Simon Gros

Spinoza’s political philosophy is often treated as detachable from his metaphysics and epistemology, as though the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) addressed fundamentally different projects. This talk challenges that division. Reading the Ethics together with the TTP and the Political Treatise, it argues that Spinoza’s political theory is organised around a robust, though rarely foregrounded, account of the essences of states and that grasping these essences can be understood as a case of the third kind of knowledge, scientia intuitiva. On this view, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, and political philosophy form a single, mutually reinforcing enterprise.

The point of departure is Spinoza’s definition of essence in Ethics II: what necessarily belongs to a thing, such that given the thing, the property is given, and removed the thing, the property is removed. This bi-conditional structure marks essence as ontological, not merely classificatory. Spinoza’s mature political writings transpose this structure into the domain of the state: a commonwealth, too, has an essence—those institutional, affective, and juridical conditions without which it cannot persist. When the TTP and Political Treatise describe the basis of the state in terms of natural right as power, the transfer of power to a sovereign, and the aim of freeing individuals from fear so that they may live securely and develop their faculties, they articulate the state’s essential form as a configuration of conatus under law whose end is freedom.

Against readings that treat the opening promise of the TTP—“that freedom of philosophising can be allowed while preserving piety and the peace of the republic, and cannot in fact be preserved without them”—as merely rhetorical, the talk shows how it encodes an essential condition of any adequate state: the liberty of thinking and saying what one thinks, within a framework that protects civil peace. Spinoza’s sustained defence of this liberty in chapters 16–20 is not a pragmatic compromise but follows from his account of natural right, the dynamics of the affects, and the nature of collective power. A state that systematically suppresses free judgment undermines its own essence, since its stability depends on ordering, rather than extinguishing, the rational capacities and imaginative lives of its subjects.

The talk then returns to scientia intuitiva. Just as intuitive knowledge proceeds from an adequate grasp of God’s attributes to the singular essences of finite modes, so political understanding can proceed from the adequate idea of human nature and natural right to the singular “essence” of a given constitution—its specific way of organising powers, laws, and affects. To recognise, for example, that a democratic state is “the most natural” form because it best preserves the original equality of natural right and most fully realises the state’s purpose—freedom—is to see the essence of that state under the aspect of eternity, rather than as a contingent historical arrangement. On this interpretation, central theses of the TTP—about the secular jurisdiction of the sovereign over religion, the harmlessness and necessity of free philosophising, and the subordination of theology to practical obedience—emerge as political expressions of Spinoza’s deeper metaphysical and epistemological commitments.

In conclusion, the presentation proposes that Spinoza offers a model of intuitive political knowledge: a way of knowing states that is neither empirical rule-of-thumb nor abstract moralising, but a direct understanding of their essences as structured expressions of human power. Recovering this dimension of Spinoza’s project sheds new light on early modern attempts to give politics the certainty of science, and it suggests a distinctively Spinozistic framework for thinking about contemporary questions of religious pluralism, free speech, and the fragility of democratic orders.

Aaron Garrett is a historian of early modern philosophy whose work traces the development of moral and political thought, as well as changes in philosophical method and metaphysics, from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. His research follows the emergence of normative and meta-ethical concepts in the wake of Hobbes and the revival of Hobbesian themes in Mandeville, mapping a trajectory that runs from Grotius through Hume and beyond. He has written widely on Spinoza, Butler, Berkeley, and on early modern theories of “human nature,” including contributions to The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy and editorship of The Routledge Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy. Based at Boston University, he is currently completing The Devil’s Mountain, a study of moral philosophy from Grotius to Hume; two monographs on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral theory; and a volume titled Duties towards Others on early modern accounts of obligations to women, non-Europeans, and animals. He also works in the philosophy of art, film, and music, and is co-authoring, with David Barker, a book on montage and the philosophy of film.