The Vision of Necessity and the Intellectual Love of

God in Spinoza Lecture 12

A pril 15, 2014
Part 5 is perhaps the hardest part of
the Ethics, and not because it is
impossible to understand the words
we read. Such an interpretative
difficult probably belongs to the book
as a whole. Rather, even if we can
understand the words, do we really
know what Spinoza means by the
intellectual love of God? Is it possible
to have such an experience? It
reminds me of some of the stories in
Platos dialogues which are there to
explain the ultimate end of
philosophy. I can read the words of
the Symposium that describe the
ascent to the beautiful, but can I
really know what this means if I
have never had such an experience,
which as Spinoza writes at the last
sentence of the Ethics, is as
beautiful as it is rare? Sometimes we confuse knowing about
philosophy with being a philosopher, and they are not always the
same thing at all.
What is the highest wisdom of philosophy? Plato and Spinoza are one
is this regard: to teach you not to fear death. As Spinoza writes in the
scholium to proposition 38:
From this we understand what I touched on in IVP39S, and
what I promised to explain in this part, namely that death is
less harmful to us, the greater the minds clear and distinct
knowledge, and hence, the more the mind loves God.
But how do we get to this sanguine state so that we no longer fear
death, which is probably the greatest fear we all have? We do so by
reaching what Spinoza calls the third level of knowledge. It has
already introduced us to this level in the second part of the Ethics
(IIP40), and it is worthwhile here to remind ourselves what the three
levels of knowledge are. The first level is the stage that most people
are at. It is the knowledge of opinion and belief, which is motivated by
fear and hope. This level is not really knowledge at all, but ignorance
and unawareness of the world around you and the network of infinite
series of causes and effects that determine ones existence. The
second level is a little more difficult, but is knowledge proper. It
involves, Spinoza argues, common notions and the adequate ideas of
things. Thus, he will write in the second part of the Ethics that there
are universal properties of bodies that are recognised by all (IIP38).
These common notions are adequate ideas of things and form the
basis of our scientific understanding of the universe, but not only this
understanding as we shall see later. Now we would think that this
would be the end of the matter: the distinction between knowledge
and opinion, but it is not. Spinoza says that there is a third level of
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knowledge, which is the intuitive knowledge of God. It is this
knowledge that is the proper knowledge of the philosopher, or the
wise human being, which is the same thing, and is the purpose of the
Ethics to convince us both that it exists and is possible, and finally can
enable us to free ourselves from the worse effects of our affects.
What is this intuitive knowledge of God, or what Spinoza will call, in
Part 5, the intellectual love of God, and how does it differ from the
second level of knowledge? The first thing to underline, as Lloyd
stresses, is that we should not confuse this with any kind of mystical
or supernatural knowledge (Lloyd 1996, p.110). There is no
transcendence in Spinoza, no reality beyond this reality, no being
beyond being. The second kind of knowledge is an understanding of
things through the parallelism of the order and connection of ideas and
the order and connection of things, but the third kind of knowledge is
an immediate understanding of myself and my place within the
universe, or to use Spinozas language, my place within God. My
understanding of this produces the highest affect of joy in my mind (for
we have to remember that there is no division between reason and
affects for Spinoza), which is what he calls blessedness. However this
immediate joyful wisdom is not be confused with mysticism or
irrationalism.
At the end of his lectures on Spinoza, Deleuze explains these different
types of knowledge in terms of swimming (he is adamant that we
should not take mathematics as the model of adequate knowledge,
but just as one example) (Deleuze 1978). What does it mean to know
how to swim? Perhaps the best way to understand this is to think
about what it means not to know how to swim. Not to know how to
swim means to be at the mercy of the waves such that if one entered
the ocean one might drown. To be at the mercy of the waves is
inadequate knowledge, for one has a passive relation to external
elements about which one only knows the effects (I am drowning)
and not the causes, which would be precisely to know how not to
drown, and which is the same as knowing how to swim (learn to float,
learn to shut ones mouth so the water does choke you, and so on).
Now as the waves crash over me, depending on what happens, I
might cry out in joy or shock. Such are my affects or passions, to use
Spinozas language, and they are always related to external relations
to an external body. The waves on my body, which might be nice, but
also could be quite dangerous (these are the screams and shouts one
hears on the beach all day, which generally one takes to be an
expression of happiness, but there is always the threat of tragedy on
the horizon, otherwise there would be no lifeguard). But what does it
mean to know how to swim? How come that is not the same? It does
not mean, Deleuze says, that I have to have a mathematical or
physical understanding of wave mechanics. That would be going too
far. Rather, as they say in French, one has a savoir faire of the wave.
Instead of fighting against the wave, one goes with it, one has
rhythm. In the sense one knows how to compose ones body with the
body of the wave. One knows the right moment to jump in, when to
dive, to surface, to use the wave to propel one along, and so on. It is
important not to think that the second level is mathematical.
Mathematics is kind of second level knowledge, but it isnt what this
knowledge is tout court.
Just as one can speak of knowing how to swim, Deleuze says, one can
speak of knowing how to love. How does someone love inadequately?
Just as in the case of the wave, one who does not know how to swim,
one is at the mercy of external effects of which one does not know the
causes. Whereas to know how to love is to know how to compose
ones body and mind with another. This is a strange kind of happiness,
Deleuze says, but no-one would confuse it with mathematics or
physics.
What then is the third kind of knowledge? It hardly seems possible
that such a thing could exist. It does so because the other two are
relations to external bodies and not to essences. I either know how to
compose with another body, or I do not, but neither the relation of
composition or decomposition is an essence. What is an essence
Spinoza? It is a degree of power. To have the third level of knowledge
is to know (or to intuit, to use Spinozas word, so as to distinguish it
from the second level of knowledge) what makes up ones own degree
of power and what makes up the others degree of power. For every
degree of power that is given there is always a degree of power
stronger, since the totality of Nature would be infinite degree of
power, and no singular thing could be the same as infinite Nature, as
this would be to confuse a mode with a substance. Now if we were to
view this relation between essences externally, then we would say
that the weaker essence would be destroyed by the stronger one (the
hand crushes the fly), but if this were the case, Deleuze says the
whole of Spinozism would collapse, for it would mean that there would
only be inadequate relation between essences. How can we think of
the relation between essences in a different way?
The key he says is proposition 37 of part 5, for it explains that the
axiom in part 4 that describes the relation between essences as one
destroying another only has to do with singular essences in a
determinate time and place. What does it mean to think of something
in this way? It means to think of it in terms of existence. What does it
mean for something to pass into existence at a certain time or place?
It means that a body is determined from the outside by other external
bodies. I have an essence, you have an essence, each essence is
singular, but to exist is to be determined from the outside by other
bodies (I cannot exist without food, water and air, for example). To
exist is to have a time and a place, and to have a time and place is to
exist in relation to other external bodies that determine one from the
outside. Until such point that these external bodies enter a different
relation, then I exist.
At this level, everything exists at the level of opposition. I kill the pig to
eat its meat, but the next day, I die of botulism, and so on. In this
case, one might speak of a stronger power destroying a weaker one.
Such is the risk of death, which is the inevitable and necessary event
that external relations that sustain my body enter a different
relationship (which is what we mean by disease). My essence,
however, is not the same as the external relations that I have with
other bodies. A degree of power describes an intrinsic and not only an
extrinsic relation and for this reason it makes no sense for Spinoza to
say one degree of power destroys another degree of power, just as
much as it does not make any sense to say that the colour red is
redder than green. Intensive magnitudes cannot be compared
extensively.
What then does it mean for Spinoza to say that one is eternal? It is
not a declaration of belief, as if by that one means that one is
immortal, for eternity and immortality are not the same. To think that
one is immortal is simply to take ones finite existence and to imagine
that it would continue for every, which contradicts the very fact of
death. An experience of eternity, on the contrary, Deleuze says, can
only be felt as a kind of intensity. It would be to understand that ones
death, as the relation of a body to other external bodies, was
insignificant and did not matter, because as intensive parts, singular
essences, we all degrees of the infinite power of God.
What matters, what is important, is not the duration of our lives (how
long we live), but the actualisation of ones essence. If one laments a
premature death, it is just because they did not live long enough, or
that they didnt actualise what they could have become? Equally, we
might think someone who had a lived a long life in years but did not do
everything with their lives that they could, might also have lived a sad
life. It is perfectly possible to live a short life, as Spinoza did, but
intensively as though one where eternal. Intensity, then, would be the
measure of the third level of knowledge.
Many find the end of the Ethics incoherent and a contradiction of the
overall message of the book. The most notorious of these is Bennett,
who pretty much gives up on it altogether. Sometimes one thinks that
Bennett doesnt like Spinoza at all, and one wonders why he is reading
him, since most of the time, in his opinion, Spinoza is wrong (Bennett
1984, pp.32975).[1] I think, however, that Lloyd is absolutely right in
stressing that this third level of knowledge is not religious at all, but is
merely a taking on board, in terms of our lives and our experiences,
what is taught abstractly through definitions and axioms in part one
that God is the totality of the universe of which we are an intrinsic
part, rather than an element separate from it sustained by a fictional
personal God, who in reality is nothing else than a projection of our
absurd pride that the universe could have been created for us in the
first place (Lloyd 1996, pp.11213).
One way that people imagine that they have a special and unique
place with the universe, rather than just a finite mode of an infinite
substance, is to believe that there is immortality of our lives after
death. To overcome our fear of death, we imagine that our personality
and consciousness continue after we have disappeared. This is not
possible for Spinoza, because my sense of myself is only possible
because I have a body. My mind, as we learnt from part 2, is an idea of
my body, and my body is not an idea of my mind. Without my body I
wouldnt have a mind at all, and any sense of duration, and time would
cease to exist. Immortality is based on the false idea that minds can
exist without bodies, and no one suggest that bodies are eternal.
Combined with this false idea is the confusion of eternity with infinite
duration, so that I imagine myself living together as I am now but just
for an infinite time.
Eternity does not mean for Spinoza time going on forever, but
something quite different. This is why he can say that even though
there is no immortality in the way that religions have imagined it, there
is part of my mind which is eternal. This seems to be very strange since
it implies that the mind can exist without the body, and this cannot be
what Spinoza is saying since it would contradict the fact that the mind
is the idea of the body. The contradiction exists for us, because we still
viewing eternity in terms of duration. We are imagining that mind
would continue to exist in the same way as it endures whilst the body
exists.
Again the best way to understand the eternity of the mind, as Lloyd
suggests, is in relation to the third kind of knowledge (Lloyd 1996,
p.121). I only understand myself through the affections of my body,
but it is impossible that I could know the infinite network of causes and
effects that lead up to this affections. I can know, however, the true
status of myself as mode of infinite substance. How would this
knowledge, Lloyd asks, overcome my fear of death? Not through the
knowledge gained by simply reading the first part of the Ethics, but
something more subtle:
What is new is the understanding of the truth of finite
modes in relation to particular bodily modifications, and to
ourselves as ideas of these modifications. (Lloyd 1996,
p.121)
Lloyd continues to explain that is not a matter of ascending to a
transcendent vision of the universal, like Platos ascent to the beautiful
and the vision of the one, but of understanding the actual existence of
these affections (Deleuze would have said the singular essences). For
all that exists for Spinoza are singular things and substance, or the
being of singular things. To understand singular things as the
expression of substance is different from understanding them in
relation to other singular things, which is the basis of the 2
nd
level of
knowledge, which compares one thing with others. This kind of
knowledge, though adequate, can never be complete. As Lloyd
concludes, we know that we are in God, and are conceived through
God; we understand ourselves through Gods essence as involving
existence (Lloyd 1996, p.122) Having seen this, I can understand that
dying is of no consequence to me, since, in understanding myself in
relation to substance which is eternal, the greater part of my mind is
given over to what is eternal, rather than to what is individual and
perishable in me, my imagination and memories.
Works Cited
Bennett, J., 1984. A Study of Spinozas Ethics, [Indianapolis, IN]:
Hackett Pub. Co.
Deleuze, G., 1978. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Sur Spinoza. Available
at: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?
cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2 [Accessed September 30, 2012].
Lloyd, G., 1996. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and the
Ethics, London; New York: Routledge.
Zizek, S., 2004. Organs without Bodies : On Deleuze and Consequences,
New York; London: Routledge.

[1]. Surely there is a better way of reading philosophy which isnt so
sad. Perhaps Deleuzes advice, as quoted by iek, is more joyful:
Trust the author you are studying. Proceed by feeling your way [].
You must silence the voices of objection with you. You must let him
speak for himself, analyse the frequency of his words, the style of his
obsessions.(2004, p.47)
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Spinoza and Truth Lecture 11
March 30, 2014
What does Spinoza
mean by truth?
When we think
about truth normally
in philosophy then
we think about the
agreement between
a statement and a
state of affairs in the
world, but this cant
be what Spinoza
means by truth, at
least not in any
simply way. Why is
this? Because for
Spinoza truth cannot
be the agreement
between two different attributes, since attributes can have no causal
relation to one another. Thus the idea of tree cannot be true because
it agrees with an object called a tree, rather an idea is true because it
is true in itself and not because it represents something else. What
then does it mean to say that an idea is true in itself?
In one sense, Spinoza is repeating the story of truth that we have
heard since Plato: perception is not sufficient to explain truth. This is
because, as we know, perception does not tell me truth about things
at all. Indeed if all I had were perceptions, then I probably wouldnt
have a very good idea of reality at all. One of the basis premises of the
new modern science is what common sense tells us about nature
(which we might say is the Aristotelian starting point) can only lead us
astray. Common sense might tell me that the earth is at the centre of
the universe, because that is how it appears to me, but I know in fact
that this is not the case. What is true is not what my senses tell me,
but what true knowledge does, and true knowledge is not perception,
as Plato would have already told us, but mathematics. Copernicus
does not disagree with Ptolemy because he saw something different in
the heavens, but he postulated a different mathematical model and
that is why he saw the heavens in a different way. It might be the
case that Galileo did see something different in his telescope, but he
wouldnt have seen what he was looking for unless he had already
agreed with Copernicuss mathematical revolution.
If an idea is not true because it agrees with what I see with my eyes,
then why is it true? Here we have to make a difference between the
psychological event of having an idea and the content of the idea
itself. I might be thinking of a circle because I see a circle. Or I might be
thinking of circle because I associate it with something else. Perhaps I
have being thinking about bears and then the idea circle just pops in
my mind. Or, I might be thinking about circle, but I have completely the
wrong idea of circle in my mind. I might think lines drawn from the
centre of the circle are not equal. None of the instances of thinking of
the idea circle would make the idea true. The occasion of thinking the
idea does not make the idea true (and this is really the reason why
perception cannot be the source of the truth of ideas, since it
psychologises them, and would make truth subjective). What is true is
the objective content of the idea itself, which can be thought by
anyone (or anything if it capable of thinking true ideas).
In proposition 35 of the second part of the Ethics, Spinoza explains
how such an error is possible. There is no positive idea of falsehood.
Strictly speaking there are no false ideas in themselves, because every
idea is an idea of something that exists. Rather there are confused
ideas. To have an ignorant idea is to have an idea of a positive thing,
but in a confused way. The example that Spinoza gives in the scholium
is the idea of freedom. Why is it that people falsely believe they are
free? The answer is because they are ignorant of the causes that
make them act the way they do. Because they are ignorant, they
therefore think they are free. The cause of false ideas is not a real
idea, but ignorance on our behalf, and this ignorance is always
ignorance about causes. To use the other example that Spinoza gives
in this scholium. I believe that the sun is 200 hundred feet away from
me because I am ignorant of the true distance. Even though I know
that the sun is further away than it seems. Because the distance that
it appears from me is caused by the relation of my body to the sun, I
might still fall under the error that the sun is closer than the actual
distance. Of course I can also understand why it is that the sun
appears in the way it does to me (I can understand for example that
the sun really doesnt get larger at sunset or change from yellow to
red, but this is the effect of light in the Earths atmosphere), but that
means I have to have a true idea of what the sun is and what the my
body is and how they interact.
Because of our limited knowledge, Spinoza thinks that is very easy for
us to have inadequate of idea of things, but does he think that we can
have adequate idea? It would surprise us if he said no to this
questions, since Spinoza is an exponent of the new modern science.
He is a realist. He does not think that our scientific theories are just
our way of understanding what reality is, but are true picture of what
is. Indeed Newtons laws would be true, even if there were no human
being to think them.
The difference is between understanding a particular thing as a mode
or as an expression of substance. Let say I look at a stretch of water
that is in front of me. I could just describe the water as I see it,
perhaps in the way that I writer might describe it in a story, or painter
paint it. Or I could describe it in terms of substance. Not just this
stretch of water in front of me, but through an attribute that expresses
not just this part of reality, but the whole of reality. Isnt this just what
science does? Science does not explain this or that particular instance
or occasion of water, but the reality of water as such, which for
Spinoza would be explained in the current scientific explanation of
nature through the general laws of physics. This would be to have an
adequate, as opposed to an inadequate understanding of water,
because I would be understanding its true cause, which is substance
explained in this case through the attribute extension.
The laws of physics are what Spinoza calls common notions. The
occasion for us to have ideas is our bodies, for this nothing in our
minds that does not come via our bodies. Thus if we didnt have eyes
to see the sun, then we wouldnt have the idea of sun. The error, then
is not think that the truth of the idea of the sun somehow has its
origin in us. We can think the true idea of the sun, because the true
idea of the sun corresponds (or is the same as) as the causal relation
between the mode and substance. There cannot be any other idea of
the sun that is true because nature cannot be any different than what
it is, otherwise substance would be lacking that different reality and
therefore would not be infinite.
How can we escape the confused ideas of the realm of sensations and
affections? We can only do so when we understand ideas internally
and not externally. To understand ideas internally means to know the
necessary order and connections of ideas themselves and not how
they are encountered through affections. Yet even though I might
know the difference between the two, how do I take the step from
one to the other? It is probably wrong to say that Spinoza rejects
imagination, because this would be argue that he rejects the body, but
as we know, for Spinoza, only through the body can I know the world.
There must then be a route from inadequate to adequate knowledge,
and the key is common notions.
Inadequate knowledge only tells me about my individual encounters
with things. What Spinoza calls duration. How something appears to
me at a certain time and place, and which I might subsequently
remember and associate with other things. But I can, through
duration, leap out of duration. I can recognise what is common to all
things. In so doing, I am understanding the mode through substance
and not through another modes, which I can only have a limited
knowledge of. It is possible to understand the causal relation between
substance and modes. It is not possible to understand the infinite
causal relation between modes (it is this inadequate understanding
we have seen, for example, that produces the error of free will).
It is very important not to confuse common notions with universals. In
IIP40S1, Spinoza disputes the existence of universals precisely
because they are not common notions. I can have an adequate idea of
scientific laws of nature that are common to all bodies, but what I
cannot have is the idea of all horses that would be common to the
universal Horse. The latter is merely a word, whereas the former is a
true idea. This is why we differ in what we mean by the word horse,
but we do not differ when we understand what is common to all things
(like extension and the laws of nature that follow immediately from it),
because this is common to nature as such, and not just a use of
words. When we understand the universe, we understand it as it is in
reality, and our understanding cannot be any different from Gods
(what the universe is in reality in terms of truth), because there
couldnt be any other understanding. There is no mysterious
transcendent cause, nor any distinctive human understanding (as
there is in Kant for example) that would be any different from truth of
what is actually in reality, which would be true whether we knew it or
not.
It is possible to have adequate ideas because it is possible to know
the causes of things. Of course as finite beings, it is not possible to for
us to know the cause of everything, but that does not mean that we
know nothing. It is possible for us to understand the essence of God
for example, for Spinoza. It is possible for us to understand the idea of
a triangle, though it is not possible for us to have the idea of every
triangle that has ever existed. To have an adequate idea is to
understand something through its cause rather than its effects. Thus
to have an adequate idea of the sun is to understanding why it makes
my skin feels warm and appears closer than it is in reality, as opposed
to an inadequate idea, which starts with effects, my warm skin, the
appearance of the sun and the sky, and argues backwards towards
the cause. The sun is close to me in the sky because it is circling the
earth; the sun warms the my skin because it was created by God to
benefit human beings. Both these arguments are false because they
argue from effects rather than causes. To understand the effects of
the sun through its cause is to follow the order of reality itself. It is to
go from substance as it expressed through its attributes and then to
modes. Rather than to start with modes and to try and get back to
attributes and from there to substance.
We have only distinguished between inadequate and adequate
knowledge in this lecture, but there is third level of knowledge that
Spinoza describes in IIP40S2, which he calls intuitive. We will have to
wait to Part 5 of the Ethics to find out what this.
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Spinozas Materialism Lecture 10
March 18, 2014
So far, in relation to
part 2 of the Ethics,
we have only spoken
about the mind and
not the body (and
the mind in relation
to the attribute of
thought). The
particular nature of
human beings,
however, is that they
are the union of a
mind and a body.
What, then, is the
relation between the
mind and the body?
First of, unlike Descartes, Spinoza begins with the body not the mind.
If we are going to understand the nature of the human mind, we first
of all have to understand the nature of the human body. This quite is
different from Descartes who believes that the union of the body and
the mind must be thought from the vantage point of the mind and not
the body, and the mind is the truth of the body and not the other way
around.
When we are thinking about Spinozas parallelism we are thinking
about the relation between human thought and the attribute thought.
For Spinoza the true ideas of thought are independent from us. These
are necessary truths belonging to the causality of thought and not to
whom or what thinks them. When we are thinking, however, about the
nature of human thought itself, and not just its relation to the attribute
thought, then we have to think of the relation between our bodies and
our minds, because this is the kind of beings that we are. We already
saw from last weeks lecture that the idea for Spinoza has two sides:
one side is the idea itself, which Spinoza calls its formal reality, and the
other side, is the object that it represents, which Spinoza, following
general practice, calls its objective reality. No idea can be defined
without these two sides. When we thinking about the nature of
thought itself, and not just the human mind, then we are thinking just
about the formal reality of ideas, the necessary causality of thought.
When we are thinking about just the human mind, though, we focus
on the objective reality of ideas. We have to ask ourselves What is it
that the human mind represents? Spinoza answer to this question is
that the human mind represents the human body. We have to be very
clear about what this answer means. It means that body is the
essence, definition, or content of the mind. What the mind represents
is the body, and not itself. Without the body, the mind would be
nothing at all; it would have no objective reality. Thus in the scholium
to P13, Spinoza will say that the complexity of the human mind, as
opposed, for example to the mind of a dolphin, is to do with the
complexity of the human body, and not with human mind. It is because
our bodies can feel, experience, sense more that our minds are more
complex than other animals, and not the other way around. We do not
have complex bodies because we have complex minds, but we have
complex minds because we have complex bodies.[1] As Spinoza writes
in the scholium to P13,
In proportion as a body is more capable than others of doing
many things at once, or being acted upon on in many ways
at once, so its mind is more capable than others of
perceiving many things at once.
This explains why the next section of Part 2 has to do with the general
nature of bodies. If we are to understand the human mind through the
human body, then we have to understand the nature of the human
body first. The human body, of course, is acted upon as any other body
is in nature. To put it within a modern context, to understand human
psychology we first of all have to understand physics and biology. For
Spinozas interests in the Ethics is human happiness, then the central
idea in this excursus, as Curley indicates, is the idea of the composite
body, which is a body that can be acted upon by many external bodies
without losing its identity (Curley 1988, p.76).
There are many different bodies in nature: basic chemical elements,
simple material objects, simple organisms, and more and more complex
forms of life. For Spinoza, the human being is a very complex living
organism that is made up of many individual bodies, and is affected by
many other bodies, in very many complex ways. What we can or are
able to know for Spinoza, is directly related to the complexity of our
body to be affected: everything that we know, from the simplest and
most basic, to the most complex and extraordinary, first has to come to
through the experience of our bodies.
The relation of the mind to the body also explains the limitations of the
human knowledge, and the possibility of inadequate ideas. If we have
inadequate ideas, then it is because we have a confused or distorted
understanding of the body. Thus a false idea, or an inadequate idea, is
not false at the level of the mode of thought or mode of extension, but
in the relation between them. To understand this relation we have to
understand how the human mind comes to inadequate ideas of things.
For human beings, our perception of things, which is the first level of
knowledge for Spinoza, is mediated by our human body, as he states
in IIP26:
The human mind does not perceive any external body as
actually existing, except through the idea of the affections of
its own body.
Our perception of things at this level, therefore, tells us more about
the condition and nature of our own bodies, rather than the nature of
external things themselves. Thus if I am short sighted things will be
blurred and small, but this is true for human nature in general, since
we can only perceive external things in the way that they affect our
bodies, and we cannot perceive them in any other way.[2] In Spinozas
terminology this fundamental relation between the idea and the object
mediated by the body is called imagination. When I see something for
Spinoza, I am imagining it. This does mean that I am making it up;
rather I have an image of it in my mind, whose origin is mediated by
the affects of the body. The image is the correlate of the sensations.
We should, however, be very careful about what Spinoza means by
the word image here. An idea is certainly not a picture (as Spinoza
makes very clear in IIP43S), if one imagines a picture to be some kind
of thing which is a copy of a real thing, as though in the mind there
existed images which corresponded to actual things; rather an idea is
always a mode of the attribute thought. Error does not happen
because I have the image of something in my mind which is wrong;
rather error happens because my mind lacks the idea that excludes
the existence of the thing that I imagine to be present. Thus, to use
Spinozas example, when the young child imagines the existence of a
winged horse, it is not the image of the winged horse that is in error,
but the child lacks the knowledge that would tell him or her that this
image could not possibly exist. So there is nothing wrong with the
imagination in itself, as Spinoza writes in the scholium to IIP17:
For if the mind, while it imagined nonexistent things as
present to it, at the same time knew that those things did
not exist, it would, of course, attribute this power of
imagining to a virtue of its nature, not to a vice.
Inadequate ideas are those ideas which are caused from outside of my
mind. This is only a partial knowledge of an object, whereas adequate
ideas, within the internal necessity of the order and connection of
ideas, are a complete or whole conception of the object. If we only
remained within the external relations of the mind to objects, then we
would only have a partial and mutilated understanding of the universe.
But why is this understanding only partial and mutilated? This is
because the body has a negative impact on the causality of ideas, if
we assume that we only know things through perception. Thus, I am
affected by the rays of the sun as it warms my face. There is nothing in
common between me and the sun, and therefore, at this level, I
cannot have an adequate idea of the sun. Rather, as we have already
said, this relation tells me more about the body affected (in this case
myself) than the body which is the cause of the affection. As Deleuze
says in his lectures on Spinoza, a fly would be affected by the sun in a
different way (Deleuze 1978). The reason why this is inadequate
knowledge is that I only know the sun in terms of its effects on my
body (just as the fly only knows the sun in terms of the effects on its
body) and not in terms of causes; that is to say, what the cause of the
sun and what is the cause of the heat on my face and so on. To know
that I would have to know what my body was and what the sun was,
and I could not know that simply through the effects of one body on
another (it is not through the warmth of the sun against my face that I
know that my idea of the sun is adequate and the idea of the sun of
the fly is not). Inadequate ideas are therefore representation of
effects without the knowledge of causes.
The idea of inadequate ideas will become very important in the rest of
Spinozas Ethics. For to live at the level of the knowledge of effects,
that is to know nothing of the causes of things, is to live a life of
encounters only. One sensation follows another sensation, but I have
no real understanding of the causes of these sensations. This is the
level, unfortunately, that most of us live. When we come to think about
our ethical life, this means that we are completely under the control of
one feeling following another, like a paper boat buffeted by the mighty
waves of the ocean of emotion. If we knew the true cause of these
emotions, then we would be in control of them, rather than they in
control of us. Knowledge of these true causes is the aim of the rest of
the parts of the Ethics.
Works Cited
Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinozas
Ethics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Deleuze, G., 1978. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Sur Spinoza. Available
at: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?
cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2 [Accessed September 30, 2012].
Lahn, B.T., 2004. Human Brain Evolution Was a Special Event.
Available at: http://www.hhmi.org/news/lahn3.html [Accessed
November 25, 2012].
[1] Humans have extraordinarily large and complex brains, even when
compared with macaques and other non-human primates. The human
brain is several times larger than that of the macaque even after
correcting for body size and it is far more complicated in terms of
structure (Lahn 2004).
[2] We can of course improve our bodies in relation to instruments, but
these instruments themselves have to relate to what our bodies can
interact with. There is no point having a powerful electronic magnetic
microscope if we cant make available to the human eye the images
that it produces.
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Spinozas Parallelism Lecture 8
March 2, 2014
Having just finished
the first part of the
Ethics, with all its
complexity and
difficulty, we now
advance into the
second part, which is
just as difficult and
complex. Ostensibly
the object of the
second part is
ourselves, whereas
the object of the first
part was God. And
yet reading the
definition and
axioms, and the first
13 propositions, we might feel that we havent left the topic of God at
all. But then we have to understand Spinozas perspective. He wants
to rid us of any idea that we are somehow apart from the rest of the
universe and have a special place within creation, what might be called
the anthropomorphic bias of philosophy and religion. We must
remember that it is this anthropomorphism which is the true cause of
the idea of a personal God separate from the universe He creates (It is
this transcendence Spinoza wants to destroy). Rather than seeing
ourselves as somehow unique (only God is unique for Spinoza), we
must see ourselves as just one element within the universe, or what
Spinoza would call modes (and a finite mode at that). Spinoza
expresses this beautifully in the preface to part three when he writes
that there are some who conceive of human beings as though they
were a dominion within a dominion. Human beings are not
substances, but modes for Spinoza; that is to say, they are not
transcendent but immanent to the universe, part of its processes and
necessary laws.
This is not to say that Spinoza is not interested in human beings. Far
from it, this is the only thing he is interested in. For Spinoza, like all
great philosophers perhaps, philosophy is not just a clever game and
how much one knows, but how one should live ones life. This is why
his book is called the Ethics. He writes, therefore, about metaphysics
and physics, not just for their own sake, but for the sake of how we
might, as part of this infinite universe, lead a better life.[1] As we saw
earlier in this course, this idea of leading a better life is not the same
as being moral, which we, after thousands of years of Christianity
might confuse it with, but begins with our human nature as part of
nature as a whole. Morality and the personal God are intimately linked,
because both abstract human beings from nature. This is true of Kant,
for example, who writes after Spinoza, and who, although he is willing
to place human being as natural being with nature, wants us, as moral
beings, to be set apart: the moral order of human intentions, has
nothing at all to do with the deterministic physical laws of nature.[2]
There is another difficulty facing us in the second part of the Ethics,
however. That is on the whole hitherto we have been speaking about
the infinite attribute extension. This is because this is the easiest way
for us to enter Spinozas philosophy, perhaps because most of us have
an understanding of modern science, and the Aristotelian universe is
something we are unfamiliar with, whereas for his contemporaries it
would be the other way round. Modern science already contains the
idea that all individual things are in fact modes of the fundamental
structure of the material universe which is governed by universal and
necessary laws. But extension is only one the attributes of substance,
and in fact there must be, as Spinoza writes in IP11, an infinity of
attributes since God is an infinite substance consisting of infinite
attributes.
When it comes to human beings, we can only speak of two attributes:
thought and extension. But how do we think of thought as an infinite
attribute of substance? It is easy to imagine each singular objects as
the mode of extension (even ourselves when we consider ourselves as
physical objects), but it is much harder to think of thought that way,
because we think of thought as precisely that which individualises us.
Remember this is precisely what Descartes did think. Each individual
was a separate individual substance, because they were independent;
that is to say, I cannot think the thoughts you are thinking now, and
you cannot think the thoughts I am thinking.[3] But it is precisely this
way of thinking that Spinoza avoids when he says that there is only
one substance, and thought is an attribute, not a separate substance,
and moreover every individual thought is a mode of this attribute. This
means that it is not I who think thought, but thought that thinks
through me, and when I perceive something it is not I who perceive it,
but God who perceives it through me. We have to think of thought in
exactly the same way that we think about extension, as an infinite
autonomous and spontaneous attribute containing infinite modes. It is
the universe which thinks for Spinoza and that is why we think, and
not the other way around.
God or substance is thought under the attribute thought, such as God
or matter is extension under the attribute extension. Thus we have to
stop ourselves thinking of thought as something that happens in
individual minds, which are modes. Rather it is the other way around.
Thoughts are modes which are caused by the attribute thought, which
is the same as saying, that they are caused or produced by God as a
thinking substance, God under the attribute thought. This is why for
Spinoza it is perfectly possible to say that machines could or can think,
since thought is not a unique property of human beings, but is an
attribute of God or the universe. In fact for Spinoza everything in the
universe thinks (or is at least is animate), and all we can say is that
human beings, in terms of thought, simply think in a more complex way
than stones, plants or animals. Ideas exist independent of the human
mind, and are produced by God under the attribute of thought, in the
same way that things are produced under the attribute of extension,
so that there is the sun as a thing, and the idea of the sun which are
two different modes of two different attributes, extension and thought
which are immanent to the same infinite uncreated substance.
Though we have no difficulty of imagining the sun as separate from the
human mind or soul as Spinoza calls it, we have great difficulty of
thinking of the idea of the sun as being separate from the human
mind. Spinoza would say, therefore, that the truth of the idea triangle
that all triangle have 3 angles that add up to the sum of two right
angles is true in itself and is independent of any human mind that
thinks it. Thus, as Woolhouse puts it, what is essential to Spinozas
idea of ideas is:
The idea of there being real and immutable essences of
geometrical figures, essences, which have an existence
independent of any instantiation they might have in the
corporeal world, and independent of any idea there might be
of them in human minds. (Woolhouse, 1993).
This is why, as we said earlier, it is perfectly possible for a machine to
think the idea of triangle, for the truth of triangle is not produced by
the human mind, but by the universe, which contains an infinity of
ideas as it contains an infinity of things. What we have to do then is
think the idea of the sun in the same way we think the idea of triangle.
As we shall see later, this does not always happen with human beings,
because we tend to think the idea of things in terms of the affections
of our body, through what Spinoza calls imagination, and not through
our minds which can grasp the idea of things in themselves as they are
produced by the infinite attribute of thought as it expresses the infinite
nature of the universe. So we imagine the idea of the sun is produced
in our minds by the external object which has an effect on our body,
but this only produces a false and mutilated knowledge for Spinoza.
Again this is very difficult for us to accept because we tend to think a
true idea is the adequation of the idea with an object. Thus, if I have
the idea of the sun, this idea is true because the idea agrees with the
real sun outside in the real world. Now this cannot be possible for
Spinoza because attributes are autonomous. This idea of truth as the
agreement of the idea and the external object would rest on the
mysterious possibility that things could miraculous transform
themselves into ideas, that the sun could become the idea of the sun
and the object and the idea were one and the same thing, but we
cannot think one attribute through another, as Spinoza writes in 1P10.
But it is clear that Spinoza believes that we have true ideas of objects,
so how is that possible. His assertion is that there is a parallelism
between the order and connection of ideas on the one hand, and the
order of the connection of things on the other, that although these
two series are absolute autonomous, and they have to be since one is
produced through the attribute thought and the other through the
attribute extension, that none the less they are absolutely identical,
and they are so in themselves and not in the mind that thinks them.
This doctrine of parallelism is one of the most difficult notions to explain
in Spinoza, but before we can do so, we first of all need to think about
what Spinoza thinks an idea is.
As we have already seen for Spinoza, ideas are not produced by
human minds, though human minds can think them. Rather, they are
produced by the attribute thought which is independent of any other
attribute (independent in the sense of self-sufficient not independent
in the sense of substance). So we can imagine the universe not only
filled with an infinity of modes of extension (trees, plants, animals and
human beings to be rather parochial about it), but also filled with an
infinity of ideas (the idea of trees, plants, animals and human beings
and so on). How do we know that one series agrees with the other,
that the idea of the tree is the same as the tree? The answer cannot
because we say so, because this is to make the human mind a
dominion within a dominion and thought dependent on us, rather
than us dependent on thought. Ideas are produced by God, or Nature
or the Universe or Substance, whatever word you choose.
Ideas are very strange things, and are different from other modes, in
that an idea has two different functions (ontologically they exist as one
in the idea, we separate them out in terms of analysis), which Spinoza
has a special vocabulary to express, though it was a vocabulary that
all his contemporaries also used, and which Descartes, for example
makes much use of in his Meditations. Ideas are peculiar because they
have both a formal and objective reality. Now one of the best
explanations of this distinction can be found in Deleuzes lectures on
Spinoza which can be found on the web (Deleuze). An idea is a
thought in the sense that it represents an object, so the idea of the
sun represents the object sun. What an idea represents is called the
objective reality of an idea. Now this is probably what we all imagine an
idea to be and we do not think of anything else, but for Spinoza an
idea has another reality which he calls the formal reality of the idea.
Now just as much as the objective reality of an idea is something that
makes sense to us, then the formal reality of an idea does not. What
can an idea be but the representation of an object? Well the idea is
just actually what it is as an idea, or as Deleuze puts it, it is the reality
of the idea as much as it itself is a thing. Thus we must separate in
our minds what is represented in the idea, which is the object of the
idea, and the idea itself which represents the object. So in fact there
are not two things: the idea and the object, but three: the idea, the
object as it represented in the idea, and the object. Or, the idea sun,
the sun as it is represented in the idea of sun, and the sun as an
object. Now to the extent that the idea itself is a thing (not of course a
thing in the sense of the object, since it falls under the attribute
thought, and not under the attribute extension, but still nonetheless a
thing for Spinoza, or if one prefers a mode), then I can have an idea of
this idea not as an objective reality but as a formal one. I can think the
idea of sun as the idea, and not I in terms of what it represents.
It is through this difference between an idea and the idea of an idea
that we can begin to understand the parallelism between the order of
ideas and the order of things.[4] We begin here because we start with
what we are as human beings. We know ourselves and the world
through our bodies, but what is peculiar to us (what makes us more
complex than stones plants and animals) is that we are capable of
reflection; that is, capable of having an idea of an idea. I do not just
think of objects but also I can think of ideas; ideas can become an
object of another idea. I have an idea of the sun, which represents the
sun to me, but I can also just think about this idea in itself. Now it is
the idea of an idea that for human beings (not for God) that we can
begin to see how truth is possible (or as Spinoza would say we can
think adequate ideas), and notice that truth here is between an idea
and another idea as the object of this idea; that is to say it is
immanent to thought, and does require the agreement between
thought and the external world of objects.[5] The idea is the result of
the active power of the mind as a mode of the infinite attribute
thought. It is not a copy of an object. Therefore an idea cannot be true
by pointing to something in the object, for whatever I would be
pointing to would itself be an idea, or better the relation between
ideas. When I say that truth is the conformity of the object with the
idea, then this conformity itself must be an idea, or in Spinozas
language, an idea of an idea, and this conformity cannot itself be an
object. The idea itself must be adequate, and it can only be adequate
because I can think it as so. The idea is true to the extent that it
conforms to the object of the idea, but it does so only because it
contains all the causes and reason of that object, which themselves
are internal to reason (not human reason, but Reason itself). To have
a true idea therefore is know the cause of ideas. The cause of ideas is
the necessary relations between them. These necessary relations are
not produced by the human mind, but by the power of thought itself.
What we have to understand is that if ideas where only the
representation of objects, then there would be no necessary relation
between ideas, and if there were no necessary relations between
ideas, then there would no possibility of science. What we have to say
is, What are the necessary relations between ideas? which is the
same as saying, what is the causal relation between one idea and
another one?. We have to make this distinction between the idea as a
representation and the idea as a cause, and again for Spinoza we
cannot say that this necessity of ideas lies in the object, because all
attributes are autonomous. We cannot think a thought under the
attribute extension, just as much as we cannot think an extended
thing under the attribute thought.
To use Gueroults example, in his second volume on Spinoza, to have
an idea of an idea is to go from this idea back to the knowledge of the
order and connection of its cause in thought (Gueroult, 1974). I
understand thought A by knowing that it is caused by B and so on. So
as to go from the idea of triangle to the idea of the equality of the sum
of its angles to two right angles, the mind must first of all think of the
idea of the idea of a triangle, so as to understand the cause which
results in the idea of the equality of angles, and is so doing it has an
adequate idea of the triangle. Through reflection I understand the
necessary causal relations between thoughts, which are produced by
thought itself and not by my reflection, as Gueroult explains:
La liaison des ides ne dpend pas de la rflexion sur les
ides, cest--dire des ides des ides, car les ides sont en
soi produites selon lordre des causes dans la Pense, sans
quinterviennent en rien les ides des ides, cest--dire la
rflexion (The linkage of ideas does not depend on the
reflection upon ideas; that is to say of the ideas of ideas,
since ideas are produced in themselves according to the
order of causes in Thought, without the ideas of ideas
intervening at all; that is to say, reflection). (Gueroult, 1974,
p. 71)
Reflection does not produce truth; it only discovers it. It is the
discovery through human knowledge of the order of ideas as caused
by the attribute Thought.
But how do we get from these necessary causal relations of thought to
the necessary causal relations of things, and at the same time
understand that they must be identical, without one being the source
of the other? The answer to this question is to concentrate on the idea
of causality. Both ideas and things are produced simultaneously
through their attributes. This means that things, which are the object
of ideas, follow the necessity of their attribute, with the same
spontaneity and autonomy, as the ideas of these things follows the
attribute of thought. If thoughts are connected together by necessary
order of connection, then things must also be connected together
necessarily, and this necessity must be the same. They are the same
not because things determine thoughts, nor thoughts things, but this
necessity comes from the infinite nature of the one substance, which
these two attributes express. Thus to use Spinozas example in IIP7S,
the circle and the idea of the circle are other to one another, since they
fall under different attributes, though the necessary connection
between things and the necessary connection between ideas is
identical. It is not that the necessary causality of things determines the
causality of thought, but the necessity of substance (this necessity
must be the same otherwise there would be as many substances as
there would be attributes). In thought the connection between ideas
is produced by the necessary causality proper to thought, and this
order is the same as the order of things under the attribute extension.
They are the same, because both are immanent to the same
substance which is infinite and unfolds in a necessary way through
each attribute. This does not mean, however, that attributes are fused
together in substance. Each attribute is autonomous and so expresses
the necessity of substance in its own way. As Gueroult, writes, they
are both indissoluble and heterogeneous (Gueroult, 1974, p 90).
Works Cited
1. Ayers, M., & Garber, D. (Eds.). (2003). The Cambridge History of
Seventeenth Century Philosophy (Vol. I). Cambridge: CUP.
2. Deleuze, G. (s.d.). Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze: Deleuze/Spinoza, Cours
Vincennes 24/10/1978. Consult le November 5, 2007, sur
Webdeleuze: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?
cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2
3. Descartes. (1985). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Vol. I). (J.
Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdock, Trans.) Cambridge: CUP.
4. Gueroult, M. (1974). Spinoza (Vol. II, Lme). Paris: Aubier.
5. Kant. (2003). Critique of Pure Reason. (H. Caygill, Ed., & N. K. Smith,
Trans.) Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
6. Woolhouse, R. S. (1993). The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth
Century Metaphysics. London: Routledge.
[1] And in this sense, he is very different from Descartes who writes
philosophy first of all because of science and not ethics,
notwithstanding his book on the passions. (Descartes, 1985).
[2] He wants to make room for human freedom. See, for example the
preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant,
2003).
[3] See, (Ayers & Garber, 2003).
[4] Spinoza did not use the word parallelism to explain his philosophy.
Rather, it was Leibniz.
[5] In other words, truth has nothing at all to do with sensation.
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Modes in Spinoza Lecture 7
February 23, 2014
So far in our discussion of Spinozas
Ethics, we have only spoken about
substance and attributes. This is
because we have tried to answer the
question why is there only one
substance? We have seen that to
understand Spinozas argument we
have to see that it progresses from
the principles of Descartes philosophy.
Spinoza is only taking to its logical
conclusion what is already implicit in
Descartes philosophy, which he
himself, because he is still caught up in
a theological world view, where God is
viewed as transcendent in the world,
could not see. It is this theological
prejudice, this human fiction as Spinoza calls it in the appendix to Part
1, which is the source of the separation, distance and split between
attributes and substance in Descartes thought, and which
necessitates the one-to-one correspondence between attributes and
substance, such that every attribute must have its corresponding
separate substance. Thus, there is not just the thought-attribute, but
also thought-substance; there is not just extended substance but also
extension-substance. As Curley argues, this doubling up of substance
and attribute is caused in Descartes text because he cannot accept
that God could also be extension, and therefore he still needs the split
between infinite and finite substance.
Spinoza, on the contrary, begins with the idea of infinity (which was
already there in Descartes definition of God, but is still confused with
the more traditional attributes), and deduces the necessity of the
existence of one substance from it. This is well explained in Bennetts,
whose tone, however, can be quite confusing, because like most
analytic philosophers, he begins with the premise that the philosophy
he is studying must be wrong because he could not have been aware
of recent modern developments, as though the philosophy progressed
like an empirical science, and one would no more read Aristotle to
understand the world, than Ptolemy the night sky (Bennett 1984,
pp.709).
Let us, us therefore, have a closer look at Bennetts explanation of
Spinozas monism. The answer to the question, he argues, as to
Spinozas monism. The answer to the question, he argues, as to
whether Spinoza is a monist, is whether it takes more than one
substance to instantiate two attributes. For Descartes, as we have
seen, it is clear that two attributes means two substances. The
argument for Spinozas monist can be seen in 1P14, where Spinoza
states that except God, no substance can be conceived. The proof is
that God, as an infinite being, must include every attribute (1D6) and
therefore must necessarily exist (1P11). If any other substance exists,
then it must be explained in terms of an attribute of God (since every
attribute is included in God). This would mean that two substances
would exist with the same attribute. Following 1P5, this is absurd and
therefore no other substance, other than God, can exist or even be
conceived. From this it follows, as shown in the corollaries, that God is
one alone and that, contrary to Descartes, extension and thought are
either attributes or modifications of God.
Bennett explains this proposition in the following way. There must be a
substance with infinitely many attributes, and there cannot be two
substances with an attribute in common. Therefore there must be one
substance. The issue is the first premise: why must there be a
substance with infinitely many attributes? The answer to this question,
Bennett suggests, is to be found in 1P7 and 1P11. In 1P7, Spinoza
argues that substance must exist because a substance cannot be
produced by something other than itself, otherwise it would not be
independent (this is Spinozas version of the ontological argument). It
therefore must be its own cause, and its existence is included in its
essence. And 1P11 that God is an infinite substance which consists of
infinite attributes which necessarily exists.
After Kant and Hume, we might not so easily convinced by the
ontological argument, Spinoza or anyone elses, but Bennett points
out, Spinozas is peculiar because it goes through the idea of
substance which is defined, to use Bennetts expression, as being
entirely self-contained (Bennett 1984, p.73). This means that is
cannot owe its existence to anything else. We must add to this
definition the rationalist insistence that everything that exists must
have a reason to exist (of course if one does not believe this then one
cannot be a rationalist as this fundamental belief is what is common
to Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz). There can, therefore, be only two
possibilities, either substance is caused by itself, or it is caused by
something else. It could not be caused by something else otherwise it
would not self-sufficient, entirely self-contained, therefore it must be
its own cause. So we have to see that for Spinoza it is because God is
a substance that he necessarily exists. It is built into the definition of
God that he must have every attribute, and if you link that to 1P5 that
two substances cannot have the same attribute, then we are lead
necessarily to the conclusion that there can only be one substance.
How then do modes fit into the relationship between substance and
attributes in the Ethics? To answer this question we first of all have to
remind ourselves that the fundamental distinction is Spinozas
philosophy is between independence and dependence (Curley 1988,
p.20). Attributes and substance are both independent; that is, they
are conceived through and exist in themselves (this follows from 1D3
and 1P19)). It is important not to separate attributes and substance,
however, since they are nothing but the essence of substance. Modes,
on the contrary, are dependent; that is to say, we can only conceive of
them through attributes and they exist, to use, Spinozas language, in
another (1D5). Again we can understand this difference, which is
essentially the difference between attributes, which make up the
essence of substance, and modes, through Descartes (though as we
shall see for Spinoza, his modes are particular things because the way
that he conceives of substance). Take, for example, the famous
example of the piece of wax in the Mediations. When Descartes first
experiences the piece of wax, when he brings it into his room, it smells
of flowers, tastes of honey, makes a sound when rapped, is hard and
cold to the touch, and it is white, a cube and an inch in diameter.
These are obviously all the properties the wax, and if someone where
now to ask me what the wax is, I would list them. But now Descartes
places the wax near the stove and the action of the heat changes all
the properties. So these qualities cannot be the explanation of what
the wax is, for the wax is still there, and yet it has completely different
properties. It has no fragrance of flowers, no longer tastes of honey, it
doesnt make a sound, it is soft rather than hard, and is no longer
white or a cube. There, then, has to be a more fundamental
explanation of what the wax is, which explains these changes of
properties in relation to the action of heat, and this is the attribute of
extension, which for Descartes is matter in motion; that is to say it is
the interaction of the tiny particles of matter set into motion by the
action of heat which explains the change in properties of the wax,
which are dependent on them.
The primary law of physics, as Curley explains, for Descartes is the
principle of inertia (Curley 1988, p.40). Everything remains the same
state unless acted upon by an external cause and every motion is in a
straight line so that any deviation must be explained by an external
cause. These two laws tells us that there would no change in the
universe unless by an external cause. The third law explains the
nature of change. If a moving body comes into contact with another
body which has more motion that it, then it will not impart any motion
to that body, but will change its direction, but if it comes into contact
with a body that has less, it will move that body along with itself, and
impart as much motion to it as it loses. This means that in the
interaction between bodies the total motion of the universe is
preserved. From these 3 fundamental laws all the laws of nature can
be deduced, and from these laws all secondary qualities can be
explained.
Of course we have to ask ourselves why these fundamental laws are
not any others. And remember that as a rationalist I am committed to
the principle that everything must have a reason to exist, otherwise it
wouldnt. Descartes answer to this question is God. But as we have
already seen for Descartes, God and matter cannot be identical. This
seems to imply that the eternal and immutable essence of nature is
separate from God, and there are therefore two eternities: the
eternity of God and the eternity of nature. Descartes gets around this
problem by arguing that the eternity of nature, the fundamental laws
of physics that underlie all the laws of nature and thus all secondary
qualities, are in fact dependent on Gods will. To use Descartes
metaphor, God has established them as a king establishes laws in his
kingdom. They are eternal only because of the eternal will of God,
which implies that God could have created the fundamental laws of
nature differently. Thus the difference between modes, attributes,
finite and infinite substance expresses a hierarchy of being for
Descartes, and it is for this reason that he remains trapped within
theological vision of the universe, however much he might say the
opposite.
It is this hierarchy that Spinoza sees as incoherent. Cartesian physics
needs the fundamental laws of physics to eternal and necessary, but
at the same time he makes them contingent on the absolute power of
God, which would make them utterly arbitrary. Spinoza is as committed
as Descartes to the rational view of nature, so in order to preserve the
rational explanation of the universe, he has to get rid of the personal
God who still inhabits the pages of Descartes philosophy, who has the
same capricious will as a tyrant (again this is why the appendix of part
1 of the Ethics is so important, for of course the mis-identification of
God with the arbitrary power of a king also has a political message).
What Spinoza does is identify God with the laws of nature. Every time
that we compare Descartes and Spinoza we can see that it is matter of
the latter getting rid of the all the divisions and separations that the
former still want to hang onto. Spinoza flattens Descartes
transcendent split between finite and infinite substance, and thus the
separation between substance and attributes attributes are not
other than substance, rather they express the essence of substance.
We need to rid ourselves of the anthropomorphism of thinking that
nature is created by the arbitrary choice of a God that stands outside
of it, and also places us both at the centre and outside of it. Gods
essence is nothing else than the eternal and immutable laws of
nature. We do not need anything else than the fundamental laws of
nature, already explained by Descartes. We do not need to ask why
these laws and not any other, because there could be no explanation
beyond them. To explain is go from particular to general (just as I do in
the example of the wax). There is nothing more general than these
laws. To then say that these laws are explained by the arbitrary will of
God is to go from the general to the particular, which is not
explanation at all, but just a descent into superstition and error. Of
course, I can say this and believe it, and there were people in
Spinozas time who believed it, and may who still do, but this does not
make it an explanation however many times that I utter it, and
however dogmatically I believe it. Religious belief is not a substitute for
scientific explanation, and the kind of religious belief that thinks that it
can replace science is nothing but the absurd project of human power
onto the universe, where we think we are separate, rather than just
one more part of the whole (this separation is perhaps the true
psychological origin of all religion the fact that the human species
cannot conceive of itself except as an extraordinary exception).
Everything follows from the universal and necessary laws that are
inscribed within the attributes, which do not need any more
explanation since attributes can only be conceived through and exist in
themselves. From these laws follow all the individual things and
properties that we see in the universe, which are what Spinoza call
modes. Modes themselves are distinguished by Spinoza as either
infinite or finite. Infinite modes follow immediately from the attribute.
Thus motion and rest are infinite modes that follow immediately from
extension, and these laws in turn explain finite modes; that is
particular individual things. Infinite modes are infinite because they
apply to all of nature at any time and any place, and are eternal in the
sense that they are necessary. They are not infinite and eternal,
however in the same sense, as attributes, since they are dependent on
these attributes, whereas attributes, as we know, are entirely self-
contained.
The difference between finite and infinite modes is that former do not
follow unconditionally from the attributes. It is for this very reason that
they are finite and not infinite. Any particular thing comes into
existence and passes away. Thus to explain why two bodies interact
completely we would not only need the fundamental laws of physics,
but also a complete description of the history of these two bodies
circumstances and why they met in this place and at this time. This
complete explanation is not possible, because we would have to know
the infinite series of causes and effects which brought about this
encounter, which we cannot know (and we remember from our reading
of Part Three that this is the source of inadequate ideas).
We do, however, need to be to be careful here. This does not mean
that Spinoza is letting chance make the universe. It is not that the
encounter is unpredictable; it is just that we cannot know the infinite
series. The universe is utterly deterministic for Spinoza; that is,
everything follows, whether immediately or mediately from the essence
of God. Contingency does not belong to the structure of the universe;
rather it arises, as Spinoza states in 1P33S1, as a defect of our
knowledge. Such determinism is utterly important to understand
Spinozas ethics which follows from his physics and metaphysics. For
the human fiction of morality is based upon the idea of human
freedom, which of course is merely magnified, is the image of the
transcendent and hysterical God, which is equally loved by both the
tyrant and the slave.
Works Cited
Bennett, J., 1984. A Study of Spinozas Ethics, [Indianapolis, IN]:
Hackett Pub. Co.
Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinozas
Ethics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.
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From Descartes to Spinoza Lecture 6
January 25, 2014
For Spinoza there is only one
substance and this substance is
God. God, too, is central to
Descartes philosophy, for without
the proof of the existence of God
his whole metaphysics would
collapse. But to some extent he
still has a theological conception of
God. God is understood as
separate and transcendent in
relation to the world such that
Descartes splits substance
between the infinite and finite, and
finite substance itself is split
between extension and thought.
Spinoza is precisely rejecting this
split when he writes in the Ethics
that: God is the immanent, not the
transitive, cause of all things
(1P18). We can understand
Spinozas metaphysics as deducing the necessity of there being only
one substance from Descartes principles. Therefore it is not simply a
matter of Spinoza rejecting Descartes philosophy, but of
demonstrating that following his own principles he too must agree that
there can only be one substance and that this substance must be God.
The relation of Spinoza and Descartes to the idea of God is itself
ambiguous. On the one hand they both agree with the essential
definition of this idea that God is supremely perfect and infinite being.
This means that God cannot be conceived as limited in any way since
he would be less than perfect if he were so. Already in this idea,
therefore, lies the necessity of one substance. For if, like Descartes,
we do make a split between infinite and finite substance, then we are
limiting God, namely by contrasting and opposing God to the created
world, which has its own independent existence (and must do if we
are to call it a substance). The only way Descartes can get out of this
contradiction is by producing another one by arguing that finite
substance must be dependent on Gods power for its own existence,
which would mean that finite substance would be both dependent and
independent at the same time. For Spinoza the very idea of a
dependent substance, following from Aristotle, is a contradiction in
terms.
We can still see, however, that even with this abstract definition,
which is the same for both Descartes and Spinoza, Descartes
philosophy is still caught within a theological definition of God (a
human fiction for Spinoza, following the appendix of the first part of the
Ethics). This is because Descartes is still willing to talk about God in
terms of divine attributes, such as omnipotence and omniscience that
distinguish God from the created world. There is a separation between
what is created and the creator. God is special kind of substance in
relation to the substance of the world. Thus the idea of creation is still
central to Descartes metaphysics, which would be completely
meaningless for Spinoza. In fact we might think of Spinozas
metaphysics as the final expulsion of any idea of creation from
philosophy (in the appendix to Part 1, Spinoza writes about this idea
through the fiction of final causes, where nature is imagined to be
created for the benefit of humankind by a tyrannical God, as opposed
to being considered in terms of its essence).
Descartes still exists in the theological conception of an absolute
separation, division or opposition between the world, on the one
hand, and God, on the other. For Descartes, therefore, God cannot be
extended, because God and the world are entirely different
substances. How would Spinoza counter this theological conception?
Again, following the appendix to the first part of the Ethics, he would
say that we must start with the essence of things, rather than what
people might imagine things to be, and that this is the same with the
idea of God, as of anything else. What many people say of God He is
good, omniscient, omnipotent, and so on are properties, but they do
not say what God is in terms of attributes; that is to say, in terms of
his essence. Take, for example, of omniscience. This is a property of
God, but it cannot be a fundamental property, since it presupposes
the attribute of thought on which it is dependent (it is impossible to
conceive of an all-knowing being which does not think).
Descartes would probably not disagree with this argument, but it is
clear that he would not accept that God could be conceived of in terms
of extension, since extension is not infinitely perfect for Descartes. This
is because extended matter is divisible, and it is clear that God cannot
be. Why does the divisibility of matter imply imperfection for Descartes?
This is because divisibility is the destruction of matter, and destruction
is an imperfection. Spinozas argument against this is that divisibility of
matter is merely a mode, and in essence, matter is not divisible. This is
because following 1P5 there can only be one extended substance,
since two or more substances cannot have the same attribute, since
they would not be anything that would distinguish them: In Nature
there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or
attribute.[1] If there is only substance, can we really say that matter
is being destroyed? Even if I divide extended substances into different
parts, nonetheless these different parts still exist as part of the one
substance, which has not been destroyed at all. The leg that I cut off
the horse is no longer part of the horse, but both the horse and the
leg are still part of one and the same substance, and therefore I have
not separated this substance, when I have separated the horse from
its leg. If this were the case, then the separated leg would no longer
belong to extension at all. In fact the horses leg is just a portion of
extension that is qualified in a certain way. We should not, therefore,
confuse the disabling of matter with its destruction. It is also means
that extension is as infinite and eternal as thought, and it is only a
theological prejudice of Descartes that prevents him from saying that it
is just as much a fundamental property or attribute of God as
thought.
Spinozas philosophy is not a refusal of Descartes, but is a thorough
logically worked out consequence of his thought, which Descartes
could not himself go to the end of perhaps because of a theological
prejudice which prevented him from understanding these
consequences. For Descartes, each substance has one attribute which
constitutes its essence. For minds it is thought, and for bodies,
extension. He calls these principle attributes. Knowing what the
principle attributes are would tell you what you are dealing with, and
what you should expect. Thus, you would not be led to the mistake of
confusing and thought with a thing. One could say for Descartes,
therefore, that what is important is not substance, but attributes,
since attributes are the principles of explanation. For Spinoza it is the
other way around. It is substance itself which is the principle of
explanation, and not attributes, since it is not limited to the two
attributes which Descartes describes, but must contain infinite
attributes. Since to argue otherwise would be to limit substance and
thus contradict its infinite essence, as Spinoza writes in IP8: Every
substance is necessarily infinite.
For Descartes each separate attribute, which must be conceived in
itself, since we do not need to know what thinking is to know what
extension is, and vice versa, implies a separate substance, since he
understands substance through attributes. Why, then, does Spinoza
argue that we should think reality the other way around, and say that
there is one substance with infinite attributes? In response to this we
might ask whether it is possible to think of one substance with infinite
attributes, perhaps because we tend to think in the same way as
Descartes. Spinozas answer to this question is that we already do so
through the idea of God. Since God is by definition infinite, He must
contain infinite attributes, since if he did not, then He would lack
something, which would contradict his infinite essence. Moreover if God
did lack something then there must be something that caused God to
do so, which again would contradict his essence and the very meaning
of substance as independent.
We might not be convinced by Spinozas argument at this point, but
Curley says that there is another way to get to the same conclusion. If
each attribute is conceived through itself, it must, therefore, also exist
in itself. If it existed in something else in order to exist, then we would
need to be able to conceive such a thing before we could conceive the
attribute. If an attribute is conceived in itself, and exists in itself, then
it satisfies the definition of substance in 1D3 (by substance I
understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself). But if we
have infinite attributes, each conceived and existing in itself, wouldnt
we then have an infinite amount of substances, rather than just one,
as Spinoza believes? Curleys answer to this question is to say that
Spinozas substance is a complex of very special elements (Curley
1988, p.30). If each attribute is conceived through itself, they must
also exist in themselves, and must also exist necessarily. If this is the
case, then no single attribute could exist without the others, since
they all necessarily exist: The existence of each one of the attributes
implies the existence of all the others (Curley 1988, p. 30). Substance,
therefore, is not anything different from attributes. It isnt something
that lies behind attributes, as some kind of separate and distinct
cause, which would lead us straight back to the transcendence we are
trying to get rid of. God, therefore, is nothing but the existence of an
infinite plurality of attributes, and nothing else.
Work Cited
Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinozas
Ethics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.
[1] Ethics, p. 3. See also IP13. To make matter divisible is to divide it
into parts, but that would either mean that these parts would not be
the same as substance, which would cause substance not to exist, or
there would be many substances with the same attribute which would
be absurd.
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Spinoza: What is Substance? Lecture 5
December 18, 2013
Perhaps one of of the greatest
obstacles to modern readers of
Spinozas Ethics is the language he
uses. It is one which would be
perhaps understandable to readers
of his time, but has become pretty
meaningless to us now. It is a
language that has its roots in
greatest obstacles to modern
readers of Spinoza scholasticism,
though, like Descartes, (who is the
most important philosophical
influence on Spinoza) everything he
writes is a rejection of this tradition.
Scholasticism obtains its language
from Aristotle (or at least as he is
handed down by the Islamic scholars
to the West in the 9
th
century), so we first need to go back to this
source.
Those of you who have done a basic cause in Greek philosophy might
remember Aristotles philosophy and especially his notion of
substance, and this is where we need to start, since substance in
one of the most important words in Spinozas vocabulary. We are also
going to use as our guide here the excellent book by Woolhouse, The
Concept of Substance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics.[1]
When we normally think of the word substance in English, we
associate it with the idea of matter. As for example, when we think of
the question what substance is this table made out of?, we would
probably respond by saying, wood or plastic, corresponding to the
material it was constructed from. This is not what Aristotle means by
substance at all, and certainly not what Spinoza means by it. In fact
Aristotle has a completely different word for matter in Greek, which is
hyle. The word in Greek for substance is, on the contrary, ousia. Ousia
is the 3
rd
person singular feminine present participle of the Greek verb
being. Now the grammar of this word is not particularly important for
us, but what is important is that it has its origin in the verb being.
Ousia is not the word for matter for Aristotle but for what is. Everything
that is, is named by the word ousia, since everything that is must
necessarily be; that is, must necessarily possess being, whether were
talking about tables, galaxies or even ourselves. This notion of being,
Aristotle says in the Metaphysics, is the proper subject matter of
philosophy, and no other study. So the question we must ask
ourselves is what did Aristotle think was the answer to the question
what is being?
What is real for Aristotle are individual things like men, animals and
plants and so on, and what is, is made up of these individual things.
This seems to follow common sense, and it is clear those philosophers
before Aristotle where not so ready to agree with common sense.
Many of them tended to believe that there was a much greater reality
behind the individual things we experience, which it is the task of
philosophers to describe. Think, for example of the first Greek
philosopher that we have any information about, Thales, who thought
that every individual thing was in fact made of water, which was
therefore the ultimate explanation and reality of the universe.
The best way to understand Aristotles idea of substance is to go back
to his theory of predication. In fact we might say that it is this theory of
predication which is the true source of his understanding of being: the
way we understand being has its origin in the way we talk about the
world. A substance for Aristotle is a subject of a predicate, but which at
the same time is not a predicate of anything else. This is true definition
of what we mean by an individual thing: it is independent of anything
else. This notion of independence, as we shall see, is crucial to the
meaning of substance, and is the key especially of understanding
Spinozas use of the word. A substance is what undergoes change (it
can have different predicates attached to it), but it itself remains the
same, or holds onto its identity. Think of Socrates the man. He can be
young or old, cold or warm, wise and ignorant, and so on. We can
predicate all these different and opposite predicates of Socrates, but
nonetheless it is still Socrates the individual (who is different from
Peter and the chair over there) who we say these things of.
Substance, then, has two very important parts of its definition:
independence, and identity.
Now the question for Aristotle, as it is for every philosopher, is
whether individual things are the ultimate substance or whether there
is something greater than individual things, and which can explain
them in a better way than they can explain themselves. This would
mean that individual things would not be independent but would be
dependent on something higher. In the same way that hot only makes
sense predicated on some other individual thing, and can only have a
meaning because of this; individual things would be, in fact, predicates
of something else. This would mean, therefore, that their
substantialness, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, would be an
illusion. But it is precisely this kind of thinking he rejects. What is real
are individual things, and it is they that undergo change and not
something else. We tend to think there is some more ultimate reality
because like Plato we confuse the definition of something with its
reality thus, because we notice there is something common between
different horses, we make the mistake of thinking that there is some
kind of Horse which is the ultimate cause of them. Or we confuse
substance with matter; that is to say, we think everything is the same
because they are all made of the same kind of stuff.[2] It is true that
things are made of matter, and there might be some ultimate matter
which is the explanation of all forms of matter (like atoms), but that is
not enough to explain what something is for Aristotle. For Aristotle
what something is made up of its matter and its form, and it is this
form which is explained by substance. The form, therefore, tells us
what the thing is and why it is what it is. Matter, alone, for Aristotle,
cannot do this, for it just tells what is the same about everything, but
not why this thing is the thing that it is and not any other.
The most important influence, as we have already indicated, on
Spinoza is Descartes, who will use this Aristotelian vocabulary, but will
give it a very different meaning. The two important characteristics,
however, remain: independence and identity. Descartes writes as
though he has escaped Scholastic philosophy, which has been the
dead hand on scientific progress by retaining the Aristotelian view of
nature, against the new mechanistic theory of nature. But this is just
propaganda, for he will still use their vocabulary, and in relation to the
idea of God, there is much that is scholastic in his thought. The most
important influence is the very idea of God itself. For this is not
something that would have been of concern for Aristotle, at least not
as it is presented in theological thought. For Aristotle the universe is
eternal, but for the Christian thinkers, such a view would deny
creation; an idea which would have been utterly inconceivable to
Aristotle. The idea of creation changes everything in the doctrine of
substance, for the notion of independence belongs to its definition. If
the universe is created by God, and it must be in Christianity, then
everything that exists in creation must be dependent on Him. There,
therefore, can only be one independent substance, which is God.
Descartes, however, is not willing to go this far. Rather, he says, we
can distinguish between two kinds of substance: infinite substance,
which is God, and created substance, which is any individual thing
which is dependent on God for its existence, but not anything else. We
could say they have relative independence, and they correspond to
what Aristotle defines as substance. A substance, just as in Aristotle,
is everything which is conceived of through itself and not through some
other kind of thing, and that which exists (apart from the fact that it is
created) in its own right. A substance is therefore the subject of
predication, of which we predicate qualities, properties and attributes
to, and remains identical through change.
We say that created substance is similar to Aristotles notion of
substance. It is similar in its definition (independence and identity), but
not similar in what it describes. For substance describes individual
things in Aristotle, tree, galaxies and you and me, but it does not do so
for Descartes. To understand this difference, we are going to have to
look at two other technical expressions, which are also fundamental
for Spinoza: attributes and modes. Descartes philosophical system
has three levels of reality: infinite substance, finite or created
substance, and properties or qualities. We could see the relation
between these levels as one of dependence: with infinite substance,
created substance would not exist, and without created substance
properties and qualities could not exist, for they always need to be
properties or qualities of something. These properties or qualities of
created substance Descartes calls modes. If modes are dependent on
substance, then substance in itself cannot be a mode. We know
substances, therefore, for Descartes through attributes, and there are
two main attributes which explain all the possible modes that we
know: extension and thought. The first explains objects in the world,
and the second thoughts in our heads. These two are quite different,
and this is why they are to be explained through two very different
attributes, which cannot explain each other. A thought is not an object,
and an object is not a thought. Attributes, therefore, have something
in common with substances: they can only be conceived through
themselves and not through something else thus we can only
understand the attribute extension through extension (length, breadth
and shape which can be understood mathematically) and not
through anything else, whereas a mode must be understood through
extension (heat is the motion of particles). In the same way a thought
can only be understood through the attribute thought, and not
through anything else, whereas any mode of thought (belief, love,
desire and so on) must be understood through thought, since one
cannot desire something, for example, which one cannot think. These
principal attributes constitute the nature of substance for Descartes,
and there must, therefore, be two kinds of substances, which explains
his dualist metaphysics. Thus, whatever exists, substance, attribute,
mode, must either be a body or thought, and cannot be anything else.
He does not give a reason why there is only two kinds of substance,
but only that there are only two. Or if you like, God was free to create
two kinds of finite substance, but he could have created more of
different kinds.
How then is Descartes different from Aristotle? In terms of nature, the
notion of individual substances disappears, such as trees, galaxies and
human beings called Socrates. Rather, there is only one corporeal
substance, of which these things are only modes. Thus, Descartes gets
rid of Aristotles notion of forms, which explains why each thing is what
it is. For Descartes this can be explained by the location, motion and
rest of matter itself, and no appeal to any form is required. Individual
human minds are, however, for Descartes, individual substances in the
way that Aristotle would still talk of them. Anyone who thinks is an
individual thinker, and cannot be the same as any other individual
thinker we do not have the same thoughts (this follows the rule that
any substance must be independent). So for Descartes it is my mind or
soul that individualizes me and not my body.
How, then, does Spinozas thought fit within these two descriptions of
substance by Aristotle and Descartes? First of all, it follows the same
definition of substance that it must be conceived in and through itself.
Again this is what is meant by saying that substance must be
independent. Also his notion of attribute appears to be the same as
Descartes, in that it expresses the way that we perceive substance.
We might ask ourselves, therefore, how an attribute comes to express
substance. Why this attribute and not any other, for example? We
have already seen that Descartes just says that there are two, but not
why there are only two. Attributes are ways through which substance
is understood. Now we really need to take care with our propositions
here. For though Spinoza will agree that it is through attributes that
we understand substance, he will argue further that substance is not
only conceived through itself, but also in itself. What is the difference
between conceiving substance through itself and in itself? Descartes
collapses the real distinction between finite substance and its
attributes (whilst making the latter dependent on God who is separate
and transcendent) and this is why he can only conceive of two principal
attributes. But for Spinoza, thought and extension are only the way
that we perceive substance, but it in itself must have infinite
attributes, since it must be infinite.[3] If it were finite, then it would be
limited by something outside of itself, and therefore it will fail the test
of independence which is the definition of substance. There must,
therefore, be only one substance, and not two kinds of substances, as
Descartes argues. If can only do so because he holds onto the
difference between creation and God, finite and infinite substance. For
Spinoza, on the contrary, there is only one substance which is God or
Nature. We will need to describe the essence of this substance in the
next lecture.
[1] Descartes and Substance in R. S Woolhouse, The Concept of
Substance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics. London, Routledge,
1993, 14-27.
[2] Later on it will be important to see whether Spinoza is doing this,
and whether substance means matter for him, for it is clear that unlike
Aristotle he thinks that there is only one substance.
[3] This does not mean that thought and extension is merely the
appearance of substance, which is something different in itself. They
are real distinctions.
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Spinoza, Freedom and Democracy Lecture 4
November 11, 2013
Perhaps one of the most difficult ideas to grasp in Spinoza is freedom,
for his metaphysics seems to run counter to it. If we are modes of an
infinite being, then this being is the cause of everything that we do
and think, otherwise we would be separate from it, and this is clearly
not possible for Spinoza (man is not a dominion within a dominion as
he writes in the preface of part 3). And yet, throughout the Ethics he
talks of the rational man as a free man, and indeed that the highest
goal of human life is freedom. How can this possibly be when we are
totally dependent and therefore determined by God?
This contradiction, however, is only a surface one because it is the
result of our misunderstanding of what Spinoza means by the word
freedom. What we mean by freedom is freedom of choice. That I am
free to do what I wish to do, and whatever I wish to say or think. This
is not what Spinoza means by freedom. For Spinoza, freedom is
freedom to be oneself, but to be oneself is to follow the necessity of
ones nature. The difference between these two conceptions of nature
can be found in letter that Spinoza writes to Schuller:
That thing is free which exists and acts solely from the
necessity of its own nature and I say that that thing is
constrained which is determined by something else to exist
and to act in a fixed and determinate way. [] I place
freedom, not in free decision, but in free necessity. (Spinoza
1995, pp.2834)
This difference, of course, reminds us of the difference between
passive and active affects. In passive affects and I am affected by an
external body that is outside of me and which I have an inadequate
idea of, whereas in active affects I am the determining cause because
I understand both the nature of my body and how it relates to other
external bodies. Since everything seeks to preserve its own existence,
by the principle of conatus, if I were only to follow my own reason, then
I would only seek those external bodies that brought me joy, and
avoid those that brought me sadness. But what has active affects to
do with free necessity, and why would the free man, so to speak,
always be the joyful one?
The key, as we have already suggested is the difference between
inadequate and adequate ideas. A rational person for Spinoza, which
is the same as a free person, is someone who has adequate ideas. I
have an adequate idea of something when I know its cause. What
does Spinozas mean by cause? He does not just mean the narrow
sense of cause that we might use in scientific explanations, when we
say that something causes something else. Rather, cause has a much
broader meaning as explanation. It is to know the cause of why
something exists. Clearly a finite mode, which we are, cannot know
every cause (this is why for Spinoza it is not possible to free ourselves
from inadequate ideas completely and thus passive affects), but we
can know some things. To know the cause of something means the
explanation ends in self-evident truths. Now a self-evident truth is a
necessary and eternal truth. How do we distinguish between
inadequate idea and adequate ones? Inadequate ideas are those
ideas that I can never know because they belong to an infinite series.
Such a series is always a historical, temporal one for Spinoza. Thus if I
ask why did such a thing happen to be at this time, then I will never
know because I cannot know all the circumstances. Adequate ideas,
on the contrary, are ideas of things that I can know, because they are
explanations that end in self-evident truths that are eternal. I can
know the same thing inadequately or adequate. Thus if I ask myself
why did I write the word triangle at this moment, rather than square,
then I cannot know this. But if I ask myself what is a triangle, then I
can. It is a three sided figure whose internal angles add up to 180
degrees.
It is inadequate ideas that give us a false idea of freedom, because we
confuse freedom simply with the impossibility that we can know the
cause. Thus I might say to myself if only I hadnt made that choice then
I wouldnt be unhappy now. But I have no idea whether that is true or
not, or all the reasons why I made that choice or not. It is the fact that
I cannot explain it that gives me the illusion there were hidden
possibilities that I could have chosen. Because I get fixated by that
choice, I then become enslaved to it. I end up isolating a particular
cause, but this can only ever be a partial cause and thus an
inadequate idea. Indeed for Spinoza this is how most people live, a
slave to their passions. They are attached to one cause or another,
one object or another, that they either love or hate, but this cause or
object can only be a partial cause or object in infinite network of
causes and objects that they cannot know. This is what Spinoza
means by slavery and it is a slavery of the understanding. My ideas are
attached to objects or causes that begin to dominate them. Thus the
only way to escape this enslavement is through the natural power of
the understanding itself.
We can already see what this might be. It means that I should direct
my attention to eternal truths that I can understand, rather than
partial causes that I cannot. I would analyse my affects in terms of
those that I can understand and those that are the result of my
imagination, and since I am an active thinking being, it would be the
most rational thing to follow my reason rather than my imagination. A
free person is therefore someone who uses the power of their mind to
free themselves from the domination of the passions. To understand
freedom here we have to, like every other concept in Spinoza, relate it
back to the ontology of the Ethics. Every individual strives to preserve
itself in its being and thus to increase its power. Such striving is what
makes an individual an individual, for if they did not strive they would
cease to exist and be swallowed by a stronger power. As a physical
thing, I resist the physical environment that surrounds me. But human
beings are not just physical things, they also think. So what does it
mean to strive for existence in terms of thinking? It means to increase
the power of thinking. To understand more is therefore to exist more
as the very activity of thought itself. Active thinking means that
thought determines itself rather than is determined by partial causes
that it does and cannot know, and the more self-determining I am the
more free I am; that is to say free from the passive affects that are
caused by inadequate ideas.
It is this conatus, this striving for existence that determines the
meaning and reality of freedom for Spinoza, which is not an ideal that
lies outside of us. The more power that I have, the more freedom I
have, and therefore the more reality and perfection. Virtue for Spinoza
therefore means being oneself, the power to be or realising oneself,
which means being an individual. My conatus is not to be a best of
kind, but to preserve myself as an active individual in terms of both my
body and my mind.
We should not confuse this freedom with the freedom of choice, if you
mean by that freedom to choose between different possibilities. We
are free to the extent we can determine the essence of our nature,
but not what our nature is. The only choice is either reflectively
choosing oneself, or passively ending up being who one already is.
Freedom here is freedom of reflection. If I am caught up in inadequate
ideas, then I will chose things that will undermine my existence. If I
know the essence of things, what is truly useful and what is not, then
I will not choose those things. But to know what something is, is to
know it necessarily and eternally. It is not as though I can change it.
Thus freedom and necessity are not a contradiction. Whether I do or
do not choose has already been determined, but since I do not know
this, it is irrelevant (or at least is something I am indifferent to
rationally). Spinoza did not choose to become Spinoza, but he did not
choose not to either.
For every belief and idea that I have there is an explanation. Every
passion that I have is an idea of joy and an idea of sadness which is
accompanied with the idea of the cause of that joy or sadness. I can
either know this cause adequately or inadequately. To know it
adequately is to know what it is in terms of its self-evident truth. To
know it inadequately, is to know it only in terms of the association of
ideas whose origin I cannot fathom. Freedom means dont let yourself
be enslaved by an idea or belief that you cannot or do not know,
because that belief or idea will determine you rather than you
determining it. Either the partial cause is the source of my affect, and
then I am passive, or I have an adequate idea of that cause, and then
I am active, and self-determining. What I cannot do is either change
the order of things, or the order of ideas, since neither totality can be
adequately grasped by me, as finite mode, nor could change, since
what is cannot be otherwise than it is, otherwise it would not be
infinite. If I have cancer, then I cannot change that, but what I can
change is my understanding it, and in understanding it, free myself
from the passive affects that might be associated with it (the idea that
it might be a punishment for example). Or to use the example by
Stuart Hampshire, I am angry with someone (Kashap 1972, p.321). I
thus have an idea of them and that they have displeased me because
of something they said or did. I become obsessed with this, and
imagine that they could have said or done something different. As
soon as I, however, reflect on this passive affect, I realise that there
are a chain of associations that have led to this obsession, and what
this person said or did is only a partial cause. As soon as this happen,
then I am not longer in the thrall of this passive affect. The activity of
reflection has dissolved it into an active affect as opposed to a passive
one, because I realise it has nothing at all to do with them at all. In
going through such a process my power of existence is increased
because my understanding is.
Freedom then for Spinoza is self-affirmation and self-assertion of ones
individuality as a thinking being. The more I understand, the more I
think, the more I express my power as a thinking being and the more
express my individuality since I am no longer subject to the attachment
to objects or persons whose partial causes I cannot explain or
understand. The two conditions of freedom, therefore, for Spinoza, are
detachment and affirmation. Its path is the realisation of the illusionary
nature of my fantasies that have their basis in my inadequate ideas
where I become a prisoner of my affects. Freedom is nothing less than
self-determination. Of course this is a continual act of liberation for
Spinoza, since I can always, as finite mode, because subject to other
passive affects that I have not understood, but the route to
understanding is always open to me.
Individuality is the highest expression of freedom that comes directly
from Spinozas principle of conatus. It should not surprise us that this
has directly a political meaning. In fact there is no separation of ethics
and politics for Spinoza because both are thought ontologically. A
superficial reading of the Ethics would confuse individualism as a
retreat from political life, but precisely the opposite is the case. This is
because at the very heart of Spinozas understanding of human nature
is a sociability that is linked directly to conatus.
For Spinoza a right is an expression of power. Thus all things have
rights to the extent that they have power. Yet since every individual
thing is a finite mode, these rights are always limited. I have a right to
the extent I have the power to assert that right and no more. This
political realism is very explosive because it means that no state has
absolute power over individuals. It can rule by consent or violence, but
violent states will eventual fail when the power of individuals exceeds
them (as we see in the recent example of Libya). The most powerful
state would have the most right, because it would have the most
power. We should not confuse that we tyranny and violence, however,
since it is the most reasonable state that would have the most power,
because it would be the one that would compose most with the
individuals that made it up. To say that everyone is individual is not to
say that everyone lives in isolation, for what makes an individual
individual is the relation to other individuals. I am nothing but the
encounters that form me.
The key proposition here is proposition 37 of part 4. To be guided by
reason is seek what is useful to oneself. What is most useful is other
people, because associating with others is what increases my own
power to exist. This sociability is not based on equality but on
difference. Each with our different abilities combines with others and
therefore increases each others power. To desire others as useful to
me is not to desire them to be the same as me, but exactly the
opposite: to desire them in their difference; that is to say, as the
individuals that they are. Such a collective individuality is what Spinoza
calls friendship. But he knows that isnt why most people end up
together. There is also the affective genesis of a collectively which is
not based on the rational idea of utility, but the fact that we love or
believe in the same object. Such is the basis of patriotism, for example.
In this case it is passive affects that are joining is together. If we were
only rational creatures then we would live only in rational cities, but
because we are not, we also live in affective ones. This isnt a
distinction between two cities, as though the rational one were ideal,
and the affective one, real, which would be to read Spinoza as though
he were Plato, but that every political institution is a combination of
both. The political problem for Spinoza is to make sure that the
affective does dominate the rational, because it will essentially
unstable and conflictual. It is the state as such which has to ensure
that this does not happen.
It is in his two political writings, the earlier Theologico-Political Treatise
[hereafter TPT], and the later, shorted, and unfinished, Political
Treatise, that Spinoza thinks about these ontological ideas in terms of
political reality as such. In other words, what would be the best state
to exist in? In the earlier work, there is no doubt that Spinozas writing
reflects his own situation. The best state is the democratic one, which
reflects the Dutch republic at the time under the De Witt brothers. Why
would democracy be the best state? Because it instantiates the
highest level of freedom that we have just described in that it allows
the freedom of thought. The particular political problem is whether this
freedom can also be granted to religion, which is more affective than
rational. Spinozas solution is that one should separate private from
public belief. In private, everyone should have the right to believe
whatever they want, but in public worship should be regulated by the
state. But reality was to show that Spinozas solution was a false one.
As Balibar suggests, there were two reasons for this.(Balibar 1998,
p.114) One, that the Dutch republic was not democratic at all, since it
was founded on social inequality, but secondly, and more importantly,
it was an illusion to think that the masses would be open to rational
argument, and thus that the democratic state could negotiate
between the rational and affective.
The Political Treatise was a response to these real problems, and
initially it might appear that Spinoza was giving up on democracy as an
ideal, but this is only apparent. The real difference of the approach is
that Spinoza now sees the purpose of the state as security (this ties in
with the principle of conatus in the Ethics). A state that could embody
the collective security of individuals would be absolute or most perfect
state. It is clear that a democratic state might not ensure this at all.
The real problem is how one would reach a consensus about what
would be security for all. It is here that Spinoza sees that what is
fundamental is the question of the multitude or the masses. In the
TPT, the masses were what was regulated by the state, but now
Spinoza sees that the state is the masses, and the masses the state.
Desire is always already collective. The key political question is how
the passive affects of the masses can be transformed into active ones.
We already know the answer to this and that is knowledge and
understanding. So effective political power would always be the power
that increases the knowledge and understanding of the masses. Such
a power, again following Balibar, we might call democratisation as
opposed to democracy, since even democracy require democratisation.
It would the increasing of knowledge and communication because that
increases knowledge and understanding generally and therefore the
security of the state, because the majority would know what their
common interest would be and would not be attached to the partial
understanding of external objects and thus the violence and vacillation
of passive affects.
Works Cited
Balibar, E., 1998. Spinoza and Politics, London: Verso.
Kashap, S. ed., 1972. Studies in Spinoza, Critical and Interpretive
Essays., Berkeley: University of California Press.
Spinoza, B., 1995. Spinoza : the Letters, Indianapolis Ind.; Cambridge:
Hacket.
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Joy and Sadness Spinoza Lecture 2
October 13, 2013
When we come to Spinozas analysis of affects the fundamental
distinction is between active and passive ones. This is because the
essence of singular things is to be understood in terms of power. Since
only existence is what distinguishes one thing from the other, each
thing seeks to preserve its own existence (Each thing, as far as it can
by its own power, strives to preserve in its being IIIP6), otherwise it
would cease to be what it is. Any singular thing, however, is also
linked to an exterior environment, and the more complex it is, the more
complex these relations will be. What defines the nature of human
beings, is not some natural perfection, or that they are created in the
image of God, (all ideas guilty of the worse kind of anthropomorphism
for Spinoza), but the complexity of their bodies and therefore the
complexity their relations to other external bodies. These relations can
have two basic forms either active or passive: either I determine
myself in relation to these external bodies, or they determine me, and
the more that I determine myself the more my power increases, and
less I determine myself, or the more that I am determined by external
causes, the more my power decreases.[1]
The distinction between passive and active affects is understood by
Spinoza through two fundamental affects: joy and sadness. We might
say that for Spinoza human affective life is made up of three basic
affects: desire (conatus the striving for self-preservation that all
singular things have), and then joy and sadness. All the other
emotions that Spinoza describes in the Ethics are merely variations of
these three basic affects but the most fundamental are joy and
sadness.[2] How can we understand this difference between joy and
sadness? Spinoza explains it in proposition 11 of Part 3:
The idea of any thing that increases or diminishes, aids or
restrains, our bodys power of acting, increases or
diminishes, aids or restrains, our minds power of thinking.
Whatever increases or diminishes the power of the body to act also
increases or diminishes the power of the mind to think. This follows,
Spinoza writes in the demonstration, from 11P7 and IIP14. The first is
the statement of parallelism the order and connection of things is
identical to the order and connection of ideas and the second is that
the mind contains what the body experiences, and the more complex a
body is the more sophisticated these experiences are. In the scholium,
Spinoza explains that our minds, because of the complexity of our
bodies can go through many changes. These changes, to use
Bennetts expression, are to be thought in terms of up and a down,
as the passage from a great or lesser perfection (Bennett 1984,
p.257). What does Spinoza mean by perfection in this context? Again
we have to remind ourselves that for Spinoza human beings are not a
dominion within a dominion. We are part of the universe of infinite
series of causes and effects, about which we cannot have absolute
knowledge. The human body is essentially vulnerable to external
bodies, because it has so many complex and involved relations to
them. To increase my power to act is to increase my power to
determine myself and act against these external bodies through the
desire of self-preservation, and my power to act is decreased when
these external bodies threaten by existence. I can only be destroyed,
Spinoza writes, by external causes. Perfection is an affirmation of
existence. The more perfect something is the more reality that thing
has, and therefore the more power to act it has and thus the more
power to think.
It is with respect to this increase and decrease of the power to act
that we can understand the two fundamental affects joy and sadness.
Joy is the affect by which the mind passes to a greater perfection, and
sadness to a lesser one. There are things in the world that make us
joyful and there are things in the world that make us sad. This is all
that we need to understand passive affects. First of all these affects
have to do with the body, but we know from part 2 that the mind is
the idea of the body and that the power of the mind to imagine things
depends on the existence and relation of the body. Thus joy and
sadness, at least for human beings, does not just involves direct
relations with our bodies, but also with our imagination, the idea of the
bodies we have, and the ideas of how they are changed or modified by
external bodies (whether persons or objects). For the most part,
because of the very way we do have ideas of our body, these ideas
are inadequate (because we do not have an adequate understanding
of the relation our body to the other bodies).
As long as the body is affected by an external body, Spinoza writes in
the following proposition, the mind will regard that body as present,
and as long as the mind imagines that external body as present, then
our own bodies will be affected in the same way. This means that if the
mind imagines an external body that increases the power of the body
to act then the minds power of thinking will be increased, and it will
feel joy, and if it imagines an external body that decreases the power
of the body to act then the minds power of thinking will be decreased,
and it will feel sadness. Then mind, then, Spinoza states in the
corollary of IIIP13, will try to stop imagining those things that restrain
the power of that body and its own, and in the scholium this explains
the difference between love and hate. One who loves strives to make
present the thing he loves, because this is a passage to a greater
perfection through the idea of an external cause, joy, and one hates,
for the opposite reason, will try to destroy the thing that she hates.
Through imagination we have, therefore, very complex relations to
external bodies. It means in IIIP15 that anything can be the accidental
cause of joy or sadness, and we can love or hate those things without
any cause known to us because they are similar in our imagination to
other objects that affect us. Thus, as in IIIP16, by the mere fact that
there is a resemblance to one object or another, we can be affected by
joy or sadness. Moreover imagination also opens us up to time. We
are affected by the same joy or sadness, Spinoza argues, whether we
are talking about a past or future external body, or whether we are
speaking about a present one. Thus the imagination retains past
impressions of encounters which still affect it in the present, and as
the same time can project these impressions, both present and past
ones into the future. As long as I am affected, Spinoza writes in the
demonstration, I will regard the external body as present, even if it
doesnt exist. The image of an external body is the same whether it
exists in the past, present, or future; it is there in my mind, and it
affects me. We might say that accidental causes of affects are always
the mediation of one affect by another affect, either through different
affects, or different times. In each case, for Spinoza, the causes of
these affects are inadequately understood and thus experiences
passively, whether they are sad or joyful.
It is the intersection between affects and affections which determine
the specific nature of human emotions. The mind strives to imagine and
recollect images that augment the power of the body to act, and to
keep before those ideas which exclude the existence of things that
diminish my power to act. It is these images that carry associative
feelings from the past, which reflect the causal interactions between
my body and others that have left their traces within me, such that
different bodies with different traces will react differently in the present
then I will. My body is all my past interactions which affect my mind
carried through into the present and projected into the future.
Our relation to affects is not merely individual but social (and this will
be very important in part 4, to show that the self-interest does not
contradict friendship and sociability). It is true for Spinoza that each
being strives to exists, but the form that this striving takes is
determined by the nature of that being. Human beings are social
beings. This means that my own well-being is inconceivable without
others. I am not first an isolated being which then encounters others;
rather, my very individuality is inconceivable without my relations to
others that care for me, and I care for them. It is not that the individual
pursues his or her own interests against the interests of others but
that to be an individual is to be already acted upon and act with
others. My existence, as a determinate mode of infinite substance, is
already involved with the existence of others. This is why from IIIP21
Spinoza argues that if we imagine the thing that we love affected with
joy and sadness, then we too will be affected by joy and sadness and
we will love those who affect those we love with joy, and hate those
who cause them sadness. We too also feel empathy towards other
beings like ourselves (IIIP27). If the nature of an external body is like
our body, then if we imagine that body involving an affect, then we too
will be affected by that same affect, which explains the feeling of pity
that we have for those that suffer. For human being, affects are
imitative. We do not only affirm ourselves but also those we love.
Those we love are those whose existence gives us joy, and we wish to
give them joy, and exclude from existence everything that gives them
or us sadness. This is not altruism as an idea but the power of
imagination. If we imagine someone like us to be affected by an affect,
we can likewise imagine ourselves also so affected and so also be
affected. This similarity is not one of common identity but a direct
apprehension through bodily awareness. Thus in every bodily
experience there is a direct relation to other bodies and this must
always be the case for human beings. And this is both the cause of
conflict and harmony. Every human emotion, whether positive or
negative, is caused by bodily imaginings, and our ideas of good and
evil arise out the joy and sorrow of being in our bodies. What is good
is not what we judge but what we desire. We judge it good only
because we desire it, and not the other way around.[3]
There is no Good and Evil in the moral sense. Rather they are relations
between bodies. What is good is what augments my existence; what
is bad is what diminishes it. If we think of this in terms of food, Deleuze
explains, then what is bad for us is what destroys our bodies (Deleuze
1983, p.34). This is what we mean by poison. What is good is what
suits our nature, and what is bad is what doesnt. If something suits
our nature then it increases our power, if it doesnt, then it decreases
it. Thus, as Deleuze writes, the aim of the Ethics is replace
transcendent morality with an immanent ethics, which is nothing else
than the relation between bodies (Deleuze 1983, p.35). It follows from
this that Spinoza does not see any benefit to sadness at all. Sadness
does not teach us anything. It only makes us weak, and from this
weakness arise feeling of hate, aversion, mockery, fear, despair,
pity, indignation, envy, humility, repentance, abjection, shame, regret,
anger, vengeance, cruelty(Deleuze 1983, p.39).
Every individual, for Spinoza is a singular essence, which is a degree of
power. This degree of power is determined by an ability to be affected.
Thus an animal is not defined, Deleuze explains, in Spinoza as a
species, but in terms of its power to be affected, by amount of
affections that it is capable of (Deleuze 1983, pp.3943). When it
comes to human beings this power of being affected is defined by two
types of affections: actions and passions. Actions explain the nature of
the individual (what it can do) and passions how it is affected by
external bodies. The power to be affected is present as the power to
act, when it is filled by active affections of the individual, and the
power to suffer when it filled by passions. For every individual the
power to be affected is constant, but the relation between active and
passive affects is variable. It is not only important, however, to
distinguish between actions and passions, Deleuze adds, but between
two kinds of passions. If we encounter an external body which does
not suit us, then the power of this body is opposed to the power of
ours and as such it acts as a subtraction or fixation. It takes
diminishes or subtracts from our power to act, and the passions that
correspond to this relation are sad. In the opposite case, if we
encounter an external body that suits us, then its power is added to
ours, and we are affected by the passion of joy. Now joy, just like
sadness must be separated from our power to act, since it is a passion
and must therefore have an external cause, but the power to act
increases proportionally such that we reach a point where passive joy
transmutes into active joy. There cannot be, however, any active
sadness, because sadness by definition decreases the power to act
and thereby, the power to exist, and not being does not seek to
preserve its existence. Suicide, for Spinoza, is not a sign of strength
but weakness: a more powerful cause outside of me causes me to
take my own life, if even I think mistakenly that I am the cause.
All the sad emotions and passions of our lives represent the lowest
point of our power, and thus of our existence. Sadness alienates us
from ourselves. We are totally at the mercy of feelings that come from
the outside, and totality powerless from stopping them. Only joy can
help us to act. If we allow ourselves to be affected by those things
that bring us joy, then we become more powerful and more active.
One issue for Ethics, then, is how can we experience the most joy so
that this feeling of joy can be transformed into active free sentiments
especially since our nature since to make us so vulnerable to sadness
and unhappiness (are we not the most miserable creatures on this
planet?), since we are constantly affected by external bodies that we
do not understand. How then can we affirm ourselves when we are
buffeted from negative passions from all sides? This is the question
that part 4 will seek to answer.
Works Cited
Bennett, J., 1984. A Study of Spinozas Ethics, [Indianapolis, IN]:
Hackett Pub. Co.
Deleuze, G., 1983. Spinoza : philosophie pratique, Paris: d. de Minuit.
Lloyd, G., 1996. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and the
Ethics, London; New York: Routledge.
Rorty, A.O., 1987. The Two Faces of Spinoza. The Review of
Metaphysics, 41(2), pp.299316.
[1] This is always relative for Spinoza, since as finite determinate
modes, human beings can never totally be separated from external
causes. The aim of the Ethics cannot be to rid ourselves of affects,
since they belong to our nature, but to understand them better.
Whether we do so is itself is not up to us. Self-determination is not
free will for Spinoza but the recognition of necessity (Rorty 1987).
[2] Bennett lays these out, though he is not convinced that Spinoza
should treat desire in the same way that he does joy and sadness
(Bennett 1984, pp.2634).
[3] Genevive Lloyd gives an excellent explanation of this (Lloyd 1996,
pp.776).
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Spinozas Ethics Lecture 1
October 4, 2013
Ancient philosophy sought to understand the power of emotions
through the division of the mind against itself, like Platos famous
image of the chariot in the Phaedrus, where the irrational part of the
mind fights against the rational part. Spinoza, on the contrary, like
Descartes, wants to understand emotions through the relation of the
body to the mind. The human mind for Spinoza is only the idea of the
body. We only have a limited understanding of what the body can do,
and how it interacts with other bodies. Ethics, for Spinoza, is
knowledge of our bodies. To truly understand ourselves is therefore to
understand our bodies. As Spinoza writes at the end of the preface to
the third part of the Ethics, I shall consider human actions and
appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.
(EIII preface)
When we normally think about ethics, we assume there is some kind
moral system that would prescribe our actions in advance. This moral
system would be based on, and defend, some kind of moral ideal that
separates human beings from the rest of nature. Only human beings
are capable of moral action, because only human beings can have
moral ideas such as responsibility, freedom and duty. To be moral is
not to follow ones nature, but quite the opposite; it is to go against
nature. For Spinoza, on the contrary, ethics is only possible by
understanding our own nature. There is no fact/value distinction for
Spinoza. What is good is what follows our nature, and nature is to be
understood in terms of our desires or appetites (thus it is perfectly
possible to think that animals are capable of ethics in this sense).[1]
We do not desire something, as Spinoza writes in the scholium to
proposition 9 in part 3, because we say it is good, rather we say
something is good because we desire it:
We neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire
anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary
we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will
it, want it, and desire it. (EIIIP9Sc)
Such a statement is precisely the opposite to any kind of idealistic
morality that believes in the existence of moral ideas in advance that
determine how we ought to act. There is no ought for Spinoza if we
imagine this to be the contrary to our desires, since what we are is our
desires and nothing more. We have to see ourselves as part of nature
and not, as Spinoza writes at the start of the preface to the third part
of the Ethics, a dominion within a dominion (imperium in imperio)
(EIIIpref). This is just the case with morality as it is with any other
sphere of human activity.
It is in Deleuze lectures on Spinoza that we might find the best
explanation of the full scope of Spinozas ethics (Deleuze 1978). Why
does Spinoza call his ontology an ethics? This is very peculiar, since we
normally think of ethics and ontology being very different things. First
of all we have to ask ourselves what is Spinozas ontology. It is the
unique infinite substance which is being. This means that individual
beings, singular things, including ourselves, are only modes of this one
infinite substance. What does mode mean in Spinoza? Deleuze replies
that we should understand the word mode as meaning a way of
being or a state, in the way that we say that green is a state of grass
(as opposed to brown). So a tree is a way of being of substance, just
as we are a way of being of substance. He writes: Et un mode cest
quoi? Cest une manire dtre. Les tants ou les existants ne sont
pas des tres, il ny a comme tre que la substance absolument infinie
[And a mode is what? It is a way of being. Beings or existents are not
being; there is only being as an infinite absolute substance] (Deleuze
1978). He adds that if we are to think of ethics in a Spinozist sense
then we have to sharply distinguish it from morality. Ethics has to do
with our way of being as a mode of infinite substance. As a way of
being, it is better to understand ethics in the same way that we
understand ethnology; that is, the study of human behaviour, in the
same way that we study the behaviour of other animals for example.
How is this different from a morality? Morality, Deleuze answers, has to
do with knotting of two key concepts, essence and value. Morality
indicates what our essence is through values. This has nothing to do
with ontology, since values are meant to point beyond being (think of
the idea of the Good in Plato, which is beyond being). They indicate
what being should be rather than what it is. The aim of every morality,
he continues to explain, is the realisation of ones essence. This means
that ones essence, is for the most part, not realised; something is
always lacking or absent. Thus Aristotle, in book 1 of the Nicomachean
Ethics, will define our essence to be eudaimonia and the object of
ethics is to reach this essence. The reason that we do not realise our
essence is that we dont act in a rational way, since we lack
knowledge of what it means to go beyond our being in order to reach
its moral realisation. This moral end, which allows us to reach our
essence, what it means to be a human being, is supplied by our
values. Thus we see how in morality essence and values are ultimately
tied together.
When we come to Spinozas ethics, Deleuze says, we have to stop
thinking in terms of essence and value. An essence is not a general
definition of something, like the definition of what it means to be a
human being; rather essence always means a singular thing. As
Deleuze says, there is an essence of this or that, but not of human
beings in general. Another way of thinking of this change in the
meaning of the word essence is to say that what really interests
Spinoza is existence not essence understood as a general term. For
what is general is only the unique infinite substance, everything else is
a mode, which is a determinate mode of infinite substance. Thus what
truly differentiates one thing from another is existence not essence,
since there is only one essence, strictly speaking, which is the infinite
substance itself. An ethics, then, Deleuze argues, as opposed to a
morality, is interested not in general abstractions, but the existence of
singular things. But why is this different from morality? Deleuze gives a
concrete example.
With morality the following operation always ensues: you do
something, you say something and you judge yourself. Morality has
always to do with judgement and it is a double system of judgement:
you judge yourself and you are judged by someone else. Those who
have a taste for morality always have a taste for judging themselves
and others. To judge, Deleuze insists, is always to have a relation of
superiority to being and it is value that expresses this superiority. But
in ethics something quite different happens. In ethics there is no
judgement at all, however strange that might appear to be. Someone
says or does something. You do not refer this to a value which is
superior to it; rather you say how is this possible?; that is to say, you
only refer the statement or activity as a way of being in the same way
that one might refer the activity of a lion hunting a gazelle you dont
judge this being bad or good in relation to a value that is superior to it.
The question of ethics, then for Spinoza, is not is this good or bad, but
what am I capable of? Which really means, what is my body capable
of? Quest-ce que tu dois en vertu de ton essence, cest quest-ce que
tu peux, toi, en vertu de ta puissance [what you have in virtue of your
essence, is what you are capable of, you yourself, in virtue of your
power] (Deleuze 1978).
The most important aspect of the existence of any singular thing is the
desire to preserve its existence, which Spinoza calls conatus and
defines as follows in IIIP6: Each thing, as far as it can by its own
power, strives to preserve in its being. This is not just a definition of
human existence, but all existence as such, whether we are talking
about a stone, a plant or even a human being. To the extent that
nothing prevents it from existing, everything that does exist will strive
to preserve itself in its existence. Thus, to use Curleys example, if
doing X preserves its existence, then it will desire to do X unless a
more powerful external cause prevents it from doing so (Curley 1988,
p.108).
Spinozas argument for believing that this is case follows from his
definition of essence. We tend to understand the meaning of essence,
as we explained via Deleuze above, from Aristotle as the general
definition of a thing which defines its nature in advance, but this is not
how Spinoza understands essence. For him essence does not just
define what something is, rather a good definition ought to be able to
tell us how a thing is produced. Thus, if I want to properly define a
circle what I have to be able to do is not just say what a circle is, but
how a circle might be constructed. So again to use Curleys example,
the proper definition of a circle would be a figure produced by the
rotation of a line around a point (Curley 1988, p.111). The essence of
something tells me how it and why it exists, and also why it continues
to exist. It is, so to speak, its power of existence. We can see why,
therefore, conatus, the striving to continue to exist, would be the same
as the essence of something and any activity that went against it
could not be properly speaking an activity at all, but caused by some
external cause, and therefore passive.
How do we apply this conatus doctrine to ethics? The answer is that
everything which helps me to preserve my existence I take to be good
and everything that goes against my existence I take to be bad. What
is good is what is useful, relative to my existence, and what is bad, is
what dangerous, relatively speaking, to my continued existence. This
striving is not only a striving for self-preservation, but also, as we shall
see in the next lecture, an increase in the power of action, since in
relation to the external causes that would extinguish my existence, all
I have is my power to act against them.
What then is an affect? An affect is not a feeling for Spinoza, but a
representation. My mind represents my body and states of that body.
My mind is nothing more than this, nor is my thoughts anything more
than this representation. Of course states of my mind can be caused
by things outside of my body, but my body can only represent these
external things through the states of my body itself. Since effects, for
Spinoza, represent causes, in representing these effects, I represent
the external things in some way through the power of my body to be
affected by them.
As we saw above, the essence of something is its power to act. But
just as much as a body has a power to act (I can swim ten lengths of a
pool) so does a mind. The minds power to act is contained by what it
is capable of representing. But remember what the mind contains for
Spinoza is the representation of the body and states of the body, so
that the more that the body is capable of the more it can think. Thus,
for Spinoza, the reason why the human mind has more power to act
Previous Entries
than the cabbages mind (and Spinoza argued that all bodies have a
mind to some extent) is that the human body is capable of more. So an
affect is the representation of the body whose power to act has either
increased or decreased as he defines it in the third definition of part
three:
By affect I understand affections of the body by which the bodys
power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at
the same time, the ideas of these affections. (EIIID3)
Every individual being strives to exist. Such a striving is a desire. I
desire that which preserves my being. To preserve my being I must
increase my power to act, since power is my essence. Every time I
increase my power to act, I experience joy, and conversely, every that
my power to act is decreased then I experience sadness. So what we
mean by emotion is the power of the mind to be affected from within or
without. All the emotions or affects that we speak of are merely
modifications of these three fundamental affects. To understand or
affects, then, is to bring them back to joy and sadness and how my
existence is increased or decreased in relation to them. The aim of the
Ethics is to show how using our reason we should be able to promote
the former over the latter.
What is decisive, however, in Spinozas understanding of affects, is
that they are representational. They are representation of the body
and states of the body in the mind. If the origin of the transition for joy
to sadness is external to my mind, then it is a passive affect. If it is
internal to the mind then it is an active affect. The aim of life, therefore,
is to replace passive affects with active ones, which means to
understand the true origin of our affects, which is to understand that
the idea in my mind is also an idea in Gods or my mind is nothing else
than an idea in the mind of God.
Works Cited
Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinozas
Ethics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Deleuze, G., 1978. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Sur Spinoza. Available
at: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?
cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2 [Accessed September 30, 2012].
[1] This is not to say that animals have rights for Spinoza. Not even
human beings have these, at least not in the normal way that we think
of them. A right is a power for Spinoza and so we have a right over
something to the extent that we have power over them.
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