But to argue to-day for freedom of speech is to invite the charge of emphasizing the obvious. It may be wholesome to remind ourselves, by a few examples, that however universal the theory of free speech may be, the practice is still rather sporadic. An American professor is dismissed because he thinks there is a plethora of unearned income in his country; an English publicist is reported to have been refused “permission” to fill lecture engagements in America because he had not been sufficiently patriotic; and one of the most prominent of living philosophers loses his chair because he supposes that conscience has rights against cabinets. But indeed our governing bodies are harmless offenders here in comparison with the people themselves. The last lesson which men and women will learn is the lesson of free thought and free speech. The most famous of living dramatists finds himself unsafe in London streets, because he has dared to criticise his government; the most able of living novelists finds it convenient to leave Paris because there are still some Germans whom he does not hate; and an American community full of constitutional lawyers shows its love of “law and order” by stoning a group of boys bent on expounding the desirability of syndicalism.
Perhaps the world has need of many Spinozas still.
VII
Virtue as Power
FREEDOM of expression is the corner-stone of Spinoza’s politics; the postulate without which he refuses to proceed. But Spinoza does not have to be told that this question of free speech precipitates him into the larger problems of “the individual vs. the state”; he knows that that problem is the very raison d’être of political philosophy; he knows that indeed the problem goes to the core of philosophy, and finds its source and crux in the complex socio-egoistical make-up of the individual man.
The “God-intoxicated” Spinoza is quite sober and disillusioned about the social possibilities of altruism. “It is a universal law of human nature that no one ever neglects anything which he judges to be good, except with the hope of gaining a greater good.”[101] “This is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part.”[102] This confident reduction of human conduct to self-reference does not for Spinoza involve any condemnation: “reason, since it asks for nothing that is opposed to nature, demands that every person should ... seek his own profit.”[103] Observe, reason demands this; this same self-seeking is the most valuable and necessary item in the composition of man. Spinoza, as said, goes so far as to identify this self-seeking with virtue: “to act absolutely in conformity with virtue is, in us, nothing but to act, live, and preserve our being (these three have the same meaning) as reason directs, from the ground of seeking our own profit.”[104] This is a brave rejection of self-renunciation and asceticism by one whose nature, so far as we can judge it now, inclined him very strongly in the direction of these “virtues.” What we have to do, says Spinoza, is not to deny the self, but to broaden it; here again, of course, intelligence is the mother of morals. Progress lies not in self-reduction but in self-expansion. Progress is increase in virtue, but “by virtue and power I understand the same thing”;[105] progress is an increase in the ability of men to achieve their ends. It is part of our mental confectionery to define progress in terms of our own ends; a nation is “backward” or “forward” according as it moves towards or away from our own ideals. But that, says Spinoza, is naïve nonsense; a nation is progressive or backward according as its citizens are or are not developing greater power to realize their own purposes. That is a doctrine that may have “dangerous” implications, but intelligence will face the implications and the facts, ready not to suppress them but to turn them to account.
It was the passion for power that led to the first social groupings and developed the social instincts. Our varied sympathies, our parental and filial impulses, our heroisms and generosities, all go back to social habits born of individual needs. “Since fear of solitude exists in all men, because no one in solitude is strong enough to defend himself and procure the necessaries of life, it follows that men by nature tend towards social organization.”[106] “Let satirists scoff at human affairs as much as they please, let theologians denounce them, and let the melancholy, despising men and admiring brutes, praise as much as they can a life rude and without refinement,—men will nevertheless find out that by mutual help they can much more easily procure the things they need, and that it is only by their united strength that they can avoid the dangers which everywhere threaten them.”[107] Nihil homine homini utilius. Men discover that they are useful to one another, and that mutual profit from social organization increases as intelligence grows. In a “state of nature”—that is, before social organization—each man has a “natural right” to do all that he is strong enough to do; in society he yields part of this sovereignty to the communal organization, because he finds that this concession, universalized, increases his strength. The fear of solitude, and not any positive love of fellowship, is the prime force in the origin of society. Man does not join in social organization because he has social instincts; he develops such instincts as the result of joining in such organization.
VIII
Freedom and Order
EVEN to-day the social instincts are not strong enough to prevent unsocial behavior. “Men are not born fit for citizenship, but must be made so.”[108] Hence custom and law. Each man, in his sober moments, desires such social arrangements as will protect him from aggression and interference. “There is no one who does not wish to live, so far as possible, in security and without fear; and this cannot possibly happen so long as each man is allowed to do as he pleases.”[109] “That men who are necessarily subject to passions, and are inconstant and changeable, may be able to live together in security, and to trust one another’s fidelity,”—that is the purpose of law.[110] Ideally, the state is to the individual what reason is to passion.[111] Law protects a man not only from the passions of others, but from his own; it is a help to delayed response. How to frame laws so that the greatest possible number of men may find their own security and fulfilment in allegiance to the law,—that is the problem of the statesman. Law implies force, but so does life, so does nature; indeed, the punishments decreed by “man-made” states are usually milder than those which in a “state of nature” would be the natural consequents of most interferences; not seldom the law—as when it prevents lynching—protects an aggressor from the natural results of his act. Force is the essence of law; hence international law will not really be law until nations are coördinated into a larger group possessed of the instrumentalities of compulsion.[112]
It is clear that Spinoza has the philosophic love of order. “Whatever conduces to human harmony and fellowship is good; whatever brings discord into the state is evil.”[113] But discord, one must repeat, is often the prelude to a greater harmony; development implies variation, and all variation is a discord except to ears that hear the future. The social sanction of liberty lies of course in the potential value of variations; without that vision of new social possibilities which is suggested by variations from the norm a people perishes. Spinoza does not see this; but there is a fine passage in the Tractatus Politicus[114] which shows him responsive to the ideal of liberty as well as to that of order: “The last end of the state is not to dominate men, nor to restrain them by fear; rather it is so to free each man from fear that he may live and act with full security and without injury to himself or his neighbor. The end of the state is, I repeat, not to make rational beings into brute beasts or machines. It is to enable their bodies and their minds to function safely. It is to lead men to live by, and to exercise, a free reason, that they may not waste their strength in hatred, anger, and guile, not act unfairly toward one another. Thus the end of the state is really liberty.”
So it is that Spinoza takes sharp issue with Hobbes and exalts freedom, decentralization, and democracy, where Hobbes, starting with almost identical premises, concludes to a centralized despotism of body and soul. This does not mean that Spinoza had no eye for the defects of democracy. “Experience is supposed to teach that it makes for peace and concord when all authority is conferred upon one man. For no political order has stood so long without notable change as that of the Turks, while none have been so short-lived, nay, so vexed by seditions, as popular or democratic states. But if slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, then peace is the worst misfortune that can befall a state. It is true that quarrels are wont to be sharper and more frequent between parents and children than between masters and slaves; yet it advances not the art of home life to change a father’s right into a right of property, and count his children as only his slaves. Slavery, then, and not peace, comes from the giving of all power to one man. For peace consists not in the absence of war, but in a union and harmony of men’s souls.”[115]