Spinoza & the Troubles of the Heart

Dan Taylor shows that even great philosophers can have their hearts broken.

- Dan Taylor

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) isn’t often read for his counsel on love. We do not know the extent to which he knew love, and his words on physical love tend to be distrusting and unsentimental. In a passage on jealousy, he gives this example of ‘love toward a woman’ – one of the few instances where women appear in his work:

“For he who imagines that a woman he loves prostitutes herself to another not only will be saddened, because his own appetite is restrained, but also will be repelled by her, because he is forced to join the image of the thing he loves to the shameful parts and excretions of the other.”

(Ethics Part III, Proposition 35 Scholium, 1677)

It is an unusually bitter, even broken-hearted formulation, in a writer otherwise characterised by a generosity of spirit and an affection for humankind. Such love as he describes always seems doomed to failure. If it does not end in infidelity and deception, then it otherwise distracts from the solitude appropriate for a philosopher (who, like many others in this period, neither married nor had children, or to our knowledge had any significant romantic relationships – except one, which we will come to…).

In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1662) – one of the best places to get first acquainted with Spinoza’s famously difficult philosophy – Spinoza speaks with a sense of loss about how he came to embrace the philosophical life: