Spinoza. Relación y contingencia

Francisco José Martínez

MORFINO, Vittorio. Relación y contingencia, Brujas, Buenos Aires, 2010, 126 pp.

Nos encontramos con un libro que reúne dos importantes trabajos de Vittorio Morfino

donde se continúa su proyecto de construcción de un nuevo materialismo a partir del círculo

hermenéutico que conecta a Spinoza con Althusser o que contempla la obra de Spinoza

desde la problemática althusseriana. Las dos tesis del libro son: que en Spinosa se puede

encontrar una ontología de las relaciones que supone un primado de la estructura sobre sus

elementos, en consonancia con las tesis althusserianas de los años sesenta y setenta, y que

se da en Spinoza el primado del encuentro (contingente) sobre la forma, en consonancia

con el materialismo aleatorio o materialismo del encuentro que Althusser desarrolló en los

años ochenta.

Respecto a la cuestión de la relación, Morfino parte de la prohibición aristotélica de pensar la substancia como relación, el respeto de dicha prohibición por parte de Locke y Leibniz y su olvido por Kant y Hegel. Para Morfino se trata de establecer una ontología de las relaciones que no sea idealista ni teleológica y para ello parte de la obra de Enzo Paci,

fenomenólogo y marxista italiano que se esforzó por construir una filosofía relacional no idealista que excluye la identidad cerrada del universo y concibe la relación como abierta, lo que permite una ética relacionista basada en que el individuo puede organizar los elementos del mundo a través de nuevas relaciones. Paci pasa de la noción de sustancia como lo que está en sí a la noción de acontecimiento como aquello que existe por otro y en relación a otro.

Morfino se pregunta por el estatuto de la relación en la obra spinoziana y constata primero

su estatuto mental y su cercanía a las denominaciones extrínsecas. Mientras que las

propiedades remiten a la interioridad de una esencia, la relación se refiere a la exterioridad

de una existencia. Pero es en el tratamiento de las pasiones donde Morfino descubre la

importancia de la relación en la obra de Spinoza. Partiendo de la traducción de la locución

“passionibus obnoxious” como “atravesado por las pasiones”, Morfino constata que las

pasiones no serían tanto propiedades de una naturaleza humana genérica sino más bien relaciones que atraviesan al individuo constituyendo su imagen de sí y del mundo. El individuo

en Spinoza no sería una esencia ni un sujeto sino la relación entre un exterior y un interior

que se constituye mediante las relaciones que establece con los demás individuos y cosas

exteriores. Vemos, pues, como se pasa de una noción de relación como mero ente de razón

a una noción constituyente de relación, ya que las pasiones son relaciones que constituyen

tanto el individuo aislado como el individuo social que es la multitud a través de la práctica.

Retomando la distinción de Leibniz entre las relaciones de comparación y las relaciones

de concurso, Morfino dice que en Spinoza las relaciones entendidas como conveniencias

son entes de razón, pero las relaciones entendidas como concurso son constitutivas en el

plano ontológico.

El concepto de privación en Spinoza (en inglés)

Raphael Demos

According to Spinoza, the categories of good and bad --in fact, all categories of value-- are relative. The only valid category is that of substance; value as distinct from reality has no genuine meaning. Spinoza's attack on valuation is based on two sets of arguments, one rationalistic and scientific, the other religious and theological. We will consider each in turn.

(A) The world is governed by law; whatever happens, does so by necessity. Now, we easily 

believe this of external nature, but we balk when we come to human nature; we say man is free to do what he likes. Yet man is not a kingdom within a kingdom; he is part of nature, subject to the same general processes. Human emotions such as hatred, anger, envy, follow from the same necessity as other things, and can no more be reviled or criticized than the cold dampness of the rain or the screeching of the wind. So, Spinoza proceeds to say, "I will consider human actions and appetites just as if I were considering lines, planes, or bodies."

What are the forces which control human conduct? They are both internal and external. (a) We are determined by our own respective characters. "The infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast; the angry boy believes that by free will he wishes vengeance; the timid man thinks it is with free will he seeks flight; the drunkard believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things which when sober he wishes he had left unsaid. Thus the madman, the chatterer, the boy, and others of the same kind, all believe that they speak by a free command of the mind, whilst in truth they have no power to restrain the impulse which they have to speak; so that experience itself, no less than reason, clearly teaches that men believe themselves to be free simply because they are conscious of their actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined" (E2p11schol). The rose is fragrant by the necessity of its own nature, and a thorn pricks; similarly a man with a bad character behaves badly, and should no more be blamed for that than the thorn for pricking. All things, all bodies and all minds, have a determinate nature; as we know to-day, water is a determinate ratio of oxygen and hydrogen, coal is a ratio of other elements, and out of this determinate nature inevitably flow the various properties and behaviour of things.

(b) Causation is, moreover, external. We are determined by our characters, and our characters come from heredity and from the environment. The individual is an inseparable part of the universal scheme of things. We are a particular confluence of the forces of nature, or, as Spinoza would express it, we are modes of the Infinite Substance. Our actions and our desires and our make-up are a necessary outcome of the nature of things. We are what we are because the Universe is what it is. In such a scheme, obviously there is no place for freedom, and therefore no place for moral judgment. We come at the conclusion of a long process of development; we issue from the dark womb of Being. We are aware only of the last stages of this continuous process, and are unaware of its deep sources; therefore we have the delusion that we are independent individuals controlling our destinies. Imagine, suggests Spinoza, a stone, hurled high by a man; imagine further that the stone, as it reaches the peak of its curve, comes to consciousness. The stone then would naturally think itself as free because it is ignorant of the forces that launched it; and the stone would then congratulate itself on its success on rising so high. So are we, human beings, missiles flung into the air of life by the hand of Nature, and we delude ourselves with the thought that the course of our lives is traced by our will.

Spinoza. Pensamiento y materia, otra vez

Antonio Escohotado

Resulta difícil hallar en la historia de la filosofía una secuencia deductiva tan brillante, tantos paralogismos reunidos y tanta falta de sentido crítico [como en Descartes]. La unidad del ser y el pensamiento, la reconciliación con la realidad que es la conciencia de sí del hombre, desemboca […] en un yo singular que reconoce el ser real sólo a través de las garantías ofrecidas por un buen Dios. Puede decirse, en consecuencia, que Descartes sigue aún dentro del tanque de privación sensorial representado por la famosa estufa donde se metió cuando andaba guerreando con los católicos bávaros contra infieles y herejes; y que al abrirse allí de repente un pequeño tragaluz quedó cegado por la súbita claridad del día, incapaz de discernir sino las sombras de las cosas.

Esto lo vemos cuando define después la substancia («aquella cosa que no necesita de ninguna otra para existir») repitiendo a Aristóteles textualmente, aunque extraiga dos consecuencias nada aristotélicas: a) Que substancia sólo puede haber una, la divina, espiritual y providente; b) Que absolutamente todo lo otro o el mundo entero se reduce a dos «cosas» (res) rigurosamente separadas desde siempre y para siempre: la extensión y el pensamiento. La síntesis propuesta como «yo» no sólo no representa síntesis real alguna, sino que para explicar cómo puedo mover un dedo necesito suponer órganos fantásticos como la glándula pineal, donde burbujas o glóbulos de cosa extensa se hacen misteriosamente consonantes con burbujas de cosa intelectual, como si llevar el problema a términos microscópicos pudiese resolver el defectuoso concepto básico.

Finalmente, la conciencia de sí desemboca en un dualismo más estrecho aún que el platónico, donde lo sensible ni siquiera es propiamente corpóreo o material sino pura extensión regida por leyes geométricas. La unidad inmediata de sí mismo, dicen las Meditaciones de filosofía primera, significa dar por «evidente» que «soy distinto de mi cuerpo y puedo existir sin él». La extravagancia de este “mí mismo” bien podría derivar también del clima inquisitorial, que rodea siempre a Descartes como una opresiva malla.

Los dos ojos de Spinoza (en inglés)

Leszek Kolakowski

Monist doctrines always have trouble with the idea of negative freedom. It is only with great effort, and at enormous cost, that they succeed in salvaging it within their constructions; indeed it is doubtful whether this has ever been achieved without sacrificing coherence. Perfect solipsism aside (never seriously proposed and existing only in the realm of the imaginable), the monist project – to interpret all the qualities of existence as relative to one primordial being – inevitably ends up abolishing the entire realm of the subjective (understood as an irreducible realm). In this relativized monist world, subjectivity is always a particular state, arrangement, manifestation or phenomenon of something else – something that is not subjective – and can thus be defined entirely in terms of the object.

Belief in freedom as a negative quality of the subject is the belief that some if not all actions of the self-knowing subject have an unconditioned beginning: a perfect, ultimate source and spontaneous origin. It presupposes that when we ask about the reasons for our freely-made decisions, we will always reach an impassable barrier, a point where our question can go no further: the ultimate reason of our wanting something is, in the end, simply our wanting it – just that and no more. I can always ask why I want one thing rather than another, and sometimes I will be able to find an answer, but each new answer will be another “because I want . . .” After a number of such answers, going further and further back, the chain of explanations comes to an end, and I am left only with “I want this just because this is what I want.”

A subject to which we attribute this ability to evade determination, to refuse the question concerning the reasons for its own choices, is one whose every action must be considered as an unconditioned beginning: a new and unpredictable act of self-creation; a crack, or rather a kind of self-formed whirlpool, in the great mass of existence. Thus there are as many absolutes as there are self-conscious subjects capable of choice: at every point of subjectivity in the universe, the unity of the divine absolute, or of the absolute of nature, breaks down. When we consider this, we can appreciate the difficulties with which the scholastics had to grapple in their search a non-contradictory formula that would reconcile God’s definition as the absolute and only beginning with freedom of choice – a freedom that determines ex nihilo but is not itself predetermined. The search is ultimately pointless, the solutions proposed fragile as porcelain, and the results paltry; but the huge efforts expended by Christianity, in all its varieties, to avoid the either/or – the disjunctive choice between divine omnipotence and human freedom – also have their roots in the monist temptation, present in the doctrine of creation.

Cartesianism disentangled itself from this predicament through the epistemological decision expressed in the cogito. The cogito allows us, in fact compels us, to salvage our own existence – existence as it is experienced by us; it is the uniquely compelling starting-point of thinking about existence. As a result, we can more easily endow this epistemological primacy with ontic meaning. Indeed we cannot avoid doing so: if we tried – if we considered that what is “given” in the most primary sense is merely an appearance – then we could not legitimately pass from the appearance to the reality. But the cognitive absoluteness of a self-directed act of thinking endows that act with the right to claim absoluteness in the ontic order for itself as well. Consequently, freedom is not hopelessly entangled in the shackles of divine Grace as soon as we begin to think about it; its foundations can be built long before we are even aware of such a thing as divine Grace. We do not need to rescue it with excuses and evasions. Cartesian freedom, being negative, knows no restrictions; it is, from the start, simply our inalienable ability to add our own fiat to that of God. This is something we do with each act of subjective consciousness, and through each such act we become equal with our creator. It is a freedom that lies in the power of our self-defined creativity to choose.