The stunting or the incapacitation of
a dialogue, the absence of reciprocation in communication is a question which
is of fundamental pedagogical relevance particularly within the classroom - a
space which offers the opportunity of a constructive and critical conversation,
one not easily afforded in a world and an economy with increasing constraints
and regulations on time and spaces. Yet even the initiation of such a dialogue
(if it is to become that) requires not merely the time and place but a certain
minimum effort, a will to construct one. An effort which is not merely directed
at whoever may be addressed but is constitutive of the form which this possible
dialogue could take. This brief monograph will try and shed some light on how
such an effort is envisioned in the metaphysics and philosophy of Spinoza.
Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish
community at the age of 23 on account of his controversial views on the nature
of the Divine and the Hebrew Bible, his books were placed under the index of
the Catholic Church's list of forbidden books. Spinoza lived the rest of his
life grinding and polishing optical lenses. The grounds of his expulsion shall
not be delved into here in detail as it is not the purpose of this monograph,
suffice to say that the prime accusations against him were charges of
materialism, immoralism and atheism. Such 'accusations' today may not carry the
weight they once did and there has certainly been extended developments in the
way in which societal disciplinary measures are implemented as documented in
works such as Discipline and
Punish by Foucault. Of concern
to us presently is Spinoza's own renunciation. A denunciation which forms a
keystone in his philosophical edifice, a denunciation of consciousness, values
and sad passions (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze).
It is possible to now already see
principally the nature of the antagonism produced between him and the Jewish
community. The image of an Abrahamic god, with its emphasis on the notion of a
transcendent creator and its augmentation of the suffering in life into a
parableistic aphorism for the struggle and sacrifice of Abraham was moved away
from. Most crucially in Spinoza's equation of God with Nature - which is why he
was called a pantheist ( the belief that the universe or nature is identical
with divinity.)
This constitutes a brief sketch of the
conditions of Spinoza’s
movement away from Jewish communal life and some of its core theological
beliefs as they existed in the Dutch Jewish Synagogues of the 17th century. We
shall now touch briefly upon the constructivist hypothesis and potential
present in his work which is also what may be of most immediate pedagogical
relevance to us today.
Spinoza's denunciation of the sad passions and
traditional values opens the space for another kind of pedagogical practice.
But one which does not begin with the assumption of a moral, tradition or a
belief which is to be passed on to eager ears. Such would constitute today
merely another form of monologue, a declarative speaking from a summit. The
emergence of a dialogue begins with the creation of the possibility of a
response. Where one is attentive to what it seeks or expects of who s/he may be
addressing. The posing of a question may open an invitation to a dialogue. Yet
a response arrives only within conditions in which it is welcome. A theme may
emerge from the product of difference present which counter-pose questions or
offer their take on the dialogue transpiring. What is crucial to emphasize here
is that these are not merely word being spoken or written but is constitutive
of the people who express them. If it were taken to be merely words then one
would regress back to precisely the kind of dualisms he leaves behind. Which
brings us to an important provocation offered by Spinoza. A restatement of the
very grounds of rationalism. Spinoza asks not what the mind or consciousness
can do, but what can a body do. The body is presented as the new model.
The thesis on parallelism presented in
his work explicates and builds upon such a constructivist hypothesis. The
thesis proposes not merely that there exists no real causality between the body
and the mind but it disallows any primacy of one over the other. If Spinoza
rejects any superiority of the mind over the body, this is not in order to
establish a superiority of the body over the mind, which would be no more
intelligible than the converse. The practical significance of parallelism is
manifested in the reversal of the traditional principle on which Morality was
founded as an enterprise of domination of the passions by consciousness.
(Deleuze ibid).
This liberation of the passions from
consciousness is what lies at the heart of Spinoza's Ethics
- an appreciation of the value of the affectations and actions of the body, of
what the body can do. An understanding that what is an action in the mind is
necessarily an action in the body and what is a passion in the body is
necessarily a passion in the mind. In the invitation of taking the body as a
model what is shown is that the body surpasses the knowledge that we have of
it, and likewise thought surpasses the consciousness that we have of it (ibid).
To continue briefly along this philosophical excursion, this would imply that
there are no fewer things in the mind that exceed our consciousness than there
are things in the body that exceed our knowledge. Deleuze puts it aptly -
'So it is by one and the same movement that we shall
manage, if possible, to capture the power of the body beyond the given
conditions of our knowledge, and to capture the power of the mind beyond the
given conditions of our consciousness. One seeks to acquire a knowledge of the
powers of the body in order to discover, in a parallel fashion, the
powers of the mind that elude consciousness, and thus to be able to compare the
powers. In short, the model of the body, according to Spinoza, does not imply
any devaluation of thought in relation to extension, but, much more important,
a devaluation of consciousness in relation to thought: a discovery of the
unconscious, of an unconscious of thought just as profound as the
unknown of the body.' (Ibid)
This
parallelism is also crucial to how Spinoza works around Descartes, the earlier
significant rationalist of the period and his implied mind-body dualism.
What
I have called earlier the constructivist hypothesis begins with the taking on
of a minimal degree of responsibility to the other, a willingness to welcome
and respond to what is put forth in a dialogue creating the possibility of and
conditions for continuity or any further development. This is indicated in the
name of the work in question Ethics as opposed to a morality. This
privileging of an ethics as opposed to a morality, of thought against mere
consciousness is the path Spinoza takes in his effort to construe an
understanding of emotive affections such as joy or sadness in terms of the
encounter between bodies. The composition or decomposition which these bodies
may enter into is what produces the affections of joy or sadness. We experience
joy when a body enters into composition with ours and sadness when a body or an
idea threatens our own coherence. Or as Deleuze would put it , the object which
agrees with us would help us form superior totalities, including us, the object
and ourselves.
Principally these are the elements of
Spinoza's work which Deleuze draws upon in the construction of his rhizomatic
hypotheses. What constitutes a
philosophical escape from history into a terrain of geography. The historical
method, so long enshrined in the legacy of the humanities is temporarily moved
away from and a form of thought more nomadic in its sensibilities arises, an
exploratory hypothesis which is not bound to a tradition, thought or situation
but seeks to move through these, entering into compositions and decompositions
along the way, extending and retracting and reconstructing in a multiplicity of
directions. A nutritive and vitalistic mode of thinking with the word rhizome
naming the amoebic and vegetative aspects immanent to it, a constant restless
intrusion between the molar and the minor, for Deleuze and Guattari 'becoming
minoritarian' is here an ethical action. Minor and becoming minor here do not
refer to minority groups which are yet defined by identities and are hence
molar configurations belonging to the state machine. Deleuze and Guattari's
central example here is Kafka who finds himself at home neither among the
Prague Jews nor the dominant Austria Hungarian power structure For him a people is missing and his
literature sets out to summon that people.
This constitutes a brief exposition on
the use value of some of Spinoza's conceptual production as well as
developments further drawn on by Deleuze in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Any work in the field of Spinoza scholarship needs
to contend with the unique form of his book Ethics laid out as a series
of propositions expounding each other in a geometric sequence rising from
definitions to explanations. Here however I would like to reflect a moment on
Deleuze's work which too takes a form rather interesting. The fourth chapter
(which is also the largest) is presented in the form of a dictionary. An
explications of the words and terms used by Spinoza in a coherent and
systematic manner listed alphabetically. One may wonder as to why such an
explication is dealt into in such a work and it is here that the value of such
an exposition may be appreciated. In Spinoza's original treatise the axiomatic
delivery of its theses in their geometric form is transcribed, or perhaps
translated into the form of an enunciatory dictionary. This transcribing in
ways extends the brief geometric and axiomatic extensions effectively
enfleshing it with the relations that these terms are constitutive of. The
relation between extension and thought for example. This exploration of the terrain
between and its exploration of the multiplicity of relations immanent to it is
what constitutes the methodological proficiency of Deleuze's thought.
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