A Response: Accidents and Modifications: An Additional Note on Axioms 1 and 2 in Appendix 1 of the Short Treatise

Mogens Lærke

Let me begin by thanking Melamed for a chapter that helps us get a substantially better grasp of a text rarely discussed in Spinoza scholarship. In my view, both appendices of the Short Treatise afford us essential information about the genesis of Spinoza’s system. Melamed has provided a compelling argument for seeing the first appendix of the Short Treatise as Spinoza’s first “draft” of the Ethics and as a crucial text for understanding the passage from the doctrine expounded in the main part of the Short Treatise to the Ethics. He has also tentatively suggested that one of the central theses presented in this appendix, namely Spinoza’s explicit denial of divine self-limitation, is a concern that it is hard to understand without a context—why would anyone think that God would limit himself?—and that the most plausible context is the Lurianic doctrine of zimzum, that is, the doctrine according to which God, when creating the world, first vacated a primordial space within himself to make room for creation. Axiom 6 of the first appendix would thus be a rare place in Spinoza where he addressed in an argumentative mode the Kabbalah rather than simply dismissing it as “trifles” and “madness,” as in effect he later does in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.1 I have no objections really to any of these suggestions or very much to add to them. Melamed has provided compelling evidence that the first point is true and that the second is very plausible. So I will leave it at that. I would rather like to focus on the text Melamed has analyzed and return to what could appear to be a detail concerning Axioms 1 and 2 of KV-A1. I want to consider in more depth how they relate to the passages that, as Melamed shows, “mirror” them in the Ethics, namely E1p1 and E1p4. I think we can learn something important from such an analysis about the development of Spinoza’s philosophy that concerns his attitude toward the notion of “accidents.” I shall also consider some related translation issues.

Let me first recall the first two axioms in the first appendix and their “mirror” texts in the Ethics. I give the texts in the original Dutch and Latin and then also provide the two English translations most used these days, by Edwin Curley and Samuel Shirley2:

I.

KV-A1a1:

  

De zelfstandigheid staat wegens syn natuur voor alle syne toevallen (modificationes).

Curley:

  

Substance is, by its nature, prior to all its modifications.

Shirley:

  

Substance is, by its nature, prior to all its modifications.3

E1p1:

  

Substantia prior est natura suis affectionibus.

Curley:

  

A substance is prior in nature to its affections.

Shirley:

  

Substance is by nature prior to its affections.

II.

KV-A1a2:

  

De dingen welke verscheiden zyn, worden onderscheiden, of dadelyk of toevallig.

Curley:

  

Things that are different are distinguished either really or modally.

Shirley:

  

Things which are different are distinguished either realiter or modaliter.4

E1p4:

  

Duae aut plures res distinctae vel inter se distinguuntur ex diversitate attributorum substantiarum, vel ex diversitate earundem affectionum.

Curley:

  

Two or more distinct things are distinguished from one another, either by a difference in the attributes of the substances or by a difference in their affections.

Shirley:

  

Two or more distinct things are distinguished from one another either by the difference of the attributes of the substances or by the difference of the affections of the substances.

What I am interested in are the Dutch expressions toevallen and toevallig onterscheiden, how exactly we should translate them, and the extent to which they do in fact “mirror” their corresponding expressions in Ethics, that is to say, respectively, affectiones and ex diversitate affectionum. But I first want to take a look at the English translations, Curley’s and Shirley’s. They are not substantially different. If we just read those translations, we easily come to think that if there is any difference to consider between the passages in the Short Treatise and their corresponding passages in the Ethics, it concerns only the fact that, in the Short Treatise, Spinoza speaks about “modifications,” whereas in the Ethics, he speaks about “affections.” This terminological shift is real enough and not just a translation issue. For, as Melamed points out in a footnote, if we are to give credence to Pierre Balling’s translation of the Ethics in the Nagelate Schriften, the appropriate Dutch rendering of the Latin affectio is not toeval but aandoening. So far so good, and there may very well be something worthwhile to say about that change in terminology. That is however not what I want to focus on here. For there is another, I think interesting, variation we can witness between Appendix 1 and the Ethics, but that both English translations fail to capture.

Hence, if we go to the original Dutch, we realize that the matter may be a little more complicated. In Axiom 1, Spinoza’s text actually provides two terms, namely the Dutch toevallen and the Latin modificationes in parenthesis. Both Curley and Shirley here seem to think that the Latin term is simply the translation of the Dutch and renders them both in English by a single term, namely “modifications.” Accordingly, they also render the cognate Dutch term toevallig as “modally.” The question is, however, whether it is appropriate to translate the two terms given in Axiom 1 by only one. The question is: Do the Dutch terms toevallen and toevallig simply translate the Latin terms modificationes and modaliter, or was Spinoza, when providing both terms in Axiom 1, indicating some equivalence of two different notions rather than simply providing a translation of a term into another language? Was it just the Dutch translator of the Short Treatise who found it a good idea to put the Latin term he translated by toevallen in parenthesis? Or was he in fact translating an original Latin text that included two different terms?

Such questions may appear to represent the summum of nitpicking. My interrogation is, however, prompted by the fact that “modal” and “modally” are not very natural translations of the Dutch toeval and toevallig. What one would expect would rather be “accident” and “accidental.” If we look for other occurrences in the Short Treatise, we will see that “accident” or “accidental” is indeed the choice for translation that imposes itself elsewhere. There are three of those:

KV, I, ch. iii, §4:

  

God is een oorzaak door zig zelfs, en niet door een toeval.

Curley:

  

God is cause through himself, and not an accidental cause.

Shirley:

  

God is a cause through himself, and not by accident.

KV, II, ch. v, §6:

  

Want deze dewyl ze buyten syne magt zyn, en veel toevallen onderworpen, zoo is ‘t onmogelyk dat als die komen te lyden, hy daar van zoude konnen bevryd zyn.

Curley:

  

For because they are outside his power and subject to many accidents, it is impossible that, when they are acted on, he would be able to be freed of them.

Shirley:

  

For, since these are beyond his power, and subject to many accidents, it is impossible that, when they are affected, he should be free from these affects.

KV, II, ch. xiv, §4:

  

(dewyl het voorwerp zoo veel toevallen ja de vernietinge zelve onderworpen is)

Curley

  

(because he is subject to many accidents, indeed to destruction itself)

Shirley:

  

(since the object is liable to so many accidents, ay, even to annihilation)

So, if we follow that practice, as I think we should, it appears that we could better translate as follows the two axioms in the first appendix:

KV A1a1:

  

Substance is, by its nature, prior to all its accidents (modifications).

KV A1a2:

  

Things that are different are distinguished either really or accidentally.

But why do the English translators avoid the term “accident” and “accidentally” and use only the terms “modification” and “modally,” thus glossing over the fact that Spinoza seems to suggest that what he calls modifications are similar or identical to “accidents”? There are reasons internal to the appendix to justify this. Later in the appendix, in the demonstration of proposition 4, Spinoza adds in parenthesis the Latin term modaliter when speaking of wyzelyk (modaliter) onderscheiden. Now, wyzelyk and toevallig are not the same terms, obviously, but Spinoza in this context also provides an explicit reference to Axiom 2,5 which makes it reasonably clear that he is talking about the same kind of distinction when speaking of a difference that is wyzelyk, toevallig, or modaliter. Moreover, translating “modification” and “modally” in Appendix 1 makes for a better fit with the terminological inventory of the substance-mode metaphysics of the Ethics, where the notions of “accident” and “accidental” do not occupy a prominent place. Spinoza does, of course, use the determination per accidens in E1p16c2 when writing that “God is cause through himself and not an accidental cause,” a wording very close to KV, I, ch. iii, §4, already quoted above. Moreover, in the third part of the Ethics, the determination per accidens shows up frequently in the theory of affects, in order to explain how a present thing can produce “accidentally” a certain affect in us.6 But “accidentally” here acquires only a psychological meaning, as something that is perceived by us as accidental. Spinoza never says that something which is thus perceived as accidentally caused can be called an “accident.” And he never suggests in the Ethics that a mode or affection can be properly described as an “accident,” or that we can think about a modal distinction, a distinction between modes or between affections, as an “accidental” one. Hence, one could be tempted to project this terminological choice in the Ethics back onto the Short Treatise and opt for “modification” as a better translation of toeval in the Spinozist context.

Such retrospective reasoning would however, I think, be inappropriate. Spinoza was not always averse to using the term “accident.” In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, for example, he speaks of “accidents” rather than “modifications” or “affections” when writing that “no one will ever perceive anything in natural things except accidents.”7 Probably more to the point, in Ep. 4 to Oldenburg, written around October 1661, Spinoza was perfectly happy about assimilating “modifications” to “accidents,” writing that he understands “by modification, or accident, what is in another and is conceived through what it is in.”8 This letter seems to reflect the same use of the term “accident” that I suggested we should also see in Spinoza’s use of the term toeval in Appendix 1. Hence, these three texts—the TIE, KV-A1, and Ep. 4—together bear witness to an early period when Spinoza was willing to talk of “modifications” in terms of “accidents.”

Why did Spinoza then later drop the notion, to replace it with the term “affection” in E1p1 and E1p4? I think we find the explanation in the Cogitata Metaphysica, a text published in 1663 but which, according to Jacob Freudenthal, was written before the Principia Philosophiae Cartesianae, the introduction to Descartes to which the Cogitata Metaphysica are appended. Some commentators have suggested that the Cogitata Metaphysica were written as early as late 1660. I think, however, that the attitude towards accidents that it reflects shows that it must have been later than Letter 4, i.e., October 1661, when Spinoza still had no particular concerns with the term. In the Cogitata Metaphysica, Part 1, Chapter 1, Spinoza writes about the Cartesian distinction between substance and mode:

I only wish it to be noted, concerning this distinction, that we say expressly that being is divided into Substance and Mode, and not into Substance and Accident. For an Accident is nothing but a mode of thinking, inasmuch as it denotes what is only a respect, E.g., when I say that the triangle is moved, the motion is not a mode of the triangle, but of the body which is moved. Hence the motion is called an accident with respect to the triangle. But with respect to the body, it is called a real being, or mode. For the motion cannot be conceived without the body, though it can without the triangle.9

Modes alone are “real beings.” Accidents are only “modes of thinking.” We can reconstruct the argument as follows. An accident is a property that can be conceived without conceiving of the concept of the thing of which it is an accident. But movement is an accident in relation to the abstract concept of a triangle because there is nothing in triangularity as such that prescribes a particular pattern of movement. It is perfectly possible to conceive of some movement that a triangular body undergoes without conceiving of the triangularity of that body, say, moving it two feet to the left. The body moved could just as well be round or square, and the movement would still be conceived as perfectly the same, to wit, two feet to the left. A mode, on the contrary, is such that one cannot conceive of it without conceiving also of the thing of which it is the mode. For example, if we move a triangular body two feet to the left, this movement cannot be adequately conceived without conceiving of the body moved. Movement is a real mode of a triangular body when it moves, because any particular body is caught up in a global causal nexus, wherein both its internal (in this case triangular) constitution and external pattern of movement (in this case moving two feet to the left) are equally perfectly determined.

So what are we to make of this? I have presented some evidence in favor of the idea that the double Dutch-Latin expression “toevallen (modificationes)” in KV-A1a1 provides us with some important information regarding the early Spinoza’s attitude towards the use of the notion of “accidents.” This information is lost if we conflate the terms in translation, as we have seen is the case in the translations of both Curley and Shirley. Moreover, I have provided evidence that there is a shift away from using the term “accident” when speaking of modes in Spinoza, sometime around 1662, depending on what exact date of composition we ascribe to the Cogitata Metaphysica, and which presumably explains why, in the Ethics, he will choose to assimilate modes and modifications to affections rather than to accidents. The notion of “accident” is, it appears, too abstract for his taste. One contextual way of explaining this aversion to the term “accident” would be to stress that, as any good Cartesian, he does not believe in scholastic “real accidents.”10 According to the Cogitata Metaphysica, Spinoza does not believe that one can conceive of properties that are separable from that of which they are properties as anything but “modes of thinking.” The inseparability of actual or real modes from that of which they are modes is also what Spinoza later stipulates in E1d5: “By mode I understand the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived.” In scholastic philosophy, however, “real accidents” are properties that can be separated from one thing and attached to another, thereby allowing for a transferal of properties from one subject to another and serving a central purpose in explaining transubstantiation. Thus, Spinoza’s resistance to the term “accident” might reflect his unwillingness to employ a term the traditional connotations of which involved a possibility of separating concrete properties from their concrete subjects.

Notes

1    TTP, ch. ix [C II 217/G III 135–136]: “I’ve also read, and for that matter, known personally, certain Kabbalistic triflers. I’ve never been able to be sufficiently amazed by their madness.”

2    Curley’s translation of the KV is found in C I. Shirley’s translation of the KV can be found in Spinoza, The Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002).

3    Two current French translations have “La substance existe, de par sa nature, antérieurement à tous ses modes (modificationes)” (“Le Court Traité,” ed. Filippo Mignini, trans. Joël Ganault, in Spinoza, Œuvres Complètes I: Premiers écrits,. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 411) and “La substance est, en vertu de sa nature, antérieure à ses modifications” (“Court traité,” in B. d. S. Spinoza, Œuvres, Tome 1: Court traité, Traité de la réforme de l’entendement, Principes de la philosophie de Descartes, Pensées métaphysiques, trans. Charles Appuhn (Paris: Flammarion, 1966), 159).

4    The French translations have “Les choses qui sont différentes se distinguent ou réellement ou modalement” (Ganault, 411) and “Les choses qui sont différentes se distinguent les unes des autres ou bien réellement ou bien modalement” (Appuhn, 159). Appuhn notes, however, that it is “fort probable que Spinoza use ici de la terminologie de Descartes qui oppose les choses qui se distinguent réellement (realiter) aux choses qui se distinguent modalement (modaliter). Toutefois, le texte hollandais donne ici toevallig, accidentellement, de même que dans la démonstration de la proposition 1.”

5    The cross reference is mistakenly given as Axiom 3 by Shirley.

6    See E3p15; E3p16d; E3p17s; E3da24; E4d5.

7    TIE §27 [C I 16/G II 13].

8    Ep. 4 [C I 171/G IV 13].

9    CM I, ch. i [C I 303/G I 236–237].

10  Spinoza discusses “real accidents” in his letter to Oldenburg about Boyle’s treatise on niter from July 17–27, 1663: “But I do not know why he calls the impossibility of a vacuum a Hypothesis, since it follows very clearly from the fact that nothing has no properties. And I am surprised that the Distinguished Gentleman doubts this, since he seems to maintain that there are no real accidents. I ask whether there would not be a real accident if there were Quantity without Substance” [C I 209/G IV 65].