Spinoza on Fictitious Ideas and Possible Entities

Abstract

The aim of this article is twofold: to provide a valid account of Spinoza’s theory of fictitious ideas, and to demonstrate its coherency with the overall modal metaphysics underpinning his philosophical system. According to Leibniz, in fact, the existence of romances and novels would be sufficient to demonstrate, against Spinoza’s necessitarianism, that possible entities exist and are intelligible, and that many other worlds different from ours could have existed in its place. I argue that Spinoza does not actually need to resort to the notion of possible entities in order to explain the incontrovertible existence of fictions and fictitious ideas. In order to demonstrate this, I will first show how, according to Spinoza, true ideas of nonexistent things need not be regarded as fictitious ideas. Then I will show by which means Spinoza can justify the real existence of fictions and fictitious ideas in the human mind through our present knowledge of actually existing things, to conclude that fictitious ideas neither add anything to what we already know of things, nor do they increase the extent of the existing conceivable reality by demanding the existence of possible non-actualised entities.

Keywords:

• Spinoza
• necessity
• contingency
• fiction
• essence
• existence

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Syliane Malinowski-Charles, Jimmy Plourde, Mogens Lærke and, in particular, Torin Doppelt for helpful comments and criticisms on previous versions of this paper. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and encouraging feedback.

A shorter version of this paper was presented in July 2015 during the Collegium Spinozanum, organised at the University of Groningen by Andrea Sangiacomo, to whom I am grateful.

This work was supported by scholarships from the Programme de soutien aux étudiants de cycles supérieurs and the Laboratoire sur l’histoire et la pensée moderne of the UQTR.

Notes

1. All English quotations of Spinoza’s texts are from The Collected Writings of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). For Spinoza’s works, I use the following abbreviations: E = Ethics [followed by the part number; ax = axiom; def = definition; dem = demonstration; p = proposition; schol = scholium]; CM = Metaphysical Thoughts; KV = Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being [the division into sections is the one proposed by Christoph Sigwart, also followed by Curley; app = appendix]; PPC = Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy [followed by the book number; def = definition]; TIE = Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect [followed by the section number; the division is the one proposed by Carl Hermann Bruder, also followed by Curley]; OP = B.d.S. Opera Posthuma (Amsterdam, 1677); NS = Nagelate Schriften van B.d.S. (Amsterdam, 1677).

For Leibniz’s works, I use the following abbreviations and editions: H [followed by the page number] = Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, ed. Austin Farrer, trans. E. M. Huggard (LaSalle, PA: Open Court, 1985); and L [followed by the page number] = Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker, 2d ed. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989).

Liebniz, H 234: “Spinoza… appears to have explicitly taught a blind necessity, having denied to the Author of Things understanding and will, and assuming that good and perfection relate to us only, and not to him. … As far as one can understand him, he acknowledges no goodness in God, properly speaking, and he teaches that all things exist through the necessity of the divine nature, without any act of choice by God. We will not waste time here in refuting an opinion so bad, and indeed so inexplicable.”

2. Liebniz, L 263.

3. Liebniz, L 263. “Unless someone imagines,” Leibniz adds, “that there are certain poetic regions in the infinite extent of space and time where we might see wandering over the earth King Arthur of Great Britain, Amadis of Gaul, and the fabulous Dietrich von Bern invented by the Germans.” See also H 234–35: “My own opinion is founded on the nature of the possibles, that is, of things that imply no contradiction. I do not think that a Spinozist will say that all the romances one can imagine exist actually now, or have existed, or will still exist in some place in the universe. Yet one cannot deny that romances such as those of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, or as Octavia, are possible.”

4. Spinoza, E IV, def3.

5. Spinoza, TIE §53.

6. Syliane Malinowski-Charles, “De la possibilité des fictions littéraires chez Spinoza,” Teoria 32.2, 3d series, Spinoza nel XXI secolo 7.2 (2012): 247–65.

7. Jon A. Miller, “Spinoza’s Possibilities,” The Review of Metaphysics 54.4 (2001): 779–814.

8. See Miller, “Spinoza’s Possibilities,” 803–8, and Malinowski-Charles, “De la possibilité des fictions littéraires chez Spinoza,” 258–62.

9. Even though big and fundamental differences between the two philosophers are still acknowledged. For neither Malinowski-Charles, nor Miller, for example, argue that Spinoza would ever admit a set of possible things whose existence can be explained according to different laws of nature, as it was for Leibniz.

10. See note 3. For an exhaustive analysis of Leibniz’s criticism of Spinoza, see Sébastien Charles, “Le possible comme critique du Spinozisme: Leibniz et la fiction,” Science et Esprit 67.1 (2015): 17–33.

11. For criticism of this kind, see Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s “Ethics” (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1984), 111–24. Bennett’s analysis has prompted studies that focus only or mainly on the topic of Spinoza’s account of modality, and which are worth considering, such as Richard Mason, “Spinoza on Modality,” The Philosophical Quarterly 36.144 (1986): 313–42, and Samuel Newlands, “Spinoza’s Modal Metaphysics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013), ed. Edward N. Zalta, URL=<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/spinoza-modal/>.

12. Spinoza, TIE §51.

13. Spinoza, TIE §50.

14. Spinoza, TIE §41 and §42.

15. PPC I, def3.

16. PPC I, def4. See also KV I, 1, 8 and KV II, app2, 7. It is to be noted that in the Ethics Spinoza will drop the concept of “representation” as a valid epistemic category to explain the relationship entertained by the true idea and its corresponding existing object, in explicit opposition to Descartes’ epistemology.

17. Spinoza, TIE §33.

18. Spinoza, TIE §33.

19. Spinoza, E II, p1 and p2. Actually, there is a third and fundamental consequence that follows from these premises, since they seem sufficiently strong to immediately bind Spinoza to a form of parallelism between true ideas and their objects, as can be seen later in TIE §41: “The idea is objectively in the same way as its object is really. So if there were something in Nature that did not interact with other things, and if there were an objective essence of that thing which would have to agree completely with its formal essence, then that objective essence would not interact [note by Spinoza: ‘To interact with other things is to produce, or be produced by, other things’] with other ideas, i.e., we could not infer anything about it. And conversely, those things that do interact with other things (as everything that exists in Nature does) will be understood, and their objective essences will also have the same interaction, i.e., other ideas will be deduced from them, and these again will interact with other ideas.”

20. Spinoza, TIE §52.

21. Spinoza, CM I, 2. In the CM Spinoza dedicates a full chapter to “Real Beings, fictitious Beings, and Beings of Reason” (CM I, 1), a full chapter to “What are the being of Essence, the being of Existence, the being of Idea and the Being of Power” (CM I, 2), and a full chapter to “Concerning what is necessary, Impossible, Possible, and Contingent” (CM I, 3). Notwithstanding their being Spinoza’s longest exposition available on the subject, they are almost unemployable without a preliminary exegetic work. As reported by Lodewijk Meijer’s Preface to the volume, amongst the claims exposed by Spinoza “there are many that he rejects as false, and concerning which he holds a quite different opinion” (Curley, The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, 229; see also Ep13). Amongst these claims, some that make the reliability of the CM very problematic with regard to our selected topic are “That creatures are in God eminently” (CM I, 1) and, most important of all, “That God, if he acted necessarily, is not infinitely powerful” (CM II, 10). Moreover, some passages concerning necessity in CM I, 3 seem to be outright contradictory, especially when Spinoza awkwardly refers the modal category of “necessity” to “essences” (the “necessity of essence”) to distinguish it from the “necessity of existence” in existing things (“the former depends on the eternal laws of nature, the latter on the series and order of causes”), and concludes a few paragraphs later that “the necessity of really existing is not distinct from the necessity of essence,” and that the order of causes are the same laws of nature. Miller correctly cannot and does not employ this passage to defend his interpretation of Spinoza as distinguishing between an ordo naturæ and an ordo causarum. Unfortunately, there is no other place in Spinoza’s works where such a distinction is so clearly expressed (and rejected at the one and the same time), and the few other passages which Miller explicitly regards as proofs are subject to interpretation (E II, x1; E I, p33, schol1; TIE § 12; TP II, 8).

22. Spinoza, E V, p23, dem.

23. Spinoza, CM I, 2. Spinoza’s vocabulary is inaccurate in this context, or, better said, it reflects the Cartesian theory: by “their substances” Spinoza means in fact infinite extension (with regard to the essences of bodies) and infinite thought (with regard to the essences of ideas). According to Spinoza’s theory, as exposed in his later Ethics, infinite extension and infinite thought are not substances, but God’s attributes (see E I, p10, schol; E II, p1 and p2; see also KV II, app2, 10).

24. Spinoza, E I, ax6.

25. Spinoza, TIE §76, 2nd note.

26. Spinoza, E I, p11, dem2. The substance whose necessary existence can be deduced by attending to its essence alone is, in fact, God. The reason why I call this a “strong version” of the principle of sufficient reason, is that it requires at least two conditions, which might be both questionable. The first is the identity, as to their effects, between ontological causation and logical entailment. The second is that a sufficient reason or cause be provided both for the existence and for the nonexistence of the same thing.

27. This interpretation has been proposed and developed by Mogens Lærke in “Aspects of Spinoza’s Theory of Essence: Formal essence, non-existence, and two types of actuality,” in The Actual and the Possible: Modality and Metaphysics in Modern Philosophy, ed. Mark Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

28. This seems to be coherent with the fundamental axiom expressed in E I, ax4: “The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause.”

29. I am not considering here the more complex case of what Spinoza scholars call “immediate infinite modes” and “mediate infinite modes.”

30. Spinoza, E II, p8, cor and schol: “The ideas of singular things, or of modes, that do not exist must be comprehended in God’s infinite idea in the same way as the formal essences of the singular things, or modes, are contained in God’s attributes. … From this it follows that so long as singular things do not exist, except insofar as they are comprehended in God’s attributes, their objective being, or ideas, do not exist except insofar as God’s infinite idea exists.” See also E I, p8, schol2: “This is how we can have true ideas of modifications which do not exist; for though they do not actually exist outside the intellect, nevertheless their essences are comprehended in another in such a way that they can be conceived through it.”

31. That is to say that God is cause of Itself (causa sui), both on the ontological level (God’s essence is the only cause of its necessary existence) and on the epistemological level (by the knowledge of God’s essence we necessarily know God as existing): “By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing” (E I, def1).

32. Spinoza, E I, p17, schol.

33. Spinoza, E I, p29.

34. Spinoza, E I, p33.

35. Spinoza, E I, p33, schol1.

36. See Spinoza, E IV, p12, dem: “Insofar as we imagine a thing as contingent, we are not affected by any image of another thing that posits the thing’s existence; but on the other hand… we imagine certain things that exclude its present existence. But insofar as we imagine a thing in the future to be possible, we imagine certain things that posit its existence.” We see from this passage that possible or contingent things can only be “imagined” by the mind. That is, according to Spinoza’s vocabulary, that the ideas through which we regard things as possible and contingent are inadequate with respect to their objects, i.e., they lack knowledge as to the actual existence and the causes of existing of their objects; see E II, p17, schol: “The mind does not err from the fact that it imagines, but only insofar as it is considered to lack an idea that excludes the existence of those things that it imagines to be present to it. For if the mind, while it imagined nonexistent things as present to it, at the same time knew that those things did not exist, it would, of course, attribute this power of imagining to a virtue of its nature, not to a vice.”

37. Edmund H. Hollands, “Possibility and Reality,” The Philosophical Review 19.6 (1907): 604. See also Mason, “Spinoza on Modality,” 327.

38. Hollands, “Possibility and Reality,” 608.

39. Spinoza, E I, p35.

40. Malinowski-Charles, “De la possibilité des fictions littéraires chez Spinoza,” 250–58.

41. Spinoza, TIE §52.

42. Spinoza, TIE §53. The use of “existence” rather than “essence” regarding “possible” things in this passage, has caused trouble to readers: see Curley’s note to the English translation in The Collected Writings of Spinoza, vol. 1, 24, n. 39.

43. Spinoza, TIE §54. The original text from OP has been emended: see Curley, The Collected Writings of Spinoza, vol. 1, 24, n. 40.

44. As examples of impossible objects, or, better said, of objects whose existence is impossible because of their contradictory essence, Spinoza mentions chimeras and square circles (see KV II, 16, 4, note; CM I, 1; CM I, 3; TIE § 54).

45. Spinoza, TIE §57, note 1.

46. Spinoza, TIE §61: “When the mind attends to a fictitious thing which is false by its very nature, so that it considers it carefully, and understands it, and deduces from it in good order the things to be deduced, it will easily bring its falsity to light. … If by chance we should say that men are changed in a moment into beasts, that is said very generally, so that there is in the mind no concept, i.e., idea, or connection of subject and predicate.”

47. Spinoza, TIE §52.

48. Miller, “Spinoza’s Possibilities,” 787. See also 786: “It is necessary for us to know something lest we not possess any propositional attitudes whatsoever. Since feigning is a propositional attitude, we must have some knowledge in order to be able to feign. In the example, if the speaker did not know anything about Peter, he would not be uncertain about Peter’s actions. He would not wonder whether Peter would go home, or come to him, or whatever, because he would not wonder anything about Peter: he could not, since he did not know him. A little bit of knowledge is necessary if one is to feign.” I am not fully convinced that such a reduction of the feigning to a propositional attitude is entirely tenable, especially in light of Mason’s warnings about interpreting Spinoza “in purely de dicto: terms”: “Not only does Spinoza omit to express his views in the de dicto terms of standard modal logics: his claims are uniformly and relentlessly de re” (Mason, “Spinoza on Modality,” 318). Notwithstanding Mason’s correct remarks, however, it seems to me that a fundamental difference between a de dicto and a de re account of necessity can be envisaged on another level, at the core of the whole Spinozist system, demarking the difference by which God is said to exist necessarily (de re), and it is necessary therefore (de dicto) that all creatures either exist or not. This needs to be investigated. Be that as it may, I thought it useful to quote Miller, since his analysis brilliantly grasps the main point concerning fictitious ideas, namely, “that we must have some knowledge in order to be able to feign.”

49. See also Spinoza, TIE §73: “it is certain that inadequate ideas arise in us only from the fact that we are part of a thinking being, of which some thoughts wholly constitute our mind, while others do so only in part.”

50. Spinoza, TIE §56.

51. On this point, see also Mason, “Spinoza on Modality,” 322: “One imagines that Spinoza would not have sought to deny that sentences such as ‘Jan de Witt might not have been assassinated’ could have been used meaningfully. Nor, of course, would he have been concerned with discovering the truth conditions for the use of such sentences. In so far as he could be said to have any contact with this sort of approach then it could only be to deny that the conditions suggested by counterfactuals could ever obtain.”