Kinkatso & Co.: THE EXISTENCE OF ETERNITY or THE ETERNAL AND INFINITE ESSENCE

THE EXISTENCE OF ETERNITY or THE ETERNAL AND INFINITE ESSENCE

On reading an interesting book by Rachel Kadish (The Weight of Ink), I was once again attracted by Spinoza's philosophy. So, I quickly browsed through an article by Roger Scruton in order to refresh my memory on Spinoza's writings relating to God and His attributes. Here it is, slightly abridged (and, at bottom of page, a summary in Italian)...

GOD

The first part of Spinoza's Ethics is devoted to two major questions: why does anything exist? and how is the world composed? Spinoza, like many of his forerunners, was convinced that the Universe lacks an explanation unless there is something which is cause of itself – that is, whose nature it is to exist. The explanation of such a thing will be found within itself: it has to exist, otherwise it would be in violation of its own definition. This thing that exists necessarily and by its very nature has traditionally been called God, and the first part of the Ethics is duly entitled "On God". Here, simplifying somewhat, are the definitions with which it begins:

D1: By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.

D2: That thing is said to be finite in its own kind that can be limited by another of the same nature.

D3: By substance I understand what is in itself and conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.

D4: By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence.

D5: By mode I understand the modifications (affectiones) of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived.

D6: By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, each of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence.

D7: That thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined to act by itself alone. But a thing is called necessary, or rather compelled, which is determined by another to exist and to produce an effect in a certain and determinate manner.

D8: By eternity I understand existence itself, insofar as it is conceived to follow necessarily from the definition of the eternal thing.

Seldom has a great work of philosophy begun so forbiddingly. Already a large part of Spinoza's world-view has been suggested by these eight definitions, and much of the difficulty of the Ethics lies in deciphering them.

The first definition is taken from Moses Maimonides, a twelfth-century Jewish thinker who was one of the greatest influences on medieval philosophy. As I remarked previously, it seemed to Spinoza that there could be an answer to the riddle of existence only if there were a being whose very nature it is to exist, a being whose existence would be self-explanatory. Such a being must be self-produced, or "cause of itself". Hence the definition.

From the same repertoire of theological ideas comes Spinoza's distinction between the finite and the infinite. Finite things, he believes, have limits – whether in space or time or thought. And a thing with limits is limited by something: a larger or greater or more long-lasting thing can always be conceived. Not everything can be compared with (and therefore limited by) everything else. A great elephant is not larger or smaller than a great thought. In general, physical things (bodies) are limited by physical things, and mental things (ideas) by mental things. Hence the expression "finite in its own kind".

The third definition introduces the pivotal concept of Spinoza's philosophy – the concept on which his metaphysical arguments turn. The term "substance" was one of the technicalities of seventeenth-century philosophy. But each thinker had his own way of using it. According to Spinoza, reality divides into those things that depend upon, or are explained through, other things, and those things that depend upon nothing but themselves. Thus the child derives from its parents, who in turn derive from their parents, who in turn... The chain of human reproduction is a chain of dependent beings. These are not substances, since form a true conception of their nature (an explanation of what and why they are) we must conceive them in terms of their causes. "Substance" is the term Spinoza reserves for the things in which all else inheres or upon which all else depends. Substances are conceived not through their causes, but through themselves. Lesser, dependent, beings are "modes" of substances. In Definition 5 he calls these lesser things "affectiones" – a Latin technicality, meaning, roughly, "ways in which substances are affected", as a piece of wood is affected by being painted red or a chair by being broken. (If a chair were a substance, then its being broken would be a mode of the chair. But we can already see that, by the definition, nothing so humble and contingent as a chair could be a substance.)

Definition 4 is fraught with controversy. Roughly speaking, here is what Spinoza had in mind. Roughly speaking, here is what Spinoza had in mind. When we understand or explain a substance, it is through knowledge of its essential nature. But there may be more than one way of "perceiving" this essential nature. Imagine two people looking at a picture painted on a board, one an optician, the other a critic. And suppose you ask them to describe what they see. The optician arranges the picture on two axes, and describes it thus: "At x = 4, y = 5.2, there is a patch of chrome yellow; this continues along the horizontal axis until x = 5.1, when it changes to Prussian blue." The critic says: "It is a man in a yellow coat, with a lowering expression, and steely blue eyes." You could imagine these descriptions being complete – so complete that they would enable a third party to reconstruct the picture by using them as a set of instructions. But they have nothing whatever in common. One is about colours arranged on a matrix, the other about the scene that we see in them. You cannot switch from one narrative to the other and still make sense: the man is not standing next to a patch of Prussian blue, but next to the shadow of an oak tree. The Prussian blue is not situated next to a coat sleeve, but next to a patch of chrome yellow. In other words, the two descriptions are incommensurate: no fragment of the one can appear in the midst of the other without making nonsense. Yet neither description misses out any feature that is mentioned in the other. This is something like what Spinoza had in mind with his concept of an attribute: a complete account of a substance, which does not rule out other, and incommensurate, accounts of the very same thing.

Spinoza's sixth definition introduces the "God of the philosophers": the God familiar from countless works of ancient and medieval theology, who is distinguished from all lesser things by the completeness and fullness of his being. He contains "an infinity of attributes" – in other words, infinitely many accounts can be given of him, each of which conveys an infinite and eternal essence. The idea of the eternal is explained in the final definition, where, in an added clause Spinoza makes the distinction between eternity and duration. Nothing that is conceived in time can be eternal – at best it endures without limit. True eternity is the eternity of mathematical objects, like numbers, and of the "eternal truths" that describe them. To be eternal is to lie outside time. All necessary truths are eternal in that sense, like the truths of mathematics. When the existence of something is proved by deductive argument from its definition, then the result is an eternal truth: and God is eternal in just that sense.

The seventh definition tells us that dependent and determined things are not free, in the proper sense of the word. Only self-dependent things – that is, things that accord with the first definition – can be truly free.

Having given us these definitions, Spinoza moves on to the axioms, which are the supposedly self-evident premises of his philosophy. Here they are:

A1: Whatever is, is either in itself or in another.

A2: What cannot be conceived through another, must be conceived through itself.

A3: From a given determinate cause the effect follows necessarily; and conversely, if there is no determinate cause, it is impossible for an effect to follow.

A4: The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause.

A5: Things which have nothing in common with one another also cannot be understood through one another, i.e. the conception of the one does not involve the conception of the other.

A6: A true idea must agree with its object.

A7: If a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence.

The axioms are scarcely less forbidding than the definitions. Spinoza was aware of this, and counselled his readers to follow some of the proofs in order that the meaning and truth of the axioms should be brought gradually home to them. This is not to deny the self-evidence of the axioms, but only the difficulty in achieving the perspective from which their self-evidence will dawn. It is true of geometry and set theory, too, that the axioms are often less clear than the theorems.

The first two axioms nevertheless need elucidating. For Spinoza, "B is in A" is another way of saying that A is the explanation of B. In such a case B must also be "conceived through" A – which means that no adequate account of the nature of B can fail to mention A (hence Axiom 4). In effect, the first two axioms divide the world into two kinds of things. The first are those that are dependent on other things (their causes), and which must be conceived through their causes. The second are things that are self-dependent and conceived through themselves. And it should be obvious from the definitions that this is the distinction between modes and substances.

To understand the axioms fully, we need to know what Spinoza wishes to prove. The first part of the Ethics consists of 36 propositions and their proofs, together with several extended passages of commentary. They constitute Spinoza's argument for the view that there is one and only one substance, and that this substance is God, and therefore infinite and eternal. Everything else exists in God – that is, it is a mode of God, and as such is dependent upon God. The proof of this remarkable claim follows a pattern familiar from medieval philosophy – the pattern of the "ontological argument" for God's existence, as Kant was later to call it. Since God is defined as a being with infinite attributes, then nothing exists that could limit or take away his being: in every respect he is without limits. Since non-existence is a privation, a limitation, it cannot be predicated of God. Therefore God's essence involves existence – he is, by Definition 1, "cause of himself". However, if we understand this traditional argument for the existence of God correctly, Spinoza reasons, we must see that it does not prove only that God exists, but that God embraces everything – that, outside God, nothing can exist or be conceived. If there is anything other than God, either it is in God and dependent upon him, in which case it is not a substance but simply a mode of God, or else (Axiom 1) it is outside God, in which case thre is something that God is not – some respect in which God is limited, and therefore finite (Definition 2) – which is impossible (Definition 6). Hence there is in the world only one substance, and this substance is God.

All finite things follow each other in an infinite chain of cause and effect, and each is determined to be what it is by the cause that produces it. As Spinoza puts it:

Position 29: In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way.

The one substance is both God and Nature, and can be considered both as the free and self-creating creator (Natura naturans) and as the sum of his creation – of those things that are in God and conceived through him (Natura naturata). In the metaphysical sense, only God is free (see Definition 7). Hence:

Proposition 32: The will cannot be called a free cause, but only a necessary one.

From all this follows that:

Proposition 33: Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order, than they have been produced.

God, the infinite substance who comprehends everything, is the only free being, in the sense defined in Part 1 of the Ethics, since only he fully determines his own nature. Everything else is bound in the chain of causation, whose ultimate ground is God.

It is easy to understand why Spinoza was regarded as such a dangerous heretic. He offered to prove the existence and grandeur of God. But the small print tells us that God is identical with Nature, and that nothing in the world is free. For the bewildered believer, anxious for a philosophy with which to counter modern science, this is the ultimate sell-out. The inexorable machine of nature is all that there is, and we are helplessly enslaved to it. And the fact that nature is "cause of itself" – that is, the fact that it exists of necessity and could not be other than it is – only adds to the disaster.

Young Bento de Espinosa (Spinoza): artistic representation

GOD'S ATTRIBUTES

Spinoza would have rejected that interpretation of philosophy. For it overlooks the most important and original of his claims, which is that God has infinitely many attributes, only one of which is studied by physical science. Two of these attributes are thoroughly familiar to us – namely, thought and extension. The term "extension", taken from the science of Spinoza's day, refers to space and its contents – in other words, to the physical world. Extension is an attribute of God in the sense that a complete theory of the physical world (of extended things) is a theory of all that there is. And thus far modern science would agree with Spinoza. But while physics is, when complete, the truth about the whole, it is not the whole truth. For God can be conceived in other ways. For example, he can be conceived under the attribute of thought. This means that God is essentially a thinking thing, just as he is essentially an extended thing. And by studying the nature of thought, one studies God as he is in himself, advancing towards a complete theory of the world – just as when one studies the nature of extension.

Another way of expressing this point is to say that everything that exists – every mode of the divine substance – can be conceived in two incommensurate ways, as physical or mental. In my own case I have an inkling of what this means – for I know that I have both a mind and a body, the first being composed of ideas (where "idea" is a general term for all mental entities), the second being composed of particles in space. Spinoza's suggestion is that the relation between mind and body that I perceive in myself is reduplicated through the whole of nature: that everything physical has its mental correlate.

But what is the relation between mind and body? The problem has vexed philosophers since ancient times, and had come to a head in Spinoza's day, on account of Descartes' influential argument for the view that I am a mental substance, distinct from my body and only contingently connected with it. By contrast, the second part of the Ethics – "Concerning the Nature and Origin of the Mind" – describes the relation between mind and body as one of identity:

Part 2, Proposition 21, scholium: The mind and the body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension.

Spinoza thinks that his theory of the attributes enables him to say this, since it implies not only that the one substance can be known in two ways, but that the same two ways of knowing apply also to modes. The mind is a finite mode of the infinite substance conceived as thought; the body is a finite mode of the infinite substance conceived as extension. And another way of saying this (Part 2, Proposition 13) is that the mind is the "idea of" the body – meaning that the two modes are in fact one and the same reality, conceived in two different ways.

This is a striking claim, with many surprising consequences. For Spinoza, every object in the physical world has its mental counterpart, with which it is identical, in the same way that mind and body are identical in me. The idea of every physical thing already exists – not necessarily in any human mind, but in the mind of God, which comprehends the whole of reality under the attribute of thought. Moreover, there is no interaction between mind and body, despite their identity, for interaction implies cause and effect, and A is cause of B, in Spinoza's thinking, only if B must be conceived through A. But nothing conceived under one attribute can be explained in terms of (that is, conceived through) something conceived under another attribute. The world may be one substance, but there is no single theory of its nature, and in particular no way of reducing the mental to the physical.

This theory looks less odd if we forget our own case and look at the minds of others. Suppose I see John waving frantically from the other end of the field. I ask Helen, one of my companions, why John is waving. She replies, "Electrical impulses from his brain are activating the motor neurones of the arm and producing muscular spasms of a rhythmical kind." Well yes, that is true. But is not the answer I was seeking. I turn to Jim and repeat the question. Jim answers, "He is trying to warn us about a danger somewhere – maybe a bull." The answer is more pertinent, but no more true.

In this example, both Helen and Jim have given true explanations of what we observe. But one is frame in physical terms, the other in mental terms. One mentions processes in the body, the other conceptions in the mind. As we might put it, the one gives the physical causes of John's action, the other the mental reasons for it. And I can relate to the second explanation more readily, since it gives insight into what John means – in other words, into his mental states, which have a direct connection with my own intentions. Helen could be the best neurophysiologist in the world; she could give a far more complete explanation of John's waving than any broached by Jim. But the chances are we should both be dead before the explanation ended.

Moreover, the two explanations are incommensurate. You cannot add fragments of Helen's account to fragments of Jim's and achieve a complete account – or any account at all – of John's behaviour. You must take either one route or the other to an explanation of what you see. And that is what Spinoza meant by saying that "the body cannot determine the mind to think, nor the mind the body to remain in motion or at rest" (Ethics, Part 3, Proposition 2).

But what of those finite modes – rocks and stones and trees, tables and chairs, typescripts and coffee cups – that we normally regard as inanimate? Spinoza must say that they are not inanimate at all, and that if I saw them as God sees them then I should be as clearly aware of their mental counterparts as I am aware of my own mind and its ideas. This is not as absurd as it sounds. Consider the following example. When I hear music, I hear a sequence of sounds, distinguished by their pitch, timbre and duration, which are events in the physical world. A physicist can give a thorough description of these sounds as vibrations in the air, and say exactly what they are, in terms of the "motion and rest" (to use Spinoza's terminology) of things in space. And that is what I hear, when I listen to music. But also hear these sounds in another way, a way that is not captured by their physical description. I hear a melody, which begins on the first note, rises through an unseen dimension, and falls again. Note responds to note in this melody, as thought responds to thought in consciousness. A musical movement, through musical space, carries on through the sequence, even though no sound moves in the space described by the physicist. A critic, describing the music, is describing the very same objects as the physicist who describes the sounds; and yet he is interpreting them in mental terms, seeing the intention that animates the musical line and drives the melody to its logical conclusion. The music is not separate from the sounds. Rather it is the sounds, understood through the conceptions that we use when describing the mental life of people. And that, incidentally, is why music is so important to us: it provides a sudden insight into the soul of the world. These rare glimpses into the soul of things enable us to understand what it would be like to see the world as God sees it, and know it not as extension only, but also as thought.

THE GOD'S-EYE PERSPECTIVE

All ideas exist in God, as modifications of his thinking. Some ideas exist also in the human mind. Spinoza therefore says that our ideas exist in God in so far as he constitutes the human mind. Conversely, since God has adequate knowledge of everything, our own ideas are adequate in so far as we share in the infinite intellect. This "in so far as" is a matter of degree: the more adequate my conceptions, the more I reach beyond my finite condition to the divine substance of which I am a mode.

Now it is only in a manner of speaking that we can describe God and his attributes in temporal terms. God is eternal, which means (Part1, Definition 8) that he is outside time and change. Hence "things are conceived as actual in two ways – either in so far as they exist in relation to a certain time and place, or in so far as we conceive them as contained in God, and following from necessity of the divine nature" (Part 5, Proposition 29, note). To pass from the divine to the human perspective is to pass from the timeless to time, and conversely. Although the modifications of God are understood by us as "enduring" and as succeeding each other in time, this permeation of our knowledge by the concept of time reflects only the inadequacy of our understanding. In so far as we conceive things adequately, we understand them as flowing from God's eternal nature, by a chain of explanation that is logical in form and therefore free from time's dominion in the same way as the truths of mathematics.

Hence "it is in the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain aspect of eternity" (Part 2, Proposition 44, corollary 2). An adequate conception of the world is a conception "under the aspect of eternity" (sub specie aeternitatis); that is how God sees the world (with which he is identical), and that is how we see it, in so far as our minds participate in the vision that is God's.

Spinoza argues that "the human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God" (Part 2, Proposition 47), for what is the Ethics, if not a demonstration of our ability to know God as he essentially is, and to know that, apart from God, there is nothing? By achieving adequate knowledge we come to understand what is divine and eternal. On the other hand, we understand our own nature and identity under the aspect of time – sub specie durationis – for it is as enduring and finite modes that we enjoy the conatus that distinguishes us from the self-sufficient whole of things, and to know ourselves as separate individual existences is to be locked in the time-bound conception that leads to confused and partial knowledge. The human condition is one of conflict: reason aspires towards the eternal totality, while the concerns of sensuous existence bind us to what is temporal and partial. The remaining three parts of Ethics set out to prove that our salvation consists in seeing the world sub specie aeternitatis, as God sees it, and in gaining thereby freedom from the bondage of time.

THE HIGHER LIFE

The fifth and last part of the Ethics, subtitled "On the Power of the Intellect, or on Human Freedom", is more or less entirely given over to a discussion of God, and the relation between God and man. Spinoza has already argued against the popular conception of freedom, according to which we choose always among open possibilities. The very idea of possibility stems from ignorance:

I call . . . individual things possible in so far as, while we regard the causes by which they must be produced, we do not know whether they are determined to produce them. (Part 4, Definition 4)

The more we know of the causality of our actions, the less room we have for ideas of possibility and contingency. However, the knowledge of causality does not cancel the belief in freedom, but vindicates it. It is the illusory idea of freedom, arising from imagination, that creates our bondage, for we believe in the contingency of things only in so far as our mind is passive. The more we see things as necessary (through the medium of adequate ideas), the more we increase our power over them, and so the more we are free (Part 5, Proposition 6). As we have seen, therefore, the free man is conscious of the necessities that compel him.

Such a person understands himself and his emotions, and also loves God, "and the more so the more he understands himself and his emotions" (Part 5, Proposition 15). This love, which stems necessarily from the pursuit of knowledge, is an intellectual love (amor intellectualis Dei). That is to say, the mind is wholly active in loving God, and hence rejoices constantly, but without passion, in the object of its contemplation. God himself can experience neither passion, nor joy nor sorrow (Part 5, Proposition 17), and is therefore free from emotion, as we normally understand it. He neither loves the good nor hates the wicked: indeed he loves and hates no one (Part 5, Proposition 17, corollary). Hence, "he who loves God cannot endeavour to bring it about that God should love him in return" (Part 5, Proposition 19). Love towards God is wholly disinterested, and "cannot be polluted by an emotion either of envy or jealousy, but is cherished the more, the more we imagine men to be bound to God by this bond of love" (Part 5, Proposition 20). Indeed, man's intellectual love of God "is the very love of God with which God loves himself" (Part 5, Proposition 36). In loving God we participate more fully in the divine intellect, and in the impersonal, universal love that reigns there, for although God cannot reciprocate our love, he nevertheless loves men, in so far as he loves himself in and through men. This eternal love constitutes our "salvation, blessedness or liberty".

During the course of his discussion of man's blessedness, Spinoza gives a singular proof of our immortality – or rather, of the proposition that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but something of it remains which is eternal" (Part 5, Proposition 23). The obscure proof of this depends upon Spinoza's view that, through adequate ideas, the mind comes to see the world sub specie aeternitatis, and therefore without reference to time. The essence of the mind consists in the capacity for adequate ideas. (Essence = conatus = activity = adequacy.) The instantiation of this essence in time (in the world of duration) cannot be explained by adequate ideas, since they contain no temporal reference. Such ideas are given "duration" only through their attachment to the mortal body, and not intrinsically:

Our mind therefore can be said to endure, and its existence can be defined by a certain time, only in so far as it involves the actual existence of the body, and thus far only does it have the power to determine the existence of things by time, and to conceive them under the aspect of duration. (Part 5, Proposition 23, scholium)

We should not think of eternity as endless duration – since that is to confuse eternity with time. The eternity that we achieve through our thinking is like an escape from time to another dimension. The eternal part of us does not endure after death, but only because it does not endure in life. It comprises a vision, a point of view, a perspective outside time and change, in which we are one with God and redeemed by our knowledge of him. This blessed state is "not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we enjoy it because we restrain our lusts; on the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them" (Part 5, Proposition 42).

That – the last proposition of the Ethics – is Spinoza's answer to the religions of the ignorant, whose view of the after-life, as reward or punishment for behaviour here below, is an option "so absurd as to be hardly worth mentioning" (Part 5, Proposition 41). Nevertheless the truth about our relation to God is both difficult and forbidding, and it is not surprising if ignorant people are unable to discover it. Hence, just as virtue is its own reward, so ignorance is its own punishment:

not only is the ignorant man troubled in many ways by external causes, and unable ever to possess true peace of mind, but he also lives as if he knew neither himself, nor God, nor things; and as soon as he ceases to be acted upon, he ceases to be. On the other hand, the wise man, in so far as he is considered as such, is hardly troubled in spirit, but being, by a certain eternal necessity, conscious of himself, and of God, and of things, he never ceases to be, but always possesses true peace of mind.

If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still it can be found. And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard. For if salvation were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

With those famous words Spinoza concludes his argument, bequeathing to posterity what is perhaps the most enigmatic book of philosophy that has ever been written.

IN CONCLUSION...

Spinoza undertook what has rarely been attempted, and never so boldly or arrogantly achieved: he gave a description in outline of all that there is, and a guide in detail as to how to live with it.

The physical world is all that there is, and it is a system bound by laws that relate every part of it to every part. These laws can explain what we observe only if the system as a whole has an explanation – only if there is an answer to the question: why is there anything at all? But the cause of the world cannot exist outside it, for then the link between the world and its cause would be unintelligible. Nor can the cause be inside the world, for it is either a part of the world, and therefore unable to explain it, or the whole of the world, in which case the world is self-explanatory.

In other words, the world must be "cause of itself": its existence must follow from its nature. But when we explain the world in this way, we are not engaged in ordinary science. The scientist explains one thing in terms of another, only by assuming a relation in time between them. When deducing the existence of the world, however, we are dealing with relations of logic, which are outside time and change.

We can easily see that this must be so. In the nature of the case, no scientific theory could explain why the Universe came into existence just when it did, for before that time there was nothing, and therefore nothing in terms of which this "coming into existence" could be explained. Science, which links events in temporal chains, comes unstuck when there is no previous event to the one that needs explaining. Only if we step outside the temporal sphere, and see the world "under a certain aspect of eternity" can we hope to solve the mystery of its origins.

There are cosmological theories that try to avoid this difficulty, by espousing the idea that there is no first moment – that time is a closed system, like a circle, which constantly returns to any given moment. If that is so, then no moment has any greater claim to be the beginning than any other. But even if we can make sense of this (and it is surely not obvious that we can), it leaves the crucial question unanswered: the question why such a temporal order should exist at all.

This mystery is solved only if the total system is such that it must exist, for only then could we have a logical argument for its existence, an argument that deduces the existence of the system without reference to time. It must exist, Spinoza argues, because there is nothing that could negate it. The total system of the world is self-dependent, and conceived through itself. Nothing that we encounter can take its existence away, since everything we encounter is a part of it, and explained through it.

The self-dependent cause of all things is what people have called God, and if this description applies to the total system of physical reality, then that is what God is. But it is not all that he is, for a crucial feature of our world is left out of physics: the feature of mind or consciousness.When the physicist lays down the laws of motion of the Universe, he deals in terms of space, time, matter and energy (or "motion and rest", as Spinoza called it). And he reduces the world without remainder to those all-comprehending variables. Where you and I find thought and feeling, he finds only organisms with central nervous systems; where you and I find intention, desire and rational action, he finds only complex patterns of stimulus and response, mediated by some information-processing software. Yet we need only look into ourselves to discover that this is not all there is – that the crucial fact of consciousness, that strange transparency which veneers the world, has been left out of the physicist's account, for the simple reason that the account is, as it must be, complete without it. Everything physical has been included in his inventory, and nothing else remains.

But there is another aspect to things, and we know it from our own experience. All that the physicist describes as spatial and material can be redescribed as mental – not just you and me, but the entire world. If it were only you and I who could be described in mental terms, then mind would be a mystery, for there could be no physical explanation of what distinguishes us from the rest of nature (the mind being unmentionable in physics), and no mental explanation either. If the world contains anything mental at all, then it is mental through and through. And have we not felt from time to time that this might be so, felt, with Wordsworth,

the sentiment of Being spread
O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still;
O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;
O'er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings,
Or beats the gladsome air; o'er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself,
And mighty depth of waters...?
(The Prelude, Book 1, 401-9)

And when, a few lines later, Wordsworth describes himself as "With God and Nature communing", we need only change "and" to "or" for the thought to be Spinoza's.

But if we see the world in this way – and there is no other vision that is both true to science, and true to our knowledge of ourselves – then we cannot hope to be released from natural laws, or stand apart from the chain of causality. If we are free, then it must be in another and more elevated sense than that proclaimed by the old religions. Freedom can reside only in a point of view, a way of looking upon the systems of necessity. And are we not all of us, in our thinking moments, familiar with what this means? Surely this is the one freedom that we may attain to: not to be released from physical reality, but to understand reality and ourselves as part of it, and so be reconciled to what we are. This work of reconciliation is the true religion, and it is what we owe to ourselves, and to the God from whom our being flows.

If this is so, however, Spinoza is right in thinking that we must strive to see the world under the aspect of eternity. There is no other release from the chain of causality than the kind of thinking that looks beyond causality, to the meaning and pattern of the whole. And when we discover this pattern, things change for us, as a landscape changes when the painter elicits its form, or sounds change when they are combined together as music. A kind of personality shines then through the scheme of things. We come face to face with God, in the very fact of his creation.

If religion is to be reconciled with science, it can be only in Spinoza's way. Spinoza is right in believing that God's majesty is diminished by the idea that things might have been otherwise. The belief in miracles does no credit to God, for what need has God to intervene in events that he originates? The laws of the Universe must be universally binding if we are to understand them, and the intelligibility of the Universe is the premise from which all science and religion begin.

Nor should we disparage Spinoza's moral vision, remote though it may seem in our age of sensuous indulgence. Spinoza is right to believe that truth is our only standard, and that to live by any other is to surrender to circumstance. There is implanted in every rational being the capacity to distinguish the true from the false, to weigh evidence, and to confront our world without illusions. In this capacity our dignity resides, and in committing ourselves to truth we stand back from our immediate concerns and see the world as it should be seen – under the aspect of eternity. Truth cannot be fashionable, even if it so often offends. To take truth as our guide is to ponder time and all its minions with a sceptical disfavour.

... AND TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE

Our age is more dominated by scientific theory than was Spinoza's; but only a fond illusion persuades us that it is more guided by the truth. We have seen superstition triumph on a scale that would have startled Spinoza, and which has been possible only because superstition has cloaked itself in the mantle of science. If the heresies of our day are, like Nazism and communism, the declared enemies of religion, this merely confirms, for the student of Spinoza, their superstitious character, and confirms, too, Spinoza's insight that scientific objectivity and divine worship are the forms of intellectual freedom. Spinoza, like Pascal, saw that the new science must inevitably "disenchant" the world. By following truth as our standard, we chase from their ancient abodes the miraculous, the sacred and the saintly. The danger, however, is not that we follow this standard – for we have no other – but that we follow it only so far as to lose our faith, and not so far as to regain it. We rid the world of useful superstitions, without seeing it as a whole. Oppressed by its meaninglessness, we succumb then to new and less useful illusions – superstitions born of disenchantment, which are all the more dangerous for taking man, rather than God, as their object.

The remedy, Spinoza reminds us, is not to retreat into the pre-scientific world-view, but to go further along the path of disenchantment; losing both the old superstitions and the new, we discover at last a meaning in truth itself. By the very thinking that disenchants the world we come to a new enchantment, recognizing God in everything, and loving his works in the very act of knowing them.

DEUS SIVE NATURA — a summary in Italian:

Deus sive natura

La sostanza unica, infinita ed eterna di cui parla Spinoza non è altro che Dio stesso. La dimostrazione dell'esistenza di Dio coincide con quella della sostanza. Egli infatti non è altro che la realtà stessa considerata nella sua totalità, con tutte le sue infinite espressioni e manifestazioni . Gli attributi e i modi della sostanza sono gli attributi e i modi di Dio. Le cose particolari non sono altro se non affezioni degli attributi di Dio , ossia modi mediante i quali gli attributi di Dio sono espressi in maniera certa e determinata . Dio è la causa necessaria e necessitante di tutte le cose.

Non esiste nulla di contingente. Tutto deriva necessariamente da Dio e tutto avviene necessariamente secondo il modo in cui si determinano gli attributi della sostanza . Dio soltanto è causa libera: non tanto nel senso che egli possa liberamente scegliere se una cosa sia o non sia , quanto piuttosto nel senso che egli non è necessitato da null' altro che dalla propria natura. In Dio quindi coincidono libertà e necessità. Oltre che causa incausata, Dio è causa immanente dell'intera realtà. Dal momento che la sostanza è unica, Dio e le cose che da lui necessariamente derivano sono la stessa realtà, anche se considerata sotto due diversi aspetti. Dio e la natura coincidono, ma quest' ultima può anche essere vista sotto due diverse determinazioni. La natura naturante è la realtà esaminata come sostanza infinita, come somma totale degli attributi, come causa di sé e di tutte le cose, ossia come Dio in quanto fondamento causale di tutto ciò che esiste. La natura naturata, invece, è la realtà esaminata come insieme delle cose particolari e finite, ossia dei modi che derivano dagli attributi di Dio, e che pertanto senza Dio non possono né essere né essere concepiti.

Questa causalità necessaria va intesa sia in senso reale, dal momento che Dio è causa dell'effettiva esistenza delle cose singole, sia in senso logico-matematico, dato che i modi derivano dalla sostanza divina così come nella geometria le proposizioni ultime derivano dai primi princìpi. I modi sono perciò legati tra di loro secondo un ordine necessario, che è nello stesso tempo ordine reale (ossia una struttura ontologica della realtà) e un ordine geometrico (cioè un'articolazione logico-matematica). Accennavamo che la forma letteraria in cui è scritto il trattato dell'Etica dimostrata secondo l' ordine geometrico non è un semplice omaggio a una esigenza di rigore metodologico. Ecco che adesso possiamo capire meglio quest'affermazione: Spinoza compone un trattato geometrico di filosofia perché la realtà stessa ha una struttura geometrica.

I modi sono legati tra loro da rapporti causali necessari , così come in un trattato geometrico le proposizioni sono congiunte tra loro da rapporti necessari di antecedenza e conseguenza. Il ricorso al modello matematico, che non deve stupirci se teniamo conto che Spinoza vive nel 1600, il secolo della matematica, non ha quindi un valore puramente analogico: la geometria è l'unico linguaggio che possa esprimere una conoscenza adeguata della realtà, proprio perché la realtà è in termini geometrici (il libro della natura, diceva Galileo).

Questa concezione della realtà, per la quale Dio è causa incausata e necessaria di tutto quanto comporta in Spinoza una radicale e serrata critica al finalismo, tanto nell'uomo quanto nella natura. Gli uomini, proprio perché non hanno coscienza delle cause necessarie che li determinano, ma soltanto dell'utile in vista del quale agiscono, conferiscono a torto a quest'ultimo il carattere di fine e, in modo ancora più sbagliato, proiettano questo loro modo di pensare sulla natura, arrivando a pensare che anch'essa agisca in vista di fini. Questo pregiudizio, sostiene Spinoza, è rafforzato dal fatto che gli uomini ravvisano nella natura cose che sono loro utili: per esempio gli occhi per vedere, le mani per impugnare oggetti, i denti per masticare, le orecchie per sentire, gli ortaggi e gli animali per mangiare, i torrenti per bere e così via) e, sapendo che queste cose non sono state prodotte da loro, congetturano che esse siano state create per loro da Dio. Ma quando incorrono in cose nocive e non utili, quali le malattie e le calamità naturali, le interpretano poi come punizioni divine, sostenendo che la volontà di Dio è imperscrutabile e quindi evitando perfino di trovare una spiegazione ragionevole. Ecco che gli uomini cercano di spiegare le cose facendo appello all'ignoranza, ma, cosa ancora peggiore, si costruiscono un'immagine falsa di Dio dato che, attribuendogli fini da conseguire nell'uomo e nella natura, lo considerano manchevole di qualcosa e quindi imperfetto.

Nel passato avevano abbracciato posizioni finalistiche, tanto per citarne qualcuno, Platone e Aristotele; quest' ultimo, è bene ricordarlo, sosteneva che l'uomo avesse la mano perché è il più intelligente degli animali e non che l'uomo fosse il più intelligente degli animali proprio perché ha la mano, come diceva invece Anassagora (con cui Spinoza si sarebbe schierato). Ma posizioni finalistiche serpeggiano anche nel 1600: pensiamo a Leibniz, contemporaneo di Spinoza (i due ebbero pure modo di incontrarsi ).

Si vedano le seguenti pagine in italiano dedicate a Spinoza: