concept of death, of disintegration.
Furthermore, how can the concept of God play more than a purely ornamental role in the system? For the concept of God plays a crucial role in propositions that can well be inter-preted within the horizon of the then contemporary mystical Christianity, rather than in a simple metaphysical or physical way.
P18: No one can hate God.
[…]
Cor.: Love toward God cannot be turned into hate.
[…]P19: He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.
[…]
P20: This Love toward God cannot be tainted by an affect of Envy or Jealousy:
instead, the more men we imagine to be joined to God by the same bond of Love, the more it is encouraged.
[…]P36: The Mind’s intellectual Love of God is the very Love of God by which God loves himself, not insofar as he is infinite, but insofar as he can be explained by the human Mind’s essence, considered under a species of eternity; i.e. the Mind’s intellectual Love of God is part of the infinite Love by which God loves himself.
[…]
Cor.: From this it follows that insofar as God loves himself, he loves men, and consequently that God’s love of men and the Mind’s intellectual Love of God are one and the same. […]
Schol.: From this we clearly understand wherein our salvation, or blessedness, or Freedom, consists, viz. in a constant and eternal Love of God, or in God’s Love for men. And this Love, or blessedness, is called Glory in the Sacred Scriptures6 – not without reason (E5 P18 & C & 19 & 20 & 36 & C & S, Spinoza 1988, 604 sq, 612).
In the first instance, one can obviously attempt to harmonize the paradoxical relation between life and death in Spinoza either by reducing life to the physical plane or by inter-preting death on the metaphysical plane. The following passage is an obvious example of an attempt by Spinoza to do both, because one can easily see its link to the passage on the conditions of possibility of the survival of bodies I quoted earlier:
6 As for the passages one can refer to cf. Wolfson 1934/1962, II, 311–317.
I understand the Body to die when its parts are so disposed that they acquire a different proportion of motion and rest to one another. For I dare not deny that – even though the circulation of the blood is maintained, as well as the other [signs] on account of which the Body is thought to be alive – the human Body can nevertheless be changed into another nature entirely different from its own. For no reason compels me to maintain that the Body does not die unless it is changed into a corpse (E4 P39S, C 569).
Thus, we can speak of death physically when the proportion of motion and rest among the ingredients of the body – or to put it in another terminology, its capability to act as a self-identical cause bringing forth its typical effects – changes to an extraordinary meas-ure. This event will unavoidably set in due course in every finite being’s life as its proper extreme, its limit value. This is what Spinoza asserts very seriously at the beginning of Part 4 of the Ethics quoted above: the potency-in-act of the external bodies overcomes infinitely that of our own body.
At this point, it seems reasonable to insert a short excursus on the suicide, which Spino-za’s official view treats as a special type of the being overcome by the potency of the external bodies.
The well-known sentences in E4 P18S leading to the pronouncement on suicide are as follows:
Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it demands that everyone love himself, seek his own advantage, what is really useful to him, want what will re-ally lead man to a greater perfection, and absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can. This, indeed, is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part (see IIIP4).
Further, since virtue (by D8) is nothing but acting from the laws of one’s own nature, and no one strives to preserve his being (by IIIP7) except from the laws of his own nature, it follows:
(i) that the foundation of virtue is this very striving to preserve one’s own being, and that happiness consists in man’s being able to preserve his being;
(ii) that we ought to want virtue for its own sake, and that there is not anything preferable to it, or more useful to us, for the sake of which we ought to want it;
and finally
(iii) that those who kill themselves are weak-minded and completely conquered by external causes contrary to their nature (Spinoza 1988, 555 sq.).
First of all, we must be aware of the difficulty the translator faces when attempting to avoid presenting Spinoza’s view as appearing more dogmatic than it really is. In the deeper layer of the Latin expression animo impotens it refers to what happens if we fail
to preserve our own being physically, while fixing what happens to the one who commits suicide only as a physical being. However, if we want to understand Rubens’ painting on Seneca’s suicide we will clearly miss the point if we summarize the event by asserting that Seneca was “weak-minded and completely conquered by external causes contrary to [his] nature”.
On the one hand, it can hardly be denied that if someone intends to remain healthy as long as she can, it will be necessary for her body to cooperate with the external bodies – “causes” – in a moderate, well-tempered way, controlled by herself. On the other hand, the immoderate cooperation, i.e. the one that gets out of her control will immediately turn against life, and not only against life as a physical-ontological phenomenon. This will be destructive for the respective proper life as well, insofar as the dynamic multi-level causal flow constituting her environment is no more governed by her, by her mind in the manner of a “spiritual automaton,” but by the embodied external powers. The embodi-ment of external powers does not relate to external bodies only. The ingredients of her own body threaten to merit less and less the adjective “proper” in the sense in which Eth-ics 2 Ax 4 singles out the respective “proper” body from among all other bodies of the environment.
We feel that a certain body is affected in many ways (Spinoza 1988, 448).
This means, that the complex being consisting of a soul-or-mind and a body has come to the point where it either does not at all feel anything anymore, or where its sensible parti-cles do feel – or even all the partiparti-cles may perceive, like in Diderot, a century later – but they do not have any felt experience whatsoever of I. They are no longer capable of singling out a certain affected body against all others, or against the whole in which all bodies are dissolved in the final analysis.
So far so good. But nothing has been said concerning death up to now that regards suicide as a particular form of death. For, agony can well be described generally as our becoming impotens, incapable to govern for ourselves as spiritual automata the order of the influences of external causes – that could include the particles of our own bodies, in extreme cases of lethal illness. But Spinoza does tell us more about suicide than what he says about death in general, and I propose to search for this “more” in the qualification of “impotens” in our above quotation, namely in the adverb animo. Those who commit suicide are not simply impotens but precisely animo impotens, i.e.: the origin of the suicidal person’s terrifying failure in preserving her being – in complying with the “normal” burden of external causes in one of the ways “normal” people do – is to be looked for in the soul or in the mind.
I do not want, however, to maintain that Spinoza worked out a sophisticated theory of the various species of death qua becoming impotens. One of the obvious reasons for not claiming this is that on the one hand, in Spinoza the differentiation between living and non-living things is not sufficiently clear. On the other hand, it is not an easy task to sepa-rate unambiguously the events that happen to the soul/mind from those happening to the
body. Everything that happens in any individual can equally be interpreted on the level of the body and on that of the soul/mind. So I would confine myself to a rather cautious inter-pretive statement. First, death as becoming impotens can always be interpreted as a process on both the bodily-physical, and on the metaphysical/ontological level of the soul/mind.
In the case of suicide however, we have to reckon with a bifurcation on the metaphysical plane. When interpreting suicide, not only the bodily-physical dimension, but also the part of the metaphysical dimension that can be analyzed on the level of reason, without considering intellectually the individual qua this unique individual will appear precisely as irrelevant for those explaining the occurrences leading to the agony. In this way, and corresponding to the well-known differentiation between the three kinds of cognition, we can differentiate between three layers in Spinoza’s interpretation of death. The first is the causal level of bodily events becoming fixed in the body/soul as traces of imagination and memory. The second is that of the processes in the soul that can be interpreted as a type of proto-psychology by way of reason’s general laws similar to the adequate knowledge of the physical phenomena. The third layer is that of the ineffable individuality, as it were, informed by the intellect. Here the individual does not only feel the involuntary manifes-tations of the general causal system of bodies in a “certain body” – such manifesmanifes-tations being pleasure, pain, etc. – but in addition she is also able to express their belonging to her as a unique individual through reflective knowledge. In this latter case, the relevant issue is not that she can make an objective-scientific statement belonging to the second layer, but that she cannot help integrating all possible scientific statements concerning her body-soul-mind in her literal lifelong striving for her real individual happiness; for not only pre-serving her being but continually increasing her intellect-based power of acting. Only the presupposition of this third layer of knowing herself establishes the accentuated sense for individuality that appears first in the very short preface to Book 2 of the Ethics,7 in order to unfold in those passages of Book 5 that belong to the so-called intuitive science as the highest mode of cognition.8 All these passages aim at the attainment of true individual happiness, whose truth and individuality stem evidently from its being the farthest from any kind of egotism. This is the real happiness Spinoza is looking for from the very
begin-7 “I pass now to explaining those things which must necessarily follow from the essence of God, or the infinite and eternal Being – not, indeed, all of them, for we have demonstrated (IP16) that infinitely many things must follow from it in infinitely many modes, but only those that can lead us, by the hand,
begin-7 “I pass now to explaining those things which must necessarily follow from the essence of God, or the infinite and eternal Being – not, indeed, all of them, for we have demonstrated (IP16) that infinitely many things must follow from it in infinitely many modes, but only those that can lead us, by the hand,