Notes from the lecture on SPINOZA’S PHILOSOPHY.

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Notes from the lecture on SPINOZA’S PHILOSOPHY.

March 4, 2005

For Spinoza, the main task of philosophy is to explain the path to human happiness and the moral life on a fully scientific basis. In this respect, according to Spinoza, Descartes failed as a philosopher. In order for Spinoza to achieve this goal, he thought it was necessary to clear up some misconceptions about the nature of the world and its relation to God. And for Spinoza this required a new metaphysics, a new way of thinking about substance. Metaphysical reflection on the nature of substance was unavoidable because the search for happiness cannot be separated from the intellect and a right understanding of reality.

According to Spinoza, since substances are by their very nature completely self-contained, there can be only one substance. The whole of reality is comprised of one substance. And that one substance is God. Therefore, we can say that for Spinoza, God is one with the universe. To be more precise, Nature is God. This means that for Spinoza, the traditional distinction between the Creator and the Creation, between God and nature no longer obtains. Spinoza completely rejects this Jewish and Christian belief in a God who has purposes, who designs and creates a world, and who loves and cares about his creation. For Spinoza, it is a misleading to think of God and nature as two different entities. (Spinoza’s view is called pantheism). When Spinoza says that God is the only substance, he means that all individuals, all human beings, all living things are various forms of the One substance, God. According to Spinoza, the essence of a substance is an attribute or essential quality belonging to the substance. Among the many attributes or modes of substance, the ones that we are most familiar with are mind and body.

Spinoza thought that the speculations of Descartes were still too much regulated by the Judea-Christian conception of God and the teachings of the medieval Catholic tradition.

Listen to what Spinoza wrote to his friend, Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the Royal Society in London: “ I hold an opinion about God and Nature very different from that which modern Christians are keen to defend. For I maintain that God is the immanent cause of all things, not the transcendent cause.” In this letter Spinoza also says that many of the attributes which Christians ascribe to God are not eternal attributes but things created. And what Christians consider aspects of the created world, he, Spinoza, sees as eternal attributes of God. He says in the letter: “I could not separate God from nature as all those of whom I have any knowledge have done.” Spinoza rejected the Cartesian view of God as the infinite, transcendent and free cause of a world of finite substances. He replaced the Cartesian view with a view of God as coextensive with the whole of nature. For Spinoza, there must be no distinction between God and the whole of nature. This meant that Spinoza denied that Will and Understanding are real attributes of God. It is wrong to say, according to Spinoza, that understanding and will are real things in God. Not only does Spinoza reject Descartes’ view of God as the transcendent cause of nature, he also rejects Descartes’ distinction between the mind and nature. In another letter to Oldenburg (these are my favorite among Spinoza’s writings), he writes, “ As regards the human mind, I believe that it is also part of nature; for I maintain that there exists in nature an infinite power of thinking, which, insofar as it is infinite, contains subjectively the whole of nature, and its thoughts proceed in the same manner as nature—that is, in the sphere of ideas….I maintain that the human mind is a part of an infinite understanding.” (Works of Spinoza, Letter 15, p.292). For those interested in what Spinoza the Jew thought of Christ, Letter 21 to Oldenburg provides some surprising reflections. Spinoza writes, “I do not think it necessary salvation to know Christ according to the flesh (that is, the historical Jesus): but with regard to the Eternal Son of God, that is the Eternal Wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all things and especially in the human mind, and above all in Christ Jesus, the case is far otherwise. For without this no one can come to a state of blessedness, inasmuch as it alone teaches, what is true or false, good or evil. This wisdom was made especially manifest through Jesus Christ.” (Works, p. 299).

In the first two books of his Ethics, Spinoza tries to show that there is and can be only one substance with many attributes. In this way, Spinoza tries to overcome the dualism of Descartes in which mind and body are two different substances. (Magee and Quinton offer a helpful discussion on Spinoza’s problem with any kind of dualism that makes God and creation to distinct or separate realms.) Spinoza believed that his approach to the metaphysics of substance has profound implications for the meaning of life in this world. Spinoza thought that his metaphysics or philosophy of substance was not some obscure and irrelevant bit of abstract speculation. He held that it was the clue to the meaning of life and happiness.

In Spinoza’s conception of the real nature of things, there is no ultimate distinction between different individuals. He wants to say that we are all part of one single substance, which is also God. What this really means is that our sense of opposition to one another, or isolation from one another is just an illusion. In Spinoza’s view, the Christian idea that we are separated from God by our sin is also a mistaken view. (Sin can only be false perception and ultimately an illusion for Spinoza.. Reinhold Niebuhr, a moral philosopher, disagrees and argues that human sinfulness is the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine.)

Spinoza’s thinking would have a profound influence upon the shapers of modern European thought, especially upon thinkers such as Goethe and Hegel. Hegel who found the traditional Judeo-Christian concept of a transcendent God that stands over against the world an alienating one, turned to Spinoza with enthusiasm. It was Novalis who described Spinoza as a God intoxicated man. Don Garrett in an excellent article in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy writes, “Spinoza ascribes to nature most of the characteristics which Western theologians have ascribed to God: Spinoza’s nature is infinite, eternal, necessarily existing, the object of the ontological argument, the first cause of all things, all knowing, and the being whose contemplation produces blessedness, intellectual love, and participation in a kind of immortality or eternal life.” One must take seriously then Spinoza’s belief in God. But it must be noted that he denies that God is personal; he denies that God acts for purposes; and he denies that anything is good or evil from the divine perspective; or that there is a personal immortality involving memory.

Aristotle’s gave to the West its philosophical understanding of causality. He also described God as causa Sui, the cause of itself. Spinoza had used this notion of cause in an argument for God’s existence. However, his chief use of this notion of cause was in defense of determinism. In a deterministic view of things, from a given cause, the effect follows necessarily. However, Spinoza’s determinism, although inspired by science, has as its focus something else. It is the idea of fate or destiny. According to Spinoza, whatever happens to us happens necessarily. So if we say that the universe is God, we can be sure that whatever happens to us, happens for a reason.

His determinism is the context and basis of his ethics. He wants us to see ourselves as one with God and other people. He also wants us to see our lives as determined by divine necessity. In the Ethics, he tries to establish his position mathematically, deductively, starting from a few basic axioms. He believes that the details of our lives are shaped by the philosophical outlook, which we adopt. Our lives, it turns out, are essentially about our emotions. And the last three books of the Ethics are devoted to a study of the emotions. This is ignored in many discussions of Spinoza’s Ethics since commentators usually stop after the end of the second book where the metaphysical position is established. But his discussion of the emotions is essential to his philosophy of life. If you wish to understand his view of human freedom, read the last book of the Ethics (Part V).

Spinoza teaches that an emotion is a confused idea through which the mind affects our desires through our bodies. An example of this confusion can be seen in our tendency to want what we cannot have, or to want what we already have but do not know that we have it. Spinoza shows that it pointless to want what we are not meant (determined) to have, and much of what we want—union with other people and oneness with God---we already have. Most of our emotions are thoughts based on our desires, usually bodily desires. To the extent that we are slaves of our emotions and desires, we are not really in control of our selves. We need to be in control of our attitudes and accept ourselves. Acceptance or resignation is the right attitude to life.

But Spinoza does not recommend the Stoic rejection of emotion in favor of apathy or indifference). Quite the opposite. He teaches that the emotion that comes with an attitude of acceptance is bliss. And this is experience of bliss is a far more preferable emotion than the ephemeral, the momentary feeling of the satisfaction of bodily desires. In this way, we obtain a feeling of control over ourselves. To have this is to share in Spinoza’s philosophical vision which he calls the intellectual love of God. The whole point of his metaphysics is to bring his reader to experience this intellectual love of God.

[You (students) should look at Quinton’s answer to Magee’s question whether, according to Spinoza, we do or do not have free will. Quinton says that Spinoza clearly rejects as an illusion the commonsense notion of freedom, the view that a human being can “sometimes act as spontaneous, uncaused cause of things, exercising the freedom of pure spontaneity”. On the other hand, Quinton notes, Spinoza recognized that there is such a thing as bondage, a state of human servitude from which people can be liberated, there is a kind of freedom that is available for those who wish to escape from bondage. Quinton calls attention to Spinoza’s distinction between passive emotions and active emotions. Passive emotions such as hatred, anger and fear arise within us “by the frustrating influence of the parts of the world that are outside us.” But we also have active emotions, “those generated by an understanding of our circumstances in the world, a knowledge of what is really going on. The more our activities are caused by active emotions and the less by passive ones, the less we are in bondage, the more we are ourselves. This is the only kind of freedom that Spinoza can countenance.”

The impact of Spinoza on the Western mind has been enormous. His influence extends not only to the history of biblical criticism and literature including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Heine, Shelley, George Eliot, Somerset Maugham, but also upon 20^th century thinkers such as Freud and Einstein. Some admirers look upon Spinoza’s monistic metaphysics as an anticipation of twentieth century field physics. He can also be seen as the precursor of contemporary modern determinism and naturalism, and of the mind-body identity theory.

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