Immanent Causality: A Spinozist Viewpoint on Evolution and Theory of Action

Abstract

Spinoza’s monism is seldom taken into consideration when the mind-body problem is stated and its traditionally proposed solutions are discussed. Sometimes, Spinoza’s philosophy is referred to as a “parallelism” which is tantamount to a revised Cartesian dualism. Sometimes, it is considered as a materialist monism, thereby setting Spinoza as a precursor of the 18th materialist philosophers, like Diderot and d’Holbach. In fact, Spinoza’s theory of psychophysical identity is neither of these. I will argue that it is particularly well-adapted to a discussion of the mind-body problem in the framework of present day natural sciences. In fact, Spinoza’s philosophy can only be understood if one takes into consideration his notion of immanent causality. The cause of itself, causa sui, which pertains to the Substance, is distributed in the modes through their essences or conatus, although the modes in their existence are produced by one another, come to existence and are destroyed in their infinite chain of efficient causes. With such a notion of immanent causality, Evolution can be seen as the unfolding of a dynamic system, or a process of cornplexification and self-organization of matter, produced as a necessary outcome of the laws of physics and chemistry. In this process, new species come to existence one after the other as effects of mutations and stabilizing conditions working as their efficient causes, whereas their particular organizations are particular instances of the whole process. This view of Evolution is compatible with the idea of a dynamic evolutionary landscape with peaks of local stability. The whole dynamics created by the physical constraints of composite organized bodies is an intemporal theoretical description of possible organisms. The actual peaks of stability are populated one after the other in a historical, partially contingent fashion, which constitutes the temporal evolutionary processes. The latter may be oriented by adaptive natural selection, but that is not always necessarily the case. The temporal evolution is also a self-organizing process, driven by a random walk, whereby more “sophistication” (Koppel & Atlan, 1991; Atlan, 1995) or “logical depth” (Bennett, 1988), in the sense of functional meaningful complexity, can be memorized and accumulated.