A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Modern Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

This bare skeleton of our rich and varied world appears very much the same as that which one might find beneath Descartes’ philosophy. However, Spinoza’s conception of substance transforms it into a framework of a very different kind of philosophy. Since God is the inclusive reality of it all, we have here a pantheism instead of a dualism. The antithesis which in Descartes’ philosophy was between extension and thought, now in Spinoza’s teaching is between God and other things.

What is the place of the attributes and modes in the all-embracing and real substance? As to the attributes, Spinoza maintained that we, as finite beings, do notknow God in His character as substance, but that He always appears to us through His attributes of thought and extension. There are only these two attributes that the human mind can know, although God as an infinite being must possess an infinite number of such attributes. In our human world all things are either thought-things or extension-things. Each of these two attributes is infinite after its kind. Each fully expresses an aspect of God without depreciating the value of the other. Each is fully adequate, just as a table may be both white and hard without either quality infringing upon the other. The attributes are the substance made more concrete. The modes are in turn modifications of the attributes and more concrete expressions of them and of the substance. Each mode is infinite after its kind. Since God exists only in reality, He would not supposably see from His point of view the world laid out in attributes and modes; for these are only human ways of interpreting Him. While the critics agree that the modes are human interpretations of the attributes and therefore unreal, they disagree about the relation of the attributes to God. Some maintain that the attributes are merely human ways of seeing the substance, analogously to the modes—as if we saw God now as thought and now as extension; others maintain that God is nothing other than the sum of the attributes; of extension, thought, and the unknown, infinite, other attributes. The difficulty lays bare the nerve of the problem of pantheism, and probably Spinoza was not clear in his own mind about the relation of the attributes to the substance.

Spinoza speaks more definitely upon this same problem of the relation of the modes to God. Is God thesum-total of all existent things, or is He the principle behind them? Spinoza says that God is both. God is the cause of the world, not cause in the way that the term is commonly used nor in the sense that Descartes used it. God is not to existent things the first cause or the unmoved mover of matter, or the teleological cause of thought, as in Descartes. He is cause in the sense that a triangle is the cause of its own three sides. He is the rational ground (ratio essendi) or the logical reason for the being of things. In this sense God may be regarded as the cause both in the sense that He is the sum-total of existent things or modes (natura naturata), and in the sense that He is the immanent and energizing principle of existent things (natura naturans). These conceptions as well as their phrases Spinoza probably got from Bruno.

The world is, therefore, related to God in that it follows directly from the nature of God; God is related to the world in that He is the logical ground of the world. Is God the creator of the world? No, He is the world. Is God a person? Is He a self-conscious being like ourselves,—an individual? No. The thought-aspect of God includes our thought, but it is the very different infinite thought; the extension-aspect of God includes our body, but it is the very different infinite body. God has soul and body and an infinite number of other aspects. God is—an unchanging, self-dependent being, whose modifications are necessarily determined in their relation to Him and to one another. Spinoza conceived the character of God exactly from the nature of geometry. Just as all geometrical conclusions follow from the nature of space and exist in determined and fixed relations to one another, so everythingfinite follows from the nature of the Infinite, and each finite thing is in a rigid chain of finite things of its own kind—a chain without beginning or end. The necessity of the divine nature appears in all, not as a series of emanations from God, but in a series, each member of which is determined equally by Him.

The Mysticism of Spinoza. From the point of view of man, mysticism in speculative or religious thought has reference to the immediate apprehension of God. Mysticism frequently accompanies pantheism, and from the point of view of God refers to the oneness of His all-inclusive nature. Spinoza’s pantheism is also a mysticism which involves the immediate apprehension of the divine by the human; it involves the oneness of God and man. More often than otherwise mysticism is animated by a religious motive, and Spinoza’s philosophy is profoundly religious. We have already seen similar mysticism in the Orphic-Pythagorean sect which formed so great a peril to Greek culture in the sixth century B. C., in the neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Platonists at the beginning of this era, in many of the churchmen of the Middle Ages, especially Scotus Erigena and Meister Eckhart. Bruno and many of the Humanists were mystics, and if we should wish to go outside our field, we should find mysticism to be the prevailing attitude of mind of the great Oriental peoples. Mysticism frequently is accompanied by belief in occult spiritual appearances, but that is not necessarily the case; nor was it the case with Spinoza. Spinoza’s mysticism was purely intellectual. Although a religious philosophy with an immediate ethical bearing upon conduct, it was a scientific relationalism that could not tolerate the miraculous and the abnormal psychologicalphenomena (such as clairvoyance, hallucinations, etc.). Spinoza is, on the contrary, distinguished as a mystic because he interpreted the universe in entirely non-human terms. His great service to mysticism lies in divesting the reality of life of every human attribution and laying bare a mathematical skeleton. The desire of the period to find a greater unity in life was responded to by him in a mathematical mysticism. To him the universe is not only divided into parts, not only is there no opposition between God and the world, but life is so completely a rational thing that no exceptional phenomena can occur. He believed that any description of God or of nature in anthropomorphic terms disunites life. Spinoza dehumanized the universe, conceiving matter to consist of elements, and conceiving spirit to consist of simple ideas. He resolved the personality of man into parts for the sake of the unity of the universe, and he obtained scientific clearness at the expense of humanity. Thus, instead of being able to say with Descartes, “I think and therefore I am,” Spinoza could say, and wished only to say, “God thinks” (Deus cogitat).

Like the usual speculative mystic, Spinoza described his God in the terms of formal deductive logic. God is the most real being, ens realissimum. What is the most real being to a mystic? Would reality contain any finite quality such as the world around us contains? Can you say that God has this particular faculty, or is endowed with that concrete attribute? Does God enjoy, love, hate; does He create and destroy? But how can God be the real unity of the world unless He contains in Himself everything in the finite world? We approach here the threshold of the problem of the concrete universal,which has engaged the attention of so much of modern philosophy. A concrete universal is all-inclusive of finite existence, but at the same time is a self-consistent unity. In contrast with the concrete universal is the abstract universal, which is a unity, but outside of which all finite existence falls. While it was undoubtedly the concrete universal that Spinoza sought, his method could lead to nothing more concrete than the abstract universals of Plato and the Schoolmen. The world of finite things is included by Spinoza’s God in the same way that blocks are included by a string which has been tied around them.

Spinoza’s God is the most abstract entity which it is possible to conceive. All finite things fall outside Him. No quality can be predicated of Him, for to define Him is to limit Him. After the manner of the “negative theology” (see vol. i, p. 283), Spinoza refused to ascribe any quality to God. He does not feel, think, or will as we do, nor can extension be ascribed to Him in the sense of finite spaces. We can say only that He is not this and not this. Spinoza’s conception of God is reached by dropping off all determinate qualities, until the most general and most abstract term is gained. The barrenness of this logical conception, its absolute emptiness and abstractness, makes all description of it impossible. God is a bloodless entity, an absolute logical necessity and the most abstract universal. Outside of Him falls all that we call life. If this is God’s character, is He everything or nothing? If the process of abstraction rises so far above every limitation to an ens realissimum et generalissimum,—to the most real and most general entity,—if all content falls away from God, what does such an empty form amount to? The paradox inSpinoza’s philosophy appears here as in the case of all mysticism—for the mystic revels in paradoxes. This empty generality is all that really is. God is everything, and Spinoza points out empirical proof of this by insisting that the transitory life of man has its only meaning in such a substance. God is not this particular thing nor again that finite determination, but He is all these. He is the timeless reality of the temporal world, the infinity of finite things, the necessity of contingent nature. When therefore Spinoza speaks of God as having an intellectual love for Himself, and when he says that the attributes of thought and extension constitute the essence of the substance, he is not giving finite characteristics to God. He is struggling with language to express the inherent paradox of his philosophy.

Moreover, the delineation of the finite world with God as a background, as it appears from the point of view of a human being, is an inadequate presentation of Spinoza’s profound conception of God. For the substance is not merely a neutral point nor the central point of the universe. The substance is all. All things have neither their explanation nor their existence in themselves. God alone has an existence that explains itself, and He is the reality and essence of all finite things. God is immanent in the world. Just as the sides of a triangle get their meaning from the triangle itself, so the significance of the attributes and modes of the substance lies in the substance.

The unity of Spinoza’s God is further suggested by the relation of the attributes of thought and extension, however separate they must appear in their quality and causal dependence. Both are aspects of the same substance, in the one case in the form of extension, andin the other in the form of thought. In the all-inclusive nature of God, presumably each moment has an infinite number of correlative moments corresponding to the infinite number of the attributes of God. Since to human beings only two of these worlds lie in sight, only two corresponding modes appear, but always two. This correspondence of the physical and psychical throughout nature is called in later times panpsychism; in the relation of the body and mind of a human being it is called psycho-physical parallelism. This correspondence helped Spinoza to solve the apparent dualism of the two worlds. While ideas are determined only by ideas, and motions by motions, both series point below to the divine substance which is the significance of both. They are like the top and bottom sides of a piece of paper, neither side constituting the piece of paper, but both being necessary to it. The substance is immanent in thought as well as in extension. Both thought and extension are aspects of God. The relation of thought and extension through the Deity discloses the monistic character of Spinoza’s philosophy and seems to prove that he cannot be a materialist, although some critics have said that he is. The same reality is seen, now as consciousness and now as extension.

Spinoza’s Doctrine of Salvation. Spinoza divided his Ethics into five parts. The first is a treatment of the nature of God; the second, of the nature and origin of the mind; the third, of the emotions; the fourth, of human bondage; the fifth, of human freedom. This most important writing of Spinoza, the only treatise on metaphysics which has been called Ethics, is a practical philosophy of life and redemption. The divisions of it, as they appear above, show that the philosophy of lifeis looked at from two points of view: with reference to the nature of God, and with reference to the nature of man. We have above discussed the first point,—Spinoza’s conception of God, whom he regards as pantheistic and mystic. But Spinoza’s conception of the nature of the human being in relation to such a God is the other pole of this subject. The problem of life from the human point of view involves primarily the question of human freedom. Human freedom and human bondage are conditions that depend upon the human as well as the divine nature. By Spinoza’s eliminating the human element from the nature of God, man himself has been reduced by Spinoza to an insignificant detail in a machine-like universe. Yet for man in his littleness Spinoza hews out a way to God in His greatness by his mystic reconstruction of the universe. Existence in Spinoza’s pantheistic mysticism is, after all, a sphere of wonderful grandeur for man,—more wonderful and of wider utility than the existence which man is ordinarily supposed to possess. Since God is the reality of everything, man is deified; even the loss of man’s essential humanity is the apotheosis of man.