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Intellectual History Review 23(1) March 2013: 99 108 SPINOZA AND GALILEO: NATURE AND TRANSCENDENCE 1 Herman De Dijn 1. SPINOZA AND GALILEO: THE BOOK OF GOD-NATURE Galileo was convinced that the Book of Nature is really written in mathematical language. 2 To read the Book of Nature in this language is to read the true Mind of God. This was a really revolutionary idea. It meant that the other Book, the Book of Revelation, the Holy Scripture, could not be the revelation of the truth about nature, but only of the truth as to salvation: The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes. 3 This also proved to be a very dangerous idea, precisely because of its consequences with respect to the authority of Scripture (and therefore of the Church itself). 4 If mathematical physics reveals what God truly thinks about the world, then its interpretation of the world also tells us something about God s Mind, and perhaps about God himself. As Galileo says: nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature s actions than in sacred statements of the Bible. Perhaps this is what Tertullian meant by these words: We conclude God is known first through Nature, and then again more particularly by doctrine. 5 By subordinating mechanical laws of nature to divine guidance, mathematical physics provided the key to knowledge of God. In the scientific culture of early-modern Europe, Galileo becomes the forerunner 1 Translations used: The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, edited and translated by E. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) (henceforth referred to as C); Spinoza. The Letters, translated by S. Shirley (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1995) (henceforth referred to as S). These translations are based on Gebhardt s edition of the Spinoza Opera (4 vols) (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925) (henceforth referred to as G). 2 P. Redondi, Galileo Heretic, translated by R. Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 23; R. Feldhay, The Use and Abuse of Mathematical Entities: Galileo and the Jesuits Revisited, inthe Cambridge Companion to Galileo, edited by P. Machamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 133; J.-L. Marion, The Idea of God, inthe Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy, edited by D. Garber and M. Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 269; W.L. Wisan, Galileo and God s Creation, Isis, 77 (1986), 477 8. 3 G. Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), in G. Galilei, The Essential Galileo, edited and translated by M.A. Finocchiaro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), 119. 4 E. McMullin, Galileo on Science and Scripture, inthe Cambridge Companion to Galileo, edited by P. Machamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 614; T. Rudavksy, Galileo and Spinoza: Heroes, Heretics, and Hermeneutics, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2001), 614. 5 Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 116. Intellectual History Review ISSN 1749-6977 print/issn 1749-6985 online 2013 International Society for Intellectual History http://www.tandfonline.com/journals http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2012.737997
100 H. DE DIJN of Descartes, Malebranche, and Newton [and perhaps even more so of Spinoza, as I will argue] rather than the follower of Lucretius, Epicurus, and Democritus. 6 In early modern thought, certainly in Galileo, theology and science are not independent concerns; they are inseparable. 7 Mathematical physics frees itself from the shackles of Church authority, but it allies itself with what Funkenstein has called a secularized theology. 8 For Galileo, the new physics requires (and reveals) God. 9 The scientist-philosopher is like a prophet, be it a prophet only using his natural light. 10 It seems that Galileo saw himself as a sidereus nuncius whose mission was to enlighten the Church. 11 What then is it that is revealed of God through physics? In a letter to Piero Dino (1614), Galileo speaks about a very spiritual substance (light) which diffused itself through all the world and it concurs and unites and fortifies itself in the solar body, located for this in the center of the universe. 12 But if nature reveals God in this way, does mathematical physics not impose necessity on God, as Pope Urban VIII came to suspect? 13 In his famous letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo has this to say about nature: Nature is inexorable and immutable, never violates the terms of the laws imposed upon her, and does not care whether or not her recondite reasons and ways of operating are disclosed to human understanding. 14 What does this view of a strictly determined world-order tell us about God? [W]ith hindsight, so says Pietro Redondi, it would be easy to claim that Galileo was going to transfer the absolute attributes of God s craftsmanship to matter itself and to the secular skill of mathematicians, virtuosi, clockmakers, and engineers. 15 But his suggestion clearly is that this would be wrong. Galileo does not eliminate God; on the contrary, he saw a close link between God and nature. 16 Yet, it remains unclear how Galileo would reconcile if this was at least what he wanted God as mathematician and the transcendent, unknowable and loving God revealed in the Bible. 17 Spinoza can be understood as the follower of Galileo who drew the ultimate consequences of the view that mathematical physics tells the truth about nature as obeying inexorable and immutable laws. Although Spinoza never quotes Galileo by name, 18 he surely knew of Galileo s works in mathematics and optics, as evidenced in his letters. 19 Like Galileo, Spinoza does not have the slightest doubt about the objective validity of the new science. 20 Like Galileo he combines this 6 Redondi, From Galileo to Augustine, 210. 7 Redondi, From Galileo to Augustine, 210. 8 Rudavsky, Galileo and Spinoza, 617. 9 Redondi, From Galileo to Augustine, 176. 10 Spinoza sees the lumen naturale as the first source of prophecy as being sure knowledge of the divine: see Tractatus theologico-politicus, chapt. 1. 11 Wisan, Galileo and God s Creation, 473. 12 Quoted in Wisan, Galileo and God s Creation, 479. 13 Wisan, Galileo and God s Creation, 484. 14 Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 116. 15 Redondi, From Galileo to Augustine, 210. 16 Wisan, Galileo and God s Creation, 474. 17 At the beginning of the Modern Age, the two ideas are (usually) seen as incompatible; see Marion, The Idea of God, 268 70. 18 Galileo s name is not mentioned in the Lexicon Spinozanum of E.G. Boscherini. 19 Rudavsky, Galileo and Spinoza, 613. 20 Spinoza has no mercy for scepticism, whether or not methodological. See his dismissal of scepticism in TEI 46 8 (C. 21 2).
NATURE AND TRANSCENDENCE 101 with the view that, consequently, the Holy Scripture has only to do with salvation. 21 As for Galileo, physics and a secularized theology are seen as needing each other. But it is Spinoza who tries to solve all the problems raised by this new predicament: what exactly is the relation between God and nature; does matter (extension) reveal the (an) essence of God; can God be perfectly intelligible and preserve his transcendence; is there still room for ethics and religion in such a worldview; does the God of the new naturalistic metaphysics still have anything to do with love? In the rest of this paper, we will show how Spinoza solves all these questions, thereby creating a perfectly Galilean theology of which physics is an integral part. 22 2. NATURA NATURANS AND NATURA NATURATA Spinoza s metaphysics is usually understood as the combination of a kind of anti-theology, a critique of traditional theistic metaphysics, and of a pantheistic naturalism. Spinoza explicitly rejects the idea of God as a kind of Superhuman Being, an infinite Intellect, existing in a transcendent, supernatural realm, creator and designer, out of his free Will, of a contingent universe of finite things in which humans occupy the central place (E I App). Spinoza s God is nothing but Nature itself, considered in its necessity, infinity and eternity. If there is any intelligibility in the conception of God as an absolute being, the origin of everything, God must be understood as a substance consisting of infinite attributes explaining everything as to essence and existence, i.e., as Nature (Deus sive Natura) (E I Def6 and E IV Pref, C. 544). But is it not strange that Spinoza preserved the word God, if God really is Nature? Is it possible that this was only a protective device against the theologians and authorities of his day? What actually is the relation between God and Nature and the things he/it produces? The relation between substance with its attributes and the world(s) of modes is expressed in terms of being in, immanence (E I Def5 and E I P15). The primary meaning of immanence is not, as one might expect, the immanence of God in things, but the immanence of things in God, of modes in their substance (E I P15). Modes inhere in the substance, as properties do in their essence (E I P16 Dem). At the same time, they are intelligible or conceivable only through the substance and its attribute(s) (E I Def5): immanence or inherence implies conceivability of the modes through the substance. Immanence also implies causal dependence (E I P16 Cor 1). God is the efficient cause of the modes he produces in himself. So, God is the immanent, and not the transitive, cause of all things (E I P18). This is simply a repetition, from the point of view of causation, of E I P15. God does not produce his effects outside himself, as independent beings (or substances): they are simply his modes, being in him. NoticethatinherenceandimmanentcausationdonotimplyanypluralityinGod.Thederivationof inherence and immanent causation of the modes (I P15 P18) follows upon the proofs of God s oneness and uniqueness (E I P13 and P14 Cor 1). The inherence and causal immanence of the modes in God must be compatible with the one-ness and uniqueness of substance, in other words with monism. In a certain sense, we can speak of a second kind of immanence: the immanence of God in the modes or effects: each mode presupposes, as a mode of substance, the full backing of the 21 Unlike Rudavsky, I do not think that their views on the interpretation of the Bible are similar. For one thing, Spinoza does not think at all that (t)he Bible must be read and understood naturalistically, that is, in terms of the laws of physical causation (Rudavsky, Galileo and Spinoza, 627). 22 See also R. Mason, The God of Spinoza. A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) for an interpretation stressing the centrality of the notion of God and of the union of physics and theology.
102 H. DE DIJN substance and of the appropriate infinite attribute. Each mode is, therefore, in a certain sense, God itself: water insofar as it is substance ([aqua] quatenus substantia, E I P15 Sch). But this kind of immanence of God in the modes cannot be called pantheism, at least if this concept is understood to indicate the identity of or the collapse between the (totality of) modes and God. The immanence of God in the modes cannot mean that God is conceivable through the modes, or that he is the causal product of the modes. Instead of Spinoza saying that God is nothing but nature, he is saying that nature is nothing but God, i.e., God s modes. Even the infinite modes of God are in God as in something else (in alio) (E I P5, E I Ax1). If we need a name for this relationship between God and the (totality of) modes, it should be panentheism, not pantheism. All this perfectly squares with what Spinoza says in E I P29 Sch, where he explains what we must understand by Natura naturans and Natura naturata: For from the preceding I think it is already established that by Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, i.e. [by P14 Cor 1 and P17 Cor 2], God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. But by Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God s nature, or from any of God s attributes, i.e., all the modes of God s attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and can neither be nor be conceived without God. (C. 434) God as Natura naturans can be and should be considered without the modes. Even though the modes follow with necessity from God and as a totality are called Natura naturata, they can neither be nor be conceived without God as Natura naturans. There can be no mistake that the infinite modes, both immediate and mediate (E I P21 23) belong to Natura naturata, and not to Natura naturans, which is God himself and the attributes which together form his absolutely infinite nature (E I Def6; E I P29 Sch). The Infinite Intellect, the immediate infinite mode of Thought (Ep. 64, S. 299) can, for all purposes, be identified with the Idea of God (E I P21 Dem and E II P3). Spinoza says explicitly that the Infinite Intellect belongs to Natura naturata (E I P31) and that it is related to God s attribute of Thought in the same way as the infinite immediate mode Motion and Rest is related to the attribute of Extension (E I P32 Cor2), which therefore also belongs to Natura naturata. A fortiori the infinite mediate mode of Extension, the facies totius universi or the face of the whole universe, which, although varying in infinite ways, yet remains always the same (Ep. 64, S. 299; see also E II P13 L7) also belongs to Natura naturata. In other words, all the modes, whether infinite or finite, belong to Natura naturata, and not to Natura naturans. Is this not panentheism, rather than pantheism? 3. SUBSTANCE AS MATTER AND ITS RELATION TO THE UNIVERSE OF BODIES Matter [= Extension] is everywhere the same, and [ ] parts are distinguished in it only insofar as we conceive matter to be affected in many ways, so that its parts are distinguished only modally, but not really (E I P15 Sch). Substance as matter is infinite, unique and indivisible (E I P15 Sch, C. 423, referring to E I P12). As indivisible, it cannot have really distinct parts (Ep. 12, C. 202), but only modes or affections. All extended modes or bodies together form one Individual, whose parts, i.e., all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole Individual (E II P13 L7; see also Ep. 32, On Whole and Parts ). This infinite (mediate) mode, being the necessary product of substance (E I P22) does not have the proper properties of substance, which are infinity, necessity and
NATURE AND TRANSCENDENCE 103 eternity (E I P23 Dem). The infinite mode exists necessarily, but it exists necessarily not through itself, but through its cause, its substance (E I P23); it is infinite, but not in the sense of infinite by its [very] nature as is the infinity of the substantial attribute (E I P21 Dem), but only in the sense that it cannot be a finite whole, lacking some parts ; it is not eternal in the proper sense (E I Def8), but only sempiternal, i.e., it cannot have a determinate duration (E I P21 Dem). Outside the intellect, i.e., in reality ( in rerum natura ), there is only substance and modes, i.e., what is in itself and what is in another (E I P4 and P5). Substance and its attribute(s) are eternal; modes have duration (Ep. 12, C. 202). Duration cannot be measured by time, since time implies really distinct moments (C. 203). We cannot separate Duration from the way it flows from eternal things (C. 203). The non-atomistic character of duration is due to the relation of mode to substance. The relation between finite modes and the infinite (mediate) mode or Universe is a relation as between modal parts and modal whole, and not a relation between discrete parts and an aggregate whole beyond any number. The duration of finite modes cannot be determined by a definite number and time (C. 204), yet they are not sempiternal like the infinite mode (E I P21). The infinite mode is an actual, sempiternal infinite, containing an infinite, i.e. indefinite, chain of finite modes (E I P28). Although finite modes are not infinite, yet their parts we cannot explain or equate with any number, though we [may] know [their] maximum or minimum (Ep. 12, C. 201). 23 They are infinitely divisible by thought, and one such infinitely divisible body may be greater than another (Ep. 12, C. 201 + n. 74). Like all finite modes, bodies are produced by God both according to their essence (E I P25) and according to their existence, which means also according to their conatus or perseverance in existence (E I P24 Cor). All these essences are contained eternally in the attribute of Extension as long as they do not actually exist (E II P8 + Cor + Sch). The essences come into actual existence as produced by an endless chain of already existing finite causes (E I P28). Once existing in the Whole or the Face of the Whole Universe, they inevitably undergo and produce endless variations (E II P13 Sch; see also Ep. 32, G. iii, 173, l. 5 8 and S. 194: Now since the nature of the universe [ ] is not limited, but is absolutely infinite, its parts are controlled by the nature of this infinite potency in infinite ways, and are compelled to undergo infinite variations ). It is only the existence of the body or its variations which are produced by the chain of existing bodies, not its essence or its endeavour as such. E.g. humans can be the cause of the existence of other humans, not of their essence (E I P17 Sch). All this explains why there is a dual way of looking at the actuality of a finite thing: either as existing in relation to a certain time and place, i.e., as occupying a certain position in the infinite chain of causes; or as necessarily following, both according to existence and endeavour from God under a species of eternity (E II P45 Sch, referring to E I P24 Cor; and E V P29 Sch; see also E II P10 Sch). As parts, bodies have a strong unity with other parts within the whole chain of the Infinite Individual. But it is ultimately substance and its attribute Extension which secure the unity: However, I conceive that in respect to substance each individual part has a more intimate union with its whole. For [ ] since it is of the nature of substance to be infinite, it follows that each part pertains to the nature of corporeal substance, and can neither be nor be conceived without it (Ep. 32, S. 194). Bodies too are modal parts which, as to their concrete, limited duration, depend on the chain of concrete causes and effects within the Infinite Individual; they are caught up within the order of nature ( natura, ejusque ordo : E I P33 Sch2). But behind these contingent looking durations, 23 Letter 12 (1663) is still being referred to in 1676 (see Ep. 81, S. 352).
104 H. DE DIJN usually measured by time, lies something, the essences and conatus of things, which are such that, together with all other essences (E II P8 Cor), they form the necessary modal expressions of Extension. Bodies are the special sort of parts they are and they form the special kind of unity they form, because they are in the words of Macherey each one of them une partie totale. 24 Water cannot be water, cohering in the whole of the infinite mediate mode, except because water is aqua quatenus substantia (E I P15 Sch, C. 424). Water cannot be water except for substance modifying itself into water and at the same time modifying itself in an endless variety of other modes with which water forms a unity without any vacuum (Ep. 12). Water as underpinned by substance also explains why it is an intrinsic force, a certain intensity of power, engaged in the struggle with other such forces in the endless chain of causes, driving or driven out of existence according to the laws of motion and rest contained in the infinite immediate mode of Extension. No mode can be understood except on the basis of an understanding of the fixed and eternal things, and the laws inscribed in them: substance and infinite mode. So although these fixed and eternal things are singular, nevertheless, because of their presence everywhere, and most extensive power, they will be to us like universals, or genera of the definitions of singular, changeable things, and the proximate causes of all things. (TEI 101, C. 41) These fixed and eternal things, which serve as a kind of genera of the definitions of finite things, are clearly the substantial attributes. Already in the Short Treatise, Spinoza refers to the attributes as a kind of genera for the definition of those things which do not exist through themselves, but only through the attributes of which they are modes, and through which, as their genus, they must be understood (KV I vii, C. 90). Of the infinite modes God is said to be the causa proxima, more precisely the causa absolute proxima, not the causa proxima in suo genere (E I P28 Sch). If we apply this to finite modes and their existence, then we can still say that God is their effective, proximate cause (E I P24 Cor), but not the absolutely proximate cause of their existence (or variation), which are other finite modes. 25 Far from reducing substance to the universe or the infinite Whole, Spinoza understands substance as that which underpins both modal parts and modal whole and as that which is even ultimately responsible for the sort of part and whole they are and for the sort of unity they have. 4. ONE STEP FURTHER: IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 26 According to the well-known Spinoza scholar Martial Gueroult, we should not talk about pantheism, but about panentheism in Spinoza. 27 Gueroult draws attention in this context to a passage in Letter 12 where we read that modes differ from substance toto genere; they are entirely different (Ep. 12, C. 202). This is also what is expressed in E I P17 Sch where Spinoza on the one hand denies that (infinite) Intellect and Will belong to God s essence (see also E I P31 & E I P32 24 P. Macherey, Introduction à l Ethique de Spinoza. La troisième partie. La vie affective (Paris: PUF, 1995), 378 (I thank Frédéric Manzini for this reference). 25 See also H. De Dijn, Historical Remarks on Spinoza s Theory of Definition, inspinoza on Knowing, Being and Freedom (Proceedings), edited by J.G. van der Bend (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), 41 50. 26 About transcendence in Spinoza, see also H. De Dijn, Metaphysics as Ethics,inGod and Nature. Spinoza s Metaphysics (Proceedings First Jerusalem Conference), edited by Y. Yovel (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991), 119 31 (129). 27 M. Gueroult, Spinoza. I. Dieu (Éthique, 1) (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1968), 223.
NATURE AND TRANSCENDENCE 105 Cor 2), and on the other hand affirms that there is a fundamental commonality between part and whole, finite intellect and infinite Intellect (reaffirmed in E II P11 Cor). 28 In other words there is a fundamental difference in essence and existence between God and his modes, also the infinite modes; whereas there is commonality in essence between part and whole. Spinoza denies of course that God is the transitive cause of his modes, but that Gueroult says does not entirely eliminate transcendence: (transcendence) can indeed survive [ ] even if the dissimilarity of effect and cause does not involve their real separation ( elle (la transcendance) peut subsister, en effet, même [ ] quand la dissemblance entre l effet et la cause n entraîne pas leur séparation réelle ), as is the case between God and his modes, which after all are only modes. 29 For Gueroult, God s transcendence means the incommensurability between the ultimate cause and the modes, differing from God both according to their essence and according to their existence. Indeed, effects differ from their cause precisely in that which they derive from their cause (E I P17 Sch). 30 The real problem in this perspective is how modes can still be an effect of God, since cause and effect must also have something in common (E I Ax5). The answer, according to Gueroult, concerning what constitutes the commonality between substance and modes is: the attribute. 31 Already in a very early letter to Oldenburg (probably October 1661), Spinoza writes: As for your contention that God has nothing formally in common with created things, etc., I have maintained the exact opposite in my definition. For I said that God is a Being consisting of infinite attributes, each of which is infinite, or supremely perfect, in its kind. (Ep 4, C. 172) The attribute is at the same time that which constitutes God s essence and which is like a genus for the essences of the modes. Let s investigate this topic of transcendence a little further. The very first proposition of the Ethics states that substance is prior in nature to its affections. We also read in E I P5 Dem: if affections are put to one side and [substance] is considered in itself, i.e., considered truly. This means that in order to solve questions about substance, we don t and shouldn t consider the modes or affections. These cannot teach us anything about substance as such, whether they are finite or infinite modes. Even though God necessarily produces an infinite infinity of modes (E I P16), and therefore cannot be considered without them, yet, this cannot mean that substance depends ontologically or epistemologically upon the modes either as parts or as a whole. On the contrary, as E I Def3 indicates: By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed. Singular things can neither be nor be conceived without God, and nevertheless, God does not pertain to their essence [E II P10 Sch; C. 455]. To the essence of a mode belongs that which, if it is given, the thing is posited, and if it is taken away, the thing is taken away, i.e., the essence is what the thing can neither be nor be conceived without, and vice versa, what can neither be nor be conceived without the thing. (E II P10 Sch, C. 455 6) 28 See also H. De Dijn, Deus. Intellectus Dei. Voluntas Dei,inThe Continuum Companion to Spinoza, edited by W. van Bunge, H. Krop, P. Steenbakkers, and J. van de Ven (London/New York: Continuum, 2011), 196 8; and H. De Dijn, Spinoza. The Way to Wisdom (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 206 9. 29 Gueroult, Spinoza. I. Dieu, 300. 30 Gueroult, Spinoza. I. Dieu, 291. 31 Gueroult, Spinoza. I. Dieu, 292.
106 H. DE DIJN But is it not the case 1) that without God there can be no modes, and 2) that if God is given, the modes are given as well? So we would have to conclude after all that God belongs to the essence of his mode(s)? Furthermore, do not the attributes constitute something common to God and his modes? We can only escape this conclusion if we observe the [proper] order of Philosophizing in which the divine nature should be contemplated before all else (because it is prior both in knowledge and in nature) (E II P10 Sch). Even though God cannot be thought except as producing his modes, we should not be led to the conclusion that there is an identity between God and modes: God is substance; modes are only modes. They cannot be properly understood except on the basis of substance, which itself can be understood on its own, as completely self-sufficient. All this also goes for Substance as Extension (Quantity). In the TEI 108 Spinoza writes: For it [the intellect] forms the idea of quantity absolutely, without attending to other thoughts, but it forms the ideas of motion only by attending to the idea of Quantity [ ]. Those (ideas) that it forms absolutely express infinity, but determinate ideas it forms from others. For it forms the idea of a quantity through a cause [ ] as when it perceives that a body arises from the motion of some plane, a plane from the motion of a line, and finally, a line from the motion of a point. These perceptions do not help to understand the quantity, but only to determine it. This is evident from the fact that we conceive them as arising from the motion, although the motion is not perceived unless the quantity is perceived, and also because we can continue the motion to form the line to infinity, which we could not do at all, if we did not have the idea of infinite quantity. (C. 43 4) In geometry, we have a perfect model for thinking the immanence and transcendence of substance: quantity can be understood through itself alone; the modes of quantity are formed by conceiving the application of motion to an element (or mode) posited, such as point, line, body. All these figures are peculiar ways in which quantity can be modified; and never is there a radical separation between the different figures; they can be formed in a continuous flow. They are not parts, but something like intensities of the infinite nature behind them. The conclusion can only be that there is a radical asymmetry between substance and modes. Substance is absolutely prior to its affections (E I P1), even though it necessarily expresses itself in an infinite infinity of them. This is nothing but the distinction between Natura naturans and Natura naturata. Substance does not need its modes; the modes need substance. Whether individually or taken all together, they radically presuppose substance; they are nothing but substantia quatenus modificatus. This is the very opposite of pantheism: it is monism, characterized by a radical asymmetry between substance and modes, by transcendence. 5. WHY PHYSICS IS NOT ENOUGH Spinoza is not primarily a physicist, but a metaphysician and an ethicist. Yet he is a modern philosopher, i.e., someone for whom the new science of nature not only provides the right method of thinking, but also radically changes our view not only about nature, but in principle also about everything else: about God, ourselves and our well-being (see the title of his early work, Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being). His aim was not to eliminate talk about God (antitheology), but to make people see what has to be said about God once we reason properly, untainted by the imagination (E II P47 Sch). His aim was not to replace metaphysics by physics or its methodology, but to provide a metaphysics, an onto-theology, which satisfies the desire for a full explanation, also of the most fundamental laws of the new physics (see his
NATURE AND TRANSCENDENCE 107 remarks already quoted about Descartes understanding of the relation between Extension, motion, and particular bodies in Ep. 83). To succeed in such an explanation, one must start synthetically with what is self-explanatory, i.e., not with the universe or with any finite thing(s), but with substance. 32 In the second place, the monistic metaphysics of substance makes it possible to extend the new kind of understanding to the domain of the mind and its emotions. The abolition of the view of a teleologically ordered cosmos, and its replacement by a universe ordered by strictly efficient causation, shared by the new science and the Spinozistic metaphysics, leads to a completely new understanding of ourselves, even of our minds. The way mind is understood cannot be divorced, as it is in Descartes, from the way body is understood: in strictly causal, deterministic, terms. Again, only the sort of metaphysics developed in Spinoza s De Deo provides the framework in which minds can and should be understood as parts of nature, obeying the universal laws of nature. A third reason why a naturalistic metaphysics is of primordial importance is that it allows and requires to come to a new understanding of the most fundamental human activities as natural phenomena: ethics, religion and politics. The programme of the first books of the Ethics (E I, II and III) is precisely to provide the groundwork for an ethics based on rational and intuitive knowledge (E IV and V). 33 This requires us to understand even rationality itself as a product of nature having certain effects itself (at least in certain human beings), i.e., leading to active emotions of contentment with oneself and piety towards others (E IV). In some humans reason can even transform itself into an intuitive kind of knowledge leading to an active form of religion, Amor intellectualis Dei, combined with highest blessedness, acquiescentia animi, as developed in Ethics V. 34 On top of this, the naturalistic understanding of God, man and his emotions also provides the basis for a completely new, modern understanding of ordinary ethics, religion and politics, being products of passions and imagination. Again, the new metaphysics of God-Nature is a crucial preliminary step. If God is not in essence Intellect and Will, like us, but Natura Naturans, then the teachings of revealed religion and the divine commandments of ethics cannot come from God. Neither can sovereignty derive from the delegation of God s authority to kings and other worldly and ecclesiastical authorities. For the first time it becomes possible (and necessary) to understand ordinary religion, ethics and politics as natural phenomena, based not on revelation, not even on rationality, but on the emotions. 35 In Ethics III the study of the passions demonstrates how they lead to common-sense ethics and revealed religion. Ethics IV contains a critique of this kind of ethics and religion from the point of view of the recta ratio vivendi. 36 In his political treatises, Spinoza interprets the reality of politics, also in its relation to religion, as a social phenomenon and as originating in the passions. He also tries to show there how such a realistic understanding 32 See also H. De Dijn, Conceptions of Philosophical Method in Spinoza: Logica and mos geometricus, The Review of Metaphysics, 40 (1986), 55 78. 33 About the relationship between Ethics IV and V, see H. De Dijn, Ethics as Medicine for the Mind (5 P1 20), inspinoza s Ethics. A Collective Commentary, edited by M. Hampe, U. Renz and R. Schnepf (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), 265 79. 34 Further see H. De Dijn, Spinoza and Religious Emotions, inreligious Emotions. Some Philosophical Explorations, edited by W. Lemmens and W. Van Herck (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 105 19. 35 Spinoza here anticipates David Hume s The Natural History of Religion. 36 See also H. De Dijn, Spinoza s Theory of the Emotions in Its Relation to Therapy, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, 5 (2010), 71 90.
108 H. DE DIJN of politics can be used in function of an (always relative) improvement of political life, provided the sovereign takes these insights into account. It is only at the end of the Ethics, through the derivation of the new philosophical religion and its active emotions (religio) that we come to understand the real point of preserving the notion of God, and not simply of Nature. Just as Spinoza is establishing a new ethics based on reason and not on the passions, so he is establishing a new religion not based on the passions or even on reason but on intuitive knowledge and its active emotions. This religion consists in a special emotional, and therefore also cognitive, relationship with the ultimate ground of all reality: the intellectual Love of God. The substance can and should be given the proper name of God. 37 It is the name people have always linked with an idea which, although adequate in their minds, is usually overclouded by all sorts of images having nothing to do with its proper content (E II P47 Sch). K.U. Leuven 37 See also De Dijn, Metaphysics as Ethics.