On God and Nature - Spinoza's Ethics Part I

Spinoza’s life project was for reason to triumph over emotion. And to do that, he needed to first lay out his metaphysics. This makes the first chapter of his Ethics difficult to parse, but as I’ll show below, it’s worth the effort upfront to make sense of the later chapters, which in my case, couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Life sometimes presents us with a sharp dose of reality to test whether we have actually learned the lessons philosophy teaches. The past week, I received that opportunity in the form of a (second) ruptured achilles.

As a reminder, here are the order of the chapters. I’ve updated the dates to reflect the delays caused by my injury. They may change:

March 13 - Introduction: George Eliot’s Spinoza

April 8 - Part I: Of God (we’re here)

April 15 - Part II: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind

April 17 - Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions

April 22 - Part IV: On the Servitude of Man and on the Power of the Passions

Apr 29 - Part V: On the Power of the Intellect, or, On Human Liberty

On Monday, March 30th, I tore my left achilles tendon playing basketball, almost nine years to the day when I first tore my right achilles, also playing basketball. I’m scheduled for surgery later this week. Nine years ago, that surgery had major complications including severe MRSA infection, so I’m a little nervous going under the knife again. Now, nine years later, I am older, a bit wiser, have some experience dealing with this particular injury, and I get to enjoy Spinoza’s teaching in how to confront my own emotion of fear.

To begin his grand argument he starts off with his metaphysics, Of God, where he lays out important definitions and axioms followed by arguments in the form of propositions and scholia, about the nature of being, substance, God, and Nature.

The reason this chapter in particular, and metaphysics in general, seem difficult is because they don’t appear to be about anything concrete or real. Metaphysics has long gotten a bad rap for being close to nonsensical and a waste of time given the stretches it has to make. Still, man is always in search of knowledge and the quest to understand what is the true, fixed, underlying nature of reality has always perplexed us.

The opening chapter primarily deals with ontology, the theory of being. As Beth Lord writes, “before we understand what things are, we need to understand what being is.”

Spinoza believes that we need to start with being because being is not a conceptual abstraction; it is the concrete ground of all of reality. Only once we understand what being is will we have the right basis for understanding objects, people, ideas and the universe. Spinoza’s basic idea is that being is one, that being is equivalent to God and that all the individual beings we experience are ‘modes’ of being and thus ‘modes’ of God. This is what Spinoza tries to convince you of in Part I.

Before we go further, a bit of context. In the tradition of philosophy, Spinoza is responding to those before him who he feels got something terribly wrong. In this, he is challenging the worldview of Descartes and Aristotle. Specifically, he is challenging what he sees as confused definitions which invariably lead to faulty conclusions.

The Aristotelian principles that were the basis of science and metaphysics for hundreds of years stated that the world is made up of substances and their attributes. Substances are the basic, independently existing ‘things’ of the universe, and attributes are their changeable properties. Attributes depend on substances for their existence while substances depend on nothing but themselves.

Descartes revised this to say that while the universe is indeed made up of innumerable substances with changeable properties, every substance has one fundamental, unchangeable, property that is essential to it. “Substances which are bodies,” Lord writes, “have the property of extension.” Extension is the term philosophers use for the way things take up space, i.e., their physicality. A point extends itself in space to become a line. Extension as such doesn’t change, even if the extent of a body changes.

He also believed in non-physical substances which he called minds, whose essential property is thinking. These essential properties, thinking and extension, he called ‘principal attributes’. The changeable properties (red, green, tall, short, human, animal, etc.) he called ‘modes’ of those attributes.

To add the confusion, Descartes argued for “a necessarily existing infinite thinking substance, God, who creates and sustains the existence of all these substances.” So that’s two principal attributes of substances, namely body and mind, or extension and thinking, plus a third—God.

What Spinoza does is brilliantly destroy these arguments by beginning with good definitions in order to arrive at a true conception of reality, a single substance which is God.

Are the definitions themselves true? Spinoza was asked this very question in a letter by the Collegiants, a philosophy study group in seventeenth Century Netherlands that would get together to discuss Spinoza’s ideas during his lifetime.

Definitions may be accurate descriptions of real things, as in the definition of a mammal. In this case, the definition is true in the sense that it coincides with what is real. Alternatively, definitions may be clear explications of how we understand certain terms, as when we define a radius from the nature of a circle. The truth of this definition does not consist in its coinciding with really existing circles and radii. The definition of a radius is true because it is fully explained from the nature of a circle, whether or not any circles actually exist.

A good definition, Lord argues, is one that is well-conceived and understood clearly, distinctly, fully, and consistently. Spinoza believes his definitions correspond to reality, but that’s not what makes them true. What makes them true is the intrinsic truth of the ideas behind them. He asks us to accept them, for now, on trust in order for him to make his argument and, once we’ve reached the end of the Ethics, their truth will become evident to us.

Definition 1: By a thing which is its own cause, I understand a thing the essence of which involves existence, or the nature of which cannot be conceived except as existing.

Spinoza is saying here that something that causes itself brings about its own existence and therefore, logically, must already exist. A being that is cause of itself cannot not exist, since its nature, or essence, involves existence. It also can never have ‘started’ to cause its existence because that would entail a ‘prior’ to existence, which doesn’t make any sense. Nor could it ever ‘finish’ causing its existence and continue to exist. Cause of itself must be of an eternally active nature. It is eternal both in its eternally existing and eternally bringing about its existence. It is both a noun (existence) and a verb (actualizing).

Definition 3: By substance I understand that which exists in itself [in se est] and is conceived through, or by means of, itself: i.e., the conception of which does not require for its formation the conception of anything else.

The word ‘in’ here means more of a logical dependency, not ‘inside of’. By telling us that substance is in itself, he is saying that substance depends, for its being, on itself alone. “A substance requires nothing beyond itself to exist and a true understanding of it requires nothing outside of the concept of the substance itself.” It is ontologically (its nature) and epistemologically (the knowledge of it) independent — it requires nothing outside of the concept of the substance itself.

Definition 5: By mode I understand the affections of substance, or that which exists in something else [in alio est], through which it is [also] conceived.

In other words, where a substance depends only on itself, a mode depends on something else and can only be understood through the concept of that logically prior other thing. Affections of substance here means changeable properties of substance.

From these three definitions alone, you can already start to grasp the entire picture. “Substance is that which is prior to, and independent of, its modes.” Pure, indeterminate being. A substance depends on itself for being suggesting that it is ‘cause of itself’, so we can say that being as such is the power of making itself actual.

It makes sense now to look at Definition 4 where he defines Attribute.

Definition 4: By attribute I understand what the mind [intellectus] perceives of substance, as constituting the essence of substance.

I had to read this several times and, as I’ve done heavily for this chapter, relied on Beth Lord’s excellent guide. The idea here is that attributes are the different ways substance can be perceived. We, as thinking sensing humans, know of two attributes of substance: thinking and extension.

Similar terminology to Descartes, but the order (and essence) is moved around to be more precise and coherent. Instead of the Cartesian thinking and extension representing properties of infinite substances in the universe, Spinoza says there is only one substance and thinking and extension are two ways of perceiving substance. They are two expressions of its essence.

The axioms are the basic logical principles which Spinoza assumes readers will treat as self-evident, eternal, and uncontroversial truths. From there, he builds out his propositions which depend on the axioms and definitions, which if you’ve read Euclid’s Geometry is exactly where he got the inspiration for this type of structure. This is what is meant when you hear people refer to Spinoza as using ‘geometrical proofs.’

In Proposition 4 he begins to lay the groundwork by getting you to agree that there are only two ways of distinguishing substances: either by their attributes or their modes. The reason is that reality consists of nothing but substances (as their attributes) or the modes of substance.

By Proposition 5, he makes his break from Descartes. Can there be more than one substance of the same attribute? No. This is because either two substances share the same attribute with different modes, or two substances have two different attributes and also differ in their modes. An attribute, if you remember from above, is simply what the substance exists as. A substance without its attributes is simply a “pure, indeterminate being.” If two substances share the same attribute, you’re just talking about one substance underneath. If the substances with the same attribute have different modes, Spinoza says we’re just talking about different modes, not different substances. This is because, as we saw in Proposition 1, substance is prior to its modes, and according to Definition 3, substance is understood through itself, not through its modes.

So he’s now shown that Descartes is wrong for proposing multiple substances that share the same attribute (either thinking or extension) but it still leaves the possibility for multiple substances each with its own unique attribute. Propositions 6-14 shows this is incorrect, that there is only one substance, and that substance is God (or Nature). In Proposition 6, he reminds us that there can’t be two substances of the same attribute, and that one cannot cause the other. Proposition 7 and 8 say that the nature or essence of substance is to exist, since Definition 1 stated that it must be its own cause, and therefore, by Proposition 8, substance is necessarily infinite. For something to be finite, it must be limited by some other thing. “A plant is prevented from growing infinitely large, or living infinitely long, by other physical things that limit it.” But a substance can never be limited by something else of the same nature because there are no two substances of the same nature.

The simplest way to understand this is that ordinary finite things cannot be substances and, therefore, substances do not have a beginning and end time in time or any limitation in space, as everyday finite things do. He has shown that it is logically inconsistent to see everyday things as substances and thereby dismantles the entire Cartesian project. At this point we’re only half way through the chapter.

The more reality, or being, a thing has, he says in Proposition 9, the more attributes belong to it. And taking this further, a being with many attributes stretching out to infinity is really just another way of saying an absolutely infinite being, which was defined in Definition 6 as…God.

In Proposition 11, he lays out the claim for the necessary existence of God.

If you think you can conceive of God not existing, then, by A7, his essence does not involve existence. But P7 demonstrates that it pertains to the nature of substance to exist, because substance is cause of itself. It would be absurd to say that the essence of a substance of infinite attributes did not involve existence. Since God is that substance (by D6), God exists necessarily.

This may seem like a circular argument of the type:

“God is by definition the greatest being you can imagine. A being that doesn’t exist is less great than a being that does exist in reality; so if God were only imaginary, he wouldn’t be the greatest possible being. Therefore, God must exist.”

It’s not. He’s not starting with God, he’s starting with a substance of infinite attributes which cannot not exist. God is defined as a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence (Definition 6). God, for Spinoza, is a pure being, perceived as every attribute there is. Every way that being as such expresses itself is substance, of which is there only one, which is the same as God.

If your head is spinning at this point, I don’t blame you. But if you go back to what I wrote up top, about noun and verb. A substance is not a ‘thing’, it is the power of actualizing its own existence. A substance of infinite attributes actualizes itself in infinite ways, it has an infinite amount of reality, power, and being. Its essence involves existence, both logically and actually.

Beth Lord outlines 3 major objections people have when they get to this part:

1. You accept that Spinoza has demonstrated the existence of a substance consisting of infinite attributes, but not the existence of God.

2. You follow his argument, but do not believe in God and so you cannot accept his conclusion.

3. You follow his argument, but you believe in a personal God and so cannot accept his definition of God.

These are pretty fair critiques on the surface. And yet they are also wrong.

On #1, it’s true that Spinoza demonstrates the existence of ‘a substance with infinite attributes’ and then defines God as this substance (how convenient). But, Lord argues, he believes all philosophers, theologians, and religious authorities would find it uncontroversial that the essential nature of a divine being is to be a substance with infinite attributes expressing eternal and infinite essence, i.e., ontological independence, infinite power, and eternal being. “If you accept Proposition 11 has demonstrated the existence of substance with infinite attributes, and if you accept that the being which has those qualities is what we understand by ‘God’, then you must accept that Proposition 11 has demonstrated the existence of God.” The harder question, whether Proposition 11 itself succeeds in demonstrating that substance, is the one I'll come to in a moment.

On #2, Spinoza isn’t arguing the existence of the God of the Bible, simply a substance of infinite attributes. You can call it whatever you want. A shape with three sides is conveniently called a triangle but it can also just be a shape with three sides. You can call this substance of infinite attributes Nature, being, substance, power, whatever. What you can't easily do is deny that being is real in some sense, and that's what Spinoza needs to make his claim.

On #3, Spinoza says that what you essentially believe in is the same thing, only that different religions have anthropomorphized this substance of infinite attributes who intervenes in the affairs of humankind. But none would say that their God is not an infinite being of infinite attributes. The religious believer's deeper objection, of course, is that Spinoza's God can't love you back, hear you, or care what you do. For most religious traditions, that's the whole point. Spinoza is arguing that's exactly the anthropomorphism he's trying to strip away. Whether what's left still deserves the name 'God' is a question each reader has to answer for themselves, and it’s why Spinoza goes with God or Nature.

I’ve tried to resist this part in the chapter, mainly to see if I could find holes in his arguments but I ended up finding them plausible, which then started seeping into all the different ways I see reality. I think Spinoza knew this would be hard for people during his lifetime to accept, and it’s still a bit weird for us now to think of these arguments and their implications. We’ve all heard the New Age “we’re all one” mantra, and we are all made up of matter, but it is surprisingly difficult to fully let go of the individualistic, subjective experience we have as an ‘I’ that is distinct from others. But if you probe through Spinoza’s arguments, that notion becomes increasingly untenable.

The answers to those questions will come in future chapters.

One of the other Propositions that stood out to me in this first chapter was Proposition 18:

“God is the immanent and not the transient cause of all things.”

God, in Spinoza’s system, is the creator, but not in the same way that Descartes meant, since everything that is, is in God. This is why he is called immanent, because there is nothing outside of God or separate from God. As Beth Lord writes, “God’s causality of modes is the actualization of its own being.” Remember, noun and verb. In the Scholia to Proposition 29, he uses the terms Natura naturans, referring to God as cause of itself, and Natura naturata, referring to God as effect of itself. Both the cause and the effect. I like the analogy Lord uses of you causing your own facial expressions.

Propositions 21-25 were some of the toughest for me to parse, even with Lord’s guide in hand. Here’s how she explains it which sort of helped me grasp and visualize what he’s saying:

God, or substance, has infinite attributes. Of these infinite attributes, we can conceive of two: thinking and extension. God exists as thinking being, and God exists as extended being. So thinking being and extended being as such exist, necessarily and eternally… Because each of these attributes has infinite essence, what follows from the nature of the attributes must also be infinite. This means that each of the attributes expresses an immediate infinite mode: there is an infinite way in which thinking is expressed and an infinite way in which extension is expressed. What follows from the nature of "thinking being" as such is the infinite intellect, i.e., infinite true understanding. What follows from the nature of "extended being" as such is infinite motion and rest. Infinite intellect and infinite motion and rest are caused immediately by the absolute nature of God's attributes. In other words, infinite, thinking, being necessarily includes, causes, and expresses itself as infinite intellect. Infinite extended being necessarily includes, causes, and expresses itself as infinite motion and rest.

The mediate infinite mode, which Spinoza says follows the immediate infinite mode, is what he calls the face of the whole universe, in a letter to a study group which asked him to explain these passages.1

Multiple cells and micro-organisms make up a fish and multiple fish, plants, stones and water make up rivers, and rivers and mountains and land make up the earth, and multiple planets make up a solar system, and so on.

In Proposition 29, he makes the obvious conclusion that nothing is contingent, everything is determined. God causes everything both at the level of finite modes causing each other (you are alive because your parents created you and their parents created them, etc.) and at the level of causing the essence of humans to be what it is, “insofar as God exists as infinite intellect and infinite motion and rest.”

This is, according to Spinoza’s logic, a fully determined universe with no room for free will. Not only do we not have free will, but to think of God as having free will is to misunderstand God. He says this outright in Scholia 2 of Proposition 33:

“But I do not doubt that many will reject this opinion as absurd, and will not deign to apply their minds to it, on no other ground, than because they are accustomed to attribute to God, another kind of liberty, far different from that which we have attributed to him, namely, Absolute Will.”

He argues that all one has to do is meditate on the subject and the flow of his arguments which he has presented, and you will also come to the same conclusion. To not do so, he says, would be “a great obstacle to science.” To think of the risk he took writing and publishing these thoughts in the time period he did is astounding.

The Appendix, to me, was the real treat of slogging through Chapter 1. Freed from the geometric structure, Spinoza drops the formality and takes on the boogeymen of his day, namely, the prevailing ideas of the anthropomorphic God of the Bible, intelligent design, and the moral concepts of good and evil. He lays out why we believe these things, why they are false, and the impact on us and society.

His main angle of attack is to dismantle the notion of ‘final causes’, a term popularized by Aristotle’s metaphysics. A ‘final cause’ is simply the aim or purpose for the sake of which a thing exists or acts. As humans, we tend to believe that our actions have a purpose, and Spinoza believes we mistakenly ascribe that same purpose-oriented idea to nature or God. The Christian world-view of the seventeenth century was that God acts with intention or purpose, God organized the world for the sake of human or divine purposes, that natural things exist for the sake of human or divine purposes, and that the universe itself has a final purpose and is in constant movement towards fulfilling that purpose. If you were a philosopher at the time, you would be expected to fit your philosophy into that framework and the Aristotelian notion of ‘final cause’ was a useful one.

The doctrine of final causes derives from basic human experience. We are mostly aware of our desires and ambitions, but we can’t even dream of all the causes impacting us every second of the day. We also tend to do things for some purpose which we imagine is a better state than the one we’re in, and then ascribe this same purpose-orientation to other things outside of ourselves. We also enjoy different aspects of our bodies (teeth for chewing, eyes for seeing, etc.) that it seems on the surface that these must have been given to us by some ‘ruler of nature’ who provides these things for the sake of mankind. It’s no surprise then, Spinoza argues, that since we can only know our minds, we ascribe the same kind of mental pattern to this ruler or rulers and believe that if they share the same kinds of minds as us, certainly we can curry their favor by one-upping each other with prayers or sacrifices or other superstitions.

The discovery of mathematics, Spinoza says, was the first time humans began their escape from the trap of ignorance about God because it is not concerned with final causes, but with the essences and properties of figures. It is another ‘standard of truth’ that does not depend on experience.

Our standard image of God is simply a maximized version of humans and if triangles could speak, they would say God is ‘eminently triangular’ in nature. This human-centric way of viewing the world leads us to judge things according to what is useful to us, developing a host of value-terms to judge natural phenomena such as good, evil, order, disorder, beauty, ugliness, etc. But from the perspective of God, as Spinoza advocates, none of those terms is relevant. Nature, and God, simply is. Nature has no purposes and makes no judgements.

“For if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something which he lacks.”

Spinoza’s God is specifically not mysterious, but is simply being and therefore fundamentally knowable. By gaining true knowledge about the world, we gain more true knowledge of God. Knowledge of God is to be found through mathematics, science, and philosophy, and “not through religious texts or the doctrine of priests,” Lord writes. As if this were not already a huge slap in the face to the Church of the seventeenth century, Spinoza goes on to write that it is specifically theological doctrine which is superstition and keeps people ignorant. To gain true understanding of the universe, we have to break free from these superstitions.

It’s clear why he was branded an atheist in his time and his work banned for over a hundred years. But why go through all of the process to prove God if he was a committed atheist? One answer is that during the time he lived, this was about as far as anyone could go without risking real harm. But that doesn't quite hold up when you read his private letters, where he's just as committed to God-as-Nature in correspondence he never expected to be published.

The more I dig into Spinoza, the more I see something more than simply a hard materialist weaving in spirituality to placate would-be haters. I see someone deeply spiritual but in a way that would not, and could not, forsake reason. And for that, I think he deserves the credit he was given in posterity.

As I head into surgery tomorrow, I think of all the decisions that led up to this second achilles rupture. For nine years, I avoided playing basketball precisely because of the fear of re-rupture. So why did I decide to play again this year? Spinoza says it couldn’t have happened any other way, and as much as I want to fight that, to say ‘no, I could have chosen not to go’, I can’t actually know the causes impacting all of my decision making in the moment. I can, and did use reason to weigh probability in my head, but that’s an imperfect science. Maybe the pressure to bond with friends in a sport I denied myself for almost a decade was too great? Maybe I needed close to a decade to finally ‘feel safe enough’ to try the sport again? Maybe if I’d worn different shoes or didn’t choose to play the fourth game and stopped after three? I don’t know, and no one knows. What Spinoza would say is that it just is and there’s no use in concocting stories of blame or superstition or bad luck. Sometimes, it just is. The best we can do is try to understand more, while accepting the limits of what we can know.