Spinoza’s Social Theory. One of the most powerful forces affecting human life is also one of the least understood. Normative force, while operative in ethics, is not generally thought of as a physical force. But how, then, can we explain the effect of norms and customs on individuals? How else can we explain how we can move from the idea that I ‘ought’ to perform some action my feeling that I ought to do something, to my actually performing the action? Kantians argue that actions, even those most socially determined actions, are freely chosen, and that at each moment we can choose from among the plethora of physical possibilities and choose the right one. The social world, the norms and practices which we have internalized and on the basis of which constructed our identity, for these theorists does not determine our choice, nor should it. In making extremely important decisions, for example the decision to choose whether or not to enter the state of nature, 219 E4P37S1,S2 such Kantian theorists argue we can and should try to forget our social and cultural background, since it is irrelevant to whether or not the new civil state is just or unjust. Such theorists see our social background as irrelevant for our moral and ethical decisions. For Spinoza, there is no freedom of the will, and any use of freedom in an explanation of human action is just a fancy short-hand for ‘I have no idea how this works’. That I have free will, or that I choose freely does not explain the force of norms and my expectations of the reaction of my social world on my behavior. Through the medium of the affects, Spinoza seeks to show how normative force works, as both a physical force and as a mental force, in shaping human behavior and in creating the human social world. The mental and the physical aspects are not causally related, for Spinoza, but they are two aspects of the same forces, one a feature of our physical being and the other a feature of our mental life, involving the imagination and intellect. Normative force is the force of the affects and the imagination of each individual working individually but affecting one another. Affects and images are communicated among individuals, tying them together into social groups but also burdening them in the ways that only norms can, seemingly from the outside and from the inside at once. Because we live in the community and we know what is expected, we feel the weight of this expectation, the force of what we are supposed to do, even when we feel we can no...
