Spinoza’s God, and the need for religion.
From Reddit user u/topsicle11
Spinoza understood something deeply profound about the relationship between philosophy, religion, and politics; that each played an important role in the intellectual and moral life of society. However, far from a monism that is reducible to a knowable singularity, I believe what Spinoza offers us is a metaphysics and ethics that is grounded in a belief in a transcendent God.
The monism that most of us will have learned in our college classrooms after having been introduced to Spinoza’s Ethics will reveal to us a deep seated belief that because ultimately everything is of one substance, the moral life inheres similarly in what might be called a single “virtue;” that is, to have understood that properly moral action line up with properly conceived ideas, and that whatever one does one has already deemed good in some sense. For Spinoza, since it is the case that the idea of goodness already accompanies every action, then it is also the case that whatever one does is always because one has deemed it worth doing. For whatever these reasons are – and as Spinoza painstakingly argues in the Ethics – nothing is really “good” nor “bad,” except as it profits one’s livelihood. It is this principle of conatus that is crucial to the metaphysical arguments he makes. While the monism, the necessitarianism, and the parallelism is all good and fine for the metaphysician, for the ethicist – which is arguably exactly what Spinoza was – the principle of conatus, or the crucial idea that all things which exist have it in their nature to exist and to persist in existence, is fundamental to understanding how Spinoza’s claim of monism is for him and his contemporaries a radical way of conceiving of nature and an important precursor for the basis of modern and contemporary ideas of social justice.
Importantly, in Ethics IV, Spinoza ties up his argument insisting that it is only through an understanding of adequate ideas that we can truly be our best selves; that is, ensuring our wellbeing and the wellbeing of others. As I have recounted elsewhere, for Spinoza, the only truly adequate idea is the idea of God (or nature) as he understands it; the one substance in which everything else inheres and upon which everything depends. For Spinoza the “first cause,” is not only the solution to an old mereological problem, but understanding God, the first cause, and the only adequate idea, is what will prevent us from taking actions against others or ourselves (and vice versa) so as to ensure our continued survival and wellbeing. [1] [2]
The argument then can be made that whatever an individual does, in order for it to be actually most beneficial to himself, it must also be for everyone else. In addition, if what is most beneficial is grounded in the most adequate idea which is the idea of God, then it must be the case that what man does for the good of himself (and so also for the good of others) must be accompanied by an understanding of God.
Contrary to what many scholars would have us believe, it is this argument which leads me to believe that for Spinoza, his idea of God was truly something divine and not simply something reducible to the physics of nature. [3] This is to say, that for Spinoza, proper behavior would be ordered such that it understands the shared substance of all things. If, let us say, we accept the thesis that Spinoza’s “deus sive natura” or “God, or [otherwise] nature.” (KS) meant that God is interchangeable with some physical conception of nature as opposed to an understanding of nature as something akin to a fundamental foundation (which, for me, is much more conducive to the ethical argument which Spinoza makes, which is further backed by the TTP), [4] then could one not conceive that for Spinoza there is no special significance that would be assigned to the oneness of this nature such that man would act accordingly and not contradictory to the wellbeing of himself and others if he did not have an idea any which way about what was good for him? Spinoza’s insistence that the virtue of knowing God is available to all [5] is to be taken seriously and not to be amended with psychologizing something we might call the properly ordered mind.” For Spinoza it is quite simply the case that all people – like all other things that exist – strive for their existence even if one were to kill themselves. [6] It must be the case then that if one’s very existence strives to continue to exist and nothing to the contrary, then it must be the case that if one is to also want that for another, and that it is essential that this desire be coupled with an idea, then the proper desire for others must be accompanied by some idea that the shared first cause that makes both one and another worthy of continued existence must have some inherent moral value that transcends the finitude of nature.
It is for this reason that I believe the Spinozist God is a transcendental God not dissimilar to the idea of God espoused in the Jewish and Christian religions from which his contemporaries were afraid he had deviated too far; that is to say, a God of infinite attributes and thus not wholly knowable, but one whose existence can reasonably be posited.
It would be of worth, then, to consider that for Spinoza religion can and does in fact play a real and necessary role in the ordering of human life and these religious beliefs also play a role in determining the good governance of a society. He writes:
“Indeed, all the Law promises for obedience is the continental prosperity of their state and the other advantages of this life. Conversely, [it threatened] nothing for obstinacy and breaking the covenant except the ruin of their state and the greatest [temporal] disadvantages… So nothing else could be promised to the social order of the Hebrews, for their constant observance of the laws, except security of life and the advantages [security provides].”[7]
One can firmly be of the opinion that for Spinoza, the most important thing to believe was that the nature of all things is a God that contains within itself something of the eternal. While it is true that one can understand Spinoza to have understood something akin to the contemporary belief that all humans are worthy of the same dignity because of our shared and same nature, I believe that Spinoza crucially offers us something more: that our very existence is a trace of something transcendent and even divine, and if we are to take this claim seriously, then we must also consider that what is most necessary for a truly Spinozist ethics is a belief in something beyond ourselves, the very nature of which demands our concern and deferral.
NOTES
Ethics IVp30-37
It is also the case that for Spinoza another important moment in his argument is that there is something about human being which is eternal. Ethics Vp23
This also raises questions about how the work of science makes cuts which demarcate things as “natural” based on whether or not they can be reduced to the specimens necessary for its various methods.
Theological Political Treatise (TTP), Curley, 113. “Whatever we can honorably desire is related above all to these three things: [i] understanding things through their first causes…”
Ref. [2]
Ethics Vp22
TTP, 115