Spinoza ve Sartre'da etik ve politika eklemlenmesi

With his monumental work entitled Individu et communeauté chez Spinoza [The Individual and the Community in Spinoza] , Alexandre Matheron gave a new orientation to the studies of Spinoza's philosophy. Through his penetrating analyses, Matheron underlines the interconnections between the metaphysical, ethical and political aspects of Spinzonian thought, with a particular accent on Proposition 6 of Ethics III in which Spinoza presents the concept of conatus. This concept plays the leading role in Matheron's account, due to the fact that it is located at the intersection of the interrogations on being, ethics and politics in Spinoza, which together form a well-structured philosophical system. For this reason, Matheron's approach to Spinoza' s thought proves to be a good reference point for a study about the articulation of ethics and politics.In various occasions, Matheron attempts to go beyond an internal lecture of Spinoza's system and to confront it with other theories that can stimulate new researches. In the origin of the present study lies such a passage from Matheron's book, where a highly interesting question incites the reader to reflect on the articulation of ethics and politics through a comparative study of Spinoza's and Jean¬Paul Sartre's practical philosophies. This question emerges in the section where Matheron interprets the theory of the imitation of affects in order to analyze the human relations which are structured by passions . In that analysis Matheron uses Sartre's concept of "positive reciprocity" and "negative reciprocity", and in a footnote, he explains that he borrows these notions from the French philosopher. Moreover, through his particular usage of the Sartrian vocabulary, he refers to two types of human plurality analyzed in Critique of Dialectical Reason, namely "seriality" and "group-in-fusion" Hence, through a direct reference to the forms of sociability that structure Sartre's political thought, Matheron seems to pave the way for bringing together the Sartrian and Spinozian theories of interindividuality. But at this particular point where Matheron tends to inspire a comparative study on Sartre and Spinoza, he asks the following question in a footnote, which plays a key role in our work: "Isn't there, by the way, an analogy between the Sartrian problematic of the passage from the series to the group and the classical problematic of the passage from the state of nature to the civil state?" Through this question, Matheron seems to reveal a key problem which occupies his mind: Would it be plausible to establish a parallelism between Sartre's and Hobbes' theories on the passage to civil state, by reading the former as a version of contractualism? Remarkably, despite the fact that he refers to Sartrian terms in his analysis of interindividual affective relations in Spinoza, in his footnote where he leaves this question unanswered, he seems to bring Sartre closer, not to the Spinozian theory, but to classical contractualist thought.In the present work, Matheron's question will constitute the point of departure of a reflection on the possibility of establishing a parallelism between the philosophies of Spinoza and Sartre. By proposing a negative answer to it, we will make a categorical distinction between Sartre's and Hobbes' political theories. To the extent that we will distinguish Sartre's political theory from classical contractualism, we will be able to emphasize the points of contact between the Sartrian and Spinozian standpoints, which, in our opinion, share a common anticontractualist basis. Throughout our analyses of the fundamental anticontractualist principles in both philosophers, we will clarify the senses and usages of the notions of "negative reciprocity" and "positive reciprocity" in Sartre. Following that, we will consider Matheron's analyses centered on these Sartrian conceptions and evaluate the way he analyzes the theory of interhuman relations in Spinoza through reference to Sartrian terms. Throughout this comparative study, a detailed analysis of the moment of the organization of political society will be presented, with a view to disclose a particular way of articulating politics and ethics that is common to both of these philosophers who seems radically different at first glance.For many, the confrontation of Spinoza's and Sartre's thoughts should only lead to the recognition of a series of radical divergences between the two philosophers' methods and themes. This recognition may only result in a comparative study where the philosophical and historical sources of the divergences between these philosophers would be illuminated. However, we think that a study concentrating on these two philosophers would get extremely limited benefit from an emphasis of the differences between them, since the concrete points of contact between the two philosophers are extremely rare. In order to escape anachronism, one should acknowledge that Spinoza does not play a central role in Sartre's philosophy, and that he is neither a central reference, nor a serious interlocutor for the French philosopher. In those rare cases where Sartre refers to Spinozian concepts or formulations (such as conatus, idea-ideae or Nature), he makes a rather superficial use of those concepts.However, the rarity of Sartre's references to Spinoza is far from being the major source of the difficulty behind a comparative study which concentrates on these two thinkers. The difficulty arises rather from the differences between the two thinkers' respective conceptions of freedom. It is a well-known fact that Spinoza and Sartre represent two conflicting positions in the history of philosophy: Spinoza's thought revolves around the assumption of an absolute necessity, while Sartrian theory takes the absolute freedom as a starting-point. In a generalizing reading of the history of philosophy, Spinoza's thought is usually reduced to a philosophy of necessity in which freedom can be explained exclusively in terms of a passive awareness of the necessary relations of causation. Sartre's thought, on the other hand, is generally reduced to a philosophy of perpetual conflict dominated by the struggle between individual free wills. However, as the present study will attempt to show, those radical differences can be surpassed when a problematic that is common to both philosophers is brought under scrutiny: the problem of the production and the preservation of the free community. This common agenda offers a good context in which the two thinkers can be interpreted on the basis of their common characteristics and as the proponents of similar strategies to resist the "contractualist" theory of political society. Hence, a philosophical interrogation on the question of the articulation of ethics and politics enables us to evaluate those philosophers as two representatives of a political and ethical approach based on the idea of the perpetual emancipation of the individual in and through the community.The presentation of a detailed answer to Matheron's question constitutes the main goal of the first part of the present study. We first propose a brief analysis of the "classical problematic of the passage from the state of nature to the civil state", with a view to distinguish it from the Sartrian analysis of the passage from the series to the group. The exposition of the divergences between Sartre's and Hobbes' political philosophies enables us to unveil the anticontractualistic principles that ground the former. Following that, we attempt to prove that the very principles that help us to differentiate between Sartre and Hobbes may serve to justify a parallel reading of the political theories of Sartre and Spinoza. By concentrating on the dynamics that are at play in the constitution of a free community, the similarities between the Sartrian and the Spinozian theories can be emphasized, which are both based on the affirmation of the singular existences integrated in a common experience. Hence, the accent will be put on the idea of the irreducibility of every single individual, as the source of the similarity between both philosophers' conception of the incomparable singularity of every human society.The second part of our thesis is devoted to a study of the social stage following the moment of the emergence of free community. In this part, we study the question of the preservation of freedom and the conditions of possibility for establishing peace and concord in a free community according to Spinoza and Sartre. Having described the stage of the organization of free community and of the establishment of peace among individuals as the reflexive continuation of the constitutive and spontaneous experience, we attempt to answer the following questions: How can we define the principles and rules regulating the peaceful life of a political society that already left behind the state of crisis and urgency, and is unified by that experience? What is the proper domain of practical philosophy in which these rules and principles find their source? In order to give detailed answers to these questions, we concentrate on the similar ways in which Sartre and Spinoza explain the conditions of possibility of the preservation of freedom in organized community and of the constitution of peace. In such a comparative project, which situates itself beyond a simple confrontation of the political and ethical theories of Sartre and Spinoza, the main goal is to establish the legitimate philosophical domain where those theories can be interpreted in parallel terms. In our study, this domain is that of the analysis of the common liberation and, following that, the establishment of the permanence of freedom, interindividual peace and concord in human society. In such a context, Sartre's thought can by no means be reduced to a philosophy of individual and isolated free will. One should rather conceive it as a system of thought taking departure from the idea of the ontological freedom of every individual, which implies, in Sartre, the form of expressing the unique way in which each individual exists. This idea forms the background of Sartre's resistance to the classical contractualism, which is based on the identification and standardization of the individuals in an organized rational political society. Having considered the Sartrian conception of freedom as a principle structuring the whole political philosophy, we found the opportunity to relate it to a central notion of the Spinozian theory, which also embodies some kind of a resistance against the contractualist theory and the standardization of individuals in human society. This notion, which may be associated with the Sartrian understanding of freedom, is conatus, a term situated at the center of all the political, ethical and ontological analyses that one finds in Spinoza.This parallelism between the Sartrian idea of freedom and the Spinozian notion of conatus, which both point towards the absolute affirmation of singularities, enables us to stress on another idea that one can find in both philosophers: Neither for Sartre, nor for Spinoza, the exit from a hypothetical state of negativity preceding the civil state is definitive. In the case of Spinoza, the idea of the constitution of human society is grounded by the suggestion of the equivalence between the power of existing and the right of existing (a point strictly related with the idea of conatus, understood as each individual's power to persevere in being). As a consequence, the passage to civil society can by no means be explained as a transfer of individual rights to a figure of sovereignty. This is the reason why civil society never ceases to contain the plurality of the irreducible manners of existing and, by the same token, the risk of decomposition for these particular powers never ends. Hence, the passage to civil society is nothing more than a modification of the unique singularities taking part in a collective action. A similar approach can be found in Sartre's political theory as well: By emphasizing the specificity of every single individual as a unique manifestation of freedom, Sartre describes the passage from the series to the group in a way that is reminiscent of the passage from the state of nature to the civil state as it is explained in Spinoza's political theory. As a part of the resistance to absolute forms of political society, the common experience of liberation of a plurality of individuals, which is found at the origin of the constitution of a political society, arises as an experience of the invention of the common freedom in and by collective action. Therefore, our negative answer to Matheron's question leads us to propose a specific definition of politics which seems to be valid for both Sartre and Spinoza. Accordingly, politics may firstly be defined as an effort to disclose the structure of the movement of perpetual oscillation of human reality between negative and positive phases of interindividual relations. Secondly, it may be defined as an effort to modify this structure, not in order to surpass the negative phase once and for all, but with a view to prolong the positive phase by the explanation of the condition of possibility of favoring each individual freedom in human multiplicity. Both for Spinoza and for Sartre, interindividual conflictuality is considered as the basic ground of human reality. And this situation of everlasting conflict always contains the possibility of the emergence of new free pluralities that would arise as a part of a common experience of surpassing conflictuality. Following Spinoza and Sartre, one may possibly argue that political theory has to base itself, not on the idea of a utopian possibility to surpass human conflictuality once and for all, but rather on the idea of a prolongation of the positive phase of interhuman relations. In such a perspective, the central goal is to favor the freedom of each member of the community, and the political question has to do with the freedom that is always to be established in and through the plurality of human individuals. That is why neither in Sartre, nor in Spinoza, politics is reduced to a series of practical questions on the different manners of governing or institutionalizing the plurality of human individuals. Politics rather deals with the elucidation of the conditions of possibility of liberation, and hence with the processes of individual and collective perfection. In both philosophers, the idea of freedom necessarily implies the plurality of human individuals, and its emergence depends on the adequate modifications of interhuman relations. In other words, freedom necessarily implies the constitution of a common power to act through the unique combination of individual and irreducible powers of each.Hence, the discovery of the parallelism between the Spinozian and the Sartrian conceptions of collective liberation enabled us to present an analysis of their political philosophies in which a specific mode of articulating ethics and politics is revealed. This analysis, preceded by the clarification of the emergence of free community, deals with the establishment of the highest possible level of perfection of the freedom that was reached in and through an originary common action. In this moment of the liberation, which is both individual and collective, the individuals experience the accomplishment of a spontaneous action. And throughout this passage to the stage of the organization of free community, the desire of stabilizing collective freedom, as well as that of safeguarding all the positive consequences of the act of emancipation, becomes decisive. At the stage of the organization of the free multitude or of the group-in-fusion, the articulation of the politics of collective liberation with the ethics of irreducible singularities becomes fairly discernible in both Spinoza and Sartre. Throughout the establishment of the permanence of the degree of perfection (and hence of freedom) realized in the originary and collective experience, a process of active self-contemplation or an awareness of the self becomes central. As a consequence, for both philosophers, the stage of the constitution of concord and peace in a free community contains some kind of a reflexive activity that transforms the relation that the individual has both with himself and with others. In this particular moment in which concord is established in the plurality of free individuals, Spinoza and Sartre follow similar strategies for articulating politics and ethics: Both philosophers suggest that the preservation of collective and individual freedom does not depend exclusively on the practical organization of a government, but also on the active reflection of each individual who is conscious of the fact that freedom cannot be established outside of the plurality of individuals. In Sartre, this active reflection leads to generosity, which is considered as the veritable concretization of freedom. With the awareness of the plural structure of freedom, generosity becomes the primordial principle of the affirmative relations of interindividuality and constitutes, at the same time, the principle of the highest level of freedom. Parallel to this, in Spinoza, the notion of the strength of character (la force d'âme), by its two inseparable modes, courage (la fermeté) and generosity -or high mindedness (la générosité), grounds the principle or the strategy of living freely in the plurality of singularities. Hence, both in Spinoza and in Sartre, the real affirmation of the self (the principle of the conservation of the self) overlaps with the affirmation of others (the principle of alliance). What is remarkable here is that what makes such an overlap possible is the suggestion, common to both thinkers, that freedom is a continual process of modification in the relations of interdependence that exist in the plurality of singularities.In the Sartrian notion of pure reflection, which is based on the comprehension and the assumption of the ontological structure of the human individual, and in the Spinozian notion of the strength of character, which is based on the adequate knowledge of the functioning of the existence, what is at issue is a liberation that is both cognitive and praxical. In both philosophers, the constitution of peace and the conservation of freedom in and through the community should consist in the continuation of the collective activity aiming to organize interindividual relations in varying social conjunctures. Consequently, the establishment of peace and the preservation of collective freedom do not depend on a definitive organization of the society. The accomplishment of these two goals necessitates rather the prolongation of the positive phases of interhuman relations that are ceaselessly actualized in a movement of oscillation between the negative and positive phases. In other words, Spinoza and Sartre ground their ethical and political theories on the assumption that it is not possible to construct a society that would stay in the positive phase forever. As a consequence, it is not possible to define the freedom of the human individual as a real independence; on the very contrary, freedom can and should emerge only in the relations of interdependence among individuals. For this reason, political theory and ethics function in Sartre and Spinoza as practical enterprises organizing interhuman relations with a view to enhance the individual freedom of each as the condition of possibility of a real collective freedom. In such a framework, the perpetual risk of conflictuality is not a failure that necessarily leads to the decomposition of the free community, but rather the ground of a series of new collective praxis that structure and modify the community throughout a continual renewal of human actuality. In fact, both for Spinoza and Sartre, political action implies the spontaneous modification of interindividual relations in a state of crisis and urgency. And ethical action, in turn, has to be defined through a simultaneous process of getting awareness of the ontological structure of the freedom that is to be attained in spontaneous political activity and throughout a process of continuation of the constitution of the individual and collective freedom in the community. In the last analysis, in both Spinoza and Sartre, politics and ethics are based on a realistic and concrete conception of the human condition that should take into consideration the underlying conflictuality. Such a realistic standpoint shapes the practical thoughts of these two philosophers, which are not based on a hierarchization of ethical and political theories, but rather on the articulation of these spheres in such a way as to lead to the theorization of the perpetual constitution of freedom in human reality.