mattermorphosis

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FREEDOM - The whole effort of the Ethics is aimed at breaking the traditional link between freedom and will-whether freedom is conceived as the ability of a will to choose or even create (freedom of indifference), or as the ability to adjust oneself to a model and to carry the model into effect (enlightened freedom). When one conceives God’s freedom in this way, as that of a tyrant or a legislator, one ties it to physical contingency, or to logical possibility. One thus attributes inconstancy to God’s power, since he could have created something else instead-or worse still, powerlessness, since his power is limited by models of possibility. Further, one grants existence to abstractions, such as nothingness in the case of creation ex nihilo, or the Good and the Better in the case of enlightened freedom (Ethics, I, 17, schol.: 33, schol. 2). Spinoza holds that freedom is never a property of the will: “will cannot be called a free cause”; the will, whether finite or infinite, is always a mode that is determined by a different cause, even if this cause is the nature of God under the attribute of thought (I, 32). On the one hand, ideas are themselves modes, and the idea of God is only an infinite mode according to which God comprehends his own nature and all that follows from it, without ever conceiving possibilities; on the other hand, volitions are modes involved in ideas, which are identical with the affirmation or negation that follow from the idea itself, without there ever being anything contingent in these acts (II, 49). Hence neither the intellect nor the will pertain to the nature or essence of God and are not free causes. Necessity being the only modality of all that is, the only cause that can be called free is one “that exists through the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined by itself alone to act.” Thus God, who is constituted by an infinity of attributes, is the cause of all things in the same sense that he is the cause of himself. God is free because everything follows necessarily from his essence, without his conceiving possibilities or contingencies. What defines freedom is an “interior” and a “self’ determined by necessity. One is never free through one’s will and through that on which it patterns itself, but through one’s essence and through that which follows from it.

Can it ever be said in this sense that a mode is free, since it always refers to something else? Freedom is a fundamental illusion of consciousness to the extent that the latter is blind to causes, imagines possibilities and contingencies, and believes in the willful action of the mind on the body (I, app.; II, 35, schol.; V, pref.). In the case of modes, it is even less possible to link freedom to the will than it is in the case of substance. In return, modes have an essence, that is, a degree of power. When a mode manages to form adequate ideas, these ideas are either common notions that express its internal agreement with other existing modes (second kind of knowledge), or the idea of its own essence that necessarily agrees internally with the essence of God and all the other essences (third kind). Active affects or feelings follow necessarily from these adequate ideas, in such a way that they are explained by the mode’s own power (III, def. 1 and 2). The existing mode is then said to be free; thus, man is not born free, but becomes free or frees himself, and Part IV of the Ethics draws the portrait of this free or strong man (IV, 54, etc.). Man, the most powerful of the finite modes, is free when he comes into possession of his power of acting, that is, when his conatus is determined by adequate ideas from which active affects follow, affects that are explained by his own essence. Freedom is always linked to essence and to what follows from it, not to will and to what governs it.

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Spinoza: Practical Philosophy by Gilles Defeuze