Recently I have taken up cycling. I used to take great joy in this all the way up through graduate school until my bike got stolen. I wasn’t a serious cyclist. I used my bike simply to get places and often to just cruise about. I loved jumping off of curbs or taking turns at breakneck speeds. This time around I’m taking it more seriously, riding for fitness and mental health. I’m not a beast like some of my friends who are avid cyclists, but every day I go a bit further, a bit faster, and get more endurance.
I’ve named my bike Spinoza. Why? In Part II, Proposition VII of the Ethics, Spinoza says that “the order and connection among ideas is the same as the order and connection among things.” This is Spinoza’s famous parallelism. Unlike dualists, he does not claim that there is one order of the body ruled by extension and cause and effect interactions and another of thought governed by different types of relations (it would be odd, perhaps, to say that one idea causes another in the way that one billiard ball hitting another causes it to move in a particular direction). Unlikely the materialist he does not say that thought is an expression of neurological events like the Churchlands claim. For Spinoza, thought does not cause bodily events, nor do bodily events cause thought. Rather, they run parallel to one another. Perhaps we can even say they are one and the same thing expressed through different attributes, now seen under the attribute of thought, now seen under the attribute of extension. As such, while they are the same, they do not resemble each other. Nothing about my thoughts as I write this rather vapid post resembles neurological events in my brain, nor does anything about neurological events that resemble my thoughts, but for each thought I have there’s a neurological event (along with other bodily events) and for every bodily event there’s a thought. Our thoughts might not be at all veridical in many cases for this reason. For example, I might be irritated by another driver on the road (a thought). I think the other driver is the cause of my ire. But maybe I’m just hangry (hunger + angry) and am suffering a deficiency of various nutrients in my body that makes me especially sensitive to stimuli from my environment such as the other car seeming too close to me. Perception is as much about filtering stimuli out as it is about sensing stimuli. When we are tired or our chemistry is off kilter, that ability to filter stimuli comes painfully flooding in. We are overwhelmed by the world. Notice how well this accords with Deleuze’s account of desire where there is no lack. At the bodily level there’s no lack, just gradients and differentials.
These thoughts are what have led me to name my bike Spinoza. There’s a sort of experiment here. If parallelism is true— a big if —then what becomes of my thought as I live my body in this way? As my body undergoes transformations, becoming stronger, having more endurance, breathing better, etc, will the nature of my thought change as well? Already, in the weeks I’ve been cycling, I’ve begun getting the exercise high. I find myself less irritated in the evenings. The horrors of the world and the mundane frustrations of daily life seem more muted, more distant. Will there be other changes? Will there be new lines of thought running parallel to the becomings my body is undergoing? In Part III, Proposition II, Spinoza says we don’t know what a body can do. I certainly don’t know what my body can do and experience wonder as it does more and more. But if parallelism is true, then we also don’t know what thought can do and discover more and more of the power of thought as we discover the power of our bodies.
Larval Subjects . 
August 26, 2022 at 3:44 pm
I am wondering if the last sentence is not a bit abelist? The only way out then would be that a differently abled body already performs on unknown levels thereby enabling the discovery of unknown powers of thought (see S. Hawking). I am not unsympathetic to your reading though generally suspicious about interpretations that allow a drifting towards ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’ statements. Though if materialist views can be brought in there are insights that the training of motor behavior may even be beneficial for the mental health of Parkinson’s patients for example. And while a certain (mind-based) flexibility indeed can be proven through physical activity I prefer the lines where thought is described as not to “cause bodily events, nor do bodily events cause thought. Rather, they run parallel to one another.” A (mysterious) entanglement between body and mind (among others) that does not run along clearly explicable lines binary systems are based on.
August 26, 2022 at 4:23 pm
I’m not sure how it’s ableist. All of us have bodies. All of those bodies have powers. Those powers will differ from person to person.” And must be discovered by each person.
August 27, 2022 at 7:51 am
Two small thoughts:
1. Physical transformations in a narrow sense (getting stronger, breathing better, etc.) are just a small (albeit important) subset of “what a body can do”. Unfortunately, even many spinozist commentators have misinterpreted corporeal capacities for fitness. But in the very same text (III P2sc) that Deleuze made famous, Spinoza talks about the arts as corporeal processes. And we can add a lot of things here, for example language is, for Spinoza, a corporeal phenomenon; the same goes for all kinds of affects. So, the more “complex” a body is -and the human body is, afaik, the most complex body we know of-, the more complex ideas its mind can form. Everything that happens in extension is an effect of corporeal capacity: putting a musical symphony down on paper, cycling, doing acrobatics, writing a poem, looking at someone in an certain manner… So ableism is a priori out of the question, since physical fitness is but a part of corporeal capacities. (See the digression to physics after II P13. Also V P39: “He who has a Body capable of a great many things has a Mind whose greatest part is eternal”.)
2. The second thing is that, while the main ingredients of your take on II P7 ring true, with the central point being the causal isolation between the attributes, I think “parallelism” (a rather unfortunate coinage) is a lot more nuanced than a simple, straightforward 1-to-1 correspondence between modes of extension and thought. The different attributes have different laws, “common notions”, types of priority, etc. in the Ethics, correspond to different kinds of knowledge, and serve different purposes in the overall strategy of the book. In a way, for example, the first part of V is a sort of revenge of the imagination, which is based on corporeal relations: forming good imaginative habits.
I’m glad you named your bike Spinoza, the name is quite apt! A nice bike too. I used to move around daily (in Athens, Greece) by bicycle for almost twenty years, it’s been just a few months that I switched to a 650cc motorcycle, and whenever I happen to ride my bicycle I feel… well, free! I hope I’ll manage to switch to a more balanced scenario between the two means of transportation; after all, socialism can only arrive by bicycle. Keep on cycling :-)
August 27, 2022 at 11:00 am
Great comment! I definitely didn’t mean to give the impression that physical fitness is the extent of what a body can do. I wrote a short post earlier this week on ballet, for example.
August 27, 2022 at 12:54 pm
The arts as a coporeal processes and transformations… as my old body grows weaker, and more limited by bouts of chronic pain–in making art (like Blake nearing his death), I feel myself grow stronger and more enduring in my imagination. Yes… in making art, our art becomes our true body, even as our body of bone and flesh grows weaker and more feeble.