Sympathy andaffectuum imitatio: Spinoza and Hume as social and political psychologists

Abstract

This paper starts from the premise that Spinoza and Hume share a realisticnaturalistic approach to human nature. Human beings are finite parts of nature, and as such strongly interdependent creatures. This interdependence is reflected in the central social-psychological principles that Hume and Spinoza employ, respectively sympathy and affectuum imitatio. Both principles show the immediacy of the communication of passions, and the strong influence that other people's passions exert over our own affective lives. Central to this paper are an analysis and comparison of the working of sympathy and imitation of affects. As it turns out, both philosophers consider humans to be limitedly social beings. Social, because we tend to be moved by the pains and pleasures of our fellows. Limitedly social, because our egoistic side limits the scope of our fellow-feeling, and may turn the other's pain into our pleasure and vice versa. This puts a pressure on (larger) groups; their living together can never be truly harmonious without external interference. Spinoza and Hume, therefore, regard a further stabilisation and harmonisation of collective affective life as a key political concern. As will finally be argued, the precise way in which this concern is fleshed out in their political theories makes them occupy a shared, distinctive position in early modern political thought.

Tarde’s ancestors. Imitation and crowds from Hobbes to Locke

“…While for Hobbes society was the outcome of a deliberate contract and for Malebranche a sort of necessary evil, Spinoza held a naturalist view that saw human beings as spontaneously ‘inclined to bond, to stick together, to form societies, which as a consequence should be understood as perfectly natural creations’ (Van Bunge, 2012: 92). Indeed, humans are ‘fundamentally (inter)dependent creatures, strongly influenced in their affective lives by those of their fellows’ (Bijlsma, 2014: 3). Spinoza elaborated on this notion in his Ethics (2018; henceforth E ; citations refer to book, part and page) where he outlined a theory of the ‘imitation of affects,’ that is, a transmission by sympathy from like to like: ‘[I]f we imagine something similar to us being affected by some emotion, this imagination will express an affection of our body similar to that emotion.…”

The need for a community ethics in the teaching-learning of mathematics in engineering careers

“…Nosotros, los humanos, somos principalmente afectados continuamente por nuestros contextos; somos interdependientes en la forma en que llegamos a conocernos y sentirnos unos con otros. En otras palabras, la dimensión ética considerada plantea una imagen de los seres humanos "como seres fundamentalmente interdependientes, cuyas pasiones y opiniones son continuamente despertadas, reforzadas y transformadas por las de sus semejantes" [6]. De manera más general, "tener una idea es al mismo tiempo estar en un estado afectivo" [6].…”

“…En otras palabras, la dimensión ética considerada plantea una imagen de los seres humanos "como seres fundamentalmente interdependientes, cuyas pasiones y opiniones son continuamente despertadas, reforzadas y transformadas por las de sus semejantes" [6]. De manera más general, "tener una idea es al mismo tiempo estar en un estado afectivo" [6]. Un corolario que se desprende de esta argumentación es que el aprendizaje no puede ser reducido a un problema de representaciones o cogitaciones mentales, sino un problema de toma de conciencia, más específicamente, una toma de conciencia concreta de un saber cultural, de sus presupuestos, de sus posibilidades, de sus límites.…”

Need for Communitarian Ethics in Mathematics Teaching-Learning in Engineering Careers

“…When we talk about the self as an individual of necessity, we state that it is an entity that finds "outside itself [...] the conditions of agency, responsibility, and ethical subjectivity" [5]. We, humans, are primarily affected continuously by our context.…”