Keeping Them With You: Spinoza, Love, and Eternal Minds

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”.