THE BRIGHT LIGHTS ON SELF IDENTITY AND POSITIVE RECIPROCITY

Spinoza’s Ethics of the Other Focusing on Competency, Sustainability and Divine Love

Abstract

The claim of this paper is to present Spinoza’s view on self-esteem and positive reciprocity, which replaces the human being in a monistic psycho-dynamical affective framework, instead of a dualistic pedestal above nature. Without naturalising the human being in an eliminative materialistic view as many recent neuro-scientific conceptions of the mind do, Spinoza finds an important entry point in a panpsychist and holistic perspective, presenting the complexity of the human being, which is not reducible to the psychophysiological conditions of life. From a panpsychist point of view, qualities and values emerge from the world, in a situation similar to what could be seen in animism, or early childhood psychology, where the original distance between the mind and the exterior thing is reduced ad minima, and both can even interrelate in a confusing manner. Human reality is nevertheless a social reality, it supposes a basis for shared competencies, that we will present as grounded on the one hand of the sustaining character of the essence of the animalman as will-to-power. Negatively speaking we all share same asocial tendencies and affects. This aspect is not only negative but it is also a will to develop and master the environment, because values have an onto-metaphysical immanent dimension in nature, not because there is an individual bottomup will to survive, but rather a will to live in harmony with the surrounding world. On the other hand, we shall see that Spinoza understood and described perfectly the power of the mind over the power of the affects, as a co-constituting dimension, which is alienating natural dependencies, leaving an inner space for the objectification of ethical values, not related to mere compensation mechanisms. We shall present the high standard of Spinoza’s personal values and positive reciprocity, related to his crucial understanding of the concept of wholeness of life grounded in nature as the strong roots of a tree of life, but also the very metaphysical conditions for ethical values. The essential capacity of shared social affects is completed by a self-overcoming of the animal-man based passions, restraining and sometimes harming social or spiritual life. We are first going to present these proto-ethical conditions for the sustainability of life as affective and dynamic grounding into the immanent world, second we shall present realistic principles of an ethics of competency and see how far mutual recognition, as the concrete activity of mutually serving each other, has been presented in a convincing way by Spinoza.