Ian MacLean-Evans

In Ethics 5, Spinoza writes that “something” of the human mind remains eternally beyond death (E5p23). I develop a novel implication of this doctrine, given Spinoza’s views of knowledge and interpersonal love. I argue that one can Spinozistically keep the eternal element of a passed loved one “with them” by developing adequate ideas of parts of their loved one’s essence. §1 identifies what remains of someone post-death: namely, the idea of that person’s essence as the idea of their striving, both bodily and mentally. §2 argues that Spinozistic love compels us and our loved ones to produce commonalities, that through commonalities we can thereby adequately know parts of the essence of a person we love, and that we can thus hold parts of the exact entity which remains eternally of a loved one in our own minds. Spinoza’s correspondence with Pieter Balling makes this view especially plausible. Indeed, Spinoza there says that through their love Balling and his son became “as it were, one and the same” and that Balling could “participate” in his son’s “ideal essence”. In §3, I respond to potential objections and provide Spinozistic motivations for “keeping them with you”.

I argue alongside some other scholars that there is a plausible reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of suicide which holds both of the following tenets: first, that suicides occur because of external conditions, and second, that there are at least some suicides which are rational. These two tenets require special attention because they seem to be the source of significant tension. For Spinoza, if one’s cognitions are to be the most adequate, they must be “disposed internally” (E2p29s/G II 114), or determined more from one’s own mental nature than from “fortuitous encounters” with other things (E2p29s/G II 114). It may seem there is a conflict, then, in saying both that there are rational suicides in the Spinozist framework, and that suicides must always be a result of external conditions: it seems a suicide simply cannot be rational if it is the result of external conditions. But this tension, it will be shown, can be dissolved. Once this tension is dealt with, I offer some brief closing arguments. I explain how this reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of suicide can satisfy a call for new suicide research which avoids forms of over-individualism and epistemic injustice, and which encourages us to abolish oppressive conditions that lead to rational suicides.