From the Self to Oneself: Subject and Interiority in Spinoza

If Spinoza philosophizes in the first person, as the prologue of On the Improvement of Understanding attests, his preference for the plural over the singular must be noted. To describe the human experience in its cognitive and affective form, he prefers to use "us" over "I" in parts 2–5 of Ethics. In addition, he essentially uses impersonal and third-person expressions, such as "man thinks" (Spinoza, II, Axiom 2) or "a free man thinks of nothing less than of death" (Spinoza IV, Prop. 67). This is well known, but we will not go as far as to conclude that there is no subject in Spinoza's work. In her book L'automate spirituel, Lia Levy successfully shows the existence of subjectivity in the work of Spinoza. Although the term barely appears at all,¹ the presence of a subject—understood as the capacity to refer to oneself and to relate its ideas and affections to a self—exists in Spinoza's work. There are far too many subjects reflected upon, such that one cannot always identify them all: the wise man, the free man, the man living under the guidance of reason, beginning with God, who loves himself with an infinite intellectual love, if we are to consider Ethics V, Prop. 35. If Spinoza does not literally affirm that the absolute is subject, as Hegel does, the fact remains that God or the infinitely infinite substance is thought through the idea of the self; it contemplates itself and loves itself, either because it is infinite or because it can be explained by the human mind's essence (Spinoza 1988, Ethics V, Prop. 35 and 36, Demonstration). It is thus bold, or false, to abruptly affirm that Spinoza's philosophy is a philosophy of substance and not of the subject. In a certain way, the substance is subject: whether it is explained by its attributes, its infinite modes, or by the human mind, it refers in fact to itself.

But if Spinoza admits that substance forms an idea of oneself, and that man makes an effort to be self-conscious, in proportion to his wisdom, we must note that he never refers to "me." If the personal pronoun "I" is barely used, although most of the time it is stripped of any strictly intimate subjective connotation, the reflexive pronoun "me" is in contrast, completely absent. There is no "me" in the work of Spinoza but only a "self." The wise man does not base his meditation on the thinking "I," but he is "aware of himself, and of God and things" (Spinoza 1988, Ethics V, Prop. 42). The overshadowing of the first person in favor of the third is not the result of a critique and does not come along with a diatribe against selfishness. The "me" is not detestable as it is for Pascal, it is not loving either; it simply does not exist, or at least it does not have aplace in Spinoza's philosophy. Rather the self takes over. In contrast to the me, which is inseparable from an irreducible intimacy of a particular experience, and of a personal subject, enclosed in an unshakable inner fortress, the self limits more the access to an interior, distinguishable from all others, than it limits the access to a reflected consciousness that may very well be mine, yours, or of anyone else. The self introduces impersonal distance, and it expands the dimension of the subject by including the possibility of weakening it in all forms: you, me, them, and us, without privileging any of them. The passage from the I to the self shakes the classical representation of the meditating subject and invites to rethink afresh the categories of the interior and exterior.

What does it mean then, to be oneself? And to begin, does this concept have the same meaning for substance and for modes? We can in fact ask ourselves if the self of the substance and the self of modes possess common features, even if they do not share the...