Posted by Timotheos  4/11/2016 5:28 am | #1 |
So I was recently reading Part I of Spinoza's Ethics for the first time, and I was actually surprised to find that I found it to be an enjoyable read, despite his obvious agenda.
What particularly struck me about it was how much scholasticism was lurking in the background; I thought most of his axioms were actually perfectably reasonable, and since he is stipulating his own definitions, one cannot argue too with him too much on that front.
My biggest beef with him was that he slyly grafted in his definition of substance, which he defined as that which exists in itself AND is conceived through itself, an expansion from the generally Aristotean definition of substance as that which exists in itself. It's a sly move, because in a number of places, he, in my view, incorrectly equates his definition of substance with merely meaning that it is that which exists in itself, which allows him to shift Axiom 1 from stating, basically, that everything is either a substance or an accident to stating that everything is either a Spinoza-defined substance or an accident. This later allows him to basically use a proof that there is only one God to show that there is only one substance, and of course that is Spinoza's biggest thesis he wants proved.
Hence, I actually can agree with Spinoza that there exists only one "substance" (i.e. God), as long as we bear in mind that it is in Spinoza's quacky sense that the word is here being defined; as soon as those two meanings get equated however, one should jump ship. Thus, the classical theist, I think, could pretty much agree with Spinoza right up to Prop 14***, just taking the whole thing to be an eccentrically worded proof for God's existence; right afterwards though, we should get off the bus and never look back.
What do you guys think?
*** I don't think his proof actually does work though; for the life of me, I cannot understand how he is supposed to be deriving Prop 2, or even why anyone would believe that it is true for that matter.
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Posted by iwpoe 4/11/2016 5:37 am | #2 |
Spinoza is an interesting case. I'll remark more about him as I gather my thoughts, but the scholasticism you're finding in him is a combination of the influence on him by Maimonides and his ultra-Cartesianism who is, himself, a kind of dissident last-stage scholastic. Spinoza is actually rather frustrated by Descartes' glorification of the geometric method and his total failure to present his philosophy in a truly geometric form so what's you're reading is his kind of geometric reworking of Descartes' late dissident scholasticism.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
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Posted by Timotheos 4/11/2016 6:38 am | #3 |
I know most people I talked to about it find the whole Geometric format to be off-putting; I actually idiosyncratically disagree here, since I like the style and don't think Spinoza's really misusing it.
He makes mistakes, I think, in his reasoning, but that's not really the fault of the method, only the reasoner; as I've said, I think *most* of his reasoning is valid, and accept [at least some version of] his axioms as sound.
Really I think what people are reacting to is Spinoza's insistence that we have strong metaphysical certianties; most people would balk at that sort of thing outside logic and mathematics. (Inconsistently, I think, since I doubt even 9/10ths of what we take as "mathematical certianties" would hold up as certain under the scrutiny most philosophers nowadays apply to metaphysics, amoung other things)
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Posted by iwpoe 4/11/2016 6:48 am | #4 |
The geometric method is perfectly fine. I've watched analytic philosophers shove dumb ideas about everything from physics to art to politics into first order logical form. Why balk at a Euclidian method? At least one isn't covering over the bad ideas.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
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Posted by Spinozist20 8/11/2017 3:42 pm | #5 |
I'm glad to hear that a classical theist appreciates Spinoza. Most theists either don't know who he is or else dismiss or under appreciate him. I think there's a lot to learn from Spinoza even if one doesn't accept his radical conclusions. And indeed: the scholasticism is definitely there. In my studies, understanding the scholastic background with which Spinoza was thinking (e.g., Aquinas, Suarez) made it such that when I returned to the Ethics it was like seeing in colour compared to black and white. Spinoza's definition of substance has spawned a lot of debate. It's an interesting question whether he's on to something, or if he's question-begging, or if he's doing something else. It's also an interesting question of how it came about given the traditional notion of substance. Aristotle's Categories and other works only sometimes gesture at anything remotely like Spinoza's notion of substance. Descartes, however, comes much closer to his Principles 1.51, in which he says that since substances are independent beings, God is the only a substance in the strict sense, whereas finite things are substances in a weaker sense in that they only depend on God. Spinoza arguably took this very seriously and wanted to be consistent unlike Descartes on the matter, and together with his commitment to thoroughgoing intelligibility (via a strong PSR), he arrived at his radical doctrine of substance monism. I'm not sure the theist can agree with everything Spinoza says just short of 1p14, however, though I think there's a lot of theists can agree with. To paraphrase Spinoza's view of God as the only and infinite substance: God is a substance exemplifying every possible fundamental way of being (e.g., extension, thought) and every possible derivative way of being (e.g., being liquid, being the idea of purple). If God, so understood, exists at 1p11, then the conclusion at 1p14 is basically already affirmed. The theist will have to reject Spinoza's steps earlier on, or even just outright reject Spinoza's notion of substance. I was a theist with classical leanings in the past but later found Spinoza, and have since been most attracted to his view of God. Nonetheless, I see classical theists as allies in many respects. But one thing that has been a strong pull on me toward Spinoza is his idea of God as the most perfect or greatest conceivable being, metaphysically speaking. As such, God is metaphysically infinite and unlimited in his being. If God is such a being, I have a hard time seeing how God could fail to be anything else than the only substance, and everything else his modes. Of course, theists are understandably appalled by such a conclusion. They typically tell me that Spinoza's God cannot be the most perfect being since it lacks the familiar moral attributes. But in short, I don't find this rebuttal very convincing, personally, because it seems to entail that God is metaphysically finite and limited in his being. Any thoughts on this guys? There is an old video (with some flaws on YT) on the argument here if you'd like to know more. The video is called "The Ontological Argument from Infinity (Against Theism)."
