Descartes

Descartes and Rationalism – Lecture 2

March 18, 2016

For the next several weeks we are going to do a quick tour of the history of philosophy. This is not meant to be exhaustive, but give you a general map of some of the key concepts and ideas. Philosophy is not the history of philosophy, but you cannot do philosophy without its history. First of all because all philosophers are in argument with others, and you don’t know what they are arguing about if you don’t have a grasp of the context of their argument. Secondly, there is a lot of technical jargon in philosophy, so if you don’t know what the concepts are, then you can be totally confused (especially since a lot of these concepts sound like words we ordinarily use, and you soon come to realise that ordinary definitions are pretty worthless when it comes to philosophy). Some people argue that history isn’t important in philosophy, but I don’t agree. Philosophy is historical through and through, like any human activity, and the idea that philosophical ideas are timeless and eternal, is itself an historical idea. There seems something very strange to me to treat Plato’s problems as though they were exactly the same as our, and what he meant by the words he used, is the same as what we do, even though there are thousands of years separating us. Of course, in the end history does not answer everything, but not to know the history leaves you very much in the dark.

When we come to read Descartes’ Meditations we can be very blasé about it. Doesn’t everyone know the famous cogito ergo sum, and has the idea that reality is a dream the basis of a very successful movies series?[1] Because we have become very used to Descartes’ ideas, we also think that they are very easy to dismiss and counter, as though we hardly have to think about them at all. To understand Descartes, however, like every philosopher, is to know what his problem was, since metaphysics is always an answer to a problem. His problem wasn’t whether reality existed or not, but what is the status of our scientific theories. Scientists, on the whole, are not interested in metaphysical problems, but of course philosophers are.

Descartes’ Meditations cannot be understood without the rise of new sciences in the 16^th and 17th century. Before he was a philosopher, Descartes was a scientist and mathematician. What propelled him towards philosophy, was his worry about the metaphysical consequences of the new science. Something he believed, for example, that Galileo had not been sufficiently concerned.[2] What this new science required was a completely different metaphysics, but before we can understand what this is we need to be aware, if only in a very schematic way, the metaphysics he was rejecting, which was Scholasticism that had its basis in a reworking of Aristotle.

Let us compare, therefore, an Aristotelian account of vision from a Cartesian one (Hatfield, 2003, pp. 291–4). We today might be very blasé about Descartes’ mechanical explanation of colour, because we take for granted the physiological explanation of colour (colour is nothing but the interaction of the spectrum of light with the retina), but it would have sounded strange to his contemporaries. In the Aristotelian conception of sensation, my perception of external objects is caused by the real qualities of those objects. Thus if I see a red rose then my perception of ‘red’ is caused by the red qualities of that rose. The red exists in the rose, travels to my eye, and thereby causes my sensation of red. As we can see, this seems to be a very common sense view of what happens when we see things (and there are probably people who still think that this is what it means to physically ‘see’ the colour red). For Descartes, on the contrary, there are no ‘red’ things as such. On the contrary, nature is nothing but matter in motion. Matter is corpuscular (infinitely divisible particles). The quality of red in the object, therefore, and its interaction with the eye, can be explained by the shape, size and motion of these particles. Colour is caused by the surface of the object I am looking at, which refracts light particles that interact with the eye. Descartes is not denying that we see red, but that red cannot be explained by a real quality called red. Rather the phenomenon ‘red’ requires a deeper explanation that can only be provided scientifically through the kind of mechanical model that Descartes describes

Now the point is, if you are going to reject the scientific account of Aristotelianism, then you are also going to have discard the metaphysics that underpins it. This is what Descartes does and he thinks Galileo doesn’t. Fundamentally for Aristotle, everything that exists is explained through form and matter. It is the form of something that explains what it is. Thus to understand what it a tree is one has to understand the ‘form’ tree. If we are looking at an oak tree, then the form would be contained in the acorn. This is true, just as much for animate as well as inanimate things. So to explain the sun, we also have to understand the form of the sun, as well as its material existence (which for Aristotle was the four elements, plus the mysterious fifth one, aether). For Descartes, there is only a material explanation of nature. If one wants to understand the sun, then one needs to understand the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium. Moreover, these material laws are the same for all objects in nature and the whole of nature itself. The explanation of our sun would be the same as for all suns in the universe, and these explanations would be would be the same for everything that exists (that is, matter in motion, which can be mathematical defined).

The different physics of Aristotle and Descartes means that they have completely different metaphysics. The basis of the universe for Aristotle is individual substances. Because matter is not sufficient to explain what it is to be something, there cannot be a material explanation of nature. Each thing is an individual substance, which is the specific conjunction of form and matter, whether we are speaking of a tree or animal, me or you, the sun and the other stars. For Descartes, there is only one thing that exists and that is matter in motion, and every individual thing we see is only a property or a mode of this one material substance. Things differ only because matter differs (there is a difference is shape, size and motion of particles), not because there is an extrinsic difference between them. We can see in Aristotle’s metaphysics, that we need an explanation for each thing (if we wish for a total explanation), whereas for Descartes, we only need a few simple laws of motion (three), in order to explain everything that we see, and that these simple laws of motion, since they have to only to do with shape, size and motion, can be explained quantitatively (that is mathematically) other than qualitatively in the Aristotelian system.

Only now with this scientific background, can we really begin to understand the Meditations. Descartes’ scepticism, at the beginning, then, is not merely an amusing thought experiment, which will later become the plot of the film Matrix, but presupposes the fundamental break that modern science has taken with the common sense perception of the world. For the hypothesis that nature is matter in motion is precisely that a hypothesis, which one can quite literally not see, and thus what I see cannot itself be true. Thus, the task for Descartes is not to destroy our knowledge of the world, but to rebuild it, but where the foundations will be more secure, no longer resting on our fallible senses, but reliable understanding and reason. Scepticism is not employed for its own sake, or even to make philosophy impossible, but on the contrary, to make our knowledge of the world even more certain, by showing that sceptical arguments can be defeated if our metaphysics is robust enough.

If I can doubt everything in reality, even that my mathematical ideas are a true representation of what is real, then there is one thing, Descartes argues, that I cannot doubt, and that I am thinking. For even if I doubt everything, there is one thing I cannot doubt and that is in the very act of doubting, I am in fact doubting. What is important at this point in Descartes’ argument is not to confuse the status of the ‘I’ in the statement ‘I think therefore I am’. This I is not me as physical being. The ‘I’ that stands before you know, the ‘I’ that is writing this lecture on the computer. My physical reality is just as doubtful as the reality of the rest of physical nature. Also this ‘I’ only exist in the very moment of thinking. Only in the very act of thinking can the ‘I’ be said to exist, because it is self-refuting to argue otherwise. Even if I say, ‘I do not exist’, it is I who am thinking this, and so must exist in the moment I think it.

Though the cogito is very limited in one sense, it also includes a lot more than one might first assume. First of all Descartes includes all acts of consciousness, such remembering, desires, and most importantly for us, perceiving. Thus when I desire something, I exist in the moment of desiring, when I remember something I exist in the moment of remembering it, and when I perceive something, I exist in the moment of perceiving it. When I perceive a something I exist in perceiving it. Of course, following from radical doubt of the first meditation, I don’t know whether what I perceive is the same as what is in reality (it really could be all a dream, or mathematical code as in the film Matrix), but I cannot doubt that I am perceiving the chair. Secondly, and this is going to be very important when we come to look at the wax example, the content of what I think, desire, remember and perceive is also real Again, it is not real, as in ‘out there’, but real in my mind. So when, I am thinking, remembering, desiring, perceiving a chair, I really am thinking, remember, desiring, perceiving a chair, even though I don’t know whether a chair real exists.

When we come to the example of the wax in the third mediation, therefore, we can become completely confused if we think Descartes is talking about the external perception of the wax, because this is precisely what he has given up (we don’t know what the real wax is, because we don’t even know if reality is real). What he is describing is our idea of the wax, how the wax appears to us, even if we don’t whether the wax is real or not. His first description, then, is how the idea of wax appears to us when we take the wax as something we perceive, but perception means here, perception as an action of thought (I am thinking about how the wax is perceived by me), and not perception as the sensation of an external object that I take to exist really outside of me and which effects my sense and which I then think of as was (our example of real qualities and the red flower above). If we were to take that Descartes was doing the latter, then we would be confusing him with Aristotelian account of perception.

What do I think I perceive when I think that the idea of wax is sensation? I have a list of properties that describe the wax. It smells of flowers; it tastes of honey; it makes a sound when you tap it; it is hard and cold to the touch; and it is white and the shape of a cube. Doesn’t this, then, tell us exactly what the wax is. Why would we need to know anymore? We remember, though that Descartes is sitting in a warm room (it tells us at the beginning of the Meditations). With the heat of the room, all the properties of the wax change: there is no fragrance of flowers; no sweetness of honey; no sound when a hit it; it is not hard and cold; it is no longer white and shaped like a cup. How, therefore, can the sense tell us what the wax is, since now it is completely change. The idea of the wax under the thought of perception is a completely confused idea. However, even though I know the wax has completely changed, it is nonetheless the same piece of wax that remained the same throughout this transformation. What is this wax? It can’t be the list of properties of the sensation because these are completely different. It must be what remains when we strip away all these properties that have changed in our idea of the wax itself. What is it that remains? It is the idea of the body in general as ‘something extended, flexible and changeable’. Although I cannot experience this body, since it would have innumerable shapes that I cannot imagine, I nonetheless can think it, and the idea of this body is less confused and incoherent understanding of the wax in general, than what is present by the idea of sensation. Going back to Descartes’ definition of truth, it is, therefore more true.

True, however, only internal to my own thoughts. Not true as true to reality. I still have no idea whether reality is what my ideas say it is, however internally coherent my ideas are. At this point we haven’t got outside the cogito itself. I can say that the idea of extension as the correct understanding of bodies, rather than their real qualities, might make more sense, but it does not mean that the what the wax is in the real world is anything like that at all. At this stage, extension (that matter is extended in three dimensions) as the explanation of all the phenomena we see, including the secondary phenomena of the senses, is merely a hypothesis. To prove that nature in itself is like that, we need to get outside of our minds. But how are going to do that? Through the proof of the existence of God, because the idea of God is a very strange idea, and necessitates the actual existence of the content of the idea, in the way that no other idea I have does.

It is at this point that we can get confused about Descartes’ philosophy. We are told that he is a rationalist and that he is attempting to ground the new science in more rigorous metaphysics, but we associate the idea of God with religion, or even worse with superstition. Why would he know introduce God? Isn’t he rejecting reason altogether? This answer to this question is to go back to the problem. The new science postulates a mathematical reality which is not open to the senses. How do I know that this isn’t a fiction? To the practical scientists this is not a problem. She isn’t worried. She just gets on with her experiments. For the philosopher that isn’t enough. He wants to know that reality really is what we say it is. For this we need there is an external guarantee and this is what God is. Descartes is not proving the existence of God because he lacks faith. He already believes in God. He does not need a proof. We are speaking here of a philosophical concept of God and not a religious one (although as we shall see with Spinoza’s criticism of Descartes, in the conclusion to this this lecture, he might sneak a theological notion within this concept). The concept of God is solving a philosophical problem for Descartes, how do we know that are scientific hypothesis that we cannot see with our senses, is actually telling us the truth about the world, and not a crisis of faith.

One of the problems for the modern reader following Descartes proof is that he uses Scholastic terminology that they might not know.[3] Let us briefly explain this jargon before we look at the argument itself. When it comes to ideas in our minds, Descartes makes three important distinctions: objective reality, formal reality and eminent reality. The objective idea of the triangle is the idea of the triangle insofar as it represents a thing. The objective reality is not the thing represented, but the representation. One of the best ways to think of this is in terms of the operation of an image, though we should be careful here not thinking that Descartes thought that all representation were images. Thus when we say that a picture is a picture of something we can distinguish between what the picture is and what the picture represents. In the case of a picture of a tree for example, we can distinguish between the picture and the tree that is represented in the picture.

What is much more difficult is the idea of formal reality in Descartes. It is much more difficult because Descartes himself seems to be confused about it. We could interpret formal reality to be the actual existence of the thing that is represented in the idea. But this would admit the existence of external things, whereas we are only talking about the nature of ideas. Formal reality is the part of the definition of the idea and not the description of a thing. Many misunderstandings of Descartes have to do with confusing the formal reality of the idea with the reality of a thing. On the contrary, the formal reality of the idea describes the status of the idea itself. Whatever idea we speak of and whatever this idea might represent, the idea itself exists. Again if we go back to our picture example, being mindful that ideas are not pictures for Descartes, so that this is only an analogy, then we can make a distinction between the picture, on the one hand, and what the picture represents on the other. Now the picture, on this analogy, is the formal idea. That is to say idea of the tree itself, and not the tree that is represented in the idea.

Now for Descartes ideas themselves and not just what they represent in the idea, have degrees of reality. The best way to understand what Descartes means by ‘degrees of reality’ here is degree of perfection, otherwise again you are going to get confused and think that he is speaking about real external things. Now for Descartes it is possible to say that some ideas, formally speaking are more perfect than other’s. The idea itself is more perfect and not just what is represented in the idea (though it is true to say that when we are speaking about perfection these two are connected). It is the idea itself that is more perfect, that is to say its formal reality, and not just what is represented in the idea, that is to say its objective reality. The idea of God does not just have more objective reality than the idea of frog; rather it has more formal reality than any other idea (Deleuze, 1978). The idea of God, therefore, for Descartes, has eminent reality. Of course the immediate question we need to ask is why is the idea of God more perfect than any other idea? But before we get to this question we need to think about how Descartes explains the relation between objective and formal reality, for this is the basis of the proof of the existence of God

This relation is essentially causal for Descartes. That is to say that the formal idea is the cause of the objective idea. We might put it this way. In the absence of the idea of the frog, they would be no ‘frog’ as an object of the idea. This means for Descartes that the idea of the frog, it formal reality, is the cause of the objective reality of the frog. It is not just the causality of ideas that we need to be aware of, but also, as we have already seen, that reality means for Descartes ‘degrees of perfection’. The proof for the existence of God is a combination of causality and perfection. Thus the formal reality not only causes the objective reality to exist, but also the degree of perfection that this idea has. Descartes regards it as a fundamental axiom that more cannot come from less. If the formal reality is the cause of the objective reality, then there must be as much reality in the formal reality as there is in the objective reality. We need to be very careful that we are speaking about ideas and not objects here, and the best way to think about it is again in terms of a picture. Descartes’ argument is that a picture will have more reality the more reality that the object of the picture has. Thus to use Bernard William’s example: a picture of a pile of sticks will have less reality than a picture of a complex machine, precisely because the complex machine, as an objective reality, has more reality than a pile of sticks (Williams, 2005, p. 124). The best way to think of the relation between objective and formal relations, when it comes causality and perfection, is therefore backwards. From the complexity of the object of thought we go back to the complexity of the idea which is the origin of this thought.

The question, then, is how I get from this relation between formal and objective reality of ideas to the proof of the existence of God. Again we need to remember that this is a causal relation for Descartes. The idea must have as much reality, perfection or complexity, as the object that it represents. In Descartes language, it contains formally as much reality as the object contains objectively. But this does not present it having more reality than the object it represents. In this instance, Descartes says it contains eminently what the object of thought only contains formally. But how does this further distinction get us any closer to the idea of God? Descartes asks whether it is possible that there is one idea that contains formally what I cannot be the cause of objectively; that is to say, whether there is an idea whose objectively reality, whose object of thought cannot have its origin in me.

Thus if I look at all the content of my ideas, I can see that they can all have their origin in me, but the objective reality of the formal idea of God cannot. Why is that? What is it about the idea of God that means that its objective reality cannot be inside of me and that it must exist outside of me? It is because the very formal idea of God, the definition of God, contains an objective reality that I could not be the cause of because I know that I myself am an imperfect being. We have already agreed that what has less perfection cannot be the cause of something that has more perfection. I could be, Descartes argues, the cause of all my other ideas, since objectively they contain nothing more than I contain formally, but I cannot be the origin of the content of the formal idea of God, the objective reality of God, since this objective reality contains more perfection than I do. That is to say my picture of God is less than the objective reality of the idea, and thus could not be its cause. This idea must be caused by something that existed outside of me, and it must contain formally speaking as much reality as the objective reality of the idea of God. Only God could be the cause of the idea of God.

So the idea of God necessarily proves that God exists and we have a little chink in the armour of the cogito. There is one thing I know that exist outside of my idea of it, and that is God. But why would that solve my problem with the wax. Why would the existence of God demonstrate that my idea of wax must be what the wax is in nature? It is the existence of God that guarantees the existence of external objects, and also that my idea of these objects correspond to the true nature of external objects. What I can clearly and distinctly perceive is true, but without God this truth would not be sufficient, since although I am perceiving this truth in my mind, there might be nothing like it in the outside world. If I can prove that God exists, then it follows that everything depends upon him, since God is the only perfection, and such a God could not deceive me. It follows, therefore, what I clearly and distinctly perceive, and I can remember having done so, must be actually true.

The success of Descartes’ metaphysical project rests on the existence of God. It would not surprise many readers that no many philosophers, even immediately so, were convinced by it. Cartesian science itself was pretty much left behind with the success of Newton (though he was clearly influenced by Descartes). However, I want to refer to one important critique of Descartes, which is Spinoza. He was as rationalist as Descartes (and thus his critique is very different from the empiricists and Kant who come later), but his argument with Descartes is that he did not take his ideas seriously enough. In other words, Spinoza wanted to out ‘Descartes’ Descartes.

Spinoza issue’s with Descartes is that he smuggles a theological conception of God into his philosophical idea of God, and that is the idea of creation. There are in fact three substances in Descartes: the two finite substances, mind and matter, and the infinite substance God. This mirrors the theological distinction in the idea of creation of the difference between transcendence and immanence. Now the transcendent God is beyond the comprehension of the finite mind (this is the turning point of the ontological proof for Descartes, I know that God exists, but I don’t know what God is, and God in his absolute power could have created a world in which triangles have 4 sides and 2+2=5). For Spinoza this is absurd. If there were a difference between an infinite God and a finite world, then God would not be infinite, since God would lack something; that is the finite world that is different from him. Also God could not be governed by different laws (as though God were a capricious tyrant), because this would mean that laws that came from God could have been different, but this too would mean that God would lack something, which would be the laws that he did not create. If God is infinite, and we start with this infinite, then the idea of transcendent wilful God that is still at the heart of Descartes’ project (which Spinoza will explain is only anthropomorphic idea of God), must be a fiction. ‘God,’ Spinoza writes, is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things’ (Spinoza, 1996, sec. 1P18).

Rather than explaining attributes in relation to infinite substance, Descartes has explained substance in relation to attributes, and this is why he has ended up with three substances, rather than one unique substance, God, whose essence must infinite attributes (not just two), which express themselves through infinitely many things and ideas. We must begin, Spinoza is saying, with the infinite universe and explain our place within it, rather than projecting an image of ourselves onto this infinite universe.

Bibliography

Ariew, R., 1986. Descartes as Critic of Galileo’s Scientific Methodology. Synthese 67, 77–90.

Deleuze, G., 1978. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze [WWW Document]. Sur Spinoza. URL http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2 (accessed 10.9.14).

Hatfield, G., 2003. Routledge philosophy guidebook to Descartes and the meditations. Routledge, London.

Spinoza, B. de, 1996. Ethics. Penguin Books, London; New York.

Williams, B., 2005. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. Psychology Press.

[1] I am thinking of the Matrix trilogy, and the first film in particular.

[2] He believed that although Galileo was to be admired, he tended to rush over the subject matter and not explain it sufficiently. The purpose of Descartes’ project was to set philosophy on firm principles and work from these in a systematic way (Ariew, 1986).

[3] This shows that Descartes was not as far from the Scholastics as some have presented him, and indeed, how he sometimes presents himself.

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Descartes and the New Metaphysics – Lecture 2

March 22, 2015

If Galileo is the name that stands for the emergence of a new science and a new way of looking at the world, then Descartes is the one who grounds it in a new metaphysics.[1] For the scientist, who is dismissive of the need for philosophy, since for her it is only important if her model works, this is of no importance, but in the history of philosophy, he institutes a whole new way of thinking that all subsequent philosophy has to answer to.

One of the difficulties of reading Descartes, at least if you don’t read him in too much detail, and jump over the things he says that seem anachronistic, their main ideas have become such a part of our philosophical culture, indeed our culture as a whole (who has not heard of the famous cogito ego sum), that we can just read him without really making any attempt to understand. Moreover, the apparent ease of our interpretation means we can even think that we can easily dismiss these arguments, because everyone knows them and they hardly require any thought whatsoever. This is especially the case when we come to his famous proof of the existence of God, which we can dismiss with great ease if we are not aware of what problem it answers. Indeed the problem is more interesting than the question.

The simplicity of this reading has more to do with our ignorance, however, rather than our deep understanding. It is because we are unaware of the context of Descartes’ argument, why he wrote what he did, and especially their revolutionary nature, that we can easily be misled as to their depth and originality. The most important element of this context is the rise of the new sciences in the 16^th and 17^th century. Before he saw himself as a philosopher, Descartes viewed himself (if these different functions were really as separable to him and his contemporaries, as they might be to us), as a scientist and a mathematician. He wrote a philosophy as a defence of the new science, and the importance of the mathematical method, rather than just a work of philosophy in itself.

If we are going to understand how revolutionary the new science was, and why Descartes believed it required a different metaphysics to support it, then we have to recognise, if however succinctly and briefly, that metaphysics it rejected, which was Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s understanding of nature was the dominant picture of reality. The problem of dislodging this picture was not just that the new science rejected it, but that its hold on people’s imaginations was so prevalent and dominant. This is because Aristotle’s philosophy is the philosophy of common sense. It describes what we see around us, and thus to reject it is to reject everything we know around us. We can see why Descartes’ method is sceptical, because before he can reinstitute the new science on a secure ground, he must first of all get us to reject what we ordinarily take to be knowledge of the world. It is not enough to reform our current views; we have to reject them completely.

Such a revolutionary change, one we are still living with, is obvious in the famous rejection of the geostatic universe for a heliocentric one, but it is perhaps a more ordinary example that might make it clearer for us exactly what is at stake here. Let us compare, therefore, an Aristotelian account of vision from a Cartesian one (Hatfield 2014, pp.291–4). We today might be very blasé about Descartes’ mechanical explanation of colour, because we take for granted the physiological explanation of colour (colour is nothing but the interaction of the spectrum of light with the retina), but it would have sounded strange to his contemporaries. In the Aristotelian conception of sensation, my perception of external objects is caused by the real qualities of those objects. Thus if I see a red rose then my perception of ‘red’ is caused by the red qualities of that rose. The red exists in the rose, travels to my eye, and thereby causes my sensation of red. As we can see, this seems to be a very common sense view of what happens when we see things (and there are probably people who still think that this is what it means to physically ‘see’ the colour red).

For Descartes, on the contrary, there are no ‘red’ things as such. On the contrary, for Descartes, nature is nothing but matter in motion. Matter is corpuscular (infinitely divisible particles). The quality of red in the object, therefore, and its interaction with the eye, can be explained by the shape, size and motion of these particles. Colour is caused by the surface of the object I am looking at, which refracts light particles that interact with the eye. Descartes is not denying that we see red, but that red cannot be explained by a real quality called red. Rather the phenomenon ‘red’ requires a deeper explanation that can only be provided scientifically through the kind of mechanical model that Descartes describes

Although there are specific problems with Descartes’ explanation of colour, which will wait for the modern developments in optics, we can see that we are in two totally different scientific worlds. Fundamentally for Aristotle, everything that exists is explained through form and matter. It is the form of something that explains what it is. Thus to understand what it a tree is one has to understand the ‘form’ tree. If we are looking at an oak tree, then the form would be contained in the acorn. This is true, just as much for animate as well as inanimate things. So to explain the sun, we also have to understand the form of the sun, as well as its material existence (which for Aristotle was the four elements, plus the mysterious fifth one, aether). For Descartes, there is only a material explanation of nature. If one wants to understand the sun, then one needs to understand the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium. Moreover, these material laws are the same for all objects in nature and the whole of nature itself. The explanation of our sun would be the same as for all suns in the universe, and these explanations would be would be the same for everything that exists (that is, matter in motion, which can be mathematical defined).

The different physics of Aristotle and Descartes means that they have completely different metaphysics. The basis of the universe for Aristotle is individual substances. Because matter is not sufficient to explain what it is to be something, there cannot be a material explanation of nature. Each thing is an individual substance, which is the specific conjunction of form and matter, whether we are speaking of a tree or animal, me or you, the sun and the other stars. For Descartes, there is only one thing that exists and that is matter in motion, and every individual thing we see is only a property or a mode of this one material substance. Things differ only because matter differs (there is a difference is shape, size and motion of particles), not because there is an extrinsic difference between them. We can see in Aristotle’s metaphysics, that we need an explanation for each thing, whereas for Descartes, we only need a few simple laws of motion (three), in order to explain everything that we see, and that these simple laws of motion, since they have to only to do with shape, size and motion, can be explained quantitatively (that is mathematically) other than qualitatively in the Aristotelian system.

It is for this reason why Descartes takes his doubt much further than classical scepticism. We should not only doubt our senses, for we know that they tell us lies about the world (is that pencil really bent that I see in the glass of water), but also the world of mathematics and even the status of reality itself. How do I know that this is not all a dream, since my dreams have been as vivid as my perception of the world right now, and why it is not possible that a malicious demon hasn’t put into my head the idea that 4+4 = 8, when it really is 9?. Now all these sound a bit excessive if we don’t know the scientific context of these doubts. If the truth of reality is in fact mathematical, then the question Descartes is really asking is how I know that this mathematical reality is real, when there is nothing in my ordinary experience that would verify it.

If I can doubt everything in reality, even that my mathematical ideas are a true representation of what is real, then there is one thing, Descartes argues, that I cannot doubt, and that is I am thinking. For even if I doubt everything, there is one thing I cannot doubt and that is in the very act of doubting. What is important at this point in Descartes’ argument is not to confuse the status of the ‘I’ in the statement ‘I think therefore I am’. This I is not me as physical being. The ‘I’ that stands before you now, the ‘I’ that is writing this lecture on the computer. My physical reality is just as doubtful as the reality of the rest of physical nature. Also this ‘I’ only exists in the very moment of thinking. Only in the very act of thinking can the ‘I’ be said to exist, because it is self-refuting to argue otherwise. Even if I say, ‘I do not exist’, it is I who am thinking this, and so must exist in the moment I think it.

Though the cogito is very limited in one sense, it also includes a lot more than one might first assume. First of all Descartes includes all acts of consciousness, such remembering, desires, and most importantly for us, perceiving. Thus when I desire something, I exist in the moment of desiring, when I remember something I exist in the moment of remembering it, and when I perceive something, I exist in the moment of perceiving it. Of course, following from radical doubt, I don’t know whether what I perceive is the same as what is in reality (it really could be all a dream, or mathematical code as in the film Matrix), but I cannot doubt that I am perceiving the chair. Secondly, and this is going to be very important when we come to look at the wax, the content of what I think, desire, remember and perceive is also real Again, it is not real, as in ‘out there’, but real in my mind. So when, I am thinking, remembering, desiring, perceiving a chair, I really am thinking, remember, desiring, perceiving a chair, even though I don’t know whether a chair really exists.

What is going here, which is very important for understanding Descartes’ metaphysics, is that he is totally changing our idea of truth. Normally when we think of truth (and it should not surprise us, when we think of what we said about science above, that this too has a long Aristotelian heritage), we think of it as adequation. That is, we think that truth is about how we speak about the external world. When I say to you ‘There is chair’, you take this statement to be true, because there is a chair in the real world that corresponds to the statement. Now Descartes’ cannot appeal to this notion of truth, because at the moment of the status of the real world has been bracketed (I don’t know whether the world is true or not). He therefore replaces the truth as adequation, with truth as coherence. An idea is true because it is clear and distinct in my mind. The cogito is therefore a measure of what it is to be true since is self-evident that to have a thought there must be an ‘I’ that thinks it. But we can also say that the idea of triangle as a three sided figure is true, whereas the idea of square circle is not. Not because there are no square circle in the world, but because the idea itself does not make sense, since it is incoherent.

What then do I think I perceive when I think that the idea of wax is sensation? I have a list of properties that describe the wax. It smells of flowers; it tastes of honey; it makes a sound when you tap it; it is hard and cold to the touch; and it is white and the shape of a cube. Doesn’t this, then, tell us exactly what the wax is. Why would we need to know anymore? We remember, though that Descartes is sitting in a warm room (it tells us at the beginning of the Meditations). With the heat of the room, all the properties of the wax change: there is no fragrance of flowers; no sweetness of honey; no sound when a hit it; it is not hard and cold; it is no longer white and shaped like a cup. How, therefore, can the sense tell us what the wax is, since now it is completely change. The idea of the wax under the thought of perception is a completely confused idea. However, even though I know the wax has completely changed, it is nonetheless the same piece of wax that remained the same throughout this transformation. What is this wax? It can’t be the list of properties of the sensation because these are completely different. It must be what remains when we strip away all these properties that have changed in our idea of the wax itself. What is it that remains? It is the idea of the body in general as ‘something extended, flexible and changeable’. [AT VII, 30] Although I cannot experience this body, since it would have innumerable shapes that I cannot imagine, I nonetheless can think it, and the idea of this body is less confused and incoherent understanding of the wax in general, than what is present by the idea of sensation. Going back to Descartes’ definition of truth, it is, therefore more true.

At this point we haven’t got outside the cogito itself. I can say that the idea of extension as the correct understanding of bodies, rather than their real qualities, might make more sense, but it does not mean that the what the wax is in the real world is anything like that at all. At this stage, extension (that matter is extended in three dimensions) as the explanation of all the phenomena we see, including the secondary phenomena of the senses, is merely a hypothesis. To prove that nature in itself is like that, we need to get outside of our minds. But how are going to do that? Through the proof of the existence of God, because the idea of God is a very strange idea, and necessitates the actual existence of the content of the idea, in the way that no other idea I have does.

Descartes is not the first philosopher to use the ontological proof for the existence of God, but it does have a particular form in his philosophy, so it is worth going into it in a little more detail. Also, we need to remember what kind of work the proof is doing. Descartes is not proving the existence of God because he lacks faith. He already believes in God. He does not need a proof. We are speaking here of a philosophical concept of God and not a religious one (although as we shall see with Spinoza’s criticism of Descartes, he might sneak a theological notion within this concept). The concept of God is solving a philosophical problem for Descartes, how do we know that are scientific hypothesis that we cannot see with our senses, is actually telling us the truth about the world, and not a crisis of faith.

One of the problems for the modern reader following Descartes proof is that he uses Scholastic terminology that they might not know.[2] Let us briefly explain this jargon before we look at the argument itself. When it comes to ideas in our minds, Descartes makes three important distinctions: objective reality, formal reality and eminent reality. The objective idea of the triangle is the idea of the triangle insofar as it represents a thing. The objective reality is not the thing represented, but the representation. One of the best ways to think of this is in terms of the operation of an image, though we should be careful here not thinking that Descartes thought that all representation were images. Thus when we say that a picture is a picture of something we can distinguish between what the picture is and what the picture represents. In the case of a picture of a tree for example, we can distinguish between the picture and the tree that is represented in the picture.

Now for Descartes ideas themselves and not just what they represent in the idea, have degrees of reality. The best way to understand what Descartes means by ‘degrees of reality’ here is degree of perfection, otherwise again you are going to get confused and think that he is speaking about real external things. Now for Descartes it is possible to say that some ideas, formally speaking are more perfect than other’s. The idea itself is more perfect and not just what is represented in the idea (though it is true to say that when we are speaking about perfection these two are connected).. It is the idea itself that is more perfect, that is to say its formal reality, and not just what is represented in the idea, that is to say its objective reality. The idea of God does not just have more objective reality than the idea of frog; rather it has more formal reality than any other idea (Deleuze 1978). The idea of God, therefore, for Descartes, has eminent reality. Of course the immediate question we need to ask is why is the idea of God more perfect than any other idea? But before we get to this question we need to think about how Descartes explains the relation between objective and formal reality, for this is the basis of the proof of the existence of God

This relation is essentially causal for Descartes. That is to say that the formal idea is the cause of the objective idea. We might put it this way. In the absence of the idea of the frog, they would be no ‘frog’ as an object of the idea. This means for Descartes that the idea of the frog, it formal reality, is the cause of the objective reality of the frog. It is not just the causality of ideas that we need to be aware of, but also, as we have already seen, that reality means for Descartes ‘degrees of perfection’. The proof for the existence of God is a combination of causality and perfection. Thus the formal reality not only causes the objective reality to exist, but also the degree of perfection that this idea has. Descartes regards it as a fundamental axiom that more cannot come from less. If the formal reality is the cause of the objective reality, then there must be as much reality in the formal reality as there is in the objective reality. We need to be very careful that we are speaking about ideas and not objects, and the best way to think about it is again in terms of a picture. Descartes’ argument is that a picture will have more reality than any other one the more reality that the object of the picture has. Thus to use Bernard William’s example: a picture of a pile of sticks will have less reality than a picture of a complex machine, precisely because the complex machine, as an objective reality, has more reality than a pile of sticks (Williams 2005, p.124). The best way to think of the relation between objective and formal relations, when it comes causality and perfection, is therefore backwards. From the complexity of the object of thought we go back to the complexity of the idea which is the origin of this thought.

Rather than explaining attributes in relation to infinite substance, Descartes has explained substance in relation to attributes, and this is why he has ended up with three substances, rather than one unique substance, God, whose essence must infinite attributes (not just two) that express themselves through infinitely many things and ideas. We must begin, Spinoza is saying, with the infinite universe and explain are place within it, rather than projecting an image of ourselves onto this infinite universe.

Bibliography

Ariew, R., 1986. Descartes as Critic of Galileo’s Scientific Methodology. Synthese, 67(1), pp.77–90.

Deleuze, G., 1978. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Sur Spinoza. Available at: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2 [Accessed October 9, 2014].

Hatfield, G.C., 2014. The Routledge guidebook to Descartes’ Meditations,

Williams, B., 2005. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, Psychology Press.

[1] He believed that although Galileo was to be admired, he tended to rush over the subject matter and not explain sufficiently. The purpose of Descartes’ project was to set philosophy on firm principles and work from these in a systematic way (Ariew 1986).

[2] This shows that Descartes was not as far from the Scholastics as some have presented him, and indeed, how he sometimes presents himself.

2 Comments | Science and Belief | Tagged: Aristotle, Cogito, corpuscular theory of matter, Descartes, Descartes' Meditations, Descartes' ontological proof, Galileo, metaphysics, Science, Spinoza | Permalink
Posted by drwilliamlarge

November 8, 2014

One of the difficulties of reading Descartes’ Meditations is that it has become such a part of our philosophical culture, indeed our culture as a whole (who has not heart of the famous cogito ego sum), that we can just read the text without really making any attempt to understand it. Moreover, the apparent ease of our interpretation means we can even think that we can easily dismiss these arguments, because everyone knows them and they hardly require any thought whatsoever.

The simplicity of this reading has more to do with our ignorance, however, rather than our deep understanding. It is because we are unaware of the context of Descartes’ argument, why he wrote the Meditations as he did, and especially their revolutionary nature, that we can easily be misled as to their depth and originality. The most important element of this context is the rise of the new sciences in the 16^th and 17^th century. Before he saw himself as a philosopher, Descartes viewed himself (if these different functions were really as separable to him and his contemporaries, as they might be to us), as a scientist and a mathematician. He wrote a philosophy as a defence of the new science, and the importance of the mathematical method, rather than just a work of philosophy in itself.

If we are going to understand how revolutionary the new science was, and why Descartes believed it required a different metaphysics to support it, then we have to recognise, if however succinctly and briefly, that metaphysics it rejected, which was Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s understanding of nature was the dominant picture of reality. The problem of dislodging this picture was not just that the new science rejected it, but that its hold on people’s imaginations was so prevalent and dominant. This is because Aristotle’s philosophy is the philosophy of common sense. It describes what we see around us, and thus to reject it is to reject everything we know around us. We can see why Descartes’ method in the Meditations is sceptical, because before he can reinstitute the new science on a secure ground, he must first of all get us to reject what we ordinarily take to be knowledge of the world.

Let us compare, therefore, an Aristotelian account of vision from a Cartesian one (Hatfield 2014, pp.291–4). We today might be very blasé about Descartes’ mechanical explanation of colour, because we take for granted the physiological explanation of colour (colour is nothing but the interaction of the spectrum of light with the retina), but it would have sounded strange to his contemporaries. In the Aristotelian conception of sensation, my perception of external objects is caused by the real qualities of those objects. Thus if I see a red rose then my perception of ‘red’ is caused by the red qualities of that rose. The red exists in the rose, travels to my eye, and thereby causes my sensation of red. As we can see, this seems to be a very common sense view of what happens when we see things (and there are probably people who still think that this is what it means to physically ‘see’ the colour red). For Descartes, on the contrary, there are no ‘red’ things as such. On the contrary, for Descartes, nature is nothing but matter in motion. Matter is corpuscular (infinitely divisible particles). The quality of red in the object, therefore, and its interaction with the eye, can be explained by the shape, size and motion of these particles. Colour is caused by the surface of the object I am looking at, which refracts light particles that interact with the eye. Descartes is not denying that we see red, but that red cannot be explained by a real quality called red. Rather the phenomenon ‘red’ requires a deeper explanation that can only be provided scientifically through the kind of mechanical model that Descartes describes

The different physics of Aristotle and Descartes means that they have completely different metaphysics. The basis of the universe for Aristotle is individual substances. Because matter is not sufficient to explain what it is to be something, there cannot be a material explanation of nature. Each thing is an individual substance, which is the specific conjunction of form and matter, whether we are speaking of a tree or animal, me or you, the sun and the other stars. For Descartes, there is only one thing that exists and that is matter in motion, and every individual thing we see is only a property or a mode of this one material substance. Things differ only because matter differs (there is a difference is shape, size and motion of particles), not because there is an extrinsic difference between them. We can see in Aristotle’s metaphysics, that we need an explanation for each thing, whereas for Descartes, we only need a few simple laws of motion (three), in order to explain everything that we see, and that these simple laws of motion, since they have to only to do with shape, size and motion, can be explained quantitatively (that is mathematically) other than qualitatively in the Aristotelian system.

It is for this reason why we can Descartes’ takes his doubt much further than classical scepticsm. We should not only doubt our senses, for we know that they tell us lies about the world (is that pencil really bent that I see in the glass of water), but also the world of mathematics and even the status of reality itself. How do I know that this is not all a dream, since my dreams have been as vivid as my perception of the world right now, and why it is not possible that a malicious demon hasn’t put into my head the idea that 4+4 = 8, when it really is 9?. Now all these sound a bit excessive if we don’t know the scientific context of these doubts. If the truth of reality is in fact mathematical, then the question Descartes is really asking is how I know that this mathematical reality is real, when there is nothing in my ordinary experience that would verify it.

When we come to the example of the wax in the third mediation, therefore, we can become completely confused if we think Descartes is talking about the external perception of the wax, because this is precisely what he has given up (we don’t know what the real wax is, because we don’t even know if reality is real). What he is describing is our idea of the wax, how the wax appears to us, even if we don’t whether the wax is real or not. His first description, then, is how the idea of wax appear to us when we take the wax as something we perceive, but perception means here, perception as an action of thought (I am thinking about how the wax is perceived by me), and not perception as the sensation of an external object that I take to exist really outside of me and which effects my sense and which I then think of as was (our example of real qualities and the red flower above). If we were to take that Descartes was doing the latter, then we would be confusing him with Aristotelian account of perception.

One of the problems for the modern reader following Descartes proof is that he uses Scholastic terminology that they might not know.[1] Let us briefly explain this jargon before we look at the argument itself. When it comes to ideas in our minds, Descartes makes three important distinctions: objective reality, formal reality and eminent reality. The objective idea of the triangle is the idea of the triangle insofar as it represents a thing. The objective reality is not the thing represented, but the representation. One of the best ways to think of this is in terms of the operation of an image, though we should be careful here not thinking that Descartes thought that all representation were images. Thus when we say that a picture is a picture of something we can distinguish between what the picture is and what the picture represents. In the case of a picture of a tree for example, we can distinguish between the picture and the tree that is represented in the picture.

Now for Descartes ideas themselves and not just what they represent in the idea, have degrees of reality. The best way to understand what Descartes means by ‘degrees of reality’ here is degree of perfection, otherwise again you are going to get confused and think that he is speaking about real external things. Now for Descartes it is possible to say that some ideas, formally speaking are more perfect than other’s. The idea itself is more perfect and not just what is represented in the idea (though it is true to say that when we are speaking about perfection these two are connected). Thus to use Deleuze’s example from his own lectures, the idea of frog is less perfect than the idea of God (Deleuze 1978). It is the idea itself that is more perfect, that is to say its formal reality, and not just what is represented in the idea, that is to say its objective reality. The idea of God does not just have more objective reality than the idea of frog; rather it has more formal reality than any other idea. The idea of God, therefore, for Descartes, has eminent reality. Of course the immediate question we need to ask is why is the idea of God more perfect than any other idea? But before we get to this question we need to think about how Descartes explains the relation between objective and formal reality, for this is the basis of the proof of the existence of God

This relation is essentially causal for Descartes. That is to say that the formal idea is the cause of the objective idea. We might put it this way. In the absence of the idea of the frog, they would be no ‘frog’ as an object of the idea. This means for Descartes that the idea of the frog, it formal reality, is the cause of the objective reality of the frog. It is not just the causality of ideas that we need to be aware of, but also, as we have already seen, that reality means for Descartes ‘degrees of perfection’. The proof for the existence of God is a combination of causality and perfection. Thus the formal reality not only causes the objective reality to exist, but also the degree of perfection that this idea has. Descartes regards it as a fundamental axiom that more cannot come from less. If the formal reality is the cause of the objective reality, then there must be as much reality in the formal reality as there is in the objective reality. We need to be very careful that we are speaking about ideas and not objects, and the best way to thing about it is again in terms of a picture. Descartes’ argument is that a picture will have more reality than any other one the more reality that the object of the picture has. Thus to use Bernard William’s example: a picture of a pile of sticks will have less reality than a picture of a complex machine, precisely because the complex machine, as an objective reality, has more reality than a pile of sticks (Williams 2005, p.124). The best way to think of think of the relation between objective and formal relations, when it comes causality and perfection, is therefore backwards. From the complexity of the object of thought we go back to the complexity of the idea which is the origin of this thought.

The success of Descartes’ metaphysical project rests on the existence of God. It would not surprise many readers that no manner philosophers, even immediately so, were convinced by it. Cartesian science itself was pretty much left behind with the success of Newton (though he was clearly influenced by Descartes). However, I want to refer to one important critique of Descartes, which is Spinoza. He was as rationalist as Descartes (and thus his critique is very different from the empiricists and Kant that we will look at next week), but his argument with Descartes is that he did not take his ideas seriously enough. In other words, Spinoza want to out Descartes Descartes.

Spinoza issue with Descartes is that he smuggles a theological conception of God into his philosophical idea of God, and that is the idea of creation. There are in fact three substances in Descartes: the two finite substances, mind and matter, and the infinite substance God. This mirrors the theological distinction in the idea of creation of the difference between transcendence and immanence. Now the transcendent God is beyond the comprehension of the finite mind (this is the turning point of the ontological proof for Descartes, I know that God exists, but I don’t know what God is, and God in his absolute power could have created a world in which triangles have 4 sides and 2+2=5. For Spinoza this is absurd. If there were a difference between an infinite God and a finite world, then God would not be infinite, since God would lack something; that is the finite world that is different from him. Also God could not be governed by different laws (as though God were a capricious tyrant), because this would mean that laws that came from God could have been different, but this too would mean that God would lack something, which would be the laws that he did not create. If God is infinite, and we start with this infinite, then the idea of transcendent wilful God that is still at the heart of Descartes’ project (which Spinoza will explain is only anthropomorphic idea of God), must be a fiction. ‘God,’ Spinoza writes, is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things’ (1P18).

Rather than explaining attributes in relation to infinite substance, Descartes has explained substance in relation to attributes, and this is why he has ended up with three substances, rather than one unique substance, God, whose essence must infinite attributes (not just two) that express themselves through infinitely many things and ideas. We must begin, Spinoza is saying, with the infinite universe and explain are place within it, rather than projecting an image of ourselves onto this infinite universe.

Bibliography

Deleuze, G., 1978. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Sur Spinoza. Available at: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2 [Accessed October 9, 2014].

Hatfield, G.C., 2014. The Routledge guidebook to Descartes’ Meditations,

Williams, B., 2005. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, Psychology Press.

[1] This shows that Descartes was not as far from the Scholastics as some have presented him, and indeed, how he sometimes presents himself.

Leave a Comment » | Western Philosophy | Tagged: Cogito, Descartes, God, Meditations, metaphysics, Science, Spinoza, Wax | Permalink
Posted by drwilliamlarge

Modes in Spinoza – Lecture 7

February 23, 2014

So far in our discussion of Spinoza’s Ethics, we have only spoken about substance and attributes. This is because we have tried to answer the question ‘why is there only one substance?’ We have seen that to understand Spinoza’s argument we have to see that it progresses from the principles of Descartes’ philosophy. Spinoza is only taking to its logical conclusion what is already implicit in Descartes’ philosophy, which he himself, because he is still caught up in a theological world view, where God is viewed as transcendent in the world, could not see. It is this theological prejudice, this ‘human fiction’ as Spinoza calls it in the appendix to Part 1, which is the source of the separation, distance and split between attributes and substance in Descartes’ thought, and which necessitates the one-to-one correspondence between attributes and substance, such that every attribute must have its corresponding separate substance. Thus, there is not just the thought-attribute, but also thought-substance; there is not just extended substance but also extension-substance. As Curley argues, this doubling up of substance and attribute is caused in Descartes text because he cannot accept that God could also be extension, and therefore he still needs the split between infinite and finite substance.

Spinoza, on the contrary, begins with the idea of infinity (which was already there in Descartes’ definition of God, but is still confused with the more traditional attributes), and deduces the necessity of the existence of one substance from it. This is well explained in Bennett’s, whose tone, however, can be quite confusing, because like most analytic philosophers, he begins with the premise that the philosophy he is studying must be wrong because he could not have been aware of recent modern developments, as though the philosophy progressed like an empirical science, and one would no more read Aristotle to understand the world, than Ptolemy the night sky (Bennett 1984, pp.70–9).

Let us, us therefore, have a closer look at Bennett’s explanation of Spinoza’s monism. The answer to the question, he argues, as to whether Spinoza is a monist, is whether it takes more than one substance to instantiate two attributes. For Descartes, as we have seen, it is clear that two attributes means two substances. The argument for Spinoza’s monist can be seen in 1P14, where Spinoza states that ‘except God, no substance can be conceived’. The proof is that God, as an infinite being, must include every attribute (1D6) and therefore must necessarily exist (1P11). If any other substance exists, then it must be explained in terms of an attribute of God (since every attribute is included in God). This would mean that two substances would exist with the same attribute. Following 1P5, this is absurd and therefore no other substance, other than God, can exist or even be conceived. From this it follows, as shown in the corollaries, that ‘God is one alone’ and that, contrary to Descartes, extension and thought are either attributes or modifications of God.

Bennett explains this proposition in the following way. There must be a substance with infinitely many attributes, and there cannot be two substances with an attribute in common. Therefore there must be one substance. The issue is the first premise: why must there be a substance with infinitely many attributes? The answer to this question, Bennett suggests, is to be found in 1P7 and 1P11. In 1P7, Spinoza argues that substance must exist because a substance cannot be produced by something other than itself, otherwise it would not be independent (this is Spinoza’s version of the ontological argument). It therefore must be its own cause, and its existence is included in its essence. And 1P11 that God is an infinite substance which consists of infinite attributes which necessarily exists.

After Kant and Hume, we might not so easily convinced by the ontological argument, Spinoza or anyone else’s, but Bennett points out, Spinoza’s is peculiar because it goes through the idea of substance which is defined, to use Bennett’s expression, as being ‘entirely self-contained’ (Bennett 1984, p.73). This means that is cannot owe its existence to anything else. We must add to this definition the rationalist insistence that everything that exists must have a reason to exist (of course if one does not believe this then one cannot be a rationalist – as this fundamental belief is what is common to Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz). There can, therefore, be only two possibilities, either substance is caused by itself, or it is caused by something else. It could not be caused by something else otherwise it would not self-sufficient, ‘entirely self-contained’, therefore it must be its own cause. So we have to see that for Spinoza it is because God is a substance that he necessarily exists. It is built into the definition of God that he must have every attribute, and if you link that to 1P5 that two substances cannot have the same attribute, then we are lead necessarily to the conclusion that there can only be one substance.

How then do modes fit into the relationship between substance and attributes in the Ethics? To answer this question we first of all have to remind ourselves that the fundamental distinction is Spinoza’s philosophy is between independence and dependence (Curley 1988, p.20). Attributes and substance are both independent; that is, they are conceived through and exist in themselves (this follows from 1D3 and 1P19)). It is important not to separate attributes and substance, however, since they are nothing but the essence of substance. Modes, on the contrary, are dependent; that is to say, we can only conceive of them through attributes and they exist, to use, Spinoza’s language, in another (1D5). Again we can understand this difference, which is essentially the difference between attributes, which make up the essence of substance, and modes, through Descartes (though as we shall see for Spinoza, his modes are particular things because the way that he conceives of substance). Take, for example, the famous example of the piece of wax in the Mediations. When Descartes first experiences the piece of wax, when he brings it into his room, it smells of flowers, tastes of honey, makes a sound when rapped, is hard and cold to the touch, and it is white, a cube and an inch in diameter. These are obviously all the properties the wax, and if someone where now to ask me what the wax is, I would list them. But now Descartes places the wax near the stove and the action of the heat changes all the properties. So these qualities cannot be the explanation of what the wax is, for the wax is still there, and yet it has completely different properties. It has no fragrance of flowers, no longer tastes of honey, it doesn’t make a sound, it is soft rather than hard, and is no longer white or a cube. There, then, has to be a more fundamental explanation of what the wax is, which explains these changes of properties in relation to the action of heat, and this is the attribute of extension, which for Descartes is ‘matter in motion’; that is to say it is the interaction of the tiny particles of matter set into motion by the action of heat which explains the change in properties of the wax, which are dependent on them.

The primary law of physics, as Curley explains, for Descartes is the principle of inertia (Curley 1988, p.40). Everything remains the same state unless acted upon by an external cause and every motion is in a straight line so that any deviation must be explained by an external cause. These two laws tells us that there would no change in the universe unless by an external cause. The third law explains the nature of change. If a moving body comes into contact with another body which has more motion that it, then it will not impart any motion to that body, but will change its direction, but if it comes into contact with a body that has less, it will move that body along with itself, and impart as much motion to it as it loses. This means that in the interaction between bodies the total motion of the universe is preserved. From these 3 fundamental laws all the laws of nature can be deduced, and from these laws all secondary qualities can be explained.

Of course we have to ask ourselves why these fundamental laws are not any others. And remember that as a rationalist I am committed to the principle that everything must have a reason to exist, otherwise it wouldn’t. Descartes answer to this question is God. But as we have already seen for Descartes, God and matter cannot be identical. This seems to imply that the eternal and immutable essence of nature is separate from God, and there are therefore two eternities: the eternity of God and the eternity of nature. Descartes gets around this problem by arguing that the eternity of nature, the fundamental laws of physics that underlie all the laws of nature and thus all secondary qualities, are in fact dependent on God’s will. To use Descartes’ metaphor, God has established them as a king establishes laws in his kingdom. They are eternal only because of the eternal will of God, which implies that God could have created the fundamental laws of nature differently. Thus the difference between modes, attributes, finite and infinite substance expresses a hierarchy of being for Descartes, and it is for this reason that he remains trapped within theological vision of the universe, however much he might say the opposite.

It is this hierarchy that Spinoza sees as incoherent. Cartesian physics needs the fundamental laws of physics to eternal and necessary, but at the same time he makes them contingent on the absolute power of God, which would make them utterly arbitrary. Spinoza is as committed as Descartes to the rational view of nature, so in order to preserve the rational explanation of the universe, he has to get rid of the personal God who still inhabits the pages of Descartes’ philosophy, who has the same capricious will as a tyrant (again this is why the appendix of part 1 of the Ethics is so important, for of course the mis-identification of God with the arbitrary power of a king also has a political message). What Spinoza does is identify God with the laws of nature. Every time that we compare Descartes and Spinoza we can see that it is matter of the latter getting rid of the all the divisions and separations that the former still want to hang onto. Spinoza flattens Descartes’ transcendent split between finite and infinite substance, and thus the separation between substance and attributes – attributes are not other than substance, rather they express the essence of substance.

We need to rid ourselves of the anthropomorphism of thinking that nature is created by the arbitrary choice of a God that stands outside of it, and also places us both at the centre and outside of it. God’s essence is nothing else than the eternal and immutable laws of nature. We do not need anything else than the fundamental laws of nature, already explained by Descartes. We do not need to ask why these laws and not any other, because there could be no explanation beyond them. To explain is go from particular to general (just as I do in the example of the wax). There is nothing more general than these laws. To then say that these laws are explained by the arbitrary will of God is to go from the general to the particular, which is not explanation at all, but just a descent into superstition and error. Of course, I can say this and believe it, and there were people in Spinoza’s time who believed it, and may who still do, but this does not make it an explanation however many times that I utter it, and however dogmatically I believe it. Religious belief is not a substitute for scientific explanation, and the kind of religious belief that thinks that it can replace science is nothing but the absurd project of human power onto the universe, where we think we are separate, rather than just one more part of the whole (this separation is perhaps the true psychological origin of all religion – the fact that the human species cannot conceive of itself except as an extraordinary exception).

Everything follows from the universal and necessary laws that are inscribed within the attributes, which do not need any more explanation since attributes can only be conceived through and exist in themselves. From these laws follow all the individual things and properties that we see in the universe, which are what Spinoza call modes. Modes themselves are distinguished by Spinoza as either infinite or finite. Infinite modes follow immediately from the attribute. Thus motion and rest are infinite modes that follow immediately from extension, and these laws in turn explain finite modes; that is particular individual things. Infinite modes are infinite because they apply to all of nature at any time and any place, and are eternal in the sense that they are necessary. They are not infinite and eternal, however in the same sense, as attributes, since they are dependent on these attributes, whereas attributes, as we know, are entirely self-contained.

The difference between finite and infinite modes is that former do not follow unconditionally from the attributes. It is for this very reason that they are finite and not infinite. Any particular thing comes into existence and passes away. Thus to explain why two bodies interact completely we would not only need the fundamental laws of physics, but also a complete description of the history of these two bodies circumstances and why they met in this place and at this time. This complete explanation is not possible, because we would have to know the infinite series of causes and effects which brought about this encounter, which we cannot know (and we remember from our reading of Part Three that this is the source of inadequate ideas).

We do, however, need to be to be careful here. This does not mean that Spinoza is letting chance make the universe. It is not that the encounter is unpredictable; it is just that we cannot know the infinite series. The universe is utterly deterministic for Spinoza; that is, everything follows, whether immediately or mediately from the essence of God. Contingency does not belong to the structure of the universe; rather it arises, as Spinoza states in 1P33S1, as a ‘defect of our knowledge’. Such determinism is utterly important to understand Spinoza’s ethics which follows from his physics and metaphysics. For the human fiction of morality is based upon the idea of human freedom, which of course is merely magnified, is the image of the transcendent and hysterical God, which is equally loved by both the tyrant and the slave.

Works Cited

Bennett, J., 1984. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, [Indianapolis, IN]: Hackett Pub. Co.

Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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From Descartes to Spinoza – Lecture 6

January 25, 2014

For Spinoza there is only one substance and this substance is God. God, too, is central to Descartes’ philosophy, for without the proof of the existence of God his whole metaphysics would collapse. But to some extent he still has a theological conception of God. God is understood as separate and transcendent in relation to the world such that Descartes splits substance between the infinite and finite, and finite substance itself is split between extension and thought. Spinoza is precisely rejecting this split when he writes in the Ethics that: ‘God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things’ (1P18). We can understand Spinoza’s metaphysics as deducing the necessity of there being only one substance from Descartes’ principles. Therefore it is not simply a matter of Spinoza rejecting Descartes’ philosophy, but of demonstrating that following his own principles he too must agree that there can only be one substance and that this substance must be God.

The relation of Spinoza and Descartes to the idea of God is itself ambiguous. On the one hand they both agree with the essential definition of this idea that God is supremely perfect and infinite being. This means that God cannot be conceived as limited in any way since he would be less than perfect if he were so. Already in this idea, therefore, lies the necessity of one substance. For if, like Descartes, we do make a split between infinite and finite substance, then we are limiting God, namely by contrasting and opposing God to the created world, which has its own independent existence (and must do if we are to call it a substance). The only way Descartes can get out of this contradiction is by producing another one by arguing that finite substance must be dependent on God’s power for its own existence, which would mean that finite substance would be both dependent and independent at the same time. For Spinoza the very idea of a dependent substance, following from Aristotle, is a contradiction in terms.

We can still see, however, that even with this abstract definition, which is the same for both Descartes and Spinoza, Descartes’ philosophy is still caught within a theological definition of God (a human fiction for Spinoza, following the appendix of the first part of the Ethics). This is because Descartes is still willing to talk about God in terms of divine attributes, such as omnipotence and omniscience that distinguish God from the created world. There is a separation between what is created and the creator. God is special kind of substance in relation to the substance of the world. Thus the idea of creation is still central to Descartes’ metaphysics, which would be completely meaningless for Spinoza. In fact we might think of Spinoza’s metaphysics as the final expulsion of any idea of creation from philosophy (in the appendix to Part 1, Spinoza writes about this idea through the fiction of final causes, where nature is imagined to be created for the benefit of humankind by a tyrannical God, as opposed to being considered in terms of its essence).

Descartes still exists in the theological conception of an absolute separation, division or opposition between the world, on the one hand, and God, on the other. For Descartes, therefore, God cannot be extended, because God and the world are entirely different substances. How would Spinoza counter this theological conception? Again, following the appendix to the first part of the Ethics, he would say that we must start with the essence of things, rather than what people might imagine things to be, and that this is the same with the idea of God, as of anything else. What many people say of God – He is good, omniscient, omnipotent, and so on – are properties, but they do not say what God is in terms of attributes; that is to say, in terms of his essence. Take, for example, of omniscience. This is a property of God, but it cannot be a ‘fundamental property’, since it presupposes the attribute of thought on which it is dependent (it is impossible to conceive of an ‘all-knowing being which does not think).

Descartes would probably not disagree with this argument, but it is clear that he would not accept that God could be conceived of in terms of extension, since extension is not infinitely perfect for Descartes. This is because extended matter is divisible, and it is clear that God cannot be. Why does the divisibility of matter imply imperfection for Descartes? This is because divisibility is the destruction of matter, and destruction is an imperfection. Spinoza’s argument against this is that divisibility of matter is merely a mode, and in essence, matter is not divisible. This is because following 1P5 there can only be one extended substance, since two or more substances cannot have the same attribute, since they would not be anything that would distinguish them: ‘In Nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute.’[1] If there is only substance, can we really say that matter is being destroyed? Even if I divide extended substances into different parts, nonetheless these different parts still exist as part of the one substance, which has not been destroyed at all. The leg that I cut off the horse is no longer part of the horse, but both the horse and the leg are still part of one and the same substance, and therefore I have not separated this substance, when I have separated the horse from its leg. If this were the case, then the separated leg would no longer belong to extension at all. In fact the horse’s leg is just a portion of extension that is qualified in a certain way. We should not, therefore, confuse the disabling of matter with its destruction. It is also means that extension is as infinite and eternal as thought, and it is only a theological prejudice of Descartes that prevents him from saying that it is just as much a ‘fundamental property’ or attribute of God as thought.

Spinoza’s philosophy is not a refusal of Descartes’, but is a thorough logically worked out consequence of his thought, which Descartes could not himself go to the end of perhaps because of a theological prejudice which prevented him from understanding these consequences. For Descartes, each substance has one attribute which constitutes its essence. For minds it is thought, and for bodies, extension. He calls these ‘principle attributes’. Knowing what the principle attributes are would tell you what you are dealing with, and what you should expect. Thus, you would not be led to the mistake of confusing and thought with a thing. One could say for Descartes, therefore, that what is important is not substance, but attributes, since attributes are the ‘principles of explanation’. For Spinoza it is the other way around. It is substance itself which is the principle of explanation, and not attributes, since it is not limited to the two attributes which Descartes describes, but must contain infinite attributes. Since to argue otherwise would be to limit substance and thus contradict its infinite essence, as Spinoza writes in IP8: ‘Every substance is necessarily infinite.’

For Descartes each separate attribute, which must be conceived in itself, since we do not need to know what thinking is to know what extension is, and vice versa, implies a separate substance, since he understands substance through attributes. Why, then, does Spinoza argue that we should think reality the other way around, and say that there is one substance with infinite attributes? In response to this we might ask whether it is possible to think of one substance with infinite attributes, perhaps because we tend to think in the same way as Descartes. Spinoza’s answer to this question is that we already do so through the idea of God. Since God is by definition infinite, He must contain infinite attributes, since if he did not, then He would lack something, which would contradict his infinite essence. Moreover if God did lack something then there must be something that caused God to do so, which again would contradict his essence and the very meaning of substance as independent.

We might not be convinced by Spinoza’s argument at this point, but Curley says that there is another way to get to the same conclusion. If each attribute is conceived through itself, it must, therefore, also exist in itself. If it existed in something else in order to exist, then we would need to be able to conceive such a thing before we could conceive the attribute. If an attribute is conceived in itself, and exists in itself, then it satisfies the definition of substance in 1D3 (‘by substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself’). But if we have infinite attributes, each conceived and existing in itself, wouldn’t we then have an infinite amount of substances, rather than just one, as Spinoza believes? Curley’s answer to this question is to say that Spinoza’s substance is a ‘complex of very special elements’ (Curley 1988, p.30). If each attribute is conceived through itself, they must also exist in themselves, and must also exist necessarily. If this is the case, then no single attribute could exist without the others, since they all necessarily exist: ‘The existence of each one of the attributes implies the existence of all the others’ (Curley 1988, p. 30). Substance, therefore, is not anything different from attributes. It isn’t something that lies behind attributes, as some kind of separate and distinct cause, which would lead us straight back to the transcendence we are trying to get rid of. God, therefore, is nothing but the existence of an infinite plurality of attributes, and nothing else.

Work Cited

Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[1] Ethics, p. 3. See also IP13. To make matter divisible is to divide it into parts, but that would either mean that these parts would not be the same as substance, which would cause substance not to exist, or there would be many substances with the same attribute which would be absurd.

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Spinoza: What is Substance? – Lecture 5

December 18, 2013

Perhaps one of of the greatest obstacles to modern readers of Spinoza’s Ethics is the language he uses. It is one which would be perhaps understandable to readers of his time, but has become pretty meaningless to us now. It is a language that has its roots in greatest obstacles to modern readers of Spinoza scholasticism, though, like Descartes, (who is the most important philosophical influence on Spinoza) everything he writes is a rejection of this tradition. Scholasticism obtains its language from Aristotle (or at least as he is handed down by the Islamic scholars to the West in the 9^th century), so we first need to go back to this source.

Those of you who have done a basic cause in Greek philosophy might remember Aristotle’s philosophy and especially his notion of ‘substance’, and this is where we need to start, since ‘substance’ in one of the most important words in Spinoza’s vocabulary. We are also going to use as our guide here the excellent book by Woolhouse, The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics.[1]

When we normally think of the word ‘substance’ in English, we associate it with the idea of matter. As for example, when we think of the question ‘what substance is this table made out of?’, we would probably respond by saying, ‘wood’ or ‘plastic’, corresponding to the material it was constructed from. This is not what Aristotle means by substance at all, and certainly not what Spinoza means by it. In fact Aristotle has a completely different word for matter in Greek, which is hyle. The word in Greek for substance is, on the contrary, ousia. Ousia is the 3^rd person singular feminine present participle of the Greek verb ‘being’. Now the grammar of this word is not particularly important for us, but what is important is that it has its origin in the verb ‘being’. Ousia is not the word for matter for Aristotle but for what is. Everything that is, is named by the word ousia, since everything that is must necessarily be; that is, must necessarily possess being, whether we’re talking about tables, galaxies or even ourselves. This notion of being, Aristotle says in the Metaphysics, is the proper subject matter of philosophy, and no other study. So the question we must ask ourselves is what did Aristotle think was the answer to the question what is being?

What is real for Aristotle are individual things like men, animals and plants and so on, and what is, is made up of these individual things. This seems to follow common sense, and it is clear those philosophers before Aristotle where not so ready to agree with common sense. Many of them tended to believe that there was a much greater reality behind the individual things we experience, which it is the task of philosophers to describe. Think, for example of the first Greek philosopher that we have any information about, Thales, who thought that every individual thing was in fact made of water, which was therefore the ultimate explanation and reality of the universe.

The best way to understand Aristotle’s idea of substance is to go back to his theory of predication. In fact we might say that it is this theory of predication which is the true source of his understanding of being: the way we understand being has its origin in the way we talk about the world. A substance for Aristotle is a subject of a predicate, but which at the same time is not a predicate of anything else. This is true definition of what we mean by an individual thing: it is independent of anything else. This notion of independence, as we shall see, is crucial to the meaning of substance, and is the key especially of understanding Spinoza’s use of the word. A substance is what undergoes change (it can have different predicates attached to it), but it itself remains the same, or holds onto its identity. Think of Socrates the man. He can be young or old, cold or warm, wise and ignorant, and so on. We can predicate all these different and opposite predicates of Socrates, but nonetheless it is still Socrates the individual (who is different from Peter and the chair over there) who we say these things of. Substance, then, has two very important parts of its definition: independence, and identity.

Now the question for Aristotle, as it is for every philosopher, is whether individual things are the ultimate substance or whether there is something greater than individual things, and which can explain them in a better way than they can explain themselves. This would mean that individual things would not be independent but would be dependent on something higher. In the same way that hot only makes sense predicated on some other individual thing, and can only have a meaning because of this; individual things would be, in fact, predicates of something else. This would mean, therefore, that their ‘substantialness’, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, would be an illusion. But it is precisely this kind of thinking he rejects. What is real are individual things, and it is they that undergo change and not something else. We tend to think there is some more ultimate reality because like Plato we confuse the definition of something with its reality – thus, because we notice there is something common between different horses, we make the mistake of thinking that there is some kind of ‘Horse’ which is the ultimate cause of them. Or we confuse substance with matter; that is to say, we think everything is the same because they are all made of the same kind of stuff.[2] It is true that things are made of matter, and there might be some ultimate matter which is the explanation of all forms of matter (like atoms), but that is not enough to explain what something is for Aristotle. For Aristotle what something is made up of its matter and its form, and it is this form which is explained by substance. The form, therefore, tells us what the thing is and why it is what it is. Matter, alone, for Aristotle, cannot do this, for it just tells what is the same about everything, but not why this thing is the thing that it is and not any other.

The most important influence, as we have already indicated, on Spinoza is Descartes, who will use this Aristotelian vocabulary, but will give it a very different meaning. The two important characteristics, however, remain: independence and identity. Descartes writes as though he has escaped Scholastic philosophy, which has been the dead hand on scientific progress by retaining the Aristotelian view of nature, against the new mechanistic theory of nature. But this is just propaganda, for he will still use their vocabulary, and in relation to the idea of God, there is much that is ‘scholastic’ in his thought. The most important influence is the very idea of God itself. For this is not something that would have been of concern for Aristotle, at least not as it is presented in theological thought. For Aristotle the universe is eternal, but for the Christian thinkers, such a view would deny creation; an idea which would have been utterly inconceivable to Aristotle. The idea of creation changes everything in the doctrine of substance, for the notion of independence belongs to its definition. If the universe is created by God, and it must be in Christianity, then everything that exists in creation must be dependent on Him. There, therefore, can only be one independent substance, which is God. Descartes, however, is not willing to go this far. Rather, he says, we can distinguish between two kinds of substance: infinite substance, which is God, and created substance, which is any individual thing which is dependent on God for its existence, but not anything else. We could say they have relative independence, and they correspond to what Aristotle defines as substance. A substance, just as in Aristotle, is everything which is conceived of through itself and not through some other kind of thing, and that which exists (apart from the fact that it is created) in its own right. A substance is therefore the subject of predication, of which we predicate qualities, properties and attributes to, and remains identical through change.

We say that created substance is similar to Aristotle’s notion of substance. It is similar in its definition (independence and identity), but not similar in what it describes. For substance describes individual things in Aristotle, tree, galaxies and you and me, but it does not do so for Descartes. To understand this difference, we are going to have to look at two other technical expressions, which are also fundamental for Spinoza: attributes and modes. Descartes’ philosophical system has three levels of reality: infinite substance, finite or created substance, and properties or qualities. We could see the relation between these levels as one of dependence: with infinite substance, created substance would not exist, and without created substance properties and qualities could not exist, for they always need to be properties or qualities of something. These properties or qualities of created substance Descartes calls modes. If modes are dependent on substance, then substance in itself cannot be a mode. We know substances, therefore, for Descartes through attributes, and there are two main attributes which explain all the possible modes that we know: extension and thought. The first explains objects in the world, and the second thoughts in our heads. These two are quite different, and this is why they are to be explained through two very different attributes, which cannot explain each other. A thought is not an object, and an object is not a thought. Attributes, therefore, have something in common with substances: they can only be conceived through themselves and not through something else – thus we can only understand the attribute extension through extension (length, breadth and shape – which can be understood mathematically) and not through anything else, whereas a mode must be understood through extension (heat is the motion of particles). In the same way a thought can only be understood through the attribute thought, and not through anything else, whereas any mode of thought (belief, love, desire and so on) must be understood through thought, since one cannot desire something, for example, which one cannot think. These principal attributes constitute the nature of substance for Descartes, and there must, therefore, be two kinds of substances, which explains his dualist metaphysics. Thus, whatever exists, substance, attribute, mode, must either be a body or thought, and cannot be anything else. He does not give a reason why there is only two kinds of substance, but only that there are only two. Or if you like, God was free to create two kinds of finite substance, but he could have created more of different kinds.

How then is Descartes different from Aristotle? In terms of nature, the notion of individual substances disappears, such as trees, galaxies and human beings called Socrates. Rather, there is only one corporeal substance, of which these things are only modes. Thus, Descartes gets rid of Aristotle’s notion of forms, which explains why each thing is what it is. For Descartes this can be explained by the location, motion and rest of matter itself, and no appeal to any form is required. Individual human minds are, however, for Descartes, individual substances in the way that Aristotle would still talk of them. Anyone who thinks is an individual thinker, and cannot be the same as any other individual thinker – we do not have the same thoughts (this follows the rule that any substance must be independent). So for Descartes it is my mind or soul that individualizes me and not my body.

How, then, does Spinoza’s thought fit within these two descriptions of substance by Aristotle and Descartes? First of all, it follows the same definition of substance that it must be conceived in and through itself. Again this is what is meant by saying that substance must be independent. Also his notion of attribute appears to be the same as Descartes, in that it expresses the way that we perceive substance. We might ask ourselves, therefore, how an attribute comes to express substance. Why this attribute and not any other, for example? We have already seen that Descartes just says that there are two, but not why there are only two. Attributes are ways through which substance is understood. Now we really need to take care with our propositions here. For though Spinoza will agree that it is through attributes that we understand substance, he will argue further that substance is not only conceived through itself, but also in itself. What is the difference between conceiving substance through itself and in itself? Descartes collapses the real distinction between finite substance and its attributes (whilst making the latter dependent on God who is separate and transcendent) and this is why he can only conceive of two principal attributes. But for Spinoza, thought and extension are only the way that we perceive substance, but it in itself must have infinite attributes, since it must be infinite.[3] If it were finite, then it would be limited by something outside of itself, and therefore it will fail the test of independence which is the definition of substance. There must, therefore, be only one substance, and not two kinds of substances, as Descartes argues. If can only do so because he holds onto the difference between creation and God, finite and infinite substance. For Spinoza, on the contrary, there is only one substance which is ‘God or Nature’. We will need to describe the essence of this substance in the next lecture.

[1] ‘Descartes and Substance’ in R. S Woolhouse, The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics. London, Routledge, 1993, 14-27.

[2] Later on it will be important to see whether Spinoza is doing this, and whether substance means matter for him, for it is clear that unlike Aristotle he thinks that there is only one substance.

[3] This does not mean that thought and extension is merely the appearance of substance, which is something different in itself. They are real distinctions.

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Modes in Spinoza – Lecture 7

November 12, 2012

So far in our discussion of Spinoza’s Ethics, we have only spoken about substance and attributes. This is because we have tried to answer the question ‘why is there only one substance?’ We have seen that to understand Spinoza’s argument we have to see that it progresses from the principles of Descartes’ philosophy. Spinoza is only taking to its logical conclusion what is already implicit in Descartes’ philosophy, which he himself, because he is still caught up in a theological world view where God is viewed as transcendent in the world, could not see. It is this theological prejudice, this ‘human fiction’ as Spinoza calls it in the appendix to Part 1, which is the source of the separation, distance and split between attributes and substance in Descartes’ thought, and which necessitates the one-to-one correspondence between attributes and substance, such that every attribute must have its corresponding separate substance. Thus, there is not just the thought-attribute, but also thought-substance; there is not just extended substance but also extension-substance. As Curley argues, this doubling up of substance and attribute is caused in Descartes text because he cannot accept that God could also be extension, and therefore he still needs the split between infinite and finite substance.

How then do modes fit into the relationship between substance and attributes in the Ethics? To answer this question we first of all have to remind ourselves that the fundamental distinction is Spinoza’s philosophy is between independence and dependence (Curley 1988, p.20). Attributes and substance are both independent; that is, they are conceived through and exist in themselves (this follows from 1D3 and 1P19)). It is important not to separate attributes and substance, however, since they are nothing but the essence of substance. Modes, on the contrary, are dependent; that is to say, we can only conceive of them through attributes and they exist, to use, Spinoza’s language, in another (1D5). Again we can understand this difference, which is essentially the difference between attributes, which make up the essence of substance, and modes, through Descartes (though as we shall see for Spinoza, his modes are particular things because the way that he conceives of substance). Take, for example, the famous example of the piece of wax in the Mediations. When Descartes first experiences the piece of wax, when he brings it into his room it smells of flowers, tastes of honey, makes a sound when rapped, is hard and cold to the touch, and it is white, a cube and an inch in diameter. These are obviously all the properties the wax, and if someone where now to ask me what the wax is, I would list them. But now Descartes places the wax near the stove and the action of the heat changes all the properties. So these qualities cannot be the explanation of what the wax is, for the wax is still there, and yet it has completely different properties. It has no fragrance of flowers, no longer tastes of honey, it doesn’t make a sound, it is soft rather than hard, and is no longer white or a cube. There, then, has to be a more fundamental explanation of what the wax is, which explains these changes of properties in relation to the action of heat, and this is the attribute of extension, which for Descartes is ‘matter in motion’; that is to say it is the interaction of the tiny particles of matter set into motion by the action of heat which explains the change in properties of the wax, which are dependent on them.

It is this hierarchy that Spinoza sees as incoherent. Cartesian physics needs the fundamental laws of physics to eternal and necessary, but at the same time he makes them contingent on the absolute power of God, which would make them utterly arbitrary. Spinoza is as committed as Descartes to the rational view of nature, so in order to preserve the rational explanation of the universe, he has to get rid of the personal God who still inhabits the pages of Descartes’ philosophy, who has the same capricious will as a tyrant (again this is why the appendix of part 1 of the Ethics is so important, for of course the misidentification of God with the arbitrary power of a king also has a political message). What Spinoza does is identify God with the laws of nature. Every time that we compare Descartes and Spinoza we can see that it is matter of the latter getting rid of the all the divisions and separations that the former still want to hang onto. Spinoza flattens Descartes’ transcendent split between finite and infinite substance, and thus the separation between substance and attributes – attributes are not other than substance, rather they express the essence of substance.

Everything follows from the universal and necessary laws that are inscribed within the attributes, which do not need any more explanation since attributes can only be conceived through and exist in themselves. From these laws follow all the individual thing and properties that we see in the universe, which are what Spinoza call modes. Modes themselves are distinguished by Spinoza as either infinite or finite. Infinite modes follow immediately from the attribute. Thus motion and rest are infinite modes that follow immediately from extension, and these laws in turn explain finite modes; that is particular individual things. Infinite modes are infinite because they apply to all of nature at any time and any place, and are eternal in the sense that they are necessary. They are not infinite and eternal, however in the same sense, as attributes, since they are dependent on these attributes, whereas attributes, as we know, are entirely self-contained.

Works Cited

Bennett, J., 1984. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, [Indianapolis, IN]: Hackett Pub. Co.

Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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From Descartes to Spinoza – Lecture 6

November 11, 2012

Spinoza’s philosophy is not a refusal of Descartes’, but is a thorough logically worked out consequence of his thought, which Descartes could not himself go to the end of perhaps because of a theological prejudice which prevented him from understanding these consequences. For Descartes, each substance has one attribute which constitutes its essence. For minds it is thought, and for bodies, extension. He calls these ‘principle attributes’. Knowing what the principle attributes are would tell you what you are dealing with, and what you should expect. Thus, you would not be lead to the mistake of confusing and thought with a thing. One could say for Descartes, therefore, that what is important is not substance, but attributes, since attributes are the ‘principles of explanation’. For Spinoza it is the other way around. It is substance itself which is the principle of explanation, and not attributes, since it is not limited to the two attributes which Descartes describes, but must contain infinite attributes. Since to argue otherwise would be to limit substance and thus contradict its infinite essence, as Spinoza writes in IP8: ‘Every substance is necessarily infinite.’

Work Cited

Curley, E., 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method : a Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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Substance in Spinoza – Lecture 5

November 4, 2012

Perhaps one of the greatest obstacles to modern readers of Spinoza Ethics is the language he uses. It is one which would be perhaps understandable to readers of his time, but has become pretty meaningless to us now. It is a language that has its roots in scholasticism, though, like Descartes, (who is the most important philosophical influence on Spinoza) everything he writes is a rejection of this tradition. Scholasticism obtains its language from Aristotle (or at least as he is handed down by the Islamic scholars to the West in the 9^th century), so we first need to go back to this source.

Those of you who did the first year course on Greek philosophy might remember we briefly discussed Aristotle’s philosophy and especially his notion of ‘substance’, and this is where we need to start, since ‘substance’ in one of the most important words in Spinoza’s vocabulary. We are also going to use as our guide here the excellent book by Woolhouse, The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth Century Metaphysics (Woolhouse 1993, pp.14–27).

When we normally think of the word ‘substance’ in English, we associate it with the idea of matter. As for example, when we think of the question ‘what substance is this table made out of?’, we would probably respond by saying, ‘wood’ or ‘plastic’, corresponding to the material it was constructed from. This is not what Aristotle means by substance at all, and certainly not what Spinoza means by it. In fact Aristotle has a completely different word for matter in Greek, which is hyle. The word in Greek for substance is, on the contrary, ousia. Ousia is the 3^rd personal singular feminine present participle of the Greek verb ‘being’. Now the grammar of this word is not particularly important for us, but what is important is that it has its origin in the verb ‘being’. Ousia is not the word for matter for Aristotle but for what is. Everything that is, is named by the word ousia, since everything that is must necessarily be; that is, must necessarily possess being, whether we’re talking about tables, galaxies or even ourselves. This notion of being, Aristotle says in the Metaphysics, is the proper subject matter of philosophy, and no other study. So the question we must ask ourselves is what did Aristotle think was the answer to the question what is being?

Now the question for Aristotle, as it is for every philosopher, is whether individual things are the ultimate substance or whether there is something greater than individual things, and which can explain them in a better way than they can explain themselves. This would mean that individual things would not be independent but would be dependent on something higher. In the same way that hot only makes sense predicated on some other individual thing, and can only have a meaning because of this; individual things would be, in fact, predicates of something else. This would mean, therefore, that there ‘substantialness’, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, would be an illusion. But it is precisely this kind of thinking he rejects. What is real are individual things, and it is they that undergo change and not something else. We tend to think there is some more ultimate reality because like Plato we confuse the definition of something with its reality – thus, because we notice there is something common between different horses, we make the mistake of thinking that there is some kind of ‘Horse’ which is the ultimate cause of them. Or we confuse substance with matter; that is to say, we think everything is the same because they are all made of the same kind of stuff.[1] It is true that things are made of matter, and there might be some ultimate matter which is the explanation of all forms of matter (like atoms), but that is not enough to explain what something is for Aristotle. For Aristotle what something is made up of its matter and its form, and it is this form which is explained by substance. The form, therefore, tells us what the thing is and why it is what it is. Matter, alone, for Aristotle, cannot do this, for it just tells what is the same about everything, but not why this thing is the thing that it is and not any other.

The most important influence, as we have already indicated, on Spinoza is Descartes, who will use this Aristotelian vocabulary, but will give it a very different meaning. The two important characteristics, however, remain: independence and identity. Descartes writes as though he has escaped Scholastic philosophy, which has been the dead hand on scientific progress by retaining the Aristotelian view of nature, against the new mechanist theory of nature. But this is just propaganda, for he will still use their vocabulary, and in relation to the idea of God, there is much that is ‘scholastic’ in his thought. The most important influence is the very idea of God itself. For this is not something that would have been of concern for Aristotle, at least not as it is presented in theological thought. For Aristotle the universe is eternal, but for the Christian thinkers, such a view would deny creation; an idea which would have been utterly inconceivable to Aristotle. The idea of creation changes everything in the doctrine of substance, for the notion of independence belongs to its definition. If the universe is created by God, and it must be in Christianity, then everything that exists in creation must be dependent on Him. There, therefore, can only be one independent substance, which is God. Descartes, however, is not willing to go this far. Rather, he says, we can distinguish between two kinds of substance: infinite substance, which is God, and created substance, which is any individual thing which is dependent on God for its existence, but not anything else. We could say they have relative independence, and they correspond to what Aristotle defines as substance. A substance, just as in Aristotle, is everything which is conceived of through itself and not through some other kind of thing, and that which exists (apart from the fact that it is created) in its own right. A substance is therefore the subject of predication, of which we predicate qualities, properties and attributes to, and remains identical through change.

We say that created substance is similar to Aristotle’s notion of substance. It is similar in its definition (independence and identity), but not similar in what it describes. For substance describes individual things in Aristotle, tree, galaxies and you and me, but it does not do so for Descartes. To understand this difference, we are going to have to look at two other technical expressions, which are also fundamental for Spinoza: attributes and modes. Descartes’ philosophical system has three levels of reality: infinite substance, finite or created substance, and properties or qualities. We could see the relation between these levels as one of dependence: with infinite substance, created substance would not exist, and without created substance properties and qualities could not exist, for they always need to be properties or qualities of something. These properties or qualities of created substance Descartes calls modes. If modes are dependent on substance, then substance in itself cannot be a mode. We know substances, therefore, for Descartes through attributes, and there are two main attributes which explain all the possible modes that we know: extension and thought. The first explains objects in the world, and the second thoughts in our heads. These two are quite different, and this is why they are to be explained through two very different attributes, which cannot explain each other. A thought is not an object, and an object is not a thought. Attributes, therefore, have something in common with substances: they can only be conceived through themselves and not through something else – thus we can only understand the attribute extension through extension (length, breadth and shape – which can be understood mathematically) and not through anything else, whereas a mode must be understood through extension (heat is the motion of particles). In the same way a thought can only be understood through the attribute thought, and not through anything else, whereas any mode of thought (belief, love, desire and so on) must be understood through thought, since one cannot desire something, for example, which one cannot think. These principle attributes constitute the nature of substance for Descartes, and there must, therefore, be two kinds of substances, which explains his dualist metaphysics. Thus, whatever exists, substance, attribute, mode, must either be a body or thought, and cannot be anything else. He does not give a reason why there is only two kinds of substance, but only that there are only two.

How, then, does Spinoza’s thought fit within these two descriptions of substance by Aristotle and Descartes? First of all it follows the same definition of substance that it must be conceived in and through itself. Again this is what is meant by saying that substance must be independent. Also his notion of attribute appears to be the same as Descartes, in that it expresses the way that we perceive substance. We might ask ourselves, therefore, how an attribute comes to express substance. Why this attribute and not any other, for example? We have already seen that Descartes just says that there are two, but not why there are only two. Attributes are ways through which substance is understood. Now we really need to take care with our propositions here. For though Spinoza will agree that it is through attributes that we understand substance, he will argue further that substance is not only conceived through itself, but also in itself. What is the difference between conceiving substance through itself and in itself? Descartes collapses the real distinction between finite substance and its attributes (whilst making the latter dependent on God who is separate and transcendent) and this is why he can only conceive of two principle attributes. But for Spinoza, thought and extension are only the way that we perceive substance, but it in itself must have infinite attributes, since it must be infinite.[2] If it were finite, then it would be limited by something outside of itself, and therefore it will fail the test of independence which is the definition of substance. There must, therefore, be only one substance, and not two kinds of substances, as Descartes argues. If can only do so because he holds onto the difference between creation and God, finite and infinite substance. For Spinoza, on the contrary, there is only one substance which is ‘God or Nature’.

Works Cited

Woolhouse, R.S., 1993. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz : the Concept of Substance in Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics, London; New York: Routledge.

[1] Later on it will be important to see whether Spinoza is doing this, and whether substance means matter for him, for it is clear that unlike Aristotle he thinks that there is only one substance.

[2] This does not mean that thought and extension is merely the appearance of substance, which is something different in itself. They are real distinctions.

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Lectures

Descartes and Rationalism – Lecture 2

Descartes and the New Metaphysics – Lecture 2

Descartes

Modes in Spinoza – Lecture 7

From Descartes to Spinoza – Lecture 6

Work Cited

Spinoza: What is Substance? – Lecture 5

Modes in Spinoza – Lecture 7

From Descartes to Spinoza – Lecture 6

Substance in Spinoza – Lecture 5

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