God & the Unconscious:A Psychoanalytic Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics
I know that nothing has ever been real/ without my beholding it./ All becoming has needed me./ My looking ripens things/ and they come toward me, to meet and be met. – Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours. trans. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy
But the first notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. – William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
We arrive at a conception of the unconscious through the God of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics. The Ethics supports the integration of the unconscious into specific actions of a person’s life by emphasizing the importance of the body’s movement, as it will be shown that the body is the site of unconscious production and expression. I will be using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rendition, that the unconscious is a productive force that generates ideas and flows that are ever-creating, interconnecting, and at each moment rise anew. Despite its various definitions, the unconscious is that realm of existence we do not have immediate, conscious access to; the unconscious is immanent and requires mediation. For Spinoza a similar definition follows with what he calls substance: a productive immanent force that is Being, or God, containing all beings and producing all movement in the world. In the Ethics, beings are those things that mediate the ideas of God and put them into motion, or express them—with the body being the apparatus of God and the vessel of God’s creation. I will demonstrate how the unconscious and Spinoza’s substance operate similarly and will argue that the unconscious is immanent—is involved in and sustains everything.
The first section of this paper will use Spinoza’s ontology in the Ethics to demonstrate that the greater the extent one is connected to the unconscious the greater the capacity one has for creative movement. Creative movement is a coalescence of body and mind through the direct connection with one’s affects, or feelings, and the active production of one’s own ideas. Creative movement is not like an arts and crafts but is a creation-movement that brings ideas into the world. The creation and production of ideas is the expression of one’s particular essence, for we communicate with and confirm or deny reality through action.
Movement in the world is incited by desire, the drive that prompts us to act and go towards certain situations and assess or create meaning specific to that situation. One of my intentions is to illustrate how the body is the locale for a diagnostic concerning the circumstances in which we live for the body cannot lie as it discloses either directly or through symptom what its ailments and its joys are. The larger the access an individual has to their unconscious the more reality that individual contains, in the sense that the individual is able to think and act according to their desire and not according to the givens or passions of the external world. Desire, as Spinoza defines it, is the essence of human beings: it defines one’s proclivities and affinities—desire moves one in a specific direction. For Spinoza, one’s desire and one’s essence are interchangeable.
The second section of this paper will act as a proposal for further research and will be divided into three parts, where each part demonstrates evidence that Spinoza’s appreciation of the body has been taken up by other philosophers to corroborate that the body is the site of the unconscious, of its creative movement, but also its disfunction. The parts are conceptually interconnected, yet each will be centered around particular expansions of Spinoza’s concepts in order to demonstrate the applicability of Spinoza’s system to an understanding of the body and the mind, and ultimately the world that an individual inhabits. This section will conclude with a contemporary diagnosis of the unconscious in light of contemporary symptoms such as depression and depersonalization.
I. Spinoza
If the driving question for Spinoza is what can a body do?[1] the succeeding question should be what can a body tell us? The Ethics parses through experiential and expressive existence, attempting to assist the reader in understanding their essence, their mind, but most importantly, their body. Spinoza’s insistence that we do not know what the body can do should be understood that we do not know how the body—and its discrete parts—thinks. In figuring out the apparatus of the body, we come to learn what the body’s movement signifies—that action in the world is expression of desire, and under particular circumstances action denotes an explication of reality, or creates an intelligible reality according to the circumstances of a being’s expressive existence.
I will first outline Spinoza’s system of substance in order to demonstrate how a conception of the unconscious arises. In doing so, we will understand why his insistence on the body is integral for the unconscious and for investigating the inherent capacities of creation and production allotted to all beings. What will come to light is that the body, when coalesced with the mind, is the medium of God’s creation and production—parallel to how the unconscious is the mechanism of creation and production. We will come to see that unconscious production generates ideas and that the body is the tool acting those ideas into the world.
The starting point for Spinoza’s treatment of Being is that all existence is of one substance that is infinite, self-created and creating.[2] The words God and substance are likewise interchangeable, denoting the intentional matter, medium, and means by which all things come to be.[3] Substance consists of all beings whose existence is expression, meaning that in existence all beings express God since they are entirely composed of it. Prior to the conception of anything, God set forth every potential and made potentials immanent to substance. When a being comes forth, from within its source it has the capacity to access potentials. How a being expresses its essence, its existence, signifies its ability to contact not only its source, but its desire. At every moment there are infinite ideas and bodies that can arise out of substance depending on a being’s material and affectual circumstance—the world and one’s feelings towards a situation influence whether or not one can create or produce ideas and act on them. In order to access those potentials one must possess capacities that seek expression.
The first degree of the expression of substance is the attributes. An attribute is what the “intellect perceives as substance, constituting its essence,” consisting of the boundaries through which a being perceives its existence.[4] The more attributes a thing contains the more reality belongs to it, and as God contains an infinite amount of attributes, Spinoza claims that human beings partake in thought and extension.[5] An attribute defines the specific dimension of substance that qualifies how one can participate, seen in how a human being’s essence is defined by what thought and extension express. What a human being understands of God is that he is a thinking thing and an extended thing, for God’s highest power “is nothing except his active essence,” his ability to express thinking and extension simultaneously.[6] Similarly, a human being expresses action, an active essence, when thought and extension are coalescent—the significance of this will become clear with the explication of an adequate idea. A being expresses the essence of God more directly when it itself mirrors God’s power of acting. Power correlates to the amount of expressive reality a being contains, which correlates to its ability to express its essence, which is ultimately its ability to express its desire. It is to say that power is the ability to act.
Modalities are another degree of expression upon substance, their movement demonstrating how an attribute participates in the world. For example, a mode of extension is a body and its composite parts, and its parts will move according to its affective states, feelings, and desires. Additionally, a mode of thinking is an idea that represents something in the world or a body’s affect to the mind. Substance persists as one thing in its various degrees of expression seen in how “a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways.”[7]Modalities determine the physical components of how a being participates in existence, how the body is compelled by thought to act this or that way, and how what the body feels further determines the ways one thinks. One’s feelings either increase or decrease, aid or restrain, one’s power to act; furthermore, when an idea is connected to a specific feeling, or affect, a being’s ability to think is likewise increased or decreased, aided or restrained based on the idea of that feeling.[8]
Modalities determine a composition in extension and thought, and are held together by the relation of the bodies and ideas it is composed of. The more modes a being can express the higher the degree of its reality and the more power it contains, as it has more ways of acting. Modal existence is the location of individuation, for modes express the nature of one’s particular being existant at the time of its participation. A composition, as it belongs to a particular being, is affected differently opposed to the composition of another. This difference becomes apparent when bodies come into contact with one another, as bodies are “distinguished from one another by reason of motion and rest; and so each must be determined necessarily to motion or rest by another singular thing, namely, by another body, which either moves or is at rest.”[9]Encounters with another body’s specific assemblage prompt one’s own body to recalibrate its movement based off what it thinks and feels about the situation—the encounter alters a body’s movement by exposing it to various ideas and states of being thus having it situate itself in agreement or disagreement with the situation present. Encounters cause either expansion or diminution through the individual’s ability to create ideas and move on one’s own or to receive ideas and have them influence one’s movement. What determines this, initially, is how one responds to affect.
Spinoza delineates the affective register on the spectrum of joy and sadness. Sadness influences ideas by not having the thing or situation agree with one’s composition, thus one concludes that their body is not in agreement with this particular space in the world, leading one to accept the idea present and have it control one’s movement. Sadness impairs one’s power by delivering them to a lesser perfection, a lesser composition: a composition that is determined externally and not in accordance with the being’s desire.[10] Sadness is a passive affect that generates inadequate ideas. Inadequate ideas contain and transmit within them “something imaginary which inhibits it from being real.”[11] An inadequate idea does not assert anything of one’s essence as it does not express anything, “it ‘involves’ only our impotence, that is to say, the limitation of our power of actions.”[12] Inadequate ideas are not created, they involve replication and simulation, one feels and moves according to an idea that is given.
Conversely, encounters of joy affirm the body and incite the mind to agree with the idea present. Joy demonstrates that not all passive affects not originating from one’s essence, or feelings that are externally supplanted, lead to a diminution of power. “Joy is man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection […] I say a passage. For joy is not a perfection itself. If a man were born with the perfection to which he passes, he would possess it without an affect of joy.”[13] Joy is specifically a passage into a greater composition of perfection, as perfection denotes the assertion of a composition’s essence and is consistent with that composition’s power to act.[14] The affect of joy does not incite the creation of ideas, but instead assists the mind in reasoning the assertion of its own ideas, thus increasing its power. Joy moves one towards expansion that is in accord with its own proper action, for if joy transmitted an adequate idea the body would not persist in its movement and instead would simply apply the given idea and remain at rest. Joy does not create; its importance resides in the fact that it affirms the idea and affect one already contains.
An essential feature of existence is the body’s capacity for affective experiences. Prior to any affective rendering, there is the primary affect of desire that is simply one’s drive “to do something.”[15] Joy and sadness govern the organization of passive affections and inadequate ideas as well as the expansion or diminution towards active affections—hence determining one to move this way or that—where desire is “the very nature, or essence, of each [individual]” and reveals one’s essence as it is involved with what a person produces and creates.[16] As one moves through space and has various encounters, its desire regulates how an instance of sadness or joy affect it. So, it must be determined that joy and sadness correspond to one’s desire by affirming or denying an encounter. Joy and sadness regulate a composition externally and are not in direct accord with a being’s essence, but work to situate a being in the world as it is given.
Each being’s desire differs from the other “as much as the nature, or essence, of the one differs from the essence of the other.”[17] Desire, as defined by Spinoza, expresses the drive that lies beneath a person’s every action; desire is expansion, existence, expression, and is the weight and driving pull that moves one in a certain direction. Regarding the importance of Spinoza’s theory of affect, philosopher Catherine Malabou asserts
the fundamental role of emotion in cerebral life, in other words, in the unity of the organism, the complex formed by body and spirit. Reason and cognition cannot develop or exercise their functions normally if they are not supported by affects. Reasoning without desiring is not reasoning. In order to think, to want, to know, things must have a consistency, a weight, a value, otherwise emotional indifference annuls the relief, erases differences in perspective, levels everything.[18]
Malabou’s elucidation helps us understand that one’s modalities, the compositional relation of one’s ideas and bodies held in extension, are prompted by one’s desire and is shifted this way or that way based off affectual events. As ideas determine the ontological composition of a subject, the affective capacity of bodies support its ability to affirm its desire. Affective involvement latches one to the world and insists that it participate. Joy acts as a passage for one’s essence to enter into a higher composition. The larger the space of agreement the more substantial the mind’s ability is to reason what it has in common with other bodies. As Malabou points out, an affect is what supports the development of reason and common notions.
Common notions and are “the foundations of our reasoning.”[19] Common notions are what bodies have in common with other bodies, their acquisition demonstrating a “formative process,” an architecture of desire in which one is becoming active.[20] Activation is the ability to think and act in agreement, and agreement is the affirmation that the body exists here and now as a particular expression of substance. Common notions constitute a biological geometry, indicating a common pattern operating beneath every situation.[21] This geometry provides an open space where the encounter can be interpreted according to the idea the mind has and the affect the body feels. Common notions can only be formed through experience in the world. Experience appears as an experimentation seen in how the acquisition of common notions necessarily requires one to participate in as many situations as possible in order to be able to organize and reason a general pattern of how one’s own body agrees with others and with the world they inhabit.
The expression of one’s desire is determined by how it finds agreement in the world and how it can use this agreement to prompt the creation of its own idea. Expression “is never a final symbolization, but always and everywhere, a causal explication.”[22] It is to say: this feeling emanates from my essence, it is an expression of my direct experience with the changing world—this is how I see it. When one produces an adequate idea one is not accessing a pattern that is installed, but is using that pattern as a guide to express its own essence according to the forms of substance that exist here and now.
The creation of an adequate idea is foregrounded on the desiring aspect of the individual; desire and reason integrate in the affective space. One’s desires are the sum of the relation one’s ideas and feelings—and this specific relation informs what it is one creates. Joy and sadness redirect or compound one’s desire, but do not initiate it. Spinoza argues that desire is the comprehensive, immanent movement of an individual’s essence and operates beneath all encounters—to a larger or lesser extent depending on one’s power and the affect. All movement works to express God’s infinite ideas to the utmost of its capacity. Desire is not only one’s essence, it is God’s idea of each and every body. It is through affect that the capacity for change enters, signified by the emergence of an adequate idea. All ideas are involved in God, and the creative act extracts one according to one’s ability to access their body unmitigated from external influence. Connection to the body is connection to one’s substance and by the definition of substance, connection to God, the source. The emergence of a new idea signifies the site of one of God’s infinite ideas.
Before preceding further it is important to briefly review Spinoza’s system in order to arrive at the conclusion that substance is the unconscious: God is substance, substance is the matter, medium and means through which everything exists, God has created an infinite amount of ideas, and all ideas are latent within substance. The attributes a human being participates in are thought and extension, and God’s active essence is his ability to think and act directly in correlation to each other—so God’s active essence must be the persistence and production of substance, infinitely and at all times. When the body and the mind are coalesced it forms the highest activation of a being’s participation in substance by situating the individual in the here and now, where the individual directly experiences how it exists and how it feels, and so it creates an idea that corresponds to the experience it is in. This is an adequate idea and is the expression of an individual’s desire. As all ideas are infinite and are within God, the creation of an idea is a direct connection to God, and furthermore the creation of an idea is the production of one of God’s infinite ideas. Every idea that comes to be is particular and is expressed according to how the subject desires and what inspires its movement. Movement, when it transpires from one’s desire, is the affirmation of one’s existence. Through the expression of ideas, a being builds its ontological composition—the modalities that inform it.
Spinoza’s Substance and Deleuze and Guattari’s unconscious define the same mechanism: creation and production. Deleuze contends that the Ethics “is a voyage in immanence, but immanence is the unconscious itself, and the conquest of the unconscious. Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation.”[23] Joy is the ascent that leads a being to affirm their reality—to act in it. Speculative affirmation connotes that each individual’s production relates reality in accordance to their desire. As God is immanent to all matter in the world, so is creation and production, being that God’s active essence and ultimate power is his ability to think and act simultaneously—and we have witnessed that thinking and acting at the same time is the production of an adequate idea. The unconscious, as Deleuze and Guattari conceive of it, is an incessant and productive force whose sole drive is to create and connect new ideas, in order to create and connect new ideas and so on. Both substance and the unconscious require the mediation of the body for expression. Furthermore, both are immanent to being and arise when one’s mind and one’s action are congruent. From the perspective of psychoanalysis the common notions appear as a methodology to access the unconscious, being that unconscious is the site of creation and production and common notions likewise assist in the creation and production of adequate ideas.[24]
Creative ideas arise from the explicit movement of one’s desire. Desire is the drive that incites the unconscious to experiment, produce, create, as desire is what prompts movement. If an individual cannot express itself in the way its desire requires, a symptom appears that points to the disconnect between the mind and the body—that the mind and the body are filled with ideas and feelings that do not belong to it. Conversely, when the mind and body are harmonious, one’s essence is connected to the unconscious and thus has a greater the capacity for the expression of adequate ideas, being that it is connected to a force that wants to produce and create, as becoming is the preservation of life and God’s infinity seeks expression.
Adequate ideas form within particular encounters, as an individual is not incessantly creating adequate ideas. These ideas seep forth at critical moments when a subject is fully connected to their desire and can express it, and this movement directs one towards a higher, more integrated composition, where one’s composition expands with the revelation of a new idea. An adequate idea is a torsion in consciousness, a tearing beyond convention and is the opening of immanence. This event is prompted by an affect—a direct connection to the body that informs the mind of its situation, for desire is the affect that is connected to an adequate idea and desire informs the creation of an idea.
The body is an apparatus of divinity. Being so, every movement of substance that exists here and now is a direct expression of one of God’s infinite ideas. The body is endowed with an affectual register that acts as the map and as the source of one’s movement based on one’s desire. The body pinpoints a being on the substance of God and from there that being takes up their existence. The world is something that must be moved through, in the company of others and the environment one takes root in. As long as one is here, one will be affected by the conditions in which they live. The task is to have those things that affect an individual place them entirely in the present so they can witness the variation of substance they are privy to and can act according to the reality in which they live as it moves with them, not according to the past nor a false idea of what they are suggested to think they experience. The variation of substance is the recognition of immanence, through how existence forms and presents itself in the world. It is to integrate an understanding that the unconscious expresses itself in the hic et nunc.
[1] Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (London: Penguin Books, 1996): 71.
[2] Spinoza, Ethics, 6-7.
[3] Spinoza, Ethics, 16.
[4] Spinoza, Ethics, 1.
[5] Spinoza, Ethics, 6.
[6] Spinoza, Ethics, 33.
[7] Spinoza, Ethics, 35.
[8] Spinoza, Ethics, 70.
[9] Spinoza, Ethics, 41.
[10] Spinoza, Ethics, 77.
[11] Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 2013): 224.
[12] Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 224.
[13] Spinoza, Ethics, 104.
[14] Spinoza, Ethics, 8; 25.
[15] Spinoza, Ethics, 104.
[16] Spinoza, Ethics, 101.
[17] Spinoza, Ethics, 104.
[18] Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Massachusetts: Polity, 2012): 22. My italics.
[19] Spinoza, Ethics, 55.
[20] Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 288.
[21] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988): 13.
[22] Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 234.
[23] Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 29.
[24] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 285.
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