(The plan? To try one new philosophical exercise every month. This article is part of a series. In the previous episode, we explored Postural Yoga and the sense of earth)
For the month of March, I tried to practice Spinozist mindfulness. It’s not that “Spinozist mindfulness” is an established practice, mind you. I just wanted to see if it could be! In the end, my impression is that Spinoza and mindfulness are not a perfect match. However, they are far from being a bad match. I don’t know if my impression is correct, and I suspect that verifying it would require no less than answering some very thorny questions of Spinoza scholarship (more on that later). My tentative speculation is that the paradigmatic Spinozist practice of recalling the philosophical system laid out in the Ethics might be closer to loving kindness meditation, not mindfulness.
All of this pondering started as I was reading Christos Hadjioannou’s excellent article about what a Stoic version or a Heideggerian version of mindfulness would be or could be1. I became fascinated by the question of what criteria we should use to claim that a certain philosophy could have or did have a version of mindfulness. A sort of phenomenological training regimen for your attention, inclined towards the ideas and values of a particular philosophy. I was very excited about this, because depending on what the answer is to this question, it could potentially mean that there are many flavours of mindfulness one could try out. Including mindfulness variants for some western philosophies that lack a focused exercise.
I decided to try to combine Spinozist philosophy and mindfulness, since it was on my mind for a reason I will touch on at the end of this post. I studied the Ethics again, and I practiced mindfulness meditation (I do it all the time already). As much as I could, I tried to combine the two. I tried to have mindfulness meditation be the catalyst that would elicit the assimilation of the lessons from the Ethics. And I tried to have the lessons from the Ethics support my mindfulness practice.
It is crystal clear that Spinozist philosophy is a way of life2. You are meant to assimilate this philosophy so that it changes your personality and the way you see the world. The goal is happiness, or liberation, however you want to call it. This fact of the matter is a good starting point because in order for a philosophy to be eligible for a mindfulness variant, it must be a way of life. Philosophy as a Way of Life triggers the necessary shift in perspective. It is hard to characterize this newly found point of view, but perhaps one way to describe it is that it is a type of meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) that adds a particular pragmatic dimension to your cognition: the issue of good timing. The quality of one’s thoughts will be judged by whether or not they are likely to swoop down just in time to rescue you from akrasia. In anticipation of this moment, the good quality of the thought is achieved by paying attention to timing (How many times did you push yourself to remember the salvific idea? How much did you linger on it? Did you identify the crucial times when you should push yourself to remember it?) This point of view allows you to appreciate differently things that the layperson (or philosophers not versed in philosophy as a way of life) might consider to be non-rational nudges derailing your thinking (imagination, repetition, idea association, somatics, theatrics, etc ; anything that gives you “cultish brain-washing” vibes basically). On the contrary, to the Way of Life philosopher, it seems that those elements can be indirectly rational, as they further one’s thinking against akrasia, improving one’s cognition by deepening it, as long as it is in the service of good cognitive timing. This shift in perspective is a necessary condition for mindfulness, because mindfulness opacity3, the ability to see thoughts as thoughts in such a way that it leaves a lasting and beneficial impression, relies on this way of life perspective.
Yet, this necessary condition of being a way of life, is not a sufficient condition. And this is the reason why I am not convinced Spinozist philosophy is a perfect match for mindfulness. To be sure, if you look at the remedies to the passions that Spinoza proposes4, you see a lot of things that are very mindfulness-friendly. Not only is it compatible with mindfulness, but it is actively encouraging you to pay attention to things that are very good targets for mindfulness practice.
One remedy is knowledge of the affects: when passions hurt us, it means that they are passive affects. They are passive because we have a confused idea of them. However, it is possible to become aware of them, to form a distinct and clear idea of them, and to therefore convert them into active affects, which no longer hurt. This is very reminiscent of mindfulness, where active awareness of a passion removes its sting.
Another remedy is removing the idea of an external cause: I am not sure that my interpretation of this one is correct, but the way I have been practicing this was always to dispel confusion about free will. Spinoza tells us that we mistakenly think that we have free will because we are not thinking clearly about the causes that determine our actions. I often use that reasoning on myself, but I also use that reasoning on people who have offended me. I remove the idea of an external cause by ceasing to arbitrarily delineate the offender as the sole cause of my hurt. The whole of Nature has conspired to cause the event, so why arbitrarily think about what I confusedly take to be the free will of the offender? And then, as Spinoza points out, I cannot be mad at the whole of Nature, given that to know its necessity is to love it. As far as I am concerned, removing the idea of an external cause was always about deflating the motivation for arbitrarily singling out the last domino in the chain of cause and effect. I don’t know if this is the right interpretation of this second remedy, but I have been practising that for years now, and it has done me a lot of good!
Those two remedies call for a certain way of paying attention to your experience. A way that is pretty close to mindfulness meditation. But is it the same way of paying attention? When it comes to the debate of whether mindfulness should be characterized as relying on wiser judgments or as relying on a non-judgemental attitude, I always try to hold both together. I feel like it has to be two ways of describing the same thing. The hermeneutical characterization of the efficacy of mindfulness (which describes the practice as equipping you with better notions to interpret phenomena) and the bare attention characterization of the efficacy of mindfulness (which describes it as shedding unhelpful notions and paying attention to phenomena themselves) must work together. But for our purpose, the bare attention characterization comes to the foreground, because the hermeneutical characterization alone could mislead us into thinking that being a way of life is sufficient to offer a version of mindfulness: after all, if this philosophy has something interesting to say about the wise life, it means that it equips us with better notions to interpret phenomena... and if that’s all there is to mindfulness, then it is sufficient to have a mindfulness variant. The question then becomes: is there a bare attention exercise that we can extract from Spinoza’s philosophy?
This question was brought to my attention by the difficulty I had to make compatible my study of Spinoza’s system and the largely non-verbal nature of my mindfulness practice. Bare attention is a training in non-verbal phenomenality: it is about attending to phenomena as they are, inherently meaningful even before we apply our linguistic schemes onto them. This requires a concept of suspension, of refraining from judgment. This concept is something that the Stoics and the phenomenologists like Heidegger have, which makes them good candidates for mindfulness. Is this something that Spinoza has as well? In Spinozist scholarship, there is a debate as to the link between what he calls the second kind of knowledge (reason) and the third kind of knowledge (intuition): is there a gradual continuity between the two, or is there a qualitative jump, a leap in kind, between the two? This question matters because reason employs language, whereas intuition holds blessedness, the highest good of Spinoza’s philosophy. Do we suspend other kinds of knowledge in order to access the intuitive kind? When I had first encountered Spinoza, I had assumed that there was a kind of jump between the two, but how much of that was informed by my non-verbal meditation practice? And to be frank, how much of that was motivated by wanting to agree with Spinoza’s conclusion without actually attending to the weird idiosyncratic steps he thinks are important to get there (the geometry!)? The bridge between those two kinds of knowledge might be the “geometric order” of his demonstrations, that Spinoza lays out in the Ethics, but am I really invested in that, or is it just, to me, a quirky layout on the page? I have always taken this order to be important mnemonically: it helps you remember the system. Is that enough to be invested? I don’t know. Maybe. For Philosophy as a Way of Life, mnemonics is not a superficial affair, an after-thought: the entire point is to remember wisdom!
I do not have the answers to these difficult Spinoza scholarship questions. I do not hope to answer these questions this month, unfortunately. I can only try out things and see how they feel. This month, it felt to me that Spinozist meditation had to be a constructive style of meditation. It has been proposed that there are three types of meditation5: attentional exercises, deconstructive exercises, constructive exercises.
- Mindfulness is an attentional exercise. As Jan Puc argues6, with mindfulness, you train yourself to pay attention to the appearance and disappearance of phenomena, refraining from elaborating or developing the object of attention, and therefore stopping the spread of its affective force in consciousness.
- Deconstructive exercises deflate certain experiential schemes by pointing directly to them and revealing them as constructed (not basic) and, in fact, baseless (insight into the absence of enduring self, insight into non-duality).
- Constructive exercises, such as loving kindness, work by voluntarily fostering a specific feeling or mood in your experience. It is marked by a clear preference towards a state of mind that you cultivate.
I think that the standard mindfulness curriculum7 tries to touch on some deconstructive and constructive aspects, but they can be a bit optional. Similarly, I feel that Spinoza’s philosophy has many resources that touch on all of these things: attention, deconstruction, construction. All of it is in there, in some way. However the way the entire philosophical system hang together inspired me to practice it like one would “loving kindness”: fostering blessedness voluntarily, while relying on common notions and imagination, but in an enlightened way.
Though common notions and imagination do not belong to the third kind of knowledge (the best one), they seem to allow for some good things to happen. One remedy that Spinoza proposes against the passions is the “re-ordering of the affects”. I didn’t know what it meant, so it had to be explained to me by secondary literature, and here is the explanation that I was given:
“It is an activity that we can intentionally perform to diminish the force of our passions. It is based upon the power that he believes the human mind has to intentionally join two ideas to one another by frequently thinking about them in unison, so that when the first idea occurs, the second idea is naturally aroused in the mind as well. One of the ways in which we may apply this power is by intentionally joining passionate affects together with mottos or rules, “sure maxims of life,” that are rational to follow whenever those passions take hold of us (E5p10s, G II/287).”8
If this is correct, and if you see, as I do, the last two remedies - “the endurance of rational affects” and the “multiplicity of the causes of rational affects” – as creating this sort of highway that lets you gain a lot of momentum while you become more and more active in fostering feelings of love, then it would stand to reason that enacting Spinoza’s system would be very similar to a loving kindness practice. I might be biased, because the reason why Spinoza was on my mind when I started all of this is that I wanted a remedy to my constant anxious rumination. I came to see rumination as this network of bad feelings9, self-reinforcing, each unhappy passion leading back to all the others like some kind of sad maze. It seemed like Spinoza was proposing the opposite: building a network of self-reinforcing good feelings. And I must say that it works on me! One of my biggest flaws as a meditator is that I tend to focus exclusively on attentional and deconstructive exercises. Thus, I keep shooting down inadequate ideas without ever thinking to put something better in their place. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, playing defense, and never building something better. Spinoza’s philosophy is such a good fit for that unfortunate gap in my spiritual life.
Pierrick Simon
02/04/2024
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
(do not hesitate to reach out)
Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social
Twitter: @PhiloTranquille
1“Heideggerian and Stoic Mindfulness” by Christos Hadjioannou in The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness
2 https://pwl.fcsh.unl.pt/project/ to know more about Philosophy as a Way of Life
3Victor Lange, Thor Grünbaum, Transparency and the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis, The Philosophical Quarterly, 2023;, pqad098, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqad098
4In the scholia of Proposition XX, of part 5 of the Ethics (“Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom”)
5 Cortland J. Dahl, Antoine Lutz, Richard J. Davidson ; Reconstructing and deconstructing the self: cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice ; Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 19, Issue 9, 2015, ; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.07.001.
6Puc, J. (2019). In Defence of Bare Attention: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (5-6):170-190.
7https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness-based_stress_reduction
8https://iep.utm.edu/spin-mor/#H3 “Benedict De Spinoza: Moral Philosophy” by John Grey in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
9 Thanks to this article : Russell, Jodie Louise (2021). Stuck on repeat: Why do we continue to ruminate? Synthese 199 (5-6):13143-13162.
