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.
After establishing that there is only one Reality, God, and that all things are expressions of God, in the next few propositions, Spinoza tackles the question of how all the things that exist follow from God’s being. His fascinating answer paints a very different picture than that of traditional theism.
In Proposition 16, Spinoza writes:
From the necessity of the divine nature unlimited things must follow in unlimited ways (i.e. all things that can fall under an unlimited intellect).
What Spinoza is saying here is that the universe follows from the divine intellect. On the surface, this might seem to be a standard theistic assertion, but it’s not.
What makes this assertion interesting is that Spinoza clarifies that the divine intellect is not like the human intellect- in fact, it is so dissimilar that comparing the two is, he writes, like saying “the heavenly sign of the dog is the same as the barking animal the dog.” One thing which makes the divine intellect so different from the human intellect that Spinoza hesitates to even use the word “intellect” is the following:
A human intellect understands what follows from the nature of a thing (which Spinoza calls its “essence” or logical structure) either simultaneously with the arising of the thing or afterward. For example, a human intellect may see fire and immediately understand heat, or might see smoke and then understand there must be fire. The divine intellect, however, understands what follows from a thing before it exists.
Say what?
Spinoza calls the divine intellect “the laws of God’s being” or God’s “unlimited essence (nature, logical structure).” Remember that God is equivalent to Reality. The divine intellect, therefore, mean the intellectual, or logical structure of Reality. The “divine intellect” is effectively a deeper take on what we normally call “the laws of nature.”
For Spinoza, everything that happens follows inexorably from the divine intellect. The divine intellect does not cognize what happens, however, rather, what happens follows from the divine intellect, or in other words, because something is logical in the divine intellect, it is causal in the universe.
One danger here is to misunderstand Spinoza as talking about God in the traditional sense: that God thinks about things and then creates them. On the other side, though, we may fall into the mistake of thinking that Spinoza is just talking about the lawful, materialistic universe and calling it God for sentimental or political reasons. Aside from the fact that Spinoza himself said anyone who believed him an atheist misunderstood and slandered him, the text itself paints a different picture (see Yitzhak’s Melamed’s amazing Spinoza’s Metaphysics for an in-depth discussion of this).
Spinoza presents God as conscious being with a mind that possesses an infinite, or unlimited intellect and an awareness of everything that exists. Unlimited things naturally, or automatically, follow from this unlimited intellect, and this infinite following is the universe we experience. One interesting corollary of this, though, is that we should not think of God as being able to remember what has been. In God’s unlimited intellect, God is always aware of everything as it happens, but is not a mind that can separate itself from itself (like a human) and think back on what has been or ahead to what will become.
There will be much more on all of this to come, but for now, the key thing to understand is that the infinite intellect of God is the immanent cause of the unfolding of all things, and this intellect is what we normally call “the laws of nature.” We exist within the mind of God, watching what follows from the divine intellect come into being moment by moment.
This means that the universe is what is implied by the nature of the divine intellect.
Spinoza clarifies this by making the point in Proposition 16 that the divine intellect is different from the essence of a finite thing (mode) like a plant. The essence, or logical structure, of a plant, is the primary cause of its existence (but not the sole cause, since if it was, the plant would be eternal and indestructible).
God, however, or unlimited nature of God, is the cause of both the essence (logical structure) of a given plant and its actual existence (the fact that, within the total causal matrix of the universe, that plant does actually exist).
Lastly, and in support of what we have said above, in Proposition 18 Spinoza asserts that God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things. What this means is that God is not outside of or other than the things it causes but causes them from within.
God doesn’t “pass over things”, causing them and then leaving them behind, like the breath of the holy spirit. God creates things and remains, so to speak, “within them.” In fact not only does God cause things from within, God causes things in every way- God is the logical and material cause of all things, things which are themselves simply natural expressions of God arising within God according to the logic of God.
In the next six propositions, Spinoza sets out to discuss the way that things unfold from God’s being.
God, or all the attributes of God, are eternal.
What Spinoza means by this is that God, and the qualities of God, are self-caused and necessary- they cannot not exist. Since attributes are inherent parts of God, that is true of them as well. Spinoza here says, then, that thought and extension are inherent, eternal aspects of God/Reality. This in itself is a radical position. Spinoza is arguing that Reality has always been and will always be thought unfolding in space. We should remember here that Spinoza is a panpsychicist: there are no bodies without thought. All existent things have minds, even if extremely simple ones. If at some point the universe was just undulating, simple waves of energy in space, than that was the extended thinking thing that God was then.
He then argues that God’s existence and his essence [nature] are one and the same thing.
To understand this, we need to understand there is a difference between the essence and the existence of you and I.
Spinoza understands “essence,” or nature, as the unique informational/energetic ratios of our individual being and not as some hidden, esoteric reality, as shall see later. There is a unique logical structure to the particular being of any thing- very much like its DNA, but this also applies to tables or supernovas- and one can describe that unique individuality even if the thing does not exist. Also the unique individuality of a thing does not and cannot guarantee its actual existence for any particular duration. This means that our actual existence as a space/time entity and our essence are separate issues.
Our existence does not follow from our essence [nature] — if it did we would be indestructible and the cause of ourselves, or in other words, God. For God, though, its essence does require existence, and therefore there is no distinction between God’s essence and its existence. This is another way of saying that God/Substance/Reality/Nature must exist, unlike us.
Spinoza then takes another flight of abstraction — buckle your seatbelts — but one that it’s not hard to make sense of concretely.
Spinoza says that the attributes of God, which are eternal, are nevertheless modified (changed, affected) by two types of things: infinite modifications and finite modifications.
Infinite modifications are realities that follow directly from the infinite attributes of God. So some infinite modes are logical results of the nature of the attributes themselves, i.e. there are infinite modes which express the inherent nature of thought and extension. Others follow from the nature of the infinite modes themselves.
Ok, what does this mean? It seems that the very nature of thought and extension inherently contain basic properties of the universe—basic properties of thought and the basic properties of physics (which for Spinoza, as we shall see, are two sides of one thing).
The basic laws of thought and physics give rise to more complexity as they interact.
Speaking of “thought and physics” may sound strange here- don’t I just mean physics? Remember, though, that Spinoza views consciousness and thought as fundamental elements of the cosmos- he is not a materialist. Materialism is based on a belief that everything can be explained by the interaction of nonconscious forces and what we call consciousness is somehow an emergent property of these nonconscious forces-- matter. This belief has not yet been demonstrated, and Spinoza would argue that it is inherently incoherent.
We should also pause to remember that when Spinoza says that Substance/God/Reality causes the infinite modes, he does not mean that at one time Substance/God/Reality exists and then it causes other things.
For Spinoza, God’s attributes are an inherent and eternal part of its nature. God always has attributes that are expressed in infinite modes which are an inherent part of their nature.
This is a very important point. If we don’t realize this, we may think that there is such a thing as Reality without attributes or ponder how it is that Reality gives rise to its attributes. According to Spinoza, there is no Reality without attributes and although the attributes “follow from” Reality this simply means that the attributes are a necessary and inherent part of it. God’s being possesses thought and extension; Reality includes its attributes. God is the totality.
So the attributes behave in certain ways either as a direct result of their own nature (i.e. God’s nature) or as their infinite modes (qualities which follow from their own nature) interact and give rise to new things.
Ok, this has been a rather abstract essay. Next week we’re going to bring it back close to home as Spinoza weights in (heavily) on the question of free will.