Spinoza, Maimonides, and Neuroscience: Anger, Habit, and the Embodied Conditions of Freedom

Jacques J. Rozenberg

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research, France.

Abstract

Effective emotion regulation is a central problem for both moral psychology and contemporary psychology because entrenched affects often persist despite explicit knowledge of their causes. This article compares Spinoza's and Maimonides' accounts of affective transformation, with particular emphasis on anger, habituation, and the conditions of agency. Its principal claim is not that contemporary neuroscience empirically validates a medieval doctrine of free will, but that Maimonides' emphasis on repeated action and the formation of stable dispositions displays a functional and conceptual convergence with contemporary research on neuroplasticity and habit formation. Spinoza's account is treated in its stronger form: affects are not overcome by true propositions merely as propositions, but by adequate understanding insofar as it becomes affectively efficacious and participates in a stronger counter-affect. The comparison therefore distinguishes historical anticipation, conceptual convergence, functional analogy, empirical compatibility, and empirical confirmation. Neuroscientific evidence concerning distributed emotion processing, cognitive reappraisal, and corticostriatal learning is used only at the levels of functional analogy and empirical compatibility. The analysis suggests that repeated practice can reorganize emotional dispositions without thereby establishing metaphysical freedom, and that the most productive contribution of the comparison to psychology lies in integrating cognition, behavior, emotion, and neural plasticity in accounts of durable self-regulation.

Maimonides, Spinoza, affects, free will, anger, therapy of the mind, habituation, repentance, neuroscience, brain reorganization