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8 - Dissimilarity: Spinoza’s Ethical Ratios and Housing Welfare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2021

Beth Lord
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
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Summary

As this collection shows, ideas linking ratio (or reason) to human qualities are present throughout Spinoza's writings. In the Ethics these relationships are described through a geometric method in which equality is constructed, coun-ter-intuitively, from the uniquely differentiated God/Nature. Human nature is also uniquely differentiated into the mind and the body. Yet this dissimilarity between the attributes also defines a relationship between them. Together, within the person, mind and body compose a kind of correspondence or equality of attributes. Human life is therefore formed through a mutual recognition of difference in each ‘element’ (for example, our mind or body) rather than a definition of individuation that is based upon finding similarity between mental or physical capacities. In the long closing scholium to Part II, Spinoza argues that his doctrine of these relations has ‘practical advantages’ for understanding human life. Interestingly for this chapter, which considers the relationship between the Ethics and housing welfare, he also states that society is assisted by this doctrine of relations which ‘teaches us to hate no one, despise no one, ridicule no one, be angry with no one, envy no one. Then again, it teaches us that each should be content with what he has and should help his neighbour … solely from the guidance of reason as occasion and circumstance require’ (E IIP49S).

For Spinoza, reasoning is not confined to our intellectual powers, which have tended to be defined as independent from a specific corporeal body or societal value (for example, as in mathematical or geometric reasoning). Rather, the Ethics shows that the power of reasoning is intimately connected to differentiated and specific human modes of expression, especially our affects and emotions, which are often considered to be most strongly affiliated with corporeal and irrational expression. Instead, for Spinoza, reasoning is a capacity that is directly related to our affective corporeal capacities for producing ethical individuals (and society). Reasoning, we find, is a consequence of these transitive and relational qualities, which rationalist thinking generally seeks to exclude for their contravention of the constancy associated with rational and intellectual thought.

Interestingly, however, Spinoza locates his thesis within a process of geometric reasoning first used by Euclid. Unlike traditional scientific or mathematical understandings of geometry, forms of intellectual reasoning that are often explicitly disconnected from the irrationality and inconstancy of daily life, Spinoza shows that geometry is in fact deeply connected to it.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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