For the last two semesters I have been teaching, after previous failed attempts, Part 1 and Part 3 of Spinoza’s Ethics in my Intro to Philosophy courses. Much to my surprise compared to previous experience, it has been a pleasure to teach this text this time around. In the past, I think, the failure of my attempts to teach it was due to starting at the very beginning. Jumping straight into the Ethics from page 1 is very likely doomed to failure as Spinoza gives no overarching account as to what he’s attempting to do, but rather simply assaults his reader with a series of definitions and propositions without explaining why he’s beginning where he’s beginning or what he wishes to demonstrate. The trick is to instead begin with the appendix to Part 1. On the one hand, the first sentence of Part 1 summarizes what he believes he has demonstrated about the nature of God, while the remainder of the appendix– a beautiful critique of superstition –outlines the consequences that follow from this understanding of God and God’s relationship to its creatures. In this way the reader is given something like a thesis, helping to guide him through the text.
This semester, rather than teaching Spinoza at the end of the semester, I chose to begin with the Ethics. In part I chose to do this because Spinoza– even where he fails –give such a gorgeous model of deductive argument coupled with careful explanation. One of the things I find about my students is that they simply don’t know what an argument is. Beginning with Spinoza would therefore give me the opportunity to discuss the nature of argument, the distinction between inductive and deductive arguments, the relationship between premises and conclusions, what it means to make inferences, and so on. Spinoza’s thought is particularly suited to this end not only stylistically (his famous “geometric method” where the relationship between premises and conclusions is clearly laid out), but also in the sheer integrity of his thought. By “integrity” I am here referring to something like “deductive fidelity”, where one sides not with intuition or “common sense”, but with what is deductively entailed by the premises of ones arguments. Take the example of Spinoza’s infamous parallelism. Clearly parallelism or the idea that the order and connection among thought is the same as the order and connection among objects is a deeply counter-intuitive view. However, Spinoza is led to this position by claims he has already demonstrated in Part 1, namely the lack of anything in common between different attributes. Rather than hedging and claiming that thought can affect bodies and bodies can affect thought, Spinoza squarely accepts the implications of his claims about attributes and develops its implications (I do not, of course, endorse Spinoza’s parallelism, but nonetheless admire his deductive fidelity).
read on!
Another reason I have chosen Spinoza’s Ethics is that it is such an exotic metaphysics. Spinoza makes a number of highly counter-intuitive claims about the nature of God and the world. From a pedagogical perspective this is extremely valuable in an Intro course. The aim of an Intro course, I think, should not be to convince the student of a particular philosophical position– though I think it’s important to present each philosopher as strongly as possible –but rather to introduce a sort of void into the thought of the student. Here I am deeply influenced by Feyerabend’s discussions of the value of alternative worlds in science. When the scientist creates an imaginary or fictional world where everything happens differently (objects fall up, things blip in and out of existence, objects are not temporally continuous but are events that exist only for an infinitesimal instant, etc) the value of this is absurd exercise is two-fold: 1) First, it brings into relief the scientist’s own assumptions about the nature of the world, and 2) it creates a quest for grounds (“why do things happen this way rather than the way they happen in my imaginary world?). In short, the commonplace becomes problematized, such that it requires explanation. A philosophy such as that we find in Spinoza or Leibniz is so strange and exotic with respect to our commonplace understanding of the world that it comes to serve a heuristic function by calling that world into question and leading the student to both make their own positions explicit and seek grounds for that position in response to the strange world of the philosopher. Rather that being patients of unconscious assumptions, the student becomes [hopefully] an agent of their own claims. Recently I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with a beloved student from four or five years ago to whom precisely this had happened. He had begun my course as a very religious man, deeply involved with his church. This did not change over the course of the semester, nor should it be the aim of a philosophy class. However, this student was so shaken by the challenges of the course that he went on to pursue advanced degrees in philosophy of religion, developing arguments so that he might better defend his positions. This, I think, is success. The issue here wasn’t whether the student came to advocate my positions or the positions of the philosopher’s we studied, but rather that of how the student came to discover his own positions, to become an agent of those positions, engaging in the activity of seeking grounds for his claims and being transformed by the grounds that he discovers. Something like this, I think, is the highest achievement that can be hoped for in the philosophy classroom… Not interpellating other individuals, but rather opening a space where other individuals might get a little further along in developing their own thought.
At any rate, after four weeks of class, we have just now arrived at proposition 1 of the Ethics (the first week was devoted to basic technical concepts of philosophy, two weeks to the appendix with an ice day mixed in, and the last week to the definitions and axioms). One of the things I’ve found most amusing in my interactions with Graham and in observing Graham interacting with others– especially Kevin –is just how viscerally he reacts to Spinoza. When a philosopher reacts this strongly to the positions of another philosopher it’s a fair bet that the stakes are high and fundamental. And indeed, in the case of Graham’s ontology, this would certainly be true, for if Spinoza is such a prime target, then this is because, in many respects, Spinoza is the anti-thesis of Graham’s object-oriented philosophy. Where Graham asserts the independence of objects almost to the point of madness (philosophical madness being a sign of deductive fidelity in my book), Spinoza is the great thinker of the One, where objects are not independent but are rather affections of the One substance. What we have here, then, is a sort of fault-line in philosophy between the One-All and the radical independence of objects. In the spirit of the Clark/Leibniz debate over motion, we could call this particularly fault-line the Spinoza/Leibniz debate. Here the debate centers on whether there is one substance (Spinoza) or an infinity of substances (Leibniz). Graham, of course, would be the neo-Leibnizian, which is not to say he adopts Leibniz’s particular metaphysics, but rather that his ontological commitment is to that of a radical pluralism of substance. It is worth noting that philosophers, above all, need their rivals. These rival positions function as a fertile soil from which concepts, arguments, and positions are developed, introducing a fundamental instability into ones thought that perpetually haunts it, spurring it on to develop further. There are few things worse for a philosopher than the loss of a sophisticated and serious rival (as opposed to trollish defenders of commonplaces against a philosophy as in the case of those critics of idealism that invited idealists to jump off a building).
Paradoxically, the strength of Spinoza’s thought is also its great weakness. Because of the deductive structure of Spinoza’s thought and the interdependence among the propositions where propositions demonstrated earlier in the Ethics function as premises for later arguments, Spinoza is particularly prone to defeat at the early stages of his arguments. On the one hand, if something is amiss with the definitions and axioms of Part 1 of the Ethics, it is difficult for the remainder of his argument to get off the ground as these definitions and axioms are the ultimate premises of his argument. On the other hand, Spinoza’s metaphysics is particularly prone in propositions 1 through 5 in Part 1, for it is here that the entire groundwork for all his subsequent claims is accomplished. In particular, if one concedes Spinoza’s argument for proposition 5– “there cannot exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or attribute” –the entire game is up. After establishing this claim Spinoza will beat the reader over the head with it again and again, demonstrating, among other things, that one substance cannot produce another substance (because things that have nothing in common cannot cause one another), that one substance cannot limit another substance (because they would have to share the same attribute and would therefore be the same substance), that substance must, therefore, necessarily be infinite, that substance must be eternal or self-caused, that nothing can compel substance to act beyond itself (as this would require another substance with the same attribute), and so on. Proposition 5 is, at the end of the day, the germinal seed from which Spinoza’s entire metaphysics unfolds. After demonstrating 5 it’s simply a matter of working through the implications or entailments that follow from this proposition.
However, rather than tackling Spinoza at proposition 5– if one is so inclined –perhaps it is better to start a bit earlier. In proposition 1p1 Spinoza makes the modest and rather obvious claim that “substance is, by nature, prior to its affections.” It is noteworthy that Spinoza has not yet here made any claims as to how many substances exists. He simply alludes to a necessary– in his view –feature of any substance should substances exist regardless of whether there are one or many substances. Traditionally (Spinoza will take the concept in a very different direction), of course, when we speak of substance we are not speaking of matter, but rather of any independent individual thing. Under this rather loose, problematic, and ill defined concept of substance, a substance would just be any individual thing. God would be a substance, you would be a substance, rocks would be substances, souls would be substances, angels would be substances. More rigorously, Spinoza defines substance as “what is in itself and exists through itself; that is, the existence of which does not require the existence of another thing to be formed” (1d3, modified). Here, I think, Spinoza stacks the deck in his favor with his definition of substance. That is, by defining substance as what exists in and through itself, it is clear that only one thing can fit this definition: the universe taken as a totality. But I’ll set that point aside. It could be that he is simply taking the established definition of substance to its logical conclusion.
When Spinoza speaks of “affections”, he is referring to modes, or “that which exists in and through another; or that which is an affection [modification] of a substance” (1d5). In short, affections or modes refer to qualities, properties, or predicates of substances. When Spinoza claims that substance is, by nature, prior to its affections, he is not making a claim about time. In other words, the relationship between substances and affections asserted in this proposition is not a temporal relationship of succession wherein first substance exists and then modes or affections come along. Rather, Spinoza is making a claim about logical dependence. The point here is that in order for something to count as an affection or quality, it must be an affection or quality of something. Brown (an affection) cannot just float about on its own, but rather must be in something else: hair, a table, tree bark, etc. All affections, then, are properties of substance. And this claim, Spinoza, follows directly from definitions 3 (substance) and definition 5 (mode).
If Spinoza finds it important to begin the Ethics with this proposition, then this is because ultimately he will show that there is only one substance. Proposition 1 implies that there are only two ways of existing: Something is either a substance or a mode. Alternatively, something either exists in and through itself or it exists in and through another. Consequently, if it is demonstrated that there is only one and exactly one substance in all of being, it would follow that all other things must be affections or modes of this one substance, rather than substances in their own right. Consequently, proposition 1 foreshadows Spinoza’s monism.
Now, there are, no doubt, well founded intuitions behind Spinoza’s understanding of the relationship between substance and affections. When, taking the concept of substance in its traditional sense as any individual that exists in its own right, we notice that affections of any object or individual change, while the object is still the same object, we are led to the conclusion that there must be something about objects that is in excess to their qualities. That is, if the qualities of an object can change while the object remains the same object, it follows that the object cannot be reduced to its affections (or seems to follow). I am the same Levi as I was at the age of three despite the fact that I have undergone radical changes at the level of my qualities– my shape has changed, my hair has become curly and a little gray, I have more hair and in odd places, cognitively I am very different, etc. If, then, I am a substance (and Spinoza will conclude I’m not), there must be something about my being as a substance that cannot be found among my qualities, modes, or affections.
However, as we reflect on Spinoza’s notion of substance as presented in proposition 1, we find that some rather odd consequences follow from this relation between substance and affections. In particular, in claiming that substance is, by nature, prior to its affections, Spinoza seems to imply that substance can be what it is without any affections whatsoever. What else would it mean to say that substance remains the same while its affections change? This point seems confirmed in proposition 1p5 where Spinoza claims that there cannot exist two substances with the same attribute; for in the demonstration of this all important proposition, Spinoza excludes the possibility of individuating or distinguishing substance from another substance through the modes or affections of that substance. In short, Spinoza seems necessarily committed to the view that affectionless substances are possible. Admittedly he here has some wiggle room, for while it might be possible to conceive a substance that is completely independent of its affections, substances are, nonetheless, defined by their attributes. Yet here again we seem to encounter the same problem. For we can ask ourselves just what it would mean to think an attribute without any affections. Put otherwise, we run afoul of the whole problem of a bare substratum.
Now it is clear that how things shake out with respect to substance is going to be of crucial importance to any object-oriented ontology. Spinoza is not an object-oriented philosopher not because he isn’t a realist– he is –but because he doesn’t affirm the independence of objects, but treats them as affections of substance. In order to qualify as an object-oriented ontology (and it could turn out that object-oriented ontologies are just wrong and horribly confused), it is necessary to affirm a pluralism of substances or that there are many independent substances. Likewise, Kant’s thought cannot qualify as an object-oriented ontologist because for him substance is not things, but is rather a category imposed by mind upon things like Badiou’s operations of the count-as-one. You could then have conservative and radical Kantians. The former would claim that substances may exist independently of mind but that we cannot know whether this is the case, while the latter would claim that while something besides mind exists in its own right it certainly cannot be substances as substance is merely a category imposed by mind on a manifold of intuition somehow produced through this radical alterity affecting our minds. Graham argues that substances exist in their own right and are absolutely independent, but only as infinitely withdrawn, leading one to wonder (or leading me to wonder, anyway) whether these vacuum packed substances are not bare substrata without any internal differences of their own. Latour, by contrast, individuates entities or substances as temporal instants or events, each of which is a unique and singular individual independent of all the others. I think there are a number of assumptions about the nature of time or duration here that are problematic. Finally, I am inclined to argue that substances are nothing but their affections related together as a sort of time-space worm in irreversible time. In other words, I am inclined to reject Spinoza’s definition of substance from the get-go, along with his conception of the relationship between substance and affections, instead seeing substance as an unfolding process in which each succeeding moment is related to its prior moment. This, of course, requires me to give an account of how objects or substances achieve closure or some degree of autonomy or independence from other objects, as well as the principles presiding over relations among affections (I presume these principles will differ depending on the sort of object or substance being considered).
Larval Subjects . 
February 14, 2009 at 12:31 am
It is not at all clear that under the definitions that Spinoza provides, and despite his love from the PSR, that human beings can indeed hold completely adequate ideas. (For instance Della Rocca and I both argue that this is not possible.)
If human beings cannot hold completely adequate ideas, the status of the propositions and axioms that begin the Ethics themselves cannot be taken to be completely Adequate, and the entire Ethics cannot be seen as vulnerable in exactly the sense that you take its stacked deductions to be.
You do make a very good case in the context of the traditional reading of Spinoza, wherein if one central toothpick in the structure fails to entail, the entire thing crumbles.
It is more likely that the Ethics should be seen as a pedagogic edifice or device, a material thing which was designed to cause in its reader the capacity for the Intuitions that make up the third form of knowledge, rather than to simply and conclusively prove that the universe is one way and not another (through rational explanation and deduction is its primary and most powerful means of expression). The Ethics is perhaps best seen as a Tool of the Intellect, something to be materially and ideational interacted with such that he analogizes to blacksmith tools, barrowing from Descartes, even a device not unlike the metal forms that Spinoza used to grind his glass blanks into powerful lenses, augmenting our vision. Because we as human beings cannot hold completely adequate ideas, we must grind outselves, (our bodies and minds) so as to sharpen our capacities to think and explain.
Understood as a pedagogic device, a causal interface, it is notable and even beautiful that you have turned it into one.
February 14, 2009 at 12:45 am
Hi Kvond,
Thanks. Nice to see you commenting. I don’t think Spinoza’s Ethics is simply a pedagogical device. Certainly Spinoza is a deeply important thinker for me, one whom I’ve been reading off and on for about twenty years now (though not with the depth you’ve read him). In a number of respects, Spinoza is my model of the “ultimate philosopher”.
Your point about adequate ideas is interesting, but I wonder how it fares against his criticism of mystery in the appendix. I quote the following passage at length, for the benefit of readers less familiar with Spinoza’s Ethics and so you know exactly what I’m referring to. Spinoza writes:
The passage I find particularly significant as a potential problem with your criticism are his references to superstitious evocations of mystery in defense of a conception of nature governed by ends or purposes. It seems that much of the force of Spinoza’s critique of superstition lies in his ability to claim that he is able to present adequate ideas of God. If, by contrast, we back-peddle and say “well we can’t have adequate ideas on these matters”, then it seems difficult to hold that one mystery should be preferable to another mystery.
This aside, I very much like your point about tools of the intellect designed to cause a certain Intuition. This, I think is a corrective to a sort of hard-line linguistic constructivism that sees everything taking place at the level of the signifier and very much reminds me of the function of Icons as outlined by Peirce in relation to mathematics in his various semiotic writings.
February 14, 2009 at 1:25 am
Thanks for the kind words.
Spinoza inconsistant in how he characterizes Adequate ideas, but if you take all of his qualifications it does not seem that human beings or any finite being can hold a completely adequate (or any set of them). But this does not mean that he thinks that all ideas are created equal, or their are no means by which we can tell the adequacy of one to that of another. As you know, he most certainly believes and argues for degrees of adequacy in ideas, and he creates several standards for their measure. He is not only against superstition (though it has served its purpose in history), but also against the generally seen as pernicious effects of “wonder/admiration”, which you can find in his defintions of the affects.
What Spinoza really does is set up the Adequacy of Ideas as a telling asymptotic limit, the closer to which one’s ideas come, the more internally coherent and explanatory of causes they become. What this does for the standing of his deductive arguments is unclear. Ultimately though, his Ethics stands as something that we causally interact with.
February 14, 2009 at 1:39 am
Good points and very relevant reminder about degrees of adequacy. However, I do wonder, can we really claim degrees of adequacy for the opening definitions of the Ethics? I can surely see that I can’t, for example, have an adequate idea of my own body or another body, but it seems to me that the notions Spinoza works with in his definitions are proposed as adequate ideas in contrast to these other inadequate ideas. This would seem to underlay his distinction between understanding and imagination. The pictures of God and world presented to us by superstition are based on imagination, whereas Spinoza contends, under my reading, at least, to deliver us to an understanding of God and the world (what can be understood of it for beings such as ourselves, at any rate). It seems to me that if we go the route of claiming that we don’t have an adequate understanding of these notions, then a good deal of his arguments are wrecked. I ask these questions in all earnestness, not combativeness, deferring to your superior understanding of his thought. I am weakest in my understanding of Spinoza with respect to my understanding of his epistemology, my primary fascination with his work over the years revolving around his metaphysics and its holism, along with his naturalistic psychology as presented in Part III.
ASIDE: We really need to get a life on Friday nights! I think this is the third or fourth time we’ve bounced back and forth on a weekend night over some issue.
February 14, 2009 at 4:46 am
Honestly, your reading of Spinoza is the traditional one, a generally the one that has lead to his disqualification on supposedly his own terms. So your reading has much greater standing than mine. Most argue just as you: Spinoza sets a very high standard, and therefore falls to his own standard.
The big problem is with identifying whether a finite being can hold a completely adequate idea or not. At many points Spinoza speaks as if they can, but his specific treatment of adequate ideas seems to preclude the possibility.
Micheal Della Rocca in his new book on Spinoza puts this on two places in the Ethics:
“…but insofar as he also has the idea of another thing together with the human mind, then we say that the human mind perceives the thing only partially, or inadequately” (E2p11c)
and,
“The actions of the mind arise from adequate ideas alone; the passions depend on inadequate ideas alone” (E3p3, see scholia).
Della Rocca points out, or interprets the latter as the individual human mind being the complete cause of such ideas termed adequate, and concludes,
“…it seems difficult, if not impossible, for the human mind to have genuinely unconfused and adequate ideas. For how can any of our ideas fail to be caused – at some remove or other – from outside the mind?”
I arrived at the same kind of conclusion from a different direction, my understanding that the Ideas of the Human mind are necessarily understood as differences that make differences within the finite horizon of its border. [talked about here: http://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/spinozas-notion-of-inside-and-outside-what-is-a-passion/ ]It literally makes no sense to read a difference that makes a difference within the horizon of the human body to be completely adequate to all the differences that lie outside of it. This is because Ideas are not (in my opinion) Representations, but actions which are affirmations of a degree of power of the body. As Spinoza tells us, the object of an idea in the human mind is a state of the human body, and this would include even ideas about God or Substance.
Now it is unclear if the human being or any finite being can act as in a way that is not in some way a passion of the Mind, a pure action untainted by inadequacy. To do so would require it would seem for the human being to be completely its own cause, which strikes me as ludicrous.
Now are the opening axioms and defintions of the Ethics statements that Spinoza’s finite mind was the only cause of? I cannot see that through. When Spinoza thinks “There is one Substance” are the changes in his body commensurate with when Substance holds the same Idea? This makes no sense. All that we can say, along with Spinoza, is that because the human mind, and all minds, are contained within the mind of Substance, the most adequate ideas that we can hold are those that approach that asymptotic limit.
The degree of adequacy of his ideas about God or Substance are actually shown for him the real increase in the body’s capacity to act and harmonize with other bodies (E2p13s).
The difference between imagination and rational knowledge is, as you know, that the imagination is one literally of fused images or indirect associations or traces, contingent conflations of affections of our bodies. Rational knowledge is linked and deductive, but this does not mean that as such it means that we are holding completely adequate ideas when we rationalize. And rational knowledge is not even the highest form of knowledge for Spinoza, intuition is.
As for the properness of my interpretation, I have read no commentator who has even considered the possibility that the ideas of the Ethics may themselves be to some degree inadequate. I think though because finite human minds can only hold ideas asymptotical adequate, and we understand that for Spinoza “man is a god to man” the more human beings that hold the ideas of the Ethics, the more adequate they becomes, paritially due to their internal coherence, but also because human beings combine to form a larger, more dynamic and self-causing body.
Really though, I do suspect that it is not so much that Spinoza intented to deduce everything from God or Substance in an ultimate kind of proof, but rather, as Deleuze points out, he wants to get as quickly to God as he can, because one has to start from the breadth of cohension to figure out how other things cohere. This is in keeping with Spinoza’s critique of Descartes optics (and representational conceptions of knowledge). For Spinoza it is the periphery that grants clarity to anything in the center. Where Descartes wanted to go internally attempting to find some rock truth (in his own version of a pedagogy), Spinoza directs one’s vision to the edges, as wide as possible so one can orient oneself within the topography. This really is the work of his broad conceptions of God and Substance in terms of the power of cohernce and explanation. It isn’t so much deduction, I believe, but a finite being’s attempted orientation, compass-work.
He treats his psychology of the affects and theories of sociability in much the same way.
I don’t say any of this to dispute your rejection of his axioms or deductions, although I do find them more convincing than most do. It is for me not their air tight unchallengable nature, but their coherent interlocking causal effect towards intution. Honestly though I do not see them as unalterable truths, even feeling that I have identified a third Attribute of Substance, or can accept Negri’s judgment that the Ethics is split in two movements.
I think though that if people understood that the Ideas of the Ethics themselves were not completely adequate, but only asymptotically adequate, they would understand Spinoza’s possible contribution to philosophy better.
February 16, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Without getting too wordy, I suspect some of the objections Graham raises to Spinoza’s conception of substance lie in his a refusal to grasp substance as the ultimate _explanation_ of Being. It is clear that every object has its own explanation (natura naturata). If we set it up that all the chains of cause (explanation) lead back to a single cause, we arrive at a thing that is no less “thingie” than the individual things that emanated from that imagined first cause. But if we conceive God as an eternal substance (explanation) then God remains an un-thing-like “being.” God is the explanation — the substance — of all modal explanations.
The defensive paragraph that begins with these words, “Now, there are, no doubt, well founded intuitions behind…” misses a critical aspect of Spinoza’s thought. Spinoza does not suggest that intuitions are “well founded,” but rather suggests that they stand alone as direct intuitions of the mind.
Along these same lines, Della Rocca’s argument rests on a belief that Spinoza’s definition of adequate ideas cannot be experienced as described by the philosopher, that in fact, all ideas depend on and involve something external to the mind. But the idea that logical processes — when properly executed — always produce a conclusion that is no better (or worse) than its premises, is adequate, true, and unlearned. It simply is.
One may rightfully argue, as Wittgenstein and many others do, that logical statements are always tautological, but the adequate statement about the power of logic is not a tautology. Nor can the power of logic be defended by logical analysis (which would make it “well-founded”) but rather derives its power directly from the mind. It is “true” for no reason other than that our minds find it impossible to doubt.
Hume arrived at a similar conclusion re: the law of causes. It cannot be proven without a self-warranting argument. Nevertheless, he found it necessary to trust that all effects have causes. Perhaps, otherwise, he could never have discovered his clever assessment of the law of causes.
These thoughts derive from a grasp of what Spinoza meant by knowledge of the third kind.
February 17, 2009 at 2:47 am
Frank D: “Without getting too wordy, I suspect some of the objections Graham raises to Spinoza’s conception of substance lie in his a refusal to grasp substance as the ultimate _explanation_ of Being.”
Kvond: The only problem is, at least as far as I can discern, Graham offers no substitute as an explanation, but rather shrugs off a need for explanation, simply assuming the autonomy of object essences (not needing an explanation). The object essences, for Graham, simply seem to float unconnected to anything else that might define their particularization. Aligned to this shrugging is a rather sparse if not outright failure to account for causation itself, that is the way that each of his two kinds of objects interact (in particular at the inanimate level). What Spinoza has knitted together in an explanation (the breadth of what is needed to make sense of things), Graham has unspooled and let lie tangled, yet artfully, on the floor.
It remains to be seen if you can take something like Malebranche’s Occasionalism, remove the explantory force of God from it, and still have in your hands a metaphysical explanation of the world. (As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, leaving out the explanation does have the short term illusion of granting freedom to objects, but also as the long term problem of refusing a “path” to freedom for objects, i.e. understanding and acting on their own causes, in self-determination.
Levi has invoked Leibniz here, as an alternative to Spinoza, someone who may ground Graham’s thinking. Perhaps, except that Graham will not defend Leibniz’s view on three accounts:
1). ” his distinction between substance and aggregate is too dogmatic and too crude. I see no reason why the Dutch East India Company should be less substantial than a diamond.”
2). “Leibniz pulls the (understandable) occasionalist cop-out of letting God do all the causal work. We need a local occasionalism that doesn’t pass through a centralized Divine government.”
3). “Leibniz erodes the crucial distinction between substance and accident by imploding all of a thing’s accidents into its very monad.”
On all three issues, I would contend that Spinoza as a stronger case than Leibniz.
1). All objects have equal footing.
2). It is not only Substance that is “doing the work” (veritically, pervasively), but also modal action (horizontally, locally)
3). There are no accidents, but only the combination with other bodies/essences.
Ultimately, Spinoza’s Substance reads much more like Heidegger’s Being liberated from the human-centric bias, the very same thing bias is looking to correct.
February 17, 2009 at 3:51 am
Just for the record, this post is not designed to defend Graham’s version of object-oriented philosophy but to give an account of why an object-oriented philosophy turns out to be hostile to Spinoza’s substance-monism. My evocation of Leibniz is extremely limited, restricted to his affirmation of a plurality of independent substances, rather than the claim that there is only one substance. I certainly wouldn’t accept some of Leibniz’s other claims such as the thesis that monads contain all of their predicates, past, present, and future, that their change results from a strictly internal principle, or that monads possess no interaction with other monads. In other words, my evocations of Spinoza and Leibniz in this context are more as philosophical personae representing monism and pluralism than with the details of their respective philosophies or positions. In this respect, I would refer to a number of philosophies as “Spinozist” or “Leibnizian”, depending on whether they affirm a substance monism or a substance pluralism.
With Graham I share the thesis that objects are individual and independent theses. With that said, we differ on a number of details as to just what this means. I’m not sure I share Frank D’s thesis that substance, in Spinoza, explains. It seems to me that substance explains very little in Spinoza. Rather, if you want explanation in Spinoza you have to investigate relations among modes and their various interactions. What substance, establishes, rather, is that all modes belong to one substance as predicates to a subject, that this substance isn’t produced by anything else, that it cannot be limited by anything else, and that therefore it is absolutely infinite. Beyond that, substance, as far as I can discern, doesn’t do a whole lot where explanation is concerned. Rather, it serves to undermine or foreclose any transcendent causation among the modes (here I disagree with any Neo-Platonist reading of Spinoza). It could be, however, that I’m misreading Spinoza. I am certainly no expert where his thought is concerned.
Apologies for inviting confusion by referring to Graham’s position early in the post. What struck me more than anything was a particular affect that accompanies his thought whenever Spinoza comes up. I used this affect as a segue for my own rumination as to why an object-oriented philosophy would be hostile to Spinoza and for my own ruminations as to where Spinoza runs afoul of problems and equivocations pertaining to questions of individuation in the first five propositions of Part 1. Each proposition there, in my view, makes substantial claims (and, I think, assumptions) about the nature of individuation that are highly contentious. This becomes most clear in propositions four and five where we are given the stark alternative between individuation either through modes or attributes, the latter being chosen by Spinoza and allowing him to treat any substances sharing the same attributes as the same substance. Of course, all of this raises the question of just why this thesis should be conceded when we readily recognize that two entities can share the same essence while nonetheless being distinct individuals, i.e., I think Spinoza is guilty of an equivocation on the term “same” which he uses very effectively to advance his monism. This equivocation finds its origin earlier in assumptions he has about the nature of the relationship between substance and affections that I question in the body of the post above. I have not found any of these arguments or positions enunciated in what I’ve read by Graham. In other words, Graham isn’t responsible (or guilty) for my hairbrained thoughts on these matters, and the term “object-oriented philosophy” should not be understood to have a univocal designation when I use it but as referring to my own position first and, more generally, as denoting something like “idealism” as what Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel share in common (very different philosophies and positions).
February 17, 2009 at 4:47 am
Levi: “With that said, we differ on a number of details as to just what this means. I’m not sure I share Frank D’s thesis that substance, in Spinoza, explains. It seems to me that substance explains very little in Spinoza. Rather, if you want explanation in Spinoza you have to investigate relations among modes and their various interactions.”
Kvond: Well, I think this depends on how you interpret “explains”. Spinoza adopts a priciple that one understands something through its cause, and for him this is not restricted to transitive causes. Substance is the immanent cause of events, and does not act at a distance to them (E1p18). The explanation that you accept (modal) here is only a transitive causal explanation. It is precisely that Spinoza turn to immanent causation, a turning to the conditions which express themselves vertically in events that can also be read transitively that he gives depth to “explanation”, a depth he pushes all the way to its limit, Substance (which serves as the ground for other very important explanative distinctions, the Attributes.
Of course there can be disagreement. Some people all the way back to Anselm feel that the posit of absolute coherence explains everything, and others say it explains nothing. But at the very least one must admit that FOR SPINOZA Substance explains alot, in fact everything.
p.s. I don’t think you are wrong to call Graham’s philosophy Leibnizian. You are correct. My points contra Leibniz were really directed towards a hypothetical Graham: “you are Leibnizian, but your trouble with Leibniz might push you towards Spinoza”.
Levi: “all of this raises the question of just why this thesis should be conceded when we readily recognize that two entities can share the same essence while nonetheless being distinct individuals”
Kvond: I am interested in this. What would be an example of two entities sharing the same essence (in Spinoza’s terms), and how does this invalidate Spinoza’s reasoning about Substance?
February 17, 2009 at 5:14 am
Hi Kvond,
You write:
Honestly I don’t have an answer to this question at this point as I’m still mulling it over in my mind. Working from ordinary intuition (i.e., not a reliable guide), the point I have in mind is this. There are two ways in which we use the term “the same”. On the one hand, we use “the same” to refer to members of the same kind. Thus, you and I are the same in that we belong to the same kind, or the human. By contrast, we use “the same” to refer to the same entity. Suppose you and I are sitting together on your porch (or mine) enjoying a nice bottle (or three) of wine. A new blue VW bug drives by. Later, after the first two bottles of wine, a new blue VW bug drives by. I remark to you “wow, this is amazing, it seems everyone is getting blue VW bugs!” You respond, “No you confused dope without a philosophy or metaphysics! That’s the same VW Bug! The guy down the street owns it!” Here “the same” refers to one and the same entity, rather than two members of the same kind. My suspicion is that Spinoza’s arguments in the first eleven propositions of part 1 of the Ethics trade on a similar equivocation or confusion to the one I make in my imaginary drunken revelry sitting on your porch. That is, Spinoza seems to elide essence (attribute) with substance in a way that doesn’t fit with the logic of substance. When we speak of a substance we are speaking of individuals. Spinoza’s famous claim, of course, is that only one truly individual substance exists. However, he gets to this conclusion by arguing that substances are individuated by their attributes or essence. Yet generally we think essence as that which belongs to a plurality of individuals that are nonetheless distinct while belonging to the same kind. I emphasize that this is a suspicion on my part because 1) I find Spinoza’s argument for proposition five very convincing within the syntax of how he’s defined his terms, and 2) because such an argument requires me to give an alternative account of individuation that responds to Spinoza’s considerations about what individuates a substance or what makes a substance what it is. This latter I certainly haven’t done yet.
February 17, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Kvond: Please get a bit more “wordy” on this one. “Ultimately, Spinoza’s Substance reads much more like Heidegger’s Being liberated from the human-centric bias, the very same thing bias is looking to correct.” I would love to hear more. My local Spinoza Group is getting into Heidegger — with Spinoza in mind.
Larval: “It seems to me that substance explains very little in Spinoza. Rather, if you want explanation in Spinoza you have to investigate relations among modes and their various interactions.” You are right. But substance is an explanation in itself, standing opposed to various superstitions and, belatedly, to other monistic systems, Leibnitz’s as the best example. Spinoza explicitly states in E5p24, “The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God.” Couple this advice to the axiom preceding Part Four, “There is in Nature no individual thing that is not surpassed in strength and power by some other thng…” and we wind up right where Spinoza began, with the definitions presented in Part One — an infinity of “things,” all of which are finite in themselves, but infinite in the relatioonship of their “explanations.”
Perhaps — because I’m new here — I ought to get “wordy” about my general take on Spinoza. I think of him as the ultimate pragmatist. I got the first clue for this from E1def4, where he defines the attributes of substance in terms of what the “intellect perceives.” Other clues can be found in similar choices of words, but I was particularly grabbed by the remarks he made to Simon de Vries in letter 8, where he leaves little doubt about the nature of the definitions he has used in the “Ethics.” His definitions are of the “curved line” variety. I say “little doubr” only because Spinoza nowhere says clearly which sort of definition he used, but to argue that his are of the “straight line” sort would be to disregard the iconoclastic nature of his entire work. He surely meant that he was defining God in a way that would be remarkably different from the conventional understanding.
I struggled long and hard with the idea that we cannot make useful statements (ethical dictums) that would pass muster as adequate ideas, and finally concluded that Spinoza would agree and that it would make not a sungle dent in his philosophy. The adequate ideas that follow from his axioms and definitions lose their adequacy (as Larval brilliantly showed above) if we refuse to accept his definitions, even in their smallest part. The adequacy of logic and causation can hardly be doubted, but they tell us nothing specific about how to deal with our real-world problems. The “Ethics” is not a rule book on how to act, but rather a schematic that outlines a more perfect envelope for our thinking. Kvond’s remark about “Ethics” being an exercise book demonstrating right thinking comes close. But I think it is not only that but is also a description for a more practical (i.e., effective) way of thinking about how the world works. His discussion in Part Two of “common properties” — beginning with E2p37 — describes the way we may adequately think about objects (extended things). This discussion lays out the program under which science can proceed. But we must, I think, note it well that one of the objects science is to deal with is the human brain. More to the point, if Spinoza is right, we do not have to know the details of how the brain does what it does in order to know that it does it in accord with the law of causes (and we can know this by logical deduction from the axioms in Part One). And this means that if we formulate a practical idea (an ethical dictums) our brains will have us act on that idea whether it is “true” or “false.” With this view of how we think — and of what we are — Spinoza has settled all responsibility for our behavior right where it belongs, on the behaving person. And given that we are absolute prisoners of our brains, having this adequate idea of how the brain works (and we work) we become immediately more conscious of our abilities and responsibiities in the world. Thus, Spinoza’s view of God offers, at the very least, a path to “salvation” that is not anchored to superstitious beliefs and false notions of the mind’s power.
I realize that, apart from my remarks about Spinoza’s pragmatism, this is vanilla Spinozism, but then, what else should it be?
February 17, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Kvond asks: “What would be an example of two entities sharing the same essence (in Spinoza’s terms), and how does this invalidate Spinoza’s reasoning about Substance?”
Given that Larval has deferred his answer, let me try one.
First, the essence of substance is that it exists. Beyond that factum, our knowledge of substance is limited to what we perceive by way of its attributes. (But note that we do not directly perceive the attributes, only their modes. We deduce the attributes pragmatically from the modes.) But I take it you’re asking about Spinoza’s claim that if two substances possess an attribute in common then they are not two different substances but one and the same. Take the example of the God of Genesis as one substance and the universe, his creation, as another. Unless we choose to give God supernatural powers — and Spinoza cannot do that — we must confess that for a physical thing to cause a different physical thing to exist, it must itself possess the attribute of physicality. But if the God of Genesis did possess physicality as an attribute (and how else explain his creative power), then we have the example of two (presumed) substances possessing the same attribute. But the second, created substance thus cannot properly be called a substance since it fails as the cause of itself.
But even if we grant supernatural power to the God of Genesis, and say that he created the universe ex nihilo, then because the two substances possess no attribute in common, they cannot truthfully relate to each other. That is, if the God of Genesis is our creator, then we have no means (other than supernatural revelation) to know anything about him. So, even if there are many true substances, none can know of the other and any notions we might express about such other substances would all be equally “true” and equally “false.” In other words, they would all be superstitions.
But all of this depends on accepting Spinoza’s definitions and axioms. To employ (out of context) Wittgenstein’s ethical dictum, Spinoza’s explanation of God as a “becomer” (as opposed to a creator) is useful. It is language put to use. And as I said in my previous post, its use goes beyond the mere answering of rhetorical questions. We can use the language to achieve a more perfect way of living, if not as a society, at least as a “saved” individual.
February 17, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Ah, Kvond, I see that I have answered the wrong question. I think you were responding to Larval’s discussion of two objects that presumably possessed the same essence. If we restrict the question to a consideration of extended objects, and accept Spinoza’s axiom E1ax4, that knowledge of an effect includes knowledge of the cause, and if we take the leap and say that this axiom is somehow involved in the essence of objects, then there cannot be two objects with the same essence. Peter and Paul may be of the same species, but they are essentially, in the cause-effect sense, different. (All of which adds infinite complexity to the problem we call “ethics.”)
BTW, Kvond…after reading your replies here more carefully, I suspect that what you refer to as “asymtotic adequacy” brings you and I into very close company. My understanding of Spinoza as a pragmatist is essentially thisL that if we take him seriously, we may in fact achieve a level of understanding of “things” (including ourselves) that would take on asymtotic form…Spinoza’s conception of Heaven.
February 18, 2009 at 1:10 am
Just a few scattered thoughts concerning this exchange, which I’ve found very interesting. please forgive me, if I don’t cite Spinoza, but I truly don’t have the will to root around in the Ethics to find stuff.
Concerning adequate ideas: My sense has been that ‘adequate idea’ designates what Spinoza calls elsewhere (somewhere in the Letters, I think) a pure positivity. That is, it’s an infinite, unlimited, and unconstrained force for change (Spinoza jokes somewhere that ideas typically function by limitation and negation, and whenever we try to think positivity, we simply negate the negation; contra negative philosophies of Hegel and Schelling, the doubled negation doesn’t produce a positivity).
Anyhow, Pure Ideas are active, and causing, rather than passive and caused (think natura naturata rather than natura naturans). And we have them to the extent that live spinozistically virtuous lives (i.e. are able to increase our power while maintaining our conatus’ balance of drives). In a sense, one is a subject for Spinoza only insofar as one has an adequate idea — i.e. only insofar as one is self-moving or sui-generis (quick dem: the mind is the idea of the body; adequate ideas are pure positivities; only what is finite, negative, and limited can be acted upon, or be passive => adequate ideas are sui-generis bodies).
The problem, however, is the relationship between adequate ideas and so called common notions. But that’s a separate problem….
Viz essence: isn’t the essence of a thing simply the attribute under which it is conceived? I don’t think there’s any mystery about how two things can share the same essence, since (1) modes have an essence only insofar as they are caused and (2) cause is only coherent when viewed from the perspective of one of the attributes (only things of the same kind can limit one another and enter into causal-affective networks). But this introduces that pesky mode-attribute-substance problem that kvond still thinks is a problem created by secondary lit ( ;-) ).
February 18, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Don’t have much time, to respond in detail here, but…
Levi: “On the one hand, we use “the same” to refer to members of the same kind. Thus, you and I are the same in that we belong to the same kind, or the human. By contrast, we use “the same” to refer to the same entity.”
Kvond: Spinoza is inconsistent on this. Generally each modal thing has a different essence, a uniqueness which is unresolvable into any other modal thing. But then when discussing the capacity of men to find agreement he says that they have the “same nature” (and possibly even essence, I don’t recall). This puts him into seeming conflict in just the way that you suggest.
But the way that I read this is that two men have the same nature due to the capacity to form a mutual object which combines both of them. So, in a sense, they both as ideational and extensional expressions in a self-supporting way, combine to make a composite object, which is its own object with its own essence. (But there is no universal man, which is only a confused idea, Spinoza is strict about it). Key is seeing that where Hobbes says, “Man is a wolf to man” Spinoza says “man is a god to man”. Two men share enough mutualities such that one man can make another so much more free and powerful, they can combine and become a new thing twice as powerful as either of them (ideally, this is how he puts it).
I’m not sure though if the same potential problem arises in the early propositions because the numericity of same really only counts from the modal perspective. The entire prop 5 argument really rests on the fullness of the notion explanation through causes. If there is a point of logic which would say that multiple Substances could share an attribute, but all have other attributes from each other (and this is I believe a criticism that Leibniz makes), as oppposed to Spinoza’s assumption of One Substance and an Infinity of Attributes, the logical possibly is foreclosed by the necessities of explanation itself, explanation as causal force. The reason why we must assume two attributes (or an infinity of them), and not two substances (or an infinity of them) is that for Spinoza there must be a causal ground, something that only Singular Substance can provide. This is strongly linked through the vector of power, knowledge and action which pervades his descriptions of the world. Each thing has greater reality the more it acts as its own self-cause, that is, the more it approaches asymptotically the capacity that Substance has. To call individual objects or their essences autonomous and self-caused is to not grasp what cause is. The ground of Substance is what puts all modal beings on an imperative of combinative action, the ability to harness more and more complex patterns of interaction so as to make of oneself and other things something which is more self-determining than before. The appeal of this interpretive grounding is not just logical, but also empiricial for Spinoza, things in the world which are more powerful are those things which are more their own cause. The investigation into real beings points the mind up and out toward an aymptotic limit upon which all beings naturally are graded upon, the ultimately self-caused horizon of totality, that which has no exterior. And one strengthens oneself to the degree that one participates in just this dynamic.
If there were a multiplicity of Substances, all rolling about and cross indexed, what would be needed in Spinoza’s view is their cause, and thus their explanation. It is not enough to simply primordeally posit them. The reason for this is that with such a dispersive understanding of substances, the traction in the real life that is real ontological power increase when causes are understood (in particular one’s own causes) becomes undercut. And where there is no explanation, there is no path to freedom.
One can see this very problem in Latour, one that Graham is seeking to solve, but in which is having very little progress. Latour, like Spinoza, sees a world of actors all existing in various degrees of power and effectiveness, but has no real explanation for how or why this state has come about, hence, his local and secular occasionalism. But failing to explain actually brings about a blockade for actors who are looking to become more connected, more linked, more substantial…in Spinoza’s terms, more self-determining. One can say, “cajol, humor, convince, connect, bully, trick as many people and object conditions as you can” but unless these actions are understood causally, there is no real power change (and one certainly does not understand well when you are the subect of any of these). Only the causal understanding of connections gives the kind of traction which results in effective self-determination.
Ultimately Spinoza’s logic of one substance is his logic for how modal things can leverage their own increase in power and freedom.
Sorry, that went on longer than I wanted.
Alexei, sorry I don’t have time to comment.
Frank, my next post on my blog may help explain how Spinoza’s Substance and Heidegger’s Being are quite aligned, if we relieve Heidegger of his human-centric vision of the world.
February 18, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Frank,
I had a moment to return to your last comment. On the first half we seem to be in agreement, and then on the last as well.
I do see Spinoza as incredibily pragmatic, though it makes a strange Pragmaticism. This comes into view if you correct the distant vision of the centuries that have made Spinoza an Abstractist, a man separated from real, concrete consequences. This view is changes. As uncovered to a very small degreee in my research into his optical practices, Spinoza is coming to be seen as a hard-nosed scientist, experimenter, optical theorist, maker of some of Europe’s most powerful telescopes and microscopes, daily craftsman of glass, minor mathematician. It was the pragmaticism of real tool use, the kind that cuts your hand if you use it incorrectly, the kind where technique makes all the difference in result (as opposed to Heideggerian theoretical and idealized tool use), that made for Spinoza I believe “the real world” the ultimate testing ground for even his greatest abstractions. The most lofty ideas must be ideas that press upon the smallest of material and mental differences, their perspectives bringing real and registerable change. While he toiled at night working his propositions, he ground glass under the pressure of his hand, assembled instruments, conducted tests and investigations in the day. There is a very good reason why he made the body and the mind parallel, they were parallel in his experience as well. I think this goes a long way toward exposing his pragmaticism. It also makes for an interesting parallel between Heidegger and Spinoza, because while Graham works hard at correcting a too Pragmatic reading of Heidegger, we now have to work hard at correcting a too-Rationalistic reading of Spinoza.
February 21, 2009 at 3:09 am
[…] he appeals to propositions he has already demonstrated. Thus, Spinoza appeals to 1p1 where he believes he has established that “substance, by nature, is prior to its affections.” If, Spinoza […]