Spinoza: on the necessity of faith and a new religion

This essay outlines introductory thoughts regarding the relationship between Benedictus de Spinoza’s monism and the possibility of a morality based upon a commitment to necessitarianism. The criticism has been levied against the idea that Spinoza is committed to a metaphysical necessitarianism, even to say that perhaps Spinoza is at best ambivalent towards such a commitment. While these charges have merit, it is the purpose of this paper to wager another interpretation: that the commitments which are made in the Ethics must not be one of metaphysical necessitarianism, but one more akin to a defense of such a metaphysics. Closely following the lead of Omri Boehm in a series of lectures given in the Spring semester of 2022 at the New School for Social Research, I argue that the sort of necessitarianism Spinoza appears to outline is one that is most immediately concerned with the defense of the dignity of the human person as free insofar as that they have no purpose for their existence except to exist, and that this existence is identical to any other human existence and thus cannot be submitted to utility as an instrument for the purposes of another. Though the obvious criticism against this argument would point to the fact that a commitment to necessitarianism – whether or not it is able to demonstrate a purposiveness in nature – must already mean that things are already determined towards certain ends and are not, as it were, ends in themselves, to borrow Kantian language. In order to demonstrate this point, I offer my argument that Spinoza, explicitly or not, can be read in the Ethics to offer a sort of vindication of faith that also upholds the dignity of the individual. It is important to this strand of my argument to interpret that the Ethics, rather than laying out the metaphysical foundations of what may uniquely be called a Spinozist ontology, deals in offering and defending against reasonable attacks another mode of believing in something beyond ourselves; Deus sive natura – God, otherwise nature. Ultimately, this essay argues that the project laid out in the Ethics can be read as a defense of God as that alone which is the adequate object of belief, without which one would be unable to defend the dignity of the person, which would otherwise be subject only to the baseness of human passion.

This essay assumes a rudimentary understanding of the Spinozist metaphysical argument, which, in sum, follows: A substance is that thing which exists necessarily by its essence, and that those things which inhere in it do so necessarily with it as its ground, and it the ground of its own existence. A substance also may not be sufficiently affected by another substance, but so also may nothing else be so affected by another thing which is not of the same type; bodies may affect bodies and thoughts may affect thoughts, but bodies may not affect a thought, and the same vice versa. Inhering within a substance are those things which make up its essence. These things are called attributes, which, as well, may inhere in those things which are modes of a substance, or the affections thereof. This is to say that there may be some mode called a body which is a thinking thing (that is, contains as part of it the attribute of thinking) which is capable of thinking a thought. Therefore, that thought inheres in that thinking thing, a mode that inheres and is necessarily (that is, inherently), part of the substance. It is also the case that while no limit can be placed on a thing by something of another type, it is also the case that a thing cannot be destroyed by anything external to it, or by anything of another type.

The ultimate substance, for Spinoza, is God, the only substance which exists, and all other things which exist inhere necessarily in this substance. To make a longer point short, it follows from this that humans are modes which exist within this substance, God, which involve both thinking and extensive attributes. For Spinoza, both the body (the extensive) and the mind (the thinking) are inherent in this one substance. But because of a hard and fast distinction between the attributes of thinking and extension, or what Michael Della Rocca calls a “conceptual barrier” between attributes, it is also the case that the thinking mind does not affect in any causal manner the extensive body, and vice versa.

This is to say that while the body may act and the mind might perceive that action, it is also the case that while the mind might think, it does not cause the body to act. It might be noted that action for Spinoza is almost coextensive with the drives of the passions, which are not aligned with proper reason and thus are subjected to the determinations of the body, and this conception plays a great role in Spinoza’s ethical commitments. Yet it is the case that the idea of anything that can pose a limit to the ability of the body to act also does so to the ability of the mind. That being the case, those passions of the body, the knowledge of which are always inadequate, make the mind susceptible to inadequate thinking, orienting the mind towards the sort of teleological thinking which Spinoza completely rejects.

The tendency for inadequate ideas to lead towards teleological thinking is grounded in Spinoza’s commitment to necessary thinking as the foundation of adequate thoughts, and that to conceive otherwise is to conceive that the object of an idea can have been otherwise (which directly contradicts the idea of necessity) and is thus manipulable towards some end, and this sort of contingent thinking, that some thing might exist for the purpose of some end outside of itself is something which Spinoza implicitly warns against in EIIp4, where he writes that, “No thing can be destroyed except through an external cause,” and again following up in p5 and p6 that, “Things are of a contrary nature, i.e., cannot be in the same subject, insofar as one can destroy the other. Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” This is to say that it is not a reasonable nor adequate thought to conceive of a thing as non-existent, and that the very possibility of a thing necessitates its existence. This necessity may determine outcomes, but it is not the case that these outcomes are the goals or purpose of the thing, because to regard a thing as purposed is to regard it as having been intentionally fixed, and thus possible to imagine otherwise.

It is here that I point attention to Parts IV of the Ethics where the large bulk of Spinoza’s ethical commitments are laid out. IVp28 lays out a powerful statement; that “[t]he greatest thing the Mind can understand is God; its greatest virtue is to know God.” Alone, or in its context, this statement speaks volumes. It is clear at this point that for Spinoza, the only truly adequate thought is the understanding of God and his necessity; that the very possibility of the world necessitates its existence, and that it’s existence inheres in a single deterministic substance is the only thought which is free from the passions and affects of man’s being. This is to say, that to think God, and understand this thought adequately, is to understand that all things which exist exist only out of necessity and not for some aim. It is here that we begin to see clearly that although unorthodox in many ways, Spinoza can appear to be vindicating religious thought, that at least the philosophical contemplation of God can serve as the basis of some sort of faith which rightly orders man’s behavior and can justify it as good.

Spinoza continues, “Insofar as a thing agrees with our nature, it is necessarily good,” (IVp31) and that “Insofar as men are subject to passions, they cannot be said to agree in nature.” (IVp32) For Spinoza, adequate thinking has more to do with the freedom of man than just knowledge of himself. Rather, adequate thinking is necessary for man’s survival, insofar as it is the case that inadequate thinking makes man capable of being used or instrumentalized by either others who think inadequately or by their own inadequate thoughts which fix them towards some end outside of themself. To the extent that inadequate thinking either within one’s self or by another is contradictory to the nature of man, it is the case that inadequate thought negates man’s nature, and thus disposes man to destruction by these contingent and instrumental ideas.

More to the point, however, is the idea that it is the belief in God or nature that justifies all of this. From the start of the Ethics, Spinoza has attempted to distance himself from subjective thinking in the cartesian sense to demonstrate in a geometric and axiomatic argument that his metaphysics must be the case. Yet, the rhetorical point can be made that the Ethics still begins with definitions that involve the phrase “I understand,” rather than a de facto injunction. The geometric argument thus coincides with a subjective onset, and it is here that I speculate and consider it of scholarly import to attempt to understand Spinoza’s position as one which does not lay out an objective or doxastic metaphysics, but one which seeks to justify this sort of system of thinking as one which is most adequately suited to the health and continued welfare of man in his nature.

It is for this reason that I would like to advance the idea, along with others like Martijn Buijs that rather than defying religion as an authority on the matters of morality as is often understood to be the case with Spinozist scholarship, it can quite well be argued that rather Spinoza imagines a new conception of religion that is grounded in rational belief and thus liberates man from the bondages of human authority which seeks to order their behavior from the outside. Rather, I believe it can well be understood that for Spinoza, an adequate and true faith in God must recognize that the very idea of God’s necessity is sufficient for moral and good behavior, as it frees man from passion and liberates him quite literally from destruction and death. Rather than thinking of religion as something which imposes itself upon man from the outside, Spinoza offers us a new way of seeing faith as that which inspires good behavior from within ourselves, and that it is the endless contemplation of the most expansive of thoughts – that is, to think adequately what one might intuitively think is the most unthinkable thought – is to place God’s necessity above all human passions, vindicating this sort of faith as that which is necessary to the Enlightenment’s strife to save man from his bondage.