| Part of the series on 17th Century Scholasticism |
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| Title page of the Calov Bible | |
| Background | |
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Protestant Reformation |
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| 17th Century Scholastics | |
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Second scholasticism of the Jesuits |
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| Reactions within Christianity | |
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Labadists against the Jesuits |
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| Reactions within Philosophy | |
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Modernists against Roman Catholics |
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Spinozism (also spelt Spinoza-ism or Spinozaism) is the monist philosophical system of Baruch Spinoza which defines "God" as a singular self-subsistent substance, and both matter and thought as attributes of such. Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is the highest kind attainable.
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In a letter to Henry Oldenburg he states that: "as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken".[1] For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world. According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote "Deus sive Natura" (God or Nature) Spinoza meant God was Natura naturans not Natura naturata, and Jaspers believed that Spinoza, in his philosophical system, did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence.[2] Even God under the attributes of thought and extension cannot be identified strictly with our world. That world is of course "divisible"; it has parts. But Spinoza insists that "no attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided" (Which means that one cannot conceive an attribute in a way that leads to division of substance), and that "a substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible" (Ethics, Part I, Propositions 12 and 13).[3] Following this logic, our world should be considered as a mode under two attributes of thought and extension. Therefore the pantheist formula "One and All" would apply to Spinoza only if the "One" preserves its transcendence and the "All" were not interpreted as the totality of finite things.[2]
Martial Guéroult suggested the term "Panentheism", rather than "Pantheism" to describe Spinoza’s view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, "in" God. Not only do finite things have God as their cause; they cannot be conceived without God.[3] In other words, the world is a subset of God.
In 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi published a condemnation of Spinoza's pantheism, after Lessing was thought to have confessed on his deathbed to being a "Spinozist", which was the equivalent in his time of being called an atheist. Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Moses Mendelssohn disagreed with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time, which Immanuel Kant rejected, as he thought that attempts to conceive of transcendent reality would lead to antinomies (statements that could be proven both right and wrong) in thought.
The attraction of Spinoza's philosophy to late eighteenth-century Europeans was that it provided an alternative to materialism, atheism, and deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas strongly appealed to them:
Spinoza's "God or Nature" [Deus sive Natura] provided a living, natural God, in contrast to the Newtonian mechanical "First Cause" or the dead mechanism of the French "Man Machine." Coleridge and Shelley saw in Spinoza's philosophy a religion of nature[4] and called him the "God-intoxicated Man."[5] [6] Spinoza inspired the poet Shelley to write his essay "The Necessity of Atheism."[5]
Spinoza was considered to be an atheist because he used the word "God" [Deus] to signify a concept that was different from that of traditional Judeo–Christian monotheism. "Spinoza expressly denies personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence, feeling, nor will; he does not act according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law...."[7] Thus, Spinoza's cool, indifferent God [8] is the antithesis to the concept of an anthropomorphic, fatherly God who cares about humanity.
"According to Spinoza's ideas God is “a Substance consisting of infinite attributes each of which expresses an absolutely infinite and eternal essence.” It follows that this Substance—necessary and infinite, one and indivisible, is God, the only Self-existence, All-Perfection and absolute Infinitude. Take away the name of the Deity, and you have here the abstract ideas about the only creative Power of the World, of the Svâbhâvikas. “Nothing exists in the Universe but Substance—or Nature,” say the latter. “This Substance exists by, and through itself (Svabhavat) having never been either created or had a Creator.” “No”—echoes unconsciously Spinoza, “nothing exists in this world but Substance, and the modes of its attributes; and, as Substance cannot produce Substance there is no such thing as Creation.” This is the claim of most of the Hindu philosophies. And again . . . . . It (creation)—says Spinoza, has no beginning and no end, but all things have to proceed or emanate from the Infinite One and will so proceed eternally. According to his philosophy, only two out of the innumerable infinite attributes of the Deity are known to us—extension and thought, the objective and the subjective of which He (the Infinite) is the identity. God is the only free Cause (causa libera), all other beings having neither free will nor contingency are moved by fixed laws of causation. The Deity is “The causa immanens omnium, not existing apart from the Universe,” but manifested and expressed in it, as in a living garment.” In the Zohar the creation or universe is also called “the garment of God” woven from its own Substance. And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by, says Goethe, another German Theosophist in his Faust. And, in Vedanta, we find Brahma the Absolute God, unconscious of the Universe, and remaining ever independent of all direct relation to it." H. P. Blavatsky in in The Theosophist, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 7, April, 1962, pp. 8-13.—Compiler.
Spinoza's doctrine was considered radical at the time he published and he was widely seen as the most infamous atheist-heretic of Europe. His philosophy was part of the philosophic debate in Europe during the Enlightenment, along with Cartesianism.
In Spinozism, the concept of a personal relationship with God comes from the position that one is a part of an infinite interdependent "organism". Spinoza taught that everything is but a wave in an endless ocean, and that what happens to one wave will affect other waves. Thus Spinozism teaches a form of determinism and ecology and supports this as a basis for morality.
Additionally, a core doctrine of Spinozism is that the universe is essentially deterministic. All that happens or will happen could not have unfolded in any other way. Spinozism is closely related to the Hindu doctrines of Samkhya and Yoga. Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is the highest kind attainable.
Spinoza's metaphysics consists of one thing, substance, and its modifications (modes). Early in The Ethics Spinoza argues that there is only one substance, which is absolutely infinite, self-caused, and eternal. He calls this substance "God", or "Nature". In fact, he takes these two terms to be synonymous (in the Latin the phrase he uses is "Deus sive Natura"). For Spinoza the whole of the natural universe is made of one substance, God, or, what's the same, Nature, and its modifications (modes).
| “ | It cannot be overemphasized how the rest of Spinoza's philosophy—his philosophy of mind, his epistemology, his psychology, his moral philosophy, his political philosophy, and his philosophy of religion—flows more or less directly from the metaphysical underpinnings in Part I of the Ethics.[9] | ” |
Spinoza defines "substance" as follows:
| “ | By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.(E1D3)[10] | ” |
This means, essentially, that substance is just whatever can be thought of without relating it to any other idea or thing. For example, if one thinks of a particular object, one thinks of it as a kind of thing, e.g., x is a cat. Substance, on the other hand, is to be conceived of by itself, without understanding it as a particular kind of thing (because it isn't a particular thing at all).
Spinoza defines "attribute" as follows:
| “ | By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence.(E1D4)[10] | ” |
From this it can be seen that attributes are related to substance in some way. It is not clear, however, even from Spinoza's direct definition, whether, a) attributes are really the way(s) substance is, or b) attributes are simply ways to understand substance, but not necessarily the ways it really is. Spinoza thinks that there are an infinite number of attributes, but there are two attributes for which Spinoza thinks we can have knowledge. Namely, thought and extension.[11]
The attribute of thought is how substance can be understood to be composed of thoughts, i.e., thinking things. When we understand a particular thing in the universe through the attribute of thought, we are understanding the mode as an idea of something (either another idea, or an object).
The attribute of extension is how substance can be understood to be physically extended in space. Particular things which have breadth and depth (that is, occupy space) are what is meant by extended. It follows from this that if substance and God are identical, on Spinoza's view, and contrary to the traditional conception, God has extension as one of his attributes.
Modes are particular modifications of substance, i.e., particular things in the world. Spinoza gives the following definition:
| “ | By mode I understand the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived.(E1D5)[10] | ” |
The argument for there only being one substance (or, more colloquially, one kind of stuff) in the universe occurs in the first fourteen propositions of The Ethics. The following proposition expresses Spinoza's commitment to substance monism:
| “ | Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.(E1P14)[10] | ” |
Spinoza takes this proposition to follow directly from everything he says prior to it. Spinoza's monism is contrasted with Descartes' dualism and Leibniz's pluralism. It allows Spinoza to avoid the problem of interaction between mind and body, which troubled Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy.
The issue of causality and modality (possibility and necessity) in Spinoza's philosophy is contentious.[12] Spinoza's philosophy is, in one sense, thoroughly deterministic (or necessitarian). This can be seen directly from Axiom 3 of The Ethics:
| “ | 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.(E1A3)[10] | ” |
Yet Spinoza seems to make room for a kind of freedom, especially in the fifth and final section of The Ethics, "On the Power of the Intellect, or on Human Freedom":
| “ | I pass, finally, to the remaining Part of the Ethics, which concerns the means or way, leading to Freedom. Here, then, I shall treat of the power of reason, showing what it can do against the affects, and what Freedom of Mind, or blessedness, is.(E5, Preface)[10] | ” |
So Spinoza certainly has a use for the word 'freedom', but he equates "Freedom of Mind" with "blessedness", a notion which is not traditionally associated with freedom of the will at all.
Though the PSR is most commonly associated with Gottfried Leibniz, it is arguably found in its strongest form in Spinoza's philosophy.[13] Within the context of Spinoza's philosophical system, the PSR can be understood to unify causation and explanation.[14] What this means is that for Spinoza, questions regarding the reason why a given phenomenon is the way it is (or exists) are always answerable, and are always answerable in terms of the relevant cause(s). This constitutes a rejection of teleological, or final causation, except possibly in a more restricted sense for human beings.[10][14] Given this, Spinoza's views regarding causality and modality begin to make much more sense.
Spinoza's philosophy contains as a key proposition the notion that mental and physical (thought and extension) phenomena occur in parallel, but without causal interaction between them. He expresses this proposition as follows:
| “ | The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.(E2P7)[10] | ” |
His proof of this proposition is that:
| “ | The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause.(E1A4)[10] | ” |
The reason Spinoza thinks the parallelism follows from this axiom is that since the idea we have of each thing requires knowledge of its cause, and this cause must be understood under the same attribute. Further, there is only one substance, so whenever we understand some chain of ideas of things, we understand that the way the ideas are causally related must be the same as the way the things themselves are related, since the ideas and the things are the same modes understood under different attributes.
This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.