A Political Economy of Spinoza’s Ethics: Possession and love

• Authors: Jitka Ryndová
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This transformation of one’s possessive desire is the common project of the Ethics and of Spinoza’s political writings. Both ethics and politics, from a Spinozian perspective, train one’s comportment toward possession. In the Ethics, one learns to have and to hold otherwise. The tendency to imagine the beloved as situated within an economy of scarce resources taints love with sadness and subjects the soul, or mind, to violent vacillation (fluctuatio animi) and discomfort, which undermines the freedom and fortitude of the individual. This admittedly abstract account conveys the need to comport oneself toward ”ordinary love, ”or the love of finite individuals, so as to open oneself and one’s beloveds onto increasingly joyful engagements with other natural beings. Envious and avaricious love is conservative and exclusive in a way that harms both the lover and the beloved. This maddening and sickening love aims to possess things as we imagine them in our initial joyful encounters and thereby ironically thwarts the very amplification of power that first provokes our love. The drive to possess things through fixing them and captivating them undermines our own power, and the urge to possess the other must eventually fail. A love that aims, alternatively, at self-possession through joyful and enabling encounters with other beings opens the lover to affect and be affected by ever more beings.

Keywords

EN

Economics; God; Hilaritas; Intuition; Immanence; Love; Mind and Body; Possession

Discipline

• ECONOMICS: ECONOMICS

• Publisher: The Institute of Technology and Business in České Budějovice, Czech Republic
• Journal: Littera Scripta
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 2
• Pages: 107-114

Dates

published

22.12.2009

Contributors

author

Jitka Ryndová

• Institute of Technology and Business in ˇ Cesk´e Budˇejovice

• [e-mail], Redakce Littera Scripta, Okružní 10, 370 01 České Budějovice, Czech Republic