We all know Spinoza's famous line, "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death." (EIVP67) I have turned to the line again and again, in graduate school it draw a line of demarcation if not a line in the sand between Heideggerians and neo-Spinozists, and, as I have argued, made possible different ways of thinking of finitude. It makes for a great slogan, but, as they say in graduate school, let's unpack that.
First, we should ask the question why? As Deleuze says a proposition cannot be separated from its demonstration. Here is the demonstration of that proposition:
"A free man, that is, one who lives according to the dictate of reason alone, is not led by fear (by P63), but desires the good directly (by P63C), that is (by P24), acts, lives, and preserves his being from the foundation of seeking his own advantage. And so he thinks of nothing less than of death. Instead his wisdom is a meditation on life, q.e.d."
The demonstration repeats a theme that comes up several times in Part IV of the Ethics, the difference between doing things because of the affects, especially sad affects, and reason, is developed in the corollary of Proposition 63.
"The sick man, from timidity regarding death, eats what he is repelled by, whereas the healthy man enjoys his food, and in this way enjoys life better than if he feared death, and directly desired to avoid it. Similarly, a judge who condemns a guilty man to death-not from hate or anger, and the like, but only from a love of the general welfare-is guided only by reason."
Death then is only the most extreme example of acting from an affect, from fear. Which implies that death is not something we can have an adequate idea of, not something we can know. This is a point that Spinoza develops throughout earlier sections of the Ethics. As Spinoza writes, "We can have only an entirely inadequate knowledge of the duration of our body. (EIIP30). The duration of our body depends on the common order of nature and the constitution of things, but as such it exceeds what we are capable of knowing. Our death is part of this common order, its conditions, the bullet, bus, or butter (as in cholesterol) that will be our undoing is already out there, but the series of causes and effects that would bring it to us is more complex than we could possibly comprehend. We cannot know how and when we will die. However, that does not stop us from imagining our own death. What we imagine is in some sense fundamentally different from what is actually true. The things that people fear, things like shark attacks, plane crashes, and being killed in violent crime are statistically less likely than drowning in a bathtub, getting hit by a car, or dying of sedentary lifestyle. Which is not to say that these things are entirely irrational. "Inadequate and confused ideas follow from the same necessity as adequate, or clear and distinct ideas" (EIIP36) For every imagined cause of death there is a cause, or series of causes, from shark week to the nightly news maxim of "if it bleeds it leads" that produces an entirely skewed sense of the real dangers. Even if we know the real truth, that a rip current is far more dangerous and likely than a shark attach, there is a limited efficacy of the true insofar as it is true (EIVP1). Our imagination of our demise is riddled with spectacular images of fears that knowledge of the real risks of living cannot efface.
There is no wisdom of death in that sense. We cannot know when, where, or how we will die, and that void is filled with spectacular and inadequate images of our imagination. There is nothing profound about death, just a void of ignorance that our imagination fills. That is the epistemological argument for not thinking of death. There is also the affective one. Death is not just a bummer, but it is the complete and nullification of all of our powers to preserve and maintain ourselves. No matter what we do, and how we strive, by being clever, strong, popular, smart, etc., all those qualities and skills mean nothing in the face of death. As Sleater-Kinney put it, "we are equal in the face of what we are most afraid of." (although Hobbes might be a more timely reference). Death is the great equalizer. Death can only be a source of sadness, frustration, and impotence.
Finally, there is Spinoza's suggestion, in his example of the healthy man and the judge, that whatever death, or a recognition of our finitude might drive us to do, eat healthy or condemning someone to death(?), we would be better served to do for different reasons, for reason itself. We should strive to increase joy not reduce sadness, increase health not avoid sickness, to increase reason not just decrease the imagination. This distinction culminates in the division between the free man and the slave. As Spinoza writes,
"If these things are compared with those we have shown in this Part up to P18, concerning the powers of the affects, we shall easily see what the difference is between a man who is led only by an affect, or by opinion, and one who is led by reason. For the former, whether he will or not, does those things he is most ignorant of, whereas the latter complies with no one's wishes but his own, and does only those things he knows to be the most important in life, and therefore desires very greatly. Hence, I call the former a slave, but the latter, a free man."
I would argue that the term "free man" only has a heuristic significance in Spinoza. It is a model that we strive for, an ideal, but one that can never be realized. We are always affected, always subject to the imagination. Spinoza's political writings effectively undermine this division between free and slave, between acting on one's own reasons and acting through others. We are never free of the affects, of the imagination, of our dependence on others.
What does all of this mean for thinking of death? I have been thinking about this a lot since my mother passed last month. I was fortunate in that I spent her last days with her, and was able to say what I needed to say, even if I do not know if she could hear me. Her death has got me thinking of the other people (and one ten year old dog) in my life, whose deaths I imagine will happen before mine. Is it possible to live with that fear and uncertainty, to have an ethical relation to what we cannot know? I have no real answer to this question, but I will say at least I am more comfortable not thinking of my own death, and when it might arrive, than I am not thinking of the deaths of others. At the very least I feel that I have a responsibility to make their lives as joyful as possible. Or too put it differently, as much as we strive to overcome our own finitude, to become more active, more rational, more capable (and to some extent more eternal) we must at the same time recognize the insurmountable nature of finitude itself, and in others. I have spent a lot of the last few months in care facilities, and it has me coming back to a basic, and I would say Spinozist core, of my politics, we are finite creatures, loss, death, heartbreak, are unavoidable facts of our existence, politics, which is to say the organization of our social relations, should exist to alleviate that sad affects of our finitude as much as possible, to produce joy and understanding, not, exacerbate them. We should strive to make each other as free as possible, while recognizing that it is an impossibility.
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