Spinoza

Modernity from the time of Descartes experienced what Kant would call antinomies (unresolvable dilemmas) with regard to questions of freedom and determinism. These were not eternally given, but resulted from specific, contingent historical developments — not only emerging modern science, but also some very specific features carried forward from medieval European theological controversies. (See Errors of the Philosophers; Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul; God and the Soul; Mind Without Mentalism.)

Since the early modern period, many philosophers have struggled to formulate their own incompatible ways of trying to assert both billiard-ball causality and a hyper-strong concept of personal identity to which something like voluntaristic free will was attributed. Even Kant and Hegel used a good deal of socially acceptable voluntaristic-sounding rhetoric that was at odds with their more careful arguments. (In a real world where audiences have prejudices, philosophers who want to be heard have to be careful to gauge their audience, and pick their battles wisely.)

In this context, Spinoza stands apart from the rest. Like the others, he wanted to assert modern-style univocal causality, but the kind of freedom of reason he argued for in Book V of the Ethics did not presuppose the hyper-strong personal identity and free will others wanted to assume. He emphasized the relational character of all determination, and famously mounted a head-on critique of free will.

Ethically, Spinoza was profoundly committed to reason and an immanent understanding of nature and society. He published the first critical textual analysis of the Old Testament, and was among the first open advocates of free speech. His work was a major inspiration to the left wing of the Enlightenment that gave us the ideal of democracy. The Left Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach called him “the Moses of the freethinkers”.

Among philosophers, he also stands out for giving unprecedented attention to emotions and their interaction with reason. He is particularly concerned with the harmfulness of sad passions, and recommends that we use joyful passions as well as reason to help free ourselves from the grip of the sad passions.

Spinoza rejected the theologized Aristotle, and knew no other version. In spite of this, I think Aristotle would agree that Spinoza’s arguments against free will by no means rule out Aristotle’s moderate conception of deliberation and choice. The problem has been that many medieval and modern authors felt it necessary to defend what were actually unnecessarily extreme versions of freedom. (See also Ends.)

While praising Spinoza’s monism, Hegel alleged that Spinoza’s thought led to an “oriental” dissolution of personality into the One, and things like that. We might say he should have paid more attention to Spinoza on the freedom of reason, but Terry Pinkard’s good biography of Hegel attests that he already worried about police scrutiny of his views, and a failure to substantially criticize Spinoza would have placed him in the company of the extreme left. In the literature on Hegel, Hegel’s references to Spinoza are too often simply accepted at face value, which is a great injustice.

To the extent that Spinoza has limits in comparison with Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel, it is perhaps in a tendency to simplify; and in his relatively univocal and static, basically one-level (albeit highly relational) conception of nature.

Pierre Macherey’s untranslated five-volume, line-by-line French commentary on the fine inferential structure of Spinoza’s Ethics is, I think, the best discussion of Spinoza in any language. A smaller work of Macherey, Spinoza or Hegel, has been translated to English, and develops many points I would wish to make.

In a very different vein, the 1934 classic study by Harry Austryn Wolfson pointed out many hidden allusions in Spinoza to arguments and positions from the Hebrew tradition of medieval philosophy. Wolfson called Spinoza “the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns”.

Medieval connections also figure in Gilles Deleuze’s 1968 thesis Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy, which I find to be very uneven. On the one hand, in a long digression expounding the “expression” theme, Deleuze had interesting things to say about relations between implication and explication, or folding and unfolding, in relation to Spinoza and late neoplatonism. On the other, he made what I now think was terribly wrong use of the “univocity of being” thesis of the Latin theologian Duns Scotus, with whom he wanted to closely link Spinoza. I believe both Spinoza and Scotus would have been appalled by this suggestion.

The historian Jonathan Israel has documented the large importance of the Spinozist movement in the Enlightenment. The important scholar of German Idealism, Frederick Beiser, gave a fascinating account of the mostly very hostile German philosophical reception of Spinoza around the time of Kant in part of his first book The Fate of Reason (1987).

Brandom characterized Spinoza as a proto-inferentialist in Tales of the Mighty Dead.

I like the fact that Spinoza’s main philosophical work was simply called Ethics. Spinoza sought to develop a truly philosophical ethics, incorporating a wide range of meta-ethical considerations.

Influence

In some circles, the notion of intellectual “influence” has fallen into disrepute. Influence refers to a partial dependency of A on B, without specifying the nature of the dependency. Granted that it does tend to suggest a causal relation and that causality is a blunt instrument for describing relations between historical philosophers, it seems to me that the vagueness with which the causality is suggested is a saving grace. When I say A was influenced by B, I simply mean that the way that A was had some dependency on the way that B was.

The great late scholastic Francisco Suárez did develop an unfortunate theory of “influenza” as something literally passed from cause to effect in the process of causation, but this is certainly not what historians have in mind in speaking of “influence”.

More speculatively, the objection seems to concern any application of a modern notion of univocal causality to what we otherwise want to refer to as autonomous subjects. It is true that modern univocal causality and the autonomy of reason operate on entirely different levels, so directly applying the one to the other would be a category mistake. But I submit that that is not what is going on when we say A was influenced by B. (See also Agency.)

A bit of elementary Aristotelian semantic analysis is helpful here. The historic philosopher A is “said in many ways”. She participated in the autonomy of reason. Simultaneously, she was subject to many empirical determinations. “She” is said in a different way in each of the two previous sentences. Therefore, there is no contradiction and no category mistake in affirming both. (See also Historiography.)

Ever since the middle ages and the controversy over so-called Averroism, Western culture has been affected by a desire to affirm a hyper-strong concept of personal identity. Under this notion of identity, all references to persons always univocally refer to what in modern terms would be an autonomous subject. (Modern people have become so used to thinking in this actually very extreme way that they look at the ancient world and say silly things, like that the ancient world had no concept of persons or individuality.)

Kant’s Rousseauian sympathies led him to sometimes speak this way. But this is not a necessary consequence of Kant’s analysis. Kant’s analysis requires that there is an autonomy of reason in which we participate. It does not require that my empirical subjectivity subject to empirical determination somehow be equated with a transcendental subjectivity blessed with the autonomy of reason, or mysteriously replaced by it. That is precisely the difference between a good concept of the autonomy of reason and a bad concept of free will.

Here Kant’s alleged dualism is more helpful than his Rousseauian sympathies. We should say that it is a category mistake to simply equate transcendental and empirical subjectivity, or to substitute one for other in an argument.

Kant says the transcendental I has no content; therefore in particular, it has no content overlapping the content of my (or any) empirical self. It is a pure index of the unity of a unity of apperception.

I am therefore reluctant even to refer to “a” transcendental subject as if it were individuated, let alone claim it as mine.

The Platonic terminology of “participation” is useful in cases like this. Empirical “we” don’t quite have transcendental subjectivity, because it exceeds us, but we do “participate” in it. Only my empirical subjectivity’s limited participation in transcendental subjectivity is specifically mine. It is not even clear that my whole empirical subjectivity is included in this participation. “My” participation in transcendental subjectivity in any event does not make empirical me into a transcendental subject or give me ownership of transcendental subjectivity. Meanwhile, transcendental “I” am no mere subject. (“I am every name in history,” as Nietzsche said.) (See also What Is “I”?; Subject.)

Material Culture

Ethical or spiritual culture is about value expressed in our doings, and ways and patterns of doing. Material culture is the literal reification of such values into material objects — a piece of carved stone or painted pottery, for instance, or a book (perhaps even a web page). Hegel would surely recognize that Geist is also embodied in the pottery or the book.

Among other functions, cultural artifacts and culturally contexted material objects of all sorts supplement our memory with a kind of external storage, as archaeologist Colin Renfrew suggested. They differ from psychological memory in that they are publicly accessible. Something is lost, but something is also gained by this. The archaeologist has no choice but to work from this sort of data embodied in objects.

Material culture is like revealed religion in Hegel — it is open to all, with nothing esoteric about it. It turns traces of the operation of the transcendental into publicly accessible objects.

A certain kind of reification can be a good thing, a fulfillment even — an actualization making explicit what was implicit. Embodiment is a good thing, not the embarrassment Porphyry attributed to Plotinus.

Foucault developed a whole metaphorical “archaeology” of intellectual and cultural history, focused not on implicit subjectivity but on differences in materially explicit forms. There is a lot to be said for this sort of approach.

Some time between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago in Africa, human material culture began to change much faster than human biology. By the time of the European Upper Paleolithic, our kind of apes had clearly become cultural animals.

Individualistic prejudices in the modern West lead people to downplay the importance of culture in human behavior, but individual personality itself is a sort of micro-culture. Aristotle used the same word (ethos) for personality and culture. (See also Aristotelian Matter; Historiography; Freedom and Free Will.)

Golden Rule

Because I favor the unconditional autonomy of reason I generally dislike any reduction of ethics to rules that would supposedly tell us what to do in all cases, but the so-called golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you; or, do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you) seems like a variant of Kant’s categorical imperative, which is a higher-order rule that rather obviously leaves a place to be filled in by judgment.

Some prefer the negative version of the golden rule, as avoiding possible arrogance or presumption. I like the Leibnizian idea that to be truly ethical is to do more than what is merely required of us, so I actually like the positive version.

The golden rule could also be considered a nice popularization of the ethical import of Hegelian mutual recognition.

Honesty, Kindness

To be honest or sincere is first of all to be intellectually honest with oneself, which is a commitment to what Kant called unity of apperception, whether one thinks of it in such terms or not. As Brandom would remind us, this means to the best of our ability honoring an implicit higher-order commitment — to the consequences of our commitments, and to avoiding incompatible commitments — that we have necessarily made in being committed to anything at all.

We could refer to this as integrity, or a commitment to commitment. Recall Aristotle’s indignation in the Metaphysics against the sophist who refused to honor the principle of noncontradiction.

This is obviously a high standard, if we intend to apply it to people’s emotional responses in ordinary life. We need to be forgiving of the fallibility of others, as well as of ourselves. Honesty to others needs to be tempered with kindness (or wise charity, as Leibniz would say). But we should strive to be integral beings in our emotional responses.

Kindness has no set formula; sometimes something like tough love is appropriate. These things are always matters of judgment. I would go beyond Kant and say we should be kind to all beings, period, but the mode of that kindness should be appropriate to the situation. I am kind to inanimate objects by not engaging in senseless destruction or waste. I may kindly question your conclusion, or tell you what you don’t want to hear. I may even kindly revolt against your oppressive regime. That just means there is no spite or ressentiment in my heart as I take a stand for justice. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; Things Said; Interpretive Charity; Affirmation; Genealogy.)

Substance

Aristotle thought we should be ethically committed to the idea that becoming or process is in principle intelligible. An often misunderstood part of his program for showing this was to emphasize that our very talk about change presupposes that we can pick out relative stability or persistence somewhere in the context.

This is a careful, minimalist assertion of moments of weak unity or stable points of attraction within the flux, intended only to deny Plato’s strong pessimistic denial of the knowability of any such points of attraction. It has nothing to do with some direct incarnation of metaphysically given essences. (See Aristotelian Identity; Identity, Isomorphism; Equivocal Determination.)

Plato recommends an ethic of quasi-skeptical honesty about the epistemic difficulties involved in any practical judgment or view of the world. Aristotle deeply respects the intellectual honesty promoted by Plato about what we do not know in life, while putting a higher value on things subject to becoming.

Ousia (traditionally “substance”, or more accurately “what it was to have been” a thing) is Aristotle’s preferred alternative to talking about Being (either as utterly general or as utterly unique). It redirects our attention away from these sterile extremes toward a fertile middle ground where conceptual articulation is possible. In the Metaphysics, it undergoes a major dialectical development through many senses, including a division into actuality and potentiality. (See also Abstract and Concrete; Being, Existence; Aristotelian Dialectic; Free Will and Determinism.)

Later authors developed increasingly rigidified reinterpretations of Aristotelian substance, such as the Latin medieval notion of substantial form. This laid the basis for early modern redefinitions of substance in terms of some kind of logical identity.

The Animal’s Leg Joint

In De Motu Animalium, Aristotle says there is an unmoved mover in the animal’s leg joint, and proceeds to a geometrical description of the axis of rotation of the joint. More famously, he says there are unmoved movers in the apparent motion of the fixed stars and planets, and there too associates them with geometrical axes of circular motions. What is going on here? This is a good illustration of several points.

First, Aristotle is perfectly happy to use mathematics in natural science. (He just correctly judged that early Greek arithmetic and geometry generally had little to contribute to the intelligibility of becoming, and wisely objected to the Pythagorean numerology that found a place in the Platonic Academy.)

Second, there is nothing mysterious about what he calls an unmoved mover. In the best-known cases, it refers to something that is in fact not only observable but mathematically describable. (This is not the only way a concept can have value, but that is not the point here.)

Third, he calls the unmoved mover a “mover” in the sense that it is the descriptive law or form of the physical motion in question, not a driving impulse or force. In a similar move, Leibniz famously said God is the law of the series.

Aristotelian Dialectic

It was no sophomoric error when Friedrich Engels described Aristotle — not Plato or some neoplatonist — as the greatest dialectician of the ancient world. Aristotelian “dialectic” is just cumulative, exploratory discursive reasoning about concrete meanings in the absence of initial certainty.

Broad usage of the term “dialectic” includes meanings of both dialogue and logic. For Plato, dialogue aimed directly at truth (though not necessarily reaching it). Aristotle considered a many-sided logical/semantic analysis to be the single most important tool of science, and to be more rigorous than the dialogue that was Plato’s favorite literary device.

For Aristotle, unlike Plato, dialectic is not a direct quest for truth. Plato had already emphasized that dialectic is a matter of an ethically motivated quest for truth rather than a claim to mastery or simple possession of it. Aristotle opened things up further by preferring an indirect, semantically oriented approach to the quest. Dialectic ends up being his main critical tool.

Aristotelian dialectic is a semantic and pragmatic inferential examination of opinion or what is merely said (or analogously, I would argue, of appearance). It uses the same logical forms as the rational knowledge Aristotle called episteme; but unlike the latter, yields results that Aristotle calls only “probable”, because they depend on premises that are merely “said” rather than rationally known. (This is a qualitative assessment having nothing to do with statistical probability.)

This has often been taken as a denigration of dialectic. I take it instead as Aristotle’s affirmation of the importance of semantics and pragmatics.

Because dialectic for Aristotle makes no assumptions about what is really true, it is perfectly suited for the examination of arguments for their purely inferential structure. Because it examines concrete arguments with concrete terms, the role of material as well as formal inference can be considered. (See also Inferential Semantics.)

Aristotle also says (Topics Book 1) that dialectic in just this sense is the best means we have for getting clarity about first principles. This is a good example of Aristotle’s inferentialism. Aristotle’s own approach to what later came to be called “metaphysics” is (“merely”) dialectical in this specific sense. In being so, it is essentially semantic and normative. I don’t think Aristotle regarded metaphysics as episteme (“science”) any more than he regarded ethics or phronesis (“practical judgment”) as episteme, and in neither case is it a denigration. (Aristotle is far more honest than most later writers about the relatively less certain nature of so-called first principles, compared with many other apparently more derivative results. He is the original antifoundationalist. See also Dialectic Bootstraps Itself; Demonstrative “Science”?; Abstract and Concrete.)

Hegel actually said the greatest example of ancient dialectic was the commentary on Plato’s Parmenides by neoplatonist Proclus (412 – 485 CE). (He did not know the work of the other great late Neoplatonist, Damascius (458 – 538), which included an even more sophisticated development along similar lines.) The Parmenides explicitly examines a series of antithetical propositions, which does resemble the common image of Hegelian dialectic. (See The One?) In any case, I think this is misleading.

While at least the common image of Hegelian dialectic as concerned with antitheses does not apply well to Aristotle, very fruitful clarifications of Hegel can be obtained by looking out for his use of Aristotelian-style dialectic, despite that fact he — general enthusiasm for Aristotle notwithstanding — did not much mention Aristotle when expounding his own version. Underlying the occasional emphasis on antitheses in Hegel is a broader concern for actually many-sided inferential/semantic examination of opinion or appearance, which is just what Aristotle’s dialectic does. (See also Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic; Three Logical Moments; Contradiction vs Polarity.)

My own candidate for the greatest example of ancient dialectic is the development of the concepts of ousia (“what it was to have been” a thing) and energeia (“at-work-ness”) in the central books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. As in the biological works, merely binary distinction is not the main point there.

The stereotype of a binary schematism at work in Hegel is not without basis, but more careful commentary has limited its scope. Aristotelian dialectic actually pervades Hegel’s works.

In a dialectical development (Aristotelian or Hegelian), it is common to begin with one presumed meaning for a term, and end up with a different one. The classic discussion in the Metaphysics mentioned above begins with the idea of a simple substrate that remains constant through a change, and goes through multiple transformations to progressively richer concepts. (See also Form, Substance; Aristotelian Demonstration.)

Aristotelian Semantics

When Aristotle talks about ways in which a word “is said” — which is one of the main things he does — it is not inappropriate to reconstruct this as a semantic concern. I would say the same about both Plato and Aristotle’s concern with definition and classification of terms. This is taking “semantics” in the broad sense of having to do with meaning.

For Aristotle and Plato, meanings are developed principally in terms of other meanings. Aristotle also pays a lot of attention to use. For neither of them is there any thought of reducing meaning to extensional criteria, as in modern model-theoretic semantics. Plato famously contrasted definition of “what” something is with enumeration of examples. Aristotle was interested in both, but respected the contrast.

Aristotle agrees with Frege that the minimal unit of truth or falsity is a complete proposition. (Medieval logicians working in a broadly Aristotelian tradition extended this to an elaborate theory of what they called “supposition” (see de Rijk, Logica Modernorum), which concerned meanings in the context of concretely uttered sentences. Various kinds of “supposition” — or ways in which a referential meaning can be logically intended — were analyzed, in a now forgotten technical vocabulary largely shared by realist and nominalist logicians.)

Aristotelian practical judgment (phronesis) is a kind of interpretation or hermeneutics of the implications of situations. Ultimately, I think Kantian judgment moves into the same territory. Judgment in general involves far more than mere assertion or belief. “Judgment” should refer first and foremost to a process, an investigation, and only very secondarily to a conclusion. All such processes are in principle open. The final word is never said.

For both Plato and Aristotle, implications and presuppositions uncovered in dialogue or many-sided monologue are more important in getting at meaning and truth than any referential pointing. Even medieval scholastics arguing for or against a proposition did this largely in terms of analyzing its implications and presuppositions.

I don’t think it’s possible to cleanly separate considerations of truth from considerations of meaning. Truth can only be apprehended in terms of some meaning. Much more interesting than the abstract question whether some proposition is true is insight into what is really being said. (See also Dialectic, Semantics; “Said of”; Aristotelian Propositions; Univocity; Agency; Inferential Semantics; Edifying Semantics.)