The last sentence

“... a separate spot in Hell ... for tyrants ...”  (La Boétie)

Well begun is half done. So authors give often special attention to the first sentence of their work. In particular novelists do. But also the end of a piece of writing gets much attention and some last sentences have become famous. “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” It’s the end of Hemingway’s A farewell to arms. It’s simple and effective, after you have finished reading the novel. It makes you think of what has happened.

Philosophical works sometimes have last sentences that rather open a new discussion than that they close one. Some last sentences have become famous. Indeed, the last sentence of Spinoza’s Ethics is such a one:

“Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt.”

“But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

The idea, incidentally, behind this sentence is not Spinoza’s but goes back to Cicero. But makes it this last sentence less valuable?

Even more famous is how Wittgenstein ends his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” And just what we cannot say, is the most important in life, as Wittgenstein suggests in the passage before this quote: Philosophy begins just now when we had thought that we had wound up our argument. And we cannot even say it in words! Many readers will get here the feeling “??????”.

I simply want to present some examples of last sentences of philosophical works, without much comment. The selection is rather arbitrary. It says more about which books I have in my library and what popped up in my mind about what might be interesting than that I have selected the quotes in a specific way. But there is an idea behind it: Last sentences are often as important or more important than the text they conclude: Just a last sentence can make you think and be a new start for new thoughts.

- “And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing.” Plato, The Republic (ca. 380 BC).

- “But because the exigencies of action often oblige us to make up our minds before having leisure to examine matters carefully, we must confess that the life of man is very frequently subject to error in respect to individual objects, and we must in the end acknowledge the infirmity of our nature.” – René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).

- “...I believe God has reserved, in a separate spot in Hell, some very special punishment for tyrants and their accomplices.” – Étienne de La Boétie, The discourse of voluntary servitude (ca. 1548).

I think that both for religious and for non-religious readers the meaning is clear: How many tyrants haven’t been overthrown during the past years?

In this quotation I have added the last sentence but one in order to make the last sentence easier to understand. As you can see here, German philosophers of Kant’s time were famous for their long sentences.

- “The critical path alone is still open. If my reader has been kind and patient enough to accompany me on this hitherto untravelled route, he can now judge whether, if he and others will contribute their exertions towards making this narrow footpath a high road of thought, that which many centuries have failed to accomplish may not be executed before the close of the present—namely, to bring Reason to perfect contentment in regard to that which has always, but without permanent results, occupied her powers and engaged her ardent desire for knowledge.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

- “Philosophy must always continue to be the guardian of this science; and although the public does not take any interest in its subtle investigations, it must take an interest in the resulting doctrines, which such an examination first puts in a clear light.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

Spinoza is not the only one who (actually) ends his work with a quotation. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty finished his Philosophy of Perception (1945) with a sentence borrowed from A. de Saint-Exupéry, Pilote de Guerre:

- “Man is but a network of relationships, and these alone matter to him.”

- “... [After] so many centuries of folly orchestrated by the retributive spirit, it finally does seem time ‘to give peace a chance.’ ” Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness (2016).

My last quotation in this little list is actually not the last sentence but one of the last sentences of the work. It’s from Montaigne’s Essays (1595) and philosophically it closes the work but also the author’s life:

- “Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must yet walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech.”

References

Exceptionally, I don’t give detailed references of the quotations. They are all easy to find on the Internet (for instance on http://www.gutenberg.org) (or send me a message).

Spinoza’s ethics

Part 4 and the first half of Part 5 of Spinoza’s Ethics are about ethics in the narrow sense. The first three parts of the book can be seen as an introduction to what the core of the book describes: a moral philosophy. They constitute the frame of Spinoza’s exposition of good life. In Part 4 he describes his ethics of emotions, so what we must do in order to avoid that our emotions make us behave in the wrong way. Like Part 3, it is followed by a summary. The first part of Part 5 gives an ethics of freedom and it is about our possibilities.

Maybe you expect that Spinoza presents a range of rules about what to do and not to do, like, for instance, the Ten Commandments in the Bible: “You shall not murder”, or “Honour your father and your mother”. Not so Spinoza. Even his summary of Part 4 doesn’t contain explicit rules to follow for leading a moral life but it describes how a good life looks like. The rules of life are implicit, although not difficult to infer.

Spinoza is a rationalist and knowledge is everything for him. Therefore I think that the heart of his ethics can be found in this quotation from Part 4 (Chapters 4 and 5):

“[T]he ultimate aim or highest desire ... is that whereby [man] is brought to the adequate conception of himself and of all things within the scope of his intelligence. ... Therefore, without intelligence there is not rational life: and things are only good, in so far as they aid man in his enjoyment of the intellectual life, which is defined by intelligence. Contrariwise, whatsoever things hinder man's perfecting of his reason, and capability to enjoy the rational life, are alone called evil.” For our freedom – treated in Part 5 – this means that in order to be free, we must understand (so trying to get knowledge) what freedom from being led by our emotions involves. We must not be blindly guided by them but try to understand what they do to us. This is the maximum possible, for in the end man is determined by nature. If you find this confusing and contradictory, I agree, for how can being free be compatible with being determined? But that is another discussion – a discussion that still is current – and here I want to restrict myself to clarifying Spinoza’s ethics.

How do you know whether you have knowledge of your emotions so that you will not be taken over by them? For in order to know what to do, you must know which emotions to follow. Spinoza makes this clear in proposition VIII of Part 4 and its proof:

“We call a thing good or evil, when it is of service or the reverse in preserving our being ..., when it increases or diminishes, helps or hinders, our power of activity. Thus, in so far as we perceive that a thing affects us with pleasure or pain, we call it good or evil; wherefore the knowledge of good and evil is nothing else but the idea of the pleasure or pain... Therefore the knowledge of good and evil is nothing else but the emotion, in so far as we are conscious thereof.” In other words: Good is what makes us happy and bad is what makes us sad, and to get knowledge of what makes us happy or sad is not difficult, at least not most of the time. This is the basis of Spinoza’s ethics.

Now you may say that we can fill in all this as we like. For example, sadistic behaviour might make someone happy, and so it would be good for him (but certainly not for the victim). This is not how Spinoza sees it. Spinoza’s ethics is a humane ethics. Some examples: Stand up for yourself, he says, but take care of others. Cooperate where you can. For doing so and helping each other is better for yourself and makes it is easier to become happy. “[I]n reality, Avarice, Ambition, Lust, &c., are species of madness, though they may not be reckoned among diseases.” (proof of proposition XLIV)

Moreover, don’t return hate for hate, for, “Hatred can never be good” (proposition XLV). As Spinoza explains in the proof of the next proposition: “... hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can be quenched by love ..., so that hatred may pass into love ...; therefore he who lives under the guidance of reason will endeavour to repay hatred with love, that is, with kindness.”

And a final quote in order to show how humane Spinoza’s philosophy is: “He who is moved to help others neither by reason nor by compassion, is rightly styled inhuman, for ... he seems unlike a man.” (note on proposition L)

Spinoza on emotions

After my intermezzo on Marx last week, I want to write again on Spinoza. I introduced him as a philosopher whose work is often obscure and difficult to understand. If one compares him with his mental opponent Descartes it is certainly true. When I read Descartes’s Discourse on Method for the first time many years ago, I was surprised how easy to understand his argumentation was, even though I read it in French. When you read Spinoza’s work, you need a lot of background knowledge and often you are wrestling with his style and his ideas, even when you read it (as most of us will do, including me) in translation in your native language. Nevertheless, I can advise you to give it a try. Especially Spinoza’s Ethics is a wonderful book and if you use a good introductory guide to the work – like Lord’s  Spinoza’s Ethics, which I have also used: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Phil_100/Spinoza_files/guide%20to%20spinozas-ethics.pdf) – it will help you to enrich your life and to understand yourself and the world around you better. This is especially so for the later parts of Ethics. If you consider the ontological part of the book too difficult, you can skip Part 1 and also Part 2 and immediately jump to Part 3, where Spinoza starts to write on the emotions of man, so actually about you and me. He devotes two parts to this theme. In the last part of Ethics, Part 5, he writes on human freedom and free will. Let me concentrate here on Part 3.

In Part 3 it becomes clear that Spinoza is not only a deep thinker but also an attentive observer of man. For in 45 pages (my edition) he succeeds to distinguish even 48 emotions, all explained by a shorter or longer clarification. Remarkable is also that he succeeds to ground all these emotions in three basic emotions: desire, pleasure and pain (or as Lord calls them: desire, joy and sadness). If you find 45 pages too long to study, Spinoza lets his explanations follow by a summary of ten pages. Spinoza’s definition of the three basic emotions are probably not exactly as you expect, so I’ll give them here (quoted from the summary):

“I. ‘Desire’ is the actual essence of man, in so far as it is conceived, as determined to a particular activity by some given modification of itself. ...  By the term desire ... I here mean all man’s endeavours, impulses, appetites, and volitions, which vary according to each man's disposition, and are, therefore, not seldom opposed one to another, according as a man is drawn in different directions, and knows not where to turn.

II. ‘Pleasure’ is the transition of a man from a less to a greater perfection.

III. ‘Pain’ is the transition of a man from a greater to a less perfection.”

You may find it strange to describe pleasure and pain as transitions, but as Spinoza explains:

“I say transition: for pleasure is not perfection itself. For, if man were born with the perfection to which he passes, he would possess the same, without the emotion of pleasure. This appears more clearly from the consideration of the contrary emotion, pain. No one can deny, that pain consists in the transition to a less perfection, and not in the less perfection itself: for a man cannot be pained, in so far as he partakes of perfection of any degree. Neither can we say, that pain consists in the absence of a greater perfection. For absence is nothing, whereas the emotion of pain is an activity; wherefore this activity can only be the activity of transition from a greater to a less perfection—in other words, it is an activity whereby a man's power of action is lessened or constrained.”

I have added the latter quotation also in order to give you also an impression of the way Spinoza argues.

As always, I must restrict myself in my blogs and so I cannot summarize the other emotions here (but didn’t Spinoza do it himself in his book?). But if you are going to read the chapter, pay then special attention to the passages on passionate love (propositions XXXIII - XXXVIII): It is as if Spinoza himself has been betrayed by a lover.

Although the list of emotions is already quite long, Spinoza says that he didn’t describe them all: “I have neglected the outward modifications of the body observable in emotions, such, for instance, as trembling, pallor, sobbing, laughter, &c., for these are attributable to the body only, without any reference to the mind.” (Comments on proposition LIX)

I’ll end my notes on Spinoza’s definitions of emotions with a quotation. Desire is for Spinoza the most important emotion. It’s a kind of drive or impulse to get what we like, to attain a goal, etc. Does this mean that we desire the object because we consider it good? Not at all: “in no case do we strive for, wish for, long for, or desire anything, because we deem it to be good, but on the other hand we deem a thing to be good, because we strive for it, wish for it, long for it, or desire it.” (Comments on proposition IX) Think about it when you want to follow your desires.

Quotations from Spinoza, Benedict de, The Ethics, on http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/919/pg919-images.html