Research

My two principal aims in this essay are interconnected. One aim is to provide a new interpretation of the ‘infinite modes’ in Spinoza’s Ethics. I argue that for Spinoza, God, properly conceived as the one infinite and eternal substance, is not to be understood as causing two kinds of modes, some infinite and eternal and the rest finite and non-eternal. That there cannot be such a bifurcation of divine effects is what I take the ‘infinite mode’ propositions, E1p21–23, to establish; E1p21–23 show that each and every one of the immanent effects of an infinite and eternal God is an infinite and eternal mode. The other aim is to show that these propositions can be understood as part of an extended critical response to Descartes’s infamous doctrine that God creates eternal truths and true and immutable natures. If we have the correct (Spinozan) conceptions of what God is and how God works, we see that an eternal and infinite God can only be understood as causing ‘eternal truths,’ and that these eternal truths are infinite and eternal modes of God.


This piece complements "Spinoza's 'Infinite Modes' Reconsidered." I suggest that Spinoza acknowledges a distinction between formal reality that is infinite and timelessly eternal and formal reality that is non-infinite (i.e., finite or indefinite) and non-eternal (i.e., enduring). I also argue that if only intelligible causation is genuine causation, then infinite, timelessly eternal formal reality cannot cause non-infinite, non-eternal formal reality. A denial of eternal-durational causation generates a puzzle, however: if no enduring thing—not even the sempiternal, indefinite individual composed of all finite, enduring things—is caused by the infinite, eternal substance, then how can Spinoza consistently hold that the one infinite, eternal substance is the cause of all things and that all things are modes of that substance? 


Here I explain how Spinoza’s system could be understood in light of a denial of eternal-durational causation. On the interpretation I offer, God is the cause of all things and all things are modes because the essences of all things follow from the divine nature and all essences enjoy infinite, eternal reality as modes immanently caused by the infinite, eternal substance. Yet the same non-substantial essences can also be conceived as enjoying non-infinite, non-eternal reality, and so conceived, they are enduring, finite (or sempiternal, indefinite) entities that cannot be conceived as modes caused by and inhering in the one infinite, eternal substance. If we read Spinoza in the way I suggest, however, we do have to read him as committed to acosmism, or a denial of the reality of the world—at least the world of enduring, finite things.


In this article, I  sketch a way of understanding three important doctrines from Spinoza’s Ethics: intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva), contentment of mind (acquiescentia mentis), and intellectual love of God (amor Dei intellectualis). Along the way, I suggest how these doctrines could build on more familiar doctrines, including monism, necessitarianism, the parallelism of ideas and bodies, and the “ideas of ideas.”


In "Finding oneself in God," I argue that we should understand scientia intuitiva as a “metaphysically locating” thought. Physically locating thoughts are familiar: when I wake up and realize, in a flash, that I am in Berkeley, I connect my felt experiences with a non-perspectival description of a place. The metaphysically locating thought of scientia intuitiva also involves connecting felt experiences to a non-perspectival description. When I enjoy scientia intuitiva, I realize, in a flash, that I am as things are described in the monist system of the Ethics: I am such that I can be understood as a mind or body, as a modification of God’s eternal and infinite reality or as a temporally and spatially limited finite thing.  I explain how, if scientia intuitiva is what I think it is,  it can be characterized as exploiting, in one intuition, the power of two specific Cartesian intuitions: the cogito and the Fifth Meditation’s ontological argument (with some alterations to the ideas involved, of course). 


Cognition of the third kind, or scientia intuitiva, is supposed to secure beatitudo, or virtue itself (E5p42). But what is scientia intuitiva, and how is it different from (and superior to) reason? In this chapter, I suggest a new answer to this old and vexing question at the core of Spinoza’s project in the Ethics. On my view, Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva resembles Descartes’s scientia more than has been appreciated. Although Spinoza’s God is not Descartes’s benevolent, transcendent God, Spinoza agrees with Descartes that the highest certainty requires that a cognizer correctly conceive of God and her causal relation to God; it is only with cognition of the third kind that a cognizer can be certain that her adequate (that is, clear and distinct) representations of extramental things agree with formally real, extramental ideata, and so are true. If this is right, a reading of Spinoza that has dominated scholarship since the Ethics’ publication is misguided: for Spinoza, it is not always the case that having (and recognizing that one has) a clear and distinct idea is sufficient for knowing that that idea is true. I end the chapter by suggesting why scientia is intuitive for Spinoza: Spinoza attempts to avoid Cartesian-Circle-style circularity by insisting that a cognizer must intuit the correct representation of God and God’s relation to things. 


I first turn to Spinoza’s obscure “ideas of ideas” doctrine and his claim that “as soon as one knows something, one knows that one knows it, and simultaneously knows that one knows that one knows, and so on, to infinity” (E2p21s). On my view, Spinoza, like Descartes, holds that a given idea can be conceived either in terms of what it represents or as an act of thinking: as I read the propositions, E2p7 (where Spinoza presents his doctrine of the “parallelism” of minds and bodies) primarily concerns the former way of conceiving of an idea while E2p21 primarily concerns the latter. I propose that in E2p21, Spinoza makes a few crucial points about an adequate idea conceived as the “idea of the idea,” or as the activity of thinking: 1) when one has an adequate representation of p, one automatically knows that one is thinking an adequate representation of p, and 2) this reflective knowledge cannot be improved. I then turn to E2p43, “he who has a true idea at the same time knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt the truth of the thing." This is a denial of skepticism, but I think we need to be careful. E2p21 and E2p43 rule out the most hyperbolic doubts like those we see in Descartes's Third Meditation (AT VII 36), so it is the case that thinkers need no additional validation for the “adequate ideas of properties of things” and “common notions” employed in "cognition of the second kind," or reason. However, a reasoning thinker might nevertheless be troubled by doubts about the extramental world. As I have argued in other work, we can take Spinoza as following Descartes at least this far: once our reasoning thinker comes to adequate ideas of God and God’s relation to things, their ideas cannot be rendered doubtful. Here I concede that because one can reason to these adequate ideas of God and God's relation to things, scientia intuitiva is not unique in removing doubt. However, scientia intuitiva may still be distinctive in the way it removes doubt. 



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