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In writing this paper I have profited from comments from Henry E. Allison, Ruth Mattern, Robert Pippin, and Zeno Vendler.
“Spinoza's Definition of Attribute,”Philosophical Review, LXII (1953). Also in S. Paul Kashap, ed.,Studies in Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 28 (subsequent references give page numbers in this edition).
A lengthy account of some of the principal forms of the subjectivits view has been offered by Martial Gueroult:Spinoza, Vol. I (Hildesheim: Olms, 1968), Appendix 3, pp. 428–461.
“Essence and the Definition of Attribute,” in Marjorie Grene, ed.,Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 177.
Subsequent references to theEthics will give part and proposition numbers, abbreviated and placed in the text, thus: E-II, 1.
The equivalence is more explicit still in some of Spinoza's correspondence. See, for instance, Ep. 2 and Ep. 9, A. Wolf, ed.,The Correspondence of Spinoza (London: Cass, 1966), p. 75, p. 108. Martial Gueroult argues for the equivalence of substance and attribute using various passages from theEthics as well as other texts.Spinoza, I,op. cit., A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1973), pp. 47–48.
Haserot, “Spinoza's Definition of Attribute,”, p. 28.
Allison, Henry E.,Benedict de Spinoza, (Boston: Twayne, 1975), p. 59. Although I have used his formulation of the objectivist view as an example, I should point out that Allison does not regard the attributes as properties of substance but as “perspectives.”
It is not easy to decide whether the “sources of diversity” formulation suffers mainly from treating attributes as properties or from the other basic error, to be discussed presently, of treating them as representations.
Sometimes the subjectivist may go further, asserting not just the uniqueness of substance but its perfect simplicity and homogeneity. This is a mistake, as Gueroult and others have argued (Spinoza, I, pp. 446–47). Nevertheless, Alan Donagan is right to insist that it is still thesame essence that is expressed under each attribute (“Essence and the Definition of Attribute,”op. cit. in Marjorie Grene, ed.,Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 176).
Ep. 9, Wolf, ed.,, p. 107.
I am not here denying that something (call it the music) remains the same in each of the transpositions of a piece; the point is that there is no representational gap between the transposition and the music. It is meaningless to ask whether the transposition does or does not “correspond to” the music (assuming that itis a transposition—that the mechanics of transposition have been correctly carried out). A transposition does notrepresent the music to us—it justgives us themusic. A similar remark applies to my discussion below of synonymous sentences and the “meanings” they express.
The theory of language invoked here, according to which there is no need to appeal to meanings as entities, is not accepted by all philosophers. But that does not matter; it is not my purpose to defend a theory of language but to explain the relation between the attributes in Spinoza. Nor does the rejection of the triadic view as an interpretation of Spinoza depend on the analogy with language: it follows from the rejection ofany representational theory of the attributes, which we worked out in the previous section. The analogy with language is intended to make the following point: if wedo think that synonymy can be explained without appeal to meanings as entities to which synonymous expressions stand in semantic relations (and many people, I think, believe this or at least find it intelligible), then we have a model which can be used to illustrate Spinoza's “one and the same thing expressed in two different ways” (where we also wish to avoid a semantic gap between the expressions and whatever it is that they express).
Perception as Spinoza characterizes it is usually something done by the mind; thus, the notion of intellectual perception developed in the text need not be taken as a deviant usage. When perception by the bodily senses is in question, Spinoza's word is “imagination,” not “perception,” although counter-examples can be found. We should note also that the distinction between conception and perception is not rigidly adhered to (e.g. in E-II, 38, “perception” occurs in the demonstration even though “conception” would seem to be the appropriate word). I do not think that these irregularities undermine the general claims made in the text.
Whether they hold for Spinoza's theory of perception by the senses I shall leave open. Spinoza is generally said to hold a representative theory of perception, but my own work on Spinoza's philosophy of mind has convinced me that this claim requires thorough examination, although I shall not pursue the point in this essay. In such an examination it is essential to distinguish representative theories of peception from representative theories of knowledge; that Spinoza did not hold the latter is, I believe, demonstrable.
These considerations should be enough to rule out the notion that the attributes are somehow dependent on human apprehension, and with it those versions of the subjective view which talk of the attributes as “inventions of the human intellect.” Nevertheless, there is one lesson to be drawn from this discussion. Although the attributes do not depend on human apprehension, they do, according to the definition, relate in some fashion to intellect, and this must figure in any acceptable interpretation. Hence my insistence in the text on perception by the intellect.
The analogy can be pushed a bit further. Notice that the duck and the rabbit are independent in just Spinoza's sense that one does not involve the conception of the other: we cannot see the duck-rabbit simultaneously as a duck and as a rabbit, nor when we see it one way are we necessarily led to see it the other way. One might see itonly as a duck oronly as a rabbit, and be unable to see it any other way. Furthermore, there may, for all I know, be any number of additional ways to see it even though I can discern only two.
My distinction between the concept and the actual existence of substance is very close to Gueroult's separation between the concept of substance and the “realité de la chose” (Spinoza, I, p. 49).
Spinoza's views are similar in interesting ways to the views of certain contemporary philosophers who have attacked the traditional explanation of necessity in terms of analyticity anda prioricity.
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Mark, T.C. The spinozistic attributes. Philosophia 7, 55–82 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02379992
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02379992