Levinson, M.- A Motion and a Spirit, Romancing Spinoza (Article-2007)

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A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing SpinozaAuthor(s): Marjorie LevinsonSource: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter, 2007), pp. 367-408Published by: Boston University

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MARJORIE

LEVINSON

A

Motion

and

a

Spirit:

Romancing Spinoza

i

THE

SIMPLEST

DESCRIPTION

OF WHAT I

PROPOSE IN

THIS

ESSAY IS

SOURCE

study.

The

source

in

question

is

the

thought

of

Benedict de

Spinoza,1

which I would characterize as a

submerged

philosophical

context in a

number of

nineteenth-century

poetries.2

My

immediate

goal

is

to

identify

and

activate

a

resonance

once

triggered,

I

believe,

by

certain

words,

ges

tures,

and

claims that

occur

throughout

William

Wordsworth's

poetry

but

that loom

especially large

in

the

early

verse.

Because

Spinoza's

thought

car

ried

a

clear

political

valence

in

the

age's

climate

of

ideas,3

hearing

the

Spinozistic

echo

in

words such

as

joy,

nature,

affection,

appetite,

and

mo

tion

(and

claims

such

as

"And

'tis

my

faith that

every

flower

/

Enjoys

the

air itbreathes") is to feel the presence of an active and pointed cultural en

gagement

in

poems

that

seem to

lack

a

polemical

element and

in

several

cases

to

lack

propositional

content

altogether.

More

interesting

at

this

mo

ment

in

the

history

of Romantic

studies

(now

that

situating

literature

within its

cultural

contexts

and

contests

has become

part

of

our

operating

program

in

the

humanities),

we

may

use

this

resonance

to

close

upon

some

1.

References

to

Spinoza's

Ethics

are

to

Edwin

Curley's

translation

(Princeton:

Princeton

UP,

1985),

and

by

convention,

where

'4P39S'

names

Part

4,

Proposition

39,

Scholium.

From

Curley: "Roman numerals refer to parts of the Ethics. Arabic numerals are used for axioms,

definitions,

propositions,

etc.

The

following

abbreviations

are

used:

A

=

axiom;

P

=

propo

sition;

D

(following

a

roman

numeral)

=

definition;

D

(following

P

+ an

Arabic

numeral)

=

demonstration;

C

=

corollary;

S

=

scholium;

Exp

=

explanation;

L

=

lemma

.

.

.

;

Post

=

postulate;

Pref

=

preface;

App

=

appendix

. . .

;

Def

Aff= the

definitions of the

affects.

.

."

(xix).

2.

In

work

to

come,

I

put

William

Blake,

S.

T.

Coleridge,

and P.

B.

Shelley

in

dialogue

with

Spinoza

so

as

to

untangle

and

re-weave

the

knotted

skeins of

idealist and

materialist

thought

in

all three.

I

look

at

Blake's

Marriage

of

eaven

and

Hell,

Shelley's

Defense

of

Poetry,

and

Coleridge's

conversation

poems

(and,

in

theWordsworth

section,

at

the

Lucy

poems,

"Last of the Flock," "Anecdote for Fathers," "We Are Seven," and Essays on Epitaphs).

3.

Jonathan

Irvine

Israel,

Radical

Enlightenment:

Philosophy

and the

Making

of

Modernity,

1650-1750

(Oxford:

Oxford

UP,

2001).

SiR, 46

(Winter

2007)

367







368

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

key

Romantic

themes

that have thus far eluded

us.4

[Appendix

A]

We

are

beginning

to recover

and

to

develop

frames of reference for those

themes?the work of

Timothy

Morton

and Alan

Richardson stands

out

now,

as

has Alan Bewell's

all

along5?and

I

offer

this

essay

as a

contribution

to

that discussion.

Let

me

suggest

more

specifically

what

is

at

stake

in

exploring

the

Spinoza

connection.

Throughout

Wordsworth's

early

poetry,

my

reference

point

in

this

essay,

there is

an

insistence

on

the

body

and

itsmotions

as

being

at

the

heart

of,

if

not

simply being,

individual

identity.

"Simon

Lee,"

"Old

Man

Travelling,"

"Resolution

and

Independence,"

and "The Ruined

Cottage"

are

good examples

of this.6

At

the

same

time,

and

in

tension

with that

insis

tence, the poetry foregrounds theworkings of relational dynamics (such as

ownership,

commerce,

and

conversation)

as

in

a

strong

sense

constituting

individual

identity

rather

than

merely characterizing

it.

Here,

think of

"Michael,"

"The Last of the

Flock,"

"The

Old Cumberland

Beggar,"

and

"Anecdote

for Fathers."

Think

too

of the first

set

of

poems,

but focus

on

the formation of

the

narrator-interlocutor's

identity

rather than that

of the

central character

(e.g.,

the

leech

gatherer,

Margaret). Spinoza's

theories

of

the individual and

its

"composability,"

of

endeavor,

and

of

both

power

and

pleasure help us negotiate these tensions, giving a new purchase on these

Wordsworth-effects

and

thus

a new

kind

of

access

to

the

many

poems

that

foreground

them.

Similarly,

Wordsworth's

statements

of unmediated

body-knowledge

(as

in:

"One

impulse

from

a

vernal wood

/

May

teach

you

more

of

man

. .

."),

his

equation

of

pleasure

with increased

activity

(viz,

the distinction

between "a

wise

passiveness"

and

a

"savage

torpor"),

his

signature

narrative

effect,

which

I

call

fatalism

without

finalism,

his

4.

Although

some

of

these themes have received

scholarly

attention,

most

recently

in

Simon

Jarvis'

Wordsworth's

Philosophic

Song

(Cambridge:

Cambridge

UP, 2007),

they

have not

been

critically

read,

a

phrase

that denotes

an

exercise

geared

toward

clarifying

and

specifying

what

within

the

text

or

in

its

larger

relations

that

is

obscure,

vague,

or

apparently

either

unmotivated

or

incoherent.

Reading

on

that definition

takes the form

of

an

explanation

susceptible

to

public

discussion

and debate.

It

does

not

mean

mimetic

expansion

(either

para

phrastic

or

"poetic")

wherein the critic

chronicles

his

own

interiorizing

or

appropriative

processes.

Nor

does

it

mean

randomly

associative

glossing.

5.

Timothy

Morton,

Ecology

Without

Nature;

Rethinking

Environmental

Aesthetics

(Cam

bridge,

MA: Harvard

UP,

2007);

Shelley

and theRevolution

in

Taste

(Cambridge:

Cambridge

UP,

1994),

Alan

Bewell,

Wordsworth

and the

Enlightenment:

Nature, Man,

and

Society

in

the

Experimental

Poetry

(New

Haven: Yale

UP,

1989);

Bewell,

Romanticism and Colonial Disease

(Baltimore:

Johns

Hopkins

UP,

1999);

Alan

Richardson,

British

Romanticism and

the

Science

of

theMind

(Cambridge:

Cambridge

UP,

2001).

6.

Celeste

Langan's

Romantic

Vagrancy:

Wordsworth

and

the Simulation

of

Freedom

(Cam

bridge:

Cambridge

UP,

1995)

is

our

fullest

exploration

of this familiar

pattern.

My

reading

of

"Old

Man

Travelling"

also

tries

to

shed

some

light

on

the

topic:

Levinson,

"Romantic Po

etry:

The

State

of

the Art"

(MLQ

54.2,

June

1993:

183-214).







ROMANCING SPINOZA 369

figurations

of

immortality,

and,

in

the

spots

of

time,

his

treatment

of

emo

tion

"in

terms

of

lines,

planes,

and bodies"7

come

alive

and

they

cohere

conceptually

when read

against

"le

spinozism." Although

I

will

not

be able

to

explore

these

many

thematic

convergences

in this

essay,

I

try

to indicate

range

by

pairing

definitions from and short discussions

of

Spinoza

with

res

onant

excerpts

from

Wordsworth's

poetry.

In

part

three,

by

way

of

a

fuller

demonstration,

I

offer

a

reading

of

a

famous

problem-poem,

"A

Slumber

Did

My

Spirit

Seal."

I

very

much

regret

the

disproportion

between

ground-laying

and

building

in

this

essay,

required

by

the relative

obscurity

of

Spinoza's thought

within

the

discourse

of

Romanticism.

The

genre

of

what follows

is

better considered

as an

introduction

to

a

full-length study

of

Spinoza

in and for Romanticism than as a

free-standing

demonstration

of

that

connection. The

key figures

in

that

study

will

be William

Blake,

Wordsworth,

S. T.

Coleridge,

and P. B.

Shelley

(see

note

2

above).

A

second

reason

to

recover

Spinoza's

thought

for students

of 18th

I9th-century

Britain is its

implications

for

our

practices

of

periodization,

and

more

narrowly,

for

our

ideas about

Enlightenment

and

Romanticism's

relation

to

it. In

the

process

of

reconsidering

that

relationship,

we

might

find

ourselves

bringing

back

on

a more

robust

application

of the

term

"Romantic" than we are used to seeing and a more capacious one as well,

reaching

back

not

just

into

the literature of

the

18th

century

but

into

the

conceptual paradigm

of

Enlightenment.

The

pendulum

has

swung

far

to

ward the

nominalist

position

and

a

move

in

the other

direction

might

re

fresh

our

critical

vision.

Specifically,

we

might

at

long

last

lay

the

ghost

of

a

Romanticism

born

in

reaction

to

Enlightenment,

and

recover

instead the

sense

of

a

movement

of

immanent

critique

modeled

on

a

major

figure of

the

Enlightenment.

We

might

in

addition

recover

for

our

students the

in

terpretive

and aesthetic

power

of the

Hegelian

narrative

of

Romantic

natu

ralism

(a

story

rarely

told these

days)

even aswe

draw

that

dialectical drama

back toward

its

source

in

Spinoza,

where,

instead

of

a

solution

to

the

di

lemmas of Cartesian

dualism,

we

find

a

radical

refraining

of the field

that

produced

those

dilemmas.

In

this

reframing,

which

in

both

method

and

content sets

aside the

seductions

(and

the

subject

forms)

of

narrative,

our

students

may

find

another kind

of

power

and

majesty,

a

kind

perhaps

more

persuasive

than

Hegel's

to

the

generations

we

currently

teach. As

many

have

averred

(see below),

Spinoza

is

the

philosopher

of

our

climate.8

7.

"... and

I

shall

consider

human actions

and

appetites just

as

if it

were

a

question

of

lines,

planes,

and bodies"

(111

ref).

8.

The

12

July

2007

issue of Le

Point

devotes

ten

pages

to

interviews and

commentary

on

Spinoza,

featuring

philosophers, biologists,

historians,

and

Judaic

studies

scholars,

all

of

whom

speak

to

the fact

that

"aujourd'hui

encore,

l'auteur de

YEthique

souleve les

passions.

Partout

on

s'en

reclame,

a

droite

comme a

gauche,

chez les

scientifiques

comme

les

ecrivains,







370

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

Third,

Romantic

period

studies

are

seeing

an

upsurge

of

interest

in

two

old

topics?intellectual

and

religious backgrounds

to

Romanticism,

and

the work of

meter.

Spinoza's

relevance

to

the first

is

obvious.9 As

for

the

discipline's

more

general

interest inmeter as not

just

body-language

but

body-knowledge,

Spinoza's

unique representation

of

mind

as

the

idea

of

the

body,

and

his definition of the

individual

as

a

ratio

of

speed

to

slow

ness?as a

distinctive

rhythm?is

rich with

potential.10

A

fourth incentive for thiswork of

recovery

is

that students of literature

and culture face

a

welter of studies

calling

themselves "materialist."

A

sam

pling

of

the

scholarly

practices

that

lay

claim

to

the

titlewould include

Marxist

and

psychoanalytic critique,

textual

studies,

histories of the

book,

metrical analysis, body and emotion studies, cultural and formal phenom

enology,

studies of

space

and

place,

trauma

theory,

trash

studies,

theory

and

practice

of the

archive,

social and historical

re-inscription,

eco-criticism,

gender

and

race

studies,

and

cognitive

studies.

If

we

are

to

continue

using

the

term

"materialist"

to

any

effect,

we

must

work

to restore

its

precision

or

to

develop

new

kinds of

reference,

even as we

take

care

to

situate those

new uses

within the field of

existing

applications. Although

all of the

prac

tices

listed above

could

amply justify

the

descriptor,

"materialist,"

the

meaning of the term ismore often assumed than explained, leading to

con

fusion and false

contradiction.11

More

disturbing, by

shying

from thework

les

laiques

comme

les

religieux. Spinoza,

tout

public?"

Pierre-Francois

Moreau

(l'Ecole

Normale

Superieure

de

Lyon)

comments

at

length

on

the

contemporary

relevance

of

Spinoza: "Spinoza

fascine

pour

le

discourse radical

qu'on

lui

a

attribute

et

qui

a

suscite

de

nombreaux

fantasmes,

notamment

litterarires.

II

est

aussi

revendique

par

les

laiques,

par

exemple,

aujourd'hui

en

Israel

ou

dans les

pays

arabes.

Certains

theologiens

s'en

inspirent

pour

renouveler

leur

vision

de

l'Ecriture.

II attire

aussi

pour

l'attention

qu'il

porte

au

corps

. . . ce

qui

le

distingue

de

beaucoup

de penseurs

classiques."

I thank Anne Stoler (The New

School

of

Social

Research)

for

sending

me

this article.

9.

Colin

Jager,

The Book

of

God: Secularization

and

Design

in the

omantic Era

(Philadelphia:

U of

Penn

P,

2007).

10.

Meredith

Martin,

The Rise

and

Fall

of

Meter: Poetic Form

and

English

National

Culture,

1880?ig2o

(dissertation,

2005);

Julia

Carlson,

Romantic

Emphasis:

Wordsworth's

Poetry

and the

Marks

of

Culture

1750-1850

(dissertation,

2006).

Consider

the

implications

of

theory

of

meter

for

Spinoza's

definition of

individual

and social bodies

as

particular

proportions

of

motion

and

rest,

the

preservation

of which constitutes

the

good

for that

entity.

See

also Gilles

Deleuze,

Spinoza:

Practical

Philosophy,

trans.

Robert

Hurley

(San

Francisco:

City

Lights,

1988;

in

French,

1970),

for a discussion of music as the

aptest

illustration of the constitution of

identity through proportions

of

speed

and slowness

(123,

125,

126,

128).

Also

see

Timothy

Morton's

essay

"Matter and

Meter:

Ambient

Form

in

Coleridge"

forthcoming

in Literature

Compass:

Romanticism.

11.

Bill

Brown

(The

Sense

of

Things:

The

Object

Matter

of

American

Literature

[Chicago:

U of

Chicago

P,

2003])

is

an

important exception

to

this

rule.

He

explains

that he

initially

conceived

his

project

as

"a materialist

phenomenology

of

everyday

life" but found

himself







ROMANCING SPINOZA

371

of

explaining

our

terms,

we

have cleared

a

path?a

shortcut?for work that

promotes

its

brand

of

materialism

by disparaging practices

that differ from

it. The

result

is

a

critical discourse that looks less

like

intellectual

inquiry

than like a game of capture the flag?a veryworn and tatteredflagwhose

markings

have

grown

indecipherable,

lending

it

to

the latest critical

projec

tion.

[Appendix

B]

Let

me

insist

on

this:

no one

would wish

away

the

va

riety

of

practices

self-identified

as

materialist.

However,

supplementing

the

object

lessons

at

which

we

excel with efforts

at

object

theory

makes

good

sense,

if

for

no

other

reason

than

to

help

us

to account

responsibly

for

our

rejection

of

certain

models,

if

that

is

what

we

choose

to

do.

Additionally,

a

wondering

whether

readings

of

this

kind?consumption

critique?do

not

somehow

"leave

things

behind,"

never

quite

asking

"how

they

become

recognizable, representable,

and

ex

changeable

to

begin

with."

In

overcoming

the residual realism of the

productivist paradigm,

consumption

critique

shortchanges

the felt and

effective

thingness

of

things.

Brown

sets

his

sights,

therefore,

on

that "indeterminate

ontology

where

things

seem

slightly

human and hu

mans seem

slightly thinglike"

(13),

in

effect

aligning

his work with

that

of

Michel de

Certeau,

Michel

Serres,

and Michael

Taussig.

I

would also

cite

the work of

Brian

Massumi,

Parables

for

the Virtual:

Movement,

Affect,

Sensation

(Durham:

Duke

UP,

2002);

Daniel

Tiffany,

Toy

Medium: Materialism andModern

Lyric

(Berkeley:

U of

California

P,

2000);

Joan

Richard

son, A Natural History ofPragmatism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007); and Brian Cantwell

Smith,

On

the

Origins

of Objects (Cambridge

MA:

MIT

Press,

1996).

Smith

is

a

computa

tionalist

philosopher

who

sets

his

project,

that

of

"do[ing] metaphysics,"

under

the

sign

of

Bruno

Latour's

"irreductionist foundationalism."

As

opposed

to

"the idea

[of]

metaphysics

as

univocal,

perspective

independent,

value-free,

and the

like,"

his

"successor

metaphysics"

is

"messy,

fluid,

partial,

non-rational."

His

point

is

that the

concept

of

foundations

need

not

be

foundational

(in

the received

sense)

any

more

than

accounts

of surfaces

must

be

superficial.

However,

what he retains from the

old

("predecessor")

metaphysics

is the

goal

of

"telling

a

story

that

is

neutral with

respect

to

the

schisms between the

sciences and the

humanities,"

grounding

them both

in

a

common

ontology.

More

narrowly,

he

wants to

build

an account

that, instead of splitting the difference between constructivism and realism (the inevitable

fallout from

a

paradigm

of

representation),

"reconstructs the

two

classical

positions

under

a

single

more

powerful

conception,"

one

that he

terms

a

"non-eliminative materialism."

He

includes

political

and social

reasons

among

his motivations

for

developing

this model.

"I

want to

rescue

foundationalism,

at

least

foundationalism

of

a

very

special

irreductionist

sort

('grounded,

but

not

grounded

in

Q

for

any

Q')

..."

(88),

in

large part

so as

to

reclaim foun

dations from "the

religious

right"

(n. 92).

For

Smith,

the

wholesale

rejection

of the

project

of

"telling

metaphysical

stories"

has

largely

to

do with

our

assumption

that

foundations

are

"scientific"

foundations:

quantum

mechanics,

relativity,

set

theory,

mathematics,

and

logic"

(90).

Smith

is

slow

to

say

just

"what irreductionist

foundations

are."

It

is

not

until he

teaches

us, through very precise and often technical scientific discussions, how to "let go of individu

als

..

.

and of

physical

registration

as

well"

(319)

following

the

"field-theoretic

interpretation

of

physics,"

that he

begins

to

answer

the

questions

that launch

the

inquiry

(85):

"What,

then,

of

a

non-question-begging

nature,

can

be

said about the

notion of

an

object?

Can

an

object

be

an

object

on

its

own?

Or,

in

order

to

be

an

object,

must

it be

taken

as

an

object

by

a

sub

ject?

If

a

subject

views

an

object

in

this

way,

what

relation

binds them?

And

what about

these

subjects,

anyway?are

they

objects

too?"

(Ch.

11).







372

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

serious

and

collaborative

probing

of

the

deep

binaries

that still

support

many

of

our

readings

(e.g.,

mind/matter;

part/whole;

cause/effect,

entity/

environment,

individual/group) supplemented by

efforts

to

acquaint

our

selves with

philosophical

materialisms available to thewriters we

study

(and

with scientific

models available

to

us)

might

reveal

points

of

identity

and

difference

across

thematerialist

board,

so

to

speak,

effectively

enlarging

the

common

ground

and

improving

the

quality

of

the conversation

that takes

place

there.

It

is

my

belief

that

a

reading

of

Spinoza

informed

by

contem

porary

work in

the

physical, biological, computational,

and

cognitive

sci

ences

and

brought

to

bear

on

Romantic

poetry

and

poetics

represents

a

move

in

this direction.

[Appendix

C]

My role models in the genre of source study are Stuart Tave's Some

Words

of ane

Austen

(1973)

and

Marilyn

Butler's

Romantics,

Rebels

and

Reac

tionaries

(1981),12

works

that

I

name

here

by

way

of

homage.

Tave

un

earthed the

network

of

associations,

distinctions,

and values within

which

terms

that

are

central

to

Austen's novels

registered

to

readers

of her

day.

He

showed

how

words

that

had

been

thoroughly

assimilated

to

modern

usage

(e.g.,

sense,

sensible,

sensitive)

once

made

up

a

unique

lexical

system,

a

sys

tem

complex

and

generative

enough

to

be called

a

problematic.

He

further

showed

how that

system organizes

Austen's

plots

in

ways homologous

to

its

workings

in

the

political,

social,

and moral debate of the

day.

By

linking

the

two

domains,

Tave

gave

us

an

Austen

and

an

age

far

more

faceted and

dynamically

intertwined

than

anyone

had

thought.

Butler's

Romantics,

Rebels

and

Reactionaries

was

an

epochal

study

in

both

senses

of

the word:

about

one

epoch

(early

19th-century

Britain),

it

ush

ered

in

another,

1980s

new

historicism. Butler excavated

within

the

poet

ries

of the British

Romantics

an

aesthetic

debate within

which

a

lively

and

often fierce

political

and

more

broadly

cultural debate unfolded.

On

the

battlefield of

style,

post-Revolutionary

retrenchment

squared

off

against

progressive

liberalism.

By

restoring

the

pressure

of

ideas

that

helped

to

give

contemporary poetry

its

form,

Butler

turned

what had

been

a

strictly

de

scriptive

classification?dividing

a

taste

for the

local,

the

gothic,

and

the

"northern,"

from

a

taste

for

the

classical

and the

cosmopolitan?into

a

pro

ductively analytic

distinction.

There

is

one

big

difference

between

my

source

study

and the

work of

Tave and

Butler,

namely,

that the

resonance

I

hope

to

recover

for

Roman

12.

Stuart M.

Tave,

Some

Words

of ane

Austen

(Chicago:

U

of

Chicago

P,

1973);

Marilyn

Butler,

Romantics,

Rebels and

Reactionaries

(New

York: Oxford

UP,

1981)

and

Jane

Austen

and

the

War

of

Ideas

(Oxford:

Clarendon,

1987).

A

general

term

for

this

genre

of critical

work

might

be

cultural

philology

and

its

most

prominent exemplars

are

Erich Auerbach and

Leo

Spitzer.

For

a

discussion

of

this

"indexical

formalism,"

see

Levinson,

"What

is

New

Formal

ism,"

PMLA

122.2

(March

2007).







ROMANCING

SPINOZA 373

ticism

is

amplified

by

an

intermediary

discourse.

Mutterings

about

Spinoza

and

Romanticism

are as

old

as

the

movement

itself and

they

take the

form

of

a

kinship

claim

grounded

in

a

philosophy

of

mystical

ecstatic naturalism.

The thread runs

through

Herder,

Schelling,

and Goethe, via

Coleridge

and

Shelley,

and

through

Coleridge

to

Wordsworth.13 These

intimations of

influence

never

went

anywhere,

first,

because

Spinoza's

bibliographic

and

therefore cultural

presence

in

the

period

could

not

be

established. That has

changed,

as

I

explain

below.

Second,

the

trail

went

cold

because

Spinoza's

system

of

nature

could

not

be read

in

any

but

its

own

antiquated

and,

by

existing

standards,

incoherent

terms.

Characterized

as

both materialist and

idealist,

atheist and

pantheist,

rationalist and nominalist?branded

as

scho

lastic, Epicurean, Stoic, and Kabalistic?Spinoza was until fairly recently

the

great

outlier

in

the

history

of

philosophy. Although

Hegel

and

Nie

tzsche had

taken

Spinoza

seriously,

no

one

seemed interested

in

the

why

or

the how

of

that

attraction

nor

in its

effects

upon

their

thinking.14

Another

way

to

put

this

is

to

say

that

Spinoza

lacked

analogues

with bodies of

thought

in

any

other

explanatory

domain. That lack

persisted

up

until the

1960s,

with the

simultaneous

and

surely

related

occurrence

of

two

intellec

tual

upheavals?Continental

critical

theory

and

postclassical

physical

and

biological science.

Louis

Althusser,

Pierre

Macherey,

Etienne

Balibar,

Gilles

Deleuze,

Luce

Irigaray,

and

Antonio

Negri

(all

of

themmindful of

Nietzsche's admiration

for

Spinoza)

wrote

monographs

and

essays

on

Spinoza,

adapted

his

ideas,

and cited him

as

author of

"an

unprecedented

revolution

in

the

history

of

philosophy

...

a

revolution which

was

the

object

of

a

massive

historical

repression."

To

the

extent

that

Spinoza

remained

impenetrable, they

argued,

"his work

measured the

opacity

of

the

present

to

itself."15

At

ex

13-David Bell, Spinoza inGermany from 1670 to theAge ofGoethe (London: Institute of

Germanic

Studies,

University

of

London,

1984).

14.

"To

be

a

follower

of

Spinoza,"

Hegel

once

said,

"is

the essential

beginning

of all

phi

losophy"

(Matthew

Stewart,

The

Courtier

and

the

eretic:

Leibniz,

Spinoza,

and the

ate

of

God

in

theModern

World

[New

York:

Norton,

2006]

13).

15.

Louis

Althusser

and

Etienne

Balibar,

Reading

"Capital"

(London:

NLB,

1970)

102;

Warren

Montag,

Bodies,

Masses,

Power:

Spinoza

and

His

Contemporaries

(London,

New

York:

Verso,

1999)

xv;

Warren

Montag

and

Ted

Stolze,

The

New

Spinoza,

Theory

out

of

Bounds,

Vol.

11

(Minneapolis:

U

of

Minnesota

P,

1997)

x:

"Spinoza's

works constitute

a

philosophy

that

never

definitively

closes

upon

itself,

that

is

never

strictly

identifiable with

a

finite

set

of propositions or arguments thatwould allow it to be categorized once and for all as 'ratio

nalist'

or

even

'materialist.'

It is

rather

a

philosophy

characterized

by

an

inexhaustible

pro

ductivity

that

is thus

capable,

as

Pierre

Macherey

has

argued,

of

producing,

and

not

simply

reproducing,

itself

endlessly."

On Nietzsche

and

Spinoza,

see

Christopher

Norris,

Spinoza

and

the

Origins

of

odern

Critical

Theory

(Oxford:

Basil

Blackwell,

1991).

From Friedrich Wil

helm

Nietzsche,

The

Portable

Nietzsche,

trans.

Walter

Kaufmann

(New

York:

Viking,

1964)

92:

from

Nietzsche,

letter

to

Overbeck,

1881:

"Not

only

is

his

[Spinoza's]

overall

tendency







374

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

actly

the

same

time

and

within

the

same

institutional and

political

context,

the

young

or

emerging

fields of

general

systems

theory,

computational

philosophy,

artificial

intelligence,

non-linear and

complexity theory,

self

organization

theory,

and

cognitive

science

started

converging.

(To

my

knowledge,

this

joint

eruption

of

the

two

bodies of

critical

theorizing

has

not

been

investigated.)

They

started

converging

with

one

another,

con

verging

upon

the

ground

traditionally

occupied by philosophy

of

mind,

metaphysics, epistemology,

and

ontology,

and

converging

around

a

para

digm

of

dynamic

materialism

that

broke with

all

existing

models?all

ex

cept

Spinoza's,

that

is.

[Appendix

D]

In

the work of Paul

Damasio,

a

neurophysiologist

currently

working

within

those

paradigms,

the debt

to

Spinoza is acknowledged.

I

reference these intellectual

histories?poststructuralist

critical

theory

and

postclassical physical,

biological,

and

systems

theory?because

I

want

to

emphasize

that

mine is

not

a

strict

ork

of historical

recovery

like Tave's

or

Butler's.

I

named

it

a

source

study

above,

but

in

truth

it is

more

of

an

intersectional

reading,

prompted by

dilemmas,

confusions,

and

ironies

oc

curring

in

the

discipline

today

and reliant

on

the

conceptual

resources

of

our own

time.

(Because

of

space

constraints,

I

use

Appendix

C

rather

than the body of the text to provide discussion and a select bibliography of

this

work.)

I

might

worry

about this

but

for the fact that

it

illustrates

Spinoza's

own

theory

of

immanent

cause: a

cause

that

exists

only

in

and

as

its

effects,

effects

which,

as one

critic

writes,

"may

remain

dormant

for

cen

turies,

(re)activated

only

in

an

encounter

with unforeseeable

theoretical el

ements

from

beyond

itsboundaries"

(Montag

and

Stolze,

The

New

Spinoza

xi).

More

familiarly,

it

illustratesWalter

Benjamin's

thesis that "no fact that

is

a

cause

is for

that

very

reason

historical.

It

became historical

posthu

like

mine?making

knowledge

the

most

powerful

affect,

but

in

five

main

points

of his doctrine

I

recognize myself;

this

most

unusual and loneliest thinker

is

closest

to me

in

precisely

these

matters:

he denies

the

freedom

of the

will,

teleology,

the moral world

order,

the

unegoistic,

and evil

..."

Much

of this

work, however,

was

either

in

the

nature

of

figurative

extrapolation,

revision

of

Marxist

political theory,

or

it

explored Spinoza's

thought

in its

own

political

contexts.

Norris

characterizes Deleuze's

engagement

with

Spinoza

as

"elliptical

and

impressionistic

rather

than

conceptually

rigorous"

(Norris 14).

This

is

wrong,

especially

so

for

Expressionism

in

Philosophy?a deep, precise,

and

logically elegant monograph?but

one

can

understand

how,

in the absence of conversation between

Spinoza

and

empirical

research into

body-brain

systems,

Deleuze's

treatment

of

Spinoza

could

be taken

less

seriously

than

it

should:

i.e.,

as

legitimation

for his

own

theoretical

paradigms

rather

than

as

a

responsibly

interpretive

com

mentary.

A

new

generation

of

philosophers

(not

theorists)

has learned

from

Deleuze,

and

works

to

test

the

pre-

and

post-modern

convergences

hinging

on

Spinoza

in

markedly

self

accounting

ways.

Gilles

Deleuze,

Expressionism

in

Philosophy:

Spinoza

(New

York:

Cam

bridge,

MA:

Zone

Books;

Distributed

by

MIT

Press,

1990).







ROMANCING

SPINOZA

375

mously,

as

it

were,

through

events

that

may

be

separated

from

it

by

thou

sands of

years."

Althusser has named

Spinoza's

thought

a

"retrospective

an

ticipation."16

The

change

in our

grasp

of

Spinoza's

cultural

presence

is the achieve

ment

of

one

scholar,

Jonathan

Israel.

His

book,

Radical

Enlightenment:

Philosophy

and

the

Making ofModernity,

1630-1750

(see

note

3

above),

out

lines

a

movement

centered

on

Spinoza,

whose

dates

are

1632?1677

and

whose

major

works

(the

Tractatus

Theologico-Politicus

and The

Ethics)

were

written

in

Latin,

banned

throughout Europe

almost

immediately

upon

their

appearance

and

for

decades

after,

and

for

many years

translated

only

into

Dutch and

French

(Israel

159,

285).

Contrary

to

learned

opinion

that

Spinoza was for this reason a non-combatant in the long war of ideas we

call

Enlightenment,

Israel

shows

a

complex

but

thoroughgoing

process

of

cultural

penetration

through

the

new

information

highways

of the

age:

he

lists

the

"erudite

journals,

'universal'

libraries,

literary

clubs,

lexicons,

and

encyclopedias"

(59).

Perhaps

more

important,

he

reminds

us

of the

transmissive

power

of the

more

mundane

sectors

of

the

emergent

public

sphere,

i.e.,

newspapers,

gentlemen's

magazines,

coffee-houses,

and after

1730,

Masonic

lodges

(vi).

Israel

establishes for the

period

not

just thewidespread knowledge of

Spinoza

but

the

clear

perception

of

his

thought

as

a

paradigm

of

Enlighten

ment?so-called

by

Israel,

"radical

Enlightenment"?a

movement

seen

at

the

time

not

as

a

complement

to

the

"moderate"

model

centering

on

Descartes,

Bacon,

Newton,

and

Locke

but

sharply

opposed

to

it.

(Let

me

underscore

the

importance

of

Israel's

scholarship,

which,

although

it

con

tributes

to

our

sense

of

the

positional

pluralism

of the

age,

is

better

under

stood

as a

critical

intervention,

re-organizing

that

pluralistic

account

into

a

picture

of

intellectual

warfare

waged

by

two

distinct

parties,

programs,

and

methods.)

Whereas

moderate

Enlightenment

from

the

1730's

on

"was

re

garded,

even

among

the

most

reactionary

sections

of

the

French

Church

...

as

intellectually

safe,

innovative

perhaps

but

entirely supportive

of

re

vealed

religion,

Providence,

and

the

political

and

social

order"

(516),

radi

16.

Walter

Benjamin,

"Thesis

on

the

Philosophy

of

History,"

in

Illuminations,

ed.

Hannah

Arendt

(New

York:

Schocken

Books,

1969).

And,

see

Louis

Althusser,

"The

Only

Material

ist

Tradition,

Part

1:

Spinoza,"

in

The

New

Spinoza

12?14.

He

characterizes his

interest

in

Machiavelli

(and

Spinoza)

as

an

interest

in

"the

repeated

insistence of

certain

affects,

whether

they be psychic or theoretical or political, which are trulygrasped and experienced only after

the fact and

whose

order

of

appearance

matters

little,

since

most

of the

time it is

a

subsequent

affect

hat

not

only

gives

meaning

to

a

previous

affect,

but

even

reveals it

to

consciousness and

to

memory.

I

would

never

have finished

meditating

on

this

word

of

Freud's:

'an

affect

is

al

ways

in

the

past.'

One

may

wish,

therefore,

to

follow

me

in this

retrospective

anticipation"

(the

last

phrase

only,

my

emphasis).

See

also Louis

Althusser,

"On

Spinoza,"

in

Essays

in

Self

Criticism

(London:

NLB,

1976)

133-41.







376

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

cal

Enlightenment,

practiced

by

such

"nouveaux

spinozists"

as

Diderot

and

LaMettrie,

was

accused

of

"excluding]

Deity

from

the

universe"

by

identi

fying

soul

with

sense

and

movement

with

matter

(520).

According

to

Israel,

"no one

remotely

rivaled

Spinoza's

notoriety

as the

challenger

of

revealed

religion,

received

ideas,

tradition,

morality,

and

divinely

consti

tuted

political authority"

(516, 517).

Israel devotes

a

chapter

to

the circulation of

Spinoza's

ideas

in

Britain,

long

regarded

by

historians

as

singularly

immune

to

Spinoza's

influence due

to

the

preeminence

of

Newton

and

Locke,

and

because

it

was

thought

that

Hobbes,

the closer

source

of

materialist

thought,

would

have

eclipsed

Spinoza.

Israel's

research

makes

it

clear

that

knowledge

of

Spinoza

and

of

the political salience of his thoughtwas not only available to but unavoid

able

by

the

writers

of

our

period.

To

get

a

quick

sense

of

how this could

play

out

in

Romantic

studies,

consider

James

Chandler's

startling discovery

of

the Burkean

strain in

Wordsworth's

poetry?in

his

early

poetry,

not

in

the laterwork where

we

would

expect

to

find

it.17

o

hearWordsworth

quoting

Burke and thus

re

jecting

(or

at

the

very

least

severely

qualifying)

both

Jacobin

and

more

broadly

republican

ideals

at

the

very

moment

when he

had

seemed

most

ardent inhisRevolutionary identification had huge implications. It stillhas

those

implications

and

they

grow

more

complex

when

we

bring

Spinoza

into

the

picture.

As

we

know,

Burke

grounded

his

attack

on

the

Revolution

in

what

he

called habit

or

custom,

a

principle

of

spontaneous

and

embodied individual

and social

being,

and of

their inevitable

and

evolving

constancy

over

time,

a

principle

betrayed,

so

he

argued,

by

the unnatural

(that

is,

premeditated,

abstract)

willfulness

of

political

insurgency.

Something

strange

happens

when

we

couple

Burke's

brief for

habit

with

Spinoza's

oddly

cognate

and,

in his

system

of

thought,

central doctrine of "conatus." Conatus isdefined

as a

ceaseless

and instinctive

striving

through

which individuals endeavor

to

persist

in

their

individuality.

What

gives

conatus

its radical

cast

is

that

un

like

an

instinct for

self-preservation

operating

within

individuals

to

pre

serve

their

defining

essence

or

"content,"

so

to

speak

(and

unlike

a

physical

17- Chandler,

Wordsworth's

Second

Nature:

A

Study of

the

Poetry

and

Politics

(Chicago:

U of

Chicago

P,

1984).

Pierre

Bourdieu's notion

of

habitus,

a

concept

elaborated

from both medi

cal

usage

(disposition

toward

disease)

and from

early anthropology

(Marcel

Mauss,

"body

techniques"),

is a clear contemporary

analogue

to conatus. I thank Anne Stoler for distin

guishing

between

the

two

by

reference

to

the

sedimentation

and

inertia

that characterizes

habitus,

as

compared

to

the

fluidity

and

dynamism

of

Spinoza's

conatus.

Another and

slightly

earlier

analogue

is,

again,

Althusser,

who

traces

his

"

'theory'

of

the

materiality

of

ideology

(see

what

Michel

Foucault

terms

'disciplines

of

the

body'

in

the

17th

century)"

first

to

Pascal's

"theory

of the

apparatus

of

the

body:

'Kneel

and

pray'"

and then

to

Spinoza

(Montag

and

Stolze,

The

New

Spinoza

3).







ROMANCING

SPINOZA

377

instinct

in

the

service of

a

mental

entity), Spinoza's

conatus

equates

individ

uals with

their endeavor

to

preserve

a

kinetic

poise

within

a

dynamic

en

semble

of

relations,

an

ensemble that also

composes

them

as

individuals.

"The human

body,

tobe

preserved,

requires

a

great

many other bodies,

by

which

it

is,

as

it

were,

continually

regenerated"

(2Post4).

Conatus,

as

that

term

is

deployed by

Spinoza,

is

specifically

not

an

endeavor

either

to

pre

serve

or

to

actualize

a

soul,

a

character,

or a

set

of

either

properties

or

aims.

In

fact,

it is

better

understood

as a

physical principle

than

an

ethical

one; or,

as a

physical principle

with effects

that,

because

we

do

not

understand

their

cause,

appear

to

belong

to

the

category

of

the ethical.

"Spinoza's

ethics has

nothing

to

do with

a

morality;

he conceives

it

as an

ethology,

that

is,

as

a composition of fast and slow speeds, of capacities for affecting and being

affected

on

the

plane

of immanence"

(Deleuze,

Practical

Philosophy

125).

Moreover,

Spinoza applies

the

term conatus

not

just

to

humans

and

to

ani

mals

more

generally

but

to

inanimate

objects

as

well

as

to

collective social

bodies.

It is

not

hard

to

appreciate

the scandal

of

Spinoza's

conatus?at

once

de

terministic,

socially

and

ontologically

leveling,

de-

or

anti-humanizing,

and,

in

its

figuration

of individual and collective

identity

as

both

enmeshed

and

as

effects

of

active

"composings," politically open-ended and

even

Uto

pian. Spinoza's

conatus

and Burke's

custom

are

strange

bedfellows but bed

fellows nonetheless.

Returning

to

Wordsworth,

to enter

Spinoza's

conatus

under the

sign

of

Burke

is

to

put

a reverse

spin

on

Wordsworth's Burkean

politics,

switching

the

rotation from

right

to

left,

and

to

a

different and

more

radical

left

than that

of

Paine,

et

al.18

2

On

the

view

that

Spinoza

is

not

a

known

quantity

to

students of

Romanti

cism,

Iwill

try

to

lay

out his

system

as

clearly

as

possible,

drawing

on some

excellent

recent

commentary

and

on

excerpts

from

Spinoza's

Ethics.19

I

re

18.

Henry

Louis

Gates,

Jr.,

"Third World of

Theory:

Enlightenment's

Esau,"

Critical

In

quiry

34,

suppl.

(Winter 2008):

S191-S205.

19.

Genevieve

Lloyd,

Routledge Philosophy

Guidebook

to

Spinoza

and

the

Ethics

(London,

New

York:

Routledge,

1996);

Genevieve

Lloyd,

Part

of

Nature:

Self-Knowledge

in

Spinoza's

Ethics

(Ithaca:

Cornell

UP,

1994);

Montag,

Bodies, Masses,

Power;

Montag

and

Stolze,

The

New

Spinoza;

Moira

Gatens,

Imaginary

Bodies:

Ethics,

Power

and

Corporeality

(London,

New

York: Routledge, 1996); Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford: Clarendon,

2005);

Jonathan

Francis

Bennett,

A

Study

of

Spinoza's

Ethics

(Indianapolis,

IN:

Hackett,

1984);

Pierre

Macherey,

Emilia

Giancotti,

Gabriel

Albiac,

in

Montag

and

Stolze,

The

New

Spinoza

49-64

and

109?46.

Bennett

emphasizes

Spinoza's

dualism.

There

is

no

causal

flow

either

way

between mind and

body;

instead,

you

get

a

picture

of

a

person's

mental and

phys

ical

aspects

running

in

harness without

either

acting

on

the

other"

(14).

"Spinoza's

is

a

prop

erty

dualism;

but

he

rejects

Descartes'

stronger

substance dualism

(41);

".

.

.a

fact

about

an







378

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

gret

the lack of

space

for

comment

on

topics

that

are

both central

to

Spinoza's

thinking

and

to

Wordsworth's

poetics

(e.g.,

appetite,

affect,

and

freedom)

but

not

to

my

interest

in

the

poem

I

address

below,

where

the

topic ofmotion helps me establish theWordsworth-Spinoza link at the

level

of

allusion

and

not

just conceptual

resonance.

Spinoza

is

labeled

an

ontological

monist and

epistemological

dualist

(or,

as a

substance

monist/property

dualist).

His is

a

thoroughgoing

materialism

and

at

the

same

time

a

rigorous

rationalism?in

its

spirit

and

style

(the

geo

metrical

style)?at

odds with

the

empiricist

thrust of

mainstream

British

Enlightenment

and with

the

Cartesian

grounding

of that

project

(that

is,

the

classification

of

sensation

as

extension,

or,

the isolation

of mind

from

both itsown body?henceforth susceptible to scientific inquiry?and from

the

bodies

that

make

up

the

rest

of the

world).

How

can

we

elucidate

such

deep

paradoxes

without

falsely

resolving

them?

I

begin

with the

metaphysics.

Following

his

early approving

commen

tary

on

Descartes,

Spinoza

saw

the

problems

arising

from

Descartes'

triple

substance

theory,

in

which

God

is

conceived

as a

fundamentally

different

stuff

rom

both

mind and

matter,

both

of which

differ

fundamentally

from

each

other.

In

place

of this

schema,

Spinoza proposed

a

theory

of substance

(from

the

Aristotelian

tradition, i.e., self-grounded being)

that

is

single

and

infinite but

that

is

only

available

to

us

under

one

of

two

incommensurable

attributes,

thought

and

extension

(two

of

an

infinity

of

attributes,

the

rest

of which

exceed

the

power

of the

human

body

to

know

them).

In

other

words,

mind

and

matter

are

cognitively

but

not

actually

distinct.

Despite

this

language,

it

is

crucial

to

Spinoza's

system

that attributes

be

conceived

as

more

than

and different

from

subjective

viewpoints

on

the

unity

of sub

stance.

"The order

and connection

of ideas

is

the

same

as

the

order and

connection

of

things"

(IIP7,

my

emphasis);

and,

"an attribute

is

not

truly

distinct from the substance inwhich it inheres." Or, "a mode of extension

and the

idea

of that

mode

are

one

and

the

same

thing,

but

expressed

in

two

different

ways"

(IIP7S).

Thought

and extension

are

"two

complete

and

adequate

descriptions

of

the

world

as

it

essentially

is."

Each

completely

"expresses"

substance

(IPn)

and

neither

can

be

reduced

to

the other

nor

can

it

be

causally

related

to

the

other,

a

view that

flies

in

the face

of

our

everyday

experience

and

intuitions.

Although

the

language

of

parallelism

is

standard

in

accounts

of

Spinoza

(although

it

appears

nowhere

in

the

Ethics),

entity's physical

properties

can't

be

explained

by

reference

to

any

entity's

mental

properties"

(47);

"Spinoza's

panpsychism

keeps

his

naturalism

from

committing

him

to

materialism.

It

lets

him

off the hook

by

introducing

mentality

as a

basic

feature

of

the entire

universe

(38)."

Bennett's

claim

for

Spinoza's

theist

position

(126?27)

is

echoed

in

Nadler

(32?35)

as

well

as

in

Montag,

Bodies,

Masses,

Power

4,

5,

42.

See also

Israel for

parallel

chains

(233).







ROMANCING SPINOZA

379

a

better

figure

for this

emphatically

non-logical

relation

might

be that of

the

Moebius

strip,

with

its

two

surfaces

twisted

into

one

single

and

contin

uous

plane.

A

so-called "two-dimensional

manifold,"

the

figure

is

locally

two-sided but globally one-sided.20

Spinoza's

name

for this

amassing

substance

is

"God,

or

Nature."21 Iden

tifying

God

with

nature

(and

mind

with

matter,

soul with

body,

natura

naturans

with

natura

naturata,

and,

with

important

qualifications,

right

with

power)

means

that the first

term,

because

it

just

is

the

second,

cannot act

upon

it.One

can

see

here

the

source

of

the

joint

charge

against Spinoza,

atheist-pantheist.

One

can

also

see

the

radical

implications

of

Spinoza's

metaphysics

for

an

early

modern

(and

early

modernist, i.e.,

Romantic)

readership; out goes creationism, intelligent design, Providence, and even

more

consequential,

out

goes

the

deep

intuition

that the

mind

controls the

body

(and

that intellect controls

will).

As

with the

two

attributes,

mind

and

matter,

God

and

nature

are

like

parallel

lines that

cannot

for

that

reason

in

tersect

or

interact.22

God's

will?Providence^"necessarily

follow[s]

from

20.

I

wish

to

thank Michael

Barany

(Cornell

University)

for

explaining

the force of

my

.

intuition

to

me

in

topological

terms.

I

would

also

reference

Zia

Gluhbehovic

(University

of

Illinois),

who

proposed

"enfoldment"

(of

mind

and

matter)

as

a

useful

metaphor.

For

a

larger

frame of reference, re-enfoldment or "implication," see David Bohm, Wholeness and the Im

plicate

Order

(London,

Boston:

Routledge

&

Kegan

Paul,

1981),

chapter

7.

21.

Critical

commentary

on

the

substance-attribute relation

ranges

shows

a

range

of

em

phases.

In

my

view,

Deleuze's

and

Jonathan

Bennett's

discussions

are

the

most

successful

in

explaining

the

conceptual hybridities.

For

a

representative

range,

see

Steven M.

Nadler,

Spinoza's

Heresy:

Immortality

and the

Jewish

Mind

(New

York:

Oxford

UP,

2001);

Steven M.

Nadler,

Spinoza's

Ethics:

An

Introduction

(New

York:

Cambridge

UP,

2006).

Deleuze's

expli

cation

of

expression

(Expression

in

Philosophy)

centers

on

the relation

of attributes

to

sub

stance.

The

former

are

dynamic

and

active

forms,

he

writes,

not

"attributed"

(following

Ar

istotle)

to

substance but

attributive.

Each

attribute

(the

two,

thought

and

extension,

being

the

only ones we recognize, given the state of complexity of our bodyminds) expresses an es

sence

and

attributes

it

to

substance.

All

the

attributed

essences

coalesce in

the

substance

of

which

they

are

the

essence

(44-47).

For

a

literary

gloss,

consider

Milton's

epithet

for

Christ:

"Bright

effluence

of

bright

essence

increate"?thus,

a

God

who

does

not

exist

("increate")

until

he

expresses

himself

in

Christ,

his

own

expression,

or,

effluence.

Or,

we

could

read that

peculiar

father-son

relation

as

an

instance

of

recursion:

a

system

which has

itself

as

a

member.

It is

the

immanence of

the

expression

to

what

is

expressed

that

distinguishes

it

from

emana

tion

(a concept

that

involves

the

eminence

of

God).

22.

On

the

formula

"mind and

matter,"

see

Bennett

84-106.

Bennett

reads

Spinoza's

ex

tension

as

synonymous

with

space,

not

matter,

and

he

sees

late

20th-century

physics,

or

"the

contemporary view," as "a version of Spinoza's own position" (84). Drawing on Parts 1 and 3

of the

Ethics,

Bennett

argues

that for

Spinoza,

"bodies

are

not

basic

and

.

.

.

space

is"

(98),

a

view

he

terms

a

"field

metaphysic,"

which is

opposed

to

the

"space

plus

contents"

metaphysic?on

Spinoza's

account,

an

ontologically

extravagant

notion

(105).

Bennett

glosses

Spinoza's

understanding

of

matter

by

reconstructing

one

of

Newton's

thought

experiments,

the

conclusion

of

which

is

that "actual

physical

things

are

just

regions

of

space

which

have

been

suitably

thickened,

so

to

speak."

Or,

"our

account

of

the

world

does

not







380

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

God's

given

nature"

(IP33D).

God

"cannot

be said

...

to act

from freedom

of

the

will,

any

more

than he

can

be said

to act

from freedom

of

motion

and

rest

on

account

of those

things

that

follow

from

motion

and

rest.

.

."

(IC2). "[T]he chain of necessity is infinite, and infinitely complex, and

only partially

knowable

through

human

science,"

not

because the

chain

hangs

from

a

transcendental

hook

nor

because "elements of the chain

are

conceptually

beyond

the reach of human

reason

but because

science

can

not

empirically

take

account

of thewhole of such

a

sequence"

(Israel

231).

The

empirical

limit

is

emphatically

not

a

measurement

problem

(as

in

some

kind of

vanishing-point

atomism)

but

a

function of the

complexity

and

what

we

might

call

today

the

self-organizational

and

emergent

properties

of the sequence, and also of the fact that science is itselfembedded in that

sequence.

Empiricism

(and,

more

relevant

to

Romanticism,

Lockean/Hartlean

associationism)

runs

into

two

big problems:

on

the

one

hand,

its

unavoid

able

posit

of

some

sort

of real-world that

sponsors

or

anchors

perception,

and

on

the other

hand,

its

need for

some

sort

of

mind-stuff,

such

as

reason,

that

organizes

but

is

not

influenced

by

perception.

As

a

finessing

of the

problem

of

grounding

at

both

ends,

Spinoza's

theory

is

brilliant. If

every

thing

is

substance and

is determined

not

in advance

nor

by

divine

will

but

by

its absolute

nature,

then the foundational

authority

of

substance

as

either

first

cause or

material

ground

vanishes.

We

are

pitched

into

a

universe

that

is

radically

relativist but

at

the

same

time,

thoroughly

embodied and

deter

mined,

not

in

advance,

however,

but

through

the

mechanically

interactive

play

of

contingencies

(see

Appendix

C).

Nor

do

we

require

reason

either

to

organize

sensation

or

to

represent

it

to

ourselves,

once we

regard

the

mind

as

the idea

of the

body. Spinoza's

reason

is

freed

to

do

thework of

understanding

the

causes

of

our

ideas,

which

it

accomplishes

on

the

basis

of

our

human

capacity

to

form

common notions. As Deleuze

points

out,

such

notions "are

not at

all abstract

ideas

but

general

ideas,"

representing

"some

thing

common

to

bodies"

(Practical

Philosophy

54).

We

are

not

born

with

these;

they

arise

through

our

experience

of

good

encounters,

or

with

modes

that

agree

with

ours,

which

is

to

say,

that

preserve

and

increase

our

power.

We

experience

this

phenomenon

as

joy,

which

spurs

us

to

select

such

encounters

rather than

randomly undergo

them and

which

empowers

us

to

inquire

into

the

causes

of these

agreements.

From

such

causes,

we

de

duce others of the same kind, and thus we move from strength to strength,

start

with

objects

and

their locations and

then

move

on

to

talk about

strings

of

place-times.

Rather,

we

start

with

facts about

strings

of

place-times,

and

out

of

them

we

logically

con

struct

'objects'

and

a

relation

of

'occupancy'

between

them

and

regions.

This does

not

add

physical

objects

to

our

basic

ontology;

all

that that

contains is the

one

substance,

space"

(89).







ROMANCING

SPINOZA

381

or,

from less

to

more

adequate

ideas.

Spinoza's

reason

is

literally

a

practice

of the

body;

it has

no

need for transcendental

bona fides.

That

is

an

overview

of

the

metaphysics;

here

is

(a

humanist's version

of)

the

physics.

Newton's

revolutionary

science

crucially

involves the claim

that motion

is

external

to matter

and is therefore

mechanically explicable

by

way

of

general

laws

rather

than individual

cases.

Ultimately,

however

(in

a

way

that

I

find

analogous

to

Descartes'

disconnect between

body

and

mind),

motion is

enabled

by

gravity,

"a

power

emanating

directly

from

God

. . .

ceaselessly

conserving

and

regulating

the universe":

a

power

that

is

universal "and

intirely

/mmechanical

[sic],

or

beyond

the

power

of all

material

agents

whatsoever"

(Israel 519).

Like

Newton,

Spinoza

proposes

that "a body which moves or is at restmust be determined tomotion

or

rest

by

another;

and that

again

by

another;

and

so

on,

to

infinity"

(IIP13L3).

However,

in

defining

each

body

as

itself

a

unique

ratio

of

mo

tion

to

rest,

and,

in

stating

that

"what

constitutes

the form of

the individual

[body]

consists

only

in

the

union

of the bodies

[which]

is

retained

even

if

a

continual

change

of bodies

occurs"

(IIP13L4D),

Spinoza

displaces

gravity

as a

first

cause.

Everything

that moves?which

is

everything?is

at

once

self-moved

(viz.,

its

conatus)

but

every

"self"

or

singular body

is

also

an

ef

fect of the

striving, pulsating

whole.

The

body's

ratio

of motion

to

rest

is

determined

not

just

by

its

own

nature

(which

is

itself

composed

of

many

diverse bodies

[IIPi3Posti])

but

by

all

other bodies

(with

the

connected

idea that

"cohesion,

or

solidity,

of

bodies derives

from the

air

pressure

around

them,

a

form of

pressure

of

bodies

on

bodies"

[IIP13L4D]).

Spinoza

thus denies the

existence

of

static

extension

(from Descartes)

and

of Newtonian

absolute

or

empty

space.

Thus

too,

"neither

is

there

any

such

thing

as

inertia?rest

[for

Spinoza] being

merely

a

balance of

opposing

pressures"

(Israel

251).23

By

defining

motion as

integral

to matter and

(through

the

concept

of

conatus)

as

the factor that

individuates

bodies,

Spinoza

asserts

that the

cre

ation and

evolution of

both

living

and inanimate

bodies is

inherent

in

the

properties

of

nature

itself?in

other

words,

a

process

of intrinsic

mutation

or

what

we

might

call

today

"co-evolution"

as

distinct

from

adaptationism.

He

asserts too

the

systemic

and

dynamic

wholeness

of

a

nature

that

is

also

23.

Consider

in

this

context

the

following

observation from

Samuel

Taylor

Coleridge,

Biographia Literaria, Chapter 13: "It is equally clear that two equal forces acting in opposite

directions,

both

being

finite

and each

distinguished

from

the other

by

its

direction

only,

must

neutralize

or

reduce each

other

to

inaction"

(Samuel

Taylor

Coleridge,

Kathleen

Coburn,

and

Bart

Keith

Winer,

Collected Works

of

Samuel

Taylor

Coleridge,

vol.

7,

Bollingen

Series, 75

[London,

Princeton:

Routledge

and

Kegan

Paul;

Princeton

UP,

1968] 299).

Spinoza

died

before the

publication

of

Newton's

Principia

(1687).

I

make

this

comparison

because knowl

edge

of

both would of

course

have

been available

to

the

Romantic

period

writers.







382

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

culture,

a

oneness

that

nonetheless

preserves

the

functional

differences of

the

two

orders.

Coleridge's

famous

coinage,

"multeity" ("multeity

in

unity"),

gains

force from

Spinoza's

insistence

on

the

entity

status

of the

components of the organized unity.

To

say

how this

process

of individuation

works and

to

say

what

it is

that

saves

Spinoza's

monism

from

meltdown

into

undifferentiated

unity

(Hegel's

great

objection

to

Spinoza

and the

spur

to

his

theory

of

dialectics),

I

return to

the

topic

of conatus.24

As I

have

said,

Spinoza

defines the indi

vidual

as a

proportion

ofmotion

and

rest

which strives

to

maintain

itself?

not to

maintain

its

elements but rather its

defining

relation of

speed

to

slowness.

In

other

words,

bodies differ

as

do

their

"speeds"

within

the

whole of

nature

of which all bodies

are

a

part (and

where the

parts

are con

tinuously

defined

by

their

dynamic

relations within the

whole).

Who then

(or

"what,"

since

the

theory

applies

to

inanimate

matter

as

well)

is

"doing"

the

striving?

Or,

as

one

commentator

says,

"it

seems

strange

to

identify

what

a

thing

is

with

its

endeavor

to

persist

in

being,

for

surely

the

thing

must

be what

it is

independent

of that endeavor"

(Lloyd,

Part

of

ature

15).

The

answer

would be:

having

a

certain

proportion

of

motion

to rest

is

what

it is

for that individual

to

exist.

In

Spinoza-speak,

one

would

not

say

that

an

individual

(a

rock,

a

tree,

a

person,

a

species?and

those

too

will

be

radicalized

by

Spinoza's

idea of a

body

without

predetermined

contours)

"has"

a

certain

ratio.

Rather,

there

being

an

individual consists

in

there be

ing

such

a

proportion. Spinoza

refers

to

this

ratio

as

the

"power"

of that

body.

How

does this

proportion

maintain

itself;

what is this

"striving"

or

"endeavor" that

might

have

assuaged

Hume's

worry

about

the

constancy

of

identity

over

time?

Spinoza's

celebrated

theory

of

conatus

has links

to

Hobbes

but,

as

mentioned

above,

it

liberates

striving

from

notions

of will

and from aim. In another idiom, that of narrative structures, one might say

that

it

lacks arche and telos

(another

reason,

perhaps,

beyond

its

demonstra

tive

certainty,

for

Spinoza's

choice of the

geometrical

method of

presenta

tion).25

The

closest that

Spinoza

comes

to

a

kind of "drives"

theory

is

to

say

that bodies seek

to

combine

with

whatever enhances their

power,

which,

for

Spinoza,

is the

same as

their

singularity.

At

the

same

time,

power

gets

treated

as

each

body's capacity

to

affect

and

to

be affected

by

other

bodies;

thus,

the

more

complex

the

body,

the

greater

its

power.

Preserving

the

motion-rest ratio that

constitutes individual

being

involves

not

just

what

goes

on

within the

commonsense

body-contours;

it

includes the

24.

Georg

Wilhelm

Friedrich

Hegel,

et

al.,

Lectures

on

the

History

of

Philosophy:

The

Lectures

of

1825-1826

(Berkeley:

U of

California

P,

1990).

25.

See

Roger

Scruton:

"for there

is

a

real

sense

in

which

nothing

in

Spinoza's

world

re

ally

'happens'"

(Roger

Scruton,

Spinoza,

Past Masters

[Oxford,

New

York: Oxford

UP,

1986]

49).








pressure

of

conflicting

and

compatible

forces from

outside those boundaries

(Lloyd,

Part

of

Nature

15).

What

we

are

("we"

meaning

persons,

rocks,

trees,

and all the "individuals"

that

compose

those

entities)

iswhere

and

how we move within the ceaselessly interactive network of God or

Nature.

Whereas

empiricism

defines the

body

by

what

it

excludes

(for

example,

the

environment,

other

bodies,

etc),

the

Spinozistic

body

(like

the

Hegeli

an

and

Marxian

but

without the

engine

of

determinate

negation,

or,

the

metabolic

digestion

of other

into

self)

is

sustained

and

"continually

regen

erated"

by

other bodies

(IIPost4).

(This

is

one source

of the characteriza

tion

of

Spinoza's thought

as

a

philosophy

of

presence.)

This

is

to

say,

bodyminds

do

not

incidentally

interact

with others.26

Rather,

these

envi

ronmental

interactions

(and

for

Spinoza,

environment

emphatically

in

cludes the social

formation)

impede

or

enhance the

body's

power

which,

as

explained

above,

constitutes

that

body.

Each

body's

drive

to

maintain

that

power?each

individual

conatus,

that

is?brings

it

into unities

"through

synchronizations

of forces"

(Lloyd,

Part

of

Nature

22).

Thus individual

existence

depends

not

just

on

what

is

internal

to

the

body, conventionally

conceived,

but

on

the

impacts

and

pressures

of external

forces,

again,

"external"

as

conventionally

conceived.

It is

nearly impossible

to think that the

body

does not end at the skin and

it is

just

as

hard

to

imagine

identity

as

not

centered

in

themind inside that

envelope.

(We

may

apply

to

that

"ghost

in

the

machine"

concept

the

same

phrase?a politically charged

one?that

Spinoza

uses

to

critique

the

illusion

of

man's

apartness

from the

natural

world,

"a

kingdom

within

a

kingdom"

[IHPref].)

Spinoza

famously

defines mind

as

"the idea

of

the

body."

Of all

the

challenges

posed

by

Spinoza's

thought,

this

one

is

possibly

the

greatest

(and

both

Jonathan

Bennett and Gilles

Deleuze,

from

their

very

different

perspectives, provide matchlessly clarifying commentary on it). On my

translation,

we

might

render

"idea"

as

"expression,"

using

that

term

in

its

mathematical

sense,

where

an

expression just

is

the

thing

(or,

the

value,

re

lation,

or

quantity)

that

it

expresses.

Mind

is

the

expression

of

the

body,

then,

in

the

sense

that the formula

"2

+

2+?

4"

is

what

it

represents

(in

Kant's

idiom,

an

analytic

apriori).

The

challenge

here is

to

remember that

because the

Spinozan

body

is

continuously regenerated

in

and

through

the

flux of

other

bodies,

the

"expression"

which

is

mind

is also

always

chang

ing (with

its

constancy comparable

to

the preservation of the

2+ 2

=

4 rela

tion

that

persists

as one moves

from base

5

to

base

10).

Or

perhaps

a

better

metaphor

for the

temporal

persistence

of

the

mind-body's uniqueness

is

the

relation

between

1

1

+

3

and

2+

2+1,

suggested

to

me

by

Michael

Barany

26.

For

no

predefined

contours to

body,

see

Lloyd,

Part

of

Nature

21,

24;

for

synchroniza

tion

of

forces,

see

Lloyd,


Guidebook

55.







384

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

(see

note

20

above).

What

abides

is,

again,

a

proportion

of

speed

to

slow

ness,

an

organizational

coherence,

when

organization

is

grasped

along

tem

poral

and

not

merely

spatial

lines.

The bottom line is thatmind isnot the container of ideas about the

body

nor

(and

this

is

crucial)

does

it

represent

he

body,

not

even

in

the

categori

cally

mediated

fashion

of

Kant.

It

might

be closer

to

our

notion of

body

image,

which,

by

today's

neuroscience

studies,

is

the

inevitably

confused

and

partial

state

of

awareness

of the

body

("of"

the

body meaning

both be

longing

to

the

body

and

modeling,

or

re-presenting

it?that

is,

a

recursive

relationship),

as

that

body-mind

is

embedded

in

a

network

of

biological,

cognitive,

and cultural

systems.27

In

being

aware

of the

body,

the

mind is

aware of other bodies, and the experience of other bodies togetherwith

one's

own

is

what

Spinoza

calls

imagination

(Lloyd, Routledge Philosophy

Guidebook

54?56). (It

becomes

reason

when

we

understand the

causes

of

these

"composings"?not

the

purposes,

let

me

insist.

There

is

no

finalism

in

Spinoza's

system.

"Nature

has

no

end

set

before

it,

and

...

all final

causes

are

. . .

fictions"

[IApp]).

Spinoza's

use

of the

terms

"affect"

and "affection"

is

extremely

rich and

subtle

and

I

cannot

begin

to

do

it

justice

here. Suffice

it

to

say

that

he

sometimes

uses

"affection" interchangeably

with "modes" such

as

our

selves,

that

is,

singular

beings

(i.e.,

properties,

relations,

facts,

processes,

and

individuals).

More

generally,

however,

"affection" indicates what

happens

to

our

"modes"

as

other "modes" affect

us

(i.e.,

impinge

on or

combine

with

us),

according

to

our

capacity

both

to

affect and

to

be

affected

by,

or,

in

a

word,

our

"power."

At times in

the

Ethics,

affection

is

synonymous

with

"idea,"

underscoring

that

the

mind is

an

unmediated

registration

of

the

impact

of other

bodies

on our

own

and,

bringing

on

the

more

modern

sense

of

affect,

that

we

feel these

pressures

as

joy

or

sadness,

pleasure

or

pain,

depending

on whether

they strengthen

or lessen the

body's

power

of

acting,

which

is,

to

repeat,

our

very

being

as

individuals

and

as

part

of

the

order

of

natura naturata

(IP29S).

We

do

not

perceive

external bodies

with

any

more

clarity

than

we

perceive

our

own;

such bodies

are

to

us

"confused

states

of

awareness

of what

is

happening

in

the

universe

as a

whole,

confused

because

of the

limitations of

our own

bodies.

We

no

27.

See

Lloyd,

Part

of

Nature

23,

Antonio R.

Damasio,

Looking for

Spinoza: Joy,

Sorrow,

and

theFeeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), and Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics,

chapter

6.

In

math,

recursion

names

a

way

of

defining

functions

where

the

function

being

defined

is

applied

within

its

own

definition. More

generally,

it

describes

objects

that

repeat

in

self-similar

ways

(e.g.,

the

girl

on

the

Morton's

salt box who

is

holding

a

box of Morton's

salt)

or as a

special

case

of

synecdoche,

where

the

part

contains the whole

in

addition

to

rep

resenting

it.

In

all

descriptions

of

recursion,

what

is

crucial

is

the

infinitely

generative

effect

of this structural

design.







ROMANCING

SPINOZA

385

more

perceive

them

as

part

of

the

system

of

nature

than

we

perceive

our

selves

as

such." What

we

register

through

our

senses are

"resonance and

dissonance

between

bodies."

Depending

on

whether these

impacts

increase

or lessen our

body's

power

of

acting,

we will feel them as

pleasure

or

pain

(Lloyd,

Part

of

Nature

17,

8).

And

we

will

"know" them

as

either

more or

less

adequate

ideas.

Spinoza,

who

is

very

stingy

with

his

metaphors,

offers

one

that

helps

a

little.

In

letter

32

to

Henry

Oldenburg, Spinoza

compares

our

position

within the whole

of

nature to

that of

a worm

in

the

bloodstream.

Our

ideas of ourselves and of the

objects

around

us are no

more

than the

recip

rocal

pressures

exerted

by

us on

our

surround and

it

on us.

All

our

ideas?

and the mind itself as the body's idea?are unsurpassably perspectival.

While

Spinoza

does indeed make

room?a

spacious

and

distinguished

room?for

reason

(and

a

higher

stage yet,

intuition),

he

states

that the

greatest

wisdom that

this

knowledge

of

causes can

yield

us

is

awareness

of

the fact

of

our

necessary

embeddedness. This

is

precisely

what

we

know

when

we

see

"under the

aspect

of

eternity."

By

definition,

all ideas

must

entail

a

physical

manifestation.

If,

as

Spinoza

avers,

"the

order and

connection

of

ideas

is

the

same as

the order and

con

nection of

things" (IIP7),

then

nature

truly

never

will

betray

the

heart that

loves

her,

because

every

idea,

love

being

one,

is

an

extended

thing

under

a

different notation.

Moreover,

in

formulating

this

thought

as

"

knowing

that

nature

never

did

betray" (my

emphasis),

the

narration

of the

poem

that

I

echo

("Tintern

Abbey,"

of

course)

doubles the

truth-claim. The

cause

of

the

idea(s)?in

this

case,

both love

and

knowledge?may

not

be

grasped,

and the idea

itself

may

be

confused

and

partial,

but the

object

or

"ideatum"

of

that

idea,

that

is,

the

"affection" of the

body,

still

exists,

and will

not

go

away,

even as

the

idea becomes

more

adequate. [Appendix

E]

In

other

words,

Spinoza

introduces

a

continuum

between

adequate

and

inadequate

ideas,

between

reason

and

imagination,

and between

truth

and

falsehood.

Neither rational

knowledge

of

the

sun

(for

example,

its

composition,

size,

processes,

etc.)

nor

the

understanding

of

what

causes

its

appearance

as a

small

orange

ball

about

200

feet above

our

heads drives

out

the

reality

of

its

appearance

(IVPiS).

Adequacy

describes the

power

of

the

body,

the

idea

of which

is

the

mind,

and

that

power

has

to

do

with

the

number

and

complexity

of

relations that

constitute the

body.

That

com

plexity is reflected in themind's knowledge of the causes of its imaginings,

causes

which remain

on

the

same

plane

(Deleuze,

Practical

Philosophy, Spin

oza's

"plan(e)

of

immanence"

[122])

as

their

effects.One

might

call

this

an

operational

rather

than

a

representational

or a

coherence

paradigm

of

knowledge.

Adequacy

(and

reason

too)

is

not

a

matter

of

penetrating

to

the

underlying

reality;

there

is

no

deep

truth

in

Spinoza.

The

truth

is

the







386

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

whole

and

it

has

no

depth, being

substance all

the

way up

(or,

surface

all

the

way

down).

I

do

not

include

a

summary

of

Spinoza's

levels of

knowledge

(see

above

discussion of common notions) but to say that he explains the human

capacity

for

reason as

a

function of the

complexity

(that

is

his

word)

of the

human

body,

which he

ascribes

to

its

ability

to

retain

traces

of affections?

of

the

impacts

of other bodies

on our

own?after

the

event

has

passed.

Because less

complex

bodies

cannot

do

this,

they

cannot

sustain

transition

from

an

idea

of

bodily

modification

to

the

understanding

of it.

We

might

still

ask

what,

if

not

the

will,

spurs

themind

to

the

greater

levels

of

activity

that

we

experience

as

reflection and reason?

Spinoza,

ref

erencing conatus, would frame reflection as an effect of enlargement and

complexity

of

affectivity;

in

other words

(Wordsworth's

and

Shelley's

words),

the

greater

the

body's

susceptibility

to

"the

goings-on

of the

uni

verse,"

the

greater

its

capacity

to

remember

former

impressions

and

to

use

them "to

imagine things

that

increase the

body's

power

of

acting"

(that

is

the

more

"habitually

impelled

[that

body

is]

to create

volitions and

passions

.

.

.

where

[it]

does

not

find

them"),

the

greater

a

man's

capacity

to

"imag

ine

intensely

and

comprehensively

. . .

put[ting]

himself

in the

place

of

an

other and

of

many

others

[until]

the

pains

and

pleasures

of his

species

. . .

become

his

own,"

the

greater

that

individual's rational

power.28

Such

power

is

experienced

as

joy

or

pleasure?the

awareness

of

becoming

joined

to

another

body

harmonious with one's

own,

or

of

"passfing]

from

a

lesser

to

a

greater

perfection"

(IIIDII)29?and Spinoza

does

not

restrict

pleasure

to

human

and animal

life.

Neither does

Wordsworth:

"The

budding

twigs

spread

out

their

fan,

/

To

catch

the

breezy

air;

/

And

I

must

think,

do all

I

can,

/

That

there

was

pleasure

there"

("Lines

Written

in

Early Spring").

As

the mind "must"

think,

so

must

the

twigs

bud;

the

two

phenomena

are

not

just

parts

of nature

but,

under certain

conditions,

one and the same event

or

"individual,"

conceived

under

the

two

attributes,

respectively,

thought

and

extension.

Indeed,

one can

easily imagine Spinoza

as

the author of

this

famous

statement,

fromWordsworth's

Preface

to

Lyrical

Ballads

(1802):

Nor

let this

necessity

of

producing

immediate

pleasure

be considered

as

a

degradation

of

the

poet's

art.

...

It

is

an

acknowledgement

of the

beauty

of

the

universe

. . .

[and]

a

task

light

and

easy

to

him who

looks

28.

William

Wordsworth,

The

Major

Works,

ed.

Stephen

Gill

(Oxford:

Oxford

UP, 1984,

2000)

603;

Percy

Bysshe Shelley,

Donald

H.

Reiman,

and Sharon

B.

Powers,

Shelley's

Poetry

and

Prose: Authoritative

Texts,

Criticism

(New

York:

Norton,

1977)

487,

88;

cf.

"to

imagine

things

that

increase

the

body's

power

of

acting,"

Lloyd,


Guidebook

28.

29.

"all

the

ideas

we

have of

bodies

indicate

the actual constitution

of

our own

body

(by

IIP16C2)

more

than the

nature

of the external

body"

(Def

Aff).







ROMANCING SPINOZA87

at

theworld

in

the

spirit

of

love:

further,

it is

a

homage

paid

to

. .

.

the

grand

elementary

principle

of

pleasure, by

which

[man]

knows,

and

feels,

and

lives,

and

moves.

We

have

no

sympathy

but what is

propa

gated by pleasure . . . [and] [w]e have no knowledge . . .but what has

been built

up

by

pleasure,

and

exists

in

us

by

pleasure

alone.

(Major

Works

605)

Good and

evil,

argues

Spinoza,

are

but

names

for

whatever

enlarges

or

diminishes

us,

and

as

such

they

are

synonyms

for

pleasure

and

pain:

"One

impulse

from

a

vernal

wood

/

May

teach

you

more

of

man,

/

Of moral

evil and of

good,

/ Than

all

the

sages

can." Evil is

no more

than

a

word for

the body's insensibility

to

themotion of other bodies; Spinoza's preferred

terms

for

this

state

are

passivity

and sadness

(in

Coleridge's

idiom,

dejec

tion).

The best

gloss

on

this

is

found

in

Blake's

Marriage

of

eaven

and

Hell,

especially

"The Voice of

theDevil"

and

"A

Memorable

Fancy"

[Isaiah

and

Ezekiel].

"Virtue,"

Spinoza

writes,

"is

human

power

itself,"30

and

"acting

from

virtue is

nothing

else

in

us

but

acting,

living,

and

preserving

one's

be

ing

. .

.

and

.

. .

seeking

one's

own

advantage"

(IVP24D) (which,

given

Spinoza's

enlarged

and interactive

concept

of

the

individual,

may

well

entailwhat

appears

to

be

self-abnegation).

Blake

again

comes

to

mind:

"the

cut worm

forgives

the

plow."31

Seeking

one's

advantage

is

for

Spinoza

the

analytic expression

of the

experience

of

love:

i.e.,

imagining

and

conserv

ing objects

and relations that

enable

passage

from lesser

to

greater

perfec

tion

(cf.

Wordsworth's

"Lines

Written

at

a

Small

Distance

from

My

House":

"Love,

now

an

universal

birth,

/ From

heart

to

heart

is

stealing,

/

From

earth

to

man,

from

man

to

earth:

/ It is

the hour of

feeling").

As

for

freedom

(too

large

a

topic

for

me

to

pursue

here),

that

occurs

when

we

grasp

our

immersion

in

the

whole

of

nature,

for

when

we

do,

we

see

that

nature cannot be said to act on the

body.

Rather, the

bodymind

partici

pates

actively?literally,

mindfully?in

the

global

play

of motions

and af

fections,

giving

as

well

as

getting.

Seeing

into the

life of

things

and

seeing

ourselves

there?that

is,

adequately

knowing

our

position

in

the

whole?is

freedom.

One last

topic,

death:

what

is

the

difference

between

the

inclusion

of

a

mind

during

life

in

the

totality

of

thought

and

its

inclusion

after death

in

the

same

totality?

(Lloyd,

Part

of

Nature

129).

In

language strikingly

like

Wordsworth's in the Essays Upon Epitaphs, Spinoza outlines the paradox

30.

Quoted

in

Israel

237;

see

also

Montag,

Bodies,

Masses,

Power

31.

31.

William

Blake,

David

V.

Erdman,

and

Harold

Bloom,

The

Poetry

and

Prose

of

William

Blake

(Garden

City,

N.Y.:

Doubleday,

1970)

35.

See

also:

"A

dead

body

revenges

not

inju

ries";

"The

roaring

of

lions,

the

howling

of

wolves,

the

raging

of the

stormy

sea,

and the de

structive

sword,

are

portions

of

eternity

too

great

for

the

eye

of

man"

(35, 36).







388

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

that

while

we

know

that

our

mind

endures

only

insofar

as

it

involves

the

actual

existence

of

body,

we

also

feel

that

we

are

eternal.

(And

remember

both

the

epistemic

force

of

feeling

for

Spinoza,

and

the

ontological

force

of

knowing: to say, "and I have felt" [e.g., "a pleasure thatdisturbsme with

the

joy

of

elevated

thoughts"]

is

to

say

"and

I

know,"

which

is

to

say,

"and

there is"

[my

emphases].)

Spinoza

stresses

that

we

do

not

ascribe

"dura

tion"

to

the

mind

except

while

the

body

endures;

nevertheless,

since

what

is

conceived is

still

something,

still

God

or

nature

(VP23S)

this

something

will

be

eternal

(though

without

temporal

duration).

Several

commentators

address

this

puzzle

of

a

persistence

lacking

duration,

most

seeing

it

as

a re

jection

of

personal

or

individual

immortality

(see

Nadler,

Spinoza's

Heresy,

chaps. 5

and

6). Spinoza

is

also clear that "the body can die, that is,become

something

other

than

itself

[due

to

a

great

change

in

the

internal

and

exter

nal

relations

that

define

it]

without

ceasing

to

live."

Identity

"can

cease

to

exist in

the

midst

of

life"?the

example

is

of

a

person

who

becomes

de

ranged?making

death

"no

more

than

a

threshold

of

transformation.

"32

3

Where

does

this

get

us,

"us"

meaning

students of

Wordsworth? To

open

my reading I quote from an email exchange with Marshall Brown, who

was

helping

me

work

through

some

of

the issues

at

play

in

this

essay.

Com

menting

on

my

own

early

reading

of

Wordsworth,

I

wrote

as

follows:

"In

revealing

romantic

naturalism

as

the

thinking

of

history,

and

romantic

au

tonomy

as

the

figure

of

cultural

possession,

we

read

nature

as

culture

and

relegated

the

leftovers?those

rocks

and

stones

and

trees

that

didn't

figure

in

anyone's

interests

or

histories?to the

category

of

the

unthinkable,

a

kind

of

metaphysical

junk."

Marshall

wrote

back

saying

that

I

had mis

quoted

the

Lucy

lines

by

leaving

out

the

commas,

which

to

him

argue

that

"Wordsworth

is

hesitating,

even

stuttering.

Rocks

and

stones

are

matter,

and he

wants to

get

to

bodies,

such

as

trees,

but it's

too

hard for

him

to

make

the

leap.

The

plurals

seem

somehow

crucial

too.

Lucy

is

unique;

things

that

can

be

pluralized

can't

be

unique

and

so

the

pull

is

back from

the

tree

as

organism

to

trees

as

matter,

from

Lucy

as

organism

to

Lucy

as

matter.

"33

Marshall's

comment

made

me

see

my

casual

borrowing

of

that

phrase

from

"A

Slumber Did

My

Spirit

Seal"?an

offhand

synecdoche

for

the

physical

world?as the

germ

of a

re-reading.

Wordsworth makes a

category

error

in

lumping organic

bodies

(trees)

with

inanimate

ones

(rocks

and

32.

Montag,

Bodies, Masses,

Power

46;

see

also

33, 34.

See also

Wordsworth's

"We

Are

Seven";

for

"duration"

see

Israel

240;

for the

eternity

of

mind

versus

the

immortality

of the

soul,

see

Nadler,

Spinoza's

Heresy.

3 3.

The

commas

came

later.

Marshall and

I

were

thinking

of

two

different

texts

of

the

poem.







ROMANCING

SPINOZA

389

stones),

and

he

compounds

the

error

with the

implied

addition of

a

human

body

that has

passed

from

an

animate

to

inanimate

state,

from

person

to

thing.

What

if

we

seize

this

way

of

writing

not

as an error

but

as signposting Spinoza, who, as we now know, distinguishes things from

each

other,

from their

background,

and from

what

we

think of

as more

than-things

(e.g.,

humans,

animals,

and

less

complex

organisms)

only

on

the basis

of

proportions

ofmotion-and-rest

(IIP13S;

IIP13A1).

Those

trou

blesome

missing-links

between

mineral,

vegetable,

and animal

nature

are

no

more

problematic

for

Spinoza

than

the

body-mind

link,

which

drove

Descartes

to

the

desperate

remedy

of

theorizing

the

pineal

gland

as

the

magical

crossover.

For

Spinoza,

the

transition

is

mechanical

(though

as

we

would

say today, nonlinear)

and

it

pertains

not to

the internal

physics

of the

body

(the

body

as

standardly

conceived,

that

is)

but

to

the

body's

relations

within the whole network

of which

it is

a

part:

i.e.,

its

active

"composability,"

arising

from

repeated "joyful

encounters"

with other

res

onant

bodies.

To

follow this

signpost

is

to

group

"A

Slumber" with "Animal

Tranquil

lity

and

Decay,"

"We

Are

Seven,"

"The

Last

of the

Flock,"

and

other

poems,

as

pondering

the

switch-point

between

two states

of

the

individual

(refusing

the

deep

and

essential

category

distinction between human

and

thing

and/or

animal,

life and

death)

and between individuals and each

other and

their

physical

surround.34

At

the

same

time,

these

poems

do

without

any

recourse

to

a

soul

in

the

sense

of

some

immaterial

principle

of

continuity transcending

the life-death

divide.

They

show, instead,

how,

"in

both

the

natural and the moral

world,

qualities

pass

insensibly

into

their

contraries,

and

things

revolve

upon

each other."35

A

slumber

did

my

spirit

seal,

I had no human fears:

She

seemed

a

thing

that could

not

feel

The touch

of

earthly

years.

No

motion

has she

now,

no

force

She neither hears

nor

sees

Rolled

round

in

earth's

diurnal

course

With

rocks and

stones

and

trees

(Lyrical

Ballads

1800)36

34-

Geoffrey

H.

Hartman,

Wordsworth's

Poetry,

1787-1814

(Cambridge,

MA,

London:

Har

vard

UP,

1987)

158:

Lucy

"seems

to

jump

over

the

crisis

of

self-consciousness

by

dying

into

nature."

35.

"Essay

upon

Epitaphs

1" in

William Wordsworth and W.

J.

B.

Owen,

Wordsworth's

Literary

Criticism

(London,

Boston:

Routledge

&

Kegan

Paul,

1974)

124.

36.

For

variant

punctuation,

see

Poems, 1815,

"Poems

of

Imagination"

section.







390

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

"A

Slumber"

is

typically

read

as a

before-and-after

narration

with

the

central

event,

either the death

(by

convention,

"Lucy's"

death),

or,

the

narrator's

recognition

of

the

meaning

of

that

death,

occurring

in

the

gap

between the two stanzas. Let me frame the

story

as the

latter,

that

is,

as the

utterance

of

a

narrator

who knows

at

the

outset

that

Lucy

has died.

But

in

stead

of

reading

the

tense-shift between

stanzas

as a

marker of

thought

(and

regret)

a-borning

let

us see

it

as

marking

a

conceptual

shiftbetween

two

different

systems

of

thought offering

two

different

consolations of

philoso

phy,

one

of

them

empiricist,

the other

Spinozist.

The

giveaway

as

to

which

is

superior

is

the narrator's

description

of his

spirit

as

having

been "sealed"

when

it

offered itself the

empiricist

story.

In

other

words,

the

poem's

final

position is that of radical, not moderate, Enlightenment: Spinoza, not

Newton

and Locke.

In

the

first

stanza,

the

narrator

declares himself

lacking

fears,

pleasantly

anaesthetized

because

he

knows

that

Lucy

is

no

longer

subject

to

the

as

saults

of

time.

She has

undergone

an

ontological

or

substantive

change,

from

person

to

thing,

and her

insensible

state

enables his

own

release

from

feeling.

On

the face

of

it,

the

narration of

stanza two

seems to

render the

dead

girl

even

more

categorically

other,

as

if

deepening

the

statement

of

stanza

one.

"No

motion

has she

now,

no

force," and,

"she neither hears

nor

sees."

However,

instead

of

treating

"no

motion,

no

force"

as

redun

dancy

in

the

service of emotional

emphasis,

we

might

construe

"force"

as

qualifying

"motion" rather

than

reiterating

it:

as

in,

she

has

no

motion

in

the

sense

of

force.

Given

the

contemporary

resonance

of those

words,

that

distinction

could

signify

"she

has

no

motion

in

Newton's

sense,"

motion

that

is external

to

matter

and

measurable

as

the

effect

of

one

body

on an

other

as

the

two

collide

in

empty

space.

Thus

the

narrator,

rather

than de

claring

Lucy

motionless,

could

be

using

a

contrastive

syntax

in

order

to

define the kind ofmotion that

pertains

to

Lucy,

a kind that is inherent and

"conative" rather

than,

like

Newton's,

external.

Why

then does

the

narra

tor

say

"no motion

has

she now"?

Perhaps

he

does

so

in

order

to

distin

guish

a

body

that

has

motion from

one

that

ismotion?more

specifically,

a

unique

ratio

of

motion

to

rest

that

is

what

it is

to

be

Lucy?Lucy

dead,

however,

not

the

living

Lucy.

He

says

it

to

distinguish

a

Newtonian from

a

Spinozan

body.

To

read

in

this

way

also

resolves that

irritating

contradic

tion

between

the

"no

motion

no

force"

claim

and the

description

of

Lucy

as "rolled round."

This

way

of

framing

the

dead

girl

puts

paid

to

the consolation

voiced

in

stanza

one,

for

on a

Spinozistic

reading,

Lucy

has

not

only

not

been

re

leased

from

some

sort

of

individual

being,

she

is

also

still

in time.

In

fact,

with

her

own

"motion"

literally

entering

into

the

earth's

rotation,

she

has

*

become

corporeally

part

of

the

system

of

motion that

makes

the touch

of







ROMANCING SPINOZA

391

years?"makes"

human

time. To

be

sure,

she

no

longer

hears

nor sees.

On

a

Lockean

reading,

she

is

deprived

of the

materials

on

which

thought

oper

ates

and

is

thus

devoid of

mind,

motion,

and

feeling?in

effect,

a

thing.

On

aCartesian

reading,

she has lost themeans of

differentiating

herself asmind

from

an

external

world;

she has

lost the conditions

of

the

cogito.

On

a

Spinozistic

reading,

however,

all that

is

averred

is

a

transition

from

one

sys

tem

of

modifications

to

another that

is

part

of the

same

continuum.

This

is

not

an

end

to

modification,

an

arrest

translating

into

the

annihilation of

in

dividuality?as

in,

Lucy

the

unique

individual

becoming

Lucy

a

count

noun,

or even a

mass

noun.

In

motion,

rolled

round,

embedded

in

nature,

she

continues

to

"feel,"

not

as

consciousness

of sensation

but

as

undergoing

modification, being affected. "Our bodies feel, where'er they be, /Against

or

with

our

will"

("Expostulation

and

Reply,"

my

emphasis).

What

manner

of

consolation

is

yielded

by

this

austere,

elemental

view

of

death?

I

would

answer:

exactly

what

seems

most

painful,

namely,

that

Lucy

remains in

motion,

in

nature,

embodied,

and

individuated

(albeit

a

differ

ent

"individual").

And

indeed,

now

for the

first

time,

the

narrator

sees

her

and therefore

himself

as a

part

of

the

whole,

part

of

the

larger,

more

active

and

complex body

inwhich

Lucy

participates.

In

place

of

a

wishful

or con

secrating belief in immortality,Wordsworth makes

a

physical claim resting

on

motion's

inherence

in

matter.

Rocks and

stones,

like

trees

and

persons

are

what

they

are

through

the

conatus

that

sustains

their

relational

physics.

When

Lucy

no

longer

persists

in

her

"endeavor"

to

be

a

"she"

(the

dualist

language

is

unavoidable),

she

perishes

as

that

individual but

assumes

an

other

conatus:

part

of the

planet's

rolling

course,

entering

into

new

rela

tions,

and thus

becoming

another ratio of motion

to

rest.

Reconsider

Margaret

from "The

Ruined

Cottage"

in

this

light.

Her

death,

we

recall,

is

rendered

by

the

narrator as a

translation

from

one

mode

of

persistence (human)

to

another

(natural).

This

translation,

or

transition,

is

no

different

from

that

which

occurs

during

Margaret's

life

as

her universe

of interactions

dwindles.

Armytage

explicitly

and

with

a

strange

literalness

ties

Margaret's

identity

to

her

physical activity?her

rhythms,

her ratio

of

speed

and

slowness.

He

ties

it

to

the

objects

that

she

loves and

actively

at

tends

or

affects

(e.g.,

her

infant,

cottage,

garden,

books),

objects

that form

part

of the

system

that somehow

just

is

Margaret.

The

other

elements

in

that

"Margaret system"

are

of

course

her

husband,

whose

disordered

rhythmsprecipitateMargaret's change, and Armytage himself,whose own

irregular

comings

and

goings, speed

and

slowness,

are

prominent

in

the

text

(and

offered

to

the

narrator

and

thus

to

the

reader

as

well

as a

metro

nome

or

tuning

fork for

triggering

and

regulating

our

sympathetic

vibra

tion).

As

the

system

changes

its

identity

so

does

Margaret,

and

the

change

is

"essential"

because

it

is

relational.







392

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

I

think the

philosophical

ambition of

"A

Slumber"

might

even

be

a

bit

greater

than

I

have

suggested.

Look

at

the

two

wordplays

in

the

poem,

course

and

diurnal.

Wordsworth

uses

the archaic form

"corse"

for

"corpse"

in the

Essays

Upon

Epitaphs

and

elsewhere,

and critics have

long

noted the

presence

of

an

"urn"

in

the

word

"diurnal."

Both

meanings

work

to

drive

home

the

image

of

a

body

very

graphically,

materially

in

the

earth and of

it,

earth

to

Earth,

corpse

to

planetary

course.

However

infinitesimaUy, Lucy's

incorporation

into

the earth adds

to

the earth's

mass,

affecting

the ratio of

motion

to rest

in

all

other

earthly

and

celestial

bodies?affecting

the

earth's

course.

(I

like

this because

it

allows

for

a

Spinozism

that

accepts

the

me

chanical

physics

of

gravity

without

positing,

as

Newton

did,

an

unmoved

mover.)

Read

in

this

fashion,

the

poem

respects

the

commonsense

experience

of

life

and death

as

essentially

distinct

and

at

the

same

time

demonstrates that

the

distinction

is

not

absolute. We think

they

are

qualitatively

different

states

because

our

ideas

are

most

of the time

and for

most

of

us

confused

and

partial,

and

because

it

quiets

the

unbearable

thought

that there

might

be such

a

thing

as

feeling beyond

the

grave

(cf,

the deleted

stanza

of

the

Immortality

Ode).

At the

same

time,

reading

this

poem

through

Spinoza

enables a kind of consolation of physics, or ofmetaphysics, understood as

the

conditions

of

the

possibility

of

objects,

which

is

the

same

thing

as

the

conditions of

possibility

of

being

a

subject.

All this

without

a

triumph

of

the

will.37

By poem's

end,

the

before-and-after

structure

undergoes

a

transforma

tion,

in

effect,

healing

the breach between

feeling

and

knowing.

The

most

concrete

expression

of

this

reunion is the

syntax

of

the

two

long

sentences

that

comprise

the

poem,

sentences

that

lack

both

internal

subordination

and

causal

continuity.

It

is

as

if

ordsworth

is

re-fashioning

both the

nar

rative and contrastive

formats of the

poem

into

the

geometrical

style,

the

style

of timeless demonstration rather than

developmental becoming.

"A

slumber did

my

spirit

seal,

/

I

had

no

human fears."

In

the

light

of

Spinoza's double-aspect

monism,

the

two statements

read

not

as

figurative

followed

by

literal

statement

but

as

identical

although non-interchangeable

notations,

the first under the attribute of

extension,

the second

under the

attribute of

thought.

Between such

notations,

there

can

be

no

causality,

only

perfect

equivalence.

In

the

echo

of

the last

line,

the

narrator's claim

to

lack "human fears"

37-

See

my essay

on

"Old Man

Traveling"

in

Marjorie

Levinson,

"Romantic

Poetry:

The

State

of the

Art,"

Modern

Language

Quarterly

54.2

(1993);

also

see

Arnold's

comment

on

Wordsworth's

style,

that

it is

"as inevitable

as

Nature

herself"

(Matthew

Arnold,

ed. Freder

ick

Wilse

Bateson,

Essays

on

English

Literature

[London:

U

of London

P,

1965]

104).








reads neither

as a

statement

of obtunded

feeling

nor as a

rational

response

to

the

knowledge

that the

beloved has been released from

the assaults of

time. It

emerges

rather

as a

statement

of

joy?a

passing

beyond

all sad

passions?and

as one that

transfigures

the

very

notion of what it is to be

human.

It

is

as

if the

narrator

himself,

in

understanding

the

largest

necessity

of

Lucy's

change,

shares

in

her

"species

of

eternity."

The

second

time

round,

Lucy's

becoming

a

"thing"

does

not

separate

her from the

commu

nity

of the

living;

persons,

count-nouns,

and

mass nouns

are

all,

on

Spinoza's

account,

individuals,

all

modes of

the attributes of

thought

and

extension

and

all,

by

definition,

forms of substance.

In

the

language

of

"We

Are

Seven":

"But

they

are

dead;

those

two

are

dead

Their

spirits

are

in

heaven "

'Twas

throwing

words

away;

for

still

The littleMaid would have her

will,

And

said,

"Nay,

we are

seven "

4

I

hope

I

have

shed

some

light?a

new

kind of

light?on

Wordsworth's

deep

poem.

[Appendix

E]

I

also

hope

this

reading

gives

some

purchase

on

the curious

fondness that intention-theorists

have

for

the

poem.

The

num

ber of studies that

use

"A

Slumber"

to

argue

for

or

against

authorial and/or

linguistic

intention

is

staggering:

we

have

M. H.

Abrams,

Cleanth

Brooks,

Norman

Holland,

Paul

de

Man,

J.

Hillis

Miller,

Geoffrey

Hartman,

E. D.

Hirsch,

P. D.

Juhl, Peggy

Kamuf,

Brian

Caraher,

and

most

notori

ously,

Steven

Knapp

andWalter

Benn

Michaels.

Way

back,

F.

R. Leavis

put

his

finger

on

the

stylistic

salient

of

this

poem

(I

would

say,

of all

the

Lucy

poems)

and I

quote

his words now because

they

not

only

get

at

"A

Slumber"'s interest

to

intention-theorists,

but

they

chime

uncannily

with the

intertexts

I

have

referenced. Here is

Leavis: "...

the

experience

has been

so

impersonaliz'ed

that the

effect

...

is

one

of

bare and

disinter

ested

presentment.

. . .

But

the

statement

is

concrete,

and

once

the

reading

has been

completed

the

whole

poem

is

seen

to

be

a

complex

organization,

charged

with

a

subtle

life."38

Turn

that

statement

into

a

question.

How

are

complex organizations

charged with a subtle life? Ask that, and you have stated the research

agenda

of that

postclassical

science

ensemble

that stands

behind

this

reading

of

Spinoza

and that

I

discuss

in

Appendix

D.

How

do

agentless

processes

38.

F.

R.

Leavis,

"Thought

and

Emotional

Quality:

Notes in

the

Analysis

of

Poetry,"

Scrutiny

13

(1945):

54;

my

emphasis.







394

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

or

those

lacking

all centralized

control

(e.g.,

computers,

traffic

patterns,

ter

mite

mounds,

subsymbolic neurological

connections,

sensorimotor

pat

terns,

poems) give

rise

to

effects that behave

as

agents

for all intents

and

purposes?effects

that

just

are intents and

purposes,

being indistinguishable

from them? One

common

response

to

that

question

would be that all

the

above

processes

are

best conceived

as

complex

systems,

made

up

of

a

large

number

of

densely

connected

parts

that interact

in

non-simple

ways

so as

to

"specify"

their

environments. Interactions

within levels

are

mechanical,

or

simple;

what

are

not

simple

are

the

transitions

between levels and the

continuous

re-formation

of

levels

following

from

routines,

habits,

and

practices.

These

transitions

are

non-linear,

which

means

that

very

small

changes at one level yield very large outcomes at another. And that means

that

one

cannot

scale

up

to

predict

an

outcome,

or

down

to

explain

one,

no more

than

one can

infer from the

parts

the

properties

of the whole. The

whole

will

always

be

greater

than and different from

the

sum

of

the

parts

when the

operative

model involves

simple layers

that

are

superimposed,

self-interactive,

and

responding

to

actual

practice

(reading,

for

example) by

forming

emergent

regularities

without fixed

or

final constraints.

Moreover,

those "wholes"

cannot

be understood?do

not

exist?independently

of

the domain of distinctions which their functioning specifies. "Just as there

is

no

entity

without

an

environment,

so

there

is

no

environment

without

an

entity."

The

two

domains

"enact"

one

another.

What

does this

mean

for

us?

It

gives

us

tools,

even a new

framework,

for

thinking

about

poems,

especially

lyric

poems,

which

on some

level have al

ways

been read

in structuralist-formalist fashion

as

minds

performing

what

it is

to

be

a

mind

in

relation

to

a

world

(or,

as

language performing

what it

is

to

be

language

in relation

to

a

world).39

Models

of

self-organization,

emergent

properties

and

so

forth

help

us

advance

what

phenomenology

began,

in

studying

the

way

that minds

bring

forth?enact,

specify?

particular

environments and

objects strictly

on

the basis of their

own

clo

sure,

a

closure that

may very

well

change

in

response

to

the world with

which

they couple.

Structural

coupling

has been described

as a

process

through

which

a

system

"selects

or

enacts

from

a

world of

randomness

a

domain of distinctions

that has

relevance for the

structure

of

the

system

. . .

[W]e

can

say

that

a

minimal kind of

interpretation

is

involved,

where

inter

pretation

is

understood

widely

to

mean

the

enactment

of

a

domain

of dis

tinctions out of a

background"

(Maturana

and Varela

151, 55,

56).

Serious

readers

have

always recognized

poems

as

complex,

autonomous,

self

39-

I

develop

this line of

thought

in

"Ideas and

Methods,"

Cornell

lecture,

2007,

a

talk

I

am

preparing

for

publication.







ROMANCING SPINOZA

395

revising,

and

co-evolving

systems

but

our

grammar

and

vocabulary

for

ex

plaining

this

intuition

are

hugely

enriched

by

today's understanding

of

mind-body

relations

(not

the

least

of

the

gains being

our

ability

now

to

in

clude

history

and

culture

in

those

relations).

And that

understanding

is

itself

enlarged

and

improved by

contact

with

its

precursor,

Spinoza's

philosophy.

University

of

Michigan







396

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

APPENDICES

Appendix

A:

Let

me

comment

briefly

on

this

elusiveness

and

on a

related

topic,

namely,

the new historicism's

reading

of nature as a

displacement

of

history.

The

aim

of

early

new

historicism

was

to

explain

how certain

highly

abstract

and/or

general

and ideal

terms

signified

within

the

economy

of

the

poem.

The

poem

was

conceived

as

itself

a

dynamic

element

("dynamic"

meaning

capable

of critical

distantiation and

disruption)

within the

more

encompassing

and

determinative economies

of

its

time

and

place,

econo

mies

to

which the

work

as a

whole

alluded,

its

structure

homologous

with

those

embedding

systems.

By

studying

the

differential relations

between

the elements of the poetic text, one could gauge the extent towhich the

poem

projected

its

own

"parole,"

as

it

were,

both within

and

over

against

the

governing "langue."

(What

should

go

without

saying

at

this late date is

that

only

a

genuine

work of

art

[as

opposed

to

what

we

may

term,

follow

ing

Theodor

Adorno's

usage,

"tendency"

writing],

can

produce

these

self

contradictory

effects,

effects that

come

under the rubric of

irony

within

a

Romantic

idiom,

and,

within

a new

historicist

idiom,

under the

rubric of

critical

distantiation.)

New

historicism

departed

from the

structuralistmodel

I

just sketched,

however,

insofar

as

it

focused

on

textuality,

or

rather,

grammatology,

rather

than

argument.

Informed

by

the

logic

of the

Derridean

supplement,

new

historicist

reading

conceived the formal

units

of the

text

as

both additions

to

and

displacements

or

negations

of their

referential

object.

As

my

terms

indicate,

the

thinking driving

this

approach

was

neo-Marxist

(or,

Marxist

Hegelian)

and

psychoanalytic,

or

citing

a more

immediate

set

of

resources,

Romantic

new

historicism found

its

problematic

and its

methods

in

the

work of Paul

Ricoeur,

Paul de

Man,

Theodor

Adorno,

the

Georg

Lukacs

of

History

and Class

Consciousness,

Louis

Althusser,

Pierre

Macherey,

and

Fredric

Jameson.

Drawing

on

these

critics and

theorists,

new

historicism

adopted

a

view

of

meaning

as

brought

about

by

processes

of internal

nega

tion

(following

Adorno,

the dialectical

relationship

between affirmative

culture

and

variously

non-identitarian

or

negatively

dialectical

processes

and

effects)

structured

by larger

systems

in

which the individual work

ac

tively

participates.

Guided

by

the

grammar

of the

poetry

(literal

syntax

as

well

as

formal,

dramatic,

and

rhetorical

grammars),

and

by

the

poetry's

pat

terns of representational difference (e.g., particularized vs general, concrete

vs

abstract,

individualized

vs

collective),

scholars

were

able

to

elucidate

Romantic

nature

as a

dialectical

formation,

an

identity

of

identity

and

dif

ference.

Nature

marked

the site

of

a

protest

against

history,

but

a

protest

conducted

in

a

fashion

overdetermined

by

its

historical other.

Romanti

cism

could

not

itself

"think"

an

effective

critique

of

history;

it

could

no







ROMANCING

SPINOZA

397

more

bring

its

own

conditions of

being

under

a

concept

than

the

eye

can

see

itself

seeing

(or,

than the

ego,

to

the

extent

that

it is

constituted

by

its

repressions,

can

perceive

their

operations).

However,

the

poetry

could

and

did

embody

or enact its valorization of an alternative to

history?its

com

mitment

to

what

Jerome

McGann

called the

"non-normative"

(again,

striking

an

Adornian

note:

viz,

Adorno's

distinction

between

art

and

affirmative

culture).

Over

the

last

ten

years,

with the

explosion

(and

con

vergence)

of

research

in

the

physical

and

biological

sciences?that

is,

with

the

advent

(or,

the

filtering

into

general

awareness)

of the

so-called

"postclassical"

sciences,

and

in

the

academy,

with

the

emergence

of such

humanities

research

sectors

as

biocultural,

ecological, cognitive,

and

envi

ronmental studies?we are for the first time able tomodel, rather than sim

ply

identify,

that

non-normative:

to

give

it

(again,

echoing

McGann's

own

borrowing)

a

local

habitation

and

a name.

Appendix

B:

I comment

on a

work

thatmatches

this

description,

Simon

Jarvis'

Wordsworth's

Philosophic

Song. Jarvis'

exclusive

reliance

on

The

Ger

man

Ideology

for his

reading

of

Marx and

his isolation

of

that

essay's

imme

diate

polemic

from

its

working

out

of the

theory

and

the

narrative

of the

historical

dialectic

signal

his commitment

to

the

genre

of

journalistic spar

ring. By

"immediate

polemic,"

I

refer

to

Marx's

attack

on

the

young

He

gelians

for their

non-dialectical

thinking:

i.e.,

their

failure

to

grasp

the

nec

essary

and immanent

relationship

between

theory

(specifically, religious

doctrine

and

belief)

and

practice

(means

and

relations

of

production).

Unwittingly, they

thereby

give

aid

and

comfort

to

their

enemy,

religious

ideologues

who

separate

thought

from

life.

Marx's

larger,

procedural

con

cern

in

the

essay

is

to

distinguish

"criticism"?normative,

extrinsic,

and

positing

an

indifferent and/or

inert

relationship

between itself and its

ob

jects

of

criticism?from

critique,

or

an

active and

immanent

unfolding

of

the

dialectical

structure

of

one's

object

from

within.

Jarvis

attacks the

new

historicism

by

equating

it

with

the

young

Hegelians'

debunking

of

reli

gious

thought

and with their

assumption

of

a

position

of

absolute

enlight

enment

(mere

criticism

rather

than

critique).

In

light

of

new

historicism's

endlessly

reiterated

distinction

between

an

older

ideology critique

and

an

attempt

to

read

"the

content

of the

form,"

and,

given

its

methodological

framing

of

its

project

as

following

a

Marxist

Hegelian

and

Althusserian

di

rection (modeled by such critics as Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, John

Barrell,

T.

J.

Clark,

and

John Goode),

Jarvis'

attempt

to

impugn

new

historicism

as

either

Feuerbachian idealism

or

vulgar

Marxism?is

too

gross

to

qualify

as a

misreading.

It

should

instead be

recognized

as

the

cynical

construction

of

a

strawman.

That

this

is

the

strategy

is

borne

out

by

the

book's

failure

to

engage

or

even

in

several

cases

to

cite the

arguments

that







398

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

it

summarily

disparages.

Moreover,

to

suggest

that

Marx

recommends

ideol

ogy

as a

form of

genuine

knowledge

(Jarvis

58)?as

opposed

to

saying

that

ideology

may

be

parsed

to

release its

core

truth,

classically,

an

inverted

im

age of itsconditions of historical being; or, following Althusser, that ideol

ogy

is

the

way

that individuals live their relation

to

the real?is

a

claim

too

silly

to

bother

disputing.

Finally,

it

should be noted that

Jarvis'

horror of

system

(and

thus,

his

attempt

to

rescue

Wordsworth's

poetry

from

the

grip

of the

systematizers)

derives from his reliance

on a

notion

of

system

chal

lenged

in

Wordsworth's

own

time

and demolished

in

our own.

On

Jarvis'

view,

system

is

a

synonym

for

totalizing

machine?"a

philosophical

edifice

from

which

'[a]ll

the anomalies' would have been removed"

(3,

cf.

27).

He

seems

not to

have noticed that

Spinoza's "system

of

nature,"

now

recog

nized

as a

presence

in

the

age's marketplace

of

ideas,

develops

a

materialism

characterized

as

the

unsurpassed

thinking

of

immanence

and cited

as

source

of

today's interdisciplinary

research

into

the

workings

and

nature

of

self

organizing

systems.

Nor

does

Jarvis'

interest

in

"yesterday's

unintelligibly

avant-garde

social

science,

or

metaphysics

and

epistemology"

extend

to

the

"common

sense" of

today

(7).

Systems

have been the

subject

of

scientific

and

philosophical

re-definition since

the

1950s

and

prevailing

wisdom

now

views

them

as

models of

complexity,

fluidity,

self-revision,

and

internal,

di

versely

scaled,

and

self-interactive determination:

in

essence,

the antithesis

of the

anomaly-eating

monster

conjured

up

by Jarvis.

"When

'system'

is

simply

shorthand for

'machine

governed

by

a

program,'

it

usually signals

a

concern

with

static,

centralized

control

rather than with the

sort

of distrib

uted,

dynamic,

contingent

control

under consideration

here"40

Or,

"The

notion

of

system

is

no

longer

tied

to

a

changing

configuration

of

particular

components

or

to

a

set

of internal

or

external

relations.

Rather,

a

system

now

appears

as a

set

of

coherent,

evolving,

interacting

processes

which

temporarily manifest in globally stable structures."41 Finally, Jarvis' notion

that

a

genuinely

poetic

materialism

cannot

support

the

weight

of

ideas

or

the

indelicacy

of

philosophical

exposition

shows

as narrow

an

understand

ing

of

poetry

as

it

does

of

philosophy.

It

not

only

violates

Romanticism's

own

project

in

overcoming

the

poetry-philosophy

divide but

it

turns

a

blind

eye

to

the

whole

history

of

post-war

poetry

and

poetics.

Appendix

C:

Ironically,

Althusser's claims

to

have

produced

a

Marxist

sci

ence are realized now, forty years after,

in

theories of self-organization,

emergence,

complexity,

autopoiesis,

enactive

cognition,

and

the

like.

Then

again, perhaps

this

is

not

so

ironic,

for

nearly

all

those

areas

of

study

were

40.

Susan

Oyama,

Evolution's

Eye:

A

Systems

View

of

the

Biology-Culture

Divide

(Durham:

Duke

UP,

2000)

51.

41.

Erich

Jantsch,

The

Self

Organizing

Universe:

Scientific

and

Human

Implications

of

the

Emerging

Paradigm

of

Evolution

(Oxford,

New

York:

Pergamon

P,

1980)

6.







ROMANCING

SPINOZA

399

born

in

the

1960s,

Althusser's

era,

and

many

of themwithin the

European

scientific

community.

These

studies of

systems

and life forms describe

an

other historical

materialism

than the

one

that

Marx

ushered

in,

one

that

might help us make headway on a question that has been at the heart

of critical

work

in

the

humanities

since

the

1980s.

Namely,

how

can

the

phenomena

traditionally assigned

to

the

mind

(rational

and

unitary

or

self

contradictory

and

heterogeneous)

arise

without

that transcendental

postu

late,

and

(here

is

the hard

part)

without

anything

else

rushing

in

to

fill

the

vacuum

(such

as,

modes

of

production,

drives,

history).

As

far back

as

the

60s,

the

research

sectors

listed above

were

investigating

the

fragmented,

dispersed,

and

processual

nature

of

the

cognizing subject.

Marvin

Minsky

(MIT

artificial

intelligence pioneer)

in

The

Society of

Mind and

Seymour

Papert

in

Mindstorms,

for

example,

defined

mind

as a

"heterogeneous

col

lection of

networks of

processes"

and

cast

the

ego-self

as

"the historical

pattern

among

moment-to-moment

emergent

formations.

"42

Note

that

the

grammatical subject

of that

sentence

(which

references

the

philosophical

"subject,"

as

it

happens)

is

"historical

pattern,"

not

history

and

not

forma

tions,

a

detail worth

keeping

in

mind for those who

worry

about

structuralist

or

formalist

reifications

slipping

in.

The

common

denominator

among

the

specialized

researches

I

have

listed is first that

they

are

literally post-structuralist,

in the sense of describ

ing

structures

as

effects

of

dynamic

regimes

and

not

as

their

components.

In

the

neurosciences,

for

example,

the

parts

making

up

the whole do

not

precede,

express,

or

engender

it.

They

are

"temporarily

stable

structures

in

the coherent evolution of

one

and the

same

system" (Jantsch

6),

one

that

is,

however,

by

definition

open

to

other

systems.

Second,

these

sciences

historicize

matter

more

profoundly

than

Darwin

did for

species,

for

they

bring

the

concept

of evolution

into

the

lifespan

of the

individual

entity

and

into the processes and systems making up that entity. They explain how

histories

of

interactions

or

"couplings,"

co-evolutions,

routines, habits,

etc.

give

rise

to

determinate units

and entities.

This

evolution

tends

to

be

un

derstood

as

nonlinear:

very

small

changes

at

one

level

yield

very

large

out

comes

at

another.

Third,

as

with

Spinoza's

substance

monism

and

property

dualism,

these studies

conceive

of mind

(consciousness,

self-awareness,

in

tention)

as

the result

of

a

particular organization

of

matter.

They

write

of

subsymbolic

(that

is,

nonrepresentational)

aggregates

that cohere

as a

result

of routine rather than through any kind of centralized control. In their dif

ferent

idioms,

these

sciences

ask

how

agentless

processes

give

rise

to

effects

that behave

as

agents;

how

a

computer,

for

example,

might

precipitate,

or

might

even

just

be,

intending, wanting,

etc.

Fourth,

for

these

studies,

42.

Francisco

Varela,

Evan

Thompson,

Eleanor

Rosch,

The

Embodied Mind:

Cognitive

Sci

ence

and Human

Experience

(Cambridge,

MA: MIT

Press,

1993).







400

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

action

is

inseparable

from

perception.

Perceiving

means

perceiving

as,

per

ceiving

as means

perceiving

in

reference

to

a

world;

having

a

world

is

the

result,

not

the

cause

of interaction

with

the

environment

(a

term

that

very

much includes the social and political). Cognition "depends on the kinds

of

experience

that

come

from

having

a

body

with

various

sensorimotor

capacities"

(Embodied

Mind

173).

These

capacities

are

themselves

embedded

in

more

encompassing biological,

psychological,

and

cultural

contexts.

(The

name

of this

process

is

"enactive

cognition.")

Not

only

are

perceiving

and

acting

inseparable

in

lived

experience, they

are

said

to

have evolved

to

gether

and

to

have

brought

forth

(or,

"specified")

each other. This is

to

say

that the

two

are

not

merely contingently

linked

in

different

individuals

(as

in

nature-nurture

empiricist accounts).

Environments

not

only

are

what

they

are,

but have

evolved

along

certain

lines,

because of what

organisms

are

and what

they

do

(and

vice

versa).43

Fifth,

these

research

programs

are

all of the

nature

of

general

systems

theory.

They

try

to

formulate

principles

that

are

valid for

systems

in

general

whatever the

nature

of

their

compo

nents.

They

attempt

"a

'general

science

of

wholeness,'

which

until

now

was

considered

a

vague,

semi-metaphysical

concept."44

Short Bibliography

David Abram. The

Spell of

the

Sensuous:

Perception

and

Language

in

a

More

Than-Human World.

New

York:

Pantheon, 1996.

Gregory

Bateson.

Steps

To

an

Ecology of

Mind

[Collected Essays

in

Anthro

pology, Psychiatry,

Evolution,

and

Epistemology].

New York:

Ballantine,

1972.

David

Bohm.

Causality

and Chance

in

Modern

Physics.

Philadelphia:

U of

Pennsylvania P, 1987.

-.

Wholeness

and

the

Implicate

Order.

London,

Boston:

Routledge

and

Kegan

Paul,

1981.

David Bohm and

B.

J.

Hiley,

The

Undivided

Universe:

an

Ontological

Interpre

tation

of

Quantum

Theory.

London,

New

York:

Routledge,

1993.

John

C.

Briggs

and

F.

David

Peat.

Looking

Glass

Universe:

The

Emerging

Science

of

Wholeness.

New

York:

Simon

&

Schuster,

1986.

43.

See Richard

Levins

and Richard C.

Lewontin,

The Dialectical

Biologist (Cambridge,

MA:

Harvard

UP,

1985),

for

a

clear and

exciting

discussion of

some

of these

topics;

other

useful

works listed above

and

below.

44.

Ludwig

von

Bertalanffy,

General

System

Theory:

Foundations,

Development,

Applications

(New

York: G.

Braziller,

1968)

37;

quoted

in

Taylor

140.







ROMANCING

SPINOZA

401

Paul

Buckley

and

F.

David

Peat.

Glimpsing

Reality:

Ideas

in

Physics

and the

Link

to

Biology.

Toronto,

Buffalo:

U

of

Toronto

P,

1986.

Antonio Damasio. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and theFeeling Brain.

Orlando,

FL:

Harcourt,

2003.

-.

The

Feeling of

What

Happens:

Body

and

Emotion in

the

Making of

Consciousness.

New

York:

Harcourt

Brace,

1999.

-.

Descartes' Error:

Emotion, Reason,

and the

Human Brain.

New York:

G.

P.

Putnam,

1994.

Richard Dawkins. The

Selfish

Gene.

Oxford,

New

York: Oxford

UP,

2006.

-.

The Extended

Phenotype:

The

Long

Reach

of

theGene.

Oxford,

New

York: Oxford

UP,

1999.

-.

River

Out

of

Eden:

A

Darwinian View

of Life.

New

York:

Basic,

1995

Terrence

William

Deacon.

The

Symbolic

Species:

The

Co-Evolution

of

Language

and the

Brain. New

York:

Norton,

1997.

David Deutsch. The

Fabric

ofReality:

The Science

of

Parallel

Universes?and

Its

Implications.

New

York:

Penguin,

1998.

Gerald Edelman and

Guilio

Tononi.

A

Universe

of

Consciousness: How Mat

ter

Becomes

Imagination.

New

York:

Basic,

2001.

Luc

Ferry.

The New

Ecological

Order,

trans.

Carol

Volk.

Chicago:

U

of

Chicago

P,

1995.

Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe:

Superstrings,

idden Dimensions, and the

Quest

for

the

Ultimate

Theory.

New

York:

Norton,

1999.

William

Hasker.

The

Emergent

Self

Ithaca,

Cornell

UP,

1999.

N.

Katherine

Hayles.

How

We

Became

Posthuman:

Virtual

Bodies

in

Cybernet

ics,

Literature,

and

Infomatics.

hicago:

U

of

Chicago

P,

1999.

-.

Chaos and

Order:

Complex Dynamics

in

Literature

and

Science.

Chicago:

U of

Chicago

P,

1991.

Douglas

R.

Hofstadter.

J

Am

a

Strange Loop.

New

York,

London:

Basic,

2007.

-.

Fluid

Concepts

& Creative

Analogies: Computer

Models

of

the unda

mentalMechanisms

of

Thought.

New

York:

Basic,

1995.







402

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

John

H.

Holland. Hidden Order:

How

Adaptation

Builds

Complexity.

Read

ing,

MA:

Addison-Wesley,

1995.

Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific ndHuman Implications

of

the

Emerging Paradigm

of

volution.

Oxford,

New York:

Pergamon

P,

1980.

Mark

Johnson,

The

Body

in the

ind: the

Bodily

Basis

ofMeaning, Imagina

tion,

and

Reason.

Chicago:

U

of

Chicago

P,

1987.

Steven

Johnson.

Emergence:

The Connected

Lives

of

Ants,

Brains,

Cities

and

Software.

London: Allen

Lane/Penguin,

2001.

George

Lakoff and Mark

Johnson. Philosophy

in theFlesh: The Embodied

Mind and

its

Challenge

to

Western

Thought.

New

York:

Basic,

1999.

Richard

Levins

and Richard

C. Lewontin.

The Dialectical

Biologist.

Cambridge,

MA:

Harvard

UP,

1985.

Roger

Lewin.

Complexity:

Life

at

the

Edge of

Chaos.

Chicago:

U

of

Chicago

P,

1999.

Brian Massumi.

Parables

for

theVirtual:

Movement, Affect,

Sensation.

Durham,

NC: Duke

UP,

2002.

Humberto

R. Maturana

and Francisco

J.

Varela.

Autopoiesis

and

Cognition:

The Realization

of

the

Living.

Boston: D.

Reidel, 1980.

-.

The

Tree

of

nowledge:

The

Biological

Roots

of

uman

Understanding.

Boston:

Shambhala,

1987.

Marvin Lee

Minsky.

The

Society

of

Mind.

New

York:

Simon

&

Schuster,

1986.

Lee

Nichol,

et

al. The Essential

David

Bohm. London:

Routledge,

2002.

Susan

Oyama.

Evolution's

Eye:

A

Systems

View

of

the

Biology-Culture

Divide.

Durham,

NC:

Duke

UP,

2000.

Seymour

Papert.

Mindstorms.

New

York:

Harper

&

Row,

1981.

Arkady

Plotnitsky

and

Barbara

Herrnstein

Smith,

ed.

Mathematics,

Science,

and

Postclassical

Theory.

Durham,

NC:

Duke

UP,

1997.

Maurice Merleau

Ponty.

Nature: Course

Notes

from

the

College

de

France.

Evanston,

IL:

Northwestern

UP,

2003.

Ilya

Prigogine

and

Isabelle

Stengers.

Order

out

of

Chaos:

Man's New

Dialogue

with

Nature.

Toronto,

New

York,

Bantam,

1984.







ROMANCING

SPINOZA

403

V.

S.

Ramachandran

and Sandra

Blakeslee. Phantoms

in

the

Brain:

Probing

the

Mysteries

of

the

uman Mind.

New York: William

Morrow,

1998.

William Rasch and Cary Wolfe. Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and

Postmodernity.

Minneapolis:

U

of

Minnesota

P,

2000.

Brian

Cantwell Smith.

On the

Origin of Objects. Cambridge,

MA:

MIT

Press,

1996.

Mark

C.

Taylor.

The

Moment

of Complexity:

Emerging

Network Culture.

Chicago:

U of

Chicago

P,

2001.

Esther

Thelen and Linda

B.

Smith,

A

Dynamic Systems

Approach

to

the

Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1996.

Francisco

Varela,

Evan

Thompson,

and Eleanor Rosch.

The

Embodied

Mind:

Cognitive

Science

and

Human

Experience.

Cambridge,

MA: MIT

Press,

1993.

M.

Mitchell

Waldrop, Complexity:

The

Emerging

Science

at

the

Edge

of

Order

and Chaos.

New

York:

Simon

&

Schuster,

1992.

Cary Wolfe. Animal Rites: American Culture, theDiscourse of Species, and

Posthumanist

Theory.

Chicago:

U

of

Chicago

P,

2003.

-.

Critical

Environments:

Postmodern

Theory

and

the

Pragmatics

of

the

'Outside.'

Theory

Out of

Bounds,

vol.

13.

Minneapolis:

U ofMinne

sota

P,

1998.

Steve

Woolgar,

ed.

Knowledge

and

Reflexivity:

New

Frontiers in

the

Sociology

of

Knowledge.

London:

Sage,

1988.

Appendix

D:

Althusser's

borrowings

from

Spinoza

were

seminal for the

theoristswho

followed.

Specifically,

Althusser

cited

Spinoza

as

the

source

for

his

theory

of

structural

causality

and his

theory

of

knowledge,

Althusser's

two

great

departures

from

both

mainstream

(at

that

time)

Marx

ism

and

from

the

Hegelian

Marxisms

that

followed.

Althusser

famously

challenged

the classical

Marxian

binary,

knowledge

vs.

ideology,

defining

the latter

as

the

way

that

individuals live

their relation

to

the

real,

which,

in

his system, signifies the totality.On this reading, ideology isnot false con

sciousness

(as

in,

an

idea

without

an

object)

but

consciousness

plain

and

simple,

and

as

such

(given

the

immanence

of

mind

in

body

and of

the

indi

vidual

in

the

body-social,

body-politic,

etc.),

ideology

is

also the

expression

(or, instantiation)

of the

real. This

position

is

now

nearly

normative in

the

humanities and has

been from

the

emergence

of

new

historicism

more

than







404

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

twenty

years

ago,

travesties

of

its

crudely

realist

epistemology

(and

moral

ism)

notwithstanding.

At

the

same

time,

Althusser insists

upon

different

levels of

knowledge.

He correlates these, however, not with perceptual or reflective powers aris

ing

from

praxis

but

as

the

differential effects of

the

structural

whole

(or,

we

might

say,

of its

internal

systemic

interactions),

resulting

from

(again,

my

gloss)

the

organizational

complexity

of

the

system:

that

is,

its

consisting

of

many

relatively

autonomous

levels.

(That

last

phrase

is

Althusser's,

a

famously

inscrutable

one,

and doubtless

related

to

Spinoza's

adequacy

stan

dard

of

truth).

That

phenomenon,

"structural

causality,"

is

formulated

by

Althusser

as

the

effectivity

of

a

structure

on

its

elements

(does

elements des

ignate persons, classes, subject-positions, apparatuses, levels?). Structural

causality

is

also,

in

his

phrase,

the

effectivity

of thewhole

on

the

part,

im

plying

that the

part

does

not

come

into

existence until the

whole

crystal

lizes

as a

totality:

the

part,

thus,

being

a

kind of

back-formation of

the

whole. This

concept

of

causality

serves

to

link

base

to

superstructure

(and

all the levels

in

between)

by

a

logic

other than

that of either

reflection

or

production,

surpassing

thus the

theory-praxis binary

and also

collapsing

the

time-line of

historical

change,

folding

cause

into

effect and

past

and

future

into

the

present.

One

can

feel how

bewildering

a

design

this

is, i.e.,

a

cause

that

comes

into

being

only

in

and

as

its

effects,

a cause

that,

although

it

does

not

precede

those

effects,

does

explain

them,

remaining,

however,

as an

explanation, absolutely

immanent

to

those effects.

Bewildering,

but

enthralling.

Sadly,

Althusser,

whose

total

output

on

Spinoza

numbers

only

50

pages,

never

actually

said

what he took from

the

philosopher

and

maddeningly,

he

never

said how

structural

causality

worked

(nor,

how

it

squared

with his

law of

"determination

in

the last

instance,"

which could

seem

its

direct

an

tithesis).

Even the modest

expansion

above ismine, not Althusser's. Fredric

Jameson

helpfully distinguished

structural

causality

from

mechanical

and

expressive

causality

(respectively,

billiard balls

and

organisms)

but

not

even

he could

go

beyond

negative

definition.

I

think

we can

finally begin

to

understand these ideas because

they tally

in

a

deep

and

precise

way

with models of determination and of

thought

action

relations

developed

in

those

biological

and

physical

research domains

I

have mentioned.

Moreover,

contemporary

models of

recursion

provide

a

good gloss of the causal looping?the circularity and retroactivity?central

to

the

description

of structural

causality.

Appendix

E:

Readers

who know

my

early readings

ofWordsworth

might

wonder

if

and

how

this

new

orientation

bears

on

those.

It

does,

and

I

will

give

one

instance

of how

it

does.

My

reading

of

"Tintern

Abbey"

focused








on

the

opening

movement,

lines

1-49?literally,

the

ground-plan

or

topo

graphical

mise

en

scene

of

thismeditative

landscape

poem

cum

Pindaric ode.

In

the insistent

couplets

organizing

those

lines

and,

I

suggested, setting

up

a

sustained

pattern

in the

poem

(steep-lofty,

heavy-weary,

serene-blessed

.

.

.),

I

traced the

Cartesian

problematic,

and thus the

epistemic

dilemma

organizing

the

poem

as a

whole:

namely,

the

gap

between

subject

and

ob

ject?in

Wordsworth's

idiom,

the

mind

of

man

and

nature,

and

in

the

lan

guage

of the

poem,

"all

thinking

things"

and "all

objects

of all

thought."

I

linked the narrator's

sense

of

epistemic

and

existential

discontinuity

to

the

poem's

intimations

of

collectivity,

as

in

the

way

of

life

exemplified by

the

extinct monastic

community?its

memento

mori,

the

abbey

itself.

And,

I

linked that, the idea of the robust religious community, with more recent

instances

of communal

hope, namely,

both the

Revolution,

and

the soli

darity enjoyed by

its

enthusiasts

(Wordsworth

and his fellow

travelers until

the

watershed of

1794

or

so,

dividing

his

first

from

his

second

visit

to

Tintern).

The

poem's

insight,

I

argued,

resides

in

its

figuration

of

the

poet

subject

as

the

dispossessed

guardian

of his

own

imagination:

that

is,

the

Cartesian

subject,

cut

off from

its

world of

objects,

reduced

to

hermit,

vagrant,

or,

a

more

elevated but

no

less alienated

figure,

the vatic

seer.

I

argued

too

(following

both

a

deconstructive and

psychoanalytic logic)

that

the

poem's

oversight

is

an

effect of

the

very

problematic

that

generates

its

insight.

What

"Tintern

Abbey"

could

not

"see"

but

could

for

that

reason

(a

crucial condition

[cf.

Heidegger,

De

Man]

that has

routinely

been

ignored

in

the

reception

of

my

argument)

make

visible

was

its

critique

of

that sub

ject-object problematic,

and

by "critique"

I

intend

a

Kantian

usage,

where

it

means

establishing

the conditions

of

possibility

of that

dualism.

Those

conditions

were,

in

a

word,

the

social,

that

larger

and

prior

mode of

being

or

system

of

relations

which

creates

both

subjects

and

their

objects

of

knowledge,

and,which obscures itsown

priority.

I stand

by

that

reading

today.

Two

features of

the

poem,

however,

remained

outside

and

unassimilable

to

that

account.

One is

the narrator's

developmental

history

(his

formation

as

child

of

nature,

lines

66?84)

and

two,

his

large,

ecstatic,

visionary

claims

(e.g.,

"A

presence

that

disturbs

me

with

the

joy

/

Of

elevated

thoughts";

"?that

serene

and

blessed

mood,

/ In

which

the

affections

gently

lead

us

on,?

/

Until,

the

breath of

this

corporeal

frame

/

And

even

the

motion of

our human blood /Almost suspended, we are laid asleep / In body, and

become

a

living

soul").

Reading

Spinoza

folds those

features

in,

and,

I

believe

that the

preva

lence

in

the

poem

of

terms

that

have

a

unique

and

powerful

presence

in

Spinoza's

writing

(animal

movements,

passion,

appetite,

feeling

and

love,

joy, motion)

argues

that

the

poem

itself

folds them in.

These

words,

that







406

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

have

a

hollow

ring

when

played

in

an

empiricist,

a

Cartesian,

as

well

as

in

a

Marxist-materialist

register, sing

out

when

set

under the

sign

of

Spinoza.

They

mount

an

argument

for

processes

of

transition

from

"joy

to

joy,"

from identity to

identity,

based not on

knowledge

(". . .had no need of a

remoter

charm,

/

By

thought

supplied")

but

on

organization

and

activity:

histories of

couplings,

routines,

habits which

give

rise

to

determinate

units

and

entities.

Enriched

by Spinoza,

the

poem

figures

thought

not

as a

cate

gorically

hived-off mental

product

but

as

the result of

a

particular

organiza

tion of

matter

and

of

activity, activity

that

is

inseparable

from

perception.

I

would

now

read

the

turn to

Dorothy,

to

her

"wild

eyes"

(which

I

had

characterized

as an

instinctive

attempt

"to

escape

the

binary problematic

through which the poem gets written"), as a striving on the narrator's part

to

combine

with thatwhich resembles

him,

"to

compose

an

individual

proportionately

more

powerful

than each

one

alone"

(Montag,

Bodies,

Masses,

Power

31).

It is

thus,

says

Spinoza,

that "when each

man

most

seeks

his

own

advantage

for

himself,

then

men are

most

useful

to

one

another"

(IVP35C2).

The

movement

toward

Dorothy

is

as

the kernel of

a

sociality

or

collectivity

comparable

to

that of the

monastery

or

the

Revolutionary

spirits,

but that

it

offers itself

to

a

different

kind

of

analysis,

for there

is

no

act

of

will,

of

consent,

of intellectual decision that

brings

it

about

(depart

ing,

thus,

in

this

important

way,

from Hobbes'

theory

of social

genesis).

Wordsworth "discovers"

himself

in

his

instinctive

"composings,"

his

join

ing

together

with

whatever

increases

his

power,

finding

himself

more

highly

individuated, thus,

not

less

so.

And,

these

composings

arise

as

the

expression

of

a

thoroughgoing

"pragmatism"

(for

want

of

a

better

word),

one

that

dissolves the

very

premise

of

an

anterior

and/or

teleological

"self."

In

addition,

I

would

now

return to

the

subject-object couplings

that

structure

the

poem's

opening

movement

and

work

the

conjunction

"and"

along

the lines of

Spinoza's

celebrated

"or"

(sive

or

seu,

"which

nor

mally

indicates

an

equivalence

rather than

an

alternative"

[Curley,

Works,

1:

xix]).

In

the echo

of

Spinoza's

"God

or

nature,"

"right

or

power,"

Wordsworth's

"and"

(e.g.,

"a motion and

a

spirit")

strikes

a

new

note.

Warren

Montag,

commenting

on

Spinoza's

"or"

formulations,

writes

as

follows:

"Strictly speaking,

these

are

not

equations,

in

that

they

are

not

re

versible:

nature

never

becomes

God,

power

never

becomes

right.

Instead,

the

first

term

is

translated

into and then

displaced

by

the

second. God dis

appears into nature (the immanent cause which does not exist prior to its

effects and

which

cannot

be

without

them),

and

right

into

power,

that

is,

power

in

the

physical

sense,

or

force

(outside

of which

right

has

no

mean

ing

or

reality)"

(Bodies,

Masses,

Power

5).

Splicing

Spinoza's

usage

to

Wordsworth's

provides

us a

critical

style

answerable

to

that of

the

poem,

as

supple,

holistic,

and

yet

finely

discriminated

as

the

movement

ofWords







ROMANCING

SPINOZA

407

worth's

thought.

Wordsworth's

"and" colored

by Spinoza's

"or"

expresses

the

difference

and

identity

of the

yoked

terms

and

it

does

so

without

bring

ing

on

either

an

extrinsic

agency

or,

as

in

a

Hegelian

(natural

supernatural

ist) reading, a structuraldisequilibrium traceable to amythically founding

scission.

Short

Spinoza Bibliography

Louis Althusser.

Essays

in

Self-Criticism.

London:

NLB,

1976.

Etienne

Balibar.

Spinoza

and

Politics.

London,

New

York:

Verso,

1998.

David Bell. Spinoza inGermanyfrom 1670 to theAge ofGoethe. London:

Institute of

Germanic

Studies,

U of

London,

1984.

Jonathan

Francis

Bennett.

A

Study of

Spinoza's

Ethics.

Indianapolis:

Hackett, 1984.

William

E.

Connolly. Neuropolitics:

Thinking,

Culture,

Speed. Theory

out

of

Bounds,

vol.

23.

Minneapolis:

U

of

Minnesota

P,

2002.

Edwin

Curley,

trans.

&

ed. The Collected

Works

of

Spinoza,

vol.

1:

(Ethics).

Princeton: Princeton

UP,

1985.

Gilles

Deleuze.

Spinoza:

Practical

Philosophy.

San

Francisco:

City

Lights

Books,

1988.

-.

Spinoza: Expression

in

Philosophy.

New

York:

Zone

Books,

1990.

Michael Delia

Rocca.

Representation

and the

Mind-Body

Problem

in

Spinoza.

New

York:

Oxford

UP,

1996.

Moira Gatens. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London,

New

York:

Routledge,

1996.

-.

Collective

Imaginings: Spinoza,

Past

and

Present.

London: Rout

ledge,

1999.

Marjorie

Glicksman

Grene,

ed.

Spinoza:

A

Collection

of

Critical

Essays.

Garden

City,

NY:

Anchor,

1973.

Marjorie

Glicksman

Grene

and Debra Nails.

Spinoza

and the Sciences.

Dordrecht: Kluwer/Boston: D.

Reidel, 1986.

Stuart

Hampshire.

Spinoza.

London: Faber and

Faber,

1956.

-.

Spinoza

and

Spinozism.

Oxford:

Clarendon,

2005.

G.

W.

Hegel,

Lectures

on

the

History

ofPhilosophy:

The Lectures

of

1825-1826.

Berkeley:

U

of California

P,

1990.







408

MARJORIE

LEVINSON

Jonathan

Irvine

Israel.

Radical

Enlightenment:

Philosophy

and

the

Making of

Modernity,

1650?1750. Oxford,

New

York:

Oxford

UP,

2001.

Genevieve

Lloyd. Routledge Philosophy

Guidebook

to

Spinoza and the thics.

London,

New

York:

Routledge,

1996.

-.

Part

of

Nature:

Self-Knowledge

in

Spinoza's

Ethics.

Ithaca:

Cornell

UP,

1994.

Richard Mason.

The

God

of

Spinoza:

A

Philosophical

Study.

Cambridge:

Cambridge

UP,

1997.

Warren

Montag.

Bodies, Masses,

Power:

Spinoza

and

his

Contemporaries.

London, New York: Verso, 1999.

Warren

Montag

and

Ted

Stolze,

ed. The

New

Spinoza.

Theory

out

of

Bounds,

vol.

11.

Minneapolis:

U of Minnesota

P,

1997.

Steven M.

Nadler,

Spinoza's

Ethics: An

Introduction.

ew

York:

Cambridge

UP,

2006.

-.

Spinoza's

Heresy:

Immortality

and

the

Jewish

Mind. New

York:

Oxford

UP,

2001.

Antonio

Negri.

The

Savage

Anomaly:

The

Power

of

Spinoza's

Metaphysics

and

Politics,

trans.

Michael

Hardt.

Minneapolis:

U

of

Minnesota

P,

1991.

Christopher

Norris.

Spinoza

and the

Origins

of

Modern

Critical

Theory.

Oxford:

Basil

Blackwell,

1991.

Richard

H.

Popkin.

Spinoza.

Oneworld

Philospohers,

2004.

Nathan Rotenstreich and

Norma

Schneider,

ed.

Spinoza,

His

Thought

and

Work. Jerusalem, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1983.

Roger

Scruton.

Spinoza.

Oxford,

New

York: Oxford

UP,

1986.

Benedictus

de

Spinoza,

Samuel

Shirley

and

Seymour

Feldman.

Theological

Political

Treatise,

Gebhardt

Edition,

1925.

Indianapolis:

Hackett,

1998.

-.

Political

Treatise.

Indianapolis:

Hackett,

2000.

Matthew

Stewart,

The

Courtier

and the

eretic:

Leibniz,

Spinoza,

and the

ate

of

God

in

theModern World.

New York:

Norton,

2006.

Yirmiyahu

Yovel,

ed.

Desire

and

Affect:

Spinoza

as

Psychologist.

Papers

Presented

at

the Third

Jerusalem

Conference

(Ethica Iii).

New York:

Little

Room

P,

1999.

(Distributed

by

Fordham

UP.)

Levinson, M.- A Motion and a Spirit, Romancing Spinoza (Article-2007)

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