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ABSTRACT
Spinoza argues that there is one substance, God, with at least two distinct attributes. On Objective Interpretations, the “attributes” are what God conceives of God’s own essence. Because God truly conceives the attributes as distinct, it must be that they are in some sense distinct. However, several of Spinoza’s texts suggest that God is identical with God’s attributes. How can one God be identical with two or more distinct attributes? I will argue that no Objective Interpretation can plausibly make sense of Spinoza’s identification of substance and attributes. I argue that the solution to this Identity Puzzle is understanding that “attributes” are what the finite human intellect conceives of God’s essence. Though we can conceive God’s attributes as distinct, they are not thereby ontologically distinct. On my interpretation, the distinction we conceive between the attributes is a distinction in the reasoning we use to arrive at a highly adequate idea of God. While we may use distinct attribute names for God to mark the distinct origins of this idea in our reasoning, these names do not correspond to a distinction in God. In this way, each of the attributes is identical with God.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alan Nelson, two anonymous referees for this journal, and the participants in the 2019 Atlantic Canada Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy for their invaluable comments on this work.
Notes
1 I will cite Spinoza’s Ethics in the standard form. For example, 1P32c2 refers to the second corollary of the thirty-second proposition of the first part of the Ethics. The following scheme will be used to cite the Ethics: App = Appendix, A = Axiom, c = corollary, D= Definition, d (lower case) = Demonstration, Exp = Explanation, L = Lemma, P = Proposition, s = Scholium. Unless noted otherwise, I use Curley’s translation.
2 According to most of those with an ‘Objective Interpretation’ of the attributes, God has infinitely many more attributes than the two we perceive (e.g. Haserot).
3 The following is a very truncated list of supporters of the Objective Interpretation. I have cited an example of each of their works in the bibliography: Allison, Ariew, Bennett, Curley, Delahunty, Deleuze, Della Rocca, Donagan, Garrett, Gueroult, Haserot, Huebner, Joachim, Lin, Martens, Melamed, Morrison, Nadler, Newlands, Parkinson, Radner.
4 Though Spinoza focuses on Descartes’ notion of a real distinction as it is explained in Principles of Philosophy and explicated in Spinoza’s commentary on that work, I should note that Descartes’ notion itself is partially inherited from his medieval predecessors (e.g. Suarez). I will cite the Principles as PP and then the number of the relevant principle in Part I.
5 Bennett (64) also cites 1P4d, 1P19, 1P20c2. Following Curley (Spinoza’s Metaphysics), he also cites 1D6. See also Shein’s (“The False Dichotomy”, 510) discussion of Gueroult on this point. See also 1P19s and 1P28d. At 1P10d, 1P11s, and 1P20, Spinoza identifies God with God’s essence. The identification is also suggested by combining 1A2 and 1P6c. Finally, note the subtle switch at 1P30d from “substance” to “attribute”. All instances of underlining are my emphasis.
6 For example, see Shein’s (“The False Dichotomy”) discussion of Bennett, Donagan, Della Rocca, and Gueroult.
7 The definition of ‘attribute’ is silent on which intellect is perceiving God’s essence. As Haserot (503) notes, this will require an interpretation on which the “only” attributes are Thought and Extension. I argue in “Spinoza’s Conception of God’s Attributes” (MS) that there is strong textual support for this reading. I will explain later that this does not require a ‘Subjective’ interpretation of the attributes, nor one on which our perception of God’s attributes explains why God has those attributes.
8 I say “an” and not “the idea of God” because Spinoza’s notion of “the” idea of God presents unique interpretative difficulties addressed later.
9 In my usage, ‘adequacy’ is a feature of ideas that comes in degrees, specifically, degrees of clarity and distinctness. Spinoza’s notion of adequacy tracks Descartes’ technical notion of clarity and distinctness and his notion of inadequacy tracks Descartes’ technical notion of confusion (3D1, 3P1d, 4P52d). See Nelson (“Descartes’ Ontology of Thought”) for a thorough explanation of these technical notions. At 2P34, Spinoza notes that true ideas are “adequate and perfect”, suggesting that some ideas are adequate and imperfect. But perfection comes in degrees (1D6, 2P1s), so it must be that some ideas are more adequate than others (2P49s). This is consistent with Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge coming in degrees of adequacy (2P40s).
10 Melamed is unclear on this point, especially given his repeated claim that God ‘has’ the attributes, suggesting that the attributes are somehow distinct from God, at least collectively. Melamed hints that God is identical to the collection of attributes (83) and it seems to me that his interpretation requires it. Otherwise, Melamed will have to commit himself to an independent notion of ‘substance’ such that the collection of attributes is distinct from substance. His criticisms of Bennett – made earlier by Shein (“The False Dichotomy”, 516–9) – suggest that this latter option is not his view (82–3). In (“The Building Blocks of Spinoza’s Metaphysics”, 101–3), Melamed claims that substance and attribute are only “rationally distinct”. However, Melamed takes God’s “rational distinctions” to correspond to distinctions outside of the intellect.
11 This is consonant with what Spinoza says about conceiving things sub specie aeternitatis in his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE) (39,108). The TIE will be cited (Gebhardt pagination, Curley section number).
12 The Short Treatise (KV) will be cited (Part, Chapter, Gebhardt page number).
13 By extension, one could argue that Spinoza’s commitment to God’s simplicity in 1P12, 1P13, and 1P15 is a commitment to simplicity in all respects.
14 As we will see later, this account seems to misread Shein’s (“The False Dichotomy”) more plausible account of ‘real’ versus ‘rational’ distinctions in Descartes and Spinoza.
15 These texts are problematic for the Objectivist because the Objectivist thinks of ‘the idea of God’ as referring to something in God’s intellect. Later, we will see that these texts are better understood as referring to ‘an’ idea of God in the finite intellect where there are several ideas properly called ‘an idea of God’.
16 2P44dem, cited by Shein (“The False Dichotomy”, 509) who cites Gueroult’s (Spinoza, 50) discussion of God’s perfect knowledge.
17 This also makes sense of the claim that “one and the same” substance can be conceived under two distinct attributes at 2P7s and the previously cited commitments to God’s simplicity.
18 This has been challenged by Melamed (“The Building Blocks of Spinoza’s Metaphysics”, 95) who claims that definition of “attribute” is “clarified” at 2P7s, where Spinoza “restates” that attributes are conceived by the infinite intellect. This is hard to square with Spinoza’s claim that this fact about the infinite intellect has been “shown” in previous propositions, most likely 1P30, which show that any intellect must comprehend the attributes. 2P4d presents a similar problem, which will be dealt with later.
19 Shein’s discussion of the objections to Wolfson’s Subjective Interpretation is an excellent synopsis of the secondary literature on this issue (“The False Dichotomy”). In Spinoza, see also 1P30, 2P44, 2P47, 5P30.
20 My interpretation is not ‘idealist’ in Della Rocca’s (“Rationalism Run Amok”) sense, where the attributes are objective, albeit mind-dependent features of reality. It also cannot be characterized as idealist in the sense that the attribute of Thought plays a uniquely fundamental role in reality because (1) one of the central claims will be that we demonstrate that God has extension by starting with an idea of the body (2A4), (2) though the real distinctions discussed here are largely discussed under the attribute of Thought, 2P7s and 2P13 require that the processes of reasoning in the finite intellect have an extensional correlate in some the activity of the finite body, and (3) because this interpretation excludes the possibility of ideas with objects other than modes of Thought or Extension.
21 Pace Curley (Spinoza’s Metaphysics, 16). This is consistent with Spinoza’s adoption of the Cartesian claim that a substance is only rationally distinct from its attributes. See also Shein (“The False Dichotomy”, 528–31) and 4P8s.
22 This interpretation of Descartes is also discussed in Sowaal (“Descartes’s Reply to Gassendi”) and Sowaal (“Attribute”).
23 Descartes, on this interpretation, believes that humans can form the same wholly clear and distinct idea of God that God has. As we will see, this cannot be Spinoza’s view.
24 “Someone may say: indeed, it’s not necessary to understand God’s attributes, but it’s quite necessary to believe in them, simply, without any demonstration. But anyone who says this is talking nonsense” (from Ch. 13 of the Theological-Political Treatise). See also 2P47 and 5P23s.
25 In other words, we reason from inadequate ideas of finite things to an adequate idea of the infinite thing. This inverts the typical order of reasoning from infinite to finite things suggested by most commentators who focus on intuitive knowledge of God. For a defense of proceeding this alternative way, see Shein (“The Road to Finite Modes”).
26 On this point, see Nelson (“The Rationalist Impulse”) and Lennon (“The Rationalist Conception of Substance”). In Spinoza, see 1P8s2, Letter 12. This doctrine can be called the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
27 Similar reasoning is also implicit in Part V. At 5P14, Spinoza claims that our ideas of bodily affections can be “related to” an idea of God via forming “clear and distinct concept[s]”. And at 5P30, Spinoza tells us that “[i]nsofar as our Mind knows itself and the Body under a species of eternity, it necessarily has knowledge of God, and knows that it is […] conceived through God”. Knowing the body and mind “under a species of eternity” is to understand them as following from an eternal thing, God (5d8). Understanding things under the species of eternity is in the “nature of Reason” (2P44c2). This suggests a connection between the demonstrations implicit in Part II and the knowledge of God that plays the central role in Part V.
28 There is further evidence of this pattern of reasoning in KV. Spinoza writes, “ … But this Idea [i.e. the soul] cannot find any rest in the knowledge of the body, without passing over into knowledge of that without which neither the body nor the Idea itself can either exist or be understood” (II, xxii, 102). It is clear that the earlier demonstration of God’s existence leads us to “an” idea of God that “man” has, not necessarily “the” idea of God that God has (I,i,15). Nelson (““The Problem of True Ideas”) argues that the process of clarifying and distinguishing ideas by comprehending their causes to reach the idea of God is also present in TIE.
29 This might suggest a conception of conceiving a mode under an attribute that is only ‘bottom-up’ from modes to substance to use Shein’s (“The Road to Finite Modes”) term. This might seem initially problematic to some readers who are familiar with texts like 2P10s and Letter 83 that suggest a ‘top-down’ chain of reasoning. I agree with Shein who argues that the latter is dependent on and a reversal of the former.