The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (14 page)

34
Cf. in this connection Bernard Williams on the explanation of people’s ethical beliefs in Williams (
2006o
),
Ch. 8
.

35
Cf. Nietzsche (
1967c
), §533; and Sullivan (
2007
), §III passim. We shall return to this issue, more or less directly, in several of the following chapters: see esp.
Ch. 2
, §5;
Ch. 7
, §3;
Ch. 10
, §3;
Ch. 15
, §6;
Ch. 16
, §6(c); and
Ch. 20
, §3. I shall also have a little more to say about my own response to the Creativity Question in the Conclusion, §§3–5.

36
See
Ch. 2
, §2, for a brief account of Descartes’ considered reason for thinking that minds and matter are separate substances.

37
Leibniz’ recoil, which involves denying the existence of material substance altogether, has a celebrated echo in Berkeley: see Berkeley (
1962a
). Cf. Lloyd (
1994
), p. 39.

38
For more on the idea that the self is to be conceived independently of its environment, and for criticism of the idea, see McDowell (
1986
), esp. §§5 and 6. For discussion of the essential modernity of the idea, see Burnyeat (
1982
).

39
Their
interaction
is to be explained in this way. The same is not true of
all
of their behaviour: Descartes notoriously allows that some of their behaviour is to be explained by the actions of the mind (
Passions
, Pt One, §34). For criticism of this idea, see Williams (
1978
), pp. 287ff.

40
Cf. Husserl (
1995
), p. 83.

41
This reference to
expression
is the first hint of how much I shall be borrowing from Deleuze: see esp. Deleuze (
1990a
). For a fascinating discussion of the idea and its historical importance, see Taylor (
1975
),
Ch. 1
.

42
Cf. Deleuze (
1990a
), p. 325.

Chapter 2 Spinoza Metaphysics in the Service of Ethics

1. Introduction

One of the most striking and most significant features of Spinoza’s masterpiece
Ethics
¹
is its title. Unless we see this as a work in ethics we do not know the first thing about it. The fact that it is undeniably a work in metaphysics as well tells us something about how Spinoza conceives both ethics and metaphysics, and one of my aims in this chapter is to explain these intertwined conceptions. As we shall see, the attempt to make sense of things, for Spinoza, is itself an ethical enterprise; and the most general attempt to make sense of things, for Spinoza as for Descartes, involves surveying that very enterprise, making sense of making sense of things.
²

Descartes too had an ethical vision that was tied, in its own way, to his metaphysics. Having acknowledged different grades of freedom, and having equated freedom of the highest grade with determination by reason (Descartes (
1984a
), AT VII: 56ff.), he urged that our supreme happiness depends on our being so determined, while its chief obstacle depends on our being determined instead by our passions – where the contrast between our being determined by our reason and our being determined by our passions is essentially a contrast between our being active and our being passive (e.g. Descartes (
1991
), AT IV: 267 and 295, and Descartes (
1985d
), Pt One, §17).
³
Although Spinoza had no patience for the mind/body dualism
in whose terms Descartes expounded this vision, and in whose terms he tried to explain various techniques for mastering our passions,
⁴
there was much here that aligned them. They were both part of a rationalist tradition that venerates the freedom and power of the mind. But there was a far more carefully worked out and far more compelling development of that tradition in Spinoza than there was in Descartes.
⁵

Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677) was, in the memorable words of Bertrand Russell, ‘the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers’ (Russell (
1961
), p. 552). He produced work that was both a testament to his nobility and itself ennobling. Deleuze describes Spinoza’s philosophical method in the
Ethics
as follows:

It is opposition to everything that takes pleasure in the powerlessness and distress of men, … everything that breaks men’s spirits…. Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy, and in vision. He let others live provided they let him live. He wanted only to inspire, to waken, to reveal. (Deleuze (
1988a
), p. 14)

In order to inspire, to waken, and to reveal, Spinoza sought to achieve a general understanding of things which, on the one hand, would conduce to the more particular understanding of things in which the mind’s ‘highest virtue’ consists (Vpp25–28) but which, on the other hand, and in contrast to that more particular understanding of things, could also be communicated to others (see §6). The pursuit of this general understanding of things, which he undertook in the
Ethics
, was a metaphysical pursuit. In what follows I shall try to substantiate these claims.

2. Substance

In §6 of the previous chapter we considered Descartes’ complex views about substance, views which first separated God from His creation and then, within that creation, separated freely rational conscious minds from the inert, meaningless, mechanistically regulated material world. At the heart of Spinoza’s vision is a profound recoil from this. Spinoza acknowledges
only one substance. (Descartes acknowledged only one substance ‘in the strictest sense’. But in Spinoza there are no concessions.) This substance is ‘absolutely infinite’. This means that it must encompass everything, lest there be anything separate from it by which it is limited. Substance is that ‘in’ which everything that is, is (Ia1,p15). There are no fundamentally different domains of being for Spinoza, no fundamentally different levels of being, no fundamentally different ways of being. To be, even in the case of substance, is to be ‘in substance’. Substance is in itself (Id3).
⁶

One of the ways in which Descartes distinguished between substances was by means of their attributes, where an attribute of a substance is a property of that substance that constitutes its essential nature (Descartes (
1985c
), Pt One, §53). In the case of created substances he recognized two attributes: that of thought, which each mind enjoys, and that of extension, which the material world enjoys. And it was because he believed that a substance that enjoys one of these attributes can always be conceived independently of a substance that enjoys the other that he concluded that the one can always exist independently of the other; in other words, that minds and matter are separate substances (Descartes (
1984a
), AT VII: 78).
⁷

Spinoza agrees that a substance that enjoys one of these attributes can in some sense be conceived independently of a substance that enjoys the other. But he does not think it follows that the one can exist independently of the other. For there can be two ways of conceiving the same thing. Thus, to borrow Frege’s famous example, it is possible in some sense to conceive the evening star without conceiving the morning star (Frege (
1997c
), p. 152/p. 27 in the original German).
⁸
But it does not follow that the evening star can exist without the morning star. Indeed, astronomical investigation has revealed that the evening star
is
the morning star. This one entity can be observed, and can be thought of, in two quite different ways, or from two quite different points of view. So there is no reason, Spinoza insists, why thought and extension should not be two attributes of a single substance (Ip10+acc). And given his understanding of substance as all-encompassing, that is precisely what he thinks they are. ‘Thinking substance and extended substance,’ he says, anticipating the Fregean analogy, ‘are one and the same substance, comprehended now under this attribute, now under that’ (IIp7s).
⁹

In the created realm, thought and extension were the only two attributes that Descartes recognized. There is a sense in which they are the only two attributes that Spinoza recognizes. They are the only two attributes that he identifies. And he takes them to be the only two of which we are aware. He nevertheless holds that there are infinitely many others, which somehow indicate their existence to us (
Short Treatise
, p. 39, n. 3). What are we to make of Spinoza’s commitment to all these further attributes? The first thing that needs to be emphasized is that it plays no role in the
Ethics
. It is true that in the
Ethics
he takes substance to have ‘infinite attributes’ (Id6,p10s,p11). But in terms of how this relates to the rest of the work he might just as well have taken substance to have all the attributes there are, leaving open how many that is. Indeed, as far as the
Ethics
itself is concerned, he might reasonably be
interpreted
as taking substance to have all the attributes there are: ‘infinite’, in this context, can be heard as meaning ‘unlimited’ rather than ‘infinitely many’.
¹⁰
The conviction that there are infinitely many attributes other than thought and extension, whose existence we can somehow register, is in any case something of an anomaly in Spinoza’s overall system, his sole concession to the idea that we can ever make sense of anything transcendent. For, absent that conviction, Spinoza shows absolutely no sympathy for this idea, even on the least demanding conception of what it would be either to make sense of something or for something to be transcendent. Spinoza’s metaphysics is very definitely a metaphysics of the immanent.
¹¹

The notion of a single substance with different attributes of which we are aware may itself suggest an unknowable transcendent reality set apart from different known immanent representations of it. But that is not at all how Spinoza intends the notion. He says that attributes ‘express’ the very essence of substance, or again, that they express its very existence (Ipp11,20+pf). He also says that a particular body expresses the essence of substance
qua
extended, or, to put it another way, that a particular body is a ‘mode’ by which substance’s extension is expressed, in ‘a definite and determinate way’ (Ip25c and IId1). And he says the same
mutatis mutandis
in the case of a particular thought (IIp1pf). Some of the terminology here may be bemusing, but the basic point is clear enough. The world with which we are familiar – the
world of supernovae, sunshine, and snow, the world of pains, schemes, fears, and dreams – stands in a much more intimate relation to substance than one of representation. This relation is not quite identity for Spinoza, because identifying them would violate his understanding of what it is for us to conceive substance in two ways (and to fail to conceive it in countless other ways).
¹²
But it is, so to speak, as close to identity as this caveat allows, and certainly close enough for us to be capable not only of knowing the world of snow and pain but of knowing substance (IVp28+pf). Substance itself is both a thinking thing and an extended thing (IIpp1,2). Moreover, the
whole
of substance is both a thinking thing and an extended thing. (Substance does not have parts: Ip13s.
¹³
) The ways we have of knowing substance may not be all the ways of knowing it. But they are ways of knowing all of it. Whatever is expressed by one attribute is expressed by all of them. It follows that modes of extension and modes of thought must be paired off with one another. To each mode of extension there must correspond some mode of thought that expresses the same thing, albeit differently, and vice versa (IIp7+s and Vp1+pf).
¹⁴
In some cases, if not in every case, we may be able to identify the pairing. Thus we may be able to see that some particular headache, say, is paired with some particular activity inside a person’s brain. But whatever pairings we may or may not be able to identify, the fact remains that any mode, and in particular any mode of which we are aware, already implicates the whole of substance.
¹⁵

I have not yet used the word ‘God’ in this connection. ‘God’ is Spinoza’s name for substance (Id6). But he does not of course use it just as a label. He uses it with every intention of exploiting its normal semantic power. The word has many associations, particularly in the Judæo-Christian context in which Spinoza is writing, that are precisely suited to his purpose: perfection, eternity, necessary existence, wholeness, self-sufficiency, self-explanatoriness; in sum, what I have elsewhere called metaphysical infinitude (Moore (
2001a
), pp. 1–2), a cluster of ideas that certainly fits Spinoza’s conception of substance (Ip11+acc). The word ‘God’ also calls to mind a being which is not subject to any external standards of assessment and which, in its grandeur and orderliness, is an appropriate object of adoration and awe. This too fits Spinoza’s conception and is suited to his purpose (Ip33s2 and Vpp15ff; see §5.).
¹⁶