BdSpinoza

Spinoza's (paradoxale?) gebruik van 'sui iuris' [4]

Daar m.i. het onderwerp nog niet echt af was, maar het stil bleef, lokte ik reacties uit door er een grapje tussendoor te gooien: het blog "Spinoza schrijft een wedstrijd uit". En dat werkte en leverde zoals daar in een reactie van Rob van der Hoeden blijkt, een nieuwe interessante bron op:

Andre Santos Campos: Spinoza's Revolutions in Natural Law [Palgrave Macmillan. 2012 - [ cf. eerdere signalering in dit blog]. Books.google laat 27 hits op sui juris zien.

Daaruit wil ik graag een aantal sprekende citaten brengen en gezien de kant die de reacties op het laatste blog op gaan (waar dit moeilijk meer tussen past), maak ik dit aparte vervolgblog (wat ook het voordeel heeft dat cursief gestelde tekst behouden blijft).

Eerst herneem ik hier nog eens de eindnoot (nr. 8 op p. 192 uit dit boek, hoewel niet te zien bij welke tekst dit precies een noot is) over de vertaalmoeilijkheid die er uiteraard ook in het Engels is:

"Sui juris is commonly translated as 'being one's own master' (Duff, 1903; Harris, 1973; Spinoza 1994, 2002) — however, insofar as even the wisest of men is always subject to some passions and always an existent effect of other individuals' productivity, this self-mastery has nothing to do with a Stoic control of reason over passions or causality. Rather than to mastery or control, sui juris refers mostly to one's understanding of how causal heteronomy actually works — It is an adequate power of oneself."

De volgende beschouwingen [op p. 115-16 en p. 124] vind ik echt verhelderend:

"The TP reshapes the state of nature even further in order to solve its original incompatibility with both Hobbes's resolutive-compositive method and with Aristotle's traditional 'social animal' theory. What mostly concerns Spinoza in his final work is the causal process through which natural law becomes effective in human individuals. Spinoza still talks about the situation of a 'first man' and of states of nature, but now he measures man's minimum expressive degree of power through the conceptual pair sui juris/alterius juris that he derives from private Roman law. He says explicitly that a man is alterius juris 'for as long as he is in the other's potestas', and that he is sui juris 'to the extent that he can repel all force, take whatever vengeance he pleases for injury done to him and, in general, live as he chooses to live' (TP 11/9). Spinoza lists these criteria for sui juris still with the idea of a 'first man' in mind, and he claims that none of them can be found in that man at all when he is isolated in a state of nature (TP II/15).

Consequently, the first man's power is neither a control of his own right nor a right of his own — he is not sui juris. That man must necessarily be, then, subject to another's power — alterius juris, that is. But if he is alterius juris, he can only be conceived at all when there is already some individual power in play [jus] and the presence of another [alter]. His complete isolation contradicts the very idea that he is a minimum degree of power. The hypothetical scenario of Adam's experience is thus merely feigned by the imagination and by theology — it is an opinion, not a fact (TP II/15).

The resolutive—compositive method suffers a definite blow: the 'first man' must necessarily be 'a man with other men'. Still, Spinoza continues to think that man neither has a Grotian appetite for society nor is he a mere deducible component of already established societies. The beginning of politics is still explained inside the idea of a state of nature. But this state of nature has a different status, since it seems to appear only when human natural law also appears — that is, in actual sociality. The moment in which this appearance takes place represents the moment of birth of the state of nature, of human natural law and of society:" [p. 115-16]

[...]

"How, then, is individual power formed through the multitude? Spinoza conceives individual political empowerment in the TP mostly by means of the conceptual pair sui juris/alterius juris. However, since the completely autonomous individual who is master of his own right is merely an opinion rather than a fact, the sui juris/alterius juris pair seems more mutually complementary than an actual dichotomy. One becomes sui juris when there is a mutual validation of individual powers between several individuals — that is, the individual's empowered right is born with the simultaneous empowered right of another [alter]. The multitude appears to be at the outset the realm of the common emerging out of the multiplication of others' powers. The multitude is the realization of an individual's power by means of the simultaneous right of another individual [alterius juris]." [p.124]

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Een interessante conclusie, kortom , sui juris/alterius juris, is geen elkaar uitsluitende dichotomie, maar een elkaar wederzijds veronderstellende en versterkende complementariteit. Een wat mij betreft als typisch Spinozistische gedachte te herkennen.

Stan Verdult 

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Toevoeging - de eerste alinea's uit het 16e hoofdstuk van  

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill. London, 1651

[Chapter] XVI: Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated

A person is he whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction.
    When they are considered as his own, then is he called a natural person: and when they are considered as representing the words and actions of another, then is he a feigned or artificial person.
    The word person is Latin, instead whereof the Greeks have πρüσωπον, which signifies the face, as persona in Latin signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it which disguiseth the face, as a mask or vizard: and from the stage hath been translated to any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals as theatres. So that a person is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate is to act or represent himself or another; and he that acteth another is said to bear his person, or act in his name (in which sense Cicero useth it where he says, Unus sustineo tres personas; mei, adversarii, et judicis—I bear three persons; my own, my adversary’s, and the judge’s), and is called in diverse occasions, diversely; as a representer, or representative, a lieutenant, a vicar, an attorney, a deputy, a procurator, an actor, and the like.

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spinoza | 25-03-2014 | 11:51 | Link | Reacties (6)