Episode 99: Steven Nadler discusses Spinoza on freedom
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What is the opening introduction and sponsor plug for the episode?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going, I just thought I'd put in a quick plug for Pippa. We've been doing our hosting with them since two thousand sixteen. It's been a fantastic experience. So if you have a podcast You might check 'em out. They have great analytics, the service is free, and they make it easy to migrate. So if you're curious, visit their website at PIPPA dot IO. All right, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman. And with me today is Stephen Nadler. William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, and F U Bascom Professor of the Humanities, and Weinstein Baskum Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And he's here to discuss Spinoza on freedom. Stephen Nadler, welcome.
Thanks for having me, Matt.
Okay, so freedom is a word that gets tossed around a lot in contemporary political discussions. We wanna be free. And then there's also freedom as it pops up in philosophy, which maybe it's related, maybe it's the same thing, maybe it's different, I don't know. And that that has to do more with like do we have control and responsibility over the things we do? What did the philosopher Baruch Disminoza think freedom was?
Well, Spinoza had a very um idiosyncratic conception of freedom, idiosyncratic because of the larger metaphysical picture in which he discusses the issue of freedom. Remember that for Spinoza, um, we are all modes or in God or nature. And so human beings don't have this kind of ontological autonomy that we ordinarily think that things have. We are no different from other parts of nature. We're part of nature, we're governed by nature's laws. And this is just as true for our states of mind, our mental states, our emotions, our passions, our acts of volition, our imaginations, even our intellectual thoughts are all bound together by the laws of nature just as much as our bodies are. So Spinoza does not think that there is such a thing as freedom of the will, either in a libertarian sense or in any sense in which all things being the same one could have chosen otherwise than as one did.
So if you are looking for the kind of freedom that gives you independence from the causal determinism that governs most of nature, you're not Going to find that in Spinoza. What freedom does consist in for him is a kind of spontaneity or self-governing autonomy. Not spontaneity in the sense of uncaused events. There are no such things for Spinoza in nature. But in a way very much like a Kantian kind of autonomy, where the things you do, the choices you make, the decisions you make, the goals you pursue follow not so much from how you are affected by other things, that's passivity, but from your own knowledge of what's really good and what is in your own best interest.
Okay, right. So it's not like the things I do I just make happen out of nowhere, they're caused. They're uh subject to all the same laws of nature as everything else. So I'm not free in that sense. But still he wants to make some distinction between me being acted on by other things and I don't know what exactly, taking the initiative or like having the reason for doing things i initiate in me or something like that. Is that
How do Matt and Stephen introduce the topic of freedom in philosophy?
You know, exactly. Uh well and maybe the most precise way to put it is it's the difference between being acted on and being active. You're being we're always active to some degree because we are always striving, that's sort of our core essence for Spinoza. Every individual, every human being is striving to persevere in its existence and even striving to increase its own power to persevere. And so what you have in this grand picture of nature for Spinoza is this very agonistic or confrontational picture of things in nature are parcels of striving against each other. Things strive to maintain themselves, other things strive to maintain themselves and sometimes they come into conflict and these strivings push against each other.
And so we as a part of nature are always being impinged upon by other things and we're always being passively affected by the objects in the world around us.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the opening introduction and sponsor plug for the episode?
0:00–3:40
2
How do Matt and Stephen introduce the topic of freedom in philosophy?
3:40–6:11
3
What is Spinoza’s unique, reason‑centric conception of freedom?
6:11–9:27
4
Why does Spinoza deny a libertarian “freedom of the will”?
9:27–12:42
5
How does Spinoza describe the balance between being acted upon and being active?
12:42–27:53
6
What does the burger‑and‑orange example illustrate about Spinoza’s freedom?
27:53–39:08
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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