Abstract
In the Ethics (Part One), Spinoza argues that, while he rejects both (a) the voluntarist God of Descartes, and (b) the God of rational agency that deliberately chooses (e.g., to create this world) on the basis of practical reasons, in favor of his own God/Nature/Substance from which everything follows with necessity, he nonetheless remarks that if he had to choose between (a) and (b), he would choose (a). Nadler finds this a rather surprising thing for Spinoza to say. In this paper, he discusses the different conceptions of God, explains why he finds Spinoza’s remark surprising, and examines why Spinoza does claim such a hypothetical preference.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Rutherford (1995), for example, has argued for the primacy of philosophical theology, and especially the problem of evil, over other concerns (metaphysical and logical) in Leibniz.
- 2.
See Leibniz’s fourth letter to Samuel Clarke, GP VII.372; L 687. This is only one of many occasions where Leibniz employs this argument for his law. See also Leibniz’s Fifth Paper (for Clarke): “I infer from [the principle of sufficient reason] … that there are not in nature two real, absolute beings, indiscernible from each other, because if there were, God and nature would act without reason in treating the one otherwise than the other; and that therefore God does not produce two pieces of matter perfectly equal and alike” (GP VII.393; L 699 [translation modified]).
- 3.
Quoted by Leibniz at Theodicy, §227, GP VI.253; H 268.
- 4.
For a discussion of this, see André Robinet (1965, 22).
- 5.
See Dialogues on Metaphysics, VIII.13.
- 6.
“Assuming that God wants to act, I contend that he will always do it in the most wise manner possible, or in the manner which most bears the character of his attributes. I insist that this is never an arbitrary or indifferent matter for Him … Immutable Order, which consists in the necessary relationship that exists between the divine perfections, is the inviolable law and the rule of all His volitions” (Reply to Arnauld’s Philosophical and Theological Reflections on the New System of Nature and Grace, OC VIII.752–3).
- 7.
- 8.
This process is described, for example, in the Fourth Meditation.
- 9.
In addition to the passage cited above, see TNG, OC V.180, 185.
- 10.
Reflections philosophiques et théologiques sur le nouveau système de la nature et de la grace, OA XXXIX.600. According to Arnauld, it also generates a problem of consistency for Malebranche because Malebranche does want to say that God is indifferent in the initial choice to create a world outside Himself.
- 11.
“By following Malebranche in the manner in which he conceives God, I do not see how He can be indifferent to creating or not creating something outside Himself, if He was not indifferent to choosing among several works and among several ways of producing them. For God … , according to [Malebranche], having consulted His wisdom, is necessarily determined to produce the work that it [wisdom] has shown him to be the most perfect, and to choose the means that it has shown Him also to be the most worthy of Him” (Reflections, OA XXXIX.599). As Robert C. Sleigh, Jr., points out (1990, 45–47), this concern (worded in almost exactly the same way) reappears less than 20 years later in his criticisms of Leibniz.
- 12.
“If we are asked why God has created the world, we should reply only that it is because He wanted to; and … if we are asked again why He wanted to, we should not say, as [Malebranche] does, that ‘He wanted to obtain an honor worthy of Himself.’ The idea of God does not allow us to accept Malebranche’s proposition. We ought rather to say that He wanted to because He wanted to, that is, that we ought not to seek a cause of that which cannot have one” (Reflections II.3, OA XXXIX.433). Vincent Carraud (1996, 91–110) notes that this is Arnauld’s refusal “to submit God to causality, that is, to submit His will to rationality in the form of a principle of reason.” See also Thomas M. Lennon (1978, 186); Lennon recognizes that, contrary to Malebranche’s “rationally constrained” God, for Arnauld “divine self-determination [is] utterly unconstrained and thus mysterious.”
- 13.
“[People] find—both in themselves and outside themselves—many means that are very helpful in seeking their own advantage, e.g., eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for light, the sea for supporting fish. Hence, they consider all natural things as means to their own advantage. And knowing that they had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to believe that there was someone else who had prepared those means for their use. For after they considered things as means, they could not believe that the things had made themselves; but from the means they were accustomed to prepare for themselves, they had to infer that there was a ruler, or a number of rulers of nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken care of all things for them, and made all things for their use. And because they had never heard anything about the temperament of these rulers, they had to judge it from their own. Hence, they maintained that the gods direct all things for the use of men in order to bind men to them and be held by men in the highest honor. So it has happened that each of them has thought up from his own temperament different ways of worshipping God, so that God might love them above all the rest, and direct the whole of Nature according to the needs of their blind desire and insatiable greed. Thus this prejudice was changed into superstition, and struck deep roots in their minds” (Ethics I, Appendix, G II.78–9; C 440–41).
- 14.
Marion (1981, 181–296) rightly cautions against using the label ‘voluntarism’ for Descartes’s position, insofar as it suggests a continued distinction between divine faculties, except now with will having priority over understanding—which is incompatible with Descartes’s insistence that there is no such distinction in God. However, the term, while misleading in this way, does serve well to highlight the fact that for Descartes, the eternal truths are dependent on God’s causal power, even if His willing those truths is identical with His understanding them.
- 15.
Marion (1985, 143–164) argues that in formulating his critique of Descartes’s doctrine, Leibniz willfully misreads it to introduce a priority of will and understanding in God.
- 16.
“According to this principle, the universe is perfect because God willed it. Monsters are works as perfect as others according to the plans of God. It is good to have eyes in our head, but they would have been as wisely placed anywhere else, had God so placed them. However we invert the world, whatever chaos we make out of it, it will always be equally admirable, since its entire beauty consists in its conformity with the divine will, which is not obliged to conform to order. All the beauty of the universe must therefore disappear in view of that great principle that God is above the Reason that enlightens all minds, and that His wholly arbitrary will is the sole rule of His actions” (Dialogues on Metaphysics IX.13, OC XII.220–221; JS 168–69).
- 17.
I refer here to Spinoza confronting Leibniz’s God, although of course Spinoza knew nothing about Leibniz’s own conception of God at least until their meeting in 1676, over a decade after he was probably finished composing Part One of the Ethics. What Spinoza is referring to in the passage is the traditional, rationalist conception of God found among medieval philosophers such as Maimonides and Aquinas.
- 18.
This is especially so given the way “men commonly,” including Descartes (but not Spinoza), conceive of the relationship between will and understanding in human beings.
- 19.
See IIP49 and its scholia.
- 20.
See A VI.3.474–5.
- 21.
For their helpful feedback on this paper and on the issues addressed, I am very grateful to the participants in the conference on Leibniz and Spinoza held at Princeton University in September 2007, members of the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Amsterdam in June 2007, colloquium audiences in the philosophy departments at Notre Dame and Indiana University in October 2007, and especially colleagues in the Montreal Interuniversity Workshop in the History of Philosophy in November 2006.
References
Beyssade, Jean-Marie. 1979. La philosophie première de Descartes. Paris: Flammarion.
Carraud, Vincent. 1996. Arnauld: A Cartesian theologian? Omnipotence, freedom of indifference, and the creation of the eternal truths. In Interpreting Arnauld, ed. Elmar Kremer. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Lennon, Thomas M. 1978. Occasionalism, Jansenism, and skepticism: Divine providence and the order of grace. Irish Theological Quarterly 45: 185–90.
Marion, Jean-Luc. 1981. Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Marion, Jean-Luc. 1985. De la création des vérités éternelles au principe de la raison. Remarques sur l’anti-cartésianisme de Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz. XVIIe siècle 37: 143–64.
Robinet, André. 1965. Système et existence dans l’oeuvre de Malebranche. Paris: J. Vrin.
Rutherford, Don. 1995. Leibniz and the rational order of nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sleigh, Robert C. Jr. 1990. Leibniz and Arnauld: A commentary on their correspondence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Stewart, Matthew. 2006. The courtier and the heretic. New York: Norton.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nadler, S. (2010). Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Gods of Philosophy. In: Fraenkel, C., Perinetti, D., Smith, J. (eds) The Rationalists: Between Tradition and Innovation. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 65. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9385-1_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9385-1_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9384-4
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9385-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)