Spinoza on Composition, Causation, and the Mind's Eternity

Abstract

Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind is often understood as the claim that the mind has a part that is eternal. I appeal to two principles that Spinoza takes to govern parthood and causation to raise a new problem for this reading. Spinoza takes the composition of one thing from many to require causal interaction among the many. Yet he also holds that eternal things cannot causally interact, without mediation, with things in duration. So the human mind, since it is the idea of a body existing in duration, cannot have an eternal part. In order to solve this problem, I propose an aspectual reading of Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind: the mind itself is eternal, under one of its aspects.

Keywords:

• Spinoza
• eternity
• composition
• causation
• rationalism
• mind

Notes

¹A version of this paper was presented at the 2012 conference of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, and it benefitted greatly from the comments of the audience there; I would like to express my thanks to the organizers of that conference, Beth Lord and Eric Schliesser, for bringing together scholars with a wide variety of approaches to Spinoza's philosophy. Thanks are also due to Michael Della Rocca for providing extensive suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. Finally, thanks to several anonymous referees for their helpful, constructive criticism.

²References to Spinoza's writings in Latin (Geb) are from Spinoza, Opera. References to the Ethics (E) in English translation are to Spinoza, Collected Works of Spinoza. References to Spinoza's correspondence (Ep) in English are to Spinoza, Letters, though for citations to particular lines in longer letters I provide page numbers from Geb. Finally, references to Descartes' works in English translation (CSM) are to Descartes, ‘Philosophical Writings of Descartes’.

³Cf. Garrett, ‘Spinoza on the Essence of the Human Body’, 284. On Garrett's reading, there is a sharp ontological distinction between a body's actual essence (essentia actualis) and its formal essence (essentia formalis). Garrett (285–7) argues that the part of the mind that remains after death is the idea of its formal essence, not its actual essence. In fact, the textual evidence for this reading is slim – in developing the doctrine of the eternity of the mind, Spinoza only says that there is in God's mind an idea of the essence of each human body. Furthermore, in this section he also writes,

We conceive of things as actual in two ways: either insofar as we conceive them to exist in relation to a certain time and place, or insofar as we conceive them to be contained in God and to follow from the necessity of the divine nature. But the things we conceive in this second way as true, or real, we conceive under a species of eternity … (EVp29s)

In brief, things conceived under a species of eternity are conceived as actually (not merely formally) existing. But the idea of the essence of the body that remains in God is the idea of ‘the essence of the body under a species of eternity’ (EVp23s). So the eternal idea is apparently the idea of the essence of the body as actually existing, albeit not as existing ‘in relation to a certain time and place’. This suggests that even if the distinction between actual and formal essences is at work in these passages, that distinction is not ontological, as Garrett maintains, but merely conceptual.

⁴On the mind as the idea of an actually existing body, see EIIp11 and 13. Regarding the problems this raises for most interpretations of the doctrine of the eternity of the mind, see Parchment, ‘Mind's Eternity in Spinoza's Ethics’, 354–5, 358–62.

⁵On Spinoza's conception of eternity as timeless, see Parchment, ‘Mind's Eternity in Spinoza's Ethics’, 366–8, Nadler, Spinoza's Heresy, 111–14, and Garber, ‘Free Man Thinks of Nothing Less Than of Death’, 104. Against this conception, see Kneale, ‘Eternity and Sempiternity’ and Donagan, ‘Spinoza's Proof of Immortality’. My sympathies lie with the former camp, though I agree with Hallett, ‘Spinoza's Conception of Eternity’, 288–99 about the hazards of taking Spinoza's eternity to consist in the mere absence of time. As I hope to show, my argument does not depend upon ascribing any particular conception of eternity to Spinoza.

⁶See Garrett, ‘Spinoza on the Essence of the Human Body’, 296–7 and Lebuffe, ‘Change and the Eternal Part of the Mind in Spinoza’, 369 for summaries of the problem.

⁷Parchment, ‘Mind's Eternity in Spinoza's Ethics’, 350–4 presents a guide to the standard (but wildly divergent) interpretations of the doctrine.

⁸See e.g. Della Rocca, Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza, Chapter 3, esp. 53–64.

⁹Nor are these authors alone in this assumption, though it would take too much space to show all the rest. Nadler, Spinoza's Heresy, 113–14 and Garber, ‘Free Man Thinks of Nothing Less Than of Death’, 104–6 both take it up, to pick two prominent examples. Bennett, Study of Spinoza's Ethics, 358 is one of the few commentators to dispute that Spinoza took there to be an eternal part of the mind, but this is only because he rejects the entire doctrine of the mind's eternity as ‘rubbish’ (374).

¹⁰Note that Shirley translates Spinoza's ‘consentiant’ as (a form of) the English ‘agree’, whereas Curley (in his translation of the Ethics) translates ‘conveniant’ as ‘agree’. The difference is important because when Spinoza says that distinct things agree (‘conveniant’) in nature, he means that they have the same essence. By contrast, when he here says that a thing's parts come to agree (‘consentiant’) in nature, he surely does not mean that they come to have the same essence. The point is that Spinoza's account of composition in Ep 32 does not require that the parts of a thing all come to have the same nature.

¹¹The objection described here is inspired by Lebuffe, ‘Change and the Eternal Part of the Mind in Spinoza’. As described in the previous section, Lebuffe favors a picture on which the parts of an individual are like apples in a bucket, which need not be causally connected in any interesting way.

¹²My claim here is not intended to be controversial; Bennett, Study of Spinoza's Ethics, 232, Garrett, ‘Spinoza's Theory of Metaphysical Individuation’, 82–97, Garber, ‘Descartes and Spinoza on Persistence and Conatus’, 54–5, Della Rocca, Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza, Chapter 2, Barbone, ‘What Counts as an Individual for Spinoza’, Lin, ‘Memory and Personal Identity in Spinoza’, 248–52, and Viljanen, ‘Field Metaphysic, Power, and Individuation in Spinoza’, 409–10 each present interpretations of Spinoza's discussion of composition and parthood that agree, roughly, with the one I present here. These commentators only begin to disagree with one another in their understanding of Spinoza's ‘patterns’.

¹³What conditions are sufficient for many things to compose one, on Spinoza's view? Martin Lin answers this question as follows: ‘some objects constitute a complex individual just in case their motions are systematically related and that relation tends to persist’ (Lin, ‘Memory and Personal Identity in Spinoza’, 252). But this highlights the real problem for Spinoza's account, which is to distinguish ‘systematically related’ patterns from arbitrary collections of causal relations. Lin claims that on Spinoza's account, there will simply be cases in which it is vague whether many things compose one (252 n. 31). Lin's suggestion would create great difficulties for Spinoza, however. He holds that everything that exists must be the cause of some effects (EIp36), so if it is vague whether there exists a composite individual, it will also be vague whether certain effects are produced. But causation does not look to admit of vagueness, on Spinoza's view – it is as determinate as can be (EIa3). So, whatever Spinoza's account of composition is, it had better not admit of vagueness.

¹⁴Strong evidence for the biconditional is found in Spinoza's use of EIp21 and 22 in the demonstration for EIp28. The former propositions assert, ‘If x follows from the (absolute) nature of y and y is infinite and eternal, then so is x.’ By contrast, Ip28dem asserts that ‘If x is determined to exist and produce an effect by y and y is infinite and eternal, then so is x’; see esp. Geb II/69, 10–25. Spinoza appears to take these formulations (‘follows from the nature of’ and ‘is determined to exist and produce an effect by’) to express the same relation. But the latter formulation is also used to express the relation of direct, efficient causation. For example, at EIp32dem, Spinoza appeals to Ip28 to show that every volition is bound up in an infinite chain of direct, efficient causes.

¹⁵For example, see Allison, Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction, 72.

¹⁶My argument here should be acceptable on any extant interpretation of Spinoza's theory of causation, since they all ascribe to Spinoza the claim that if x causes y, then y is conceived through x. There are two general lines of interpretation to consider. The first interpretation is that Spinoza in some way identifies causing and conceiving, so that to cause an effect is nothing more than to render that effect conceivable or intelligible, and vice versa. Della Rocca, ‘Rationalist Manifesto’, 75–92 and Spinoza, Chapter 2, and Newlands, ‘Another Kind of Spinozistic Monism’, 474–76 defend variations on this view (though they disagree about whether conceiving should be understood mentalistically; see Newlands, ‘Thinking, Conceiving, and Idealism in Spinoza’). The second interpretation is that Spinoza takes causing and conceiving to be coextensive but not identical. Laerke, ‘Spinoza's Cosmological Argument in the Ethics’, 446–59 and Melamed, ‘Spinoza's Metaphysics of Thought: Parallelisms and the Multifaceted Structure of Ideas’ take this line. On either line of interpretation, the required conditional obtains.

¹⁷For example, Della Rocca takes ‘quatenus’ in these passages to mean ‘to the extent that’, and to refer to ‘degrees of eternality’ (Spinoza, 271). Julie Klein presents a more nuanced interpretation, arguing first that,

“Spinoza's use of the language of aspects, found in passages that propose considering a thing ‘under the aspect [sub speciel’ and ‘in so far as [quatenus ad]’, … indicates that the same thing can be considered from different perspectives and in different respects”.(Klein, ‘Spinoza's Debt to Gersonides’, 21)

Yet she also claims that, ‘In a number of propositions, “quatenus” can be understood as “to the extent that”, and so echoes Gersonides’ “b'ofen mah”’ (‘Spinoza's Debt to Gersonides’, 35). In developing her aspectival interpretation of Spinoza, Klein is led to the view that ‘eternity need not be construed in terms of transcendence or separation’ (‘By Eternity I Understand’, 297). Rather, eternity is ‘not really distinct from duration and time’, but all three are aspects of our cognition of nature (‘By Eternity I Understand’, 311). This suggests that, in the end, she would agree that the aspectival sense of ‘quatenus’ is what Spinoza has in mind in these passages.

¹⁸Here I disagree with Curley, Spinoza's Metaphysics; see Melamed, ‘Spinoza's Metaphysics of Substance’ for the most recent (and, I think, decisive) objections to Curley's view.

¹⁹Spinoza's discussions of causation are almost always shot through with the term ‘quatenus’, reflecting the way in which he takes causal powers to be aspects or facets of God's power to cause itself. As Laerke puts the point, ‘En fait, Spinoza ne dit jamais qu'un mode est cause d'autre chose sans ajouter des précisions et des formules réduplicatives qui mettent en évidence qu'il s'agit plutôt d'une determination de la cause unique’ (‘Deus Quatenus’, 274). (The ‘formules réduplicatives’ to which Laerke refers are Spinoza's uses of ‘quatenus’ to ascribe a causal power to something under one of its aspects, about which I will say more below.)