An Account of Power and Possibility in Spinoza
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An Account of Power and Possibility in Spinoza Galen Barry Charlottesville, VA B.A. Philosophy, Oregon State University M.A. Philosophy, University of Virginia A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Virginia March, 2015 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor, Antonia LoLordo, for her willingness to take me on as an advisee, as well as for her consistently prompt and frank advice. I would also like to thank Walter Ott, a co-advisor of sorts, for his sincere encouragement and for his careful readings of my chapter drafts. Thanks are also due to Dan Devereux and Asher Biemann for serving on my committee. I am grateful for my partner, McCailin Wunder, for her constant support and patience, and for my parents, Steven Barry and Kathleen McAuliffe, for the freedom they gave me to study philosophy and for the pride they always showed in me. Finally, I would like to thank my undergraduate professor, Joseph Orosco, for writing me a letter of recommendation seven years ago in exchange for this acknowledgment. 2 Table of Contents Introduction………..……………………………………………………………………………..5 Abbreviations ...………………………………………………………………………………...13 Chapter One: Spinoza’s Theory of Possibility………………………………………………...14 1.1 Error Theory……………………………………………………………………….....16 1.2 Dispositionalism……………………………………………………………………...20 1.3 Projection in Sensation……………………………………………………………….23 1.3.1 The Falsity Condition………………………………………………....……25 1.3.2 The Category Mistake Condition…………………………………………...27 1.3.3 The Phenomenology Condition…………………………………………….30 1.4 The Projection of Possibility………………………………….………………………34 1.4.1 The Falsity Condition………………………………………………………35 1.4.2 The Phenomenology Condition…………………………………………….36 1.4.3 The Category Mistake Condition……………………………….…………..41 1.5 Necessitarianism and Projectivism…………………………………………………...43 Bibliography …………....………………………………………………………………..45 Chapter Two: Spinoza on Modal Reasoning…………………………………………………..48 2.1 Examples from the Ethics…………………………………………………………….51 2.2 Initial Accounts…………………………………………………………… ……....…53 2.2.1 The Following-From Account……………………………………………...55 2.2.2. Per Se Accounts……………………………………………………………57 2.3 A Linguistic Account of Impossibility……………………………………………….62 2.3.1 The Phenomenon of Feigning………………………………………………62 2.3.2 The Linguistic Account of Impossibility…………………………………...64 2.3.3 The Context-Sensitivity of Philosophical Terms…………………………. 68 2.4 The Role of Definitions………………………………………………………………71 2.5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………77 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….. 80 Chapter Three: Spinoza’s Concept of Power………………………………………………… 82 3.1 The Meaning of Power……………………………………………………………….83 3.1.1 Obscurity……………………....…………………………………………...84 3.1.2 Stipulation……………………………. ...……………………... ………….85 3.2 The Causal Interpretation…………………………………………………………….87 3.3 A Dilemma for the Dynamicist Interpretation…………….. ..……………………….91 3.4 Arguments against the Conceptualist…………………………………………………94 3.4.1 The First Argument………………………………………………………...95 3.4.2 The Second Argument……………………………………………………...98 3.4.3 The Third Argument………………………………………………………102 3.5 Desiderata of a Theory of Power……………………………………………………103 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………… ……108 3 Chapter Four: Perfection in Spinoza’s Argument for Monism……………………………..111 4.1 The Power to Exist…………………………………….....………………………….113 4.2 The Principle of Perfection………………………………………………………….120 4.2.1 The Missing Premise…………………………………………………….. .122 4.3 God’s Greater Perfection……………………………………………………………128 4.3.1 Letter 36………………………………………………………………… ..129 4.3.2 Human Perfection…………………………………………………………130 4.3.3 Ethics 1p16………………………………………………………………..134 4.4 Two Competing Accounts…………………………………………………………..136 4.4.1 Garrett’s Argument………………………………………………………..137 4.4.2 Carriero’s Argument………………………………………………………138 4.5 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..140 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………… ……141 Chapter Five: The Problem of Diversity……………………………………………………..143 5.1 Three Problems……………………………………………………………………...145 5.1.1 Diversity and Possibility…………………………………………………..148 5.1.2 Diversity and Motion……………………………………………………...152 5.2 How God Grounds Possibility………………………………………………………154 5.3 God and the Cause of Motion……………………………………………………….160 5.3.1 More’s Argument…………………………………………………………160 5.3.2 Clarke’s Argument……. ..……………………………………….. .……..162 5.4 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..165 Bibliography…………………………………………………... ………………………166 Chapter Six: Spinoza’s Solution to the Problem of Diversity………………………………169 6.1 God and Power……………………………………………………………………...170 6.1.1 Ethics 1p34………………………………………………………………..170 6.1.2 Attributes and Power……………………………………………………...173 6.2 Power and the Origin of Motion…………………………………………………….179 6.3 God and Possibility………………………………………………………………….182 6.3.1 Space…………………………………………………… ... ……………...183 6.3.2 Shape and Color………………... .………………………………………..185 6.4 Spinoza and Mechanism…………………………………………………………….188 6.5 God and Diversity………………………………………………….………………..190 6.5.1 The Role of Numbers……………………………………………………..191 6.5.2 God and Number………………………………………………………….193 Bibliography……………………………………….. ..…………………………………198 Conclusion……………………………. ...……………………………………………………..201 The Nature of Necessity………………………………………………………………...201 The General Problem of Error…………………………………………………………..204 The Nature of Inherence………………………………………………………………...205 Bibliography………………………………………… …………………………………207 4 Introduction One of Spinoza’s most famous theses is his necessitarianism. It claims that nothing—nothing— could have been otherwise than it actually is. God’s existence, the laws of physics, my decision to eat cereal this morning—it’s all as necessary as 2+2=4. Necessitarianism lends itself quite well to Spinoza’s rationalism. In its broadest aspirations, rationalism, as I use the term, is an attempt to explain everything. If something exists, there is a reason explaining why it exists. If a relation that holds, there is a reason explaining why it holds. Similarly for things that don’t exist and for relations that don’t hold—there are reasons for that too. If necessitarianism is true, then everything is sufficiently explained by its cause. Things exist because they were caused to exist and relations hold because they were caused to hold. So necessitarianism goes hand in hand with Spinoza’s rationalism. If there were any contingent or brute facts, then they would count as unexplained. In addition to cohering well with Spinoza’s general philosophical outlook, necessitarianism also provides his system with many benefits. Perhaps most importantly, it constitutes the backbone of his theory of well-being: we can gain control over our passions and reach beatitude only through a recognition of the necessity of all things. Necessitarianism faces a number of problems, however. Most famously, it seems to leave no room for traditional moral concepts like praise and blame. We blame people for immoral acts primarily because we think that they could have, and should have, done otherwise. If every action is necessary, then nobody could have done otherwise than she actually did and nobody is blameworthy. So necessitarianism cannot help but undermine traditional morality. But it also faces a number of problems unrelated to morality. First, it just seems false. For example, it seems fairly obvious that I might have had toast this morning rather than cereal. After all, I remember 5 deliberating about the choice and I didn’t feel compelled either way. Nothing about the way I woke up or the happenings of the previous night spoke in favor of any particular breakfast. Necessitarianism seems to leave this general feeling of contingency unexplained. Second, the concept of possibility plays an important, and plausibly indispensable, role in philosophical argumentation. Among other things, it undergirds the practice of using hypothetical cases as philosophical evidence. If nothing is merely possible, as necessitarianism claims, then it’s not obvious that there are any hypothetical cases. There are only actual cases. And if we cannot help ourselves to hypothetical cases, then the ways we can argue shrink considerably. The benefits of necessitarianism seem to come at a very high cost. My dissertation is an examination of several key issues pertaining to Spinoza’s necessitarianism. In the first two chapters, I aim to defend Spinoza against the two non-moral objections to necessitarianism mentioned above. First, I will offer an interpretation of his theory of possibility which aims to explain why so much of the world seems—in a robust sense—to be contingent. Things appear contingent to us because of the tendency of the mind to project its own features onto the world (in this case, its ignorance of causes). Second, I will argue that Spinoza’s necessitarianism can accommodate the use of hypothetical cases. It does so by construing hypothetical cases not as genuine possibilities, but as actually existing linguistic entities such as sentences. For the remainder of the dissertation, I will focus on a particularly important use of hypothetical cases that appears in one of Spinoza’s arguments for God’s existence. There Spinoza argues that God exists because God is more powerful than any other substance or substances would be, if they existed. I focus on this argument not merely as an illustration of Spinoza’s use of hypothetical cases. Rather, the concept of power is a concept traditionally tied to the concept of 6 possibility: a thing’s power tells