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Imagine that you had dedicated yourself to helping others think a little differently about life so they’d be happier and better off. You’ve put your whole heart into this work and made a lot of sacrifices in doing so. But you’ve gotten no appreciation from others—on the contrary, everyone’s said your ideas are garbage and you’re a rotten person for suggesting them. No doubt, you’d be bitter and disheartened.
That was exactly the situation in which the 17th-century Portuguese Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza found himself: working to make the world a happier, more harmonious place by arguing that God is everywhere, and that humans are one with him. But Spinoza was, in the words of his biographer Bertrand Russell, “considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness.” For his work, he was rejected by his own Jewish community in Amsterdam for questioning the literal truth of the Bible; despised by Christian leaders for denying the personal, interventionist nature of the Divinity; and condemned by the civic-religious authorities as a threat to social stability. In today’s terms, Spinoza got canceled.
His cancellation did not harm him economically, because he made a good living not as a philosopher but by producing lenses, microscopes, and telescopes. Yet the repudiation of his life’s work had to hurt.
Despite all of this rejection, Spinoza used his philosophical insight to figure out how to manage his emotions and avoid dejection. Centuries before modern neuroscience, he developed an intuitive understanding of the relationship in the brain between emotion and reason and taught himself to maintain equanimity in spite of censure and contempt. Anyone today who faces the wrath of the cancel-scolds for trying to speak the truth can benefit greatly from his approach.
Most people in Spinoza’s situation would probably experience anger and fear—and that reaction would certainly be justified if their livelihood or social position was affected by the persecution. One thing that has changed, for the worse perhaps since Spinoza’s time, is that the cancel mob can be entirely virtual today. That hardly softens the effect of denunciation: You can feel as though the whole world is against you even if you know none of your tormentors in person. Spinoza would say that this sense of oppression is a form of emotional bondage. “When a man is a prey to his emotions,” he wrote in Ethics, “he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.”
[Arthur C. Brooks: How to stop freaking out]
What Spinoza thought of as fortune, we might today call the limbic system. This primitive console of brain tissue that largely controls emotion includes the amygdala, which is stimulated when you perceive a threat. In the estimation of many neuroscientists, fear is the master emotion because it clears all else and makes you focus on the immediate danger (a phenomenon that has been called an “amygdala hijack”). This may save your life if an actual tiger is after you, but most of the time this mechanism lowers your quality of life by leading you to say and do things you later regret. A hijacked amygdala can make you feel completely freaked out over something relatively insignificant—such as, say, a bunch of trolls attacking you online.
Spinoza had a solution to such emotional bondage: achieving greater consciousness. As he went on to explain in Ethics, for a person to be “scarcely at all disturbed in spirit,” he should be “conscious of himself, and of God, and of things.” The trick is not to eradicate the turbulence stoked by others’ disapproval that triggers primordial fears in your limbic system, but to have a rational understanding of exactly what that inner turmoil is. Knowledge, Spinoza argued, gives you power over your emotions.
Science bears this out. Rational observation of negative emotions is called “metacognition”: an awareness that uses the brain’s executive function to reach impartial judgment of thoughts and feelings. Metacognition moves the experience of your emotions from the limbic system to the prefrontal cortex, where the emotions can be understood and you can decide whether they’re appropriate and productive.
Although metacognition takes practice and discipline, when you do it well, you can give yourself the sort of advice a rational observer of your situation would give you, rather than the hysterical commands a person flailing in terror would issue. So, instead of trying to out-troll the trolls, you would just be able to say to yourself, Delete the app and get on with your life.
You may object that such higher rationality will turn you into Mr. Spock from Star Trek, incapable of the emotional range that brings mystery and spontaneity to life. That isn’t Spinoza’s objective at all. He doesn’t want to eradicate emotions, but to regulate them so that they can be as productive and helpful as possible in any given situation. That could mean, for example, that you’re able to respond with courage and dignity when you are under attack—calibrating your anger appropriately, rather than acting out of panic.
Spinoza argued that this rationality sorts out not only earthly problems but heavenly ones as well. Though considered a heretic by Jews and Christians alike, he never lost his faith and maintained his belief in a good God whom he aspired to know more deeply and whom he might love more rationally than emotionally. An “intellectual love of God” was not to “imagine him as present,” Spinoza argued, but to “understand him to be eternal.”
You don’t have to embrace Spinoza’s theology to benefit from his philosophy of emotions. In times of strife and malice, Spinoza offers the best defense to free you from the fear of unjust reproval. Here are three ways to make use of his wisdom.
1. Take a beat.
When you were a child, your mother probably told you that if you’re angry, you should count to 10 before speaking. Spinoza would approve entirely: Pausing when you are emotionally aroused gives your rational executive centers time to catch up with your jumpy limbic system and make your self its “master,” as Spinoza might say. The habit of counting to 10 (some scholars recommend 30)—or saving that email in draft or waiting until tomorrow to post a social-media response—is an excellent one to adopt.
2. Understand your emotions.
When you are getting hijacked, Spinoza would generally counsel understanding before action—the metacognition I mentioned above and have written about before. You can pick from many practices to assist this; one I like is insight meditation (known by Buddhists as Maha-satipatthana), which allows you to observe your feelings at a distance. If you are religiously inclined, prayers of petition work in the same way. Alternatively, you can simply try journaling your feelings before reacting emotionally.
[Arthur C. Brooks: Sit with negative emotions. Don’t push them away].
3. Be your own therapist.
So you know the difference between emotion and reason, and you have the Spinozan technique for moving from one to the other. Thus armed, try adopting the kind of advice that you would give a close friend—as a way to manage obstructive feelings and embrace emotions that are in your interest. If someone insulted this hypothetical friend, in public or online, you would probably encourage them not to freak out and get into a huge battle, and instead maintain a respectful but firm attitude. Say what you think in the right medium, in a rational and measured way, you might advise, and then move on. Then take that very solid advice from you, and make it to you.
Spinoza’s emotional-management protocol sounds simple enough in theory, but how did it work in practice—for him? True, he never won public affection during his lifetime (nor did his reputation improve in the century that followed). But as reviled as he was by all the arbiters who counted in his day, did he succumb to despair and rail against those ignorant scolds? Not a bit. “Unlike some other philosophers, he not only believed his own doctrines, but practised them,” writes Russell, his biographer—and himself a celebrated philosopher. “I do not know of any occasion, in spite of great provocation, in which he was betrayed into the kind of heat or anger that his ethic condemned.”
And he lived out his own ethic to the end. “On the last day of his life he was entirely calm,” Russell writes. Spinoza had canceled his cancelers where it really mattered: in his own mind.
