Spinoza’s Value Projectivism

Abstract This chapter defends a projectivist reading of Spinoza’s theory of evaluative judgment—his account of how we come to form judgments of good and evil. Projectivism, roughly, states that although we represent value as an objective feature of the world, this representation in fact originates in some non-perceptual feature of the mind itself. Spinoza states clearly that our value judgments depend on our desires. The chapter argues that the phenomenon of projection explains this dependence: for Spinoza, we project our desires onto things and thus represent them as good and evil. The chapter develops this thesis to a full extent, offering a historically informed account of projectivist views, delineating Spinoza’s account of the mechanism of projection, locating the place of the affects within this account, and squaring this all with the role Spinoza seems to grant to reason in the cognition of value.