Right now I’m teaching part I of Spinoza’s Ethics in my intro to philosophy class and I find myself wracking my brain on his position on free will and determinism. Here’s the problem as I see it: For Spinoza everything is the result of efficient causes such that for any event X that occurs, event Y is the only possible event event that can follow and could not have been otherwise. Spinoza applies this principle across the board, such that it, presumably, would include all human thought, feelings, etc., etc. (am I wrong here?). If this is accurate, then humans would be a bit like zhu zhu pets:
In the video, the zhu zhu pet appears to be acting for the sake of goals, purposes, ends or final causes, but this is entirely an illusion. In reality the zhu zhu pet’s actions are just a product of efficient causes or the movement of its gears and so on. Presumably this would be the case for human beings as well. The zhu zhu pet cannot act otherwise than it acts because it’s actions are purely the result of the mechanisms or efficient causes that produce these actions. This too would be the case for humans.
So here’s where I find myself confused. Presumably Spinoza wishes to accomplish something in writing the Ethics. He hopes to provide us with the tools that would allow us to overcome the slavery of sad passions so that we might have joyous affects. The problem is that this project and Spinoza’s thesis about determinism seem to be mutually exclusive. If Spinoza’s determinism is true then it would seem to follow that every thought and feeling I have is already pre-determined by preceding thoughts and feelings. I would have no power or control over what I think or feel but would be like an unfolding code or algorithm. Those people who someday attain joyous passions would be predetermined to do so in much the same way that the movements of the zhu zhu pet is predetermined, while those people who are predetermined to remain mired in sad passions would be predetermined to do so. Yet the project of freeing myself from sad passions through knowledge of causes seems to entail that I must have some minimal freedom that allows me to purposively engage in these activities. In other words, it seems to require that I can choose to take up this project.
I feel like I must be missing something fundamental in Spinoza or that I must have misunderstood him in some very basic and fundamental way. I am asking these questions in earnest here and am not trying to spark and interpretive battle over Spinoza. If anyone has any insight here it would be deeply appreciated.
Larval Subjects . 
April 12, 2011 at 5:13 pm
I think Spinoza’s aim is to dissolve a false dilemma: either I am the absolute source of my activity, or I am merely the passive recipient of the causal forces that shape me. For Spinoza, human agency just *is* a way for natural history to unfold.
The key, I think, to understanding his view here is this: he is not claiming that agency is *nowhere*; in fact, he is claiming that agency is *everywhere*. This is the key to understanding his notion of conatus. I think your own terminology is useful here: Spinoza advocates for a democracy of all objects (all finite individuals). First, finite individuals include not simply particular objects like me or you or the sun or the Earth; multiple-objects like the human species, the solar system and the Milky Way are equally individuals. Second, each individual has its own conatus – its own tendency to preserve itself in its being. But to have a conatus is not to be an extra-natural will: it’s a mode of being-determined-by-nature. The history of nature unfolds very locally in the conatus of the individual which is *me*, less locally in the individual of which I am a sub-individual, the human species, even less locally in the individual of which the human species is a sub-individual, the Earth, and so on.
When Spinoza rejects final causation, I don’t believe for a minute he rejects activity which is purpose-driven: some of the things I do are guided by my ends. But it is crucial to realize that the notion of *final cause* is not simply the notion of purpose-driven activity. Rather, it is a technical notion from Aristotelian metaphysics, a particular theoretical construal of purpose-driven activity. For Aristotle, final causation is subsumed under formal causation: a thing’s activities have the functions and purposes they do because of it has the form it does. For example, to refer to Aristotle’s picture in the “Nicomachean Ethics,” for Aristotle a central activity in human life is ‘activity of the soul in accordance with reason’ – the process whereby human beings reason about what to do, make decisions and then act on those decisions. The purpose or function at which such activity aims is eudaimonia – human well-functioning. However, this is the case because any particular human being is what it is because it has the form ‘human’ – a form which gives us its essence or nature. However, for Aristotle, the human form is a matter of *local* structure. the human form is so to speak *in* me (and you, and any other human), and that form shapes the activities I undertake and the processes I undergo. However, the form ‘human’ is not in the tree, the rock, the Earth, etc. To the extent that these are all substances – genuine individuals – they have their own local forms shaping their own activities and processes. Each substance is, so to speak, a bubble defined by its form independently of any other form.
Spinoza’s metaphysics is deeply opposed to this atomistic view of things’ natures. For him, every thing is what it is in virtue of its place in nature. There is no segregation from nature in any sense. But while Spinoza thinks this, it does not mean he rejects the notion that I, you, the Earth etc. are genuine individuals. For him, to have a place in nature *is* to be genuine individual: having a place in nature is what makes genuine individuality possible.
His rejection of localism and atomism is part and parcel of his rejection of the notion that agency requires a kind of ‘big-bang’ moment – a moment in which I am the absolute origin of my actions. For him, this is a myth, a bit of mystifying nonsense. We don’t *lose* our agency in being locations at which natural history unfolds: rather, being a distinctive location at which natural history unfolds – to be sure, different from other locations, other beings – is the heart of human agency. Distinctions between the active and the passive have to be made *within* this framework, and the desire to see ourselves as absolute origins of our activity is a remnant of a (for him) false picture of divinity. We think that God is the absolute agent because we think he is the absolute origin of his own activity. And since we think of ourselves as created in his image, we think our own agency must amount to the same. But what is involved here, for Spinoza, is both a false image or God and a false image of ourselves: the mistake is to think that our agency must be extra-natural, that our actions must be like little ‘big bang’ moments in order for us to be free, genuine agents.
April 12, 2011 at 5:38 pm
Wow, many thanks Mandel! I’ve only gotten a chance to skim this over, but this is hugely helpful!
April 12, 2011 at 6:55 pm
This is not meant to supplant Mandel’s excellent answer, but I might ad I don’t see the problem since we can say: then Spinoza was determined to write the Ethics, it was determined to influence you to act differently, etc.
April 12, 2011 at 9:06 pm
[…] Posted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized Leave a Comment Thinking more about the question I posed earlier with respect to Spinoza and Mandel’s gorgeous follow-up I find myself […]
April 12, 2011 at 9:07 pm
I want to second Mandel’s excellent answer. Spinoza is very clear that God is not a unified and determinate entity. This is what gets us off on the wrong track, as Mandel pointed out. God is simply the infinite power of existing and the infinite web of causal relations. There is no God’s eye view from which one can see that we are like the zhu zhu of the post (great video by the way). It is this assumption that lead to many of the false assumptions about Spinoza and determinism, but this assumption brings into play a unitary perspective and transcendence, both of which Spinoza rejects. But now I converge with Mandel’s points which I need not repeat.
April 12, 2011 at 9:15 pm
I’m not sure if it precisely covers your question as regards Spinoza (Mandel almost certainly answers that better), but you may or may not find Patricia Churchland’s take on it interesting, in her strangely short (2 1/2 pages!) 1983 article, Is Determinism Self-Refuting?.
April 12, 2011 at 10:41 pm
Freedom is only a matter of degree not of determination or no determination. Absolute freedom is one completey caused from within. For modes, freedom comes in degrees. The more auto-determination of a mode the higher its power, and power is nothing but freedom. The more a thing is caused in its actions from without the less free it is.But determination is in fact a must.The question is where it comes from.
In some sense, Spinoza’s act of writing the Ethics was the highest act of rationality and so of freedom and thereby of power that a human beeing could achieve.
It’s late in Europe, my English isn’t that good, but I recommend the Book of Micheal Della Rocca on Spinoza. It’s fantastic.
April 12, 2011 at 10:47 pm
And I should add, I forgot. The more a action is determined from outside and not from the inside of an Individual, the less it is the action of that individual, so responsability comes in a correlation to degrees of freedom to. That means you can’t say I was just less free and more determined by external causes, because it was not I, how acted this or that necessary way.
April 13, 2011 at 11:16 am
@ Mandel Cabrera
If I understand you correctly you suggest a shift from “freedom as comprehended necessity” (i.e., emancipation from the illusion of free will & accepting causal determinism) to the paradoxical “freedom as comprehended NECESSITY OF freedom.”
(i.e., freedom is not something that we must achieve by overcoming natural obstacles and definitely is not the monstrous crack in the Substance/Deus sive Natura, but the way we are pre-determined, our “natural” condition, our emplacement in the sense that we are part of Nature precisely AS FREE INDIVIDUALS).
Please correct me if I’m sailing the wrong seas here.
April 14, 2011 at 8:53 pm
Spinoza is not the Substance in and through himself. He must have been floored to realize this. Amor Dei Intellectualis strikes me as kind of an organizing intelligence, with Substance as Spinoza’s crowning realization.
Indeed, Spinoza was fascinated by nascent experimental science. Efficient causation and determinism had never been fresher or more robust stances than in the mid-1600s in Amsterdam. For a Sephardic lens grinder, the thought and the feeling of literally partaking of the modes and attributes of an unknowable Power would produce rapturous affect.
The leverage Spinoza exacted from the view of efficient causation is prodigious. His reading of biblical history, his outspoken views on political tolerance, and his practical scientific efforts are all strengthened by an appeal to the conatus of a singular Blessed Thorn. Nothing gets the iron filings pointed in the same direction like Spinoza’s view of efficient causation.
April 14, 2011 at 9:47 pm
Lawrence Krauss recently wrote that “one must point out that in science when one is trying to explain and predict data, one tries to explore all possible physical causes for some effect before resorting to the supernatural.”
Spinoza is a crucial link between the natural sciences and the humanities in this regard.
One should not underestimate this point when considering the meaning of Spinoza’s views of causation.
April 14, 2011 at 10:00 pm
Spinoza’s efficient causation also replaces a medieval notion of prophecy inherited from Maimonides. For Spinoza, the role of lawgiver and messianic warrior become situated and called-forth by deterministic Power. This is very important. In this regard, you cannot simply pray a messiah into existence. The entire known and unknown universe must conspire. Questions of the necessary and sufficient functions of a social system to produce positive affect are opened to universal questions of religious toleration and secularized administration by virtue of an enlightened awareness of the interdependence of modes and attributes on Power.
April 15, 2011 at 3:54 pm
There is no free will in an absolute sense for Spinoza. Only God/Nature has free activity, but even for it anything resembling the concept of a volitional faculty or “free will” would be impossible, for its actions would flow from its nature in the same way that the nature of a triangle would necessitate that the sum of its interior angles is 180 degrees.
I had a paper I wrote on this published by Boston University, so I’m fairly certain about this one. I’m amazed that no one has quoted from Spinoza’s Letter 58. Spinoza wrote to a Mr. G.H. Schuller thus:
April 15, 2011 at 7:35 pm
Superstitious as I am, I’m reluctant to post the 13th comment on this thread. Hopefully Lady Luck will give me a pass.
Anyway: I don’t think you’re missing anything at all. You’re dean on: there is a fundamental contradiction between Spinoza’s metaphysical determinism and his emancipatory agenda.
The way I resolved it to myself when reading the Ethics was as follows:
–No one is really ever ultimately and metaphysically free.
–But if you’re lucky enough to stumble upon the stoics, Spinoza, Buddhism, or something similar during your lifetime, or to formulate a similar creed on your own, you have a chance of obtaining a degree of relative freedom from human bondage to sad passions. But this stumbling-upon or self-formation of an emancipatory philosophy is itself ultimately determined by chains of mechanical causation over which humans have no real control. So it’s not really freedom from the grand perspective.
I used to actually find this perspective kind of comforting–but these days I find myself wondering if it’s enough.
April 15, 2011 at 7:37 pm
I meant “dead on,” obviously.
April 16, 2011 at 12:50 am
Looks like I lucked out and escaped 13th place. Thanks if you changed the order, Levi.