Much commentary on Spinoza's philosophy can give the impression – even while acknowledging Spinoza's mind-body parallelism – that his primary interest is in the metaphysics of mind, with the body merely featuring as mind's worldly shadow, or indeed encumbrance. In this new book, which offers a clearly-written and accessible treatment of some notoriously complex philosophical arguments, Eugene Marshall persuasively contends that nothing could be further from the truth.
Placing consciousness at the centre of his account enables Marshall to develop a compelling reading of the Ethics which respects Spinoza's stipulations that mind and body are ways of understanding what exists, rather than different ways of existing. He draws on close reading of the Ethics and other works, occasionally revisiting the standard translations, to argue that Spinoza eludes philosophical categorisation by rejecting the dichotomy between reason and emotion and proposing instead that human thought is intrinsically affective. An appreciation of the ethical dimension of Spinoza's philosophy requires understanding that thinking is essentially embodied and that the physical movements of the body are ideas in action. Although situating his work squarely in the Anglo-American strand of Spinoza scholarship, Marshall eschews the kind of interpretive approach that demands seventeenth-century solutions to twenty-first-century philosophical preoccupations. Instead, he pursues a rigorous and open-minded exploration of the texts which makes this book an illuminating introduction to Spinoza, as well as a valuable addition to the specialist academic literature.
The Spiritual Automaton opens with a succinct explication of the pivotal concepts of adequate and inadequate ideas and proceeds to argue for a series of innovative and sometimes challenging readings of some central themes in the Ethics. Adequate ideas are neither metaphysically impossible on Spinoza's own terms, nor an epistemic ideal beyond the reach of human finitude, but are intrinsic to mind. Here, Marshall draws a compelling parallel between Spinoza's common notions and Leibniz's theory of innate ideas. This leads him to develop an account of the conatus doctrine in which the affirmative or volitional nature of ideas is taken to be the mental analogue of physical momentum and inertia. On this reading, beings must be understood through the manifestations of their power or striving, whether they are considered under the physical or the mental aspects of their existence. That this striving is essentially conditioned by external forces is seen by some to present problems for the cogency of both epistemological and ethical aspects of Spinoza's theory, but Marshall embraces the constraint on the power of individual existent things as the basis for his central thesis: that a being's affective repertoire constitutes its consciousness, or in other words, that consciousness is affectivity.
As Marshall points out, some recent work on Spinoza has begun to focus on consciousness as a means of demystifying the panpsychism implicit in his metaphysics, but such projects face the difficulty that the Ethics, while discussing many aspects of (human) psychology, makes barely any reference to consciousness in any sense. Nonetheless, since it is reasonably clear that Spinoza does not hold all beings to have equal capacities for thought, and specifically does not wish to equate the ‘thinking’ of a stone with that of a human being, for example, consciousness seems like a promising way to capture the variation in such capacities. Rather than seek to shoe-horn Spinoza's philosophy into a full-blown ‘theory of consciousness’, Marshall explores how the theory of ideas and their power in Book 2 of the Ethics can do duty for an account of everyday experiences of consciousness or awareness. He proposes that consciousness can be seen as present in Spinoza's work in the relation between the striving of particular minds and the power of the ideas that constitute them: that an idea becomes conscious when its power is causally involved in a mind in such a way as to impact on that mind's power of striving. In Marshall's elegant summary, ‘the mind is a mechanism in which ideas exercise their power in relation to each other’ (170) and conscious ideas – experienced as emotions, or affects – are those which exercise their power so as to impact on the power of the mind as a whole. In this way, he is able to draw a novel and useful distinction between ideas that are merely constitutive of minds and ideas as deployed in the activity of thought.
This interpretation gives us a consciousness that is intrinsically embodied, contextualised and relational: each mind as constituted by ideas of bodily encounters, interchanges and effects. Marshall's Spinoza locates consciousness in the individual mode, or being: as such, consciousness is not a mental phenomenon to be puzzled over but a feature of existence itself, realised in both mind and body and reflecting the situatedness and interdependence of all individuals. It is perhaps disappointing, therefore, that Marshall largely confines his exploration of the implications of his suggestive new picture of Spinozistic consciousness to the latter books of the Ethics, rather than engaging fully with Spinoza's own overtly relational works, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Tractatus Politicus. It would confirm The Spiritual Automaton as a significant contribution to Spinoza scholarship if consciousness-as-affectivity proved a resource capable of addressing some of the obstacles that commentators have encountered in reconciling Spinoza's political writings with his metaphysics.
The motivation for Marshall's addressing Spinoza's individual psychology and the moderation of the affects, rather than the political writings, can be gleaned from the title of the book, derived from Spinoza's Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, where the soul is described as ‘acting according to certain laws, like a spiritual automaton’ (TIE s85). An automaton, of course, is a self-moving machine, and Marshall mobilises his distinctive interpretation of Spinoza's metaphysics to illuminate the ethical project of Book 5 of the Ethics: how human beings can realise their freedom – can become, as far as possible, self-movers – within the mechanistic laws of the operation of the affects. He puts his theory of affectivity to especially good use in explaining Spinoza's beatitudo as a matter of acting in certain ways, rather than of meditative or isolated contemplation. But, having whetted his reader's appetite for further development of this interesting line of interpretation he then shifts to a reading of Book 5 as a therapeutic project of self-improvement, of overcoming passive affects with active ones.
Nonetheless, Marshall's account of Spinoza's ethical prescriptions is more nuanced than that of commentators who see Spinoza as effectively an early-modern neo-Stoic. He identifies Spinoza's target as the order of affects, rather than the affects themselves. That is, he reads Spinoza as locating virtue in the effort to improve one's understanding of how things are, rather than in the avoidance or suppression of affective responses. And he rightly draws attention to the parallels between Spinoza's recommended techniques for improving one's understanding by re-ordering one's affects, on the one hand, and the psychological processes giving rise to affects in the ordinary way, on the other. Associative mechanisms, over which we can only ever have partial control, underlie both the condition of human bondage and the extent to which we are able to improve our understanding and increase our freedom. Thus the ‘therapeutic’ content of Book 5 amounts to no more or less than showing the reader how a proper understanding of how beliefs and prejudices come about may be put to good use. This key element of Spinoza's philosophy, whereby ideas follow inexorably from one another regardless of their adequacy, is often elided by those who read Spinoza as a rationalist simpliciter, and it is to Marshall's credit that he brings it out so explicitly. It is refreshing, also, to read an account of Spinoza's difficult arguments regarding the eternity of the human mind that persuasively reconciles that eternity with embodiedness.
Marshall's central strategy of situating consciousness in affectivity comes under strain at certain points. Affectivity offers an intuitively compelling way to appreciate why Spinoza's metaphysical panpsychism does not require us to think that consciousness is equally attributable to people and frying pans; but it is not clear whether Marshall's equation of an idea's being conscious with its being available for reflective thought is equally successful. And the distinction between adequate idea and active affect, which Marshall deploys in his account of minds achieving love of God, perhaps reflects Marshall's own philosophical commitments, rather than Spinoza's.
The Spiritual Automaton provides a well-evidenced, rigorously argued and stimulating overview of Spinoza's Ethics which is both respectful of and challenging to major strands of interpretation in the Anglo-American tradition. Engagement with other approaches that foreground the treatment of affectivity, such as that of Deleuze or of feminist philosophers, might have helped Marshall to bring out the strength and potential of his consciousness thesis even more strongly. Nevertheless, this book will be a rewarding read for anyone interested in exploring Spinoza's philosophy of mind.
