Necessitarianism and Divine Divine Self-Causation in Spinoza John Grey Michigan State University
[email protected]
Abstract: Spinoza is a strict necessitarian, that is, he ho lds that things could not be different than they are. His arguments for this view are less clear than is usually acknowledged, however. After considering accounts of Spinoza ’s reasoning offered by Martin Lin and Olli Koistinen, I propose an interpretation that fills in important gaps in those accounts. On my interpretation, Spinoza's conception of the way that God ca causes uses itself plays a crucial role in his argument. As I argue, the power by which Spinoza's God causes itself is token-identical with the powers of its modes. Spinoza thus sees the way finite things cause each other as one of the ways in which God causes itself, yet he denies that God could cause itself in any other way than it does. It is for this reason that he accepts strict necessitarianism.
Necessitarianism and Divine Divine Self-Causation in Spinoza
How general is the expression that finite beings are modifications or consequences of God! What a gulf must be filled in here, and what questions must be answered! Friedrich Schelling (1987, 230)
1
Spinoza is a strict necessitarian: he claims that things could not be otherwise than they are. It is unclear why Spinoza is a necessitarian, however. As a number of commentators have observed, Spinoza’s other principles do not obviously co mmit him to the view; yet the view is a strange one indeed, and absent pressure from other parts of his system, there seems to be no good reason for him to have accepted it. In this paper, I will argue that Spinoza’s thesis that God is the cause of itself can be used to make mak e sense of his primary argument for strict necessitarianism. I will begin in §1 by presenting the strict necessitarian thesis, along with the textual evidence that suggests Spinoza accepted it. My aim in this section will be to draw out just how strange the view is vis-à-vis Cartesian ontology. All things are modes of the one substance, God; and under the standard constraints of the Cartesian ontology, most of the modes of a substance are neither essential to it, nor do they follow from its essence. By contrast, on Spinoza’s view, particular things follow from God’s nature, and so they could not be otherwise than they are. Yet this is not entailed by Spinoza’s view that particular things are modes of God. So why should he accept it? In §2, I will argue that the missing explanation for Spinoza’s necessitarianism is his conception of the way in which God is “causa “causa sui,” sui,” cause of itself. Put briefly, Spinoza holds 1
References to the Ethics are from Curley’s translation Spinoza (1988); where it serves a purpose, I also cite the page and line numbers from the Gebhardt edition of Spi noza (1925). References to the Letters are from Shirley’ s translation of Spinoza (1995). References to Descartes are to Descartes (1985) (CSM I) and Descartes (1984) (CSM II), with page numbers from Descartes (1904) (AT) where it serves a purpose.
that the various ways in which particular things cause one another are just ways in which God causes itself; and God could not cause itself in any other way than it does. My argument here is intended as a friendly but significant amendment to a large family of interpretations of Spinoza’s metaphysics of modality. But, more importantly, it also provides an example of how the thesis that God is self-caused has subterranean connections throughout the rest of Spinoza’s system. I will conclude in §3 with a brief discussion of how this point bears on a larger debate within Spinoza scholarship about what Spinoza could even mean when he speaks of self-causation.
§1 It is useful to begin with a distinction between three views: (1) determinism, the claim that the way things will be follows necessarily from the way they are and the laws of nature; (2) moderate necessitarianism, the conjunction of determinism with the claim that the laws of nature 2
are necessary; and (3) strict necessitarianism, the claim that everything is nec essary.
Strict necessitarianism is stronger than mere determinism. According to determinism, things could not be otherwise than they are, given the way that things were in the past as well as the laws of nature. Given the laws of nature and the state of the world on the day Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, the mobilization of the Russian army was determined to occur. This is a strong thesis, but it is weaker than strict necessitarianism, for it leaves open the possibility of either different natural laws, or different causal sequences of things, or both. Strict necessitarianism is also stronger than moderate necessitarianism. Moderate necessitarianism ascribes conditional necessity to things, which is compatible with the possibility that the conditions for that necessity differ all down the line. It is compatible with moderate 2
The distinction is made well by Martin (2010), and is also observed by Curley & Walski (1999, 241–242).
necessitarianism to suppose that the Archduke could have avoided assassination, so long as the causes and effects involved in the assassination differed accordingly. Had Gavrilo Princip’s bullet missed the Archduke, the Russian army might not have mobilized. However, in order for the bullet to miss, its causes must have differed in some way; and so the causes of those causes must also have differed; and so on down the line. Strict necessitarianism is stronger than moderate necessitarianism, then, in that it denies the p ossibility of any such alternative causal sequence. Nothing could have been otherwise. Necessarily, Gavrilo Princip’s bullet hit the Archduke; necessarily, the Russian army mobilized; and so on down the line. Given the distinctions just outlined, strict necessitarianism can be formulated as the conjunction of moderate necessitarianism with the claim that there are no possible alternative 3
causal sequences of things. Since it is clear that Spinoza accepts determinism as well as moderate necessitarianism, the debate about whether he is a strict necessitarian has focused on whether or not he thought there could be alternative possible causal sequences of things. Most commentators agree that Spinoza is a strict necessitarian. However, some disagreement remains.4 Those opposed to the strict necessitarian interpretation often appeal to the fact that Spinoza has no good reason to accept the view. This sometimes appears to be one of the primary motivations for their interpretations. Curley & Walski (1999) note that strict necessitarianism is extremely counterintuitive, and claim that “views which are tremendously implausible should not be attributed to the great, dead philosophers without pretty strong textual
3
The strict necessitarian thesis may be expressed in a number of ways using the standard modal terms and the notion of actuality, e.g. “Everything possible is actual,” “Everything actual is necessary,” each of which is logically equivalent in certain strong (but generally unobjectionable) systems of modal logic. I here avoid these formulations because they might lead to debate about the meaning of the term ‘actual’ in Spinoza’s metaphysics (e.g., in Curley & Walski 1999, 244–252), a debate which I think can be sidestepped. 4 For compelling arguments that Spinoza accepts strong necessitarianism, see Allison (1987, 74–78); Garrett (1991); Koistinen (1998, 61–70); and Della Rocca (2008, 76–78). The loyal opposition—those who hold that Spinoza accepts only the weaker thesis of moderate necessitarianism—is primarily constituted by Curley & Walski (1999), though see also Bennett (1984, Ch. 5) and, much more recently, Martin (2010).
evidence” (241). Part of my aim here is to remove this motivation by showing that Spinoza had an extremely good reason to accept strict necessitarianism, a reason that lies at the very heart of his metaphysical system. In order to appreciate Spinoza’s motivation for accepting the strict necessitarian view, it’s important to start with a basic picture of his ontology. Although he accepts something very close to Descartes’s substance–mode ontology, Spinoza’s picture deviates from Descartes’s in crucial ways. Most crucially, on Spinoza’s view, there is just one substance: God. Everything else is a mode of the one substance: “Particular things are nothing but affections of God’s attributes, or modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a certain way” (Ip25c). For my purposes here, 5
I’ll simply assume that we should take Spinoza fairly literally when he says this. At the very least, this means that particular things inhere in God in the manner that (to take an example from Descartes) “shape and motion” are related to “the corporeal substance in which they inhere” (CSM I, 214).
6
So, does the ontological thesis that all things inhere in God give Spinoza reason to hold the strong necessitarian thesis that everything is necessary? It is helpful here to draw on the 7
Scholastic distinction between the properties and accidents of a substance. A mode is a property
5
Spinoza’s ontology can be understood in a variety of ways that are all more or less consistent with the text. For example, Curley (1969, 1988) reads the claim that all things are modes of God in a very weak sense, as meaning that all things are governed by laws of nature. Melamed (2009, 2013) argues, against Curley, that we should take it in the most literal sense, such that particular things not only inhere in, but are predicable of, God. And Carriero (1995) develops a middle position according to which particular things inhere in, but are not predicable of, God. I will assume only that particular things inhere in God, since I don’t think going the further step of viewing them as predicable of God will make any difference to t he debate about necessitarianism. 6 Descartes provides a definition of modes at CSM I, 211, but it is at that point difficult to see how he wants us to understand the distinction between modes and attributes. Fortunately, we receive several examples of modes (e.g., a stone’s being “in motion” and “square-shaped”) in the following pages (CSM I, 214-216). Descartes finds occasion to further clarify his meaning in his “Comments on a Certain Broadsheet” (CSM I, 297–298), in which he rejects as absurd the thought that the mind could be a mode of a corporeal substance. Modes are qualities that are “naturally ascribable to something” but that are nevertheless “susceptible of change.” This suggests that for Descartes, the modes of a substance never follow from its essence, and thus are never properties in the Scholastic sense (discussed below). 7 As is frequently done in the literature, e.g., Melamed (2009, 67–69).
of a substance when it follows from the essence of that substance that it has that mode. For example, the mode of having some shape or other is a property of an extended substance — a candle, say — since the extended thing must have a shape in virtue of being extended. Note that on this definition, a substance could not lose any of its properties without its very essence becoming different. By contrast, a mode is an accident of a substance when it inheres in the substance but it does not follow from its essence. The mode of being candle-shaped is an accident of the candle, since the candle could lose this mode without ceasing to exist. It might be expected that Spinoza would hold that particular things are accidents of God. Yet on a fairly common (and, I think, correct) reading of Spinoza, all of the modes of God are properties rather than accidents. If so, the strict necessitarian thesis is true, for modes that follow 8
from the essence of a necessary substance must themselves be necessary. The textual evidence for that view has sometimes been thought cut-and-dried. Take Spinoza’s assertion that: From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow [ sequi debent ] infinitely many things in infinitely many modes, (i.e., everything which can fall under an infinite intellect). ( E Ip16) Many commentators take this to be the moment in the Ethics at which Spinoza unequivocally 9
commits himself to necessitarianism. After all (the thought runs), since God’s nature is necessary, surely that which “must follow” from it is also nece ssary. So, “infinitely many things in infinitely many modes,” presumably all things, are necessary. Yet doubts — I think reasonable doubts — have been raised on this score. The main problem is that it is not clear what Spinoza means when says that “everything which can fall 8
The interpretation that all particular things are properties (rather than mere accidents) of God is defended by Melamed (2009, Forthcoming), and I think it is at work in the interpretation of Garrett (1991); note his discussion of essences, properties, and accidents (201–202). Koistinen (2003, 301–303) makes the same point in different terms, claiming that Spinoza is a “superessentialist”; more on this possibility below. 9 For example, Garrett (1991, 205–209), Koistinen (1998, 62), and (implicitly) Viljanen (2008, 427-428).
under an infinite intellect” is necessary. An infinite intellect might carve nature at different joints than does a finite one. An infinite intellect might comprehend each thing — including finite particulars — or it might only comprehend everything — that is, it might comprehend nature as an infinite whole without comprehending any finite particulars. Yet if an infinite intellect is blind 10
to the finite, then Ip16 does not tell in favor of strict necessitarianism. Indeed, it might tell against that view. If finite particulars are mere accidents of Go d’s attributes, then they can be at best conditionally necessary. The “necessity of divine nature” spoken of in the quoted passage might reasonably be taken to apply only to infinite modes, such as laws of nature or essences of things. So it is not clear from E Ip16 alone where Spinoza stands. There are other passages, however, that taken together push very hard toward the strict necessitarian reading. The most commonly cited passages include: E Ip29: In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way. E Ip33: Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced. The first passage (Ip29) expresses at least moderate necessitarianism: all things are determined to exist, and to have the properties that they have, by prior things and the necessary laws of (divine) nature. The second passage, however, expresses the claim that there are no alternative possible causal sequences. Taken together, the two passages entail strict necessitarianism. Where Ip29 says that the future is necessitated by what happened in the past, Ip33 says that the entire causal sequence of things — past, present, and future — could not have been otherwise than it was, is,
10
See Wilson (1983). Martin (2010) applies a similar (though more clearly developed) line of interpretation to criticize necessitarian readings of Spinoza.
and will be. By extension, each particular thing necessarily has the properties and relations that it has. Nothing could have been otherwise than it is. It may not be clear why I say that the first passage, Ip29, only commits Spinoza to determinism. How (you might ask) could the ba ld claim that nothing is contingent leave any room for things having been otherwise? For this reason, Lin (2012, 419–420) takes Ip29dem to be Spinoza’s main argument for necessitarianism. He suggests that we read the argument as follows: 1. Whatever exists (other than God) is a mode of God. (by Ip15) 2. God exists necessarily. (by Ip11) 3. The existence of the modes follows from the divine nature. (by Ip16) 4. The effects produced by the modes follow from the divine nature. (by Ip26) 5. Whatever follows from something necessary is itself necessary. (suppressed premise) 6. Therefore, there is nothing contingent. This all looks good until we hit premise (5), that whatever follows from something necessary is itself necessary. (Lin somewhat cagily lists this as a “suppressed premise”.) It is certainly a plausible principle, but Spinoza invokes a distinction that makes it irrelevant in this context. Spinoza divvies up the ways in which things can follow from God’s nature into two categories: either insofar as God’s nature is considered absolutely, or insofar as it is considered to be determined to act in a certain way. We can think about this as the difference between the way in which an eternal truth or necessary law of nature comes into existence and the way in which a particular individual comes into existence. Particular individuals always come to exist in virtue, at least partly, of other particular individuals. And indeed, in the proposition just before this (Ip28dem), Spinoza has made clear that when something is caused by “God’s nature, insofar as it
is considered to be determined to act in a certain way,” he means that it is caused by another particular thing, another finite mode (to use Spinoza’s terminology). So we are left with a picture in which there is a totally determined sequence of particular things unfolding according to necessary laws of nature. But this provides no justification for ruling out alternative possible sequences. In other words, although Ip29 seems to express strict necessitarianism, Spinoza’s argument here only establishes moderate necessitarianism. Again, I agree with Lin (and many others) that Spinoza is committed to strict necessitarianism. The problem is that neither of the quoted arguments get us quite there. And indeed Spinoza seems to have realized this, for he adds yet another argument in this vein a few pages later, at E Ip33. Individually, I don’t think that any of these passages would secure a strict necessitarian reading, but taken together, the evidence in favor of this reading seems to me overwhelming. (It’s as though Spinoza wants to b e a strict necessitarian but can’t summon up a good argument for it.) Yet even if one thinks there is good reason to believe that all things are determined, and that the laws of nature are necessary, it seems downright epistemically immodest to make the further claim that everything is necessary. The natural question to ask is, why would Spinoza take up this view? I say that the demonstration of Ip33 holds part of the answer to this question, and his conception of the relation between God and finite things holds the rest. The demonstration of Ip33 reads: For all things have necessarily followed from God’s given nature (by Ip16), and have been determined from the necessity of God’s nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way (by Ip29). Therefore, if things could have been of another nature, or could have been determined to produce an effect in another way, so that the order of nature was
different, then God’s nature could also have been other than it is now, and therefore (by Ip11) that [other nature] would also have had to exist, and consequently, there could have been two or more Gods, which is absurd (by Ip14c1). So things could have been produced in no other way and no other order, etc., q.e.d. This argument is much less complicated than the previous one. Hewing closely to the text, let’s break the argument into its four main steps: 1. All things have necessarily followed from God’s nature and been determined by God’s nature to exist and produce a certain effect in a certain way. (Ip16, Ip29) 2. So, if things had followed from God’s nature in a different way or been determined by God’s nature to produce a different effect, God’s nature would be different. ( from 1) 3. God’s nature could not have been different than it is. (Ip11) 4. So, things could not have been produced in any other way, or any other order. (from 2, 3) Step (2) is the most important part of the argument, since it allows us to infer a difference in God’s nature from a difference in things. Yet this step is mysterious. Finite things are merely modes of God (Ip25c), and modes depend upon their substance; substance does not depend upon its modes. It ought to be possible for the modes to vary without entailing any change in God’s nature. That is, absent some stronger connection between God and its modes, there ought to be possible alternative causal sequences of modes even though God’s nature could not be other than it is. Spinoza denies this possibility, claiming instead that “if things could have been of another nature, or could have been determined to produce an effect in another way...God’s nature could 11
also have been other than it is now”. The problem we face is to explain why he claimed this.
** ,-./01//2
345678/ 95668::; <=>.?@A5 @? B808//.:C;D .? !"#$%&'() !+#,"-&+- .+ /,&-+0"12 E:4.0/; 8F.:8F GC HI J@./:.?8? KHLM@6F2 HNO; "++)P; >>I **(Q*#)IR
There have been some attempts to provide such an explanation. The best of these seems to me to be offered by Koistinen (2003, 300–304), who rightly recognizes that an important part of Spinoza’s argument for necessitarianism is the premise that all of the modes that a substance 12
has, it has necessarily. But Koistinen’s explanation of why Spinoza held this view is somewhat speculative; he attempts to derive this thesis from the “causal independence” of substance combined with the claim that a substance can instantiate accidental modes only in virtue of causal dependencies upon other substances (302–3). Therefore, since Spinoza’s God is causally independent, it can have no accidental modes. So each of God’s modes follows necessarily from its nature. This argument gets the logical job done, but I do not think there is much in the way of textual evidence that Spinoza would have accepted such reasoning. It is not apparent in the relevant demonstrations (of Ip16, p29, and p33), and the premise that a substance’s accidental properties could arise only via interactions with other substances is less plausible than Koistinen indicates. He explains, The belief in contingent properties is, I believe, founded on the assumption that the properties of a substance can be divided to those that somehow follow from the nature of the substance and to those that somehow depend on their interaction with other things. ... But when a thing is seen as causally closed, the naturalness of the distinction between contingent and necessary properties vanishes. (303) There is an allure to this line of argument — it’s true, for instance, that many common accidental or contingent properties are relational and extrinsic. Yet the category of accidental properties was invented in part to account for temporary intrinsic properties, and temporary intrinsics need not 12
Koistinen calls this view ‘superessentialism’ to develop some affinities that it bears to some contemporary work in the philosophy of modality. Given the Scholastic distinction between essence, property, and accident, this name is more confusing than useful for my purposes. I elide it.
be instantiated in virtue of interaction with any other substance. (Sitting and standing are two standby examples of temporary intrinsics that do not seem to require causal interaction with other substances; but Greek mythology includes more interesting cases, such as Zeus’s turning himself into a swan or a shower of gold.) Although I concur with the overall aim of Koistinen’s account, then, we need further explanation for why Spinoza would accept the premise that if a substance has a mode, it has that mode necessarily.
§2 If we want to understand the pressure Spinoza felt to accept strict necessitarianism, there’s no better place to start than at the beginning. He writes, Id1: By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing. A bit later, he applies this definition to show that a substance must be self-caused: Ip7d: A substance cannot be produced by anything else (by Ip6c); therefore it will be the cause of itself, i.e. (by Id1), its essence necessarily involves existence, or it pertains to its nature to exist, q.e.d. This sounds like it’s building up to a standard ontological argument for the existence of God, and 13
in some ways it is. But there is something deeper at work here, for Spinoza does not hold that the sense in which God causes itself is merely negative — as in, not caused by another. Rather, he holds that there is a positive sense in which God is the efficient cause of itself. The striking
13
Spinoza’s not-quite-ontological argument appears at Ip11dem1, and (as expected) Ip7 features promi- nently in it. But Ip11dem1 is far from persuasive: “conceive, if you can, that God does not exist. Therefore (by Ia7) its essence does not involve existence. But this (by Ip7) is absurd.” Spinoza seems to recognize that this argument wants fortification, so he adds three additional arguments. See Garrett (1979), Barcan Marcus (1995), and Lin (2007) for discussion of Spinoza’s ontological argument; Garrett’s and Lin’s papers, especially, outline the logical difficulties that Spinoza’s argument faces (273-275), highlighting the importance of Spinoza’s other arguments for filling in these gaps.
claim comes in a note appended to Ip25, just prior to his claim that particular things are modes of God: God is the efficient cause, not only of the existence of things, but also of their essence. ...[I]n a word, God must be called the cause of all things in the same sense in which he is called the cause of himself . ( E Ip25 & 25s, emphasis added) I say this is striking because it suggests that when Sp inoza speaks of God as self-caused, he means more than merely that nothing else caused God to exist. The sense in which God causes itself is the same as the sense in which God causes things, and it’s clear that Spinoz a’s God is not the cause of things in a merely negative sense. God is the efficient cause of all things. But the passages just quoted then also suggest that God is the efficient cause of itself. Now, this is a mysterious claim. What could it mean to say that something is its own efficient cause? Doesn’t efficient causation require that the cau se be prior in time to its effect? These are important questions, and I’ll return to them later. For now, however, I want to show that Spinoza’s thesis that God causes itself in the same way that it causes all things can provide a nice explanation for his strict necessitarianism. The explanation has two steps. First, if God’s act of causing itself could be different, then God’s nature could be different. Second, if the causal sequence of finite things could be different, then God’s act of causing itself could be different. I will argue that Spinoza held both of these views; together they account for the puzzling step in the argument for necessitarianism at Ip33dem. The first conditional can be gotten easily. God is the cause of itself (Ip7dem). Yet Go d’s causal power is its essence, and it is this power “by which [God] and all things are and act”
(Ip34dem). So, God’s act of causing itself partly constitutes God’s essence. Therefore, if this act of self-causation could be different, eo ipso God’s very nature could be different. The second conditional requires some philosophical work. Suppose, per impossibile, that the causal sequence of finite things were different than it in fact is. One way of doing this would be to suppose that, say, Gavrilo Princip’s bullet missed the Archduke because an Austrian soldier happened to catch sight of Princip in time to stop him (along with all of the other changes in the world’s causal history that would be required to generate this different outcome). Another way of doing this would be to suppose that there were a sequence of wholly different things, such that in this alternative sequence there would be nothing even remotely like Princip, his bullet, or Archduke Ferdinand. It is not relevant for the sake of the argument, so for the sake of clarity let’s consider the former case. In the existing sequence of finite things, the Archduke was assassinated. In the alternative sequence, he was not. I claim that, on Spinoza’s view, God’s act of self-causation could not conceivably be the same in both cases. His conception of the connection between God’s power and the power of finite things requires that the two acts of self-causation be different in the two different cases. The reason for this is that Spinoza takes the (token) causal activity of finite 14
things to be the (token) causal activity of God, insofar as God is modified in a certain way.
This idea is absolutely fundamental to Spinoza ’s account of how God causes things. It first appears in the propositions that constitute the foundation of Spinoza’s theory of modes in Ethics I (roughly p22–p28), and it plays an important role the arguments for key propositions in
14
There are two distinct locutions that Spinoza uses to express the same thought: (1) “insofar as God is modified by...”; and (2) “insofar as God is considered to be modifi ed by...” He also sometimes uses the term ‘affected’ i nstead of ‘modified’, but in the relevant contexts they are clearly meant to express the same relation. That these locutions are intended to by synonymous is made clear by their deployment together at Ip28dem. If Spinoza intended these distinct locutions to have different meanings, they could not work together in the way that they do in his argument there.
15
every subsequent book of the Ethics. There are many passages that support this reading of Spinoza, but two are especially straightforward. By way of explaining how God is the efficient cause of finite things, Spinoza writes: [Particular things] follow from, or [are] determined to exist and produce an effect by God...insofar as [God] is modified by a modification which is finite and has a determinate existence. ( E Ip28dem) So God causes one mode, x, by constituting another mode, y, such that y is the cause of x. In other words, God causes its modes by way of its modes causing each other. But the only way that this picture makes sense is if the causal power of God’s modes is the causal power of God. The fact that y causes x need not preclude the fact that God causes x, for y’s causal power is God’s causal power. Another passage in this vein has already been quoted, but merits closer attention: ...from the necessity alone of God’s essence it follows that God is the cause of himself (by Ip11) and (by Ip16 and Ip16c) of all things. Therefore, God’s power, by which he and all things are and act, is his essence itself, q.e.d. (Ip34dem, emph. added) We should take seriously Spinoza’s claim that when things act, it is God’s power doing the work. Yet Spinoza does not seem to think that the action of a finite thing is merely an occasion for God to exercise its power; nor does he seem to think that finite things act in mere concurrence with God’s acts. Rather, the causal power of a finite thing is identical with the causal power of God, insofar as that thing is a modification of God. 16 I propose that we should understand the situation
15
See, e.g., IIp5–6 & 8–10; IIIp1–2; IVp1 & 4; Vp36 & 36c. There is some difficulty in expressing the relation that the power of finite things bears to the power of God according to this picture. Viljanen (2011, 74) is close to the mark when he says that “finite things...can quite plausibly be described as specifically modified portions of the tot al power of nature.” But this cannot be quite ri ght. God cannot on Spinoza’s view have parts (or “portion”), or else God would be dependent upon those parts (Ip13). Somehow, then, the power of a finite thing is not distinct from God’s power, but neither is it a part of God’s power. 16
as follows: the way in which finite modes cause each other is one of the ways in which God causes itself. Return to the Archduke’s assassination. The bullet that killed the Archduke was a mode of God, and its causal power was the causal power of God modified in a certain way. Now, were it possible for the bullet not to have killed the Archduke, there would be two possible causal sequences of things: one in which the bullet hits the Archduke, and another in which it misses. But if there are two possible causal sequenc es, then there are two possible ways in which finite modes could cause each other, and (by extension) two possible ways in which God could cause itself. So, if the causal sequence of finite things could be different, God’s act of self-causation could be different. This was the second conditional to be established. To sum up: Spinoza accepts that if God’s act of causing itself could be different, then God’s nature could be different. He also accepts that if the causal sequence of finite things could be different, then God’s act of causing itself could be different. Together, these entail that if the causal sequence of finite things could be different, then God’s nature could be different. This makes it plain why Spinoza would accept the otherwise puzzling step in his argument. The way in which things “follow from” and are “determined by” God’s nature is by participating in God’s act of self-causation. Although God is metaphysically prior to the sequence of finite things, that sequence is nonetheless necessary, since it is one of the ways in which God causes itself. These background assumptions account for the inference from (1) to (2) in the paraphrased version of the argument I gave above.
My suspicion is that further clarification of this relation would require a detailed examination of Spinoza’s theory of aspectual predication.
§3 Some of what I have said here bears upon a recent debate about how best to understand Spinoza’s notion of God as self-caused. On a fairly common, traditional interpretation, all that it means to be self-caused is to be causally independent (as we saw Koistinen sugge st above). Bennett (1984, 60), for instance, writes that “c ausal self-sufficiency is clearly part of [Spinoza’s] concept of substance, and he seems to take that as implying [...] that it cannot be acted on in any way by anything else.” Recent commentators have wanted to say more. Della Rocca (2008, 50– 51) attempts to make sense of God’s self-causation by arguing that Spinoza took all causal relations to be reducible to conceptual or explanatory relations. He writes, “[T]o say that a thing is self-caused is nothing more than saying that it is self-explanatory. [...] This is in keeping with [Spinoza’s] rationalist commitment to the intelligibility of all things, including God.” Della Rocca’s reading has much to commend it, for it deftly reduces away the notion of causation (which involved a variety of worries about time and dependence), replacing causal talk with talk about explanation and intelligibility. Fewer eyebrows are raised over the notion of selfexplanation than over the notion of self-causation. Mogens Laerke, however, has recently argued that this notion of self-explanation cannot really be what Spinoza is up to when he speaks of self-causation. Lærke (2011, 456–457) argues: [I]f self-causation could be reduced to a conceptual relation in the way that Della Rocca’s overall interpretive strategy suggests, this would imply that the connotations of efficient causation are ultimately evacuated from the fundamental understanding of God’s necessary existence and that self-causation reduces to something like formal causation.
The thought is that if self-causation amounted to nothing more than self-explanation, then Spinoza’s repeated and emphatic uses of notions such as power and efficient causation turn out to have little or no content. The interpretation I’ve provided here weighs in favor of Laerke’s argument. Della Rocca’s interpretation is supposed to have a great advantage in being able to explain why Spinoza would accept necessitarianism. Conceptual connections are generally supposed to be necessary, but the individuals that fall under, and exemplify, those connections are generally not supposed to be necessary. Why would Spinoza think that they were? Roughly speaking, Della Rocca’s answer is that Spinoza conflates individuals with their p ower, then conflates their power with that which follows from their essence or concept. Spinoza is supposed to have reduced individuals to concepts. I agree with Laerke that this sort of idealism, with its shades of Leibniz, makes for an unlikely reading of Spinoza. If an alternative interpretation can explain Spinoza’s necessitarianism without reducing causation to conceptual conne ction, that speaks well of the interpretation. Part of what I have shown here is that there is a way to take Spinoza’s conception of God as causa sui to explain his necessitarianism without requiring us to reduce causation to conceptual connection.
References
Allison, H. E. (1987). Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale University Press, revised ed. Barcan Marcus, R. (1995). “Spinoza and the ontological argument.” In Modalities (pp. 163–176). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bennett, J. (1984). A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Carriero, J. P. (1995). “On the relationship between mode and substance in Spinoza’s metaphysics.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33, 245–273. Curley, E. (1969). Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ——— (1988). Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Curley, E., & Walski, G. (1999). “Spinoza’s necessitarianism reconsidered.” In R. Gennaro, & C. Huenemann (Eds.) New Essays on the Rationalists (pp. 241–263). New York: Oxford University Press. Della Rocca, M. (2008). Spinoza. New York: Routledge. Descartes, R. (1904). Ouvres de Descartes. C. Adam and P. Tannery (Eds.) Paris: Leopold Cerf. ——— (1984). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdoch (Eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1985). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdoch (Eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garrett, D. (1979). “Spinoza’s ‘ontological’ argument.” Philosophical Review 2, 198–223.
——— (1991). “Spinoza’s necessitarianism.” In Y. Yovel (Ed.) God and Nature in Spinoza’s Metaphysics (pp. 191–218). Leiden: Brill. Koistinen, O. (1998). “On the consistency of Spinoza’s modal theory.” Southern Journal of Philosophy XXXVI, 61–80. ——— (2003). “Spinoza’s proof of necessitarianism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXVII (2), 283–310. Lærke, M. (2011). “Spinoza’s cosmological argument in the Ethics.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 49 (4), 439–462. Lin, M. (2007). “Spinoza’s arguments for the existence of god.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXXV (2), 269–297. ——— (2012). “Rationalism and necessitarianism.” Nous 46 (3), 418–448. Martin, C. (2010). “A new challenge to the necessitarian reading of Spinoza.” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy V, 25–70. Melamed, Y. Y. (2009). “Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance: The substance-mode relation as a relation of inherence and predication.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78, 17–82. ——— (2012). “Spinoza on inherence, causation, and conception.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50, 365-386. Rosen, G. (2010). “Metaphysical dependence: Grounding and reduction.” In B. Hale, & A. Hoffmann (Eds.) Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology (pp. 109–135). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaffer, J. (2009). “On what grounds what.” In D. Chalmers, D. Manley, & R. Wasserman (Eds.) Metametaphysics (pp. 347–383). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1987). “Philosophical investigations into the essence of human freedom and related matters.” In E. Behler (Ed.) Fichte, Jacobi, Schelling: The Philosophy of German Idealism. New York: Continuum. Spinoza, B. (1925). Opera. C. Gebhardt (Ed.) Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsverlag. ——— (1988). The Collected Works of Spinoza. E. Curley (Ed. and Trans.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. ——— (1995). The Letters. S. Shirley (Trans.) Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Viljanen, V. (2008). “On the derivation and meaning of Spinoza’s Conatus doctrine.” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy Vol. 4, 89–112. ——— (2011). Spinoza’s Geometry of Power . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, M. D. (1983). “Infinite understanding, scientia intuitiva, and Ethics I.16.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 8, 184–186.
