...Spinoza’s conception of God, which, because of its striking unusualness and, consequently, bound to elude popular comprehension, brought charges of atheism against him, is distinctly reminiscent of the authentic Jewish preoccupation with the Essence of God, which, in a previous entry, I called “a Journey into God’s Mind.” In his Ethica, he calls God “a thing that thinks, a being absolutely infinite, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses His eternal and infinite essence.”
I need to mention that calling God “a thing” means no disrespect. It is a philosophical term, foreshadowing Kant’s Ding an-Sich, where Ding, Thing, denotes something infinitely superior to anything that the popular sense may find behind this word.
Ethica starts off with the distinction of substance, attributes, and modes. Substance is something that can be conceived as existing in complete independence. It cannot be explained by anything else, it becomes its own cause, and it is necessarily in existence. Because of the specific way it has been defined, substance comes to be identified with God, but also with nature as a whole, hence the presumed slide toward “pantheism.”
Substance possesses an infinite number of attributes, defined by Spinoza as “what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.” Of these attributes, only thought and extension can be known to the human mind. “All things are alive,” Spinoza insists, which is a natural deduction from his basic premises.
Substance is diversified into an infinity of finite modes, human beings and all other discreet objects being of this nature. Modes are parts of the whole, and cannot be separated from it, thus, the human mind is part of God’s mind.
In this “shocking” exposition, I see “pantheism” as a trap word, which allows the know-it-all skeptic to nod, with a self-indulgent smile, as he is quick to understand what the normal implications are when a concept is identified with its denotate. However, considering God in the traditional sense of an Unknowable Being, as we should, there are also His Sefirot ranging, in terms of their proximity to the human mind, from the “also-unknowable,” to the knowable, and, with this in mind, Spinoza’s God, as Substance, may be identified with a reasonably knowable manifestation of the unknowable God. By the same token, Nature may not necessarily be identified with God in-toto, but only via this great proviso of Moses Cordovero, who lived a full century before Spinoza, and can be summoned here to put Spinoza’s alleged pantheism in proper perspective: “God is Everything, but Everything isn’t God.”
Substituting “Nature” for “Everything,” we can now arrive at this far more palatable “pseudo-pantheistic” formula: “God is Nature, but Nature isn’t God.”
I may be now contradicted in everything that I have said so far about Spinoza’s God, that Spinoza himself has famously denied his God transcendence, to which I stubbornly reply that, as far as I am concerned, the question here concerns not the Unknowable God, but only His manifestations. Furthermore, even I myself would not dare to call the Unknowable God “transcendent,” because knowing even this much/little about the Unknowable, makes it partially knowable, and therefore, creates a contradiction in terms. Thus denying the fact of God’s transcendence, on Spinoza’s part, can be logically reduced to denying the possession of such positive knowledge of the Unknowable God.
On the other hand, allowing the quality of immanence (as opposed to transcendence) to God, means, in the honorable Kabalistic tradition of Gvul, etc., not restricting God’s power to the sphere of the transcendent only. By the same token, his denial of free will to God (see my discussion of free will as a curse of man), as well as his “banishing of good and evil to the realm of human imagination” (note my treatment of ‘evil’ as a necessary and sufficient temporal consequence of free will), are merely removing certain restrictions on the power of God. In Nietzsche’s words, from Genealogie II (15), Spinoza “defended the honor of his free God against those blasphemers who asserted that God effected all things sub ratione boni (for a good reason) --- ‘but that would mean making God subject to fate and would surely be the greatest of all absurdities.’”
(Approaching this from a slightly different angle, one might ask, how come, that man, made in the image of God, possesses certain qualities, like free will, in which God Himself is deficient? True, indeed, that God is not in possession of a number of qualities implanted in man, but not on account of some deficiency in His powers, as much as on the grounds of their logical impossibility. The missing qualities are all qualities that characterize dependence. Thus, being independent, God cannot possess the quality of being dependent. As The First Cause, he cannot be an effect. Being the Creator of All, he cannot be a creature. Free will is one of the qualities of a creature, ergo God cannot have free will. Using the same line of reasoning, being the Creator of evil (see Isaiah 45:7), God cannot Himself possess the quality of evil (which I define as making a wrong choice in one’s exercise of free will). On the other hand, no natural disaster, resulting in a tragedy, which we call a Force Majeure, or an Act of God, can be called ‘evil,’ as Nature does not possess free will, and cannot make choices, this quality being restricted to man alone. For more on this particular subject, see my entry Creator And The Creature in the Philosophy section.)
To wrap this up, I do not insist, mind you, that Spinoza’s actual background thinking was precisely along the lines of my interpretation. But if this is not what he may have had in mind, that, in my opinion, would have put him in error.
And now, a final note to what could be an endless discussion.
When I started reading Spinoza’s Ethica for the first time many years ago, I found his ‘geometric’ style at the same time funny and irritating, as if he were artificially dressing up his greatest opus as a participant in a masked ball, where the participants’ identities could never be figured out without tearing off their masks first. The fact that his annoying style ought to be taken as something superficial, while the ‘essence’ of his thinking needed to be considered on its own merit, was confirmed by Nietzsche’s attitude, as he is hardly a wholesale admirer of everything belonging sub specie Spinozae (spoof of Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis in The Antichrist 17), as he ridicules “the hocus-pocus of mathematical form, with which Spinoza clad his philosophy, really “the love of his wisdom,” in mail and mask, to strike terror into the heart of assailants,” which Nietzsche attributes to the “personal timidity and vulnerability of a sick hermit.” (Jenseits 5.)
The masquerade, however, was not entirely a hocus-pocus on Spinoza’s part, but, perhaps, a matter of some principle. He was, alas, too unhappy with the much lighter and livelier style of the presentation in his pre-Ethica works, and decided to adopt the style of Euclid’s Elements, Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, as he has chosen to subtitle his Ethica. Well, each genius has his own foibles, which should not bring him down, just as the adoption of a pleasant writing style does not elevate a mediocrity to the unattainable heights of a genius.
But, whether or not he wished to appear impersonal to the maximum, his appeal to geometry does appeal to me, especially now that I have developed the concept of God by Postulate where geometry is always a most welcome guest, maybe not in form, but definitely in spirit!
Come to think of it, Spinoza, like Nietzsche, is a kindred spirit to me, if not in his manner of writing, still in more ways than one.
I need to mention that calling God “a thing” means no disrespect. It is a philosophical term, foreshadowing Kant’s Ding an-Sich, where Ding, Thing, denotes something infinitely superior to anything that the popular sense may find behind this word.
Ethica starts off with the distinction of substance, attributes, and modes. Substance is something that can be conceived as existing in complete independence. It cannot be explained by anything else, it becomes its own cause, and it is necessarily in existence. Because of the specific way it has been defined, substance comes to be identified with God, but also with nature as a whole, hence the presumed slide toward “pantheism.”
Substance possesses an infinite number of attributes, defined by Spinoza as “what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.” Of these attributes, only thought and extension can be known to the human mind. “All things are alive,” Spinoza insists, which is a natural deduction from his basic premises.
Substance is diversified into an infinity of finite modes, human beings and all other discreet objects being of this nature. Modes are parts of the whole, and cannot be separated from it, thus, the human mind is part of God’s mind.
In this “shocking” exposition, I see “pantheism” as a trap word, which allows the know-it-all skeptic to nod, with a self-indulgent smile, as he is quick to understand what the normal implications are when a concept is identified with its denotate. However, considering God in the traditional sense of an Unknowable Being, as we should, there are also His Sefirot ranging, in terms of their proximity to the human mind, from the “also-unknowable,” to the knowable, and, with this in mind, Spinoza’s God, as Substance, may be identified with a reasonably knowable manifestation of the unknowable God. By the same token, Nature may not necessarily be identified with God in-toto, but only via this great proviso of Moses Cordovero, who lived a full century before Spinoza, and can be summoned here to put Spinoza’s alleged pantheism in proper perspective: “God is Everything, but Everything isn’t God.”
Substituting “Nature” for “Everything,” we can now arrive at this far more palatable “pseudo-pantheistic” formula: “God is Nature, but Nature isn’t God.”
I may be now contradicted in everything that I have said so far about Spinoza’s God, that Spinoza himself has famously denied his God transcendence, to which I stubbornly reply that, as far as I am concerned, the question here concerns not the Unknowable God, but only His manifestations. Furthermore, even I myself would not dare to call the Unknowable God “transcendent,” because knowing even this much/little about the Unknowable, makes it partially knowable, and therefore, creates a contradiction in terms. Thus denying the fact of God’s transcendence, on Spinoza’s part, can be logically reduced to denying the possession of such positive knowledge of the Unknowable God.
On the other hand, allowing the quality of immanence (as opposed to transcendence) to God, means, in the honorable Kabalistic tradition of Gvul, etc., not restricting God’s power to the sphere of the transcendent only. By the same token, his denial of free will to God (see my discussion of free will as a curse of man), as well as his “banishing of good and evil to the realm of human imagination” (note my treatment of ‘evil’ as a necessary and sufficient temporal consequence of free will), are merely removing certain restrictions on the power of God. In Nietzsche’s words, from Genealogie II (15), Spinoza “defended the honor of his free God against those blasphemers who asserted that God effected all things sub ratione boni (for a good reason) --- ‘but that would mean making God subject to fate and would surely be the greatest of all absurdities.’”
(Approaching this from a slightly different angle, one might ask, how come, that man, made in the image of God, possesses certain qualities, like free will, in which God Himself is deficient? True, indeed, that God is not in possession of a number of qualities implanted in man, but not on account of some deficiency in His powers, as much as on the grounds of their logical impossibility. The missing qualities are all qualities that characterize dependence. Thus, being independent, God cannot possess the quality of being dependent. As The First Cause, he cannot be an effect. Being the Creator of All, he cannot be a creature. Free will is one of the qualities of a creature, ergo God cannot have free will. Using the same line of reasoning, being the Creator of evil (see Isaiah 45:7), God cannot Himself possess the quality of evil (which I define as making a wrong choice in one’s exercise of free will). On the other hand, no natural disaster, resulting in a tragedy, which we call a Force Majeure, or an Act of God, can be called ‘evil,’ as Nature does not possess free will, and cannot make choices, this quality being restricted to man alone. For more on this particular subject, see my entry Creator And The Creature in the Philosophy section.)
To wrap this up, I do not insist, mind you, that Spinoza’s actual background thinking was precisely along the lines of my interpretation. But if this is not what he may have had in mind, that, in my opinion, would have put him in error.
And now, a final note to what could be an endless discussion.
When I started reading Spinoza’s Ethica for the first time many years ago, I found his ‘geometric’ style at the same time funny and irritating, as if he were artificially dressing up his greatest opus as a participant in a masked ball, where the participants’ identities could never be figured out without tearing off their masks first. The fact that his annoying style ought to be taken as something superficial, while the ‘essence’ of his thinking needed to be considered on its own merit, was confirmed by Nietzsche’s attitude, as he is hardly a wholesale admirer of everything belonging sub specie Spinozae (spoof of Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis in The Antichrist 17), as he ridicules “the hocus-pocus of mathematical form, with which Spinoza clad his philosophy, really “the love of his wisdom,” in mail and mask, to strike terror into the heart of assailants,” which Nietzsche attributes to the “personal timidity and vulnerability of a sick hermit.” (Jenseits 5.)
The masquerade, however, was not entirely a hocus-pocus on Spinoza’s part, but, perhaps, a matter of some principle. He was, alas, too unhappy with the much lighter and livelier style of the presentation in his pre-Ethica works, and decided to adopt the style of Euclid’s Elements, Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, as he has chosen to subtitle his Ethica. Well, each genius has his own foibles, which should not bring him down, just as the adoption of a pleasant writing style does not elevate a mediocrity to the unattainable heights of a genius.
But, whether or not he wished to appear impersonal to the maximum, his appeal to geometry does appeal to me, especially now that I have developed the concept of God by Postulate where geometry is always a most welcome guest, maybe not in form, but definitely in spirit!
Come to think of it, Spinoza, like Nietzsche, is a kindred spirit to me, if not in his manner of writing, still in more ways than one.
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