Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding 1785275437, 9781785275432

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Peter Winch’s depth as a philosopher comes out in the depth of his engagement with Spinoza. Spinoza’s ethical concerns resonated with Winch’s own; and his lectures are wonderfully expressive of how he saw philosophy itself. Winch’s discussions of the complex relation between Descartes’s philosophy and that of Spinoza are among the most valuable features of this fine book. –​Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita, Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia This volume deserves to be celebrated at several levels. It collects previously unpublished work on Baruch Spinoza by Peter Winch, one of the most important British philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. It offers an original interpretation of Spinoza, highlighting the enduring significance of Spinoza for current debates in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. It places Spinoza’s thought in philosophical conversation not only with predecessors such as René Descartes, but also with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, whose thought was studied in depth by Winch in groundbreaking contributions.   –​Maria Rosa Antognazza, Professor of Philosophy, King’s College London

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Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein publishes new and classic works on Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian philosophy. This book series aims to bring Wittgenstein’s thought into the mainstream by highlighting its relevance to twenty-​first-​century concerns. Titles include original monographs, themed edited volumes, forgotten classics, biographical works and books intended to introduce Wittgenstein to the general public. The series is published in association with the British Wittgenstein Society. Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein sets out to put in place whatever measures may emerge as necessary in order to carry out the editorial selection process purely on merit and to counter bias on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and other characteristics protected by law. These measures include subscribing to the British Philosophical Association/​Society for Women in Philosophy (UK) Good Practice Scheme. Series Editor Constantine Sandis –​University of Hertfordshire, UK

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Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding by Peter Winch Edited by Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper

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Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2020 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–​76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA Copyright © By Peter Winch; Edited by Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper 2020 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-​13: 978-​1-​78527-​543-​2  (Hbk) ISBN-​10: 1-​78527-​543-​7  (Hbk) This title is also available as an e-​book.

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements

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Editors’ Introduction

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Winch, Spinoza and the Human Body, by David Cockburn

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Note on the Text

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List of Abbreviations

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Chapter 1.

Method and Judgement

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Chapter 2.

Substance and Attributes

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Chapter 3.

Negation, Limitation and Modes

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Chapter 4.

Mind and Body

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Chapter 5.

The Emotions, Good and Evil

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Chapter 6.

The Life of Reason

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Bibliography

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A number of people have helped with this project. David Cockburn generously lent us the audiotapes of Winch’s Swansea seminars and gave us permission to use them. He has also provided encouragement as well as helpful and detailed feedback on multiple drafts of the manuscript. Drew Johnson helped with the laborious process of transcribing the audio recordings of the seminars. He also helped search through the Peter Winch archives at King’s College London for relevant supplementary texts. We are grateful to the King’s College London archives for permission to use the Peter Winch archival material for background research. Among others who have provided useful feedback and support, we would like to mention Raimond Gaita, Lars Hertzberg, Lynette Reid and Christopher Winch. We are grateful to the Austrian Science Fund FWF (project P 29072 ‘Spinoza on the Concept of the Human Life Form’, led by Professor Ursula Renz) for providing financial support for Sarah Tropper. Michael Campbell’s work was supported by the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (registration No. CZ.02.1.01/​0.0/​0.0/​15_​003/​0000425), which is co-​financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic (OP VVV/​OP RDE). In addition, we would like to thank Constantine Sandis, Megan Greiving and the staff at Anthem Press for their enthusiasm for this project and their support. Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper

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EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper Peter Winch was a British philosopher known for his work in the philosophy of social science and ethics, as well as for his interpretations of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. But it is less well known that, throughout his career, Winch also engaged in various ways with Spinoza’s philosophy. He published two articles on Spinoza’s thought, one a critical notice of Jonathan Bennett’s book, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics,1 the other a discussion of the relation between mind and body in the Ethics.2 Alongside this, in his other work Winch referred to Spinoza’s views, either in passing or as a foil, when discussing topics such as the nature of religious belief and the relationship between metaphysics and ethics.3 Winch’s interpretation of Spinoza developed out of a close reading of the Ethics and De Emendatione, and he gave two sets of seminars on them; first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then again at King’s College London in 1989. Despite the progress in Spinoza scholarship made since then, Winch’s reading remains worthy of consideration due to its idiosyncrasies both of style and content. His aim is not only to introduce his audience to Spinoza’s thought but also to encourage them to engage with this difficult material on their own terms. Winch finds three issues to be central to Spinoza’s philosophical concerns, namely, the position of man in relation to the universe; the inseparability of the theoretical and practical; and the relation of judgement, ideas and the world. This focus yields an engaging interpretation of Spinoza’s 1 Peter Winch, ‘Review of Jonathan Bennett’s A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics’. Philosophical Investigations 9:2 (1986): 140–​52. 2 Peter Winch, ‘Mind, Body & Ethics in Spinoza’. Philosophical Investigations 18:3 (1995): 216–​34. 3 See, for example, his discussion of Simone Weil's concept of ‘the void’ in comparison to Spinoza’s thought (Peter Winch, Simone Weil. The Just Balance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 120–​25) and his passing comment on the similarity in Spinoza’s and Wittgenstein’s accounts of the will (‘Wittgenstein’s Treatment of the Will’, in Ethics and Action, London: Routledge, 1972, 117).

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work, one that takes the ethical and metaphysical aspects of the Ethics to be inseparable, and which unifies them under the concept of the understanding. Winch expresses this conviction, in characteristically laconic fashion, at the beginning of the seminars: Generalising, we can say that Spinoza’s enquiry has ethical, metaphysical and epistemological aspects, all internally related. Ethics presupposes both metaphysics and epistemology; the former, because the good life for men is something that requires understanding and the latter, because the nature of man and of the world and of the relation between them has to be understood. And metaphysics presupposes epistemology because we have to enquire what sort of understanding man is capable of and what sort of understanding it is possible to have of these particular kinds of questions. But epistemology presupposes metaphysics too, since understanding is itself a relation of man to the world and to himself, and we need to grasp the nature of the terms of this relation.4

For Winch’s Spinoza, the characteristic mark of the human condition is that of vacillation. We are tossed one way and then another by our emotions, thereby passing judgements on things in a piecemeal fashion and without any surety that these evaluations can be finally justified by reference to a single, coherent outlook. Both in terms of what happens to us and how we react to it, we are at the mercy of forces that we do not understand. We call some things good and others evil as our inclination and attention dictates; we judge, condemn, blame, praise, extol, envy and admire, at different times and to varying degrees. Sometimes aware of the arbitrariness in this process we belatedly use reason to try to bring our scattershot evaluations under control. We appeal to this or that authority to justify ourselves, or we formulate some theory which we identify as our ‘moral outlook’, in the hope that by so doing we will bring stability, coherence and consistency to the results of our passing judgements. But a person’s commitment to any such outlook is only as stable as the emotional life which undergirds it, and her conformity to it is only as close as her ability to draw out the consequences of the doctrine in her life. We rationalise away some wrongdoings and fixate on others. We are selective about whom we forgive and how readily we do so. We do not hold ourselves to the same standards to which we hold others. In these and other ways we show that our evaluations are, despite our best efforts, unstable and inconsistent. The reason for this, Spinoza thinks, is that in evaluating things as good or bad we think that we are speaking objectively, being guided by the impersonal

4 This volume, p. x.

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faculty of reason, but are in fact simply evaluating things in relation to our own interests. The upshot of refusing to draw out the connection between evaluative judgement and the interests of the judger is confusion, at once ethical and metaphysical, since ‘to be confused about the nature of good and evil is to be confused about one’s own nature and about the nature of one’s relation to the rest of the world.’5 Accordingly, the first step in attaining a clear understanding of the world is to realise that good and evil as we ordinarily ascribe them to things are impediments to seeing things objectively. To judge something evil is to say, inter alia, that things could have been better. But, according to Spinoza, everything follows from something else, and ultimately from God’s nature, by necessity. Accordingly, no sense can be attached to the ‘could’ in ‘could have been better’. As a consequence, necessity and contingency do not form a pair; ‘necessity’ describes the ultimate metaphysical relation holding between particulars, whereas ‘contingency’ describes a lack of understanding of the relations between particulars which arises from the limitedness of an individual’s perspective. This holds also for human nature. Our tendency to judge people or deeds as good or evil stands in the way of our understanding them, as these judgements occasion reactions in us which incorrectly attribute free agency to some individual, when in fact all changes are nothing other than the unfolding of God’s nature. Beliefs in chance or in free agency distort our perception by presenting objects to us not as they are, but rather in the light of an imagined cluster of possibilities, that is, in the light of how we imagine they might otherwise be or become. Since that nimbus of possibilities is determined by our imagination, it is an expression of a certain inadequacy in our ideas. Being able to see things clearly and adapt one’s emotional life accordingly, that is, to achieve a different perspective on the turmoils in which the world engulfs us, would be to achieve ‘blessedness’. However, in order to achieve such a state it is not sufficient to assent to a general doctrine of determinism. According to Winch, the reasons for this are to be found in Spinoza’s conception of language and thought, since making a genuine judgement, which is equivalent to having an idea, requires more than simply assenting to a certain combination of words. Rather, a judgement or an idea essentially involves commitment, and this requires it be in harmony with the larger patterns of judgements (and thereby also of actions and responses) which characterise the life of the judging subject. In this way, metaphysical reflection has an ethical dimension, in the sense that general doctrines, if they

5 This volume, p. x.

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are genuinely grasped, are also applied to the circumstances of one’s life. As Winch puts it, ‘One frees oneself from bondage not through “abstract knowledge of good and evil”, but through coming to understand the concrete particularities of one’s situation, one’s relation to the environment.’6 The notion of ‘the particularities of one’s situation’ bears special emphasis here. Confused ideas are the result of limitations in our necessarily perspectival view of the world. The route to blessedness goes through the progressive refinement of ideas towards greater adequacy, a refinement which goes hand in hand with an alteration of one’s conception of self; a diminution in the sense of importance ascribed to the particular bodily existent that is one’s body, and the replacement of a strict self/​other distinction with a view of nature as an unbounded nexus of causes. As already indicated, central to Winch’s reading of Spinoza is the latter’s account of what constitute genuine ideas. Winch takes the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1662) as preparing the ground for the later Ethics (started in the 1660s, prepared by Spinoza for publication in 1674, but published only posthumously in 1677), and finds in them a conception of ideas according to which every genuine idea contains some truth within it. Putting it roughly, an idea is a judgement, and as such makes a truth claim about a certain thing’s being some way or another. Thus, not every kind of combination of a subject and a predicate qualifies as an idea. Ideas presuppose a genuine connection between subject and predicate, and therefore cannot be formed at will. To put it another way, judgements are identifiable as the judgements that they are by virtue of their content, that which they are about. Accordingly, even a false judgement enjoys a degree of success, for in making it one manages to say something meaningful. Therefore, for Spinoza, truth and falsity are not an all or nothing affair; there are grains of truth even in the most egregiously incorrect judgements. Falsity is a privation and so requires a relation to truth: Only in relation to truth that there could be such a thing as falsity. I  can be wrong about something if I’m right about something else, but I can’t be wrong about everything. What would I be wrong ‘about’? Moreover, I don’t need some general criterion by which to distinguish truth and falsity. ‘T‌ruth is the standard both of itself and of the false.’ (EIIp43s, C 1:479) If I can think at all, there must be some truth in what I think and I must use this in order to sift out truth and falsity in the rest of what I think.7

6 This volume, p. x. 7 This volume, p. x.

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This conception of judgement secures the assumption that the mere exercise of the capacity to formulate judgements guarantees the existence of a ‘world’, of something beyond the particular judgement, which forms its subject matter. On Winch’s reading, the framework of substance, attributes and modes in the Ethics is therefore not designed to be an external guarantor of the possibility of true ideas, that is, of a distinct realm of independent objects to which our ideas correspond if they are true. Rather, the world is a presupposition for our having any ideas at all. Therefore, substance, attributes and modes as defined by Spinoza in the first book of the Ethics are to be treated as explications or preconditions of the possibility of ideas and as indications of their underlying structure. Spinoza’s definitions and axioms are thus not to be evaluated independently for their truth or plausibility (any more than Euclid’s axioms should be), but are justified if (and only if) they form an integral part of a coherent explication of the relation between thought and reality. Putting it another way, Winch takes the main driving force and presupposition in Spinoza’s reasoning to be a demonstration of the ultimate intelligibility of the world, which provides at the same time the explanation of our ability to speak meaningfully about it. In a sense, Winch thereby turns the order of reasoning presented in the Ethics around and utilises his understanding of Spinoza’s conception of ‘ideas’ as judgements in Part II in order to shed light on the book’s opening definitions. According to this approach, we have –​and so are entitled to start with –​a given idea. As an idea, it is a judgement and hence a genuine connection of a subject with a predicate, as opposed to the mere putting together of words or images. Though such an idea might be inadequate in a number of respects and to a great degree, its being an idea of a world cannot be called into question –​for the result of calling into question all given ideas would be to call into question even the idea that our ideas can all be called into question. Moreover, and more importantly, since Spinoza denies the metaphysical possibility of the world’s having been otherwise than it is, ‘a world’ must be ‘the world’. Thus, the world is a presupposition for having any ideas at all. Genuine thinking is always thinking about the world and therefore also always constrained by the world. Because there is such a close relation between ideas and their objects, an investigation into the structure inherent in thought reveals at the same time the structure the world has. As much as our ideas belong to a system of ideas, so do their objects, bodies, belong to a physical system. For this reason, the object of the system of ideas is nothing but the physical system of cause and effect. According to Winch, this is what Spinoza tried to capture in the claim that both extension and thought are attributes of the same substance. Ideas and their physical objects belong to the same world and any genuine

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investigation into ideas or into bodies will form an aspect of a greater explanation in which the relations of ideas and objects are unified. Therefore, different investigations into the nature of the world form a systematic whole, and to have a full understanding of this nature would also entail grasping how these different investigations can and do form such a systematic connection. And so, in the opening definitions of the Ethics, where we find the definition of substance as conceived through itself and modes as conceived through something else, ‘we are exploring the structure of thinking. And this is, at the same time […] an exploration of the structure of reality’.8 Winch tries to bring out some of the distinctive features of Spinoza’s system by reading them as a critique of Descartes’s conception of the relation between the world and ideas concerning it. He illustrates this by contrasting Spinoza’s treatment of method in De Emendatione with the radical skeptical doubt which drives the argument in the first chapters of the Meditations. In the latter, radical or methodological doubt is supposed to lead to the conclusion that, in a first instance, only the cogito, that is, that I myself exist and am a thinking thing, can be known with absolute certainty. The process of sceptical doubt requires that we remove our assent from every idea whose truth or accuracy has not been proven beyond all doubt. Virtually all ideas fail this test, given the unreliability of sense perception, the possibility of mistaking dreaming and being awake and, ultimately, the possibility of an evil genius constantly deceiving us. Indeed, so long as God is not introduced as an external guarantor for the truth of ideas, there is only one thought which is absolutely immune from sceptical doubt, namely that I am a thing that doubts, asserts, wills and senses – that is, a thinking thing. As Winch emphasizes, in De Emendatione Spinoza argues that Cartesian doubt is a self-​defeating process, because the state in which the sceptic would be left is unrecognisable as one of meaningful doubting. Apart from the fact that doubting is just an expression of insufficient knowledge rather than a method that can be applied on any occasion and to any idea simply through an act of will, if we are willing to use the concept of doubting without constraint we will succeed only in undermining intelligibility across the board, thus pulling the rug out from under our own feet: On Spinoza’s argument, if Descartes’s recipe for his hyperbolical doubt is really taken seriously, it won’t even yield the cogito  –​that supposed paradigm of clearness and distinctness. It won’t yield that because it will equally ­undermine confidence in the intelligibility of our attempts to express the cogito.

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On Descartes’s argument we couldn’t even be sure we were expressing anything intelligible when we made those sounds.9

The problem with Descartes’s method, therefore, is not merely that sceptical doubt as a method misunderstands the nature of doubt, but also that its ultimate result would be to undermine thought entirely. Since this is paradoxical, it shows that there must be some problem in the way that Descartes is conceiving of the process of doubting –​and since to doubt is to suspend denial or assent regarding the truth or falsity of a particular idea, that problem must ultimately be located somewhere in the underlying structure of ideas, truth and acts of giving or withholding assent. The difference between Descartes and Spinoza regarding ideas turns not only on a difference regarding the nature of doubt and the character of ideas, but more fundamentally on their differing conceptions of what makes language meaningful. It is because of this concern that Spinoza attacks Descartes’s conception of true judgements as corresponding to how things are. Descartes, like many others, assumes that ideas are mental items distinct from the various objects of the external world that they represent, and that their truth and falsity is determined by the fact as to whether things are as the ideas represent them to be. He separates thought and world so radically from each other that there is no incoherence in supposing that all ideas that have any relation to the external world might be false; since for these ideas truth is a matter of correspondence with an external reality, we can simply select in our minds the totality of all ideas and suppose that for each of them the required correspondence relation fails to hold. Winch’s Spinoza finds this picture unacceptable because it makes a mystery of how it is that we can make genuine, meaningful judgements. Starting from the Cartesian picture of ideas, no helpful investigation into the mind and its content can be undertaken. The difference, as Winch sees it, between Spinoza’s and Descartes’s conception can be spelled out as follows: Descartes takes ideas to be mental items that have content independent of their truth or falsity and it is therefore only once we willingly put together ideas and form judgements that the question of the truth of their content arises, that is, only then can we ask whether there is anything is in the world that corresponds to the judgement we have formed. Whereas, for Spinoza, as we have seen, we cannot separate the fixing of the content of a thought from that which determines its truth: the world is involved in specifying what our thought is about, and this involvement already guarantees that a given idea will contain some degree of truth. Furthermore, it is part of the nature of an idea to demand assent, doubt

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or rejection on part of the thinker; these postures of mind are essential to the character of the idea as such and are not incidental to it. Accepting Spinoza’s view means reconsidering the notion of thinking. To make a claim of the form ‘I think’ is to abstract from particular acts of thinking, particular judgements of the form ‘I think that p’, which in turn have their content from simple unreflective judgements of the form ‘p’. The ‘I  think’ does not describe an activity which is undertaken upon ideas, but is itself a particular kind of idea, intelligible only in relation to the other judgements to which it is related. Thus, in Spinoza we must start with an idea and self-​reflective thoughts must come later, as a modification: ‘ “Knowing” that we think is reflective, the primary fact is simply: that we think. And that primary thinking is, one might say, absorbed in its object.’10 In the network of ideas that is our mind, we may progressively refine our ideas and to move from lesser to greater adequacy in our thoughts. This is done not by an inner act of will but by tracing out the implications of one’s assertions and seeing how they fit or fail to fit together. In this context, the idea ‘I think that p’ stands to ‘p’ as a framing device which allows me to shift my attention from the grounds which necessitate ‘p’ to the grounds which necessitate the state of my believing that ‘p’. By shifting between ‘the cat is on the mat’ and ‘I think that the cat is on the mat’ I may focus now on the relation between the cat and the mat, now on the relation between myself and the state of affairs of the cat’s being on the mat, and in so doing I  can come to a richer understanding of the causal interrelations between myself, the cat, the mat and all the other surrounding factors which make possible both of these judgements. But this is only possible if we treat ‘I think that p’ as a thought on the same par as ‘p’ and not if we treat the ‘I think that’ as indicating an act different in kind to the idea which is its object. However, by asserting that all judgements are to some extent true, Spinoza seems to create a difficulty for himself regarding the possibility of falsehood. After all, for a judgement to be false is for it to be deficient in some respect, but if reality fixes the content of judgements, it would seem that falsity is mere illusion. This seems counterintuitive to us, because of our preconception that truth and falsity are contradictories. But that all ideas have some degree of truth in them is precisely due to the fact that they are constrained by the world; they are to at least a minimal degree true because they are meaningful. At root here is, for Winch, a difficulty concerning the compatibility of causal determinism with there being such a thing as meaningful judgements. One may

10 This volume, p. x, n. XX.

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see this tension by explaining judgement as a type of free action; in judging that ‘p’ I am taking up a stand on how things are and it seems I am implicitly committed to my stance being right if things turn out one way and wrong if they turn out another. Understood in this way, judgement seems to involve a set of concepts which stand at odds with the categories by which we understand the natural world. By starting with a given true idea, Spinoza seems on first glance to help himself to the idea of content, and so to simply sidestep this difficulty. But in fact his position is more sophisticated than this. As we have seen, for Spinoza the structure of the world is at the same time the structure of all true ideas concerning it. An idea’s content is determined by its position within this network; just as one, for example, completely grasps the content of a Euclidean axiom only if one also grasps its role within Euclidean geometry. It is in this respect that Spinoza’s account can be seen as a form of coherence theory of truth, though as Winch points out, this terminology is somewhat misleading, since the coherence between ideas goes hand in hand with an identification of a ‘part’ of the physical world with which the idea is identical. This account of content explains the content of a true belief by relating it to other true beliefs. In order to explain how falsity comes in to this picture, Winch focuses on the following passage: As regards that which constitutes the reality of truth, it is certain that a true idea is distinguished from a false one not so much by its extrinsic object as by its intrinsic nature. If an architect conceives a building properly constructed, though such a building may never have existed and may never exist, nevertheless the idea is true; and the idea remains the same whether it be put into execution or not. On the other hand, if anyone asserts, for instance, that Peter exists without knowing whether Peter really exists or not, the assertion, so far as its asserter is concerned, is false, or not true even though Peter actually does exist. The assertion that Peter exists is true only with regard to him who knows for certain that Peter does exist. Whence it follows there is in ideas something real, whereby the true are distinguished from the false.11

For Winch, Spinoza’s aim here is to relate the question of falsity back to the ability to make genuine judgements. The question of truth or falsehood can only arise when a genuine assertion is made, and that requires in turn that there be grounds on which the asserter can draw for making the assertion: [On Spinoza’s] view […] the conditions under which somebody can be clearly said to be making an assertion include an understanding of some things which 11 TIE; Elw 26/​C 1:31.

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are undisputedly true of a given situation. Because without that –​[i.e.] unless my words or my thoughts are surrounded by some understanding of how things actually are  –​my thoughts or my words don’t actually make any connection with the world at all. My words are just sounds.12

To see how Spinoza distinguishes between doubt and error, we have to understand where precisely the difference between these two concepts lie –​and it is not, as Descartes would have it, merely a question of being willing to suspend judgement in the case of doubt and assenting to a false proposition in the case of error. Rather, on Spinoza’s picture, when inadequate ideas make it clear that the data they are based on is insufficient for either an assertion or denial of the states of affairs they represent, the thinker will doubt them –​not based on an act of will (as per Descartes), but on the force the idea has given its content and its relation to other ideas we hold as true. In the case of error, an idea seems to provide sufficient information to make an assertion when in fact it does not. In other words, the asserter feels constrained by circumstances to make a certain assertion, but that constraint is illusory; had they realised what they were trying to say, or understood better how things were, the feeling of constraint would disappear. The source of both, doubt and error, is the idea/​ judgement itself and its relation to the other ideas/​judgements we hold. No investigation into the nature of judgements would be complete without an account of negation. Pursuing this topic leads Winch from Spinoza’s theory of ideas into his metaphysics. As Winch points out, negation already plays an important role in Definition 6 of the first Book of the Ethics, where it is used to characterise the absolute infinite as that which involves no negation. By taking the intelligibility of the world and thus the nature of ideas (and the world) as Spinoza’s fundamental concern, Winch argues that the concept of negation as it appears in the book on substance and its attributes has to be read in light of his theory of judgements. A negative judgement, that is, a judgement that states that some A is not x, requires, in order to be understood, an assertion that some other B is x. But anything which requires something else in order to be understood cannot be substance, since substance is that which is conceived solely through itself. In the case of substance, there is nothing else which is required in order to understand it, which equally means that there is nothing limiting it. Now, it is also the case that on Spinoza’s picture of the world, every finite thing that exists, exists determinately. Therefore, some positive truth holds about every thing, that is, nothing in the world is ultimately characterized in a purely negative way. Accordingly, negative judgements (i.e. claims that things

12 This volume, p. 15.

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are not a certain way) are deficient insofar as they leave room for further positive characterisation; they are merely the tools of a finite understanding. To be forced to make a negative judgement is to reveal that not everything that can be said about the object of the judgement has in fact been said. This raises the question of the role negative judgements play in any enquiry into the world. On the one hand, as finite beings, it seems as if we can hardly ever dispense with them when we are trying to state how things are. On the other hand, Spinoza suggests that all investigations into the world ultimately constitute a methodological whole, and must, therefore, resolve into an account which makes reference only to positive judgements. This raises the question of how this unifying process is to be carried out; how, in other words, are we to transition from our partial understanding towards a more perfect and systematic understanding of the whole? The key to this is seeing the objects of our judgements as belonging to a system, and so as standing in determinate and systematic relations with other items of the system. Mathematical truths provide an illustration of this kind of understanding, as for instance, in the way that the fact that the internal angles of a triangle sum to 180° follows from the axioms of Euclidean geometry. But Spinoza is committed to the view that all other kinds of judgements can be understood along the same lines. However, as Winch notes, difficulties immediately arise when one tries to conceive of empirical judgements in these terms, as such judgements seem to presuppose an indefinite amount of background understanding to be adequately understood. For instance, in order to understand fully a simple statement regarding the scheduled departure of a train from one city to another, we must have sufficient knowledge of facts concerning cities, train networks, timetables and so on. Supposing that the truth of the proposition depends on a grasp of everything needed to forestall potential misunderstanding, the listener would need not only to understand the relevant facts of the social and historical milieu, but also to have knowledge of the mechanics of the world, up to and including knowledge of the laws of physics. The elements in this list are disparate and seemingly infinite in number. But, on Winch’s reading of Spinoza, they must form a unified system, and it must be possible, in principle at least, to grasp all of them, as well as the relations between them. This is taken by Spinoza to be an extension of the thought that judgement involves a genuine connection of subject and predicate, though it in fact goes beyond that assumption, as Winch notes: The predicate is only genuinely connected with the subject (i.e. there is only a genuine judgement) insofar as the context in which the question is asked provides an answer. Insofar as a genuine question is raised, the procedure for answering it is also given; and the application of that procedure necessitates a particular

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answer. Spinoza is insisting (rightly, it seems to me) that the connection between subject and predicate in a judgement presupposes the form of enquiry to which the judgement belongs. He is also insisting (and this is more questionable) that a form of enquiry presupposes the possibility of giving definite answers to the questions it raises; and also (even more questionably) that there are no fundamental logical differences between different forms of enquiry involving different relations between the procedures for seeking answers and the giving of such answers.13

Such a system of enquiry constrains the investigator in two ways. First, if we know everything relevant to settling the truth of a judgement, then the judgement is not only necessarily true, but the recognition of that truth is also non-​optional for us, since we are constrained by our insight to assent to it. Second, all of the different forms of enquiry must belong to a single system, so that an adequate understanding would also entail grasping the relations between the different methods and the different pieces of knowledge which these methods yield. Thus, the more one knows, the more one’s thought is constrained in the assertions that one can make. Elaborating the background knowledge presupposed in a judgement is part of the process by which we verify the truth of the judgement in question. We can only recognize its truth to the degree we see how it fits within the total chain of causes. Thus, for any question as to why things are as they are, there will be a sufficient answer. For there to be a further why-​question without such an answer or for us to stop without having grasped the whole of nature would be for justification to have come to end in an arbitrary way. It is not that there cannot be an end to investigation and justification, but, as Winch says, the point at which we stop, if there is to be a real connection with the world, has got to be dictated by the nature of the world. You stop not because you’re not going to say any more, but because there is nothing more to say. And I suppose [Spinoza] would think that is only the case when you have reached something that is self-​explanatory or self-​evident, which is, to use his terminology, the cause of itself.14

According to Winch, it is at this point that substance enters into Spinoza’s system as providing the necessary brake on this regress and ensuring that the system of thought is not undermined by inexplicable, ‘brute’ facts. In this way,

13 This volume, p. x. 14 This volume, p. x.

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substance as that which is not and cannot be limited by anything outside of itself, which is and is conceived through itself, is required as the explanation as to how there can be an end to enquiry that is given by the nature of the object of the enquiry, namely the world:  the self-​explanatory or self-​evident thing that is the cause of itself. While the unity of various methods is guaranteed by the assumption of a self-​explanatory whole, there is also the question of the right method and its starting point. Since Spinoza’s overarching aim is to gain an understanding of the world, and thereby also an improvement of the understanding, and his hope is presumably that, in following his thought, the understanding of his readers will likewise be improved, it is important that we can refine the inadequate material we are given by the world. But it is not as if we have to find a method (such as Cartesian doubt) and successively apply it to each of our individual ideas. Rather, the method we use cannot be independent of our given ideas. In order to illustrate this point, Spinoza uses an analogy with the progressive refinement of a tool: We may improve a tool as we go along and as we discover limitations in its use over time, but to have even begun the process, we must have started with a primitive tool. That first tool, however crude it might have been, must have preceded the process of its refinement.15 Winch takes this analogy between the method for improving ideas and refining tools to mean that, for Spinoza, there is ‘no real division between an enquiry and an investigation of how to conduct the enquiry’.16 After all, just as there was an original primitive tool that has been refined over time and has grown more efficient in preforming the task at hand, so we have a given true idea and the method for improving understanding follows from our understanding of the original enquiry. ‘Method is thus a form of “reflective” knowledge. The original “tool” is “the true idea”.’17 In the process of improving our judgements, we broaden our attention from immediate circumstances, from our individual perspective, to the wider web of causal connections, and in so doing progress towards a greater degree of adequacy in our thought. This process of expanding the adequacy of our ideas also has an ethical dimension, in that it draws the individual out of herself, out of preoccupation with the relations of things to her particular perspective, and into a contemplation of the timeless, unchanging and impersonal order of the world. But this strive for adequacy should not let us forget that the individual enquirer is nonetheless deeply embedded in their particular

15 TIE; C 1:16–​17. 16 This volume, p. x. 17 Ibid.

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circumstances and is bound to start from an individual perspective. Since Spinoza holds that the mind is nothing but the idea of the body, this perspective is first and foremost determined by one’s own physical body. But our understanding of the body in question, according to Winch, has to go beyond the purely geometrical or physical view that seems to be suggested in the second part of the Ethics.18 From an ethical perspective, a person’s identity is to be understood not only in terms of the external physical forces taking hold of him or in terms of the geometrical properties of his physical form, but also in terms of ‘a certain coherence in the way that he lives’.19 Just as our empirical statements cannot be understood in isolation, but can only be meaningful in relation to their surrounding context, ‘man’ for Winch’s Spinoza cannot be reduced to an isolated physical object, but only be understood adequately when considered not only in its relations to his surroundings, but also in his interests and the kind of life he leads. On this view, the boundaries of the individual are not to be drawn solely through the results of a practical test concerning the exertion of physical control, but are equally to be determined through a clarification of what one is interested in. The question is not merely ‘What can I make happen?’ but also ‘What do I have a stake in?’. In other words, the boundaries of the individual are defined through one’s vulnerabilities as much as through one’s powers. But as we have seen, the refinement of one’s understanding that comes from moving from inadequate to adequate knowledge involves coming to see that our original suppositions concerning the causes of things are deeply confused and thus the way we allow for things to influence us is misguided. Our original egocentric perspective makes us regard our surroundings under the notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, since we are ignorant of the causes and effects of men’s actions. But we can free ourselves from this ‘human bondage’ by increasing our understanding of the causes and thus becoming freer, more active. Moreover, Because ideas are modes which are also expressed under the attribute of extension, a man whose ideas become increasingly adequate will also undergo a bodily change […]: a man whose ideas are adequate will live differently from one whose ideas are inadequate, live in such a way that his own body is not the centre of his activities. In a sense he will increasingly come to treat the whole extended universe as ‘his body’.20

18 For an elaboration of these ideas, see David Cockburn’s ‘Winch, Spinoza and the Human Body’ in this volume. 19 This volume, p. x. 20 This volume, p. x.

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Thus, for Winch, an important part of Spinoza’s project is a clarification of what it means to be human, of how to find room for the particularities of human life, including judgement, within a conception of the world as understood sub specie aeternitatis and as fully determined. Winch’s Spinoza is driven by the belief that the world is ultimately intelligible and that it is through the refinement of our ideas that we come to see things as they are, for, however difficult the circumstances of our lives may be, our ideas provide us with all the material that we need to attain a clearer view on our situation, and thereby transcend it. Throughout his seminars, Winch advances a reading of Spinoza’s work which shows the inseparability of his metaphysical doctrines from questions of language and meaning as well as from the ethical vision that gives them their purpose. We hope this collection will serve as a useful resource for readers making their own way through Spinoza’s philosophical system.

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WINCH, SPINOZA AND THE HUMAN BODY David Cockburn

1. Peter Winch is, one might think, a very different kind of philosopher from Spinoza. While one might expect the ethical slant of Spinoza’s thinking to be attractive to him, there is, even here, a radical difference. For, as Spinoza sees things, while it may be true that geometry cannot show a man where he should stand, philosophy can, through a demonstration by strict geometrical method of the truth about the world, show a man what he should attach importance to. This is ‘metaphysics’ in just the (or a) sense of which Winch was, I take it, deeply suspicious. It involves a picture of the place of ethical thought in relation to thought of other forms –​a picture in which ethical thinking is systematically the dependent partner –​against which I believe much of Winch’s work can be read as a protest. And it involves a picture of ‘proof ’ in philosophy –​a picture in which philosophy is to be seen at its purest in deductive reasoning on the printed page –​that is radically at odds with Winch’s own philosophical practice. Whether it is, in fact, within a ‘meta-​philosophical’ framework of this form that the value of Spinoza’s thought is best appreciated is a question to which I will return. The focus of my discussion will be Winch’s treatment of the place of the human body in Spinoza’s thinking. In contrast to Descartes (as commonly read), who thinks of mind and body as two distinct substances in causal interaction, Spinoza argues that ‘the Mind and the Body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension’ (EIIp21s). It can be tempting at this point to try to fit Spinoza into one or another of the familiar positions available within the philosophy of mind today. The greatest temptation for one with Wittgensteinian leanings may be to read Spinoza as giving central place to the notion of a

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human being: a single thing –​this biological entity –​that may be conceived in two radically different ways: as thinking and as extended. There are strands in Spinoza’s thinking that might fit quite well with such an approach. One is the importance he attaches to the notion of ‘conatus’: to the idea that ‘everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being’ (EIIIp6). While it is not, perhaps, wholly wrong, to read this as an empirical claim about the behaviour of a certain class of entities with which we are familiar  –​individual things such as trees, dogs, houses and mountains –​it may be closer to the mark to read it in the opposite direction: as the suggestion that something counts as an ‘individual thing’ in so far as it manifests a tendency to self-​preservation. And it is, one might plausibly suppose, biological organisms, including the living human being, that provide Spinoza’s paradigm of ‘individual things’ understood in this way. One thing, highlighted by Winch, that counts against a close assimilation of Spinoza and Wittgenstein at this point is the fact that the former is still firmly in the grip of the Cartesian categories of the ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’ in a way that cuts across most of our normal characterisations of the thought and behaviour of human beings:  characterisations of a kind that are central to Wittgenstein’s treatment of these matters. Rather than develop that, however, I will focus on another strand of Spinoza’s thinking that is in radical conflict with any proposed assimilation to Wittgenstein. Winch notes: ‘Spinoza wishes above all to emphasise […] the place of the human body [and so also of the human mind] in an infinite natural order; its total dependence, in respect of both its origin and its continued functioning, on external physical conditions over which it has no control’ (this volume, p.  73). Now this emphasis, as Spinoza develops it, has radical implications for, among much else, our normal thought about others. A central feature of our everyday relations with other human beings is the way in which we love or hate them, feel gratitude or anger towards them and so on. The reason for this, according to Spinoza (this is Winch’s formulation), ‘is that we do not see and do not take any account of –​indeed because we deny that –​the nature and actions of the object of our love or hatred are themselves caused by further features of the environment’. Freed of the illusion of contra-​causal free will, our reactions of love or anger (again Winch) ‘wouldn’t be focussed solely on this person; it would be spread out over everything that I understand to be a contributory factor’. Our attachments to (or hatreds of) particular human beings, along with the special place that human beings, in contrast with other things, have in our thinking, are a mistake: a mistake that flows from our ignorance of the causes of their behaviour. There are things in Spinoza’s thinking there that should, I believe, strike us as pretty implausible. It is, however, worth noting that, as Winch stresses,

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Spinoza himself insists that the mere correction of this mistaken belief –​the belief that human beings are exempt from the network of causes that governs the behaviour of other things –​will not dislodge the special place that other human beings have in our thinking. What we might, much more plausibly, suppose would dislodge it is a constant vivid awareness of that network of causes. If we agreed that such an awareness was an ideal to be aspired to, we might find that we are drawn a good way down Spinoza’s path: one in which other human beings –​understood as these particular biological organisms with faces, arms, legs and so on –​will have nothing like their familiar place in the thought of one who is thinking clearly. 2. ‘The Mind and the Body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension’ (EIIp21s). How we understand this will turn on how we think of the relation between the two attributes:  thought and extension. Consider these articulations:  ‘The object of the idea constituting the human Mind is the Body’;1 and, whatever happens in this Body ‘there will necessarily be an idea of that thing in the Mind’.2 A natural reading of these remarks will understand Spinoza to be taking as given a familiar idea of the body, and suggesting that we can, through that, come to an understanding of what the human mind is.3 And, with nothing else to go on, we might assume that when Spinoza speaks of ‘the human body’ he is speaking of this biological organism. Spinoza may then emerge as a champion of some form of the familiar identity theory in which each of my mental states is one and the same thing as some physical state of this body. Winch argues, however, that, while Spinoza is at times drawn in this direction, there is also something quite different, and much more interesting, going

1 EIIp13. 2 EIIp12. 3 Spinoza invites this reading when he writes, ‘in order to determine, wherein the human mind differs from other things, and wherein it surpasses them, it is necessary for us to know the nature of its object, that is, of the human body’ (EIIp13Note). And Winch seems clearly to endorse this reading when he writes: Since the mind is the idea of this body, in order to understand what the human mind is, you’ve got to understand what the human body is. And it’s a bit hard to see how he could do it the other way round. Particularly as, you see, in order to specify the ideas that are in question, you would precisely have to identify them as ideas of this body. They actually have no reality except as ideas of this body. So it doesn’t look to me as if the relation between those attributes can be symmetrical. (unpublished correspondence)

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on in his thinking. If we reverse our reading, giving priority not to the attribute of extension but to that of thought, we will read Spinoza as taking as given something like our current idea of an individual human mind and, through that, proposing a radical rethinking of our understanding of what constitutes ‘the human body’. It is in this spirit that Winch suggests that the identity of a human body is not, for Spinoza, to be conceived on a biological model: is not to be conceived in terms of the creature of flesh and bone that a doctor would call the same living body from birth to death. Rather, as Winch expresses it, ‘what counts as “my body” is settled by its being a portion of the material world of which I have a certain sort of understanding’ and thus, insofar as I have an adequate idea of a certain tree, that tree is part of my body –​or, as we might equally say, of  me.4 In the lectures, Winch wobbles over the question of whether, and in which direction, Spinoza gives some priority to one of the two attributes: thought or extension. My sense is that these wobbles mirror wobbles in the Ethics. At any rate, while it is difficult to doubt that Spinoza is sometimes drawn to something akin to modern, physicalist, forms of identity theory, there is also much in what he says that clearly does not sit easily with that.5 Overall, Winch suggests, we will make a good deal more philosophical sense of Spinoza –​the text will hang together more clearly, and there will be more to learn from it –​if we read him in the way he proposes. I will quote one extended passage from Winch’s review of Jonathan Bennett’s book that I think particularly suggestive: It implies that the dynamic system constituting the body of a human being consists not just in the complex system of physiological sub-​systems which is its ‘life’ in the medical sense. It comprises also the equally complex system of sub-​systems of motion and rest that is his ‘life’ (in the sense that is of interest

4 Winch offers a range of formulations, not all obviously consistent. He speaks of a person’s body as ‘what goes into the conception someone has of him or herself ’, and as ‘as much of the physical world as is necessary if we wish to describe the kind of life necessary to the fulfilment of the man’s deepest interests’. Again, he writes: ‘My body involves any physical aspect of the world in which I have an involvement, in the sense that […] there is something that can be said about it in which reference to me has an essential part’; and ‘insofar as my identity is in a certain sense involved with the house, it is part of the ideatum (of the idea) which constitutes my mind and that is the same thing as to say it belongs to my body’. 5 For example, the relation between individual mental states and individual physical ones is articulated in terms of the first being an idea of the second; and it is clear from numerous remarks in the text that this phrase should be read, at least up to a point, in the familiar sense in which my thought may be ‘of ’ the weather or ‘of ’ Paul.

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to his biographer rather than to his physician). One difficulty in being clear about Spinoza’s position is that he would not have recognised any fundamental conceptual distinction in the above two uses of the word ‘life’. Hence he would no doubt have regarded the contribution of a ballet dancer’s prowess at his dancing to his life as just the same in kind as the contribution made by the functioning of his liver. However, it is important not to overlook the possibility of turning this point round. The nature and health of something like the liver’s functioning can be assessed only in the light of a standard of health provided by the peculiar nature of the subject’s life –​where the word ‘life’ is being used in the biographer’s rather than the physician’s sense. […] Better than calling Spinoza’s ethical theory ‘medical or psychotherapeutic’ would be calling his medical and psychotherapeutic theory ‘ethical’.6

3. The following charge might be made against Spinoza as read by Winch. While it may be true that Spinoza is not at all concerned to conform to everyday usage of key terms –​for he believes that everyday usage embodies serious distortions –​to speak of what constitutes ‘my body’ in this way is simply to highjack a perfectly good everyday term: putting it to a quite different use in a way that is bound to cause confusion; and, perhaps, through presenting what may be a useful metaphor –​that of my body incorporating everything of which I have an adequate understanding –​as a claim to literal truth, creating a specious impression of profundity. I believe this charge is misplaced. For one thing, as Winch observes, it is a fiction to suppose that in everyday usage the reference of the phrase ‘my body’ is this physiological organism (a fiction that may owe much of its mesmerizing force to Descartes). For another (as I don’t believe Winch does observe), Spinoza can be seen here to be thinking through, more consistently than others, the implications of the assumption that the appropriate starting point of reflection on what a person is is a reflection on what I am; or, perhaps better, reflection on the individual in abstraction from relations in which he or she stands to others. Thus, suppose that, approaching things from this, Cartesian, perspective, we ask: what is involved in the idea that this biological organism is ‘my body’; or, as Spinoza could equally comfortably express it, is ‘me’? At a more particular level, what is the substance of the idea that these hands are part of my body /​of me –​in a sense in which the pen that I hold is not? In response to this question we might speak, among other things, of special forms of knowledge 6 Winch, ‘Review of Jonathan Bennett’s A  Study of Spinoza’s Ethics’. Philosophical Investigations 9:2 (1986): 149.

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and experience that I have of this body, of the special place that this body has in my knowledge and experience of other things, and of the special place that it has in my action in the world. Focusing on the last of these, suppose that we think of the special place of my body like this: ‘my body’ is that object that I can control ‘directly’. For example, I can raise my arm directly, but only raise this pen by doing something else: perhaps, closing my fingers round it and raising my hand. Now that, of course, is not a way of expressing the matter with which Descartes could be happy. For him, what I may do ‘directly’ is limited to the mental realm: the movement of the hand being simply one step along the causal chain that runs from the act of will, through brain events and muscle contractions, and on to changes in the world beyond my body such as pen risings and door openings. A Cartesian of a certain stripe might seek to procure some more or less privileged position for the hand movement within this sequence. But this may be no easy matter. If there is a sense in which I often move my arms and hands ‘directly’, it is one in which what I do ‘directly’ is often at some distance from ‘my body’ in the sense of this physiological organism. Consider the sculptor’s relation to her tools and to the block of stone on which she is working. All her attention may be focused on her equipment and on the stone. Perhaps she has no more conception of how her hands must move if she is to get the nose right than she has of how her arm muscles must move. In the context of our practical engagements with the world there is often a sense in which parts of the world other than this physical organism are ‘closer’ to me than it is. From the immediate perspective of one, such as the sculptor, absorbed in some activity, there is a sense in which the grounds for saying that, for example, the chisel is part of her may be better than are those for saying that these hands are; that is, there is a sense in which the line that we may draw round ‘her body’ –​in the sense of this physiological organism –​ may not be of deep significance. I distinguished the special forms of knowledge and experience that I have of this body, the special place that this body has in my knowledge and experience of other things, and the special place that it has in my action in the world. But in speaking of the last of these I have inevitably spoken of the other two. One problem in the ‘Cartesian’ picture of the self as located within the body is its representation of the individual’s place in –​or, truer to his image, ‘relation to’ –​the world as lying in a two-​way causal interaction with it: my relation to other things in the world being primarily a matter of them having certain effects on me in perception, and me on them in action. But exploring the world through sight or touch is itself a form of activity; and one in which, in many cases, ‘learning about’ something and ‘acting on’ it cannot be clearly separated. We know things through, or better in, handling and manipulating

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them. I act on a thing in exploring it with my hands; and in bringing about changes in it I am aware of those changes.7 I have presented these considerations as raising a problem for a mind-​body dualism of the kind presented by Descartes (along with at least some of its brain-​ body dualism descendants): given their general picture of the person they can give no adequate account of the special place that the human body –​this biological organism –​has in our understanding of what we are. It might, however, be more relevant to a discussion of Spinoza (at least, to Spinoza as Winch invites us to read him) to turn the points round: to think of them as suggesting a possible radical revision of our normal picture of ourselves and our situation in the world. It is in this spirit that I now wish to pursue it. (Though one might add: a failure to keep these two projects clearly distinct in one’s thinking might well contribute to a sense that ‘metaphysical’ reflection on what we are provides a grounding for the ethical revision. If one starts from the perspective of the Cartesian question ‘What, of the objects I encounter in the world, constitutes my body, or a part of it?’ it may appear that there is no possibility of retaining a special place for this biological organism as opposed to something larger (or, perhaps, smaller).) 3. An analogy that Winch discusses in his book on Simone Weil –​that of the blind man’s stick –​is helpful here. Weil writes: Let the whole universe be for me, in relation to my body, what the stick of a blind man is in relation to his hand. His sensibility really no longer resides in his hand, but at the end of the stick. […] The relationship between I and the world. I am such and such a star, in the sense that, when I write, the pen is a part of my body, and in the sense that, when I press the fraise down on to the metal it is at their point of contact that the centre of my existence lies, and in the sense that, when I look at a picture, […] and in other ways besides.8

Weil derives the analogy of the blind man’s stick from Descartes (curiously, without remarking that he employs it to ends more or less diametrically opposed to hers9). While, so far as I  am aware, Spinoza does not himself 7 There is, perhaps, some kind of analogue of this in certain cases of the sense of sight: when what I am looking at is another human being, ‘experiencing’ and ‘acting on’ may also often be closely tied. 8 Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, transl. Arthur Willis. London:  Routledge, 2004, 19, 23. 9 Simone Weil, ‘Essay on the Notion of Reading’. Philosophical Investigations 13:4 (1990): 298. Descartes employs the image to illustrate how an impression is transmitted from the object perceived, to the fringes of the body and from there to the brain, where the ‘common’ sense is located.

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employ this analogy, it is clear that Weil has Spinoza very much in mind in her discussion at this point. One explicit reference is this:  ‘Effective liberation as regards the body; the blind man’s stick furnishes the key to it. Hence Spinoza’s Principle “He who possesses a body capable of the greatest number of activities, possesses a mind whereof the greatest part is eternal [Ethics V, XXXIX].” ’10 In his lectures on Spinoza, Winch offers the following elucidation of that Principle: ‘A man whose ideas are adequate will live differently from one whose ideas are inadequate: live in such a way that his own body is not the centre of his activities. In a sense he will increasingly come to treat the whole extended universe as “his body” ’ (this volume, p. xx). In his book on Weil he offers a parallel reading of the parallel, Spinozistic, remarks in her work: ‘What happens outside our bodies [can come] to have a significance for us as great as, or greater than, what happens in our bodies themselves. I can extend my sensibility in such a way that I no longer locate myself and my well-​ being in my (biological) body.’11 Now, while there may be substantial grounds in Spinoza, and some grounds in Weil, for reading their remarks in this way, I think it might be more philosophically illuminating –​and, in a sense, philosophically accurate  –​to develop the image of the blind man’s stick rather differently. Merleau-​Ponty puts it this way: Once the stick has become a familiar instrument, the world of feelable things recedes and now begins, not at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the stick. […] [H]‌abit does not consist in interpreting the pressures of the stick on the hand as indications of certain positions of the stick, and these as signs of an external object, since it relieves us of the necessity of doing so. The pressures on the hand and the stick are no longer given; the stick is no longer an object perceived by the blind man, but an instrument with which he perceives.12

10 Weil, Notebooks, 23. And compare One should identify oneself with the universe itself. Everything that is less than the universe is subjected to suffering [being partial and consequently exposed to outside forces]. Even though I die, the universe continues. That does not console me if I am anything other than the universe. If, however, the universe is, as it were, another body to my soul, my death ceases to have any more importance for me than that of a stranger. (Notebooks, 19) 11 Peter Winch, Simone Weil: The Just Balance, 134. 12 Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 176.

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Closely parallel to this, Weil remarks: ‘His sensibility really no longer resides in his hand, but at the end of the stick.’ (Simone Weil, Notebooks, 19). The suggestion here is not of the form: I may come to care about –​my attention and concern may come to focus on –​other aspects of the world in ways akin to that in which I now care about my own body (myself). For as Merleau-​Ponty conceives the matter it is through the blind man’s stick ceasing to be an object of his attention that it becomes, in a sense, a part of his body (a part of him). The blind man’s stick is an ‘extension of his body’, not in a sense in which his concern and attention focus on it, but in a sense in which it transforms the character of his attention to other things. 4. I  want to relate this to the kinds of change in our patterns of thought and concern that Spinoza and Weil call for. Remember Spinoza’s suggestion that ‘reason […] demands that every man should love himself, should seek that which is useful to him’. How does this sit with what is surely his radical critique of the pervasive ‘egoism’ of everyday thought? Winch’s treatment of the body may suggest the following picture. Everyday egoism is to be overcome, not through an abandonment of the exclusive pursuit of my own good, but through a transformation in my understanding of what constitutes ‘my’ good: in my understanding of what constitutes ‘me’. I believe, however, that something goes wrong there. I suggested that what marks something as a feature of ‘my body’ is, not so much its being a special focus of my attention and concern, but the place that it has in the character of my attention to other things. With that, the pervasive failure in human life that Spinoza seeks to correct may be best construed, not so much as an exclusive focus of concern and attention on myself (‘myself ’ as normally understood), as a bias in the focus of my concern and attention on other things. While there is of course such a thing as obsessive preoccupation with oneself, this must be distinguished from something quite different: a preoccupation, not with oneself, but with what immediately surrounds one –​whether that be my children, this landscape or the last piece of cake: an interest, that is, in which I may be completely absent. Thinking of Weil’s image in these terms, we might suppose that the ideal is a condition in which I have an awareness of ‘everything’ of the same form as that which the blind man has, not of his stick, but of what lies at its end. We are to feel what is happening (e.g. the sufferings of people hundreds of years ago); not simply observe it as something happening a long way off. Feel it as the blind man feels what is at the end of his stick while his sighted companion only sees it. Feel it as most of us, as we are now, may feel for our family and friends, the landscape on our doorstep, or what happened yesterday or last week; but, in any meaningful form, little beyond. (The sense

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of touch providing, for reasons that are very relevant here, the model for engaged awareness.) This proposal does not, however, quite fit the image as Weil develops it. For it is to my (or, as she expresses it, ‘my body’s’) relation to ‘the universe’ that Weil likens the relation of the blind man (or ‘his hand’) to his stick. Now, if we take this seriously we cannot help but ask: what am I to be aware of through ‘the universe’ –​which is to become for me a second body –​ as the blind man is aware of the step through his stick? Weil answers: ‘Blind man’s stick making it possible to touch God’. But how are we to understand that? The passage continues: ‘Ceremonies? Sacred chants? Sacraments? /​In the phenomenon of the blind man’s stick, analogy plays a part, but it is also a question of contact’.13 Switching analogies: the sculptor’s sensibility no longer resides in her hand, but at the end of her chisel: at the point of contact with the stone. She has contact with the block of stone in so far as her handling of the chisel is guided by the changes produced in the stone. With that, her activity is to be judged in purposive terms: in terms of the changes wrought in the stone. If, as Weil invites us to, we think of contact with God on this model, we will note a fundamental disanalogy (and that, perhaps, is partly why she finds the image helpful). Such contact is manifested in ‘ceremonies, sacred chants and sacraments’: that is in non-​purposive activities –​activities in which my handling of particular things is not guided by, and my success is not to be judged in terms of, changes produced in anything else. As I  have presented Weil, we may think of the ideal as one in which the familiar bodily human being lives a life structured by an astonishingly transformed pattern of awareness and concern. We might, I think, add: each one of us is to live in this way. It is relevant to this that Weil’s appeal to the blind man’s stick as an image of ‘the relationship between I and the world’ is qualified in one crucial respect:  ‘The relationship between me and another man can’, she writes, ‘never be analogous to the relationship between a blind man and his stick’ (Notebooks, 24). For reasons on which I have touched, there may be no place for such a qualification in Spinoza. With that, if we take seriously Winch’s reading of Spinoza, this way of thinking of the ideal –​as something to be aspired to by each of us –​would surely involve a failure fully to assimilate the proposed revision in my understanding of myself. For it fails to give due weight to the fact that these biological organisms  –​that which I take myself to be, and those that I take others to be –​will occupy no special place in my thought in so far as I am thinking clearly. We fail, then, to take Spinoza’s image seriously if we think in terms of a transformation of the concerns and engagements of the familiar bodily human being: for example,

13 Weil, Notebooks, 252.

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of the man we know as Spinoza. Thus, Spinoza articulates the ideal in this way: ‘that the minds and bodies of all should form, as it were, one single mind and one single body, and that all should, with one consent, as far as they are able, endeavour to preserve their being, and all with one consent seek what is useful to them all’.14 How far the image is really one that we are able to think through in a comprehensive way is a moot question.15 But one thing, I take it, is clear. What Spinoza offers us can provide little consolation to the everyday egoist: not simply because the joys on offer are ones that are unlikely to appeal to him; but also because, to the extent that he moves in this direction, he (in the sense that, in his egoism, concerns him) will not be the recipient of  them. 5. It can be tempting, at least for philosophers of the kind who like to keep their feet fairly firmly on the ground, to suggest that Spinoza’s more radical articulations of his views on mind and body are simply suggestive metaphors or analogies –​not to be treated as claims to literal truth. I believe that Winch’s discussions should discourage any casual appeal to that contrast here: at any rate, should encourage the thought that there are things to be learned from pressing the core images as far as one is able. I do not know how far that might be. I do want to suggest –​though with no more grounding than whatever my paper may already have supplied –​that how far we, as philosophers, are able to take the images seriously is inseparable from a sense of what would be involved in practice in doing so. I suggested at the start that Spinoza offers us ‘metaphysics’ in just the sense of which Winch was deeply suspicious:  suspicious, in particular, of

14 EIVp18s. 15 Spinoza, I believe, sometimes struggles to keep the radical nature of his proposal in clear focus; as in this passage (of which I have just quoted a portion): ‘Therefore, to man there is nothing more useful than man –​nothing, I repeat, more excellent for preserving their being can be wished for by men, than that the minds and bodies of all should form, as it were, one single mind and one single body, and that all should, with one consent, as far as they are able, endeavour to preserve their being, and all with one consent seek what is useful to them all. Hence, men who are governed by reason […] desire for themselves nothing, which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind’ (Ethics IV xviii Note). While it is extremely difficult to avoid such crossing of wires here, Winch is closer to the mark when he writes: ‘If one speaks of the development of power in terms of the development of oneself, then the picture is of somebody, this centre of activity here (me sitting here) striving to exert more and more control over events. Whereas I think that the better way to understand Spinoza is totally different; it’s a matter of my coming to have a completely different conception of myself, so that, as it were, I am not what is sitting here. I identify myself with the forces of the universe, rather than try to take them over’ (unpublished correspondence).

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any suggestion that an attempt to get clear about the proper way to live is dependent on getting clear about the kind of being that I am and my place in the world. In practice, the radical transformation in our understanding of the human body suggested by Spinoza is, I am now suggesting, dependent on a radical transformation in our sense of what is proper in our awareness of and relation to other things:  dependent on the conviction that the proper view of things is a view sub specie aeternitatis; and, with that, a view in which bodily human beings have no special place. A defence of the idea that this is the way to think of the body is dependent on a defence of that ideal. The coherence of the metaphysics stands or falls with the coherence on the moral vision. And coming to think of my body –​of myself –​in this way is dependent on (or possibly better: is one and the same thing as) my coming to have a structure of concerns of that form. That is to say, Spinoza’s official understanding of the relation between ethics and metaphysics –​as reflected in the structure of his book The Ethics –​is upside down. This is a view with which I have very little doubt Winch would wholeheartedly agree.

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NOTE ON THE TEXT The following is a collection of material on the philosophy of Spinoza, compiled from Peter Winch’s Nachlass. The bulk of the material is derived from two sets of seminars that Winch gave on the subject, the first in Swansea in 1982 and the second at King’s College London in 1989. Supplementary material is drawn from Winch’s research notebooks held in the King’s College London archives. David Cockburn recorded the Swansea seminars on audiocassette. After transcribing these recordings, we then combined them with Winch’s own type-​and hand-​written notes, which he produced in preparation for the seminars. Records of the King’s College seminars survived only in Winch’s preparatory typescripts. Since the content of the seminars overlapped in substantial places, we decided that the best way to arrange the material was thematically rather than temporally, even though this required some significant editorial decisions. The original texts had a number of idiosyncrasies of style, especially in those parts that were transcriptions from spoken word. We have tried to regiment the style in order to improve readability, without compromising Winch’s distinctive voice. Some repetition has been eliminated. Between the first lectures in 1982 and the second lectures in 1989, the first volume of Edwin Curley’s The Collected Works of Spinoza was published and Winch used it from thereon, where possible, rather than the older English translation by R. H. M. Elwes. Since both lectures were combined here into one narrative whole, we decided to leave the translations as they were presented by Winch in the respective passages, but added also the reference to the newer and nowadays more widely used Curley translations in those places where Elwes was originally used. We have also added in various places throughout the text references to the passages in Spinoza that Winch alludes to as well as, in a few cases, refer the reader to possibly helpful secondary sources. All references that stem from Winch himself are also presented in footnotes and marked with the prefix ‘PW’.

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ABBREVIATIONS Abbreviations of Spinoza’s Works E                 TIE C 1 C 2 Elw

Ethics c: corollary d: definition da: definition of the affects dem: demonstration ex: explication p: proposition pref: preface s: scholium Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, Volume 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, Volume 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. On the Improvement of the Understanding; The Ethics; The Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes. New York: Dover, 1955.

Abbreviations of Further Works Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, transl. J.  Cottingham, R.  Stoothoff and D.  Murdoch, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. CSM 2 Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, transl. J.  Cottingham, R.  Stoothoff and D.  Murdoch, Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. CV Wittgenstein, Culture and Value/​ Vermischte Bemerkungen, ed. G. H. von Wright, transl. Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Letters Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein in Cambridge:  Letters and Documents, 1911–​1951, ed. Brian McGuinness. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. CSM 1

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OC Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G.  E. M.  Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, transl. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977. PI Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, transl. G. E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. TLP Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus, transl. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922. Zettel Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, transl. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967.

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Chapter 1 METHOD AND JUDGEMENT I want to begin with a discussion of De Emendatione. There is an obvious comparison between this and Descartes’s Discourse on Method; and obvious contrasts. It does not look as though Spinoza’s essay was written deliberately as an ‘anti-​ Discourse’. But many of the positions he criticises are reminiscent of Descartes and the contrasts are constructive. I shall use them to help highlight what is distinctive about Spinoza’s position. Notice first the way in which De Emendatione begins. The goal is to try to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good, capable of communicating itself and which alone would affect the mind. Compare the opening pages with the title ‘The Ethics’. Spinoza’s aim is to see how to achieve ‘blessedness’. Note how this is immediately linked with questions concerning the understanding, its ‘purification’ and ‘improvement’.1 This is because it is not obvious what ‘blessedness’, ‘felicity’, ‘happiness’ and so on, consist in or how they are to be achieved. Spinoza’s starting point is that to answer these questions we have to understand what the nature of man is –​because ‘the terms good and evil are applied only relatively, so that the same thing may be called both good and bad, according to the relations in view, in the same way as it may be called perfect or imperfect’.2 So we have to ask what is good in relation to man; and to answer this we have to understand the nature of this relatum –​man. Moreover, we shall be asking what sort of relation between a man and the world around him is to be counted ‘good for him’. So the enquiry broadens into a general metaphysical one: into the nature of the ‘world’ and of man’s ‘place’ in it. Furthermore, since all this is something we are trying to understand, we must enquire into what counts as ‘understanding’ as far as men are concerned. Putting it another way, if we are to ‘purify’ and ‘improve’ the understanding, we have first got to understand what understanding consists in. Suppose an engineer is given a piece of machinery and asked to consider how it may be 1 TIE; C 1:7. 2 TIE; Elw 6/​C 1:10.

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improved. He’s got to have some understanding of the machine before he can go about this. If he thinks that it’s a machine for making guns, he’s going to make a hash of it, if the machine is in fact designed for time management. One might note this alongside the title of Spinoza’s magnum opus: Ethics. This title is to be taken seriously. Although the direct focus on obviously ethical questions waits till the last part (or perhaps the last two or three), I believe that the sense of much of what is said in the earlier parts cannot be properly understood except in the light of Spinoza’s ethical position. (My main criticisms of Jonathan Bennett’s Study stem from this point.3) A parallel interest is present in Descartes’s Discourse, but it plays nothing like the same role. Where Descartes argues that practical interests stand in the way of ‘pure enquiry’,4 Spinoza constantly argues for an intimate relation between theory and practice. Descartes could never have called a major work on metaphysics ‘Ethics’. Unlike him, Spinoza treats confusions about the nature of good as the main obstacle to the purification of the intellect in relation to all other matters. (One cannot say ‘including the purely theoretical’, because for Spinoza there are no ‘purely theoretical’ matters in Descartes’s sense.) Generalising, we can say that Spinoza’s enquiry has ethical, metaphysical and epistemological aspects, all internally related. Ethics presupposes both metaphysics and epistemology; the former, because the good life for men is something that requires understanding and the latter, because the nature of man and of the world and of the relation between them has to be understood. And metaphysics presupposes epistemology because we have to enquire what sort of understanding man is capable of and what sort of understanding it is possible to have of these particular kinds of questions. But epistemology presupposes metaphysics too, since understanding is itself a relation of man to the world and to himself, and we need to grasp the nature of the terms of this relation. In case these observations seem unduly platitudinous, let’s notice that their application, at least, is not uncontroversial. We can see this by drawing a rough comparison between Spinoza and Descartes. Although there is no clear line of demarcation between epistemology, metaphysics and ethics, the De Emendatione concentrates mainly on the metaphysical aspect of this complex of questions, and this is where I shall start. How does Descartes see the relation between epistemology and metaphysics? Because metaphysics is a field of warring opinions, it’s necessary to ask what

3 Peter Winch, ‘Review of Jonathan Bennett’s A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics’, Philosophical Investigations 9:2 (1986): 140–​52. 4 See Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. London: Penguin, 1978.

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we can be certain about. What does certainty consist in? Descartes’s method of dealing with this is what has come to be called ‘Cartesian doubt’:  the attempt to doubt everything which cannot be regarded as absolutely certain. The application of this method results in the progressive driving of a wedge further and further between the subject who tries to know and understand and the world which is the object of this attempt. Or, in Cartesian terms, between my ‘ideas’ and what those ideas purport to be ideas of. What Descartes calls more and more into question is how far the fact that I have certain ideas guarantees that the world is as those ideas represent it to be. Or, eventually and more radically, whether the existence of these ideas is any guarantee of the existence of the represented world at all. In this way, Descartes’s main epistemological problem becomes that of arriving at some existential judgement which is immune to the ‘hyperbolical’ doubt. He thinks he has arrived at this with his ‘cogito’. The upshot of this is that the words ‘I doubt whether I exist’ are senseless (do not express a possible judgement) and that therefore there is something the existence of which I  can be certain of, namely, myself as thinking subject.5 There are, of course, plenty of difficulties about this. But let’s assume for a moment that everything so far is in order and ask where it has taken us. What is claimed I can be certain of is that I (as thinking subject) and my thoughts exist. From here Descartes tries to go in two directions: 1 . To enquire what I can know about the nature of myself. 2. To enquire what else I can come to know, using this as a basis. But there are grave difficulties about advancing in either direction. We have to remember that there’s nothing in the argument so far which justifies relaxing the extreme rigour of the requirements of Cartesian doubt, that is, any further step must meet the same criteria of certainty as the ‘cogito’ itself. With respect to (1), Descartes claims to derive the proposition ‘I am a thinking substance’. However, the notion of substance seems to introduce all sorts of assumptions which are questionable –​according to Descartes’s own criteria. Am I really entitled to go any further than saying that the thought that I exist exists, or rather that the doubt whether I exist exists? And with respect to (2), we have to remember that the most that has been established to exist are my thoughts themselves. The problem Descartes has  set himself is to move on from there to some object of those thoughts.

5 Cf. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy 1.7; CSM 1:195; Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation II; CSM 2:17.

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The Cartesian doubt had precisely consisted in insisting that the existence of a thought does not in itself guarantee the existence of what it purports to be a thought of. His procedure at this point is to argue that there is something about the nature of certain thoughts which I have, which guarantees the existence of something beyond them, namely, thoughts of God. This is the upshot of the ontological argument, the argument from cause and effect and the idea that an effect cannot contain more ‘perfection’ than its cause.6 Having thus ‘established’ the existence of a God who is not a deceiver, Descartes then uses this to close the gap he had opened up between thoughts and their putative objects. But here we meet the ‘Cartesian Circle’. The gap between thoughts and their putative objects is to be closed by the existence of God, but this demonstration depends on moving from thoughts of God to God, a step which cannot be taken unless the gap has already been closed. Many of the things Spinoza says in De Emendatione can be seen as attempts to avoid such difficulties by pointing to confusions which have given rise to them. Let me first allow Spinoza to raise an even more radical difficulty than any I have so far mentioned, which is closely related to the Cartesian Circle: It may perhaps provoke astonishment that, after having said that the good method is that which teaches us to direct our mind according to the standard of the given true idea, we should prove our point by reasoning, which would seem to indicate that it is not self-​evident. We may therefore be questioned as to the validity of our reasoning.7

Spinoza’s answer to this charge is that ‘for proving the truth, and for valid reasoning, we need no other means than the truth and valid reasoning themselves: for by valid reasoning I have established valid reasoning, and, in like measure, I  seek still to establish it’.8 The exact purport of this answer I’ll come back to later.9 For now it will suffice to say that Spinoza could better have said that there can’t be any question of ‘establishing’ valid reasoning. We can establish something by valid reasoning, but not valid reasoning itself. As Wittgenstein remarked, justification comes to an end. And here at least, the notion of justification has surely disintegrated. (‘Our spade is turned.’10)

 6 Descartes, Principles 1.17; CSM 1:198–​ 99; Descartes, Meditations, Meditation III; CSM 2:28.   7 Elw 16/​C 1:20.   8 Ibid. PW: Cf. attempts to provide a foundation for logic.   9 This volume, pp. 25–28. 10 PI §217.

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Spinoza goes on to say this of those who will not accept this point: Such persons are not conscious of themselves. If they affirm or doubt anything, they know not that they affirm or doubt. They say that they know nothing, and they say that they are ignorant of the very fact of their knowing nothing. Even this they do not affirm absolutely, they are afraid of confessing that they exist, so long as they know nothing; in fact, they ought to remain dumb, for fear of haply supposing something which would smack of truth.11

Now Descartes, of course, does not quite reach the position Spinoza describes here. But perhaps Spinoza is entitled to argue that he ought to have reached it. For when Descartes says ‘I think’ or ‘I exist’, or when he thinks these words, he already assumes that they mean something; and this is essential, of course, to his argument. They are not, for him, occurrences like any other. But what right has he to assume this? If he can be mistaken about all the other things he claims to be able to doubt, why not about this? On the other hand, if this ‘doubt’ is allowed to arise, then ought he not, as Spinoza says, ‘to remain dumb’? (In dreaming one sometimes has the impression of saying something intelligible, but remembers on waking that what one uttered was just a meaningless string of sounds.12) As Spinoza says, someone in this condition ‘is not conscious of himself ’, that is, he is not in a position to say ‘cogito ergo sum’. This point is fundamental to the kind of position Spinoza develops in opposition to Descartes. Descartes tries to treat ‘ideas’ as if they were simply (to borrow Hume’s terminology from a different, though related, context) ‘independent existences’, having their own character quite distinct from anything else.13 So that if they are found to ‘correspond’ with something different (something ‘external’), that would be quite a contingent matter. What, then, is Spinoza’s alternative conception of an idea? In the first place, an idea makes a claim to truth; it has the character of a judgement or proposition. Spinoza is most explicit about this in the Ethics: No one who has a true idea is ignorant that a true idea involves the highest certainty. For to have a true idea is only another expression for knowing a thing perfectly, or as well as possible. No one indeed can doubt this unless he thinks

11 TIE; Elw 17/​C 1:22. 12 Compare OC 676. 13 See Book 1, Part 4, Section 4 in David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-​ Bigge. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1978, 228.

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that an idea is something lifeless, like a picture on a panel, and not a mode of thinking –​namely the very act of understanding.14

But again, in De Emendatione he says that in order to be clear about the nature of ideas we have to be clear about the nature of, and connection between, subject and predicate. In other words, an idea is a judgement in which something is asserted to be true of something.15 So an idea points beyond itself; it has an object, an ideatum. Spinoza distinguishes between ‘essentia formalis’ and ‘essentia objectiva’. Note that the sense of ‘objective’ doesn’t at all lie here in a contrast with ‘subjective’; it highlights the relation of an idea to its object, to what it asserts or represents to be the case. The ‘formal essence’ on the other hand is, as it were, the idea as a distinct mental existent, considered in abstraction from its relation to an object. Suppose I say, ‘There is a pencil in this case.’ Then to consider what I assert to be the case –​the pencil’s being in the case –​apart from my assertion of it, is to consider its formal essence. When I assert it, or when I think of it –​when I think of the pencil being in the case –​then my thought of the pencil in the case is the objective essence of the very same situation. That is, when I  say or think ‘the pencil is in the case’, my thought constitutes what Spinoza calls the ‘objective essence’ of that situation. So, in my thought, the object of the thought itself is being expressed; I mean the essence of the situation being expressed appears in my thought. It appears in the form of an objective essence. Now you can see why Elwes translated that as subjective:16 because it relates to an aspect of thoughts. But I think as a matter of fact the sense of the term ‘objectiva’ is much more closely related to the sort of phrases Brentano used when he talked about the ‘intentional object’ of something.17 When I think of the pencil in the case, the pencil in the case is –​in that language –​the intentional object of my thought. Now Spinoza is putting much the same point but the other way round; when I think of the pencil in the case, my thought of the pencil in the case is the objective essence of the pencil’s being in the case. But of course that’s not to say that the pencil is only in the case by virtue of my thinking that it’s in the case. That’s not what’s being said. And that is registered by Spinoza’s terminology. He wants to say that you can

14 EIIp43s; Elw 115/​C 1:479. 15 TIE; Elw 23/​C 1:28. 16 See TIE; Elw 12–​15; Elwes translates ‘essentia formalis’ as ‘actual essence’ and ‘essentia objectiva’ as ‘subjective essence’, while Curley remains close to the Latin with his translations as ‘formal essence’ and ‘objective essence’, respectively (see C1:17–​19). 17 Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, transl. Antos C.  Rancurello, D. B. Terrell and Linda L. McAlister. London: Routledge 1995, 88–​89.

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think of the object of the thought apart from the thought itself. And indeed, the thought, of course, is directed straight onto the object. And the situation which is the object of the thought has its own formal essence quite independently of being thought of. Thus, the ‘objective essence’ of an idea is, as it were, the content of the idea: what it says or states to be the case. It [an idea] can be considered in abstraction from its ideatum, by being made the object of another idea (the idea of an idea –​something akin to what recent writers have called a ‘metalanguage’, perhaps). Its ‘formal essence’ is what it is itself in abstraction from its ideatum. But it is very important to Spinoza’s position that this aspect only emerges insofar as we reflect on the idea and make it the object of another idea.18 But the essential point is that, as it were, in its original primitive appearance, the idea is a representation of another situation. And this has to be accepted if anything is to be said at all. We can’t use language to cast doubt on the possibility of language. There can’t be ‘doubt concerning the possibility of ­language’, for that would have to be expressed in language. As Spinoza says, the only way such a doubt could express itself would be silence. This brings us to the question of truth and falsity. For Descartes, in the context of his ‘doubt’, the question of truth is the question whether there is anything corresponding to our ideas. As I have tried to show, Spinoza thinks this is a question which cannot be asked, because the very asking of it would presuppose that there is something concerning which the question is being asked. And the relation between ideas of ideas and the ideas which are their objects is not different from that between first-​order ideas and their objects. So if we presuppose such a relation in one case, what reason can there be for not presupposing it in the other case? The question for Spinoza is rather whether our ideas adequately represent their objects. I  may have a distorted idea of what the world is like, but it cannot be that there is no world corresponding to my ideas; the existence of the world is a presupposition of my having any ideas at all. (This is another way of putting the insistence that we have no way to doubt the syntax of our words.19) To put this another way: ‘the world’ is given along with my ideas, for my ideas are ideas of a world. Thus, I can’t start with my ideas and then raise 18 PW: It then itself has an ‘objective essence’ qua content of this further idea: we speak of its formal essence insofar as we want to refer to it, rather than to it qua represented in another idea. –​There are difficulties here we shall have to come back to much later. 19 Winch may have in mind here Rush Rhees’s discussion in his ‘ “Ontology” and Identity in the Tractatus’, in Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. Peter Winch. London: Routledge, 1969, 51–​65.

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the question whether there is a world corresponding to them. This should be compared to Wittgenstein’s remark in the Tractatus: if there were logic given that there is no world, how could there be logic given that there is a world?20 If I can think, [then] there is a world, since to think is to think about something. So I can’t wonder whether or not there is a world. In other words, there are necessary constraints on thoughts, which emanate from the world which is the object of thought. I can’t think just what I like. There is no absolutely free will in relation to what I think. Descartes, by contrast, does presuppose such an absolutely free will. This is a condition of the possibility of his ‘doubt’: I will to suspend my belief. For Spinoza, this is impossible. If I can doubt in a given case, this is because I don’t have the knowledge which constrains me to make an assertion. More strongly, doubt is itself constrained by my knowledge that I do not have enough information to warrant a positive assertion. The difference between Descartes and Spinoza here consists in this: Descartes does think that my will is constrained by the cogito; but for him this is a special case and one which he only arrives at by way of a supposed freedom of will to suspend belief as far as the nature of thought as such is concerned. For Spinoza, on the other hand, the constraints on thought do not arise out of any special case; thought as such, of its nature, is subject to constraints. For Spinoza, any given thought (judgement, assertion) belongs to a system of judgements. The conditions which make it possible for me to think at all also constrain me to think certain things and prevent me from thinking other things. How, then, is error possible? For Descartes, there is no great problem about this: Thought is subject to will, and error consists in willing assertions which do not happen to correspond with reality. For Spinoza, on the other hand, it is the relation with reality (or the constraints of the system to which thoughts belong) which makes it necessary to think (or not to think) things in the first place. How, then, can I think what is false, if what is false is simply an absence of correspondence with reality?21 This takes us to new considerations. The answer is that truth for Spinoza does not consist straightforwardly in correspondence with reality; ideas cannot but correspond with reality. However, they may represent the reality they correspond with more or less ‘adequately’. A true idea is an adequate idea of what it represents, a false idea a more or less inadequate representation. Adequacy consists in the clarity and distinctness with which the relations of a given thought to other thoughts in the system to which it belongs are perceived. 20 TLP 5.552. 21 This volume, p. x.

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Thus a large part of Descartes’s argument rests on the idea that truth consists in a relation between one’s ideas and something which is quite independent of them. And the doubt Descartes raises in its most general form is simply the doubt whether there actually is anything to which ideas relate in the way in which they seem to claim to relate. That conception of truth is one which Spinoza quite explicitly and emphatically opposes. There are various places in which he does this. One of the most explicit is in the following passage: As regards that which constitutes the reality of truth, it is certain that a true idea is distinguished from a false one not so much by its extrinsic object as by its intrinsic nature. If an architect conceives a building properly constructed, though such a building may never have existed and may never exist, nevertheless the idea is true; and the idea remains the same whether it be put into execution or not. On the other hand, if anyone asserts, for instance, that Peter exists without knowing whether Peter really exists or not, the assertion, so far as its asserter is concerned, is false, or not true even though Peter actually does exist. The assertion that Peter exists is true only with regard to him who knows for certain that Peter does exist. Whence it follows there is in ideas something real, whereby the true are distinguished from the false.22

This is a rather difficult passage. One of the most obvious difficulties is that in the first example it is hard to understand what Spinoza is saying when he says that the architect’s design is true even though the building is never built. I suppose he must mean that judged by the standards of architecture it is a good, sound design. But I’m not sure whether that, so far, helps us very much, and I want to pay more attention to the second example, because it is here that the difficulties become even more apparent, in particular in the claim that the true idea is distinguished from a false one not so much by its extrinsic object but by its intrinsic nature. I’m not going to tackle this problem head on, but rather will raise a number of points which I think will help us to see what is being said here and maybe make it a bit more acceptable than it seems at first sight. First of all, it is clear already in this passage, from the general way in which Spinoza expresses himself, that he thinks of an idea as involving what in current philosophical jargon might be called a ‘truth claim’. An idea has the character of an assertion, it involves the claim that something is the case, [that it] is so. And there are other passages where that is made much more explicit. There’s an interesting passage where he says:

22 TIE; Elw 26/​C 1:31.

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If we were to assert that Men are suddenly turned into beasts, the statement would be extremely general, so general that there would be no conception, that is no idea, or connection of subject and predicate in our mind. 23

Here ‘a connection of subject and predicate’ is meant as almost a synonym for ‘idea’. The Latin is ‘id est idea sid coherentia subjecti et predicati in menti’. Coherence or connection –​‘putting together’ –​of subject and predicate in the mind, that is what Spinoza is saying an idea is. So he is thinking of an idea as very much having something like the structure of an assertion.24 He is quite clear from the whole way he talks that he is thinking of an idea as something like an assertion or a judgement that something is so. Now if one says that, the question arises when it can be said of someone that he has in his mind a connection between subject and predicate. Or, to put it in a less cumbersome way, the question arises under what conditions we are entitled to say that somebody is making the judgement that something is so. It’s quite clear that Spinoza recognises the importance of that question because he repeatedly insists at various points in all sorts of arguments throughout the Ethics that a genuine judgement is not simply a matter of putting words together or putting images together.25 Just juxtaposing a couple of images is not making a judgement. That is the lesson of the attempted assertion that men are suddenly turned into beasts. Spinoza thinks that this happens quite often in philosophy –​people put together forms of words which look as if they express judgements but in fact express no genuine judgement at all. I may form a picture to myself of a man gradually turning into the image of a beast of some sort, an ass let’s say. But the fact that I could do that would not show that I can attach any sense to the idea that a man might turn into a beast. The mere fact that I can form an image of it doesn’t mean I could attach sense to the assertion that that is something which has happened. This brings us onto the difference between doubt and error. In both cases my ideas are not fully adequate. Where all my ideas are fully adequate they constrain judgements which are true. But my ideas can be inadequate in different ways. It may be that the ideas I have make it clear that I have insufficient data either to affirm or deny certain things. In this case my ideas are

23 TIE; Elw 23/​C 1:28. PW: I have added a comma after ‘idea’ here. 24 PW:  Unfortunately, he’s not always consistent about this. There is a place in the Emendation of the Intellect where he does talk about an idea in itself as being just like a mere sensation, as not having this subject-​predicate structure, but I’m sure that doesn’t represent Spinoza’s mature view. (See Elw 29/​C 1:34.) 25 EIIp49s; C 1:485–​91.

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not fully adequate, for if they were, I  should have no choice at all what to affirm or deny. But it may also be that the inadequacy of my ideas is such that they don’t make it clear that some things are not yet to be either affirmed or denied. They may present the appearance of constraint. That is enough to constrain me, until I achieve the next stage of clarity, which is to get rid of that appearance of constraint. See the slave boy in the Meno. He is first constrained to think that the square double the area of a given square is that constructed on one of the latter’s sides. He is then shown that this is not so. Later he comes to see that the square must be constructed on the diagonal.26 Spinoza would call this a progressive increase in clarity or adequacy. Socrates’s account works most easily in connection with mathematical examples (which are those he himself most leans on), because in a mathematical problem all the data necessary for a solution are given and it’s a matter of getting a perspicuous representation of these data –​ordering them in such a way that they yield a solution. It is more difficult when we are dealing with empirical truth and error. Spinoza, of course, doesn’t recognise any fundamental difference here. But why he doesn’t and whether or not he is right in this are questions I must defer until we’ve gone deeper into his metaphysics.27 Spinoza says that falsity is not something positive but is a privation of truth.28 Part of what this means is that it is only in relation to truth that there could be such a thing as falsity. I can be wrong about something if I’m right about something else, but I  can’t be wrong about everything. What would I be wrong about? Moreover, I don’t need some general criterion by which to distinguish truth and falsity. ‘Truth is the standard both of itself and of the false.’29 If I can think at all, there must be some truth in what I think and I must use this in order to sift out truth and falsity in the rest of what I think. There is no problem without data. We must remember, too, that thought is part of the world: thinking is something that takes place in the world; otherwise, how could the world exercise any constraints on thought? If thoughts are constrained, the constraints must come from something which exists (which is in the world), and they must themselves of course exist (be in the world) and in the same world as that which

26 See Plato, Meno, 82a–​83e. 27 This volume, pp. 47–52. 28 PW: Cf. what Dummett says, comparing Yes with Win. [I.e. Michael Dummett, ‘Truth’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59:1 (1959): 141–​62; reprinted in Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978, 1–​24. For Spinoza’s view that falsity is a privation of truth, see EIIp35; C1: 472–​73]. 29 EIIp43s; C 1:479.

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exercises the constraints. What this involves will be clearer when we consider the notion of ‘attributes’.30 We could say that the starting point of Spinoza’s Ethics is a question concerning what it is to judge that something is so. Because of the constraints on judgement, on the connection of subject and predicate imposed by the form of enquiry to which any judgement belongs, this includes the question what it is to explain why something is so. We haven’t truly judged anything except insofar as we have seen why it is so.31 Here we have to be careful, because Spinoza is running together questions of meaning and truth. This is closely bound up with Spinoza’s taking mathematics as his model of investigation. Within mathematics these two notions seem to merge. To understand clearly what is meant by a ‘triangle’ and by ‘two right angles’ is to see the truth of the proposition that the interior angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.32 Prima facie, the situation is different with empirical judgements. There are some judgements which make sense and some which don’t make sense. Compare: ‘Jones is six feet tall’ and ‘Jones’s mind is six feet tall’. We can put this in terms of ‘the relation between s and p’: Jones’s mind is not the sort of subject of which height can intelligibly be predicated. In this way, the subject by its nature seems to rule out combinations with certain predicates. But this is not sufficient to tell us whether it is true that Jones is six feet tall. Don’t we need something besides understanding of the ‘connection between subject and predicate’ in order to arrive at knowledge of the truth of empirical judgements? Spinoza’s answer to this objection would be that I  have not been considering ‘Jones is six feet tall’ as a genuine judgement but simply as a sentence. Or, to stay closer to Spinoza’s terminology, I have, as it were, simply been juxtaposing two images –​that of Jones and that of a certain height. But so far there is no judgement; a judgement is made in a particular context, a context which gives rise to a definite question concerning such a man’s height and which does or does not authorise and compel an answer to that question. The predicate is only genuinely connected with the subject (i.e. there is only a genuine judgement) insofar as the context in which the question is asked provides an answer. Insofar as a genuine question is raised, the procedure for

30 This volume, pp. 25–30. 31 PW: All this has to be borne in mind if we are to understand how Spinoza is using key expressions in the Ethics such as ‘substance’, ‘attribute’, ‘mode’, ‘cause’, ‘essence’, ‘conceived through (itself or something else)’. 32 Cf. EIIp49dem; Elw 120–​21/​C 1:484–​85.

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answering it is also given; and the application of that procedure necessitates a particular answer. Spinoza is insisting (rightly, it seems to me) that the connection between subject and predicate in a judgement presupposes the form of enquiry to which the judgement belongs. He is also insisting (and this is more questionable) that a form of enquiry presupposes the possibility of giving definite answers to the questions it raises; and also (even more questionably) that there are no fundamental logical differences between different forms of enquiry involving different relations between the procedures for seeking answers and the giving of such answers.33 The connection between subject and predicate presupposes a form of investigation. The kind of connection between a triangle and its interior angles, which a geometer speaks of, presupposes geometry. It’s different from the kind of connection which is established by measurement, and an adequate conception of the connection would comprise both of these and make clear the connection between them. We have not reached a fully adequate conception until we have understood the relation of different enquiries to each other; and according to Spinoza, this must mean that we have subsumed them all under a single enquiry (into the ‘nature of the world’).34 I turn now to a discussion of Spinoza’s account of method and in particular to his argument that there is no infinite regress in seeking a method of seeking the truth. This is not just a bit of logic-​chopping, but involves a point crucial to his whole conception of his project. Matters here stand as they do with corporeal tools, where someone might argue in the same way. For to forge iron a hammer is needed, and to have a hammer, it must be made; for this another hammer and other tools are needed; and to have these tools too, other tools will be needed, and so on to infinity; in this way someone might try, in vain, to prove that men have no power of forging iron. But just as men, in the beginning, were able to make the easiest things with the tools they were born with (however laboriously and imperfectly), and once these had been made, made other, more difficult things with less labor and more perfectly, and so, proceeding gradually from the simplest works to tools, and from tools to other works and tools, reached the point where they accomplished so 33 To see what motivates this assessment, see Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1958. 34 PW: This view can be compared to Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm; see also Wittgenstein’s discussion ‘language games’. [See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, 12–​20, and PI §§1–​12.] We will return to these issues below. (This volume, p. x –​ Eds)

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many and so difficult things with little labor, in the same way the intellect, by its inborn power, makes intellectual tools for itself, by which it acquires other powers for other intellectual works, and from these works still other tools, or the power of searching further, and so proceeds by stages, until it reaches the pinnacle of wisdom.35

The main point is that there is no real division between an enquiry and an investigation of how to conduct the enquiry. The latter must arise from (and be a sharpening of) one’s understanding of what the original enquiry is. Method is thus a form of ‘reflective’ knowledge. The original ‘tool’ is ‘the true idea’ (‘for’, he says, ‘we have a true idea’).36 There’s another important point raised early in the De Emendatione about ‘the good’, which we’ve already quoted from in part: Here I  shall only say briefly what I  understand by the true good, and at the same time, what the highest good is. To understand this properly, it must be noted that good and bad are said of things only in a certain respect, so that one and the same thing can be called both good and bad according to different respects. The same applies to perfect and imperfect. For nothing, considered in its own nature, will be called perfect or imperfect, especially after we have recognized that everything that happens happens according to the eternal order, and according to certain laws of Nature.37

‘Respects’ are aspects and manifest themselves only in or to a certain perspective, and it is the nature and position of the observer that provides the perspective. So investigation into the nature of ‘the true good’ is at the same time investigation into the nature of human beings. What is important here, at present, is the emphasis on the necessity of starting from where we are. See Wittgenstein: ‘A curious analogy could be based on the fact that even the hugest telescope has to have an eye-​piece no larger than the human eye.’38 There is, pace Nagel, no ‘view from nowhere’.39 As we will see, this creates serious difficulties for any metaphysics (like Spinoza’s). But Spinoza is aware of them and at least tries to accommodate them. Here we have two interconnected differences between Descartes and Spinoza. First, Spinoza does not set theory apart from practice, and second, 35 TIE; C 1:16–​17. 36 Ibid. 37 TIE; C 1:10. 38 CV 17e. 39 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Spinoza does not think we can start enquiry with a ‘hyperbolical’ doubt. In fact, these points converge, since Descartes’s doubt is itself divorced from practice; it is not a ‘real’ doubt. As Spinoza remarks: It remains now to investigate the doubtful idea –​i.e. to ask what are the things that can lead us into doubt, and at the same time how doubt is removed. I am speaking of true doubt in the mind, and not of what we commonly see happen, when someone says in words that he doubts, although his mind does not doubt. For it is not the business of the Method to emend that. That belongs rather to the investigation of stubbornness, and its emendation.40

One way of putting the general form of Spinoza’s criticisms, a way which I think accords with Spinoza’s own language, would be to say that doubt is itself the symptom, the expression, of confused ideas. In other words, it can’t be used as a source of clear and distinct ideas. On Spinoza’s argument, if Descartes’s recipe for his hyperbolical doubt is really taken seriously, it won’t even yield the cogito –​that supposed paradigm of clearness and distinctness. It won’t yield that because it will equally undermine confidence in the intelligibility of our attempts to express the cogito. On Descartes’s argument we couldn’t even be sure we were expressing anything intelligible when we made those sounds. The aspect of Cartesianism that is under criticism is the supposition that our ideas might have no truth in them –​the supposition, I mean, not merely that we might be mistaken about something, but that we might be mistaken about everything. It’s a sort of attempt to prise away, to consider our ideas in complete distinction from any truth that they might have in them. Spinoza attempts to show that a supposition that our ideas are radically dissociated from any world will land us into confusion which there is no way out of. Such a supposition can’t provide the basis for any search for truth. What I need to do now is consider whether Spinoza succeeds in meeting the grounds Descartes gives us for doubting. Spinoza insists that really the only possible method of enquiry is to start with a ‘given true idea’, adding laconically, ‘for we have a true idea’. And one might well ask, opposing it from the side of Descartes: At this point, doesn’t it beg the question to talk about a ‘given true idea’? Indeed, the whole point of Descartes’s method is that we should not rely on anything given, but only on what we ourselves can see the truth of –​only what we ourselves can show to be the case by the exercise of our own reason. According to him, the truth of an idea could not be ‘given’, something

40 TIE; C 1:34.

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with which we start; we have to establish the ‘marks’ of truth before we are entitled to accept any idea as true. Now, the only way to meet the objection that the question is being begged would be to argue that this very conception which Descartes is pressing on us –​of seeing the truth for oneself rather than taking something as given or taking it on authority or taking it without any good grounds –​requires the acceptance of a given true idea. In other words, if we didn’t take something for granted without questioning it, we wouldn’t understand what it was to see the truth of something for ourselves, to show that something was the case by giving reasons for it. Spinoza remarks that we have to accept some idea as true in order to be able to lay down what the marks of truth are. Perhaps we should first ask what we are going to have to understand by an ‘idea’ if we are to be able to ask questions about its truth or falsity. We might say it will have to have the character of an assertion or it will have to make a claim to truth. Spinoza is more explicit about this in the Ethics than he is in De Emendatione, but there is clear enough indication in both: So we ought not to fear in any way that we are feigning something, if only we perceive the thing clearly and distinctly. For if by chance we should say that men are changed in a moment into beasts, that is said very generally, so that there is in the mind no concept, i.e., idea, or connection of subject and predicate. For if there were any concept, the mind would see together the means and causes, how and why such a thing was done. And one does not attend to the nature of the subject and the predicate.41

An idea is neither an image nor what recent logicians have called a ‘proposition’, which can be asserted indifferently by a number of different people on different occasions. It is ‘a mode of thinking, viz. the very act of understanding’.42 And don’t overlook what Spinoza undoubtedly sees as a corollary: that in an idea we ‘see together the means and causes, how and why such a thing was done’.43 In other words, an idea involves two inseparable aspects, namely a relation to something asserted, or judged to be the case, and a connection with ideas of other things (i.e. being part of a system of causes).44 I can now express the difference between Spinoza and Descartes in the following way. For Descartes ideas do not, as such, involve any implications 41 TIE; Elw 23/​C 1:28. For the Ethics, see EIIp43s; C 1:479. 42 EIIp43s; C 1:479. 43 TIE; C 1:28. 44 PW:  N.B. ‘cause’ here refers indifferently to physical causes and to logical relations between ideas (= ground and consequent).

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about objects, they are simply mental existents. Questions of truth can arise only when we, by an act of our wills, put ideas together. (Notice, looking ahead, that Spinoza rejects any ‘acts of will’ of any sort. What I am telling at present is part of a much larger story.) But there cannot be any presumption, just because I have put two ideas together in a certain way, that anything further ‘corresponds’ to that juxtaposition. Only in the special case of the cogito does the very existence of the idea imply the existence of an ‘object’: hence its very special importance for Descartes. So, one might say, for Descartes it is the formal essence of idea that is primary (‘epistemologically primary’): we are first confronted with ideas as individual, separate existents: then the question may arise whether anything corresponds to them, any ‘object’. For Spinoza the position is reversed: We think.45 To think is to judge that something is so, to connect a subject and predicate. That is our thought. On reflection we may become conscious that we think: that is, we are conscious of our idea’s ‘formal essence’. That, however, is not what is primary. It is an abstraction from what is primary. An idea is a judgement that something is the case; primitively, it is absorbed in its object which is its ‘objective essence’; such a judgement involves a relation of subject and predicate; these have to be understood not simply as ­linguistic, grammatical components but as real (‘mental’) constituents of the ‘act of understanding’. Their ‘relation’ is not simply a juxtaposition; it has to be a relation that yields a genuine judgement. And what yields a genuine judgement?  –​The appropriate relation to a context of cause and effect. I cannot judge whatever I  like. My judgement is constrained by the other judgements I accept. So: it is not just a matter of yielding a sentence that makes grammatical sense; that is insufficient to constitute a judgement. Consider the sentence: ‘l shall defeat Wellington at Waterloo tomorrow.’ Uttered (or ‘thought’) by Napoleon the day before the battle, that may express Napoleon’s judgement. Uttered (or ‘thought’) by me now it certainly does not. It does not make sense to suppose that I, now, could make that judgement.46 Why not? It can have no intelligible relation to my present situation; and that situation includes what I know about myself, my surroundings and Wellington.

45 PW: Note that in Ethics that has the status of an axiom. Part II, Axiom 2: ‘Man thinks.’ It is interesting that Spinoza’s original editor, Gebhardt, adds as a ‘gloss’ from the earlier Dutch version:  ‘or, to put it differently, we know that we think’. So far from being a gloss, this seems to me completely to distort Spinoza’s thinking here. ‘Knowing’ that we think is reflective, the primary fact is simply: that we think. And that primary thinking is, one might say, absorbed in its object. 46 PW: Question: What about insanity?

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The situation is not importantly altered if, for words, one substitutes mental images of one sort or another. If the words I utter (or ‘think’) have a meaning, it is because of their role in my judgements. And so it is, too, with mental pictures. This takes me back to Descartes’s ‘doubt’ and the cogito. Spinoza seems to be arguing that the possibility of my meaning something when I  utter or entertain words depends on their place in a system of judgements (i.e. judgings). These are what they are (i.e. they have the character of judgings) only by virtue of their systematic relation to other facts about my situation. The hyperbolical doubt (if, per impossibile, it could be implemented) would sever some of the most important of these connections. It would, thereby, rob the words I  utter of any meaning; that is, if I  doubt all the things Descartes recommends, what stops me doubting whether the words I am uttering (such as ‘Cogito, ergo sum’) really mean anything? It is no good saying, with Descartes, that in that case, since I am doubting, I know that I exist, because I cannot be confident that in using these words I am framing an intelligible thought. (There is some poignancy in this in my view, since I should say that I am not.) The sceptic is left without the resources to carry out conversation, whether philosophical or otherwise. Spinoza describes their predicament as follows: Finally, there is no speaking of the sciences with them. (For as far as the needs of life and society are concerned, necessity forces them to suppose that they exist, and to seek their own advantage, and in taking oaths to affirm and deny many things.) For, if someone proves something to them, they do not know whether the argument is a proof or not. If they deny, grant, or oppose, they do not know that they deny.47

Consider:  ‘There is no doubt in the soul […] through the thing itself concerning which one doubts.’48 But doubt will arise through another idea which is not so clear and distinct that we can infer from it something certain about the thing concerning which there is doubt. That is, the idea that puts us in doubt is not clear and distinct: From this it follows that only so long as we have no clear and distinct idea of God, can we call true ideas in doubt by supposing that perhaps some deceiving God exists, who misleads us even in the things most certain. I.e., if we attend

47 TIE; C 1:22. 48 TIE; C 1:34.

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to the knowledge we have concerning the origin of all things and do not discover –​by the same knowledge we have when, attending to the nature of the triangle, we discover that its three angles equal two right angles –​anything that teaches us that he is not a deceiver [NS:, then the doubt remains]. But if we have the kind of knowledge of God that we have of the triangle, then all doubt is removed. And just as we can arrive at such a knowledge of the triangle, even though we may not know certainly whether some supreme deceiver misleads us, so we can arrive at such a knowledge of God, even though we may not know whether there is some supreme deceiver. Provided we have that knowledge, it will suffice, as I have said, to remove every doubt that we can have concerning clear and distinct ideas.49

So prima facie the situation is different with empirical judgements. However, we have to be careful here to remember that we are looking at judgements rather than at sentences (or ‘propositions’). Why is this important? Consider the sentence ‘President Bush has a scar from an appendicitis operation.’ Considered as a sentence that is quite unproblematic and meaningful. (Unlike the sentence: ‘President Bush’s ambition has a scar from an appendicitis operation.’) Now I am completely ignorant about Bush’s medical history. I can utter the sentence ‘Bush has an appendicitis operation scar,’ but it would express no judgement or affirmation. (Alternatively I can picture to myself Bush with a scar, but this would not be the expression of a judgement either. Unlike the case where I picture a friend, whom I have seen involved in an accident, with wounds on his body.) So the structure of an idea (‘the connection of subject and predicate’) comes from the reality which is its object. As the idea belongs to a system of ideas, so its object (if something physical) belongs to a physical system. The object of this system of ideas is the system of physical causes and effects. Spinoza expresses this in his talk about thought and extension both being attributes of the same substance. The constraints to which thought is subject (expressed in the subject–​predicate relation) are exercised by the intellectual system of which it is a part, which is identified by reference to its subject matter (physical reality). What Spinoza is getting at is that there would be no articulated thought, hence no enquiry, discovery, knowledge, were thinking not part of the very same world of the physical causes and effects which form its object or subject matter. (This is, of course, contrary to the view of Descartes.) The more a given idea represents of the connection of causes and effects the firmer and more determinate is its own structure; the more is it ‘adequate’.

49 TIE; C 1:35.

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I have been trying to show how, in this part of his thinking, Spinoza tends towards an emphasis on unity. The mind, and the reality which is its object, belong to, are aspects of, one and the same world. When would the Bush-​sentence start to express a judgement? To the extent to which I  acquire some information, or something which I  have reason to believe is information, about his medical history. This putative information has to have some actual reference to Bush if it is to serve such a purpose. It has to have some truth in it, that is, even though it may be in many respects wildly wrong. But the more I actually know about Bush and his medical history, the more determinate become the judgements it is possible for me to make. If yesterday I  actually saw Bush’s scar and remember this clearly, it makes no sense to suppose I could judge that Bush does not have a scar. All this looks pretty continuous with what could be said about the geometrical judgement that the angles of a triangle equal two right angles. The more clearly I  understand the place of this within Euclidian geometry, the less possibility there is in my judging otherwise. In discussing De Emendatione I have emphasised that, according to Spinoza, it makes no sense to say that we could doubt the power of our thinking to arrive at the truth. To say that we can do that is to misunderstand the nature of thought (the relation between objective and formal essence, among other things). Of course, the extent of my, and our, understanding of such matters varies enormously; so, pari passu, Spinoza would say, I think, does the clarity, the nature of the connection between subject and predicate, in our ideas, in our judgements. I can judge something only to the extent that I can give the causes connecting subject and predicate. Consider the disjunction between ‘conceived through itself ’ and ‘conceived through another’. These notions are not themselves defined by Spinoza, but they play a crucial role in the Definitions that are given and in the Axioms. How are we to understand the distinction? There seem to be just two possibilities here. Either the predicate is seen as belonging to the nature of the subject itself or the causes linking the predicate to the subject lie outside the nature of the subject itself. Hence Definition 3: By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.50

50 EId3; C 1:48.

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And Definition 5: By mode I  understand the affections of [a]‌51 substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived.52

In the present discussion of ‘conceived through itself/​conceived through something else’ we are exploring the basic structure of thinking. And this is at the same time (because of the objective essence of ideas) an exploration of the structure of reality. We need to ask what kind of condition has to be satisfied if we’re to say of someone that he is neither merely uttering or thinking to himself certain words, nor just entertaining certain images, but is rather making a genuine judgement. In laying stress on that question, Spinoza and I  are implicitly criticising Descartes’s conception of judgement or assertion. According to Descartes, of course, to make an assertion is simply an exercise of one’s will –​according to Descartes, in putting subject and predicate together, to use his terminology, I  perform a free act of my will. And indeed Descartes’s whole account of error, of mistakes, depends on that conception of assertion. Descartes’s point is that error arises where someone puts things together through the exercise of his will, the connection between which he has not understood. Descartes thinks that the will is in a certain sense infinite in its operation. One can freely put together any ideas one likes and, if one puts them together, that counts as an assertion apparently, whereas Spinoza is quite deliberately rejecting that. Of course that goes with a larger rejection in Spinoza’s philosophy of the whole conception of free will. I am not going to talk about his arguments about that at the moment, as for now I am simply considering the notion of judgement. Spinoza’s point is that you can exert your will and string words or images together, but that in itself won’t produce a judgement. There’s actually quite an interesting footnote of Spinoza’s where he says that he’s shown in an investigation that is to come that without ideas neither affirmation nor negation nor volition are possible.53 That’s to say, until we’re in a position to actually make assertions, or until we’re in a position to see the connection between subject and predicate in our minds, we’re not in a position

51 PW: N.B. I think it better, where possible, to leave out the article. My hesitations are philosophical, rather than linguistic. But, linguistically speaking, Latin does not contain an article. I do not know what the Dutch is. [We’ve followed Winch’s practice here and where he has left out articles in quotations we have refrained from reintroducing them. This means deviating at times from the Elwes or Curley translations.] 52 EId5; C 1:49. 53 See TIE; C 1:18.

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to will anything because we wouldn’t have any understanding of what we were willing. Our will would, as it were, have no object and would be unable to express itself properly. Spinoza gives a twofold answer to the question, ‘Under what conditions can we say of someone that there is a connection in his mind between subject and predicate?’ His answer is that the thinker must either see the connection of subject and predicate in the idea itself or understand the causes which connect them. To say that the connection is ‘in the idea itself ’ is to say that it is obvious simply from a consideration of the subject and predicate of which the idea is constituted that they belong together, that they form the right sort of coherence. But it is the alternative that I want to lay more stress on right now:  the idea that one may grasp the connection between subject and predicate by (as he puts it) understanding the causes which connect them. The crucial point is the assumption that the intelligibility of an idea –​and therefore its character as an idea –​rests on the possibility of seeing how its elements connect with each other. And they either connect with each other directly considered in themselves, if we simply consider the idea in isolation, or one sees their connection by seeing the idea in a broader context of ideas, in a context of causes, as Spinoza would put it. So if I could go back to the example of the existence of Peter, On the other hand, if anyone asserts, for instance, that Peter exists, without knowing whether Peter really exists or not, the assertion, as far as its asserter is concerned, is false, or not true, even though Peter actually does exist. The assertion that Peter exists is true only with regard to him who knows for certain that Peter does exist.54

Now I  think as a matter of fact that what Spinoza wants to say goes a bit further than that. He wants to say that, unless there is something about the person who claims to be making the assertion which provides some grounds for making such an assertion, he can’t actually be said to be making an assertion at all, true or false. But that is to use the terms ‘true’ or ‘false’ not quite as Spinoza is using them. I think that it is quite certain that, for Spinoza, any genuine idea, although it may not be completely true, has some truth in it. There is no such thing as an idea which is completely false. That isn’t a way I would myself want to put things, but I think what Spinoza is getting at here is perfectly correct, namely that, unless my assertion shows some understanding of the situation to which my words relate, I don’t actually make any assertion at all, neither true nor false. The question of truth or

54 TIE; Elw 26/​C 1:31.

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falsehood doesn’t arise. I mean, suppose I were to utter the words, ‘It’s going to snow in two minutes’ time here.’ Well, let me utter those words. I have uttered them! Let me utter them without saying ‘suppose’. I’ll say: ‘It’s going to snow in two minutes’ time here.’ Now one can raise the question whether I have actually made any assertion. Supposing you were to ask me what makes me say that. I mean, do I know something which you don’t know, have I had some advance warning from the meteorological office or do I  have some special knowledge of weather conditions which lend some support to this? If nothing of that sort is true, I think at least a question is raised as to whether I really have made any assertion. Am I not just aping someone making an assertion? I think that would be so even if, as a result of some cause of which I am completely unaware at the moment, it does in fact snow in two minutes’ time. That wouldn’t show that I had actually made a prediction that it was going to. Or at least I don’t want to say dogmatically in a case like this that I would have made no prediction, or I’m not making any assertion. I don’t want to say that in a dogmatic way, because I think our use of these expressions is so indeterminate different people might be inclined to give different answers to this, and I might be inclined to give different answers at different times. What I do want to say, though, is that there’s certainly a question mark here about whether I made an assertion or not, or whether I’m not just pretending to be making an assertion. I think that is what Spinoza is getting at when he gives the Peter example; the sort of claim Spinoza is making has to do with when an assertion can actually be said to be being made. That links up with truth in Spinoza’s thinking precisely because on his view (and incidentally on mine too) the conditions under which somebody can be clearly said to be making an assertion include an understanding of some things which are undisputedly true of a given situation. Because without that –​[i.e.] unless my words or my thoughts are surrounded by some understanding of how things actually are –​ my thoughts or my words don’t actually make any connection with the world at all. My words are just sounds. There is a sentence in De Emendatione that makes this point really well: ‘If there were such a conception we should at the same time be aware of the means and the causes whereby the event took place.’55 In other words, unless in some way we understand something about the situation which bears on what we claim to be saying, we can’t actually be said to have a genuine thought. But now, when Spinoza says that it is an understanding of the causes of an event which makes thought about the event possible, that does make it sound as though, after all, he is concerned with a relation between the thought and

55 TIE; Elw 23/​C 1:28.

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something extrinsic to the thought; whereas you remember he does say quite categorically that he is only concerned with the thought’s intrinsic nature: Wherefore the reality (forma) of true thought must exist in the thought itself, without reference to other thoughts; it does not acknowledge the object as its cause, but must depend on the actual power and the nature of the understanding.56

The point is that it isn’t merely that there must be causes of the event in question happening, supposing I’m judging that a certain event is happening or is going to happen. It isn’t merely that there must be causes of that, if I’m to be counted as making such a judgement genuinely. What is necessary is that I should have some understanding of those causes. I only achieve a genuine connection of subject and predicate insofar as I  have some understanding of what connects the subject and predicate. So the character of my idea as asserting that something is true depends on the relation between that idea and other ideas that I have which express my understanding of the causes. So to go back to my example of saying, ‘It’s going to snow.’ As I said, one can of course imagine the situation in which having –​for absolutely no reason whatever –​ uttered these words, ‘it’s going to snow in two minutes’ time,’ to everybody’s great surprise, including mine, it does snow in two minutes’ time. Well, if it does snow in two minutes’ time, then it does so because there are certain causal factors bringing it about. That, of course, in itself doesn’t help my alleged assertion to be a genuine assertion, supposing I knew nothing whatever about those causes at the time I uttered those words. My words only express a genuine assertion –​the claim is –​insofar as my uttering of those words is based on some understanding that I have of the causes. So, for Descartes, clarity and distinctness of ideas are put in the service of a doubt of the truth of everything and thence into the proof that there are some things we cannot doubt. Whereas, for Spinoza, if we could doubt everything there could be no proof of anything; clarity and distinctness cannot be put into the service of Cartesian doubt because the ‘doubt’ is itself the expression of confusion concerning the nature and possibility of doubt. Spinoza then claims that concentration on clear and distinct ideas will both make this manifest and will lead to a clear awareness of ‘the first principle of all things’ out of which knowledge can progressively develop.

56 TIE; Elw 26/​C 1:31.

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Chapter 2 SUBSTANCE AND ATTRIBUTES I want to continue by taking up the treatment of substance and God and their role in the epistemology we’ve been discussing. First, let’s return to Spinoza’s account of his method. In some ways it is rather like Descartes’s account, but importantly different in that right at the start we find that an idea which causes us to doubt is not clear and distinct. Spinoza’s point is that doubt is by nature a state of confusion. He goes on to say that sometimes the deceiver may incline us to doubt things represented to us –​but the doubt is again removed. And you will notice there are very considerable differences from Descartes. Spinoza is quite clear that doubt we may have of the deliverances of the senses is corrected by more careful use of observation. He doesn’t make Descartes’s move of trying to cast doubt on the deliverance of the senses as a whole: Hence we cannot cast doubt on true ideas by the supposition of a deceitful Deity, who leads us astray even in what is most certain. We can only hold such an hypothesis so long as we have no clear and distinct idea.1

In other words, until we reflect on the knowledge we have of the first principle of all things and find that knowledge teaches us that God is not a deceiver –​ and we know this when we know God with equal certainty [as] that a triangle’s angles are equal to two right angles. And if we have knowledge of God equal to that of a triangle, doubt is removed. This sounds, if one doesn’t read it carefully, as if Spinoza is envisaging an argument like Descartes’s –​doubt is brought to an end by a truthful God who removes the doubt –​but not in the same way. Whereas in Descartes, philosophical doubt has already proceeded some way and one is relying on doubt as the method of ensuring ideas are clear and distinct, in Spinoza the recognition that God is the first principle of all things and is not deceitful is not, as in Descartes, an external guarantee which shows we needn’t doubt anymore –​on the contrary, there is a recognition that doubt of that sort is impossible: to try 1 TIE; Elw 30/​C 1:35.

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to doubt the reliability of thought is just confused. The point is that Spinoza doesn’t think of God as an external guarantor. Proof that he is not a deceiver is conceived as a clear realization that thinking as such can’t be called into question. I think this is brought out by the way Spinoza says that in the same way we have knowledge of a triangle, so we can come to have knowledge of God under the right conditions; clarifications of thoughts about God are on a par with clarifications of thoughts about anything else. We do not need to step outside the process of clarification. So, for Spinoza, to realise that God isn’t a deceiver isn’t to be confirmed in something that guarantees the reliability of thinking, but to become clear about the nature of our thinking and what in our thinking can be relied upon. I want to think about this as a transition to Part I of Ethics. How, first, does it relate to Descartes? Spinoza says that, until we are clear about the nature of God, we cannot be clear about anything. In particular, as long as we are uncertain whether or not God is a deceiver we are confused. Descartes, on the contrary, held that we can achieve a certain clarity before coming to this knowledge. We have to work through the doubt and the cogito before we can have a clear idea of God. It is part of the same conception that the cogito has a sort of super-​clarity. For Spinoza, on the other hand, it is bound to be a very confused idea since it is formed in a condition of doubt as to whether God is a deceiver. Spinoza insists that our knowledge of God’s veracity is the same in kind as any other clear and distinct knowledge (e.g. that of geometry). This relates to the ‘Cartesian Circle’, which arises for Descartes because he conceives God as an external guarantor of the veracity of our thinking, which creates the problem how we are ever to get to him in our thinking. For Spinoza, on the other hand, God is certainly fundamental to our confidence in our own thinking, but he is in a sense involved in all our thinking and what we have to do is to clarify our thinking that we see this clearly. To say that God is not a deceiver amounts to saying that we have it in us to arrive at reliable knowledge. And we do this by scrutinizing the ideas we already have (‘the given true idea’). We have no other source for our conception of truth. To realize that God is not a deceiver is not to be confident in the existence of something guaranteeing the reliability of our thinking; it is to be clear about the nature of that ‘reliability’. It is often said that Descartes begins with the cogito. But, actually, he begins with universal doubt. Spinoza’s point is that that is a confusion and we have to see that it is a confusion before we can confidently prove anything. The cogito, far from being a paradigm of clear proof, is as confused as anything can be: its presuppositions should make me unclear whether I am not just babbling when

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I utter the words ‘Cogito, ergo sum’. Spinoza starts with an enquiry into what makes thinking possible. So Part I of Ethics is called ‘On God’. It’s interesting to note, in passing, in the light of that fact, the content of the seven Axioms. They concern notions like ‘is’, ‘cause’, ‘conceive’, ‘know’, ‘understanding things in relation to each other’, ‘true’, ‘essence’. Again, the Definitions contain only one reference to God, and that simply serves to relate that concept to others which are apparently of a purely formal nature. Spinoza discusses God in terms that sound a bit like Descartes’s. And maybe he doesn’t distinguish his own position clearly enough. But, in fact, the role that God plays in his thinking is totally alien to Descartes’s approach. First, the supposition of a deceitful God can’t be ‘clear and distinct’. This undermines Descartes’s doubt, because this was supposed to exclude everything not clear and distinct. Spinoza is saying that the attempt to develop a doubt in this way must itself be confusion. And second, we eliminate this confusion in the same way as we eliminate other confusions. The point of this is to eliminate the ‘Cartesian Circle’. God is not an external guarantor of our thought. The thought of God is a thought like other thoughts and subject to the same constraints as other thoughts. Or rather, God does play a fundamental role in our thinking, but it is a role in our thinking. He doesn’t, as it were, stand outside our thought as something external and guarantee its correspondence with reality. What has been shown so far is that it is a confusion to think we can doubt the power of thought to discover the truth –​to do that would be to misunderstand the nature of thought. One can regard the opening passage of Part I of Ethics as an attempt to lay down the general structure of this insight. It is clear from that general view of the relation between thought and its object that there’s no difference in Spinoza between examining our thinking and examining the world which is the object of that thinking. For what gives thought a structure, which is as much as to say: what makes it thought, is that it is about something, and to investigate its structure is to investigate the constraints imposed by that which it is about –​the world. And we have to remember, too, that as Spinoza conceived things, thought is there as an aspect of the world. It isn’t as though there is, on the one hand, thought and, on the other, a world over against it. Thinking is something that takes place in the same world in which everything else takes place, and it is only for that reason that the world can exercise any constraints on our thinking. If our thought is constrained (that’s to say, if it makes no sense to say that we could think anything we like), then the constraints have to come from something which exists. And to say that it comes from something in the world is just to say the same thing. And that from which the constraint comes must be in the same world as the thought on which

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the constraints are being exercised. What I’m talking about here, of course, is Spinoza’s doctrine of the relation between substance and its attributes. The two attributes about which anything can be said are extension and thought. (I’ll come back to the idea of attributes later, and especially the idea that there are infinite attributes.) Saying that extension and thought are two attributes of substance is a way of saying thought and extension are aspects of the same world; and that, of course, is in deliberate contrast to Descartes’s view that thought and extension constitute two distinct substances.2 Now, earlier I emphasised a number of points which I’ll summarise as follows: First, what Spinoza calls an idea has the form of a judgement; as he puts it, ‘the very act of understanding’.3 Second, a judgement (and hence the structure of an idea) is a combination between a subject and a predicate. Third, there is no question of subject and predicate being connected arbitrarily –​that is the point I put earlier by saying thought is subject to constraints. On Spinoza’s view, you don’t have a judgement at all if the connection between subject and predicate is arbitrary. Fourth, insofar as an idea is adequate at all, it is manifest in itself –​that is, in the idea itself is the very judgement as to how the subject is connected with the predicate. Ideas may be more or less adequate. Insofar as they are inadequate, it isn’t clear by examining the judgement how the subject and predicate are connected with each other. And that will be because, insofar as our ideas are inadequate, their relation to a wider system is not apparent. That’s to say, it’s in virtue of the place they occupy in a whole system of thinking that it can be said that subject and predicate have a connection which makes them into a judgement. The upshot of that is that the investigation of how subject and predicate are connected in actual judgements will at the same time be an investigation into the whole system of thought to which the judgements belong, because it is only in virtue of their place in that system that it is a judgement at all. Take an example from geometry, which Spinoza is very fond of:  When a geometer speaks of the connection between a triangle and the fact that its internal angles are equal to two right angles, that connection presupposes geometry –​it presupposes a system of general truths. That’s brought out by the fact that you don’t understand what the connection between being a triangle and being two right angles is except by understanding the proof of that theorem in the geometrical system. For example, if someone merely measured the internal angles and discovered, in a given triangular figure, that they are more or less equal to 180° by measurement, he hasn’t understood the connection of subject and

2 See, for instance, Descartes, Principles 1.60–​65.; CSM 1:213–​16. 3 EIIp43s; Elw 115/​C 1:479.

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predicate in a geometrical theorem and in fact isn’t making a geometrical judgement. Now, the comparison between the geometer and the person who merely measures a given triangle suggests that there isn’t just one system of thinking to which our ideas belong. What I mean is that the procedure of offering a proof of a theorem in a system like Euclid’s is quite different from the procedure involved in measuring the angles of the same figure I  draw on the board. Of course, doing that is also a systematic procedure. Measurement is something that has to be done in a certain way and has to conform to certain standards. But the standards aren’t the same kind of standards as those involved in a geometrical proof. It is an absolutely central tenet of Spinoza’s that any such apparent diversity of systems of thinking as the examples I’ve given  –​geometrical proof and empirical measurement  –​is only apparent, and that properly understood, there’s just one form of thinking and we won’t have a fully adequate idea of any of our thoughts at all until we have seen the supposed systematic connection between the various procedures we apply in thinking about different kinds of things. In a way, this is what his conception of substance comes to. To bring out what I  think is important here I  could perhaps contrast what Spinoza is insisting on with the writing of someone like Kuhn. I  will sketch Kuhn’s view in a very ‘cor blimey’ way. Kuhn, in talking of the history of science, notes that science doesn’t just develop by an accumulation of one truth after another nor even by a simple expansion of our theoretical understanding. Science, on Kuhn’s view, has a history in which there are crises, and it’s a feature of these crises that the form of scientific theories change between one period and another. It changes by being dominated by what he calls a new ‘paradigm’. In other words, there will be a period of fairly smooth development, in which there is progress of understanding, but at some point difficulties will break out which can no longer be handled by the structure that characterizes that period. There is, then, a sort of revolution in which the theoretical paradigm people have appealed to in that period is overthrown and a new one introduced. Now one of the main points Kuhn wants to emphasise in putting things that way is that there really is a quite radical discontinuity in science, so there isn’t what one would call a progressive increase in our scientific understanding of the world. Instead, he compares scientific endeavour to something like the solving of crossword puzzles.4 Certain rules have to be adhered to if something someone produces is to count as a solution to a certain sort of puzzle. And so you have the idea of science as an activity

4 Kuhn, Structure,  35–​42.

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of setting oneself puzzles and solving them according to certain rules which aren’t universal, aren’t, as it were, impressed on us by the nature of things, but are culturally determined and hence subject to cultural change, so that as culture changes the way in which these puzzles are understood changes along with it. Thus, you get a period of progress and then everything starts afresh. In contrast with Kuhn, I think Spinoza would say something like this: if you have a form of supposed investigation which is culturally determined in this way, then it can’t be said to be an investigation into the nature of the world at all. It would be no more than an activity of puzzle-​solving, meaning it wouldn’t constitute a real attempt to understand how things are. And when Spinoza insists on the oneness of substance,5 he is insisting that real investigation into the nature of the world must constitute a genuine unity –​that there must be a world into which there is an investigation, and that means that all methods of investigation are ultimately systematically interconnected. Thus, it would go against Spinoza’s conception to think, as one may want to, that different investigations aren’t systematically linked, that they can’t be reduced to a common form, that there is no possibility of giving an account of the connection of subject and predicate (i.e. that there just isn’t any universal form). Now, the question we are faced with is the following: How can we deny this central doctrine of Spinoza’s and retain the idea that enquiries are genuine investigations into a reality? Even if I were capable of answering this question, I fear the answer would take us too far afield from our discussion of Spinoza. So I will leave it dangling and instead will turn to the rest of the Ethics, so that we can look at some of Spinoza’s accounts of the key expressions against the background of this question. The expressions to which we particularly have to attend are the following: ‘substance’, ‘attribute’, ‘mode’, ‘cause’, ‘essence’ and the phrase ‘conceived through itself ’ as contrasted with ‘as conceived through something else’. Let me start with that distinction. The phrase ‘conceived through itself ’ is one which Spinoza uses in Definition 3. He gives what may be regarded as an explanatory paraphrase of the phrase, though not a definition of it. The third definition reads like this: ‘By substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.’6 Now, maybe we can get at what Spinoza is maintaining here, and also link it with what he says elsewhere by taking an example of something which isn’t conceived through itself but 5 PW: Although he does speak of the one-​ness of substance, it would perhaps have been better for him to deny the plurality of substance  –​I’ll come back to that issue, but without being pedantic, let’s use that phrase for now. 6 EId3; Elw 45/​C 1:408.

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through something else. For this, one can take almost any empirical judgement one likes. Supposing that I say that my train back to London leaves Swansea at 5.45. First of all, I am using expressions which presuppose an enormous amount of understanding about other things –​a train is a train only by virtue of belonging to a railway system, and a railway system is a railway system only by virtue of playing a certain role within the life of a community. If I talk of the time at which the train leaves, it involves the understanding of timetables at least, of the way a railway system works in making trains run on time and so on. The notion of time presupposes certain mechanisms, and so on and so on. So my understanding that the train leaves at 5.45 depends on it bearing a connection with so many other things on which it depends. Furthermore, going back to something I said last week, an idea for Spinoza is a particular act of judgement, so that the idea that my train leaves at 5.45 is a thought I  now have. The question that we looked at earlier now arises again. What makes it possible for me to have that thought now –​what in my situation makes it possible to say I am having that thought? In answering that I would have not only to answer your questions about the railway system, but also explain my relation to these things, the fact that, for example, I have travelled here from London and have to travel back –​and when I say ‘I have to’, in order to elucidate the sense of that, I would refer to the fact that I have a job, commitments in London the fulfilment of which requires that I be there tomorrow and so on. The point is, the judgement about the necessity is related to some understanding of my present situation. To put the point in Spinoza’s way is to draw attention to the fact that I am what Spinoza would call a ‘finite mode’. My position vis-​à-​vis the whole world around me is as a human being, a finite mode of substance, represented as in a particular place in the world and having a particular understanding of that world. And the thoughts it is open to me to have are, as one might put it, a function of that position in the world, a function of the finite mode of substance that I am. An important part of the way Spinoza sees this is that any judgement that I make must, by the very fact that it is an intelligible judgement, have truth in it. I may make a mistake, but this is only possible because I’m not completely at sea about trains, where I am and where I live and so on. Unless a whole lot of things are understood for what they are, or unless I could be said to know the truth of certain things, I couldn’t be said to have made the judgement that I have made. Now I put the matter in that way in order to give a sympathetic account of the very close connection Spinoza sees between the significance of a judgement, its intelligibility as a judgement and its truth. The way he often puts things is open to very obvious objections and, as we’ve seen, he tends to rely heavily on mathematical examples. It’s a feature of many examples of

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a certain sort that there’s no break between understanding the significance of what is said and seeing its truth. We might take the example of Socrates and the slave boy in the Meno –​trying to construct a square which is twice the area of an original square.7 Socrates leads the boy to the correct answer by getting him to see more clearly what the question is –​it’s not a matter of telling him, but getting him to see. Insofar as he clearly understands, has the answer, there is no break between understanding the issue and seeing its truth. We might be inclined to say, in the case of judgements like when the train leaves, there is no direct link between understanding and seeing the correct answer. I can know what the question ‘When does the train leave?’ means, but no amount of working away at the question will give me an answer –​I have to find it in a timetable or a station or somebody’s got to tell me. Nonetheless, while that does indeed mark a difference between that sort of question and a mathematical question, it could still be said, going along with Spinoza: I understand the question only insofar as I understand how to go about getting an answer, and what an answer would amount to –​and this I understand by the position I occupy in the world. So if I’m raising the question of when the train leaves in a serious way, that commits me to doing what is necessary to find the answer. My understanding manifestly is what I do to understand the answer. Thus, some sense can be made of this very tight connection between subject and truth, even in not very promising cases. I’m not aiming at comprehensiveness in my discussion of Spinoza. But there are some quite central questions that we haven’t properly discussed, and one of these is the claim that substance exists necessarily. You find the arguments for this set out (roughly speaking) between Propositions 7 and 11.8 Proposition 7 is the proposition that existence belongs to the nature of substance. The argument that’s given in the proof there is fairly perfunctory, but it is treated at greater length in the pages that follow, and I think Part I, Proposition 8, Scholium 2 is especially interesting. Now, Spinoza’s arguments have an obvious superficial affinity with those that Descartes uses for God’s existence, for instance in the Meditations. And like Descartes’s arguments, Spinoza’s seem to hinge on a sort of ontological argument. Of course, in Descartes the traditional ontological argument in its most explicit form is given in Meditation 5, I think. But there are very important differences. The ontological argument as Descartes uses it is from the idea of God as a supremely perfect being to God’s existence via the idea that existence is a perfection which a supremely

7 Plato, Meno 82a–​83e. 8 C 1:412–​16.

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perfect being couldn’t be said to lack without contradiction. I don’t actually want to discuss the difficulties with the argument in that form because, really, I think the differences in the way Spinoza argues are perhaps more important than the similarities. As we have already seen, these differences are connected with the very different role played by God in Descartes’s and Spinoza’s philosophies, respectively. Now one of these differences concerns the oneness of substance, or at least the denial of the plurality of substances. I’m sorry I keep on rephrasing the matter in that seemingly pedantic way. As I’ve said before, it is perfectly true that Spinoza does talk about substance as one, but as I’ve said I  think that his thought would be better expressed by saying it makes no sense to talk of many. And it seems to me there are quite good reasons for saying it makes just as little sense to talk of one as it does of many. My reason for saying that could be illustrated by one of the arguments Spinoza gives us for the oneness of substance, namely, that when we’re dealing with finite things, we can notice that the definition of the thing concerned, whatever it may be, implies nothing concerning the number of such things that exist. He says: No definition implies or expresses a certain number of individuals, inasmuch as it expresses nothing beyond the nature of the thing defined. For instance, the definition of a triangle expresses nothing beyond the actual nature of a triangle: it does not imply any fixed number of triangles. There is necessarily for each individual existent thing that there be a cause why it should exist. This cause of existence must either be contained in the nature and definition of the thing defined, or must be postulated apart from any such definition.9

And he goes on to argue that with finite individuals there must be an external cause (one which isn’t included in the definition of the thing in question) which explains why just a given number, neither more nor less, of that individual thing exists. And, so he goes on, ‘hence we may lay down the absolute rule that everything which may consist of several individuals must have an external cause’,10 because in the definition of any finite individual can be found no reason why there should be any particular number rather than any other. And then, switching to substance, he says: ‘And as it has been shown already that existence appertains to the nature of substance, existence must necessarily be included in its definition; and from its definition alone existence   9 EIp8s2; Elw 49–​50/​C 1:415. 10 EIp8s2; Elw 50/​C 1:415.

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must be deducible.’11 The point being that the existence of substance isn’t to be explained by anything external to substance, because of course there is nothing external to substance, by definition. And so he goes on: ‘But from its definition […], we cannot infer the existence of several substances’,12 and concludes: ‘therefore it follows that there is only one substance of the same nature’,13 It seems to me that the last conclusion is clearly a non sequitur. Maybe you can argue that it’s impossible to infer the existence of several, but it doesn’t follow from that that it’s possible to infer the existence of just one. Because the conclusion might be that one can speak neither of one nor many in this context. But anyway, to return to the contrast I was wanting to point to between Spinoza and Descartes. In Descartes’s philosophy you do, of course, have a reference to a plurality of substances. And indeed you even have a plurality of kinds of substance insofar as Descartes speaks of, on the one hand, God who is an infinite substance and, on the other hand, thought and extension which are finite substances.14 For the moment, let’s focus on the distinction between infinite and finite substances. Descartes’s definition of substance is actually very similar to Spinoza’s. The definition he gives in the Meditations is that a substance is a thing which exists in such a way as to stand in need of nothing else in order to exist. In Meditation 3, to be exact, Descartes does argue that what he calls finite substances depend for their existence on the creative power of God, infinite substance. Descartes goes out of his way in a rather interesting argument to try to show that this dependence of finite substances on the power of God shouldn’t be conceived simply as a dependence of their beginning of existence on God. It’s not just that God brought them into existence. He argues that God’s power is necessary to conserve any finite substance in existence at each moment, so that the idea is that finite things will continue to exist only insofar as God positively exerts his power to keep them in existence. If that power is turned off, as it were, things will just go out of existence, will just no longer exist.15 There’s a lot there that it would be interesting to discuss and it would take us too far from Spinoza, but the point about it I want to emphasise here is that in Descartes the dependence of the existence of finite substances on infinite substance is very strongly emphasised. And that at once raises the question why they should be called substances at all, if a substance is defined as a thing which exists in such a way as to stand in 11 Ibid. 12 EIp8s2; Elw 50/​C 1:415–​16. 13 Ibid. 14 See, e.g. Descartes, Principles 1.51–​53; CSM 1:210. 15 Descartes, Meditation III; CSM 2:33–​35.

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need of nothing else in order to exist. I mean, Descartes seems to have gone out of his way to show that what he’s calling ‘finite substances’ do depend on something else in order to exist. I think Descartes does, in dealing with that very obvious objection, say at one point that the word ‘substance’ is used in two different senses when we speak of God and when we speak of extension and finite thinking substance.16 But, still, it would perhaps not be unduly unkind to say that this is a bit of a shuffle really, that if one is going to speak consistently here it would be better not to use the word ‘substance’ in the two cases, especially where the whole point of the word ‘substance’ is to put at the centre the notion of something which needs nothing external in order to exist. It looks as if everything cries out for saying that in this case, given Descartes’s doctrine, only God can correctly be called a substance. Descartes doesn’t take that view. Of course, his talk of a plurality of substances raises other difficulties apart from that, very well-​known difficulties we’ll be coming back to connected with the relation between mind and body, each of which is regarded as a substance. And, again, you get the question how, if mind and body are distinct substances, there can be any interaction between them, since any sort of interaction seems to imply that what is true of the one needs the other for its explanation, and that, once again, seems to go against the whole idea of the completely independent existence of substance. So that’s one important respect, I think, in which the role of the notion of substance in Spinoza is quite different from that in Descartes and it’s a difference which I think is connected with the peculiarities of Spinoza’s arguments for the necessary existence of substance, for the view that in the case of substance and in the case of nothing else, essence involves existence. Furthermore, the quasi-​substantial character given by Descartes to thinking things and extension contributes to his view that the manner in which they are ‘maintained in existence’ by God is unintelligible to us:  it’s simply an arbitrary decree of God’s will (which, according to Spinoza, is the ‘refuge of ignorance’17). Now another respect in which there’s an important difference is the way in which God or infinite substance is thought of as involved in the possibility of making true judgements. In Descartes, God is introduced at a fairly late stage of his argument in order to provide an external guarantee for the truth of certain judgements that we want to make. The way in which Descartes constructs this argument seems to involve allowing the intelligibility of the

16 Descartes, Principles, I.51; CSM 1:210. 17 EIapp; C 1:443.

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judgements the truth of which is being regarded as doubtful. He allows these judgements to be intelligible as such, and then introduces God in order to provide a guarantee for, or support for, our belief in their truth. You remember that I suggested earlier on that, had Descartes’s method of doubt really been carried through consistently, there would have been a question whether he was dealing with intelligible judgements at all. With Spinoza, although the notion of God is indeed appealed to as a sort of foundation of truth, this happens in a very different way. For Spinoza, there is a close connection, of a sort Descartes seems not to have noticed, between truth and intelligibility. Spinoza wants to say that if you do try to doubt the truth of all judgements as radically as Descartes invited us to, you’re left with the impossibility of attaching any sense to the notion of judging at all. Now, correspondingly, for Spinoza God is introduced not as a prop to give us confidence in the truth of our judgements. God is introduced rather, right at the very start, as somehow involved in the very possibility of making judgements at all. And this role that God plays at this point is in fact the hinge on which the argument for God’s necessary existence turns. That is made most explicit in the following passage: We may have true ideas of non-​existent modifications [PW: that is, of anything other than substance, we can have true ideas of things which are non-​existent]; for, although they may have no actual existence apart from the conceiving intellect, yet their essence is so involved in something external to themselves that they may through it be conceived.18

So the possibility of thinking correctly about non-​existent things depends upon the fact that we think about them in relation to something external to them which does exist. Whereas [PW:  and here the contrast is made] the only truth substances can have, external to the intellect, must consist in their existence, because they are conceived through themselves. Therefore, [PW: and this is the sentence I wanted particularly to emphasise] for a person to say he has a clear and distinct –​that is, a true –​idea of a substance, but that he is not sure whether such substance exists, would be the same as if he said that he had a true idea, but was not sure whether or not it was false (a little consideration will make this plain); or if anyone affirmed that substance is created, it would be the same as saying that a false idea was true –​in short, the height of absurdity.19

18 EIp8s2; Elw 49/​C 1:414. 19 Ibid.

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The point there, I  suppose, is something like this:  in saying something one is ascribing a predicate to a subject. And if one really is saying something there’s got to be a genuine connection between subject and predicate. And if there is a genuine connection between subject and predicate, there’s got to be, in Spinoza’s language, some cause which links subject and predicate. And there can only be this if, at some point, there is a connection between subject and predicate which requires nothing external, since otherwise you’re left with nothing which is actually making a connection. And so, his argument here seems to me to be: if you try to make a judgement at all, for example that substance doesn’t exist, you’re trying to do something which itself is possible and makes sense only given the existence of substance. And I think that is the hinge on which all of Spinoza’s arguments for the existence of substance turn. And as you can perhaps see, it’s different from the traditional ontological argument for God’s existence, which Descartes uses in Meditation 5, for example, in that it places right at the centre the question: Under what conditions can anybody be said to be making a judgement at all? And the power of Spinoza’s argument for the necessary existence of substance lies precisely in the fact that it makes substance a necessary condition for any sort of thought or judgement. And if you’re going to attack it, then it seems to me, you’ve got to attack the view of judgement on which it rests. I’m only making a genuine judgement if there is something in my surroundings which makes it an intelligible thing to say. So I  can say, for instance, ‘I had a tedious journey up here this morning because the 125 Train was taken off and replaced by one of the old ones’ –​that is an intelligible thing to say given the surroundings in which I say it, [i.e.] that ground that we went over before. And the way Spinoza uses the term ‘cause’, these surroundings that give that judgement sense would be thought of as the ‘cause’ which links the subject and the predicate. There is something which makes what I say true, and in order to bring out what it is that makes it true you’ve got to appeal to the surroundings. But one of the confusing things here is the way there can be many different uses of the notion of ‘cause’. If you ask how is it that at half past nine this morning I was in London and now I’m here in Swansea, and I say ‘I took a train there’, you might say I’m speaking to a cause which accounts for my transport from London to Swansea. That’s not quite the same as the idea that in saying that I travelled from London to Swansea in a certain way, there are certain contextual surroundings which, being presupposed, make what I say intelligible; whereas, were I to utter those words in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, they wouldn’t express a judgement. I suppose Spinoza’s view of that would be that in the first case, when we’re speaking of what we would naturally call a ‘cause’, we are, as it were, speaking of the order of things conceived

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under the attribute of extension, and when we speak of the surroundings which give my judgement sense, which make it a judgement, we’re speaking of the order of ideas conceived under the attribute of thought. Not that I think that that would work, but that’s one distinction I think he’d want to make here. Another way to bring this out is to look at the step from ‘there must be a genuine connection between subject and predicate’ to ‘there must be a connection between subject and predicate that requires nothing external’. One can compare Spinoza’s position with what Wittgenstein was saying when he said justification comes to an end,20 because Spinoza too is saying justification comes to an end. In fact, Spinoza is saying there’s a point at which justification has to come to an end. I think that’s an important difference. First of all, let’s see what the two positions have in common, which is that if, per impossibile, justification didn’t come to an end, you’d just go on and on and on and there would be nothing you could ever call a justification; it would just trail off into the distance. What Wittgenstein is suggesting is that we just do stop justifying, and that’s a condition of our judgements having the sense they have. For Wittgenstein, there is nothing that ‘makes thought possible’ in Spinoza’s sense; we can only describe what thinking does consist in –​and we must be prepared for surprises in that the descriptions don’t follow the systematic pattern we might have been inclined to expect. I think Spinoza would say of that, if that position were put to him, ‘Well, if you just stop, it’s all quite arbitrary and there’s no reason why you should stop in one place or another. You only stop not because you’ve understood anything but because you just stop. And so the whole conception of understanding what you’re saying rests on what is a completely arbitrary decision and to that extent can’t be called understanding at all.’ I think that would be his position. I don’t know if one could follow it a little further like this by saying that if the point at which we stop is quite arbitrary, then there’s no real connection with the world. As it were, the point at which we stop, if there is to be a real connection with the world, has got to be dictated by the nature of the world. You stop not because you’re not going to say any more, but because there is nothing more to say. And I suppose he would think that is only the case when you have reached something that is self-​explanatory or self-​evident, which is, to use his terminology, the cause of itself. But now a serious problem remains. According to this explanation, there is a sense in which all of our judgements need the kind of surroundings which provide the external cause of their intelligibility. Even in cases such as statements about the internal angle of a triangle that would show in the application of

20 See Wittgenstein, OC §192.

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geometry. As such, they wouldn’t really be examples of what Spinoza wants, because their possibility, too, does rest on something else. I take it that is one of the reasons why, in his schema of different kinds of knowledge, he introduces a third kind of knowledge, which is intuitive knowledge, in which everything follows immediately from the essence of something, and there is no infinite tracing back of causes.21 But Spinoza doesn’t really give an example of what would meet his own criteria of this and in a way can’t. So far we’ve taken account only of what is involved in the bare notion of making a judgement (thinking, saying) that something is so, that is, nothing has hung on the sort of judgement we’re making or its particular content. But there are constraints on the intelligibility of our judgements of another sort; they belong to systems which seem to be differentiated by the content of the judgements concerned, such that we cannot, for example, explain what is so as expressed in one such system by reference to something that is so as expressed in another system. Spinoza expresses this by saying that substance has different attributes and that anything that is conceived has to be conceived under one given attribute and cannot be explained by reference to anything under a different attribute.22 The two attributes which suggested themselves to him were thought and extension. The reasons for this are partly historical.23 But Spinoza doesn’t say these are the only attributes of substance; he says that substance has ‘infinite’ attributes. His reasons seem to be something like this: Substance must be ‘unlimited’ just because it is ‘conceived through itself ’; to say that substance had a limit would be to say that there is something else that limits it. And this would mean that there were something one could say of substance, the explanation of which would lie in the nature of something else. Which contradicts the definition. Hence if one said that substance had only two (or n) attributes, we should be implying some negative judgement as true of substance. It would be to say that it does not have any more. And this would only be possible if there were something positive which were true; which ‘something’ would have to be true of something other than the substance. So to admit any limitation on the number of substance’s attributes would in effect be to admit that there were more than one substance. Which is impossible. This position has its embarrassments though. How is it that we have the conception of only two attributes? Since the whole enterprise is meant to guarantee the intelligibility of the world, any attribute of substance must itself 21 EIIp40s2; C 1:478. 22 E2p7s; C 1:451–​52. 23 Winch probably assumes that Spinoza inherited this view from Descartes.

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be intelligible. And for Spinoza this means that there must be an idea of it in God’s infinite intellect, that is, in the attribute of thought. But then (a) how is it that our intellect has the idea only of extension? (Not too serious perhaps.) (b)  Isn’t the attribute of thought given a special place? Any attribute must have its counterpart in thought. We know what ‘counterpart’ means here in terms of what we understand thought to be. But what would it mean in relation to other attributes? This is not clear. There may seem to be a tendency in Spinoza for thought to take a dominant position. A tendency towards idealism –​though this is not a conclusion which Spinoza draws. Let us return now to the necessary existence of substance. Spinoza’s proof of the necessary existence of substance looks like (and indeed is, but with qualifications) a form of the ontological argument. A common form of objection to the ontological argument is this: we can define a concept how we like (within the limits of consistency), but the question whether anything exists corresponding to the definition cannot itself be settled by the definition. This is sometimes put by saying that ‘existence is not a property’ of something; it consists rather in the instantiation of properties.24 But I’m not sure that this form of objection quite reaches Spinoza. It’s not clear that his argument does involve treating existence as a ‘property’ (whatever exactly that means). The underlying form of all Spinoza’s arguments for the necessary existence is as follows: Substance is whatever makes thought possible. To say substance does not exist is to say thought is not possible. But this last expresses a thought too. But if so, it presupposes the truth of what it denies and therefore involves a contradiction.25 As we have seen, to think something is to connect a predicate with a subject; this can only be done intelligibly insofar as it can be shown why (the cause) the predicate attaches to the subject. In dealing with finite existences this always consists in specifying some further circumstances which make it necessary that the subject should have the predicate. But if we always had to appeal to ‘further circumstances’ ad infinitum we should never have shown why any predicate attached to any subject. So the possibility of doing this depends on there coming a point where the connection is self-​explanatory, that is, where what we are conceiving is conceived through itself (= substance). I have talked rather largely about the issues Spinoza is raising in his discussion of the notion of substance and about the nature of the stand he is taking on those issues. Now I want to relate what I say more closely to the text and in 24 For an early example of this criticism, see Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason A598/​B626-​ A599/​ B627; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 566–​67. 25 PW: This form of the argument emerges most explicitly in EIp8s2.

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particular to talk about Part I, Propositions 1–​8, which form a sort of natural unit. Let me first list them minus Proofs, Corollaries and so on: P1. A substance is prior in nature to its affections. P2. Two substances having different attributes have nothing in common with one another. P3. If things have nothing in common with one another, one of them cannot be the cause of the other. P4. Two or more distinct things are distinguished from one another, either by a difference in the attributes of the substances or by a difference in their affections. P5. In nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute. P6. One substance cannot be produced by another substance. P7. It pertains to the nature of substance to exist. P8. Every substance is necessarily infinite.26 I suppose that 5, 6 and 7 are the most striking positive-​sounding claims here. Notice that, close as he gets to it, Spinoza does not up to this point claim there can, absolutely, be no plurality of substances: only that there cannot be a plurality of substances of the same nature or attribute.27 It would probably be going too far to say Spinoza identifies subject/​ predicate and ground/​consequent. But he approaches that. He is happy, for example, to speak of substance as the cause of its affections. (We have to remember that, when we are dealing with finite existence, what we identify as the subject of a predication is not ultimately a subject, but itself a mode or affection [of substance].) What are we to understand by ‘attribute’? By attribute I  understand what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.28

This has given commentators much difficulty. Some have seen ‘idealism’ in it.29 I think certainly wrongly. Spinoza’s point is something like this: substance 26 C 1:410–​12. 27 PW: The larger claim comes in Proposition 14: ‘Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.’ [C 1:420] But let us leave that on one side for now, if possible. 28 EId4; C 1:408. 29 See, e.g., Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza. Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, Volume 1, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934, esp. 142–​44.

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has various aspects, which the intellect perceives, that is, to perceive substance is to perceive it under one of its aspects. (But we should not think of the aspect as getting ‘between’ perceiver and perceived.) One might try saying that to talk of the aspect (attribute) is to talk of the perceived in its particular relation to the perceiver. Spinoza does not formally specify what the attributes of substance are until Part II; it’s interesting that he does not do so in axioms, but in demonstrated propositions: P1. P2.

Thought is an attribute of God, [or] God is a thinking thing. Extension is an attribute of God, [or] God is an extended thing.30

The Demonstration starts with the existence of singular thoughts, relying on a demonstration that these are modes.31 Hence there must be an attribute which, as it were, accommodates singular thoughts: the attribute of thought. (In Demonstration of Part II, Proposition 2, he says, ‘proceeds in the same way’.) Another comparison with Descartes is needed here. Spinoza is clearly putting himself in opposition to Descartes’s claim that thought and affection cannot exist independently of the thing affected, modified (i.e. it makes no sense to speak of its so existing). Notice that Part I, Propositions 5 and 6 above already contradict important Cartesian claims. It is true that Descartes thought that there is only one extended substance; but he also thought there is a plurality of thinking substances.32 That contradicts Spinoza’s Proposition 5 (if one construes ‘the same nature or attribute’ as Spinoza does). Again, Descartes thought that both extended and thinking substances are created (= produced and maintained in existence) by God, whom he conceives as an infinite substance. That contradicts Proposition 6. Compare this with Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat.33 The smile is, as it were, mistaken for a substance. ‘The cat has a smile’ is not like ‘the cat has green eyes’; it’s equivalent to ‘the cat is smiling’ –​and here there’s no temptation to hypostatisation. This is obviously closely related to what Spinoza has said about ‘the connection of subject and predicate’. In fact, he is discussing the

30 EIIp1–​2; C 1:448–​49. 31 EIp25c; C 1:431. 32 See, for this view, e.g., Williams, Descartes, 127–​28. 33 ‘Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice; ‘but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!’ Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and through the Looking-​Glass, ed. Peter Hunt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 59.

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structure of that connection. Remember my discussion of how that connection is a function of the idea’s connection with a whole system of ‘causes’. In these Propositions this functional relation is also not far below the surface. In connection with ‘attributes’ Spinoza introduces the notion of things ‘having something in common’, as in Proposition 2. Spinoza appeals here as follows: D3 By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.34

Also relevant here is the definition of attributes: D4 By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence.35

Proposition 2 can hardly be thought to follow from Definition 3, which doesn’t mention attributes. But Definition 4 does; and if we conflate ‘perceive’ and ‘conceive’ (as surely we can), the connection is made. ‘Forming a concept’, the thought is, always involves seeing an aspect of things (an ‘attribute of substance’). Since to say that one thing is another’s ‘cause’ is to say, or imply, that it is required for the understanding of the other, our conceptions of the one and the other must belong to a single system of understanding (attribute). So although Spinoza denies the independent substantiality of thought and extension, he retains Descartes’s insistence that they cannot causally interact, that the one cannot be understood through the other. In fact, he maintains this much more rigorously than Descartes in, for example, the Passions of the Soul,36 which Spinoza lampoons savagely. See especially, Again, no one knows how, or by what means, the Mind moves the body, nor how many degrees of motion it can give the body, nor with what speed it can move it. So that when men say that this or that action of the Body arises from the Mind, which has dominion over the Body, they do not know what they are saying, and they do nothing but confess, in fine-​sounding words, that they are ignorant of the true cause of that action, and that they do not wonder at it.37

34 EId3; C 1:408. 35 EId4; C 1:408. 36 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul; CSM 1:328–​404; especially the first part. 37 EIIIp2s; C 1:495.

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Spinoza’s proof that there can be no causal interaction between substances has two aspects: a. There can be no causal interaction between things (modes) conceived under different attributes.38 b. ‘One substance cannot be produced by another substance.’39 On (b), contrast Descartes on finite and infinite substances. As we saw earlier, Descartes said the word (i.e. ‘substance’) is used in two senses. This enabled him to shuffle. (Only God is really independent, but mind and body [are] sort of independent.) Spinoza will have none of this, which he regards as just confusion. It’s well to remember always that an overall aim of Spinoza is to represent the world as through and through intelligible. Spinoza thinks Descartes’s moves at this point inimical to that goal. Let us now consider Propositions 5 and 7: P5. In nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute.40 P7. It pertains to the nature of substance to exist.41 Proposition 7 is in a way the lynchpin of Part I and hence of the Ethics as a whole. The reason for Proposition 5 is easy enough to understand: It’s a version of the identity of indiscernibles. There is no way to distinguish substances except by their attributes. If two substances have the same attributes, they are indistinguishable, therefore identical. (Identical because there would be no way of explaining that we were thinking of the one rather than the other.) They cannot be distinguished simply by their modes or affections, because substance is ‘prior in nature’ to them, that is, the affections of substance follow from its nature (otherwise it would not be ‘conceived through itself ’), hence there would have to be a difference in the nature, or attributes, of the two substances (contrary to hypothesis). Notice that this claim is applied here only to substances. Who is right in the conflict between Descartes and Spinoza? I think Spinoza is perfectly entitled to argue as he does, given that Descartes thinks in terms of substances (as defined) at all. On the other hand, we may also ask whether

38 39 40 41

EIIp6; C 1: 450. EIp6; C 1:411. EIp5; C 1:411. EIp7; C 1:412.

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Spinoza’s own claim to make the existence of the world ultimately intelligible itself comes off. It depends on his (very questionable) presumption that if the existence of the world is not intelligible, then nothing that happens ‘in the world’ (a pleonasm) is intelligible either. There’s something queer in the idea that we would have to decide whether Spinoza or Descartes is right before we could be sure that we had ever understood anything.

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Chapter 3 NEGATION, LIMITATION AND MODES I turn now to discuss negation. This is a subject that runs through a good many of Spinoza’s positions, and I  think there are certain preconceptions concerning it which are at work in much of Spinoza’s reasoning. The notion of negation crops up fairly early in the Ethics –​in fact, in the explanation of Definition 6. Definition 6 is a definition of God as a being absolute infinite, and the explanation runs, I say absolutely infinite, not infinite of its kind. Of a thing infinite only of its kind, infinite attributes may be denied, but that which is absolutely infinite contains in its essence whatever expresses reality and involves no negation.1

The central presumption here is that anything of which we have to say that it is not something in order to give a complete account of it, of what it is, is not substance. Because in saying that there is something which it is not, I think Spinoza would understand this as saying there is something else which it is not, and so we require a reference to something else, other than the nature of that which we are trying to explain. But if we require a reference to something else in order to give that explanation, then that which we are explaining the nature of can’t be substance, because it’s being conceived through something else and not through itself. So the thought here seems to be that anything which requires a negation in order to be explained is something that requires that we understand the nature of something else in order to understand it. Hence it can’t be substance. Essentially the same point can be put, and is put by Spinoza in various places, by saying that anything, the account of which involves negation, is limited by something else.2 And it seems to me that all of Spinoza’s arguments (or most of them anyway) against the possibility of a plurality of substances

1 C 1:409. 2 See, e.g. EIp8; C 1:413.

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turn on this point in one way or another. If there were two substances, A and B, then there would be something that was not true of A but true of B, otherwise they’d be indistinguishable and we couldn’t say they were two. So we wouldn’t have a full understanding of A without knowing what it was that was true of B and not true of A. Note that point. This is actually in addition to what I have said so far, I think, and something that I’ll say more about. We would not have a firm understanding of A without knowing what it was that was true of B and not true of A. That’s to say, in knowing that something wasn’t true of A  –​if we understood that  –​we would have to know what in fact was true of B.  So, there is some positive assertion/​judgement we must be in a position to make, in order to be in a position to make, with full understanding, the (negative) judgement that something is not true of A. And this would mean that A was (in this language) ‘limited by B’, or that A was ‘conceived through B’, and that’s absurd because the supposition was of course that they, A  and B, were both substances  –​and that’s a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument. Now, Spinoza’s position also involves the thought that what is real must be determinately so. There can’t be any fuzziness, as it were, in reality or indeed any gaps in reality. And this comes up in the doctrine that there is no vacuum.3 We shall have to understand by this that for any given part of the world or reality (‘part’ is not a good word here, but I can’t think of a better one) there is something quite definite and specific which is true of it. Anything which belongs to the world is something of which a truth holds, a positive truth. But this means that no part of the world can be such that its ultimate characterization is negative; and that again I’ll come back to. What we’re to understand by an ‘ultimate characterisation’ in a way contains the whole problem of a philosophical system like Spinoza’s. So, no part of the world can be such so that its ultimate characterisation is negative, because a negative judgement, Spinoza thinks, necessarily leaves room for a further positive characterisation. Let me just dwell on that for a bit. One might put the point by saying that positive and negative judgements aren’t symmetrical. Suppose someone asks me later what Professor Phillips was wearing this afternoon, and I say, ‘Well, he wasn’t wearing a green jacket’ –​ that seems to leave the way open for the question, ‘Well, what was he wearing then?’ If I say that he wasn’t wearing a green jacket, then it is so far indeterminate what he was wearing. Whereas, if I say ‘He was wearing a blue jacket’ (in answer to the question), that of course leaves no room for the question, ‘Well, what wasn’t he wearing then?’ –​that would be nonsensical. If I have

3 E1p15s; C 1:423.

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said what he was wearing, I have already answered the question ‘What wasn’t he wearing?’ There’s no further question about that to be raised. And I think that brings out what lies behind the idea that a positive judgement is determinate in a way in which a negative one isn’t. I think it’s worth saying a bit more about this, because it’s easy to misunderstand the point and extend it in a way that it won’t bear. It would be wrong, for instance, to say that I or anybody else can’t be in a position to say how things were not unless I’m in a position to say how they were. If I’m asked what Professor Phillips was wearing this afternoon, I may be absolutely confident that he wasn’t wearing a green jacket without having the faintest idea what he was wearing. I don’t have to know what he was wearing in order to be in a position to say that there is something that he wasn’t wearing. Now, I think Spinoza would say of this that that’s alright as an account of what is involved in the knowledge and abilities of a finite being, of a finite mode, but can’t be accepted as an account of how things, as they really are, are ultimately to be characterised. But I  think he would say that if we are interested not merely in the question, ‘What judgements are we in a position to make in certain kinds of circumstance?’ but in the question ‘How actually is it with the things concerning which we are making the judgements?’, then we shall have to say that the world as it is is characterisable only positively, only affirmatively, in the sense that if we are left with a negative judgement, we are in fact left with not yet having said all there is to say. To use another way of speaking that Spinoza sometimes has: if something is not the case that is because its being the case is excluded by what is the case.4 I think, actually, Spinoza would even use the term ‘cause’ there: if something is not the case that is because there is some cause preventing it from being the case. And so, if Professor Phillips isn’t wearing a green jacket, there is some cause preventing his wearing a green jacket (namely that he’s wearing a brown jacket). That, of course, is not how we would normally use the word ‘cause’, but I think that Spinoza would probably speak of ‘cause’ there. As I  suggested before, the crucial question for us in evaluating these positions is whether we really understand what is being said, what we’re saying when we speak of how things ultimately are, even though none of us could ever be in a position to say how they are. What I mean is that it seems fairly evident that any human being that wants to say how things are in one matter or another is not going to be able to dispense with negative judgements. So, if it’s a question of the characterisation of the world that any human being is ever going to be in a position to give, it looks as though negative judgements

4 See, e.g. EIp11dem.

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are going to have to come into that. If it is said that this is simply a result of, or a symptom of, human imperfection and human ignorance, which I imagine is what Spinoza would say, the question we’re left with is: ‘How are we to understand this talk of judgements which specify how things ultimately are, these being judgements that no one is ever going to be in a position to make?’ In fact, it isn’t merely that no one is ever going to be in a position to make such judgements; it isn’t clear to me what the description of someone as being in such a position could amount to. I don’t mean necessarily that we would have to include some negative judgement any time we describe something. But negative judgements would be in the offing. For example, and I’ll come back to this, it comes up in the field of scientific explanation. Let’s take the conventional account of scientific explanation that you get in people like Carl Hempel, which I think suits perfectly well for our purposes. This is the idea that a particular event is explained by –​follows from –​certain general laws and a statement of the particular initial conditions.5 Let’s accept that for the sake of argument. It remains the case that any such explanation has an ‘other things being equal’ assumption, that is to say, provided there isn’t some further factor which hasn’t been mentioned which interferes with it. Spinoza’s comment on this would be: so much the worse for what are commonly accepted as explanations. To the extent to which there is contingency, to that extent explanation is lacking. So the only reason why causal explanation is not fully deductive is the deficiency of our knowledge. If this answer is to be accepted, we have to be assured that we understand what is meant by ‘deficiency’ here. Of course we know how our knowledge may be deficient in this or that respect. The question is, though, whether the (bare) possibility of there being some further circumstance which will affect the result marks out such a deficiency. Let us ask what would be involved in rectifying the ‘deficiency’. It is clear from the nature of the case that this would have to involve complete knowledge of the whole of nature. Insofar as we had less than that, we could never be sure that there was not something left in what we did not know which would intervene and prevent the outcome. If we did have such knowledge, it would be knowledge of that which is ‘conceived through itself ’, which requires nothing apart from itself in order to be fully understood, that is, substance. Spinoza’s argument, therefore, is: the possibility of enquiry rests on the supposition that something can be understood, but no understanding of particular

5 See, for instance, Carl G.  Hempel, ‘Aspects of Scientific Explanation’, in Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New York: Free Press, 1965, 331–​496.

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situations is possible unless we can be clear about all the forces acting on the situation and know that they are ‘all’. This is only possible insofar as we conceive all situations belonging to a self-​contained, and therefore self-​explanatory, whole. So to engage in enquiry is to presuppose the existence of substance. The weak point in the argument is the italicised clause. Can it be given any sense? One might say in response to Spinoza that in any application of concepts and theories there will always be a margin for error. Spinoza talks as if the applications of concepts is somehow determined by the logical structure of the concepts (idea and ideatum). It is true that without an application there would be no logical structure. But this does not mean the application can somehow be read off from a logical structure which is evident from the ‘concepts themselves’ without our having to look for their application.6 This is connected with the point made about concepts and their application, and Spinoza’s neglect of this distinction. It belongs to the nature of the concept ‘red’ that if something (which must have some colour) is not red, then it must be some other colour. But the correct application of the concept red in a negative judgement does not depend on my being able to make some positive judgement –​some positive application of another colour concept. One digression that I won’t develop because it’s something that I’ll try to come back to later:7 an area in which this general contention of Spinoza’s may be harder to accept than it may look in physics is an area in which there are difficulties of a different sort, namely psychology. Consider, in particular, the account of notions like ‘desire’, where it looks as though if someone wants something, it is a presupposition of this that he hasn’t got it. And it looks as though the very characterisation of him as wanting it, the very characterisation of the state he’s in, involves a reference to something’s not being the case. Indeed, I  think Spinoza only escapes that sort of difficulty by giving what I myself think is an unacceptable account of notions like desire in terms of efficient causation. Spinoza’s account of desires would not be in terms of what they aim at, but as ‘forces’, as it were, which push someone forward and which he would think of as characterisable completely in positive, affirmative, non-​negative  terms. Let me make some more remarks about explanation. People have commented on how Spinoza takes mathematics as his model of rational thinking. So his most important/​central examples are usually mathematical ones, and it has been objected, very naturally and in the end rightly, I  think, that empirical enquiries cannot be conceived of in the same way. The mathematical model 6 For a development of these points from a Wittgensteinian perspective, see Charles Travis, Thought’s Footing,  26–​30. 7 This volume, pp. 87–120.

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by itself will not enable us to understand the form of empirical science, theories and explanation in empirical science. Now, one way in which pure mathematics and logic, on the one hand, and an empirical science like physics, on the other, seem obviously to differ is that within pure mathematics and within logic there is no room for a ceteris paribus clause. Let’s take a simple example from logic. Suppose I’ve got an argument of the form ‘p’ and ‘p implies q’. It would make no sense to conclude ‘therefore, other things being equal, q’, because given those two premises, ‘q’ just follows and that’s that. So it wouldn’t do, for instance, for someone to come along and say, ‘But look: also “r” and “s”, so perhaps that might make a difference and prevent “q” from being true’ –​ unless, of course, acceptance of ‘r’ and ‘s’ is thought of as somehow modifying your acceptance of ‘p’ or ‘p implies q’. Now compare that with a scientific explanation or a scientific prediction. Let’s take a simple example, like explaining the cracking of a cylinder in one’s car by the facts that the temperature recorded today is below 0° Celsius and water freezes at below 0° Celsius, and when water freezes it expands, and when you have expanding water and so on. That plus, of course, a description of the structure and state of the car cylinder. That may be, I suppose, perfectly good as an explanation, but the conclusion, the cracking of the cylinder, given that you’ve accepted those laws and positive initial conditions, still leaves room for a ceteris paribus clause. Because all sorts of further conditions are conceivable which may counteract the destructive forces of the expanding water and prevent the cylinder from cracking. And so we would understand in a case like this that the explanation only holds with the at least tacit understanding that other things are equal, that there are no further forces operating which would prevent that from happening. And so here you have, standing in the wings all the time, a qualification which would just make no sense if applied to a question of logic or mathematics. In the latter kinds of case, if this question does arise, then that simply means that the problem has not been properly stated and we haven’t got all the data for a mathematical or a logical solution to the problem. So we haven’t really got a problem in pure mathematics or logic. Now, of course, connected with that feature of explanation is the fact that in the actual conduct of a particular enquiry in natural science, there are techniques, more or less well developed, for ensuring that disturbing forces are excluded. Hence the care with which lab experiments are set up –​precisely in order to show that the experimenter can be reasonably sure (and of course often he can be very sure indeed) that he has accounted for all the relevant forces which are operating on the experimental situation. I don’t think it’s a great thought of mine, but it is an important point that what we mean by phrases like ceteris paribus or ‘if nothing happens to prevent

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it’ is entirely dependent upon the fact that there are techniques developed for detecting disturbing forces; that there are techniques for conducting careful experiments; that there are techniques for finding out whether something is interfering with the results and so on. What I want to say about this is that really an expression like ceteris paribus would be completely empty if there weren’t such techniques. I think that is very important in a consideration of Spinoza’s, for the following reason: Let me refer you to an important passage at the end of Part I, Proposition 33, Scholium 1 –​a passage in which Spinoza gives an explanation of what he wants us to understand by the words ‘necessary’, ‘impossible’ and ‘contingent’: A thing is called necessary either by reason of its essence or by reason of its cause. For a things existence follows necessarily either from its essence and definition or from a given efficient cause. And a thing is also called impossible from these same causes –​viz. either because its essence, or definition, involves a contradiction, or because there is no external cause which has been determined to produce such a thing. But a thing is called contingent only because of a defect of our knowledge. For if we do not know that the thing’s essence involves a contradiction […], and nevertheless can affirm nothing certainly about its existence, because the order of causes is hidden from us, it can never seem to us either necessary or impossible. So we call it contingent or possible.8

So you might say Spinoza thinks that the word ‘contingent’ falls into a different category altogether from ‘necessary’ and ‘impossible’. As far as the nature of things is concerned, everything is either necessary or impossible, and the term ‘contingent’ cannot sensibly, Spinoza thinks, be applied to the way things are –​ it can only be applied relative to our knowledge of things or, more accurately, relative to our ignorance of things. It’s only insofar as we don’t know the full story of how things are, that there is room for the term ‘contingent’. He goes on: the ‘thing of which we do not know [whether the essence does or does not involve a contradiction] […] cannot appear to us either necessary or impossible. Wherefore we call it contingent or possible.’9 But in calling it that we are not, for Spinoza, saying anything about it; we are simply expressing our own ignorance concerning it. Now let’s apply that point to what I was saying before about natural scientific explanation and the importance of the conception of ceteris paribus. Of

8 Cf. EIp33s1; C 1:436. 9 EIp33s1; Elw 71/​C 1:436.

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course, to say that this conception of ceteris paribus is equal to scientific explanation is to say, on Spinoza’s view, that any scientific explanation we in fact give is hedged about with ignorance. Spinoza is saying here that insofar as we are forced to say in the context of an explanation ‘all other things being equal’, that can only be because of our ignorance, because we don’t know all the causes there are, and if we did know the complete story of all the causes, there would be nothing else to be equal, as it were. Now the question here, of course, is what sense we’re to attach to that –​to the idea of there being a whole story. Coming back to the point I reminded you of concerning the existence of actual techniques of excluding disturbing factors, I think it ought to be clear on reflection that however refined those techniques become and with whatever care those techniques are employed, while in a given case an investigator may be absolutely justified in saying with the utmost confidence, ‘I have isolated all the relevant factors with no possibility of anything disturbing the experiment’ –​while that is perfectly alright in the sense in which yes, indeed, there may be no possibility of disturbing factors  –​it remains the case that considered as, as it were, a logical form, the explanation he gives is still open to the qualification ‘ceteris paribus’. That is to say, while other things may be completely excluded within the context of the explanation that’s being given, that does not at all mean that the form of the explanation has become any more like a bit of purely mathematical or logical reasoning than it would have been if techniques had not been so decided and hadn’t been so carefully applied. It doesn’t do anything to change the logical form of the explanation that’s being offered. The point being that, while you may say, ‘No, there are no other things to be taken into account here’, that’s not because it now makes no sense to talk of other things but precisely because it does make good sense to talk of that and we’ve taken really very good precautions. Spinoza would say, I suppose, that insofar as that is the case, there is still logical space for the phrase ‘ceteris paribus’. What we say is still an expression of ignorance because we’re still admitting contingency –​and insofar as we’re admitting contingency, we’re giving expression to our ignorance. And he says –​his arguments concerning substance are precisely about this –​that this is a feature of explanation which is indeed ineradicable from any treatment of particular situations which were explained in terms of other particular forces, and it can be eliminated from the picture only insofar as in our initial conditions, as it were (reverting to the terminology), is included a statement about the whole of nature; the state of the whole universe. And it’s easy to see how, if we could hazard a statement that indeed would remove contingency, that would be because there would be nothing else  –​nowhere from which contingency could come.

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But what, I think, really needs emphasizing is that this way of removing contingency, a definitional way of removing contingency, is not at all continuous with the practical methods of removing disturbing factors that you actually find in science. It isn’t as though the techniques that are developed for making sure that nothing disturbs the experiment point in the direction of some comprehensive account of the whole state of the physical world which we aren’t in a position to give because we never find that we’ve gone far enough. I think that the picture of the state of affairs is quite a confused one, because –​however refined our techniques become –​what we’ve got here are two distinct logical forms. That refinement gets one no nearer the kind of complete account of the whole of nature that’s necessary for Spinoza’s account, because there is no sense to the notion of getting nearer. So putting it another way, what I’m really suggesting is that any techniques we could intelligibly ever expect to have, would do nothing to give a content to the idea of the natural world as a whole. Whereas I think that in order to attach sense to what Spinoza is saying, one needs to be able to attach sense to this. So, according to Spinoza, the contingency that infects our empirical knowledge is a symptom of our ignorance, of a deficiency in our knowledge. Thus, he would not think it made sense to speak of substance existing ‘only contingently’ (‘it just happens to exist’). We can only say that when we do not know whether we have all the relevant data. In the case of substance there is, by definition we might say, no question of that sort of ignorance, since substance comprises everything. There is nothing ‘outside’ it of which we could say ‘ceteris paribus’. However, there are difficulties in speaking of our knowledge always being deficient when we try to explain empirical matters. It is a necessary deficiency, consisting in the fact that we do not ever know whether we have possession of all the relevant factors. But it is essential to Spinoza’s position that the phrase ‘knowledge of all the relevant factors’ (including knowledge that they are indeed ‘all’) should express something intelligible. But does it? If we are told that contingency is always relative to a deficiency in our knowledge, we have to understand what ‘deficiency’ means in this context. It’s no use saying:  ‘Well, we understand its meaning perfectly well in other contexts and we are simply using it in the same meaning here.’ That is to presuppose that meanings can be carried around from one context to another with complete immunity to the changes. But first, this is manifestly not the case. (‘Green is green.’)10 And, second, Spinoza himself does not think it is so. All ideas are what they are by virtue of their place in a system.

10 See TLP 3.323.

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I have argued that the notion of a ‘margin for error’ is always involved in the empirical application of theories and concepts, and moreover that it is here, that is, in the context of application, that the notion of the ‘world’ enters. Spinoza seems to neglect this; he talks as though the logical structure of the concept itself determines its application. It is true that a logical structure is necessary before there is anything that can be ‘applied’. It is also true that talk of a ‘logical structure’ itself only has application on the assumption that the structure has an application. (Cf. ‘Green is green’ again.) But that does not of course mean that the application can somehow be read off from a logical structure which is somehow evident ‘from the concepts themselves’, without our having to look to their application. This brings us back, in turn, to the gap between denial and affirmation. If I am told ‘It’s not red,’ I can ask: ‘What colour is it then?’ But if told ‘It’s red,’ I cannot intelligibly ask: ‘What colour isn’t it then?’ This gives rise to the claim that not-​p is equivalent to ‘q or r or s or...’. I don’t think this is quite right. But even if we allow it, first we mustn’t overlook the ‘...’ (which is not shorthand for a list), and second, the fact that we can assert not-​p does not imply we are in a position to assert one or other of the other disjuncts. We might say: a judgement belongs to a system (logical? conceptual? grammatical?). But that doesn’t mean that when we are in a position to deny something we are in a position to assert which of the other possibilities holds; or even to assert what ‘all the other possibilities’ are. I  use scare quotes there, because its meaning is not clear. Hence it’s not obvious (as Spinoza seems to think) that there is anything deficient in a judgement not made with full knowledge of all the alternatives. What is ‘full knowledge’ supposed to mean here? A proposition belongs to a grammatical system. But this doesn’t mean that all propositions belong to a single system. Or, to put it another way: Any proposition (perhaps) expresses a putative truth about the world. This doesn’t mean, though, that there is a univocal conception of ‘the world’ which refers to that about which all propositions express putative truths. We understand what ‘the world’ amounts to in connection with a given kind of proposition in terms of the system to which it belongs. We may say, perhaps, that the concept of ‘the world’ plays a formally identical role in all systems of propositions. But it is a formal, not material, identity. To use a traditional mode of expression, it operates analogously. The unity of the world and of enquiry is a unity based on analogy, not a unity based on identity of referent.11 But suppose someone asks: what about the realm of being? That brings us back to the notion of substance and its relation to the concepts of negation

11 This paragraph is lightly crossed out in the manuscript.

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and limitation. For Spinoza (and rightly, up to a point), affirmation and negation are not on a level.12 The best way to see why is perhaps to go back to the relation between idea and ideatum. The objective essence of an idea is the actual state of affairs it affirms; thus, unless we make a distinction, negative ideas are going to have to affirm negative facts; and Spinoza will not recognize such. He would probably have thought that a ‘negative fact’ would correspond to (literally) nothing at all. So the object of a negative idea will really be something positive, that is, it will really affirm that, whatever it is, which excludes what is negated. It will do this confusedly, that is, I will not fully understand a negative idea until I understand what the positive facts are which make it impossible for what is negated to obtain.13 This really explains why Spinoza thinks of negation and limitation as virtually identical. To say of X that something is not true of it is to say that something else is true which excludes what is negated. We can think of the non-​plurality of substance anew in this light. To say that X is not the only substance would be to say that something is not true of it. That would mean that something else excludes this. And that would mean that we cannot (contrary to Definition 3) ‘conceive X through itself ’. So far this claim to no plurality is qualified, but ‘every substance is necessarily infinite’14 in effect removes the qualification, since Spinoza treats this as involving both that every attribute of substance is infinite and an infinity (an infinite number) of attributes. Hence no substance could have an attribute that another substance did not have (since then one of them would not be infinite). Hence they would necessarily be the same in attributes or nature, hence identical. How one should apply the doctrine of infinite attributes is obscure, since we are (mysteriously) only aware of two: thought and extension. Perhaps this doesn’t matter too much. What I  find much more interesting is something about the proof (in EIp8: every substance is necessarily infinite). This proof appears both in the Demonstration and also in a slightly different version in Scholium 1. The first proof uses the notion of one thing’s being limited by another thing; the second the notion of negation. And the nature of the proofs shows that Spinoza regards these as almost identical.

12 PW:  Cf. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in which a negative proposition is always a truth-​ function of another proposition. (TLP 5.234 and 5.2341). 13 PW:  In passing:  Sartre, in Being & Nothingness, denies this. He thinks that nothingness is real, cf. his description of himself looking for Pierre in the café. (Jean-​Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956, 41.) 14 EIp8; C 1:412.

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Both rely on Proposition 7. Obviously we have here a form of ontological argument. But let that not prejudice you. Spinoza’s version has a special twist. The primary proof is extremely laconic: A substance cannot be produced by anything else (by P6C); therefore it will be the cause of itself, i.e. (by D1), its essence necessarily involves existence, or it pertains to its nature to exist.15

There is a natural riposte available:  Suppose it isn’t produced by anything, either itself or something else, but just happens to exist. Of course, that is ruled out by Spinoza’s Axioms 1 and 2. But why accept these Axioms? Spinoza’s answer, I think, would have to be that to suppose a radical surd in reality of that sort would entirely subvert ‘the relation of subject and predicate’. But Scholium 2 to Proposition 8 is much fuller and addresses some of the inevitable objections. Remember we are talking about substances, which, unlike other things, can have no beginning. A  crucial, but difficult passage is this: But the truth of substances is not outside the intellect unless it is in them themselves, because they are conceived through themselves. Hence, if someone were to say that he had a clear and distinct, i.e., true, idea of substance, and nevertheless doubted whether such a substance existed, that would indeed be the same as if he were to say that he had a true idea, and nevertheless doubted whether it was false (as is evident to anyone who is sufficiently attentive).16

Substance is what makes possible the connection of any subject and predicate. To deny the existence of substance would be to deny the possibility of making any judgement and would, therefore, short of a very radical scepticism of the sort Spinoza has rejected in De Emendatione, be self-​refuting. Or else, perhaps, would render itself nugatory. The intelligibility of anything is expressed in Spinoza’s language by saying there is an idea of it. Anything conceived under the attribute of extension also exists under the attribute of thought. That, I take it, amounts to the claim that there is nothing in the world which is in principle unintelligible. But still, let’s bracket that for the moment. The intelligibility of extended things is expressed by saying that for every extended thing there is an idea –​that is, a mode of

15 EIp7; C 1:412. 16 EIp8s2; C 1:414.

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God conceived under the attribute of thought. So the intelligibility of extension lies in the fact that there is also an attribute of thought which has everything conceived under the attribute of extension in it, in idea. Now if you say that substance has infinite attributes, presumably since, after all, what’s in question altogether is the intelligibility of the world, it would seem to follow that what I’ve just said of extension must apply to every other attribute as well, namely, that it must somehow be reflected in thought. But then, as we have mentioned already, it seems puzzling that our intellect has only the idea of thought and extension. Moreover, the attribute of thought is given a very special place in that every attribute will have to be mirrored in its own way in thought. If we think of thought as the idea of extension, what is the relation between thought and the other, infinite and unknown attributes? Indeed, if we speak of things having their counterpart, of being mirrored –​ well, we’re given some sense of what that means in connection with the relation between extension and thought, but what we would have to understand by it of other attributes I just don’t know. This is a serious puzzle, which incidentally is taken up by one of Spinoza’s most interesting correspondents, Tschirnhaus. See the following letter from a man named Schaller [Schuller] to Spinoza. He is reporting to Spinoza questions which Tschirnhaus has raised: I send you this letter to inform you, that our noble friend von Tschirnhaus is enjoying the same [PW: namely good health] in England, and has three times in the letters he has sent me bidden me convey his kindest regards to the master, again bidding me request from you the solution of the following questions, and forward to him your hoped-​for answer: would the master [PW: that’s Spinoza] be pleased to convince him by positive proof, not by a reduction to the impossible [PW: reductio ad absurdum, I suppose], that we cannot know any attributes of God, save thought and extension? Further, whether it follows that creatures constituted under other attributes can form no idea of extension? If so, it would follow that there must be as many worlds as there are attributes of God. For instance, there would be as much room for extension in worlds affected by other attributes, as there actually exists of extension in our world. But as we perceive nothing save thought besides extension, so creatures in the other world would perceive nothing besides the attributes of that world and thought.17

Spinoza’s reply to that seems to me very unsatisfactory. He says it’s plain that the human mind or the idea of the human body neither involves nor expresses

17 Letter 65(63) in Elw 396–​97/​Letter 63 in C 2:436.

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any attributes save these two. Spinoza defines the human mind as the idea of the human body. So the thought here is that what is to be understood by a human being is a certain modification of substance conceived under just those two attributes, thought and extension. And he goes on: ‘Now from these two attributes […] no other attribute of God can be inferred or conceived […] besides these, which is the proposition you inquire about.’18 It isn’t, actually. ‘With regard to your question, whether there must be as many worlds as there are attributes, I refer you to Ethics II. vii. note.’19 I think that reference is a little bit cryptic, but I think the point he wants to make is that when we speak of things conceived under different attributes we’re not speaking of different worlds. That’s a fair enough riposte. To suggest there might be as many worlds as there are attributes is not a way of putting things that Spinoza could tolerate, but I wonder whether all the same this quite deals with the difficulty Tschirnhaus feels. I didn’t really mean to spend so long on this since we have enough difficulty dealing with the attributes we are aware of without bothering too much about those we aren’t. But it’s a somewhat puzzling feature of Spinoza’s whole thought. I’d like to go on now to the notion of modes. Modes are defined as ‘the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself ’.20 Spinoza distinguishes two classes of modes, what he calls the infinite modes and the finite modes. You’ll find the infinite modes discussed in Propositions 21–​23 of Part I, and the finite modes in Proposition 28. (Of course there are other references as well.) The general distinction between them, I think, is this: that the infinite modes follow directly from the nature of any given attribute of substance, whereas the finite modes don’t. I take it that what Spinoza has in mind by ‘infinite modes’ are the most fundamental laws governing anything that exists conceived under a given attribute. So that under the attribute of extension, the laws of mechanics (I suppose) would be infinite modes, possibly the principles of geometry too. Now, of course there’s a very positive claim concealed in this definition, namely that such laws can be deduced directly from the nature of an attribute, from the nature of extension for instance. However, from the nature of a given attribute we cannot infer directly the existence of any particular finite thing. In order to do this we need first to posit the existence of some other finite thing. So in the argument to finite modes

18 Letter 66(64) in Elw 399/​Letter 64 in C 2:438. 19 Ibid. 20 EId5; Elw 45/​C 1:409.

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there is an infinite regress of explanation. For this reason it looks as though there will always be an ineradicable element of contingency involved in any explanation of a particular thing or event, since there will always be something relevant to the explanation which is not yet known –​relating to some further particular thing or event. This is a point on which von Tschirnhaus repeatedly presses Spinoza in his correspondence. Spinoza’s move here is to appeal to modes. Our understanding of infinite modes can be adequate, because (so Spinoza thinks) we can see how they follow directly from the attributes of substance. (Motion and rest; will and intellect –​I think Spinoza saw these as counterparts.) But with the latter [i.e. finite modes] our ideas are inadequate, because there is always a regress of explanation; we never reach the final stage. There is a link between them: Spinoza thinks that the finite modes lead us on, as it were, to the infinite modes. They do this by embodying ‘common notions’ of ‘what is equally in the part and in the whole’, that is, perhaps, they embody the explanatory principles which we come to apply to them.21 I think one could take as examples of common notions fundamental geometrical properties of things. I think Spinoza’s thought is this: if you take any particular finite extended thing, then just as being an extended thing, it will necessarily exemplify certain fundamental geometrical properties, the same geometrical properties that any other extended thing exemplifies. So that by examining the nature of any particular extended thing you are led to the fundamental principles of geometry. There is, on the face of it, a puzzle in interpreting Spinoza. We are finite beings, and our finitude necessarily gives rise to, or is expressed in, partiality and distortion in our thinking. Our thinking will be affected by arbitrary matters; any individual human being’s thinking will be affected by arbitrary contingencies of his life history, what he happens to have met with in the course of his life, the order in which he happens to have met things, and so forth –​none of which will, except by good chance, correspond with the true order of causes of things. If that is so there is then a puzzle about how any man could ever achieve any sort of order in his thinking, since one of the things Spinoza quite explicitly maintains is that from inadequate ideas (which is what these distorted, fragmentary ideas would be) only inadequate ideas follow.22 It looks as if, if you start with inadequate ideas, then you’re never going to get anything else. And of course the position is made more difficult

21 PW:  See EIIp37–​40 (C 1:  474–​78). Note that Descartes also uses the expression ‘common notions’, but not quite in the same way (see CSM 1:209). 22 EIIp36, C 1: 473–​74.

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by the fact that in Spinoza there’s no such thing as free will; there’s no sense in which one can free oneself from the influence of inadequate distorted ideas by exerting one’s will. I think that the so-​called common notions are intended to provide a way out of this situation in the following way:  although, according to Spinoza, one’s ideas are to a large extent necessarily disordered, distorted and fragmentary owing to the fact that one is an insignificant part of the order of nature and infinitely transcended by the natural forces around one, it is also the case that every person has, in the presence of his own body of which his mind is the idea, the means of arriving at the true order of causes, namely precisely in the common notions, since every human body –​and every other body for that matter –​just as such exemplifies the principles according to which all extended things are interrelated and behave. So that, putting this in the language of finite and infinite modes, you might say that the finite modes, of which the human body is one, as it were, lead us on to the infinite modes, because the finite modes embody the explanatory principles according to which all finite things behave. I won’t say any more about the ineradicable contingency involved in the explanation of the behaviour of any finite thing; that’s come up already. I will just refer you to another of the letters: again it’s von Tschirnhaus, who presses the point in Letter 71. He says: I wish you would gratify me in this matter by pointing out how, from the conception of extension, as you give it, the variety of the universe can be shown a priori. You recall the opinion of Descartes, wherein he asserts, that this variety can only be deduced from extension, by supposing that, when motion was started by God, it caused this effect in extension. Now it appears to me, that he does not deduce the existence of bodies from matter at rest, unless, perhaps, you count as nothing the assumption of God as a motive power; you have not shown how such an effect must, a priori, necessarily follow from the nature of God. A difficulty which Descartes professed himself unable to solve as being beyond human understanding.23

I think there are really two points of difficulty here. The first, whether Spinoza is right in thinking that the infinite modes, in particular the laws of motion, follow directly from the nature of God conceived under the attribute of extension –​the contrast with Descartes being that Descartes had thought that motion is not something that is involved in the idea of extension as such. Motion is,

23 Letter 71(82) in Elw 408/​Letter 82 in C 2:485.

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as it were, injected into the extended world by God. Whereas Spinoza thinks that you can deduce the laws of motion directly from the attribute of extension. There is, in fact, a place in Part II, where Spinoza tries to derive what is virtually Galileo’s principle of inertia24 directly from the conception of a body. That comes in the Corollary to Lemma 3 under Proposition 13. The argument is this: Hence it follows, that a body in motion keeps in motion, until it is determined to a state of rest by some other body; and a body at rest remains so, until it is determined to a state of motion by some other body. This is indeed self-​evident. [PW: It wasn’t self-​evident to Aristotle!] For when I suppose, for instance, that a given body, A, is at rest, and do not take into consideration other bodies in motion, I cannot affirm anything concerning the body A, except that it is at rest. If it afterwards comes to pass that A is in motion, this cannot have resulted from its having been at rest, for no other consequence could have been involved than its remaining at rest. If, on the other hand, A be given in motion, we shall, so long as we only consider A, be unable to affirm anything concerning it, except that it is in motion. If A is subsequently found to be at rest, this rest cannot be the result of A’s previous motion, for such motion can only have led to continued motion; the state of rest therefore must have resulted from something, which was not in A, namely, from an external cause determining A to a state of rest.25

It’s of some importance for Spinoza’s project that he should think he is able to arrive at these infinite modes directly from the attribute of extension. You will notice that Spinoza later uses the phrase ‘motion-​and-​rest’. He doesn’t speak just of motion. This is rather speculative, but I think the reason for this must be precisely to make it plausible that one could be said to deduce the laws of motion from, say, the laws of geometry. Or at least that one should be able to deduce the possibility of motion from geometry. I think the idea is as follows: from the conception of something as extended one cannot deduce that there will be any motion, but only that it is either in motion or at rest. It’s got to be one or the other. Although, of course, one may reply to this that the phrase is only going to be meaningful if one understands what motion is. One can speak about something being at rest when one has something to contrast with that, namely the idea of something’s being in motion. If all you’ve got

24 Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems –​Ptolemaic & Copernican, transl. Stillman Drake. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 147. 25 EIIp13lem3c; Elw 94/​C 1:459.

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is the geometrical idea of extension, it isn’t clear that you’ve yet got the basis for employing any distinction between motion and rest. It isn’t clear that this hyphenated phrase is actually achieving anything in the way of enabling you to arrive at the idea of something being either in motion or at rest simply from the idea of its being extended. The second difficulty is whether, supposing Spinoza is right about the ­derivation of infinite modes from extension, it would follow that we could deduce the existence of any particular thing acting in accordance with those laws. That seems to be one of the questions von Tschirnhaus is asking when he asks: ‘How from the concept of extension is it that the variety of the world can be shown a priori?’ That’s of course a different question from that of how we are to get the infinite modes from the concept of God conceived under the attribute of extension. As Spinoza says, Descartes appealed at this point to an arbitrary fiat of God, as it were ‘injecting’ motion into the universe. This, of course, is a recourse not open to Spinoza, as he denies the sense of ascribing any arbitrary free will to God. But it is not at all clear that he has a better solution to the problem. What he says is: With regard to your question as to whether the variety of the universe can be deduced a priori from the conception of extension only, I believe I have shown clearly enough already that it cannot; and that, therefore, matter has been ill-​ defined by Descartes as extension; it must necessarily be explained through an attribute, which expresses eternal and infinite essence.26

But he seems to recognise that this is insufficient, because he concludes: But perhaps, some day, if my life be prolonged, I may discuss the subject with you more clearly. For hitherto I have not been able to put any of these matters into due order.27

Spinoza seems right in claiming that this difficulty shows that matter shouldn’t be defined as extension. His alternative is to say that, though matter presupposes extension, it’s not identical with it. What he cannot show, however, is that, given that extension is an eternal and infinite attribute of God, it follows that matter must exist. And surely von Tschirnhaus is right in the feeling he seems to have that Spinoza ought to be able to conclude this; or ought alternatively to agree with Descartes that there is something in principle inexplicable here.

26 Letter 72(83) in Elw 409/​Letter 83 in C 2:487. 27 Ibid.

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What exactly is the objection to Descartes here? I find this obscure. Does it have to do with the distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans?28 Von Tschirnhaus is referring to Descartes’s appeal to an arbitrary fiat of God, injecting motion into a static extended universe. Now Spinoza, in his remarks to von Tschirnhaus agrees with Descartes that ‘the variety of the universe [i.e. the finite modes?] can[not] be deduced a priori from the conception of extension only’29 but does not (of course!) accept Descartes’s conclusion of an arbitrary divine fiat. What he says is that Descartes was wrong to define matter as extension and says it must instead be ‘explained through an attribute, which expresses eternal and infinite essence’.30 Okay. But if we now ask, ‘Through what attribute?’, the answer must clearly be ‘the attribute of extension’. The point is really that Spinoza is objecting to the way Descartes is conceiving extension:  as an inert, independent substance. If it is an attribute of God, then it already, of course, contains all the divine power (it is natura naturans) capable of producing infinite variety. This links up with the idea that the infinite modes follow immediately from the divine attributes. In this case, it is the infinite mode of motion-​and-​rest. Spinoza’s thought here must be that, from the conception of something as extended, we can immediately infer that it is either at motion or at rest (though not, of course, which). It may be objected that we cannot infer any ‘thing’ either from the mere concept of extension and cannot, therefore, infer motion-​and-​rest from it. But to that Spinoza can respond: this rests on a wrong conception of extension in the first place, as a sort of ‘abstract entity’ (to use modern jargon). Spinoza would say, on the contrary, that the concept of dynamic systems is already involved in our concept of extension, which is abstracted from our (more or less confused) awareness of such systems. Because, as I  have emphasized in my account of formal and objective essence, an idea is identified as the idea of this or that object, it may look as though the object has a certain primacy here. But [this is] not so. Just as my judgement that the book is on the table is identified by reference to the state of affairs it affirms, so the state of affairs is identified through that judgement. There is no way of arriving at the state of affairs except through this judgement (or its equivalent). Hence, we can approach the question what it means to speak of the mind as the idea of the body by starting with what Spinoza means by ‘idea’. As we have seen, he means by it a certain sort of activity. We should then expect his account of the body similarly to emphasise ‘activity’. And so it does. 28 EIp29s; C 1:434. 29 Letter 72(83) in Elw 409/​Letter 83 in C 2:487. 30 Ibid.

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A human being’s mind and body are one and the same mode of substance conceived under different attributes. They are equally perhaps, one might say, local activities31 of substance. In the realm of thought the striving in question is understanding; this is a finite form of the striving of substance conceived under the attribute of thought. Correspondingly, a finite human body is a striving of substance conceived under the attribute of extension; it is a certain configuration of motion-​and-​rest. See Ethics Part IV, Proposition 26: ‘What we strive [conamur] for from reason is nothing but understanding; nor does the Mind, insofar as it uses reason, judge anything else useful to itself except what leads to understanding.’32 Ethics Part II, Proposition 13 is clearly fundamental. Be struck by the fact that so much emphasis should be placed, in a section allegedly about the nature of the human mind, on the nature of the human body. In this Proposition, and the Lemmas that follow it, Spinoza develops a ‘dynamic’ conception of the body. Its identity is not an identity of material stuff; it consists in the preservation of a certain ‘proportion of motion-​and-​rest’, that is, in a certain dynamic equilibrium of physical forces. It is a highly complex equilibrium, involving a system of sub-​systems, for example, circulation of the blood, respiration, alimentation, muscular system, nervous system and so on.33 But also, because it is a finite system, it stands itself in all sorts of complex relations to external systems of forces.34 It is interdependent with its environment, with which it is in constant interaction. This interaction can clearly threaten its stability (and hence continued existence), but is also necessary to it.35 And don’t forget that in this interaction, the environment is modified as well as the body itself. So: When Spinoza calls the human mind the idea of a particular human body he is speaking of two ‘strivings’, one of which is the object of the other. I think that Spinoza conflates a large number of different types of cases under this last heading. We will return to this later.

31 PW:  Or, because of terminological complications, let us say ‘striving’. The Latin is ‘conatus’. 32 Elw 205/​C 1:559. 33 PW:  Spinoza was here influenced by the seventeenth-​century physiologist William Harvey (1578–​1657). 34 PW: Physical and human environment. 35 PW: Metabolism; gravitation, etc.

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Chapter 4 MIND AND BODY Let’s not forget that Part II of Spinoza’s Ethics comes after Part I and before Parts III, IV and V. We aren’t going to understand his account of the human mind unless we see it in relation to his account of the way in which we have to think of the world, if we are to hold that the world can be understood. Look at Part I and his account of the kind of life which is possible for man and of how these possibilities may be exploited so as to achieve ‘blessedness’. We aren’t even going to understand the kind of account of the human mind that is in question here (what the problems are and what interest Spinoza has in answering them), unless we have a prior grasp of his conception of the world and the conditions under which it can be understood. Spinoza himself gives us a clear signal in this direction in the short preface to Part II.1 And we might put that alongside Part IV, Proposition 26.2 The whole of the Ethics deals with the question of what it is to understand something, and the account of the human mind in Part II is part of his treatment of that question. I  mean this remark in a very strong sense. Spinoza’s account of substance and its attributes and modes is not an account of some thing, an entity and its features, though it may often sound like that. He himself says, quite explicitly, that to think in this way is to think with the greatest possible degree of confusion, at the very lowest level.3 And, a ­fortiori, when he says, for instance, that the individual human mind is a mode of the divine mind, we shall miss entirely his meaning if we have some strange picture of God as a sort of superman, composed of literal homunculi.4 He takes it to be confusion to think ‘either the nature of God appertains to the essence of created things, or else that created things can be or be conceived without God’.5 Such confusions come from not keeping to ‘the proper order

1 2 3 4 5

C 1:446. C 1:559. EIIp40s1; C 1:476–​77. EIIp11c; C 1:456. EIIp10s; Elw 90/​C 1:455.

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of philosophical thinking’6 and from ‘putting into the first place what they call the objects of sensation’7 instead of the divine nature. The result is that people who hold either of these positions cannot properly understand either God or nature: While they are considering natural phenomena, they give no attention at all to the divine nature, and, when afterwards they apply their mind to the study of the divine nature, they are quite unable to bear in mind the first hypotheses, with which they have overlaid the knowledge of natural phenomena, inasmuch as such hypotheses are no help towards understanding the Divine nature. So that it is hardly to be wondered at, that these persons contradict themselves freely.8

So Spinoza’s discussion of substance and its attributes and modes is an account of the order in which thought must be conducted if it is to lead to understanding. And if we are to understand the nature of the human mind, we must first understand how the notions of substance, attribute and mode are to be applied in considering what it is for a man to have a mind. Stated baldly and formally, Spinoza’s view of this is, of course, that the human body is a mode of substance considered under the attribute of extension and that the human mind is the very same mode of substance considered under the attribute of thought. But this, so far, does not tell us very much. To consider what the mind is is to consider what it is for a man to understand something. It is not to consider the properties which some entity, forming part of the complete human being, must have if understanding something is to be possible. It would be better to say that it is to consider the nature of some activity of which men are capable. I want now to justify that description of how Spinoza conceives this matter. In the first place, as we have already seen, to think in terms of notions like ‘entity’ is to think confusedly. But, in the second place, to think is to have the idea of something. This is Spinoza’s way of saying that thought must have an object; to think is always to think about something. The idea which someone has in thinking about something is not itself the object of his thought. It is not even a component of the thought or the medium of his thought. It is his thinking about whatever it is he is thinking about. For this reason Spinoza regards as radically misconceived from the outset the Cartesian project of trying to find some ‘marks’ (clarity and distinctness) which ideas have by which 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 EIIp10s; Elw 90/​C 1:455.

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we can ascertain whether such ideas are true or not; or of trying to find some guarantee that things are as our ideas of them portray them to be.9 ‘An idea […] is a mode of thinking –​namely, the very act of understanding.’10 Now Spinoza also says that a man’s mind is the idea of his body.11 I will consider later what this puzzling doctrine means and why Spinoza holds it. Here I simply want to put it alongside Spinoza’s account of what an idea is. The outcome of this operation is the doctrine that a man’s mind is not an entity correlated in some way with another entity –​his body –​but rather the way in which he understands his body. That is, a man’s mind is a certain sort of activity  –​the activity of understanding  –​and the object of that activity is his body. It follows that, for Spinoza, the problem of ‘the relation between mind and body’ (though, as we shall shortly see, this must be for him a mis-​statement of the problem) is identical with the problem of how an idea is related to its object. In other words, for Spinoza the question of what the mind is is identical with the question of what it is to think that something is the case. Now we must ask some questions about how Spinoza conceives the activity of understanding something. Everything which exists has relations with other things that exist; and to understand any existing thing is to understand its relations with other existing things.12 The overall category under which such relations fall is that of ‘cause’ (about which, of course, much needs to be said which I cannot say here; I will only note that we must guard against thinking of this category in a Humean sort of way). Extended things are related only to other extended things; we can understand something extended only by becoming aware of its causal relations with other things that are extended. Nothing extended is causally related with anything non-​extended; and in particular not with ideas. Indeed, we must not speak of extended things being ‘related to’ ideas in any way at all. An idea is one and the same ‘thing’ as its ideatum.13

  9 PW: EIIp43s (Elw 115/​C 1:479–​80). Compare also Spinoza’s critique of the Cartesian idea that a judgement involves an act of will by which ideas are put into relation with each other. And compare Frege’s and Wittgenstein’s view that a name has meaning only in the context of a proposition (see Gottlob Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953, pp. x, 71, 73, 116; TLP 3.3). 10 EIIp43s; Elw 115/​C 1:479. 11 See EIIp13; C 1:457. 12 PW: Furthermore, everything that exists is related to everything else that exists; and to understand anything completely would be to understand all its relations with everything else. But we’ll leave this important and difficult addition aside for the time being. 13 PW: Where ‘thing’ here means ‘mode of substance’.

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How is this to be understood? I think that part of what Spinoza has in mind is the following: that the identity of a given idea can only be specified by identifying its object. If I think that Peter is taller than Paul, then that identifies my thought; and if Peter is taller than Paul, then that very fact, which Spinoza would regard as a mode of extension, is what my thought was a thought of, not something similar to, nor something having any sort of relation to, the content of my thought, but the very content of my thought. This, of course, leads Spinoza, as anyone who thinks about such matters must be led, to the problem of how a thought may be false. And his answer is that to say that a thought is false is not to say anything positive about the thought at all. Falsity is mere negation. Any thought, insofar as it is a thought, is true. If it is an adequate thought (idea), then its truth will be evident from its very nature; but insofar as it is inadequate, thus far its precise nature will not be clear –​we shall not, in other words, be in a position to say precisely what idea it is. It can thus be seen that Spinoza runs together the conceptions of truth and meaning. How vicious this running together is or is not cannot well be considered in isolation, because it hangs closely together with his view that everything that is true is necessarily true, that nothing is contingent in the nature of things, but that things only appear contingent to us because of our ignorance, which is to say: because of the inadequacy of our ideas. Before I  pass on, let me mention another important ramification of Spinoza’s conception of idea and ideatum. I  have said that a thought can be identified only as the thought of a given ideatum. But conversely a given ideatum can only be identified through a thought of it. To identify an object is to have a thought of it. I think it must be some such consideration as this which leads Spinoza to say, not merely that for every idea there is something extended which is its ideatum but also for every extended thing there is an idea of which it is the ideatum.14 He puts this by saying that for every extended mode there is an idea in the infinite intellect of  God. Now this may sound bizarre. We may feel unhappy about certain aspects of its converse  –​that there is something extended corresponding to every thought of something extended; but at least that doesn’t sound as mad as perhaps the other does. Especially not if it is made clear that the precise nature of the extended thing corresponding to it may not be evident from the nature of the idea considered by itself (if, that is, it is inadequate). But what sense can be given to the view that nothing extended exists of which an idea does not also exist? I think the movement of Spinoza’s thought must be something like this:

14 EIIp13s; C 1:458.

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1 . Everything that exists can be understood. 2. To say that something is understood is to say that there is an adequate idea of  it. 3. Of everything that exists there can be an adequate idea. 4. But what can be the case is the case. If it seems to us otherwise that is because we do not have an adequate idea of what is and is not possible; we do not see that what seems to us possible is in fact prevented from being so by some factor of which we are not aware. 5. Therefore, of everything that exists there is an adequate idea. As for the interpretation of Spinoza’s view, perhaps he is saying something like this: A genuine thought must make some sense. Whether it makes sense or not does not depend on any arbitrary ‘act of will’ on the part of him who thinks it, but on the nature of things. So a man who thinks an intelligible thought, thinks something that is intelligible quite apart from the fact that then he happens to think it. So far this seems to me acceptable. What we may find questionable is the further claim that such a thought must exist apart from its being thought by any particular man. But what is questionable about this seems to me to be in the first place its meaning rather than its truth. The question seems to be what ‘mode of existence’ should be ascribed to thoughts un-​thought by any human being. This is a question about the relation between the concept of a thought as, for example, Frege15 understood it, and the concept of a thought as what some would want to call perhaps a ‘psychic episode’. I’m not happy with that last phrase, though perhaps most people will be. Anyway, I leave this question open. I turn now to another consequence of Spinoza’s conception of the relation between idea and ideatum. I’ve already noted that there cannot be any causal relations between these and this, of course, has consequences for both sides of the distinction. Just as anything that falls under the attribute of extension can only be explained in terms of something else which falls under the same attribute, so any thought can only be explained by reference to other thoughts. It would be a mistake to dismiss this doctrine out of hand with a muttered ‘Coherence Theory of Truth’; understood in a certain way it seems to me entirely acceptable. A thought can be criticised only by its being thought about. This is not to deny, of course, that such criticism may take the form of testing this thought against the facts. But it is not as though the mere physical occurrences do the work of criticism on their own; what is required is some 15 See, e.g., Gottlob Frege, ‘Logic’, in his Posthumous Writings, ed. Hans Hermes et  al., transl. Peter Long and Roger White’. Oxford:  Basil Blackwell, 1979, 126–​51, 131, 144–​45.

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idea of what the facts are and we must remember that on Spinoza’s (correct) view an idea always does have an ideatum; that is, it always is an idea of what the facts are. If there are difficulties in Spinoza’s view, as of course there are (though it is not alone in this), they must be sought in his account of what it is to have an idea of what the facts are, that is, in his account of the connection between idea and ideatum. And this requires that we now turn to what he says about the way we are to understand what it is for a man to consist of both mind and body. As we have seen, the only sort of connection between anything mental and anything physical is that of idea to ideatum and this is not any sort of causal relation, nor indeed any sort of relation at all, but an identity. So mind is to body as idea is to ideatum, which is to say that the two are identical though conceived under two distinct attributes. This seems to imply that all a man’s ideas are ideas of his own body, which does not seem to be true. Spinoza’s reasons for talking in this way of course have to do with his account of what we might call the physical conditions of perception: any idea which a man has is associated with some physical modification of his body. Suppose we accept this bit of science fiction crystal-​gazing (and I’m not just thinking of Spinoza), it still will not follow, of course, that the idea in question is the idea of the physical modification of the man’s body with which it is associated. And indeed I cannot help thinking that Spinoza is just confused in speaking in this way. However, the consequences of this way of talking may not be as immediately unpalatable as one would first be inclined to think. Spinoza is not committed to the doctrine that a man cannot know anything besides his own body, for he holds that a knowledge of one’s own body and its modifications already involves a knowledge (more or less confused and inadequate) of those modifications of other bodies which are responsible for it. If Paul’s body has been affected by Peter’s body, then Paul has an idea answering to that modification in his own body, but also, by the same token, answering to the way in which it has been affected by Peter’s body and therefore to the modification in Peter’s body responsible for so affecting it. So, Spinoza says, ‘we clearly understand what is the difference between the idea, say, of Peter which constitutes the essence of Peter’s mind, and the idea of the said Peter, which is in another man, say, Paul’.16 It goes without saying that there are numerous difficulties here which remain to be picked over. I shall, however, leave the picking over of most of them and concentrate on what seems to me the major difficulty which Spinoza faces in the context of his overall project, which, as I indicated at the outset, must be taken into account if we really want to understand what Spinoza is

16 EIIp17s; Elw 99/​C 1:464–​65.

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getting at. What Spinoza wishes above all to emphasise throughout the Ethics, and not least in Part II, is the place of the human body in an infinite natural order; its total dependence, in respect of both its origin and its continued functioning, on external physical conditions over which it has no control. The appearance of control created by the existence of technology and the like is itself, on Spinoza’s view, a sort of illusion, arising out of the failure to see that the possibility of such a technology depends entirely on a system of natural laws which are what they are quite independently of any wishes which men may have. Moreover, since the human mind simply is the idea of the human body, it in its turn is in just the same way dependent on an infinite natural order transcending it as is the body itself. From which it follows that the wishes, aims, passions and thoughts of the mind are themselves only to a quite infinitesimal extent due to the nature of that mind considered in isolation; they are caused, rather, by the place which that mind occupies in the total order of nature –​a place which exactly mirrors the place occupied by the body in the total order of nature. It is this inescapable situation that Spinoza calls ‘human bondage’. But his account of human bondage is given for the purpose of explaining the possibility of what he calls ‘human freedom’. This latter, of course, does not consist in a man’s freeing his mind and his body from dependence on the order of nature –​such an idea does not make sense. It consists rather in a man’s coming to understand his total dependence. Naturally, one question which needs to be asked here is whether it is not misleading to call such an understanding by the name ‘freedom’. But two prior questions concern (a) what sort of ‘necessity’ is here in question and what the understanding of it would consist in; and (b) how, on Spinoza’s own presuppositions, such an understanding can be thought of as possible of attainment. From lack of time I shall deal only, and that only sketchily, with question (b). The problem is this: The human body, and therefore the human mind also, is ineluctably rooted to a particular perspective in time and space. But even to say that seems to involve occupying a position from which particular perspectives can be viewed and compared. What could such a position amount to and how could a man ever arrive at it if his position in the world is what Spinoza depicts it to be? There seem to me to be two routes which Spinoza follows in dealing with this problem, neither of which I properly understand. The first of these routes is indicated in Part II of the Ethics, the second elaborated mainly in Part IV. P38. Those things, which are common to all, and which are equally in the part and in the whole, cannot be conceived except adequately. P39. That, which is common to and a property of the human body and such other bodies as are wont to affect the human body, and which is present

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equally in each part of either, or in the whole, will be represented by an adequate idea in the mind. P40. Whatsoever ideas in the mind follow from ideas which are therein adequate, are also themselves adequate.17 Spinoza here clearly has in mind the possibility of such sciences as geometry and physics. These yield ‘common notions’, ideas which are not tied to any one perspective in particular. He is trying to show how such sciences are possible.18 Let me put my difficulty in the following, very unsatisfactory, way (I do feel very much at sea here): It is not just the human body which has geometrical and physical properties in common with other bodies; and not just the human mind which therefore has ideas of these properties. The same holds good for the bodies and minds of horses too, for example. But horses are not capable of developing the sciences of geometry and physics. Wherein lies the difference? Spinoza would say, I  suppose, that it lies in the greater internal complexity of organisation of the human body and the consequent greater complexity of its reactions to external influences. But this will hardly give him what he needs. For however complex a body’s reactions to its environment, they will still be reactions of this body, at this time and in this place, to this immediate environment. If this is all there is to say, then the greater complexity would seem to lead to greater confusion –​of the sort portrayed by Spinoza in his critique of ‘transcendental’ terms like ‘Being, Thing, Something’19 and universal terms –​rather than to greater clarity. Greater complexity of involvement in an environment will not in itself lead to the possibility of transcending the perspective of that environment; it seems more correct to say that it will simply provide more and more fetters chaining it to that perspective. So I just do not know how Spinoza’s use of the doctrine of ‘common notions’ is supposed to help him. Spinoza’s second route lies through the notion of ‘the idea of an idea’. A particular idea is the idea of a particular ideatum. As long as it is the idea only of a particular bodily ideatum, it is necessarily inadequate. But it is also possible for a man to form a higher-​order idea of that ideatum and it will be related to the first-​order idea in just the same way as the latter is related to its bodily ideatum. The idea of an idea will be an idea of how its (mental) 17 EIIp38-​40; Elw 109–​11/​C 1:474–​75. 18 PW:  I do not consider here the important question of whether, given that Spinoza could demonstrate their possibility convincingly, this would suffice as a basis for the sort of understanding of ‘necessity’ with which he is really concerned: on which see Rush Rhees, Without Answers. London: Routledge, 1969, 18. 19 EIIp40s1; C 1:476.

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ideatum is related to its (bodily) ideatum; so it is something of which the ideas expressed in Part II of the Ethics give us an example. Spinoza thinks that a man can form an adequate idea of his ideas (why I am not quite sure, but I will leave this). But the idea of an idea cannot be differentiated in any way from its object; for they are both one and the same mode of substance conceived under one and the same attribute. Therefore to say that I  have formed an adequate idea of one of my ideas is to say that that (ideal) ideatum has become adequate. Hence it is possible for inadequate ideas to become adequate. Now this argument seems to me quite clearly a piece of legerdemain. Either the idea of an idea can be differentiated from its object or it cannot. If it cannot, then the two are identical in absolutely every respect; that is, they are not two but one. (This is an argument which Spinoza himself relies on heavily in his discussion of substance in Part I.) In that case, if the object idea is inadequate, then the idea of it must be inadequate also. On the other hand, if they can be differentiated, they are not one but two. And if I have an adequate idea of an inadequate idea, then the second remains inadequate. I do not see how (and Spinoza does not assert this) the two would become one simply by virtue of the one becoming adequate; so the inadequacy of the other would not be affected. So there is a dilemma. The horn which Spinoza must embrace is clearly the first one; for his doctrine of substance, attributes and modes precludes him from saying that any real distinction can be drawn between the idea of an idea and the idea which is its object. But in that case, as I have tried to show, he has not in any way shown how an idea which starts by being inadequate can become adequate. The difficulty Spinoza has here is one which many philosophers have had to face, coming at it from different directions. It is the difficulty of showing what philosophy is, whether it is possible and whether, if it is possible, it can do other than ‘leave everything as it is’.20 Let’s return to the question of the relation between mind and body. I want to elaborate on Spinoza’s view in a little more detail, focusing in particular on how the notion of ‘the body’ is to be understood. Since the mind is the idea of the body (the objective essence of the mind is to be a representation of the body; mind and body are one and the same mode under different attributes), this complexity in the body will be duplicated in the mind. (‘Duplicated’ may be the wrong word here, perhaps ‘manifested’ is better?) That is, to spell this out, the mind must be conceived as a system of ideas in an equilibrium which both depends on and is constantly threatened by the other systems of ideas

20 PI §124.

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with which it is in interrelation. These interdependencies will of course correspond exactly to the interdependencies between bodies, that is, the ideas with which the idea(s) constituting a given human mind are in interaction themselves have bodies as their objects; and their formation and development therefore exactly corresponds to the modifications produced in their (bodily) ideata by their interaction. We now have enough to sketch what is an individual mind’s ability to have knowledge and understanding of things (bodies) outside its own body. As the body interacts with other bodies so the mind interacts with other (systems of) ideas, the ideata of which are those very bodies with which that body is interacting. So that the mind is the idea of the body in so far as it is affected by the other bodies with which it interacts. And again, the mind can have knowledge and understanding of bodies other than its own ideatum only in so far as those other bodies affect its ideatum.21 And note Part II Proposition 19:  ‘The human Mind does not know the human Body itself, nor does it know that it exists, except through ideas of affections by which the Body is affected.’22 Consider some examples. Yesterday I read in the newspaper that a British actor, Harry Andrews, just died.23 How is my knowledge of this (my idea) related to its ideatum? On the ‘physical’ side there is (I assume –​and remember this interpolation!) a causal process leading from the deathbed to my seeing certain words in the New York Times. So my body is affected by those physical occurrences via that chain of intermediaries. What about the ‘mental’ side? Spinoza would say that I have an idea the object of which is a modification of my own body as affected by those other bodies in interaction with it. So the nature of my body and that of those others are involved in the object of my idea. Now what is the mental counterpart of the presumed physical causal process? It is important here that we are dealing with a case of (at least presumed) knowledge. It isn’t merely that I  have certain images before my mind’s eye. And this means that I think I am justified in believing in Andrews’s death. If I am asked what justifies this, I would probably tell a long story about how newspapers are run, the technology of information transmission, the reliability of New York Times staff and so on.24

21 PW: EIIp16: ‘The idea of any mode in which the human Body is affected by external bodies must involve the nature of the human Body and at the same time the nature of the external body’ (C 1:463). 22 C 1: 466. 23 Harry Andrews died on 6 March 1989. 24 PW: Hume spells out an account like this in the Treatise. (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-​Bigge. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1978, 1.3.4.)

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Spinoza’s point about the nature of my own body being involved in this, too, can be brought out by a different example. Two people, A and B, go to a lecture on birds. A is bored and unaffected; B fascinated –​he starts reading books on birds, buys equipment, goes birdwatching, starts writing books and articles about birds himself. Let’s start at the beginning. A and B were bodily in the lecture hall and their bodies were affected by the sound waves produced by the lecturer’s vocal chords. We can also say that A and B were listening to the lecture; that in B’s, but not A’s case, new thoughts were stimulated. I have expressed the ‘physical’ side of the matter in terms suggesting physiology. But we can also draw attention to the differences between A’s and B’s respective behaviours. Their postures were different and the expressions on their faces. They emitted different sounds. Afterwards the patterns of their movements were different. A difficulty we are in here is that much of what is included under ‘behaviour’ is described in what we should think of as psychological terms. But Spinoza has to think of the distinction between these two kinds of description of behaviour as confusion. This points to a difference in the concept of a ‘bodily process’ as this expression is applied in psychological and behavioural contexts. The way he thinks about this is mirrored by Hobbes’s talk of the ‘small beginnings of motion’ within the body in terms of which he defines terms like ‘intention’.25 The conceptual, grammatical difference is concealed; we are offered a picture of a continuous physical process which has different phases. Let’s ask another question: What do the physical events which take place in the lecture hall and so on have to do with birds? Spinoza’s picture is of a long causal process having birds at its beginning and at its end, as it were. A process like that of the bees’ honey dance, but much more complicated. However, we have to remember again that we are concerned here with justification, not just any old causal process.26 According to Spinoza, my ‘idea’ must have the same multiplicity (the expression is Wittgenstein’s27) as the physical process that is its counterpart.28 But how are we to understand this? It’s not as though the thoughts I  have about the causal process involved have as their objects the actual events that

25 See c­ hapter 6 of Hobbes’s Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 33–​34. 26 PW: These difficulties have of course reappeared in recent attempts to develop a ‘naturalistic’ epistemology. (See Willard Van Orman Quine, ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1969, 69–​90.) 27 See TLP 4.04. 28 EIIp15dem; C 1:463.

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took place between Andrews’s death and my reading of it. For the most part the source of my ideas is quite different.29 There are very different ‘systems of motion-​and-​rest’ involved in the identity of the human body. This diversity gives rise to the possibility of two quite radically different interpretations of Spinoza’s account of the relation between mind and body. On the received view, the ‘correspondence’ of mind and body is to be understood physiologically. Cf. Bennett’s ‘doctrine that there is a one-​ one relation correlating mental items with physical ones, mapping similarities onto similarities and causal chains onto causal chains. If x is a physical item, then the correlated mental item is what Spinoza calls ‘the idea of  x’ ”30 But remember that not only is the mind the idea of the human body, but the body is the ideatum of the human mind. So let us ask: What goes into the conception someone has of him/​herself ? Clearly, the body in the narrow sense is important to this, but does not by any means exhaust it. And this opens up the possibility of a different interpretation of Spinoza, on which no priority is given to either the physiological or the mental. For instance, Ethics Part II, Proposition 13 does not explain the mind in terms of the body but, if anything, vice versa.31 Because the body is infinitely inferior in power to the rest of nature, its influence on the order in which it interacts with external things will be minuscule. This is very important for Spinoza’s methodology. Correspondingly, the ideas formed in the mind will, in the main, not be due to the mind’s own activity. They will be formed very unsystematically. This is central to Spinoza’s account of the fragmentary, confused and inadequate nature of ideas belonging to the imagination. This is mirrored in our ordinary language: ‘Universal notions’ are put together arbitrarily and will involve quite different associations in the case of different individuals.32 It’s important to remember this in connection with certain objections one may have about many of his claims, for example, concerning the nature of the human body or concerning the definitions of the emotions. So, on this rival understanding of Spinoza’s picture, we cannot ask about the relation between mind and body before we grasp what it is that is meant by ‘the body’; and an individual’s body is, on investigation, going to become an indiscernible element within the greater nexus of causes. 29 PW: And while I think I ‘know’ these, ask yourselves how much of it I really do know from my own experience. See Wittgenstein’s On Certainty for a brilliant treatment of such questions. 30 Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics. Indianapolis: Hackett: 1984, p.127. 31 C 1:457. 32 EIIp40s1; C 1:476–​77.

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One needs to ask, though, how the point about ‘different associations’ is related to meaning. Spinoza does not pay much attention to education. Language is learned; this learning involves children and adults responding to each other ‘as persons’, that is, in ways hardly assimilable to responses to other things in nature. That point is indeed incompatible with Spinoza’s outlook. It is an aspect of his failure to appreciate the differences between activities. The point is also crucial to his account of ‘human bondage’. See the preface to Part III.33 This is also connected with Spinoza’s rejection of free will.34 There is nothing in the human mind save the ideas it has of its own body; no superior faculty of manipulating these ideas. The way in which ideas ‘behave’ depends, like everything else, on causes whose operation is necessary. (Adequate ideas follow from adequate ideas and inadequate from inadequate.) Therefore, I  shall treat the nature and powers of the Affects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same Method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies.35

So the possibility of clarification has to be found in one of three places: in the nature of the ideas themselves (the ‘given true idea’); or in the ‘common notions’ (the idea ideae); or in the concept of ‘conatus’, the mind’s natural tendency towards adequate ideas.36 I  have already mentioned the first two of these; later I will discuss the third. Earlier I introduced the phrase that Spinoza uses in connection with the human body. He says that ‘the human mind is the idea of the human body’ –​ a particular human body –​and the issue I want to address is how we are to understand that. The position that is being argued for in Part I of the Ethics, is that we can’t think of mind and body as two distinct substances. That’s an impossibility deriving from the very conception of substance. Spinoza’s alternative formulation is to say that both mind and body are finite modes of substance conceived under the attributes of thought and extension, respectively.37

33 PW: Activity & passivity is closely related to adequacy and inadequacy; and this latter distinction depends on the extent to which one’s concepts are formed by oneself. In this Spinoza is still a Cartesian. 34 We will return to this later –​cf. this volume, 89–90. 35 EIIIpref; C 1:492. 36 See EIIIp6–​7 and EIVp26; C 1:498–​99 and 559. 37 PW: When I use the phrase ‘mind and body’ here I mean a particular human mind and a particular human body.

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Or, more exactly, a given mind and a given body are one and the same mode of substance, conceived under those two different attributes. We have to remember that every mode of substance manifests itself, on Spinoza’s view, in all the attributes of substance. So, if an individual human body is treated as a single mode of substance, there is an individual idea which is the idea of that body. And this is the mind of the man whose body is in question. So a human being has to be thought of as a particular finite mode of substance conceived under both these attributes. He’s not a union of two substances. So, in that sense, Spinoza thinks of a human being as potentially a unity in a way Descartes doesn’t. This explains Spinoza’s extended polemical discussion against one of the positions Descartes has about the relation between mind and body.38 This is Descartes’s account in the Treatise of Man where he introduces the theory of the pineal gland as the seat of the mind, as it were the point of interaction between mind and body.39 Spinoza encourages us really to look further –​at the whole idea of interaction –​to see, here, that there is no common denominator, there’s no comparison possible between the power of the mind and the strength of the body. Consequently, one cannot in any way be determined by the strength of the other. The whole purpose of the theory of the pineal gland was based on the idea that there can be determination of the mind by the will, and Spinoza spends quite a bit of time lampooning this idea. Let’s take this formula, that ‘a human mind is the idea of a particular human body’. The first thing to remember in interpreting the formula is that, for Spinoza, an idea or a thought is not something passive.40 For him, an idea is the very activity of thinking or understanding. Now, if one applies that conception of an idea to this formula that ‘the mind is the idea of a human body’, the view is suggested that we ought to regard the human mind not as any sort of entity but as a certain sort of activity –​namely, the very activity of thinking or understanding. That’s to say:  the leading thought in Spinoza is that the human mind isn’t something which thinks or understands, but the very activity of thinking or understanding. It’s for this reason that, for him, the problem of the so-​called relation between mind and body is misstated, because to speak of a relation between mind and body suggests that one really is thinking in terms of a relation between things, 38 EIIIpref; C 1:491–​92. 39 CSM 1:99–​108. 40 PW: It shouldn’t be regarded as in any sense a sort of entity. It’s worth mentioning in that connection that in any case Spinoza discourages the use of words like ‘entity’ –​ quite rightly, in my opinion. He thinks it’s a word which tends to express a confused idea, a sort of mish-​mash of arbitrary impressions belonging to the imagination.

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and that is not how we ought to conceive the matter at all. But the problem, anyway, that’s traditionally phrased in that way, is for him identical with the problem of the relation between thought and its objects. However, if we hold that the mind is a certain sort of activity, then it looks as if a problem at once suggests itself, namely:  What is it an activity of ? Grammatically, it looks as though you can’t speak of an activity unless you’ve got some conception of something which performs this activity. Descartes was following that grammatical suggestion when he identified the mind as a thinking substance –​a substance which thinks. If we ask the question in the context of Spinoza’s philosophy, ‘What is thinking an activity of ?’, it’s clear we can’t say it’s an activity of the mind, since the whole point is that the mind is being identified with the activity. And we can hardly say that it’s an activity of the body, because to put it like that would seem to involve an illegitimate mixing together of two distinct attributes, the attributes of thought and extension. One of Spinoza’s leading thoughts of course being, as we’ve already seen, that anything or any event conceived under one particular attribute must be understood and explained only in terms belonging to that attribute, so that you can’t give a physical explanation of anything mental, or vice versa. I think, as a matter of fact, that this question finds a fairly easy formal answer in Spinoza (the question what is thinking an activity of): at the level of human beings, one can say thinking is an activity of human beings. And human beings are, remember, finite modes of substance conceived under two attributes. Or, putting the matter in the context of Spinoza’s whole picture of things, one could say:  thinking is an activity of substance. And when we speak of the thinking of a human being, we are of course speaking of substance considered as finitely modified. We are considering a man as a finite mode of substance. Anyway, whatever one thinks of that formulation, I think it has this merit, that it does discourage us from thinking in terms of everyday notions of mind and body as, as it were, distinct entities. Because it’s precisely that which, Spinoza is arguing, gives rise to trouble. The next question I want to ask is: if we think of thinking –​of the mind –​ as a sort of activity, and if we say that its object is a particular human body, the question then is: How are we to think of this activity as being of the body, that is, in what sense is the body its object? We start with the formula that the human mind is the idea of a particular human body. I’m now suggesting that in speaking of the mind as the idea of a particular human body, Spinoza is thinking of the mind as a form of activity rather than as an entity. The question is: how is this activity supposed to be related to the body? Put it this way: how are we to read the phrase ‘an idea of the human body’? In what sense is the human body the object of this activity?

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Now, at this point, it does seem to me that Spinoza conflates a large number of really quite different cases. But I’ll try to approach it by following his own order of exposition. So let me ask a different question, as Spinoza does, namely:  What do we understand by a particular human body? What is it of which we’re here asking –​in what sense is it the object of the activity of thinking that constitutes the human mind? What does the identity of the human body consist in? This question is raised very early on in Part II of the Ethics, in Proposition 13.41 It’s a question to which he gives quite extensive treatment. I  want to emphasise again how striking this is, that the Book is called ‘Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind’ and it virtually starts off with a very detailed discussion of the nature of the human body. Here, again, I want to avoid getting bogged down in details except insofar as the details are necessary to understand what’s going on. I said that Spinoza has a conception of human thought as activity. And his conception of the identity of the body mirrors that insofar as what constitutes a given human body as that body, and in particular what the identity of that body through time consists in, is not an identity of material constituents at all. It’s rather the maintenance of a certain balance of physical forces. The identity of the human body is (you could say) the identity of a sort of dynamic mechanical system, a system the material parts of which can and do change over time without affecting the identity of the body. I remember I used to be taught as a child that all the material parts of my body change once about every seven years –​whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but they clearly do change, quite a lot. Our conception of a living human body as the same body over a time clearly doesn’t actually depend on its actually consisting of the same material stuff all the time. As Spinoza himself puts it, the human body is a system which maintains a constant proportion within itself of motion and rest. I take that to mean:  it’s a system which has a sort of dynamic unity. Spinoza spells out what he means by that in some detail in the development of Proposition 13, where he emphasises that the human body consists of an enormously complex variety of subsystems, each of which in its turn has a certain sort of dynamic unity. And they all hang together in a complex equilibrium. What he’s thinking of here clearly (it seems to me clearly) are physical systems like circulation of the blood, the respiratory system, the alimentary system, the muscular system, the bone structure, the nervous system, and so on. Now this account also emphasises the (again very various and very complex) interdependence of the system that constitutes a given human body with the rest of extended nature outside it. That is to say, a human body is, of its

41 C 1:457–​62.

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nature, in constant interaction with its environment. It requires external things for its maintenance, for the maintenance of its peculiar equilibrium in all sorts of ways, clearly: air to breathe, food to eat. In other contexts, of course, it’s dependent on its place in a gravitational system. So when astronauts blast into space they suffer from space sickness, for instance. It requires external things for its maintenance in those sorts of ways. And also, of course, just as importantly, the human body modifies external things itself, by acting on them. Now that general picture, of a system comprising a wide variety of interdependent subsystems, which maintains its fundamental dynamic harmony while yet interacting with the external environment, is used by Spinoza as the basis of his account of the mind and its relation to the body. So that, for a start, the complexity of the body, which I just suggested will be mirrored in the mind, will have its exact counterpart in the mind. The mind will have the same degree of and the same sort of complexity as the body which is its object. So instead of speaking of the mind as the idea of the body, we might think of it in terms of a very complex, dynamic organisation of ideas, mirroring the parts and the internal dynamic complexities of the body. To speak of the idea of the human body may again suggest that the unity is a sort of entity, and that’s not what’s in question here. The unity that’s in question in his account of the mind is the whole system of ideas. And, furthermore, just as the individual human body depends on, is affected by and also affects things outside it, so does the mind. An individual human mind is as interactive with what is outside it as is the body. Here remember that by ‘what is outside it’ we mustn’t mean extended nature or anything bodily, because it is part of the requirement of the whole system of thought that we can only speak of what is psychological in relation to what is psychological, or (if you like) mental in relation to what is mental. If one speaks of an individual human mind as in interaction with its environment, its environment is an environment of ideas. And those (if I can put it this way) external ideas, ideas (that is to say) external to a particular mind, those ideas with which it is in connection, of course also have objects. That is to say, they are ideas of certain physical things, physical modes –​so that this begins to give some picture of how one is to conceive an individual mind’s ability to have knowledge of and understanding of things outside the particular body of which it is, formally speaking, the idea. In this way, a given body interacts with physical things around it –​the mind, which is the mind of that body, interacts with other ideas, ideas namely of those very physical things with which that body is interacting. The ideas that constitute my mind and which reflect what is happening in my body, also reflect those other physical events which are interactions of other things with my body. I put that very clumsily –​let’s try again. The ideas that constitute my mind, being reflections of what goes on in my body, are at the same time reflections

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of what has caused those events in my body, where the events in my body are caused by things external to my body. So the picture here is that the ideas that I have are all, in a sense, necessarily ideas of my body, but ideas of my body in its interaction with other bodies. So that we can speak here of me, my mind, having awareness of things outside my body, insofar as my body is in interaction with those other things. Spinoza has been compared with ‘central state materialists’42 who believe that mental ‘items’ are ‘contingently identical’ with bodily items (brain states). And there are points of similarity. However, there are also important points of difference. 1. Obviously, the metaphysics of substance, attribute and mode is peculiar to Spinoza and is essential to his whole picture –​in particular, it’s essential to what he does with his account of mind and body in his treatment of ‘human bondage’, ‘human freedom’ and ‘the intellectual love of  God’. 2. Unlike central state materialists, Spinoza doesn’t give any special primacy to the physical. Officially, different attributes are metaphysically on a level: they express the reality of substance equally. If there is any bias, Spinoza’s is in the opposite direction: that of the primacy of thought. (I’ve already commented on a discernable drift towards idealism.) Also, the concentration is all on the mind in what he says about human freedom –​ though he never forgets the intimate union of mind and body. 3. Spinoza doesn’t talk about ‘contingent identity’. He would reject this way of talking as a confusion, I think, and would be more likely to agree with Saul Kripke that, metaphysically speaking rather than epistemologically speaking, identity statements can only be necessary.43 Because everything is necessary, contingency always involves lack of knowledge. This account is developed in the subsidiary argument attached to Proposition 13 of Part II, which issues in 5 Postulates.44 Thus, though the object of the idea(s) constituting the human mind is the body, it has access to other things outside the body insofar as those things act on the body. So the ideas I have of my body and what is happening in it (at least very often) are real ideas of my body as affected by other bodies. And even more importantly, the ideas I have of other things (outside my body) are 42 See Douglas Odegard, ‘The Body Identical with the Human Mind:  A Problem in Spinoza’s Philosophy’, Monist 55:4 (1971): 579–​601. 43 See Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980, 97–​105. 44 C 1:462.

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really ideas of those things only insofar as they affect my body. So perception of the external world will consist in awareness of things through the effects they have on my body (sense organs, nervous system, etc.) The account of memory and imagination follows from this. When external things act on my body they may leave more or less permanent marks on the body (traces), which persist after actual causal contact has ceased. In this way one can continue to have ideas of external bodies even in their absence. (Imagination.)45 Furthermore, if one has been affected by two or more bodies together or in succession, one’s body will be disposed subsequently such that their traces will continue to be associated in the same way. Correspondingly, ideas of the one will tend to be with the ideas of the others. (Memory.)46

45 EIIp17s; C 1:464–​65. 46 EIIp18s; C 1:465–​66.

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Chapter 5 THE EMOTIONS, GOOD AND EVIL I’d like now to discuss Spinoza’s account of the emotions as they relate to the topics that we have broached so far. The word ‘emotion’ is a somewhat controversial translation, I  suppose. The Latin is de affectibus or De origine et natura affectuum. That is sometimes rendered ‘affects’, but there really is no such word, so it doesn’t help very much. I think ‘On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions’ is alright, particularly in view of what Spinoza is doing in this Part. It doesn’t particularly matter if the notions which Spinoza discusses in this part don’t correspond precisely to what we would normally call emotions, because Spinoza’s aim, anyway, is not (and he explicitly says this) to give an account of what we ordinarily understand by the various terms that come under discussion. That’s to say, Spinoza’s interest isn’t in rendering explicit what we ordinarily understand either by the term ‘emotion’ or by the particular emotion terms which fall into that category. Thus, Spinoza’s attitude towards the emotions is in fact nuanced. One might be tempted to say that for Spinoza, the emotions are the manifestation of human confusion par excellence. That’s to say, the emotions precisely arise from the fact that men are subject to confused and inadequate ideas. But that is too quick. Emotions are only the manifestation of confusion insofar as we are considering what he calls ‘passive emotions’. Spinoza does recognise the existence of active emotions as well, and this is important. Although most of what he says in Part III has to do with emotions he would regard as passive, in part this a necessary propaedeutic for the shift from passivity to activity in the subject. Thus, he deploys terms in ways which are unusual but which remain closely enough rooted in our ordinary ways of speaking for them to have an elucidatory effect: I am aware that these terms are employed in senses somewhat different from those usually assigned. But my purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things. I therefore make use of such terms, as may convey my meaning without any violent departure from their ordinary signification.1

1 EIIIda20ex; Elw 178/​C 1:535–​36. PW: It occurs in the explanation of indignation (and possibly approbation).

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Still on the question of Spinoza’s aims in this Part, I’ve so far made a negative point. For a more positive point we ought to go back to the very beginning of the Essay on the Improvement of the Intellect, where Spinoza sets out his aim. I think it is okay to think of this aim as the same as that of the Ethics. He says: After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.2

So the aim of the whole investigation is precisely to find a way of thinking, and a way of living which would go with that way of thinking, which would free the mind from fears which are vain and futile. And not just fears, but any other emotion which is vain and futile. In general, I think that answers very well to what Part III of the Ethics is about. It’s an analysis of the forces operating in human life which stand in the way of achieving this aim of living in this way. Now, going on to relate the kind of treatment we get in Part III to what’s gone before, Parts I and II, I’d like to make the following point: that in Parts I and II we have combined into one account, on the one hand, an attempt to show what it is to understand anything at all, how anything at all is to be understood. One might put this perhaps by saying that we’re offered an account of the formal conditions of understanding in Parts I and II. But also, in the very same account, and as part of the same exposition, you might say, we are given hints at the kinds of obstacle which stand in the way of understanding. The whole apparatus of substance and attributes, and infinite and finite modes, itself points in the direction of the obstacles one is going to encounter in trying to reach the understanding, the general shape of which is set out in that system of concepts. That’s to say that, on the one hand, the central point that’s being made (especially in Part I) is that understanding involves seeing each individual thing and event in its relation to the whole, the whole face of nature. On the other hand, the account of man as a finite mode seems to make it virtually impossible that any man should be able to achieve that, simply because a man is a finite mode and therefore his view of things is necessarily fragmentary and therefore distorted.

2 TIE, Elw 3/​C 1:7.

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Now, let’s turn to the emotions discussed in Part III. The passive emotions represent the very mechanism of human bondage. Though perhaps that’s too weak a way of putting it –​it isn’t so much that the passive emotions are the mechanism of human bondage, but rather that subjection to the passive emotions is human bondage. See the following quotation: I think I have thus explained, and displayed through their primary causes the principal emotions and vacillations of spirit, which arise from the combination of the three primary emotions, to wit, desire, pleasure, and pain. It is evident from what I have said, that we are in many ways driven about by external causes, and that like waves of the sea driven by contrary winds we toss to and fro unwitting of the issue and of our fate.3

Now that somewhat purple passage (I mean purple in comparison with most of what Spinoza writes) is precisely a description of what Spinoza takes bondage to be. And the point to emphasise here is that this picture of man as ‘driven about by contrary winds’ arises directly out of Spinoza’s account of what the emotions are. You might say the account of the emotions isn’t so much a preparation for that picture, it is a picture of man as finding himself in this situation. So if the aim (as it was stated in that opening sentence of the De Emendatione that I quoted) is to escape from this bondage, it’s important for us both to understand the nature of the bonds and the route of escape that is open to us, if any. And of course that is offered in Part V. I’m not going to discuss that as yet, but one negative point about that does need to be made, namely that if there is any way of freeing oneself from this bondage, it isn’t to be found in any exercise of free will, because Spinoza has no use for that concept. He thinks there’s no such thing, that the phrase expresses an illusion, an illusion created by our ignorance of the causes of our own desires. In that respect, of course, his treatment of the notion of free will precisely parallels his treatment of the notion of contingency. Of course, the notions are closely connected. Furthermore, and this is a development of the same reason, if men are subject to emotions, it’s a feature of the natural order that they should be so. And our task, as Spinoza understands it, is simply to understand this situation, not to denounce it. That point is made very clearly right at the beginning of Part III, in the opening statement before the Definitions. He says he’ll consider human actions and desires ‘in exactly the same manner’ as our concern ‘with lines, planes and solids’.4 And he’s prefaced that by arguing that it’s absurd to speak of the human susceptibility to emotions as a flaw in human 3 EIIIp59s; Elw 172/​C 1:530. 4 EIIIpref; Elw 129/​C 1:492.

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nature because, he says, ‘nothing comes to pass in nature, which can be set down to a flaw therein’.5 That’s to say, if we’re concerned with nature, there’s no room for the notion of a flaw. We can only speak of a flaw in relation to some particular human purpose, because, as far as nature is concerned, things just are what they are, come about and pass away, according to the appropriate laws, and any notion of a defect or a flaw is just out of place in that sort of understanding of things: There should be one and the same method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature’s universal laws and rules. Thus the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from this same necessity and efficacy of nature; they answer to certain definite causes, through which they are understood, and possess certain properties as worthy of being known as the properties of anything else, whereof the contemplation in itself affords us delight.6

Next I want to say something about this distinction between passive and active, which is central to the whole treatment. These terms are actually defined in Definition 2 at the beginning of Part III: I say that we act when anything takes place, either within us or externally to us, whereof we are the adequate cause; that is (by the foregoing definition) when through our nature something takes place within us or externally to us, which can through our nature alone be clearly and distinctly understood. On the other hand, I say that we are passive as regards something when that something takes place within us, or follows from our nature externally, we being only the partial cause.7

So a person is said to be active when the matter which is under consideration –​ the process or whatever is the subject of our intention –​when what happens follows from causes which are within that man. Of course, the question then arises: When are we to say that a cause is within a man and when not? That question I’ll put to one side for a moment. Now the importance of this distinction, first of all, the general importance in the context of the whole enterprise, is that having dismissed any conception of free will as confused, the question is bound to arise: what room can there be for talk of freedom at all? And Spinoza’s answer to this is to try to 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 EIIId2; Elw 129/​C 1:493.

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give an account which doesn’t involve freedom from causality, but which is stated in terms of causality. So that to act freely here, or to be active, to act, as distinct from being acted upon, is not to be independent of relations of cause and effect –​because that is just meaningless; it is rather to have the causes of what occurs lie entirely within oneself. In the realm of thought, this distinction between being active and being passive precisely parallels –​indeed, one could say is identical with –​the distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas. Spinoza characterises inadequate ideas as ‘conclusions without premises’.8 So a person has inadequate ideas insofar as the grounds from which these ideas follow are not available to him –​not available to him in the sense that he’s not conscious of them. And now, the thought goes, if I have an idea the grounds of which aren’t present in my consciousness, then the grounds for this idea, my reasons for having it, lie outside me. They lie outside my mind, and therefore, applying the explanation of the distinction between being active and being passive, I am passive in respect of having this idea. The idea, as it were, is imposed on me by something of which I am not aware. Putting it differently, not everything which is necessary to the understanding of the idea in question is available to me. That is because, again, I am a finite mode, I am only a fragment of the divine intellect. Now, of course, Spinoza seems also committed to saying that where my ideas are in this way inadequate, there will be something corresponding to my mind’s passivity in the causation of my body’s movements. Now one may ask how that’s to be understood. Well, I’m sure that there are many different possible cases here, some of which would be much less plausibly fittable into this general schema than others. An example of a case that might seem to fit what Spinoza’s saying might be the behaviour of someone in a building that’s on fire, who panics. On the mental side, his panic is manifested in an inability to think clearly about what the precise danger is and what the best ways of escaping from it are. And on the bodily side, this –​his panic –​will express itself in an aimless rushing around which does not express or manifest any coherent policy on the part of the person in question. I won’t here try to present other examples that would cause greater difficulties for Spinoza’s account, though such examples can be found. And there’s rather a lot more to talk about here. Let’s move on to ask what more is required for the concept of the emotions. Spinoza’s answer to that is that we need the three notions of pleasure, pain and desire. And he says, roundly, in the Note to Proposition 11, that beyond these three –​namely pleasure, pain and desire –​‘I recognise no other primary

8 EIIp28dem; C 1:470.

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emotion’.9 So the account of the various individual emotions that follows is supposed to be all in terms of (as it were: constructed out of) these materials (pleasure, pain, desire), using also those distinctions that have been discussed previously –​in particular the distinction between activity and passivity, and between adequate and inadequate ideas. First, let’s say something about the notion of desire. Spinoza ties this concept to very central features of his whole account of things,10 because desire is almost synonymous with what I  have called ‘endeavour’. The Latin for this is conatus. And it’s common in the literature on Spinoza to use that Latin term conatus in discussing his view. I’d like to draw your attention especially to Proposition 7: ‘The endeavour (conatus), wherewith everything endeavours (conatur) to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.’11 So endeavour isn’t (as it were) something which something happens to have; it is the very nature of the thing in question. Although, of course, to say that is to take a very particular view of what it is for something to have a nature or an essence. I think we might read Spinoza as thinking of a thing’s essence as a sort of affirmation of its own existence. An affirmation which (as it were) will prevail, that’s to say, the thing will exist, unless (as it were) it’s contradicted by something else. So, insofar as we have an idea of something which doesn’t exist, the non-​existence of this will be due to the fact that something is preventing it from existing. The idea is that there is in any essence of a thing a presumption of existence. And of course –​a fortiori I suppose it would be –​if anything does exist, then it will go on existing until something stops it, until something destroys it. This, incidentally, one might connect up with the idea that substance necessarily exists, because the point here is that there is nothing beyond which can contradict its existence. That’s why the existence of substance is said to follow necessarily from its essence, because there’s nothing that can prevent it from existing. One might ask how this applies to non-​living things. To this I  want to say: well, it just applies to them –​don’t ask me what it means! It’s certainly meant to apply as much to a non-​living thing as to a living thing. This isn’t an answer, but it has a bearing on the question. One might contrast this view of things with the view which Descartes expresses in the third Meditation, where he has an argument which is about God’s creative power. And he says that things depend on God for their existence, not only in respect of their origin but also in respect of their continuance. So that the only thing keeping any   9 EIIIp11; Elw 138/​C 1:501. 10 PW: By his whole account of things I mean the account of things that’s been offered in Part I especially and also Part II. 11 EIIIp7; Elw 136/​C 1:499.

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finite substance in existence is God’s conserving power, and if God withdraws this, as he can, then the thing in question will just cease to exist.12 I  think Spinoza’s conception is completely opposed to that. Although it isn’t too easy to get the difference between them clear, because, of course, Spinoza too thinks that the existence of any finite thing is a dependent existence, because its existence and its essence have to be understood through God. On the other hand, for Spinoza the relation between God and a finite existing thing isn’t like Descartes’s at all, insofar as we can form no conception of the thing except as a finite mode of God. And, of course, what goes with that is the conception of God’s power as flowing necessarily from his nature and not being a matter of arbitrary fiat as in Descartes. For Descartes, God’s will was arbitrary, for Spinoza not, and God’s will is [for Spinoza] simply an expression of what follows necessarily from his nature. And so finite things depend on God insofar as they follow necessarily from his nature. But they do follow necessarily from his nature, and so there can’t be any question for Spinoza of God’s arbitrarily deciding to withdraw his conserving power, because that is a way of speaking that makes no sense. Of course that doesn’t make it natural for us, any more natural than it was before, to say of a material thing that it strives to maintain itself in existence. On the other hand, it does give it some grip. This goes with Spinoza’s endorsement, for which he gives no a priori argument, of something like Galileo’s principle of inertia, which in terms of motion is that a thing will retain the degree and direction of motion which it has until something acts upon it to change things. Spinoza regards that as simply an aspect of this general theory of conatus. Anything will retain the nature it has, in all its aspects, unless something happens to change it. And that will have to be something outside, something different from the thing in question. So it’s really a sort of principle of explanation, I suppose, more than anything else. A consequence of this, which Spinoza draws explicitly, is that a thing can’t be responsible for its own destruction. He says in Proposition 4: ‘Nothing can be destroyed except by a cause external to itself ’,13 and he has other propositions to the same effect. It may help to understand better what exactly Spinoza’s saying if one tries to refute that, say, by pointing to the fact of suicide. Somebody may say: ‘But look, people do sometimes deliberately die by their own hand, isn’t that a case of something’s being destroyed by itself and not by something external?’ To which Spinoza would certainly reply:  ‘No, it’s not a case of that’, because, he would say and I won’t try to defend this, that this act was necessarily the consequence of inadequate ideas; and insofar

12 CSM 2:31–​35. 13 EIIIp4; Elw 136/​C 1:498.

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as that is so, of course despite all appearances, the causes do lie outside the person committing this act. According to Spinoza, no one could clearly understand what it is he’s doing when he commits suicide; and to say he doesn’t really understand what he’s doing is, on Spinoza’s way of thinking, to say he is to that extent passive in relation to what is happening, that he is not in full control. So that wouldn’t be acceptable as a counterexample, and that may show something about the application of this notion of a conatus. So everything that exists has an essence, its essence is a conatus, that is, a striving to preserve its existence, an affirmation of its own existence. And this striving or affirmation entails, and these are Spinoza’s words I’m quoting, ‘all those results which tend to its preservation’.14 So the affirmation of my existence, which is my conatus, involves a striving to do all those things which will serve to preserve me in existence. Incidentally, in that same Note you will find a discussion of how this notion of conatus or endeavour is related to terms like will, appetite, desire, but I won’t bother to go into that now, because it’s all merely terminological and of no great importance. There is, however, a conclusion right at the end of the Scholium to Proposition 9 which is of great importance. Namely, he says, that it is thus plain from what has been said that in no case do we strive for, wish for, long for, or desire anything, because we deem it to be good, but on the other hand [PW: I think that should really be ‘on the contrary’15] we deem a thing to be good, because we strive for it, wish for it, long for it, or desire it.16

That’s to say, it is the conatus which is primary here, and the notion of what is good has to be understood relative to the conatus, so that what is good is what is conducive to this affirmation of the existence of the thing in question. So what is sometimes called the ‘striving after good’, on Spinoza’s view, is not a seeking after something which can be understood independently. It is nothing more than the striving to maintain one’s own nature and existence. Everything necessarily strives in this way, since otherwise its essence would contradict itself (cf. Proposition 4). As far as man is concerned, Spinoza splits endeavour into a mental aspect (‘will’) and a combined mental-​cum-​ physical aspect (‘appetite’ or ‘desire’). Endeavour is a tendency which follows necessarily from our own nature and is not determined by anything outside

14 EIIIp9s; Elw 137/​C 1:500. 15 Winch’s suggestion is also reflected by Curley, who translates this passage with ‘on the contrary’. 16 EIIIp9s; Elw 137/​C 1:500.

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ourselves, for example, [anything] good. (Proposition 9 Scholium.) On the contrary, the good is simply that which we desire and is therefore relative to our particular natures. However, our endeavour can be helped or hindered by extraneous factors and when this happens we experience pleasure and pain, which are simply the consciousness of the enhancement or diminution of our power of activity. It follows that pain is necessarily an evil and pleasure necessarily a good. But we have to remember that mind and body are complex systems comprising subsystems, so that it is possible to experience pleasure and pain in relation to subsystems, which may be evil and good, respectively, in relation to our nature as a whole. So that is one element in the general account of the emotions, the notion of desire or endeavour. Now I come to pleasure and pain. Remember that he calls desire, pleasure and pain the three primary emotions out of which everything else is constructed. If you look at the Scholium to Proposition 11, you’ll see the main thing he says about pleasure and pain. Let me just read this: Thus we see, that the mind can undergo17 many changes, and can pass sometimes to a state of greater perfection, sometimes to a state of lesser perfection. These passive states of transition explain to us the emotions of pleasure and pain.18 By pleasure therefore in the following propositions I shall signify a passive state wherein the mind passes to a greater perfection. By pain I shall signify a passive state wherein the mind passes to a lesser perfection.19

By greater or lesser perfection here, it’s clear enough from the context I  think, Spinoza wants us to understand the greater or lesser power of activity, power of acting. I’ve got a number of problems about this. The first is: what sort of connection are these two definitions of pleasure and pain supposed to have with our ordinary understanding of these notions? In the passage I quoted we seem to be presented, as it were, simply with a couple of stipulative definitions: he says, ‘by pleasure I shall signify’, and similarly with pain. But presumably, these definitions must be thought of as having some relation to what we ordinarily understand by pleasure and pain. And it’s not easy to see what connection they do have. There are, after all, on the face of it at least, examples enough which would seem not 17 PW: The Latin there is ‘posse pati’, ‘can suffer’. I emphasise this because I want to raise a question about how the notions of activity and passivity come into this. The translator rightly uses a word here expressing passivity. 18 PW: And the Latin there for passive states of transition is ‘passiones’. 19 EIIIp11s; Elw 138/​C 1:500–​501.

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to be easily reconcilable with those definitions considered as an account of what we ordinarily understand by pleasure and pain. I mean, it seems to be obvious enough that a man’s power of acting can sometimes be impeded by pleasure of one sort or another. Now there is an answer to that in Spinoza’s thinking, which to extract involves going back to some things I  said earlier. The answer lies in the great complexity of the human mind as Spinoza pictures it. Remember that I emphasised the fact that we’re to think of the mind as a system comprising many different subsystems, which have a close relation to the complexity of organisation of bodily systems. Well, of course it is perfectly possible for Spinoza to say (in fact he does say) that different kinds of pleasure correspond to transitions to greater powers of activity of different subsystems of the mind and body. And of course it is perfectly possible now to say that the growth in the power of activity of a particular subsystem of a body can impede the balance of the system as a whole. And the same can go for the mind too, I suppose. So one might be able to regard many of the apparent examples of pleasure which reduces rather than enhances a man’s power of acting in that way: by saying that this pleasure arises from the distorted or disproportionate growth in the power of activity of a particular part of a man’s nature at the expense of the whole. I won’t bother to discuss pain separately here and no doubt in many respects it wouldn’t be parallel, but in many respects it would be and one could say the same things about it, I believe. But supposing we have some success in dealing with counterexamples in that general way, Spinoza is still making, residually, a quite heavy, substantive claim about the connection between pleasure and pain on the one hand, and a passage to a greater or lesser power of action on the other hand, which, I would say, is a dubious truth. It doesn’t seem to me obvious that pleasure and pain, considered in any natural sense, have that sort of connection that Spinoza is alleging. And it’s certainly unsupported by Spinoza. Another problem which I’ve already hinted at is whether pleasure and pain themselves, considered as these transitions from one level of perfection (that is, power of acting) to another, are to be regarded as actions or passions. In other words, is a man who experiences pleasure, understood in the way Spinoza understands it, active or passive in respect to that? In the passage I quoted from the Note to Proposition 11, certainly Spinoza says quite clearly and explicitly that it’s passive. He says, ‘I shall signify a passive state wherein the mind passes to a greater perfection,’ or ‘a passive state wherein the mind passes to a lesser perfection’. Unfortunately, in the Definitions of the Emotions you find him saying:

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Neither can we say, that pain consists in the absence of a greater perfection. For absence is nothing, whereas the emotion of pain is an activity; wherefore this activity can only be the activity of transition from a greater to a lesser perfection.20

That does seem quite deliberate; the Latin is actus. I don’t know what one should say about that. Of course, one line one could take about this, which I think would be perfectly in accordance with Spinoza’s general way of thinking, would be simply to distinguish different cases: and say that sometimes a man is active in respect to such a transition and sometimes not. Sometimes a man’s power of acting may be enhanced by external factors, but sometimes a man can enhance his own power of acting by, for instance, ordering his thoughts better, and making his ideas more adequate. That probably, I think, is what one ought to say. I now want to look more generally at the form which Spinoza’s definitions of the emotions take, and raise one or two issues about his procedure. Many of the particular definitions, or the definitions of particular emotions, are couched in terms of the idea of pleasure, pain and desire on the one hand, plus the idea of a cause on the other –​in particular, the idea of what has caused pleasure and pain in the person experiencing the emotions. That is clearest in the definitions of love and hatred, for instance, which we will come to later. Of course, not all of the emotions that Spinoza discusses have just that form. It isn’t always a matter of the idea of a cause of pleasure and pain. It is always, I  think, pleasure and pain accompanied by the idea of something else. The formula that Spinoza uses, which is translated here ‘accompanied by the idea of ’, is an ablative absolute phrase, concomitante idea, ‘with the accompanying idea of …’, I suppose, or ‘with the idea of something or other accompanying …’. One might raise the question how far what Spinoza is talking about when he speaks of an ‘accompanying idea of pleasure and pain’ corresponds to what people nowadays have called the object of the emotion, as distinct from the cause of an emotion. That is a distinction that some people have made much of in the literature in the last twenty years or so. Let’s take some examples. Definitions 16–​18 of joy, disappointment and pity: D16. Joy is pleasure accompanied by the idea of something past, which has had an issue beyond our hopes.

20 EIIIda3; Elw 174/​C 1:532.

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D17. Disappointment is pain accompanied by the idea of something past, which has had an issue contrary to our hope.21 D18. Pity is pain accompanied by the idea of evil, which has befallen someone else whom we conceive to be like ourselves.22 In those cases it looks as though what Spinoza speaks of as ‘the accompanying idea’ is an idea of what we would naturally think of as the object of the emotion. I mean, take disappointment: I am disappointed at something past which has had an issue contrary to my hope so that if I were asked to explain the nature of my disappointment, that is what I  would mention  –​I  would explain what I am disappointed at. That, I think, is a rough and ready ground for saying that what I there refer to is the object of the emotion. One can of course distinguish that from the cause of the emotion, because it might be that I expressed severe disappointment at something that had happened, and you can’t see why I should be so disappointed at this and might now mention something else other than what I mentioned. It could be that I am generally in a distressed state over something quite different and as a result come to feel much greater disappointment over some trivial matter than I otherwise would. In that case, the object of my disappointment would still be the same –​what I am disappointed at is still the outcome which I refer to –​but one might say that is not the real cause of my feeling so disappointed; the real cause is this other thing which has generally put me into a black mood for the past few weeks and caused me to take things much more seriously than I  otherwise would, so that the real explanation of my disappointment doesn’t lie in the object of my disappointment but in something else. Spinoza, as far as I  know, doesn’t actually make any distinction of that kind and it is a fairly fruitless conjecture to ask whether, in any given case, he is speaking of the cause or the object of the emotions, just because he doesn’t make any distinction of that kind. Indeed, Spinoza himself would reject that distinction, since he would want to treat everything in terms of a notion of cause. For instance, in the example I  just gave, of disappointment which is disproportionate to its object, the kind of treatment you might expect from Spinoza would be along the following lines:  what I  have referred to as the object of the emotion is not an adequate cause of the emotion and to give a fully adequate account of the cause you’d have to refer to something else as

21 PW: Of course hope has already had a definition: ‘Hope is nothing but an inconstant joy which has arisen from the image of a future or past thing whose outcome we doubt’ (EIIIda12; C 1:534). 22 Elw 177/​C 1:535.

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well. And I think he’d want to say that in each case we are dealing with the same sort of relation –​a relation of cause and effect. One point involved in his treatment of the emotions is that at least all the more complex emotions  –​indeed all emotions other than simple pain and pleasure, and perhaps even them too, but at least others –​involve something like a judgement or something like belief. This is of some importance, I think, for the general place that Spinoza’s treatment of the emotions has in his whole philosophy: in his account of human bondage, in his account of what freedom would be and the extent to which freedom is attainable by human beings. They are all pain or pleasure accompanied by a certain idea and, as I remarked on an earlier occasion, for Spinoza an idea has the character of a judgement or of an assertion. So to experience an emotion on Spinoza’s view, one might say, is always to make a certain sort of judgement about things: Either a judgement about what is causing one’s pleasure or pain, or a judgement about something which has happened, or which might conceivably happen in the future, at which one’s pleasure or pain is somehow directed. And the reason why I think that this is important especially for Spinoza is that this judgement, this accompanying idea, is not merely, as it were, statically conjoined with the pleasure and pain. It plays a sort of dynamic causal role itself. So that if you look at Spinoza’s often very arresting accounts of how certain emotions can become entrenched and obsessive, you will find that the way in which belief is involved in these emotions plays a role in the escalation of the emotion. For instance, there are some examples of that to be found in the following propositions in Part III: Propositions 21, 40, 43 and 44. Here is 21: He who conceives, that the object of his love is affected pleasurably or painfully, will himself be affected pleasurably or painfully; and the one or the other emotion will be greater or less in the lover according as it is greater or less in the thing loved.23

Or perhaps that ought to read ‘will be greater or less in the lover according as the lover thinks that it is greater or less in the thing loved’. It is the lover’s belief in what pleasure or pain is affecting the object of his love which makes his own pleasure or pain greater or less. Again, let’s look at Proposition 40. This is a very characteristic and a quite central sort of remark of Spinoza’s: He who imagines he is hated by someone, and believes he has given the other no cause for hate, will hate the other in return.24 23 EIIIp21; Elw 145/​C 1:506. 24 EIIIp40; C 1:517.

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There you have a case in which the emotion is pretty well generated by beliefs. I think that somebody else hates me, I think that he hates me for no reason, that I have given him no cause for it, and that complex of beliefs in itself is enough to generate hatred in me. So the (I hate this word to pass my lips but it is struggling past) cognitive side of things is central to what Spinoza has to say about the emotions. The idea of judgements about the ways things are, judgements about the way I am related to things and especially to people in my environment, are absolutely central –​not merely to Spinoza’s definitions of the emotions, but also to Spinoza’s account of how those emotions arise; of how difficult they are to overcome; and, eventually, of how nevertheless it is possible in principle to overcome them through a certain form of clarification (of purification of one’s understanding, of one’s beliefs, of one’s ideas). But in Part III the general tendency of the argument on this matter is in the direction of instability in human emotions, instability in the sense that a man’s emotions will be through and through subject to the vicissitudes of his position in his environment. The word that Spinoza uses here is ‘vacillation’.25 This is quite an important concept in his treatment of the emotions. It includes both the way we normally understand it, for instance violent transitions from hatred to love (of which he gives quite arresting accounts), and also cases where one loves and hates the same thing at the same time.26 Once again the involvement of judgements and beliefs in the emotions is of course fundamental to the possibility of that –​one loves and hates according to different beliefs one has concerning different aspects of the object of the emotions. Another extremely important strand running through this account is the notion of attachment. And indeed it is closely connected with the phenomenon of vacillation. This is involved in for instance both love and hate. Proposition 49 is the key passage here: Given an equal cause [ex pari causa] of love, love toward a thing will be greater if we imagine the thing to be free than if we imagine it to be necessary. And similarly for hate.27

Of course he is using the term ‘freedom’ here in the sense in which he thinks it is a confused idea, as independence of the chain of causes and effects.

25 EIIIp17s; C 1:504. 26 PW: This is closely related to what Freud called the ambivalence of the emotions. [See, for instance, Sigmund Freud, Case Histories 2, trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin Books (=Penguin Freud Library, vol. 9), 1988, 118–​19.] 27 EIIIp49; C 1:521.

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And in the Scholium he draws a further consequence from that: Hence it follows that men, thinking themselves to be free, feel more love or hatred towards one another than toward anything else.28

The reason that something thought of as free generates greater love or hate is that we do not see and do not take any account of the fact that the nature and actions of the object of our love or hatred are themselves caused by further features of the environment. (Indeed, we go out of our way to deny that there is this causal dependency on features outside of the agent.) As a result of that, we think that the loved or hated one’s actions flow entirely from his own free choice and aren’t the product of anything beyond that, and so we focus all our emotion on that person. So, to take an example, suppose somebody slapped me and wounded my pride, perhaps fairly clearly deliberately, in order to be offensive and to hurt me. That is something that Spinoza would say would tend to increase my resentment. If I think of that person as a free agent in the confused sense, I won’t see that this action is a product of this person’s own difficulties, for instance, and the influences on him of his environment. It may be that he has done it because somebody else has just insulted him, or belittled him, or something of that sort. I, however, won’t see this; I will think that his action is, as it were, a spontaneous creation, springing only from him. For that reason all of my resentment will be focused on him, to the exclusion of anything else. Spinoza’s point is: If I could understand the whole causal story which led to my feeling of pain at the slapping, then my reaction to it wouldn’t be focused solely on this person, it would be spread out over everything that I understand to be a contributory factor. Let’s look more closely at what the finitude and passivity of men actually amounts to, in terms of human life. We’ve seen how Spinoza fleshes out his account of passivity in terms of the emotions. A passive emotion is a feeling of pleasure or pain (which is a sense of an increase or decrease of power), connected with an inadequate idea of its cause. It is this inadequacy of the idea of the cause which constitutes one’s passivity. And the inadequacy is a consequence of the fact that one occupies a particular finite perspective. The bodily expression of this is the fact that one’s body occupies a particular finite point in space and is subject to the forces of nature acting on that particular point in space –​forces which infinitely surpass its own. A man necessarily has some understanding of forces acting on him from without, since his ideas of his own body are ideas of that body as acted upon

28 EIIIp49s; Elw 162/​C 1:521.

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by external bodies. The converse of this, however, is that his understanding of those external causes is limited to that aspect of them which is relevant to their effects on him. Thus, he will tend to see himself as the centre of the universe and, correspondingly, his view of other things and people will be limited and distorted by the fact that he takes an interest only in what, in them, has a bearing on his (finite) concerns. This feature of the human condition is what is responsible for the belief in final causes, the belief that things are what they are because of some purpose which they serve –​a purpose which is in its turn conceived in egocentric terms. See the following poem by Don Marquis: warty bliggens the toad i met a toad the other day by the name of warty bliggens he was sitting under a toadstool feeling contented he explained that when the cosmos was created that toadstool was especially planned for his personal shelter from sun and rain thought out and prepared for him do not tell me said warty bliggens that there is not a purpose in the universe the thought is blasphemy a little more conversation revealed that warty bliggens considers himself  to be the center of the said universe the earth exists to grow toadstools for him to sit under the sun to give him light

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by day and the moon and wheeling constellations to make beautiful the night for the sake of warty bliggens to what act of  yours do you impute this interest on the part of the creator of the universe i asked him why is it that you are so greatly favoured ask rather said warty bliggens what the universe has done to deserve me if i were a human being i would not laugh too complacently at poor warty bliggens for similar absurdities have only too often lodged in the crinkles of the human cerebrum29

The effect on a man’s view of his fellow men will be this: He will view them and their actions chiefly in the light of the pleasure or pain which they cause him, not seeing that, on the one hand, this does not exhaust their effects and, on the other hand, that they themselves have remoter causes that are not immediately or obviously open to view. For this reason his love and his hate (i.e. pleasure and pain connected with the idea of a cause) will become attached to particular individuals. It is this idea of attachment to what is finite which I think is really at the centre of Spinoza’s conception of human bondage. And it’s inseparably connected with lack of understanding: lack of understanding of

29 Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel. New York: Anchor Books 1927, 60–​62.

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all the effects of men’s actions and of their causes. This lack of understanding pervades popular morality also, with its ideas of returning evil for evil, pity, humility and repentance. Another important aspect of this egocentric distortion of perspective is in relation to time. A man will attach more importance to what is present or immediately anticipated than to what is relatively remote. It will seem to have more reality to him. (Though in fact, of course, nothing has ‘more reality’ than anything else. Everything is equally a necessary expression of the essential nature of  God.) This being, sketchily, what human bondage amounts to, we’re now in a position to examine more closely what human freedom could be and whether its attainment really is conceivable. To be more free is to be more active and that total activity is conceivable only in God Himself or Substance. For a man’s life to be an expression of activity, therefore, would be for it to be lived from the point of view of God, that is, it would be for him to view everything that exists or happens sub specie aeternitatis: viewing everything and everyone as equally real and equally necessary (oneself included). This will express itself in one’s life in detachment from particular things and objects. But how is this to be understood? It can’t be a listless failure to take any interest in anything. It must rather involve an interest tempered with the thought that, whatever happens, it cannot be otherwise, so that complaining about what is must be irrational. (Unless it is seen as a means of bringing about something different: that is allowable. But insofar as it is directed at what is unalterable, it is senseless.) There is a more positive side to this as well. If something exists, has existed or will exist, it belongs to reality and is equally an expression of God with everything else that has existed, does exist or will exist. That it is now over (consider, e.g., the death of a person including oneself) is of no importance whatever sub specie aeternitatis; nor is that it does not yet exist and will not exist contemporaneously with me –​the important point will be that it and I belong to the same universe. We’ve also seen that Spinoza rejects any conception of ‘free will’, that is, any conception of freedom which places it in opposition to necessity. Everything happens of necessity and the conceptions of both contingency and of free will involve confusions springing from ignorance of the real causes of what occurs. However, Spinoza does of course have his own conception of freedom: indeed, his account of this is the culmination of the Ethics. This must be understood not in terms of the distinction between free will and necessity, but rather in terms of the distinction between activity and passivity, which he thinks of within a general framework of necessity. In general:  a thing is considered as ‘active’ when the causes of what takes place in it are internal to it, ‘passive’ when they are external to it. Freedom is not to be contrasted with necessity; consequently bondage is not to be identified with necessity. Freedom

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is to be understood in terms of activity. Activity, in its turn, is to be understood in terms of being determined to action by factors internal to oneself rather than by external factors. In the realm of thought this is to be equated with having adequate rather than inadequate ideas, because adequate ideas alone contain all that is necessary for their own understanding.30 It is clear that because the world comprises a single system of necessary connections, any finite fragment of the world will lack factors necessary for the explanation of what happens within it and will therefore to that extent be passive rather than active. (But there can, of course, be a more or less here.) Only the whole system can be said to be completely active, that is, God, or Substance. Hence the question of how far a man can be free reduces to the question how far the causes of what he does can lie in himself; and, as far as the mind is concerned, this reduces to the question how far he can have adequate ideas. We have to remember, though, that because ideas are modes which are also expressed under the attribute of extension, a man whose ideas become increasingly adequate will also undergo a bodily change. See: ‘He who possesses a body capable of the greatest number of activities, possesses a mind whereof the greatest part is eternal.’31 It’s easy to give this a banal interpretation (mens sana in corpore sano), but it’s also possible to understand it in a deeper sense: a man whose ideas are adequate will live differently from one whose ideas are inadequate, live in such a way that his own body is not the centre of his activities. In a sense he will increasingly come to treat the whole extended universe as ‘his body’.32 Hence for a man to become more active (= freer) will be for him to approach closer to God. And we should have to say, I suppose, that a man who was completely free, if there could be such, would be a man who was identical with God. (This connects with idea of Incarnation, of the properties of a being which is at once fully God and fully human.) Some of the main difficulties here are the same, then, as the difficulties surrounding the idea of an Incarnation (God becoming man). Since God is infinite and man is necessarily finite, how could the one even approach the other? Anything finite is equidistant with everything else finite from the infinite. (Two million is not closer to infinity than is two; though of course it is closer to three million.) 30 PW: Cf. Spinoza’s conception of mathematics again, the problems of which contain all the data necessary for their own solution. 31 EVp39; Elw 267/​C 1:614. 32 PW:  Simone Weil:  Blind man’s stick; interpretation of Christ and his passion. [See, e.g. Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills, London: Routledge, 2004, 19.]

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There are two related difficulties for Spinoza’s account, which I would now like to consider. The first is that Spinoza stresses the dependence of the mind and the body on the rest of nature so heavily that it’s difficult to see how, on his view, anyone could achieve adequate ideas at all, or at least to any significant extent. The second is that Spinoza’s determinism leaves no room for talk of a method of understanding; thus, even if a transition from inadequate to adequate ideas were possible, it does not make sense for us to try to bring it about. Let’s take these in turn. Spinoza does, indeed, want to stress the great obstacles that face anyone trying to attain adequate ideas. But what is important for us is to see whether he leaves any ‘logical space’ within which such an achievement could be conceived at all. I have emphasised how Spinoza’s account of the connection of mind and body is part of his account of the relation between thought and its object and of truth. This in its turn involves the distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas. An upshot of this whole account is that many (at least) of the ideas constituting a human mind are bound to be inadequate. This is because these ideas are necessarily of what is going on in the body and because much (most) of what is going on in the body is due to causes external to it; and this means that the nature of the ideas constituting the human mind must also in large part be due to causes external to it. Hence a man does not have at his disposal all the ideas necessary for a full explanation of those ideas that he does have. Thus, for the most part his mind will be constituted of inadequate ideas. But there are exceptions to this. There are two points in what he says which are fundamental here: 1. Part II Propositions 36–​40.33 Proposition 36 states the difficulty: Inadequate ideas in themselves will give rise only to further inadequate ideas. However, Propositions 37–​39 argue that the human mind will necessarily contain some ideas which are adequate. Looked at from the point of view of the body, this is because no human body (no particular extended thing) can be understood solely in virtue of properties peculiar to it. ‘All bodies agree in certain respects.’34 (They all involve geometrical and mechanical principles, are all subject to the same natural laws.) These laws and principles do not apply to any one part of extended nature exclusively, nor to any one part more than to any other, that is, they are ‘equally in the part and in the whole’. Ideas of such properties, however, can only be conceived adequately: the point is that these laws and principles, according to which my body functions, are necessarily the same as those according to which all other bodies function;

33 C 1:473–​78. 34 EIIp38c; Elw 110/​C 1:474.

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so I have here at my disposal ideas in terms of which I can understand the functioning of anything extended whatever –​I am not simply confined to the limited perspective of my own body. Furthermore, to clinch the argument, Spinoza points out that from such given adequate ideas further adequate ideas necessarily follow. Here, then, is a route by which my adequate ideas can be indefinitely extended. (An important corollary is that these ideas are necessarily shared by everyone: providing the possibility of mutual understanding and mutual help towards the increase of understanding –​a point which is central to Spinoza’s conception of the beneficial character to any individual of cooperation with other men. This comes out not only in the argument of the later books of the Ethics but also in Spinoza’s own attitude to his correspondents –​cf. beginning of Letter 32 to Blyenbergh.35) 2. The other relevant point is his conception of reflective knowledge (idea ideae) by reference to which he argues that ideas which are inadequate can be transformed into adequate ideas. We have already discussed this earlier; whether it is satisfying or not, of course, remains an open question. I turn now to the second objection to Spinoza’s offering ‘a method of improving the understanding’ and at the same time adopting such a radically deterministic position which involves denying any free will. One of his correspondents (identity doubtful, but perhaps John Bredenburg or John Bresser36) had raised this question and Spinoza replies as follows: I pass on to your question, which runs as follows: ‘ls there, or can there be, any method by which we may, without hindrance, arrive at the knowledge of the most excellent things? or are our minds, like our bodies, subject to the vicissitudes of circumstance, so that our thoughts are governed rather by fortune than by skill?’ I think I shall satisfy you, if I show that there must necessarily be a method, whereby we are able to direct our clear and distinct perceptions, and that our mind is not, like our body, subject to the vicissitudes of circumstance. This conclusion may be based simply on the consideration that one clear and distinct perception, or several such together, can be absolutely the cause of another clear and distinct perception. Now, all the clear and distinct perceptions, which we form, can only arise from other clear and distinct perceptions, which are in us; nor do they acknowledge any cause external to us. Hence it follows that

35 Elw 330–​35/​Letter 19 in C 1:357–​61. 36 Elwes notes the uncertainty as to who the original sender of the letter was and that Bredenburg and Bresser have been suggested. Curley identifies Johannes Bouwmeester as the recipient of the following letter by Spinoza.

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the clear and distinct perceptions, which we form, depend solely on our nature and on its certain and fixed laws; in other words, on our absolute power, not on fortune –​that is, not on causes which, although also acting by certain and fixed laws, are yet unknown to us, and alien to our nature and power. As regards other perceptions, I confess that they depend chiefly on fortune. Hence clearly appears, what the true method ought to be like, and what it ought chiefly to consist in –​namely solely in the knowledge of the pure understanding, and of its nature and laws.37

There is obviously a difficulty here. Probably the best thing would have been for Spinoza not to have said it. Why not acknowledge that the body too is not entirely ‘subject to the vicissitudes of circumstance?’38 That may perhaps be easier if the conception of ‘the body’ is broader than the purely physiological conception. There may seem still to be a difficulty here in that talk of a ‘method’ seems to imply a notion of choice, but I think Spinoza has the resources to deal with it. What is the role of Spinoza’s writings, we may ask? His answer would have to be: well, they are a causal factor which may lead some men in the direction of improving their understanding, making their ideas more adequate. Similarly, the production of these works is itself the product of a complex causal sequence. The whole process is a manifestation of the natural tendency (conatus) of human minds towards greater adequacy of ideas, that is, this conatus includes a tendency towards seeking certain kinds of relation with other human beings. This brings us back to Spinoza’s letters to Blyenbergh. These are interesting for the way they reveal him putting his philosophical principles into practice. To me, of the things outside my power, I esteem none more than being allowed the honor of entering into a pact of friendship with people who sincerely love the truth; for I believe that of things outside our power we can love none tranquilly, except such people. Because the love they bear to one another is based on the love each has for the knowledge of the truth.39 37 Letter 42 in Elw 360–61/​Letter 37 in C 2:32–​33. 38 PW: The long Scholium to EIIIp2 is important. It argues at discursive, and (I think) rather persuasive, length against thinking of the mind as ‘freely commanding’ the body and traces the source of the idea that we have such ‘freedom’ to the fact that ‘men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their own actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined, that the decisions of the Mind are nothing but the appetites themselves, which therefore vary as the disposition of the Body varies’ [C 1:496–​97]. 39 Letter 19, C 1:357.

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(The course of pure intellectual friendship did not run entirely smooth; in Letter 21 Spinoza is wondering whether ‘we can instruct one another with our letters’,40 given Blyenbergh’s predilection for appealing to Scripture against reason. But the blip is only temporary.) Let’s fasten on the philosophical idea contained in this passage. It will lead us on to the main theme of the Ethics, Part III. Spinoza says that ‘tranquil love’ is possible only between people who love ‘knowledge of the truth’. Now, in fact Spinoza does think that love is the main cause of turbulence in human affairs because, for the most part, it is not directed at knowledge of the truth. How are we to understand this though? We have to start by understanding what, in general, love is. It is the thought of an increase in one’s own activity associated with the thought of someone, or something, as its cause.41 But to understand this we need to go back even further. What are we to understand by ‘activity’ (and its opposite, ‘passivity’)? Remember, first, that there is no independent faculty of ‘will’. The mind is constituted by its ideas; and ideas are ‘acts of understanding’. But ideas, understanding, can be more or less adequate. It is more adequate according as the ideatum is conceived more fully in its relation with its causes, that is, according as one’s mind contains more ideas of its causes, and this means:  the more (the content of) one’s mind is self-​determined. Greater activity means greater self-​determination and greater passivity less self-​ determination, that is, activity and passivity come down to having adequate or inadequate ideas.42 But being passive can also be thought of as being subject to emotions. The passivity in human emotions results from the fact that the causes of a man’s emotions lie for the most part outside his own nature and aren’t understood by him. Though Spinoza emphasises this aspect of the emotions, he does allow that there are active emotions too. This is because the mind is active insofar as it has adequate ideas, and the experience of its own activity is pleasure. Furthermore, the emotions arising from adequate ideas can only be pleasant, not painful, since the mind here is necessarily active and pain implies a diminution of activity. Spinoza singles out as the leading active emotions:  strength of character (fortitudo), courage (animositas) and highmindedness (generositas).43 40 Letter 21, C 1:375. 41 EIIIda6; C 1:533. 42 PW: ‘Our Mind does certain things (acts) and undergoes other things, viz. insofar as it has adequate ideas it necessarily does certain things, and insofar as it has inadequate ideas, it necessarily undergoes other things’ [EIIIp1; C 1:493]. 43 See EIIIp59s; C 1:529–​30.

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Apart from the Joy and Desire that are passions, there are other affects of Joy and Desire that are related to us insofar as we act.44 Among all the affects that are related to the Mind insofar as it acts, there are none that are not related to Joy or Desire.45

In the Scholium to Proposition 59, Spinoza links the active affects to ‘strength of character’ (tenacity & nobility). These have to do with striving (‘solely from the dictate of reason’) to preserve one’s own being and striving (ditto) ‘to aid other men and join them to [one] in friendship’.46 The latter, it should be noted, is really a subspecies of the former, since reason dictates that the (right sort of) friendship with other human beings is the most advantageous thing for oneself. The crucial concept in these definitions is clearly that of ‘reason’, as it is only through this that we can attain stability in relation to our environment. Of course, many (perhaps most) philosophers have recognised an important connection between being subject to emotions and failing to understand. Spinoza, though not uniquely, at least distinctively, understands this connection as an identity. By affect I understand affections of the Body by which the Body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections. Therefore, if we can be the adequate cause of any of these affections, I understand by the Affect an action; otherwise, a passion.47

Clearly, in his letter to Blyenbergh, Spinoza has this in mind when he speaks about choosing as one’s friends those who ‘love the truth’.48 They will assist one in making one’s ideas more adequate, hence in becoming more ‘active’; and in this lies ‘tranquillity’, since one will no longer be at the mercy of the ‘vicissitudes of circumstance’. Spinoza says that an increase in the power of acting is experienced as joy, a decrease as sadness. We see, then, that the Mind can undergo great changes, and pass now to a greater, now to a lesser perfection. These passions indeed explain to us the

44 EIIIp58; C 1:529. 45 EIIIp59; C 1:529. 46 Ibid. 47 EIIId3; C 1:493. 48 Letter 19 and 21; C 1:357 and 375.

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affects of Joy and Sadness. By Joy, therefore, I shall understand in what follows that passion by which the Mind passes to a greater perfection. And by Sadness, that passion by which it passes to a lesser perfection. The affect of Joy which is related to the Mind and Body at once I call Pleasure or Cheerfulness, and that of Sadness, Pain or Melancholy.49

Spinoza says in Proposition 12 that we strive to think of things which will improve our power of acting and correspondingly, in Proposition 13, that we strive to exclude from our memory things which impair our power of acting. And this brings him to his account of love and hate: Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause and Hate is nothing but Sadness with the idea of an accompanying external cause.50

I should like you to notice that practically all the Propositions from 13 to 57 speak of what the mind ‘imagines’. Imagination is, of course, to be understood as the lowest form of knowledge, involving quite inadequate ideas of the causes of things. Correspondingly, in these Propositions, Spinoza is concerned with ‘passions’ (i.e. emotions in respect of which a person is passive). Only in Propositions 58 and 59 does he speak of ‘the affects which are related to the Mind insofar as it acts’.51 The trend of the discussion is to emphasise the haphazard, unstable and confused way in which we come to imagine others to be responsible for our joy and sadness, and hence to dispose our loves and our hates. Because we do not understand the necessary order of causes and effects, we are at the mercy of purely chance (from our point of view) associations in forming our ideas of what causes us pleasure and pain. The instability of our emotions is connected with this: associations which have been set up by chance can also be destroyed by chance. Moreover, even the feelings of pleasure and pain can themselves be misleading as to our true benefit, since often they will reflect an increase in power of only a part of ourselves (perhaps even at the expense of the whole.) Noteworthy is Spinoza’s account of ‘vacillation’:52

49 EIIIp11s; C 1:500–​501. PW: Note that Spinoza distinguishes between changes in the whole and changes in the part. Thus, some kinds of pleasure are not signs of genuine well-​being; some kinds of pain not signs of genuine ill-​being. 50 EIIIp13s; C 1:502. 51 EIIIp58–​59; C 1:529. 52 PW: EIllp17 and EIIip17s [C 1:504]. This is one of the points at which Spinoza has, plausibly, been compared with Freud.

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If we imagine that a thing which usually affects us with an affect of Sadness is like another which usually affects us with an equally great affect of Joy, we shall hate it and at the same time love it.53

The instability of our emotions is also, as it were, cumulative. On the one hand, (passive) love turns very easily to hate: if I love someone I am dependent on him/​her and thus vulnerable. I shall imagine all sorts of things that cause me sorrow (jealousy, inter alia) and then my love will turn to hate, since the previously loved object which caused (or seemed to cause) me joy now causes (or seems to cause) me sorrow. Indeed, the situation is worse than this: since love is itself a form of pleasure or joy, its loss will be experienced as an additional sadness, which will be attributed to the previously loved object as its cause.54 This may provoke negative reactions in return. For hate breeds on hate. I will try to harm (diminish the power to harm me of) the object of my hate. This will arouse the hate of the other, who will now try to harm me; and this will increase my own hatred. Because of all this instability, unpredictability and ambivalence in our affective life, Spinoza says, it is clear that we are driven about in many ways by external causes, and that, like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and fate.55

There is a great deal in all this which is very reminiscent of the account Hobbes gives of the natural condition of mankind in Leviathan.56 And Spinoza was in fact much influenced by Hobbes. It results in a political philosophy not unlike that of Hobbes, with the state accounted for as an instrument for mitigating and stabilizing the strife there will naturally be. There is, however, a major difference: 53 EIIIp17; C 1:504. 54 PW:  Cf. Thomas Mann’s rather nasty story about the middle-​aged woman who thinks she is experiencing the dawn of a new youthfulness, when it is in fact the onset of a terminal cancer. [Thomas Mann, The Black Swan, transl. Willard R. Trask. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.] 55 EIIIp59; C 1:530. PW: The image reminds me of Plato’s account in Republic [496b–​d] of the position of the philosopher in society (crouching behind a windbreak to shelter from the storm). Cf. too Simone Weil’s image of ‘tacking against the wind’ [e.g. in Simone Weil, ‘Science et Perception dans Descartes’, in Formative Writings 1929–​41, trans. Dorothy Tuck McFarland and Wilhelmina van Ness. London: Routledge, 1987.] Weil was heavily influenced by both Spinoza and Plato. 56 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch.13, 82–​86.

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The difference which you inquire about between Hobbes and myself, consists in this, that I always preserve natural right intact, and only allot to the chief magistrates in every state a right over their subjects commensurate with the excess of their power over the power of the subjects.57

And this is connected with the fact that Spinoza thought there was a route from human bondage to freedom in the reason of the individual (which Hobbes seems to have denied). Hobbes thought of reason as an essentially divisive force except when used for the construction of a ‘commonwealth’. In view of the state of bondage in which people for the most part live, Spinoza approved of central coercive power. But he also thought people could obtain freedom and a harmonious common life through the common ‘love of truth’. This idea, remember, was central in the letter to Blyenbergh from which these last reflections took off. Let’s go back to it. Notable is the combination of a central affective and a central cognitive notion: love and truth. This combination is essential to what Spinoza wants to say. As I have remarked before, for him the affects are not to be contrasted with ideas ([or] emotions with understanding). They constitute different forms and levels of understanding. As one would expect, this combination plays a prominent role in Spinoza’s account of the ‘active’ affects. The preface to Part IV contains an important discussion of terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘perfection’ and ‘imperfection’. His main point, expressed in our contemporary jargon, is that these are ‘relative notions’. If someone has decided to make something, and has finished it, then he will call his thing perfect58 and so will anyone who rightly knows, or thinks he knows, the mind and purpose of the Author of the work. For example, if someone sees a work (which I suppose to be not yet completed), and knows that the purpose of the Author of that work is to build a house, he will say that it is imperfect. On the other hand, he will call it perfect as soon as he sees that the work has been carried through to the end which its Author has decided to give it. But if someone sees a work whose like he has never seen, and does not know the mind of its maker, he will, of course, not be able to know whether that work is perfect or imperfect.59

Spinoza then gives an account of how the use of these words has come to be extended, linked (I think very elegantly) to his critique of the universal terms of common language. 57 Letter 50 to Jelles (Jellis) in Elw 369/​C 2:406. 58 PW: Curley points out that in Latin this is a tautology, that is, translates as complete or incomplete [C 1:543]. 59 EIVpref; C 1:543–​44.

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But after men began to form universal ideas, and devise models of houses, buildings, towers, etc., and to prefer some models of things to others, it came about that each one called perfect what he saw agreed with the universal idea he had formed of this kind of thing, and imperfect, what he saw agreed less with the model he had conceived, even though its maker thought he had entirely finished it. Nor does there seem to be any other reason why men also commonly call perfect or imperfect natural things, which have not been made by human hand. For they are accustomed to form universal ideas of natural things as much as they do of artificial ones. They regard these universal ideas as models of things, and believe that nature (which they think does nothing except for the sake of some end) looks to them and sets them before itself as models. So when they see something happen in nature which does not agree with the model they have conceived of this kind of thing, they believe that Nature itself has failed or sinned, and left the thing imperfect. We see, therefore, that men are accustomed to call natural things perfect or imperfect more from prejudice than from true knowledge of those things.60

While I have no evidence that Spinoza has Plato particularly in mind in this passage, the contrast between them is instructive. Let us keep it in mind in what follows. What sort of enquiry is an investigation into the nature of reason? It’s not like an enquiry into how oil may be extracted from an unpromising environment like the North Sea. In that case, we should understand the nature of what was being sought and, correspondingly, we should know it when we had found it. That is not true of good and evil, where people often mistake the one for the other. And what sort of mistake is this? It’s not like mistaking iron pyrites for gold, where it’s a matter of not applying one’s knowledge, one’s concepts, carefully enough. Spinoza thinks that we are confused about the concepts of good and evil. And this is not a trivial or, as I feel inclined to say, ‘merely local’ confusion, as would be, say, confusion about the distinction between a sonnet and an epigram. To be confused about the nature of good and evil is to be confused about one’s own nature and about the nature of one’s relation to the rest of the world. Spinoza diagnoses the source of this fundamental confusion as a certain sort of ‘egocentricity’ which is inseparable from our nature as finite modes. However, there is still the possibility of making a grave error at this point, if

60 EIVpref; C 1:544.

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we are not careful about the nature of this ‘egocentricity’. The preface to Part IV is about this possibility. There is an apparent paradox here. One might expect Spinoza to argue that we should not use ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in a purely relative way (as expressing our own desires), but should seek a good ‘in the nature of things’. But the preface to Part IV does not do this; on the contrary, it identifies the confusion as arising precisely out of supposing that there is any such thing as a ‘good in the nature of things’. And much earlier he had noted: From all this, then, it is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it.61

I think it is clear that Spinoza does not think this can be changed. If there is to be a change, then, in the way we think about good and evil, that must be consequent on a change in the direction of our desires and strivings, and not vice versa. What he is identifying in the preface is something he takes to be a confusion: we sometimes think that we are finding a standard of goodness, or perfection, ‘in the nature of things’ (or, to use the barbarous contemporary locution, ‘out there’), but all we are doing is imposing our own wants on nature. Of course our use of the words may change. Spinoza’s point is that if our use of the words did change in this crucial respect, the words would express different concepts entirely. Cf. Wittgenstein, Zettel: if we speak according to a different grammar we are not doing something ‘wrong’ –​we are speaking of something different.62 I will conclude by providing an overview of some of the themes of Part IV. Propositions 1–​4 emphasise the nature of human beings as part of nature. This means no human individual is self-​sufficient. Each is ‘infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes’63 and cannot be the adequate cause of all the changes undergone. The force and growth of any passion, and its perseverance in existing, are not defined by the power by which we strive to persevere in existing, but by the power of the external cause compared with our own. That is, no person can control his or her affects ‘by his or her own strength’. The strength and influence of an affect depends on a relation between one’s own strength and

61 EIllp9s; C 1:500. PW: Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan [­chapter 6, p. 35]. 62 Zettel 320. 63 EIVp3; C 1:548.

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that of ‘the external cause’. This last phrase presumably means the object(s) which is (are) actually the cause(s) of one’s affect rather than that which one imagines is the cause of one’s affect. Hence an affect one has may surpass one’s own power, since its power comes from the relation between one’s own power and that of external causes and because these ‘infinitely surpass’ one’s own power. It can be overcome, then, only by another affect (or other affects), stronger than it. The direction in which all this is clearly heading is this:  that in order to master any of our affects, we must put ourselves into such a relation with surrounding nature that other affects are produced in us of sufficient power to overcome it: ‘The knowledge of good and evil is nothing but an affect of Joy or Sadness, insofar as we are conscious of  it.’64 Propositions 14–​17 return to ‘knowledge of good and evil’.65 They deal with the ‘paradox’ that one may, in a sense, know quite well what action would be good for one and do something different. Spinoza, like everyone else who discusses this, quotes Ovid:  ‘…video meliora, proboque, deter/​ ore sequor…’66 Unlike everyone else he also quotes Ecclesiastes: ‘He who increases knowledge increases sorrow.’67 Though whether that really does make the same point I don’t know. Unlike everyone else again, he does not quote St Paul: ‘For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.’68 Proposition 14 reads: ‘No affect can be restrained by the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as it is true, but only insofar as it is considered as an affect.’69 ‘True’ knowledge of good and evil must be knowledge of what really is useful or harmful to us. But for this to result in action it must involve a stronger affect than any other. But because of the greater influence on us of things which are present to us, for example, this may well not be the case. A desire which arises from true knowledge of good and evil, insofar as this knowledge concerns the future, can be quite easily restrained or extinguished by a desire for the pleasures of the moment.70 [Or] more easily still by a desire for things which are present.71

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

EIVp8; C1:550. EIVp14–​17; C 1:553–​55. ‘I see and approve the better, but follow the worse.’ EIVp17s; C 1:554. Eccl 1:18. Rom 7:19. C 1:553. EIVp16; C 1:554. EIVp17; C 1:554.

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Perhaps this sounds rather puzzling. What is the point of it? I think Spinoza is preparing a critique of the idea that knowledge of good and evil can control our affects (as Plato/​Socrates thought?). Since good and evil simply register what we desire, to know good and evil is just to know, be aware of, what we desire. And this is simply an idea ideae, which cannot be differentiated from its object (since they constitute the same mode conceived under the same attribute). That is a spelling out using Spinoza’s own terms. More informally, knowledge of good and evil cannot give us control over ourselves since it is just an expression of that which we wish to control.72 Spinoza next turns to an analysis of the factors which determine the strength of the affects whose objects are external things. (This is a necessary prolegomenon to figuring out what strategies will reduce their power over us.) And Propositions 8–​13 focus on the influence of time here. The main thought is that things that are present, or thought to be present, affect us more strongly than things that do not (or are not thought to) exist at present or be likely to come into existence. I will leave you to figure out his arguments for this, which are more or less what one would expect. Notice that the dominance of what is thought to be present on the strength of the affects is a special case (perhaps a specially important case) of the importance of our essentially perspectival existence and relation to other things. One might say he is dealing with ‘temporal perspective’. In a sense, spatial perspective could be thought of as a special case of temporal perspective. What is important, for Spinoza, is, as it were, how long it takes to get from one place to another: that is, the time it takes for it to become existent for me. This then sets out the case for man’s lack of power and inconstancy, and why men do not observe the precepts of reason. What are these precepts? Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it demands that everyone love himself, seek his own advantage, what is really useful to him, want what will really lead man to a greater perfection and, absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can.73 So there can, for Spinoza, be no question of a conflict between virtue, which is what reason demands, and self-​interest. Virtue is human power itself, which is defined by man’s essence alone, that is, solely by the striving by which man strives to persevere in his being.74 Spinoza does not, however, regard this as a recipe for disruptive rivalry since 72 Is it right to say: here Spinoza is using the complete identity of idea and (mental) ideatum as a means of showing the powerlessness of reflection, while elsewhere (Part V) he argues in the reverse direction? 73 EIVp18s; C 1:554–​55. 74 EIVp20dem; C 1:557. PW: Note the tension between ‘virtue’ in its ordinary use and in its use here.

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there are […] many things outside us which are useful to us, and on that account to be sought. Of these we can think of none more excellent than those which agree entirely with our nature. […] To man, then, there is nothing more helpful to the preservation of his being than that all should so agree in all things that the Minds and Bodies of all would compose, as it were, one Mind and one Body; that all should strive together, as far as they can, to preserve their being; and that all, together, should seek for themselves the common advantage of  all.75

The question here is whether this, ‘that all should so agree in all things that the Minds and Bodies of all would compose, as it were, one Mind and one Body’ is, as Spinoza claims, based on a realistic understanding of human nature. Let’s look at the argument. Crucial are Propositions 29–​35 and in particular what Spinoza says about ‘agreement’. See the Demonstration and Scholium of Proposition 32. Things only ‘agree’ insofar as they share something positive. To say two things agree only in what they are not is to say that they do not agree at all. ‘For things that agree only in a negation, or in what they do not have, really agree in nothing.’76 Should we accept this –​for all cases? In particular, of course, should we accept it for the cases in which Spinoza is here interested, namely, that ‘insofar as men are subject to passions, they cannot be said to agree in nature’77? Or is there a persuasive analogy between saying that black and white agree only in not being red and saying that two people agree only in both being obsessively in love? Spinoza considers an objection in Proposition 34 Scholium. Suppose Peter and Paul hate each other because they both love the same thing. Is that not a case of their being mutually ‘troublesome’ by virtue of their agreement? Spinoza thinks that is wrongly described: For we suppose that Peter has the idea of a thing he loves which is already possessed, whereas Paul has the idea of a thing he loves which is lost. That is why the one is affected with Joy and the other with Sadness, and to that extent they are contrary to one another.78

What are we to say? It is certainly possible in (perhaps) most cases so to phrase things that it comes out Spinoza’s way. But what really carries argumentative weight here? I suspect that Spinoza is really making harmony a criterion 75 76 77 78

EIVp18s; C 1:556. EIVp32s; C 1:561. EIVp32; C 1:561. EIVp34s; C 1:562.

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of ‘agreeing in nature’ and, beyond that, of rationality itself. This becomes almost explicit in Proposition 35, Demonstration. Compare Wittgenstein: If white turns into black some people will say ‘Essentially it is still the same’. And others, if the colour becomes one degree darker, say ‘It has changed completely’.79

Exactly what is at issue is obscured, or made more complex at least, by the fact that the human ‘agreement’ of which Spinoza is speaking is closely connected with ‘living together in harmony’. But then it’s not obvious that the argument can be conducted in terms of whether two things can be said to agree only in something that they are not. But because each one, from the laws of his own nature, wants what he judges to be good, and strives to avert what he judges to be evil […], and moreover, because what we judge to be good or evil when we follow the dictate of reason must be good or evil […], it follows that insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason, they must do only those things that are good for human nature, and hence, for each man, i.e. […], those things that agree with the nature of each man.80

I expect it is possible (though not as easy as one might at first be inclined to suppose) to list some things which are ‘good for human nature’. But that will of course not show that there are no things that are good for one and not for another or that these differences will not bring men into conflict. It may be assumed that coming into conflict is necessarily bad for anyone, but that will not have been demonstrated. It will be a sort of  dogma. Furthermore, should we accept that, when people are divided, they are so as a result of passion? I do not think anything in Spinoza shows that people may not be driven apart by reason, that is, through each acting rationally. That, presumably, is the crunch.

79 CV 42e. 80 EIVp35dem; C 1:563.

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Chapter 6 THE LIFE OF REASON I’d like now to turn to an issue which is fundamental to Spinoza’s project, namely showing how the life of reason is possible. Demonstrating this is the goal of the last part of the Ethics. Remember that the identity of the body, which is the object of a given idea, presupposes the idea of which it is the object, just as much as does the identity of the idea presuppose its extended object. It’s quite important to realise this in thinking in connection with what Spinoza says in Part IV about the life of reason. As we have seen, the notion of virtue is defined primarily in terms of the powers of an individual, so that a man’s virtue is identical with his powers. This leads to a certain egocentrism in both Spinoza’s psychology and his ethics. Yet, at the same time, Spinoza does seem to want to have the word ‘virtue’ carry ethical force. He wants to retain the notion of a virtuous life, so that his idea is that the man is, as it were, living a virtuous life insofar as he is developing his proper virtues, in other words: his proper powers. Now, what that amounts to depends entirely on what conception you have of the identity of him whose virtue is in question. A lot of Spinoza’s discussion does give the impression that the identity in question is physical, especially in the early stages, for example, in Part II where there is that long quasi-​ physiological digression concerning the nature of the human body.1 But there is another strand in Spinoza’s thinking – on which the identity of a human body isn’t to be conceived on a biological model. It isn’t that which a doctor would call the same living body from birth to death which constitutes what Spinoza would call ‘the body’ of a given man, the man whose mind is the idea of that body. No –​as I understand Spinoza, a man’s identity is to be understood in terms of a certain coherence in the way that he lives. And that would have to take in the relationships into which he enters with other men, his position in the world, which will include his relation to things other than other men as well, his involvement with causes, his participation in certain activities

1 The ‘Physical Digression’ follows after EIIp13; C 1:458–​62.

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and so on. If you apply the conception of virtue as a man’s power to a man conceived in that way, as having his identity as being something the identity of which is expressed in a kind of life he leads, that, I think, makes it much more intelligible that Spinoza should define the word virtue in the way he does, and that he should link it up with the moral notion of virtue in the way he does. In this way, in a sense, we run together the identity of the body and the identity of the person, but only given a certain idiosyncratic understanding of ‘body’. The identity of the body is conceivable only as the object of the idea of being a man. The Scholium to Proposition 39 is certainly relevant here, though its purport isn’t unequivocal. In its first paragraph, he does seem to be repudiating a narrowly physiological conception of ‘the body’: Here it should be noted that I understand the Body to die when its parts are so disposed that they acquire a different proportion of motion and rest to one another. For I dare not deny that –​even though the circulation of the blood is maintained, as well as the other [signs] on account of which the Body is thought to be alive –​the human Body can nevertheless be changed into another nature entirely different from its own. For no reason compels me to maintain that the Body does not die unless it is changed into a corpse.2

That looks promising enough. But the examples he goes on to give do not go nearly as far in my direction as I should like: It sometimes happens that a man undergoes such changes that I should hardly call him the same. As I have heard tell of a certain Spanish poet, who had a certain sickness, and though he recovered therefrom, yet remained so oblivious to his past life, that he would not believe that the plays and tragedies he had written were his own: indeed he might have been taken for a grown-​up child, if he had also forgotten his native tongue. If this instance seems incredible, what shall we say of infants? A man of ripe age deems their nature so unlike his own, that he can only be persuaded that he too has been an infant by the analogy of other men.3

These examples suggest that the identity of the man is not the identity of his body. But they do not go very far beyond that, in a positive direction. So let’s look at it another way. Let’s consider quite apart from Spinoza the conception we have of a man and his interests and the way in which a man’s interests

2 EIVp39s; C 1:569. 3 EIVp39s; Elw 216/​C 1:569–​70.

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can be furthered or damaged. Indeed, putting it differently, let’s consider the way in which we think a man can be benefitted or damaged. Now obviously what happens to his body –​in the perfectly ordinary sense of ‘his body’ –​is of great importance there. If he gets a physical injury that clearly is not merely an injury to his body, it is an injury to him. And, similarly, if a man’s health improves, which would be first of all described in bodily terms, that is a benefit to him. Now, at the same time, of course, our idea of what harms a man or what damages a man isn’t by any means confined to what happens to his body in that narrow sense. If someone burns down my house, that harms me too. Again, if I am involved in some activities to which I attach great importance –​ for example, the teaching and study of philosophy –​then what happens to the subject affects me. So if someone makes an important advance in the subject I care about, then that is of great interest and benefit to me. Now, let us come back to the text in the light of that point: there are two passages –​two in Part IV (Propositions 38–​39) and the other one in Part V (Proposition 39). I’ll read both of those out: Whatever so disposes the human Body that it can be affected in a great many ways, or renders it capable of affecting external Bodies in a great many ways, is useful to man; the more it renders the Body capable of being affected in a great many ways, or of affecting other bodies, the more useful it is; on the other hand, What renders the Body less capable of these things is harmful. Those things are good which bring about the preservation of the proportion of motion and rest the human Body’s parts have to one another; on the other hand, those things are evil which bring it about that the parts of the human Body have a different proportion of motion and rest to one another.4 He who possesses a body capable of the greatest number of activities possesses a mind whereof the greatest part is eternal.5

And there are other propositions which bear on the same point. When one first reads about the body being capable of being affected and affecting external bodies in a greater or lesser number of ways, one may think that Spinoza is talking simply about dexterity, skills, that sort of thing. But he is talking about that only among other things. He is also saying that insofar as I have a certain relation to (for instance) philosophy as a subject, I thereby become capable of being affected by other things that happen which are quite remote from me in space –​or in time, for that matter. I become capable of 4 EIVp38-​9; C 1:568. 5 EVp39; C 1:614.

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being affected by this text here, for instance, in a way I wouldn’t be if I hadn’t studied subjects which brought me in relation to it. Equally, on the active side, what I do becomes capable of affecting others in a way in which I wouldn’t affect others if I didn’t have that relation. Of course that all has its physical side: I mean, I am talking here about that book which is here in front of me, which I carried down on the train with me from London, which I open and read. These are all acts in which my body is clearly essentially involved and so these are all cases to which one could apply this notion which Spinoza is developing here of ‘one’s body being capable of affecting and being affected in increasing numbers of ways by external bodies’. The best way to bring this out is to go back to this conception of my interests, what can further my interests, what can damage or benefit me. Let’s put it this way:  you could only say that some development in philosophy could affect me given that you identify me as someone who is involved in philosophy in a certain way. So one can only speak of things (including relations to members of my family or to other human beings) as benefiting or harming me insofar as my identity is bound up with them. That way of looking at this point clearly goes along with the issue of the priority (if any) of the physical over the mental, because on Spinoza’s conception, the human body, of which the idea is the human mind, is the person’s physical manifestation and his mind is his mental manifestation. Another point is that these are completely complementary. A person’s physical presence in the world is absolutely correlative with his mental presence, or let’s say his physical manifestation is completely correlated with his mental manifestation insofar as I identify certain physical occurrences (e.g. the burning down of a house) as affecting me by speaking of the physical object in question –​the house –​as being my property. And now in order to identify it as my property, it is necessary to do so by way of a conception of my interests. And here we are not just using physical terms. I don’t think this involves mixing up the physical and the psychological in a way that Spinoza would think objectionable, since the relation between them is always that the physical manifestation is identified as the object of a certain idea. (Here I’m using the term ‘idea’ in the very general way in which Spinoza uses it.) Let us turn now to Spinoza’s contention that when people are in conflict this is always a consequence of passion and not of reason. Consequently, he thinks, to seek ‘virtue’ is to seek something which ‘is common to all, and can be enjoyed by all’.6 And this is not accidentally so, he explains in the Scholium, but

6 EIVp36; C 1:564.

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is ‘deduced from the very essence of man’.7 More than this, each person, qua rational, seeks the same good for all others as he seeks for himself.8 To understand this we must get clear on what Spinoza understands by ‘reason’. But getting clear on this is not easy –​largely, I think, because it is not clear. This is not exactly because Spinoza himself gives no answer; it is rather that it is often difficult to reconcile his actual use of the term with the answer he gives. In De Emendatione and Part II of the Ethics Spinoza associates the use of reason with knowledge of causes. This does not take us as far as we might suppose or hope since, as I have emphasized, Spinoza does use the word ‘cause’ very widely indeed. (He includes ground and consequent, causes according to laws of nature, and so forth.) And these general categories themselves break up into kaleidoscopes. He also speaks of substance as causa sui. I am implying, of course, that these are very different uses of the term –​and this is something Spinoza would (have to) deny. I do not think the possibility even occurs to him. Still it is clear that his understanding of the natural sciences, and of mathematics, has a central place in his thinking about reason. Not that he regards it as the highest possible manifestation of reason, rather as the necessary route to that highest manifestation. Imagination is the First Kind of Knowledge; Science the Second Kind of Knowledge; and then there is the Third Kind of Knowledge.9 And the Third is a sort of taking to a further stage what is involved in the Second.10 There are two features of the Second Kind of Knowledge to emphasise. It is knowledge of why things happen as they do and it sees its objects as necessary. Of course Spinoza thinks these inseparable. We do not understand why x unless we see x as inevitable. Something similar goes for the ‘being affected’: this can certainly be taken as, in part, referring to perceptual and learning capacities. I suppose it is obvious enough how this spelling out of reason supports, in part at least, a technical conception of it. A good example of this kind of technical conception is provided by the manner in which Hempel and his followers in the philosophy of science treated explanation and prediction as twins.11

  7 EIVp36s; C 1:564. PW: Hence to accept counterexamples, mine or any, as such will be to dispute Spinoza’s understanding of the ‘essence of man’ –​either of what the essence is or of there being such an essence at all.   8 PW: EIVp37 (C 1:567–68) spells out the consequences of these ideas for the nature of the state.   9 EIIp40s2; C 1:477–​78. 10 PW: I shall leave discussion of the ‘Third Kind of Knowledge’ for later. But no one knows what to say about this. 11 This volume, 50–53.

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If  I  understand why something happens I  understand what circumstances make its occurrence necessary. I am then in a position to make it happen, or to predict its happening, and make preparations for its occurring or not. I was discussing how we should understand Spinoza’s talk about ‘reason’. I  had been emphasising how his explicit account (in terms of knowledge of ‘causes’) seems to favour a ‘technical’, even ‘instrumental’ reading. This undoubtedly plays an important role in his account of what living a ‘life of reason’ would amount to. I have in mind, especially, his remarks about pity, humility and repentance.12 But I am uneasy about this characterisation. On the other hand, if this is all that is being said, Spinoza’s whole enterprise becomes very puzzling and acquires an air of triviality which seems to sit ill with his evident highness of purpose. And what does it have to do with the good that is common to all human beings and which we, if rational, will strive to make available to all, namely the ‘good of understanding’? It is important, I think, that understanding is presented not as a means to other goods, but as the good which all human beings seek. It is hard to reconcile that with the ‘technical’ interpretation of Propositions 36 and 37. So it isn’t quite right to see Spinoza’s notion of reason as involved only instrumentally in action. He is clearly trying to characterise a mode of life to which ‘reason’, as he wants to understand it, would be internally related. I think that a large part of the trouble lies with his identification of reason with the understanding of causes. This springs, I think, from confusions about necessity. I want you to compare Spinoza’s position with what is expressed in this letter from Wittgenstein to Drury: Dear Drury, I have thought a fair amount about our conversation on Sunday and I would like to say, or rather not to say but write, a few things about these conversations. Mainly I think this: Don’t think about yourself, but think about others, e.g. your patients. You said in the Park yesterday that possibly you had made a mistake in taking up medicine: you immediately added that probably it was wrong to think such a thing at all. I am sure it is. But not because being a doctor you may not go the wrong way, or go to the dogs, but because if you do, this has nothing to do with your choice of profession being a mistake. For what human being can say what would have been the right thing if this is the wrong one? You didn’t make a mistake because there was nothing at the time you knew or ought to have known that you overlooked. Only this one could have called making a mistake: and even if you had made a mistake in this sense, this would now have to

12 EIVp50, 54 and 63; C 1:574, 576, and 582–​83.

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be regarded as a datum as all the other circumstances inside and outside which you can’t alter (control). The thing now is to live in the world in which you are, not to think or dream about the world you would like to be in. Look at people’s sufferings, physical and mental, you have them close at hand, and this ought to be a good remedy for your troubles. Another way is to take a rest whenever you ought to take one and collect yourself. (Not with me because I wouldn’t rest you.) As to religious thoughts I do not think the craving for placidity is religious: I think a religious person regards placidity or peace as a gift from heaven, not as something one ought to hunt after. Look at your patients more closely as human beings in trouble and enjoy more the opportunity you have to say ‘good night’ to so many people. This alone is a gift from heaven for which many people would envy you. And this sort of thing ought to heal your frayed soul, I believe. It won’t rest it; but when you are healthily tired you can just take a rest. I think in some sense you don’t look at people’s faces closely enough. In conversations with me don’t so much try to have the conversations which you think would taste well (though you will never get that anyway) but try to have the conversations which will have the pleasantest aftertaste. It is most important that we should not one day have to tell ourselves that we had wasted the time we were allowed to spend together. I wish you good thoughts but chiefly good feelings.13

What is difficult here is understanding the notion of facing things as they are. Spinoza thinks that he is giving an account of this. How does his account differ (if it does) from what Wittgenstein is recommending? First let me offer some comments on Wittgenstein’s letter to Drury. It starts off with an imperative. The route to happiness is to attend to others, not yourself. This is then connected with the idea of fate. Thus, Wittgenstein speaks of the opportunity Drury has to ‘say goodnight’ to his patients as a gift from heaven, that is, not as something he has worked for or something which he has deserved or, especially, something which can be understood or explained. This is important in contrasting him with Spinoza, especially if we put it alongside this passage from Culture and Value: In the sense in which asking a question and insisting on an answer is expressive of a different attitude, a different mode of life, from not asking it, the same can be said of utterances like ‘It is God’s will’ or ‘We are not masters of our fate.’ The work done by this sentence, or at any rate something like it, could also be done by a command; including one which you give yourself. And conversely the

13 Letters, Letter 214, p. 265.

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utterance of a command, such as ‘Don’t be resentful,’ may be like the affirmation of a truth.14

We might compare this with something else Wittgenstein once said apropos the issue in Plato’s Crito as to whether things are good because the gods will them or whether the gods will things because they are good.15 Socrates, of course, argues for the latter (as do most philosophers); but Wittgenstein said he thought the first conception the much deeper one.16 Spinoza would not speak in quite this way at all, but he is closer to Socrates than to Wittgenstein, that is, he thinks there is an explanation of such matters. For him, to say that something follows from the nature of substance is to say there is an explanation of it. Wittgenstein is not saying, exactly, there is no explanation; but that a deeper way of looking at the matter is not to ask for an explanation. Such an attitude constitutes, of course, a root and branch rejection of Spinoza’s whole project; a refusal to put reason at the centre of one’s view of things, especially of human life. Contrast the following: The use of the word ‘fate’. Our attitude to the future and to the past. To what extent do we hold ourselves responsible for the future? How much do we speculate about the future? How do we think about the past and the future? If something unwelcome happens: do we ask ‘Whose fault is it?’, do we say ‘it must be somebody’s fault?’, –​or do we say ‘it was God’s will’, ‘it was fate’?17

Wittgenstein would have distinguished wisdom from the use of ‘reason’, most certainly, at least in Spinoza’s understanding of that word. Note the opposition between wisdom and ignorance. Is wisdom a matter of knowing a lot? This brings us to human bondage, and of the routes to our liberation from it. In the final part of the Ethics, Spinoza tries to demonstrate how the operation of reason is the only true freedom, and how through reason the wise person gains powers which are unavailable to the ‘ignorant’: I pass, finally, to the remaining Part of the Ethics, which concerns the means, or way, leading to freedom. Here, then, I  shall treat of the power of reason, showing what it can do against the affects, and what Freedom of Mind, or

14 CV 61e. 15 It seems likely that Winch misspoke at this point and is actually referring to the puzzle presented by Plato in Euthyphro (10a) rather than Crito. 16 Friedrich Waismann, ‘Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein’. Philosophical Review 74:1 (1965): 12–​16. 17 CV 61e.

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blessedness, is. From this we shall see how much more the wise man can do than the ignorant [quantum sapiens potior sit ignaro].18

Let’s consider Propositions 1–​13,19 and first 1–​4. These claim to establish the possibility of a kind of freedom, in the face of the formidable obstacles described in Part IV. P1

In just the same way as thoughts and ideas of things are ordered and connected in the Mind, so the affections of the body, or images of things are ordered and connected in the body. [PW: NB this use of ‘image’.]

Note that there is no talk of any priority of one over the other here. That has been ruled out from the beginning and with great deliberation in the preface to Part V. P2 If we separate emotions, or affects, from the thought of an external cause, and join them to other thoughts, then the Love, or Hate, toward the external cause is destroyed, as are the vacillations of the mind arising from these affects. P3 An affect which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of  it. P4 There is no affection of the Body of which we cannot form a clear and distinct concept. The picture seems to be that although the mind has no power over the body, it does have power over itself. That is to say, its adequate ideas have the power to extend themselves. (And the existence of the ‘common notions’ guarantees that the mind will have some adequate ideas.) This does not exactly bring about or produce any change in the body, but it necessarily manifests itself physically in bodily changes. I  will talk and act differently if my ideas are adequate than if they are inadequate. In particular as my understanding of the external causes changes, so will my behaviour towards such causes. See the following: P10 So long as we are not torn by affects contrary to our nature, we have the power of ordering and connecting the affections of the Body according to the order of the intellect. 18 Evpref; C 1:594. 19 EVp1–​13; C 1:597–​603.

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Note that he says we have this power, not ‘the mind’. And ‘we’, of course, are bodies as well as minds. It is Proposition 3 that I find most difficult. I mentioned this in connection with Part IV, Proposition 8: The knowledge of good and evil is nothing but an affect of Joy or Sadness, insofar as we are conscious of  it.20

That seemed designed to show that reflection on our own ideas, affects, cannot liberate us, since it is merely an expression of that from which we need to be liberated. I suppose he may be understood somewhat like this: It is no use forming our ideas of good and evil simply on the basis of our existing attitudes and desires. We need first to change these. And this can be done through reflection on what is adequate in our ideas of their objects. That will result in these ideas becoming more adequate. The development must be a very concrete one; only thus can we find the power (from our connections with external things) to bring about a real change. Otherwise our reflection is simply going to be a reinforcement of our prejudices. If this is indeed what Spinoza means, I think (for what that is worth) that there is a great deal of truth in it.21 But there are still problems. In particular, I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that Spinoza is reintroducing control of the body by the mind through the back door. Cf. Proposition 14: The Mind can bring it about that all the Body’s affections, or images of things, are related to the idea of  God.22

Propositions 5–​13 for the most part reiterate points made in Part IV. Liberation comes with seeing things as necessary rather than as contingent.23 It comes with extending our knowledge of causes to take in a wider network so that we do not see any one thing or person as responsible for our joy or sadness. The somewhat difficult Proposition 7 can be understood in this light.

20 EIVp8; C 1:550. 21 PW: An analogy can be drawn here with Simone Weil’s ‘Essai sur la notion de la lecture’. [Simone Weil, ‘Essay on the Notion of Reading’. Philosophical Investigations 13:4 (1990): 297–​303.] 22 EVp14; C 1:603. 23 PW: Understanding that there is no ‘free will’ is especially important in this connection when we are concerned with our attitudes to other human beings.

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Affects that arise from, or are aroused by, reason are, if we take account of time, more powerful than those that are related to singular things which we regard as absent.24

I suppose the thought is somewhat like this. Insofar as we focus our attention on something absent our ideas are necessarily inadequate and we are necessarily passive. This is because absence is a negation, which has no reality. What are real are the factors (of which there will be a multiplicity) which exclude the object’s presence. We shall draw strength from considering these. How much truth is there is this? Consider Simone Weil: If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire. If we long for a certain being (who is dead), we desire a particular being, therefore a mortal; and we long for that special being ‘who’ …, ‘whom’ … in short, that being who died at such and such a time on such and such a day. And we have that being –​dead. […] In such cases suffering –​emptiness –​is the mode of existence of the objects of our desire. We only have to draw aside the veil of unreality and we shall see that they are given to us in this way …25 The loss of contact with reality –​there lies evil, there lies sorrow. There are certain situations which bring about such a loss: deprivation, suffering. The remedy is to use the loss itself as an intermediary for gaining reality. The presence of the dead one is imaginary, but his absence is very real; it is henceforth his manner of appearing.26

It seems to me there is a very close kinship between Simone Weil and Spinoza here; but also a yawning gap. How to characterise their relation is difficult. Most obviously, their difference lies in Simone Weil’s willingness to characterise someone’s absence (a negation) as real; whereas Spinoza would say: it is only those positive factors which exclude that person’s present existence which are real. The difference is one of emphasis, but it is a very important difference for all that. Spinoza’s recommendation is that we look away from the one on whom all our desires and longings are concentrated. Simone Weil’s, on the contrary, is that we concentrate on the absence, regard the absent one ‘as an intermediary for gaining reality’, that is, we might say, we seek the reality of the world in ‘what it is not’ (Deus absconditus). Compare her anti-​Spinozistic

24 EVp7; C 1:600. 25 Weil, Notebooks, 20. 26 Ibid., 28.

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remark that we need a representation of the world that contains a void, so that God may enter.27 In her working out of that thought, the notion of desire as involving a lack is absolutely fundamental. And she regards that as if it were a fundamental feature of human reality –​that men desire and in desiring show that they lack something. And of course, that is also fundamental to the conception she has of the relation between men and God. And it is no accident that that relation as she develops it, is a relation to a God who, as she puts it, is in fact not in the world, is outside the world. And in fact the conception of God as outside the world and the conception of the world as a void are two different sides of the same coin. I would think that, in putting the matter this way, Simone Weil very likely had Spinoza in mind.28 This idea of the void is connected in Weil’s thought with her idea that we should not suppose that blessedness is something that we can obtain through our own powers (‘reason’). If we achieve it, that is a grace of God. (Cf. Wittgenstein: ‘a gift’.) Compare her great remarks about Saint Peter: that his sin lay not so much in his denial of Christ, but in his saying to him in advance: ‘I will not deny thee’; since it was to suppose the source of loyalty to be in oneself, and not in grace.29 Since he was of the elect, this denial fortunately became clear. But in other cases, people’s boasts may come true and be confirmed, and they never understand. If we consider Spinoza in the light of these comparisons, it may become easier to see some justification for those who regarded him as an atheist. Propositions 14–​20, nevertheless, bring Spinoza’s treatment of these matters into relation with the notion of ‘God’ and make prominent the notion of the love of  God. P14. P15.

P16. P17. P18.

The Mind can bring it about that all the Body’s affections, or images of things, are related to the idea of  God. He who understands himself and his affects clearly and distinctly loves God, and does so the more, the more he understands himself and his affects. This Love toward God must engage the Mind most. God is without passion, and is not affected with any affect of Joy or Sadness. No one can hate God.

27 Ibid., 148. 28 See also Peter Winch, Simone Weil. The Just Balance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 120–​32. 29 See Peter Winch, ‘Can a Good Man Be Harmed?’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 66 (1965–​66): 55–​70,  69.

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He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.30 This Love toward God cannot be tainted by an affect of Envy or Jealousy: instead, the more men we imagine to be joined to God by the same bond of Love, the more it is encouraged.31

Propositions 17 and 19 raise important questions about the relation between Spinoza’s position and that of traditional Judeo-​Christian religion. In some (dare I say the deepest?) versions, the love of God for human beings and of human beings for God are virtually indistinguishable: it is only in so far as we are inspired by God’s love for human beings that we can love one another and hence love God. In Spinoza’s version, it is not a matter of being ‘inspired by’ God’s love; rather, sharing in God’s love is a result of our own efforts, our own rational activity. The reasoning behind the notion is roughly this:  Love is joy, which is consciousness of increased activity, associated with the idea of an external cause. Increased activity means greater understanding, more adequate ideas. Greater understanding or adequacy comes with awareness of a wider network of causes. In becoming aware of a wider network of causes, one becomes less vulnerable to external forces, hence less passive, hence less subject to sadness and more joyful. This is because in understanding external causes one takes them into oneself; they in a way cease to be ‘external’. The ultimate network of causes is God himself. Hence, in so far as one relates one’s understanding of one’s own state to God, one ceases to be vulnerable to anything (because, by definition, there is nothing left to be vulnerable to); one is in the fullest degree active and hence experiences nothing but joy. Hence one loves God. Anyone who thinks he or she hates God is deluded, mistaken about the object of his or her hate. That, as I say, is roughly the reasoning. Do we understand it? One’s suspicion should be roused by the need to interpolate, as I did, ‘by definition’. We encountered similar problems already in Part I: God is by definition causa sui because there is nothing else that could be his cause. Taken by itself, this is perhaps not a conclusive objection. It leads on to the question:  How are we to apply these formulae? Consider, for example, Proposition 14. What are we to understand by the expression ‘related to’ in this formula? What it has to mean in the context of Spinoza’s argument is something like ‘are understood to be caused by’. But this, by Spinoza’s own lights, must mean more than understanding in an abstract way that God is the

30 See also EVp36; C 1:612–​13. 31 EVp14–​20; C 1:603–​6.

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cause of everything. For one thing, Spinoza represents this understanding –​ ‘the Third Kind of Knowledge’ –​as arising out of scientific knowledge, which is not abstract but deals in specific relations between very concrete things. And this too, as I tried to bring out, is important to his ethical views: one frees oneself from bondage not through abstract ‘knowledge of good and evil’, but through coming to understand the concrete particularities of one’s situation, one’s relation to one’s environment. And indeed, Spinoza seems to be emphasizing this point by interpolating Proposition 24 just at the beginning of his account of the Third Kind of Knowledge: The more we understand singular things, the more we understand God.32

Let’s look at the Third Kind of Knowledge. The notion is introduced in Part II of the Ethics: … we perceive many things and form universal notions: I.

II.

III.

IV.

from singular things which have been represented to us through the senses in a way that is mutilated, confused, and without order for the intellect; for that reason I  have been accustomed to call such perceptions knowledge from random experience. from signs, e.g. from the fact that, having heard or read certain words, we recollect things, and form certain ideas of them, which are like them, and through which we imagine the things. These two ways of regarding things I  shall henceforth call knowledge of the first kind, opinion or Imagination. Finally, from the fact that we have common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things. This I  call reason and the second kind of knowledge. In addition to these two kinds of knowledge, there is (as I shall show in what follows) another, third kind of knowledge, which we shall call Intuitive knowledge. And this kind of knowing proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things. I  shall explain all these with one example. Suppose there are three numbers, and the problem is to find a fourth, which is to the third as the second is to the first. Merchants do not hesitate to multiply the second by the third, and divide the product by the first because they have not yet forgotten what they heard from their teacher without any demonstration, or

32 EVp24; C 1:608.

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because they have found this on the simplest numbers, or from the force of the Demonstration of P7 in Bk. VII of Euclid, viz. from the common property of proportionals. But in the simplest numbers none of this is necessary. Given the numbers 1, 2, and 3, no one fails to see that the fourth proportional number is 6 –​and we see this much more clearly because we infer the fourth number from the ratio which, in one glance, we see the first number to have (to) the second.33 While the example is perspicuous enough in itself, it does not take us far, since the problem remains how to apply it to the case in hand, to knowing that proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things. The difficulty here is more than lack of imagination; it is inherent in Spinoza’s whole account. It belongs to the notion of ‘finite modes’ that they follow from God’s nature only insofar as God is conceived as finitely modified. So the chain of causes here stretches into infinity. Every singular thing, or any thing which is finite and has a determinate existence, can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an affect by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence; and again this cause also can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an affect by another, which is also finite and has a determinate existence, and so on, to infinity.34

I will conclude by addressing myself to Part V, Proposition 23; I want to discuss what Spinoza says about the relation between mind and body in Part V. The relevant Propositions are 21 to the end. Here are the most important: P21 P22 P23

The Mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the Body endures. Nevertheless, in God there is necessarily an idea that expresses the essence of this or that human Body, under a species of eternity.35 The human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which is eternal.36

33 EIIp14s2; C 1:477–​78. 34 EIp28; C 1:432. 35 PW: This must surely mean ‘under the aspect of ’, or ‘from the point of view of ’. 36 EVp21–​23; C 1:607.

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Whatever the Mind understands under a species of eternity, it understands not from the fact that it conceives the Body’s present actual existence, but from the fact that it conceives the Body’s essence under a species of eternity. Insofar as our Mind knows itself and the Body under a species of eternity, it necessarily has knowledge of God, and knows that it is in God and is conceived through God.37

Of course, the main difficulty here is concentrated in Proposition 23. On the face of it, this seems to run right in the face of Part II of the Ethics, which seems to argue for a complete parallelism of mind and body. If the mind is the idea of the body, how can it continue to exist when the body no longer exists? My own view is that, while there are indeed difficulties about this which cannot be overcome, there is something genuinely important in what Spinoza is trying to say.38 What, first of all, are we to understand by sub specie aeternitatis? Let’s approach this by distinguishing tensed and untensed statements with respect to their truth. The statement ‘I am lecturing today’ is true if uttered by me today; it will not be true if uttered by me next Tuesday. On the other hand, the statement ‘Winch lectures on Spinoza’ remains true, one may feel inclined to say, irrespective of the passage of  time. I think this corresponds to part of what Spinoza says in Proposition 22: ‘In God there is necessarily an idea that expresses the essence of this or that human Body, under a species of eternity.’39 What is true of a body, expressed ‘tenselessly’, remains true ‘eternally’. What is true of a body is, in other words, an idea of that body. And an idea of a body belongs to the mind of that body. Hence the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body.40 To that we must conjoin Proposition 29, that is, the stipulation that the mind can understand itself as eternal.41 I think this must include the idea that the mind can see itself as having an eternal significance. Now for the difficulties. First an internal difficulty: There remains in eternity an idea that must also have some bodily manifestation and that must

37 EVp21–​30; C 1:609–​10. 38 PW: There are illuminating parallels, I think, between what Spinoza says on this subject and what Socrates says about the immortality of the soul in Plato’s Phaedo. [See Phaedo 69e–​84b.] Of course there are important differences too. But I  do not have time to discuss this. 39 EVp22; C 1:607. 40 EVp23; C 1:607–​8. 41 EVp29; C 1:609–​10.

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presumably belong to the body of which the idea in question is an idea. So it looks as though there must be something wrong, or at least wrongly expressed, about 23. Asking where this wrongness lies will, I think, take us further. One question we may ask is how this continuing manifestation of the body is to be understood. In some cases we may be able to answer this. For example, here we are after 300 years discussing Spinoza: there is (we suppose) a continuous causal connection between the history of Spinoza’s body and what is happening now. But can we generalise that for all minds and bodies? To suppose so would require an act of  faith. A different point. Proposition 23 runs together notions belonging to time and notions belonging to eternity in a very questionable, though not uncommon, way. To explain:  Clearly ‘2 × 2  =  4’ is unaffected by changes of tense. It makes no (obvious) sense to say ‘2 × 2 = 4 yesterday, today, tomorrow’. That is sometimes put in the form ‘2 × 2 is, always was and will be = 4’. But that gives the bogus impression that the equality of 2 × 2 and 4 endures –​perhaps like Mount Vernon only much more so. Proposition 23 gives this misleading impression in ‘something of it remains which is eternal’. Another (though not so obviously) connected point. It sounds to some degree plausible to speak of a true idea as timeless so long as one is thinking of the idea itself as something dissociated from people’s thinking. The moment we do make this connection all sorts of difficulties arise, for example, concerning ‘future contingencies’. Suppose I do, without any reason at all, say: ‘tomorrow there will be an earthquake in Champaign’. And suppose that tomorrow an earthquake does occur in Champaign. Did I  have a true idea? As we have seen, Spinoza would dispute whether I  had any idea at all. As I  repeatedly emphasised earlier, for him an idea is ‘the very act of understanding’. Thus the conception of God is indispensable to him at this point. The difficulty is to see what the phrase ‘act of understanding’ comes to when applied to Spinoza’s God, concerning whom every anthropomorphism is to be avoided. (Perhaps the Jewish religious leaders had something on their side.) Note that I  am not objecting to talk of ‘being judged by God’. I  am objecting to the introduction of such notions into a metaphysical context like this. Compare Sir Thomas More to Richard Rich. When Rich (who later shopped More and perjured himself) solicited him unsuccessfully for employment, More advised him to continue as a teacher. Rich protested that, even if he were a good teacher, no one would know. To which More replied: ‘Your students would know, and you would know, and God would know.’42 Our

42 Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons. A Play of Sir Thomas More, Act I. London: Bloomsbury, 2006, 5.

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question is: what is the status of the last clause? On Spinoza’s view, this is a demonstrable metaphysical truth. For More, it is a profession of faith. That does not mean it is the same ‘truth’ arrived at in different ways. The different context completely changes the sense. What I  do matters. We are concerned with a particular way of understanding that.

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Quine, Willard Van Ormond. ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969: 69–​90. Rhees, Rush. Without Answers. London: Routledge, 1969. Sartre, Jean-​Paul. Being and Nothingness. A  Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Travis, Charles. Thought’s Footing:  A Theme in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Waismann, Friedrich. ‘Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein’. Philosophical Review 74:1 (1965): 12–​16. Weil, Simone. ‘Essay on the Notion of Reading’. Philosophical Investigations 13:4 (1990): 297–​303. —​—​—​. Formative Writings 1929–​41. Translated by Dorothy Tuck McFarland and Wilhelmina van Ness. London: Routledge, 1987. —​—​—​. The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Translated by Arthur Willis. London: Routledge, 2004. Williams, Bernard. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. London: Penguin, 1978. Winch, Peter. ‘Can a Good Man Be Harmed?’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 66 (1965–​66): 55–​70. —​—​—​. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1958. —​—​—​. ‘Mind, Body & Ethics in Spinoza’. Philosophical Investigations 18:3 (1995): 216–​34. —​—​—​. ‘Review of Jonathan Bennett’s A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics’. Philosophical Investigations 9:2 (1986): 140–​52. —​—​—​. Simone Weil. The Just Balance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Wolfson, Harry Austryn. The Philosophy of Spinoza. Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, Volume 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934.

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INDEX action 96–​97 activity 65, 68, 78, 95, 96, 104–​5, 109, 123, 133 local 66 of the mind. See mind, activity of affects 87–​119, 129 active 90–​91 passive 90–​91 agreeing in nature 118–​19 application of concepts 51, 56 attachment xxviii, 100, 103–​4 attribute xv, xxvii, xxix–​xxx, 19, 28, 38, 39–​40, 41, 57, 58–​60, 64, 67, 68, 71, 75, 79–​80, 81, 84, 88, 105, 117, 134 as an aspect 41–​42, 43 conceived through something else 20–​21 Bennett, Jonathan xi, xxx, 2, 78 blessedness xiii, 1, 67, 129, 132 Blyenbergh (Blijenbergh), Willem van 107, 108, 109, 110, 113 body xxiv, 35, 43, 44, 67–​85, 95, 96, 101–​2, 106–​7, 110, 118, 121, 129, 130, 135–​37 human xxvii–​xxxviii, 60, 62, 65–​66, 72–​74, 78, 79–​80, 81–​84, 105, 121–​24, 136 Bolt, Robert 137n42 bondage xiv, xxiv, 73, 79, 84, 89, 99, 104, 113, 128, 134 Bouwmeester, Johannes 107n36 Brentano, Franz 6 Carroll, Lewis 42 cause 23–​24, 37–​38, 39, 41, 43, 49, 54, 69, 79, 89, 90, 97–​99, 100, 101, 103,

104–​5, 107, 109, 110, 111, 125, 126, 130, 134 adequate 90, 115 chain of causes 135 connecting subject and predicate 20, 22, 37, 40 and effect xv, xxiv, 4, 17, 19, 91, 99, 100, 111 efficient 53 equal 100 of existence 33 external 33, 38, 53, 63, 89, 93–​94, 102, 106, 107, 109, 111, 112, 115–​16, 129, 133 final 102 of itself xxii, 38, 58, 125, 133 partial 90 system of causes xiv, 16, 43, 53, 61, 62, 78, 111, 133 central state materialism 84 ceteris paribus 52–​54 cogito xvi, 3, 5, 8, 15, 17, 18, 26–​27 common notions 61–​62, 73–​74, 79, 129, 134 conatus xxviii, 79, 92–​95, 108 constraint xv, xvi, xviii, 8, 10–​11, 17, 19, 27, 39 illusory xx on investigation xxii contingency xiii, 5, 50, 54–​55, 61, 62, 70, 84, 89, 104, 130 contingent 53 Curley, Edwin xxxix, 6n16, 113n58 Descartes xvi–​xviii, xxvii, xxxi–​xxxiii, 1, 2–​5, 9, 14–​17, 18, 21, 24, 25–​28, 32–​33, 34–​36, 39n23, 42, 43, 44–​45, 61n21, 62–​63, 64–​65, 68, 80, 92–​93

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desire 51, 89, 91–​92, 94–​95, 110, 115, 130, 131 destruction 92, 93–​94 disappointment 98 doubt xx, 8, 10–​11, 18–​19, 25–​27 Cartesian xvi–​xvii, xxiii, 3, 7, 9, 15–​16, 18, 24, 25–​27, 36 Dummett, Michael 11n28 Ecclesiastes 116 egocentrism/​egoism xxiv, xxxv, xxxvii, 104, 114–​15, 121 Elwes, RHM. 6 emotions. See affects endeavour. See conatus enquiry xxi, xxiii, 1, 2, 13–​14, 19, 114 empirical 51 end of xxiii form of xxii, 12, 13 method of 15 possibility of 50 pure 2 unity of 56 error xx, 8, 10–​11, 31 essence 35, 39, 41, 43, 47, 53, 58, 67, 94, 117, 125, 135, 136 actual 92 eternal and infinite 64 formal 6–​7, 17, 20, 65, 134 objective 6–​7, 17, 20, 57, 65 Euclid 135 Euclidean geometry xix, xxi, 20 existence 70–​71, 92, 94, 104, 117, 135 existence as a property 40 extension xv, xxiv, xxvii, xxix–​xxx, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 57, 58–​60, 62–​65, 68, 70–​72, 105, 106 falsity xiv, xviii–​xix, 7, 8, 11, 16, 22, 70 as privation xiv, 11 free xxiv, 73, 84, 88, 99, 101, 104–​5, 113, 128–​29, 134 agency xiii, xix, 21, 91 will xxviii, 8, 21, 62, 64, 79, 89, 90, 104, 107, 130n23 Frege, Gottlob 69n9, 71 Freud, Sigmund 100n26, 111n52

Galilei, Galileo 63, 93 geometry 60, 61, 63, 74, 106 God xxxvi, 4, 18–​19, 27, 32–​33, 35–​36, 42, 44, 60, 62–​63, 64, 67–​68, 92–​93, 104–​5, 130, 131–​32, 133, 134, 136 as absolute infinite 47 infinite intellect of 40, 70 and knowledge 25–​26 love of. See love of God good xii–​xiii, xiv, xxiv, 1, 9, 88, 94–​95, 114–​15 knowledge of xiv, 116–​17, 130, 134 life 2 the true 1, 14 Harvey, William 66n33 hate xxviii, 99–​101, 103, 111, 112, 118, 129, 133 Hempel, Carl G. 50, 125 Hobbes, Thomas 77, 112–​13 hope 98 human xxv, xxviii–​xxix, 31, 49, 61, 68, 81, 88, 115, 126 body xxvii–​xxxviii, 60, 62, 65–​66, 72–​ 74, 78, 79–​80, 81–​84, 105, 121–​24, 136 bondage. See bondage condition xii, 102 imperfection 50 life 101, 128 nature xiii, 1, 2, 14 Hume, David 5, 69 hypostatization 42 idea 121, 124, 136, 137 idealism 40, 41, 84 ideas 8–​11, 16–​18, 21–​22, 55, 65, 68–​72 accompanying 98 adequate xxiv, xxxiv, 7, 8, 10–​11, 19, 28, 29, 70, 74–​75, 91, 97, 105, 106–​7, 109, 129, 134 clear and distinct 15, 19, 24, 25, 58, 68 confused 15, 78, 87 genuine xiv

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Index given true xix, xxiii, 4, 15–​16, 26, 79 of ideas 74–​75, 79, 117 identity of 70 inadequate xiii, xxiv, xxxiv, 8, 10–​11, 28, 61–​62, 70, 75, 78, 87, 91, 93, 101, 105, 106–​7, 111, 131 negative 56–​57 system of xv true xv, 9, 16, 58 universal 113–​14 ideatum 6, 7, 51, 57, 69, 70, 71–​72, 74–​75, 76, 78, 117n72 identity of indiscernibles 44, 48 ignorance. See knowledge, deficiency of image xv, 10, 12, 16, 18, 21, 76, 129, 130, 132 imagination xiii, 78, 80n40, 85, 111, 125, 134, 135 imperfect 113–​14 impossible 53 incarnation 105 individual xxiii inertia 63, 93 infinite 105 intellectual love of God 84 intelligibility xv, xviii, xx, xxv, 15, 17, 18, 22, 31–​32, 35–​39, 40, 44, 45, 56, 58–​59, 71 intention 77, 90 interest 104, 122–​24 investigation xv–​xvi, xxii, xxiii, 28 form of 30 Jelles [Jellis], Jarig 113n57 joy 97, 110–​12, 116, 118, 130, 133 judgement xiii, xix, 10, 17–​18, 24, 31–​32, 35–​39, 56, 99–​100, 115 act of 31 in Descartes 21 empirical xxi–​xxiii, 12–​13, 19–​20, 30–​31 geometrical 20, 29, 39 negative xx–​xxi, 39, 47–​51 positive 48, 49 system of 8 justification xxii, 4, 38 regress of xxii, 38

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Kant, Immanuel 40n24 knowledge 26, 72, 76 complete 50 deficiency of 50, 53, 54, 55, 89, 128 of God 26 intuitive 134 kinds of 39, 111, 125, 134–​35 reflective xviii, xxiii knowledge, deficiency of 104 Kripke, Saul 84 Kuhn, Thomas S. 13n34, 29–​30 language xvii, 79, 122 critique of 113 possibility of 7 learning xxx, xxxii, xxxvii, 79, 125 life xiii, xxiv, xxv, xxx–​xxxi the good xii limitation 47–​48, 57, 102 logic 52 logical structure 51 love xxviii, 99, 100–​101, 103, 111, 118, 129 of God 132–​33 tranquil 108–​10 Mann, Thomas 112n54 Marquis, Don 102 mathematics 12, 51–​52, 125 meaning xv, xvii, xviii, xxv, 5, 12, 18, 19, 55, 70, 71, 79 memory 85, 111 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice xxxiv–​xxxv method 13–​14, 25 geometrical xxvii to improve understanding xxiii unity of xxiii, 30 mind xxix, 43, 44, 60, 65–​66, 67–​85, 95, 96, 106, 109, 118, 129, 130, 135–​37 activity of. See mind, activity of eternal part of 105, 135, 136 mode 44, 60–​65, 67, 68, 75, 84, 105, 117 finite 31, 33, 40, 41, 49, 62, 80, 81, 88, 92–​93, 114, 135 infinite 60–​65, 88 More, Thomas 137–​38 motion 43, 62–​64, 65, 77, 93 and rest xxx, 61, 65–​66, 78, 82, 122, 123

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Nagel, Thomas 14 natural right 113 necessary 53 necessity xiii, 31, 70, 73, 79, 84, 90, 93, 104, 125, 126, 130 negation xx–​xxi, 21, 47–​51, 56–​57, 70, 118, 131 object of thought xv, xxi, 4 intentional 6 ontological argument 4, 32–​33, 40, 58 Ovid 116 pain 95–​100, 103, 109, 110–​12 parallelism 136 passive 80, 96–​97, 101, 104–​5, 109, 111, 131, 133 perception xiii, xvi, xxxii, 16, 72, 85, 107–​8, 125, 134 perfection 4, 13, 14, 32, 95, 96, 110, 113–​14, 117 person xxviii, 22, 125 identity of xxiv perspective xiii, xiv, xxiii–​xxiv, xxxii, 14, 73, 74, 101, 107, 117 physics xxi, 51, 52, 74, 124 physiology xxx, xxxi–​xxxii, 77, 78, 108, 122 quasi-​ 121 pineal gland 80 pity 98, 126 Plato 112n55, 114, 117, 128, 136n38 pleasure 95–​100, 103, 109, 110–​12 possibility 71 possible 53, 56, 67 predicate xiv, xxi, 6, 10, 12–​13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21–​22, 24, 37, 38, 40, 42, 58 predication 12, 41 psychology 51, 77, 83, 121 Quine, Willard Van Orman 77n26 reality xv, xvi, xviii, 19–​20, 24, 47, 48, 58, 84, 104, 131 correspondence with xvii, 8, 27 structure of 21

reason xii, 15, 66, 109, 110, 113, 114, 117, 119, 124–​26, 128–​29, 131, 132, 134 Rhees, Rush 7n19, 74n18 Rich, Richard 137–​38 Romans 116n68 sadness 110–​12 sceptic 18 Schuller [Schaller], Georg Hermann 59 scientific explanation 50, 52–​53, 54 self xiv, xxxii self-​preservation xxviii Socrates 11, 32, 117, 128 Spanish poet 122 striving 66, 110, 115, 117 sub specie aeternitatis 104, 135–​37 subject xiv, xxi, 6, 10, 12–​13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21–​22, 24, 37, 38, 40, 42, 58 thinking 3 substance xvi, xxii, 29, 31, 54, 55, 57–​58, 60, 67, 68, 75, 79–​80, 81, 84, 88, 104 Cartesian 28, 34–​35, 42, 44–​45, 92–​93 conceived through itself xx, xxiii, 20–​ 21, 30–​31, 39, 40, 43, 44, 47, 50 existence of 34, 36, 51, 58 necessary existence of 32, 37, 40 one-​ness of 30, 30n5, 34, 39, 57 suicide 93–​94 tensed/​untensed 136, 137 thought xv, xxvii, xxix–​xxx, 17, 20, 23–​24, 28, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 57, 58–​60, 68, 70–​72, 81, 84, 105, 106 reliability of 26 time 104, 117, 123, 131, 136, 137 Travis, Charles 51n6 truth xiv, xv, 5–​6, 7, 8–​9, 11, 16, 22, 26, 31–​32, 56, 70, 71 coherence theory of xix, 71 marks of 16 in mathematics xxi, 12, 31–​32 Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried Walther von 59–​60, 61, 62, 64–​65 understanding xii, xix–​xx, xxi, xxii, 1–​2, 23–​24, 43, 48, 67–​69, 76, 80, 88 act of 16, 17, 137

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Index improvement of xxiii–​xxiv, 107, 108 method of 90, 106 vacillation xii, 89, 100, 111, 129 vacuum 48 virtue 117, 121–​22, 124 warty bliggens the toad 102–​3 Weil, Simone xi, xxxiii–​xxxvi, 105n32, 112n55, 130n21, 131–​32 will xiv, xvi, xviii, xx, xxxii, 17, 21, 22, 61, 71, 80, 94, 109, 115

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free. See free will of God 35, 93, 128 Williams, Bernard 42n32 Wittgenstein, Ludwig xi, xxvii, xxviii, 4, 8, 13n34, 14, 38, 51n6, 57n12, 69n9, 75n20, 77, 115, 119, 126–​28, 132 world xi, xiii, xiv, xv–​xvi, xvii, xix, xxiii, 1, 2, 7, 11–​12, 15, 20, 27–​28, 31, 38, 49, 56, 59, 67 characterization of 48 existence of xv, 3, 7–​8, 27, 45 intelligibility of xx, xxv

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