James Luchte: Philosophy

On Freedom: Heidegger (and Deleuze) on Spinoza

James Luchte

University of Wales, Lampeter

 

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’[1]

Spinoza is often quoted approvingly (for instance, by Deleuze in his Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza[2] and Andre Garcia Düttman in his Address to the 3rd Annual Joint Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy in 2007) to the effect that the free man is the one who thinks about, or fears, death the least.[3]  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,[4] 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, upon 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,[5] dependent upon their respective preliminary ontological investigations.  

The Significance of Spinoza for Heidegger

At first glance, it may seem strange to juxtapose Spinoza and Heidegger, the first an ‘excommunicated’ Jew living in Amsterdam in the mid-1600’s (and then, The Hague), the other a German (and a dissident ‘Nazi’)[6], living at the time of his lectures on Schelling, that is 1936, near Freiburg. Although, as we will see, Heidegger’s documented interest in Spinoza and ‘Spinozism’ had already arisen at least as early as the 1920’s, it is interesting that in his lectures, after his first mentions of Spinoza, Heidegger seems necessitated or compelled to explain to his audience (among whom were the panoptic Nazi auditors) that the latter is not properly a ‘Jewish thinker’, citing of course, his expulsion from the Jewish community at the age of 23.[7]  It should be remembered that well before this time, Heidegger already had a quite severe falling out with leading Nazi officials and academic operators, such as Alfred Baumler, who had not only prevented him from being elected President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, but had also placed Heidegger under surveillance.  Strangely enough, in a long report that would remove from Heidegger any hope of being elected President of the Academy of Sciences, it was stated that Heidegger was a schizophrenic, and that his philosophy was influenced by Jewish ideas (notably Husserl).[8] 

Beyond these perplexing historical considerations, however, the significance of Spinoza (and ‘Spinozism’) for Heidegger was long-standing and quite profound in relation to the development of his own philosophical perspective. Of course, it is Heidegger’s opposition to the rationalist and mathematical aspects of his philosophy that is most pronounced in all of his extant statements about Spinoza.  It is these aspects which come under focus in his 1936 lectures on Schelling’s The Essence of Human Freedom in which Heidegger states that it is Spinoza who was the first to develop a complete modern (post-theological) philosophical system based upon the framework of a mathesis universalis.  He states that the need for a system in philosophy is a specifically Modern need in light of the attempt by philosophy to establish an independent grounding, distinct from the then hegemonic Christian theology.  At the same time, Heidegger states that the problem of freedom enters centre stage in light of the various efforts of ‘system builders’, and he attempts, over the period of the rest of the lecture course, to lay out the conditions for a ‘system of freedom’.  It would seem that Heidegger was not convinced by Spinoza’s conception of freedom, conceived as acquiescence to God (or Nature).  In his exploration of Schelling, for instance, it was precisely in a revolt against God, indeed, in active ‘evil’ or the self-assertion of human existence, that freedom is disclosed as the law of one’s own being.  It could be stated that Spinoza’s notion of acquiescence shares a family resemblance with Heidegger’s reading of Schelling, however, to the extent that Spinoza regards the divine Substance as our ownmost proper being, and that our acquiescence is merely a surrender to ourselves.  Heidegger, however, does not see matters this way, as he seeks the specific character of human freedom which involves the negativity of an ontological difference of human existence from the being of beings, including the divine being.  The criteria for this difference is, of course, that of temporality and the insurmountability of finitude for human existence of our very inability to ever conceive of ‘infinity’ or the ‘eternal’.  It is in this way that their respective views of death (and, thus, temporality) will highlight the ontological differences between Heidegger and Spinoza.

This aspect of temporality, of finitude, is further thematised in other treatments of Spinoza by Heidegger.  Of course, it could be argued that any time Heidegger considers the principle of reason, Spinoza will remain an elephant in the room, implicated as one of the great rationalist system-builders (and who set the stage for the efforts toward a system in German idealism, as Beiser has recently detailed in his German Idealism and The Romantic Imperative).  In fact, the issue of Spinoza, or more properly ‘Spinozism’, becomes a central issue for Heidegger in his 1920’s project of radical phenomenology, specifically in his work Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, in which he seeks to retrieve Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, as a laying of the ground for metaphysics, or a metaphysics of metaphysics.  The issue of ‘Spinozism’ concerns the question of the authority of reason which erupted in the ‘Pantheism controversy’ of the 1780’s at the instigation of Jacobi who had accused Lessing of ‘Spinozism’.[9]  ‘Spinoza’ is moreover significant beyond this particular controversy, for in its aftermath, and the redefinition of Reason by Hölderlin, Schlegel, Novalis, and Herder, as an organic, aesthetical and historical reason, he provided (well over one hundred years after his death) some of the tools to overcome the apparent subjectivism of the Kantian-Fichtean philosophy in the development of early German Romanticism and German Idealism.  Of course, with the eruption of Romanticism and German Idealism, ‘Spinozism’ underwent a radical transfiguration, which perhaps, transformed his ideas beyond anything we could immediately recognise as ‘Spinoza’.  Yet, we must leave this latter issue of for the present time, and I refer you to the work of Frederick Beiser for more detail on this topic.[10] 

The ‘Pantheism controversy’, as Beiser initially relates in his seminal, The Fate of Reason, concerned the ‘authority of reason’, and took place primarily as a dispute between Mendelssohn and Jacobi (and Hamann).  Moreover, this dispute was a defining moment in the development of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in which he, in his essay, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ (1786), rehearsed the basic shift in his thinking which became manifest in the revisions of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Critique of Practical Reason (1787).  In this essay, as Heidegger characterises it in his History of the Concept of Time, a rationalist (subjectivistic) criteria was established which became increasingly divorced from the indications of the transcendental, imagination, temporality and (being-in-the-) world.  Beiser tells us that Kant came down on the side of Mendelssohn in the controversy, and with his essay on orientation, as Heidegger suggests, he effectively ended the dispute.  Heidegger makes much of the revisions of the Critique of Pure Reason, as he specifies not only the rationalist domestication of imagination and temporality in the constitution of knowledge, but also the exclusion of temporality and imagination from the meaning and operations of practical philosophy.[11]  Indeed, contrary to Kant’s own purported limitation of knowledge to make room for faith, it is clear that this limitation does not in itself limit the authority of reason in practical matters, and this was noticed by those such as Jacobi and Hamann, who expressed their outrage at the time over what they regarded as Kant’s betrayal.  It would seem, in this way, that Kant, while pretending to dispel the taint of ‘Spinozism’ as a totalitarian theoretical knowledge, in fact establishes the rationalist philosophy of Spinoza at a deeper, more subterranean level.  We could argue that ‘Spinoza’ is merely swallowed up within Kant’s architectonic of transcendental subjectivity, but is given a purely regulative significance. 

The significance of the subordination of temporality and imagination in the theoretical philosophy and its exclusion from the practical philosophy was not lost on Heidegger in his late 1920’s investigations of Kant.  In fact, he elaborates a distinct ‘Kantian’ philosophy in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics[12] in which the A Edition characterisation of a transcendental power of imagination (Einsbildungskraft) is restored as a surrogate for Heidegger’s own indication of an original, ecstatic temporality in his 1920’s radical phenomenology.  As I have explored in depth in my recent Heidegger’s Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality,[13] the 1920’s radical phenomenology was an attempt to not only disclose the specific temporal be-ing of human existence, but also to cultivate an indigenous conceptuality (the Existentiale) in which such a be-ing could be expressed intimately (if not immanently in the sense of Deleuze, whose interpretation relies upon a notion of a univocity of Being which is positive and merely affirmative).  There lurks in Heidegger’s temporal problematic the supposition that Reason, or Spinoza’s God, as an a-temporal (eternal) substance, is not, and does not express, properly our own, human be-ing.  As I will explore below, that which is deemed our own, Heidegger contends, is disclosed through the negativity that specifies us over against beings which enter our world and any Being which (whether through emanation, creation or expression) is said to produce our ‘world’.  In this way, an acquiescence to such a God, to such a necessity is not freedom as self-determination according to a law of one’s own be-ing (a temporal lawfulness or regulation), but the surrender to what effectively is a transcendent, un-worlded dogmatic being (and one not given a merely regulative status).  This is a law or logic that is expressly not our own, but instead serves merely to cover over, conceal, our ownmost be-ing.  While we will explore these issues in more detail in the following pages, suffice it to say for now that we could very well argue that, of all the metaphysicians since Plato, it is Spinoza who is the greatest target of Heidegger’s destruction of the history of ontology.  But, as a destruction is not meant to be merely an elimination, but a setting free of an original impulse of an ontology, we will see that there is much that is akin between Heidegger and Spinoza, to the extent that the former could be seen as a radicalisation of the latter, especially if we succeed in dismantling the ousiological[14] conception of Being, as substance, or God, which imprisons his philosophy as does a frame (Ge-stell).

Spinoza and Freedom

One way to understand Spinoza is in his own destruktion of Descartes.  In contrast to the notion of two heterogeneous substances, of thought (res cogitans) and extension (res extensa), and of their incomprehensible relation, Spinoza demonstrates that there is only one Substance which is the common root of two parallel stems, or attributes, of thought and extension.  The question of freedom culminates, in the Ethics[15] of Spinoza, with a notion of eternity which is the rational intuition, and intellectual love, of God (or Nature) as a system, or systasis, of necessity.  Eternity is that originary event which is beyond the transient modifications of substance and is thus beyond a conception of time as mere duration – indeed, with Augustine, Spinoza could himself declare that such a sense of time is not sufficiently real, but is merely an illusion, a ladder to be thrown down once we have expressed our own active affections.  Freedom, therefore, in the context of the ‘third kind of knowledge’ (sub specie aeternitatus), is the affirmation of an imminent necessity arising from the singular nature of the thing itself. 

However, in order to comprehend the significance of such a notion of freedom, we should return to the beginning, to the initial condition of existence, so as to fathom the difficulty and rarity of any attainment of freedom in the world.  In other words, that which is required is the unfolding of the system of Spinoza in order for us to ascertain our place within the whole, and thus, to locate the pathway upon which we must embark from a state of fear and weakness toward one of freedom, or as Deleuze suggests, beatitude.[16]  This pathway corresponds to the three kinds of knowledge, each of which discloses a specific orientation of the being of the self, which Spinoza contends, is desire (conatus).  The first kind of knowledge, is that of the ‘order of passions’, of the phantoms of the imagination.  It is characterised by inadequate ideas which are contrived by the random projection of partial perspectives upon extrinsic determinations, passively received through chance encounters.  Deleuze mentions that this kind of knowledge is that of the ‘order of nature’ and even comprises such ‘universalist’ ideas as the civil state and religion and their respective drives for obedience.  The second kind of knowledge comprises the ‘order of relations’, of the understanding.  It is characterised by ‘common notions’ which disclose the connection of our knowledge with that of God, whose essence is disclosed through these notions. The second kind of knowledge comprises an ‘order of reason’, in which the understanding increasingly begins to exercise control over the imagination and place its ideas and passions into order.  In other words, our being becomes determined, as Deleuze suggests, by the desires of reason.  The third kind of knowledge comprises the ‘order of essences’, and fathoms the singularity of each mode, including our own body, as an expression of the divine, sub specie aeternitatus.  It is the active affection of a mode in its acquiescence to the eternal substance, or God. This knowledge regards the singular essence of God which we find in ourselves, through our own internal resources, in distinction to both the random encounters and the general relations of the external world.

Freedom, in this way, is a state of being that is the unfolding, according to Spinoza, of one’s own essence in an active affection.  This activity is indicative of an increase, as Deleuze writes, of our power of active being.  Yet, as we have seen, we do not begin in such a state of freedom, but in dependency and passivity, as in infancy and childhood.  We begin, lost in the stems, distracted by the fragmentation of the passions which cause us sadness and pain.  Here we are known, but do not know ourselves.[17]  This is our situation and predicament, and it is the topos from which we strive to achieve a freedom which is only implicit in our being, as the origin and source for our being, and thus, our true, active being is that of God, the eternal substance.  In this way, that which is, is God in his positive, immanent and univocal Being which is explicated as a world, which itself implicates the very eternal Substance as its source and truth.  The negative, the nothing, fear, despair, all ‘sad passions’ are, for Spinoza, tainted with illusion, superstition and ignorance.  Freedom comes when this veil is torn asunder to disclose the positive actuality of God.

To the extent we wish to travel this pathway toward freedom, one which as Deleuze mentions, may perhaps be attained only near the end of life, it is understandable why Spinoza would state that the man who thinks least of death is the most free.  This of course does not rule out the possibility that our power of action may become so great that we will be able to even tackle such negative emotions head-on as fear, but one senses that such an opportunity may never arise as each ‘mode’ has been trained to organise an ‘order of encounters’ according to quite a hedonistic calculus.  In this way, we may never get beyond repression and substitution in respect of our fear of death, as in the case of Lucretius, for instance, or others, such as the early Wittgenstein, who merely state that we will never live to see death and thus we should not fear it, nor do we have any rational grounds to do so.  Yet, the question remains – and I believe that this is the primary significance of Heidegger’s criticisms of Spinoza, and more generally, of rationalism – of the true being of the self amidst its existence, not only with respect to the problematic character of substance as the meaning of being, but also with respect to the issues of negativity and possibility, indeed, of futurity and projection, which remain suppressed by Spinoza.

Heidegger, Spinoza  and Freedom

Heidegger would agree with Spinoza’s basic intuition that freedom (or, in this context, eternity), is not to be regarded as bound up with the events of duration, but is, in this way, beyond ‘beings’ or ‘modes’.  At the same time, however, while he agrees with the notion of a common root of Being, Heidegger would not endorse the sentiment that such a root is that of God or Nature, which, at the end of the day, is, from his perspective, ontologically the same as a mode, or a particular being, a sameness expressed in the univocity of being.  As I have suggested, for Heidegger, substance is not what we are, as finite beings.  But, how do we know this, what is the epistemic source for such a determination of difference, of the ontological difference between beings and the be-ing of human existence?  As suggested, the epistemic source is that of mood, in this case, anxiety in the face of death.  A contrast between Heidegger and Spinoza on this epistemic issue will disclose the specific difference between their ontologies, and the difference between their conceptions of time (or temporality in the case of Heidegger).  Now, it can be stated immediately that Heidegger, in the 1920’s phenomenology, is not speaking primarily of fear, as in the fear of death.  He speaks instead of anxiety.  More specifically, fear is a mood in which that which is feared is a threat that may happen or not.  In this way, fear in Heidegger is the same as fear in Spinoza’s Ethics, as this emotion is always accompanied by hope (that some event, etc. will not occur).  In this way, we could find a striking agreement between Heidegger and Spinoza with respect to the inauthenticity of fear and of the unreality of its associated conception of time.  However, as stated, fear is not Heidegger’s primary concern, nor is it his epistemic source for the differentiation of our own being from that of entities.  This is indicated, as I have mentioned, in anxiety, and again, we can find an analogue of this indication in Spinoza.  For Heidegger, anxiety is a sense of a threat to our being that is insurmountable, of our own possibility of impossibility.  In the absence of any hope, anxiety shares a family resemblance to Spinoza’s emotion of despair.  That which is crucial here is that Heidegger contends that anxiety reveals to us the Nothing, which has the sense of the negativity of ourselves (finite transcendence), in our difference from generic beings and from any transcendent being.  Moreover, as it is insurmountable, anxiety, in distinction from fear and the unreality of its sense of time, discloses the truth of what is there in its ultimate necessity.  In his radical, that is phenomenological and existential, ontology, Heidegger is seeking to disclose the specificity of our own human being, which, truth be told, is in each case, my own.  Heidegger has, in this way, exposed a radical leap by Spinoza away from the truth, and into the consoling fiction of his notion of divine substance, which is meant to be imminent, to be our true being, but becomes, in its lack of being, perhaps the symbol of our greatest weakness and un-freedom.          

In contradistinction to such a being of eternity, Heidegger offers us a glimpse of negativity, a look at the personal being of finite, human existence which decides its own binding commitments, chooses its makeshift projection of ‘world’ amid the ecstasies of temporality, a freely chosen world which provides a clearing into which beings may enter.  In this way, Heidegger has articulated a philosophy of finite transcendence in which existence is regarded as transcending as such.  In this light, it is not emotion (or, mood), albeit negative, which precludes our freedom, but our inability or unwillingness to face, for instance, the anxiety of being-towards-death, and follow this event to where it takes us, ‘all the way to the end’.  

Epilogue: On Necessity

Hannah Arendt speaks of a gale that blows through Heidegger’s philosophy, a wind that is untimely, in its standing out from the ‘experience’ of the present, as an intimation of the primordial.[18]  It is in this light that we may come to terms with his difference from Spinoza.  The question is that of the meaning of necessity, and of its determination from within the context of a specific ontology.  Spinoza lays out his distinction of freedom and necessity:

That thing is called free, which exists solely by the mere necessity of its own nature, and of which the action is determined by itself alone. On the other hand, that thing is necessary, or rather constrained, which is determined by something external to itself to a fixed and definite method of action.[19]

It is significant that Spinoza gives us two senses of necessity in this definition, that, on the one hand, of the ‘necessity’ of one’s own nature, a sense of necessity disclosed with respect to freedom as self-determination.  On the other hand, there is the ‘necessary’ as that which compels or constrains the self from its actualisation of freedom. To this extent, since the ‘necessary’ places a limit upon the possibility of the self determination of ‘necessity’, it must be deemed to be false.  The language of necessity becomes that of reason, of geometry, mathematical deduction and the logical procedures which construct a judgment of necessity.  It could be argued that Spinoza gives priority to the attribute of pure rational thought, mirrored though it is in the dimension of body with the construction of an ‘order of encounters’ – and its ultimate, though possibly ironic, quieting of our emotional being. 

From the perspective of Heidegger, the question and sense of necessity undergoes a metamorphosis to the extent that the gale of the wind blows away the dead language of substance and the field of its metaphysical lexicon.  To this extent, Heidegger’s comportment with respect to the history of ontology is that of a ‘phenomenological destructuring’, or, in other words, of a retrieval of the originary situation of questioning in the wake of the dissemination of the gift of death.  In this way, we could juxtapose a logical conception of necessity to that of an existential, the latter, Heidegger would contend, being primordial in relation to the former conception.  In this light, logic and mathematical limit, as with Heidegger’s engagement with Leibnizian analytic judgment in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic,[20] intimate the primordial limit of finite existence.  

Such an overwhelming horizon for the disclosure of the truth of Being cannot be contained by the ‘necessity’ of the logical concept and mathematical deduction.  It is in this way that acquiescence to the ontical substance, as a resting place from the breathless linear succession of common time, cannot be the pathway of freedom.  Indeed, there is a depth of radical freedom that always already underlies the procedures of judgment, a freedom that is an originary eruption of the projection of the binding commitments of ‘world’, as a makeshift, revisable shelter for an ecstatic openness to others and the myriad beings in the world-around (Umwelt). 

Spinoza seeks to use the dead language of logic to transcend his emotional, personal being, in a leap into the infinity of substance – indeed, in a negative mirror image of the tomb of logic, as a seemingly impossible escape into the Unlimited.  Heidegger, on the contrary, would indicate that we must not seek freedom in the impossible other-world of eternity, but that we must comprehend that we are by necessity free to love and hate and to chose a ‘world’ – not to mention free to radically question the world of the present, sub specie temporis.[21]  It is our radical openness to the other, to the different, to the event of radical possibility, which intimates the ground of freedom that is expressed in a living language.       

I will close with a return to Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Partisan’,

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.

Amid the thrownness of existence, the wind of becoming blows through the graves, and it is in the face of becoming and the artefacts of death – standing in-between natality and fatality – that a clearing (Lichtung) emerges, the topos in which we can decide, to choose our world, one that is inscribed with the makeshift self-expression of our own be-ing.  In our courage to face the futurity of our being-toward-death, we thus come to ourselves from out of the shadows – as the truth of Being.  In this way, it could be contended that Spinoza does not give us an adequate conception of freedom, as he has failed, as Heidegger suggests in his lectures on Schelling, to disclose the true radicality and depths of human existence. 

Contrary to Deleuze (to whom I have not given enough mention), therefore, the issue is not that of a choice between immanence and transcendence, but to apprehend the unavoidable and ‘positive’ negativity of the ‘middle world’ of finite transcendence which concerns the intimacy of our own be-ing, and with Foucault, to undertake a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’.[22]  It is in this way that we affirm the desire which is our being, and do not take the path of renunciation for an eternal that is only a prison-house of graves. 

 

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[1] Cohen, Leonard, ‘The Partisan’, a song of the French Resistance: