The Prologue of the ‘Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect’

The mind may perceive the seed, so to speak, of a relation which would have a harmony beyond the mind’s power to comprehend or experience once the relation is fully developed. When this happens, we call the impression sublime; it is the most wonderful bestowed on the mind of man.
– Goethe, A Study Based on Spinoza (c. 1785)

It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy.
– Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 3: Medieval and Modern Philosophy

Introduction

Much valuable ink and typefaces have been wasted on answering the question as to what makes the philosopher a philosopher.  Alain Badiou, in his preface to ‘After Finitude’ by Quentin Meillassoux, writes:

It may be, as Bergson maintained, a philosopher only ever develops one idea. In any case, there is no doubt that the philosopher is born of a single question, the question which arises at the intersection of thought and life at a given moment in the philosopher’s youth; the question which one must at all costs find a way to answer.
- Badiou, 2008: vi: emphasis added.

The question of the genesis of the philosopher, for Badiou, is thus localizable in the point of contact between lived experience and the intellectual enterprise of the philosopher-to-be. This aristocratic view of the genesis of the philosopher possesses a speculative truth worth pointing out (despite said aristocratism): the genesis of the philosopher always occurs with reference to a set of existential conditions, whether they be a set of normative regulations in a societal constellation, political rupture, or with reference to the historicity of the philosopher-to-be, and so on and so forth.

In this short text, my task will be to provide the reader with an entry-point into the Spinozian view of such a genesis, the transition from a philosopher-to-be to a philosopher-become, if you will. To accomplish this, I propose to walk you through the prologue to Spinoza’s ‘Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect’ (from now on simply referred to as ‘TdIEi’).¹ Why this text? I hope that this question becomes clearer as my fragmentary exposition unfolds itself.

§1. What Type of Text?

The unfinished TdIE is a complex and difficult text to dissect. It is a text which not only tries to develop in detail the methodological presuppositions of Spinoza’s philosophical enterprise but also wants to answer the question of why one becomes a philosopher via a narration of a subject’s gradual metamorphosis into one. The text, in its totality, can be seen as a part of Spinoza’s early philosophical phase, hence its incompleteness (D’Agostino, 2023: 125-130)²: however, this does not mean that the text does not hold the promise of revealing to the reader some of the central issues for the mature Spinoza³. The prologue, our object of focus, has thus become the subject of book length expositions. I will not deal with these, insofar as they are beyond the scope of my own exposition⁴. That being said, in order to open up the text itself, I need to comment on some basic narrative devices and genre-based techniques.

Anyone familiar with the Christian canon will be familiar with texts such as Saint Augustine’s ‘Confessions’. The Confessions occupy a space in between a literary production, a philosophical treatise, and a collection of theological doctrines. With regards to the literary elements of the text, Augustine’s Confessions is an early example of a type of autobiographical text, a conversion narrative. One of the central elements of a Christian conversion narrative is that the narrator, at a certain period in their life, reaches a point of existential toil which is impossible to cross without complete resignation to God. To quote:

[…] now that I have the evidence of my own misery to prove to me how displeasing I am to myself, you are my light and my joy. It is you whom I love and desire, so that I am ashamed of myself and cast myself aside and choose you instead, and I please neither you nor myself except in you (Augustine, 1961: 207).

What is essential for the understanding of this quotation from Augustine’s text is the fact that a significant driving force in the Confessions is Augustine narrating his gradual turn towards God, after having spent his youth and young adulthood in a state of existence which he himself is quick to label as (among other things) shameful. A very real sense of existential pain thus expresses itself in the text: major parts of the text – including the above quoted passage – are expressions of a deep regret of the past. The reader of the prologue is struck by something which is very much an anomaly in Spinoza’s corpus: the very first passages of text follow similar emotive tropes as a typical Christian conversion narrative (Moreau, 2022: 41-42). ⁵ . Consider the following passage from the opening to the TdIE:

After experience had taught me that all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life [communi vita] are empty and futile, and I saw that all the things which were the cause or object of my fear had nothing of good or bad in themselves, except insofar as [my] mind was moved by them, I resolved at last to try to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good, capable of communicating itself, and which alone would affect the mind, […] whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity (Spinoza, 1985: 7 [¶1]).

What strikes the reader in this opening statement is primarily the fact that what moves the narrator to fundamentally changing his theoretical and practical orientation is a radical dissatisfaction with the conditions of existence of his own time. When comparing Curley’s translation with the original Latin, one notices that ‘ordinary life’ in the original is ‘communivita’: this is significant, insofar as Spinoza is actually gesturing towards common life, not merely ordinary life⁶. A translation which is more faithful to the original would thus be “After experience had taught me that all the things which regularly occur in common life [i.e., a form of life shared with others] are empty and futile […]”. The philosopher-become, reflecting on why he became a philosopher ⁷, identifies a discordance between a subjective desire for another mode of being and the social expectations of what type of subjectivity one ought to be interpellated into. The difference – manifesting as a tension – between subjective desire and external expectation thus expresses itself in the formation of a new life-project which does not conform to the dominant ideological standards.

A reaction to ideological standards implies (in a rather obvious way), that the philosopher-to-be is deeply enmeshed in and saturated with relations of social causation. The very fibre of his being is infected with causal relationships not only in relation to his own psychological-physiological disposition but also in relation to the external others: the very choice of the philosopher-become to make the leap into the life led in love of wisdom, as he recounts his intellectual conversion, is a response to an affectively negative stance towards the praxes of others. Antonio Negri identifies as central to the understanding of Spinoza’s genesis as a philosopher the fact that he was thoroughly situated in the cultural context of the Dutch Golden Age, characterized by the emergence of a bourgeois economic class: Spinoza’s philosophical enterprise emerged as both an expression of seventeenth century Dutch humanism and maritime capitalism, and as a subaltern negation of said tradition and system (Negri, 1991: 3-21). Can we identify this embeddedness in the Dutch seventeenth-century maritime capitalist regime in the prologue? Consider this quote:

Nor do honor and wealth have, as sensual pleasure does, repentance as a natural consequence. The more each of these is possessed, the more joy is increased, and hence the more we are spurred on to increase them. But if our hopes should chance to be frustrated, we experience the greatest sadness. And finally, honor has this great disadvantage: to pursue it, we must direct our lives according to other men’s powers of understanding – fleeing what they commonly flee and seek what they commonly seek (Spinoza, 1985: 8 [¶4]).

This passage from the prologue seems to confirm Negri’s suspicion that Spinoza has to be understood in the context of the Dutch Golden Age. With regards to our current topic of discussion, I would like to point out the fact that what Spinoza is gesturing towards in this quotation is the tragic existential situation of the incessant striving for perishable, material, goods: the precarity of incessant striving towards ever greater wealth entails the real potential of being in a repetitive state of sorrow. Spinoza, himself the son of a merchant émigré (Nadler, 2018: 32-48), was more than likely all too familiar with this potential situation: Spinoza, by taking part in his father’s business (ibid.: 93), was more than likely to have seen how the incessant striving for material goods affects the striving subject. The choice to become a philosopher was thus, in the case of Spinoza, a radical break with the familiar. No longer wanting to be a commodity fetishist, the task for Spinoza thus became to find a new source of joy. This became philosophy.

§2. What Type of Experience?

The transformation from one mode of being to another, as TdIE prologue shows us, is far from painless. To understand the subjective implications of the break from the circumstances of common life (praxes, valuations, and so on), we have to turn to the second and third passage of the TdIE:

I say resolved at last – for at first glance it seemed ill advised to be willing to lose something certain for something the uncertain. I saw, of course, the advantages that honor and wealth bring, and that I would be forced to abstain from seeking them, if I wished to devote myself seriously to something new and different; and if by chance the greatest happiness lay in them, I saw that I should have to do without it. […] I wondered whether perhaps it would be possible to reach my new goal – or at least the certainty of attaining it, without changing the conduct and plan of life which I shared with other men. I tried this, but in vain (Spinoza, 1985: 7 [¶2 & ¶3]: emphasis added).

The choice to distance oneself from other members of one’s community is not an act which can just happen. It requires multiple attempts and usually happens only after all other alternatives are exhausted. The consequences of such a break with one’s community and the expected praxes are potentially disastrous. The example of such disastrous consequences par excellence is Spinoza himself, who in his early twenties was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam. It is written in Spinoza’s herem (a document issued when someone had to be excommunicated) as follows:

Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The lord will not forgive him (Nadler, 2018: 141).

Of course, the herem was issued on the grounds of Spinoza’s wholly antithetical views concerning the status of Judaic orthodox teaching, such as the anthropomorphic nature of God, the status of the Jewish people as “the chosen people”, and so on and so forth⁸. Nevertheless, I think that it is safe to say that Spinoza was anything but naïve in the TdIE as to what the consequences of distancing oneself from popular norms and practices would be.

The narrative of the prologue thus expresses a tension: as a narrative of the genesis of a philosopher, it indicates that the I of the philosopher-to-be is torn between the sense of wanting to belong to his community, participate in its praxes, and belief (to some extent) in the normative values expressed by his community; however, the text also points to the sad reality of having to momentarily break with said community, to reevaluate one’s belief system, to retreat intellectually from common-held dogmas. Does this mean that the I’s genesis as a philosopher is driven by an egotistical desire to elevate himself above others? In other words, is the genesis of the philosopher, as narrated by the prologue, a process of atomization?

§3 Why?

We have now reached the heart of the matter. Before we answer this question, we need to make something clear. None of what the prologue narrates concerning the genesis of the philosopher is to be read as an autobiographical account of Spinoza’s own life as such. What does this mean for the hitherto produced interpretation? It means that, despite the fact that one can legitimately infer that the narrative of the I in the TdIE correlates to events in Spinoza’s own life, it is non-reducible to Spinoza as a historical individual. How are we to solve this hermeneutical problem? Up until now, we have maintained 3 things: 

1. The text draws on certain tropes from at that time well-known literary genres, such as the conversion narrative. 
2. The text describes an I having to reevaluate its acceptance of the normative conditions (and their antecedent ideological conditions) for its existence in a community it happens to find itself within and as a part of. 
3. The text ought not to be read as primarily a biographical account of Spinoza’s own life.

The third point was just introduced and needs to be explained. The reason for not reading the prologue as primarily autobiographical (although it very easily fits the general mould of what laymen think Spinoza’s life-story is), is to be found in the very wording of the text: the narrator of the text speaks in such general terms that it might as well be an account of the life of another individual than Spinoza. The narrative, narrated in past tense by an I who is not to be read as solely belonging to Spinoza (but, rather, to what Spinoza thinks it means to become a philosopher)⁹ is instead tracing the genesis of the I of a philosopher-to-be in general. The obvious question to be asked now is “why?”.

Sylvian Zac, in an article entitled ‘Life in the Philosophy of Spinoza’ (1985/2001) writes that: “Philosophy is, for Spinoza, the love of wisdom in the etymological sense of this phrase: it is the study of the goal of wisdom – both a true knowledge and a true life –, of the means to achieve it and the conditions for its acquisition.” (Zac, 2001: 239). Whilst Zac is primarily interested in showing that the link between the concept of ‘Divine Life’ [Vita Dei] and human life is a continuous link throughout Spinoza’s oeuvre (ibid.: 242 & 244), this is just as true for the prologue of the TdIE. Consider passage 13:

[…] since human weakness does not grasp that order by its own thought, and meanwhile man conceives a human nature much stronger and enduring than his own, and at the same time sees that nothing prevents his acquiring such a nature, he is spurred to seek means that will lead to such perfection. Whatever can be a means to his attaining it is called a true good; but the highest good is to arrive – together with other individuals if possible – at the enjoyment of such a nature (Spinoza, 1985: 10 [¶13]: emphasis added).

And Passage 14:

This, then, is the end I am at: to acquire such a nature, and to strive that many acquire it with me. […] to do this it is necessary, first to understand as much of Nature as suffices for acquiring such a nature; next, to form a society of the kind that is desirable, so that as many as possible may attain it as easily and as surely as possible (ibid.: 11 [[¶14]: emphasis added).

What these two passages tell us about the Spinozian conception of the genesis of the philosopher is nothing other than the fact that the activity of doing philosophy presupposes a striving to change the societal circumstances: this striving is not for purely egoist intentions, but to the contrary is directed towards the other as a subject whose internal constitution may also benefit from said purposive activity on the part of the philosophical I. It is an intellectual enterprise, which consists in both a study of Nature and its relation to human nature, i.e., our embeddedness within Nature¹⁰, our distinct nature as “being humans”, and so on: it is a multi-faceted process. Philosophy is thus never an isolated activity but presupposes that one is actively engaged in the material circumstances in which one finds oneself. Philosophy is also, according to this conception, a polemic (in a certain sense¹¹) insofar as it is based on a critique of the consequences of the normative framework and the antecedent ideological conditions of a given society. The answer to the question of “why?”  is therefore to be found in the fact that the conception of philosophical thinking at play in the prologue is one which rests on a certain dialectical tension between (on the one hand) the experience of feelings of inadequacy of the philosophical I in its pre-philosophical mode of existence, and (on the other hand) the realization that the only way out of this despair is to actively engage in bringing forth new conditions of existence in one’s society, community, or whatnot.

§4. Concluding remark

One cannot be a serious student of both Spinoza and German Idealism without studying the correspondence between the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the German socialite Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi from 1785. This letter correspondence marks the revival of Spinoza’s relevance after having been declared a “dead dog” as a consequence of the militant attacks of his philosophy by thinkers such as Pierre Bayle (1697)¹². This correspondence between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, commonly referred to as the ‘Pantheism feud/controversy’ [Pantheismusstreit] made Spinoza into the subject of philosophical discussion and (according to Kant and his immediate followers) intellectual schwärmerei¹³. The letters as such are not the object of investigation, but I would still like to draw upon a formulation from the letters. Jacobi writes concerning the spirit of Spinoza’s philosophy that:

What distinguishes Spinoza’s philosophy […] what constitutes its soul, is that it maintains and applies with the strictest rigour the well-known principle, gigni de nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil potest reverti [roughly: from nothing comes nothing, and from nothing returns nothing] (Jacobi, 1994: 205).

What (to me) is of significance here is the stroke of genius by which Jacobi gets to the heart (inadvertently, perhaps) of the revolutionary potential of Spinoza’s philosophy. The radicality of Spinoza’s philosophy lies in the fact that it is exactly because nothing comes from nothing that philosophy implies a radical rethinking of the societal circumstances in which the philosophical I finds itself.

The Cartesian school’s notion of the I, as identified by Udo Thiel, is in agreement with the general scholastic definition of the I as an individual substance of a rational nature (despite the numerous criticisms the school raised against the scholastics), with consciousness being understood as a self-reflexive structure grounded upon the I being able to think the fact that it is thinking (Thiel, 2011: 36-39 & 49). From what has been argued up until now, the fact that this view of the I not being Spinoza’s own should be clear. This raises the question of what constitutes the I for Spinoza, in this case in the TdIE. The answer to this question lies in the relational character of Spinoza’s general philosophy. In the article “Desire is Man’s Very Essence”: Spinoza and Hegel as Philosophers of Transindividuality’, Jason Read argues for an understanding of the subject in Spinoza (in relation to its desires) is both singular (my desires, based on what has happened to me, how it has happened to me, how I responded to it, and so on) and relational (my desires never happen in a vacuum, but always in relation to other objects and beings) (Read, 2012: 44-47). In a similar vein, in their discussion of the concept of desire in the Ethics, Judith Butler writes that “[…] to persevere in one’s own being means that one cannot persevere in that being understood as radically singular and set apart from a common life.” (Butler, 2015: 66). Whilst both of these commentaries on Spinoza’s understanding of the subject centre around his magnum opus, ‘Ethics’, they still draw our attention to a similar conception of the I in the TdIE: the philosophical I of the TdIE is not a substantial I (in the Cartesian sense of the term), but thoroughly moulded by its surrounding community and societal circumstances, as well as attempting a moulding anew of said circumstances so that others may participate in the same process of attaining joy through philosophy.

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