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Causation and Intelligibility in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

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CHAPTER SEVEN CAUSATION AND INTELLIGIBILITY IN THE TRACTATUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS There is every reason to expect Spinoza to be highly sceptical as regards the possibility of formulating religious truths, for the E delivers an essen- tially secular moral philosophy providing a strictly intellectual path to ‘salvation’. What is more, according to the TTP it is necessary to separate philosophy from theology: whereas philosophy produces truth, theology is solely concerned with obedience. It would seem, then, that in Spinoza’s thought little room is left for the possibility of arriving at real religious truths.1 In this chapter, however, an attempt will be made to demonstrate that Spinoza’s philosophy awards religion a rationality of its own. 1. Causation and Intelligibility: Spinoza’s Rationalism The general assumption that Spinoza was some sort of epistemological rationalist is shared widely among scholars of early modern philosophy, as is the recognition that Spinoza’s rationalism is closely connected to his views concerning causation. Causality is, of course, a crucial concept in Spinoza’s entire philosophy: on the one hand it defines the ontological status of everything that according to the E can be said to exist, on the other it also takes pride of place in Spinoza’s theory of knowledge in that he adhered to the essentially Aristotelian position that we can only be considered to know anything to the extent that we know its cause. However, in order to fully grasp the nature of Spinoza’s rationalism, some further comments may be in order before we address the issue in which sense Spinoza is able to recognize the reality of religious truths. As far as Spinoza’s metaphysics is concerned, causality serves as its unique principle of ontological distribution: Nature perceived as cause is natura naturans, nature perceived as an effect is natura naturata (E, I, 29schol.). God, or all his attributes, is causa sui (E, I, 10schol.), while his modes are 1 For a good example of this line of reasoning, see Cook, ‘Did Spinoza Lie to his Landlady?’ 102 chapter seven caused by other modes, which in the end, that is as part of all modes taken together (or, as Spinoza puts it in Letter 64 ‘facies totius universi’) are caused by the attributes. Indeed, it is God’s essence to be the imma- nent cause of all things (E, I, 18), while it is the essence of modes to be caused by God, that is by one of God’s attributes: in the case of man, for instance, Spinoza notes that his essence ‘is constituted by certain modifi- cations of God’s attributes’ (E, II, 10cor.). And, finally, the ‘reach’ if you will of causation is infinite, since, E, I, 36: ‘Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow’. In short: 1) every thing that exists has a cause for its existence; 2) what a thing is, is decided by the kind of cause it has; 3) every thing is itself a cause, producing further effects. Spinoza’s theory of knowledge is also crucially dependent on the con- cept of causality even if at first sight the essential propositions of E II in which Spinoza expounds his theory of knowledge are mainly concerned to reveal what the mind is, how it relates to God and his attribute of thought as well as to his infinite intellect, and in particular how the mind, which according to Spinoza is an idea, can be understood to have ideas. But again, this theory results from the conclusion, reached in E, I, 16 that ‘(F)rom the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes (i.e., everything which can fall under an infinite intellect)’: the mind as a finite mode is a product of the infinite causal force that is the attribute of thought. Once the nature of the mind itself has been explicated, the universal reality of causality is reaffirmed in the E, for according to Spinoza—E, II, 44—‘It is of the nature of reason to regard things as necessary, not as con- tingent’. Again man serves as a further illustration, for—E, II, 48dem.— ‘The mind (. .) cannot be a free cause of its own actions, or cannot have an absolute faculty of willing and not willing. Rather, it must be deter- mined to willing this or that (. .) by a cause which is also determined by another, and so on.’ Many commentators have wrestled with the ques- tion how Spinoza’s comments on modes being caused by God’s attributes should be related to his recurring remarks according to which modes are ‘in’ God. One could of course join Martial Gueroult’s line of interpreta- tion and subscribe to his attempt to take this literally: modes are caused by God in himself, but I am not sure how helpful this approach really is.2 Perhaps Michael Della Rocca’s recent proposal to reduce both inherence and causation to kinds of dependence, that is of conceptual dependence, 2 Gueroult, Spinoza I, esp. 325 ff..
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