Spinoza's Joyful Republic: On the Power of Passions, Politics, & Knowledge
Open Access
- Author:
- Sharp, Hasana
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 27, 2005
- Committee Members:
- Shannon Wimberley Sullivan, Committee Member
Emily Rolfe Grosholz, Committee Member
John Philip Christman, Committee Member
Daniel Joseph Conway, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jeffrey Nealon, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Political Philosophy
Spinoza
Passions
Epistemology - Abstract:
- My dissertation contends that, because his theory of knowledge is at the same time a theory of the body and its powers, Spinoza’s epistemology comprises a political doctrine. Commentators typically treat Spinoza’s philosophy of mind separately from his politics. Such a separation, however, violates his fundamental insight into the dependent, dynamic, and passionate nature of bodies and minds. I, therefore, interpret Spinoza’s major texts, political and metaphysical, as a coherent and unitary effort. Spinoza’s philosophy, I argue, is most essentially an account of the transformation of the passionate dispositions of bodies and minds – individual and political – into a joyful coordination of powers. Human freedom, as characterized in the conclusion to the Ethics, requires the democratic constitution advocated in the political writings. More specifically, both democracy and the maximization of intellectual power entail collective practices and institutions that reorient possessive desire and transform sad passions such as envy, hatred, and fear. Wisdom as much as peace depends upon a collective body and mind whose individual constituents unequivocally and joyfully affirm themselves as “parts of nature” necessarily subject to passions. The mutual affirmation of passionate interdependency, paradoxically perhaps, yields greater powers of autonomy and self-determination.