Spinoza

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• Things to know for Spinoza 1) Definitions for Substance, atrributes and mode 2) God 3) Morality

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• Q1) Explain and assess Spinoza's argument for substance monism. Q2) Is Spinoza an athiest?

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• Theory of Substance (1) That substance is its own cause; otherwise it would be produced by something other than itself, in which case it would not be a substance; (2) That it is infinite (if it were finite, it would be limited by other substances, and consequently depend on them); (3) That it is the only substance; for if there were two substances, they would limit each other and cease to be independent, i.e., they would cease to be substances. ·         Hence there can be only one substance, which depends on nothing, and on which everything depends. ·         Descartes himself had intimated by his definition of substance that in reality God alone is substance, and that the word substance when applied to creatures has not the same meaning as when applied to the infinite Being. But instead of removing the ambiguity, he continued to call finite things substances; and in order to distinguish them from God, created substances, as though his definition could make a created, relative, and finite substance anything but a substance that is not a substance. Hence we must refrain from applying the term "substance" to things which do not exist by themselves; the term must be reserved for the being which exists in itself and is conceived by itself, i.e., for God. God alone is substance, and substance is God. ·         Substance being the only being, and not dependent on anything, is absolutely free in the sense that it is determined solely by itself. Its liberty is synonymous with necessity, but not with constraint. ·         To act necessarily means to determine one's self; to act under constraint means to be determined, in spite of one's self, by an external cause. That God should act, and act as he does, is as necessary as it is that the circle should have equal radii. Because a circle is a circle, its radii are equal; because substance is substance, it has modes, but it is free because its own nature and no extraneous cause compels it to modify itself. Absolute freedom excludes both constraint and caprice.(16) ·         Substance is eternal and necessary; its essence implies existence. ·         It cannot be an individual or a person, like the God of religions; for, in that case, it would be a determined being, and all determination is relative negation. ·         It is the common source of all personal existences, without being limited by any of them. ·         It has neither intellect nor will: (17) for both presuppose personality. Not being intelligent, it does not act with an end in view; it is the efficient cause of things. ·         Though Spinoza calls God the cause of the universe, takes the word "cause" in a very different sense from its usual meaning. ·         His idea of cause is identical with his notion of substance; his conception of effect, with that of accident, mode, modification. ·         God, according to him, is the cause of the universe as the apple is the cause of its red colour, as milk is the cause of whiteness, sweetness, and liquidness, and not as the father is the cause of the child's existence, or even as the sun is the cause of heat. ·         God is not the cause of the world in the proper and usual sense of the term, a cause acting from without and creating it once for all, but the permanent substratum of things, the innermost substance of the universe.(20)  ·         The words God and universe designate one and the same thing: Nature, which is both the source of all beings (natura naturans sive Deus) and the totality of these beings considered as its effects (natura naturata). ·         In short, Spinoza is neither an acosmist nor an atheist, but a cosmotheist or pantheist in the strict sense of the word; that is to say, his cosmos is God himself, and his God the cosmical substance.  

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• Theory of Attributes- Substance consists of infinite attributes, each of which expresses in its way the essence of God. ·          The human intellect knows two of these: extension and thought. ·         The cosmic substance is an extended and thinking thing; it forms both the substance of all bodies, or matter, and the substance of all minds. ·         Matter and mind are not two opposite substances, as in Cartesianism; they are two different ways of conceiving one and the same substance, two different names for one and the same thing. ·         Each of the attributes of the substance is relatively infinite. ·         The substance is absolutely infinite in the sense that there is nothing beyond it: the attribute is only relatively infinite, that is, after its kind. ·         Extension is infinite as such, and thought is infinite as such; but neither extension nor thought is absolutely infinite, for alongside of extension there is thought, and alongside of thought there is extension, not counting such attributes of substance as are unknown to us. ·         Substance as such is the sum of all existing things; extension, though infinite as extension, does not contain all existences in itself, since there are, in addition to it, infinite thought and the minds constituted by it; nor does thought embrace the totality of beings, since there are, besides, extension and bodies. ·         It has been suggested that Spinoza, like the Neo-Platonic philosophers and the Jewish theologians who do not apply attributes to God, may have meant by attributes, not qualities inherent in God, the supra-rational, incomprehensible, and indefinable being, but the different ways according to which the understanding conceives God, i.e., purely subjective and human ways of thinking and speaking. ·          An attribute would then mean: what the human understanding attributes, ascribes, and, as it were, adds to God, and not what is really and objectively (or as Spinoza would say, formally) in God; and substance would be conceived as an extended and thinking thing, without really being so. ·         Spinoza does not mean to say that God is an absolutely indeterminate being, or non-being, or negative being, but, on the contrary, that he has absolutely unlimited attributes, or absolutely infinite perfections, - that he is a positive, concrete, most real being, the being who unites in himself all possible attributes and possesses them without limitation. ·         Spinoza evidently intended to forestall the objections of the non-attributists(26) by ascribing to God infinita attributa, which seems to mean both infinite attributes and an infinity of attributes. ·         God is therefore no longer conceived as having separate attributes, which would make him a particular being; he is the being who combines in himself all possible attributes, or the totality of being. ·         Now each divine attribute constitutes a world: extension, the material world; thought, the spiritual world. Hence, we must conclude from the infinite number of divine attributes that there exists an infinite number of worlds besides the two worlds known to us, - worlds which are neither material nor spiritual, and have no relation to space or time, but depend on other conditions of existence absolutely inaccessible to the human understanding. ·         Strictly speaking: infinita attributa are boundless attributes rather than innumerable attributes. Had Spinoza been decided on the question as to whether the absolute has attributes other than extension and thought, he would evidently not have employed an ambiguous expression. In fact, his substance has extension and thought only, but it has them in infinite degree. ·         Difficulty= Spinoza holds that God has neither intelligence nor will; yet he attributes thought to him, and speaks of the infinite intelligence of God. These two assertions seem to contradict each other flatly. But we must remember that according to Jewish and Catholic theology (and Descartes himself), God has not discursive understanding, which needs reasoning and analysis in order to arrive at its ends; they attribute to him intuitive understanding ·          Now there is indeed reason in nature, but it is unconscious. The spider weaves its web without the slightest notion of geometry; the animal organism develops without having the faintest conception of physiology and anatomy. Nature thinks without thinking that it thinks; its thought is unconscious, an instinct, a wonderful foresight which is superior to intelligence, but not intelligence proper. ·         By distinguishing between cogitatio and intellectus, Spinoza foreshadows the Leibnizian distinction between perception and apperception, or conscious perception.

Annotations:

• Theories of Modes-The modifications of extension are motion and rest; the modifications of thought are intellect and will. ·         Movement, intellect, and will, i.e., the entire relative world (natura naturata) are modes or modifications of substance, or, what amounts to the same, of its attributes. ·         These modes are infinite, like the attributes which they modify. Movement, intellect, and will, the physical universe and the intellectual universe, have neither beginning nor end. ·         Each one of the infinite modes constitutes an infinite series of finite modes. Movement, i.e., infinitely-modified extension, produces the infinitude of finite modes which we call bodies; intellect and will, becoming infinitely diversified, produce particular and finite minds, intellects, and wills. ·         Bodies and minds (ideas) are neither relative substances, which would be a contradiction in adjecto, nor infinite modes, but changing modes or modifications of the cosmical substance, or, what amounts to the same, of its attributes. ·         By distinguishing between infinite modes and finite modes, Spinoza means to say that motion is eternal, while the corporeal forms which it constitutes originate and decay, - that intellects and wills have existed for eternities, but that each particular intellect has a limited duration. ·         Bodies or limited extensions are to infinite extension, particular intellects to the infinite intellect, and the particular wills to the eternal will, what our thoughts are to our soul. Just as these exist only for the soul, of which they are temporary modifications, so too this soul, like the body, exists only for the substance, of which it is a momentary modification. ·         Compared with God, souls and bodies are no more substances than our ideas are beings apart from ourselves. In strictly philosophical language, there is only one substantive; everything else is but an adjective. ·          The substance is the absolute, eternal, and necessary cause of itself; the mode is contingent, passing, relative, and merely possible. ·         The substance is necessary, i.e., it exists because it exists; the mode is contingent and merely possible, i.e., it exists because something else exists, and it may be conceived as not existing. ·         The human soul, like all intellectual modes, is a modification of infinite thought, the human body a modification of infinite extension. ·       Since the intellectual or ideal order and the real or corporeal order are parallel, every soul corresponds to a body, and everybody corresponds to an idea. The mind is therefore the conscious image of the body (idea corporis). ·          Spinoza, like Descartes, regards body as merely extended, and soul as merely thought. But the body is the object of thought or of soul, and there can be no thought, apperception, or soul, without a body. The mind does not know itself, it is not idea mentis except in so far as it is idea corporis or rather idea affectionum corporis. ·         Sensation is a bodily phenomenon; it is a prerogative of animal and human bodies, and results from the superior organization of these bodies. Perception, on the other hand, is a mental fact: simultaneously as the body is affected by an excitation the mind creates an image or idea of this excitation. The simultaneity of these two states is explained, as we have said, by the identity of the mental and bodily substance. ·         The mind is always what the body is, and a well-formed soul necessarily corresponds to a well organized brain. ·         The only universal that really exists and is at the same time the highest object of reason, is God, or the infinite and necessary substance of which ever thing else is but an accident. According to Spinoza, reason can form an adequate idea of him, but not the imagination. ·         Let us sum up. Substance is that which exists by itself and by itself alone. Hence neither bodies nor minds can be called substances; for both exist by virtue of the divine activity. God alone exists by himself and by himself alone: hence there is but one absolutely infinite substance. This substance or God has two relatively infinite attributes: extension and thought. Extension is modified, and forms bodies; thought is infinitely diversified, and forms minds. Such is the metaphysics of Spinoza. Necessity and joyful resignation: these two words sum up his ethical teachings

1. God/Nature

   Annotations:

   • ·         Spinoza believed God exists and is abstract and impersonal ·         As a youth he first subscribed to Descartes's dualistic belief that body and mind are two separate substances, but later changed his view and asserted that they were not separate, being a single identity. ·         He contended that everything that exists in Nature (i.e., everything in the Universe) is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality namely the single substance (meaning "that which stands beneath" rather than "matter") that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is understood only in part. ·         Spinoza contends that "Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature") is a being of infinitely many attributes, of which thought and extension are two. ·         Treats the physical and mental worlds as one and the same. ·         The universal substance consists of both body and mind, there being no difference between these aspects. This formulation is a historically significant solution to the mind-body problem known as neutral monism. ·         Spinoza's system also envisages a God that does not rule over the universe by providence, but a God which itself is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. ·         God would be the natural world and have no personality. ·         In Ethics talks about attribute – that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance, and mode – the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.
2. Free Will/Determinism

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   • ·         Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of necessity. ·         For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. ·         So freedom is not the possibility to say "no" to what happens to us but the possibility to say "yes" and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way. By forming more "adequate" ideas about what we do and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). ·         This means that we become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. ·          However, Spinoza also held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, humans have no free will. They believe, however, that their will is free. This illusionary perception of freedom stems from our human consciousness, experience and our indifference to prior natural causes. ·         "Men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which [their desires] are determined." ·         This picture of Spinoza's determinism is ever more illuminated through reading this famous quote in Ethics: ″the infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast; the angry boy believes that by free will he wishes vengeance; the timid man thinks it is with free will he seeks flight; the drunkard believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things which when sober he wishes he had left unsaid. ... All believe that they speak by a free command of the mind, whilst, in truth, they have no power to restrain the impulse which they have to speak.″ ·         Spinoza's philosophy has much in common with Stoicism inasmuch as both philosophies sought to fulfil a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness. However, Spinoza differed sharply from the Stoics in one important respect: he utterly rejected their contention that reason could defeat emotion. ·         On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion. ·         For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former being those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not. ·         Just as the conclusions of geometry inevitably follow from their axioms, so the moral and physical facts which the philosopher considers follow with absolute necessity from the nature of things, expressed by their definitions; and he no more inquires into their final causes than the geometer asks to what end the three angles of a given triangle are equal to two right angles. ·          It is not his method that leads him to mathematical determinism; He agrees with Descartes, Plato, and Pythagoras that philosophy is the generalization of mathematics. ·         "I understand that which exists in itself, and is conceived by itself, i.e., that which does not need the conception of any other thing in order to be conceived." ·         "By attribute I understand that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of the substance." ·         "By mode I understand the modifications of the substance, i.e., that which exists, in and is conceived by something other than itself."
3. Argument for Monism

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   • Substances can share an attribute IP11: God (ID6), a substance possessing an infinity of (ie all) attributes, necessarily exists Therefore IP14: Except God, no substance can be or be conceived = monism regarding substances IA1: Everything that exists is either a substance or a mode ID5: Modes only exist ‘in’/can’t be conceived without substance IP14: God is the only substance Therefore IP15: Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God = monism as such

1. Q- Spinoza on Why There Can Only Be One Substance

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   • ·         Spinoza’s view about substance differs in two main respects from Descartes’. ·         Descartes thinks that there are two main kinds of substance (three if you count God), while Spinoza thinks that there is only one kind; and Descartes thinks that there are many particular substances, while Spinoza thinks that there is only one particular substance.  ·         There are two main kinds of substance, mental and physical, and many particular substances of each kind. ·          It also captures the idea that each of us has a substance of each kind, a body and a mind.  (More precisely, for Descartes, each of us is a mind and has a body.) ·         Spinoza modifies this picture in two ways ·          Argues that there cannot be more than one substance with the same attribute.  (Attributes are more or less the same as Cartesian essences; unlike Descartes, ·         Spinoza appears to believe that there are more than two attributes, but he also thinks we only know of two, namely thinking and extension; the supposed further attributes play no role in the argument.)  ·         So, so far, it looks as though for Spinoza there can be at most one mind and one body.   But even this is too generous; in Proposition 14, he argues that there cannot be different substances with different attributes either, so that there can only be one particular substance.  ·         What does seem odd is not the idea that mind and body are really the same thing differently thought of, but rather the idea that there is only one mind and only one body (which of course are both really the same substance). ·          (Jonathan Bennett’s formulation): 1.  There must be a substance with all possible attributes. 2.  There cannot be two substances with an attribute in common. So,       3.  There cannot be more than one substance.
2. Q-Why must there be a substance with all possible attributes?

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   • ·         But whereas Descartes (and Anselm) argue that existence is part of the notion of God because existence is a perfection and God has all perfections, Spinoza argues that God must exist because God is a substance and existence is part of the notion of substance. ·         (a) Why must there be a substance? Spinoza argues that “it pertains to the notion of substance to exist.”  1.  Nothing outside a substance can cause it to exist. 2.  Everything must have a cause. So,       3.  Substance must cause itself to exist. ·         The second premise, a version of what is often called the “principle of sufficient reason," is simply taken for granted by Spinoza:  he apparently takes it to be so evident as hardly to require mentioning.  ·         The first premise, most helpfully argued for in the second demonstration of proposition 6, is virtually a consequence of the definition of substance.  Substances must be independent; as Descartes put it, they can depend on nothing else for their existence.  (Of course Descartes has to fudge this a bit, since he thinks minds and bodies depend on God for their existence; Descartes says that only God is a substance in the strict sense, but minds and bodies can be called substances by virtue of the fact that they depend on nothing except God for their existence.)  ·         If a substance was brought into existence by something else, it wouldn’t have the right kind of independence.  To put this in a more explicitly Spinozistic terminology, if something else brought a substance into existence, then we would have to “conceive it through” its cause.  But substance can be "conceived through itself” (def. 3).  ·         If a substance cannot be caused by anything else, and has to be caused by something, then it must be caused by itself.  It’s hard to see how something can cause itself to exist.  (For one thing, we normally think that causes precede their effects, but a thing cannot precede its own existence.)  ·         But Spinoza identifies two things that we think of as different, namely causation and logical necessity. ·         It is causally necessary that if one billiard ball hits another, the second billiard ball begins to move (other things being equal).  It is logically necessary that, given that ‘P’ and ‘if P, then Q’ are true, ‘Q’ must be true as well.  ·         We think of these as two very different kinds of necessity, but for Spinoza they come to the same thing.  ·         So for a thing to cause its own existence is for its existence to be logically necessary because of some fact about it rather than because of any facts about other things. ·          If something about a substance makes it the case that it has to exist, then its essence must include existence (much as Descartes thought God’s essence had to include existence). ·          (b) Why must the substance have all possible attributes? We know that God exists because he is a substance and substance necessarily exists.  But why must there be an existing substance with all possible attributes? ·         One answer is “by definition.”  God is by definition “substance consisting of infinite attributes” (def. 6).  But there is something very fishy about this step.  Just because God is defined as “substance with all attributes” and there necessarily is a substance, it doesn’t follow that anything fits the definition of God. ·          If it were that easy to prove the existence of things, we could prove the existence of a lake a thousand miles long by defining it as “substance consisting of fresh water and extending for a thousand miles.”  There must be some other reason for thinking God has all attributes. ·         Spinoza there says that if something doesn’t exist, there must be an explanation of why it doesn’t exist.  (A negative application of the principle of sufficient reason!)  ·         This explanation must come from the thing’s own nature or from something outside it. ·         The reason for the nonexistence of the thousand-mile lake comes from outside it:  it doesn’t exist because of causal laws and the course of geological history.  But the reason for the nonexistence of a substance with all attributes cannot come from outside the substance, since two substances with different attributes have nothing in common with each other (proposition 2), and things with nothing in common cannot cause each other to exist or not exist (proposition 3).
3. Q- Why can’t two substances share an attribute?

   Annotations:

   • 1.  The only things that can distinguish two substances (i.e. make them different) are attributes and modes (proposition 4). 2.  If two substances have different attributes, then they are not two substances with “the same nature or attribute.”  So the first of the two means of distinguishing between substances is of no use here. 3.  Substance is “prior to its modifications.”  So what we really need to consider is the essence of the substance rather  than its modifications.  But two substances with the same attribute have the same essence (even if they have different modes).  So, “the modifications . . . being placed on one side,” the supposed two substances must really be the same thing.  So,  4.  Since our supposed two substances with the same attribute cannot be distinguished by either attributes or modes, and since those are the only two ways they could be distinguished, there cannot really be two substances with the same attribute. ·          To say there cannot be two substances with “the same attribute” might mean (a) That two substances could not have all their attributes in common, or it might mean (b) That two substances cannot have any attribute in common.  The phrase “nature or attribute” suggests that Spinoza must mean (a), ·         Since presumably two things would not have the same nature unless they shared all their attributes.  And his argument is a good argument for (a):  if two substances are distinguished by means of their attributes, then they cannot have all their attributes in common.  ·         The only trouble with interpretation (a) is that it will not give him the conclusion he needs.  For, to return to the main argument of proposition 14 sketched at the beginning of this handout, the existence of a being with all attributes will not rule out the existence of substances with just one attribute unless we can rule out substances having any attributes in common. ·         Interpretation (b), then, is the one Spinoza needs for his one-substance argument.  But his one-line defence of premise 2 does not support (b).  If one substance had attributes a, b, and c, and a second substance had attributes c, d, and e, then they would have an attribute in common but would nevertheless be distinguishable by means of their attributes. ·          So the short argument does not show that there could not be different substances which shared some but not all of their attributes. 
4. Is Spinoza an athiest

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   • Yes No 1.      Spinoza’s God is not a person 1. Spinoza’s God is a thinking being 2.      Spinoza’s God has no free will 2. God acts freely in accord with his own nature 3.      There was no act of creation 3. The world is dependent on God 1.      There is no teleology 4. God is infinite   5. God is perfect and good

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• Leibniz’s objection: couldn’t two substances share one attribute but have others that are unique to each of them (so that they can still be distinguished in terms of their attributes)? [Questioning the argument of IP5]