Spinoza vol 2 ebook: Chapter 8: How Can We Evaluate Spinoza on Immortality and the Soul from his Preface to Part 2 of his Short Treatise?

Chapter 8: How Can We Evaluate Spinoza on Immortality and the Soul from his Preface to Part 2 of his Short Treatise?

In this chapter, I shall evaluate Spinoza’s detailed discussion of the human soul in his preface to part 2[i]. I think it is a valuable section in itself because it gives two types of arguments, the more verbose but concise main text and the logical argument in the subtext, both of which provide further insight into Spinoza’s views of the soul, life, death and immortality. This preface also acts as an interesting link between chapter 23 and appendix 2 of the Short Treatise[ii].

Spinoza’s use of the terms motion and rest in the Short Treatise (and other works, including the Ethics) are reminiscent of the science of physics. Simply put, what Spinoza may have meant by motion is something which is moving at a given speed in a certain direction (whose velocity can be mathematically calculated) which makes it change its location. By rest, Spinoza may have expected us to think of something which has no velocity so is stationary unless something impacts on it, known in physics as being acted upon, a phrase Spinoza uses a great deal in his metaphysics and ethical theories. Physics, including mathematical calculations, is a subject Spinoza was steeped in as a maker of instruments and lenses. Spinoza researched and designed microscopes and telescopes together with complex mathematical calculations for them. These were appreciated by scientists of the day who wanted to work with him on ambitious scientific projects in this field, such as how to construct the largest telescope in Europe. So, Spinoza was not just some lowly lens grinder as he is so often portrayed these days. Indeed, back in Spinoza’s time, lens grinding was the in-thing![iii] He was a well-respected scientist! Therefore, I think it’s important to read Spinoza’s physics, mathematical and scientific vocabulary across his works in light of scientific theory, whether he is directly discussing science or not. For instance, his chapter ‘On Our Happiness’ in his Short Treatise where he sets out biological statements such as “all the activities of the body must proceed from motion and rest” before he claims that motion and rest also impact on whether we consider an object to be good or bad[iv]. In short, Spinoza argues in his chapter concerning happiness that, the more harmonious the proportion, the more favourably we view it[v]. Conversely, the more inharmonious the proportion of motion and rest is, the more we dislike the object[vi]. This has an impact on how we feel about things around us and our mood. The soul is aware of these states and, moreover, “the intelligent soul uses the body as a tool, and, consequently, as the soul is more active in this case, so is the feeling more perfect.”[vii] These notions and applications of motion and rest are reflected earlier in his preface to part 2 of the Short Treatise when he claims that motion and rest vary in proportion to one another and that this produces differences in the particular, which impacts on what we can say about that particular[viii].

Another direct application of motion and rest to the topic of life and death in his Short Treatise is when Spinoza clarifies in note 11 that the knowledge he is discussing picks out “not any body you please….but just such a body having this proportion of motion and rest, and no other: for as the body is, so is the Soul, Idea, Knowledge, &c.”[ix] In this note 11 passage[x], Spinoza is clearly showing that it is possible to track a specific individual human’s personal identity through time, because substantial knowledge picks out that individual’s body and soul from all the others. It could be argued against this reading of Spinoza (as it has been argued contra Gersonides’ account of personal immortality[xi]) that Spinoza seems to base the uniqueness of that individual’s personal identity on the knowledge they possess. Therefore, such contras argue[xii], one cannot pick out an unique individual because it is possible for both person A and B to possess the same knowledge, call it X, as each other. However, I struggle with this type of refutation of Spinoza’s views on immortality and personal identity. It does not address why Spinoza would specify in note 11 “not any body you please, but just such a body ….and no other…”[xiii]. Given Spinoza is also grouping the body, soul and knowledge together as all matching up with each other and the identity of a specific person, it follows that the human soul must be as unique as the body and its personal identity must be trackable across different life stages, or else it would not amount to perfect, infinite, substantial knowledge. In this passage, Spinoza is not merely relying on the knowledge the individual acquires over their lifetime as a marker of their personal identity, but here is referring to substantial knowledge containing the relevant information about the unique individual[xiv]. Since substantial knowledge is perfect, infinite knowledge and is an attribute of God, who is omniscient, I suggest it is unlikely that this type of knowledge is unable to pick out an individual’s personal identity. Hence, even if we were unable to identify an unique individual after death, surely God would be able to do so? Thus, I think perhaps God’s omniscience and attribute of perfect, infinite, substantial knowledge ensures our individual, personal immortality continues after death. My proposed resolution of this tension is supported by Spinoza’s note 15, which reiterates that the soul unites with the one, thinking substance, God[xv]. So, I maintain, surely it follows from this that substantial knowledge, as an attribute of God, should be able to distinguish one soul from another uniting with it, even if we could struggle to do so because we do not possess only perfect knowledge. If, as Spinoza states in note 15[xvi], the soul can know and love extension as well as the one substance, God, then I’m inclined to think that perhaps one cannot rule out the possibility of the soul continuing to know its unique extended body in some way. If this were left open as a possibility, I think, this would make room for a soul’s knowledge being distinct from other souls’, meaning an individual soul would continue to be unique (at least as unique as our bodies are). This, I argue, would provide one way of continuing Spinoza’s mind/body parallelism after death because the body would immediately live on as an idea in the soul.

I suggest all this may have important implications for Spinoza on personal identity not only during a person’s lifetime but also after their death. Nadler, unlike some Spinoza scholars (eg. Donagan, Wolfson), argues that Spinoza’s claims about immortality do not leave room for a specific, unique individual and their unique soul surviving death[xvii]. In this way, he maintains that Spinoza does not have a theory of personal immortality and even rejects the notion of the immortality of the soul altogether[xviii]. However, I question this. Firstly, if we were to grant Nadler the claim that Spinoza denied personal identity, this, I argue, would not be a problem for Spinoza, nor would it count as a grave error in his metaphysics. Why? I suggest that, by looking at Spinoza’s philosophy within the historical context of Jewish thought and Judaism down the ages as Nadler does[xix], one can nevertheless draw very different conclusions about Spinoza’s notion of the soul and how it unites with God without a strong emphasis on personal immortality, namely, that Spinoza coheres very well with it, especially given the era he lived in. Most medieval Jewish philosophy did not advocate personal immortality of the soul[xx]. During this period, it was commonly argued that the intellect, “which bears no trace of individuality”, remained after death and Maimonides (1135-1204) argued more specifically for the immortality of the intellect rather than the soul[xxi]. Some, such as Hasdai Crescas (1340-1410), disagreed with an intellectual account of immortality, replacing it with an ethical account and arguments concerning love of God[xxii]. I suggest that Spinoza’s views on immortality across his writings contain a balanced combination of all these aspects, as he interweaves his accounts of the intellect, ethical behaviour and a love of God. Indeed, medieval Jewish philosophers who advocated the vital role of the intellect in immortality also gave ethical conduct, in this life, a central role in their philosophy[xxiii], so Spinoza’s combination of ethics and intellect for achieving immortality is typical of Jewish philosophy. Moreover, like Spinoza, medieval Jewish philosophy maintained that immortality could not be assumed, but rather seen as something to be earned in this life through increasing our intellectual and ethical capacities[xxiv]. It has been suggested that Spinoza, like Crescas but unlike Leibniz, emphasizes virtue in his book, Ethics, especially when discussing the immortality of the soul[xxv]. Indeed, Spinoza’s account of the human soul uniting with God to survive bodily death and achieve immortality, I argue, is remarkably similar to Crescas’s account of what happens to the souls of the righteous[xxvi]. Crescas maintains, as does Spinoza, that after the body dies, souls can “attach themselves to God to an extent which was denied them while they were in the body, and their union with God is constantly being strengthened.”[xxvii] Similarly, for both Spinoza and Crescas, if this union does not take place, the soul suffers and is annihilated[xxviii]. This is in line with the medieval Jewish idea that, because God brings everything into existence, God has the power to make it also go out of existence[xxix]. So I suggest interpreting Spinoza’s descriptions of blessedness and joy in loving and understanding God to be akin to Crescas’s view that, “The souls of the righteous after death enjoy the splendor of the *Shekhinah” when their souls cleave to and unite with God[xxx].

The Shekhinah is a feminine Hebrew noun for the immanent presence of God and I maintain that Spinoza may well have believed in the Shekhinah because in Letter 58 (54), dated 21^st September 1674, Spinoza answers Boxel’s questions about the possible existence of ghosts. Spinoza rejects Boxel’s habit of assuming ghosts are always male as merely “a fancy” and suspects Boxel’s preconceived ideas of gender come from “the common imagination that God is masculine, not feminine”[xxxi]. Here, I argue, is a strong feminist statement by Spinoza on gender assumptions. He refuses to subscribe to the narrow prevailing view (which still persists to this day), that God is male and never female! He also does not fall into implicit gender bias of ascribing and assuming maleness of ghosts, despite not even believing in them. I argue that the way Spinoza answers Boxel shows how the faculty of imagination can create a fictional image based on unexamined notions, causing a flight of fancy rather than a conclusion based on rationality drawn from logically examined true, adequate ideas. This, I suggest, could inform contemporary feminist theory and feminist interpretation of Spinoza concerning the topic of how gender bias functions and generates false beliefs. To situate my feminist interpretation of Spinoza within current strands of feminist philosophy, Spinoza’s letter to Boxel would, I argue, provide textual evidence which challenges feminist interpretations of Spinoza’s ideas as inherently sexist and committing implicit bias.

Returning to the topic of immortality in Jewish philosophy, personal immortality was not emphasised until a century after Spinoza’s lifetime, beginning with Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) arguing for the continuance of everyone’s soul after death[xxxii].  Nevertheless, Jewish philosophers in the 19^th and 20^th continued to prefer collective immortality over personal immortality[xxxiii].  Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903) refuted personal immortality as being too selfishly focused on the individual when the emphasis should be on the collective and creating an ethical society[xxxiv].  Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) understood Judaism to advocate “the soul's immortality as applying to the people as a whole rather than to the individual”[xxxv]. Personal immortality is only relevant to the extent to which it comes from an individual’s personal moral improvement but the focus should still be on the Jewish collective history living on eternally and promoting truth and morality in society[xxxvi].

Hence, irrespective of whether Spinoza believed in immortality for individual humans where their unique personal identity continues clearly after death, I argue that Spinoza’s account of the immortality of the human soul is generally very much in line with various strands of Jewish philosophical accounts down the ages. I claim that Spinoza did believe in a type of personal immortality in that it is the individual soul which attaches itself to God. The soul is a mode of the one substance, God, so it is always linked to God, just to a closer extent after death. In the Jewish prayer, Modeh Ani, a person thanks God for returning their (divine) soul to them in the morning, after it has been with God during the time they were asleep. If God did not return their soul but kept it, the person would have died. The concepts in this prayer are derived from the Sages (especially the Psalms and Lamentations) therefore these very personal concepts about the soul’s relationship with God would be familiar to Spinoza. This would support my hypothesis that the soul can remain distinctly personal and individual post-uniting with God, given that it would be un-returnable by God if it was not identifiable and unique to a specific individual. Or, it would run the risk of waking up a different person if the identical soul were not returned! Furthermore, this process which takes place every night until morning is paralleled with the resurrection of the dead when the soul reunites with its body in the messianic age. So these concepts about the soul are directly relevant to both life, death and immortality in Spinoza. In this way, Spinoza accounts for both individual and collective immortality. Thus the notion of personal immortality is not missing but only de-emphasised and I do not think this reduced focus in Spinoza on individual, personal immortality constitutes a weakness in his philosophy. Indeed, one may look upon it from the Jewish philosophical perspective that an emphasis on a collective immortality and social ethics constitutes a strength in an account because it highlights the importance of moral, sociable behaviour in society during our lifetime, rather than emphasising a self-focused, personal immortality after death. 

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[i] Benedict de Spinoza, Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man & His Wellbeing, ed. and trans. Abraham Wolf (London: A. & C. Black, 1910), https://archive.org/details/spinozasshorttre00spinuoft/page/n7.

[ii] Spinoza.

[iii] Abraham Wolf, ‘Introduction: I. The Life of Spinoza, II. History of the Short Treatise’, in Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man & His Well-Being (London, UK: A. & C. Black, 1910), lxix, https://archive.org/details/spinozasshorttre00spinuoft/page/n7.

[iv] Spinoza, Short Treatise, 123.

[v] Spinoza, 123–24.

[vi] Spinoza, 123–24.

[vii] Spinoza, 124.

[viii] Spinoza, 63–66.

[ix] Spinoza, 64.

[x] Spinoza, 64.

[xi] Martin Lin, ‘Nadler Steven Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Book Review by Lin)’, Notre Dame Philosophical Review, N/A, N/A, no. N/A (4 December 2002): N/A.

[xii] Lin.

[xiii] Spinoza, Short Treatise, 64.

[xiv] Spinoza, 64.

[xv] Spinoza, 65.

[xvi] Spinoza, 65.

[xvii] Lin, ‘Nadler Steven Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Book Review by Lin)’.

[xviii] Lin.

[xix] Lin.

[xx] Gale Thomson, ‘Soul, Immortality of’, Encyclopaedia Judaica. Encyclopedia.com (Encyclopaedia Judaica. Encyclopedia.com, 19 December 2018), https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/soul-immortality.

[xxi] Thomson.

[xxii] Thomson.

[xxiii] Allan Arkush, ‘Immortality: Belief in a Bodiless Existence: Everlasting Life Was Not Always Guaranteed to the Jewish Soul.’, educational, myjewishlearning.com, Unavailable, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/immortality-belief-in-a-bodiless-existence/.

[xxiv] Arkush.

[xxv] Kohler Kaufmann, ‘IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL (Late Hebrew, “hasharat Ha-Nefesh”; "ḥayye “Olam")”’, Jewish Encyclopedia (JewishEncyclopedia.com, Web publication date unavailable. Ffom   printed edition 1906), http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8092-immortality-of-the-soul.

[xxvi] Thomson, ‘Soul, Immortality of’.

[xxvii] Thomson.

[xxviii] Thomson.

[xxix] Arkush, ‘Immortality: Belief in a Bodiless Existence: Everlasting Life Was Not Always Guaranteed to the Jewish Soul.’

[xxx] Kaufmann, ‘IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL (Late Hebrew, “hasharat Ha-Nefesh”; "ḥayye “Olam")”’.

[xxxi] Benedict de Spinoza, THE CHIEF WORKS of BENEDICT DE SPINOZA, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, REVISED EDITION. London, UK, vol. II, BOHN’S PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY. SPINOZA’S WORKS. (London: york street, covent garden new york: 66, fifth avenue, and bombay: 53, esplanade road cambridge: deighton, bell & co: GEORGE BELL & SONS, 1901), 380, http://lf-oll.s3.amazonaws.com/titles/1711/1321.02_Bk.pdf.

[xxxii] Arkush, ‘Immortality: Belief in a Bodiless Existence: Everlasting Life Was Not Always Guaranteed to the Jewish Soul.’

[xxxiii] Thomson, ‘Soul, Immortality of’.

[xxxiv] Thomson.

[xxxv] Thomson.

[xxxvi] Thomson.