Eight Years Ago Today: Virtue its own reward

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 27, 2009, not one word different, but another image has been added and a different image of Spinoza substituted.]

Having learned a great deal from neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio’s 1999 book about consciousness, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, I decided to read another of his books.
    Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003) explores, among other things, the role of feelings in ethics and other social arrangements. Damasio brings the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) into the discussion because of his profound insights into the subject in his Ethics (Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding [Tractatus de intellectus emendatione])¹.

    I took special note of Spinoza’s role in the story for two reasons. First, I have to confess that even as a philosophy major at Yale, I read nothing of Spinoza as an undergraduate. Second, and more important, Spinoza had such unconventional views on God that he was actually expelled from the Jewish community in Holland and for this reason (according to Damasio) had such a “bad reputation” that his writings were largely ignored for a long time.
    Spinoza was not literally an atheist, but he certainly was with respect to the conventional divinity of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition:

God has not revealed himself to humans in the ways portrayed in the Bible. You cannot pray to Spinoza’s God. [p. 273]

    Ethics derived from biology, from feeling. Damasio quotes Proposition 18 in Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics:

    “...the very first foundation of virtue is the endeavor (conatum) to preserve the individual self, and happiness consists in the human capacity to preserve its self²”....
    At first glance the words sound like a prescription for the selfish culture of our times but nothing could be further from their real meaning. As I interpret it, the proposition is a cornerstone for a generous ethical system. It is an affirmation that at the base of whatever rules of behavior we may ask humanity to follow, there is something inalienable: A living organism, known to its owner because the owner’s mind has constructed a self, has a natural tendency to preserve its own life; and that same organism’s state of optimal functioning, subsumed by the concept of joy, results from the successful endeavor to endure and prevail. Paraphrased in deeply American terms I would rewrite Spinoza’s proposition as follows: I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are created such that they tend to preserve their life and seek well-being, that their happiness comes from the successful endeavor to do so, and that the foundation of virtue rests on these facts. Perhaps these resonances are not a coincidence. [pp. 170-171]

Spinoza’s best-known recommendation for achieving a life well lived came in the form of a system for ethical behavior and a prescription for a democratic state. But Spinoza did not think that following ethical rules and the laws of a democratic state would be sufficient for the individual to achieve the highest form of contentment, the sustained joy that he equates with human salvation....Many human beings require something that involves, at the very least, some clarity about the meaning of one’s life....
    ...the yearning is a deep trait of the human mind. It is rooted in human brain design and the genetic pool that begets it, no less so than the deep traits that drive us with great curiosity toward a systematic exploration of our own being and of the world around it...The same natural endeavor of self-preservation that Spinoza articulates so transparently as an essence of our beings, the conatus, is called into action when we are confronted with the reality of suffering and especially the reality of death, actual or anticipated, our own or that of those we love....
    ...From this perspective, any project for human salvation – any project capable of turning a life examined into a life contented – must include ways to resist the anguish conjured up by suffering and death, cancel it, and substitute joy instead³....[pp. 268-271]

You need not be in fear of...God because he will never punish you. Nor should you work hard in the hope of getting rewards from him because none will come. The only thing you may fear is your own behavior. When you fail to be less than kind to others, you punish yourself, there and then, and deny yourself the opportunity to achieve inner peace and happiness, there and then....Spinoza’s salvation – salus – is about repeated occasions of a kind of happiness that cumulatively make for a healthy mental condition....[p. 273]

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1. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Spinoza’s Psychological Theory.
       Damasio points out that Spinoza was the source of many of Montesquieu’s ideas, which greatly influenced the United States Constitution.
   

   Montesquieu’s views on ethics, God, organized religion, and politics are through and through Spinozian and were, unsurprisingly, denounced as such. [p. 256]

2. Note how diametrically opposite to this – how unethical – are our contemporary acts of suicide bombing.

3. Powerful motives for religiously believing in an afterlife, however wistful the belief!

Copyright © 2017 by Moristotle