A Response: Essence, Variations in Power, and “Becoming Other” in Spinoza

Céline Hervet

Simon Duffy’s paper, “The Transformation of Relations in Spinoza’s Metaphysics,” illustrates not only the results of an encounter between two interpretative traditions, but also how Spinoza’s body of work has allowed for various repetitions, transmissions, and hybridizations on both sides of the Atlantic. This follows in the wake of a fastidious translation project he has undertaken over the course of recent years.¹ Such undertakings give us a larger and richer sense for trends in European Spinoza scholarship.

In his chapter, Duffy returns to a classic interpretative problem that a number of French commentators, such as Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Macherey, and more recently Charles Ramond, have confronted. The problem involves both an ambiguity and a hesitation: What is the place or status of variation in Spinoza’s ontology? On the one hand, affects are transitory; on the other hand, essences are immutable and individual. The essence of a thing allows for the thing to “hold,” as it were, conserving both its form and structure. Spinoza certainly does not formulate the problem in these terms; nevertheless, the sub specie aeternitatis point of view that is adopted by Spinoza in the Ethics—the essence of a singular thing corresponding both to what it is as well as what it will become—may be seen as evacuating any possibility of change, gradation, or variation. Notwithstanding this, the affects present us with the moving spectacle of incessant modifications, modifications that any thing experiences insofar as any thing is in relation with some other thing. The concept itself of affection [affectio] also bears witness to the fact that any singular thing is a modification of substance. Spinoza’s own notion of a mode’s essence, which from the scholastic point of view appears perfectly contradictory, can only be understood if we admit that essences are endowed with power.2 We can say, therefore, that each thing’s actual essence corresponds to that portion of the divine power that is attributed to that thing. It remains to be seen what exactly such portions of divine power actually are and how they make themselves manifest in space and over time. Understanding their expression as quantities reveals itself to be the key to resolving the problem.

Part 3 of the Ethics, and the introduction of the concept of the conatus, signal what appears to be a paradigm shift with respect to Part 1. In Part 1, the essence of singular things is comprehended in light of the eternal and infinite production of substance. However, Part 1, de Deo, is not self-sufficient, nor can it be divorced from the geometrical order it inaugurates. For Spinoza, metaphysics is not an end in itself; rather, it is subordinated in its articulation to the deployment of an ethical theory, wherein precisely we find variation, fluctuation, passages in degrees of power, all of which, in fact, the beginning of the Ethics prefigured. If substance is determined by its affections, it is essential to know how such affections come to be, and to know what each thing is, as well as what it becomes. If substance’s modifications are understood from the point of view of eternity, our mental and our affective lives can only be understood as “a lived experience of duration,”³ which is already implied by the concepts of conatus and the power of acting, both of which imply that the existence of a singular thing is marked by the presence of a quantitative dimension.

Much ink has been spilled, and rightly so, about the abundance of terms that can be seen as more or less related to the term quantum and to a lexicon of quantity in general. It is less clear whether scholars have sufficiently measured the impact of this vocabulary on the system’s coherence and comprehensibility. In effect, it is not self-evident by any means how an individual’s or singular thing’s essence or nature is meant to be understood within the terms set by a philosophy of power, according to which quantitative measurements are to be had, yet modes are the necessary product of an infinite and eternal substance. How can substantial unity yield the singularity of infinite modes and their endless change and variation?⁴ At the point when the distinction between power and act is effaced, when every thing is always that which it could be, when reality and perfection mean the same thing, and when every essence is actual and correlated to a degree of acting and of passivity, it becomes necessary to rethink these variations, and to ask ourselves if they are modifications of an essence, and if not, in what manner they circumscribe it.

Duffy aims to resolve these issues. Relating with precision the major steps of the relevant French Spinozist literature, he proceeds with much subtlety to compose a pluralistic account of the question, bringing into dialogue Deleuze, Macherey, and Ramond. He looks over forty years of Spinoza research in France and confronts the challenge posed by what, following Duffy, we may be tempted to call “an apparent contradiction in Spinozism.” Ultimately, according to Duffy, this apparent contradiction turns out to be grounded in a difference in frameworks or “plans” (as Deleuze would say): the physical vs. the ethical. If no variation is conceivable on the physical “plan,” the ethical “plan,” the “plan” of affects and passions, is dynamic and rich in variations.

In order to create a real dialogue among commentators, Duffy adopts a relatively simple method that consists in decomposing the problem into its three elements (essence, power of acting, and the conatus) and allowing these to be developed following the different commentators. Ramond’s work spurs Duffy on in formulating the principal terms of this alleged “apparent contradiction.” In his 1995 Quality and Quantity in Spinoza’s Philosophy, Ramond maintains that Spinoza adopts a double perspective on the nature of things as a means of ridding himself of the occult qualities that plagued Cartesian metaphysics. According to Ramond, Spinoza adopts a qualitative approach when discussing substance and its attributes understood as Natura naturans and he adopts a quantitative approach when discussing modes qua expressions of substance and its attributes, that is to say Natura naturata. These two perspectives are tightly interwoven throughout the system, Spinoza never entirely abandoning one in favor of the other. Invariably, this leads to difficulties, and what is, according to Ramond, an “incomprehensible” anthropology. Pace Ramond, Duffy rejects such a conclusion. He calls on other commentators, beginning with Deleuze, and in particular his treatment of the essence of modes of bodies, before turning to Macherey, in his effort to resolve the tension between the two perspectives. One point of contention that Duffy taps into concerns the variability of the body in its exchanges with other bodies, and the fact that these exchanges and this intercourse are built on a subsisting structural unity of bodily parts.5 Macherey, in his commentary on Ethics Part 3, recognizes the ethical dimension of the system as especially meaningful if we are to understand the nature of the body and its variability. If there very well can be an augmentation or diminution of the power of acting of a given singular thing over the course of a thing’s existence (as Spinoza presumably would like to maintain, granted his theory of the affects and the polarity of joy and sadness), and if any thing’s mutations are sustained by the “uninterrupted affective flux”⁶ to which any thing must be subject, must we conclude that the thing’s essence changes over time as well?

At the very least, Deleuze, Macherey, and Ramond seem to agree on the following: a singular thing’s essence remains unaltered, though its power of acting is variable. This inalterability is maintained on multiple occasions by Spinoza, for example at E4Pref, where Spinoza specifies what he understands by a thing’s passing to a greater perfection, namely, not that it exchanges its essence for another essence, but rather that its power of acting increases.7 A thing’s nature is conceived in this manner as situated within the limits set by a minimum and a maximum of power and as enjoying the possibility of passing between these two limit-states. This definition of essence is formulated in terms of a thing’s effort, intensity, or tendency, which spontaneously becomes gradual or quantitative, thereby implying its assimilation to the conatus. Recall that at E3p6, Spinoza writes that “each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” At E3p6d, furthermore, Spinoza maintains that a thing cannot be destroyed but by something external to it. Recall also the terms of E3p7, where Spinoza substitutes the term actual essence for essence tout court: “The striving by which each things strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.” Likewise, the demonstration of E3p7 establishes an equivalency between power, conatus, and the actual essence of singular things. In other words, the essence of modes, described in quantitative terms, is itself a variable something. Thus Spinoza breaks with the scholastic tradition, according to which the essence of a thing is that which resists change in opposition to the accidental features of a thing that do change. What does, however, remain identical over time is this precise capacity for change that each thing possesses. To better alleviate the difficulties surrounding the ambiguity of this Spinozist proposition, Ramond reexamines the notion of a quantum of power, in the aim of showing that if there is a variation this is a variation not of the quantum of power, but in it, i.e., within the quantitative limits set by its essence. Deleuze, for his part, defines the essence of the mode by the degrees of power in observance of which the precise ratio of movement and rest among its parts remains undisturbed, any such essence being written into the infinite succession of all modes. Furthermore, in order to explain the variations in degrees of acting and to elucidate the essence of modes, it is necessary to externalize one’s point of view and interest oneself not only in the internal structure of a thing, but also in its relations to other, external things. Macherey invites us to do just this by bringing into relief the intrinsic positivity of the essence of singular things, rejecting all negativity to the side of external things.

Likewise, in light of Deleuze’s reading of Ethics Part 3, there can also be added to the mix a third term in addition to qualitative and quantitative variation, namely, dynamic variation. Inasmuch as Deleuze assimilates Spinoza’s concept of the power of acting to Leibniz’s concept of force, one sees here what Deleuze owes in his reading of Spinoza to his reading of Leibniz. Both the power of acting and force evoke the same activity, the same positivity, and the same affirmation of the existence of the essence of a singular thing. This alignment allows Spinoza, following Deleuze, for gradual variation without upending his basic point, that an essence must remain fixed and inalterable: an essence is always active, and only affects which are themselves active belong to it; passive affects come from outside a thing and limit the expression of its power of acting, or conatus, understood as a power of being affected. On a particularly conciliatory note (not without Leibnizian undertones), Duffy maintains: “The apparent contradiction vanishes.” The differences in the “plans” of expression are, on his reading, the key to make sense of Spinoza’s system’s coherence.

Despite the brio with which Duffy executes his operation, one might be tempted, however, to question the necessity of performing any such operation whose aim is to “save the system” from any ambiguity and exonerate the doctrine of its difficulties. It is in effect strange to attempt to oppose the ontology of beginning of the Ethics, which is developed with specific goals and problems in mind, to the anthropology of the middle of the Ethics, wherein we find the affects at play and which is the most meaningful part of the work. Can one really speak of incoherence or contradiction? Spinozism, it rather appears, poses a number of theoretical problems as soon as it is attributed the quality of being a system. The theoretical problem of particularization, which bears on the passage from substance and its attributes to the reality of the modes, and which many a commentator has struggled with, is certainly not itself resolved by underscoring the conatus and the dynamic dimension involved in the experience that we have of being modes. Nevertheless, Part 1’s general ontology is truly commanded by the ethical necessity of liberating man from the processes of internal and external domination. Likewise, the equivalence established at E3p6d must be taken seriously: the actual essence, the definition of an individual, the “philosophical monstrosity that is the essence of a mode”8 which constitutes one of Spinozism’s most original trademarks, cannot be thought of as independent from the “ethical anthropology”⁹ proposed in Parts 3 and 4. The philosophical monstrosity refers to the assembly of essence, which in the Platonic tradition was both general and immutable, and mode, a reality that is only relative and can only have an existence or an essence that is extrinsic, modes beings effects and properties of substance: that by which it acts and understands itself. As much as they are modes of substance, singular things are endowed with a certain quantity of power which delimits the conatus, the effort of a thing to strive “in its being.”

Power is conceived as an infinite productivity, a causal efficaciousness, and it is because the divine essence is understood to be power that Spinoza’s anthropology, along with the practical effects that individuals can produce, can be linked to Spinoza’s ontology. The effort or the part of power ascribed to singular beings is itself understood as a capacity to act and to operate. It is first and foremost the power to act that defines essence, which is to say that the definition or nature of a thing is linked to its intrinsic productivity, and its aptitude to produce and sustain effects, such things that it has the “power to do” in accordance with the “laws of its nature.” Likewise, a thing can “become other” without “changing its form,” to the degree that its nature is in large part built upon its encounters with other things. In other words, if Part 3 seems to suddenly precipitate us into a world of movement and variation, movement and variation were in fact already latent in the beginning of the Ethics, in virtue of the fact that the redefinition of the notion of power grounds a dynamic ontology. This is especially salient if we turn to Spinoza’s treatment of human life and his treatment of how an individual can be variously constructed without changing form. From such a point of view, is it not true that any individual must always be another while remaining itself?

The intermodal determinism described at the opening of the Ethics could only but lead to an eminently social anthropology. Moreover, Spinozist determinism does not ground an absolute limitation of individual power. The relations an individual nourishes with other things similar to it define an individual’s “trajectory.” E4p4 shows that inasmuch as man is a part of Nature, he necessarily is passive and subject to changes of which he is only an inadequate cause.10 If we never abandon our essence or form, though we remain capable of augmenting or diminishing our power of acting, this is only because we are modes and as such we are conceivable only within the framework set by a fundamental form of coexistence or social life: we do not exist alone, and so we exist in this intermodal, social way. Affective variation is therefore not extrinsic to an essence, but rather it is constitutive of it. Similarly, there is a place within the quantum of power that we inherit for a singular history. This variation suggests a way for modes to interact loosely—instead of freely—and that throughout the intervention of a plurality of causes, determinism admits evolutions which are not the realization of a predetermined plan. This is what the Spinozistic concept of ingenium is meant to evoke: the individual or collective ingenia can be compared to a kind of weaving together, within different individuals or human groups, of distinct causal series, i.e., it points to physical and mental dispositions and their being shaped by external relations and encounters.¹¹ “A chain of determinations bound up to form the course of an individual life,”¹² the ingenium or mentality, we may say, results from this difference, from this variability bound by a determinism that has nothing to do with a predeterminism. The actual essence of each thing, understood as a power of acting that varies as modes reciprocally determine one another, introduces a form of becoming or historicity into things, which biographies and personal trajectories illustrate.¹³ Spinoza’s concept of conatus or effort is motivated by the fact that the encounter with external things can increase or decrease the power of acting. Inasmuch as a thing is challenged over the course of its existence, its power of acting cannot only be seen as the expression of a divine power, since it must overcome obstacles and make an effort. If there is a modification in a thing’s power of acting, that can only mean that it struggles against “headwinds” to preserve its power, singular things being parts of Nature or of divine substance and as such subject to change over the course of their relations with other things.14 The “tailwinds,” the “good encounters” which augment our power of acting, orient our history, and guide us in our accomplishments are also components of this loosely tight determinism. To further pursue our maritime metaphor, the speed with which a boat can sail, considering its construction, the physical constraints imposed on it by the materials, and the weather conditions, form the limit within which it is capable of finding its own path, its own rhythm, despite any obstacles and the currents it must traverse. At the intersection of such constraints, the clever captain will know how to bring the boat to port and not allow it to be beaten about by the waves, all while maintaining the boat’s integrity. The good use of external things is, in the same way, the condition of the health of the body and the mind, and maintaining a healthy equilibrium, both qualitative and quantitative, is the wise man’s main objective.¹⁵ The “uninterrupted affective flux” is therefore not a secondary element; it is rather that which allows the individual to express its power of acting.

Spinozism cannot be broken into two parts, as if there were a Spinozist metaphysics the aim of which is to fix once and for all that which a thing is, a Spinozist ethics, according to which, suddenly, everything is thrown into a permanent state of instability and wherein essences are annihilated by the inherent variations implied by the concept of the conatus. The dynamic features of Spinoza’s ontology serve to ground Spinoza’s anthropology of variation and becoming. His ethical theory would teach us to not succumb to the flux, but to sustain it, to orient it, and to become its adequate cause.

Notes

Translated by Jack Stetter

1    His translations of Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza (1971–87) are noteworthy in this regard.

2    E1p34: “God’s power is his essence itself.”

3    Cf. Pierre Macherey, Introduction à l’Éthique de Spinoza, tome 3: La vie affective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 90.

4    E1p16: “From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes (i.e., everything which can fall under an infinite intellect.)”

5    Spinoza develops this is in the “short physical treatise” interwoven between E2p13 and E2p14.

6    Cf. Macherey, Introduction, 120–121.

7    E4pr: “But the main thing to note is that when I say that someone passes from a lesser to a greater perfection, and the opposite, I do not understand that he is changed from one essence, or form, to another. For example, a horse is destroyed as much if it is changed into a man as if it is changed into an insect. Rather, we conceive that his power of acting, insofar as it is understood through his nature, is increased or diminished.”

8    Cf. François Zourabichvili, Spinoza: Une physique de la pensée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 94.

9    Julie Henry’s work is especially helpful in this respect. Her goal is to think the historicity and becoming of singular things within the framework of Spinoza’s non-predetermined determinism. See Julie Henry, Spinoza, une anthropologie éthique. Variations affectives et historicité de l’existence (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015).

10  E4p4: “It is impossible that a man should not be a part of Nature, and that he should be able to undergo no changes except those which can be understood through his own nature alone, and of which he is the adequate cause.”

11  Chantal Jaquet shows how the concept of ingenium allows us to better think contemporary social issues and class mobility in Les transclasses ou la non-reproduction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014).

12  Jaquet, Les transclasses, 102.

13  For more on this, see Barthélemy Durrive and Julie Henry, Redéfinir l’individu à partir de sa trajectoire: Hasard, déterminismes et rencontres (Paris: Éditions Matériologiques, 2015), esp. “Quel sort réserver au hasard selon la philosophie spinoziste ? Vers une définition historique des individus.”

14  E3p59s: “From what has been said it is clear that we are driven about in many ways by external causes, and that, like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and fate.”

15  E4p45s: “It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation [… ] For the human Body is composed of a great many parts of different natures, which constantly require new and varied nourishment, so that the whole Body may be equally capable of all the things which can follow from its nature, and hence, so that the Mind also may be equally capable of understanding many things.”