Spinoza on Learning to Live Together by Susan James (review)

For too long, Spinoza's ethics was misread as an ethics of ideals, in which the most virtuous life possible was said to consist of the life of pure reasoning. The "free man," Spinoza's paragon of virtue, was understood to be the individual who is neither helped nor harmed by anything external. The goal, on this view, was to transcend the life of the body, of the material, and of the political, in order to focus solely on becoming like God by increasing one's store of rational ideas.

This, of course, is an impoverished understanding of Spinoza's aims. Not only does it cast virtue as something unattainable for actually existing, materially and socially embedded individuals, but it overlooks a vast swath of Spinoza's political writings and the explicit emphasis Spinoza places on the imagination throughout his work. Fortunately, recent works focusing on Spinoza's views on the emotions, on social and political life, and on the power of the affective imagination have begun to remedy this misunderstanding. Susan James's fine volume of essays, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together, is an excellent addition to this growing body of literature.

The volume, comprised of thirteen essays, is split into three parts. The first focuses on our practices of cultivating social relationships in a way that can best enable us to live collectively, which in turn promotes individual freedom and joy. James reminds us that, according to Spinoza, individuals are not wholly autonomous but are rather parts of a collective whole and are thus deeply dependent on the others with whom they share their lives. Therefore, structuring our social relations effectively is an essential, if often overlooked, step on the path toward Spinozistic freedom. According to James, learning to live with others is a process that requires both the understanding and the imagination; in part 1, she focuses especially on the ways that the imagination can supplement and augment reason throughout this process. Much of her discussion here is a refreshing departure from previous interpretations of Spinoza. For instance, the traditional reading holds that Spinoza viewed all superstitious practices to be irrational and thus antithetical to the goal of freedom. In the fourth chapter of part 1, James challenges this view and shows how so-called degraded forms of superstition can be transformed into empowering fictions that promote both the harmony of the collective and ultimately the freedom of the individual.

This reconceptualization of the role that the imagination has to play within Spinoza's ethics is a real strength of this volume and binds together its three parts. In part 2, James shifts her attention to a more explicit discussion of political structures and to an examination of the laws and forms of government that can best promote individual freedom in Spinoza's sense. Here, too, the imagination has an important role to play. In chapter 8, for instance, James argues that while imaginative limitations can hinder the pursuit of freedom, the role of the sovereign is not to eliminate the imagination from political life entirely but rather to expand our imaginative vision. That is, the sovereign must offer an imaginative ideal of the kind of society that can inspire and empower her subjects to live more freely.

Recognizing the inescapability of the imagination, James argues that the goal, for Spinoza, is not to transcend it but instead to transform it. It is therefore surprising that she does not fully apply this thesis to her treatment of individual freedom in part 3. In an interesting discussion in chapter 12, she wonders whether the Spinozistic version of freedom is actually anything we would want to attain and considers whether individuals give up anything in the process of becoming freer. Her conclusion is that they do. But her discussion here relies on the traditional understanding of the free man as the individual who is devoid of all passions, and who trades a life of social and emotional connectedness for a life of philosophical...