Emotional engineering
Tue. August 3, 2004Categories: Abstract Dynamics
Spinoza is the prince of philosophers; really, the only one you need.
He took for granted what would later become the first principle of Marxs thought – that it was more important to change the world than to interpret it. His project of systematically rooting out the underlying motivation for irrational behaviours was effectively psychoanalysis three hundred years early. Freud, whose written acknowledgments to Spinoza were few, nevertheless admitted in his correspondence to being thoroughly indebted to Spinozas framework; Lacan was more explicit in his homage, comparing his own excommunication from Psychoanalysis to Spinoza’s banishment from the Amsterdam Synagogue. Deleuzes thought is unimaginable without Spinoza.
Even when there’s no influence, there’s often an affinity. I doubt know whether he ever read Spinoza, but Burroughs was a Spinozist through and through. So is Luke.
Philip K Dick wrote on Spinoza, and the vision Dick bequeaths to cyberpunk: of simulated worlds stimulated by drugs, mood and technology – the Gibsonian concept of simstim – is Spinozist through and through.
These reflections have been prompted by my accidentally coming upon Antonio Damasios Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain on the secondhand book stalls outside the NFT while strolling along the South Bank on Saturday with Siobhan. (Discovering books by accident is of course the best way to come upon them).
Damasio’s book is an incredible achievement. Not only does it bring together Spinoza’s account of the relationship between body and mind with his program for increasing human happiness and freedom, it also draws upon up-to-the minute scientific knowledge – Damasio is a neurologist – to establish that Spinoza’s conceptual framework is remarkably attuned with contemporary neurobiology.
Academic philosophers often treat Book V of Spinoza’s Ethics – Of the Power of the Human Intellect, or of Human Freedom – as little more than an embarrassment, sometimes derisively referring to as a ‘self-help manual’. So it is – but this is a strength, what makes Spinoza’s philosophy more than mere contemplation. (I’ve often thought, actually, that a killing could be made by translating Spinoza’s insights into a Pop Therapy book).
At the same time, non-philosophical readers are likely to be scandalized by Spinoza’s sober and geometrical treatment of human emotions. Vernacular psychology has it that emotions are irreducibly mysterious, too fuzzy and indistnct to analyse beyond a certain point. Spinoza, on the other hand, maintains that happiness is a matter of emotional engineering: a precise science which can be learned and practiced.
In place of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ a vulgarized Kantianism and vestigial Christianity has inculcated into us, Spinoza urges us to think in terms of health and illness. There are no categorical duties applying to all organisms, since what counts as good or evil is relative to the interests of each entity. In tune with popular wisdom, Spinoza is clear that what brings wellbeing to one entity will poison to another. The first and most overriding drive of any entity, Spinoza says, is its will to persist in its own being. When an entity starts to act against its own best interests, to destroy itself – as, sadly, Spinoza observes, humans are wont to do – it has been taken over by external forces. To be free and happy entails exorcising these invaders and acting in accordance with reason.
It is Burroughs obsession with alien takeovers and viruses that makes him so utterly Spinozistic. Whether hungering for a drug, for orgasm or for images, the principal figure of human bondage in Burroughs universe – the addict – is enslaved to exogenous forces.Spinoza makes it clear that while reason is necessary in the quest to regain control, it is is not sufficient. Reason can set the goals, but emotions can only be overcome by the cultivation of stronger emotions.
Damasio begins by explicating and exploring Spinozas claim that the mind is the idea of the body. He moves on to distinguish between emotions and feelings (which together are termed affects). Emotions are presubjective response-tendencies whereas feelings are the conscious processing of these reponses. An analogous distinction in Spinozas thought is that between appetite – the impulse towards a certain object – and desire – the conscious awareness of that impulse. Damasio demostrates that, remarkably, Spinozas diagram of these relations is borne out by neurobiology. As he puts it, the sublimity of the mind is matched by the sublimity of biololgy.
While, fittingly, Damasios book is a joy to read, I think it could usefully be put into dialogue with Deleuzianism. Where Deleuze and Guattari treat Spinoza as the great prophet of the Body without Organs, Damasio concentrates on the organic, perhaps fatally equating Spinozas body with the organism. Moreover, Damasios claim that bliss is to be attained through achieving homeostasis (oddly, after admitting he prefers the term homeodynamics, he never uses it again!) would put him in tension with D/Gs emphasis on the plateau.
It is in Spinozas account of God that we encounter his vision of the Body without Organs. Many of Spinozas champions like to position him as a forerunner of humanist enlightenment, as if his famous formula, God = nature and his claim that the greatest form of joy is only possible through intellectual love of God were obfuscations, codes designed to conceal an underlying atheism. If they were conceived of in such terms, they failed: Spinozas denial of the personal God, his contention that God could not intervene in the world and neither assigned praise nor blame, offered reward nor punishment, saw him viciously pilloried and ostracized, with an attempt even being made on his life. But to think of Spinoza as a covert atheist is to repeat the same mistakes his contemporary religious critics made (and to reiterate their insult). Spinozas God is beyond even indifference, gloriously, desolately without interests of any kind. Intellectual love of God is effectively an identification with the cosmos as BwO. Spinozas conviction that awe, wonder and dread – not worship – are the only appropriate responses to a God that is the Great Zero, means that his thought can offer us a pitilessly materialist spirituality that is as important a legacy as anything else he has left us.
More by me on Spinoza
Me on Kubrick, Spinoza and coldness at alt.movies.kubrick (this thread contains one of my proudest moments ever — gaining praise from Gordon Stainforth, who edited The Shining).
If youve a spare few minutes and want a laugh have a look at this thread from amk in which I debate Spinozas concept of God with Leonard Wheat, the author of this stupefyingly ridiculous book on Kubrick’s 2001.
“it was more important to change the world than to interpret it” = actually the *eleventh* principle of Marx’s thought! 😉
(sorry)
http://www.abstractdynamics.org/linkage/archives/003773.html
k-punk: Emotional engineering…
Lol! But first in IMPORTANCE, Angus!
Any way, nice to hear from you!! It’s been a while…
Yeah, sorry about that, my blog-reading has been falling behind in general lately.
You’re right about Marx of course–you have to respect a thinker who understands the principle of the punchline!
the mind is the idea of the body
cool! that’d make a nice t-shirt slogan.
all this is v. interesting.
as coincidence would have it, i’ve just got spinozas ethics out the library. i wasn’t going to read it, just going to let the prestige of it soak into my skin, but maybe i’ll give it a crack if i can email you and demand explanations of opaque passages.
But of course Luke!!!
and thanx matt
loved the piece, one of the best things you’ve written. When your’e feeling sad on a lovely summer day, there’s little better than to sit in the garden reading the Ethics. Your’e almost certain to feel better (St Augustine is good for this too – it was Ian Penman who turned me onto him).As Zizek asked recently, is it impossible not to love Spinoza? Just ordered the Damasio book from Amazon, it looks v. interesting.
Thanks Gary, the Damasio book is very good buy — clear, well written, inspiring, a real page turner….
As regards Spinoza as ‘self-help manual’: I often read Nietzsche in this regard, as being a producer of joy in life.
I’ve read little Spinoza, but there would also seem (at least from your account) to be somewhat of a parallel with Nietzsche, in his use of the categories ‘illness’ and ‘health’. What makes (the collective) you of this?
Yes Catherine, you’re completely right, and just this morning remembered that I’d meant to mention Spinoza as a precursor of Nietzsche… Unaccountably forgot ….
Nietzsche himself was at times sniffy about Spinoza, at times effusive (counting him as his only real forebear). Methodologically, they couldn’t be more different (or so it wd appear); Spinoza ultra-systematic, quasi-geometrical, proceeding by means of demonstrations and proofs — (Nietzsche mocked Spinoza for this in Beyond Good and Evil). Nietzsche by contrast systematically unsystematic, no patience for argumentation (philosophers wasted too much time telling us how they came to their view rather than what they thought), aphoristic.
And yet, Spinoza’s practical orientation – contemplation to serve the goal of increasing joyful encounters – was what delighted Nietzsche. And yes, the same language of sickness and wellbeing (Spinoza already beyond good and evil).
I prefer to think of both Spinoza and Nietzsche less as self-help manuals than as manuals for dismantling the self (and making a Body without Organs)…
I prefer to think of both Spinoza and Nietzsche less as self-help manuals than as manuals for dismantling the self
Too right; more Haynes than Alain de Botton [sp?]. I always think that people who feel better after reading Spinoza or Nietzsche are missing the point somehow…
PPl interested in this might enjoy the similar-themed post I’ve just put up at hypersition:
http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003782.html
Nice to see the same arguments still being rehearsed after almost three years.
Nice to see you reading so attentively. Read again, GC.
I have. Same arguments, same basic political/philosophical positions. Although Alf Garnet’s maintaining the guise of civility commendably well.
Yr being negative I think. You can’t expect ppl to just abandon their convictions, but it’s not as if the debate is simply going round in circles, or incandescing into inchoate fury as it did 3 years ago.
Yr being negative I think.
Horrors!
it’s not as if the debate is simply going round in circles, or incandescing into inchoate fury as it did 3 years ago.
On the contrary, people set out their positions with admirable clarity and honesty. Hate’s not your enemy…
I get johneffay’s point. I don’t mean you should just passively consume Spinoza (and N.) in order to “feel better”. More like you said Mark about using them as “manuals for dismantling the self”, tool kits to create for yrself a BwO. Catherine’s point about “increasing joyful encounters” – mmmm, I do like that.
I don’t mind the ‘feeling better’ thing coz – contra the Great Conciliator I think being negative is not admirable – but it’s a question of what is doing the feeling (i.e. not you anymore).
Not so much “admirable”, as an occasional tactical necessity.
http://www.hum.au.dk/romansk/borges/bsol/abadi.htm
Interesting piece about Spinoza, Borges and philosophy here.
Who does the concillator think he is? I’d like to read his Essays and then we’ll decide just how grat he is!!! Its very easy to criticise others views and ten times easier when you don’t put your own on the line for criticism.
So, Mr Caesura, you think “unilateral militarized anglosaxon-style zionist hyperliberal technomaniac globalization” is a serious and worthwhile position we could potentially explore?
[…] In this very last quote, we catch a glimpse of the continuities that stretched across Fisher’s thought, with the constructive implex of (re)weirding calling back directly to the the Spinozist core of the Cold Rationalist program. As he described in a 2004 post titled—so appropriately, in retrospect—Psychedelic Reason, the philosophy of Spinoza “tells you not to get out of your head but how to get out through your head”. Given that this ego-annihilating process was to intended to make one a conduit for the Lemurian signal (“the ultimate interests of any body lie in having no particular interests at all – that is in identifying with the cosmos itself as the BwO, the Spinozist God, the Lemurian body of uttunul”), what is happening here can be described as not only something truly weird, but something that is approachable through “awe, wonder and dread”. […]
[…] piliulę, bet ir paskatino vėl įdėmiau susidomėti akseleracionizmu. 2004 m. tekstas „Emotional engineering“ apskritai atrodo it viso Fisherio spinozizmo pagrindas, […]