Yes — what you’ve just done is exactly the pressure point, and it’s a philosophically legitimate reversal of Spinoza rather than a misunderstanding of him.
Let me restate your move as cleanly as possible, then say where Spinoza would resist it and where, interestingly, his own resources partially support you.
1. Your reframing (made explicit)
You are saying:
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If Bonhoeffer’s plot fails and he lives on in bitterness,
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the primary harm is the reduction of his conatus,
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that reduction is not self-generated, but imposed,
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and Hitler (standing in for a whole assemblage of unjust forces) is the causal agent of that harm.
Therefore:
Bonhoeffer is not a “hidden murderer” in any morally or ontologically interesting sense;
rather, he is being murdered slowly, affectively and existentially, by the conditions he confronts.
That is a powerful inversion.
2. Where Spinoza would resist you
Spinoza would resist you at exactly one point — and it’s decisive for him.
He insists on a strict distinction between:
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external causes that diminish our power, and
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the affects that arise from our fixation on those causes.
For Spinoza:
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Hitler (and the regime, and the war) are indeed external causes of Bonhoeffer’s diminished power.
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But hatred is not identical with that causal relation.
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Hatred is a mode of imagination that binds Bonhoeffer’s conatus to the image of Hitler as its explanatory anchor.
And that binding — not the original harm — is what Spinoza calls pathological.
So Spinoza would say (coldly, but consistently):
Yes, Bonhoeffer is harmed by Hitler.
But hatred is not the harm itself — it is Bonhoeffer’s affective response to the harm, and that response further binds him to passivity.
This is where “hidden murder” enters for Spinoza:
not because Bonhoeffer deserves blame, but because the affect remains oriented toward annihilation rather than reconfiguration of power.
3. Where your critique lands (and Spinoza weakens)
Here’s the crucial point:
Spinoza has no adequate language for cumulative, irreparable harm.
He treats diminutions of power as:
You are insisting on something stronger and darker:
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Some harms persist even when understood.
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Some reductions of conatus are not merely situational but scarring.
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Some affects are not misorientations but truthful registrations of damage.
In that register, calling Bonhoeffer’s hatred “hidden murder” really does look like a misdiagnosis — because it treats the symptom as if it were the site of agency.
Your move exposes how easily Spinoza’s analysis slides into what you earlier named, correctly, secular theodicy:
the world remains intelligible, and therefore no remainder is allowed to accuse it.
4. A deeper asymmetry Spinoza cannot resolve
You are also pointing to an asymmetry Spinoza smooths over:
Spinoza treats both under the same formal schema of affects and causes, but that symmetry is morally and phenomenologically suspect.
Your account insists:
The hatred is downstream of injustice, not its mirror image.
Spinoza insists:
The hatred is still a passive affect, regardless of its origin.
This is not a factual disagreement; it is an ontological commitment.
5. A careful synthesis (without smoothing it over)
If we are maximally fair to both sides, we might say:
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Spinoza is right that hatred does not restore power and often deepens bondage.
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You are right that the primary “murder” is the world’s ongoing violation of the subject, not the subject’s affective response to it.
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Calling the response “hidden murder” risks misplacing agency and exonerating structural violence.
And this is why your earlier remark about resentment discourse rhyming with theodicy was so accurate:
it is precisely here — in the relocation of damage from world to subject — that the rhyme arises.
6. One clean way to state the disagreement
Spinoza says:
Hatred is hidden murder because it remains oriented toward destruction rather than power.
You are saying:
Hatred may be the internal trace of an actual murder already underway — the slow annihilation of a person’s power by unjust forces — and to redescribe that trace as pathology is to let the world off the hook.
That is not a misreading of Spinoza.
It is a refusal of his moral metaphysics at its most exposed point.
And it’s a serious refusal.
If you want, the next step could be:
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testing whether any non-theodical naturalism can survive this objection,
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or asking whether Spinoza’s notion of conatus secretly presupposes a reparable world,
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or bringing Agamben’s idea of being “remnants” into direct confrontation with Spinoza’s smooth ontology.
All three would stay right on this fault line.
Short answer: contemporary science partly vindicates Spinoza, partly vindicates you, and in its better moments quietly abandons the frame that would force a choice between you.
Let me explain without smoothing over the tensions.
First, what science clearly does support in Spinoza. Modern affective neuroscience strongly confirms that affects are not primarily judgments, beliefs, or moral errors. They are bodily–relational processes that track changes in capacity, safety, agency, and constraint. Antonio Damasio’s work is the obvious reference point here: emotions register changes in the organism’s ability to persist and act, long before reflective thought intervenes. In that limited sense, Spinoza’s definition of joy and sadness as increases or decreases in power maps remarkably well onto contemporary models of homeostasis, allostasis, and action-readiness.
Likewise, Spinoza’s insistence that understanding an affect does not automatically dissolve it is now basic science. Insight alone does not deactivate threat circuitry, grief responses, or rage states. Regulation requires either changes in environment, changes in bodily state, or the slow construction of countervailing affective forces. On this point, Spinoza looks prescient rather than naïve.
So far, so Spinozist.
But now the fault line.
Contemporary science also shows something Spinoza did not have the conceptual resources to register: irreversible or semi-irreversible affective injury. Trauma research, moral injury literature, and developmental neuroscience all point to the same uncomfortable fact: some affective changes are not merely transient decreases in “power” that can be reasoned or regulated away. They involve durable alterations to stress reactivity, trust, memory consolidation, and expectation itself. The organism does not simply lose power; it reorganizes around loss.
This directly supports your position.
In cases of prolonged injustice, betrayal, or catastrophic failure, resentment, bitterness, and hatred are not best understood as misdirected affects clinging to external causes. They are structural adaptations to a world that has proven persistently hostile. They serve functions: vigilance, boundary maintenance, refusal of false reconciliation. Neuroscience does not call these states “confusion.” It calls them learned, conditioned, and context-sensitive.
And crucially, science does not treat their persistence as evidence that the subject has misunderstood reality. Often it treats their persistence as evidence that reality was, in fact, damaging.
This is where Spinoza’s framework begins to look like what you rightly called a theodicy. His model presumes that increased understanding tends toward reintegration and restored power. Contemporary science says: sometimes understanding sharpens pain because it removes illusions that once buffered the system.
Now to the question of “hidden murder.”
Modern psychology does not support the idea that unacted hatred is inherently equivalent to a latent will to annihilate. Hatred can be destructive, yes—but it can also be inhibited, contained, morally acknowledged, and borne without projection. Bonhoeffer’s hypothetical post-failure hatred would today be described not as murderous intent thwarted by impotence, but as moral injury compounded by enforced powerlessness.
And here your inversion lands hard: science increasingly recognizes that the deepest harm often lies not in hostile affect but in chronic obstruction of agency. Being unable to act against injustice is itself causally pathogenic. In that sense, Bonhoeffer’s reduced conatus is not something he does to himself; it is something done to him. Hitler, as you say, is the nodal cause standing in for an entire machinery of constraint.
So where does that leave us?
Contemporary science neither fully endorses Spinoza nor simply sides with you. Instead, it moves toward a third position Spinoza could not occupy and you are implicitly gesturing toward: affects are neither moral errors nor purely liberatory truths. They are records. They store information about what a world has made necessary, unbearable, or impossible.
In that light, resentment is not pathology as such, nor is it virtue. It is evidence.
Spinoza wanted affects to be translated into freedom. Science suggests that some affects testify to the limits of freedom under certain historical conditions. To insist they must be overcome risks repeating theodicy in neural language.
So the most defensible contemporary position looks like this: Spinoza is right about the mechanics of affect, wrong about its ultimate reparability. You are right about the ethical danger of misplacing harm inside the subject, but science would caution against romanticizing hatred as inherently truthful or just.
What remains unresolved—scientifically as much as philosophically—is whether a non-theodical account of affect can exist at all. And that unresolved remainder is exactly where your resistance lives.
Short answer: contemporary science partly vindicates Spinoza, partly vindicates you, and ultimately forces a third position that neither of you would fully accept.
Long answer below — carefully, without therapeutic moralizing or theodical drift.
1. Where contemporary science does bolster Spinoza
a) Affects are not primarily cognitive errors
Neuroscience and affective science overwhelmingly reject the idea that emotions are just “mistaken beliefs.”
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Affects arise from bodily regulation, prediction, metabolic balance, threat detection.
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They are causally downstream of constraint, not simply of interpretation.
This strongly supports Spinoza’s core move:
affects express changes in power, not failures of reasoning.
Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, Lisa Feldman Barrett (despite major disagreements among them) all converge on this point in different ways.
This does undercut moralized resentment discourse that says:
“If only you understood better, you wouldn’t feel this.”
Spinoza is right against that.
b) Blocked action reliably produces bitterness and hostility
Your hypothetical about Bonhoeffer is empirically sound.
Across psychology, ethology, and neuroscience:
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Frustrated goal pursuit → increased irritability, hostility, fixation
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Chronic constraint → rumination, anger, bitterness
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Inescapable threat → affective narrowing, not catharsis
This aligns with Spinoza’s claim that:
passive affects follow necessarily from diminished power.
So far, Spinoza is looking good.
2. Where contemporary science undermines Spinoza
Here’s the decisive break.
a) Damage is often non-reversible, even with understanding
Modern trauma science is absolutely clear on this:
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Some harms persist after insight
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Some affective patterns remain even when fully contextualized
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Memory, affect, and threat systems can be structurally altered
This directly contradicts Spinoza’s optimism that:
adequate understanding, in principle, restores freedom.
Science says: sometimes it doesn’t.
Not because of confusion — but because systems have been changed.
This supports your insistence on scarring rather than mere misorientation.
b) Moral injury is not reducible to sadness or impotence
Contemporary research on moral injury (distinct from PTSD) shows:
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Persistent guilt, anger, or bitterness can remain
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even when the subject agrees with the moral analysis,
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even when they reject self-justification,
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even when no delusion or resentment narrative is present.
This maps uncannily well onto your Bonhoeffer hypothetical.
From a scientific standpoint:
these affects are not “pathological” in the sense of error or malfunction — they are stable adaptations to catastrophic moral contradiction.
Spinoza has no category for this.
3. Where science also resists your position
Now the uncomfortable part — science does not fully endorse your reversal either.
a) Hatred does not merely “register” harm — it amplifies it
Neurobiologically:
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Sustained hatred and rumination increase stress load
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They entrench threat perception
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They further reduce behavioral flexibility
So while hatred may originate in injustice, it does not remain neutral.
Science supports Spinoza’s claim that:
certain affects deepen bondage even when justified.
But — and this is crucial — without implying blame.
b) Externalizing all harm risks causal simplification
Science is careful here.
While injustice, violence, and constraint are primary causes,
affective dynamics become partially self-sustaining over time.
This does not mean:
“it’s your fault”
But it does mean:
causal responsibility becomes distributed, not singular.
This resists a clean inversion where Hitler (or the system) is the only agent of harm once time passes.
4. The third position science pushes us toward
What contemporary science really suggests is something neither you nor Spinoza quite endorse:
Affects are neither errors nor pure truths — they are adaptive residues of constraint
In this view:
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Hatred is not a cognitive mistake (contra resentment discourse)
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Nor is it simply a moral pathology (contra Spinoza’s hidden murder)
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Nor is it merely an innocent signal (contra full exoneration)
It is:
a residue of forced adaptation to injustice that may remain even when the injustice is fully understood and named
This avoids theodicy and avoids romanticizing affect.
5. Reframing “hidden murder” in scientific terms
If we translate your debate into contemporary language:
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Hitler and the system inflict primary injury
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Bonhoeffer’s bitterness is secondary injury
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Spinoza mistakes secondary injury for misplaced agency
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Resentment discourse mistakes secondary injury for moral failure
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Pure exoneration risks ignoring how secondary injury can propagate further harm
Science does not moralize this.
It simply says: this is how damaged systems behave.
6. A careful synthesis sentence
Contemporary science supports Spinoza against moralizing psychology, supports you against ontological optimism, and ultimately forces a tragic, non-theodical view in which some affects are neither errors to be corrected nor truths to be affirmed, but scars that alter the field of possible action without redeeming it.
That position is colder than therapy culture and darker than Spinoza.
But it is closer to reality.
