Spinoza. posted by Richard Seymour

One of my favourite critical bloggers (next to Charlotte Street), K-Punk, finally gets round to linking to me . He remarks, on the topic of rationalism and religion:

[M]ost of the great rationalist philosophers - Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant - were religious. It's no surprise, therefore, that Zizek, Zupancic, Copjec Negri and Badiou have returned to rationalist sources to produce a counter-capitalist ethics. Rationalist religion forces a disconnection from the commonsense world of pathological interestedness; contemporary 'realism', by contrast, takes it as read that this is all there is. Religion provides a horizon beyond that of the oed-I-pod, and, at its most powerful, in Spinoza's monontheism, it can elaborate the seeming paradox that pursuing your own interests CAN ONLY be achieved by suspending your animal pathologies.

I think this is perfectly put. I'm reading Spinoza at present, (Theologico-Political Treatise), and the paradox is one that he plays with throughout. Certain naive liberals, following a certain sanitised version of Adam Smith, assume that self-interest and the general interest coincide. Precisely when it seems that this isn't the case - when the aggregate of individual interests produces a general interest that is oppressive, racist etc. - the liberal falls back on conservatism. Reduce the power of democracy, thereby freeing individual liberty.

In fact, David Chandler notes (in From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention, Pluto Press, 2002) that a new liberalism is emerging in which evil is the ultimate ethical horizon, and in which the chief problem is the emergence of democratic human rights abusers. Their recommendations usually involve reducing the scope of the democratic state, preferring the Republic of Humanitarian Management to the Democracy of Risk. Hence, Paddy Ashdown's secular-liberal dictatorship in the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Bernard Kouchner's enlightened autocracy in Kosovo. Taking the risk out of democracy is no longer the preserve of the political right; it is a prerogative of "ethical" liberalism too. However, as Chandler points out, human rights are never secure when they are purchased at the expense of political rights.

For instance, those who accept restrictions on the rights of gypsies or asylum seekers out of 'pathological' interests, risk losing their own liberties. If, insteady, they abstracted from their immediate experience (I am not speaking of 'imaginative sympathy', the liberal literateur's answer to every dilemma, but of rationalism as abstraction, of indifference to, say, the apparently obnoxious aspects of gypsies or immigrants) and demanded a principled defense of rights, they would find their own that much more secure.