Spinoza’s first philosophy and the knowledge of God

A thesis submitted by

Inja Stracenski

to

The Department of Philosophy

in fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the subject of

Philosophy

School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

The University of Sydney

2020

Spinoza’s first philosophy and the knowledge of God

Abstract

This dissertation is an interpretation of the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics. Its subject matter, Of God, is, when formulated in more definite terms, the question of the determination of being in relation to our understanding of the ethical in philosophy. Or put differently, it is the question of a complete redefinition of the relationship between the ontological and the ethical, as it emerged in the early modern period after the end of medieval finalism and in the wake of the new ontology of the infinite inaugurated by the scientific revolution.

This dissertation argues that Spinoza’s Ethics is best understood within the context of first philosophy, i.e. within the early modern question of foundations as a system elaborated in order to prevent the breaking apart from what we usually call facts and values. Hence, that the overall ethical purpose of Spinoza’s ethica consists in elaborating a system of foundational knowledge claims to serve as a basis for future ethical matters in various disciplines. And since ‘first philosophy’ deals with the origin of our knowledge, this dissertation argues that Spinoza’s system was also designed to ethically redefine the very nature of philosophical knowing and hence introduce an altogether new understanding of philosophy.

The aim of this dissertation and the suggestion for a different reading of Spinoza’s major work is to uncover, as far as this can be done with an analysis of the first part of the Ethics, that segment of early modern thought, which never materialised in history. For the gap modernity never closed, between the human and the natural world, became the parameters of reality within which we found ourselves. And in this, there is little doubt that the ‘God’ whom “we have killed” (Nietzsche) is nothing else than this ethical task philosophy did not successfully carry out at the beginning of modernity.

i Contents

Foreword ………………..v

Introduction ………………..1

§1. The Question ………………..1 §2. The Argument ………………..12 §3. The function of the notion of God ………………..23 §4. Chapter outline ………………..28

Part I

Knowledge of God

1. The One God ………………..30

1.1. The priority of the knowledge of God ………………..30

1.2. The one and unique substance ………………..45

1.3. Pantheism in question ………………..64

2. The Two Attributes ………………..79

2.1 Extension and Thought ………………..79

2.2 Knowing the world by the infinite ………………..91

Part II

Ethical Foundations

3. Where Ethics Begins ………………..103

3.1 The origin of ethical knowledge ………………..103

3.2 Spinoza’s doctrinal imperatives ………………..107

3.3 The preliminaries in theory and practice ………………..109

3.4 The ethical guide to any (future) philosophy ………………..120

ii Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to thank all those involved in this long journey. I am deeply grateful to Moira Gatens, my doctoral supervisor for the strong support and generous guidance I found at her side. For all the words, thoughts, and laughs, for all of our time spent together.

Every teaching session and conversation with my students in tutorials at the University of Sydney and in philosophy courses at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney mattered greatly to me. I am grateful to every one of my students for teaching me what teaching and what philosophy can mean.

For all the personal conversations, conferences, reading groups and all the work we did together, I am grateful to Anthony Uhlmann and Danielle Celermajer, Timothy Laurie and

Jason Tuckwell, Cat Moir and Dalia Nassar, Jon Rubin and Janice Richardson, Joe Hughes and Justin Clemens, Talia Morag and David Macarthur, and to all members of the old good

Nemo group.

And finally, nothing would have been possible without those back home at the Ludwig-

Maximilians University of Munich, at the departments of philosophy, catholic theology, Jewish history, logic and the theory of the sciences. In particular without Dr. Michael Heinzmann who introduced me to Jewish Thought and so set the course of my intellectual quest for the years to come. And without Prof. Peter Reisinger, who made the German heavy weights – Hegel, Kant, or Fichte – intelligible to us and taught us all the secrets of the trade.

Many thanks to my friends and family for their invaluable goodness and support,

Emmanuelle de Garsignies, Elisabeth Kaufer, Cornelia Hesse, Anne Tilkorn, Georg Kraus,

Helmut Hofbauer, Johannes Chromow, Mirjana Milutinovic, Frances Harrington, Blaženka

Kohut, Janko Stracenski, Ljubica Stracenski, Lidija Pesa, and Charlotte Wang.

This work is dedicated to my father, Miron Stracenski, in loving memory.

iii Abbreviations

Spinoza’s works:

CM Cogitata Metaphysica DPP Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy Ep. Spinoza’s Letters GLE Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae KV Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being TdIE Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione TTP Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

Passages in the Ethics are referred to by means of the following abbreviations: a-(xiom), c- (orollary), e-(xplanation), l-(emma), p-(roposition), s-(cholium), and app-(endix); ‘d’ stands for either “definition” (when immediately to the right of the part of the book), or “demonstration” (in all other cases). The five parts of the Ethics are in Arabic numerals. Hence, E1d3 is the third definition of part 1 and E1p16d is the demonstration of proposition 16 in part 1.

iv Foreword

There are few doubts about the significance of the relationship between ethics and the sciences for modern philosophy. As scholars, we are all too familiar with the history of this

“divorce of the world of values and the world of facts”1 from the seventeenth century philosophical and scientific revolution. And even more so with all the subsequent struggles in philosophy - from the crisis of scepticism and nihilism, to phenomenology and hermeneutics - to restore a common world to both kinds of knowledge, to the scientific and to the ethical. The world of scientific knowledge became, as it is often said, ‘devoid of meaning’ with the loss of its final and formal cause. But the world of values lost nothing less than its reality, that is, the ontological ground from where fundamental concepts of knowledge correspond to real entities of the world, and not merely to human reason, consciousness or history. A loss from which this kind of knowledge, about values and meaning never completely recovered. We do not know which path modern philosophy would have taken if this divorce had not prevailed. And it is this prospect of a common world in seventeenth century philosophy, namely Spinoza’s attempt to prevent the split between scientific and ethical knowledge, between ontology and ethics, that this dissertation is about.

This dissertation is an interpretation of the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics. Its subject matter, Of God, is, when formulated in more definite terms, the question of the determination of being in relation to our understanding of the ethical in philosophy. Or put differently, it is the question of a complete redefinition of the relationship between the ontological and the ethical, as it emerged in the early modern period after the end of medieval finalism and in the wake of the new ontology of the infinite inaugurated by the scientific revolution.

1 Koyré, Alexandre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1957) p.2

v Introduction

In history the price we pay for our great critical freedom in regard to the answers is the non-negotiability of the questions. Hans Blumenberg

§1. The Question

The question of the determination of being in relation to the ethical is the oldest in the reception history of Spinoza’s philosophy, raised as one of pantheism and atheism, with all the ensuing variations (later in terms of determinism and naturalism), and with all the often negative, or conflicting consequences that seemingly follow from it for a philosophy of ethics.

It is against this old-new certitude, that Spinoza’s God is “morally indifferent”2, or, in the language of contemporary literature, that the Ethics represents an “attempt to establish an acceptable ethic on the unpromising foundation of subjectivism, egoism, and determinism”3, that I will suggest a different reading. Spinoza’s Ethics is, as I understand it, an explicit intervention in the philosophical debates of his time, an attempt to resolve the most difficult question of early modern philosophy, namely, how to redefine ethics in light of the new ontology of the infinite adopted by Galilean sciences, which seemed to “imply the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim” 4, and yet to offer that kind of knowledge“ […] by which we are led to do only those things which love and morality advise”5 (E2p49s4)6.

2 Schama, Simon. Belonging, The Story of the Jews 1492-1900, (London: The Bodley Head, 2017), p. 206 3 Curley, Edwin. Editorial Preface to the Ethics, “The Metaphysical Moralist” in The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol.1, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) p. 402. 4 Koyré, Alexandre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1957) p.2 5 […in quo nostra summa felicitas sive beatitudo consistit, nempe in sola Dei cognitione, ex qua ad ea tantum agenda inducimur, quae amor et pietas suadent] E2p49s4 6 In this thesis passages in the Ethics are referred to by means of the following abbreviations: a-(xiom), c-(orollary), e-(xplanation), l-(emma), p-(roposition), s-(cholium), and app-(endix); ‘d’ stands for either “definition” (when immediately to the right of the part of the book), or “demonstration” (in all other cases). The five parts of the Ethics

1 The distinction between the ontological and the ethical in the Ethics is, as many scholars have pointed out7, never a clear-cut line, due to the internal coherences, deductive connexions and compatibilities in Spinoza’s system. Nevertheless, all contemporary readings of the Ethics are based on the assumption that there is Spinoza’s ontology (or metaphysics) on the one hand, with its basic entities of substance, modes and attributes, and that there is Spinoza’s moral theory on the other, with its theories of human freedom, passions and action. The recourse to this classical distinction, between onto-logic and prudence (gr. phrónēsis) in the interpretations of the Ethics, is what separates contemporary scholarship from the earlier reception of Spinoza’s philosophy.

What in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was referred, as a matter of course, to the notion of God (the question of the relationship between the ontological and the ethical) became now a matter of analysis of the complete architecture of Spinoza’s system. The twentieth century renaissance in Spinoza studies is marked by various developments, but what has most contributed to its renewal is this possibility of disengaging the notion of God from immediate ethical ramifications. Namely, of interpreting the notion of God in the first part as a ‘theory of the absolute substance’ that enabled a whole range of structural analyses on Spinoza’s substance-ontology, and the later parts of the Ethics as the actual ethical purpose of the whole work, a ‘theory of human behaviour’8, which successfully rehabilitated Spinoza as a philosopher of ethical, human concerns9.

are in Arabic numerals. Hence, E1d3 is the third definition of part 1 and E1p16d is the demonstration of proposition 16 in part 1. 7 It is a standard view that the ontological and the ethical are “interlinked”, “the crucial question, however, is: how, exactly, are practical wisdom and science related in the Ethics?” in: Spinoza’s Ethics, A Collective Commentary, ed. Michael Hampe, Ursula Renz, Robert Schnepf (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), Introduction, p. 1 8 This formulation is from Bartuschat, Wolfgang: “…Metaphysik, die eine Theorie der absoluten Substanz ist, und Ethik, die eine Theorie menschlichen Handelns ist […]”, in “Metaphysik und Ethik in Spinozas ‘Ethica’”, Studia Spinozana, Vol. 7: The Ethics in the “Ethics” (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1991) p. 15 9 The description provided by Don Garrett of ‘Spinoza’s ethical theory’ is representative of a whole generation of scholars: “Ethics, for Spinoza, is knowledge of “the right way of living”. The centrality of ethics to his philosophical project is unmistakable in the title of his most systematic presentation of his philosophy: Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order. The Ethics seeks to demonstrate a broad range of metaphysical, theological, epistemological, and psychological doctrines. Most of these doctrines, however, either constitute, support, or elucidate the premises for his ethical conclusions. […] Spinoza’s ethical theory is […], despite the brevity of its presentation, one of the most important ethical theories of the modern era”, in Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 268 - 269

2 Consequently, the ethical purpose of the Ethics is understood as an end-purpose towards which everything in the text is oriented. Such reading effectively overturned Jacobi’s conclusion on fatalism10, but not Spinoza’s ontology, conceived in terms of determinism or naturalism.

Ontology and epistemology are here presuppositions, which “explain how a happy and self- determined life can be lived on the basis of the structures and laws of nature and human existence”11. They are the conditions of knowledge of the later parts of the Ethics, “the natural foundations of ethical theory”12, but never ethical knowledge in and for itself, not even in

Deleuze for whom the most important point is “not Spinoza’s substance, but the composition of finite modes”13, i.e. the ethical as a question of behaviour under ‘natural conditions’ or ethology14. And nothing is more common in contemporary literature than the taxonomy of the

Ethics, which breaks it down into ontology or metaphysics, epistemology, and moral theory. As

Nadler puts it, that the “metaphysics, theory of knowledge, and psychology of Parts One through Three pave the way for Spinoza’s account of human freedom and virtue and the path to happiness”, and that Spinoza’s “goal is to illuminate what constitutes the good life, how to achieve some degree of flourishing in a deterministic universe that is indifferent to human happiness”15.

10 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn, (Supplementary Texts to Schelling Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, ed. Dennis J. Schmidt, New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 106: “For the determinist, if he wants to cut to the heart of the matter [bündig sein], has to become a fatalist. From this the rest follows by itself”. 11 Spinoza’s Ethics, A Collective Commentary, ed. Michael Hampe, Ursula Renz, Robert Schnepf (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), Introduction, p. 1 12 Garrett, Don, (The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, 1996), p. 270 13 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968; trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 11. From Deleuze’s discussion with his translator quoted in the Preface to the English edition: “What interested me most in Spinoza wasn’t his Substance, but the composition of finite modes. I consider this one of the most original aspects of my book. That is: the hope of making substance turn on finite modes, or at least of seeing in substance a plane of immanence in which finite modes operate, already appears in this book. What I needed was both 1) the expressive character of particular individuals, and 2) an immanence of being”. 14 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981; trans. Robert Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 27: “…the Ethics is an ethology which, with regard to men and animals, in each case only considers their capacity for being affected. Now, from the viewpoint of an ethology of man, one needs first to distinguish between two sorts of affections: actions, […] and passions, […]”. 15 Nadler, Steven. A Book Forged in Hell, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) p.18

3 At the same time, the extremely controversial reception history centred around

Spinoza’s notion of God, i.e. on the relationship between the ethical and the ontological, portraying him as an extraordinary case breaking the basic rules of philosophical thinking, including those of language conventions as Leibniz described it16, have a conclusive validity.

Or rather, it might be said that the text one is reading does not at all presuppose the same rules, of onto-logic and of prudence, for the claims it makes. There has always been a sense that Spinoza’s

Ethics deals not only with ontology and ethics in new ways, but that it is shifting the very ground of what philosophy itself means. And in fact onto-logic and prudence, the commonly accepted criteria of interpretations, are nothing else than classical names for philosophy: the first pertains to the relationship between being and thought as metaphysics, as logic or as a science (onto-logic); and the second to the relationship between thought and action as practical wisdom, a good life, or care of the self (prudence). Neither of them, in other words, deals directly with the relationship between the determinations of being and the ethical. And it is this atypical constellation of classical distinctions in Spinoza’s Ethics, one that Hermann Cohen considered to be the ‘fundamental error of pantheism’, which, despite all refinements in scholarly exegesis, invariably resists the standard differentiation between the ontological and the ethical17.

It is to this “pantheistic fusion”18 I wish to return in my interpretation of Spinoza and claim that ‘nature’, or more precisely everything that is posited with the notion of God in Part

1 of the Ethics, is by no means ethically neutral.

16 See on this: Mogens Lærke, “The Problem of Alloglosia. Leibniz on Spinoza’s Innovative Use of Philosophical Language”, in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 17 (5) 2009: 939-953. 17 In various places Cohen formulates his critique of Spinoza, in: Kant’s Begründung der Ethik, 1877, I/19. Cohen understands Spinoza’s Ethics as a “false beginning” which “obscured the basic distinction” between the ought and the is, between ethics and ontology, and which makes a philosophy of ethics impossible in Cohen’s view. About the “fundamental error of pantheism” see: Kant’s Begründung der Erfahrung, chap. VIII, or Cohen’s major work translated into English: Religion of Reason: Out of Sources of Judaism, chap III/1 or chap VII//16. For an overview, see Franz Nauen, “Hermann Cohen’s Perceptions of Spinoza: A Reappraisal” in: AJS Review, Vol.4 (1979) pp. 111-124. Also Zeev Levy, ”Hermann Cohens Spinoza-Kritik” in: Baruch Spinoza: Seine Aufnahme durch die Jüdischen Denker in Deutschland, (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2001) pp. 177-194 18 The expression is from Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Part III/II “If creation is held to be continuous, I remain always suspended between a distinct existence and a pantheistic fusion with the Creator Being” (London and New York: Routledge, 2003/2005), p.256 (emphasis in the original).

4 We can take much further, it seems to me, the assessment of the ethical dimension of

Spinoza’s Ethics and extend it to all of its five Parts under which the ethical is, I shall claim, articulated. It is possible, as I hope to show with this thesis, to recognise the eminently ethical character of Part 1 without referring to other parts of the Ethics and clearly illustrate that, contrary to Macherey’s view, Spinoza does not begin the Ethics with “notions that are still abstract, simple words, natural ideas that acquire no real significance except at the moment when they function in the demonstrations and where they produce real effects, thus expressing a capacity that they did not have at the beginning” and that a “foundation for knowledge” is not in the least a simple “pretence to an original understanding”, whose “abstraction and indeterminacy” we need to escape19. Or as Bartuschat writes, that “in Part 1 […] one cannot speak of a content at all” (emphasis in the original) because the human being appears only in Part

2 (Axiom 1), so that “the content of the determinations of the one substance remains empty (my emphasis)” since they need, in Bartuschat’s view, to “be filled with the empirical”, i.e. with a reference to human beings20. It is possible, in other words, to ward off the last shadow German

Idealism still casts over the interpretations of Spinoza’s substance, and show that ‘God does posit things’21 and that whatever is posited with the notion of God in the Ethics has an ethical meaning.

19 Macherey, Pierre, Hegel or Spinoza (English ed. 2011) p. 49: “the pretence to an original understanding, a foundation for knowledge, is laughable. In effect, it misrecognizes the necessarily fictitious character of beginnings to which the mind is condemned in its effective history”, and “If a knowledge is possible, it is precisely through this distance that it has established in relation to its beginning; it does not “emerge” from this to develop a content that is already positively given within it but to escape from its indeterminacy and its necessary abstraction” (p. 50), hence, “[…] we must engage in a reading of Ethics that is freed from all formalist prejudices, abandoning the illusion of an absolute beginning […] Substance, attributes, modes, such as they appear in these preliminary principles, are exactly equivalent to the rough-hewn stone that the first blacksmiths needed to “begin” their work; these are notions that are still abstract, simple words, natural ideas that acquire no real significance except at the moment when they function in the demonstrations and where they produce real effects, thus expressing a capacity that they did not have at the beginning” (p. 51). 20 Bartuschat, Wolfgang, “Metaphysik und Ethik in Spinozas Ethica“ (1991) p. 16: “Im sachlichen Gang dieser Schrift […] ist vom Gegenstand der Ethik, also vom Menschen, erstmals im Axiom 1 des 2. Teils die Rede. Im Teil 1, der von Gott handelt, kann von ihm nicht die Rede sein, weil dort überhaupt von keinem Inhalt die Rede sein kann. Aus Gott, aus dessen Macht alles folgt, folgt ebendeshalb nichts Bestimmtes. […] Nur die Substanz, weil deren Einzigkeit bewiesen werden kann, erfährt eine inhaltliche Bestimmung, dass sie Gott ist, die aber leer bleibt, […]. Ihre inhaltliche Füllung bedarf der Empirie und damit eines aus der Substanz nicht Deduzierbaren“ 21 I am alluding here to Schelling’s remarks on Spinoza in his lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 69 (emphasis in the original): “Spinoza, whose system, by the

5 While I do not pretend to have definite answers to problems that arise from a return to

Spinoza’s notion of God in its immediate relation to the ethical, I do believe that the time has come to try to make a step further in clarifying some of the strongest thoughts in Spinoza. For

I do think that the abstract use of the notion of God and its narrow application in the reception history of Spinoza’s philosophy has stood for too long in the way of a fruitful analysis of what represents an exceptional response to one of the most decisive moments in modern history, namely, the question of how to redefine ethics in light of the new ontology of the infinite adopted by Galilean sciences.

To make the case that the ethical is formulated from the beginning of Spinoza’s Ethics, relies on an altogether different understanding of how the ontological and the ethical are brought together. At first sight, however, nothing in the history of philosophy seems to allow for a different conception of philosophy itself: one where ethics would no longer have the meaning of prudence and practical wisdom, to which we are accustomed, but become on the whole another name for philosophy. A name redefining the very nature of philosophical knowing, so that every assertion simultaneously indicates both, an onto-logical fact and an ethical truth. And it is this name, of an ethical vision of philosophy (and not of an ethical world vision,22 conceived in terms of power, as in Deleuze), of a different future of what philosophical knowledge itself could mean, I will claim, Spinoza gave to his Ethics.

way, is capable of higher development even as a system of mere necessity and even within its limit (that God (1) does not posit things at all and (2) already for this reason does not posit them outside Himself) …The substance of Spinoza is just object […]” and thus, in Schelling’s view (which is in this point the same as in Hegel, and in many other German Idealists) incapable of capturing the ethical dimension linked to an individual or ‘subject’. Hence, Spinoza’s system would need a further development of those (ethical, individual) elements it would not itself possess. Such reading of Spinoza’s ontology, according to which ‘the proper concerns of the human have no place in the cosmos’ (Bloch, quoted in Moir, 2019, p.53) is not very different from contemporary accounts: as the question of ethical ‘behaviour under natural (deterministic) conditions’ (Deleuze), or as ‘the attempt to establish an acceptable ethic on the unpromising foundation of […] determinism’ (Curley). In both cases, the ‘ontological’ is precisely not the ‘ethical’, and hence, as I will try to show with this thesis, not Spinoza’s position. 22 Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, Paris : Les éditions de minuit, 1968, ch. XVI : 234-251.

6 In her description of the manuscript23 of the Ethics, recently discovered in the Vatican,

Pina Totaro writes that:

“The codex does not have a frontispiece, nor does it carry any precise title. This absence is probably not accidental, nor is it inexplicable or does it have to be attributed to a simple error on the part of the scribe. Rather, it may attest to the uncertainty of the author himself who wavered in establishing a definite title. […] In the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione he speaks about his Philosophia as a work in progress in which he plans to present his thoughts at length. The title of the definite exposition of his system, Ethica, occurs for the first time in a letter to Willem van Blijenberg of 13 March 1665, but Spinoza also occasionally refers to it as “my philosophy” 24

Spinoza’s wavering about a definite title for his work is telling. The word philosophia does not capture the ethical dimension, and the word ethica not the new conception of philosophy he was trying to articulate. The conventional meanings of both ‘philosophy’ and of ‘ethics’ seem, in other words, too narrow for Spinoza, and his project in the Ethics too different from what the language of philosophy, with its distinctions and pre-conceptions, can identify.

With this thesis, I will suggest another possibility of understanding the connection between the ontological and the ethical in Spinoza’s Ethics. An avenue no one seems to have ventured into, which combines Spinoza’s intellectual indebtedness to Judaism with the main questions of early modern philosophy. My approach is, to be sure, not historical. The aim is not to show the parallels to Jewish medieval or rabbinic sources that Spinoza is using, as scholarship of the last decades has increasingly done25. And although I share Melamed’s remark that “a thorough, careful and ideology-free examination of Spinoza’s critical dialogue with

Jewish sources is still a desideratum, awaiting the formation of a critical mass of scholars

23 The Vatican manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethics (Vat. Lat. 12838) was discovered in the Vatican Library in 2011. It contains the complete text of the Ethics and predates the edition of the Opera Posthuma and its Dutch translation in the Nagelate Schriften. 24 Totaro, Pina, and Leen Spruit, The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethica. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Vol. 205/11, (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2011) p.3 25 For a recent publication on the subject, see Nadler ed., Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

7 equipped with the required philological and philosophical skills”26, I will here follow the comment Levinas wrote in his review of Wolfson’s historical studies on Spinoza27, namely that

“we should not forget that a message of a philosophy does not lie in its causes, and that grasping its inner workings does not necessarily mean to take it seriously, and finally, that to rethink a doctrine does not necessarily mean to understand it”28. Put differently, with historical studies little is changed philosophically as long as it remains a matter of ‘comparison’, of ‘influence’, or of ‘philology’, i.e. as long as the meaning directed towards the question of ethics is not made transparent. For every Jewish intervention into philosophy is, however different, related to the ethical (and therefore often to the social and the political), precisely because the ethical is the focal point of both Judaism’s and philosophy’s very dissimilitude. Or in the language of the tradition, it is always about the hope that Yaphet (philosophy and sciences), which the Talmud describes as ‘beautiful’, will “dwell in the tents of Shem” (ethics).29

Hence, before this constellation in Spinoza can be grasped historically, the task of interpreting the Ethics, if it is indeed to be based on our knowledge of both, Judaism and of philosophy, consists in proceeding from within the text itself in light of the problematic of being in relation to the ethical. If being or Spinoza’s substance is to be conceived in terms of ethics, that is, if attributes and modes are to become intelligible in their attribution to the essence of being and in their modifications of affections of being by taking ethical meaning into consideration, then the infinite being itself, or God, will have to become visible in its ethical character. When

26 Melamed, Yitzhak, Y. ed. The Young Spinoza: Metaphysician in the Making (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) p. 2-3. 27 Wolfson, Harry Austryn, The Philosophy of Spinoza, (Cleveland/New York: The World Publishing Company, 1958-61) 28 My translation of the original : « il ne faut pas oublier que le message d’une philosophie n’est pas dans ses causes ; …que saisir le mécanisme d’une pensée n’est pas encore la prendre au sérieux et, qu’en somme, faire repenser une doctrine, ce n’est pas nécessairement la faire comprendre », Emmanuel Lévinas, « Spinoza, philosophe médiéval », Revue des études juives, n° 1-2, (Paris 1937), S.119. 29 How this old theme of Shem and Yaphet could be transcribed within the contemporary context, for instance by German-Jewish thinkers, Cohen, Rosenzweig, Benjamin and Adorno into a “difference between the tragic and the messianic”, and which is just another form of the same traditional ethical concern, see Agata Bielik-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity – philosophical Marranos (London and New York: Routledge, 2014).

8 this is done, it will become manifest that in that case, ‘ethics’ no longer means prudence, and that

‘ontology’ no longer indicates merely the physis, i.e. that Spinoza’s substance posits an understanding of being, which from the very beginning of philosophical knowing reveals itself as ethical. Only then, in other words, will we be able to compare Spinoza with the thoughts of differing traditions, to assess this constellation historically, or to make use of philology for taking the measure of the initial distance, or of concluding agreements between the language of philosophy and the saying of the Hebrew ‘word’.

Viewed in this way, we need then first call to mind the main reason for Spinoza’s intervention, i.e. to recall what is about to happen in philosophy at the time Spinoza is writing.

It is the “major event” as Nietzsche famously called it, that is taking shape here, and which

Spinoza won’t be able to prevent. The very concept of being of Aristotelian Scholasticism and of the Platonism of the Greek and Latin Patristic is to lose its validity in the wake of the scientific revolution, it is the ‘end’ of traditional metaphysics, i.e. of the very specific role Plato and

Aristotle had long played in philosophy and the sciences. One of the major consequences for early modern philosophy consists in the formulation of a new ‘philosophia prima’, i.e. in systematizing the revolutionary ideas for an ontology of the infinite, together with an epistemology and logic that can account for it. The history of this task, of the new foundations in philosophy, together with the history of modern sciences and logic is well known.

The other consequence however, is less clear, its genealogy more difficult to retrace and its task more complicated than the first: with the progressive withdrawal of the traditional

(Greek and medieval) notion of being in the wake of the scientific revolution, the very connection between the determinations of being and the understanding of the ethical is breaking loose. At the time Spinoza is writing, philosophy is, in other words, about to lose ontology as a locus of axiology. Namely, an ontological structure of reality and conception of being in which all ethical philosophies hitherto, however different, could find their ontological and epistemological basis

9 for ethical claims: the matrix of a finite and hierarchised world structure with all its ethical correlations of scaled degrees of perfection, with its substantial forms and essentialism, its priority of rest over movement, or its teleological determinations.

Thus, the second major task for early modern philosophy consists in re-connecting the ethical alongside the new structure of an infinite ontology, that is, in formulating a new first philosophy with an eminently ethical role, or simply, an ethica. This implies that all notions of traditional metaphysics – matter and form, rest and movement, cognition and intellection, substance and accident, time and eternity, essence and existence, and the notion of being itself - had to be not only replaced (reconceived along the new revolutionary ontology, epistemology and logic) but replaced in a way that would allow all future understanding of the ethical to remain equally firmly attached to the now new onto-logical ground and conception of being.

This new philosophy or ethica would so play the same role as traditional metaphysics did for ethical philosophies in the past, namely provide an onto-logical and epistemological matrix along which all ethical philosophies of the future, however different they might be, will be able to find their basis for ethical claims: alongside new conceptions of perfection and contingency, of eternity and finitude, of rest and movement, of substance and essence, of perception and intellect, of extension and thought (instead of matter and form), of body and mind, of will and reason, or of human affects and freedom. In short, precisely all of the conceptions we find in

Spinoza’s Ethics. This is, as I understand it, the main reason for Spinoza’s intervention: to prevent the breaking apart of the connection between the ontological and the ethical or between facts and values, which is taking place in this moment of our intellectual history.

In scholarship, this ethical task of early modern philosophy never gained a significant foothold and a place of its own, because, historically, it did not actually materialise. Instead, philosophy took another direction, as Blandine Kriegel clearly demonstrates in her new book

10 “Spinoza: L’autre voie” [Spinoza: another path]30, and the gap it never closed (between the is and the ought, facts and values) became the parameters of reality within which modernity found itself. Hence, strictly speaking, there is no history of a question whose unrealized future became the very modus of the present we live in. And in this, there is little doubt that the ‘God’ whom

“we have killed” (Nietzsche) is nothing else than this ethical task philosophy did not carry out at the beginning of modernity.

This is not to say that it will suffice to return to Spinoza and find a solution as one finds a lost key in the attic of an old house, for the door the key opens is no longer the same. But it is perhaps possible to shed some light on the question itself, on what belongs to it and what doesn’t. Interpreting Spinoza anew in light of the question of the determination of being in relation to the ethical, which the notion of God designates, can bring us a step closer, I hope, in understanding on the one hand, the meaning and the limitations of Spinoza’s intervention, and on the other, why no later philosophy could permanently shift the early modern split between ethics and the sciences (between the human and the natural world). Neither philosophies of consciousness and subjectivity, nor philosophies of existence and of language, nor the Heideggerian return to the question of Being as reappropriation of Greek philosophy.

And clearly, the fact that for contemporary analytic metaphysics the question of the relationship between ‘naturalism and normativity’ is a major problem and its resolution still one that offers no alternative to either reductionism or transcendentalism, only attests to the long history of this never-ending predicament.

The interpretation, therefore, that I undertake here is one from within the text itself and based on the possibility of thinking the ontological and the ethical together, the philosophia, as

Spinoza calls it in the TdIE and in his Letters, now synonymous with his ethica.

30 Kriegel, Blandine, Spinoza, L’autre voie, (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2018)

11 §2. The Argument

I shall claim that Spinoza’s Ethics is best understood within the context of first philosophy, i.e. within the early modern question of foundations – as in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, more typically associated with the early modern new beginnings and with the effort to substitute traditional first philosophy or metaphysics – introducing new revolutionary ideas within the frame of a system and of a method. The details of any comparison between

Spinoza, Descartes, or Aristotle are left to individual chapters. My overall argument is that works on foundations in philosophy require a reading in accordance with their own objective, namely, that maintaining a clear distinction between systems of foundations and the prospective sciences or disciplines that are to emerge from such grounds in future is paramount.

Foundational works are concerned with the elaboration of fundamental principles, prime axioms and basic conceptions upon which other sciences or disciplines are to eventually later establish their own field of positive investigation and research. This is true of Spinoza’s Ethics, as I will try to show, as it is of any other work concerned with foundations31.

The implication this has for the Ethics is the starting point of my analysis: that its overall ethical purpose consists not so much in providing an account of moral theory, but rather, in presenting an elaborated system of foundational knowledge claims to serve as a basis for future ethical matters in other disciplines (in political, legal or moral theories, biology, medicine or other). And moreover, as should be clear at the end of this thesis, also as an ethical foundation for philosophy itself. Consequently, I will abstain from the usual taxonomy of the Ethics, from its division into metaphysics or ontology, epistemology, and moral theory. The reason is similar to what John Rawls remarked in his introduction to the history of moral philosophy in the period between 1600-1800, “The problem […] was not the content of morality but its basis:

How we could know it and be moved to act from it. Particular moral questions are examined

31 As in Descartes or later Kant.

12 for the light they throw on those matters” because, as he continues “The problem was how the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, of Newton and Huyghens and others, were to be understood in relation to religion and morals. Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant answer this question in different ways, but they face a common problem”32.

Put differently, the ethical in the Ethics is primarily a question of truth, which refers to what we need to know of God, of the mind, of human affects, bondage and freedom, so that knowledge

(of nature and of the human being) can be based upon ethical-philosophical foundations. This implies that all concepts in the Ethics (substance or causality, freedom or affects, will or reason) are ontological and ethical at the same time, or that all relations of the ontological are at the same time intelligible as relations of the ethical.

I am well aware that this description does not conform to any standard view, and since there is no literature to refer to for a similar approach, let me offer here two brief examples: the determinations of the two attributes and Spinoza’s rejection of ‘free will’33:

I. The example of the two attributes

The difference between the attribute of Extension and the attribute of Thought in the Ethics is one of essence and not a difference of substance (E1d4); there is no causal relation between the attributes (E1p3); and no attribute, or any of their modifications, can be conceived (E1p10) through the other (both attributes are causally and conceptually independent), hence, reality is not substantially distinct, but essentially differentiated and substantially one.

Now, if this is a foundational knowledge claim of an ethica understood as ‘first philosophy’ whose determinations are to serve as a basis for future ethical questions in other disciplines as

32 Rawls, John, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. by Barbara Herman (Cambridge/Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000) pp 10-11 33 These two examples are just a simple outline for the connection between an ontological fact and an ethical truth. A detailed account of the two attributes is provided in the following chapters, whereas the notions of human freedom and will are not part of this thesis and are used here to merely illustrate the overall claim I am making regarding the connection between the ontological and the ethical in the Ethics.

13 well as in philosophy, then we need to know the determinations of the attributes because first, this is the case, in the sense of an ontological fact; and second, because this same case is of eminent ethical importance.

On that account, we can say that: any kind of positing a substantial difference between

Extension and Thought, or the positing of a causality or conceptual intelligibility between them, inevitably leads to ethically highly problematic consequences, i.e. to unethical results and not only to a theoretical impasse or epistemic error. Such models namely, as we know them from substance-dualism, from (one-sided) ontologies of idealism and materialism, rationalism and empiricism, or from contemporary scientific naturalism and the understanding cognitive sciences seem to have of causality between the modes of Extension and modes of Thought.

It is necessary therefore, or an ‘imperative’ for every ontology (either in philosophy or ontologies other sciences are working with) to be based on these determinations, namely, on the substantial oneness and on the attributive essential duality. The substantial unity needs to be maintained for all finite entities (finite modifications of the substance), while at the same time neither causal relations nor conceptual models of explanations can be used for the relations between anything that falls under the attribute of Extension or under the attribute of Thought, if the same philosophies or sciences are to yield over time ethical, as well as true (ontologically valid) results within their own field of positive investigation and research.

How this can play out within the framework of a specific science has been clearly demonstrated by Henri Atlan in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Biology and Cognitivism: Spinoza and

Contemporary Biology. Atlan, himself a biologist and practitioner of medicine, strongly criticises any form of ontological reductionism in contemporary biology and cognitive neurosciences, and thus represents a case in point for a fruitful return to Spinoza in questions of the relationship between the ontological and the ethical in contemporary life sciences34.

34 Atlan, Henri, Cours de philosophie biologique et cognitiviste: Spinoza et la biologie actuelle (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2018). An English translation is forthcoming by EUP.

14 Hence, if we are attentive enough, we can recognise in the determinations of Spinoza’s attributes a strong critique directed towards the whole history of philosophy:

Namely, of philosophy’s own original positioning, leaning commonly either towards different forms of idealism and rationalism or towards different versions of materialism and empiricism.

And nothing exemplifies more clearly philosophy’s own difficulties in abandoning the ontological and epistemological pattern of either materialism or idealism, than the entire reception history of Spinoza’s Ethics. Many contemporary scholars, as did great philosophers before them, are still looking for what is ‘first’ in Spinoza. For Schelling it was “what is extended is obviously the First, that alone which is truly primary, of the two. Thinking only relates to what is extended and could not be at all without it” 35. For Melamed it is “thought that has a clear priority over the other attributes”36. The title of his book, which opposes Thought to Substance

(and Thought to Being)37 is already indicative of that same effort to accommodate Spinoza within the traditional understandings of philosophy’s own beginnings, i.e. within the question of identity between being and thought, from Parmenides to Hegel. But again, this amounts to vaulting over the primacy of the one being in the Ethics, which has no counterpart. For there is clearly no pair

35 Schelling on Spinoza in: On the History of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge 1994), p. 68. Heidegger has later a very similar view on Descartes, which is crucial to his overall negative assessment of modernity described in terms of ‘Thinghood’ and of mere quantities as ‘mathematical knowledge’ well suited to an understanding where “Being is equated with constant presence-at-hand”, precisely because the “material Nature” is supposed to be “the fundamental stratum” of reality in Descartes, i.e. (again) the ‘first’ of the two substances “defining the world as res extensa”. And hence cannot, according to Heidegger, account for qualities or values. Heidegger can therefore say of Descartes, as he does on other places of Spinoza, that “he is far behind the Schoolmen”, i.e. falling far behind medieval ontology. See Being and Time I. 3 § 19-21. To be sure, such ‘mistakes’ in understanding the early modern systems are no simple exegetical errors. But rather a clear indication of how deep the revolutionary break with the philosophical tradition in fact runs, so that any attempt to think or readjust the early modern along traditional lines (here of the relationship between ‘being and thought) must fail. Put differently, Being is in the early modern systems of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz not identical with - or opposed to - Thinking as it is in Parmenides or in Hegel. This is to become clearer throughout the chapters of this thesis. 36 Melamed (2013), p. 193 37 Melamed (2013) Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought. The last chapter (6) of the book is entitled The Multifaceted Structure of Ideas and the Priority of Thought. See expressions in § 7 of the same chapter: “The priority of Thought and Spinoza’s rejection of Idealism”, p. 191 (Melamed argues against a reductive idealism in Spinoza); and § 8 “Spinoza’s dualism of Thought and Being”, p. 196. Throughout the book, Melamed reverts to the opposition “between thought and being” (as on p. 196), i.e. to traditional understandings of philosophy. Or as he explains in the introduction, p. xxii “I argue that Spinoza is a dualist – not a mind-body dualist as he is commonly conceived to be, but rather a dualist of thought and being”. (my emphasis).

15 of being and thought, (Sein and Denken; gr. einai and noein) in the Ethics, only of extension and thought.

Being itself is one.

Put differently, if philosophy always tends towards various forms of ontological dualism in its original positioning, towards, in Spinoza’s terms, a ‘substantial’ separation of the one reality, from Greek Antiquity to its contemporary versions of rationalism, empiricism, naturalism, logical positivism, existentialism or constructivism, then philosophy as philosophy is inevitably, and without grasping the stakes, producing “shallow and hollow foundations”38 for the ethical.

II. The example of free will and freedom39

Human freedom is in the Ethics explicitly not grounded in the notion of free will. Because:

1) The human will (as any other faculty of the human mind, “understanding, desiring, loving etc.”

E2p48 and p49) cannot determine itself ‘out of nothing’, nihilo nihil fit, i.e. absolutely.

2) The will cannot be conceived independently from the ideas whose content single acts of volition

affirm or deny. With the word ‘will’ we refer to specific connections rather than to an

independent faculty of the mind, that is, to single acts of volition, which affirm or negate our

own (true or false, more complete or partial) concrete understanding of something.

3) The will cannot be thought separately from the human intellect. They are “one and the same”

(E2p49 Cor.). Spinoza does not understand “by will […] the desire. […] by which the mind

wants a thing or avoids it” (E2p48 Schol.). Hence, he refers to the “medieval invention of a

Third Faculty”, the Thomistic voluntas40 as a faculty “intermediate between desire (orexis) and

38 I am referring here to a poem that Halevi,12th century Jewish-Spanish poet, wrote in defence of Judaism and against philosophy as a wisdom “built on shallow and hollow foundation”, in Selected Poems of Jehudah Halevi, ed. Heinrich Brody and Nina Salaman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946), pp. 16-17. To be sure, the opposition here is not one between ‘religion’ and ‘knowledge’, but between knowledge based on ethical foundations and knowledge with ‘weak’ ethical foundations, i.e. philosophy in Halevi’s view. 39 I wrote about this subject elsewhere in more details, “Der Wille und die Vernunft: Kant und Spinoza über die Grundlagen der Ethik”, in: Motivationen für das Selbst: Kant und Spinoza im Vergleich, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, Herzog August Bibliothek, Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2012, pp 15-31 40 Aquinas, Summa theologica, I, quarto 83. article 3, reply

16 intellect (logos) […], which was entirely lacking for the Greeks”41. The distinction between will

and intellect as two separate faculties of the mind assigns freedom to the will (values) and truth

to the intellect (facts). Thus, it is against an understanding of freedom as grounded in “The Latin

liberum arbitrium (free will) [which] replaced the Greek notion of autoexousion (authority over

oneself) with that of an indifferent choice between opposites, and thus locates the entire concept

of liberty in this indifference of choice”42 that Spinoza is arguing in the Ethics.

4) The human capacity of willing, of which we are at any time conscious, is not freedom. It is simple

consciousness of a Self, “men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their volitions

and their appetite” (E1 App.). But human freedom is a virtue for Spinoza and not already given

with the simple fact of consciousness, nor is it a matter of (indifferent) choice, i.e. real freedom is

an affirmation of the ethical, “determined to acting from an affect of joy” (E5p 10 Schol.), and

hence “the action or virtue, called morality” (E5p4 Schol.) not a constraint imposed on us.

5) The sequence of causes determining our will (modifications of the attribute of Thought) are

going back ad infinitum (E2p 48). We can therefore never know the whole complexity of causal

relations, which leads to certain volitions and individual actions. But “each of us has – in part

at least, if not absolutely – the power to understand himself and his affects” (E5p4 Schol.).

6) Both attributes (Thought and Extension) are causally and conceptually independent. What

determines the human will are thus modifications of the attribute of Thought, not of Extension.

There is no physical determinism of the mind in Spinoza, since the attribute of Extension cannot

cause anything in the attribute of Thought. The various ways by which we conceive of things

(including the affections of the body, E5p 4) are determinant of what we affirm or deny in will.

This affirmation or negation of a specific content of our thoughts (adequate or inadequate)

expressed in volitions is a form of judgement. Hence, there is no psychological blind mechanism

41 Cassin, Barbara, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), in the entry on “Liberty”, p. 1234 42 Ibid., p. 575. For the absence of a problematics of will in Greek Antiquity and the medieval invention of a ‘Third Faculty’ (thelêsis sive voluntas), see entry on “Will”, pp 1234-1237 (Claude Romano), where he says that: “The lack of an equivalent concept of will in ancient Greek thought can be established through a few examples. In Aristotle, the act of making a deliberate choice (proairesis) is not an indication of a power of self-determination analogous to the will, but refers to a judgement of the practical intellect that starts from a wish or recognition of a desired end (bouleusis) […] Thus the choice itself is an act of the nous (intellect)”, p. 1234

17 to which we would be passively exposed, but “the power of the mind defined by understanding”

(E5 Praef.). For Spinoza “locates freedom in knowledge rather than volition”43.

Thus, following my working hypothesis, Spinoza refutes the traditional notion of free will because it is ontologically and ethically erroneous at the same time. The Latin liberum arbitrium does not reflect the truth about the human mind nor is it supportive of morality or of freedom. The late medieval voluntas, against which Spinoza is arguing, is in fact conceived along the same model as the divine creation ‘out of nothing’, that is, as the “unlimited sovereignty of a will”44 now on the human scale as free will.

In consequence, the liberum arbitrium generates an understanding of the ethical as grounded in the (absolute and non-determined) mastery or power of the will. Such absolute ‘power of willing’ is either absolutely condemnable for not willing the good (its sentence as merciless as it was in medieval jurisdictions), or absolutely unintelligible, since the will has no ground, i.e. nothing for its determination. It has no limits (it relates to the infinite), it is not bound by anything else (as, for instance, later by the notion of duty in 18th and 19th century German philosophy) than by its own capacity (potentia) of willing. Hence, the free will is an arbitrary will. And the ethical, insofar as it is reflected in the notion of human freedom is obviously not determinant of what is asserted in will, since freedom is equal to opposite choices. As a result, the will can assert itself as ‘free’ at the antipode of virtue, i.e. as free in destruction.45 A design for despotism.

43 Gatens, Moira and Lloyd, Genevieve, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, past and present (London/New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 41 44 Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1985) where he speaks about the divine will in Scholasticism and its adaptation to the Aristotelian unmoved mover, p. 171: “the formula that the Creator had done His work for no other purpose than to demonstrate His power omitted man entirely from the determination of the world’s meaning and approached the voluntaristic formulas that closed the sequence of development, formulas whose function was not to answer but to reject the question. The world as the pure performance of reified omnipotence, as a demonstration of the unlimited sovereignty of a will to which no questions can be addressed – this eradication even of the right to perceive a problem meant that, at least for man, the world no longer possessed an accessible order”. What Blumenberg is touching upon here, are the unethical consequences such understanding of divine will and freedom in fact leads to, and which are insofar comparable to Spinoza’s rejection of such understanding of divine will and freedom in the first part of the Ethics. 45 Contemporary debates in philosophy caught up in the opposition between free will and determinism, both conceived absolutely, represent, from this point of view a historical backlash.

18 Further, the conflict, which the liberum arbitrium conceived as a faculty separate from the intellect introduces within the one and the same human consciousness (between two separate faculties of the mind and not simply between two opposite volitions) is a form of coercion.

Insofar the “I will” tries to overpower the “I”, i.e. to subjugate it as something external to itself, the Self is ‘in itself’ never free. The ethical assigned to the will appears as imposed from above the Self within oneself. Thus, in order to feel free, the “I” will try to shake off the ‘burden’ of the ethical coming from the will. Or, in order to follow the ethical to shake off the ‘burden’ of freedom, i.e. the ‘burden’ of having a Self. Hence, either I do violence to myself (by subjugating myself to my own or someone else’s will), or to others (by subjugating them to my own or someone else’s freedom). It is either morals or freedom, but in this form none of them is bona fide.

A design for pathologies.

In addition, the same assumed separation, between will and the intellect, changes the conception we have of intellection, i.e. of our own cognition. It assigns truth to understanding alone, and values only to the willing. A design for nihilism.

But there is no need for us to go into this any further in order to illustrate why the traditional notion of free will is indeed a fallacy.

Rather, let us conclude with a quote regarding its application in political theories from

Hannah Arendt for whom “[…] this identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will. For it leads either to a denial of human freedom – namely, if it is realized that whatever men may be, they are never sovereign – or to the insight that freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic can be purchased only at the price of the freedom, i.e. the sovereignty, of all others. Within the conceptual framework of traditional philosophy, it is indeed very difficult to

19 understand how freedom could have been given to men under the condition of non- sovereignty”, so that “If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce”46.

From the perspective we have now reached, one can say that, according to Spinoza, any theory grounding human freedom or morals on the notion of free will (or on anything that this notion entails, including the consciousness of the Self, which from the 18th century onwards still serves as the locus of freedom and of subjectivity in philosophy, from Fichte to Sartre, or Hegel to Marx, and beyond. Or on the determinations of physicalism that casts itself as in opposition to ‘free will’ but is nothing more than its logical reversal into physicalism and no less absolute) inevitably leads to unethical results as well as to misconceptions about what the human mind is.

It is now clear, I think, how the notions of free will and of freedom in the Ethics pertain simultaneously to both: to their ontological truth and to their ethical meaning47. Consequently, one can do the same with all the conceptions of the Ethics and show their two sides, one ontological and one ethical48.

Whereby it is obvious that, if the ethical in the Ethics is a question of truth, which refers to what we need to know (of nature and of the human being) in order to provide ethical- philosophical foundations for knowledge, because Spinoza’s system works as a philosophia prima, this implies that the ethical meaning for none of the concepts in the Ethics is explained (as I have just done with the examples above) or separately introduced to the reader by Spinoza. Put differently, this implies that, through the geometric form of demonstration, the ethical meaning

46 Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” in: Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books,1954-2006), pp.162-163 47 It is also clear how far we are now from those countless remarks we find in literature about the “illusory notion of freedom” in Spinoza, “since everything is determined”, as MacIntyre, for instance, puts it in his A Short History of Ethics (1967), p. 135. I will deal later with what is meant by the Latin determinatio, i.e. with the notion of determination in the text (in the context of causation), and argue that it has nothing to do with some blind mechanism, neither for the modifications of Extension nor of Thought, as many assume it to be the case. In other words, I will try to show that ‘purposiveness’ does not altogether disappear with the Aristotelian final cause, but is, as all other traditional Greek and medieval scholastic key notions, re-conceived and to be sought here in Spinoza along the notion of perfection in relation to existence. To think that nothing replaced the Aristotelian telos in the early modern systems, or at least that no attempts have been made to successfully replace it with something more aligned with the new sciences, is certainly a widespread, but nevertheless simplistic view. 48 As for instance with the conception of the union of body and mind, of affects or of reason, or of any other.

20 is already contained within the ontological determinations and is defined together with what is, for Spinoza, an established ‘truth’.

Now, if the ethical meaning in the Ethics pertains to every determination of the is like the other side of the same coin, we are dealing here with nothing else than the Janus-faced structure of reality itself, namely with Spinoza’s famous ‘pantheism’. But now we have a quite different echelon of meanings that lies in this historic label, and which leads us back to the original question of this thesis concerning the new possibility of understanding the connection between the ontological and the ethical in Spinoza’s Ethics. In other words, because the geometric form of demonstration formulates only determinations of the is (of what is the case) and claims apodictic certainty of an ‘exact science’ for a philosophy defined as ethica, the task of an interpretation consists in grasping at once what is posited together: the ontological as well as the ethical side of any of its claims, from the beginning to the end of the Ethics.

Overall, if I am not mistaken, this means that:

1. Spinoza’s Ethics is a system eminently concerned with ethics.

2. The ethical (the ought) and the ontological (the is) are in no way distinct.

3. The geometric form of demonstration presents us only with the is.

4. The ethical refers to the knowledge of what we need to know of God, of the human mind, of human

affects, bondage and freedom.

5. The ethics in the Ethics is in all of its five parts.

6. The title Ethics refers to what philosophical knowledge could be, namely ethical to its very

foundations.

7. This systematic elaboration of fundamental tools in the Ethics provides us with all the

conceptions Spinoza considered to be of great consequence for the future of the ethical in all

sciences (natural or humanistic).

This means, in other words, that the ethical in the Ethics neither ‘surpasses’ the world of facts (as in idealism) nor disappears into the ‘scientific worldview’ (as in empiricism). On the

21 contrary, the ethical is firmly grounded in the facticity of being. Thus, the classical distinction between onto-logic and prudence does not, from this perspective, apply to Spinoza’s philosophy for two reasons: a) no early modern system of foundations is drawn on this distinction, i.e. within the context of a first philosophy trying to systematically replace the core ideas of traditional metaphysics, this distinction does not apply to Spinoza any more than to Descartes or Leibniz, or than it would to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and b) for the reversibility between the ontological and the ethical, i.e. for the unusual view Spinoza has on where the ethical ‘resides’, namely within being itself, or where the ethical ‘begins’, namely with our understanding of the infinite being itself, or God.

Instead of the standard distinctions we find in literature, one can simply follow the text and speak of the knowledge of: God, the human mind, affects, bondage and freedom in the Ethics.

Because, if my working hypothesis holds, this knowledge is always ethical. What is demonstrated more geometrico is all that ‘is necessary to know’ (of causality, of extension, of substantiality, of perfection, of the mind, of the affects or of freedom) for philosophy to be an ethica, i.e. for a ‘first philosophy’ to provide other disciplines with those main concepts, which are of vital ethical significance and the consequences of their application in any science (social or natural sciences) ethically critical. Spinoza’s Ethics is therefore neither ‘naturalistic’ nor ‘humanistic’ in the commonly understood sense, but rather both, facts and values, are posited together in the ideas of philosophical reasoning, so that truth always signifies both.

And it is this way of thinking the connection between the ontological and the ethical, where facts and values are no longer dissociated, that I will follow in my analysis of the first part of the Ethics.

§3. The function of the notion of God

22 The notion of God posits its own ‘doctrinal complex’49, a web of fundamental connections between ontological, epistemological and ethical elements. It is arguably the most difficult and ambiguous notion in philosophy, from where being itself is referred to, conceived of, posited and determined in a certain way. It is being’s own being, and nothing else, that is determined with the notion of God (as simple and eternal, an absolute power or actual infinity), with this tautology par excellence of which nothing contingent could traditionally be predicated, a concept of the intellect of which nothing is grasped through imagination or representation.

The apotheosis of abstraction. Hence, reading a philosophical text that makes use of the notion of God, entirely depends upon how we understand its workings50.

The underlying paradigms in philosophy and the sciences shifted in the early modern period, away from Aristotelian Scholasticism and medieval Platonism, in the sense Kuhn51 described it. Nevertheless, the function that the notion of God performs in a philosophical text is still the same: as the first principle of being and cognition; as the first cause; as the unity that posits an intelligible reality with the proof of God’s existence; and as the question of ethics it raises.

This fact is not, as is often believed among intellectual historians, a remnant of Scholasticism in the vocabularies of Descartes, Spinoza or Leibniz52. Rather, as we shall see, the notion of

God plays a central role in the early modern philosophical and scientific revolution in the articulation of a complete redefinition of the notion of being, whose function will determine human knowledge anew, that is, revolutionize the whole of the Western episteme. In other words, if the function of the notion of God is still the same in the early modern period as it was in

49Gilson, Etienne, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, (Sheed and Ward, London, 1955), p. 238: “A doctrinal complex is a more or less organic whole, made up of interrelated theses which are frequently found united despite the diversity of their respective origins” 50 Nothing is more misleading than the simple use of the word ‘God’ in literature, as the subject or the object of a sentence, such as ‘God is a single substance’, ‘God is x’ etc., if no explanation is provided for this notion and Spinoza’s statements simply reiterated. Then in fact, ‘God’ remains a notion without a content, an empty word. 51 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 4th ed., 2012). 52 This view is widespread among intellectual historians, we find it prominently in Hans Blumenberg on Leibniz and Descartes in his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983) or in A. Koyré in his Essays on the idea of God in Descartes: “Essai sur l’idée de dieu et les preuves de son existence chez Descartes”, (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1922).

23 medieval philosophy, it is because no other notion could have actually ‘launched a revolution’, that is, radically changed from within the content it carries, namely, to entirely redefine the very meaning of being and of knowing, of causality and of reality, of infinity and of finitude, and raise once again the question of ethics. The following is a brief summary of this function, of what is common to medieval and early modern systems.

a) The first principle

As the principle of being and cognition (principium essendi et cognoscendi53), the notion of God refers to the ‘highest’ or first principle of knowledge. Hence the principle, the Latin principium in the sense of beginning, origin or source is not the same as the cause, that is, as the Latin causa in its meaning of the relationship between cause and effect. As the highest principle of knowledge in philosophical literature, the notion of God refers to the origin of our knowledge from where we conceive of being as well as from where we conceive of our own cognition in its relation to knowing. Thus, it is the principle through which fundamental conceptions of being and of cognition are determined in a text: such as perfection, causality or reality in the realm of being, or of ontology. And, in the realm of the cogitatio or of epistemology, the conceptions of reason, perception, or knowledge. In brief, the function of the notion of God as the principle of being and cognition, consists in determining the conceptual framework in ontology and epistemology.54

53 The ‘principium essendi et cognoscendi’ as it was used in all major works in medieval and Renaissance philosophy. As for instance in Cusa’s “On God as Not-other”[Deus igitur per ‘non aliud’ significatus essendi et cognoscendi omnibus principium est. Quem si quis subtrahit, nihil manet neque in re, neque in cognitione] “Therefore God, who is signified by ‘Not-other’ is, for all things, the principle of being and of cognition. If anyone were to remove God, nothing would remain either in reality or in knowledge”, Nicolai de Cusa, Directio Speculantis Seu De Non Aliud (Opera Omnia Heidelbergensis, III/10. Baur, Wilpert ed., Meiner Verlag, 1944) p.7. Or as we find it later in Hegel: “Not to mention the task that touches the interest of philosophy most nearly at the present moment: to put God back again at the peak of philosophy, absolutely prior to all else as the one and only ground of everything, the unique principium essendi et cognoscendi, after all this time in which he has been put beside other finite things, or put off right to the end as a postulate that springs from absolute finitude” (WGH, 2:195), Aufsätze aus dem Kritischen Journal der Philosophie (1802/1803) in: Jenaer Schriften 1801-1807 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1970), p. 195 (emphasis in the original). 54 This distinction, between cause and principle is traditionally seen as in accordance with the interpretations of Scripture. As in John 1,1, where the Greek archē (Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος) is translated in Latin as principium (In principio erat verbum), and usually rendered in English as At the beginning was the word. The logos that was here in the

24

b) The first cause

As the first cause (causa prima), the notion of God refers to the ‘first’ or uncaused cause in the chain of natural causality. As the first cause, whose effects are reflected in the causal chain of natural things, it refers to the generation of beings, where ‘first’, in contrast to the meaning in

‘first’ principle, now means first in time. Its function consists in determining such conceptions as being and becoming (individuation); actuality and potentiality; quality and quantity; matter and form

(or extension and thought); substance and accidence (or substance and modes). In other words, what has been traditionally called ‘the power of God’, its dynamis and entelechy. Put simply, the notion of

God as the first cause (causa prima) determines what causes finite or infinite things to exist in the way that they do.

These two points of the same function are thematically one ‘of the beginnings’, or we can say that every use of the notion of God in philosophy, in the sense mentioned, represents a doctrine of a twofold beginning: of principle and of cause. What an author means by God translates here for the reader as an understanding of these two aspects of its use in philosophical writing, i.e. a clarification of what exactly follows in a text for the ontological and epistemological conceptual framework of the first principle of being and cognition, as well as for the categories of existence and becoming of beings of the first cause.

c) The Unity

beginning is explicitly not a beginning in time, but one of the origins of intelligibility: a principle or archē. Or in the words of Maimonides: “There is a difference between first (cause) and beginning (or principle). The latter exists in the thing of which it is the beginning, or co-exists with it; it need not precede it […}”, and about the first verse of Genesis for the Hebrew word reshith, derived from rosh (head), in relation to the creation/beginning of the world, Maimonides explains that: “For this reason Scripture employs the term “bereshit” (in a principle), in which the beth is a preposition denoting ‘in’. The true explanation of the first verse of Genesis is as follows: “In a principle God created the beings above and the things below””,, in: Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, Part II, Chap. XXX, (New York: Dover Publications, 2014) p.212

25 As unity of being and cognition, the notion of God refers to the possibility of knowledge, scientific or philosophical. Affirming such primal unity, where being and cognition (gr. noein- einai) correspond to each other prior to any determination (of a particular being), amounts to providing a proof that, and how such unity is given in reality. Put differently, to all philosophers making use of the notion of God, this notion has its fundamentum in re, its foundation in the thing itself. In other words, God necessarily is - or ‘exists’. All such proofs, about the existence of God, are, without exception self-referential in their argumentative structure. The content such a form of argument generates, and which applies in our philosophical history only to the concept of

God, posits the conditions under which reality is claimed to be intelligible.

For this function of unity, as the safeguarding of truth, as the warrant of the Greek aletheia, or of the Latin veritas, the various types of proofs have always been ontological (ontological arguments) and epistemological (epistemological justifications). Whatever is attributed to God: perfection, simplicity, incorporeality, or infinity is sheer positivity of being. And whatever assertion can be made about it: as knowing, perceiving or as an ideatum, is the positing of the simple fact of cognition. And it is their unifying common point of reference, which enables an intelligible reality that eminently is with God.

Hence, what is ‘proven’ with the various proofs of God’s existence in philosophy is that knowledge, or science (modern Galilean or medieval Aristotelian and Platonian) is possible.

What an author means by God translates here for the reader in understanding how such a unifying function is used in a philosophical writing, i.e. of clarifying what follows from the proof of the existence of God for the position an author holds on the possibility of scientific or philosophical knowledge.

From the historical point of view, it is not surprising therefore that the notion of God disappears from philosophical usage altogether as soon as this unity, where being and cognition

(gr. noein-einai) correspond to each other prior to any determination (ontological or

26 epistemological), was called into question. Namely with Kant’s distinction between the categories of reason (belonging to the structures of our mind) on the one hand, and the world

‘as it is’ (the ens in general: being and essence of things) on the other, with no other (common) ground than the synthetic unity of reason. That the notion of God did not ‘survive’ its transformation into a mere ‘postulate of practical reason’ in Kant, i.e. its transformation into a mere ethical concept that takes away its function in ontology and epistemology, is well known.

d) The Question of Ethics

The three previous points, which we also find in the title of one of Bruno’s major work, namely

Cause, Principle and Unity, provides a good summary55 of what can be said about the role Of God in philosophy. Or more precisely, what can be said about its function concerning being and knowing, so that one question still remains: ethics.

Ethics, in relation to the notion of God in philosophical writing, is not another aspect of its function, which would come as an addition, but a question that involves, or reflects them all.

The ethical position depends upon what is posited with the notion of God: upon notions of being and becoming; matter and form; substance and accident, or perfection, causality, and rationality. This relation of dependence, of an ethic on its ontological and epistemological matrix, is often portrayed in medieval philosophy as one of analogy, image or of imitation (as in Imitatio Dei), and in the early modern as one of reflection, mirror or participation. Thus, we can say that the question of ethics in philosophies that make use of the notion of God entirely depends on what an author considers of being and of knowing to be ethically relevant or binding56. And whatever is considered as

55 Bruno, Giordano. Cause, Principle, and Unity (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1976) 56 Every ethical philosophy justifies its claims through ontological and epistemological elements. Which elements an ethical theory will use in order to validate its claims, that is, which elements it considers as relevant is a theoretical choice made in assumption of its consequences for ethical practice. This is what I mean by ethically ‘binding’, namely what an author considers of ontology and epistemology to be ethically relevant. I am using the word ‘binding’ here for the fact that ethics always claims to be in some way authoritative, or an imperative, precisely because it is grounded or justified through the facticity of ontology and epistemic truths. No other discipline in philosophy has therefore such difficulties with grounding (or justification) than ethics or moral

27 ethically binding - such as various types of causality determining conceptions of freedom and action, different understandings of the mind’s faculties determining the notions of will and reason, or various definitions of essence and substance, determining relations between body and mind, and which an ethical philosophy reflects - is a theoretical choice made by an author in anticipation of its practical use or pedagogic practice. Such undertaking, of making ethics ontologically and epistemologically binding, and therefore authoritative and not arbitrary, consists of the same set of relations the notion of God posits in its function (of the three previous points).

Put differently, what has been called the knowledge of God, refers to the one and the same knowledge for the sciences and for ethics. But the rules of its ethical appropriation in a text, that is, the rules of how the ethical (values) conforms to the ontological (facts), and which can be derivative or axiomatic, are essentially incomplete, owing to the system of strategic choices, so that ethics always remains a question, not only of knowledge, but of wisdom. That is, a question of what philosophy in its combination of thinking and acting ultimately is.

§4. Chapter outline

This is in short, the content of this dissertation, which consists of two main sections: the first is on the Knowledge of God and the second on the Ethical Foundations in Philosophy.

The first section is centred on substance ontology of the first part of the Ethics, and on the complex role of the notion of God in the text. And the second section is centred on the ethical meaning of these same ontological claims from the first part of the Ethics.

The first section has two main chapters, one on the ‘one God’, and the other on the

‘two attributes’ in Spinoza’s ontology. And the second section has one main chapter with four

philosophy, precisely because it tries to ground or to create a bond (a binding force) out of its own. And wherever the source of ethical knowledge is considered to reside, either in norms, in the greatest good for all or in the laws of reason, ethical knowledge claims to be binding, authoritative or un-conditioned, i.e. well justified.

28 separate sections dealing with the ‘ethical foundations’ in philosophy, that is, with the question of where the ethical knowledge begins for Spinoza and with ‘the preliminaries in theory and practice’ that follow from my interpretation of the text.

The first chapter examines the question why Spinoza begins with the knowledge of

God, that is, with the knowledge of substance ontology in a system defined as ‘ethics’. It provides an analysis of Spinoza’s reconfiguration of traditional categories of being, of which the category substance is the most important one. The chapter concludes with an account of the philosophical and historical background to the topic of the oneness of being, that is, to the so- called ‘pantheism’ in question here.

The second chapter examines the role of the intellect in the conceptions of the two attributes, of Extension and of Thought, that is, of the intellectual perception in relation to the difference we perceive of being between the extended and the thinking nature. Whereby I contrast Spinoza’s notion of the attribute of Extension with the medieval scholastic notion of matter. The second part of this chapter is dedicated to the examination of the epistemology in its relation to the infinite in Spinoza, as well as in revolutionary thought of the early modern.

And concludes with an analysis of Spinoza’s notion of substance in the context of ‘knowing’ or epistemological access to infinite and to finite things.

The second section of this thesis examines the question of where ethics begins for

Spinoza, by providing an analysis of the main ontological doctrines that have been presented in the previous chapters. And provides a detailed account of the ethical meaning of each of the major doctrines, that is, of what follows from the interpretation I suggest overall in this thesis for our understanding of the ethical in philosophy according to Spinoza’s Ethics. This dissertation concludes with a short description of the future task of philosophy concerning the relationship between the ethical and the ontological.

29 If there is one conviction shared by the majority of contemporary philosophers, this is it: the one is not [l’un n’est pas].57 Christian Jambet Part I Knowledge of God

Chapter I The One God

1.1 The priority of the knowledge of God

It has become commonplace in scholarly literature to answer the question of beginnings in the Ethics with reference to causality as reflecting “the real order in which things were produced”58. Because we know things through their causes (E1a4), we would need to begin with the knowledge of the first cause, namely with God. From Curley’s 1969 work, to the recent book by Melamed in 2013 (both on Spinoza’s Metaphysics59), it is also common to contrast

Spinoza’s beginnings with the infinite in the Ethics with Descartes’ beginnings with the (finite) cogito in the Meditations60. This is an opposition that works well in support of the causality thesis according to which “Spinoza develops a philosophical content completely different from that of the Cartesian system […] in a progression that goes from cause to effects”61, so that “we must begin with the knowledge of the infinite, the cause of all things, before turning to the knowledge of finite things”62.

57 Jambet, Christian, “some comments on the question of the one”, Angelaki (2003) 8:2, 33-41 58 Macherey, Pierre, Hegel or Spinoza, transl. by Susan M. Ruddick (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 57 59 Curley, E.M., Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) and Melamed, Yitzhak Y., Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) 60 Descartes, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia in quibus Dei Existentia et Animae Humanae a Corpore distinctio demonstratur, Adam and Tannery (eds.), Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris, second Latin ed. from1642) 61 Macherey (2011) p. 55 62 Melamed, Spinoza’s Metaphysics (2013) p. xvii

30 It follows from this, however, that God is a synonym of the first cause. And evidently, the notion of God designates the first cause (causa prima) in the Ethics, but not only the first cause.

And hence, I argue, cannot be reduced to it or to anything else in Spinoza’s system.

In addition, as we shall see, all revolutionary thinking of the early modern begins with the epistemological overturn of the tradition, i.e. with the cognition of the infinite and never with the finite, whatever the form of its exposition in a system might be, as in Descartes. For it is this overturn, the fact that the infinite now “first naturally falls under the intellect” [cadit sub intellectus] (Bruno)63, which set modern sciences altogether in motion64.

The Ethics does not, I argue, simply begin with God, but with the knowledge of it, i.e. with the content of the intrinsic denominations65 the true and first idea posits, and of which causation is only one among others, together with unity, infinity, rationality, and perfection. Spinoza’s system in the Ethics is the application of the method, which is “reflexive knowledge” (TdIE 37) to the content of the true idea (of God). Or put differently, the Ethics does not begin with a principle of causation (with the fact that “The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause”, E1a4), any more than it begins with a principle of perfection, of unity or of (sufficient) reason. Rather, it begins by defining what perfection, causation, infinity, rationality and unity are.66

63 Bruno, De l’Infinito, universo et mondi, cited in Koyré, From the Closed World, (1957). Before quoting Bruno, Koyré remarks that “at the very beginning of his Dialogue on the Infinite Universe and the Worlds, Bruno (Philoteo) asserts that sense-perception, as such, is confused and erroneous and cannot be made the basis of scientific and philosophical knowledge. Later on, he explains that whereas for sense-perception and imagination infinity is inaccessible and unrepresentable, for the intellect, on the contrary, it is its primary and most certain concept” (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press: 1957) p.44-45 64 Those who began with the cognition of finite things are Plato and Aristotle, and thus the whole of medieval philosophies. But this should become clear in more details throughout the following chapters, as well as Descartes’ own position. 65 TdIE 69-70 66 Moreover, the conception of causation (the way we should conceive of it according to Spinoza) is posited with the notion of God as the first principle of being and cognition and not with those determinations the notion of God posits in its function as the first cause, following the standard distinction of principle (gr. archē) and cause (gr. aitía). Hence, the first principle of being and cognition in the Ethics needs to be carefully distinguished from what ‘follows’ from the first cause for the categories of existence in Spinoza’s system.

31 The system of the Ethics is, as Herman De Dijn puts it, “the culmination and completion of the logical project, both in the sense that it is itself a methodical development of ideas leading to the ultimate aim indicated at the beginning of the Treatise, and in the sense that it realizes this aim in knowledge”67. The realization of this project, the Ethics, is the application of what

Spinoza understands by method, and begins with the content of the true idea of God (as the title of

Part 1 indicates). Hence, the Ethics begins with the (true) knowledge of God (vera Dei cognitio) for all the determinations that this notion posits in its function:

I. as the first principle of being and cognition (principium, archē)

II. as the first cause (causa, aitía)

III. as the unity of being and cognition (unum, hén)

IV. as the beginning of philosophy conceived as ethica (sapientiae, sophia)

By insisting on this breakdown of the four different aspects the notion of God posits in its function, I am alluding to what I believe needs clarification, both on a conceptual level and with respect to the concrete purpose of Spinoza’s undertaking as a whole. The conceptual level points to the content of Spinoza’s beginnings in the Ethics, i.e. to the question what is exactly posited with the notion of God in Part 1. And a clarification of the concrete purpose of the whole project points to the question why Spinoza begins his system with the knowledge of God, i.e. with this specific content and not with any other.68

a) The conceptual level

67 De Dijn, Herman, Spinoza, The Way to Wisdom (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1996) p. 195 68 To be sure, we have no reason to assume that Spinoza’s, or any other early modern system is any less complex in structure than what it seeks to substitute, namely, Aristotle’s Metaphysics or medieval Scholasticism. On the contrary, the kind of interpretative issues that in the early modern systems were necessarily bound to arise from the use of the same scholastic-Aristotelian language directed against the whole of traditional (Greek and medieval) metaphysics requires an increased level of conceptual care, and presupposes a willingness to come to terms with the concrete purposiveness of these works within the new scientific context.

32 Based on the complexity of its function ‘God’ has no synonym, i.e. it cannot be equated with any one of the many determinations it posits. If this would be the case, Spinoza could have abstained from using the word ‘God’ and could have replaced it with either the first cause; or with nature; with the infinite; with being; or with substance. That this is not applicable becomes clear as soon as we try to substitute the notion of God with any other in the text. Hence, God is never simply something else, because its function pertains to the positing and in fact, as we shall see, to nothing else69.

In consequence, the copula is in relation to God, which is neither restricted to the terms of a definition (which gives the term a new meaning) nor to the description of a feature (which explains an important category of the term) cannot turn any of its determinations (causality for instance) into another first principle, as many scholars seem to suggest70.

Rather, in the Ethics there is one central notion (God) through which are posited a number of different principles, conceptions or truths. Hence, what God is in the Ethics is the following: the first principle; the first cause; the primal unity; and origin of wisdom (of the ethical). And what is posited through the notion of God in Spinoza’s system, is outlined in the second row of the diagram below:

69 And this is also the reason why a mere reiteration of Spinoza’s statements about God as being something (the first cause, the cause of itself, infinite, substance, perfect, or nature), a simple ‘identity’ (between God and Nature or other) cannot replace a comprehension of the specific content of Spinoza’s claims. 70 In effect, since Wolfson (1934) it has become common to attribute to the geometric ‘method’ a “behind” of underlying principles “as an aid to the proper understanding of Spinoza”. For most contemporary accounts, the interpretation depends on the application of a major principle from within the system as the driving force behind the entire Ethics. In Della Rocca, it is the principle of sufficient reason (2008); in Melamed, the principle of sufficient reason and “the priority of the infinite over the finite as two separate principles” (2013); in Curley, the proof of God’s existence and priority of the infinite over the finite (cogito) as counter position to Descartes (1969 and 1994); and in Macherey, it is causation, i.e. the deductive function of the geometric ‘method’ that shows “the necessity of real things according to the rational order of cognition, which leads us from causes to their effects and not from effects to their causes”, (my translation from: “ par ordre géométrique, aussi bien dans les Principes de la philosophie de Descartes que dans l’Éthique, il faut d’abord entendre l’ordre synthétique au sens de la forme de discours dont l’organisation, c’est-à-dire la progression nécessaire, est agencée sur le modèle selon lequel se déroule le processus causal, et reproduit tel qu’il est en lui-même l’ordre du réel, ce qui amène à comprendre comme de l’intérieur les choses telles qu’elles sont et telles qu’elles se font, suivant le mouvement rationnel conduisant des causes aux effets et non l’inverse“, in : Macherey, Pierre, Introduction à l’Éthique de Spinoza : La première partie - La nature des choses (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1998) p.18

33 God (Being)

First Principle Primal Unity Origin of wisdom First Cause (of being and cognition) (of being and cognition) (of the ethical)

derived principles: categories of being : the conjunction of being ethical foundations of substance; attributes; perfection; infinity; and thought knowledge causation; rationality modes

Hence, ‘God’ - and not causation, sufficient reason or the priority of the infinite over the finite as in Macherey, Nadler and Melamed – is the first principle (gr. archë) in Spinoza’s system71. For

71 The search for one single ‘principle’ driving the whole of Spinoza’s system in contemporary accounts, and which I suggest is a misleading reduction of terms, presupposes that it is the inner structure of reality which in the Ethics either ‘unfolds in front of us’ through causal relations (Macherey), or connects all things in the text as it does in reality through the principle of sufficient reason (Nadler), or it is the priority of the infinite over the finite, in the text as it is in reality, without which we cannot ‘understand the nature of finite things, because […] all things are to be known through their causes’ (Melamed, 1998, p. 19). What drives the whole of the Ethics is here figured as the same as what drives the whole of reality. From this perspective, it seems that the notion of God turns the principles of knowledge it posits into principles of interpretation, as if they were one and the same thing. Consequently, there is no distinction between a beginning as a principle or a cause, where knowing and being begins and which the notion of God posits in its function, on the one hand, and the beginning in the sense of where Spinoza’s system begins, on the other. There is therefore, strictly speaking, no clear distinction between form and content, that is, between the geometric form of demonstration (or form of proofs: ordine geometrico demonstrata) and the method (the content of the true idea). Such interpretations, where there is no difference between form and content (between principles of knowledge in the Ethics and principles of our own interpretations of the text), i.e. where “the form of exposition is not only an adequate, but also the necessary expression of its content” (Macherey, 1998, p. 66-68) are still moving within the Hegelian legacy, closely aligned to the language of his Logic regarding identity within the absolute in his section on reality (see Hegel, Science of Logic: Volume II, Second Book, Third Section: About Reality, Chap 1: The Absolute). But Spinoza himself tells us that: Method is not the reasoning itself by which we understand the causes of things; much less the understanding of the causes of things, it is understanding what a true idea is by distinguishing it from the rest of the perceptions [...] (TdIE 37). The method in the Ethics is not geometric, this is a serious misunderstanding. Moreover, Spinoza tells us also that The more we understand singular (finite) things, the more we understand God [Quo magis res singulares intelligimus, eo magis Deum intelligimus] (E5p24) and that we can understand the essences of (finite) things without the knowledge of God because essences of things are eternal. It could still be asked how we, not yet understanding the nature of God, understand the essences of things, because they depend on the nature of God alone, […]. In reply I say that this arises from the fact that things are already created. If they had not been created, I would entirely agree that it would be impossible to understand them except after an adequate knowledge of God (CM I/2).

34 the ‘method’ in the Ethics unfolds “according to the standard of the […] idea of the most perfect

Being” (TdIE [38])72

What we see in contemporary accounts of Spinoza’s beginnings in philosophy, the emphasis on causation, i.e. the focus on Spinoza’s causa sui, and the emphasis on rationality, i.e. on knowing that presupposes no other determination (relatively to anything else) than the

(sufficient) reasons of its own cognition, is not however, some random ‘mistake’. It is the traditional approach to the relationship between being and thought, i.e. the question of ‘identity’ between being and knowing that animates all Western philosophy since Parmenides as the question of beginnings in philosophy, where genuine philosophizing begins and is realized either as logic or as metaphysics (as in Aristotle’s Metaphysics or in Hegel’s Greater Logic) under different conditions of the equation between esse and logia in virtue of which being is known73.

The legacy of our philosophical tradition is strong. Nevertheless, it is not evident that it can be applied in this form to a system that does not begin with the mind’s apprehension of ‘pure being’, which traditionally does not contain any determination and means only being in general, but with the knowledge of God, which on the contrary, posits a number of determinations, i.e. where being is never indeterminate, never ‘empty’. Or as Gueroult put it, where ‘God is unique, unlike the Eleatic One that is empty, without differentiations, but the unique substance, which in itself involves of all of the realities’74 in a system, which in addition reveals itself not as a science

(metaphysics) or logic, but as ethica.

72 […] hoc est, p e r f e c t i s s i m a ea erit m e t h o d u s , quae ad datae ideae entis perfectissimi normam ostendit, quomodo mens sit dirigenda]. “That is, the most perfect method will be one which shows how the mind is to be directed according to the standard of the given idea of the most perfect Being”. 73 Hegel’s reconfiguration of Spinoza’s attributes of extension and thought into Being and Thought is telling here. It allows him to bring the system of the Ethics back into the traditional form of thinking about philosophy’s own beginnings, and since it is a beginning with the infinite it will translate itself into an ‘absolute knowledge’ for Hegel, i.e. into his own Logic. 74 Gueroult, Martial, Spinoza - Dieu (Éthique I), (Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1968), p. 221 [Ainsi, Dieu est unique, étant non point l’Un vide et sans difference de l’Éléate, mais la substance unique incluant en elle toutes les réalités], (my translation above, emphasis in the original).

35 But let us return to the topic of this section and say that on the conceptual level of analysis one needs to distinguish the first principle (of being and cognition) from those (ontological and epistemological) principles it posits, and thus to take care not to reduce any of the latter to the former. Or put simply, in the Ethics the true and first idea (of God) posits “primary truths”75 about ontology and epistemology, on the one hand.

On the other however, as in any ‘first philosophy’ or metaphysics, one needs to distinguish between principium and causa (gr. archē and aitía). One thing is namely, what the notion of God posits as the first principle of being and cognition, and another what it posits as causa prima. That is, what follows from the first cause for the categories of existence in Spinoza’s system.

The axiom 4 in the first part of the Ethics, that “the knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause” is reminiscent of Aristotle’s “We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing …when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and, further that the fact could not be other than it is” (Posterior Analytics, 1.2.71b 9-12). And both statements are comparable insofar as they concern the knowledge of a fact, and not ontological or epistemological principles.

Put differently, what is posited with the first cause are ‘basic truths’, formulated in the affirmative or in the negative, about the existence (the being) of finite or infinite things, and which I therefore called the categories of existence. Because the first cause introduces, or more precisely, reconfigures in Spinoza’s system the (traditional) categories of being, and of which the substance (category) is famously the first and the most important one.

Therefore, what needs to be distinguished is the Greek aition/aitia or the Latin causa/ratio in difference to the archē or principium. Whereby everything in the text related to the first cause is a

75 In the way Aristotle defines principles as ‘primary truths’, (Posterior Analytics, 2.1.100b 10-11).

36 res or ens [the equivalent of the Greek to on], a factum, i.e. something that has existence as an entity and is precisely not a principle76.

The attribute of Extension for instance, is not a principle of knowledge or of being, but something that has a determined existence (is eternal, infinite, conceived through itself, etc.), namely, a res that has reality in Spinoza’s view.

Causation in contrast, is a principle of knowledge and of ontology, and not a res.77 As such a

‘principle’, causation (or any other notion posited with the first principle) is inevitably, as the first principle itself twofold: it is epistemological and ontological. It tells us, for example, that anything that falls under the attribute of Extension cannot cause anything that falls under the attribute of Thought, and vice versa. Hence, it is an ontological principle (the principium essendi) according to which things are caused in the realm of Extension or of Thought. And it is an epistemological principle (the principium cognoscendi) through which we know or ‘cognize’ things in the realm of Extension or of Thought. Because anything that falls under the attribute of

Extension cannot be conceived through anything that falls under the attribute of Thought, and vice versa. Or as Leibniz formulates it, “A cause in the realm of things corresponds to a reason

(ratio) in the realm of truth”78.

There is no need therefore to introduce a “twofold use of the PSR”, one that “asks what causation is”, and the other which “accounts for causation by appealing to conceivability or explicability or intelligibility itself” as Della Rocca did in his interpretation of the Ethics79.

Because the principle of being and cognition is twofold by definition, it is always the cause

(principium essendi) and the reason (principium cognoscendi) for the (first) truths it posits80. Kant later

76 The Latin res, ens has a long philosophical history. I am taking it here in its most common meaning as the equivalent to the Greek to on, onta, ti in the sense of being, something, existent. 77 This, of course, does not mean that principles are not ‘real’ in the sense we say real as in contrast to illusory in English or in any other vernacular language. 78 Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, book 4, chap. 17 79 Michael Della Rocca, Spinoza (2008), p.45 80 The ‘principle of sufficient reason’ is the early modern reconfiguration of the cognoscendi, i.e. of the second component of the traditional Scholastic principium essendi et cognoscendi.

37 translates the principle of being as the Realgrund (ratio as related to res); and the principle of reason or knowledge as the Idealgrund (ratio as related to idea-tum), which indicates the complexity of the matter we are here presented with. There is namely, latest since Aristotle, no simple separation between, on the one hand the physis (principles of being), and on the other, the organon

(principles of knowledge), that is, in the language of medieval commentators, between that which is non realiter distincta (that which is not distinct in the thing itself, i.e. how things are in themselves), and that which is sed tantum ratione (the way we think about or understand things)81.

Hence the twofold-ness of our first principle.

In consequence, what is required of the first principle is precisely the clarification of terms (in epistemology and ontology) and hence cannot be reduced to (or simply identified with) its first notion, with the notion of God in Spinoza’s Ethics. And what is required of the first cause is the clarification of the categories of being, and hence should not be conflated with the principle of causation.

The third and further aspect on the conceptual level of analysis concerning Spinoza’s notion of God is the one of unity, that is, the so-called proof for the existence of God.

Every early or late medieval Aristotelian or (Neo) Platonist thinker “knew that the proper name of God […], the true meaning of his name, is to be” 82 or simply being. As Augustine put it: “he is indeed is [est enim est]83. But, as Gilson describes it “even for men who agreed on the truth of this divine name, there remained a problem of interpretation [the question of] what is being?”84

Therefore, with the question of the ‘existence of God’ we are dealing not only with the determinations of being’s own being, that is, with the question of how to think about being –

81 This medieval distinction is based on the Book Z and H of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. 82 Gilson, Étienne, (1955), p. 368 and 369. 83 Augustine, Enarrationes en Psalmos, 134, RT: PL, vol. 37, col. 1741; see also Confessions, 12:31.46: quidquid aliquo modo est, sed est est [everything which is in some way anything (modo est), is in virtue (sed est ) of the who is not in just any way, but it is (est]. 84 Gilson, Étienne, (1955), p. 368 and 369.

38 whether ’to be’ is something fixed and at rest in being (Aquinas), or whether it is substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence (Spinoza). But with the proof that this is the case: that being’s own being, in the way determined by the author, is a fact (a res), an existing entity (ens).

This question obviously involves more than just to say that being is, or to say that it is about such a being that is because its essence, nature or definition is to be. The mere focus on the

(inevitably) tautological form of such arguments (about the existence of God) can bring us no further than to that critique, which since Gaunilo85 has always accompanied such arguments, namely, that it is ‘circular’. For the natura essendi (the nature of being) is at any time esse (to be), i.e. a self-referential concept, this tautology par excellence and apotheosis of abstraction I mentioned earlier. This factum, however, needs to be established as a factum, at least according to our authors, that is, as ‘realitas’ (existing in res), what Descartes calls realitas eminens, because without it there seems to be nothing holding these two (enai and noein) together. Namely, no reason why anything existing would correspond in reality (in res) to our own cognition, and so secure the possibility for knowledge. Thus, this original unity86, as Poser rightly remarks, is in Descartes, as it was in Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas or now in Spinoza, an argument for the warrant or “the securing of truth”87.

85 Gaunilo of Marmoutiers (a Benedictine monk in the 11th century) is known for his refutations of the ontological argument of St Anselm. His refutations are important, and still little studied for what they have to say not only about circularity, but for the claims about the relationship between ‘being and cognition’. It is interesting to note that Hegel uses the point made by Anselm in his reply to Gaunilo for his own critique against Kant that he formulates with some irony by saying that Gaunilo already put forward the same (claim) as Kant, namely that the concept of being has in itself no reality, i.e. that the concept remains the same regardless of the existence of a thing: “Schon zu Anselm’s Zeit brachte ein Mönch dasselbe vor, er sagte: das, was ich mir vorstelle, ist darum doch noch nicht” (Already in Anselm’s times a monk proposed the same by saying that: what I can represent is not therefore something), my translation. In: G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Beweise vom Daseyn Gottes, Werke Bd. 16, hg. Von H. Glockner (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt, 1965), p. 549. Thus, Hegel puts Kant on the side of Gaunilo as someone who did not grasp that this epistemological truth applies to all other things of our representation, but not to the conception of being as being. 86 Hence, this original unity is not the same as the ‘ground’ in the sense of ratio, as in “nihil est sine ratione” [nothing is without a reason or ground], this was the first principle (of being and cognition) as we saw earlier. In addition, as we shall see later, it is also not the identity between ‘being and knowing’ as in Parmenides. 87 Poser, Hans, René Descartes, Eine Einführung (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2003), chap. 4.4 “Gottesbeweise und die Sicherung der Wahrheit, pp 75-91. Or as Robert Schnepf puts it, ‘as the source and warrant of truth for clear and distinct ideas’ [als Quelle und Garant der Wahrheit klarer und distinkter Ideen, in: Metaphysik im ersten Teil der Ethik Spinozas, (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1996), p. 185.

39 But the arguments are different in each of the thinkers, and so are the consequences for the possibility of knowledge. What follows from the proof about the factum of being in Aquinas who draws closely on Aristotle is worlds apart from what follows from it in Spinoza, although both arguments involve, infinity, causation, cognition, and God’s own being and essence. Modern sciences are conceivable with Spinoza, not so with Aquinas.88

This is also one of the reasons why contemporary philosophy, that is, philosophy since Kant, operating without the notion of God, is primarily concerned with the question of how knowledge is possible, i.e. with epistemology and logic. 88 Aquinas, who defines God as an absolute ‘act of being’ can be read in direct opposition to Spinoza: “because the existence of God is not immediately evident; self-evidence would only be possible in this matter if we had an adequate notion of the divine essence, the essence of God would then appear to be one with his existence. But God is an infinite being and, as it [the intellect] has no concept of him, our finite mind cannot see existence as necessarily implied in his infinity; we therefore have to conclude, by way of reasoning (alone), that existence which we cannot intuit. Thus […] Let us therefore seek in sensible things, whose nature is proportioned to our intellect, the starting point of our way to God” because “itself a form, it (the human intellect) feeds on other sensible forms. […] The origin of human knowledge is therefore in the senses” for Aquinas as it was for Aristotle. (Quoted in Gilson, 1955, pp. 369-370, and p. 377). In proposition 11 of the Ethics we read the opposite: “there is nothing of whose existence we can be more certain than we are of the existence of an absolutely infinite, or perfect Being – that is, God”. And the origin of knowledge is for Spinoza the infinite substance (or essence) and not the senses. Descartes is doing nothing else at the opening of the Meditations, namely, showing that the origin of human knowledge is not in sense perception. Now, in Aquinas and in Spinoza, one of the crucial moments that secures the possibility for knowledge in the proof about the factum of being is in both arguments causation. In Aquinas, who draws closely on the Aristotelian prime mover for the “Prime Cause, which is what we call God […] starts from the fact that movement (immediately perceptible to sense knowledge) exists”, and hence that “It must be admitted, either that the series of causes is infinite and has no origin, but then nothing explains that there is movement, or else that the series is finite and that there is a primary cause, and this primary cause is precisely what everyone understands to be God”. For Aquinas, as it was for Ancient Greek philosophy, in the order of causes “it is not possible to go on to infinity” (gr. apeiron) (Gilson, 1955, p. 370). Spinoza by contrast, who starts with what is first to the intellect (being) and not to sense perception, i.e. with the “absolutely infinite, or perfect Being” defined as substance and as cause of itself, the first alternative proof (aliter) to E1p11 is drawn along the notion of ‘ratio seu causa’, along the notion of causality and sufficient reason (which is only one of the few points Spinoza makes for the demonstration of this proposition). Hence, it is the principle of sufficient reason and of proximate causation, which will determine the ground upon which being and cognition correspond, i.e. upon which (scientific) knowledge or the intelligibility of anything that is is warranted within the being’s own being as a factum. In consequence, in the order of causes it is for Spinoza now possible to go on to infinity (ad infinitum) in the realm of Extension as well as in the realm of Thought. Moreover, in the Thomistic model “esse, the act of being (as Aquinas defines God) is the keystone of the whole structure. Hence, “beings are so called because of the act of being (esse) which makes them to be” and therefore “the truth of (our scientific or philosophical) judgements ultimately rests on the esse (the traditional quoddity or ‘thatness’) of the thing rather than on its essence” (Gilson, 1995, p. 378). By contrast, in Spinoza’s model the existence of the substance (as Spinoza defines God) is “nothing but its essentia” (E1p11s). Hence, because everything existing is in one way or another the expression of the essence of the one substance, we can know the essence of things, i.e. what they are (the traditional quiddity or ‘whatness’) with scientific or philosophical certainty in Spinoza. So much so that we can understand the essences of things without the knowledge of God because essences of things are eternal (CM I/2). Hence, although God is the first cause and absolute being in both Spinoza and in Aquinas, they are very different as to the role and the possibilities for knowledge that follow from their proofs about the facticity of being.

40 The fourth and final aspect on the conceptual level of analysis concerning Spinoza’s notion of God is the one of ethics. That is, the beginning with the knowledge of God in a philosophical system conceived as ethica.

From the previous, it follows that the true meaning of the word God is being. Notwithstanding,

God wouldn’t be ‘God’ if it were to determine only being and not at the same time also define the relations we call ethical, namely, if it did not posit at the same time what ensues for the ethical from both: our comprehension of either being itself or of beings (either as individual beings or beings as a whole), and our comprehension of our own cognition.

God is the only notion where being, cognition and the ethical are posited together. Thus, when God is something (infinite, first cause, or substance), these same determinations (of being’s own being) are also defining the ethical. How they do this, will depend on the text we are dealing with. In the case of Spinoza’s Ethics, it will depend on where we are in the text (between Part 1 to 5). And if we are in Part 1, where Spinoza claims that philosophy as philosophy needs to begin in this ‘order’, then the first principles of knowledge are determining the ethical at the beginning of philosophizing.

Put differently, the beginning of philosophizing with ‘the knowledge of God’ means that the

‘fate’ of the ethical is sealed here with those first principles of knowledge upon which philosophy as philosophy constitutes itself. How this plays out in the text is open to interpretations, but when God is something, it is the ethical that is also determined, otherwise these determinations

(of being’s own being,) wouldn’t be ‘God’s’ determinations, but simply ontology (determinations of being). And Spinoza’s ‘order of philosophising’ would amount to saying that philosophy needs to begin with the knowledge of (infinite, perfect, first cause etc.) being, which would then unfold into a system of metaphysics or of logic rather than into a system of an ethica, as it did from the

41 Hegelian point of view of ‘absolute beginnings’ where “The beginning is logical” (my emphasis) and “the beginning therefore is pure being” (emphasis in the original)89.

Philosophy traditionally begins with the question of the relationship between being and thought. That is, with the question of unity or of identity between being and cognition90. With

Spinoza’s notion of God however, where God determines the relationship between being, cognition and the ethical at the beginning of philosophising, we are no longer within this tradition.

And with relations between three instances (being, cognition and the ethical) instead of two (being and thought), we are also on another level of complexity.

b) The purpose of the Ethics

We have seen that the Ethics is about the application of what Spinoza understands by method, namely “reflexive knowledge” (TdIE 37) to the content of the true idea (of God). What is under discussion here, with Spinoza’s ‘order of philosophizing’ is the beginning of philosophical knowing in light of all the determinations the ‘true idea of God’ posits in its function as 1) the first principle of being and cognition; 2) as the first cause; 3) as the unity of being and cognition; and 4) as the beginning of philosophy conceived as ethica. The point was to note that when the notion of God takes the form of the first principle or first cause, its function pertains to the positing, and to nothing else. Whereby I argued that the Ethics begins with a certain (true) understanding of causation, of perfection, of unity, of rationality, or of infinity, and that however

89 Hegel, Logic, chap. With what Must the Science Begin? The quote in English from The Hegel Reader, Stephen Houlgate (ed.) (Oxford/Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998), p. 178 and 179. For Hegel’s understanding of Spinoza’s beginnings in philosophy as “an unachieved form…and broken promise”, because it does not develop into a system of logic, see Macherey (2011, p. 19, the section on ‘Philosophy of Beginning), where he writes: “ To really read Spinoza, for Hegel, is to reconstruct the edifice of his thought, causing the conditions of another form of knowledge to appear from what is only the unachieved form or the anticipated ruin, because in Spinoza, the effort to link knowledge to the absolute resolves itself only in a broken promise” (emphasis in the original). 90 The whole of Ancient Greek philosophy begins with the question of identity between being and thought, and the whole of German Idealism is in fact moving back (after the early modern) to the same traditional form of ‘beginnings in philosophy’ and reads Spinoza under this angle (as in Hegel or Schelling).

42 important one of these determinations might appear to be in Spinoza’s system, none of them can be assigned more weight than the others, none of them can be singled out as a ‘key principle’ for the interpretation of the Ethics. This is because Spinoza’s system begins with the

‘true knowledge of God (vera Dei cognitio), i.e. it begins at the same time with all the conceptions that this notion posits in its function.

Now on the other hand, a clarification of the concrete purpose of the whole project of the

Ethics points to the question of why Spinoza begins his system with the notion of God, i.e. with this specific content and not with any other. And it is clear from what I have previously argued that I do not think the Ethics begins with the notion of God in order to provide a logical reflection of the inner structure of reality through textual composition, either epistemological or ontological in the way we find it in contemporary accounts.

It is philosophy that needs to begin in this order, according to Spinoza’s ‘order of philosophizing’ (E2p10s2), with the true knowledge of God, because it provides all the basic elements upon which philosophy as philosophy constitutes itself, namely 1) conceptions of infinity, causation, rationality, and perfection on the one hand (the notion of God as principle of being and cognition); 2) conceptions of substance, attributes, or modes (the notion of God as the first cause); and the 3) conception of unity or the conditions under which knowledge is possible (the notion of

God as the unity of being and cognition). Therefore, the priority given to the knowledge of God in the Ethics concerns the beginnings of philosophy as philosophy (philosophia prima), as it concerns the internal coherences, deductive connexions and compatibilities in Spinoza’s system. This is rather unproblematic, but it does not fully answer our question yet about the purpose of such beginnings (with God) because the conclusion we are to make of why this first assertion is to define the whole of Spinoza’s system is still open to interpretations.

Therefore second, what is open to interpretations is the ethical that the notion of God posits in its function (as the beginning of philosophy conceived as ethica) and for which there are two

43 pathways: either we understand Part 1 along the traditional lines of the relationship between being and thought, meaning that we understand it as ontology (or metaphysics) that precedes the ethical of the later parts of the Ethics and conclude that the purpose of such beginnings in the Ethics is to “explain how a happy and self-determined life can be lived on the basis of the structures and laws of nature and human existence”91.

Or, we abandon the traditional approach, together with the Hegelian legacy of a ‘logic of reality’, and instead try to determine the relationship between being, cognition and the ethical in

Part 1 posited together with the notion of God, and conclude, as I do, that the purpose of such beginnings in the Ethics is to ethically redefine philosophy as philosophy.

On this account, not every philosophy needs to begin with the (true) ‘knowledge of

God’, but every philosophy needs to understand the ethical ramifications of its own original

(ontological and epistemological) positioning. Hence, it follows that the whole purpose of

Spinoza’s system, which depends on such (non-traditional) beginnings of philosophizing with

‘God’, consists in providing the ethical foundations of knowledge for all of its five parts: for the first principles upon which philosophy as philosophy constitutes itself, i.e. for the origin of human knowledge (Part 1); for the determinations of being and epistemological principles upon which the mind comprehends its own cognition, i.e. for the origin of the mind (Part 2); for the determinations of finite beings and principles of cognition upon which we understand our own intellectual and bodily nature, i.e. for the origin of the affects (Part 3); for the determinations of the affects upon which we understand our own human condition, i.e. for the power of the affects

(Part 4); and for the determinations of the human intellect upon which an individual relationship to being itself is established, i.e. for human freedom (Part 5).

91 Spinoza’s Ethics, A Collective Commentary, ed. Michael Hampe, Ursula Renz, Robert Schnepf (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), Introduction, p. 1. On this view, ontology reflects the order of reality, either through causation (Macherey), the infinite (Melamed) or through the principle of sufficient reason (Della Rocca).

44 Put simply, the Ethics begins with the knowledge of God because our understanding of the ethical begins for Spinoza with our comprehension of being as being. And ends with an intellectual love of God because this same knowledge is always ethical, “by which we are led to do only those things which love and morality advise”92 (E2p49s4).

Philosophy is no longer, as in Aristotle or later Heidegger, a “purposeless knowledge” where “Man’s essential nature justifies itself simply by being realized and has no need of relation to any other existential purpose”93. On the contrary, philosophical knowledge, by its own thinking nature, introduces existential consequences for anything it thinks.

1.2 The one and unique substance

Let us begin, then, with the first, to wit, the one (CM I/6).

Spinoza’s Ethics rests, as any metaphysics of the seventeenth century on those two descriptions given by Aristotle of what the ‘science of being’ is, namely, a ‘first philosophy’ (protē philosophia) and a ‘knowledge (episteme) of God’ (theologike), “upon which depend”, as Aristotle puts it, “heaven and nature” (Met.1072b 14 et seq.). Thus, first philosophy considers the being of beings, but it is the knowledge of the being’s own being, namely of God, upon which our

92 […in quo nostra summa felicitas sive beatitudo consistit, nempe in sola Dei cognitione, ex qua ad ea tantum agenda inducimur, quae amor et pietas suadent] E2p49s4 93 Blumenberg, Hans (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 1983), p. 255. This passage, where Blumenberg describes the difference between Socrates and Aristotle is worth quoting in full here, because it is at the very opposite of what follows from Spinoza’s understanding of the purpose of philosophical knowledge, which begins with God and not with sense perception, that is, with the infinite and not with the finite: “At the beginning of the Metaphysics, Aristotle detaches the human striving for knowledge from coordination with self-knowledge and moral action [from the way Socrates understood philosophy, as restricted to logic and ethics]. Man’s essential nature justifies itself simply by being realized and has no need of relation to any other existential purpose. The naturalness of the cognitive drive is read directly from man’s relation to the perceptual world, from the delight he takes in his access to it through the senses. Something so natural and essentially appropriate is not grounded merely in the circumstances and needs of human life. The order of the senses themselves confirms this by the pre-eminence of sight, which stands closest to knowledge because it conveys the greatest number of differences between things. But the history of the human conduct of life also proves the essential superiority of purposeless knowledge, of knowledge unrelated to needs: If men have turned to philosophy so as to escape their ignorance, then they evidently sought knowledge for its own sake and not for its practical usefulness. […] Here the essential appropriateness of pure knowledge is related to the freedom of man, who exists for his own sake and whose self- realization is his only end”.

45 understanding of everything else depends, including that of the conditions under which “man thinks” (E2a2). And keeping in mind that the overturn of traditional metaphysics in the early modern period amounts to an overturn of the very conception of being, i.e. of the most fundamental structures of reality that follow from it, this section involves the question of its oneness and uniqueness together with Spinoza’s reconception of the ontological distinction to which the categories of being traditionally refer to, that is, Spinoza’s notion of substance.

In the appendix to Part 1, Spinoza gives the summary of what has been demonstrated:

With these [demonstrations] I have explained God’s nature and properties: that he exists necessarily; that he is unique; that he is and acts from the necessity alone of his nature, that (and how) he is the free cause of all things, that all things are in God and so depend on him that without him they can neither be nor be conceived; and finally, that all things have been predetermined by God, not from freedom of the will or absolute good pleasure, but from God’s absolute nature or infinite power.

Of what is enumerated here, only two statements directly refer to the ontological is, namely that God necessarily is and that he is unique. The other refer to a how: how God acts; how he is the first cause; how things depend on him; or how they have been predetermined by his absolute nature or infinite power. Hence, I shall focus the analysis here on these two, on the is of the one infinite being and its uniqueness, i.e. on the basic determinations of being’s own being.

To begin with, let us have a closer look at the text we are dealing with.

The eight definitions and seven axioms with which Spinoza opens the Ethics determine together all the specifics that the notion of God involves, namely the definitions of: cause of itself (1d1); of what is (non) finite in its own kind (1d2); of substance (1d3); of attribute (1d4); of mode (1d5); of God as an absolutely infinite substance (1d6); of a thing free in relation to existence and determination to act (1d7); and of eternity that cannot be explained by duration or time (1d8).

With these definitions the notion of God is already outlined in the Ethics.94

94 The definition of God is not the first definition in the Ethics, but the sixth out of eight definitions. This is because the definition of God in Def. 6 could not have been formulated in this form without 1d1-1d4, i.e.

46 And the seven axioms Spinoza attaches to these definitions concerning the following: in itself- in another (1a1)95; conceived-through-itself (1a2)96; cause-effect (1a3)97; knowledge-of-cause

(1a4)98; concept (1a5)99; true idea (1a6)100; essence-existence (1a7)101 are no general rules of logic, such as the principle of identity, of contradiction or of sufficient reason, but are to serve as guiding rules ‘fitting’ (gr. axiomata) the knowing of God, which unfolds in the following 36 propositions of Part 1 of the Ethics.

Furthermore, what immediately follows after the definitions and axioms in Part 1 of the

Ethics, are propositions 1-8 dealing with the nature of substance, its definition and uniqueness.

It is the notion of substance that first introduces the notion of God in the Ethics, showing “that there is only one [substance] of the same nature” (E1p8S2). In other words, because substance belongs to the very definition of God (1d6), it was the first to be determined and its features demonstrated in propositions. Propositions 9 and 10 subsequently refer to the notion of the attributes, as defined in 1d4, outlining that “Each attribute of a substance must be conceived through itself” (E1p10), so that the entire definition of God (1d6) can be now restated in full with proposition 11, this time together with the affirmation of God’s necessary existence, namely that “God or a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists” (E1p11)

The task, therefore, is to understand that crucial moment of the whole system: that only the one “absolutely infinite being or God: ens absolute infinitum sive Deum” (E1p11s) is

without the definitions of cause, of the non-finite, of substance, and of attribute, and insofar modes are to be differentiated from the attributes, also not without 1d5. Definitions 7-8 also relate to God, so that all eight definitions at the opening of the Ethics are determinations of what the notion of God involves, a synopsis. 95 A1: “Whatever is, is either in itself or in another” 96 A2: “What cannot be conceived through another, must be conceived through itself” 97 A3: “From a given determinate cause the effect follows necessarily; and conversely, if there is no determinate cause, it is impossible for an effect to follow” 98 A4: “The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause” 99 A5: “Things that have nothing in common with one another also cannot be understood through one another, or, the concept of the one does not involve the concept of the other” 100 A6: “A true idea must agree with its object” 101 A7: “If a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence”

47 thought by Spinoza in terms of substance: [ens absolute infinitum hoc est substantiam] (E1d6).

Whereby we need to distinguish the uniqueness of the substance, the claim that there is only one substance, from the oneness of the substance. Namely, from the question of the oneness of being established by the infinite substance in the Ethics.

First, let us note that insofar being cannot be apprehended in plural without changing its meaning into beings, i.e. into singular entities, which in turn ‘have’ their own being, it is always one (gr. hén) and unique, the only one of its kind (not a species of any genus), a unicum (gr. monadikos). But the proper domain of the inquiry, Spinoza seems to say, is neither lexical nor numerical, that is, strictly different from the being of numbers or the being of words. And thus,

“God is only improperly called one and unique” (CM I/6)102, for neither words nor numbers say anything about the idea or about the being of the ‘one’. Hence, we know nothing specific yet by calling God one and unique, apart from the most general assertion that “insofar as we separate God from other beings, he can be said to be one” and ”insofar as we conceive that there cannot be more than one of the same nature, he is called unique” (CM I/6).103

What can be classed as (real) being and as (true) idea (whose object [ideatum] is some real being) in Spinoza’s Division of Being from his Metaphysical Thoughts (chap. I) can serve here as an introduction to the text from the Ethics.

Being is here divided into what exists of its own nature and what does not exist of its own nature, i.e. into that whose essence involves existence and whose essence involves only possible existence (CM I/1)104.

102 The full quote here is “In truth, if we wished to look into the matter more rigorously, we might perhaps show that God is only improperly called one and unique. But this question is of little importance – indeed, of no importance – to those who are concerned with things rather than words” (CM I/6), Shirley translation, (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), p. 106. 103 In other words, the simple truth that only one entity is called being (singular) and everything else beings (plural) tells us nothing specific about what it means, or how to understand it, and thus needs classification or distinction. 104 This statement corresponds to A1; A2 and A7 from the first part of the Ethics: Whatever is, is either in itself or in another (A1); What cannot be conceived through another, must be conceived through itself (A2); If a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence (A7)

48 This division, seemingly unspectacular, which Spinoza writes with such an ease is decisive and sufficient to remove those “matters that are rather obscure” in what has been hitherto called metaphysics (CM I/1).

Decisive is that Spinoza does not divide being into reality that is accessible to the mind and reality that is accessible to the senses as in Plato (Phaedo, 79a6)105. Nor does he divide being into quid est and quod est, into what something is and that it is, namely, into essence and existence, or into legein, logos and einai, on (being and thought) as in Aristotle (Posterior Analytics, 2.7.92b4-11; Metaphysics, Book Z and H)106. Nor into any of their later variants, as in Cicero, where “The things I call existing are those which can be seen or touched” and “Those things, I say have no existence, which are incapable of being touched, but which can be perceived by the mind and understood […] which I call the notion of them” (Topics, 5.27). Or in Seneca, where the Stoics introduce the quid as a supreme genus to the quod est (Letters to Lucilius, 58, 6-15).

Fundamentally they are all variations of the same way of thinking about the division of being: one visible, one invisible, “one which can be seen and one which cannot be seen”107.

This is not, Spinoza tells us how we should think of the fundamental division of being. It is ‘wrong’ he says, to divide it into Real Being and Being of Reason, Being and Non-Being, Being and

Modes of Thought [ens reale and ens rationis; ens and non-ens; ens and modum cogitandi]108, namely into being (gr. on, einai) on the one hand, and the mind (gr. logos, legein) on the other109. This kind of

105 δύο εἴδη τῶν ὄντων (Phaedo, 79a6) – (duo eide ton onton), ‘two forms of being’. 106 That which is non realiter distincta (that which is not distinct in the thing itself, i.e. how things are in themselves), and that which is sed tantum ratione (the way we think about or understand things), a distinction based on the Book Z and H of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. And which raises the question of unity between the two as I mentioned earlier. And it is this ‘unity’ which is traditionally referred to as the “One” – which is obviously not the same in Spinoza. 107 δύο εἴδη τῶν ὄντων, τὸ μὲν ορἁ τόν, τὸ δὲ ἀιδές (Phaedo, 79a6) – (duo eide ton onton, to men oraton, to de aides) ‘two forms of being, one which can be seen and one which cannot be seen’. Needless to say, it remains the same fundamental division of being if we reverse what is ‘real’, i.e. if we say that ‘thought’ is real (idealism or rationalism) or if we say that physis is ‘real’ (empiricism or positivism). There is always one side of the equation which is real and the other non-real – being and non-being as Spinoza puts it. 108 CM I/ 1-6. 109 It is clear from here that ‘real being’ can be either one of the two, either what can be ‘touched’ or ‘seen’ (empirical entities) or what can be ‘thought’ (logic), and where all possibilities of philosophy’s own original positioning either as materialism or idealism, empiricism or rationalism are already entailed. This is obviously not Spinoza’s point of departure, i.e. not his fundamental distinction of being.

49 ‘error’ have been made by those “verbal and grammatical philosophers” (CM I/1), namely, in the way I understand Spinoza’s reference here, by the Roman translators of Plato and Aristotle, such as Apuleius, Victorinus or Quintilian, who were indeed prose writers, rhetoricians and

Latin language teachers rather than philosophers, but whose translations of the Greek ousia and eidos into the Latin essentia and substantia became crucial for the whole subsequent development in metaphysics.110

These few lines from the Metaphysical Thoughts advance nothing less than a wholesale reconception of what ontology means. There is in Spinoza’s division of being no onto-logic (being on the one side, and the logos on the other) in the sense we use the word, referring to ontology as the question of the relationship between ‘real things’ and the ‘mind’s apprehension’, that is, between being and thought111.

Moreover, Spinoza tells us that from such (wrong) traditional division of being into real being and beings of reason “it is obvious that there is no agreement between real being and the objects (ideata) of a being of reason” (CM I/1). Hence, the question of identity that arises from

110 As for the comment Spinoza makes here about fiction “for they think that a fictitious being is also a being of reason because it has no existence outside the mind”, he might possibly refer to Seneca, namely to the same Letter to Lucilius (Letter 58 On Being, 15) I mentioned above where Seneca explains the Stoic introduction of the aliud genus magis principale (58.14) after having stated that “I divide ‘what is’ into these species: things that are corporeal or incorporeal; there is no third possibility” [“Quod est” in has species divide, ut sint corporalia aut incorporalia. Nihil tertium est] (58. 14), but where Seneca states also the following: “in order of nature some things exist, and other things do not exist. And even the things that do not exist are really part of the order of nature. What these are will readily occur to the mind, for example centaurs, giants, and all other figments of unsound reasoning, which have begun to have a definite shape, although they have no bodily consistency” [“in rerum”, inquiunt, “natura quaedam sunt, quaedam non sunt. Et haec autem, quae non sunt, rerum natura complectitur, quae animo succurrunt, tamquam Centauri, Gigantes et quicquid aliud falsa cogitatione formatum habere aliquam imaginem coepit, quamvis non habeat substantiam] (58.15). And which is contrary to what Spinoza is saying, namely that “the question as to whether fictitious being is real being or being of reason is based on error. For it presupposes that all being is divided into real being and being of reason” (CM I/1). Note that Seneca continues his explanations here by saying that “I now return to the subject which I promised to discuss for you, namely, how it is that Plato divides all existing things in six different ways. The first class of “that which exists” cannot be grasped by the sight or by the touch, or by any of the senses, but it can be grasped by the thought. Any generic conception, such as the generic idea “man”, does not come within the range of the eyes; but “man” in particular does; as, for example, Cicero, Cato. The term “animal” is not seen; it is grasped by thought alone. A particular animal, however, is seen, for example, a horse, a dog”. (English translation here from: Seneca, Epistles, Volume I: Epistles 1-65, transl. by Richard M. Gummere (Loeb Classical Library 75. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), pp. 386-408 Epistle 58 on Being. Accessible online via www.loebclassics.com 111 Almost needless to say, the entire reception history of Spinoza’s philosophy has great difficulties to deal with this novelty, or even to recognize it, and has repeatedly drawn Spinoza back, as did Hegel, into the mould of the traditional question of onto-logic, based on the standard distinction of being that Spinoza is rejecting here.

50 such fundamental distinction, all efforts to ‘unite’ being and thought based on the traditional division of being seem ill positioned in both directions, ontologically as well as epistemologically.

For, as he continues, “it is one thing to enquire into the nature of things, and quite another to enquire into the modes by which we perceive things. If these are confused, we shall not be able to understand either modes of perceiving or nature itself. Indeed – and this is a point of greatest importance – it will be the cause of our falling into grave errors, as has happened to many before us” (CM I/1).

To the ‘many before us’, who have divided being into being on the one hand, and thought on the other, belong Heraclitus and Parmenides no less than Plato and Aristotle, medieval

Platonists and Aristotelians, or many who came after Spinoza, from Kant112 to Hegel113. It is the most standard distinction upon which philosophy as philosophy understands itself as well as its own object of inquiry that is under scrutiny here.

Thus, in this reading of the Metaphysical Thoughts let us try to understand what Spinoza could have had in mind, what is wrong with the traditional division of being?

112 Kant could not at the end ‘unite’ the two realms of his system, the realm of freedom (thought) and the realm of nature (physis). For the ontology of the latter (supportive of early modern sciences in Kant) is different from the former introduced to ‘complement’ what Kant thought went wrong with the early modern development, that is, the missing ethical dimension (realm of freedom) in Kant’s view. In an imagined dialogue a Spinozian could ask a Kantian: Are not forms of our understanding not only conditions of knowledge, but already knowledge of being? And already something to which reason refers to before it is respectively used for sciences (theoretical reason) and for ethics (practical reason)? A Kantian would reply that the synthetic unity of reason posited a priori creates the underlying unity of knowledge, the unity of the ideas of reason prior to the distinction between the practical (freedom) and the theoretical (scientific) realm. The Spinozian could then close the case: if you have to refer to the synthetic unity of reason a priori and so create the categories of reason, as stated in the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (A23/B38), then your reason has one understanding of being (in the unity of the synthesis) before it has two (in theory and practice) different understandings of the same. In consequence, we very much differ it seems in this: that you think the ethical is better grounded in the autonomy and the self-legislation of reason, while I think that it is better grounded in the immediate conception that reason has of being. For I don’t see any stronger foundation for what you intended ‘to save’ (the ethical) by looking back at those old philosophies, which I have already refuted. 113 Namely Hegel’s Logic in which a philosophical system is elaborated where there is no longer a difference between real being and being of reason (being and thought; ón and logos), between the metaphysical and the logical level, as some scholars call it, that is, where “the separation of knowing and truth is overcome”, as Hegel himself puts it (Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit) in order to describe his own undertaking as the accomplishment or “the end” of philosophy – precisely because he was able to formulate such ‘unity’ between being and thought, the apex of the whole history of philosophy as we know it.

51 What is wrong, Spinoza seems to say, is that the traditional division of being ‘adds’ being to being. There is first ‘being’ (as physis) as the opposite to ‘thought’ (or to non-being); and then there is in addition ‘being’ as the unity or synthesis of both (being pure and simple). Thus, there are two beings, although clearly, being (in singular) can be only ‘one’ (everything else are beings).

Spinoza formulates it as follow:

They say that this term (unity) signifies something real outside the intellect [that it really exists]. But they cannot explain what this adds to being, and this is a clear indication that they are confusing beings of reason with real being and are thereby rendering confused that which they [otherwise] clearly understand. But we on our part say that unity is in no way distinct from the thing itself or additional to being and is merely a mode of thinking whereby we separate a thing from other things that are similar to it or agree with it in some respect. (CM I/6. My addition in brackets)

Put differently, what is usually called ‘unity’, the ‘one’ being that traditionally unites both, being and thought, is a ‘doublet’ and therefore different from ‘the thing itself’. Namely, from being already posited in the opposition to thought.

The contradiction is this: if there is only one being (because everything else are beings), then we cannot posit being (one more time) as the opposite to thought. Or, if we assume that the opposition between being and thought is fundamental, then we cannot introduce another, more fundamental being (pure and simple) in addition. The tradition clearly ‘adds’ being to being in order to secure the ‘identity’ between being and thought, that is, the epistemological access to things. Without it, the distinction between being and thought would indeed be fundamental, that is, there would be no epistemological access or knowledge of things. But because it is an addition we ourselves make, an abstraction and not the unity of being itself that generates it, this doublet of being cannot actually, in Spinoza’s view, account for what it has been created for (however ‘pure’ or however ‘deep’ its ground), namely for the “agreement between real being and the objects (ideata) of a being of reason” (CM I/1).

52 We are here touching upon one of the main differences between the early modern overall and the whole of traditional metaphysics. Because not only Spinoza introduces extension instead of being as the counterpart to thought. Or think that “in Nature there is nothing but substances and their modes” as Spinoza refers to Descartes in CM II/5114. Notwithstanding, let us first hold to the fact that Spinoza’s model consists in positing one being for both, extension and thought so that all modes of being (extended or thinking) can be considered as beings (plural) existing in different ways. Hence, there is one being and there are beings, nothing else. And from where follows that “the true is not a transcendental term” (CM I/6) because being is for

Spinoza not “the transcendens pure and simple”115, not the ‘doublet of being’ as I called it above.

Therefore, if we are to speak of the one then only as something “in no way distinct from the thing itself or additional to being” (CM I/6). In other words, the ‘one’ is not something which comes in addition to being. It is not a synthesis.

When Hegel famously comments on the “abstract unity” in Spinoza and in Parmenides, he criticizes ad verbatim the synthesis, i.e. the way in which the metaphysical (independent) and the logical (dependent) level are held together in one: in Parmenides being and truth with the seeming and the opinions (gr. doxa) , i.e. the first part of his Poem with the second116; and

114 […] we must recall what Descartes said in Princip. Philosophiae Part I Arts. 48 and 49, that in Nature there is nothing but substances and their modes, whence in Arts. 60, 61, and 62 he deduces a threefold distinction between things – real, modal, and a distinction of reason. Hence, there is already in Descartes a division of being that operates only with substance(s) and modes. Whereby ‘distinction between things’ refers to modes of knowing. 115 As Heidegger puts it in his introduction to Being and Time, and who himself reverts back, as did all of German philosophy after the early modern, to the traditional division of being (and from where Heidegger can raise the question of Being), in particular to Aristotle, and which is worth quoting here as in contrast to Spinoza: “Being, as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class or genus of entities; yet it pertains to every entity. It’s ‘universality’ is to be sought higher up. Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. Being is the transcendens pure and simple. And the transcendence of Dasein’s Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation. Every disclosure of Being as the transcendens is transcendental knowledge. Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis”, Heidegger, Being and Time Int. II/C, 38 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962), p. 62 (all emphasis in the original). Hence, it is not the so-called religious side of the tradition that makes being a transcendens pure and simple, but Platonism and Aristotelianism in the way it was received in Western Thought and applied to religion(s). Thus, ‘transcendence’ has little, if anything to do with the Scriptures. 116 How the two different parts of Parmenides’ Poem relate to each other is an old topic in philosophy, and subject to continuous debates in scholarship. The first part is on the understanding of being (in terms of truth), and the second on the world of change (in terms of physis and in terms of opinions, gr. doxa).

53 in Spinoza, the way in which “attributes, modes, movement, reason, or the will”117 are ‘one’ with the substance. In other words, all things dependent upon our own cognition (beings of reason), that is, modes of being are ‘relativa’ and not ontological ‘absoluta’118 (real being) in Hegel’s reading of Spinoza. Hence, if we are to read Spinoza along the traditional lines, we need not look further than Hegel.

If we are to think outside of this tradition, however, and try to grasp the novelty of

Spinoza’s division of being, then we can expect that Spinoza’s ‘one’ being or God, its oneness and uniqueness won’t have much in common (ontologically or epistemologically) with the traditional

“One”, the synthesis that comes in ‘addition to being’ (CM I/6). And if the ontological question is fundamentally set up differently by Spinoza, we can expect the idea of philosophical research

(as ‘the science of being or metaphysics, and of logic - logos) to shift with it.

“But let us return to our theme […] that being should be divided into being that exists necessarily of its own nature (i.e. whose essence involves existence) and being whose essence involves only possible existence”, to which we can add what Spinoza says in the letter to Meyer, namely, between that whose existence “we can explain by Duration” and that whose existence

“we can explain by Eternity, i.e., the infinite enjoyment of existing, or (in bad Latin) of being”119.

That is, into “Substance and Mode”, whereby “this (is) to be noted, that we expressly say that being is divided into Substance and Mode, not Substance and Accident. For Accident is nothing more than a mode of thinking, inasmuch as it denotes only a relation [respectum] (CM I/1).120

117 […] eben ein solcher Inhalt ist ein synthetischer überhaupt, synthetisch im allgemeinerem Sinne genommen. So bekommt Parmenides mit dem Scheine und der Meinung, dem Gegenteil des Seins und der Wahrheit, zu tun; so Spinoza mit den Attributen, den Modis, der Ausdehnung, Bewegung, dem Verstand, dem Willen u.s.f. Die Synthesis enthält und zeigt die Unwahrheit jener Abstraktionen, in ihr sind sie in Einheit mit ihrem Anderen, also nicht als für sich Bestehende, nicht als Absolute, sondern schlechthin als Relative. This passage is from the first chapter of part I of the Science of Logic, on the ‘Unity of Being and Nothing’, Remark 3, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), p. 91 118 Ibid. 119 Ep. XII [to Lodewijk Meyer], CWS I, 202. To be sure, the division is not simply between the infinite and the finite, but between the absolutely infinite (indivisible) and the finite, as Spinoza clearly explains the different infinites in this famous letter usually called Spinoza’s letter ‘on the infinite’. 120 There are many ‘accidents’ in secondary literature on Spinoza, namely when authors think one can simply substitute Spinoza’s modes with accident and so revert to Aristotelian categories. The confusion certainly comes from Spinoza’s determination of the one being as ‘substance’. But the substance is here not the Aristotelian ousia, i.e. not the substance of a finite thing and its modes not qualities predicated of or inhering in it. To turn modes

54 Thus, we have first nothing but substance and modes. And both are clearly being, for it is being that occurs in a multiplicity of ways or modes.

It is helpful here, as it is in other places, to revert Spinoza’s Latin into Greek121. What corresponds to the Latin modus is the Greek kategorein: the ‘category’122, that is, different ways

(modes) by which being is said to be and which Aristotle ‘fixes’ as an assertion made by what

‘we can say (gr. legein) of being’ in general, so that only few categories apply to all beings (the ten categories in Aristotle)123. What corresponds to modes in Spinoza are therefore no ‘accident’, as some scholars confuse the issue, but the (traditional) ‘categories’. The fact is, however, that in contrast to Aristotle, Spinoza cannot introduce any ‘fix assertions’ of the ways (modes) by which being is. At least not in form of a table, as in Aristotle or later Kant, applicable to everything that is, namely, as no further reducible forms of understanding. Because Spinoza calls mode everything “whose essence involves only possible existence” (CM I/1), or as he defines modes in the Ethics, as “the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived” (1d5). Thus, if one cannot introduce fixed ‘categories’ for the modalities of being because they are themselves ‘beings’ defined as modes, there remains only being as that which is asserted through its own modalities as a supreme category, namely, the substance.

into accidents in Spinoza is a ‘categorical’ mistake, closer to Aquinas [sed duplex est esse, scilicet esse essentiale rei siue substantiale, …, et hoc est esse simpliciter; est autem aliud esse accidentale] in De Principiis Naturae, cap. I. than to Spinoza and hence an anachronism as well as a misunderstanding about the early modern revolutionary turn in philosophy and the sciences. For ‘accidents’ are the categories of ‘Simplicio’, as Galileo calls the follower of Aristotle in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632). 121 Greek is helpful not because Spinoza knew any Greek, he didn’t. But because his scholastic Latin vocabulary corresponds to the medieval translations of Ancient Greek philosophy, and which despite all differences clearly delineate the matter in question with all important connotations. The scholastic vocabulary for Greek conceptions is still closer to the sources than we are at any rate with vernacular languages. 122 The Greek word kategorein means nothing else than ‘modes of being’. Hence, kategorein is already an understanding by which we ‘assert’ a mode of being as such a general ‘category’ as quality, quantity, or other. 123 Or the ‘genus, genera’ (gr. géne) in Plato, determining every being (Theatetus, 197D8), to which Aristotle will oppose the doctrine of the categories (Met. B 3, 998b14-28). When Spinoza refers to the example of homo animal rationale here in this first chapter of the Metaphysical Thoughts, or later in the second part of the Ethics in the scholium to proposition 40 (E2p40s), it is the same passage in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Met. B 3, 998b14-28) where Aristotle criticises Plato for the determinations of being as ‘genera’ and where he uses the example of the rational animal (definition of the human being) to counter Plato and prove that being (gr. on) is not a genus (gr. genos). This is one of the classical text passages indicating the difference between the philosophy of Aristotle and that of Plato. Spinoza knew too well why to refer precisely to this example in the context of the division of Being, and use it for discarding both, Platonist and Aristotelian positions.

55 But why conceive of the one being as substance?

Substance is that which traditionally signifies solidity or ontological support in the sense that what ‘lacks reality’ is lacking substance. To ‘have substance’ [substantiam habere] or to

‘take substance’ [substantiam capere] meant to exist as a concrete entity, and thus to be

‘manifest’ in the sense of having a ‘body’ or foundation in reality. It is with these basic connotations of the Latin translations of Greek texts that the word substance must have resonated with all those who, like Spinoza, were about to completely change its meaning in the early modern period124.

In contrast to the whole of previous metaphysics, the word substance does no longer refer to the substance of a single finite entity in Spinoza, to the being of (finite) beings as in Aristotle or

Plato, and of which various qualities or properties (essential or accidental) can be predicated or inhere in. It refers to being itself, as the category of existence (gr. kategorein, assertion) determining what the absolutely infinite being ‘is’.

To illustrate this difference, let me quote the author whom I mentioned above and believe Spinoza counts among the “verbal and grammatical philosophers”, namely Victorinus who writes about the difference between existence and substance:

The sages and ancients define existence and existentiality as pre-existing subsistence without accidents because they subsist purely and only in that which is only “to be”; but they define substance as a subject with all its accidents inseparably existing with it125 Existence differs from substance, since existence is “to be” itself, “to be” which is neither in another nor subject of another but solely “to be” itself, whereas substance has not only “to be” but also has “to be” something qualified. For it is subject to the qualities within it and on that account is called subject126

124 I am here, however, not concerned with any parallels or differences to Spinoza’s contemporaries, let us just outline what is specific to the Ethics. 125 [Existentiam quidem et existentialitatem, praeexistentem subsistentiam sine accidentibus, puris et solis ipsis quae sunt in eo quod est solum esse, quod subsistent; substantiam autem, subjectum cum his omnibus quae sunt accidentia in ipsa inseparabiliter existentibus], Marius Victorinus, Adversus Arium, 1A.30.21 in Theological Treatises on the Trinity, trans. Clark, quoted from Cassin (2014), in the entry on “Essence”, p. 301. 126 [Existentiam ipsum esse est et solum esse, et non in alio esse aut subjectum alterius, sed unum et solum ipsum esse, substantia autem non esse solum habet, sed et quale aliquid esse. Subjacet enim in se positis qualitatibus et idcirco dicitur subjectum], Marius Victorinus, Candidi epistola, 1.2.19-23, in ibid.

56 Or as Pierre Hadot explains “For Victorinus and in the letter of Candidus, existence is the still undetermined being, pure being, taken without qualification, without a subject and without a predicate; substance, on the contrary, is qualified and determined being, the being of something and which is something”127.

In Spinoza we have being itself that is now substance, that is, we have together what has been traditionally (since Antiquity) separated, the undetermined and the determined, being pure and simple from the being of beings. It is now the one and the same being. The ‘doublet of being’

(the difference between Being and the being of beings) disappears by the stroke of a single move, by defining being itself a substance.128

Thus, substance applies to nothing else but to being itself because it is the category of being associated with: presence (Dasein) and actuality; with being a subject in the sense of activity or effective power; with concretitude in the sense of singularity and individuation; with being manifest in the sense that whatever it effectuates has a solid foundation in (res) reality; and with the support

(ontological and epistemological) it provides to what it produces (subsistence). Hence, when being itself is defined as substance, it gives the world or the whole of beings an overall firm, real, concrete, actual and powerful foundations effective in the whole of its infinite realm.

The argumentative structure of the Propositions 1-8 in the first part of the Ethics, which demonstrate that the category ‘substance’ is appropriate only for the infinite being itself or God, relies on the eight definitions that precedes them and applies the rules (axiomata) that Spinoza inserts between the definitions and the propositions. The set of these propositions directly

127 Hadot, Pierre, Porphyre et Victorinus (Paris, Institut d'Etudes Augustiniennes (IEA), 1968) quoted as in previous from Cassin (2014), p. 301. Or see Hadot’s article on the history of the notion of existence by the Stoics “Zur Vorgeschichte des Begriffs ‘Existenz’ bei den Stoikern”, in Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Bd. XIII, Heft 2, (1969). This difference is also the one between the quid and the quod, between what something is and that it is (‘what-the thing-is and ‘the-thing-which-is’), Plato Phaedo, 78c-d) and Aristotle (Posterior Analytics, 2.7.92b4-11). 128 Almost needless to say, philosophy’s subsequent return to the Greeks, i.e. to the same traditional division of being from the 18th century onwards, especially in Germany, is from this perspective a backlash. And as an attempt to bring philosophy in accord with modern sciences, which are themselves operating upon the early modern model of the one being, that is, on the model of an infinite ontology, an impasse. The ‘end’ of metaphysics after Hegel owes its development not to the implementation of what has been clarified from previous existing systems. Rather, it is what has not been sufficiently clarified or resolved that brought it to an ‘end’.

57 applies the category ‘substance’ to being itself129, and so deals with the question of how to conceive of being’s own ‘is’. Namely, as having a nature of substance, and therefore as unique, one and absolutely infinite.130 Thus, the uniqueness (Spinoza’s argument that there is only one being and not two or a doublet), and the oneness (Spinoza’s argument of the oneness of reality the one being introduces) are one of substance (of something that has the nature of substance)131. It is, in other words, a substantial oneness and uniqueness.

Instead of quoting the text, however, let us simplify things for a moment before we complicate them again and summarize here the set of Propositions 1-5 without using the words

‘substance’ and ‘conception’ (concipere and intelligere) before we return to both.

P1: Being is prior to beings.132 P2: If there would be two Beings, they would be different and have nothing in common.133 P3: If they have nothing in common, they cannot be the cause of one another.134 P4: Things are distinguished either by a difference in being or a difference in modalities.135 Because: whatever is, exists either of its own nature or exists not of its own nature. There is Being and there are beings, nothing else.136 (As in the Division of Being in Metaphysical Thoughts). P5: In Nature there cannot exist two Beings of the same kind. If we try to distinguish them by kind, they would turn out to be the same (in kind). Perhaps we can distinguish them by what they produce? But what is produced (beings) is later than Being. Hence, we need to consider them separately, to leave beings (plural) aside and turn to Being

129 The same features ‘substance’ traditionally has, but now applied to the infinite Being itself: actuality, being a subject, singularity, foundation in reality, etc. traditionally attributed to the substance of a single and finite thing. 130 We are thus not yet dealing with the attributes, introduced with Proposition 9. 131 This is clear from the fact that from the first proposition onwards Spinoza uses the word substance. Hence, what needs to be demonstrated is not the reason why Spinoza uses the word substance, but that substance can be conceived only as unique, one and infinite. He famously does not explain at any place to his readers such pre- systemic reflexions and does not ‘justify” what he thought obvious and easy to grasp in the form he presents it. 132 P1: A substance is prior in nature to its affections. 133 P2: Two substances having different attributes have nothing in common with one another. 134 P3: If things have nothing in common with one another, one of them cannot be the cause of the other. 135 P4: Two or more distinct things are distinguished from one another, either by a difference in the attributes of the substances or by a difference in their affections. Dem.: Whatever is, is either in itself or in another (by A1), that is (by D3 and D5), outside the intellect there is nothing except substances and their affections. 136 P5: In Nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute. Dem.: If there were two or more distinct substances, they would have to be distinguished from one another either by a difference in their attributes, or by a difference in their affections. If only by a difference in their attributes, then it will be conceded that there is only one of the same attribute. But if by a difference in their affections, then since a substance is prior in nature to its affections (by P1), if the affections are put to one side and [the substance] is considered in itself, that is, considered truly, one cannot be conceived to be distinguished from another, that is (by P4), there cannot be many, but only one [of the same nature or attribute], q.e.d.

58 again. And assert that there cannot be two Beings of the same kind, and so come to the same conclusion as at the beginning (that there cannot be two realities same in kind).

This is the bone structure of Spinoza’s argument in the Ethics that there is only one ‘being’ as the refutation of the traditional ‘doublet’. And which works as an argument because it relies on

Spinoza’s own division of being that whatever is, exists either of its own nature or exists not of its own nature.

From here we can add the ‘conceiving’ (lat. concipere and intelligere) or revert to the definitions137, and at the end replace the ‘bad Latin’ (of ‘being’ or esse) by calling Being substance and beings affections or modifications and so arrive at the original formulations of the Ethics.

This is, however, just the breaking down of the structure. It is the content that we need to grasp.

Namely, what it means when these denominations - Being and beings defined as substance and affections, modifications, and their conception and intellection - are staged together.

What is unusual in the first pages of the Ethics is that there is no ‘observer’ speaking of

‘being’ and describing how the world ‘is’ or appears to be from his or her own perspective.

What is ‘absent’ is the classical separation between the ‘thinking subject’ and the ‘object of thought’, which is unsettling to many commentators138. Instead, what we read includes the

‘conceiving’ and the ‘intellect’ in the definitions, axioms and propositions. Every definition (D1-

D8) determining what something ‘is’ includes, in one way or another, the conception or intellection of the definiendum.139 As does every axiom and the following propositions.

137 P1: What is in itself and is conceived through itself (Being) is prior to what is not in itself and is not conceived through itself (beings) (by D3 and D5) etc. 138 As is for Bartuschat whom I mentioned in the introduction. 139 D6 does not entail ‘conception’ or ‘intellection’ as words, but insofar as it includes the definitions of substance (D3) and of attributes (D4) it does. We find the word ‘conceive’ in the exposition to D6. The same holds for D7 about “That thing called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined to act by itself alone” and “a thing called necessary, or rather compelled, which is determined by another to exist […]”. One could as well say ‘That thing is called free “whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing” (D1), and that thing is called necessary “which is in another through which it is also conceived” (D5).

59 Or more precisely, conception and intellection are an integral part of the definiendum. In other words, ‘what something is’ is that which ‘can be conceived as such’. And unsettling it is, for the traditional difference between being and thought (ón and logos) is fused here together through the very definition of what being ‘is’ and needs, as mentioned earlier, no synthesis in

Spinoza’s system.

Goetschel calls this the “epistemologico-critical moment”, which is “already deeply inscribed in Spinoza’s metaphysics, whose structure itself represents a critical reflection on the conditions that make knowledge possible”140, and rightly suggests that knowledge, as Spinoza understands it well before Kant, wouldn’t be able to ever isolate itself from its own conditions.

These ‘conditions’, however, are not the Kantian a priori.

In Spinoza ‘there is’141 thought as the constituent of what makes being a res (esse realiter), an existing thing. Hence, cognition and intellection are the constituents (gr. enuparchon: ‘present-in’) of what being ‘is’, and therefore neither (subjective) forms of understanding (categories of reason) nor specific human conditions under which we know things only insofar ‘as they appear to us’

(phenomena) as physis. This implies that we are no longer observers who speak of ‘being’ in many ways (Aristotle’s legetai pollachos) from a neutral ground of contemplation but are through cognition and intellection involved in what is essentially of being (what cannot be conceived is not).

This, however, is possible only if being itself is understood as substance, that is, if it is itself the form through which things are and through which they are comprehended. For ‘the attribute’ thought belongs to the essence of being, i.e. it belongs to the substantial oneness of the reality it posits.

And nothing illustrates the case better than the developments in contemporary physics

(or biology and chemistry) where ‘thought’ is nothing ‘subjective’, but an inherent part of what

140 Goetschel, Willi, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing and Heine, (Madison Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) p.27. Goetschel refers here to the definition of the attribute (D4), while I take this ‘critical’ moment of cognition and intellection as the constitutive part of all definitions, axioms and the following propositions. The difference between ‘to conceive’ and the ‘intellect’ from D4 is part of my analysis about the two attributes in the next chapter. 141 “there is’ in the same sense as the French ‘il y a’, or the German ‘es gibt’.

60 can be defined as an entity at all. And which is in fact unsettling, as it is fascinating, precisely because it has nothing to do with subjectivity or with the specific human limitations of apprehension, that is, with the traditional separation between being and thought142.

Hence, the ‘conditions’ under which “man thinks” (E2a2) is such that our cognition or intellect is part of what belongs to the very essence of being (attribute of Thought)143. Strictly speaking, we don’t ‘have’ thoughts (as one has objects), but ‘are’ or live in thought144 at any given time of our existence, for not only the intellect, but also “will, desire, love and the like” are, although different from each other, all a “certain mode of thinking which […] must be conceived through absolute thought, that is, it must be so conceived through an attribute of

God, which expresses the eternal and infinite essence of thought” (E1p31). And from where results a very different understanding about the ‘autonomy’ of our thinking than in Kant and the Enlightenment, or from the “cristal dur et impénétrable” where all thoughts dissolve in their object of knowing, and of which Alain145 incorrectly accused Spinoza’s ontology.

Now, in conclusion, we can say that propositions 1-8 in the first part of the Ethics introduce Spinoza’s new fundamental division of being, namely, the introduction of the category substance as applying to nothing else than to the one and unique being. The category of substance, however, is not a principle, as we saw earlier, but a thing or res. Hence, Spinoza’s application of this main category to nothing else but being itself introduces a category of existence that itself needs a cause (propositions 6 and 7) in order to be (cause of itself).

142 I found the description of this problem in Heisenberg’s biography Physics and Beyond (1971) to be particularly insightful regarding the difference between the ‘conditions’ (ontological and epistemological) in modern physics and the conditions of knowledge as Kant understood them. (German ed. Der Teil und das Ganze. Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik. Piper, München 1969, 2002), chap. 10 “Quantenmechanik und Kantsche Philosophie”, pp 141-150 143 The old question ‘why there is something rather than nothing’ is from this perspective not the right question, for it still presupposes the observer ‘wondering’ (gr. thaumazein) ‘before’ he begins to think. For Spinoza the question is ‘how’ to respond to the facticity of being. Hence, ‘wondering’ would be here already a form of thought. 144 In this sense, there is no need for a ‘critique of pure reason’, which lays the ground for a metaphysics that ‘belongs to human nature’ as in Kant, for it is already and essentially there. Or for a ‘fundamental ontology’ that introduces Dasein into an ontological analytic as in Heidegger, because it is already existentially there. 145 Alain, Souvenirs, concernant Jules Lagneau (1925) quoted in André Comte-Sponville, “Le dieu et l’idole, in: Olivier Bloch, Spinoza au XXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), p. 21

61 Being itself or God is therefore not, as Wolfson writes “something whose existence is independent of any cause”, the “existence per se”146 that we find in medieval Jewish or Islamic philosophies drawing on Antiquity, and which Wolfson compares to Spinoza. Because, as we have seen by now, there is in Spinoza no ‘existence pure and simple’, ipsum et solum esse, a simple meaning of “to be”147, pure (act) being (actus essendi) or the ‘mere entity’ referring to the Greek einai monon (being pure and simple). This is the old traditional way148. Spinoza’s substance does have a cause (as every other existing thing) but is alone the cause of itself.149 Because substance is a category of existence, as mentioned earlier, posited through the notion of God as the first cause.

And from where it follows that God or being itself is “the efficient cause of all things”; that “God is a cause through himself and (therefore) not an accidental cause”; and that “God is absolutely the first cause” (E1p16, c.)150.

The term ‘existence’ concerns the essence (nature) of a thing as having existence ‘from somewhere’ (Latin ex-sistere). And since the substance has existence from itself as a cause, it causes itself to ex-sist as a res, namely to exist beyond its cause or ‘really’ in “what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence” (E1d4). And which makes the attributes of the substance “really distinct” although “we still cannot infer from that that they constitute two beings, or two different substances” (E1p10s), as we shall see later in the chapter about the two attributes (known to us) of Extension and Thought.

146 Wolfson, Harry Austryn, The Philosophy of Spinoza (1934), p. 187 (on E1p11). 147 Victorinus, Adversus Arium, 1A.30.21, in Theological Treatise on the Trinity, transl. Clark 148 A comparison between Jewish medieval philosophies and Spinoza is of course possible, but not in what the medievals have in common with Greek Antiquity, Maimonides for instance with Aristotle. Rather, in comparing what they have in common through Jewish teachings in spite of very different philosophical frameworks. 149 The substance or God does not need another entity in order to be, as Descartes puts it, but it needs a cause: “By substance we can understand nothing else than an entity which is in such a way that it needs no other entity in order to be (Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, I/51). Namely in the Ethics as “what is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed” (E1d3), whereby the definition of cause is precisely defined through the notion of existence, i.e. as “that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing” (E1d1). 150 E1p16 corollary 1-3 (my addition here of ‘therefore’ in brackets).

62 This is also why Leibniz could coin a new term from this Latin meaning by saying that

“There is, therefore, a cause for which existence prevails over non-existence; in other words,

God is existencing [existentificans]“151. Thus, every existing thing, however different the entities might be, as a human being, a plant, an organ or a cell, have some capacity of self-causation, i.e. of producing some real effect in accordance with their own particular essence insofar as “all existings are founded [fundatur] within God (the necessary Being) existing indeed”152. Every similarity here between God and the single finite or infinite entities is therefore no longer one of ‘analogy’ or that which cannot be said ‘univoce’ (of Being and of being in beings), as it was formulated in medieval philosophies, but the very determinations in res of what different beings are as modes (either finite or infinite) of the one and the same substance.

In consequence, the oneness such being (as substance) generates is the substantial oneness of reality as a whole, and at the same time a substantial oneness for every individuum of its modifications (as the case of the union between body and mind in humans with which Spinoza deals later in the Ethics). And the uniqueness such being (as substance) introduces is the uniqueness of being insofar as it is being, that is, the refutation of the traditional (Greek and medieval) division of being and therefore the abolishment of the doubling of being into ‘Being pure and simple’ and

‘the being of beings’. Hence, we will cognize what is unique in things (finite or infinite) now through the infinite being itself, and no longer through the (Aristotelian) substance of a finite thing, i.e. through what is eternal in beings, their unique essence.153

151 Leibniz, Vingt-quatre thèses métaphysiques, in Recherches générales sur l’analyse des notions et des vérités. [RG], ed. E. Cattin, (Paris, PUF, 1998). GP VII, 289 152 Ibid. 153 In this section, I haven’t looked into proposition 8 that “Every substance is necessarily infinite”. Instead, the next section presents a historical overview in order to better understand what is at stake with the infinite nature of the one substance in the Ethics.

63 1.3 Pantheism in question

It is well known that in the Middle Ages all scholastic philosophers advocate Aristotle's "infinitum actu non datur" as an irrefutable principle Cantor

In contrast to the one being of Parmenides154 that Moira (fate) famously bound to be a whole (gr. holon) and immovable (gr. akineton) (B8 37) for hard necessity keeps it in the bonds of the limit (gr. peras) and Wherefore it is not permitted to what is (being) to be infinite (gr. ateleuteton) (B8 30); and in difference to Aristotle’s substance that is always finite (gr. oùsia tóde ti) and the infinite (gr. apeiron) never ‘real’ or actual (gr. entelecheia), we are in the context of modern sciences dealing with a being that is absolutely infinite (E1d6), actual from eternity [actu ab eterno] (E1p17s), an infinite activity or power (gr. energeia), and where motion (gr. kinesis) and potence (gr. dyname) became ad verbum the ‘motive force’ (Newton) of modern physics.

In addition, in Spinoza’s Ethics there is one substance, but a five-fold output of the infinite. Namely, 1) the infinitude (the nature of the attributes) of 2) an infinite number of infinites (of the attributes) of 3) the one infinite (substance) out of which 4) follow infinitely many things [infinita (rerum)] 5) in infinitely many ways [infinitis modis] (E1p16)155. Hence, the mathematical in Spinoza, in the sense of mathesis, as that which is conceived through itself and which only the mind or the intellect, and never the senses, can conceive of (lat. concipere or gr. epistemein) or perceive (lat. percipere or gr. noien), is not primarily due to the (Euclidean) geometric

154 Parmenides, ‘Poem’, here Fragment [B] followed by verse numbers. Simplicius, who, short before the closing of the Academy in Athens, saved parts of what we have today of the Poem of Parmenides never doubted that the title comes from Parmenides himself. The Poem bears the title “Περὶ Φύσεως” (gr. peri physeos). In spite of important scholarly contributions on the subject, however, it is still often translated as “On Nature”. This is misleading because in the time of Parmenides and of Heraclitus the word physis does not refer to what we understand as physical nature today but refers to the essence of beings. In this context, the more appropriate translation is therefore ‘On the essence of beings’, as Uvo Hölscher translated it for the German Suhrkamp edition: “Vom Wesen des Seienden” (Frankfurt, 1969). The best indicator for this meaning is Lucretius’ “De rerum natura”, which is a translation of Parmenides’ title and is in English translations of Lucretius somewhat closer to the actual meaning as “On the Nature of Things”. 155 rerum is my addition here for “things” that follow in infinitely many ways (E1p16)

64 order of proofs in the Ethics or to Spinoza’s views on numbers (where Spinoza is concerned with the ‘being’ of numbers, and defines them as an “aid to the imagination”156), but to the nature of the one infinite substance157 (or substance-nature of the infinite).

The overall success of mathematics in the early modern goes back to the fact that it is now the infinite that “first naturally falls under the intellect [cadit sub intellectus]” (Bruno)158, so that the principles of mathematics could outline the fundamental position out of which natural sciences will unfold in the way formulated by Newton in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia

Mathematica. The consequences of the substantial character and of the oneness of such an actual and absolutely infinite being, as Spinoza defines it in Part 1 of the Ethics, involve at any rate more than a simple breakdown of the hierarchical structures of ancient and medieval ontologies.

Many important studies have been made comparing definitions of ‘substance’ in either

Aristotle or Descartes and Leibniz with Spinoza’s, i.e. in terms of discrepancies and similarities159. But “There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them […] Even the first concept, the one with which a philosophy “begins””.160

Clearly, neither Aristotle nor Descartes or Leibniz have one single concept or definition for what the word substance refers to. Rather, it is the understanding that is new in each of the great philosophers, and which finds its words out of the new possibilities for what has been previously thought. And what has been thought prior to the early modern period is confined

156 Ep. XII [to Lodewijk Meyer]; CWS I, p. 203. 157 Comparable to Spinoza’s statement on mathematics, “which is concerned not with ends, but only with the essences and properties of figures” (E1App.), is the role of the one infinite substance through which essences and properties of things are determined. Note however, that ‘mathematics’ is not the same as the ‘mathematical’ (mathesis). The later deals with the possibility of the former, and hence belongs to philosophy. 158 Bruno, De l’Infinito, universo et mondi, cited in Koyré, From the Closed World, (1957). Before quoting Bruno, Koyré remarks that “at the very beginning of his Dialogue on the Infinite Universe and the Worlds, Bruno (Philoteo) asserts that sense-perception, as such, is confused and erroneous and cannot be made the basis of scientific and philosophical knowledge. Later on, he explains that whereas for sense-perception and imagination infinity is inaccessible and unrepresentable, for the intellect, on the contrary, it is its primary and most certain concept” (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press: 1957) p.44-45 159 See for instance, Woolhouse, R.S., Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz: the Concept of substance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 160 Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, What Is Philosophy? transl. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 15

65 within centuries of medieval commentaries on Greek philosophy, primarily on Plato and

Aristotle within the context of, as Gilson called it, a “metaphysics of Exodus” (Ex 3,14)161. That is, within an understanding of the biblical name of God that signifies being162 or to be, , as in

Augustine’s est enim est [he is indeed is]163, so that we can say that the whole of medieval thoughts is mainly concerned with the apprehension of being’s own being, with what God himself, is.

In his booklet on ‘Bruno and the infinite universe as the foundation of modern philosophy’, Émile Namer164 tells us that during his travels, Bruno was perceived as a

‘Dominican without religion’, according to the statements of a number of witnesses called for his trial. And which is reminiscent of the way that Bayle speaks of Spinoza as a ‘virtuous atheist’ in his Pensées Diverses (1682).

Now, for Bruno God is a mona (lat. one), for Spinoza one and unique, for Leibniz there are infinitely many monads and one God. We can therefore legitimately ask if the God of the medievals, of those thinkers reputedly more religious than our ‘heretics’, was not one and unique?

As a matter of fact, he wasn’t. The God of the medievals is still too close to Aristotle and to

Plato, in spite of the great efforts Christian philosophy made to accommodate the biblical God with the philosophical heritage, i.e. too close to Greek dualism and its Demiurge.

Hence, before we continue the analysis of Spinoza’s text, let us have a look into this philosophical background, which will help us understand better the claims Spinoza makes in the Ethics.

First, the medieval Latin substantia refers to various understandings of what ‘substance’ means more broadly: as that from where something is primarily known to us, because it is that which primarily constitutes the essential, non-accidental being of something. Hence, if the vast

161 Gilson, Étienne, “L’Être et Dieu”, Revue thomiste 62/2 (1962): 181-202 162 The revealed name of God [the Hebrew Tetragrammaton] in the Septuagint is translated as the Greek on. 163 Augustine, Enarrationes en Psalmos, 134, RT: PL, vol. 37, col. 1741; see also Confessions, 12:31.46: quidquid aliquo modo est, sed est est [everything which is in some way anything is in virtue of the who is not in just any way but it is]. 164 Namer, Émile, Giordano Bruno ou l’Univers infini comme fondement de la philosophie moderne (Paris: éditions Seghers, 1966) p.11

66 scope of medieval thought can be narrowed down to one concept the Latin substantia refers back to in Greek philosophy, it would be a notion that determines the definition or essence of a thing.

Namely, the concept of form (gr. morphë) in Aristotle, and the concept of idea (gr. eidos) in

Plato rather than just the notion of ousia, as a simple ‘comparison’ of terms or accounts of historical ‘influence’ commonly suggest. What the early modern is overall taking up again and is trying to eventually resolve in its persisting contradictions and shortcomings (from Cusa and

Bruno to Descartes, Spinoza or Leibniz) are medieval interpretations of the Aristotelian form

(hypokeimenon, ousia, entelecheia, energeia, dynamis) and of Plato’s idea (eidos, ousia).

And because the Aristotelian form indeed closely concerns the notions of the underlying subject

(substratum), of essence/substance, of potentiality and actuality, and Plato’s idea the one of form and essence/substance, all early modern systems present a complete reconception of these notions: form/essence; substrate/subject; essence/substance; potentiality/actuality (entelechy for Leibniz), and famously reject the final cause, which in fact closely relates to the formal cause in Aristotle (Physics II 3) in the context of the so called ‘natural teleology’ (telos in nature).

Moreover, the question of form equally concerns one of the most contentious point in medieval debates, namely, the ‘formal’ side of the intellect (gr. noûs) in Aristotle (De Anima, III/5, 430a10-

25), the active ‘agent intellect’, which raises the questions about intellection and cognition, about the origin and objects of human knowledge, about immortality of the (intellective) soul and the question of what makes the human being (composed of form and matter, soul and body) a human being.

The difficulties of interpretations are therefore not merely due to the use of the scholastic vocabulary in Spinoza or in the early modern systems, but foremost to the fact that philosophical concepts combine specific questions pointing beyond the simple meaning of words in a definition.

67 Second, there is another component important to our understanding of the same context that we usually don’t find in literature, and which concerns the question of the oneness of being.

Namely, the reason why the early modern did not consider medieval being to be truly ‘one’.

We often find the mention of the creatio ex nihilo as a contrasting point to Spinoza’s position. While this is accurate, we rarely ever find an explanation of what this expression philosophically stands for. Namely, the fact that it represents a response early Christian, and afterwards also Jewish and Islamic medieval philosophies opposed to Ancient Greek dualism.

The ‘creation out of nothing’ is the initial model of a ‘monism’, as it were, an attempt at establishing the ‘oneness of being’ Greek philosophy could not proffer. A constellation, which cuts through the conception of form, and hence also through the one of matter. But let me summarize:

In order to build the world, the Demiurge forms the prime matter. The prime matter does not belong to the Demiurge’s own being and is at all times available (passive) to him.

Hence, the ‘formative power’ and the ‘matter to be formed’ are an opposition of principles, i.e. none of the two (matter and form) can be traced back to a ‘common ground’. Both are equally

‘eternal’ (Plato, Timaios 28ff, Philebos 22 C, Aristotle, Met., 1073a27). Hence, the manifold, i.e. the diversity of things is ‘one’ only in respect to the abstract representation of the ontological hierarchy of beings arranged by ‘the architect’ of the world. That is, in the ascent from the dark matter to ever higher forms of being (increasingly resembling the Demiurge himself: without matter or decay and corruption). This is the (philosophical) model of evolution, in which the

Demiurge remains always ‘free’ from any matter, and in which matter (source of decay and contingency) remains excluded from the ‘master builder’s’ being.

No less dualistic is the thinking of Late Antiquity, namely, philosophies of emanation, which represent a reversal of the former model. In place of an ascent, there is now a descent, a doctrine of declension of the hierarchical ontological world structure. Being emanates, i.e. it ‘falls down’

68 from height of the ‘pure one’ to lower grades, by lessening itself to the lowest, down to matter

(Plotinus, Enneads VI,7,9). In both cases, the Demiurge is, like the Aristotelian carpenter, working with an existing material and thus ‘dependent’ upon what is at his disposal. That is, both models, of evolution and emanation are dualistic, in the Greek sense of this word, namely, dualistic within the very principle of being.

To both these models, Christian philosophy opposes the doctrine of creation: God is now no longer a world architect, but a world creator. He is, in this sense, more independent and does no longer form (prime matter), but creates ‘out of nothing’, that is, out of not-something (already existing). God as a ‘creator’ is no longer bound by something other than himself and creates out of his own ‘power’ or potentia. In consequence, the medieval notion of God is determined along the absolute own non-dependent power (gr. dynamis kath’auto, lat. potentia per se, or in

Scotus: a se, the aseitas), that is, in terms of the ‘all’ powers (lat. omni) as: omni-potence, omni- science and omni-presence. This ‘highest good’, however, of which no greater good can be conceived, [bonum quo maius bonum cogitari nequit] (Anselm)165, produces through this symbiosis and reinterpretations of Greek conceptions its own numerous contradictions. In particular regarding the 1) the final cause; 2) infinity; 3) perfection; 4) matter and 5) actuality.

1) Only an architect (the Demiurge) works with something he does not himself have

(matter) and in view of something (final causes) he has not realized yet. “this doctrine

takes away God’s perfection. For if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants

something which he lacks” (E1app.). Such notion of being is therefore excluding both,

matter and (actual) finality, and is thus not a wholeness. This is an “analogy with human art”

as Kant puts it, which “could at most establish a highest architect of the world, who would

always be limited by the suitability of the material on which he works, but not a creator of the

165 For an English translation, see St Anselm’s Proslogion with A Reply on Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilo and the Author’s Reply to Gaunilo, transl. and ed. by M. J. Charlesworth (London: University of Notre Dame Press 1979), II-IV.

69 world, to whose idea everything is subject”166. Hence, the rejection of the Aristotelian final

cause in the early modern is to necessarily lead to a different understanding of

‘purposiveness’ (and not to its simple denial) than the one based on “human fictions”

(E1app.), as Spinoza calls them, of the final causes.

2) Perfection is in medieval philosophy, as it was in Greek Antiquity, not attributed to God

but only to created things. Contingent things have been created for a certain ‘purpose’,

but God himself lacks nothing and in this sense, has no purpose or perfection. The Greek

perfection is the teleos167 (root: telos), from where we derive the word ‘teleology’ (Latin

perfectio, perfectum - from perficio: to finish, bring to an end). It is a static totality, closed-off

as is the past (perfectum), to which nothing can be added or subtracted because it

concerns the formal cause or the essence of things (substantial forms). We find

‘perfections’ for the first time (after Bruno) clearly attributed to God (and not only to

creation as in Aquinas) in Descartes’ Meditations. The early modern perfection is defined

through the positive reality or the actual existence of things. Hence, “Perfection,

therefore, does not take away the existence of a thing, but on the contrary asserts it”

(E1p11s), and “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing” (E2d6), or as

Leibniz formulates it, “que Dieu est absolument parfait, la perfection n’étant autre

chose que la grandeur de la réalité positive, prise précisément, en mettant à part les

limites ou bornes dans les choses qui en ont. Et là où il n’y a point de bornes, c’est à dire

en Dieu, la perfection est absolument infinie”168.

166 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A627/B655. 167 Aristotle, Met. Book V.16: “What is called complete [teleion legetai] is: 1) that outside which it is not possible to find any, even one, of its parts; 2) that which in respect of excellence and goodness cannot be excelled in its kind; 3) the things which have attained their end, this being good, are called complete; for things are complete in virtue of having attained their end”. ‘Perfect numbers’ are for instance, the ‘teleioi’ for the Greeks. English here from W.D.Ross, http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/metaphysics.html 168 Monadology § 41: ‘From it, it follows that God is absolutely perfect, whereby perfection is nothing else than the amount (grandeur) of the positive reality, taken in its precise meaning, namely by putting aside limits or boundaries of things that have them. And here where there are no boundaries whatsoever, namely in God, perfection is absolutely infinite’ (my translation), quoted above from Monadologie, French /German edition, (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998) p. 33

70 Perfection (gr. teleos) is now greater where there are less boundaries (gr. peras). One could

not be further from the Greeks. Hence, if we don’t make the standard mistake to assume

that purposiveness disappears altogether in the early modern period with the rejection

of the Aristotelian final cause, it is to be sought along the new notion of perfection in its

relation to existence. Because if God is now ‘perfect’ (teleos), the purposiveness lies within

the structure of being as it actually exists in reality, that is, in the idea of the actual and

formal essence of things in the Ethics.

3) Infinity is in medieval philosophies still associated with the Greek apeiron, the ‘limit-less’

(incomplete, undetermined), i.e. with the absence of form. In the Pythagorean table of

opposites, peras-apeiron, the latter means non-being (Aristoteles, Met., 986a), the ‘illogical’

per se that leads to an infinite regress. The world is finite to the medievals (as the Greek

cosmos), but also imperfect or incomplete (which would be a contradiction in terms for

the Greeks, because what is ‘perfect’ was also ‘finite’). Hence, God’s own nature in

medieval philosophies, transcends created things, but is so in fact ‘limited’ by the finite169

and never ‘actually’ infinite. Put differently, the medieval non-contingent nature of God

determined as a dynamis kath’auto (potentia a se) cannot become energeia and

entelecheia170 (lat. actualitas), unless infinity is attributed directly to God himself, i.e. the

Greek apeiron now completely (ontologically and epistemologically) transformed into a

positive meaning, as it was done by Cusa and Bruno and which was to bring medieval

thought, i.e. the relation of ‘transcendence’ to its fall, precisely because it was putting

limits to God. That is, boundaries to the determinations of being’s own being.

4) Matter is, as the Greek hylë, another absence of form, a non-being in contrast to the idea

(eidos, idein) in Plato, or that which in its potentiality (dynamis) individuates in Aristotle. It

169 In his description of ‘older metaphysics’, Hegel puts it in the following terms: “But a limited infinity is itself only something finite”, but Hegel draws different consequences from here than the early modern did (Enz. § 28). 170 These two notions, energeia and entelecheia are for this reason so important to Leibniz, and are always related to ‘perfection’, either of monads or of God.

71 is the most persistent philosophical difficulty throughout the medieval period. For there

is an obvious contradiction: God alone creates the matter (out of his own being), but at

the same time matter needs to be kept away from the purity of his own being (who still

resembles the architect). Hence, matter remains the “lowest of all creatures”171, created

(somehow) ‘apart’ from being’s own being, even in Aquinas who was in fact the first to

attribute infinity to God, but within the (Aristotelian) downgrade hierarchy of beings,

could not accommodate matter within the absolute simplicity of being, or of God.

Therefore now in early modern systems: “it must also be considered that matter is not a thing

opposed to God” (Leibniz)172 and that to “remove corporeal, or (more precisely)173 extended

substance itself from the divine nature by arguing it has been created by God” means not to

“understand what they themselves say” (E1p15s1).

5) Actuality, (gr. energeia, lat. actus) together with potentiality (gr. dynamis, lat. potentia and potestas)174

refers to existence, to something that actually or potentially ‘is’. All that is at stake with existence

as an actual reality and presence (Dasein)175 or as a ‘possible future existing’ belongs to strictly

any ontological claim, including those we know from the history of modern physics about motion,

energy, force or virtue by which things are produced or are sustained. In other words, this point

now concerns the question of ‘presence-absence’ (gr. parousia-apousia), namely the question of

171 Gilson, Etienne, p. 451 172 Leibniz, On the doctrine of Universal Spirit, in Philosophical Works of Leibniz (New Haven, 1908), p. 155 173 My addition here of ‘more precisely’ for the Latin sive [corpoream sive extensam], usually translated with ‘or’. The Latin ‘sive’ is closer to the English expression ‘that is to say’ or to the French ‘c’est-à-dire’ than simply ‘or’ and means a specification of the term in the given sentence rather than mere identification of two terms. In this sentence, Spinoza is first using the term ‘corporeal’, referring to the scholastic-Aristotelian term of the corporeal determined through the notion of the finite ‘matter’, which he replaces with ‘extension’. In other words, medieval philosophy kept ‘the corporeal’ away from the divine nature because it was wrongly conceived in terms of finite ‘matter’. The notion of ‘extension’ on the other hand, will allow to include the extended nature into the divine precisely because it is extension and no longer matter, i.e. because extension is also infinite and immaterial and not conceived in terms of “quantity, with length, breadth, and depth, limited by some certain figure” (E1ps1). Hence, when Spinoza uses ‘sive’ here in the sentence, it is to say: that they entirely remove corporeal, ‘or’ (what is more exactly called) extended substance itself from the divine nature. In other words, the early modern can accommodate matter within the being’s own being precisely because no longer conceived as ‘matter’ (finite, divisible, material, passive) but now as extension (infinite, non-divisible, non-material, active). 174 The Latin distinction between potentia and actus was used to render the Aristotelian distinction between dynamis and energeia. And the distinction between potentia and potestas translates what the Aristotelian dynamis signifies, namely both: a potentiality as the ‘not yet’, and the power resulting from it. 175 As Leibniz introduces the word (Dasein) in this context into the German language.

72 the ousia176, which since Seneca, Quintilian or Victorinus is translated as substantia or essentia, as

well as subsistentia, existentia, esse essentiae or esse existentiae. And it is here that we find the link to

Spinoza’s notion of substance (or Cartesian and Leibnizian versions), because the medieval

scholastic background to which the notion of substance is opposed to in the Ethics is more

fundamental (it becomes the category for being itself or God) than the question about the

Aristotelian ‘prote ousia’ in the sense of the hypokeimenon (substrate), as subject of predication and

bearer of essential or accidental properties as some scholars assume177. It is namely about the

fundamental difference in the meanings of being, which the medievals drew on the Greek

distinction between hyparxis and ousia, that is, between the Latin existentia and substantia178.

Existence is here ipsum et solum esse, the simple meaning of “to be” “which is neither in another

nor subject of another but solely “to be” itself”179, pure (act) being (actus essendi) or the ‘mere

entity’ referring to the Greek einai monon (being pure and simple). Whereas “substance has not only

“to be” but also has “to be” something qualified. For it is subject to the qualities within it and

on that account is called subject”180. Hence, to be manifest or actually present (parousia) is proper

only to finite created things, i.e. to those things that ‘have substance’ [substantiam habere].

Whereas existence itself (hyparxis) in its simplicity refers, as Hadot rightly notes, “to the One, prior

to the composition of the ‘substance’”181. Hence, this pre-existing foundation, being itself is

176 Ousia in the sense of ‘presence’, ‘property’, to which the German word Anwesen closely corresponds. 177 Some scholars, mostly of anglophone analytic schools are looking into Aristotle’s prote ousia’ as a point of comparison for their studies on Spinoza’s notion of substance, and assume, as did Mill in his System of Logic (1843) and Russell in The Principles of Mathematics (1903) before them, that the verb ‘to be’ has no other dimension than the logical ambiguity or “double meaning” to be the subject either of predication or of identification, a “sign of predication or a sign of existence”. In other words, that Spinoza’s substance refers to the Aristotelian hypokeimenon as the subject of predication and the bearer of essential or accidental properties. Another ‘ambiguity’ however, closer to the medievals and therefore to the early modern responses, has been noted by Maritain in his Preface to Metaphysics: Seven Lectures on Being (1939) and by Gilson in his L’être et l’essence (1972), namely the two aspects of being as the one of essence (the possible or potential, capacities of the existence of things) and the one of existence (actual, concrete existence of things, their presence or ‘energy’). 178 See Pierre Hadot on Porphyry and Victorinus explaining precisely this difference and its transposition from its Greek into the Latin context: Hadot, Pierre, Porphyre et Victorinus (Paris, Institut d'Etudes augustiniennes, 1968) or his article on the history of the notion of existence “Zur Vorgeschichte des Begriffs ‘Existenz’ bei den Stoikern” in Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Bd. XIII, Heft 2, (1969). This difference is also the one between the quid and the quod, between what something is and that it is (‘what-the thing-is and ‘the-thing-which-is’), Plato Phaedo, 78c-d) and Aristotle (Posterior Analytics, 2.7.92b4-11). 179 Victorinus, Adversus Arium, 1A.30.21, in Theological Treatise on the Trinity, transl. Clark 180 Ibid. 181 Hadot, Pierre, “Fragments d’un commentaire de Porphyre sur le Parménide, in Revue des Études Grecques (Paris, 1961), pp. 410-438

73 absent (apousia), which is to say that we have here a notion of being as being, i.e. of God that is

never really present, or whose power (potentia) as the ‘pure being’ or ‘pure act of being’ (esse)

remains an undeployed ‘indeterminacy’. This amounts to saying that being is before it actually is.

It is now not hard to see the difficulties and contradictions regarding actuality and existence

inherent in the medieval notions of God that the early modern systems were trying to (re)solve.

And why Leibniz could use the notion of force (vis, virtue) for the clarification of the notion of

substance: “I will say that for the present that the concept of forces or powers [vis or

virtus], which the Germans call Kraft and the French la force, and for whose explanation

I have set up a distinct science of Dynamics, brings the strongest light to bear upon our

understanding of the true concept of substance”182 as an active deployed presence in

the world. For ‘power’ is nothing else than the ability to act in an effective way.

Already from this, we can conclude that the ‘religion’ our heretics did not have are those

“speculations of the Aristotelian and the Platonists” (TTP, Pref.). And the one God they did have, is an actual and determined presence, infinitely more powerful than the medieval transcendence.

But let me put this revolutionary reversal of traditional metaphysics to which Spinoza historically belongs to in another way, by considering what it means that the infinite becomes

“the first thing that naturally falls under the intellect [cadit sub intellectus]” (Bruno)183, or where

“everything is in God and God in everything” (Cusa)184.

182 Leibniz, De la réforme de la philosophie première et de la notion de substance [1694] [Mais l’importance de ces réflexions apparaîtra surtout en ce qui concerne la notion de substance, comme je la définis et qui est si féconde que l’on en déduit des vérités primordiales même sur Dieu, les esprits et la nature des corps, vérités dont certaines sont connues mais pas assez démontrées, d’autres inconnues jusqu’ici, mais qui seront de la plus grande utilité pour les autres sciences. Pour en donner un avant-goût, je dirai pour le moment que la notion de virtus ou de vis (nommée Krafft en allemand, en français la force), à laquelle j’ai dédié une science particulière, la Dynamique, apporte beaucoup de lumière pour comprendre véritablement la notion de substance], ed. and transl. Leroy E. Loemker. The French title, literally “About the reform of first philosophy and the notion of substance” is translated by Loemker as On the correction of metaphysics and the concept of substance, in G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), p. 433 183 Bruno, De l’Infinito, universo e mondi, cited in Koyré, From the Closed World, (1957) p.45 184 Cusanus, Docte Ignorantiae, II, 3

74 The first in the order of knowledge in Ancient Greek philosophy are finite things of the physis, so that what allows single things to appear as a phenomenon (phainomenon)185, and which is itself non-contingent (hypokeimenon, arche, aitia, idea, ousia)186 is subject to philosophical investigations187, whereby the infinite (apeiron) is clearly not among them188.

In medieval thoughts it is the relationship between the finitude of the world and the non- contingent nature of God that is first given to philosophical knowledge, so that what allows single created things to be is the same as in Greek philosophy (substraturm, principium, causa, idea/forma, substantia, essentia), but now determined along an almost contrary understanding of this relationship189. Therefore, regarding the non-contingent, medieval thoughts struggle to attribute infinity (infinitum) to God himself, in fact “it has taken them a long time to realize that, in the God of their faith, infinity was a perfection”, as Etienne Gilson190 remarks, because of the difficulties to positively transform the negative meaning of the Greek apeiron.

Instead, God’s being is determined along the notion of its absolute own non-dependent power (gr. dynamis kath’auto), as the omni-potentia, omni-scientia and omni-presence. What has

185 φαινόμενον 186 ὑποκείμενον, ἀρχή, αἰτία, ιδέα, οὐσία 187 Overall, Greek philosophy begins with the cognition of the finite, with the ‘disclosure of the visible’, the understanding of what is first present to the senses along the paradigm of ‘vision’. 188 As mentioned above, the apeiron, from Anaximander to Aristotle, is conceived in negative terms, as something which lacks being, as the absence of form (non-intelligible and indeterminate), the non-perfect or incomplete (gr. teleios: perfection and completeness is attributed only to finite things), whereby a regressus in infinitum represents the, by definition, a-logical invalid argument. In the Pythagorean table of opposites: peras-apeiron, the latter means non- being and non-perfection (Aristoteles, Met. I, 5, 986a). 189 As mentioned above, medieval philosophies will retain the finitude of the world (gr. cosmos) but in contrast to the Greeks conceive of it as something imperfect or incomplete. 190 Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, (1955) p. 38 “[…] the notion of ‘infinite’ was hard to conceive for a mind of Greek formation (Origen). To the Greeks, an infinite was an apeiron, that is something without a determining limit (peras), hence an ‘indeterminate’. Now pure indetermination escapes the grasp of the intellect. In the present case, what would be the power of God if it remained indeterminate? It would be the power to do no one thing in particular, that is, the power to do nothing. In Origen’s own words: “We must say that the power of God is finite, and not, under pretence of praising him, take away his limitation. For if the divine power be infinite, it must of necessity be unable to understand even itself, since that which is naturally illimitable is incapable of being comprehended. He made things therefore of such a size as to be able to apprehend and keep them under his power, and control them by his providence; so also he prepared matter of such size (i.e. in such quantity) as he had power to ornament”. This clearly shows what a tremendous effort was going to be required from Christian philosophy before it could achieve a complete awareness of the metaphysical import of the Christian revelation […]. All Christians have always believed in the same identical God of Holy Scripture, but it has taken them a long time to realize that, in the God of their faith, infinity was a perfection”

75 ‘no end’ in God is thus something positive: his creativity (Aquinas), goodness, and power

(Anselm: bonum quo maius bonum cogitari nequit). This relationship, however, is one of stark opposition, still similar to the Pythagorean table. Both sides, the finite world and God are incommensurables, or, to use the simple formula, God is transcendent. But this transcendence, which is a relationship based on incommensurability rests on a contradiction: on an infinity that, by this very opposition, is ‘limited’ by the finite, or in other words, which is never actually infinite191. Put differently, the medieval non-contingent nature of God determined as a dynamis kath’auto (potentia a se) cannot become energeia and entelecheia192 (actualitas), unless infinity is attributed directly to God himself, i.e. the Greek apeiron completely transformed into a positive meaning, as it will be done by Cusa and Bruno and which will bring medieval philosophy, precisely because primarily based on such relationship of transcendence, to its end.

Modern thought does not appear all at once, but there is no mathesis universalis or modern physics without the (epistemological and ontological) priority of the infinite over the finite, not only because “no corporeal sense can perceive the infinite”193, but because the infinite being (ens infinitum) becomes a concept of reason (intellect) and nature (physis) what corresponds to its true idea. Put differently, what is first given to cognition in revolutionary thought of the early modern is the infinite itself (predicated by the notion of God) in the ‘certainty of reason’, so that what allows for the apprehension of single finite things (and of which the intellect can be uncertain and call them into doubt as in Descartes’ Meditations) needs a ‘proof’ or a sufficient

191 In his description of ‘older metaphysics’, Hegel puts it in the following terms: “But a limited infinity is itself only something finite”, but draws different consequences from here than the early modern, Enz. § 28 192 These two notions, energeia and entelecheia are for this reason so important to Leibniz, and always related to ‘perfection’, either of monads or of God. 193 Bruno, De l’inf. universo., p. 280 (/), “Philotheo: No corporeal sense can perceive the infinite. None of our senses can be expected to furnish this conclusion; for the infinite cannot be the object of sense-perception; therefore, he who demandeth to obtain this knowledge through the senses is like unto one who would desire to see with his eyes both substance and essence. And he who would deny the existence of a thing merely because it cannot be apprehended by the senses, nor is visible, would presently be led to the denial of his own substance and being. Wherefore there must be some measure in the demand for evidence from our sense-perception, for this we can accept only in regard to sensible objects, and even there it is not above all suspicion unless it cometh before the court aided by good judgement. […]”.

76 reason (logos/ratio) for everything that is a single case, as enacted in experiments or as undergone in experience. Thought can clearly not actualize the physical infinite, but the infinite as the true idea of the intellect194 (not of ratio). And only then could one turn to the geometrization of space, posit truths about the whole of nature in the way of mathematics or ‘form objective essences’ as with geometrical figures, quantify the space (infinite universe), i.e. one could turn to mathematical physics, create scientific instruments for the observation of the now ontologically uniform laws of nature ( because of the oneness of being) and put an emphasis on experiment and ‘natural philosophy’195.

Hence, modern thought begins with the cognition of the infinite, or more precisely with God as the

‘immediate object of our perceptions’196. For the first time in the history of philosophy we have these two words linked together Deus and cognitio or Deus and intelligere and percipere. It is the notion of God, which from the Greek demiurge and unmoved mover to the medieval transcendent other is now the first for the intellect, launching the revolution and changing everything.197

There is in consequence, from this point of view, of the revolutionary context and its epistemological reversal of the relationship between the finite and the infinite, of its rejection of

Aristotelian and Platonist paradigms underlying medieval thought and the whole of traditional metaphysics, no difference between Cusa, Bruno, Leibniz, Spinoza or Descartes:

194 Intellectus is here the highest form of cognition – free of sensatio and higher than ratio – (Kant reversed later the hierarchy between ratio (Vernunft) and intellectus (Verstand), ratio in the early modern is still the conceptual adaptation of what is provided by sensatio, while the intellectus is entirely free of any relation to sense-perception up to the ‘knowledge of God’. 195 It is presumably the greatest paradox of our philosophical history that the tradition which posits the finite at the beginning of philosophical knowing (traditional metaphysics) is primarily concerned with the search for the immutable, the lasting and non-contingent; the tradition which posits the transcendence of God at the beginning of its knowing (medieval metaphysics) is focused on nothing so much than resolving its immanent contradictions; while modern philosophy, which posits the most abstract notion human reason is capable of, the actual infinite (God), in the certainty of its true idea at the beginning of knowledge, is focused on nothing so much as on empirical contingent truths (experimental philosophy). 196 Paraphrasing Leibniz here from Discours de Métaphysique, § 28 197 And it is this matter of “understanding what a true idea is by distinguishing it from the rest of perceptions” (TdIE 37), which the eighteenth century will subsequently question in its very conditions of (a priori synthetic) knowledge (Hume and Kant), and the nineteenth to re-introduce a dialectic between being and cognition (Sein and Denken) into the beginnings of knowing (Hegel), while retaining the absolute character of an infinite ontology.

77 On the contrary, I clearly understand that there is more reality in an infinite substance than in a finite one, and hence that my perception of the infinite, that is God, is in some way prior to my perception of the finite, that is myself. For how could I understand that I doubted or desired […], unless there were in me some idea of a more perfect being, …? [This idea] “is utterly clear and distinct, and contains in itself more objective reality than any other idea; … It does not matter that I do not grasp the infinite, or that there are countless additional attributes of God which I cannot in any way grasp, and perhaps cannot even reach in my thoughts; for it is in the nature of the infinite not to be grasped by a finite being like myself. It is enough that I understand the infinite, […]. This is enough to make the idea that I have of God the truest and most clear and distinct of all my ideas. (Med. III/46)198.

What the shift in scientific paradigms, I have been trying to outline here, meant for philosophy is the following: in metaphysics, this reversal means a necessary re-conception of the very notion of being, this time in terms of an ontology of the infinite that can account for the infinity of the universe and the geometrization of space of the new sciences199. In epistemology, it means the re-conception of our cognition of (the infinite) being, this time in terms of a clear and distinct idea of the intellect that can account for empirical contingencies. And in ethics, this reversal means a necessary re-conception of the very relationship between human beings and being, based on the new epistemological and ontological matrix that can provide for an ethical direction of human actions. Taken together, these re-conceptions in metaphysics

(ontology and logic), epistemology and ethics amount to nothing less than to a re-foundation of philosophy as philosophy. No other notion in philosophy could fulfil these tasks at once than the one of God, and no other question needed more urgently a redefinition than the one of ethics after Cartesian philosophy provided major foundations for sciences, but failed to formulate an ‘ethica nuova’, as Spinoza fully understood200.

198 Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. and transl. by John Cottingham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 65 199 This shift in the subject-matter of philosophy, the change in the very conception of being, amounts to philosophy’s own reinvention, i.e. to the question of philosophy’s own foundations. 200 De Dijn in his comparison between Galileo and Spinoza remarks that “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. […] Like Galileo, Spinoza does not have the slightest doubt about the objective validity of the new science” and “If mathematical physics reveals what God truly

78

Chapter II

The Two Attributes Spinoza’s true idea is, therefore, an absolute unity of substance combined with absolute opposition (mutual exclusion) of the attributes. Schelling

2.1 Extension and Thought

We can, in Spinoza’s view, clearly conceive of the one, unique and infinite substance, that is, we can have a true idea of it [idea Dei]. But we cannot perceive it, for “what the intellect perceives of [a] substance, as constituting its essence” (E1d4) are attributes. And because “God is eternal, [or] all God’s attributes are eternal” (E1p19).

Therefore, the intellect (human or other) perceives what is eternal, but already as differentiated201, as Spinoza explains in his letter to de Vries “I understand the same by attribute [and the substance] except that it is called attribute in relation to the intellect, which attributes such and such a definite nature to substance”202.

Hence, it is an intellectual perception and by no means a sense perception for “See!

With no effort I have reached the place where I wanted to be! I now know that even bodies are

thinks about the world then its interpretation of the world also tells us something about God’s Mind, and perhaps about God himself”, De Dijn, Herman, “Spinoza and Galileo: Nature and Transcendence”, in: Intellectual History Review 23 (1) Special Issue: Galileo and Spinoza, March 2013, pp.99-108 201 This differentiation amounts to a definition of the intellect, which Spinoza never provides in the Ethics. For the intellect (logos, noein) is precisely what differentiates (gr. kritein, dianoia). If we imagine how Spinoza could have formulated a definition of the intellect, then perhaps as “by intellect I understand that which differentiates the essence from the substance”. In the Prologue to his On Being and Essence [De Ente et Essentia], Aquinas begins by writing that “A small error at the outset can lead to great errors in the final conclusions, as the Philosopher says in De Caelo et Mundo cap. 5 (271b8-13), and thus, since being and essence are the things first conceived of by the intellect, as Avicenna says in Metaphysicae I, cap. 6 […]”. The difference to Spinoza would then be that the intellect conceives first of an infinite being and its infinite essence, instead of a finite being and essence. 202 Ep. IX [to Simon de Vries]; CWS I, p. 195.

79 perceived not by the senses or by imagination but by the intellect alone [sed a solo intellectu percipi], not through their being touched or seen but through their being understood

[intelligantur]”203 (Descartes, Med. II/16) 204.

The old conceptual pair of form and matter is replaced in the early modern with thought and extension, that is, with an entirely new understanding of what had previously defined the

‘being of beings’ (as in the hylomorphism of Aristotelian scholasticism), as well as the ‘being of

Being (as the Thomistic ‘pure act’ or God, conceived as pure form without reference to matter).

There is now, as we have seen, only one being. Hence, extension and thought are now constitutive elements of being (in singular) as they are of beings (in plural). That is, of the substance as they are of modes in Spinoza’s system.

Instead of something finite, contingent, divisible and passive, the matter on the one hand; and something infinite, non-contingent and active, the form on the other, (instead of the old division of being into visible and invisible, sensible and intelligible)205, the new conceptual pair of extension and thought are now both infinite, non-contingent, eternal, non-divisible or immaterial, non- perceptible by the senses, and active.

203 From intelligo, in the sense of ‘intellige’ as one could render it closer to the Latin. It is the same word Spinoza uses for his definitions at the beginning of the Ethics, and which all start with “intelligo”, usually translated with “I understand”: “By cause of itself I understand”; “By substance I understand”; “By attribute I understand” etc. Consequently, a good definition for Spinoza expresses the very essence of the thing, because it is the intellect that makes the assertions. 204 This is also why Descartes begins his Principia Philosophiae with “the principles of human knowledge”, namely, because the new conception of an absolute or actual infinitude of being changes everything in terms of our epistemological access to things (finite or infinite). What is now “the most familiar to us” (Aristotle, Physics, Book I, Part 1), and with which knowledge begins for all of the early modern, are no longer finite things of the physis, as in Aristotle, where one begins with sense perception (gr. aisthesis) and goes over to experience (gr. empeireia) before achieving knowledge (gr. theoria: kata to logon echein), but the nature of the infinite, natura infiniti, whose “perfections […] we can understand more vividly and clearly than we can of any corporeal things. Why? Because they permeate our thought [cogitationem nostrum magis implent] to a greater extent, being simpler and not obscured by limitations” [Quamvis enim illas non comprehendamus, quia scilicet est de natura infiniti ut a nobis, qui sumus finite, non comprehendatur, nihilominus tamen ipsas clarius & distinctius quam ullas res corporeas intelligere possumus, quia cogitationem nostrum magis implent, suntque simpliciores, nec limitationibus ullis obscurantur]. Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, I/19. 205 Not the finite (matter) the other infinite (form), one passive the other active, one visible one invisible, one real (form) the other without real being or form (matter), but a substantial oneness of what is essentially differentiated as infinite, eternal attributes.

80 As in medieval philosophies, matter (finite divisible quantity) is here not attributed to God.

But unlike the principled dualism of older metaphysics, it is not kept away from being itself either

(as with the model of the Demiurge). For “by what divine power could it be created?” (E1p15s) other than out of being’s own being? Hence, Spinoza206 can ‘attribute’ extension to God precisely because it is no longer conceived as matter, but as extension, i.e. as something infinite, eternal, and indivisible (as God himself is) perceived and comprehended by the intellect alone. In consequence, God is not, as Zac Sylvain and many others have concluded, “material”207.

For “No attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided” (E1p12) and from where it “follows that no substance, and consequently no corporeal substance, insofar as it is a substance, is divisible” (E1p12c) 208 because it is “one of God’s infinite attributes” (E1p15s). An admittedly ingenious solution. The one for which Bruno lost his life, because the world is now, in this sense, indeed ‘infinite’.

This revolutionary move is, however, still the source of many confusions, in particular to those who read Spinoza along the traditional lines and conclude that attributes have to be either subjective or objective, either real or unreal. This brings the old ‘observer’ back on the stage, as if one could simply revert to traditional metaphysics and division of being.209 And to all those who still read the medieval ‘matter’ (divisible quantity) instead of extension (indivisible and

206 Not every philosopher in the early modern introduces this novelty in the same way of course. It is well known that Descartes hesitates more than Spinoza to attribute extension directly to God, or that Geulincx struggles with the ‘modus cogitandi’ in relation to ‘res’. Notwithstanding, the simple fact of this change in paradigms indicates clearly the direction by which the early modern departs from traditional metaphysics. 207 Zac, Sylvain, L’idée de vie dans la philosophie de Spinoza (Paris: PUF, 1963), chap. II, p. 58 “Par conséquent, dire que l’étendue est un attribut qui constitute l’essence de Dieu, c’est dire que Dieu est effectivement étendu et, par consequent, matériel” [In consequence, to say that extension is an attribute constitutive of the essence of God, amounts to saying that God is effectively extended, and thus material]. 208 The “corporeal substance” in the Ethics refers to something infinite, indivisible, eternal etc., which makes the corporeal be and be conceived, namely, to the attribute of Extension. And is therefore, for the very use Spinoza makes of the word ‘substance’ nothing divisible or tangible in the sense of quantity and finite matter. 209 For an overview of ‘subjectivist and objectivist’ positions, see Shein, Noa, "Spinoza's Theory of Attributes” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018).

81 infinite) into the text, as one can imagine the theologians would have done, just with contrary reactions than have the materialist readers210 of Spinoza. 211.

For “they think that corporeal substance, insofar as it is substance, consists of parts. And therefore they deny that it can be infinite, and consequently, that it can pertain to God” (E1p15s

[II]). But “no corporeal substance, insofar as it is a substance, is divisible” (E1p13c), because

“the nature of substance cannot be conceived unless as infinite” (E1p13s).

If someone should now ask why we are, by nature, so inclined to divide quantity, I shall answer that we conceive quantity in two ways: abstractly or superficially, as we [NS: commonly] imagine it, or as substance, which is done by the intellect alone [NS: without the help of the imagination]. So if we attend to quantity as it is in the imagination, which we do often and more easily, it will be found to be finite, divisible, and composed of parts; but if we attend to it as it is in the intellect, and conceive it insofar as it is a substance, which happens [NS: seldom and] with great difficulty, then (as we have already sufficiently demonstrated) it will be found to be infinite, unique, and indivisible [infinita, unica et indivisibilis]. This will be sufficiently plain to everyone who knows how to distinguish between the intellect and the imagination (E1p15s[V]).

210 As in Curley (1988), p.74: “For me the true affinities of Spinoza’s theory of the relation between mind and body are with materialism. And here I would appeal to the exegetical principle I alluded to in my introduction: if we would understand what Spinoza means by saying that the mind and the body are one and the same thing, conceived under different attributes, then we must see what consequences Spinoza thinks follow from this. If we do, I think we will find that subsequent materialists had reason to see a precursor in Spinoza”. As I mentioned earlier, the whole reception history of Spinoza’s philosophy oscillates in various forms between ‘materialism’ or ‘idealism’ and cannot think outside of this pattern, i.e. outside the tradition against which Spinoza is arguing. 211 Bruno is in this context worth quoting in full: Teo: “We have seen, haven’t we? that the Peripatetics, like the Platonists, divide substance by differentiating between corporeal and incorporeal. Then, just as these differences are reduced to an identical potency, so it is necessary for the forms to be of two sorts. Some are transcendent (that is, superior to genus) and are called principles, such as entity, unity, one, thing, something, and their like. Others are of a genus distinct from another genus, such as substantiality and accidentality. The first sort of forms do not make distinctions in matter and do not constitute different potencies out of it; but as universal terms, they include corporeal as well as incorporeal substances, signifying the most universal, most common, and single substance of them both. After this, what prevents us, asks Avicebron, just as before recognising the matter of accidental forms (that is, the composite) we recognise the matter of the substantial form (which is part of the composite) – what prevents us, before knowing the matter that is contracted so as to be under corporeal forms, from coming to know a single potency, which is distinguishable though the form of corporeal and incorporeal nature, the one dissoluble, the other indissoluble? Besides, if all that is (beginning from the sovran and supreme being) owns a certain order and shows a system of dependencies, a ladder on which one climbs from the composite to the simple, and thence to the most simple and absolute, through proportional intermediaries which bind together and participate in the nature of the one and the other extreme, while separating themselves out according to their particular essence – then there is no order where there is not a certain participation; there is no participation where a certain union is not found; there is no union without some participation. It is therefore necessary that all things which subsist should have a single principle of subsistence. Add to this that the same line of reasoning cannot help presupposing, before anything capable of being distinguished, something indistinct. I speak of things which exists; for the distinction between being and non-being, in my view, is not real, but is merely verbal and logical” (as in Spinoza, cf. Metaphysical Thoughts), Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, transl. Jack Lindsay (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 123. Hence, ‘matter’ cannot be a ‘principle of subsistence’, for it presupposes the old and not the revolutionary (early modern) division of being. The whole materialism is, from this point of view, mistaken or ‘reactionary’.

82

The notions of substance, attributes and modes belong to the ‘categories of being’. To those conceptions that the notion of God posits as the first cause in Spinoza’s system212, and which determine what causes finite or infinite things to exist in a certain way. Namely, what has been traditionally called ‘the power of God’ (its dynamis and entelechy), and which Spinoza defines through his essence: “God’s power is his essence itself. […] by which he and all things are and act” (E1p34), for “Whatever exists expresses the nature, or essence of God in a certain and determinate way, that is, whatever exists expresses in a certain and determinate way the power of God, which is the cause of all things” (E1p36).

The reason for recalling the categories of being here is to remind us what has been mentioned earlier, namely, that everything in the text related to the first cause is a res or ens [the equivalent of the Greek to on], a factum, i.e. something that has existence as an entity.213

The centrality of this notion res in the first part of the Ethics has been analysed by Robert

Schnepf with precision, to my knowledge, unique in scholarly literature of the last decades on

Spinoza’s metaphysics. He understands the res to be the ‘actual object of inquiry in the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics’214. And he has good reasons for doing so. Because if we are to name the most salient aspect of Spinoza’s notion of God, i.e. the greatest difference between Spinoza and traditional metaphysics, it would certainly be the way by which something is a res. That is, the way by which things (finite or infinite) are produced and exist as an entity or ‘really’.

As Schnepf shows in his analysis, Spinoza’s categories of being can be read as an answer to the scepticism of the time, more precisely to the philosophical uncertainties of the implications that the concept of being (conceptus entis) displays in the theories of univocity and

212 As mentioned in the introduction, following the breakdown of the four different points about the function of the notion of God. As in the diagram made to illustrate it. 213 And which, as noted earlier, is not to be conflated with causation as a principle (of being and cognition). 214 Schnepf, Robert, Metaphysik im ersten Teil der Ethik Spinozas, (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1996), chap. II, 1-5: “Res ist der Gegenstand des ersten Teil der Ethik”, pp 135-170. This work is a great achievement, which through the language barrier has not received the attention it deserves internationally.

83 analogy in Suarez or Glocenius215. In other words, as a reply to the last attempts at constructing a metaphysics that satisfies the demands of an Aristotelian science in the early modern period.

And which ties in with Spinoza’s critique of the universals, as we read it in the scholia to E2p40.

Francesca di Poppa, on the other hand, convincingly clarifies the coherent use made by

Spinoza of the notions of substance and attribute in the Short Treatise and in the Ethics. In her article, under the heading of “what are the attributes?”, she writes that “Spinoza consistently rejects the notion that God’s attributes are properties or ‘adjectives’”, and that “Therefore, extension and thought are best understood as ‘ways in which God is’, or better yet, as ways in which God causes”216.

And in fact, every ‘res’217 or entity seem to have a cause in the first part of the Ethics, including God himself who is the cause of itself. Therefore, we can say that what makes something a ‘res’ or a ‘real being’, and which concerns the essence of a thing as having existence ‘from somewhere’ (lat. ex-sistere) is causation. This is the case for the substance as well as for modes

(although in very different ways), but not for the attributes. The relationship between substance and attributes, as well as the relationship between different attributes does not involve causation. Attributes are causally and conceptually independent from each other, in the same way as the substance is causally and conceptually independent from anything else than itself.

In other words, attributes are not ‘modes of being’, not the modification or affections of the one substance (E1d5), nor are they the substance (E1d3). For “although two attributes may

215 Schnepf (1996), pp 152-169. Schnepf also compares the definitions given by Glocenius in his Lexicon Philosophicum (1613) in order to work out the whole difference between Spinoza and early modern scholasticism, which is useful for understanding how the question of res relates to the notion of substance and modes (res and modus rei). For both, Suarez and Glocenius draw on this point on Duns Scotus. 216 Poppa Di, Francesca, “Spinoza’s concept of substance and attribute: A reading of the Short Treatise “, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 17 (5) 2009: 921-938., p. 933. Di Poppa also rightly notes that “Descartes calls God a substance when reminding us that God is, properly speaking the only real substance, for example in Principles, I, 52 (CSM, I, 210; AT VIII, 24). [and that] God is called Being in several places: in particular, in Meditations (including Descartes’ replies) and the Principles of Philosophy I”, footnote 20, p. 927, as does Spinoza, namely call God ‘Being’ rather than a substance in various places in the Short Treatise. 217 The expressions in the Ethics in Latin are: res, ens and id. Res relates to realitatis (reality or actuality); ens to the participle of esse (being, entity); and id is the relative pronoun for res.

84 be conceived to be really distinct (i.e., one may be conceived without the aid of the other), we still cannot infer from that that they constitute two beings, or two different substances” (E1p10s).

Put simply, attributes are not entities because they were caused. Rather, because the substance is cause of itself, it causes itself to ex-sist as a res, i.e. to exist beyond its cause or in ‘reality’ in “what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence” (E1d4).

Therefore, an attribute is a real entity for Spinoza, a res, but one that does not ‘ex-sist’, i.e. does not have a cause from (-ex) somewhere (else). Rather, if we take the Latin by word, the attributes can be said to “in-sist” (lat. sistere), that is, ‘to be joined’ to the essence of a [subject]218.

And this is what makes them (attributes) real (res, realitas), namely, the fact that they belong to the essence of the one and absolutely infinite substance. For “outside the intellect there is nothing except substances and their affections”, that is, nothing “except substances or what is the same (by D4), their attributes, and their affections” (E1p4).

This is also the reason why Spinoza is not using the Cartesian vocabulary of a ‘res’ extensa and ‘res’ cogitans for the attributes of Extension and of Thought. This would have made the attributes ex-sist as ‘created’ substances. And so trigger the kind of difficulties associated with Descartes’ definitions of substance(s) and attributes as we read them in the Meditations.

Attributes are not ‘created things’, but “the attributes it (the substance) has have always been in it together, and one could not be produced by another, but each expresses the reality, or being of substance” (E1p10s). In consequence, there is on the one hand, Spinoza’s ontological distinction between being (singular) and beings (plural), i.e. between what exists of its own nature and what does not exist of its own nature, i.e. between that whose essence involves existence and whose essence involves only possible existence (CM I/1)219. And on the other, there are three

218 For the Latin verb sisto,sistere (‘ex-sist’ and ‘in-sist’) meaning ‘to cause, to stand, akin to’, and the use of the verb exsisto in medieval philosophy, see Cassin, Barbara, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), in the entry on “Essence”, p. 300. 219 This statement corresponds to A1; A2 and A7 from the first part of the Ethics: Whatever is, is either in itself or in another (A1); What cannot be conceived through another, must be conceived through itself (A2); If a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence (A7)

85 categories of being, two for being itself: substance and attributes; and one for beings: modes.

Whereby all of the categories of being relate to causation, that is, to the essence (characteristics or nature) and to the existence (from where the essence is obtained) of a finite or infinite entity.

Mogens Lærke calls the causa sui “the ‘archetype’ of causation”220 within the context of

Spinoza’s “causal rationalism” by which he understands “the idea that everything is rational and thus explicable and that causal explanations are somehow fundamental”221. I would add that this term ‘causal rationalism’ in fact amounts to Spinoza’s understanding of what

‘rationality’ means in the Ethics, namely: ‘to have nothing else to refer to, except to substances, attributes and their affections’ [extra intellectum nihil datur praeter substantias, sive quod idem est, earum attributa earumque affections] (E1p4).

Thus, the ways by which the substance, out of its infinitely diversified essence and the perfection of its nature causes is “nothing […] contingent” (E1p33). Those things, which have an external cause as to their existence and their essence, i.e. modes (finite or infinite) “could not have been produced in no other way, and in no other order” (E1p13) precisely because the first cause is a cause of itself, that is, a determinate being or substance. And the chain of causation it introduces is therefore also determinate, i.e. intelligible or rational.

In consequence, what the first cause generates is the reality of being insofar as it is being as substantially one and essentially differentiated. Because, as Lærke rightly remarks, “immanent causation is not a distinct kind of causation, but a way of describing how self-causation and finite causation are conjoined (in the sense of being ‘connected’ or ‘fitted’ to one another – as Spinoza himself employs the adjective coniuncta in this sense in E1p28s)”222. Namely, in the sense I mentioned the verb sistere above, and which, to be sure, does not concern a relation between parts and the whole, for the essence of something is not a ‘part’ of a whole. It is its “nature”, as

220 Lærke Mogens, “Spinoza and the Cosmological Argument according to Letter 12”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (1) 2013: 57-77., p. 58 221 Ibid. 222 Ibid.

86 Spinoza later explains what he means by essence in the second part of the Ethics, as “that which, if it is given, the thing is posited, and if it is taken away, the thing is taken away, that is, 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” (E2p10s).

‘God’s essence’ is nothing but the determination of being’s (God’s) own being (essence).

Its nature is that of a substance and is, as Gueroult called it, ‘the infinitely infinite infinitude’223 of which “the intellect perceives” what it attributes to it as constituting its essence (E1d4).

Hence, what needs some clarification is Spinoza’s use of the verb percipere in the definition of the attributes in difference to concipere that he uses for other definitions: for the cause of itself, d1; substance, d3; mode, d5; and eternity, d8.

To ‘perceive’ (percipere) is not the same as to ‘comprehend’ (intelligere) or to ‘conceive’

(concipere). Not the same as having an understanding or a concept of something. The perceiving is simpler, but it is still the intellect that does the perceiving. It is therefore an ‘intellectual perception’ – perceived by the intellect alone [sed a solo intellectu percipi]224 - not a sense- perception nor a cognition. In other words, there is something ‘passive’ in the perceiving, but I wouldn’t speak here of a “passive intellect”, in the way Ursula Renz does in her chapter “From the Passive to the Active Intellect”225, and which applies, as she nicely shows to the theory of the mind. That is, to the second parts of the Ethics rather than the first.

Instead, as I have done before, let me revert Spinoza’s Latin into Greek and say that what corresponds to the Latin percipere is the Greek noesis, noien. Namely, the intellect (logos, noein) as the one that differentiates (gr. kritein, dianoia)226.

223 Gueroult, (1968) Vol. I, p. 191: “l’infinitude infiniment infinite”. 224 As formulated by Descartes in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, (Descartes, Med. II/16). 225 Renz, Ursula, “From the Passive to the Active Intellect”, in: The Young Spinoza: A Metaphysician in the Making, ed. by Yitzhak Y. Melamed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp 287-300 226 See note 198 above.

87 Thus, it is not the activity of reasoning or comprehending (not the intellection), although it in fact relates to the nous (intellect).

But rather, ‘that which reasons’, as it is sometimes translated into English, in the meaning of ‘awareness’. Or, as noien was indeed translated in 18th century England, as a

‘common sense’. And from where the subsequent history of the term ‘intellectual perception” in the 18th and 19th century as “intellectual intuition” or ‘Anschauung’ in German Idealism could take its course. It would be misleading, however, to take the Kantian or Fichtean

‘Anschauung’ for the understanding of Spinoza’s definition of the attributes. Because the only aspect they have in common is one of immediacy, which the word ‘perception’ entails.

To be sure, in the following propositions of the first part, Spinoza will explain how to cognize or conceive of the attributes, as in E1p10. But this cognition concerns each of the attributes taken separately and which need to be comprehended in the same way as the substance, namely “through itself”227. In other words, it does not concern the percipere, the simple distinction that the intellect makes by ‘attributing’ something to being itself as in E1d4.

Put differently, the perceiving is not a cognizing, not a judgement or knowledge, but simple ‘awareness’ common to every intellect. The object of perception are different aspects of what the intellect attributes to being, as their name ‘attributes’ indicates. Every intellect perceives differences in being, as humans do between extension and thought. Thus, it is a simple intellectual perception, the awareness of distinctiveness attributed to ‘what is’. Whether we have a true or false, adequate or inadequate cognition of any of the attributes, this simple perception of differences ‘attributed’ to what belongs to the essence of being, namely, that ‘it is’ or ‘exists’, is “known to all”. As we read later that “God’s infinite and eternal essence is known to all”

227 E1p10: Each attribute of a substance must be conceived through itself. Dem: “For an attribute is what the intellect perceives [as differentiated] concerning a substance, as constituting its essence (by D4); so (by D3) it must be conceived through itself, q.e.d.”

88 (E247s), and which is by no means a “trivialization of the knowledge of God’s essence”228. But the basic epistemological access to our understanding of anything that is (of singular entities which we will understand under different attributes) and which is given to intellectual perception in its immediacy.

Hence, the percipere is the difference the intellect makes in its immediate perception of being as a nous (or as ‘intelligence’ as Montaigne for instance, translated the term) - as ‘the one which differentiates and separates’ (dia-noein) what can be attributed to something which is said

‘to be’. Therefore, if the verb intelligere relates to the ‘idea’ in the definitions, axioms or propositions (Spinoza begins his statements with intelligo, because he states them following the

‘true idea’ of God); and concipere to the ‘concept’ (which we can build without contradiction of something that we say ‘it is’ the case, i.e. what we can clearly think and conceive of); then the verb percipere relates to what is ‘intellected without comprehension’ - yet.

The expression “intellected without comprehension” is from Cusa, Book 1 of his De

Docta ignorantia (incomprehensibiliter intelligitur), as Emmanuel Faye explains in his comparison of

Cusa and Descartes and says that “Book 1 of the Docte ignorantia ended by stating the primacy of negative theology; Descartes, by contrast, emphasizes the fact that man is naturally capable of a “positive” knowledge or intellection of the infinite being. It is this capacity itself that characterizes the metaphysical way of thinking”. For, as he remarks, “The distinctions that

Descartes’ philosophy sets in place no longer operate among nouns – ratio, intellectus, mens – designating both distinct faculties and ontologically different beings; rather, they work among verbal forms that signal the different ways of thinking and knowing proper to man: intelligere, concipere, comprehendere“229 and we can add the percipere to it, which both Descartes and Spinoza

228 Melamed (2010) regarding E2P47 and E2P47S: “This trivialization of the knowledge of God’s essence (one cannot fail to have this knowledge!) would hardly be acceptable to any of Spinoza’s contemporaries or predecessors […]”, Introduction, p. xvi. 229 Faye, Emmanuel, in: Cassin, Barbara, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, (2014), entry on “Intellect, intelliger (French)”, p. 491. What Faye says here in this article about twentieth century French interpretations of Descartes, which have “downplayed the importance of the Cartesian distinction between intelligere and comprehendere” is important also for the interpretations of Spinoza. Namely, that “when Ferdinand

89 use in the same way. Hence, it is by no means something “hardly acceptable to Spinoza’s contemporaries” as Melamed writes230. On the contrary, the “knowledge of God” is at the core of revolutionary thinking in the early modern, which Spinoza defines in its own specific terms.

Put simply, the attributes represent the basic epistemological differentiation or access

“common to all” in Spinoza’s system, first independently of our ‘true’ or false conception or comprehension we might have of the determinations of being in general, or of the attributes in particular. And from where it follows that in order to have “an adequate knowledge of God’s eternal and infinite essence” (E247) one needs to refer to the ‘ideas’ “the human mind has from which it perceives (percipit) [itself, its own body, and external bodies as actually existing]”. As

Spinoza does refer to the ‘idea’ in this proposition. “And so has an adequate knowledge of

God’s eternal and infinite essence” (E247). Or as Spinoza refers to the ‘ideas’ in the previous proposition, “The knowledge of God’s eternal and infinite essence which each idea involves is adequate and perfect” (E246). In other words, the percipere makes the basic distinctions from where knowledge follows only in connection with ideas and with conceptions. Hence, the attributes are the fundamental common ‘forms of understanding’ under which we conceive or

Alquié wanted to justify the absence of the “Conversation with Burman” from his edition of Descartes’s Œuvres philosophiques, he translated as nous comprenons (we understand) the verb intelligimus used by the philosopher in relation to our knowledge of God’s perfections. What is more, in his concern to promote the image of a pre- Kantian Descartes, he spoke in 1950 of an “unknowable transcendence” and of a “metaphysics of an inaccessible being” in relation to the God of the Meditations (La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes. More recently, Jean-Luc Marion has developed a similar interpretation by invoking the “unknowability” of an “inaccessible” God in Descartes (Questions cartésiennes). Both conclude by referring to the presence of a “negative theology”, or via negativa in Descartes. These interpretations tend toward replacing the Cartesian metaphysics of the positively known infinite with a theology of an incomprehensible omnipotence. Descartes, however, tells us something very different: in the “Third Meditation” (in Œuvres [AT], 7:45), the supremely knowing character (summe intelligentem) of the divine substance is affirmed before its omnipotence. From this one may then conclude that the name of the supremely “intelligent” being is intelligible to us only to the degree that the supreme being is indeed understood (intelligo) to be “supremely intelligent”: Dei nomine intelligo …,” writes Descartes in the same sentence. One cannot emphasize enough, then, the importance of the Cartesian distinction between intelligere and comprehendere. At stake here, no doubt, is our perception of modern metaphysics, since we find in the Meditations a metaphysical thinking that does not subscribe to the Scholastic thesis (taken up by Kant in the modern age) of the impossibility for man to have any “intellectual intuition”. An attentive reading of Descartes’s Latin texts might then contribute to a reevaluation of the intellective capacities of man, which should continue to inform our use of the word “intellect”.” (p.492). Hence, the same caution in interpretations applies to Spinoza’s texts, despite all the differences to Descartes. For we are in the same settings of the early modern, and the claim to ‘know God’ or the infinite is precisely what determines this philosophical age. Every drawing back of God into an “unknown transcendence” is a relapse into medieval Aristotelianism and Platonism, as Faye rightly notes. 230 Melamed (2010), Introduction, p. xvi.

90 comprehend singular entities. And are therefore not simply sed tantum ratione but are given in the immediacy of intellectual ‘perception’ (dia-noein) of anything we attribute being to.

And if we try to put it in more contemporary terms, it would be the simple consciousness of the ontological difference, the German Einsicht or English insight, synonymous with intelligentsia231 and different from conception and comprehension. That is, different from what is usually translated as ‘understanding’ or ‘conceiving’ in the Ethics.

2.2 Knowing the world by the infinite

The substance, from which the expression of its essence is differentiated (by the intellect in terms of attributes), is that to which everything (finite or infinite) is related as to their determinate being. But the substance is an ‘infinitely infinite infinitude’232. So that what is now

“the most familiar to us”233, and with which knowledge begins are no longer finite things of the physis, as in Aristotle, where one begins with sense perception (gr. aisthesis) and goes over to experience (gr. empeireia) before achieving knowledge (gr. theoria: kata to logon echein), but the nature of the infinite, natura infiniti, whose “perfections […] we can understand more vividly and clearly than we can of any corporeal things. Why? Because they permeate our thought

[cogitationem nostrum magis implent] to a greater extent, being simpler and not obscured by

234 limitations” (Descartes, Principles I 19) .

231 What Spinoza’s vocabulary still has, however, in common with Scholasticism is well illustrated with the description Aquinas makes, “it is called ‘intellect’ because it reads inside, that is, has an intuition of the essence of a thing; intellect and reason differ as to the mode of knowledge, since intellect is an act of simple intuition [cognoscit simplici intuitu], whereas reason moves discursively from one thing to another”, Summa theologica, I, q. 59. Hence, when the intellect ‘perceives’ (definition of the attributes in the Ethics) it has a simple insight into the essence of being, into its differentiations. When later in the Ethics Spinoza speaks of the third kind of knowledge and uses ‘intuition’ it is together with intelligere that the tertium cognitionis genus is explained (E5p31-33), the intellect has here a cognition or knowledge of the essence of being as it has of its own cognizing of the essence of being. For it is precisely an amor intellectualis, an intellectual love of God. That is, an intellectual comprehension. 232 Gueroult, (1968) Vol. I, p. 191: “l’infinitude infiniment infinite”. 233 See the beginning of Aristotle’s Physics, Book I, Part 1 234 “Quamvis enim illas non comprehendamus, quia scilicet est de natura infiniti ut a nobis, qui sumus finite, non comprehendatur, nihilominus tamen ipsas clarius & distinctius quam ullas res corporeas intelligere

91 In Aristotle, “it is impossible for a substance or quality or affection to be infinite”235, and the independence of the substance is due to the fact that “everything else is predicated of the substance as the underlying subject”236 or hypokeimenon (lat. subiectum, substantia).

When an infinitely infinite being defines reality or the beginning of our knowledge, it is no longer an inert substratum to predication, another ‘substantial form’ now just on a larger scale, as it were, but an infinite ‘in actu’.

In other words, when an actual absolutely infinite being defines reality, and is “prior both in knowledge and in nature” (E2p10s2), we acquire knowledge of all things through the infinite.

Either by comprehending the nature of the infinite itself (substance), or by comprehending the non-finite character of singular things (modes of being), i.e. their ‘substantial’ or ‘infinite’ properties. One does no longer ask what the substance of a (finite) thing is, as in traditional metaphysics, whereby non-substance categories (particulars) ‘inhere in’, as (Aristotelian- scholastic) qualities in the bodies or are ‘predicated of’ as of an underlying inert subject

(substratum).

Consequently, the substantial or infinite character of the corporeal is extension

and any other property a body has presupposes extension as merely a special case of it. For example, we can’t make sense of shape except in an extended thing, or of motion except in an extended space”. And the substantial character or the infinite aspect of the mind is thought, “and anything else that is true of a mind is merely a special case of that, a way of thinking. For example, we can make sense of imagination, sensation and will only in a thinking thing (Descartes, Principles I 53).

Hence, a special case or the way (modus) of extension or of thought (a particular volition for instance) does not ‘inhere in’ or can be ‘predicated of’ thought, nor can a special case of the corporeal (the shape) be predicated of extension.

possumus, quia cogitationem nostrum magis implent, suntque simpliciores, nec limitationibus ullis obscurantur”. Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, I/19 235 Aristotle, Physics, 185a: substance alone is independent, for everything is predicated of substance as subject 236 Panta gar kat’hypokeimenou legetai tes ousias, Physics 185b

92 The contemporary debates on predication and inherence in Spinoza, in the way we find them in some accounts of the past few decades in Anglophone literature, I understand them to be an unclarified instance of Aristotelianism, that is, in the case of Spinoza as well as of Descartes, an anachronism237. In other words, the question is not if “for Spinoza modes are

God’s propria”238, and it is not at all “clear that what makes something a substance is the fact that it is a subject of which properties are predicated”239.

Many scholars support their view for predication and inherence in Spinoza, i.e. for the

‘similarity’ they think exists between Aristotle’s and Descartes’ notion of substance with the following statement from Descartes:

Substance. This term applies to every thing in which whatever we perceive immediately resides, as in a subject, or to every thing by means of which whatever we perceive exists. By ‘what we perceive’ is meant any property, quality or attribute of which we have a real idea. (CSM II 114).

What is ‘subject’ here in the sentence, however, is not the substance, but the singular thing. Namely, the subject in which we find those (non-finite, essential) properties, and through which we perceive that the same singular thing exists in reality (as a res).

For example, we find extension in a flower which exists through its many properties, quality or attributes of corporeality. It is the flower, the singular thing, which is now the subject

(subiectum) of these properties, not the extension (substance). Furthermore, we have a ‘real idea’ of these properties, qualities or attributes we perceive immediately (as residing in a singular thing), i.e. of the corporeality in the flower. That is, we have in our mind an idea of something, which exists as such in reality [realiter], namely extension, through which we know that the

237 Curley (1988) for instances asks “whether any of the properties we might be inclined to predicate of finite particulars is going to be properly predicable of the one substance. It’s clear that properties like warmth and fragrance are not going to be fundamental enough to be predicable directly of substance”. Such questions are in my view wrong questions, based on a scholastic predication and inherence relation applied now to Spinoza. 238 Melamed (2013), p. 4, note 3 239 Melamed (2013), p. 14

93 flower exists (as a res) by means of all of the various modifications of extension. And from where we can know many other things with (scientific) certainty about the flower. In other words, we do not know that the flower ‘really’ is based on sense perception, but because of the intellectual perception and comprehension of the infinite (attributes and substance) in it [the subject].

To be sure, if the infinite is the beginning of our knowledge this does not mean that we don’t see, hear and perceive by the senses. Just that we cannot rely on sense perception for scientific or philosophical knowledge (as in the Cartesian ‘doubt’), i.e. that genuine knowledge

‘begins’ with the perception and comprehension (‘real idea’) of the infinite. And this is what

Descartes means at the end of the fifth Meditation for whom knowledge, similar as in Spinoza,

‘begins’ with God:

Thus, I see plainly that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends strictly on my awareness of the true God. So much so that until I became aware of him, I couldn’t perfectly know anything. Now I can achieve full and certain knowledge of countless matters, both concerning God himself and other things whose nature is intellectual, and also concerning the whole of the corporeal nature that is subject matter of pure mathematics.

The ontology of the infinite elaborated in early modern philosophy and sciences is an ontology without a substratum, i.e. without the substance understood in terms of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon. Hence, one cannot return to this same model as if the notion of the infinite (being) would be just another substratum (laying quietly at the ground of reality) of which something is ‘predicated’ (‘as said of a substrate’: gr. kat’ hypokeimenou legetai) or where different qualities

‘inhere in’ (‘being in a substrate’: gr. en hypokeimeno esti).

This will be sufficiently plain to everyone who knows how to distinguish between the intellect and the imagination – particularly if it is also noted that matter is everywhere the same, and that parts are distinguished in it only insofar as we conceive matter to be affected in different ways, so that its parts are distinguished only modally, but not really [unde ejus partes modaliter tantum distinguuntur, non autem realiter]. (E1p15s[V.]).

94 Thus, ‘affections’ of the substance, which Spinoza calls modes, i.e. the former Aristotelian

‘qualities’ or patos legetai (Met. Book Delta, 21) are now the actualization of activities of the one infinite substance in virtue of which they exist (as modes) and in virtue of which their essence becomes intelligible to us in a way as they have never been before for scientific knowledge.

Precisely because they are now ‘known’ through the infinite.

In his article on “Immanence et extériorité absolue”240, Lærke argues that it was Leibniz who with his reading annotations to the Ethics ‘bent’ (infléchit) Spinoza’s definition of the substance towards a scholastic reading. And thus, introduced an interpretative model subsequently followed by Bayle and stretching to Hegel, as well as from Bennett and Garrett,

Koistinen and Biro to Melamed as to the question of (Aristotelian scholastic) predication and inherence in Spinoza.

I cannot go into further details here about the reason why I disagree with Lærke’s assertion that it was Leibniz who introduced a scholastic Aristotelian ‘bending’ into Spinoza’s interpretations. But I certainly agree, although for different reasons, with the overall assessment that no Aristotelian or Platonising interpretation can account for Spinoza’s thoughts. It is and remains an anachronism, as if one would try to read Newton with Aristotle’s Physics. Whereby

I would strictly maintain a difference between ‘errors’ made by someone like Hegel, and which are of an altogether different quality than those misunderstandings made by contemporary scholars. Because Hegel’s ontology, as in the early modern, does not have a substratum either.

And his admiration for Aristotle has less to do with his reading of Spinoza and more with

Hegel’s attempt to rehabilitate Aristotle, i.e. to take him out of precisely scholastic medieval readings and open-up a new reception of Aristotle’s work, which he in fact successfully

240 Lærke, Mogens, “Immanence et extériorité absolue. Sur la théorie de la causalité et l’ontologie de la puissance de Spinoza”, in: Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009/2), vol. 134, pp 169-190

95 introduced. “Hegel’s admiration for Aristotle is well-known”241, but, “Note that, unlike

Aristotle […], Hegel does not think that change […] presupposes an underlying substratum”242, in the sense of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon.

Let us now close this note on predication and inherence and turn to another aspect of infinite causation, namely, to the series of causes going ‘ad infinitum’. In E1p28, we read that:

Every singular thing, or any thing which is finite and has a determinate existence, can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence; and again, this cause also can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another which is also finite and has a determinate existence, and so on, to infinity.

And in the following proposition (E1p29), Spinoza “Like Bruno, distinguishes between Natura naturans and Natura naturata”243, but unlike many entries in literature, I should not qualify this difference as one between ‘active’ and ‘passive’244. For nothing is just passive in Natura naturata, in “whatever follows from the necessity of God’s nature, or from any of its attributes, that is, 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” (E1p29s). Because the Nature of both is the same, it is the ‘being nature’ (natura essendi) of the one, unique and infinite substance, or the nature of the one being that is ‘everywhere’ the determinate cause of anything that ‘is’.

Thus, the question here with the causation ‘ad infinitum’ is the following: how is there an infinite causation (going back ‘ad infinitum’) and at the same time “an absolutely first cause”

241 Gérard, Gilbert, “Hegel, Reader of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Substance as Subject”, in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 2012/2 (Nr. 74), pp 195-223. DOI 10.3917/122.0195, available online in English translation at: https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_RMM_122_0195--hegel-reader-of-aristotle-s-metaphysics.htm, p.195 242 Houlgate, Stephen, The Hegel Reader (Oxford/Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1998) p. 210 (note 3). For outstanding studies on the medieval reception of Aristotle’s substance, see Galluzzo, Gabriele, The Medieval Reception of Book Zeta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (2 vol. set:), 2012, Brill (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, Vol. 110). 243 Kenny, Anthony, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 2010), p. 733 244 Ibid.: “Like Bruno, Spinoza distinguishes Natura Naturans (literally, ‘Nature Naturing’, which we may call ‘active nature’) and Natura Naturata (‘Nature Natured’, which we may call ‘passive nature’)”.

96 245 (E1p16c3)? In other words, why is there in Spinoza no ‘antinomy of reason’ (Kant) , i.e. no contradiction between an absolute beginning with the first cause and the order of final causes going back ‘ad infinitum’?

The short answer would be because “All the things which follow from the absolute nature of any of God’s attributes have always had to exist and be infinite, or are, through the same attribute, eternal and infinite” (E1p21). That is, because whatever originates from the absolute and infinite cause of itself is by its own nature infinite. In other words, because there are infinite modes in Spinoza’s system, immediate and mediate, through which finite entities come into being, and whose causes therefore go back ‘ad infinitum’.

Whereby it goes without saying that the number of attributes (of which we know only two) is infinite, as is the number of immediate infinite modes or the number of mediate infinite modes.

Hence, that the possibility for different configurations of the existence of finite things to arise from here is absolutely infinite as is their primary cause, or God.

Therefore, in order to understand this schema with the ‘infinite modes’, one needs to answer the question of how finite things come into being according to Spinoza. We have seen previously that with the reversal of traditional metaphysics, epistemology is also turned on its head, and that Spinoza’s ontology of the one infinite substance is throughout compatible with modern sciences, as they developed from the seventeenth century onwards.

Hence, let us take an example from one of Boyle’s discoveries that was much later to become the first ‘element’ in the periodic table, namely, hydrogen.

In the language of the Ethics, hydrogen would be a mediate infinite mode (insofar we assume that hydrogen is the most abundant chemical component in the universe, which occurred during the so-called ‘recombination period’, i.e. during the initial formation of our universe).

245 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B454: The Antinomy of Reason, First Conflict of the Transcendental Ideas. “Thesis: The world has a beginning in time, and in space it is also enclosed in boundaries. Antithesis: The world has no beginning and no bounds in space, but is infinite with regard to both time and space”, (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 470-471.

97 That is, something that occurs from a modification of the infinite attribute of extension, mediated through a number of modifications of the immediate infinite modes of motion and rest and their many other modifying instances until it reaches the form that we call hydrogen.

For “Whatever follows from some attribute of God insofar as it is modified by a modification which, through the same attribute, exists necessarily and is infinite, must also exist necessarily and be infinite” (E1p22). And “Every mode which exists necessarily and is infinite has necessarily had to follow either from the absolute nature of some attribute of God, or from some attribute, modified by a modification which exists necessarily and is infinite” (E1p23). As does hydrogen from the many modifications of the corporeal, the corporeal itself from the many modifications of motion and rest, themselves infinite modifications of the attribute of extension.

Everything here is infinite. Recall that in proposition 15, Spinoza said that matter is everywhere the same, and that parts are distinguished in it only insofar as we conceive matter to be affected in different ways, so that its parts are distinguished only modally, but not really (E1p15s[V.]). And that we read in Descartes that “All the variety in matter, all the different forms it take, depend on motion: So the universe contains the very same matter all through, and it’s always recognized as matter simply in virtue of its being extended” (PPh. II/23) 246.

Hence, the finite particular mode is “made up of certain configurations”247, aggregations or formations. In other words, the finite mode is made of certain particular configurations of infinite elements. A flower is the result of a ‘meeting’, as it were, in a real three-dimensional space (that is not different from corporeal substance)248 of infinite elements, which cross each other ways, similar to the vectors in the Cartesian coordinate system249. Put

246 Descartes, Principia Philosophiae II/23: “Omnem materiae variationem, sive omnem ejus formarum diversitatem pendere a motu: Materia itaque in toto universo una et eadem existit, utpote quae omnis per hoc unum tantum agnoscitur, quod sit extensa”. 247 Descartes, “Particular bodies are “made up of certain configurations of limbs and other accidents of that sort” - ex certa membrorum configuration aliisque ejusmodi accidentibus constare (Synopsis to the Meditations, AT VII 14). 248 Descartes, Principia Philosophiae II/11 249 The Cartesian coordinate system will play a decisive role in the development of the infinitesimal calculus by Newton and Leibniz, precisely because of the ‘infinity of changes’. I am convinced that Spinoza could have eventually discovered the calculus, would he have been more interested in sciences than he was in ethics.

98 differently, when hydrogen meets carbon together with other elements, there come into being a finite mode, a flower or a stream. In other words, particular things are the effects of the infinitely infinite infinitude of different modifying activities. And they are finite or can perish, precisely because they are the result of such a ‘meeting’, i.e. of the configuration of certain elements, which, for this very reason (because they form a compound) is ‘limited’. Hydrogen might become part of the flower, but when the ratio of motion and rest no longer holds the individual together and the flower vanishes, hydrogen will flow back into space, a stream or into any other compound. 250. Thus, all finite beings perish for the same reason for which they come into being, namely, because they are at the crossroad of infinite (modes) elements, i.e. a composite of fascinating complexity.

What sustains the ‘being of things’, their “persevering in existence” (E1p24c), i.e. that which maintains their existence and duration is ‘the power of God’ as the causa prima,251 namely, its dynamis and entelechy. But the effects of the potence (gr. dyname) of being conceived as absolutely infinite (E1d6), and actual from eternity [actu ab eterno] (E1p17s), is no longer the traditional

‘potentiality’. In other words, what sustains or ‘conserves’ the ‘being of things’ is the power of the natura essendi conceived as energy or force, which, as in Aristotle but now with entirely different results, stands in relation to motion (gr. kinesis) and rest.

The Aristotelian contrasting between ‘energy’ and ‘potentiality’, which marked the development of medieval sciences, is now transformed into an interplay between force, energy and conservation, whereby ‘force’ becomes a ‘virtue’ and property of bodies that is due to their own nature as modes of the corporeal. Precisely because the infinite being itself (God) is an infinite ‘in actu’, all of its attributes and what follows from them are an ‘active’ formative power.

250 What makes an individual, the ratio of motion and rest, is explained by Spinoza in the second part of the Ethics in the context of the union between the body and the mind. Namely, in the text passage that has been often called Spinoza’s ‘small physics’ (set of axioms and lemmas with definitions and postulates between propositions 13 and 14). And which is, as Henri Atlan shows in his Lectures, misleading, because it is about a ‘theory of the individual’, a model of protobiology or a draft of biophysics, rather than physics. Henri Atlan, Cours de philosophie biologique et cognitiviste: Spinoza et la biologie actuelle (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2018), pp 69-91. 251 As the function of the notion of God as the first cause is described earlier in the introduction of this thesis.

99 Hence, the bodies’ entelechy, perfection or ‘purpose’ is already contained in the form of their realized existence and have no ‘telos’ external to their actual ‘being’.

Thus, notwithstanding such modifications of ‘infinitude’, a finite being is a determinate and finite existence. This does not mean, however, that it is ‘powerless’ or passive. Because although a finite thing is not the cause of its own essence (only God himself is), its essence has from its primary cause a determinate or well-defined capacity of acting, i.e. of effectuating.

A ‘finite thing’ can, in this sense, be anything finite: a flower or a human being252, it

“cannot render itself undetermined” (E1p27). Hence, although it “has been so determined by

God […] what is finite and has a determinate existence could not have been produced by the absolute nature of an attribute of God; for whatever follows from the absolute nature of an attribute of God is eternal and infinite. It had, therefore, to follow […]” (E1p28) from some other mode. That is, to follow from modifications (of the infinite), from the ‘crossroad’, “which is finite and has a determinate existence. […] And in turn, this cause, or this mode had also to be determined by another, which is also finite and has a determinate existence, and again, this last by another, and so always to infinity” (E1p28).

Thus, finite things never ‘emerge’ directly from God, or from any of its infinite modifications in a straight line. He is not our immediate cause, as some ‘creationist’ would assume in their imaginative world. Nevertheless, “God cannot properly be called the remote cause of singular things, except perhaps so that we may distinguish them from those things that he has produced immediately, or rather, that follow from his absolute nature” (E1p28sII).

Because, although at the crossroads of infinite immediate and mediate infinite modes in the infinity of elements in the universe (or in multiverses), the primary cause is “conjoined”, as

Spinoza uses the word here, “in any way with its effects” (E1p28sII). So that finite things can

“neither be nor be conceived without” it (E1p28sII). Hence, we are to the innermost of our own

252 Neither the plant nor the human being consists only of extension, but I am taking extension here just as the one attribute under which we conceive some finite thing.

100 essence and capacities of acting ‘conjoined’ with the first cause. However small we might appear to be within such absolutely infinite infinity.

In consequence, there is no contradiction or ‘antinomy of reason’ between two different and actual infinites.253 The infinite sequence (ad infinitum) of the finite (causes) is an infinite continuum in time, of which we can never reach or trace back the ‘first finite cause’. Thus, probability or potentiality needs not, as still in the school of Port-Royal or in Pascal, to be defined through

‘chance’, but rather as an infinitely infinite infinitude of their infinitely many possibilities of

253 Let us recall here what Schelling writes in order to illustrate the whole misunderstanding in place in German Idealism about Spinoza on this topic: “The God of Spinoza is still lost in substantiality and thereby in immobility. For mobility (=possibility) is only in the subject. The substance of Spinoza is just object. Things follow from God, not through a movement, a wanting in Himself, but in a quiet manner, as, in his one simile, the nature of the right-angled triangle follows from the relationship of the hypotenuse to the two sides. His intention, therefore, is that the connection is a merely logical one. But he himself does not explain this connection, he only affirms that it takes place. As first mediating elements between God and individual finite things he posits both kinds of being, infinite extension and thought, which in its own way is just as infinite. But the substance itself does not unlock itself in them but remains in its reserve (Verschlossenheit) as mere ground of their existence, without emerging as being(s) that they have in common, as the living bond of the two. To the question why he gives the divinity just these, and no other, attributes, he answers in one of his letters: this happens simply because in mankind or in human nature no more than these two are recognisable (thus no basis in the substance itself, but just in experience). To infinite thought and infinite extension, he then gives two more subordinate modes, as he calls them, namely movement and rest these, therefore, are again the immediate attributes of infinite extension, as, then, will and understanding are immediate attributes of infinite thought. New mediating elements. But he does not get any nearer to the individual real things thereby, which are either extended or thinking, and the affections, i.e. determinations of the infinite substance, are of substance as it presents itself as either extended or thinking. The whole sequence is, therefore, the following: right at the op infinite substance, then attributes, then modi, finally affections. But he completely rejects the question as to how these affections arise in the infinite. Because he absolutely cannot admit any real transition from the infinite to the finite, he does not have any of these finite things arise immediately from the infinite, but only mediately, namely mediated through something else separate and finite, which itself is again mediated through another etc., into infinity. I therefore never arrive at a point where I can raise the question how the things result or are made to result from God. Spinoza therefore denies any true beginning of the finite, everything finite only ever directs us towards something else finite, by which the former is determined for existence, this goes back into infinity, so that we never finish and nowhere can we prove an immediate transition from the infinite into the finite. We are compelled to go back into infinity with the explanation of everything. Spinoza maintains nevertheless that every thing follows in a temporal way only from another thing, but only in an eternal way from the nature of God ( aeterno modo), but such that one includes the other. A;; things – both those which are now and those which used to be or will be in the future – are posited in an eternal way by the nature of God, like the properties of a triangle”, On the History of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 70-71. It is in such a way that Schelling taught Spinoza to his students. The difficulty is obvious: to think of finite things as not ‘immediately’ emerging from God, and which has something naïve almost, and is at any rate an abstract use of the notion of God, if we compare it with the understanding of the infinite in early modern sciences. If we think of Darwin’s evolutionary theory for instance, there is no ‘end’ to all the finite causes out of which humans or plants emerged, although we can say with some certainty which forms emerged at which time, but never the actual whole chain of causations (for all the ‘gaps’ in the theory of evolution) for which we would need to include not only the beginning of life on earth, but earth’s own beginning, and so on ‘ad infinitum’. No science can retrace the whole of finite causes, either for features explained through Extension or through Thought. There is no ‘end’ in scientific research on finite causes, in this sense. Hence, there is something non-scientific in Schelling from this point of view, from his expectation to have God as the ‘immediate’ cause of finite things.

101 combinations into a compound (similar to what Hume later, or Newton calls the ‘ probability of causes’). And the absolute infinite nature of the one substance and of everything infinite that immediately or mediately follows from its essence, is eternal. That is, not determined through duration and time. Hence, we have two infinites to think together, one of (temporal) sequences and one of (non-temporal) essences.

It is from such perspective then, of infinite elements and forces in nature, of the interplay between force, energy and conservation in relation to the ratio of motion and rest that one could conceive not only of modern physics, but also of chemistry and biology as science later. And thus, develop instruments and laboratories, or a calculus (today far more sophisticated) in order to ‘see’ those things, which are precisely not object of sense-perception. Medieval science, of course, ‘observed’ closely things in nature, in particular the Aristotelians, as in the remarkable work of Albert the Great. But what they observed was never conceived in terms of the infinite

(infinite causalities, forces, qualities or modifications of a self-organized and self-purposive nature), precisely because in traditional theism God could not be conceived as a cause of itself.

Hence, we no longer observe a finite thing as it is simply given to our sense perception, but as it is accessible to our intellectual perception and comprehension of its (the finite thing) infinite

‘properties’. So that what we now ‘emulate’ of nature are those infinite ‘substantial’ properties, elements and forces we can retrace, discover, rearrange in many ways, or re-enact within a new configuration and ‘unleash’ its powers, as we do with hydrogen for nuclear energy.

If Spinoza would have been interested in sciences as much as he was in composing an ethics, his work would have been received with far more sympathy and understanding.

102 Part II Ethical foundations

– an Ethics. Since all metaphysics will henceforth fall into morals254

Chapter III The foundation - where ethics begins

3.1 The origin of ethical knowledge

In his article about ‘the ethical meaning of the first part of the Ethics’, Pierre Macherey asks

‘how to read a theory of necessity presented in De Deo so as to extract from it the notion of freedom that it implies? That is, how the restore to this ‘part’ of the text its fundamentally ethical dimension without which Spinoza’s philosophy would run the risk of being divided into heterogenous elements?’255. And provides a clear analysis of ‘how God acts’ through the difference between ‘operation’ (operandum) and ‘action’ (agere) in the text, where he rightly shows that it is not God alone (natura naturans) who ‘acts’, in the sense mentioned earlier, namely that every finite thing retains from its primary cause the capacity of acting.

The ethical dimension of the first part of the Ethics lies for Macherey in the notion of divine freedom as the model (libera necessitas) for the notion of human freedom later in the text, grounded in causation understood “au sens propre” (properly) as that which acts from within

254 The first line of The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism (Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin) 255 Macherey, Pierre, “Action et operation: sur la signification éthique du De Deo”in: Macherey, Pierre, Avec Spinoza, Études sur la doctrine et l’histoire du spinozisme, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992) pp 69-109. “Ainsi, à la lettre, le De Deo est la première “partie” d’une Ethique don’t il ne pourrait être artificiellement détaché. Et ceci ramène au problème general […]: comment lire la théorie de la nécessité exposée dans le De Deo de manière à dégager le concept de liberté qui doit y être impliqué? En d’autres termes, comment restituer à cette “partie” du texte sa dimension fondamentalement éthique sans laquelle la philosophie de Spinoza risquerait d’être divisée en éléments hétérogènes?”, p. 71 (my translation above).

103 and determines what is caused (finite thing) to be itself able to act and produce effects necessarily in accord with its own specific (human or other) nature.256

In difference to Macherey, or to anyone else known to me in the scholarly community, my understanding is that all conceptions in the first part of the Ethics have an ethical meaning.

Not because they relate to the later parts of the Ethics (which they certainly do), and so reveal their ethical significance, but because they are themselves ethically meaningful and belong, as

I understand Spinoza, to the overall purpose of the Ethics. Namely, to a system, which in its entirety claims apodictic certainty of an ‘exact science’ for a philosophy defined as ethica.

Basic concepts of such a science and its primary categories demonstrated more geometrico do not, at least directly, refer to the rules of human behaviour. But rather, to those fundamental instances of our comprehension, which have ethical consequences for any theory and practice.

Hence, the title ethica in Spinoza does not, despite its Greek etymology (gr. mores and gr. ethos) refer to customs, habits, character or personal disposition, that is, to its philosophical usage as practical philosophy, but rather to the ‘foundations’ of the ethical, in the sense of an early modern philosophia prima. For “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”257.

That is, to a completely new understanding of what follows for the ethical in the economy of human knowledge from such radical changes. And the only systematic foundations we have for the ethical from this historical period, namely Spinoza’s Ethics is the third major work in the

256 Ibid., p. 103: “La cause, au sens propre, ce n’est donc jamais ce qui agit “sur” une chose, parce que […] “agir” exclut la consideration d’une telle relation extérieure; mais c’est ce qui, agissant “dans” une chose, la determine elle-même à agir, c’est-à-dire à produire tous les effets don’t elle est capable en vertu de sa cause, c’est-à-dire en vertu de sa nature”. 257 De Dijn, “Spinoza and Galileo: Nature and Transcendence”, Intellectual History Review, 23:1, 2013), p. 107.

104 history of philosophy to bear this title, after Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics258 and Abelard’s

Ethica, seu scito se ipsum259. A turning point.

Let us state once again the most obvious, the fact that Spinoza’s system defined as ethica begins with the knowledge of the one and unique God. In other words, it is with our understanding of being’s own being that systematic foundations for the ethical begins for

Spinoza. And this link, between the knowledge of being and the understanding of the ethical, opens up a whole field of new contents that had not existed in previous philosophies.

Something like an ‘ethical foundation’ for philosophical thinking seem conceivable; because, if philosophy is a science of being ‘insofar as it is being’, this means that our understanding of the ethical begins where philosophical thinking begins. It seems to be of the very nature of the ethical to be knowledge from its very first steps; and of the very nature of knowledge to be of consequences for the ethical, from its very first thoughts. Such apparent indistinctiveness between the usually two different kinds of knowledge, between the ontological and the ethical is for Spinoza not an inflection of our own philosophical interest but lies within the structures of being as it ‘is’.

This does not mean, however, that there is ‘con-fusion’ and no difference between the ontological and the ethical, and which would in fact represent ‘a false beginning’, in the sense

Hermann Cohen criticised it260. In other words, it is not something that we would not be able to clearly distinguish from one another, the ontological from the ethical. On the contrary, the content of the ‘true idea’ (of God) according to which the method unfolds in the Ethics, contains all the doctrines Spinoza formulates, ontological and ethical. The text contains “all ethical

258 Aristotle also wrote the Eudemian Ethics, which gained on significance only recently (in the last few decades). But which can be counted together here with the Nichomachean Ethics as the ethical philosophy of Aristotle. 259 Abelard, Peter (1079-1142), Ethics, or Know Thyself. For last English edition, see Peter Abelard, Ethical Writings (London: Hackett Publishing, 1995). 260 As noted in the introduction, Cohen understands Spinoza’s Ethics as a “false beginning” which “obscured the basic distinction” between ethics and ontology, in Cohen’s view. About the “fundamental error of pantheism” see: Kant’s Begründung der Erfahrung, chap. VIII, or Cohen’s major work translated into English: Religion of Reason: Out of Sources of Judaism, chap III/1 or chap VII//16.

105 postulates” as a Kantian would say, that is, all the doctrines with an ethical meaning at the beginning of philosophizing. And which resemble more a doctrinal imperative than a (practical) postulate, i.e. something ineluctable that we ‘need to know’.

Moreover, the ethical content in Spinoza’s system is easier to grasp than its ontological

‘other side’. For each time a reader could ask ‘how do I do this?’: how do I maintain, for instance, the ethical/ontological postulation of a substantial unity between the human body and the mind without any causal relations or conceptual intelligibility between them in a particular case of an individual entity in medicine, biology, or law? the text would refer the reader back to the ontological side, i.e. to the ‘true’ understanding of the complexity of things in nature. Spinoza’s Ethics, as any other first philosophy does not answer this kind of practical questions but teaches what its author considers to be fundamental and so remains open to further adjustments, investigations and research in various disciplines, including philosophy.

Consequently, its ontological and ethical basic truths are meant to be valid in general, at least in Spinoza’s intention, regardless the current state of affairs in a single science with its changing insights, shifting focuses or methods of research.

Hence, it is because all our understanding of the ethical, our ethical judgements or views necessarily involve, one way or another some comprehension of being that the ethical begins where philosophical thinking begins in the Ethics. And not because Spinoza would have projected into the notion of being some additional dimension or endowed it with a transcending meaning it does not have. The purpose of such foundational understanding of the ethical in the system of the Ethics is therefore the perfecting of human knowledge, for Everyone will now be able to see that I wish to direct all the sciences toward one end and goal, namely, that we should achieve, as we have said, the highest human perfection. […]– in a word, all our activities and thoughts are to be directed to this end.

TdIE [16].

106 3.2 Spinoza’s doctrinal imperatives

The basic postulations then of such a ‘fundamental and exact science of ethics’, of the first part of Spinoza’s ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata can be formulated as follow:

1. the substantial oneness and uniqueness of being needs to be maintained at all times, in all sciences

(human or natural sciences).

2. the essential difference between the thinking and the extended needs to be maintained together

with the oneness of being at all times, in all forms of knowledge.

3. What is eternal should not be conceived in terms of duration and time.

4. What is perfect or real needs to be conceived in terms of an entity’s own power and nature.

5. Purposiveness shall not be understood in terms of final causes, but in terms of perfection.261

As mentioned in the introduction, the ethical consists of the same set of truths that the notion of

God in the complexity of its function posits for ontology and epistemology, and which become intelligible in their ethical meaning if we read them according to the rules of its appropriation in the text.

Consequently, we cannot read the ethical in the same way as we read the ontological or the epistemological, although we are in fact dealing with the same set of truths. Hence, we have entered the language of imperatives, as it were, about what we ought and ought not to ‘do’.

This ‘ontologico-ethical’ suggestion for the interpretation of the first part of the Ethics, with which the analysis changes its direction here (from the first meaning to the second), may seem strange in comparison. But what is ‘new’ here is in fact very old, “in Judaism the ethical always

261 From the conceptions that the system of the Ethics juxtaposes in its first part with great precision, I selected here only the major few, without obviously exhausting everything the text covers for what I call Spinoza’s ‘doctrinal imperatives’, so as to remain within the scope of this thesis. One would need to add, for instance, the following postulations, that 1) Nothing finite should be thought as immediately caused or explicable by the absolutely infinite; that 2) Rationality shall not be conceived as something external to being, that is, as something standing on a seemingly neutral ground as if thinking would not itself belong to being; or that 3) Freedom (divine and therefore later also human) shall not be conceived as non-determined, that is, as an absolutely arbitrary will.

107 reaches down into the ontological”262. And the understanding of God’s oneness and uniqueness always translates into the ethical. But I will return to this eventually later. For the main goal of this thesis is not to ‘prove’ Spinoza’s intellectual indebtedness to Judaism, but to ‘take it seriously’, as Levinas put it263, namely, to try to better understand the text with the help of it.

Let us look then into each of the postulation enumerated above and try to outline their ethical meaning in the following section.

Whereby we are to leave out of considerations Spinoza’s proof of God’s existence here.

Because, as we saw earlier, the facticity of being concerns the possibilities of knowledge (scientific and philosophical), namely, such principles as the one of sufficient reason and proximate causation. As for the popular rather than genuinely philosophical debates about the question if

‘God’ does or does not exist, that is, if being is or is not, one can answer with the psalmist that only a “fool” can ask this (Psalm 53), or with Spinoza, “conceive if you can, that God”, in the meaning of its ‘true name’ and not some fiction of your imagination “does not exist” (E1p11).

The fact that “the European Enlightenment shed light on the superstitions, naïve beliefs, theological dogmatism and institutional clericalism” 264, does not mean that it shed a new light on the notion of God in philosophy or religion. Or, that it had actually followed up on the early modern notion of God or of being, and established from there a new comprehension of what follows from it for our understanding of the ethical, either in philosophy or in general. On the contrary, it retained the same imaginative abstractions in its reference to what ‘God’ means, namely the same as in those naïve beliefs it helped overcome, and from where contemporary debates about the ‘existence of God’ are, unfortunately, still taking their clue. Hence, to ‘be enlightened’ amounts for many to not believing in fancies, which is no great effort.

262 Lévinas, Emmanuel, “Mais dans le judaïsme, la morale a toujours la portée d’un fondement ontologique”, in Difficile liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963/1976), p. 53 (my translation). 263 See note 26 in the introduction of this thesis. 264 I wrote about this in a recent article, “Spinoza’s Compendium of the Grammar of the Hebrew Language”, in: Parrhesia: 32 (2020), pp 122-144. http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia32/parrhesia32_stracenski.pdf

108 3.3 The preliminaries in theory and practice

Ad 1: the substantial oneness and uniqueness of being

Being itself or God is one and unique, a unum et unicum natura (E1p14c1), which in its infinity is nothing else than the “absolute affirmation of existence”, the absoluta affirmatio existentiae (E1p8s1).

If being itself is substantially one, then what we call ‘reality’ is also substantially one, and in consequence, also every entity produced by such reality is substantially one.

And if being is unique, then reality as such (wherever in the infinity of being, in some other galaxy or universe) is each time unique, as is in consequence every entity produced by such reality a singularity, or unique.

Hence, for all entities, it means that every individual (a human being, a plant, the cell of an organism, or other) is a ‘substantially one singularity’, a finite unum et unicum, however different their composition and individual essences might be.

Following my working hypothesis, according to which the appropriation of the ethical in the text of the Ethics follows the pattern of traditional core teachings of Judaism, we can say that: we ‘need to know’ that God is one and unique not only because this is the case, in the sense of an ontological fact for Spinoza; but also, because this same fact is of eminent ethical importance. Whether we deal with being ‘in general’, that is, with ontology in any of the sciences (human or natural sciences), or whether we deal with singular entities in any of the fields of our research (in medicine, biology or anthropology), or with specific questions of human individuals and human affairs (in social, political or moral theories), to maintain the oneness and uniqueness of being (singular) and therefore also of beings (in plural), is, in this sense, an ‘imperative’.

109 From this, it follows that any suspension of this first and most important imperative, that is, any positing of a substantial division of ontological reality as a whole; or the positing of a substantial division within the oneness and the singularity of individual entities is necessarily leading to unethical consequences. Namely, to an impasse and ethically highly problematic outcomes, and not only to ontologically questionable assertions and epistemological errors.

In theory: this would include any school of thought based on one-sided ontologies, such as materialism, idealism, physicalism or naturalism, as well as historicism, phenomenology or existentialism. Namely, every theory built upon only one aspect of reality attributed to being, i.e. based on the reduction of being to only one of its attributes, and usually argued against the other.

Whether we argue against natural sciences (Husserl, Heidegger) or in name of the sciences against a non-naturalist approach, we remain in any case reductionist and have from the outset missed the opportunity to establish well-founded and more permanent ethical results.

Put differently, if we take Spinoza ‘seriously’, this strong claim concerns the whole of the history of philosophy. Because, from Greek Antiquity to its contemporary versions, philosophy handed down (lat. tradere) the principled dualism of being. That is, an understanding of the division of being where thought is structurally opposed to being, the intelligible to the sensible, or the form to matter. Thus, with its traditional division of being, and without the one and unique being or God at the beginning of philosophizing, philosophy as philosophy is inevitably, and without grasping the stakes, producing “shallow and hollow foundations”265 for the ethical.

In practice: this refers to any judgement we make about the ethical, not only in philosophy, but also in the everyday. That is, to the traditional understanding of phronêsis. Because there is no prudence, moderation, temperance, virtue, or any moral action without a certain (true or false) understanding we have of the oneness and uniqueness of being. Whether we debase the body or the intellect, whether we assign priority to action or to contemplation, whether we

265 Halevi, in Selected Poems of Jehudah Halevi, ed. Heinrich Brody and Nina Salaman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946), pp. 16-17.

110 understand virtue as something contrary to nature, or we reduce the mind to the corporeal or vice versa, that is, ‘naturalize’ the first or ‘idealize’ the second, we remain within a pattern of thought that leads us to unethical outcomes, and not only to false conclusions about the true nature of the mind, of the body, or of virtue. In other words, all of our moral judgements are based on this primary discernment that the intellect makes of being, i.e. of reality as either substantially one or as substantially divided into fundamentally two different realms (of freedom and of nature, as in Kant). Thus, our whole understanding of the ethical depends on it.

Ad 2: the essential difference between the thinking and the extended

Being itself, the whole of reality as well as individual entities (finite modifications of the one substance) are substantially one and unique. But they are not therefore ‘fused’ in their oneness, nor are they ontologically or epistemologically ‘separated’ from other entities in their uniqueness. On the contrary, they are essentially differentiated while remaining substantially one; they are one and two, without contradiction. In addition, they are essentially relational while remaining a substantial singularity or uniqueness, that is, they are autonomous and heteronomous at the same time, without contradiction.

God himself is one and two – two insofar our intellect perceives no more than two features of what belongs to the very nature of being, that is, to the essence of being as two different attributes.

Reality as a whole is substantially one and essentially two, insofar what is extended and what is thinking has its own specific laws, standards and properties. As is every single individual or finite modification of the same one substance, one and two – insofar whatever belongs to the extended or corporeal is essentially (in res) and not substantially different from what belongs to the thinking or sentient nature.

111 And finally: God or being’s own being stands in a relation, to itself as a cause on the one hand; and to the “infinitely many things” that follow from its nature (E1p16) on the other, without therefore losing its own absolute, unique and incomparable nature.

Reality as a whole consists of infinitely many infinite relations, the one extended and the other thinking, without therefore losing its substantial oneness. And individual entities are woven into a great number of relations affecting them in various ways externally, as well as the great number of internal relations of which they are the compound, without therefore losing their singularity or individuality.

Hence, we need to maintain this second ‘imperative’ in all sciences together with the first. Namely, the substantial oneness of being and of beings needs to be maintained together with the essential duality of anything that falls under the attribute of Thought or under the attribute of Extension. For insofar attributes belong to the essence of the one substance they

“cannot be divided” (E1p15sV) and thus each of them “must be conceived through itself”

(E1p10). Both attributes are causally and conceptually independent, that is, nothing in the realm of thought can be caused by anything from the realm of extension, and vice versa. Nor can anything extended be conceived through models of explanations that apply to anything that falls under the attribute of thought, and vice versa. This essential difference, between

Extension and Thought, can be maintained only because none of them, neither extension nor thought are ontologically or epistemologically the ‘first’. Only the one infinite being is the first in the order of things as well as in the order of knowledge, that is, first “in nature” and first “in knowledge” (E2p10s).

In consequence, any con-fusion of the extended and thinking nature in the order of causes as well as in the order of knowledge leads, from this perspective, to unethical results - in theory and in practice.

112 In theory: this refers to philosophy’s own original positioning, leaning commonly either towards different forms of idealism and rationalism or towards different versions of materialism and empiricism. None of which, as we saw above, are to produce strong ethical foundations from such ontological and epistemological reduction. Hence, it refers at the same time to all other fields of knowledge operating along similar models. Whether we explain the functioning of an organism through a transcendentalism of the non-extended rather than with laws specific to the relational dynamics of the corporeal; or we explain human thoughts through the physical functioning of the body rather than with the laws, standards and criteria of the thinking nature in the complexity of its relations (feelings, volition, love, desire), we are in any case to yield ethically problematic outcomes out of our own research and specific disciplines. And which therefore concerns not only sciences, but art and literature as well, that is, any medium through which we express a certain understanding of reality (as thinking: of history for instance, or as extended: of the natural world for instance) and the way we speak and think of ourselves and of other beings as extended and thinking - or sentient.

In practice: this refers to any effort we make to ‘act well’ out of our understanding of the world, of ourselves and of others as thinking (or sentient) and corporeal at the same time.

Either out of philosophical or scientific insights, or out of our everyday experience and life.

That is, the content of this second ‘imperative’ refers to the traditional (Aristotelian or Kantian) or more modern (Positivist, Marxian or Sartrean) understanding of praxis. Because there is no notion of identitas, of action, alienation, pragmatism, subjectivity, agency, autonomy, or practice of language without a certain already acquired understanding we have of the relationship between the ‘abstract and the concrete’, between “nature and artifice”, or poiein and prattein – out of which we develop ‘values’ to which we have previously assigned meaning in res or in reality (extended or thinking) and upon which we act.

113 Ad 3: What is eternal should not be conceived in terms of duration and time.

Aeternitas is not the same as infinitas. Infinity is the “absolute affirmation of existence (E1p8s1); and eternity is existentia ut aeterna veritas, sicut rei essentia, the “existence itself insofar as it concerns the essence of a thing” (E1d8), either of God himself or of finite entities. Hence, being’s own infinite being is an eternal truth, as is the essence of individual finite beings.

In other words, there is eternity in Spinoza’s system and no longer immortality conceived in terms of time and duration as in Greek Antiquity and its later Christian theological versions, from the patristic of Church Fathers onwards.

Hence, neither God nor humans are ‘immortal’ in the Ethics. The discussion is not on mortality or immortality. Rather, God is absolutely infinite and eternal; eternal and infinite are his attributes or everything else, which is infinite and follows from God’s infinite nature.

Whereby modes are a finite affirmation of existence, and not an infinite. But their essence is an eternal truth, and eternal are therefore also their individual specific essences, and eternal are the essence of any of their constitutive aspects, of the body and of the mind. All this, Spinoza will explain in the fifth part of the Ethics in the context of human freedom and the intellectual love of God266.

266 Because there is no principled dualism of being in Spinoza, the soul cannot be ‘liberated’ from the body as in Plato; and because eternity is not conceived through duration and time, the soul as “an impression made on wax” (Aristotle, De Anima, 2.I.412b7) is not something that simply vanishes with the body either (like the impression when the wax melts). It is something altogether different in Spinoza, close to the conception of ‘eternal life’ in Judaism, and which is never a dualism (of body and soul) as is clear from core texts of the tradition, or even from daily prayers (such as the text of the ‘mourner’s kaddish, or other) and customs in their references to life and death. Hence, Spinoza cannot simply promote or deny the ‘immortality of the soul’ based on a very different conceptual ground. This does not mean, however, that there were no Platonising or Aristotelian takes on the question among Jewish philosophers in their various reception of Hellenistic thought. Christian and Islamic philosophy on the other hand, in similar manner as in the question of the infinity of God that we saw earlier with the Greek apeiron, had difficulties (and still have) to understand the so-called ‘resurrection of bodies and of souls” that both religions inherited from Hebrew Scriptures. Because it is obviously the ‘one and unique’ person that is ‘resurrected’, or better: the person who is an eternal and unique truth that has lived only once and who is now ‘bound up in the bond of life’ as we read it on Jewish gravestones. From Church Fathers and medieval theologians, to the philosophers of Islam, they have all found various ways to deal with it. The body was no longer a body for instance, but something ethereal (Origen, Contra Celsum 5.22) because they understood alone the ‘soul’ to be created in the image of God and not the body, since God is not corporeal. And that its immortality “depends on God, who alone - following the Greek conception of divine attributes – is absolutely immortal”, in The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most and

114 Here in the first part we only learn what eternity is. Namely, that we cannot conceive of eternity in terms of duration and time. That is, of something truly ‘permanent’ and eternally

‘true’ in terms of temporality, “even if duration is conceived to be without beginning or end”

(E1d8).

Therefore, what is truly permanent is not related to time, however long (billions of years or few centuries) or short (a second or a day) the time sequence might be, but to the essence of things (res). Thus, whenever we assign true permanence to something temporal, or temporality to something truly permanent, we are to inevitably fail the comprehension of both, of that which is temporal and of that which is eternal. Whether we assign true permanence to skin colour in relation to the essence of human beings, which is in fact a temporal and not essential feature; or whether we assign temporality to something truly permanent, as we do when we conceive of human essence as something merely historical (as wholly determined through time, culture or anything else temporal, such as illness) and not as an eternal or truly permanent factum of human beings, we will with great certainty produce ethically highly problematic outcomes within our own field of investigation and research. Because we failed to distinguish between the temporal and the eternal, to separate the permanent from the transient.

Ad 4: What is perfect or real needs to be conceived in terms of an entity’s own power and nature.

Through the natura aeterna all things are produced “with the greatest perfection” (E1app.).

Hence, perfection is nothing else than reality, that is, to be perfect means ‘to exist or be real’: perfectio sive realitatem (E1p11s).

Hence, perfection is defined through the positive reality or the actual existence of things.

“Perfection, therefore, does not take away the existence of a thing, but on the contrary asserts

Salvatore Settis (Cambridge/Massachusetts: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), entry on ‘Immortality of the soul’, p. 477. See on this also, Nadler, Steven, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford/New York: 2001).

115 it” (E1p11s). For what all things receive in virtue of their causes (either out of external causes or out of itself as causa sui), i.e. what they owe to them is perfection or reality. In consequence, perfection relates to existence, which means that in relation to causality, finite or infinite things are ‘perfect’ for their existing, and not for their comparison within a hierarchy of beings as in older metaphysics.

In consequence, their specific power or nature is their own perfection. From this it follows that the perfection of a thing needs to be asserted only from an entity’s own specific powers and nature. The cell of an organism is not ‘less perfect’ than the human body, only less complex.

Thus, the perfection of the cell ‘lacks nothing’ and is to be asserted only out of its own specific powers and nature (as a cell), and not through a comparison with other entities (a horse, or a plant). This does not, however, exclude the ‘perfecting’, which is also occurring only within one’s own power and specific nature. A cell can improve its powers or effects it produces, although in very different ways as human beings can perfect themselves according to their own specific nature. “For the perfection of things is to be judged solely from their nature and power; things are not more or less perfect because they please or offend men’s senses, or because they are of use to, or are incomparable with, human nature” (E1app.)

Whether we are dealing with natural or human sciences, we are to abandon therefore the understanding of perfection conceived in terms of ontological hierarchies of older metaphysics, if we are to do justice to existing beings, on the ontological and on the ethical level. And we need no longer to compare ourselves to (mythological) gods, as was done in

Antiquity, for we are ontologically ‘accomplished’ in our own nature and powers as human beings. Hence, our own perfecting as human beings, it depends on us alone and not on the divine nature. And since ‘thinking’ belongs to the essence of our own being, as it belongs to the essence of being itself, our perfecting lies in the capacity to think and to understand.

116 Ad 5: Purposiveness shall not be understood in terms of final causes, but in terms of perfection.

Nothing seems to stand more in the way of knowledge and sciences “than this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end”, because “they could not believe that the things had made themselves“ and did not properly attend to the

“essences and properties of things” (E1papp.). Namely, the prejudice of final causes, the main obstacle to sciences and research for Spinoza.

The right question for philosophy here seems no longer to be ‘why’ there is something, rather than nothing? But rather, ‘how’ the existing is? The focus is on the understanding of the essences and properties of things, rather than on what still seems to be an “analogy with human art”267, and which conceives of things in nature to exist and behave “on account of an end”

(E1app.). In other words, when we ask ‘why’ there is something rather than nothing, we only seem to ‘imagine’ (‘imagine’ here in the sense of ‘conceive falsely’) that there could be nothing, and hence do not attend to the facticity of being by asking ‘how’ are the already existing things, what are their properties and essences? For there is, in the infinity of the absolute being, in the

“absolute affirmation of existence” [absoluta affirmatio existentiae] (E1p8s1), no nothingness for

Spinoza. Or as the tradition has it, “There is nothing empty of Him” (Tikkunei Zohar 57)268

Put differently, for Spinoza philosophy does not begin with an abstraction, with the assumption that ‘positing’ presupposes nothing, i.e. philosophical questioning does not stand at its origin on some imaginary ground from where it could ask ‘why there is something rather than nothing?’, but on the ground of the facticity of being (on the fact of the existence of the one).

What this means for the final causes and the ethical significance of this postulation in relation to philosophy (and not only to single sciences about nature and their supposed ends),

267 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A627/B655). As mentioned earlier in the section on ‘pantheism in question’. 268 Constantinople edition, 1719, https://www.sefaria.org/Tikkunei_Zohar?lang=bi

117 is that philosophy (understood as the fundamental kind of knowledge of reality and of ourselves) is tasked with the provision of an adequate understanding of the essences of things. Namely, of the essences and properties of being and of beings.

And because the purposiveness of things is directly related to the meaning we assign to them, to the purpose of their existence and to the finality of their strivings, philosophy as philosophy needs to take special care about its conception(s) of purposiveness (of things in nature as well as in relation to ourselves), because it has major consequences for our understanding of the ethical.

Namely, since the eternal nature produces every single thing “with the greatest perfection”

(E1app.), all things are ‘perfect’ or ‘real’ in their existing, so that their purposiveness is not something other than (or external to) their own essence. Hence, what Spinoza is strongly rejecting is not purposiveness as such, but purposiveness understood in terms of the Aristotelian final causes. I mentioned earlier that it is very easy to overlook the meaning of the Latin perfectio, which in fact translates the Greek teleos, of which the root is precisely the telos. Thus, Spinoza is in the Ethics reconfiguring the traditional understanding of purposiveness, rejecting the old and trying to establish a new one. One where purposiveness relates to the ‘perfection of existence’.

That is, to being and beings as they actually exist in reality, i.e. to the actual and formal essence of things.

Put differently, instead of saying that human beings have been created ‘in order to’ think we can now say that it belongs to the essence of human beings to think, as Spinoza himself puts it in the second part of the Ethics without any further explanation as to the ‘why’, but just: “men thinks” (E2a2). Instead of saying that “the eyes have been made for seeing” (E1app.), we can say now that the nature of the eye (in its complexity as an individual compound) is seeing. The purpose of the eye is not to see, but its nature is seeing and therefore can (or cannot) serve certain purpose(s). In any case it was not ‘made for seeing’ by some external reason or intention.

A research on the eye in biology or medicine is not to come very far if it is looking for the reason

118 why have eyes been made for seeing rather than not seeing? And much further if the research consists of the investigation of the eyes’ properties, i.e. of the seeing nature of the organ ‘eye’.

And which the properties of the corporeal have brought about ‘out of their own’ dynamics and power to effectuate certain constellations in their complexity. Because in nature “things have made themselves” (E1app.) in this sense. Or in Spinoza’s words, nature has not made “eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, etc.” (E1app.). The existence of an animal is to exist in its own specific nature as an animal, and not to become our food or anything else than it is (it can become our food, but it is certainly not the purpose of its existence, of the

‘why’ there is an animal). And so, for anything else: the purpose of being is to be, of thinking to think, of the extended to extend, of loving to love, of teeth to be teeth, of a fish to be a fish; and the purpose of an earthquake is not to destroy us, but to be the earthquake that necessarily or inevitably occurs at a specific moment in time through specific movements of the earth269.

While this might sound almost trivial, because we are in modern sciences more used to it than to Aristotelian medieval scientific questions, it remains an issue in sciences as well as in philosophy. For any re-introduction of purposiveness in terms of final causes, as it was done by

Jonas with the vitalist ‘transcendence of want” is, as Henri Atlan clearly shows270, problematic for sciences as it is for the understanding of the ethical it generates.

Hence, whether we deal with natural or human sciences, the old understanding of purposiveness in terms of (Aristotelian) final causes remains a major obstacle for sciences as it remains for our understanding of the ethical. Because through such purposiveness, external to the essence of the specific singular (one and unique) nature of things, everything can become a

269 Susan Neiman worked out how much it took to differentiate between the so-called ‘natural evil’ and the ‘human made evil’ in early modern thought on the example of the earthquake from Lisbon, in her outstanding book Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 270 Atlan, Henri, Cours de philosophie biologique et cognitiviste: Spinoza et la biologie actuelle (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2018). In particular, chapter II on Jonas’ vitalist misunderstanding of Spinoza.

119 means to a purpose or an ‘end’ (telos). That is, everything can become an instrument and tool for something else than itself271. And is thus directly connected to the ethical.

Finally, if no beings have been made for any other purpose than to be what they are, let us close this chapter by saying that the purpose of human life is obviously nothing else than to become human, namely, to ‘perfect’ ourselves and become more humane, in accordance to our own specific (thinking and extended) nature and powers as unique individuals, and as a whole of humanity.

3.4 The ethical guide to any (future) philosophy

I hope to have shown, at least to some extent, that even if we would possess only the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics, and the rest of the manuscript would have been somehow lost, we would still be able to understand not only the ontological claims, but also its ethical message and unambiguous ‘ethical critique’ of philosophy as it traditionally proceeds and understands itself.

We do not know how philosophy would have looked like today if it had closer followed

‘Spinoza’s other path’272. But we can see how philosophy was meant to shift, in Spinoza’s view, towards its own more ‘modern’ and more ethical future. That is, how in its ontological alignment with the infinite ontology of Galilean sciences it could have established a new understanding of the ethical without the help of the traditional transcendence, and without the help of the traditional Aristotelian understanding of purposiveness in terms of final causes.

Hence, in its reaching back to the traditional division of being of older metaphysics, philosophy from the 18th century onwards was trying to “re-establish the unity of thought and

271 This is of course, at least in part, reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative. But Kant, unlike Spinoza, keeps separate ‘the laws of freedom’ and ‘the laws of nature’ for which he famously re-introduced the final cause for organisms in the Critique of Judgement. 272 Kriegel, Blandine, Spinoza, L’autre voie, (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2018)

120 Being, whether they achieve that harmony by proclaiming the primacy of matter (materialism) or of mind (idealism) or whether they play with various perspectives to create a whole that bears the stamp of Spinoza”273. But, as a matter of fact, philosophy did not follow the Spinozian division of being nor his understanding of the ethical as grounded in the facticity of being.

Neither philosophies of consciousness and subjectivity, from Kant to Husserl, nor the

Heideggerian return to the question of Being as reappropriation of Greek philosophy could close the early modern split between ethics and the sciences. Precisely because they were using the traditional division of being and the more or less traditional conception of freedom. It is for no other reason than this ontological failure to ‘shelter’ the human being within a world ‘devoid of meaning’ that we fall back on scientific modes of cognition, namely, on ontologically justified forms of knowledge (determinism, naturalism, physicalism, functionalism), and introduce them into the realm of human affairs. Thus, we are reductionists by (ontological) necessity, or else, idealists out of (ethical) emergency. But none of this is to solve the question of the relationship between the ethical and the ontological. On the contrary, from the Spinozian perspective, it will produce more unethical outcomes, and further conflicts.

The Ethics still fits well with the ontology of modern sciences. It is still the ontology of the infinite, with its epistemology that leads to observation and experiment. Thus, to an even greater extent, it must still fit well with the possibilities it opens for our understanding of the ethical that would not be at odds with the ontological.

The ethica more geometrico demonstrata is not a manual for practical philosophy but can serve as an ethical guide to any future philosophy, if we understand its stakes. The text does not explain everything to its readers, but it does present everything we need to philosophically ‘act’ upon it in response. A response that would be able to continue Spinoza’s project and ethically

273 Arendt, Hannah, What Is Existential Philosophy? in “Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954”, (New York: Schocken Books, 1994) p. 164

121 redefine philosophy as philosophy, that is, to provide a ground upon which we can deal with ethical questions in any field of knowledge in our contemporary inquiries and research.

What Spinoza has left us with is something that has never been realized, that is, something that the future of philosophy might still hold for us. Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt (E5p42).

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