The Framework of Essences in Spinoza's Ethics

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Notes

¹Spinoza's monism, his claim that there can be or be conceived no other substance except God, is established in EIp14. From this, in conjunction with the definition of ‘substance’ and ‘mode’ in EIdef3&5 respectively, it follows that everything else is a mode or affection of God (EIp15). Spinoza later writes: ‘particular things are nothing but affections of God's attributes, or modes by which God's attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way’ (EIp25c).

²A note to the reader regarding citations from Spinoza's Ethics: EIp25c refers to Ethics, part 1, proposition 25 corollary; EIIdef2 refers to the second definition of part 2; EIp8s2 refers to the second scholium of proposition 8 in part 1 etc. Other abbreviations include ‘dem’ for ‘demonstration’, ‘ax’ for ‘axiom’, ‘l' for ‘lemma’, and ‘ep’ for ‘epistola’. Unless otherwise noted, all quoted passages from Spinoza's Ethics, Short Treatise[ST] and Theological-Political Treatise[TTP] are taken from Edwin Curley, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

³Such thinkers include Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics[Study] (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1984) 61 and 357–8; Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, Vol. 1 [Heretics] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 163; Micheal Della Rocca, Representation and the Mind–Body Problem in Spinoza[Representation] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) 86–8; Wallace Matson, ‘Body Essence and Mind Eternity in Spinoza’, in Spinoza: Issues and Directions, edited by E. Curley and P.-F. Moreau (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990) 82–95; Sherry Deveaux, ‘The Divine Essence and the Conception of God in Spinoza’[‘Divine Essence’], Synthese 135 (2003) 329–38; and Don Garrett, ‘Spinoza on the Essence of the Human Body and the Part of the Mind that is Eternal’[‘Essence of the Human Body’] (unpublished manuscript).

⁴Alhough I will be focusing on passages from the Ethics, there are passages in the Short Treatise where Spinoza explicitly endorses this view. Spinoza writes, for instance, that ‘Peter must, as is necessary, conform to the Idea of Peter, and not to the Idea of Man’ (KV I 6 (G I 43)) and ‘things must agree with their particular Ideas … and not with the general [Ideas]’ (KV I 10 (G I 49)).

⁵Commentators reading EIIdef2 in this way include Bennett, Study, 61; Yovel, Heretics, 163; Della Rocca, ‘Egoism and the Imitation of Affects in Spinoza’[‘Egoism’], in Spinoza on Reason and the ‘Free Man’, edited by Y. Yovel and G. Segal (New York: Little Room Press, 2004) 123–48; and Deveaux, ‘Divine Essence’.

⁶Della Rocca discusses this in ‘Egoism’, 128–34.

⁷‘Unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur’.

⁸Della Rocca provides a helpful discussion of these propositions, although I do not think that he is right to see both conceptions of modal essences at work here. See Della Rocca, ‘Egoism’, 128–34.

⁹It was once customary to defend a personalist conception of the eternity of the mind, cf. Harry Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934) 289–311; Martha Kneale, ‘Eternity and Sempiternity’, in Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays[Collection] edited by M. Grene (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1973) 227–40; Alan Donagan, ‘Spinoza's Proof of Immortality’, in Collection, 241–58; and Tamar Rudavsky, Time Matters: Time, Creation and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000) 181 and 186. This view has of late fallen out of favour, and been replaced by an improved impersonal account of the eternity of the mind. See Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method[Geometrical Method] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) 83–6; Jonathan Bennett, Study, 357–63; and, most forcefully, Steven Nadler, Spinoza's Heresy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 94–131.

¹⁰Descartes makes a similar remark about triangularity. He understands the nature of the triangle to be ‘a determinate nature, or essence, or form of the triangle which is immutable and eternal … ’ (John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Douglas Murdoch [CSM], translated by Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings[Descartes] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 106 (AT VIII 64)).

¹¹See Aristotle, Metaphysics, translated by J. Barnes in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) 1584 (B.6: 1003a14–15) and 1635 (Z.7: 1035b28–1036a8).

¹²Samuel Shirley treats ‘simplicem’ in the phrase in question as an adverb rather than an adjective. Thus Shirley translates ‘Ex. gr. definitio trianguli nihil aliud exprimit, quam simplicem naturam trianguli; at non certum aliquem triangulorum numerum’ as ‘The definition of a triangle expresses nothing other than simply the nature of a triangle, and not a fixed number of triangles’ (Baruch Spinoza, Complete Works, edited by M. Morgan, translated by S. Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002) 220). This translation makes it difficult for the objection to get off the ground in the first place, as there would then be no corroborating evidence that Spinoza understands definitions as being deficient representations of the essences they define.

¹³Harry Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934) 292.

¹⁴Alan Donagan, Spinoza (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988) 58–9; R. J. Delahunty, Spinoza (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) 295–6; Bennett, Study, 357–8; and Matson, ‘Body Essence Mind Eternity’, 88–9 all characterize formal essences in this way. Garrett, ‘Essence of the Human Body’, distinguishes the two and argues, as do I, that formal essences are infinite modes.

¹⁵The Latin for each is as follows: ‘Unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur’ (EIIIp6), and ‘Conatus, quo unaquaeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est praeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam’ (EIIIp7). I am using Curley's translation, but should note that the proper translation and interpretation of these two propositions has given rise to considerable debate among commentators. See Curley, Geometrical Method, 107–9; Bennett, Study, 240–3; Donagan, Spinoza, 153–5; Michael Della Rocca, ‘Spinoza's Metaphysical Psychology’, in Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by D. Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 192–266; and especially Don Garrett, ‘Spinoza's Conatus Argument’, in Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes, edited by O. Koistinen and J. Biro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 127–58.

¹⁶A caveat: Spinoza does not use ‘mode’ in EIIp13def, but he does define a body as ‘a mode that expresses God's essence in a definite and determinate way’ in EIIdef1, so it is fair to replace ‘body’ with ‘mode’ in EIIp13def.

¹⁷This proposition has vexed many scholars. See Edwin Curley, Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation[Spinoza's Metaphysics] (Cambridge, Harvard University press, 1969) 138–40; Curley, Geometrical Method, 84–5; Bennett, Study, 358; and Della Rocca, Representation, 134 and 191, n4. A few respond in roughly the way I do, but none do so by relying so heavily on the continuity between it and EIIp7, yet I think this is the key to making sense of the proposition.

¹⁸Alhough his precise meaning is a matter of significant controversy, he goes so far as to claim that ‘a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways’ (modus extensionis et idea illius modi una eademque est res, sed duobus modis expressa (EIIp7s).

¹⁹Spinoza probably inherited this terminology from Descartes, who also distinguishes between the formal and objective reality of a thing. For Descartes, the objective reality of a thing refers to the thing's reality as an object of thought, whereas the formal reality of a thing refers to the thing's reality as an actual object. Spinoza slightly modifies this by restricting formal reality to things conceived under the attribute of extension. For a good discussion of these terms in Descartes, see CSM, Descartes, 90–1 (AT VII 40), and Georges Dicker, Descartes: An analytical and historical introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 92–6.

²⁰This is also suggested by EIIp8's following from EIIp7, as EIIp7 is a proposition about modes. Formal essences, furthermore, could not be substances or attributes as they are expressions of extension, and so dependent on it. Mode, then, is the only remaining option. Don Garrett makes a similar claim, cf. ‘Spinoza on the Essence of the Human Body’ (unpublished manuscript).

²¹Alan Donagan, understanding formal essences as mere possibilities, argues that although they are contained in the attribute, they are not actual, and so are neither infinite nor finite modes. See Donagan, ‘Spinoza's Proof of Immortality’, 254 and Spinoza, 194–7. Spinoza, we will see, clearly affirms that formal essences are not non-actual, i.e. they are actual things. Donagan's contrary claim comes very close to wiping them out of existence except while their mode actually exists, which is indicative of the failure to distinguish formal from actual essences.

²²See Martial Gueroult, Spinoza II, L'Ame (Ethique II) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1974) 102 (Chapter 4, §XXXI) 115–17 (Chapter 5, §VIII), and 547 (Appendix 3, §I).

²³Ibid., 102 and 115–17.

²⁴Spinoza uses ‘God's idea in thought’, i.e. the finite idea of God in God's mind, to explicate this. As we are concerned with the question of objective essences in thought and their corresponding formal essences in the attribute of extension, I will replace Spinoza's example of ‘the idea of God in thought’ with ‘the objective essence humanity’.

²⁵Curley, Spinoza's Metaphysics, 62.

²⁶I do not think that formal essences are limited by other formal essences, as Gueroult would suggest. Only finite modes are so limited, and although for each formal essence there are many other ways of being a formal essence, this does not exclude each formal essence from being applicable to each mode of an attribute, so it does not limit their being pervasive, i.e. infinite.

²⁷In so far as there are apparently two infinite modes of extension, there should, correspondingly, by two infinite modes of thought, and Spinoza describes them as such in EIp32c2, where he says that intellect and will are related to God in the same way as motion and rest. However, at least with respect to motion and rest, it may be more appropriate to regard these as a single infinite mode: motion-and-rest. This is because Spinoza understands motion-and-rest to be the determinate order that is responsible for the identity of the thing, so its nature or form should be a single thing – motion-and-rest, cf. ep. 32 and ep. 64.

²⁸This is suggested by Spinoza's claim that in the third kind of knowledge the mind proceeds from the nature of the attributes themselves to the nature of the more specific essences that follow from them (EIIp40s2).

²⁹I should clarify that, as I understand it, each attribute has its own set of laws of nature – the laws governing the behaviour of its more specific expressions. This set in each attribute should correspond to the set of laws in each of the other attributes. The laws of nature, like modes and with respect to Thought and Extension, are ‘one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways’. For our purposes, we might say, however, that the attributes and their modes are related, so too are the laws inscribed in them.

³⁰The characterization of laws of nature as infinite modes was first proposed, as far as I can tell, by Edwin Curley. See Curley, Spinoza's Metaphysics, 58–62 and Geometrical Method, 42–7. Yovel also provides a nice discussion of some of these issues. See Yirmiyahu Yovel, ‘The Infinite Mode and Natural Laws in Spinoza’, in God and Nature: Spinoza's Metaphysics, edited by Y. Yovel (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991) 79–96. Alan Hart also thinks along these lines, but offers less support than Curley or Yovel for his claims. See Alan Hart, Spinoza's Ethics Part I and II: A Platonic Commentary (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983) 48–9.

³¹This would suggest that when Spinoza identifies (facies totius universi), which is usually translated as ‘the face of the whole universe’, as the mediate infinite mode of extension we should instead translate it as ‘the producing or production of the whole universe’ as ‘facies’ may be rendered both ways and the latter is closer to the characterization of the mediate infinite modes as the further modified laws of extension. This is a matter of controversy that I will simply note here.

³²As there are laws that govern the actions and interactions of modes under each attribute, so too must laws of nature appear in the infinite modes of each attribute. I am ultimately concerned with formal essences, and so will confine our discussion to the laws of nature that follow from the attribute of extension.

³³Whether the immediate infinite modes are laws is a difficult question. If they are the totality of laws as a single law, then the immediate infinite modes are laws, but if they are just the order manifested through the laws, they seem not to be themselves laws. This may have import in the necessitarian debate, as it promises to shed light on the reason behind the laws – is itself a law, or something other?

³⁴Because even manifest infinite laws rely on the principle of motion-and-rest, they cannot be construed as immediate infinite modes.

³⁵Plato, Phaedo, translated by G. M. A. Grube, edited by J. Cooper in Plato: Complete Works[Plato] (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997) 88 (102b5). Gail Fine, ‘Immanence’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy supplementary volume (1986) 71–97; Daniel Devereux, ‘Separation and Immanence in Plato's Theory of Forms’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 12 (1994) 63–90; and Allen Silverman, The Dialectic of Essence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) discuss this issue in further detail. Form-copies, sans the forms, are also the predecessors of trope theory.

³⁶Plato's depiction of a form's being ‘itself by itself’ is intended to rule out its being immanent in particulars. ‘’I think you, Socrates, and anyone else who posits that there is for each thing some being, itself by itslef, would agree, to begin with, that none of those beings is in us‘. ‘Yes – how could it still be itself by itself?’ replied Socrates‘ (Plato, Parmenides, trans. Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan, edited by John Cooper in Plato, 367 (133c3–6)). See also Plato, Phaedo in Plato, 68 (78d5–6) and 86 (100b5–7).

³⁷Form-copies recall what Aristotle characterizes in the Categories as things that are in but not said of any subject: ‘For example, the individual knowledge-of-grammar is in a subject, the soul, but is not said of any subject; and the individual white is in a subject, the body … but is not said of any subject’ (Aristotle, Categories, translated by J. Barnes in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) 3 (1a26–28)).