Spinoza and the Philosophy of Love

Abstract

Strawser’s Spinoza and the Philosophy of Love is a long-needed investigation into what Spinoza has to say about love, how Spinoza’s views of love are historically situated, and how Spinoza’s views of love may have implications for how we ought to live today. To date, this aspect of Spinoza’s thought has not been the subject of a comprehensive book-length study, despite love being an important element of Spinoza’s moral philosophy. Strawser’s contribution in this book is thus both novel and needed in Spinoza scholarship, and holds within it many important observations about contemporary applications of Spinoza’s approach to interacting with others. Strawser claims his central argument is that Spinoza should be considered ‘predominantly a philosopher of love’ (2). To make this case, Strawser does not principally concern himself with Spinoza’s approval of the ‘intellectual love of God’. This might surprise Spinoza scholars who may assume he would focus on it, given the high esteem Spinoza offers of such. Rather, Strawser focuses on what he calls Spinoza’s theory of noble love. Strawser’s reading of noble love is principally developed in the book’s Introduction, and it is the ‘guide (of) the remaining study’ (17). The introduction is, then, the central portion of the book, and it is an impressive and vital resource for anyone looking at Spinoza’s moral philosophy generally, since it finds so much ethical weight in Spinoza’s philosophy of love. Yet, as we will see, the Introduction does not save a disagreement I have with some of Strawser’s later critique of Spinoza’s speciesism in Chapter 4 of the book. On Strawser’s reading, noble love is the kind of love that is expressed by nobility (generositas) whereby rational people aim to join together with other people in friendship and to increase their wellbeing. Strawser rightly justifies a reading of noble love by referring to Spinoza’s identification of love (amor) with nobility (generositas) through a number of passages, though most directly