The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza [Second Edition] 1107096162, 9781107096165

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the cambridge companion to

SPINOZA Second Edition

Benedict (Benedictus, Baruch) de Spinoza (1632–77) was one of the most systematic, inspiring, and influential philosophers of the early modern period. From a pantheistic starting point that identified God with Nature as all of reality, he sought to demonstrate an ethics of reason, virtue, and freedom while unifying religion with science and mind with body. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, ethics, politics, and the analysis of religion remain vital to the present day. Yet his writings initially appear forbidding to contemporary readers, and his ideas have often been misunderstood. This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza includes new chapters on Spinoza’s life, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and biblical scholarship, as well as extensive updates to the previous chapters and bibliography. A thorough, reliable, and accessible guide to this extraordinary philosopher, it will be invaluable to anyone who wants to understand what Spinoza has to teach. d o n g a r r e t t is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University. His publications include Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy (1997), Hume (2015), and Nature and Necessity in Spinoza’s Philosophy (2018).

other volumes in the series of cambridge companions

ABELARD Edited by jeffrey e. brower and kevin guilfoy ADORNO Edited by thomas huhn ANCIENT ETHICS Edited by christopher bobonich ANCIENT GREEK AND ROMAN SCIENCE Edited by liba taub ANCIENT SCEPTICISM Edited by richard bett ANSELM Edited by brian davies and brian leftow AQUINAS Edited by norman kretzmann and eleonore stump ARABIC PHILOSOPHY Edited by peter adamson and richard c. taylor HANNAH ARENDT Edited by dana villa ARISTOTLE Edited by jonathan barnes ARISTOTLE’S ‘POLITICS’ Edited by marguerite deslauriers and paul destre´e ATHEISM Edited by michael martin AUGUSTINE 2nd edition Edited by david meconi and eleonore stump BACON Edited by markku peltonen BERKELEY Edited by kenneth p. winkler BOETHIUS Edited by john marenbon BRENTANO Edited by dale jacquette CARNAP Edited by michael friedman and richard creath CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE Edited by william e. scheuerman COMMON-SENSE PHILOSOPHY Edited by rik peels and rene´ van woudenberg THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO Edited by terrell carver and james farr CONSTANT Edited by helena rosenblatt CRITICAL THEORY Edited by fred rush DARWIN 2nd edition Edited by jonathan hodge and gregory radick SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR Edited by claudia card DELEUZE Edited by daniel w. smith and henry somers-hall DESCARTES Edited by john cottingham DESCARTES’ ‘MEDITATIONS’ Edited by david cunning DEWEY Edited by molly cochran DUNS SCOTUS Edited by thomas williams EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY Edited by a. a. long EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY Edited by donald rutherford EPICUREANISM Edited by james warren EXISTENTIALISM Edited by steven crowell ‘THE FEDERALIST’ Edited by jack n. rakove and colleen a. sheehan Continued at the back of the book

The Cambridge Companion to

SPINOZA second edition Edited by Don Garrett New York University

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107096165 DOI: 10.1017/9781316156186 First and second editions © Cambridge University Press 1996, 2022 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1996 13th printing 2009 Second edition 2022 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Garrett, Don, editor. Title: The Cambridge companion to Spinoza / edited by Don Garrett, New York University. Description: Second edition. | Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Series: Cambridge companions to philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021025361 (print) | LCCN 2021025362 (ebook) | ISBN 9781107096165 (hardback) | ISBN 9781107479876 (paperback) | ISBN 9781316156186 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677. | BISAC: PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / Modern Classification: LCC B3998 .C32 2021 (print) | LCC B3998 (ebook) | DDC 199/.492––dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025361 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025362 ISBN 978-1-107-09616-5 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-47987-6 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Contributors List of Abbreviations and Method of Citation Introduction don garrett

page vii ix 1

1

Spinoza’s Life piet steenbakkers

12

2

Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Substance yitzhak y. melamed

61

3

Spinoza on the Metaphysics of Thought and Extension martin lin

113

4

Spinoza’s Epistemology ursula renz

141

5

Spinoza on Natural Science and Methodology alan gabbey

187

6

Spinoza’s Metaphysical Psychology michael della rocca

234

7

Spinoza’s Ethical Theory don garrett

282

8

Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan edwin curley

309

9

Spinoza’s Philosophical Religion susan james

335

v

vi contents

10 Spinoza’s Contribution to Biblical Scholarship edwin curley

354

11 Spinoza’s Reception pierre-franc¸ ois moreau and mogens lærke

405

Bibliography Index

444 475

Contributors

Edwin Curley, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan, has published Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Harvard University Press, 1969), The Collected Works of Spinoza (2 vols., Princeton University Press, 1985 and 2016), Behind the Geometrical Method (Princeton University Press, 1988), and articles on a wide variety of topics in Spinoza’s philosophy. Michael Della Rocca is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. His writings include The Parmenidean Ascent (Oxford University Press, 2020), Spinoza (Routledge, 2008), and numerous articles in the history of philosophy and in contemporary metaphysics. Alan Gabbey is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College, New York, and is a membre effectif of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences. He specializes in early modern philosophy and science and has published articles on Descartes, Newton, Henry More, Anne Conway, Huygens, and Spinoza. Don Garrett is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author of Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1997), Hume (Routledge, 2015), and Nature and Necessity in Spinoza’s Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Susan James is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College London. Her publications include Spinoza on Philosophy, Theology, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Spinoza on Learning to Live Together (Oxford University Press, 2020). Mogens Lærke is a senior researcher at the CNRS in France, a fellow at the Maison Française d’Oxford, and a member of the research institute IHRIM at the ENS de Lyon. He is the author of Spinoza and the Freedom of Philosophizing (Oxford University Press, 2021).

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viii list of contributors

Martin Lin is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of Being and Reason: An Essay on Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2019) and many articles on early modern philosophy. Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He works on early modern philosophy, German idealism, medieval philosophy, and some issues in contemporary metaphysics and political philosophy. He is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford University Press, 2015). Pierre-François Moreau is Emeritus Professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He is the editor of Œuvres complètes de Spinoza (Presses Universitaires de France, 2009) and the author of Le récit utopique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1982); Spinoza. L’expérience et l’éternité (Presses Universitaires de France, 1994); and Lucrèce. L’âme (Presses Universitaires de France, 2002). Ursula Renz is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Graz, Austria. She has authored several books and numerous articles on historical and philosophical topics. Her monograph on Spinoza, The Explainability of Experience (Vittorio Klostermann, 2010 in German; Oxford, 2018 in English) won the Journal of the History of Philosophy Prize in 2011. Piet Steenbakkers, before retiring in 2016, was Senior Lecturer of the history of modern philosophy at Utrecht University and holder of the Chair of Spinoza Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. With F. Akkerman and P. F. Moreau, he edited Spinoza’s Ethica (Presses Universitaires de France, 2020).

Abbreviations and Method of Citation Where references are by author and year of publication, full reference information may be found in the Bibliography. The following common abbreviations have been used in referring to Spinoza’s writings: CGLH DPP

E Ep KV TIE TP TTP

Compendium of Hebrew Grammar (Compendium grammatices linguae Hebraeae) Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy” (Renati Des Cartes Principiorum philosophiae pars I et II, more geometrico demonstratae) Ethics (Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata) Correspondence (Epistulae) Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch, en des zelfs Welstand) Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de intellectus emendatione) Political Treatise (Tractatus politicus) Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus theologicopoliticus)

References to the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being are by part number followed by chapter number; references to the Political Treatise and the Theological-Political Treatise are by chapter number followed by the section numbers introduced in the Bruder edition of Spinoza’s works and reproduced in many subsequent editions. References to the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect are by Bruder section numbers. References to the Correspondence are by letter number. References to the Ethics and to Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy” begin with the part number and employ the following common abbreviations: a ap c d d

axiom appendix corollary definition (when not following a proposition number) demonstration (when following a proposition number) ix

x list of abbreviations and method of citation

da ex le p po pr s

definition of the affects (located at the end of Ethics Part 3) explanation lemma (located following Ethics 2p13) proposition postulate preface scholium (note)

For example, “E 1p14d,c1” refers to Ethics Part 1, proposition 14 demonstration and corollary 1. Citations may also include reference to the volume and page number of the Gebhardt edition of Spinoza’s works: G

Spinoza, Benedict de. 1925. Spinoza Opera, 4 vols., ed. Carl Gebhardt. Heidelberg: Winter (reprinted 1972).

Other abbreviations employed for purposes of reference in multiple chapters are as follows: AA

AT CSM

CW I

CW II

PP W/CZ

Leibniz, G. W. 1923– (ongoing publication). Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Akademie-Ausgabe. Darmstadt and other places: Reichl and other publishers. Descartes, René. 1964–76. Oeuvres de Descartes, 12 vols., ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: J. Vrin. Descartes, René. 1985. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spinoza, Benedict de. 1985. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, ed. and trans. Edwin M. Curley, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spinoza, Benedict de 2016. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume II, ed. and trans. Edwin M. Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Descartes, René. Principles of Philosophy, in CSM, vol. 1. Walther, Manfred, and Michael Czelinski, eds. 2006. Lebensgeschichte Spinozas, 2 vols. (based on Freudenthal, 1899). Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.

Introduction Don Garrett

In many ways, Benedict (or Benedictus, or Baruch) de Spinoza appears to be a contradictory figure in the history of philosophy. From the beginning, he has been notorious as an “atheist” who seeks to substitute Nature for a personal deity; yet he was also, in Novalis’s famous description, “the God-intoxicated man.” He was an uncompromising necessitarian and causal determinist; yet his ethical ideal was to become a “free man.” He maintained that the human mind and the human body are identical; yet he also insisted that the human mind can achieve a kind of eternality that transcends the death of the body. He has been adopted by Marxists as a precursor of historical materialism, and by Hegelians as a precursor of absolute idealism. He was a psychological egoist, proclaiming that all individuals necessarily seek their own advantage and implying that other individuals were of value to him only insofar as they were useful to him; yet his writings aimed to promote human community based on love and friendship, he had many devoted friends, and even his critics were obliged to acknowledge that his personal conduct was above reproach. He held that the state has the right to do whatever it has the power to do, while at the same time he defended democracy and freedom of speech. He denied supernatural revelation and criticized popular religion as a grave danger to the peace and stability of the state; yet he devoted himself to the careful interpretation of Scripture and argued for toleration and freedom of religion. Rarely employing figures of speech or rhetorical flourishes of any kind, his works are nevertheless among the most magisterial and uplifting of all philosophical writings, and they have inspired more poets and novelists than those of any other philosopher of the early modern period. Providing explicit definitions of his terms and formal demonstrations of his doctrines, he sought to clarify his meaning and reasons more diligently than has perhaps any other philosopher; yet few philosophers have proven more difficult to interpret. To understand how all of these things can be true of one person and his philosophy is to do more than merely resolve some fascinating interpretive puzzles. It is more, even, than to gain insight into the seventeenth-century intellectual world that produced him and the 1

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subsequent eras that have tried to understand him. It is both of those things, of course; but it is also to see into one of the deepest philosophical minds of the modern or any other era, and thereby to see deeply into philosophy itself. The seventeenth century was a period of scientific, political, and religious turmoil that gave rise to many philosophical “systems.” Of these, it is Spinoza’s monistic and naturalistic system, so initially forbidding in language and presentation, that ultimately speaks most cogently and persuasively to the twentieth century. As Alan Donagan has written: Most philosophies, whatever their superficial attractions, are incoherent, and so impossible. Others, while not impossible, either gratuitously assume what there is no reason to believe, or deny what there is good reason to believe . . .. [T]he number of possibly true philosophies there is some reason to believe is very small indeed, and the philosophical interest of every one of them is correspondingly great. Spinoza’s is of that number. (Donagan 1989: xiv)

Born and educated in the Jewish community of Amsterdam and strongly influenced by his study of Descartes, Spinoza was excommunicated in his early twenties, changed his name from “Baruch” (“blessed”) to its Latin equivalent “Benedict,” and lived out the remaining two decades of his life quietly as a lens-grinder in and near Leiden and the Hague. His personal insignia bore the motto “Caute” (“caution”), and he was indeed a cautious intellectual revolutionary, often expressing new and even radical doctrines in traditional terminology and formulae. Always careful about sharing his views with others, he published his Theological-Political Treatise – examining the relation between religion and the state through the interpretation of Scripture and the history of the Hebrew nation – anonymously under a false imprint; and he declined to publish his masterwork, the Ethics, during his own lifetime. He was not, however, a solitary individual working in personal or intellectual isolation. On the contrary, he influenced and was influenced by many of his contemporaries and was part of an active Dutch intellectual community. In Chapter 1, Piet Steenbakkers provides a lively, rich, and authoritative new narrative of Spinoza’s life and work in context, drawn from exacting research into all available resources. It will be of enormous value to students and scholars alike. The bold, complete title of Spinoza’s mature presentation of his philosophical system is Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order.

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introduction 3 This “geometrical order,” modeled on Euclid’s Elements, evidently corresponds to what Descartes had called the “synthetic” method of demonstration: As for the method of demonstration, this divides into two varieties: the first proceeds by analysis and the second by synthesis. Analysis shows the true way by means of which the thing in question was discovered methodically. . .. Synthesis, by contrast, employs a directly opposite method . . .. It demonstrates the conclusion clearly and employs a long series of definitions, postulates, axioms, theorems, and problems, so that if anyone denies one of the conclusions it can be shown at once that it is contained in what has gone before, and hence the reader, however argumentative or stubborn he may be, is compelled to give his assent. (CSM II: 110–11)1

Spinoza had already used this synthetic method, or geometrical order, as an expositor of Descartes in the only work that he published under his own name during his lifetime, Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy.” In the Ethics, Spinoza sought to demonstrate his ethical doctrines in proper order from the metaphysical principles on which he believed they depend and through which he believed they must be understood. His metaphysical ontology, like Descartes’s, comprises substance, attributes (what Descartes called “principal attributes”), and modes. According to Spinoza, a substance is that which is “in itself and conceived through itself” (E 1d3); an attribute is that which “the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence” (E 1d4); and modes are “the affections of substance, or that which is in another through which also it is conceived” (E 1d5). Because he maintained that all other things are causally dependent on God for their creation and conservation, Descartes had recognized a strict sense of the term “substance” in which God is the only substance (CSM I: PP I.49–52). In a looser and more everyday sense of the term, however, he recognized two kinds of created substances, each with its own principal attribute: bodies, whose principal attribute is extension (i.e., spatial dimensionality); and minds, whose principal attribute is thought. From definitions and axioms seemingly acceptable to Cartesians – with the main exception of an essential Aristotelian axiom requiring that things be understood through their causes (E 1a4) – Spinoza’s Ethics aimed to demonstrate that the only substance is an

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“absolutely infinite” being, God (E 1d6). In Chapter 2, Yitzhak Y. Melamed carefully explains how Spinoza understood his definitions of “substance” and “God” in the context of the philosophies of Descartes and Aristotle, examines the nature of the three key relations of priority in which Spinoza’s God is said to stand to other things (inherence, conception, and causation), and clarifies what Spinoza meant by “absolutely infinite.” He then explores the nature of Spinoza’s “monism” about substance, including the significance of his references early in the Ethics to “substances of one attribute” and the propriety of describing God as “One.” Finally, he explains the nature, reality, and manner of existence of the “modes” – including human beings and all other particular things – that inhere in, are conceived through, and are caused by God Whereas Descartes held that the body and the mind of a human being are two different substances, Spinoza sought to show that a human being’s body and mind are “one and the same” mode of God expressed and conceived though extension and thought, respectively, as two of the infinite array of divine attributes. Whereas Descartes held that the body and the mind of a human being causally interact with each other, Spinoza states that there cannot be any causation between bodies and minds, or indeed, between the modes of any two attributes of God. In Chapter 3, Martin Lin astutely sets out many of the interpretative difficulties regarding Spinoza’s notion of an attribute in general and describes Spinoza’s conception of the attributes of extension and thought in particular, giving special attention to his argument for the structural similarity between the mental and physical realms and for mind-body identity. While granting that “there are as many different ways of interpreting Spinoza’s views on psychophysical causation as there are ways of reading his philosophy of mind more generally,” Lin then goes on to propose and defend a strikingly new interpretation of the relation between attributes, according to which they are fundamentally merely different conceptual languages for referring to the same things. Spinoza, like Descartes, drew a fundamental distinction between the intellect and the imagination. He regarded the former as comprising nonimagistic adequate ideas and the latter as comprising imagistic inadequate ideas. As the title of his early and unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect suggests, part of his philosophical project was to improve and strengthen the former. In Part 2 of the Ethics, he proposed to demonstrate – as consequences of his metaphysics – the character of the human mind as the “idea” of the human body, the

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introduction 5 nature of sense perception, the relation between true and false ideas, and the way in which all ideas (including human minds) are contained in the infinite intellect of God. He also distinguished three kinds of “knowledge” or cognition (cognitio): the first kind, opinion or imagination, includes random or indeterminate experience and hearsay or knowledge from mere signs; the second kind, reason, depends on “common notions” (shared features of things that are “equally in the part and in the whole”) and on adequate knowledge of “properties” (rather than essences) of things; the third kind, intuitive knowledge, “proceeds from an adequate knowledge of the essence or attributes of God to knowledge of the essence of things,” in proper order, from causes to effects. Both the second and the third kinds of cognition are true and adequate, but the third kind provides the greater understanding and insight into the essences of things. In Chapter 4, Ursula Renz traces the development of Spinoza’s epistemology from the early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect to the Ethics; explains the meaning and significance of his technical epistemic vocabulary of “ideas,” “truth,” and “adequacy”; demonstrates how the distinction of three kinds of knowledge or cognition is intended to address a wide range of epistemological issues; and analyzes the doctrine that human ideas and minds are literally contained in “the infinite intellect of God.” The theory of knowledge, on the one hand, and what we now call natural science, on the other, were closely related for Spinoza. In his view, the former serves as the basis from which the methods of natural science, like those of any inquiry, must be derived and through which they must be understood. In addition, however, it follows, from the parallelism of the two attributes of thought and extension and the identity of their corresponding modes, that the power of logical entailment itself – by which adequate ideas produce or give rise to other adequate ideas under the attribute of thought – is literally one and the same as the causal power by which modes of extension produce or give rise to other modes of extension. That is, logical power and physical power are the very same power, expressed in two different ways, under two different attributes. The Ethics itself devotes somewhat less discussion to the sciences of extended bodies, or what we would now call “physics,” than it does to the sciences of thinking things, or what we would call “psychology.” Nevertheless, Spinoza’s concern with both the methods and the content of natural science is evident throughout his writings, from his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect to his geometrical presentation of Cartesian physics in Descartes’s “Principles

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of Philosophy,” and from his so-called physical excursus following Ethics 2p13 to his correspondence with Henry Oldenburg (the first Secretary of the British Royal Society and a friend of Robert Boyle). In Chapter 5, Alan Gabbey locates Spinoza’s scientific interests in the context of the disciplinary categories of the seventeenth century, investigates the authorship of two small treatises (on the rainbow, and on the calculation of chances) often attributed to him, describes his scientific correspondence, evaluates his strengths and weaknesses as an expositor of Cartesian physics, assesses the role of Cartesian physics in his own philosophy, and explores his conception of methodology in the natural sciences. Spinoza’s doctrine that there is only one substance raises the question of how individual things can be distinguished from one another. Because different individuals are not different substances, they must be distinguished, within the one substance, in some other way. Within the attribute of extension, individual things are constituted by “fixed proportions of motion and rest” – that is, persisting patterns in the distribution of fundamental physical forces. Within the attribute of thought, individuals are constituted by the ideas of such actually persisting patterns. Individuals each have a definite nature or essence and are, to that extent, finite approximations to substances. Part 3 of the Ethics argues that a thing’s essence or nature must seek to exclude from itself what is incompatible with its own persistence, so that a thing can be understood as active – that is, as the adequate cause of effects – only to the extent that it endeavors, through its own nature, to persist. This striving or endeavor (conatus) to persevere in its own being is thus a consequence of the conditions for being an individual at all, and it constitutes each individual’s own distinctive power. In this way, Spinoza’s solution to the problem of individuation entails a doctrine of necessary individual psychological egoism that applies throughout all of nature. He sought to derive the content of human psychology by adding to this general doctrine two further postulates about human beings in particular: (i) that they are affected in many ways that can increase or decrease their power of acting (in the sense of being an “adequate cause”); and (ii) that they are sufficiently complex to form and retain sensory images or traces of other things. On this basis, Spinoza defined three primary emotions or “affects”: (i) desire (cupiditas), which is “appetite [i.e., the endeavor for self-preservation] together with consciousness of the appetite”; joy (laetitia), which is an affect “by which the Mind passes to a greater perfection” or capacity for action;

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introduction 7 and sadness (tristitia), which is an affect “by which the Mind passes to a lesser perfection” or capacity for action (E 3pp9–11). When an affect is produced by external causes, rather than through the agent’s own power, the affect is a passion. Part 3 of the Ethics goes on to analyze and define a large number of additional affects in terms of these three – by varying their combinations, their causes, and their objects – and deduces from these definitions a number of consequences for emotional and motivational phenomena. In Chapter 6, Michael Della Rocca analyzes and evaluates in detail Spinoza’s argument for the metaphysical conclusion that “each thing, insofar as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being” (E 3p6); he describes and assesses Spinoza’s attempt to apply this metaphysical doctrine to human psychology; he critically examines Spinoza’s account of the particular laws governing human psychology; and offers new insights on the much-debated question of whether Spinoza recognized teleology or purposive explanation in nature. Throughout, he emphasizes both the importance to Spinoza of the Principle of Sufficient Reason – that is, the requirement that everything have a sufficient reason for being as it is – and the naturalistic character of Spinoza’s project, which requires Spinoza to regard human psychological states as subject to laws that are instances or applications of more general laws operative throughout nature. Spinoza’s analysis of the emotions, or “affects,” and his doctrine that each person necessarily endeavors to persevere in being, provide, together with his metaphysics and his theory of knowledge, the basis for the ethical theory that he developed in Parts 4 and 5 of the Ethics. There he sought to explain human susceptibility to passions (i.e., affects of which the individual is not the adequate cause), the ways in which the understanding provides power to control those passions, and the elements of “the right way of living.” The “good,” as Spinoza defined it, is whatever we know to be useful for preserving our being. Since all human beings do necessarily endeavor to persevere in their being, all human beings will be motivated, at least to some extent, so far as their own power permits, to pursue the good as they conceive it. Ethics, as knowledge of the “right way of living,” is for Spinoza a kind of knowledge of nature that is at the same time knowledge that is necessarily motivating (to some extent) for human beings. He argues that the highest human good lies in adequate knowledge, which is itself eternal and thereby allows a part of the human mind to be eternal. Those who are most able to pursue their own advantage through adequate knowledge are “free

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men,” who are “guided by reason” and possess virtue. The existence of human freedom is compatible with necessitarianism because freedom involves, not chance or indeterminism, but rather action from the necessity of one’s own self-preservatory nature, in contrast to necessitation by external causes. Accordingly, only those who are guided by reason, rather than passion, are truly free. Part 4 of the Ethics evaluates a variety of affects and behaviors from an ethical perspective, praising friendship and nobility (because nothing is more advantageous to a human being than other human beings who are guided by reason), but condemning such Christian virtues as humility, repentance, and pity (because they are kinds of sadness). In Chapter 7, I outline Spinoza’s ethical theory and related doctrines and examine several crucial but often neglected or misunderstood aspects of that theory: (i) the meaning of ethical language, (ii) the nature of the good, (iii) the practicality of reason, (iv) the role of virtue, (v) the requirements for moral freedom and moral responsibility, and (vi) the possibility and moral significance of altruism. The chapter also addresses in new detail the meaning of Spinoza’s claim that the ideal “free man” always acts “honestly” (“cum fide”). Spinoza’s psychological egoism provides the basis not only for his ethical theory but for his political theory. Like his ethical theory, his political theory is a branch of the study of nature; but whereas his ethical theory primarily concerns the power and advantage of human individuals, his political theory, as detailed in his Theological-Political Treatise and his later unfinished Political Treatise, primarily concerns the power and advantage of the political collectives that human individuals compose. Fundamental to his political theory is his doctrine that “right” and “power” are coextensive. Like Machiavelli, he sought to understand relations of political power practically, scientifically, and dispassionately. Like Hobbes, he held that citizens are well-advised to give up their right and power to the state in return for the protection that it can provide to them in their pursuit of self-preservation. Unlike Hobbes, however, Spinoza emphasized the breadth of the practical limitations on the individual’s concession of power to the state; and also unlike Hobbes, he located a human being’s highest advantage not in mere continued life and the pursuit of pleasure, but in the achievement of adequate knowledge and its resulting peace of mind. For Spinoza, the state is itself an “individual,” with its own endeavor for self-preservation. However, it is usually in greater danger from its own citizens than it is from external enemies; and in order to preserve itself, it must take care how it seeks to exercise its power over

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introduction 9 them. The wisest and most stable state, he maintained, is a limited constitutional democracy that allows freedom of expression and religious toleration. A free state is thus “free” in three different but related senses, for Spinoza: It places no restrictions on speech or religion; it is conducive to the development of “free men,” in the sense of Spinoza’s ethical ideal; and it is itself a free individual, because it acts through its own nature to achieve its own self-preservation. In Chapter 8, Edwin Curley explains Spinoza’s relation to Machiavelli, to Hobbes, and to the concept of a social contract, and he critically assesses Spinoza’s subordination of the concept of political right to that of political power. Although he was a naturalist – in the sense of holding that nothing exists outside of or beyond Nature – Spinoza was more than a simple atheist hiding impiety in conciliatory or ironic theistic terminology. Rather, by reconceiving Nature as active and self-causing, and at the same time reconceiving God as nonpurposive and extended, he was able to conceive of God as identical with, rather than as the transcendent creator of, Nature. His God, like the God of many theologians, is perfect and infinite, is the self-caused cause of all, has an essence identical with its existence, and is the object of an eternal contemplative love and blessedness. Unlike the God of many theologians, however, the essence of Spinoza’s God is directly intelligible to the intellect through the divine attributes of thought and extension. Indeed, since Spinoza’s God is the only substance, in which everything is and through which everything must be conceived, all knowledge is knowledge of God, for Spinoza, just as all effects are effects of God’s power. Spinoza’s naturalistic and intellectual understanding of God as the absolutely infinite substance is largely coextensive with his metaphysics as presented in Part 1 of the Ethics. However, Spinoza sought not only to provide a philosophical understanding of God in the Ethics, but also to describe in the Theological-Political Treatise the kind of imaginative theology – that is, theology as grasped by the faculty of imagination – that could serve as the basis of a universal popular religion. In Chapter 9, Susan James show how Spinoza’s sharp distinction in that work between “theology” and “philosophy,” as two separate realms with entirely different standards for belief, is compatible with his view that philosophy as well as imaginative theology can constitute a genuine kind of religion. Spinoza saw the Bible as a work of great importance, capable of exacerbating social conflict and motivating persecution, but also capable of exercising a beneficial influence on the unphilosophical multitude, depending on the manner in which it was interpreted. In consequence,

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10 don garrett

he himself sought to interpret it with great care, as a historical product of nature, on the basis of careful attention to the meaning of its authors, philological understanding of its language, and historical knowledge of its composition and transmission. In addition to writing a Compendium of Hebrew Grammar, he devoted considerable attention to the interpretation of Scripture in the Theological-Political Treatise. He concluded, from the content of Scripture itself, that prophets are distinguished not by the strength of their intellects but by the vividness of their imaginations, that revelations were accommodated to the minds of the prophets who received them, and that Scripture itself teaches nothing as essential to salvation except justice (i.e., obedience to the laws of the state) and charity toward one’s neighbor. In Chapter 10, Edwin Curley provides the most accurate and thorough account to date of Spinoza’s specific contributions to biblical scholarship on a variety of questions, while emphasizing that his most important contribution lay in developing a systematic method of interpreting the Bible that came to set the norm for the entire field. Spinoza and his philosophy have meant many things to many people. Most of his own contemporaries regarded his philosophy as a thinly disguised form of atheism, while Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) served to reinforce the image of an absurd and heretical metaphysician who nonetheless lived an exemplary life, even as Spinoza exerted a powerful appeal on freethinkers and radicals. He has exerted a powerful influence on both German and French philosophy from the time of the Enlightenment to the present. Succeeding generations of natural scientists, psychologists, novelists, and poets have found in his writings a continuing source of inspiration. In Chapter 11, PierreFrançois Moreau and Mogens Lærke chronicle the varied history of Spinoza’s reception and influence from the seventeenth century onward. In spite of – and sometimes because of – his use of “geometrical order,” Spinoza is among the most difficult philosophers to interpret; and as Moreau and Lærke make clear, he has been the subject of many divergent interpretations up to and including the present. Our understanding of what Spinoza meant to convey to his readers is by no means complete; it is, however, considerably greater than it has been at any time in the past. More than half of the chapters in this volume – Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, and 10 – are entirely new contributions by leading scholars written specifically for this second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. The other chapters have been updated by their authors (and,

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introduction 11 in the case of Chapter 11, with a new co-author) to reflect recent developments in Spinoza scholarship. The chapters not reprinted from the first edition – W. N. A. Klever’s “Life and Works,” Jonathan Bennett’s “Spinoza’s Metaphysics,” the late Margaret Wilson’s “Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge,” the late Alan Donagan’s “Spinoza’s Theology,” and the late Richard H. Popkin’s “Spinoza and Bible Scholarship” – are all classics of their kind and have been frequently cited in the decades since their publication. They remain available in the first edition of this volume.

note 1 Descartes also used the term “geometrical order,” but he did so in a broader sense than did Spinoza. For Descartes, geometrical order required only that “the items which are put forward first must be known entirely without the aid of what comes later; and the remaining items must be arranged in such a way that their demonstration depends solely on what has gone before” (CSM II: 110). For Descartes, both the analytic and the synthetic methods of demonstration are examples of geometrical order.

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1

Spinoza’s Life* Piet Steenbakkers

s t u dy i n g s p i n o z a ’ s l i f e The story of Spinoza’s life is of interest for students of his philosophy in several ways. To begin with, it is important to understand the times in which he lived and developed into one of the world’s greatest thinkers – to map his networks and to describe the political, cultural, religious, and social contexts that provided the conditions for his thought to emerge. Again, for a proper assessment of his philosophical stature and impact, we must chart the canon, genesis, order, and reception of his works. This requires solid and detailed biographical research. And finally, the way Spinoza lived and died constitutes a special case in the historiography of philosophy. More so than with other philosophers (with the possible exception of Socrates), the story of his life has always been associated with his moral reputation. From the very beginning, his way of living has been considered as the application of his ethics in practice and, by the same token, as an eminently relevant source for assessing his philosophy. This comes out very clearly, for example, in the popular image of Spinoza as the “virtuous atheist.” A philosopher who offers precepts for a good life, or “a life worth living,”1 will make his readers wonder about the extent to which he observed these himself. If, moreover, this philosopher is considered an atheist – and Spinoza no doubt was reputed to be one, despite his protests to the contrary – people apparently tend to take the moral character of his own life into account in assessing that reputation. It worked that way even for Spinoza himself.2 Thus, the reception and interpretation of Spinoza’s works has always been, and still is, inextricably linked to an appraisal of his life and reputed character. In combination with his highly controversial ideas and the dearth of ascertained facts, this has given rise to a tradition in which rumors, speculations, legends, and popular imagery have always played an important part. As a result, many ill-founded and sometimes even contradictory images of Spinoza have emerged. Among the most persistent and influential ones is the idea that Spinoza was an unworldly ascetic, a hermit. There are contemporary reports that make it understandable why people came to think of him that way,3 but the image 12

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spinoza’s life 13 certainly does not fit the historical Spinoza. Though he may have been fond of peace and quiet, he did not spend his life in isolation. He had sizeable networks of friends, acquaintances, and kindred spirits.4 Large parts of Spinoza’s life are virtually undocumented, and many episodes – even crucial ones – can be reconstructed only with varying degrees of probability. There are at least two reasons for this remarkable paucity of solid biographical facts. To begin with, Spinoza preferred to live quietly and inconspicuously. To all appearances, he was selfsufficient. He was no recluse, but he did shun the hustle and bustle of city life. He declined the offer of a chair at the University of Heidelberg5 and was intent on avoiding quarrels.6 His signet ring had for its motto Caute, “cautiously.”7 Though receiving many visitors himself,8 it seems that he rarely went to see other people, nor did he ever start a correspondence with someone he did not know. According to his loyal friend Jarig Jelles, Spinoza had given the explicit instruction that his name should not appear in full on the title page of the posthumously published Ethics.9 In spite of all his discreetness, however, Spinoza could not avoid attracting the attention of his contemporaries and whipping up adoration as well as animosity. He had friends, admirers, and followers, but they were outnumbered by his enemies: his works stirred up the odium theologicum and made him the most notorious thinker of the age. Calling an adversary a Spinozist soon became tantamount to the serious accusation of atheism.10 This, then, is the second reason for the obscurity surrounding much of his life: it was dangerous to be associated with Spinoza. In the letters published in B.d.S. Opera posthuma, the names of many correspondents were concealed.11 His books were banned and circulated clandestinely. Although this did not stop people from reading them – quite the contrary – the circumstances were not conducive to the preservation of contentious material.12 The notoriety and controversial nature of Spinoza’s thought also gave rise to another problem that obfuscates the biographer’s view: the abundance of rumors, legends, and myths about his life. They have their origin not only in the defamation of the philosopher in hostile pamphlets, sermons, and refutations, but also in the zeal of his defenders. The rumor that he was the diabolic inspirer of the policy of Johan de Witt is an instance of the first kind,13 the legends spawned by the anonymous La Vie de Monsieur Benoit de Spinosa, a text that will be dealt with shortly, is the prime example of the second kind. La Vie is the source of the unfounded story that Spinoza was banned from the city of Amsterdam, as well as a number of other wild anecdotes.

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sources What, then, are the sources we can rely on for the study of Spinoza’s life? His philosophical works contain no information on that score. Though the opening pages of the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione have a personal and autobiographical ring to them, they reveal no concrete details about his private life. The function of this apparent disclosure is rhetorical, as in Descartes’s Meditationes and in Augustine’s Confessiones.14 Spinoza’s correspondence, on the other hand, does contain a wealth of precious information about his whereabouts, his reading, his friends and acquaintances, his health, and the development of his thought. The earliest extant letter written by Spinoza dates from September 1661, when he was twenty-eight years old; the last ones were written in the second half of 1676.15 Other sources are letters between other people and annotations jotted down by contemporaries. And although Spinoza’s philosophical texts themselves do not reveal biographical details, two of his published books were provided with instructive prefaces by close friends. Lodewijk Meyer supplied a prologue to Spinoza’s Renati Des Cartes Principia philosophiae & Cogitata metaphysica (1663) and Jarig Jelles wrote a lengthy preface to De nagelate schriften, which was translated into Latin by Lodewijk Meyer for the Opera posthuma. Jelles’s preface, especially, is invaluable as a direct eyewitness account by someone who had known Spinoza very well for many years. Though its main concern is an apologetic one, viz., to exculpate Spinoza and to show that his philosophy is fully compatible with Christianity, it contains several pages specifically devoted to Spinoza’s life. Research in archival records such as official documents and notarial deeds has also revealed many details about Spinoza’s background and family, his activities as a merchant, his expulsion from the synagogue, the banning of his books, and a variety of other issues. There are, however, relatively few documents in which Spinoza is mentioned. His course of life was such as to produce few traces. He never held a public office, remained unmarried, and did not join any religious denomination after his break with the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community in 1656. Even so, Jacob Freudenthal managed to bring out an impressive collection of archival documents relating to Spinoza in 1899,16 and A. M. Vaz Dias and W. G. van der Tak discovered and published an additional batch in 1932.17 In 2006, Manfred Walther and Michael Czelinski brought out a heavily expanded revised edition of Freudenthal’s book.

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spinoza’s life 15 This Lebensgeschichte also contains the early biographies of Spinoza, sources to which we must now turn. Johannes Köhler, better known under his Latinized name Colerus, was the pastor of the Lutheran parish in The Hague from 1693 till his death in 1707. He was born in Germany in 1647. When he arrived in The Hague, sixteen years after Spinoza’s death, the specter of Spinozism apparently still haunted the parish, for as late as 1704, Colerus felt the need to denounce Spinoza’s philosophy as incompatible with the Christian faith in a long Easter sermon. That sermon was published in Dutch a year later, accompanied by an extensive biography of Spinoza.18 Colerus was in a good position to gather information about Spinoza’s life, for he knew a considerable number of people who had been acquainted with the philosopher. His most important witnesses were the painter Hendrik van der Spyck and his wife, the couple in whose house on the Paviljoensgracht Spinoza had lodged during the final five years of his life. Colerus himself had initially rented a room in the house on the Veerkade where Spinoza had lived before moving to the Van der Spyck’s home. Moreover, he had access to material that has since been lost: he mentions a sketchbook with drawings by Spinoza (who apparently was a competent artist) and letters from Spinoza’s publisher Jan Rieuwertsz to Van der Spyck about the papers found in the philosopher’s writing desk after his death, as well as a whole series of bills and other exhibits documenting Spinoza’s demise and burial. In spite of his hostility toward Spinoza’s views, Colerus was an honest chronicler, who assiduously collected and critically examined all the documentation he could lay hands on. His early biography is therefore an indispensable source, in particular for the years Spinoza spent in The Hague. It is, however, not to be relied on without reservations. Colerus depended heavily on the reports given to him by his informants. After so many years, events inevitably had been forgotten or mixed up. Even sincere witnesses such as the Van der Spycks may unconsciously have adapted stories or withheld information out of courtesy. The second early description of Spinoza’s life is a hagiography. It is contained in the anonymous pamphlet La Vie et l’esprit de Monsieur Benoit de Spinosa. Though not published until 1719, Meinsma advanced the thesis that it was written before 1688, by someone who had known Spinoza personally.19 Many scholars have subscribed to this very early dating, in spite of the lack of evidence for a date before 1712.20 Its author remains unknown. The work has often been attributed to an ardent follower of Spinoza, Jean-Maximilien Lucas, but he died in 1697. As an

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alternative candidate, Gabriel de Saint-Glain (or Saint-Glen, Ceinglen) has been mentioned; he died, however, in 1684. La Vie was published together with a Spinozistic treatise entitled L’Esprit de Monsieur Benoit de Spinosa, also known as Traité des trois imposteurs. The two texts need not necessarily have the same author.21 Apart from two printed editions published in 1719, the text also survives in a large number of undated manuscript copies. They all appear to derive from the printed editions.22 Irrespective of the date and authorship, however, La Vie may safely be disregarded as a reliable source of information about Spinoza’s life. Nor was it ever intended as a biography. It is propaganda designed to demonstrate – by means of edifying and wholly fictitious anecdotes – that Spinoza was a secular saint and that Spinozism is morally superior to superstition, a delusion the author imputes mainly to Judaism. None of the details given in La Vie make it plausible or even likely that its author knew Spinoza personally. Apart from Colerus’s biography and the anonymous La Vie, there are five more early texts that contain information about Spinoza’s life and environment. The most influential of these is Pierre Bayle’s entry “Spinoza” (and related texts) in his Dictionaire historique et critique of 1697, expanded in subsequent editions. Bayle depicted Spinoza as a virtuous atheist, an image that did catch on, no doubt because it must have appeared a glaring contradiction in terms to his contemporaries: atheists were considered immoral by definition, as they did not believe in an afterlife and thus could not fear God.23 Another sketch of Spinoza’s life is offered by Sebastian Kortholt in the preface he added in 1700 to the second edition of his father Christian Kortholt’s De tribus impostoribus magnis liber, a denunciation of the three “atheists” Herbert of Cherbury, Thomas Hobbes, and Spinoza.24 Sebastian Kortholt had visited the Dutch Republic around 1697 and spoken with several people, among them Hendrik van der Spyck and probably also Jan Rieuwertsz Junior, the son and heir of Spinoza’s publisher of the same name.25 As the reports by Kortholt and Colerus are mutually independent, their agreement confirms Van der Spyck’s consistency as a witness. Two romans à clef written by Johannes Duijkerius and published in 1691 and 1697 depict the life of a fictional protagonist, Philopater, who started out as an orthodox Reformed Christian, then became a Coccejan and a Cartesian, and finally lapsed into Spinozism. Though fictional, the novels contain explicit references to historical events and actually existing people. They offer a unique view on the earliest stage of

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spinoza’s life 17 Spinozism and disclose several details about the publishing of Spinoza’s works.26 Important details about Spinoza’s life are also to be found in the travel diaries kept by a German scholar, Gottlieb Stolle (1673–1744), and a companion of his by the name of Hallmann,27 of a scholarly tour they made in Northern Germany and the Dutch Republic in 1703–4. Stolle was obviously fascinated by Spinoza, and he and his companion gathered as much information as they could find. One of their informants was Jan Rieuwertsz Junior. Though Rieuwertsz apparently was reserved with these visitors and did not speak his mind, they still managed to elicit important information from him. A final addition to the early biographical sources is a mid-eighteenth-century note on Spinoza’s life written by Johannes Monnikhoff (1707–87). Monnikhoff was a surgeon and a follower of the amateur philosopher Willem Deurhoff (1650–1717).28 Both Monnikhoff’s and Deurhoff’s interest in Spinoza was an ambiguous mixture of attraction and aversion. They carefully collected all they could find by and about Spinoza, thus preserving for posterity the unique manuscript of the Dutch translation of Spinoza’s Korte verhandeling. Monnikhoff inserted a brief biographical sketch in his own apograph of that text.29 The story of Spinoza’s life has been told by many later biographers.30 In English, two fairly recent monographs are currently available. In Spinoza: A Life, Steven Nadler offers a solid, scholarly, and entertaining account not only of Spinoza’s life, background, and context, but also of the development of his thought. Less reliable is Margaret Gullan-Whur’s Within Reason; it incorporates original research, but is marred by a strong tendency to psychologize and to fill in gaps with speculations.31 In order to avoid a fragmentary enumeration of the bare facts that are beyond dispute, I will now present Spinoza’s life in a narrative structure. As the story unfolds, uncertainties and blanks will come up. These will be dealt with by assessing the available evidence and negotiating any remaining hurdles with as little speculation as possible.

d e s c e n t a n d fa m i ly Benedictus de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher, who was born in Amsterdam in 1632 and died in The Hague in 1677. He never set foot outside the Dutch Republic. He was born into a Portuguese-Jewish family. Spinoza’s mother was born in Amsterdam (year of birth unknown), but all his grandparents were born in Portugal, as was his

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father.32 They had come to Amsterdam among many other Sephardic Jewish immigrants, who settled in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century because of the persecution Jews – or those who were suspected of practicing Judaism – suffered in Portugal and Spain. In the almost nine centuries of Islamic rule in medieval Spain, from the early seventh century until the end of the fifteenth, Jewish culture flourished in Sepharad (Hebrew for Iberia). Most of the time, Jews enjoyed a certain amount of protection and toleration, at any rate notably more so than elsewhere. This is not to say that Islamic Spain was free from persecution, oppression, and discrimination, but at least Jews had been allowed to profess their religion there for a long period. In 1492, the “Catholic Monarchs” (Reyes Católicos) Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile ended Muslim rule on the Iberian peninsula. Immediately after this Christian reconquest of Spain, the Jews were expelled from the country, at the zealous instigation of the Spanish Inquisition. Most of the Spanish Jews fled to Portugal. In 1497, however, the Portuguese King Manuel I married Isabella of Aragon, the daughter of the Reyes Católicos. His in-laws demanded of him that Jews be no longer tolerated in Portugal. For economic reasons, Manuel did not want to expel them. Instead, he forced all Jews to convert to Christianity. Yet many of them continued to practice Judaism in secret, and initially – as long as there was no Portuguese Inquisition – they were not actively persecuted. In the second half of the sixteenth century, however, the Portuguese Inquisition began its own pernicious hunt.33 The flight of conversos from Portugal turned into mass emigration after the political unification of the Iberian peninsula in 1580 under King Philip II of Spain. Many refugees went to harbor towns in France (Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen) and to Antwerp, and from there eventually to Amsterdam, where they were allowed to practice their religion, albeit under strict conditions.34 The choice for seaports enabled them to keep in touch with their extended network of overseas mercantile contacts and thus continue their international trade. Spinoza’s father, Michael de Spinoza (alias Gabriel Alvares de Spinoza), was born in Vidigueira, Portugal, in 1587 or 1588, the son of Pedro Rodrigues Espinosa (alias Isaac Espinosa de Nantes) and Mor Alvares.35 In 1605, Michael’s parents fled from Vidigueira to Nantes in Brittany with their three children. In the early 1620s, Michael moved to Amsterdam. He married three times. His first marriage was in (or around) 1623 with a cousin, Rachel de Spinoza (the daughter of his uncle

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spinoza’s life 19 Abraham Espinosa de Nantes), who died in 1627. The couple had two stillborn children. Michael then married Hana Deborah Senior, with whom he had five children: Miriam (ca. 1629–51), Isaac (ca. 1631–49), the future philosopher Bento or Baruch, Gabriel (born ca. 1634–38) and Rebecca (died 1695). There are no archival records that document the birth of Benedictus de Spinoza on November 24, 1632.36 He was the third child and second son of Michael and Hana Deborah, who duly named him Baruch, after his maternal grandfather (Henrique Garces alias Baruch Senior, ca. 1568–1619).37 In this sacral form, the name was used for official purposes only; in everyday usage, the child was called Bento, the Portuguese version of Baruch (“blessed”). No documents survive in which Spinoza himself used the Hebrew name. He signed legal documents as “Bento” and his letters as “Benedictus” (the Latin form of his name) or simply with the initial “B.”38 The family lived on the edge of Vlooienburg, an artificial island created in 1593 in the bed of the river Amstel as part of the urban expansion of the rapidly growing town of Amsterdam.39 In this newly developed area, many Sephardi immigrants settled. The house in which Spinoza was born and grew up no longer exists. It has been described as a handsome merchants’ residence close by the old Amsterdam synagogue.40 It stood on what are now the premises of the “Mozes en Aäronkerk,”41 on the north quay of the Houtgracht, a canal that was filled in in 1882 and is now part of the Waterlooplein. To all appearances, Michael de Spinoza and his family lived in the same house for decades, which implies that Bento grew up there. The parental home may well have remained his abode up until or even beyond 1656, when he left the Jewish community.42 A few weeks before Bento turned six, his mother Hana Deborah died, on November 5, 1638. She was buried in Beth Haim, the Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk.43 Michael’s last marriage, with Hester de Spinosa (alias Giomar de Soliz) in 1641, remained childless. Neither Bento nor his two brothers left any offspring, but both of their sisters did. Miriam married Samuel de Casseres in 1650. They had a son, Daniel, in 1651. Miriam died in childbirth. Samuel then married Miriam’s younger sister Rebecca, who thus became her nephew’s stepmother. Samuel and Rebecca had three children: Hana, Michael, and Benjamin.44 Spinoza’s older brother Isaac died at the age of eighteen, in 1649.

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yo u t h , e d u c at i o n , e x p u l s i o n When he was five years old, Spinoza went to the nearby PortugueseJewish elementary school (cheder) “Ets Haim,” of whose board of governors his father was a member. There he received a solid Jewish education. He did not, however, attend the school’s highest levels, possibly for financial reasons.45 It is therefore certain that Spinoza was never trained to become a rabbi. Instead, he must have joined his father’s trading firm while still fairly young, presumably in his early teens. Michael de Spinoza was a respected member of the “Portuguese nation” in Amsterdam,46 who held several important functions in the Jewish community. He was a merchant who imported and exported commodities, mainly comestibles such as raisins, almonds, wine, and olive oil. During 1651–53, however, Michael de Spinoza’s firm suffered severe losses, forfeiting cargo and vessels owing to piracy and acts of war.47 In 1652, Michael’s third wife, Spinoza’s stepmother Hester de Spinosa, died. Michael himself died on March 28, 1654. Spinoza, then twenty-one years old, and his younger brother Gabriel initially carried on their father’s trading firm together. The philosopher’s stint as a merchant has left some traces in the archives, mainly because of an unpleasant dispute he had with a debtor in 1655.48 He remained in business for barely two years. His father had left huge debts, and bankruptcy loomed. Bento managed to dodge the blow by a stratagem that was bound to bring him in conflict with the Jewish community.49 Although he had already been actively involved in the firm, and had thus in practice accepted the inheritance left by his father, including the debts, Spinoza used to good advantage an escape route available under Dutch law. Being twentythree years old, he had himself legally declared a minor and placed under tutelage on March 16, 1656.50 His guardian, Louis Craeyer, immediately took action to have Spinoza released from the insolvent estate. That was the end of the philosopher’s mercantile career. According to Dutch law, a person became of age at twenty-five (or when married), so the custody automatically expired on November 24, 1657. It appears as if Gabriel somehow managed to continue the family firm alone, in spite of the severe financial straits. On October 31, 1664, before setting off to the Barbados Islands, he granted power of attorney in all matters relating to the company to Moijes (Moises?) and David Juda Lion. Gabriel signed the deed with the name of the firm, “Bento y gabriel despinoza,”51 exactly as his brother Bento had done in a bill of exchange of November 17, 1655.52 At the time Spinoza made his surprising escape from the imperiled

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spinoza’s life 21 family business, the two brothers were living together in the parental home. Their sister Rebecca had married Samuel de Casseres and moved out in 1650; their other brother and sister and their father and stepmother were no longer alive. One wonders what the mood would have been in the house on the Houtgracht. And this was not the end of the misfortune yet. Four months after Spinoza’s legal breakout, on July 27, 1656, the board of governors (Mahamad) of the synagogue of the Amsterdam Talmud Tora congregation officially expelled its member “Baruch espinoza.”53 The subject himself did not attend the ceremony,54 although it took place only a few buildings farther along the street from where he lived. The written record of the herem (ban) does not offer the complete Hebrew text as it must have been read in the synagogue, but an abridged and adapted Portuguese translation.55 It states that the Mahamad had taken notice of Spinoza’s “evil opinions and activities” (más opinioins e obras), and of “the horrible heresies he practiced and taught, and the monstrous acts he committed” (horrendas heregias que praticava & ensinaua, e ynormes obras q. obrava). No specification is given of the opinions, heresies, or acts that Spinoza was charged with. It is usually taken for granted that he was excommunicated for the philosophical views that were to make him famous and notorious in the decades that followed. The phrase “horrible heresies he taught” indeed implies that the spreading of heretical ideas was at least part of the accusation. At the moment the herem was pronounced, however, Spinoza had not yet (as far as we know) published anything. Odette Vlessing56 has argued that Spinoza’s reaction to the financial crisis in 1655 fully accounts for the ban. By having himself placed under tutelage, he had defied the parnassim’s instructions to accept the huge debts he had inherited from his father’s firm. That in itself may be considered as a punishable act of disrespect of the parnassim’s authority – and, by implication, that of the rabbis.57 Moreover, such behavior was detrimental to the commercial interests of the Amsterdam Jewish community. Again, we do not know whether this was indeed what was meant by the “monstrous acts he committed,” even if excommunications are known to have been pronounced in similar cases.58 We cannot establish if, and to what extent, Spinoza had already developed the – patently heterodox – theories set forth in his two mature and completed masterworks, Tractatus theologico-politicus and Ethica.59 Steven Nadler has plausibly argued that the herem should be explained in the context of heated debates in the Amsterdam Jewish

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community about the immortality of the soul.60 There are indications that his philosophical views did indeed play a part. The most important of these are two testimonies of travelers who had met Spinoza and another excommunicate, Juan de Prado, in Amsterdam in 1658–59. On August 8, 1659, an Augustinian monk by the name of Tomás Solano y Robles bore witness before the Spanish Inquisition in Madrid. He was from Tunja (in what is now Colombia).61 The ship on which he sailed from South America to Rome had been seized by the British near the Canary Islands. Solano was taken to London, where he remained imprisoned for two months. After his release, he went to Amsterdam, where he stayed from August 18, 1658 to March 21, 1659, before traveling on to Spain. The reason the Inquisition wanted to see Solano was that he had firsthand information about a spectacular conversion in Amsterdam. Lorenzo Escudero, a Spanish actor from Sevilla, with no Jewish background, publicly converted to Judaism, despite attempts by Solano and others to stop him. But Solano also had additional information to offer about Jews in Amsterdam. He told the Inquisition that he had met the physician Juan de Prado and a good philosopher, named “de Espinosa.” Both men, Solano testified, were expelled from the synagogue because they had become atheists.62 They held that the law of Moses is not true, that the soul dies with the body, that God exists only in a philosophical sense, and that they did not need faith. Solano’s testimony is supported by another witness, Captain Miguel Pérez de Maltranilla, who appeared before the Inquisition the next day, August 9, 1659.63 The Captain had stayed in Amsterdam from November 1658 to January 14, 1659, in the same house where Solano lodged. He told the Inquisition about a group of people who frequently visited a good friend of his, a nobleman from the Canary Islands, Dr. Joseph Guerra. He himself most regularly went to see Guerra, who had come to Amsterdam to be cured of leprosy.64 In a period of about two months, he had often seen Juan de Prado and Spinoza at Guerra’s residence. They came, so the Captain said, to nurse Guerra as well as for entertainment (“a entretenerse”). About Prado and Spinoza, Pérez de Maltranilla had repeatedly heard that they had renounced Jewish law, as it was no good and false, and that they had been expelled on that account. The Captain had the impression that the two apostate Jews professed no religion at all. The two testimonies both mention the rejection of Jewish law as the breaking point. Solano’s account includes the more specific philosophical views that the soul is mortal and that God exists only

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spinoza’s life 23 philosophically speaking. Of course, we do not know how reliable and accurate these witnesses were. Nor should we overlook the fact that they knew each other very well. Even so, their depositions strongly suggest that Spinoza was indeed expelled for his heretical views – views akin to the ideas he was to propound in his mature works. There is another reason to believe that Spinoza’s philosophy was already gestating in the middle of the 1650s, in some form or another. As early as 1661, before having published anything, Spinoza had already acquired a reputation as a redoubtable philosopher. In Amsterdam he gained a group of followers. He obviously flourished in the heterodox circles in which he moved in the latter half of the 1650s. Unfortunately, this formative period in Spinoza’s life is very poorly documented. For all we know, Spinoza accepted the herem as an accomplished fact. He certainly never made amends in order to be readmitted to the community. That would have been possible – at a price. In his early youth (1639–40), Spinoza may have witnessed ceremonial readmissions of repenting excommunicates in the Amsterdam synagogue on the Houtgracht. The most notorious case was that of Uriel da Costa, who described the event in his Exemplar humanae vitae. Da Costa – whom Spinoza certainly had seen about, as he lived around the corner – shot himself some time afterwards. The reliability of Da Costa’s account of his readmission, published posthumously in 1687, is disputed; no archival documentation supports it. There is, however, no doubt about the historicity of a similar episode, that of the penitent Abraham Mendes on November 13, 1639. His recantation was followed by a public humiliation: a (symbolic) whipping of thirty-nine lashes, after which the repenter was made to lie on the threshold of the synagogue, and all those who had attended, young and old, stepped over him as they went out.65 In a small and close-knit community such events must have reverberated and left a strong impression on the child.

fi n a l y e a r s i n a m s t e r da m As far as Spinoza was concerned, then, the break with Judaism was definitive. This is not to say that it left him cold. Being expelled must have been a dreadful and deeply humiliating experience, even for someone who, like Spinoza, was reputed for his independence. He may have reacted with a written statement. According to Salomon van Til (in the preface to Het voor-hof der heydenen, 1694), Spinoza had drafted a vindication (in Spanish) for his dissent from Judaism.66 The German

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travelers Stolle and Hallmann, who visited Jan Rieuwertsz Junior, the son of Spinoza’s publisher in 1703, reported that he mentioned “a large work Spinoza had written against the Jews” before he started working on the Tractatus theologico-politicus.67 When Jan Rieuwertsz Senior got hold of the work (presumably a manuscript found among Spinoza’s papers after his death in 1677), he thought the author had never intended to publish it, so it was not included in the edition of the posthumous works. The publisher’s son told his visitors that the manuscript had been given away to someone. It is possible, though not certain, that Van Til and Rieuwertsz Junior are referring to the same text. Another interpretation is that, in preparing the Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza composed several preliminary drafts and memoranda, not all of which were eventually included in the published book.68 If that hypothesis is correct, the documents mentioned by Van Til and Rieuwertsz may well be different parts of that larger family of manuscripts.69 The five years after Spinoza’s excommunication from the synagogue are shrouded in haze. He had turned his back on the family firm and definitively exited from the Amsterdam Portuguese nation. Gabriel, his brother and business partner, and all other members of the Jewish community were not permitted to speak with him, come near him, or be with him under the same roof. Thus, all his contacts with relatives and Jewish acquaintances were abruptly severed (at least formally – there is no telling how strictly the measures were observed). It is therefore unlikely that Spinoza continued living in the parental home on the Houtgracht. Just what he did in Amsterdam after 1656 and where he lived is unknown. He associated with freethinking Christians and apostate Jews.70 Several of his Christian friends were Mennonite merchants whom he had met when he was still in business: Jarig Jelles, Pieter Balling, Simon Joosten de Vries. He also became acquainted with Jan Rieuwertsz, his future publisher, and the Mennonite circle around him. That included Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker, the professional translator who was to translate most of Spinoza’s works, as well as an astounding number of other books. Another important contact was the former Jesuit Franciscus van den Enden, who ran a private Latin school in Amsterdam. Though direct documentary evidence that Spinoza attended this school is lacking, it is virtually certain that he went there to be trained in Latin in 1657–58.71 Fokke Akkerman has plausibly argued that Spinoza was among Van den Enden’s pupils when they performed Terentius’s Andria in the municipal theater of Amsterdam on January 15 and 16, 1657, and that he played the part of the slave Parmeno in Terentius’s Eunuchus,

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spinoza’s life 25 staged in the same theater on May 21 and 22, 1658.72 This means that Spinoza attended Van den Enden’s school (possibly as a boarder) when it was at its pinnacle73 and confirms the contemporary reports that he went there to learn Latin. Staging Latin and Neo-Latin plays was a tried and tested method of teaching Latin in the Jesuit tradition. It is possible that Spinoza in turn was enlisted by the school to do some teaching.74 If this included Hebrew lessons, that might account for the (unfinished) Hebrew grammar he wrote, although there are no concrete clues that allow us to determine the date and circumstances of that work. Unfortunately, the administration of Van den Enden’s Latin school did not survive. We know the names of only a handful of his pupils and little about the curriculum; no documentary evidence is available about the lessons and the teachers. One of the school’s assistants is known, though: the schoolmaster’s daughter Clara Maria van den Enden, who apparently was a skilled Latinist and singer. She was born in Antwerp in August 1641.75 Around the time when Spinoza came to Van den Enden’s school, he was twenty-four years old, Clara Maria fifteen. According to Colerus, Spinoza had often recounted that he had fancied the girl, because of her wit and learning, and in spite of her physique. The story is not confirmed by any other source: it looks like romanticized gossip. Precisely because of its strong romantic appeal, this alleged love story has firmly established itself as one of the most persistent legends about Spinoza and is eagerly exploited both in biographical accounts and (more appropriately) in works of art and fiction about the philosopher.76 Eventually, Clara Maria married another pupil, Dirck Kerckrinck.77 Although we are in the dark as to the exact whereabouts and exploits of Spinoza in the period between 1656 and 1661, the picture that emerges is that of someone who is setting out on a new course. His talents burgeoned. By the time he moved to Rijnsburg, Spinoza had gained renown as a philosopher, had mastered the art of grinding lenses, and was proficient in Latin, the international language of scholarly and scientific communication. In the remaining years in Amsterdam, Spinoza moved in various circles, with the common denominator that they were heterodox and tolerant. His friends and acquaintances came from a variety of religious backgrounds: Jewish, Roman Catholic, Mennonite, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed. They had broad interests: among them we find merchants and tradesmen with a philosophical penchant (Balling, Jelles, De Vries, Rieuwertsz); academics (physicians in particular) who displayed literary activities, especially in the Amsterdam theatrical scene (Van den Enden, Meyer, Bouwmeester,

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Vallan); and an assorted mixture of others (Glazemaker, Van Bronckhorst, De Prado). Quite a few of the people he associated with in the latter half of the 1650s stayed in touch with Spinoza and remained loyal friends. Simon de Vries remembered Spinoza in his will, leaving him a yearly pension of 250 guilders.78 Many of his old friends were actively involved in getting Spinoza’s works published: Lodewijk Meyer oversaw the publication of his Principia philosophiae & Cogitata metaphysica in 1663, Pieter Balling supplied a Dutch translation in 1664, and Johannes Bouwmeester and Hendrick van Bronckhorst contributed dedicatory poems. Jan Rieuwertsz published all of Spinoza’s works, both in Latin and in Dutch. Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker translated the remainder of the Latin texts. In 1677, Jarig Jelles, Bouwmeester, Meyer, and Rieuwertsz took care of Spinoza’s philosophical legacy. Spinoza’s early education would have given him a solid introduction to the Jewish philosophical tradition, of which many traces can be found in his later works. Being fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, he would also have picked up some Latin. But after 1656, he set out to enlarge his philosophical scope and to master the Latin language sufficiently to be able to write (and converse) in it. When Spinoza started writing the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione cannot be established, but I am inclined to situate that in the final years of the Amsterdam period. It shows that he had already acquired a familiarity with contemporary philosophical issues and with the works of Descartes and Bacon in particular. The Latin style of his early treatise was, according to his friends, still unsophisticated.79 Sometime before the summer of 1661, Spinoza moved from Amsterdam to the village of Rijnsburg, near Leiden. An obstinate legend, introduced by the anonymous author of La Vie, has it that Spinoza was banished from the city of Amsterdam by its magistrates, at the instigation of the spiteful rabbi Saul Levi Morteira.80 It is inconceivable that this could have taken place without leaving any trace whatsoever in the archives; banishments were duly recorded. The truth is that Spinoza had nothing to fear from the city magistrates: he left Amsterdam of his own volition and was able to return there several times afterwards without any trouble. This is what Jarig Jelles had to say about his friend’s successive moves: To get rid of all the worldly worries and troubles that commonly hinder the search for truth, and in order to be the less disturbed by all

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spinoza’s life 27 his friends, he left the city where he was born, Amsterdam, and took up residence first in Rijnsburg, then in Voorburg and eventually in The Hague, the place where he died on 21 February of this year 1677 of a certain illness called consumption.81

Colerus reports that Spinoza did not move directly to Rijnsburg after leaving Amsterdam, but that he first learned the art of grinding lenses to support himself, and then moved in with someone who lived outside town, on the road to Ouderkerk.82 Monnikhoff adds to this that Spinoza subsequently moved to Rijnsburg together with the person in whose home he had lived near Ouderkerk.83 There is, however, no further evidence to support this information. It does fit in with the general impression that Spinoza left Vlooienburg after the herem and found temporary accommodation with various friends.

rijnsburg The first letter in Spinoza’s correspondence as we have it is from Henry Oldenburg. It is dated August 26, 1661. Oldenburg must have visited Spinoza in Rijnsburg before the end of July, for he had returned to London early in August, and the letter continues the discussions they had had in Holland. This ties in neatly with two reports of visitors, recorded by the Danish polymath Ole Borch (Olaus Borrichius). On September 10, 1661, a certain Daniel Langermann declared that there was an apostate Jew living in Rijnsburg, almost an atheist but yet an honest, irreproachable man, who made telescopes and microscopes.84 On September 24, another visitor, whose name is given as Menelaus, revealed the near-atheist’s name: Spinoza. He was said to be an expert in Cartesian philosophy and to surpass the master in the clarity of his concepts.85 The cottage in Rijnsburg where Spinoza rented a room had been built not long before he arrived there. Monnikhoff added a note to his biography that made it possible to identify the exact house. According to this note, it was situated in “de Laan” (now “Spinozalaan”) and recognizable by a plaque in the façade, dated 1660, that displayed the final stanza of a poem by the Remonstrant theologian Dirk Rafaëlsz Camphuysen, “Mayschen Morgenstond.”86 When the house came up for sale in 1896, Willem Meijer, the first secretary of the Vereniging Het Spinozahuis (Spinoza House Society), dug up more details.87 Spinoza’s landlord must have been the surgeon who built the cottage

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between 1656 and 1660, Herman Homan. Rijnsburg was at that time the center of the Collegiant movement, an informal latitudinarian current that attracted Arminians, Mennonites, and Socinians. Several of Spinoza’s friends in Amsterdam were Collegiants, and that may have been a factor in choosing a new place of residence. There are, however, no indications that Spinoza himself was actively involved in the meetings (“colleges”) that formed the backbone of this religious movement. Another reason for Spinoza’s choice must have been that Rijnsburg was at walking distance (four miles) from the University of Leiden. Though he did not matriculate there, he was in touch with students and professors, and he may have attended lectures. In the Cogitata metaphysica, Spinoza evinces familiarity with the philosophy textbooks used at Leiden University, Franco Burgersdijck’s Insitutionum metaphysicarum libri II (1647) and Adriaan Heereboord’s Meletemata philosophica (1654). Attempts to find concrete evidence that he attended lectures in Leiden have so far remained fruitless.88 Spinoza lived in Rijnsburg for only two years, but it was a very productive period, in which he laid a firm foundation for his own philosophy. He worked on the first systematic exposition of it, the Short Treatise, but soon began to rearrange the material for what was to become his masterpiece, the Ethics. It was also there that he wrote his geometrical presentation of Descartes’s Principia. Leaving aside the hypothetical Apology that Spinoza may or may not have drawn up in 1656, there are two texts that Spinoza certainly did write before 1662: the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione and the Korte verhandeling van God, de mensch en deszelvs welstand (Short Treatise of God, Man and His Well-Being). He did not finish either of these works. The Tractatus de intellectus emendatione was found by Spinoza’s friends among the papers in his writing desk after his death, and they included it in their posthumous edition of his works in 1677.89 Of the Short Treatise, an outline and then two complete manuscript copies were discovered in the 1850s.90 Which of the two is Spinoza’s oldest work? For a long time, scholars agreed that the Short Treatise must have been the earliest of the two, on account of its alleged primitivity and inconsistency. More than a century after its discovery, though, Filippo Mignini argued that Spinoza must have written the Short Treatise immediately before embarking on the Ethics, a work that was very close to it in scope and content.91 As evident from his correspondence, he was transcribing and correcting the Short Treatise in 1661–62.92 At some point between May 1662 and January 1663, Spinoza must have

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spinoza’s life 29 decided to abandon the project altogether and devote his attention instead to an entirely new presentation, ordine geometrico, of his philosophy – a project that was to occupy him for the next twelve years.93 According to Mignini, the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione predated the Korte verhandeling, and I think he is right.94 Even with the relative order established, we still face the problem of a more accurate dating of the two works. From the correspondence it is clear that Spinoza had hesitations about finishing the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione, although he never definitively abandoned it either.95 In the preface to De nagelate schriften, the Dutch version of the posthumous works, Jarig Jelles wrote: “The Treatise of the Emendation of the Intellect was one of the author’s first works, as his style and the thoughts it contains testify.”96 The Korte verhandeling was not included in the posthumous works, and it is not discussed in Jelles’s preface either. If Spinoza’s friends knew about that text, and if they had a copy at their disposal,97 they must have seen it as a pilot fragment that had become obsolete and redundant by the publication of the Ethics. The Tractatus de intellectus emendatione may have been written when Spinoza was still in Amsterdam, in the period between 1656 and 1661. Even if he still entertained thoughts of finishing it one day, there are no signs that he ever edited or updated the manuscript. It is sometimes referred to in Spinoza’s correspondence as a work in progress. Akkerman argued that Spinoza’s original (and presumably still somewhat awkward) Latin had been thoroughly edited by Lodewijk Meyer before publishing it in the Opera posthuma. This would indicate an early date, well before September 1661 (when he wrote his earliest surviving letter – in perfectly adequate Latin). Mignini suggested that Spinoza may have started writing the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione as early as the end of 1656 or the beginning of 1657. An outline that Spinoza included in the text makes it clear that the argument was to be developed in seven parts. Only five of these parts were finished; the text breaks off in the beginning of what was to constitute the chief part of his method. The aim of the work, as set forth in the arresting opening pages, is to find out whether it is possible to attain a true and highest good. That would be a means to acquire a more perfect human nature, and to stimulate other people to strive after it, too. This requires an understanding of the laws of nature and a reorganization of society. The treatise itself wants to contribute to this project by working out a way of improving the intellect. In this first treatise, many elements of Spinoza’s mature philosophy can already be discerned, but his fundamental claim that all

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knowledge depends on the true idea of God as the source of all that exists will be elaborated only in the Ethics. The Short Treatise has survived only in a contemporary Dutch translation. It is certain that Spinoza wrote it originally in Latin. Throughout his works, he always preferred Latin as the language of philosophical communication.98 In its transmitted form, the Short Treatise consists of thirty-six chapters and several subsidiary texts: two dialogues, two appendices, and a large number of extensive explanatory notes. Though it is not always clear where the subsidiary texts belong, they must have been part of an initial attempt to revise the work.99 In the process, however, Spinoza decided to abandon it altogether and started recasting the material in what was eventually to become the Ethics. Thus, the Short Treatise can be considered Spinoza’s first attempt at a systematic presentation of his philosophy and the Ethics as his definitive version of it. In a letter to a close friend, datable to May or early June 1665, he still calls that work – then well advanced – his philosophia.100 The first six letters exchanged between Oldenburg and Spinoza indicate that by April 1662, Spinoza had not yet embarked upon the Ethics, but he must have done so soon afterwards. For in February 1663, Simon Joosten de Vries wrote Spinoza a letter in which he describes the regular meetings of a group (collegium) of friends to discuss a work by Spinoza. The references and quotations both in De Vries’s letter and in Spinoza’s reply leave no doubt as to what the friends had at their disposal: an early installment of the Ethics, consisting of definitions, axioms, at least nineteen propositions, and several scholia.101 Spinoza must have started well before January 1663 or even before December 1662. In spite of all the work Spinoza put into elaborating his own views in Rijnsburg, his first publication was mainly a presentation of the philosophy of René Descartes: Renati Des Cartes Principiorum philosophiae pars I & II more geometrico demonstratae, with an appendix entitled Cogitata metaphysica. It is the only book he ever published with his full name on the title page and with a straightforward publisher’s imprint. That he published this rather disparate set of texts was the result of a concurrence of circumstances. On the one hand, it documents Spinoza’s appropriation of Descartes’s philosophy. He must have been studying Descartes’s works for a number of years, and this book evinces his mastery of it. On the other hand, Spinoza was interested in Cartesian and contemporary scholastic philosophy with an eye to formulating his

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spinoza’s life 31 own ideas. This comes out most clearly in the Cogitata, in which Spinoza offered a discussion of metaphysical issues in a scholastic jargon, applying it to topics that Descartes had not dealt with. Though close to traditional and contemporary textbooks of philosophy in terminology, the approach was inspired by Descartes and by issues Spinoza encountered in his own enquiries. He had not envisaged publication of these notes. A student of divinity, Johannes Casearius, who apparently also lived for a while in Homan’s house in Rijnsburg,102 had asked Spinoza for philosophical instruction. Spinoza did not yet want to reveal his own views to Casearius and gave him an introduction to Descartes instead.103 For that purpose, he reorganized part 2 (and a tiny fragment of part 3) of Descartes’s Principia in geometric fashion. From the correspondence it appears that this private course must have taken place in the winter of 1662–63. Shortly afterwards, in April 1663, Spinoza moved to the village of Voorburg, near The Hague. After having transferred his furniture there, Spinoza went to Amsterdam to see his friends. He showed them his adaptation of Principia, part 2, with the appended remarks on metaphysics, and they implored him to process part 1 of the Principia in the same manner. Spinoza obliged, delivering the requested text two weeks later. In fact, this additional text draws not only on the Principia but on several other Cartesian texts, in particular the Replies to the Objections that accompanied the Meditationes. Spinoza then stayed in Amsterdam for a while to oversee the preparations for publication of the entire text.104 Lodewijk Meyer edited it, touching up Spinoza’s Latin style and supplying a preface in which he made it clear that the book did not present Spinoza’s own views.105

vo o r b u r g In Voorburg, Spinoza rented rooms in the house of the painter Daniel Tydeman in the Kerklaan (now called Kerkstraat).106 Apparently he acquired some notoriety in the village. In 1666, there was a quarrel in the local Reformed Church about appointing a new clergyman. Some church members, among them Spinoza’s landlord Tydeman, had submitted a request to the city magistrates of Delft to appoint a certain candidate, Van der Wiele, as minister. Alarmed opponents drew up a petition against this Van der Wiele. They insinuated that the request was written by a stranger, viz., Tydeman’s lodger Spinoza, whom they described as being of Jewish descent and reputedly an atheist, who mocked all religions and who was a threat to the Republic.107

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In 1664, an unusually severe epidemic of plague struck the Dutch towns, and many inhabitants of Amsterdam fled to the countryside.108 Though Spinoza lived in a village, he moved temporarily to a homestead near Schiedam, called Langen Bogert (“Long Orchard”). It was the residence of Alewijn Gijsen, a Mennonite merchant and the brother-in-law of Spinoza’s close friend Simon Joosten de Vries. Perhaps Simon, who lived in Amsterdam but had a share in the property of the homestead,109 had also gone there to escape the plague. Spinoza spent about three months in Schiedam, from December 1664 to February 1665.110 Spinoza was keenly aware that his philosophical enterprise would meet with formidable opposition from zealots. The public church was a political factor to reckon with, and its power was supported by what Spinoza saw as an idolatrous interpretation of the Bible. Thus, the authority of God’s Word was a pivotal political issue. In 1666, a book came out with the provocative programmatic title Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres (Philosophy the Interpreter of Scripture). Spinoza was rumored to be its author, but he certainly did not write the book. There is an old tradition that attributes it to Spinoza’s friend Lodewijk Meyer. The name of Johannes Bouwmeester has also been mentioned in this context, and in view of the close friendship and collaboration between Meyer and Bouwmeester, it is possible that they co-authored the book. At any rate, Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres has been associated with the Spinoza circle from the very beginning.111 It is the more surprising that Spinoza himself never mentioned the book nor reacted to its argument and that there was no copy of it in his library when he died.112 The view he himself developed on the relationship between reason and Scripture differed widely from that expounded in Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres. It has been suggested that Spinoza’s critique of Maimonides in the Theological-Political Treatise, chapter 7, also targets the Interpres.113 In 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh was arrested and brought to trial for having attempted to publish a sacrilegious book, Een ligt schijnende in duystere plaatsen.114 When the printer read the leaves that came from his press, he notified the sheriff of Utrecht. Adriaan had studied law and medicine, his brother Johannes divinity. The Koerbagh brothers moved in the circle of Spinoza’s Amsterdam acquaintances in the early 1660s115 and developed radical views of their own, under Spinoza’s influence. They knew Franciscus van den Enden, Lodewijk Meyer, and Johannes Bouwmeester, and were relatives of Jacob Vallan, but there are no indications that they themselves were very close to Spinoza. When

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spinoza’s life 33 interrogated during the trial, Adriaan admitted that he had visited Spinoza several times, but denied that he had spoken to him about this book.116 Adriaan Koerbagh was sentenced to ten years in prison, subsequent banishment, a fine of 4,000 guilders and an indemnity of 2,000 guilders for his imprisonment. He died of exhaustion in October 1669. We do not know how Spinoza took the news. Neither in his works nor in his letters, as far as they are extant, did he ever refer to Koerbagh’s fate. The six years Spinoza spent in Voorburg were very productive. He continued working on his Ethics, but between the summer of 1665 and the end of 1669 he devoted most of his energy to his other masterpiece, the Tractatus theologico-politicus. The letters Spinoza wrote when he lived in Voorburg testify to the broad range of his interests and activities. They inform us about the progress of his assorted philosophical projects: from his letter to a close friend of June 1665 (Ep 28) we learn that Spinoza’s work on the Ethics had by then advanced to proposition 80 of part 3. In the shape in which it has come down to us, that part has only fifty-nine propositions, so Spinoza apparently split it up later.117 Unfortunately, Spinoza’s further correspondence does not allow us to keep track of the progress of the Ethics. He does not explicitly refer to it again until 1675, after the manuscript was completed.118 One does, however, find traces of the content of the Ethics in other letters. Thus, his correspondence with Johannes Hudde contains many textual parallels to the crucial arguments Spinoza develops in propositions 8–14 of part 1 of the Ethics in order to establish the identity of God and substance.119 During his stay in Voorburg, Spinoza discussed philosophical issues with other correspondents, too, but mostly in connection with his book on Descartes’s Principles and its appendix. Willem van Blijenbergh, a grain broker from Dordrecht, started an exchange with a request for clarification about that publication, but it soon turned into a lengthy discussion about a wide range of philosophical topics: free will, freedom and necessity, determinism, the origin of evil, moral responsibility, the authority of Holy Writ, and reason and revelation. In spite of the considerable size of their correspondence, their points of view remained far apart, and Spinoza eventually broke off the exchange.120 In one of the letters, he refers to a passage in his unpublished Ethics.121 Spinoza deals with the issue of a true and infallible method in philosophy in a letter to Bouwmeester, in terms that are reminiscent of the Treatise of the Emendation of the Intellect.122 In the correspondence of the Voorburg period several other topics are discussed. Spinoza wrote about scientific and alchemic experiments123 and performed some experiments himself

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with nitre and in hydrostatics. One isolated letter reveals an interest in the calculation of probabilities.124 Neither the addressee’s name (a certain Johannes van der Meer) nor the topic turn up anywhere else in Spinoza’s correspondence or works. A booklet with two Dutch treatises, Stelkonstige reeckening van den regenboog (Algebraic Calculation of the Rainbow) and Reeckening van kanssen (Calculation of Probabilities), published anonymously in The Hague in 1687, has been attributed to Spinoza, but erroneously so. Both texts are still to be found in editions and translations of Spinoza’s works, but it has now been established beyond doubt that the author was not Spinoza but Salomon Dierquens.125 Spinoza’s occupation as a lense-grinder for microscopes and telescopes accounts for his interest in dioptrics, as attested in letters to Hudde and to Jelles.126 In Voorburg, Spinoza also made the acquaintance of Christiaan Huygens and his brother Constantijn, whose family often came to their country house “Hofwijck” (“Refuge from the Court”). Between September 9, 1667 and May 11, 1668, Spinoza is mentioned in eight letters from Christiaan to Constantijn in connection with lenses, three times together with Hudde.127 Spinoza’s main project in the Voorburg period, however, was the composition of his other masterpiece, the Tractatus theologico-politicus, from the summer of 1665 till the end of 1669. Spinoza informed Oldenburg about it in a lost letter on 4 September 1665. Oldenburg’s reply was wary: “I see that you are not so much philosophizing as (if it is permissible to speak thus) theologizing; for you are recording your thoughts about angels, prophecy and miracles. But perhaps you are doing this philosophically.”128 In his answer Spinoza explained what was at stake for him: I am composing now a treatise on my opinion regarding scripture. The considerations which move me to do this are the following: (1) the prejudices of the theologians; for I know that they are the greatest obstacle to men’s being able to apply their minds to philosophy; so I am busy exposing them and removing them from the minds of the more prudent; (2) the opinion the common people have of me; they never stop accusing me of atheism, and I am forced to rebut this accusation as well as I can; and (3) the freedom of philosophizing and saying what we think, which I want to defend in every way; here the preachers suppress it as much as they can with their excessive authority and aggressiveness.129

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spinoza’s life 35 It had become clear to Spinoza that it would be difficult for him to bring out his Ethics and, with the book he envisaged, a plea for the freedom to philosophize; he wanted to intervene in contemporary debates on religion, philosophy, and politics. Writing the Theological-Political Treatise became a priority, for which he interrupted, or at any rate decelerated, his work on the Ethics. In fact, we know little about what Spinoza did in the years 1667–69: curiously, there is a gap of twenty-nine months in his correspondence between letters 40 (March 25, 1667) and 41 (September 5, 1669).130 This may indicate that he was immersed in finishing the book.

t h e h ag u e , i : p o l i t i c a l u p h e ava l Around the time that his Theological-Political Treatise came out, toward the end of 1669 or the beginning of 1670,131 Spinoza moved to The Hague. The exact date cannot be determined: no letters from that period have survived, nor is there any document that indicates when he left Voorburg.132 In The Hague, he initially rented a room in a house on the Veerkade. The identity of his landlady, a certain widow Van Velen, is unknown. Colerus later on rented rooms in the same house.133 In the summer of 1671, Spinoza moved to another and cheaper accommodation around the corner, very close by, on the Paviljoensgracht. There, in the house of the painter Hendrik van der Spyck, he remained until his death in 1677.134 As soon as the Theological-Political Treatise began to circulate, shocked church councils, as well as individual clergymen and academics, started campaigning to have it banned. The book is mentioned with dismay as early as April 8, 1670.135 Though it would not be formally prohibited until 1674, there were attempts to have it suppressed from the very beginning.136 Spinoza’s treatise created a scandal, but thereby also a demand: it was reprinted five times in the seventeenth century.137 It had been published anonymously, but the author’s identity was soon known and Spinoza made no attempts to disavow the book. He had hoped to find at least a charitable reception among a more philosophically minded audience, but even Cartesians with a reputation for broadmindedness let him down. Spinoza’s response (Ep 43, February 17, 1671) to an attack by Lambertus van Velthuysen (Ep 42, January 24, 1671) betrays his disappointment. Van Velthuysen, an eclectic thinker who combined Cartesian epistemology and metaphysics with Hobbesian political thought and a loyal adherence to Calvinism,138

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accused Spinoza of being an atheist, a charge Spinoza indignantly rejected. This did not prevent the two men from becoming acquainted and even, to some extent, friends – although Van Velthuysen later attacked Spinoza’s Ethics as well.139 Though in 1670 the political system was still officially that of the “True Freedom” boasted by Johan de Witt, then Grand Pensionary, tensions were building up. They came to a head when the De Witt party failed to protect the Dutch Republic against the combined aggression of the French King Louis XIV, the English, and two German bishoprics. Together they invaded the country in 1672 – known in Dutch history as the Year of Disaster – in the south, the east, and on the western seaboard. The French gained several military successes and occupied part of the Republic, including the city of Utrecht. The Utrecht government – among them Lambert van Velthuysen – surrendered on June 23, when they found that the Dutch States army had left the town to its own resources. The Dutch could only just prevent the foreign armies from taking Amsterdam and The Hague by inundating parts of the provinces of Utrecht and Holland (the so-called Dutch water line). Incited by Orangist leaders (including the young Prince William, whose role in the events was, however, carefully obfuscated), a violent mob brutally lynched Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis on August 20, 1672 in The Hague.140 We know how Spinoza reacted, for he told the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz about it four years later. In the night after the murder of the De Witt brothers, Spinoza wanted to go to the site of the crime (where the naked and mutilated corpses of the victims were still on display) with a placard that said “Utter barbarians,” but his landlord, Hendrik van der Spyck, blocked the door for fear his lodger would get slaughtered, too.141 During the Year of Disaster, The Hague, officially not a town and hence devoid of ramparts, was seriously threatened on several occasions by the French army as well as by the English fleet, and only narrowly escaped being attacked and captured. The French occupation lasted until the end of 1673. In the meantime, the Prince of Orange had become stadholder of the Dutch Republic and inaugurated a period of autocracy, zealously supported by the ministers of the public church. Though never a partisan of De Witt, Spinoza had enjoyed relative freedom as long as the latter’s States faction was in power. After 1672, he thought it wiser not to publish anymore unless conditions improved. At the same time, both his fame as an original thinker and his notoriety as an arch-atheist spread. In February 1673,

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spinoza’s life 37 Spinoza received a letter from J. Ludwig Fabritius with an invitation on behalf of the Elector Palatine Karl Ludwig to occupy a chair at the University of Heidelberg. Fabritius, however, had phrased the call in inauspicious terms: “You will have the most ample liberty to philosophize, which he [Karl Ludwig] believes you will not abuse to disturb the publicly established religion.”142 Spinoza suspected a catch and declined politely: I don’t know what the limits of that freedom of philosophizing might have to be, for me not to seem to want to disturb the publicly established religion. In fact, schisms arise not so much from ardent zeal for religion as from men’s varying affects, or their eagerness to contradict one another. This results in their habit of distorting and condemning everything, even things rightly said. I have experienced these things already, while leading a private and solitary life. How much more would I have to fear them after I rose to an office of this rank.143

His misgivings may have been justified: according to Urbain Chevreau, who was in Heidelberg at the time, Spinoza was deterred by the conditions specified in the invitation.144 It may be noted in passing that his decision turned out to be a fortunate one: in 1674, Heidelberg was captured by the French. They closed down the university, and Fabritius roamed around for over twenty years, until he died in 1697.145 One of the most puzzling events in Spinoza’s life is a visit he made to the occupied town of Utrecht in July–August 1673. Spinoza never was much of a traveler: up to that point he had never been outside the province of Holland (at least as far as we know). Though Utrecht was not far from The Hague, it was at that moment a precarious destination, where no one would go without a very good reason. It required one to enter occupied territory that could be reached only by crossing the inundated area of the “water line,” equipped with passports so as to be allowed to leave the United Provinces, enter the occupied town, and eventually return home again. What urgent reason did Spinoza have to go to Utrecht in those circumstances? So far, we are in the dark about his motives, nor do we know what he did there. Fortunately, recent research by Jeroen van de Ven and Albert Gootjes has shed new light at least on the dates and on the people involved.146 Newly found letters from Spinoza’s intimate friend Johannes Bouwmeester to the Utrecht professor Johann Georg Graevius prove that Spinoza left The Hague on Wednesday July 26, 1673, traveled to Gouda, and crossed the water line

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there in order to go to Utrecht. By August 14, he still was in Utrecht, but he must have returned home before August 23. The French military commander, Louis II of Bourbon, Prince of Condé, had signed a safe conduct pass that allowed Spinoza to cross the French lines, but it is unlikely that Condé himself was otherwise actively involved in the invitation. It appears that the purpose of the visit was not an encounter with Condé. At any rate, it is absolutely certain that the two men did not meet, in spite of several contemporary accounts that assert the contrary. Condé had left Utrecht on July 25 to join the army camps in Grave and did not return until much later. Thus, the question still remains: Why did Spinoza go to Utrecht? The investigations by Van de Ven and Gootjes have identified several people who played an active part in a combined effort to get Spinoza to Utrecht: in the French army there was the Swiss officer Jean-Baptiste Stouppe, his brother Pierre-Alexandre Stouppe (the – relatively mild – military governor of Utrecht), and Antoine Manasses de Pas, the Marquis de Feuquières; then, among the group of Utrecht Cartesians, there was Graevius and most likely also Van Velthuysen; and finally, among Spinoza’s friends in particular, Johannes Bouwmeester, who acted as a sort of impresario, mediating between Graevius and Spinoza. Bouwmeester declined an invitation from Graevius to accompany his friend to Utrecht. The French officers and Utrecht Cartesians who were involved were impressed by the profundity of Spinoza’s thought, but they were neither close friends nor followers. In May 1673, Jean-Baptiste Stouppe wrote a series of letters to a Calvinist minister in Bern in order to justify his taking part in an invasion of a Calvinist country by a Roman Catholic army.147 In fact, so Stouppe argued, the Swiss were mistaken about the Dutch Republic: it was so tolerant that it could no longer be considered Calvinist – it even permitted atheists like Spinoza, whose Theological-Political Treatise absolutely subverted the foundations of all religions.148 Graevius and Van Velthuysen were the central figures of a circle of Cartesians in Utrecht, dubbed “the College of Savants” by their Voetian opponents. Like Stouppe, with whom they were well acquainted, they were both intrigued and repelled by Spinoza’s thought. After the appearance of the Theological-Political Treatise they worked out a systematic strategy to combat its arguments.149 So one wonders why precisely these people invited Spinoza to Utrecht – was it in order to muster ammunition for their fight against Spinozism? In the summer of 1673, the mood in The Hague was very nervous: English and French fleets were preparing an attack; this would

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spinoza’s life 39 eventually result in the Battle of Texel, on August 21, where they were defeated by the Dutch fleet under Michiel de Ruyter. Bouwmeester was anxious about the threat of the English fleet bombarding The Hague while Spinoza was absent: that would put at risk Spinoza’s unpublished works – Bouwmeester obviously had in mind the Ethics. While we now know more about the circumstances of Spinoza’s visit to Utrecht, his own motives for accepting the invitation and undertaking the journey, and his exploits there, remain obscure. Broadly, there are two options: Spinoza may have gone to Utrecht in order to be of service to friends or acquaintances (in the circle of Cartesians, or perhaps also among French officers), or for political reasons, such as negotiating with the French. There is, so far, not a scrap of evidence to substantiate the second option.150 It seems that Spinoza’s contemporaries did suspect a political motive, viz., that Spinoza was a spy who had dealings with the enemy. According to Colerus, Hendrik van der Spyck was alarmed about rumors to that effect circulating in The Hague upon Spinoza’s return. Colerus then quotes Spinoza as having addressed his landlord in the following way: Do not worry, I am innocent, and there are many among the notables who know very well why I went to Utrecht. As soon as you notice any trouble at your door, I will go out to the people, even if they would deal with me as they did with the good gentlemen De Witt. I am a sincere republican, and the public weal is my purpose.151

t h e h ag u e , i i : s p i n o z a ’ s l a s t y e a r s Late in 1674 or early in 1675, Spinoza completed his Ethics. From his correspondence with Oldenburg, we know that he went to Amsterdam to have the work printed in the summer of 1675 but then decided to put the manuscript away.152 The recent discovery by Leen Spruit of a handwritten copy of the work executed by Pieter van Gent now enables us to date the completion of the text more precisely. The copy was made at the request of Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, who took it with him on his Grand Tour through Europe. Tschirnhaus stayed in the Netherlands from the end of 1674 until May 1675, and that is apparently when he obtained Spinoza’s permission to have Pieter van Gent, a mutual acquaintance, copy the completed Ethics. This allows us to conclude that Spinoza had finished the text toward the end of 1674 or in the first months of 1675. A detailed comparison of the text as it

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appears in Van Gent’s copy and the printed version of the Opera posthuma has convinced me that Spinoza never systematically went through the entire work again after having completed it in 1674–75. Instead, he seems to have turned his attention mainly or exclusively to a treatise on politics that was to remain unfinished: the Tractatus politicus. This was conceived as a systematic exposition of his political thought, developed on the foundation provided by the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise. Spinoza’s death prevented him from completing the work. It contains ten chapters and breaks off just after the beginning of chapter 11, on democracy. Spinoza first deals with politics in general and then with the three forms of government he sees as basic: monarchy, aristocracy, and (a fragment on) democracy. From one of Spinoza’s last letters, we know that he had planned to add considerations on laws and on specific political issues.153 In November 1676, Spinoza was visited by Leibniz, who spent about three weeks in Holland. According to Leibniz himself, he had several long meetings with Spinoza,154 during which they discussed the murder of the De Witt brothers, Descartes’s laws of motion, and Spinoza’s finalized but as yet unpublished Ethics.155 It is quite possible that Leibniz had already seen Tschirnhaus’s copy of it in Paris, against Spinoza’s explicit instructions.156 At any rate, Leibniz arrived well prepared. He came from London, where he had seen Henry Oldenburg and copied three recent letters (Ep 73, 75, and 78) from Spinoza to Oldenburg. The latter had also entrusted Leibniz with a letter for Spinoza, but that was a misjudgment: for some mysterious reason Leibniz eventually did not pass it on.157 Toward the end of 1676, Spinoza’s health began to deteriorate. Although it has commonly been assumed that his health had always been frail and that he suffered from (hereditary) phthisis, a fresh examination of the available evidence has shown that in fact his physical condition must have been quite good – good enough to have an adequate resistance against many infectious diseases.158 “Phthisis” is now commonly interpreted as a designation of pulmonary tuberculosis, but in Spinoza’s time it was a catch-all term that covered a variety of lung diseases involving coughing (and coughing up blood) and respiratory problems. When, therefore, his early biographers speak of phthisis or consumption as the cause of Spinoza’s death, that still does not get us very far.159 So what did Spinoza die of? The most detailed report of his death is that by Colerus, based on the information he had obtained from the couple in whose house Spinoza breathed his last. Colerus took

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spinoza’s life 41 special pains to clear up the exact circumstances of Spinoza’s death. It will be useful to quote his extensive account, as it explicitly confronts the rumors that circulated about that topic with the facts as he could reconstruct them: I will now turn to Spinoza’s demise. On this topic I find so many wrong descriptions, that I cannot help being astonished that scholars did not come up with better research, but divulged their stories merely on the basis of hearsay . . .. I will therefore give an impartial description of his death and corroborate it with proofs, given that his demise as well as his burial took place here in The Hague . . .. None of the others who lived in the house entertained the least idea that his end was so near and that death was to overtake him so suddenly . . .. Sunday morning before divine service he came downstairs again and talked with the landlord and his wife. He had sent for a doctor, a certain L. M. from Amsterdam . . .. In the afternoon the people of the house went to church together, while the aforementioned doctor L. M. stayed alone with him. Upon their return from the church, however, they were informed that Spinoza had passed away at three o’clock, in the presence of this physician. The latter did not bother about the deceased any more, but made off with some money that Spinoza had left lying on the table, viz. a ducaton and some change, as well as with a silver-handled knife. There has been much controversy about certain circumstances that allegedly occurred in his illness and demise. It is being said that, firstly, he had taken care not to be surprised or caught unawares by anyone visiting him when he would be moribund; secondly, he had been heard once or repeatedly to have uttered the words “God, have mercy upon me, a sinner!”; thirdly, he had often sighed “Oh God!,” and, when bystanders asked him whether he now finally acknowledged the existence of God, whom he was to fear as a Judge after his death, he reportedly said that it was habit that made him utter the name of God. It is said, fourthly, that he had laid in stock poppy juice and that he took it when death approached, closed the curtains of his bedstead, and gained eternity in a torpor; fifthly, that he had ordered to let no one in near the end, and moreover, when he felt his final hour had come, summoned his landlady and asked her to prevent any clergyman from visiting him in this condition, as he wanted to die without a dispute, and so on. I have examined these matters meticulously and questioned the landlord and his lady, who are both still alive, several times, but they tell me frankly that they do

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42 piet steenbakkers not recognize this at all, and that they hold most of these reported circumstances to be false. For he had never forbidden her to allow visitors in, nor had anyone else but the physician from Amsterdam been with him in his final hour. No one had heard him utter “God, have mercy upon me, a sinner,” for neither he himself nor his housemates entertained any idea that he was about to die. He was not bedridden either, but had come downstairs the last morning; nor did he sleep in a bedstead but in a closet bed in the front room. The landlady says she never heard a request from him not to allow any clergyman to see him. None of the people in the house ever heard him utter “Oh God!” in his illness, for he had a wasting disease and was of a stoical and tough disposition: he often chided others when they showed themselves too pusillanimous and squeamish in their diseases. Finally, that he had taken poppy juice in order to die without pain, that, too, is something the people of the house are unaware of, even though it was by them that all victuals, beverages, and medicines he used were passed on to him. Nor do I find it on the pharmacist’s bill, whereas even what the physician from Amsterdam prescribed on the last day had been fetched from the drugstore. His landlord, who had been asked to do so, took care of his funeral.160

The identity of the physician from Amsterdam, indicated by Colerus by his initials, L. M., is uncertain. Colerus obviously had in mind Spinoza’s lifelong friend Lodewijk Meyer, whom he refers to as “L. M.” elsewhere in his biography, too.161 He had obtained this information from the Van der Spyck couple, and there is no reason to doubt their integrity. But they may have mixed up details, so long after the event. There are other candidates as well. To begin with, there are indications that the physician at Spinoza’s deathbed may have been Georg Hermann Schuller rather than Meyer. In a letter to Leibniz, dated April 17, 1677, Tschirnhaus says that Schuller had informed him “that our friend died in The Hague, in the presence of Mr. Schuller, clear-headed and after having arranged what was to be done with his manuscripts.”162 The reliability of Schuller is problematic, so his testimony – here related by Van Gent – should be taken with a pinch of salt.163 There is, however, an additional piece of evidence, viz., the occurrence of the words “d’heer Georgius Hermanus” (without surname) as one of the witnesses to the first inventory of Spinoza’s legacy, drawn up by notary public Willem van den Hove on the day Spinoza died. Yet that does not conclusively prove Schuller’s presence, for the words have been struck out again and

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spinoza’s life 43 his signature is lacking.164 In sum, the evidence is inconclusive: for Meyer we have the (generally reliable) testimony of the Van der Spycks, transmitted by Colerus, for Schuller his own (not always reliable) information, as well as the ambiguous indications in the notarial inventory. To confound the issue further, there are two more physicians whose names have been cited as candidates, a certain Samuel Gottlieb Scholtze165 and the Cartesian physician Cornelis Bontekoe.166 Another rumor about the physician who attended Spinoza when he died is given in an anonymous notebook from 1678–79, without supplying a name.167 Piecing all the evidence together, we know that Spinoza died in the presence of a medical doctor, that this was most likely either Lodewijk Meyer or Georg Hermann Schuller, and that the historical details were soon overrun by rumors. It is indicative of the secrecy surrounding Spinoza that the physician in question, the only person who knew the full facts of the case, did not leave a written report or, if he did, never divulged it. That could have solved the issue of his identity, but more importantly it might have provided precious details about the cause or causes of Spinoza’s sudden death. In a letter to Leibniz from February 26, 1677, Schuller wrote: “I had to tell you that the excellent and acute Mr. Spinoza passed away on 21/11 February, after having suffered from extreme atrophy.”168 If that is indeed a reliable and accurate description of the cause of Spinoza’s death, he may have died of what is now designated as a cachexia, a wasting of the body due to severe chronic illness.169 Van der Spyck sent for a public notary, Willem van de Hove, who came the same day to draw up a first, unspecified inventory of the goods Spinoza had left, after which he sealed the deceased tenant’s rooms.170 Spinoza was buried on Thursday, February 25, in a rented grave inside the Nieuwe Kerk, a nearby Reformed Church in The Hague.171 The burial was arranged by Van der Spyck, while Spinoza’s publisher Jan Rieuwertsz stood surety for the expenses.172 Graves were rented for a certain number of years, after which the relatives (or acquaintances) of the deceased had to renew the lease. If they did not do so, the grave was emptied. Spinoza’s grave was emptied sometime in the eighteenth century, and his remains (together with those of other bodies) were dispersed over the surface of the churchyard of the Nieuwe Kerk and dug in. Although he is, strictly speaking, indeed still buried on the site, there is no locatable plot that can be said to contain Spinoza’s body. A monument just outside the Nieuwe Kerk commemorates the philosopher. In front of it is a large black slab with in Latin the inscription: “The

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earth here covers the bones of Benedict de Spinoza, formerly buried in the New Church.” When Spinoza’s relatives – his sister Rebecca and her stepson (who was also her and Spinoza’s nephew) Daniel de Casseres – heard about his demise, they came to The Hague to claim the inheritance, if there was any. They asked for a complete inventory, which was made by the same notary public Van den Hove on March 2.173 Eventually, when they found there were still debts to be settled, Rebecca and Daniel waived all their rights to an inheritance.174 Before he died, Spinoza had made arrangements with his landlord, his publisher, and his friends in Amsterdam that they would see to the publication of his Ethics. A writing box that contained manuscripts and letters was sent to Rieuwertsz by Van der Spyck very soon after Spinoza died.175 A number of people were involved in preparing Spinoza’s posthumous works for publication.176 As we have seen, Johannes Bouwmeester felt responsible for Spinoza’s philosophical legacy in 1673, and he certainly participated in the project.177 Lodewijk Meyer, who had subedited Spinoza’s Principia/Cogitata in 1663, was also involved. He turned the Dutch preface written by Jarig Jelles for De nagelate schriften into a Latin foreword for the Opera posthuma. Between them, Bouwmeester and Meyer edited Spinoza’s Latin. Jelles, Glazemaker, and Rieuwertsz took care of the Dutch edition of the posthumous works. All these men belonged to the early circle of Spinoza’s friends in Amsterdam. In addition, two younger friends were involved: Schuller and Van Gent. Van Gent contributed in a practical way, by copying material. Although Schuller certainly was not the pivot of the enterprise, as he would have Leibniz believe, he did play an important part. My impression is that Schuller convinced the others they should publish not only the Ethics but the unfinished treatises and a selection of the correspondence as well. In about nine months, they managed to bring out simultaneously the Opera posthuma and De nagelate schriften. The two tomes contained the Ethics, the Political Treatise, the Treatise of the Emendation of the Intellect, and the letters. The Hebrew Grammar was published only in the Opera posthuma. Around 1680, Rieuwertsz ordered an engraved portrait from an unknown artist. It was printed on a loose sheet, and could be bought by customers to have it bound in with their copy of the Opera posthuma or De nagelate schriften. The portrait came with a Latin poem, but there is also a Dutch version that is pasted on to the Latin text in some copies.178 Though made after Spinoza’s death, it is

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spinoza’s life 45 assumed to present a fair likeness of Spinoza – one would not expect Rieuwertsz to sell it as a portrait if the resemblance had been poor. Another early portrait is the oil painting in the collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. The two portraits closely resemble each other. Perhaps the Wolfenbüttel painting was made after the engraving, or they may both stem from a common unknown original.179 On November 4, 1677, Spinoza’s possessions were auctioned.180 For our knowledge of Spinoza’s development, the most relevant element of the auction was his library, with his collection of optical instruments and tools for lens production as the runner-up. The second notarial inventory of March 2, 1677, contains a list of the books Spinoza owned when he died. It was probably compiled with the help of Jan Rieuwertsz, who was present as a witness when the inventory was made. The list is most likely incomplete: thus, it mentions neither author’s copies of the books Spinoza himself wrote, nor any titles by Meyer, Balling, or Koerbagh. We do not know what happened between the moment Spinoza died and the notarial sealing of his rooms. Schuller informed Leibniz confidentially that he went through Spinoza’s belongings before and after he died, in search of items worth buying. Van der Spyck may have salvaged the writing box with manuscripts before the notary arrived. Again, Spinoza need not necessarily have read all the books in his library, nor, conversely, was his reading limited to what he had on his shelves. Even so, the list is an extraordinary document and it is avidly studied by Spinoza scholars.181 Who bought the books is unknown, though Cornelis Bontekoe has been mentioned as one of the scholars who was interested in them.182 An almost complete reconstruction of the library as described in the inventory is now kept in the Spinozahuis in Rijnsburg.183 That so far not a single book has surfaced with Spinoza’s signature in it, or a bookplate carrying his name, strongly suggests that he was not in the habit of marking his ownership. Several books did turn up with the name “Spinoza” in them, but that was someone else.184 The posthumous works were printed in December 1677 and distributed as of January 1678.185 Within a matter of weeks, the machinery to ban the books was set in motion: from February 4 onwards, church councils and synods expressed their disapproval. The books were formally proscribed by the States of Holland and West-Frisia on June 25, 1678, and more bans were to follow soon.186 That, however, is the beginning of another story. The tale of Benedict de Spinoza’s life ends here.

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notes * This chapter has benefited greatly from comments and suggestions by Steve Nadler, Albert Gootjes, Jeroen van de Ven, Frank Mertens, and Nanne Bloksma. Van de Ven is currently putting together a comprehensive Spinoza chronicle (working title, The Historical Spinoza: A Chronological Companion to His Life and Times) and the present account of Spinoza’s life could not have been written without his extensive research and the many discussions we have had. As his book is still under construction, I cannot yet provide concrete references to it. All English Spinoza quotations are taken from CW. I refer to Spinoza’s letters as “Ep” (epistola) followed by a number. The numbering that is now generally adopted was introduced by Van Vloten and Land (in vol. 2 of their edition Spinoza 1882–83). The largest collection of sources on Spinoza’s life is Walther and Czelinski 2006, henceforth cited as W/Cz. On principle, I will refer to this monumental collection whenever a source can be found there. 1 The expression vita vitalis (a liveable life) occurs in Ethics 4, appendix, heading 5, in the Latin text as preserved in the Vatican Manuscript (MS Vat. Lat. 12838). See Spinoza 2011: 284, line 20. That Spinoza did indeed write vitalis (and not rationalis, the reading found in the Opera posthuma) is confirmed by the contemporary Dutch translation in De nagelate schriften. See the new critical edition: Spinoza, OEuvres, IV: Ethica/Éthique, edited by Fokke Akkerman and Piet Steenbakkers, translated by Pierre-François Moreau, with introduction and notes by Pierre-François and Piet Steenbakkers (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2020): 508n261. 2 Ep 43: “First, he [Van Velthuysen] says: it’s not important to know what my nation is, or what way of life I follow. But of course if he had known, he would not so easily have persuaded himself that I teach atheism. For atheists are accustomed to seek honors and riches immoderately. But I have always scorned those things. Everyone who knows me knows that.” (CW II: 386). 3 In a letter to Christianus Kortholt of April 6, 1681, Chr. N. Greiffencrantz wrote that he visited Spinoza in 1672 “in his solitude (for he seemed to live for himself only, being always alone and as it were buried in his study)”; the Latin original (Kiel University Library, Cod. ms. SH 406A) has: “in solitudinibus suis, (sibi quippè soli vivere videbatur, semper solitarius et quasi in museo suo sepultus).” Part of that letter is quoted (inaccurately) in W/Cz II: 48. 4 The first scholar to debunk this hermitic image of Spinoza with a solid monograph based on original archival research was Koenraad Oege Meinsma, whose Spinoza en zijn kring (1896) is still invaluable. 5 See Ep 48. Spinoza was suspicious of the amount of freedom of philosophizing this position would actually give him. Yet he also explicitly refers to the advantages of

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spinoza’s life 47 a private and solitary life: a high office like this would expose him to much more religious zealotry and quarreling. 6 See the end of Ep 6, where he says to Oldenburg that he absolutely dreads quarrels (CW I: 188). Cf. also E 4p69c. 7 Spinoza’s seal has been preserved in full on his letter to Leibniz of November 9, 1671. For a detailed study, see Mignini 1981. 8 For frequent visits by friends, see, for example, Ep 13: “Since I returned to this village where I am now living, I have hardly been my own master because of the friends who have been kind enough to visit me” (CW: I: 207); for instances of “tourists” in search of sensation, see the account by Johann Christoph Sturm of a visit to Spinoza in 1660 or 1661 (like many others, he wanted to see that “exotic animal” W/Cz I: 401) and a letter from Chr. J. N. von Greiffencrantz to Chr. Kortholt of 1672 (about going to see Spinoza in The Hague as some sort of attraction: W/Cz II: 48n118). 9 In the (anonymous) preface to De nagelate schriften (Spinoza 1677b), sig. *3v (W/Cz I: 4). 10 After the publication of Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus in 1670, a remarkable paradigm shift took place: whereas before that time it was common to associate an opponent with atheism by calling him a Socinian, “Spinozist’” rapidly becomes the new term of abuse for that purpose (cf. Gawlick 1995: 1399). 11 Leibniz was annoyed when he found that his name had accidentally been printed in full. See G. H. Schuller’s letters to Leibniz of February 6 and March 29, 1678 in the Akademie-Ausgabe of Leibniz’s works and letters (henceforth cited as AA), 3.2: 342 and 359. 12 Occasionally, though, precious material was stored in order to serve as ammunition in combating Spinozism. That is how Tschirnhaus’s personal manuscript copy of the Ethics of 1675 survived. It was discovered in the Vatican Library by Leen Spruit in 2010. See the introduction to Spinoza 2011: 26n74. 13 It occurs in several pamphlets. See, for example, Van der Linde 1871: 18 (item 62). 14 The Confessiones served as a model for Descartes, as the Meditationes and Descartes’s Discours de la méthode had that function for Spinoza. 15 The first letter is Ep 2, Spinoza to H. Oldenburg, September 1661; the last letters are Ep 83, Spinoza to Tschirnhaus, July 15, 1676, and Ep 84, Spinoza to an unknown friend, undated but assignable to the second half of 1676. The originals of letters 2, 83, and 84 are lost, but the text was printed in the Opera posthuma. There are eightyeight letters to and from Spinoza that have survived (seventy-five in the posthumous works, thirteen in other ways). Research by Jeroen van de Ven (see introductory note to this chapter) has established that forty-six more can be postulated (state of affairs in July 2021; the number will probably increase). 16 Freudenthal 1899.

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48 piet steenbakkers 17 Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1932 (English version, without facsimiles, in Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1982: 109–71). 18 Colerus 1705 (W/Cz I: 98–170. Van der Tak, who analysed the Dutch text of Colerus’s life of Spinoza, concluded that it must have been translated from a lost German original (Van der Tak 1932: 477). A French translation that adapted the text rather freely appeared a year later. Other early translations are based on the French version rather than the Dutch. (For an overview of the various editions, see W/Cz: II: 311–14.) 19 Meinsma 1896: XIX. 20 See W/Cz: II: 10–15 for a good survey of the available evidence. I retailed Meinsma’s dating myself in several publications (in particular in Steenbakkers 2003), but have changed my mind since. Frampton (2006: chapter 4) has convinced me that it was written at a much later date, while confirming my view that its contents are fictitious. 21 Berti (1994: XL–LVI) argued that the author of the Traité des trois imposteurs was Jan Vroesen (1672–1725). 22 A possible exception is Ms. Gall 415 (Staatsbibliothek, Munich), which may have served as printer’s copy for the 1719 edition by Levier, according to CharlesDaubert (1999: 6). 23 See Mori 1998 and the literature cited there in note 1; and Mori 2014. For Bayle, Spinoza’s moral character was above suspicion. In the article “Spinoza” in his Dictionaire, he famously called Spinoza an athée de système, an atheist not on account of his moral conduct but on account of his philosophical system, which leaves no room for a personal God (W/Cz I: 64 and note q). For Bayle’s influence on the early popular image of Spinoza, see (e.g.) McKenna 1990. A recent exploration of the theme is Billecoq 2016. 24 W/Cz I: 74–80. 25 W/Cz I: 75 and 95; II: 47n111 and 60n200. 26 Duijkerius 1991. 27 The group in fact consisted of three travelers. Only the identity of Stolle has been ascertained. One of the others was, most likely, Johann Ferdinand Hallmann von Halmenfeld (W/Cz II: 53). They were joined by a relative (“Vetter”) of this Hallmann von Halmenfeld, whose name may also have been Hallmann. It is unknown which of Stolle’s two companions is the one who wrote “Hallmanns Reyse Journal,” one of the diaries that Stolle used as a source when he attempted to turn their travel notes into a book. Three manuscripts of the Stolle-Hallmann journal survive. On the complicated textual history, see W/Cz II: 52–53. Czelinski has incorporated all relevant fragments about Spinoza in the text as given in W/Cz. (Private communication, July 18, 2015, from Martin Mulsow, who is working on an edition of the entire journal insofar as it has been transmitted.)

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spinoza’s life 49 28 See Jensen 1997a, 1997b. 29 Both the seventeenth-century manuscript (known as Ms. A) and Monnikhoff’s copy of it (Ms. B) are now in the Royal Library in The Hague. 30 For a comprehensive and detailed bibliographical enumeration, see W/Cz II: 326–37. 31 Gullan-Whur 1998; Nadler 1999; second, updated edition 2018. 32 See W/Cz II: 83–84, and the appendix with the family’s pedigree (II: 485). 33 Saraiva 2001: ch. 2: 20–42. On the historiographical debates about the status of the Jews in this period, see Bodian 1997; on the notions of Conversos, New Christians, Marranos, see her introduction, 6–7. 34 D’Ancona 1940; Nahon 1979–80; Swetschinski 2000. 35 It was common for Jews from the Iberian peninsula to use different names inside the Jewish community and when involved in trade, for reasons of security. Michael’s birthplace is mentioned in two documents (W/Cz I: 191–92, items 23 and 24). His year of birth can be calculated approximately (see Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1932: 11, 48). Vidigueira was among the more than hundred Portuguese towns with a self-governing Jewish community (judiaria). See Saraiva 2011: 1–3. See Révah 1995: 169–72; and Kaplan 2016 for additional information on Spinoza’s grandparents. 36 The correct dates of his birth and death are given in a copper engraving with Spinoza’s portrait, made shortly after his death (ca. 1680) by an unkown artist, that is found in some copies of the Opera posthuma and De nagelate schriften; see Ekkart 1999: 13, 28. Colerus specified that Spinoza died when he was forty-four years, two months, and twenty-seven days old (W/Cz I: 170. The date of his demise is certain: February 21, 1677 (see the first inventory drawn up by notary W. van den Hove, item 147 in W/Cz I: 336–37). Thus the day of Spinoza’s birth must be November 24, 1632. This is also the date given in the French translation of Colerus’s life (p. 4). The Dutch text, however, erroneously states that Spinoza was born in December 1633 (W/Cz I: 98). The correct date is also mentioned in a late eighteenth-century chronicle of the Sephardim in Amsterdam, written by David Franco Mendes (W/Cz I, item 59: 238), but that may depend on the French version of Colerus. 37 Spinoza’s maternal grandmother was Maria Nunes, also known as Miriam Senior (ca. 1577–1647). It seems that Henrique Garces adopted Judaism only on his deathbed; after his death he was circumcised and given the name Baruch. See Kaplan 2016. 38 “Bento”: W/Cz I (items 68 and 69): 253–54; facsimiles VIII and IX in Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1932; “Benedictus”: Ep 6, Ep 49; as a witness he signed two deeds as “B. DeSpinoza,” but the deeds themselves specify his full name as “Benedictus de Spinoza” or “Benedictus Spinosa” (W/Cz, I item 102: 298, and item 108: 304);

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50 piet steenbakkers autograph letters signed with “B. de Spinoza” (or minor variants like “B. despinoza”): Ep 12a, 15, 23, 27, 32, 46, 69, 72. 39 Bonke 1987: 32–41. The name Vlooienburg is most likely a corruption of Vloenburch, “embankment” (literally: flood-barrier). See Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1932: 48, annotation at 2a; in English: Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1982: 139. 40 W/Cz I: 98; on “Vloijenburch.” See also II: 98n39. 41 This location can be inferred from the findings published by Vaz Dias 1931: 89 (in English: Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1982: 175). The house can be discerned on a detailed map of Amsterdam made in 1625 by the cartographer and surveyor B. F. van Berckenrode (KOKA00047000001 at https:// beeldbank.amsterdam.nl). Note that the Spinoza family never lived in the house that in 1743 received the name ’t oprechte Tapijthuijs. Vaz Dias has shown that this conjecture of Monnikhoff (W/Cz I: 173) is mistaken. 42 There are no indications in archival records or other sources that the family ever moved. The relevant documents show that Michael still lived in the same house in 1652 (see W/Cz I, item 24: 192; item 42: 213–14; item 54: 233; and the notes in W/Cz II: 98, 119n100.) The misconception that Bento was born in a house on the nearby Zwanenburgwal (where Nicolas Dings’s Spinoza statue was put in 2008) and subsequently moved to the Houtgracht is due to the seemingly disparate “addresses” given by the archival records (Vlooienburg), Colerus (Burgwal) and Monnikhoff (Houtgracht), but Vlooienburg and Burgwal refer to the area, that is, the artificial island including the quays that faced it, and Houtgracht refers to a canal and its adjacent quaysides. See Vaz Dias 1931: 88 (in English: Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1982: 174). 43 Beth Haim was also the final resting place of Michael’s first wife Rachel (February 21, 1627), Bento’s brother Isaac (September 24, 1649), his sister Miriam (September 6, 1651), his stepmother Hester (October 24, 1653), and his father Michael (March 28, 1654). Michael and Rachel’s first stillborn child was buried there on December 3, 1623, and Michael’s father on April 9, 1627. See Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1932: 113–15 (and 1982: 113–15). 44 For the family pedigree, see W/Cz II: 483. 45 Rosenberg 2008. 46 Jewish immigrants from Iberia were collectively designated as the Portuguese nation (Portugeesche natie) by the Dutch authorities. The Jewish community called itself the Portuguese nation (nação Portuguesa), the Hebrew nation, or simply, “the Nation.” See Bodian 1997: 6. 47 For documentary evidence both of Michael’s commercial activities and of his position in the Amsterdam Sephardi community, see items 36–57 in W/Cz I: 207–36. 48 W/Cz I (items 64–67): 244–51.

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spinoza’s life 51 49 Under rabbinical law, it was punishable for Jews to contravene the authority of the parnassim (the members of the board of the synagogue). See Kaplan 1982: 111–55, 135. That also included failing to subject a financial conflict among Jews to arbitration of the parnassim. See Vlessing 1997: 23n25. 50 W/Cz I (items 70–71): 257–59. For a detailed analysis of the procedure and of what was at stake for Spinoza, see Vlessing 1997: 18–24. 51 W/Cz I (item 82): 277–78; English translation: Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1932: 189. Gabriel probably never returned to the Netherlands. He was granted English denizenship on Jamaica on June 22, 1671. See Vaz Dias and Van der Tak 1934: 13–22. 52 W/Cz I (item 69): 253–55. 53 Recorded in the “Notta de Herem que se publicou da Theba em 6 de Ab [5416], contra Baruch espinoza,” in the Livro dos Acordos da Nação e Ascamot (Book of Ordinances of the Amsterdam Jewish community, now in the Municipal Archives of Amsterdam). W/Cz I (item 73): 262. 54 Colerus explicitly mentions this (W/Cz I: 118). 55 Salomon 1984: 185. 56 Vlessing 1996: 205–11; Vlessing 1997; Vlessing 2002. 57 See note 49. 58 Steven Nadler enumerates a number of offenses that were punishable according to Maimonides, among these: disrespect for rabbinical authority, and using a Gentile court of law to recover money that would not be recoverable under Jewish law (Nadler 2001: 6). 59 The earlier, unfinished treatises Tractatus de intellectus emendatione and Korte verhandeling cannot be dated precisely, but they certainly do not predate the herem. Spinoza’s earliest letter (Ep 2), which already testifies to his peculiar notion of God, is from September 1661. 60 Nadler 2001. 61 For Solano’s testimony, see Révah 1959: appendix IIa: 61–65, and Révah’s account on 31–32. W/Cz I (item 77: 272–73) prints only the passages of Solano’s testimony that mention Spinoza. 62 Révah 1959: 64 (“por aber dado en ateistas”). 63 The Captain’s testimony: Révah 1959: appendix IIb: 66–68 (cf. also 32–33); relevant extracts: W/Cz I (item 78): 274–275. 64 Spinoza’s parental home was next to the Amsterdam leprosy hospice, but it is unlikely that Guerra stayed there, because it accepted only Amsterdam burghers. 65 See Salomon and Sassoon’s “Introduction” to Da Costa 1993: 1–50; on Mendes, 20–24. See also Kaplan 1982: 142. 66 W/Cz I (item 186): 399. 67 W/Cz I: 85. 68 The hypothesis is offered by Walther and Czelinski (W/Cz II: 56n157).

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52 piet steenbakkers 69 Elsewhere, I have argued that Van Til in 1678 had been a member of a committee in Leiden investigating whether Spinoza’s works should be prohibited, and that he apparently had access to documents that are no longer extant (Steenbakkers 2010: 31). The latter is obviously true, as Van Til also cites a letter that contained an account of an interview with Spinoza (see W/Cz I: 424). He was not, however, on that committee. My source for that remark was a note in Walther 1998: 284; also in W/Cz II: 256n365. He there refers to a document included in Freudenthal 1899 (item 84: 177), where a certain Van Thilt is mentioned as a member of that committee. This was, however, someone else: Johan van Thilt, one of the governors of Leiden University (who died in 1679), not Salomon van Til. 70 The deposition by Captain Pérez de Maltranilla suggests that Spinoza belonged to a circle of Jewish dissidents. See also I. S. Révah 1995: 221–45 (“Aux origines de la rupture spinozienne: Nouveaux documents sur l’incroyance dans la communauté judéo-portugaise d’ Amsterdam à l’époque de l’excommunication de Spinoza”) and 247–81 (“Aux origines de la rupture spinozienne [II]: Nouvel examen des origines, du déroulement et des conséquences de l’affaire Spinoza-Prado-Ribera.” For Spinoza’s contacts with Christians in Amsterdam after 1656, see Mertens 2008. 71 Though the connection between Spinoza and Van den Enden cannot be backed up by letters or documents, it is mentioned as a matter of fact in a variety of different sources, for example, a letter of J. van Neercassel of September 9, 1678 (W/Cz I: 412); Colerus (W/Cz I: 100); Stolle/Hallmann (W/Cz I: 83, 91, 92); La Vie (W/Cz, I: 24); an anonymous notebook kept by a student in Utrecht in 1678–79 (Steenbakkers, Touber, and Van de Ven 2011: 236, 286, 337); and Beverland 1679: 110. 72 Akkerman 1977: 9. 73 See Frank Mertens’s excellent website on Van den Enden: http://users.telenet.be/ fvde/Bio3b.htm. 74 When in Amsterdam in 1703, Gottlieb Stolle and his companions interviewed an old man who had known Spinoza well. He told them that he had heard Spinoza was a teaching assistant (submagister) in Van den Enden’s Latin school (W/Cz I: 92). Cf. also the information supplied by Rieuwertsz Junior, that Spinoza made a living by teaching children as soon as he had left the Jewish community (W/Cz I: 86). 75 See the information on Mertens’s website. 76 Thus Gullan-Whur 1998: 72–73, 86–87, 124, 186. Clara Maria van den Enden has an important part in the recent opera The Rise of Spinoza (2014) by composer Theo Loevendie. 77 W/Cz I: 100. Dirck (or Theodoor) Kerckrinck (1638–93) is portrayed by Colerus as a jealous rival who won Clara Maria’s heart by giving her an expensive pearl necklace. Kerckrinck was to become a famous anatomist. Spinoza had two books of his former fellow pupil in his library: Spicilegium anatomicum (Amsterdam:

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spinoza’s life 53 Frisius, 1670) and Commentarius in currum triumphalem antimonii (Amsterdam: Frisius, 1671). In the Spicilegium (p. 178), Kerckrinck praised the most excellent microscope he owned, crafted by that famous noble mathematician and philosopher Benedictus Spinoza (“Est & mihi microscopium praestantissimum à Benedicto illo Spinosa Mathematico & Philosopho nobili elaboratum”). 78 That sum is mentioned by Rieuwertsz Junior; Colerus has 300 guilders, Schuller 100 Imperiales (Reichsthaler). See W/Cz I: 89, 127, 282; cf. W/Cz II: 148–49 (note 176), where 100 Imperiales are equated with 250 guilders. 79 Jelles in the preface to De nagelate schriften (W/Cz I: 6). According to Akkerman (1987), Lodewijk Meyer thoroughly edited the Latin text for publication in the Opera posthuma. 80 W/Cz I: 28. As Travis Frampton has pointed out (2016: 114), the details of the story strongly resemble that of Pilate’s obligingness toward the demands of the Pharisees to have Jesus executed. 81 W/Cz I: 2 (my translation). According to Colerus, Spinoza left Amsterdam after (and because of ) an alleged knife attack (W/Cz I: 104). Colerus’s sources here are Bayle (cf. W/Cz I: 60) and the testimonies of the Van der Spyck couple. Bayle and Colerus disagree as to the details, and none of the other sources say anything about it. Whether such an attack took place (and if so: how, when and why) remains in the dark (see W/Cz II: 37n88). 82 W/Cz I: 118–20. 83 W/Cz I: 172. This is a specific element that Colerus does not mention, so I am not entirely convinced that Monnikhoff relies only on Colerus, as Walther and Czelinski suggest (W/Cz II: 68n257.) 84 W/Cz I (item 79): 276. This is the earliest mention of Spinoza’s production of optical instruments (including, presumably, the manufacturing of lenses). 85 W/Cz I (item 80): 276. A third reference to Spinoza is given by Borch on May 17, 1661, where he cites a certain Höjerus, according to whom there were a number of atheists in Amsterdam, most of them Cartesians; and among these there was one impudent atheist Jew. See Borrichius 1983: I: 128 (not in W/Cz). It is tempting to conclude from this report that Spinoza still lived in Amsterdam in May, but the report is not specific enough. 86 W/Cz I: 172. The stanza as quoted by Monnikhoff runs: “Ach waaren alle menschen wijs,/ En wilden daar by wel;/ De Aard waar haar een Paradijs;/ Nu is ze meest een Hel.” (My translation: “If all the people would be wise, and welldisposed as well, the earth to them were paradise; now mostly it’s a hell.”). 87 Meijer’s findings were first communicated by G. J. P. J. Bolland in the speech with which he inaugurated the renovated house as a museum (Bolland 1899: 41–53). Meijer’s own account was published in an article on the history of the village (Meijer 1909; on the cottage where Spinoza lived: 176–82).

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54 piet steenbakkers 88 See, for example, Edwin Curley, “Editorial Preface” to Spinoza’s Principles and Metaphysical Thoughts, in CW I: 221–24; Van Ruler 1999: especially 98–99. 89 After Spinoza’s death, the manuscript of the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione had fallen into the hands of Georg Hermann Schuller. He seems to have been the driving force behind the editorial decision to publish the work as part of the Opera posthuma. See Steenbakkers 1994: chapter 1, especially 56, 66–70. 90 The outline was discovered in 1851; soon afterwards the two manuscripts turned up. They were published in 1862 and in 1869 respectively. 91 Mignini 1979, 1987, 1986; Mignini’s introduction to Spinoza 1986: 11–118; and Mignini’s introductions to the two works in Spinoza 2009: 21–54 and 159–77. 92 Ep 6, end: “As for your new question, how things have begun to be, and by what connection they depend on the first cause, I have composed a whole short work devoted to this matter and also to the emendation of the intellect. I am engaged in transcribing and emending it, but sometimes I put it to one side because I do not yet have any definite plan regarding its publication.” (CW I: 188) Mignini thinks the “whole short work” (integrum opusculum) Spinoza mentions here refers only to the Short Treatise. 93 Steenbakkers 2009: 27–28. In those twelve years he wrote not only the Ethics, but also the Principia/Cogitata metaphysica and the Tractatus theologico-politicus. For a full and recent account of the genesis of the Ethics, see the introduction by Moreau and Steenbakkers in Spinoza, OEuvres, IV: Ethica/Ethique (cited in note 1): 13–38. 94 Most scholars nowadays have adopted the order proposed by Mignini (though not necessarily all his arguments). Notable exceptions are Rousset 1992 (Introduction, 7–51) which asserts that the work must have been written between autumn 1661 and summer 1662; and Domínguez in Spinoza 2015: 24. 95 W/Cz I: 6; cf. also the “Notice to the Reader” that the editors of Spinoza’s posthumous works provided to the work itself: “This Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect etc., which we give you here, kind reader, in its unfinished state, was written by the author many years ago now. He always intended to finish it. But hindered by other occupations, and finally snatched away by death, he was unable to bring it to the desired conclusion . . .. And so that you would be aware of, and find less difficult to excuse, the many things that are still obscure, rough, and unpolished, we wished to warn you of them.” (Trans. Curley, CW I: 6). 96 W/Cz I: 6 (my translation). 97 They most probably had; at any rate Jan Rieuwertsz Junior showed a manuscript of the Korte verhandeling to Hallmann (W/Cz I: 91–92). It had been in his father’s possession. 98 According to Colerus, Spinoza had been working on a Dutch translation of the Old Testament (p. 61 §XII), but according to Kortholt (W/Cz I: 80) the translation was

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spinoza’s life 55 into Latin. No such text survives. For Spinoza’s reluctance to write about philosophical issues in Dutch, see the end of Ep 19. 99 Mignini in Spinoza 1986: 63–66; cf. also 821–64, about the series of numbers in manuscript A. 100 Ep 28; Spinoza 1925: IV: 163 (l. 20). He also refers to it thus in the footnotes to the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Jelles’s interpretation that these notes announce an eventually unrealized work on general physics (W/Cz I: 8) is implausible. Ep 28 is a very important source for biographical information on Spinoza. It has survived only as an autograph draft, undated and without the addressee’s name. Its contents show that it was written during the Second AngloDutch War, before the Battle of Lowestoft (June 13, 1665), and after April 28 (combining reports about Spinoza’s health as given in Ep 25 and in Ep 28; see Bloksma 2018: 34n180). In Spinoza scholarship, the addressee is now usually taken to be Johannes Bouwmeester, and though he certainly is a likely candidate, other close friends qualify as well. I am grateful to Frank Mertens, who is preparing a biography of Bouwmeester, for pointing out to me the uncertainties that appertain to Ep 28 (private communication). See Mertens 2017: 75n43. 101 Ep 8 and 9. For a more extended reconstruction, see Steenbakkers 2009: 27–28. 102 According to Ep 8 (Simon de Vries to Spinoza, February 24, 1663) Casearius lived under the same roof with Spinoza. 103 Ep 9 (Spinoza to Simon de Vries, March 1663). 104 Ep 13 (Spinoza to Oldenburg, July 17/27, 1663). 105 Ep 15 (Spinoza to Meyer, August 3, 1663). 106 Spinoza himself spelled out the address and the name of his landlord in a postscript to Ep 19 (Spinoza to Blijenbergh, January 5, 1665). According to Kees van der Leer (2016: 59–61) the house can now be identified as Kerkstraat 39. 107 The request by Tydeman and his group (rumored to have been written by Spinoza) is lost. For the opponents’ protest, see W/Cz (item 83): 279–80 (where the 1666 protest is mistakenly dated to 1665). Their intervention was successful: Van der Wiele’s rival Eduardus Westerneijn was appointed. This appears from a request of October 4, 1669, by the elders and deacons of Voorburg to the magistrate of Delft to appoint a new minister (a certain Jesaias Wijckentooren), as Westerneijn had accepted a call to Leiden. Like the 1666 protest, this document from 1669 is kept in the archives of Delft, division “Stadsbestuur,” inventory no. 1597. 108 Noordegraaf and Valk 1996; mortality figures for 1664: 228; flight from Amsterdam: 48. 109 This appears from an archival document in the Amsterdam municipal archives: SAA, access no. 5046, inv. 2, fol. 115r (private communication from Frank Mertens, April 9, 2018).

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56 piet steenbakkers 110 The episode has been thoroughly investigated by Van der Tang 1984. 111 The Interpres was published by Rieuwertsz in 1666 and reissued in 1673–74 together with the third (octavo) edition of Spinoza’s Tractatus theologicopoliticus. Bouwmeester’s involvement has been suggested by Thijssen-Schoute 1954: 395n3; Bossers 1986; and Mertens 2011: 121. 112 That is to say: it does not figure in the inventory. 113 Carl Gebhardt, in Spinoza 1987: 51. 114 A modern edition, with an English translation: Koerbagh 2011. 115 See Wielema 2003; Mertens 2010: 74; and Van Bunge’s “Introduction” in Koerbagh 2011: 1–37; esp. 6–15. 116 W/Cz I (item 87): 285–86. 117 It is likely that Spinoza first divided Part 3 in two parts, and subsequently detached Part 5 from what now remains of Part 4. That Part 5 originally was a section of Part 4 may also account for the fact that it is the only part of the Ethics without definitions of its own. 118 Ep 68, to Oldenburg, September–October 1675. Spinoza mentioned his intention to publish the Ethics in a lost letter to Oldenburg of July 5, 1675 (see Ep 62). 119 Three letters from Spinoza to Hudde have survived, all written in Voorburg in 1666: Ep 34 (January 7), 35 (April 10) and 36 (June). The argument of Ep 34 occurs almost verbatim in Ethics 1p8s2. 120 Letters from Blijenbergh to Spinoza: Ep 18, 20, 22, 24; Spinoza to Blijenbergh: Ep 19, 21, 23, 27. 121 Ep 23; though there is no literal parallel in the Ethics in its final shape, E 4p37 comes close. 122 Ep 37, June 10, 1666. Spinoza’s description of the true method here appears to be akin to what he designates as the (unfinished) second part of his method in §23 of the Treatise of the Emendation of the Intellect. 123 Ep 13 (to Oldenburg, July 27, 1663) about scientific experiments on nitre by Boyle and by Spinoza himself; Ep 41 (to Jelles, September 5, 1669) on hydrostatics by Spinoza; Ep 40 (to Jelles, March 25, 1667) on alchemic transformation. 124 Ep 38, to Johannes van der Meer, October 1, 1666. Nothing is known about this correspondent, whose name was revealed to Leibniz by Schuller (AA 2.1: 405, no. 170; AA 3.2: 360, no. 150). 125 De Vet 2005. 126 Ep 36 to Hudde; Ep 39 and 40 to Jelles. Spinoza reportedly also wrote a small treatise on the rainbow, but may have burnt the manuscript (according to Jelles, W/Cz I: 4; and Colerus, W/Cz I: 146). 127 W/Cz I (item 86): 282–85.

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spinoza’s life 57 128 Ep 29, around September 20, 1665, trans. Curley, CW II: 11. 129 Ep 30, around October 1, 1665, trans. Curley, CW II: 14–15. 130 Spinoza’s apparent silence about Koerbagh’s fate may also be due to the lack of surviving letters in precisely this period. After letter 41 to Jelles, another gap presents itself: his next letter (Ep 43) was written in February 1671. 131 On its printing history, see Steenbakkers 2010: esp. 33–35. Recent research by Rindert Jagersma and Trude Dijkstra has brought to light the very wellconcealed identity of the printer: Israël de Paull. See Jagersma and Dijkstra 2013: esp. 293–96. Jeroen van de Ven composed an exhaustive descriptive bibliography of Spinoza’s works in the seventeenth century: Printing Spinoza: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Works Published in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming December 2021). 132 In May 1668, Spinoza’s landlord, Tydeman, bought another house in Voorburg, on the Herestraat. It is unknown when Tydeman moved there, and if his lodger went with him (Van der Leer 2016: 61). 133 W/Cz I: 120. Her name occurs in this form only in the Dutch version of Colerus’s life of Spinoza; it was corrupted to Van Velden in the French translation and again to Van der Werve by nineteenth-century scholars, but Willem Meijer (1902) argued convincingly that Colerus was right. Widow van Velen did not own the house, but must have rented it. 134 Colerus reports that Spinoza lodged in the house of Van der Spyck for well over five years and a half (W/Cz I: 122). 135 By the Utrecht church council: W/Cz I: 287. 136 Israel 2001: 275–85. Already on April 16, 1671, a resolution of the Court of Holland stated that the book was sacrilegious, pernicious, and thereby actionable (W/Cz I, item 98: 293–94). On the banning of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, see W/Cz I (items 88–101, 103–5, 111, 113–24, 126–35, 157). See also Van Bunge 1989. 137 Steenbakkers 2010: 33: first printing in 1670, second in 1672, third in 1673–74, and fourth and fifth after 1677; all except the third in quarto size. But for part of the second printing, all title pages of the quarto editions pretend to have come out in 1670. The third edition was different: part of the print run was rigged with false title pages, its size was octavo, it was dated 1673 or 1674 and it was bound together with Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres. The false titles caused such indignation that the book was banned. 138 He was “a faithful member of the Walloon Church of Utrecht throughout his life” (Catherine Secretan in “Introduction” to Van Velthuysen 2013: 7). Secretan stresses that the Walloon communities “were known for their liberalism and, in many towns, were an alternative for those who found the Reformed Church too rigorous or strict” (p. 6).

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58 piet steenbakkers 139 In his Tractatus de cultu naturali et origine moralitatis, oppositus Tractatui theologico-politico, et Operi posthumo B.D.S., published in Van Velthuysen 1680: II: 1363–1570. 140 For an analysis of William’s involvement in organizing and facilitating the murder and of the cover-up, see Prud’homme van Reine 2013. 141 Leibniz, undated note: W/Cz I (item 107): 303. 142 Ep 47, trans. Curley, CW II: 396. 143 Ep 48, trans. Curley, CW II: 397. 144 W/Cz I (item 109): 305 (from Chevreau’s memoirs of 1700). 145 See Spinoza 1977: 48. 146 Van de Ven 2015; Gootjes 2020. Albert Gootjes discovered a set of nineteen letters from Bouwmeester to Graevius, dating between April 1673 and February 1676. Graevius’s part of the exchange has not been found. An edition of Bouwmeester’s letters is currently in preparation. For a preliminary notice, see Gootjes 2016. 147 His apology was published as a pamphlet in July/August 1673 in Paris, and reprinted in Cologne later that year, under the title La Religion des Hollandois (Stouppe 1673). 148 Stouppe 1673: 66–67. 149 See Gootjes 2018. On the Utrecht Cartesians, see Gootjes 2019, 2020. 150 As Gootjes (2020: 614) convincingly argues, “it is altogether unlikely that Spinoza undertook a diplomatic mission of any significance at all.” 151 W/Cz I: 128–30. The English translation from the Dutch here is mine; it differs considerably from the rather loose English version, The Life of Benedict de Spinosa, “done out of French” (London: Bragg, 1706). 152 Ep 68. 153 Ep 84, second half of 1676, to an unidentified friend. 154 Leibniz to Gallois, AA 2.1: 379; W/Cz I (item 139): 331: “Spinosa est mort cet hyver. Je l’ay veu en passant par la Hollande, et je luy ay parlé plusieurs fois et fort long temps.” 155 Malcolm 2003: 226. 156 Ep 70, Schuller to Spinoza, November 14, 1675 (passing on Tschirnhaus’s request for permission to show Spinoza’s writings – i.e., the Ethics – to Leibniz); Ep 72, Spinoza to Schuller, November 18, 1675 (refusal). 157 Laerke 2016a: 18–19. 158 This is argued by Bloksma (2018). That his “phthisis” was hereditary is specified by Schuller (letter to Leibniz, February 6, 1677, AA 3.2: 37; W/Cz I, item 143: 334), but pulmonary tuberculosis is caused by an infection (though susceptibility to it is determined genetically as well as by external factors).

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spinoza’s life 59 159 Jelles (W/Cz I: 2): “aan zekere ziekte, de Tering genoemt, overleden”; Meyer’s Latin rendering is “ex Pthisi [sic] hanc vitam reliquit.” Colerus (W/Cz I: 157): “hebbende wel twintig jaar de teering gehad.” 160 W/Cz I: 156–60; my translation. 161 W/Cz I: 134 (about the author of Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres). 162 AA 3.2: 64; my translation. The letter in which Schuller told Tschirnhaus about Spinoza’s death is lost, but its date can be reconstructed as February 26, 1677. See Steenbakkers 1994: 58. 163 For a detailed account of this assessment of Schuller’s character, see Steenbakkers 1994: 50–63. 164 See W/Cz, II (item 147): 180n292; Steenbakkers 1994: 59–60. 165 W/Cz I: 93 (Hallmann and Stolle): “Er sey als Medicus beÿ Spinoza in seiner Letzten Krankheit gewest, der den äußerl. Schein nach gar ruhig gestorben.” Biographical information about Scholtze has been gathered by Rik Wassenaar and Jeroen van de Ven (see introductory note to this chapter). A niece of Scholtze’s wife Catharina Micheel married Jacob van der Spyck, the brother of Spinoza’s landlord. Scholtze was an acquaintance of Colerus’s son (and presumably of Colerus himself, too). This specific social context makes it implausible that he would figure as “a certain L. M. from Amsterdam” in Colerus’s account, the more so as Scholtze was still alive when Colerus was gathering his information; he died in 1711. 166 According to a libelous pamphlet that came out in 1680 or 1681: Dialogue van een groote thee en tobacq-suyper, over het wonderlijck hart gevecht voorgevallen in den Haag tusschen . . . Johan Fredericq Swetser, alias doctor Helvetius, en mennoniste Kees alias Dr. Cornelis Bontekoe (no place, no name). 167 Steenbakkers, Touber, and Van de Ven 2011: 232–36, 306–7. 168 In Leibniz, AA 2.1: 304; W/Cz I (item 144): 334 (my translation). Schuller mentions the date according to both the Gregorian (February 21) and the Julian calendars (February 11). 169 Bloksma 2018: 44–45. Cachexia is currently defined as a chronic condition with either at least 5 percent weight loss in less than a year or a body mass index below 20 kg/m2, plus three out of five additional criteria (fatigue, decreased muscle strength, anorexia, low fat-free index, abnormal biochemistry). See Farkas et al. 2013: esp. 174 (fig. 1) and 177 (note 10). 170 W/Cz I (item 147): 336–37. 171 W/Cz I (item 148): 338. Spinoza was buried in grave number B 162. 172 Thus Colerus: W/Cz I: 160. The expenses were eventually covered in part by the proceeds of the auction of Spinoza’s goods and in part by a gift from Alewijn Gijsen. 173 W/Cz I (items 149, 150, 151): 339–61; cf. also Colerus (W/Cz I: 140, 166).

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60 piet steenbakkers 174 W/Cz I (item 160): 371 (September 30, 1677); cf. also items 153–55 and 158–59 for the legal steps that lead to their renunciation. 175 See Colerus’s account, W/Cz I: 140. Van der Spyck must have secured the box even before the first inventory was made, as it does not feature in the second inventory and the rooms had remained sealed between the two inventories. 176 For a detailed reconstruction of their activities, see Steenbakkers 1994: 5–70 (chapter 1, “The Editorial History of the Opera postuma”). That reconstruction does not take into account the Vatican manuscript of the Ethics, which was discovered later. See now the introduction by Moreau and Steenbakkers in Spinoza, OEuvres, IV: Ethica/Éthique (cited in note 1): 27–37. 177 Ep 37, Spinoza to Bouwmeester, June 10, 1666, was printed from the letter received by Bouwmeester, not from the draft that was found among Spinoza’s papers; see Steenbakkers 1994: 17, 41. 178 W/Cz I (item 168): 377–78. 179 For a critical survey of all known portraits, see Ekkart 1999. 180 W/Cz I (item 163): 373. 181 For an analysis of Spinoza’s library see, e.g., Vulliaud 1934; W/Cz II: 182–86; Krop 2010. 182 According to Kortholt (W/Cz I: 79). 183 See Offenberg 1973. 184 Fuks 1952. 185 Schuller to Leibniz, December 31, 1677 (W/Cz I: 377). 186 W/Cz I (items 171–85): 380–98. Most proscriptions occurred in the Dutch Republic. The book was put on the Roman Catholic index of prohibited books early in 1679 (W/Cz I, item 184: 397).

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2

Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Substance Yitzhak Y. Melamed

“Substance” (substantia, zelfstandigheid) is a key term of Spinoza’s philosophy. Like almost all of Spinoza’s philosophical vocabulary,1 Spinoza did not invent this term, which has a long history that can be traced back at least to Aristotle. Yet, Spinoza radicalized the traditional notion of substance and made a very powerful use of it by demonstrating, or at least attempting to demonstrate, that there is only one, unique substance – God (or Nature) – and that all other things are merely modes or states of God. Some of Spinoza’s readers understood these claims as committing him to the view that only God truly exists, and while this interpretation is not groundless, we will later see that this enticing and bold reading of Spinoza as an “acosmist” comes at the expense of another audacious claim Spinoza advances, namely, that God/Nature is absolutely and actually infinite. But before we reach this last conclusion, we have a long way to go. So, let me first provide an overview of our plan. In the first section of this chapter, we will examine Spinoza’s definitions of “substance” and “God” at the opening of his magnum opus, the Ethics. Following a preliminary clarification of these two terms and their relations to the other key terms defined at the beginning of the Ethics, we will briefly address the Aristotelian and Cartesian background of Spinoza’s discussion of substance. In the second section, we will study the properties of the fundamental binary relations pertaining to Spinoza’s substance: inherence, conception, and causation. The third section will be dedicated to a clarification of Spinoza’s claim that God, the unique substance, is absolutely infinite. This essential feature of Spinoza’s substance has been largely neglected in recent Anglo-American scholarship, a neglect which has brought about an unfortunate tendency to domesticate Spinoza’s metaphysics to more contemporary views. The fourth section will study the nature of Spinoza’s monism. It will discuss and criticize the interesting yet controversial views of the eminent Spinoza scholar, Martial Gueroult, about the plurality of 61

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substances in the beginning of the Ethics and address Spinoza’s claim in Letter 50 that, strictly speaking, it is improper to describe God as “one.” Finally, it will evaluate Spinoza’s kind of monism against the distinction between existence and priority monism recently introduced into the contemporary philosophical literature. The fifth and final section will explain the nature, reality, and manner of existence of modes.

t h e d e fi n i t i o n s o f “ g o d ” a n d “ s u b s t a n c e ” The title of the first part of the Ethics reads “De Deo” (“On God”), and in this part we indeed find the core of Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance. Substance is defined in the third definition of this part: E 1d3: 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 [Per substantiam intelligo id, quod in se est, et per se concipitur; hoc est id, cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei, a quo formari debeat].

For Spinoza, the proper definition of a thing must spell out the thing’s essence.2 E 1d3 focalizes on the independence of substance as its essential feature. Substance is said to be both ontologically independent (i.e., it is “in itself”) and conceptually independent (i.e., it is “conceived through itself”). What is not ontologically and conceptually independent is not a substance. In E 1d5, Spinoza defines “mode” [modus] as having the inverted features of substance, that is, as that which is ontologically and conceptually dependent. E 1d5: By mode I understand the affections3 of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived.

The dual and symmetric formulation of the definitions of substance and mode (once in ontological terms, and then in terms of conception) does not seem to be a coincidence, for the very first definition of Part One of the Ethics follows the same pattern: E 1d1: By cause of itself [causa sui] I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.

Why does Spinoza define his key notions twice, once in terms of their existence, and then in terms of how they are conceived? Recent

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 63 scholarship provides different answers to this intriguing question,4 and we are going to leave it open, at least for a while. Let us only note that E 1d3 seems to make the substance’s being in itself and conceived through itself the two essential expressions of the substance’s independence.5 In the following, I will refer to the relations of being in itself and in another as the opposite variants of the inherence relation.6 Thus, substance inheres in itself, while modes inhere in another. Moving ahead in our presentation of the core notions of Spinoza’s metaphysics, let us turn now to the definitions of attribute and “God”: E 1d4: By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence [Per attributum intelligo id, quod intellectus de substantia percipit, tanquam ejusdem essentiam constituens]. E 1d6: By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence [Per Deum intelligo ens absolute infinitum, hoc est, substantiam constantem infinitis attributis, quorum unumquodque aeternam, et infinitam essentiam exprimit]. Exp.: I say absolutely infinite, not infinite in its own kind; for if something is only infinite in its own kind, we can deny infinite attributes of it [NS:7 (i.e., we can conceive infinite attributes which do not pertain to its nature)]; but if something is absolutely infinite, whatever expresses essence and involves no negation pertains to its essence [Explicatio. Dico absolute infinitum, non autem in suo genere; quicquid enim in suo genere tantum infinitum est, infinita de eo attributa negare possumus; quod autem absolute infinitum est, ad ejus essentiam pertinet, quicquid essentiam exprimit, et negationem nullam involvit].

One crucial element in Spinoza’s definition of attribute is the role of the intellect.8 In one of his early letters, Spinoza quotes the definition of substance from an early draft of the Ethics. The definition is very similar to the one we find in E 1d3, though it concludes by noting: “I understand the same by attribute, except that it is called attribute in relation to the intellect, which attributes such and such a definite nature to substance.”9 We will not get into the details of Spinoza’s definition of attribute, as this is the topic of another essay in this collection.10 We

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should, however, keep in mind two important points on this issue. First, for Spinoza, there is some distinction between the substance and its attributes. Second, the distinction between the substance and its attributes is rather subtle and weak.11 In fact, in E 1p10 Spinoza will argue that insofar as the attributes constitute the essence of substance (E 1d4 and E 1d6e), they share the substance’s essential feature of being conceived through itself. Spinoza’s definition of God (E 1d6) is probably the deepest ground of the entire metaphysical edifice of the Ethics. Spinoza frequently relies on this definition in proving later propositions in the book,12 and E 1p16 – its main rival for the title of the most-cited text in the Ethics – relies primarily and explicitly on E 1d6. We too will return frequently to this key definition, but let us begin our explication by registering some crucial observations. First, Spinoza defines God as a substance. However, he does not define either God or the substance as existing by virtue of its essence. In E 1p11, Spinoza will prove that God exists and that God’s essence involves existence. However, Spinoza’s proof relies heavily on a strong version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and specifically on the alleged implication of this principle according to which everything (God included) must have a cause for its existence.13 Spinoza’s main argument for the existence of God in E 1p11d has been frequently referred to in the existing literature as a variant of the “ontological argument.”14 Though such reference to E 1p11 is not groundless,15 it is still quite misleading, as Spinoza proves – rather than assumes – that existence pertains to the nature of God.16 The Principle of Sufficient Reason – the claim that everything must have a reason or cause – plays hardly any role in Anselm’s ontological argument (or in the ontological argument in Descartes’s Fifth Meditation).17 In contrast, Spinoza’s two main arguments for the existence of God (in E 1p11d) would be absolutely toothless without assuming that everything (God included) must have a cause both for its existence as well as for its non-existence.18 Second, the definition of God asserts that God “consists [constantem]” of infinite attributes. The same claim also appears in the Short Treatise.19 But what could this claim mean? The attributes cannot be parts of God, since in E 1p14 Spinoza proves that God is indivisible.20 Without venturing too much into the discussion of the nature of the attributes, I think it is fair to say that per E 1d6 the attributes must have a very intimate and real relation to God. This rather modest conclusion seems to undermine those interpretations of Spinoza’s definition of attribute (E 1d4) which

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 65 take this definition to assert that the attributes are merely perceived as constituting the essence of God, but do not truly constitute it.21 Third, the final phrase in E 1d6 – “quorum unumquodque aeternam, et infinitam essentiam exprimit” – is adequately translated by Curley as: “of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” However, we should keep in mind that since the Latin has no definite and indefinite articles, the phrase may also be translated as “of which each one expresses the eternal and infinite essence”; the Latin text does not rule out the possibility that it is the same one essence that is expressed by each of the attributes. Martial Gueroult, the eminent Spinoza scholar, points out some interesting considerations in favor of the reading that takes each attribute to express a distinct essence of God.22 There is, I think, textual evidence at least as strong in favor of the alternative reading.23 Here I wish merely to raise the question, draw the reader’s attention to it, and leave it open. Fourth, the definition of God and its explicatio draw an important distinction between what is absolutely infinite and that which is merely infinite in its kind. God is absolutely infinite, but each of the infinitely many attributes of God is merely infinite in its kind,24 since we can deny of it all of the other infinitely many attributes. Spinoza makes the last point quite explicitly in one of his early letters, where he uses the example of the attribute of extension and states: “Extension is not infinite absolutely, but only insofar as it is Extension, i.e., in its own kind.”25 The kinds (genera) at stake seem to be just the attributes themselves. Spinoza does not define infinity, but in E 1d2 he provides a definition of finitude (in a kind): E 1d2: That thing is said to be finite in its own kind that can be limited by another of the same nature. For example, a body is called finite because we always conceive another that is greater. Thus, a thought is limited by another thought. But a body is not limited by a thought nor a thought by a body.

The attribute of thought is the kind to which all ideas, or thoughts, belong. The attribute of extension is the kind to which all bodies belong. Spinoza’s employment of E 2d2 later in the book confirms that each attribute constitutes a kind of its own.26 Having this preliminary exposition of Spinoza’s definitions of substance and God in our minds, let us turn now to examine briefly the historical background of Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance.27

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We have already noted that the essential characterization of Spinoza’s substance is its independence. Substance is both ontologically and conceptually independent. It is a thing that does not depend on anything else in order to be or be conceived. This understanding of substance follows traditional theories of substance, though the slight (or apparently slight) changes Spinoza introduces into the concept of substance lead to radical and revolutionary conclusions. We provide this concise overview of the historical background of Spinoza’s discussion of substance not only for the obvious reason that Spinoza was not working in a void, but also because the two competing theories of substance that were readily available to Spinoza – those of Aristotle and Descartes – suggest two main ways of understanding Spinoza’s own concept of substance. Due to the complexity of these matters, we can only supply a very general outline of the delicate issues. The two main loci for Aristotle’s discussion of substance are the Categories and the Metaphysics. In the Categories, Aristotle discusses substance (ousia) while explicating the ten categories of being, of which substance is the first and most important. Aristotle defines substance as follows: A substance – that which is called a substance most strictly, and most of all – is that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, e.g., the individual man or the individual horse. The species in which the things primarily called substances are, are called secondary substances, as also the genera of these species.28

For Aristotle, the term “substance” in the fullest sense of the word applies only to particular things, such as a particular horse or a particular man. Whatever is not a particular thing can either be said of a particular thing or be in a particular thing. To the first group belong the genera and species under which particular things fall (such as “man,” “animal,” etc.). The second group includes properties such as “red” or “hot” that do not constitute genera or species. In broad terms, we can say that the distinction between being in and being said of a thing is a distinction between accidental and essential predication.29 Aristotle allows for the existence of secondary substances; these are the genera and species that are said of (but are not in) the primary substances.30 Hence, whatever is not a primary substance depends on a primary substance, since it must either be in a primary substance or be said of a primary substance.31 In the Metaphysics, Aristotle suggests that the substratum (hypokeimenon) “which underlies a thing primarily is thought to be in the

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 67 truest sense its substance.” The substratum itself is defined as “[T]hat of which the other things are predicated, while it is not itself predicated of anything else.”32 The element that is stressed in the discussions of substance in both the Categories and the Metaphysics is the predicative independence of the substance. That is, primary substances do not depend on anything else upon which they are said to be predicated. Let us mark this understanding of substance as the predication definition of substance: x is a primary substance if and only if it is a subject of predication33 and it is not predicated of anything else. What is Descartes’s conception of substance? Clearly, the Aristotelian definition of substance was not alien to Descartes’s contemporaries.34 Descartes himself, in the Second Set of Replies appended to the Meditations, defines substance in terms that are quite close to Aristotle’s view:35 Substance. This term applies to every thing in which whatever we perceive immediately resides, as in a subject, or to every thing by means of which whatever we perceive exists. By “what we perceive” is meant any property, quality or attribute of which we have a real idea.36

Unlike Aristotle’s characterization of primary substance, however, Descartes’s does not stipulate that a substance should not be predicated of anything else.37 Yet it is clear that what makes something a substance is the fact that it is a subject of which properties are predicated. Following his definition of substance, Descartes defines God as “the substance which we understand to be supremely perfect, and in which we conceive absolutely nothing that implies any defect or limitation in that perfection.”38 Although it renders God supremely perfect, this definition does not say that God is more of a substance than other, finite substances. Such a distinction between God, the only substance in the strict sense of the word, and finite substances appears in Descartes’s most famous discussion of the topic in section 51 of the first part of the Principles: By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence. And there is only one substance which can be understood to depend on no other thing whatsoever, namely God. In the case of all other substances, we perceive that they can exist only with the help of God’s

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68 yitzhak y. melamed concurrence. Hence the term “substance” does not apply univocally, as they say in the Schools, to God and to other things; that is, there is no distinctly intelligible meaning of the term which is common to God and his creatures. In the case of created things, some are of such a nature that they cannot exist without other things, while some need only the ordinary concurrence of God in order to exist. We make this distinction by calling the latter “substances” and the former “qualities” or “attributes” of those substances.39

Some scholars suggest that in this passage Descartes introduces a new definition of substance as an “independent being.” This is somewhat imprecise, since Aristotle also stresses the independence of substance. Descartes diverges from Aristotle in the way he spells out this independence, however. While Aristotle defines the independence of primary substance solely in terms of predication, Descartes stipulates that substance in the full sense of the word must also be causally independent. Hence, in addition to being self-subsisting, a fully fledged Cartesian substance must also comply with the causal stipulation of substance: x is a fully fledged substance only if it is not caused to exist by anything else. Created substances, according to the passage above, are selfsubsisting yet externally caused by God (they need “God’s ordinary concurrence”).40 As a result, they are not fully fledged substances for Descartes. This brings us to an interesting asymmetry between causation and predication in Descartes’s view of substance. While Descartes grants the title “substance” to things that causally depend only on God, he does not make the same compromise in regard to predication. Things which depend only on God in terms of predication (i.e., God’s attributes) are not recognized in this passage (or, as far as I know, in any other text of Descartes) as substances, even in the weaker sense of the word.41 This seems to indicate that even for Descartes, the sine qua non condition for substantiality is still independence in terms of predication. Only when this necessary condition is satisfied can the test of causal self-sufficiency distinguish between God, the substance in the full sense of the word, and finite, created substances (which depend on God in terms of causation, but not in terms of predication). The view of God as the only substance in the full sense of the word (and of finite things as substances only in a secondary sense), appears also in a major medieval work which, though unknown to Descartes, was clearly familiar to Spinoza.42 Consider the following passage from

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 69 the Wars of the Lord, by the early fourteenth-century Provencal Jewish philosopher, Levi ben Gerson, or Gersonides: It can be verified that the attributes of God are predicated of Him primarily but of other things secondarily, even though it be conceded that there is no relation [yahas]43 between God and His creatures . . .. It is important to realize that there are attributes that must be attributed to God, for example, that He is a substance. The term “substance,” however, is not predicated of God and other things univocally but [of God] primarily and [of everything else] secondarily. For, that which makes all things describable by some attribute in such a way that they are [truly] describable by that attribute – i.e., by virtue of what these things have acquired essentially and primarily from it – is more appropriately called by that term. Now God makes [sam] all other things in such a way that they are substances, for he endows them with their substantiality; accordingly, he is more appropriately describable as “substance.” Moreover, the divine substance exists by virtue of himself [nimtza me-atzmo],44 whereas all other substances derive their existence from something else, and whatever exists by virtue of itself is more appropriately described as “substance” than something whose existence derives from another thing.45

Like Descartes, Gersonides feels the pressure to extend the Aristotelean definition of substance as independent in terms of predication to causal independence as well. Yet, if we push this line to its conclusion, we would have to deny the substantiality of any created thing, and for Gersonides, just as for Descartes, this appeared to go one step too far. To return to Spinoza, he seems to have little patience for the Cartesian, in-between category of “created substance.” If the title “substance,” in its strict sense, applies only to God (since God is the only entity that is not dependent on anything else in terms of both predication and causation), Descartes’s willingness to grant the status of “created substance” to things which “need only the ordinary concurrence of God in order to exist” may rightly seem a mere concession to popular religion and its demand to secure the substantiality (and hence everlastingness) of human minds.46 As I have already noted, Spinoza does not define substance as causally independent, yet it takes him no more than five propositions to prove that “[o]ne substance cannot be produced by another substance” (E 1p6) and to derive from this proposition the corollary that “substance cannot be produced by anything else” (E 1p6c). Thus, substance must be

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causally independent from anything else. However, for Spinoza, the causal independence of substance does not only mean that it is not caused by anything else, but also that substance is positively selfcaused.47 Relying on E 1p6, and on the implicit and crucial assumption that everything must have a cause,48 Spinoza proves in E 1p7d that substance is “the cause of itself.” But what does it mean for a thing to be “cause of itself?” Though the notion of causa sui seemed paradoxical to many of Spinoza’s predecessors,49 Spinoza did not shy away from using it and even assigning it a central role. As we have already seen, the Ethics opens with the definition of this very notion. Let us have a second look at it: E 1d1: By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.

A cause of itself is a thing whose essence alone necessitates its existence, and which cannot be conceived as non-existing.50 The causal independence of substance leads Spinoza to the conclusion that substance must exist by virtue of its own essence (E 1p7) – otherwise, the existence of substance could not be explained.

t h e s u b s t a n c e ’ s r e l at i o n s Having briefly studied Spinoza’s definitions of substance and God and some of the historical background of Spinoza’s conception of substance, I would like to turn now to the three quintessential relations which the substance bears: inherence, conception, and causation.51 I will first consider Spinoza’s view of the interconnections among these relations and then turn to examine the logical properties of each relation. Two of the aforementioned relations – inherence and causation – can be composed so that the results are the relations of immanent and transient causation.52 The term “causa immanens” first appears in the Ethics in E 1p18. I cite the proposition and its demonstration in its entirety, since it tells us precisely what is an immanent cause.53 E 1p18: God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things. Dem.: Everything that is, is in God, and must be conceived through God (by P15), and so (by P16C1) God is the cause of [NS: all] things, which are in him. That is the first [thing to be proven]. And then

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 71 outside God there can be no substance (by P14), i.e. (by D3), thing which is in itself outside God. That was the second. God, therefore, is the immanent, not the transitive cause of all things, q.e.d.

In the first sentence of E 1p18, Spinoza establishes that God is the immanent cause of all things by pointing out his previous demonstrations that (1) all things inhere in God54 and that (2) God is the efficient55 cause of all things.56 This, Spinoza claims, suffices to establish “the first thing,” that is, that God is the immanent cause of all things. Thus, causa immanens seems to be just the composition of the relations of efficient causation and inherence.57 In his early work, the Short Treatise, Spinoza presents an eightfold taxonomy of the kinds of efficient causes. One of the distinctions in that taxonomy is between immanent and transient causes: the former causes an effect “in itself,” the latter causes an effect “outside itself.”58 The very same distinction is at work in E 1p18d. In order to establish that God is not a transient cause of anything, Spinoza points out (in the second sentence of E 1p18d) that there is nothing outside God.59 Thus, it is clear that a transient cause is an efficient cause whose effect does not inhere in the cause, while an immanent cause is an efficient cause whose effect inheres in the cause.60 The discussion of the distinction between immanent and transient cause in the Short Treatise also makes clear that the terms “internal cause” and “external cause” have precisely the same denotation as “immanent cause” and “transient cause,” respectively.61 Let us turn now to our third relation: conception. Spinoza does not need to suggest a composition of conception with one of his other two fundamental relations, since he thinks the connection between conception and causation is built into the nature of both relations. In E 1a4, one of the most crucial axioms of the Ethics, Spinoza erects a bridge between causation and conception: The cognition62 of an effect depends on, and involves, the cognition of its cause [Effectus cognitio a cognitione causae dependet, et eandem involvit].

The precise meaning and import of this axiom cannot be determined merely from this axiom itself, since it can be read in several different ways. Many of Spinoza’s contemporaries and predecessors would have been likely to accept it at first glance, and then be horrified by the implications Spinoza draws from it.63 In order to fix the meaning of the axiom, we need to look carefully at its applications later in the book.64 Without getting too

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much into the details of the issue,65 let me point out that it is uncontroversial that the axiom commits Spinoza to the conditional: if x is the cause of y, then y is conceived through x. It is, however, controversial whether the axiom also commits Spinoza to the converse claim: if y is conceived through x, then x is the cause of y. In other words, it is not clear whether E 1a4 constitutes a bidirectional bridge between conception and causation, or merely a unidirectional bridge (from causation to conception, but not the other way around). Though I do not think we currently have conclusive evidence either way, I tend to accept the commonly held view according to which E 1a4 is a bidirectional bridge between causation and conception.66 Let us turn now to examine the logical properties of the three relations of inherence, conception, and causation. For Spinoza, all three relations are neither reflexive nor irreflexive. In some instances, a thing inheres in itself, in others, not.67 In some instances, a thing is conceived through itself, in others, not.68 In some instances, a thing causes itself, in others, not.69 Spinoza seems to consider all three relations as transitive,70 though it is hard to point out texts in which he explicitly proves this feature.71 In E 1p28s Spinoza notes that if God produces (i.e., efficiently causes) mode A, and mode A produces mode B, then God should also be considered the producer of B. Similarly, in E 1p23 Spinoza argues that if an infinite mode B follows from (i.e., is caused by and inheres in)72 an infinite mode A, and infinite mode A follows from (the nature of ) God, then infinite mode B also follows from God (or more precisely, from God’s nature).73 Spinoza also uses conception as a transitive relation, though here we should be careful to spell out the sense of “a is conceived through b” as equivalent to “a is explained by b.”74 Other uses of the terminology of conception (and conceivability), even among Spinoza’s contemporaries, need not be transitive.75 Are inherence, conception, and causation symmetric relations? I will begin with what seems to be the easier case: inherence. Apparently, inherence is anti-symmetric, that is, if x inheres in y, and y inheres in x, then x = y.76 Why cannot inherence be a symmetric relation? Obviously, one substance cannot inhere in another (per E 1d5). However, let us consider a hypothetical scenario in which two modes, x and y, inhere in each other. Now, we may ask whether – in addition to their mutual inherence – x and y also inhere in any substance. We have three mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive possibilities: either both modes do not inhere in a substance, or the one inheres and the other does not, or, finally, both inhere in a substance.77

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 73 If neither one of them inheres in a substance, we have an impossibility, since by their definition (E 1d5) modes depend for their existence on a substance and cannot exist detached from the substance. If one of the two modes (say x) inheres in substance S, while the other mode y does not inhere in S, we reach another absurdity: x inheres both in S and in y. Since x is a mode of S, x’s dependence on y also implies that its substance, S, depends on y (while y is not in S, per our assumption).78 However, this would contradict S’s status as substance, that is, as a being strictly in se. Let’s consider, then, the third and final possibility: x and y inhere in each other, and they also inhere in substance S. Now, the traditional understanding of the in alio relation considers the mode (the dependent thing) to be less real than the thing on which it depends.79 Obviously, x cannot be less real than y, while y is also less real than x. Our question is whether Spinoza accepts this traditional feature of the in alio relation, and specifically whether he requires that the dependent entity be less real than that on which it depends, or whether he might instead accept a slightly weaker requirement according to which a dependent being is less-or-equal in reality to the thing on which it depends.80 I think we have clear textual evidence showing Spinoza accepts the stronger requirement. At the beginning of the Appendix to Part 1 of the Ethics, Spinoza considers the relationship among the infinite modes which follow in a linear order81 from the absolute nature of God. Spinoza is committed to the view that from each infinite mode must follow another infinite mode, and that the linear order of these modes runs to infinity.82 In the following passage, Spinoza argues against divine teleology by claiming that such a view inverts the order of infinite modes (the subject of E 1pp21–23) by making infinite modes, which are more distant from God’s absolute nature, the telos (and hence the perfection) of the more immediate infinite modes: This doctrine concerning the end turns nature completely upside down. For what is really a cause, it considers as an effect, and conversely. What is by nature prior, it makes posterior. And finally, what is supreme and most perfect, it makes imperfect. For – to pass over the first two, since they are manifest through themselves – as has been established in E 1pp21–23, that effect is most perfect which is produced immediately by God, and the more something requires intermediate causes to produce it, the more imperfect it is. But if the things which have been produced immediately

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74 yitzhak y. melamed by God had been made so that God would achieve his end, then the last things, for the sake of which the first would have been made, would be the most excellent of all. (II/80/10–22; emphasis added)

In the italicized passage above Spinoza suggests that there is a depletion of perfection in the order of infinite modes, and that the more distant from God’s nature an infinite mode is, the less perfect it is.83 Now, since in E 2d6 he asserts, “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing,” it follows that an infinite mode is also less real the more distant it is from God’s nature. This, of course, should not surprise us, since as we mentioned above, the traditional understanding of the in alio relation is that a mode is less real than the substance on which it depends. By extending this very logic, we reach the conclusion that the more a mode is dependent on other intermediaries, the less real it is.84 We therefore have, I believe, clear evidence that, for Spinoza, the relation of being in alio involves a difference of reality between the dependent (and hence less real) being, and that other upon which it depends (which is thus more real). We can therefore conclude that two modes cannot inhere in each other, and that the inherence relation must be anti-symmetric (while its in alio variant is asymmetric). Is causation symmetric or asymmetric in Spinoza? It seems that Spinoza places no in-principle restrictions on the symmetry/asymmetry of causal relations. Some causal relations do not (and cannot) obtain reciprocally. For example, God’s essence is the cause of Fido (per E 1p16c1); however, Fido is not the cause of God’s essence.85 Other causal relations are reciprocal. Consider, for example, Spinoza’s claim in Letter 32 that parts of the same whole adapt themselves to each other,86 communicate their motions to each other,87 and “are determined by one another to existing and producing an effect.”88 Similarly, the “Physiological Digression”89 following E 2p13s addresses mutual interaction between colliding bodies,90 as well as between particles and the surfaces of the human body.91 Thus, causation for Spinoza is neither symmetric nor asymmetric.92 Turning now to conception, it seems that given the causationconception bridge of E 1a4, conception, like causation, would have to be neither symmetric, nor asymmetric. In some instances of the relation Cxy (=def x is conceived through y), Cxy obtains, while Cyx doesn’t.93 In other cases, both Cxy and Cyx obtain.94 We could point out several other logical properties of the relations of causation, inherence, and conception,95 though for the purpose of

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 75 providing an overview of the foundations of Spinoza’s metaphysics, our discussion so far should suffice. Before we conclude our discussion of the relation of causation, inherence, and conception, let me address briefly an exciting suggestion made recently by Michael Della Rocca. In his 2008 book, Della Rocca argued in favor of what he called “the twofold use of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.” According to Della Rocca, Spinoza not only requires that everything must have a reason or cause, but also further demands that everything must be ultimately explained in term of – or reduced to – reason.96 Applying this bold claim to the relation of inherence and causation, Della Rocca argues that Spinoza reduced the relations of inherence and causation to conceivability.97 In the course of developing his bold reductive argument, Della Rocca claims that in Spinoza causation, inherence, and conception (intelligibility) are coextensive, that is, x is conceived through y if and only if x is caused through y; and x is caused through y if and only if x inheres in y.98 If causation, conception, and inherence are indeed coextensive, one could argue that such coextensiveness cannot be a brute fact, and that therefore the reduction of causation and inherence to conception provides the required explanation for the alleged coextensiveness of the relations. More recently, Samuel Newlands has pushed Della Rocca’s reading one step ahead by arguing that Spinoza is not only a substance monist, but also a relations monist, holding that all the various dependence relations that obtain in Spinoza’s metaphysics are reducible to one fundamental relation of conceptual dependence.99 I find Della Rocca’s and Newlands’s readings truly exciting. They are innovative, daring, and original, and for all I can tell this is just philosophy at its best. That being said, I think both readings strongly conflict with Spinoza’s key doctrines; furthermore, both readings fail to acknowledge the crucial differences between the properties of the relations at stake, differences which preclude any attempt to identify these relations. I have argued elsewhere that Della Rocca’s identification of inherence and causation conflicts with many of Spinoza’s key metaphysical claims.100 Thus, for example, the identification of inherence and causation rules out the very possibility of transient causation, that is, a cause whose effect does not inhere in the cause.101 Spinoza makes ample use of the notion of a transient (or what is the same, an external) cause, and thus, this consideration alone seems to me to pose a very strong challenge to Della Rocca’s reading.

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Let me add here briefly two additional considerations against the identification of inherence and causation which I have not discussed so far. First, consider Spinoza’s claim in E 1p17s that when “one man is the cause of the existence of another man,” then, “if the existence of the one perishes [pereat], the other’s existence will not thereby perish.”102 The choice of men to exemplify the causal principle here is clearly random. A porcupine that was brought into existence by another porcupine would just as much fail to perish when its cause (ancestor) perished. Thus, Spinoza seems to be holding that at least some cases of causation do not involve the existential dependence of the effect on the cause. This would flatly conflict with the strict existential dependence which is built into the relation of inherence: a mode is in another (E 1d5), and as such it cannot exist in the absence of its substratum. This crucial difference between the existential dependence involved in the inherence relation and the lack thereof in some cases of causation is exemplified very nicely in a passage of the Short Treatise which singles out the properties of the immanent cause, that is, the relation composed of (efficient) causation and inherence:103 “The freest cause of all, and the one most suited to God, is the immanent. For the effect of this cause depends on it in such a way that without it, [the effect] can neither exist nor be understood.”104 When we contrast the E 1p17s passage with the above passage from the Short Treatise, it becomes clear that Spinoza makes a sharp distinction between immanent and transient causation. The effect of the immanent cause existentially depends on its cause (it cannot be without the cause), while the effect of a transient cause (discussed in E 1p17s) does not depend for its existence on its cause. Since the difference between an immanent and a transient cause is that the former involves inherence, while the later doesn’t, and since existential dependence is built into the nature of the inherence relation, it is clear that it is only the element of inherence in immanent causation that makes the effect of this cause existentially depend on its cause. Causation simpliciter (without inherence) does not make the effect depend existentially on the cause. Since inherence is by its nature an existential-dependence relation, while causation is not, it would not make sense to identify these two relations. The second consideration against the identification of inherence and causation is quite straightforward. We have seen earlier that the in alio relation is asymmetric. We have also noticed that Spinoza allows for reciprocal (transient) causation, as when two billiard balls collide, or when two parts of the same whole interact with each other.

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 77 A symmetric relation cannot be identical with an asymmetric relation. Moreover, the case of the colliding balls provides a clear counterexample to the alleged coextensiveness of causation and inherence. Now, even if we accept the claim that inherence is merely anti-symmetric and not asymmetric,105 the case of the colliding billiard balls still provides a clear counterexample to the coextensiveness of causation and inherence, since anti-symmetry requires that if Rxy and Ryx, then y = x. However, our two colliding billiard balls remain two items, in spite of the mutual causal relations they bear to each other.106 The foregoing arguments against Della Rocca’s identification of inherence and causation are obviously potent as well against Newlands’s stronger theory of relations monism. I will only add here briefly two further counterexamples which I believe refute Newlands’ suggestion that in Spinoza all relations are reducible to conceptual dependence. Consider first the part-whole relation. This relation is ubiquitous in Spinoza’s metaphysics and is closely tied to essential notions of Spinoza’s philosophy, such as extension, infinity, parallelism, the adequacy and inadequacy of ideas, the infinite modes, and the nature of individuals and singular things. A particular issue relative to which the importance of the parthood relation is stressed most explicitly is Spinoza’s definition of destruction: “to destroy a thing is to resolve it into such parts [rem destruere est illam in ejusmodi partes resolvere] that none of them express the nature of the whole . . ..”107 In short, parthood cannot be brushed away as a marginal, unimportant relation in Spinoza’s philosophy. Now, in E 1p12d, as well as in numerous other texts, Spinoza asserts that parts are prior to their wholes, both in terms of existential dependence and in terms of conceptual dependence.108 If we accept Newlands’s suggestion that there is one, and only one, dependence relation in Spinoza, it would seem that parthood would also have to be reduced to conception. Specifically, since substance is that which is conceptually independent while a mode is that which is conceptually dependent, it would seem that reducing parthood to conception would force us to assert that the substance (the independent relatum) is part of its mode (the dependent relatum). This seems very odd indeed. To be sure, oddness is not sufficient for invalidity. But there is still, I believe, more conclusive evidence. For Spinoza (as for most of his contemporaries),109 the concept of part is restricted to what we would call a proper part.110 This is clearly indicated by Spinoza’s remark that “the whole is greater than its part” is a necessary truth (E 4p18s).111 Thus, for Spinoza, parthood is an

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irreflexive relation. Since, for Spinoza, the relation of conceptual dependence is neither reflexive nor irreflexive (the substance is conceived through itself while the modes are not), conception and parthood cannot be the same relation. In other words, were conception and parthood the same relation, the fact that substance is conceived through itself would commit Spinoza to the claim that the substance is part of itself. But were the substance part of itself, this part would be equal to its whole: a view Spinoza explicitly rejects as a logical absurdity. The second dependence relation which I believe we can show cannot be reduced to conception is the relation of expression. In E 1d6, Spinoza asserts that the attributes express the (or an)112 essence of God. Now, if we accept the claim that expression, conception, inherence, and causation are coextensive, then God’s essence would turn out to be the cause in which the attributes inhere. However, this seems to create an ontological distance between God’s essence and the attributes that cannot be admitted. Making the attributes inhere in – and be effects of – God, obliterates Spinoza’s crucial distinction between attributes and modes, while Spinoza clearly groups the attributes together with the substance in the realm of natura naturans, and not in the realm of natura naturata, the domain of the modes.113 Asserting that an attribute is a mode seems to be a flat contradiction, given Spinoza’s characterization of the two notions: a mode is conceived through another (E 1d5), whereas an attribute is conceived through itself (E 1p10). Despite my great sympathy with the boldness, elegance, and originality of the readings of Della Rocca and Newlands, I think that, at the end of the day, they are not tenable.114 I turn now to the issue of Spinoza’s understanding of infinity.

h ow m u c h i s i n fi n i t e ? At the beginning of the first section above, we encountered Spinoza’s definition of God (E 1d6) “as a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.”115 Although this most central definition of the Ethics unequivocally asserts that God has infinitely many attributes, the reader of the Ethics will find only two of these attributes discussed in any detail in Parts 2 through 5 of the book. Addressing this intriguing gap between the infinity of attributes asserted in E 1d6 and the discussion merely of the two attributes of Extension and Thought in the rest of the book, Jonathan Bennett writes: “Spinoza seems to imply that there are

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 79 other [attributes] – he says indeed that God or Nature has ‘infinite attributes.’ Surprising as it may seem, there are reasons to think that by this Spinoza did not mean anything entailing that there are more than two attributes.”116 In this section, I will argue that Bennett’s claim is fundamentally wrong and deeply misleading. I do think, however, that addressing Bennett’s challenge will help us better understand Spinoza’s notion of infinity. I will begin by summarizing Bennett’s arguments. I will then turn to examine briefly the textual evidence for and against his reading. Then I will respond to each of Bennett’s arguments and conclude by pointing out theoretical considerations which, I believe, simply refute his reading. Bennett presents the following five arguments to motivate his surprising claim: (1) Spinoza frequently uses “infinite” as virtually synonymous to “all.” The claim that God has all the attributes merely commits him to the view that whatever attributes are there, they must be instantiated in God. If there are only two possible attributes, then the claim that God has infinite attributes amounts to nothing over and above the claim that God has two attributes.117 (2) If Spinoza was serious in ascribing infinitely many attributes to God, he should have discussed them in some detail in the body of the Ethics.118 (3) In Letters 64 and 66, Spinoza attempts to explain why we cannot know any attributes other than Thought and Extension. However, argues Bennett, Spinoza’s claim is “a move so abrupt, ad hoc, and unexplained that we cannot even be sure whether it is a retraction of the metaphysics or of the epistemology.”119 (4) The traditional conception of God as an ens realissimum could have motivated Spinoza to ascribe to God all attributes or perfections. However, there was no respectable theological tradition that would motivate him to ascribe to God infinitely many attributes.120 (5) Spinoza had no theoretical or philosophical pressure that would push him to assert that God has more than two attributes.121 Let us turn now to examining Spinoza’s text and check whether it can support the claim that God/Nature has no more than the two attributes of Extension and Thought. We’ll begin with a simple question: is there any text in Spinoza’s oeuvre in which Spinoza’s asserts that there are no more than two attributes? To the best of my knowledge, the answer is a resounding “no.”122 In contrast, we have abundant texts – in the Ethics and outside it – in which Spinoza clearly commits himself to the existence of attributes other than thought and extension. Consider the following two passages from E 2p7s:

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80 yitzhak y. melamed Whether we conceive nature under the attribute of Extension, or under the attribute of Thought, or under any other attribute, we shall find one and the same order, or one and the same connection of causes, i.e., that the same things follow one another.123 So long as things are considered as modes of thinking, we must explain the order of the whole of nature, or the connection of causes, through the attribute of Thought alone. And insofar as they are considered as modes of Extension, the order of the whole of nature must be explained through the attribute of Extension alone. I understand the same concerning the other attributes.124

Notice that in both passages Spinoza does not entertain the slightest doubt about the existence of the unknown attributes. He does not say, “I understand the same concerning the other attributes, if there are any.” Instead, he affirms without any reservation that the same order of explanation should obtain with regard to the other, unknown, attributes. Interestingly, we do have a nice example of Spinoza’s formulating a claim about an issue he is not confident about. Consider E 3p2: “The Body cannot determine the Mind to thinking, and the Mind cannot determine the Body to motion, to rest or to anything else (if there is anything else).”125 In E 3p2, Spinoza formulates his claim in a reserved manner that entertains the possibility that a body might be determined to states other than motion and rest, without committing himself to the existence of this third kind of state. In contrast, both passages in E 2p7s clearly commit Spinoza to the existence of attributes other than extension and thought. In addition to the two crystal-clear passages from E 2p7s, there is an interesting yet more intricate passage in E 2p13d in which Spinoza is bothered by the possibility of a mismatch between the minds of modes of different attributes, that is, he is bothered by the possibility that “the object of the Mind were something else also, in addition to the Body.”126 In order to rule out the possibility that my mind might have as its object not only my body but also a mode of one of the unknown attributes, Spinoza appeals to E 2a5 which asserts that the human mind has access only to modes of Extension and Thought. I reconstruct this argument in greater detail in another place.127 Turning now to Spinoza’s correspondence, in Letter 56 (dated Oct./ Nov. 1674) Spinoza writes: “I don’t say that I know God completely, but only that I know some of his attributes, not all of them, not even most of

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 81 them. Certainly, being ignorant of most of them, does not prevent my knowing some.”128 Spinoza’s assertion that we do not know the majority of the attributes, clearly entails that he believed there are at least . . . five attributes. In an earlier letter, Spinoza referred to “other attributes” of God, other than intellect (i.e., Thought),129 hence implying that there must be at least . . . three attributes.130 In Letters 64 and 66, Spinoza unmistakably asserts the existence of infinitely many attributes unknown to the human mind. We will postpone the explication of these crucial letters until we address the important question of Spinoza’s reasons for asserting that we cannot know any attributes other than thought and extension. In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza does not employ his typical metaphysical terminology of substance, attributes, and modes,131 yet in a note appended to his discussion of nature in the sixth chapter, he remarks: “By Nature here I understand not only matter and its affections, but in addition to matter, infinite other things.”132 It is highly likely that these “infinite other things” are the infinite attributes (apart from Extension). In the Short Treatise, the infinitely many unknown attributes are discussed in detail in KV 1.1,133 and the Second Appendix to the Short Treatise offers an elaborate discussion of the nature of the minds, or souls, of the modes of the unknown attributes: The essence of the soul consists only in the being of an Idea, or objective essence, in the thinking attribute, arising from the essence of an object which in fact exists in Nature. I say of an object that really exists, etc., without further particulars, in order to include here not only the modes of extension, but also the modes of all the infinite attributes, which have a soul just as much as those of extension do.134

Finally, as a piece of external evidence, consider the following passage from Leibniz’s notes on Spinoza’s metaphysics, following a conversation he had with Spinoza: “He [Spinoza] thinks that there are infinite other positive attributes besides thought and extension. But in all of them there is thought, as here there is in extension. What they are like is not conceivable by us; every one is infinite in its own kind, like space here.”135 In summary, we have, I believe, a solid body of textual evidence committing Spinoza to the existence of infinitely many other attributes beyond thought and extension. We do not have even a single text in

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which Spinoza asserts that God has, or even might have, only the two known attributes of Extension and Thought. I turn to address Bennett’s arguments in favor of his reading. (1) Bennett’s claim that in Spinoza “infinite” always means “all” is not precise. In Letter 12, the foremost text for Spinoza’s discussion of infinity, he notes that some “kind of infinite can be conceived to be greater than another infinite, without any contradiction.”136 Thus, the smaller infinity may not contain all the items contained within the larger infinity. But this is a marginal point. The following consideration seems to me more important. Bennett is right in claiming that if by “infinity” Spinoza meant nothing over and above “all,” and if there were only two possible attributes, then for God to have infinite attributes would amount to nothing more than having two attributes. Yet, why not extend Bennett’s logic one step further? If no attributes were possible (and no modes were possible), it would be perfectly correct under Bennett’s reading to assert that God has infinitely many attributes and infinitely many modes. Yet, such an assertion would be highly misleading, and it would make no sense for a speaker who even suspects that there might be no possible attributes to assert that there are infinitely many attributes. The very same consideration works against reading Spinoza’s infinity of attributes as “all, that is, two.” If Spinoza meant to claim that God merely has all the attributes, why should he not use the simple and common term “all” instead of the highly misleading “infinity”? (2) Spinoza does not elaborate upon the nature of the other attributes in Parts 2 to 5 of the Ethics for a simple reason: the aim of these parts is the study of the nature of the human mind and the best measures leading to its blessedness. The preface to Part 2 announces as much. It explains that from that point onward, Spinoza is homing in on a tiny fraction of his universe – that fraction that is relevant to the knowledge and blessedness of the human mind: I pass now to explaining those things which must necessarily follow from the essence of God, or the infinite and eternal Being – not, indeed, all of them, for we have demonstrated (IP16) that infinitely many things must follow from it in infinitely many modes, but only those that can lead us, by the hand, as it were, to the knowledge of the human Mind and its highest blessedness.137

From Part 2 onward, Spinoza is focusing on the restricted part of his universe that is relevant to the achievement of human blessedness. For the most part, the knowledge of the infinitely many unknown

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 83 attributes is irrelevant to this endeavor.138 This is the trivial and primary reason for Spinoza’s silence about the infinitely many attributes.139 In addition, Spinoza had good reasons to believe that while we know that God/Nature has infinitely many attributes, we can hardly know anything about the nature of these attributes. He develops these claims in Letters 64 and 66, and we shall turn now to examine his reasons. (3) Spinoza had a perfect explanation for the fact that one does not know the nature of any attributes other than Thought and Extension. According to Spinoza, the human mind is a complex idea (i.e., mode of Thought) whose object is nothing but a human body (a mode of Extension).140 One of the most central doctrines of the Ethics asserts that there is a parallelism, or isomorphism, between the order of things and the order of ideas (E 2p7).141 Things (res) for Spinoza are everything that is real, including bodies and ideas. In the first section of this chapter, we encountered Spinoza’s claim that each attribute must be conceived through itself (E 1p10). Relying on E 1p10, Spinoza proves in E 2p6 that the attributes are also causally isolated from each other (i.e., a mode from one attribute cannot cause a mode from another attribute). Thus, there is a causal and conceptual barrier between the infinitely many attributes.142 In Letter 66, Spinoza relies on these two doctrines – the IdeasThings Parallelism and the barrier among the attributes – to prove not only that items belonging to different attributes cannot interact causally with each other, but also that mental representations of items belonging to different attributes cannot causally interact with each other. In other words, in addition to the barrier among the attributes introduced in E 1p10 and E 2p6, there is a parallel barrier within the attribute of thought among representations (i.e., ideas) whose objects are items belonging to different attributes. Thus, it is not only the case that my body cannot causally interact with a mode of the third attribute, but also the case that my mind (which is just the idea of my body) cannot causally interact with any mind (or idea) which represents items of the third attribute. The parallel barrier, which is internal to Thought, does not allow any communication between ideas representing different attributes (or, modes of different attributes). Our minds (i.e., the ideas of our bodies) cannot communicate with the minds of the infinitely many attributes, just as our bodies cannot interact with the modes of the infinitely many other attributes. Each attribute (and its representation in Thought) is isolated from every other attribute (and its representation in Thought). Thus, contrary to Bennett’s claim, Spinoza’s argument in Letters 64 and 66 is well grounded in E 1p10 and E 2p7.143

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(4) Spinoza was well acquainted with a philosophical and theological tradition that ascribes infinitely many attributes to God, though it was not the tradition under Bennett’s lamplight. In his discussion of the divine attributes in the Light of the Lord, Crescas develops in great detail the claim that God has infinitely many attributes and that each of his attributes is infinite.144 Given Spinoza’s detailed discussion and endorsement of Crescas’ conception of actual infinity in Letter 12,145 it is highly unlikely that he was unaware of this claim, especially since Crescas was not the only medieval Jewish thinker to advance such an argument.146 Another philosopher with whom Spinoza was of course acquainted and who affirmed that God has “countless” attributes beyond the ones we know is Descartes.147 These “countless” attributes of God cannot be just non-essential modes, since Descartes explicitly denies that God has any modes.148 There is, however, a remarkable difference between these claims of Descartes and Spinoza. Descartes’s claim that there are uncountable divine attributes which we cannot comprehend secures the transcendence of the Cartesian God.149 Spinoza’s claim that Deus sive Natura has infinitely many attributes which are not accessible to us makes Nature (with a capital “N,” i.e., as not restricted to extended and thinking nature) just as transcendent to us as God is.150 This is a bold and highly original view that is consistent with Spinoza’s deep critique of anthropocentrism.151 (5) Let’s turn to Bennett’s final point. Were there any theoretical and philosophical pressures within Spinoza’s system that would push him to affirm the existence of more than two attributes? Yes, there were. We will point out two strong reasons that motivated Spinoza to affirm that God has infinitely many attributes beyond extension and thought: (i) Spinoza’s first reason for rejecting the idea that the infinity of attributes may mean only “all possible attributes, even if there is only a finite number of them” is quite straightforward. Both in the Short Treatise and in the Ethics, Spinoza denies that the infinite can be composed of an accumulation of finite parts.152 Now suppose, per Bennett’s suggestion, that God has all the attributes, and that the number of attributes, n, is finite. Thus, “the infinity of attributes”, that is, the number n of attributes, would be composed of n attribute units, and this would flatly contradict Spinoza’s assertion that the infinite cannot be composed from the finite. (ii) To begin elucidating Spinoza’s second reason, consider E 1p9: The more reality or being [esse] each thing has, the more attributes belong to it.

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 85 In E 1p10s, Spinoza points to E 1p9 as explaining his reason for defining God – at the very beginning of Part One – as consisting of an infinity attributes. Nothing in nature is clearer than that each being must be conceived under some attribute, and the more reality, or being it has, the more it has attributes which express necessity, or eternity, and infinity. And consequently, there is also nothing clearer than that a being absolutely infinite must be defined (as we taught in D6) as a being that consists of infinite attributes, each of which expresses a certain eternal and infinite essence.153

The passage above would appear pretty odd under Bennett’s reading: Why would Spinoza formulate a general rule about the correspondence between the reality and the number of attributes a thing has, when only two attributes are possible at all? Again, to expose oddity is not to refute. But, yet again, we can push this line of objection toward a more conclusive result. In a letter dated October 1674, three years before his death, Spinoza writes: Truly, I confess I still don’t know in what respect spirits are more like God than other creatures are. I know this: that there is no proportion [nullam esse proportionem] between the finite and the infinite; so the difference between the greatest, most excellent creature and God is the same as that between the least creature and God.154

Since the reality of God (per E 1p9) correlates with the number of attributes God has, then, if God were to have any finite number of attributes n, there would be a clear and simple proportion between the reality of a finite being – for example, me – and God’s reality. Since I am constituted by modes of two attributes, the proportion between God’s reality and mine would be precisely: n/2. Yet, as the passage above states unequivocally, Spinoza denies the very possibility of such a ratio between the infinity of God and the finitude of finite things.155 We have thus pointed out two significant philosophical reasons – as well as a theological tradition – that would have motivated Spinoza to hold that God has infinitely many attributes beyond thought and extension. We have exhibited numerous texts, both in the Ethics and outside it, in which Spinoza commits himself to the existence of the infinitely many other attributes, and we have found not even a single text in which Spinoza asserts that God has – or even might have – only two attributes. We also

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explained Spinoza’s flawless argument in Letters 64 and 66 concerning why human beings (and generally, the minds of modes of extension) cannot know any other attributes beyond thought and extension.156 I submit that the case for taking Spinoza at his word, and reading “infinite attributes” as greater than any number, is as strong as it can be.157

substance monism Spinoza is frequently portrayed as a “substance monist.” Like similar headings, this title is slightly imprecise. In the current section, I would like to address a few challenges raised against the description of Spinoza as “substance monist,” and help clarify his type of monism. One recent challenge was raised by Mogens Laerke, who rightly pointed out that both in the early Cogitata Metaphysica and in Letter 50 (dated June 1674) Spinoza stressed that God may only improperly called one, or even unique.158 Here is the passage from Letter 50, where Spinoza’s claims are presented very clearly: Regarding the demonstration I establish in the Appendix of the Geometric demonstrations of Descartes’s Principles, namely that God can only very improperly be called one or unique, I reply that a thing is said to be one or unique only in relation to its existence, but not to its essence. For we don’t conceive things under numbers unless they have first been brought under a common genus.159

Let me first note that the view that God is “one but not in number,” or that strictly speaking it is improper to describe God as one, is found throughout medieval and early modern Jewish literature: in philosophy, Kabbalah, and even liturgy.160 The ubiquity of this view in the Jewish context does not, however, provide any answer to the question: Why is it improper to call God “One?” To the best of my knowledge, there is more than one reason for denying “oneness” from God. One clear motivation is negative theology, which denies that any attributes of finite things can be applied, even by analogy, to God.161 However, as Letter 4 states explicitly, Spinoza held a view completely opposite to negative theology.162 Let us have a look then at Spinoza’s own explanation for denying that God may be properly called “one”: For example, someone who holds a penny and a dollar in his hand will not think of the number two unless he can call the penny and the

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 87 dollar by one and the same name, either “coin” or “piece of money.” For then he can say that he has two coins or two pieces of money, since he calls not only the penny, but also the dollar, by the name “coin” or “piece of money.” From this it is evident that nothing is called one or unique unless another thing has been conceived which (as they say) agrees with it. But since the existence of God is his essence, and we can’t form a universal idea concerning his essence, it is certain that someone who calls God one or unique does not have a true idea of God, or is speaking improperly about him.163

Spinoza’s reasoning seems to be the following. A thing x may be called “one,” only if a plurality of x’s is conceivable. In such a case, to say that there is actually one x is informative: though there could be a number of x’s, it is the case that only one obtains. In this manner, “one” is functioning like any other number. We begin with a sortal under which an unknown number of individuals may fall, and then, when we claim that there are x items of the given sortal, we are providing valuable information. In the case of God, Spinoza’s absolutely infinite substance, this process cannot even commence, since the notion of an absolutely infinite substance logically excludes the very possibility of any similar items. This is precisely Spinoza’s argument in E 1p14: “Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.”164 The inconceivability of another (substance, and a fortiori, another) God rules out the possibility of appealing to a genus or sortal – or, as Spinoza says: “we cannot form a universal idea concerning his essence” – and thus the whole process of counting does not even get off the ground. Another notable challenge to the characterization of Spinoza as substance monist was raised originally by Gueroult, and more recently by A. D. Smith.165 Both pointed out, rightly to my mind, that at the beginning of Part 1 of the Ethics Spinoza refers to substances of only one attribute as genuine possibilities. A particularly compelling piece of evidence brought forward by Smith is that if we look closely at E 1p12 (“No attributes of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided”), and E 1p13 (“A substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible”), it becomes clear that E 1p13 would be completely redundant, unless we realize that E 1p13 addresses the substance of infinitely many attributes (“absolutely infinite”), while E 1p12 refers to a substance of one attribute (“infinite in its kind”).166 I would add that, prior to E 1p14, Spinoza is not entitled to exclude the possibility of

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single-attribute substances, and that therefore they should have been part of the logical space mapped out at the opening of Part One.167 While I accept the core claim of Gueroult and Smith that at the beginning of Part One of the Ethics Spinoza is also addressing singleattribute substances, I beg to differ with a related thesis of their reading, namely, that “the single substances are synthesized into a single divine substance” or that “God is ‘constructed’ out of substances of a single attribute.”168 Both scholars are aware of the problem involved in such claims, although neither, as far as I can see, addresses it adequately.169 The issue should be clear to us following our recent discussion of infinity: the infinite cannot be constructed from the finite, or as Spinoza asserts in E 1p15s (II: 58/27): “infinite quantity . . . is not composed of finite parts.” The infinity of the attributes is not constructed, or synthesized, from adding the extended substance to the thinking substance, and then these to the infinitely many unknown attributes (which we do not know, so in what sense can they be synthesized?). Rather, the infinity of the attributes is built into the very definition of God. No construction of God’s absolute infinity is possible, and none is needed, since for Spinoza the “proper order of philosophizing” is to begin with the absolutely infinite God, and then go on to give an account of the rest of things.170 How the infinitely many attributes (which are each “infinite in their own kind”) are related to God, the “absolutely infinite being” having infinitely many attributes, is indeed a crucial question. In another place, I have attempted to answer it by arguing that each attribute is a causally and conceptually independent aspect of the very same being: God or Nature.171 The third and final monism-related issue I would like to discuss is the distinction, introduced by Jonathan Schaffer, between Priority and Existence Monism. Schaffer suggests a very helpful general framework for a taxonomy of metaphysical monisms.172 The distinction that interests us (and is also at the center of Schaffer’s discussion) is that between Existence Monism and Priority Monism. The Existence Monist holds that there exists exactly one concrete token (this one concrete token might be the world, though we can conceive of alternative variants of Existence Monism). The Priority Monist maintains that there is exactly one concrete fundamental token.173 An item is fundamental if “it has nothing prior to it,” that is, if, within the domain of concrete objects, it does not depend on anything else.174 At this point in his argument, Schaffer claims that “[t]he priority monist holds that whole is prior to (proper) part, and that the maximal

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 89 whole is ultimately prior.”175 Schaffer does not seem to motivate the identification of the “fundamental concrete token” with the “whole,” and of the priority relation with the relation of parthood, but let us grant him this move. Since for Schaffer the whole is prior to its parts, and since Spinoza is strictly committed to the priority of parts to their whole,176 one might be tempted to conclude that Spinoza is simply not a Priority Monist. I suspect this conclusion is somewhat premature, since it is not clear that Schaffer and Spinoza are using the term “part [pars]” in the very same sense (and the term is notorious for its ambiguity). For Spinoza, substance is prior to its modes (E 1a1). Since everything that is in Spinoza’s universe is just the substance and its modes (E 1p4d), substance is prior to everything else. Now, if Schaffer is willing to expand his notion of the parthood relation so that it would contain the priority (i.e., inherence) relation obtaining between Spinoza’s substance and its modes, then I think it would be fair and apt to describe Spinoza as a certain kind of Priority Monist (Substance-Priority Monist, but not Whole-Priority Monist). Schaffer characterizes his Priority relation as irreflexive and transitive,177 and as we saw earlier in this chapter, both characterizations are also true of Spinoza’s in alio relation. Thus, we have good grounds to assume much in common between Schaffer’s Priority relation and Spinoza’s in alio relation (though not according to Spinoza’s understanding of the part-whole relation). Lest we lose track of it, let me restate the obvious: Spinoza defines the modes as posterior or dependent entities (E 1d5 and E 1p1). Now, since Spinoza is committed to the most radical plurality of modes (“infinita infinitis modis”), using Schaffer’s terminology, we may now characterize the uniqueness of Spinoza’s position as the combining of Priority Monism with the most radical plurality of non-fundamental concrete tokens.

t h e n at u r e a n d r e a l i t y o f m o d e s Our discussion of Spinoza’s concept of substance cannot be complete without an explication of the complementary notion of mode (modus). At the beginning of this chapter we have seen that, contrary to the definition of substance as that which is in itself and conceived through itself (E 1d3), a mode is defined as what is in another and conceived through another (E 1d5). The definition of mode also tells us that a mode is “an affection” or a property of a substance.178 Thus, a mode is a property that strictly depends on the substance.

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In order get a deeper understanding of the nature of modes, it will be useful to examine Spinoza’s claims in his celebrated “Letter on the Infinite” (Ep 12). Though the letter is dated to April 1663, we know Spinoza circulated copies of the letter – and referred his colleagues to this letter – even at a very late period,179 and thus it clearly reflects the views of the late Spinoza as well. The letter presents in a condensed manner much of the core of Spinoza’s metaphysics. The main topic of the letter is certain “discoveries” Spinoza made about the infinite,180 but in order to explain his discoveries Spinoza asks his correspondent, Lodewijk Meyer, to let him first briefly “explain these four [concepts]: Substance, Mode, Eternity, and Duration.”181 Explaining his understanding of substance, Spinoza stresses three points: (1) that existence pertains to the nature of substance, (2) that there exists only one substance of the same nature, and (3) that every substance must be understood as infinite. All three points should be familiar to us from the beginning of the Ethics.182 At this point, Spinoza turns to the concept of mode, beginning with an explicit definition of modes. I call the Affections of Substance Modes. Their definition, insofar as it is not the very definition of Substance, cannot involve any existence. So even though they exist, we can conceive them as not existing. From this it follows that when we attend only to the essence of modes, and not to the order of the whole of Nature, we cannot infer from the fact that they exist now that they will or will not exist later, or that they have or have not existed earlier. From this it is clear that we conceive the existence of Substance to be entirely different from the existence of Modes.183

In this passage, Spinoza defines modes simply as “the Affections of Substance.” More importantly, Spinoza seems to imply that modes can be conceived in two opposed ways. On the one hand, we may consider modes to be defined by the very definition of substance. Regrettably, Spinoza does not here tell us anything more about how we should think of modes “insofar as they are defined by the definition of substance” (but, as we shall shortly see, he will elaborate on this in other places). The alternative way to conceive of modes is as not defined by the definition of substance. On such a conception, says Spinoza, the essence of modes does not involve existence, since it is only of the essence of substance to involve existence.184 We thus have a clear contrast between the existence of substance, which belongs to the very essence of substance, and the existence of

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 91 modes – insofar as we conceive of modes as not defined by the definition of substance – which does not follow from their essence, but rather from “the order of nature.” The existence of modes, that is, follows from the chain of their previous causes.185 When we conceive modes as detached from the substance, their essence does not determine their existence, and thus their existence must be determined by external causes. This sharp contrast between the existence of substance and the existence of modes gives rise to another crucial distinction between two kinds of existence: the distinction between eternity and duration. Thus, in the paragraph that immediately follows the passage we have been discussing, Spinoza writes: “The difference between Eternity and Duration arises from this. For it is only of Modes that we can explicate186 the existence by Duration. But [we can explicate the existence] of Substance by Eternity, i.e., the infinite enjoyment of existing, or (in bad Latin) of being.”187 Spinoza here presents a clear dichotomy between the existence of modes, which can be explicated by duration (notice that Spinoza does not rule out here the possibility of explicating modes through eternity), and the existence of substance, which is explicated through eternity.188 But how precisely does this distinction between eternity and duration “arise” from the fact that the essence of substance involves existence, while the essence of modes does not? To answer the last question, we had better turn to the definitions of eternity and duration at the beginnings of Parts 1 and 2 of the Ethics, respectively. E 1d8: By eternity I understand existence itself, insofar as it is conceived to follow necessarily from the definition alone of the eternal thing. Exp.: For such existence, like the essence of a thing, is conceived as an eternal truth, and on that account cannot be explained by duration or time, even if the duration is conceived to be without beginning or end. E 2d5: Duration is an indefinite continuation of existing. Exp.: I say indefinite because it cannot be determined at all through the very nature of the existing thing, nor even by the efficient cause, which necessarily posits the existence of the thing, and does not take it away.189

E 1d8 defines eternity as existence following necessarily from the essence of the eternal thing.190 This claim is consistent with Spinoza’s assertion in Letter 12 that the essence of substance involves existence.

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Such an existence, says Spinoza, is an eternal truth. Thus, eternity, the existence of substance, is due merely to the definition – or, what is the same for Spinoza, the essence – of substance, and cannot be affected at all by anything else. Duration, on the other hand, is the existence of a thing whose essence does not necessitate its existence, that is, modes.191 As such, the essences of enduring things, or modes, leave their existence completely “indefinite,” and Spinoza adds that even the efficient cause that brings about the existence of an enduring thing cannot fully explain its duration, since it is another cause that will bring about the end of the duration of the enduring thing. In the “Letter on the Infinite,” Spinoza takes the contrast between substance and modes two steps further. First, he argues that, in contrast to the indivisibility of substance, modes are divisible.192 Second he asserts that, unlike the substance, which can be conceived only by the intellect, the modes are commonly conceived by the imagination. From all this it is clear that when we attend only to the essence of Modes (as very often happens), and not to the order of Nature, we can determine as we please their existence and Duration, conceive it as greater or less, and divide it into parts – without thereby destroying in any way the concept we have of them. But since we can conceive Eternity and Substance only as infinite, they can undergo none of these without our destroying at the same time the concept we have of them. . . But if you ask why we are so inclined, by a natural impulse, to divide extended substance, I reply that we conceive quantity in two ways: either abstractly, or superficially, as we have it in the imagination with the aid of the senses; or as substance, which is done by the intellect alone. So if we attend to quantity as it is in the imagination, which is what we do most often and most easily, we find it to be divisible, finite, composed of parts, and one of many. But if we attend to it as it is in the intellect, and perceive the thing as it is in itself, which is very difficult, then we find it to be infinite, indivisible and unique, as I have already demonstrated sufficiently to you before now.193

In the following, I will refer to the passage above as “Paragraph A.” Addressing the second half of Paragraph A, Michael Della Rocca writes: Seeing things as divisible is, for Spinoza, a function of the imagination. This is something Spinoza stresses in Letter 12: “if we attend to

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 93 quantity as it is in the imagination . . . it will be found finite, divisible, and composed of parts.” Since division is a function of the imagination and since, for Spinoza, the imagination is the domain of inadequate, confused, and not true ideas, it seems that to see reality in terms of divisible modes is, for Spinoza, to fail to grasp the way the world really is.194

Undoubtedly, Della Rocca is right in stressing that the imagination is the source of our inadequate, confused, and mutilated ideas,195 and I therefore think Della Rocca is pointing out an extremely important and sensitive problem in Spinoza. As far as I can see, Paragraph A is almost the only text in Spinoza’s works that seems to support the socalled acosmist reading of Spinoza,196 developed originally by Salomon Maimon, and then made highly influential in Hegel’s reading of Spinoza.197 According to the acosmist reading, Spinoza denies the reality of the world of diverse phenomena and affirms the sole existence of God. Hegel presents Spinoza’s alleged acosmism as a modern revival of the ancient Eleatic philosophy. Like Parmenides and Zeno, claims Hegel, Spinoza denied the reality of plurality, change, and duration, and affirmed the sole existence of the one, immutable, and indivisible substance. The plurality of attributes and modes in Spinoza is, according to Hegel, a mere illusion198 and “has no truth.”199 I have to confess that I have much sympathy for the acosmist reading of Spinoza, due to its boldness, elegance, and the fact that it might have some ground in Spinoza’s texts. Still, on final consideration, I think it must be rejected. Let me point to some of the main textual and theoretical considerations in favor of this conclusion.200 (1) I have claimed that Paragraph A in Letter 12 is the strongest textual support for the acosmist reading. Let me first note that Paragraph A, while asserting that modes are commonly conceived by the imagination, does not rule out the possibility that modes might be conceived by the intellect. Indeed, we have seen that an earlier passage in Letter 12 alludes to the possibility that modes may be defined by the definition of substance, and presumably such a conception of the modes is adequate and not imaginary. Furthermore, if we continue reading Letter 12, we encounter a passage in which Spinoza criticizes certain opponents201 for “depriving Corporeal Substance of its Affections and bringing about that it does not have the nature which it has.”202 The passage not only makes clear that the affections (i.e., modes) of substance truly belong to it, but it also asserts that were the substance not

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to have the affections which it actually has, it would have to have a different nature or essence (which is, for Spinoza, a clear absurdity). The argument here is simple, since the actual affections of substance follow necessarily from God’s nature; were God not to have the actual affections it has, it would have to have a different nature.203 The context of this passage makes no reference to the imagination and provides no reason to think that it is only by virtue of the imagination that we ascribe affections to the substance. (2) Along similar lines, in another passage in Letter 12, Spinoza speaks about “the way Duration flows from eternal things” and the errors that result when we separate duration from its source.204 Since duration is the kind of existence typical of modes, it would seem that Spinoza genuinely considers duration and modes to flow (or be the effects) of the eternal core of the substance. In this passage, again, the context contains no indication that the flaw at stake is merely imaginary. (3) The third and last passage from Letter 12 I would like to consider is the following: “From everything now said, it is clear that some things are infinite by their nature and cannot in any way be conceived to be finite, that others [are infinite] by the force of the cause in which they inhere, though when they are conceived abstractly they can be divided into parts and regarded as finite.”205 The distinction in this passage is between the infinity of substance and its attributes (which is due to its essence) and the infinity of the infinite modes (which is due to the infinity of the substance in which they inhere). Notice Spinoza’s emphasis on the point that it is only when the infinite modes are conceived abstractly (i.e., detached from the substance) that they can be divided, and thus subject to the operation of the imagination. The clear implication of this passage is that the (infinite) modes can also be conceived in another manner (i.e., nonabstractly), and when the modes are conceived in the latter manner, they are not subject to division and the operation of the imagination. (4) E 1p16 is probably the most central juncture in the derivational map of the Ethics (no fewer than twenty passages cite it explicitly).206 In this proposition, Spinoza argues that “infinita infinitis modis” follow from God’s essence, and in the demonstration of this proposition Spinoza refers to the flow of the infinite infinity of modes as “what the intellect infers” from God’s essence. For Spinoza, the intellect is never a source of error. Thus, the facts that the modes that follow from God’s essence are inferred by the intellect and are described by Spinoza as “falling under an infinite intellect”207 seem to guarantee their veracity and reality, and this sharply contradicts the acosmist denial of the reality

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 95 of modes. (5) E 1p16 itself relies on one text only: the definition of God as “a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence” (E 1d6). In the third section above, we saw that Spinoza has a very strong understanding of infinity as actual, quantitative, and transcending any finite number or quantity (i.e., having no ratio to the finite). Such an understanding of God as embedding the most radical plurality possible is diametrically opposed to the acosmist denial of any plurality. Now, one may make the methodological point that almost any comprehensive interpretation of a philosopher like Spinoza is likely to contain some unresolved tensions and may conflict with one text or another.208 I tend to agree with this last claim. Yet I do not think that all tensions and textual conflicts are of equal value. In many cases, we can clearly point out the texts that constitute the very core of the philosophical system at stake, and in the case of Spinoza, I argue, E 1d6 and E 1p16 constitute this very core. Of course, there can be (and should be) debates about what constitutes the core of a certain philosophical system. On my side, I would be ready to enter such a debate, if asked, and would argue that Spinoza-sans-E 1d6 is a radically domesticated animal, one deserving of mercy rather than admiration. (6) The definition of God as absolutely infinite provides at least a partial answer to Hegel’s main argument in favor of the acosmist reading of Spinoza. Frequently, Hegel argues that – due to Spinoza’s lack of recognition of the importance of dialectic – Spinoza failed to derive the reality of the multiplicity of finite things from the absolute unity of substance (and that as a result the multiplicity of phenomena is not really grounded in reality).209 This kind of argument relies on the misperception of Spinoza as beginning from an Eleatic point of departure, and then attempting (and failing) to prove the derivation of the plurality of modes from the original, absolute unity of God. Yet, the radical plurality built into the definition of God in E 1d6 makes this reading plainly false. Spinoza begins his system with absolute infinity, and thus he does not need to derive plurality, as a negation of the One, in the manner Hegel would like him to do. (7) I have been alluding for quite some time to the fact that in Letter 12 Spinoza implies, but does not develop, the alternative conception of modes as things which are conceived by the intellect and defined by the very definition of substance. Conceived in this manner, modes would be eternal, and presumably also indivisible. Let us now turn to two crucial passages in the Ethics where Spinoza develops this kind of

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conception of modes “sub specie aeternitatis.” The first passage appears in E 2p45s. The proposition that precedes the scholium asserts that each idea of each singular thing involves God’s eternal and infinite essence (E 2p45): By existence here I do not understand duration, i.e., existence insofar as it is conceived abstractly, and as a certain species of quantity. For I am speaking of the very nature of existence, which is attributed to singular things because infinitely many things follow from the eternal necessity of God’s nature in infinitely many modes (see IP16). I am speaking, I say, of the very existence of singular things insofar as they are in God. For even if each one is determined by another singular thing to exist in a certain way, still the force by which each one perseveres in existing follows from the eternal necessity of God’s nature.

The topic of the passage is the existence of singular things, that is, modes. Notice Spinoza’s insistence that he is speaking here not of duration but rather “of the very nature of existence,” that is, of the innermost kind of existence, which is clearly eternity. Modes can be conceived as eternal once we consider them, not as in any way independent, but rather “as they are in God.” When we conceive of modes in this manner, we really conceive of God, and God’s existence is eternity. Thus, conceived or defined by the very definition of substance, the modes are eternal. (8) Spinoza’s talk about conceiving modes “insofar as they are in God” may appear too general, and we may wish to have an illustration of such a conception. In E 5p30, Spinoza provides an example of a conception of a certain mode “insofar as it is in God.” The mode at stake is nothing but the human mind: E 5p30: 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. Dem.: Eternity is the very essence of God insofar as this involves necessary existence (by ID8). To conceive things under a species of eternity, therefore, is to conceive things insofar as they are conceived through God’s essence, as real beings, or insofar as through God’s essence they involve existence. Hence, insofar as our Mind conceives itself and the Body under a species of eternity, it necessarily has knowledge of God, and knows, etc., q.e.d.210

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 97 Notice the phrase in italics above. When we conceive a mode – here, the human mind – through God’s essence, the mode is really defined by the definition of substance, and to that extent the mode involves existence, that is, is eternal.211 Let me summarize. We have, I think, an extensive body of textual evidence showing that modes are not illusory, and that in the rare cases when we conceive them properly to involve existence through the essence of God, the modes are eternal. Let me return now to Della Rocca’s important question from a few pages ago. We have, I think, a solid body of evidence showing that the modes may be conceived by the intellect, and not only by the imagination. But are modes divisible when conceived by the intellect? I tend to think that the answer is: no. Modes, conceived through the definition of substance, are eternal, just like the substance, and presumably they should also be indivisible like the substance. Does that mean that we are back with the Eleatic conception of the mere existence of one, indivisible being? I do not think so. The basic premise of Spinoza’s mereology is that parts are prior to their wholes, both in existence and in knowledge.212 For this reason, the substance is indivisible: were it to have parts, the parts would be prior to the substance, and the substance would cease to be in itself and conceived through itself. Thus, the substance cannot have parts that are prior to it. Can it have parts that are posterior to the substance? With one apparent exception, Spinoza never recognizes parts which are posterior to their whole,213 but he does have another term for such entities, namely, modes,214 and in the Ethics Spinoza speaks ceaselessly about the plurality of modes. The fact that the substance has two distinct modes, n and m, does not make the substance divisible (according to Spinoza’s mereology), since neither n nor m are prior to the substance. Thus, the substance’s having a plurality of modes seems to be consistent with its indivisibility.

conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to provide a multilayered account of Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance. Following a brief introductory study of the main definitions at the opening of the Ethics, we turned to examine the logical properties of three core relations of Spinoza’s metaphysics: causation, conception, and inherence. I argued that these relations have different logical properties and cannot be identified. Nor can

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either one of these relations be identified with the parthood relation in Spinoza. In the third part of the chapter, I argued against Bennett’s claim that Spinoza is not committed to the existence of more than two attributes. I showed that, given Spinoza’s bold advocacy of actual infinity, the interpretation of “infinite” as entailing no more than two attributes makes little, if any, sense. In this section, I also explained Spinoza’s reasons for holding that God cannot have a merely finite number of attributes. Following an elucidation of the nature of Spinoza’s substance monism (in the fourth section), I proceeded to discuss the reality and nature of modes in Spinoza’s metaphysics. I argued that Spinoza is committed to the view that the modes can be conceived by the intellect as defined by the very definition of substance, and that when modes are conceived as such, they are eternal. I have also argued that the indivisibility of substance is consistent with the reality of the plurality of modes and attributes, and that, as a result, the acosmist interpretation of Spinoza, despite its inherent allure, must be rejected. We have no doubt left untouched many aspects of Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance, but I hope, and believe, that we have been able to break some new ground in achieving a more nuanced and precise understanding of this subject. It turns out that – as the formidable edifice of Spinoza’s Ethics itself testifies – unraveling the simple and bold assertion that only one substance exists requires one to engage in a lengthy, detailed, and nuanced project of philosophical elaboration.

notes 1 The notion of an “infinite mode” seems to be the only key concept of Spinoza’s metaphysics that was first introduced by Spinoza and has no antecedents in the writings of his predecessors. See Melamed 2013a: 113. Unless otherwise marked, all quotations from Spinoza’s works and letters are from Curley’s translation (CW I). I have relied on Gebhardt’s critical edition (Spinoza 1925) for the Latin text of Spinoza. I would like to thank Justin Bledin, Don Garrett, Zach Gartenberg, Colin Marshall, John Morrison, and Kristin Primus for their most helpful and discerning comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 2 See TIE §95: “To be called perfect, a definition will have to explain [explicare] the inmost [intima] essence of the thing.” “Explicare” might be better rendered here as “explicate.” 3 It is not easy to pin down the precise meaning of “affection” [affectio] in Spinoza. Roughly speaking, the term refers to a quality. In CM 1.3, Spinoza notes that “by affection we have here in mind what Descartes has elsewhere called attributes”

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 99 (Descartes 1985: Principles of Philosophy, 1.52). Spinoza reserves the terminology of “attribute” for what Descartes would call a “principal attribute,” that is, an attribute that constitutes the essence of a thing (Principles 1.53). Cf. Curley’s editorial notes in CW: I: 625. 4 Compare Della Rocca 2008: 42; and Newlands 2010 with Melamed 2013a: 198–99. 5 Unlike these two features, the causal independence of substance is not built into the definition of substance. It is demonstrated in E 1p6 and its corollary. 6 Apart from one rare occasion in Letter 12 (IV: 61/2), Spinoza hardly uses the term “inherence.” Still, I will keep on using it to denote the in se/in alio relations in accordance with current conventions. 7 “NS” [Nagelate Schriften] refers to the text of the 1677 Dutch translation of Spinoza’s works. 8 This is in contrast to Descartes’s discussion of the principal attributes, which makes no reference to the intellect. See Descartes 1985: Principles of Philosophy 1.53. 9 Ep 9 | IV: 46/22. Italics added. 10 See Chapter 3 of this volume. 11 In Melamed 2017, I argue that the distinction between the substance and its attributes (and between any two attributes) is one which was classified as a “distinction of reasoned reason” in late medieval and early modern philosophy. Sam Newlands (2017) has independently reached the same conclusion. 12 See, for example, E 1p10s, E 1p11, E 1p14, E 1p14c1, E 1p16, E 1p19, E 1p23, E 1p23, E 1p23, E 1p31, E 2p1, E 2p45, E 4p28, and E 5p35. 13 See E 1p7d: “A substance cannot be produced by anything else; therefore, it will be the cause of itself.” By “the Principle of Sufficient Reason” I understand the claim that everything must have a reason, or that there are no brute facts. For further elaboration on the principle and its role in Spinoza’s philosophy, see Melamed and Lin 2016. 14 See, for example, Bennett 1996: 64. 15 In E 1p8s2 Spinoza writes: “Since it pertains to the nature of a substance to exist (by what we have already shown in this Scholium), its definition must involve necessary existence, and consequently its existence must be inferred from its definition alone” (italics added). In E 1p7d, Spinoza indeed infers the existence of substance, yet this inference does not rely on the mere definition of substance but rather assumes that the substance must have a cause. I suspect that for Spinoza the last assumption was simply self-evident, and for this reason he could refer to the inference of the existence of substance as relying “on its definition alone.” 16 For an excellent reconstruction of Spinoza’s proof of E 1p11 and the role of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in this proof, see Della Rocca 2002. In Melamed 2015, I have traced Spinoza’s experimentation with various definitions and conceptualizations of both substance and attribute. Notably, all the drafts of the

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100 yitzhak y. melamed Ethics that are quoted in Spinoza’s correspondence derive the claim that God’s nature involves existence from the inability of one substance to produce another. The earliest draft of the Ethics (which is commonly accepted as such) is quoted in Letter 2, and the argument from the inability of one substance to produce another to the existence of God is hinted at in IV.8/5–8. The same argument also appears in Propositions 3 and 4 of the First Appendix to the Short Treatise. In Melamed 2019, I suggest that this appendix is most likely the earliest draft of Spinoza’s Ethics we currently have. 17 AT VII: 65–67 | CSM II: 45–46. 18 This crucial point was first pointed out in Garrett’s outstanding “Spinoza’s ‘Ontological’ Argument.” (Garrett 1979). 19 KV 1.7 note a | I: 44/23. 20 Moreover, since Spinoza is committed to the priority of parts to their whole (i.e., the whole depends asymmetrically on its parts both for its existence and for its conception; see E 1p12d), were the attributes parts of God, God would depend on the attributes. This would seem to undermine the status of God as being in itself and conceived through itself. 21 See, for example, Wolfson 1934: I: 53–54: “If the expression ‘which the intellect perceives’ is laid stress upon, it would seem that the attributes are only in intellectu. Attributes would thus be only a subjective mode of thinking, expressing a relation to a perceiving subject and having no real existence in the essence . . .. According to [this] interpretation, to be perceived by the mind means to be invented by the mind.” 22 See Gueroult 1969: 51. 23 Since (1) Spinoza asserts that the attributes explicate and express God’s existence (E 1p20d), and since (2) he also affirms that “God’s essence and his existence are one and the same” (E 1p20d), it would seem to follow that the attributes express and explicate God’s essence. I tend to think that both readings can be reconciled if we view each attribute as constituting an aspect of God’s essence/existence. See my discussion of the attributes in Melamed 2012b: 101–3; 2017. Cf. Morrison 2020. 24 See Spinoza’s assertion in E 1p16d: “Each of the attributes expresses an essence infinite in its own kind” (italics added). 25 Ep 4 | IV: 13/2–21. 26 See E 1p8d and E 1p21d. E 1p22d may commit Spinoza to the view that each degree of mediation of the infinite modes constitutes a separate k ind. Cf. Melamed 2013a: 116–19. 27 In the following few pages I rely partly on Melamed 2017. 28 Aristotle 1963, Categories 2a12–2a17 (the translation is by J. L. Ackrill). 29 See Categories 2b31 (quoted in note 30). The further question of whether or not what is in a substance (such as whiteness) is repeatable is a subject of major

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 101 controversy among scholars. For two opposing views, see Ackrill in Aristotle 1963 and Owen 1965. 30 Aristotle explicitly states his reason for considering genera and species as secondary substances: “It is reasonable that, after the primary substances, their species and genera should be the only other things called (secondary) substances. For only they, of things predicated, reveal the primary substance. For if one is to say of the individual man what he is, it will be in place to give the species or the genus” (Aristotle 1963: Categories 2b29–31). 31 For Aristotle, the relation y is said of x is transitive. Hence, the genus that is said of an individual’s species is also (transitively) said of the individual itself. 32 Metaphysics VII (Z), 1028b36. 33 An interesting question, which I will not discuss here, is whether an Aristotelian substance must have properties. On the one hand, if the substance were to have no properties it would be unintelligible (in fact, it would be very much like Aristotelian prime matter). On the other hand, if a substance must have properties, then the substance is dependent (admittedly, in a weak sense) on its properties, which seems to conflict with the independence of substance. Spinoza would face a similar problem were he to explain why God must have modes. For medieval objections to the possibility of substance without accidents, see Normore 2010: 675. For Leibniz’s claims that the monad cannot subsist without some property, see Leibniz 1989: Monadology. For a defense of Spinoza’s view that substance must have modes even though it is not in any way dependent on its modes, see Melamed 2012d. 34 See, for example, Arnauld and Nicole’s characterization of substance: “I call whatever is conceived as subsisting by itself and as the subject of everything conceived about it, a thing. It is otherwise called a substance” (1996: 30). “Subsistence by itself” is traditionally explained as not being predicated of anything. According to Eustachius of St. Paul, “to exist or subsist per se is nothing other than not to exist in something else as in a subject of inherence” ([1609: I.97. iv]; translated in Rozemond 1998: 7). 35 Cf. Rozemond (1998: 7) for a similar stress on the continuity between the Scholastic and Cartesian views of substance. 36 AT VII: 161 | CSM II: 114. 37 In fact, in the Sixth Set of Replies, Descartes explicitly allows for one substance to be predicated of another substance, though only in a loose manner of speaking (AT VII: 435 | CSM II: 293). 38 AT VII.162 | CSM II.114. 39 CSM I: 210. The passage in angle brackets appears only in the French version of the Principles. 40 Cf. the Synopsis to the Meditations (AT VII: 14 | CSM II: 10).

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102 yitzhak y. melamed 41 Of course, for Descartes, the distinction between substance and principal attributes is only a distinction of reason. Still, this does not make God’s attributes into substances (at least no more than the attributes of any finite substance). 42 In a note in the Theological-Political Treatise (CW II), Spinoza refers to Gersonides as “virum eruditissimum [a most erudite man]” (III.257), a compliment quite uncommon for Spinoza. For discussion of Spinoza’s response to Gersonides, see my “Spinoza’s Critique of Gersonides’ view on Divine Omniscience” (forthcoming). 43 I have slightly altered Feldman’s translation, which renders “yahas” as “similarity.” The more precise translation is, I believe, “relation.” 44 I have again slightly altered Feldman’s translation, which renders ‘nimtza meatzmo’ as “self-subsisting,” 45 Gersonides 1560: III: 3.23b | 1884–99: II: 114. 46 Spinoza refuses to mark out a genuine category of “second best” substance, a category which would aim primarily at securing, or appeasing, common religion (“Why stop with ‘second best’ substances and not continue with ‘third best’ substances, etc.?” one might ask). 47 In Letter 60 (1675) Spinoza argues that a proper definition of a thing must express its efficient cause. In this letter he applies this stipulation to the case of God, indicating that God must have an efficient cause as well. Since God cannot be caused by anything other than itself, it must be the efficient cause of itself. 48 The claim that everything must have a cause is a variant or corollary of the Principle of Sufficient Reason; one can read E 1a3 as stating this principle. 49 Although, in the First Set of Replies, Descartes notably claims that God is the efficient cause of itself. Descartes characterizes the cause of itself in terms of independent existence, which differs little from his conception of substance (AT VII: 108–9). For a nuanced study of causa sui in Descartes, see Tad Schmaltz 2011. Cf. Carraud 2002: 266–87, 295–302. 50 Notice the dualistic nature of this definition that – like the definitions of substance and mode – defines the term in both ontological and conceptual terminology. On the nature of the “x involves y” relation, see Melamed 2012b: §3.1. 51 For the sake of simplicity of presentation, I will treat the above relations as binary (i.e., relations obtaining between two relata), though strictly speaking, Spinoza seems to consider at least some of them as multigrade relations, that is, having various degrees of arity. (Conception, e.g., may obtain between two relata, as when y is conceived through x, but it may also obtain among any other n number of relata, such as when x1 and x2 and x3 . . . and xn are all conceived through y.) For the distinction between unigrade and multigrade relations, see Leonard and Goodman 1940: 50–51. 52 Like Garrett, I translate “causa transiens” as “transient cause” (rather than Curley’s “transitive causation”) in order to avoid the likely confusion with transitivity as a property of logical relations.

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 103 53 In passing, let me note that the adjective “immanent” appears in Spinoza’s work in one and only one context, that is, as a modifier of “cause.” Spinoza is frequently described in current literature (especially in circles of so-called continental philosophy) as “immanentist.” Such a description, to the extent that it has any clear meaning, is just false. Later in this chapter, I will expound Spinoza’s strict commitment to the existence of infinitely many attributes that are just as real as our universe of extension and thought. To that extent, Spinoza’s God/Nature infinitely transcends what we understand by the notion of “nature.” 54 E 1p15: “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.” 55 For Spinoza, causation is primarily, and most probably uniquely, efficient causation (in the Ethics there is only one mention of non-efficient causation in E 5p31d). In his otherwise insightful book, Vincent Carraud has argued that Spinoza’s notion of causation should be understood as formal causation (2002: 313–24). As the discussion above shows, both immanent and transient causes (which are the most commonly mentioned causes in the Ethics) are indisputably efficient. Spinoza’s claim in Letter 60 (IV: 271/30) that the definition of God must express God’s efficient cause implies that God has an efficient cause. Obviously, the only being that can be God’s efficient cause is God himself. Therefore, we may conclude that for Spinoza (unlike Descartes) even the causa sui of E 1d1 is efficient. 56 E 1p16c1: “From this it follows that God is the efficient cause of all things which can fall under an infinite intellect.” 57 Cf. Garrett 2003: 157n31. 58 KV 1.3 | I: 35/20. 59 Strictly speaking E 1p18d argues that there is no substance outside God. Yet, since all things are either substances or modes (per E 1a1), if there were something outside God that were not a substance, it would have to be a mode. But a mode must be in a substance, and thus it must be in God, the only substance. 60 Later, in E 2p13s (II: 99/6), Spinoza will draw the very same distinction, though with the slightly different terminology of “internal/external cause.” Cf. KV 2.26 | I: 110/23. 61 See KV 2.25 | I: 110/23. 62 Curley translates “cognition” as “knowledge.” Spinoza, however, allows for inadequate and false cognitio. Therefore, I have amended the translation and rendered “cognition” as “cognition.” 63 In E 2p47, Spinoza relies on E 1a4 in order to establish the claim that “God’s essence is known to all,” that is, that one cannot fail to know God’s essence (though, of course, one may not know that she knows God’s essence). E 2p47

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104 yitzhak y. melamed makes the knowledge of God’s essence the most accessible and trivial kind of knowledge, since any other knowledge assumes it. See Melamed 2013a: xvi. 64 E 1a4 is explicitly cited in E 1p3, E 1p6c, E 1p25, E 2p6, E 2p7, E 2p16, E 2p45, and E 5p22. 65 For two excellent studies of E 1a4, see Wilson 1999 and Morrison 2013. 66 For a powerful argument against the bidirectional interpretation, see Morrison 2013. Spinoza applies E 1a4 as implying causation from conception only once (in E 1p25d), and this one application could be a result of a simple confusion in opening a contrapositive. For my reasons for (hesitantly) supporting the bidirectional interpretation, see Melamed 2013a: 105–6. 67 The substance inheres in itself (E 1d3), while a mode does not (E 1d5). See, however, Garrett 2002 for an intriguing argument to the effect that even modes inhere in themselves to a degree. 68 The substance is conceived through itself (E 1d3), while a mode is not (E 1d5). 69 The substance is the cause of itself (E 1p7d), while a mode is not (since a mode is conceived through another [E 1d5], and per E 1a4 it must also be conceived through that other). 70 Notice that I am here using the term “transitive” in our sense, as a property of relations (which satisfy the condition: necessarily, if Rxy and Ryz, then Rxz), and not in the sense used by Spinoza (in Curley’s translation) in talking about “transitive cause [causa transiens],” that is, an efficient cause whose effect does not inhere in the cause. 71 I assume he considers the transitivity of the three relations trivial eternal truths (just like the claim that the whole is greater than its part). Still, a certain degree of caution is in order here, since in the case of another relation that is almost universally considered as transitive, that is, identity, Spinoza has a rather surprising and bold view. See Garrett 2017. 72 In Melamed 2013a (123–24), I show that the relation “x follows from y” (in E 1pp21–23) is one of immanent causation, that is, a combination of efficient causation and inherence. 73 Thus, any infinite mode “which exists necessarily and is infinite, has had to follow from the absolute nature of some attribute of God – either immediately or by some mediating modification, which follows from its absolute nature” (E 1p23d; italics added). 74 For the equivalence of conception and explanation in Spinoza, see Della Rocca 1996: 3–4. 75 One route to documenting the transitivity of conception in Spinoza is by relying on the transitivity of causation (per E 1p28s or E 1p23d), and the causation-conception bridge of E 1a4. 76 Since a thing may inhere in itself, inherence cannot be asymmetric.

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 105 77 I will not consider the possibility of the modes’ inhering in each other and in different substances, since such a scenario would patently make the alleged substances mutually dependent by virtue of the mutual dependence of their modes. 78 Since in the absence of y, S would not have x as its mode. 79 And not merely equally-or-less-real than its substance. On the degrees of reality in Descartes, see Meditation III | AT VII: 41, and the Third Set of Replies | AT VII: 185. Spinoza endorses the view that reality comes in degrees in several texts. See, for example, E 1p9. 80 In such a case, x and y could inhere in each other as long as they were equally real. 81 Namely, the relation of flow of one infinite mode from another is transitive, asymmetric, and every two items it relates are comparable. See Melamed 2013a: 114–22. 82 Since everything must have an effect (E 1p36), and the effect of an infinite mode can only be another infinite mode (E 1p22), it follows recursively that there must be an infinite chain of infinite modes (in each attribute). For a detailed explication of this issue, see Melamed 2013a: 119–20. 83 This depletion of perfection would constitute a serious problem for an interpretation which ascribes to Spinoza strict adherence to the Principle of Sufficient Reason and a complete assimilation of inherence and causation. I would argue, however, that for Spinoza inherence – unlike (transient) causation – is not a closed system, and that the totality of inhering entities is less real, and less perfect, than the substance. In other words, (transient) causation, but not inherence, conserves the degree of reality among its two relata. 84 In the E 1ap passage above, Spinoza uses the terminology of causation in claiming “that effect is most perfect which is produced immediately by God.” I pointed out earlier that the causation among the infinite modes is that of immanent causation, which is a relation composed of efficient causation and inherence. The depletion of perfection/reality is truly the product of the inherence (rather than the causation) element in immanent causation (since Spinoza clearly accepts that modes are less real than the substance, and we have no textual evidence for the claim that an effect [of transient cause] is less real than its cause). 85 For otherwise, God’s essence would have to be conceived through Fido (per E 1a4), and it would cease to be self-conceived. 86 Ep 32 | IV: 170/15–18. 87 Ep 32 | IV: 171/9–13. 88 Ep 32 | IV: 172/17. 89 I prefer the term “Physiological Digression” rather than the more common “Physical Digression,” since it is clear that this interlude in the middle of Part Two of the Ethics was not at all meant as an overview of Spinoza’s physics (see Peterman’s convincing argument in 2014: 218–21), but rather provides the relevant

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106 yitzhak y. melamed physiological background for Spinoza’s theory of the imagination, developed in E 2pp17–19. 90 See II: 99/9–14. 91 Compare II: 99/16–21 with II: 105/5–9. 92 Since we have established before that, for Spinoza, causation is neither reflexive nor irreflexive, we can now further assert that causation is also neither antisymmetric, nor not-antisymmetric. 93 For instance, Fido is conceived through God’s essence, but not the other way around. 94 As when two billiard balls A and B collide, and the explanation of the state of each ball (after the collision) lies partly in the nature of the other ball. 95 Thus, if we define A as the set of all things that exist in Spinoza’s ontology (substance, attributes, and modes), the relation of conception Cxy ¼def x is

conceived through y) is serial on A, that is, for every x 2 A, there exists y 2 A, so

that Cxy. The same will hold true for causation and inherence. Neither one of the three relations is comparable on A, since it is not the case that for every x, y 2 A, either Rxy or Ryx. Comparability will obtain in more restricted domains of Spinoza’s ontology. Thus, if we define E as the set of all infinite modes of extension, the relation of inherence Ixy ¼def x is in y) is comparable on E, since for

every x, y 2 E, either Ixy or Iyx.

96 See, for example, Della Rocca 2008: 2, 8, and 30. 97 “Both inherence and mere causation are kinds of dependence, but, for Spinoza, by virtue of his rationalism, they are ultimately the same kind of dependence, and that is conceptual dependence tout court” (Della Rocca 2008: 67. Cf. 265). 98 Della Rocca (2008: 44) states the coextensivness of causation and conception (a claim I readily accept), and he argues (2008: 68–69) for the identity of inherence and causation (a view I will shortly challenge). Newlands states the coextensiveness of three relations: “Necessarily, for all x and y, x is conceived through y, iff y causes x, iff x inheres in y, iff x requires y to exist” (2010: 471). 99 “Spinoza treats all instances of metaphysical dependence as synonymous or reducible to causation, inherence, or conceptual dependence. Examining these three relations in more detail will help us grasp Spinoza’s remarkable monistic conclusion: all relations of dependence are just conceptual dependence relations” (Newlands 2010: 474). Newlands ambitious claims are a remission to Husserl’s project in his third Logical Investigation (2001), which attempts to develop a theory of a relation of pure logical dependence. 100 See Melamed 2013a: 94–104. 101 See E 1p18d and my explication of E 1p18d above. For a possible response by Della Rocca, and a rebuttal to this response, see Melamed 2013a: 96–97. 102 E 1p17s| II: 63/18–22.

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 107 103 Formally, if Cxy ¼def x is the cause of y, and Ixy ¼def x is that in which y inheres, then the immanent cause would be the composite relation: C◦I.

104 KV 2.26 | I: 110/32–35. Italics added. 105 Newlands 2010: 470. 106 In the texts in which Spinoza discusses reciprocal causation, there is no trace of the view which identifies the two relata. 107 Ep 36 (IV: 184/24–29). This definition of destruction seems to be at work also in E 4p39d (II.240/10). 108 Thus, in the last step of the reductio argument in E 1p12s, Spinoza writes: “and the whole (by D4 and P10) could both be and be conceived without its parts, which is absurd, as no one will be able to doubt” (italics added). For other texts where Spinoza asserts the priority of parts, see, for example, DPP 1p17d, CM (I: 258/16), KV (1.25/23) and (I: 30/10), and Ep 35 (IV: 181/25). 109 For a helpful discussion of the medieval consensus that no part is identical to its whole, see Arlig 2015: §3 and §4.1. 110 The precise definition of “proper part” will require us to decide whether we allow for a null individual. Assuming there is no null individual, a proper part of x is any part of x that is not numerically identical to x. 111 “The whole is greater than the part” is also the Fifth Axiom of the First Book of Euclid’s Elements. 112 Since the Latin has no definite or indefinite articles, both readings are grammatically correct. 113 See E 1p29s: “Before I proceed further, I wish to explain here – or rather to advise [the reader] what we must understand by Natura naturans and Natura naturata. For from the preceding I think it is already established that by Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, i.e. (by P14C1 and P17C2), God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. But by Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God’s nature, or from any of God’s attributes, i.e., all the modes of God’s attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and can neither be nor be conceived without God.” 114 For an alternative, and more intricate, reconstruction of the interrelations among conception, inherence, and causation in Spinoza, see Melamed 2013a: 105–12. 115 Italics added. 116 Bennett 1996: 65. Italics added. 117 Bennett 1984: 76; 1996: 65. 118 Bennett 1984: 78–79. 119 Bennett 1984: 78. 120 Bennett 1984: 76–77; 1996: 66.

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108 yitzhak y. melamed 121 Bennett 1984, 77. 122 The closest Spinoza comes to the last claim is in a note to the first chapter of the first part of the Short Treatise where he claims: “After the preceding reflections on Nature we have not yet been able to find in it more than two attributes that belong to this all-perfect being” (KV 1.17/35–38). However, he immediately continues and argues against the view that God has merely two attributes: “And these give us nothing by which we can satisfy ourselves that these would be the only ones of which this perfect being would consist. On the contrary, we find in ourselves something which openly indicates to us not only that there are more, but also that there are infinite perfect attributes which must pertain to this perfect being before it can be called perfect” (KV 1.17/38–42). 123 II: 90/14–18 (Italics added. 124 II: 90/23–28. Italics added. 125 Italics added. 126 II: 96/12. 127 Melamed 2013a: 169–71. 128 IV: 261/11–15. Italics added. 129 Ep 35 | IV: 181/16. 130 Though I would not put much weight on the latter source, since it addresses Spinoza’s 1663 book, Descartes’ “Principles of Philosophy,” and one could argue that there Spinoza is referring to the Cartesian conception of God’s attributes. 131 See Melamed 2015b: 277–78. 132 TTP chapter 6 | III: 83/10. 133 See note d | I: 17/34–48. 134 KV Appendix 2 | I: 119/6–13. Cf. I: 120/1–6. 135 Pollock 1966: 161; Leibniz AA, 6th Series, Volume 3, 385 (lines 12–15; italics added). I slightly amended Pollock’s translation by replacing “in this world” by “here.” which is more loyal to the Latin hic. 136 Ep 12 | IV: 53/12–14. 137 E 2pr | II: 84/8–12. Italics added. 138 Though, as we have already seen, the issue occasionally crops up in E 2p13s, given the possibility of a mismatch between minds and their proper object. 139 One may speculate that the version of the Ethics written by Spinoza’s twin in the third attribute would be silent about the nature of extension, since the latter kind of knowledge would be of no use in studying the measures leading to the blessedness of the mind of this third-attribute twin of Spinoza. 140 E 2p13. 141 E 2p7: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” 142 See the elegant account of the barrier in Della Rocca 1996: 9–22.

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 109 143 For a detailed presentation of this issue, see Melamed 2013a: chapter 6. My account here and in the next page relies partly on my paper “Building Blocks” 144 Crescas 1990: I: 3, 3 (pp. 106–8). Cf. Levy 1987: 204–7; and Harvey 2010: 91–94. 145 Ep 12 | IV: 62/1–10. 146 See Harvey 2010: 94. 147 See Descartes’s Letter to Mersenne from July 1641 (AT III: 394 | CSM III: 185). The letter was included in the third volume of the first edition of Descartes’ letters, published in Paris by Claude Clerselier, in 1667. 148 See Principles of Philosophy, 1.56. Cf. Comments on a Certain Broadsheet (AT VIIIB: 348 | CSM I: 297). 149 On the incomprehensibility of the infinite in Descartes, see Ariew 1990: 17. 150 Notice, however, that in contrast to the incomprehensibility of the Cartesian God, Spinoza’s “unknown attributes” are comprehended by some finite minds, that is, the minds of the modes of the unknown attributes. 151 See Melamed 2010. 152 “The infinite cannot be composed of a number of finite parts” (KV 1.1 | I: 18/10). E 1p15s (II: 58/27): “infinite quantity . . . is not composed of finite parts.” Cf. KV 2.24 | I: 107/1: “For how is it possible that we could infer an infinite and unlimited thing from one that is limited?” 153 E 1p10s | II: 72/10–17. Italics added. 154 Ep 54 | IV: 253/7–11. Italics added. A similar argument appears at the end of E 1p17s, where Spinoza argues that insofar as God is the cause both of the essence and existence of finite things, they must differ “and cannot agree with it in anything except in name” (II: 63/30). Italics added. Cf. CM 2.11 | I: 274/32–34. 155 The claim that there is no ratio between the infinity of God and finite things also appears in Gersonides (1560: III.3/23b | 1884–99: II.114.), quoted above, and in Crescas 1990: I: 3, 3. Cf. Melamed 2014: 213–14. 156 A reader who is still confused by Spinoza’s arguments in Letters 64 and 66 is invited to consult my detailed reconstruction of Spinoza’s arguments in Melamed 2013a: 156–65. 157 In passing, let me note that in his 1883 work Foundations of a General Theory of the Manifolds: A Mathematico-Philosophical Investigation into the Theory of the Infinite, Cantor was engaged in a close study of Spinoza’s advocacy of actual infinity in Letter 12, and of his theory of the infinite modes. Thus, for example, Cantor notes: “An especially difficult point in Spinoza’s system is the relationship of the finite modes to the infinite one; it remains unexplained how and under what circumstances the finite can maintain its independence with respect to the finite, or the infinite with respect to still higher infinities” (Cantor 1990: 892). Cantor’s discussion of the independence of finite modes clearly echoes the concerns raised by Hegel (for a discussion of the last issue, see Melamed

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110 yitzhak y. melamed 2010a). Overall, Cantor’s discussion of the kinds of infinity in Spinoza is blended with his own views about the transfinite numbers. Thus, Bennett’s mockery of “Spinoza and his contemporaries” who unlike Cantor “had just muzzles and puzzles” (Bennett 1984: 76) seems somewhat out of place, as Cantor’s writing seems to show that it was precisely “the muddles and puzzles” of Crescas, Spinoza, and Leibniz, that engaged Cantor and stimulated the development of his theory of transfinite numbers. 158 Laerke 2012. 159 Ep 50 | IV: 239/25–31. Italics added. 160 The formula “You are one but not in number [had ve-lo be-hushban]” appears in the Second Preface to the Tikkunei Zohar (in Zohar 1998: 10, 85). See also Ibn Gabbirol’s magisterial poem, “Kingdom’s Crown” (Gabirol 2010: 141): “You are one but not as one that’s counted.” “Yigdal,” a liturgical poem that is recited in many Jewish communities at the conclusion of the Sabbath eve service, contains the phrases: “one but there is no one like him in his oneness [ehad ve-ein yahid ke-yihudo].” For an illuminative discussion of similar claims in Aquinas, see Geach 1971: 21–22. 161 See Yosef Irgas 1965: 80. Irgas cites several other sources supporting his view. 162 Ep 4 | IV: 14/12–16. Cf. Melamed 2012c: 189. 163 Ep 50 | IV: 239/32–240/25. Italics added. 164 Italics added. 165 Gueroult 1969: 107–76; Smith 2014. For Gueroult and Smith, every single attribute is a substance, and thus, even after the synthesis of the infinitely many single-attribute substances into God, there is a sense in which there infinitely many substances (just as there are infinitely many attributes). 166 Smith 2014: 659. 167 Smith rightly points out that even in E 1p15s Spinoza feels comfortable moving from the terminology of attributes to single-attribute substance, as in II: 56/21: “extended substance is one of God’s infinite attributes.” (Smith 2014: 672). Let me only add that in the early drafts of the Ethics (as documented in Spinoza’s letters), Spinoza occasionally switches the definitions of substance and attribute, see Melamed 2015: 274–75. 168 Gueroult 1969: 184; Smith 2014: 656n7 and 685–86. 169 Gueroult 1969: 184–85; Smith 2014: 685–86. 170 E 2p10s | II: 93/30–94/4. 171 See the section discussing the attributes in Melamed 2013a: 83–86 and 154–56; 2017. For a recent attempt to develop this view, see Morrison 2020. 172 See Schaffer 2016: 1–9. 173 See Schaffer 2016: 8. 174 Concreta foundationalism is the view that every concrete item is either basic (among concreta) or dependent on something basic (among the concreta). 8x(Cx !

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spinoza’s metaphysics of substance 111 (Bx ∨ 9y(By & Pyx))) (when ‘C’ denoted the property of being concrete, ‘P’ the

priority relation, and ‘B’ being a basic object (Schaffer 2016: 24). Priority Monism asserts that there is precisely one basic concrete object. 175 See Schaffer 2016: 24. 176 See, for example, E 1p12d. 177 See Schaffer 2016: 12. 178 In his Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Behind the Geometrical Method, Edwin Curley argued that Spinozistic modes are merely caused by God, but that they do not inhere in God, and that therefore, Spinoza is not a pantheist. There is no doubt that Spinozist modes are indeed caused by God (or more precisely, caused by God’s essence, or natura naturans, per E 1p16), but as far as I can see, Curley’s reading conflicts flatly with the bulk of Spinoza’s texts, and with many of his key philosophical doctrines. For a detailed critique of Curley’s reading, see Carriero 1995 and my Spinoza’s Metaphysics, (Melamed 2013a: 3–60). 179 See Ep 80 and Ep 81. 180 Ep 12 | IV: 52/25. 181 Ep 12 | IV: 53/18. 182 See E 1p7, E 1p5, and E 1p8, respectively. 183 Ep 12 | IV: 54/9–16. Italics added. 184 In Melamed 2012b, I show that the existence of substance is strictly identical to its essence. 185 Another place where Spinoza displays in sharp relief the contrast between the existence of substance and the existence of modes is E 2p10, where he argues (against Descartes) that the esse (being) of substance does not belong to the essence of man. On the distinction between the esse of substance and that of modes, see Schechter 2014: 61–62. 186 I amend here Curley’s translation of “explicare” as “explain,” since it is clear that Spinoza is not looking here for the causes which explain existence, but rather addresses the two opposite manners of explicating, or unfolding, existence. 187 Ep 12 | IV: 54/18–55/3. 188 In E 1p21, Spinoza ascribes eternity to the (immediate) infinite modes. However, the eternity of the infinite mode is of an inferior kind: it is a mere sempiternity (unlike the eternity of substance). I show that Spinoza distinguishes between these two kinds of eternity, and ascribes only the inferior eternity to the infinite modes, in Melamed 2012b: 93–96; 2016: 158–61. 189 Italics in original. 190 The definition of eternity in E 1d8 is circular, and arguably, it is intentionally (and legitimately) so. I discuss this issue in Melamed 2016: 152–56. 191 Yet, the existence of enduring things must be internally consistent, as well as consistent with the “order of nature,” that is, the order of other things instantiated in duration. See E 2p8c.

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112 yitzhak y. melamed 192 On the indivisibility of substance and the divisibility of modes, see Melamed 2012b: 47–48 and 126–32. 193 Ep 12 | IV: 55/5–56/15. Italics added. 194 Della Rocca 2016: 196. 195 See Della Rocca 1996: chapters 3 and 6. 196 The only other significant text is E 1p5d (II: 48/12–13). Here, much depends on the meaning of the expression “verè considerata.” On the reading I am about to suggest, to consider modes to have functions not grounded in their substance is to consider them not truly. 197 See Melamed 2010a, 2014. 198 Hegel 1969: 98. 199 Hegel 1995: III: 269. 200 For some additional arguments against the acosmist reading, see Melamed 2012b: 79–82; 2013b: 209–10. 201 Those who believe that there is a beginning to movement and time, and thus that before that beginning, the extended substance “was deprived of its Affections.” 202 Ep 12 | IV: 60/13–14. 203 The argument here is a certain variant of modus tollens. 204 Ep 12 | IV: 56/17. 205 Ep 12 | IV: 61/1–3. Italics added. 206 For a detailed discussion of this key proposition, see Melamed 2013a: 50–52 and 150–51. 207 E 1p16d | II: 60/29–30. 208 See Della Rocca 2016: 296. 209 See Hegel 1969: 537–38; 1995: III: 260, 264, 288–89; and 2007: 138. 210 Italics added. 211 When we conceive the modes independently of the definition of substance, their essence does not involve existence (Ep 12 | IV: 54/10). 212 See E 1p12d | II: 55/12–14. 213 The one apparent exception is Letter 32 (IV: 174/13). See note 214. 214 In Letter 32, Spinoza does not employ the terminology of modes. The one apparent exception in Letter 32, where Spinoza refers to a part which is prior to its whole, is clearly a reference to what Spinoza would call in other texts a mode. Here is the relevant passage: “But in relation to substance I conceive each part to have a closer union with its whole. For as I tried to demonstrate previously to you in my first Letter, since it is of the nature of substance to be infinite, it follows that each part pertains to the nature of corporeal substance, and can neither be not be conceived without it” (Ep 32 | IV: 173/8–13).

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3

Spinoza on the Metaphysics of Thought and Extension Martin Lin

Perhaps no philosopher of mind has been subjected to more widely divergent interpretations than Spinoza. He has been described as, among other things, a substance dualist,1 a materialist,2 an idealist,3 and a property dualist.4 Why so many conflicting interpretations? A partial answer is that Spinoza’s philosophy of mind is both difficult and, at crucial junctures, unclear. But this is not the complete answer. Another part of the explanation is that Spinoza’s philosophy of mind is strikingly original and thus resists assimilation to the traditional categories of materialism, idealism, and dualism. And yet despite this originality, Spinoza’s philosophy of mind purposely retains certain attractive features of each of them in ways that make it easily mistaken for any one of them. Spinoza’s thinking about the metaphysics of mind and body must be understood against the background of a philosophical revolution started by Descartes, who arguably introduces into philosophy the mind-body problem as we know it today. Descartes claims that the world divides neatly into two realms: the mental and the physical. These two realms are radically distinct and have nothing in common. By insisting on this radical distinction, Descartes thus purifies the physical realm of colors, sounds, smells, and other qualities, which he considers covert mentalistic features – projections of the mind – and thereby paves the way for, or so he hopes, a purely mechanistic physics. By the same token, Descartes also develops a new conception of mind as an essentially thinking thing whose nature can be understood completely independently of the body to which it is connected. But once the world is split into two completely different realms, how can they be brought back together again? How can the body convey sensations to the mind and how can the mind control the actions of the body? How can two radically dissimilar things causally interact? Descartes was sanguine about this problem. For him, dissimilarity is no barrier to causal interaction. Causation is merely subsumption under a law of nature and God can institute laws of nature relating anything he likes, no matter how dissimilar.

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Many philosophers who were otherwise sympathetic to Descartes’s program were nonetheless deeply dissatisfied with his account of mind-body interaction. They believed that causation had to be an intelligible relation. This means that causal relations cannot be arbitrary, as they would be if they were freely legislated by God. Rather, they must be somehow grounded in an intelligible way in the natures of the causes and their effects. But because these philosophers were also convinced by Descartes that mind and body were radically dissimilar, and they believed that dissimilar natures couldn’t ground intelligible causal relations, they followed their commitments to their logical conclusion and denied mind-body interaction. It is difficult, however, to deny mind-body interaction. There are robust correlations between mental and physical phenomena. Damage my body and I will feel pain. This strongly suggests that bodily states cause mental states. I get up out of my chair and go the refrigerator because I want beer and believe that there is some in the fridge. Such explanations presuppose that mental states cause physical states. If there are no mind-body causal interactions, why do such obvious correlations between mental and physical objects occur? There are as many different ways of interpreting Spinoza’s views on psychophysical causation as there are ways of reading his philosophy of mind more generally. If he is a materialist, then he denies psychophysical causation because he denies the reality of the mental. If he is an idealist, then he denies psychophysical causation for the opposite reason. And those who read him as some kind of metaphysical dualist, generally interpret him as replacing psychophysical causation with a doctrine known as the parallelism of mind and body, which we will explore at length presently. In this chapter, I will argue that all of these interpretations are mistaken. I will argue instead that Spinoza is a conceptual dualist who accepts psychophysical causation but denies psychophysical causal explanation. I will begin by setting out some interpretative difficulties regarding Spinoza’s notion of an attribute in general. I will then explain Spinoza’s conception of the attributes of thought and extension in particular. Next, I will explain how Spinoza argues for the structural similarity of the mental and physical realms from his claim that the mind and the body are one and the same thing conceived under different attributes. This will require developing a new interpretation of Spinoza’s notion of attribute. This interpretation will both explain why his philosophy of mind has

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 115 been subject to such contradictory interpretations as well as solve a host of interpretative difficulties that have long vexed commentators. I will conclude by explaining how Spinoza’s denial of mind-body causal explanation is compatible with his assertion of mind-body identity.

at t r i b u t e s i n g e n e r a l For Spinoza, the world is fundamentally a unity. It is a single infinite substance, which he calls God or nature. This infinite substance is the most real or most fundamental thing, but it is not the only thing. There are also finite things that depend upon it. These finite things or modes, in Spinoza’s terminology, stand to the infinite substance as waves stand to the waters of the ocean. Just as a wave is nothing more than the waters themselves insofar as they move in a certain way, a finite thing is the infinite substance itself insofar as it satisfies a certain condition. These modes can be conceived under different attributes. Conceived under the attribute of thought they are ideas and conceived under the attribute of extension they are bodies. What is an attribute? This question relates to one of the greatest interpretative difficulties concerning Spinoza’s philosophy and commentators have reached little consensus regarding it. In this section, I will first attempt to situate the concept with respect to its Cartesian heritage. I will then set out some of the more mysterious features of Spinoza’s discussion of the attributes. For Descartes, there are two kinds of attributes or properties: principal attributes and modes. The principal attribute of a substance is its essence. (Often when Descartes uses attribute he means principal attribute and uses mode to mean attributes that are not essential.) The attribute of a physical substance is extension. The attribute of a thinking substance is thought. Apart from these two attributes, there are no others. The nonessential properties of a substance, its modes, all presuppose and entail possession of one of these two essences or principal attributes. That is, every mode of a physical substance entails extension and every mode of a mental substance entails thought. That something is a cube, to give a physical example, entails that it is extended. That something doubts, to give a mental example, entails that it is thinking. These entailments run in one direction only. That something is extended does not entail that it is a cube nor does that something is thinking entail that it doubts.

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Descartes’s theory of the attributes makes three significant assumptions about the nature of property space. The first is that all fundamental or natural properties are either attributes or modes of attributes. The second is that every mode entails one and only one attribute. Third, the only attributes are thought and extension. Together, these three assumptions divide the world up into two disjoint realms, one mental and the other physical. Every property is either mental or physical and no property is both. What is more, because attributes are the essences of substances and no substance can have more than one essence, every substance is either mental or physical and no substance is both.5 Spinoza takes over the Cartesian terminology of substance, attribute, and mode but his use of them indicates some important theoretical differences. In an earlier work, the Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, Spinoza simply identifies attributes with substances (KV 1.7). This is arguably good Cartesian doctrine, as there are texts in which Descartes appears to identify a substance with its principal attribute.6 In Spinoza’s mature work, however, the relationship between attributes and substances is presented in a more complex way. Here is his official definition of the attributes in the Ethics: By attribute I understand that which an intellect perceives as [tamquam] constituting the essence of a substance. (E 1a4)

This is an awkward formula but many commentators have understood it to mean something that can be stated more simply: An attribute constitutes the essence of a substance.

This reformulation provides us with a clearer meaning and harks back to its Cartesian roots. And yet it also appears to leave out important elements of the definition. For instance, what about intellectual perception? Spinoza does not say that an attribute constitutes the essence. Rather, he says that it is what an intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence. This leaves open the possibility that Spinoza is suggesting that attributes are only perceived to be essences even though they are not essences in reality. Such a reading can be given further support from the fact that “tamquam” can mean both as and as if. So, the Latin permits the following reading of the definition: An attribute is what an intellect perceives as if constituting the essence of a substance.

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 117 This reading leaves it open whether or not an attribute is in fact the essence of a substance. If someone has perceptual experience as if of a dagger before her, this in no way entails that there is a dagger before her. And indeed, it would be rather odd to emphasize perception at the expense of reality if there were in fact a dagger before her. Thus, to say of someone that she has perceptual experience as if of a dagger before her is to strongly suggest that there is no such dagger in reality. Furthermore, even if we read “tamquam” as “as” instead of “as if,” the phrasing of the definition still raises doubts that Spinoza intends us to understand attributes as actually being the essence of a substance rather than merely being perceived as such. As Jonathan Bennett puts the point, it wouldn’t inspire much confidence in the safety of parachutes if one were told that parachutes were devices that are perceived as devices that allow one to safely jump out of airplanes.7 These considerations have led some readers of Spinoza to understand him to mean not that attributes constitute the essence of a substance but that the intellect mistakenly perceives them as if they were. Indeed, some have read Spinoza as meaning that the attributes are not really features of substance at all. Rather, they are creatures of the intellect, projected out onto external reality. Call this the subjectivist reading of the attributes.8 This interpretation, although once popular, has been largely refuted. Its principal weakness is that it attributes error to the intellect. But Spinoza identifies the intellect with reason and he says that reason is immune to error.9 Thus, the intellect perceives the attributes as constituting the essence of a substance only if the attributes do, in reality, constitute the essence of a substance.10 This explains the appeal of the simplified version of the definition according to which attributes are or constitute the essence of a substance. But despite the problems with the subjectivist reading, doubts still trouble the straightforward realist reading. If attributes are just essences, then why drag the intellect into it in the first place? Is “what the intellect perceives” just a pleonastic phrase that adds nothing to the definition? It is hard to believe that it is merely pleonastic given that we know that Spinoza uses the phrase in the definition of the attributes in earlier drafts of the Ethics,11 and repeats it when paraphrasing the definition elsewhere in the Ethics, suggesting that he regards it as meaningful. And yet if the intellect always perceives truly, it is hard to see what it could be adding. We will return to these interpretative difficulties presently. First, let us explore some other main doctrines connected

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to Spinoza’s metaphysics of thought and extension. Once we have these other elements in place, we will be in a better position to understand the solution to these difficulties.

c h a r ac t e r i z i n g t h e b o dy We have knowledge of just two attributes: thought and extension. What is the specific character of these attributes? We will begin with extension. Spinoza follows Descartes in calling the nature of corporeal substance “extension.” Extension, for Descartes, is three-dimensional Euclidian space. Such three-dimensional extension is capable of further determination in terms of size, shape and motion. These determinations of extension, or modes, are the only real features of bodies. In other words, the physical world is composed of objects of geometry in motion and that is all. It is important to realize how austere this notion of body is. It is a world devoid of color, sound, smell, and taste. This picture of physical nature devoid of sensory qualities is an ancient one, going back at least as far as Democritus. But Descartes does more than merely revive an older theory of body. What is novel in Descartes’s account is his identification of body with space. Intuitively, there is a difference between an empty region of space and a region of space occupied by a body. Descartes, however, denies this difference. Indeed, he says that empty space, a vacuum, is metaphysically impossible because any region of space is a body and hence cannot be empty. Thus, he is willing to say that if a vessel were hermetically sealed and all the matter – air, etc. – were sucked out of it, the walls of the vessel would touch.12 And not because the resulting pressure would deform the sides, pulling them inward toward each other, but because, as a conceptual matter, if there is nothing between the sides, then they are ipso facto touching. Physical matter is space. There are reasons to think that Spinoza follows Descartes in holding that the essence of body is three-dimensional Euclidean space. He claims that the essence of body is “extension” (extensio), which was the common term for three-dimensional space in the seventeenth century and is also Descartes’s own term for it. Descartes’s program for physics based on extension was widely influential and, in correspondence, Spinoza affirms the correctness of Descartes’s collision rules (with the exception of rule six), which strongly suggests that he thought that Descartes was on roughly the right track in physics.13 Thus, if Spinoza

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 119 meant anything other than three-dimensional extension, we would expect an explicit statement to that effect. We have no such statement. It must be acknowledged, however, that Spinoza does say things that do not sit easily with the assumption that for him, as for Descartes, extension is simply spatial existence. One such occasion is in the Short Treatise where he claims that the only modes of extension are motion and rest.14 This is a puzzling claim. Surely, size and shape are also modes of extension understood as three-dimensional space. Indeed, they are better candidates for being modes of extension than motion and rest. Perhaps, Spinoza thinks that size and shape can be analyzed in terms of motion and rest, although it is far from clear how this could be done and Spinoza himself gives us no indication. Certainly, it is not part of Descartes’s understanding of extension that its only modes are motion and rest. Nevertheless, it would be, in my judgment, a mistake to make too much of this difference. First of all, the Short Treatise is an early work that contains many claims that Spinoza does not accept in his maturity. Secondly, the claim is just too obscure and underdeveloped to bear much interpretative weight. Another such occasion is in his correspondence with Tschirnhaus, where he addresses the question of how the diversity of things can be inferred from extension alone. This is a pressing question, because Spinoza claims in E 1p16 that the existence of an infinity of things can be deduced from the nature of God. Extension expresses the nature of God. Thus, Spinoza is committed to the existence of an infinity of bodies deducible from extension. And yet it’s obvious that the existence of infinitely many bodies does not follow merely from the existence of a substance infinitely extended in length, breadth, and width. Tschirnhaus notes this and asks Spinoza to explain the derivation of infinitely many bodies from extension alone. Spinoza responds to this challenge by distancing himself from Descartes. He writes: [F]rom Extension as conceived by Descartes, to wit, an inert mass, it is not only difficult, as you say, but quite impossible to demonstrate the existence of bodies. For matter at rest, as far as in it lies, will continue to be at rest, and will not be set in motion except by a more powerful external cause. For this reason I have not hesitated on a previous occasion to affirm that Descartes’s principles of natural things are of no service, not to say quite wrong.15

This response strongly suggests that Spinoza does not understand extension in a Cartesian way. Tschirnhaus presses him to elaborate an alternative to the Cartesian conception. Spinoza, unfortunately, defers:

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120 martin lin With regard to your question as to whether the variety of things can be demonstrated a priori solely from the conception of Extension, I think I have already made it quite clear that this is impossible. That is why Descartes is wrong in defining matter through Extension; it must necessarily be explicated through an attribute which expresses eternal and infinite essence. But perhaps, if I live long enough, I shall some time discuss this with you more clearly; for as yet I have not had the opportunity to arrange in due order anything on this subject.16

This response merely restates his opposition to Descartes’s conception of extension without clarifying his own position. Sadly, Spinoza died seven months later having never delivered the promised discussion.17 Part of what is going on in the correspondence with Tschirnhaus is that Descartes had a creative power that resided outside of the extended world that could create corporeal substances as well as create and sustain motions in and causal interaction between those substances. That power is God. For Spinoza, by contrast, there is no God that exists above and beyond the world. Instead, God is the immanent active power of nature. Thus, the power that explains the existence and behavior of bodies must be immanent to extension itself. But how that power could be immanent to extension understood as three-dimensional space Spinoza never says.18 As we will see, this reticence is appropriate. If Spinoza gave an intrinsic characterization of extension, his position would entail metaphysical dualism. But Spinoza’s position is not, as I will argue, properly understood as metaphysical dualism. It is, rather, a merely conceptual dualism. We will return to this point later.

c h a r ac t e r i z i n g t h e m i n d Spinoza holds a number of striking theses about the nature of the mental. First of all, Spinoza denies that the human mind is a substance. Just as the human body stands to God insofar as he is an extended thing as a wave stands to the ocean, so too does the human mind stand to God insofar as he is a thinking thing. The human mind is, as it were, a wave on the ocean of thought. The human mind is God’s idea of the human body, which in turn is God insofar as he satisfies some condition. Another striking thesis is panpsychism. The human mind is just the idea that represents the human body. There is, for Spinoza, an idea in the thinking substance that represents each body in the attribute of

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 121 extension. Just as Spinoza calls the idea that represents the human body the human mind, so too we might call the ideas that represent all the other bodies the minds of those bodies. On this use of “mind,” everything has a mind. It must be noted that when Spinoza speaks about minds, he is usually talking about the human mind and he does not generally refer to the ideas of non-human bodies as minds. I don’t think too much can be made of this fact and it certainly does not mean that Spinoza thinks that the human mind differs in kind from the mental reality associated with non-human bodies. Just as the human mind is the idea of the human body, so too are there ideas of the body of Brownie the donkey, the tree outside my window, and even the microscopic particles that make up my table. The only differences between them can be located in the complexity of the objects that they represent. My body is more complex than Brownie’s and even much more complex than the microscopic particles. This difference in complexity accounts for the psychological differences between us. Panpsychism is a consequence of Spinoza’s naturalism. He denies that the human being is a “kingdom within a kingdom” and insists that we are continuous with the rest of nature and subject to the same laws as any other natural thing. We have minds, but that doesn’t make us special. Mentality is a pervasive feature of fundamental reality.19 So, for Spinoza, mind is everywhere. But what is the mind? What are the characteristic features that mark something as mental and distinguishes it from physical things? The principal attribute of mind is thought. And what is thought? This question is left unanswered. Just as it is a bit mysterious exactly what Spinoza means by extension, so too is it mysterious exactly what he means by thought. This is appropriate because, just as in the case of extension, Spinoza cannot give a substantive characterization of thought without committing himself to the kind of metaphysical dualism that, as I will argue later in this chapter, he rejects.

pa r a l l e l i s m Spinoza claims that the causal structure of mind and body are the same. This is known as the parallelism doctrine. According to this doctrine, each body is associated with an idea that represents it. Likewise, there is a body for every idea. If an idea in the mind of God represents a body, then that body exists. The parallelism doctrine further states that there is a complete description of the causal order of the world in terms of

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ideas and a complete description of the causal order of the world in terms of bodies. The causal structure indicated by these two descriptions is the same. As Spinoza puts it, “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” (E 2p7). For example, suppose a baseball shatters a window. The baseball causes the shattering of the window. Because the causal structure of the mental is the same as the causal structure of the physical, the idea that represents the baseball causes the idea of the shattering of the window.20 In what follows, I will examine Spinoza’s argument for this doctrine. After concluding that it fails, I will examine an alternative argument that is put forward by Spinoza in the scholium to E 2p7. I will conclude that this alternative argument is more successful, although it raises difficult questions that we will tackle in the subsequent sections of this chapter. The official argument for the parallelism is short and baffling. It says merely: This is clear from 1a4. For the idea of each thing caused depends on the cognition of the cause of which it is the effect. (E 2p7d)

Thus, the parallelism is supposed to follow from a single premise. But, as discussed previously, for the mental and the physical to be isomorphic several conditions must be met: (a) Each body is such that there is an idea that represents it. (b) Each idea is such that there is a body represented by it. (c) For every causal relation between two bodies, there is a causal relation between the two ideas that represent those bodies. (d) For every causal relation between two ideas, there is a causal relation between the two bodies represented by those ideas.21 Spinoza’s argument for this claim cites a single premise, E 1a4, which says: The knowledge [cognitio] of an effect depends on and involves knowledge of its cause.

However, E 1a4 does not, on its most natural interpretation, entail the satisfaction of any of the above conditions. On the face of it, E 1a4 looks to be merely an anodyne statement of the old Aristotelian doctrine that knowledge is knowledge of causes.22 That doctrine certainly does not entail (a)–(d). The unsuspecting reader who signs up for E 1a4 assuming that it means what it appears to mean is surely in for a shock when she

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 123 discovers that Spinoza takes her to have thereby committed herself to the parallelism doctrine. But Spinoza does make that assumption, so let us read E 1a4 as liberally as we can and see if we can extract (a)–(d) from it. In his use of it in the argument for the parallelism, Spinoza appears to be interpreting E 1a4 as saying: The idea of an effect depends on and involves the idea of its cause.

That is, the idea of a body or mode of a body is causally determined by the idea that represents the cause of that body or mode of a body. We can illustrate this claim with the following example. Suppose you stab me with a knife and I feel pain. My pain is the idea of the damaged state of my body. The cause of this idea is the idea of the cause of the state of the body that it represents. So, my idea of the tissue damage caused by your stabbing is caused by the idea of your stabbing. Since your stabbing is a mode of your body, the idea of the stabbing is a mode of your mind. My pain is caused by your idea of your stabbing. This means that if there is an idea of some physical object or state, then there must be ideas that represent the causes of that physical object or state. And those ideas must stand in the same causal relations in which their physical objects stand. But this is compatible with the falsity of (a), (b), and (d) as well. Thus, even liberally interpreted, E 1a4 succeeds in securing only one fourth of the parallelism doctrine. It is possible, however, to supplement E 1a4 with other Spinozistic premises that help close the gap. Consider E 1p16, which says that anything that “can fall under an infinite intellect” exists. I take this to mean that anything that can be represented in thought exists. Thus, if there is a body represented in thought, then that body exists. This gets us (b). And E 2p3 says that there is in God an idea both of his essence and everything that follows from it. Since bodies exist in virtue of following from the essence of God, there is an idea of each body. This gets us (a).23 We already established (c) by E 1a4, so we now have conditions (a)–(c). All that remains is to establish (d) and we will have successfully derived the parallelism from genuinely Spinozistic premises. Consider what would be the case if (a)–(c) were true but (d) were false. There would be causal relations among ideas that are not mirrored by causal relations among bodies. How could this happen? It could be, for example, that the mental realm contains some causal overdetermination while the physical realm does not. Then there would be extra causal structure in the mental realm not reflected in the causal structure of the physical

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realm.24 Thus, not only does Spinoza fail to establish the parallelism doctrine on the basis of the official demonstration, even supplemented with additional premises, but the required interpretation of E 1a4 strains credulity. Recall that in order to make E 1a4 relevant to the demonstration of the parallelism, we had to interpret it as saying that the idea of an effect involves and depends upon the idea of its cause. That is, the cause of the idea of something is the idea of that thing’s cause. There is very little reason to suppose that this is true, let alone axiomatic. Just think of how surprising the very idea that my pain is caused by your mind, or the representation of your stabbing motion in your mind is. That such is the causal structure of the mental is surely possible, although unlikely, and certainly not axiomatic. There is, however, an intriguing suggestion in the scholium that follows the official demonstration of the parallelism, which offers a more promising route to the doctrine. Because interpreting it will require a bit of finesse, it is worth citing the scholium in full: Before we proceed further, we must recall here what we showed before, viz. that whatever can be perceived by an infinite intellect as constituting an essence of substance pertains to one substance only, and consequently that the thinking substance and the extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under that. So also a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways. Some of the Hebrews seem to have seen this, as if through a cloud, when they maintained that God, God’s intellect, and the things understood by him are one and the same. For example, a circle existing in nature and the idea of the existing circle, which is also in God, are one and the same thing, which is explained through different attributes. Therefore, whether we conceive nature under the attribute of Extension, or under the attribute of Thought, or under any other attribute, we shall find one and the same order, or one and the same connection of causes, i.e., that the same things follow one another. When I said before that God is the cause of the idea, say of a circle, only insofar as he is a thinking thing, and the cause of the circle, only insofar as he is an extended thing, this was for no other reason than because the formal being of the idea of the circle can be perceived only through another mode of thinking, as its proximate cause, and that

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 125 mode again through another, and so on, to infinity. Hence, so long as things are considered as modes of thinking, we must explain the order of the whole of nature, or the connection of causes, through the attribute of Thought alone. And insofar as they are considered as modes of Extension, the order of the whole of nature must be explained through the attribute of Extension alone. I understand the same concerning the other attributes. So of things as they are in themselves, God is really the cause insofar as he consists of infinite attributes. For the present, I cannot explain these matters more clearly. (E 2p7s)

In this first paragraph of the scholium, Spinoza reaffirms his substance monism. There is only one fundamental substance and all particular finite things are modes of it. Although we perceive a physical world and a mental world, these are, in fact, the same world “now comprehended under this attribute, now under that.” Next comes a crucial claim for understanding the parallelism: just as the mental substance and the physical substance are one and the same, so too are the mind and body. That is, the mode of extension that is the human body and the idea of this mode are one and the same thing expressed in two different ways. What is the relation between substance monism and mode identity? Spinoza transitions from the topic of substance monism to mode identity with the phrase “sic etiam.” Does this mean that mode identity follows from substance monism or that they are merely similar in some sense? We will return to this question. In the second paragraph, Spinoza says that, because the mind and the body are one and the same thing, the order and connection (that is, the causal structure) of the physical realm is the same as the order and connection of the mental realm. This follows straightforwardly from Leibniz’s Law. Here is the argument for the Parallelism from Identity (PFI): (1) The modes of extension have causal structure S. (2) The modes of extension are identical to the modes of thought. (3) Therefore, the modes of thought have causal structure S. This successfully secures the parallelism. But it does so by assuming that every mode of thought is identical to some mode of extension and that every mode of extension is identical to some mode of thought. What entitles Spinoza to this assumption? I will attempt to answer this question in the next section.

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Apart from this question, there is an additional serious problem for this route to the parallelism. In E 2p7s, Spinoza appears to deny psychophysical causation: he says that God is the cause of the idea of a circle only insofar as he is a thinking thing and the cause of the circle only insofar as he is an extended thing. Other texts appear to confirm this as well. For example, in E 3p2, Spinoza bluntly says: “The Body cannot determine the Mind to thinking, and the Mind cannot determine the Body to motion, to rest or to anything else (if there is anything else).” But the argument for the parallelism seems inconsistent with the claim that mind and body do not causally interact. If mode of extension e1 causes mode of extension e2 and e1 is identical to mode of thought t1, then, by Leibniz’s Law, t1 causes e2. This is mind-body interaction and hence appears to conflict with statements such as E3p2. This problem does not escape Spinoza’s notice, and in the third and final paragraph, Spinoza attempts to address it. He says that: (1) “the formal being” of an idea “can be perceived only through another mode of thinking, as its proximate cause,” and likewise for body; (2) “so long as things are considered as modes of thinking, we must explain the order of the whole of nature, or the connection of causes, through the attribute of Thought alone” and likewise for body; and (3) “so of things as they are in themselves, God is really the cause insofar as he consists of infinite attributes.” What is striking here is that Spinoza appears to make a thing’s causal profile depend on how it is “perceived” or “considered” or “explained.” Causes can be thought about in different ways. Sally’s throwing the baseball caused the window to break. It doesn’t matter if we are thinking about it as “her careless overthrow” or “her unsuccessful attempt to throw out the runner at home plate” or as “her first throw of the afternoon.” Under any description, it still breaks the window. Why then does Spinoza attempt to explain why he denies mind-body causation by emphasizing how we perceive or consider things? I will return to this question after developing an interpretation of Spinoza’s dualism of mental and physical concepts.

w h at i s a n at t r i b u t e ? We have so far encountered serious difficulties that face any interpretation of the attributes in Spinoza. We can present them in the form of six questions. (1) What is the relationship between attributes and thought? (2) What is the relationship between attributes and essence? (3) Does mind-body identity follow from substance monism? (4) How does the

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 127 parallelism follow from mind-body identity? (5) Why is the denial of mind-body interaction in E 2p7s formulated in mentalistic or epistemic and not metaphysical terms? (Spinoza uses “perceives,” “considers as,” “explains,” “perceives as a cause,” and never simply “cause.”) (6) How is mode identity consistent with his denial of interaction?25 Question (1) has its roots in the formulation of Spinoza’s definition of attribute as “what an intellect perceives as constituting the essence of a substance.” What does “intellectual perception” have to do with it? Are the attributes part of mind-independent reality? If they are, then why drag in intellectual perception? If not, then are they merely projections of thought, as subjectivist commentators have maintained? Whether they are mere projections or not, doesn’t the idea that they depend on thought introduce an asymmetry between the attributes, making thought the most fundamental attribute and the rest somehow dependent on thought? Question (2) also derives from the definition of “attribute.” Do attributes constitute the essence of a substance or are they merely perceived as doing so? If they really do constitute the essence of a substance, then, once again, why bring intellectual perception into it? And what exactly is the relation of constitution that is said to obtain between attributes and essence? If they are merely perceived as constituting the essence, what is the real essence of a substance? Question (3) arises from E 2p7s where Spinoza says, in effect, that just as there is a single substance the essence of which is expressed by every attribute and, consequently, the thinking substance and the extended substance is the same substance, so too modes of thought and extension are identical. In other words, mind and body are one and the same thing. Why would Spinoza think this? Is there any reason to think that the modes of two distinct attributes must be identical to each other? As we saw in the last section, question (4) does not by itself present any serious difficulties. If modes of thought and extension are identical then parallelism follows in a straightforward way. Difficulties arise only if we assume, as many commentators do today, that attributes are metaphysically distinct essential properties of a substance, for then we need some additional principles that mandate the isomorphic causal structure between modes of such distinct properties. Questions (5) and (6) arise in the context of the part of E 2p7s where Spinoza is trying to explain why mind-body identity does not lead to mind-body interaction, as we discussed in the last section. Why does

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Spinoza insist that mind and body are such that we cannot “perceive” their causal interaction in responding to the worry that mind-body identity and universal causal determination entail mind-body interaction? Although these questions are difficult, they represent a significant interpretative opportunity. Because these questions appear to have presuppositions that do not sit easily with one another, any interpretation that can coherently answer all six has a very great likelihood of being correct. In what follows, I will give such an interpretation. Although it requires some extrapolation from the text, that it succeeds an answering all six questions gives me confidence that it is the view toward which Spinoza was aiming although he never succeed in formulating it exactly. This lack of a clear articulation sometimes bedevils Spinoza and there are texts where he says things that do not fit the kind of view he was seeking. But, as we will see, none of this is all that surprising. The theory of the attributes that Spinoza was attempting to develop is subtle and sophisticated and the ways that he sometimes runs afoul of it are predictable. In what follows, I will attempt to articulate this view of the attributes. I then argue that this interpretation answers all six of the questions asked above. On the interpretation that I will develop and defend in what follows, the term “attribute” refers to the essence of a substance and presents it to the intellect under a certain guise. E 1d4 defines the concept ATTRIBUTE in terms of both its referent and how that referent is presented to the intellect. The definition of ATTRIBUTE can be adapted to the case of the concepts of specific attributes. The concept EXTENSION applies to the essence of substance and it presents that essence to the intellect under the guise associated with extension. THOUGHT also applies to the essence of substance but it presents it to the intellect under the guise associated with thought. Furthermore, THOUGHT and EXTENSION present the essence of substance to the intellect in such a way that they allow it to infer everything that follows from that essence. And, although they differ from each other, they differ from each other in no descriptive respect. In other words, each concept of the essence of substance tells the whole truth about that essence and what follows from it. They tell the same story but in terms of different conceptual guises. That is, although the concepts used to tell the story are different, they do not differ with respect to content or content determining descriptions. This interpretation makes sense of the definition of ATTRIBUTE in a straightforward way without attributing error to the intellect as the

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 129 subjectivist does and without making reference to the intellect otiose as the objectivist does. We conceive of the essence of a substance as an attribute when we think about it in a certain way. For this reason, reference to the intellect in the definition of ATTRIBUTE is ineliminable. But unlike subjectivist interpretations, my interpretation does not mean that the attributes are illusions or projections of the intellect. Rather, the intellect perceives the essence in a wholly accurate way under a particular guise. This does not mean that each attribute is a different property as they are according to the objectivist interpretation. Each attribute is the same essence conceived of differently. God is not a substance that has many essential properties: thought, extension, etc. Rather, God is a substance that has a single essence that appears to the intellect under many guises: the concepts (THOUGHT, EXTENSION, etc.) by means of which it grasps the essence in various ways. An attribute is the essence of a substance. This means that thought and extension is the very same essence of God. How, then, can thought and extension be distinct from each other and yet both identical to the same essence? The answer is that there is merely a distinction of reason between them. This distinction of reason obtains in virtue of the various guises under which the essence of God is presented to the intellect. When we count by distinctions of reason, there are infinitely many attributes. When we count by real distinctions, there is one.26 How can a single thing be grasped by the intellect under different guises that don’t differ from one another descriptively? On the standard Fregean picture, according to which many philosophers today understand the notion of a guise or mode of presentation, guises are individuated descriptively. For example, suppose a person believes that Hesperus is a million miles away and simultaneously believes that Phosphorus is not a million miles away. Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus. “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” are two names for the same star, Venus. But this person is not irrational if the names “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” are associated with different descriptions, for example, the brightest star in the evening sky and the brightest star in the morning sky under which she thinks about Venus. Although the names “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” both refer to the same star, what matters in assessing the rationality of belief is how the believer thinks about them, that is, the guise or mode of presentation under which she conceives them. Different guises can support different rational attitudes toward the same object. This shows how the belief that Hesperus is a million miles away and Phosphorus is not a million miles away need not

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be irrational, but it does so only because they are associated with different descriptions. A single object satisfies different descriptions in virtue of having distinct properties. This entails a kind of dualism. Venus satisfies the two different descriptions associated with the two guises only in virtue of having two distinct properties. Hence, the two descriptions say different things about Venus. I have said that the guises under which the essence of substance is presented to the intellect do not say different things about the essences. Therefore, the guises cannot be individuated by different associated descriptions as they are on the Fregean picture.27 But guises or modes of presentation need not be individuated descriptively. Consider, for example, linguistic guises. “Londres est jolie” and “London is pretty” are two different guises of the same content that do not differ in any descriptive respect. They differ only with respect to the syntactic properties of the languages used to express that content. (By “syntactic” I mean the features of a language that pertain to the shapes of the primitive symbols and the rules that govern how they may be combined to form words and sentences.) Similarly, demonstrative concepts may have different modes of presentation despite lacking any descriptive guise. For example, I might have two different demonstrative concepts, one introspective and one perceptual, expressing the same property: this (when introspectively attending to an experience) and this (when perceptually attending to a brain scanner). Introspection and perception are different ways of thinking about the very same thing, but the demonstrative character of the concepts ensures that there is no descriptive difference between them. Thus, there can be a difference in guise without a difference in descriptive character. The guises under which the essence of the substance is presented to the intellect also explain cognitive significance. There are conceptual connections between ideas of things conceived under a single guise but no conceptual connections between ideas of things conceived under different guises. Thus, there are no conceptual connections between ideas that represent extended things and ideas that represent thinking things. The explanation of the lack of conceptual connections is not to be found in whatever descriptive content may be associated with the several guises. Rather, the lack of conceptual connections is explained by some non-descriptive feature of the guises. We can understand how there can be non-descriptive features of guises that affect conceptual connections on analogy with proof theoretic relations between sentences of different formal languages.

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 131 One cannot prove “A.B” from the sentence “A^B” where “.” is the conjunction symbol in the language of the first sentence but not in the second and “^” is the conjunction symbol in the language of the second sentence but not in the first. The proof-theoretic rules of inference are language bound. Of course, the truth of the proposition expressed by “A.B” metaphysically entails the truth of the proposition expressed by “A^B” but they are nonetheless not provable from each other in the sense indicated. On my interpretation of the attributes, cognitive significance is explained in a similar way. There are no conceptual connections between ideas that represent, for example, the thinking substance and the world of minds and ideas that represent the extended substance and the world of bodies. These ideas represent the very same things, but in a “conceptual language” that does not allow for conceptual connections between them. Now, of course, two formal languages can be extended to create a new common language in which inferential relations do obtain between translations of sentences that are not inferentially related in the old languages. Spinoza, therefore, must deny that the conceptual languages associated with the guises thought and extension can be extended in this way into a common conceptual language. Perhaps he could claim that each of thought and extension are conceptually complete and so there is no metalanguage in which to define the extension. Or perhaps he could embrace radical conceptual nativism and claim that we are locked into the concepts that we are prepackaged with and do not have the power to create new concepts. Although the guises associated with the attributes are not individuated by their descriptive content, I have been careful not to deny that they have descriptive content. This is because Spinoza suggests that an intellect can infer things from an attribute. Thus, the intellect’s perception of an attribute must be such as to explain such inferences.28 That the guises are descriptive would explain the availability of such inferences. There may be other ways as well, but further speculation is unnecessary. That it is possible to have a diversity of guises without a diversity of associated descriptions is enough to preserve the ability of an intellect to make inferences from what is conceived under such guises without entailing essential property pluralism. I have claimed that, for Spinoza, attributes are the essence of substance, which the intellect perceives under certain guises. I must note here that my interpretation does not capture Spinoza’s use of

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attribute in every text. This is because Spinoza occasionally commits use/mention errors in his use of attribute. For example, when he says that we conceived of substance under an attribute (E 1p10s, E 2p21s, E 3p2s, and E 4p4d) or when he says that an attribute expresses the essence of a substance (E 1d10s, E 1p23d, and E 1p29s), he is using attribute to refer to the concept or guise by means of which the attribute is presented to the intellect. Use/mention errors are common among seventeenth-century philosophers, and an interpretation that requires us to read Spinoza as occasionally making one is not at all implausible on that account. Textual evidence comes from Letter 9, written to Simon de Vries in February 1663, in which Spinoza attempts to respond to the question: How can one substance have more than one attribute? The letter is illuminating as to the nature of the relationship between the attributes and the substance to which they belong. He writes: The definition as I gave it to you runs, if I am not mistaken, “By substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that whose conception does not involve the conception of another thing. I understand the same by attribute, except that attribute is so called in respect to the intellect, which attributes to substance a certain specific kind of nature.” This definition, I repeat, explains clearly what I mean by substance or attribute. However, you want me to explain by example – though it is not at all necessary – how one and the same thing can be signified by two names. Not to appear ungenerous, I will give you two examples. First, by “Israel” I mean the third patriarch: by “Jacob” I mean that same person, the latter name being given to him because he seized his brother’s heel. Secondly, by a “plane surface” I mean one that reflects all rays of light without any change. I mean the same by “white surface,” except that it is called white in respect of a man looking at it.

Note first that Spinoza emphasizes the importance of the intellect for characterizing the attributes. The attributes are the substance insofar as it is related to the intellect. There are two (or more) attributes because a single thing, the substance, is related in two distinct ways to the intellect. He goes on to explain how a single thing can be thought of in two different ways by making an analogy to a single thing having two different names and a single property expressed by two separate predicates. With respect to names and objects, Spinoza gives the example of the same man being called both “Jacob” and “Israel.” Each name is

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 133 associated with a different description. “Jacob” is associated with “seized his brother’s heal” and “Israel” is associated with “the third patriarch.” With respect to properties and predicates, Spinoza gives the example of “plane surface” and “white” as expressing the same property. But in the case of the predicates, unlike in the case of the names, they are associated with a single description, “being such as to reflect all rays of light without any change.” The difference is that one is said “with respect to a man looking at it.” In other words, “white” expresses the same property as “plane surface” but by means of different concepts that are distinguished by a different relation to the subject of perception. This is consistent with the concepts being distinguished by the fact that WHITE presents the property under a perceptual guise whereas PLANE SURFACE does not. In Letter 9, Spinoza offers two different conceptions of a guise. The first, introduced in connection to names, is clearly a descriptive account and to that extent does not fit with my interpretation. The second, introduced in connection with predicates, is not clearly descriptive in nature. It would seem that in the letter, Spinoza does not have control over the distinction between these two conceptions of guise. Perhaps he never gains complete control over it, but it is not entirely implausible that between 1663 and the composition of the relevant passages of the Ethics his understanding of the issue deepens. This would explain why he never attempts in that work to elucidate the notion of an attribute by means of examples that suggest descriptively individuated guises in any subsequent text even though in the Ethics much of what he says is strongly suggestive of attributes being the essence of a substance grasped under a guise. Having considered the textual basis of my interpretation, let us now consider how it answers the six questions posed earlier. Question (1): How are the attributes related to thought? That is, are they merely projections of thought as the subjectivists would have it? Or if they are part of mind-independent reality as the objectivists would have it, then why mention the intellect in the definition? When we conceive of the essence of substance as an attribute, we conceive of it under a specific guise. This introduces a distinction of reason between the various attributes and explains how a substance with a single essence could have multiple attributes, each one of which is not really distinct from that essence. The intellect thus grounds the plurality of the attributes.

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Question (2): What is the relationship between the attributes and the essence? The attributes are the essence. The distinction between both the attributes and the essence and the attributes and each other is a distinction of reason and not a real distinction. Thus, the plurality of attributes does not entail any metaphysical diversity and is merely a function of a plurality of guises by means of which this essence is grasped. These guises in no way misrepresent the essence of the substance and hence they involve no projections of the intellect. Question (3): Does mind-body identity follow from substance monism? Yes. If the attributes are not really distinct, then their modes are not really distinct. Therefore, the modes of thought and extension are not really distinct. Thus, on my interpretation, the “sic etiam” that transitions us from the topic of substance monism to the topic of mode identity indicates an entailment, which is the most natural reading of the phrase.29 Question (4): How does the parallelism follow from mind-body identity? The parallelism obviously poses no difficulty for my interpretation. Mind and body are literally identical. Thus, the causal structure of the modes of thought will be identical to the causal structure of the modes of, for example, extension. They are the same thing conceived differently. Questions (5) and (6) both relate to the denial of mind-body interaction, which is the most difficult issue for my interpretation. We will consider them in the next section.

m i n d - b o dy i n t e r ac t i o n Spinoza’s identity theory makes it very difficult for him to deny mindbody interaction. Consider the following argument for interaction (I): (1) The extended substance causes bodies to move. (2) The extended substance = the thinking substance. (3) For all x and for all y, if x = y, then for all properties F, x is F just in case y is F. (4) Therefore, the thinking substance causes bodies to move. Both I-1 and I-2 appear to be accepted by Spinoza. I-3 is an uncontroversial logical principle, the Indiscernibility of Identicals, which says that nothing can be different from itself. And yet Spinoza states in E 3p2 that “The Body cannot determine the Mind to thinking, and the

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 135 Mind cannot determine the Body to motion, to rest or to anything else.” What can account for this apparent contradiction? The answer is that Spinoza often uses “. . . causes . . .”, “. . . determines . . .”, and similar expressions as what we could call intensional contexts.30 An intensional context is a context that does not license the substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate. Thus, we cannot infer “the thinking substance caused the body to move” from “the extended substance caused the body to move.” To say that such contexts are intensional does not explain why the relevant inferences are not licensed; it is merely to say that they are not. But why does Spinoza believe that causal contexts are intensional? Paradigmatic cases of intensional contexts such as “. . . believes . . .” are intensional because they express relations that a psychological subject has to a content under a certain guise. The truth conditions of ascriptions of beliefs to a subject are sensitive to how the subject conceives of the object of her belief. Commentators have sometimes tried to explain why seemingly causal contexts behave as intensional contexts for Spinoza by connecting them to explanatory contexts. There are at least three different ways that this may be done: (1) Spinoza’s conception of causation might have explanatory notions baked into it. On this interpretation, Spinoza has no notion of a cause that is independent of explanation so that whether one thing causes another depends on how it is conceived;31 (2) Spinoza might use “. . . causes . . .” and related words to express explanation. Thus, apparent discussions of causation are in fact about explanation. (3) Finally, Spinoza’s causal locutions may be ambiguous between causal and explanatory notions.32 In my own estimation, option (3) is correct. The reason why “. . . cause . . .” is sometimes intensional for Spinoza is that he often uses it to express the relation of causal explanation. For Spinoza, as I will argue presently, explanation relates things that happen in the world to the intellect under a guise. Therefore, Spinoza sometimes uses “x causes y’” as an intensional context. But, as Koistinen has noted, there is also textual evidence (to be considered presently) that Spinoza sometimes uses “. . . causes . . .” to express the notion of causation as a mind-independent relation.33 Thus, Spinoza does not have distinct terminology to talk about causation and explanation. Some have argued that the notions of cause and explanation are obviously distinct and we should not interpret Spinoza as inexplicably

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failing to mark such an obvious distinction.34 But such an objection is misguided for three reasons. (1) The nature of the distinction between cause and explanation remains a controversial matter to the present day. Thus, it will not do to simply take one of several currently popular ways of making out the distinction and insist that Spinoza’s philosophy respect it.35 (2) It could be plausibly argued that the words for cause in English, Latin, and ancient Greek, for example, are all ambiguous between cause and explanation. This being so, Spinoza ambiguously using “cause” sometimes to mean causal explanation and sometimes to mean cause is hardly remarkable. (3) Causation and explanation are very closely related topics, and the differences between them are subtle and difficult to formulate without distinctions such as proposition/event and intensional/extensional. Although I am arguing that Spinoza sometimes treats “. . . causes . . .” as an intensional context, there is very little evidence, if any, that Spinoza explicitly theorizes the distinction, and there is just as little evidence that he has the resources to do so. Given these three considerations, it would be altogether unsurprising if Spinoza did not distinguish cause from causal explanation in a careful or systematic way in his terminology. For Spinoza, inferring psychophysical causal statements from statements about mental or physical causation is unexplanatory. Explanation, for Spinoza, requires that the explanans and the explanandum are conceptually connected and no such connections obtain between the mental and the physical concepts. When Spinoza says that minds don’t cause bodies and vice versa, he means that there are no genuine explanations of that sort. The evidence in favor of this interpretation comes from two sources. The first source is the larger context in which Spinoza makes the claim that mind and body don’t interact. In the scholium of that proposition (E 3p2s), Spinoza makes explicit who he takes his opponent to be. It is someone who thinks that there are some physical events with mental but not physical causes and that there are mental events with physical but not mental causes. That is, Spinoza is arguing against someone who, for example, believes that a decision caused a bodily action and that no correlative physical change was necessary in order to cause the action. Spinoza is not worried about someone thinking that a physical event has a mental cause that is identical to a physical cause. Rather, his opponent believes in interaction in a substance dualist framework, which entails that neither the mental nor the physical is causally complete. Spinoza, on the contrary, thinks that everything that happens

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 137 under an attribute can be explained using only the conceptual resources proper to that attribute. I don’t think Spinoza would be particularly bothered by someone inferring that the physical causes of a physical event are also mental. But he would insist that real scientific knowledge is not possible so long as the conceptual connections that explain the causal structure are not delineated. The second source is the abundance of epistemic and psychological terminology that Spinoza uses in stating his theses about mindbody interaction. He says that modes have God for a cause insofar as he is “explained” by the attribute of which they are modes (E 2p6d). He says that modes “arise from God insofar as he is considered” under the attribute of which they are modes (E 3p2d). In explaining why he makes statements such as these, Spinoza says, “this was for no other reason than because the formal being of the idea of [the mode in question] can be perceived only through another mode” of the appropriate attribute (E 2p7s). He then concludes that “so long as modes are considered” under a given attribute “we must explain the order of the whole of nature, or the connection of causes, through” that attribute (E 2p7s). Clearly, Spinoza’s topic is something connected to how things are perceived, conceived, considered, and explained. Such a topic is more aptly called “causal explanation” than “causation” as such because the latter could carry the connotation of a relation insensitive to how things are conceived, perceived, considered, or explained. Spinoza himself does not have distinct terms for cause and causal explanation and he uses “cause” for both notions. Spinoza’s thesis could then be formulated as mind and body don’t causally explain each other.36 But Spinoza does think that a mind-independent causal relation does hold between minds and bodies even if it is of little scientific interest. At the end of E 2p7s, after discussing how we must explain the causal order by considering modes under the same attribute, he acknowledges that “of things as they are in themselves, God is really the cause insofar as he consists of infinite attributes.” I read this as saying, following Koistinen, “of things as they are in themselves (that is, apart from being conceived under any particular attribute), God is really the cause no matter what attribute he is conceived under.”37 Thus, Spinoza should not be interpreted as holding the nonsensical position that mind and body are one and the same thing, but while minds cause minds and bodies cause bodies, minds cannot cause bodies and vice versa. Rather, he holds the completely coherent position that although mind and body are identical, we cannot perceive the

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intelligible causal connections that obtain between modes unless we conceive of them under a single attribute. Spinoza’s point is that scientific inquiry and explanation are undermined by mixing and matching psychological and physical concepts. If we want to develop perspicuous theories that actually generate understanding, we must do psychology in entirely psychological terms and physics in entirely physical terms.

conclusion In this chapter, I have developed a new interpretation of the attributes in Spinoza according to which an attribute is the essence of a substance. A diversity of attributes obtains in virtue of the fact the essence is presented to the intellect under a diversity of guises, which results in a distinction of reason between them. The whole story of the world can be accurately and completely told in terms of thought. Call this the idealist story. But the whole story of the world can equally be accurately and completely told in terms of extension. Call this the materialist story. This helps explain why Spinoza has been subjected to such widely divergent interpretations. If one focuses on the fact that he agrees with the idealist story, he looks like an idealist. If one focuses instead on the fact that he agrees with the materialist story, he looks like a materialist. But if his agreement with both is most salient, he looks like a dualist. But what these interpretations get wrong is that, for Spinoza, there is no metaphysical difference between idealism and materialism. They are the same theory expressed in different conceptual languages. In this way, Spinoza develops a monistic metaphysics that privileges neither the mental nor the physical. What is more, he does so in a way that explains why idealism, materialism, and especially dualism remain persistent philosophical illusions.

notes 1 Donagan 1980: 89–102. 2 Negri 1991: 65, 155; Montag 1999: 57. 3 Martineau 1882: 189; Murray 1896: 474; Hegel 1995: III/260. 4 Bennett 1984: 41. 5 Principles of Philosophy 1.53 in CSM. 6 Principles of Philosophy 1.62–63 CSM. 7 Bennett 1993: 11. 8 See Wolfson 1934: chapter 5.

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spinoza on the metaphysics of thought and extension 139 9 E 2p44d and E 4ap article 4 10 See Delahunty 1985: 116–17. 11 Ep 9. 12 Principles of Philosophy 2.18 in CSM. 13 Ep 32. 14 KV 2.19 and appendix 2. 15 Ep 81, May 5, 1676. 16 Ep 83, July 15, 1676. 17 I believe that it is instructive to consider Spinoza’s conatus doctrine in light of his exchange with Tschirnhaus on this matter, although it by no means answers all the questions that surround the issue. This is not the place to pursue these questions further. 18 See Peterman 2015 for an interesting discussion of these issues. I believe, however, that Peterman goes too far in dissociating Spinoza’s conception of extension entirely from three-dimensional space. 19 See Garrett 2008. 20 For a different view of Spinoza’s parallelism doctrine, see Melamed 2015: chapter 5. 21 Morrison (2013: 12) denies that Spinoza is committed to (d). 22 Posterior Analytics 71 b 9–11. Cf. Posterior Analytics 94 a 20. 23 Bennett 1984: 130 makes this point. 24 On this point, I am indebted to Della Rocca 1996: 23. See, however, Morrison 2013: 12–13 for a different perspective. 25 See Bennett 1993. 26 I elaborate on the individuation of attributes by distinctions of reason in greater detail in Lin 2019: chapter 4. 27 This is a principal difference between my interpretation and the one developed in Shein 2009. 28 On this point, I benefited from conversation and correspondence with John Carriero. 29 The ease with which my interpretation answers this question is a distinct advantage over rival interpretations, such as those of Della Rocca, Marshall, Bennett, and Delahunty, on which attributes are metaphysically distinct essential properties. If attributes are distinct properties, then how can the modes of one be identical to modes of another? Such commentators have to either deny identity (Marshall and Bennett) or introduce exotic principles of identity (Della Rocca). 30 This thesis has been argued for by Charles (1991); Della Rocca (1991); and Koistinen (1996). The position I develop here is most similar to Koistinen’s to which I am indebted. 31 This is the approach of Della Rocca 1991: 268–69; Bennett 1984: 145; and Jarrett 1991: 472.

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140 martin lin 32 This is the view of Koistinen 1996: 30–37. 33 Koistinen 1996: 36–37. 34 Marshall 2009: 908. 35 See, for example, Anscombe “Causation and Extensionality” for a denial that causal contexts are extensional. 36 Michael Della Rocca has objected that Spinoza’s topic cannot be causal explanation because he sometimes uses causal language unmodified by explanatory language in discussing his ban on psychophysical interaction (Della Rocca 1996: 269). But this is not probative if Spinoza sometimes uses “causes: as a synonym for “causally explains.” 37 Koistinen 1996: 37.

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Spinoza’s Epistemology Ursula Renz Only those lacking any education or desire for knowledge will fail to see how necessary the true knowledge of these three things [the first cause and origin of all things; the true nature of the human mind; and the true cause of error] is.1

Epistemology plays a key role in Spinoza’s philosophical approach to many issues. First, epistemology is absolutely crucial to his metaphysics. According to a widespread opinion, Spinoza advocates a very radical form of rationalism according to which nothing which is not intelligible can ever exist, act, or happen.2 This suggests not only a reductionist outlook on what there is;3 it also grounds Spinoza’s postulating the principally unlimited reach of (human) knowledge and understanding, by which any “asylum ignorantiae” is denied its legitimacy.4 There is nothing in the world which cannot be known, or which we cannot possibly come to understand. Second, epistemology is also essential to Spinoza’s views on human mental life. Assuming that the mind consists of an idea, or a complex of ideas,5 or “bits of knowledge”, as this view is sometimes expressed,6 he champions a special kind of cognitivism according to which any mind is reducible to the content of its cognitions.7 Third, being concerned with the improvement of human knowledge, Spinoza’s epistemology is also the driving force behind the more practical aspects of his philosophy, be that the conception of a philosophically grounded self-therapy against the passions,8 the ideal of the free man and the good way of living in society,9 the meta-ethical positions as developed in Part 4 of the Ethics,10 or Spinoza’s interventional statement on the relation between politics and religion put forward in the Theological-Political Treatise.11 Fourth, and finally, Spinoza’s epistemology is also at the bottom of his doctrines on the eternity of the human mind, its blessedness, and the intellectual love of God.12 The question arises: What must an epistemology look like which is to accomplish all these tasks? The answer, in a nutshell, is this: It must spell out the rationalist idea of the complete intelligibility of being in epistemological terms. This involves several sub-tasks. On a principal

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layer, any epistemology aiming at addressing the mentioned concerns must first and foremost exhibit the consistency of this rationalist ambition; it must, as it were, rule out skepticism once and for all. On a cognitive-psychological layer, furthermore, it must provide an understanding of man’s mental capacities supporting the notion that the rationalist ideal of complete intelligibility of being can be materialized in human subjects. As far as the discussion of our epistemic goals is concerned, finally, it must argue that there is no need for an ideal of goodness that points beyond our consciously living in truth. Thus, it must show that man’s striving for happiness is, rationally considered, targeting the same end as his striving for true knowledge and consciousness. It is against this background that I will reconstruct Spinoza’s epistemology in this chapter. I shall begin by taking a closer look at the early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Differing from the Ethics in several of the rather technical details, this text is a strong expression of two quite fundamental commitments on which later also the Ethics relies: the idea that doing epistemology is contributing to our ethical concerns and the denial that skepticism is even an arguable position. Discussing these two features, I shall provide a first outlook on Spinoza’s overall epistemological program. The second section intends to give a brief introduction to the epistemic vocabulary employed in the Ethics. In particular, I shall discuss Spinoza’s concepts of “idea”, “truth”, and “adequacy”, as well as the view that there are ideas of everything in God. I will argue that these notions all indicate Spinoza’s ambition to establish a radical rationalism, while at the same time abandoning some of the main pillars of Cartesian epistemology. The question arises, of course, how such rationalism is possible, and how, in particular, the metaphysical contention of the intelligibility of being is reflected in human knowledge. I shall address this question in several steps by a reconstruction of what is perhaps the core of Spinoza’s epistemology, viz., the doctrine of the three genera of knowledge (cognition) established in E 2p40s2. The third section discusses, in a preliminary fashion, why Spinoza defends classifications of cognitions in all his epistemological writings. Assuming that behind this move is a reliabilist conviction, I will discern several dimensions of epistemic reliability in Spinoza’s approach. The next three sections then examine the three genera of knowledge as contained in the Ethics, one by one. It will be shown that by distinguishing three genera of knowledge, Spinoza is addressing quite different

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spinoza’s epistemology 143 problems. The conception of imaginative knowledge is intended to show why man, even though his cognitive-psychological apparatus is such as to provide him usually with rather unreliable and distorted views on the world, is entitled to belief in the reality of his own body, the outer world, and some causal relation between them. Another question, I shall suggest, motivates the second genus of knowledge, namely, whether or not, and if so how, man can have adequate knowledge of some basic features of reality. I will argue that, considering how Spinoza reinterprets the inherited doctrine of the “common notions”, grounding his views on reason or the knowledge of them, he not only makes a case for our having the capacity for rational knowledge, or for departing in reasoning from necessarily true ideas; rather, he also points to the fact that whether or not we actually do so depends to a certain degree on the historical development of the sciences. The problem to be tackled by the third genus of knowledge, finally, is to make room for the option of epistemic perfection. According to this option, there is the possibility of having full knowledge of all there is in such a way that even particular things can be known completely. Considering how Spinoza employs the concept of the infinite intellect in Part 1 of the Ethics, I will argue that while man does not have this knowledge to its full extent at once, he is in the position to develop it, bit by bit.

s p i n o z a ’ s e a r ly e p i s t e m o l og i c a l v i e w s Among Spinoza’s early writings is an unfinished text which is largely concerned with epistemological issues: the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE). As indicated by the title, the overall project pursued in this text is methodological rather than analytical in spirit. It aims, as it were, to be an essay in revisionary, rather than in descriptive, epistemology; its goal is not to analyze and discuss our epistemological vocabulary or to examine the cognitive processes by which we acquire knowledge, but to provide a method in virtue of which we may improve our epistemic position. Notwithstanding its revisionary ambition, however, the TIE contains many analytical passages. This is partly because Spinoza derives the plan of his method from a preceding analysis of the kinds of human perception13 and the notion of true knowledge;14 and partly it is due to the fact that the text breaks off in the middle of the second of four methodological parts announced.15

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Compared with the epistemology of the Ethics, many of the technical details of the analytical passages of the TIE are expressed in premature language.16 Yet, there is a common ambition behind the two texts: both consider epistemology as a means to amend the epistemic balance of our doxastic activities, so that the conditions under which we live may be improved. Without a doubt, this is an attractive program, but can we really trust it? Is it sound to expect that by amending the epistemic balance of our doxastic activities, our lives are going to be changed? And on which grounds can we assume that the epistemic balance of our doxastic activities can at all be improved? In what follows, I shall address these questions by discussing two programmatic decisions behind the TIE.

The Pragmatic Value of Epistemic Certainty Let me begin by pointing out a peculiarity of the opening paragraph of the TIE. Spinoza enters his discussion on method with a narrative telling in a stylized way of the frustration the author experienced in his previous life.17 The gist of this tale consists in the acknowledgment that so far he (i.e., the author, who may or may not be identical with Spinoza) has mainly been striving for goods which, as he now sees, are unable to provide him with constant happiness.18 Against this background, he reports to have asked himself “whether there was anything which would be a true good, capable of communicating itself, and which alone would affect the mind, all others being rejected – whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity.”19 This question already specifies, albeit in a preliminary way, what requirements a thing qualifying as a true good has to fulfill: (1) it must be truly good and not just seem good, that is, its goodness must be grounded in its real nature; (2) it must communicate itself, or be available, in principle, for detection; (3) it must be discernible as truly good and distinguished from things that are only seemingly good; (4) it must be able to affect our whole mind; that is, it must be able to satisfy all our mental needs, but not necessarily also those of our bodies; (5) it must persist eternally so that it can provide us with eternal pleasure. Without further inquiring into what possible candidates there are to qualify as a true good, we can conclude that these qualifications already suggest that the true good is epistemic in nature. Only epistemic objectives, or the

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spinoza’s epistemology 145 kinds of things to be considered as the ultimate target of our epistemic striving, are such as to meet all these conditions at once. The question might arise why we should expect that our epistemic objectives, be they spelled out in terms of absolute certainty, true ideas or beliefs, conclusive understanding, or any other doxastic end, are of such a nature as to satisfy our desire for happiness. What reasons did Spinoza have for assuming that doing epistemology is valuable for our ethical concerns? To answer this question, it is helpful to contrast Spinoza’s suggestion with two alternative approaches from which he arguably departs. The first is Pyrrhonian skepticism, which, as we know since Popkin’s seminal inquiry, had an enormous impact on early modern philosophy.20 In contrast to contemporary skepticism, Pyrrhonian skepticism is not just challenging the assumption of knowledge’s being possible, but is directed at inherently practical aims. If we question our opinions by means of the methods suggested,21 according to its programmatic suggestion, we come to see that neither sense impressions nor intellectual reasoning may provide us with knowledge. As a result, we come to withhold assent to all sense impressions and inferred conclusions, thereby suspending any belief or other firm doxastic attitude, and we enter into a state of complete peace of mind, called ataraxia, a Greek term for “imperturbability”. This state not only allows us to abstain from further doxastic struggle, but ideally we will also be less disturbed by the uncontrollable nature of fate, so that we are less afflicted by it.22 Spinoza apparently shares the assumption underlying the Pyrrhonian idea of ataraxia that our subscribing to certain judgments has a decisive influence on our feeling and thus on our well-being.23 This is why he can embrace the idea that epistemology may contribute to, or even substitute for, ethics. Moreover, he seems to agree with Pyrrhonism that the kind of inner struggle we undergo when we are committed to uncertain moral beliefs is often a disturbing or even painful affair. However, in postulating that a true good must be “capable of communicating itself”, he makes it clear from the very beginning that he disagrees with Pyrrhonian skepticism about what we eventually should aspire to when we are doing epistemology for morality’s sake. We should not resign, he thinks, from looking for a true good; we should rather aim at knowing something which by its very nature makes itself seen and understood as truly good, that is, as satisfying all our mental needs forever. To pursue this goal, epistemology has to discredit rather than to support skeptical doubts. Hence, part of the answer to why

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Spinoza considers doing epistemology as valuable for our moral striving consists in the assumption that epistemic certainty makes a difference to the states or experiential qualities making up our mental lives. A different, though complementary answer comes to the fore if we consider how Spinoza’s TIE is related to another key text of early modern epistemology, namely, Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon.24 This text, which consists of a collection of dozens of aphorisms and essays on issues in philosophical methodology, is certainly among those approaches in early modern epistemology which value knowledge as most useful to all kinds of practical concerns. It relies on an assumption that Spinoza certainly shared with him: that knowledge is power. Given this assumption, one can expect the increase of one’s knowledge to reliably produce an increase in one’s power also.25 Bacon and Spinoza disagree, however, with respect to the reasons why they think that knowledge is power. According to Bacon, knowledge is power because it may help us to improve our control over nature; the relation between knowledge is thus instrumental. Spinoza, in contrast, while he of course also considers knowledge to be useful for our ruling nature in both internal and environmental respects, does not account for the power of knowledge in merely instrumental terms. Rather, he thinks that power is an inherent quality of knowledge. Thus, his view is that to come to know a thing is in itself to become more powerful, and this, he thinks, is also why the acquisition of knowledge is a matter of empowerment, and not just because of the increase of control with which it may provide us. A second reason why Spinoza considered doing epistemology as valuable for our ethical concerns is therefore this: if knowledge is power, and if knowledge is possible, then to get an understanding of how we achieve more knowledge is a first step toward a systematic increase of power. No less remarkable, even though perhaps less significant, is how epistemology directly influences our condition: If knowledge is essentially power, then any bit of knowledge of any content will make us more powerful, independently of whether it consists in the answer to a metaphysical question, the solution to a mathematical problem, the discovery of a physical law – or the insight into the vain character of our previous striving.26

The Denial of Skepticism So far, we have seen that Spinoza had several reasons to assume that doing epistemology is valuable for our ethical concerns. But we have also

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spinoza’s epistemology 147 seen that both his departure from Pyrrhonism and his re-interpretation of the Baconian view that knowledge is power are connected with the anti-skeptical assumption that knowledge is possible and, thus, that the improvement of the epistemic balance of our doxastic attitudes is a realistic goal. But why, one might wonder, can Spinoza be so sure about this? Why is it reasonable to expect that epistemic realism holds and our attempts at knowing what is truly good will win the battle against skeptical resignation? At this point, it is worth examining his depiction of the skeptic in the TIE. During his whole life, Spinoza was a fervent critic of any kind of epistemological skepticism.27 Knowing this and knowing what impact Pyrrhonism had on early modern philosophy, we would assume that the first task to be accomplished in an epistemological treatise would be to refute skepticism. Strikingly, however, Spinoza is not engaged in disputing skeptical arguments in a more than indirect manner in the TIE. Instead, he is simply denying the skeptic any credibility, either by accusing him of insincerity, or by depicting him as suffering from a complete lack of awareness or of having a mind. Thus, he writes in §47 of the TIE that “either he [the skeptic] will speak contrary to his own consciousness, or we shall confess that there are men whose minds also are completely blinded, either from birth, or from prejudices, i.e. because of some external change. For they are not even aware of themselves.”28 Defending this indirect approach, the next paragraph adds “[T]here is no speaking of the sciences with them . . .. 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, grant, or oppose. So they must be regarded as automata, completely lacking a mind.”29 To see what kind of position Spinoza is advocating here, let us grant him that no direct argument against skepticism is needed and that he is right in assuming that to refute the skeptical denial of the possibility of knowledge; it is sufficient to undermine the skeptic’s credibility. Then the question arises: How is his judgment, that the skeptic is either self-deceiving or a person who is characterized by a complete lack awareness or “mind”, justifiable? In answering this question, let us consider two tenets which Spinoza advocates, in one form or another, in all his epistemological writings. First, following his notion of truth, truth is a primary property of all ideas, whereas falsity is only a privative determination which, while it characterizes in fact most of the ideas we actually have, is not

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an essential property of any idea, as falsity merely consists in the confusion of the contents represented in true ideas. Thus, we have true knowledge in any idea and only err in our interpretation of what a seemingly false idea is about. Second, Spinoza famously assumes that everybody who has a true idea must be aware of this, whereas one can be mistaken in considering one’s wrong ideas as truly representing a certain thing. Openness to truth is, so to speak, the default attitude of any human mind, from which adherence to wrong views is only the aberration. Given these two claims, it is natural to conclude that the adoption of a skeptical attitude is simply a form of craziness, as skepticism runs against both the notion that all ideas have some truth in them and the idea that the nature of the human mind is such that openness to truth constitutes some kind of default mental attitude. We shall see in the next section how these two tenets are explained and defended in detail. For now, let me just emphasize a few points. First, note that, if these two tenets hold and truth is inherent in all ideas and openness to truth is the default mental attitude of any healthy mind, then Spinoza is indeed welladvised to abstain from engaging in arguments against the skeptic and to simply deny that skepticism is even an arguable position. Otherwise, he would take skepticism more seriously than it deserves, given his position. Furthermore, let me point out that relying on these two tenets, the method Spinoza is out to promote in the TIE is largely a matter of proposing a guided reflection on the ideas we already have.30 Given these two tenets, the most direct way to amend the epistemic balance of our cognitive activities is to avoid confusion. And this, indeed, is best accomplished if, with the help of some criteria, we pay attention to the truth already inherent in our ideas. Then we are freed, Spinoza says, from the failure of confusion, “as long as we strive to consider all our perceptions according to the standard of a given true idea.”31 Let me close this section by emphasizing that this position, according to which truth is simply there to be detected by reflection on what we already know, is just the flip side of what has been referred to as Spinoza’s radical rationalism. This suggests that while he has obviously changed his mind about many issues in general and about the technical vocabulary to be employed in epistemology in particular, his rationalism is certainly among the most deep-rooted convictions of all his philosophical thought. It is in elaborating this intuition that he arrives at the system put forward in later writings.

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spinoza’s epistemology 149

t h e e p i s t e m o l og i c a l vo c a b u l a ry o f t h e e t h i c s In the Ethics, epistemology becomes a sub-domain of Spinoza’s inquiry into the human mind. Accordingly, with the significant exception of E 1ax6,32 Spinoza’s epistemological vocabulary is mainly introduced in the definitions of Part 2, which is about “the Nature and Origin of the Mind”, and further developed in the course of the first few pages of this part. In this section, I shall discuss some of the peculiarities underlying Spinoza’s E 2d3 and E 2d4, as well as the assumption that there are ideas of all there is in God.

The Definition of “Idea”: Spinoza’s Departure from Cartesian Innativism In E 2d3, Spinoza announces: By idea I understand a concept of the mind that the mind forms because it is a thinking thing.33

And in the explication, he adds: I say concept rather than perception, because the word perception seems to indicate that the mind is acted on by the object. But concept seems to express an action of the mind.

Obviously, Spinoza draws a lot of importance to the notion that he considers ideas to consist in concepts, not in perceptions. This is not to say that he denies that perceptions rely on ideas. Rather, he emphasizes that ideas themselves, if we consider them as mental states, are not to be mistaken for some kind of perception, as a lot of constructive activity by the mind is involved in forming them. But why is this mentioned in this explicit manner? As some have pointed out,34 Spinoza seems to here to be correcting Descartes, who introduces his notion of ideas in the Third Meditation as follows: “Some of my thoughts are as it were the images of things, and it is only in these cases that the term ‘idea’ is strictly appropriate – for example, when I think of a man, or a chimera, or the sky, or an angel, or God.”35 This statement, consisting in a terminological clarification of the term “idea” rather than in a real definition of what ideas are, alleges that the activity of having an idea is like the grasp of some given image by which the mind perceives a representational content. Introducing this notion, which is qualified only later, Descartes

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articulates a, roughly speaking, Platonic or Augustinian intuition according to which the contents of our ideas (or at least some of them) are somehow given to us so that our task is primarily to grasp them rightly. This view was challenged immediately after the Meditations had been published, notably by Hobbes in his Objections to the Meditations. Two points of his critique are important here. Having denied that from our displaying mental activities we can infer, as Descartes suggested, the immateriality of our soul or mind,36 Hobbes goes on to argue against the Cartesian notion of idea suggested by the quoted passage as follows: considering how we come to have ideas of angels or of God, we cannot possibly refer to the ideas in order to prove the existence of their objects. For, as Hobbes says, “the idea by means of which I imagine an angel is composed of the ideas of visible things,” and as to the idea of God, he contends, “there is no idea of God in us,” but man, considering the infinite chain of causes, “concludes that something eternal must necessarily exist” – a being which, for the lack of an appropriate idea, he “gives the name or label ‘God’.”37 Hobbes thus departs from Descartes by emphasizing first the bodily origin of our ideas and, secondly, our constructive role in forming them. Interestingly, Spinoza places his approach quite in the middle, as it were, of Descartes’s approach and Hobbes’s critique. Emphasizing in the definition that ideas are concepts of the mind and formed by the mind, Spinoza presents himself as following Descartes rather Hobbes. In the explication, however, Spinoza underlines the constructive character of the cognitive activity resulting in our ideas, indicating that he is rather on Hobbes’s side.38 With this double affiliation, Spinoza sets the stage for the second part of the Ethics. Whereas the emphasis on mental origin is to lay the ground for his philosophy of mind, it is the second aspect that determines the further course of his epistemology. It shows that in his mature epistemology, Spinoza comes to distance himself from Descartes’s approach by discarding the notion of innate ideas. Or more to the point: the Cartesian classification of ideas into innate, adventitious, and invented ideas is undermined and substituted for the claim that all ideas involve all the features for which this classification stood.39 More generally speaking, we can say that unlike in Descartes, where the epistemological focus is on the discussion of different types of representational contents, Spinoza’s epistemology is rather organized around the inquiry into man’s conceptual capacities.40

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Truth and Adequacy: The Grounds of the Possibility of Epistemological Evaluation Having communicated what he takes our ideas or cognitions to be, Spinoza goes on, in E 2d4, to say: By adequate idea I understand an idea which, insofar as it is considered in itself, without relation to an object, has all the properties, or intrinsic denominations of a true idea.41 Exp.: I say intrinsic to exclude what is extrinsic, viz. the agreement of the idea with its object.42

In this definition, Spinoza draws a parallel between “adequate” and “true” ideas, stating that, in principle,43 truth and adequacy are coextensive terms. All and only adequate ideas are true ideas. Yet, as the explication shows, behind this statement is a functional difference. The notion of truth establishes what we expect to be the case for an idea which we consider to be true: it must, so E 1a6 claims, “agree with its object.”44 Whether or not this commits Spinoza to a correspondence theory of truth is a controversial issue;45 what is clear, though, is that adequacy is distinguished from truth by not being a matter of “agreement” or “correspondence” with some extra-mental object. Due to this difference, Spinoza can later use the notion of adequacy as some kind of truth criterion, which allows him to decide whether or not a given idea is true. Naturally, that adequacy must be coextensive with truth is a prerequisite for its being applicable as a truth criterion. Yet, another point is perhaps even more important: a property of ideas can only serve as a truth criterion if it is detectable without our presupposing that someone already knows the truth; otherwise, we would run in a vicious circle. This is why Spinoza states that adequacy consists in the “intrinsic denominations of a true idea,” thus abstaining from lending it that feature which constitutes its truth. All told, this definition thus alleges that we can notice an idea’s adequacy without already knowing its being true, whereas its being true can be exhibited by the proof of its adequacy. But why is the concept of truth, which is obviously the very reason for Spinoza’s interest in the adequacy of ideas, clarified in an axiom at the beginning of Part 1, rather than defined at the beginning of Part 2 of the Ethics? It has to be pointed out here that in scholastic philosophy truth was considered, among other notions, as one of the transcendental terms; as such it belonged to the most fundamental concepts of

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metaphysics. Spinoza was familiar with this tradition, as is clear from the way in which the concept of truth is discussed, together with two other transcendental terms, viz., oneness and goodness, in the appendix called Metaphysical Thoughts to his Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy.” There, however, Spinoza explicitly claims that truth is not “a transcendental term, or affection of being. For it can only be said improperly – or if you prefer, metaphorically – of the things themselves.”46 This shows that although Spinoza is explicitly inspired by scholastic transcendental philosophy here, he is dismissing the notion that truth belongs to the transcendental terms. By the time he wrote the Ethics, Spinoza’s views about transcendental philosophy certainly were more differentiated, but the overall strategy is the same.47 Voicing his conception of truth in the beginning of his metaphysics, Spinoza affirms the intuition at the bottom of transcendental philosophy that the conception of truth one maintains is crucial to one’s metaphysical position. But he is not rejecting his earlier, rather deflationary, view embraced in the Metaphysical Thoughts that truth can only improperly be said of the things themselves. He still takes truth to be a property of ideas or thoughts, but not of things. It is our idea of a thing which, insofar as it agrees with its object, is called true, and this is also the basis on which he can later maintain coextensiveness of truth and adequacy in the way discussed. So far, we have been provided with a preliminary grasp of what truth is and how it must be related with the property of adequacy in order to allow for an epistemological evaluation of our ideas. But we have not said anything about what adequacy is. Ethics 2d4 does not tell us this, and the explication, which clearly precludes adequacy from consisting in an idea’s agreement with its object, does not specify this either. Therefore: What is meant by the term “intrinsic denomination,” or more to the point: To what property of true ideas does it refer? This issue is only addressed in the last sentence of E 2p11c, where Spinoza equates inadequate perception with a perception we have insofar as God has both the idea constituting our mind and the idea of another thing.48 Unfortunately, this move, as well as the whole corollary, is extremely difficult to make sense of.49 But so much is clear: whether or not an idea is adequate is a matter of the relation between the idea in question and other ideas. Thus, when Spinoza calls adequacy an intrinsic denomination, he is not saying that it is a property of isolated ideas. It’s a property of ideas which we may detect when,

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spinoza’s epistemology 153 abstaining from any consideration of how they match with extra-mental reality, we examine them in their relation to other ideas. Hence, by stating that adequate ideas contain all intrinsic denominations of true ideas, it is not precluded that adequacy is itself a relational property. This sheds new light on the relation of Spinoza’s epistemology with Descartes’s approach. It is well known that Descartes considers the clarity and distinctness of an idea as the criteria for its truth. An idea is clear, for him, if it is evident through itself or derived in an evident manner from self-evident ideas; and it is distinct, when, in addition, it is so separate from all other ideas, that its content consists in nothing but clear ideas.50 In order to decide whether an idea, which we actually have, is true therefore, we not only have to single it out mentally and consider it in isolation from all other ideas we also have in our mind. Given the notion of clarity, we also would have to reconstruct all our knowledge by deriving it from simple ideas. In sum, we can say that Descartes’s criteria for truth largely express the foundationalist ambition of his epistemology. Spinoza famously adopted the Cartesian equation of true knowledge with clear and distinct ideas in the TIE, for instance, when saying that simple things can only be known by clear and distinct ideas.51 Even in the Ethics, he employs the terminology of clear and distinct ideas in several places.52 There, however, Spinoza no longer appeals to the notion of clear and distinct ideas as a criterion for truth. That we have clear and distinct ideas of things is considered a result of our epistemic efforts, not a criterion we may use to get started. This is no less than a reflection of the fact that in his mature epistemology, Spinoza comes to challenge Descartes’s foundationalist epistemology. Unlike Descartes, Spinoza defends a holistic view of the mental according to which the very content of an idea depends on its relation with other ideas contained in the same mind;53 and thereby he is also undermining the notion of simple ideas at the bottom of Descartes’s truth criteria. Given Spinoza’s holism, therefore, the notion of clarity and distinctness must be substituted for another truth criterion, which also allows for holism. This is, I think, the reason why, or rather the function with regard to which, he introduces the notion of “adequacy” in E 2d4. To conclude, we can thus say that – like his conception of ideas – Spinoza’s views on truth and adequacy show that he is dissociating himself, step by step, from the kind of innativist rationalism that was defended by Descartes.

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Ideas in God: Spinoza’s Metaphysical Rationalism It is high time to take a closer look at one of Spinoza’s most typical, or to put it more bluntly, idiosyncratic, ways of expressing his epistemological views: the notion that there are ideas of certain things in God. It is first used in E 2p3 which says: In God there is necessarily an idea, both of his essence and of everything that follows from him.54

At first glance, this does not look like an epistemological tenet about the issue of human knowledge, but rather a statement exhibiting a basic feature of reality. It points out that there exists an idea in God of everything there is. Yet, it is by the appeal to E 2p3 that some of the most dubitable knowledge claims put forward in the Ethics are defended.55 This observation suggests that the assumption of there being an idea of all there is in God serves as some kind of guarantee to ensure the complete intelligibility of being. Given these usages of E 2p3 in later demonstrations, it is the gist of this proposition that all there is must be, by the very nature of being, within the reach of knowledge and understanding.56 E 2p3 can thus be regarded as one of the pillars of Spinoza’s rationalism. But in which sense is this a rationalist commitment? Certainly not in the sense of Cartesian rationalism, which began from the insight that we always already have certain necessarily true ideas. Spinoza would not deny this insight, but to take this as the basic claim of rationalism is to put the cart before the horse.57 Rather, to opt for rationalism requires us, he thinks, to embrace the view that given the nature of being, things are such as to be fully known and fully understood. And he thinks that, once we have got this right, we also get into the position to discern the nature and content of our ideas in a way that alone amounts to the discovery of our necessarily true ideas. Hence, unlike Descartes’s epistemologically grounded rationalism, Spinoza’s is relying on the metaphysical notion of the complete intelligibility of being. While, apparently, this shifts the burden of defending rationalism to another field of philosophy, viz., metaphysics, it also frees epistemology from the charge of refuting skepticism. Or more to the point: as skepticism is precluded already by the adoption of the metaphysical tenet that all being is intelligible, the task left to epistemology is to show how human beings actually achieve knowledge and understanding. In sum, we can therefore say that, given Spinoza’s

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spinoza’s epistemology 155 own version of rationalism, epistemology is first and foremost aimed at demonstrating that, and how, humans are apprehending all that Spinoza claims is intelligible in his metaphysics.

c l a s s e s o f k n ow l e d g e a n d d i m e n s i o n s of reliability Spinoza’s classification of our ideas into different types, or “genera,” of knowledge is certainly one of the central doctrines of his epistemology. This doctrine is developed only toward the end of Part 2 of the Ethics in E 2p40s2. There, Spinoza distinguishes four ways of perceiving, or conceptualizing, things, which then he divides into three classes or “genera” of knowledge.58 The first “genus”, which is called “opinion or imagination”, contains two species of concepts: those originating in the senses and those mediated through signs. Deriving from representations of singular things, both these species constitute rich classes of perceptions of their own. Presumably, Spinoza’s notion of the imagination is meant to cover the whole range of everyday thought, where overgeneralizations in fact often dominate our concepts of things.59 The second “genus” of knowledge, also called reason, or “ratio”, subsumes all the adequate ideas we have of the properties shared by the things of a certain kind. As explicated in E 2p40s1, these ideas, which we acquire by forming “common notions”, ideally provide us with the points of departure for inferential processes and are meant to constitute valid foundations of reasoning. The third “genus” of knowledge is famously equated with intuitive knowledge, or rather intuitive science, or scientia intuitiva in Latin. It is explained in E 2p40s2 as proceeding “from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things,”60 and presented later on as the very goal of epistemic perfection. We shall discuss these three genera of knowledge separately in later sections. In this section, however, let me address the question of why Spinoza takes such a classification to be a useful tool for his epistemological concerns. What does he gain by dividing all our thoughts into different classes? It is worthwhile mentioning at this point that similar classifications are already discussed in the Short Treatise and in the TIE.61 Apparently, the notion that classifying our cognitions may be of some use is a pervasive element of Spinoza’s epistemological thought. It would be wrong, however, to infer that the classifications themselves just

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remained the same in all these texts. On the contrary, there are important differences in the conception of the singular categories. Note, for instance, that reason is in both the Ethics and the TIE described as some kind of knowledge by inference. But it is only in the Ethics that Spinoza takes its result to consist in adequate knowledge.62 This shows that even with respect to this pervasive feature, Spinoza’s epistemology undergoes important developments. Still, the very fact that Spinoza uses such classifications of cognitions in all his epistemological writings is instructive: He obviously assumes that there are stable correlations between ways of acquiring ideas and our entitlement to rely on them. Thus, he is committed to an assumption that is also at the root of most reliabilist approaches in contemporary epistemology, namely, that distinct types of cognition differ with regard to their epistemic reliability. But what does “reliability” precisely mean in Spinoza’s approach? Is not this notion, one might object, beyond the point, considering the framework we have sketched in the previous section? Certainly, the envisaged reliability cannot consist in an idea’s being more or less likely to be true, for, according to Spinoza, all ideas are to some extent true, and remarkably this assumption is taken up by the example of the rule of three, “regula de tribus”, which is used in all three texts to illustrate the differences among the several categories. It is one of the points of this comparison that in all cases the fourth number we are looking for is rightly identified. Taking this at face value, it must be possible to know the very same thing in different ways, forming true ideas by different means as it were. This alleges that reliability is not simply a matter of a cognition’s truth-inductiveness – that is, of how likely it yields true ideas, according to Spinoza. Therefore, rather than thinking of cognitions’ presumptive truth-inductiveness, I suggest differentiating between several dimensions of reliability in Spinoza along the lines of the following considerations: (1) The more reliable a cognitive process is, the more we are enabled to see the very reach of the truth we have got by it. Thus, while a true answer to a mathematical question can be given, in principle, by repeating something we know from hearsay, the knowledge we get from hearsay is extremely limited in its reach. It only bears on isolated particular facts and it will never allow for a judgment of whether in a given situation we mistakenly rely on them. (2) The more reliable a cognitive process is, the more it yields causal knowledge and provides us thus with an understanding of why

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spinoza’s epistemology 157 certain things are what they are. This is why it is better to get a grasp of the rule of proportionality by which the searched-for fourth number is calculated than to rely on what we are told by other people. For only a grasp of this rule puts us into the epistemic position to causally derive the result by our proper means. (3) The more reliable a cognitive process is, the more determinately it disposes us to embrace its target notion and to affirm what is required. This is what is behind Spinoza’s contention that given “the numbers 1, 2, and 3, no one fails to see that the fourth proportional number is 6.”63 Unfortunately, however, as Spinoza is quite aware, this is also due to the fact that in this case the problem is articulated with regard to “the simplest numbers” only. A crucial interpretive question is therefore whether, and if so how, this kind of determinate disposition can be achieved with regard to more complex issues. For now, let me just point out that there exists a dimension of reliability, according to Spinoza, which is due to the fact that some things are just known in a very determinate way. Coming back to the initial question, we can say that behind Spinoza’s pervasive usage of classifications of knowledge is the reliabilist conviction that types of cognition are correlated with types and degrees of reliability. Unlike most contemporary approaches, Spinoza’s version of epistemic reliabilism is characterized by an internalist twist. What is important to our quest for knowledge is not only that our cognitive activities increase the amount of true ideas, but that we get more certainty, where “certainty” has both an objective and a subjective meaning. What we ultimately may achieve is a distinctive reflective sense of what we can objectively rely on, and this provides us with a subjective feeling of epistemic safety. Clearly, the classifications suggested in all the epistemological writings support this aim. But in the Ethics, Spinoza also pursues an additional goal. Considering how the three genera of knowledge are developed in this text, the classification is not simply meant to suggest a method or tool to sort out our ideas with respect to their reliability. More important is this: by establishing different ways of knowing, Spinoza also provides support for the view that man is able, in principle, to improve his epistemic position, or even to achieve perfection. Thus, behind the conception of the three genera of knowledge is the contention that the human mind’s capacities are such as to be consistent with the ambition of his radical rationalism. It is against this background that I now discuss the three kinds of knowledge one after the other.

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t h e fi r s t g e n u s o f k n ow l e d g e : i m ag i n at i o n o r t h e g ro u n d s o f m a n ’ s e p i s t e m i c ac c e s s to reality When he introduces the classification of the three genera of knowledge in E 2p40s2, Spinoza explicitly says that he is drawing general conclusions from previous discussion. With regard to the first genus of knowledge, also named “imagination or opinion”,64 it is, in particular, two pieces of text that are important here. Obviously, Spinoza invokes the preceding scholium where he explained how universal concepts are created by categorizing objects with respect to perceived, imagined, or memorized similarities.65 More crucial, perhaps, is the passage between E 2p16 to E 2p18s, where the notion “imaginatio” (and its corresponding verb, “imaginari”) is first introduced66 and accounted for by means of a cognitive-psychological model.67 There, it is not only explained how imaginative concepts are psychologically brought about, but Spinoza also prepares the ground for the claim alleged in the stipulation of the first genus that even imaginative processes provide us with some kind of knowledge. Before addressing the question in which sense we can be said to know things by the imagination, therefore, let us examine Spinoza’s cognitive-psychological model in more detail.

Some Bits of Cognitive Psychology In Spinoza’s psychological vocabulary, the word “imaginatio” has an extraordinarily wide meaning. This is due to two factors. First, the term is used both to describe a cognitive process and to refer to the representations in which this process results. Perhaps, one might say, this is not very exciting, as this is a common characteristic of our epistemic language. We can apply the verb “to know” to both the process by which we become acquainted with an object and to the relation we thereby establish and hold to it; and the same is true for other epistemic predicates such as “to see” or “to sense”. The reason why this may strike us as odd with regard to the imagination is simply that, unlike in the case of the mentioned examples, the concept of the process of imagining does not imply a veridical relation to an external object. Thus, in our daily talk, “to imagine” is not an epistemic verb. We shall, however, see shortly that Spinoza’s concept of imagination essentially departs from this practice. Even more remarkable is a second point: Spinoza is not distinguishing between different kinds of processes.68 Or even more to the

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spinoza’s epistemology 159 point: he is abstaining from drawing distinctions one would expect him to draw. Considering, for instance, how in E 2p16 Spinoza characterizes the process by which imaginative representations are brought about, one is tempted to say that Spinoza’s description is in essential respects underdetermined. Not only are all imaginations prompted by an affection between two distinct bodies, the subject’s own body and an external body, one of which is affecting the other.69 But what’s even worse: regarding the content of imaginative representations, any imagination is constituted by a complex of at least three different (types of ) ideas: the (complex of ideas constituting the) idea of the subject’s own or affected body, the (complex of ideas constituting the) idea of the external or affecting body, and the idea of the affection(s) between those bodies. Thus, the imagination is from the very beginning conceived of as a cognitive process entailing at least two entities besides the imagining mind, the affected and the affecting bodies, and as representing them both, so that ultimately the notion of a categorical distinction between sensation (or cognitions representing internal events) and perception (or ideas representing external objects) is undermined. Furthermore, Spinoza takes the imagination to be indifferent also with regard to several questions one might wish to raise about its representational content and/or its phenomenology. Consider, for instance, what he discusses at E 2p17s, E 2p18, and E 2p18s: whether the intended object actually exists, that is, whether it is present or absent, when we imagine it; whether we conceive of it as present or as absent, that is, whether we think of the process as an instance of perception, fantasy, or recollection; and whether, finally, some external body is actually affecting us or whether we are just reminded of an earlier affection by an external body by means of an associative process. All these questions do not matter for a representation’s counting as an instance of imagination. Certainly, Spinoza does not mean to preclude any distinction between different kinds of imaginations such as perceptions, sensations, instances of memory, and fancy. That these are distinct types of processes, which essentially differ when considered from a phenomenological perspective, is not denied in the Ethics. On the contrary, Spinoza makes it quite clear that what he refers to as “imaginations or opinions” is a class of cognitions, which may contain subclasses to be described quite distinctly. It is, in Aristotelian terminology, a “genus”, rather than a “species”.70 But Spinoza is obviously not willing to weigh phenomenological differences constituting the species as a reason for establishing further epistemological classes.

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These observations explain several claims underlying the stipulation of the first genus of knowledge. First and foremost, note that Spinoza’s neglect of phenomenological considerations is a programmatic move. Even though he accepts the idea of several phenomenologically distinct types of sensory cognitions, he does not think those distinctions to be so important as to outweigh the fact that the cognitive processes from which they all arise are only of a very limited epistemic reliability. He is obviously of the opinion that phenomenology simply doesn’t matter for epistemology.71 Therefore, whether we perceive an object which is actually present, whether we imagine it to be present, or whether, finally, we merely undergo a hallucination, does not make a big difference for Spinoza. And indeed, if these cognitions are just the common result of the very same kind of physiological processes, that is, affections of our own body by external bodies, as well as their representation in our mind, then we may rightly assume that they all provide us with more or less the same picture of what the world is like.

Imaginative Ideas as Inadequate Knowledge Unfortunately, the picture of the world which the imagination creates in us is such that it cannot possibly provide us with adequate ideas. On the contrary, as Spinoza discusses in detail in the passage between E 2p25 and E 2p29, all ideas constituted by the imagination are inadequate. Imagining an external body by means of having an idea of our own body’s affections gives us only a confused idea of the external body, and no less confused are the ideas of our own body or the affective event itself. Likewise, the reflexive idea of our mind, insofar as it is derived from the sensation of our body, is necessarily confused, whence it comes that our primitive self-awareness is often misleading. It is not surprising therefore, when Spinoza concludes in E 2p29c: From this it follows that as long as the human mind perceives things from the common order of nature [i.e., according to the usual way of conceptualizing the world], it does not have an adequate, but only a confused and mutilated knowledge of itself, of its own body, and of external bodies.72

Thus, the process of the imagination so conceptualized is such as to provide us with not very reliable representations of the things in the world, whether we mean to sense or perceive or else only to imagine them.

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spinoza’s epistemology 161 But why, one might ask here, does Spinoza at all consider our imaginations to yield knowledge, rather than simply belief or opinion? To answer this question, I suggest taking a closer look at the representations we get by imaginative processes. Considering the cognitivepsychological model underlying Spinoza’s conception of the imagination, we can take it for granted that in every imaginative process we acquire, with one stroke so to speak, a preliminary idea of three of the most basic features our world: ourselves (or our body), an external body or the world outside of us, and the causal relation between them. Moreover, given that the very idea we have of our own body is our mind,73 imagination at the same time also provides us with some kind of primitive self-awareness. Certainly, this all has neither brought us into the position to clearly distinguish between self and other, or mind and body, nor to understand how they are interrelated, and of course, we do not know the essences of these items either. What we have so far is nothing but a preliminary glimpse of these three things and their intricate connections. Still, given this understanding, we know that these three items exist. This insight, furthermore, is not just a necessary by-product of any affection registered or sensed by the subject; Spinoza also thinks that every instance of imagination is veridical, as it depends on at least one instance of real affection. Taken together, he can safely conclude that any imagination entails at least as much knowledge as to render mistaken the skeptical scenario of the world’s existence being a mere illusion. This shows that behind Spinoza’s obvious neglect of any phenomenological distinction that allows us to differentiate between sensation, perception, fancy, and hallucination is a twofold – negative and positive – epistemological commitment.74 On the one hand, he apparently thinks that our cognitive apparatus prompts us to err permanently about all that we can sensorily apprehend: the nature of ourselves, what is at stake in our affections, and the precise object of our cognition. But no less important, on the other hand, is the positive commitment underlying the notion of a first class of knowledge constituted by all kinds of imaginative cognitions: there are, Spinoza contends, a few issues on which we cannot possibly be mistaken, however wrong the conclusions are which we usually draw from our imaginations. That we exist, that there exist things outside of us, and that we are connected with them by regular causal connections, are tenets that all instances of imagination can teach us with indubitable certainty. We are thus granted, in any imaginative process, some kind of epistemic access to all those objects the knowability of which has been

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questioned in skeptical debates: our body, the external world, and the necessity of causal connection. This is also the reason, I suppose, why Spinoza regards our imaginative cognitions as cases of knowledge, rather than of mere belief, and I think that considered within his – admittedly extremely general – framework this is a justified view. If all cognitive processes that involve the sensory apparatus are taken to operate according the cognitive-psychological model developed in the passages between E 2p16 to E p218; if, furthermore, we suppose our bodies to always be affected in some way or another;75 and if, finally, our mind is such that we must have some awareness of what happens to our body,76 then we can indeed take it for granted that there is some knowledge in all human beings of themselves, of the external world, and of the relation between themselves and the world. Following Spinoza’s cognitive psychology, we cannot seriously doubt this, or else we are one of those skeptics “whose minds are . . . completely blinded, either from birth or from prejudice,” as it says in the TIE.77 To summarize, we can say that behind Spinoza’s stipulation of the first genus of knowledge is the contention that every man, or even every sentient subject, must necessarily have some kind veridical epistemic access to both reality or being and its most fundamental manifestations.

t h e s e c o n d g e n u s o f k n ow l e d g e : r e a s o n o r m a n ’ s c a pac i t y t o d e v e l o p a d e q uat e i d e a s Let us now come to the second genus of knowledge, also referred to as reason, “ratio”. As with respect to the first genus, in introducing this category in E 2p40s2 Spinoza is relying on previous exposition, namely, the doctrine of the common notions, which is developed in the four propositions preceding this scholium. Before discussing this doctrine, however, let us have a look at the cognitive-psychological prerequisites for one’s being capable of having or forming common notions.

The Complexity of the Human Mind: Some More Bits of Cognitive Psychology In E 2p29s, just after having concluded that in perceiving things from the common order of nature the mind has only inadequate knowledge, Spinoza goes on by commenting on this disenchanting conclusion in the following words:

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spinoza’s epistemology 163 I say expressly that the mind has, not an adequate, but only a confused knowledge . . . so long as it perceives things from the common order of nature, i.e., so long as it is determined externally, from fortuitous encounters with things, to regard this or that, and not so long as it is determined internally, from the fact that it regards a number of things at once, to understand their agreements, differences, and oppositions. For so often as it is disposed internally, in this or another way, then it regards things clearly and distinctly, as I shall show below.78

For the first time in the Ethics, Spinoza explicitly advocates the view that man can, in principle, have adequate ideas, if perhaps not of particular things, then at least of their properties. But why, or in virtue of what, is this possible for the human mind? E 2p29s only mentions the mind’s being “internally determined” or “disposed”, but neither here, nor in the passage between proposition E 2p37 and E 2p40, is there provided any further information about this disposition. Presumably, a crucial role is played by the notion of the human mind’s complexity. In E 2p14, Spinoza has claimed that any mind’s capability to perceive a great many things is correlated to its body’s capability to be affected by external bodies, and in E 2p15, he adds that considering the composition of the human body mentioned in the postulates after the physical digression, the human mind must consist in a very complex idea.79 This assumption may be sufficient to ascribe to the human mind, on a general level, the capacity to regard “a number of things at once,” and even to draw comparisons among them, so that it may “understand their agreements, differences, and oppositions”; it does not allow, however, for discerning a special faculty in virtue of which the human mind is able to do this. Considered from a cognitive psychological point of view therefore, this might seem rather unsatisfying. Yet, it shows, I think, that by stipulating a second genus of knowledge and calling it “reason”, Spinoza does not wish to ascribe to humanity an additional, special cognitive faculty. But can he really do without one? Perhaps he assumes that all we need to account for human rational achievements from a cognitive-psychological perspective has already been provided by the model explaining the imagination. And indeed, given the complexity of the human mind, the very same cognitive apparatus that allows for all kinds of imaginative processes also enables us to perform other and wholly different kinds of cognitive operations which do, however, yield adequate knowledge.

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But in what do these cognitive operations consist? The crucial point is, I think, that the mind is focusing on a series of affections rather than on a singular affective event. That said, we can assume that the operations in question are best described in terms of a comparative analysis of the contents of our imaginative ideas, or the things perceived, upon their commonalities and distinctions. Consistently, the second genus of knowledge is defined, in E 2p40s2, as constituted by our “adequate ideas of the properties of things,”80 rather than of some particular thing itself.

The Contents of Rational Knowledge So far, we have seen that, given the complexity of the human mind, one is capable of having adequate ideas if one considers things according to those properties they share or do not share with each other. The question arises what Spinoza has in mind here. What properties, which the human mind acquires by means of drawing comparisons between the things perceived or imagined, are these ideas about? To answer this question, I suggest taking a closer look at the doctrine of the common notions. First, however, we have to consider the way in which Spinoza reinterprets this term, which has a long-standing history in philosophy. It is generally accepted that the idea of “common notions” or “common conceptions” goes back to the Aristotelian concept of an axiom, or “koinai ennoiai”, where it was meant to invoke concepts shared naturally by all human beings; and from this time onward, the concept was used in many different contexts. Cicero appealed to it in his writings in relation to both epistemological and ethical arguments.81 In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the term was used mostly in connection with geometry.82 Among the medieval scholastics, Aquinas invoked it in order to advocate the notion that all men have an idea, if not of all the detailed consequences, then at least of the principles of natural law.83 In early modern philosophy, finally, the term had a revival in Deist considerations,84 where it was used to defend the rationality of the idea of a supreme Deity, before Descartes came to use it interchangeably with the notion of innate ideas in his writings.85 Spinoza was apparently familiar with this background. This is most evident from his first mention of the term in E 1p8s2 where he says [I]f men would attend to the nature of substance, they would have no doubt at all of the truth of P7. Indeed this proposition [which claims

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spinoza’s epistemology 165 that it pertains to the nature of substance to exist] would be an axiom for everyone, and would be numbered among the common notions.86

Remarkably, however, in E 2p37 to E 2p39 a reinterpretation of the term is suggested, which turns the idea of “common notions” upside down. Following Spinoza’s proposal, what is essential for a notion to be “common” is its being about properties that presumably all things share, whereas the idea of some concepts naturally embraced by every human mind takes the back seat. The idea of some conceptions common to all human beings is substituted, as it were, for the more demanding assumption of there being certain properties which are common to all objects of (human) thought. Certainly, this understanding of common notions does not preclude that these are common to all human minds. On the contrary, if there really are such properties common to all things, we may expect that people may, sooner or later, come to know them. So, Spinoza can safely conclude, as he in fact does it in E 2p38c, “that there are certain ideas, or notions, common to all men.”87 Hence, even on Spinoza’s rather unusual account of the common notions, the traditional claim that some notions are common to all human beings, notions containing the principles behind some kind of shared knowledge, is maintained. Still, to make a case for some kind of shared knowledge was not Spinoza’s primary goal; his concern was rather to develop an understanding of the nature of things that allows us to see why we can rely on certain views and to discern the views on which we can in fact rely. But, to come back to our initial question, what are these views about? Obviously, Spinoza attaches a great deal of importance to the structural requirements any property must meet in order to be a possible object of a common notion. For a feature to be a candidate for being the object of a common notion, it must either (1) hold universally of all things (E 2p38) or (2) be shared by a type of things which mutually affect each other (E 2p39); in addition, it must (3) apply equally to the parts and to the whole of these things (E 2p37). Following these requirements, what we come to know by forming common notions are just the most general features of beings. In Spinoza scholarship, these features are sometimes associated with the doctrine of the infinite modes of the substance.88 Yet, references to the first part of the Ethics are wholly absent in this passage, and it must be possible therefore to make sense of Spinoza’s views on the contents of the common notions without invoking his metaphysical

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terminology. To do so, let us take a closer look at the structure of the demonstration to E 2p38, which is perhaps the key argument of this passage. Spinoza contends here that, if there is a feature which applies universally to all bodies, then we can expect that our mind, which is by definition equated with idea of our body, entails some knowledge of this feature. Prima facie, this might look like a rather weak and questionable claim, for two reasons. First, note that the notion of universal features applying to all bodies is clearly meant to voice a hypothesis only. Thus, all Spinoza claims here is that if there are such things as universal features of nature, then we can rely on the human mind’s developing an understanding of them sooner or later. Second, arguably, the awareness we have of our own body, which has been equated in E 2p13 with the human mind, provides us only with an imaginative idea of our own body.89 Why, therefore, should we expect this awareness to entail some adequate knowledge? On closer consideration, both points turn out to be unproblematic. Note that in E 2p37, where he first talks of the commonalities of things, Spinoza appeals to lemma 2 following E 2p13. This shows that the hypothesis of universal features of bodies is meant to invoke the geometrical properties of bodies underlying mechanist physics. But if this is what Spinoza has in mind here, then he can safely expect the reader to find his hypothesis plausible. The reader is either already familiar with Cartesian physics or has learned about its principles in the digression following E 2p13s. Thus, at least as far as the physical aspects of things are concerned, the hypothesis of universal features can be taken for granted. Regarding the second concern, note that E 2p38d explicitly mentions the adequate idea of our body as it exists in God. Given our previous interpretation of Spinoza’s “idea-in-God” talk, his claim here is that ideally even our own body can be known adequately, and thus our actual awareness of our body only matters insofar as it is a psychological precondition of any knowledge claim about our own body.

Reason and Geometrical Science To put it succinctly, the view Spinoza advocates in E 2p38d is this: given that Cartesian physics holds, we are, in principle, in a position to develop an adequate view of the nature of our own body as well as of any external body affecting us. What we come to know in forming common notions,

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spinoza’s epistemology 167 therefore, is coming close to the understanding of nature, or any kind of natural items, in terms of the causal explanations of mechanist physics. The question arises how this reading of E 2p38d fits with Spinoza’s radically rationalist ambitions. Does this not entail that ultimately Spinoza’s conception of reason – including the claim that the human mind is capable of adequate knowledge – relies on a particular and, notably historically occasioned, body of scientific knowledge? I think it is indeed an implication of Spinoza’s doctrine of the common notions that some sort of scientific inquiry plays a crucial role for our rational understanding of things and that the realization of our rational capacities is dependent in a sense upon historical factors. But this is not to say that it is irrevocably Cartesian physics on which reason depends, nor does this assumption weaken Spinoza’s case. Remember that Cartesian physics only supports the argument of E 2p38d insofar as it is an instance of a theory the principles of which satisfy the hypothetical condition. Hence, the argument is valid also with respect to other scientific theories, as long they are pursued in the same geometrical way as Descartes proposed it in his physics. Moreover, note that in E 2p39 Spinoza makes the case that similar kinds of concepts may be developed for other fields of knowledge, where the aim is no longer to identify the properties all things share with each other, but to understand what we, or our bodies, share with other beings of a certain type. Accordingly, we can apply the very same method underlying the doctrine of the common notions to form concepts of more specific objects, such as living beings, or beings having a mind of certain degree of complexity. What matters is just that we again begin by identifying the features constituting those specific objects carefully, features we share with them in the same manner in which we share the geometrical properties at the foundation of Cartesian physics with all other bodies. Finally, and most important to our present concern, it has to be emphasized that the mentioned function of geometrical science for Spinoza’s doctrine of the common notions is by no means disadvantageous for his metaphysically grounded rationalism. The assumption that the realization of our rational capacities is dependent on bodies of historically occasioned knowledge is a challenge only for those interpretations that reconstruct Spinoza’s rationalism by means of the notion of innate ideas, whereas it is quite in line with our interpretation of Spinoza’s rationalism as grounded in the metaphysical claim of the full intelligibility of being.

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To my mind, Spinoza indeed assumes that with the rise of modern sciences our ability to form common notions and to employ them in producing rational knowledge has significantly developed. This might seem striking, but it fits nicely with several statements where the usefulness of geometrical knowledge is praised. Remember, for instance, how, in the appendix to Part 1 of the Ethics, mathematics is praised for having taught the human race to think about the properties and essences of things independently from any consideration of natural aims.90 Or think of the preface to Part 3, where the geometrical method is invoked as a tool to construct an appropriate and morally neutral account of the emotions.91 In all these passages, Spinoza alleges that whether we actually succeed in understanding the properties of natural things depends, among other things, on insights and the display of methods of geometrical sciences. Hence, an important insight behind Spinoza’s doctrine of the common notions is the contention that scientific theories and methods can play a crucial role in the realization of our rational capacities. This is not to say that the usefulness of science is restricted to the development of new theories; its greatest value rather lies in the fact that it raises the perspicuity of self-reflection. Departing from a causal understanding of the properties that we share with other objects, we not only get a better understanding of the things outside us, but we can better reflect upon our own existence.92 In the most paradigmatic case – the case on which Spinoza develops his doctrine of the common notions – what we come to know first is our existence as physical bodies. But we can also employ our notions of human bodies, feeling subjects, or political bodies to reflect upon our existence as human bodies, feeling subjects, or members of a political community. In doing so, we will not just engage in introspection, but in applying the explanatory properties spelled out in scientific theories to ourselves, and we may develop a causal understanding of the contents of our minds that might turn out to be more efficient in improving our lives. All told, Spinoza’s doctrine of common notions shows that humans have, in principle, the possibility to do a better epistemic job than we usually do when, in our daily lives, we indulge in unguided contemplation. We just have to begin reasoning by conceptualizing reality along the lines of those properties we share with all things. Fortunately, for Spinoza, this method of proceeding has already been practiced with substantive results in mechanist physics, so our capacity to have adequate knowledge is beyond any reasonable doubt.

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spinoza’s epistemology 169

t h e t h i r d g e n u s o f k n ow l e d g e : intuitive science or the option of epistemic perfection The discussion of the imagination and the concept of imaginative knowledge has shown that, given Spinoza’s account, any sentient being has always and necessarily some kind of epistemic access to the most basic manifestations of reality – the external world, one’s self, and the relations between them. Moreover, the interpretation of his doctrine of common notions and the notion of reason has exhibited that the human mind is also capable, according to Spinoza, of having at least some adequate ideas of the properties shared by all beings. This, it has been argued, allows us to improve our epistemic position and to develop a better understanding of both ourselves and the things with which we interact. These are certainly good beginnings; they constitute real epistemic accomplishments that we may safely rely on. Yet, considering the ambition we have ascribed to Spinoza, namely, to demonstrate that all being can in principle be fully known and understood even by human subjects, this is only halfway satisfying. Imagination and reason provide us at best with a partial knowledge of the properties of beings, but neither with a full grasp of any singular thing nor with an understanding of reality in its full depth. It remains to be shown that it is possible for human beings to achieve perfection in knowledge, or, what amounts to the same, to have full knowledge of at least a few entities. It is against this background that I am now going to discuss the third genus of knowledge, also referred to as “intuitive knowledge” or “science”. Intuitive knowledge shares with reason the property of adequacy; but while the category of reason is meant to provide us with reliable points of departure for inferential processes, the notion of intuitive science marks an aim; it ensures, so to speak, the meaningfulness of our epistemic efforts. As Spinoza points out repeatedly in Part 5 of the Ethics, intuitive science constitutes the highest achievement the human mind can ever reach; thus, its notion is intimately connected with the eudaimonic ends for which we strive in our lives. Having said this, it is no surprise that many interpreters have been fascinated by the third genus of knowledge. However, what intuitive knowledge ultimately is, according to Spinoza, and how we are to arrive at it, has proved notoriously hard to determine. In what follows, I shall try to shed light on this by examining the definition of intuitive science and connecting it with some of Spinoza’s claims about God’s infinite intellect.

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The Twofold Definition of Intuitive Science In defining the third genus of knowledge, Spinoza is no longer drawing conclusions from previous epistemological analyses. Indeed, as we shall see shortly, this category is based on his metaphysics rather than on his epistemology and philosophy of mind. This already indicates that the third genus of knowledge is not in the same way present in our mundane – that is, daily and scientific – thought, as it has been shown to be for the imagination and reason. Being neither required for our having epistemic access to the manifestations of reality, nor presupposed as the adequate point of departure for rational inferential processes, intuitive science departs functionally from both imaginative cognitions and rational knowledge. Rather than constituting a foundational factor of either man’s daily thought or scientific accomplishments, it constitutes the ideal end of the development of the human mind. This can be corroborated by a closer look at the definition by which Spinoza introduces the third genus of knowledge in E 2p40s2, which says In addition to these two genera of knowledge, there is (as I shall show in what follows) another, third genus, which we shall call intuitive science. And this genus of knowing proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the [NS: formal] essence of things.93

Note that intuitive science is given a double specification here: With respect to the process of knowing, intuitive knowledge is described as a procedure departing “from an adequate idea of formal essences of certain attributes of God,” whereas with regard to the epistemic result, it is taken to consist in the adequate idea of a particular kind of object, namely, the formal essence of things. How these specifications are related to each other is not made explicit here, so it is unclear whether intuitive knowledge consists either in a certain method or procedure, or in the having of adequate ideas of a certain kind of objects identified here with the “formal essences of things”, or whether both are necessary.94 To address this question, we first have to get a better understanding of the two requirements voiced here.

Intuitive Knowing: “Scientia Intuitiva” as a Manner of Proceeding Considering the first specification, Spinoza is inspired by Descartes, who, in his early methodological treatise on the Rules for the

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spinoza’s epistemology 171 Direction of the Mind, proposes to proceed by means of inquiring, first, “what we can clearly and evidently intuit,” and then to deduce all other concepts from these intuitions.95 At first glance, this seems to challenge the line of interpretation chosen here. Having argued earlier that Spinoza’s metaphysically grounded rationalism dispenses with assuming innate ideas, we have to acknowledge that the way of proceeding invoked by Descartes is no longer a possible option for him. But this is not precisely what Spinoza is after when postulating the ideal of an intuitive science. In the definition quoted above, Spinoza only affirms that from the adequate idea of “the formal essences of certain attributes of God” intuitive knowledge of all things following from this idea can be deduced. Considered as a process, the definition of the third genus of knowledge is making a case for the possibility of Cartesian deduction, but not of Cartesian intuition. Now, to see why Cartesian deduction is possible according to Spinoza, one has to recall propositions E 1p15 and E 1p16 of the Ethics, which claimed Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.96

and From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes (i.e. everything which can fall under an infinite intellect).97

Given these propositions, ideas of beings must be entailed in the idea of God’s nature, and this in a way that, provided one has or has had the idea of the latter, adequate ideas of all other things must be deducible from it.98 We can thus say that by defining the third genus of knowledge in terms of a subject’s proceeding “from an adequate idea of the formal essences of certain attributes of God,” Spinoza introduces the notion of a way of knowing things according to the metaphysical order as it has been established in Part 1 of the Ethics.

Intuitive Knowledge: “Scientia Intuitiva” as Possession of Complete Knowledge of Particular Things Let us now take a closer look at the second specification given in the definition of the third genus of knowledge. It declares that, regarding its object, intuitive knowledge consists in “the adequate knowledge of the (formal) essences of things.” As has been pointed out by several

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interpreters, Spinoza is thinking here of the (formal) essences of particular things.99 But what are these (formal) essences? Generally, we can distinguish between two ways of talking about the essence of an entity in the Ethics, one of which is sometimes referred to as its “formal”, the other as its “actual”, essence. Unfortunately, Spinoza does not always explicitly say whether a certain passage or tenet is about the formal or about the actual essence; remarkably, such a clarification is even lacking in the definition of the concept of “essence” introduced in E 2def2. Therefore, any reconstruction of Spinoza’s views on the essences of things including the distinction between the two kinds of essences is ultimately a matter of interpretation. One point, however, is clear: Spinoza assumes that essences are not about types, but about individuals, where “individual” refers to both particular entities and wholes or instantiated properties of wholes. What we come to see in knowing the essence of a thing therefore are not the features that explain why a thing counts as an exemplar of a certain type; instead, we come to understand its existence in a certain way: we grasp it as a necessary consequence of its having the essence in question.100 In other words: the essence of a thing has to do with the grounds of its existence, not with its being of certain kind, and this is also what is suggested, independently of any specification, in E 2d2 where Spinoza claims I say that to the essence of any thing belongs that which, being given, the thing is posited and which, being taken away, the thing is necessarily taken away; or that without which the thing can neither be nor be conceived, and which can neither be nor be conceived without the thing.101

According to this definition, essences are the objects of a certain kind of concepts of things, namely, concepts which, if given, allow for inferring to the existence of its object, or, if inquired into, can be derived from our knowledge of the existence of them. This already alleges that two ways of engaging epistemically with the essence of a thing can be distinguished. We can, on the one hand, conceptualize the essence of a thing and ask whether it is such as to necessitate its existence, and we can, on the other hand, consider an existing entity and ask what essence it must have that allows us to explain its existence. Presumably, when distinguishing between formal and actual essences, it is these two ways of thinking about the essence of a thing that Spinoza wants us to differentiate. Thus, if we ask whether a conceived essence is such as to necessitate the thing in question, then

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spinoza’s epistemology 173 we talk about its formal aspect, whereas if we make an inference from our contemplation of the existence of a thing to its essence, then we examine its actual essence. Now, the crucial question is, of course, whether these notions mean, ultimately, the same thing, considered from different perspectives, or whether they can be taken to refer to separate features of things. Are, in other words, the formal and the actual essence of a thing identical, or do these terms denote different things? Spinoza’s answer to this question is as differentiated as it is clear. With respect to this question, he thinks, everything depends on what kind of object we are about to examine. If what we are contemplating is an eternal being, then its formal and actual essence must amount to the same essence. This is because an eternal being’s existence is entailed by its being eternal; and this in turn indicates that eternity is eventually an aspect of the essence of certain beings. In contrast, if we want to infer the existence of a finite thing from its formal essence, all we come to know is why it could possibly exist. Consisting at most in a manner of enduring, the existence of finite things is not entailed in its essence. This suggests that, notwithstanding E 2d2, what we need to know in order to account for the existence of a finite thing is more than merely its formal essence. To conclude, we can say that by equating the third genus of knowledge with the adequate ideas of the formal essences of things, thus giving a second specification of intuitive science, Spinoza is making a case for a type of knowledge which is about those properties of individuals that may serve as reasons to assume their existence. The objects to be known intuitively, in other words, are those features of individual entities that make their existence a comprehensible option, without already necessitating its realization.

The Infinite Intellect and the Option of Complete Knowledge of Particulars Our discussion of Spinoza’s metaphysical view about the essences of things suggests that claims of intuitive knowledge are subject to a serious restriction: unless the object in question is an eternal being, no insight into the necessity of its existence is acquired, as the formal essence of finite things only exhibits why they possibly exist. How, one might ask, are we ever in the position to know finite things fully, that is, in their fully grounded and necessary existence? Having defined intuitive knowledge also as “proceeding from an adequate idea of the formal essences of certain attributes of God,” there

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is a way out. As mentioned, what Spinoza is proposing with this specification is to proceed according to the metaphysical order established in Part 1 of the Ethics. This points to an option of knowing things which, while not explicitly claimed, is alleged in the definition of the third genus of knowledge given in E 2p40s2: the option that intuitive science constitutes the ideal knowledge by which an infinite intellect can or could have adequate ideas of all those “infinitely many things following from the necessity of the divine nature.” Following this option, what is knowable intuitively is not just how the formal essence of any given singular thing is to be deduced from the formal essence of certain attributes of God, but rather how all formal essences of all things follow from God’s nature. In other words, the infinite intellect would have knowledge of all formal essences of all beings at once. I cannot elaborate on this in detail, but let me emphasize that given Spinoza’s views on the uniqueness of God, nature, or reality, and moreover its necessity, and given finally the holistic structure of his metaphysical views about Godnature-reality, this provides the infinite intellect with a knowledge that is no longer subject to the restriction pointed out above. At least the infinite intellect must be such as to comprehend particular things not only insofar as they possibly exist, but also insofar as they, together with all other particulars, necessarily exist.102

The Epistemic Subject of Intuitive Science It has turned out that, from the perspective of the infinite intellect, full intuitive knowledge of all particular things, including the reasons necessitating their actual existence, is available. This shows that there is room, in Spinoza’s epistemology, for the option of complete knowledge, or of that knowledge corresponding to the claim of complete intelligibility posited previously by Spinoza’s metaphysical rationalism. The question remains what modal status, and in consequence, what epistemological function, this option has. Is it merely an ideal that is supposed to orient inquiry, while knowledge of this sort can never really be instantiated? Or may it be materialized, if not by our own mind, then by some kind of divine intellect? Or is it an option to be realized partially by the human mind, even though it is never in the position to know all formal essences of all particular things at once? Certainly, the easiest and most obvious answer to this question is to assume that this option is always already fully materialized by the infinite intellect, and that the human mind, being part of the infinite intellect, can

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spinoza’s epistemology 175 at least partially realize it, too. I must confess that I find this kind of explanation somewhat suspicious; to my mind, it hides rather than explains what is at stake here. Moreover, a closer examination of the passages in which the infinite intellect is mentioned shows that Spinoza did not want the reader to take his talk of an infinite intellect literally. Consider, for instance, how the term is used in E 1p16, where it first appears: Not only is the infinite intellect invoked here only to clarify the infinite scope of what follows from the necessity of the divine nature. No less striking is the fact that Spinoza is referring only to “everything which can fall under an infinite intellect”103, avoiding thereby commitment to the assumption that God actually is such as to have a faculty called “intellect”. Ultimately, however, my reserve is motivated by E 1p31s, where the infinite intellect, together with the finite intellect, is mentioned for the second time. Spinoza comments here on his usage of the term “actual intellect” in E 1p31 as follows: The reason why I speak here of actual intellect is not because I concede that there is any potential intellect, but because, wishing to avoid all confusion, I wanted to speak only of what we perceive as clearly as possible, i.e. of the intellection itself. We perceive nothing more clearly than that. For we understand nothing that does not lead to more perfect knowledge of the intellection.

Note that Spinoza rejects two views in one stroke here. In the first phrase, rejecting the notion of potential intellect, he makes it clear that his notion of the actual intellect is not to be understood in the way it was used in the Scholastic debate about Aristotle’s De anima. Thus, in the first instance, Spinoza rejects any interpretation of his views that operates along the lines the Averroïst idea of there being one singular divine possible intellect for all human beings.104 Spinoza then goes on by arguing, on a more general level, that, in order to account for some epistemic accomplishment, no faculty needs to be invoked. Instead, he suggests, we should simply acknowledge what we most perfectly know, namely, that there is intellection. Taking this seriously, rather than interpreting the notion of the infinite intellect as referring to a faculty ascribed to a divine subject, we should think of it in terms of denoting an infinite activity of intellection, namely, an infinitely powerful activity that may provide us with a complete understanding of infinitely many things’ essences. But whose intellection is this? one might ask. Who is it, in other words, who displays the activity referred to as (infinite) intellection in E 1p31s?

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My response to this is simply that Spinoza’s interest here is – as always when he is talking of the infinite intellect – to qualify the activity, not to identify a subject. This brings us back to our initial question, which was whether intuitive knowledge of particular things – not only insofar as they possibly exist, but also insofar as it is exhibited why their actual existence is necessary – can be held by human being or by some kind of divine intellect only. Spinoza’s view, as I see it, is this: Even though the human mind is never in the position to know all formal essences of all particular things at once, it cannot be denied either to have the right kind of knowledge. For, on what ground could the human mind be denied this? Being an idea, the human mind is of just the same kind as any intellect, finite or infinite. Thus, if there is knowledge of all formal essences of all particular things in God, then the same knowledge must potentially be accessible to the human mind. Moreover, in E 2p47, Spinoza ascribes “adequate knowledge of God’s eternal and infinite essence” to the human mind105 and thereby explicitly affirms that man has that instance of knowledge from which adequate knowledge of all formal essences of all particular things can be deduced. Certainly, as long as we are engaged in deducing it, we will not know them all at once. And given our finite existence, this engagement will perhaps never arrive at an end. In other words, we will never have full knowledge of what an infinite intellect knows, but this does not undermine the idea that full knowledge of all formal essences of all things at once is possible. We can reasonably have this idea and strive for our realizing it, step by step. To summarize, we can thus say that even if we abstain from understanding Spinoza’s talk of the infinite intellect literally, we can make a case for his holding the view that the ideal of full intuitive knowledge of all beings is both intelligible and realizable by our own means. The rationalist outlook of his metaphysics is such as it can be brought, in principle, to perfection. And this is not undermined by the fact that the ideal knowledge represented by scientia intuitiva is hardly ever fully realized, for he convincingly argues that is no reason to deny its realizability either.106

notes 1

Letter 2, to Henry Oldenburg, CW I: 167. Unless otherwise noted, translations are from Curley. In contrast to him, however, I do not capitalize the words “mind” and “body”. The quotation above is part of Spinoza’s answer to the question of what errors he finds in the philosophy of Descartes and Bacon.

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spinoza’s epistemology 177 2 See Della Rocca 2003: 84–88. Note that Spinoza’s radical rationalism has been emphasized also in the seminal works by Deleuze 1968; Gueroult 1968; and Matheron 1969, which initiated recent French Spinoza scholarship. For Deleuze’s rather qualified view on this issue, see also note 38. 3 This reductionist drive is in particular emphasized by Della Rocca’s view according to which Spinoza’s adherence to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) commits him to the denial of (almost) any conceptual bifurcation; cf. Della Rocca 2008: 6–8 and, for an early version, Della Rocca 2002: 14. See Renz 2018b for a critique of this radical reductionism. 4 Cf. E 1ap: 443. See also Bartuschat 1992: 18f. 5 See E 2p11, E 2p13, and E 2p14 for different aspects of this claim. 6 To underscore her claim that for Spinoza there is no sharp break between logical or epistemic terms, on the one hand, and psychological terms, on the other, Margaret Dauler Wilson has coined the formula that Spinoza’s ideas consist in “bits of God’s omniscience”; cf. Wilson 2001: 153. While I agree with her that ideas are both psychological and epistemic entities, I think her formula is misleading in one particular respect. Given Spinoza’s critique of anthropomorphism, we should abstain from ascribing ideas to God, as if He (or rather: It) had a mind like the human mind. As a consequence of this dissent, I also disagree with her about two other issues: First, I do not share her negative judgment that Spinoza’s theory of mind is fundamentally flawed (Wilson 2001: 126f.). Second, and more importantly, my approach to many of his epistemological tenets differs essentially from the interpretation she gives in her chapter on Spinoza’s epistemology in the 1996 first edition of this Companion. I would like to emphasize, though, that, although I am departing from her in this crucial point, my own research is in many instances inspired by her critical attitude toward several trends in Spinoza scholarship. 7 I have argued for this interpretation in Renz 2010: 170–76; 2018a: 145–49. See also Renz 2018b. 8 Cf. Garrett 2003: 86–93; Hampshire 2005 (first 1987): 108–12; De Djin 2011: 265–79; Renz 2012: 121–35; and Marshall 2013: 186–205 for exemplary interpretations of this aspect of Spinoza’s thought. 9 Cf. LeBuffe 2010 and Kisner 2011 for recent, though contrary, interpretations of this theme. 10 Garrett 1996: 287 points out that Spinoza’s metaethics is in line with what some would call “cognitivism” in contemporary metaethics. But this is not to say that “emotivism” or “non-cognitivism” is the main target of Spinoza’s critique. As Schnepf 2008: 109 argues, more important is his opposition to metaethical realism as alleged in the Scholastic conception of the “bonum” as an “entia realis”. 11 The extent to which the interventional intention of the TPP has shaped this text has recently been exhibited by James 2012: 4. In general, however, the importance

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178 ursula renz of Spinoza’s epistemology for politics is to be located on a methodological – or as Saar 2013: 93f. has recently put it: meta-theoretical–level (cf. Bartuschat 1992: 226 for a similar point). In other words, philosophy and knowledge are prerequisite for being a good political theorist, not for being a good citizen. 12 These doctrines discussed in the second half of Part 5 of the Ethics have long been the subject of complaints (cf. Bennett 1984: 357; Curley 1988: 84). Recently, several interpreters have been successful in making sense of them; and while they have developed quite different reconstructions of this passage, they all have succeeded in taking the notion seriously that the mind, as it exists eternally, consists in some kind of true knowledge or eternal truth. Cf. Moreau 1994: 515; Garrett 1996: 282f.; 2003: 195f.; Nadler 2006: 262; Schnepf 2006: 190; LeBuffe 2010: 209; Renz 2010: 315f.; 2018a: 271f.; Marshall 2013: 223f.; and Soyarslan 2014: 237. 13 Cf. §§18–29. 14 Cf. §§30–36. 15 The methodological program behind the text is summarized in §49. Note that the first and only fully realized part of this program is still dedicated to an analytical task, viz., to “show how to distinguish a true idea from all other perceptions,” whereas the strictly speaking methodological steps are planned for parts two to four only. Thus, the text just breaks off, before it gets to its revisionary concerns. 16 Interpreters often tend to neglect or underrate the conceptual gap behind the differences between the technical terminologies of the two texts, and they thus read the TIE as some kind of methodological preface to the Ethics. In contrast, I think that on the level of concepts there is much development going on between the TIE and the Ethics. In consequence, I am abstaining from referring to the TIE to clarify the concepts of Spinoza’s mature epistemology and only use it to outline the basic assumptions of his general epistemological ambitions. Note that in assuming a gap between Spinoza’s early and his mature views on epistemology, I am not taking sides with any of the parties of the philological debate around the order of Spinoza’s early writings. 17 Moreau 1994: 17–63 proposes a close reading of this passage (the first eleven paragraphs of the TIE) along the lines of its stylistic features. 18 These goods are later, in §3, identified with the classical triad of wealth, honor, and sensual pleasure. This indicates that more important than any consideration of what are particularly satisfying or frustrating goods is the issue of what formal properties a thing must have to qualify for a true good. 19 CW I: 7. The quotation departs from Curley’s translation in that it speaks of “a true good” rather than of “the true good”. Since Latin doesn’t have articles, and since this is the first mention of the phrase “verum bonum,” I think the indefinite article is more appropriate here. 20 Cf. Popkin 2003.

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spinoza’s epistemology 179 21 The classical text is Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism (Sextus Empiricus 2000). 22 Sextus Empiricus 2000: chapter 21. 23 This assumption, which I have featured elsewhere as cognitivism with respect to the emotions (cf. Renz 2012: 124f.), was a widespread view in Hellenistic ethics, shared by such otherwise different schools as Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonism. It is also widely received in early modern philosophy. In his theory of affects, Spinoza is obviously influenced by Stoicism, but this introductory passage of the TIE operates rather against the background of Pyrrhonism. 24 See A. Garrett 2003: 73–86, for an illuminating discussion of the TIE within the context of early modern discussion about method. 25 This has been convincingly shown by Garrett 2003: 80f. 26 The author of the TIE makes use of this in a didactic manner, when in §11, reflecting on the experience he has just made in his own meditation, he concludes: “I saw this, however: that so long as the mind was toward these thoughts, it was turned away from these things, and was thinking seriously about the new goal. That was a great comfort to me” (CW I: 10). 27 See also Doney 1975 for Spinoza’s struggle against Cartesian doubt in the early works. The anti-skepticism of Spinoza’s mature philosophy has been emphasized by Della Rocca 2007, 2008: 127–36; and Perler 2007. 28 CW I: 22. 29 CW I: 22. 30 In §38 of the TIE, Spinoza defends his notion of method as follows: “From this it may be inferred that method is nothing but a reflexive knowledge or an idea of an idea; and because there is no idea of an idea, unless there is first an idea, there will be no method unless there is first an idea. So that method will be good which shows how the mind is to be directed according the standard of a given true idea” (CW I: 19). 31 CW I: 33. At this point, it’s worth saying a few words about why, in my opinion, Spinoza did not finish the TIE. To infer from the terminology employed in the analytical passages of this text, Spinoza is relying in many respects on a set of broadly speaking Cartesian intuitions, which are bound, to some extent at least, to a framework that embraces epistemological foundationalism, or the notion that true knowledge derives from, or is grounded on, first principles. As I am going to show in the next section, in the Ethics Spinoza adopts a different, that is, holistic, outlook on both the mental and on the criteria for what counts as knowledge. This indicates that, at some point in his career, Spinoza must have come to think of our (adequate) ideas in holistic terms; and we can presume that, once he has made this step, he must have realized that some crucial aspects of his early methodological views are no longer defensible.

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180 ursula renz 32 See the second subsection for a discussion of this move. 33 CW I: 447. Here, as in what follows, I shall not follow Curley’s translation in capitalizing the word “mind”. 34 Cf. in particular Gueroult 1974: 21. See also Renz 2010: 93–97; 2018a: 78–82, for a longer discussion of this issue. 35 Descartes in CSM II: 25f. 36 Cf. his second objection in Descartes CSM II: 123. 37 CSM II: 127. 38 Cf. Renz 2010: 93–97; 2018a: 78–82, for a more detailed analysis of E 2d3 against this background. 39 That Spinoza rejects Descartes’s classification is claimed by Delahunty 1985: 24 and Allison 1987: 114. That he still adheres to some kind of innativism is maintained by Wilson 1996: 137n36; Garrett 2003: 82; Marshall 2008: 82–85; and Soyarslan 2016: 20f. In Renz 2010: 106f.; 2018a: 90f., I have argued that according to Spinoza, all ideas have a certain property which, according to Descartes, characterizes only innate ideas: they suggest that given a certain idea, certain inferences are to be drawn necessarily; but see also Renz 2014: 473n24 for an exposition of this discussion, and Renz 2014: 484n43, for a critique of Marshall’s equation of common notions with innate ideas as defended in Marshall 2008: 62–66. The most profound way to negotiate this issue is still that of Deleuze, who claimed in one of the most intriguing passages of his first book on Spinoza: “One of the paradoxes of Spinoza – and this is not the sole instance in which we will see it at work – is to have rediscovered the concrete force of empiricism in applying it in support of a new rationalism, one of the most rigorous versions ever conceived” (Deleuze 1990: 149; see Deleuze 1968: 134). 40 This is of course not an absolute contrast. So, Descartes’s classification of representational contents into innate, adventitious, and invented ideas is, superficially considered, based on a differentiation between distinct ways of acquiring ideas (cf. CSM II: 26), whereas Spinoza is entering the discussion of the epistemic value of our cognitions by examining different contents provided by the imagination (cf. E 2p24–31, CW I: 468–72). Still, in their overall tendency, the two approaches point in quite different directions. This fact is often underappreciated, to my mind. 41 CW I: 447. 42 CW I: 447. 43 I say “in principle” because there is a structural dissimilarity between the two notions that seems to undermine coextensionality between them: adequacy allows, or even calls for, degrees, whereas truth and falsity require clear distinctions. I cannot discuss this in detail here, but let me just mention that this appearance of inconsistency can be dissipated by a closer analysis of how those true

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spinoza’s epistemology 181 ideas which we actually have are incorporated in all our ideas. See also Renz 2010: 266–68; 2018a: 257–60, for further discussion. 44 CW I: 410. It may seem striking that Spinoza employs the normative formulation that a true idea must agree with its object. Yet, as indicated by the formulation in the main text, I take this to express the norm underlying our talk about true ideas, rather than our search for them. Moreover, note that the Latin term for object is “ideatum”; thus, this axiom seems to express something trivial. However, Curley’s translation rightly indicates that Spinoza is referring to the thing itself and not just to its ideal representation; cf. also Walther 1971: 139n1 to §3, for this point. 45 That he advocates a correspondence theory of truth is affirmed by Curley 1969; Hampshire 1994; Schmid 2008, and myself (cf. Renz 2010: 265; 2018a: 227f.). But cf. Mark 1973; Hacking 1975: 131; and Curley 1994, for critique and qualification of this view. 46 CW I: 312f. 47 The relation between Spinoza’s metaphysics and other ways of inheriting Scholastic transcendental philosophy in the seventeenth century has been examined in the very instructive, although largely ignored, monograph by Schnepf 1996. 48 CW I: 456. I have dealt with this corollary in detail in Renz 2010: 176–84; 2011: 104–6; and 2018a: 157–61. 49 Marshall 2013: 24–30 rightly distinguishes between two senses of “adequacy”: the containment sense and the causal sense. 50 Descartes defines the terms “clarity” and “distinctness” in §45 of the first part of his Principles of Philosophy (cf. Descartes 1985: I: 207f ). However, for a better understanding of his views on this issue, the reader is advised to consult Rule three of his Rules for the Direction of the Mind (cf. CSM I: 13–15.) Note that, even though a Latin version of text was only published in 1701 in Amsterdam, it is easily possible that Spinoza knew the manuscript. Leibniz bought a copy of the manuscript, when he was in Amsterdam in 1670, and Jan Hendrik Glazemaker, who was also among the translators of Spinoza’s posthumous works into Dutch, translated this text into Dutch also; cf. Springmeyer 1970 and, for Glazemaker’s contribution to the translation of Spinoza’s works, Israel 2001, 275–94. 51 See §63, where he says: “And since a fictitious idea cannot be clear and distinct and since all confusion results from the fact that the mind knows only in part a thing that is a whole, or composed of many things and does not distinguish the known from the unknown, it follows, first, that if an idea is of some simple thing, it can only be clear and distinct. For that thing will have to become known, not in part, but either as a whole or not at all” (CW I: 28f., emphasis mine). 52 See, for instance, E 2p36, E 2p38c, or E 3d1.

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182 ursula renz 53 It would go beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the issue of Spinoza’s holism in the manner it deserves, but see for this issue Brandom 1976; Della Rocca 1996: 68–83; Perler 2008; Renz 2010: 61 and 176–84; 2018a: 46f. and 149–56. See Renz 2011: 104–6 for a reading of 2p11c against this background. 54 CW I: 449. 55 See, in particular, E 2p9c on the knowledge of things happening in the object of any idea, and E 2p20 on the knowledge of the human mind. 56 In her chapter on Spinoza’s theory of knowledge contained in the first edition to this Companion, Wilson advocated for a reading according to which “the point of E 2p3 is that God not only ‘can,’ but does ‘form the idea of his own essence and of everything that necessarily follows from it’” (Wilson 1996: 96). Wilson concludes: “Any legitimate account of Spinoza’s theory of knowledge must take full account of the role of ‘idea Dei’” (96). I agree with her on the crucial epistemological role of this notion, but my reading of E 2p3, as I have defended it in my book, points in the opposite direction. Notwithstanding its seeming concern with the actual existence of the idea of all things in God, its aim, I contend, is to posit the principal and irreducible possibility that an idea of all there is may be formed (see Renz 2010: 118–124; 2018a: 100–105). 57 To my mind, this is the problematic aspect of Eugene Marshall’s otherwise quite illuminating study (2013): he’s taking the similarities between Spinoza’s and Descartes’s approach as providing grounds for several of his epistemological claims. My perspective, in contrast, is this: Underlying Spinoza’s mature epistemology is the metaphysical intuition that all beings are by their very nature completely intelligible, and it is in virtue of this intuition that he arrives at claims which seem to echo, in some respect, some of the principles from which Descartes departed. Still, Spinoza is taking another route and this is crucial to the character of his epistemology. 58 See CW I: 477f. 59 For a comprehensive exposition of the reach and uses of the imagination, cf. Vinciguerra 2005. 60 See for all these CW I: 477f. 61 Cf. the beginning of Part 2 of the Short Treatise, CW I: 97f.; and §§18–29 of the TIE, CW I: 12–16. 62 This difference is, I think, due the fact that in the TIE, the concept of the common notions is still lacking. Without this concept, however, Spinoza also lacks the means for making a case for a type of inferential process that essentially departs from necessarily true ideas. 63 CW I: 478. In the early writings, this is sometimes also spelled out in terms of immediacy. Considering how intuitive science is defined in the Ethics, this metaphor can be misleading.

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spinoza’s epistemology 183 64 Note that Spinoza is not equating imagination and opinion here, as the Latin “imaginatio vel opinio” (CW I: 478; emphasis added) shows. Generally, Spinoza painstakingly differentiates between the conjunctions “sive’” and “vel”; the former is only used when Spinoza wants us to think of the two entities whose terms are juxtaposed as identical. 65 CW I: 477. 66 Cf. E 2p17s, which says: “Next, to retain the customary words, the affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things. And when the regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines” (CW I: 465). 67 See for this model E 2p16; for its application in accounting for all kinds of cognitive processes, cf. E 2p16c1 and E 2p16c2, as well as E 2p18 and E 2p18s. I have dealt with this at some length in Renz 2019. 68 See also Garrett 2008: 18–21, for an alternative discussion of this point. 69 Note that the distinction between “affected” and “affecting” does not involve a statement concerning activity or passivity here. 70 It is somewhat misleading, therefore, that Spinoza’s explicit reference to the “genera” of knowledge is translated as “kinds of knowledge” by Curley (cf. CW I: 477f ). 71 This point is corroborated by the parallel observation that while Spinoza distinguishes more than fifty different kinds of affects in his theory of the emotions, what mostly matters in the moral evaluation of an emotion is whether it consists of an “action” or “passion”. 72 CW I: 471. 73 Cf. in particular E 2p13 which says: “The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, or a certain mode of extension which actually exists, and nothing else” (CW I: 457). Usually, interpreters read this as claiming that our mind is an idea which God has of our body; this would imply that it consists in his adequate knowledge. In contrast, I have argued in several texts (cf. Renz 2010: 189–97; 2011, 109–13; 2018a: 161–68; 2018b, 214) that in E 2p13, Spinoza is equating the human mind with our awareness that we have of our body which is, usually, rather confused and inadequate. This alternative interpretation is uncommon; not surprisingly, therefore, it is usually received with reservation. Note, however, that my approach not only accounts for some rather puzzling textual details, but it also allows for a consistent overall interpretation of the Ethics. 74 Interpreters have often emphasized only the negative epistemologist commitment, but see also Vinciguerra 2005 for another perspective. 75 Given the mechanist framework of Spinoza’s philosophy of nature, this second condition is rather trivial, as basically all natural events reduce to some kind of collision between bodies.

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184 ursula renz 76 This is famously claimed in E 2p12. It has often been objected, however, that this proposition claims too much, as, it is pointed out, it says that my mind, for example, contains “ideas that represent changes going on in my pancreas right now, and indeed, ideas that represent all the changes going on in my other internal organs” (Della Rocca 2008: 109). Note, however, that this so-called pancreas problem only arises if we take the human mind to consist in the idea which God has of our body. Assuming, however, as I have suggested, that the human mind is our confused awareness of our body (cf. also note 74), we can avoid this problem from the very beginning. As a matter of fact, Spinoza does not claim in E 2p12 that we must have knowledge of whatever happens in the body which is parallel to our mind, but only that “[w]hatever happens in the object of the idea constituting the human mind must be perceived by the human mind.” What happens in a particular cell of my pancreas is not happening in “the object of my mind”; it is not part the body as it is represented in the confused awareness of my body constituting my mind. Cf. also Renz 2010: 184–89; 2011: 106–109; 2018a: 157–61. 77 CW I: 22. 78 CW I: 471. 79 CW I: 462f. See Perler 2014: 235–46, for a succinct interpretation of the second genus of knowledge along the lines of the notion of complexity; the idea of increasing complexity is also emphasized by Garrett’s interpretation of Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind in terms of an “incremental naturalism” (Garrett 2008). 80 CW I: 478. Given that, in his metaphysics, Spinoza treats finite things as modes, or instantiated properties of God, this might seem striking at first. Obviously, he does not weigh the difference between particular items and their properties as amounting to a categorical difference. But this is not important here. Spinoza’s point is just that all our rational knowledge eventually consists in insight into the “agreements, differences, and oppositions” among several things. 81 Gueroult 1974: 358n57 quotes several passages from the Academica and cites De finibus, II: chapter 10, §33. It has to be mentioned, though, that other than in the Academica, where Cicero explicitly mentions the Greek term “koinai ennoiai,” the reference in the passage of De finibus is rather indirect. 82 Cf. Kohlenberger 1971: 1024. 83 See ST (Summa Theologica) I/II, question 94, article 4, c. It is perhaps against this background that in the glossary to the Bloomsbury Companion to Spinoza, Theo Verbeek suggests understanding the common notions as referring to “something like a natural law or shared property” (Van Bunge et. al 2011: 277). Note that the term “natural law” is absent from this part of the Ethics, and it is only in E 3pref, where nature is compared with a dominion lacking sub-dominions (CW I: 491), that Spinoza also refers to the “universal laws and rules of nature” (CW I: 492).

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spinoza’s epistemology 185 84 See for the latter in particular Herbert of Cherbury’s De veritate, Prout Distinguitur a Revelatione, a Verisimili, a Possibili, Et a Falso from 1624. 85 See for this in particular §13 of the Principles, CSM I: 197. See for the issue of the background of Spinoza’s conception of the “common notions” also Gueroult 1974: 332, 358f.; and Wolfson 1958: 119f. 86 CW I: 413. 87 CW I: 474. 88 Cf. Ellsiepen 2011: 137 and Marshall 2013: 33 for recent instances. Generally, I think that to talk of a “doctrine of the infinite modes” (Marshall 2013: 33) is unduly speculative. As Melamed 2013: 88 rightly points out, “Spinoza’s discussion of the nature of the finite modes of the particular attributes, Extension and Thought, is brief and fragmentary”; but, clearly, this is not “forcing the reader to rely heavily on speculation,” as he concludes. Lack of unambiguous evidence can just as well be a reason for adopting an attitude of interpretive austerity. 89 See also note 74. 90 CW I: 441. 91 CW I. 492. 92 I thus think that Bennett 1985: 183 was exactly right in claiming that Spinoza makes reason “a faculty of self-knowledge after all.” The second genus of knowledge is always about ourselves, but never exclusively, as it is about properties we share with other things. 93 CW I: 478. 94 This has been emphasized by Soyarslan 2016 who, after distinguishing between “content and method interpretations” of intuitive science, defends a rigid content interpretation. 95 Cf. Descartes CSM: 15. Cf. Garrett 2009, for the way in which this text is in the background of Spinoza’s concept of the third genus of knowledge. 96 CW I: 420. 97 CW I: 424. Note that both E 1p15 and E 1p16 are referred to in the demonstration and the scholium of E 2p45, a proposition which, without actually being mentioned, addresses the issue of intuitive knowledge as well. 98 Cf. Renz 2010: 82–88; 2018a: 68–73, for a detailed discussion of the verb “sequi” in E 1p16. 99 Cf. also Curley 1973; Allison 1987; Wilson 1996: 118; and Soyarslan 2016. 100 One might say that there are places in the Ethics where this does not hold – cf. in particular E 2p10 and E 2p10c – and that, moreover, Spinoza does assume man to have a specific nature. I admit this. Still, the way in which the notion of essence is to guide our inferences upon the actual existence of things, and this even in E 2p10 and E 2p10c, shows that it is primarily meant to apply to individuals. 101 CW I: 447.

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186 ursula renz 102 It is against this background that I have suggested interpreting Spinoza’s concept of intuitive knowledge as some kind of precursor of Leibniz’s “notiones complete,” (cf. Renz 2010: 290–97; 2018a: 249–55). This has been criticized by some as “too Leibnizian” (Bartuschat, in personal communication). I contend, however, that considering how Spinoza develops the third genus of knowledge, this is just what he is after. 103 CW I: 424. 104 In Renz 2018b, I argued in detail that the definition of the human mind as constituted by the idea of one’s body can also be read as an anti-Averroïst move. 105 CW I: 482. 106 I would like to thank Michael Della Rocca and Zachary Gartenberg for their valuable comments on a previous version of this chapter.

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5

Spinoza on Natural Science and Methodology Alan Gabbey

introduction The question of Spinoza’s involvement with natural science depends initially on the kinds of scientific pursuit in which he is thought to have been involved. Spinoza does not merit an entry in the sixteen-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Gillispie 1970–80), which implies that he was not importantly involved in any kind of science. This is the judgment of most historians of early modern science, who might mention Spinoza in passing as part of the historical furnishing. A few historians take a more constructive view. In Wolf’s History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries, Spinoza joins Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz in the chapter on psychology, and he is accorded a chapter or section in most histories of psychology, including collections of source material. Many studies deal in one way or another with Spinoza’s psychology (however understood). Biology, medicine, and psychoanalysis also figure topically in Spinoza bibliographies.1 There is an entry on Spinoza in a (somewhat) recent onevolume encyclopedia of political science and in each of two main English-language encyclopedias of the social sciences.2 Spinoza’s engagements with optics, the science of motion, physics in general, and scientific methodology, have received mixed treatments in monographic studies. The authors of most accounts of Spinoza say little if anything about these aspects of his intellectual life. They write about him as though he were a philosopher-colleague of today, working in his office down the corridor, unburdened by the antique science of his own time. In some studies, the scientific themes are collateral to the “philosophical” thought. Even Wolfson is remiss in saying little about the scientific dimensions of Spinoza’s thought, absurdly sidelining his account of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy (PP) as at best “only introductory” to a reading of the Ethics. Among those who recognize the scientific dimensions of Spinoza’s thought are Pollock, Curley, Parkinson (useful on Spinoza’s methodology), Delahunty, and McKeon, who provides a useful survey of the scientific episodes in Spinoza’s life 187

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and letters. There are valuable articles on Spinoza and the physical sciences, especially those by Lachterman and Savan. Authors of important recent studies that spotlight fresh aspects of Spinoza’s involvement with physics are Jon Miller, Manning, Peterman, and Schliesser. Complementing Biasutti’s monograph on Spinoza’s “doctrine of science,” there is a volume of papers devoted centrally to Spinoza and particular sciences.3 Prominent among those who recognize Spinoza’s role in the emergence of scientific hermeneutics are Savan, Curley, and Popkin, though they disagree about its nature and importance.4

t h e d i s c i p l i n a ry b ac k g ro u n d Spinoza’s absence in histories of science and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography broadcasts two messages. First, he made no positive contribution to the natural or mathematical sciences. Second, his recognized achievements do not merit the label “science,” at least not “proper” science. The first of these messages is unexceptionable, but whether the second is valid depends on the disciplinary classifications tacitly assumed by scientists, historians, compilers of biographical dictionaries, and bibliographers.5 In this chapter, I am not concerned with the question of how much of what Spinoza did was “science” by whatever modern criteria. Nor will I venture into the arena of novelties on “Spinoza and” this or that modern scientist or scientific notion.6 The intellectual traditions and relations among the disciplines known to Spinoza and his contemporaries are the proper contexts on which to base an assessment of his thought, originality, and influence. The disciplinary categories of Spinoza’s day can be found in the philosophical and logical manuals with which he studied during his formative years. Precisely because these categories were common coin – praecognita philosophica – it is only in didactic or propaedeutic texts that we find informative accounts of them. Among the works Spinoza knew were the textbooks of neo-scholastics such as Burgersdijk and his disciple Adriaan Heereboord, and of others such as Bartholomew Keckermann,7 all of which Spinoza began to study in Franciscus van den Enden’s Latin school after his expulsion from the Amsterdam Synagogue in 1656. Keckermann’s Systema logica was in Spinoza’s library, its influence is discernible in the Short Treatise, and the same holds for Burgersdijk’s Institutiones logicae and Heereboord’s Meletemata philosophica. Spinoza was sympathetic to Heereboord’s way of philosophizing, and he quotes directly from the Meletemata in

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 189 his Cogitata Metaphysica, during the writing of which he seems to have had on his desk Burgersdijk’s Institutiones metaphysicae.8 These treatises do not exhaust the sum of Spinoza’s instruction in the major philosophical tradition of his day, but as far as the taxonomy of disciplines is concerned, they represent enough of a broad consensus to allow a better understanding of Spinoza’s thought. In the wide sense employed “by teachers and professors of philosophy today,” as Keckermann puts it, and as distinct from the three “higher” facultates (theology, jurisprudence, and medicine), philosophia comprises the liberal disciplines: grammar, rhetoric, logic, physics, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, economics (home management, domestic economy), and politics. In the strict sense, though not properly speaking, philosophia means theoretical or contemplative philosophy, that is, the three scientiae (metaphysics, physics or natural philosophy, and mathematics) or even metaphysics alone. Properly speaking, philosophia comprises six disciplines: the three scientiae and the three prudentiae (branches of practical philosophy): ethics, home economy, and politics. There is a corresponding division according to nature and purpose. The purpose of the scientiae is contemplation, theoria, knowledge for its own sake; the purpose of the prudentiae is praxis, practical knowledge with a view to action.9 Logic is not part of philosophy. Like grammar and rhetoric, it is an instrumental art (ars instrumentaria), one of whose instrumenta is method, which teaches how best to find truth through the illative process, and how best to retain in the memory the knowledge thus acquired.10 While warning that philosophy cannot be perfectly defined (in the sense of stating its essence), Heereboord offers the conventional “knowledge [cognitio] of divine and human things inferred from principles known per se through the natural light of the intellect” (Heereboord 1659: Collegium logicum, p. 1, Theses 1–3, 5). Scientia, properly speaking, arises from demonstration with respect to “the why” and is knowledge of necessary things through their proximate causes. Loosely speaking, scientia can be said to be knowledge of virtually anything (Heereboord 1659: Collegium Physicum, p. 1, Thesis 1). In his philosophical dictionary, the most comprehensive of the early seventeenth century, Goclenius notes that scientia, when used in the proper sense, is scientia absolutely speaking. When used loosely, it becomes adjectival, or the science of something (political science, the science of medicine, etc.).11 Spinoza’s writings reflect both senses of “scientia.” To judge by the opening chapter of TTP, scientia properly speaking – vera scientia –

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is knowledge acquired through causal explanation. The third kind of knowledge in the Ethics is scientia intuitiva because it involves proceeding “from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things” (E 2p40s2).12 It is a moot question whether this process is to be understood as causal or illative, but at least it reflects the causal dependence on God of the essence of particular things, and allows for whatever purely demonstrative bridge Spinoza thinks is possible between the infinite attributes and finite modes. In one respect, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE) is more explicit than the Ethics: the fourth mode of perception (perceptio, the “third kind of knowledge” of the Ethics) obtains when “a thing is perceived through its essence alone, or through knowledge (cognitio) of its proximate cause” (TIE §19). On the other hand, Spinoza uses the umbrella phrase “artes et scientiae” when arguing that freedom is an absolute prerequisite for their advancement, or that they in turn are prerequisites for human perfection. That means that he would not reject “scientia” (in the loose sense) as a suitable label for all six divisions of philosophy.13 More telling is the passage in the TIE where Spinoza lists the disciplines required to reach the human perfection that consists in the union of mind and Nature: moral philosophy, educational doctrine, the whole of medicine, mechanics (as an ars), and the subject of the TIE, “corrective method” (modus medendi intellectûs). This is a heterogeneous group, yet Spinoza reveals their common identity in the footnote referring to the passage: “I take the trouble only to enumerate the sciences (scientia) necessary for our purpose, without attending to their order (series)” (TIE §16n). In seventeenth-century terms, therefore, Spinoza was a major contributor to two branches of practical philosophy (prudentia), to one scientia and part of another (psychology and the science of animate bodies were then subdivisions of physica specialis), to an instrumentum of logic, and to the special disciplinary medley labeled by Alsted as critica theologica.14 Spinoza mechanicus earned his living by excelling in the art of lens-grinding. He was not a significant figure in mathematics, nor in any of the scientiae mediae such as optics.15 Nor was he a notable natural philosopher, except as an insightful and original expositor of Descartes, and to the extent that physics underpins his psychology, political philosophy, and ethics, “which, as everyone knows, must be founded on metaphysics and physics” (Ep 27). The aim of the natural philosopher was to explain the physical world: Spinoza’s central purpose was to know how human beings do and should behave as individuals and

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 191 as social creatures. As Brunschvicg puts it: “Spinoza s’est consacré à la philosophie parce qu’il s’est demandé comment il devait vivre. Les hommes ont des genres de vie différents, chacun doit choisir le sien; il s’agit de faire le choix le meilleur, et c’est là le problème que Spinoza s’est proposé de résoudre” (Brunschvicg 1951: 1; see also Roth 1929: 43). Nancy Maull, on the other hand, “cannot conscript [Spinoza] into the ranks of Descartes and Boyle, Leibniz and Newton,” nor can she conscript him into “the lineup of scientific ‘greats’ either theoretically or by virtue of some concrete scientific achievement” (Maull 1986: 3). But why expect Spinoza to be something other than the great philosopher we know? To ask why he did no original mathematics or natural philosophy, implying almost a dereliction of duty, is like asking why Wagner wrote no piano concertos, or Chopin no operas. Or why Descartes, Boyle, or Newton wrote no political philosophy. The disciplinary taxonomies I have outlined illuminate one important aspect of Spinoza’s originality. The very title of the Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata signaled a disciplinary incongruity for Spinoza’s contemporaries, a feature of the work of which he was fully aware: [T]hose who prefer to abuse or deride the emotions and actions of men rather than to understand them . . . will doubtless find it surprising that I should attempt to treat of the faults and follies of mankind in the geometric manner, and that I should wish to demonstrate through secure reasoning what they cry out is repugnant to reason, and is vain, absurd and horrifying. (E 3pr)

In accordance with Peripatetic tradition, Burgersdijk distinguished between “natural” method, which observes and preserves the order of nature and the order of our distinct cognitions of things in the order of nature, and “arbitrary” method, which ignores the natural order to deal in confused cognitions for the purposes of persuasion or entertainment. All parts of natural method must be homogeneous, a rule that decrees “not only that the disciplines not mix, and that ethical matters be not committed to mathematical matters, nor the converse; but that every single thing be committed in its place. . .” (Burgersdijk 1651: Institutiones logicae, 275–76, 280). Yet, in the Ethics, Spinoza commingled ethical content with a species of geometrical form of presentation. The result was a hybrid disciplinary foursome consisting of one prudentia (ethics), two scientiae (metaphysics and parts of natural philosophy), and a measure of methodus (modus geometricus). In this respect, the

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Ethics was more radical than Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687), where at least the mathematics and the natural philosophy were both parts of philosophia speculativa (Gabbey 1992). When one of Spinoza’s critics, Noël Aubert de Versé, sardonically labeled him “ce géomètre” (Aubert de Versé 1685: 29), he was not targeting some imagined prowess in geometry, but the supposed apodictic respectability conferred on the dangerous doctrines in the Euclideanly garbed Ethics and the impious absurdity of trying to geometrize the moral life. In the Peripatetic tradition, the subject of each prudentia was contingent things dependent on human will and action, and the subject of each scientia was necessary things produced by divine or natural causes. Spinoza’s strict necessitarianism abolished that distinction (E 1p29),16 making the principal subjects of the Ethics and the two political Treatises formal impossibilities within a Peripatetic perspective.

n at u r a l a n d e x p e r i m e n t a l p h i l o s o p h y i n the correspondence Taken together, the other chapters in this volume provide studies of Spinoza’s contributions to two domains of philosophia practica, to critica theologica, to two scientiae (metaphysics and psychology), and to a subdomain of logic (epistemology).17 That leaves for this chapter the mathematical sciences, aspects of Spinoza’s method, and natural philosophy minus the psychology and Spinoza’s teachings on animate bodies.18 Spinoza took a serious interest in the latest advances in the natural or mathematical sciences and knew or corresponded with leading mathematicians and natural philosophers.19 I think it wise not to exaggerate Spinoza’s participation in the natural philosophy of his day. In this role, he was one of the many “esprits curieux” of the age, not one of the select band of innovators that conventional historiography associates with “The Scientific Revolution.” In addition to the caveats mentioned in the previous section, it was also a matter of personal interest and commitment. A significant measure of Spinoza’s engagement with the topics of this chapter is the proportion of relevant titles that made up his library, which at his death numbered about 160 volumes. This was the residue of what had probably been a modest collection, even taking into account that some valuable items were sold off before the inventory was prepared. The titles that relate to the concerns of this chapter make up about 30 percent of the total (Van Rooijen 1888: 110–220).20 The size of a private library is not a measure of

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 193 its owner’s intellectual capacities, but the proportionate holding in a given domain is normally an index of the owner’s interest in that domain. It is impossible to factor in Spinoza’s borrowings of books from friends and libraries. At any rate, the inventory of Spinoza’s library does not support Klever’s claim that he “devoured all [the] literature of the new physical science” (Klever 1990: 126). For the purposes of this chapter, a reading of Spinoza’s correspondence is disproportionately rewarding in comparison with the expectations that a perusal of his library holdings might raise.21 Twenty-eight letters make up the exchanges between Spinoza and the first Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg,22 and accentuating their importance is the fact that five of them (Ep 6, 7, 11, 13, 16) are effectively letters to and from Robert Boyle, with Oldenburg as intermediary. Stretching over the period 1661–76, with a ten-year break from 1665 to 1675, the correspondence with Oldenburg throws light on many aspects of Spinoza’s reactions to the natural and experimental philosophy of his day. In the initial exchanges, they discuss God, the mind-body union, Thought and Extension, and the philosophical infirmities of Descartes and Bacon: their imperfect knowledge “of the first cause and origin of all things,” their ignorance of the “true nature of the human mind,” and their failure to grasp “the true cause of error.” Oldenburg sends Spinoza a copy of Boyle’s Certain physiological essays on its publication in 1661,23 an important gesture that was instrumental in eliciting from Spinoza his critique of Boyle’s interpretation of his experiments on fluidity and firmness, and on nitre (see sixth section of this chapter). In 1663, Oldenburg sends a copy of Boyle’s reply to Francis Linus’s attack on “the spring of the air” championed by Boyle in his New experiments physico-mechanicall (1660).24 In 1665, Oldenburg sends Spinoza news of experimental researches in the Royal Society and at Oxford, of Boyle’s treatise on colors, and of the publications of Kircher and Hevelius. Hevelius has told Oldenburg that his Cometographia is in press (it appeared in 1668), and that he has sent Oldenburg his Prodromus cometicus (1665), containing descriptions of two recent comets whose explanation is a matter of controversy among astronomers. Like Oldenburg, Spinoza has “not yet heard that any Cartesian explains the phenomena of the recent comets on Descartes’s [vortex] hypothesis,” and Spinoza doubts “whether they can rightly be thus explained.” (Ep 30, 31). Oldenburg asks Spinoza about advances in Holland, notably Huygens’s work on the pendulum clock, on collision theory, on dioptrics, and in astronomy. Spinoza

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replies that Huygens has been telling him about Boyle and his treatise on colors, about “the book on the observations with the Microscope” that Oldenburg had already mentioned (Hooke’s Micrographia, 1665), and about new telescopes from Italy that had been used to observe the rings of Saturn and the shadows cast on Jupiter by its satellites. Dioptrical matters figure prominently in Spinoza’s correspondence. He asks Johan Hudde if he does not agree, on the basis of calculations derived from Hudde’s own Dioptrics (now lost), that plano-convex lenses are better for telescopes than concavo-convex lenses. Jarig Jelles consults Spinoza on a difficulty in Descartes’s Dioptrics (see fourth section of this chapter). Leibniz sends Spinoza his Notitia opticae promotae (1671), mentions the dioptrical work of Francisco Lana and Johannes Oltius and his own Hypothesis physica nova (1671), and proposes a way of eliminating spherical aberration. Spinoza has not yet seen the latter three works, and confessing that he does not follow Leibniz’s argument in the Notitia, asks for further clarification and offers an idea of his own that he had already used in his reply to Jelles’s difficulty concerning Descartes. There are no further extant letters between Leibniz and Spinoza. In the last of the nine letters of the 1670s between Spinoza and Tschirnhaus, the penultimate extant letter in Spinoza’s whole correspondence, Spinoza asks him what he can find out about recent dioptrical discoveries in Paris. These letters on dioptrics testify to Spinoza’s enthusiasm for the subject and its prospects, yet overall they convey an impression of moderate theoretical competence. Lucas claimed that Spinoza so excelled in lens-making that “if death had not prevented it, he would have discovered the most beautiful secrets of Optics” ([Lucas] 1927: 60), but the evidence suggests that after 1666 his contemporaries, at least in Holland, became aware of his limited abilities in optical theory.25 In a letter now lost, and in conversation, Jarig Jelles asks Spinoza if he thought that the pressure and speed of water flowing through a horizontal tube under gravitational pressure from a raised tank vary along the length of the tube. To answer the question, Spinoza builds the required apparatus and with two assistants conducts a series of careful experiments. He finds that for still water the pressure remains constant along the tube, and that for flowing water the speed remains constant independent of the length of the horizontal tube. The experiments seem to have been well thought out, and the results are empirically sound, though Spinoza’s theoretical explanations are shaky, especially his application of Galileo’s law of fall, which he

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 195 misunderstands. There is no sign in Spinoza’s reply to Jelles (Ep 41, September 5, 1669) that either of them is aware of the pioneering researches in the same field that Pascal had published in Paris six years earlier.26 Two letters indicate something of Spinoza’s attitude to alchemy. In March 1667, Jarig Jelles asks him about a reported successful transmutation carried out by J. F. Helvetius, physician to the Prince of Orange. Spinoza replies that he mentioned it to Vossius, who ridiculed the whole idea. Ignoring Vossius’s views, Spinoza visits the silversmith who had tested the gold and learns that the transmutation took place and that the silversmith thinks the gold used to initiate the process “contained something uncommon,” a view shared by others who were present.27 Finally, Spinoza visits Helvetius himself, who explains what had happened and shows Spinoza the apparatus, adding that he plans to publish an account of the transmutation (Ep 40). Eight years later, writing to The Hague physician G. H. Schuller, Spinoza says he has not yet tested the claims of an anonymous (alchemical) Processus Schuller has sent him, nor does he think he would be able to apply his mind to the task at a later date. He doubts on technical grounds Schuller’s claim to have made gold (Ep 70, 72). These doubts were not on the grounds that transmutation is impossible in principle, given the Cartesian view of matter and the claim in Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy” 3 that “matter, with the aid of these Laws [of Nature], successively takes on all the forms of which it is capable” (CW I: 296). Spinoza’s views on transmutation were not unusual for the time. He had an open mind on the subject, though tinged with skepticism. He was certainly interested in alchemy, without it being for him an area of continual study. In his library there was just one alchemical book: Theodore Kerckring’s Commentarius in Currum Triumphalem Antimonii Basilii Valentini (Amsterdam, 1671). Spinoza’s most extended contributions to natural philosophy were Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy” (DPP) as commentator, and parts of the Ethics. Before examining them, I must address a curious issue in Spinoza scholarship.

s p i n o z a t h e au t h o r o f t h e t wo r e e c k e n i n g ? Two mathematical texts have conspired to complicate Spinoza scholarship since the mid-nineteenth century: the Stelkonstige Reeckening van den Regenboog (Algebraic Calculation of the Rainbow) and the

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Reeckening van Kanssen (Calculation of Chances), first published anonymously in The Hague in 1687 by Levyn van Dyck. Despite the expository and editorial labors of McKeon, Dutka, Petry, and Moreau, all of whom take Spinoza to be the author of both treatises, it is not universally agreed that he wrote either of them. Klever and De Vet (1986) reject Spinoza as their author, and Freudenthal doubted that he wrote the Reeckening van Kanssen. In particular, De Vet’s critique of the assumptions informing Petry’s edition of the treatises (Spinoza [attributed] 1985) persuades me that Spinoza was not the author of these mathematical exercises. This denial of Spinoza as author puts paid to the unvoiced expectation (as I suspect) that Spinoza, one of the great philosophical minds of the seventeenth century and a practical optician, must have published something on a mathematical science. De Vet (1986) suggests an alternative author for the Reeckening van den Regenboog: Salomon Dierquens, a magistrate in The Hague. In a comprehensive critique of De Vet’s position, Petry (1994) rejects this suggestion.28 However, DeVet (2005: 164–68, 186–88) shows that a title-page dedication of the work was written in Dierquens’s own hand. In addition to the historical work of Klever and De Vet, there are two pieces of internal textual evidence that severally count against the supposition of Spinoza as the author of either Reeckening. Whatever its value as a contribution to optics, the author of Stelkonstige Reeckening van den Regenboog had a measure of competence in the management of Descartes’s dioptrical principles. He would scarcely have been responsible for a lapse commited by Spinoza in his letter to Jelles of March 3, 1667 (Ep 39). Replying to a question Jelles had raised in a lost letter about Descartes’s account in La Dioptrique of image size on the retina, Spinoza claims that Descartes “does not consider the size of the angle which these rays make when they cross each other at the surface of the eye,” because he “knew of no means of gathering the rays coming in parallel lines, from different points, in as many other points.” Spinoza suspects that perhaps Descartes “was silent about it in order not to put the circle in any way above the [other] figures which he had introduced.” Then he continues: For it is certain that in this matter the circle surpasses all other figures that may be discovered. For the circle being everywhere the same has everywhere the same properties. For instance, if the circle [circulus] ABCD [Figure 1] had the property that all rays parallel to the axis AB and coming from A were refracted at its surface so that afterward they all came together at the point B; and also all rays parallel to the axis

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 197 Figure 1

CD and coming from C were refracted at the surface so that they came together at D: that could be said of no other figure, though Hyperbolas and Ellipses have infinite diameters.29

There is some confusion in this argument. For the circular glass to have the dioptrical property Spinoza hypothesizes, the refractive index of the glass would have to be a function of the angle of incidence.30 There is no indication, either here or later in the letter, that he is aware of this condition, or of its incompatibility with Descartes’s law of refraction. In his next letter to Jelles, who had asked for clarification, Spinoza explains (Ep 40) that light rays from a relatively distant object are in fact only approximately parallel, since they arrive as “cones of rays” from different points on the object. Yet he maintains the same property of the circle in the case of ray cones, apparently forgetting the importance of the “[other] figures” (the “Ovals of Descartes”) that Descartes had constructed in Book 2 of La Géométrie to provide a general solution to the problem of spherical aberration. The evidence of these letters to Jelles counts against Spinoza being the author of Stelkonstige Reeckening van den Regenboog, though he may have written a treatise on the rainbow, which allegedly he burned shortly before his death (Spinoza [attributed] 1985: 8). The five questions of the Reeckening van Kanssen are taken verbatim from Huygens’s pioneering treatise on games of chance (Van Schooten 1657),31 and only the First Question receives a solution (First and Second Propositions). To tackle the First Question, the author applies the second rule of what he calls “de Denckonst van de Heer Descartes,” which Petry italicizes as “Descartes’ Art of Thinking” and identifies without comment as the Discours de la méthode (Spinoza [attributed] 1985: 80–81). It is indeed the second rule of the Discours that is in question, but it is unlikely that Spinoza would have thought “Denckonst” a suitable translation for any part of the title of Descartes’s Discours, or that he (of all people) would have confused the titles of the

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Discours and the Port-Royal Logic.32 Nor is it likely that he would have referred to “Heer” Descartes. Only once did Spinoza refer to Descartes in that way – in the Short Treatise [ST], where the conventionally respectful “D[ominus]. des Cartes” of the Dutch text is presumably an untranslated import from the lost Latin original. Spinoza worked on the doctrine of chances, as is clear from his solution to a problem posed in 1666 by Van der Meer (Ep 38). That is not incompatible with the supposition that he wrote the Reeckening van Kanssen, but it does not strengthen it.

spinozan physics and cartesian physics Spinoza’s propaedeutic reworking of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy (1644) is selective; its “geometric” presentation does not reflect the format of the original, whose purpose was to replace the Peripatetic summae philosophiae in colleges and universities; nor is it unspotted by misunderstandings of Descartes’s text. Yet in many instances, DPP is a faithful résumé of Descartes’s intentions. More than that, it clarifies important points that were unexplained in the original and resolves difficulties that Descartes left hanging. Its mos demonstrandi reflects the epistemological security that characterized the principles of Descartes’s natural philosophy, though not its explanatory hypotheses.33 In addition, the mos demonstrandi of the DPP is a harbinger of the ordo geometricus of the Ethics and its excursions into Spinoza’s natural philosophy.34 Johannes Casearius, the student for whom Spinoza wrote the text, was fortunate to have as his tutor such a perceptive reader of the Principles of Philosophy, though whether he appreciated his good fortune is another matter.35 A few examples will illustrate important distinguishing features of DPP. I take my cue from Spinoza’s instructions to Lodewijk Meyer, who saw the text through the press, to explain to readers that “I demonstrate many things in a way different from the way Descartes demonstrated them, not to correct Descartes, but to retain my own order better and not increase the number of axioms so much, and that for the same reason I demonstrate many things Descartes asserts without any demonstration, and have had to add others that he omitted” (Ep 15).36 The first example is not so much a difference in demonstration as a difference in nomenclature signaling a deeper difference relating to demonstration. Articles 37–38, 39, and 40–42 of Descartes’s Part II present the three foundational “leges naturae” on which Descartes had grounded his physics. The term “lex (leges) naturae” does not reappear in Spinoza’s text, and the three laws are redrafted as demonstrated propositions (DPP 2p14–18, 20, and their corollaries and scholia).

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 199 Though necessary leges Naturae (sive Dei Spinozani) will become the ground of all change and action in Spinoza’s later conception of Nature, it is not clear from DPP that in 1663 he fully appreciated the function or status of the “laws of nature” that appear in Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy. Descartes derives his laws of nature from the attributes and actions of God, which in turn derive ultimately from the primacy of the cogito argument. But once that ontological authentication is in place, the laws of nature constitute the nomological starting point of Descartes’s program of natural philosophy. His arguments in support of his laws of nature reappear in DPP as Spinozan demonstrations, but there is an enormous difference between identifying something as a “Law of Nature” and labeling it “Proposition XIV.” Within a Cartesian framework, the appellation “law of nature” identifies primarily a principle of explanation, its warrant for that role being its demonstration, which thereby fits it to explain innumerable phenomena within a certain empirical class. Spinoza rarely identifies single laws of nature, but refers rather to laws of nature as to an open class, each member of which is an eternal truth.37 Spinoza’s laws of nature enable causal explanations of phenomena, but he does not say if there are classes of phenomena that they are fitted severally to explain, nor how to match a law of nature (even if identified) with its explanatory domain. The propositions in Spinoza’s version of Descartes’s Part II derive from nine definitions and twenty-one axioms, and most of the latter could change places, mutatis mutandis, with some of the propositions that follow them. Just before the demonstrations of each of DPP 2p14 (part of Descartes’s First Law) and DPP 2p15 (part of Descartes’s Second Law), Spinoza notes that though these propositions can be viewed as axioms, he will demonstrate them nonetheless.38 Here, as in the Ethics, Spinoza’s “axioms” are not indemonstrable Euclidean premises from which all else flows “uni-directionally” so to speak, but a set of starting points selected in preference to other sets (the propositions), some of which could also have served as axioms. But that does not mean that DPP 2p14 and DPP 2p15, renamed as “axioms,” would retain the nomological primacy that Descartes had intended for them. This aspect of DPP announces Spinoza’s ideal of a unified body of interrelated demonstrative truths de Natura. Spinoza’s real terminus a quo is the Whole, rather than any of its constituent parts. Grene effectively makes the point:39 As atomism, the effort to explain the whole of reality through its least parts, recurs from time to time as a style of metaphysical

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200 alan gabbey thinking, so, if more rarely, does Spinozism, the effort to understand the parts of reality in terms of the ultimate nature of the whole. Thus, the Ethics represents, as few texts do, a permanent possibility of human vision, one of the possible ultimates of philosophical reflection. (Grene 1973: xvi)

Within that perspective, the categorization of truths as axioms or propositions becomes almost a matter of choice. There can be no Spinozan equivalent of the cogito argument. The second example that shows a significant difference between Spinoza’s demonstrations and those of Descartes is the trio of propositions DPP 2p15,16,17. These three correspond sequentially to the steps in Descartes’s presentation of his Second Law of Nature (Principles of Philosophy II, 39): that every motion is from its own nature rectilinear, and so bodies moving in a circle always tend to recede from the center of the circle they describe. [Commentary:] The next law of nature is that each single particle of matter, considered individually, never tends to continue moving along any deviating lines, but only along straight lines – although many particles are often compelled to deviate, because of collisions with others.

Descartes’s justification of his Second Law is fairly clear and insufficiently distinct. He grounds the law in the immutability and simplicity of the conserving activity of God, who conserves motion precisely as it is only at the very moment of time at which he is conserving it, it being of no relevance how it might have been a short time previously. And although no motion takes place in an instant, it is still evident that in each single instant which can be designated during the motion of anything that moves, it is determined [determinatum] to continue its motion in some direction along a straight line, never along any curved line.

Spinoza does better than that (DPP 2p15), though he is still at one remove from clearness and distinctness. Because God creates motion at each instant, we cannot attribute to motion, as pertaining to its nature, a duration that can be conceived to be longer than another. There is no non-zero shortest duration of continuously re-created Cartesian motion that belongs to its nature. But if it pertained to the nature of motion that a moving body naturally described a curved line, this motion would be of

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 201 longer duration than if it moved in a straight line, which by DPP 2a17 is the shortest distance between two points. Hence the proposition follows. In the scholium to DPP 2p15, Spinoza raises and rejects an objection arising from the fact that for any given line (curved or straight) there is always another one (curved or straight) that is shorter. His demonstration has to do solely with the “universal essence or essential difference” of the lines, not with their quantities or accidental differences. To avoid obscuring what is already clear, Spinoza refers the reader to the definition of motion (PP 2.25; DPP 2d8) as the translatio of one part of matter from the vicinity of immediately contiguous bodies taken to be at rest to the vicinity of other similarly disposed bodies and signs off with the claim that if we conceive the simplest translatio to be other than rectilinear, we attribute to the motion something foreign to its nature. The scholium does little to clear up the difficulties in the demonstration of 2p15. It is not clear what Spinoza takes the “universal essence” of the straight and of the curved to be, nor why 2d8 is relevant, and he could have avoided the scholium altogether had he simply compared rectilinear and curved motion between the same arbitrary points A and B. Given DPP 2a17, any curve AB is necessarily longer than the straight line AB, so for a given body moving with a given speed, its motion along curve AB is necessarily of longer duration than motion along the straight line AB. The corollary states that curvilinear motion results from an external cause continually making the body deviate from its natural rectilinear motion. Descartes illustrates his Second Law with the example of a stone whirled in a sling. At any point in its circular motion, the stone tends to move along the tangent to the circle at that point, and in that sense away from the center of the circle, but is prevented from doing so by the sling. The stone per se is not determined to move along the circle, because curvilinearity is not naturally “in” its motion, although it is continually being forced to move in a circle, as is shown by the tension in the sling.40 Rather than repeat Descartes’s analysis, for DPP 2p16 Spinoza offers two ingenious alternative demonstrations of his own. DPP 2p16 states that “every body moving in a circle, for example a stone in a sling, is continuously determined to continue moving along the tangent.” There is a textual difficulty at the beginning of the first of the two demonstrations. The first sentence (Latin text; two sentences in Curley’s translation) is a straightforward application of DPP 2p15, p15c to circular motion: “A body moving in a circle is continuously prevented by an external force from continuing to move in a straight line (by P15).

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If this force ceases, the body of itself will continue to move in a straight line” (CW I: 278). But Curley’s third sentence (translating the second Latin sentence) reads: “I say, moreover, that a body moving in a circle is determined by an external cause to continue to move along a tangent.” This sentence leads Curley to note: “It is not clear that Spinoza’s exposition is even consistent with Descartes’s, since Spinoza treats the sling as a cause of the stone’s tendency to continue along a line tangential to the circle in which it is moving . . . whereas Descartes treats the sling as an impediment to a tendency to rectilinear motion” (CW I: 278–79, n42). Worse than that, Spinoza’s original second sentence contradicts his own opening sentence. Yet Curley’s translation is an accurate rendering of the original Latin: “Dico praeterea corpus, quod circulariter movetur, à causâ externâ determinari, ut secundum tangentem pergat moveri.”41 Spinoza would not have perpetrated a formal contradiction in two successive sentences, so the Latin text is surely defective. It can be easily restored and the sentence brought into contextual consistency by transposing the comma after “movetur” to after “externâ,” and deleting the comma after “determinari.” The sentence would then read (modifying Curley): “Moreover [praeterea], I say that a body moving in a circle by an external cause is determined to continue to move along a tangent.” The force of “praeterea” comes through when it is recognized that Spinoza is making two subtly different claims in the first demonstration of 2p16. First, a body moving in a circle is prevented from moving in a straight line by an external force, and if the force is removed the body will now continue its motion in a straight line. Second, a body externally caused to move in a circle is determined to continue its motion along the straight line that is tangent to the circle, which is a rewording of the enunciation of Proposition 16. The claims are differentiated by Spinoza’s correct introduction in the second claim of the Cartesian concept of “determination,” which he clearly understood and knew how to apply. The first demonstration depends on DPP 2a18: “If A is moved from C towards B [along the straight line CB], and is forced back by a contrary impulse, it will move towards C along the same line.”42 Spinoza proceeds by reductio ad absurdum. Suppose that a stone, moving from L to B, is not determined to move along the tangent BD when it arrives at B, but along some other line BF (Figure 2). Now suppose that the same stone arrives from the other direction along CB, and suppose similarly that it is determined to move not along the tangent BA but along BG, with angle GBH equal to angle HBF, because of the symmetry about B. The motion along CB can be seen as arising from an impulse that is

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 203 contrary to the impulse that brought the stone from L to B (Spinoza does not spell this out, but that is what he means). So, it follows from 2a18 that when the stone arrives at B from C, its determination should be in the direction BK, that is, in the direction opposite to the supposed direction in which the stone is determined to move when it arrives at B from L. But that is contrary to the hypothesis of a determination in the direction BG for the stone arriving from C. The only directions of determination that do not lead to absurdity are BD and BA, that is, the two segments of DBA, the tangent at B. Q.E.D. The second demonstration of DPP 2p16 begins not with a circle but with a hexagon ABH inscribed in the circle radius DB (Figure 3). A body is at rest at the midpoint C of the side AB of the hexagon, and the ruler DBE swings counterclockwise round the fixed center D. When the ruler strikes the body at C the ruler will be perpendicular to AB, and so will determine the body to move along the straight line FBAG toward G. (This step in the argument assumes what has to be proved, but let it pass.) Now the same will hold for any figure inscribed in the same circle radius DB, so go to the limit and replace the hexagon with a figure with an infinite number of straight sides (“hoc est, circulum ex def. Archimedis,” Spinoza explains). When the ruler DBE strikes the body sitting at the midpoint C of a side of this Archimedean circle, it will Figure 2

Figure 3

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determine the body to move along the tangent to the circle at C. Replace the ruler with a sling, and the proposition follows. Note the Archimedean inspiration of the second demonstration, a feature that it shares with the mathematical work of Spinoza’s friend Christiaan Huygens.43 Spinoza notes at the end of the second demonstration that both demonstrations “can be accommodated to any curvilinear figure whatever.” This is a fine insight, in that a body moving along any curve does continually tend at each instant to move along the tangent. Yet I wonder how much accommodation Spinoza thought the two demonstrations would require. Curves in general are not symmetrical on either side of a point lying on them, as required in the first demonstration; and a radius vector does not in general cut chords at right angles within the curve, as DBE does AB at C in the second demonstration. Spinoza rounds off his account of the Second Law with DPP 2p17, that “every body moving in a circle endeavors [conatur] to recede from the center of the circle it describes.” An excellent example of the “many things that Descartes merely proposed without any demonstration,” or in this case without explanation, is his concept of “determination” (determinatio), which we have seen Spinoza using in his version of the Second Law, and of which he made important use in his own later philosophy. In classical Greek and Latin, “determination” denoted a specification of some kind, or a bounding of something within limits or termini. In the medieval and early modern periods, determinatio and its cognates were frequent currency in philosophical texts, one relevant sense of determinatio being a specific, particular actualization of a general power or cause. Descartes shaped the concept for his own purposes in Le Monde, La Dioptrique, and the Principles of Philosophy. It is one of the more slippery notions in his thought, a condition not improved by the absence in his writings of a precise explanation of what he meant by it. In a lengthy attempt elsewhere to pin down its Cartesian sense, I concluded that Descartes’s determinatio is not the direction of a body’s motion (as some still persist in believing), but what I called its “directional mode of motive force.”44 Spinoza appreciated, as few have then or since, the crucial role that determinatio plays in Descartes’s collision theory and in his physics as a whole. He saw that the concept would create difficulties, and he would have learned from Descartes’s published correspondence the misunderstanding it had created in Descartes’s disputes with Fermat, Roberval, and Hobbes. To avert confusion in the minds of his readers, Spinoza

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 205 follows the corollary to DPP 2p27 (Descartes’s Third Rule of collision, PP 2.48) with a scholium in which he sets out his clear understanding of the distinction between the “force of determination” (vis determinationis) and “the force of motion” (vis motûs). The corollary says in effect that the determination of a body to move along a straight line is proportional to its speed. But the same is true of a body’s force of motion, so in the scholium (modeled on the arguments in La Dioptrique, Discours Second) Spinoza shows that force of determination, unlike force of motion, is inseparably associated with a given direction and can be resolved and compounded according to the parallelogram rule. He goes further than Descartes by using vis determinationis to try to solve the illustrative example of two bodies in oblique collision. His solution goes astray, but it is not Spinoza who is at fault. Descartes’s law of conservation (PP 2.36) applies only to motion, not to determination, the parallelogram rule applies only to determinations, not to motions, and his rules of collision apply only to collinear collisions – all of which makes it impossible to analyze oblique collisions in Cartesian terms.45 Spinoza cannot be expected to have made the necessary emendations to Descartes’s theories of motion and of collision that were to be the combined revolutionary contributions of Huygens, Leibniz, and Newton. A major element in Descartes’s collision theory that is missing from the original PP, but which Spinoza accurately supplies, is what I call elsewhere “The Principle of Least Modal Mutation” (PLMM), Descartes’s version of the principle of economy. Presumably because of its threatened teleological implication, Descartes made no mention of the PLMM in PP. Yet his collision rules are unintelligible without it, as is clear from his letter to Clerselier of February 17, 1645: “they [the rules of collision] depend on only a single principle, which is that when two bodies collide and have in them incompatible modes, there must undoubtedly occur some mutation of these modes to make them compatible, but this mutation is always the least possible.”46 Spinoza’s version is DPP 2p23: “When the modes of any body are forced to undergo a variation, the variation will always be the least possible.”47 The onesentence demonstration comes as a surprise: “This proposition follows clearly enough from Proposition 14.” DPP 2p14 is Spinoza’s rewording of Descartes’s First Law of Nature: “Each thing, in so far as it is simple and undivided, and is considered in itself alone, perseveres, as far as possible, always in the same state.” Spinoza never explains why DPP 2p23 follows from DPP 2p14, either in DPP or elsewhere.48 Neither does Descartes explain why his PLMM is true, though it is probably because God’s

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simplicity of action permits nothing superfluous in interactions in the corporeal world. Perhaps the simple and undivided things of DPP 2p14 change their modes as little as possible so as to remain as close as possible to the state they happen to be in at any given instant. If that is the right answer, it has interesting implications. E 3p6 says essentially the same thing as Spinoza’s DPP 2p14. So, if DPP 2p23 follows as clearly from the earlier DPP 2p14 as Spinoza claims, why does E 3p6 not imply with equal clarity a Spinozan equivalent of Descartes’s PLMM? There is no sign of a minimal principle in the Ethics, and the closest Spinoza comes to one is E 5a1: “If two contrary actions are set up in the same subject, a change (mutatio) must necessarily occur in both, or in one alone, until they cease to be contrary.”49 The terminology and the associated concepts have changed from Cartesian (incompatible modes of interacting bodies) to Spinozan (incompatible actions in the same finite modes), but E 5a1 hints that Spinoza’s ostensible text harbors the supplementary axiom that the required mutatio must be the least possible. This possibility is strengthened by the beginning of Spinoza’s explanation of the harmonious interconnections of the parts of Nature in the letter to Oldenburg of November 20, 1665: “So by the coherence of parts, all I mean is that the laws, or if you like the nature, of one part so accommodate themselves to the laws or nature of another part, that there is the least possible amount of contrariety between them (ut quàm minimè sibi contrarientur)” (Ep 32). This is not the equivalent of Descartes’s PLMM, but it is close. In the 1996 version of this chapter, I was rash in claiming that Spinoza’s “equivalent” of Descartes’s PLMM is “plainly teleological.” It is true that Spinoza’s conatus doctrine of E 3p6 along with DPP 2p14, E 3p7, and E 5a1 with its echo of Descartes’s PLMM, all create difficulties for the conventional view that Spinoza’s later philosophy is free of finalism.50 Yet these difficulties arise from a misunderstanding of what Spinoza understands by a thing’s “endeavor to persevere in its being,” as for example in E 3p7: “The endeavor [conatus] by which each single thing endeavors to persevere in its being is nothing other than the thing’s essence in act [essentia actualis]”. Hoos shows convincingly that for Spinoza the endeavor of finite things to persist in their existence is not a teleological notion, but a modal expression of God’s power, which translates as their ability to do what their nature determines in the moment, that is, to exercise efficient causality (Hoos 2000: 73–91). I would add that because there is no absolute faculty of willing, whether in God or humans or anything else, there cannot be any Spinozan

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 207 conatus in the metaphorical sense, but it is now transformed through its being the ground of the will, the conatus of the mind to persevere in its being. The term remains, but the metaphor has vanished, to linger only in the minds of those more at home with Scholastico-Cartesian ways of talking about the world. Given Spinoza’s understanding of Descartes’s determinatio and the PLMM, it is not surprising that he spots the collision rule that Descartes unaccountably omitted. Descartes’s Rule 1 (PP 2.46) states that two equal (hard) bodies colliding with equal speeds rebound with speeds unchanged. Rule 2 (PP 2.47) states that if the bodies are unequal in size, only the smaller one rebounds, and as before the speeds remain unchanged. If the bodies are equal but one is faster than the other, Rule 3 (PP 2.48) specifies that only the slower body rebounds, receiving motion from the faster body so that both bodies move together with the mean speed.51 But Descartes offers no Rule that specifies what happens when the sizes and (nonzero) speeds are both unequal. Spinoza sees the omission, and between Rules 2 and 3 (between Rules 3 and 4 would have been a better spot) places DPP 2p26: “If the bodies are unequal in bulk (molis) and speed, with B twice as big as A but A’s motion twice as fast as B’s, with everything else as before, then both bodies will be reflected in the opposite direction with each retaining the speed it had.”52 This is the special case where the ratio between the bodies’ sizes is the inverse of the ratio between their speeds. In the demonstration, Spinoza notes that the bodies have the same quantity of motion, so there is no contrariety between their motions, and their forces of motion are equal. The outcome is therefore the same as in Rule 1, where the equal determinations are in opposition, but not the motions. Spinoza has modified Descartes’s theory. In PP 2.44, Descartes had argued that there is no contrariety between motions of equal speed, but only between motion and rest or between speed and slowness (“in so far as it participates in the nature of rest”), and between determinations in opposite directions. To introduce the new Rule, Spinoza sees the convenience, if not necessity, of extending the denial of contrariety to equal quantities of motion, as he had already done in the corollary to DPP 2p19. Finally, in the corollary to DPP 2p26, Spinoza takes the opportunity to highlight two important points about determinatio that follow from DPP 2p24–26, and which he would have found Descartes explaining to Clerselier in the letter of February 17, 1645. To change the determination of one body requires as much force as it does to change its motion, so a body that loses more than half of its determination and more than half of its

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motion suffers a greater mutation than one that loses the whole of its determination. Something prompted Oldenburg to write to Spinoza in 1665 (Ep 31): “In talking about Huygens’s Tractatus de motu, you intimate that Descartes’s Rules of motion are nearly all false.”53 There are no extant letters in which Spinoza talks about these matters. Oldenburg goes on to ask him to explain what is wrong with Descartes’s rules, and mentions DPP. Spinoza replies (Ep 32) that it was Huygens who found fault with Descartes’s collision rules, that he himself objects only to Rule 6, and that there he finds Huygens at fault as much as Descartes. Oldenburg asks once more that Spinoza explain to him where Descartes and Huygens go astray in their collision theory (Ep 33), but at that point in their correspondence there began a ten-year break, and there is no extant answer to Oldenburg’s request. I do not know what might have been Spinoza’s reasons for simultaneously (a) accepting six of Descartes’s Rules, (b) rejecting Rule 6, (c) rejecting Huygens’s solution to the same problem, and probably by implication (d) accepting the rest of Huygens’s collision theory. Descartes’s Rule 6 (PP 2.50) states that if bodies B and C are equal and C is at rest, then C will be set in motion by B, and B will be reflected by C, each with a different quantity of motion. Huygens’s (correct) solution is that B comes to rest, and C moves off with B’s initial speed (Huygens 1888–1950: XVI, 33–39). If both solutions are in error, did Spinoza have one of his own? Probably not.54 Rivaud has suggested that Spinoza rejected Rule 6 because the bodies’ change of speed implies “changing their nature and losing their essence,” which is characterized in each of them by a fixed speed (Rivaud 1924–26: 31). But the final speeds in Rule 6 are as fixed and calculable as those in the other Rules, and as Gueroult points out (Gueroult 1968–74: II: 552), Spinoza accepts the other Rules, in three of which (Rules 3, 5, and 7) the bodies also change their speed on collision. In any event, Rivaud seems to be mistaken in supposing that for Spinoza bodies change their nature or essence when they change their speeds. If the colliding bodies are taken to be the corpora simplicissima of Ethics Part 2, then motion, rest, speed, and slowness, are their sole distinguishing characteristics, according to E 2p13le1 and the paragraph at the end of E 2p13a2''. But neither of these kinematic characteristics constitutes the essence of a corpus simplicissimum, to judge by E 2d1, since a simple body can exist and be conceived (by E 2p13, a1'', a2', a2'') whether it is in motion or not, and whatever its speed if in motion.55 The problem then arises of unraveling what exactly Spinoza means in E 2d1

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 209 (body as “a mode which expresses in a certain and determinate way the essence of God in so far as he is considered as an extended thing”). If the “certain and determinate way” excludes (or does not necessarily include) the kinematic characteristics that distinguish a simple body (presumably empirically), what does it necessarily include, in addition to extension? It includes the body’s own essence, as stated in E 3p7: “The endeavor [conatus] by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its being is nothing beyond the essence in act [essentia actualis] of the thing itself.” But then, persevering in its own being necessarily involves the body persevering in its present state of rest or in its present motion with this or that speed. Perhaps Rivaud is not mistaken after all. On the other hand, if a body in collision is taken to be a corpus compositum, or an individuum (Definition following E 2p13), its nature depends on the preservation of the same proportionate internal exchanges of motion between the simple bodies out of which it is composed. Provided those proportionate internal relations of motions and rest remain the same, the nature or essence of the composite body does not change or perish if it changes speed when moving as a whole or qua individual. That much is clear from E 2p13le6, le7s. Despite his many insights into and elucidations of Descartes’s natural philosophy, Spinoza’s concept of the individual is striking evidence of an apparent disinclination to clarify and disentangle a fundamental difficulty in Descartes’s doctrine of motion that arises from the couple “motion and rest.” In PP 2.36, Descartes introduces the familiar thesis that God is the universal and primary cause of motion and describes his creative and conservative power in the following terms: [T]he general cause of all motion in the world . . . is none other than God himself, who in the beginning created matter together with motion and rest, and who through his ordinary concourse alone now conserves in all of matter as much motion and rest as he put in it then. For although this motion in moved matter is nothing other than its mode, it has nonetheless a certain and determined quantity, which we can easily understand is always the same in the whole totality of things, although it might change in its individual parts.

The creation and conservation of a quantity of motion are unproblematic (assuming Descartes’s concept of motion), as is the creation of bodies at rest. But it is a problem to know what it means to say that rest has “a certain and determined quantity,” or how it can be quantified and conserved, as is the case with motion. In Descartes’s collision theory, rest is quantifiable

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and functions as a quantity in the explication and operation of the Rules,56 but it is unclear what Descartes means by the quantitative conservation of “motion and rest” in the universe as a whole. God conserves all things with the same power, but the translation of that power into quantifiable rest remains obscure. Descartes does not explain himself here or elsewhere, and DPP is no help either (DPP 2p11s,12,13). Whether or not Spinoza saw the difficulties, “rest and motion” becomes a leitmotiv in his own philosophy (as in many Spinoza commentaries). It is the central notion in his concept of Individual, which he defines in the Definition following E 2p13: When a number of bodies of the same or different magnitude are constrained by other bodies to press on each other, or if they are moved with the same or diverse grades of speed so that they communicate [communico] among themselves their motions in a certain fixed proportion [certâ quâdam ratione], we may say that those bodies are united among themselves, and that all together they compose one body, or Individual [Individuum], which is distinguished from other bodies through this union of bodies.57

There is no mention of rest being communicated between bodies, perhaps because Spinoza was unhappy with the idea of bodies “communicating rest” among themselves,58 but it is implied in E 2p13le5 and E 4p39. Lemma 5 of E 2p13 reads: “If the parts composing an Individual become greater or smaller, yet do so in a proportion (eâ . . . proportione) so that they all maintain among themselves the same proportion of motion and rest (motûs, & quietis ratio) as before, the Individual will likewise retain its nature as before, without any mutation of form.”59 In the worm-in-the-blood illustration of the harmonious interrelation of all parts of Nature, the formula “motûs, & quietis ratio” becomes the more promising “ratio motûs ad quietem.” In November 1665, Spinoza writes to Oldenburg that all bodies: are surrounded by others, and are determined to exist and to act, each by the other, in a fixed and determined way (ratio), the same proportion of motion to rest (eâdem ratione motûs ad quietem) always being preserved in all things as a whole, that is, in the whole universe. (Ep 32)

I empathize with Spinoza in these path-breaking texts. Given the enormous difficulty of penetrating the unity-in-diversity characteristic of all organic creatures, Spinoza’s individua, which include both organic

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 211 and inorganic individuals, reveal in their very conception a singular insight into an important feature of the natural world, and one which seems to me to occupy a place in a broader historical sequence of cognate ideas. I suggest that Spinoza’s concept of individuum takes the form of an ingenious transformation into mechanical language of the Galenic medical doctrine of humoral balance (good health) and imbalance (illness). More telling is Garrett’s comment: “readers of the Ethics are often struck by a sense that modern science will eventually lead us to something very much like Spinoza’s approach to individuation” (Don Garrett 1994: 97). It seems that this has already happened. Spinoza’s concept of individuum is cognate with Claude Bernard’s concept of milieu intérieur, which he introduced in 1865, and which was renamed homeostasis in 1926 by Walter Bradford Cannon.60 Whether or not Bernard knew about the Definition following E 2p13, he and Spinoza shared basically the same insight, but with this important difference. In the case of Spinozan individua enduring through time, it is a question of fixed proportions between internal exchanges of motions and rest. In the case of milieu intérieur or homeostasis, it is a question of self-regulation to re-establish the internal state of physiological individuals during deviations from their normal state. The notion of self-regulation is absent in what Spinoza says about individua. Its presence would have required establishing at the outset its causal relation to the conatus of individuals to maintain their existence. Neither Spinoza nor anyone else in the early modern period could have achieved a quantitative development of his concept of individuum beyond its Definition, Axiom 3” and Lemmata 4–7. That would have required a mathematical account of the fixed proportions of motion to rest, coupled with an account of the laws that ensure the claimed invariance in proportionalities. Understandably, Spinoza provided no such laws, nor could he have said how the proportions might be mathematically expressed.61 In his day, it would have been possible in principle to mathematize mechanical individua such as clocks and watches, but totally impossible to attempt the same exercise for organic individuals, however simple. Matheron fails to make sense of the quantitative aspect of the Spinozan individuum, largely because of an unintelligible mathematical reconstruction of Spinoza’s presumed intentions (Matheron 1969: 37–41).62 The mathematical irretrievability of Spinoza’s doctrine of the individual did not dissuade Gueroult from an excursion into the theory of rigid bodies in an attempt to restore to the doctrine mathematical

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intelligibility. In an Appendix devoted entirely to the matter, he defends at length the eccentric claim that Spinoza’s definition of the individual (certa quadam ratio) can be found in the relationship between speed and distance in the investigations on center of oscillation carried out by Descartes, Roberval, and above all Huygens. According to Gueroult, Spinoza could have taken the idea of his distinction between corpora simplicissima and composita from Huygens’s distinction between simple and compound pendulums, and the arguments in the famous letter to Oldenburg of November 20, 1665 show the “probable influence” on Spinoza of the researches on pendulums of Roberval and Huygens, notably “le principe de la conservation du mouvement du centre de gravité.” Gueroult admits that On doit préciser que si l’hypothèse d’une influence de la théorie pendulaire de Huygens sur la théorie spinoziste des corps n’est pas historiquement prouvée par des documents, des allusions précises ou des textes formels, mais ne s’impose que de par leur convergence indéniable, en revanche, les circonstances historiques, à tout le moins, l’autorisent. (Gueroult 1968–74: II, 557)

The historical circumstances authorize nothing of the sort. There is no evidence in Spinoza’s historical circumstances (notably his friendship with Huygens), or in his writings or letters, that he had any grasp of the mathematical intricacies of Huygens’s investigations into rigid-body motion, or that there is any link between these investigations and Spinoza’s concept of individuum. Gueroult’s Appendix 5 is an unaccountable aberration in an otherwise superlative commentary on Spinoza’s philosophy.63

s c i e n t i fi c m e t h o d The criticisms of Bacon in Spinoza’s first letter to Oldenburg do not imply a repudiation of Bacon’s philosophy in toto, any more than the criticisms of Descartes in the same letter imply that Spinoza’s philosophy is free of Cartesian ideas. The first-order fact-gathering business of natural philosophy was viewed by Spinoza in a Baconian way. In chapter 7 of the Theological-Political Treatise, he brackets the methods of scriptural exegesis and natural philosophy in the following terms: I say that the method of interpreting Scripture is scarcely different from the method of interpreting nature, but accords with it closely. For just as the method of interpreting nature consists above all in

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 213 compiling a natural history from which, as from established facts, we infer definitions of natural things; so also to interpret Scripture we must prepare a sound Scriptural history, and from that, as from established facts and principles, to reach legitimate conclusions about the intentions of the authors of Scripture. (G III: 98)

The compilation of natural histories was the first step in Bacon’s method, and Spinoza’s inference of definitions (of essences or natures) parallels Bacon’s inductive extraction of forms and natures. In TIE, Spinoza lists four steps assisting the selection of the best among the four modi percipiendi. The first two steps read: “I. That we know exactly our nature, which we desire to perfect, and at the same time know as much of the nature of things as is necessary. II. That we collect therefore the differences, agreements, and oppositions of things” (G II: 12). Savan sees in the second of these the influence of Bacon’s inductive tables of “Degrees or Comparison,” “Presence and Essence,” and “Deviation or Absence in Proximity” (Savan 1986: 122n8). The same Baconian spirit leads Spinoza to advise Oldenburg in April 1662 (Ep 6), during his discussion of Boyle’s “The History of Fluidity and Firmness,” that for an understanding of the nature of fluids in general, it suffices to know that we can move our hand in a fluid in all directions with a motion proportionate to it (motu fluido proportionate) and without any [other?] resistance. This is clear enough to those who pay sufficient attention to those notions that explain Nature as it is in itself, not as it is related to human sense. I do not therefore despise this history as useless. On the contrary, if [a history] of each liquid could be compiled as accurately as possible and that was of the utmost reliability, I should judge it to be most useful for understanding their individual differences, which being highly necessary is something to be greatly desired by all philosophers. (G IV: 33)64

In the same letter, he goes beyond Baconian natural history to cite Bacon as having “more than adequately demonstrated” before Descartes that tangible qualities depend only on motion, shape, and other mechanical affections – though I suspect Spinoza is using Bacon here to scold Boyle for making too much of an experimental meal out of something that his illustrious compatriot had cleared up years before. More decisive perhaps is the letter to Bouwmeester of June 10, 1666 (Ep 37) in which Spinoza argues that our clear and distinct

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perceptions are not caused by anything outside ourselves, but only by other clear and distinct perceptions. This means that our clear and distinct perceptions arise only from the certain and fixed laws of our nature alone, that is, from our absolute power (potentia), not from chance (fortuna), that is, from causes, though also certain and acting through fixed laws, that are unknown to us and alien to our nature and power. As for other [kinds of] perceptions, I acknowledge that they depend wholly and utterly on chance.

Accordingly, the true Method consists in the knowledge alone of the pure understanding, of its nature and of its laws. To acquire this method, you must first of all distinguish between intellect and imagination, or between true ideas and the others, that is fictitious, false, and doubtful ideas, and, absolutely speaking, all those that depend on memory alone. To understand this, at least as far as the Method requires, there is no need to know the nature of the mind through its first cause; it is sufficient to compile a short history (historiola), in the way taught by Verulamius [Bacon], of the mind or of its perceptions.

The “true method” envisioned by Spinoza is scarcely Baconian, insofar as it charts the generation of clear and distinct perceptions from each other, but the materials on which it is intended to work are to be collected in a Baconian manner. Without those empirical materials, we cannot hope to ascend to a knowledge of the nature of things. Or given the fourth kind of perceptio in TIE, without those materials we cannot acquire a knowledge of the essences or definitions of finite modes through their proximate causes (TIE §19).65 Assuming such a Baconian influence in Spinoza’s methodology, there reemerges the question of Bacon’s presence in the Spinozan taxonomy of knowing. Spinoza’s notion of experientia vaga has traditionally been taken to be an allusion to or borrowing from Aphorism 100 of Novum Organum, Book I: But not only is a greater abundance of experiments (experimentum) to be sought for and procured, and that too of a different kind from what has been done hitherto; but an entirely different method, order, and process for continuing and advancing experience (experientia) must also be introduced. For random experience (experientia vaga), when it

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 215 just follows its own nose, is, as was said above, mere groping in the dark, and confounds men rather than instructs them. But when Experience proceeds by fixed law, without interruption and in regular order, then we may hope for something better of the sciences.66

There is a parallel between the experientia vaga of the two philosophers; and Spinoza, who had closely studied Novum Organum by September 1661, can scarcely have been unaware of Bacon’s use of the expression. Yet everyone has assumed the link with Bacon by default, rather than inferring it after an examination of other sources of prima facie relevance. Spinoza and Bacon may well have been the only philosophers to couple “experientia” and “vaga” to make a philosophical point, but they were not the first to use the latter term for that purpose. Since the thirteenth century at the latest,67 “vagus” had functioned in logical treatises in ways that invite us to reconsider Spinoza’s use of the term. To take once again the manuals that Spinoza knew, Burgersdijk, in his Institutiones logicae (1626), introduces “vagus” in his discussion of universals, singulars, and individuals. The singular is that which is predicated of one thing through its own nature (Theorem VII), and singulars are “atoms,” or individuals, in the sense that they cannot be subdivided into entities that retain the same name and nature (Theorem VIII). Furthermore (Theorem IX), each individual is either determined (determinatum), or undesignated (vagum). An individual is determined in four ways (Theorem X): through a proper name (“Alexander,” “Bucephalus”), through a common name (“The Philosopher,” meaning Aristotle), through a demonstrative pronoun (“this person”), and periphrastically (“The Apostle to the Gentiles,” meaning St. Paul). An individual is vagum in one way (Theorem XI): through an indefinite pronoun (“someone,” “some person”). As Heereboord puts it in his explicatio of Theorem IX, “Individuals are said to be determined, when they are delimited to a certain place and time. They are undesignated, when the contrary obtains.”68 A useful source from earlier in the century is the article on “confusa” in Goclenius’s Lexicon philosophicum (1613). After “confusa” as “indistincta,” and Aristotle’s and Zabarella’s “confusum” as a “Whole comprising a multitude of parts,” Goclenius goes on to note: Confusum is also taken by some Scholastics to be Vagum, & in Fonseca’s teaching De suppositionibus it is the opposite of “specified” (signatum) and “determined” (determinatum). Children first know confused particulars as particularia vaga, later they know particularia

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216 alan gabbey signata. First they know father or mother only as another person who is no different from other people but who resembles them. Later, however, they know him or her as this specified person (ut hunc signatum), that is, they distinguish father and mother from other persons. John the Grammarian also took it [confusum] in this sense in [his commentary on Aristotle’s] Physics I. (Goclenius 1613: 439)

Given this traditional understanding of “vagus,” as expressed in Burgersdijk, Heereboord, and Goclenius, Spinoza is using the term in the same way as a description of the logical status of the individuals on which experientia vaga is based. First, the opposition between vaga and determinata is explicitly mentioned in TIE, and the way Spinoza presents it implies that some of what he is saying will be familiar to his readers: II. There is the perception we have from experientia vaga, that is, from experience that is not determined (determinatur) by the intellect, but is spoken of in just this way because it happens by chance (casu) and we have to hand no other counter-instance (nullum aliud habemus experimentum, quod hoc oppugnat), and so for us it remains an unshaken perception. (TIE §19)

Second, Spinoza illustrates experientia vaga by noting that through experientia vaga I know that I shall die, for I affirm this because I have seen that others like myself have died, though they did not all live through the same interval of time, or die from the same disease. Again, I know also from experientia vaga that oil is suited to feeding fire, but that water is suited to extinguishing it; I know also that the dog is a barking animal, and that man is a rational animal, etc. (TIE §20)

Each of these items of knowledge, and the non-mathematician’s knowledge of simple arithmetical algorithms (including the Rule of Three, the illustration that appears in TIE, the Short Treatise, and the Ethics), is inferred from or grounded on individual experiences that merit the epithet “vaga” because they are not “determined by the intellect” in one or other of the four ways listed by Burgersdijk. When we say that “man is rational,” we do not mean only that Alexander or The Apostle to the Gentiles is rational, but that any human is rational. When we say that “oil feeds fire,” we do not mean just this or that measure of oil, but simply “oil,” that is, any and every measure of oil. This is William of

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 217 Sherwood’s third mode of simple supposition, as in “Pepper is sold here and in Rome” (see note 77). Spinoza says – significantly for my argument – that those he has seen die did not live the same life-spans or die from the same causes, meaning that the death of anyone at all, and of no one in particular, has played its part in leading him to infer that he too will die. He does not know this merely through having seen the lifeless body of his father on a certain day in March 1654, of Simon de Vries on a certain date in 1667, of Adriaan Koerbagh on a certain date in 1669, or the bodies of the murdered Jan and Cornelis de Witt on or after August 20, 1672.69 Had Spinoza inferred his own mortality from these deaths alone, the knowledge acquired would have been from experientia determinata, but because of its narrower observational base, it would have been less assured (in this instance) than the knowledge acquired from experientia vaga. Similar considerations hold for E 2p40s1,2. In E 2p40s1, the discussion is partly of universals (as was Burgersdijk’s above), which we form in varying ways according to the dispositions of our individual bodies. Accordingly, Spinoza claims in E 2p40s2, “we perceive many things and form universal notions: I. 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 (see p29c); for that reason I have been accustomed (consuevi) to call such perceptions knowledge from random experience (experientia vaga).70 Note how “consuevi” significantly alters the sense of the last phrase: Shirley omits it, leaving only “and therefore I call such perceptions” (Spinoza 1982: 90), which breaks the direct link – implied in the Latin text – with TIE, and possibly the indirect link with the Peripatetic logical tradition. It is significant that in TIE Spinoza describes knowledge from experientia vaga as “unshaken,” provided there are no counterinstances, and as constituting nearly all the practical knowledge we need in life. Each of the items of knowledge with which Spinoza illustrates experientia vaga is in itself anything but “vague” or “undetermined.” Each item is clear, unambiguous, and, like death (the ideal example) and taxes, is one of the certainties of this life. Each product of experientia vaga is an empirical generalization, or a scientific law, or a mathematical truth. But because there might be counter-instances, at least in principle (even human mortality seems open to experiential disconfirmation), knowledge from experientia vaga is not absolutely certain, being at several removes from scientia intuitiva. Those who believe, on the basis of their own random experience, that all sheep have short tails, are

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surprised to discover that Moroccan sheep have long tails (KV 2.3). And although Spinoza is unclear on the question, I assume that even the Rule of Three is open to correction in the sense that a mathematician might show that there are exceptions to the algorithm assumed without benefit of Euclid through extrapolation from a simple case, though no one is likely to come across them in ordinary circumstances. To convert these items of knowledge from experientia vaga into absolute certainty requires knowing the essence of dogs, oil, water, humans, and the Euclidean theory of proportions, from which the respective accidents might be deduced. It cannot be assumed that Bacon is the direct source for Spinoza’s experientia vaga.71 It makes more sense to see in the Peripatetic logical tradition the source for both Bacon and Spinoza on this question, each of them using vagus in his own way and for his own different purposes. Bacon’s purpose in the aphorisms on either side of Aphorism 100 (Novum Organum, Book I) is to assess methods that others have chosen to attain truth in the sciences. Some have resorted to authority, some to logic, and some to simple experience (experientia mera), “which if it [just] occurs, is called chance (casus), and if sought for, is called experiment.” Simple experience therefore includes experientia vaga, which Bacon brackets with chance experience earlier in the same aphorism (Aphorism 82, Bacon 1857–74: I: 189–90). But all these methods are useless as means of discovering causes, in contrast to the proper method, which proceeds “by fixed law, without interruption and in regular order” (experientia determinata). Where “experientia vaga” appears in Spinoza, his purpose is not to emulate Bacon with a critique of methodologies or with proposals for a new method, but to set out three or four kinds of perception or knowledge. Although Spinoza’s experientia vaga does not uncover causes or essences, at least it yields empirical generalizations (and mathematical algorithms as a special case) that form a useful part of one’s general knowledge of things. The contrast between Bacon and Spinoza is that for Bacon experientia vaga is an ineffectual method of finding the causes of things. For Spinoza, it is a sound empirical base of a specific logical kind from which we infer general propositions which are useful in our lives, but which do not reveal the essences or causes of things. What therefore is Spinoza’s method for revealing the essences of things? How do we obtain “adequate ideas of the properties of things,” or the scientia intuitiva that consists in the move from “an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 219 knowledge of the essence of things” (E 2p40s2)? It is difficult to shape an answer, since it is not clear how precisely Spinoza’s method is supposed to yield an understanding of causes or essences. Where he counsels Baconian recipes, as in the letter to Bouwmeester or in the letter to Oldenburg advocating a history of liquids, that preliminary part of the method is straightforward, but as a means of unveiling essences and proximate causes it would have been as powerless as Bacon’s own method proved to be. Where Spinoza adumbrates his method, the matter is much less straightforward. The optimistic Bouwmeester had asked Spinoza if there exists a method by means of which “we can proceed safely and without weariness [!] in the consideration of the most exalted subjects.” Spinoza replied that there is such a method, “by which we can direct and concatenate our clear and distinct conceptions,” which however “can only arise from other clear and distinct conceptions which are in us; they acknowledge no other cause outside us.” So as we saw above, the true method consists “in the knowledge alone of the pure understanding, of its nature and of its laws” (Ep 37). It is impossible to envisage such a method “rightly controlling the Reason in acquiring knowledge of unknown truths,” as Tschirnhaus characterized the method he vainly sought from Spinoza in January 1675 (Ep 59). In TIE, Spinoza’s only extended essay in methodology, albeit an unfinished draft, he explains that Method is not the reasoning itself by which we understand the causes of things, much less the understanding of the causes of things; it is understanding what a true idea is by distinguishing it from the rest of the perceptions . . .. From this it may be inferred that Method is nothing but a reflexive knowledge (cognitio reflexiva), or an idea of an idea. (TIE §§37–38)

As Parkinson puts it, Spinoza’s method “consists in thinking about what is known, rather than in trying to prove that a given proposition is known.” In sum, the rules in TIE “are of little value for the discovery of new truths” (Parkinson 1954: 11, 21).72 As we saw earlier, Spinoza valued experimentation, because it reveals new phenomena and new qualities of things. But it cannot uncover the nature of things: sensory knowledge belongs to the imagination, knowledge of essences and causes to the intellect alone.73 In the controversy with Boyle, there is no suggestion that his experiments might have helped to supplement Spinoza’s knowledge of fluidity and

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solidity or of the nature of nitre. Spinoza’s response to Boyle’s Essays was essentially an examination of Boyle from a Spinozistic Cartesian standpoint. The natural contrast was with Descartes, who had uncovered the real natures of all these things through rational demonstrations, and whose explanations of these natures had not been amplified or improved on by Boyle’s experimental investigations. I pass over Spinoza’s comments on the essays on fluidity and solidity, and will look briefly at his critique of the experiment of which “On Nitre” was the published account in Boyle’s Essays. Boyle had dropped a piece of glowing coal onto nitre (saltpetre, potassium nitrate), thereby decomposing it into a fixed part (fixed nitre, potash, potassium carbonate),74 and a volatile part (spirit of nitre, nitric acid) which he distilled. On recombining the two parts he retrieved the “redintegrated” nitre, and a rough quantitative check showed that almost as much nitre was recovered as had been “divided” initially. Boyle concluded that nitre is a chemical compound (as opposed to a mechanical mixture of different substances), the constituent parts being substances of different specific chemical and physical natures, the spirit of nitre showing acidic properties, the fixed nitre showing “an Alkalizate nature,” each of them being of a different nature from the nitre itself, which exhibited other properties. Boyle inferred that the corpuscles of the constituent parts persist unchanged throughout the reactions, and that the reactions were explicable on the basis of his corpuscular chemistry, but not by the doctrine of substantial forms, according to which the form of nitre is destroyed in the substantial change brought about in the experiments.75 Spinoza objected that Boyle would need an additional experiment to show that the nitre and the spirit of nitre are in fact different substances and that the spirit of nitre cannot be crystallized without the fixed nitre, which Spinoza took to be an impurity in the original nitre and in the spirit of nitre. Furthermore, Boyle’s quantitative check did not support his case. He should have investigated further, to see if a given quantity of nitre always produces the same quantity of fixed nitre and if the fixed nitre is always proportional to the amount of nitre required to produce it. It is unclear why Spinoza thought this additional experimentation might have tested Boyle’s interpretation of his results, any more than it might have tested his own. You would expect the proportionate relationship to apply equally to the fixed nitre interpreted as simply an impurity. A more significant feature of this quantitative critique of Boyle’s methodology is that Spinoza’s emphasis on proportionalities

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 221 foreshadows the Law of Definite Proportions, recognized by chemists in the eighteenth century and validated experimentally by Joseph-Louis Proust in 1797. The law states that “Elements combine in definite ratios by weight and the composition of a pure chemical compound is independent of the way in which it is prepared.”76 This surprising affinity between Spinoza’s individuum and Proust’s Law, each of them from disparate origins, points to a shared alertness to mathematical invariance in Nature, expressed as unchanging proportionalities in physical processes. Above all, this alertness to invariant proportionalities is exactly what Spinoza shows in his concept of individuum. According to Spinoza’s explanation of Boyle’s results, the two products of the experiment were nothing more than the observed effects of different mechanical states of the same fundamental particles. Nitre and the spirit of nitre consist of rigid, carrot-shaped particles.77 The particles of nitre are at rest, those of spirit of nitre are in rapid motion; the fixed nitre slows the faster particles of the spirit of nitre to produce nitre and has pores whose sizes change and whose walls become brittle when the nitre is forced out by the fire. As for the difference in taste that Boyle noted between the fixed nitre (alkaline) and spirit of nitre (acidic), their particles lie lengthways on the tongue when slow and prick it when they move fast. The inflammability of nitre and non-inflammability of spirit of nitre, also noted by Boyle, arise from the inability of fire to carry the motionless particles of nitre upwards as quickly as it does the already quickly moving particles of spirit of nitre, which thereby extinguishes the fire rather than feeding it. To support his interpretation of Boyle’s experimental results, Spinoza describes three experiments he performed to show that spirit of nitre is really volatile nitre. Though the experiments are of interest in themselves, they neither confirm nor deny their Cartesian theoretical parentage. Boyle had little difficulty in accounting for them without having to revise his own position.78 To prove Boyle’s claimed specific differences between the substances would have meant showing that their particles have different geometrical forms. Instead, Boyle was content to show their different chemical properties, without explaining how they derive from the presumed corresponding corpuscular states, though he had no doubt that that was their origin.79 His principal purpose in the experiment, according to Oldenburg, was not to present “a really perfect and philosophical analysis of niter,” but to show the weakness of the doctrine of substantial forms and qualities (which for Spinoza could be taken as read), to show that forms and qualities can themselves be explained in

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mechanical terms (Ep 11).80 Yet in the essay itself, Boyle claimed that his experiment proved the reducibility of sensible qualities to the “primary and mechanical affections” of bodies. Since Boyle censured Spinoza for making gratuitous (Cartesian) assumptions about the nature of nitre and the associated substances, the dispute as a whole, including the arguments over fluidity and solidity, comes across as a case of the pot calling the kettle black. As Meinel has shown (at least for the earlier seventeenth century), experimental confirmations of mechanical hypotheses were far from being as conclusive as the theoreticians and experimentalists of the mechanical philosophy claimed (Meinel 1988). We might look afresh at Spinoza’s insistence on the epistemological insufficiencies of the experimental way.

n at u r a v e x at a ( s i v e d e u s v e x at u s ) Bacon’s distinction between natura libera and natura vexata is among the earliest of a number of related distinctions that categorize modern notions of Nature and of the Natural Sciences. We have assumed the distinction between observation and experiment, between Natural and Experimental History, between Nature left free for human inspection and Nature subjected to human inquisition, between attending to what Nature tells us and “torturing” Nature to tell us more, between Nature and Art. The mechanical or manual arts consisted in the construction and operation of machines to benefit human society by moving things contra naturam. The Peripatetics distinguished between secundum naturam (according to nature), contra naturam (against nature), praeter naturam (beyond though not strictly contrary to the natural, such as being born with six fingers), and supra naturam (the supernatural, such as miracles). Lending intelligibility to these distinctions is the belief that Nature and Ourselves are separable entities, that we can thereby exercise our will to intervene in the natural world, to disturb the natural run of things, to have dominion over the creatures, to make ourselves masters and possessors of Nature. Spinoza the metaphysician cannot admit any of these distinctions, except as entia rationis. They are not demarcations within the real. As modes of infinite substance, human beings are integral parts of Nature. They are not distinct from it when intervening in Nature in a Baconian way as technological or experimental agents. Everything that happens, without exception, is secundum Naturam, sive Deum, that is, according to the Laws of Nature or God. Nothing can act contra naturam, as

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 223 Spinoza proclaims in chapter 6 of the Theological-Political Treatise (“On Miracles”), so there cannot be a distinction in re between Art and Nature.81 Infinite substance cannot intervene in its own operations to change them in accordance with some imagined intentional act of will. Here the notion of “intervening” makes no sense. As an ordinary citizen using ordinary language, Spinoza grinding lenses would describe the activity as ars mechanica, and lenses don’t grow on trees. But as a metaphysician he cannot say that through an act of “free” will he is intervening in Nature to produce lenses contra naturam. The will, being an ens rationis, cannot cause volitions, whose real causes lie hidden elsewhere (Ep 2). Spinoza, his lathe, and the crafted lenses behave strictly and solely according to the Laws of Nature expressed through his and their own essence. In the Preface to Ethics Part 3, Spinoza censures those who, writing about the passions and human conduct, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of nature, but of things that are outside nature (extra naturam). Indeed they seem to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion (Imperium in imperio). For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself. (CW I: 491)

This powerful idea reappears in TP 2.4–6. There is no difference between desires engendered within us through reason, and desires arising from external causes, because both are the products of the laws of nature (TP 2.5): Whether wise or ignorant, a human being is part of nature, and every single thing by which each individual person is determined to act must be attributed to the power of nature, that is, in so far as that thing can be defined by reference to the nature of this or that person. Whether led by reason or by desire alone, no human being acts except in accordance with the laws and rules of nature, that is (by Art. 4 of this Chapter), from the right of nature [ex naturae jure].

Nevertheless (TP 2.6), most people believe that the ignorant perturb the order of nature rather than follow it, and conceive of men in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom (imperium in imperio). They decree that the human mind is produced not by any natural causes, but is created

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224 alan gabbey immediately by God, and is so independent of other things that it has absolute power (potestas) to determine itself and to use reason correctly.82

Reflecting on the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–67), Spinoza wrote to Oldenburg in September or October 1665: these disorders . . . do not move me to laughter nor even to tears, but rather to philosophizing, and to the better observation of human nature. I do not think it right for me to laugh at nature, much less to weep over it, when I consider that men, like the rest, are only a part of nature, and that I do not know how each part of nature is connected with the whole of it, and how with the other parts. (Ep 30)83

This is the dispassionate lesson that Spinoza drew from his philosophical vision of Man and Nature. Among the lessons we today might draw from the same rich source, the most disconcerting must be that “Modern Technological Man” and “Man in the State of Nature” are one and the same thing. It is a lesson whose implications we show little sign of beginning to comprehend.84

notes 1 Wolf 1935: 564–81, especially pp. 571–75. Spinoza re-appears in the chapter on philosophy, pp. 650–56. The author of this serviceable history of early modern science is the eminent Spinoza scholar. See also Brett 1965: 394–406; Klein 1970: 402–49 (“Spinoza’s Hormic Psychology”); Sahakian 1970: 34–38. Spinoza does not appear in Herrnstein and Boring 1965. For a list of other studies, see Neu 1977 and Nails 1986. 2 Seligman and Johnson 1930–35: XIV: 299–301 (by Benjamin Ginzburg); Sills 1968– 79: XV: 135–37 (by Rosalie L. Colie); and David Miller 1987: 502–503 (by Robert J. McShea). 3 McKeon 1928; Wolfson 1934: 1, 32; Parkinson 1954; Pollock 1966; Curley 1973a; Lachterman 1978; Biasutti 1979; Delahunty 1985; Grene and Nails 1986; Jon Miller 2003; Manning 2012; Peterman 2012, 2014; Schliesser 2014. 4 Popkin 1986, 1996; Savan 1986: 97–99; Curley 1994b. 5 See the thoughtful introduction to Grene and Nails 1986. 6 For some examples, see Hessing 1977; Bennett 1984: 91ff; Grene and Nails 1986. For a welcome corrective to Bennett in this context, see Ariew 1987: 652–53. See in particular Steenbakkers 2012.

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 225 7 On neo-scholasticism in Dutch universities during the first half of the seventeenth century, especially the work of Burgersdijk, Heereboord, and Keckermann, see Dibon 1954. On Burgersdijk’s thought, historical context, and influence, see Bos and Krop 1993. 8 See Van Rooijen 1888: 180; Wolf’s commentaries in Spinoza 1910: xxxi, 190–92, 194, 198; Wolfson 1934: I: 64n2, 81n1; Siebrand 1986: 65–66. 9 See Keckermann 1614: “Praecognitorum philosophicorum liber primus, qui est de philosophiae natura”; Cap. I, “De nomine et deflnitione philosophiae,” col. 7; Cap. II, “De philosophiae partitione,” cols. 11–18. In Cap. II, Keckermann comments at length on the drawbacks of partitioning philosophy into theoretical and active. See also Burgersdijk 1651: “ΕΡΜΗΝΕΙΑ Logica: sive Synopseos logicae Burgersdicianae Explicatio,” p. 277; Heereboord 1659: “Collegium logicum,” “Positionum logicarum disputatio prima, de philosophiae et logicae natura,” Theses 8–14, p. 1. 10 Heereboord 1659: Collegium logicum, Positionum logicarum disputatio prima, de philosophiae et logicae natura, Theses 15–18, p. 1. Burgersdijk 1651: Lib. II, Cap. I (De definitione in genere, déque definitione nominali), Theorema II; p. 143, Lib. II, Cap. XXVIII (de methodo), and Heereboord’s explicatio in “ΕΡΜΗΝΕΙΑ Logica: sive Synopseos logicae Burgersdicianae Explicatio,” p. 127. 11 Goclenius 1613: 1010. Another sense of “scientia” is habitus, the intellectual state or quality of those who possess scientia. See Goclenius 1613: 623–25, 1012; Heereboord 1659: Collegium logicum, Positionum logicarum disputatio quarta, de Qualitate, p. 6; Keckermann 1614: cols. 871–75, Lib. I, Cap. VI (De explicatione qualitatum), Exemplum primae speciei qualitatis nempe Habitus. 12 In his analysis of scientia intuitiva, Mignini does not ask what exactly Spinoza understood by scientia (Mignini 1990). Except where otherwise stated or indicated, all translations are my own. 13 TIE §4n (G II: 6); TPP chapters 5, 15, 20; TP, chapter 8 (G III: 73, 187, 243, 346). 14 Alsted 1649: Tom. IV (Praecipuae Farragines disciplinarum), Lib. 35 (Apodemica, Critica). Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise might be described in Alstedian terms as a farrago of política, historia, and, as Alsted’s Tabula XXXVIII puts it (Tom. I), “critica specialis theologica de libris Scripturae Sanctae.” 15 The scientiae mediae (middle sciences), a sub-division within speculative philosophy, operated between mathematics and physics, treating physical objects in a mathematical way. The principal scientiae mediae, or “mixed mathematics,” as they were called in seventeenth-century England, were optics, music, astronomy, and mechanics. See Keckermann 1614, Generalis introductio in praecognita philosophica, Cap. II (De Philosophiae Partitione), col. 17. Also Gabbey 1992: 308–12.

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226 alan gabbey 16 The contingent things defined in E 4d3 are contingent only for us, who, attending only to their essence, find nothing that necessarily posits or excludes their existence. On Spinoza’s necessitarianism, see Don Garrett 1990c: 32–37; 1991. 17 “Epistemology” belongs to logic de re though not by name. I do not know when the term epistemología first appeared, other than in modern neo-scholastic manuals. The English term dates from 1856 (O.E.D.). 18 On Spinoza’s model of organic structure, see Jonas 1973; Duchesneau 1974. On the possible influence on Spinoza’s natural philosophy of Lambert van Velthuysen’s biological and medical writings, see Dunin-Borkowski 1933. 19 For valuable surveys of the scientific side to Spinoza’s intellectual life, see McKeon 1928: 130–57; Spinoza 1928: Introduction, especially pp. 39–43; Savan 1986; Siebrand 1986; and more recently, Manning 2012; Peterman 2012, 2014; Schliesser 2014. For the singular view that “his philosophy was strikingly disconnected from the sifting and interrogating science that went on around him,” consult Maull 1986. 20 Parkinson (1954: 2–3) sees more significance in the number of Spinoza’s “scientific” books than I do. 21 For further details on this aspect of the correspondence, see Van de Ven 2014. 22 I use G IV as the source reference for all Spinoza’s correspondence (Ep), but note that his correspondence with Oldenburg appears also in vols. I and II of the Halls’ excellent edition, with translations, of Oldenburg’s correspondence: Oldenburg 1965–86. Originally, there were more than twenty-eight letters between Spinoza and Oldenburg; the internal evidence of the correspondence shows that at least five letters are lost. 23 Spinoza did not read English, so Oldenburg would have sent the Latin translation that appeared in London in 1661: CW I: 173n14. See also Letter 25, Oldenburg to Spinoza, April 28 (O.S.), 1665, where he tells Spinoza that the Essays has already appeared in Latin in England and asks him therefore to try to prevent it being printed in Holland. 24 The reply was included in the second edition of New experiments physicomechanicall (Oxford, 1662), and the Latin version (presumably sent to Spinoza) was published in 1663, though there is no extant evidence that Spinoza responded to Oldenburg’s invitation to send him his comments on it. 25 See Petry’s remarks in Spinoza [attributed] 1985: 96–97. 26 Pascal 1663; also CW I: 187n51. 27 Klever misreads Spinoza’s account of the transmutation, taking it to mean that Spinoza himself did the experiment, and that its purpose was “to find out the structure of gold” (Klever 1990: 124). The purpose of the operation was not to discover the structure of gold, but to find a way of making it, in this instance from silver.

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 227 28 Freudenthal 1904: 298; Dutka 1953; McKeon 1965; De Vet 1983, 1986; Klever 1983; Moreau, trans. Spinoza [attributed] 1984–85; Petry in Spinoza 1985 [attributed]1994. 29 By “circulus ABCD” Spinoza intends ABCD to represent a circular disc of glass. In the Latin original of this quotation, the long third sentence is a conditional, which was ignored in the translations of Wolf and Shirley, and by myself in the 1996 version of this chapter (Garrett 1996). In a blog of June 21, 2008, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu highlights this grammatical feature of the third sentence, taking it to signal a supposition Spinoza made to simplify his claim about the superiority of the circle, and which moreover does not imply that he had forgotten Descartes’s law of refraction. However, the superiority that Spinoza finds in the circle pertains only to its geometrical properties, not to the physico-geometrical (i.e., dioptrical) properties of a circular or spherical glass, where Descartes’s law of refraction must hold, whatever the purely geometrical superiority of the circle. 30 If i is the angle of incidence between the ray and the radius of the globe or circular disc, with r the radius and μ the refractive index of the glass, then the distance from A to the intersection X of refracted ray and diameter AB is given by: r AX ¼ qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi þ r μ2 " sin2 i " cos i

If X were always to coincide with B, that is, if AX ¼ 2r for all values of i, then μ would have to depend on i, with μ2 ¼ 2 þ 2 Cos i. Equivalently, the angle of

refraction would have to be always half the angle of incidence, as Wolf points out in his annotation to Ep 39 (Spinoza 1928: 434). An analysis of this sort would have been within the competence of the author of Stelkonstige Reeckening van den Regenboog. 31 Huygens’s Tractatus de ratiociniis in aleae ludo, originally written in Dutch, first appeared in Van Schooten’s Latin translation in his Exercitationes mathematicae, a copy of which was in Spinoza’s library (Van Rooijen 1888: no. 27, p. 154). See Huygens 1888–1950: XIV: 3–6; 29–31n7, which contains the first French translation of the two propositions answering the first question in the Reeckening van Kanssen (attributed to Spinoza). 32 Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La logique, ou l’art de penser (Paris, 1662). Cf. De Vet 1986: 297. Though it proves nothing either way, Spinoza had in his library both L’Art de penser and the 1659 edition of J. H. Glazemaker’s Dutch translation of the Discours. See Van Rooijen 1888: 141–42, 187–88. 33 In the Praefatio, Meyer writes confusingly that he often wished that someone well versed in analysis and synthesis, and in Descartes’s writings and philosophy, would “render in the Synthetic order what Descartes wrote in the Analytic, and to demonstrate it in the manner familiar to the geometricians” (Spinoza CW I: 227).

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228 alan gabbey But Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy are not couched in analytic form (nor are the Meditations, properly speaking; see Garber 1992: 47–48), which leads Curley to infer from the Praefatio that Spinoza was unclear about Descartes’s distinction between analysis and synthesis: Curley 1977; also CW I: 224 n3. Siebrand disagrees, suggesting that the confusion is Meyer’s alone, not Spinoza’s: Siebrand 1986: 69. See also Garber and Cohen 1982: 141–47. To economize on footnotes, I use only in-text references to the articles of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy. In DPP, Spinoza used the Latin edition of 1644. 34 On DPP and Spinoza’s reception of Cartesian physics, see Dunin-Borkowski 1933– 36: III: 95–146; Siebrand 1986: 65–73. Notable recent studies that spotlight fresh aspects of Spinoza’s involvement with physics are Manning 2012; Peterman 2012, 2014; Schliesser 2014. 35 Spinoza found Casearius disagreeable and “more anxious for novelty than for truth.” See Ep 9. 36 Spinoza’s instructions are duly reflected in Meyer’s Preface. I warn readers that Halbert Hains Britan’s translation of Spinoza’s text (Spinoza 1974) is thoroughly unreliable. 37 See Jon Miller 2003 for a close analysis of the complex issue of “laws of nature” in Spinoza’s philosophy. For Spinoza, laws of nature determine what is possible or impossible and apply with necessity throughout the whole of Nature, whether physical, moral or political. 38 Proposition 14: “Each thing, in so far as it is simple and undivided, and is considered in itself alone, perseveres, as far as possible (quantum in se est), always in the same state.” Proposition 15: “Every moved body tends, of itself, to continue to move along a straight line, not along a curved line.” 39 See also McKeon 1928: 155–56. 40 Later, in PP 3.57–59, Descartes examines circular motion in greater detail. See Gabbey 1980: 290–97; and Garber 1992: 218–23, 285–88. 41 Gebhardt’s reading of the sentence (G I: 204, lines 6–10) is identical to that of the first edition, and the Dutch translation of 1664 conveys accurately the sense of the Latin text (Spinoza 1663: 64; 1664: 74). 42 It is obvious from the simple diagram (omitted here), that CB is a straight line. 43 Huygens was an Archimedean through and through. See the relevant articles in Bos 1980. 44 Gabbey 1980: 248–60. See also Garber 1992: 188–93. For a survey of Scholastic senses of determinatio and cognates, see Goclenius 1613: 523–25. 45 See Gabbey 1980: 256–57. In La Dioptrique, Discours Second, the collisions are oblique, but one of the bodies is always immovable, and the changes in speed of the ball are arbitrary. These devices are legitimate in the context of a demonstration of the law of optical refraction, but in the general case of oblique collision, both

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 229 bodies are in motion, and changes in speed and direction are precisely what one is trying to find. 46 Descartes 1964–74: V: 185. It is modes in the Cartesian sense that are at issue here, not the modes of the later Spinoza. I have translated Descartes’s “changement” as “mutation,” which is inelegant but technically precise. Descartes is thinking of mutatio in the Peripatetic sense that includes instantaneous change, which is the case in the hard-body collision Rules in PP. On mutatio and on the tangled relations between the PLMM and the collision Rules, see Gabbey 1980: 306–307n77, 313n147, 263–65. 47 Spinoza places DPP 2p23 immediately before his presentation of Descartes’s Rules of collision, and uses it to demonstrate them. 48 Lecrivain claims, without explanation, that in DPP Descartes’s minimal principle is “an application of the law of inertia,” and that in Spinoza’s hands the principle “can perhaps be understood as the beginning of a principle of internal regulation – of an almost statistical nature – which will make possible a dynamic definition of individuality, notably in the Ethics” (Lecrivain 1986: 50). 49 Note Spinoza’s use of “mutatio”; see note 55. 50 In their objection-and-reply on teleology in Spinoza, neither Curley (1990b) nor Bennett (1990b) mentions the appearance of Descartes’s PLMM in DPP, so neither of them examines its relevance to the issue in question. Its relevance is recognized in Hoos 2000 (see main text). 51 For a useful synopsis of Descartes’s Seven Rules, together with translations of the Latin and French texts (1644, 1647) and of the important letter to Clerselier of February 17, 1645, see Garber 1992: 255–62. 52 I put “bulk” for “molis” rather than the equivalent “mass,” which has a misleading Newtonian connotation. 53 Wolf mistakenly translates “Cartesii Regulas motûs” as “Descartes’s Laws of Motion” (Spinoza 1928: 207). The treatise of Huygens that Spinoza had told Oldenburg about was the De motu corporum ex percussione, written about 1656 but not published until 1703, in which Huygens set out the first successful general theory of perfectly elastic collisions. 54 Huygens’s revision of Rule 6 is correct because his collision theory applies to perfectly elastic bodies, in contrast to Descartes’s Rules, which apply to perfectly hard bodies, construed as being perfectly inelastic. It is possible that Spinoza could not reconcile Huygens’s empirically respectable collision theory with Descartes’s, which he seems to have accepted (Rule 6 excepted) to the end of his life. After meeting him in 1676, Leibniz wrote: “Spinoza ne voyait pas bien les défauts des règles du mouvement de M. Descartes; il fut surpris quand je commençai à lui montrer qu’elles violaient l’égalité de la cause et de l’effet” (quoted in Gueroult 1968–74: II: 552). Spinoza told Tschirnhaus that it is absolutely impossible to

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230 alan gabbey demonstrate the existence of bodies from Descartes’s conception of extension, for matter at rest will stay at rest unless moved by a stronger external cause. “For that reason,” concluded Spinoza, “I did not hesitate at one time to affirm that the Cartesian principles of natural things are useless, not to say absurd” (Ep 81). It’s a moot point whether this should imply that Descartes’s impact Rules en bloc are also useless. The evidence of the Ethics is that for Spinoza many Cartesian principles of natural things were not at all useless. 55 On Spinoza’s physics in general, and on the difficulties attending especially the notions of simple and composite bodies, see Lachterman 1978. 56 See Gabbey 1980: 265–72. 57 For a thorough analysis of all aspects of Spinoza’s theory of individuation, see Don Garrett 1994. Shirley ignores Spinoza’s crucial use of “communico” (“ut motûs suos invicem . . . communicent”), thereby weakening his translation of the definition: “so as to preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves” (Spinoza 1982: 74). 58 A possible hangover from a curious feature of Descartes’s Rules of collision. In none of them is any body brought to rest by the collision. That could be a marginal side effect of Descartes’s faulty Rules, or it could reflect a worry that colliding hard bodies coming to rest might threaten his conservation law. Descartes’s Rules of collision apply only to bodies that are perfectly hard, that is, perfectly nonelastic. Elasticity in varying degrees and under some physical description is a prerequisite to establishing the universality of the conservation law. See Gabbey 1973. 59 Shirley mistakenly uses the hyphenated formula “motion-and-rest” for Spinoza’s “motus & quies” (Spinoza 1982: 75). Hyphens imply inseparability (like “Punchand-Judy”), but all Spinoza intends by “motus & quies” is that each constituent body of the Individual is sometimes in motion, sometimes at rest. 60 Damasio (2003) manages to associate Spinoza and the modern concept of homeostatis through Spinoza’s concept of conatus, though without mentioning the Definition of individuum following E 2p13. 61 Spinoza did not even formulate his own definitions of motion and rest. In DPP 2d8, he gives a good exposition and explanation of Descartes’s definition of local motion, properly understood. In doing so, he makes use of PP 2.13, 24–26, 28, 29, 31, without questioning any of these articles. That strongly suggests that at the time he was working on DPP Spinoza accepted Descartes’s overall account of local motion and rest (though not all of the Rules of collision), and there is no evidence that he had changed his mind by the time he wrote the axioms and lemmata that follow E 2p13. In January 1675, Tschirnhaus asked Spinoza for “the true definition of motion” (Ep 59). Spinoza replied that he had not yet formalized his ideas on the subject, but was reserving that for another time (Ep 60). The time seems not ever to

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 231 have arrived, since we hear nothing further from Spinoza on the nature of motion and rest, other than their being infinite modes. 62 Matheron expresses Spinoza’s “motion and rest” invariance as a meaningless (and dimensionally incorrect) formula in which the quantity of rest is measured by and indeed made equal to the mass, while the quantity of motion is measured by the more conventional “mass $ speed.” I have not incorporated into my analysis the precise “1/3” given as an example of the “motion and rest” ratio in the Short

Treatise II Preface Section 12, 14 (CW I: 96), because the passage in question is an addition possibly not by Spinoza. In any event, the ratio 1/3 used for this purpose means little in the absence of quantitative measures of both modes. 63 “Appendice N% 5. Disques tournants, pendules composés, corps composés, corps vivants.” (Gueroult 1968–74: II: 555–58). The problems of centers of oscillation and of percussion arise from properties of a rigid body rotating or revolving about an axis within or external to the body. If the body is oscillating under gravity about an axis within the body, find the length of the “string-and-bob” pendulum that oscillates with the same frequency (the center of oscillation problem). If it is swung under any impressed force, like a cricket or baseball bat, find the point on the body where the maximum force is exerted (the center of percussion problem). These problems were among the most difficult of seventeenth-century mechanics. They were solved partially by Descartes, Roberval, and others, and comprehensively by Huygens. 64 See Savan 1986: 113. 65 On the general question of experience in Spinoza’s epistemology, see Parkinson 1954 passim; Curley 1973a; Klever 1990. On Spinoza the empiricist and on seventeenth-century usages of and distinctions between “reason” and “experience,” see Francks 1985, especially pp. 180, 187–91. 66 Bacon 1857–74: I: 203; IV: 95, translation modified. See Joachim 1901: 164; 1940: 25–26n2; and Curley 1973a: 35. The original Latin of the penultimate sentence of Aphorism 100 reads: “Vaga enim Experientia et se tantum sequens (ut superius dictum est) mera palpatio est, et homines potius stupefacit quam informat” (Bacon 1857–74: I: 203). The precision of “vaga experientia” vanishes in the EllisSpedding-Heath translation: “For experience, when it wanders in its own track, is, as I have already remarked, mere groping in the dark, and confounds men rather than instructs them” (Bacon 1857–74: IV: 95). 67 In chapter 5 (“Properties of Terms”) of his Introductiones in logicam, William of Sherwood (thirteenth century) distinguishes three modes of simple supposition, the third of which he explains in the following way: “The third mode occurs as follows: ‘pepper is sold here and in Rome.’ This supposition is unlike the first, since the species itself is not sold, and unlike the second, since ‘pepper’ is not used here [for everything belonging to the species]

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232 alan gabbey insofar as it is pepper. Instead, ‘pepper’ here supposits for its significatum [as] related in a general, unfixed way to the things belonging to it. Thus, it is often said that this is unfixed (vaga) supposition. [A term having this third mode of simple supposition] supposits for a species insofar as [it does so] through individuals belonging to the species, but undesignated (non signata). It is as if someone asked ‘what animal is useful for plowing?’ and one answered ‘the ox’; in answering one does not intend to speak of a particular ox, but simply ox. Likewise, whoever says ‘pepper is sold here and in Rome’ does not intend to speak of some pepper in particular, but simply of pepper.” (Sherwood 1966: 112; brackets as in printed text). Note Kretzmann’s translation of “vaga” as “unfixed.” Although in William’s text “unfixed” could be replaced without loss by “undetermined,” “unfixed experience,” as a possibility for Spinoza’s “experientia vaga,” would sound odd. A better alternative for “undetermined” is given in the next sentence: “undesignated” (“non signata”). Note also that the use of “vaga” in this way predates William’s treatise (“thus it is often said”). See the quotation from Goclenius’s Lexicon philosophicum below in text. 68 Burgersdijk 1651: lib. I, cap. II (De themate simplici & complexo, universali & singulari) p. 9; and ΕΡΜΗΝΕΙΑ Logica: sive Synopseos logicae Burgersdicianae Explicatio, p. 5. 69 I assume that Spinoza did not just hear about the deaths of the last four, but saw the bodies as well. Merely hearing about the deaths would have been perceptio ex auditu. 70 Here and elsewhere Spinoza uses the terms “mutilatè” and “confusè” in the technical Peripatetic senses. For details on this unexplored aspect of Spinoza’s thought, see Gabbey 2007b, especially pp. 253–58. 71 Henri Krop (2014) thinks it is “obvious that Spinoza adopted the Baconian model of experience,” and without recognizing the relevance of any common logical tradition or even of the 1996 version of this chapter, declares that Spinoza “directly adopted from Bacon” the term experientia vaga. 72 See further McKeon 1928: 133–37; Joachim 1940: 102–11; Curley 1973a; and Savan 1986: 110. 73 See the important analysis in McKeon 1928: 152–53, also 133–35, 144–45. 74 Boyle was not aware that the coal contributed to the formation of the fixed nitre. 75 For details on the Boyle-Spinoza dispute, see McKeon 1928: 137–57; Daudin 1948; Hall and Hall 1964; Oldenburg 1965–86: 1: 466–70 (editors’ notes on Spinoza to Oldenburg, April 1662); Yakira 1988; Clericuzio 1990: 573–79; Banchetti-Robino 2012. 76 Partington1951: 4. 77 Cf. Descartes, PP 4.110, and Plate XXI, Figure iii. 78 Ep 6, 11.

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spinoza on natural science and methodology 233 79 See Banchetti-Robino 2012. 80 This point is reiterated in Letter 16. See Clericuzio 1990: 574–75. 81 On this theme, see Gabbey 2007a. 82 G III: 277–78. Commenting on this passage in notes he wrote on Spinoza’s philosophy around 1707, Leibniz countered with his view that “every substance whatsoever is a kingdom within a kingdom, but one in precise harmony with everything else” (Leibniz 1989: 280). For Leibniz, too, humans are part of Nature, though clearly not in a Spinozistic sense. Leibniz’s notes on Spinoza appear in a longer discussion on Johann Georg Wachter’s Elucidarius Cabalisticus (1706), one chapter of which is “On the agreement between the Cabala and Spinoza.” See Leibniz 1989: 272–73. 83 Oldenburg included this part of Spinoza’s letter in his letter to Boyle of October 10 (O.S.), 1665. Oldenburg 1965–86: II: 557–58. 84 I am grateful to Marjorie Grene, Michael Petry, and Samuel Shirley for helpful comments and suggestions arising out of their reading of a draft of the 1996 version of this chapter. I would like this essay to stand also as a personal tribute to Marjorie Grene.

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6

Spinoza’s Metaphysical Psychology Michael Della Rocca

Spinoza is a metaphysician.1 I emphasize this fact here (and in my title) because one can discover what is most exciting and important about Spinoza’s psychology only by seeing it as emerging from his metaphysics. Spinoza is a systematic philosopher, and nowhere is his system more ambitious than in his attempts to derive an account of human motivation, affects, and other aspects of our psychological lives from his general metaphysics. This project of deriving psychology from metaphysics stems from Spinoza’s guiding belief in naturalism about human beings – a belief he famously expresses by the claim that man in nature is not a kingdom within a kingdom (E 3pr). For Spinoza, the principles at work throughout nature in general also govern human psychology. The clearest statement of his view occurs in the Preface to Part 3 of the Ethics: [N]ature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere the same, i.e., the laws and rules of nature, according to which all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same. So, the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, viz. through the universal laws and rules of nature. The affects, therefore, of hate, anger, envy, etc., considered in themselves, follow from the same necessity and force of nature as the other singular things.2

As this passage indicates, Spinoza’s naturalism comprises two claims: (1) There are laws or rules governing the psychological states of human beings.3 (2) These laws or rules are instances of more general laws or rules operative throughout nature. The main task of this chapter is to analyze and evaluate Spinoza’s way of carrying out this naturalistic program in psychology. In light of (1) and (2), I will divide this task into three parts. First, I will investigate the general metaphysical principles central to Spinoza’s 234

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 235 psychology, but without, at this stage, delineating their psychological ramifications. I will then, in the second section, explain and assess the way in which Spinoza applies these metaphysical principles to human beings and their psychology. In the third section, I will focus on the claim that laws govern psychological phenomena. As we will see, one can usefully explain these principles, in many instances, on their own terms, without paying specific attention to the way in which Spinoza attempts to derive these principles from more general metaphysical views.

t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l ac c o u n t : s t r i v i n g , s e l f - p r e s e r vat i o n , a n d t h e p ow e r o f ac t i n g Let us begin with the metaphysical claims that will be relevant to psychology. The most important of these is: “Each thing, insofar as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its being” (E 3p6).4 In this section, I will show what this claim means, why it might be thought to be false, and the good reasons that are nonetheless behind Spinoza’s making of this claim. Throughout this section, I will highlight the rationalist underpinnings of E 3p6 and associated claims.

The Meaning of E 3p6 The first thing to note about E 3p6 is that, for Spinoza, the striving of a thing to persevere in its being is equivalent to its striving to persevere in existence or its striving to preserve itself (for example, E 4p22). A central issue in interpreting E 3p6 concerns the meanings of the terms “strives” (“conatur”) and “insofar as it is in itself” (“quantum in se est”). Although commentators have investigated the meanings of these terms, they have not often recognized the potential significance of Spinoza’s inclusion of both terms in a single proposition. For that reason, after examining the meaning of each of these terms separately, I will investigate the import that they have together. E 3p6 and the immediate context do not provide enough information for us to be able to separate the different contributions these two locutions make to the meaning of the proposition as a whole. Thus, when analyzing these locutions, I will turn to other, related texts in which they occur. A comparison with Descartes’s use of these terms will also prove illuminating.

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I will focus on the meaning of “strives” first. It is important to realize that this term by itself does not carry any psychological implications. The point in E 3p6 is supposed to apply to things in general: rocks and tables can be said to strive as well as dogs and human beings. Spinoza is, as many would argue, a panpsychist: for him, each thing is animate to some degree (E 2p13s) and each body is one and the same thing as an idea or mode of thought (E 2p7s). Thus, a striving table is an animate thing that strives. But the fact that a table strives does not, for Spinoza, by itself presuppose that it has mentality. Spinoza’s attribution of striving to all things is, in this respect, independent of the considerations that lead to his panpsychism.5 Striving is, then, for Spinoza, a nonpsychological notion. This accords with Descartes’s use of the term. But this is not the only point of agreement here and, for this reason, examining Descartes’s positive characterization of striving will shed much light on Spinoza’s own account. In his Principles of Philosophy (henceforth PP) Descartes offers his definition of striving in terms of the striving of a certain kind of physical object: When I say that the globules of the second element strive [conari] to move away from the centres around which they revolve, it should not be thought that I am implying that they have some thought from which this striving [conatus] proceeds. I mean merely that they are positioned and pushed into motion in such a way that they will in fact travel in that direction, unless they are prevented [impediantur] by some other cause. (PP 3.56; Descartes 1985: I: 259)

This passage suggests the following Cartesian definition of striving in general: x strives to do F (e.g., move in a certain direction) if and only if x’s state is such that it will do F unless prevented by external causes.

It is clear from this definition and from the above quote that what x strives to do is, in part, a function of what its state is at a given moment. The globules, for example, strive to move in a certain direction only because of their current position and motion. This shows that a given object can strive for different things at different times, depending on its state at those different moments. A related passage is Principles of Philosophy 2.39, where Descartes says that a moving body will continue moving in a rectilinear fashion, unless it is deflected by other bodies: “All motion is in itself rectilinear; and hence any body moving in a circle always tends (tendere) to move

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 237 away from the centre of the circle which it describes” (emphasis added). Descartes elaborates this as follows: “[E]very piece of matter, considered in itself (seorsim spectatam), always tends to continue moving, not in any oblique path but only in a straight line. This is true despite the fact that many particles are often forcibly deflected by the impact of other bodies.” Descartes’s point here concerns tending and not, apparently, striving. However, by eliciting the general account of tending implicit in this passage, we can see that the notions of striving and tending are equivalent for Descartes. Notice that whether a body tends to move in a straight line depends in part on its state, on whether it is already moving at a given moment. So tending, like striving, is a function of one’s state. The above passage also makes clear another similarity between tending and striving: Both concern what a given object will do unless prevented by external causes. Thus, the general account of tending here seems to be: x tends to do F if and only if x’s state is such that it will do F unless prevented by external causes.

Since “tending” is defined in the same way as “striving,” these terms are synonymous for Descartes.6 I think that Spinoza (at least most of the time) uses “strives” in the way that Descartes uses this term and the term “tends.” Evidence for this claim comes from the fact that Spinoza is, of course, thoroughly familiar with the Cartesian usage and represents it accurately in Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy.” E 3d3 of that work is Spinoza’s version of the definition of “striving” contained in Principles of Philosophy 3.56: “By striving for motion (conatum ad motum) we do not understand any thought, but only that a part of matter is so placed and stirred to motion, that it really would go somewhere if it were not prevented by (impediretur) any cause.” The counterpart of Principles of Philosophy 2.39 is Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy” 2p17.7 Further evidence for Spinoza’s understanding of the term “strives” comes from the appendix to Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy,” Metaphysical Thoughts I.6. There Spinoza speaks of a body A that strives to persevere in its state of motion. He says that in such a case A cannot be “losing, of itself, its force of moving” (“illud suam vim movendi ex se amittere”). That is, its loss of motion can be explained only by things external to A. Spinoza’s point, then, is that for A to strive to continue moving is for it to be such that external causes are required for it to be the case that it does not continue moving. This seems to fit perfectly with the Cartesian account of striving.

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Let us turn to the phrase “insofar as it is in itself.” This also is a Cartesian term with which Spinoza is familiar. The phrase famously occurs in Principles of Philosophy 2.37: “[E]ach thing, insofar as it is in itself (quantum in se est), always continues in the same state; and thus what is once in motion always continues to move”.8 What is it for a thing, insofar as it is in itself, to do something, to continue moving? The subsequent passage provides an answer: [E]ach thing, insofar as it is simple and undivided, always remains in the same state, insofar as it is in itself (quantum in se est), and never changes except as a result of external causes. Thus, if a particular piece of matter is square, we can be sure without more ado that it will remain square for ever, unless something coming from outside changes its shape. If it is at rest, we hold that it will never begin to move unless it is pushed into motion by some cause. And if it moves, there is equally no reason for thinking it will ever lose this motion of its own accord (sua sponte) and without being checked by (impeditam) something else. Hence we must conclude that what is in motion always, insofar as it is in itself (quantum in se est), continues to move. (PP 2.37)

Descartes’s point seems to be that when simple and undivided things change their state, this change must be a result of factors external to the thing. The qualification “insofar as it is in itself” in the initial statement of the law of motion thus seems to mark the fact that a simple and undivided thing that is moving will continue to do so unless prevented by external causes.9 On the basis of this example, we can arrive at a general definition of what it is for a thing, insofar as it is in itself, to do F: x, insofar as it is in itself, does F if and only if x’s state is such that it will do F unless prevented by external causes.

Here we can see that, for Descartes, what it is for x insofar as it is in itself, to do F is the same as what it is for x to strive to do F.10 The same equivalence seems to hold for Spinoza. In Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy” 2p14 and its demonstration, he accurately captures the Cartesian meaning of the qualification “insofar as it is in itself.” Further, this reading of the locution fits nicely with Spinoza’s technical use of the term “in itself” (“in se”). For Spinoza, as Curley and others have pointed out, to say that something is in itself is to say that it is independent of external causes.11 Things can, of course, be more or less subject to outside influences, and that is why it makes sense to

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 239 speak of the extent to which something is in itself. This suggests that, for Spinoza, to say that x, insofar as it is in itself, does F is equivalent to saying that x, insofar as it is independent of outside causes or insofar as it is left to itself, does F. This is in line with the Cartesian sense of the sentence, “x, insofar as it is in itself, does F.” Because, for Descartes, this sentence is equivalent to the sentence “x strives to F” and because, as we have seen, Spinoza also accepts the Cartesian reading of this latter sentence, it follows that Spinoza, like Descartes, treats the two sentences as equivalent. With this understanding of the terms “insofar as it is in itself” and “strives,” we can offer an interpretation of E 3p6. All we need to do is substitute the appropriate defining phrases for the key terms in the proposition: Each thing, insofar as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its being.

First, let us substitute for the phrase “insofar as it is in itself.” The result is: (a) For each thing x, x’s state is such that, unless prevented by external causes, it will strive to persevere in its being. Now let us substitute for the term “strives” as it appears in (a): (b) For each thing x, x’s state is such that, unless prevented by external causes, x’s state will be such that, unless prevented by external causes, x will persevere in its being. It is not immediately clear that (b) makes sense at all. There is an air of redundancy or even incoherence about it. The problem arises from the fact that Spinoza uses both crucial terms (“insofar as it is in itself” and “strives”) in a single proposition.12 Nevertheless, I believe we can make sense of (b) and of the joint contribution of “quantum in se est” and “strives” to the meaning of E 3p6. Indeed, this understanding of 3p6 is confirmed by Spinoza’s derivation of E 3p6 from E 3p4 and E 3p5, and it is crucial to obviating certain perennial, alleged counterexamples to this proposition. To see how to make sense of (b), let us return for the moment to (a): (a) For each thing x, x’s state is such that, unless prevented by external causes, it will strive to persevere in its being. This can be read as saying that each thing is such that it will strive to persevere in its being unless external causes prevent it from so striving.

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(a) opens up the possibility that external causes can act on x in such a way that x no longer strives to persevere in its being. To say that x strives to persevere in its being is to say that external causes are required in order for it to be the case that x ceases to exist or does not persevere in its being. Thus, (a) opens up the possibility that external causes act on x in such a way that external causes are no longer required to bring about x’s non-existence. The external causes will have brought it about that x’s state is sufficient, without any further input from outside, for the nonexistence of x. The point behind (a), and thus behind (b), is that x will be such that external causes are no longer required for its non-existence only if external causes have caused x to be in a state in which external causes are no longer required for x’s non-existence. This reading does, I believe, show (a) and (b) to be coherent. Not only is this reading of E 3p6 as (b) coherent, it enables Spinoza to avoid some seemingly glaring counterexamples. If E 3p6 is understood as a simple denial of the claim that a thing can ever tend toward its own destruction, then it seems obviously false. The world is filled with examples of things that are seemingly bent on their own destruction. Consider an example from Wallace Matson: “The sun will perish, and it is possible, indeed highly probable that it will perish by burning itself out, by depleting its nuclear and then its gravitational energy” (Matson 1977a: 407). The sun seems to be such that it will go out of existence, even if external causes do not prevent the sun from existing – say, by being struck by a bigger star. Matson discusses a similar example, which Curley describes as follows: “Imagine a candle, burning on Spinoza’s table . . .. Will it not, if left to itself, burn itself out, and thereby destroy itself?”13 Even if external causes do not prevent the candle from existing, the candle will still, it seems, go out of existence. Also relevant here is the case of a person who commits suicide. A person in a suicidal frame of mind seems to be such that even if external causes do not prevent this person from existing, he will still cease to exist. While such examples may threaten the claim that no thing tends toward its own destruction, they do not undermine 3p6 understood as (b). On this interpretation, each thing strives to persist unless external causes make it the case that the thing is no longer such that external causes are required in order for the thing to cease to exist. Thus, consider the example of the candle. The burning candle destroys itself, but only and ultimately because of some fact beyond the essence of the candle and beyond the candle itself, for example, the fact that someone lit the candle.14

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 241 Spinoza himself addresses the case of suicide in precisely these terms. He acknowledges that such cases do occur, but he also claims that suicidal persons are – in one way or another – so overcome by external causes that they no longer seek to preserve themselves (E 4p20s). But even if Spinoza can handle alleged counterexamples in this way, he still faces a problem stemming from his own explicit view that “The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing” (E 3p7). In allowing as he does that a thing can fail to strive to preserve itself as long as that failure is the result of external causes, Spinoza may seem to run into conflict with E 3p7’s claim that such striving is essential to each individual. Even if it is because of certain kinds of external stresses that individuals can come to strive for their own destruction, they would nonetheless strive for their own destruction, and this is something that is contrary to the very essence of a thing. No thing can seek to – tend to – destroy itself, according to E 3p4, but this is precisely what E 3p6 interpreted as (b) allows. To resolve this potential conflict, it will be helpful to look more closely at Spinoza’s way of arguing for E 3p6, a way of arguing that depends on E 3p4 and E 3p5, propositions to which I now turn. E 3p4 is the claim, “No thing can be destroyed except through an external cause.” Spinoza regards this proposition as self-evident. This may seem surprising, and the cases of suicide or burning candles again come to mind as apparent counterexamples. But to see that these too are only apparent counterexamples, focus on an important aspect of E 3p4d: the definition of any thing affirms, and does not deny, the thing’s essence, or it posits the thing’s essence, and does not take it away. So while we attend only to the thing itself, and not to external causes, we shall not be able to find anything in it which can destroy it.

Here Spinoza supports E 3p4 by exhorting us to focus on the definition of a thing, that is, on that which states or posits the thing’s essence. I believe that this context indicates that when Spinoza mentions attending “only to the thing itself,” he is encouraging us to focus on the definition or essence of a thing. When we do so, he says, “we shall not be able to find anything in it which can destroy it.” Spinoza’s point seems to be that the destruction of a thing cannot follow from the thing’s essence alone. The essence of a thing is, in this way, purely positive in that simply by positing the essence of a thing, we will never be led to the conclusion that the thing does not exist. If a thing is to cease existing, its

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non-existence must be due at least in part to something other than the nature or essence of the thing. Why would Spinoza hold the view that the essence of a thing is purely positive in this way? Consider the alternative: if x’s nature alone dictated that x would go out of existence, at what point would x go out of existence? Let’s say that x’s nature guarantees that x would go out of existence 15 minutes after coming into existence. But how can this be? Even if x has a nature which makes it very likely that it would go out of existence in 15 minutes, certainly it is conceivable that there is an external sustainer that extends x’s existence beyond the 15 minutes. That there could be such an external sustainer is suggested by Spinoza’s view that for each finite thing, there is always a more powerful finite thing: There is no singular thing in nature than which there is not another more powerful and stronger. Whatever one is given, there is another more powerful by which the first can be destroyed. (E 4ax)

Thus, if finite thing x is tending toward its own destruction, then there can be another, more powerful finite thing which, as it were, countermands this tendency of x and makes it the case that, contrary to x’s own tendency, it exists beyond its 15 minutes of fame. Although the axiom of Part 4 is not, of course, argued for by Spinoza, one can see it as grounded in Spinoza’s rationalist principle that each thing has an explanation. This is the so-called Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) – so called by Leibniz, not by Spinoza. Spinoza gives expression to the PSR in E 1p11d2: “For each thing there must be assigned a cause or reason both for its existence and for its nonexistence.”15 The PSR can be seen as behind E 4ax in the following way: Each finite thing has a certain limited degree of power (E 1p36). For a thing with a certain degree of power, it seems that there is no bar to there being a finite thing with a greater degree of power. The lack of such a more powerful thing would seem, for Spinoza, to be a brute fact. Thus, a presupposition of this purported counterexample – namely, that a thing bent on its own destruction is, for a time, impervious to any other finite thing – is one that would be rejected by Spinoza on rationalist grounds. And thus we can see Spinoza’s rationalist rejection of brute facts as supporting his purely positive conception of the essence of a thing.16 This purely positive conception of essence or definition is also at work in E 3p5, which can be seen as an elaboration of E 3p4. “Things are of a contrary nature, that is, cannot be in the same subject insofar as one can destroy the other.” Spinoza’s point is that because – by

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 243 E 3p4 – nothing can be in the nature of a subject which can by itself lead to that thing’s destruction, there also cannot be anything in a subject which is contrary to its nature. This restriction to the nature of a thing is in force, as we have seen, in E 3p6, for there Spinoza argues in effect that, although a thing’s nature by itself cannot lead to a thing’s destruction, external causes can so act on a thing that it no longer tends to its own preservation and can indeed tend to its own destruction. And, finally, in this light we can return to the problem posed by E 3p7’s claim that the striving to persevere is essential to each thing. The demonstration of this proposition depends on E 3p6 and, thus, E 3p4. Spinoza says in E 3p7d that the essence of a thing determines all that a thing produces or does. (Here he invokes E 1p29: “things are able [to produce] nothing but what follows necessarily from their determinate nature (by E 1p29)” (E 3p7d).) He goes on to say that a thing’s striving to persist is that through which it produces or does anything. Here he invokes E 3p6 – and again the purely positive conception of essence is at work. All that follows from a thing’s essence is the preservation of the thing – and thus, as far as the essence of the thing alone is concerned, all that a thing does is preserve itself. Spinoza’s attention in E 3p7 is restricted (as in E 3p4–3p6) to the definition or essence of a thing and to the striving for preservation that is, as it were, built into that essence. Thus, E 3p7 is compatible with external objects – independent of a thing’s essence – causing that thing to be in a state in which it no longer tends toward its own preservation. For the same reason that any destructive tendency a thing has must be due at least in part to objects apart from the thing’s essence, it is also the case that all that the essence is responsible for, taken on its own, is the preservation of the thing. Thus, considered with regard to its essence alone, that is, considered quantum in se est, a thing strives to persist, and this striving is simply the essence of the thing. Again, this entire suite of propositions from E 3p4 to E 3p7 can be seen as stemming from Spinoza’s conception of the essence of a thing as purely positive, a conception that, as we have seen, can in turn be regarded as stemming from Spinoza’s rationalism, from his commitment to the PSR.

3p6 and Power of Acting Before we leave Spinoza’s metaphysics and turn to his psychology, we must examine an important conclusion he draws from E 3p6. Spinoza

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couches this claim in psychological terms (in E 3p12 and E 3p13), but it is clear that he sees a general metaphysical thesis at work here.17 It is this general thesis that I want to explore in this subsection before turning to its psychological version in the next section. The general claim is that each thing not only strives to persist in existence, but also strives to prevent a decrease in what Spinoza calls power of acting (agendi potentia) and indeed strives to increase its power of acting. In order to see what these further claims mean and how they are connected with 3p6, we must, for reasons that will soon become apparent, turn to Spinoza’s notion of an adequate cause: “I call that cause adequate whose effect can be clearly and distinctly perceived through it. But I call it partial or inadequate if its effect cannot be understood through it alone” (E 3d1). Because, for Spinoza, to perceive an effect through its cause is to explain it,18 we can say that for Spinoza an adequate cause is a complete or sufficient explanation of it. The notion of adequate causation is crucial to Spinoza’s notion of acting: I say that we act when something happens, in us or outside us, of which we are the adequate cause, i.e. (by E 3d1), when something in us or outside us follows from our nature, which can be clearly and distinctly understood through it alone. On the other hand, I say that we are acted on when something happens in us, or something follows from our nature, of which we are only a partial cause. (E 3d2)19

This definition indicates that something acts or is active to the extent to which it is an adequate cause of some effect. Correspondingly, something is acted on or is passive to the extent to which it is only a partial cause of some effect.20 Activity and passivity, so defined, are matters of degree. Consider, for example, a stone that, at t1, is held in a moving sling. The stone’s motion at t2 is a function of its motion at t1 together with the motion of the sling at t1. Let us say that at t2 the sling drops away and so it no longer plays a role in determining the stone’s motion. The motion of the stone at t3 will then be solely a function of the stone’s motion at t2 (on the assumption that at t2 no other object interferes with the stone’s motion). In this case, we can say that initially (at t1) the stone’s motion is determined to a large extent by something apart from the stone (viz., the sling). However, because at t2, the sling is no longer determining the stone’s motion, the stone itself becomes more nearly the complete cause

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 245 or explanation of the stone’s motion. To this extent, the stone is more active at t2 than at t1. Of course, there is a sense in which the stone at t2 is not completely active. Although the stone’s state at t2 may suffice for its being in another state of motion at t3, that state at t2 is due in part to external causes that were operative before t2. Thus, the explanation of the stone’s motion at t3 will, at some stage, have to appeal to outside causes. However, this undeniable passivity in the stone does not alter the fact that at t2 the stone is less subject to outside forces and relatively more independent than it was previously. Given this account of degrees of activity, we can characterize an increase in power of acting in the following way: “An object comes to have a greater power of acting to the extent to which it comes to be able to be active to a greater degree with regard to a certain effect.” In other words, something’s power of acting increases to the extent to which it becomes less dependent on external things in the production of some effect. A decrease in power of acting can be defined in a corresponding fashion.21 A different example will help to clarify this point. Let us say that prior to my breakfast of champions, I am able to move my refrigerator only with the help of someone else. However, after my breakfast, I have the ability to move the refrigerator without assistance from another person. Thus, my power of acting increases: after the breakfast, I have a greater ability than I had previously to approximate being the complete cause of the refrigerator’s moving. A decrease in power of acting can be illustrated in a similar way. If, after my breakfast of champions, I unwisely have an unhealthful lunch of losers, I may cease to be able to move the refrigerator by myself. I then have less ability to approximate being the complete cause here, and so my power of acting has decreased. Before turning to Spinoza’s claim that each thing strives to increase its power of acting, there are three important points to notice about the general notions of increase and decrease in power of acting. (1) Something’s power of acting can simultaneously increase in certain respects and decrease in others. This is because power of acting is defined in terms of one’s ability to bring about (on one’s own) a certain kind of effect. Since a certain change can make one more adept at bringing about one kind of effect, but less adept at bringing about another, it can happen that one’s power of acting increases in

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one respect, but decreases in another. (Consider, for example, a drug that increases my ability to lift heavy weights, but decreases my ability to perform delicate movements with my fingers.) These simultaneous transitions in opposite directions form the basis of Spinoza’s account of psychological vacillation (see E 3p17s). (2) The above account enables us to represent dying or being destroyed as a decrease in one’s power of acting to nothing, a complete elimination of one’s power of acting. This is because when an object is destroyed, it no longer has any power to be even the partial cause of anything, and so it no longer has any degree of activity.22 (3) Finally, it is clear that an increase or decrease in one’s power of acting can be due to external objects. That is, external objects can make one more or less dependent on external objects in the production of certain effects. For example, the lunch of losers or the breakfast of champions – themselves external objects (at least initially) – make me more or less dependent on external objects when it comes to producing the effect of moving the refrigerator. This third point is simply a more general version of an implication of the reading of E 3p6 as (b). On that reading, which I favor, Spinoza implies that external causes can make an object more or less dependent on external causes when it comes to bringing about that thing’s destruction. (b) concerns the specific effect of destruction, while the claim elicited in the previous paragraph from Spinoza’s notion of power of acting simply makes the same point for effects in general. Let us turn to the claims about striving with which I began this section. Consider first the claim that each thing strives to increase its power of acting. Such a claim is evident from E 3p12d. There Spinoza says that if the mind imagines certain things, then its power of acting is increased.23 Spinoza concludes from this that the mind, as far as it can (quantum potest), strives to imagine those things. Although the point here concerns the mind in particular, the form of the inference would seem to be general. Thus, we can conclude that, for Spinoza, each thing strives to increase its power of acting and to do those things that will increase this power. For example, since being free of the sling would increase the stone’s power of acting, the stone can be said to strive to be free of the sling. Spinoza expresses this general point in the Short Treatise: “each thing in itself has a striving to preserve itself in its state, and bring itself to a better one” (KV I.5; emphasis added).

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 247 Since each thing strives in this way, it follows directly that it also strives to prevent any decrease in its power of acting. Again, this simply means that, if left to itself, a thing will not undergo any decrease in its power of acting. Spinoza seems to make this kind of claim for the mind in E 3p13d and E 3p13c; but, again, the claim would seem to have more general import. Two questions immediately arise. First, the claim about striving to increase power of acting seems quite implausible. It seems we can easily imagine cases in which an object fails to strive to increase its power of acting in a certain respect. We can, for example, easily imagine “lazy” objects that do not tend to increase their own power or that even tend to decrease their own power. What reason, then, is there to regard Spinoza’s claim about increase as true? A further and related question concerns Spinoza’s basis for making the claim about striving to increase in power. Spinoza derives the claim ultimately from E 3p6. But even if we grant Spinoza’s claim in E 3p6 that each thing, quantum in se est, strives to persevere, that is, strives to have some non-zero power of acting, why should we grant that it also strives to increase its power of acting? The key to answering both of these questions is to recall that Spinoza’s focus in his discussion of striving is on what follows from the nature or essence of a thing considered on its own. That is, Spinoza is interested in what a thing will do if not prevented by external causes. This focus, as I explained, is indicated by Spinoza’s use of the phrase “quantum in se est” in E 3p6 and elsewhere. And that Spinoza still has this focus when he considers the striving to increase in power of acting is evident from the fact that he phrases his conclusion in E 3p12d as the claim that “the mind, as far as it can (quantum potest), strives to imagine” certain things. Spinoza’s point then is that, to the extent that external things don’t interfere, the essence of a thing always leads to an increase in power of that thing. Thus, although there may be “lazy” objects, their laziness is due in part to the external forces which drag them down, just as – as we saw – there may be apparently selfdestructive individuals but this self-destructiveness is always in part due to external things and not fully explained by the essence of the thing in question. Even if we understand the general view at work in E 3p12 as a claim about the essence of a thing taken on its own as never leading to decrease in power and as always leading to increase in power, what reasons does Spinoza have to regard this claim – so understood – as true?

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Earlier we saw that – properly understood – E 3p6 derives from the PSR: given the PSR, it must be the case that each thing, as far as its essence alone is concerned, strives to persist. If the essence of a thing – by itself – leads to a thing’s destruction, then one would have to deny that there could be a more powerful external thing – powerful enough to sustain the thing in question. To deny that there could be such an external sustainer would be an arbitrary limitation and so would be precluded by the PSR. Thus, it is because of the PSR that the destruction of a thing can never follow simply from the thing’s nature. Similarly, I now want to argue, a thing’s failure to increase in power of acting can never follow from the nature of that thing alone. For consider: if a thing fails to increase in power of acting, then what is holding it back? What is preventing it from such increase? Given a minimal application of the PSR, there must be an explanation for this failure to increase in power of acting. Keep in mind here that we are considering the thing quantum in se est – insofar as it is independent of external causes, insofar as its essence alone is concerned. The explanation of a thing’s failure quantum in se est to increase in power of acting cannot be external things, things outside of x’s nature: we are, after all, considering the thing quantum in se est and so external things are irrelevant. Can the explanation for the failure to increase be the thing’s nature itself? It is hard to see how its own nature could be the explanation for the failure to increase. If this nature could prevent an increase in power, then why could it not also cause a decrease in power? Causing a decrease in power is not different in kind from causing a failure to increase – both are ways of causing the power of acting to be below a certain level. But if the nature of a thing could cause it to decrease in power, then what could prevent the nature of a thing from causing a decrease to zero power of acting, that is, what could prevent the nature of a thing from, on its own, destroying the thing? There would be no principled way to draw the line here between causing a failure to increase in power of acting, on the one hand, and causing a decrease in power of acting and destroying a thing, on the other. And so the PSR, which rejects unprincipled lines, dictates that there is no such line to be drawn. If this is the case, then as long as we allow that a thing’s nature can, on its own, cause a failure to increase, a thing’s nature can cause that thing’s destruction. But, as we have already seen, a thing’s nature – by the PSR – cannot cause its own destruction. For the same reason – that is, because of the PSR again – a thing’s nature cannot cause a failure to increase. Thus, just as a thing quantum in se est must strive to persist, so too a thing quantum in se est must strive to increase in power.

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 249 Here’s another way to see the same point: left to itself – that is, independently of external causes – a thing will not be limited, it will be, per impossibile perhaps, in se, independent of others, dependent only on itself. A thing thus strives quantum in se est to be like a substance.24 Each thing thus, in effect, strives to be like God. Because each thing thus strives to be a substance, no matter what finite degree of power a thing starts from, when a thing is considered in itself, it will increase in power. Insofar as a thing is in itself, increase in power follows from the nature of the thing. In this light, we can see the rationalist underpinnings in Spinoza’s system not only for the universal striving for self-preservation, but also for the universal striving to increase in power. Spinoza makes the claim about striving to increase in power mostly with regard to the striving of human beings, but the rationalist basis holds more generally, as is in keeping with Spinoza’s naturalism.

t h e a p p l i c at i o n o f m e t a p h y s i c s t o p s yc h o l og y We are now ready to turn to Spinoza’s naturalistic derivation of psychology from the general account of the metaphysics of striving and of power of acting. For such a derivation to be successful, Spinoza must show that the principles at work in human psychology are instances of principles at work throughout nature. The aspect of our psychology that Spinoza is most concerned to derive in this way consists of what he calls affects.25 There are, for Spinoza, three basic affects: desire, joy, and sadness. In this section, I will first examine the way in which Spinoza presents his naturalistic account of these affects. For each of the three, I will ask: What is Spinoza’s account of this affect and does this account draw only on elements already found in the general metaphysical story we have outlined? After examining these derivations, I will consider the threat that apparent cases of prudence and altruism pose for Spinoza’s naturalism.

Desire To elicit Spinoza’s account of desire, I need to introduce his notion of appetite. For Spinoza, as we have seen, everything strives to do certain things. The striving of a human mind in particular Spinoza calls will. Given Spinoza’s parallelism,26 whenever the mind strives, the body must be striving as well. In fact, Spinoza would also hold that the

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striving of the mind is one and the same thing as the striving of the body.27 This allows Spinoza to consider a single striving as “related” to mind and body together. When Spinoza considers this striving as simultaneously a striving of the mind and the body, he calls it appetite (E 3p9s). Following Descartes, Spinoza uses the term “man” (“homo”) for the union of mind and body (E 2p13c). I will use this term or the term “human being” to refer to this entity. Thus, an appetite can be seen as the striving of a man or human being. Initially, it appears that Spinoza considers a desire to be a certain kind of appetite – an appetite accompanied by consciousness (E 3p9s). But in E 3da1, we find Spinoza downplaying this distinction: “I really recognize no difference between human appetite and desire. For whether a man is conscious of his appetite or not, the appetite still remains one and the same.” Thus, he defines desire so as to “comprehend together all the strivings of human nature that we signify by the name of appetite, will, desire, or impulse.” And so: “By the word ‘desire’ I understand any of a man’s strivings, impulses, appetites, and volitions.” For Spinoza, then, while there is a distinction to be drawn between those appetites or human strivings of which one is conscious and those of which one is not, Spinoza’s account of desire does not have to be seen as turning on this distinction. Thus, I think it is best to view a desire as simply an appetite, that is, as the striving of a human being. To begin to evaluate Spinoza’s naturalistic account of desire, we must specify the objects of desire. As we have seen, for Spinoza, things in general – insofar as they are in themselves – strive to preserve themselves and to increase their power of acting. Spinoza’s naturalism dictates that the same is true of human beings and, since the strivings of human beings are their desires, it follows that, for Spinoza, all human beings – insofar as they are in themselves – desire to preserve themselves and to increase their power of acting.28

Joy and Sadness In E 3p11s, Spinoza defines joy as “that passion by which the mind [mens] passes to a greater perfection.” Sadness, correspondingly, is there defined as “that passion by which it [the mind] passes to a lesser perfection.”29 This definition seems to make joy and sadness wholly mental states or episodes. But, in his definitions of joy and sadness at the end of Part 3, Spinoza does not restrict these affects to the mental realm: “Joy is a man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection. Sadness is a man’s

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 251 passage from a greater to a lesser perfection” (E 3da2–3). Notice that here Spinoza defines joy and sadness in terms of a man’s (hominis) transition to a different degree of perfection, not (as in E 3p11s) in terms of a mind’s transition. As I pointed out earlier, a man, for Spinoza, consists of a mind and a body (E 2p13c). This indicates that, in the definitions at the end of Part 3, Spinoza regards joy and sadness as related to both mind and body and not to the mind alone.30 In speaking of joy or sadness as related to both mind and body, Spinoza intends the following: Whenever the body increases or decreases in power of acting, the mind changes correspondingly (E 3p11). This follows from Spinoza’s parallelism, which also entails that whenever the mind increases or decreases in power of acting, the body undergoes a corresponding change. The transitions of the mind and the simultaneous transitions of the body are actually, for Spinoza, one and the same thing (E 3p2s). So we can speak of the transitions involving joy and sadness as transitions equally of the mind and of the body. In this sense of the terms “joy” and “sadness,” these affects straddle the attributes in much the same way that appetite and desire do. In what follows, the difference between the E 3p11’s definitions of joy and sadness and the later definitions of these affects will not be relevant. Since throughout Part 3, desire is defined in terms of a man’s striving, I will, for the sake of a more unified overall presentation of Spinoza’s views, focus on the account of joy and sadness in terms of a man’s transition, rather than in terms of mind’s transition. The first thing to note about these definitions is that they are fully naturalistic. The notion of a transition to a greater or lesser degree of perfection is a notion that, on Spinoza’s view, is applicable not just to human beings, but to all objects in nature. For Spinoza, things in general undergo transitions from one degree of perfection to another. Things in general can become more or less dependent on external causes in the production of certain kinds of effect. (Recall the example of the stone which at first is and then is not restrained by a sling.) Spinoza’s definitions of joy and sadness suggest that what is going on when human beings experience these affects is not fundamentally different from certain kinds of changes that occur throughout nature. A second important general feature of these accounts of joy and sadness (as well as of desire) is that Spinoza’s treatment of the mental aspects of these affects is fundamentally representational. For example, joy considered as a mental state is nothing but a certain kind of representation, an idea of something. Thus, ask: When the body passes to a

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greater degree of perfection, what is the mind doing? Given parallelism, the mind must, of course, likewise pass to a greater degree of perfection. But what does the shift at the mental level involve? For Spinoza, the mind is simply the idea of the body (and is made up of ideas which are of or represent the various parts or states of the human body or events in the human body). So prior to the change, the mind represented a certain bodily state and, after the change, the mind comes to represent a more perfect and more powerful bodily state. This passage to a new idea of a more powerful bodily state is, given parallelism, a passage to a more powerful mental state. So, in making the transition which is constitutive of joy, the mind moves from one representation to another. That’s all. Similarly, sadness is simply the mind’s transition from one representation to another. Desire, on the part of the mind, is simply the mind’s tendency to go from one representation to another. Of course, the tendency may not always be successful – desires can be frustrated – but this tendency is a tendency to have certain ideas. And, insofar as we are in ourselves, the mind’s desire is simply the desire to come to have an idea of a more powerful bodily state, an idea that itself is a more powerful mental state. As Spinoza says in E 3p12: “The mind, insofar as it can, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the body’s power of acting.” In the case of all these affects, there is no feeling involved over and above these representations and the transitions between them. This runs counter to what can be seen as the commonsense view that there is more to affects such as joy, desire, and love than mere representations or ideas. To feel joy is not simply to represent a certain state of affairs, but to come to have, perhaps on the basis of such representations, a different kind of mental state, a non-representational state, a kind of mental buzz that is a distinctive feeling of joy. But Spinoza will have none of this. For him, representation is all there is to joy as well as to sadness and desire and, indeed, all there is to any other affect, for as we will see, Spinoza constructs all the other affects out of these three. The representational nature of the affects is fully on display in Spinoza’s general definition of the affects at the end of Part III of the Ethics: An affect which is called a passion of the mind is a confused idea, by which the mind affirms of its body, or of some part of it, a greater or lesser force of existing than before, which, when it is given, determines the mind to think of this rather than that.

An affect is just an idea, an affirmation. Here Spinoza defines passions and so he speaks of confused ideas which are ideas caused from outside

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 253 the mind. Active affects would be various unconfused or adequate ideas. The fully representational nature of affects is also evident from Spinoza’s claim in E 2p11d that ideas or representations are prior in nature to “other” mental states such as affects.31 Here we can see Spinoza’s rationalist rejection of brute facts at work. To say, contrary to Spinoza, that there are fundamentally different kinds of mental states – representations (ideas) and non-representational affects or feelings such as joy and sadness – would be to introduce an inexplicable distinction within the mental. This is because the question now arises: What is it in virtue of which these features – representational and non-representational features – are both mental? It is difficult to see what kind of illuminating or non-question-begging answer to this question can be given. The distinction between the representational and nonrepresentational within the mind cannot be made intelligible, and that is a reason (indeed, a sufficient reason!) for a rationalist such as Spinoza to reject this distinction and to hold that all that is within the mind is fundamentally representational.

Prudence and the Primacy of the Immediate In Spinoza’s treatment of striving, desire, joy, and sadness, he seeks to explain – in naturalistic terms – behavior that is ordinarily regarded as teleological. These are cases in which human beings seem to act for the sake of an end, for the sake of something good or perceived to be good. For example, Spinoza intends to explain what it is to go to the store for the sake of obtaining cookies or coffee or paint or what-have-you. It seems that in such cases, we act a certain way because of – for the sake of – something good (or something perceived to be good) such as obtaining food. A number of questions arise here: first and foremost, how is such apparently teleological behavior possible? If human striving is teleological, then a further question – one also inspired by Spinoza’s naturalism – is this: Can such teleological activity be found throughout nature? That is, is striving in general teleological, and, if not, how can our apparently teleological activity be reconciled with Spinoza’s overall naturalism? Such questions about the intelligibility of teleology, for Spinoza, and its naturalistic credentials are extremely controversial, and we will turn to these important debates at the end of this chapter. Before doing so, however, it will be important to address a different potential threat to naturalism, a threat that also arises in connection with apparently end-directed activity. Even without determining

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whether striving is inherently teleological – in the human case or in general – a certain aspect of striving as it manifests itself in the human case is potentially troubling. We seem to have the ability to strive for, to desire, outcomes that are not immediate but are somehow distant in time from the action that is a manifestation of the desire for that faraway outcome. And, further, we seem to have the ability to act on the desire for some far-off end even though the action that we perform now does not bring us any immediate benefit. In other words, we seem to be able to engage in behavior that is purely prudential. An example will make clear what I mean by prudential explanation. Suppose that I need to take a certain medication immediately (at t1) in order to avert great pain or sadness at t2. I am, it seems, not in pain now at t1. Rather, there is the threat of pain at t2, and such pain can be avoided only by taking the medication at t1. Further, let us assume, for the sake of simplicity, that there are no pleasurable or painful side effects of the medication, either at t1 or afterwards. If I know all these facts about the medication, I might well desire to take the medication at t1. It seems that in such a case I desire to take the medication only because it will have the good effect of my not being in pain at t2. No good effect that obtains earlier seems to be relevant to my desiring to take the medication. Rather, I take the medication only because I believe that a state of non-pain will, as a result, obtain in the future (at t2). Since the only benefit that seems to be relevant to my desiring to take the medication at t1 is a benefit that obtains only after t1, we can say that my desire is prudential. In this light also, we can say that my belief concerning the good effect at t2 provides a prudential explanation of my desire to take the medication at t1. In general, a prudential desire to do F at t1 (immediately) is a desire that one has not because of any benefit at t1 of doing F at t1, but only because of some anticipated later beneficial effect of doing F at t1. As I indicated, it seems quite plausible to hold that human beings (and indeed planning creatures in general) have prudential desires. And Spinoza certainly does want to allow that we can act in a way that seems to fit this pattern. Thus, he seems to allow that there can be cases of what I call “future-directed striving”: (FDS) It is possible for an object, x, to strive to do G immediately (at t1), not because doing G would increase x’s power of acting at t1, or offset a decrease in that power at t1, but because such an action would increase x’s power of acting at t2 or offset a decrease in that power at t2.

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 255 But – and here is the problem for Spinoza’s naturalism – even if human beings can engage in future-directed striving, it is not clear whether beings in general can engage in such behavior. And if they do not while we human beings do, then there is a potential threat to Spinoza’s naturalism about human psychology. Certainly, it does seem that objects in general do not engage in future-directed striving. Even if it makes sense to see stones, for example, as striving, it is difficult to see how stones can strive for anything but some immediate state: the stone – on Spinozistic terms – strives to keep moving now. It does not seem to strive for some more distant outcome. More generally, everything the stone strives to do at t1, it strives to do only because of the immediate benefit of doing such a thing and not because of any benefit further off in the future. The stone thus does not seem capable of future-directed striving nor do most or all objects that are not normally regarded as planning creatures. Spinoza could avoid this threat to naturalism either by denying that human beings are generally capable of future-directed striving or by pointing to some difference between human beings and, say, stones in terms of which we can make intelligible the difference between human beings and stones. This second approach may seem the more plausible one, but it is not the approach Spinoza takes. Instead, he preserves his naturalism here by taking the less plausible and correspondingly more daring route of denying that human beings are capable of future-directed striving. If Spinoza is to take this less plausible path, he must offer an alternative account of what is going on in the apparent cases of futuredirected striving. My aim for most of the rest of this subsection is twofold: to show how Spinoza would explain away apparent cases of such striving and, concurrently, to explain why Spinoza thinks that human beings (in addition to stones) are not capable of such striving. The first thing to notice is that apparent cases of future-directed striving in humans involve the anticipation of pleasure or pain. In the medication example, I anticipate being in pain at t2 and, for this reason, I take the medication immediately (at t1). Similar cases of futuredirected striving involve the anticipation of pleasure. I will, for the sake of simplicity, continue to focus on the anticipation of pain, but corresponding points apply to the anticipation of pleasure. The reason Spinoza would deny that there are any genuine cases of future-directed striving in humans turns on his account of anticipation. The basic point here is that, for Spinoza, the anticipation of pain is itself painful. This is evident from 3p18: “Man is affected with the same affect

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of joy or sadness from the image of a past or future thing as from the image of present thing.”32 I will briefly discuss the argument for this claim in the third section of this chapter. For now, however, it will suffice to note that there is something obviously right about Spinoza’s position here: The anticipation of a painful experience is itself a painful experience. The pain of anticipation may not be as intense as or of the same type as the anticipated pain, but it is pain nonetheless. This point will enable Spinoza to explain away the apparent cases of futuredirected striving. Another crucial point in this explanation is that, for Spinoza, whenever we are in pain, we strive to remove that pain. This is because pain is a decrease in power of acting, and Spinoza holds, as we have seen, that each thing strives to prevent any decrease (including any further decrease) in its power of acting. Since the anticipation of future pain is itself painful, it follows that in such a case we strive to remove this pain of anticipation; that is, we strive to stop anticipating the future pain. This is indicated by E 3p13d where Spinoza says, in effect, that when the mind believes that something painful exists or will exist, it strives to remove that belief.33 How does one stop anticipating the future pain (and thus remove the pain of anticipation)? Typically – important exceptions will be discussed a bit later – one stops anticipating the pain by doing something that, one believes, will avert the pain. This is clearly what happens in the medication case. Taking the medication at t1 would have, I believe, the result that I am not in pain at t2. Given this belief, if I take the medication at t1, and am aware of so doing, then I will no longer anticipate pain at t2. And so I no longer feel the pain of anticipation at t1. Thus, in this and other apparent cases of future-directed striving, there is an immediate benefit to doing F at t1. But this does not yet show that there is after all no future-directed striving in such cases. For all I have said so far, it may well be the case that although doing F at t1 has an immediate payoff (in addition to the longterm payoff of not being in pain at t2), I desire to do F only because of the long-term payoff and not because of the immediate benefit. If this were so, then we would still have a genuine case of future-directed striving. Spinoza would, however, reject such a situation. For Spinoza, the immediate benefit of doing F at t1 does explain why I desire to do F. In fact, for Spinoza, I desire to do F only because of the immediate benefit. This is evident from E 3p37d where Spinoza says: “[A]ll a man affected by sadness strives to for is to remove sadness.”34

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 257 We can see this claim as a reflection of Spinoza’s purely positive conception of essence. What a thing, insofar as it is in itself – that is, insofar as its essence is concerned – tends to do is simply to preserve itself and to increase its power of acting. In this light, Spinoza’s claim in 3p37d makes perfect sense: a human being – at least insofar as he is in himself – will strive only to maintain or increase his power of acting, and so, if a person is currently experiencing sadness or a decrease in power of acting, all of the person’s energies – insofar as he is in himself – will be devoted to the striving to remove that sadness or decrease in power. In the case at hand, since I now anticipate being in pain at t2, I now experience the pain of anticipation. Further, let us assume that I am not experiencing any other pain now. Thus, for Spinoza, my conatus or striving would be wholly directed to removing the pain of anticipation. Since in this case I do strive to do F at t1, this striving must be solely a function of striving to avoid having any further pain of anticipation. Since, in this apparent case of future-directed striving, my striving to do F at t1 is not a striving I have because of the future benefit of doing F, the apparent case of future-directed striving is, after all, not a case of future-directed striving. The same conclusion would apply to other apparent cases. Thus, we can see that Spinoza’s view that our striving is wholly directed to the removal of current pain (if we are in pain), and his account of anticipation both lead to the conclusion that there are no genuine cases of future-directed striving. At least in respect of such striving, there is, for Spinoza, no fundamental difference between human beings and objects such as the stone. For Spinoza, outcomes that are relatively distant in the future can lead us to act only because of their connection (via anticipation) with immediate outcomes. The more distant outcomes cannot by themselves impinge on our desires. Such a view reflects what might be called the primacy of the immediate in Spinoza. This primacy of the immediate is complemented by the primacy of the self in matters of desire, as we will see in the next subsection. Of course, whether we in any sense really do something now because of a desired future outcome is an issue to which we will return when we consider whether Spinoza allows genuinely teleological behavior. For now, my point is that apparent cases of future-directed striving can be seen in Spinoza’s system as not genuinely cases of future-directed striving but rather as cases of striving for immediate outcomes, striving of a kind found throughout nature.

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Let me close this subsection by noting an important complication in Spinoza’s position, a complication that reveals in a new way how astute and insightful Spinoza’s psychology is. As I mentioned earlier, there are cases in which one does not relieve the pain of anticipation by doing something that one believes will avert the anticipated pain at t2. Some of the most important cases of this kind are ones in which I do not do F (which I believe would avert the anticipated pain) but I believe that I am doing or have done F. Since the anticipation of pain at t2 involves a belief that the pain will occur, believing that one has done something which will avert that point serves to undermine the former belief and thus serves to eliminate the anticipation and its attendant pain. This fact yields an interesting result. Spinoza insists, as we have seen, that we desire the removal of any pain we are currently experiencing. Since a belief that one has performed a certain action (regardless of whether one has actually done so) would serve to eliminate that pain, we can see that Spinoza holds that there is some motivation to have the belief that I have performed this action, even if I have not done so. Our dominant desire to avert pain can, in the other words, generate cases of motivated false belief. Spinoza recognizes the phenomenon of motivated false belief and discusses it in kinds of cases other than the above one concerning anticipation. For example, Spinoza offers reasons for thinking that if I believe that I have made others feel pleasure, then I myself will feel pleasure.35 Because such a belief would thus involve pleasure, Spinoza says that I desire to have it. However, this desire may outrun the facts and thus, Spinoza says, “it can easily happen that one who exults at being esteemed is proud and imagines himself to be pleasing to all, when he is burdensome to all” (E 3p30s).36 In general, Spinoza quite rightly allows for the possibility that our desires can obscure the truth from us and lead us to espouse falsehood.

Altruism and the Primacy of the Self As was the case with the apparent instances of prudential desire, apparent instances of altruistic desire pose a threat to Spinoza’s naturalism. In this subsection, I want to show why this is so and also how Spinoza’s way of dealing with apparent altruism mirrors his way of handling apparent prudence. Here again, I bracket the general question of whether acting for the sake of an end is possible in Spinoza’s system. Instead,

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 259 I will focus for now on the specific question of whether – even if striving for the sake of oneself is possible – one can strive on behalf of another. A case of altruistic desire would be one in which I desire to do F, not because doing so will give me pleasure or avert some pain that I would have had, but simply because doing so will benefit some other individual. A desire to do F can be altruistic even if doing F is beneficial to me. Altruism simply requires that I do not desire to do F because of the benefit to me of that action. The possibility of such a desire would threaten Spinoza’s naturalism. To see why, consider the metaphysical analogue of the claim that altruistic desires are possible. Here I use the metaphysical notions that correspond, in Spinoza’s system, to desire, joy, and sadness in order to generate a description of what might be called other-directed striving: (ODS) It is possible for an object, x, to strive to do F, not because such an action would increase x’s power of acting or offset a decrease in x’s power of acting, but because such an action would increase another individual’s (y’s) power of acting or offset a decrease in y’s power of acting.

Altruistic desires would be a species of other-directed striving. The threat to naturalism emerges because, while human beings (and perhaps certain other creatures) seem to be capable of other-directed striving, objects in general seem not to be. Return for a moment to the example of the stone whose motion is restrained by a sling. Let us embellish the example by saying that the motion of the sling itself is restrained by a person holding it. As we have seen, the stone strives to be free of the sling. Such strivings are directed at states that will maintain or enhance the stone’s power of acting. However, there seems to be no plausible way to attribute to the stone a striving for the sling’s wellbeing. For example, the stone does not strive that the sling be free of the person holding it (or if the stone can be said to strive in this way, that is only because such freedom for the sling would generate freedom for the stone). In general, stones and most other objects do not seem capable of other-directed striving. If human beings were capable of such striving, while most other objects were not, we would be faced with a potential violation of naturalism. Of course, as we saw in the case of future-directed striving, if this difference between human beings and others were itself explicable naturalistically, then naturalism could be retained. However, as in the previous case, Spinoza does not neutralize the threat in this way; rather,

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he neutralizes the threat by denying that there is any such difference between human beings and other objects. Spinoza denies that we are capable of altruistic desire. This point is explicit in the way Spinoza applies his conatus doctrine to human beings. For Spinoza, human beings, like any other thing, strive exclusively to preserve themselves and to maintain or enhance their well-being. See, for example, E 3p28: “We strive to further the occurrence of whatever we imagine will lead to joy, and to avert or destroy what we imagine is contrary to it, or will lead to sadness.” As Spinoza makes clear, the joy or sadness in question is one’s own joy or sadness. This claim indicates that our actions are focused on our own well-being. A denial of a particular kind of altruistic desire occurs in E 4p25: “No one strives to preserve his being for the sake of anything else.” Ethics 3p28 and 4p25 concern human beings in particular, but they are clearly intended to be psychological versions of metaphysical claims that hold generally. Thus, we can see that Spinoza would reject other-directed striving in general. Spinoza is, of course, aware that there are apparent cases of otherdirected striving, and it is clear how he would explain these away. I will give two examples of this kind of explanation. In many of the cases in which I may be motivated to assist another individual, I am motivated to do so out of pity. Such a motivation cannot be altruistic, for Spinoza. This is because, for Spinoza, pity is a form of sadness (E 3p22s). As we have seen, for Spinoza, the striving of one experiencing sadness is entirely directed to the removal of that sadness. Thus, for Spinoza, when I act out of pity, I am striving to ease my own suffering which is involved in that very feeling of pity (E 3p27c3d). In this way, Spinoza would characterize an apparent case of altruism as one that does not involve altruism at all. Consider another case: A person might desire to instill in others a love of reason and a desire to live one’s life according to the dictates of reason (see E 4p37). This noble desire might seem to be a manifestation of an altruistic concern for the quality of life other people can have. But Spinoza could explain such a desire without invoking altruism. Spinoza would likely see such a desire as prompted by the fact, as he sees it, that to the extent that people live according to the guidance of reason, they are more beneficial to one another.37 For this reason, a given individual might desire to instill in others a desire to live according to the dictates of reason because such a desire in others would ultimately be beneficial to that individual. Again, Spinoza has the resources to explain away an apparent case of altruism. In similar ways, he would, I believe,

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 261 reconstrue all other cases of altruistic desires and thus preserve his general view that there is no other-directed striving. Earlier we saw that, in the matter of desire, Spinoza espouses what might be called the primacy of the immediate. In a similar way, Spinoza espouses what might be called the primacy of the self. Spinoza holds that the benefits to oneself of a certain action play a more direct role in the explanation of one’s desire to perform that action than do the benefits of that action to another individual. I can desire to do F because such an action will help another individual only if and only because that action benefits me.38 It is interesting to note that there is no logical connection between the primacy of the immediate and the primacy of the self. One might hold that desires are always directed at immediate benefits, but also hold that these immediate benefits need not always be benefits to oneself. Similarly, one might hold that desires are always directed at one’s own benefits, without holding that the benefits are always at bottom immediate benefits. Thus, Spinoza’s primacy of the immediate does not lead to his primacy of the self, and his primacy of the self does not lead to his primacy of the immediate. Rather, both positions are generated at least in part by Spinoza’s naturalism.

t h e l aw - g ov e r n e d n e s s o f t h e m e n t a l r e a l m At the outset, I described Spinoza’s naturalism about human beings as consisting of two claims: (1) There are laws or rules governing the psychological states of human beings. (2) These laws or rules are instances of more general laws or rules operative throughout nature. As I explained, these two claims generate two different strategies for analyzing and evaluating Spinoza’s naturalistic psychology. The first strategy is to investigate the way in which Spinoza applies to human beings and their psychology metaphysical principles at work throughout the rest of nature. This is what I have done in the previous section of this chapter. The second strategy is to investigate the nature of the principles that govern psychology, according to Spinoza, without concerning oneself with the extent to which these principles are instance of more general principles. I want to go some distance toward carrying out such an inquiry in this section of the chapter. Of course, we have already

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explored some of the principles governing psychology by explaining the way in which Spinozistic psychology grows out of Spinozistic metaphysics. But there are many aspects of the law-governedness of psychology that we can profitably examine without direct attention to the extent to which psychological laws and rules are derived from more general metaphysical laws and rules. In this light, I want to explore three central issues in this final section: Spinoza’s account of irrational action, his account of the principles controlling the relations between different affects, and the extent to which Spinoza allows teleological explanations in psychology and in general.

Irrational Action Irrational action occurs in certain cases in which I have conflicting desires: I desire to do F and I also desire to do G, which is incompatible with F.39 For example, I might desire to have spicy food and also desire not to have spicy food because I believe that it will cause indigestion. Such a conflict of desires is only a necessary condition of irrational action. It is not sufficient. Irrational action occurs only when, in the face of such a conflict, I intentionally perform one of the actions even though I believe that it is better somehow in the long run for me to take the opposite course of action.40 Spinoza seems to accept that there is irrational action in this sense. Quoting Ovid in E 4p17s, Spinoza appears to assert that there are cases in which “I see the better and I approve, but I follow the worse.”41 The phenomenon of irrational action might seem to threaten the law-governedness of psychology in the following way: Even if we do sometimes act irrationally, it is clear that we do not always, or perhaps even often, do so. Thus, a naturalist who, like Spinoza, accepts that we can act irrationally faces the challenge of articulating the principles that specify the circumstances under which irrational action occurs. To explain why irrational action occurs in a given case, it would not be sufficient for a naturalist to say simply that irrational action does sometimes take place without going on to spell out what it is about this case that accounts for the appearance of irrationality. To deny that any such explanation is forthcoming would be to deny the law-governedness of psychology and thus would be to deny naturalism. In taking up this challenge to explain irrationality, Spinoza turns to his account of anticipation. Recall that, for Spinoza, the anticipation of pain is itself painful.42 As given in E 3p18d, Spinoza’s reason for this

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 263 claim is that when the mind anticipates a given state of affairs, the body is in the same state as it would be if that state of affairs were to obtain. Spinoza assumes that if at two different times the body is in the same state, then at those different times the mind must be in the same state.43 Given this assumption, it follows that when the mind anticipates a given state of affairs, it is in the same psychological state as it would be if that state of affairs were to obtain. Thus, if the anticipation is of a state of affairs that would involve pain, the state of anticipation itself will involve pain. In other words, for Spinoza, the anticipation of pain is itself painful. This argument raises a number of questions, and I will address some of them when I discuss Spinoza’s views on memory in the next subsection. What I want to note here is an important way in which Spinoza qualifies his view that in anticipating pain, the mind is in the same state as it would be if this painful state actually obtained. As Spinoza claims in E 4p9 and elsewhere, the states are not exactly the same. Rather, the pain of anticipation is weaker than the anticipated pain. The point is that the anticipated pain is stronger when it occurs than the pain of anticipation was at the earlier moment when it occurred. Spinoza does not make completely clear what the weakness or strength of an affect is, but one thing that is clear is that weaker affects are, for Spinoza, less capable of producing action than stronger ones. For example, a weaker pain is less able than a stronger one to prompt action intended to alleviate that pain. This is evident from the very beginning of Part 4 where, while discussing irrational action, Spinoza describes the strength of an affect in terms of its ability to force a certain course of action. See also E 4p17s where Spinoza concludes that there is irrational action after an account of the relative strengths and weaknesses of certain affects. So, the upshot of E 4p9’s claim that the pain of anticipation is weaker than the anticipated pain is that the ability of the pain of anticipation to prompt action directed at its removal is less than the ability of the anticipated pain itself to prompt action directed at its removal. With the help of E 4p9, Spinoza demonstrates a further claim that plays a crucial role in his account of irrationality: “We are affected more intensely (intensius) toward a future thing which we imagine will quickly be present, than if we imagined the time when it will exist to be further from the present” (E 4p10). Consider two different anticipations that an agent might have at time t1. Anticipation A is the anticipation of having a certain degree of pain at a later time t2. Anticipation

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B is the anticipation of having that same degree of pain at t3, a time even further off in the future. In each case, for Spinoza, the pain of anticipation will be weaker than the anticipated pain. However, Spinoza thinks that we can also compare with one another the strength of the pain of anticipation A and the strength of the pain of anticipation B. As E 4p10 makes clear, for Spinoza, the pain of anticipation A is stronger than the pain of anticipation B. Spinoza’s plausible claim is that the strength of the pain of anticipation is, in part, a function of the temporal distance of the anticipated pain from the present.44 However, for Spinoza, the strength of the pain of anticipation is also a function of something besides the temporal distance of the anticipated pain, viz., the size of the anticipated pain. This will become apparent by considering two anticipations directed at future pains which are of different degrees, but which are at the same temporal distance from the present. For example, at t1, an agent might anticipate a very severe pain (the pain of torture) at t2. That agent might also or instead anticipate at t1 a very mild pain (the pain of a minor scratch) at t2. Call the first anticipation, “anticipation C,” and the second, “anticipation D.” It would seem that the pain of anticipation C is stronger than the pain of anticipation D. Spinoza’s system can deliver this plausible result. For Spinoza, the greater a pain is, the stronger it is, that is, the more capable it is of prompting appropriate action. This is evident in E 3p37d where Spinoza says, “the greater the sadness, the greater the power of acting with which the man will strive to remove the sadness.”45 The pain of torture is clearly greater than the pain of a minor scratch, so the former pain is stronger than the latter. How do the anticipations of these two pains compare in strength? First of all, recall that, for Spinoza, the pain of anticipation of the torture is weaker than the pain of the torture itself, and the pain of the anticipation of the scratch is weaker than the pain of the scratch itself. As we saw, the weakness of the pain of anticipation relative to the anticipated pain is a function of the temporal distance between the two. As I have stipulated, in this case, the distance between anticipation C and the torture is the same as the distance between anticipation D and the scratch. This makes it plausible to conclude that the degree to which the pain of anticipation C is weaker than the pain of the torture is the same as the degree to which the pain of anticipation D is weaker than the pain of the scratch.46 If this is correct, then since the pain of torture is stronger than the pain of the scratch, it follows that the pain of anticipation C is stronger

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 265 than the pain of anticipation D. We can thus see how Spinoza might arrive at the claim that the pain of a certain anticipation is a function not only of the temporal distance from the present of the anticipated pain, but also of the size of the anticipated pain. All the elements needed for Spinoza’s account of irrational action are now in place. We have considered a case (that of anticipations A and B) in which the size of one anticipated affect is the same as that of another, but the temporal distance of those anticipated affects differ. We have also considered a case (that of anticipations C and D) in which the temporal distance of one anticipated affect is the same as that of another, but the sizes of these affects differ. To see how irrational action arises, we need to consider a case in which two anticipated affects differ with regard to both size and distance. Thus, return to the spicy food case. I anticipate immediate pleasure if I eat the spicy food, but I also anticipate the pain of indigestion later on. Let us assume that the pain of anticipation is greater than (and hence stronger than) the immediate pleasure of eating the food. Let us also assume that I am aware of this fact. As we have seen, the strength of the anticipation of a certain affect is, in part, a function of the size of the anticipated affect. Since the pain of indigestion is greater than the immediate pleasure of consuming the food, we can say that, as far as the size of the anticipated affect is concerned, the pain of the anticipation of the pain would be stronger than the pleasure of the anticipation of the pleasure. But because the anticipated pain and the anticipated pleasure are not at the same temporal distance, the door to irrational action is opened. Because of the temporal disparity here, the degree to which the pain of anticipating the pain of indigestion is weaker than the pain of indigestion itself is greater than the degree to which the pleasure of the anticipation of the pleasure of consuming the food is weaker than that pleasure. In such a case, it can happen that the temporal proximity of the anticipated pleasure compensates, indeed overcompensates, for its relative smallness.47 In his account of irrational action, Spinoza appeals to temporal disparities of the kind of I just outlined (see, for example, E 4p60s and E 4ap30). Further, his claim that there can be irrational action is made in E 4p17s immediately after he elaborates his view that an anticipated affect is stronger than the affect of anticipation. These two facts indicate that the above explanation of irrational action is the one Spinoza has in mind. He thus has a way to meet the challenge to his naturalism that

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irrational action poses by specifying with some precision exactly the kinds of circumstances under which irrational action arises. Such an account has, I believe, much to recommend it. However, one of its defects should be noted. This explanation relies heavily on Spinoza’s claim in E 4p9 that the pain of anticipation of a certain pain is less than that pain itself. Although such a claim is plausible, Spinoza does not seem to argue for it well. He makes this claim in E 4p9d: “[A]n imagination . . . is more intense [intensior] so long as we imagine nothing that excludes the present existence of the external thing.”48 To support this point, Spinoza appeals to E 2p17, but as Bennett rightly notes, “E 2p17 does not contain the concept of intensity or anything like it” (Bennett 1984: 284). That proposition simply concerns the circumstances under which imagining something amounts to regarding it as actually existing. E 2p17 does not provide the materials for making a connection between the fact that a given imagining amounts to regarding a thing as actually existing and the fact that that imagining is more intense or stronger than an imagining of that thing as far off in the future.

Principles of Affect Constitution and Transition The previous subsection focused on the principles governing the relation between affects and actions. Spinoza’s naturalism dictates that there are also principles covering the relations among affects themselves. Because such principles play a number of important roles in the ethical parts of the Ethics, I will briefly explain some of them here. I should note, however, that I will not draw out in any detail the ethical implications of these principles. One can see Spinoza as employing two basic types of principles concerning the relations among affects: principles of affect constitution and principles of affect transition. To explain the nature of principles of affect constitution, I need to say a little about Spinoza’s program for the classification of affects. As we have seen, Spinoza recognizes three basic affects: desire, joy, and sadness. They are basic not in the sense that they are indefinable, but in the sense that each other affect is simply a specific version of one of the basic three.49 Thus, for example, love is a kind of joy: It is joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause. Similarly, hate is a kind of sadness: It is sadness accompanied by the idea of an external cause (E 3p13s, 3da6,7). Because, for Spinoza, joy is partially constitutive of

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 267 love and sadness is partially constitutive of hate, we might say that Spinoza’s definitions express principles of affect constitution. Throughout Part 3 of the Ethics, Spinoza offers other, often quite subtle descriptions of many other complex affects that are varieties of the three basic ones. In the interests of space and because Spinoza’s taxonomy of the affects has been well-discussed elsewhere, I will not linger over the details here.50 The other type of principle governing the relations among Spinozistic affects consists of principles of affect transition. Affect transition occurs when affect A gives rise to affect B, but neither affect constitutes the other. That is, neither affect contains the other in the way that my love of something contains a feeling of joy. An example will make this clear. Let us say that I have an affect of sadness. As we have seen, for Spinoza such an affect gives rise to another: the desire to remove the sadness (E 3p37). The desire is not constituted by the sadness; my desire is not my sadness qualified in some way. Similarly, my sadness is not constituted by my desire. Rather, my desire is a separate affect caused by the affect of sadness. Thus, this would not be a case of affect constitution, but instead a case of what I call affect transition.51 I want to examine some of the principles governing affect transition. The principle behind the above transition from sadness to desire is one we have already investigated. This transition flows simply from the tendency of each thing to preserve itself and enhance its power of acting. However, other cases of affect transition turn on different principles. To see these different principles, I need to explain Spinoza’s general doctrine of the association of mental states. This in turn requires focusing on Spinoza’s account of memory. For Spinoza, the recollection of an earlier event or object that one experienced requires that one’s body be in the same state as it was when that event or object was originally experienced (see E 2p17cd). In this respect, the account of memory parallels Spinoza’s account of anticipation. As we saw, the anticipation of a given event requires that the individual’s body be in the state that it would be in if the event were actually occurring. Bracketing the many questions that might arise in connection with this account of memory, I simply want to point out the way in which this account can be seen as stemming from a general doctrine of the association of mental states. In E 2p18, Spinoza makes the important claim: “If the human body has once been affected by two or more bodies at the same time, it will immediately recollect the others also.” Thus, if at a certain moment I perceive x and y, and if at a later time I recall x,

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then at that later time I will also recall y. His argument is as follows: If I recall x, then, by the above account of memory, my body must be in the same state as it was when I originally perceived x. As we saw in connection with E 3p18d, Spinoza assumes that if at two different times the body is in the same state, then at those different times the mind is in the same state. My bodily state when I originally perceived x was present with certain mental states. These mental states included not only an idea of x, but also an idea of y. Thus, given Spinoza’s assumption, it must be the case that if my body is again in that state, my mind must again have an idea not only of x, but also of y. This is why, for Spinoza, if I recall x, I will recall y as well (E 2p18d). At work here is the following principle about the association of ideas of particular objects: If at t1 I have an idea of x and an idea of y, and if at a later time t2 I again have an idea of x, then at t2 I again have an idea of y.

The considerations at work here suggest a claim about the association of mental states in general: If at t1 I am in mental state A and mental state B, and if at t2 I am again in mental state A, then at t2 I am again in mental state B.

Although Spinoza does not explicitly formulate this more general doctrine, nonetheless, given that, as we have seen, all mental states are fundamentally ideas for Spinoza, one would expect some such general claim to hold. The above Spinozistic associationist claims are problematic. The general problem is this: Spinoza seems to say that the recurrence of a mental state requires the recurrence of the entire physical state of the individual at the time of the original occurrence of the mental state. But this seems not to be true. In the case of the recurrence of a mental state, the earlier physical state and the later one must, perhaps, have something in common. However, why should there be a thoroughgoing similarity that would drag along all of the mental states originally associated with the one that recurs? Further, why should the similarity drag along any of the associated mental states? The answers to these questions are far from clear, although I can imagine Spinoza trying to justify these claims by saying that in recollection, the mind is in a similar state to a state it was in earlier. If one wants to say that the later state is similar to the earlier state only in certain respects, where does one draw the line between the properties of the earlier state that are replicated later and

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 269 the properties that are not? Spinoza could argue that there is no principled way to draw this line, so – given Spinoza’s rationalist commitment to rejecting unprincipled lines – there is no line here at all. Whatever the basis of the associationist doctrine is, something like this doctrine does seem to be true, that is, in recollection there is some tendency for the mind to make associations between the thing recollected and other things experienced at the same time. And it is the plausibility of the general view that confers plausibility on certain principles of affect transition that depend on the associationist doctrine. Let us begin with a simple case of affect transition. At one time, I experienced two affects: enjoyment of ice cream and sadness at the loss of a game by my favorite team. Later, when I enjoy ice cream again, I experience a revival of the earlier sadness. Since the enjoyment at the later time gives rise to the sadness, and since neither the later sadness nor the later enjoyment constitutes the other, this is a case of affect transition between the later enjoyment and the later sadness. Affect transition is also manifest in the relation between the earlier affects and the later ones. The later ones are caused, in part, by the earlier ones, but they are not constituted by the earlier ones. The general doctrine of the association of mental states also makes possible certain more complicated cases of affect transition. For example, at a moment of great sadness for x, another individual, y, happened to be present and x was aware of this presence. y, however, was not the cause of x’s sadness and did not contribute to it. In this case, an association is established between the affect of sadness and a perception of y. By the general doctrine of the association of mental states, later perceptions of y will give rise to a similar feeling of sadness. y is, therefore, a partial cause of this subsequent sadness, and x may well regard y as such a cause. In seeing y as the cause of sadness, x will come to hate y. Spinoza recognizes this kind of case and offers his account of it in E 3p15 and E 3p15c. In the terminology of that account, Spinoza would say that y is the “accidental cause” of x’s later pain and that that is why x comes to hate y.52 Similarity between individuals provides a particularly interesting kind of affect transition that arises out of the general phenomenon of the association of mental states. Thus, in E 3p16, Spinoza says: “From the mere fact that we imagine a thing to have some likeness to an object that usually affects the mind with joy or sadness, we love it or hate it even though that in which the thing is like the object is not the efficient cause of these affects.” His demonstration proceeds along the following lines:

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Assume that y causes x to feel sad and that x is aware of this fact. At the time at which y harms x, x is aware that y has feature F, although this feature is not relevant to the harm y caused x. At a later time, x perceives another individual, z. Despite their distinctness, z, like y, has feature F and x is aware that z has F. Because of x’s past acquaintance with y, an association has been established in x’s mind between the perception of feature F and sadness. Thus, when in encountering z, x perceives F again, x will, by virtue of this association, feel sad. z is the “accidental cause” of this second episode of sadness, and if x realizes this, then x will come to hate z. Thus, the original sadness caused by y gives rise to further sadness and also hatred of z. This is another case of affect transition.53 Two further facts about this case should be noted. First, the transition of affects as a result of similarity will not occur unless x regards z as F. The transition turns upon an association between a perception of F and a feeling of sadness. Thus, without a perception of z as F, no feeling of sadness is due to z, and no hatred of z can arise for this reason. Second, the transition would occur even if x’s belief that z is F is false. The transition turns on the features x regards z (and y) as having, not on what features they actually have. A different kind of affect transition seems not to operate on a principle of the association of mental states within a given individual. Such transition occurs when an affect in one individual gives rise to a similar affect in another individual. Spinoza calls this phenomenon “the imitation of affects,”54 and he introduces it in E 3p27: “If we imagine a thing like us, toward which we have had no affect, to be affected with some affect, we are thereby affected with a like affect.” Such imitation can arise with any affect. For example, the sadness of another can elicit a corresponding feeling of sadness in me. Spinoza calls this “pity” (E 3p22s, 3da33). It is difficult to deny that Spinoza captures an actual phenomenon here, though, as we will see, his argument for the view that such imitation occurs has important flaws. In order to determine the circumstances under which, according to Spinoza, x imitates y’s affects, three features of Spinoza’s doctrine of imitation must be considered. (1) Spinoza specifies in E 3p27 that for x to imitate y’s affects, y and x must be similar.55 This is a plausible point. I am much less likely to be moved by the struggles of a spider than by those of a fellow human being. Spinoza does not, however, spell out the degree of similarity required before imitation takes effect.56

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 271 (2) The phrase “toward which we have had no affect” in 3p27 might suggest that x imitates y’s affects only when x has no previous affect directed toward y. Thus, Spinoza seems to be thinking along the following lines. Normally, if x and y are similar, y’s affect of joy will generate a similar affect in x. However, if x hates y, then y’s joy will sadden x (E 3p23). Thus, x will not imitate y’s joy. However, it would be wrong to conclude from E 3p27 that, for Spinoza, when x antecedently hates y, affect imitation does not occur. In 3p27d, Spinoza says merely that to the extent that (eatenus) x hates y, x is affected by an affect contrary to y’s. This is compatible with affect imitation because it is compatible with saying that to the extent that x is like y, x is affected by an affect similar to y’s. If this latter claim is correct, it follows that if x is like y and x hates y, then x experiences conflicting affects. Spinoza makes precisely this claim in E 3p47: “The joy which arises from our imagining that a thing we hate is destroyed, or affected with some other evil, does not occur without some sadness of mind” (see also E 3p23s). (3) x’s imitation of affect A in y occurs only if x regards y as having that affect. Further, even if x falsely regards y as having a certain affect, then x will come to have an affect of that type. These claims are implicit in Spinoza’s specification that affect imitation involves x’s imagining y to have a certain affect. The above three points suggest the following general account of affect imitation: x imitates y with respect to affect A if and only if y is similar to x and x regards y as having affect A.

However, because of the possibility of x’s becoming sad on the basis of a false belief that y is sad, this account must be modified slightly. As stated above, this account implies that in such a case, x imitates y with respect to sadness. But how can x be said to imitate y in this way if y is not actually sad? Imitation of affects seems to require an actual matching of affects in two individuals. Spinoza does not explicitly deal with this kind of problem, but to avoid it we simply need to coin some new terms. I will say that in the case in which x’s belief concerning y is false, there is non-veridical imitation. If x’s belief is true, there is veridical imitation. I will use the term “q-imitation” to cover cases of veridical imitation as well as cases of non-veridical imitation.57 Thus, to say that

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x q-imitates y with respect to affect A carries no implication as to whether y actually has affect A. The claim simply implies that x believes that y has affect A. With the notion of q-imitation in hand, we can modify the above account of imitation: x q-imitates y with respect to affect A if and only if y is similar to x and x regards y as having affect A.

The notion of imitation throws new light on Spinoza’s views on anticipation. Recall that, for Spinoza, the anticipation of pain is itself painful. If I believe at t1 that I will experience sadness at t2, then I experience sadness at t1. Although Spinoza does not describe the case in these terms, it might be seen as turning on one’s present self imitating one’s future self. Let us say that x is my current self and y is my future self. x and y might well satisfy the conditions for affect imitation. y is, it seems, similar to x. Further, if I anticipate being sad at t2, then we can say that x (my present self ) believes that y (my future self ) will be sad at that time. Thus, x satisfies the two conditions for imitation y.58 Not only does the account of imitation shed light on Spinoza’s views on anticipation, there is also illumination in the reverse direction. As we have seen, for Spinoza, the pain of anticipation is weaker than the anticipated pain (E 4p9). This would be a case in which what might be called the imitating affect is weaker than the imitated affect. This fact suggests the plausible and more general view that when one individual imitates the affects of another, the imitating affect is weaker than the imitated affect. Spinoza’s doctrine of imitation plays many other key roles in his system. Perhaps most important is the way in which he employs the doctrine to show how a concern for the interests of others emerges from his thoroughgoing egoism (E 4p37d2).59 The importance of the doctrine only heightens the importance of providing a cogent argument for it. Unfortunately, Spinoza’s argument does not seem cogent. It rests on a general claim to the effect that if x perceives y to be F (for any feature F), then x thereby becomes more like y in respect of F.60 However, it does not seem that, for example, if I perceive that Bob is seven feet tall, I thereby become a bit taller. So, E 3p27d does not seem to work.61 But all is not lost. Spinoza’s own doctrine of the association of mental states can, I believe, go some distance toward shoring up the demonstration. It is important to note that this is not a trivial claim: It is not the case that the imitation of affects is by definition a kind of association of mental states. Association, as I have defined it, is a particular relation between mental states of a given individual, whereas the imitation of affects concerns (purported) cases relating affects in different

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 273 individuals.62 Nevertheless, imitation may be regarded as involving association in a subtle way. Recall that in order for me to imitate y’s sadness, I must believe that y is sad. Typically, I become aware of sadness in y by observing y’s behavior. In the past, when I was sad I may have behaved similarly, and I may have been aware of such behavior on my part. Thus, my own experience has established an association between an idea of a certain kind of behavior and a feeling of sadness. When I perceive such behavior in y, the general principle of the association of mental states determines that I will also experience sadness. In this way, I come to imitate y’s affect of sadness. We could, in a similar fashion, explain any of the other cases of affect imitation that Spinoza’s account is meant to cover.63

Teleology In this final subsection of the chapter, I would like to take up a suite of questions concerning teleology that I postponed in the second section. The basic question is: Does Spinoza allow that there is any teleological behavior, any action that is undertaken for the sake of an end, for the sake of some good or some perceived good? In cases of teleological behavior, the action would be explained by the end or the good or the perceived good. This topic is among the most controversial in Spinoza scholarship, and it gets to the heart of Spinoza’s conception of action. On the one hand – and this may be the historically more prominent interpretation – Spinoza is regarded as denying all teleology, as holding that neither God, nor human beings, nor natural things in general act for the sake of an end. On a more moderate interpretation, human beings (and perhaps also creatures such as dogs and other living things) act for the sake of ends, but other objects – such as rocks – in general do not and God does not. At the opposite extreme from the radical no-teleology reading is a view that sees teleology as pervasive among finite objects – human beings as well as dogs as well as rocks act teleologically – even if God or nature itself does not. There have been and are prominent supporters of these interpretations, each of which draws on significant textual resources. While this debate cannot be resolved here definitively, I would like to present here a line of thought that militates in favor of a radical no-teleology reading. Almost all interpreters agree that Spinoza denies that God or nature acts for the sake of an end or a good or a perceived good. Spinoza says fairly definitively that “nature” – and by this he means, of course, God – “has no end set before it” (E 1ap; G II 80). But even if Spinoza rejects divine teleology, he may still accept that there is

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teleological behavior in the case of human beings or even teleological behavior among (finite) natural objects in general. In fact, there is considerable prima facie evidence that Spinoza accepts teleological behavior in each of these two general cases. First, Spinoza says, in the course of denying that nature acts for the sake of an end, that “All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end” (E 1ap; G II 78). Spinoza goes on to say that “Men act always on account of an end, namely, on account of their advantage, which they want” (E 1app; G II 78). Further, some evidence suggests that Spinoza thinks that natural objects in general – not just human beings – act for the sake of an end. Don Garrett influentially interprets Spinoza’s conatus doctrine in this way. For Garrett, when Spinoza says that each thing strives to persist and to increase its power of acting, Spinoza can be seen as saying that each thing acts for the sake of preservation or for the sake of increase in power of acting, that is, each thing’s actions are explained by these ends.64 Garrett also regards Spinoza’s talk of human striving in particular as “intended to license teleological predictions and explanations of human actions.”65 Predominantly because of Spinoza’s conatus doctrine, Garrett regards Spinoza as more favorable to teleological explanation than any other major early modern philosopher. Let us try now to walk back these arguments for a pro-teleological reading of Spinoza. First, consider: Does Spinoza’s conatus doctrine commit him, as Garrett argues, to teleological explanations of behavior? Significant doubt is cast on this reading when we recall that – as I have argued in this chapter – Spinoza’s conatus doctrine is, in some respects, a more general version of the stripped-down account of striving or conatus or tending in Descartes’s treatment of extended objects. Descartes thinks that a physical object (insofar as it is simple and undivided) strives or tends to keep moving (if it is moving) and this striving is nothing more than the fact that the object will keep moving unless external causes prevent it from doing so. This austere account of striving in the extended realm is explicitly non-teleological. For Descartes, as Garrett recognizes, extended objects do not act for the sake of an end, rather they are simply impelled to a certain outcome by efficient causes.66 As I have argued, Spinoza’s notion of striving is a general version of Descartes’s austere account: a thing strives to do what it will do unless prevented by external causes. Given the Cartesian pedigree of Spinoza’s account, it is difficult to see how Spinozistic striving can be seen as genuinely teleological if the equally austere Cartesian striving is not.

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 275 Even if, as I am suggesting, we do not understand the conatus doctrine in Spinoza as teleological, how are we to avoid interpreting in a teleological fashion Spinoza’s apparent claims about human enddirected activity. For example, Spinoza says that we act on account of an end “propter finem agere” (E 1ap) and speaks of a person’s appetite to build a house (E 4pr). Spinoza tells us how to understand such apparently teleological talk. I believe that, for Spinoza, when we act for a reason, what happens is not that we do something because we regard that action as somehow good or worth pursuing. Rather, we do it because we desire or strive to act in that way. And, as we have seen from the account of striving in general, to desire that course of action is just to be such that we will act in that way unless we are prevented by external causes. So, for Spinoza, it is not goodness or perceived goodness that is driving our action; instead, we are driven by our current state to a certain action. As we are being impelled in this way, we may be aware of the direction of our tending but we are typically unaware of the causes of this striving. Because of this ignorance of the true cause our action, we may mistakenly regard the thought of the object toward which our striving tends as the cause of the action. In this respect, we are, for Spinoza, like the conscious falling stone in Spinoza’s fanciful example in Letter 58 to Schuller. Spinoza begins by asking us to consider that: A stone received from the impulsion of an external cause a fixed quantity of motion whereby it will necessarily continue to move when the impulsion of the external cause has ceased. The stone’s continuance in motion is constrained, not because it is necessary, but because it must be defined by the impulsion received from the external cause. (G IV 266)

Spinoza goes on to say: What here applies to the stone must be understood of every individual thing, however complex its structure and various its functions. For every single thing is necessarily determined by an external cause to exist and to act in a fixed and determinate way. (G IV 266)

Then Spinoza draws the analogy: Conceive, if you please, that while continuing in motion the stone thinks, and knows that it is endeavoring, as far as it can [quantum potest], to continue in motion. Now this stone, since it is conscious

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276 michael della rocca only of its endeavor and is not at all indifferent, will surely think it is completely free, and that it continues in motion for no other reason than that it so wishes. This, then, is that human freedom which all men boast of possessing, and which consists solely in this, that men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which they are determined. (G IV 266)

Spinoza speaks in a similar vein in E 3p9s when he says that our action is not the result of our judging something to be good or worthy of pursuit. Instead, says Spinoza, “we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (E 3p9s).67 The key to this reading is to see Spinoza as offering in E 3p9s and Letter 58 a way to explain away apparent claims concerning teleology in non-teleological terms.68 In this light, there is positive reason to see Spinoza as denying that there are genuine teleological explanations anywhere in nature. Not only does Spinoza deny that such explanations hold for God’s activity, but such explanations also do not apply to the activity of rocks or even of human beings. Rather, the activity in all these cases is explained by the action’s efficient cause and not by its ends or outcomes. Finally, in this light, we can see also that the apparently teleological behavior of human beings is no threat to naturalism: such behavior is just an instance of the kind of blind activity directed by efficient causes, the kind of activity that is found throughout nature. The threat to naturalism is defused in the case of apparent end-directed activity just as it was defused in the cases of apparent future-directed striving and other-directed striving: in each case, the problematic anti-naturalistic descriptions of the phenomenon are simply rejected. There is no genuine future-directed striving, other-directed striving, or action for the sake of an end. Of course, this defense of a no-teleology reading of Spinoza does not settle this debate, but it does offer a way to see that Spinoza’s view may be just as austerely nonteleological as interpreters have traditionally feared or hoped.

notes 1 This chapter is a substantial revision of my contribution to the original edition of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Especially in the section on teleology, my thinking in this version departs significantly from the earlier chapter. Although in this version I discuss some more recent literature, I have not been able to engage here with all the excellent work that has been done on the topics of this chapter since the original essay appeared. Parts of the section “The Metaphysical Account: Striving, Self-Preservation, and the Power of Acting” in this chapter draw on my

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 277 paper, “Perseverance, Power, and Eternity: Purely Positive Essence and Spinoza’s Naturalism.” 2 Unless otherwise noted, I employ Curley’s translations of Spinoza (CW I and CW II). See also E 4p57s. 3 In Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect §85, Spinoza says that he conceives of the soul “as acting according to certain laws, like a spiritual automaton.” 4 “Unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare.” Cf. TheologicalPolitical Treatise 16 (CW II: 282): “The supreme law of nature is that each thing, insofar as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its state” (“lex summa naturae est, unaquaeque res in suo statu, quantum in se est, conetur perseverare”). I use the translation “insofar as it is in itself” of the phrase “quantum in se est” because it highlights the important connection, which I will draw later, between Ethics 3p6 and Spinoza’s definition of substance as that which is in itself. Curley (“as far as it can by its own power”) and Caillois (“selon sa puissance d’être”) prefer translations that invoke phrases that go back at least to Lucretius. (For discussions, see CW I: 498n15 and Spinoza 1954: 1427–28.) Such translations, while certainly idiomatic, downplay the resonances between Spinoza’s notion of striving and his notion of substance. Garrett 2002 also sees quantum in se est in this light. For helpful correspondence on this matter, I am indebted to Piet Steinbakkers who comes down on the opposite side of this translation issue. 5 See Curley 1988: 107–8. 6 See Principles of Philosophy 3.57 (Descartes 1985: I: 259–60) and Garber 1992: 354n10, 355n29. Hoffman regards Descartes’s term “tending” as not synonymous with “striving.” See Hoffman 2009: 303–4. 7 Here Spinoza speaks of the striving to move in a certain way, rather than tending to do so. However, this discrepancy is not significant since, as we have just seen, these terms seem to be synonymous in Descartes. See Curley’s note on this passage in CW I: 280n43. 8 And even more famously in Newton’s definition of inertial force as “the power of resisting by which each body, insofar as it is in itself (quantum in se est), perseveres in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight line.” See Cohen 1964. 9 For the significance of Descartes’s restriction to simple and undivided things, see Garber 1992: 212–13. Spinoza’s principle concerning the preservation of motion and rest is restricted to what he calls simplest bodies (corpora simplicissima). See 2p13le3c and 2p13a2’’ after that corollary. 10 And this, in turn, is the same as what it is for x to tend to do F. 11 See Curley 1969: chapter 1; 1973b: 367–68. (I disagree with Curley, however, in that I regard the in-relation as a relation of inherence, and Curley does not. For discussion, see Della Rocca 2008a.) The most important occurrence of the term “in se” is, of course, in the definition of “substance” as that which is in itself and is conceived through itself (E 1d3). Interestingly, in Letter 32, Spinoza equates

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278 michael della rocca regarding something as independent of external causes with regarding something as a whole (ut totum). It seems, then, that for Spinoza, x is in itself if and only if x is independent of external causes if and only if x is a whole. 12 See also the passage from the Theological-Political Treatise 16, quoted in note 4. Although Descartes tends not to use both expressions in the same sentence, he does combine “tends” and “quantum in se est” in the same sentence in Principles 2.43: “everything tends, quantum in se est, to persist in the same state (unaquaeque res tendet, quantum in se est, ad permanendum in eodem statu in quo est).” 13 Curley 1988: 110. See Matson 1977 407–8. The example derives from Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect §57. 14 Part of this paragraph is adapted from Della Rocca 2008b: 141. 15 See also 1a2 and Lin 2008. 16 Parts of this paragraph were adapted from Della Rocca 2008b: 142–43. 17 See, for example, Short Treatise 1.5, to which I will return briefly later. 18 See E 2p7s and Della Rocca 1996: 3. 19 Spinoza’s definition is, strictly, only a definition of activity in us (presumably in human beings). But there is no obstacle to formulating a notion of activity for things in general along similar lines. 20 It appears from this definition that changes of which one is not even a partial cause are ones with regard to which one is neither active nor passive. 21 For Spinoza, the notions of increase and decrease in power of acting are equivalent to the notions of increase and decrease in perfection. See E 3da3ex and E 4pr. 22 Of course, effects brought about by the object prior to its destruction can go on to produce further effects, after that thing’s destruction. We might then say that the object is producing effects even after its destruction. But, in a clear enough sense, the object is no longer directly producing any effects and, in this sense, it is no longer active at all. 23 Spinoza actually speaks of the mind’s power of thinking here (not power of acting). But it is clear that the mind’s power of thinking is its power of acting. In 3p11s, Spinoza describes an increase in the mind’s power of thinking as its passage to a state of greater perfection. As I mentioned in note 21, Spinoza equates a thing’s passage to a state of greater perfection with an increase in that thing’s power of acting. Thus, for Spinoza, an increase in the mind’s power of thinking is an increase in its power of acting. 24 See Garrett 2002. 25 Spinoza’s term “affectus” is often translated “emotion,” but Curley presents good reasons for preferring the translation “affect.” See CW I: 625. 26 As expressed in E 2p7: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” 27 See E 2p7s and E 3p2s where Spinoza affirms that mental things and physical things are one and the same. I discuss such claims in Della Rocca 1996. For a different

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 279 interpretation of the significance of Spinoza’s locution “one and the same,” see Marshall 2009 and Silverman 2017. 28 For the former kind of desire, see E 4p20d; for the latter kind, see E 3p12d (which we discussed earlier). 29 Recall that by “perfection,” Spinoza means “power of acting.” See note 21. Spinoza’s terms for these affects are “laetitia” and “tristitia.” Some have translated these not as “joy” and “sadness,” but as “pleasure” and “pain” (e.g., Elwes and Shirley). I endorse Curley’s reasons for preferring “joy” and “sadness.” See CW I: 642, 654. However, since certain Spinozistic theses are somewhat less cumbersomely phrased in the pleasure/pain vocabulary than in the joy/sadness vocabulary, I will use the former vocabulary in such cases. 30 Bidney 1940: 75, comments on this difference between E 3p11s and the later definitions. 31 See Della Rocca 2003b. This paragraph and the previous paragraph were adapted from Della Rocca 2008: 157–58. 32 See also Spinoza’s definitions of fear and despair, E 3p18s2 and E 3da13, 15. 33 E 3p13d does not explicitly concern anticipation, but it does speak of imaginative states in general and, as Spinoza claims (E 2p44s), anticipatory beliefs fall under this category. 34 Spinoza makes a parallel claim concerning the preservation of joy in E 3p37d. He seems to regard both claims as following directly from his view that each thing strives for self-preservation; it is not clear, however, why this should follow. 35 Spinoza’s reasons here turn on his doctrine of the imitation of affects which I will discuss in the third section. 36 For related passages, see E 3p26s, 3da21, 22, 28, 29. 37 For different reasons for this claim that rational people are beneficial to others, see the two demonstrations of 4p37 which I discuss in detail in Della Rocca 2004. Spinoza’s views on what it is to help others are complicated by his intentionally blurring the boundaries between similar individuals. For some of these complications, see Della Rocca 2010. 38 This claim is, of course, subject to qualifications concerning what one believes will help oneself. Similar qualifications apply to the primacy of the immediate. 39 For Spinoza’s account of conflicts of desires, see E 3p17s. 40 As I will argue at the end of this section, such apparently teleological action and desire would need to be understood in terms that ultimately do not invoke teleology, but for now, I will leave the teleological talk unreduced. 41 See also E 3p2s and E 4pr (beginning), as well as Curley’s note on E 4p17s in CW I: 554n11. 42 As before, all the points I will make about the anticipation of pain have corresponding versions concerning the anticipation of pleasure.

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280 michael della rocca 43 Spinoza does not justify this assumption, but perhaps it is meant to follow from his thesis of parallelism (E 2p7). Spinoza’s assumption can be seen as a kind of supervenience claim: no mental difference without a physical difference. 44 Despite the plausibility of this point, I do not find the demonstration of E 4p10 completely clear. Spinoza’s proof turns on the notion of degrees of imagining something that excludes the present existence of a certain thing, but it is not obvious what such degrees might amount to. 45 Here Spinoza accepts the conditional: “If pain x is greater than pain y, then pain x is stronger than pain y.” I am inclined to think that Spinoza would also accept the converse. See, e.g., 5p8 and 5p8d, where Spinoza seems to regard “greater” and “stronger” as equivalent terms. 46 This is only a reasonable conclusion to draw. It is not required. There may well be kinds of pain which are such that the pain of anticipating them is less sensitive to temporal distance than the pain of anticipating other kinds of pain. And in some cases, it might even be true that – as the adage goes – the anticipation is worse than the pain. Still, I think that something like the above conclusion is correct and, more importantly for our purposes, I cannot see how to make sense of Spinoza’s account of irrational action without attributing this conclusion to him. 47 Notice that, on this account, some apparent cases of prudence would be ones in which the greater size of one anticipated affect is not overcompensated for in the above way by the relative proximity of another affect. 48 Spinoza uses “more intense” as equivalent to “stronger” (“fortior”). See the last sentence of E 4p9d. 49 See Wolfson 1934: II, 208; Neu 1977: 76–77. Spinoza puts the point by saying that all other affects “arise (oriri) from these three” (E 3p11s) and by saying that all other affects are either “composed” (componitur) of or “derived” (derivatur) from desire, joy, or sadness (E 3p56). In recognizing only three basic affects, Spinoza differs from Descartes who recognizes six: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness (Passions of the Soul 2.69 in Descartes 1985: I: 353). 50 See Bennett 1984: 262–67. Wolfson 1934: II: 209–10 and Voss 1981 each delineate the similarities and differences between Spinoza’s list of affects and Descartes’s. 51 This point requires qualification: if, as I have argued elsewhere, effects are in or inhere in their causes, for Spinoza, then there would be no sharp line between affect constitution and affect transition, at least not when the transition is causal. See Della Rocca 2008a. 52 For related passages, see E 3p36 and E 3p36c, where Spinoza describes cases in which an object or person is an accidental cause of an affect of joy. See also E 3p50’s account of accidental causes of hope and fear.

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spinoza’s metaphysical psychology 281 53 Similarly, Spinoza sees hatred of an entire class or nation as a result of a transition from an affect of sadness caused by one person to an affect of hate directed at all those like that person (E 3p46). 54 As I will explain, however, not everything that Spinoza calls affect imitation actually involves affect transition. 55 Actually, E 3p27 can be read as requiring not actual similarity, but perceived similarity. On this point, see Della Rocca 2004. 56 See Matheron 1969: 155; Bennett 1984: 281; Curley 1988: 118–19. 57 “Q-imitation” is short for “quasi-imitation.” Compare the notion of quasi-memory in recent discussions of personal identity. See, e.g., Parfit 1984: 220. 58 Similar points apply to memory and the imitation of the affects of my past self. 59 See Della Rocca 2004. Other important uses of the imitation doctrine appear in Spinoza’s view that hatred breeds further hatred, but can be checked by love (E 3p43, E 4p46) and in his accounts of ambition (E 3p29s), shame, love of esteem (E 3p30s), and envy (E 3p32s). See also Della Rocca 2010. 60 This is, I believe, what the following claim from E 3p27d amounts to: “[I]f the nature of the external body is like the nature of our body, then the idea of the external body will involve an affection of our body like the affection of the external body.” 61 For similar criticisms, see Bennett 1984: 281 and Broad 1930: 37–38. For a more favorable account of the demonstration, see Matheron 1969: 154–55. 62 Perhaps, however, the imitation of past or future selves by one’s present self can be seen as a case of association. 63 In this paragraph, I am following an argument in Della Rocca 2004. 64 See Garrett 1998: 313–14. 65 Garrett 1998: 314. 66 See, e.g., Descartes Principles 1.28. 67 I am indebted here to Carriero 2005: 135–37. See also Carriero 2018 and Hübner 2018. 68 Here I am departing not only from Garrett 1998 but also from Curley 1990b and Lin 2006 and others who defend a more or less pro-teleology reading. In the previous version of this essay, I rejected a radical no-teleology reading and criticized Bennett’s version of such an interpretation. I stand by my rejection in that essay of Bennett’s reasons for his no-teleology reading, though I have now seen my way to such a reading for independent reasons.

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7

Spinoza’s Ethical Theory Don Garrett So the Philosophers . . . follow virtue not as a law, but from love, because it is the best thing. (Ep 19)

Ethics, for Spinoza, is knowledge of “the right way of living.”1 That ethics is central to his philosophical project is unmistakable from the title of his most systematic presentation of his philosophy: Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata). While that work seeks to demonstrate a broad range of metaphysical, theological, epistemological, and psychological doctrines, they are selected for inclusion, at least in large measure, because of the support he takes them to provide for his ultimate ethical conclusions. Many of those conclusions are distinctive and provocative, and many of his reasons for them are innovative and intriguing. Although Spinoza’s ethical theory has often received less attention than his metaphysics and political theory, it has begun to draw more sustained examination in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.2

a n o u t l i n e o f s p i n o z a ’ s e t h i c a l t h e o ry Spinoza touches on ethical topics in several of his works, as well as in his correspondence. Part 2 of the early Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being takes up the topics of good and evil, blessedness, and freedom, as well as discussing various “affects” (i.e., emotions). The Theological-Political Treatise naturally bears on ethics in the political context. By far Spinoza’s fullest, most systematic, and most mature discussion of ethical theory, however, is contained in Part 4 (“Of Human Bondage”) and Part 5 (“Of the Power of the Intellect”) of his Ethics, which I will therefore follow.

The Natural Foundations of Ethical Theory In Parts 4 and 5 of the Ethics, Spinoza seeks to derive his ethical theory from the accounts of nature in general and human psychological nature in particular that he has already developed in Parts 1 through 3. One

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spinoza’s ethical theory 283 measure of this dependence is the fact that, although Part 4 begins with eight new definitions, it adds only a single new axiom – an axiom, moreover, that is not distinctively ethical. (The axiom states: “There is no singular thing in nature than which there is not another more powerful and stronger.”) Part 5 introduces two additional axioms; but again, neither is distinctively ethical, and indeed Spinoza describes the second (despite its official status as an underived axiom) as “evident from” E 3p7.3 Spinoza famously identifies God with Nature (“Deus, sive Natura”), and the doctrine that “singular” (i.e., particular) things are not themselves substances but rather “modes” of this sole substance is central to his ethics. Human beings, according to Spinoza, stand in an intimate relationship both to God-or-Nature and to other things within nature, from which they are not “really distinct” in the Cartesian sense.4 On the one hand, this implies that human beings cannot act independently of, or separately from, God-or-Nature’s own activity, and that every human action must be conceived as one among many expressions or manifestations of God-or-Nature. On the other hand, however, it also implies that there is at least a prospect for a kind of direct participation in the divine (E 4p45c2s). Equally important to Spinoza’s ethical theory is his necessitarianism (stated in E 1p29 as the doctrine that “in nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way”; see also E 1p16 and E 1p33).5 This doctrine rules out the possibility of what Spinoza calls “absolute or free will,” which is freedom understood as the absence of causal determination of the will; it helps to determine the character and structure of knowledge (which E 3pp26–28 declare to be our highest good);6 and it provides prospects for consolation in adversity (E 4ap32; see also E 5p6). Spinoza’s doctrine of the identity between modes of extension and their corresponding modes of thought (E 2p7s) entails the identity of the human mind with the human body and the identity of affects (as well as of cognitions more generally) with bodily modifications or occurrences. It thereby extends the scope of ethics, as a doctrine about the right way of living, to both the mental and the physical domains, and it precludes any construal of ethics as involving conflict between the mind and the body. The distinction between imagination (as the first and lowest kind of “knowledge” or cognition [cognitio]) and the intellect (further

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distinguished into reason [ratio] as the second kind of knowledge and intuition [scientia intuitiva] as the third and highest kind) is central to the epistemology on which his knowledge-centered ethical theory rests and in terms of which it is formulated. Perhaps the single most crucial underpinning of Spinoza’s ethics, however, is the conatus doctrine of E 3p6, which states that “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its existence.”7 From this proposition, he derives the closely related E 3p7: “The striving (conatus) by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.” The active tendency toward perseverance in being (i.e., self-preservation) thus becomes, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, the essential and defining feature of the natures of all individual things, including all human beings, and the central element in the explanation of their behavior.8 A thing is truly active, for Spinoza, only to the extent that it is an adequate cause through its own nature (E 3d1), and it is passive to the extent that its nature is only a partial or inadequate cause of states or events. It follows that a thing’s genuine activity – however much or little it may have – always expresses an effort at its own self-preservation. Desire (cupiditas) is defined as this striving (conatus) as it involves both mind and body, and especially as it is directed with some considerable degree of consciousness toward a particular object (E 3p9s). Joy (laetitia) and sadness (tristitia) are defined as the increase and decrease, respectively, in perfection or capacity for being active (E 3p11s). Desire, joy, and sadness – and the further affects defined in terms of them – play central roles in Spinozistic ethics. It is, in fact, largely the human capacity for so many varieties of desire, joy, and sadness, described throughout Ethics Part 3, that makes human ethics, for Spinoza, such a potentially rich and complex domain. Much of his ethical theory in Part 4 consists in his ethical evaluation of the various human psychological phenomena whose nature and causes he has already deduced from this metaphysical basis in the psychology of Part 3. He concludes Part 3 and signals the transition to a discussion of ethics proper by characterizing the power of genuine human activity – as distinguished from mere passion-driven behavior – as strength of character (fortitudo). He then distinguishes two aspects of strength of character: tenacity (animositas), which is “the desire by which each one strives, solely from the dictate of reason, to preserve his being”; and nobility (generositas), which is “the desire by which each one strives, solely from the dictate of reason, to aid other human beings and join them to him in friendship” (E 3p59s).

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Definitions of Ethical Terms Spinoza begins the preface to Ethics Part 4 by defining the term “bondage” as “a human being’s lack of power to moderate and restrain the affects.” He then sets out two aims for Part 4 itself: to demonstrate the causes of bondage and to demonstrate “what there is of good and evil in the affects.” The first aim corresponds to E 4pp1–18; the second corresponds to E 4pp19–73 plus an appendix to Part 4. Before pursuing these aims, however, Spinoza devotes the remainder of the preface to an account of two pairs of evaluative terms: “perfect”/“imperfect,” and “good”/“evil.” The original Latin meaning of “perfectus,” is “completed”; hence, he explains, something has been said to be perfect, in common usage, when the speaker believed that the thing had been completed in accordance with the purpose of its creator. But human beings mistakenly suppose that nature itself, on analogy with themselves, seeks to produce things in accordance with archetypes or forms that correspond to the ideas of imagination that they form as models or “universals” (see E 2p40s1). They have therefore accustomed themselves to apply the terms “perfect” and “imperfect” to all natural things – not just to artifacts – depending on whether the things in question did or did not conform to their own imaginative models. In addition, because many have supposed that there is one highest genus or universal, that of “being” in general, the term “perfect” has also come to be used as a technical philosophical term for describing a thing’s degree of reality – as, indeed, Spinoza himself has already done in E 2d6. In Ethics Part 3, Spinoza had asserted that we apply the terms “good” (“bonum”) and “evil” (“malum”) to things depending on whether the things happen to affect us with desire or aversion, respectively. Thus, we do not desire things because they are “good,” or avoid them because they are “evil,” as those terms are generally used; rather, we call things “good” simply because we desire them and “evil” simply because we are averse to them (E 3p9s). In the preface to Part 4, he adds that, for this reason, the same thing must often be said to be “good” for one person, “evil” for a second, and indifferent for a third. Hence, both pairs of evaluative terms in their common usage “indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves.” Instead, they “arise because we compare things to one another,” and they indicate rather our own personal and idiosyncratic modes of thinking: vague imaginative universal models in the case of “perfect” and imperfect,” and personal desires and aversions in the case of “good” and “evil.”

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Rather than rejecting these terms outright, however, Spinoza proposes to retain them and give them a more scientific ethical usage. He does so, he explains, because it is advantageous to have a particular “model of human nature that we set before ourselves.” Thus, he proposes definitions of “perfect”/“imperfect” and “good”/“evil” in terms of relations to that model. The “good,” according to these definitions, is “what we know is certainly a means by which we may approach nearer and nearer to the model,” while “evil” is the opposite; and human beings themselves are “more perfect or imperfect, insofar as they approach more or less near to this model” (E 4pr). In the formal definitions at the beginning of Part 4 proper, however, Spinoza defines “good” and “evil” without explicit reference to the “model of human nature we set before ourselves,” referring instead simply to what is certainly known to be useful to us: D1: By good I shall understand what we certainly know to be useful to us. D2: By evil, however, I shall understand what we certainly know prevents us from being masters of some good.

These reformulations thus embody the assumption that whatever is known to be useful to human beings is also something that enables them to approximate the model of human nature that Spinoza aims to set before us. Of the remaining six formal definitions of Part 4, only E 4d8 concerns an ethical term, “virtue” (“virtus”), and this he defines in terms of its Latin meaning of “power” or “strength”: D8: By virtue and power I understand the same thing, i.e., (by 3p7), virtue, insofar as it is related to human beings, is the very essence, or nature, of human beings, insofar as they have the power of bringing about certain things, which can be understood through the laws of their nature alone.

Bondage and Its Causes In explaining “the causes of human beings’ lack of power and inconstancy, and why they do not observe the precepts of reason” (E 4p18s), Spinoza emphasizes that human beings, as finite parts of nature, have a limited amount of power and are always subject to external forces that may be more powerful than their own natures. These forces may prevent

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spinoza’s ethical theory 287 them from achieving or acquiring what is most advantageous to them. In particular, these forces can induce passions – that is, affects of which the person alone is not the adequate cause and which, therefore, may or may not be conducive to the person’s well-being. Among the harmful affects, some are affects of sadness, which decrease the person’s capacity for action; some are affects of joy that increase the person’s capacity for action in one respect but only at the expense of rendering the person less fit for other kinds of actions (e.g., by increasing the power of one part of the body at the expense of others, or by rendering the individual incapable of perceiving or thinking of other things); and some are desires which misdirect the individual’s endeavor for self-preservation onto the pursuit of objects that are not truly or entirely advantageous. Because they arise from external causes, passions may prevent human beings from appreciating where their own true good or advantage lies. However, passions can also prevent human beings from pursuing their advantage even when they do understand it; as Spinoza remarks (quoting Ovid), we sometimes “see and approve the better, but follow the worse” (E 4p17s). He must therefore explain how this phenomenon can be reconciled with his doctrine that human beings necessarily seek their own advantage as far as they can. He does so by contending that ideas have motivational force not through their truth or falsehood but only through their also being affects. Hence, a desire or other affect that is a harmful passion can be stronger than another affect that constitutes true knowledge of what is really (in the scientific sense) good or evil. In such a case, one can be driven by passions to “act” – or rather, to behave, since “passion” and “action” are opposites – against one’s own acknowledged best interests, interests that one thereby lacks sufficient power of action to pursue. Constraining or removing affects that are harmful passions therefore depends on the occurrence of opposite and stronger affects (E 4p7). For example, an affect becomes more powerful, Spinoza argues, if we imagine its cause as present rather than past or future (E 4p9); as in the near, rather than the distant, future or past (E 4p10); as free rather than necessary (E 3p49d); as necessary rather than merely possible (E 4p11); or as possible rather than merely contingent (E 4p12).

The Prescriptions of Reason The remainder of Part 4 (E 4p19–33 and E 4ap) is devoted to the second aim Spinoza sets out in the Preface – specifically, to show “what reason prescribes to us, which affects agree with the rules of human reason, and

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which, on the other hand, are contrary to those rules” (E 4p18s). As knowledge of the second kind, reason is for Spinoza – like imagination but unlike intuition – a way of “perceiving many things” (E 2p40s2) and is therefore always general. He indicates in advance the most general character of reason’s prescription: 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. This, indeed, is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part. (E 4p18s)

Spinoza proceeds in several distinct stages. The seven propositions of E 4pp19–25 concern the relation between virtue (as already defined at E 4d8) and conatus – that is, the endeavor at self-preservation that he has attributed (at E 3p7) to all singular things as their “actual” (one might also say “actualized”) essence. Because conatus constitutes the actual essence of each individual, it defines the power and activity of the thing’s own nature. It follows for Spinoza that greater virtue for a human being is simply a greater capacity to strive for and achieve one’s own advantage, which lies in self-preservation and the means to it (E 4p20). Comparison of this account of virtue with E 4p18s shows that “acting from virtue” and “acting under the guidance of reason” are equivalent, as Spinoza himself notes at E 4p24. The three propositions of E 4pp26–28 concern the intimate relationship between virtue and understanding, and they lead to the conclusion that “knowledge of God is the Mind’s greatest good; its greatest virtue is to know God” (E 4p28). The mind’s highest good is knowledge, according to Spinoza, because the mind’s own good must be that which it actively strives for through its own nature – that is, what it tends to produce or acquire insofar as it is genuinely active. But the mind is genuinely active only insofar as it is an adequate cause of its thoughts, and it is the adequate cause of its thoughts only when it is deriving adequate knowledge from other adequate knowledge through its own intellectual power. Since the highest object of knowledge is the absolutely infinite being, God, through which everything else must be understood (E 1p15), it follows that knowledge of God is the mind’s highest good and that to know God is its highest virtue. The propositions of E 4pp29–36 concern relations among human beings and the preconditions for sustained and mutually beneficial

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spinoza’s ethical theory 289 cooperation. Spinoza holds, as a general metaphysical thesis, that whenever two things “agree in nature” they will, to that extent, be mutually beneficial, because what is conducive to the preservation of their shared nature must be the same (E 4p31). Human beings necessarily “agree in nature” to the extent that they are guided by reason (E 4p35). Human reason as such is the same in all and aims at the same thing – namely, adequate knowledge, or intellectual understanding. Such understanding, moreover, is a good that can be shared by all without diminishing anyone’s enjoyment of it (E 4p36). In fact, Spinoza holds, nothing is more useful to a human being than another human being who is guided by reason (E 4p35c1). Hence, individuals who are virtuous and guided by reason will all seek, from their own self-interest, the same goods for others that they seek for themselves (E 4p37). Indeed, to the extent that a community of human beings is guided by reason, its members can “compose, as it were, one Mind and one Body” (E 4p18s) – that is, a complex individual, composed of like-minded human beings as coordinated parts, which has an endeavor for self-preservation of its own. In contrast, to the extent that human beings are not guided by reason, but are instead subject to passions, they are contrary in nature and liable to come into conflict with one another (E 4p32). This is so even when the passions themselves seem similar (for example, passionate love for the same person or thing), since being subject to passions is a privation of power, rather than a positive source of agreement in nature (E 4p32). Moreover, individuals subject to such passions come into conflict not through their similarity, according to Spinoza, but rather through their difference. For example, they will not desire the same distribution of apparent goods to others that they desire for themselves; rather, they will differ in striving to make different disposals of those goods.9 The portion of the Ethics comprising E 4pp38–66 moves from the general to the specific, aiming to establish what is truly good, virtuous, or in accordance with reason, and what is not. Good things include those that are conducive to preserving the distinctive “proportion of motion and rest” that constitutes the nature of the human body, and thereby serve to keep it alive (E 4p39); those that so dispose the human body that it can either be affected by many things (so that its mind can perceive many things) or affect many other things (E 4p38); and those that enable human beings to live harmoniously together (E 4p40). Among the affects, cheerfulness – which is the kind of joy in which all parts of the body are equally affected – is always good (E 4p42). More

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generally, all joy, as such, is good, and all sadness, as such, is evil (E 4p41). However, pleasure (in contrast to cheerfulness) is joy in which one or several parts of the body are affected more than others; hence, it can be excessive when it prevents us from being affected in other advantageous ways (E 4p43), as also can desire and love (E 4p44). Pain, although it is directly evil, can be indirectly good when it restrains excessive pleasure (E 4p41). Affects that can, when based on adequate ideas, be in accordance with reason include approval (favor),10 defined as love toward one who has benefited another (E 4p51); self-esteem (E 4p52); and love of esteem (E 4p58). Hatred can never be good (E 4p45), however, and the envy, mockery, disdain, anger, and vengeance that result from hatred are all evil (E 4p45c1), as are overestimation and scorn (E 4p48). Indignation (defined as “hatred toward one who has harmed another”), pity, humility, and repentance – sometimes regarded as virtues, but all species of sadness – cannot arise from reason and are not genuine virtues (E 4pp50,51,53,54). Among kinds of behavior, seeking to repay hatred, anger, or disdain with love and nobility is in accordance with reason (E 4p46), as is the policy of “following the greater of two goods or the lesser of two evils” (E 4p65), even when the greater good or lesser evil is in the more distant future. More generally, any behavior leading to harmless pleasure is good (E 4p45C2s). Ethics 4pp67–73 conclude the main body of Part 4 by providing a description of the ideal “free human being” (“homo liber”) who evidently constitutes Spinoza’s promised “model of human nature we set before ourselves.” Freedom has already been defined, at E 1d7, as follows: “That thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone.” Although only God is absolutely free in this sense, human beings can have degrees of freedom, corresponding to the degrees to which they are the adequate causes of their own actions. Because free human beings directly pursue the good more than they seek to avoid evil, they “think of nothing less than of death, and [their] wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death” (E 4p67). Indeed, human beings who were born free “would form no concept of good and evil” for as long as they remained free (E 4p68). The free human being exhibits freedom by avoiding dangers as well as by overcoming them (E 4p69); seeks to avoid the favors of the ignorant (E 4p70); is most thankful to other free human beings (E 4p71); always acts in good faith, not fraudulently (E 4p72, my translation; see the second section of this chapter); and is more free in a political state under a common law than in a condition of solitude (E 4p73).

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spinoza’s ethical theory 291 In the thirty-two articles of the appendix to Part 4, Spinoza summarizes his ethical doctrines, discusses additional affects, and takes the opportunity to add a number of practical maxims concerning money, marriage, and other matters.

The Way to Freedom If human beings are often in bondage to their passions, in Spinoza’s view, still they sometimes achieve a degree of freedom over them. Whereas the initial propositions of Part 4 set out the causes of human weakness, the initial propositions of Part 5 (E 5pp1–20) set out “the means, or way, leading to freedom.” However, unlike Descartes – who sought to describe the mind’s ability to improve its command over the body through the interaction of mind and body at the pineal gland – Spinoza seeks to describe the various respects in which the human mind’s own cognitive capacity to achieve adequate knowledge naturally gives it a certain degree of power over its own affects. In E 5p20, Spinoza summarizes five of these “means,” appealing to the frequency, persistence, power, and/or associability of adequate ideas. One of these means is reminiscent of a strategy also proposed by Descartes: the ability to frame and memorize maxims or “practical precepts” of right conduct that we can associate with particular circumstances in which they might be useful. However, none of the other “means” that Spinoza lists at E 5p20s corresponds directly to therapeutic techniques that one could consciously adopt in order to increase one’s freedom and power over the passions; nor are they intended to be. Spinoza’s primary goal in the first half of Part 5 is not to describe techniques that could be consciously undertaken as exercises, but rather to explain the most important respects in which having adequate knowledge tends to produce a lessened susceptibility to passions over the long run, so as to strengthen the desire of his readers – a desire that is of course already present with some degree of strength in all human beings – to achieve such greater adequate understanding. In adequately understanding oneself and one’s emotions, one necessarily feels joy, he remarks, and because we understand this joy as having its source in God, we thereby come to love God A further respect in which Spinoza holds that reason has power over the affects is not included in his summary at E 5p20s.11 This is the power the mind acquires over the affects when it understands things – and especially singular things – as necessitated. In his view, affects are

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greatest toward a thing that we imagine as free by imagining it “while we are ignorant of the causes by which it has been determined to act” (E 5p5, derived from E 3p49). Understanding a thing – and, in particular, an evil or disappointing thing – as necessitated by external causes decreases the power of the affects associated with it. This is a point for which, he remarks, “experience itself also testifies.” Thus, necessitarianism is not only true; it has positive psychological value as well.

Eternity, Intellectual Love of God, and Blessedness Spinoza strikingly concludes E 5p20s: “With this I have completed everything which concerns this present life . . .. So it is time now to pass to those things which pertain to the mind’s duration without relation to the body.”12 The remainder of Part 5 of the Ethics accordingly deals with what he calls “the part of the mind that is eternal” and with the intellectual love of God and eternal blessedness in which the mind can participate through this eternal character. The eternality of (a part of ) the mind in Spinoza is a topic that defies easy categorization. It is at once metaphysical, because concerned with the relations between existence and essence and between duration and eternity; epistemological, because concerned with the character of the second and, especially, the third kinds of knowledge; theological, because concerned with knowledge of God and of God’s relation to human beings; and ethical, because concerned with the proper attitude toward life and death and with achieving blessedness as the best state of being. Spinoza holds that there is in God an idea which “expresses” the unchanging formal essence (as contrasted with the actual existence [E 3p7]) of the human body and is itself therefore something eternal. This idea is the human intellect itself, which is the part of the mind that consists entirely of true and adequate ideas, ideas that are therefore unchanging and eternally in God;13 and in acquiring and strengthening true and adequate ideas, a human being is always acquiring and strengthening in itself knowledge that expresses the essence of the human body in just this way. Thus, as one gains a larger and more powerful share of adequate ideas, one’s mind becomes something “whose greatest part is eternal” (E 5p39). In saying this, Spinoza is not asserting one achieves continued personal existence after one’s biological death, however. There can be no personal or individual persistence after death, for individual personality involves imagination (including sensory awareness from a particular perspective) and memory

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spinoza’s ethical theory 293 (E 5p21). Instead, on Spinoza’s view, one brings adequate knowledge that is eternally in God also within the scope of one’s own mind and thereby achieves for oneself the perspective of the eternal while one is alive. In consequence, a greater part of one’s mind is composed of ideas that are impervious both to harmful affects – including fear – and to death itself (E 5p38). Thus, as the intellect is strengthened, the mind becomes less affected by fear in general and by fear of death in particular. At the same time, death becomes less harmful and so less to be feared, because the greatest and most important part of the mind will survive – although not, of course, as the idea of the actually existing body, since that body will have perished. This is not all. In Spinoza’s view, human minds, as complex ideas or representations, are parts of an infinite mode of God that he calls “the infinite intellect of God” (E 2p11c), which is God’s own thought as it involves or is composed of ideas or representations. However, human thought has not only a representational but also an affective or emotional aspect; and this is possible only if God’s attribute of thought itself – of which human thought is of course a mode – also has an eternal affective character. Indeed, the existence of this affective character is presumably one reason why the infinite intellect of God is only an infinite mode of God, for Spinoza, and not the entire attribute of thought itself. To the extent that one achieves knowledge of the third and highest kind – which involves understanding the essences of singular things through the attributes of God, effects through their causes (E 2p40s2) – one possesses God’s own knowledge in the same way that God does. That is, one’s knowledge is in one’s own mind in the same way that that knowledge is also in God, and so one participates more completely and powerfully in the infinite intellect of God. In a similar way, knowledge of the third kind involves having affects in something like the way that those affects are in God, and so enables one to participate more completely and powerfully in what might be called the affective life of God. Of course, Spinoza’s God, although it is an infinite thinking thing, is not a person. God’s eternally supreme perfection is incompatible with desire or purpose, both of which imply some lack; with joy, which requires a transition from a lesser perfection or capacity for action; and with sadness, which requires transition to a lesser perfection or capacity for action. It follows that God does not literally love anything or anyone, since love is a kind of joy (E 2p13s), implying an increase in something that God eternally possesses supremely. Moreover, love is joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause, whereas nothing is or can be external to God.

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Nevertheless, because God eternally has the greatest perfection and capacity for action, it has a kind of eternal analogue of joy, an eternal “rejoicing” that we experience as joy whenever we increase our participation in it. Moreover, because God is self-caused, God’s eternal rejoicing has God itself as its true object, and so God also has an eternal – but internally directed – analogue of “love.” As we come to participate in the third kind of knowledge, we come to participate in this eternal analogue of love, which Spinoza calls “the intellectual love of God.” As durational existing beings in the process of coming to acquire this affect, we will experience it as actual joy. But this affect pertains to that part of our mind that is eternal; and to the extent that we are enabled to take on the eternal viewpoint that is characteristic of adequate knowledge, we can recognize this affect as itself something eternal – that is, not merely a transition to greater perfection, but perfection itself (E 5p33s). This affect of perfection itself – as opposed to the transition toward it – is what Spinoza calls “blessedness” (E 5p33s). Blessedness, when considered as having an object, is the same thing as the intellectual love of God (E 5p36s). It is, in fact, an intellectual love that is “of” God in two different senses: It has God as its loved object, but it is also God’s own love of itself, and a love in which we, through the third kind of knowledge, can participate. Furthermore, we recognize that, because we are modes of God, the object of this love includes ourselves as well. Accordingly, Spinoza says that knowledge of the third kind allows us to love God with the very same love with which God “loves” himself, and the same love with which God “loves” us (E 5pp35–36,36c). Spinoza emphasizes that knowledge of the doctrine of the eternality of the mind is not required for the motivational efficacy of ethics (E 5p41), because the advantageousness of tenacity and nobility were already fully demonstrated in Part 4, independently of this doctrine. Virtue is desirable for as long one has it, he maintains; to insist that it can have no value unless it brings immortality would be “no less absurd . . . than if someone, because he does not believe he can nourish his body with good food to eternity, should prefer to fill himself with poisons and other deadly things” (E 5p41s).

four important questions for spinoza’s e t h i c a l t h e o ry This outline naturally raises a number of important questions about Spinoza’s views on some of the most central topics in ethical theory.

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spinoza’s ethical theory 295 These include the meaning and motivational force of ethical judgments, the conditions for ethical responsibility, the role of altruism in ethics, and the value of life and harmfulness of death. In what remains, I will address these topics in order.

The Nature and Motivational Force of Ethical Judgments Ethics is a prescriptive and action-guiding discipline; yet in Ethics Parts 4 and 5, Spinoza claims to demonstrate his ethical propositions entirely from what appear to be the purely descriptive premises provided by his axioms and a set of definitions. How can he suppose this to be possible? The answer lies largely in Spinoza’s conception of the meaning of ethical terms themselves. The ethical propositions of the Ethics do not exhort or entreat the reader, nor do they directly command. Instead, they evaluate, using four primary terms of positive ethical evaluation: “good,” “virtue,” “accordance with reason,” and “the free human being.” As Spinoza uses them, each can be defined in entirely nonnormative terms. As we have already seen, he defines “good” as whatever is useful or advantageous (E 4d1), which in turn he defines as that which is conducive to self-preservation (E 4p8d). “Virtue” he defines as power for self-preservation (E 4d8). “Accordance with reason” is definable in terms of the affective and motivational consequences of reason – that is, adequate general knowledge resulting from inference (E 2p40s).14 “Free human beings” may be defined as those who are the adequate causes of their own behavior through their own natures (E 1d8). Spinoza appears to treat the last three of these terms as coextensive: at E 4p24 and E 4p37s1, he identifies acting from virtue with acting from the guidance of reason; and at E 4p66s, he writes that he calls the person who is “led by reason” a “free human being.” Furthermore, there are no cases in which he applies one of these three terms to an affect or behavior while denying the applicability of any of the others. This treatment is understandable, given that genuine activity, on Spinoza’s view, is equally a matter of having adequate understanding, exercising one’s own power to achieve one’s essential ends, and being determined by one’s own nature. Indeed, in Part 4 of the Ethics, he sometimes seems simply to alternate among the practical-rationality language of “accordance with reason,” the character-centered language of “virtue,” and the metaphysical-causal language of “free human being” as if to imply that at least many of his ethical doctrines can be expressed equally well in any of these terms.

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From the emphasis that Spinoza places on defining “perfect” in the preface to Part 4, one might have expected that this term would also feature prominently in Spinoza’s ethical evaluations, but it does not.15 Presumably, this is because the preface defines it in application to human beings only in terms of a yet-to-be-specified “model of human nature that we set before ourselves” – a model that is subsequently spelled out as the virtuous person, the person guided by reason, or, especially, “the free human being.” Taken literally, of course, something that is perfectly virtuous, rational, or free while still being human is contradictory, on Spinoza’s view: “It is impossible that a human being should not be a part of Nature, and that he should be able to undergo no changes except those which can be understood through his own nature alone, of which he is the adequate cause” (E 4p4). Nevertheless, he also believes that literal truths can be expressed in terms of idealizations – as he explains, for example, in connection with a description of a “candle burning . . . where there are no bodies [i.e., in a vacuum]” (TIE §57). Descriptions of the activity of the free human being state what human beings would do from their own power in certain external circumstances unless other external circumstances prevented them from doing so. Such actions also become more common as one becomes more perfect and free – that is, they vary proportionately with freedom.16 To use one of Spinoza’s most frequent expressions, the description of the free human being is to be understood as a description of the affects and behavior that human beings exhibit “insofar as” they are free. The term “good,” in contrast, appears to function somewhat differently for Spinoza in at least some contexts. Because he defines the good as whatever is advantageous for persevering in one’s being, the term can in principle apply not only to affects and behaviors, but also to things such as food, shelter, or laws. In addition, however, he sometimes characterizes an affect or behavior as good – at least to some extent or in some circumstances – even though it is not virtuous, fully in accordance with reason, or an expression of human freedom. For example, he holds that shame is a kind of sadness, and so is not a virtue; yet it is nevertheless said to be “still good insofar as it indicates, in the man who blushes with Shame, a desire to live honorably” (E 4p58s). He explains this on the grounds that “a lesser evil is really a good” in relation to a greater evil, since “good and evil are said of things insofar as we compare them to one another” (E 4p65d). And more generally, we may observe, the behavior that would be advantageous in order to approach a model of human nature we set before ourselves need not always be the same as the behavior of one who has already achieved that model.

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spinoza’s ethical theory 297 Thus, all ethical evaluations state descriptive truths for Spinoza, and the subject matter of ethical propositions is not separated from the study of nature. Rather, ethics is simply that particularly useful branch of the study of nature which describes things in respect of their relations to goodness, virtue, reason, and human freedom. Its usefulness as a branch of study consists in its ability to guide and motivate human beings in pursuing a way of life that will truly suit the purposes that they already necessarily have. The question, “Why be ethical?” no more needs an answer than does the question, “Why achieve one’s ends?” On Spinoza’s conception of ethical motivation, it should be emphasized, ethical judgements do not merely interact with existing desires and other affects in order to motivate action; rather the desires and other affects that motivate human beings are always themselves judgments that the mind affirms. For example, a sensory idea representing some food as present, occurring in a normally functioning human being who needs food, will often, in its affective aspect, be a desire to obtain and eat the food. Similarly, if one determines by reason that one’s own advantage lies in the pursuit of knowledge, or in the institution of a well-ordered state, or in association with individuals like oneself, then the idea that constitutes this understanding will itself be a desire for the thing so conceived, in Spinoza’s view. This identification of affects with judgments is made possible by the conatus doctrine that every individual, by its very essence, necessarily endeavors insofar as it can to persevere in its own existence. Because it pertains to the very essence of minds to desire whatever they can perceive (adequately or inadequately) as conducive to their own advantage, there is no need for him to distinguish the desire from the judgment as separate elements in the mind; for a mind that perceives something as advantageous and yet does not, at least to some extent, desire it, is an impossibility in his metaphysics.

The Conditions for Ethical Responsibility Spinoza does not hold that the desires, choices, and behaviors of human beings are causally irrelevant; for if that were true, the same outcomes would ultimately result independent of what human beings desire, choose, and do. He is, however, a necessitarian, holding that everything that is true is true necessarily and could not have been otherwise. One aspect of his particular version of necessitarianism is determinism: that is, the doctrine that, when taken in conjunction with the laws of nature, the totality of the states of all individual things at any time completely

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determines the totality of the states of all individual things at any subsequent time. Thus, although human desires, choices, and behavior have genuine causal consequences, for Spinoza, they are entirely determined by their causal antecedents. It is often supposed that the truth of determinism would be incompatible with the kind of freedom required for genuinely ethical (i.e., moral) responsibility. Furthermore, because of his determinism, Spinoza aims to take an objective, scientific attitude toward the desires, choices, and behavior of human beings, writing, for example, that he will “consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies” (E 3pr). Yet it is also often supposed that this kind of objective attitude is incompatible with what P. F. Strawson has called the moral “reactive attitudes, such as resentment,” that are essential to ascriptions of ethical responsibility (Strawson 1974). Hence the question naturally arises: Does Spinoza recognize ethical responsibility? As we have seen, Spinozistic freedom (as defined at E 1d7), does not demand an absence of causal determination; it requires instead that the free thing be determined by its own nature, rather than by external causes. Moreover, although God alone is perfectly free, for Spinoza, human beings can achieve a human measure of freedom to the extent that they act through their own striving to persevere in their being. Because human beings are modes of God, on his view, there is no incompatibility in saying both that God freely causes human behavior and that human beings sometimes freely cause their own behavior. For insofar as human beings act freely, God produces effects by constituting their own natures; insofar as they do not act freely, on the other hand, God produces effects through other means. But although Spinoza clearly allows a measure of freedom to human beings, it is a further question whether this will be a kind of freedom that can sustain ascriptions of moral or ethical responsibility. Because he does not use a term corresponding directly to “responsibility,” we must look for his attitude toward it in his discussion of affects and attitudes toward those who do good and those who do evil. Spinoza does use the terms “praise” (“laus”) and “blame” (“vituperium”). As he defines them, however, they apply only to affects toward individuals who strive to benefit or harm the person who is feeling the affect in question. Thus, praise is “the joy with which we imagine the action of another by which he has striven to please us,” while blame is “the sadness with which we are averse to his action” when the other “strives to harm” us (E 3p29s). Of more relevance for present purposes

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spinoza’s ethical theory 299 are “approval” and “indignation.” Approval is defined as “love toward someone who has benefited another,” while indignation is “hatred toward someone who has done evil to another” (E 3da19,20). Approval and indignation thus differ from praise and blame in three ways: (i) they are instances of love or hate, rather than merely joy or sadness; (ii) they are not explicitly restricted to the imagination; and (iii) they are attitudes toward actions affecting human beings generally, and not merely oneself. I will assume that by “another,” Spinoza’s definitions simply mean someone other than the one who performs the behavior, so that one can feel approval or indignation for benefits or harms to oneself as well as to others. On this understanding, approval and indignation qualify as Spinoza’s primary moral or ethical “reactive attitudes.” Spinoza argues in E 4p51s that “indignation . . . is necessarily evil.” Because it is a form of hatred, and hence of sadness, it is directly evil in itself. Moreover, it leads us to desire to harm or destroy the person we hate, which is contrary to reason’s aim of uniting human beings in friendship. It is also inappropriate for another reason: As we become aware of the causes of someone’s doing harm to another person, we will inevitably become aware that the perpetrator is not the adequate cause of that behavior but has instead been overcome by passions, for a free human being actively seeks to benefit others, not to harm them. One who does evil is never the adequate cause of the evil behavior, and, accordingly, indignation toward such a person is never in accordance with reason. It is contrary to reason, and no virtue, to disturb one’s own peace of mind through feelings of hatred or desires for vengeance. In contrast, E 4p51 affirms that “Approval is not contrary to reason, but can agree with it and arise from it.” This is because approval can arise from an adequate understanding of another’s behavior. This is not to say that all approval is in accordance with reason: if, for example, we feel approval toward someone who, moved by passion, has behaved in a way that has benefited others, that person is not the adequate cause of the benefit. Understanding this fact will naturally result in a withdrawal of approval. When human beings benefit others out of what Spinoza calls “nobility,” however, seeking to unite others to themselves in friendship, they are the adequate causes of their actions; when we are guided by reason, therefore, we will feel approval toward them. That the beneficial acts flow from the necessity of the divine nature is no hindrance to our approval for the human agent. For as we have seen, God and the human agent are not competitors for the causation of the good; rather, God produces the benefit through the adequate causality of the human agent

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who is, of course, a mode of God, and whose own power is a share of God’s power. Compatibilists hold that determinism is compatible with the kind of freedom needed for ethical responsibility for good and evil actions. Incompatibilists hold that determinism is incompatible with the kind of freedom needed for ethical responsibility for good and evil actions. These two parties thus share a common assumption that Spinoza denies: namely, that, as far as freedom is concerned, ethical responsibility for good actions and ethical responsibility for evil actions must stand or fall together. Spinoza in effect denies this; instead, he has a conception of “asymmetrical freedom.”17 That is, he holds that we sometimes freely do good but can never freely do evil. Evil is always the result of passion or lack of power, and hence not the result of one’s own adequate causality – that is, not the result of freedom. Because freedom is asymmetrical in this way, so too are rational assignments of ethical responsibility. Reason moves us to love and approval for those who freely do good, but without hatred or indignation for those who do evil. Spinoza emphasizes that a lack of indignation is rationally compatible with imposing punishment for evil behavior. But such action will be motivated entirely by an informed desire for protection; it will not be motivated by resentment, or a desire for retribution. Thus, he writes: “But it should be noted that when the supreme power, bound by its desire to preserve peace, punishes a citizen who has wronged another, I do not say that it is indignant toward the citizen. For it punishes him not because it has been aroused by hate to destroy him but because it is moved by [political] duty” (E 4p51s).18 Because indignation is evil and not in accordance with reason, Spinoza’s free human being is never indignant. Nonetheless, absolute freedom is, as we have seen, an approachable but unreachable ideal; and this is true not just in application to the free human being’s actions, but also in application to the free human being’s affective reactions. Spinoza would certainly admit that he was not, and could not be, a completely free human being. Indeed, his seemingly indignant reaction to the murder of the republican De Witt brothers (as described by Leibniz and by Lucas; see Freudenthal 1899: 19) is evidence that Spinoza’s own affective reactions were sometimes passionate rather than determined entirely by reason. Nevertheless, to the extent that one gains understanding, on Spinoza’s view, one’s power over the passions will increase, and the freer one becomes, the less indignation one will feel.

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The Role of Altruism in Ethics Spinoza identifies the “striving by which one does anything, or strives to do anything” as the “striving to persevere in being” (E 3p7d), wherein one’s own advantage lies. Yet observation of human life suggests that human beings often seek to benefit one another quite independently of any prospect of advantage to themselves. This raises the question of whether Spinoza recognizes the existence of genuinely altruistic motivation and, if so, what role it plays in his ethical theory. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume distinguishes two forms of psychological egoism: [i] There is a principle, supposed to prevail among many . . . that all benevolence is mere hypocrisy . . . and that while all of us, at bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises, in order to put others off their guard, and expose them the more to our wiles and machinations. There is another principle, somewhat resembling the former . . . that, whatever affection one may feel, or imagine he feels for others, no passion is, or can be disinterested; that the most generous friendship, however sincere, is a modification of self-love. [ii] [One who holds this latter principle] readily allows, that there is such a thing as friendship in the world, without hypocrisy or disguise; though he may attempt, by a philosophical chymistry, to resolve the elements of this passion, if I may so speak, into those of another, and explain every affection to be self-love, twisted and moulded, by a particular turn of imagination, into a variety of appearances. (Hume 1975: 295–97)

Hume himself, although he regards the second form of psychological egoism as compatible with morality, rejects both forms in favor of a psychology that makes room for loving and sympathetic benevolence as original principles entirely independent of “self-love.” In terms of his distinction, however, Spinoza clearly belongs, not with those who maintain that all apparent benevolence is hypocrisy and deceit, but rather with proponents of the “second principle” – that is, with those who seek to apply a kind of “philosophical chymistry” to resolve all behavior into modifications of a single original force of self-interest, directed and redirected by circumstances. Accordingly, Spinoza need not deny that human beings are sometimes motivated in their behavior by sincere desires for the welfare (or harm) of others without explicit thought of or concern for themselves.19 Nor need he deny that individuals sometimes forego something that

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they desire for themselves for the sake of the happiness or welfare of another. He need not deny even that individuals sometimes sacrifice their lives for the well-being of others. Thus, he need not deny the psychological reality of altruism. He is committed only to the view that the causal origins of these phenomena always lie in permutations of a single psychological force, which is the individual’s own endeavor for self-preservation, often as it is affected by external forces. This single force can, through circumstance, come to be directed onto a variety of objects, objects which agents may then experience themselves as pursuing directly. As he emphasizes, in the appendix to Part 1 and elsewhere, we often know our desires while in ignorance of their causes. In order to explain altruistic behavior, then, Spinoza must explain how this self-preservatory force or conatus comes to be directed onto the well-being of others. Hume mentions only one faculty by which his “philosophical chymists” might suppose an original egoistic force to be directed – namely, the imagination. This is understandable, since Hume does not recognize a separate representational faculty of intellect in addition to the imagination. Spinoza, in contrast, distinguishes intellect and imagination as two distinct representational faculties; and for him, the individual’s endeavor for self-preservation may be directed by either. The imagination can direct the conatus of an individual toward the well-being of another in many ways. For example, if we perceive individuals as the cause of imaginative ideas that affect us with joy, we will love those individuals and thereby seek their benefit. If we perceive that an individual hates another individual whom we also hate, we will seek to benefit the first individual in order to harm the object of our hate. If we perceive an individual to be like ourselves, our affects will imitate the affects of that individual, and we will be motivated to pursue the well-being of that individual as well as our own well-being. In each case, the well-being of another becomes one of the many objects onto which our fundamental self-preservatory endeavor becomes directed. To the extent that this direction occurs through the imagination, we are at least to some extent passive. When the intellect, through the use of reason, directs the conatus of the individual toward the welfare of others, it does so through recognition that the true advantage of individuals largely coincides because “to a human being . . . there is nothing more useful than human beings” (E 4p18s). Among human beings, the most useful are those who are guided by reason, for to the extent that human beings are guided by reason they share the same nature, so that whatever is beneficial to one

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spinoza’s ethical theory 303 is beneficial to all. The highest good that such individuals pursue – namely, knowledge – is not only shareable rather than limited; it is also a good that can best be pursued in company with others. As we have observed, Spinoza regards behavior aimed at benefiting others in these circumstances with ethical approval. Nevertheless, a complete coincidence of human interests is not always possible. Because they are finite individuals who must maintain life in order to pursue even understanding, they may be in competition for limited resources. When such a divergence of interests occurs, a common cooperative course of conduct on which all can rationally agree may be impossible. One may then be forced to choose between achieving one’s own advantage at the expense of others and aiding others through sacrificing oneself. What is Spinoza’s assessment of such self-sacrificing altruism? Motivated self-sacrifice is psychologically possible, for Spinoza, and the loss even of one’s life may be of small importance in relation to the blessedness that one already enjoys from the eternal perspective, but it cannot be a positive good for the sacrificing individual, and hence it cannot be entirely the result of reason or virtue. Accordingly, it must result from being overcome, at least in part, by passion. Since selfsacrificing individuals cannot be the adequate cause of their own behavior, approval is not a response that is in accordance with reason. Neither, however, is indignation, for the individual has not harmed others, but rather benefited them. Hence, reason calls for neither approval nor indignation toward one who chooses self-sacrifice to prevent harm to others. On the other hand, an individual who refuses to engage in altruistic self-sacrifice cannot be the object of approval for Spinoza either, for the individual has not benefited others. Yet neither will reason counsel indignation toward such an individual, since indignation is never in accordance with reason. Hence, the rational affect toward any person faced with a choice between self-preservation at others’ expense and selfsacrifice will be neither approval nor indignation, regardless of the person’s ultimate choice. Such a situation calls only for understanding, on Spinoza’s view; it is entirely outside the reach of ethical reactive attitudes or responsibility – at least, from the standpoint of reason. Nevertheless, just as a complete coincidence of interests is an ideal that no human community can entirely attain, so the affective standpoint of reason alone is an ideal that no actual human being can entirely maintain. If a self-sacrificing person benefits others whom we love, we as

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human beings – and Spinoza among us – are likely to feel at least some degree of approval, in his view, even if the perfectly rational free human being would feel none.

The Value of Life and the Harmfulness of Death Because Spinoza defines “good” and “evil” in terms of what is useful or harmful to persevering in being, it seems that remaining alive must be the greatest good and that death must be the greatest evil. He seems to confirm this in E 4p39: “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.” The preservation of this “proportion” is simply the preservation of one’s life, as E 4p39s makes explicit. On the other hand, he asserts at E 4pp26–28 that the mind’s true good is understanding or adequate knowledge itself, and that the highest good is knowledge of God.20 Yet while adequate knowledge is often useful for continuing one’s life, inadequate sensory cognition is very often equally or even more advantageous for this purpose. Indeed, the adequacy of one’s knowledge is often only loosely correlated with the length of one’s life; Spinoza himself, for example, did not live to the age of forty-five. In some circumstances, one might even have to choose between increasing one’s knowledge and lengthening one’s life. What, then, is Spinoza’s view about the absolute value of life and the harmfulness of death? This tension between placing the highest value on persevering in being and placing the highest value on understanding can be resolved only if understanding can itself constitute or guarantee a kind of perseverance in being. Spinoza’s doctrine of the eternality of part of the human mind – far from being a mere concession to religious sensibilities, as is sometimes alleged – offers the prospect of just such a resolution. Gaining adequate knowledge, according to this doctrine, does more than merely provide one with more cognitive resources for preserving one’s life, even while increasing the activity and perfection of the life that one leads. For it also makes a greater part of the mind eternal, and so ensures that a larger part of one’s own mind – though not the whole of the mind – is indeed something that has an eternal being. Because understanding allows one to participate in the eternal, Spinoza can suppose, it cannot help but constitute the most important kind of “perseverance in being,” whether the mere duration of one’s life is long or not. Indeed, a thing can have a kind of “being” for Spinoza, even when it no longer actually exists, through the existence of its formal essence (E 2p8) – and the part

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spinoza’s ethical theory 305 of the human mind that is eternal is, as we have seen, precisely the idea of the formal essence of the human body. Yet, although Spinoza asserts that the more adequate knowledge one has, the less one is actually harmed by death and the less one will be disturbed by fear of death (E 5p38s), it can still never be to one’s own positive advantage, on his view, to die rather than to live. For death is always the complete end of some part of the mind – namely, that part which is not eternal – and it is the complete end of the actually existing human mind that is identical with the actually existing human body. Furthermore, it marks the end of any prospect of gaining additional understanding, and hence the end of any prospect for increasing the part of one’s mind that is eternal, as one necessarily strives to do. Although “the free human being thinks of nothing less than of death” (E 4p67), according to Spinoza, this is because the free human being is motivated by direct pursuit of the good of continued life, and not because death is not always itself an evil for a human being. Since one’s own death is always an evil, it must always be good, on Spinoza’s view, to do what is needed to prevent one’s own death – even if one means of prevention may sometimes be better than another. Nevertheless, this conclusion may seem to conflict with the ethical precept expressed in E 4p72: “A free human being always acts in good faith, not fraudulently.”21 Indeed, in the scholium to this proposition, Spinoza explicitly considers and rejects the proposal that the model free human being, guided by reason, might save himself from death by treachery: Suppose someone now asks: What if a human being could save himself from the present danger of death by treachery? Would not the principle of preserving his own being recommend, without qualification, that he be treacherous? . . . [But] if reason should recommend that, it would recommend it to all men. And so reason would recommend, without qualification, that human beings should make agreements to join forces and to have common laws only by deception – that is, that really they should have no common laws. This is absurd.

In assessing this objection to Spinoza, however, it should be emphasized how narrowly he understands the terms I have translated as “in good faith” (“cum fide”), “fraudulently” (“dolo malo”), and “by treachery” (“perfidia”). Like Thomas Hobbes before him, Spinoza typically uses the Latin terms “cum fide” and “dolus” only to describe

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keeping and breaking promises or contracts. Moreover, throughout E 4p72, its demonstration, and its scholium, he always uses the more specific term “dolus malus” – which I have translated as “fraud,” but means more literally “evil trickery or deception.” This was a wellknown legal term (originally from Roman law) meant to contrast with “dolus bonus” (literally, “good trickery or deception”); the former term designates fraud with “evil intent,” while the latter term designates appropriate shrewdness or trickery of precisely the kind that might be justified in dealing with an enemy who threatens one’s life. In his Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza not only recognizes this distinction explicitly, but also indicates that the proscription of any deception as specifically dolus malus depends on the edicts of the state (Annotations to TTP 16). Furthermore, he maintains that “if the utility [of a contract] is taken away, the contract is taken away with it, and is null and void” (TTP 16.20). Hence, it is not merely the absence of an enforcing state power that can invalidate a contract or promise, but equally any other cause of a lack of relative utility in keeping faith on the part of one partner or another. In his Political Treatise, he denies that a state breaking its word for reasons of utility thereby acts “deceptively or treacherously” (“dolo, vel perfidia”), and he insists that whoever relies on a promise or contract while recognizing that faithful performance is not useful to the other party has only his only “foolishness,” not another’s bad faith, to blame (TP 3.14).22 Second, however, and equally important, we have already seen that behavior that would be advantageous in order to approach the model of human nature we set before ourselves need not always be the same as the behavior of one who has already achieved that model. In the present example, Spinoza argues that reason cannot recommend treachery “without qualification” (“omnino”) to save one’s own life because reason recommends that human beings join forces through cooperation. But the perfectly free, rational, and virtuous human being would arguably always have better means than treachery available or would have the power to avoid situations in which such a choice was forced. Someone who lacked those resources might still find it advantageous to choose treachery in the pursuit of survival, with the aim of becoming freer, more powerful, and more virtuous in the future. When the only alternative is death, treachery may well be a “lesser evil,” for Spinoza (E 4p65), and hence a good – even if it is not a characteristic action of a free human being guided solely by reason.23

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notes 1 The phrase is from the first paragraph of the appendix to Ethics Part 4, and also occurs in the preface to Part 3. Spinoza uses the term “pietas,” which Curley translates as “morality,” as the name for a desire – specifically, “the desire to do good generated in us by our living according to the guidance of reason” (E 4p37s1). 2 Important recent monographs include LeBuffe 2009, 2019; Kisner 2011; J. Steinberg 2018; and Youpa 2020. Kisner and Youpa 2014 is a very valuable collection of essays. See also Miller 2005. 3 E 5a1 states: “If two contrary actions are aroused in the same subject, a change will have to occur, either in both of them, or in one only, until they cease to be contrary.” E 5a2 states: “The power of an effect is defined by the power of its cause, insofar as its essence is explained or defined by the essence of its cause.” E 3p7 reads: “The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.” 4 “Strictly speaking, a real distinction exists only between two or more substances” (Principles of Philosophy 2.60, in Descartes 1985: I: 213). 5 See Garrett 1991 for a fuller discussion of the meaning and grounds of this doctrine. While I still believe it is correct to say that Spinoza’s necessitarianism involves a kind of logical as well as metaphysical necessity, I would now emphasize that Spinoza’s conception of logic – in contrast to Leibniz’s, for example – makes logic a matter of content, rather than of form, and is closely related to conceptions of logic as “laws of thought,” analogous to laws of physics. 6 Since things must be understood through their causes (E 1a4), and these causes necessitate (E 1a3), the good of knowledge is achievable only to the extent that things are necessitated. 7 For extended discussion of this proposition and its demonstration, see the first section of Chapter 5. 8 See Garrett 1994 and the first section of Chapter 6. 9 For more extensive discussion of the line of argument contained in E 4pp29–36, see D. Steinberg 1984. 10 Curley translates this term as “favor” in English. I prefer “approval” because it is a better match for Spinoza’s term for the opposite affect, which is “indignation” (“indignatio”), and because it makes the responsive character of the state more apparent. 11 Bennett discusses Spinoza’s treatment of this source of power over the affects, and notes Spinoza’s failure to include it in his summary (Bennett 1984: 337). 12 Wilson 1997 argues that this line results from a simple mistake on Spinoza’s part, and should have read: “Now it is time to pass on to those matters that concern the reality of the mind without respect to the duration of the body.”

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308 don garrett 13 The doctrine of the eternity of a part of the mind stands in some prima facie tension with the parallelism of mind and body. This tension can be dispelled by recognizing that a corresponding part of the human body – namely, its formal essence – is also eternal for Spinoza. For a fuller account, see Garrett 2009. 14 See LeBuffe 2019. 15 The terms “perfect” and “imperfect” do not occur in any of the definitions, axioms, propositions, corollaries, or demonstrations of Part 4, although “perfect” occurs in several scholia (twice in E 4p18s, and once each in E 4p45s and E 4p58s). “Perfect” and related terms recur several times, in application both to God and to man, in Part 5, where they are connected especially with the third kind of knowledge. They also occur in ethical application in the Short Treatise and the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. 16 For further discussion of this topic, see Garrett 1990a. 17 The memorable phrase is Susan Wolf’s (Wolf 1979). She does not use the term in connection with Spinoza, however, but in connection with Kant. 18 It is also worth noting Spinoza’s willingness, in this passage, to refer to the affects of the State. The State is itself an individual thing, composed of human parts, that naturally endeavors to preserve its being. Although only human beings have human affects, just as only horses have equine affects (E 3p57s), it is no mere metaphor, for Spinoza, to speak of the desires and other affects of the State. 19 This point has been developed by LeBuffe 2010. 20 See also E 4p22c, which holds that self-preservation is the “first and only foundation of virtue.” 21 Curley translates E 4p72 thus: “The free man always acts honestly, not deceptively.” For the reasons given in the main text, I believe the translation here more closely reflects Spinoza’s meaning. 22 For discussion, see Garrett 2010. 23 For discussion, see Garrett 1990a.

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Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan Edwin Curley

In an interview with Oriana Fallaci in 1972, Henry Kissinger, asked about the influence of Machiavelli on his thought, denied that the Florentine adviser of princes had had any influence on him at all: There is really very little of Machiavelli’s one can accept or use in the contemporary world . . .. If you want to know who has influenced me most, I’ll answer with two philosophers’ names: Spinoza and Kant. Which makes it all the more peculiar that you choose to associate me with Machiavelli. (The New Republic, December 16, 1972, p. 21)

We may suspect, of course, that if Kissinger had learned anything at all from Machiavelli, the last thing he would want to do, given Machiavelli’s reputation as a teacher of evil, would be to admit it. If a leader cannot actually be virtuous, Machiavelli tells us, he must at least try to seem virtuous (unless, in the particular circumstances, seeming vicious will be more helpful in maintaining his position). So far as I can discover, however, no one seems to have noted the irony involved in Kissinger’s combining his disavowal of Machiavelli with an embrace of Spinoza. Spinoza is arguably the most Machiavellian of the great modern political philosophers.1 We do not know Spinoza,2 and so we do not notice the irony. Let us try to repair our ignorance.

spinoza as an eccentric hobbesian At first glance, Spinoza may appear, in his political philosophy, to be more an eccentric Hobbesian than a Machiavellian. He imagines a state of nature in which men’s natural egoism and hostility to one another make their lives insecure, wretched, and brutal (TTP 5.18–25).3 This state of nature is completely amoral. Each individual in it has a perfect right to do whatever he is capable of doing, in the sense that he cannot be criticized on grounds of justice for pursuing his own self-interest in any way.4 The concepts of justice and injustice make sense only in civil society, and there they are to be defined in terms of obedience or 309

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disobedience to the civil law (TTP 16.42; cf. Hobbes, L xv.3, xxiv.5, xxvi.4, 8). But because men live miserably in the state of nature, rational pursuit of their self-interest leads them to contract to form a state which will restrain their behavior (TTP xvi.12–14; cf. L xvii.1, 13). They come to see that less really is more, that if they give up the right they have in the state of nature to take whatever they can, and transfer it to a state which will have the power to make and enforce rules about property, they will be more secure in the possession of what they have acquired in the past or might acquire in the future. Not only will they be better off economically, since enterprise can flourish only where possessions are secured by law, they will also be better off in terms of less mundane goods, like knowledge, since cultural pursuits can flourish only when not all of our waking hours are consumed in attending to basic needs. The state men form to provide these goods will have absolute authority over its citizens, the supreme right to compel them by force in all matters, including matters of religion (TTP 16.24–25, and TTP 19; cf. L xvii.13, xviii, xxxi.37). So far this all sounds very Hobbesian, and to the extent that there is little or no talk in Machiavelli about the state of nature or natural rights or a social contract, nor much concern with the question whether there might legitimately be limits on the authority of the state, not very Machiavellian. No doubt Machiavelli would agree with the Hobbesian claim about what life would be like without an effective government,5 but the passages in his work which come closest to discussing a state of nature (The Discourses I.i–ii) seem to be more speculative history than a thought experiment. Though he cites the need for security as a motivation for the founding of cities, he does not develop a theory of human nature to explain that need. If he were to use the concept of a state of nature, he might well sympathize with the Hobbesian contention that in the state of nature utility is the measure of right (DCv i.10).6 But the fact is that he does not seem much interested in the concept of right (or rights). Perhaps there is a slight hint of a social contract where Machiavelli writes, regarding cities built by natives of the place where they are built, that the people “undertake to live together in some place they have chosen in order to live more conveniently and the more easily to defend themselves” (Machiavelli 1975: 100–101). But there seems here to be only the vague notion of an agreement to live together, with no notion of a transfer of rights, or of the establishment of a power possessing rights. Since Machiavelli is not interested in issues about

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 311 the rights of the state, he does not discuss the right of the state in matters of religion (although his discussion of Roman religion in Discourses xi–xv certainly assumes that it is legitimate for the state to encourage such forms of religion as the rulers find useful for their secular purposes).7 So Machiavelli’s conceptual framework is very different from that of Hobbes and Spinoza. Nevertheless, when we consider what kind of state is supposed to emerge from the contractual process in Spinoza, we see that he is an eccentric Hobbesian at best. Unlike Hobbes, he has a marked preference for democracy, characterizing it as the most natural form of government, because in it everyone remains equal, as they were in the state of nature, and because democracy approaches most nearly to the freedom of the state of nature. In a democracy, “no one so transfers his natural right to another that in the future there is no consultation with him, instead he transfers it to the greater part of the whole society, of which he makes one part” (TTP 16.36). This may make us think more of Rousseau than of Machiavelli,8 but it is clearly a perspective Hobbes is very anxious to argue against.9 Spinoza’s preference for democracy is also grounded on the very un-Hobbesian assumption that in a democratic state, “there is less reason to fear absurdities. For if the assembly is large, it is almost impossible that the majority of its members should agree on one absurd action” (TTP 16.30). The reasons for this confidence in the decisions of large assemblies are unclear. Surely Spinoza was familiar with Hobbes’s argument that in a large assembly very few people would have the understanding of foreign and domestic affairs to judge wisely what is conducive to the common good; that the great majority would therefore be prey to orators who knew how to make the worse appear the better cause, appealing to popular prejudice rather than reason; and that the influence of passion on these decisions would frequently lead to faction, inconstancy, and in the worst case, civil war (cf. DCv x.9–15). And Spinoza’s own view of the masses’ capacity for rational choice does not, on the whole, seem to be more favorable than that of Hobbes.10 So it is a puzzle, which for now I leave to be discussed later, why Spinoza should think there is less danger of absurdity in a democracy. But that he does think this, and that it is a very un-Hobbesian view, is clear. Perhaps the strongest indication that Spinoza is at best a very revisionist Hobbesian, though, lies in the fundamental purpose of his main political work: to argue that, however absolute the sovereign’s

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right may be to do as he pleases, even in sacred matters (TTP 19, title), nevertheless, “in a free state everyone is permitted to think what he wishes and to say what he thinks” (TTP 20, title). Hobbes, on the other hand, argues that the sovereign must have absolute control over what doctrines may be published in books, taught in the schools, or preached in the churches (L xviii.9; Review and Conclusion, 16; xlii.68), and that this control is consistent with the freedom of his subjects (L xxi.7). And though Hobbes may be more concerned to defend the sovereign’s right of control over the external expression of belief than he is to license attempts to control “the inward thought and belief of men” (L xl.2; cf. xxxii.4–5, xlii.11), still, so long as he holds that “the actions of men proceed from opinions, and in the well-governing of opinions consisteth the well-governing of actions, in order to their peace and concord” (L xviii. 9), he cannot leave opinions alone for long.11 However similar the foundations of their political philosophies may be, Spinoza somehow manages to reach very different conclusions than Hobbes does.

t h e c o e x t e n s i v e n e s s o f r i g h t a n d p ow e r Sometimes comparisons are odious; sometimes they help us to understand by making the unfamiliar seem more familiar. But in the end Spinoza is Spinoza, not Hobbes (or Machiavelli either). He is, as one recent writer puts it, an anomaly.12 To understand the anomaly we need to try to probe more deeply into the logic of the system. We may begin by considering why Spinoza holds that the right of each thing extends as far as its power does (TTP 16.4). I find this a disturbing thesis, and I imagine that most readers of Spinoza share that reaction. Perhaps the fact that this thesis is so central to Spinoza’s political theory, and has often seemed not to be persuasively argued, helps explain why historians of political thought have often neglected him. The thesis is reminiscent of Hobbes’s claim, already disturbing enough, that in the state of nature every man has a right to every thing (L xiv.4), but it is a stronger statement in at least two respects: Spinoza applies it to all individuals (and not only to human beings), and he does not qualify it by saying that it applies only to individuals in the state of nature.13 In Hobbes, we can construct at least two paths to the more restricted claim,14 and at least one of these may have exercised some influence on Spinoza. The more familiar line of argument proceeds as follows: In war it is permissible to do whatever is necessary to preserve

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 313 yourself; but the state of nature is a state of war; therefore, in the state of nature it is permissible to do whatever is necessary to preserve yourself; but anything at all might turn out to be necessary for self-preservation; therefore, there is nothing which is absolutely impermissible in the state of nature; in that state, you may do whatever you can do. This can seem at least to be the argument running from the beginning of Leviathan xiii through Leviathan xiv.4, and perhaps it does represent the best way to understand that argument. It has the virtue of relying on a moral intuition – the permissibility of self-preservation in extreme situations – which seems to be deeply rooted in people and might be granted even by people who are otherwise quite skeptical of morality. It has the virtue that Hobbes can and does make a strong case for the assumption that in the state of nature (understood as a state in which there is no effective government) there would be enough actual conflict (or well-founded fear of conflict) to make everyone’s life intolerably insecure. It has the weakness (from the standpoint of justifying a conclusion as strong as the one Hobbes seems to want) that it seems to license behavior contrary to conventional morality only where you can make a plausible case that the behavior really is necessary for selfpreservation.15 In some passages of De Cive, there may be a different, more theological route to the conclusion that right is identical with power, and one which gets us closer to Spinoza’s argument in the TheologicalPolitical Treatise. Suppose we begin with the proposition that God’s right of sovereignty over man derives from his omnipotence (DCv xv. 5). This seems a plausible reading of the book of Job, where God defends the justice of his afflicting Job, not by pointing to any sin Job has committed, but by affirming his own power (cf. Job 38:4, cited by Hobbes in DCv xv.6). We then contend that if it is the irresistibility of God’s power which confers on him a right to behave in whatever way he pleases, similar power in man must confer a similar right on the man who possesses it. Under pressure from theological opponents, Hobbes may deny that any man could have irresistible power, but that does not appear to be his position in De Cive i.14, where, in virtue of the maxim that irresistible power confers a right of ruling, conquest is held to confer a right to the obedience of the vanquished without the need to argue that the vanquished consent by their submission.16 The argument in Theological-Political Treatise 16.3–4, seems to follow a similar pattern, except insofar as it apparently involves at least one thesis peculiar to Spinoza’s metaphysic: God has absolute

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sovereignty, that is, the supreme right to do all things, that is, whatever he can do; but the power of nature (considered absolutely) simply is the power of God; therefore, nature (considered absolutely) has the right to do whatever it can do; but the power of the whole of nature is nothing but the power of all the individuals in nature; therefore, everything in nature has a right to do what it can do. Right is coextensive with power. You can understand why some people might find this argument unpersuasive. Insofar as it relies on traditional assumptions about God’s sovereignty, it is an argument we might expect to be persuasive to Spinoza’s audience. Insofar as it relies on the doctrine that the power of God may be identified with the power of nature (where that notion in turn is identified with the power of all the individuals in nature), it is not. Some have suggested that this is not a peculiarly Spinozistic assumption, and hence is an assumption one would not have to be a Spinozist to grant,17 but this seems to me to be wrong. Spinoza’s critique of the common understanding of miracles proceeds very much on the assumption that people ordinarily make a (mistaken) distinction between the power of nature and the power of God (cf. TTP vi.1–2). Moreover, if we compare the version of Spinoza’s argument in Theological-Political Treatise 16.3–4 with the reprise in the Political Treatise 2.2–3, we can see that in his later work, Spinoza is trying to provide an alternative version of the argument which avoids simply assuming an identity between the power of nature and the power of God.18 Whether or not that attempt is successful, there will, I think, be a problem with any argument for the coextensiveness of right and power which proceeds on the assumption that God’s right is based on his power (as the argument of the Political Treatise does explicitly, and the argument of the Theological-Political Treatise does implicitly). Some theists will grant this; others will not. I suggest that Spinoza has a more effective argument for the coextensiveness of right and power, which does not presuppose this assumption, to be found not in the overtly political chapters of the Theological-Political Treatise, but in chapter 4. We might reconstruct the argument of chapter 4 in the following way: Suppose there is a law which imposes an obligation on us, and hence limits what we are permitted to do; if this law is to impose an obligation on us, we must conceive it as a command, and not merely as a statement about how, in virtue of their nature, some or all members of some species act;19 a law in the proper sense must be, not only a command, but a command which it is possible for the person

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 315 commanded to disobey (not only does “ought” imply “can,” it also implies “cannot”); but a command which it is possible for the person commanded to disobey must be a human command; for if God commands something, then obedience must follow, else he would not be omnipotent (we assume here that to command an act is to will that it occur, and that God’s omnipotence implies that what he wills to occur occurs); therefore, any law which imposes an obligation on us must be a human law; God cannot be a law-giver. This conclusion of reason is confirmed by what we find in experience; for a law-giver rewards obedience and punishes disobedience; but experience teaches us, as Solomon puts it, that “the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil.”20 As far as God or nature is concerned, what we can do, we may do. It is sometimes said that Spinoza’s theory of natural right is “without normative content,”21 and it is sometimes suggested that in this way he avoids the objection Rousseau made against those who base right on power (Social Contract I.iii). Spinoza, the idea is, grants that might gives you a right, but because he simply identifies the notion of right with that of physical power, this doctrine has no justificatory implications: If a new Genghis Khan invaded a small Spinozist republic with crushing forces, he would have the right to invade it, then the right to oppress its inhabitants, as long as they remained too frightened to resist him. Not that Spinoza intends by that to justify whatever tyranny may be, nor to justify anything in general. (Matheron 1985: 176)

Certainly, Spinoza does not intend to justify such an invasion or oppression, if justifying it implies that the people invaded have a moral duty to submit to their new master (as it seems to in Rousseau’s critique of this doctrine). To point this out is useful. But I think the doctrine that right is coextensive with power should not be thought of as a doctrine which identifies right with power if that implies that, when Spinoza says this “new Genghis Khan” (Louis XIV, perhaps) has the right to invade “a small spinozistic republic” (the Dutch Republic of 1672, perhaps), all he means is (what we already knew) that Genghis Khan has the power. Generally, Spinoza will express his thesis about the relation between right and power by saying that right extends as far as power does. He does not identify the two concepts. And if he did, the thesis would lose interest. As things stand, though, Spinoza is using normative language with normative implications here: He is saying that there is no

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transcendental standard of justice by which Genghis Khan’s actions can be judged to be unjust (cf. note 5). And this (challenging) normative disclaimer does not imply that there is no other standard by which his actions may be judged. For to say that Genghis Khan acts in accordance with natural right is compatible with saying that he acts contrary to the law of reason (cf. TTP 16.5–6), and I take this also to be a genuinely normative claim.22

s p i n o z a a s a s o c i a l c o n t r ac t t h e o r i s t To say that it is not unjust for us to do, because no transcendent law forbids us to do, what we have the power to do, is to make a disturbing, normative, perhaps Machiavellian claim. It is also to make trouble for the idea that the right of the state is founded on a social contract. This idea was already in trouble in Hobbes. For although it is a law of nature, according to Hobbes, that we should keep covenants we have made (L xv.i), it is unclear what the status of the laws of nature is in Hobbes. In the final paragraph of Leviathan xv, Hobbes will say that these “laws” cannot be regarded as laws in the strict sense of the term unless we think of them as divine commands; but his own commitment to theism is questionable enough that we do not know what to make of this escape clause. Elsewhere (Curley 1992), I have argued that Hobbes was probably (as many of his contemporaries thought) an atheist. If that is correct, the escape clause implies that the laws of nature do not bind us (since the condition for their being binding cannot be satisfied).23 So we would be left with the conclusion that the laws of nature are simply theorems about what conduces to our self-preservation, and do not impose any obligations on us. On this view, the imperative “keep covenants you have made” looks like no more than good general advice about how to conduct your life, advice you would be free to disregard if special circumstances made it seem not to be good advice – as, for example, when there is no sovereign to make sure that the other party reciprocates your honesty (L xvii.2). I do not think Hobbes was happy to settle for viewing his laws of nature in that way. He seems, for example, to have a very deep attachment to the value of promise keeping, arguing repeatedly that we are bound to keep promises even in the state of nature, provided the other party has already performed first (L xiv.27; cf. DCv ii. 16, and Elements of Law I.xv.13). In his famous “reply to the fool” (L xv.5), he goes to some lengths to persuade us that, appearances to the contrary

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 317 notwithstanding, this really is the prudent thing to do. But his indignation against Wallis for betraying the king during the Civil War (English Works IV: 416–19) seems evidence of moral intuitions which it is hard for prudential considerations of the normal sort to justify. Spinoza seems to lack those intuitions entirely. As we might expect, given the argument of the preceding section, that right is coextensive with power, he holds that “no contract can have any force except by reason of its utility. If the utility is taken away, the contract is taken away with it, and is null and void” (TTP 16.20). This conclusion is also derived in part from an egoistic psychology which seems to make any contractarian theory of the state hopeless: “The universal law of human nature is that no one fails to pursue anything which he judges to be good, unless he hopes for a greater good, or fears a greater harm, nor does he submit to any evil, except to avoid a greater one, or because he hopes for a greater good” (TTP 16.15). From this it follows, Spinoza says, that “no one will promise to give up the right he has to all things except with intent to deceive, and absolutely, that no one will stand by his promises unless he fears a greater evil or hopes for a greater good” (TTP 16.16).24 There are two strange things here: one is that Hobbes, whose psychology generally seems to be no less egoistic than Spinoza’s, should present people as sincerely making, in the social contract, an (apparently) irrevocable commitment to obey the commands of the sovereign (L xviii.3; but see below on pp. 318–320); the other is that Spinoza, who has no such expectations of people, should nevertheless couch his political theory in terms of a social contract. Commentators frequently point out that talk of a social contract is prominent in Spinoza’s earlier political work, the Theological-Political Treatise, and absent in his later work, the Political Treatise, from which we might infer that Spinoza abandoned social contract theory because he recognized that the contract was superfluous.25 If no contract is binding unless it is useful, then the supposed social contract can play no real part in founding the sovereign’s right to command. The sovereign’s right will depend on his power to persuade his subjects (in one way or another) that it is in their interest to obey. If they believe that, they will obey (and the sovereign, in virtue of his power, will command with right). If they do not, then no matter what promises they may have made, they will not obey (and he, in virtue of his lack of power, will cease to be the sovereign). Now there is much that is right about the discussion summarized in the preceding paragraph, but I think we should not infer from it that

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Spinoza changed his mind, in any fundamental way, about the issue of political legitimacy, between the Theological-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise. Even in the Theological-Political Treatise, where Spinoza seems to be most contractarian, there is something distinctly odd about his contractarianism. Given his views about the moral and psychological force of the act of making a promise, Spinoza simply cannot regard that act by itself as endowing the sovereign with the moral authority to command his subjects. If all people were rational, he thinks, it would be rational for all people to keep their promises; but most of the time people are not rational, and no natural law obliges them to behave rationally (TTP 16.21–22). That is why, he says, though men may promise with definite signs of an ingenuous intention, and contract to maintain trust, still, no one can be certain of another’s reliability unless something else is added to the promise. For by natural right each person can act deceptively, and is bound to stand by the contract only by the hope of a greater good or fear of a lesser evil. (TTP 16.23; emphasis added)

What must be added, I take it, is the existence of a sovereign with the power (and the will) to enforce contracts. If such a sovereign exists, then we will be able to rely on others to perform what they have promised and we will be bound to do the same. But what does it take to bring such a sovereign into existence if the act of promising in a social contract is not enough? Here I think Spinoza’s answer is that we must reconceive the social contract, not (as in Hobbes) as a transfer of right, but (in accordance with Spinoza’s theory about the relation between right and power) as a transfer of power (cf. TTP 16.24–25). It is the transfer of power which generates the sovereign, not the utterance of any magic formulas. But how can power be transferred? The best way to approach this, I think, will be to consider what the social contract ultimately comes to in Hobbes. Hobbes does not always write as though what bound us to obey the government in power was a promise we (or our ancestors) made in the past. He knows that the actual origins of many, if not most, political orders are lost in the mists of history, and that if we knew what they were, we might not find them pretty. “There is scarce a commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in conscience be justified” (L “Review and Conclusion,” 8). What matters, in the end, is not whether promises were made, but whether the government has the power to provide us with the security which was our end when we

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 319 agreed to obey its commands. This strain of thought is strongest in Hobbes in the “Review and Conclusion” of Leviathan, where he is explicitly concerned to settle a problem of conscience for those who had supported the late king in the Civil War: At what point may they, consistent with any oaths of loyalty they may have taken, transfer their allegiance to the new government? But it is present earlier in Leviathan, and even in Hobbes’s earlier works (cf. DCv vi.3; Elements of Law II.i.5), so we cannot in fairness accuse Hobbes of having written Leviathan “to secure Oliver’s title.” And in any case, from this point of view what matters is not the person who holds power, but the power he holds. “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer than, the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them” (L xxi.21).26 When Hobbes is in this mode, the fundamental question is “what are the conditions for the preservation of political power?” Having lived through a civil war in which the rebels won, Hobbes is acutely conscious of the fragility of political power. One of the fundamental propositions of his political theory is that individuals are approximately equal in mental and physical power. Whatever differences may exist between them are not sufficient to provide the basis for a lasting relationship of dominion based on power alone (L xiii. 1). It is a consequence of this that a ruler cannot dominate a multitude of subjects unless many of those subjects are willing to help him enforce his commands. It need not be the case that the majority of the people obey all of his commands willingly, but there must be at least a substantial number who willingly obey enforcement commands, and the enforcement cadre must be larger and more dedicated just in proportion as people in general are more hostile to the regime. Enforcing the law is risky business and Hobbesian man is highly risk averse.27 Hobbes puts this most sharply in Behemoth, his history of the English Civil War, where he writes: “The power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people . . .. If men know not their duty, what is there that can force them to obey the laws? An army, you will say? But what shall force the army?” (English Works VI, 184, 237). Spinoza could not have known Behemoth, but he might have found similar reflections in Leviathan itself, for example, in the analysis of power in the opening sections (1–15) of chapter x, or in chapter xxx, which reminds sovereigns that they were entrusted with power to procure the safety of the people (L xxx. 1) and that they need to be both loved and feared by the people if they are to perform their office with good

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success (L xxx.28–29). It is not enough, pace Machiavelli, for the ruler to be feared.28 If we apply these reflections on the conditions of power to the question of political legitimacy, in the context of a political philosophy where it is understood that right is coextensive with power, the result we get is that rulers govern with right just to the extent that their subjects consent to their rule by obeying their commands. What matters is not an oath of loyalty to the state, but a willingness in the enforcement cadre to see that the laws are obeyed, and a willingness in the general population at least not to forcibly resist the enforcement cadre.29 As we shall see, this perspective yields limits on the right of the sovereign which one might not have expected from Spinoza’s initial characterization of the social contract.

s p i n o z a a s a m ac h i av e l l i a n I began this chapter by suggesting that in some important sense Spinoza was a Machiavellian in political theory. You may feel that I have already identified one important sense in which that is true: Spinoza holds that it is never unjust to do what your power permits you to do. Given this doctrine, we would expect a Spinozistic political leader to behave like Kissinger’s Bismarck: pursuing “political utility unencumbered by moral scruples” (Kissinger 1968: 916).30 If Machiavelli were to agree that right and power are coextensive, then he would agree with one of the most central tenets of Spinoza’s political theory. But I am not sure he would agree with Spinoza about that. The question of Machiavelli’s amoralism is often framed in terms of the question whether the end justifies the means. We might better ask, I think, whether there are certain ends (such as the establishment or preservation of a political community) so good that they justify the use of any means whatever. The most instructive passage I find on this occurs in Machiavelli’s discussion of Romulus’s murder of Remus, where his consequentialism falls somewhere in between the extreme individualism of the egoist and the extreme universalism of the utilitarian: A prudent founder of a republic, one whose intention is to govern for the common good, and not in his own interest, not for his heirs, but for the sake of the fatherland, should try to have the authority all to himself; nor will a wise mind ever reproach anyone for some

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 321 extraordinary action performed in order to found a kingdom or institute a republic. It is, indeed, fitting that while the action accuses him, the result excuses him; and when the result is good, as it was with Romulus, it will always excuse him; for one should reproach a man who is violent in order to destroy, not one who is violent in order to mend things. (The Discourses I.ix in Machiavelli 1979: 200–201)

In this passage, Machiavelli does concede that in some sense an act like that of Romulus is reprehensible; the fact that it leads to a good result does not justify the action, it excuses it. But I think we should not put too much weight on this distinction in this context. On some readings of Machiavelli, he remains committed to the moral standards which would judge the actions of a Romulus to be evil at the same time that he is recommending that political actors disregard those standards.31 I find this not merely paradoxical, but incoherent. If “good” really is the most general adjective of commendation (as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, and as I believe), then there is a kind of contradiction in recommending conduct you go on to call evil. I think we must take Machiavelli to be using the term “good” ironically when he urges rulers to learn how not to be good.32 In the passage under discussion here, he talks about excuses only because he wants to allow for the condemnation of such actions when they are not aimed at (and do not lead to) results of the kind Romulus’s did. We should still reproach the man “who is violent in order to destroy.” It is not just any good result which will “excuse” an action of this character. It takes a very significant result, affecting a large number of people, not merely the agent and those who are close to him. As Bondanella and Musa point out, the result in this case was “the establishment of the most durable and powerful republican government in human history” (Machiavelli 1979: 22, editors’ introduction). It may be that “patriotism, as Machiavelli understood it, is collective selfishness,”33 but Machiavelli’s “patriotic consequentialism,” as I am inclined to call it, falls short of saying that whatever you can do, you may do. What it does hold is that a ruler is to be praised, not blamed, even though he does things which might otherwise be highly reprehensible, provided he acts with a prudent regard for the well-being of the community he is ruling. So, I do not call Spinoza a Machiavellian because he believes that right is coextensive with power, since I do not think Machiavelli himself believed that. As Spinoza is sometimes more Hobbesian than Hobbes himself, sometimes he is more Machiavellian than Machiavelli himself.

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A much more fundamental point of similarity, I believe, lies in Spinoza’s pragmatic attitude toward politics, exemplified in the opening paragraph of the Political Treatise, where he writes that Philosophers . . . think they perform a godly act and reach the pinnacle of wisdom when they have learned how to praise a human nature which exists nowhere, and how to assail in words the human nature which really exists. For they conceive men not as they are, but as they wish them to be. That’s why for the most part they have written satire instead of ethics, and why they have never conceived a politics which can be put to any practical application. The politics they have conceived would be considered a chimæra, and could be set up only in utopia, or in the golden age of the poets, i.e., where there was no need for it at all. In all the sciences which have a practical application, theory is believed to be out of harmony with practice, but this is most true of politics. (TP 1.1)

This critique of utopian political theorizing naturally makes us think of the similar critique Machiavelli makes at the beginning of chapter xv of The Prince, and on the other side, of Thomas More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic. But in a fascinating article (Matheron 1986) Matheron has argued that we need not imagine that Spinoza meant to criticize only such thinkers as Plato and More, that the less obviously utopian political theory of Thomas Aquinas is also subject to these strictures, and that if we take what Spinoza said strictly, he must have had Hobbes in his sights as well. For Spinoza does not say merely that some or many philosophers who have written on politics have erred by conceiving men not as they are but as they wish them to be; he says philosophers have done this, that is, that this is what philosophers generally do when they write about politics. Machiavelli will escape criticism, because it is clear that Spinoza classes him, not with the philosophers attacked in Political Treatise i.1, but with the politicians, who are praised in Political Treatise 1.2, for having learned from experience to anticipate the wicked conduct of men, and for having, as a result, written successfully about human affairs. But there is no denying that Hobbes is a philosopher, and that his work was too prominent in Spinoza’s field of vision for Spinoza to have ignored it when he made his generalization about philosophers. Now if we must include Hobbes among the targets of Spinoza’s critique, that really is a paradox. Who would have thought that Hobbes, of all people, would be criticized for conceiving men not as they are, but

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 323 as he wished them to be? Can Spinoza fairly charge Hobbes with taking an overly optimistic view of man, when Hobbes wrote that, because of man’s natural propensity to competition, mistrust, and glory-seeking, the life of man in the state of nature would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”? Can we really class Hobbes with Plato, Aquinas, and More?34 And yet, from what we have said above, we can see that there would be some justice in that criticism. Hobbes does (in some moods, at least) found the legitimacy of the sovereign on men’s willingness to surrender all their natural rights to him, and the sovereign’s power on their willingness to stand by that promise come what may. And this is arguably an abandonment of his otherwise realistic psychology.35 So we find Spinoza, after defending a broadly Hobbesian theory of sovereignty in chapter 16 of the Theological-Political Treatise, taking much of it back in chapter 17, which begins with the following warning: In the last chapter we contemplated the right of the supreme powers to do everything, and the natural right which each person has transferred to them. But though the view expressed there agrees in no small measure with practice, and a practice could be established so that it approached more and more closely to the condition contemplated, still, it will never happen that this view should not remain, in many respects, merely theoretical. For no one will ever be able to so transfer his power, and hence, his right, to another that he ceases to be a man, nor will there ever be any supreme power which can carry out everything it wishes. (TTP 17.1–2)

There are some things a sovereign cannot effectively command a subject to do – hate someone who has benefited him, love someone who has harmed him, not be offended by insults, and so forth. And since the sovereign’s right can be no more extensive than his power, these matters to which the sovereign’s power cannot reach are also matters to which his right does not extend. Men have never surrendered their right and transferred their power to another in such a way that they were not feared by the very persons who had received the right and power from them, and that the state was not in greater danger from its own citizens . . . than from enemies . . .. It must be granted that each person reserves many things to himself, that he is his own master (sui juris) in many things, which depend on no one’s decision but his own. (TTP 17.3–4)

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Spinoza concludes from this that a violent rule never lasts long, that it is incumbent on the supreme powers to consult the common good (to maintain their own power, if for no other reason – cf. TTP 16.16). The most stable state will be one in which the constitutional arrangements decentralize the decision-making. In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza makes his argument for this, paradoxically, in a lengthy analysis of the political history of the Hebrew state. It is a mistake to regard this apparent digression, which begins at Theological-Political Treatise 17.25, and runs to the end of chapter 18, as mere “aimless wandering,” and as a place where the “progressive tendencies” of Spinoza’s thought are not visible.36 For its point is to argue that after the death of Moses No one had all the functions of the supreme commander. These things did not all depend on the decision of one man, nor of one council, nor of the people, but some were administered by one tribe, and others by the other tribes, with equal right for each one. From this it follows most evidently that after Moses’ death the state was neither monarchical, nor aristocratic, nor popular. (TTP 17.60)

In the continuation of the passage quoted, Spinoza will characterize this state as a theocracy, because of the central place which religion held in it, but his political message appears more clearly in an earlier passage in which he argues that, though from a religious point of view the people of Israel were fellow citizens, “in relation to the right they had against one another, they were only allies, in almost the same way as the Federated States of the Netherlands are.” (TTP 17.54; emphasis added). The path to political stability lies in constitutional arrangements which “contain both the rulers and the ruled so that the ruled [do] not become rebels and the rulers [do] not become tyrants” (TTP 17.62; cf. TP 6.3). There is a similar movement of thought in the final two chapters of the Theological-Political Treatise. Chapter 19 argues for a strongly Hobbesian juridical position regarding the rights of the state concerning religion: [S]acred matters . . . are subject only to the control of the supreme [secular] powers. Without their authority or permission no one has the right or power to administer these things, to choose their ministers, to determine . . . the foundations of the Church and its doctrine, to judge concerning customs and the actions of religious duty, to excommunicate someone or to receive someone into the Church, nor even, finally, to provide for the poor. (TTP 19.39)

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 325 But chapter 20 undermines that Hobbesian position by arguing that there are necessary limits on the sovereign’s power to control people’s minds (TTP 20.1–6), and hence on his right to do so (TTP 20.7). Even Moses, who was able to persuade most of his people that he spoke by divine inspiration, was not able to entirely avoid dissent and rebellion (TTP 20.5). Less charismatic leaders must beware of trying for too much control over their subjects’ minds and tongues, lest they alienate their subjects and consequently destroy the power they have, which depends on the willing obedience of their subjects. The best state, judged purely by the criterion of stability, will be one which permits its citizens a broad freedom to think as they like and to say what they think. Though Spinoza often seems to be an extremely conservative political thinker,37 the emphasis he places on freedom is an important liberal element in his thought. The most important point of similarity between Spinoza and Machiavelli, however, lies in the preference they both have for a form of republican government in which the people act as a check on their leaders, a preference which readers of Machiavelli will not learn about if they read only The Prince. As I noted above, Spinoza claims that there is less reason to fear absurdities in a democratic state. This is reminiscent of Machiavelli’s claim that, although the people are apt to be unstable, ungrateful, and unwise, princes are even more liable to these faults: A prince who is able to do what he wishes, that is, who is unrestrained by laws, is apt to behave like a madman, whereas a people which can do what it wishes is apt merely to act unwisely (Discourses I.lviii). In Spinoza’s case, part of the explanation for this somewhat unexpected optimism about the decisions of popular assemblies seems to be that in a large population true madness is likely to be found only among a minority, who will find it difficult to persuade the majority to behave as the minority would (TTP 16.30). But where power is concentrated in the hands of one person, if that one person is mad, the consequences can be disastrous. But I suspect that Spinoza also felt that a reading of history would show that if a ruler was not mad when he assumed power, his possession of absolute power was very apt to drive him mad. This certainly seems to be an important theme in one of his favorite Roman historians. Consider the speech Tacitus puts in the mouth of Lucius Arruntius, as he is about to commit suicide, to escape punishment on trumped-up charges of adultery and disloyalty to Tiberius: I have lived long enough . . . I only regret that between insults and dangers I have endured an anxious old age . . .. Certainly I might

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326 edwin curley survive the few days before Tiberius dies, but how will I avoid the youth of his successor? If Tiberius, with all his experience of affairs, has been subverted and transformed by the power of domination, will Gaius Caesar [Caligula] take a better course, when he is hardly out of his boyhood, knows nothing, and has been trained by the worst people . . .? I foresee an even more bitter bondage, and so flee both evils past and those to come. (Tacitus, Annals Vl.xlviii; emphasis added)38

We lack Tacitus’s account of the reign of Caligula, but the corrupting effect of power is a central theme in his work.39 Nero provides another example of the same phenomenon, as Spinoza’s contemporary, Racine, saw. Defending himself against the conflicting accusations that in his Britannicus he had made Nero both too cruel and too good, he wrote: “It is necessary only to have read Tacitus to know that, if he was for a while a good emperor, he was always a very wicked man . . .. I have always regarded him as a monster, but here he is a nascent monster.”40 Racine’s play can be read as a case study in the effects of power on personality: how the subservience of his subjects permits an autocratic ruler to act on desires others must repress, but how, in spite of his power, he must nevertheless be tormented by continual fear of rivals and assassins.41 Spinoza too is acutely aware of the dangers, both to the ruler and to the ruled, when one man possesses “absolute” power, though in his case they are articulated in the abstractions of political theory, not in the concreteness of historical drama (cf. TP 6.3, 7.1,14,27).

conclusion The fundamental question I have about Spinoza’s political philosophy is whether he is not too complacent about the limits of state power. Alexandre Matheron seems to sum up Spinoza’s position very well when he writes: “If the people acquiesces in obeying a tyrant, whatever its reasons, so much the worse for it. And so much the worse for the tyrant, if the people awakes, for a small minority, even well armed, can no longer do anything, and hence has no right against a multitude unified by a common desire and no longer restrained by fear.”42 In our own time, we might illustrate this proposition by citing the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of its domination of Eastern Europe, or the rapid rise and fall of Nazi Germany. Spinoza, lacking these examples, is fond of quoting Seneca’s observation that “no one has ever maintained a violent rule for long.”43

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 327 Perhaps tyrannical governments do inevitably destroy themselves. If the power of autocratic rulers is as fragile as Spinoza seems to think,44 this would seem likely. The question I have is whether such a dispassionate view of tyranny is acceptable. A tyrant can do a great deal of harm even if his tyranny lasts only a relatively short time, as the history of the Third Reich illustrates. And Stalin’s rule was not so very short. Does viewing things sub specie aeternitatis require us to accept the success of such governments so long as they are able to maintain their power? If so, does being a good Spinozist not require a level of detachment from individual human suffering which is either superhuman or subhuman?45 In the Political Treatise, Spinoza recognizes that a tyrannical government can be quite stable and long-lasting, and he is apparently not so preoccupied with security that he is prepared to approve of such a government simply for that reason. He writes: No state has stood so long without any notable change as that of the Turks, and, conversely, none has been less lasting or more liable to civil strife than democratic or popular states. But if slavery, barbarism, and desolation (solitudinem) are to be called peace, nothing is more miserable for men than peace . . . peace consists not merely in the absence of war, but in a union or harmony of minds. (TP 6.4)

This eloquently expresses a sentiment which I believe many of us share. But does Spinoza’s philosophy possess the theoretical resources to condemn tyrannical governments as strongly as we would wish to? Consider the classical passage to which Spinoza is alluding here. The Agricola is Tacitus’s homage to his father-in-law, the general who completed the Roman conquest of Britain. It is a tribute to Tacitus’s objectivity that, in the course of celebrating the imperialist, he composes for the British leader, Calgacus, a biting condemnation of the imperialism, culminating in the famous lines: “If the enemy is rich, they [the Romans] are greedy; if he is poor, they are ambitious [for power] . . . alone of all people they lust equally after both poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter and rapine they give the lying name of ‘empire.’ They make a wasteland (solitudinem), and call it peace” (Agricola 30).46 Part of what gives this passage its force is the use of language which implies, not merely that the Romans are making life miserable for the Britons, which would no doubt be bad enough, but that they are doing something even worse: violating their rights by taking from them what is properly theirs, their lives, their property, and their honor. If we cannot make sense of

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the idea that people have a natural right to such things, then we seem to be handicapped in the criticism we want to make of the Roman conduct (or of a tyrant’s treatment of his own people). That the notion of natural right (not coextensive with power) disappears in Spinoza seems to me still to be a defect in his political philosophy, sympathetic though I may be to the arguments which lead to that result.

notes 1 Machiavelli’s influence on Spinoza has been emphasized both in McShea 1968, and Stanley Rosen, in his contribution to Cropsey and Strauss 1981. The most thorough study is Calvetti 1972. 2 I.e., Anglo-American philosophers do not know Spinoza as a political thinker, particularly if their knowledge of the history of political thought is derived from works like Sabine’s influential A History of Political Theory (1973), where he is barely mentioned. 3 The Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) was Spinoza’s first political work, published anonymously in 1670, with false information about the publisher and the place of publication. It aroused a great storm of protest, mainly because of the theological portions of the work, which encouraged skepticism about miracles, prophecy, and the authority of Scripture. At his death, Spinoza was at work on a purely political treatise, the Tractatus politicus (TP), which was published in an unfinished state in his Opera Posthuma (1677). Translations from Spinoza’s political works are mine, from the second volume of my Collected Works of Spinoza, Princeton University Press (C II). I use the Bruder section numbers for references to the Theological-Political Treatise. For a comparable passage in Hobbes, see Leviathan xiii. In comparisons with Hobbes, I will cite either De Cive (which we know Spinoza owned a copy of ) or Leviathan (which some scholars think he never read), as convenience dictates. Leviathan was translated into Dutch in 1667, by Abraham van Berkel, a member of the “Spinoza circle” who saw its argument for the indivisibility of sovereignty as supporting the De Witts in their controversy with the House of Orange, which had traditionally claimed executive and military power (see Secretan 1987). It was available in Latin by 1668. I think it virtually certain that Spinoza knew Leviathan at least by the time he was composing the final draft of the Theological-Political Treatise. I abbreviate Leviathan as L, and cite it by chapter and paragraph. I abbreviate De Cive as DCv, and cite by chapter and section. My edition of Leviathan (Hobbes 1994) indicates the major differences between the English and Latin editions of Leviathan. 4 Cf. Theological-Political Treatise 16.2–4. For the distinction between weaker and stronger senses of right (jus), cf. Grotius, De jure belli ac pads, I.i.3–4. Comparable

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 329 passages in Hobbes would be L xiii. 13, xiv.4, though Hobbes does not use the language of natural rights in connection with animals, and apparently grounds the natural right of every man to every thing on the right of self-preservation (L xiv. 1). There will be more on this below. 5 This seems a reasonable inference from his account of what people are like in civil society. See particularly chapters xv–xix of The Prince (Machiavelli). I have discussed this in Curley 1991a. 6 Machiavelli has strong consequentialist tendencies, but does not endorse the unbridled pursuit of personal power. In The Prince he writes: “In the behavior of all men, and particularly of rulers, against whom there is no recourse at law, people judge by the outcome [si guarda al fine].” (Machiavelli 1994, 55) Pace some translators, this is a comment on the way people generally judge human actions, not a claim that they are justified in doing so. Machiavelli himself looks to the outcome, but regards only some ends as worthy; others are shameful. (See Machiavelli 1994, xxi–xxxi; or Machiavelli 1979, 20–24) For the right kind of end – say, the establishment of a stable representative government – he will justify (or excuse) much otherwise reprehensible conduct. He will not forgive a ruler who uses his power to destroy a republic and rule tyrannically. 7 Presumably, his consequentialism would also imply the legitimacy of discouraging forms of religion which may be harmful to the state (as he appears to think that Christianity is, in Discourses II.ii). 8 Cf. Social Contract I.viii: “freedom is obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself.” But in Rousseau this freedom appears to be consequent on membership in any legitimate civil society, whether the form of government is democratic or not. In fact, Rousseau seems to have thought that as a form of government democracy was fit only for gods, not for men (cf. the Social Contract III.iv) and that the best form of government was an aristocracy (Lettres écrites de la montagne vi; III: 808–9 of the Pléiade edition). It is against the natural order that the greater number should govern and the smaller number be governed. In Machiavelli, the contrast is not democracy vs. monarchy or aristocracy, but republican or popular government vs. princely rule, and the assumption is that there is more freedom in republican government. Cf. Discourses I.iv–v, I.xvi–xviii, and II.ii. 9 Cf. DCv x.8, for an attack on the view that there is more liberty in a democracy than in a monarchy. 10 Cf., Negri 1991. For example, Theological-Political Treatise 17.13–16, or Political Treatise 1.5. 11 For a suggestive treatment of these issues, see Ryan 1983. 12 Cf. Negri 1991. Though I accept Negri’s phrase, I reject what he seems to mean by it: “that in posing spes against metus, libertas against superstitio, the republic against the monarchical absolute, Spinoza proposes and renews concepts that the

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330 edwin curley entire century is moving against” (122). To see Spinoza as standing in romantic isolation against the dominant intellectual tendencies of his century is to neglect the strength of the contemporary republican tradition (here see Mulier 1980) and to ignore the extent to which Hobbes anticipates Spinoza’s critique of revelation (on which, see Curley 1992). 13 Cf. the famous statement in Letter 50: “As far as politics is concerned, the difference between myself and Hobbes, which you ask about, consists in this: that I always keep natural right intact, and that I maintain that in any state whatever, the supreme magistrate has no more right over his subjects than he has an excess of power over them, which is always the situation in the state of nature.” Similarly, in the Political Treatise 3.3: “the right of nature does not cease in the civil order.” 14 In what follows, I partly rely on (and partly, I hope, improve on) things I have said in more detail in two previous articles: Curley 1990, 1991b. 15 In the comparable passage in De Cive (DCv 1.7–10), Hobbes deals with this by arguing that the right to preserve yourself entails a right to judge what means are necessary to self-preservation. But even this seems to require, as a condition for my rightfully taking, say, the life of an unarmed prisoner, that I believe, in good faith, that he is a danger to my preservation. Perhaps that is why Hobbes drops this line of defense in Leviathan. Cf. Hobbes’s Elements of Law I.xix.2, and my discussion of this and other passages in Curley 1991c. See also the useful discussions in Spinoza 1958: 13–14 and Den Uyl 1983: 11–14. 16 As Hobbes will argue in L xx.11. In “Of Liberty and Necessity,” Hobbes says that “Power irresistible justifies all actions, really and properly, in whomsoever it be found; less power does not, and because such power is in God only, he must needs be just in all actions, and we, that not comprehending his counsels, call him to the bar, commit injustice in it” (English Works IV, 250). In Leviathan (xxxi.5), Hobbes does not explicitly deny that any man’s power can be irresistible, but he does treat the hypothesis as counterfactual (“if there had been any man of power irresistible . . .”). By contrast, in DCv i.14 and in the Elements of Law (I.xiv.13), Hobbes understands the notion of irresistible power in such a way that a man can possess it (e.g., when the other person is an infant or temporarily indisposed). I think, then, that Matheron is wrong to say that Hobbes does not make any use, even surreptitiously, of the maxim that might makes right (Matheron 1985: see particularly 151). 17 Cf. Alexandre Matheron in Matheron 1969: 290. 18 I have discussed this in much more detail in Curley 1991c. Also interesting in this connection is Pufendorf’s critique of Spinoza in De jure naturae et gentium (II.ii.3, and III.iv.4), which I have discussed in an article in the proceedings of the Cortona conference on the reception of the Theological-Political Treatise (Cristofolini 1995). One point Pufendorf sharply criticizes is Spinoza’s identification of the power of nature with the power of God.

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 331 19 Note that Spinoza begins chapter iv by distinguishing between laws which describe how all or some members of a species act and laws which prescribe a certain kind of conduct. Only the latter are properly called laws. It is an interesting question how far the assumption that only commands are properly called laws was common in the natural law tradition. Certainly, Hobbes and Suárez make this assumption (cf. Leviathan xxvi.2 and xv.41; and De legibus II.vi). And Suárez claims to be following Aquinas, who had defined law as “a rule and measure of acts, whereby man is induced to act or is restrained from acting” (Summa theologiae I–II.xc.i [Aquinas 1964–66]). This suggests a prescription of some kind (if not a command, then a counsel). But by using the natural inclinations of creatures as a guide to what they ought to do, Aquinas arguably confuses the descriptive with the prescriptive (cf. Summa, I–II 94.2). This may be why Spinoza insists so strongly on distinguishing them. Again, if a command must proceed from a superior to an inferior (as Suárez argues, De legibus I.xxi.4), and if natural law is binding on God (as Grotius contends, in De jure belli ac pacis I.i. 10), presumably, it cannot be essential to natural law that it be a command. So far as I can see, the tradition does not speak with one voice on this issue, which may limit the effectiveness of Spinoza’s argument. 20 Ecclesiastes 9:1–3, cited twice in the Theological-Political Treatise, at vi.32, and in xix.7. 21 The phrase is Douglas Den Uyl’s, in Den Uyl 1983: 7. 22 See Curley 1973b. 23 I take it to be significant that the escape clause is omitted in the Latin Leviathan and even in a subsequent reference back to this passage in the English Leviathan (L xxvi.8). 24 McShea is right to point out (McShea 1968: 167), however, that this statement about promises occurs in the context of a philosophy which makes the knowledge and love of God the highest good. (Cf. Ethics 4p28 and Theological-Political Treatise 4.9–16.) 25 See, for example, Spinoza 1958: 25–27. We might also class Alexandre Matheron with Wernham, on the strength of his discussion in Matheron 1969: 307–30. But a subsequent article on this topic makes it clear that Matheron does not intend his theory to address the issue of the legitimacy of the state, but only the issue of its historical origin. See Matheron 1990. 26 My interpretation of Hobbes here is much influenced by the work of Quentin Skinner, e.g., Skinner 1974. 27 I have discussed these issues in more detail in Curley 1990: section 4. 28 This may be unfair to Machiavelli. Chapter xvii of The Prince advises that it is hard to be both loved and feared, and that if forced to choose, a prince should prefer being feared to being loved. But chapter xix counterbalances this with the advice

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332 edwin curley that a prince need not worry too much about conspiracies “as long as his people are devoted to him; but when they are hostile, and feel hatred toward him, he should fear everything and everybody.” Machiavelli concludes that one of the most important of a prince’s concerns is “to keep the aristocracy from desperation and to satisfy the populace by making them happy” (Machiavelli 1992: 51; cf. TP vii. 12, 14 – passages which contain several allusions to Tacitus). 29 So I agree with Matheron when he writes “Spinoza always thought that the existence and legitimacy of political society derive, ultimately, from the consent of the subjects; if you wish to call that ‘contract,’ he was always a contractualist [not only in the Theological-Political Treatise, but even in the Political Treatise] . . . if you wish to call ‘contractualism’ the doctrine according to which the conclusion of an agreement would give rise, by itself alone, independently of any subsequent variation in the relations of forces, to an irreversible obligation, he was never a contractualist [not only in the Political Treatise, but even in the TheologicalPolitical Treatise]” (Matheron 1990: 258). The contractualism Matheron is interested in is a theory according to which (questions of legitimacy to one side) political society is in fact founded in a historically actual state of nature, by a deliberate, rational, collective decision, and not by a dynamic process involving the interplay of the passions, in which the imitation of the affects plays a key role. This is the contractualism he finds in the Theological- Political Treatise, and not in the Political Treatise. At the moment, I am not persuaded that Matheron is right to find the evolution he claims, since it seems to me that Spinoza is quite pessimistic about human rationality even in the Theological-Political Treatise (cf. TTP 17.14–16). My main point is that Hobbes sometimes inclines toward a contractualism of the kind which (according to Matheron) Spinoza always embraced. Hobbes is not always a contractualist of the kind Spinoza never was. 30 Kissinger does not hesitate to characterize Bismarck’s approach to politics as Machiavellian (Isaacson 1992: 906), though he also reports that Bismarck was a great reader of Spinoza (894). Did the influence of Spinoza on Kissinger really make it “peculiar” for Ms. Fallaci to associate him with Machiavelli? 31 An example is the interpretation of Walzer 1973 (specifically, 175–76). Cf. Isaiah Berlin: “It is important to realise that Machiavelli does not wish to deny that what Christians call good is, in fact, good, that what they call virtue and vice are in fact virtue and vice” (Berlin 1982: 46). Berlin’s Machiavelli does, nevertheless, reject Christian ethics in favor of a rival (“Roman or classical”) morality (54). 32 Berlin tacitly recognizes this when, in paraphrasing this passage, he consistently puts the term “excuse” in single quotes: “The end ‘excuses’ the means, however horrible these may be in terms of even pagan ethics, if it is (in terms of the ideals of Thucydides or Polybius, Cicero or Livy) lofty enough. Brutus was right to kill his children: he saved Rome” (Berlin 1982: 64; cf. 62). Another symptom of this is the

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kissinger, spinoza, and genghis khan 333 fact that Walker feels obliged to use the term “justify” for “scusare” in this passage (Machiavelli 1975: 132). 33 As Leo Strauss argued, in Strauss 1984: 11. 34 It seems a curious fact that Hobbes never mentions Machiavelli. (At any rate, there is no entry for Machiavelli in Molesworth’s indices of either the English or the Latin works.) We might suppose that this was because of Machiavelli’s reputation. But Francis Bacon (whom Hobbes served for a while as secretary) was not afraid to praise Machiavelli: “We are much beholden to Machiavelli and other writers of that class, who openly and unfeignedly declare or describe what men do, and not what they ought to do. For it is not possible to join the wisdom of the serpent with the innocence of the dove, except men be perfectly acquainted with the nature of evil itself” (from De augmentis scientiaium VII.ii, translated by F. R. Headlam, cited by Adams in the Norton Critical Edition of The Prince [Machiavelli 1992: 270]). Spinoza is generous in his praise of Machiavelli (TP 5.7, 10.1). 35 Cf. Hampton 1986: chapters vii–viii, and my discussion of her book in Curley 1990: 205–11. 36 The phrases are Negri’s, Negri 1991: 116–17. Haitsma Mulier is very helpful on this theme. Cf. Mulier 1980: 181–85. 37 As when he argues in Theological-Political Treatise 18.28–37 (in the manner of Machiavelli) that it is extremely dangerous for any state to attempt a fundamental change in its form of government, moving either from a republican form of government to a monarchy or vice versa. Cf. The Prince, chapter v. 38 I have given a conservative, literal translation of this passage, but Michael Grant’s freer translation of the italicized clause would suit my purposes even better: “If Tiberius, in spite of all his experience, has been transformed and deranged by absolute power” (Tacitus 1989: 225). On Tacitus’s overall influence on Spinoza, see Wirszubski 1955. I am indebted for this reference to F. Akkerman, “Spinozas Tekort aan Woorden,” in Akkerman 1980. 39 Cf. his comment on Vespasian in The Histories 1.1: “He alone, unlike all the emperors before him, was changed for the better [by his office].” 40 Preface to the first edition, 1670, Théâtre complet, 254. 41 I suggest that Racine believes Nero’s decline to be inevitable, once he takes the fatal step of murdering his half-brother (and potential rival for power), Britannicus. He conveys this by presenting Nero at an early, comparatively innocent stage of his reign, and having both Burrus and Agrippina predict, with prophetic accuracy, his future crimes and ultimate suicide. Cf. Π.1337–76, 1673–94. This is similar to the effect of the speech Tacitus composes for Lucius Arruntius, predicting the corruption of Caligula. 42 Matheron 1985: 176. I note that Kissinger expressed a similar view in his analysis of the situation in Europe in the early nineteenth century: “The Napoleonic

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334 edwin curley Empire for all its extent demonstrated . . . the tenuousness of a conquest not accepted by the subjugated people” (Kissinger 1957: 4; cf. 21). In Kissinger 1968, Kissinger makes an analogous point at the level of international relations: “The stability of any international system depends on at least two factors: the degree to which its components feel secure and the extent to which they agree on the ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’ of existing arrangements” (899–900). 43 The quotation is from the Troades 258–59 and is used by Spinoza in TheologicalPolitical Treatise 5.22, and 16.29. 44 Cf. particularly Theological-Political Treatise 7.12,14. The latter passage is particularly interesting for its use of Tacitus (Histories I.xxv) to illustrate the proposition that once political power has been vested entirely in one man, it is all the easier to transfer it to another. Spinoza cites the same passage in a note he added to Theological-Political Treatise 17.3. 45 As Aristotle says that any man must be who is capable by nature of living outside any political community (Politics 1253aI–3). 46 Spinoza also alludes to this passage in Political Treatise 5.4. Stanley Karnow took the famous line “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” as the motto for his history of Vietnam (Vietnam, a History, New York: Viking Press, 1983).

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9

Spinoza’s Philosophical Religion Susan James

In a letter he sent to Henry Oldenburg in 1665, Spinoza included a defense of his decision to write the Theological-Political Treatise.1 One reason, he explains, is that “the common people never stop accusing me of atheism, and I am forced to rebut this accusation as well as I can” (Ep 30 | IV: 166).2 In the TTP, Spinoza repudiates the charge that he is an atheist by defending a view that he attributes not only to the common people, but also to the more powerful theologians of the Dutch Reformed Church: that God reveals himself in Scripture. The Bible, Spinoza agrees, not only teaches us that God exists, but shows us how to attain blessedness by obeying him. However, as Spinoza adds in his letter to Oldenburg, the TTP also has a further aim. It sets out to vindicate “the freedom of philosophizing and saying what we think, which I want to defend in every way; here the preachers suppress it as much as they can with their excessive authority and aggressiveness” (IV: 166). In response to the theologians and ecclesiastical officials who claim the right to police philosophical inquiry, Spinoza argues that philosophy and theology are distinct and autonomous practices. Since each reaches its conclusions by a valid and trustworthy method, but neither possesses the authority to judge the other, there is no epistemological conflict between them. As the title of chapter 15 puts it, neither should be the handmaid of the other. This argument is designed to persuade the Dutch state and its Reformed Church that philosophers can safely be given the freedom to develop and discuss their ideas without endangering religion. “Scripture leaves reason absolutely free and has nothing in common with philosophy; each rests on its own foundation” (TTP 15.24). But Spinoza’s separation of philosophy from theology nevertheless brings the religious status of philosophy into question. If philosophical inquiry is not constrained by theologically grounded conclusions about the content and practice of religious faith, is there scope for it to be, or become, irreligious? More specifically, does Spinoza’s own philosophy conflict with the demands of revealed religion, thus exposing him after all to the charge of atheism? According to some of the earliest readers of the TTP, it definitely does. As Lambert Van Velthuysen sums up the charge, “I think I am not 335

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deviating very far from the truth, or doing the Author any injustice, if I denounce him for teaching pure Atheism, by disguised and counterfeit arguments” (Ep 42 | IV: 218).3 But Spinoza’s own attitude to the relation between religion and philosophy is harder to fathom. Following the lead of the TTP, some commentators have read him as the author and defender of a philosophy independent of religion. Spinoza, they contend, ushers in a secular form of philosophizing.4 Following the lead of the Ethics, where a philosophical way of life is endowed with a religious aura, other commentators have arrived at the contrary conclusion: that Spinoza views his philosophy as a form of religion, albeit an unorthodox one.5 While this debate has many strands, it is fueled by an apparent tension between the Ethics and the TTP, which seem to pull in opposite directions, the first toward a religious interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy, the second away from it. My aim in this chapter is to show how this conflict can be resolved. From the fact that Spinoza distinguishes philosophy from religion in the TTP, I shall argue, we should not infer that he views them as categorically distinct. Instead, religion as he understands it can take various forms, of which the religion revealed in Scripture and articulated in the TTP is one, and Spinozist philosophy is another. The shift from a theological to a philosophical mode of inquiry is not a move from a religious to a non-religious outlook, but a transition from one form of religious practice to another. Spinoza’s defense of this view rests on the claim that the fundamental demands of a religious life – to love God and love one’s neighbor – are endorsed by philosophy as much as by revelation. The Scriptures teach us to live as they dictate, but so, in a different way, does philosophical understanding. Spinoza’s argument therefore hinges on a particular view of what constitutes a religious way of life, and although he derives this conception from the Bible in the TTP and arrives at it by reasoning in the Ethics, the Bible takes priority. The conclusion that the truly religious way of life described in Scripture only requires religious people to love God and their neighbors, and does not impose any further demands, sets a religious standard that Spinoza then finds mirrored in a philosophical way of life. If, as revelation tells us, this is what religion requires, then philosophy qualifies as a form of religion. As Spinoza was well aware, his minimal conception of religion challenged the more elaborate, biblically grounded creeds of many of his theological opponents, who did not accept the conception of religion on which his argument is grounded. While they agreed that Scripture

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spinoza’s philosophical religion 337 requires us to love God and our neighbors, they denied that these requirements are sufficient, on the grounds that a religious way of life also involves other commitments, such as membership of a church, specific forms of observance, and a range of theological beliefs.6 In the TTP, Spinoza sets out to show that they are mistaken, but he does not expect to convert them and largely writes them off as superstitious (TTP Preface 35 | III: 12). Instead, he aligns himself with the various Dutch advocates of a minimal form of religion that can be practiced in many ways.7 One of these ways, Spinoza now goes on to explain, is philosophical.

dividing philosophy from religion The clearest objection to the view that Spinoza views philosophy as a religious practice lies in his insistence that philosophy lacks authority to identify the nature of a truly religious way of life. Starting from the viewpoint of its intended readership, the TTP assumes that we learn what religion requires of us by studying Scripture’s account of God’s revelations to his prophets. As the opening of chapter 1 explains, “Prophecy or revelation is the certain knowledge of some matter which God has revealed to men” (TTP 1.1 | III: 15). But the task of interpreting the word of God as it is recounted by the biblical prophets belongs to theologians. It lies outside the expertise of philosophers, who are limited to deploying their rational understanding to grasp the fundamental structure and organization of nature. In explicating the differences between philosophical and theological inquiry, Spinoza assumes that his readers already have a sense of what philosophizing involves. Philosophical reasoning, he summarizes, starts from common notions, and shows how other adequate ideas necessarily follow from them (TTP 4.19 | III: 61). At its best, reasoning captures and explains the universal causal laws that govern natural things, including human beings, and delivers knowledge that is absolutely or mathematically certain. This knowledge in turn informs our grasp of many domains, including, for example, astronomy, architecture, psychology and ethics (TTP 2.26–33 | III: 36–37). In the Ethics, Spinoza traces the fundamental truths that reasoning yields; but in the TTP, his main concern is to distinguish philosophical from theological inquiry. “My principle purpose,” he emphasizes, “is to speak only of what concerns Scripture” (TTP 1.7 | III: 16). Theology, he

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argues, is a hermeneutic practice, a matter of uncovering the meaning of Scripture rather than reasoning from one adequate idea to another. By carefully and systematically interpreting the texts of the Bible, and not attributing anything to the prophets that they did not clearly and repeatedly say, it decodes the content of the divine laws that God has revealed and explains what they require of us. In doing so, however, it also elucidates the nature of prophetic insight and identifies the limits of its authority. While the prophets’ knowledge informed them of the demands of a religious way of life, it did not enable them to assess the truth of philosophically grounded claims. To substantiate this account of the epistemological scope of theology, Spinoza offers an anthropological analysis of the practice of prophecy, which he derives from his interpretations of the Old and New Testaments. It is clear, he argues, that the prophets were human beings endowed with the same mental powers as everyone else, and equally evident that they did not possess a significant level of philosophical understanding. What set them apart was rather their extraordinary powers of imagination, which made them unusually sensitive and responsive to the circumstances in which they found themselves; they “perceived God’s revelations only with the aid of the imagination, i.e. by the mediation of words and images, which may have been true or imaginary” (TTP 1.43 | III: 28). Prophets noticed things that eluded ordinary people and felt their significance; but rather than articulating their insights in philosophical terms, they expressed them imaginatively. Drawing on their inadequate ideas of the things and processes around them, they experienced God “as they were accustomed to imagine him” (TTP 2.20 | III: 34). For example, Isaiah saw God clothed and sitting on a royal throne, Ezekiel saw him like a fire, and because Moses “believed that God’s nature admits of . . . compassion, kindness, etc., God was revealed to him according to this opinion and under these attributes” (TTP 2.41 | III: 40). Moreover, Moses’s idea of the deity enabled him to communicate his revelation to the Israelites, who shared his anthropomorphic conception of God and were ready to accept it. Spinoza’s analysis offers us a way to make sense of the phenomenon of revelation, but does not so far tell us how to distinguish genuine from false prophecy. Drawing once again on the biblical record, he argues that a true prophecy must satisfy three conditions, which are jointly sufficient to establish it as a piece of morally certain knowledge. The first condition concerns revelation itself: a prophet must have imagined the things revealed to him “very vividly, in the way we are usually

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spinoza’s philosophical religion 339 affected by objects when we are awake” (TTP 2.10 | III: 31). But since a prophet whose vivid experiences have sincerely persuaded him that he has received God’s word may nevertheless be mistaken, this is not enough. Two further conditions must be met, the first of which is the occurrence of a sign. When a prophet publicly asks God to confirm that he has received the divine word, and he and his audience experience some extraordinary occurrence that they interpret as a sign from God, they gain further grounds – as do the readers of Scripture – for believing that the prophecy is genuine (TTP 2.10–11 | III: 31–32). But a final and yet more important kind of evidence lies in the prophet’s moral character. He must be the sort of person who will not deceive others or allow himself to be deceived, because his heart is “inclined only to the right and the good” (TTP 2.10 | III: 31). When these requirements are satisfied, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that a prophecy is genuine; but they do not, of course, generate the mathematically certain knowledge that philosophy yields. As we have seen, prophecy is an imaginative practice, and “to be able to be certain of things we imagine, we must add something to the imagination – viz. reasoning” (TTP 2.4 | III: 30). It remains possible that an apparently virtuous prophet has faked a revelation and rigged a sign, and thus that a prophecy which appears to satisfy all three criteria is false. The trio of requirements do, however, guarantee what Spinoza describes as moral certainty (TTP 2.5 | III: 30). The knowledge that God has revealed himself to a particular prophet rests on inductively grounded generalizations (for example, that genuine prophecies are accompanied by signs, and that only virtuous people are true prophets) that have come to define the practice of prophecy. Somewhat as the inductive practices of naturalists give us reliable knowledge about the identity of a particular bird or animal, so the practice of prophecy reliably identifies prophets. Furthermore, this kind of knowledge is vital to our lives. It gives us access to conclusions, including conclusions about prophecy, that are not attainable by philosophical means, because they lie “beyond the limits of the intellect.” In Spinoza’s view, “we can compose many more ideas from words and images than we can by using only the principles and notions on which our whole natural knowledge is constructed” (TTP 1.45 | III: 28). Because imagination is in a sense more fecund than reasoning, it enables us to grasp aspects of particular situations and processes that escape our rational deliberations and allows us to put them to use in our lives. By focusing on the genuine prophecies recorded in Scripture and ignoring the false ones, theologians are able to assemble a body of

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evidence about the content of divine revelation. But revelation remains hard to interpret. Since prophets experience God in the light of their own temperaments, imagination, and opinions, since they express themselves in metaphors and narratives, and since they communicate in terms that their audiences will be able to grasp (TTP 2.13 | III: 32), the meanings of their insights are elusive. To uncover them, we need to begin by considering what kinds of things prophets know, and thus what truths they have authority to speak about. And since, as far as we can tell from the biblical record, their insights were not the fruit of philosophical training or knowledge, we should not expect them to be able to pronounce on philosophical issues. To be sure, many people have rashly persuaded themselves that the prophets “knew everything the human intellect can attain to” (TTP 2.25 | III: 35); but a moderately careful reading of Scripture reveals that this is not the case. For example, although the author of the book of Joshua recounts that, during Joshua’s battle with the Ammonites, the sun stood still in the sky, we have no reason to believe that he had any knowledge of astronomy, and every reason to suppose that he is describing the event in imaginative terms, as it appeared to Joshua and his army. “They believed [that the sun stood still in the sky] and did not consider that a refraction greater than usual could arise from the large amount of ice then in that part of the air – or from some other cause” (TTP 2.27 | III: 36). We are therefore “not at all bound to believe [the prophets] concerning speculative matters” (TTP 2.24 | III: 35; TTP 13.1 | III: 156). What remains of revelation once the prophets’ speculative misunderstandings have been stripped away? A first clue lies in the biblical evidence that genuine prophets were virtuous people whose hearts were inclined to the right and the good (TTP 7.11 | III: 99). Despite their lack of philosophical acumen, they possessed morally certain knowledge of “things which concern loving-kindness (charitas) and how to conduct our lives” (TTP 2.52 | III: 42), and on these issues were in a position to speak authoritatively. So rather than looking to prophecy for an understanding of physics or the nature of God (TTP 2.31–32 | III: 37), we should concentrate on its moral message. Happily, this proposal is confirmed by the revelations recorded in the Bible. Again and again, the prophets enjoin their listeners to live as revelation dictates by obeying the divine law; again and again, they make it clear that the way to do this is to obey God by loving your neighbor; and again and again, they emphasize that this is sufficient for salvation. “Scripture requires nothing from men but obedience . . .. Next, obedience to God consists only in the love of your

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spinoza’s philosophical religion 341 neighbor – for as Paul says in Romans 13.8, he who loves his neighbor in order that he may obey God has fulfilled the Laws” (TTP 13.7–8 | III 168; TTP 14.9 | III: 174). What theology establishes, then, is that revelation gives us morally certain knowledge of the essential features of a religious and saving way of life. In the TTP, Spinoza abstracts this core meaning of revelation from a sequence of biblical narratives and presents it in propositional form. But, as he repeatedly acknowledges, this is not how the prophets themselves express it. Their accounts of the divine law are couched in the figurative terms of our imaginative thinking. This feature of prophecy draws attention to a further difference between theology and philosophy. Whereas the goal of philosophy is truth, the aim of the prophetic narratives contained in Scripture is to move us to obey the divine law. “Who does not see,” Spinoza urges, “that each Testament is nothing but a training in obedience, and that neither Testament has any aim but that men should obey from a true heart” (TTP 14.6 | III: 174)? The first half of this contrast between philosophy and theology is familiar from the Ethics as well as the TTP and underlies the argument we have so far traced. As the Spinozist philosopher extends his understanding, he becomes increasingly skilled at identifying and perceiving the relations between adequate ideas, and gains an increasingly full and accurate conception of the causal structure of nature. (He comes to understand, for example, that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way round, and that the sun therefore cannot “stand still” in the sky.) As part of this process, he gains a better understanding of human beings by learning what is good and bad for them, and comes to appreciate that the only sure way to overcome the confusion and sadness to which our inadequate ideas give rise is to enlarge our philosophical understanding. Philosophy is therefore the means by which we acquire true or adequate knowledge, not only of what the world is like, but also of how it is best for us to live. By contrast, the scriptural narratives with which theologians concern themselves deal in the inadequate or imaginative ideas of the prophets, and cannot be a source of adequate knowledge. Rather than contributing to our certain, philosophical understanding, the function of prophetic utterance is to encourage people to obey the divine law. A crucial aspect of a prophet’s skill lies in his ability to move his listeners to live in accordance with the law by enlivening their images of an obedient way of life and stirring up their hearts to obey. Thus conceived, the Bible is fundamentally a rhetorical text designed to

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persuade, and in order to fulfill this purpose its claims need not answer to the standard of philosophical truth. It is important, for example, that the miraculous story of Joshua’s battle with the Ammonites should strengthen the faith of at least some of those who hear it, and as long as it serves this purpose it does not matter that its account of the course of the sun is false. Equally, it was important that Moses’s description of his meeting with an anthropomorphic deity served to strengthen the Israelites’ commitment to the Mosaic law, but not important that it misrepresented the nature of God. “Moses did not try to convince the Israelites by reason . . .. [H]e threatened the people with punishment if they did not obey the laws and urged them to obedience with rewards. All these are means only to obedience, not knowledge.” (TTP 14.7 | III: 174). This analysis of the relationship between philosophy and theology is designed to establish that the two forms of inquiry are not in competition and that their conclusions do not come into conflict (TTP 14.37 | III: 179). Since each has its own goal and epistemological standards, neither is in a position to pass judgment on the other. Philosophy is consequently unable to assess the morally certain knowledge that prophecy yields, and theology lacks the means to endorse or criticize philosophically grounded conclusions. “We conclude, unconditionally, that Scripture is not to be accommodated to reason, nor reason to Scripture” (TTP 15.25 | III: 185). In addition, however, philosophy and theology give us knowledge of different things. While philosophical understanding ranges over many aspects of nature, theology provides us with morally certain knowledge of true religion. It shows us what the divine law requires of us, and it reliably assures us that obedience to the law is sufficient for salvation. If, then, we ask how knowledge of true religion can be acquired, Spinoza’s answer seems to be that that we gain it from theology. Philosophers must therefore accept that, for all its power, their mode of inquiry does not deliver knowledge of the nature of a religious life. It cannot establish that all we have to do in order to be saved is to obey the divine law (TTP 15.26 | III: 185).

b l u r r i n g t h e b o u n da ry Ever since the TTP was published, Spinoza’s argument for the distinctness of philosophy and theology has aroused suspicion. Although he insists that theology is not the handmaid of philosophy (TTP 15.1–2 | III: 180) and purports to give theology its own epistemological domain, many readers have found his case unconvincing. Their reservations often

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spinoza’s philosophical religion 343 focus on the TTP’s discussion of faith, where the requirements of a truly religious life are filled out. Siding with St. James and St. John against St. Paul (TTP 14.15–18 | III: 175–76), Spinoza initially seems to hold that one’s actions are a sufficient mark of obedience, and that the test of one’s religious faith lies in what one does rather than in what one believes. “No one can deny that one who, according to God’s demand, loves his neighbor as himself is really obedient, and according to the law, blessed” (TTP 14.9 | III: 174). As the discussion proceeds, however, Spinoza’s position turns out to be more complex. Although, by Jewish or Christian standards, true religion as he conceives it imposes very few constraints on one’s beliefs, there are nevertheless some doctrines of the universal faith that one must affirm, because one will otherwise be unable to obey the law. “The only beliefs we are bound by Scriptural command to have are those which are absolutely necessary to carry out this command” (TTP 14.10 | III: 174). For example, one cannot love God unless one believes that he exists, and one cannot love him wholeheartedly unless one believes that he is present everywhere (TTP 14.25–26 | III: 177, 268). Spelling out these conditions, the TTP lists seven doctrines, of which the last, in particular, challenges the division that Spinoza has so far been at pains to establish between philosophy and theology, and casts doubt on its claim that neither has authority over the other. According to this final doctrine, one cannot obey the law unless one believes that “God pardons the sins of those who repent.” For, as Spinoza goes on to explain, “no one is without sin. So, if we did not maintain this, everyone would despair of his salvation, and there would be no reason why anyone would believe God to be merciful” (TTP 14.28 | III: 178). We therefore seem to be required to believe in the existence of an anthropomorphic deity who punishes or pardons human beings, although it is significant that the doctrine does not specify how this belief is to be fleshed out. As the TTP emphasizes, “each person is bound to accommodate these doctrines of faith to his own power of understanding, and to interpret them for himself, as it seems to him easier for him to accept them without any hesitation, with complete agreement of the heart, so that he may obey God wholeheartedly” (TTP 14.32–33 | III: 178–79). However, while this may give many people the imaginative latitude they need in order to believe that God pardons those who repent, it is not clear that it will enable Spinozist philosophers to do so. According to the Ethics, philosophical reasoning definitively shows that God does not have anthropomorphic properties and therefore cannot

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truly be described as pardoning human beings. So, although individuals who lack this knowledge may legitimately imagine God in anthropomorphic terms, anyone who has a philosophical understanding of the deity will be unable to affirm the seventh doctrine of faith. This implication of Spinoza’s argument poses a double threat. If affirming the doctrines of universal faith is a condition of leading a religious life, Spinozist philosophers who are unable to do so will qualify as irreligious. In addition, however, the incompatibility between the commitments of philosophy and religion appears to undermine the TTP’s claim that philosophy has no epistemological authority over theology. If philosophers are in a position to assess and reject the truth of fundamental doctrines on which a truly religious way of life depends, theology must surely be epistemologically subordinate to philosophy. Equally, if enlightened philosophers are bound to hold beliefs that are contrary to the demands of true religion, studying philosophy must surely be incompatible with a religious existence. This apparent incoherence has led some commentators to suggest that Spinoza is insincere when he claims that theology and philosophy have independent spheres of authority.8 Others have taken the more straightforward view that, whatever his motivations may have been, his attempt to separate theology from philosophy fails.9 Although he establishes that theology is not in a position to assess philosophical arguments and conclusions, he does not establish the contrary, so that philosophy proves to be the more powerful of the two forms of inquiry. Regardless of their differences, both these strands of criticism imply that Spinozist philosophy surpasses revealed religion. As philosophers extend their understanding, they come to appreciate that the claims on which revealed religion rests are inadequate or confused, and progressively replace them with an adequate or true understanding of the relation between God and human beings. Losing their commitment to religion, they immerse themselves in a philosophical way of life. But before we accept this view of Spinoza’s position, we need to ask again how philosophy and religion are related. Does the philosopher transcend religion, as these interpretations imply? Or is philosophy itself a religious practice, so that as people learn to philosophize they manifest their faith in a new way?

philosophical religion If a religious life fundamentally consists in loving God and loving one’s neighbor, a philosophical form of religion must satisfy this standard. Just

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spinoza’s philosophical religion 345 as revelation encourages us to live as true religion demands, philosophical understanding must do the same. In the Ethics, Spinoza sets out to establish that it does, and although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a full account of his argument, we can nevertheless outline some of the main steps by which he arrives at this conclusion. A first fruit of philosophical reasoning is that it transforms our conception of God. In place of the anthropomorphic ideas of the deity that dominated the imaginative outlooks of the prophets, and indeed of most of the religious people by whom Spinoza was surrounded, philosophers who follow his arguments are led to a quite different conception of the deity. The God of the Ethics is the infinitely powerful, immanent cause of everything that exists. As Spinoza puts it, “whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God” (E 1p15), who “is the immanent . . . cause of all things” (E 1p18). Moreover, rather than exercising his power in the arbitrary, anthropomorphic fashion described by the prophets, this deity manifests his power in the systematic causal processes at work in nature: “In nature . . . all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way” (E 1p29). As philosophers increase their understanding of individual things and the relationships between them, they therefore increase their understanding of the operations of divine power and increase their knowledge of God. In the words of the TTP, “the more we know natural things the greater and more perfect is the knowledge of God we acquire” (TTP 4.11 | III: 60); and as the Ethics elaborates, “[P]erfecting the intellect is nothing but understanding God, his attributes and his actions, which follow from the necessity of his nature” (E 4ap4). As well as radically altering the philosopher’s idea of God, the pursuit of rational understanding transforms the philosopher himself. The more adequately philosophers understand how they are affected by the external things they encounter, the better they are able to distinguish between relationships that promote and relationships that undermine their efforts to extend their understanding. Putting this knowledge to work, they become more active and resilient (E 5p20s), and they experience what Spinoza describes as an increased joyfulness – a growing confidence and satisfaction in the power of understanding, which commits them yet more strongly to the project of philosophical inquiry (E 3p58). Connecting these two aspects of their knowledge, philosophers come to understand that their power and joyfulness are manifestations of the infinite power of God. But this, according to Spinoza, is what it is to love God. We love things that affect us with joy (E 3da5); so the more

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fully philosophers understand that God is the ultimate cause of their joyfulness, the more they will love him. As Spinoza puts it, “he who understands himself and his affects clearly and distinctly rejoices, and his joy is accompanied by the idea of God. Hence he loves God, and does so the more he understands himself and his affects” (E 5p15). Making the religious connotations of this condition clear, Spinoza adds that, “whatever we desire and do of which we are the cause insofar as we have the idea of God, or insofar as we know God, I relate to religion” (E 4p37s). Because philosophical understanding is manifested in love of the deity, those who attain it meet the first requirement of a religious life. They love God. “The man who is necessarily the most perfect and who participates most in supreme blessedness is the one who loves above all else the intellectual knowledge of God, the supreme being, and takes the greatest pleasure in that knowledge. Our supreme good, then, and our blessedness, come back to this: the knowledge and love of God” (TTP 4.12 | III: 60). But does their understanding also bring them to love their neighbors? As we have seen, the philosopher’s ability to increase his power and become more active depends on learning to control the way that external things affect him, and here his relationships with human beings play a central role. Of all external things, other people have the greatest potential to harm or help us (E 4ap9). We both depend on them for our survival and are vulnerable to the damage they can inflict. If philosophers are to avoid debilitating social relationships that will block their efforts to develop their understanding, they must ensure that they relate to other people in ways that empower them and make them joyful. To put the point another way, their relationships with other people must be loving ones. In everyday life, our efforts to form stable, loving relationships often fail. For example, we tend to try to get others to help us realize our desires without taking their own preferences into account, “and when all alike want this, they are all alike an obstacle to one another” (E 3p31s). However, understanding shows philosophers how to solve this problem. To form enduring loving relationships with other people, we have to form relationships that empower all parties and ensure that no one has anything to gain by damaging them. Philosophers who appreciate this requirement will therefore want others to share the joy that they themselves desire and will do their best to create the mutually empowering relationships that Spinoza describes as bonds of friendship with those around them (E 4p40). They will try to live harmoniously with other people by forming political associations (E 4ap26).

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spinoza’s philosophical religion 347 In an ideal philosophical community whose members have grasped these rational insights, individuals will express their love for one another in perfect mutual friendship. The nature of religion can be summed up, Spinoza observes, in the principle that “everyone who is led by reason desires for others also the good he wants for himself” (E 4p73s). But even in more realistic circumstances, where some people have more rational understanding than others and many of them have inadequate ideas about what stable, loving relationships involve, philosophers will still love their neighbors. To take one of Spinoza’s examples, people may try to win support for their own projects by giving people unsolicited gifts and expecting favors in return. A philosopher who understands the deficiencies of this strategy will try not to accept the gifts he is offered; but nor will he rebuff the giver. Recognizing the strategy as a misguided attempt to form a mutually supportive relationship, he will do what he can to help the donor create a genuinely empowering friendship, and where this is beyond his power, will do his best to limit the sadness the donor’s action is liable to cause. “So it often happens that it is necessary to accept favors [of this kind] and return thanks to [the donor] according to his temperament” (E 4p70s). Because we are finite, “we do not have an absolute power to adapt things outside us to our use” (E 4 ap32), and must cooperate with other people as best we can; but we can nevertheless maximize our joy and satisfaction by loving our neighbors as far as possible. Philosophical understanding therefore empowers us to live as the divine law requires by loving God and our neighbors; and as long as this is all that religion demands of us, a philosophical way of life will consequently qualify as a religious one. But here a further objection arises. The religious life revealed to the prophets demands that we obey the divine law; and according to Spinoza, this in turn requires us to affirm the doctrines of faith. As we have seen, Spinozist philosophers cannot meet this last condition; if obedience to the law requires us to believe the final tenet of faith – that God pardons those who repent – they cannot obey the divine law. So, if obeying the law is a necessary feature of a religious way of life, a life informed by philosophical understanding cannot after all be a religious one. To assess this argument, we need to examine Spinoza’s conception of obedience. According to the prophets, he contends, salvation depends on obeying a law, understood as a set of commands imposed on us by a divine legislator whose rewards and penalties encourage us to follow his decrees (TTP 4.3–4 | III: 58). Readers of the Bible, like the audiences to

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whom the prophets revealed the divine word, are not expected to conform to the divine law because they understand the intrinsic benefits of doing so, but because they fear God’s punishment and hope for salvation. To follow a law for these instrumental reasons is, Spinoza contends, to obey it. The prophets imagined God as a legislator and judge who requires us to obey his commandments on pain of punishment and in the hope of mercy. However, while a prophet such as Moses “conceived the way that people could best be compelled to obedience,” he credited God with qualities that are in fact “attributes only of human nature, and ought to be removed entirely from the divine nature” (TTP 4.29–30 | III: 64). Spinozist philosophers understand enough to avoid this mistake. They know that the prophets’ ideas of the deity are confused and that their representations of him are imaginative constructions. As philosophers abandon an imaginative outlook, they come to understand that God is not the sort of being who issues commands and that the only sense in which he can be said to impose laws on us is a figurative one (TTP 4.4–5 | III: 58). Like all individual things, we are subject to the necessary laws of nature, which “produce effects in a fixed and determinate way” (TTP 4.3 | III: 58), and insofar as they determine the course of human events these laws undoubtedly bind us. However, since we cannot fail to conform to them and are powerless to do anything about this fact, the issue of obeying or disobeying them does not arise. We are bound to live in accordance with the laws of nature through which God expresses his power, but we cannot be said to obey or disobey them (TTP 4.7 | III: 59). Here, once again, a gap seems to open up between religion and philosophy. If philosophers cannot accede to the biblical injunction to obey the divine law, it seems that they cannot satisfy the requirements of a religious life and philosophizing again fails to qualify as a religious practice. But before we settle for this conclusion, there is a further point to consider. Spinoza makes it clear that the revelations of the Hebrew prophets were meant to persuade people who would see no reason to live in accordance with the divine law unless they were given some external incentive for doing so. To induce the ancient Israelites to lead religious lives, for example, Moses had to represent the law as a set of commands that they would be punished for disobeying (TTP 4.29 | III: 64). However, while the prophets hit on one way of persuading people to live as religion requires, theirs is not the only way to achieve this goal. Rationally grounded understanding also teaches us that the best and most joyful way to live is to love God and one’s neighbors. Moreover, once we

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spinoza’s philosophical religion 349 understand the reasons for living as these truths dictate, “we embrace them, not as laws, but as eternal truths. That is, obedience passes into love, which proceeds from true knowledge as necessarily as light does from the sun. So, under the guidance of reason, we can love God but not obey him” (TTP 16.53n | III: 264). Without being prodded into obedience by external sanctions, philosophers actively embrace the tenets of the divine law and enforce them for themselves. Obedience to the divine law therefore has no place in a philosophically informed outlook, but this is not enough to make such an outlook irreligious. The core demand of religion, as the TTP presents it, is not to obey God, but to love him and love your neighbor. The primary religious requirement is to live in accordance with these precepts rather than to do so in one particular way. Since philosophers have their own way of conforming to the law, the fact that they cannot obey it does not prevent them from leading a form of religious life. “The only one who follows the divine law is the one who devotes himself to loving God, not from fear of punishment, nor from love of another thing such as pleasure or reputation, but only because he knows God, or because he knows that the knowledge and love of God is the highest good” (TTP 4.14 | III: 60).

philosophical and revealed religion So far, Spinoza’s arguments for the religious character of philosophy have presupposed considerable philosophical sophistication. While readers of the TTP and the Ethics who were already familiar with the lineaments of his philosophical system would presumably have found them reassuring, those whose primary loyalty lay with revealed religion might well have remained troubled. The philosophical position developed in the Ethics suggests that, while people who obey the revealed divine law do everything that religion requires and all that is needed for salvation, the love of God and one’s neighbor that arises from philosophical understanding opens out a superior form of religious life. Although the Bible and philosophy articulate two forms of religion, they are not of equal worth, and only philosophy can lead us to the highest degree of perfection. People whose theological sympathies made them suspicious of philosophy (of whom there were many in seventeenth-century Europe) were bound to ask whether there was any biblical warrant for this view. Regardless of what philosophers say, does Scripture give us any reason to think that the religious insights revealed by the prophets can be matched

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or even surpassed by philosophical understanding? In the TTP, Spinoza aims to remove this doubt by arguing that there is ample biblical evidence for the existence of the two forms of religion that he identifies. Biblical testimony informs us that, while the Old Testament prophets revealed the divine law as a set of externally imposed commands, they also foretold “a time to come when God would inscribe it in [people’s] hearts” (TTP 7.3 | III: 159). Furthermore, their predictions were borne out in the teachings of Jesus Christ, which, unlike those of the other prophets, were grounded on rational knowledge. Although Christ sometimes resorted to parables and anthropomorphic images in order to make his insights accessible to his audiences, the substance of his revelations reflected a philosophical rather than an imaginative understanding of God. He communicated with God “mind to mind,” and as far as we know was the most extraordinary philosopher who has ever lived. He was, Spinoza insists, “not so much a prophet as the mouth of God’” (TTP 4.431 | III: 64). Christ’s teachings therefore illuminate the character of religion in its philosophical form.10 Instead of teaching the law as a set of commands that bound a particular group of people, he perceived the content of revelation “truly and adequately.” He was therefore able to communicate it in its universal form, as a sequence of “common and true notions” (TTP 4.31 | III: 64) that one can conform to for oneself, regardless of external incentives. Thus understood, the fruits of reasoning are accessible to everyone and, as long as we reason correctly, lead us to a single set of truths about the nature of a religious way of life. The claim that Christ’s philosophical understanding was revealed to him, and thus that revelation can be a source of philosophical knowledge, may seem paradoxical. But Spinoza embraces it. All our natural knowledge, he claims, can be called prophecy; “for what we know by the natural light depends only on the knowledge of God and of his eternal decrees.” Thus, “we can call natural knowledge divine with as much right as anything else, since God’s nature, insofar as we participate in it, and his decrees, as it were, dictate it to us” (TTP 1.2–3 | III: 15). The fact that we can come to know God through imagination and through understanding indicates that God reveals himself in both these ways. Furthermore, whereas the imaginative powers that give rise to prophetic revelation are extremely rare and no longer in evidence, the rational capacities through which God also reveals himself are “common to all men” (TTP 1.2 | III: 15, 77). Admittedly, Christ’s revelation was unparalleled, and manifested a superlative level of philosophical understanding.

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spinoza’s philosophical religion 351 But since all humans have some capacity to reason, all of us, including people who have never heard of the Bible, have the means to start cultivating a religious way of life. “Since our mind . . . has the power to form certain notions which explain the natures of things and teach us how to conduct our lives, we can rightly maintain that the nature of the mind, insofar as it is conceived in this way, is the first cause of revelation” (TTP 1.5 | III: 16). Spinoza therefore defends his view that philosophy is a form of religion on philosophical and theological grounds. There is both rational and biblical evidence that the way of life opened out to us by philosophy enables us to follow the divine law by loving God and loving our neighbors. For some of Spinoza’s current admirers, this conclusion may be unwelcome, because it conflicts with an attractive line of interpretation to the effect that he ushers in a secular form of philosophizing. One of the most radical features of his work, so some commentators contend, lies in its rejection of religion.11 Spinoza undoubtedly rejects many aspects of the religious outlook shared by his contemporaries and this is why he was regarded as an atheist. But to claim that his philosophy abandons or transcends religion is to misidentify the nature of his radicalism. While he aims to challenge the dominant religions of his time, and does so in no uncertain terms, he does not aspire to slough off religion in favor of a more “scientific” or secular style of philosophizing. Instead, he aspires to illuminate a form of religious life that does justice to what he regards as our best and fullest understanding of God. Rather than confining religion to a single imaginative form of belief and practice, he acknowledges that the manner in which we love God and our neighbors can alter with our circumstances, and with the levels of understanding that changing cultural and historical conditions make possible. Revealed religion emerges in communities with relatively little philosophical understanding, and it offsets this limitation by providing imaginatively grounded reasons for loving God and one’s neighbor. One of its great achievements is its power to encourage and inculcate cooperative ways of life. But its requirement to obey the divine law nevertheless subjects people to an arbitrary constraint, namely, the commands of an imagined anthropomorphic God who has the power to punish or reward as he chooses. To put the point in the republican terms that run through Spinoza’s work, there is a hint of servitude about revealed religion, insofar as it encourages us to understand ourselves as subject to an arbitrary divine power. Indeed, as Spinoza remarks, since

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law is generally taken to be a principle of living prescribed by the command of others, “those who obey the law are said to live under the law and seem to be slaves” (TTP 4.7 | III: 59). They cannot be called just (TTP 4.7 | III: 59) and do not qualify as free. Philosophical religion liberates us from this form of servitude. Rather than obeying the divine law in order to win rewards or avoid punishments, we become able to follow it on the basis of our understanding of God and in doing so act “freely and with a constant heart” (TTP 4.7 | III: 66). As the teachings of Christ indicate, religion can make us free; but a free religious existence is nevertheless only available to people who, partly by virtue of their place in history and their material circumstances, are able to cultivate their philosophical understanding. In the republics of his own day, Spinoza suggests, we see the fragile beginnings of a form of political organization in which people are free to philosophize; but we still await an accompanying conception of a fully free religious life. This is what the TTP and Ethics offer us. By developing our philosophical understanding, they contend, we can overcome the servitude implicit in the religious way of life revealed to the biblical prophets and love God and our neighbors in a spirit of liberty. Spinoza’s philosophical conception of religion differed radically from the established Dutch confessions of his own time and conflicted with them in a number of highly controversial ways. As his critics repeatedly pointed out, he rejected divine providence (E 1ap), denied that God loves us (E 5p17c), and allowed no place for prayer or other kinds of intercession. In the eyes of many of his readers, a philosophy that so signally lacked the redemptive features of religious practice was nothing but a form of atheism, and although Spinoza firmly resisted this charge (Ep 43), it can hardly have surprised him. He insists on the religious value of biblical revelation: “Everyone, without exception, can obey. But only a very few (compared with the whole human race) acquire a habit of virtue from the guidance of reason alone. So, if we didn’t have this testimony of Scripture, we would doubt nearly everyone’s salvation” (TTP 15.45 |III: 188). But he cannot agree that obedience is essential to a religious way of life. On the contrary, he holds out the possibility of a more comprehensive and blissful union with God, grounded on philosophical understanding. For his critics, this is where true religion ends. For Spinoza, philosophy takes the requirement to love God and one’s neighbor to a higher level of perfection and marks the beginning of a free form of religious life.

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notes 1 References to the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP), to the Ethics, and to Spinoza’s Correspondence follow the conventions of this volume. Translations are those of Edwin Curley in CW I and CW II. 2 Letter 30 to Oldenburg. On accusations of atheism against Spinoza, see Lagrée 2004: 17–24; Israel 2010; Laerke 2010: 115; and Rosenthal 2012. Richard Mason claims that Spinoza was not concerned to rebut charges of atheism or skepticism. See Mason 1987: 22–23. But given Spinoza’s letter to Oldenburg and Letter 43 to Ostens (see note 3) this seems implausible. 3 Lambert Van Velthuysen, Letter 42 to Jacob Ostens. Van Velthuysen was an advocate of Cartesian philosophy and sympathetic to many of Spinoza’s philosophical views. Curley suggests that he attacked Spinoza so fiercely because he felt the need to distance himself from the controversial argument of the TTP. See CW II: 365. Spinoza adamantly rejects Velthuysen’s charge: “Has someone who maintains that God must be recognized as the highest good, and that he should be freely loved as such, cast off all religion? Is someone who holds that our greatest happiness consists only in this [love of God] irreligious? Or that the reward of virtue is virtue itself, whereas the punishment of folly and weakness is weakness itself? And finally, that each person ought to love his neighbor and obey the commands of the supreme power? Not only have I explicitly said these things. I have also proved them by the strongest arguments” (Letter 43 to Ostens, February 1671). 4 For versions of this stance, see Delahunty 1985:175; Deleuze 1992: 270; Althusser 1997: 9; Strauss 1997: 1–31; and Nadler 2010: 70. Jonathan Israel argues that Spinoza ushered in “a general trend in culture and ideas towards rationalization and secularization” (Israel 2001: 6–7.) 5 See Smith 1997: 21; Lagrée 2004: 214; Rosenthal 2010: 232; and Carlisle 2015 (especially 69–72). For the view that Spinoza is a theist, and not as Bennett puts it, “a mealy-mouthed or perhaps ironical atheist,” see, for example, Bennett 1984: 35; Matheron 1988: 142; and Della Rocca 2008: 285. 6 For the theological context in which Spinoza was writing, see Nadler 2011: 17–35; James 2012: 7–34. 7 See James 2012: 189–91. 8 The leading advocates of this view are Strauss (1952) and Yovel (1989). For a careful and to some extent sympathetic assessment of Strauss’s claims, see Curley 2015. 9 Verbeek 2003: 28–37; Garber: 2008: 166–87; James 2012: 216–24. For further discussion of Spinoza’s distinction between philosophy and theology, see Rosenthal 2001 and Zac 1965. 10 On Spinoza’s view of Christ, see also Letters 75 and 78 to Oldenburg, and Melamed 2012a: 140–51. 11 See note 4.

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10 Spinoza’s Contribution to Biblical Scholarship Edwin Curley

Historians of philosophy have found it hard to do justice to Spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship. Often they’ve ignored it. Philosophers attracted to Spinoza tend to be a secular lot, who lack the background necessary to evaluate Spinoza’s work in this area and often don’t consider it worth their while to acquire it. This is a mistake. Whatever we may think about the value of the Bible, it has had, and continues to have, a tremendous influence on our culture. Many regard it as the foundation of, and a guide to, our basic rights and obligations. To know how far it deserves this status, we need to understand it. And to understand it, we need to think carefully about the best way to read it. The long history of conflict over the meaning of the Bible, particularly acute since the Reformation, tells us this will not be easy. But things which are important are rarely easy. Historians of religious thought have often done better than historians of philosophy. They tend to care more about, and know more about, biblical religion. They often acknowledge that Spinoza played a major role in developing the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation.1 But sometimes they’ve tried to use this story of the origin of that method to discredit it: Spinoza had unorthodox religious views and a political agenda; so, the charge is, his purportedly scientific approach to the study of the Bible was not “value-free,” not objective, not truly scientific. Believers should be warned against being seduced by it.2 This is no less a mistake. Spinoza’s method for understanding the Bible would not have become the landmark in biblical scholarship that it is if its arguments depended on a secularist bias. One historian of philosophy who did not ignore Spinoza’s biblical scholarship was Richard Popkin, who wrote more about this topic than anyone else I know. But Popkin was preoccupied with Spinoza’s denial that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and with the question “how original was Spinoza in reaching that result?”3 He didn’t say much about the method that led Spinoza to this conclusion or about his other

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 355 conclusions. Undoubtedly, the authorship of the Pentateuch was, and remains, a significant issue. For Maimonides, it was a fundamental principle of Judaism that God gave us the Pentateuch through Moses, “who acted like a secretary taking dictation.”4 But the difficulties of that theory are pretty glaring. So, finding precursors for some version of Spinoza’s conclusion is not hard. His real importance for the discipline of biblical scholarship was that he developed a method of interpreting the Bible that subsequently set the norm for that field.

the method Spinoza sets out his method in chapter 7 of the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP), where he argues that we should attribute nothing to Scripture which we haven’t understood as clearly as possible from its history, where a history of Scripture requires first, a thorough understanding of the languages in which the books of Scripture were written, and which their authors normally spoke, including awareness of their ambiguities, idioms, and changes over time; second, a subject index, organizing what Scripture says so that we can easily compare different discussions of the same topic; and finally, an account of the authorship of each book – who wrote it? when? under what circumstances? for what audience? for what purpose? in what language? – and of its fate – how was it first received? who preserved it? how faithfully did they transmit the text? how many different readings of the text were there? who decided that it was a sacred text? and how did they make that decision?5

It’s not obvious why anyone would object to this method. Of course, not every reader of the Bible will approach the text with a good knowledge of biblical Hebrew and New Testament Greek. But presumably the first requirement will be satisfied if there is, in the community, a considerable group of careful and conscientious scholars who do know the relevant languages thoroughly and can produce and evaluate the translations on which the rest of us rely. Otherwise, the requirements of the method look perfectly reasonable. So, it’s not surprising that, as Kugel has put it, with this program Spinoza gave practitioners of biblical scholarship their “marching orders” for the next three centuries. (Kugel 2007: 31) How did this come about?

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Philology Spinoza did, of course, have precursors. The first requirement of his method applies a principle Renaissance humanists had found necessary in establishing the texts of classical literature, both pagan and sacred. Before the printing press was introduced into the West, around the mid-fifteenth century, books were preserved and circulated in manuscripts produced by copyists, a process which, as the works were copied and recopied, inevitably led to textual variations between different copies of the same work. Humanists like Valla and Erasmus undertook to locate the oldest and best manuscripts they could, to determine the history of the different versions of the text, and to establish the most accurate text possible, correcting errors in copying and in translation. Both aspects of this project required a thorough knowledge of the languages in which the works were first written and into which they were subsequently translated. Valla made a key contribution to this process when he undertook to compare Jerome’s then standard Latin translation of the New Testament with the Greek manuscripts available to him and make corrections in it based on his exceptional knowledge of Greek and Latin.6 Nowadays, this might seem an obvious thing to do, but Valla’s project was controversial. He did not publish his Annotations on the New Testament in his lifetime (1407–57), and they didn’t appear until 1505, when Erasmus read the manuscript and arranged for its publication. Over the next ten years, he extended Valla’s work, making a more thorough search for Greek manuscripts than Valla had, using them as a basis for his own edition of the Greek text, and making a new Latin translation based on that edition. Erasmus’s work illustrates the kind of controversy this scholarship could generate. He decided not to include in his Greek text a passage known as the Johannine comma, which occurred in a letter traditionally ascribed to one of the twelve apostles, John, the son of Zebedee: Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the son of God? This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only, but with the water and the blood. And the spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the truth. There are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth, the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree.7

The “comma” is the part of this passage I’ve italicized. Erasmus could not find that language in any of the Greek mss. available to him, so he

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 357 rejected it as a later interpolation. An interpolation, note, not merely a copying error. One result of this kind of textual scholarship was that many passages came to be regarded as not truly a part of the earliest mss.8 These days, Erasmus’s conclusion is widely accepted. But the words he omitted provided critical support for the orthodox doctrine of the trinity. So, it took a long and heated debate to reach that result. For some time, the church continued to regard Jerome’s translation as definitive, preferable to the Greek manuscripts on which it was based. The theory was that Jerome, who had to deal with Greek manuscripts which did not always agree, as well as varying earlier Latin translations, had been divinely inspired in making his judgments about what text to translate and how to translate it. In 1546, the Council of Trent ordained that the Old Latin Vulgate Edition, which, in use for so many hundred years, has been approved by the Church, be, in public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions, held as authentic, and that no one dare or presume under any pretext whatever to reject it.9

The church now takes a different view, and works which question the authenticity of the Johannine comma and other dubious passages10 can receive its nihil obstat and imprimatur, as Raymond Brown’s Introduction to the New Testament illustrates.

Making a Subject Index Perhaps the work which most nearly anticipated the index Spinoza called for was written by a rabbi in his own synagogue, Menasseh ben Israel. In 1632, Menasseh began publishing his Conciliator,11 which undertook to identify all the passages in Scripture which seem to contradict one another, and to explain why they are not actually contradictory. Menasseh assumed that because the Bible is “in the highest degree true, it cannot contain any text really contradictory of another.” (Conciliator, ix) And he went through each book of the Bible in order, with the plan of citing any passage apparently contradicted elsewhere in Scripture. When he encountered a prima facie contradiction, he would cite both passages and then describe the solutions previous Jewish commentators had offered to resolve the inconsistency. For example, in discussing the different accounts of the creation in Genesis, Menasseh noted the apparent inconsistency between the first chapter – where plants are created on the third day (1:9–13) and man not until the sixth day (1:24–31) – and the second – where man is created

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before any plants have been created (see 2:5–9). Then he surveyed what various commentators said about this and decided in favor of Rabbis Amé, Rashi, and Gersonides, against Rabbis Abarbanel and Maimonides.12 He did not always endorse a particular explanation. Sometimes he simply set out a number of alternatives, content to say that there are various ways of resolving the apparent inconsistencies and leaving it to the reader to decide which is most satisfactory.13 Menasseh’s work does not really give us a subject index. It’s not organized as a subject index would be. To compare the different discussions of immortality, for example, you can’t simply look up “immortality” in an alphabetical list of subjects discussed. But if you know that there are apparently mortalist passages in Ecclesiastes, looking at Menasseh’s discussion of that work will help you locate other relevant texts. By reorganizing these materials, you could begin compiling a subject index. This would not be a simple matter. Menasseh’s discussion of Ecclesiastes does not refer you to the prima facie mortalist passages in Job, and his discussion of Job does not mention them either. Moreover, because Menasseh’s project is to resolve apparent inconsistencies, a version of his work which simply reorganized his data would not lead you to passages on topics where Scripture never even seems to contradict itself, such as those prescribing the love of God and of one’s neighbor. That’s an issue Spinoza was much interested in, wanting, as he did, to contrast the topics where Scripture is indisputably consistent with those where its teaching seems to vary from one book or passage to another. Menasseh’s work will not help you there. But it might easily have suggested the need for something more systematic. In the TTP, Spinoza never makes explicit reference to Menasseh, but he frequently discusses passages Menasseh had discussed.14 And what is most important: in his preface he explicitly rejects the principle which guided Menasseh’s work. Most previous writers on Scripture, he complains, have presuppose[d], as a foundation for understanding scripture, and unearthing its true meaning, that it is everywhere true and divine. So what we ought to establish by understanding scripture, and subjecting it to a strict examination, and what we would be far better taught by scripture itself, which needs no human inventions, they maintain at the outset as a rule for the interpretation of scripture. (TTP Preface §19)

It’s not, as critics have sometimes suggested, that Spinoza assumes in advance that the Bible is a human document, like any other. Rather, he

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 359 argues that we must first understand the Bible before we can legitimately conclude that it has a non-human, divine origin. In particular, we cannot assume, in advance of a careful examination, that because Scripture is the word of God, all those passages in the Bible which seem to contradict one another must really be consistent.

Identifying Dates of Composition Another antecedent for Spinoza’s method is found in Valla’s unmasking of the notorious forgery known as The Donation of Constantine.15 This document purported to record Constantine’s donation to the pope of spiritual power over all Christian churches, wherever they might be, and of temporal power over the territory he controlled in the Western Roman Empire. The authenticity of the Donation had often been suspected, notably by Nicholas of Cusa,16 who attacked it on historical grounds: I have collected all the histories I could find, the acts of the emperors and Roman pontiffs, the histories by Jerome, who was very careful to include everything, those of Augustine, Ambrose, and the works of other learned men. I have reviewed the acts of the holy councils which took place after Nicaea, and I find no confirmation of what is said about that donation. (Catholic Concordance, 217)

Valla too used historical arguments of that kind. But his most decisive arguments were philological: whoever wrote the Donation did not write the kind of Latin we would expect from a fourth-century author. For example, he used the term “satrap” to refer to high officials in Rome, when this term did not come into use with that meaning until the eighth century;17 he used “Constantinople” to refer to the city we now call “Istanbul,” which at the time of the supposed donation was called “Byzantium,” and not called “Constantinople” until after Constantine’s death. So, the “thorough understanding of the language” we spoke of earlier has a historical dimension. It includes an awareness of changes in the language over time. This understanding can help us date the text by appealing to its internal features, without having to rely on dubious traditions.18 Spinoza did not need to learn this from Renaissance humanists like Valla. It was part of Ibn Ezra’s case against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, as he recognizes in TTP 8.10. (Issues about linguistic change also come up in TTP 9.44–52.)

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Throughout most of the Middle Ages, the Donation had been widely accepted as authentic. It was Valla who showed definitively, by a combination of historical and philological arguments, that it was a fake. For the most part, Valla’s exposure of the Donation did not deal directly with Scripture. But at one point, he does make a passing reference to Scripture: When I was a boy, I remember asking someone “Who wrote the Book of Job?” When he answered “Job himself,” I asked the further question: how, then, did he manage to mention his own death? This can be said of many other books, although it is not appropriate to discuss this here. (Donation, 113)

I would not suggest that Valla meant to hint that there might be problems about the authorship of the Pentateuch. But it’s surprising that he reports being told that Job was the author of the book of Job. The traditional view was that Moses wrote it (Talmud, Baba Bathra 14bff ).

Who Wrote the Pentateuch? The authorship of the Pentateuch, which Spinoza discusses in TTP chapter 8, is the first significant result of Spinoza’s application of his method. As I’ve noted, some of the problems about supposing that Moses wrote those first five books are pretty obvious. The last eight verses of Deuteronomy describe Moses’s death (Deuteronomy 34:5–12). So the Talmud, a major source for the traditional view, says only that Moses wrote everything in the Pentateuch except those last verses, which it assigns to Joshua (Baba Bathra 15a). Luther adopted a variant of this view, ascribing the entire final chapter to either Joshua or Eleazar.19 These are conservative solutions, which attribute to another author only a small portion of the text, and attribute that portion to an author roughly contemporary with Moses, who might have been an eyewitness to many of the events reported, and could at least have heard about them directly from Moses himself, who was presumably an eyewitness to much of the history recorded in those books.20 Popkin had no trouble showing that in Spinoza’s day many Christian commentators accepted such conservative solutions and did not think they presented any problem for believers.21 Unfortunately, conservative solutions don’t work. One of Spinoza’s contributions was to show this, in a way subsequent scholars

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 361 have generally found convincing.22 Immediately after reporting the death of Moses, Deuteronomy describes his burial, commenting that “no one knows his burial place to this day.” (Deuteronomy 34:6) Four verses later, it eulogizes him, saying “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses.” This language certainly suggests an author writing long after Moses’s death. To assign it to a contemporary, as conservative solutions do, is anachronistic. Clues like this don’t occur only in the last chapter of the Pentateuch. They’re scattered throughout the text in a way that creates problems for any simple theory of its composition. For example, in Genesis 12:6, the author, describing Abraham’s passage through Canaan, writes: “the Canaanite was then in the land.” Whoever wrote that verse was evidently writing at a time when the Canaanite was not in the land. But that could not be Moses or any contemporary, like Joshua. In their days the Canaanite was in the land. Those are problems of anachronism. There are also problems of point of view. Often “Moses” speaks of himself in the first person (Deuteronomy 2:2: “Then the Lord said to me . . .”). But he also often speaks of himself in the third person (Numbers 12:3: “Moses was very humble, more so than anyone else on . . . earth.”) If Moses was the author of both passages, why does he switch between the first person and the third? And how could a truly humble man say that he’s the humblest man on earth? Yet on the theory of Mosaic authorship, that’s precisely what Moses did.

La Peyrère One way of minimizing the significance of Spinoza’s results is to say that his conclusions were well-known before he wrote. Popkin’s favorite candidate for a precursor who anticipated Spinoza’s arguments was Isaac La Peyrère, a seventeenth-century French Millenarian best known for claiming that there were men before Adam. Now, it’s highly probable that Spinoza read La Peyrère; he had his book in his library;23 his modest means would not permit him to buy books he did not read. Moreover, La Peyrère did question Moses’s authorship of the Pentateuch on some of the same grounds Spinoza did. But it’s very doubtful that La Peyrère had any significant influence on Spinoza. For one thing, he lacked what Spinoza thought was an essential qualification for serious Old Testament scholarship: a knowledge of Hebrew. Secondly, his arguments against the Mosaic authorship were much more limited than

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Spinoza’s. And finally, as we’ll see, the evidence is that Spinoza had questions about these matters long before he could have known anything about La Peyrère’s work.

Ibn Ezra Spinoza himself credits the twelfth-century Jewish commentator Ibn Ezra with having been the first to note many of the problems about the Mosaic authorship (TTP 8.4). But Ibn Ezra only hinted at the problems. Spinoza thinks that’s because he realized Moses couldn’t have written the Pentateuch, but didn’t dare say so openly. If Maimonides correctly reported twelfth-century Jewish views about what was essential to Judaism, that wouldn’t be too surprising. Ibn Ezra’s style is allusive. Modern scholars still debate what he thought about the problems he raised. In a recent translation of his commentary on the Pentateuch, the editors write that he “no doubt wanted to make his novel approach to that work obscure to the uninformed and unintelligent,” but that he was not “an anti-traditionalist in disguise,” or “a forerunner of modern Biblical criticism.”24 Still, Spinoza clearly read Ibn Ezra as an anti-traditionalist. And the use he makes of him in chapter 8 of the TTP – spelling out problems Ibn Ezra had raised in a veiled way, giving him credit for being the first to call attention to these problems, and adding numerous examples of his own – suggests that Spinoza himself regarded Ibn Ezra as his true precursor. If we think Spinoza’s doubts about Scripture are likely to have begun well before his excommunication in 1656, probably as early as his teens25 (and so, long before he could have had any contact with La Peyrère), it would be hard to find a better candidate. This was Gebhardt’s view.26

Hobbes By mid-seventeenth century, Spinoza had precursors who were openly offering quite radical solutions. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes came as close to Spinoza as anyone, arguing that whoever wrote the account of Moses’s burial must have been writing “long after the death of Moses,” pointing out that the anachronisms are not only in the last chapter of Deuteronomy, noting the references in the Pentateuch to earlier histories of the Jewish people, now lost, and contending that only a relatively small part of the Pentateuch can reasonably be ascribed to Moses, namely, the “Volume of the Law” set out in Deuteronomy 11–27.27 La Peyrère, by contrast, seems to have thought that Moses wrote most of the

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 363 Pentateuch. He has no doubt, for example, that Moses gave an accurate account of the exodus from Egypt and of the laws delivered at Mt. Sinai.28 On these matters, Spinoza seems unlikely to have been influenced by Hobbes either. Leviathan was not published in a language he could read until 1667, by which time the excommunication was long past, and he’d been at work on the TTP for two years. Moreover, Spinoza makes a much stronger argument for his conclusions than Hobbes had. One way he does this is by offering many more examples of anachronism. The numbers matter, because the more anachronisms there are, and the more widely distributed they are in the text, the harder it will be to devise conservative hypotheses to explain them. He also raises problems Hobbes had not mentioned, like the problem of point of view. (La Peyrère did not mention this either.) But he reaches roughly the same conclusion about how much of the Pentateuch Moses actually wrote: mainly “the book of the second covenant,” which he identifies with Deuteronomy 11–26, but also the song attributed to Moses in Deuteronomy 32 (TTP 8.20–30). That makes Moses’s contribution to the Pentateuch a rather small part of the whole, much less than the high percentage conservative commentators insisted on.

The Ezran Hypothesis in Hobbes The most interesting point on which Hobbes and Spinoza agree is that the Hebrew Bible, in the form in which it has come down to us, is largely the work of Ezra, a priest in the postexilic period. The hypothesis that Ezra did much to shape the Hebrew Bible had been around for a long time.29 Both Hobbes and Spinoza embrace it, though in different forms, and on quite different grounds. For Hobbes, the Ezran hypothesis is the thesis that the entire Hebrew Bible, in its final form, was “set forth” by Ezra (Leviathan: 255–56). He bases this on a passage in 2 Esdras in which the author, who presents himself as the postexilic priest Ezra, petitions God to enable him to restore the Scriptures, which are supposed to have been lost. This “Ezra” claims to have said to God: Your law has been burned, and no one knows the things which have been done or will be done by you. If I have found favor with you, send the holy spirit into me, and I will write everything that has happened in the world from the beginning, the things that were written in your law, so that people may be able to find the path.30

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Second Esdras is an odd text, and not a very credible one. When Hobbes quotes it, he reminds us that it does not have the sanction of the church, which classifies it as apocryphal, not canonical. By “the church” here I presume Hobbes means the Church of England. That would entail that the church does not endorse the use of 2 Esdras to establish any doctrine, though it does encourage reading it “for example of life and instruction of manners.”31 Modern scholarship holds that 2 Esdras was written after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce, several centuries after the death of the historical Ezra.32 If that’s correct, the historical Ezra could not have been its author. Hence, the scare quotes around “Ezra” in referring to the author of this work. As the passage quoted above continues, “Ezra” reports that God granted his request, and that for forty days and forty nights, he dictated the Scriptures to five amanuenses. The amanuenses were able to stop for nourishment and sleep. “Ezra” stopped for neither. This process yielded ninety-four books, of which twenty-four were to be published and seventy reserved for restricted circulation “among the wise.” I find it hard to believe that Hobbes actually expects us to accept this tale. It posits a large body of divine revelation, not to be made known to all of God’s followers, an esoteric teaching, reserved to an elite. More crucially, it also assumes that we have our present Hebrew Bible only because of a miracle. On this account, all extant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible derive from copies made by Ezra’s amanuenses, dictated by “Ezra” under divine inspiration, in a superhuman feat of endurance. Elsewhere in Leviathan (298–300) Hobbes is skeptical about miracles, cautioning us that we’re easily deceived by false miracle stories. And in the passage quoted, he does not endorse the Ezran hypothesis unconditionally. He writes that “if the books of Apocrypha. . . may in this point be credited, the Scripture was set forth in the form we have it in by Ezra” (255). As Malcolm has shown, Hobbes’s theory of Ezra’s authorship of the Hebrew Bible became a common feature of skeptical attacks on religion in the Enlightenment.

The Ezran Hypothesis in Spinoza Spinoza’s version of the Ezran hypothesis (TTP 8.42–58) is more limited, and based on an argument modern scholars might more easily regard as a serious contribution to their discipline. He does not make any appeal to 2 Esdras, a work he dismisses as containing “legends added by some trifler.”33 And he doesn’t claim that his theory holds for every book in

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 365 the Hebrew Bible. Instead, he applies it only to the series of books beginning with the Pentateuch and extending through the next several books, to the end of 2 Kings, a sequence which purports to tell the history of the people of Israel from the creation down to the Babylonian captivity. I follow Noel Freedman in calling this sequence of texts “the Primary History” of the people of Israel.34 None of these books, Spinoza argues, could have been written by the author to whom tradition ascribed it. “Tradition” here means the account given in Tractate Baba Bathra of the Talmud, 14b–15b. So, on Spinoza’s view, not only did Moses not write the Pentateuch, Joshua did not write Joshua, Samuel did not write either the book of Judges or the books bearing his name, and Jeremiah did not write 1 or 2 Kings. In each case, the reasons for denying these traditional ascriptions are similar to those we’ve already discussed, though Spinoza deals with them much more briefly. All these books were “written,” he thinks, by Ezra. What’s the evidence for Ezra’s authorship? And what does “written” mean here? Spinoza’s argument is essentially a literary one. First, if we pay careful attention to the way the books are written, we’ll see that they had a single author, trying to tell a coherent story, the history of the Jews, beginning with their origin in the creation and ending with the first destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity. (TTP 8.42–47) One sign of this is the way the books are linked together. As soon as the author has stopped narrating the life of Moses, he passes to the history of Joshua, using these words: “And it came to pass, after Moses, the servant of God, died, that God said to Joshua” (Joshua 1:1). Similar transitional formulae are used to tie the other books together. What’s more, the author evidently wants to tell his story in chronological order. And most crucially, there’s a common theme to the narrative: the history of the Jewish people is the history of God’s providential dealings with them. Moses promulgated laws, and made certain predictions about what God would do for (or to) the people of Israel, depending on whether or not they obeyed his laws. If they obeyed, God would see that they flourished. If they disobeyed, he would punish them. The subsequent history of the Jewish people is the story of how these predictions were fulfilled. When the Jews were obedient, they prospered. When they were disobedient, they did not. The author ignores things which don’t contribute to his case for that perspective, or refers us to other historians for an account of them.35

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So far, we have an argument for a single author. But why Ezra? First, the author carries the story into the period of the Babylonian captivity; the last event the Primary History mentions is Jehoiachin’s release from prison in the thirty-seventh year of the exile. So, if there was only one author, it can’t be anyone earlier than that (TTP 8.48). Spinoza is apparently mistaken about Ezra’s dates, taking him to have flourished in the time right after the return from Babylon, in the second half of the sixth century bce (TTP 10.1). Modern scholarship makes Ezra a contemporary of Artaxerxes I, who reigned in the mid-fifth century (ABD II: 726–27). But whatever Ezra’s dates were, the single-author theory, combined with the scope of the history recorded in these books, limits the candidates for its author to people who lived during the captivity or later. Second, Scripture describes Ezra as someone who zealously studied God’s law, became skilled in it, honored it, and tried to teach it to the people of his time, amplifying it with explanations, to make it more intelligible to them. (See Ezra 7:1–10 and Nehemiah 8:1–8.) Spinoza can cite canonical scripture in favor of these propositions. He does not need to appeal to the Apocrypha. Furthermore, Scripture does not mention anyone else in the postexilic period who possessed all these qualifications: a zealous student of the law, who tried to explain it to the people, amplifying it as necessary. Spinoza does not advance his claim about Ezra’s authorship of these books as something we can be certain of. He says he will assume that Ezra was their author “until someone establishes another writer with greater certainty” (TTP 9.2). But if Ezra was not the author, Spinoza’s arguments at least make it probable that the author was someone like Ezra, particularly as regards the late date at which he was writing. Perhaps that’s enough for us to know.

What, Exactly, Did Ezra Do? What does Spinoza mean when he says that Ezra was the writer of these books? So far, I’ve used the words “author” and “writer” as if they were synonyms. But Spinoza makes a distinction between the Latin terms I translate this way. When he’s discussing Moses, he frames the question the way the literature typically does, as when he writes that “no one has any basis for saying that Moses was the author [autor] of the Pentateuch” and that it’s completely contrary to reason to say that (TTP 8.30). But when he’s advancing his hypothesis about Ezra, he uses the term “scriptor”: Ezra was, as I would put it, the writer of those books (e.g., at TTP 9.2).

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 367 I take it that Spinoza uses autor to refer to someone who is the originator of a work, whereas scriptor is a more general term, which might refer to a work’s originator, but might also refer to an editor who reworks materials originally written by one or more other people. Spinoza really thinks of Ezra’s role as more akin to that of an editor than to that of an author in the strict sense. He did not just make up the stories he told, as some polemicists against Judaism and Christianity inferred from 2 Esdras. (See Malcolm 2002: 400–402.) He had at his disposal manuscripts of the works of earlier historians, works now lost, which he collected and organized as best he could, sometimes adding material of his own to explain things which needed explanation and to make the overall story more coherent. (TTP 8.56–58 and TTP 9.1–3) It was not news that the writers of our present Scriptures knew, and used, the works of earlier historians now lost. Our present Scriptures often mention these works, as when 1 Kings sends the reader to the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah for information about the life of Rehoboam, which the author of Kings chooses not to get into (1 Kings 14:29). Both Hobbes and La Peyrère had noted this. But neither of them used this information the way Spinoza does, to give us insight into the way Ezra worked when he constructed the Primary History. Spinoza does not give Ezra high marks as an editor. In TTP 9.2, he writes that Ezra did not put the narratives contained in these books in final form, and did not do anything but collect the narratives from different writers, sometimes just copying them, and that he left them to posterity without having examined or ordered them.

What’s most interesting about this passage is that in supporting his criticism of Ezra, Spinoza is led to discuss numerous passages in which the Hebrew Bible, as it has come down to us, contains apparent inconsistencies. He takes this as evidence that however much Ezra may have wanted to tell a coherent story, he didn’t succeed in doing so. He speculates that this was because Ezra did not live long enough to complete the daunting project he had embarked on.

Doublets One important kind of evidence for this theory involves what modern scholars call “doublets,” that is, repetitions of similar passages, which differ in ways scholars take to show that the passages originated in

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different sources. (See Speiser, Genesis, xxxi–xxxiii.) One example, mentioned above, would be the alternate versions of the creation story in Genesis 1–2:4a and Genesis 2:4b–3:24. Another would be the various versions of a story in which a patriarch visits a foreign country and pretends to the king that his wife is his sister, thinking that his wife’s beauty would be a danger to a husband, but not to a brother. This is a triplet, really, since there are three versions of such a story in Genesis.36 Spinoza’s example involves David’s entry into Saul’s court in 1 Samuel (TTP 9.15). In one version, David went to Saul because Saul had called him, on the advice of his servants, when he wanted a skilled musician to play the lyre for him (1 Samuel 16:17–21). In the other, David’s father, Jesse, initiated the events, when he sent David to attend his brothers, soldiers in Saul’s camp; David became known to Saul only when he asked questions which suggested a willingness to fight Goliath; and he was taken into the court as a result of his victory in that battle. In the first story, David is said to be a warrior, a man of valor. In the second, he’s just a boy, who has no experience in battle (1 Samuel 17:17–18, 31–33, 38–39; 18:1–2). Inconsistencies of this sort occur, Spinoza says, because the editor has collected stories from different historians, “piling them up indiscriminately, so that afterwards they might be more easily examined and reduced to order” (TTP 9.13). Sometimes Spinoza gives the doublets a different treatment. The fact that there are two different versions of the Decalogue evidently made an early and deep impression on him. He brings the issue up first in TTP chapter 1, where he writes: In the opinion of certain Jews, God did not utter the words of the Decalogue. They think, rather, that the Israelites only heard a sound, which did not utter any words, and that while this sound lasted, they perceived the Laws of the Decalogue with a pure mind. At one time I too was inclined to think this, because I saw that the words of the Decalogue in Exodus are not the same as those of the Decalogue in Deuteronomy. Since God spoke only once, it seems to follow from this [variation] that the Decalogue does not intend to teach God’s very words, but only their meaning. (TTP 1.13)

Spinoza does not say at this point what the differences between the two versions were, and goes on to give reasons for rejecting his earlier opinion. But the problem had apparently bothered him long before he began to write the TTP. It’s easy to understand why this might be so, since the Decalogue would have figured prominently in any young Jewish

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 369 student’s introduction to the Torah. It’s also a problem Menasseh discussed in his Conciliator. Spinoza returns to the Decalogue at the end of chapter 8, where he enumerates three differences between the two versions (TTP 8.55). In Deuteronomy 5:21, the tenth commandment orders the prohibitions differently, commanding the Israelites first not to covet their neighbor’s wife and only then not to covet his house and other possessions, altering the order of Exodus 20:17. This shows, at least, that we’re not dealing in these passages with a stenographic transcript of God’s words. More significant are the differences concerning the commandment to keep the sabbath. In Deuteronomy, not only is this commandment stated more fully, with more emphasis on the application to slaves, but the fundamental reason for observing it is different: not because it was on the seventh day that God rested after creating the world (as in Exodus 20:8–11), but to commemorate his bringing his people out of bondage in the land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:12–15). Spinoza does not explain these differences as he had those in the story of David and Saul. He does not present them as arising simply because Ezra reproduced different sources, without reconciling the inconsistencies between them. Instead, he postulates that Ezra was responsible for the variations in Deuteronomy, which he introduced as he was trying to explain the law of God to the men of his time (TTP 8.56) On this theory, Ezra gives a reason for this commandment which is more consistent with his overall theological perspective, emphasizing God’s providential relation with the people of Israel. Spinoza thinks this was probably because Deuteronomy was the first book Ezra wrote. After the return from exile, the people urgently needed to have the law explained to them. Only then did Ezra undertake the task of writing a complete history of the Hebrew people, from the creation to Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem in the early sixth century.

Chronological Issues For many, the truth of Scripture is a fundamental principle. So, it may be helpful to add another kind of inconsistency Spinoza considers. Much of TTP chapter 9 is devoted to problems of chronology. His most detailed example – involving the statement in 1 Kings 6:1 that 480 years passed between the Exodus and Solomon’s construction of the temple – is too complicated to discuss here.37 But the text offers another, more manageable example.

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The last fourteen chapters of Genesis tell the story of Joseph and his brothers. Genesis 37 reports how the brothers sold Joseph to the Egyptians. Genesis 38 interrupts the story of Joseph with a story about Judah and Tamar, in which Judah first marries a Canaanite woman, called “Shua’s daughter,” then arranges for his first son by Shua’s daughter to marry Tamar. When that son dies without having fathered a child, he arranges for his second son to marry Tamar. After that son also dies without children, Judah promises Tamar that when his third son grows up, he will fulfill the brother-in-law’s duty and marry her. But Tamar does not trust his promise. When she sees that the third son has grown up but still has not been given to her in marriage, she disguises herself as a prostitute and has intercourse with Judah. This produces two children, one of whom has fathered two children by the time Judah moves to Egypt. Genesis 38 does not tell that part of Judah’s story. It ends with the birth of Judah’s children by Tamar. Then Genesis 39 goes back to the story of Joseph in Egypt. The problem is that all these things are supposed to have happened within a definite – and all too short – time period: between the time Joseph was sold into bondage and the time he was reunited with his father in Egypt. Genesis 38 begins the story of Judah and Tamar by saying, “It happened at that time that Judah went down from his brothers.” Our normal narrative expectations would dictate that the italicized phrase refers to the time at issue in the immediately preceding verse, which describes Joseph’s being sold into bondage. When Jacob moves his family to Egypt in Genesis 46, to be reunited with Joseph, Judah is part of this move, as are his surviving son by Shua’s daughter, the children he had by Tamar, and the two grandchildren he had through one of Tamar’s sons. But according to calculations generally agreed on, only twenty-two years passed between the time Joseph was sold into bondage and the time Jacob moved to Egypt.38 This raises an awkward question: How could all the things related in Genesis 38 have happened in twenty-two years? How could Judah have produced three sons by Shua’s daughter, all of whom grew up to be of marriageable age, and then two sons by Tamar, one of whom became old enough to have children, in twenty-two years? The rabbis had worried about this as early as Seder Olam, a second-century rabbinic work on biblical chronology, which squeezed all these events into that twenty-two-year period by assuming that each of Judah’s sons married at the age of seven.39 Later commentators found this implausible. For example, Ibn Ezra rejected Seder Olam’s theory, arguing that the earliest

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 371 possible age of procreation (and hence, of marriage) is twelve. His solution is that the phrase “at that time” in Genesis 38:1 does not refer to the time in the preceding verse – when Joseph was sold – but to an earlier time. He doesn’t say when that earlier time was, or explain how Judah’s absence in Canaan (assumed in Genesis 38) would have been consistent with the role he is supposed to have played in the sale of Joseph in Genesis 37.40 To some extent, Spinoza accepts this solution. Like Ibn Ezra, he doesn’t think “at that time” can refer to the time when Joseph was sold into bondage. But he gives more weight than Ibn Ezra did to our normal narrative expectations. He hypothesizes that the narrative of Genesis 38 has been taken from another book and inserted into the Joseph narrative, without having been properly integrated into its new surroundings. Since not all these events can be related to the time in question in Genesis, they must be related to another time, treated just previously in another book. Ezra, then, merely copied this story from that book, and inserted it in Genesis, without making it fit that narrative (TTP 9.11).

The Rabbis Are Crazy Spinoza is critical of Ezra’s editorial work, but he reserves his most caustic comments for the rabbis who have tried to persuade us that the apparent inconsistencies in the text are not real: If anyone wants to compare the narratives of the book of Chronicles with those of the books of Kings, he will find numerous similar discrepancies, which I don’t need to recount here. Much less do I need to discuss the devices authors use to try to reconcile these accounts. The rabbis are completely crazy. The commentators I’ve read indulge in idle fancies and hypotheses, and in the end, completely corrupt the language itself. (TTP 9.28)

For example, 2 Chronicles 22:2, says that Ahaziah was forty-two when he began to reign. This conflicts with the claim in 2 Kings 8:26 that he was twenty-two at that point. This was one of the nearly two dozen discrepancies between the narratives of Kings and Chronicles which Menasseh discussed in his Conciliator (II: 94–95). Menasseh mentions two ways commentators tried to resolve this conflict, without expressing a preference for either one. Spinoza discusses only one, Gersonides’s proposal

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that the author of Chronicles was calculating Ahaziah’s age from the reign of Omri, not from Ahaziah’s birth. Spinoza comments that If they could show that this was what the author of the books of Chronicles meant, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that he didn’t know how to express himself. And they invent many other things of this kind. If these things were true, I would say, without qualification, that the ancient Hebrews were completely ignorant both of their own language and of how to tell a story in an orderly way. (TTP 9.29)

Gersonides’s hypothesis flouts the way we normally calculate someone’s age. If this sort of explanation is permissible, then we are playing a game that has no rules. As Spinoza puts it, “there will be no principle or standard for interpreting Scripture. We can invent anything we like.” Spinoza not only denies the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, he also challenges the traditional view of the authorship of all the other books which make up Freedman’s “Primary History” of the people of Israel, and he has a plausible theory about who did write them. He doesn’t claim to be certain of that writer’s identity, but he can at least tell us approximately when he lived, how he proceeded in constructing his history, and what his theological perspective on the history of Israel was. Developing this theory, based on internal evidence in the text itself, occupies most of chapters 8 and 9 of the TTP. Here we see Spinoza operating in ways that have no parallel in La Peyrère or Hobbes, using, not only arguments from anachronism, but also the problems of doublets and chronology, which demonstrate his knowledge of traditional Jewish biblical commentary, a tradition closed to La Peyrère and Hobbes by their lack of Hebrew.

Implications of Spinoza’s Theory Why might these questions of authorship matter? If Spinoza is right, we can’t assume that the books making up the Primary History provide a reliable account of that history. In their present form, they are essentially the work of Ezra (or some other editor writing in the postexilic period), working with chronicles written centuries earlier, which were not consistent with one another, have not survived to be examined, and which, for all we know, may themselves have been second- or thirdhand accounts. Spinoza’s theory tends to diminish the authority of the Hebrew Bible as a historical work. It may be correct in what it says happened; but its saying that is not much reason to believe that things happened that way.

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 373 Spinoza does not make these skeptical implications of his work explicit. He leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions. But he doesn’t conclude, and wouldn’t want us to think, that the Bible is without value. It may be unreliable as a work of history.41 But it does contain important moral teachings. Spinoza would insist particularly on its teaching that we must pursue justice and seek to love our neighbors. (See, e.g., TTP 13.24.) I don’t think Spinoza wanted to endorse all the moral teachings of Scripture. In TTP chapter 17, he quotes Ezekiel’s claim that God said, “I gave them statutes which were not good, and laws they could not live by” (TTP 17.96). In context (Ezekiel 20:25–26), Ezekiel seems to be referring to laws requiring the sacrifice of the firstborn (e.g., Exodus 22:28–29). But Spinoza might well think other commands were also problematic, such as those that require the killing of witches (Exodus 22:18), or the extermination of the Canaanites (Deuteronomy 7:1–2). In any case, whatever laws Spinoza thinks the people could not live by, this much is clear: he doesn’t wish to endorse every command God is represented in Scripture as having given. If we are generally skeptical about the accuracy of Scripture as a historical record of God’s dealings with his people, then we are not bound to accept as a genuine divine command everything Scripture represents as a divine command. Spinoza’s hermeneutics permit us to pick and choose, relying on our own judgment about what a just God might command. This has a cost: in obeying Biblical commands, we may not be able to justify our actions by saying that we are merely obeying the will of God. But considering the use sometimes made of such appeals, this might be a price worth paying.

Do We Need a History of the New Testament? At the end of TTP chapter 10, concluding his account of the composition of the Hebrew Bible, Spinoza writes: Now it would be time to examine the books of the New Testament in the same way. But because I’m told that this has been done by men very learned both in the sciences and especially in the languages, because I do not have such an exact knowledge of the Greek language that I might dare to undertake this task, and finally, because we lack the original texts of the books written in the Hebrew language, I prefer to refrain from this difficult business. (TTP 10.48)

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You don’t need to be an uncritical admirer of Leo Strauss to find this suspicious.42 Spinoza says he’s been told that men learned in the sciences and the relevant languages have already examined the New Testament in the way his method requires. That’s vague, and apparently based on hearsay, a kind of evidence not generally reliable. Who are these men? So far, I haven’t been able to identify any plausible candidates. Of course, Spinoza had precursors in his biblical scholarship, as we’ve seen. But although these precursors may have anticipated one or another feature of the method, none of them, so far as I’ve been able to determine, showed a grasp of the whole method and applied it to the New Testament. The other reasons Spinoza offers for not pursuing a critical history of the New Testament are also not compelling. He says he doesn’t know Greek well enough to undertake the task, and then adds that he refrains from it because “we lack the original texts of the books written in the Hebrew language.” The first of these reasons might pass muster. Although Spinoza evidently knows enough Greek to make intelligent use of the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament when he thinks it can shed light on the Hebrew, and to challenge existing translations of the Greek New Testament into Latin,43 the example of Valla reminds us that the level of linguistic competence required for a truly critical history of the text is quite high. But the third reason he offers is puzzling. How many of the New Testament books does he think were actually written in Hebrew anyway? The traditional answer, reported in TTP 7.64, was that there were just two: the gospel of Matthew and the epistle to the Hebrews.44 But if those are the only works problematic for this reason, that would be a weak justification for not critically examining the New Testament. The New Testament contains twenty-seven books. If only two are translations of a lost Hebrew original, that still leaves twenty-five books whose history might be examined without worrying about the lack of the original text. Moreover, if the lack of the original text is a serious problem for Spinoza, why was it not a serious problem for those predecessors who are supposed to have already given us a critical history of the New Testament?

What Actually Is the Original Language? In fact, it seems that Spinoza thinks most of the books of the New Testament were written, not in Hebrew exactly, but in a related

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 375 language nowadays usually called Aramaic. We see this in a note Spinoza added to the TTP in the last months of his life. There are thirty-nine such notes, known from several different sources. They did not appear in any edition of the TTP published in Spinoza’s lifetime. But most were published shortly after his death, in St. Glain’s French translation of the TTP.45 The note in question deals with a passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Spinoza considers two possible translations of that letter into Latin and prefers one to the other because, he says, it agrees best with the Syriac text. For the Syriac translation – if indeed it is a translation, which is doubtful, since we don’t know the translator, or when [the supposed translation] was circulated [vulgata], and the native language of the Apostles was Syriac – renders this text of Paul thus etc.46

I’m not interested here in the question of how to translate Paul’s letter. What I am interested in is the fact that Spinoza gives heavy weight to the “Syriac” text in evaluating the Latin translations. To see why this matters, we need to clear up some mistakes Spinoza makes.47 First, the language of the “Syriac” translation to which Spinoza refers is a dialect of Aramaic, a Semitic language that comes in many variations. The native language of the apostles (and of most Jews in first century Palestine) was also a dialect of Aramaic. So far, so good. But the Aramaic of first-century Palestine was a different dialect of Aramaic than the one used in the Syriac translation. If Spinoza thinks the Syriac translation may give us what the apostles actually wrote, he’s wrong. This would be an understandable mistake to make. When the first printed edition of the Syriac New Testament was published in 1555, many scholars thought it might give us the original of Matthew and Hebrews. Some also argued that Syriac was the language spoken by Jesus. This seems to have been one motivation for Tremellius’s translation of the Syriac New Testament into Latin in 1569.48 Scholars now judge that this version of the New Testament was an early fifth century translation from the Greek into Syriac, not the original text of the New Testament. But for a long time, there was confusion about how to classify the various languages involved in the transmission of the New Testament. When the second-century bishop Papias49 said that Matthew had originally written his gospel in Hebrew, the language he was attributing to Matthew was almost certainly the Palestinian dialect of

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Aramaic, not what we would now call Hebrew. What Papias evidently meant was that Matthew had originally written his gospel in the language spoken by Hebrews in first-century Palestine.50 By the first century, that language was no longer Hebrew, but Aramaic. Biblical Hebrew was so little understood in first-century Palestine that observant Jews needed a translation of the Torah into Aramaic to understand the requirements of the law. This led to the creation of the Targums, Aramaic paraphrases of the ancient Hebrew text, which came to play an important role in medieval Jewish liturgy and biblical studies and were often printed in the polyglot Bibles which began to appear in the sixteenth century.51 Spinoza’s knowledge of these Targums and their history may have helped him to see that the language of the Apostles must have been a dialect of Aramaic. A second mistake: Paul was a Jew of the diaspora, raised in the Jewish community in Tarsus, in what is now southern Turkey, not a native of Palestine.52 It’s likely that he knew Palestinian Aramaic, but very unlikely that he would have written his epistle to the Romans in that language. He wrote good Greek; quoted the Hebrew Scriptures from the Septuagint translation; and, when he visited Athens, addressed the Athenians in Greek. That was a language in which he felt perfectly at home, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, and the language he would surely have used in writing to the Christian community in Rome. So, Spinoza was very probably wrong in thinking that Paul might have written his letter to the Romans in Aramaic. But he does grasp some important truths: the native language of the Palestinian apostles – the twelve apostles who, unlike Paul, had personally experienced the ministry of Jesus – was not Greek, but Aramaic. What’s more, Aramaic was the native language of Jesus and of most of his audience. So Aramaic was the language Jesus would have used in his preaching.53

Why This Matters These facts have significant implications. At a minimum, they imply that whenever English Bibles report what are supposed to be the words of Jesus, what they give us is an English translation of a Greek translation of a lost Aramaic original. Not necessarily an Aramaic original text. The authors of the gospels may have been relying on an oral tradition when they reported what Jesus said. But whether they were relying on a text or an oral tradition, at the origin were utterances in Aramaic. So even if the gospel authors could rely on the testimony of eyewitnesses for their

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 377 knowledge of what Jesus said – even if they themselves were eyewitnesses54 – at some point in the composition of the New Testament text there is a translation from Aramaic into Greek, a translation whose accuracy we cannot now verify in the way we might ordinarily verify the accuracy of a translation, since we have no copy of the original text being translated. This fact would seem to warrant a certain caution in drawing conclusions about what Jesus said from what the gospels report him as having said. Of course, we already have the normal uncertainties which arise whenever we take one person’s word for what another person said. Is he giving us, to the best of his recollection, the most accurate account he can of what the person said? Did he understand what was said when it was said? How good is his memory of what was said? Did he make a contemporary record of it? Is his account influenced by what others who were also present told him about what they remember having heard, or by his beliefs about what the person is likely to have said in those circumstances? But in addition to these uncertainties, we now have another, arising from the need at some point for a translation by an unknown person, whose competence in the relevant languages we cannot evaluate.

Hints of These Problems So far, I’ve been discussing a brief note that did not appear in any version of the TTP published in Spinoza’s lifetime, but was added shortly before his death, and first published after his death. Spinoza may not have intended it for publication in his lifetime. Nevertheless, there are, in versions of the TTP published in his lifetime, passages which hint at the conclusions I’ve drawn from this note. For example, in explaining the history of Scripture he calls for, Spinoza writes that it must contain the nature and properties of the language in which the books of Scripture were written, and which their authors were accustomed to speak. In this way we’ll be able to find out all the meanings each utterance can admit in ordinary conversational usage. And because all the writers, both of the Old Testament and the New, were Hebrews, it’s certain that the history of the Hebrew language is necessary above all others, not only for understanding the books of the Old Testament, which were written in this language, but also for understanding those of the New. For though they’ve been made

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378 edwin curley available in other languages, nevertheless they’re expressed in a Hebrew manner. (TTP 7.15)

Note that whereas Spinoza says that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, he does not say that the New Testament was written in a different language; he says that it was made available (vulgati) in another language. I take it that Spinoza’s insistence on regarding the New Testament as a document which gives evidence of Jewish ways of thinking comes from his awareness that the Greek of that work contains many Hebraisms (or Aramaisms), ways of speaking natural in one of these Semitic languages, but not natural in Greek. (Note that this judgment requires a fair degree of sophistication about the relevant languages.) Spinoza mentions no examples, but readers familiar with Tremellius’s translation of the Syriac text would have found its annotation a source of many examples.55 Spinoza’s quotational practices also suggest his attitude toward the Greek text. When he quotes the Hebrew Bible, he normally gives the Hebrew text first, and then makes his own translation into Latin. When he quotes the New Testament, he never gives the Greek, and the text he quotes is usually Tremellius’s Latin translation of the Syriac text. He calls our attention to his use of Tremellius’s translation at the end of TTP chapter 4, when he quotes a passage from Romans in which Tremellius’s version differs from the Vulgate. He never says why he prefers that translation; nor does he explain why that is the translation he routinely uses. But his quotational practices, in conjunction with his emphasis on the importance of knowing the original language of the text, naturally invite the question: Why this difference in his practices regarding the two testaments?

Debates about the Original Language Though Spinoza represents the claim that Matthew originally wrote his gospel in “Hebrew” as “the common opinion,” this view had at one point been controversial.56 In the Reformation, some argued that if the original had been in Hebrew, the church would have been careful to preserve it. But none of the church fathers claims to have ever seen it. They also argued that Matthew must have written in Greek, because an audience of Palestinian Jews would not have understood a work written in Hebrew (as if knowledge of Greek was so widespread in first-century

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 379 Palestine that a work in Greek would have had a wider audience). Although this view had prominent Catholic defenders, like Erasmus and Cajetan, most of its advocates were Protestant (most notably, Calvin). Richard Simon argued that Papias’s testimony was not contradicted by any of the church fathers; that when Papias said the gospel was written in “Hebrew,” he didn’t mean Biblical Hebrew, but Palestinian Aramaic; and that when Jerome reports having consulted “the Gospel of the Nazarenes” in preparing his Vulgate translation, what he’s referring to is the lost “Hebrew” original of Matthew. The arguments for a Greek original of Matthew are so weak, Simon thinks, that they should embarrass the defenders of that view. The real reason they defend it is that they’re afraid: if people came to think that the original version of Matthew has been lost, that would lead people to conclude that we don’t have “the true gospel” of Matthew. In the case of Protestants, committed to regarding Scripture as the ultimate authority in deciding religious disputes, it would be embarrassing to admit that our record of the teachings of Jesus is based even in part on a translation of a lost original. Imagine the fuss Spinoza would have stirred up had he said, publicly, that we don’t have the originals of any of the gospels, at least insofar as they claim to report what Jesus said.

Skeptical Implications of the Method Earlier I inferred from Annotation XXVI that if the Greek text of the New Testament was a translation of a lost Aramaic original, that might properly encourage skepticism about our ability to know exactly what the teachings of Jesus were. In versions of the TTP published in his lifetime, Spinoza does not go quite so far as that. But he does hint at such a result. Toward the end of TTP chapter 7, he considers various objections that he thinks people might make to his method of interpreting Scripture: There’s one final difficulty in interpreting certain books of Scripture according to this method: we don’t possess them in the same language in which they were first written. For according to the common opinion, the Gospel of Matthew, and no doubt also the Letter to the Hebrews, were written in Hebrew. Nevertheless, the [original texts] are not extant. (TTP 7.64)

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Now if Spinoza thinks the Syriac version of the New Testament gives us the original text of the books it includes, he has an easy solution to this objection, as regards the New Testament. He could say that we do possess the texts of the New Testament in the language in which they were first written. That language is just not the Greek it has generally been thought to be. So, his method does not really face this difficulty. But Spinoza does not take that way out. Perhaps he regards it as uncertain just what the original language of the New Testament was. Or perhaps he doesn’t mind conceding the objection. At any rate, he accepts the common opinion, at least for the sake of the argument – that only Matthew and Hebrews were written originally in Hebrew, the rest having been written in Greek – and he accepts the skeptical implications his methodology leads to on that theory. So, in response to the objection quoted above he writes: I consider [the objections which might be raised against this method] so great that I don’t hesitate to say this: in a great many places either we don’t know what Scripture really means or we’re just guessing about its meaning without any certainty. (TTP 7.65)

And although this concession might be very provocative, it would probably not be quite as troubling to a Christian who thought the lack of an original text raised problems only for two books in the New Testament (one of the four gospels and one of the twenty-one epistles) as it would to a Christian who thought it raised problems for all four gospels and any epistles written by those Palestinian apostles who were witnesses to the ministry of Jesus.

Did the Apostles Speak as Prophets? I turn now to two passages in the TTP that come as close to a critical history of the New Testament as anything you find explicitly developed in that work. The first is TTP chapter 11, where Spinoza takes up the question whether the apostles wrote their letters as prophets or as teachers. Spinoza begins by saying that no one familiar with the New Testament can doubt that the apostles were prophets (TTP 11.1). The only question is whether they were acting as prophets when they wrote their letters, or whether they wrote their letters merely as teachers. The argument is fairly straightforward: if we compare the characteristic style of the prophets with that of the apostles in their letters, we find them to be quite different. The prophets don’t typically reason with their

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 381 audience; they make authoritative judgments. They claim to speak on behalf of God. “Thus says the Lord” is the typical way a prophet begins his prophecy. The apostles, on the other hand, don’t speak that way. They reason with the people they’re writing to. Sometimes they express uncertainty about what they’re saying. They may apologize for their boldness. What they don’t do is claim to speak with authority.57 I say this argument is “fairly straightforward.” It does raise certain questions. Although what Spinoza says about the style of the prophets may be generally true, it’s not true that the apostles never spoke with prophetic authority.58 More seriously, all of Spinoza’s examples of apostolic style come from letters attributed to Paul. He gives no examples from other New Testament letter writers. So, what he says is the characteristic style of the apostles may just be the characteristic style of Paul. I make no attempt to decide that now. Even if the style Spinoza attributes to all the apostles is just the style of Paul, that’s a significant point. The main purpose of TTP chapter 11 seems to be to weaken the authority of the apostles by arguing that they were just trying to work out the truth using their own human capacities, not acting as spokesmen for God. If it succeeds only in weakening the authority of Paul, that would not be a trivial result. The “Pauline” letters – that is, the letters written either by Paul or by someone claiming to be Paul59 – are undoubtedly the ones which exercised the greatest influence on the subsequent development of Christianity and the churches which gave it institutional form.

Disagreements among the Apostles The most interesting claim in this chapter, though, comes at the end, where Spinoza discusses the conflict between Paul and James over the path to salvation. The text is important enough to quote rather fully: If we survey these letters attentively, we’ll see that in religion itself the Apostles indeed agree. But they differ greatly in the foundations. For to strengthen men in religion, and show them that salvation depends only on God’s grace, Paul taught that no one can boast of his works, but only of his faith, and that no one is justified by works (see Romans 3:27–28) . . .. James, on the other hand, taught . . . that man is justified by works and not by faith alone (see James 2:24). Setting aside all Paul’s arguments, he expressed succinctly the whole doctrine of religion. (TTP 11.21)

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This disagreement about the foundations of religion, Spinoza says, is the source of the many disputes and schisms which have tormented the church incessantly from the time of the Apostles to the present day, and will surely continue to torment it forever, until at last someday religion is separated from philosophic speculations and reduced to those very few and very simple doctrines Christ taught his followers. (TTP 11.22)

Though Spinoza often seems to be sympathetic to Paul,60 here he identifies himself with James, who “expressed succinctly the whole doctrine of religion” when he rejected Paul’s position and taught that man is justified by works. Spinoza criticizes Paul for having introduced philosophical speculations into religion, as part of his effort to accommodate the unfamiliar gospel message to his Gentile audience (citing 1 Corinthians 9:19–20). The other apostles, who were preaching only to a Jewish audience, unreceptive to philosophizing, did not engage in such speculations. “How happy our age would surely be now,” he concludes, “if we saw religion again free of all superstition!” Here Spinoza moves from suggesting that Paul’s teaching is “philosophical speculation” to calling it a form of superstition. But he doesn’t say explicitly what particular teachings he objects to. He leaves that for us to figure out.

The Universality of Sin Let’s try to do that, focusing on passages where Paul offers reasons for thinking that our salvation depends on faith, not works. Essentially, what Paul argues in his epistle to the Romans is that we are all woefully sinful. So, if we had to depend for our salvation on our works – on our compliance with God’s law – a just God would condemn us to damnation. Fortunately, God is merciful; so he’s provided another way, the way of faith. If we have the right faith, we will be saved. Let’s examine this reasoning a little more closely. First, the doctrine that sin is universal: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). This might mean no more than that everyone fails to achieve perfection, not that everyone is profoundly wicked. It’s easy enough to believe that that’s true. Our common experience of the world might well suggest that everyone who reaches adulthood is guilty, at some point, of some transgression. Most people don’t commit murder. More, I would guess, commit adultery, though perhaps

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 383 most don’t. Reliable information seems hard to come by in that area. But many steal. And many children fail to respect their parents. And how many of us, children or adults, consistently refrain from coveting our neighbors’ possessions? Still, some people’s transgressions seem to be relatively few and relatively minor, compared with the horrendous crimes others sometimes commit. It would be consistent with holding that we are all sinful, in the sense of failing to achieve perfection, to add that there are still some people, perhaps quite a few, who do the right thing most of the time, and who, when they do the wrong thing, don’t do anything truly awful, anything which would justify calling them worthless. Call that the optimistic interpretation of the doctrine that sin is universal. Paul’s version of the doctrine does not seem so cheerful: [3:9] . . . we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin,61 [10] as it is written, “there is no one who is righteous, not even one, [11] . . . there is no one who seeks God. [12] All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one.”

Paul goes on in this vein for several more verses (3:13–18), which I won’t quote here. Suffice it to say that this passage seems to express a deep pessimism about our moral nature. Paul would deny, it seems, that there is anyone who does the right thing most of the time, and even that there is anyone who genuinely seeks God, or demonstrates his love for his fellow men by sometimes showing them kindness. We are all worthless. It’s not so easy to believe that everyone is that wicked. So, scholars are divided about how Paul could have come to accept such an extreme view of human sinfulness. Brown writes that “Paul’s view of the universality of sin and death stems from observing the existing world” (1997: 580). Sanders, on the other hand, argues that “both the Gentile and the Jewish worlds contained ‘saints,’ people whose lives were largely beyond reproach. It is unlikely that Paul’s view of universal heinous transgression rested on empirical observation.”62 That seems right to me. But if empirical observation won’t support such pessimism, how could Paul embrace it?

Becoming a Pauline Pessimist I’ll sketch here the answer that seems to me to emerge most naturally from Paul’s letters. The first point is that in the passage cited earlier

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(Romans 3: 9–18), Paul supports his doctrine that sin is universal by appealing to various biblical passages. Both in the verses I quoted, and in the continuation I omitted, Paul is citing Scripture, mostly the Psalms, though Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Isaiah all provide some of his quotations (or paraphrases). So, the dark view of human nature expressed in Romans is not peculiarly Paul’s. It’s a view he finds expressed often enough in the Hebrew Bible.63 I would not claim that it is the consistent view of the Bible.64 E. P. Sanders, for example, argues that In the Jewish view, God had created the world and declared it good, a teaching which is not easily reconcilable with the view that Sin is a power strong enough to wrest the law from God’s control or to render humans powerless to do what is good. (1993: 43)

Let’s suppose this is broadly true. Still, the argument Paul uses in chapter 3 of Romans shows him responding to a different, darker side of the Jewish religion. Why is Paul drawn to that side of Scripture? The answer I propose is that at some point Paul came to believe in his own sinfulness, as measured by what he had come to think was the appropriate standard. Later in Romans he will write: [7:14] . . . I am of flesh, sold in bondage to sin. [15] I do not understand what I do. For I do not do what I want to do, and what I detest, that I do. [16] Yet if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. [17] But as it is, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. [18] I know that no good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. I can desire what is good, but I cannot carry it out. [19] For I do not do the good I desire, but instead the evil that I do not desire. [20] Yet if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. [21] So I discover this principle at work: when I want to do right, evil is ready at hand. [22] For in my inmost self I delight in God’s law; [23] but I see another law in my members battling against the law that my mind acknowledges, and making me captive to the law of sin that is in my members. [24] Wretch that I am, who will rescue me from this doomed body?65

This passage is well known, and central to the interpretations of Paul which dominated Christian theology for a long time. Lately, a movement has sprung up among New Testament scholars urging rejection of the traditional interpretation of Paul and the adoption of a “new perspective” on Paul. I am rather old-fashioned

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 385 in reading this passage as expressing what Stendahl called “the anguish of a plagued conscience.”66 Stendahl, for example, doesn’t think Paul actually suffered this anguish, pointing out that in Philippians he had written: [3:4] . . . If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: [5] circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel. . . as to the law, a Pharisee; [6] as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. (my emphasis)

Stendahl observes that the statements in Romans “about the impossibility of fulfilling the Law stand side by side with the one just [quoted]” (1976: 81). On this reading, Paul did not think the law impossible to fulfill, because he believed he himself had fulfilled it. But if Paul did not think the law impossible to fulfill, and did not feel that he personally had great difficulty obeying it, why did he claim that sin – serious sin – was universal? Here’s a possible answer: it’s not true that these statements literally “stand side by side.” They occur in different letters, and there seems to be no consensus about their relative dates. Romans is generally thought to be one of Paul’s last letters, if not the last. Philippians is apparently hard to date.67 Maybe it’s later than Romans. Maybe it’s earlier. But if it is earlier than Romans, it could represent a different stage of Paul’s thought about sin, where he is more optimistic, not only about his own ability to fulfill the law, but about the ability of the Philippians to do so as well: [2:14] Do all things without murmuring and arguing, [15] so that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, in which you shine like stars in the world.

Here blamelessness appears to be a condition the Philippians can attain by doing the right thing without murmuring and arguing. Paul does not think this is easy. If the Philippians behave as he recommends, they will be rare specimens of virtue. Still, it’s possible for them to be blameless and innocent. Does Paul, then, at this stage of his career, think sin is universal, where sin is understood as involving an inability to do what one knows is right? Evidently not. But on the hypothesis I propose, he started out as a comparative optimist, who thought most people were “crooked and perverse,” but that some had it in them to be blameless, and ended as a deep pessimist, who thought no one had it in him to be blameless.

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Interiorizing the Law Why the change of heart?68 Earlier, I said that in Romans Paul was conscious of his own sinfulness as measured by what he had come to think was the appropriate standard. What I had in mind was that Paul may have come to think that when he declared himself blameless, he wasn’t setting the bar high enough. By this I don’t mean that he came to recognize that the moral requirements of the law were more crucial than its ceremonial requirements – that everyone is obliged, say, not to kill, but that not everyone needs to observe the dietary laws. What I’m postulating is a more significant change: Paul may have come to think that fulfilling the requirements of the law would take more than correct external behavior. In the passage leading up to that description of his inner conflict, in Romans 7, Paul focuses attention on one commandment in particular: the commandment not to covet: [7:7] . . . If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”

Now some of the commandments seem to require nothing more than a certain external behavior: “you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal.” But the commandment not to covet (Exodus 20:17; Deuteronomy 5:21) requires more than merely a certain external behavior. What is it to covet your neighbor’s wife? The Hebrew verb normally translated “covet,” chamad, may also be translated “desire” or “crave,” and that seems to be also the way Paul understands the commandment, since he uses a Greek verb, epithumeo, which has a similar range of meanings: “long for, lust after.” You can’t fulfill the commandment not to covet your neighbor’s wife merely by not sleeping with her. You have to not desire to do this. And this looks like much more of a challenge than avoiding the external acts would be. External behavior may, in normal circumstances, be under our control. Desires seem not to be. This emphasis on internal states of mind, as opposed to external behavior, also appears in the teaching of Jesus, in a well-known passage in the Sermon on the Mount. There Matthew reports Jesus as saying: You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust (epithumeo) has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew 5:27–28)

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 387 Those who favor a new perspective on Paul sometimes downplay this side of Jesus. In his life of Jesus, Sanders comments that these verses illustrate an “idealistic perfectionism” which “marks substantial portions of the Sermon on the Mount.”69 And he questions whether Jesus ever said such things: The reader of Mark and Luke would not know that Jesus prohibited anger and lustful thoughts. Admonition to eliminate feelings that are common to humanity is not a characteristic of Jesus’ teaching generally, but occurs only in this section of Matthew. . . the overall tenor of Jesus’ teaching is compassion towards human frailty. (1993: 202)

Perhaps Paul became more of a pessimist about the possibility of being without sin because his initial exposure to the teachings of Jesus had not included this emphasis on internal states of mind. If being blameless requires not having any desires to transgress, that will make it so hard to be good that we might easily think it impossible. If Paul did come to think of the law as making these demands on our desires, it’s easier to understand why empirical observation of people would not settle the matter. Our everyday experience of others may not lead us to believe that they are horrendously wicked. We might even find that some lead lives which are “largely beyond reproach.” But what we see is only what is external. By introspection, we learn that blameless external behavior can coexist with desires a strict moralist would condemn. We may be able to conceal these desires from human judges. But we know that we have them, and we know that in the end we will have to answer to God for our secret thoughts (Romans 2:14–16). Paul’s recognition of this point might explain why he did not think everyday observation of others could settle the matter. So far, though, I don’t find anything in Paul which deserves to be criticized as “philosophical speculation.” By the time he writes Romans, he believes that sin is universal, that everyone sins frequently and seriously, and (if my interpretation is correct) that one reason serious sin is universal is that the law makes demands which even those whose external behavior lets them pass for saints will find impossible. To the extent that this view is not based on empirical observation, it may be based partly on introspection, partly on Scripture, and partly also, perhaps, on literary and philosophical reflections on human experience. In his Metamorphoses (VII: 19–21), Ovid attributes to Medea the thought that she sees and approves the better but chooses the worse because “some strange power” draws her on against her will. In Part 4 of the

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Ethics, Spinoza cites this passage, and seeks to understand and remedy this phenomenon.70 So far, then, Spinoza might have some sympathy with Paul’s view. He himself holds a moderate, secularized form of it. He won’t accept the traditional notion of sin. He argues in TTP chapter 4 that we cannot coherently conceive God as a lawgiver whose will we have the power to disobey. How could the creature have the power to thwart the will of his creator, if that creator is omnipotent? But if we redefine sin as irrational action, in which reason succumbs to the passions, yielding antisocial action contrary to the agent’s interests, I think Spinoza would grant that sin is universal, frequent in the life of most, but not all, human beings. In the Political Treatise he writes that “it’s not in anyone’s power to always use reason and be at the highest peak of human freedom” (TP 2.8). We are all subject to affects like anger, envy, or some other form of hatred. These pull us in different directions, and make us naturally enemies to one another (TP 2.14). This is not to say that no one is virtuous. But Spinoza does think that the truly virtuous – let’s define them as those who are guided by reason most of the time, and never do anything really irrational – are very few: Everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, has always been the same. In every age virtue has been extremely rare. (TTP 12.7)

I think we have an allusion here to Romans 3:9. But if so, Spinoza has moderated Paul’s pessimism. He does not join Paul in saying with the psalmist that no one is righteous. He will allow that some (though only a few) are.

Philosophical Speculation? If Spinoza accepts a moderate version of Paul’s teaching, what is the philosophical speculation he thinks so unfortunate? I suggest that it lies in Paul’s account of original sin. Paul may not have fully articulated the doctrine the church subsequently adopted,71 but what he wrote in Romans did much to get it started. The traditional doctrine maintains that God created us with free will, an ability either to sin or not to sin, but that the first man, Adam, chose to sin, and that as a result, sin passed to all his descendants, who were henceforth unable not to sin.72 Although those descendants might now be under the power of sin, unable to order their lives as they should, the fact that they lack this power is a consequence of an act of Adam’s which he could have avoided.

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 389 When the church fathers offered scriptural support for this view, they emphasized a passage in Romans which the Vulgate rendered: as through one man sin entered the world (and through sin death), and so [death] passed into all men, in whom all have sinned.73

It’s not clear what this means, but Augustine offered a way of reading it which became official doctrine for a long time. He took the italicized phrase as a reference to Adam, the “one man” mentioned in the first clause, who brought sin into the world. His idea was that the first sin, Adam’s initial sin, involved all of his descendants, who somehow sinned in his act of sin. Hence the lines in the New England Primer: “In Adam’s fall we sinnèd all.” Augustine put the matter as follows: God, who is the author of natures, and certainly not of vices, created man morally upright. But man, corrupted willingly, and justly condemned, produced corrupted and condemned descendants. For we were all in that one man, since we all were that one man, who fell into sin through the woman who was made from him before they sinned.74

Here we have what can most aptly be described as philosophical speculation. To say things like “we were all in that one man . . . we all were that one man” is to make metaphysical claims which are no less hard to understand than they are to accept. Suppose we waive any questions we may have about the literal truth of the third chapter of Genesis. How is it possible for us all to be so involved in the actions of a remote ancestor that we can justly be found guilty for his misdeeds? These claims seem to be foreign to the Old Testament tradition, which does not engage in them. The Hebrew Bible may sometimes assert the universality of sin. But nowhere does it seem to explain that universality by a doctrine of inheritance from Adam.75 Modern objections to the doctrine of original sin tend to be moral objections, focusing on the fact that it deprives Adam’s progeny of agency, claiming that they are unable to avoid sin, for reasons which have nothing to do with any choices they have made. Spinoza’s objection seems rather different. The problem of explaining human sinfulness – in the sense in which Spinoza can accept the idea of sin – is central to the latter parts of his Ethics. Part 4 is called “Of Human Bondage,” a phrase Spinoza glosses as “man’s lack of power to moderate and restrain [his] affects,” manifested in the fact that often, though he sees the better, he cannot help but follow the worse. In the Ethics, he avoids polemic

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against the traditional religious explanation. In the Political Treatise, he is more confrontational: The theologians don’t remove this difficulty [that people don’t organize their lives wisely, but are carried away by blind desire] when they claim that the cause of this weakness is a vice of human nature, or a sin, originating in the fall of our first ancestor. If the first man had it in his power to either stand firm or fall, and if he was in possession of his faculties and unimpaired in his nature, how could he have fallen, knowingly, and with eyes open? . . . They say he was deceived by the Devil. But who deceived the Devil? . . . And how could that first man, who was of sound mind and the master of his will, be seduced and undergo the loss of his mental faculties? If he had the power to use reason correctly, he couldn’t be deceived. He necessarily strove, as far as he could, to preserve his being and keep his mind sound. It’s supposed that he had this in his power. So he must have kept his mind sound and could not have been deceived. The story of the first man shows that this is false. So it must be granted that it wasn’t in the first man’s power to use reason correctly. Like us, he was subject to affects. (TP 2.6)

In the end, Paul, Augustine, and the theologians who follow them have no genuine explanation for Adam’s sin. Spinoza’s project is to account for our irrationality through natural causes, through the laws of nature, “according to which all things happen” (E 3pr).

What Jesus Taught Spinoza contrasts the philosophical speculations Paul engaged in with “the very few and very simple doctrines Christ taught his followers” (TTP 11.22). By this, I take it, Spinoza is referring to a quite short list of ethical teachings to which hardly anyone would object. Sometimes he identifies the true religion with the commandments to practice justice and love your fellow human beings (TTP 19.9). I can understand a Christian objecting that this list is too short, that these are mere platitudes with which everyone might agree, but which are not meaningful without more specifics about what constitutes being just and loving your fellow human beings.76 Toward the end of chapter 12, Spinoza anticipates an objection of this kind. He has just claimed that the most important requirements of Scripture are the commandments “to love God above all else, and to love

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 391 your neighbor as yourself” (TTP 12.34). This recalls the saying attributed to Jesus in Matthew: One of [the Pharisees], a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”77

Jesus appears here to think that the rest of the law can be derived from these two commandments. Spinoza’s view is similar. Given the requirements to love God and our neighbor, the remaining moral precepts must be held to be no less uncorrupted, since they follow with utmost clarity from this universal foundation: to defend justice, to aid the poor, to kill no one, to covet nothing belonging to another, and so on. (TTP 12.37)

Spinoza will certainly allow that his short list can be expanded. It ends with an open-ended “etc.” But he will not allow it to be expanded indefinitely. The principle governing the expansion – that things which follow clearly from the universal foundation are part of the moral law – also limits it. Things which don’t follow clearly from that foundation are without compelling justification and not required.

What Is Required for Salvation? At the end of TTP chapter 11, Spinoza describes the conflict between Paul and James over the requirements for salvation in a way that makes his preference for James clear. In TTP chapter 14, he reaffirms that preference by effectively defining “faith” in terms of obedience: Faith is thinking such things about God that if you had no knowledge of them, obedience to God would be destroyed, whereas if you are obedient to God, you necessarily have these thoughts. (TTP 14.13)

It has always seemed to me that this was rather a bold move on Spinoza’s part, apparently seeking a victory for James over Paul by redefining the notion of faith in a way that would be congenial to James, but not to Paul. Spinoza comments that this definition is so clear, and follows so plainly from the things he has demonstrated, that it needs no

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explanation. I think this assumes an unjustified belief in his readers’ ability to see things his way. His definition of faith seems to amount to this: The faith required for salvation entails believing whatever you need to believe in order to act as the commandments require; if you have the kind of belief that leads you to do that, you will be saved; if you don’t, you won’t.

That this follows from what he has previously said seems to me not nearly as clear as he thinks it is. There is a gap in the argument that needs to be filled in. Christians who accept the gospel of John must, I think, reject Spinoza’s doctrine of what is required for salvation. That gospel contains a well-known passage which reads: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life . . .. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the only Son of God. (John 3:16, 18)

I would suppose that this means: to have eternal life, we must have some rather specific beliefs about Jesus and the power of his sacrifice on the cross: (a) that he was the son of God, and as such was totally innocent, free of the sins the descendants of Adam inevitably commit; (b) that his death redeemed all humans from sin, paid the penalty due for the sins they have committed since the Fall; and (c) that no matter how good an ordinary human may seem to be, if he (or she) lacks these beliefs about Jesus, he/she will deservedly suffer eternal torment in hell. If this is right, then on this view it would not be sufficient to believe in Jesus as a wise and charismatic preacher, whose message of love and justice we would do well to follow. Other passages in John seem to endorse a similar view, though none seems quite as explicit as this one.78 How might Spinoza defend his reading of the gospel message? One way would be to focus on the short list of moral requirements Spinoza thinks crucial to the claim of Christianity to be the true religion. Before Jesus, the prophets preached the true religion, relying on the covenant at Mt. Sinai, but they preached it only to the people of Israel,

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 393 as the law of their country. After Jesus, the Apostles also preached the true religion, but preached it to everyone, as a universal law (TTP 12.24). If the religion that Moses and the prophets preached was the true religion, and the religion Jesus and the apostles preached was also the true religion, and if the religion Moses preached did not require any particular beliefs about Jesus, it follows that no doctrine peculiar to the New Testament can be essential to the true religion. So, in TTP chapter 12 Spinoza writes: Even if we had fewer books than we do, either of the Old Testament or of the New, we would still not be deprived of the word of God, by which we ought to understand the true religion. (TTP 12.25)

One crucial implication of this is that insofar as the books of the New Testament teach doctrines not present in the Hebrew Bible, they don’t teach anything essential for salvation. Spinoza takes his principle – that even if we had fewer books of the Bible than we do, we would not be deprived of God’s word – to entail that even if we lacked one of the present four gospels, we wouldn’t lack anything essential for our salvation: It’s true that some things are contained in one gospel which are not there in another, so that one often aids in understanding the other. Still, we should not conclude from that that everything related in these four works was necessary for men to know. (TTP 12.30)

To see why this might be important, let’s compare the gospels to see how they bear on the issue between Paul and James: is salvation by faith or by works? This will be an application of the methodological requirement to “collect the sayings of each book and organize them under main headings, to that we can readily find all those concerning the same subject . . . noting all those which are ambiguous or obscure or seem inconsistent with one another” (TTP 12.16). To what conclusions does the method lead in this case?

Salvation in the Gospels Suppose a thorough examination of the gospels yields the following result: three gospels agree, roughly, in telling the same story, namely that the path to salvation is by works, obeying the commandments; one gospel rejects that answer, arguing that faith in Jesus is both necessary

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and sufficient for salvation. On that gospel’s view, obedience to the commandments would be very nice, if it were possible; but it’s not possible, and so not necessary. On Spinoza’s principle that no one gospel is essential to our determining the word of God, we should reject the outlier and follow the three gospels that agree in recommending salvation by works. Our hypothetical examination would support Spinoza’s preference for James over Paul. I cannot undertake a thorough examination of the gospels on this issue. But I can discuss some salient texts. Consider the following story, told, with minor variations, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.79 A rich young man comes to Jesus, asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus says he needs to obey the commandments. The young man says he has done that since his youth. Jesus then says that he must do one thing more:80 he must sell all his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor; then he will have treasure in heaven.81 The young man goes away sad, because he is very rich. This story, on its face, seems to support James’s reading of the path to salvation. Christians with whom I’ve discussed this passage sometimes fasten on a verse at the end, where Jesus is represented as saying: “come, follow me,” as if it implied that in addition to following the commandments and practicing extraordinary charity, there was still one more thing which was necessary: having faith in Jesus. I have found this solution recommended in popular books designed to reassure the faithful that the difficulties they might find in the Scriptures are soluble, but I do not think it can survive a careful, unbiased reading of the text, which promises treasure in heaven after the young man has sold his goods, but before anything has been said about following Jesus. Moreover, a reading of this story which would reconcile it with the gospel of John would require us to understand “following Jesus” as involving having a rather elaborate set of theological beliefs, along the lines of those mentioned earlier, beliefs of which there is no hint in any of the three versions of this story.

Spinoza’s Political Agenda At the beginning of this chapter, I noted a tendency among some historians of religious thought to acknowledge Spinoza’s importance in founding the historical-critical method but to decry his influence. Critical historical scholarship claims to be objective, disinterested, and impartial, we are told, but it has its roots in the work of a renegade

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 395 Jewish philosopher who was biased by his anti-supernaturalist view of the world and had a political agenda that called for him to “disembowel the Bible,” rendering it useless as a support for traditional religion.82 Now Spinoza certainly did have a political agenda in writing the TTP. He does not hide it. In his preface he writes: I believed I would be doing something neither unwelcome, nor useless, if I showed not only that [complete freedom of judgment and worship] can be granted without harm to piety and the peace of the republic, but also that it cannot be abolished unless piety and the peace of the republic are abolished with it. That’s the main thing I resolved to demonstrate in this treatise. To do this it was necessary to indicate the main prejudices regarding religion, i.e., the traces of our ancient bondage. (Preface 12–13)

In a letter he wrote to Oldenburg as he was beginning on the TTP, he described his goals as follows: I am composing now a treatise on my opinion regarding scripture. The considerations which move me to do this are the prejudices of the theologians (for I know that they are the greatest obstacle to men’s being able to apply their minds to philosophy; so I am busy exposing them and removing them from the minds of the more prudent) . . . and the freedom of philosophizing and saying what we think, which I want to defend in every way. Here the preachers suppress it as much as they can with their excessive authority and aggressiveness. (Ep 30; G IV: 166)

Critical scholarship aids the cause of freedom because it calls into question the view – surely one of the prejudices Spinoza had in mind in these passages – that to be saved you must have the right faith – i.e., believe a set of controversial theological propositions, which require, among other things, believing in the divinity of Jesus. To the extent that Spinoza is successful in combatting that view about our salvation, he deprives religious authorities of a crucial part of the traditional rationale for using force to secure conversions and repress dissent. If having that faith is not necessary to achieve eternal life, and avoid damnation, then the persecutors of religious dissent cannot claim to be acting for the good of the dissenters when they coerce them nor for the good of more orthodox members of society when they profess to protect them from dangerous views.83

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Does the fact that Spinoza has this political goal compromise the integrity of his biblical scholarship? That’s what some of his critics assume. But would we think the work of a medical researcher was compromised just because we learned that, in addition to wanting to discover the truth, he also hoped his research would lead to a cure for cancer? Scientists often have agendas, in the sense of goals which go beyond the pursuit of truth, but which they hope their pursuit of truth will further. What protects us (and them) from the danger that their agendas will lead them to become purveyors of plausible falsehood, rather than seekers of truth, is the fact that to succeed in their aims, they generally have to persuade an audience of their peers that they’ve made genuine discoveries. They must submit their reasoning to their critics. The fact that Spinoza succeeded, in the long run, in getting his method widely accepted, often by people who found its conclusions quite uncomfortable,84 is one reason to think that his agenda did not compromise the integrity of his scholarship. But in the end, we must examine his arguments, to see whether or not he argues well for his conclusions, and whether his arguments depend for their force either on his naturalistic metaphysics or his ambition to advance freedom of thought and discussion. Does he, for example, assume at the outset that Scripture is a purely human document, because it cannot be the revelation of a supernatural being? Or does he simply refrain from assuming that it is the revelation of a supremely perfect being, and so must be consistent, no matter how inconsistent it seems? Assuming a natural origin and not assuming a supernatural origin (until the meaning of the text has been determined) are two very different things. It’s a notable feature of conservative criticism of Spinoza that his critics pay almost no attention to his arguments, emphasizing instead his naturalistic metaphysics (or his debts to Machiavelli), to prove the bias they allege.85 In this chapter, I have tried to lay out the basic outlines of Spinoza’s biblical criticism, pointing out its weaknesses where I think it is weak, its strengths where I think it is strong, and some of the conclusions which “the oppressiveness of the times” in which he was writing persuaded him not to state explicitly. I cannot see that either his naturalistic metaphysics or his political goals played any significant role in the development of that argument. This is what we should expect if we accept the biographical evidence indicating that he had developed his doubts about Scripture well before he turned to philosophy.

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notes 1 See particularly James Kugel 2007: chapter 1. Kugel provides an interesting contrast with the polemicists cited in note 2. An orthodox Jew, he is also a consummate practitioner of the historical-critical method, who acknowledges the difficulties this poses for his faith, without abandoning either the method or his faith. 2 Paradigmatically, Hahn and Wiker 2013. In a similar vein are Dungan 1999 and Harrisville and Sundberg 2002. 3 See, for example, Popkin 1996. 4 See Twersky 1972: 420–21. The attribution of the Pentateuch to Moses is found in various early writers (Philo, Josephus, Augustine), but most crucially in the Talmud, Baba Bathra 14b–15a, which sums up traditional rabbinic views of the authorship of the books of the Hebrew Bible. The mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch still has its defenders, as a Google search for that phrase will confirm. 5 See Spinoza’s call for a proper “history of scripture” in TTP 7.15–23. In references to the TTP, I give first the number of the chapter, then the Bruder section numbers (provided in my translation, Spinoza 2016 [CW II]). On the question of canon formation, see TTP 10.1–5 and TTP 10.43–47. 6 See Bentley 1983 or Michael Massing’s very instructive and readable Fatal Discord, Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind (Massing 2018). Massing focuses mainly on the sixteenth-century debates, but in an epilogue proclaims Spinoza “the most important heir to the Erasmian tradition” (791). 7 1 John 5:5–8. Unless otherwise stated, I quote the New Revised Standard Version, as given in Meeks and Attridge 2006 (The Harper-Collins Study Bible, abbreviated “HCSB”). The attribution of this letter to one of the twelve is no longer generally accepted. See Brown 1997: chapter 12. 8 For a discussion of theologically motivated alterations of the scriptural mss., see Ehrman 1993. On the debate over the Johannine comma, see Levine 1999. 9 Schroeder 1978: 18. 10 Such as the passage known as “the longer ending of Mark” (Mark 16:9–20) or the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). 11 Only the first part was published in 1632. Subsequent parts appeared between 1641 and 1651. See the article “Menasseh ben Israel” in Skolnick and Berenbaum 2007. (Encyclopedia Judaica). References to The Conciliator are to Menasseh 1832 (Lindo’s translation). 12 See Menasseh 1832: Qu. 3, 8–9. 13 See his discussion of the apparent conflict between Ecclesiastes 3:19, which seems to deny the immortality of the soul, and Ecclesiastes 12:7, which Menasseh takes to affirm it. The Conciliator II.312–315.

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398 edwin curley 14 In my edition of the TTP, I’ve noted a number of examples. 15 Valla 2007. Sometimes I take the liberty of slightly modifying Bowersock’s translation. 16 Nicholas 1991: book III, chapter 2. Nicholas, a cardinal of the church, also encouraged Valla to work on the text of the New Testament. 17 Bowersock has called this “one of the most damning anachronisms in the entire Donation” (Valla 2007: 190n47). 18 We should note, in passing, that the appeal to tradition is a form of what Spinoza sometimes calls “knowledge from report,” and treats as a particularly unreliable way of coming to beliefs. Cf. the Treatise on the Intellect §§19–24 and Ethics 2 p40s2–p42. 19 Luther 1960: IX.310. 20 Not to all of it, of course. Since Moses comes into the story only in Exodus, he could not have witnessed the history recorded in Genesis. 21 Popkin 1996: 388. 22 For a fuller, modern treatment, see Richard Elliott Friedman’s article, “Torah (Pentateuch),” in Freedman 1992 (Anchor Bible Dictionary, abbreviated “ABD”): VI. 605–22. 23 See Aler 1965: 28. Peyrère’s Praeadamitae was published in 1655. 24 Ibn Ezra 1988: I.xv, xx. 25 So Lucas claimed. See Lucas 1927: 42. Two passages in the TTP confirm that Spinoza’s doubts about Scripture began early: TTP 1.13, discussing the varying accounts of the Decalogue, and TTP 9. 31, commenting on stylistic issues. See also Jarig Jelles’s preface to Spinoza’s Opera posthuma, which reports that Spinoza had occupied himself with letters from his childhood on, and spent many years in his adolescence studying theology, before his dissatisfaction with what he found there prompted him to turn to philosophy. See Akkerman 1980: 216–17. 26 Gebhardt’s edition of Spinoza’s Opera, originally published in four volumes in Heidelberg in 1925, was supplemented in 1987 by a fifth volume, containing commentary on the TTP and Political Treatise. For discussion of this point, see volume 5: 228–35. 27 In my edition of Leviathan (Hobbes 1994: 252–53). 28 See La Peyrère 1655: 213–14. 29 The most thorough treatment of this is Noel Malcolm’s “Hobbes, Ezra and the Bible,” in Malcolm 2002: 383–431. Malcolm shows that the question of Ezra’s role got caught up in debates between Catholics and Protestants over the reliability of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, which Protestants tended to defend and Catholics to question. 30 2 Esdras 14: 21–22. HCSB: 1622. Because 2 Esdras is not part of the canon either in the Jewish tradition or in most Christian denominations, many editions of the Bible omit it.

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 399 31 See Article 6 of the Articles of Religion of the Church of England, which credits St. Jerome with this understanding of the status of apocryphal works. 32 See ABD: VI.612. 33 See TTP 10.28, where Spinoza represents this as a view he shares with all but “the most foolish of the Pharisees.” If you think, as I do, that Spinoza had almost certainly read Leviathan by the time he was working on the TTP, in one or the other of the two translations which had by then become available, then you might also suspect that in making this comment he aimed to dissociate himself from a bad reason for accepting a theory he accepted on other, better grounds. Generally, Spinoza doesn’t have much to say about the Apocrypha. On the knowledge of Hobbes’s work in Spinoza’s circle, see Catherine Secretan, “La reception de Hobbes aux Pays-bas au XVIIe Siècle,” in Studia spinozana, 3 (1987): 27–46. 34 See Freedman and Geohegan 1994. How many books should we include in this Primary History? Spinoza thinks of himself as having argued for Ezra’s authorship of twelve books (TTP 8.57–58 and TTP 9.6) His count includes the five books of the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. But it’s doubtful that he should include Ruth. He never really discusses its authorship, and it doesn’t fit the pattern of the other books. Freedman doesn’t count Ruth as part of his Primary History. 35 viii, 46. The failure of Ruth to contribute to this narrative is one reason to doubt that it really belongs in the group Spinoza ascribes to Ezra. 36 In Genesis 12:10–20, involving Abraham, Sarah, and the Pharaoh of Egypt; in Genesis 20:1–18, involving Abraham, Sarah, and Abimelech; and in Genesis 26:6–11, involving Isaac, Rebekah, and Abimelech. 37 Briefly: the total given in 1 Kings is inconsistent with the total you get if you add up the numbers of years in the Primary History’s accounts of the different periods: the forty years Moses governed the people in the wilderness, the twenty-six years Joshua reigned, etc. This was a traditional problem for Jewish biblical commentators, discussed by Menasseh in his comment on Judges 11:26. 38 The traditional calculation is assumed in Ibn Ezra’s commentary on Genesis 38. Spinoza reproduces it in TTP 9.8–9. 39 Guggenheim 2005 (Seder Olam, The Rabbinic View of Biblical Chronology, translated with commentary by Heinrich Guggenheim): 32–36. 40 See Ibn Ezra 1988: 354–55. 41 Unreliable also as a work from which we can learn about the nature of God. Space limitations do not permit an adequate discussion of Spinoza’s analysis of biblical theology, but see TTP chapter 2 for his argument that the prophets’ conceptions of God were confused. Of particular interest is his contention that even Moses was not, strictly speaking, a monotheist, but believed in many gods, of whom the people of Israel were to worship only one. Cf. TTP 2.35–41. For recent discussions

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400 edwin curley of this reading of Mosaic theology, see Kugel 2007: passim, but especially 243 and 560; John Scullion, “God (OT),” in ABD II.1041–48; or Freedman 1987. Monotheism seems to be a late development in the religion of Israel, first appearing in Second Isaiah. 42 In Strauss 1952, Leo Strauss argued, essentially, that when we’re reading authors who wrote in a time when they might be persecuted for expressing unorthodox views, we need to be sensitive to the possibility that they might in fact hold such views and to the ways they might suggest them without stating them explicitly enough to get into more trouble than they were prepared to accept. Though I have serious reservations about much that Strauss wrote in applying this perspective (detailed in Curley 2015), that general proposition seems to me undeniably correct. Moreover, the textual evidence that Spinoza felt the need, sometimes, to engage in “indirect communication,” hinting at views he felt he could not be quite open about, seems to me conclusive. See particularly Annotation XXI, attached to TTP 10.1, and the texts discussed in the preface to my translation of the TTP, Collected Works, II: 53–56. 43 See Annotation XXI, attached to TTP 10.1, and Annotation XXVI, attached to TTP 11.3. 44 The tradition goes back to Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History (1926: III.xxiv.6; III. xxxix.16; and VI.xiv.2–3), but it was questioned in the Reformation, for reasons Richard Simon (1689) explains. See the Section “Debates about the Original Language” and note 56 of this chapter. 45 For a discussion of the notes and the textual problems they present, see Spinoza 1999: 28–35. 46 Annotation XXVI, attached to TTP 11.3, my emphasis. 47 On these issues, see Meyer 1896: chapter 1; Greenslade 1963: 73; Casey 1998: chapter 1; Metzger and Ehrman 2005: 96–100. 48 Tremellius was a sixteenth-century Jewish convert to Christianity, who translated the Bible into Latin. When he translated the Old Testament, he translated from Hebrew; when he translated the New Testament, he translated from Syriac. See Austin 2007. 49 Papias was the source of the tradition reported in Eusebius. See the latter’s Ecclesiastical History (Eusebius 1926: III.xxxix.16). 50 So Richard Simon understood the tradition: “On ne peut pas nier, à moins que de s’opposer à toute l’antiquité, que Saint Matthieu n’ait écrit son Evangile en Ebreu, c’est-à-dire, dans la langue que parloient alors les Juifs de Jerusalem, qui étoit Caldaique ou Syriaque” (1689: 47; my emphasis). In the late sixteenth century, Joseph Scaliger began the process of sorting out the different dialects of Aramaic, and Grotius continued this work in the seventeenth century. (On this, see Meyer 1986: chapter 1.)

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 401 51 On the Targums, see ABD: VI.320–21. Spinoza used Buxtorf’s edition of the Hebrew Bible, which reproduced these paraphrases. 52 The evidence on this point is conflicting, but on balance seems to favor the position taken in the text. See Brown 1997: 423–26 53 For a discussion of the language Jesus used in preaching, see Meier 1991: 255–268. Meier concludes that Jesus “regularly and perhaps exclusively taught in Aramaic, his Greek being of a practical, business type, and perhaps rudimentary to boot.” See also Casey 2010: 108–20. 54 Traditionally, it was thought that the gospels of Matthew and John were written by eyewitnesses (two of the original twelve disciples), Mark by an author who got his information from Peter, an eyewitness, and Luke by an associate of Paul’s who made a conscientious search for reliable sources. It appears that none of these attributions would now be widely accepted by critical scholars. See Brown 1997: 158–61, 208–12, 267–69, 368–71. 55 See Austin 2007: chapter 7. One example much discussed lately is the phrase ho huios tou anthrōpou, commonly translated “the son of man,” which Jesus frequently uses to refer to himself. This is apparently a very unnatural expression in Greek. But the Aramaic it probably translates, bar (e)nash(ā), is apparently quite an ordinary Aramaic term for “man.” See Maurice Casey 2010: 358–61. Meier (1991: I: 265–66) gives other examples. 56 Here see Simon 1689: chapter 5. 57 Among the examples Spinoza cites are Romans 3:28, 15:15; and 2 Corinthians 7:6, 7:25, 7:40, 10:15. 58 Cf. 1 Thessalonians 4:15. 59 Of the thirteen letters traditionally ascribed to Paul only seven – 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Romans – are now generally accepted as actually having been written by Paul. The other six are thought to be not by Paul, but by authors who took themselves to be expressing Pauline ideas. Spinoza’s examples come almost exclusively from the seven letters scholars generally regard as genuinely by Paul. 60 So much so that Melamed has gone so far as to describe Paul as “Spinoza’s true Biblical hero” (Melamed 2012a: 147). Others have sometimes engaged in similar hyperbole. (Malet called Paul “the father of Spinozism.”) I suggest that we need some nuance here. Spinoza is certainly sympathetic to some of the things Paul says. He frequently comments favorably on Romans 9:10–18, a key text for the doctrine of predestination. (In the TTP, see 2.51, 4.36, 16.53, and Annotation XXXIV; in the correspondence, see Letters 75 and 78.) He also approves Paul’s doctrine that there is no sin before the law, which he interprets to mean that there is no sin in the state of nature. (Cf. TTP 16.6, with Romans 4:15.) But TTP 11.21–24 demonstrates, as clearly as any careful reader of texts might wish, that he is not

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402 edwin curley sympathetic to the doctrine of justification by faith. Nor can he be if he wishes to defend religious liberty. As we’ll see, that doctrine is crucial to the central Christian argument against religious liberty. Graeme Hunter (2005: 54–55) is more judicious about the relation between Spinoza and Paul. 61 There are translation issues here. The King James version is more literal: “We have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin” (my italics). More recent translations introduce the notion of being under the power of sin. (Cf. the RSV and NRSV, or Fitzmyer (1992; the Anchor Bible edition of Romans). Sanders defends these translations (ABD VI.44), pointing to a number of passages in Romans 5–7 in which Paul treats sin as an active power which has “dominion” over us, enslaves us, and alienates us from God. 62 The quote comes from Sanders 1993: 44. The emphasis is mine. He expressed a similar view in his article on “Sin, Sinners (NT)” in ABD. 63 Specifically, Ecclesiastes 7:20; Psalms 14:2–3, 5:10, 140:4, 10:7; Isaiah 59:7–8; Proverbs 1:16; and Psalms 36:2b. See the Fitzmyer 1992: 334–36. The article on “Sin, Sinners (OT)” in ABD demonstrates that there are many other passages he might have cited. 64 Apart from the considerations mentioned in the text, we might cite against it the book of Job, whose protagonist is repeatedly declared, not only by the narrator but by God himself to be “blameless and upright” (Job 1:1 and passim, New JPS translation). I’ve discussed this book in detail in Curley 2002. 65 Here I use Fitzmyer’s translation from the Anchor Bible edition of Romans (Fitzmyer 1992), but for stylistic reasons, not because I see any substantive difference between it and the RSV/NRSV. 66 Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” in Stendahl 1976: 81. Among recent works influenced by Stendahl’s interpretation is Garry Wills’s What Paul Meant (Wills 2006). Wills writes that Paul “says repeatedly that he has done nothing for which his conscience could reproach him,” citing a number of passages to that effect, the most pertinent of which (apart from Philippians 3:6) is 1 Corinthians 4:4. See also Brown 1997: 568n. 67 Brown’s suggested dates for Philippians range from 56 to 63 ce (1997: 484). His suggested dates for Romans cover a narrower range, from 55 to 58 (560). Without attempting to be specific about dates, Wills suggests a chronology for Paul’s letters that makes Romans the last of the genuine Pauline letters (Wills 2006: 15–16). Similarly, Sanders 1993: 39–40. 68 Of course, if you believe that Paul’s letters are part of a sacred text, whose universal truth is guaranteed by its divine author, and so cannot – not, at least, when important matters like salvation are at stake – express inconsistent views in different passages, you may resist the idea that he changed his mind. Spinoza’s method would recommend not assuming the universal truth of Paul’s letters until

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spinoza’s contribution to biblical scholarship 403 after you have tried carefully to work out the meaning of the text. So would his argument in TTP xi, that Paul wrote as a teacher, not a prophet. 69 See Sanders 1993: 201. 70 Ovid did not invent the problem of weakness of will. He merely gave epigrammatic expression to a common human weakness which philosophers have puzzled about since Plato’s Protagoras. Euripedes attributes a similar thought to his Medea (Medea, 1076–80). 71 So Brown argues (1997: 580). 72 Unless cleansed by baptism. See Denzinger 2007, entries in the Systematic Index for “Original Man,” “Original Sin,” and “Fallen Man.” 73 Romans 5:12, as translated by Deferrari in Denzinger 2007, my emphasis. This is a pretty literal translation of the Vulgate, which still has some currency, though it’s problematic on both linguistic and philosophical grounds. The Vulgate puts all the responsibility on Adam, not only for his own sin, but also for those of his descendants, in a way many moderns may find uncomfortable. The RSV, like most recent translations, assigns responsibility for the descendants’ sins to the descendants themselves: “As sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men have sinned.” Fitzmyer has argued that both these translations face linguistic difficulties, and that the context does not permit us to evade the issue by amending the Vulgate translation: “No matter how one understands 5.12d, the universal causality of Adam’s sin is presupposed in 5.15a, 16a, 17a, 18a, 19. Hence it would be false to the thrust of the whole Pauline paragraph to interpret 5.12 as though it implied that the sinful human condition before Christ’s coming were due solely to individual personal conduct, as Pelagius advocated.” See Fitzmyer 1993: 321–39. 74 Augustine, City of God XIII.xiv; my translation, my emphasis. 75 See the article cited in note 63, “Sin, Sinners (OT)” in the ABD. 76 For a version of this objection, see Dungan 1999: 216, 240, 242. 77 Matthew 22:35–40. There are alternative versions of this story in the other synoptic gospels (Mark 12:28–34 and Luke 10:25–28), with interesting variations. 78 See, for example, John 6:44–51; 14:6. 79 Cf. Matthew 19:16–22; Mark 10:17–22; and Luke 18:18–25. 80 Note here that Jesus does not challenge the young man’s claim to have obeyed the commandments. On the face of it, this conflicts with Pauline pessimism. 81 I take it that the requirement of extraordinary charity applies to the young man because he is rich, but not to everyone. 82 The phrase “disembowel the Bible” comes from Dungan 1999: xx. 83 In Augustine, the justification for coercing belief is based on the expectation that this may save the heretic’s soul. See his Letters 93 and 185. In Aquinas, the

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404 edwin curley emphasis is on protecting the faithful from corruption by nonbelievers. See his Summa theologiae [ST] II–II, Qu. 10, art. 1, art. 3. 84 Kugel is an interesting case here. He has “spent most of his life studying and teaching modern biblical scholarship” but believes that “modern biblical scholarship and traditional Judaism are and must always remain completely irreconcilable.” Yet he remains an orthodox Jew (Kugel 2007: 45, 681). His last chapter explains how he deals with the tensions between these positions. 85 Dungan is typical. In a chapter of some sixty pages, he devotes just a page and a half to outlining Spinoza’s method of biblical interpretation and omits “all detailed biblical illustration,” on the ground that it is not essential to his analysis. That outline comes only after he has spent over thirty pages describing Spinoza’s life and philosophy (Dungan 1999: 217, 234–35). One might think Dungan himself had a political agenda: to discredit historical scholarship by showing that it originated in a philosopher whose philosophy and life experiences made him hostile to Scripture. Hahn and Wiker (2013) do no better.

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11 Spinoza’s Reception Pierre-François Moreau and Mogens Lærke A historical investigation into Spinozism teaches us at least as much about the interpreters of Spinoza as it does about Spinoza’s thought itself. More than any other, Spinoza’s philosophy has been held up as a mirror to the great currents of thought, providing a particular perspective on them. From the very beginning, Spinozism was a very controversial doctrine which gave rise to fierce polemics. It has received wildly diverging interpretations throughout its long history of reception. In some respects, Spinoza’s philosophy has suffered from it. Sometimes the voice of Spinoza himself is hard to hear behind those of his readers. But it also testifies to the power of his thinking if we can agree with Victor Delbos, a late nineteenth-century French scholar of Spinoza’s philosophy, that “the historical influence [of a doctrine] must be measured by the degree of disorganization it is capable of sustaining without losing its fundamental nature.”1 Moreover, it implies that, at each stage of its history of reception, and once instances of evident abuse or misunderstanding have been put to one side, reconstructing the exact position of Spinozism within some domain of ideas constitutes a powerful intellectual instrument for analyzing the disposition of forces within that domain, its dominant and dominated ideas, and the battles that intellectuals wage against each other within it. In this way, one can see the inner and outer conflicts and contradictions of Calvinism, Cartesianism, the Enlightenment, the Pantheismusstreit, German Idealism, and other movements, reflected and revealed in the mirror of Spinozism.

t h e fi r s t r e c e p t i o n : r e f u t i n g s p i n o z a The publication of the Theological-Political Treatise in 1670 had the effect of a lightning bolt. The work was universally condemned by the churches and the universities because of its naturalist critique of miracles and its secular, historical, and rationalist interpretation of the Bible. German, Dutch, and Huguenot intellectuals were the first to denounce it.2 As the French army officer Jean-Baptiste Stouppe put it in La Religion des Hollandois, a highly political work from 1673 (translated into English in 1680) that aimed at demonstrating the impiety of 405

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the Dutch in order to justify the French invasion, Spinoza was “a most wicked Jew” whose “principal design is to destroy all Religions and particularly the Jewish and the Christian, and to introduce Atheism, Libertinism, and the free Toleration of all Religions.”3 The rumors echoing throughout Europe about the scandalous TTP were quickly followed by the proliferation of the work itself. Multiple reeditions were printed already in 1670, 1673, and 1674. Translations into the vernacular appeared: an anonymous French translation (attributed to Gabriel SaintGlain) circulated from 1678 onwards under different titles; an English translation appeared in London in 1689; Glazemaker’s Dutch translation was published in 1693. A German translation did not appear until 1789, but the Latin version was widely available.4 The first public attack came from Leibniz’s teacher, Jacob Thomasius, who, in his Adversus anonymum de libertate philosophandi, published in May 1670, depicted Spinoza as a dangerous contractualist, naturalist, and libertine. He compared him with Thomas Hobbes, the English deist Edward Herbert of Cherbury, and Lodewijk Meyer, Spinoza’s friend who had published an anonymous treatise defending a rationalist approach to the reading of Scripture in 1666, the Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres. (Incidentally, those are all comparisons that reappear frequently in subsequent refutations.)5 The German universities produced a steady stream of refutations: in Leipzig, the very center of Lutheran orthodoxy, one could find an entire Catalogus scriptorum Anti-Spinozanorum.6 Dutch Cartesians took great pains to denounce Spinoza as violently as possible, mainly in order to ward off attempts from the side of Calvinist orthodoxy at associating them with Spinoza’s impious enterprise. As Spinoza himself wrote to Oldenburg in 1675, venting his frustration, “the stupid Cartesians, because they are believed to favor me, try to remove that suspicion from themselves by constantly denouncing my opinions and writings everywhere. Even now they’re still at it.”7 Spinoza was, however, not only attacked by the established religions but also by members of non-confessional or even dissident sects, such as the Socinian Franz Kuyper, whose Atheismi arcana revelata from 1676 is emblematic of the “extremely hostile Dutch reception” according to Wiep van Bunge.8 Spinoza was also attacked by former friends and disciples. The Danish scientist Nicolas Steno frequented Spinoza while studying anatomy with Franz de la Boë Sylvius and Johannes Van Horne at the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden in 1660–1664.9 In 1666, however, during a stay in Florence, Steno converted to Catholicism, became ordained priest, and quickly rose in

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spinoza’s reception 407 the ecclesiastical hierarchy, ultimately becoming the apostolic envoy of the Pope to Northern Europe. He attacked Spinoza vehemently in an open letter published in Florence in 1675.10 He moreover denounced Spinoza to the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome and was instrumental in getting the Ethics on the index librorum prohibitorum after its publication in 1677.11 A former member of Spinoza’s circle, Albert Burgh, performed a religious about-face similar to Steno’s during a trip to Italy and converted to Catholicism. Burgh also wrote a letter to Spinoza, denouncing his philosophical presumptuousness.12 Many of these theologically motivated refutations were emotional rather than rational, frequently insulting and diabolizing Spinoza. Albert Burgh accused him of having been “led astray and deceived by that wretched and very proud Prince of wicked Spirits,” and denounced him as a “wretched man, puffed up with Diabolic pride.”13 Willem van Blijenbergh, a Calvinist who corresponded with Spinoza about evil, later published a book, De Waerheyt van de Christelijcke Godts-dienst (1674), where he described the TTP as “a book full of studious abominations and an accumulation of opinions which have been forged in hell.”14 When it came to such outbursts, it was easy enough for Spinoza to reply, as indeed he did to Albert Burgh: “Away with this pernicious superstition! Recognize the reason God has given you, and cultivate it.”15 Or, as Leibniz laconically replied on Spinoza’s behalf to Steno’s open letter: “I have the impression that Mr. Steno presupposes too many things to persuade a man who believed in so few . . .. Spinoza would doubtless reply that those are all very pretty promises but that he has committed himself to believe nothing without proof.”16 Not all refutations, however, were as predictable or easy to forestall. Others among Spinoza’s critics revealed considerable insight and put serious pressure on his arguments. Among the most interesting early refutations of the TTP is a long letter written by the Dutch Hobbesian and Cartesian Lambert Van Velthuysen to Spinoza via Jacob Ostens. Here, as the first, Velthuysen establishes a theoretical connection between Spinoza and the French so-called esprits forts – the kind of freethinkers today sometimes called “erudite libertines.” He also points out the essential differences between Spinoza’s historical Bible exegesis and the philosophical one developed in the 1666 Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres by Spinoza’s friend, Lodewijk Meyer.17 Spinoza envisaged including Velhuysen’s letter in a planned (but never completed) second edition of the TTP along with a reply. Eventually, the exchange was published in the Opera posthuma.18 Another interesting

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early refutation of the TTP was published in France, namely, the Demonstratio evangelica by Pierre-Daniel Huet, one of France’s most prolific savants, teacher to the son of Louis XIV, and future bishop of Avranches. The Demonstratio was published in 1679 but completed around 1675. Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, who had heard about it from Leibniz, even informed Spinoza about the work.19 In his vast work, Huet employs a double argumentative strategy by showing, on the one hand, how the Old Testament prophetically foreshadows the New Testament but also, on the other hand, how all the heathen religions are in fact built up around the figure of Moses, albeit under different names, and thus somehow grounded in the Old Testament stories. Demonstrating this in excruciating detail, Huet thus constructed a pan-religious prophetic argument in favor of the authenticity of Scripture and the truth of the Christian religion, against the “author of the Theologico-politicus.”20 What exactly was it about the TTP that made such an impression? It was not the first time that the official discourse about the Bible was challenged. Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus, and the School of Saumur had already submitted the sacred text to philological critique.21 Moreover, in certain Roman Catholic milieus, such critique was even welcomed. This was because acknowledging textual problems with Scripture made it harder for Protestants to maintain that revelation could be known sola Scriptura and rendered recourse to other sources – the apostolic tradition, ecumenical councils, the Pope – legitimate. Spinoza, however, took the historicization of the sacred texts one step further. Among the arguments that particularly shocked people were Spinoza’s demonstration of the non-Mosaic provenance of the Pentateuch and his argument regarding the late addition of the Hebrew vowel points to the Old Testament. Both issues posed problems for traditional exegesis and unleashed the furor of the religious apologists. At the time of Spinoza, the authority of the sacred books was grounded in their historical authenticity. Indeed, in Protestant theology – and the vast majority of Spinoza’s first critics were Protestant – the continuous, uninterrupted transmission of the biblical text was one of the primary conditions of validity for the sola Scriptura principle that their church was founded on. However, by challenging the attribution of the biblical books to their traditional authors, for example by denying that Moses himself wrote the Pentateuch, Spinoza introduced breaks in the continuity of revelation that ended up affecting the authenticity of Scripture.

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spinoza’s reception 409 It was not the first time either that a new, historical critique of the Bible was combined with a political thesis. Thomas Hobbes already did so in the third part of Leviathan (1651).22 Spinoza argued in favor of subordinating the church to the secular authority of the state. But that position had also been defended by Hobbes and, closer to Spinoza, by numerous republican Dutch political thinkers throughout the first half of the century, among others Hugo Grotius in his De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra from 1646 – a book of which Spinoza owned a copy.23 Accusing the clergy of politically abusing power in the way Spinoza did in the preface of the TTP was hardly an innovation either. For example, in the De jure ecclesiasticorum from 1665, published under the pseudonym Lucius Antistius Constans, the author declared his “pious indignation against the impious, illegitimate and pernicious ambition of the clergy.”24 Contrary to others, however, Spinoza combined his critique of religion and the political uses of religion with a spirited defense of the freedom of philosophizing.25 The critique of superstition and miracles took on a more systematic character than in previous authors. The way Spinoza conceived of the close relation between prophecy and imagination was grounded in a rigorous anthropology. The metaphysical underpinnings of his argument did not escape his readers. Moreover, his displayed a biblical scholarship to be reckoned with. As Leibniz wrote to Lambert van Velthuysen in June 1671, comparing the TTP to Meyer’s Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres: “Do you not yet know who the author of the philosophy interpreter of scripture is [= Meyer]? Whoever he is, he is not of great importance; the author of the freedom of philosophizing [= Spinoza] is much more ingenious and knowledgeable, and for this reason also much more dangerous; surely you cannot approve of this kind of critique of sacred matters.”26 In spite of the violent reactions they prompted, Spinoza’s ideas about the Bible and its interpretation were hard to ignore, and his method caught on regardless of the scandal of his conclusions. The best example is the Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament by Richard Simon. The book was finished and printed in 1678 but immediately banned by the royal censors. The whole stock of copies was burned. And yet, Simon was not speaking in favor of Spinoza but rather attempting to refute him and reinstate the authority of Scripture using Spinoza’s own means. Regarding the transmission of the Bible throughout history, Spinoza had simply noted that the texts had been altered after first being written. Simon, for his part, undertook to study the history of reception and

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transmission of the texts in order to justify their authority by means of a more sophisticated historical analysis than what could be found in traditional exegesis. The principal topic of Spinoza’s analysis in the TTP was the constitution of the Old Testament. He showed how the different parts of the text had not been written by the people they were named after, that they were not written at the time when the events they relate occurred, and that the text as a whole had been collated from different sources long after the time of the prophets. Simon, for his part, attempted half-heartedly to save the authenticity of the text by appealing to a theory of “inspired scribes,” thus maintaining the original doctrine of divine inspiration while still correcting it on points where it had become untenable.27 Richard Simon’s controversial work was far from being the only place where the impact of Spinoza’s biblical exegesis was felt. Even authors associated with the most orthodox positions were forced to acknowledge the pressure it put on their arguments for the divine authority of the biblical text. In his 1681 Discours sur l’histoire universelle, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who instigated the royal censor’s ban of Simon’s book, had to admit that there had been alterations and distortions of the biblical text, even though he only did so only in order to deny their importance.28 The reception of the Ethics began even before its publication. The manuscript circulated among Spinoza’s friends. The fervor and particularity with which they read his texts and assimilated his ideas is nicely illustrated by a letter from Simon de Vries, where he describes the study groups they held to scrutinize the manuscript in progress: As for our group, it is arranged in this way: one of us (but each one takes his turn) reads through, explains according to his own conception, and then proves everything, following the sequence and order of your propositions. Then if it happens that one cannot satisfy the other, we have thought it worthwhile to make a note of it and to write to you, so that, if possible, it may be made clearer to us, and under your guidance we may be able to defend the truth against those who are superstitiously religious and Christian, and to stand against attacks of the whole world.29

On rare occasions, this restricted circulation of the manuscript went beyond the narrow circle of friends within which Spinoza actively tried to contain it (both Huygens and Leibniz were denied access, for example.)30 As an interesting example, one could mention the copy, written in the hand of Pieter Van Gent, that Tschirnhaus brought with

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spinoza’s reception 411 him when going to Paris in the fall of 1675 and which formed the basis for his conversations with Leibniz about Spinoza’s philosophy in Paris in 1675–76. It was this same manuscript that Tschirnhaus, for reasons unknown, handed over to Nicolas Steno the year after in Florence and that recently has been rediscovered by Leen Spruit and Pina Totaro in the Vatican library. At the same time, information, both true and false, about the content of the Ethics circulated outside Spinozist circles. The notoriety Spinoza had acquired because of the TTP made the publication of the Ethics a delicate issue. When the Ethics was completed in 1675, the political climate in Holland had changed: the “Republic in which everyone is granted complete freedom of judgment”31 that Spinoza praised in the preface to the TTP no longer existed: the French had invaded Holland in 1672, the mob lynched the De Witt brothers, and the Stadhouder had been reinstated. Spinoza refrained from publishing his philosophy because of persistent rumors in Amsterdam that he was about to publish a work “where [he tried] to show that there is no God.”32 The Ethics did not appear until after his death, when his friends with surprising swiftness prepared an edition of Spinoza’s posthumous works, along with a Dutch translation. The two editions, Latin and Dutch, appeared in early 1678 (with 1677 indicated on the title page.) The author’s name was indicated only by the initials, “B. D. S.,” and there was no place nor printer indicated. For decades after the publication of the Ethics, every philosopher had to propose his own refutation of Spinoza. Bayle’s article on “Spinoza” in the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697, second edition, 1702) already contained a long list of refutations available at the turn of the century. A Freydenker-Lexicon published in 1759 by Johann Anton Trinius counted no fewer than 129 anti-Spinozists.33 Some refutations, like those proposed by Henry More or Samuel Clarke were not as much direct refutations as attempts at showing that their own systems were philosophically more coherent and theologically more upright alternatives to Spinozism. Others were straightforward attempts at demolishing Spinoza. Putting to one side the purely theological refutations, the most common approach was to attempt to uproot Spinoza’s system by attacking its axiomatic basis, on the assumption that by hacking away at the foundations of a system written more geometrico one could make the whole edifice crumble. Some examples are the refutations by Christoph Wittich, Pierre Poiret, Noël Aubert de Versé, and François Lamy.34 While all these people refuted Spinoza, they also did their part to diffuse his philosophy. This was crucial, because nobody undertook

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reediting the Ethics, making access to the primary text progressively more difficult. The Opera posthuma was of course available in a number of European libraries. But it is worth noting that no reedition of the Latin text was published before H. E. G. Paulus’s Opera omnia from 1802–3. Moreover, translations into the vernacular appeared only slowly – except of course from Glazemaker’s Dutch translation in the Nagelate Schriften, which was published at the same time as the Opera posthuma. The first German edition of the Ethics, edited by Johann Lorenz Schmidt, was published only in 1744 along with the refutation of Spinoza by Christian Wolff originally contained in the 1737 Theologia naturalis.35 That was seventy years after Spinoza’s death! In France, it was even worse. Henri de Boulainvilliers made a French translation in 1705, but it was for his own use alone and was not published until 1907, when rediscovered by F. Colonna d’Istria.36 So, the first time a complete French translation saw the light of day was in 1842, in the edition of Spinoza’s works by Émile Saisset, no less than 165 years after the original edition. In the English-speaking world, the situation was worse still: the Ethics did not appear in a complete English translation until 1870, by Robert Willis, quickly followed however by translations by R. H. M. Elwes (1883–84), W. Hale White (1883), and others.37

e a r ly s p i n o z i s t s : r e n e g a d e c a r t e s i a n s , d i s e n c h a n t e d p i e t i s t s , e ru d i t e l i b e r t i n e s The vast majority of the printed literature and public assessments of Spinoza in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century were hostile. Spinoza did however not only have enemies. Recent work on the broader intellectual controversies in early modern Europe have revealed a somewhat clandestine, but extensive “Spinozist” substratum of the Republic of Letters in the last decades of the seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth century. First, there was the close Dutch context of what K. O. Meinsma has described as “Spinoza’s circle,” which included two kinds of people.38 On the one hand, it included intellectuals such as Lodewijk Meyer, a Cartesian who practiced medicine and directed the City theater of Amsterdam in the 1660s. Among these we also find Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, whose correspondence with Spinoza tackles some of the most vexed issues in the logic and basic construction of Spinoza’s own system, and whose own work in philosophy, notably the Medicina mentis from 1687, combines insights from Spinoza with

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spinoza’s reception 413 Cartesian and Leibnizian elements.39 On the other hand, it included nondenominational Christians belonging to the various sects that sprung up during the Second Reformation,40 such as Jarig Jelles and Pieter Balling. Later Spinozists such as Frederik van Leenhof, Willem Deurhoff, and Pontiaan Van Hattem came from similar backgrounds.41 Spinoza did however not only have local impact. His ideas and doctrines spread surreptitiously throughout the Netherlands to Germany, gaining ground over the following decades among disenchanted pietists in Germany, the “unhappy children of the Protestant CounterReformation” to use Frederick Beiser’s expression,42 including intellectuals such as Friedrich Wilhelm Stosch, Theodor Ludwig Lau, and Johann Lorenz Schmidt.43 It then quickly spread throughout the rest of Europe, as Jonathan Israel has shown in his work on the Spinozist “radical enlightenment” that swept through Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.44 This seemingly omnipresent “Spinozism,” feared and loathed by more moderate enlighteners as well as by the church, was however often a kind of “Spinozism without Spinoza,” a diffuse and many-faceted body of doctrines frequently at odds with the letter of Spinoza’s writings.45 The existence and nature of these Spinozist undercurrents can be nicely illustrated by two early modern novels, Het leven van Philopater (1691) and the Vervolg van’t leven van Philopater (1697) by the renegade Calvinist minister Johannes Duijkerius (1661/62–1702).46 The novels are structured as series of conversations that Philopater has with Voetians, Cocceians, and Cartesians about topics such as prophecy, miracles, and body-mind relations. As a result of those conversations, the hero of the novels – just like the author of them – goes from being an orthodox Calvinist to becoming a “true philosopher” and a convinced Spinozist. Duijkerius was not legally prosecuted, partly because it came to light that he had not written all of the second part, the more scandalous of the two. But he was prohibited from preaching and ended his life in poverty and misery. The publisher of the second part was severely punished with fines, prison, and subsequent banishment from Holland.47 One thing that Duijkerius’s novels demonstrated was that one did not become a Spinozist by accident: most often the point of departure was heterodox Cartesianism. This was the reason why certain Cartesian circles went to great lengths to refute Spinozism in order to separate themselves from it.48 But it was also the reason why there were refutations of these refutations written by orthodox Calvinists who attempted to show that the Cartesian arguments against Spinoza were insufficient and hardly

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better than covert apologetics. In this way, Spinozism also played an important role in the deterioration of the relations between Cartesianism and Calvinism. Those relations had always been uneasy. Nonetheless, in the Netherlands and in certain German universities, Reformation theology had quickly adapted to a kind of Cartesian scholasticism. This alliance was destroyed by the first debates on Spinozism. They highlighted how any attempt at justifying revealed religion within a Cartesian framework, maintaining divine transcendence and creatio ex nihilo, clashed head on with the Cartesian principles used by Spinoza to refute those doctrines.49 From this arose protracted debates about whether Descartes was the architectus or eversor spinozismi – the architect or destroyer of Spinozism.50 One famous commentator who systematically explored the association of Descartes to Spinoza in order to discredit Cartesianism was Leibniz, who officially entered the fray with two publications in the Journal des sçavans in 1693 and 1697, accusing the Cartesians of ignoring the Spinozist consequences of orthodox Cartesianism. The Dutch Cartesian Ruardus Andala returned the compliment in 1712 in his Dissertationum philosophicarum pentas where he accused Leibniz of having plagiarized Spinoza’s parallelism.51 The exchange is a good example of how Spinozism was both a witness to, and a factor in, the progressive downfall of the dominant philosophy of the seventeenth century, Cartesianism. In the early eighteenth century, there appeared a great many texts directed against revealed religion and sometimes against religion altogether. This “clandestine” literature was disseminated sous le manteau and often only in manuscript form. Spinoza’s presence in these texts is, again, multiform and complicated. A fairly clear-cut example is the notorious Traité des trois imposteurs, also sometimes called L’Esprit de Spinoza, a virulent clandestine treatise that circulated in manuscript as early as 1678 but was first published in 1719. This work took up the old idea, stemming from the Middle Ages, according to which the three great monotheist religions were created by three impostors – Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed – for political purposes. The book from 1719 did, however, defend the thesis by means of arguments drawn from modern authors such as Gabriel Naudé, Thomas Hobbes, and Spinoza, from whom the anonymous author borrowed numerous passages, skillfully edited to accentuate their anti-Christian spirit. The author explained, for example, combining arguments developed by Spinoza in the preface to the TTP and the appendix to the first part of the Ethics, that if people believe in final causes, or that the world as such

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spinoza’s reception 415 has a purpose, it is because they are being deceived by religious authorities who are merely seeking to justify their political agenda.52 Another good example is the Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe, attributed to Nicolas Fréret and written around 1722. The setting is the time of the Roman Empire. The author of the letter writes to a friend who is gradually turning toward the church. He explains the various religions and their rites, how they resemble each other, and why they deviate from the true understanding of nature and of ourselves. It contains major Spinozist themes. For example, while criticizing “superstition,” Fréret’s text accuses religion of absurdity and persecution – themes common to all of this literature – but it also argues that religious violence results from the wish to oppress others. Fréret’s comparative approach to religion not only tends to put all religious orientations on a par, but also serves to explain the animosity among them: “All these religions use proofs of the same kind to demonstrate the truth of what is contained in them. I see equal persuasion on all sides, equal zeal, equal devotion for the dogmas whose truth one declares to be ready to seal with one’s blood.”53 As another example, Fréret echoes chapter 7 of the TTP when chastising religious readers of the Bible for clinging to the notion of verbal inspiration: “It is to God alone that [they refer] all events, without paying any attention to proximate or sensible causes or to the corporeal means he has used.”54 Fréret’s development is a characteristic mixture of arguments coming from the libertine tradition, Hobbes, and Spinoza, enhanced by Fréret’s own substantial knowledge of comparative religion. At the same time, the anthropological and metaphysical underpinnings of Spinoza’s argument remain largely unexplored. In this respect, the Lettre is typical of the way in which, in the clandestine literature, Spinoza’s texts on religion were used as a reservoir of arguments with little regard for the fact that they represented a systematic position with a metaphysical grounding. Indeed, the Traité des Trois Imposteurs and the Lettre de Thrasybule are just examples of numerous such texts that draw their force less from systematic exposition than from the repetition and multiplication of arguments. Their unity is one of intensity and argumentative atmosphere, not conceptual coherence. Their position gains force not from its internal constitution, but from the accumulation of arguments borrowed from a certain number of authors, a kind of intellectual politics of compilation. Of course, there is still a place for originality, mainly in the general tone and the choice of sources. The Traité des Trois Imposteurs has revolutionary accents. The Lettre de Thrasybule is more about adjusting

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conceptions to the insights of the nascent science of comparative religion. But in any case, when it comes to these texts, there were as many Spinozisms as there were different writers who evoked Spinoza.

e a r ly i n fl u e n t i a l r e a d i n g s : b ay l e , l e i b n i z , wac h t e r , t o l a n d , d o r t o u s d e m a i r a n The end of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries saw the appearance of some interpretations that are not only commendable for their philosophical value but that merit particular attention for the importance they had for the subsequent reception. Here, we shall briefly consider those by Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), Johann Georg Wachter (1663–1757), John Toland (1670–1722), and Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan (1678–1771). As already noted, many early commentators of Spinoza’s doctrine only knew about the doctrine from summaries provided by opponents. No opponent of Spinoza, however, contributed more to the diffusion and maintenance of his doctrine in the eighteenth century and beyond than Pierre Bayle. His reading still served to structure the reception of Spinoza as late as Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie from 1805–6. The article “Spinoza” in Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, first published in 1697 and reedited in a considerably augmented version in 1702, is the longest entry in the entire dictionary, and testifies to two decades of grappling with Spinoza’s work.55 In the main entry, Bayle praised Spinoza for his modest and contemplative lifestyle. From the biographical viewpoint, he considered Spinoza a paradigmatic example of a “virtuous atheist,” a figure that Bayle himself had discussed at length in his Pensées diverses sur la comète (1684) in order to demonstrate that atheism is no more dangerous than idolatry. In the remarks, however, and in particular in the second set of remarks appended to the second edition, Bayle confronted Spinoza’s metaphysics, proposing an interpretation and formulating objections that continue to trouble Spinoza commentators today. For example, Bayle asked, should one consider the relation between substance and modes in Spinoza’s philosophy as comparable to the relation between a logical subject and its properties, or a grammatical subject and its predicates? In other words, do modes logically inhere in Spinoza’s substance? Bayle believed that the pressure of philosophical tradition, both Aristotelian and Cartesian, would oblige Spinoza to reply in the affirmative, but that this would also lead him into inextricable logical contradictions. In other

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spinoza’s reception 417 respects, however, Bayle also provided a mere caricature. For example, on his reading, ignoring the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata, Spinozism appears as a gigantic fusion of God and the world, a global identity that turns all the particular antagonisms among individual worldly things into contradictions within God. It is important to realize, however, how these critiques were part of Bayle’s own philosophical program, stressing the limits of reason in both natural and revealed theology. Spinoza’s naturalist monism suppressed divine transcendence. But in doing so, Bayle argued, it also makes evident the internal contradictions that reason invariably encounters when left uncurbed by dogma. This insight exceeds the framework of any particular era or philosopher but is something that manifests itself whenever reason pretends to work entirely alone. To illustrate this, Bayle showed how a kind of pan-Spinozism had appeared at the margins of many philosophical controversies throughout history, in the pre-Socratics, in Oriental philosophy, and in Averroism. This way of thinking about Spinozism as a transhistorical conceptual category created an important precedent. Similar arguments can be found in Leibniz, Hegel, and Cousin. Leibniz was acquainted with Spinoza from very early on.56 He read the TTP shortly after it was published in 1670 or 1671, and once again in 1675. In 1671, he tried to engage Spinoza in an epistolary exchange.57 He occasionally expressed some admiration for the work.58 He did however also denounce the book as “dangerous”59 and “scattered with venom against the very antiquity, authenticity, and authority of the sacred writings of the Old Testament.”60 And while he acknowledged that Spinoza was indeed “very cultivated,”61 Leibniz also deemed him an “audacious man” whose work ought to be forcefully refuted.62 In late 1675 and early 1676, before the publication of the Ethics, he discussed Spinoza’s metaphysics in some detail with Ehrenfried Tschirnhaus, whom he met and befriended in Paris. He considered the possibility of adopting some key Spinozist ideas during that period, especially Spinoza’s substance monism and theory of attributes, as is evident from the set of metaphysical fragments today known as De summa rerum.63 This brief flirtation with Spinozism ended after Leibniz gained access to Spinoza’s last letters to Oldenburg during a trip to London in October 1676 and visited Spinoza himself in The Hague the following month, and when he read the Opera posthuma shortly after its publication early 1678. His reading notes on the Ethics contain a systematic refutation of the first part of the work, almost proposition for proposition.64

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He criticizes Spinoza’s basic metaphysics for being obscure and contradictory, formulating, in particular, a series of objections to the theory of attributes that continue to puzzle commentators to this day. He also dismissed Spinoza’s theory of beatitude and the eternity of the soul as a subterfuge, designed to deceive people into believing in his religious uprightness. Leibniz’s writings about Spinoza are multiform and rich. But most of them remained unpublished until the mid-nineteenth century and did not, for that reason, produce much of an effect in the history of reception or, when they did, only with considerable delay. One notable exception is the Essais de théodicée, first published in 1710 and subsequently reedited countless times. As a whole, the work was an attempt to defend natural theology against Pierre Bayle’s theological skepticism. However, in the preface, while providing a preliminary sketch of his own position, Leibniz outlined different forms of determinism or “fates,” the fatum stoicum, the fatum mahometatum, the fatum spinozanum, and the fatum christianorum. Leibniz’s aim was to defend the rationality of religion against both fideism and excessive rationalism by showing that one can conceive of the world as a rationally determined structure without denying divine providence. He thus pits his own fatum Christianorum, a kind of religiously grounded determinism that Leibniz himself associated with the Augustinian conception of a “happy necessity,” against Spinoza’s fatalist “blind necessity” where absolute, geometrical necessity governs the world rather than divine omniscience and will to do good. Wachter was considered one of the foremost Spinoza scholars of his time. In his Letters to Serena (1704), the English deist John Toland even described him as “an excessive admirer of Spinoza, one wholly addicted to his principles, and reputed the best of any to understand his system.”65 Wachter was however not only a Spinozist, but also deeply immersed in the doctrines of the Christian kabbalah. These religiously hybrid doctrines were originally conceived by Renaissance humanists such as Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin. They were kept alive and further developed by the German Rosicrucians, Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, but also to some extent by the Cambridge Platonists, especially Henry More. In his first book on the topic, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb published in 1699, Wachter associated Spinozism with kabbalah in order to reject both on grounds of atheism. In the later Elucidarius cabalisticus from 1706, written in response to criticisms put forward by the German orientalist Johann Franz Buddeus, Wachter

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spinoza’s reception 419 developed a similar thesis, but this time only to reach the opposite conclusion, namely, that both doctrines conform to Christian orthodoxy.66 In order to arrive at this result, he reformulated Spinoza’s characteristic “immanent cause” as an emanative one, thus transforming Spinoza’s naturalist monism into a religiously less offensive neoPlatonic one.67 He also argued that, “according to Spinoza, the matter in the universe is thus nothing, but [what is] is an utterly excellent thing, or, as the kabbalists say, spirit.”68 He thus became one of the first to propose the idealist reading of Spinoza that subsequently became a determining factor in the dominant Spinozabild in Germany from the Pantheismusstreit onwards, culminating with Hegel’s “acosmist” reading of Spinoza in the 1805–6 lectures on the history of philosophy.69 Wachter’s work was censored and Wachter himself marginalized and persecuted for his Spinozist views. But in the following century, his books were widely read and commented on all over Europe. Wachter and his thesis were mentioned and discussed by Leibniz, Basnage de Beauval, Brucker, Lessing, Jacobi, Herder, Hamann, Kant, Schlegel, and many others. One finds both Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb and the Elucidarius cabalisticus in the inventory of Moses Mendelssohn’s personal library.70 And when Jacobi, in Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (1785) proclaimed kabbalah nothing but “underdeveloped or newly confused Spinozism,” he explicitly referred to Wachter’s Elucidarius cabalisticus.71 It is also telling that when Johann Gottfried von Herder prepared the second edition of Gott. Einige Gespräche (1800), he thought it worthwhile to dedicate numerous pages to refuting Wachter’s work which, at that time, was almost a century old!72 John Toland’s first major contribution to the reception of Spinozism was terminological: he coined the term “pantheism” in his 1705 Socinianism Truly Stated as a way to describe doctrines in which God is identified with the whole of nature.73 According to Toland, both Moses and Spinoza explicitly endorsed such pantheism, but, Toland argued, it is in fact the true common basis of all revealed religion. After Toland, Spinozism was – and still is – often described as “pantheism.” However, against Toland’s intentions, the designation has most often been employed pejoratively to capture Spinoza’s dissimulated atheism and as expressing a kind of hypocrisy: God is put everywhere so that he subsists nowhere. Over and above this terminological point, the importance of Toland for the reception of Spinozism relates to the transitional position he occupies between the mostly mechanical and

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straightforward Cartesian interpretations of Spinoza’s natural philosophy that dominated in the seventeenth century to the more dynamic “neo-Spinozism” that appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Letters to Serena (1704) were written by Toland following discussions with Leibniz and Wachter at the Court of Berlin around 1700–1701 (as Tristan Dagron has shown, the “gentleman” to whom the third letter is addressed is Wachter.)74 An important part of Toland’s text is a reflection on the viability of Spinoza’s natural philosophy. He is particularly interested in a question already raised by Tschirnhaus in his last letters to Spinoza regarding the logical and metaphysical deduction of individual bodies from the attribute of extension. Tschirnhaus complained that Spinoza gave no account of this. Spinoza provided answers that, at least at first sight, were disappointing. Rather than explaining himself on his own terms, he instead argued that any such account was impossible on the traditional Cartesian account of extension as passive matter that he himself believed was mistaken.75 Toland took up Tschirnhaus’s criticism, arguing that Spinoza’s difficulty was rooted in his failure to explicitly define extension as something essentially dynamic, as including an internal principle of movement that would account for the differentiation of extension into individual bodies. This (undeserved) critique of Spinoza did however at the same time indicate how to save Spinozism from its alleged Cartesian predicament by suggesting that his natural philosophy could be constructed dynamically rather than mechanistically. In this way, Toland paved the way for the neo-Spinozism of the French Enlighteners later in the eighteenth century.76 The correspondence between Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan and Nicolas Malebranche, which includes eight letters written over a year in 1713–14, is less directly influential than the other readings mentioned above for an obvious reason: it was first published in 1841.77 But it is one of the most philosophically striking examples of an assimilation of Spinoza with Malebranche that was exceedingly common in the early reception. Many critics of Descartes around the turn of the century attempted to discredit the Cartesian philosophy by associating it with Spinozism. This also extended to the occasionalist branch of Cartesianism. Hence, among French commentators in particular, but not only, there was a persistent tendency to saddle Malebranche with the accusation of Spinozism (contrary, of course, to Malebranche himself who proclaims Spinoza “a true atheist” and Spinozism a monstrous doctrine “full of evident contradictions” in the Entretiens sur la

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spinoza’s reception 421 métaphysique et sur la religion.)78 As early as 1685, in his anti-Spinozist treatise L’Impie convaincu, Noël Aubert de Versé thus put considerable energy into demonstrating that the doctrine of the “visionary” Malebranche led directly to Spinozism.79 Leibniz also associated Spinozism and Malebranche on the grounds that, by depriving finite creations of causal powers, occasionalism tended to reduce all things to mere modes: Spinoza had simply “pushed the furthest the consequences of the Cartesian doctrine of occasional causes.”80 As a later example, the English Freemason Andrew Michael Ramsey, in his The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion from 1748, bluntly claimed that “Malebranchism is Spinozism begun, and Spinozism is Malebranchism consummated.”81 But these few examples are far from isolated. Paul Vernière even claims that, during three decades of the first eighteenth century, “all the best minds of the period associated Malebranche to Spinozism.”82 Among these readings, Dortous de Mairan’s letters represented perhaps the biggest philosophical challenge to Malebranche’s system. Dortous latched on to Malebranche’s notion of “intelligible extension” which – grounded in Malebranche’s epistemology in the notion of “vision in God” – serves the purpose of providing clear and distinct ideas with an immediate object in God. Dortous, however, suggested that this conception of intelligible extension brings Malebranche close to endorsing the Spinozist notion of extension as a divine attribute.83

spinoza in the french enlightenment The image of Spinoza in the French Enlightenment was deeply ambiguous: the reception history entered an “era of confusion,” as Paul Vernière calls it in his magisterial Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution.84 The fortunes of the geometer-philosopher and the mathematicalmechanistic paradigm of scientific knowledge were declining as a result of the breakdown of French Cartesianism and the growing success of the empiricist program defined in the wake of John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton. In his 1749 Traité des systèmes, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac thus presented Spinoza’s geometrical exposition of his philosophy as the very paradigm of the absurdities that followed from the rationalist esprit de système, prone to abstraction and wordplay (as opposed to the laudable esprit systématique of the empiricist program.)85 Refuting point by point the entire first part of the Ethics, everywhere denouncing the

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vanity and the abstraction of the geometrical apparatus, he concluded that “his definitions are vague, his axioms not very exact, his propositions are the work only of his imagination, and contain nothing that may lead to the knowledge of things.”86 At the same time, however, as Spinoza the geometer was reproached for engaging in abstract logomachia, the materialist Spinoza inherited from earlier readers – be it followers who congratulated him or detractors who criticized him for it – was better received among the French Enlighteners. One very characteristic feature of the French reception was the way that Spinoza’s philosophy, considered as a kind of materialism, was assimilated to the burgeoning life sciences.87 Spinoza’s rudimentary physics has good potential for a theory of the life sciences,88 but in the first reception this potential remained largely unexplored. In the seventeenth century, Spinozism was not really confronted with the most recent developments in the life sciences. The emphasis that Cartesians put on shape and motion had encouraged attempts to reduce life to a kind of mechanics, or what is sometimes described as “iatromechanism.” Important discoveries were made, such as Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood or Steno’s theory of muscle contraction. But most of those advances were too easy to interpret in mechanistic terms to really call for the development of an independent field of study dedicated to vital motion. This all changed in the eighteenth century, opening up the possibility for rethinking Spinozism within a vitalist framework. John Toland, as already mentioned above, was among the first to explore this option, under the pretense of refuting Spinoza. But many subsequent readers, both those in favor and those opposed to him, pursued the idea.89 Julien Offray de La Mettrie associated Spinozism with materialism and determinism, and with the notion that the human being is an automaton. And while he sometimes also made superficial anti-Spinozist gestures, he also acknowledged, in his “summary of the systems” contained the Traité de l’âme (1750), that “the author of Machine Man [i.e., La Mettrie himself] seems to have written his book on purpose to defend this sad truth.”90 The work by Denis Diderot and the role Spinoza plays in it provides the best example of this vitalist approach to Spinozism. At first, Diderot compared Spinozism with deism and atheism. Hence, La Promenade du sceptique (1747) is a dialogue between a Spinozist and representatives of other philosophies. Spinoza’s position is summarized in the following brief proposition, in a reply to the deist: “Thinking being, according to him [that is, the deist], is not a mode of corporeal

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spinoza’s reception 423 being. According to me, there is no reason to believe that corporeal being is an effect of thinking being. It therefore follows from his admission and my argument that thinking being and corporeal being are eternal, that these two substances make up the universe, and that the universe is God.” However, when the deist objects that “you deify the butterflies, insects, flies, drops of water, and all the molecules of matter,” the Spinozist replies by stressing that the interest of his viewpoint lies less in its assertion of a certain number of propositions than in the way in which it serves as a contribution to a specific intellectual battle: “I do not deify anything . . .. If you understand me a little, you will see on the contrary that I work toward banishing presumption, lies, and gods from the world.”91 Nonetheless, in his entry on “Spinosa” in volume XV of the Encyclopédie from 1765, Diderot still presents and criticizes Spinoza’s doctrine as constituted by a set of propositions.92 His exposition owes much to Pierre Bayle and Johann Jacob Brucker, and does not presuppose any direct reading of Spinoza’s work. His way of criticizing is similar to many other philosophical articles of the Encyclopédie, using a slippery and orthodox-looking rhetoric that does not fully commit the personal judgment of the author. In another article, entitled “Spinosiste,” Diderot does however propose to distinguish between the outdated “old” Spinozism and a more attractive “modern” Spinozism: One should not confuse the old Spinozists with the modern Spinozists. The general principle held by the latter is that matter is sensible, which they demonstrate by the development of the egg, an inert body which through the means of heat alone passes to the state of a sentient and living being, and by the growth of any animal which, in the beginning, is nothing but a point but which then, through the assimilation of plant nutritives – in a word of all substances which serve as nutrition – turns into a big, sentient, living body in a great space. From this they conclude that nothing but matter exists and that matter suffices to explain everything; in everything else, they follow the old Spinozism in all its inferences.93

Later, in Le Rêve de d’Alembert and other dialogues from the end of the 1760s, Diderot further elaborated this neo-Spinozist metaphysics of sensible matter, arguing in the Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot that “there is not more than one substance in the universe, in man, in animals”94 and in Le Rêve de d’Alembert that “there is only one individual; it is the totality.”95 Diderot’s “neo-Spinozism” was an attempt to

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rethink the metaphysical core of Spinoza’s philosophy in terms of a metaphysics of power and becoming, adapting the doctrine to another model than the mathematical one in which it was originally couched, namely, the model of the budding life sciences.

spinoza in the german enlightenment: the pa n t h e i s m c o n t rov e r s y In a letter to Elise Reimarus from July 1783, Freidrich Heinrich Jacobi mentioned for the first time a conversation he once had with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing where the latter had confided to him that he was a Spinozist. In 1785, in Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn, Jacobi published the conversation as a written dialogue along with letters he had exchanged with Moses Mendelssohn about Spinoza’s philosophy.96 Mendelssohn, a close friend of Lessing, considered the publication an attempt to discredit his now deceased friend. Thus began the controversy that structured a great deal of the philosophical discussion in Germany in the last decades of the eighteenth century, the so-called Pantheismusstreit.97 If the whole affair became of such monumental consequence, it was because Lessing was the main front figure of the German Enlightenment program and because the evaluation of Spinozism became inextricably wound up in the contemporary discussions regarding the compatibility of Enlightenment philosophy with Christian religion. It is important to realize that while all of the protagonists in the Pantheismusstreit engaged in interpretation of Spinoza’s texts, sometimes even quite detailed interpretation, none of them nurtured any ambitions about providing historically exact accounts of Spinoza’s original intentions. They were appropriating Spinozism for their own ends, trying to search out what they sometimes called “the spirit of Spinozism,”98 which was something quite different from Spinoza’s doctrine. Johann Gottfried von Herder even went as far as to suggest that Spinoza “did not recognize the integral strength of his own system.”99 Over and above the revelations regarding Lessing’s alleged Spinozism, Jacobi’s book mainly discussed theses regarding Spinoza that Mendelssohn had already developed some thirty years before in the Philosophische Gespräche (1755), in particular, regarding Spinoza’s relationship to Leibniz.100 Mendelssohn’s take on Spinoza in this book in some respects foreshadowed the Spinoza reception of the entire following century. Far from approving of Spinozism as such,

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spinoza’s reception 425 Mendelssohn considered Spinoza a victim of historical necessity: in the historical development of philosophy, he argued, someone had to fall into this abyss in order for philosophy to move from Cartesianism to the truth of Leibnizianism. At the same time, however, he argued that Leibnizianism builds on Spinozism. In the first two dialogues of the Philosophische Gespräche, Mendelssohn thus showed how two central theses in Leibniz – the preestablished harmony of body and soul and the conception of divine mind as the regio possibilitatis – have conceptual roots that can traced back to Spinoza. The first thesis was not original: in his Dissertationum philosophicarum pentas from 1712, the Cartesian Ruardus Andala already argued that Spinoza’s doctrine was the “closest parent” of Leibniz’s doctrine of preestablished harmony. The thesis had also been supported by Christian Wolff’s adversary in Halle, Joachim Lange. In both cases, however, the intent was to discredit Leibniz by associating him with the infamous name of Spinoza. Mendelssohn’s concluded the exact opposite: Spinozism could be partly rehabilitated exactly because it formed the original basis for a later, religiously acceptable doctrine, namely, Leibniz’s. The second thesis was, as far as we know, Mendelssohn’s own invention, but it involved an idealist reading of Spinoza, including a spiritualization of the notion of extension that arguably should be traced back to Wachter’s Elucidarius cabalisticus.101 Jacobi agreed with Mendelssohn that a close kinship exists between Leibniz and Spinoza. Contrary to Mendelssohn, however, and going back to the original approach taken by Andala and Lange, he did not believe that this proximity redeemed Spinoza but that it condemned Leibniz and, along with him, the entire Enlightenment project. Jacobi denounced Spinozism as atheism.102 Leibniz’s rationalist philosophy, however, inadvertently fell into the same trap. Indeed, for Jacobi, any rationalism – that is, any philosophy based on the principle of sufficient reason – led to atheism. This, however, also meant that Spinozism could not be efficiently refuted by reason: one would have to perform a leap of faith, or what he called a salto mortale, in order to overcome it.103 Many prominent thinkers at the time got involved in the pantheism controversy. Jacobi urged Immanuel Kant to “clear himself of the suspicion of Spinozism” and take his side against Mendelssohn. Reluctantly, Kant entered the fray with the essay Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren? published in the Berlinische Monatschrift in October 1786 and with a letter to Jacobi from August 30, 1789. Trying his best to stay above the debate, he was dismayed that anyone could assimilate critical philosophy to Spinozism, to the extent that it was, for

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Kant, the only efficient means to curb a dogmatic Spinozism “leading directly to enthusiasm.” Johann Gottfried von Herder also contributed to the debate in Gott. Einige Gespräche (1787; 2nd edition, 1800).104 He defended Spinoza against Jacobi: “It is plain on every page that he is no atheist.”105 Quite to the contrary, Spinoza was “the theologian of Cartesianism.”106 For Herder, the central point of Spinoza’s doctrine was not the pantheist ontology of the first part of the Ethics, but rather the doctrine of the love of God developed in the fifth part. Moreover, Spinoza’s parallelism, which he as well assimilated to Leibniz’s preestablished harmony, was for Herder based on a kind of “mysticism” and formed a “symbolic harmony,” reconciling the internal eternity of thinking with the exteriority of body. This “mystical” interpretation was subsequently taken up by Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811), which marked the point of transition toward the interpretations that belong to German romanticism and German Idealism.

spinoza in german idealism: schelling and hegel In a recent edited volume on Spinoza and German Idealism, Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Melamed note that “there can be no doubt that without Spinoza, German Idealism would have been just as impossible as it would have been without Kant.”107 While this doubtless is true, it should be added that the Spinoza German Idealism could not do without is a particular Spinoza, namely, the Spinoza inherited from the romantics. The romantics had extracted a new reading of Spinoza from the Pantheismusstreit where the traditional figure of “Spinoza the atheist” disappeared in order to make room for his opposite: “Spinoza the God-intoxicated man” as Novalis put it. They brought the amor intellectualis Dei closer to the logos of the Gospel of John, prompting Goethe to define Spinoza as christianissimus. Goethe was particularly impressed with Part 5 of the Ethics, admiring the “disinterestedness which shone from every sentence,” emphasizing in particular E 5p19: “He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.”108 Indeed, in Goethe’s own words, Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva gave him “the courage to devote [his] whole life to the contemplation of things.”109 It was this lofty, enthusiast Spinoza already present in Herder that Schelling and Hegel inherited and built on.110 Schelling’s relationship to Spinoza is an evolving and complicated affair. His Munich lectures from 1827, Zur Geschichte der neueren

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spinoza’s reception 427 Philosophie, do however represent a highpoint. Here, Schelling presents Spinozism as a kind of objectivism: “Spinoza’s substance is a subjectobject, but where the subject has been completely lost.”111 Being objective and exterior rather than subjective and interior, the distinction between the attributes is not a real, living opposition and, conversely, their unity is a purely formal and exterior one: “The duality that he posits in unity does not ground a genuine pulse, a true life, for the oppositions remain dead and indifferent to each other.”112 And yet, in spite of leaving the absolute opposition between thought and extension, subject and object, unresolved, Spinoza’s doctrine of the attributes is potentially productive, contrary to Leibniz’s, which only worsens things by embracing empty idealism: There is this great difference between them that Spinoza, with his two attributes, has a real opposition that, even though he does not make use of it, can be used for further development. Where there is opposition, there is life. Contrary to this, in Leibniz is an absolute unitarian, so to speak. He knows only spirit, in him nothing is spiritless or opposed to spirit.113

Contrary to Leibniz’s monadology, Spinozism represents for Schelling an incomplete doctrine. However, exactly because it was incomplete, it also remains open to productive elaboration. Schelling himself incorporated important parts of Spinoza’s monist doctrine into his own Naturphilosophie.114 On Hegel’s assessment, by contrast, going beyond Spinozism involves not only completing it, but overturning it altogether.115 Hegel’s interest in Spinoza is evident from the Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, including the 1805–6 lectures in Jena and the 1825–26 lectures in Berlin, and from the Wissenschaft der Logik (1812–16). At an early stage, he contributed to the important Spinoza edition by H. E. G. Paulus, published in Jena in 1802–3.116 In the Vorlesungen, Hegel famously proclaims that “to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all philosophy.”117 The statement must be understood in a very particular sense. First of all, the philosophy of which Spinoza is the alleged “commencement” is of course not just any philosophy, but Hegel’s philosophy. Next, admitting that one has to begin with Spinoza certainly does not mean for Hegel that one should also end with him. Spinozism is a doctrine that has to be overcome. If Spinoza represents a beginning, it is because, according to Hegel, he is one who first formulated the fundamental principle of

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dialectics according to which things are only determined to be what they are by what they are not – the axiom omnis determinatio est negatio.118 However, Spinoza did not go far enough, Hegel argues, but only conceived such determining contradiction as extrinsic and not intrinsic. He discovered negation as a principle of determination, but not the principle of the negation of the negation: “Determinateness is negation” is the absolute principle of Spinoza’s philosophy; this true and simple insight establishes the absolute unity of substance. But Spinoza stops short at negation as determinateness or quality; he does not advance to a cognition of negation as absolute, that is, self-negating, negation.119

Thus, Hegel explains, the attributes are nothing but the forms under which the understanding conceives of God and their distinction therefore only an extrinsic difference that one does not find in God himself. Modal distinctions are not real either, because singular things only exist by negation: “In the absolute, which is only unmoved identity, the attribute, like the mode, is only as vanishing, not as becoming, so that here, too, the vanishing takes its positive beginning only from without.”120 Consequently, in the end, Spinoza’s Deus sive natura is nothing but inert and indifferent substance, nur starre Substanz, noch nicht Geist. It cannot account for the reality of the particular through living difference: “There is an absolute substance, and it is what is true. But it is not yet the whole truth, for substance must also be thought of as inwardly active and alive, and in that way must determine itself as spirit.”121 This is also why Spinoza should not be accused of atheism, or denying the reality of God, but rather of acosmism, or denying the reality of the world: If Spinoza is called an atheist for the sole reason that he does not distinguish God from the world, it is a misuse of the term. Spinozism might really just as well or even better have been termed acosmism, since according to its teaching it is not to the world, finite existence, the universe, that reality and permanency are to be ascribed, but rather to God alone as the substantial.122

c o u s i n a n d h i s a dv e r s a r i e s : s p i n o z a i n n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u ry f r a n c e The Cartesian polemics around 1700 often involved attempts at compromising Descartes by his dangerous proximity to Spinoza or, on the

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spinoza’s reception 429 contrary, defending Descartes by trying to show that his philosophy constituted the most solid antidote to it. A century later, similar controversies appeared in France, at the time when Victor Cousin, the allpowerful figure at the top of the university institutions, was trying to find a just mean between the philosophical positions on the left, republicanism and burgeoning socialism, and the conservative “philosophy of the clergy” on the right. Cousin, in his youth under the sway of German idealism, later, while ascending to power, veered toward a more centrist position, trying to establish Descartes as the founder of the “spiritual eclecticism” he was promoting through the university institutions under his control. The Descartes he emphasized was not the mathematician or natural philosopher, but the Descartes of the cogito, proclaimed as the French national psychologist who explored consciousness. For the spiritual eclecticists, consciousness constituted the first truth that philosophy had to be founded on. Within this philosophical and institutional strategic set-up, Spinoza occupied a peculiar place. For the antiCousinians among the clergy, Spinoza’s pantheism was nothing but atheism and materialism, incompatible with revelation and morality. Moreover, Spinoza was the necessary end point of all rationalist philosophy, thus dragging Descartes with him into the pit. For Cousin, on the contrary, who followed the Germans on this point, Spinoza was not a materialist or atheist, but the Ethics was a “mystical hymn” describing the dissolution of the human spirit in God. Hence, contrary to Descartes, “he erased personhood from existence . . . the infinite crushes the finite too much . . .. Far from being atheist, as he is accused of, Spinoza has the sense of God to such a degree that he loses the sense of man.” At the same time, Cousin downplayed the Cartesian heritage of Spinoza’s philosophy, instead depicting him as the “essentially Jewish” product of an oriental background, like “an Indian muni, a Perian sufi, an enthusiast monk.”123 This reading allowed him to dissociate Spinoza from the Cartesianism he favored – indeed to argue that Descartes constituted the only efficient bulwark against Spinoza’s dissolution of the individual consciousness in God.124 The struggles between Cousinians and antiCousiniens were, at some point, mirrored by debates internally in the Cousinian camp about whether appealing to Descartes was in fact the best way to save philosophy from Spinozism. Thus, in 1854, Louis Alexandre Foucher de Careil found a text in the Leibniz archives in Hanover that he published with a commentary under the title Réfutation inédite de Spinoza.125 By publishing this text, Foucher de Careil aimed at showing that Leibniz, and not Descartes, was the better

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rationalist to pick in order to refute Spinozism and establish spiritual eclecticism on a firm foundation because, as Leibniz writes in that text, “Spinoza began where Descartes left off, in naturalism.”126 It is worth noting how these controversies were closely related to questions regarding text edition. The discovery, publication, translation, and commentary of historical texts played an essential role in the evaluation of philosophical positions. Indeed, the relation went in both directions: the contemporary ideological controversies encouraged new text editions, while the newly edited philosophies and philosophers were enrolled in the service of those controversies. Émile Saisset’s 1842 translation of Spinoza’s works – excluding the Tractatus politicus, the Hebrew Grammar, and, of course, the Korte Verhandeling, not yet discovered – must be understood against this background: it was a project that Saisset undertook not in order to promote Spinoza, but in order to better refute him, while at the same time disproving the antiCousinian claim that “rationalism necessarily leads to pantheism.”127

s c h o p e n h au e r , m a r x , n i e t z s c h e In the late nineteenth century, a number of important German philosophers engaged with Spinoza’s thinking, including Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819), Schopenhauer complained that “the doctrine of Spinoza . . . is incompatible with our wonder at its existence and nature.”128 Instead of presenting the world “as remarkable, problematical, and indeed as an unfathomable and everdisquieting riddle,” thereby accommodating our metaphysical need for wonder, Spinoza had made it into something “far more self-evident than that two and two make four.”129 Moreover, he reproached Spinoza for not properly distinguishing the notions of causa and ratio, producing a “gross confusion between the cause and the ground of knowledge”: It was through this confusion of the ground of knowledge with the efficient cause that he succeeded in identifying God with the world. The true picture of Spinoza’s causa sui is Baron Munchhausen encircling his horse with his legs, and raising himself and the horse upwards by means of his pigtail, with the inscription Causa sui written below.130

Schopenhauer did however also offer a more positive evaluation of Spinoza as a person. He emphasized the originality of the first pages of

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spinoza’s reception 431 the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Schopenhauer believed himself to be the first to have discovered the essence of renunciation and voluntary mortification. Still, he conceded, this essence was already grasped intuitively and expressed in the actions of saints and ascetics. Whoever wanted to understand it completely would have to learn it from examples drawn from experience (extremely rare examples, he specifies, citing the last phrase of the Ethics: “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”)131 He goes on to provide some examples, and among them – between Madame Guyon and the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” inserted in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister – we find the life of Spinoza.132 To grasp the significance of Spinoza’s life, says Schopenhauer, we must use the introduction to the TIE as a key, a text he recommends for “stilling the storm of the passions.”133 The famous first phrases of the treatise are declared “sublime,” not so much for their systematic content as for the authenticity of the human experience of suffering they relate. Schopenhauer thus introduced yet another image of Spinoza: after Spinoza the atheist and Spinoza the mystic, we now meet Spinoza the sufferer. Later philological commentaries on the TIE inherited that perspective. Jacob Freudenthal, for instance, after noting that “the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione is not among the most important of Spinoza’s works,” goes on to stress that it is nonetheless the most moving, providing us with “a deep glimpse into his soul and the motives of his action.”134 Similarly, Carl Gebhardt writes that “nowhere in Spinoza’s works do we encounter so immediately the philosopher in all the sublimity and purity of his sentiments.”135 In 1841, the young Marx read the TTP and Spinoza’s letters, pen in hand.136 His notes constitute a kind of mosaic that emphasizes the division between philosophy and religion, leaving no relation between them: in philosophy, determinism excludes the supernatural; in religion, a series of opinions serves to incite obedience. He takes no interest in Spinoza’s biblical exegesis or in the rational reconstruction of “true religion” in chapters 7 and 14 of the TTP.137 In Die heilige Familie (1845), Marx placed Spinoza among the metaphysicians, following a Renouvier textbook.138 And when analyzing the relations between production and consumption, and their identity in “productive consumption,” he noted, echoing Hegel’s reading, that “this identity of production and consumption amounts to Spinoza’s thesis: determinatio est negatio.”139 It was mainly Friedrich Engels who brought Spinoza into the Marxist fold. Hence, in Anti-Dühring (1878), he defined Spinoza as a “brilliant exponent of dialectic.”140 And when Georgi

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Plekhanov asked him about Spinoza’s doctrine of substance and attributes, Engels replied: “Of course old Spinoza was quite right.”141 Plekhanov himself argued in his 1898 article on “Bernstein and Materialism,” that there was “absolutely no substantial difference between Spinozism and La Mettrie’s materialism,” and used Spinoza to argue for the existence of objective laws governing nature and society against Eduard Bernstein who had used Kant to turn socialism into a mere moral attitude.142 Subsequently, Spinoza reappeared regularly in the history of Marxism. In the USSR of the 1920s, different philosophical camps (mechanists and dialecticians) each constructed an image of Spinozism intended to help consolidate their own positions.143 It is not clear that Nietzsche had anything but second-hand knowledge of Spinoza, probably via the work by Kuno Fischer.144 Commentators always quote the letter to Overbeck of July 30, 1881, where Nietzsche recognizes Spinoza as a Vorgänger. Similar declarations can be found in the Nachlass from the 1880s, where Spinoza names again figures among several such “precursors,” such as Plato, Pascal, Empedocles, and Goethe. Yet other texts, however, written during the same period, are more ambivalent: if Spinoza figures as a model of critique in The Genealogy of Morals, he also appears in the Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ as a metaphysician opposed to the sensible world. In late notes, he deems both Spinoza’s relativization of good and evil and his critique of the Judeo-Christian traditions insufficient and argues that these conceptions themselves rest on a moral foundation. Nietzsche opposes his amor fati to Spinoza’s amor intellectualis Dei. Most importantly, he develops the idea of the will to power in explicit opposition to the Spinozist notion of power.145 Figuring as a precursor as well as a theoretical target, Spinoza thus plays a fundamental role – as an object of both fascination and repulsion – during the last period of Nietzsche’s thinking. Later readers have often assimilated Spinoza and Nietzsche. An important example is Gilles Deleuze who, in both his books on Spinoza, argues that Spinoza and Nietzsche share a refusal to “refer existence to transcendent values” and proposing instead a “typology of modes of existence.” They both “go beyond good and evil” and replace “false moral opposition” with “real ethical difference.”146 Moreover, in a general assessment of his own philosophical enterprise, Deleuze suggests that in all his own work “everything tended toward the great SpinozaNietzsche identity.”147 Such perceived convergences between Spinoza and Nietzsche have contributed to an important reception of Spinoza

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spinoza’s reception 433 among contemporary continental philosophers interested in critique and the philosophy of power.148 It is worth noting, however, that Deleuze also, in Différence et répétition in particular, stresses important differences, especially in relation to the affirmation of essential difference and becoming according to Deleuze embedded in Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return, which he opposes to Spinoza’s more static conception of actual essence as perseverance in existence.149

t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u ry s p i n o z a The end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries witnessed a formidable surge of Spinoza scholarship in Northern Europe. This scholarly movement was essentially German, but included also Dutch and Danish scholars such as Johannes van Vloten, Jan Pieter Nicolaas Land, Harald Höffding, and, a little later, Svend Valdemar Rasmussen. Konraad Oege Meinsma and Jacob Freudenthal delved into Spinoza’s biography and published archival documents. The most ambitious among these historical researchers was arguably Stanislaus von Dunin-Borkowski, the author of a gigantic four-volume biographical and contextual account where, unfortunately, Spinoza’s thought loses much of its specificity.150 New critical editions appeared, notably the editions of Van Vloten and Land (1882) and Carl Gebhardt (1925). The Chronicon Spinozanum, an annual that existed from 1921 to 1927, published articles dedicated to specific points of interpretation, but also documents relating to the intellectual context of Spinoza, such as, for example, Franciscus Van den Enden’s correspondence with Jan de Witt. Much of the philological and historical work that we still rely on today was done during that period, although a lot of it has also undergone major revisions throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Over the last decades, Dutch and Italian scholars, from Emilia Giancotti, Filippo Mignini, Paolo Cristofolini, and Omero Proietti, to Fokke Akkerman and Piet Steenbakkers, to mention just a few, have done considerable work in bringing all this textual scholarship up to date and proposing important new research tools.151 Spinoza studies in the English-speaking world followed their own path. About the same time as the German, Dutch, and Danish commentators set to work on their philological and historical projects, the British idealists renewed the Hegelian approach to Spinoza. Numerous English translations of Spinoza appeared in the 1870s and 1880s.152 R. H. M. Elwes published his two-volume English translations of The Chief

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Works of Benedict de Spinoza in 1883–84 along with an extended introduction. During that same period in the 1880s, several prominent scholars, including Frederick Pollock, James Martineau, and John Caird undertook studies of Spinoza’s philosophy.153 Pollock’s Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy of 1880 (2nd edition, 1899) and Harold H. Joachim’s A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza of 1901 represent the highpoints of this revival of Spinoza studies in the British Isles around the turn of the century.154 These various readings were circling around what they all considered a fundamental tension between unity and multiplicity in Spinoza’s metaphysics, preventing Spinoza from providing a coherent notion of the particular, much in line with the interpretation already found in Hegel.155 The advent of analytic philosophy was, at first, not good news for Spinoza studies. Far from being forgotten – after all, Bertrand Russell admired Spinoza as a person156 – early analytic philosophers had little stakes in Spinozism. The revival of Spinoza studies in the English-speaking world in the second half of the twentieth century owes a great debt to Edwin Curley’s Spinoza’s Metaphysics from 1969 and the first volume of his translation of Spinoza’s Collected Works from 1985, which included the bulk of the work on metaphysics (the second volume with the political works has appeared only recently, in 2015.)157 Samuel Shirley’s various translations of Spinoza’s works, published piecemeal throughout the 1990s and in a single Complete Works volume in 1999, later provided an alternative to Curley’s translations and the only available translation of Spinoza’s Hebrew Grammar. Lee Rice and Steven Barbone, in constant dialogue with the academic tradition of French Spinozism mainly associated with Martial Gueroult and Alexandre Matheron, produced a wealth of studies. At the same time, more analytically minded commentators like Jonathan Bennett and Don Garrett took up the challenge. The questions they chose to focus on – for example, necessitarianism, monism, teleology, proofs of God – continue to structure the field of Spinoza research in the United States. Curley’s work was in many ways informed by systematic ambitions similar to those of Martial Gueroult. But in the Anglo-American context, the effort to provide a systematic account of Spinoza’s metaphysics was accompanied by a will to make Spinoza’s philosophy more palatable to contemporary analytic philosophy by systematically avoiding the attribution to him of positions that were considered too outlandish, on the basic assumption that “views that are tremendously implausible should not be attributed to the great, dead philosophers without pretty strong textual evidence.”158 Curley’s work

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spinoza’s reception 435 contributed to putting Spinoza back on the philosophical agenda among analytic philosophers. His approach has however also recently come under critique for being excessively “domesticating” and for taking the metaphysical “boldness” out of Spinozism.159 By contrast, Michael Della Rocca has proposed an “untamed” reading of Spinoza’s metaphysics,160 depicting him, in Daniel Garber’s words, as the “superhero” of rationalism, characterized by unrelenting commitment to a principle of sufficient reason.161 Since Della Rocca’s influential reading also depicts Spinoza as a kind of conceptualist or idealist, his work has also sparked renewed interest in the old idealist readings of Spinoza, in particular, Hegel and the British idealists.162 In France, the first half of the century saw the study of Spinozism come out from the shadows of French spiritualism. Victor Delbos’s Le Problème moral dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l’histoire du spinozisme from 1893 is arguably the first scientific study of Spinoza in French.163 In the 1920s, prominent French scholars such as Léon Brunschvicg and Albert Rivaud contributed frequently to the Chronicon Spinozanum in an increasingly integrated international community of Spinoza scholars. The end of the 1960s saw a sharp renewal of Spinoza studies in France. Some works were devoted to the “structural analysis” of Spinoza’s metaphysics. The most important representative of this approach was Martial Gueroult164 whose voluminous reconstruction of the first two parts of the Ethics inspired a wave of systematic and detailed studies by French Spinoza scholars, including, most importantly, those by Alexandre Matheron.165 At the same time, from the late 1960s onwards, other philosophically influential figures contributed to shaping the discussions of Spinoza in France, including Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, and Étienne Balibar.166 Deleuze’s two Spinoza books continue to inspire and puzzle Spinoza and Deleuze scholars alike.167 French Spinoza commentary in the second half of the twentieth century cannot be adequately assessed as a single interpretive school. Nonetheless, the reception of Spinoza in France from the 1960s onward has sometimes, outside of France, been depicted as forming a militant block of political “New Spinozism” associated with structuralism or post-structuralism.168 While this has contributed importantly to the diffusion of the work of French Spinoza scholars in the English-speaking world, especially in the 1990s, it has also produced a reductive image of both the nature and origin of French Spinozism. By contrast, Knox Peden has recently published a study of an important strand of French Spinozism leading from Jean Cavaillès, via Gueroult and Ferdinand

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Alquié, Althusser and Jean-Toussaint Desanti, up to Deleuze.169 The author interestingly depicts Spinozism in post-war France as a rationalist alternative to the dominant phenomenological school in France from the end of the Second World War until today.

s p i n o z a t o day So where do we stand now? Some contemporary constellations and controversies in the scholarly world of today have already been mentioned above. We shall conclude with a few additional, general observations. A considerable body of work on the biographical and historical context of Spinoza’s philosophy has appeared over the last decades, from Jonathan Israel’s trilogy on the “radical Enlightenment” (2001–11) to the collective Dictionary of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Philosophers (2003), to mention just two highlights among many. Contemporary Dutch scholarship on Spinoza and his time is today in a class of its own. Wiep van Bunge, Piet Steenbakkers, Theo Verbeek, Henri Krop, and many others have over the last decades produced a continuous stream of philological, historical, and philosophical research of the highest quality.170 Recently, an impressive series of studies on biblical scholarship and Spinoza in the Dutch Republic mostly written by younger Dutch scholars have appeared.171 A new critical LatinFrench edition of Spinoza’s works from the Presses universitaires de France – an international project that has also included Italian and Dutch scholars – is getting close to completion, and is destined to definitively supersede the edition by Carl Gebhardt, today largely surpassed by scholarship. All this new historical and textual scholarship has opened up the possibility of conducting ever more detailed and precise studies of Spinoza’s texts and context. At the same time, research on Spinoza’s philosophy and the study of his system has exploded over the last decade. A long list of specialized studies of Spinoza has appeared. Major academic publishers are producing a steady flow of student companions and readers dedicated to Spinoza. The systematic study of Spinoza’s doctrine has today reached such a level of sophistication that researchers no longer self-identify simply as Spinoza specialists, but as specialists of some specific problem or text, be it his political philosophy, basic metaphysics, ethics, or relationship to the Jewish, Cartesian, or classical tradition. In addition to this, the Spinoza community has today become very international. We have noted above some current developments in France, the United

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spinoza’s reception 437 States, Italy, and Holland. Iberian and Latin American studies have also surged over the last decades. Gabriel Albiac’s La sinagoga vacia of 1987 is foundational for the study of Spinoza in the Jewish context.172 Lia Levy’s work on subjectivity and consciousness are today essential commentaries for anyone interested in Spinoza’s philosophy of mind.173 Marilena Chaui’s work on immanence and freedom in her 2000 A Nervura do Real is another good example of the dynamism and quality of current Latin American studies on Spinoza.174 All these varied traditions today constantly communicate with each other. In any case, it is hardly possible today to speak in any clear-cut way about the current reception of Spinoza in terms of national traditions in the way one could in the eighteenth, nineteenth, or even twentieth century. Moreover, among political philosophers, one can no longer consider the TTP a “neglected masterpiece” as Edwin Curley did in the early 1990s: Theo Verbeek, Steven Nadler, and Susan James are just some of the Spinoza scholars who have proposed major book-length studies in English of the work. Antonio Negri’s idiosyncratic but insightful Savage Anomaly (1981; English edition, 1991), written in an Italian prison, depicts Spinoza as a quintessential philosophy of power and a radical political theory of absolute democracy. Negri’s collaboration with Michael Hardt in Empire from 2000, where they develop a Spinozist approach to globalism, has contributed substantially to make Spinoza a philosophical champion of the radical left and alter-mondialism.175 In a completely different philosophical context, contemporary metaphysicians, continental as well as analytic, take a keen interest in Spinoza’s doctrine, especially in the context of the current revival of monism as a respectable philosophical position.176 Interest also goes beyond philosophy: if Freud and Lacan refer sympathetically but only allusively to Spinoza, later psychoanalysts have made more systematic use of his theory of affects in particular.177 Work by Antonio Damasio ascribes a prominent theoretical position to Spinoza in the neurosciences;178 sociologists and economists such as Frédéric Lordon appeal to Spinozist insights;179 a recent project by Beth Lord and Peg Rawes makes use of Spinoza in relation to architecture and urban planning.180 Spinoza frequently appears as a character in novels and plays.181 As one noteworthy example, Maxime Rovere has recently published a well-informed attempt at “novelizing” the life of Spinoza and his circle.182 Finally, more than any other philosopher, Spinoza has always been and remains an object of fascination and even devotion, occasioning a steady stream of publications for the more general readership on his life and work.183

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notes 1 Delbos 1993: 3. See also Vernière 1954: 3; Lærke 2020a. 2 See Israel 2001: 271–85; Walther 2009; Israel 2012. 3 Stoppa 1680: 29. 4 See Van Bunge et al. 2011: 50–52. 5 See Thomasius 1693. The same three comparisons can be found in Kortholt 1680 and Bencini 1720. 6 Beiser 1987: 48. 7 Spinoza to Oldenburg, September/October 1675, Ep 68 | IV 299 / CW II 459. 8 Kuyper 1676 and Bunge 2005: 114. See also Lærke (2021), chapter 3. 9 On Steno and philosophy, see Andrault and Lærke 2018, in particular the article by E. Jorink. 10 See Steno 1675, translated as Ep 67b in CW II 451–58. 11 See Totaro 2000. 12 For a commentary on this correspondence, see Curley 2010. 13 Burgh to Spinoza, September 11, 1675, Ep 67 | IV 281 and 285 / CW II 441 and 445. 14 Cited in Nadler 2011: 232. 15 Spinoza to Burgh, end 1675/early 1676, Ep 76 | IV 323 / CW II 477. 16 Leibniz 1923–: VI: iv, 2198. 17 For the letter from Velthuysen and Spinoza’s reply, see Ep 42 and 43 | IV 207–26 / CW II 390. 18 See Spinoza to Velthuysen, September/October 1675, Ep 69 | IV 300–301 / CW II 460–61. 19 Tschirnhaus to Spinoza, May 2, 1676, Ep 80 | IV 331 / CW II 484. 20 See Shelford 2002; Lærke 2005; 2015: 107–203;(2021): chap. 3. 21 For the latter, see Laplanche 1986. 22 Hobbes, after having read the TTP, considered that Spinoza had gone too far, writing, according to John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, that “he had out thrown [cut through] him a barre’s length, for he durst not write so boldly” (Aubrey 1898: I: 357; see Curley 1992). 23 See Grotius, 2001. 24 Antistisu Constans 1991: Preface, G. 25 For a full study on Spinoza’s freedom of philosophizing, see Lærke (2021). 26 Leibniz 1923–: II: i, 196. 27 See Gibert 2010. 28 Bossuet 1681. 29 Simon de Vries to Spinoza, February 24, 1663, Ep 8 | IV 39 / CW I 190. 30 See Schuller to Spinoza, November 14, 1675, Ep 70 | Gilbert IV 301–3 / CW II 461–63; Spinoza to Schuller, November 18, 1675, Ep 72 | IV 304–5 / CW II 465–66.

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spinoza’s reception 439 31 TTP Preface, III 7 / CW II 69. 32 Spinoza to Oldenburg, September/October 1675, Ep 68 | IV 299 / CW II 459. 33 Beiser 1987: 48. 34 For a very useful section with brief commentaries and excerpts in English from various early critics of Spinoza, including Bayle, Clarke, More, Nieuwentijt, Toland, and Wittich, see Van Bunge et al. 2011: 85–140. 35 See Walther 2009: 35–39. 36 See Spinoza 1907. 37 See Willis 1870. George Eliot completed a translation between 1854 and 1856, the first in English. An edition by Clare Carlisle has recently been published in Spinoza 2020a. 38 See Meinsma 1983. 39 See Tschirnhaus 1687. For a commentary and French translation, see Tschirnhaus 1980. 40 See Kolakowski 1969. 41 See Wielema 2004. 42 Beiser 1987: 50. 43 On these figures, see Schröder 1987; Israel 2001: 628–63; Walther 2009: 29–35. 44 See Israel 2001, 2006, 2011. 45 Moreau 2008. See also Secretan et al. 2007. 46 Duijkerius 1691,1697. 47 See Wielema 2004: 88–90. 48 The refutation by Christoph Wittich, the Anti-Spinoza sive examen ethices Benedicti de Spinoza et commentarius de Deo et ejus attributis from 1690 is a good example of this. For excerpts in English translation, see Van Bunge et al. 2011. For a commentary, see Hubert 1994. 49 See Scribano 1988; Schmidt-Biggemann 1992. 50 See Regius 1723 and Andala 1719. 51 Andala 1712. 52 See Charles-Daubert 1998; 1999; Seguin and Moreau 2016. 53 Fréret 1986: 316. 54 Fréret 1986: 274–75. 55 For an English translation, see Van Bunge et al. 2003. 56 For a detailed account of the relations between Leibniz and Spinoza, see Lærke 2008. For some briefer introductory studies in English, see Lærke 2010, 2016a, and 2018. 57 For their brief exchange from late 1671, see Ep 45–46 | IV 230–34 / CW II 392–95. 58 See Schuller to Spinoza, November 14, 1675, IV 302–3 / CW II 463. 59 Leibniz 1923–: II: i, 196. 60 Leibniz 1923–: I: i, 193.

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440 pierre-franc¸ ois moreau and mogens lærke 61 Leibniz 1923–: II: i, 320. 62 See Lærke 2005. 63 Leibniz 1992. See also Kulstad 2002a, 2002b; Lærke 2008: 361–551. 64 Leibniz 1923–: VI: iv, 1764–76, trans in Leibniz 1989: 196–206. For commentary, see Lærke 2008: 559–847; 2016a: 22–26; 2018. 65 Toland 1704: Preface, § 14. See also Dagron 2001: 212–18. 66 See Wachter 1706: 7. 67 Wachter 1706: 68–69. 68 Wachter 1706: 46. 69 See Lærke 2016b. 70 See Meyer 1926: 44, 52. 71 See Jacobi 1994: 233–34. 72 Herder 1940: 155–56, 208–9. 73 The term is traditionally attributed to Toland, who first used it in English and popularized it. Strictly speaking, however, one can find Latin occurrences in the English Newtonian Joseph Raphson’s De Spatio reali (1697), from where Toland picked it up. 74 See Dagron 2009: 212–18. 75 For the exchange, see Spinoza, Ep 80–82 | IV 331–34 / CW II 484–87. 76 See Dagron 2004; 2009. 77 For an introduction and English translation, see Grene and Watson 1995. 78 Malebranche 1992: 826. 79 Aubert de Versé 1685: 142–43, 240. 80 Leibniz 1875–90: IV : 590. 81 Ramsay 1748: 536. See also Ramsay 1735: 707. 82 Vernière 1954: 260–70, here 268. 83 See also Moreau (2018). 84 See Vernière 1954: 333. 85 Condillac 1798. For commentary, see Vernière 1954: 466–75; McNiven Hine 1979; Lagrée and Macherey 1990: 241–54. 86 Condillac 1798: 321. 87 See Vernière 1954: 555–611. 88 See Andrault 2014. 89 See Citton 2006. 90 Cited in Thomson 1996: xiii. 91 For all quotations, see Diderot 1875–77: I: 233–34. 92 Diderot et D’Alembert 1751–72: XV: 563–74. 93 Diderot et D’Alembert 1751–72: XV: 474 (we translate). See also Vernière 1954: 528–610. 94 Diderot 1875–77: II: 117.

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spinoza’s reception 441 95 Diderot 1875–77: II: 139. 96 Jacobi 1994: 173–252, esp. 181. 97 Generally on Spinoza in the German Enlightenment and the Pantheism controversy, see Bell 1984; Beiser 1987; Zac 1989. 98 Herder 1940: 137: “But he [Lessing], like us, was interested solely in the spirit of Spinozism.” 99 Herder 1940: 123. 100 See Altman 1966 and Pätzold 2011. 101 See Lærke 2016b. 102 See Jacobi 1994: 233. 103 Jacobi 1994: 189. 104 On Herder and Spinoza, see Bienenstock 1993; Zammito 1997; Forster 2012. 105 Herder 1940: 95. 106 Herder 2002: 182. 107 Förster and Melamed 2012: 1. 108 Goethe to Jacobi, June 9, 1785, in Goethe and Jacobi 1848: 86. 109 Goethe to Jacobi, May 5, 1786, in Goethe and Jacobi 1848: 105–6. See also Steig 1999; Horst 2011; Förster 2012. 110 Cf. Herder commenting on the proemium of the TIE: “I thought I should find an insolent atheist, and here I discover virtually a metaphysical and moral enthusiast” (Herder 1940: 90). 111 Schelling 1966: 55 (we translate). 112 Schelling 1966: 56 (we translate). 113 Schelling 1966: 67 (we translate). 114 On Schelling’s reading of Spinoza, see also Kisser 2008 and Vater 2012. 115 See Macherey 1992; Macherey 2011; Sharp and Smith 2012. 116 Hegel 1955: 256. See also Lucas 1982/83. 117 Hegel 1955: 257. 118 The phrase is taken out of context from Spinoza to Jelles, Ep 50 | IV 240b / CW II 406–7. Here, Spinoza speaks about “shape being a negation,” arguing that “because the shape is nothing but a determination, and a determination is a negation, as they say, it can’t be anything but a negation.” We note that Spinoza himself seems to attribute the axiom to others (“as they say”) and that he is using it in the limited context of shapes and bodies. He is not speaking of modes and substance. 119 Hegel 1969: II: iii, chapter I, § 1179 120 Hegel 1969: § 1182. 121 Hegel 1990: 154. 122 Hegel 1955: 281. 123 For all quotations, see Cousin 1838: II: 163–66.

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442 pierre-franc¸ ois moreau and mogens lærke 124 See Moreau 1978, 2014; Vermeren 1990; Cotten 2008. 125 See Leibniz 1854. In fact, the text is a commentary by Leibniz on Johann Georg Wachter’s Elucidarius cabalisticus, which also includes extended remarks on Wachter’s reading of Spinoza. On the text, see Lærke 2008: 923–72. 126 Foucher de Careil 1854: LXXXV. See Moreau 1988, 2014. 127 Saisset 1859: I: 2. See Moreau 1980, 2008. 128 Schopenhauer 1909: II: 381. Generally on Schopenhauer and Spinoza, see Grunwald 1897: V: 247–53; Rappaport 1899; Moretti-Constanzi 1946; Semerari 1952: 94, 103, 109–10. 129 Schopenhauer 1909: II: 363. 130 Schopenhauer 1909: III: 465. 131 Schopenhauer 1909: I: 491. 132 Schopenhauer 1909: I: 492. 133 Schopenhauer 1909. 134 Freudenthal 1927: 96. 135 Gebhardt 1905: 54. 136 Marx 1977. 137 See Matheron 1977. 138 See Bloch 1977; Rubel 1977. 139 Marx and Engels 1978: 228. 140 Marx and Engels 1978: 694. 141 Plekhanov 1979. 142 See Salem 2008. 143 See Kline 1952. 144 See Scandella 2012; Sommer 2012. 145 For full studies, see in particular Wurzer 1975 and Rotter 2019. For other recent studies, see Pethick 2015; Yovel 2018; and Razvan 2019. 146 Deleuze 1988: 3, 129; 1990: 254. 147 Deleuze 1995: 135. See also Zaoui 1995. 148 For a good example, see Norris 1991: 13–15. 149 See Deleuze 1968. 150 See Dunin-Borkowski 1910, 1933–36. 151 See Giancotti 1971; Akkerman 1980; Spinoza 1986; Steenbakkers 1994; Akkerman and Steenbakkers 2005. 152 See Boucher 2002. 153 Pollock 1880; Martineau 1882; Caird 1888. 154 See Parkinson 2003. 155 See Newlands 2011b. 156 See Russell 2004: 610: “Spinoza (1632–77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.” See also Russell 2004: 325.

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spinoza’s reception 443 157 See Curley 1969, 1988. 158 Curley and Walski 1999: 242. 159 See Melamed 2013. 160 Della Rocca 2013. 161 Della Rocca 2008. See also Garber 2015 (including the reply in Della Rocca 2015). 162 See Newlands 2011a, 2011b; Melamed 2010, 2012c. For a summary of the debates around the “PSR,” see Lærke 2014. 163 See Delbos 1893. See also Lærke 2020a 164 See Gueroult 1968–74. 165 See Matheron 1969, 2011; Lærke 2020b: 584–85 166 See Bunge 2009: 225–27. 167 See Deleuze 1988, 1990. 168 Montag and Stolze 1997; Bunge 2009: 226–27, 230. 169 See Peden 2014. 170 For just one example, particularly helpful for students, see Van Bunge et al. 2011. 171 See Van Miert et al. 2017; Touber 2018; Van Miert 2018. 172 See Albiac 1987. 173 See, e.g., Levy 2017, 2000. 174 Chaui 2000. 175 See Negri 1991 and Negri and Hardt 2000. 176 See Goff 2012. 177 See, e.g., Attal 2010. 178 See Damasio 2003. 179 See, e.g., Lordon 2006. 180 See the website of the AHRC project Equality and Wellbeing in Philosophy and Architecture, https://equalitiesofwellbeing.wordpress.com/category/spinoza. 181 Bunge 2009: 232. 182 See Rovere 2017. 183 The version of this chapter published in the first edition of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (Garrett 1996) was translated into English by Roger Ariew.

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470 bibliography Seligman, Edwin R. A., and Alvin Johnson. 1930–35. Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 15 vols. New York: MacMillan. Seguin, M. S., and P.-F. Moreau, eds. 2016. La Lettre Clandestine 25. Thematic issue: “Le Traité des trois imposteurs.” Semerari, G. 1952. Problemi dello Spinozismo. Vecchi: Trani. Sextus Empiricus. 2000. Outlines of Scepticism, second edition, eds. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shein, Noa. 2009. “The False Dichotomy between Objective and Subjective Interpretations of Spinoza’s Attributes,” British Journal of the History of Philosophy 17.3: 529–31. Sherwood, William of. 1966. William of Sherwood’s Introduction to Logic, ed. and trans. Norman Kretzmann. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Siebrand, Heine. 1986. “Spinoza and the Rise of Modern Science in the Netherlands.” In Spinoza and the Sciences, eds. Marjorie Grene and Debra Nails: 61–91. Dordrecht: Reidel. Sills, David L., ed. 1968–79. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 18 vols. New York: MacMillan, Free Press. Silverman, Alex. 2017. “The Nature and Scope of Spinoza’s ‘One and the Same,’” Res Philosophica 94.4: 535–54. Simon, Richard. 1689. Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament. Rotterdam. Skinner, Quentin. 1974. “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy.” In The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, ed. G. E. Alymer: 79–98. New York: MacMillan. Skolnik, Fred, and Berenbaum, Michael, eds. 2007. Encyclopedia Judaica, Macmillian Reference, second edition. London: Macmillan. Smith, A. D. 2014. “Spinoza, Gueroult and Substance,” Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 87: 655–88. Smith, Steven B. 1997. Spinoza, Liberalism and the Question of Jewish Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sommer, A. U. 2012. “Nietzsche’s Readings on Spinoza: A Contextualist Study, Particularly on the Reception of Kuno Fischer,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 43.2: 156–84. Soyarslan, Sanem. 2014. “From Ordinary Life to Blessedness: The Power of Intuitive Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics.” In Essays on Spinoza’s Ethical Theory, eds. Matthew J. Kisner and Andrew Youpa: 236–57. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. “The Distinction between Reason and Intuitive Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics,” European Journal of Philosophy 24.1: 27–54. Springmeyer, Heinrich. 1970. “Eine neue kritische Textausgabe der ‘Regulae ad directionem ingenii’ von René Descartes,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 24: 101–25. Steenbakkers, Piet. 1994. Spinoza’s Ethica from Manuscript to Print: Studies on Text, Form, and Related Topics. Assen: Van Gorcum. 2003, “Jean-Maximilien Lucas.” In The Dictionary of Seventeenth and EighteenthCentury Dutch Philosophers, eds. Wiep van Bunge et al.: 644–46. Bristol: Thoemmes. 2009. “The Textual History of Spinoza’s Ethics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza’s Ethics, ed. Olli Koistinen: 26–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Index

acosmism, 93–95, 419, 428 action, irrational. See irrationality activity and passivity, 284 Adam, 388–90, 392 affects, 6, 249–53, 263, 265–67 constitution of, 266–67 imitation of, 270–73 transition of, 267–70 Ahaziah, 371 Akkerman, Fokke, 24, 433 Albiac, Gabriel, 437 alchemy, 195 Algebraic Calculation of the Rainbow, 34, 195–97 Alquié, Ferdinand, 436 Alsted, Johann-Heinrich, 190 alter-mondialism, 437 Althusser, Louis, 435 altruism, 258–61, 301–4 Andala, Ruardus, 414, 425 anthropomorphism, 343 Antistius, Lucius (Constans), 409 Apostles, 380–82 appetite. See desire approval (favor), 290, 298–300, 303–4, 307 Aquinas, Thomas, 322, 331 Aramaic, 374–77, 400 Aristotle, 4, 66–68, 101, 215 Artaxerxes I, 366 association, mental, 267–70 atheism, 16, 46, 335–36, 353, 425, 428–29 attributes, 3–6, 63–65, 68–69, 78–88, 98–99, 114–18, 124, 126–34, 138, 170, 190, 293, 417, 427. See also extension; thought Aubert de Versé, Noël, 192, 411, 421 Augustine, 389–90 Averroism, 417 Bacon, Francis, 26, 146, 193, 212–15 Balibar, Étienne, 435 Balling, Pieter, 413 Barbone, Steven, 434

Bayle, Pierre, 10, 16, 48, 53, 411, 416–18, 423 Beiser, Frederick, 413 Bennett, Jonathan, 11, 78–85, 110, 117, 266, 281, 307, 353, 434 Bernard, Claude, 211 Bernstein, Eduard, 432 Biasutti, Franco, 188 blessedness, 294 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 410 Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 412 Bouwmeester, Johannes, 25–26, 32, 37–39, 44, 219 Boyle, Robert, 6, 193–94, 213, 219–22 Brown, Raymond, 357, 383 Brucker, Johann Jacob, 419, 423 Brunschvicg, Léon, 191, 435 Buddeus, Johann Franz, 418 Burgersdijk, Franco, 188, 191, 215–16 Burgh, Albert, 407 Caird, John, 434 Calculation of Chances, 34, 196–98 Calvinism, 405–6, 413 Captivity, Babylonian, 365 Cartesianism, 413–14, 421, 426 causation, 68–78, 97, 106, 135, 299 adequate, 244 cause of itself (causa sui), 69–70 immanent, 70–71, 76, 345 mind-body, 114, 126, 135–37 transient, 70–71, 75–77 Cavaillès, Jean, 435 character, strength of (fortitudo), 284 Chaui, Marilena, 437 Christ. See Jesus Christianity, 14, 18, 367, 381, 392 Chronicles, 371 Chronicon Spinozanum, 433, 435 Clarke, Samuel, 411 Colerus, 15–16, 27, 35, 39–40, 53 collision, 106, 193, 204–9, 228 Colonna d’Istria, G., 412 common notions. 5. See notions, common

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476 index conatus, 6, 235–38, 257, 274, 284, 288, 297, 302 conception, 70–75, 97, 102 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 421 confusion, 148, 215, 341 consciousness, 250, 284, 429, 437 contexts, intensional. See intensionality contract, social, 316–18 Cousin, Victor, 417, 428–30 Crescas, 84, 110 Curley, Edwin, 9–10, 65, 111, 187, 202, 240, 353, 434, 437 Czelinski, Michael, 14 Da Costa, Uriel, 23 Damasio, Antonio, 437 David (King), 368 De Vet, J. J. V. M., 196 De Vries, Simon Joosten, 24, 26, 30, 32, 132, 410 De Witt, Cornelis, 36, 39–40, 300, 411 De Witt, Johan (Jan), 13, 36, 39–40, 300, 411, 433 death, 290, 292, 304 Decalogue, 368 Delahunty, R. J., 187 Delbos, Victor, 405, 435 Deleuze, Gilles, 180, 432, 435 Della Rocca, Michael, 7, 75–78, 92, 97, 106, 140, 435 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 436 Descartes, René, 3–4, 14, 26, 30–31, 66–70, 84, 102, 113–16, 118–20, 149–50, 153, 164, 167, 170, 190, 193–94, 196–202, 204–10, 235–39, 274, 291, 414, 428–30 Descartes’s ‘Principles of Philosophy’ (Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae), 3, 14, 30, 195, 198, 237 desire, 6, 223, 249–50, 252–54, 256–61, 267, 275–76, 284 determination (of motion), 202–5 determinism, causal, 297, 300, 418, 422, 431 Deuteronomy, 361, 363, 368 Diderot, Denis, 422–24 dioptrics, 34, 194, 196–97 Donagan, Alan, 2, 11 Donation of Constantine, The, 359–60 Dortous de Mairan, Jean-Jacques, 420–21 doublets, scriptural, 367–69 Duijkerius, Johannes, 413 duration, 90–96

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eclecticism, spiritual, 429 egoism, 6, 8, 272, 301, 309, 317 Elwes, R. H. M., 412, 433 emotions. See affects Empedocles, 432 Engels, Friedrich, 430–31 Enlightenment, the, 10, 364, 405, 421, 424–25, 436 Erasmus, 356–57, 379, 408 essence, 5, 9, 70, 190, 213–14, 218, 241–43, 247–48, 257 actual, 172–73, 206, 241, 248, 284, 288, 433 and attributes, 133–34 of a body, 208 formal, 155, 170–76, 292, 304 God’s, 62, 74, 78, 82, 87, 94–97, 123 of modes, 90–92 of substance, 115, 126, 138 eternity, 91–92, 173, 292–93, 305, 418 Ethics (Ethica), 2, 21, 28–30, 33, 35, 39–40, 44 Euclid, 3 excommunication, 21–23, 27, 362–63 Exodus, 368 experientia vaga, 214–18, 232 explanation, 135, 244–45, 248, 260, 274 expression, 78 extension, 3–6, 65, 78–82, 115, 118–21, 124–25, 127–29, 131, 193, 209, 420, 427. See also attributes intelligible, 421 Ezekiel, 338, 373 Ezra, 363–67, 369, 371–72, 398 faith, 342, 391 Fischer, Kuno, 432 Förster, Eckart, 426 Foucher de Careil, Louis Alexandre, 429 Freedman, Noel, 372 freedom, 8, 283, 290–91, 295–300 of philosophizing, 34, 37, 335, 395, 409 Fréret, Nicolas, 415–16 Freudenthal, Jacob, 14, 196, 431, 433 Gabbey, Alan, 6 Garber, Daniel, 435 Garrett, Don, 100, 211, 274, 434 Gebhardt, Carl, 362, 431, 433, 436 Genesis, 357, 361, 368, 370–71 Genghis Khan, 315 Gersonides, 69, 102, 358

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index 477 Giancotti, Emilia, 433 Glazemaker, Jan Hendriksz, 181, 406, 412 Goclenius, 189, 215 God, 3, 9, 22, 41–42, 62–69, 72–74, 78–79, 84–88, 94–97, 120, 129, 173, 283, 298 essence of. See essence, God’s idea of, 150 intellectual love of, 292–94, 426 knowledge of, 288 love of. See love of God and neighbors power and sovereignty of, 313–15 in Scripture, 363–66, 368–69, 373, 388–94 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 426, 431–32 good and evil, 7, 285–86, 295–96, 432 Grene, Marjorie, 199 Grotius, Hugo, 409 Gueroult, Martial, 65, 87, 110, 208, 211–12, 434–35 guises, 128–34 Gullan-Whur, Margaret, 17 Hardt, Michael, 437 hatred, 270, 290 Hebrew Grammar, 29, 40, 44, 49, 53–54, 407, 412, 430, 434 Heereboord, Adriaan, 28, 188–89, 215 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 93–95, 416–17, 419, 426–28, 434–35 Helvetius, J. F., 195 Herbert of Cherbury, Edward, 16, 406 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 419, 424, 426 herem. See excommunication Hevelius, Johannes, 193 Hobbes, Thomas, 8, 16, 150, 204, 305, 309–13, 316–24, 328, 362–64, 367, 372, 406, 409, 414–15, 438 Höffding, Harald, 433 homeostasis, 211 honesty (good faith), 8, 305 Hoos, Anneliese, 206 Hudde, Johannes (Johan), 33–34, 194 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 408 Hume, David, 301–2 humility, 8, 290 Huygens, Christiaan, 34, 193, 197, 204–5, 208, 212, 410 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 359, 362, 370 idealism, 138, 427, 435 Idealism, German, 405, 426, 429 ideas, 149–50

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adequate and inadequate, 4–5, 92, 151–52, 155–56, 160–66, 169–73, 218, 253, 290–91, 337, 341, 344 in God, 154–55 innate, 171, 180 true and false, 93, 145, 151–54, 156, 180, 214 identity, mind-body, 125–27, 134, 283 imagination, 4–5, 10, 92–94, 155, 158–62, 283, 285, 292, 299, 302, 338 imitation of affects. See affects, imitation of index librorum prohibitorum, 407 indignation, 298–300, 303 Indiscernibility of Identicals, 134 individuals, 6, 172, 209–12 infinity, 65, 78–86, 88, 109 inherence, 63, 71–78, 97, 99, 104–5 Inquisition, Spanish, 22–23 intellect, 4, 29, 63, 92, 94, 97, 116–18, 127–34, 283, 302, 345 infinite, 5, 173–76, 293 intensionality, 135–36 intuition or intuitive knowledge. See scientia intuitiva (intuitive knowledge) irrationality, 262–66, 280 Isaiah, 338 Israel, Jonathan, 353, 413, 436 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 419, 424–26 James (Apostle), 381–82, 391, 394 James, Susan, 9, 437 Jelles, Jarig, 13–14, 24, 26, 29, 44, 194–97, 398, 413 Jerome, 379, 399 Jesus, 350–51, 376–77, 379, 386–87, 390–94, 414 Joachim, Harold H., 434 Job, 313, 358, 360, 402 John, gospel of, 392, 394, 401 Joseph, 370–71 Joshua, 340, 342, 360–61, 365 joy and sadness, 6, 250–53, 256, 260, 266, 271, 279, 284, 289–91, 293–94, 298, 345 Judah, 370–71 justice, 309, 313, 316, 373 Kabbalah, 86, 418–19 Kant, Immanuel, 425–26, 432 Keckermann, Bartholomew, 188 Kissinger, Henry, 309, 332–33 Klever, W. N. A., 11, 193, 196

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478 index knowledge, three kinds of, 5, 155–57, See also imagination; reason; and scientia intuitiva Koerbagh, Adriaan, 32 Köhler, Johannes. See Colerus Koistinen, Olli, 135–37 Krop, Henri, 436 Kugel, James, 355, 404 Kuyper, Franz, 406 L’Esprit de Monsieur Benoit de Spinosa, 15–16, 414–15 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 422, 432 La Peyrère, Isaac, 361–62, 367, 372 Lachterman, David, 188 Lærke, Mogens, 10, 86 Lamy, François, 411 Land, Jan Pieter Nicolaas, 433 Lange, Joachim, 425 law, divine, 340–43, 347–52 laws of nature. See nature, laws of Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 40, 47, 194, 205, 407–10, 414, 417–18, 420–21, 424, 427 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 424 Levy, Lia, 437 Lin, Martin, 4 Locke, John, 421 Lord, Beth, 437 Lordon, Frédéric, 437 love, 266, 290, 293 of God and neighbors, 336, 340, 343, 346–49, 352, 373 intellectual love of God. See God, intellectual love of Lucas, Jean-Maximilien, 15, 194, 398 Macherey, Pierre, 435 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 8, 309–11, 320–22, 325, 329, 331, 396 Maimon, Salomon, 93 Maimonides, Moses, 355, 358 Malcolm, Noel, 364, 367, 398 Malebranche, Nicolas, 420–21 Manning, Richard, 188 Martineau, James, 434 Marx, Karl, 430–32 materialism, 422, 429 Matheron, Alexandre, 211, 330–31, 434–35 Matson, Wallace, 240 Matthew, gospel of, 375, 378 Maull, Nancy, 191

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McKeon, Richard, 187, 196 Meinel, Christoph, 222 Meinsma, Konraad Oege, 46, 412, 433 Melamed, Yitzhak Y., 4, 426 Menasseh ben Israel, 357–58, 369, 371 Mendelssohn, Moses, 419, 424–26 Meyer, Lodewijk, 14, 26, 31–32, 42, 44, 90, 198, 406–7, 412 Mignini, Filippo, 28, 54, 433 Miller, Jon, 188 mind. See thought miracles, 409 modes, 3, 63, 72–74, 78, 80–86, 89–97, 134, 137–38, 205, 294, 298, 416 finite, 190, 206, 214 infinite, 73, 165 Mohammed, 414 monism, 4, 434, 437 priority, 88–89 relations, 75–78 substance, 75–78, 86–89, 125, 134 Monnikhoff, Johannes, 17 More, Henry, 411, 418 More, Thomas, 322 Moreau, Pierre-François, 10, 196 Morteira, Saul Levi, 26 Moses, 324–25, 338, 354, 365–66, 393, 398, 408, 414, 419 authorship of Pentateuch, 354, 359–62, 372, 397 motion, 200–5, 209, 230, 237 and rest, 210–11 motivation, 297 Nadler, Steven, 17, 21, 437 Nagelate Schriften, De, 14, 29, 44, 412 natura naturans and natura naturata, 78 naturalism, 9, 234, 251, 253, 255, 261 nature, 9, 222–24 agreement in, 289 laws of, 199, 261 state of, 309–13 Naudé, Gabriel, 414 Nebuchadnezzar, 369 necessitarianism, 8, 283, 297, 307, 434 Negri, Antonio, 329, 437 Newlands, Samuel, 75–78, 106 Newton, Isaac, 205, 277, 421 Nicholas of Cusa, 359 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 430, 432–33 nobility (generositas), 284

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index 479 notions, common, 162–68, 180, 337 Novalis, 426 obedience, 340–43, 347–49, 391 Oldenburg, Henry, 6, 27, 30, 34, 40, 193–94, 206, 208, 221, 226, 335, 395, 406 Opera Posthuma, 13–14, 28, 44 order, geometrical, 3, 11 Ovid, 387 pain. See pleasure and pain panpsychism, 120–21, 236 pantheism, 419, 426 Pantheismusstreit, 405, 419, 424–26 parallelism, 83, 121–26, 134 Parkinson, G. H. R., 187, 219 Parmenides, 93 parthood, 77, 98, 107 particulars. See things, singular Pascal, Blaise, 195, 432 passions, 287. See also affects bondage to, 285 Paul (Apostle), 343, 375, 381–91, 401–2 pessimism, Pauline, 382–85 Paulus, H. E. G., 412, 427 Peden, Knox, 435 Pentateuch. See Moses, authorship of the Pentateuch perfection, 6, 73, 79, 143, 155, 190, 250–52, 279, 284–85, 294, 296, 304, 349, 352, 387. See also reality Peterman, Alison, 188 physics, 5, 198–212, 228 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 418 pity, 8, 260, 290 Plato, 322, 432 pleasure and pain, 258, 262–66, 279 Plekhanov, Georgi, 432 Poiret, Pierre, 411 Political Treatise (Tractatus politicus), 40, 328, 332, 430 Pollock, Frederick, 187, 434 Popkin, Richard H., 11, 145, 188, 354, 360–61 power, 5, 7–9, 120, 146, 206, 210, 242, 312–20, 389–90, 424, 432, 437 of acting (agendi potentia), 6–7, 243–51, 254–57, 259, 274, 278 Prado, Juan de, 22 predication, 66–69 Principle of Sufficient Reason, 7, 64, 75, 99, 242, 248, 425, 435

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Proietti, Omero, 433 promises, 318–19 prophets, 337–41, 345–49 Proust, Joseph-Louis, 221 prudence and prudential explanation, 254 psychology, 5, 7, 190, 192, 234–35, 249, 258, 261–62, 317 quantum in se est, 235, 238–40, 243, 247–48, 277 rainbow, 195–97 Ramsey, Andrew Michael, 421 Rasmussen, Svend Valdemar, 433 rationalism, 106, 141–42, 148, 154–55, 157, 167, 171, 174, 243, 425, 429, 435 Rawes, Peg, 437 reality, 73–74, 85, 93, 95, 117, 428 reason (ratio), 5, 156, 162–68, 223, 284, 291 distinctions of, 129, 133 guidance by dictates of, 8, 260, 284, 286–91, 295, 299–300 principle of sufficient. See Principle of Sufficient Reason Reimarus, Elise, 424 religion, 2, 9, 35, 37, 141, 311, 324, 335–37, 342, 344–45, 349–52, 381–82, 390, 392, 409, 414, 431 Renz, Ursula, 5 repentance, 8, 290 representation, mental, 83, 158–61, 251–53 responsibility, 298–300 revelation, 337, 352 Rice, Lee, 434 Rieuwertsz, Jan, 15, 17, 24, 26, 43–45 Rieuwertsz, Jan Junior, 16, 24, 52, 54 right, 312–20 Rivaud, Albert, 208, 435 Romans, Epistle to the, 382–86 romanticism, 426 Rosenroth, Christian Knorr von, 418 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 315, 329 Rovere, Maxime, 437 sadness. See joy and sadness Saint-Glain, Gabriel de, 16, 406 Saisset, Émile, 412, 430 salvation, 340, 342, 347, 381–82, 391–95 Sanders, E. P., 383–84, 387 Saul (King), 368 Savan, David, 188, 213 Schaffer, Jonathan, 88

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480 index Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 426 Schliesser, Eric, 188 Schmidt, Johann Lorenz, 412 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 430–31 Schuller, Georg Hermann, 42–45, 54, 195 scientia intuitiva (intuitive knowledge), 5, 155, 169–76, 284, 426 Seder Olam, 370 Sermon on the Mount, 387 servitude, 352 Shirley, Samuel, 434 Short Treatise on God, Man, and His WellBeing (Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch, en des zelfs Welstand), 17, 28–29, 51, 54, 231, 430 Simon, Richard, 379, 409 sin, 382–90, 403 skepticism, 145–55, 162 Smith, A. D., 87, 110 Solano y Robles, Tomás, 22–23 sovereignty, 313–14 space, 118–19 Spinoza, Baruch de in Amsterdam, 2, 13–14, 17–27, 31 in The Hague, 35–39, 41–44 in Rijnsburg, 27–31 in Voorburg, 31–35 Spinoza, Gabriel de, 20, 51 Spinoza, Hana Deborah (Senior) de, 19 Spinoza, Michael de, 20 Spinozism, New, 435 Spruit, Leen, 411 Steenbakkers, Piet, 2, 433, 436 Stendahl, Krister, 385 Steno, Nicolas, 406–7, 411 Stolle, Gottlieb, 17 Stouppe, Jean-Baptiste, 405 Strauss, Leo, 353, 374, 400 Strawson, P. F., 298 striving (endeavor). See conatus substance, 3–4, 6, 61–73, 77–78, 87–97, 99, 115–17, 127, 249, 416, 427–28 essence of. See essence of substance monism. See monism, substance suicide, 241 superstition, 409, 415 Syriac, 375 Tacitus, 325, 327 Talmud, 360, 365

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Tamar, 370 teleology, 7, 73, 253, 273–76, 279, 434 tenacity (animositas), 284, 294 Testament, New, 373–81, 393 Testament, Old, 350, 361, 374, 377, 389, 393, 408, 410, 417 theological-political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus), 21, 33, 35, 38, 81, 306, 313–14, 323–25, 328, 335, 355, 405 theology, 9, 86, 335, 337, 341–44, 417–18 things, singular, 77, 96, 155, 173–74, 217, 288, 293, 428 Thomasius, Jacob, 406 thought, 3–6, 65, 78–86, 115–16, 120–21, 123–29, 131, 133–34, 193, 283, 293. See also attributes Toland, John, 416, 418–20, 422, 440 Totaro, Pina, 411 Traité des trois imposteurs. See L’Esprit de Monsieur Benoit de Spinosa treachery (perfidia), 305–6 Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione), 26, 28–30, 44, 55–56, 142, 179, 431 Tremellius, 378, 400 Trinius, Johann Anton, 411 truth. See ideas, true and false Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried Walther von, 39–42, 81, 119, 194, 219, 408, 410, 412, 417, 420 universals, 215, 217, 285 vacillation, psychological, 246 Valla, Lorenzo, 356, 359–60, 374, 408 Van Blijenbergh, Willem, 407 Van Bunge, Wiep, 406, 436 Van den Enden, Franciscus, 24–25, 188, 433 Van der Spyck, Hendrik, 15, 35–36, 39, 42–44, 60 Van der Tak, W. G., 14 Van Gent, Pieter, 44, 410 Van Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius, 418 Van Velthuysen, Lambertus (Lambert), 35, 38, 226, 353, 407, 409 Van Vloten, Johannes, 433 Vaz Dias, A. M., 14 Verbeek, Theo, 436–37

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index 481 Vernière, Paul, 421 virtue, 286, 288, 295 Vlessing, Odette, 21 Vossius, 195 Wachter, Johann Georg, 418, 420, 425 Walther, Manfred, 14 White, W. Hale, 412

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Willis, Robert, 412 Wilson, Margaret, 11, 177, 182, 307 Wittich, Christoph, 411, 439 Wolf, Abraham, 187 Wolff, Christian, 425 Wolfson, Harry Austryn, 187 Zeno, 93

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other volumes in the series of cambridge companions (continued from page ii)

FEMINISM IN PHILOSOPHY Edited by miranda fricker and jennifer hornsby FICHTE Edited by david james and guenter zoeller FOUCAULT 2nd edition Edited by gary gutting FREGE Edited by tom ricketts and michael potter FREUD Edited by jerome neu GADAMER 2nd edition Edited by robert j. dostal GALEN Edited by r. j. hankinson GALILEO Edited by peter machamer GERMAN IDEALISM 2nd edition Edited by karl ameriks GREEK AND ROMAN PHILOSOPHY Edited by david sedley HABERMAS Edited by stephen k. white HAYEK Edited by edward feser HEGEL Edited by frederick c. beiser HEGEL AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY Edited by frederick c. beiser HEIDEGGER 2nd edition Edited by charles guignon HERMENEUTICS Edited by michael n. forster and kristin gjesdal HIPPOCRATES Edited by peter e. pormann HOBBES Edited by tom sorell HOBBES’S ‘LEVIATHAN’ Edited by patricia springborg HUME 2nd edition Edited by david fate norton and jacqueline taylor HUME’S ‘TREATISE’ Edited by donald c. ainslie and annemarie butler HUSSERL Edited by barry smith and david woodruff smith WILLIAM JAMES Edited by ruth anna putnam KANT Edited by paul guyer KANT AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY Edited by paul guyer KANT’S ‘CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON’ Edited by paul guyer KEYNES roger e. backhouse and bradley w. bateman KIERKEGAARD Edited by alastair hannay and gordon daniel marino LEIBNIZ Edited by nicholas jolley LEVINAS Edited by simon critchley and robert bernasconi LIBERALISM Edited by steven wall LIFE AND DEATH Edited by steven luper LOCKE Edited by vere chappell LOCKE’S ‘ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING’ Edited by lex newman

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LOGICAL EMPIRICISM Edited by alan richardson and thomas uebel MAIMONIDES Edited by kenneth seeskin MALEBRANCHE Edited by steven nadler MARX Edited by terrell carver MEDIEVAL ETHICS Edited by thomas williams MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY Edited by daniel h. frank and oliver leaman MEDIEVAL LOGIC Edited by catarina dutilh novaes and stephen read MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY Edited by a. s. mcgrade MERLEAU-PONTY Edited by taylor carman and mark b. n. hansen MILL Edited by john skorupski MONTAIGNE Edited by ullrich langer NATURAL LAW ETHICS Edited by tom angier NEWTON 2nd edition Edited by rob iliffe and george e. smith NIETZSCHE Edited by bernd magnus and kathleen higgins THE NEW CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO NIETSZCHE Edited by tom stern NOZICK’S ‘ANARCHY, STATE AND UTOPIA’ Edited by ralf bader and john meadowcroft OAKESHOTT Edited by efraim podoksik OCKHAM Edited by paul vincent spade THE ‘ORIGIN OF SPECIES’ Edited by michael ruse and robert j. richards PASCAL Edited by nicholas hammond PEIRCE Edited by cheryl misak PHILO Edited by adam kamesar PHILOSOPHICAL METHODOLOGY Edited by giuseppina d’oro and søren overgaard THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY Edited by david l. hull and michael ruse PIAGET Edited by ulrich mu¨ller, jeremy i. m. carpendale and leslie smith PLATO Edited by richard kraut PLATO’S ‘REPUBLIC’ Edited by g. r. f. ferrari PLOTINUS Edited by lloyd p. gerson POPPER Edited by jeremy shearmur and geoffrey stokes PRAGMATISM Edited by alan malachowski QUINE Edited by roger f. gibson jr. RAWLS Edited by samuel freeman RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY Edited by james hankins RORTY Edited by david rondel THOMAS REID Edited by terence cuneo and rene´ van woudenberg ROUSSEAU Edited by patrick riley BERTRAND RUSSELL Edited by nicholas griffin SARTRE Edited by christina howells

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SCHOPENHAUER Edited by christopher janaway THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT 2nd edition Edited by alexander broadie and craig smith ADAM SMITH Edited by knud haakonssen SOCRATES Edited by donald morrison SPINOZA 2nd edition Edited by don garrett SPINOZA’S ‘ETHICS’ Edited by olli koistinen THE STOICS Edited by brad inwood LEO STRAUSS Edited by steven b. smith TOCQUEVILLE Edited by cheryl b. welch UTILITARIANISM Edited by ben eggleston and dale miller VIRTUE ETHICS Edited by daniel c. russell WITTGENSTEIN 2nd edition Edited by hans sluga and david stern

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