Scruton, Roger 2002. Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spinoza's greatness and originality are hidden behind a remote, impassive, and often impenetrable style. Few have understood his arguments in theri entirety; fewer still have recognized their continuing moral significance. I have presented no more than an outline, and am acutely aware of the injustice done, not only to Spinoza, but also to the patient scholars who have wrestled with his meaning. My primary object has been to describe, in simple language, the contours of a complex system of thought. Even so, I have been unable to make Spinoza's theory of substance fully accessible, and Chapter 3 must therefore be read twice if it is to be understood. (Scruton 2002)
May go to towards explaining why Spinoza is a well-known name but the substance of his philosophy is not frequently and easily summarized.
Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632-77) lived in the Netherlands at a time when scientific discovery, religious division, and profound political change had revolutionized the nature and application of philosophy. While he joined eagerly in the contemporary intellectual battles, philosophy was, for Spinoza, not a weapon but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported but a supreme and certain blessedness. (Scruton 2002: 1)
John Locke was born in the same year.
But every order requires a sacrifice, and that demanded by philosophy - the adoption of truth as one's master and one's goal - is neither easily undertaken, nor readily understood by those who refuse it. To the mass of mankind, therefore, the philosopher may appear as a spiritual saboteur, a subverter of things lawfully established, and an apologist for the devil. So Spinoza appeared to his contemporaries, and for many years after his death he was regarded as the greatest heretic of the 17th century. (Scruton 2002: 1)
Cool.
For several centuries such people had lived relatively securely in the Spanish peninsula, protected by the Muslim princes, and mingling openly with their Islamic neighbours. Their theologicans and scholars had joined in the great revival of Aristotelian philosophy, and one of them - Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides, 1135-1204) - had exerted a far-reaching [||] influence, not only over Judaism but also over Islam and Christianity. It was Maimonides, indeed, who did most to set medieval theology upon its Aristotelian path - a path that led, at last, to the strange stark theism, which many denounced as atheism, of Spinoza. (Scruton 2002: 1-3)
Your religion is weird, guy.
At the age of 20, Spinoza began to take lessons from the teacher Frances van den Enden, who introduced him to the scholastic philosophy that was to provide so much of the terminology of Spinoza's Ethics. Van den Enden also filled him with enthusiasm for modern science, and no doubt spoke to him of the new philosophy of Descartes, who had himself lived for most of his creative life in Holland. (Scruton 2002: 8)
Just can't bipass Descartes.
Van den Enden's school was already notorious in Amsterdam as a centre of free enquiry, and by 1656 Spinoza's life was so great a scandal to the Jewish community that it could no longer be endured. J. M. Lucas, a friend of Spinoza's who wrote his biography, tells us that two young acquaintances from the synagogue came atthis time to interrogate the philosopher concerning his religious opinions. He is said to have maintained not only that God has a body, but that nothing in the scriptures could be adduced that would tend to the contrary opinion. The two men left in anger, and, according to another story, embellished by Bayle, Spinoza was subsequently attacked on the steps of the synagogue. He is said to have kept by him thereafter the cloack which had been torn by his assailant's dagger. (Scruton 2002: 9)
Whether or not God has a body, surely s/he doesn't condone murder?
Through Tschirnhaus Spinoza made the acquaintance of Leibniz, who was already familiar with some of his writings. The letters between the two philosophers were cordial, although Spinoza at first distrusted Leibniz, who in turn referred to him privately as 'a Jew expelled from the synagogue for his monstrous opinions'. Since the fundamental assumptions behind their two systems are profoundly similar, it is perhaps not surprising that the two philosophers - whose conclusions are wholly opposed - should have treated each other with a certain caution. (Scruton 2002: 16)
Noted.
In Maimonides he would have encountered the image of philosophy as a guide to life; in the Kabbalah the conception of God's immanence, and of the ultimate identity between the Creator and his creation. In the Talmud, and again in Maimonides, he would have seen an obsessive love of moral detail - a minute examination of human passion and action, combined with a suspicion of the schematic morality of abstract principle. All those ideas resurge in the Ethics, in remarkable and transmuted form. (Scruton 2002: 23)
We are God's body?
Put very simply, St Anselm's argument is as follows. We understand by God a being greater than which nothing can be thought. This idea clearly exists in our mind and is the idea of an object with every perfection - every 'positive attribute'. But if the object of this idea were to exist solely in our mind, and not in reality, there would be an idea of something superior to it, namely of the being that possesses not only all the perfections already conceived, but also the additional perfection of real existence. Which is contrary to the hypothesis; hence the idea of a most perfect being must correspond to reality. In other words, it is a necessary truth that a most perfect being exists. (Scruton 2002: 26)
Because we can think of it, it must exist.
Spinoza shared Aristotle's view of man as a rational being, whose reason is expressed not only theoretically and practically, but also in his emotional life. He also followed Aristotle in seeing reason as a kind of discipline, which could turn our emotions in the direction of happiness. He departed from Aristotle, however, in his theory of [|] emotion, in his conception of the relation between reason and passion, and in his idea of happiness, of which he gave a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian description. (Scruton 2002: 27-28)
1) emotions, 2) practice, and 3) theory.
In his Discours de la Méthode of 1636 (that it was written in French and not in Latin was an event in itself), Descartes had imitated a programme a radical intellectual reform, refusing to accept as true any proposition which could not be clearly proven. All science, he argued, must be founded in metaphysics, which is itself the system of self-evident truths - truths which do not require further proof than is involved in understanding them. No proposition can be more certain than the premisses which are assumed in the proof of it. (Scruton 2002: 31)
A priori. Arutlus Meetodist.
Not only geometry, but also logic, have undergone profound changes since Spinoza's day, and while mathematicians and scientists continue to make use of the 'axiomatic method', they are no longer so disposed to believe that the axioms of any science are 'self-evident', or that the 'ideas' necessary to a science may carry some intrinsic mark of truth. Spinoza was himself aware of a major obstacle to that last suggestion, namely that a set of axioms and definitions is composed not of ideas (whatever they may be) but of words, and no word bears its meaning on its face. Only in the context of the system as a whole can the content of any axiom be specified. But how can we guarantee that there is only one consistent interpretation of the system, or that this interpretation will be understood by the enlightened reader? (Scruton 2002: 34)
Faint inklings of semiotics.
The third part, 'On the origin and nature of the emotions', contains Spinoza's account of human nature, and his answer to the major difficulty raised by his own metaphysics: the question of individual existence. If everything exists in God, in what sense does the world contain individual things, and in what sense am I an individual, with a nature and destiny that are mine? (Scruton 2002: 37)
Spinoza's psychology.
Part Four concerns 'Human servitude and the strength of the emotions'. Here Spinoza describes the enslaved condition of humanity, compelled by passion, opinion, and imagination to deny its true nature, and yet at the same time expressing, even in its bondage, the absolute perfection of the universe of which it is a component. (Scruton 2002: 37)
1) passion, 2) opinion, and 3) imagination.
In the first part of the Ethics Spinoza addresses himself to the question 'What exists?' - and his answer is contained in Propositions 14 and 15: 'Except God no substance can be granted or conceived', and 'Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God'. Those striking pronouncements are less clear - and, when interpreted, marginally less surprising - than they seem. The terms 'God', 'substance', 'conceive', and 'in' are all technicalities of Spinoza's philosophy, and their interpretation is a matter of dispute. (Scruton 2002: 38)
The universe is God experiencing itself type deal.
The hidden assumption of Spinoza's philosophy is that reality and conception coincide, so that relations between ideas correspond exactly to relations in reality. At a later point, Spinoza purports to prove this thesis, and to provide a theory of knowledge that will justify his own special version of the method of 'clear and distinct ideas'. But since that method (or something like it) is assumed in the very proof of it, the hidden assumption remains, in the end, no more than an assumption. (Scruton 2002: 39)
Sounds quite absurd on the face of it.
For Spinoza, to say that A causes B is to say that B is dependent on A for its existence and nature. This dependence between things is 'expressed in' or 'conceived through' a dependence between ideas. The idea of B is dependent on the idea of A if its truth must be established by reference to the idea of A. [...] The hidden assumption implies that relations of dependence in the world are all intelligible as logical relations between ideas. Thus something is independent if its properties follow from its idea: that is if you do not need to look outside the idea of the thing in irdore to explain it. (Scruton 2002: 39)
On the one hand this sounds a lot like some pansemiotics. On the other hand Stapledon provides an example of something like this in his description of remote viewing past lives and influencing the minds of those whose minds are viewed.
This odd use of the word 'in' can be explained by an example. Suppose a group of people join to form a club, which then does things, owns things, organizes things. When we say that the club bought a house, we really mean that the members did various things with a specific legal results. But none of the members bought a house. Hence it looks as though the club is an independent entity, doing things on its own account. In fact, however, it is dependent for its existence and nature on the activities of its members. It is only because they do things that the club does anything. In Spinoza's idiom, the club is 'in' its members. We, of course, would say that the members are in the club: the example therefore illustrates the way in which Spinoza's purified metaphysical idiom conflicts with 'the language of man'. (Scruton 2002: 40)
Collective mind is "in" its individual members.
A mode is something which cannot exist independently but only in some other thing, upon which it depends. In his earlier writings Spinoza repeatedly affirms the principle that, except for substances and modes, nothing exists (M Pt 1, Ch. 1; Pt 2, Ch. 1; C XII). However, he does not confine modes to the logical category of properties and relations: modes include individual things. You and I are both modes of the divine substance, since we can both be conceived as not existing, and therefore owe the explanation of our existence to something outside ourselves. Hence we are not self-dependent, and if we exist, it is through the power of something outside of us. On this definition, the category of mode is extremely wide: it includes (in common parlance) properties (the redness of this book); relations (this [|] book's being smaller than others); facts (that this book exists); processes (this book's slow disintegration); and individuals (the book itself). The distinctions between those categories are all insignificant for Spinoza: so far have we already come from 'the language of man'! (Scruton 2002: 42)
Everything except substance is a modification of substance. Got it.
An attribute is 'that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance' (E 1, Definition 4), and there are several - possibly infinitely many - 'attributes'. The reference to the intellect ensures that essences, for Spinoza, are defined relative to our intellectual powers. At the same time, an attribute is not simply a subjective aspect - a way things seem from a particular point of view. For, by the hidden assumption, 'what the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance' really does constitute the essence of substance. Hence the assertion that a substance has two or more attributes is tantamount to the assertion that its essence can be conceptualized in two independent ways: and this is an extremely puzzling idea. On this view, two people can each have complete knowledge of the fundamental nature of a thing, and yet each give completely incommensurable accounts of it. (Scruton 2002: 44)
The thing is what I think it is. It is also what you think it is.
Things in space can be understood a priori, and their nature disclosed to reason, precisely because extension constitutes the essence of whatever possesses it. By conceiving extension the intellect is acquainted with a 'real essence', existing independently of the finite mind which conceives it. The intellect is granted a complete insight into the nature of something - an insight from which the fundamental properties of extended things may eventually be deduced. An attribute is that which is 'attributed' to reality by the intellect, in the course of such a complete and systematic conception. To say that there are two attributes is to say that we can know the world completely in two incommensurable ways. (Scruton 2002: 45)
"In physics, astronomy, chemistry and even in the chemistry of life, man had nothing to teach them." (Stapledon 1930)
Spinoza often cautions us against speaking of God's 'singleness'. To call him 'one or single' is to imply that God might be enumerated - as though, counting the elements of the universe, we stop at the number one (C RL). Number, [|] however, does not pertain to the essence of things: it belongs, rather, to our finite understanding of them, and cannot feature in any a priori exposition of their nature. The origin of this thought is in Moses Maimonides (Guide to the Perplexed, i, 51-7), who argued that number belongs to the 'language of man', and can therefore be applied only negatively to God. But Spinoza went further than Maimonides, and based upon this and similar observations a peculiar and influential philosophy of arithmetic, according to which number signifies, not some property of reality; but a feature of human perception. Of this philosophy I shall have more to say below. (Scruton 2002: 47-48)
Similar case with the pythagorean One, which is both odd and even.
Descartes, like Spinoza, saw the physical world as a single and substantial system. However, he was unable to account for the place of mind within it. Our mental states (ideas) seem to be linked to the physical world by causal connections, without being modifications of any physical substance. They are, Descartes argued, essentially nonphysical, without place, shape, boundaries, or movement. However, only if A and B are modifications of a single substance can there be a causal relation between them. What, then, is the relation of the mind to the body? (Scruton 2002: 49)
Is the mind extended? etc.
Descartes fudged this issue, and it proved to be the major reason for dissatisfaction with the Cartesian system. Spinoza solved the problem in his own remarkable way, by arguing that ideas and physical objects are modifications of a single substance, conceived, however, in two separate and incommensurable ways, now as mind, now as matter or extension. (Scruton 2002: 49)
Here come disembodied minds.
Spinoza upholds the first interpretation in correspondence with Tschirnhaus, but in terms that are so obscure as perhaps to justify the misgivings of the learned. He affirms (C LXIV) that there are infinitely many attributes, but argues that the human mind - which is (see below) the idea of the human body - can know only two, extension (revealed in the body) and thought (revealed in the idea of it). But the explanation is neither intelligible nor obviously sincere. (Scruton 2002: 50)
Only mind and body. No soul.
Moreover, not only does his system contain this great and disconcerting lacuna; the attempt by commentators to fill it has produced one of the most exasperating, tedious, and futile secondary literatures in the entire history of scholarship. I therefore say no more about the problem, except that it is insoluble. (Scruton 2002: 51)
lol
Spinoza expresses his monism in a celebrated phrase; the world is Deus sive Natura - 'God or Nature'. This pronouncement has caused Spinoza to be considered both as an atheist and as a pantheist, even - in the famous words of Novalis - as a 'God-intoxicated man', for whom the divine countenance shines forth from the whole of nature. Both interpretations would have been repudiated by Spinoza as displaying a limited understanding of God. His theology is essentially impersonal, just as his conception of the physical world is essentially theological. All causality obeys a logical paradigm, and all explanation is really a form of proof. To understand the causality of things, therefore, is to understand a complex mental operation, undertaken by an infinite mind. (Scruton 2002: 51)
May explain the impersonal detachment and preferring collective consciousnesses in Stapledon.
Nevertheless, to explain things ultimately we must not relate them to what precedes them in time - since that is merely to relate one mode to another - rather, we must show their timeless relation to the eternal essence of God. An ideal science, therefore, like a true religion, would aim to see the world not in its temporal dimension, but 'under the aspect of eternity' (sub specie aeternitatis), in the manner of a mathematical proof. (Scruton 2002: 52)
A vaguely familiar phrase finally imbued with meaning for me.
The real difficulty for the interpretation is suggested, however, by the comparison with Einstein. Space, time, and number lie at the foundation of modern physics; but what are they for Spinoza? Time in particular seems little better than a metaphor, a kind of pervasive figure of speech which runs through all our experience, but only because our experience is an 'inadequate' guide to ultimate reality. (Scruton 2002: 55)
Time is an illusion, etc.
Spinoza's answer to the riddle of existence can be put succinctly: all things that exist, exist necessarily, in thoroughgoing interdependence. The ensuing metaphysics has certain disturbing implications for man's self-understanding. Mentality may, in some sense, be a distinguishing feature of people: nevertheless, everything in the world is expressible both as idea and as physical object, and the relation between ideas and extended things is made not more but less easy to grasp by Spinoza's theory of the attributes. (Scruton 2002: 56)
May explain "mentality" as a keyword in Stapledon. More so that an account of the evolution and bioengineering of the human body, his is a future history of human mentality.
Furthermore, Spinoza's monism generates a highly paradoxical idea of the human person. The individual person is not, it seems, an individual at all. Nor is anything else. The identity, separateness, and self-sufficiency of the person all seem to be denied by Spinoza, and man, as part of nature, seems to be no more important a feature in the scheme of things than are rocks and stones and trees. (Scruton 2002: 56)
Likewise, strongly similar vibes with Stapledon.
Normally, when we say that an idea is an idea of some object, we do not mean to suggest that the idea and the object are intimately connected. After all, we have ideas of distant objects which cannot exist in the human mind, and ideas of fictions, which do not exist at all. Normally the word 'of' means 'about', and the 'object' of an idea is that which is represented in or through it. For Spinoza, however, that way of thinking is merely a reflection of our own inadequate understanding. The only real cognitive relation that could exist between an idea and a material thing is the relation that exists between an idea, which is a mode of the single substance conceived under the attribute of thought, and the very same mode conceived [|] under the attribute of extension. Whether we can call this relation one of identity is a nice point of logic. Nevertheless, Spinoza affirms that 'the mind and the body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension' (E 2, 21, Scholium). (Scruton 2002: 60-61)
Writing is, in this sense, something like giving our thoughts extension through lines on a page or pixels on a screen (in this case as button-presses, electrical signals and a series of calculations in the processor).
What, then, is the relation between mind and body? This is again a point of scholarly controversy, but we may abbreviate a vast and inconclusive literature into a short and probably equally satisfactory sentence by saying that Spinoza combined ontological monism with conceptual dualism. Mind and body are one thing; but to describe that thing as mind and to describe it as body is to situate it within two separate and incommensurable systems. (Scruton 2002: 61)
Mind and body are of one substance but viewed as distinct.
Moreover, mind and body occur at isomorphic points in the two parallel systems. Ontologically speaking, therefore, the mind is 'nothing but' the body, and has no reality apart from the reality attributed to the body, even though 'the body cannot determine the mind to think, nor the mind the body to remain in motion or at rest' (E 3, 2). (Scruton 2002: 61)
No "disembodied mind" for Spinoza.
A man who thinks, desires, or rages is in a certain physical condition, and this condition [|] constitutes, in some manner, his thought, desire, or rage. But in describing his condition in mental terms, we use concepts that have no place in the scientific explanation of nature: we are interpreting his behaviour, by situating it in the 'human world' of personal intercourse. (Scruton 2002: 61-62)
It has been a while without a platonic triad. (1) rage, (2) desire, and (3) thought.
By contrast, Spinoza observes, there are things which have a kind of inherent resistance to the changes undergone by the lump of wax. They resist damage, fracture, or melting; sometimes, if injured, they restore themselves out of their own inherent principle of self-recovery. They endeavour, as Spinoza puts it, to persist in their own being. This endeavour [|] (conatus) constitutes their essence, since it is that which, when removed, necessarily involves the removal of the thing, and that without which the thing cannot exist. Moreover, the conatus of a thing is the causal principle in terms of which we explain its persistence and its properties. The more conatus it has, therefore, the more an object is self-dependent - the more it is 'in itself'. (Scruton 2002: 63-64)
Conatus was one of the things that interested me most - it turns up frequently in relation with Spinoza, and does seem to have a vague connection with the conative function in Jakobson's scheme of linguistic functions. The exact relation I'm hoping to thaw out during further readings. Etymologically, this would be the attempt at preservation of form. The connection with "self-organization" in biosemiotics is neat.
The obvious examples are organisms. Consider animals: unlike stones they avoid injury, resist it when it is threatened, and even restore themselves when it is inflicted - unless the injury is so serious as to destroy conatus altogether. For this reason we attribute to animals a self-dependence and an individuality that we rarely accord to inanimate things. This is borne out by our ways of describing them, using always 'count nouns' rather than 'mass nouns'. A stone is a lump of stone, a lake is a pool of water, a snowman is a heap of snow. But until dead a cat is an individual cat and not a lump of cat: only when the conatus has expired could it be described as a heap, a lump, or a mass. The individuality and self-dependence of a cat, like those of a man, are part of its nature, and to divide a cat in two is to create, not two half-pieces of cat, but two whole pieces of something else. The cat endeavours to persist as one thing, and exists just so long as that endeavour is, in Spinoza's mathematical idiom, 'granted'. (Scruton 2002: 64)
Noting this down for my fascination with article-phrases, e.g. "a lump of cat", which can sound like band names. (I call them "a titles".) The term "count noun" is necessary to discuss it, at some point.
The endeavour of the body is also an endeavour of the mind. Conceived in mental terms, this endeavour is what we mean by will (voluntas). Sometimes we refer to both body and mind in describing a creature's conatus, and then we speak of 'appetite'; sometimes - especially when describing people - we wish to emphasize the element of consciousness that leads them not only to have appetites but also to be aware of them: then we use the term 'desire' (cupiditas) (E 3, 9). In every case, however, we are referring to the same reality: the conatus that causes an organism to stand apart from its surroundings, in a persistent and active self-dependence. (Scruton 2002: 64)
An interconnected set of terms summarized under the rubric of "Secondness".
And for every idea there is an ideatum - an object conceived under the attribute of extension, which exactly corresponds to the idea in [|] the system of the world. Every idea is 'of' its ideatum, and every idea therefore displays what Spinoza called the 'extrinsic' mark of truth, namely an exact and necessary correspondence to its ideatum (E 2, Definition 4). (Scruton 2002: 66-67)
Object, referent, ideatum.
All knowledge gained through sense-perception is of that kind, and is assigned in the Ethics to the lowest of three levels of cognition. (There were four such levels in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and thre in the Short Treatise; the inspiration is in both cases classical, Aristotle having argued for four levels of cognition, Plato for three.) Spinoza calls this first level of cognition imagination or opinion, and implies that such cognition can never reach adequacy, since the ideas of imagination come to us, not in their intrinsic order, but in the order of our bodily processes. The ideas of imagination are the illogical reflections of processes that are inadequately comprehended. (Scruton 2002: 69)
That good stuff.
By the steady accumulation of confused ideas we can arrive at an apprehension of what is common to them - a universal notion (notio universalis) - such as is exemplified in our common conception of man, tree, dog, or warthog-minder (E 2, 40, Scholium). one reason for distrusting ordinary language as a philosophical instrument is that the ideas conveyed by it belong, on the whole, to this class of composite but confused conceptions, and not to the class of adequate ideas. (Scruton 2002: 69)
Imagination produces "universal notions" - possibly a progenitor of Charles Morris's "universal signs".
To return to the example: the sun cannot be adequately known through modifications of our body, but only through the science [|] which aims to provide an adequate idea of the sun. This kind of science, proceeding by reasoned reflection from first principles, exemplifies Spinoza's second level of cognition, involving adequate ideas and 'common notions' (notiones communes, to be distinguished from the 'universal notions' just referred to). A common notion is an idea of some property which is common to everything, and 'those things which are common to all and which are equally in a part and in the whole, can only be conceived adequately' (E 2, 39). (Scruton 2002: 69-70)
No examples?
Spinoza also recognizes a third level of knowledge, which he calls intuition or scientia intuitiva. 'This kind of cognition,' he explains, 'proceeds from an adequate idea fo the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things' (E 2, 40, Scholium 2). He illustrates that obscure remark with a mathematical example (expanded more fully in S II, Ch. 1), from which we may infer that, by 'intuition', Spinoza means the comprehensive grasp of the meaning and truth of a proposition which is vouchsafed to the person who grasps it together with a valid proof of it from self-evident premisses, a single mental act. Intuition had already been made central to epistemology by Descartes; Spinoza perfected Descartes' account, by describing intuition as an ideal of rational knowledge: a conception that is inextricably joined to its own valid proof. An intuition comes to us, according to Spinoza, only when we grasp the relation between the subject of study and an 'adequate idea of the formal essence of God', for nothing else can serve as the premiss of a self-validating deduction. (Scruton 2002: 70)
Noo, not intuition! I'll have to read Peirce's critique again after Spinoza. I low-key already hate this term. Curse you, Thomas! The takeaway here is that the most exact type of thinking, according to Spinoza, occurs only in relation with the substance of God.
All ideas exist in God, as modifications of his thinking. Some ideas also exist in the human spirit. Spinoza therefore says that our ideas exist in God in so far as (quatenus) he constitutes the human mind. Conversely, since God has adequate knowledge of everything, our own ideas are adequate in so far as we share in the infinite intellect. Spinoza assumes that this 'in so far as' is a matter of degree: the more adequate my conceptions, the more I reach beyond my finite condition to the divine essence of which I am a mode. (Scruton 2002: 71)
This sounds like neoplatonism, perhaps even without any extra steps.
'In so far as' we perceive things adequately we understand them as flowing from God's eternal nature, by a chain of explanation which is logical, and therefore atemporal, in form.
Thus, in Spinoza's words, 'it is the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain aspect of eternity (sub quadam aeternitatis specie)' (E 2, 44, Corollary 2). An adequate conception of the world is a conception sub specie aeternitatis; that is how God sees the world (with which he is identical), and that is how we see it, in so far as our minds participate in the vision which is God's. (Scruton 2002: 72)
A familiar hint towards this is given in the understanding of the futurity of ideas - that true or general ideas are timeless or outside of time.
On the other hand, we understand our own nature and identity sub specie durationis - under the aspect of time. For it is as enduring and finite modes that we enjoy the conatus that distinguishes us from the self-sufficient whole of things, and to know ourselves as separate, individual existences is to be locked in the time-bound conception that leads to confused and partial knowledge. Man's condition is essentially one of conflict: reason aspires towards the eternal totality, while the concerns of sensuous existence persist only so long as we see things temporally and partially. The message of Spinoza's ethics can be succinctly put: our salvation consists in seeing the world sub specie aeternitatis, and in gaining thereby freedom from the bondage of time. (Scruton 2002: 72)
The body is a tent, etc.
Spinoza does recognize the existence of self-consciousness, which he characterizes roughtly thus: our ideas may be accompanied by ideas of themselves, and those ideas by ideas of them, and so on ad infinitum. Spinoza tries to explain this by proving that 'the idea of the mind is united to the mind in the same manner as the mind is united to the body' (E 2, 21). (Scruton 2002: 75)
Isn't this metaconsciousness?
The task of philosophy, as Descartes conceived it, was to ascend from the point of view of the subject to the 'absolute conception' of the world (as Bernard Williams has described it), that is to the conception of the world from no point of view within it. Knowledge consists in the elimination of the subject from the description of what is known. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was to argue decisively that this purging of all reference to the subject is neither possible nor desirable: the world is my world, stamped indelibly with the mark of self-awareness. For Spinoza, however, the assumption of the absolute conception is fundamental; for this is precisely what 'adequate' knowledge consists in. (Scruton 2002: 76)
This is by and large what Stapledon effects in his fiction, and put into the mouth of one of his prophets within Last and First Men. Perhaps that's why Spinoza comes across as so alien - we're all basically Kantians around here.
The consequences for moral philosophy are considerable. Spinoza sees life from the point of view, not of an 'I' whose problems arise from his individual circumstances, but of a pure and disinterested reasoner, for whom the human individual is nothing but a mode of God, governed by the laws which govern everything. It is precisely in this objective, 'selfless' view of the world that Spinoza finds the basis of his moral counsels, arguing that we should rise above the illusory perspective which sees things sub specie durationis, to that absolute viewpoint which is God's. Only then, he believes, will we be truly free, and only in that intellectual freedom are we fulfilled. (Scruton 2002: 76)
Just think like God, bro.
And elsewhere, in the preface to Part 4 of the Ethics, in S 51, 60, and in various letters, Spinoza elaborates this idea, arguing that moral and aesthetic judgements are alike relative to the attitudes and interests of the subject, and contain only the most confused apprehension of the nature of things. Each person's use of such terms as 'good' and 'bad' will be governed by his own particular desires and ambitions, and nothing could be learned about the world from the ideas expressed in our moral judgements. (Scruton 2002: 77)
Scarily congenial.
In his answer to the 'problem of evil' (the problem of reconciling an evil world with a good creator), Spinoza adopts the solution of Maimonides (Guide to the Perplexed, iii, 21), and argues that the things which seem to us to be evils are merely 'privations' - that is, partial or truncated modes of God, which 'express no essence' (C XXIII, E 4, Preface): to the extent that they are evil, to that extent are they also unreal. (Scruton 2002: 77)
Stapledon's "fully human" is beginning to make sense. The crouched and tusked Eleventh Men, the kangaroo-like squatting Twelfth Men, and the primitive war-like Fourteenth Men are glanced over with three sentences giving so little information that even Wikipedia summarize these hundreds of millions of years as "several other primitive human species rise and fall", presumably because they had no remarkable "mentality" and what Stapledon called "religion of love".
If it were possible for me to have a wholly adequate idea of the process, then I should be wholly active in relation to it. As it is, I am active only in so far as my ideas are adequate, and of something so finite and limited as a falling body I can have no adequate conception. Hence my striking my companion, while more of an action than my falling against him, was still very much a passion. Moreover, for Spinoza, we may be completely active in respect of processes which are in no ordinary sense actions of our own: for example, a man falling through space, granted an adequate conception of what is happening to him, is active; while one deliberately striking his companion, but ignorant of the universal laws of motion, is passive. (Scruton 2002: 80)
Actively doing something without a clear and distinct idea of doing it is still passive. Not reasoning, but passion.
The mind is active, for Spinoza, in so far as it is self-determining, freed from the influence of things of which it has no adequate idea. (Scruton 2002: 80)
There's a neat confluence of the adequacy of ideas, conatus, independence from external influence and activity/passivity here.
Adequacy of ideas is tantamount to power; the more my ideas are adequate, the more am I independent. his independence from the world is what Spinoza calls virtue; and 'by virtue' (virtus) and power I understand the same thing' (E 4, Definition 8). Virtue is also perfection; and for Spinoza perfection and reality are one and the same. In the case of a human being, therefore, virtue consists in the enhancement of the conatus through which he persists. Finally, 'pleasure' (laetitia) is defined as 'the passion with which the mind passes to a higher state of perfection', and 'pain' (tristitia) as 'the [|] passion by which it passes to a lower state of perfection' (E 3, 11). By a combination of outrageous metaphysics and brazen definitions, therefore, Spinoza arrives promptly at the conclusion of his moral philosophy: that it is in our nature constantly to incresae our power, that this is the source of all pleasure, and that the process whereby we obtain this pleasure is the very same 'improvement of the intellect' that leads us to adequate ideas. (Scruton 2002: 80-81)
Making one's ideas clearer is how the human being achieves perfection and persistance.
It follows from the truth of Spinoza's metaphysics, then, that a geometry of the passions is possible, and that no other study of them will lead us to self-knowledge. Spinoza therefore proposes to treat of the emotions (affectiones) exactly as he had treated of God, regarding 'human actions and desires precisely as though I were dealing with lines, planes and bodies' (E 3, Preface). (Scruton 2002: 82)
The stuff I'm most excited about. (Though it might be wise to read Descartes' treatment of passions beforehand or alongside.)
The idea of a philosophical exposition of the human passions was by no means new. In the Summa Theologica Aquinas had presented an impressive survey of the subject in a style that is often close to Spinoza's, and with conclusions that display some of Spinoza's robust contempt for human self-deception. Descartes too had written a treatise on emotion, and in the Leviathan Hobbes had defined passions and motives in terms which clearly influenced Spinoza. In range and penetration, however, Spinoza far surpassed his immediate predecessors, and it is precisely in its application to this fraught and disturb area that the merits of Spinoza's metaphysical detachment are most clearly displayed. (Scruton 2002: 82)
I can't find an English translation of Summa Theologica, but there's Robert Miner's Thomas Aquinas on the Passions (2009) [lg]. And it's been a minute since I read Hobbes [JJA] - shoulda, coulda, woulda revisit.
Emotion, which is called passivity of the soul (pathema animi) is a confused idea wherewith the mind affirms a greater or less power of existing (vis existendi) of its body or of any part of it than before, and which, being granted, the mind is thereby determined to think one thing rather than another. (E 3, Appendix)In this definition he conveys two fundamental truths about emotion: first, its connection with our existence as embodied [|] creatures, propelled by forces which we do not wholly understand; second, its character as a 'mental affirmation' or judgement. An emotion, in other words, is a form of understanding, however confused, in which a greater or lesser 'activity' of the mind might be expressed. (Scruton 2002: 83-84)
Good stuff. This "power of existing" requires elucidation (conation again?). Spinoza recognizes that an emotion is a (low - confused, inchoate) type of cognition.
Thus the 'mental act' which lies at the heart of every passion may express a greater or lesser mental perfection, a greater or lesser reality, a greater or lesser power. As the metaphysics implies, perfection, reality, and power are one and the same, and in theri mental aspect they are equivalent to the 'adequacy' of ideas. Emotions, therefore, are ranged on a scale, according to the 'adequacy' of the idea involved in them; from the extreme of passion, in which the mind is the helpless victim of processes which it does not grasp, to the extreme of mental action, in which, through serene contemplation of the truth of things, the mind asserts its perfection, and its power. (Scruton 2002: 84)
It sounds like "sentiments" could be on one of the higher rungs.
The 'emendation' of the passion consists precisely in the transition from passion to action, in which the intellect gains ascendency over the disordered material of the imagination. Thus, 'an emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it' (E 5, 3), from which it follows, Spinoza argues, that 'the more an emotion becomes known to us, the more it is within our power, and the less the mind is passive to it' (E 5, 3, Corollary). (Scruton 2002: 84)
Reminds me of the anecdotal advice on how to get a small child stop crying (over nothing): ask them to verbalize (reflect on, and label) what they are feeling, which may lead them to recognize that it is not worth crying over.
Emotions are directed outwards: they focus, or 'intend', an object, and direct our energies towards that object. Spinoza's theory recognizes this fact (the fact of 'intentionality') but radically misdescribes it. For Spinoza the 'directedness' of an emotion - as we experience it - is no better than an illusion, a confused representation of processes which exist, not in the surrounding [||] world, but in the body of the subject. (Compare with Spinoza's account of perception, considered in Chapter 4.) I understand my love for you, therefore, not by understanding you, who are its object, nor by understanding myself, who am its subject, but by understanding this strange interloper, my body, in which love grows inscrutably like a cancer, erupting into consciousness in ways which inform me only dimly of the processes by which my mind is enslaved. (Scruton 2002: 86-88)
I'm not a fan of the intentionality interpretation of emotions (e.g. that all emotions have an object), nor this view of the role of the human body as something Other. The body is a strange interloper if you have one, not if you are one.
Samuel Alexander argued that Spinoza, in common with many metaphysicians, 'failed to take time seriously': like Plato, Leibniz, and many other rationalists, Spinoza considered time to be, in some ultimate sense, unreal. 'Duration' he argues (C XII), 'is only applicable to the existence of modes; eternity is applicable to the existence of substances'. Spinoza goes on to argue, in ways that bear a striking resemblance to the arguments of Kant, that 'measur, time and number are merely modes of thinking, or rather imagining' (C, ibdi.). When understanding the world through the senses, we see it as ordered in time, and diversified in space. We therefore apply to it temporal and arithmetical notions, which have no application to the underlying reality. The universe of reason is timeless, and all that is true of it is true eternally. (Scruton 2002: 93)
Time is an illusion, etc.
The Ethics describes the free man, who has risen to the higher levels of cognition, mastered his passions, and reached understanding of himself and the world. The populace, however, do not live as free men. They are led by imagination, and remain ignorant of the blessedness that comes through knowledge. (Scruton 2002: 95)
The population has no... intuition.
At the same time men live in society, and the power of each of them is increased by their association. Even the free man - indeed, especially the free man - is drawn by love and honour to seek the company of those whose thoughts and feelings may profitably be joined to his own. It is therefore necessary to establish rules and principles whereby men might live in harmony, and for their common benefit. The problem requires a scientific answer: politics therefore becomes a philosophical concern. (Scruton 2002: 95)
An alternative take on phatic communion: sociability for the sake of (1) love and (2) honour (but not - notice - 3, knowledge).
Hobbes was widely read in the Netherlands, and widely admired for a theory of government that was both comprehensive and secular, deriving its main principles from a study of human nature and without reference to the disputes evidence of revelation. At the same time, Hobbes provided no detailed theory of institutions, and [|] the need for such a theory would not have escaped the readers of John Calvin's Institutes. Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise was an answer to both Hobbes and Calvin. Its first concern was to defend the principles of tolerance, moderation, and self-limiting government. Like Hobbes, Spinoza derived his politics from a theory of human nature. (Scruton 2002: 96-97)
Sadly Hobbes is the one whose Very Short Introduction is not available as a pdf. Calvin's Institutes I know nothing about.
True religion and true philosophy are identical, and consist in the intellectual love of God. All actual human religions, however, are based on a more passionate and temporal love. They see God sub specie durationis, and present him through the medium of inadequate and imaginative ideas. Often he is represented as possessing the finite passions of the human heart, and even the bodily form and countenance of humanity. (Scruton 2002: 97)
And just like that Stapledon's "religion of love" ceases to be an unknown.
The attempt to order our affairs by revelation leads to a peculiar kind of society - which we might call the 'prophetic order'. The prophetic order is at war with freedom of thought, and fiercely defensive of its sacred revelations; in such an order men are not united by free association under law, but led by the prophet towards a common goal, to which they must subscribe as the first condition of their allegiance. The prophetic order may survive without law, without civil institutions, and without liberal education and opinion. It faces the surrounding world with a mask of unyielding belligerence, feeling threatened in its very being by the rational thought whose voice it has vainly tried to silence. (Scruton 2002: 102)
It could be argued that modern Russia is such a "prophetic order". Russian Empire was prophetic in its weird claim to be the Third Rome. The Soviet Union was prophetic in its socialist ambitions that devolved to state capitalism. And now Putin's Russia is once again unyieldingly belligerent - a dark spot on the back of a child's trousers.
A civil society is a form of corporate agency. While it has individual human beings as its constituent parts, it also has a life and individuality of its own. In other words it has its own conatus, which confers on it the absolute right to preserve its own being. A civil society therefore 'does wrong when it does, or suffers to be done, things which may be the cause of its own ruin' (P iv, 4). The body politic, like the human body, may possess more or less power, more or less virtue, more or less freedom. (Scruton 2002: 106)
Isomorphism.
This rule of offices was finely illustrated by the Dutch Estates General, which co-existed with the offices of Stadholder and Grand Pensionary in mutual influence and mutual limitations. Spinoza believed that such a rule could be sustained only by ceremony and dignity. While reasonable people will see the intrinsic virtue of offices, the mass of mankind will always prefer the rule of prophets and figureheads, who claim a purely personal loyalty. Only ceremony can attract the imagination to look with favour on the offices whose true virtue it cannot understand. (Scruton 2002: 110)
E.g. Donald Trump, who operated on personal loyalty (and fired or defrauded everyone loyal to him), vs possibly every other U.S. president, who endorse the ceremony and dignity of the office.
The temptation of Pure Reason, Kant argued, can never be overcome. It is part of our nature as rational beings that we should seek to extend our reason indefinitely, so aspiring towards the 'transcendental' perspective which Spinoza called the 'aspect of eternity'. This yearning of reason towards the eternal is the source of all the speculative errors of metaphysics. (Scruton 2002: 112)
Noted.
For Spinoza's intellectual contemporaries this 'religion of disenchantment' presented too great a challenge to be readily acceptable. Spinoza was accused of heresy and atheism. He occasionally tried to defend himself against such charges, asking 'whether a man throws off all religion, who maintains that God must be acknowledged as the highest good, and must, as such, be loved with a free mind?' (C XLIII). (Scruton 2002: 114)
Stapledon's word is "dispassionate".
Two contemporaries of Kant - Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn - had corresponded about Spinoza's system, and Jacobi published his letters in the form of a book. The level of discussion that followed upon this performance would hardly have gladdened Spinoza, consisting as it did largely of romantic and mystical speculations on the theme of the oneness of the world and the immanence of God. (Scruton 2002: 115)
These themes are indeed more familiar, yet clearly not exactly Spinoza's deal.
Herder, however, was more discriminating, spending love hours in the study of Spinoza, and writing of the profound impression made upon him by the thought that whosoever loves God cannot endeavour to bring it about that God should love him in return (E 5, 19). The same stunning proposition is mentioned by Goethe, in a beautiful page of his autobiography. But the solemn abstraction is transformed into a breathless, palpitating record of a poetic moment:That wonderful utterance: 'whosoever loves God, cannot strive that God should love him in return', with all the preceding sentences upon which it rests, with all the following sentences which spring from it, filled my entire meditation. To be in everything unselfish, to the highest unselfishness in love and friendship, was my greatest desire, my maxim, my rule, and so that insolent remark which follows - 'if I love you, wha tis that to you?' - was for me spoken directly into my heart. [The insolent remark appears in Gotehe's verse novel, Hermann und Dorothea, which the poet is discussing.]Goethe adds that Spinoza's calm and abstract style sorted so ill with his own unruly passions that he was a most unhappy student of the pages which offered to justify this powerful utterance. (Scruton 2002: 115)
Miks peaks sulle korda minema, et ma sind armastan.
Spinoza the philosopher emerged in his true colours through the work of Schelling and Hegel. In Hegel's system, indeed, the major arguments of the Ethics are appropriated and transformed. The theory of the one substance becomes that of the Absolute Idea - the single entity which is realized in and through the attributes of nature, spirit, art, and history. The theory of adequate ideas becomes the dialectic, according to which knowledge is a progressive advance from a confused and 'abstract' 'positing' of a concept, to the ever completer, ever more 'absolute' conception of the world. The theory of conatus becomes that of 'self-realization' through the successive 'objectifications' of the spirit; the theory of political order becomes that of the state as the realization of freedom, and the 'march of reason in the world'. (Scruton 2002: 116)
Hmm. Damn. There may be something to Hegel yet.
