The Philosophy of Hope: Beatitude in Spinoza

by Alexander Douglas

Can philosophy be a source of hope? Today it is common to believe that the answer is no – that providing hope, if it is possible at all, belongs either to the predictive sciences or to religion.

In this exciting and stimulating book, however, Alexander Douglas argues that the philosophy of Spinoza can offer something akin to religious hope. Douglas shows how Spinoza is able, without appealing to belief in any traditional afterlife or supernatural grace, to develop a profound and original theory of how humans can escape from the conditions of death and sin.

Douglas argues that this theory of escape, which Spinoza calls beatitude, is the centrepiece of his entire philosophy, though scholars have often downplayed or ignored it.

One reason for this scholarly neglect might be the difficulty of understanding Spinoza’s theory, which departs from the standard doctrines and methods of Western philosophy. Douglas's interpretation therefore seeks inspiration beyond the Western tradition, drawing especially on the classical Daoist text Zhuangzi and its commentaries. Here, Douglas argues, surprising resonances with Spinoza’s core ideas can be found, leading to a new way of understanding his strange yet compelling theory of beatitude.

Genres: Philosophy

162 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 24, 2023

Reviews

[bejo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couldn’t put the book down. Very accessible, even for non-philosophers, though some metaphysics is helpful to know. Makes me want to read Spinoza.

[Blaine Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

What gives me hope is that there are cross-cultural scholars today such as Douglas who understand Asian thought well enough to tell this story of a philosopher of the European tradition who could see through its entangled premises and assumptions and was able to construct a wholly non-European, Asian-Daoist-like alternative worldview. I'm basing this assessment on my many decades of Asian/Western comparative philosophy and my reading of this in-depth review from another of these outstanding contemporary scholars, Chinese scholar Brook Ziporyn, a review which I highly recommend: Douglas Review, Brook Ziporyn, University of Chicago.

Douglas reveals that in many ways Spinoza was thinking like a Daoist, interpreting his well-known "determination is negation" claim as meaning God is absolute indeterminism and introducing the term "superdeterminate" as a synonym meaning the "none-and-yet-all" that is God. Here's from Ziporyn's reivew:

...“superdetermination,” is an immensely helpful addition to our metaphysical vocabulary. Crucially, it helps us distinguish clearly, and with no room for equivocation, the difference between this Spinozistic type of “none-and-yet-all” motif and the type of “none-and-yet-all” attributed to God by many theologians in the theistic traditions, i.e., the idea that God transcends and is therefore devoid of all finite determinations, and yet contains them all “eminently”—what Leibniz called the hypercategorematic infinity of God. As Douglas puts it, “Spinoza’s superdeterminate being does not eminently embrace all determinations while remaining beyond them; it simply is determined by them and not beyond them at all.” (p, 66)

Douglas achieves this reinterpretation of Spinoza through an extended encounter with the thinking of Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi which only scholars such as Douglas and Ziporyn can unpack with skill and cross-cultural insight.

I'll leave my review there and encourage you to read both Douglas' book and Ziporyn's review but also, if you're interested in non-Western ways of understanding, Ziporyn's many other essays and books, particularly his "Why Chinese Buddhist Philosophy?" essay and his introduction to Chinese Tiantai Buddhism, Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism, and his translations of Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings are well worth your time.

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've stopped and started with this book a few times with other things constantly getting in the way of completing it. But now that I've had the time to properly work my way from start to finish, I'm glad to have read it! Douglas is one of the best Spinoza scholars out there today, and there's plenty in here that stands out to me as well-argued and plausible.

I do want to say, though, that there's also a lot in here that I disagreed with. The least important of these disagreements, first of all, is that I do think the author has misunderstood Sartre. This comes from relying on the Existentialism is a Humanism lecture, rather than Being and Nothingness. EH contains all kinds of distortions of Sartre's philosophy, not the least of which is the claim that 'existence precedes essence' - a claim that he heavily qualifies in his more developed philosophy. I side more with Hagglund and Sartre on questions of ultimate value than I do with Douglas (or Spinoza!), and I am inclined to say that the atheist position has stronger arguments for it than were considered in this book.

My bigger issue is with the interpretation of Spinoza. I don't think enough was done to demonstrate that the affect of emulation is actually so important to the structure of the Ethics. I wish it was so important, because then Spinoza could have said all of the interesting things that Douglas says, but in my reading of the book it's only ever seemed like a fairly fleeting concept.

The final two chapters were the least convincing overall. Why should we take seriously the idea that Spinoza didn't really believe in what Williams called the 'absolute conception of reality'? There are far more developed and nuanced versions of this idea than those which Douglas addresses under the label of Neutral Objectivism. Perhaps this is just me being too wedded to previous interpretations of Spinoza, but it should be acknowledged that reading him as thinking that reality is inherently contradictory and inconsistent is a big departure from how he is normally interpreted. For that reading to work, I'd need to see evidence that Spinoza thinks there can be true contradictions. But he seems like quite a fervent defender of classical logic in all sorts of ways. It's a bit unfortunate that Douglas outsources the philosophical work here to an article he cites by Borcherding. I'd have liked to see why he thinks this reading of Spinoza works (especially since I haven't found Borcherding's reading of Spinoza all that convincing either).

With all of that said, this was, again, a very fun and interesting book. And even if there's plenty in here that I don't agree with, these are at least productive disagreements where I think I can see where the author is coming from.

[Melina Harmon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily accessible. An inspiring interpretation of a notoriously difficult but important philosopher.
It's not often that philosophy makes me feel genuinely and deeply hopeful, but this book does.