Center for Medieval and Early Modern Thought

This essay examines Aquinas’s discussions of hatred in Summa Theologica
I-II, Q. 29 and II-II, Q. 34, in order to retrieve an account of what contemporary
theorists of the emotions call its cognitive contents. In Aquinas’s view,
hatred is constituted as a passion by a narrative pattern that includes its
intentional object, beliefs, perceptions of changes in bodily states, and motivated
desires. This essay endorses Aquinas’s broadly “cognitivist” account
of passional hatred, in line with his way of treating passions in general.
I suggest that Aquinas’s account of hatred’s arising out of attachment is
compelling. However, I also argue that if Aquinas’s treatment of hatred is
to help us understand the phenomenon of hate, where classes of people are
abominated for an identity they bear, and to avoid equating an oppressor’s
hatred with that of the oppressed for the oppressor, the cognitive pathway
to hatred must be broader than through envy.
KEY WORDS: Attachment, envy, hatred, bigotry, passions, emotion, love,
Aquinas.  COPY OF PAPER FOR VIEW ON ACADEMIA.EDU IS A PROOF COPY.  PLEASE DO NOT CITE.  SEE JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS FOR PAGE NUMBERS, AND OTHER INFORMATION FOR CITATION.

Aquinas's argument against the possibility of genuine self-hatred runs counter to modern intuitions about self-hatred as an explanatorily central notion in psychology, and as an effect of alienation. Aquinas's argument does not deny that persons experience hatred for themselves. It can be read either as the claim that the self-hater mistakes what she feels toward herself as hatred, or that, though she hates what she believes is her “self,” she actually hates only traits of herself. I argue that the argument fails on both readings. The first reading entails that all passions are really self-love, and so is incompatible with Aquinas's own “cognitivist” view of what it is that distinguishes specific passions in experience. The second reading entails that persons have no phenomenal access to “self,” rendering self-reference—how it is that the self can be an intentional object of conscious mental states—a mystery. Augustine's claim, which Aquinas accepts on authority, that all sin originates in inordinate self-love seems to entail the impossibility of genuine self-hatred because both thinkers fail to distinguish between two distinct forms of self-love: amor concupiscentiae and amor benevolentiae.  COPY OF PAPER FOR VIEW ON ACADEMIA.EDU IS A PROOF COPY.  PLEASE DO NOT CITE.  SEE JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS FOR PAGE NUMBERS, AND OTHER INFORMATION FOR CITATION.

This essay explores the phenomenological features of the passional response to evil that Aquinas calls ‘hatred of sin’ in Summa Thelogiae II-II Q34 A3 and I-II Q23 A1, among other places. Social justice concerns and philosophical objections, however, challenge the notion that one can feel hatred toward an agent’s vice or sin without it being the agent who is hated. I argue that a careful, contextual reading of these texts shows that Aquinas cannot be read as commending ‘hate’ in any form. The texts under consideration offer no comfort to those who appeal to hatred of sin or vice to legitimate sentiments or actions that can be reasonably taken to express hatred of persons.

I argue that if an expression of hatred of 'sin' or vice cannot be distinguished by the 'sinner', or a third-person observer from an expression of hatred for the sinner herself, there are good prima facie reasons to believe that the 'sinner' himself is hated. I then argue that this modest argument lends further support to Kolnai's argument -- the only one in philosophical literature--that hating the vice or 'sin' of a 'sinner' just amounts to hating the 'sinner'.

While “scientism” is typically regarded as a position about the exclusive
epistemic authority of science held by a certain class of “cultured despisers” of “religion”, we show that only on the assumption of this sort of view do purportedly “scientific” claims made by proponents of “intelligent design” appear to lend epistemic
or apologetic support to claims affirmed about God and God’s action in “creation” by
Christians in confessing their “faith”. On the other hand, the hermeneutical strategy
that better describes the practice and method of Christian theologians, from the inception of theological reflection in the Christian tradition, acknowledges the epistemic
authority of the best available tests for truth in areas of human inquiry such as science
and history. But this strategy does not assume that such tests, whose authority must be
regarded as provisional, provides authority for the warrant of affirming claims constituting the confessed “faith”. By attributing theological import to claims advanced by
appeal to the best available tests for truth in the practice of science, supporters of ID
not only confuse the epistemic authority of these tests with the normative authority of
a faith community’s confessional identity, but impute to scientific tests for truth a sort
of authority that even goes beyond the “methodological naturalism” against which
they counterpose their claims.
Keywords Intelligent design · Theology · Scientism · Evidentialism ·
“Old” design arguments· “New” design arguments· Apologetics· Darwin · Augustine

In this paper, I explicate Spinoza’s two definitions of blame, in Ethics III/Prop. 29 and Political Treatise 2 §24, and the only three other remarks that he makes about blame in the entire corpus of his writing.  I argue that even though Spinoza acknowledges the motivational power of placing and being blamed, because blame is a form and expression of hatred, one must never blame.  In this sense, Spinoza anticipates both Nietzsche’s view that the normative force of blame derives from hatred and motivational liability to it is a form of enslavement, and Strawson’s notion that blame is a negative emotional response toward an agent one believes has acted wrongly.  But unlike Nietzsche and current defenders of blame, Spinoza makes a plea for holding accountable from a purely detached and austerely ‘objective’ standpoint, but most pointedly, never blaming.
Key Words:
Blame, hatred, accountability punishment
POSTED IS A PROOF DRAFT OF THIS PAPER.  FOR CITATION, SEE:  http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/upload/_FILE_1395743995.pdf

In this paper, I ask what certain propositions about self-consciousness (forming ideas of oneself) in Part 2 of the Ethics reveal about Spinoza's concern about the ethical pitfalls of  inadequate ideas of oneself.  What we find is that 'mere' self-consciousness (ideas of oneself as the subject of joyful/sorrowful affects) is consciousness of oneself being changed or effected by causes 'external' to the well-functioning of one's own mind, effecting one's power, and of oneself as the subject of specific desires.  But this just amounts to conceiving oneself as "free".  It follows that overcoming inadequate ideas of oneself must entail (for Spinoza) rejecting a notion of oneself as 'free' in a sense dear to libertarian notions of freedom, and embracing Spinoza's thoroughgoing naturalism.  It turns out that self-knowledge of the ethically 'freeing' kind (far from being a romantic celebration of one's own individuality and novel self-expression) must consist in 'down and dirty' 'scientific' knowledge of one's body, the ways in which one's desires and affects form causally within a social 'plenum'.

To read a more developed version of this paper, see: "Forgiveness, Pardon, and Punishment in Spinoza’s Ethical Theory and 'True Religion'", Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS): Volume 5, Issue 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 65-87.  This published version of the paper is posted on academia above. 

I will examine the implications of Spinoza's view for forgiveness as a response to others' wrongful actions  and their expressions of hatred. This task is made challenging by the fact that Spinoza mentions forgiveness only once, in the 7th and final tenet of true religion in the "Theologico-Political Treatise"; and it is God's forgiving whom Spinoza urges affirming.  I will take as my point of departure, however: (i) that Spinoza envisages overcoming all forms of hatred as a necessary condition of human perfection, and as a good of civic community.  Overcoming hatred entails never blaming others for their actions, and not being (or needing to be) motivated to avoid wrongful actions by exposure to blame.  And (ii)  Spinoza urges us to regard wrongful actions and the hatred of others (in passages such as Ethics 4p44s) as "kinds of madness".  The upshot is that Spinoza envisages a necessary role for a kind of politically critical forbearance of others, though without the notion that forbearing entails remitting just punishment by civil authority for those who may be induced, by threat of punishment, to obey otherwise reasonable laws.

Spinoza rejects “turning the other cheek” where humans live in civic community, and denies that piety ever requires it under those circumstances.  Yet he argues that Jeremiah and Jesus counsel it under the exceptional circumstances where civic community collapses, and one is exposed to oppression.  His rejection appears in tension with his claim (in Ethics IVpp45 and 46) that hatred is always bad, that “he who lives by the guidance of reason endeavors as far as he can to repay another’s hatred with love or nobility” and his consequent rejection of blame.  I will argue that Spinoza cogently justifies his broad rejection of the idea that one should turn the other cheek  by appeal to the love command—love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself. So I will argue that there is no inherent tension  in Spinoza’s position about turning the other cheek, and that his view does not obviously subordinate love to justice.  In practical terms, Spinoza is Augustine's progeny once removed, even though (rather more like his collegiant and quaker contemporaries) he jettisons a longstanding moral psychology of 'natural' hatred that informs 'augustinian' justifications of just war and punishment through the scholastics, up to Descartes.

Recent interpreters often read Spinoza’s account of thinking ill of oneself as an account of self-hatred. Yet Spinoza claims, (in the explication of Ethics 3def.em28), that “nobody thinks too meanly of himself by reason of self-hatred’. I defend the recent interpretation of thinking ill of oneself against the idea that Spinoza, like Augustine or Aquinas, regards self-hatred as impossible.  On the proposed reading of E3def.em.28expl., Spinoza is not denying that self-hatred is possible, but is arguing that it is impossible for a person to hate herself from the necessity of her own nature.  So self-hatred is necessarily a case of suffering harm at the hands of others, and furthermore is a harm that diminishes one’s autonomy. 
KEY WORDS:
Self-hatred, hatred, autonomy, suicide, self-consciousness, self-knowledge, blame

Spinoza shares with almost all apologists for forgiveness the idea that laying down one’s resentment of a wrong, contempt for a wrongdoer, and overcoming “bondage” to hatred, must be a primary ethical aim.  Yet he implies that ordinary moral agents have no warrant whatever to pardon a penitent wrongdoer.  He argues that in civil society, it is actually a matter of charity and piety to collude in punishing a wrongdoer—dragging the wrongdoer before a judge, but not “judging” him oneself. If forgiving entails pardoning, and having standing to pardon, then it looks as though Spinoza has no room for forgiveness.  I argue, however,  that the response to others’ hatred and deceit  that Spinoza urges his reader to cultivate  in Ethics 5p10, along with his argument that one may ‘turn the other cheek’ under conditions of oppression, where no sovereign power prosecutes claims of justice, mandates a broader emergent and reparative view of forgiveness. 
Keywords: Forgiveness, Spinoza, hatred, resentment, punishment, pardon, justice

I argue that hatred, given its longstanding folk-psychological distinction from anger and other "negative" or aversive passions (in Aristotle,'s Rhetoric, ii.4), cannot be retrojected back into the foundations or necessary conditions of agency.  We  should, instead, regard it as a necessarily tragic pathology or failure of agency.  I then examine broad ethical implications of this view.  (i) I distinguish hatred (an affective response, defined by its cognitive or propositional contents, and its motivating an aim to destroy its target as an end in itself) and 'hate' (institutional and discursive formations that oppress, are depersonalizing, and potentially dealth-dealing). (ii) I argue that because hatred as an affective response is most often a 'symptom' or outcome of subjection to trauma or other psychic harm, it is always tragic but not always yielding enough to second order desires or intentions to be understood as vice.  (iii) I argue that hatred of the oppressed for the oppressor is not the moral equivalent of  hatred of the oppressed for attributes that mark or predispose them to oppression.  (iv) Finally, I argue (following the lead of thinkers such as Laurence Thomas and Rosalind Hursthouse) that the focus of any ethical reflection on hatred, and the ways in which it is engendered by 'hate', must focus upon responses to encounters with 'concrete others' that should motivate moral concern and corrective, revisionary reflection.  So the principle focus of ethical reflection, with regard to hatred, must be absence of what Nomy Arpaly calls "moral concern." I would argue (though I have not done so here) that 'hate' is an aspect of a larger problem of bigotry, for which notions of 'virtue' and 'vice' so far articulated in broadly aristotelian terms, are irredeemably insufficient.

Intended for publication in "Spinoza and Relational Autonomy: Being with Others"--(under contract)  PLEASE DO NOT CITE THIS DRAFT.  My thanks to Karel D'huyvetters for his careful editing help, especially of quoted Latin texts.  This is a draft that makes the corrections Karel indicated.  (Thanks, readers, for your patience, and any comments you're inclined to offer.)   

I argue that Spinoza anticipates a notion of autonomy, but that according to the 'relational' version that Spinoza anticipates,  much that qualifies as 'autonomy' under 'procedural' or 'neutralist (about 'the good') views fails to instantiate autonomy,  but instead reflects the condition of 'weak spiritedness' or 'weak mindedness' .  I also point out that another issue for autonomy is that on Spinoza's view,  merely 'phenomenally' 'free' action under this condition can, without individuals' knowledge, be 'highjacked' to support the 'good' or 'ends' of other 'contrary natures' and not an individual's own perseverance or 'good'.  So the sort of autonomy that Spinoza anticipates--being sui iuris--cannot be 'good neutral', and is a strong relational conception.

In E3p30 Spinoza identifies both pleasurable and painful ideas of oneself as “species” of love and hatred, and accounts for them in terms of the imitation of affects. But he then asserts that precisely because love and hatred “have reference to external objects”, different names must be assigned to these [imitation] reflexive affects. He defines both love and hatred [in E3p13, E3p30, and in the definitions of affects at the end of part 3] as affects with an idea of the cause of the affect as something external. I will point out that Spinoza’s deployment of the internae/externae distinction in E3p30s (among other places) raises both textual and conceptual issues. The apparent conceptual problem is that if one can only love or hate something that one takes to be ‘external’ (not, or not taken to be, an attribute of oneself), it follows that one can only literally be loved or hated by another. Earlier readers found this claim or its implications counterintuitive, and it led them to questions the language of the text itself. A note on the text of E3p30s from Piet Steenbakkers, in correspondence is appended. The author also thanks Karel D'Huyvetters, Andrea Sangiacomo, and Matt Kisner for the benefit of discussion, and for participants in the Budapest Early Modern Philosophy Seminar (October 16-17, 2016) for a lively and helpful discussion.

Most of the arguments in this conference talk were incorporated into a later published paper: "Spinoza and Self-Hatred", found on this academia.edu page.  What follows is a set of notes. I post to make available comments on 'activity' that are not in the self-hatred paper, and a response to Barbone and Rice arguing that Spinoza can accommodate the idea that one can choose suicide without the sort of compulsion to which Seneca was subjected (what Spinoza would call 'force' or 'coactio').

The issue I will examine is the role played by imitating others’ hatred of oneself—whether the ‘internalization’ of others’ hatred of one’s vice is a necessary condition and constituent of ‘agency’ as such, and specifically moral motivation.  Broad concurrence about the motivational role of affects (including hatred) in moral motivation notwithstanding, Spinoza answers ‘no’, Hume ‘yes’.  From their different answers emerge two deeply conflicting models of agency—models we are familiar with in other (and even contemporary) forms.  I want simply to show that it is different ‘moral psychologies’ of hatred that reflect ancient tensions inherent in earlier Augustinian/Aristotelian teleological accounts of hatred that constitutes, as it were, the ‘fork in the road.’

Abstract

Spinoza casts Moses as the exemplary prophet.  Moses’ exemplary role is as one who had the power to found the ‘Hebrew’ state through deploying miraculous ‘signs’ and images of God as a lawgiver and just judge.  This power yields the subsequent submission of the ‘Hebrews’ to laws enjoined by Moses.  Following the lead of Abraham Heschel, 20th century historical-critical scholars of biblical prophesy, both in Jewish and Christian traditions, have largely rejected the image of Moses as the exemplar of prophesy.  The prophetic ‘outsider’ or ‘rebel’, instead, has come to exemplify the prophets as a messenger of resistance to tyranny and oppression.  Though Heschel owes a significant intellectual debt to Spinoza’s ‘naturalistic’ conception of prophesy, the image of the prophet as ‘outsider’ seems a rejection of Spinoza’s conception.  I will argue that Spinoza can accommodate the prophetic ‘outsider’, and in doing so, countenances conceptual space for ‘the rebel’.  A prophet’s resistance to tyranny can be embraced, within limits, because the prophet’s challenge can be construed as a form of ‘immanent’ criticism.

Key words

Moses, prophesy, immanence, Abraham Heschel, resistance to oppression, tyranny