ABSTRACT
Amor intellectualis Dei The concept of amor intellectualis Dei, or the intellectual love of God, which follows from adequate ideas of the third kind of knowledge, and the concept of the eternity of the soul are introduced by Spinoza in the fifth and final part of the Ethics. Throughout this part Spinoza is occupied with charting the transition from ‘the love towards God’ to ‘the intellectual love of God’, and with the discussion, in relation to the intellectual love of God, of the eternity of the soul as distinct from life in the present, which is commonly mistaken for a Spinozist argument in favour of the immortality of the soul. The interpretation of these two notions by Macherey and Deleuze diverge according to their different readings of the love towards God. According to Macherey, the common notion which is the love towards God is the primary point of reference for all adequate ideas, whether they are of the second or third kind of knowledge. Therefore all adequate ideas without exception include, by means of the love towards God, an idea of God as their cause. Deleuze maintains, rather, that by means of the simplest common notions the adequate ideas of the second kind of knowledge are constituted locally, without it being necessary to make reference to the general common notion of the love towards God. Macherey therefore reads the love towards God as the point of departure for the second kind of knowledge, whereas Deleuze reads it rather as the limit of the second kind of knowledge. Nevertheless the two interpreters agree that it is necessary to make reference to the God of the love towards God before being able to have a knowledge that is constituted by adequate ideas of the third kind. According to Macherey, ideas of one’s existence and of the relations in which one finds oneself remain imaginary, that is more or less ‘distinct and vivid’,1 unless abstracted or universalized by means of the love towards God. By following the path of the ‘common notions’ defined by the love towards God, the ideas which form in the soul become ‘adequate’. Such adequate ideas belong to the demonstrative knowledge of the second kind, described by Macherey as ‘an
view by submitting it to rules or to laws which are modes of thought and not physical realities’.2 But the love towards God does not cut off ‘definitively all relation with the conditions of concrete life’,3 that is, it cannot be definitively disengaged from the criteria imposed by affectivity, since it maintains a point of view which remains that of the imagination, which, in itself, cannot be suppressed by reason because of the fact that this soul is the idea of a body which is limited necessarily by its nature as a finite mode. By giving all the images of things an absolute point of reference, the love towards God ‘confers on them a value of necessity, which extracts them from the indecision and the indetermination inherent to the hazards of the affective life’,4 permitting a regime of affective stability to be established in this life. Spinoza writes that the love towards God ‘is the most constant of all the affects, and insofar as it is related to the Body, cannot be destroyed, unless it is destroyed with the Body itself’.5 This point of view, of the irreversibility of the affective movement associated with the love towards God, indicates that, once the soul is engaged in this movement, it is rendered increasingly more active and therefore stable. The idea of God which is embodied in the love towards God constitutes therefore, according to Macherey, ‘the common element at the interior of which all our ideas, all our representations, and all our experiences develop’.6 Macherey maintains that by virtue of its basis in common notions, the love towards God leads us to ‘associate in the imagination … other individuals, and increasingly more individuals, engaged with [us] in this common, shared affective impulse’;7 as Spinoza writes, ‘the more men we imagine to be joined to God by the same bond of Love, the more it is encouraged’.8 Macherey describes this as a process of ‘depersonalization’9 whereby we are delivered from our exclusive attachment to ourselves, according to which we imagine simply – where to imagine simply is to consider a thing as a free cause, or cause of itself, on the model of substance, which is causa sui – that is to say, according to which we make a fetish of ourselves. Because of the limitations that this procedure implies, it is ‘necessarily a cause of sadness’.10 With the love towards God, we discover that the affects we understand as our own do not belong only to us in particular, but that the causes from which they derive are common in God and can therefore be
2 Macherey, Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza, la cinquième partie, p. 175. 3 Ibid., p. 97. 4 Ibid., p. 94. 5 Spinoza, Ethics, V, P20S. 6 Macherey, Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza, la cinquième partie, p. 98. 7 Ibid., p. 103. 8 Spinoza, Ethics, V, P20.
