Spinoza and the importance of living together

Spinoza’s response to his notoriety was characteristically uncompromising. He wrote a book called The Theological-Political Treatise, in which he set out two arguments. First, he argued that philosophy and religion are separate and religion therefore has nothing to fear from philosophy. Second, he argued that the State needs philosophy if it is to flourish, but that it has nothing to fear from it because the State should have the power to shut down philosophy if it becomes seditious. So, this was a sort of large-scale political intervention, the largest of Spinoza’s lifetime. This is one of the books that he actually published, and it was met with a great deal of criticism.

As to this question of what the State can do to help us live co-operatively, I think that Spinoza considers a range of answers. An obvious point is that States have enough power to coerce people into obedience. They can use fear to make us obey the law. Spinoza doesn’t disparage this political tool at all, but he thinks that it should be used cautiously and wisely, because for obvious reasons, it breeds resistance.

Second, and this is the subject of a large chunk of The Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza is interested in the way that you can use what he calls “imagination”; that’s to say, everyday experiences of the world and the stories, fictions and fantasies that we build on to encourage our own obedience. Here, the case study that he concentrates on is Christian and Jewish religion, as it’s presented through the Bible. There are lots of interesting political reasons why Spinoza chose this case, but at the heart of his discussion is the argument that there are some people, notably prophets, who are remarkably good at presenting the situation that we are in in a particular light and encouraging us to act on those insights.

This model that Spinoza offers us, using the case of religion, has broader implications, because in States there are not only religious narratives but political narratives, origin stories and so on which serve to bind people together and make them identify with a law and feel able to live under it. Liberalism in modern democratic States, for example, offers us one kind of story about who we are, what’s going on and why we should obey the law. Modern democratic States generally recognise that we’re not all liberals, and they’re fairly pluralist about allowing other stories that allow diverse groups of people to live in the same coherent and cohesive fashion. So, this, Spinoza thinks, is an incredibly important tool, one that he gives us a picture of, one that we can then take away and think about for ourselves. It’s one that we will always need because many of us don’t have much philosophical understanding. We live in the light of our imaginative grasp of the world. It’s also important to Spinoza that the narratives we draw on don’t have to be fully true: they can have an element of fiction or fantasy about them. What matters is that they should function a certain way to make us all come together.

What role does philosophy have to play in this State? Spinoza argues that people who have a reasonable degree of philosophical understanding and the fortitude to put it to work can come to understand why they should live together co-operatively on the basis of their philosophical understanding rather than that of specific narratives. They can have, in Spinoza’s view, universal reasons for thinking that the best and most satisfying way for them to live is to come together. One of the advantages of that, Spinoza thinks, is that it enables people to co-operate for themselves. Nothing is forcing them from the outside. It’s just their own understanding creating this impetus and motivating them to try to live in that particular way.

So, that is how philosophy enters into the stage, and I think that Spinoza sees political government as the very complicated business of assessing what sort of a community you are and how to use these different tools to bring people together in a coherent and secure way. One might ask, well, what sort of State does that give you, constitutionally speaking? Spinoza thinks the best kind of State is a democracy. This is quite an unusual thing to say in the 17th century and it’s a point for which he is much applauded by 20th and 21st century commentators. However, what Spinoza means by democracy is not what we do.

One of the aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy that can be exploited is his idea that a State, let alone the people who live in it, is just a tiny part of this complex whole of individual things. A State, like an individual, is surrounded by forces much more powerful than itself and has to learn to accommodate itself to them. So, that part of learning to live successfully, not only co-operatively but satisfyingly, may consist of learning to accommodate yourself to the forces around you, including environmental forces.

Part of the project of learning to live in a secure and satisfying, joyful fashion is to learn to accommodate yourself to the world around you. It’s full of things that are much more powerful than you, and you’ve got to learn to co-operate with them. Here, one might think that Spinoza offers us a model that we can use in thinking about our relationship to the climate crisis. One of the things that States have to take account of is the need to maintain the conditions on which their survival depends. If they damage the environment too much, they too will be destroyed. So, the art of co-operation, the art of living together, extends beyond the human world, arguably to nature in general.