3 - Enduring Social Relations

Summary

The way in which Spinoza initially poses the social nature of humanity in the Scholia of Proposition 35 of Part IV of the Ethics can at first appear troubling: although people are most often a nuisance to each other, nevertheless, Spinoza explains, most are not able to live solitary lives and have need of others. Everything transpires as if human beings admit their nature as social animals as a kind of concession: you have make do with others, deal with them, even if deep down you cannot help but harbour a secret hope of doing without them. Humanity would thus be such that its social nature appears to be a nuisance – something that, even as part of its essence, takes the form of a constraint that must be endured, since one cannot make do without it and must make the best of a bad hand. In short, at first sight, human beings have a bad consciousness of their own nature as social and socialised beings. This is derived from the fact that, if human beings, insofar as they are essentially part of nature, are beings in and through the relations they enter into with other parts of nature, and notably with other people, those relations are primarily relations that they endure. In other words, the passions are not understood by Spinoza to be the antithesis of sociality, as a rebellious element that must be tamed and disciplined in order to institute sociality; on the contrary, the passions are in themselves and by themselves sociality. There is certainly the possibility of socialising through reason, but, here and now, the fact is that it is not by reason that human beings are socialised, but through the passions, and this to the extent that passionate life is, like reason, engendered in each person by their effort to persevere in their being. The passions (joy and sadness, love and hate, hope and fear) socialise just as much and more surely than reason, the only difference being that socialisation through the passions does not lead human beings to the necessary mutual accord, but actually leads them to the reverse, to a social life marked by conflict and opposition. Being powerless in common is still a manner of being assembled and making society: it is the actual manner in which human beings are in fact made into society.