The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a seminar with Josefine Klingspor, Pittsburgh, "Spinoza on Self-Preservation".
Abstract
For someone who so vehemently insists on the radically dependent nature of human beings, it is curious that Spinoza positions independence at the center of his conception of the good life. Freedom, virtue, eternal life, knowledge, action—all these goods require the capacity to act or even to exist independent of external support. As commentators have often remarked, Spinoza therefore appears to bar human beings from the good life. And yet, helping us achieve such a life is the explicit goal of his philosophy.
This essay examines a less-discussed instance of the same type of problem and proposes a framework for addressing it. According to Spinoza’s conatus doctrine, human beings possess some capacity for sustaining their existence independent of external support. At the same time, Spinoza explicitly affirms, in line with a long philosophical tradition, that self-preservation is metaphysically impossible for beings like us, beings that by nature depend on other things in order to exist.
To address this issue, I argue that there are two ways of conceiving the dependence of modes on substance according to Spinoza. Just when modes are conceived as in some sense the same as the sustaining substance can they be self-preserving. Crucially, so conceived, modes are self-preserving because of way they depend on substance. Spinoza’s metaphysics thus opens up the possibility for a kind of existential independence that does not conflict with, but is on the contrary enabled by, one’s status as a dependent being.
