Welcome back to the series of revised, and free, essays on the first two books of Spinoza’s masterwork, the Ethics. I will also be sending out—more slowly— a new commentary on the last three books for my paid subscribers.
In the next few propositions of the first book of the Ethics, Spinoza says that Reality can not be divided into parts. Why should we care?
The first reason is that though it appears to us that there are barriers and separations between things, this is not so. Spinoza argues that Reality (something that exists in an of itself, exists by definition, and is understood through itself) can not be divided. If it was divided, it would mean one of the following:
There is Reality plus something that is not Reality. This is impossible, since there cannot be anything outside of Reality, as he has already shown;
or
There are two Realities. This is also impossible. They would both have to possess all the qualities of Reality- i.e. both be logically necessary, unlimited, and exist and be understood through themselves. If they were understood through themselves, then the two Realities could have no relation to each other and therefore could not be divisions of one thing. Yet if they both exist, they must be divisions of one thing. If they were divisions of one thing, they would at once lose their status as a separate Reality.
This should not be misunderstood as a denial of the possibility of multiple universes. No matter how many universes there are, however, they would simply all be expressions of one Reality.
All of this no doubt seems very abstract. The usefulness of these arguments however, lay in convincing us of the two following things:
1)There is no real division between the being of things. This amounts to the insight which has been directly experienced by mystics and ecstatics throughout human history- “all is one.”
Spinoza is trying to help us reach this realization through logic, not the more common road of an altered state of consciousness. His way is certainly not for everyone, but if one chews over the white bones of Spinoza’s arguments enough until one sees the truth of them, the benefit is that the conviction one reaches is stable and intellectually robust.
Spinoza’s assertion that all things are expressions of one Reality with no stark divisions between things is in harmony with modern physics, which understands all particular objects as existing within one unified field.
Spinoza’s conclusion here could be summed up as follows: there is one substance, one reality, or one being, and one only. All that exists is an expression of that one reality. There is no real division between one person and another, or between humans and nature, or between my elbow and the table it rests on. The human intellect thinks of these entities as separate individuals (and Spinoza will offer a definition of what individuality is later) and they can be logically separated, but their being is never separated.
2) God
As we wrote earlier, for Spinoza Reality is God. God is unlimited, exists necessarily, and unfolds according to the logic of its own being. It is the Reality of all that exists. One could say that for Spinoza the unified field of all energy is God, but one would have to understand consciousness as an inherent part of this field. Materialist physicists would reject Spinoza's view that the field is conscious and some might also reject his view that there is an inherent and intelligible logical structure to the field.
Since, as have seen, God cannot be divided, there is nothing outside God, and- more shockingly for Spinoza’s 17th century readers- there is nothing other than God. There is no division between God and beings. God is not more present in a saint than in an amoeba. Spinoza conceives of God as radically immanent- both a human being and a mosquito are simply transformations of God: so both a philanthropist and a murderer.
This is what Spinoza asserts in Propositions 14 and 15: No substance can be or be conceived besides God and Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be, or be conceived, without God.
Many theists would agree to the idea that all things are expressions of God’s will, but Spinoza is going further and saying that all things are made of God and express God’s being. As Spinoza will write later, all things are modes (transformations, expressions) of God.
Let’s pause for a moment. What are you, most deeply, reader?
You are a mode or transformation of God.
For theists, this leaves a lot of open questions- questions which The Ethics will indeed offer answers to as we go. Some of these questions might be, does God then desire and choose everything that happens to happen? Is it all part of God’s plan? Is God then also physical, and not pure spirit as many have said? Does God will everything for the good? Does God’s care permeate everything?
As you may suspect, Spinoza’s answers to these questions will not be the traditional ones, and will in fact subvert the traditional answers in a way that preserves the grain of truth within them while radically transforming them.
The Play of God
In Proposition 15 Spinoza says, “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be, or be conceived, without God.”
All things- what Spinoza calls “modes”- are transformations of God and are seen by means of God.
If all is God and seen by means of God, who sees them?
That’s right: God.
The universe is nothing but God experiencing itself by means of itself. Why? No reason at all. That’s simply what God does- what God has always done and will always do.
There is a strong resonance here to the Tantric idea of “lila” which states that God creates not out of any grand, noble idea or messianic plan, but simply to play.
Why? That’s what God does. It is God’s nature to God: to create ordered, interconnected and vital life out of itself, in itself, for itself.
In the Scholium Spinoza turns to consider anthropomorphic ideas of God: “There are some who surmise that God consists, like a human being, of body and mind and as subject to passions. But it is evident from what we have proved above how far they are from a true cognition of God.”
Spinoza goes on to say that the idea that God has a body is ludicrous, and to demonstrate why. He also argues, though, that the idea that God is not physical is likewise ludicrous.
Spinoza points out that bodies are finite objects which occupy a definite span and location, but God, as he has proven, is unlimited. He then says, though, that those who deny corporeality, or form, to God, are also wrong:
“They completely exclude corporeal or extended substance from the divine nature and insist that it was created by God,” or in other words, God is a nonphysical reality that creates the physical world.
This idea makes Spinoza want to tear his hair out.
They have no way of explaining or conceiving how God could create corporeal nature, he says, and “do not understand what they are saying.” How could the formless create form? This is an entirely incoherent assertion which no human can actually form a clear conception of. They make assertions, but have no idea what they are actually saying.
As Spinoza has shown previously, corporeal substance (or “the attribute of extension”) cannot be created since it is an inherent attribute of Reality and therefore expresses “its unlimited and eternal nature.” What he is saying is that the physical aspect of Reality cannot be created from nothing and so must always have existed. It is an inherent aspect of God’s nature. God is not before or behind it — extension in space in some form is an attribute of God’s eternal and infinite being. Neither God nor any of God’s attributes, which follow from God’s nature, can be created or destroyed.
We cannot assert that God could have existed non-spatially, for instance, and then have created space. First of all, we don’t even know what we would by meaning by “existed without space.” Second, how can any change occur in a non-spatial being? Maybe such a thing can happen, but we have no way of thinking about it, and we are simply stringing together words without any idea what reality could possibly correspond to them.
Spinoza then addresses the idea that corporeal substance, i.e. matter, or bodies, is “unworthy of the divine nature.” He surmises that it is the passivity, vulnerability and corruptibility of matter that makes it profane in the eyes of reverential theologians. Who in their right mind would say that God is excrement, a maggot, plastic waste, the vulnerable flesh of an animal?
This hesitancy is mistaken, says Spinoza, because nothing acts on God outside of God itself.
Spinoza’s argument here again has resonance with Eastern thought. A Zen Koan states:
What is Buddha?
A dried shit-stick.
The meaning is that Buddha-nature — which for our purposes we’ll just define crudely and imperfectly as the divine/sacred principle in Buddhism — is in everything. If you balk at saying it’s in a dried shit-stick, you don’t get it.
It is meaningless, argues Spinoza in effect, to argue that God cannot be what humans judge to be shameful, passive and vulnerable. Later he will argue these judgments themselves are mistaken and humans are foolish to judge the perfection or imperfection of things in nature by our own biased standards.
Here, though, Spinoza is simply saying that it is illogical to claim that materiality cannot be God because it is passive, since that which acts on materiality is also God. In other words, all of nature is simply God acting on Itself.
The idea that God has no form but simply creates all the forms of the universe is common in world religions, but Spinoza is arguing that this is incoherent- there is nothing but God. The forms of the universe are simply transformations of God, and God is not formless. As Spinoza will say later, the countless forms of the universe are “the face of God.”
This is the fourth essay in my “plain english” guide to Spinoza’s Ethics. For an intro to Spinoza see here. For the previous essay see here.
Full circle insight, thank you for sharing this writing.
Nicely put. To me this is the essence of to Advaita philosophy and the works of Adi Shankracharya …