Spinoza on Freedom

Human freedom is the central theme of Benedict de Spinoza's (1632-1677) fundamental philosophical work Ethics (1677, posthumously). His two other major works, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and the unfinished Tractatus Politicus (1677, posthumously), invoke this concept too, but in these works its status and even signification are far from clear. At some places in his political treatises Spinoza reiterates the definition of human freedom familiar from Ethics. At other places he seems to mean something else by it, associating it either with the democratic or 'well-ordered' government. My aim in this article is to clarify the relationship between Spinoza's notions of freedom in the ethical and political context, and to specify whether there is a distinct concept of political freedom in his political treatises. In what follows I shall tackle Spinoza's ideas on freedom with the help of the distinction between negative and positive freedom. As is commonly known, it was first depicted in this way by Isaiah Berlin (1969). While for Berlin this distinction can be illustrated by the grammatical distinction between 'freedom from' and 'freedom to', Gerald MacCallum has convincingly argued that the concept of freedom always has a triadic structure: freedom from something to do something (1) (MacCallum 1991). Quentin Skinner, however, has shown that we can still meaningfully distinguish between the conceptions or even concepts of positive and negative freedom, since there is at least one fundamental disagreement between theorists of 'positive' and 'negative' freedom. (2) The theorists of positive freedom believe that it is possible to distinguish a rational moral end or at least some set of human powers and potentialities for humans to pursue, while the theorists of negative freedom start from the assumption of the heterogeneity of human ends. Theorists of positive freedom thus identify human freedom straightforwardly with the attainment of a determinate moral end, and political freedom with the society in which it is possible. Freedom for theorists of negative freedom, by contrast, consists only in non-interference in individuals' pursuit of their contingent aims. Even if freedom presupposes a certain kind of society (as the republicans claim), and thus involves not just non-interference, but also non-domination, it remains a characteristic of individuals and cannot be equated with this form of society (Skinner 1984, 2002b). It is striking how so many different interpretations of Spinoza's theory of freedom have been put forward in Spinoza-scholarship during the last five decades. When Isaiah Berlin first drew the distinction between positive and negative concepts of freedom, he set up Spinoza's ideas as one example of the theory of positive freedom. For Berlin, Spinoza's concept of positive freedom translates into a positive concept of political freedom in which liberty and authority are virtually synonymous. On Berlin's view, Spinoza, along with other adherents of the concept of positive freedom, believes that men could be liberated by compelling them to act in a rational way. According to Berlin, Spinoza holds that democracy is a rational form of society in which all men remain or become free (1969:147f.). Other commentators have believed it possible to identify Spinoza as a liberal political thinker. They point out that for Spinoza the state is only a necessary precondition for human freedom, but not in itself conducive to it. For these commentators, Spinoza's defence of freedom of thought and self-expression in his political works reveals his core liberalism; however, they deny that for him there is a logical link between democracy or well-ordered government and individual political freedom (Mara 1982; Parkinson 1984; cf. the slightly more complex account of Den Uyl 1983, 1988). Some recent studies, by contrast, emphasise the unity of Spinoza's different philosophical doctrines. …