Op
zoek naar informatie over het “axioma” “nam causatum differt a sua causa praecise in eo, quod a cause
habet” [cf. vorige blog]
i.v.m. Descartes kwam ik het boek van Delahunte tegen. Hij geeft niet precies
de informatie waarnaar ik op zoek ben, maar geeft wel een uitvoerige en
kritische behandeling van Spinoza’s redenering in 1/17s .
R.J. Delahunty, Spinoza. Series: The Arguments of the Philosophers. Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston, 1985, reprints 1999, 2010,
geeft in § “2. The Divine Mind” een kritische beschouwing over de redenering van Spinoza in 1/17s [cf. books.google]).
geeft in § “2. The Divine Mind” een kritische beschouwing over de redenering van Spinoza in 1/17s [cf. books.google]).
Ik neem deze hier graag over. Hiermee hebben we, naast die van Alexandre Koyré en Charles Jarrett [cf. blog] een derde uitvoerige exegese van 1/17s
2 The Divine mind
Orthodoxy
had separated God from Nature, but it did not interdict all commerce between
them. On the contrary, it saw God's mind and power at work everywhere in the
Universe. But the principle bond between God and the world, and the bond that
made all other ties possible, was the fact that God was the Creator of Nature. Originating in the
creation-narrative in Genesis, this
view had been systematised and defended by many notable thinkers. But Spinoza,
as we have seen, was committed to rejecting it. For him, as later for
proponents of Darwinism, the belief in the Genesis
account presented a massive obstacle to the advance of science and of
reason. He devoted much effort to subverting it, as a reading of the Short Treatise, the Cogitata Metaphysica,
and Ethics I will show. In what
follows, I shall examine some of his most fundamental criticisms of
Creationism. It is not too much to say that, in studying Spinoza's critique of
this part of Theology, we can see the naturalistic world outlook struggling to
emerge (Strauss, p. 127).
Let
us try to state what Creationism held. As Spinoza represents it, it maintains
that God brought the universe of minds and bodies into being ex nihilo, and not from any preexisting
matter. His creative act involved the exercise of the Divine intellect, which
shaped His plan, and the Divine will, which ordained its execution. His will to
create the Universe occurred freely and without constraint, and He acted for
ends which were His own. The Universe therefore exists contingently, and the
assumption that it is not contingent implies the denial of God's perfection and
omnipotence. If we follow the standard calculations, we must date the origin of
the Universe to approximately 4004 B.C.: at any rate, it had a beginning in
time.
In
Spinoza's criticism of this theory, nearly all the major themes of his
philosophy are announced. In this and the sections which follow, I discuss five
aspects of his critique. First, there are his objections to the claim that God
has both an intellect and a will; second, there is his effort to reconcile
belief in God's omnipotence with denial of the contingency of the Universe;
third, there is the question whether the Universe had a beginning in time;
fourth, comes the rejection of free will in God; and last, there is the attack
on final causes, the denial that God acts for certain ends. Putting these
together, we have one of the most determined assaults ever made on religion in
the name of philosophy.
We
begin with the first issue. In E I, 17S, Spinoza appoints himself the task of
proving that 'neither intellect nor will pertain to the nature of God'. The
promised demonstration appears later in the scholium, when he writes:
To say a word, too, here about the intellect and will
which we commonly attribute to God—if intellect and will pertain to His eternal
essence, these attributes cannot be understood in the sense in which men
generally use them (aliud sane per
utrumque hoc attributum intelligendum est, quam quod vulgo solent homines),
for the intellect and will which could constitute His essence would have to
differ entirely from our intellect and will (toto caelo di-fferre deberent), and could resemble ours in nothing
except in name (nec in ulla re,
praeterquam in nomine, convenire possent). There could be no further
likeness than that between the celestial constellation of the Dog (Canis, signum caeleste) and the animal
which barks (canis, animal latrans).
This I will demonstrate as follows. If intellect pertains to the Divine nature,
it cannot, like our intellect, follow the things which are its object (as many
suppose), nor can it be simultaneous in its nature with them, since God is
prior to all things in causality (El, I6C1); but, on the contrary, the truth
and formal essence of things is what it is, because as such it exists
objectively in God's intellect. Therefore the intellect of God, insofar as it
is conceived to constitute His essence, is in truth the cause of things, both
of (heir essence and of their existence—a truth which seems to have been
understood by those who have maintained that God's intellect, will and power
are one and the same thing. Since, therefore, God's intellect is the sole cause
of things, both of their essence and of their existence (as we have already
shown), it must necessarily differ from them with regard both to its essence
and existence; for an effect differs from its cause precisely in that which it
has from its cause (nam causatum differt a sua causa praecise in eo, quod a
cause habet). For example, one man is the cause of the existence but not of the
essence of another, for the essence is an eternal truth; and therefore with
regard to existence they must differ. Consequently if the existence of one
should perish, that of the other would not therefore perish; but if the essence
of one could be destroyed and become false, the essence of the other would be
likewise destroyed. Therefore a thing which is the cause both of the essence
and of the existence of any effect must differ from that effect both with
regard to its essence and with regard to its existence. But the intellect of
God is the cause both of the essence and existence of our intellect; therefore
the intellect of God, so far as it is conceived to constitute the Divine
essence, differs from our intellect both with regard to its essence and its
existence, nor can it coincide with our intellect in anything except the name,
which is what we essayed to prove. The same demonstration may be applied to the
will, as anyone may easily see for himself.
It
is important to see that Spinoza is not
conceding that intellect and will belong to the nature or essence of God in
even a remote sense; it is stated
roundly that 'neither intellect nor will pertain to the nature of God'; and the
demonstration is designed to prove the conditional
proposition that if they belonged to God's nature, then even so His intellect
and will would have nothing in common with ours save the name (Gueroult I, pp. 562-3). If it is
necessary that intellect and will belong to a thing's nature in order that the
thing should be a person, then Spinoza's God is not a person:
Was soll mir euer Hohn
Uber das All and Eine?
Der Professor ist eine Person,
Gott ist keine. *)
Uber das All and Eine?
Der Professor ist eine Person,
Gott ist keine. *)
How
is this result proved? Assuming, of course, that intellect and will do pertain
to God's nature, Spinoza says, it is the case that (i) the Divine intellect,
insofar as it is conceived to constitute the essence of God, is the cause both
of the essence and of the existence of all things. Consequently, (ii) it is the
cause of the essence and existence of our intellect. But (iii) an effect
differs from its cause precisely in that which it has from its cause. So (iv)
the Divine intellect, conceived of as constituting the Divine essence, differs
from our intellect in both essence and existence. And this, in turn, supports
the conclusion that (v) the Divine intellect has nothing in common with our
intellect except the name.
As
so often in Spinoza, the implicit target of the argument is not easy to
identify; I conjecture that it was Descartes. In the Replies to the Second Set of Objections, Descartes wrote that 'the
idea which we have of the Divine intellect does not seem to me to differ from
that which we have of our own intellect, save only as the idea of an infinite
number differs from the idea of a binary or ternary number' (H.R. H, p. 36). (For Spinoza's related
struggle with Maimonidcs, see Strauss,
pp. 151-4.)
How
effective is the reasoning? Premiss (i) can be taken to mean that an intellect
which belonged to God's nature or essence would not be 'receptive', as human
intellects are, but `creative' (Barker,
p. 115). And that in turn can be read to mean that if such an intellect
belonged to God, then it would he the case that for any ‘p' such that it is a fact that p,
then ‘p' because God's intellect understands that p. (This contrasts with the human intellect, of which it cannot he
said that its understanding a fact causes that fact to hold.) Spinoza could
have derived this premiss from Descartes himself who, in a letter of 2 May
1644, praises St Augustine's prayer, 'Truths are so because you see them to be
so' (Kenny Letters, p. 151).
Suppose
next that it belongs to our intellect to have essence F Then we can deduce, by means of (i), that our intellect has
essence F because God's intellect understands
it to have F—or more loosely, that
our intellect has F because of God's
intellect. (In a similar way, we can deduce that our intellect exists because
of God's intellect.) That gives us step (ii). But now, by (iii), it seems to
follow that our intellect differs from God's in essence (and in
existence)—which is what (iv) asserts. To reach (v), however, we need an extra,
unstated premiss. It will not do to say that (vi) if X and Y differ in essence (and existence), then X and Y cannot both be ‘ф' in the same sense. For a man and a horse, Spinoza
says, differ in (specific) essence (E III, 57S)—as, presumably, they do in
existence; and yet both can unequivocally be called 'animal'. Instead of (vi),
we need something like (vii): if it is the specific essence of X to be ф, then if Y differs
in specific essence from X, Y cannot be called 'ф’ in the same sense as X. And this will give us (v), or something very close to it.
Thus
far, then, the reasoning appears to be successful. But let us turn our
attention to the causal axiom announced in (iii). At a first approximation,
this seems to mean that if X causes Y to be ф, then X and
Y differ in respect of фness. But how do they differ? Not, surely, in that one
is ф and
the other not-ф: in
the example Spinoza gives, both the man who imparts existence, and the man who
receives it from him, are in existence. They 'differ' in that it is possible for one to cease to exist
without the other's ceasing to do so (cp.
VI, 3 (A)). Perhaps then (iii) might be formulated as: if X causes Y to be ф, then if X is ф, it is possible for X (F) to cease to be ф, without Y's (X’s)
also ceasing to be ф.
On
this construal, the claim that God's intellect differs from our in essence
amounts to saying: if God's intellect has essence F then it could cease to have F
without our intellect's ceasing to have F
and conversely. But why should that show that the predicate `... has essence F' cannot be ascribed in the same sense
to God's intellect and to ours? In the illustration, the one man 'differs' from
the other in existence in just the way that God's intellect 'differs' from ours
in essence, but it scarcely follows that the one man 'exists' in a radically
different sense from the other.
Premiss
(vii), however, remains plausible. But that is only because it uses the phrase
`differing in essence' in a quite separate meaning. A river bank and the branch
of Barclays in the Market Place differ in specific essence, and if both are called 'banks', that does not signify
that they have a common nature—the term is just being used equivocally. If
God's intellect differed in specific essence from ours, as the Tyne bank
differs from the branch of Barclays, then indeed it would be only equivocally
that the two things could be called `intellects', or be said to have
such-and-such an essence in common. But Spinoza has done nothing to prove the
[that] the Divine intellect and the human differ in specific essence. He has
shown only that if God's intellect has the essence which it causes ours to
have, then the one could cease to have that essence without necessitating that
the other also ceased to have it. When Descartes compared the human and the
Divine intellects to a binary or ternary and to 'an infinite number', he was
assuming that the former, like the latter, were the same in specific essence.
That may be untrue of infinite intellects, as well as of 'infinite numbers',
but Spinoza has not proved it to be so. The fallacy which Spinoza committed may
have been encouraged by his nominalism (cf. III, 2; III, 7). For although he
himself uses the term 'essence (essentia)’
to cover the same ground as 'specific essence' (as at E III, 57S), he wants to maintain that there are no common essences
or natures, only individual ones. (Thus in Ep.
2 he denies that 'humanity' or 'human nature' is anything real.) When he says
that a begetter and his begotten differ in essence, what he asserts is true, if
all essences are individual. But this difference in essence cannot entail that
no specific terms can be applied to both without equivocation. If it did, then
specific terms would effectively be banished from the language. For by that
account, it would be invalid to reason: 'Abraham was a man; Isaac was a man; so
there is something which both Abraham and Isaac were'. On the extreme
nominalistic view, that would be like reasoning: 'That star is a Dog ("Canis”); Rover is a dog ("canis”); so there is something which
both Rover and that star are'.
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*) Johann Wolfgang G oethe, Zahme Xenien, 7 [»Deine Werke zu höchster Belehrung] cf. zeno.org
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