Spinoza the mystic

Recently in class (and hopefully again this week), we talked about whether Spinoza should be considered a strange theist (e.g., a pantheist or panenthiest) or an atheist. Either is consistent with his monistic metaphysics.

Hard to say...

He’s got this great way of referring to his view of reality: “God, or in other words, Nature.”

Recall that Descartes was a substance-type dualist and a substance-token pluralist. Spinoza is a substance-type monist and a substance-token monist! There is only one kind of thing, and there is, in fact, only one thing.

This one thing is “God, or in other words, Nature.”

So... what is this God like? The Appendix to Ethics part I is a wonderful tirade against traditional notions of a personal God.

He gives an argument against taking God to be a personal agent. If God is perfect, then it follows that he lacks nothing. If something intervenes owing to intentional purposes, the reason that such intervention occurs is due to a lack in the something that intervenes. The idea is that one could only hold a view of an interventionist God if one gives up the view that such a God is perfect. So, Spinoza preserves perfection at the price of God having one of the marks of personhood — viz., intentional, purposive action. The real target obviously is any traditional notion of God that is drawn from religions.

What doesn’t appear very defined at the end of this argument is the notion of perfection that he attributes to God. And here is where it begins to become clearer why he says of reality that it is “God, or in other words, Nature.”

If God were to exist as religions proclaim, it would make impossible any type of explanatory rationalism, whereby all events that occur in the spacetime world could be explained by reference to a (hopefully) small class of deterministic laws. I think that the real awe-inspiring prospect of a completed explanatory rationalism is what Spinoza has in mind when he attributes perfection to God (or Nature). For us today, I imagine it’s the same sensation of awe and hints of viewing perfection when we think about the prospects of a completed physics.

It’s not really a coherent merging of the concepts of God and Nature, since the conceptual hangover of traditional religious notions of God (e.g., the inspiration of awe) begin to obscure the impersonal but also awe-inspiring, even terrifying, aspects of the Natural world. Something that seems correct gets transposed, but can you really transpose the thing you want without also dragging along some residue of the other thing you don’t want?

Still, there’s a tense resonance that Spinoza was onto, and I probably would be where Spinoza is if I did not hold onto some of my more traditional religiously-inspired beliefs about God being personal.

I asked the students why Spinoza’s treatise is called Ethics. Here again is another tense and incoherent resonance between two views that seem right in their own ways. If something happens according to the will of (a traditional religious) God, then it follows that, in some respect, the thing that happens is “good” (though maybe not “good” for the collection of things implicated in that one event). In the same way, if something occurs by the will of Nature (that is, according to laws of determinism... Spinoza would go further and argue fatalism), and if one conjoins this alleged fact with the view of Nature as being perfect, then it follows, in some sense, that this occurrence is “good” or “fitting” or “perfect.”

The lesson drawn for agents is the same in both cases: contentment is the correct response.

In the first case, it’s pious contentment as a way of surrendering to the will of God. In the second case, it’s rational contentment as a way of surrendering to the perfect, law-like, and inevitable workings of Nature. Thus it makes sense why Spinoza’s musings, though totally saturated with metaphysics, are actually for him an investigation into ethics. It amounts to Stoicism for the seventeenth-century.

In the end, his use of “God” and “nature” may be an incoherent juxtaposition of vocabularies that are too different in their semantic histories. It is nevertheless a gem of linguistic play that makes progress in the way a pinball makes progress through a series of bumpers. It’s almost never a straight line and it’s not clear that the ball is going anywhere but you’ll play every time.

early modern direct realist perception... maybe

There’s a fun discussion in the secondary literature on whether or not early modern philosophers really should be saddled with this “veil of perceptions” doctrine, where their realism is one of representationalism (i.e., indirect realism).

One step towards getting rid of the lingering notion that all the early modern philosophers were representationalists is to find a way of talking about mental ideas such that they are not being reified under analysis.

In Descartes’ context, for example, Arnauld and Malebranche had a big fight over whether Descartes should be taken as (in our terminology) a direct realist or a representational (indirect) realist. Arnauld sided with the former and Malebranche (in his very odd way) the latter. In that Cartesian context, a way of framing the issue is as follows: In the mental act, there are three variables that must be analyzed: (i) the act of mind, (ii) the mental object, and (iii) the object that is thought of in the mental act. Arnauld, in crusading for a direct realist reading of Descartes’ theory of perception (Arnauld’s language: mental acts exemplify a “primitive integrity”), argued that (ii) and (iii) differ by a mere distinction of reason (in contemporary discourse, (ii) and (iii) are two different descriptions of the same reality). For Arnauld, there is only the mental act that is modified when it is directly presented with the object that is the content of the mental act: mind and mind-indepenent world with no reified ideational intermediary. Malebranche argued that all three are totally distinct entities.

Well, the jury is still out on that discussion, but I lean more towards Arnauld, though of course the causal mediation between mental content and represented reality is really strange (see below).

For Locke’s context, the discussion is usually brokered by arguing about the status of mental images. Yep... even in Lockean secondary literature, there’s a big hubbub about whether Locke himself was a crypto-direct-realist.

I guess that depends on making sure that Lockean ideas qua images are not things as such. This is true even though all of us, I imagine, experience mental images and even would say things like “I have a mental image of my living room.”

I would not hesitate to say of myself that “I have a mental image of my living room where blueness is represented.” Is this an attribution of a monadic property to me or a dyadic relation between myself and some other thing (in this case, the mental image)?

I think that it makes more sense to say that it’s the former. By way of analogy, when I say that I’m in a mischievous mood, I think it’s very unnatural to think that there is a thing such as a mischievous mood. Rather, to say “Dan is in a mischievous mood” is to say that Dan is acting a certain way, not that Dan is related to another thing called a mood. It is an adjectival statement about me or an adverbial modification of my acting.

Another way of saying this: To say of Dan that he is in said mood is to be assimilated to the logical form Gx rather than R(x,y) — viz, monadic, not relational.

That’s step one in claiming that some form of direct realist perception is a viable interpretation of the early modern theories of perception. In looking at the medieval period, one will find similar kinds of discussions about the ontological or merely logical status of such items as intentional species — i.e., whether they are modes of mind or more strongly tertium quid between mind and world.

In early twentieth-century philosophy, there are sense-data and arguments against such reifications.

It’s pretty interesting how perennial questions in philosophy pop up over and over again so frequently (neurotically?).