The Vision of Necessity and the Intellectual Love ofGod in Spinoza – Lecture 12A pril 15 , 2014

Part 5 is perhaps the hardest part ofthe Ethics, and not because it isimpossible to understand the wordswe read. Such an interpretativedifficult probably belongs to the bookas a whole. Rather, even if we canunderstand the words, do we reallyknow what Spinoza means by theintellectual love of God? Is it possibleto have such an experience? Itreminds me of some of the stories inPlato’s dialogues which are there toexplain the ultimate end ofphilosophy. I can read the words ofthe Symposium that describe the‘ascent to the beautiful’, but can Ireally know what this means if Ihave never had such an experience,which as Spinoza writes at the lastsentence of the Ethics, is as

beautiful as it is rare? Sometimes we confuse knowing aboutphilosophy with being a philosopher, and they are not always thesame thing at all.

What is the highest wisdom of philosophy? Plato and Spinoza are oneis this regard: to teach you not to fear death. As Spinoza writes in thescholium to proposition 38:

From this we understand what I touched on in IVP39S, andwhat I promised to explain in this part, namely that death isless harmful to us, the greater the mind’s clear and distinctknowledge, and hence, the more the mind loves God.

But how do we get to this sanguine state so that we no longer feardeath, which is probably the greatest fear we all have? We do so byreaching what Spinoza calls the third level of knowledge. It hasalready introduced us to this level in the second part of the Ethics(IIP40), and it is worthwhile here to remind ourselves what the threelevels of knowledge are. The first level is the stage that most peopleare at. It is the knowledge of opinion and belief, which is motivated byfear and hope. This level is not really knowledge at all, but ignoranceand unawareness of the world around you and the network of infiniteseries of causes and effects that determine one’s existence. Thesecond level is a little more difficult, but is knowledge proper. Itinvolves, Spinoza argues, common notions and the adequate ideas ofthings. Thus, he will write in the second part of the Ethics that thereare universal properties of bodies that are recognised by all (IIP38).These common notions are adequate ideas of things and form thebasis of our scientific understanding of the universe, but not only thisunderstanding as we shall see later. Now we would think that thiswould be the end of the matter: the distinction between knowledgeand opinion, but it is not. Spinoza says that there is a third level of

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knowledge, which is the intuitive knowledge of God. It is thisknowledge that is the proper knowledge of the philosopher, or thewise human being, which is the same thing, and is the purpose of theEthics to convince us both that it exists and is possible, and finally canenable us to free ourselves from the worse effects of our affects.

What is this intuitive knowledge of God, or what Spinoza will call, inPart 5, the ‘intellectual love of God’, and how does it differ from thesecond level of knowledge? The first thing to underline, as Lloydstresses, is that we should not confuse this with any kind of mysticalor supernatural knowledge (Lloyd 1996, p.110). There is notranscendence in Spinoza, no reality beyond this reality, no beingbeyond being. The second kind of knowledge is an understanding ofthings through the parallelism of the order and connection of ideas andthe order and connection of things, but the third kind of knowledge isan immediate understanding of myself and my place within theuniverse, or to use Spinoza’s language, my place within God. Myunderstanding of this produces the highest affect of joy in my mind (forwe have to remember that there is no division between reason andaffects for Spinoza), which is what he calls ‘blessedness’. However thisimmediate joyful wisdom is not be confused with mysticism orirrationalism.

At the end of his lectures on Spinoza, Deleuze explains these differenttypes of knowledge in terms of swimming (he is adamant that weshould not take mathematics as the model of adequate knowledge,but just as one example) (Deleuze 1978). What does it mean to knowhow to swim? Perhaps the best way to understand this is to thinkabout what it means not to know how to swim. Not to know how toswim means to be at the mercy of the waves such that if one enteredthe ocean one might drown. To be at the mercy of the waves isinadequate knowledge, for one has a passive relation to externalelements about which one only knows the effects (‘I am drowning’)and not the causes, which would be precisely to know how not todrown, and which is the same as knowing how to swim (learn to float,learn to shut one’s mouth so the water does choke you, and so on).Now as the waves crash over me, depending on what happens, Imight cry out in joy or shock. Such are my affects or passions, to useSpinoza’s language, and they are always related to external relationsto an external body. The waves on my body, which might be nice, butalso could be quite dangerous (these are the screams and shouts onehears on the beach all day, which generally one takes to be anexpression of happiness, but there is always the threat of tragedy onthe horizon, otherwise there would be no lifeguard). But what does itmean to know how to swim? How come that is not the same? It doesnot mean, Deleuze says, that I have to have a mathematical orphysical understanding of wave mechanics. That would be going toofar. Rather, as they say in French, one has a savoir faire of the wave.Instead of fighting against the wave, one goes with it, one hasrhythm. In the sense one knows how to compose one’s body with thebody of the wave. One knows the right moment to jump in, when todive, to surface, to use the wave to propel one along, and so on. It isimportant not to think that the second level is mathematical.Mathematics is kind of second level knowledge, but it isn’t what thisknowledge is tout court.

Just as one can speak of knowing how to swim, Deleuze says, one canspeak of knowing how to love. How does someone love inadequately?Just as in the case of the wave, one who does not know how to swim,one is at the mercy of external effects of which one does not know thecauses. Whereas to know how to love is to know how to composeone’s body and mind with another. This is a strange kind of happiness,Deleuze says, but no-one would confuse it with mathematics orphysics.

What then is the third kind of knowledge? It hardly seems possiblethat such a thing could exist. It does so because the other two arerelations to external bodies and not to essences. I either know how tocompose with another body, or I do not, but neither the relation of

composition or decomposition is an essence. What is an essenceSpinoza? It is a degree of power. To have the third level of knowledgeis to know (or to intuit, to use Spinoza’s word, so as to distinguish itfrom the second level of knowledge) what makes up one’s own degreeof power and what makes up the other’s degree of power. For everydegree of power that is given there is always a degree of powerstronger, since the totality of Nature would be infinite degree ofpower, and no singular thing could be the same as infinite Nature, asthis would be to confuse a mode with a substance. Now if we were toview this relation between essences externally, then we would saythat the weaker essence would be destroyed by the stronger one (thehand crushes the fly), but if this were the case, Deleuze says thewhole of Spinozism would collapse, for it would mean that there wouldonly be inadequate relation between essences. How can we think ofthe relation between essences in a different way?

The key he says is proposition 37 of part 5, for it explains that theaxiom in part 4 that describes the relation between essences as onedestroying another only has to do with singular essences in adeterminate time and place. What does it mean to think of somethingin this way? It means to think of it in terms of existence. What does itmean for something to pass into existence at a certain time or place?It means that a body is determined from the outside by other externalbodies. I have an essence, you have an essence, each essence issingular, but to exist is to be determined from the outside by otherbodies (I cannot exist without food, water and air, for example). Toexist is to have a time and a place, and to have a time and place is toexist in relation to other external bodies that determine one from theoutside. Until such point that these external bodies enter a differentrelation, then I exist.

At this level, everything exists at the level of opposition. I kill the pig toeat its meat, but the next day, I die of botulism, and so on. In thiscase, one might speak of a stronger power destroying a weaker one.Such is the risk of death, which is the inevitable and necessary eventthat external relations that sustain my body enter a differentrelationship (which is what we mean by disease). My essence,however, is not the same as the external relations that I have withother bodies. A degree of power describes an intrinsic and not only anextrinsic relation and for this reason it makes no sense for Spinoza tosay one degree of power destroys another degree of power, just asmuch as it does not make any sense to say that the colour red isredder than green. Intensive magnitudes cannot be comparedextensively.

What then does it mean for Spinoza to say that one is eternal? It isnot a declaration of belief, as if by that one means that one isimmortal, for eternity and immortality are not the same. To think thatone is immortal is simply to take one’s finite existence and to imaginethat it would continue for every, which contradicts the very fact ofdeath. An experience of eternity, on the contrary, Deleuze says, canonly be felt as a kind of intensity. It would be to understand that one’sdeath, as the relation of a body to other external bodies, wasinsignificant and did not matter, because as intensive parts, singularessences, we all degrees of the infinite power of God.

What matters, what is important, is not the duration of our lives (howlong we live), but the actualisation of one’s essence. If one laments apremature death, it is just because they did not live long enough, orthat they didn’t actualise what they could have become? Equally, wemight think someone who had a lived a long life in years but did not doeverything with their lives that they could, might also have lived a sadlife. It is perfectly possible to live a short life, as Spinoza did, butintensively as though one where eternal. Intensity, then, would be themeasure of the third level of knowledge.

Many find the end of the Ethics incoherent and a contradiction of theoverall message of the book. The most notorious of these is Bennett,who pretty much gives up on it altogether. Sometimes one thinks that

Bennett doesn’t like Spinoza at all, and one wonders why he is readinghim, since most of the time, in his opinion, Spinoza is wrong (Bennett1984, pp.329–75).[1] I think, however, that Lloyd is absolutely right instressing that this third level of knowledge is not religious at all, but ismerely a taking on board, in terms of our lives and our experiences,what is taught abstractly through definitions and axioms in part onethat God is the totality of the universe of which we are an intrinsicpart, rather than an element separate from it sustained by a fictionalpersonal God, who in reality is nothing else than a projection of ourabsurd pride that the universe could have been created for us in thefirst place (Lloyd 1996, pp.112–13).

One way that people imagine that they have a special and uniqueplace with the universe, rather than just a finite mode of an infinitesubstance, is to believe that there is immortality of our lives afterdeath. To overcome our fear of death, we imagine that our personalityand consciousness continue after we have disappeared. This is notpossible for Spinoza, because my sense of myself is only possiblebecause I have a body. My mind, as we learnt from part 2, is an idea ofmy body, and my body is not an idea of my mind. Without my body Iwouldn’t have a mind at all, and any sense of duration, and time wouldcease to exist. Immortality is based on the false idea that minds canexist without bodies, and no one suggest that bodies are eternal.Combined with this false idea is the confusion of eternity with infiniteduration, so that I imagine myself living together as I am now but justfor an infinite time.

Eternity does not mean for Spinoza time going on forever, butsomething quite different. This is why he can say that even thoughthere is no immortality in the way that religions have imagined it, thereis part of my mind which is eternal. This seems to be very strange sinceit implies that the mind can exist without the body, and this cannot bewhat Spinoza is saying since it would contradict the fact that the mindis the idea of the body. The contradiction exists for us, because we stillviewing eternity in terms of duration. We are imagining that mindwould continue to exist in the same way as it endures whilst the bodyexists.

Again the best way to understand the eternity of the mind, as Lloydsuggests, is in relation to the third kind of knowledge (Lloyd 1996,p.121). I only understand myself through the affections of my body,but it is impossible that I could know the infinite network of causes andeffects that lead up to this affections. I can know, however, the truestatus of myself as mode of infinite substance. How would thisknowledge, Lloyd asks, overcome my fear of death? Not through theknowledge gained by simply reading the first part of the Ethics, butsomething more subtle:

What is new is the understanding of the truth of finitemodes in relation to particular bodily modifications, and toourselves as ideas of these modifications. (Lloyd 1996,p.121)

Lloyd continues to explain that is not a matter of ascending to atranscendent vision of the universal, like Plato’s ascent to the beautifuland the vision of the one, but of understanding the ‘actual existence ofthese affections’ (Deleuze would have said the singular essences). Forall that exists for Spinoza are singular things and substance, or thebeing of singular things. To understand singular things as theexpression of substance is different from understanding them in

relation to other singular things, which is the basis of the 2nd level ofknowledge, which compares one thing with others. This kind ofknowledge, though adequate, can never be complete. As Lloydconcludes, ‘we know that we are in God, and are conceived throughGod; we understand ourselves through God’s essence as involvingexistence’ (Lloyd 1996, p.122) Having seen this, I can understand thatdying is of no consequence to me, since, in understanding myself inrelation to substance which is eternal, the greater part of my mind isgiven over to what is eternal, rather than to what is individual and

perishable in me, my imagination and memories.

Works Cited

Bennett, J., 1984. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, [Indianapolis, IN]:Hackett Pub. Co.

Deleuze, G., 1978. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Sur Spinoza. Availableat: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2 [Accessed September 30, 2012].

Lloyd, G., 1996. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and theEthics, London; New York: Routledge.

Zizek, S., 2004. Organs without Bodies  : On Deleuze and Consequences,New York; London: Routledge.

[1]. Surely there is a better way of reading philosophy which isn’t sosad. Perhaps Deleuze’s advice, as quoted by Žižek, is more joyful:‘Trust the author you are studying. Proceed by feeling your way […].You must silence the voices of objection with you. You must let himspeak for himself, analyse the frequency of his words, the style of hisobsessions.’(2004, p.47)

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Spinoza and Truth – Lecture 11March 30 , 2014

What does Spinozamean by truth?When we thinkabout truth normallyin philosophy thenwe think about theagreement betweena statement and astate of affairs in theworld, but this can’tbe what Spinozameans by truth, atleast not in anysimply way. Why isthis? Because forSpinoza truth cannotbe the agreement

between two different attributes, since attributes can have no causalrelation to one another. Thus the idea of ‘tree’ cannot be true becauseit agrees with an object called a ‘tree’, rather an idea is true because itis true in itself and not because it ‘represents’ something else. Whatthen does it mean to say that an idea is true in itself?

In one sense, Spinoza is repeating the story of truth that we haveheard since Plato: perception is not sufficient to explain truth. This isbecause, as we know, perception does not tell me truth about thingsat all. Indeed if all I had were perceptions, then I probably wouldn’thave a very good idea of reality at all. One of the basis premises of thenew modern science is what common sense tells us about nature(which we might say is the Aristotelian starting point) can only lead usastray. Common sense might tell me that the earth is at the centre ofthe universe, because that is how it appears to me, but I know in factthat this is not the case. What is true is not what my senses tell me,but what true knowledge does, and true knowledge is not perception,

as Plato would have already told us, but mathematics. Copernicusdoes not disagree with Ptolemy because he saw something different inthe heavens, but he postulated a different mathematical model andthat is why he saw the heavens in a different way. It might be thecase that Galileo did see something different in his telescope, but hewouldn’t have seen what he was looking for unless he had alreadyagreed with Copernicus’s mathematical revolution.

If an idea is not true because it agrees with what I see with my eyes,then why is it true? Here we have to make a difference between thepsychological event of having an idea and the content of the ideaitself. I might be thinking of a circle because I see a circle. Or I might bethinking of circle because I associate it with something else. Perhaps Ihave being thinking about bears and then the idea ‘circle’ just pops inmy mind. Or, I might be thinking about circle, but I have completely thewrong idea of circle in my mind. I might think lines drawn from thecentre of the circle are not equal. None of the instances of thinking ofthe idea circle would make the idea true. The occasion of thinking theidea does not make the idea true (and this is really the reason whyperception cannot be the source of the truth of ideas, since itpsychologises them, and would make truth subjective). What is true isthe objective content of the idea itself, which can be thought byanyone (or anything if it capable of thinking true ideas).

In proposition 35 of the second part of the Ethics, Spinoza explainshow such an error is possible. There is no positive idea of falsehood.Strictly speaking there are no false ideas in themselves, because everyidea is an idea of something that exists. Rather there are confusedideas. To have an ignorant idea is to have an idea of a positive thing,but in a confused way. The example that Spinoza gives in the scholiumis the idea of freedom. Why is it that people falsely believe they arefree? The answer is because they are ignorant of the causes thatmake them act the way they do. Because they are ignorant, theytherefore think they are free. The cause of false ideas is not a realidea, but ignorance on our behalf, and this ignorance is alwaysignorance about causes. To use the other example that Spinoza givesin this scholium. I believe that the sun is 200 hundred feet away fromme because I am ignorant of the true distance. Even though I knowthat the sun is further away than it seems. Because the distance thatit appears from me is caused by the relation of my body to the sun, Imight still fall under the error that the sun is closer than the actualdistance. Of course I can also understand why it is that the sunappears in the way it does to me (I can understand for example thatthe sun really doesn’t get larger at sunset or change from yellow tored, but this is the effect of light in the Earth’s atmosphere), but thatmeans I have to have a true idea of what the sun is and what the mybody is and how they interact.

Because of our limited knowledge, Spinoza thinks that is very easy forus to have inadequate of idea of things, but does he think that we canhave adequate idea? It would surprise us if he said ‘no’ to thisquestions, since Spinoza is an exponent of the new modern science.He is a realist. He does not think that our scientific theories are justour way of understanding what reality is, but are true picture of whatis. Indeed Newton’s laws would be true, even if there were no humanbeing to think them.

The difference is between understanding a particular thing as a modeor as an expression of substance. Let say I look at a stretch of waterthat is in front of me. I could just describe the water as I see it,perhaps in the way that I writer might describe it in a story, or painterpaint it. Or I could describe it in terms of substance. Not just thisstretch of water in front of me, but through an attribute that expressesnot just this part of reality, but the whole of reality. Isn’t this just whatscience does? Science does not explain this or that particular instanceor occasion of water, but the reality of water as such, which forSpinoza would be explained in the current scientific explanation ofnature through the general laws of physics. This would be to have anadequate, as opposed to an inadequate understanding of water,

because I would be understanding its true cause, which is substanceexplained in this case through the attribute extension.

The laws of physics are what Spinoza calls ‘common notions’. Theoccasion for us to have ideas is our bodies, for this nothing in ourminds that does not come via our bodies. Thus if we didn’t have eyesto see the sun, then we wouldn’t have the idea of sun. The error, thenis not think that the ‘truth’ of the idea of the sun somehow has itsorigin in us. We can think the true idea of the sun, because the trueidea of the sun corresponds (or is the same as) as the causal relationbetween the mode and substance. There cannot be any other idea ofthe sun that is true because nature cannot be any different than whatit is, otherwise substance would be lacking that different reality andtherefore would not be infinite.

How can we escape the confused ideas of the realm of sensations andaffections? We can only do so when we understand ideas internallyand not externally. To understand ideas internally means to know thenecessary order and connections of ideas themselves and not howthey are encountered through affections. Yet even though I mightknow the difference between the two, how do I take the step fromone to the other? It is probably wrong to say that Spinoza rejectsimagination, because this would be argue that he rejects the body, butas we know, for Spinoza, only through the body can I know the world.There must then be a route from inadequate to adequate knowledge,and the key is ‘common notions’.

Inadequate knowledge only tells me about my individual encounterswith things. What Spinoza calls duration. How something appears tome at a certain time and place, and which I might subsequentlyremember and associate with other things. But I can, throughduration, leap out of duration. I can recognise what is ‘common to allthings’. In so doing, I am understanding the mode through substanceand not through another modes, which I can only have a limitedknowledge of. It is possible to understand the causal relation betweensubstance and modes. It is not possible to understand the infinitecausal relation between modes (it is this inadequate understandingwe have seen, for example, that produces the error of free will).

It is very important not to confuse common notions with universals. InIIP40S1, Spinoza disputes the existence of universals preciselybecause they are not common notions. I can have an adequate idea ofscientific laws of nature that are common to all bodies, but what Icannot have is the idea of all horses that would be common to theuniversal ‘Horse’. The latter is merely a word, whereas the former is atrue idea. This is why we differ in what we mean by the word ‘horse’,but we do not differ when we understand what is common to all things(like extension and the laws of nature that follow immediately from it),because this is common to nature as such, and not just a use ofwords. When we understand the universe, we understand it as it is inreality, and our understanding cannot be any different from God’s(what the universe is in reality in terms of truth), because therecouldn’t be any other understanding. There is no mysterioustranscendent cause, nor any distinctive human understanding (asthere is in Kant for example) that would be any different from truth ofwhat is actually in reality, which would be true whether we knew it ornot.

It is possible to have adequate ideas because it is possible to knowthe causes of things. Of course as finite beings, it is not possible to forus to know the cause of everything, but that does not mean that weknow nothing. It is possible for us to understand the essence of Godfor example, for Spinoza. It is possible for us to understand the idea ofa triangle, though it is not possible for us to have the idea of everytriangle that has ever existed. To have an adequate idea is tounderstand something through its cause rather than its effects. Thusto have an adequate idea of the sun is to understanding why it makesmy skin feels warm and appears closer than it is in reality, as opposedto an inadequate idea, which starts with effects, my warm skin, the

appearance of the sun and the sky, and argues backwards towardsthe cause. The sun is close to me in the sky because it is circling theearth; the sun warms the my skin because it was created by God tobenefit human beings. Both these arguments are false because theyargue from effects rather than causes. To understand the effects ofthe sun through its cause is to follow the order of reality itself. It is togo from substance as it expressed through its attributes and then tomodes. Rather than to start with modes and to try and get back toattributes and from there to substance.

We have only distinguished between inadequate and adequateknowledge in this lecture, but there is third level of knowledge thatSpinoza describes in IIP40S2, which he calls ‘intuitive’. We will have towait to Part 5 of the Ethics to find out what this.

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Spinoza’s Materialism – Lecture 10March 18 , 2014

So far, in relation topart 2 of the Ethics,we have only spokenabout the mind andnot the body (andthe mind in relationto the attribute ofthought). Theparticular nature ofhuman beings,however, is that theyare the union of amind and a body.What, then, is therelation between themind and the body?

First of, unlike Descartes, Spinoza begins with the body not the mind.If we are going to understand the nature of the human mind, we firstof all have to understand the nature of the human body. This quite isdifferent from Descartes who believes that the union of the body andthe mind must be thought from the vantage point of the mind and notthe body, and the mind is the truth of the body and not the other wayaround.

When we are thinking about Spinoza’s parallelism we are thinkingabout the relation between human thought and the attribute thought.For Spinoza the true ideas of thought are independent from us. Theseare necessary truths belonging to the causality of thought and not towhom or what thinks them. When we are thinking, however, about thenature of human thought itself, and not just its relation to the attributethought, then we have to think of the relation between our bodies andour minds, because this is the kind of beings that we are. We alreadysaw from last week’s lecture that the idea for Spinoza has two sides:one side is the idea itself, which Spinoza calls its formal reality, and theother side, is the object that it represents, which Spinoza, followinggeneral practice, calls its objective reality. No idea can be definedwithout these two sides. When we thinking about the nature ofthought itself, and not just the human mind, then we are thinking justabout the formal reality of ideas, the necessary causality of thought.When we are thinking about just the human mind, though, we focuson the objective reality of ideas. We have to ask ourselves ‘What is itthat the human mind represents?’ Spinoza answer to this question isthat the human mind represents the human body. We have to be veryclear about what this answer means. It means that body is the

essence, definition, or content of the mind. What the mind representsis the body, and not itself. Without the body, the mind would benothing at all; it would have no objective reality. Thus in the scholiumto P13, Spinoza will say that the complexity of the human mind, asopposed, for example to the mind of a dolphin, is to do with thecomplexity of the human body, and not with human mind. It is becauseour bodies can feel, experience, sense more that our minds are morecomplex than other animals, and not the other way around. We do nothave complex bodies because we have complex minds, but we havecomplex minds because we have complex bodies.[1] As Spinoza writesin the scholium to P13,

In proportion as a body is more capable than others of doingmany things at once, or being acted upon on in many waysat once, so its mind is more capable than others ofperceiving many things at once.

This explains why the next section of Part 2 has to do with the generalnature of bodies. If we are to understand the human mind through thehuman body, then we have to understand the nature of the humanbody first. The human body, of course, is acted upon as any other bodyis in nature. To put it within a modern context, to understand humanpsychology we first of all have to understand physics and biology. ForSpinoza’s interests in the Ethics is human happiness, then the centralidea in this excursus, as Curley indicates, is the idea of the compositebody, which is a body that can be acted upon by many external bodieswithout losing its identity (Curley 1988, p.76).

There are many different bodies in nature: basic chemical elements,simple material objects, simple organisms, and more and more complexforms of life. For Spinoza, the human being is a very complex livingorganism that is made up of many individual bodies, and is affected bymany other bodies, in very many complex ways. What we can or areable to know for Spinoza, is directly related to the complexity of ourbody to be affected: everything that we know, from the simplest andmost basic, to the most complex and extraordinary, first has to come tothrough the experience of our bodies.

The relation of the mind to the body also explains the limitations of thehuman knowledge, and the possibility of inadequate ideas. If we haveinadequate ideas, then it is because we have a confused or distortedunderstanding of the body. Thus a false idea, or an inadequate idea, isnot false at the level of the mode of thought or mode of extension, butin the relation between them. To understand this relation we have tounderstand how the human mind comes to inadequate ideas of things.

For human beings, our perception of things, which is the first level ofknowledge for Spinoza, is mediated by our human body, as he statesin IIP26:

The human mind does not perceive any external body asactually existing, except through the idea of the affections ofits own body.

Our perception of things at this level, therefore, tells us more aboutthe condition and nature of our own bodies, rather than the nature ofexternal things themselves. Thus if I am short sighted things will beblurred and small, but this is true for human nature in general, sincewe can only perceive external things in the way that they affect ourbodies, and we cannot perceive them in any other way.[2] In Spinoza’sterminology this fundamental relation between the idea and the objectmediated by the body is called imagination. When I see something forSpinoza, I am imagining it. This does mean that I am making it up;rather I have an image of it in my mind, whose origin is mediated bythe affects of the body. The image is the correlate of the sensations.We should, however, be very careful about what Spinoza means bythe word ‘image’ here. An idea is certainly not a picture (as Spinozamakes very clear in IIP43S), if one imagines a picture to be some kindof thing which is a copy of a real thing, as though in the mind there

existed images which corresponded to actual things; rather an idea isalways a mode of the attribute thought. Error does not happenbecause I have the image of something in my mind which is wrong;rather error happens because my mind lacks the idea that excludesthe existence of the thing that I imagine to be present. Thus, to useSpinoza’s example, when the young child imagines the existence of awinged horse, it is not the image of the ‘winged horse’ that is in error,but the child lacks the knowledge that would tell him or her that thisimage could not possibly exist. So there is nothing wrong with theimagination in itself, as Spinoza writes in the scholium to IIP17:

For if the mind, while it imagined nonexistent things aspresent to it, at the same time knew that those things didnot exist, it would, of course, attribute this power ofimagining to a virtue of its nature, not to a vice.

Inadequate ideas are those ideas which are caused from outside of mymind. This is only a partial knowledge of an object, whereas adequateideas, within the internal necessity of the order and connection ofideas, are a complete or whole conception of the object. If we onlyremained within the external relations of the mind to objects, then wewould only have a partial and mutilated understanding of the universe.But why is this understanding only partial and mutilated? This isbecause the body has a negative impact on the causality of ideas, ifwe assume that we only know things through perception. Thus, I amaffected by the rays of the sun as it warms my face. There is nothing incommon between me and the sun, and therefore, at this level, Icannot have an adequate idea of the sun. Rather, as we have alreadysaid, this relation tells me more about the body affected (in this casemyself) than the body which is the cause of the affection. As Deleuzesays in his lectures on Spinoza, a fly would be affected by the sun in adifferent way (Deleuze 1978). The reason why this is inadequateknowledge is that I only know the sun in terms of its effects on mybody (just as the fly only knows the sun in terms of the effects on itsbody) and not in terms of causes; that is to say, what the cause of thesun and what is the cause of the heat on my face and so on. To knowthat I would have to know what my body was and what the sun was,and I could not know that simply through the effects of one body onanother (it is not through the warmth of the sun against my face that Iknow that my idea of the sun is adequate and the idea of the sun ofthe fly is not). Inadequate ideas are therefore representation ofeffects without the knowledge of causes.

The idea of inadequate ideas will become very important in the rest ofSpinoza’s Ethics. For to live at the level of the knowledge of effects,that is to know nothing of the causes of things, is to live a life ofencounters only. One sensation follows another sensation, but I haveno real understanding of the causes of these sensations. This is thelevel, unfortunately, that most of us live. When we come to think aboutour ethical life, this means that we are completely under the control ofone feeling following another, like a paper boat buffeted by the mightywaves of the ocean of emotion. If we knew the true cause of theseemotions, then we would be in control of them, rather than they incontrol of us. Knowledge of these true causes is the aim of the rest ofthe parts of the Ethics.

Works Cited

Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinoza’sEthics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Deleuze, G., 1978. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Sur Spinoza. Availableat: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2 [Accessed September 30, 2012].

Lahn, B.T., 2004. Human Brain Evolution Was a “Special Event.”Available at: http://www.hhmi.org/news/lahn3.html [AccessedNovember 25, 2012].

[1] Humans have extraordinarily large and complex brains, even whencompared with macaques and other non-human primates. The humanbrain is several times larger than that of the macaque — even aftercorrecting for body size — and “it is far more complicated in terms ofstructure (Lahn 2004).

[2] We can of course improve our bodies in relation to instruments, butthese instruments themselves have to relate to what our bodies caninteract with. There is no point having a powerful electronic magneticmicroscope if we can’t make available to the human eye the imagesthat it produces.

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Spinoza’s Parallelism – Lecture 8March 2 , 2014

Having just finishedthe first part of theEthics, with all itscomplexity anddifficulty, we nowadvance into thesecond part, which isjust as difficult andcomplex. Ostensiblythe object of thesecond part isourselves, whereasthe object of the firstpart was God. Andyet reading thedefinition andaxioms, and the first

13 propositions, we might feel that we haven’t left the topic of God atall. But then we have to understand Spinoza’s perspective. He wantsto rid us of any idea that we are somehow apart from the rest of theuniverse and have a special place within creation, what might be calledthe anthropomorphic bias of philosophy and religion. We mustremember that it is this anthropomorphism which is the true cause ofthe idea of a personal God separate from the universe He creates (It isthis transcendence Spinoza wants to destroy). Rather than seeingourselves as somehow unique (only God is unique for Spinoza), wemust see ourselves as just one element within the universe, or whatSpinoza would call modes (and a finite mode at that). Spinozaexpresses this beautifully in the preface to part three when he writesthat there are some who conceive of human beings as though theywere a ‘dominion within a dominion’. Human beings are notsubstances, but modes for Spinoza; that is to say, they are nottranscendent but immanent to the universe, part of its processes andnecessary laws.

This is not to say that Spinoza is not interested in human beings. Farfrom it, this is the only thing he is interested in. For Spinoza, like allgreat philosophers perhaps, philosophy is not just a clever game andhow much one knows, but how one should live one’s life. This is whyhis book is called the Ethics. He writes, therefore, about metaphysicsand physics, not just for their own sake, but for the sake of how wemight, as part of this infinite universe, lead a better life.[1] As we sawearlier in this course, this idea of ‘leading a better life’ is not the sameas being moral, which we, after thousands of years of Christianitymight confuse it with, but begins with our human nature as part ofnature as a whole. Morality and the personal God are intimately linked,because both abstract human beings from nature. This is true of Kant,

for example, who writes after Spinoza, and who, although he is willingto place human being as natural being with nature, wants us, as moralbeings, to be set apart: the moral order of human intentions, hasnothing at all to do with the deterministic physical laws of nature.[2]

There is another difficulty facing us in the second part of the Ethics,however. That is on the whole hitherto we have been speaking aboutthe infinite attribute extension. This is because this is the easiest wayfor us to enter Spinoza’s philosophy, perhaps because most of us havean understanding of modern science, and the Aristotelian universe issomething we are unfamiliar with, whereas for his contemporaries itwould be the other way round. Modern science already contains theidea that all individual things are in fact modes of the fundamentalstructure of the material universe which is governed by universal andnecessary laws. But extension is only one the attributes of substance,and in fact there must be, as Spinoza writes in IP11, an infinity ofattributes since God is an infinite substance consisting of infiniteattributes.

When it comes to human beings, we can only speak of two attributes:thought and extension. But how do we think of thought as an infiniteattribute of substance? It is easy to imagine each singular objects asthe mode of extension (even ourselves when we consider ourselves asphysical objects), but it is much harder to think of thought that way,because we think of thought as precisely that which individualises us.Remember this is precisely what Descartes did think. Each individualwas a separate individual substance, because they were independent;that is to say, I cannot think the thoughts you are thinking now, andyou cannot think the thoughts I am thinking.[3] But it is precisely thisway of thinking that Spinoza avoids when he says that there is onlyone substance, and thought is an attribute, not a separate substance,and moreover every individual thought is a mode of this attribute. Thismeans that it is not I who think thought, but thought that thinksthrough me, and when I perceive something it is not I who perceive it,but God who perceives it through me. We have to think of thought inexactly the same way that we think about extension, as an infiniteautonomous and spontaneous attribute containing infinite modes. It isthe universe which thinks for Spinoza and that is why we think, andnot the other way around.

God or substance is thought under the attribute thought, such as Godor matter is extension under the attribute extension. Thus we have tostop ourselves thinking of thought as something that happens inindividual minds, which are modes. Rather it is the other way around.Thoughts are modes which are caused by the attribute thought, whichis the same as saying, that they are caused or produced by God as athinking substance, God under the attribute thought. This is why forSpinoza it is perfectly possible to say that machines could or can think,since thought is not a unique property of human beings, but is anattribute of God or the universe. In fact for Spinoza everything in theuniverse thinks (or is at least is ‘animate’), and all we can say is thathuman beings, in terms of thought, simply think in a more complex waythan stones, plants or animals. Ideas exist independent of the humanmind, and are produced by God under the attribute of thought, in thesame way that things are produced under the attribute of extension,so that there is the sun as a thing, and the idea of the sun which aretwo different modes of two different attributes, extension and thoughtwhich are immanent to the same infinite uncreated substance.

Though we have no difficulty of imagining the sun as separate from thehuman mind or soul as Spinoza calls it, we have great difficulty ofthinking of the idea of the sun as being separate from the humanmind. Spinoza would say, therefore, that the truth of the idea trianglethat all triangle have 3 angles that add up to the sum of two rightangles is true in itself and is independent of any human mind thatthinks it. Thus, as Woolhouse puts it, what is essential to Spinoza’sidea of ideas is:

The idea of there being real and immutable essences of

geometrical figures, essences, which have an existenceindependent of any instantiation they might have in thecorporeal world, and independent of any idea there might beof them in human minds. (Woolhouse, 1993).

This is why, as we said earlier, it is perfectly possible for a machine tothink the idea of triangle, for the truth of triangle is not produced bythe human mind, but by the universe, which contains an infinity ofideas as it contains an infinity of things. What we have to do then isthink the idea of the sun in the same way we think the idea of triangle.As we shall see later, this does not always happen with human beings,because we tend to think the idea of things in terms of the affectionsof our body, through what Spinoza calls imagination, and not throughour minds which can grasp the idea of things in themselves as they areproduced by the infinite attribute of thought as it expresses the infinitenature of the universe. So we imagine the idea of the sun is producedin our minds by the external object which has an effect on our body,but this only produces a false and mutilated knowledge for Spinoza.

Again this is very difficult for us to accept because we tend to think atrue idea is the adequation of the idea with an object. Thus, if I havethe idea of the sun, this idea is true because the idea agrees with thereal sun outside in the real world. Now this cannot be possible forSpinoza because attributes are autonomous. This idea of truth as theagreement of the idea and the external object would rest on themysterious possibility that things could miraculous transformthemselves into ideas, that the sun could become the idea of the sunand the object and the idea were one and the same thing, but wecannot think one attribute through another, as Spinoza writes in 1P10.

But it is clear that Spinoza believes that we have true ideas of objects,so how is that possible. His assertion is that there is a parallelismbetween the order and connection of ideas on the one hand, and theorder of the connection of things on the other, that although thesetwo series are absolute autonomous, and they have to be since one isproduced through the attribute thought and the other through theattribute extension, that none the less they are absolutely identical,and they are so in themselves and not in the mind that thinks them.This doctrine of parallelism is one of the most difficult notions to explainin Spinoza, but before we can do so, we first of all need to think aboutwhat Spinoza thinks an idea is.

As we have already seen for Spinoza, ideas are not produced byhuman minds, though human minds can think them. Rather, they areproduced by the attribute thought which is independent of any otherattribute (independent in the sense of self-sufficient not independentin the sense of substance). So we can imagine the universe not onlyfilled with an infinity of modes of extension (trees, plants, animals andhuman beings to be rather parochial about it), but also filled with aninfinity of ideas (the idea of trees, plants, animals and human beingsand so on). How do we know that one series agrees with the other,that the idea of the tree is the same as the tree? The answer cannotbecause we say so, because this is to make the human mind a‘dominion within a dominion’ and thought dependent on us, ratherthan us dependent on thought. Ideas are produced by God, or Natureor the Universe or Substance, whatever word you choose.

Ideas are very strange things, and are different from other modes, inthat an idea has two different functions (ontologically they exist as onein the idea, we separate them out in terms of analysis), which Spinozahas a special vocabulary to express, though it was a vocabulary thatall his contemporaries also used, and which Descartes, for examplemakes much use of in his Meditations. Ideas are peculiar because theyhave both a formal and objective reality. Now one of the bestexplanations of this distinction can be found in Deleuze’s lectures onSpinoza which can be found on the web (Deleuze). An idea is athought in the sense that it represents an object, so the idea of thesun represents the object ‘sun’. What an idea represents is called theobjective reality of an idea. Now this is probably what we all imagine an

idea to be and we do not think of anything else, but for Spinoza anidea has another reality which he calls the formal reality of the idea.Now just as much as the objective reality of an idea is something thatmakes sense to us, then the formal reality of an idea does not. Whatcan an idea be but the representation of an object? Well the idea isjust actually what it is as an idea, or as Deleuze puts it, ‘it is the realityof the idea as much as it itself is a thing’. Thus we must separate inour minds what is represented in the idea, which is the object of theidea, and the idea itself which represents the object. So in fact thereare not two things: the idea and the object, but three: the idea, theobject as it represented in the idea, and the object. Or, the idea sun,the sun as it is represented in the idea of sun, and the sun as anobject. Now to the extent that the idea itself is a thing (not of course athing in the sense of the object, since it falls under the attributethought, and not under the attribute extension, but still nonetheless athing for Spinoza, or if one prefers a mode), then I can have an idea ofthis idea not as an objective reality but as a formal one. I can think theidea of sun as the idea, and not I in terms of what it represents.

It is through this difference between an idea and the idea of an ideathat we can begin to understand the parallelism between the order ofideas and the order of things.[4] We begin here because we start withwhat we are as human beings. We know ourselves and the worldthrough our bodies, but what is peculiar to us (what makes us morecomplex than stones plants and animals) is that we are capable ofreflection; that is, capable of having an idea of an idea. I do not justthink of objects but also I can think of ideas; ideas can become anobject of another idea. I have an idea of the sun, which represents thesun to me, but I can also just think about this idea in itself. Now it isthe idea of an idea that for human beings (not for God) that we canbegin to see how truth is possible (or as Spinoza would say we canthink adequate ideas), and notice that truth here is between an ideaand another idea as the object of this idea; that is to say it isimmanent to thought, and does require the agreement betweenthought and the external world of objects.[5] The idea is the result ofthe active power of the mind as a mode of the infinite attributethought. It is not a copy of an object. Therefore an idea cannot be trueby pointing to something in the object, for whatever I would bepointing to would itself be an idea, or better the relation betweenideas. When I say that truth is the conformity of the object with theidea, then this conformity itself must be an idea, or in Spinoza’slanguage, an idea of an idea, and this ‘conformity’ cannot itself be anobject. The idea itself must be adequate, and it can only be adequatebecause I can think it as so. The idea is true to the extent that itconforms to the object of the idea, but it does so only because itcontains all the causes and reason of that object, which themselvesare internal to reason (not human reason, but Reason itself). To havea true idea therefore is know the cause of ideas. The cause of ideas isthe necessary relations between them. These necessary relations arenot produced by the human mind, but by the power of thought itself.

What we have to understand is that if ideas where only therepresentation of objects, then there would be no necessary relationbetween ideas, and if there were no necessary relations betweenideas, then there would no possibility of science. What we have to sayis, ‘What are the necessary relations between ideas?’ which is thesame as saying, ‘what is the causal relation between one idea andanother one?’. We have to make this distinction between the idea as arepresentation and the idea as a cause, and again for Spinoza wecannot say that this necessity of ideas lies in the object, because allattributes are autonomous. We cannot think a thought under theattribute extension, just as much as we cannot think an extendedthing under the attribute thought.

To use Gueroult’s example, in his second volume on Spinoza, to havean idea of an idea is to go from this idea back to the knowledge of theorder and connection of its cause in thought (Gueroult, 1974). Iunderstand thought A by knowing that it is caused by B and so on. Soas to go from the idea of triangle to the idea of the equality of the sum

of its angles to two right angles, the mind must first of all think of theidea of the idea of a triangle, so as to understand the cause whichresults in the idea of the equality of angles, and is so doing it has anadequate idea of the triangle. Through reflection I understand thenecessary causal relations between thoughts, which are produced bythought itself and not by my reflection, as Gueroult explains:

La liaison des idées ne dépend pas de la réflexion sur lesidées, c’est-à-dire des idées des idées, car les idées sont ensoi produites selon l’ordre des causes dans la Pensée, sansqu’interviennent en rien les idées des idées, c’est-à-dire laréflexion (The linkage of ideas does not depend on thereflection upon ideas; that is to say of the ideas of ideas,since ideas are produced in themselves according to theorder of causes in Thought, without the ideas of ideasintervening at all; that is to say, reflection). (Gueroult, 1974,p. 71)

Reflection does not produce truth; it only discovers it. It is thediscovery through human knowledge of the order of ideas as causedby the attribute Thought.

But how do we get from these necessary causal relations of thought tothe necessary causal relations of things, and at the same timeunderstand that they must be identical, without one being the sourceof the other? The answer to this question is to concentrate on the ideaof causality. Both ideas and things are produced simultaneouslythrough their attributes. This means that things, which are the objectof ideas, follow the necessity of their attribute, with the samespontaneity and autonomy, as the ideas of these things follows theattribute of thought. If thoughts are connected together by necessaryorder of connection, then things must also be connected togethernecessarily, and this necessity must be the same. They are the samenot because things determine thoughts, nor thoughts things, but thisnecessity comes from the infinite nature of the one substance, whichthese two attributes express. Thus to use Spinoza’s example in IIP7S,the circle and the idea of the circle are other to one another, since theyfall under different attributes, though the necessary connectionbetween things and the necessary connection between ideas isidentical. It is not that the necessary causality of things determines thecausality of thought, but the necessity of substance (this necessitymust be the same otherwise there would be as many substances asthere would be attributes). In thought the connection between ideasis produced by the necessary causality proper to thought, and thisorder is the same as the order of things under the attribute extension.They are the same, because both are immanent to the samesubstance which is infinite and unfolds in a necessary way througheach attribute. This does not mean, however, that attributes are fusedtogether in substance. Each attribute is autonomous and so expressesthe necessity of substance in its own way. As Gueroult, writes, theyare both indissoluble and heterogeneous (Gueroult, 1974, p 90).

Works Cited

1. Ayers, M., & Garber, D. (Eds.). (2003). The Cambridge History ofSeventeenth Century Philosophy (Vol. I). Cambridge: CUP.

2. Deleuze, G. (s.d.). Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze: Deleuze/Spinoza, CoursVincennes 24/10/1978. Consulté le November 5, 2007, surWebdeleuze: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2

3. Descartes. (1985). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Vol. I). (J.Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdock, Trans.) Cambridge: CUP.

4. Gueroult, M. (1974). Spinoza (Vol. II, L’âme). Paris: Aubier.

5. Kant. (2003). Critique of Pure Reason. (H. Caygill, Ed., & N. K. Smith,Trans.) Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

6. Woolhouse, R. S. (1993). The Concept of Substance in SeventeenthCentury Metaphysics. London: Routledge.

[1] And in this sense, he is very different from Descartes who writesphilosophy first of all because of science and not ethics,notwithstanding his book on the passions. (Descartes, 1985).

[2] He wants to make room for human freedom. See, for example thepreface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant,2003).

[3] See, (Ayers & Garber, 2003).

[4] Spinoza did not use the word ‘parallelism’ to explain his philosophy.Rather, it was Leibniz.

[5] In other words, truth has nothing at all to do with sensation.

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Modes in Spinoza – Lecture 7February 23 , 2014

So far in our discussion of Spinoza’sEthics, we have only spoken aboutsubstance and attributes. This isbecause we have tried to answer thequestion ‘why is there only onesubstance?’ We have seen that tounderstand Spinoza’s argument wehave to see that it progresses fromthe principles of Descartes’ philosophy.Spinoza is only taking to its logicalconclusion what is already implicit inDescartes’ philosophy, which hehimself, because he is still caught up ina theological world view, where God isviewed as transcendent in the world,could not see. It is this theological

prejudice, this ‘human fiction’ as Spinoza calls it in the appendix to Part1, which is the source of the separation, distance and split betweenattributes and substance in Descartes’ thought, and whichnecessitates the one-to-one correspondence between attributes andsubstance, such that every attribute must have its correspondingseparate substance. Thus, there is not just the thought-attribute, butalso thought-substance; there is not just extended substance but alsoextension-substance. As Curley argues, this doubling up of substanceand attribute is caused in Descartes text because he cannot acceptthat God could also be extension, and therefore he still needs the splitbetween infinite and finite substance.

Spinoza, on the contrary, begins with the idea of infinity (which wasalready there in Descartes’ definition of God, but is still confused withthe more traditional attributes), and deduces the necessity of theexistence of one substance from it. This is well explained in Bennett’s,whose tone, however, can be quite confusing, because like mostanalytic philosophers, he begins with the premise that the philosophyhe is studying must be wrong because he could not have been awareof recent modern developments, as though the philosophy progressedlike an empirical science, and one would no more read Aristotle tounderstand the world, than Ptolemy the night sky (Bennett 1984,pp.70–9).

Let us, us therefore, have a closer look at Bennett’s explanation ofSpinoza’s monism. The answer to the question, he argues, as to

Spinoza’s monism. The answer to the question, he argues, as towhether Spinoza is a monist, is whether it takes more than onesubstance to instantiate two attributes. For Descartes, as we haveseen, it is clear that two attributes means two substances. Theargument for Spinoza’s monist can be seen in 1P14, where Spinozastates that ‘except God, no substance can be conceived’. The proof isthat God, as an infinite being, must include every attribute (1D6) andtherefore must necessarily exist (1P11). If any other substance exists,then it must be explained in terms of an attribute of God (since everyattribute is included in God). This would mean that two substanceswould exist with the same attribute. Following 1P5, this is absurd andtherefore no other substance, other than God, can exist or even beconceived. From this it follows, as shown in the corollaries, that ‘God isone alone’ and that, contrary to Descartes, extension and thought areeither attributes or modifications of God.

Bennett explains this proposition in the following way. There must be asubstance with infinitely many attributes, and there cannot be twosubstances with an attribute in common. Therefore there must be onesubstance. The issue is the first premise: why must there be asubstance with infinitely many attributes? The answer to this question,Bennett suggests, is to be found in 1P7 and 1P11. In 1P7, Spinozaargues that substance must exist because a substance cannot beproduced by something other than itself, otherwise it would not beindependent (this is Spinoza’s version of the ontological argument). Ittherefore must be its own cause, and its existence is included in itsessence. And 1P11 that God is an infinite substance which consists ofinfinite attributes which necessarily exists.

After Kant and Hume, we might not so easily convinced by theontological argument, Spinoza or anyone else’s, but Bennett pointsout, Spinoza’s is peculiar because it goes through the idea ofsubstance which is defined, to use Bennett’s expression, as being‘entirely self-contained’ (Bennett 1984, p.73). This means that iscannot owe its existence to anything else. We must add to thisdefinition the rationalist insistence that everything that exists musthave a reason to exist (of course if one does not believe this then onecannot be a rationalist – as this fundamental belief is what is commonto Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz). There can, therefore, be only twopossibilities, either substance is caused by itself, or it is caused bysomething else. It could not be caused by something else otherwise itwould not self-sufficient, ‘entirely self-contained’, therefore it must beits own cause. So we have to see that for Spinoza it is because God isa substance that he necessarily exists. It is built into the definition ofGod that he must have every attribute, and if you link that to 1P5 thattwo substances cannot have the same attribute, then we are leadnecessarily to the conclusion that there can only be one substance.

How then do modes fit into the relationship between substance andattributes in the Ethics? To answer this question we first of all have toremind ourselves that the fundamental distinction is Spinoza’sphilosophy is between independence and dependence (Curley 1988,p.20). Attributes and substance are both independent; that is, theyare conceived through and exist in themselves (this follows from 1D3and 1P19)). It is important not to separate attributes and substance,however, since they are nothing but the essence of substance. Modes,on the contrary, are dependent; that is to say, we can only conceive ofthem through attributes and they exist, to use, Spinoza’s language, inanother (1D5). Again we can understand this difference, which isessentially the difference between attributes, which make up theessence of substance, and modes, through Descartes (though as weshall see for Spinoza, his modes are particular things because the waythat he conceives of substance). Take, for example, the famousexample of the piece of wax in the Mediations. When Descartes firstexperiences the piece of wax, when he brings it into his room, it smellsof flowers, tastes of honey, makes a sound when rapped, is hard andcold to the touch, and it is white, a cube and an inch in diameter.These are obviously all the properties the wax, and if someone wherenow to ask me what the wax is, I would list them. But now Descartesplaces the wax near the stove and the action of the heat changes all

the properties. So these qualities cannot be the explanation of whatthe wax is, for the wax is still there, and yet it has completely differentproperties. It has no fragrance of flowers, no longer tastes of honey, itdoesn’t make a sound, it is soft rather than hard, and is no longerwhite or a cube. There, then, has to be a more fundamentalexplanation of what the wax is, which explains these changes ofproperties in relation to the action of heat, and this is the attribute ofextension, which for Descartes is ‘matter in motion’; that is to say it isthe interaction of the tiny particles of matter set into motion by theaction of heat which explains the change in properties of the wax,which are dependent on them.

The primary law of physics, as Curley explains, for Descartes is theprinciple of inertia (Curley 1988, p.40). Everything remains the samestate unless acted upon by an external cause and every motion is in astraight line so that any deviation must be explained by an externalcause. These two laws tells us that there would no change in theuniverse unless by an external cause. The third law explains thenature of change. If a moving body comes into contact with anotherbody which has more motion that it, then it will not impart any motionto that body, but will change its direction, but if it comes into contactwith a body that has less, it will move that body along with itself, andimpart as much motion to it as it loses. This means that in theinteraction between bodies the total motion of the universe ispreserved. From these 3 fundamental laws all the laws of nature canbe deduced, and from these laws all secondary qualities can beexplained.

Of course we have to ask ourselves why these fundamental laws arenot any others. And remember that as a rationalist I am committed tothe principle that everything must have a reason to exist, otherwise itwouldn’t. Descartes answer to this question is God. But as we havealready seen for Descartes, God and matter cannot be identical. Thisseems to imply that the eternal and immutable essence of nature isseparate from God, and there are therefore two eternities: theeternity of God and the eternity of nature. Descartes gets around thisproblem by arguing that the eternity of nature, the fundamental lawsof physics that underlie all the laws of nature and thus all secondaryqualities, are in fact dependent on God’s will. To use Descartes’metaphor, God has established them as a king establishes laws in hiskingdom. They are eternal only because of the eternal will of God,which implies that God could have created the fundamental laws ofnature differently. Thus the difference between modes, attributes,finite and infinite substance expresses a hierarchy of being forDescartes, and it is for this reason that he remains trapped withintheological vision of the universe, however much he might say theopposite.

It is this hierarchy that Spinoza sees as incoherent. Cartesian physicsneeds the fundamental laws of physics to eternal and necessary, butat the same time he makes them contingent on the absolute power ofGod, which would make them utterly arbitrary. Spinoza is as committedas Descartes to the rational view of nature, so in order to preserve therational explanation of the universe, he has to get rid of the personalGod who still inhabits the pages of Descartes’ philosophy, who has thesame capricious will as a tyrant (again this is why the appendix of part1 of the Ethics is so important, for of course the mis-identification ofGod with the arbitrary power of a king also has a political message).What Spinoza does is identify God with the laws of nature. Every timethat we compare Descartes and Spinoza we can see that it is matter ofthe latter getting rid of the all the divisions and separations that theformer still want to hang onto. Spinoza flattens Descartes’transcendent split between finite and infinite substance, and thus theseparation between substance and attributes – attributes are notother than substance, rather they express the essence of substance.

We need to rid ourselves of the anthropomorphism of thinking thatnature is created by the arbitrary choice of a God that stands outsideof it, and also places us both at the centre and outside of it. God’s

essence is nothing else than the eternal and immutable laws ofnature. We do not need anything else than the fundamental laws ofnature, already explained by Descartes. We do not need to ask whythese laws and not any other, because there could be no explanationbeyond them. To explain is go from particular to general (just as I do inthe example of the wax). There is nothing more general than theselaws. To then say that these laws are explained by the arbitrary will ofGod is to go from the general to the particular, which is notexplanation at all, but just a descent into superstition and error. Ofcourse, I can say this and believe it, and there were people inSpinoza’s time who believed it, and may who still do, but this does notmake it an explanation however many times that I utter it, andhowever dogmatically I believe it. Religious belief is not a substitute forscientific explanation, and the kind of religious belief that thinks that itcan replace science is nothing but the absurd project of human poweronto the universe, where we think we are separate, rather than justone more part of the whole (this separation is perhaps the truepsychological origin of all religion – the fact that the human speciescannot conceive of itself except as an extraordinary exception).

Everything follows from the universal and necessary laws that areinscribed within the attributes, which do not need any moreexplanation since attributes can only be conceived through and exist inthemselves. From these laws follow all the individual things andproperties that we see in the universe, which are what Spinoza callmodes. Modes themselves are distinguished by Spinoza as eitherinfinite or finite. Infinite modes follow immediately from the attribute.Thus motion and rest are infinite modes that follow immediately fromextension, and these laws in turn explain finite modes; that isparticular individual things. Infinite modes are infinite because theyapply to all of nature at any time and any place, and are eternal in thesense that they are necessary. They are not infinite and eternal,however in the same sense, as attributes, since they are dependent onthese attributes, whereas attributes, as we know, are entirely self-contained.

The difference between finite and infinite modes is that former do notfollow unconditionally from the attributes. It is for this very reason thatthey are finite and not infinite. Any particular thing comes intoexistence and passes away. Thus to explain why two bodies interactcompletely we would not only need the fundamental laws of physics,but also a complete description of the history of these two bodiescircumstances and why they met in this place and at this time. Thiscomplete explanation is not possible, because we would have to knowthe infinite series of causes and effects which brought about thisencounter, which we cannot know (and we remember from our readingof Part Three that this is the source of inadequate ideas).

We do, however, need to be to be careful here. This does not meanthat Spinoza is letting chance make the universe. It is not that theencounter is unpredictable; it is just that we cannot know the infiniteseries. The universe is utterly deterministic for Spinoza; that is,everything follows, whether immediately or mediately from the essenceof God. Contingency does not belong to the structure of the universe;rather it arises, as Spinoza states in 1P33S1, as a ‘defect of ourknowledge’. Such determinism is utterly important to understandSpinoza’s ethics which follows from his physics and metaphysics. Forthe human fiction of morality is based upon the idea of humanfreedom, which of course is merely magnified, is the image of thetranscendent and hysterical God, which is equally loved by both thetyrant and the slave.

Works Cited

Bennett, J., 1984. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, [Indianapolis, IN]:Hackett Pub. Co.

Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinoza’sEthics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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From Descartes to Spinoza – Lecture 6January 25 , 2014

For Spinoza there is only onesubstance and this substance isGod. God, too, is central toDescartes’ philosophy, for withoutthe proof of the existence of Godhis whole metaphysics wouldcollapse. But to some extent hestill has a theological conception ofGod. God is understood asseparate and transcendent inrelation to the world such thatDescartes splits substancebetween the infinite and finite, andfinite substance itself is splitbetween extension and thought.Spinoza is precisely rejecting thissplit when he writes in the Ethicsthat: ‘God is the immanent, not thetransitive, cause of all things’(1P18). We can understand

Spinoza’s metaphysics as deducing the necessity of there being onlyone substance from Descartes’ principles. Therefore it is not simply amatter of Spinoza rejecting Descartes’ philosophy, but ofdemonstrating that following his own principles he too must agree thatthere can only be one substance and that this substance must be God.

The relation of Spinoza and Descartes to the idea of God is itselfambiguous. On the one hand they both agree with the essentialdefinition of this idea that God is supremely perfect and infinite being.This means that God cannot be conceived as limited in any way sincehe would be less than perfect if he were so. Already in this idea,therefore, lies the necessity of one substance. For if, like Descartes,we do make a split between infinite and finite substance, then we arelimiting God, namely by contrasting and opposing God to the createdworld, which has its own independent existence (and must do if weare to call it a substance). The only way Descartes can get out of thiscontradiction is by producing another one by arguing that finitesubstance must be dependent on God’s power for its own existence,which would mean that finite substance would be both dependent andindependent at the same time. For Spinoza the very idea of adependent substance, following from Aristotle, is a contradiction interms.

We can still see, however, that even with this abstract definition,which is the same for both Descartes and Spinoza, Descartes’philosophy is still caught within a theological definition of God (ahuman fiction for Spinoza, following the appendix of the first part of theEthics). This is because Descartes is still willing to talk about God interms of divine attributes, such as omnipotence and omniscience thatdistinguish God from the created world. There is a separation betweenwhat is created and the creator. God is special kind of substance inrelation to the substance of the world. Thus the idea of creation is stillcentral to Descartes’ metaphysics, which would be completelymeaningless for Spinoza. In fact we might think of Spinoza’smetaphysics as the final expulsion of any idea of creation fromphilosophy (in the appendix to Part 1, Spinoza writes about this ideathrough the fiction of final causes, where nature is imagined to becreated for the benefit of humankind by a tyrannical God, as opposedto being considered in terms of its essence).

Descartes still exists in the theological conception of an absoluteseparation, division or opposition between the world, on the onehand, and God, on the other. For Descartes, therefore, God cannot beextended, because God and the world are entirely differentsubstances. How would Spinoza counter this theological conception?Again, following the appendix to the first part of the Ethics, he wouldsay that we must start with the essence of things, rather than whatpeople might imagine things to be, and that this is the same with theidea of God, as of anything else. What many people say of God – He isgood, omniscient, omnipotent, and so on – are properties, but they donot say what God is in terms of attributes; that is to say, in terms ofhis essence. Take, for example, of omniscience. This is a property ofGod, but it cannot be a ‘fundamental property’, since it presupposesthe attribute of thought on which it is dependent (it is impossible toconceive of an ‘all-knowing being which does not think).

Descartes would probably not disagree with this argument, but it isclear that he would not accept that God could be conceived of in termsof extension, since extension is not infinitely perfect for Descartes. Thisis because extended matter is divisible, and it is clear that God cannotbe. Why does the divisibility of matter imply imperfection for Descartes?This is because divisibility is the destruction of matter, and destructionis an imperfection. Spinoza’s argument against this is that divisibility ofmatter is merely a mode, and in essence, matter is not divisible. This isbecause following 1P5 there can only be one extended substance,since two or more substances cannot have the same attribute, sincethey would not be anything that would distinguish them: ‘In Naturethere cannot be two or more substances of the same nature orattribute.’[1] If there is only substance, can we really say that matteris being destroyed? Even if I divide extended substances into differentparts, nonetheless these different parts still exist as part of the onesubstance, which has not been destroyed at all. The leg that I cut offthe horse is no longer part of the horse, but both the horse and theleg are still part of one and the same substance, and therefore I havenot separated this substance, when I have separated the horse fromits leg. If this were the case, then the separated leg would no longerbelong to extension at all. In fact the horse’s leg is just a portion ofextension that is qualified in a certain way. We should not, therefore,confuse the disabling of matter with its destruction. It is also meansthat extension is as infinite and eternal as thought, and it is only atheological prejudice of Descartes that prevents him from saying that itis just as much a ‘fundamental property’ or attribute of God asthought.

Spinoza’s philosophy is not a refusal of Descartes’, but is a thoroughlogically worked out consequence of his thought, which Descartescould not himself go to the end of perhaps because of a theologicalprejudice which prevented him from understanding theseconsequences. For Descartes, each substance has one attribute whichconstitutes its essence. For minds it is thought, and for bodies,extension. He calls these ‘principle attributes’. Knowing what theprinciple attributes are would tell you what you are dealing with, andwhat you should expect. Thus, you would not be led to the mistake ofconfusing and thought with a thing. One could say for Descartes,therefore, that what is important is not substance, but attributes,since attributes are the ‘principles of explanation’. For Spinoza it is theother way around. It is substance itself which is the principle ofexplanation, and not attributes, since it is not limited to the twoattributes which Descartes describes, but must contain infiniteattributes. Since to argue otherwise would be to limit substance andthus contradict its infinite essence, as Spinoza writes in IP8: ‘Everysubstance is necessarily infinite.’

For Descartes each separate attribute, which must be conceived initself, since we do not need to know what thinking is to know whatextension is, and vice versa, implies a separate substance, since heunderstands substance through attributes. Why, then, does Spinozaargue that we should think reality the other way around, and say thatthere is one substance with infinite attributes? In response to this we

might ask whether it is possible to think of one substance with infiniteattributes, perhaps because we tend to think in the same way asDescartes. Spinoza’s answer to this question is that we already do sothrough the idea of God. Since God is by definition infinite, He mustcontain infinite attributes, since if he did not, then He would lacksomething, which would contradict his infinite essence. Moreover if Goddid lack something then there must be something that caused God todo so, which again would contradict his essence and the very meaningof substance as independent.

We might not be convinced by Spinoza’s argument at this point, butCurley says that there is another way to get to the same conclusion. Ifeach attribute is conceived through itself, it must, therefore, also existin itself. If it existed in something else in order to exist, then we wouldneed to be able to conceive such a thing before we could conceive theattribute. If an attribute is conceived in itself, and exists in itself, thenit satisfies the definition of substance in 1D3 (‘by substance Iunderstand what is in itself and is conceived through itself’). But if wehave infinite attributes, each conceived and existing in itself, wouldn’twe then have an infinite amount of substances, rather than just one,as Spinoza believes? Curley’s answer to this question is to say thatSpinoza’s substance is a ‘complex of very special elements’ (Curley1988, p.30). If each attribute is conceived through itself, they mustalso exist in themselves, and must also exist necessarily. If this is thecase, then no single attribute could exist without the others, sincethey all necessarily exist: ‘The existence of each one of the attributesimplies the existence of all the others’ (Curley 1988, p. 30). Substance,therefore, is not anything different from attributes. It isn’t somethingthat lies behind attributes, as some kind of separate and distinctcause, which would lead us straight back to the transcendence we aretrying to get rid of. God, therefore, is nothing but the existence of aninfinite plurality of attributes, and nothing else.

Work Cited

Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinoza’sEthics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[1] Ethics, p. 3. See also IP13. To make matter divisible is to divide itinto parts, but that would either mean that these parts would not bethe same as substance, which would cause substance not to exist, orthere would be many substances with the same attribute which wouldbe absurd.

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Spinoza: What is Substance? – Lecture 5December 18 , 2013

Perhaps one of of the greatestobstacles to modern readers ofSpinoza’s Ethics is the language heuses. It is one which would beperhaps understandable to readersof his time, but has become prettymeaningless to us now. It is alanguage that has its roots ingreatest obstacles to modernreaders of Spinoza scholasticism,though, like Descartes, (who is themost important philosophicalinfluence on Spinoza) everything hewrites is a rejection of this tradition.

Scholasticism obtains its languagefrom Aristotle (or at least as he ishanded down by the Islamic scholars

to the West in the 9th century), so we first need to go back to thissource.

Those of you who have done a basic cause in Greek philosophy mightremember Aristotle’s philosophy and especially his notion of‘substance’, and this is where we need to start, since ‘substance’ inone of the most important words in Spinoza’s vocabulary. We are alsogoing to use as our guide here the excellent book by Woolhouse, TheConcept of Substance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics.[1]

When we normally think of the word ‘substance’ in English, weassociate it with the idea of matter. As for example, when we think ofthe question ‘what substance is this table made out of?’, we wouldprobably respond by saying, ‘wood’ or ‘plastic’, corresponding to thematerial it was constructed from. This is not what Aristotle means bysubstance at all, and certainly not what Spinoza means by it. In factAristotle has a completely different word for matter in Greek, which ishyle. The word in Greek for substance is, on the contrary, ousia. Ousia

is the 3rd person singular feminine present participle of the Greek verb‘being’. Now the grammar of this word is not particularly important forus, but what is important is that it has its origin in the verb ‘being’.Ousia is not the word for matter for Aristotle but for what is. Everythingthat is, is named by the word ousia, since everything that is mustnecessarily be; that is, must necessarily possess being, whether we’retalking about tables, galaxies or even ourselves. This notion of being,Aristotle says in the Metaphysics, is the proper subject matter ofphilosophy, and no other study. So the question we must askourselves is what did Aristotle think was the answer to the questionwhat is being?

What is real for Aristotle are individual things like men, animals andplants and so on, and what is, is made up of these individual things.This seems to follow common sense, and it is clear those philosophersbefore Aristotle where not so ready to agree with common sense.Many of them tended to believe that there was a much greater realitybehind the individual things we experience, which it is the task ofphilosophers to describe. Think, for example of the first Greekphilosopher that we have any information about, Thales, who thoughtthat every individual thing was in fact made of water, which wastherefore the ultimate explanation and reality of the universe.

The best way to understand Aristotle’s idea of substance is to go backto his theory of predication. In fact we might say that it is this theory ofpredication which is the true source of his understanding of being: theway we understand being has its origin in the way we talk about theworld. A substance for Aristotle is a subject of a predicate, but which atthe same time is not a predicate of anything else. This is true definitionof what we mean by an individual thing: it is independent of anythingelse. This notion of independence, as we shall see, is crucial to themeaning of substance, and is the key especially of understandingSpinoza’s use of the word. A substance is what undergoes change (itcan have different predicates attached to it), but it itself remains thesame, or holds onto its identity. Think of Socrates the man. He can beyoung or old, cold or warm, wise and ignorant, and so on. We canpredicate all these different and opposite predicates of Socrates, butnonetheless it is still Socrates the individual (who is different fromPeter and the chair over there) who we say these things of.Substance, then, has two very important parts of its definition:independence, and identity.

Now the question for Aristotle, as it is for every philosopher, iswhether individual things are the ultimate substance or whether thereis something greater than individual things, and which can explainthem in a better way than they can explain themselves. This wouldmean that individual things would not be independent but would bedependent on something higher. In the same way that hot only makes

sense predicated on some other individual thing, and can only have ameaning because of this; individual things would be, in fact, predicatesof something else. This would mean, therefore, that their‘substantialness’, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, would be anillusion. But it is precisely this kind of thinking he rejects. What is realare individual things, and it is they that undergo change and notsomething else. We tend to think there is some more ultimate realitybecause like Plato we confuse the definition of something with itsreality – thus, because we notice there is something common betweendifferent horses, we make the mistake of thinking that there is somekind of ‘Horse’ which is the ultimate cause of them. Or we confusesubstance with matter; that is to say, we think everything is the samebecause they are all made of the same kind of stuff.[2] It is true thatthings are made of matter, and there might be some ultimate matterwhich is the explanation of all forms of matter (like atoms), but that isnot enough to explain what something is for Aristotle. For Aristotlewhat something is made up of its matter and its form, and it is thisform which is explained by substance. The form, therefore, tells uswhat the thing is and why it is what it is. Matter, alone, for Aristotle,cannot do this, for it just tells what is the same about everything, butnot why this thing is the thing that it is and not any other.

The most important influence, as we have already indicated, onSpinoza is Descartes, who will use this Aristotelian vocabulary, but willgive it a very different meaning. The two important characteristics,however, remain: independence and identity. Descartes writes asthough he has escaped Scholastic philosophy, which has been thedead hand on scientific progress by retaining the Aristotelian view ofnature, against the new mechanistic theory of nature. But this is justpropaganda, for he will still use their vocabulary, and in relation to theidea of God, there is much that is ‘scholastic’ in his thought. The mostimportant influence is the very idea of God itself. For this is notsomething that would have been of concern for Aristotle, at least notas it is presented in theological thought. For Aristotle the universe iseternal, but for the Christian thinkers, such a view would denycreation; an idea which would have been utterly inconceivable toAristotle. The idea of creation changes everything in the doctrine ofsubstance, for the notion of independence belongs to its definition. Ifthe universe is created by God, and it must be in Christianity, theneverything that exists in creation must be dependent on Him. There,therefore, can only be one independent substance, which is God.Descartes, however, is not willing to go this far. Rather, he says, wecan distinguish between two kinds of substance: infinite substance,which is God, and created substance, which is any individual thingwhich is dependent on God for its existence, but not anything else. Wecould say they have relative independence, and they correspond towhat Aristotle defines as substance. A substance, just as in Aristotle,is everything which is conceived of through itself and not through someother kind of thing, and that which exists (apart from the fact that it iscreated) in its own right. A substance is therefore the subject ofpredication, of which we predicate qualities, properties and attributesto, and remains identical through change.

We say that created substance is similar to Aristotle’s notion ofsubstance. It is similar in its definition (independence and identity), butnot similar in what it describes. For substance describes individualthings in Aristotle, tree, galaxies and you and me, but it does not do sofor Descartes. To understand this difference, we are going to have tolook at two other technical expressions, which are also fundamentalfor Spinoza: attributes and modes. Descartes’ philosophical systemhas three levels of reality: infinite substance, finite or createdsubstance, and properties or qualities. We could see the relationbetween these levels as one of dependence: with infinite substance,created substance would not exist, and without created substanceproperties and qualities could not exist, for they always need to beproperties or qualities of something. These properties or qualities ofcreated substance Descartes calls modes. If modes are dependent onsubstance, then substance in itself cannot be a mode. We knowsubstances, therefore, for Descartes through attributes, and there are

two main attributes which explain all the possible modes that weknow: extension and thought. The first explains objects in the world,and the second thoughts in our heads. These two are quite different,and this is why they are to be explained through two very differentattributes, which cannot explain each other. A thought is not an object,and an object is not a thought. Attributes, therefore, have somethingin common with substances: they can only be conceived throughthemselves and not through something else – thus we can onlyunderstand the attribute extension through extension (length, breadthand shape – which can be understood mathematically) and notthrough anything else, whereas a mode must be understood throughextension (heat is the motion of particles). In the same way a thoughtcan only be understood through the attribute thought, and notthrough anything else, whereas any mode of thought (belief, love,desire and so on) must be understood through thought, since onecannot desire something, for example, which one cannot think. Theseprincipal attributes constitute the nature of substance for Descartes,and there must, therefore, be two kinds of substances, which explainshis dualist metaphysics. Thus, whatever exists, substance, attribute,mode, must either be a body or thought, and cannot be anything else.He does not give a reason why there is only two kinds of substance,but only that there are only two. Or if you like, God was free to createtwo kinds of finite substance, but he could have created more ofdifferent kinds.

How then is Descartes different from Aristotle? In terms of nature, thenotion of individual substances disappears, such as trees, galaxies andhuman beings called Socrates. Rather, there is only one corporealsubstance, of which these things are only modes. Thus, Descartes getsrid of Aristotle’s notion of forms, which explains why each thing is whatit is. For Descartes this can be explained by the location, motion andrest of matter itself, and no appeal to any form is required. Individualhuman minds are, however, for Descartes, individual substances in theway that Aristotle would still talk of them. Anyone who thinks is anindividual thinker, and cannot be the same as any other individualthinker – we do not have the same thoughts (this follows the rule thatany substance must be independent). So for Descartes it is my mind orsoul that individualizes me and not my body.

How, then, does Spinoza’s thought fit within these two descriptions ofsubstance by Aristotle and Descartes? First of all, it follows the samedefinition of substance that it must be conceived in and through itself.Again this is what is meant by saying that substance must beindependent. Also his notion of attribute appears to be the same asDescartes, in that it expresses the way that we perceive substance.We might ask ourselves, therefore, how an attribute comes to expresssubstance. Why this attribute and not any other, for example? Wehave already seen that Descartes just says that there are two, but notwhy there are only two. Attributes are ways through which substanceis understood. Now we really need to take care with our propositionshere. For though Spinoza will agree that it is through attributes thatwe understand substance, he will argue further that substance is notonly conceived through itself, but also in itself. What is the differencebetween conceiving substance through itself and in itself? Descartescollapses the real distinction between finite substance and itsattributes (whilst making the latter dependent on God who is separateand transcendent) and this is why he can only conceive of two principalattributes. But for Spinoza, thought and extension are only the waythat we perceive substance, but it in itself must have infiniteattributes, since it must be infinite.[3] If it were finite, then it would belimited by something outside of itself, and therefore it will fail the testof independence which is the definition of substance. There must,therefore, be only one substance, and not two kinds of substances, asDescartes argues. If can only do so because he holds onto thedifference between creation and God, finite and infinite substance. ForSpinoza, on the contrary, there is only one substance which is ‘God orNature’. We will need to describe the essence of this substance in thenext lecture.

[1] ‘Descartes and Substance’ in R. S Woolhouse, The Concept ofSubstance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics. London, Routledge,1993, 14-27.

[2] Later on it will be important to see whether Spinoza is doing this,and whether substance means matter for him, for it is clear that unlikeAristotle he thinks that there is only one substance.

[3] This does not mean that thought and extension is merely theappearance of substance, which is something different in itself. Theyare real distinctions.

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Spinoza, Freedom and Democracy – Lecture 4November 11 , 2013

Perhaps one of the most difficult ideas to grasp in Spinoza is freedom,for his metaphysics seems to run counter to it. If we are modes of aninfinite being, then this being is the cause of everything that we doand think, otherwise we would be separate from it, and this is clearlynot possible for Spinoza (man is not a ‘dominion within a dominion’ ashe writes in the preface of part 3). And yet, throughout the Ethics hetalks of the rational man as a free man, and indeed that the highestgoal of human life is freedom. How can this possibly be when we aretotally dependent and therefore determined by God?

This contradiction, however, is only a surface one because it is theresult of our misunderstanding of what Spinoza means by the word‘freedom’. What we mean by freedom is freedom of choice. That I amfree to do what I wish to do, and whatever I wish to say or think. Thisis not what Spinoza means by freedom. For Spinoza, freedom isfreedom to be oneself, but to be oneself is to follow the necessity ofone’s nature. The difference between these two conceptions of naturecan be found in letter that Spinoza writes to Schuller:

That thing is free which exists and acts solely from thenecessity of its own nature and I say that that thing isconstrained which is determined by something else to existand to act in a fixed and determinate way. […] I placefreedom, not in free decision, but in free necessity. (Spinoza1995, pp.283–4)

This difference, of course, reminds us of the difference betweenpassive and active affects. In passive affects and I am affected by anexternal body that is outside of me and which I have an inadequateidea of, whereas in active affects I am the determining cause becauseI understand both the nature of my body and how it relates to otherexternal bodies. Since everything seeks to preserve its own existence,by the principle of conatus, if I were only to follow my own reason, thenI would only seek those external bodies that brought me joy, andavoid those that brought me sadness. But what has active affects todo with free necessity, and why would the free man, so to speak,always be the joyful one?

The key, as we have already suggested is the difference betweeninadequate and adequate ideas. A rational person for Spinoza, whichis the same as a free person, is someone who has adequate ideas. Ihave an adequate idea of something when I know its cause. Whatdoes Spinoza’s mean by cause? He does not just mean the narrowsense of cause that we might use in scientific explanations, when wesay that something causes something else. Rather, ‘cause’ has a muchbroader meaning as ‘explanation’. It is to know the cause of whysomething exists. Clearly a finite mode, which we are, cannot know

every cause (this is why for Spinoza it is not possible to free ourselvesfrom inadequate ideas completely and thus passive affects), but wecan know some things. To know the cause of something means theexplanation ends in self-evident truths. Now a self-evident truth is anecessary and eternal truth. How do we distinguish betweeninadequate idea and adequate ones? Inadequate ideas are thoseideas that I can never know because they belong to an infinite series.Such a series is always a historical, temporal one for Spinoza. Thus if Iask why did such a thing happen to be at this time, then I will neverknow because I cannot know all the circumstances. Adequate ideas,on the contrary, are ideas of things that I can know, because they areexplanations that end in self-evident truths that are eternal. I canknow the same thing inadequately or adequate. Thus if I ask myselfwhy did I write the word ‘triangle’ at this moment, rather than ‘square’,then I cannot know this. But if I ask myself ‘what is a triangle’, then Ican. It is a three sided figure whose internal angles add up to 180degrees.

It is inadequate ideas that give us a false idea of freedom, because weconfuse freedom simply with the impossibility that we can know thecause. Thus I might say to myself if only I hadn’t made that choice thenI wouldn’t be unhappy now. But I have no idea whether that is true ornot, or all the reasons why I made that choice or not. It is the fact thatI cannot explain it that gives me the illusion there were hiddenpossibilities that I could have chosen. Because I get fixated by thatchoice, I then become enslaved to it. I end up isolating a particularcause, but this can only ever be a partial cause and thus aninadequate idea. Indeed for Spinoza this is how most people live, aslave to their passions. They are attached to one cause or another,one object or another, that they either love or hate, but this cause orobject can only be a partial cause or object in infinite network ofcauses and objects that they cannot know. This is what Spinozameans by slavery and it is a slavery of the understanding. My ideas areattached to objects or causes that begin to dominate them. Thus theonly way to escape this enslavement is through the natural power ofthe understanding itself.

We can already see what this might be. It means that I should directmy attention to eternal truths that I can understand, rather thanpartial causes that I cannot. I would analyse my affects in terms ofthose that I can understand and those that are the result of myimagination, and since I am an active thinking being, it would be themost rational thing to follow my reason rather than my imagination. Afree person is therefore someone who uses the power of their mind tofree themselves from the domination of the passions. To understandfreedom here we have to, like every other concept in Spinoza, relate itback to the ontology of the Ethics. Every individual strives to preserveitself in its being and thus to increase its power. Such striving is whatmakes an individual an individual, for if they did not strive they wouldcease to exist and be swallowed by a stronger power. As a physicalthing, I resist the physical environment that surrounds me. But humanbeings are not just physical things, they also think. So what does itmean to strive for existence in terms of thinking? It means to increasethe power of thinking. To understand more is therefore to exist moreas the very activity of thought itself. Active thinking means thatthought determines itself rather than is determined by partial causesthat it does and cannot know, and the more self-determining I am themore free I am; that is to say free from the passive affects that arecaused by inadequate ideas.

It is this conatus, this striving for existence that determines themeaning and reality of freedom for Spinoza, which is not an ideal thatlies outside of us. The more power that I have, the more freedom Ihave, and therefore the more reality and perfection. Virtue for Spinozatherefore means being oneself, the power to be or realising oneself,which means being an individual. My conatus is not to be a best ofkind, but to preserve myself as an active individual in terms of both mybody and my mind.

We should not confuse this freedom with the freedom of choice, if youmean by that freedom to choose between different possibilities. Weare free to the extent we can determine the essence of our nature,but not what our nature is. The only choice is either reflectivelychoosing oneself, or passively ending up being who one already is.Freedom here is freedom of reflection. If I am caught up in inadequateideas, then I will chose things that will undermine my existence. If Iknow the essence of things, what is truly useful and what is not, thenI will not choose those things. But to know what something is, is toknow it necessarily and eternally. It is not as though I can change it.Thus freedom and necessity are not a contradiction. Whether I do ordo not choose has already been determined, but since I do not knowthis, it is irrelevant (or at least is something I am indifferent torationally). Spinoza did not choose to become Spinoza, but he did notchoose not to either.

For every belief and idea that I have there is an explanation. Everypassion that I have is an idea of joy and an idea of sadness which isaccompanied with the idea of the cause of that joy or sadness. I caneither know this cause adequately or inadequately. To know itadequately is to know what it is in terms of its self-evident truth. Toknow it inadequately, is to know it only in terms of the association ofideas whose origin I cannot fathom. Freedom means don’t let yourselfbe enslaved by an idea or belief that you cannot or do not know,because that belief or idea will determine you rather than youdetermining it. Either the partial cause is the source of my affect, andthen I am passive, or I have an adequate idea of that cause, and thenI am active, and self-determining. What I cannot do is either changethe order of things, or the order of ideas, since neither totality can beadequately grasped by me, as finite mode, nor could change, sincewhat is cannot be otherwise than it is, otherwise it would not beinfinite. If I have cancer, then I cannot change that, but what I canchange is my understanding it, and in understanding it, free myselffrom the passive affects that might be associated with it (the idea thatit might be a punishment for example). Or to use the example byStuart Hampshire, I am angry with someone (Kashap 1972, p.321). Ithus have an idea of them and that they have displeased me becauseof something they said or did. I become obsessed with this, andimagine that they could have said or done something different. Assoon as I, however, reflect on this passive affect, I realise that thereare a chain of associations that have led to this obsession, and whatthis person said or did is only a partial cause. As soon as this happen,then I am not longer in the thrall of this passive affect. The activity ofreflection has dissolved it into an active affect as opposed to a passiveone, because I realise it has nothing at all to do with them at all. Ingoing through such a process my power of existence is increasedbecause my understanding is.

Freedom then for Spinoza is self-affirmation and self-assertion of one’sindividuality as a thinking being. The more I understand, the more Ithink, the more I express my power as a thinking being and the moreexpress my individuality since I am no longer subject to the attachmentto objects or persons whose partial causes I cannot explain orunderstand. The two conditions of freedom, therefore, for Spinoza, aredetachment and affirmation. Its path is the realisation of the illusionarynature of my fantasies that have their basis in my inadequate ideaswhere I become a prisoner of my affects. Freedom is nothing less thanself-determination. Of course this is a continual act of liberation forSpinoza, since I can always, as finite mode, because subject to otherpassive affects that I have not understood, but the route tounderstanding is always open to me.

Individuality is the highest expression of freedom that comes directlyfrom Spinoza’s principle of conatus. It should not surprise us that thishas directly a political meaning. In fact there is no separation of ethicsand politics for Spinoza because both are thought ontologically. Asuperficial reading of the Ethics would confuse individualism as aretreat from political life, but precisely the opposite is the case. This isbecause at the very heart of Spinoza’s understanding of human nature

is a sociability that is linked directly to conatus.

For Spinoza a right is an expression of power. Thus all things haverights to the extent that they have power. Yet since every individualthing is a finite mode, these rights are always limited. I have a right tothe extent I have the power to assert that right and no more. Thispolitical realism is very explosive because it means that no state hasabsolute power over individuals. It can rule by consent or violence, butviolent states will eventual fail when the power of individuals exceedsthem (as we see in the recent example of Libya). The most powerfulstate would have the most right, because it would have the mostpower. We should not confuse that we tyranny and violence, however,since it is the most reasonable state that would have the most power,because it would be the one that would compose most with theindividuals that made it up. To say that everyone is individual is not tosay that everyone lives in isolation, for what makes an individualindividual is the relation to other individuals. I am nothing but theencounters that form me.

The key proposition here is proposition 37 of part 4. To be guided byreason is seek what is useful to oneself. What is most useful is otherpeople, because associating with others is what increases my ownpower to exist. This sociability is not based on equality but ondifference. Each with our different abilities combines with others andtherefore increases each other’s power. To desire others as useful tome is not to desire them to be the same as me, but exactly theopposite: to desire them in their difference; that is to say, as theindividuals that they are. Such a collective individuality is what Spinozacalls friendship. But he knows that isn’t why most people end uptogether. There is also the affective genesis of a collectively which isnot based on the rational idea of utility, but the fact that we love orbelieve in the same object. Such is the basis of patriotism, for example.In this case it is passive affects that are joining is together. If we wereonly rational creatures then we would live only in rational cities, butbecause we are not, we also live in affective ones. This isn’t adistinction between two cities, as though the rational one were ideal,and the affective one, real, which would be to read Spinoza as thoughhe were Plato, but that every political institution is a combination ofboth. The political problem for Spinoza is to make sure that theaffective does dominate the rational, because it will essentiallyunstable and conflictual. It is the state as such which has to ensurethat this does not happen.

It is in his two political writings, the earlier Theologico-Political Treatise[hereafter TPT], and the later, shorted, and unfinished, PoliticalTreatise, that Spinoza thinks about these ontological ideas in terms ofpolitical reality as such. In other words, what would be the best stateto exist in? In the earlier work, there is no doubt that Spinoza’s writingreflects his own situation. The best state is the democratic one, whichreflects the Dutch republic at the time under the De Witt brothers. Whywould democracy be the best state? Because it instantiates thehighest level of freedom that we have just described in that it allowsthe freedom of thought. The particular political problem is whether thisfreedom can also be granted to religion, which is more affective thanrational. Spinoza’s solution is that one should separate private frompublic belief. In private, everyone should have the right to believewhatever they want, but in public worship should be regulated by thestate. But reality was to show that Spinoza’s solution was a false one.As Balibar suggests, there were two reasons for this.(Balibar 1998,p.114) One, that the Dutch republic was not democratic at all, since itwas founded on social inequality, but secondly, and more importantly,it was an illusion to think that the masses would be open to rationalargument, and thus that the democratic state could negotiatebetween the rational and affective.

The Political Treatise was a response to these real problems, andinitially it might appear that Spinoza was giving up on democracy as anideal, but this is only apparent. The real difference of the approach isthat Spinoza now sees the purpose of the state as security (this ties in

with the principle of conatus in the Ethics). A state that could embodythe collective security of individuals would be absolute or most perfectstate. It is clear that a democratic state might not ensure this at all.The real problem is how one would reach a consensus about whatwould be security for all. It is here that Spinoza sees that what isfundamental is the question of the multitude or the masses. In theTPT, the masses were what was regulated by the state, but nowSpinoza sees that the state is the masses, and the masses the state.Desire is always already collective. The key political question is howthe passive affects of the masses can be transformed into active ones.We already know the answer to this and that is knowledge andunderstanding. So effective political power would always be the powerthat increases the knowledge and understanding of the masses. Sucha power, again following Balibar, we might call democratisation asopposed to democracy, since even democracy require democratisation.It would the increasing of knowledge and communication because thatincreases knowledge and understanding generally and therefore thesecurity of the state, because the majority would know what theircommon interest would be and would not be attached to the partialunderstanding of external objects and thus the violence and vacillationof passive affects.

Works Cited

Balibar, E., 1998. Spinoza and Politics, London: Verso.

Kashap, S. ed., 1972. Studies in Spinoza, Critical and InterpretiveEssays., Berkeley: University of California Press.

Spinoza, B., 1995. Spinoza : the Letters, Indianapolis Ind. ; Cambridge:Hacket.

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Joy and Sadness – Spinoza Lecture 2O ctober 13 , 2013

When we come to Spinoza’s analysis of affects the fundamentaldistinction is between active and passive ones. This is because theessence of singular things is to be understood in terms of power. Sinceonly existence is what distinguishes one thing from the other, eachthing seeks to preserve its own existence (‘Each thing, as far as it canby its own power, strives to preserve in its being’ IIIP6), otherwise itwould cease to be what it is. Any singular thing, however, is alsolinked to an exterior environment, and the more complex it is, the morecomplex these relations will be. What defines the nature of humanbeings, is not some ‘natural perfection’, or that they are created in theimage of God, (all ideas guilty of the worse kind of anthropomorphismfor Spinoza), but the complexity of their bodies and therefore thecomplexity their relations to other external bodies. These relations canhave two basic forms either active or passive: either I determinemyself in relation to these external bodies, or they determine me, andthe more that I determine myself the more my power increases, andless I determine myself, or the more that I am determined by externalcauses, the more my power decreases.[1]

The distinction between passive and active affects is understood bySpinoza through two fundamental affects: joy and sadness. We mightsay that for Spinoza human affective life is made up of three basicaffects: desire (conatus – the striving for self-preservation that allsingular things have), and then joy and sadness. All the otheremotions that Spinoza describes in the Ethics are merely variations ofthese three basic affects but the most fundamental are joy andsadness.[2] How can we understand this difference between joy and

sadness? Spinoza explains it in proposition 11 of Part 3:

The idea of any thing that increases or diminishes, aids orrestrains, our body’s power of acting, increases ordiminishes, aids or restrains, our mind’s power of thinking.

Whatever increases or diminishes the power of the body to act alsoincreases or diminishes the power of the mind to think. This follows,Spinoza writes in the demonstration, from 11P7 and IIP14. The first isthe statement of parallelism – the order and connection of things isidentical to the order and connection of ideas – and the second is thatthe mind contains what the body experiences, and the more complex abody is the more sophisticated these experiences are. In the scholium,Spinoza explains that our minds, because of the complexity of ourbodies can go through many changes. These changes, to useBennett’s expression, are to be thought in terms of ‘up and a down’,as the passage from a great or lesser perfection (Bennett 1984,p.257). What does Spinoza mean by ‘perfection’ in this context? Againwe have to remind ourselves that for Spinoza human beings are not a‘dominion within a dominion’. We are part of the universe of infiniteseries of causes and effects, about which we cannot have absoluteknowledge. The human body is essentially vulnerable to externalbodies, because it has so many complex and involved relations tothem. To increase my power to act is to increase my power todetermine myself and act against these external bodies through thedesire of self-preservation, and my power to act is decreased whenthese external bodies threaten by existence. I can only be destroyed,Spinoza writes, by external causes. Perfection is an affirmation ofexistence. The more perfect something is the more reality that thinghas, and therefore the more power to act it has and thus the morepower to think.

It is with respect to this increase and decrease of the power to actthat we can understand the two fundamental affects joy and sadness.Joy is the affect by which the mind passes to a greater perfection, andsadness to a lesser one. There are things in the world that make usjoyful and there are things in the world that make us sad. This is allthat we need to understand passive affects. First of all these affectshave to do with the body, but we know from part 2 that the mind isthe idea of the body and that the power of the mind to imagine thingsdepends on the existence and relation of the body. Thus joy andsadness, at least for human beings, does not just involves directrelations with our bodies, but also with our imagination, the idea of thebodies we have, and the ideas of how they are changed or modified byexternal bodies (whether persons or objects). For the most part,because of the very way we do have ideas of our body, these ideasare inadequate (because we do not have an adequate understandingof the relation our body to the other bodies).

As long as the body is affected by an external body, Spinoza writes inthe following proposition, the mind will regard that body as present,and as long as the mind imagines that external body as present, thenour own bodies will be affected in the same way. This means that if themind imagines an external body that increases the power of the bodyto act then the mind’s power of thinking will be increased, and it willfeel joy, and if it imagines an external body that decreases the powerof the body to act then the mind’s power of thinking will be decreased,and it will feel sadness. Then mind, then, Spinoza states in thecorollary of IIIP13, will try to stop imagining those things that restrainthe power of that body and its own, and in the scholium this explainsthe difference between love and hate. One who loves strives to makepresent the thing he loves, because this is a passage to a greaterperfection through the idea of an external cause, joy, and one hates,for the opposite reason, will try to destroy the thing that she hates.

Through imagination we have, therefore, very complex relations toexternal bodies. It means in IIIP15 that anything can be the accidentalcause of joy or sadness, and we can love or hate those things withoutany cause known to us because they are similar in our imagination to

other objects that affect us. Thus, as in IIIP16, by the mere fact thatthere is a resemblance to one object or another, we can be affected byjoy or sadness. Moreover imagination also opens us up to time. Weare affected by the same joy or sadness, Spinoza argues, whether weare talking about a past or future external body, or whether we arespeaking about a present one. Thus the imagination retains pastimpressions of encounters which still affect it in the present, and asthe same time can project these impressions, both present and pastones into the future. As long as I am affected, Spinoza writes in thedemonstration, I will regard the external body as present, even if itdoesn’t exist. The image of an external body is the same whether itexists in the past, present, or future; it is there in my mind, and itaffects me. We might say that accidental causes of affects are alwaysthe mediation of one affect by another affect, either through differentaffects, or different times. In each case, for Spinoza, the causes ofthese affects are inadequately understood and thus experiencespassively, whether they are sad or joyful.

It is the intersection between affects and affections which determinethe specific nature of human emotions. The mind strives to imagine andrecollect images that augment the power of the body to act, and tokeep before those ideas which exclude the existence of things thatdiminish my power to act. It is these images that carry associativefeelings from the past, which reflect the causal interactions betweenmy body and others that have left their traces within me, such thatdifferent bodies with different traces will react differently in the presentthen I will. My body is all my past interactions which affect my mindcarried through into the present and projected into the future.

Our relation to affects is not merely individual but social (and this willbe very important in part 4, to show that the self-interest does notcontradict friendship and sociability). It is true for Spinoza that eachbeing strives to exists, but the form that this striving takes isdetermined by the nature of that being. Human beings are socialbeings. This means that my own well-being is inconceivable withoutothers. I am not first an isolated being which then encounters others;rather, my very individuality is inconceivable without my relations toothers that care for me, and I care for them. It is not that the individualpursues his or her own interests against the interests of others butthat to be an individual is to be already acted upon and act withothers. My existence, as a determinate mode of infinite substance, isalready involved with the existence of others. This is why from IIIP21Spinoza argues that if we imagine the thing that we love affected withjoy and sadness, then we too will be affected by joy and sadness andwe will love those who affect those we love with joy, and hate thosewho cause them sadness. We too also feel empathy towards otherbeings like ourselves (IIIP27). If the nature of an external body is likeour body, then if we imagine that body involving an affect, then we toowill be affected by that same affect, which explains the feeling of pitythat we have for those that suffer. For human being, affects areimitative. We do not only affirm ourselves but also those we love.Those we love are those whose existence gives us joy, and we wish togive them joy, and exclude from existence everything that gives themor us sadness. This is not altruism as an idea but the power ofimagination. If we imagine someone like us to be affected by an affect,we can likewise imagine ourselves also so affected and so also beaffected. This similarity is not one of common identity but a directapprehension through bodily awareness. Thus in every bodilyexperience there is a direct relation to other bodies and this mustalways be the case for human beings. And this is both the cause ofconflict and harmony. Every human emotion, whether positive ornegative, is caused by bodily imaginings, and our ideas of good andevil arise out the joy and sorrow of being in our bodies. What is goodis not what we judge but what we desire. We judge it good onlybecause we desire it, and not the other way around.[3]

There is no Good and Evil in the moral sense. Rather they are relationsbetween bodies. What is good is what augments my existence; whatis bad is what diminishes it. If we think of this in terms of food, Deleuze

explains, then what is bad for us is what destroys our bodies (Deleuze1983, p.34). This is what we mean by poison. What is good is whatsuits our nature, and what is bad is what doesn’t. If something suitsour nature then it increases our power, if it doesn’t, then it decreasesit. Thus, as Deleuze writes, the aim of the Ethics is replacetranscendent morality with an immanent ethics, which is nothing elsethan the relation between bodies (Deleuze 1983, p.35). It follows fromthis that Spinoza does not see any benefit to sadness at all. Sadnessdoes not teach us anything. It only makes us weak, and from thisweakness arise feeling of ‘hate, aversion, mockery, fear, despair…,pity, indignation, envy, humility, repentance, abjection, shame, regret,anger, vengeance, cruelty…’(Deleuze 1983, p.39).

Every individual, for Spinoza is a singular essence, which is a degree ofpower. This degree of power is determined by an ability to be affected.Thus an animal is not defined, Deleuze explains, in Spinoza as aspecies, but in terms of its power to be affected, by amount ofaffections that it is capable of (Deleuze 1983, pp.39–43). When itcomes to human beings this power of being affected is defined by twotypes of affections: actions and passions. Actions explain the nature ofthe individual (what it can do) and passions how it is affected byexternal bodies. The power to be affected is present as the power toact, when it is ‘filled’ by active affections of the individual, and thepower to suffer when it ‘filled’ by passions. For every individual thepower to be affected is constant, but the relation between active andpassive affects is variable. It is not only important, however, todistinguish between actions and passions, Deleuze adds, but betweentwo kinds of passions. If we encounter an external body which doesnot suit us, then the power of this body is opposed to the power ofours and as such it acts as a ‘subtraction’ or ‘fixation’. It takesdiminishes or subtracts from our power to act, and the passions thatcorrespond to this relation are sad. In the opposite case, if weencounter an external body that suits us, then its power is added toours, and we are affected by the passion of joy. Now joy, just likesadness must be separated from our power to act, since it is a passionand must therefore have an external cause, but the power to actincreases proportionally such that we reach a point where passive joy‘transmutes’ into active joy. There cannot be, however, any activesadness, because sadness by definition decreases the power to actand thereby, the power to exist, and not being does not seek topreserve its existence. Suicide, for Spinoza, is not a sign of strengthbut weakness: a more powerful cause outside of me causes me totake my own life, if even I think mistakenly that I am the cause.

All the sad emotions and passions of our lives represent the lowestpoint of our power, and thus of our existence. Sadness alienates usfrom ourselves. We are totally at the mercy of feelings that come fromthe outside, and totality powerless from stopping them. Only joy canhelp us to act. If we allow ourselves to be affected by those thingsthat bring us joy, then we become more powerful and more active.One issue for Ethics, then, is how can we experience the most joy sothat this feeling of joy can be transformed into ‘active free sentiments’especially since our nature since to make us so vulnerable to sadnessand unhappiness (are we not the most miserable creatures on thisplanet?), since we are constantly affected by external bodies that wedo not understand. How then can we affirm ourselves when we arebuffeted from negative passions from all sides? This is the questionthat part 4 will seek to answer.

Works Cited

Bennett, J., 1984. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, [Indianapolis, IN]:Hackett Pub. Co.

Deleuze, G., 1983. Spinoza : philosophie pratique, Paris: Éd. de Minuit.

Lloyd, G., 1996. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and theEthics, London; New York: Routledge.

Rorty, A.O., 1987. The Two Faces of Spinoza. The Review of

Metaphysics, 41(2), pp.299–316.

[1] This is always relative for Spinoza, since as finite determinatemodes, human beings can never totally be separated from externalcauses. The aim of the Ethics cannot be to rid ourselves of affects,since they belong to our nature, but to understand them better.Whether we do so is itself is not up to us. Self-determination is notfree will for Spinoza but the recognition of necessity (Rorty 1987).

[2] Bennett lays these out, though he is not convinced that Spinozashould treat desire in the same way that he does joy and sadness(Bennett 1984, pp.263–4).

[3] Geneviève Lloyd gives an excellent explanation of this (Lloyd 1996,pp.77–6).

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Spinoza’s Ethics – Lecture 1O ctober 4 , 2013

Ancient philosophy sought to understand the power of emotionsthrough the division of the mind against itself, like Plato’s famousimage of the chariot in the Phaedrus, where the irrational part of themind fights against the rational part. Spinoza, on the contrary, likeDescartes, wants to understand emotions through the relation of thebody to the mind. The human mind for Spinoza is only the idea of thebody. We only have a limited understanding of what the body can do,and how it interacts with other bodies. Ethics, for Spinoza, isknowledge of our bodies. To truly understand ourselves is therefore tounderstand our bodies. As Spinoza writes at the end of the preface tothe third part of the Ethics, ‘I shall consider human actions andappetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.’(EIII preface)

When we normally think about ethics, we assume there is some kindmoral system that would prescribe our actions in advance. This moralsystem would be based on, and defend, some kind of moral ideal thatseparates human beings from the rest of nature. Only human beingsare capable of moral action, because only human beings can havemoral ideas such as responsibility, freedom and duty. To be moral isnot to follow one’s nature, but quite the opposite; it is to go againstnature. For Spinoza, on the contrary, ethics is only possible byunderstanding our own nature. There is no fact/value distinction forSpinoza. What is good is what follows our nature, and nature is to beunderstood in terms of our desires or appetites (thus it is perfectlypossible to think that animals are capable of ethics in this sense).[1]We do not desire something, as Spinoza writes in the scholium toproposition 9 in part 3, because we say it is good, rather we saysomething is good because we desire it:

We neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desireanything because we judge it to be good; on the contrarywe judge something to be good because we strive for it, willit, want it, and desire it. (EIIIP9Sc)

Such a statement is precisely the opposite to any kind of idealisticmorality that believes in the existence of moral ideas in advance thatdetermine how we ought to act. There is no ‘ought’ for Spinoza if weimagine this to be the contrary to our desires, since what we are is ourdesires and nothing more. We have to see ourselves as part of natureand not, as Spinoza writes at the start of the preface to the third partof the Ethics, a ‘dominion within a dominion’ (imperium in imperio)(EIIIpref). This is just the case with morality as it is with any other

sphere of human activity.

It is in Deleuze lectures on Spinoza that we might find the bestexplanation of the full scope of Spinoza’s ethics (Deleuze 1978). Whydoes Spinoza call his ontology an ethics? This is very peculiar, since wenormally think of ethics and ontology being very different things. Firstof all we have to ask ourselves what is Spinoza’s ontology. It is theunique infinite substance which is being. This means that individualbeings, singular things, including ourselves, are only modes of this oneinfinite substance. What does mode mean in Spinoza? Deleuze repliesthat we should understand the word ‘mode’ as meaning ‘a way ofbeing’ or a state, in the way that we say that green is a state of grass(as opposed to brown). So a tree is a way of being of substance, justas we are ‘a way of being’ of substance. He writes: ‘Et un mode c’estquoi? C’est une manière d’être. Les étants ou les existants ne sontpas des êtres, il n’y a comme être que la substance absolument infinie’[And a mode is what? It is a way of being. Beings or existents are notbeing; there is only being as an infinite absolute substance] (Deleuze1978). He adds that if we are to think of ethics in a Spinozist sensethen we have to sharply distinguish it from morality. Ethics has to dowith our ‘way of being’ as a mode of infinite substance. As a ‘way ofbeing’, it is better to understand ethics in the same way that weunderstand ethnology; that is, the study of human behaviour, in thesame way that we study the behaviour of other animals for example.

How is this different from a morality? Morality, Deleuze answers, has todo with knotting of two key concepts, essence and value. Moralityindicates what our essence is through values. This has nothing to dowith ontology, since values are meant to point beyond being (think ofthe idea of the Good in Plato, which is ‘beyond being’). They indicatewhat being should be rather than what it is. The aim of every morality,he continues to explain, is the realisation of one’s essence. This meansthat one’s essence, is for the most part, not realised; something isalways lacking or absent. Thus Aristotle, in book 1 of the NicomacheanEthics, will define our essence to be eudaimonia and the object ofethics is to reach this essence. The reason that we do not realise ouressence is that we don’t act in a rational way, since we lackknowledge of what it means to go beyond our being in order to reachits moral realisation. This moral end, which allows us to reach ouressence, what it means to be a human being, is supplied by ourvalues. Thus we see how in morality essence and values are ultimatelytied together.

When we come to Spinoza’s ethics, Deleuze says, we have to stopthinking in terms of essence and value. An essence is not a generaldefinition of something, like the definition of what it means to be ahuman being; rather essence always means a singular thing. AsDeleuze says, there is an essence of this or that, but not of humanbeings in general. Another way of thinking of this change in themeaning of the word ‘essence’ is to say that what really interestsSpinoza is existence not essence understood as a general term. Forwhat is general is only the unique infinite substance, everything else isa mode, which is a determinate mode of infinite substance. Thus whattruly differentiates one thing from another is existence not essence,since there is only one essence, strictly speaking, which is the infinitesubstance itself. An ethics, then, Deleuze argues, as opposed to amorality, is interested not in general abstractions, but the existence ofsingular things. But why is this different from morality? Deleuze gives aconcrete example.

With morality the following operation always ensues: you dosomething, you say something and you judge yourself. Morality hasalways to do with judgement and it is a double system of judgement:you judge yourself and you are judged by someone else. Those whohave a taste for morality always have a taste for judging themselvesand others. To judge, Deleuze insists, is always to have a relation ofsuperiority to being and it is value that expresses this superiority. Butin ethics something quite different happens. In ethics there is nojudgement at all, however strange that might appear to be. Someone

says or does something. You do not refer this to a value which issuperior to it; rather you say ‘how is this possible?’; that is to say, youonly refer the statement or activity as a way of being in the same waythat one might refer the activity of a lion hunting a gazelle – you don’tjudge this being bad or good in relation to a value that is superior to it.The question of ethics, then for Spinoza, is not is this good or bad, but‘what am I capable of?’ Which really means, ‘what is my body capableof?’ ‘Qu’est-ce que tu dois en vertu de ton essence, c’est qu’est-ce quetu peux, toi, en vertu de ta puissance’ [what you have in virtue of youressence, is what you are capable of, you yourself, in virtue of yourpower] (Deleuze 1978).

The most important aspect of the existence of any singular thing is thedesire to preserve its existence, which Spinoza calls conatus anddefines as follows in IIIP6: ‘Each thing, as far as it can by its ownpower, strives to preserve in its being.’ This is not just a definition ofhuman existence, but all existence as such, whether we are talkingabout a stone, a plant or even a human being. To the extent thatnothing prevents it from existing, everything that does exist will striveto preserve itself in its existence. Thus, to use Curley’s example, ifdoing X preserves its existence, then it will desire to do X unless amore powerful external cause prevents it from doing so (Curley 1988,p.108).

Spinoza’s argument for believing that this is case follows from hisdefinition of essence. We tend to understand the meaning of essence,as we explained via Deleuze above, from Aristotle as the generaldefinition of a thing which defines its nature in advance, but this is nothow Spinoza understands ‘essence’. For him essence does not justdefine what something is, rather a good definition ought to be able totell us how a thing is produced. Thus, if I want to properly define acircle what I have to be able to do is not just say what a circle is, buthow a circle might be constructed. So again to use Curley’s example,the proper definition of a circle would be ‘a figure produced by therotation of a line around a point’ (Curley 1988, p.111). The essence ofsomething tells me how it and why it exists, and also why it continuesto exist. It is, so to speak, its power of existence. We can see why,therefore, conatus, the striving to continue to exist, would be the sameas the essence of something and any activity that went against itcould not be properly speaking an activity at all, but caused by someexternal cause, and therefore passive.

How do we apply this conatus doctrine to ethics? The answer is thateverything which helps me to preserve my existence I take to be goodand everything that goes against my existence I take to be bad. Whatis good is what is useful, relative to my existence, and what is bad, iswhat dangerous, relatively speaking, to my continued existence. Thisstriving is not only a striving for self-preservation, but also, as we shallsee in the next lecture, an increase in the power of action, since inrelation to the external causes that would extinguish my existence, allI have is my power to act against them.

What then is an affect? An affect is not a feeling for Spinoza, but arepresentation. My mind represents my body and states of that body.My mind is nothing more than this, nor is my thoughts anything morethan this representation. Of course states of my mind can be causedby things outside of my body, but my body can only represent theseexternal things through the states of my body itself. Since effects, forSpinoza, represent causes, in representing these effects, I representthe external things in some way through the power of my body to beaffected by them.

As we saw above, the essence of something is its power to act. Butjust as much as a body has a power to act (I can swim ten lengths of apool) so does a mind. The mind’s power to act is contained by what itis capable of representing. But remember what the mind contains forSpinoza is the representation of the body and states of the body, sothat the more that the body is capable of the more it can think. Thus,for Spinoza, the reason why the human mind has more power to act

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than the cabbage’s mind (and Spinoza argued that all bodies have amind to some extent) is that the human body is capable of more. So anaffect is the representation of the body whose power to act has eitherincreased or decreased as he defines it in the third definition of partthree:

By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’spower of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and atthe same time, the ideas of these affections. (EIIID3)

Every individual being strives to exist. Such a striving is a desire. Idesire that which preserves my being. To preserve my being I mustincrease my power to act, since power is my essence. Every time Iincrease my power to act, I experience joy, and conversely, every thatmy power to act is decreased then I experience sadness. So what wemean by emotion is the power of the mind to be affected from within orwithout. All the emotions or affects that we speak of are merelymodifications of these three fundamental affects. To understand oraffects, then, is to bring them back to joy and sadness and how myexistence is increased or decreased in relation to them. The aim of theEthics is to show how using our reason we should be able to promotethe former over the latter.

What is decisive, however, in Spinoza’s understanding of affects, isthat they are representational. They are representation of the bodyand states of the body in the mind. If the origin of the transition for joyto sadness is external to my mind, then it is a passive affect. If it isinternal to the mind then it is an active affect. The aim of life, therefore,is to replace passive affects with active ones, which means tounderstand the true origin of our affects, which is to understand thatthe idea in my mind is also an idea in God’s or my mind is nothing elsethan an idea in the mind of God.

Works Cited

Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinoza’sEthics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Deleuze, G., 1978. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Sur Spinoza. Availableat: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2 [Accessed September 30, 2012].

[1] This is not to say that animals have rights for Spinoza. Not evenhuman beings have these, at least not in the normal way that we thinkof them. A right is a power for Spinoza and so we have a ‘right’ oversomething to the extent that we have power over them.

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