--- date: '2023-10-10' description: and moral philosophy, relationship with God. id: Sphinoza modified: 2026-06-05 15:08:12 GMT-04:00 tags: - philos1aa3 - philosophy title: Spinoza created: '2023-10-10' published: '2023-10-10' pageLayout: default slug: thoughts/Sphinoza permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/thoughts/Sphinoza.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- ## Ethics (1677) _Deus sive Natura_: God, or Nature (Part IV, preface). The Amsterdam Jewish community expelled Spinoza in 1656, and many readers called him an atheist. The _Ethics_ still talks about God on almost every page. The question is what he means by the word. ## God of the Philosophers/Metaphysicians - Aristotle’s unmoved mover (_Metaphysics_ XII). Xenophanes had already described one god who does not move and who thinks. - A god reached by argument, valued by philosophers for explaining the world. It is a different god from the one ordinary believers pray to. - No personal attachments: Spinoza’s God loves and hates no one (5P17 corollary). Monotheism: God $\neq$ nature. God creates nature and stays outside it. Spinoza: God = nature. God is the most powerful and perfect being, and nature is that being. ## Substance **Aristotle**: a substance is neither said of a subject nor exists in a subject (_Categories_ 5, 2a11). This horse is a substance; its color exists in the horse. **Descartes**: strictly only God is a substance, but created things divide into two kinds of substance, mind and body (_Principles_ I.51–53). This is his dualism. **Parmenides**: one should say and think only that Being is (fragment B6). Being is single and numerically one. **Spinoza**: substance is “what is in itself and is conceived through itself” (1D3). Combine this with Parmenides’s conclusion and there can be only one substance. What is it like? One infinite being that is alive, intelligent and all-powerful, and that is also material and spatial. > God is not a transcendent, supernatural cause. God is nature. God is the immanent cause of all things (1P18). ## Self-caused A cause of itself (_causa sui_) is that whose essence involves existence (1D1). Its nature cannot be conceived except as existing. Substance cannot be produced by anything else (1P6 corollary). Nothing outside it causes it, so its existence must come from its own nature (1P7). It has to exist. ## Monism > Substance is unique. There exists only one substance. Not one _kind_ of substance, but _numerically one single substance_ The lecture’s version, from the principle of sufficient reason: 1. Something exists. 2. Whatever exists has a sufficient cause. 3. Therefore a self-caused substance must exist. 4. There is at most one. Why at most one? 1. Two self-caused substances would have to differ in something. 2. A difference needs a cause. 3. One self-caused substance cannot cause anything in another, since each is conceived through itself (1P6). Nothing could ground the difference. Spinoza’s own route in Part I: 1. Two substances cannot share an attribute (1P5). 2. God has all attributes (1D6). 3. So any second substance would share an attribute with God. There is no substance except God (1P14). ## Aristotle and Spinoza on substance For Aristotle the color exists in the horse, and the horse exists in nothing else. The horse is a primary substance. For Spinoza the horse is itself “in another”: it is a mode of God. > Nature is not a totality of things Finite things are modifications of one substance. Nature is the substance they modify, and the finite things are not parts added together to make it. ## Mode and Attribute **Attribute**: “that which the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence” (1D4). Substance has infinitely many attributes, and each attribute has infinitely many modes. **Mode**: “the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived” (1D5). Finite modes are connected: each is caused by other finite modes, without end (1P28). “Mode” = modification, a way of being. A mode of substance is some way in which substance is modified. “Conceived through” = explained by, made intelligible by. ## Spinoza’s idea of Substance (= God) One single, infinite, eternal substance, comprising infinitely many attributes, each expressed in infinitely many modes. Substance > Attribute > Mode Divisibility implies corruption. If substance could be divided, its parts would either keep its nature, so there would be several substances, or lose it, so substance could stop existing (1P12, 1P13). God can’t have parts and pieces. Is God divisible? No: an absolutely infinite substance is indivisible (1P13). Bodies look divisible only when we picture them in the imagination (1P15 scholium). Definition 6: “By God I mean a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” Proposition 11: “God, or a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.” ### Method for the proof of god Ontological proof: God is a being that cannot fail to exist, because God’s essence includes existence. Cosmological proof: God is the first cause of everything else. Without God the chain of cause and effect would go back forever, and the world would have no rational foundation. Aristotle’s proof of the unmoved mover in the _Metaphysics_ has this form. Teleological proof (“design argument”): nature shows evidence of intelligent design. Spinoza rejects it. Explaining nature by purposes projects human wants onto God (Part I, appendix). None of his three demonstrations of Proposition 11 uses it. #### Reduction to absurdity (reductio ad absurdum) ```prolog To prove P: assume NP show that if NP, then Q & NQ Q and NQ is contradiction and is impossible (contradiction=False) so not NP therefore P ``` First proof (ontological): 1. Suppose God does not exist. 2. Axiom 7: if a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence. 3. Proposition 7: existence belongs to the nature of substance. Why? a. Substance cannot be produced by another. b. So, by Definition 1, substance is self-caused, and its essence involves existence. 4. God is a substance, so the supposed non-existence of God contradicts Proposition 7. 5. Therefore, God exists. Second proof (cosmological): 1. For everything there must be a cause, either of its existence or of its nonexistence. 2. The cause, whether of existence or non-existence, is either in the thing or in another. 3. A thing necessarily exists if no cause prevents its existence. 4. God’s nature does not contain a contradiction, so if God does not exist, the cause of non-existence must be in another thing. 5. What prevents God from existing would have to be another substance with nothing in common with God. 6. If two things have nothing in common, one cannot cause anything in the other (1P3). 7. Therefore, no cause prevents God’s existence. 8. So, God exists. Third proof (from power): 1. Being able to not exist is a lack of power; being able to exist is power. 2. Suppose only finite things necessarily exist. Then finite things would be more powerful than an absolutely infinite being, which is absurd. 3. We exist, either in ourselves or in something else that necessarily exists. 4. So an absolutely infinite being necessarily exists. > There is nothing of which we can be more certain than the existence of an absolutely infinite or perfect being, that is, God. (1P11 scholium)