Spinoza's metaphysical psychology

Abstract

Spinoza is a metaphysician. I emphasize this fact here (and in my title) because one can discover what is most exciting and important about Spinoza's psychology only by seeing it as emerging from his metaphysics. Spinoza is a systematic philosopher and nowhere is his system more ambitious and under more strain than in his attempt to derive an account of human motivation, affects, and other mental states from his general metaphysics. This project of deriving psychology from metaphysics stems from Spinoza’s guiding belief in naturalism about human beings - a belief he famously expresses as the view that man in nature is not a kingdom within a kingdom (E 3pr). For Spinoza, the principles at work throughout nature in general also govern human psychology. The clearest statement of his view occurs in the Preface to Part 3 of the Ethics: [N]ature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere the same, i.e., the laws and rules of nature, according to which all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, viz. through the universal laws and rules of nature. The affects, therefore, of hate, anger, envy, etc., considered in themselves, follow from the same necessity and force of nature as the other singular things.