Spinoza on the Nature of God: Participating in Collective Empowerment

Abstract

God plays a central role in Spinoza’s philosophy, directly shaping his views of ethics and politics. His theology is examined in light of contemporary perspectives in process philosophy. Analysis of the claim that “The more we understand singular things the more we understand God” (E5p24), shows that Spinoza advances a participatory theology that prioritizes a developmental process that fosters loving-kindness and intellectual generosity. Religion is the virtue enabling our participation in divine power. The key characteristics of participation in divine power are that these powers are (1) non-scarce/open-source/sharable, (2) regenerative, (3) propagate from one context to another, and (4) potentiate novel, unforeseeable discovery and invention. It is through community with other singular beings and via social affects that we understand divinity: by participating in powers that are sharable and continue to intensify and evolve when made openly accessible. His ideas can inspire our current problematic in beneficial ways.

1. Introduction

“The more we understand singular things the more we understand God”

(Spinoza 1994, Ethics, E5p24)

“Singular things are nothing but affections of God’s attributes, or modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way.”

(E1p25c)

How is it that singular things teach us about God? Does this give voice to atheism, pantheism, or panentheism? I will argue Spinoza had a participatory theology (Carlisle 2021) based in a process-oriented philosophy of expression, by examining the themes of affect and intensity. Not only through the analysis of affects and a phenomenology of intelligence, but also in an integrative effort to align our diverse powers in ourselves and with others in community. We embody the divine in singular ways so that we understand God in the greatest intensity we are capable of by participating in divine nature. Whereas the rational proofs expounding Gods nature in part one of Ethics can produce adequate knowledge, it is not the most intense in terms of affects, i.e., in terms of changing our feelings and motivating actions. Affect is a technical term Spinoza used to refers not just to an emotion, but to the internal change in power that the emotion occasions—either a resonance that increases our power or interference that diminishes it. An affect is a change in power and all emotions and perceptions reveal something of our powers, vulnerabilities, and needs: affects are the processes by which our powers intertwine with other powers—those we depend on and whose fate is bound up with our own, or those that hurt and hinder our power. But power is not derived from nothing, it all has its root immediately in God:

“the greater the Joy with which we are affected, the greater the perfection [or power] to which we pass, i.e., the more we must participate in the divine nature.”

(E4p45c2s)

High-intensity affects have a correspondingly high degree of insight and understanding. We increase our power in proportion as we improve our intelligence. Knowledge is power. Knowledge of God through singular things is the third and highest kind of knowledge with the most power; imagination surpassed by reason is surpassed by intuition (E5p25). Intuition not only increases but transforms our powers of acting and understanding and transvalues our sense of purpose, obligation, and satisfaction (E5p27). As we will see, it is in relationality with other singular things that we participate in divine power by collaboratively developing our virtues and sharing in transformative powers: generosity (see Sharp 2019). The key characteristics of these divine powers is that they are (1) non-scarce/open-source/sharable, (2) regenerative, (3) propagate from one context to another, and (4) potentiate novel, unforeseeable discovery and invention. Rather than engage all the resent scholarship, we will presently focus on bringing to life and unpacking the significance of Spinoza’s insights. One will find consonant interpretations to mine in Carlisle, Amir, and Sharp.

2. The Nature of Power

People are generally interested in promoting their wellbeing (to sustain, increase, or enrich powers), but this by no means guarantees that they find success. We too often act in well-intentioned ways while doing unintended damage. Wildfire fighters in National Parks of the US have all but eliminated the threat of regular, healthy smaller fires and created the condition for extreme fires engulfing entire landscapes. This is not the only cause of larger fires; there is also global temperature rise, increased winds, etc., but it is evidence of mutilated ideas and how they become not only ineffectual but reciprocate a decrease in our power of acting. Parents all, in some shape or form, cause emotional and developmental damage to their children—no one is perfect. A common pattern is to suppress the normal healthy flares of emotion and prepare the way for raging inferno. We also hand down our trauma and implicate generations to come in humanity’s prior mistakes. Moreover, while we are currently destroying our planet and being taken advantage of by the wealthy, we are nowhere more gravely mistaken about the nature of things than with respect to emotions, consciousness, and our optimal relation to one another. We do not understand our true powers and consistently do unintended harm to one another and ourselves. Disciplinary action is a necessary medicine for our development and social awareness, but it remains subject to the same risks as wildfires prevention. The truth is that we transmit our emotional patterns to each other and share in our disfunctions. Do we even have power?

Spinoza was no emotion-shunning stoic but was keenly aware of our need for healthy emotions that promote joy, wellbeing, and sociality. Hilaritas (E4p45c2s) is the opposite of the dissipative passions, an energizing gaiety of intelligently joking around with friends that does not derive its force or set-up through derision or humiliation (See Amir 2021). There are a hundred sad passions that detract from the friendly, heavenly hilaritas to, on the one hand, excessive buffoonery via self-deprecation, or on the other hand, cruelty. Both buffoonery and cruel humor pander to emotions of envy (the pleasure at another’s suffering). Where hilaritas leverages humor’s affective and intellectual vigor (balancing wit and playfulness) to uplift and inspire, the cruel or buffoonish seek to gain social standing at the expense of others, or vainly seeking attention, praise, fame, or wealth. Hilaritas is the shared expansion and harmony of social relations for the sake of propagating active affects available to all without value born from scarcity.1 Most humor that degrades the dignity of the other, i.e., ridicule, is generally based on the attempt to gain self-appreciation, self-esteem, for oneself or their identity groups, by comparing self-worth to something else that is made to appear worth-less. We pretend we are pulling ourselves up but we are only pushing others down, and, since we all do this, we live with the consequences: a lower power of acting overall, unable to organize our powers effectively. We are weaker than we could be and more easily taken advantage of by those with the power to control us, e.g., kings, priests, political grifters, and salesmen. Our attempts to “feel better” about ourselves via ridicule or envy always backfires and promotes antisocial emotions that adversely affect not only ourselves but one another. We can only rarely organize socially in regenerative open-sourced and sharable joy. Humor is a species of ambition (the effort to make others like us, or rather to “look on us with joy”), not only making us “people pleasers” but, worse, allowing us to make ourselves look better than we are. Pride is a self-overestimation (E3DefAff.28), and over-estimation of another, at the root of the demagogue’s power, becomes infatuation, obsession, the cult of personality, etc., such that we see ourselves and each other disproportionally to our true power. This becomes a game of complex layering: the tyrant fears over-estimating the others over-estimation of himself, as the sycophant flatters the tyrant without truly admiring him. As La Rochefoucauld proclaims “If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could never harm us.” (La Rochefoucauld 2017, maxim 152). Even in sports and games, we might seek to win at all costs and only want to be seen succeeding. Thus “Flattery is a base coin to which only our vanity gives currency.” (La Rochefoucauld 2017, maxim 157) We not only hide our weakness and humanity, but hide from them and, further, spoil all chance of enjoying the activities of life for their own sake.

These are what Spinoza calls sad passions, delusional joys wherein we wallow in our weakness and ignorance. We wrongly imagine that we can become happy by the methods of gaining power through diminishing or syphoning others’ power: the tyrant and the vampire. Humor, free from envy and all other sad passions, is a joy that positively affects the whole body and the whole mind:

“…[L]aughter and joking are pure joy…no deity, nor anyone else, unless he is envious, take pleasure in my lack of power and my misfortune…on the contrary, the greater the joy with which we are affected, the greater the perfection to which we pass, that is the more we participate in divine nature.”

(E4p45s)

Spinoza’s view of God and how knowledge of God relates to ethics provides an answer to this exact predicament, the predicament of mutilated knowledge and the antisocial affects that keeps it all moving, which keep us from rising to a higher power through hilaritas and intelligent generosity.

Consider the history and human coevolution with the plant world. There is a goal of becoming2 that has arisen in recent trends of the imaginary having to do with the growth and flourishing of life, aiming at a post-human ecological cosmology. To survive will require radically new ways of inhabiting the planet and participating in the evolution of the cosmos. The same impulse to evolve has also been taken to the transhumanist extreme: the possibility of terraforming other planets. The underlying potential has become apparent: we can use experience, science, technology, and even eco-systemic optimization as found in Indigenous ways of knowing to kindle the fecundity of life. Permaculture, biodynamics, and other efforts have been made to skillfully and scientifically guide plant interactions with each other and with the geological, climatological, hydrological, etc. We know it is possible to improve plant life significantly by properly integrating forces, and sustainable architecture and engineering is predicated on the use value of such practices. An ecology of affects! We find great joy in accessing and expressing our power or acting with success, but this requires experimentation and risk can be a major energizer of creative action. True happiness and virtue are as difficult as they are rare. The rarity is not due to a scarcity of resources: the fruits of intellect are productive, regenerative, and open to all. Surround gifted musicians with other musicians and they all benefit greatly through both inspiration and playful contest. The rarity of wisdom is due to an abundance of pests and diseases of the soul that plague our discourse and stunt our development both personally and collectively. The main cause lies in our emotional dysregulation, habituated to strong antisocial emotions such as envy and what we will refer to as the game of praise and blame.

For Spinoza, it is not possible to understand God adequately and not also feel love and veneration, free of all resentment (E5p20). The love of God is less the love of an object, which implies desires of possession and consumption, and more an intransitive, beatitude of joyful expression in one’s profoundest powers and virtues, which proceed from God directly. God is not the object of the joy but the joy itself as active affect—the event of our power increasing. This also implies, according to Spinoza, that our love of God does not involve the want or need for God to love you in return (E5p19). Such an appetite, he claims, would be impossible: merely a remnant of the inadequate knowledge, the imagined drama that pits subjects against each other as vying for advantage and supremacy (E5p36s). God judges and punishes, rather than informing and empowering. Spinoza affirms this intransitive, non-transactional love of God—a primordial joy of expanding and enriching existence—as evident to all in a true encounter with the divine. It involves an intuitive knowledge of what we might call the power of God or Nature, and oneself as an accomplishment of this power. God is power itself, in its entirety and infinity. Insofar as we can gain power as humans, it is on the basis of natural law, i.e., what powers of existing follow from God’s essence. Whatever we manage to accomplish is within our natural right. Divine law in the fourth chapter of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus or Theological Political Treaties (Spinoza 2007, TPT) prescribes the road to our greatest power and blessedness, the power of expression: participating in the affects of blessedness, generosity, and hilaritas. Divine law is not opposed to natural law, it is just the wisdom of empowerment that traces the path of maximal intensification through expression, naturans. Not unlike the primordial nature of God in Whitehead’s (1978) Process and Reality, divine law is a lure for all conati, to intensify all satisfactions via contrast and harmony (see Jones 1998).

We know God best of all by a third kind of knowledge, beyond reason, wherein thinking and acting, understanding and expressing through the power of our understanding, are inseparable. Only in thought do we distinguish them, but in their existence they are a singular accomplishment. We can give a description of the imagery and intentionality of the mind as well as of the movements in the body. The conatus unifies the parallelism of attributes in the power and action of the singular mode as such: a mind and body acting as one. Reason sees the difference between attributes, while intuitive science sees only power and moves and guides circumstances in order to accomplish the actualization. Intelligence and action are one in active affects—there is a force of motion corresponding to the thrust of an idea. Motion builds into momentum, the very effort of persevering existence, surviving, fundamental on all levels of reality. The effort to survive is continuous with generous intelligence and is ontologically primary for Spinoza. If we act with knowledge of the effect, if we have skill and precision and bring about what we intend, if we express the eideo-motor reality which is in accord with our essence (i.e., ways that promote fortitude and generosity of spirit), then we simply are the creative activity of God.

Violence and oppression are not expressions of power but symptoms of mutilated ideas and passive affects. As Jean-Marie Guyau so succinctly articulated:

“The violent man stifles the whole sympathetic and intellectual part of his being… By brutalizing others he more or less brutalizes himself. Violence, which thus seemed a victorious expansion of internal power, becomes in the end a restriction of this power… The despot becomes a child again… his objective omnipotence ends in bringing about a real subjective impotency.”

(Guyau 1898, p. 88)

Violent thoughts and emotions are phenomena such as interference or dissonance, where the strength of the component parts decreases in composition. God is the singular adequate cause of existence. If our intelligent action is adequate to not merely conceiving by reason, but actualizing by effort, and we manage to join our action up with others in fellowship, then we become the conduit of divine creation. Power, as conceived by mutilated ideas, is scarce and can only be held if another is deprived of possessing it. God’s power is free from all scarcity, and our virtues and knowledge grow stronger the more we share them in common. God is nor just omnipotent in an eternity of the present, like a static quantity of force, but rather God is the increase, advancement, and enrichment of power, force, movement, and life. When we see the qualities of creative–regenerative virtue in others, when we are affected by the abundance of their power to empower us all, we see the divinity in their expressive powers and graceful gestures, and we feel called to possess their virtues and express the same power in our own singular way. We do not seek to steal the virtue from them nor to make a display that we possess a virtue that we lack, seeking the superficial effects without the cause. All virtues, according to Spinoza, are good in themselves (because of their replenishing, enriching, intensification of power), not merely transitively the vehicle to a reward, i.e., praise or punishment. Virtues work best in groups where they can resonate harmoniously. Thus, it is through community with other singular beings and via social affects that we understand divinity: by participating in powers that are contagious and continue to intensify and evolve when made openly accessible. Religion, according to Spinoza, as Carlisle (2021) has rendered vividly, is the very virtue of intellectual generosity: loving kindness that seeks to empower by means of intelligence (E4p37s1).

3. Implicating More than It Contains: The Infinite Intellect and the Face of Nature

Like Plotinus (2018) in the fifth Ennead, Spinoza posited an infinite intellect existing eternally, but grounds his account in expression rather than emanation. In some sense this is God (not as a whole), but only one of God’s manifestations. There are an infinite number of other expressions equally as vast and profound. We happen to know God only though movement and intellect: both are the expression of God’s infinite power. But the infinite intellect, like the “face of nature”—think unison of becoming of all nature together in its multiplicity—is as integral as enveloping both simple unity (function) and infinitely complex multiplicity (analysis). This infinity is the side of expression as expressed, while God and Nature properly speaking are on the side of expressing, naturans. Here we have an infinity that is a greater order of magnitude, or rather, one that transcends number and space. God does not possess a power of expression as a statically present potential ready to actualize (spring squeezed and ready to release) and not as the manifestation of the expressed (resulting movement after the spring relaxes), but the active expressing that is always a present verb and never acts transitively on something else but unifies action and persevering in existence. It is a spring always releasing force while also increasing its tension and even evolving its action beyond the limits of a given medium, transcending the role of the spring in this metaphor and entering other modalities of expression.

The face expresses a smile which expresses underlying thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. All expression, taking it in its full complexity, always exists beyond the presentation of its actualization—it has depth, dynamism, and character. We will not understand the infinite intellect if we consider only actualized thought—finite intellect. The infinite is rather an act of expression implicating a virtual multiplicity that makes possible infinite thought forms folded into a simple whole: infinite different triangles are implicated in the idea of a shape with three sides and inner angles adding up to two right angles. The virtuality is not all ideas being known at once, but the infinite interconnection and distinctions that can be thought within a field of coherent deformations. The virtual infinite is always there on the periphery of the present, it spreads out before and after the continuous process of thinking, behind as a thrust, in front as marking a direction. The infinite intellect is the horizon, the background from which a figure emerges. The idea of a triangle is an infinite potential of possible constructions, and, furthermore, it can be used beyond this context to, for example, help make sense of parallelograms. All the citations in the Ethics are ways of actively rehearsing the discursive movements of thought that, once memorized, habituated, become virtual forces shaping and orienting our forward motion.

A good definition, according to Spinoza, implicates more than it contains. In the last letter Spinoza wrote to his friend Tschirnhaus, he briefly responds to the mistaken view that a good definition deduces only one property. Rather, a good definition draws more implications than it contains, so that, by Spinoza’s definition of God, many properties can be deduced and, in a way, all that follows from it is enfolded in it. From his definition of God as a being absolutely infinite, consisting of an infinity of attributes, each expresses an eternal and infinite essence (E1d6); he deduces the road to our happiness and flourishing. The seeds of it all are the idea of infinity and the infinite as a power of expression. Let us unpack this metaphysics or theology of infinite expression.

The modes of substance are not the predicates of a subject but instead are like adverbial constructions. Each mode is like an adverb that modifies a substantial verb, and there is only one substantive verb: God’s act of expression. The phrase “singularly existing” symbolizes the existence of modes as the adverb “singularly” and God is represented by the verb “existing.” As modes, our existence is dependent on an infinity of other modes, and ultimately on God—we never supply the substantive verb, but we can modify the adverbial qualifier. Our existence is a modification of existing, taken in an absolute sense. God is the necessity of existing eternally being modified by an infinity of adverbs. Every singularly existing (res singulares) is analyzable into a multiplicity of affects, which, taken as a whole, is either increasingly existing or decreasingly existing. Everything and everyone is a change or flux in power of existing as singular adverbial modifier. Changes in power are qualitatively diverse so that a conatus is not merely an enduring perseverance (inertia), not just intensifying (acceleration) but a transformation and transvaluation of power: enrichingly existing. As modes existing through God, we can participate more fully in the power of existing via the virtues of empowerment. The absolute existing can also be conceived as absolute thinking or absolute moving. When we think the idea of the triangle, we are the divine idea itself triangularly thinking. We are not simply “like” God in our active affects: not imitations of divine action.3 For Spinoza, we are that very divine activity of expressing a power–idea which affirms itself in us so that we are “the infinite love by which Gods loves himself” (E5p36). The more we participate in active affects, the more we see this fact: that we are not separate from God’s power, nor from what is divine in each other.

The pantheist principle, “everything is God” is only partly true of Spinoza—not to say that his modes are gods, nor on the other hand that they are “less than” divine, as merely mortal or lacking in divine essence. Rather, the way that we commonly think things exist in the world is not true. It is the construction of our imagination that cuts the world up into individual entities and treats them as signs that causally interact with each other and aid or restrain our will. This framing of the question, in terms of finite beings in transitive causal relation, misses entirely the authentic question of “is everything God?” Another way to say this is that God is more on the side of virtual than actual, if the actual be taken as the instant of the present, which is given fully and exhaustively. As we discover and participate in the virtuality of our existence, our own infinitude, we find our immanence in Gods expressive activity. By virtual I understand a power that endures while inactive and its own ways of existing, irreducible to activity or actuality.

God is what God does: existing is God’s essence, infinite eternal power of expression that is always expressing and never depleting, multiplying infinities and forming new orders of magnitude of intensity by means of intelligence. Intelligence is increasingly viewed as a power to act, less the resulting presence to consciousness of a reflection or representation. The intelligence of the body is manifest in the order of its motion and rest: the grace by which its movements are orchestrated. Everything, an infinity of finite modes, is an expression of divine essence: divine ordinance says exist, survive, and multiply life! The natural divine law, as he often refers to it (TPT 4.6-12), is not a reward for good behavior, but is simply the very fruit of virtue and power, acquired and perfected by intelligence. Thus, their lack of virtue leaves them open to ignorance and servitude to violent passions, and the punishment for violating divine law is nothing but the very misfortune of living in ignorance and confusion with respect to what matters most in promoting our happiness:

“[W]e see that the supreme reward of the divine law is to know the law itself, that is, to know God and to love him in true liberty with whole and constant minds; the penalty is lack of these things and enslavement to the flesh, or an inconstant and wavering mind.”

(TPT, 4.6)

Spinoza takes pains to articulate the radical difference between passive obedience to the divine law and a knowledge of the law that liberates and improves our wellbeing. There are many ways of living such that we do not experience the world in its divinity, infinity, and virtuality. We cannot hope to discover divinity willy-nilly. Spinoza quotes Proverbs of Solomon 16:22: “the punishment of the stupid is their stupidity.” (TPT 4.12) It is by cultivating the conatus, forming a sacred devotion, intention, and effort to understand, that we fulfill natural divine law. We come to find what is divine in others, ourselves, and the cosmos. By kindling our own fire, caring for our own wellbeing, we undergo a transvaluation, a reorientation that teaches us how to invest our effort and attention. This panentheistic interpretation of divine law is an acquired insight beyond the finite, beyond the semiotics of images, symbols, and the social dynamics of egos vying for power. Caring for one’s own wellbeing does not make us into an isolated individual seeking our advantage at the expense of others; rather, it is a prerequisite to becoming merciful and generous.

The divine law is adapted to the particularities of our singular and concrete situation; natural divine law takes both the natural and divine on an even plane, and thus, in a sense, equally values natural science, metaphysics, and moral psychology. The natural divine law is another way of describing the infinite intellect and the face of nature as inseparable; it just adds the normative and axiological orientation. Ideas are thoughts that we share in common with others, not just by consensus; consensus is always partial, not just with respect to forming consensus with others, but even with ourselves over time. In place of a consensus between sensing and speaking subjects, there is a communion of minds in the infinite intellect, reflected in the mutual aid and empowerment of bodies in community.

Participating in an idea does not require that we all have the same thoughts or are enacting the same motions. The way different musical scales relate as modes gives a clear example of the interconnections of the infinite intellect and how they do not imply a simultaneous actualization of all perspectives at once but exist as virtual or implicit unity known though modulation. Musical “modes”, which are not just scales, are permutations of a single scalar pattern, altered by shifting the starting position. In a sense, the diatonic scale with its pattern of seven intervals, forming seven modes, is a singular whole that has seven distinct perspectives. Melodies in each mode will have a unique qualitative expressive character, and, even apart from the effects of culture, the sounds themselves have qualitative diversity, lending differences in expressive potential. Thus, the same pattern of intervals results in seven district expressive powers, depending on the way it is oriented tonally. The infinite intellect is like the latent or virtual unity that subtends the change of perspective implied by modulating between each mode. For Spinoza, we are modes of substance in the way a melody is a mode of an underlying coherence between qualitatively different expressions. Each mode makes possible its own kinds of melodies. There is far more potential packed into the finite set of ratios than they contain at first blush. The composer of a good melody does more with less. A good melody, or at least one that is popular, is generally singable and has a playful simple movement that is easy to remember, and it has satisfying cadence. Not to downplay the musical virtue of fast complicated harmony, but it is different to good melody, judged by its own standards. Rather than developing harmonic or rhythmic complexity, melody relies on subtle patterning to make the movements evocative and infectious. Again, the modalities of expression multiply, the scalar structure divides into seven modes, and each mode has both melodic, harmonic expressive power. The composer draws more out of the notes than they contain by patterning them in time, giving them something like their own internal principle of movement. Not only is the infinite intellect generative of infinite novel organization; it is multiplying the modalities of its expression beyond any measurable totality. As the figure of a triangle is something more than mere lines and points, so the musical composition is far more than scales and chords which we use to describe them. The scales make it possible to be melodic, but it is in the individuation of a concrete series of tones that the unique melody comes to life. Within this intelligent action comes the generosity of aesthetic expression, not only a power to craft enchanting sounds, but also to inspire others to participate in being expressive. Music is never passive sensing but participatory: the music itself invites us to join in with the creative activity, we hum, dance, clap, etc. The artist stokes the fire of our own spiritual fortitude as a social joy, their songs encourage ambition and vocation, inspire us to create music by revealing, in one another, the power we have when we work together and when we form bonds of fellowship. Our lives are composed of a string of affects forming a melodic sequence. We act as if there are songs stuck in our head: fear leads to anger, leads to hate, leads to suffering. Our virtue consists in orchestrating our affects towards harmonic amplification—a crescendo in concert with others. Glenn Gould even sounded like a Spinozist: the power of music is an internal combustion, ignited in the heart, and not as a shot of adrenalin so much as a lifelong practice kindling a state of wonder and serenity (Payzant 1978, p. 64).

All intellection participates in the infinite and virtual, just as every perceptible body is implicated in an infinity of relation that goes beyond it and weaves it into the rest of the cosmos. By the first kind of knowledge, we break off the part (signs) from the whole (movements) and treat it as a self-sustaining whole—a (pseudo) substance conceived by the mutilated idea that in fact only confuses the singularly unique concept substantiality (being cause of itself) with what is in fact modality (dependent existence that is sustained and endures interdependently with others). We do not perceive the real movements and dynamisms of nature as they are, but through a filter—as a fragmented series of images/affects that are useful to vital needs and the games of the ego. Signs are sensible bifurcation/decision points from which a series of movement/affects follow. When we live the world of signs by the first type of knowledge, we are as disconnected from the deeper dynamisms in the realm of body as a line is abstracted from the plane or figure. Things show up in perception in order for us to anticipate the outcome of our concrete encounters. We see and move according to our strivings. The closure of thought into one idea, which is evident in conceiving a triangle (E2p49), is only a signpost marking the movement of thought that interconnects (etymology of inter-legere). The analysis and cutting up of existence are fundamental to the first kind of knowledge, while their activity leads to mutilated ideas. If it is connected to reason as a synthetic activity, it is integrated into a greater whole that draws more from it than it contains on its own and avoids its harmful potentials.

What is intelligence? The interweaving of all existence in its infinite complexity as an integral whole; the ability to see unity in a multiplicity of modalities, without losing the nuances. The ratios of motion and rest, the face of the universe, make manifest the infinite interconnection of existence, the intelligence of the body, the divine powers manifest in nature. The interconnectedness of bodies ecologically or of the organized living body of a single animal, on the one hand, and ideas on the other, when considered as an interconnected whole relating all that exists, exists virtually rather than being reducible to actual present existence in an instant. The act of perceiving, embodying movement, or representation in thought all emerge as figures from a background, as finite actuality emerges from the virtual infinite. Already with reason we go beyond the instantaneous moment of actuality (sign–anticipation) and abide in the interconnections exceeding the finite and definite existent already produced (naturata). Reason draws more out of what it thinks than the object contains. With the third kind of knowledge, we mobilize reason towards expression. We can invent new modes of thought by integrating insights into the possibilities within the interconnections. In some sense, even the finite mind is infinite when it spreads out into the infinite virtuality of the intellect or understands itself as ecologically embedded. Every thought remains permeated and implicated in an infinity of connections. Every movement remains intertwined in the integrality of the whole: its direction, velocity and information being a reflection of the totality of relations.4 By no means is a mode—a singular thing—merely negative, as the negation of everything else that this thing is not (a thousand nothings would never constitute a substance). We are singular essences, souls defined by the striving to persevere in existence. This is accomplished by weaving itself (a complex system of relation) into the fabric of the infinite intellect and face of nature, following natural divine law.

4. Ethics as Transformation and Transvaluation: The Game of Praise and Blame

Despite having deeply grasped the profundity of Spinoza’s philosophy, Deleuze [1968] (1990) may also show some divergence from Spinoza in that the latter postulated the rational, cognitive act as a purely egoic advantage seeking, rooting the Cartesian cogito in Hobbesian self-interest. Might makes right, the ancient principle of exploitative politics, is living in the gardens of our metaphysics and cannot be dug up and discarded. It will not go away like this in theory, nor in the affects of mind and community. He uses this rational, self-interested will to power to build the arguments in Ethics parts three and four. What he shows is, surprisingly, that even this apathetic rational advantage seeking will recognize the principle behind the adage: two working together is stronger than three alone. Advantage seeking becomes cleansed by intellectual generosity: an emendation to the power of the soul that will seek to maximize its own advantage by using intelligence in an experimental optimization of collective affects—joining others in fellowship. Furthermore, the instinct of survival and the sheer force of life’s inertia are not mere natural rights but are ordered by divine law.5 “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” (Coogan et al. 2018, Deuteronomy 30:19). We are ordered not only to choose life but to seek our own advantage, and thus, not to sacrifice or neglect our own wellbeing. Living with others that truly seek their own advantage, not following imagination and passions, but reason, are “most useful to one another” (E4p35c2).

“Only insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason, must they always agree in nature.”

(E4p35)

Can reason be so emancipated from harm? If we find fault in reason and intelligence, as Bergson does, we nevertheless surpass them with a superior insight. We can change the name of the faculty after its ascendency, but it is not of a wholly different reality than the intelligence that came before it, even if we encounter a new order of magnitude on its emergence—as Kant would say, power greater than any sensible force and from which a vocation arises within reason (see Kant [1790] 2000). Bergson’s intuition is just a higher intelligence that survives the failures of analysis and reason and offers wisdom. Like bodies, we do not yet know what reason can do.

Ethics part 4 propositions 38 and 39 speak of good and evil as merely those qualities that help or hinder rational self-interest. However, our greatest interest is that of communal active affects. Ethics Part 4 proposition 46:

“He who lives according to the guidance of reason strives, as far as possible to repay the hate, anger, and disdain of others with Love and generosity…”

And generosity is defined in part 3:

“By generosity I understand the desire by which each one strives, solely from the dictates of reason, to aid other men and join them to him in friendship. Those actions, therefore, which aim only at the agent’s advantage, I relate to fortitude, and those which aim at another’s advantage, I relate to generosity …[like] courtesy, mercy, and so forth.”

(E3p59s)

Love of God, guided by reason, makes us more generous, strengthens our sociality and opens us to collaborative intensities not possible “on one’s own.” It is a love of the power of intricate convergence of concrete qualities, harmonizing complexity by intelligently orchestrating a multiplicity of singularities. Ideally, like Spinoza himself, we will all become drunk on God’s essence and from this jolt of loving ambition; guided by reason surviving into intuition, we use our intelligence and sensibility to bring together each diverse person’s strengths and needs, in order to form systems of affects that maximize our power regeneratively while maintaining the embryonic transformative intelligence singular to each of us as unique individuations.

Each of us is a singular conatus: an effort uniquely striving to preserve in existence, surviving its concrete situatedness. Each moment of life is a singularity that uniquely affords our conatus the opportunity to invent its powers of acting by having ideas affirm themselves in it. Take this example: an engine affirms an idea: the compression of heat gives off force that can do work if certain solid structures can channel it and convert it into useful forms. The steam engine affirms the idea and communicates its idea by performing work. The inventor learns the ratios of motion and rest that efficiently channel the energy into the work and builds a machine in a way that is most useful in its work. There is an essence to the power it has, and the steam engine is only one manifestation. The internal combustion engine takes the idea in a different mode, manifesting its power through uniquely affirming the inner connections. The embodied soul, as conatus, is not merely a machine with a function, nor a form with an enduring set of relations, but it instead exists beyond its manifestations in the inventive pre-individuated, embryonic potentiality (see Ruyer [1952] 2016). We do not yet know what a body can do! Bodies without brains invent brains for themselves. Humans without language invented their means of expression in sounds, gestures, songs, and symbols. The hand is an organ of organs, an instrument of instruments, just as the brain is the instrumentalize of instruments and orchestrator of concerted movements. We also do not yet know what souls can think and feel, what mental activities can emerge between us if we think and feel together. Each mode is a singularity in the divine tapestry of maximal qualitatively diverse expression. Science, art, philosophy, and political science, in so far as they achieve adequate knowledge, all work to expand our powers of acting and improve our ways of enduring (forming and adjusting ratios of motion and rest). The hubris of western thought has to unfailingly cling to the model of atomistic thought: the idea that, from a few simple unchanging parts, everything can be built like a house from wood and bricks. Geometrical elements are nothing like atoms; they contain more implication in composition than is known prior to assembly.

Our nature is such that we not only need each other to live but especially to become expressive. It is only in exalting our powers through reason that we can convene as humans, not by merely forming consensus about a fact or value, (e.g., not to do harm to one other) but by convening in the powers of the ideas, to form a collective resonance though concerted movements and rests. Ratios of motion and rest form a harmonic matrix which relationally integrates power in an activity that orchestrates the multiplicity of forces. By harmonizing our bodies and spirits in (ideo-motor) community, gathering and working in fellowship, we leap to an order of magnitude greater intensity of life and expression: the same multiplicity in disorder and interference has no trace of the powers and qualities of the integrated order. There is as much to be gained by working in fellowship as there is to be lost in enmity—both are conceived through desire and survival. Three working alone in hate are less capable of violence than when plotting together. Taken all at once, we as humans have the power to destroy one another in hate and violence or work together in love and respect. Our polycrisis implies that a convergence of crises forms a higher-order crisis with greater intensity of destruction: climatological, geopolitical, economic, epidemical, martial. It is our natural right to destroy our life on this planet, just as it is for us to choose wisdom, virtue, and fellowship (TPT 16.2).

It is in our nature not only to work together but to have communal collaboration, which occasions the transformation and transvaluation of our effort. Ambition includes contrary tendencies: for example, there is a passive ambition that feeds on others’ power, based on the principle of pulling others down to move up (e.g., attempting to gain favor through flattery or by displaying our superiority), manipulating others’ emotions to our profit, and exploiting scarcity. Ambition in this sense is an exploit and power grab. But there is an active affect of ambition that includes the desire and pleasure of pleasing others, without the wounding of our spirit in violating the dignity and power of others and ourselves—an ambition to promote and propagate the non-scarce, sharable powers of virtue and intelligence.

Most average Europeans in Spinoza’s time had cultivated an anti-social and passive relation to loving God, based on the adolescent system of sanction, the sort of game of praise and blame—e.g., when the pupil attempts to gain favor before the teacher, using any means necessary to appear virtuous—even, and especially, those attempts to point out the failures of others. In the same way, we have all sought to make ourselves be loved more than others, desired to, and relished in receiving undue praise, perhaps first from our parent and then from friends and even from God (Ep1App). This superficial and confused love of God is completely out of touch with the nature of God, just as it is out of touch with human nature. It is a mere affect of greed and envy, based on imagining God as a father figure or king, which easily evolves into various superstitions promoting hate and other antisocial affects. In chapter three of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza traced many misinterpretations of the Torah and Old Testament that have fueled the idea of a “chosen people.” Using the Song of Solomon and the Psalms, Spinoza shows that God has never shown favor to any nation or race and has spread the gifts of intelligence and virtue to all. This attempt to cheat in the game of praise and blame, to stock up surplus value, cannot make one happy, and it mutilates our idea of human nature and our sense of purpose in life as a whole.

We all have the same vocation: to cultivate our highest powers as singular things, both in ourselves and with one another. The singularity is the unique way an infinity of details come together in each of us in the process of our development, a je ne sais quoi of unique mannerisms and style. We need to playfully explore and expand our powers to find what can become a way of life for us. We need devotions (imminently determined senses of obligation based on our awareness of our powers). There is a childlike wonder and sincerity that is godlike if preserved in adults—the essence of play. There is also childish vengeance and resentment that need to be overcome if one is to escape from maladapted antisocial affects that perpetuate violence and moral stunting. Children often work by the logic of “if I can’t have it, then neither should you!” The contrary is the truth of the matter:

“The greatest good of those who seek virtue is common to all and can be enjoyed by all equally.”

(E4p36)

The game of praise and blame is built on the alternating supremacy of some (worthy of praise; given privilege over scarcity) over others (worthy of blame or sanction). Rather than scorn the childishness that still lives in us all—which would be to reenter the game of praise and blame—Spinoza sought to calmly expose the cause of our obsession, and a road out. Obey your integral self, own your power [acquiescentia in se ipso]! Be true to your fullest potential! Hold and acquire power with solemnity, always seeking bonds of fellowship! Propagate shared and renewable powers! Make knowledge accessible!

An intellectual love of God, guided by reason, implies a progression of transvaluations by our effort as we move deeper into philosophical, scientific, and political revolutions. When we learn that we are capable of such greater powers of action and satisfaction by means of science, technological invention, medicine, and philosophy (all the efforts of intelligence), we often come to perceive a calling or vocation. However, as Bergson said, we must also grow our souls to the size of technology or else be destroyed by it (Bergson 1954, ch. 4). What remains constant in terms of value is the fact that any power of which we become conscious and that we are capable of developing tends to form an obligation or devotion to practicing and exercising the power, developing the virtue (cf. Guyau 1898, p. 91). The awareness of our power to aid others and enter into fellowship with them can transform and transvalue mere possibility into a duty to do so. This duty does not come down by decree like human law from the capital. It communicates itself to us in the very idea of the power in question, which as a power of existing, must be attributed immediately to God. Values change with time, but the power of spiritual fortitude and generosity have remained, in a sense, what they always have been. Likewise, there has and will always be a difference between active affects and passive ones. Affects look different in each epoch and depend on singular expressions and concrete intricacies that cannot be universalized. However, what generosity points at has always been an active affect, a real power, which always has the adverbial structure increasingly/enrichingly existing. It will always be a resonance of modes that implies mutual benefaction. God is the infinite expressive transvaluation that aims at expanding and enriching existence. Generosity is the singular expression of God’s generative power. Guyau often sounded very Spinozist:

“There is a certain generosity which is inseparable from existence, and without which we die—we shrivel up internally. We must put forth blossoms: morality, disinterestedness are the flowers of human life… charity is but one with overflowing fecundity…the heart of the truly humane creature needs to be gentle and helpful to all…the richest life is found to be that which most tends to spend itself lavishly, to sacrifice itself within certain limits, to share itself with others”

(Guyau 1898, p. 87)

In a sense, there is no community amongst those who hate and wound each other. Community is the increase in and evolution of power, made possible by entering into fellowship: there is only community for those who care for and provide for each other’s needs, education, research, and flourishing. Only by cultivating the shared virtues common to all can we participate in divine generativity.

5. Participating in the Infinite: Acquiescentia in Se Ipso

“It is never we who affirm or deny something of the thing; it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us.” (Spinoza, Short Treatise II 16 5). This fact of participation is true of our perception but even more so of intellection.6 We should not say “I think the idea of a triangle” so much as “the triangle affirms itself in my thinking when I construct and examine it.” Despite the myriad critiques of over-intellectualizing or hyper-rationalism—the majority valid in their reproach, but unable to achieve rapprochement with intelligence as an irrepressible force of our psychical life—there has been no coherent affirmation that negates or drives away the evidence of intellectual activity. The triangular idea affirms itself in me when I understand that its inner angles add up to two right angles. We can each verify, in our own experience of intelligence, what its power is, that its causality is unlike anything in the sensible world that bumps into something else, blindly mechanically and transitively. The idea of the triangle is, in a way, non-representational. It is a virtual whole that implicates infinite possible relations within a horizon of permutations. Later, Leibniz would understand this topologically: there is only one triangle that undergoes perspectival deformations that are not falsehoods, it is the truth of the unique angle by which the triangle is viewed (see Halpern 2023, p. 69).7 The idea implies all the possible deformations themselves, not actualized but as a virtual infinite inner thread that connects them as deformations of each other as with the musical modes of a single scalar sequence.

Every idea involves a duplicity of infinity and simplicity. An idea is one in its virtuality, plural in its manifestations. The phenomenology of intelligence uncovers these facts that no critique of intellect can evade. The infinite and yet formally coherent simplicity of an idea thinks itself in me and just as the blue of the sky affirms itself in each of us as we gather together under it,8 so the triangle thinks itself in us when we understand it. Our minds have become far closer together in Spinoza’s vision of the ideas in the infinite intellect. We commune in ideas just as we dwell together in homes and towns.

In Descartes, our minds are as if in separate universes, both from each other and from our bodies. In the larger cultural trends of modernity, we find self-love, egoism, and individualist values, and this is all reflected in the fighting states of Europe, which each wanted to rule the others with its own customs. La Rochefoucauld says, “Self-love is the greatest of flatterers.” (La Rochefoucauld 2017, maxim 2). The ego is a mutilated idea that lives in a mind at war with itself and with others. This all stems from thinking our joy comes from praise rather than from practicing virtue.

When we affirm our own nature and that of others, we cannot but feel the intensification of fortitude of spirit and generosity promoting a sisterhood of mankind. By participating in our regenerative, non-scarce, sharable potentials, we continuously develop the plasticity of the human form, by working in fellowship together to transform and transvalue human life as such, to invent greatest possible powers. All power expresses divine law so that virtue and knowledge increase our powers of existing by participating in God’s creative essence (naturans). Participation implies singular expressions embedded in concrete situations that grow and expose powers (fields of transformable potentiality), which are, somewhat paradoxically, sharable and regenerative. Some inventions lead to several new inventions that go in very different directions, implicating more than they contain and opening new horizons.

Spinoza cannot be an atheist, as so many have claimed. This assertion is not new but has been suggested in every generation since he started sharing his ideas—it probably began even before his excommunication. He sincerely believed in the existence of God, a being absolutely infinite, expressing infinite realities. To this day, and now for different reasons, we no longer scorn but praise his atheism and frame it as an inspiration for “new atheisms” that affirm antireductionisms of life, value, and beauty, but not the sacred or divine. This is untenable, and, while I think an agnostic reading can be viable today for contemporary agnostics, it should not be predicated on the notion that Spinoza himself was agnostic or atheist, but that his ideas are open to transgressive reinterpretation. To understand God’s role in Spinoza’s thinking is to understand his entire philosophy. God is not a parental figure of sanction, but the infinite power to create realities via a plurality of infinities. To do away with knowledge of God is to do away with infinity, power, necessity, and everything that makes knowledge adequate and diverse.

The infinite is not one thing of its own kind with a single nature. There is an absolute infinity of production (naturans), another of expression (attributes) that we experience as infinite thinking and moving, and there is a modal infinity of organizing and persevering modes within attributes. On top of these three hypostatic infinities, there are Leibnizian infinities of scale within modes, as well as an infinite web of transitive causes with no linear start or emanative center (the face of nature). Above all, the infinite is not merely extension or quantity but involves qualitative multiplicity of expression and the emergence of singular formal structures. A stick is infinitely divisible into parts; it can be cut anywhere on its extension. In concrete life, these are not mere differences of degree or quantity: some areas of the stick have qualitatively different outcomes; certain ratios will often have greater advantages and disadvantages. There will often be shadings of potency within a certain “latitude.” We will not break the stick in any place within its infinite potential, but where it makes the difference. There are an infinite number of combinations of the same seven notes of a diatonic scale, but the composer, when partway through a song, considers what note should go next, and not all of them have equal advantage and beauty: they pick one and not the others because of what came before and where it is going at that moment. Potencies change moment by moment due to global changes of ratio in the multiplicity of movements and rests. There are not only the seven modes of the diatonic but many other possible scalar structures and divisions of the octave. Even in one mode, there are not only differences of degree but of kind, so that each melody is as a singular modal perspective of its own. Like the underlying unity of the triangle and its relation to the truth of any given deformation, likewise, we affirm as much of the idea as we can, based on our local distortions of modal interdependence. We are not just living in a land of ignorance and then are transported to the heavenly realm of forms. Rather, we live ideas at every moment, affirming themselves in us when we breathe, eat, and work to persevere in existence. We affirm the power of the melody when we give it body. Philosophic community, based on mutual aid and democratic generosity, is the only idea that affirms itself in the mind of one who has come to understand the mind and its relation to other minds, the heart in its love of spirit and virtue, and the body in its concerted motions and grace.

The highest virtue we can strive after, according to Spinoza, is acquiescentia in se ipso, a tranquility in one’s power. He borrowed the term from Hobbes and Descartes (See Carlisle 2021, pp. 112–33). Acquiescence means, first of all, to consent, obey, oblige. It is to act in accordance with a command: to obey one’s imminently determined telos of emendation and virtue building, and to stay true to one’s potential and vocation. This, for each of us, is a matter of singularity within relation. In order to actualize our potential, and, even more so, to change and develop our potential, we must mobilize the resources in our concrete situatedness and take fortune into our own hands.

Carlisle (2021) has shown that there are three kinds of acquiescentia corresponding to the three types of knowledge. The first kind is a confused and dysfunctional mixture of obedience to the passions and especially to the false self they project as their source and patron. The drunk thinks they chose to say the things they later regret, rather than confront the fact that affects are driven by an internal power of their own and that, when we drink excessively, we are tossed about by affects that do not have our own nature as their cause, nor our benefit as their end. By the second, we look on life’s twists and turns with the tranquil acceptance of understanding that the course of things was not guided to reward and punish but by the power to move and think that comes from the laws of nature and that those who think themselves to act from vengeance or flattery cannot be acting from knowledge of their actions effect nor thus from free will. The drunk did not drink in order to say the things they later regretted, nor does the envious person intentionally become angry in order to foster their antisocial sense of self-love. But the philosopher who seeks to uncover their true power via knowledge of the nature of movement and thought, experimentally discovering what is actually possible, as they grow their power, obeys the way (tao) of things in their process, fostering their flourishing in often unexpected ways, without brute force or violence. Acquiescentia in se ipso is like following the grain, abiding by the concrete articulations, obeying our calling to grow, develop, and advance our singular powers together in community.

6. The Blessed Community of Philosophers

Above all, philosophy is a matter of friendship, generosity, and propagating power. When we philosophize with others, we mutually empower each other with shared insights and well-intended criticisms. The Ethics is a text that changes its reader, altering their power and sense of what is possible. It is possible that true philosophers are the best and fastest-forming friends, since they are keen to pick up signs of the philosophical and moral virtues in the actions, gestures, and conversations of others; they are also most likely to value these virtues as goods shared by all, and to desire to build them up in each other. Perhaps they will also be more willing to endure the faults of others, less likely to take their violence as personal attacks, and so more open to restorative justice through education and relationship building than scorn, sanction, or excommunication (E4p46). This is not to say that everyone who calls themselves a philosopher actually embodies these percepts, but, if there ever be philosophers worthy of the name, they will have temperaments that follow this sort of grain. They possess the proclivity to benefit others by sharing in the powers of mindfulness, reflection, and inventiveness. They recognize this incredible benefit that the other philosopher provides to their own vocation and community (E4p37). It is the same as with a great and sincere musician when they meet another of similar character, ability, and devotion: all they want is to make music together in as playful a way as they can. If they wind up trying to ‘one up’ one another, it is out of desire to inspire the other, to be outdone by the other in return. They want to surprise each other and themselves with what they can do together. There will likely always be fighting among philosophers9 but, ultimately, the openness to ongoing conversation keeps philosophers in a community that facilitates the expansion and development of reason taken to a higher order of magnitude, a sui generis affect that integrates the concrete affordances and optimizes the harmony of our strivings in regenerative ways. These are open-source ideas.

Nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, and other differences cannot rationally motivate discrimination (E4p37s1).10 This sort of discrimination is based in the imagination’s susceptibility to anti-social affects such as pride (E3p26) envy, resentment, and revenge, which are natural to our inclinations (E3p55s). In chapter three of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, we read: “these gifts of understanding and virtue are not the special property of any nation, but have always been common to the whole human race.” (TPT, 3.5). Our nature explains both our anti-social passions and our active affects, but in very different ways. Why do people cling to their unhappiness and foster the superstitions and nationalism that keep us in perpetual war with each other, despite of the fact that our greatest power and virtue are formed in community? How is it that we can all find evidence of this principle in our lives (one human to another is a god, or two working together is better than three alone), and stories told to us as children have attempted to inculcate this sublime duty in us. Why do we act as if we can heroically rise above others and be happy by towering above through no authentic improvement of our power, but by merely putting others down. Spinoza traces our antisocial affects back to fear and hatred arising from inadequate knowledge of the causes of things. Viciousness and vengeance are born of a wounded heart that acts in a way that is not adequate to what it desires. Remorse is an affect that consists of a spiritual wounding, painful consciousness of what one cannot take back or undo. It implies the tension of generosity (wanting to undo the damage) with the irreversibility of time and our inability to control our actions so as to avoid future regret. Envy is the most insidious of the passions because of its prevalence and ease of manifesting in new forms. Envy is pleasure at others’ misfortune or pain at their fortune. Nothing is more at odds with our spirit, and yet we all experience envy at some point in our lives. Envy is a necessary symptom of a society of people dominated by inadequate or mutilated ideas of themselves and each other. We move past it by gaining knowledge of its relation to power.

Violence wounds the executer, stunting their moral development, trapping them in the vicissitudes of mutilated ideas while taking others down with them. Tyrants increase their power by weakening everyone. Honor, in patriarchal values and cultures, works not only via surplus human dignity granted through venerating (not authentically as with gifts of sensibility: mothers, teachers, friends, artists, scientists, mystics, or philosophers, those whose care propagates power and facilitates regenerative enrichment of power),11 but through a sort of “handicap” advantage that has not made one stronger but weakens the others. Within patriarchy, masculinity, signifying authority, stratifies power relations by “handicapping” all others’ claims to power. This and similar supremacist worldviews weaken the perpetrator of oppression to such an extent that they sink into ever more depraved forms of cruelty and violence. Violence and any act aimed at placing oneself above by pushing others down can have no place in the political sphere of adequate knowledge, cannot be conceived in the mind of one who adequately understands God and the relationships that we have to one another. We each absolutely need each other, not only for our survival, but even more for our skill building, flourishing, and happiness. Things such as mutual aid, caring for those in need, or the insistence on funding and improving our systems of education—democratic initiatives to improve the lives of those most vulnerable—become an obvious obligation to Spinoza’s rational intuition: ethics rather than theology or metaphysics, is the true seat of the philosophical vocation.

7. From Ambitions to Vocation

Did we evolve to love harmony by a surplus of pleasures, as with Pinker’s cognitive cheesecake, or did the love of the harmonic series evolve to form a surplus of value related to inventing new work activity, i.e., devotion and vocation? Harmony is structured according to simple ratios of movement, e.g., 2:1, 3:2, or 5:4. Their simplicity makes them recognizable, while greater dissonance limits recognizable structure and interesting patterning. Simple patternings lend themselves to the complex work activity of composition and performance. While natural law makes all notes equal at all times, the intention of melody making sees only one or two possible notes to play next at any given moment and choses one for its distinctive character in the unfolding of the melody. Did humans choose to start making melodies, or did the patterns of tonality, the harmonic series, like the siren calls, enchant us?

The fact is that purely accidental formations of needs arising from contingent luxuries are not the same as the development of a vocation, based on virtues that align with the very nature of our body, mind, and community. Music uses tonality because the physics of sound affords us this potential for expressive participation, but musicians have also made music without tonality. Did we evolve to be beings with higher callings from a surplus of leisure or did higher callings in some sense pre-exist human evolution and even have some role in precipitating the whole system of physical movements and biological expansion? If we do not yet know what a body can do, it is likely we have also greatly misperceived what they have already been doing to get us where we are.

Regarding the emergence of vocation from action, or generosity from ambition, we acquire a need and even a self-imposed duty to not only act but practice and develop our action or thought. We require a sufficient force of motivation and to learn from others so that we achieve a convergence of ideas resonating as a whole, as much as a convergence of concerted movements with shifting harmonies and rhythms. The love of harmony is always, fundamentally, a love of virtue and power that comes from the nature of God. Just as life implies a plurality of vital and regenerative actions, which co-contribute to an intensity of a whole new order of magnitude from its components, so too vocation directs us to actions and thoughts that resonate and form a sui generis unity. This is grasped most profoundly for us with singular things individuating expressively, active affects based in virtual interconnected intelligence—naturans. We understand God through singular things because we see what is divine within them: their power to enrich, expand, regenerate and invent power. The more we see this, the more we love others and seek to form bonds of fellowship.

A vocation is an active affect that seeks to expand, expending its surplus in order to stretch out and attune to other tensions, but, simultaneously, in the convergent affective intensities of the cohesion of virtues, it regenerates its reserves and even grows power through a synauxesis (mutually augmenting synergy) (see Bagby 2024), both transforming and transvaluing our collective individuation. A vocation is not just fortitude of spirit, but an almost mystical and moral obligation that we place on ourselves, or rather, find in our hearts, that creates an unrealistic overvaluation of the worth of our effort and dedication. A vocation is a profound devoted, akin to a religious investment in a way of life. The surplus of value does not merely accrue value; it changes its nature and aim, it modulates its register of relevance, and, ultimately, in the generosity of intellectual–moral–aesthetic friendship, we learn who we are by being defined through our relationships. We gain our virtues by being inspired and encouraged by those who are already cultivating themselves, not to emulate but to come into an equality of valuation within a pluralism of needs and enjoyments.12

As our vocation makes us increasingly value the investment of our effort, we see more and more the advantages of our cooperative efforts. Spinoza works tirelessly to craft his text machine of mystical illumination via intellectual emendation. Above all, the Ethics acts as an inceptive communication of vocation, a challenge to be met with sweat and determination that ultimately depends on our scholarly communities and our ability to foster respect, openness, and conversation. Like Ibn Tufayl’s character Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Tufayl 2009), we are all curious and inquisitive, perhaps even carrying within us the seeds of science and mystical revelation. When we act in accordance with our true power, we exercise freedom in obedience to the divine law, finding and enacting what is generative and productive to our shared flourishing. Rather than a bootstraps individualism or grind culture, we end up with tranquility of mental and emotional acquiescence. As we will see, this does not involve quietism or retreat from the world. Rather than giving up the toil of effort, it transforms our effort from toil to joyous expression.

8. The Meaning of Freedom, or How to Acquiesce in the Nature of God

One of the biggest hurdles for many contemporary process-oriented readers of Spinoza is his harsh rebuke of the notion of free will and the legal and social systems of sanction based upon it. This difficulty applies to his psychology, which he treats as working in the same way as the construction of figures in geometry, i.e., akin to lines, planes, and figures. This is actually a less mechanical analogy than it sounds at first, although it is fully deterministic. Lines and planes build figures; they are component parts. Every triangle involves lines and points on a plane, but lines and points on their own, uncomposed, do not contain the idea of a triangle. Their implication in the idea of the triangle is not akin to a mechanical cause or an ingredient. We might make a metaphor from cooking: mix some lines and points, bake them or ferment them, and let the internal constitution change as a whole. The irreversible series is constructive insofar as it produces novel conclusions not contained in the premises. While geometrical knowledge is deterministic, and we cannot have triangles without lines and points, it also involves orders of magnitude, qualitative variations, and novel forms of organization. Emotions do not merely gear into one another in a machine, but rather they compose qualitative orders of magnitude. When certain emotions are cultivated and placed in a series in such a way as to resonate (as scenes of a play work together to tell the story, or songs on an album are not only well curated and well-ordered but written from shared inspirations and perspectives), they compose active affects. While they do not constitute free will in the cartesian or egoic sense, they do provide Spinoza with a philosophy of freedom in fellowship.

Vital intensities, conati, are never a matter of linear maximalization, but rather latitudinal optimization in a mean state between extremes. If all consciousness is degrees of intensity of effort or affects, if reality itself is a great scale of power on which we are all measured, it is equally true that linear changes on this scale are never continuous, comparisons are always perspectival, and thresholds abound at which point a shift in quality occurs. Nor can increases in intensity always be correlated with goodness and use, while decreases are always bad. Examples abound in skilled action where force needs to be precisely attenuated: more is not better and sometimes a David beats a Goliath. Furthermore, the optimization of active affects does not always mean a quantitative increase in power; more often it is a new quality of action, under a new idea that makes the biggest difference. Some of the most intense and sublime affects include tranquility, composure, and simplicity.

What is freedom? To common sense, it means doing what you choose, and what you choose in some way is based on knowledge (e.g., choosing an outcome and orchestrating the means to achieve it); a person’s freedom is measured first by how well they fulfill their intention and, second, negatively, by how it was hindered by outside forces. If freedom is understood in this way, as acting well such that a person produces the situation as intended, then this freedom is based in ideas and, at least partly, in adequate knowledge. If freedom is adequate knowledge that manifests in actions, then the cause determining the effect is not “free will” in the Cartesian sense of an indeterminate affirmation, but rather we act by the determination of the idea that affirms itself in us.

What, above all, does our freedom consist of for Spinoza? Cohering with others in a way that is in accord with our essence. Since our essence is partly open and negotiable, since we are each singular things existing in unique situations, each of us must affirm the ideas in our own way. Spinoza’s big move is to detach freedom from desire, which is passive, always determined by its relation to transitive causality. He then attaches it to the ideas that affirm themselves in us, which is to say that he attaches all responsibility back to God. Why does building a chamber and creating pressure within it actually work to build an engine? Why does using our intelligence to observe and experiment actually work to invent machines like engines? The idea of freedom is affirmed in the inventor when they arrange their thoughts and affects so as to engage in experimenting and experience building. When they learn to organize affects and forces so as to synergize in a coherent activity, is this the work of an indeterminate free will, or the freedom of intelligence carried by active affects that find what works, letting the ideas affirm themselves in assemblage? To will is to affirm the essence of an idea (E2p49), and our biggest affirmations are those that concern our power to form bonds of fellowship, to grow virtues together in collaboration.

Can one be free to hurt themselves and others? Is free action anything one does wherein they are simultaneously conscious of their desire and power? The murderer not only acts but also is conscious of the desire to kill. Natural license is our “freedom” to being enslaved by passions. If there is another affect that is at least as strong as this but runs contrary to it, one will vacillate between the two actions. When they are aligned with committing the act, they think and imagine every possible method and every reason why the act is justified. When they swing to the contrary they duly imagine being caught and question their motives. The thought eventually overpowers them and is executed. Remorse, when it arises, will consist of the memory of their desire and the eventual enactment. They feel responsible and that they could have done otherwise. The truth is that the affects that won and lead to action were not arbitrarily chosen but in fact had greater strength. The figures of our emotions are formed from the lines and planes of other emotions, love of self, love of others; what else are fear, envy, or resentment than refractions of loves and hates through circumstances that shape them into more complex constructions. How can one feel remorse but if they gather their memories of the various affects and composing them into a unique figure? The intensity and quantity of memories, perceptions, and feelings crosses a threshold and enters into action.13

The question of freedom comes down to the perspective of transitive and intransitive causality. If I act under compulsion of external influence, I am by no means a free cause, but a determined one (E1d7 and E3d2). We are deeply woven in a system of causes that vastly exceeds our comprehension. Our existence is dependent on the climate systems that organize the biosphere. No doubt we all experience transitive causality daily in which we are determined by an external force. The warmth of the sun is a necessity of life’s expansion and development. The plant also collects the energy of the sun in photosynthesis. Some of these actions are determined by the plant’s essence, its conatus, its power to persevere in existence. Its growth is a free action in the presence of external energy on which it depends. We all depend on each other in so many ways (why must we repeat this fact so many times?) but this dependency often escapes our notice and various antisocial affects encourage us to ignore the web of life or the invisible labor of women and focus on the game of egos, or praise and blame, or partisanship and hate. Everything, for Spinoza, revolves around breaking the spell of our antisocial behavior, the mutilated ideas that organize our lives and make us keep playing the game. This game is constructed on envy and the confused ideas that (1) one can, by their own action, satisfy their desires, and (2) social dynamics can be manipulated to favor one’s own interest at others’ expense. The opposite ideas (that our highest fulfilments are communal, and we can only work in fellowship not bondage) are true, adequate, and reflect the nature of our existence. When the true ideas can be connected to situations in which the ego can play its games, we can extinguish them with their contraries. Active affects will gradually shade out the weeded undergrowth of ego and envy, so long as they do not prevail in diseasing the tree before it can grow broad enough to preserve itself.

The gardener does all they can to draw the most out of the plant’s active affects. Often, its motions and alterations need to be guided, because its tendencies are equipped to respond to multiple senecios, not all of which are advantageous. For example, if the plant can develop all its shoots, the fruit growth will suffer due to spreading its energy too thinly with unnecessary leaf growth. The gardener prunes the shoots to help the plant grow bigger fruit. Likewise, when one plant has certain needs and another has excessive biproducts that match and satisfy the same needs, they plant them together. The gardener is not using their “free will” to determine what they desire but rather achieves a state of freedom in assemblage, by organizing the affects to promote the maximal symbiosis. They propagate the idea that affirms itself not merely in the mind of the gardener artisan, but in the plants themselves. Whose freedom is this? The gardener will feel some responsibility, knowing that if they did not interfere in the precise way that they do, that the plants could destroy each other rather than organize by chance. When an architect builds a house and its gardens based on intimate knowledge of geology, hydrology, local ecology, meteorological climatology, botany, and zoology, they will gather the ideas of each and determine how they can optimally affirm the idea of the house and its inhabitant. Freedom is the ability to cultivate ideas in a community of artists, researchers, and dwellers. It is to expand our affects via the communal cultivation of our virtues. We cannot hope to manage the world and our fellow community members as a gardener tends plants, but the analogy can be ammended to encourage the growth of an insight. We all have tendencies that can become maladapted. The greatest power of our virtue consists in actions that often have no manifest effects, i.e., those of restraining appetites. It takes more effort to stop our attention from randomly flitting with the appetites of a thousand micro-perceptions than in turning our head. It takes more energy to resist our passions than to follow them, even if it drives us to the most energized actions. We must tend and cultivate the garden of affects that we live in together; we all have tendencies that will become antisocial if they are nor pruned in conversation. If we cannot endure the vulnerability of open dialogue, if we cannot step out of the game of praise and blame, and look instead to what works and does not, what emends the spirit and what maims it, we cannot experience freedom. Theories of sanction, going back to Plato, have had to answer to Socrates’ challenge that punishment often does more harm than good, that the wrongdoer becomes more criminally minded. Teachers can only selectively use insult as a hortatory medicine, and always at the risk of wounding the spirit and entraining the game of praise and blame. We only praise to be praised and the refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice (La Rochefoucauld 2017, maxims 146–49).14

There is no freedom in the game of praise and blame, only in the restorative justice that builds a bridge between the criminal and the community from which they sever themselves when they violate its holy sanctions: the divine law that one human is to another as a god. These laws are based on human nature, natural law written in the book of nature (See TPT, ch. 4), not on human laws, social contracts enforced by the populous as a compromise—rationally balancing exposure to danger with an advantage taken over others. Human law is optimized when no one can have unfair advantage over others, no surplus human dignity bought at the price of destroying the dignity of both the oppressor and oppressed. But natural divine law is evident in the world and in our hearts. Can we live in community and kill each other? Can we be in community and not treat each other with respect and dignity? Is that even a community? A fortiori, can we possibly live without community? The life of solitude is in fact the internal civil war of one’s passions, drowning out our essence, depriving us of light and nourishment. Our nature, our actual essence, keeps us abiding in existence; our conatus (by which Spinoza means our virtue and our power; E4d8) does not, cannot exist in isolation from other conati. To live in accordance with our concrete horizon of possibilities, with the power that we actually posses as humans, has and will always mean a life of community. We are deeply dependent on each other; it is necessary to our survival, virtue, and happiness, and every resistance to this fact is a symptom of mutilated ideas, uncontrollable maladapted, antisocial passions fixated on the game of praise and blame. The fantasy of the rugged individual has been propagated so vastly and under so many varied forms that a pandemic of eidetic mutilation currently predominates the human sphere, as it did in Spinoza’s own time:

“True joy and happiness lie in the simple enjoyment of what is good and not in the kind of false pride that enjoys happiness because others are excluded from it. Anyone who thinks that he is happy because his situation is better than other people’s or because he is happier and more fortunate than they, knows nothing of true happiness and joy, and the pleasure he derives from his attitude is either plain silly or spiteful and malicious. For example, a person’s true joy and felicity lie solely in his wisdom and knowledge of truth, not in being wiser than others or in others’ being without knowledge of truth, since this does not increase his own wisdom which is his true felicity. Anyone therefore who takes pleasure in that way is enjoying another’s misfortune, and to that extent is envious and malign, and does not know true wisdom or the peace of the true life.”

(TPT, 3.1)

A young or inexperienced gardener one day will cry out “these godforsaken ants are eating my strawberries!”; Spinoza’s blessed tranquility steps in and melts the growing anger. God has not forsaken the ant, but neither has the ant been gifted with the strawberry to my own forsakenness. The game of praise and blame ends when we see the ant as a mode in the web of life. We enter into the divine recreation when we find what other already existing resources there are to alleviate the situation. The problem with the Old Testament commandments in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is not that they fail to prescribe necessary moral/political correctives, but that they do so in commandments that do not explain why we are so commanded. Thou shall not kill because killing is deeply at odds with our nature and wounds us morally and intellectually. We must go from ignorance and natural law to knowledge of divine law. Thus, according to Spinoza, knowledge by active affects aligns with Christ and the teachings of Paul insofar as “love thy neighbor” summarizes the other nine commandments, because it explains them all through action, through the devotion to community building that makes possible authentic charity, the generosity of spirit called agape. Do not blame the ant and return hate on it. Can the same affect arise in human affairs without permitting what we currently consider sanctionable actions?

Admiring Spinoza’s life and work, one becomes impressed by not only the precision of his geometrical order or the vastness of the scope of his considerations, but above all his sincerity, fortitude, and generosity of his heart. The true marks of freedom: the tranquility of abiding in generosity, always returning hate with love (E4p46). Freedom becomes a machine for the invention of gods, as Bergson said (Bergson 1954, p. 317), when the two diametrically opposed philosophers miraculously met back up in the middle, on their opposite paths through metaphysics, to agree on the purpose of philosophy and life itself. We can actively engage in expressing existence, but only when we act according to our nature, which means working together in collaboration. It is true that only you can find this truth for yourself, no one can enforce it on you or decide what you feel in your heart. It is also true that we depend on each other, not merely in bodies but in ideas: when we find our truth in the singularity of our individuation, when we invent a philosophical engine in ourselves, in our communities, when we build each other up into philosophers. This is always a singular assemblage of affects and yet it is a conduit of ideas affirming themselves in us. Everyone has two philosophies, Bergson said in a 1927 letter to the Société française de Philosophie: their own and Spinoza’s (Bergson 1959, p. 587). This is perhaps truer of Bergson than anyone else, and a fact which Deleuze certainly sought to undermine. Bergson even says that we become Spinozists when we read the Ethics. This is because Spinoza builds his philosophy in us. It affirms itself in us as we learn to think entirely in the system of citations and interconnections:

“That’s why, however much we may have engaged, through our personal reflections, in paths different from those Spinoza followed, we nonetheless become spinozists once more, to a certain extent, each time we reread the Ethics, because we have the clear impression that such is exactly the altitude where philosophy must place itself, such is the atmosphere in which the philosopher truly breathes.”

(Bergson 1959, p. 587.)

It is because there is something true to the nature of the philosophical vocation that Spinozism continues to survive in Bergson’s own life, so different that they nevertheless were (see Astesiano 2016). It is not that we choose to be philosophers from an indeterminate whim, but instead it is because we have experienced the power of philosophy that we can no longer be satisfied with living without philosophy! This is just how it is with ideas—unity and simplicity coexist with complexity and multiplicity, determinate affirmation, and expressive openness—seven notes forming a system of related modulations between scales with an infinite potential of melody making in each mode. Each mode of the idea encapsulates a whole system of affects and signs, but as actualized moment by moment, one particular note at a time, while the other notes are temporarily absent. Conceiving an idea implies a duration of thought moving from one gestalt-affect to another, while also expressing a species of eternity, that an infinity of absent expressions are possible. When we think of a triangle we are not simultaneously thinking of a circle, at least with respect to the same figure at the same moment. But we can think them in relation by means of modulation within the idea of geometry, or topologically through bending and straightening. The event of surpassing reason modulates our ideation. There is an affirmation of existence and survival in the striving for intellectual generosity. This affirmation constitutes our freedom. It is the freedom of expanding our intelligent perceptivity to express more of the infinite. To participate more in creative expressions that not only accomplish an action but invents a way of being, sets a goal of becoming, inspires a vocation. His idea of freedom, rooted in the infinite power of God and the infinite intellect, provides us with a space to tranquilly hold each other in the affirmation of our existence, not only to survive, but to affirm life, to tend to the garden of our affects and orchestrate our efforts into a better world that draws more out of us than we knew was possible. In this way, we come to know God through singular things.

9. Conclusions: We Do Not Yet Know What Spinoza Can Do

Today, we prioritize competitive academics where indeed one looks better by merely showing the faults of others. Arguably, this is still the best way to get ahead and succeed in academia. If a person writes an article that does not pick fights with contemporary authors, their work will be considered imperceptive. Collegiate combat is seen as the only way to the clear truth. Can learning and intelligence be all about coming out on top, making a show of our superiority of position? Is this not another new figure constructed from our old antisocial affects, powered by envy? Can we write generous philosophy without envy?

I am a singular thing endeavoring to expand and enrich my power in the philosophical community. I may indeed have two philosophies: my own, which I work to understand and clarify by inventing it in dialogue with others (a work I admit is incomplete), and Spinoza’s masterpiece of elegant enlightenment. But I also am constantly comparing my thoughts to his, and I can no longer say where his ends and mine begins. I am a freedomist of the Bergsonian and Merleau-Pontian persuasion and have long fought against determinisms. Whether this is a point of divergence from Spinoza in my philosophy is an open question when Spinozan determinism is framed as dynamic, emergent, and organismic. Where Bergson sees indeterminacy and contingency as the basis of our freedom, Spinoza sees an infinite intricacy of the idea as virtual power or tendency. In both cases, the result of freedom is dynamic organization aimed at practical optimization and moral transvaluation. In both cases, the affect takes center stage—effort is everything. We have access to ideas as our birthright and gradually our access to them, through singular inventiveness, causes us increasingly to own our power, to take up education and developing virtue from a sense of duty.

Bergson almost scolds the Spinozan percept “Comprendre et ne pas s’indigner” in his controversial political text The Meaning of the War, as he championed the need for a righteous form of anger: indignation in the face of the atrocities of war (Bergson 1915). Sharp (2019) has shown us how generosity has a militant or marshal force to it, but that it does not force or return violence with violence but instead conquers the violence of the other by making them joyful yield to the fulfilment of their higher powers (E4p46s). No doubt both Bergson and Spinoza advocated for openness, the open rather than closure: open systems, opensource knowledge production, open society, the opening of the heart. Jean-Marie Guyau is perhaps the most Spinozist of the French spiritualists; a comparative work on Spinoza, Guyau, Bergson and French spiritualism is much needed, and would doubtless contribute to a process-participatory interpretation of Spinozism as a philosophy of life.

Ultimately, Spinoza has helped me define my vocation as a philosopher and my standards for community. If I diverge on the strictness of his views of self-interest and the restriction on any personal qualities of my relation to God, or if I have imparted a Bergsonian reading of conatus as inventively drawing more from itself than it contains, these will perhaps not constitute a complete misalignment with the aim of his book. Its influence on my life and thought transcends the limits of its precise formulations. It has changed what I find satisfying in philosophy and in life. We will perhaps someday outgrow democratic republicanism, as we attempt still in our own time to move beyond the games of praise and blame and the antisocial affects of envy, prejudice, and superstitions—every action aimed at pulling others down to pull ourselves up. Generous intelligence looks beyond the scarcity and instrumentality of property ontology to the fruits of collective empowerment so that to “own” one’s power is to take it as a duty to enrich and increase our degree of perfection in collaboration.

For Spinoza, we need not live this way, besieged by constant war between nations, morally stunted by all the violence, and addicted to affects that perpetuate civil war in ourselves. We mostly do harm to ourselves and others, reasoning by opinion with the goal of extracting advantage from the situation, and it is only with great effort and care, rare as they be, that we may pull each other up through education and bonds of fellowship. We can change, but we will not unless we address some real situations regarding the existing powers that act continuously to keep us in mutilated ideas and passive affects. We have habits of emotions and mind that will not change unless we make an effort to do so: be it the addiction to the emotional roller-coaster of scrolling through social media, or the game of praise and blame that dominates our political discourse.

There is no free will to choose what we wish; it is the sobering moment witnessing our power and its true essence that shows a horizon of possibilities and then feeling the need to work on developing it further. Other humans are the greatest gift to each other’s wellbeing and friendship means being transformed by our experience of this potential: we feel a completely new value, sui generis, not a mere juxtaposing of the component affect (the other is another myself who I value “as if” they were me). This is a new sense of purpose, which has a style and character that we could not conceive of before experiencing it for ourselves. Once we have been initiated into its mysterious je ne sais quoi, once we learn the singular style of our power, we become devoted to developing it further. The singular quality is not an actualized form that can be mapped and analyzed, it is a virtuality never present all at once, but which manifests in consistent deformations and real interconnections. It is an evolving pattern of affects that unroll through various stages and cannot be understood if represented by one moment of its duration. True friendship is a common notion, a shared adequate idea that modulates our desire. We desire to enhance the concrete singularities of life with others—reciprocal generosity and enjoyment.

We must learn not only to see how our power is being parasitically depleted, but also where it is supported and amplified. If we are going to escape the destruction of our species by its own hand, it will be by working together to understand what works and what does not. The game of praise and blame does not work and is actively dangerous. If you are not creative enough to think of an alternative, then that is all the more reason to form bonds of fellowship with those who are giving it a sincere effort. We are at the edge of a polycrisis of not only geo-political, economic, and climatological cataclysmic change, but of mental, spiritual, and moral health. A pandemic of mutilated ideas festers in us, growing with vegetative consumption of content, our doom scrolling, loss of meaningful work, and loss of intimate friendships. Soon, AI will likely initiate a cascade of unemployment that will leave larger portions of the population without anywhere to sell their labor. Where will we find new powers that we can enrich into regenerative, morally uplifting affects? How do we escape perpetuating bigotry and oppression? How can we truly empower one another? What will cause us to organize and commit to fellowship beyond the divisions of social and moral closer? Not in one’s nation or in war, this is to remain with the principle of violence that maims our moral progress (violating the dignity of the other to increase our power). Will humanity continue to fester in its weakness, unable to rise because every effort is tinged with antisocial passions that draws us all lower, or will we learn to return hate with love and generosity and live within the regenerative virtuality growing from our love of God?

People typically do not want to change the way they think and act. Habits endure not only by the force of automatic repetition, but also by motivating inventive imagination and fantasy, forming false opinions about the evil of doing things otherwise, and demonizing anyone who thinks and acts differently. One reason people are slow to question and change their political beliefs is because they fear being blamed for holding the wrong views. Mainstream politics today is dominated by the game of praise and blame—feeling envious joy when the other side meets misfortune and pained by their successes. Playing the game, and spectating, we surge through the affects of envy, jealousy, and greed. However, in this mean-spirited “play”, we always excuse our own “cheating”—e.g., how Instagram photo norms become an ideal of self-presentation, at bottom an ambition to make others envious of us—while also finding fault in others for being superficial. We are really addicted to displaying our superiority through superficiality. We must rather immediately resume cultivating our singular potentials, concretely embedded in our place and time, and with a respect for the singularity of the other to use intelligence to empower. The power we compose through these bonds of fellowship surpasses all other joys, such as gratifications of ego and materialistic consumption. In the age of mass consumption, we are emptied of real satisfaction of body and mind. A pervasive effect of the technological, industrial, and capitalistic world is chronic anxiety and unease: we do not have a steady heart, often feeling we are compromising our morals or not investing our time in a way that builds up what is most real in our earthly community and spiritual potential. Now, perhaps more than ever before, there is depression, hopelessness, and defeat—the meaning crisis links the diverse modalities of polycrisis and helps explain them all. There might also come to be rapid expansions of insight, those that lead to a life lived in pursuit of the highest good to which one can advance. We might experience a rapid onset of rationality surpassing itself, awakening a philosophical participation on mass scale. This dread and mourning at the collapse of our climatological stability, or of the collapse of our shared truths and values, is, in a way, the inverse of the unity created by hilaritas—which affects the whole body and mind and attunes them to our singularity—an ironic nihilism that satirizes its self-sabotage. This present dread connects all aspects of our contemporary predicament. It consists in part of an assessment of existential risk, but even more in the sense of our lost opportunity, or, rather, the loss of our ability to truly love and care for each other. We are truly capable of so much more than we realize.

Societies should, above all, form institutions that promote wellbeing through mutual aid and education. But neither state nor institution can legislate the desires and habits of minds suited to living freely while preserving the safety of everyone. The crisis of meaning is a crisis in vocation. Historically, it was common to use the family bond and the duties of parenting to sustain a sense of purpose, but this too is disappearing rapidly. What is going to power our strivings to persevere in existing together? How can we even survive? We must expand ideas in the infinite intellect, commune in them, accumulating and enriching our virtues in collective empowerment of the singularity of our conati. What sorts of bonds of fellowship can we form through our telecommunication technology and digital humanities? How can we propagate the insights that enlivened the metaphysical thinking of Spinoza, Bergson, or Whitehead? It is possible that they can be made to go viral, not merely as a passing fad or fascination, but by making philosophical questioning itself emerge anew among masses of people across the world. Can this vocation become widespread? Could intellectual generosity motivate social media content production? Many attempts to digitize and map Spinoza’s Ethics have emerged over the past few years; I myself made such an effort working with Jean-Luc Solère and other’s at Boston College.15 Jonathan Bennett’s website Early Modern Texts, or the Perseus Project are two other examples of digital humanities that offer immense accessibility to intellectual resources previously controlled by institutions. Could we use the insights of Spinoza to design digital humanities and open-source digital resources of empowerment? Accessibility is everything. What we must consider is this: how can we use our intelligence to skillfully dismantle the game of praise and blame and, without mockery, ridicule, and disdain, skillfully awaken a true sense of our essence and virtue? We must enliven our bodies and minds to expansion and development. Can we create a machine for the invention of gods? Can we make each other participate more in the divine parts of ourselves? Can we work together to emend the soils of our minds and hearts to bear fruits common to all? Will we manage to do it before destroying ourselves?