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Preface
I started writing this book while living in Venice, California in the fall of 2011, on a sabbatical leave from Rutgers University. At the time, I had been considering turning my research attention away from Spinoza and focusing instead on Leibniz. This is not to say that I didn’t still find Spinoza’s philosophy worth studying, but I had been reading and thinking about Spinoza for a long time, since I was an undergraduate at NYU, and I felt that it was time to start something new. Nevertheless, I began to think that despite my long association with Spinoza or, perhaps, because of it, we still had more to say to each other. I had, after all, started forming opinions about Spinoza almost as soon as I started learning about philosophy, and, as a result, I had a lot of opinions about his thought that bore the marks of what now seemed to me like intellectual immaturity. In light of this, I decided to start over and try to rethink Spinoza from the ground up. The result is this book.
In some ways, my thoughts about Spinoza wound up in pretty much the same place. For example, my understanding of the nature of substance and mode, and his arguments for the conatus doctrine, although hopefully deeper and more refined, mostly agrees with what I thought before I started writing this book. But on many other topics, my thinking shifted dramatically. Perhaps the most significant of these shifts concerns Spinoza’s Principle of Sufficient Reason. Whereas I had previously assumed that its scope was very nearly universal and that it played a significant role in his system, I have now come around to the view that it is restricted to facts about existence and nonexistence and plays no role in his system other than in one of his arguments for the necessary existence of God. For me, at least, this deepening of old thoughts and, most of all, these new thoughts have made this book worthwhile.
This progress, such as it is, would not have been possible without the teachers, colleagues, students, and other interlocutors from whom I’ve learned. My graduate school teachers Ian Mueller, Martha Nussbaum, Howard Stein, Jean-Luc Marion and, especially, my advisor Dan Garber all gave me my first taste of what doing the history of philosophy seriously could be. As much as I learned from them, I learned perhaps even more, as one generally does, from my classmates. I still benefit from philosophical conversations I had back then with Jim Kreines, Rachel Zuckert, Timothy Rosenkoetter, John Kulviki, Anne Eaton, Eric Brown, Eric Wiland, Neil Kennedy, George Streeter, Eric Schliesser, Joe Schear, James Gedes, Ted Quinn, and many others.
Upon leaving graduate school, I had the good fortune to wind up teaching at the University of Toronto where my education in philosophy continued. I spent many happy hours in conversation with Phil Kramer, Bill Seager, Donald Ainslie, Marleen Rozemond, Sergio Tenebaum, Gurpreet Rattan, Gopal Sreenivasan, Jennifer Nagel, Tom Hurka, Martin Pickavé, and many others from whom I learned a great deal.
I’ve also benefited tremendously from the community of Spinoza scholars who have always been generous to me with their time, comments, criticism, and friendship. On one occasion, Michael Della Rocca, when I was still a complete stranger to him, picked me up at the New Haven train station, drove me to his house, and sat with me in his living room where we discussed, in great detail, a paper I had sent him. That was only the first of many times that I have benefited in this way from his kindness. Don Garrett was also incredibly generous to me when I was first starting out and I’ve learned a lot from him too over the years. Ed Curley, Yitzhak Melamed, Karolina Hübner, John Carriero, Steve Nadler, John Morrison, Tad Schmaltz, Alex Douglas, Lisa Shapiro and many other scholars have also significantly shaped my understanding of Spinoza’s thought.
I’ve taught the manuscript in whole or in part to a number of graduate seminars and I’ve learned tremendously from comments from graduate students, including Chris Hauser, Eddy Chen, Carolina Flores, Ezra Rubenstein, Chris Frugé, Jack Stetter, and Veronica Gomez. Savanah Kinkaid, Dee Payton, and Chris Willard-Kyle read the whole thing over the course a very enjoyable semester and gave me comments on every chapter. Simon Goldstein also read and commented on nearly the whole thing. Their feedback allowed me to make the book significantly better.
I would also like to thank audiences at Princeton University, the University of Toronto, the Quebec Seminar on Early Modern Philosophy, the Dutch Seminar in Groningen, Lingnan University, L’École normale supérieure, the Scottish Seminar on Early Modern Philosophy in Aberdeen, and Birkbeck College to whom I’ve presented material that has found its way into this book. Additionally, a workshop on the manuscript at Humboldt University afforded me valuable feedback from Sebastian Bender, Julia Borcherding, Dominik Perler, and Catherine Wilson.
John Morrison, John Carriero, Don Garrett, Alex Douglas, Uriah Kriegel, Stephan Schmid, and Jonathan Schaffer have all read portions of this manuscript and generously given me comments. I owe each of them a great deal for helping me improve the book.
I am also grateful to Michael Della Rocca and two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press for invaluable feedback and to Peter Momtchiloff for his encouragement and editorial guidance.
Part of Chapter 4 is adapted from my “Spinoza and the Mark of the Mental,” in Yitzhak Melamed, ed., Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 82–101. Part of Chapter 6 is adapted from my paper “Teleology and Human Action in Spinoza,” Philosophical Review 115 (3) (2006): 317–54.
Finally, I’m grateful to Sophia Powers who has helped me in many ways at every stage of writing this book. Not only has she always pushed me to write better and more clearly, but the hours I’ve spent discussing the ideas contained here with her have shaped my understanding of them in more ways than I can count. This book is dedicated to her.
Goa, January 3, 2018
Abbreviations and Conventions
Works by Spinoza:
CM Cogitata Metaphysica (an appendix to Spinoza’s DPP)
DPP Renati des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae Pars I & II [Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy]
Ep. Spinoza’s Letters
KV Korte Verhandeling van God de Mensch en deszelfs Welstand [Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being]
TIE Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione
TP Tractatus Politicus
Passages of the Ethics are cited in the following way:
app appendix
a axiom
c corollary
d demonstration or definition depending on context
p proposition
s scholium
References to Gebhardt (ed.), Opera are by volume number and page number. Thus, II/12 refers to Gebhardt volume 2, p. 12. Translations into English are taken from Curley’s translations in Spinoza, The Collected Works, 2 vols., with occasional modifications.
Works by other authors:
A Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag). References include series, volume, and page. For example, “A 6.4.1394” is series 6, volume 4, p. 1394.
AG Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber.
AT Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. 11 vols.
CSM Cottingham, Stoothoof, and Murdoch (eds. and trans.). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes
DM Suárez, Francisco. Disputationes Metaphysicae [Opera omnia, ed. M. André and C. Berton. 28 vols. Paris: Ludovicus Vivès, 1856–78]. Citations refer by disputation, section, and subsection within that section. For example, “DM I 1.26” refers to the 26th subsection of first section of the first disputation.
x Abbreviations and Conventions
G Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt. 7 vols.
LC Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. The Leibniz Clarke Correspondence
PP Descartes, René. Principles of Philosophy.
ST Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae
Introduction
Spinoza is a metaphysician. He wishes to describe the basic categories that structure the world in the broadest and most fundamental terms. He is also a psychologist, an ethicist, a political philosopher, and much more, but all of his efforts in these fields are rooted in his metaphysics. This is not to say that metaphysics is, in the end, the most important topic for Spinoza. Indeed, I think it would be fair to say that, in many ways, ethics and politics are more important to him and his metaphysical project is undertaken in service to them. This is why the principal source of his metaphysical views is called the Ethics. Nonetheless, he sees metaphysics as a foundational discipline on which all other branches of learning ultimately rest. What is more, Spinoza’s ethical philosophy posits knowledge of nature and our place in it as our highest good. These are manifestly metaphysical topics, and thus, in addition to being rooted in metaphysics, ethics, for Spinoza, aims at it as well. For this reason, if we want to understand the rich array of Spinoza’s philosophical interests, we must first understand his metaphysics. In Spinoza’s metaphysics, we encounter many puzzling doctrines that appear to entangle metaphysical notions with cognitive, logical, and epistemic ones. According to him, a substance is that which can be conceived through itself and a mode is that which is conceived through another. Thus, metaphysical notions, substance and mode, are defined through a notion that is either cognitive or logical, being conceived through He defines an attribute as that which an intellect perceives as constituting the essence of a substance. Intellectual perception, something cognitive, is used to define an attribute, something metaphysical. And he claims that if something exists there is a reason why it exists and if something doesn’t exist there is also a reason why it doesn’t. Thus, a reason, something cognitive or epistemic, is necessary for existence or nonexistence. Furthermore, Spinoza thinks that x causes y only if y is conceived through or understood through x and thus appears to place a cognitive or epistemic condition on something metaphysical. He also often compares causal to logical relations. In 1p17s he says that things of which God is the efficient cause follow from his nature with the same necessity as that it follows from the nature of a triangle that its interior angles equal one hundred and eighty degrees. And in numerous texts he says that what causes what depends on how things are conceived or explained.1
What are we to make of the intimate connections that Spinoza sees between metaphysical, cognitive, logical, and epistemic notions? Between being and reason? Part of the explanation is that Spinoza is, in some sense, a rationalist. He believes that we can discover rich and substantive metaphysical truths through the use of reason without input from the senses. What is more, he believes that the constitution and structure of the world is such that there are objective explanations for many phenomena and that these explanations are graspable by rational thought. This is metaphysics in the grand style and as such it has many virtues. It is ambitious, systematic, and proudly independent of any unphilosophical authority such as tradition or supernatural revelation. But it also has vices, many of which have led some philosophers to see such rationalism as a vain and empty enterprise. It is overly reliant on a priori reasoning, uncritically ignoring the natural limits of such reasoning, and hubristically claiming to know things that are beyond the scope of reason properly understood. The world is full of the contingent and the inexplicable. Without the input of experiment and observation, surely reason can tell us very little about how the world actually is with respect to contingent matters of fact. Indeed, how can we know for sure that human reason even applies to the mind-independent world at all?
There are at least two main attitudes toward this last question. The first is an attitude of uncritical self-confidence. This attitude can be expressed dogmatically: What the natural light of reason reveals, we ought not to question. But it can just as easily be joined to a humble realism. Philosophy has to start somewhere. Is there a better place to start than what seems true to us? There is no guarantee that these things are true, but, if they are not too far away from the truth, philosophical reflection can serve to correct them and bring us closer to the truth. If they are too far from the truth for this to be possible, then our efforts will have been for naught. But in that case, nothing we could have done would have yielded better results.
The second attitude is a critical one, exemplified by philosophers such as Locke and Kant, which seeks to delineate the bounds of what reason can do and which cautions us not to exceed them. This second attitude, however, can also lead to metaphysics, as it arguably does in the case of Kant, who develops a form of idealism that claims that the world itself is, in some sense, a creature of human reason and thus subject to its dictates. This too is a bold metaphysical claim the justification of which depends upon the reliability of philosophical reason.
Spinoza has been interpreted as both a realist and an idealist. On the realist interpretation, he is attempting to describe a mind-independent world that is, nevertheless, knowable through the application of reason. On various idealist interpretations, the world as it is cognized by us is either in part a creature of our own rational projections or is, in some sense, rooted in conceptual or mental foundations. In this book, I argue for what might be called a realist interpretation. This is not to say that all aspects of the idealist interpretation are without merit. For example, I will argue in Chapter 4, that an old idealist interpretation of the attributes is closer to the truth than is sometimes supposed. Nevertheless, throughout this book, I will argue that, although
Spinoza is confident that the order of being mirrors the order of reason, he believes that they are two orders, not one. There is inherence over and above conceptual dependence; there is causation in addition to causal explanation; the world has a nature that we can grasp and that our way of grasping it does not interpose an impenetrable conceptual veil between it and us.
Although the principal theme of this book is the relation between metaphysics on the one hand and epistemic and cognitive notions on the other, that is, being and reason, I have not confined myself to discussing only issues that bear directly on it. Spinoza’s metaphysics is too rich to be encapsulated by a single theme, even one as broad as being and reason, and too interesting for me to resist commenting on aspects of it that may not bear directly on this issue. Moreover, it would be impossible to understand those issues that do bear directly on my theme without placing them in their proper philosophical context, which requires discussing in detail many arguments that are, in some respects, orthogonal to the issue of being and reason.
That said, the present book is certainly not comprehensive. There are many aspects of Spinoza’s metaphysics that I make no attempt to treat: personal identity, the nature of time, and the eternity of the mind to name only a few. The conclusions that I reach here must, therefore, be regarded as tentative ones that await further confirmation by showing that they can cohere with the correct interpretation of those aspects of Spinoza’s thought as well. Indeed, given the uncommon systematicity of Spinoza’s thought, nothing short of a complete interpretation of all of Spinoza could serve as such confirmation. But that task is clearly too great for a single book or even, perhaps, a single scholar.
My aims and methods in this book are philosophical. I would like to know what Spinoza said, what he meant by it, and why he said it. I would also like to know whether or not he was right. Truth is, however, elusive in philosophy. Very little that has been said or written on the subject over its brief history is beyond controversy. For example, as unfashionable as they may currently be, Plato’s theory of the forms, Leibniz’s theory of monads, and Marx’s theory of history have not been decisively refuted. This means that although philosophy might make progress, whatever progress it makes is slow and, consequently, when measured according to the glacial pace of philosophical time, eras that by other measures are dead and gone are part of the living breathing present. For this reason, I approach Spinoza with what has been called “the collegial method.” I treat Spinoza like a colleague from whom I would like to learn. This does not require actually agreeing with him. (I’ve learned a lot of philosophy from certain living colleagues with whom I seldom agree.) But it does require taking him and the issues he discusses seriously.
Although my approach in this book is philosophical, I am acutely aware of the dangers that the misapplication of such a method presents. For example, I do not think that it is acceptable to consider only some of the relevant texts, nor do I think that there is any excuse for reading into Spinoza or any other historical figure recently popular theories that he didn’t believe or even consider. Careful attention to a historical figure’s
own words and assiduously attempting to recover exactly what the philosopher in question meant to communicate by them is absolutely necessary. But of course, in this regard, the history of philosophy is no different than any other philosophical research. It doesn’t matter if your interlocutors are down the corridor or four hundred years dead, misrepresenting their views is an intellectual sin. Although we must never misrepresent what a historical figure said and thought, comments concerning what they could have said, for example, to extend the scope of their theory to cover nearby issues or respond to an objection that they never considered, or concerning what they should have said, for example, to remain consistent with their most important or interesting commitments, can be illuminating and there is no methodological reason to avoid them so long as we are clear about what we are doing. Indeed, so long as it isn’t passed off as exegesis, there is no reason to avoid doing philosophy alongside a historical figure as a part of a historical study. That said, the exegetical portion of the historian’s task is generally large and difficult and, in the case of the present study, it has consumed the greater part of my efforts.
1
Spinoza’s
Starting Points
Spinoza’s great masterpiece and the principal source of his mature views on metaphysics, the Ethics, is hard to read. There are many reasons for this but perhaps the most immediately apparent is its geometrical style of exposition. By contrast, accessibly written works of philosophy often resemble a story more than a proof. An author might begin by introducing a problem and explaining why previous attempts to solve it failed. Then, intuitions are primed, thought experiments performed, and a new solution proposed. Spinoza does not proceed this way. Instead of easing us along with informal prose exposition, he immediately plunges us into the ice-cold waters of definition and axiom. Many of them are strange: “Whatever is, is in itself or in another.” “By attribute I mean what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence.” We are not exactly sure what these dark sayings are supposed to mean and Spinoza does not wait for us to catch up. Rather, he immediately goes to work trying to draw out their consequences, many of which are bizarre or counterintuitive: there is only one substance and all else is a mode of this substance; there is no contingency in nature; mind and body are the same thing conceived in two different ways. We wonder, “Where are we and how did we get here?”
In this chapter, I will try to do two things. First, I will explain how Spinoza understands the nature of definitions and axioms, which will tell us something about his method and how he thinks about philosophy in general. Second, I will give a characterization of the content of the definitions and axioms as a first-time seventeenth-century reader would have likely understood them. I am not, therefore, developing an-all-thingsconsidered interpretation of them that I would defend as a reading of Spinoza. Rather, I am seeking to show how they would have been received by a contemporary who was not necessarily familiar with what is to follow. This will tell us what Spinoza thinks or hopes his readers will grant him from the outset or, at least, what he could reasonably hope for in this regard. Part of the reason that some of Spinoza’s definitions and axioms can appear odd or opaque to us is that philosophy has changed since Spinoza composed the Ethics in the late seventeenth century. Various philosophical traditions have faded from prominence, terminology has shifted, and questions have gone in and out of focus. By providing some context, I hope to show that they would not have appeared quite as strange to Spinoza’s contemporaries as they do to us. And by making it clear what a contemporary would have taken Spinoza to be assuming at the outset with his definitions and axioms, we will be in a better position to understand both the philosophy he BeingandReason:AnEssayonSpinoza’sMetaphysics. Martin Lin, Oxford University Press (2019).
develops out of them and the persuasive force of the arguments he offers for it. Thus, the goal of this chapter is mainly propaedeutic. Its goal is to put us in a position to interpret and evaluate the metaphysical doctrines that Spinoza arrives at from these starting points.
Why the Geometrical Method?
In beginning his Ethics with definitions and axioms and then proceeding to derive propositions from them, Spinoza imitates the presentational form of Euclid’s Elements. That work is a work of mathematics, a discipline that is often thought to have a special place in human knowledge because its truths are necessary and known a priori. Moreover, mathematics, in Spinoza’s day as well as our own, is one of the best developed, most sophisticated, and most well-grounded bodies of knowledge that we possess. By seeking to emulate its presentational form, does Spinoza mean to claim similar virtues for his own theory? If so, does the geometrical method, in Spinoza’s hands, succeed in conferring them?
Some have thought that Spinoza’s choice of the geometrical style reflects a certain kind of foundationalism about knowledge.1 We begin, according to this foundationalist interpretation, with certain and unshakable foundations (the definitions and axioms) and we deduce a body of propositions from them by means of certainty-preserving inferences. These propositions constitute a body of knowledge because we know the foundations and the propositions are linked to them in such a way that their knowledge is transmitted upward. The propositions are known because the definitions and axioms are known.
This raises the question, with respect to axiomatic systems in general, on what basis are the foundations, the definitions and axioms, themselves known. One possible answer is that the definitions are known because they are nominal (that is, of words and not things) and stipulative (that is, stipulated by the author). The only constraint on nominal stipulative definitions is that they be consistent because you can use words however you like so long as you are explicit about it and do so coherently. Thus, knowledge of definitions can be had cheaply and, indeed, one might say that knowledge of them is free. The axioms, on the other hand, are substantive, but they are thought to be self-evident or intuitively obvious. They are, perhaps, known by means of a rational faculty that provides insight into the nature of reality, although different sources of a priori knowledge could be postulated as well. Many philosophers have found this picture attractive both as an account of the structure of knowledge in general and as an interpretation of Spinoza. Its philosophical virtues notwithstanding, there are, unfortunately, significant problems for it as an interpretation of Spinoza. Or so I will argue.
1 R. J. Delahunty, Spinoza (New York: Routledge, 1985), 94.
After laying down the conditions for good definitions, Spinoza promises to tell us the method or rules for discovering such definitions.3 Frustratingly, the unfinished work breaks off before such rules are given but Spinoza does say that in order to discover such rules, we must first know the nature and power of the intellect. In other words, we must have a real definition of the intellect. Spinoza begins his search for this real definition by enumerating eight positive properties that we clearly and distinctly perceive pertain to the intellect. He then writes: “we must now establish something common from which these properties necessarily follow, or such that when it is given, they are necessarily given, and when it is taken away, they are taken away.” With these words, the treatise abruptly ends. But, by drawing upon what we have already learned about Spinoza’s views about definition, we can see what Spinoza is up to.
Spinoza believes that good definitions both specify a thing’s proximate causes and allow all of a thing’s properties to be deduced from it. These conditions combined with Spinoza’s preliminary attempts to discover the definition of the intellect suggest the following procedure: first assemble a set of properties known to be possessed by the thing to be defined and then look for causal factors capable of bringing about something with all of those features. A definition is thus like a theory of the thing defined. It explains where the thing defined comes from and why it has the properties that it does.4
Does the account of definition extracted from the TIE apply to the Ethics as well? If Spinoza still holds at the time of the composition of the Ethics that the correct method involves starting with real definitions and deducing truths from it, then we would expect it to start with real definitions. I think that there are compelling reasons to suppose that it does. First of all, as noted earlier, Spinoza retains many of the opinions stated in the TIE until the end of his life and he never retracts this particular doctrine. What is more, if he had changed his mind and decided instead that the correct method starts with stipulative nominal definitions rather than real definitions, it would be quite surprising that he never explicitly addresses this change in view because such a momentous shift would surely merit some discussion.
There is, moreover, some textual evidence from the Ethics itself: in 1p8s where, in describing the “nature” of substance, he says that substances are in themselves and conceived through themselves, the very properties in terms of which he defines substance in 1d3. Evidently, he takes 1d3 to describe the “nature” of substance and not merely to stipulate the meaning of the word ‘substance’. It is not unreasonable to suppose that this is generally true of the definitions that begin part 1 of the Ethics. These considerations lead me to conclude that the definitions in the Ethics are intended as real definitions.5
3 TIE §107/II/39.
4 See Edwin Curley, “Spinoza’s Geometric Method,” Studia Spinozana: An International and Interdisciplinary Series 2, no. 151 (1986): 163–4, to which my account is significantly indebted; Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1984), 266.
5 Aaron V. Garrett, Meaning in Spinoza’s Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 6. Garrett argues that, when first stated, the definitions are nominal and when they are constrained by subsequent theorizing as the Ethics develops, they become real.
The Nature of the Axioms
Let us now turn our attention to the question of the axioms. Any deductive system, such as that presented in the Ethics, needs axioms on account of the structure of such a system. The derived statements of a deductive system follow from earlier statements. These statements too are often derived from earlier statements. But this process must stop somewhere, otherwise the derivations would either extend infinitely backwards or form a circle. Thus, the derivations must terminate with basic underived premises, which are termed ‘the axioms’. They are the basic statements from which, together with the definitions, the propositions are derived.
What, in general, makes a statement suitable to play the role of an axiom? There is no fixed agreement on this matter, but an influential view can be found in Aristotle, who thought that axioms were both self-evident and indemonstrable.6 This view informs many subsequent discussions of axiomatic systems and was still influential among Spinoza’s contemporaries. Once again, we turn to Meyer’s preface to Spinoza’s Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy,” where he writes:
Postulates and Axioms, or common notions of the mind, are propositions so clear and evident that no one can deny his assent to them, provided only that he has rightly understood the terms themselves.
This passage says that one does not need to know more than the meaning of the words in which the axioms are expressed in order to rationally assent to them. In this, Meyer, repeats half of the Aristotelian doctrine that axioms are self-evident and indemonstrable. He does not, however, mention indemonstrability, either to affirm or deny that it characterizes axioms. This leaves open the possibility that he thinks that axioms are indeed indemonstrable by nature, although the passage is naturally read as implicating by omission that axioms are not indemonstrable. Once again, due to Meyer’s relationship to Spinoza and Spinoza’s approval of his preface, this passage provides some evidence that Spinoza himself holds a similar view of axioms. But, naturally, this hypothesis awaits further confirmation from Spinoza’s own writings. Does Spinoza himself think that axioms are self-evident and indemonstrable?
The first difficulty that we face in attempting to answer this question concerns selfevidence, for it appears that Spinoza regards all truths as self-evident. For example, in the TIE he writes:
In order to know, there is no need to know that we know; still less is there need to know that we know that we know [. . .] It is evident that, for the certitude of truth, no further sign is necessary beyond the possession of a true idea [. . .] the truth needs no sign.7
Spinoza rejects, in this passage, the idea that knowledge requires certification by reference to some standard or criterion. We need appeal to no sign that indicates that a
6 Posterior Analytics, 71b19–25.
7 TIE §34/II 15.
true belief is knowledge and indeed, we can rationally believe any truth with certainty. In other words, all knowledge is self-evident. Spinoza expands upon these ideas in the Ethics where he writes:
He who has a true idea knows at the same time that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt its truth. [. . .] So he who knows a thing truly must at the same time have an adequate idea, that is, true knowledge of his knowledge; that is, (as is self-evident) he is bound at the same time to be certain.
This passage says that it is impossible to both have a true idea and yet not know that the idea is true or not be certain of it. This is a surprising doctrine and there are many interpretative questions that must be addressed before we can claim to fully understand it. Nevertheless, I think that, however these interpretative issues are settled, it is clear that there is little prospect for distinguishing axioms from other true ideas on the basis of self-evidence.
It is not implausible that Spinoza thinks that all of the axioms of part I of the Ethics are self-evident because they are the kind of abstract metaphysical claims that some philosophers have thought that we know on the basis of some kind of intellectual perception or intuition. But many axioms elsewhere in the Ethics do not have that character. Consider the following:
2a4: We feel that a certain body is affected in many ways.
2a5: We neither feel nor perceive any singular things except bodies and modes of thinking.
a2’: Each body moves now more slowly, now more quickly.
5a2: The power of an effect is defined by the power of its cause, insofar as its essence is explained or defined by the essence of its cause. This axiom is evident from 3p7.
The first axiom in this list means that our perceptions or feelings relate to a specific body (our own). The second says that all of our perceptions or feelings are either of bodies or of modes of thought. The third says that bodies accelerate and decelerate. All three are, arguably, obviously true in the sense that any reasonable person with minimal knowledge of the world knows them to be so. But it would be reasonable to doubt that any of them is self-evident in the sense that absolutely no experience of the world is required to justify our knowledge of them.8
And neither is it possible to interpret Spinoza as holding the view that axioms are indemonstrable. He says, by way of explicating 5a2, that it is evident from 3p7, which says that “the striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.” Thus, it would appear that he does not think that axioms are by their very nature indemonstrable.
8 Curley, “Spinoza’s Geometrical Method,” 154.
This interpretation is also confirmed by 1p8s2:
[. .] if men would attend to the nature of substance, they would have no doubt as at all of the truth of 1p7. Indeed, this proposition would be an axiom for everyone, and would be numbered among the common notions.
In this passage, Spinoza says that a proposition that he has just taken himself to have demonstrated would be regarded by everyone as an axiom if they attended to the nature of substance. Clearly then, axioms are not, for Spinoza, indemonstrable.
If axioms are not self-evident (or at least no more self-evident than any other true propositions) and if they are not indemonstrable, what distinguishes them from any other truth? What makes them suitable to play the foundational role that Spinoza assigns them in his system? One clue can be found in a passage that directly precedes Spinoza’s claim that 1p7 would be regarded as an axiom if people thought about it in the right way. He writes:
I have no doubt that the demonstration of 1p7 will be difficult to conceive for all who judge things confusedly, and have not been accustomed to know things through their first causes— because they do not distinguish between the modifications of substances and the substances themselves, nor do they know how things are produced.
It seems that Spinoza thinks that he must argue for 1p7 because most of his readers are confused and do not distinguish substances from their modes. Thus, his reasons for not including 1p7 among the axioms are dialectical. Before his readers will accept 1p7, he must clear away certain confusions that he predicts on their part and thus Spinoza appears to treat statements as axioms only if he anticipates that his readers will readily grant their truth.
This dialectical interpretation of the axioms helps to explain why the above quoted texts from parts 2 and 5 are introduced as axioms even though they would not be regarded as self-evident by any philosopher who didn’t think that every truth is selfevident. They are obviously true and will command nearly universal assent from his readers. As we shall see when we look more closely at some of the axioms of part 1, Spinoza’s assessment of the uncontroversial nature of his axioms is sometimes wildly optimistic. Nevertheless, his criterion for treating something as an axiom seems clear and reasonable, if not always correctly applied.
Approaching the Proto-Philosophy
Having looked at the definitions and axioms from the point of view of method, let us now consider them in terms of their substantive content. In beginning his work with a set of definitions and axioms, Spinoza openly states a number of assumptions for which he will not argue and that will shape his subsequent philosophizing. The definitions and axioms are substantive and philosophically interesting, and, as their uses in subsequent demonstrations show, Spinoza often understands them in a more controversial
sense then their initial presentations suggest. In a sense, they collectively constitute a kind of proto-philosophy out of which the full theory evolves. To the extent to which the propositions of the Ethics are successfully derived from it, the plausibility of Spinoza’s philosophical system depends directly upon the initial appeal of that protophilosophy. For this reason, it will be worthwhile to spend some time exploring Spinoza’s unargued-for starting points.
Before turning our attention to the content of the proto-philosophy, however, it will be useful to say a word about how the full-fledged philosophy is derived from it. It is almost inevitable that the modern reader will assume that Spinoza’s geometrical method involves logically deducing the propositions from the definitions and axioms. But, if this were so, then the definitions and axioms would be more than a proto-philosophy. They would be his philosophical system itself, albeit in a non-explicit and involuted form. The Ethics would then be nothing more than the teasing out and combining the contents of the definitions and axioms. It is, however, anachronistic to assume that the geometrical method relies upon deducing all the propositions from the definitions and axioms because the modern conception of a proof is a comparatively recent development.9 For example, Euclid’s arguments, while no doubt cogent, are not proofs in the modern mathematical sense and they awaited Hilbert in the twentieth century to reformulate them as such.10 Spinoza’s arguments are no more proofs than Euclid’s, but, despite not being proofs, they may still be cogent or rationally persuasive.
The starting points most relevant to the subject of this book are the eight definitions and seven axioms that begin part I of the Ethics. I will divide the definitions and axioms into two classes: metaphysical and theological. The metaphysical definitions deal with Spinoza’s basic ontological categories and the metaphysical axioms concern the characteristic relations that obtain between the categories. The theological definitions concern God and the concepts relevant to specifying his nature (causa sui, infinity, eternity, and freedom). By contrast, the axioms mainly concern what I am calling metaphysical topics: the relationships that obtain between the ontological categories, although one could be classified as theological (its relevance is mainly to the notion of causa sui). Naturally, not too much ought to be made of this division between the metaphysical and theological starting points. There is no clean line between them and it is principally an expository convenience.
Historical Context
Some of the most important of Spinoza’s definitions and axioms concern his basic ontological categories: substance, attribute, and mode. Despite the fact that Spinoza undertakes to explicitly define them, many readers have found them mysterious. The reason for this is, in part, that Spinoza is assuming familiarity with a long philo-
9 I’m indebted to conversation with John Carriero on this point.
10 See Ian Mueller, “Euclid’s Elements and the Axiomatic Method,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 20, no. 4 (1969): 289–309.
sophical tradition with which many contemporary readers have lost touch. For this reason, it will be a good idea to first set those definitions and axioms in their proper historical context.
Here are the definitions that outline Spinoza’s basic ontological categories and two axioms that indicate how those categories relate to each other:
1d3: By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself; in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.
1d4: By attribute, I mean that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.
1d5: By mode, I mean the affections of substance, or that which is in and conceived through, something other than itself.
1a1: Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else.
1a2: That which cannot be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself.
Spinoza’s basic metaphysical categories, substance, attribute, and mode, evoke the categories substance, essence, and accident that were widely accepted by Spinoza’s scholastic predecessors and which have their roots in Plato and Aristotle.
Let us begin with substance. ‘Substantia’ is Latin for the Greek ‘ousia’, which simply means being and occurs in a wide variety of contexts in ancient Greek philosophy. In Plato’s dialogue the Euthyphro, Socrates enquires about the ousia of piety.11 In that context, he appears to mean nature, essence, or definition. In Aristotle, the notion of substance or ousia plays a number of disparate roles. It is called upon to be the ultimate subject of predication,12 independent existence,13 essence,14 and to account for unity,15 persistence through change,16 and the causal powers of things.17
Among scholastic Aristotelians, substance is normally defined with respect to two criteria, which Pasnau, following Eustachius, calls subsisting and substanding.18 Subsisting refers to independent existence, which means that substances subsist in that they exist in their own right and do not require a substance in which they inhere in order to do so. As in Aristotle,19 the scholastics did not require that substances be independent of other substances in all respects.20 For example, they might very well depend on other substances causally for their coming into existence or depend upon God’s concurrence for their continued existence. What Aristotle and the scholastics mean when they say that substances are independent of other substances is that they don’t inhere in them.
18 Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 1274–1671 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 102–3. Eustachius, Summa I.1.3b.1.2, I:51.
19 Cat. 3a. 20 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I.25.236; Summa I.1.3b.1.1, I:50.
What is inherence? This question brings us to the criterion of substanding. Something is a substance only if it stands under non-substantial elements such as qualities, properties, attributes, or modes by providing a subject of inherence for these non-substantial features of reality. Inherence then is the relation in virtue of which some features characterize one subject rather than another. This is, of course, vague, but we will have occasion to revisit the question of the nature of inherence in Chapter 5.
Descartes, for whom substance is also the most basic ontological category, retains something like the medieval scholastic conception with an important alteration. He too thinks that substances are independent beings21 and provide non-substantial features with a subject of inherence22 but for him only God is a substance strictly speaking because only God is absolutely independent of every other being.23 Bodies and finite minds are only second-class substances because they rely upon God’s concurrence for their continued existence.24 That is, he enlarges the conception of independence to include not just independence understood in terms of inherence but to include causal independence as well.
‘Attribute’ (attributum), as Spinoza uses it, also has Cartesian roots. For Descartes, ‘attribute’ can just mean quality or property but when he speaks of the “principal attribute” of a substance, he means to indicate its essence. Not infrequently, he leaves off the ‘principal’ and just uses ‘attribute’ to mean principal attribute or essence. In these contexts, Descartes uses the term ‘mode’ to denote nonessential qualities or features. Every substance, according to Descartes, has one and only one principal attribute or essence: either extension or thought. Thus, extended substance and thinking substance are the two basic kinds of substances. What is more, all other qualities or properties of a substance are modes of the substance’s principal attribute. For example, something is extended just in case it has size, shape, and motion (or rest). But everything that has size, shape, and motion also has determinate size, shape, and motion. These determinate qualities fully characterize extended substances and must be understood through the generic notion of extension.
This brings us to the notion of a mode or accident, which are simply characteristics or properties. The color and size of an apple, for example, are accidents of the apple. According to the influential view espoused by Aristotle, being is equivocal: many different kinds of entities exist but not all in the same sense.25 Substances exist in the strongest and fullest sense. Accidents also exist but not in the same way as substances. Substances exist in their own right as free-standing items in the world. Accidents only exist in a dependent way by characterizing substances. They have no being or existence except in virtue of inhering in substances.
Although prevalent throughout the history of philosophy, talk of different “degrees” of existence or different “ways” of existing has also puzzled many philosophers. Indeed, one might plausibly object that accidents exist in a different way because they must
21 PP I:151, AT VIIIA:25. Anat Schechtman, “Substance and Independence in Descartes,” The Philosophical Review 125, no. 2 (2016): 155–204.
22 Second Set of Replies, AT VII:161. 23 PP I:55, AT VIIIA:25/CSM 210.
24 Cf. Schechtman, “Substance and Independence.”
25 Meta. Γ.2.
inhere in a substance only in the same sense that electrons exist in a different way than protons because they must be negatively charged. What differs in the two cases are the essential properties of accidents and substances on the one hand and electrons and protons on the other. They don’t differ with respect to existence as such. In the early fourteenth century, Duns Scotus argues for such a thesis.26 His way of putting the point is to say that being is “univocal.” There are not many different senses of ‘exists’, but rather, everything that exists, exists in exactly the same sense. So, accidents exist in the same sense as substances: they exist in their own right and not simply in virtue of inhering in substances. Accidents, on this view, are fully real (in the sense that they are free-standing) and thus are termed “real accidents.” Scotus’s view eventually became the mainstream view and the majority of philosophers in the Latin West accepted the doctrine of real accidents.
Perhaps the best-known application of the doctrine is providing an explanation of the Eucharist. According to the doctrine of transubstantiation that became Church orthodoxy in the thirteenth century, the substance of the sacramental element, the bread and wine given to congregants, is changed in the course of the ritual into the body and blood of Christ. The flesh and blood appear to be bread and wine because, although the substance has changed, the accidents remain: the taste, texture, color and so on remain although the substance in which they previously inhered is no longer present. If accidents are capable of such independence from the substances in which they inhere, they are “real accidents.”
It is in contrast to real accidents that we can best appreciate the category of mode as the early moderns understood it. There was debate among scholastic philosophers over whether or not all accidents were real or whether some accidents were inseparable from their substances. Suárez, for example, uses ‘mode’ as a term for such qualities or accidents that are not real and distinct beings in their own right but are instead merely aspects of a real and distinct being.27 Although they exist only insofar as a real and distinct being has a feature or quality, they are, according to Suárez, mind-independent and are causally efficacious. Nevertheless, their reality is fully dependent upon the being in which they inhere and cannot exist independently of that substance.28
Among progressive anti-scholastic early moderns, the notion of a mode is enthusiastically adopted and entirely replaces the notion of a real accident. This perhaps expresses a rebellion against the perceived metaphysical extravagances of the scholastic tradition and the belief that modes are more suitable for mechanical explanations. It also marks a shift away from hylomorphic metaphysics and its commitment to exotic metaphysical notions such as prime matter, substantial form, and the reification of the non-substantial Aristotelian categories.29
26 Ordinatio IV.12.1.
27 DM VII §17; Francisco Suárez, On the Various Kinds of Distinctions, trans. Cyril O. Vollert (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1947), 28.
28 Suárez’s paradigmatic example of a mode is inherence which is said to be a mode of a real accident. But he clearly believes that substances too have modes. Nevertheless, he is far from the progressive early modern view that all accidents are mere modes.
29 See Ch. 5 for a fuller discussion of these issues.
The Content of the Metaphysical Definitions
With these historical precedents in mind, let’s begin by looking at how Spinoza defines his basic ontological categories: substance, attribute, and mode. A substance is defined as “what is in itself and conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.”30 A mode is defined as “that which is in another through which it is also conceived.”31 In some respects, these definitions recall typical scholastic ways of characterizing substances and accidents insofar as accidents are usually said to be in another and substances are not. The phrase “in alio est” occurs frequently in scholastic discussions of accidents. Accidents are in another in the sense that accidents inhere in a subject. And scholastic authors sometimes describe substances as “in themselves.”32 But there are important differences between Spinoza’s characterization of substance and mode and those of his predecessors. The first oddity is that, although scholastic authors sometimes say that substances are in themselves, this is not the standard way that they are defined. More characteristic is to describe them as “not in another” or as existing “per se.” Moreover, the cases that I’m familiar with where a scholastic author describes a substance as “in itself,” it is fairly clear that they mean this to be synonymous with “existing per se,” which does not have any implication of self-inherence. That is, something inheres in itself just in case it doesn’t inhere in another.
This scholastic understanding of what it is for something to “be in itself” might not be Spinoza’s. We can see this by noting the inferences that the definition licenses. First of all, there is a conceptual condition on inherence. That is, if x inheres in y then x is conceived through y and he is prepared to infer from x inheres in itself to x is conceived through itself.33 This shows that he does not understand ‘is in itself’ to mean ‘is not in another’ but rather that it actually inheres in itself. It is not, however, clear that actual full blown self-inherence is an intelligible notion. For example, as the scholastics use the term, inherence is essentially a cross-categorical relation. It is the relation that accidents stand to substances in virtue of which the accident characterizes the substance. What would it mean for a substance to stand in this relation to itself? I fear that Spinoza assumes his readers will interpret it loosely (as meaning “not in another”) but then treats it literally when he wishes to draw certain inferences from it.34
The inclusion of a conceptual condition is also a noteworthy feature of Spinoza’s definitions of substance and mode. What does it mean for one concept to be formed
30 1d3. 31 1d5.
32 See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. John Patrick Rowan, rev. edn. (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1995), 1254.
33 See the inference that Spinoza makes from 1a1, which says that everything is in itself or in another, to the conclusion that everything is a substance or a mode in 1p15d. He is clearly ignoring the possibility that something is in itself but not conceived through itself or in another but not conceived through another and so accepts that inherence implies conception.
34 Garrett, Meaning in Spinoza’s Method, ch. 6. According to an interesting interpretation of Garrett’s, this sort of ambiguity is a feature, not a bug, of Spinoza’s definitions and axioms.
from another? One natural reading of this is that a concept x requires a concept y through which it is formed just in case x is complex and y is a constituent of x. For example, the concept bachelor requires the concept man through which it is formed because bachelor is a complex concept that has man as a constituent.
How would scholastic Aristotelians have received Spinoza’s claim that substances are conceived through themselves and modes are conceived through another? In general, it would depend on whether conception is interpreted as psychological or logical. If conception is interpreted as a logical notion, then nearly all scholastic Aristotelians would accept that substances are conceived through themselves and some would accept that modes are conceived through another. On the logical interpretation, to conceive of something is to define it where a definition is understood as explicating the essence of the thing defined. Substances, for all scholastics of whom I am aware, are not defined by their accidents because accidents are not part of the essence of a thing. In contrast, accidents, in the words of Aquinas, have “an incomplete definition, since they cannot be defined unless the subject is posited in their definition.”35 That is, they must be conceived through (i.e., defined through) another.
However, if conception is interpreted as a psychological rather than logical notion, then Spinoza’s definitions of substance and mode are highly tendentious and would have been rejected by all or nearly all scholastic Aristotelians. According to a dominant tradition within scholastic metaphysics, what is directly grasped by the mind are the sensible qualities of concrete substances (hylomorphic composites). We perceive, for example, the temperature, color, and shape of the kettle and not its substance. Substances are what underlie such qualities and are not directly perceived.36
There is something to be said for this scholastic view. Our cognitive grasp of things is often by means of descriptions derived from sense experience. We know Socrates through his shortness, snub-nosededness, ugliness, and so on. We do not know him through the direct apprehension of a substratum in which those qualities inhere. But the scholastics had other, more metaphysical reasons, for being pessimistic about knowledge of substances.
In order to understand these metaphysical reasons, we have to know something about the internal structure that they impute to substances. According to them, reality divides into distinct parts at a more fundamental level than that of ordinary objects and thus a particular man or horse has structure beyond what common sense depicts. In the first instance, it is a composite of substantial form and prime matter. Prime matter is pure potentiality and as such it is totally unknowable by us. It has no “actuality” and
35 Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence, trans. Armand A. Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 6.
36 Ockham writes, “we can naturally cognize no external corporeal substance in itself” (Ordinatio I.3.2 [William of Ockham, Opera Theologica, 10 vols. (St. Bonaventure, NY: Editiones Instituti Franciscani Universitatis S. Bonaventurae, 1967), 2:412.]). Scotus writes, “for substance does not immediately move our intellect to know the substance itself, but only the sensible accident does so” (John Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings: A Selection, trans. Allan B. Wolter (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 5.) See also Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 119–21.
