Educating the ingenium : On Spinoza’s perfectionism and the pedagogical relation

Abstract

This essay (written in response to Steven Nadler’s article in this issue) seeks to interrogate the promise of Spinoza’s perfectionism for education. It does so by first establishing Spinoza’s perfectionism as a striving toward the intellectual love of God, occasioning an investigation of the relation Nadler sets up between Spinoza’s and Maimonides’ perfectionist schemes, and then evaluating the educational currency of such a striving. It is argued that while Spinoza’s highest good is difficult to construe as a widely attainable educational aim, it allows for two different educational pathways, where one focuses on the reeducation of passions via narratives adjusted to the ingenia of students and the other on attaining the highest good. At a glance, these two pathways come across as radically different in their setup, but they are aligned insofar as the stability of the community (agreeability) is a precondition for the striving for intellectual perfection. In parallel, this tracks how a pedagogical relation – being necessarily asymmetrical from the outset – can evolve into a relation of mutual friendship once the striving for perfection is identified and accepted as a common goal.

‘And so the happy man, perfectly completed, is a creature of our making’

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

Introduction

To the extent that Spinoza’s conception of the highest good to strive for – qua the intellectual love of God – is as difficult to attain as it is rare (Vp42s ¹ ), one might legitimately wonder what role Spinoza’s perfectionist scheme would play in a public educational setting? Would it prescribe that only those few who possess the necessary prerequisites to form ideas of the third kind should be promoted and fully educated, or would it be organized in terms of a collective endeavor, where different people – of varying mental and physical abilities – would be encouraged to strive in concert for the same thing? This is an important question, as it hinges on the educational applicability of Spinoza’s ethical theory. It asks: is ethical perfection a matter for the intellectual elite exclusively, or is it a more general socio-political and educational concern of all members of any well-functioning community?

In his thoughtful piece on Spinoza and perfectionism, Steven Nadler (2024) sets up some important parameters for this discussion, and my aim in what follows will be to adhere carefully to these parameters while attempting to give a response to the above question vis-à-vis the educational promise of Spinoza’s perfectionism. As such, I will begin by briefly rehearsing some of the parameters set up by Nadler that I deem to be especially important for making sense of my core educational concern. I will then look to Spinoza for possible textual clues as to how this question may be convincingly answered, taking a cue from recent contributions in Spinoza studies investigating similar concerns. Because my question is of a practical nature, I will then focus my inquiry on aspects of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (hereafter TTP) (Spinoza, 2016), as this work is arguably set up so as to address central practical socio-political concerns against the background of (and in congruence with) Spinoza’s metaphysical and ethical groundwork.

Nadler’s reading of Spinoza’s and Maimonides’ perfectionism

The starting point for Spinoza’s perfectionism, as outlined by Nadler, is that human blessedness or supreme good (summum bonum) consists of the intellectual love of God (IVp28, Vp42d), which may be conceptualized in terms of a radically transformed understanding of oneself and of the causal networks one is embedded in. Because this understanding involves not just the ability to reason or of amassing experiential knowledge, but an intuitive form of cognition that is difficult to attain for most people, human perfection is laid out along a long and arduous path of intellectual emendation. Nadler illustrates the framework of this perfectionist scheme by linking Spinoza’s conception with a Maimonidean form of perfectionism, where most people will never attain perfection, but will have to settle for being affectively influenced to abide by rules of living handed down by those few who have at least approximated a true knowledge of God. In fact, for Maimonides, ordinary people do best in not even attempting to grasp after such eternal truths as they will turn out to be intellectually and affectively unprepared for it. Correspondingly, Nadler shows how Spinoza, like Maimonides, offers markedly different (albeit clearly interrelated) paths to the appreciation of God – distinguishing between the ordinary love of God and the intellectual love of God – where while most people can (at least potentially) be made to experience the first kind of love, only very few can ever hope to attain the second kind.

Love, for Spinoza, is a form of joy that accompanies an idea of something or someone that benefits one’s striving to persevere in existence. Hate – being the opposite of love – is a form of sadness that accompanies an idea of something or someone that will diminish or obstruct one’s striving (IIIDOE 3 + 4). Coming to understand – with some degree of precision – what is beneficial and what is detrimental for one’s striving to persevere, becomes a precondition then for being able to calibrate one’s desires in relation to objects that can be either beneficial or harmful for one’s continued striving. As Nadler (2024: 259) explains, this comes down to a re-ordering of ideas where one can begin to ‘diminish the strength of those passions [that are harmful] by changing one’s beliefs about their causes’. In Part five of the Ethics, Spinoza proposes that by separating affects from ideas of singular finite causes, we can weaken passions to the extent that we come to understand that their causes are more widely distributed than we would initially take them to be (Vp4s). Understanding more adequately the causes of our affects, then, turns into a means for becoming more active insofar as activity, for Spinoza, is a causal notion intimately connected with the striving for understanding. As I aim to argue below, this systematic re-ordering of ideas, whereby a better understanding of the causal networks of nature is thought to result in a form of ethical flourishing on the part of the individual, is a fundamentally pedagogical setup insofar as it presupposes a form of guidance that can be aptly described in terms of a pedagogical relation. In fact, for Spinoza, stable communities and benevolent human relations are conceived as preconditions for the individual’s ability to successfully strive for perfection. ² Once people are made to strive for the same thing, they become eminently useful to one another. Accordingly: ‘There is no singular thing in Nature that is more useful to man than a man who lives according to the guidance of reason’ (IVp35c1). For anyone seeking to improve their understanding, then, joining with others who are striving for the same thing would seem to be the best way of proceeding.

By increasingly connecting ideas of affects, not to illusory causes of random objects, but to the adequate cause of God (which grounds the infinite series of finite causes), the joy of becoming more active manifests as an enduring love of God (by Vp15d). The stability of the object of our love (qua God) ensures the stability of our emotions, and so a reliable understanding of how our affects are causally connected and determined, translates into a more stable sense of well-being, less vulnerable to the fluctuation of the passions and the coming and going of random objects. As Nadler points out, however, this is still to be considered an ordinary love of God, attainable through following the dictates of reason (Vp20d). Beyond this kind of love (as difficult as it is to attain), Spinoza proposes another kind of intellectual love of God, which, according to Nadler (2024: 262), exists ‘on a higher intellectual and affective plane’. Whereas the ordinary love of God is concerned with ‘moderating the emotions we experience as durational beings’, the intellectual love of God “transcends this immediate therapeutic project, and the benefits that attend it go beyond, and are superior to, the relief of current emotional turmoil” (Nadler, 2024: 263).

The intellectual love of God is grounded in an understanding that is atemporal and eternal insofar as we form adequate ideas ‘of essences that stand in an eternal relationship to the essence of God’ (Nadler, 2024: 264). This is what it means to form ideas sub specie aeternitatis and, as Spinoza proclaims, ‘he who knows things by this kind of knowledge passes to the greatest human perfection’ (Vp27d). The difference between the ordinary love of God and the intellectual love of God, then, hinges on the difference between forming an understanding that would allow one to temper and counter temporary harmful passions and of forming an understanding that is eternal and that is accompanied by a form of intellectual love that is equally eternal (Vp33d). As Nadler (2024: 266) conceives it, ‘[t]he intellectual love of God is not merely a remedy for the passions of which one might avail oneself; rather, it is a fundamental feature of what the human mind is’. The ethical upshot of this intellectual form of love is that it offers a more lasting form of joy; one that is not subject to the fluctuation of the passions, but that is ‘grounded in knowledge and the intellect’ (Nadler, 2024: 266).

Other differences aside, for both Spinoza and Maimonides, then, the love of God can be perceived from two distinctly different vantage points. It can be perceived as involving a cognitive form of training geared at better withstanding the fluctuation of the passions and at sustaining a sense of joy by more adequately understanding the causes of one’s affective changes, and it can be perceived in terms of an ‘atemporal intellectual apprehension of God unmediated by empirical circumstances’ (Nadler, 2024: 266). Whereas the first form of love appears to be more readily available to ordinary people, the second kind does not seem to be. Nadler (2024: 267) concludes by asserting that while Maimonides’ conception of human perfectionism entails that the highest good ‘is limited to only an elite few, those who have not only refined their moral character but, more importantly, perfected their intellects by tapping into the divine overflow of knowledge that flows through the cosmos’, Spinoza offers a more egalitarian version, where ‘it is at least in principle possible for each and every person to attain the blessedness that such a condition represents’. The question raised by this conclusion is, I suppose, what this entails for education in situ? Does it mean that education should be geared at keeping the possibility open for each and every person through public institutional means, or does it mean that education should promote the striving for blessedness as an aim primarily for those with a special aptitude for rational thought (reason being the only viable path to the third kind of cognition involved in the intellectual love of God, by Vp28d)? To put it crudely: if we are placed at an educational crossroads, where one road leads to perfection by way of a process of transformation of selected individuals geared at the attainment of the summum bonum, and the other road leads to perfection by way of collective processes of formation geared at the tempering of social prejudices and the deliberate enlistment of passive forms of joy, which way would Spinoza have us go?

A first step toward answering this question would be to look at how Spinoza conceives of relations between people who are unequal insofar as they are differently disposed toward a life guided by reason. To the extent that Spinoza’s perfectionist scheme hinges on human cooperation, it becomes imperative to figure out how far this cooperation extends and what it entails, from an educational point of view, for people to engage with one another in spite of seemingly unbridgeable differences. We have already seen that Spinoza’s perfectionism hinges on the forming of communities of people striving jointly for understanding. While this seems rather straightforward in terms of what it means for people who are already striving for the same thing, qua the summum bonum of the intellectual love of God, it is not as apparent what it would entail for communities that are made up of people who are differently disposed and whose striving is less unified. The first kind of community may be categorized as a community of friendship, where the active strivings of several individuals are amplified by them joining forces with one another. It is not so clear, however, whether people who are radically different from one another can actually form friendships of this kind. Insofar as Spinoza’s perfectionism has implications for education, and insofar as education is typically conceived in terms of the forming of relations between people – teachers and students – who are radically different from one another, it becomes important to interrogate what the ethical promise of such a relation might be.

Pedagogical relations and relations of friendship

In a recent article, Sanem Soyarslan (2023) sets out to investigate Spinoza’s account of friendship as an important part of his ethical theory, revolving around the striving to persevere of persons who are guided primarily by reason. Building on an Aristotelian account of friendship as instrumental for leading a virtuous life, Soyarslan seeks to complement recent readings by Nadler (2021) and Andrew Youpa (2020) through a close interrogation of the relation between a rational individual’s striving for flourishing and the reasons that such a person might have for engaging in relations with less than rational (i.e. ordinary) people. Focusing on the collective aspect of flourishing, and asking whether people of radically different ingenia (affective makeup) can be made to strive for the same thing (qua a life governed by reason), connects Soyarslan’s interest in Spinoza’s conception of friendship tightly with my own educational interest in his perfectionist scheme as outlined above. Accordingly, Soyarslan’s (2023) starting point reads: ‘If nobility is the rational desire to join others in friendship [. . .], it is important to examine who exactly the others at stake are and whether they include ordinary people, who are dissimilar to the relatively more virtuous people’ (p. 933, emphasis in original). This is a promising starting point insofar as figuring out ‘the limits, as well as the power, of friendship for Spinoza’ (Soyarslan, 2023: 933) will certainly be helpful for grappling with the educational concerns raised by Spinoza’s perfectionism.

Soyarslan’s (2023) investigation of the practical limitations of Spinoza’s ethical theory revolves around the following question: ‘Can a sincere lover of truth such as Spinoza enter into a bond of friendship with “ordinary people” who live an ordinary life in bondage to harmful passions, and thus are very dissimilar to him?’ (p. 941). It is clear that, for Spinoza, people who share a rational striving for a common good (qua an increased understanding) are beneficial for one another (IVp35c1). This is so insofar as they agree in nature, which they will do to the extent that they ‘live according to the guidance of reason’ (IVp35). What is less obvious is to what extent people who do not agree in nature (insofar as they do not yet share the desire to live according to the guidance of reason) can be beneficial to one another’s striving to persevere. While the summum bonum is the same for all humans – insofar as all finite things (including humans) are defined by a striving to persevere in existence (IIIp7), which from the point of view of the human mind entails a striving for understanding (IVp26) – not all people are equally equipped to translate this natural striving into a reliable guide for what to seek out and what to avoid in situ. In fact, on Spinoza’s account, most people are ‘governed only by affects, not by reason’ (TTP 17[14], G III/203/19 ³ ), and so they ‘rarely live from the dictate of reason’ (IVp54s). As a result, many people strive for things that are not in fact conducive to their striving to persevere (without seeing why this is so) and so conflicts over finite goods (such as money or fame) are more typical than a unified striving for an improved understanding in most human societies. ⁴

From the point of view of the person guided by reason, then, seeking to form a bond of friendship with someone less than rational can be motivated by the fact that once they have become relatively more rational (through the support of the person who is guided by reason) they will become more beneficial for one another’s striving to persevere. As Soyarslan notes, however, Spinoza is not overly confident in the ability of most people to become guided by reason, and so another motivation for establishing good relations (that are not then taken to fulfill the requirements of active friendship) is to protect the people guided by reason from people who are governed predominately by dangerous passions. On Spinoza’s account, this protective measure is enacted through the reeducation of the passions where dangerous passions such as greed and hate are being gradually transformed into less dangerous passions such as humility and repentance. The motivation for this pedagogical intervention being that

those who are subject to these affects can be guided far more easily than others, so that in the end they may live from the guidance of reason, that is, may be free and enjoy the life of the blessed. (IVp54s)

Soyarslan takes this to offer two markedly different pathways of the interactions between people guided by reason and people who are not. One path is the gradual initiation into the life guided by reason by one who can illustrate what this might look like and what the benefits of this life would be to someone who has already begun the transformative process from being governed by passions to being guided by reason. Let us call this the path of exemplarity. The other path is geared at the protection of the few from the uneducated and passionate masses, where a measure of affective manipulation is taken to be legitimate insofar as it can provide a basic sense of security against irrational impulses that would otherwise threaten the overall stability of the collective. Let us call this the path of benevolent manipulation. While both pathways may be viable for education in principle, it may be argued that the path of benevolent manipulation typically precedes and functions as a precondition for the path of exemplarity on a socio-political level. ⁵ Soyarslan’s conclusion, then, is that while active friendship requires a more or less horizontal relation grounded in the mutual striving for understanding, passive relations that are still conducive to friendly interactions may very well start off from a position of the reeducation of passions, provided that this reeducation is geared at supporting a gradual transition from dangerous passions to less dangerous passions. ⁶ To go back to the question of which way Spinoza would have us go, it seems then that insofar as a collective process of formation geared at tempering social prejudices and the enlistment of comparatively better passions can function as a necessary preparation required for the individual striving for blessedness to be unthreatened, it would be reasonable to assume that the path of benevolent manipulation ought to make for a common educational starting point.

Pedagogical relations are interesting to consider here insofar as while they do not typically start out from the position of reciprocal friendship ⁷ (simply because the parties involved do not typically agree in nature), it may be argued that the aim of the relation is to arrive at something like a relation of friendship and to thereby dissolve the necessarily asymmetrical pedagogical relation by transforming it into a different – more horizontally conceived – one. In a classical text by Herman Nohl (2022), first published in 1933, the pedagogical relation is conceived as unique among human relations insofar as ‘the pedagogical relation strives to make itself redundant from both sides’ (p. 81). The pedagogical relation is thereby defined in part by an initial asymmetry that both parties – from their respective positions and given their different motivations – strive to gradually overcome. It seems apt, then, to describe the kind of relation that involves a person guided by reason investing in the transformative processes of a person governed largely by passions in terms of a pedagogical relation. While this relation is not a form of active friendship in itself, its main motivation is to make itself redundant over time so that a reciprocal relation of friendship can eventually become possible in its wake. This transition would be staged through the gradual cultivation of a desire to follow the guidance of reason as well as a burgeoning understanding of what this entails in situ. The educational question arising from this basic assumption about human perfectibility is, of course, how such a gradual affective transformation would be conceived in a practical context where the guidance of reason cannot be relied upon as a given starting point? That is, what is the connection between the path of benevolent manipulation and the path of exemplarity?

Spinoza’s practical philosophy, accommodation, and the question of perfectionism as a basic educational concern

Given the fact that Spinoza seems to assume that most people are unaccustomed to living according to the guidance of reason, being largely governed by imaginative thinking and living at the mercy of the capriciousness of the passions, any convincing take on the educational challenge of perfectionism would have to address the question of how ordinary people can be made to live according to the guidance of reason if they lack the means for seeing why this is even desirable. This is intimately connected with a related question formulated aptly by Susan James (2011) in terms of ‘the question of how a community where people mainly think and live on the basis of imagination can make reasoning a part of its way of life, and reap the benefits of the second kind of knowledge’ (p. 182). Put differently, to the extent that all human societies will be necessarily influenced by passions to some degree, and to the extent that people need to take shelter in greater communities in order to avoid the relentless struggle and strife of isolated life, public education is at least in part constrained by the limitations of ordinary people, being governed largely by passions. Even people who are eminently rational, then, will need to belong to a social structure which will be founded on the basis of a collective whose majority will not typically be guided by reason. ⁸ And so even if we accept that some people will never attain a level of understanding that reaches beyond imaginative thinking, there is still the question of how a community – at least externally – can be made to comply with the guidance of reason, which Spinoza takes to be a socio-political precondition for the intellectual perfection of the individual. ⁹

While the transition from reason to intuitive knowledge is conceived in terms of an intellectual endeavor, the transition from imaginative thinking to reason is ‘in part a social one’ (James, 2011: 182). This means that ensuring the peace and security of the state (being necessary for intellectual perfection) may be parallelly conceived as an educational endeavor whereby the transition from imagination to reason can be promoted through measures of civic education (enacted through the reeducation of passions as described above) and as a political project where the external tolerance of differences can be legitimized and protected by political authorities. As James (2011) conceives it: ‘You may imagine God as a judge while I believe him to be immaterial, but as long as we both live cooperatively there is no religious reason to examine our differences’ (p. 187). How these two parallel tracks relate to one another is comparable to how Spinoza conceives of the possible coexistence of philosophy and theology within the confines of a sufficiently stable state.

In Spinoza’s TTP much care is taken to describe the processes whereby less than rational people can be made to live in accordance with the guidance of reason even if they do not fully appreciate the reasons for why they ought to do so. A helpful way of approaching this question is by way of Spinoza’s distinction between divine law and human law. This is helpful as it outlines two distinct paths – one geared at facilitating (or framing) the successful striving of the individual and one at ensuring the stability of the socio-political community – that nevertheless offer alternative routes to (or perhaps better, different aspects of) the same ethical goal qua human perfection. While these different paths may seem opposed in many ways, it is important to investigate their interconnection so as to get a better sense of how the stability of the community relates to the striving of the individual to persevere and to increase in the power of acting.

On Spinoza’s account, divine law denotes a conception of law aiming ‘only at the supreme good, that is, the true knowledge and love of God’. Human law, in contrast, describes ‘a principle of living which serves only to protect life and the republic’ (TTP 4[9], G III/59/23–26). Living by divine law, then, is to live in the light of reason, where an adequate understanding of natural causation acts as a stable guide for one’s actions. To live according to human law, instead, is to abide by rules stipulated by (hopefully) rational humans, who have endeavored to accommodate divine law to the cognitive and affective restrictions of ordinary people. What might outwardly look like the same thing, then, is in reality motivated by very different things. While living according to divine law is intrinsically motivated by an adequate understanding of natural causation, living according to human law can be motivated by the instrumental fear of punishments and hope of material rewards. The overlap between the two modes of living comes down to the ability to live according to the guidance of reason (either by internal or external means).

For Spinoza, the relation between divine law and human law corresponds with the relation between philosophy and religion. Philosophy and religion are fundamentally different insofar as philosophy is geared at increasing the understanding of nature and of first causes and religion is geared at guiding people’s behavior through affectively powerful imagery. One relies on reason and the other on imagination. One is motivated by an increasingly adequate understanding and the other is geared at establishing social cohesion through obedience and affective manipulation. While they are very different in both aim and expression, they can (and on Spinoza’s account they should) be made to support one another. Eugene Garver talks about this in terms of an overlap between being rational and being agreeable, connecting back to Spinoza’s notion (described above) that a life guided by reason is preconditioned by a relatively stable sense of community. Garver (2010) writes:

Philosophy and religion do not compete. Nor do philosophy and politics. In different ways, religion and politics, prophets and sovereigns, provide true imaginations that tell us how to preserve ourselves and increase our power without that adequate knowledge of first causes that could not help anyway. By recognizing its own nature as impractical, philosophy allows a correct formulation of the relation between theory and practice. (p. 845)

In a pluralistic social setting where the joint striving for philosophical truth is a rare thing, being agreeable can serve as a temporary placeholder for being rational. People cannot be made to be rational through external means, but they can be made to be agreeable (to some degree at least) as this does not require an adequate understanding of things. Being agreeable is about behaving in ways that accord with the guidance of reason, but it can be supported through instrumental measures, such as human laws, popular imagery, and pedagogical influence. While divine law, for Spinoza, aims at the supreme good of human perfection, human law can be made to support the striving for this without having to presuppose the means that are required to actually get there. As such, while the two forms of law seem different to the point of being incommensurable, understanding how one can be made to support the other becomes key for understanding how the individual striving for perfection is related to, and to some degree dependent upon, social stability, civil obedience, and the making of peaceful communities.

To influence people to act in accordance with reason, then, is largely an affective affair, insofar as codes of conduct need to be accommodated to people’s affective makeup – their ingenium – in order to be effective. Different people have different ingenium and so they respond differently to imagery, depending on their cultural background and their individual and collective memories. While divine law is always and everywhere the same, human laws and codes of conduct need to be accommodated to people’s actual conditions so that people are affectively responsive to them. This links nicely with what Justin Steinberg (2018) terms Spinoza’s ‘methodological principle of accommodation’, proposing that ‘commands and teachings should be accommodated to the ingenia of affected parties, such that these commands and teachings elicit optimal (epistemic and affective) responses’ (p. 115). In order to tease out what this entails in an educational setting, it seems we need to focus on who the ‘affected parties’ in question refer to.

If we take the affected parties in question to refer to students in a general sense (which I think is a plausible move given that students can be considered representative of ordinary people, as argued above), then part of what makes the pedagogical relation function is the teacher’s ability to accommodate images and narratives to the ingenia of students. While these narratives need to be aligned with the guidance of reason in order to be deemed pedagogically valuable, they cannot presuppose a rational understanding of the world. If they could, then there would seem to be no need for a pedagogical relation to begin with. As mentioned above, the pedagogical relation hinges on an asymmetry that is being purposefully leveled out over time. It begins in imagination, by the teacher offering students images that appeal to their imagination, and strives for an increasingly rational understanding of the world over time. Similarly, a pedagogical relation starts off in an asymmetry that relies on arbitrary rules offered by the teacher and – if successful – accepted by the student. While these rules start off as arbitrary codes of conduct, they can be increasingly informed by reason, making them transition from arbitrary rules into necessary principles for living according to the guidance of reason. And even if they never make the shift from arbitrary rules to rational principles of living, the fact that they are at least accepted as rules to be externally abided by, would be enough (politically speaking) to fulfill the necessary part of protecting the stability of the community, allowing those who strive for intellectual perfection to strive in relative peace and security.

The tricky part seems to be the part where students are influenced to accept rules that are arbitrary from the point of view of their limited understanding. Once the pedagogical relation has evolved from one of instilling willing obedience to one of mutual agreement, the great challenge of moving from an understanding grounded in imaginative thinking to one grounded in reason has already been tackled. Moving from imaginative to rational thinking, however, relies on the kind of reeducation of passions that seeks to influence students to make a shift from being dominated by dangerous passions (such as anger and jealousy) to relying on comparatively better passions (such as humility and hope) from the point of view of their striving to persevere. If we look at how Spinoza conceives of this transition in a theologico-political context, and if we assume that the pedagogical relation can be taken to run parallel to this setup insofar as it is intended to enable a transition from a life governed by passions to a life guided by reason, then we can glean that while the pedagogical relation starts off on the path of benevolent manipulation, it gradually needs to transition into the path of exemplarity, where students transform from being moved to act mostly by powerful external images accommodated to their ingenia, to being moved to act instead by an increasing understanding of the intrinsic rewards of a life guided by reason. This illustrates Nohl’s point well insofar as it shows that the pedagogical relation is motivated and sustained by a mutual desire to render it redundant.

Educating the ingenium: An attempt at answering the educational concern raised by Spinoza’s perfectionist account ¹⁰

Adhering to Nohl’s conception of the pedagogical relation as a relation uniquely defined by its aim to render itself superfluous over time, we might conclude that it aligns with the striving for human perfection insofar as whatever is needed to level out the asymmetry between teacher and student, will also be consistent with the striving for perfection. It may be that bringing the pedagogical relation to its natural end is considerably less demanding than the attainment of the summum bonum of the intellectual love of God, but whatever contributes to one also necessarily contributes to the other, either directly or indirectly. The starting point for both endeavors is the teacher’s ability to offer imaginative narratives accommodated to the ingenium of the student. This explicitly targets the imagination rather than reason as the ability to reason cannot be assumed to be already developed at the onset of the pedagogical relation.

Not only do the images and popular narratives used need to be accommodated to the ingenium of the student to be effective, but they also need to be geared at promoting a life in accordance with the guidance of reason to be pedagogically motivated. Besides accommodation, then, the pedagogical relation is also concerned with reforming the ingenium of the student so that their affective makeup can gradually become less dominated by dangerous passions and increasingly guided by comparatively better passions that can alleviate the transition from imaginative thinking to reason. While not all students will progress to an intuitive understanding of nature and an intellectual love of God, all students will benefit from a relatively stable community, where the striving for perfection can be pursued unthreatened by dangerous passions that would otherwise block the path for all.

Spinoza’s conclusion that people’s understanding of the world is highly influenced by their particular ingenium (both as individuals and as collectives) means that appealing to reason will generally be less effective than appealing to people’s experiences in an educational setting. Accordingly, from a pedagogical point of view, it makes more sense to take these experiences as a point of departure for reeducating people’s passions than to depart from abstract principles of reason. These abstract principles will ultimately prove ineffective for swaying people since affects are generally not restrained ‘by the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as it is true but only insofar as it is considered as an affect’ (IVp14c). For Spinoza, a person’s understanding and behavior is shaped by their ingenium which, in turn, is externally determined insofar as people are always susceptible to external influences. Because an ‘affect cannot be restrained or taken away except by an affect opposite to, and stronger than, the affect to be restrained’ (IVp7), the imagination needs to be enlisted so that people’s experiences and memories can be made to connect with, and strengthen, the power of reason (TTP 5[35–37]). In a theologico-political context, Spinoza therefore suggests that:

It follows that if someone wants to teach a doctrine to a whole nation – not to mention the whole human race – and wants everyone to understand him in every respect, he is bound to prove his doctrine solely by experience, and for the most part to accommodate his arguments and the definitions of his teachings to the power of understanding of ordinary people, who form the greatest part of the human race. (TTP 5[37])

I take this to mean that educators are encouraged to use affectively persuasive imagery so as to bring their students’ idiosyncratic conceptions of good and evil closer in line with what is actually good and bad for their striving to persevere. In an educational context, people will need relatable models helping them see what they need to do in order to improve their situation. This is part of Spinoza’s practical conception of ethics, whereby the abstract concepts of Good and Evil – being meaningless concepts from the point of view of divine law – are drawn upon to help set up a practical system of perfectionism, whereby a teacher can offer images that are suitably accommodated to the ingenia of students, while also ensuring that they accord with what he calls the model of human nature. Hence:

[. . .] I shall understand by good what we know certainly is a means by which we may approach nearer and nearer the model of human nature we set before ourselves. By evil, what we certainly know prevents us from becoming like that model. Next, we shall say that men are more perfect or imperfect, insofar as they approach more or less near to this model. (IVpref, G II/208/18–23)

Arguably, this model is conceived in terms of a cognitive aid capable of connecting imaginative ways of thinking to ways of behaving that are conducive to people’s striving for perfection. For this to work, it needs to be sufficiently accommodated to people’s ingenia so that it can begin to reform them, making them increasingly more liable to recognize what is good and bad from the point of view of their particular affective constitution. The pedagogical model resulting from this, then, takes its starting point in what we might label efficient (or valuable) educational fictions, designed to appeal to the student’s imagination, seeking to gradually nudge students into recognizing how their own striving for self-preservation is inescapably bound up with that of the greater community. What these images might contain depends on the context. It depends on the dynamic of the collective imagination of students and on the socio-political demands of the society in question. There is no single uniform image capable of responding to these various demands in a universal sense as this would bring us right back to the problem of abstract principles being inadequate tools for influencing people who rely mostly on their imagination.

To bring us back to the question of what the educational implications of Spinoza’s perfectionism would be, it seems we are now in a position where we may attempt to formulate an answer to this. Given the natural constraints of the pedagogical relation – conceived as an asymmetrical relation that aims to render itself redundant over time – it necessarily differs from the kind of relation (qua friendship) where people work to mutually enhance one another’s striving for perfection. It makes little sense, then, to assume that the intellectual love of God can be convincingly assumed to make for a general, practically attainable, aim of education. While the intellectual love of God presumes a rational understanding of natural causes, the reeducation of passions does not. And while the successful reeducation of passions is in no way a guarantee of the attainment of the summum bonum, it is at least a prerequisite for it on a societal level.

Hence, we may suppose that education – in a broad sense – should aim at promoting human perfection primarily through the reeducation of passions, making it possible for ordinary people to coexist peacefully while still allowing for the striving for perfection of the individual. This way, public education would be geared more toward protecting the basic right of all people to strive for perfection than at actively promoting it as an educational aim for all. By ensuring that active threats against the striving for perfection are mitigated – through the countering of dangerous passions by less dangerous passions – education can act as a collective means of protecting the social stability needed for individuals to be able to pursue the intellectual love of God. For some people, this will help them strive to perfect their understanding in a direct sense, by allowing them to develop the capacities necessary for cultivating friendships that can aid them in their striving, whereas for some it will only do so indirectly, by promoting the kind of agreeability that can at least act as a defense against the worst forms of irrationality.

To conclude, then, we might say that while Spinoza’s perfectionism does not seem to prescribe the intellectual love of God as a general educational aim in a direct sense, it does so at least in an indirect sense. Spinoza’s perfectionism is in some sense an individual project presupposing an already developed rational understanding of natural causation. This makes it difficult to see how it would enter into the pedagogical relation, which seems to assume an asymmetry between teacher and student in terms of one being guided more by reason and the other by imagination. However, to the extent that Spinoza’s perfectionism begins with the reeducation of passions, it does seem to play an active role in education, if only in terms of addressing some of its preconditions. The answer, then, would not be a simple yes or no but a more ambiguous both. That is, Spinoza’s perfectionism does seem to concern mainly those few who are already guided by reason, but because people are inevitably influenced by one another in any human collective, it is also an educational concern of all members of a society. The difference is that for some it concerns a recognized striving for perfection, whereas for others it is simply part of a more general form of civic education geared at promoting the peace and security of the community.