Spinoza In Plain English pt. 7: Does God Know Itself?(Propositions 19–25)
This is the latest post in my quixotic attempt to write an accessible commentary on all of Spinoza’s Ethics. See here for An Introduction To Spinoza or start the series at the beginning with Spinoza In Plain English pt.1: Substance.
Proposition 19–25
In the next six propositions, Spinoza sets out to discuss the way that things unfold from God’s being, and what that means for the nature of those things. Along the way, he will make an assertion which is very often missed by his readers.
First:
God, or all the attributes of God, are eternal.
What Spinoza means by this is that God, and the qualities of God, are self-caused and necessary- they cannot not exist. Since attributes are inherent parts of God, that is true of them as well. Spinoza here says, then, that thought and extension are inherent, eternal aspects of God/Reality. This in itself is a radical position. Spinoza is arguing that Reality has always been and will always be thought unfolding in space. We should remember here that Spinoza is a panpsychicist: there are no bodies without thought. All existent things have minds, even if extremely simple ones. If at some point the universe was just undulating, simple waves of energy in space, than that was the extended thinking thing that God was.
He then argues that God’s existence and his essence are one and the same thing.
To understand this, we need to understand there is a difference between the essence and the existence of you and I.
Spinoza understands “essence” as the unique informational/energetic ratios of our individual being and not as some hidden, esoteric reality, as shall see later. There is a unique logical structure to the particular being of any thing- very much like its DNA, but this also applies to tables or supernovas- and one can describe that unique individuality even if the thing does not exist. Also the unique individuality of a thing does not and cannot guarantee its actual existence for any particular duration. That means that our actual existence as a space/time entity and our essence are separate issues.
Our existence does not follow from our essence- if it did we would be indestructible and the cause of ourselves, or in other words, God. For God, though, his essence does require existence, and therefore there is no distinction between God’s essence and his existence. This is another way of saying that God/Substance/Reality/Nature must by definition exist, unlike us.
Spinoza then takes another flight of abstraction — buckle your seatbelts — but one that it’s not hard to make sense of concretely.
Spinoza says that the attributes of God, which are eternal, are nevertheless modified (changed, affected) by two types of things: infinite modifications and finite modifications.
Infinite modifications are realities that follow directly from the infinite attributes of God. So some infinite modes are logical results of the nature of the attributes themselves, i.e. there are infinite modes which express the inherent nature of thought and extension. Others follow from the nature of the infinite modes themselves.
Ok, what does this mean? It seems that the very nature of thought and extension inherently contain basic properties of the universe-basic properties of thought and the basic properties of physics (which for Spinoza, as we shall see, are two sides of one thing).
The basic laws of thought and physics give rise to more complexity as they interact.
Speaking of “thought and physics” may sound strange here- don’t I just mean physics? Remember, though, that Spinoza views consciousness and thought as fundamental elements of the cosmos- he is not a materialist. Materialism is based on a belief that everything can be explained by the interaction of non-conscious forces and what we call consciousness is somehow an emergent property of these nonconscious forces- matter. This belief has not yet been demonstrated, and Spinoza would argue that it is inherently incoherent.
We should also pause to remember that when Spinoza says that Substance/God/Reality causes the infinite modes, he does not mean that at one time Substance/God/Reality exists and then it causes other things.
For Spinoza, God’s attributes are an inherent and eternal part of its nature- God always has attributes that are expressed in infinite modes which are an inherent part of their nature.
This is a very important point. If we don’t realize this, we may think that there is such a thing as Substance without attributes or ponder how it is that Substance gives rise to its attributes. According to Spinoza, there is no Substance without attributes and although the attributes “follow from” Substance this simply means that the attributes are a necessary and inherent part of Substance. God’s being possesses thought and extension; Substance includes its attributes. God is the totality.
So the attributes behave in certain ways either as a direct result of their own nature (i.e. God’s nature) or as their infinite modes (qualities which follow from their own nature) interact and give rise to new things. Anything which directly follows from an infinite mode is itself infinite, and here we need to pause to note a specific argument that Spinoza makes in this regard because along the way he drops an aside which is often overlooked but has fascinating implications.
Bear with me, this will start out a steep climb but get much easier as we go. Read the following paragraph but don’t worry too much if you don’t follow everything he says. Afterward I’ll try to unpack it.
If you deny this, conceive, if you can, that there is in any of God’s attributes something following from his absolute nature that is finite and has a determinate existence or duration, for example God’s idea in thought. Since thought is supposed to be an attribute of God, it is necessarily (by p11) infinite by its nature. But insofar as it has God’s idea, it is supposed to be finite. But (by def2) it cannot be conceived as finite unless it is determined through thought itself. But not through thought itself insofar as it constitutes God’s idea, for to that extent it is supposed to be finite; therefore it must be through thought itself insofar as it does not constitute God’s idea, which nevertheless (by p11) must necessarily exist. There is therefore thought that does not constitute God’s idea, and therefore God’s idea does not necessarily follow from its nature insofar as it is absolute thought. (For it is conceived as constituting and as not constituting God’s idea.) But this is contrary to the hypothesis. Therefore if God’s idea in thought or anything in any attribute of God (it does not matter which one we pick since the proof is universal) follows from the necessity of the absolute nature of the attribute itself, it must necessarily be infinite.
What Spinoza is saying here, in essence, is simply that everything that follows directly from God’s being must be infinite. Along the way, though, he says some very interesting things. For an example of how this must be so he discusses “God’s idea in thought” or in other words, the idea that comprehends God itself (for Spinoza the idea of something is its manifestation, or representation, in thought). Spinoza argues that this thought must itself be infinite since it follows from an infinite reality- the infinite thought of God itself. In other words, in God there is an infinite thought of itself!
This staggering assertion tells us a lot about Spinoza’s thinking. First of all, apparently he thought that this was so obvious- that God would have an idea of itself- that he just mentions it in passing!
He then discusses whether “God’s idea in thought” is determined by thought that is not God’s absolute thought, i.e. by the finite thought of people who are not God, or whether it is determined by the absolute, infinite thought of God itself. He asserts that both follow necessarily from God, i.e. finite thoughts and infinite, absolute thought- but only one follows directly from God’s being as opposed to arising through the meditation of finite modes (like the minds of you and me).
The take-home of this last argument is that God is, in and of itself, self-conscious. Although Spinoza’s God has very few of the other features of traditional theism, Spinoza shows here that he did believe that God, or Reality, possesses an infinitely self-conscious intellect that is aware of its own unfolding.
This assertion is important because it refutes those who believe that Spinoza’s God could simply be called “nature” and that he is nothing more than a kind of cagey materialist or naturalist who insists on keeping the world God for sentimental or political reasons. No, for Spinoza “nature” is infinitely unfolding self-aware being.
(Note: I owe the understanding of this point to Yitzhak Melamed, who discusses it at length in his seminal masterpiece, Spinoza’s Metaphysics).
For the next in this series, please click here.
