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A Perspective on the Mind-Body Problem, with Particular Reference to the Philosophy of Spinoza

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A Perspective on the Mind-Body Problem, with Particular Reference to the Philosophy of Spinoza CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by SAS-SPACE 1 A PERSPECTIVE ON THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA MARGARET GULLAN-WHUR A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts, University of London Department of Philosophy University College London May 1996 2 ABSTRACT Spinoza's thesis of non-reductive monism was conceived in critical response to earlier dualist and materialist theories of mind. He rejects dualism with respect to both God- Nature and mind-body, yet his principles mark off the mental as severely as is possible without forfeiting monism, showing his awareness that monism (attribute identity) threatens mental irreducibility. The constraints Spinoza imposes in order to preserve mental irreducibility and to make human beings partial expressions of one thinking and extended substance produce a tension between mental autonomy and mind-body identity. However, I propose that while this remains a serious philosophical problem, some degree of tension must persist in any non-reductive monism which succeeds in giving the mental a weighting equal to the physical, and that Spinoza's sensitivity to this requirement is instructive. I argue, on the other hand, that Spinoza's theory of mind is irrevocably damaged by his turning of the traditional Mind of God into the Mind of the Whole of Nature in so far as he extrapolates from this Mind of God-or-Nature to finite minds. In characterising finite minds as partial expressions of "God's" infinite intellect I believe Spinoza becomes caught between his unorthodox conception of God's Mind as all-inclusive and a retained conception of the Mind of God as all truths. I argue that by characterising our thoughts as fractions of the adequate and true ideas "in God", that is, by claiming them (i) to express in some measure immediate judgement; (ii) to have a state of our body as a necessary feature of their representational content, and (iii) to have a place in a determined, lawlike mental concatenation, Spinoza creates a tension between two mental perspectives, namely a metaphysical explanation of human mental states, and our ordinary mental experiences. I argue that he fails acceptably to characterise the latter and that his theory of mind is therefore unsatisfactory. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my supervisor, Mr Arnold Zuboff, for giving generously of his time and interest, and for meticulous criticism of my use of Spinoza's texts. I would also like to thank Dr Jerry Valberg for supervision at an early stage, and for his support as post-graduate tutor. I am greatly indebted to Professor Tom Sorell, without whose scholarly criticism, suggestions and constant encouragement this thesis could not have been completed. I would also like to thank people who have kindly offered valuable suggestions:- Mr Alan Hobbs, Dr Susan James, Dr Paul Noordhof, Dr Timothy O'Hagan, Dr Anthony Savile, Dr David Sedley and Dr Elias Tempelis. Electronic version: I apologise for any small typological errors resulting from scanning the thesis from hard copy. 4 CONTENTS ABSTRACT p.2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS p.3 ADVICE REGARDING THE PRIMARY TEXTS p.6 INTRODUCTION p.7 CHAPTER 1 SPINOZA'S PRINCIPLE OF MONISM (ATTRIBUTE IDENTITY) p.14 § 1.1 Early commitment: God and the mind are not outside Nature. § 1.2 The semi-formal arguments in Ethics for monism regarding (i) God/Nature and (ii) attribute identity. p.18 § 1.3 Conditions for a principle of monism. p.25 CHAPTER 2 SPINOZA'S PRINCIPLE OF MENTAL AUTONOMY § 2.1 Thought is not body, nor a property of body. p.27 § 2.2 Thought is a natural property. p.32 § 2.3 A proper tension between identity and autonomy. p.38 CHAPTER 3 SPINOZA'S PRINCIPLE OF MENTAL HOLISM p.41 § 3.1 An infinite attribute of thought must contain all possible thoughts. p.41 § 3.2 In one logical dimension an infinite intellect is all truths. p.49 § 3.3 Minds which are parts of an infinite intellect know only in part. p.59 § 3.4 Some mental events which threaten the holism principle. p.63 CHAPTER 4 SPINOZA'S PRINCIPLE OF MENTAL FORMAL BEING p.74 § 4.1 Definitions and Formal Being. p.74 § 4.2 All modes of thought are ideas. p.80 § 4.3 All true ideas have formal being as units of knowledge, p.87 immediate judgements § 4.4 Are inadequate ideas, having the same formal being as adequate ideas, necessarily units of knowledge, immediate judgements. p.88 (continued) 5 CHAPTER 5 SPINOZA'S PRINCIPLE OF OBJECTIVE BEING p.98 § 5.1 Any idea has objective being. p.98 § 5.2 A true idea is an objective essence. p.101 § 5.3 The mind is the idea of the body: any human idea is the idea of a state of an actually existing body. p.104 § 5.4 The face-value representational content of human ideas. p. 121 CHAPTER 6 SPINOZA'S PRINCIPLE OF INDEPENDENT MENTAL CAUSAL POWER p.128 § 6.1 The gap in the evidence for 'parallelism'. p.128 § 6.2 There are (at least) two causal powers, each confined to its own attribute. p.143 § 6.3 "So long as things are considered as modes of thinking, we must explain the order of the whole of Nature, or the connection of causes, through the attribute of thought alone" (E2 P7 S). p.149 § 6.4 "The power of the mind is intelligence itself". p.167 CONCLUSION p.185 BIBLIOGRAPHY 6 ADVICE REGARDING THE PRIMARY TEXTS For full details of texts see Bibliography SPINOZA Abbreviations C Curley's translation of Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Short Treatise on God, Man and his Weil-Being, Principles of Descartes's Philosophy, Appendix containing Metaphysical Thoughts and Letters 1-28. E Ethics TIE Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect KV Short Treatise on God, Man and his Well-Being DPP Principles of Descartes's Philosophy CM Appendix containing Metaphysical Thoughts TTP Theologico -Political Treatise TP Political Treatise P Proposition D Definition C Corollary S Scholium Exp. Explanation L Lemma Translation is Curley's (C) unless otherwise stated. Translation of Letters 29-84 is Wolfs. Translation of TTP and TP is Wernham's except for sections he does not translate, when it is from Elwes. Double quotation marks are used for Spinoza quotations and technical terms. "Nature" (or "God") is given a capital letter at all times to distinguish it from nature (or essence). "Emend" and "emendation" are retained as Spinozistic terms which involve his doctrine of logical interrelation (mental causality) between ideas. "Sive, seu" Latin for 'or' denoting an identification of referent objects or an equivalence of terms. Such identifications and equivalences are indicated, after introducing them with textual evidence, by an oblique e.g. God/Nature. DESCARTES Abbreviations CSM I Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Discourse on the Method, Principles of Philosophy, Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, The Passions of the Soul CSM II Meditations, Objections and Replies C SMK The Correspondence Translation in Volumes I and II is by Cottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch. InVolume III, translation is by Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch and Kenny. 7 INTRODUCTION I take the mind-body problem to be the philosophical question of what mind or 'the mental' is, and how it is related to matter. This problem resists strategies designed to resolve it since any solution advanced seems to generate intractable difficulties. At one extreme the dualist, holding that mental substance is a distinct substance from material substance, fails to explain how mind interacts with body since the two substances have nothing in common. At the other, the reductive or eliminative materialist, claiming that only truths about the brain make sentences about the mental true, and that folk psychology is a primitive theory that deserves to be replaced by neurophysiology, fails to allow for the scheme of mental explanation humans find indispensable. Between these two polarities lie an array of non-reductive theories of mind which do not posit distinct mental and material substances, but nonetheless consider the mental irreducible to body. (I take 'mental irreducibility' to involve some characterisation of the mental which logically prohibits the mental from being subsequently redefined as physical and which affirms the mental as a reality in our lives.) Non-reductive accounts are not uniform. For example, talk of mental 'properties' often indicates a commitment to some essentially or constitutively mental feature, while reference to mental 'events' tends to signify a weaker claim about diverse mental and physical meanings. But all such theories come up against serious difficulties in attempting to supply a satisfactory account (that is, leaving no unexplained or implausible entailments) of what it is about the mental that justifies a claim of mental irreducibility, and how the mental and the material can constitute radically different expressions of a single thing. For Spinoza there is no mind-body problem. In his view, difficulties over fixing the place of the mind in Nature are something earlier philosophers brought on themselves. On the one hand, he says, they "did not observe the proper order of philosophising" (E2 P10 S2), and on the other they "did not know the true nature of the human mind" (Letter 1). Yet I believe Spinoza's theory of mind is no exception to the general pattern of 8 failure either preceding or following him. Spinoza stands in many respects Janus-faced between Descartes and modern philosophy of mind, his chosen framework of non-reductive monism being a popular current option, albeit among people who do not associate it with Spinoza. While the interface of Spinoza's doctrine with that of Descartes is intense, complex and instructive, his metaphysical thesis, which stipulates an essential mental property and a system of independent mental causal power, is thought-provoking for modern philosophers of mind in showing what we may have to espouse if we take the project of mental irreducibility seriously.
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