Benedict de Spinoza · Philosophy
Spinoza calls our enslavement to the passions ‘human bondage’: when we are driven by emotions we do not understand, we are passive, tossed about by fortune. Freedom is not free will but understanding - replacing confused ideas with adequate ones, and so acting from our own nature.
Spinoza titles Part IV of the Ethics “Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions”. By bondage he means “the human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions” - our subjection to the passions. “The man who is subject to emotions,” he writes, “is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.” When we are driven by emotions whose causes we do not understand - when we are swept by anger, paralysed by fear, consumed by envy or grief - we are passive: things are happening to us, pushing us about, and we are carried along like a cork on the waves. We may feel that we are choosing, but in truth we are being moved by external causes working through our confused ideas. This is bondage: to be determined from outside, to live at the mercy of whatever fortune throws at us, our inner life a battlefield of forces we neither chose nor comprehend.
This is the human condition as Spinoza finds it, and he describes it without flinching and without contempt. He even formulates a hard law of the emotions: “An emotion can only be controlled or destroyed by another emotion contrary thereto, and with more power for controlling emotion.” You cannot simply decide to stop being afraid or to stop grieving; a bare act of will has no purchase on a passion. Reason alone, as cold knowledge, is too weak to dislodge a strong feeling. This sober realism sets up the central problem of the Ethics: if we are so thoroughly at the mercy of our passions, and if mere willpower cannot free us, then how is any freedom possible at all? Spinoza’s answer will require us to rethink what freedom even is.
Here we reach one of Spinoza’s most challenging doctrines: he denies that we have free will. Recall his necessitarianism - everything follows from the divine nature by necessity; nothing could have been otherwise. The human mind is no exception. Our every volition is itself caused by a prior cause, and that by another, in the same unbroken chain that governs all of nature. There is no faculty of the will floating free of the causal order, spontaneously initiating action. The feeling that we freely choose, Spinoza says, is an illusion born of ignorance: “men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.” We know that we want things; we do not see the causes that made us want them; so we imagine the wanting sprang from a free, uncaused self. A stone, if it were conscious as it flew through the air, would think it flew of its own free will.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Spinoza calls our subjection to the passions ‘human bondage’, and that for him freedom is not free will (which he denies) but the active power that comes from understanding - turning passions into actions by replacing inadequate ideas with adequate ones. Explain this redefinition of freedom.
Leads to Epictetus.
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