Free Will and Determinism
Spinoza Takes A Stance
This is the latest post in my quixotic attempt to write an accessible commentary on all of Spinoza’s Ethics. See here for An Introduction To Spinoza or start the series at the beginning with Spinoza’s God.
A thing which has been determined by God to operate in a specific way cannot make itself undetermined.
Spinoza here begins his famous—or infamous— assertion of determinism: there are no such things as objective contingency or free will. Even God does not have free will except, as we shall see, by one narrow definition of it.
Spinoza argues that every finite thing is determined by something else, ad infinitum. A carrot is determined in its nature by the seed it came from, which was created by another plant, which was created by another plant, and so on. That’s not to mention the effects of soil, sun, water, and weather- or the plucking human hand.
The idea that a carrot freely chooses what size it will be and how much water it will consume would probably strike us as ludicrous. Spinoza would agree, but he would extend the same argument to humans. The fact that we think we make free choices is due to an illusion of human consciousness, which is simply that we are unaware of all of the causes that determine us to act.
The appearance of contingency in human choices is simply ignorance. If we knew all of the causes of our actions- genetic, cultural, neurological- we would see we could not have made any other choice than the one we did- the one all of those factors combined to cause us to make. In fact, there is no other “us” apart from the factors just described: we simply are the combination of the factors above (for which you can substitute your own list). These come together to produce effects as the individual called “me” or “you.”
This doesn’t mean we can blame other people for our actions, or even more abstract ideas like the system or “the man.” Other people are just as determined as we are, and blaming other people for their actions is irrational, whether as individuals or as a collective. In the final analysis only God is to blame.
Yet that doesn’t actually work either, because God cannot act other than it does either. In Spinoza’s conception God, which he equates with Nature and Reality itself, simply expresses its nature, and cannot choose other than it does.
So in the end there is in fact no one to blame.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t make choices. We do, but we are not free to make choices other than the ones we do in fact actually make. As Spinoza argues in these closing propositions to Book 1, everything that happens arises from the totality that is God (i.e. everything that exists) and what happens is exactly the only thing that could have happened. There is no contingency, and in a very real logical sense everything that will happen in the future has, in eternity, already happened.
This assertion can be dangerous because it is so easily mistaken for fatalism, which it is not. To decide not to choose is not only impossible, if it were somehow possible it too would be a choice. There is no escape from choosing. Spinoza’s doctrine does not aim at telling us not to choose but rather at changing our attitudes to ourselves as actors. Spinoza will in fact tell us to choose as well as we can. Information about how to make wise choices is just one more causal factor affecting the choices we make. It’s worth sharing, though (as you have probably experienced) it is usually not enough on its own to make us actually make wise choices.
What is novel here is that Spinoza will tell us to accept what choices we already have made, in the moments that follow, with equanimity as the only one we could have made given the totality of causes present at the moment we chose.
There is, however, a freedom we should pursue: one modelled after the freedom of God. God is free in the one sense that freedom is available, which is being free of determination by external forces. God is not determined by anything outside of God. . Similarly, the human being can strive to act according to its own nature (as Spinoza will define it) as opposed to being over-powered by forces inimical to that nature.
How to do that will occupy much of what Spinoza says in Books 3–5 of the Ethics, and that focus is in fact why the book is called Ethics instead of Metaphysics, as the essays I’ve written so far might convince you would be a better name for the book.
For now, however, let’s return to look at the issue of determinism and God’s freedom and purpose in acting — the first of which exists only in a limited way and the latter not at all.
In Proposition 29 Spinoza says “nothing in nature is contingent”, which is the same thought he will return to in Prop 33, when he says “things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than they have been produced.”
God is not an old man in the sky, nor even an intelligent, spiritual will outside of the universe. It’s not that God chose things to be one way, but could have chosen another. God’s activity follows naturally from God’s nature. What is real is what is possible, and things could not be any other way.
Pause for a moment to let that soak in: the real is the possible- nothing that has not happened is or was ever possible. What happens is exactly the only thing that could have happened, and what happens is what follows from the unfolding of God’s being.
Reality cannot not exist. It also cannot exist other than it does, i.e. it cannot have a different essence or nature than it does in fact have. It is hard for us to understand this. The human brain is keyed to imagine alternate realities. This is incredibly useful when it is future directed, but can be intensely harmful, even fatal, when it is directed towards the past.
Since all things are either necessary attributes of God, or modes of those attributes whose transformations and interactions follow logically from the nature of God itself, everything that happens (every mode) is determined by God and cannot, as Spinoza says, “undetermine itself.” The clay pot cannot unsculpt itself: so it is with all things.
The appearance of contingency, as Spinoza has already argued, is really just confusion which arises when we don’t understand all of the causes of a given thing. If we did, we could see that there was in fact no way that thing could not have happened given the total picture of the causes that preceded it.
This is an important point worth lingering over.
“Contingency” means that when something happens, we think that it might not have happened. Spinoza says this is merely an illusion cause by the limits of our understanding- of our natural point of view. If we could the whole causal matrix that produces any given event we would know that it was not contingent but rather necessary: pre-existing causes produced it relentlessly.
Spinoza writes that an intellect can only cognize God and God’s attributes (the unfolding transformations of Reality according to the laws of its own being). Spinoza has shown that all is a necessary expression of God/Reality that could not be otherwise; here he stresses that there are no exceptions- there is absolutely nothing perceived except for God and things that follow necessarily from God’s own being.
Spinoza points out that the human will, like anything else, is just a mode of God — a transformation of Reality, unfolding lawfully. No human decision occurs freely. What Spinoza means by this is not that we don’t make choices, but that we cannot make choices other than the actual ones we do make. A falling leaf cannot will itself to float or return to the tree from which it came. Each human decision is like the turn of a leaf in the wind.
It is now that Spinoza makes what would have been a shocking assertion to his readers: “It follows from this…that God does not operate from freedom of the will.”
As Spinoza says, God’s will follows from his nature just as “motion and rest” (the laws of physics). As infinite things follow from the laws of physics, so do infinite things follow from God’s will (or intellect) yet in neither case does God have a will that acts freely, but only one that acts necessarily.
Spinoza writes that speaking of God’s “free will” is as meaningless as speaking of God’s “free laws of physics.”
Spinoza writes that God’s power is his very essence. What does this mean? For Spinoza the essence, or the nature of something, is equivalent to its power. This is a brilliant way of looking at things. What Spinoza means is that things that exist are all action. Power is the ability to have an impact, to make things happen, to change reality. Everything that exists is defined by what it does: a table reflects light, takes up space, exerts force on the floor. A human being has a very complex essence, and complex power. God’s essence is God’s activity, which causes everything to be.
Since God’s essence, or nature, is that God is cause of itself and of all things, that is the scope of God’s power. This power is the very essence of God, it is what we mean when we say “God”: a reality whose inherent nature is to cause itself and all things.
Spinoza goes on to say that “what is within the abilities of God” and “what is” are equivalent phrases. Since “anything that exists expresses the nature or essence of God in a specific and determinate way” it follows 1) that every thing is an expression of God’s power, and 2) that all existent things have their own derivative causal power.
In other words, everything that exists causes other things. Things logically follow from the essence of any existent thing, since that essence is an expression of the essence or power of God, whose very nature it the power to cause things to follow necessarily from itself.
This is the sense in which, for Spinoza, the human being could be said to be made in the image of God— though in fact every mode (individual thing) is made in the image of God in this sense, just to a different degree dependent on the amount of its being, or power.
Spinoza sums up what he thinks he has accomplished thus far: With this I have explained the nature of God and his properties: that he necessarily exists; that he is unique; that he is and acts solely from the necessity of his own nature; that he is the free cause of all things and how this is so; that all things are in God and so depend upon him so that without him they can neither be nor be conceived; and finally that all things have been predetermined by God, not however by his freedom of will or at his absolute pleasure but by God’s absolute nature or infinite power.
Remember that for Spinoza “absolute nature or infinite power” means that unlimited things follow necessarily from God’s essence: God is not a person with infinite power but Reality itself, whose nature is such that it causes unlimited things to follow from itself.
Spinoza then turns to attack what he views as the central prejudice that will prevent people from understanding what he is saying: the belief that God acts with a purpose in mind. That’s for next time.
I would like to thank Matthew Grindin for his well accomplished effort in explaining Spinoza’s ideas. My thinking about the divine and reality are very close to those ideas.