Abstract
In this chapter, I provide an interpretation of Spinoza’s scientific method and discuss the interaction of reason and imagination in Spinozan science. I address a number of interpretive issues pertaining to reason, including the nature, origin, and adequacy of common notions. I also address the issue of the adequacy of the findings of Spinozan science raised by the role of the imagination therein. Ultimately, I argue for a hypothetico-deductive interpretation of Spinoza’s scientific method, stressing the role of hypotheses in bridging the epistemic gap between nature’s most general laws and singular things.
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Notes
- 1.
In the TTP, Spinoza uses the term scientia to connote natural (as opposed to supernatural) knowledge, meaning the kind of knowledge of things that can be attained through employment of the mind’s natural faculties. While this usage often encompasses what we would today understand by scientific knowledge, it clearly has a much wider scope. (See Curley 2:638 for references.) It is also noteworthy that in the part of the TTP where Spinoza discusses scientific methodology, and comes closest to modern notions of science, he does not employ “scientia,” but instead most often speaks of the interpretation of nature (interpretatio naturae) (TTP 7.26/G 3:102). For discussion of the connotation of “scientia” in Spinoza’s day, see Gabbey 1996, 143–48.
- 2.
This strategy for interpreting Spinoza’s views on scientific method has been recognized by some commentators. See Schliesser 2014, 4–8. Gabbey (1996, 170), Klever (1986, 185–86), and Savan (1986, 98–99) touch on TTP 7 briefly in discussing Spinoza’s scientific methodology. I am not aware of anyone who has pursued the strategy in depth.
- 3.
Spinoza explicitly approves this aspect of Bacon’s method in Ep. 37 (G 4:189a). Gabbey (1996, 170–80) provides a discussion of Bacon’s influence on Spinoza’s methodological thought in the context of surveying Spinoza’s scientific method more generally. While acknowledging the importance of a Baconian historia for the purpose of gathering data, Gabbey (1996, 176–77) argues that whereas Bacon’s inductive method could use the historia for deriving the causes of things, this is not the case for Spinoza, since the historia is derived from the imagination, whereas the causes of things must be ascertained through the intellect. This is true, but Spinoza’s method integrates experiential data with intellectual conceptions, as I argue in this chapter. In this respect, what A. I. Sabra (1967, 36–7) says about Descartes could be said equally about Spinoza: in his hands the historia naturalis is made to serve an essentially deductive method.
- 4.
Spinoza speaks of the derivation of “less universal things” at key points in articulating his conception of method without explicitly mentioning particulars. (See TTP 7.27–29/G 3:102–3.) While this phrasing in itself leaves it unclear whether the derivation is supposed to descend all the way to particulars, I take the passage just quoted regarding the “particular external actions of true virtue” to make it clear that Spinoza means for particulars to fall within the umbrella of “less universal things.”
- 5.
Hobbes 2005, 65–6. Descartes, of course, also introduced a well-known distinction between analysis and synthesis (CSM 2: 110–11), and this is explicitly invoked in Meyer’s preface to Spinoza’s DPP (G 1:129). Nevertheless, like other scholars, I see Spinoza’s methodology as closer to Hobbes’ understanding of the distinction than to Descartes’. On this, see A. Garrett 2003, 103–122.
- 6.
Cf. Bennett 1984, 183–4. Calling E2p38d “enormously obscure,” Bennett offers, by way of explanation, that whereas ideas of the imagination are inadequate because the causal flow from the environment to the human body involves a “bump” (i.e., “a qualitative discontinuity of which the metal counterpart is mutilation”), there is no such “bump” when the causal flow involves only features which the body shares with the environment. I agree that there is no mutilation in the case of common notions, but Bennett’s “flow” and “bump” metaphors here are potentially misleading, since I do not see that there is any need for information from the outside to “flow” into the human mind (with or without a bump) for the formation of common notions. The requisite information is already contained in the human mind’s idea of its own body. (I take up the related question of the innateness of common notions below.) For interpretations of Spinoza’s reasoning in E2p38d that are more congenial with my own, see Wilson 1996, 111–12, and Marshall 2008, 65.
- 7.
In Chap. 7, I will argue that the idea of God can be regarded as itself a common notion. This does not prevent God from being uniquely foundational, however, vis-à-vis the objects of other common notions.
- 8.
Schliesser 2014, 25–28.
- 9.
Schliesser 2014, 6.
- 10.
That Spinoza’s talk of laws refers, at least sometimes, to specific laws of nature, such as those regarding conservation and inertia, is widely accepted by commentators. See, for instance, Curley 1969, 47–9; Lachterman 1978, 88–90; Yovel 1991; Miller 2003; and LeBuffe 2018, 91. Schliesser cites Gabbey’s (1996) point that Spinoza eschews Descartes’ language of “laws of nature” in the DPP. But even Gabbey, who generally downplays Spinoza’s credentials as a scientific thinker, says that Spinoza largely accepted Descartes’ laws of motion and that the latter heralded the natural philosophy in which the Ethics is grounded (1996, 155, n. 55).
- 11.
See Garber 2016, 134–159, for an insightful discussion of the relationship between laws of nature and mathematics in the seventeenth century. Garber argues that the two are more independent of one another than we might expect from the vantage point of subsequent scientific development.
- 12.
Some commentators (Miller 2004, 572–73; LeBuffe 2018, 88–89) have viewed mathematical and geometrical laws (in addition to natural laws) as themselves examples of common notions. There are two issues with this suggestion. First, if by mathematical and geometrical laws are meant laws involving numbers and figures (respectively) per se, then, as we have seen, ideas of these entities are beings of reason, which may exhibit the form of truth, but cannot be (in themselves) robustly true. Second, I argued that although figures (not numbers) exist as the determinations of finite bodies in the last chapter, they are properties only of finite bodies, not the whole of extended nature (which is infinite). This means that geometrical properties (if such are understood to involve figure) cannot be properties equally of the part and of the whole of nature. I will discuss in the next chapter how geometry may contribute to a science of finite bodies nevertheless.
- 13.
TIE 101–3/G 2:36–7.
- 14.
For an interpretation which identifies common notions with laws of nature, see Miller 2004, 572–3.
- 15.
Viljanen (2011, 41–5) makes a strong case for reading the relation between natures (or essences) and the properties that follow therefrom as a relation of formal causation.
- 16.
Melamed (2013, 51) draws a tripartite distinction between the properties constitutive of the essence of a thing, properties that follow from (but do not constitute) the essence of the thing (i.e., propria), and properties that are at least partially caused by external causes (i.e., accidents, or extraneous properties). According to this distinction, it is important to note that the properties I am talking about here are not accidents or extraneous properties, but properties that follow from the nature of the thing itself. I am less certain about Melamed’s distinction between properties constitutive of the essence of the thing, which are included in the definition of the thing, and propria, which, Melamed argues, must not be included in the definition. This is because I do not see that Spinoza provides any clear way of distinguishing properties that are constitutive of the essence of some thing from “propria.” Consider that Spinoza compares the way infinite things (including modes) follow from God’s nature with the way that it follows from the nature of a triangle for its three angles to equal two right angles (E1p17s/G 2:62). Since modes, according to Melamed, are propria (with the attributes being what constitute God’s nature), the property of its angles equaling two right angles is, thus, a proprium of triangles. However, elsewhere (E2p49dem), Spinoza claims that having angles equaling two right angles pertains to the essence of a triangle, implying that it is a property constitutive of the essence, not a proprium. I return to the question of the relation between definition and essence in Chap. 6.
- 17.
Yovel (1991) argues that laws of nature are all infinite modes. It may be true that the infinite mode (i.e., motion and rest under the attribute of extension) is the first “level” (if we begin with the attributes) at which laws of nature are found that are determinate enough to be applicable in scientific inquiry. But I am using the notion of “law of nature” in a broader sense than Yovel, a sense which is, in my view, more in keeping with the notion that Spinoza articulates in the TTP. See Miller (2003) for further argument that Spinoza’s notion of laws of nature is expansive enough to encompass laws pertaining to attribute and finite modes, in addition to infinite modes.
- 18.
In addition to laws relative to particulars and laws governing all modes in an attribute, there are also local laws, governing groups of particulars. I discuss these in the section at the end of this chapter on the peculiar common notions of E2p39. Miller (2003, 258–59) lays out a useful taxonomy of the levels at which the notion of natural law can apply in Spinoza (and in the seventeenth century more generally).
- 19.
Cf. Miller 2004, 573. I agree with Miller that laws of nature are common notions, but not with his claim that “all common notions are laws of nature.”
- 20.
Another example is the following statement from the preface of Ethics Part 3: “the laws and rules of nature, according to which all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, viz. through the universal laws and rules of nature.
- 21.
Curley 1973, 51. For Descartes’ confirmation (in face of critical scrutiny) that light must follow the same laws of motion as bodies (even though light is the propagation of motion through a medium, and not a moving body itself), see CSMK, 73–4.
- 22.
I say it might indicate this, but it is ambiguous, since rather than referring to a different kind of common notion (i.e., peculiar common notions), the phrase “adequate ideas of the properties of things” could instead be simply a gloss on “common notions.” The parenthetical citation is consistent with both possibilities.
- 23.
- 24.
Spinoza’s point here is very similar to one that Descartes makes in Part 3 of his Principles of Philosophy: “The principles which we have so far discovered are so vast and so fertile, that their consequences are far more numerous than the entire observed contents of the visible world; indeed, they are so numerous that we could never in a lifetime make a complete survey of them even in our thought” (CSM 1:249). Spinoza includes this concession to a need for experience in the third part of the DPP, indicating that he may have been influenced in this regard by his study of Descartes’ Principles.
- 25.
CSM 1:193, 218–9.
- 26.
Cartesian hyperbolic doubt depends on the independence of will from intellect. Spinoza rejects Descartes’ distinction between will and intellect, and thus the possibility of hyperbolic doubt as conceived by Descartes. As discussed in Chap. 2, the process of grounding the system of knowledge against skepticism begins with reflection on the nature of a true idea (however it was acquired). This leads to the idea of God, which fully grounds the system.
- 27.
Since Spinoza officially defines reason in E2p40s2 in terms of what can be derived from our grasp of common notions (and adequate ideas of the properties of things), it is an open question whether the knowledge of the common notions themselves should count as reason. A similar interpretive ambiguity attaches to the third kind of knowledge. Spinoza defines the latter in terms of the derivation of adequate ideas of the essences of singular things from adequate knowledge of the attributes. In this case, does the knowledge of the attributes themselves count as knowledge of the third kind? Is a single kind of knowledge responsible for the grasp of the starting points of both reason and intuitive knowledge? Relatedly, it has also been wondered what kind (or kinds) of knowledge is responsible for the various propositions of the Ethics itself. Scholars have interpreted these questions in a range of different ways according to their interpretations of the second and third kinds of knowledge and the differences between them. (See, for instance, Parkinson 1973 and Fløistad 1973.) I defend a method interpretation of the difference between reason and intuitive knowledge in Chap. 7, according to which the kinds of knowledge are only differentiated in their process of derivation. This leaves it unclear how to categorize the knowledge of the starting points themselves. (I argue that the attributes are common notions, so the starting points of the kinds of knowledge overlap no less than the terminations.) However, on my particular version of the method interpretation, intuitive knowledge is just the perfection of reason. This means that intuitive knowledge could in fact be regarded as a species of reason. Thus, in the end, there is only a single candidate for grasping the axioms, attributes, or starting points. Whether we call this adequate knowledge, reason, or intuitive knowledge is a matter of little consequence, since each of these categories overlaps in this case. I expand on these matters in detail in Chap. 7.
- 28.
See also Spinoza’s discussion of admiratio (wonder) in E3defaff4/G 2:191–2. Compared to Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes, who all see in wonder an epistemic virtue (although Descartes also recognizes that wonder can be excessive), Spinoza’s relative disdain is quite striking. For Descartes’ discussion of wonder, see CSM 1:353–56.
- 29.
For accounts of the transition from imagination to reason that stress the role of joy, see Deleuze 1990, 280–88, and Charles 2002. James (2011), by contrast, stresses the social context favorable to the transition, specifically the acceptance of certain elements of the “true religion” that Spinoza outlines in the TTP. I think James is right that social factors can inhibit the transition from imagination to reason, and that the right social context can help to facilitate the transition. Even so, an affective-cognitive account at the level of the individual is still necessary to explain how the transition is possible within a favorable social context. For a helpful general discussion of the role of the affects (both passive and active) in the acquisition of human freedom and knowledge, see Goldenbaum 2004.
- 30.
The question of how passive joy could increase power of action (given that its epistemic correlate is inadequate cognition) poses an interpretive difficulty. For discussion, see LeBuffe 2009, 211–18.
- 31.
E5p9dem: “An affect is only evil, or harmful, insofar as it prevents the mind from being able to think (by 4p26 and p27). And so that affect which determines the mind to consider many objects together is less harmful than another, equally great affect which engages the mind solely in considering one, or a few objects, so that it cannot think of others” (G 2:286).
- 32.
I certainly do not suggest that microscopic evidence of invisible particulate matter provides any kind of argument against a vacuum. The atomists postulated invisible atoms, after all. The arguments that Descartes and Spinoza advanced against the void, moreover, were of a rationalist, not empirical, nature. (For Descartes’ arguments contra void, see CSM 1:229–30; for Spinoza’s, see E1p15s and DPP2p3.) But rationalist arguments are not to the purpose in the present context, since to present rationalist arguments is already to be in an active cognitive state, whereas the question is how the transition from mental passivity to activity comes about. Given that Descartes diagnoses the error (from his perspective) of believing in a vacuum to stem from the childhood belief that all that exists is sensible (CSM 1:219), microscopic evidence of invisible particulate matter seems like the type of thing that could cast doubt on, and thus rethinking of, one’s childhood preconception.
- 33.
Curley writes, “It is supposed to be impossible to perceive them [i.e., common notions] inadequately precisely because they are ideas of properties common to all objects we experience [….] How Spinoza might have reconciled this view with the fact that people did, for many centuries, have inadequate ideas about motion, I do not know” (1973, 54).
- 34.
I have in mind, in particular, Aaron Garrett’s emphasis on the notion of emendation in understanding the transition from inadequate to adequate ideas (2003, 86–93). (See also Savan 1986, 108.) For an argument that common notions, and all other adequate ideas, should be considered innate, see Marshall 2008, 81–7. I am sympathetic to seeing common notions as innate on the following grounds. The human mind has adequate ideas of the common properties of extended things just by virtue of having ideas of its own body (for reasons already laid out). But the nature of the mind is to be the idea of the human body (per E2p13/G 2:96). Thus, common notions follow from the nature of the mind itself as the idea of the human body. This plausibly makes common notions innate to the mind. I am less confident that the adequate ideas that can be derived from the common notions are also plausibly considered to be innate. This is due to the fact that they depend for their formation on input from the imagination, as I will argue in the next section. Admittedly, the data of the imagination are fitted into an adequate explanatory framework, and, thus, subsumed by the intellect (insofar as the resultant idea is adequate), but the result is still dependent upon input from external causes, and is true only in form, not robustly. Whether such derivative adequate ideas should also be considered innate depends, it seems to me, on one’s notion of innateness. While it would be in keeping with Descartes’ expansive notion of innateness, which encompasses any idea that we have “within ourselves the faculty of summoning up” (CSM 2:132), it would not, by contrast, be in keeping with other contemporary interpretations, such as that of Descartes’ one-time friend and pupil, Regius (CSM 1:295). Given the wide range of interpretations of innateness in the seventeenth century, coupled with the fact that “innate idea” is not a notion that Spinoza himself explicitly uses, I think it is inadvisable to assimilate Spinoza’s position on the matter to Descartes’ (or Leibniz’s ). Spinoza does talk of “native power” (vis nativa) of the intellect (TIE 31/G 2:14) to refer to what is not caused in us by external causes, though, as A. Garrett notes (2003, 82), this inborn power applies as much to bodies as minds. In the end, despite my openness to seeing common notions as innate, I prefer to avoid talking of “innate ideas” in the case of Spinoza (and to stick to the intellect/imagination and adequate/inadequate dichotomies), given the ambiguity of the notion itself (especially in the case of adequate ideas derived from common notions on the basis of experiential input), and Spinoza’s silence on the matter.
- 35.
It must be admitted that certain texts resist this attempt to reconcile Spinoza’s claim that common notions can only be conceived adequately by all with its prima facie implausibility, but I do not see any other way of resolving the issue, and this solution at least seems plausible. The recalcitrant text I have in mind is the following passage from E2p40s1: “But some axioms, or notions, result from other causes which it would be helpful to explain by this method of ours. For from these explanations it would be established which notions are more useful than the others, and which are hardly of any use; and then, which are common, which are clear and distinct only to those who have no prejudices, and finally, which are ill-founded [….] But since I have set these aside for another treatise, and do not wish to give rise to disgust by too long a discussion, I have decided to pass over them here” (italics added). It is Spinoza’s distinction in this passage between those notions which are common and those which are clear and distinct only to those who have no prejudices that raises the issue, since my interpretation of common notions suggested that they might need to be cleansed of prejudices in order to be grasped adequately (by all). The fact that Spinoza tables the issue for another treatise, however, suggests that he may not have fully worked out all of the details of his account. I think this leaves room for the sort of interpretation I have given.
- 36.
CSM 2:55.
- 37.
CSM 2:55.
- 38.
Cf. Klever 1990. Klever characterizes Spinoza as an “anti-falsificationist,” so inasmuch as my talk of evidence contradicting hypotheses sounds like falsificationism, it appears that my proposal is in conflict with Klever’s. But this is not the case on closer inspection. Klever’s claim is that empirical evidence cannot falsify what can be known independently by the intellect. For example, Klever highlights Spinoza’s discussion of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion in the DPP (G 1:192–96) and Spinoza’s criticism of Diogenes’ attempt to refute them through experience. Instead, the paradoxes can be shown to be flawed on purely rational grounds. I agree with Klever that when it comes to what is knowable on the basis of the intellect alone, empirical evidence is useless for either verification or falsification. (Klever’s analysis of Spinoza’s epistolary engagement with Boyle’s experimental philosophy is useful in this regard (1990, 130–33).) This would include what can be known about the basic principles of physical nature (though see the caveats in the previous section about the role of experience in arriving at the common notions). However, what I am talking about in the present context are non-universal natural phenomena that are not knowable by the finite intellect alone. In this domain, Klever’s following qualification is germane: “Of course, observed facts can falsify and refute other…opinions, conjectures, hypothetical semi-rational constructions. Spinoza does not deny this sort of ‘elimination’” (1990, 129). I would only object that there is no reason to regard hypothetical constructions as “semi-rational.” Inasmuch as hypothetical constructions can exhibit the form of true ideas, they are fully rational, in my view.
- 39.
Cf. Bennett 1984, 20–23. Bennett also highlights evidence from the DPP (and elsewhere) of Spinoza’s friendliness to hypothetico-deductive methodology. His main point, however, is to argue that the Ethics itself be viewed as a hypothetico-deductive system. Klever (1986) endorses and further develops this reading of Spinoza’s more general philosophical methodology. As I understand the notion, a hypothesis is something whose truth is not self-evident, but needs to be tested or confirmed in some way. In this case, I disagree that the definitions (at least the real, if not the nominal ones) and axioms of the Ethics serve as hypotheses as Bennett and Klever argue, since, in my view, Spinoza thinks that they are self-evident (as I argue in Chap. 2 regarding the idea of God qua foundation of Spinoza’s system), and do not need to be confirmed by what follows from them. (Bennett , at times, seems only to suggest that by reading the Ethics as a whole, one may come to better grasp the truth of the definitions and axioms. This may be true from a subjective, pedagogical standpoint, but does not signify that the definitions and axioms are in fact in need of any such confirmation.) This is why I prefer to restrict the attribution of hypothetico-deductive methodology to Spinoza’s philosophy of science. On the latter, cf. Schliesser 2014, 9–10. Schliesser quotes Spinoza as saying, “it is sufficient for me here to have shown one [cause] through which I can explain it [i.e., the mechanics of image formation] as if I had shown it through its true cause” (E2p17s), then infers: “in this limited respect Spinoza shows himself a true Cartesian for whom causal explanations of natures are always merely hypothetical.” Savan (1986, 113–18) also attributes to Spinoza a “principle of hypothetical explanation” and provides an excellent discussion of Spinoza’s scientific method with which the one presented in this chapter is in many ways congruent. However, Savan suggests that insofar as a hypothesis is not adequate and true, it must be inadequate (1986, 114–15). This strikes me as a mistake, since it implies that the hypothesis is imaginative, whereas it is certainly possible, and indeed necessary, for hypotheses to be intellectual. My notion of an idea that is true in form better captures the status of hypotheses formed by the intellect and serves to bridge the gap between ideas which are completely (or robustly) adequate and true and those which are inadequate.
- 40.
“The mind can determine in many ways the ideas of things that the intellect forms from others—as, for example, to determine the plane of an ellipse, it feigns that a pen attached to a cord is moved around two centers, or conceives infinitely many points always having the same definite relation to some given straight line, or a cone cut by some oblique plane, so that the angle of inclination is greater than the angle of the cone’s vertex, or in infinite other ways” (TIE 108/G 2:39).
- 41.
Spinoza also mentions hypotheses in a footnote to a passage in the TIE in which he is discussing a kind of thought experiment, in particular, the idea of a candle burning on its own, surrounded by nothing (in which case, it is inferred, there is no cause for the flame’s destruction). About the thought experiment, Spinoza says, “there is no fiction, but true and sheer assertions” (verae ac merae assertiones) (TIE 57/G 2:22). (I take Spinoza to use “true” (verae) here in the sense of “genuine” or “veritable,” not in the epistemic sense of agreeing with an object. Curley concurs. See Curley 1:26, n. 44.) The footnote in question is attached to this comment, and reads:
The same must also be understood concerning the hypotheses [de hypothesibus] that are made to explain certain motions, which agree with the phenomena of the heavens; except that when people apply them to the celestial motions, they infer the nature of the heavens from them. But that nature can be different, especially since many other causes can be conceived to explain such motions. (TIE 57n)
In saying that “[t]he same must be understood,” Spinoza means that astronomical hypotheses are, like the thought experiment with the candle, not fictions, but “true and sheer assertions.” Unfortunately, I do not think it is very clear what Spinoza means by “assertions” in this context. Spinoza condemns inferring the nature of things from hypotheses, on the grounds that the nature can always be different than the hypothesis suggests, but this simply follows from the nature of hypotheses. Overall, I do not think the footnote reveals much about whether Spinoza endorses the use of hypotheses or not.
- 42.
Cf. Spinoza’s definition of possibile in E4d4: “I call…singular things possible, insofar as, while we attend to the causes from which they must be produced, we do not know whether those causes are determined to produce them” (G 2:209). On the one hand, this definition of “possible” suggests something slightly different than my gloss of TTP 4 in terms of “hypothesis” might suggest, since Spinoza says here that to conceive something as possible is to conceive the causes from which it must be produced, whereas a hypothetical conception posits the manner in which something might be caused. On the other hand, both conceptions of “possible” represent causal conceptions of an object. If, then, the causes of a thing are themselves what is in question, as is the case in TTP, it seems in keeping with the spirit of Spinoza’s E4d4 definition of “possible,” to regard a hypothetical conception of the causes of a thing in terms of possibility. Savan (1986, 112–17) also connects Spinoza’s notion of “possible” with the notion of the hypothetical.
- 43.
See Miller (2003, 258–59) for further discussion of the spectrum (or different levels) of laws of nature in Spinoza.
- 44.
Spinoza affirms that we have a shared (rational) nature in common with other human beings in Ethics Part 4 (see E4p35). The logic of Spinoza’s definition of the PCNs suggests that we might have common and peculiar natures in common with all members of the class of animals insofar as we are members of this class. Thus, we would have PCNs of animal nature. However, Spinoza never talks explicitly of shared animal nature (as far as I am aware), while he frequently talks of shared human nature. Hence, I say, the latter is the most obvious (but not the only) candidate for PCNs.
- 45.
I am not suggesting that the mind has an adequate idea of white blood cells. This suggestion would contradict E2p24: “The human mind does not involve adequate knowledge of the parts composing the human body.” I am suggesting instead that the mind has an adequate idea of human nature (and, perhaps, the ratio of motion and rest that defines human nature), and that the reason for this is that human nature is equally in the part (e.g., in white blood cells) as in the whole. It might be further objected, however, that I do not have an idea of human nature as involved in or expressed by my white blood cells. To respond to this potential objection, if the fact that I do not have an explicit idea of the human nature involved or expressed in my white blood cells is taken to be a problem for the adequacy of my idea of human nature, then, by parallel logic, the fact that I do not have an explicit idea of the extension of my white blood cells should pose a problem for the adequacy of my idea of extension. Since the latter does not in fact appear to be a problem for the adequacy of the UCN of extension, the former should not be a problem for the adequacy of the PCN of human nature.
- 46.
I am grateful to Christopher Martin and John Grey for prompting me to clarify this point.
- 47.
Parkinson associates PCNs with the propositions of sciences such as physiology, explaining, “Such a science is not true of the whole of Nature, as physics is, but only of ‘individuals’…of a certain degree of complexity” (1954, 165). In order for this reading to be acceptable, the objects of the physiological propositions in question (or propositions of other special sciences) would have to be equally in the part and in the whole. It is not clear to me exactly what sort of propositions Parkinson had in mind, but it seems unlikely that their objects would satisfy this criterion. My interpretation has more in common with that of Gueroult, who interprets the PCNs as correlated with commonalities among types or species of individual of a certain complexity. (For Gueroult’s excellent analysis of PCNs, see 1974, 335–52.) As Gueroult points out, this suggests a hierarchy of PCNs. Thus, there could be PCNs for organic entities qua organic, for animals qua animal, for humans qua human, and so on. I do not follow Gueroult, however, when he states that insofar as we are composed of less complex individuals, such as blood, lymph, chyle, iron, and water, we must share peculiar common properties with such things (1974, 342), since these less complex individuals are not equally in the part and in the whole of my body.
- 48.
While Gueroult agrees that an example of a PCN would be human nature (or human essence) itself, he astutely raises the difficulty that this appears to conflict with Spinoza’s claim (in E2p37) that common notions do not constitute the essence of any individual. Gueroult’s proposal for resolving this difficulty is to distinguish between the way reason grasps human essence, that is, from the outside, and as a property, on the one hand, and the way intuitive knowledge grasps human essence, that is from the inside, and as essence proper, on the other hand (1974, 342–43). I do not believe there is any such distinction to be drawn between reason and intuitive knowledge, as I will explain in Chap. 7. I think the way to solve the problem is instead to recognize that the idea of human essence at the species level is a being of reason, not a true essence. I defend this view in Chap. 6.
- 49.
The fact that UCNs and PCNs are generated only through the interaction with external bodies does not in and of itself mean that they are passive. On this, see the discussion of the activation of common notions in Sect. 4.2.1 of this chapter on the transition from the historia naturae to common notions.
- 50.
I discuss the implications of this discrepancy further in the final section of Chap. 6.
- 51.
I think the same can be said for shared (peculiar) properties, if we are talking about properties rather than natures. While all members of a given attribute share properties universal to that attribute, I see no a priori reason for thinking that there are properties that are shared only locally (i.e., only by subsets of the members of a given attribute).
- 52.
Perhaps, for instance, species essences are required by some principle of plenitude, but if so, I am not sure how or why.
- 53.
Cf. Wilson (1999, 347): “Why should not my belief (after Spinoza) that a squirrel in my yard, or an osprey over the water—or for that matter a centipede in the bathtub—experiences joy in the life that it has, inhibit my eliminating that life, even if I think that its joy is ‘different in nature’ from mine, and that accordingly I cannot be ‘friends’ with it?” Wilson is making a normative point here about the ethical implications (or lack thereof) of differing natures, whereas I am questioning the extent of difference in nature in the first place. But Wilson’s point that other animals experience their own kinds of joys is still congenial with my own. Wilson’s paper (1999) provides a good overview of some of the aporias involved in Spinoza’s doctrine of human and animal natures. See also Grey (2013).
- 54.
Della Rocca defends the idea that adequacy comes in degrees (2008, 114–16). Della Rocca’s notion of degrees of adequacy appears to be motivated, at least in part, by his view that human beings are not capable of completely adequate ideas. The latter view is based on the following line of reasoning. In order for an idea to be adequate, it must not be caused by anything external, since ideas that are externally caused (even only partially so) are inadequate. But all human ideas are externally caused, at least in part, thus no human ideas are completely adequate. I disagree that all human ideas are externally caused in the relevant sense. The genetic geometrical conceptions from the TIE provide abstract examples of ideas that are fully caused by the human mind itself. The common notions provide non-abstract examples of such ideas, as argued above. In this regard, I agree, in general, with Eugene Marshall’s (2008) arguments in favor of the possibility of ideas that are totally caused by the human mind. Given this possibility, a motivation for the notion of partial adequacy is removed.
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That is, the passage could be interpreted to say (in line with a degree of adequacy view): as our bodies have more in common with other bodies, our ideas increase (by degree) in their adequacy. Or, the passage could be interpreted to say (in line with an all-or-nothing view of adequacy): as our bodies have more in common with other bodies, we are more capable of having adequate ideas. In my view, the capability language (aptior) fits better with the latter all-or-nothing reading. The degree of adequacy view suggests that the mind should automatically (or ipso facto) enjoy an increase in the (degree of) adequacy of its ideas by having more in common with other bodies, not just gain greater capability for adequate ideas.
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Although the “problem of other minds” is not an issue that Spinoza takes up, I imagine that the same points that I have just made regarding ideas of other bodies pertain mutatis mutandis to ideas of other minds.
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I acknowledge that in the same passage Spinoza also compares the way in which he will treat the affects with the way he treated God and the mind in the first two parts of the Ethics. According to what I just said about his analysis of the affects, it should follow that Spinoza’s analysis of God is also constructed (i.e., true in form only). Bennett (1984, 20–3), notably, interpreted all of the Ethics as hypothetico-deductive. But this reading does not comport with the distinction I made between the robust truth of our idea of God and our true-in-form ideas of finite things. To reconcile my interpretation of Spinoza’s “lines, planes, or bodies” comment with my interpretation of Spinoza’s views on the truth of God as robust (not hypothetical), it must be the case that the “lines, planes, or bodies” comment has another connotation in relation to God than I have suggested it has in relation to the affects. The obvious candidate for an alternative connotation is Spinoza’s geometrical method of beginning with definitions and axioms and deriving propositions therefrom. This certainly applies to Spinoza’s treatment of God, while being neutral on the question of whether the axioms and definitions are stipulations or claim genuine correspondence with real objects. This qualification weakens my interpretation of the “lines, planes, or bodies” comment in relation to the affects, but I do not think it undermines it completely, since there is an independent basis for treating our knowledge of God as distinct from our knowledge of finite affairs.
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Homan, M. (2021). Reason and Imagination in Spinozan Science. In: Spinoza’s Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76739-6_4
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