Recently Published Book Spotlight: The Cunning of Imagination

Eugene Garver Ph.D.’s is from the Committee for the Analysis of Ideas and the Study of Methods at The University of Chicago. Since then, he has taught at Cal State, San Bernardino and Saint John’s University in Minnesota, with visiting appointments at the University of Washington, the University of Minnesota, Yale, and the University of Texas at Austin. His books include studies of Machiavelli’s Prince, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Ethics and Politics.

What is your work about?

Spinoza seems to go out of his way to make ethics impossible—everything happens by necessity; free will is an illusion; the mind cannot act on the body; neither people nor God nor nature acts for an end. God doesn’t care what we do; there are no divine punishments and rewards. People are a part of nature subject to the same laws as the rest of nature. If body and mind are the same thing, only conceived differently, then the soul is just as mortal as the body.

The Cunning of Imagination is designed to show how ethics is possible under those very heavy constraints. By imagination Spinoza means all our ideas that come from experience, from the way things affect us. By the Cunning of Imagination I mean the way some people can come to lead an ethical life without ever aiming at it. We all start out ignorant and with weak bodies. The project of the Ethics is to show how anyone born in such a condition can come to have adequate ideas of how things really are, and eventually knowledge of God and the intellectual love of God. We, like everything else in the world, desire to preserve ourselves. Any further desires we might come to are rooted in that basic desire. The job of the Ethics and the geometric method is to show how ethical desires—the desire to live cheerfully with others and treat them with justice and charity, the desire to know things as they really are and not only how they affect us, and ultimately to know and love God—how all these desires could ever develop out of the desire to survive. The Cunning of Imagination unfolds the drama of the Ethics as it discovers a pathway from the desire for self-preservation to the desire to live an ethical and rational life.

Talk about the relationship you see between the imagination and efficient causality/the geometric method. You say it is about how we come to lead an ethical life, but is there a form or concept of imagination necessary for this to occur?

Spinoza says that he will treat the emotions as he would lines, planes, and bodies. The imagination consists in those ideas we have of how things affect us; the only kind of cause relevant to them are efficient causes. Ideas are caused by their objects. We are born weak, with bodies and minds not capable of much. The more passive we are, the easier it is to explain behavior by efficient causes. We come to lead a social, and then an ethical and rational life, through the imagination’s self-organizing power. Just as an invisible hand is supposed to convert selfish into cooperative behavior in economics, so Spinoza sees the human individual, constituted by imaginative ideas, able to cooperate with other people. Sociability is the route to rationality.

How does it fit in with your larger research project?

I’ve spent most of my career writing about Aristotle, especially the Rhetoric, Ethics and Politics. My interest there and in my other books and articles, is in practical reason, what it is and under what conditions reason can be practical and practice rational or reasonable.  Spinoza is a very unlikely place to look for a treatment of practical reason. For him, human reason can know nothing of the particulars with which practice is concerned, which are knowable only by the imagination; by reason everything is necessary; for action, at least some things are contingent. His Theological-Political Treatise shows us how the imaginative knowledge of particulars is adequate for living well and living together.  Doesn’t it follow that practical reason is impossible and unnecessary?

I argue that in the Ethics practical reason consists in self-knowledge, and that self-knowledge is knowledge of one’s passions, a transformative knowledge that converts passions into what Spinoza calls active emotions, emotions attached to our adequate ideas of the nature of things. Practical reason is self-knowledge and self-knowledge is knowledge of one’s passions. These are very limited conceptions of both practical reason and self-knowledge. But it is arguably all that one needs to lead a rational and free life. This is obviously a very different idea of practical reason from Aristotle’s. So it broadens the idea of practical reason beyond what I tease out of Aristotle, or of Machiavelli.

What is the most important difference you see between Spinoza’s concept of reason and those of Aristotle or Machiavelli?

I find theories of practical reasoning as futile as discussions of “the scientific method.” Both vary between specific prescriptions at odds with some aspects of the practices they want to regulate, and more general exhortations that boil down to Be Good. I like Machiavelli, Aristotle and Spinoza because they don’t offer theories of practical reasoning. Instead they look at the difficulties of practical reasoning and the resources people have for confronting them. Machiavelli proposes to teach hopeful new princes how to learn from great examples of the past, and he gives a very sophisticated treatment of the difficulties with such learning. Practical success turns out to turn on an art of appearance: how does an individual convince people that he is a prince rather than a usurping thug. Aristotle highlights the difficulties of practical reasoning in ways very different from Machiavelli’s. he assumes that his readers already know what good action is; the role of philosophy is to show what is good about what we already know to be good. He shows the need for practical reasoning in developing the practical bearing of abstract generalizations. To pick just one example, in his general exposition of ethical virtue, he says that each virtue is a mean between a pair of vices, but when he looks at particular virtues, what is interesting abut the Ethics is how each of them in different ways doesn’t fit that general account. The same happens throughout the Ethics, Rhetoric, and Politics.

Spinoza has a different problem of practical reason. The imagination seems to do the jobs people normally assign to reason. While reason knows that all things are determined, the imagination regards things as contingent. Reason knows that there is no free will, but the imagination thinks that we can act on those contingent things in ways we choose. The role of reason in practice is to transform people from being slaves to the passions to the freedom of having power over them. This function doesn’t usurp or deny the practical power of the imagination, but carves out a role for reason that leads not to its mastery of the external world but to a self-knowledge that is at the same time the intellectual love of God, and so to blessedness.

Why did you feel the need to write this work?

Spinoza made me do it. I didn’t choose Spinoza; he chose me. Around twelve years ago I was asked to be on a panel to discuss Biblical and Constitutional interpretation.  It wasn’t a subject I had thought about, so I had to come up with something to say. I vaguely remembered from graduate school that Spinoza had interesting things to say about Biblical interpretation, and I found that I remembered right. But from that accidental beginning, I got more and more drawn in by Spinoza, and a chance meeting turned into an obsession. Other thinkers I’ve run into in this way haven’t spoken to me in that way, so it wasn’t fully chance but something more like providence.

Which of your insights or conclusions do you find the most exciting?

Spinoza’s imagination leads to ideas it could not have imagined. It couldn’t imagine the ascent from imagination to adequate ideas, from ideas of how we are affected to how things are. A surprising conclusion I found imposed on me is that this intellectual and ethical progress is a social rather than an individual project.

Spinoza identifies an increase in power with pleasure. I can get pleasure by imagining playing center field for the Cubs, but it’s hard to think that fantasy increases my power. But people in a society do just that and do it successfully. If a group of people admire one another, they all become more powerful through their emotions toward one another: the more people admire me the more powerful I am, since I can then get other people to help me get what I want. From that social self-empowerment, an individual can become less subject to destabilizing passions, and then more rational, governed by adequate ideas, and then see herself as she really is and not just as she appears to herself to be. Someone who knows herself as an active being can, through this self-knowledge, increase her own power. Reflecting on one’s rationality makes one’s reason ore powerful. The route from fantasy to true self-knowledge is through social intercourse.  I could not have predicted the social nature of epistemic and moral progress before I tried to make sense of the argument of the Ethics.

What advice do you have for others seeking to produce such a work?

Don’t read secondary literature. Of course, that’s overstated. I found a lot of scholarship on Spinoza useful, and some of it truly inspiring. But my subject is Spinoza, and the issues and problems I found in the text are what I found in the text, and not in issues defined by the current state of Spinoza scholarship. I don’t try to locate my project in terms of what others think. And I’ve had articles and grant proposals rejected because I don’t join pre-defined issues. Writing by locating oneself relative to current debates is probably a good way to get jobs and get tenure. But I don’t think it’s a good way to do philosophy.

Sometimes the problems I found with Spinoza are problems that most scholars reading Spinoza also wrestle with. For example, almost everybody tries to come to terms with what the infinite modes and especially immediate and mediate infinite modes could be. And I do my best at making sense of them too. On the other hand, I think the following problem absolutely crucial to the argument for the Ethics, and almost nobody else thinks it’s important, or even a problem at all. Everything, Spinoza  says, tries to preserve itself and persist as what it is. But individuals—it isn’t clear whether it’s all of them—also try to increase their power. Spinoza and most of his readers regard that movement as immediate and unproblematic.  I think it’s anything but, and working out how that inference works opens up further thoughts about how his argument proceeds. Maybe Spinoza and most of his readers are right that there’s no interesting problem here. But it was a problem I had to confront to develop my own understanding of the argument. I wouldn’t have found it if I had let the contemporary state of scholarship set my agenda.

How have readers responded?

One of the hardest things to do when writing is figuring out what to do with criticism, and praise. I hope readers will respond with fulsome praise, but the more crucial question is how will or should I respond to unsympathetic readers. No doubt everybody’s first response is to dismiss criticism as mis-reading: Sometimes that’s the right response. Sometimes it’s right to reject advice. People will often misunderstand you by assuming that you’re trying to do what they would do, only you aren’t doing it very well.  I don’t think there are rules for deciding how to respond. It’s good to know that one has a choice about how to take criticism. Sometimes charity is appropriate, and sometimes ignoring criticism is the best way forward.

But sometimes obtuse-looking advice is worth taking seriously. I sent a draft of one chapter to a friend who thought the whole paper was hopeless because it violated Spinoza’s thesis that mind and body are identical. She circled passage after passage in my paper writing in the margins “Mind-body causality!” or “You violate mind/body identity!” For each citation, I could find no evidence that I was guilty of such crimes. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it wasn’t I but Spinoza who skirted dangerously close to violating his own thesis. I found that by taking that criticism as both wrong-headed and important I think I improved the book.

In this case I was led on to question another central thesis of the Ethics besides mind/body identity: there is nothing unique about human nature. People are just animals with unusually complex bodies and minds. But there are emotions, most of them harmful, that are uniquely human, and there is no evidence that Spinoza thinks other animals form societies of the kind he describes in Part 4 or have intellects that have power over the passions as in Part 5. If there is nothing unique bout human nature, there is something unique about some human emotions, which leads to his showing what is unique about human society.

The argument of the Ethics gradually and almost always tacitly narrows its scope to human beings, and then to people guided by reason. For just one example, in Part 4 we learn that the person guided by reason hates no one. He adds in a note that he’s only talking about hating other people. Hatred is pain accompanied by the idea of an external object. We do and should try to eliminate pain and its causes. There’s nothing wrong with swatting mosquitos. So there is something unique about people at least as the objects of our emotions. Human uniqueness, in spite of Spinoza’s strictures, plays an important part in the drama of the Ethics.  That’s why I think his argument that moral and intellectual progress are social affairs is so important. It is very hard to uphold mind-body identity and deny human uniqueness, and the difficulties in doing so propel Spinoza’s argument.

How do you hope readers will respond?

I read the Ethics as a drama. It t is not usual to talk about works of philosophy as dramas, and to identify their central argument as a plot. My hope is that people will share my invitation to read philosophical arguments as dramas. There is never smooth sailing in the drama of the Ethics.  How Spinoza is able to affirm mind/body identity and deny anything unique about human beings makes the argument of the Ethics full of surprises. Starting from universal premises, the Ethics ends with the statement that good things are as difficult as they are rare and so few people are fully wise. The Ethics has a plot which moves towards the ultimate happy ending, at least happy for those few in Part 5 of people becoming immortal. We get there first through the mind as a confused idea in Part 2, then through the human emotional pathologies of Part 3 and then the human bondage to the passions in Part 4. The cunning of imagination allows people to develop adequate ideas without ever aiming at them. From their introduction in Part 2, adequate ideas seem to be an alien presence in the mind, rather than a part of the mind, maybe implanted by God but in any case not achieved through our own efforts, until the drama finally takes a happy turn in Ethics 4. In the absence of teleology, the cunning of imagination is the only way open to Spinoza to make  development and are possible. I think that’s a pretty exciting drama.

You can ask Eugene Garver questions about his work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.

*

The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.