Instead, she emphasizes that throughout the Ethics, and particularly in the crucial Proposition 7 of Part II, Spinoza asserts the identity and unity of mind and body - that they are aequalis and simul. She ridicules this demand by citing Spinoza's amusing example of a householder who cries that his yard has flown into his neighbor's hen, where the absurdity arises from a failure of the utterance to express the surprised man's ideas. Jaquet maintains that the ascendency of the Leibnizian term misleads us by introducing "a form of irreducible dualism and plurality" (14), while demanding one-to-one equivalences between parallel modes in a "monolithic correspondence" (17). There she notes that this popular, indeed dominant, coinage for describing the relation of mind and body ultimately comes from Leibniz, where it describes relations between events on two very different levels, in souls and in matter. In short, parallelism replaces interactionism.īut it is just this picture of Spinoza's monism, writ both large and small, that Jaquet sets out to undermine, arguing in Chapter One that we should "ban the term 'parallelism' and replace it with 'equality'" (19). (Jaquet's book originally appeared in 2004, immediately after the publication of Damasio's.) In a brief introduction and again in the conclusion, Jaquet notes how Damasio endorses Spinoza's approach to psychophysical unity as a way to avoid the interaction problems of Cartesian dualism, holding that "mind and body are parallel and mutually correlated processes, mimicking each other at every crossroads, as two faces of the same thing" (Damasio 2003, p.
Jaquet sets up her project in the context of Spinoza's recent popularity among researchers investigating the affects, most notably the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, whose Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain was translated into French as Spinoza Avait Raison. But if Jaquet is right, this is just what we should expect from a mixed discourse illustrating that mind and body are aequalis and simul, without requiring that each aspect of a human being marches in lockstep uniformity with the other. Jaquet's approach does a great deal of justice to the dialectic of Spinoza's work in the Ethics, particularly to her main focus, Part III, where many commentators have been struck (and frustrated) by what looks like Spinoza's frequent changes of perspective and explanatory framework. Jaquet offers a revisionist way of conceiving that unity by looking at what Spinoza means by 'affect' and how it illustrates the relations of aequalis and simul through what she calls a "mixed discourse," which sometimes emphasizes the mental aspect of an affect, sometimes the corporeal, and sometimes both together. Parallelism has been one way of understanding the unity of mind and body without reduction to one or the other side. Instead we should speak of mind and body as "equal" and the same, both in their power of acting and in the order and connection of modes under the attributes of thinking and extension. Affects, actions passions chez Spinoza, recently translated into English by Tatiana Reznichenko, is a short book with a bold claim that: attributing a "parallelism" to Spinoza distorts his conception of the relation of mind and body. Chantal Jaquet's L'unit é du corps et de l' esprit.
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