April 11

Hasana Sharp (McGill University)

“The infant’s body”: On the way to freedom

Abstract: “Childhood” and “childishness” often carry negative connotations in Spinoza’s corpus. He refers to “prejudice or childish superstition,” “childish and absurd opinions,” and lists children among those, like “fools and madmen,” whom he knows not how to esteem. Rather than a state of freedom, Spinoza represents childhood as a condition of relative passivity, servility, and ignorance. Nevertheless, it would be hasty to conclude that Spinoza has a dim view of childhood. I hope to show that the association of individuals or peoples with childishness points, at the same time, to their immaturity and to their perfectibility. The receptivity and plasticity of youth entails great susceptibility to harmful passions and local prejudices. At the same time, our passivity and responsiveness render each of us perfectible by those kinds of rules and demonstrations that empower us, should we be fortunate enough to be exposed to them. The result is that human perfectibility depends to a significant extent upon fortune, and that virtue is owed to the acute receptivity of infancy and childhood.

Hasana Sharp earned her PhD from the Pennsylvania State University (2005) and a diplôme (pensionnaire scientifique étranger) from the Ecole Normale Supérieure des Lettres et Sciences Humaines (2004). Her research is in the history of political philosophy with a focus on Spinoza. Her 2011 book examines the implications of Spinoza's denial of human exceptionalism for ethics and politics, with consideration of arguments in feminist thought and critical race theory. She is currently undertaking a SSHRC-funded research project on Spinoza and Servitude. She is interested in how his analyses of human servitude, bondage, and slavery, central to both his ethics and politics, can be understood in relationship to other models. In particular, how do Spinoza's philosophical and political conceptions of servitude interact with the notions of his contemporaries objecting to the enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples or to the domination of women? 

Click here to learn more about her work.

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