It has become a central principle of liberal societies that institutions or individuals should not try to compel or coerce a person’s beliefs. It was not always this way and in many places it still is not. In the seventeenth century, systematic attempts to compel belief by either the government or the church were not rare—either in the name of civil order or revealed truth or both—and it was out of the subsequent conflicts that many of our contemporary liberal justifications for tolerance developed. One of the best known of these early modern justifications is John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, written around the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and published four years later.1 One of Locke’s three arguments for tolerance expresses this central principle:
The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. (395)
Locke’s argument was not particularly original. Fifteen years earlier Baruch Spinoza anonymously published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP). Its goal, as stated on the title page, was to persuade the magistrate that “the Freedom of Philosophizing not only can be granted without harm to Piety and the Peace of the State, but also cannot be abolished unless Piety and the Peace of the State are also destroyed.” It is a fundamental corollary to this view that the sovereign ought to grant a limited freedom of religion as well. Spinoza’s argument also rests on the claim that belief cannot be compelled:
[1] If it were as easy to command men’s minds as it is their tongues, every ruler would govern in safety and no rule would be violent. For everyone would live according to the disposition of the rulers, and only in accordance with their decree would people judge what is true or false, good or evil, right or wrong. [2] But as we have noted at the beginning of Chapter 17, it cannot happen that a mind should be absolutely subject to the control of someone else. Indeed, no one can transfer to another person his natural right, or faculty of reasoning freely, and of judging concerning anything whatever, nor can he be compelled to do this. [3] This is why rule over minds is considered violent, and why the supreme authority seems to wrong its subjects and to usurp their rights whenever it wants to prescribe to each person what he must embrace as true and what reject as false, and, further, by what opinions each person’s mind ought to be moved in its devotion to God. For these things are subject to each person’s control, which no one can surrender even if he wishes to. (TTP, xx.1–3; GIII/239)2
Some have claimed that Locke was influenced by Spinoza.3 This claim should not be surprising since Locke wrote his Letter while he sojourned in Holland. Also, while Locke’s work is better known today in some circles, it has been argued recently that Spinoza’s treatise was far more influential in his time and on the development of the Enlightenment and hence the constitution of liberal society.4 However interesting these historical questions may be, it will not be my business here to propose or assess answers to them. Instead, I want to look at the philosophical grounds of Spinoza’s claim that belief cannot be compelled.
In the seventeenth century, not everyone assumed that a tolerant policy would produce a more stable state or that belief could not be compelled. It should be obvious that the two major assumptions here are questionable, at least on empirical grounds, and indeed they were fiercely debated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First, is it the case that a tolerant regime would be more stable than an intolerant one? As Richard Tuck has pointed out, late in the sixteenth century Justus Lipsius argued for a thoroughly pragmatic position in which tolerance was subservient to political stability.5 On the one hand, “if repression was politically impossible,” a tolerant policy would be justified (26). If, on the other hand, as early modern experience amply seemed to demonstrate, religious debate was about to turn into violent conflict and rebellion, then a sovereign ought to use a heavy hand to quash it. Second, is it really the case that a person convinced of the truth cannot change the mind of another person with the convenient aid of the sword? An answer to this question is crucial because it determines the answer we give to the first. If it is possible to coerce belief successfully, then a sovereign may try to enforce confessional unanimity for the sake of stability.6 The persecution of heretics and debates over its efficacy has a long history in the church, and this is clearly the background to this early modern debate.7 Some, following St. Augustine, interpreted the scriptural passage in which Christ asks his disciples to compel those who are sitting outside a feast to enter (Luke 14:23) as a parable that justified the persecution of heretics. Others, such as Spinoza, and later John Locke and Pierre Bayle (who took issue directly with the Augustinian view in his Commentaire sur les ces paroles de Jésus Christ: “Contrains les d’entrer”), claimed that it was impossible for a sovereign to compel belief and that the sovereign should tolerate some religious diversity.
An answer to these questions had more than theoretical interest for Spinoza. Just before he published the TTP, his friend Adriaan Koerbagh had been imprisoned (and later died in prison) because he had dared to publish his own critique of religion, inspired by Spinoza’s ideas, in Dutch.8 And after the publication of the TTP, which provoked widespread indignation and systematic attempts to ban it and prevent its diffusion,9 Spinoza made every effort to prevent its translation from the Latin to the vernacular.10 He was obviously afraid that what happened to Koerbagh might happen to him. Although he was cautious in his own actions, nonetheless, the argument in the TTP demonstrates that he wanted to show that such efforts at repression were ultimately doomed to fail.
More recently philosophers have cast a critical eye on all such justifications of toleration. Jeremy Waldron, in an article focused on Locke, but which could equally apply to Spinoza, has argued both that it may indeed be rational to persecute and that, whatever conclusion we reach on this point, such arguments are lacking because they depend upon questionable empirical justifications rather than on solid moral principle.11 Most recent philosophical discourse on toleration has accepted the essence of this critique and moved away from pragmatic justifications to more principled ones, based on notions of autonomy and respect.
In this chapter, I shall examine Spinoza’s attempts to defend the premise that the sovereign cannot compel belief, both in the TTP, where he uses the idea of natural right, and in the Ethics, where the argument depends on his attack on free will. I shall raise several objections to these claims, such as the view that knowledge of the truth justifies persecution, and also, most importantly, that without a conception of free will, Spinoza has some difficulty in distinguishing the case in which the sovereign compels someone to change his beliefs from the case in which the sovereign persuades him to do so. I shall argue that Spinoza can distinguish these cases based on his distinction between freedom and constraint, which in turn is based on his conception of human nature. I shall suggest that the reasons why belief cannot be compelled are related to the structure of the argument for toleration itself and I shall make some concluding remarks about the nature of the argument as a whole and its relation to contemporary debates.
If we look at the beginning of chapter 17 in the Theological-Political Treatise, we find that the reason why one mind can never wholly be in the control of another has to do with Spinoza’s conception of natural right. In chapter 16, Spinoza notoriously says that “each individual has a supreme right to do everything in its power, or that the right of each thing extends as far as its determinate power does” (xvi.4; GIII/189). Unfortunately, in the state of nature, individuals’ power is limited and threatened by others. Consequently, they recognize that their power can only be preserved at the cost of giving up some of it to an authority whose function is to provide physical security for its subjects. Thus Spinoza explains the origin of government in terms of a social contract in which individuals in a state of nature transfer their natural right to a single individual or body of individuals and establish a sovereign authority. The definition of right as power also generates some limitations on the power of government. First, the transfer is conditional upon the individual’s satisfaction at the result of the transfer. If the individual no longer thinks that the state is able to satisfy his desires (e.g., for peace and security), then he maintains the right to withhold his transfer or give it to someone else. Second, it may not be the case that all individuals in the state of nature will transfer their rights—in other words, there need not be unanimous consent for a sovereign authority to function. A government has the right and power to rule when its power overwhelms (or at least checks) the power of those that oppose it. A democracy is the best, and most stable, form of government, in Spinoza’s view, because it involves the greatest number of individuals who have transferred their right and power.
Now at the beginning of chapter 17, he remarks upon another couple of limitations upon the power of the sovereign, which bear directly on the problem of tolerance. However successful the sovereign, it can never demand a complete transfer of right from an individual: “For no one will ever be able to so transfer his power, and hence, his right, to another that he ceases to be a man nor will there ever be any supreme power which can carry out everything it wishes” (xvii.2; GIII/201). In this case, the sovereign wishes the subject to think as it does, but Spinoza seems to insist that this is an impossible demand. On the face of it, this statement seems to be inconsistent with Spinoza’s identification of right with power in chapter 16. If the sovereign does have more power than a subject individual, then the identification of power with right would seem to justify the use of that power to compel the subject’s mind. However, to understand Spinoza’s view it is important to note that “power” has a quite specific meaning. “And because the supreme law of nature is that each thing strives to persevere in its state, as far as it can by its own power, and does this, not on account of anything else, but only of itself, from this it follows that each individual has the supreme right to do this, i.e. (as I have said), to exist and act as it is naturally determined to do” (xvi.4; GIII/189). So this is the essence of Spinoza’s position. It is not that a person has a right to do what he wants but could do otherwise. Rather, a person has a right to do what he wants and cannot do anything else. For the sovereign to compel this person to act otherwise would not only be to violate the person’s natural right in the juridical sense, but it would also be practically futile. The more a sovereign alienates his subjects through coercive policies, the less support he has from them—i.e., fewer individuals will transfer their right and power to the sovereign—and the less stable the state. The sovereign would seem to have a self-interested reason to be tolerant.12
The first objection to this view is that it does not explicitly consider the role of truth in the justification of compulsion. If we go back to the source of these debates in St. Augustine’s letters, we find that it was knowledge of the truth that justified coercion, that is, distinguished it from another, merely politically justified form of coercion. In a letter to the Donatist Bishop, Vincent, Augustine writes, “There is an unjust persecution, which the ungodly operate against the Church of Christ; and a just persecution which the Churches of Christ make use of towards the ungodly.”13 Unlike some early modern skeptics, like Pierre Bayle, Spinoza did not doubt that it was possible to know the truth in matters of religion.14 So, would it not be the case that, if the sovereign did know the truth, in this case concerning the salvation of the individual’s soul, then he would be justified in using coercive means to compel belief? Spinoza has at least two responses to this question.
First, there is no reason to think that the sovereign, or his priestly advisors, has any privileged access to the truth. This is where it is important to read not just the few chapters in the TTP which deal explicitly with political theory (i.e., chapters xvi–xx) but the whole work. From the very first chapter, Spinoza attacks the common doctrine that revelation is a privileged, supernatural means of acquiring the truth. Certainly, in contrast to “natural knowledge,” which is acquired by “the natural light of reason” and “rests on foundations common to all men,” prophetic knowledge is unique (i.2; GIII/15). But revelation or prophecy is not supernatural in Spinoza’s view at all. It is unique in the sense that it reflects the particular mental constitution and historical circumstances of the prophet. Unlike natural knowledge, which is clear and distinct, prophetic knowledge is imaginative rather than rational in nature and appeals to the passions of its audience in an effort to move them to acts of justice and loving-kindness. “Therefore,” Spinoza writes, “those who look in the books of the Prophets for wisdom, and knowledge of natural and spiritual matters, go entirely astray (ii.2; GIII/29).
Spinoza defines the role of the sovereign, and the allied function of traditional religion, in light of this critique of the traditional understanding of revelation. In the third chapter of the TTP, he divides the objects of human desire into three categories: “[i] to understand things through their first causes; [ii] to gain control over the passions, or to acquire the habit of virtue; and finally, [iii] to live securely and healthily” (iii.12; GIII/46). While the philosopher is concerned with the first two ends, the prophet and the sovereign authority can only aid us in the pursuit of the third. It is simply not the proper function of either government or public religion to concern itself with any other truths than how to secure the health of the body in this life.
Nonetheless, even if we assume that the sovereign does know the truth regarding the salvation of the soul, then the natural right argument, as we have sketched it above, should provide a reason why this knowledge would not justify persecution. Spinoza insists that any individual, whether human or not, reasonable or not, fool or madman, does what it does with supreme natural right “because it acts as it has been determined according to nature, and cannot do otherwise” (xvi.5; GIII/189). Not surprisingly, most people are led by their desires and passions rather than by reason. As we have seen, the sovereign’s concern is to establish his authority through gaining the conditional transfer of natural right from the subjects. Because the sovereign is faced with people who are more likely to be led by their passions than by their reason, he must recognize that some of his actions might adversely affect the desire of at least some of his subjects to transfer their right in support of his regime. Those who are led by their simple but strong desire to survive in a hostile world will not appreciate the sovereign devoting his energy to convincing them or others of otherworldly truths. And those who are ruled by religious passions, and convinced of their own knowledge of the truth, will not appreciate the sovereign’s efforts to convert them. So if the sovereign desires to maintain his power, even if he is convinced that he knows the truth, then, according to this argument, he will respect the natural rights of his subjects and refrain from compelling their thoughts.
Of course a juridical or political solution to the problem in terms of natural right is not entirely satisfactory for a few reasons. For one thing, as we shall see later, Spinoza does seem to think that the truth can be persuasive, at least indirectly, and so we are still left with questions about the difference between compelling and persuading someone to think something. For another, the argument depends on the very premise that we called into question above, namely, that the sovereign cannot compel belief. It seems open to the objection that if a powerful sovereign could find a way to compel a person’s mind then he would have the right to do. Because the natural rights argument is not foundational in Spinoza’s view—that is, it can be reduced to the power each thing has to persevere—its value depends on the underlying claims about human nature. That is why we must turn next to the discussion in the Ethics of the will and mind-body relations.
The crux of the question whether belief can be compelled or not is whether belief is voluntary or not. Interestingly enough, many of those who thought that persecution was effective did not think that force by itself could compel belief. As the historian Mark Goldie states the view, “Certainly force does not convince directly, but it may work indirectly, for its use can be the occasion for a reconsideration of views, a salutary means for initiating new spiritual exploration” (347). Writers in this tradition did not have to search far for Scriptural support of this view, pointing, for instance, to the violent circumstances of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Thus inspired, Augustine wrote that people who are “first compelled by fear or pain … might afterwards be influenced by teaching.”15 His idea is that the will has become enslaved by the obstinate habits of body. You break the body, and the will is now free to voluntarily attach itself to what it had previously rejected.16
Although, as we shall discuss below, Spinoza agrees with these writers that force may have an indirect effect on an individual’s mind, he utterly rejects their psychology of belief based on the idea of a free will. The origin of his critique is in his metaphysics of a single substance, or God. God is an infinite being whose existence is necessary. God expresses itself in infinite ways, through attributes, which define the essence of substance, and modes of those attributes. All things that follow from God are likewise necessary. Finite things, which Spinoza calls “finite modes,” such as human beings, are subject to this necessity in two ways. On the one hand, finite modes are governed by “infinite modes,” which, following Curley’s interpretation, we can readily understand as the system of natural laws, such as, in the case of bodies, the laws of motion or rest.17 On the other hand, finite modes are always causally related to other finite modes under their respective attributes in a determinate causal chain. As Spinoza writes in the Ethics, “In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way” (E1p29).18
Spinoza applies this rigorous doctrine of determinism not only to bodies, as the Cartesians had done, but also to the mind. Spinoza adopts a somewhat uncharacteristic tone in the preface to part V of the Ethics when he mocks Descartes’ theory of the mind-body union, in which the immaterial will attaches itself to the pineal gland, which in turn mysteriously moves the body. Spinoza considers both minds and bodies not as substances, but as finite modes, which are distinguished by their attributes, thought, and extension. As finite modes, they are causally determined by other modes (finite and infinite) of the same attribute. “The modes of each attribute have God for their cause only insofar as he is considered under the attribute of which they are modes, and not insofar as he is considered under any other attribute” (E2p6). Because they do not share the same attribute, minds and bodies do not causally interact. As Jonathan Bennett puts it, there is no “trans-attribute causality.” Rather, they are parallel, expressing one thing (i.e., a finite mode of substance) in two different ways (i.e., through the attributes of thought and extension). In this logical, though counter-intuitive, way, Spinoza hopes to avoid the occult hypotheses, such as the pineal gland, which are necessary to explain interaction in the Cartesian system, and provide a sound basis for a scientific study of the mind and its various affections.
Obviously there is no place in this system for a Cartesian, radically free, will, that is, a will independent of causal necessity. The mind is just a finite mode expressed under the attribute of thought. Since it is not a substance, the mind is metaphysically nothing over and above a collection of ideas, which bear a systematic relation to one another, and act in a determinate manner. Because each idea is a finite mode, it must also be part of a determinate causal chain. It is caused by some other idea and will in turn cause others. All ideas, then, are active in the sense that produces mental effects in a determinate causal chain. Unlike the Cartesian theory of mind, in which our intellect produces ideas to which the separate power of the will can either assent or not, Spinoza argues that “the will and the intellect are one and the same” (E2p49c). Hence, as Wallace Matson has argued, there is no meaningful distinction between ideas and beliefs in Spinoza’s system.19 Each idea contains its own intrinsic affirmation (E2p49) and does not require a discrete mental power to transform it into a belief. What we mistakenly describe as our “free will” is just the awareness of ourselves acting—that is, in this case, an idea producing some other idea—without knowledge of the causes of the event. As he writes, “So experience itself, no less clearly than reason, teaches that men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their own actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined” (E3p2s; GII/143).
Spinoza dismisses the concept of a free will as a chimera, but he does not do away with the language of volition. What we describe as our will is nothing other than the idea we associate with our action as a complex mental entity, the mind, as it acts to produce some other idea. When we explain this idea solely in reference to other ideas, under the attribute of thought, we call it a “decision.” When we consider the action in relation to other modes of body, under the attribute of extension, we call it a “determination” (E3p2s; GII/144). In neither case are we free of a determinate casual chain. Yet in both cases we describe these actions as more or less ours. It may not have been my free will which caused me to come to Seattle, and it may not have been possible that I would be elsewhere at this moment, but it was my body and my mind that were salient among the causal agents that brought me to this place in the causal chain, and thus I can be held responsible for my actions. Most importantly, for our purposes, my belief that I am currently in Seattle, even if I am responsible for the belief, cannot be otherwise. Or, to take one of Spinoza’s examples, I may imagine that the sun “is about 200 feet away from me,” but even if I knew this to be false, I may still believe it (E2p35s). It will remain “present” until some other idea eventually displaces it (E2p17s). It may be possible to change that belief, but only through an indirect route, and not through the immediate intervention of a will outside of the causal chain. As he writes:
[H]uman affairs, of course, would be conducted far more happily if it were equally in man’s power to be silent and to speak. But experience teaches all too plainly that men have nothing less in their power than their tongue, and can do nothing less than moderate their appetites (E3p2s; GII/143).
If I am incapable of changing my belief in any direct way, then it must be the case that some outside agent, such as the sovereign, would also be incapable of it.
Spinoza’s version of the classical compatibilist theory of human freedom soon came under attack. Although Spinoza was not explicit about the denial of free will in the TTP, his readers immediately understood this as an implication of what he did say. As soon as the TTP was published, it was banned for its heterodox views, central of which was Spinoza’s apparent denial of free will, the power to do otherwise. Even Spinoza’s more intimate correspondents harbored doubts concerning this position, or at least wanted to hear more on the subject. Henry Oldenburg reminded Spinoza that “the reason why I advised against the publication of the doctrine of the fatalistic necessity of all things is my fear lest the practise of virtue may thereby be impeded, and rewards and punishments be made of little account.”20 Spinoza’s response was to deny that his systematic determinism was the same as fatalism and to argue that necessity was compatible with freedom and contrary to constraint (or compulsion). He writes to another correspondent, Hugo Boxel, “Thus you fail, I think, to make any distinction between constraint [coactio] or force [vis], and necessity. That a man wills to live, to love, etc., does not proceed from constraint, but is nevertheless necessary.”21
A thing is free, according to Spinoza, when it acts in accordance with its nature. As he writes in the Ethics: “That thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined to act by itself alone” (E1d7). Strictly speaking only God fits this definition perfectly, while finite things can only approach its criteria relatively. As we saw above, unlike God who is a substance, infinite, independent, and subject to no other causal necessity than its own, human beings are finite modes, dependent and subject to the causal action of other finite things. Whereas God is always free, human beings are only free to the extent that they are able to act without interference from things external to their nature. A tentative definition of constraint, then, might be the extent and manner in which a finite mode’s actions are limited by the actions of other modes external to it. Some support for this view might be gleaned from Spinoza’s use of these terms to distinguish between “adequate” and “inadequate” (i.e., confused) ideas. The mind only knows its body inadequately “so long as it is determined externally, from fortuitous encounters with things, to regard this or that, and not so long as it is determined internally, from the fact that it regards a number of things at once, to understand their agreements, differences, and oppositions” (E2p29s). Spinoza distinguishes ideas in terms of their causal origin and this in turn becomes the basis of the distinctions between action and passion in part 3 of the Ethics and freedom and bondage in part 4.
Nonetheless, terms like “internal” and “external” are difficult to define in the complex system of finite modes. Each finite mode is originally produced by something external to it and constantly requires the input of the external world to survive. We eat to restore our bodies, perceive the world around us, and desire those things that we lack. These ideas have an external source but they have been literally or figuratively incorporated, that is, internalized, into ourselves and our experience of the world. The question is “external to what?” In the case of something simple, like a rock, the physical boundaries are easy to discern. However, if our bodies and minds are permeable to a degree, then what defines our individual nature or activity is not a spatial metaphor but a causal relation. When it comes to bodies, Spinoza says that a collection of simple bodies becomes a complex individual when they “communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner [ratio]” (A2 definition after E2p13s). Although he does not provide a parallel definition of what defines an individual mind (except to say that the mind is the idea of such a body), we can readily conceive of a certain relation among ideas, a relation that is defined by certain cognitive and emotional structures as well as patterns of association. When these structures are able to persist, that is, when they act causally in accordance with their nature, then the individual is free. When something interferes with this causal activity, then the individual is constrained.
Of course there will be many degrees of constraint and of relative freedom. This is because our natures are composites of essential and accidental qualities; that is, those qualities without which we would no longer exist and those without which we would continue to exist. And even among those qualities which are accidental we may over time prioritize some as more important than others. So we would have our first, or essential, nature and then our second nature, which is acquired through experience. Since Spinoza thinks that it is acting in accordance with our nature that makes us free, we could come to understand our freedom as a matter of degree to which we are able to act in accordance with our essential and acquired natures and the different aspects of each. The sovereign may be able to constrain some aspects of our nature but not all of them, at least not without killing us. And it would also be the case that a sovereign that only respected our essential natures would be only respecting part of our nature. A sovereign should also take into account the ways that our acquired ideas (including beliefs and desires) become part of an individual’s nature. A sovereign that constrained the expression of these acquired aspects of our nature, aspects which we strive to preserve, would also be impinging on our natural rights to some degree. So the richer the idea of human nature that underlies the idea of a natural right, the more nuanced the account of freedom we have.22
This account should help make sense of Spinoza’s claim that a person can never willingly transfer all his natural right to the sovereign and that the sovereign’s attempt to control a person’s beliefs is therefore impossible. As Spinoza writes in the Ethics, to act against one’s nature, not to strive to persist, would be contrary to our very essence (E3p7). Because no one can act to destroy themselves, such a complete transfer of right would be equivalent to self-destruction, which, according to Spinoza, is impossible (E3p6). At a minimum, any attempt to compel belief, that is, change a person’s mind through an external cause, would infringe on that person’s freedom through affecting the person’s conatus, or striving to live in accordance with his essence. It is also possible to see how such an attempt might go even farther and impinge on a person’s very ability to preserve himself. Any case of torture would have the effect of disrupting the conatus, both physically and mentally, to the extent that the person’s body and mind would no longer maintain the unity among its parts required to call that person a distinct individual.23
Those who justified coercion of belief in name of the truth did not neatly distinguish compulsion from persuasion. If, as we saw above, they justified themselves in the name of the truth, and if, as we just discussed, they believed that they were not directly changing people’s minds but rather giving them an occasion to reconsider, then compulsion could be seen as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of persuasion. True, the sovereign authority did not always have the pedagogical skills of the clergy, yet with proper preparation they could turn a torture session into learning opportunity. Augustine himself, who earlier in his career did not think such means were justified, was subsequently converted in favor of what he called the theory of “good constraint” by the many “decisive examples” in which heretics came to see the light. In his letters, he quotes testimonies from these experiences to support his claim: “And others again [said]: ‘We did not realize that the truth lay there, and did not want to learn it; but fear made us look twice and we recognized it. We thank God for having penetrated our negligence with the sting of fear.’”24 The combination of fear with other means was part of a broader cultural policy. Mark Goldie notes in his discussion of seventeenth century arguments for intolerance, which were heavily influenced by Augustine’s views, that in almost all cases it was recognized that “if coercion is to be a pastoral tool, it is vital that force be married with edification and argument” (350). This involved writing, sermonizing, face-to-face disputation, and other means.
It may seem that, once Spinoza has eliminated the concept of a free will, and established that the effort to compel belief is useless, the sovereign’s influence over the minds of his subjects would be drastically limited. Nonetheless, it turns out that early modern theorists of the state had learned something from their theological opponents. Immediately after presenting the natural rights argument in chapter xvii of the TTP, Spinoza goes on to point out just how powerful the state is in these matters. The long passage is worth quoting in full:
Nevertheless, to understand rightly how far the right and power of the state extend, we must note that its power is not limited to what it can compel men to do from fear, but extends to absolutely everything which it can bring men to do in compliance with its commands. It is obedience which makes the subject, not the reason for the obedience. [6] For whatever reason a man resolves to carry out the commands of the supreme power, whether because he fears a penalty, or because he hopes for something from it, or because he loves his Country, or because he has been prompted by any other affect whatever, he still forms his resolution according to his own judgment, notwithstanding that he acts in accordance with the command of the supreme power. [7] Therefore, we must not infer simply from the fact that a man does something by his own judgment, that he does it in virtue of his own right, and not the right of the political authority. For since he always acts in accordance with his own judgment and decision, both when he is secured by love and when he is compelled by fear, to avoid some evil, there would be no political authority and no right over subjects, if political authority did not necessarily extend to everything with respect to which it can bring men to resolve to yield to it. And consequently, whatever a subject does which is in accordance with the commands of the supreme power, whether he has been secured by love, or compelled by fear, or (as is, indeed, more frequent) by hope and fear together, whether he acts from reverence (which is a passion composed of fear and wonder) or is led by any reason whatever, he acts in virtue of the right of the political authority, not his own right (xvii.5–7; GIII/201–2).
It may seem as if Spinoza, at the beginning of this passage, distinguishes between the narrow case of compulsion by fear and the broader means by which a sovereign can gain acquiescence to his policies. Certainly he thinks that in comparison to other means of control fear does not work as well.25 It tends to control tongues better than minds. However, in section 6 of the quote, he clearly includes this case with the other techniques to induce a belief: it is an action of the sovereign on the mind of the subject, which produces an effect (fear), which in turn causes the subject to act obediently. In every case the action of the sovereign is mediated by the judgment of the subject. Even in the case of the threat of direct physical pain, the subject must be thinking something like, “if I don’t obey I may be subject to further pain and therefore I should not resist.” This fear might cause the subject to revise some of those other beliefs—such as those that are the ostensible reason for the persecution and accompanying fear—in order to prevent future harm. Even if fear does not work as well as some other method, such as a required course of study, to achieve this change of thought, its mechanism does not seem conceptually distinct from that of other techniques. If so, then it is hard to see how Spinoza can distinguish between compulsion and persuasion.26
In an important respect, then, once Spinoza has identified natural right with power, once he has eliminated the free will, which can in principle resist the imposition of external causes, and once he has recognized that the sovereign may have powerful techniques at his disposal to induce belief indirectly, then he seems to have undercut his original argument or at least narrowed its scope to such an extent that it will not serve as a very robust justification for a tolerant policy. The question remains how Spinoza can use the distinction between freedom and constraint as the ground of the distinction between persuasion and compulsion.
Spinoza understands that what we perceive as contrary to our nature depends both on the fixed structures of our nature and on our individual constitution and experience. He writes, “It would be pointless to command a subject to hate someone who had joined the subject to himself by a benefit, or love someone who had harmed him, or not to be offended by insults, or not to desire to be freed from fear, and a great many other things of this kind, which necessarily follow from the laws of human nature” (xvii.2; GIII/201). We are persuaded by something when it aids our striving, which we understand in terms of our particular experience and goals. The persuasive idea fits relatively seamlessly into our mental and physical patterns. We are constrained when the idea does not. There is not always a hard and fast distinction between these two and we can imagine cases in which what appeared to be in our best interest later turned out not to be. Violence may accompany compulsion, and it may be easier as a consequence to mark an effect as coercive when it does, but it need not always do so.
What makes us difficult to constrain is not only our striving to persist in our natures, a fact about ourselves that we share with all individual things, including rocks, but precisely our complex and composite nature. This interpretation helps us make sense of the passage in which Spinoza says that “it must be granted that each person reserves many things to himself, that he is his own master in many things, which depend on no one’s decision but his own” (xvii.4; GIII/201). Obviously Spinoza cannot be referring to a will that miraculously preserves our causal independence. Rather it is our unique constitution and the causal activity that follows from it which cannot be totally coerced unless we are simply killed. The sovereign needs to take the particular experiences of his subjects into account along with a general features of human nature. (And even then there will be much of us that escapes him.) The better the sovereign is able to do so, the more he knows us, the less his commands seem like an act of compulsion and the more they seem like an act of persuasion.
I would suggest, then, that the reason why the mind cannot be compelled is similar in structure to the argument in which it serves as a premise, the political argument for tolerance. Just as the state cannot be stable unless there is a certain degree of agreement among its constituent parts, so too the mind must maintain a certain fixed relationship among its parts. This agreement is the foundation of a single sovereign authority in a state and the foundation of personal identity in the mind. Just as the government cannot coerce its citizens without risking instability, it cannot coerce an individual mind without risking the destruction of that mind. Because those individual minds are just the entities that ultimately provide support for the state, the sovereign has an interest to cultivate their well-being rather than disrupt them, which would either destroy them or provoke their anger and possible rebellion. If the sovereign thinks of the mind of each of its subjects as a composite entity, whose components form a complex whole, then it ought not to force any of its elements to act contrary to their nature or in such a way as it would damage its relation to other parts. To do so risks destabilizing the very individual unities whose support he depends upon.
Because a sovereign power would need to use more complex and subtle means to exert control over its subjects, we would need to develop more subtle tools to distinguish between compulsion and persuasion in order to discover if the sovereign’s action constitutes a violation of the individual’s rights. Here we might add to Spinoza’s account, using his own concepts, and establish the criteria of a rough test by which we could determine the degree of compulsion or persuasion. First of all, there would be a test of the means used to effect some change in the subject. Did the sovereign use violent means or some more subtle techniques? Even among non-violent means we might distinguish between rational and imaginative attempts to convince, such as appealing to the economic consequences of a policy, on the one hand, and its place within some national myth, on the other. Second, we ought to look at the emotions involved, both in the sovereign’s attitude toward the subject and the subject’s response. Was the sovereign moved to change the subject’s mind through fear or through a more virtuous concern for the subject’s well-being? Did the subject react by feeling fear or did it produce some sense of well-being or joy? Was the fear short lived or the joy long-lasting? Finally, we would need to examine the ideas themselves for their truth value. Do they bear up under rational scrutiny? Are they ideas whose truth cannot be determined in this world? Spinoza certainly believed that there were correlations between the different criteria. For instance, true ideas are achieved through geometric reasoning and produce an enduring joy in the subject. Violence, or the threat of it, produced fear and would be less likely to be rational in its effects. But this need not always be true. Sometimes we are fearful of the truth or made glad by false ideas. None of these alone would be a clear indicator of the degree of compulsion or persuasion involved but together we might be able have a rough gauge or even a blueprint for the empirical testing of the matter.27
If we are looking for a defense of toleration in light of a conception of natural right based on an idea of moral autonomy, then we will be frustrated with Spinoza. As such liberals might suspect, on closer examination, Spinoza’s defense of toleration is weaker, and more liable to exceptions than it first seemed. Skeptics, who consider that the truth of a belief is irrelevant to the state, and that the sincerity of beliefs justifies their tolerance, would also be disappointed. While Spinoza acknowledges that individuals are all different and that our ideals of human nature are merely useful fictions, he does think that some ideas are truer than others and when we act on the basis of those ideas, whether in the political realm under the guidance of the sovereign, or in the personal realm, we are more likely to flourish.28 On the other hand, those who would justify the persecution of heterodox beliefs might find his criticisms difficult to refute. Spinoza is a self-declared realist about both the function of the state and about human nature. He thinks that stability is the precondition of a state’s freedom, and he grants the state appropriate powers over its citizens. He recognizes that individuals can be subject to enormous political pressure and are malleable. Yet he claims that self-interest and human complexity are enough to thwart the most scheming tyrants.
Spinoza does base his distinction between freedom and constraint on the distinction between internal and external causes and this may strike some as a conception of autonomy. However, Spinoza does not accept the metaphysics of free will that under-gird at least some Kantian defenses of autonomy.29 In any case, this limited idea of autonomy will probably not satisfy those who are seeking an irreducibly normative justification of toleration. While Spinoza may use the idea of natural rights as a functional equivalent of autonomy, he does not make this basic. As we have seen, an individual’s natural right is in Spinoza’s view ultimately the expression of his striving to persevere, i.e., the conatus, and so it is a claim about human nature that grounds his theory of rights. It is more appropriate to place Spinoza in the context of a virtue theory of value, in which the flourishing of a person’s nature is the source of value, and our scientific inquiry into that nature and the conditions of its flourishing is an essential part of the philosophical enterprise of ethics. If we accept that as the framework for analyzing Spinoza’s claim that belief cannot be compelled, then the normative ground of the argument for toleration will be stronger than its critics would have it.
Although Spinoza’s argument has some important points in common with Locke’s, it certainly has much wider application, and not simply in the sense that Spinoza extended toleration to Catholics while Locke apparently did not. Locke argued not only that the sovereign could not compel belief but also that the sovereign was no better to qualified to know the ultimate truths of religion than the ordinary man. Spinoza also makes this point, as we have seen. Locke’s argument might work well in the case of religion, but it might fail if we extend it to other matters, of which arguably the sovereign could have better knowledge than his subjects. In contrast, Spinoza’s argument gives a reason why the sovereign must be tolerant of the beliefs of its citizens about any number of things, precisely because he has shown how the beliefs are part of the striving (or actions) of those citizens and that the sovereign must take them into account if he is to be an effective ruler. This is where the set of distinctions made above comes into play. The sovereign need not remain neutral and does not refrain from trying to convince the public of some view or policy. Whether the sovereign is justified in endorsing some view and trying to convince the public of it will depend both on an analysis of its possible consequences for the public good, and also, more importantly for our purposes here, the means used to convince the public of it. However, the sovereign, and by extension anyone trying to change another’s beliefs, must respect the natural rights of his subjects and interlocutors, which means that he must take into account the essential and acquired nature of the person and groups of persons, including a range of beliefs, desires, and dispositions to act. Tolerance is not merely a constraint on government but part of the art of governing itself. In this way, Spinoza’s argument has more relevance to contemporary debates over toleration in which the issues go far beyond matters of religion.30
1. John Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” in John Locke: Political Writings, ed. David Wootton (New York: Mentor Books, 1993), 390–435.
2. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. E. Curley (manuscript). References to this work will be to chapter (roman numeral), and section number of this translation, followed by the relevant volume and page number of the Spinoza Opera, ed. C. Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitaetsbuchhandlung, 1972).
3. See John Christian Laursen, “Arming the State and Reining in the Magistrate,” in Difference and Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 1996), 194.
4. J. I. Israel, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
5. Richard Tuck, “Scepticism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century,” in Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Mendus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21–36.
6. Here it is important to make a further distinction. One might claim that belief can be compelled but that the sovereign ought not to do so, whether on pragmatic grounds (such as the attempt might produce more unrest than it is worth), or on theological grounds (such as only voluntary beliefs are valid for salvation). Spinoza is clearly making a stronger claim than that: “it cannot happen that a mind should be absolutely subject to the control of someone else” (my emphasis. xx.1–2; GIII/239).
7. Two historical studies I shall draw upon are: Joseph Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, trans. T. L. Westow (New York: Association Press, 1960); and Mark Goldie, “Religious Intolerance in Restoration England,” in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, eds. O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel, and N. Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 331–68.
8. See Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 170–71.
9. Immediately after its publication in 1670 the TTP was seized from bookshops in many towns and suppressed. Two years after the overthrow of the Republican regime it was banned in 1674. See Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 920–21.
10. See Letter 44 to Jarig Jelles: “I … beg you most earnestly please to look into this, and, if possible, to stop the printing” in The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995), 243.
11. See Jeremy Waldron, “Locke: Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution,” in John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (London: Routledge, 1991), 91–124.
12. For a more detailed discussion of this argument, see my article “Spinoza’s Republican Argument for Toleration,” The Journal of Political Philosophy, volume 11 (3), September 2003, 320–35.
13. From Epistle 93, quoted in Lecler, volume 1, 57.
14. This does not mean for Bayle that there is no truth of the matter, but rather that all we humans have is our good conscience. As Thomas M. Lennon puts it, “integrity in the search for truth, rather than the truth itself, is the basis of Bayle’s moral theory” (Reading Bayle [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999], 100).
15. Quoted in Goldie, 347.
16. See Augustine’s Letter 93 to the Donatist Bishop Vincent, quoted in Lecler, volume 1, 56.
17. See E. M. Curley, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), chapter 2.
18. Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, volume 1, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). References to this work are in the style adopted by the Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, with part, proposition/definition/axiom, number, etc. (see xii–xiii).
19. Consistent with this idea we find that in the TTP we do not find Spinoza using the word beliefs in this context at all, but rather thoughts [cognitio]. Interestingly enough, in chapter xiv of the TTP, when he discusses the dogmas of universal faith [fidei universalis dogmata], those things in which we traditionally believe, he interprets them as ideas that are kinds of action, not theoretical propositions at all.
20. Letter 77, The Letters, 345.
21. Letter 56, The Letters, 276–77.
22. There is the further problem for this account, as noted by Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (in Four Essays on Liberty [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984], 118–72) that the sovereign may feel justified in coercion through claiming knowledge of the subject’s essence. In Spinoza’s case this worry is mitigated by the formal insistence on the natural right of the subject and the practical significance of what I call accidental or second nature in the constitution of the subject. Moreover, as we shall see below, this account helps us understand how a sovereign, who endeavors to understand something about the essential and accidental natures of its subjects, will become a more effective ruler.
23. Modern accounts of torture emphasize just this point, i.e., that the goal of torture is to destroy, first the individual’s solidarity with others, and then second, the person’s very sense of self. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
24. See Lecler, 56–57.
25. As he writes, “It follows that the ruler who has the greatest authority is the one who reigns in the hearts of his subjects. If the person who was most feared had the greatest authority, then surely the subjects of Tyrants would have it, for they are most feared by their tyrants” (xvii.8; GIII/202).
26. The question is further complicated by the fact that in at least one place in the TTP Spinoza uses the verb cogere (to compel, constrain) in both a philosophical and legal context: “Nor is it credible that … Moses would have taught them anything other than a way of living—and that not as a Philosopher, so that after some time they might be constrained to live well [ut coacti essent bene vivere] from freedom of mind, but as a Legislator, so that they would be constrained [coacti] by the command of the Law to live well” (ii.46; GIII/41).
27. As a corollary of this point we might introduce a typology of means of persuasion. There is rational persuasion, when adequate ideas are used along with the active affect of joy; semi-rational persuasion, when there is a combination of adequate and inadequate ideas plus active and passive affects; irrational persuasion, when inadequate ideas and passive affects alone are used. The precise content of these categories, especially the mixed categories with the imagination, would be historically contingent. So it might, for example, appear rational to have some belief in God as a prerequisite to public discourse in one domain but not in another. It would depend on the set of background beliefs that people contingently hold. This flexibility is precisely what some liberal views lack and explains their failure in a cross-cultural context.
28. On this point see my article “Tolerance as a Virtue in Spinoza’s Ethics,” in Journal of the History of Philosophy, volume 39 (4), October 2001, 535–57, especially section 4.
29. It should be noted that there are some interesting parallels in Spinoza with those who eschew Kant’s complicated attempts to justify freedom metaphysically and instead rely upon his two-standpoint theory and the pragmatic position of the moral agent. In the TTP, Spinoza writes, “That universal consideration concerning fate and the connection of causes cannot help us to form and order our thoughts concerning particular things. Moreover, we are completely ignorant of the very order and connection of things, i.e., of how things are really ordered and connected. So for practical purposes it is better, indeed necessary, to consider things as possible” (iv.4; GIII/57).
30. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Washington. I would also like to thank Janelle S. Taylor for her helpful comments.