Continuing from my last post, the
other topic in Whistler’s paper for the London Spinoza Circle1 (1/03/18)
which fascinated me was the catchy phrase he used ‘language as affect’.
Contra Professor David Savan,
Whistler maintained that Spinoza does not see language as irretrievably confused
and does not relegate signs to inadequate ideas. Whistler is interested in the pertinent
question: If words are all inadequate, what happens to philosophy (which needs words)?
So, to salvage Spinoza from Savan’s negative thesis about language, Whistler
advocates an examination of Ethics, part 5, proposition 3 (EVp3). This states
that:
“An emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it” (EVp3)2
So, Whistler posed the question:
Does language also work like this for Spinoza? In other words, although language
can be confused and involve inadequate ideas at times, we may be able to
surmount this problem in the same way that we manage to turn passions (a type
of affect which involves confused ideas EVp3d) into a type of affect which
involves clear and distinct ideas. In this way, the inadequacy of language
could be conquered with knowledge of language and adequate ideas. This
parallels affects and passions in that, for Spinoza, knowledge of the affects
and adequate ideas help us turn negative passions with inadequate ideas into
positive affects with adequate ideas. Hence, Whistler reasoned, given that
language is not exempt from affect, perhaps we should think of language as an
affect.
During the paper, I was unsure about
what the phrase ‘language as affect’ exactly entailed and how wide the
application of this concept was. Did Whistler think of it as a strict identity
between language and affects in general, so this identity would hold for a
variety of situations (language ≡ affects)? Or was he merely suggesting
that he thought it was helpful to solve the tension in Savan’s negative claim
about language by approaching language in the same manner as affects in Spinoza?
The advantage of this being that it gives us a way to turn inadequate ideas
into adequate ones for language as well as the affects. Later I asked Whistler
about this to clarify in my mind how his suggestion of ‘language as
affect’ worked. Whistler answered that he was making the claim that language is
an affect itself, and therefore it works well to approach language in this way. I learnt that he was advancing both of my above versions of ‘language as
affect’. He was curious to know if I agreed with this. I explained that I agreed
that it may be very useful to approach language as an affect for the purposes
of turning inadequate ideas into adequate ones, so that all words and philosophy
do not stagnate into only involving confused ideas, especially since it feels
implausible that this is the case or that Spinoza would advocate this. However,
I was still undecided whether I wanted to identify language as being an affect.
So then I asked Whistler to explain it to me in the form of a flow chart. Where
is language placed in relation to affects? So Whistler helpfully explained how
it looks as a chart, which I found very enlightening and clear. This is how I
have attempted to reconstruct the chart he described to me:
The chart represents that there
is a main class, ‘Affects’ which contains two subcategories, psychological
affects (such as love, hate) and signs (such as words). He explained that he
saw the psychological affects and signs as having a parallelism between them,
just as Spinoza has for mind and body. So words, which are signs, are identical
to affects in the sense of belonging to a subcategory of affects. This I find
mind-blowing! So I wanted to give him my test cases to improve my understanding
of how these subcategories work in practice and relate to one another. I asked:
What about when we talk about (obviously
by using words and therefore language) affects, such as love, hate, sadness
etc?
When Whistler thought this
interesting because we see that Spinoza has to do this himself when giving
definitions of the affects in his ethics, another question crossed my mind:
Would there be a difference
between whether we were talking about affects in a general way (such as when
Spinoza gives definitions of various affects) and when we talk about our
affects we’re feeling now (I’m feeling sad)? The latter means we are using an
affect (ie the main class one at the top of the chart) to clarify an affect eg
to explain how you are feeling. How does that work?
Then Whistler put forward the
fascinating thought that perhaps when dealing with both subcategories of affect
at once (eg by talking (ie using words) about how you are feeling (eg love,
hate, sadness) this would be a mixed affect. I agreed this does logically
lead to the conclusion that it would involve mixed affects, albeit in a
different sense from how we normally refer to mixed affects in Spinoza. By mixed
affects, we usually mean a mixture of affects within the same subcategory (eg
feeling both sadness and hate). However here, it would be a mixed affect which
goes between the subcategories (psychological and signs) as well as their
subcategories (of eg hate and words) since it consists of both words and psychological
feelings. I further learnt that Whistler’s main textual support for advocating
this theory of affects is that Spinoza describes signs in a very similar (or perhaps identical way) to the way he describes affects so he feels a parallelism
approach works well. Nevertheless, he thought my questions raise complex epistemological issues about Spinoza on ideas and what Spinoza would say about having ideas
about ideas. This made me try to remember what Spinoza says in his Ethics about
the possibility of having two ideas in our mind simultaneously (which in this
case, is the idea of a sign and the idea of an affect eg love)? Do cases such
as this involve assenting or rejecting one idea in favour of the other, as is
the case when we make a judgement by excluding one idea in favour of another to
assent that we believe x.
In the end, we were both keen to
comb through the Ethics again to see what specific passages could provide the textual
evidence needed to help solve these particular complex questions and test cases
we explored in discussion. This enjoyable and thought-provoking discussion I had
with Whistler has certainly renewed my enthusiasm to re-read Spinoza’s Ethics
in light of our discussion on language and affects. Hopefully, Whistler will
comment below on this post or any other of my posts if he has something further
he’d like to ask me, add or clarify about his research. I’d welcome his thoughts on
my posts!
I am still undecided whether
language is identical to an affect yet, although I agree there is something to
be gained by approaching it as such, in order to salvage language from
inadequate ideas. I think it is true that it is easier to express adequate
ideas the more we understand language itself and how it functions. This I think
includes the recurrent question of whether the words we use satisfactorily
capture what we want to convey about our thoughts and emotions. This problem
comes up in feminist philosophy, which highlights that women can find it hard
to talk about and convey their experiences in life because patriarchal language
often leaves them lacking the words to satisfactorily describe their experiences. Such problems lead to questions about how feminism can progress
language in a way which makes it more female user-friendly. The aim of this is to
prevent language itself from silencing women. This happens when women struggle to put their
life stories/experiences and accompanying emotions accurately into words to
convey them to others in the hope of receiving an empathetic, helpful response in return.
This aside, I am still left intrigued
by the question Whistler asked me: But if ‘language is not affect’ in Spinoza,
then what is it? Surely it would leave language as being an ontologically
strange entity? So, while re-reading Spinoza’s Ethics, I shall bear this in
mind. I shall not only consider whether ‘affect is language’ or not, but also
conversely, hypothesise that 'language is not a subcategory of affect', to
examine what good alternative explanations of language in Spinoza’s works exist.
This analysis of language, signs and words in Spinoza will also hopefully, in
turn, inform my research on the affects, the passions, adequate and inadequate
ideas and imagining.
1 for more details and
his abstract see:
2 An open access text
of Spinoza’s Ethics (including his ‘Treatise on the Correction of the
Understanding’) is available at:
for this quote in the Ethics, see
page 203
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