A short piece today, to try and keep up momentum. I’m trying to finish off the ideas alluded to in my post about reading the news, and working on a different set of ideas about how Hume and Spinoza describe emotions. Most of these ideas/interests are related, sometimes obviously, but it’s only by writing them down that I really start to figure out what the relationship is, and whether it’s noteworthy.

I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch for the first time this month (first book of the year!), after having planned to read it for several years¹. It’s an incredible book, deserving all its accolades, and I would highly recommend you read it. I read it partly thinking of Spinoza (whose Ethics I read for the first time last year). It’s fairly well-known that Eliot was strongly influenced by Spinoza, and was a translator of his work into English. I can’t provide a particularly detailed analysis of Spinoza’s influence on Eliot. I didn’t read Middlemarch or the Ethics closely enough to be able to do so, and I also haven’t (yet?) read any of the scholarship on the topic. On the other hand, I can say that there are sections of Eliot’s novel, and aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy, that give me very similar impressions.

The third part of Spinoza’s Ethics deals with the passions of the human body. These are those “affections of the body [and ideas thereof] by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished” whose adequate cause we cannot be. I will be upfront and say that I don’t fully understand Spinoza’s model, or his argument, most of the time. But the general gist I get is that our passions (a certain type of emotion we have) are caused in us by things we don’t (yet) fully understand, and thus are not under our control².What I find most interesting in Spinoza, though, isn’t this part of the definition, but the way he uses it to provide definitions and descriptions of our everyday emotional lives by placing them into this rational and causal network. He takes joy, for example, to be “that passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection”, by which he means a fuller understanding of ourselves and our world. We move from lesser to greater understanding, our emotional capacities reflect this, and in doing so we become more capable of understanding and coming to terms with our place and limits within the world. Eliot’s detailed psychological analysis is one way of using this sort of rational framework to observe how our imperfect selves and perceptions react against the world. She traces, in all her characters, a causal story that tells us why they felt and reasoned in their particular ways. Her noblest characters, to me, seem to be able to identify this story as it pertains to themselves and others, and in doing so are able to live at peace with the limits of their being in the world.

This might be all nothing! But, as I said, just a short one today to try and keep myself going. I have some serious criticisms of what I’ve written so far on this blog³, but I’m enjoying trying to write more regularly and seriously, so I think that it’s important to just keep going.