Life's Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World

4. Reason and Feeling Are Interactive

4 ReasonandFeeling Are Interactive Spinoza has a view of reason (ratio) that does not place it in contradistinction to the emotions.He distinguishes between "active" and "passive" emotions, corresponding roughly to what we call "positive" and "negative" emotions respectively. Ratio supports the activeemotions and is indispensable for our questfor liberty. Spinoza is one of the thinkers in the history of the West who have been most concerned with the role of the emotions.In his viewpassivefeelings do not engage the whole person—only the active ones do so. He believes that we can transform passivefeelings into activeones. My attitude to Spinoza resembles that which I have toward Gandhi—taking account of both his writingsand his life. The stories about Spinoza are just as uplifting in regard to his character as the tales of Gandhi's life. Both inspire confidencebecause, in part, not only did they produce words, but they acted out their philosophy of life. My aim is to demonstrate how Spinoza's view of things may offer some fundamental pointers in constructing a philosophy of life adapted to our own age. I do not look upon his Ethics asa "gospel"of mankind and the world, but rather as a source of inspiration. I find much with which I do not disagree,but a number ofthoughts appear alien and irrelevant. I do not wish to pretend that I fully understand 74 the mental processesof a thinker from the seventeenth century, living in a completely different culture. Baruch de Spinoza (1632-77) is the central figure in the history of Western philosophy where the emotions are concerned. It is he who has given them the greatest prominence in his writings. This applies particularlyto the process that occurswhen powerful feelings are involved in deciding a choice of action. Spinoza is probably the least original of the great philosophers, but nonetheless everything he wrote has an original touch. Harry Austryn Wolfson, professor of philosophy at Harvard, set himself the task of investigating where Spinoza found his inspiration and ideas. He analyzed Ethics line by line and uncovered the sources of just about everything that Spinoza says. But he also showed that Spinoza modified everything that inspired him. There ismuch from oriental sources—names like Ibor Ezra,Ibor Gabriol, LeoHebraeus, Maimonides, Shakrastari. Spinoza's Jewish parents came to Holland from Portugal, so there was a strong Arabic influence on his upbringing . Where Western models are concerned, he was influenced by medieval philosophy. A careful study of his Latin requires insight into medieval Latin. For instance, a verb like naturare, literally "to make natural,"will hardly be found in the Latin ofthe ancient world. Among other things, this book isinspired by Spinoza's firm belief in humanity's potential when weare acting strictly in accordance with what is imprinted in our nature and avoiding everything else. This attitude is in stark contrast to the skeptical, not to say pessimistic , viewof ahuman being that isprevalent in a materially affluent country: to believe in real progress is usually dismissed as naive. It is generally accepted that we must overcome the belief of the Enlightenment in progress and reason, if we have not already done so. The very foundation of Spinoza's ethics is a belief in the possibility of the individual's making progress. Toward the end of his life, he was nonetheless worried by the power of politically authoritarian and dictatorial trends, and their potential effect on the individual Reason and FeelingAre Interactive 75 human being. In his view, he was witnessing a societal change that was moving in a vicious circle. But there is no hint that his view of emotional life had altered. People who knew him seem to have credited him with a light temperament. Without Feelings, No Change Spinoza believed that human nature is such that the sight of others' happiness releases happiness in ourselves—and on the other hand the sight of sorrow releases sorrow. But at the same time a human being has unbounded ability to display envy, which is a "passive " emotion in relation to our nature because it does not develop any of our essence. In someone who is envious, for example, sorrow can be triggered by the sight of someone else being happy, while unhappiness may trigger pleasure. Such being the case, there is something wrong with that person's emotional life. Nonetheless, just as in the case of happiness, there are different forms of...