The Materialism of Spinoza’s God and Nature
By: Andrew Thornebrooke
Tags: Philosophy, History, Education, Thornebrooke, Life

In his magnum opus, Ethica, Baruch Spinoza argued that substance must be that which is both within itself and also conceived through itself. By this it is understood that substance can only be that which is both self-contained and also responsible for its own creation, preceded by nothing and dependent upon nothing save itself for its own existence. And this, my friends, is where things begin to get really interesting.

In contrast, Modes, are those things that are within something else and also created through the power of something else. As such, Spinoza defines modes as being mere “affections of substance,” due to the fact that their existence is caused by something which is outside of themselves, thus limiting their essence (or nature) to that which they are conceived through.

Following these ideas with the proclamation that “nothing exists except substance and modes,” Spinoza promulgated that God must be substance itself, with an infinite number of attributes, which might be best described as conceptual modes, each of which describe a particular element of the essence of God (e.g., intellect, physics, etc…). Concerning this, he wrote, “By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” This thought is perhaps made more clear with the addition that attributes, in and of themselves, are merely the myriad ways in which the essence of God can perceived by the human intellect. God, for Spinoza, was that which is caused by itself and held within itself, and whose essence may be perceived by the intellect in an infinite number of ways.

Building on this definition of God, Spinoza posits in his fifteenth proposition that there can be only one god by arguing that the existence of multiple gods would require the gods to be in some way distinguishable from one another.

The possibility of this distinction is, however, impossible; as Spinoza’s fifth and eleventh propositions state that it would require the gods to have different attributes or modes from one another in order to be regarded as being separated, and if God has an infinite number of attributes which all stem out from it, there can be no god that has an attribute that God does not already have. God also must be infinite, as nothing but God can cause itself to exist or to not exist, so God alone contains the possibility to conceive of all things, and thus possesses an infinite nature. Furthermore, the requisite notion that a god can only exist through virtue of itself makes it also impossible for any god to owe its being to another.

Having then proved the existence of a the singular and infinite God, or substance, Spinoza’s fifteenth proposition maintains that all that exists is within God and that nothing can exist or be conceived without God. This idea follows the premise of a singular god quite easily when given Spinoza’s first definition: that God’s essence can be conceived of only as existing. The axiom of God’s existence being equated to its essence is proven by the fact that God is self-caused, and as a self-caused substance (being necessarily the only one of its kind), all that is not God must be, by definition, modes.

Hence all other things being modes, or affections of God, all things depend upon God as their cause and reside within it, as to distinguish among affections would be but to merely discern between the apparent separateness of things which are all part of a one infinite God.

As a whole, Spinoza’s argument for a one infinite God which conceives all things is logically, or at least semantically, sound. However, problems arise when notions concerning the essence of any given thing are more closely examined. Particularly in regards to the concept of the attribute.

For example, if we take the following premises of Spinoza to be true:

A) that what is known of God’s essence is its existence

B) that all attributes are perceptions of God’s essence

C) that all modes are conceived either by another modal thing or by God itself, and

D) that a mode can only perceive of something through that by which it was conceived,

then we may effectively argue that the only knowable thing concerning the essence of God, or of anything at all, is that it merely exists. This being true if all things must be understood through that which they were conceived, and all things, being conceived by God, we may only understand the essence of individual things as we understand the essence of God.

The solution to this problem may lie in a less immaterial understanding of essence than is generally attributed to Spinoza. Indeed, if we were to interpret Spinoza’s Ethica from a purely materialist standpoint, the idea of essence equating to nothing more than material existence would cause no dissonance to our conceptions of Spinoza’s other thoughts concerning the derivative nature of all things from God.

In fact, Spinoza states that “…matter is everywhere the same, and there are no distinct parts in it except insofar as we conceive matter as modified in various ways. Then it’s parts are distinct, not really but only modally.”

In other words, if there can be only one substance (i.e., God) which is indivisible, and of which any division is merely a perception of the intellect (i.e., an attribute), and all such perceptions are not true distinctions but only modal appearances (i.e., modes), and matter is an indivisible whole: it follows that matter itself is, for Spinoza, God.

In conclusion, Spinoza’s promulgations concerning the infinite nature of God and the dependence of all other things upon it can be seen to hold up to scrutiny, and may in fact even suggest a material understanding of God. Indeed, if God is matter, then God is precisely just that which exists as perceived by our thought and extensions: the whole of everything as we can understand it, divided up only superficially by our imposed taxonomies.

Good grief.

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