On Freedom: Heidegger and Deleuze on Spinoza

James Luchte

Ah, the wind, the wind is blowing

Through the graves, the wind is blowing

Freedom soon will come;

Then we’ll come from the shadows.

Leonard Cohen, ‘The Partisan’

Spinoza is often quoted approvingly (for instance, by Deleuze in his Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza and Andre Garcia Düttman in his presentation last year at this conference) to the effect that the free man is the one who thinks about or fears death the least. Such fear he considers to be a passive emotion or affection, a bondage to pain, symptomatic of impotence and servitude. The free man, in this light, is one who has not only cultivated the stronger active emotion of acquiescence to the univocal chorus of necessity (Eternity), but has also learned to disengage external factors which bring about such passive emotions – to organise the ‘order of encounters’ as Deleuze describes in his Expressionism. Heidegger, on the contrary, who criticises Spinoza, and the impersonal, mathematical character of his system, in his 1936 lecture course, Schelling’s Treatise on Freedom, would seem to take further issue with Spinoza in his own contention that the one who faces his or her ownmost possibility of death without evasion, is the one who is most free, or who, perhaps, will have found him or herself in a moment that discloses the necessity of one’s own singular, personal freedom.

Heidegger places a great emphasis upon the epistemic role of mood, and specifically, of anxiety, in this context; and with the usual stipulations, we could argue that he has a different, and seemingly more positive, relationship with the (negative) emotional aspect of existence than does Spinoza. Of course, Spinoza, as Deleuze advertises, is a great seeker of Joy and pleasant emotions (in moderation); yet, it is his aversion to the ‘sad passions’ and ‘pain’ which clearly distinguishes him from Heidegger (and from Schopenhauer, for that matter). At the same time, however, Spinoza does contend that ‘passions’ do disclose our weakness, and they thus have an epistemological role, though one not pursued in the way Heidegger suggests. While this disagreement may seem to be irreconcilable, I would like to show that in essential respects, the philosophies of Spinoza and Heidegger exhibit a marked similarity and that the source of their difference lies primarily in the domain of ‘ontology’, and thus, also, and related to the latter, to their respective conceptions of time. Their philosophies diverge in that Spinoza espouses an ontology of a divine, eternal substance, while Heidegger explicitly seeks to destroy the history of ontology, one of the primary targets of which being the ‘ousiology’ of the metaphysical tradition. For Heidegger, substance, whether eternal and divine as in Spinoza, or as the monads, created and supreme, in Leibniz, remains within the domain of beings, of an entitive metaphysics. Or, in other words, Spinoza and Leibniz give ontic answers to the question of Being. Such an ontic metaphysics, as it is grounded upon the principle of identity, is furthermore not only limited to a conception of time as duration, but places the seat of freedom in that which is, contrary to the claims of immanentism by Spinoza, actually transcendent to the being of human existence, as this latter is irreducibly temporal – in between time and eternity, to express ourselves in a variation of Plato. That which is significant will be the implication of the difference in ontological perspectives for the meaning of freedom, which, for both philosophers, nevertheless remains, as Deleuze points out in Difference and Repetition, dependent upon their respective preliminary ontological investigations.

Read the rest of this essay at: http://luchte.wordpress.com/on-freedom-heidegger-and-deleuze-on-spinoza/