The Philosophy Book

by DK Publishing

  Spinoza employs “substance” in a similar way, defining it as that which is self-explanatory—or that which can be understood by knowing its nature alone, as opposed to all other things that can be known only by their relationships with other things. For example, the concept “cart” can only be understood with reference to other concepts, such as “motion”, “transport”, and so on. Moreover, for Spinoza, there can only be one such substance, for if there were two, understanding one would entail understanding its relationship with the other, which contradicts the definition of substance. Furthermore, he argues, since there is only one such substance, there can, in fact, be nothing but that substance, and everything else is in some sense a part of it. Spinoza’s position is known as “substance monism”, which claims that all things are ultimately aspects of a single thing, as opposed to “substance dualism”, which claims that there are ultimately two kinds of things in the universe, most commonly defined as “mind” and “matter.”

  Substance as God or nature

  For Spinoza, then, substance underlies our experience, but it can also be known by its various attributes. He does not specify how many attributes substance has, but he says that human beings, at least, can conceive of two—namely, the attribute of extension (physicality) and the attribute of thought (mentality). For this reason, Spinoza is also known as an “attribute dualist”, and he claims that these two attributes cannot be explained by each other, and so must be included in any complete account of the world. As for substance itself, Spinoza says that we are right to call it “God” or “nature” (Deus sive natura)—that self-explaining thing which, in human form, sees itself under the attributes of body and mind.

  At the level of individual things, including human beings, Spinoza’s attribute dualism is intended in part to deal with the question of how minds and bodies interact. The things that we experience as individual bodies or minds are in fact modifications of the single substance as conceived under one of the attributes. Each modification is both a physical thing (in so far as it is conceived under the attribute of extension) and a mental thing (in so far as it is conceived under the attribute of thought). In particular, a human mind is a modification of substance conceived under the attribute of thought, and the human brain is the same modification of substance conceived under the attribute of extension. In this way, Spinoza avoids any question about the interaction between mind and body: there is no interaction, only a one-to-one correspondence.

  However, Spinoza’s theory commits him to the view that it is not only human beings that are minds as well as bodies, but everything else too. Tables, rocks, trees—all of these are modifications of the one substance under the attributes of thought and extension. So, they are all both physical and mental things, although their mentality is very simple and they are not what we should call minds. This aspect of Spinoza’s theory is difficult for many people either to accept or to understand.

  All changes, from a change of mood to a change in a candle’s shape, are, for Spinoza, alterations that occur to a single substance that has both mental and physical attributes.

  The world is God

  Spinoza’s theory, which he explains fully in Ethics, is often referred to as a form of pantheism—the belief that God is the world, and that the world is God. Pantheism is often criticized by theists (people who believe in God), who argue that it is little more than atheism by another name. However, Spinoza’s theory is in fact much closer to panentheism—the view that the world is God, but that God is more than the world. For in Spinoza’s system, the world is not a mass of material and mental stuff—rather, the world of material things is a form of God as conceived under the attribute of extension, and the world of mental things is that same form of God as conceived under the attribute of thought. Therefore the one substance or God is more than the world, but the world itself is entirely substance or God.

  However, Spinoza’s God is clearly different from the God of standard Judaeo-Christian theology. Not only is it not a person, it cannot be regarded as being the creator of the world in the sense found in the Book of Genesis. Spinoza’s God does not exist alone before creation, and then bring it into existence.

  "Mind and body are one."

  Benedictus Spinoza

  God as the cause

  What can Spinoza mean, then, when he says that God is the cause of everything? The one substance is “God or nature”—so even if there is more to God than those modifications of substance that make up our world, how can the relationship between God and nature be causal?

  First, we should note that Spinoza, in common with most philosophers before him, uses the word “cause” in a much richer sense than we do now—a sense that originates in Aristotle’s definition of four types of cause. These are (using a statue as an example): a formal cause, or the relationship between a thing’s parts (its shape or form); a material cause, or the matter a thing is made of (the bronze, marble, and so on); an efficient cause, or that which brings a thing into being (the sculpting process); and a final cause, or the purpose for which a thing exists (the creation of a work of art, the desire for money, and so on).

  For Aristotle and Spinoza, these together define “cause”, and provide a complete explanation of a thing—unlike today’s usage, which tends to relate to the “efficient” or “final” causes only. Therefore, when Spinoza speaks of God or substance being “self-caused” he means that it is self-explanatory, rather than that it is simply self-generating. When he talks of God being the cause of all things, he means that all things find their explanation in God.

  God, therefore, is not what Spinoza calls a “transitive” cause of the world—something external that brings the world into being. Rather, God is the “immanent” cause of the world. This means that God is in the world, that the world is in God, and that the existence and essence of the world are explained by God’s existence and essence. For Spinoza, to fully appreciate this fact is to attain the highest state of freedom and salvation possible—a state he calls “blessedness.”

  "The human mind is part of the infinite intellect of God."

  Benedictus Spinoza

  According to Spinoza, all objects, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, have a mentality. Both their bodies and their mentalities are a part of God, who is greater than all the world’s physical and mental attributes. God, for Spinoza, is the “substance” that underlies reality.

  BENEDICTUS SPINOZA

  Benedictus (or Baruch) Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1632. At the age of 23 he was excommunicated by the synagogue of Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam, who probably wished to distance themselves from Spinoza’s teachings. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise was later attacked by Christian theologians and banned in 1674—a fate that had already befallen the work of the French philosopher René Descartes. The furore caused him to withhold publication of his greatest work, the Ethics, until after his death.

  Spinoza was a modest, intensely moral man who turned down numerous lucrative teaching positions for the sake of his intellectual freedom. Instead he lived a frugal life in various places in the Netherlands, making a living by private philosophy teaching and as a lens grinder. He died from tuberculosis in 1677.

  Key works

  1670 Theological-Political Treatise

  1677 Ethics

  See also: Aristotle • Moses Maimonides • René Descartes • Donald Davidson

  IN CONTEXT

  BRANCH

  Epistemology

  APPROACH

  Empiricism

  BEFORE

  c.380
BCE In his dialogue, Meno, Plato argues that we remember knowledge from previous lives.

  Mid-13th century Thomas Aquinas puts forward the principle that “whatever is in our intellect must have previously been in the senses.”

  AFTER

  Late 17th century Gottfried Leibniz argues that the mind may seem to be a tabula rasa at birth, but contains innate, underlying knowledge, which experience gradually uncovers.

  1966 Noam Chomsky, in Cartesian Linguistics, sets out his theory of innate grammar.

  John Locke is traditionally included in the group of philosophers known as the British Empiricists, together with two later philosophers, George Berkeley and David Hume. The empiricists are generally thought to hold the view that all human knowledge must come directly or indirectly from the experience of the world that we acquire through the use of our senses alone. This contrasts with the thinking of the rationalist philosophers, such as René Descartes, Benedictus Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, who hold that in principle, at least, it is possible to acquire knowledge solely through the use of reason.

  In fact, the division between these two groups is not as clear-cut as is often assumed. The rationalists all accept that in practice our knowledge of the world ultimately stems from our experience, and most notably from scientific enquiry. Locke reaches his distinctive views concerning the nature of the world by applying a process of reasoning later known as abduction (inference to the best explanation from the available evidence) to the facts of sensory experience. For example, Locke sets out to demonstrate that the best explanation of the world as we experience it is corpuscular theory. This is the theory that everything in the world is made up of submicroscopic particles, or corpuscles, which we can have no direct knowledge of, but which, by their very existence, make sense of phenomena that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to explain. Corpuscular theory was becoming popular in 17th-century scientific thinking and is fundamental to Locke’s view of the physical world.

  Innate ideas

  The claim that man’s knowledge cannot go beyond his experience may therefore seem inappropriate, or at least an exaggeration, when attributed to Locke. However, Locke does argue at some length, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, against the theory proposed by the rationalists to explain how knowledge could be accessed without experience. This is the theory of innate ideas.

  The concept that human beings are born with innate ideas, and that these can give us knowledge about the nature of the world around us, independently of anything we may experience, dates back to the dawn of philosophy. Plato had developed a concept, according to which all genuine knowledge is essentially located within us, but that when we die our souls are reincarnated into new bodies and the shock of birth causes us to forget it all. Education is therefore not about learning new facts, but about “unforgetting”, and the educator is not a teacher but a midwife.

  However, many later thinkers countered Plato’s theory, proposing that all knowledge cannot be innate and that only a limited number of concepts can be. These include the concept of God and also that of a perfect geometric structure, such as an equilateral triangle. This type of knowledge, in their view, can be gained without any direct sensory experience, in the way that it is possible to devise a mathematical formula by using nothing more than the powers of reason and logic. René Descartes, for example, declares that although he believes that we all have an idea of God imprinted in us—like the mark that a craftsman makes in the clay of a pot—this knowledge of God’s existence can only be brought into our conscious mind through a process of reasoning.

  "If we attentively consider newborn children, we shall have little reason to think that they bring many ideas into the world with them."

  John Locke

  Locke’s objections

  Locke was against the idea that human beings possess any kind of innate knowledge. He takes the view that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa—a blank tablet or a new sheet of paper upon which experience writes, in the same way that light can create images on photographic film. According to Locke, we bring nothing to the process except the basic human ability to apply reason to the information that we gather through our senses. He argues that there is not the slightest empirical evidence to suggest that the minds of infants are other than blank at birth, and adds that this is also true of the minds of the mentally deficient, stating that “they have not the least apprehension or thought of them.” Locke, therefore, declares that any doctrine supporting the existence of innate ideas must be false.

  Locke also goes on to attack the very notion of innate ideas by arguing that it is incoherent. In order for something to be an idea at all, he states that it has to have been present at some point in somebody’s mind. But, as Locke points out, any idea that claims to be truly innate must also be claiming to precede any form of human experience. Locke accepts that it is true, as Gottfried Leibniz states, that an idea may exist so deep in a person’s memory that for a time it is difficult or even impossible to recall, and so is not accessible to the conscious mind. Innate ideas, on the other hand, are believed to somehow exist somewhere, before the presence of any sort of mechanism that is capable of conceiving them and bringing them into consciousness.

  The supporters of the existence of innate ideas often also argue that as such ideas are present in all human beings at birth, they must be by nature universal, which means that they are found in all human societies at all points in history. Plato, for example, claims that everyone potentially has access to the same basic body of knowledge, denying any difference in that respect between men and women, or between slaves and freemen. Similarly, in Locke’s time, the theory was frequently put forward that because innate ideas can only be placed in us by God, they must be universal, as God is not capable of being so unfair as to hand them out only to a select group of people.

  Locke counters the argument for universal ideas by once again bringing to our attention that a simple examination of the world around us will readily show that they do not exist. Even if there were concepts, or ideas, which absolutely every human being in the world held in common, Locke argues that we would have no firm grounds for concluding that they were also innate. He declares that it would always be possible to discover other explanations for their universality, such as the fact that they stem from the most basic ways in which a human being experiences the world around him, which is something that we all must share.

  In 1704, Gottfried Leibniz wrote a rebuttal of Locke’s empiricist arguments in his New Essays on the Human Understanding. Leibniz declares that innate ideas are the one clear way that we can gain knowledge that is not based upon sensory experience, and that Locke is wrong to deny their possibility. The debate about whether human beings can know anything beyond what they perceive through their five basic senses continues.

  Locke believed the human mind is like a blank canvas, or tabula rasa, at birth. He states that all our knowledge of the world can only come from our experience, conveyed to us by our senses. We can then rationalize this knowledge to formulate new ideas.

  "It seems to me a near contradiction to say that there are truths imprinted on the soul, which it perceives or understands not."

  John Locke

  Language as innate

  Although Locke may reject the doctrine of innate ideas, he does not reject the concept that human beings have innate capacities. Indeed, the possession of capacities such as perception and reasoning are central to his accounts of the mechanism of human knowledge and understanding. In the late 20th century, the American philosophy Noam C
homsky took this idea further when he put forward his theory that there is an innate process of thinking in every human mind, which is capable of generating a universal “deep structure” of language. Chomsky believes that regardless of their apparent structural differences, all human languages have been generated from this common basis.

  Locke played an important role in questioning how human beings acquire knowledge, at a time when man’s understanding of the world was expanding at an unprecedented rate. Earlier philosophers—notably the medieval Scholastic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas—had concluded that some aspects of reality were beyond the grasp of the human mind. But Locke took this a stage further. By detailed analysis of man’s mental faculties, he sought to set down the exact limits of what is knowable.