The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (15 page)

There are nevertheless two utterly fundamental respects in which Spinoza’s God differs from the traditional Judæo-Christian God. First, He is not separate from His creation. In particular, even if He has attributes of which we are unaware and is therefore to that extent transcendent, He is in other ways as immanent as the chair on which I am now sitting. Indeed His immanence
is
the immanence of the chair on which I am now sitting – or its is His. Spinoza is a pantheist. He famously refuses to draw any distinction between God and Nature (IVPref and
Letter
6, p. 776).
¹⁷

The second fundamental respect in which Spinoza’s God differs from the traditional Judæo-Christian God is that He is not personal. He has neither hopes nor regrets; He has no purposes; He does not suffer; He does not attend to anything; and He does not strictly speaking love anyone (e.g. Ip18s, Ip33s2, IApp, IIp3s, Vp17c, and
Letter
23).
¹⁸
So to whatever extent we are inclined to think or speak of Spinoza’s God in personal terms, we are involved in a basic falsification. In particular, this is true of my deference to convention in using the capitalized masculine singular personal pronoun to refer to ‘Him’, a deference which is, to say the least, infelicitous – as well as being unwarranted by anything in Spinoza’s text.
¹⁹
Henceforth I shall revert to ‘it’.

Is Spinoza a theist or an atheist then? There cannot be any simple unqualified answer to this question. It is not that Spinoza wavers or is undecided. The one thing that he definitely is not is an agnostic. It is rather that, as we have just seen, he believes in something that deserves to be called ‘God’ on some reasonable definitions, but not in anything that deserves to be called ‘God’ on some others. My own view is that, while there is an ineliminable religious strain in Spinoza’s thinking, and while there is much to justify Novalis’ famous description of him as ‘the God-intoxicated man,’
²⁰
there is nonetheless an asymmetry here (very roughly, belief in God is most reasonably construed as belief in something that deserves to be called ‘God’ on most reasonable definitions) which makes it altogether less misleading to call Spinoza an atheist than to call him a theist. Henceforth, therefore, as well as reverting to ‘it’ when referring to what Spinoza calls ‘God’, I shall eschew theological language (unless I am quoting Spinoza) and revert to ‘substance’.
²¹

So much, then, for Spinoza’s recoil from the Cartesian conception of substance and from all that it entails. In that recoil we find a forthright rejection of Descartes’ belief in a transcendent creator God, distinct from His creation, and an equally forthright rejection of Descartes’ view of human beings as fractured beings, part minds and part (independent) bodies. The first of these rejections signals a pattern that we shall see repeated many times in this enquiry, whereby a commitment in one philosopher to our being able to make sense of transcendent things is abandoned by later philosophers on the grounds that there is no
sense
there to be made. In Spinoza’s case, if we bracket the difficulties about attributes other than thought and extension, it seems fair to say that there is no sense to be made where no sense is expressed, while the only expression there is is expression on the part of immanent attributes and their various immanent modes.
²²
The second rejection signals a reintegration of the self, whereby all the power of a person’s mind is at the same time power of that person’s body (IIIp2s). Both rejections cast us as ourselves participants in the sense-making of whatever we make sense of.
²³
And it is on this that Spinoza’s ethics turns.

3. Nature, Human Nature, and the Model of Human Nature

We are part of nature,
²⁴
the very nature that we make sense of. But what does this involve?

For us to be part of nature is for our power to be part of nature’s power. What we can do is part of what nature can do. It is part of what substance can do. It is part of the
essence
of substance (Ip35). But the essence of substance, as we saw in the previous section, is what attributes and their modes express. It is the sense that things make. So anything we do is testimony to the sense that things make. In particular this includes our grasping such sense, our making sense of things.
²⁵
It follows that, when we make sense of things, we make sense of ourselves; indeed we ourselves make sense. And to that extent, we are active rather than passive (IIId2). The significance of this, as I intimated in §1 and as I shall now try to show, is that it makes our making sense of things, for Spinoza, an ethical achievement.
²⁶
It also has important implications, as I shall subsequently try to show, for metaphysics.

It is helpful to begin with the general idea of a body. One of the most fundamental questions that Spinoza raises in the
Ethics
, according to Deleuze in his magnificent commentary, is: what can a body do?
²⁷
The principal context in which this question arises is one in which we find Spinoza arguing for the following thesis: whenever a person’s body does anything, there must be a purely physical explanation for what it does (IIIp2+acc). This, Spinoza insists, is true even when there is a conscious decision on the part of the person so to act. It does not follow that the decision is irrelevant to what the person’s body does – or, as we would more naturally say, to what the person does. All that follows, in Spinoza’s own words, is that

[the] mental decision on the one hand, and the … physical state of the body on the other hand, are … one and the same thing which, when considered under the attribute of thought and explicated through thought, we call decision, and when considered under the attribute of extension and deduced from the laws of motion-and-rest, we call a physical state. (IIIp2s)
^28
,
29

Spinoza considers the more intuitively appealing rival view whereby it is sometimes impossible to explain what a person’s body does save in terms of the operations of the person’s mind. Part of the reason why this rival view is more intuitively appealing than his is that we find it hard, sometimes, to see how a purely physical story, involving nothing about a person but the operations of his or her body, can be adequate to the task of explaining what that body does. Spinoza himself cites the case of someone’s painting a picture. It is in response to this that he urges, ‘Nobody as yet has learned from experience what the body can do … solely from the laws of its nature insofar as it is considered as corporeal’ (IIIp2s).

Spinoza is making a very particular dialectical point here. But precisely because of the point that he is making, the question of what a body can do takes on a broader significance. And it is to this broader significance that Deleuze alludes. Whenever I ask, ‘What can I do?’ – and there are, of course, all sorts of ways in which I might ask that – I am in effect asking, ‘What can my body do?’ (I am also asking, ‘What can my mind do?’ The various things that my body can do and the various things that my mind can do are the same things, expressed differently in the two cases.
³⁰
) One
of Spinoza’s aims in this passage, and more generally throughout his work, is to remind us that our bodies, and therefore we ourselves, have untold capacities, many of which remain completely unknown to us. This has obvious ethical significance,
³¹
not least in its implications concerning the benefits and dangers both of scientific research and of various sorts of experimentation. But it has additional ethical significance for Spinoza.

To see why, let us retreat from the question of what a body can do to the yet more fundamental question of what a body is. Spinoza’s explicit definition of a body is ‘a mode that expresses in a definite and determinate way God’s essence insofar as he is considered an extended thing’ (IId1). Later he says that bodies are distinguished from one another ‘in respect of motion-and-rest’ (IIp13lem1) and that

when a number of bodies … form close contact with one another through the pressure of other bodies upon them, or if they are moving … so as to preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves, these bodies are said to be united with one another and all together to form one body or individual thing. (IIp13d)

He also makes clear that the identity of the whole in such a case depends on the ‘mutual relation of motion-and-rest’ rather than on the identity of the parts, which means that, within certain parameters of drasticness, the whole can survive the replacement of its parts, and even the gaining or losing of parts (IIp13lems4–7+acc). In the case of a human body the most obvious natural examples of what he has in mind are breathing, eating, and defecating.

Eating calls to mind what else can happen, apart from the forming of a new, additional body, when two or more bodies meet. Thus a man can eat an orange, say, benefiting himself but thereby destroying the orange; a bullet can enter into the body of a man and rearrange some of his parts, without damaging itself but thereby destroying the man; two pieces of crockery can collide and destroy each other; an egg white can combine with a heap of sugar, each destroying the other but together forming a meringue.
³²
However, the case in which none of the original bodies is destroyed and a new body is formed is in many respects the most interesting. It reminds us that not only can bodies be combined, but so too can their powers and capacities. They can do together what they could never do separately. This is true, for instance, of various pieces of wood assembled together to form a chair. Spinoza himself says the following: ‘If two individuals of completely
the same nature are combined, they compose an individual twice as powerful as each one singly’ (IVp18s). That may be somewhat crude, but the basic point, concerning what bodies or individuals can do when they combine, is clear and relatively uncontroversial.

Nor does this point apply only when some larger body or larger individual is formed. I add this caveat because, despite all that Spinoza says on this subject, it is difficult to decide just what he would count either as a body or as an individual.
³³
John, Paul, George, and Ringo are four bodies. Do they together constitute a fifth? Presumably not, in the normal course of events. But what about when they are acting ‘in concert’, as we might aptly say – that is, when they are coordinating their activities, and in particular when they are keeping time with one another? Are they not then precisely ‘moving … so as to preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves’? It is significant in this connection that Spinoza at one point alludes to the possibility that men ‘should all be in such harmony in all respects that their minds and bodies should compose, as it were, one mind and one body’ (IVp18s). A good deal obviously turns on the force of the qualification ‘as it were’. – Or if there is some doubt about whether John, Paul, George, and Ringo ever constitute a fifth body, surely there is no doubt that they sometimes constitute a fifth individual? After all, Spinoza does at one point acknowledge the whole of nature as one individual (IIp13lem17s). – Unfortunately, even this is not clear.
³⁴
The most that seems uncontentious is that the four men sometimes constitute a ‘single thing’. Spinoza says:

If several individuals concur in one act in such a way as to be all together the simultaneous cause of one effect, I consider them all, in that respect, as one single thing. (IId7)
³⁵

The important point in all of this, however, is the original point: a group of individuals has a collective power that exceeds their powers as individuals. This adds obvious political significance to the obvious ethical significance that we have already noted in the question of what a body can do. Implicated in that question is the question of what a body can do in cooperation with other bodies.
³⁶

Now, in order to understand better the additional ethical significance that the question has for Spinoza, we need first to consider Spinoza’s conception of ethics. Here it is helpful to invoke a contrast that many philosophers draw between ethics and morality.
³⁷
On one way of drawing that contrast, ethics is concerned quite generally with what counts as living well, whereas morality is concerned with what counts as living well only as seen through the prism of some very particular, very distinctive conceptual tools. Two of the most basic of these tools are the idea of a moral obligation and the idea of an act of free will. Morality treats a moral obligation as an inescapable demand that always takes precedence over a demand of any other kind, and it equates living well, in the most important sense, with performing those acts of free will that there is some moral obligation to perform while refraining from performing those acts of free will that there is some moral obligation to refrain from performing. In these terms, Spinoza’s conception of ethics is decidedly a conception of
ethics
, not of morality. He argues strenuously that the idea of free will is an illusion, based on our ignorance of the causes of what we do (Ip32+pf,App, IIpp48+acc,49+acc, and
Letter
58). Nature leaves no room for us to direct it one way rather than another. Everything that occurs in nature is governed by laws over which we have no control, and these laws determine uniquely what will happen at any given time (Ia3,pp21+pf,22+pf,28+acc,29+acc). Nor, therefore, does the idea of a moral obligation have any kind of grip on us. Still less does the idea of a moral obligation impinging on us from some transcendent source, which is how many of the more religious champions of morality have viewed it. Spinoza’s retreat from the conceptual tools of morality to the broader concerns of ethics is at the same time a retreat from one of the mainstays of a familiar form of Christianity, dominant in his own time and culture, to a much more ancient legacy.