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Rationality as the Therapy of Self-Liberation in Spinoza’s Ethics1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2010

Michael Hampe
Michael Hampe
Affiliation:
English translation by Rafael Newman, Zurich
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Extract

A given statement may be plausible, well founded or true. An individual action may be judged courageous, useful or good. Human beings are judged as well, for statements or actions that invite such evaluations, though the terms used may be different: a person may be described as truthful and virtuous, clever and happy. Epistemology and ethics – the theories that justify theoretical and practical judgements – may address not only the criteria used to assess states of belief, assertions, knowledge and the like, actions, omissions and feelings, but also the people that give rise to them. Nowadays, the issue of when and how a human being becomes clever, truthful, good or happy is less a matter of philosophy and more a question for religion, psychology and pedagogy. This has not always been the case. There has been a perceptible shift in moral philosophy: in antiquity, inquiries as to when a life is to be classified as good or happy were prevalent; in the modern era, the focus is primarily on when an individual action is to be regarded as right or good, wrong or bad.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 66 , July 2010 , pp. 35 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2010

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References

2 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 58Google Scholar.

3 Karl Löwith, ‘Gott, Mensch und Welt in der Metaphysik von Descartes bis zu Nietzsche’ (1967), in his Sämtliche Schriften 9: Gott, Mensch und Welt – G.B. Vico – Paul Valery (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), pp. 3–194; p. 155. On Spinoza as a marrano philosopher see also Yovel, Yirmiyahn, Spinoza and other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 15–127Google Scholar.

4 Klever, W. N. A., ‘Spinoza’s Life and Works’, in Garrett, Don (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 13–60Google Scholar; p. 18.

5 See Christopher Gowans, this volume.

6 The thought process bears similarities to the teachings of the Stoics; see Nussbaum, Martha, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 316–401Google Scholar.

7 Cf. with reference to knowledge of God: Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, edited and translated by J. Quint (Munich: Hanser, 1963), pp. 352 ff.; Predigten, Meister Eckharts, edited and translated by Quint, J., Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke, Sermons vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1976), pp. 437Google Scholar ff.

8 The process of reconditioning is also familiar from psychoanalysis and neural connectionism; cf. in this regard Stephan, Achim, ‘Psychoanalyse und Konnektionismus’, in Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften 4 (2001), pp. 543–554Google Scholar.

9 cf. Hampe, Michael, ‘Der Körper von innen. Zur Wahrnehmung des Körpers in Spinozas Doppelaspekttheorie der Affekte,’ in Affekte und Ethik. Spinozas Lehre im Kontext, ed. Engstler, A. and Schnepf, R. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2002), pp. 129–148Google Scholar; p. 136.

10 cf. Damasio, Antonio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003)Google Scholar, passim.

11 cf. Bittner, Rüdiger, ‘Spinozas Gedanke, dass Einsicht befreit,’ in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42 (1994), pp. 963–971CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Cf, e.g. The Sūtra on the Merit of Bathing the Buddha, trans. by Daniel Boucher in Donald Lopez, Buddhism in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 59–68. Boucher’s source for the translation is Taisho shinshu daizokyo (Tokyo, 1924–1934), 698, vol 16, pp. 799c–800c. He explains that the sūtra is ‘a short text—a little over a page in the standard Chinese Buddhist canon—that was translated into Chinese, presumably from Sanskrit, by the famous monk and pilgrim Yijing (635–713 ce).’

13 Cook, Thomas J., ‘Affektive Erkenntnis und Erkenntnis der Affekte. Ein Problem der spinozistischen Ethik,’ in Affekte und Ethik, ed. Engstler, A. and Schnepf, R., pp. 164–181Google Scholar; p. 165.

14 Cf. Löwith, ‘Gott, Mensch und Welt in der Metaphysik von Descartes bis zu Nietzsche,’ p. 180.

15 Cf. Bartuschat, Wolfgang, Baruch de Spinoza (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996), p. 76Google Scholar.

16 Cf. David Burton, this volume.