Spinoza and the Ontological Basis for Market Logic

Ninety-Nine years before Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations Baruch Spinoza was establishing the ontological basis of the economic man. If one is unfamiliar with the notion, the Economic Man is defined by his subjective but ultimately rational self interest. It is through the market that this interest is directed to the betterment of society because “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”. Spinoza centers his vision of the human essence and thus the essence of his ideal human system on conatus.

Spinoza’s view of the supremacy of man’s preservation amongst his other desires is what forms the basis of the rational economic man. Spinoza points to his subject saying “Desire is the very essence of man; that is, the conatus whereby man endeavors to persist in his own being” (prop 18, part IV). Spinoza’s portrayal of a man seeking nothing but his own preservation makes it hard to explain such exceptional men as Ghenkis Khan or Alexander the Great. Even harder to explain are more common exceptions such as addicts, criminals and heros. Depending on our value judgement, we can say that the three classes of people I just listed are driven by either foolhardiness or martyrdom. Either way they’re drives are incompatible with a subject motivated solely by his conatus. Some may see Spinoza putting the will at the center of man and think of some nietzschean sense of valor. But for Spinoza the will is nothing but the maintenance of life. Mere life. For Spinoza conatus being preserved is man’s higher pleasure, his state of perfection and from where his power arises.

In consistency with Spinoza’s view that the world is one infinite substance, God or Nature, to illuminate any concept Spinoza must point to it in God. The first appearance of power in Spinoza’s work is in what Gilles Deleuze called the “twofold” power of god to produce and exist. God produces and maintains the existence of a thing through thought out of necessity by supplying conatus to that thing. It is by “The power whereby each single thing, and consequently man, preserves his own being” that “actual essence is part of the infinite power of God, or nature” (pr. 34, I). Our desire, connatus and essence are all one and the same thing. At our core we aim to continue. Our connatus is how we extend out from God. Our desires are an extension of Gods. The desire for power is justified as the natural end of human desire.

For Spinoza emotions are the mind’s reaction to the standing of the body. Emotions are “affections of the body by which the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with ideas of these affections’’(Def 3, III). We may think of emotions as fickle things arising from nothing but our own irrationality but for Spinoza they are, mostly, an accurate way for us to gage our power in the world. Pleasure is the feeling of one increasing one’s power (pr 53, III) and pain the feeling of losing it (pr 55, III). Before we move on from Spinoza’s definition of emotions I want to focus on the phrase “together with ideas of these affections”. When our mind comes into contact with the idea of a thing that increases our power we feel pleasure regardless of whether that idea exists in our memory or we are immediately feeling its affections. It is upon this ability of memory to replicate the feeling of power that advertising lay. When we see the coca-cola ad we are reminded how much pleasure (power) that coke gave us.

If pleasure is feeling the power to exist through apprehension, a perfect being would apprehend all and experience pure pleasure because “pleasure is not in itself bad, but good. On the other hand, pain is itself bad.” (pr 41, IV). Spinoza extends this principle to the subject saying “…the more we are affected with pleasure, the more we pass to a state of greater perfection” (45, sc, IV). From this we get Spinoza’s rationalization for the image of the happy consumer. Spinoza’s subject experiences pleasure as “…the passive transition of the mind to a state of greater perfection” (11, sc, III). Pleasure also involves the increase of power through the subject being “rendered more capable of apprehension”. How does the subject apprehend through his body? He consumes. By pairing man’s pleasure with his apprehension Spinoza legitimizes the runaway dopamine cycles of capitalism. If man is more perfect by pursuing the feeling of pleasure in the body he will seek it at no end. Spinoza ties pleasure to what increases his conatus and his power. But Spinoza’s overly rational conception of the human mind forgoes any earlier conclusions of the sinfulness and shortsightedness of man and any later conclusions of behavioral economists, psychoanalysts and social scientists. When man is let to, in Spinozist terms, apprehend what is pleasurable to him and gain power he eats himself to obesity and drinks himself silly. Spinoza’s rational consumer, constantly maintaining his contanus, has all of his desires validated by the fact that his mind is “part of the infinite intellect of God” (11, II) because all of the mind’s thoughts arise from the infinite intellect of God or Nature.

Spinoza is describing something in the first book of The Ethics but even he seems hesitant to pin it down with one word sometimes referring to it as God, nature or even just as substance. Spinoza claims he is talking about God, that was sure to bring attention, but he could just as easily be describing a market. Spinoza’s God is a different God than the one shown to us in the Bible. Spinoza’s God does not have will or intellect in the anthropomorphic fashion we grow accustomed to during a study of the Bible. Spinoza’s God does not will things to come into existence rather it is through his necessity of existence and his “power of thinking” which is “coextensive with his actualized power of acting” that allows substance to be born. The market has no will except for its Conatus, which Spinoza also finds in God, but it surely exerts itself in thought and extension. The market possess thought and the people at NASDAQ, Standard and Poors and the Bureau of Labor Statistics try to quantify these thoughts. The market possess extension and the logistics managers try to manage these things. God is the invisible hand because he, just as the market, is the thought and extension that produces our world.

Capitalism may seem at odds with Spinoza’s philosophy. Spinoza’s pantheism seems at odds with the competitive and individualistic nature of capitalism. One finds it hard to reckon the image of the savvy and brutal entrepreneur with the idea we are all different modes of a single divine substance. However this seeming conflict is caused by us looking back on the history of capitalism which is much different from how early capitalism forerunners and contemporaries saw the emerging system. Capitalism was seen as a further collectivizing of humanity. Spinoza, showing how later his thought would develop into objectivism, says “It is when every man is most devoted to seeking his own advantage that men are of most advantage to one another” (35, cor. 2, IV). Spinoza is able to possess so much faith in the cooperation of man because he views our status as a rational drive that is rarely a source of conflict. The market is the pure rationality of the combined intellect of all men which exists in God. Within The Ethics we find the justification for markets, consumption and the modern subject.