Love and Essence in Spinoza's Ethics

Abstract

Several questions regarding Spinoza's concept of essence have been the topic of recent scholarly debate. In this paper, I show that the connection between love, desire and essence is ubiquitous in the Ethics, as well as metaphysically and psychologically coherent; moreover, it provides the key to answer unresolved questions. Analyzing the notion of essence through Spinoza's theory of love shows that essence can be expressed in different ways, and be reflected through different objects of love. These objects of love, in turn, signify the extent to which the affected mind understands itself, God and things in the world. Each object is a different expression of the same single, unique essence of the individual, and therefore of the desire which defines them. This interpretation allows to solve some puzzles about essence, and also to establish the importance of love in Spinoza's philosophy as a whole-especially his epistemology and ethics.

Spinoza’s Geometry of Affective Relations, the Body Politic, and the Social Grammar of Intolerance: A Minimalist Theory of Toleration

“…After Gersonides, many Jewish philosophers did likewise, and some of them, like Rabbi Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340-1410/11), who rejected the concept of intellectual love, and Leon Ebreo (c. 1465-after 1523), who accepted it, had a distinct influence on Spinoza's theory of amor Dei intellectualis (NADLER 2014, 104). Noa Lahav Ayalon (2021) has convincingly argued for a single concept of essence that can be conceived rationally as shared or unique, as Spinoza's accounts of essence point to "a single, specific, and unequivocal notion that has various expressions and can be perceived in different ways." Neither dualistic nor monadological, the individual cannot thus be evoked in a Hobbesian-like methodological atomism that allows for the civic constitution of the body politic, but rather refers us back to "human essence as an idea with shared properties between individual humans" (AYALON 2021, 33), including friendship, commonwealth, and love.…”