Discuss the dualism of Descartes' - parallelism, epiphenomenalism
The basic assumption of philosophy / rationalism:
Reality || Rationality
While this may, in Spinoza, lead to absurd consequences - we need to be aware of
a) how this rationalist tradition reaches back to the very beginnings of Western philosophy /science
b) how this argumentum ad absurdum - i.e., Spinoza's taking a philosophical set of presuppositions to their logical conclusion, which seems radically counterintuitive, helps in the longer run of the history of philosophy to develop a larger tradition (including how all this intersects in Kant), and
c) how his rationalist account of one substance, etc. - while counterintuitive - nonetheless offers interesting parallels with contemporary Quantum Mechanics.
Day Two:
Issue of Spinoza forbidding equivocation regarding the definition of substance.
If he's correct - that substance can have one and only one meaning, and
if terms can be only either univocal or equivocal
then the rest of his argument follows. In particular, one cannot consistently distinguish between
a "finite" substance and an "infinite" substance - for this is equivocate between how substance is used in each case -
and equivocation can only lead to nonsense (according to not only Spinoza but all the moderns since Scotus). (cf. Jones, 199f.; 201 - the passage re "Dog" as (a) the heavenly constellation and (b) the animal)
Nota bene: this insistence on either univocal or equivocal terms
a) runs counter to the Medieval and Ancient traditions --> Aristotle, "Being is said in many ways," and the doctrine of analogical equivocals
b) runs counter to Kant's resolution of the conflict between idealism and empiricism - a resolution which turns in part on his recovering the Ancient and Medieval doctrine of analogical equivocation.
There can be only one substance - this substance is the totality of everything that is.
Assume: either there is one substance or many
Assume: the second alternative
If there were a plurality - then there would not be one universe, but several.
But this is clearly absurd,
Therefore, the first alternative - there is but one substance - must be true.
(cf. Jones, 200)
This is a deductively valid argument -
and because Spinoza assumes that Reality is coextensive with Reason - as reflected primarily in a system of deductive-related views -
to deduce a conclusion from (ostensibly) valid premises is to thereby at once to discover something about Reality.
Similarly:
According to Spinoza's view of the nature of knowledge,to understand anything is to be able to deduce it from something else, and in order to be deduced, the thing in question must stand in an implicatory relation to that other thing. Hence
either several allegedly independent substances are implicatorily related (in which case they are not independent substances)
or the universe contains entities that are in principle incomprehensible.
Since this second alternative conflicted with one of Spinoza's deepest convictions, he concluded that nothing, except the one whole, stands alone, and that this whole is a single implicatorily related system. (Jones, 200)
[To identify God with the system of implicatorily related truths may seem odd - but only from the standpoint of a religious view that sees God as transcendent, personal, and creative. The identification Spinoza makes between "God" and the comprehensive system of deductive truths knowable by the mind, as Jones points out, is older than Plato - and, I would add, central in the development of Western science and philosophy]
The truth, [Spinoza] would have said, is what it is. It is unfortunate if the truth fails to satisfy the ordinary man's religious needs, but that cannot be helped. Metaphysics is the attempt to ascertain the truth about reality. It is not designed to comfort the ignorant or to assuage the fears of the superstious, and its should not be judged by such emotional criteria. (Jones 202)
God as free, as unlimited by anything "outside" (because there "is" nothing "outside")
Everything that is not God is an attribute or a mode of God - because everything must exist as a property of God as the one substance.
By introducing the notion of mind and body as attributes of the same substance - Spinoza allows for a difference between the two, but it is a difference which is more like the difference between two difference languages which refer to the same reality - rather than the substantive difference between mind and body we see in Descartes. (Jones 203-6)
Notice that this means that perception is always inadequate (see Jones206f.);
for that, physics does not face the problem it faces in Descartes' dualism (and elsewhere) i.e., why should mathematics work? The real is assumed to be co-extensive with the rational - and thus the logical/mathematical.
BUT this further means that the perception of individual differences - especially if taken to be substantive differences - is illusory (208f.)
Psychology:
body is a finite mode of God under the attribute of extension;
mind is a finite mode of God under the attribute of thought
There is a general correspondance - but ideas have one property bodies lack: Ideas are reflexive - one can have an idea of a body, and an idea of an idea - but one cannot have a body of a body. This "reflexive" power is what makes knowledge, science, and philosophy possible.
Moreover, given the correlation between the Rational and the Real - to understand the necessary connections between bodily modes is to be this interconnection:
Insofar as I really understand the interrelations in which my body stands to other bodies, my mind is enlarged; it loses the limitations that made it uniquely mine. (210)
But this identification leads to the final point:
...personal uniqueness is an illusion. One's sense of uniqueness is - sense; it is confused thinking. At the level of perception (that is, in introspection), each of us feels himself to be a distinct individual; at the level of thought, each of us knows himself to be all the others.
Thus Spinoza's analysis of the nature of knowledge led him to a conclusion about the human mind that corresponded exactly with the conclusion he had already reached, as a result of his analysis of the nature of extension, about the human being. Being exactly parallel aspects, what is true of the one must be true of the other. Neither a man's body nor his mind is the autonmous, indpendent entity that it seems to be; each is only a finite mode, the one of the attribute of extension, the other of the attribute of thought. (211)
This does not mean, however, that "all distinctions fade into nothingness."
On the other hand, "will" is an illusion: both mind and body are caught in a nexus of necessary cause-effect/implication relationships.
Ethics
a personal Deity is gone, as is personal freedom - how can there be an ethics?
There is the drive to know God:
Prop. XXVIII. The mind's highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind's highest virtue is to know God.
Proof. - The mind is not capable of understanding anything higher than God, that is (I. Def. vi.), than a Being absolutely infinite, and without which (I.xv.) nothing can either be or be conceived; therefore (IV.xxvi. and xxvii.), the mind's highest ... good is the knowledge of God. Again, the mind is active, only in so far as it understands, and only to the same extent can it be said absolutely to act virtuously. The mind's absolute virtue is therefore to understand. Now, as we have already shown, the highest that the mind can understand is God; therefore the highest virtue of the mind is to understand or to know God. Q.E.D.
The "intellectual love of God" thus issues in an ethics (see. 214f.) - one (not surprisingly) Stoic in character: happiness = the tranquility which comes from recognizing that things occur through necessity, a recognition that comes, finally, from the holistic/intuitive grasp of all that is as one system of necessarily interconnected elements/truth. (Cf. Buddhism?)
This further leads to moving out from individual desire, beyond the vagaries of the passions (215f.)
Estimate
Several strands come together here - rationalis/naturalism/determinism/mysticism. But not without difficulties - i.e., the fundamental contradiction we have seen marking all fully deterministic systems (e.g., Hobbes): if all things are determined, then why does it seem we have a choice in which theory we pursue?