Stephen Connelly
In this
article I will focus exclusively on Spinoza’s theory of power (potentia)
which forms a key element of his theories of natural right and imperium [….] My
purpose here is to convey the deep structure of the Spinozan concept of power,
rather than become too lost in the geometrico-theological terminology he
deploys, or the countless interpretations by which he has been determined.
Following
Spinoza, it is necessary to construct a definition. Firstly, Spinoza posits a self-caused
something (substance) which is the cause of all things — this is its essence,
which follows from its properties (infinity, immutability, capacity to know
etc.). Spinoza calls this something ‘God’.
Secondly
Spinoza now considers what this God is doing, the importance of which question
is illustrated by the classical logical distinction between capacity to do and
act. For example, Cato is able to walk (property and power [potestas]) and
Cato walks (attribute) are clearly different things. Though this God must be
able to do infinitely many things, for human purposes Spinoza can only perceive
two properties enacted, namely the attributes of Thought and of Extension.
Thirdly,
Spinoza notes that this God is ‘unrestrained’ save by its own necessity, and
being essentially self-caused (so propelled to act, as it were), this God
exercises all his properties infinitely; that is, just as Cato, when he walks,
is a walking thing, so God is a thinking and extending thing. Spinoza reserves
the name God for this thing when it is thinking, and Nature for when it is
extending (Deus sive Natura).
Note
that because God or Nature is unrestrained save by its own necessity, every
attribute is enacted immediately and inexhaustibly: it is eternal. Now, this
enactment is perceived as everlasting in the sense that while Cato may get
tired of walking, God or Nature does not, but Spinoza wants us to conceive of
this enactment as rigorously eternal i.e. not even indefinite duration may
properly be ascribed to it.
Equipped
with this construction of substance and its attributes, we are now in a position
to conceive potentia by literally ‘plugging’ God or Nature into its
attributes. What do I mean? Well, the attributes must be considered as ordering
functions — if they are presented with something to function on, they will
assign and distribute that something in a single and determinate manner. For
example, imagine I took all the letters from this page and jumbled them up into
a tiny ball. Now imagine there was a computer program which, if I fed these
same letters into it, would distribute them in such a manner as to recreate
this text. The attributes operate in something like this way: on their own they
are empty, but if we feed God or Nature into them, God or Nature will be
distributed in a single, determinate manner to constitute a completed, well-ordered
world.
This is
easier to illustrate with an albeit misleading example about Extension, where
if we posit the Extension function Ext(x), then Ext(Nature) distributes
Nature according to a definite coordinate system, in a manner that evolves
Descartes celestial fluid model shown in the diagram above. This would be
nothing other than Cartesian space, which is why it is misleading — Spinoza in
our view is convinced that Cartesian analytic geometry is quite incapable of
grasping the subtleties of the ‘infinite series’ of things. Likewise, we can
imagine a Thought function T(x), which explicates God as the infinite understanding
(every idea). To underline, while we speak of plugging God or Nature into the
attributes, the essence of God is such that God does his own ‘plugging’: he
self-explicates.
This
concept of ordered distribution is critical to understanding power, for if it
is not already evident, insofar as the attributes explicate the essence of God
or Nature, they distribute God’s very power with the result that that which
appears as distributed (the modes) each express God or Nature’s infinite power
in a certain and determinate way (hence ‘modus’). As Spinoza puts it: ‘God is
the immanent, not the transitive, cause of things’. Consequently, power or potentia
is only correctly conceived when we appreciate that it has been distributed
according to a certain and determinate order — that if I point at any ‘this’,
it must have a definite degree of power — and that in fact this is the only
real characteristic of power that Spinoza is asking us to be interested in. In
other words, to the question ‘what is power?’ we must respond that power has
been radically divested of any ‘occult qualities’ in favour of its determination
by reference to its well-ordered distribution. That is, power is defined
only by its relation to a whole order as a determinate difference: omnia determinatio
est negatio. To put this in another way:
All instances of power
distributed by the attributes identified above are intense in infinite
degree — that is, all the way down — and are continuous everywhere.
I flag
for the reader the possibly problematic interrelation between this distribution
and the corporeal plenum which constitutes Spinozan extension which follows
from the fact that in a plenum we have nowhere to assess these potentials
‘alone’. My view is that Spinoza’s conception of ‘corporeal plenum’ is
rigorously other than the common sense meaning of the term (see my thesis
referred to at the end).
Hegel’s
criticisms of Spinoza on this very point of determinate negation are well
known, but in fact Spinoza demands that we raise the complexity of our
understanding multi-fold to really get at the heart of his conception. The
problem with the above outline is that despite its liturgical nods to infinite
power, it does not quite appreciate what Spinoza’s infinity means for the
proposed structure. The tendency to distribute infinitely harks to Hegel’s
spurious infinite which proceeds indefinitely, whereas, as I have shown
elsewhere, Spinoza has available another conception of the infinite which is
decidedly more concrete. This infinite is obtained by considering the finite
case and then passing immediately to the limit, a technique Deleuze
revived in his own work [1]. What happens at the limit is inevitably some form
of transition: the curve becomes the straight line (Cusanus), motion becomes
rest (Bruno), the citizen becomes “a god amongst men” (Aristotle). So what
happens when power is raised to the limit?
Correctly
speaking Spinoza does not ask this about power because of its nature; rather he
asks it about the ‘things’ of the type that we have been constructing: things
that operate in a certain determinate manner. In other words, he asks it about machines.
Spinoza is asking what happens when we raise a finite machine to the limit.
What happens when we have a machine that operates at the concrete infinite?
What can this ‘body’ do? We have already encountered a key aspect of the answer
above, though we only applied its meaning spuriously. Such a machine would
operate without restraint save in accordance with its own laws of operation. We
initially applied this idea of non-restraint to conclude that the attributes
distribute the operations of the machine ‘everywhere’, but even if we do assign
power to every point of a notional space, however extended, can we be satisfied
that every possible operation has been accounted for? Difficult as it may seem,
we cannot. A distribution of power across infinitely many finite machines is
just an indefinitely large aggregate of finite powers.
Furthermore,
and I believe this to be Spinoza’s thought process, considered as the whole
face of the universe — the aggregate of all the finite machines connected
together in a plenum – all this power would have one effect and one alone: it
would hold the universe together as a One, as one divine machine, but there
would be no events. The machine would be like a lever in a void, held together
by power, completely packed with as much potentia as it could ever need,
but completely static. Even if we conceived that this lever was mobile — that
it was moving at 1 ft/s downwards, say — this kinematic fact would suggest a
constant motion, that is, a change which simply repeated itself to remain the
same. People tend to trip up here, because they equate motion with dynamism,
and read Spinoza’s theory in paricular as dynamic because machines move about
indefinitely (this is their conatus, or endeavour to persist). The confusion is
understandable, but leads to brutal, flattening misreadings of Spinoza, in
which he is collapsed into a kind of eccentric Hobbesianism in which all are
choked by the bonds of fate.
Spinoza
realised there is a very real physical need for another machine to be posited
which would literally upset the balance — a machine which additionally,
once it had acted, must necessarily not have exhausted itself just so it can
continue to force further impulsions into the finite mechanical system. It is
this capacity which is provided by power taken to its limit. Thus Spinoza
dynamises the universe and teaches us what dynamics is: it is not the motions
of the spheres, it is not even change; it is the change of motion and so the
variation of change. These variations of change he terms ‘transitions’ and they
have their sources in the determinate distributions of God or Nature’s infinite
that is inexhaustible power.
The
infinite divine machine not only constitutes a (spuriously) infinite world of finite
machines all running in a certain and determinate manner, but in addition it
overlays (as it were) an order of (truly) infinite power which disrupts the
settled concrescence of things. Accordingly, in addition to the appearance of
actual power in the world, which Spinoza calls the ‘actual essence’ of things,
we must also be attentive to a second critical category, viz. the ‘formal
essence’ of things which is nothing other than the distributed power of God or
Nature insofar as it constitutes potential ‘forms’ [formae] into which
existing machines may coalesce and produce new effects. God or Nature not
merely determines the world, but ‘over-determines’ the world into a foment of
creation, though it is my view that this over-determination is perceptual and
once all aspects of ‘time’ (eternity, duration, and time) are reintegrated into
this model the augmented system returns to complete determination. The study of
power now takes on the aspect of studying the distribution of formal essences
and thus falls within the preliminary ambit of transcendental empiricism.
In
addition, however, it is necessary to re-fold this notional formal overlay into
the immanent structure of the world. By simply positing an additional realm of
essences have we not returned to a kind of Platonism, to the transcendence
which Spinoza explicitly ruled out? Our questioning consequently devolves on
how this truly infinite power is integrated in the world at the same level as
its finite content. In physical terms I have undertaken research attempting to
piece together Spinoza’s thinking regarding this infinite Natural power which I
will not repeat here, but it is his arguments and studies in the physical realm
which, like all classical materialists, inform his explicit response in the
field that concerned him most of all viz. ethics.
Spinoza’s
insight is this: that insofar as the human is a thinking thing she is the
vehicle, or better, source, of God’s infinite power in the thought world, a
fact which indirectly follows from Spinoza’s reworking of the Cartesian cogito in which certain
ideas transit into the substance of thought [2]. Applying our knowledge, we
realise that not only therefore does each human machine express finite power in
its having this or that thought within the determinate chain of conscious
duration, but in addition each human expresses infinite power as an
inexhaustible power of thought intervening as the condition of thinking, and in
particular as the condition of thinking the infinite idea Dei (the goal of all
thought to which we must turn once thought).
For
Kant this difference in the mind appeared as a difference between a determinate
world of desires and a completely free, but empty, will that reigned over
inclinations. Spinoza, on the other hand, has derived a necessary and
determinate power which is nevertheless free because it is inexhaustible and
can pass across the realm of formal essences in an instant (I call this an
homological power). To adopt anachronistic language, the will is completely and
materially determined as to its ethical content — it is this infinite will here
being acted upon by other infinite wills (the acts of the virtuous) — but it
freely gives that content to determinate desire and further determines this
latter without negating or alienating its own power: in short, it negates
negation.
It is wrong,
however, to assume that a human is to be considered an atomic building block of
this world. The very nature of Spinoza’s conception requires us to consider the
human itself as constituted by a determinate series of machines coalescing
around a formal essence, this latter itself determined by its relation to all
essences. There is no foundational element: the essence does not justify some
vulgar essentialism for the simple reason that it is mute form — it is the
condition of meaning but has no meaning. The formal essence rather may be said
to form a ‘hospitable zone’ in which an inexhaustible variety of lives may be
lived, human and otherwise. In this idea we see aspects of Deleuze’s larval
subjects, and Balibar’s transhuman individuality.
With
this briefly outlined movement, Spinoza enters the sphere of legal theory armed
with a conception of power which imputes into the overbearing ‘force’ theories
of legal power of the Early Modern power an additional, subtly integrated
structure of infinite power which rises up from every free-thinking individual
[….]
Notes
1. It is worth
indicating that limits in Spinoza’s time only occurred at the ‘far end’ of
finite series, whereas subsequent analytical developments have shown limits
cropping up everywhere.
2. A move Hegel also
adopts in his Philosophy of Right.
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario