MATHERON ON HUMAN LIBERATION Sages strive . . . to make reign around them a climate of social peace and friendship.

They also practice the virtue of generositas [generosity] by applying without lapse . . . rigorous positive reciprocity, prudence in the choice of partners, gratitude, good faith, and perfect obedience to the civil laws. They also work peacefully for the reform of the City. But their mundane activities from now on are subordinate to a much vaster metahistorical venture. Beyond the bourgeois liberal state and the transitional stage of reasonable interhuman life, they want to establish a communism of minds*: to enable all of Humanity to exist as a totality conscious of itself, a microcosm of the infinite Understanding, in the heart of which every soul, although remaining itself, would at the same time become all the others. This is an eschatological perspective, which would be somewhat analogous to certain Kabbalists, if the final outcome were not in Spinoza pushed back to infinity: this result will never actually be attained; but at least we can always approach it. Thus we shall wind up at a partial solution to the ontological drama at the origin of the human drama: infinite Understanding, separated from itself by the necessity in which it finds itself to think the modes of Extension in their existence hic et nunc [here and now], will all the better overcome this separation as Humanity more and more reconciles itself with itself. Therefore, the existence of knowledge of the third kind has two aspects. On the plane of duration, it completes the existence of knowledge of the second kind by providing complete satisfaction to our individual and interhuman conatus: surpassing all alienations and divergences; an actualization of the I in the most complete lucidity, an actualization of the We in the most complete of communions. If need be, Spinoza could leave it at this. The discovery of the eternity of our mind changes nothing about the facts of the ethical problem: even though we believe ourselves to be mortal, animositas [courage] and generosity retain all their value in our eyes; beatitude merges with virtue, far from being a reward in the hereafter. And yet it is indeed the passage to the plane of eternity that reveals to us the entire significance of our quest. The intellectual knowledge of our essence delivers us not only from the mutilations that prevented us from being ourselves: by removing our soul from the present existence of its object, it emancipates us from the ultimate servitude that is death. Intellectual communion in the knowledge of essences themselves suppresses not only the antagonisms that opposed us to one another: by removing our souls from the spatially localized existence of their objects, it abolishes every separation. This would be a complete and definitive individual liberation in a community without restriction: does not this double passage to the limit retrospectively clarify the deepest motivations of Spinozism? (Translated by Ted Stolze from Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communaut chez Spinoza, nouvelle dition [Paris: Minuit, 1987], pp. 611-13) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "Which would logically imply . . . a communism of goods: if you and I fused, then the distinction between yours and mine would be abolished. This would be a communism with neither juridical laws nor institutional constraints: the state would disappear after having created the conditions of its own uselessness . . . all human beings would spontaneously have the same ideas regarding what happened to each of them. . . . of course, this is an ideal limit that will never be attained; but for sages it functions as a regulative Idea in the Kantian sense.!