Sive ratione, sive affectu

In June, the Dutch publisher Noordboek released Afkicken met Spinoza — roughly, Kicking the Habit with Spinoza — by Yoram Stein, a philosophy teacher in Amsterdam, board member of the Spinoza House Association, and holder of a doctorate on Spinoza. The book stakes out a position rarely put so sharply in the Dutch debate. Addiction, Stein argues, is the defining problem of our time, and it concerns not a small group but everyone: phones, social media, food, moral outrage, the conviction of being right. He describes society as a toxic amusement park, built by industries that share a single business model, and he concludes that only collective and political measures can change that culture. (1)

Then the book does something else. As Martijn Meijer notes in his review in NRC, it turns primarily to the question of what the individual can do. The answer is philosophy, with Spinoza as the medicine. Meijer closes with a reservation he borrows from Spinoza himself, the final line of the Ethics: sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt. All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. (2)

That line deserves better than the status of a closing caveat. It contains the problem facing any remedy that runs through individual insight, and Spinoza drew the consequence himself, in a work seldom consulted in discussions of addiction. Rüdiger Safranski supplies the other half of the argument — why insight reaches compulsion so poorly. Together they mark the limit of the philosophical remedy, and therefore the point at which structural analysis has to begin.

• • •

First, what Stein gets right. Spinoza had no word for addiction, but his account of unfreedom fits it without strain. In the preface to Part IV of the Ethics, he calls the human inability to moderate and restrain the affects servitus, bondage. A person governed by the affects is not his own master but subject to fortune, so much so that he is often compelled to follow the worse while seeing the better. (3) Beneath this lies a proposition that dismantles the self-image of the autonomous consumer. The force by which a human being persists in existing is limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes (Ethics IV, proposition 3). The individual is not a sealed domain. It is a junction of influences.

The remedy in Part V follows from that. An affect that is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it (Ethics V, proposition 3). Understanding what moves you alters your relation to it. The thought is not naïve, and it is partly correct. Anyone who learns to recognise variable reward in a feed, who knows why the notification is red and why the page has no end, stands differently towards the device. Recognition and understanding are the first two layers of what The Limbic Economy calls Limbic Literacy. Stein is right that they can be taught, and that a classroom where thinking is done together is a better place for it than an app.

The difficulty lies in what is assumed to follow: that insight, once acquired, carries conduct with it. Spinoza is more sceptical on this point than the therapeutic reading of his work suggests. An affect can be restrained or removed only by a contrary and stronger affect (IV, proposition 7). True knowledge of good and evil, insofar as it is true, can restrain no affect at all; it does so only insofar as it is itself experienced as an affect (IV, proposition 14). In the scholium to proposition 17 he quotes Ovid: video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. I see the better and approve it, and I follow the worse. (4)

That line describes a scene that recurs throughout the literature on the attention economy. Gabor Maté, who understands the mechanisms of addiction better than almost anyone, admits he cannot sit for five minutes without reaching for his phone. Aza Raskin, the designer who invented infinite scroll in 2006 and therefore knew its workings from the inside, became addicted to it himself. His insight did not free him. What freed him was a piece of software he wrote for his own use, delaying each new load by two hundred and fifty milliseconds. A quarter of a second of friction. (5)

This is not an argument against Spinoza. It is an argument for the Spinoza who is read less often.

• • •

In the last years of his life Spinoza worked on the Tractatus Politicus, left unfinished and published posthumously in 1677. It opens with a reproach to the philosophers. They treat the affects as vices into which people fall by their own fault, and so write satire rather than ethics. They imagine human beings as they would like them to be rather than as they are, with the result that their political theory remains a chimera — serviceable in Utopia, useless in an existing state (TP I, 1). (6)

A few paragraphs later comes the proposition that relocates the entire question of an addicted society. A state whose welfare depends on anyone’s good faith, and whose affairs are managed properly only if those concerned are willing to act in good faith, is anything but stable. To endure, public affairs must be so arranged that those who administer them, sive ratione ducantur, sive affectu — whether led by reason or by affect — cannot be brought to act in bad faith or wrongly (TP I, 6). (7)

Here the last line of the Ethics is no longer a melancholy footnote but a design principle. If excellence is rare, a society cannot make its protections contingent on excellence. It must work for those who are reasonable and for those who, that evening, after a full working day, no longer are. Raskin’s quarter second is one such arrangement: friction works sive ratione, sive affectu. So do the default usage limits, overnight blocks and notification restrictions for minors laid down in the American settlement with Meta at the end of August. (8) They demand no insight from the user. They take on the environment that outmanoeuvres insight as a matter of course.

This political Spinoza has a Dutch prehistory that sits strikingly close to the Anabaptist tradition. From 1661 to 1663 Spinoza lived in Rijnsburg, the centre of the Collegiants, in the house now known as the Spinozahuis. Among his closest friends were the Mennonites Jarig Jelles and Pieter Balling. Jelles wrote the preface to the posthumous edition in which the Tractatus Politicus appeared. (9) The milieu that saw Spinoza’s legacy into print knew both the philosophical conversation and the congregational practice of mutual admonition. Neither existed there without the other.

• • •

That leaves the question of why insight reaches compulsion so poorly. Spinoza’s answer is formal: an idea, as idea, is weaker than an affect. Safranski gives an answer closer to experience, and one that explains why the attention economy is so effective.

His 2015 book Zeit begins not with the clock but with boredom. Time becomes most palpable, Safranski argues, when it refuses to pass, when too little happens to cover it over. That empty time has always provoked literature and philosophy, because what is the matter with a human being can best be seen when nothing else is the matter. The chapter presents boredom as a drama in three acts, following Heidegger’s analysis in the lectures of 1929–30, where the deepest boredom is not waiting for something but the condition in which everything at once becomes a matter of indifference and one is thrown back on oneself. (10) Earlier, in his biography of Schopenhauer, Safranski had portrayed the thinker for whom life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom. (11)

That pendulum is the pre-scientific form of what Anna Lembke calls the pleasure-pain balance, and it makes visible what the business model actually exploits. The feed corrects no false idea. It fills an empty moment. Pascal, writing in the same decades in which Spinoza worked on the Ethics, observed that all of humanity’s unhappiness stems from one thing: the inability to sit quietly in a room alone. (12) What was then a remark about human nature is now a revenue model. A platform earns its money by ensuring that the moment never arrives at which, in Safranski’s terms, what is the matter with us would become visible. Treat addiction as the product of a mistaken conception of the good, and the therapy targets the conception. The industry targets the time.

This is why Stein’s formulation — addiction as the opposite of a philosophical life — is both right and insufficient. Right, because philosophising is one of the few activities that tolerates empty time and makes something of it. Insufficient, because the capacity to tolerate empty time is precisely the capacity the environment systematically erodes. A therapy that presupposes what the affliction destroys works for those who still have enough left to begin with. Once again, that is the few.

• • •

Safranski offers a second route to the same core. On 30 October 1955, in his birthplace of Meßkirch, Heidegger delivered an address published four years later under the title Gelassenheit. He argued there that we need not relate to technology either as adversary or as slave. We can use technical things and at the same time say both yes and no to them: yes to their unavoidable use, no to their claim on us in our entirety. That stance he called Gelassenheit — releasement. He set it alongside an openness to what in technology withdraws from our understanding, and against a calculative thinking that knows only planning and optimisation. (13)

The word comes from Meister Eckhart, the same source from which the early Anabaptists drew, and The Limbic Economy closes with that Mennonite Gelassenheit. The two derivations share an origin and diverge at the decisive point. Heidegger’s Gelassenheit is a stance of thought belonging to the solitary individual, attained in reflection. Menno Simons’s is the practice of a congregation: releasing what you cannot control and remaining faithful to what you can do, together, without any guarantee of result. Safranski’s Heidegger biography also documents the political history weighing on Heideggerian thought, and why the concept is better read along the other line. (14)

A symmetry emerges. Stein’s Spinoza and Heidegger’s Gelassenheit each offer an individual stance, one by way of insight, the other by way of reflection. Both are valuable and both are rare. What makes them durable comes from the same seventeenth-century Dutch milieu: the political Spinoza, who detaches the arrangement of society from the virtue of the citizen, and the Mennonite congregation, which embeds the virtue of the individual in a shared practice.

• • •

For the debate Stein rightly wants to open, three conclusions follow.

Insight is necessary. Spinoza is right that unfreedom begins in failing to understand what moves us, and education that teaches pupils to recognise how their attention is engineered is no luxury.

Insight is not sufficient, and Spinoza says so himself. An idea restrains no affect, and an environment designed to elicit the affect defeats any idea not carried by something stronger. To place the remedy with the individual, however refined the philosophy, is to shift the burden onto those least able to bear it. In the world of care and social services that move has a recognisable shape: the limbic alibi, in which a structurally produced outcome is attributed to the deficient capacity of the individual. (15)

And the arrangement must work for those who are not excellent. This is no dim view of humanity. It is the view of the Tractatus Politicus: realistic about the affects, and precisely for that reason ambitious about institutions. Friction in the design, safe defaults, regulation of the revenue model, and communities that carry the stance no individual sustains alone.

Meijer ends his review by asking whether everyone, pressed philosophically far enough, ultimately wants the good. It is a legitimate question, but for policy the answer matters less than it appears to. Spinoza arranged his politics so that it would not have to matter. All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. A society that takes that seriously designs for the evening on which we do not manage.

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Notes

(1) Yoram Stein, Afkicken met Spinoza. Hoe filosofie je bevrijdt van alledaagse verslavingen (Noordboek, 2026), 260 pp., published 15 June 2026. No English edition exists at the time of writing; the title translates roughly as Kicking the Habit with Spinoza: How Philosophy Frees You from Everyday Addictions. The characterisation of the book here rests on the publisher’s description and the review cited in note 2.

(2) Martijn Meijer, “Stoppen met sociale media, blowen of gokken, hoe doe je dat? Spinoza weet raad,” NRC, 10 September 2026. The quotation is the closing line of Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, scholium to proposition 42. Translations from the Latin in this article are the author’s.

(3) Spinoza, Ethics, Part IV, preface. Spinoza uses impotentia for the inability and servitus for the condition that follows from it.

(4) Spinoza, Ethics, Part IV, propositions 7 and 14, and the scholium to proposition 17. The line from Ovid is Metamorphoses VII, 20–21, where Medea describes her own divided will.

(5) On Maté: Gabor Maté in conversation with Steven Bartlett, The Diary of a CEO, episode 193, “The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All of Our Lives.” On Raskin, the invention of infinite scroll and the 250-millisecond delay: The Limbic Economy, chapter 2, with the sources cited there.

(6) Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, chapter I, section 1.

(7) Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, chapter I, section 6.

(8) See “Design as the Object of the Settlement” (House of Viridian, Limbic Literacy, September 2026). The court entered the consent judgment on 26 August 2026; the provisions named apply only to users under eighteen.

(9) Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; 2nd edn 2018). Jelles’s preface appeared in De Nagelate Schriften van B.d.S. (1677) and in Latin translation in the Opera Posthuma of the same year.

(10) Rüdiger Safranski, Zeit. Was sie mit uns macht und was wir aus ihr machen (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2015), chapter 1, “Zeit der Langeweile.” No English translation has appeared. For Heidegger’s analysis of boredom: Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit, lecture course 1929–30, Gesamtausgabe vol. 29/30; in English, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

(11) Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer und Die wilden Jahre der Philosophie (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1987); in English, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). The image of the pendulum between pain and boredom: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, § 57.

(12) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, fragment 136 (Lafuma), 139 (Brunschvicg), in the sequence on divertissement. On Lembke: Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (New York: Dutton, 2021), and The Limbic Economy, chapter 6.

(13) Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), the text of the address delivered at Meßkirch on 30 October 1955; in English as “Memorial Address” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Heidegger there distinguishes calculative from meditative thinking and pairs releasement towards things with openness to the mystery.

(14) Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1994); in English, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). On Gelassenheit in the Anabaptist tradition and its derivation from Meister Eckhart: The Limbic Economy, chapter 21, and C. Arnold Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1995), chapter 4.

(15) See The Limbic Alibi (House of Viridian, Limbic Literacy, 2026).