A Response: A Puzzle in Spinoza’s Views on the Mind-Body Problem
Jack Stetter
I would like to begin by thanking Alison Peterman for her analysis of Spinoza’s accounts of the mind-body problem in Part 2 of the Ethics. The fastidious way she scrutinizes Spinoza’s claims is recognizably Anglo-American in origin, with its characteristic high level of technicality married to a general desire to get at the arguments and unpack the philosophical truths they would motivate. I think it fair to say, then, that she practices what Jonathan Bennett calls the “collegial” approach to the history of philosophy: the philosophers we read, no matter when they lived and died, are like our colleagues; our duty is to submit them to the same kind of respectful but hard-hitting analysis to which we would submit any of our living philosopher colleagues.1 In a volume that intends to present the current state of American Spinoza scholarship, it is fitting to include such a chapter.
There is, however, a sense in which the results of Peterman’s study can been held as kindred in spirit to some of the classic French literature on Spinoza. Take, for instance, Peterman’s concluding claim, namely, that Spinoza never connects the two meanings of “depends upon and involves,” both derived from E1a4, which, in turn, explains in part why he adopts “two pictures of embodiment.” The disjunction between “two pictures of embodiment,” so Peterman claims, speaks to “a very deep and basic rift driving Spinoza’s system.” So, with regards to the French literature, one might find it fruitful to compare this to Ferdinand Alquié’s influential reading of Spinoza in Le rationalisme de Spinoza.2
According to Alquié, Spinoza attempts to bridge two irreconcilable philosophical endeavors. Alquié construes these two endeavors quite broadly as being religious and scientific in intent, respectively. Hence, on Alquié’s understanding, for instance, Spinoza alternatively “divinizes Nature” and “naturalizes God.”3 Granted, there is little else about Peterman’s chapter that makes it resemble anything found in Alquié: Alquié, faithful to the tradition of spiritualism in France that harkens back to Descartes’s Meditations, believes that it is by introspection that philosophers have their metaphysical experience, and that it is to this personal metaphysical experience that as readers we are meant to be initiated.4 It is no surprise, then, that Alquié’s commentary is a resolutely first-personal and even confessional statement about the “incomprehensibility” of Spinoza.5 Nevertheless, the fact remains that Alquié also shows that there is some “very deep and basic rift driving Spinoza’s system.”
A good characterization of Alquié’s approach is to call it the anatomist’s approach to Spinoza, as opposed to the surgeon’s approach.6 A surgeon, like Martial Gueroult for example, may make local incisions into his patient, but the goal is to save the whole, and preserve its overall well-being, its internal coherence; Alquié, an anatomist, is happy cutting up and taking apart the dead body on the table, seeing what pieces were really in there all along.7 Save for the admittedly central fact that Peterman, like other analytically trained philosophers, is quite like Gueroult in virtue of the way she pays very close attention to Spinoza’s arguments, there is nonetheless a sense in which the conclusions of her study are in keeping with Alquié’s otherwise idiosyncratic intuitions.
I will now turn to first-order matters in the study of Spinoza’s treatment of the mind-body problem. For Peterman, Spinoza has two distinct accounts of this problem: Parallelism and Idea-of.8 Peterman views the former as grounded in Spinoza’s underlying metaphysical commitment to substance monism. She views the latter as primarily motivated by the first-person intuition that there is something special about the way the mind has ideas of affections of the body. Her suggestion that the latter account stands on its own is well-shored up by E2a4, where Spinoza baldly asserts: “We feel that a certain body is affected in many ways.” Moreover, following Peterman, we should interpret E2p13d, the proof for Spinoza’s identification of the mind as the idea of the body, as follows: on Spinoza’s understanding, the fact that ideas of affections of the body are in God only insofar as God constitutes the idea of the body is by itself meant to motivate Idea-of. According to Peterman, this suggests the impossibility of squaring the “two pictures of embodiment,” since the claim in E2p13d about the content of the idea of the body is not derived from Parallelism, but rather is motivated by an appeal to how God constitutes the idea of the body. On Peterman’s reading, what the proof for Spinoza’s identification of the mind as the idea of the body suggests, therefore, is that Spinoza is implying that there is a certain, special kind of awareness in God’s ideas of bodies that the mind inherits, which, in turn, is manifest in the experience of the embodied subject. Although at first glance it may appear as if, on Peterman’s account, Spinoza is about to turn his back on anti-anthropomorphic naturalism, her account does have a compelling aspect to it, for some supplemental content is necessary to make the move from Parallelism to Idea-of. It would not be surprising, then, if this supplemental content—awareness or representationality—were somehow grounded in the specific way that the mind is “in” or depends on God and how it involves something about his nature.9
For the uninitiated, such a detail in Spinoza’s philosophy might appear trivial. But when we look at all this from a broader perspective, the issue’s importance is salient. Recall that the nature of any body as a body has nothing to do with the nature of any mind as a mind, since these are modes of two different and utterly incommensurable attributes. Why is it, then, that my mind gives me ideas of affections of my body, i.e., access to my body’s states, qualities, or properties? The fact that “the order and the connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things,” to quote E2p7, does not give us the answer. That there is only one selfsame set of causal or structural facts—that “God’s [NS: actual] power of thinking is equal to his actual power of acting,” as per E2p7c—does not explain why the mind is aware of the body to which it is specifically attached.
Peterman’s interpretation hints at a puzzle, namely whether we can piece together Parallelism and Idea-of. In what follows, I will explore several aspects to this puzzle. I do not pretend to resolve all of the issues raised, but only to point to various ways of approaching them. I will also discuss Spinoza’s conception of relations of involvement, a fundamental issue touched on by Peterman. I will then conclude by noting several more wide-ranging issues suggested by Peterman’s interpretation.
Her bold reading heightens the tension between Spinoza’s account of the mind-body problem in terms of some idea that is for the body and which replicates it in Thought (Parallelism), and the account Spinoza gives of the nature of the mind as the idea of the body (Idea-of).10 A look at E2p19 and its demonstration will clear up what Spinoza takes to be the scope of the content of the mind insofar as it is the idea of the body.11 At E2p19, Spinoza writes:
The human Mind does not know the human Body itself, nor does it know that it exists, except through ideas of affections by which the Body is affected. [E2p19]
In other words, the mind, itself an idea or mode of Thought, not only is the idea of the body, following E2p13, but, moreover, it has ideas of the body’s affections, and it is because it has such ideas that it “knows”—is aware of—the body at all. Spinoza’s demonstration for this is illuminating, especially the first half, because it clarifies why the mind cannot “know” the body in the same way as God, even though the mind is an idea in God of the body:
For the human Mind is the idea itself, or [sive] knowledge of the human Body (by E2p13), which (by E2p9) is indeed in God insofar as he is considered to be affected by another idea of a singular thing, or because (by E2post4) the human Body requires a great many bodies by which it is, as it were, continually regenerated; and [NS: because] the order and connection of ideas is (by E2p7) the same as the order and connection of causes, this idea will be in God insofar as he is considered to be affected by the ideas of a great many singular things. Therefore, God has the idea of the human Body, or [sive] knows the human Body, insofar as he is affected by a great many other ideas, and not insofar as he constitutes the nature of the human Mind, i.e. (by E2p11c), the human Mind does not know the human Body.
But the ideas of affections of the Body are in God insofar as he constitutes the nature of the human Mind, or the human Mind perceives the same affections (by E2p12), and consequently (by E2p16) the human Body itself, as actually existing (by E2p17).
Therefore to that extent only, the human Mind perceives the human Body itself, q.e.d. [E2p19d]
The mind has the idea of the body, but the idea of the body the mind has is not the same idea of the body that God has. The first half of this demonstration tells us so much: the idea of the body that is in God and that is the mind includes a “great many” other ideas of other bodies, indeed, all those other bodies that underwrite the existent activity of our body and which keep it “continually regenerated.” Our idea of the body, on the other hand, the one that our mind in fact has, is only in God insofar as he constitutes the nature of the human mind and not insofar as he is affected by a great many other ideas. And since God constitutes the nature of the human mind such that it “perceives” what “happens” to its object, following E2p12, what this means, to return to the letter of E2p19, is that “the human mind does not know the human body itself […] except through ideas of affections by which the body is affected.”
Now, logically enough, it would make sense if the fact that there is an idea for the body (Parallelism) somehow grounded the fact that there is an idea of it.12 But this is not what we find in Spinoza. The fact that, for Spinoza, attributes are parallel to one another, and that no interaction among them is permitted, and that, moreover, for every singular thing there is some idea,13 does not give us the means to further infer this one important feature about ideas, that ideas are inherently intentional or representational, being about this or that object external to the mind.14
On Peterman’s reading, the only justification we find for Idea-of is that we inherit from the divine mind some of its infinite representational capacity, or omniscience, i.e., some of God’s capacity to have ideas of everything.
Interestingly, Peterman shows that Spinoza can do this only by putting to use a second, non-mechanistic, and semantic account of involvement relations, according to which the content of the idea of the cause is “involved in” the content of the idea of the effect. Hence, if I have an idea of my body, following Spinoza, the content of this idea “involves” in a non-mechanistic sense (InvolvesS) a representation of its cause, another body. Bodies are represented as parts of the content of our ideas, because the latter “involve” bodies, even if, mechanically (or physically) speaking, no “involvement” (InvolvesM) between the two is metaphysically possible. Peterman’s treatment of this touches on a delicate issue about Spinoza’s views on relations of inherence and involvement. And as Peterman rightly suggests, E1a4 is indeed a crucial text for understanding much of what Spinoza can say about representation and how knowledge “involves” or is about things. Some words about it are in order. At E1a4, Spinoza writes:
The knowledge [cognitio] of an effect depends on [dependet], and involves [involvit], the knowledge of its cause. [E1a4]
On a straightforward reading, part of what E1a4 must mean is that if p causes q, therefore q is conceived through p. In recent Anglo-American literature, following Don Garrett, this is referred to as “the causality implying conception doctrine.”15 Spinoza puts E1a4 to such a use at E1p6d, when demonstrating why “one substance cannot be produced by another substance,” namely, because if a substance were produced by another substance, the first substance would involve the conception of that other substance in its definition, in virtue of the fact that it would be caused by that other substance, which is flagrantly contradictory to its definition qua substance, a being which is conceived through itself.
On another reading, E1a4 also implies that if q is conceived through p, then q is caused by p. That Spinoza takes E1a4 to imply as much can be seen at E1p25d. At E1p25 Spinoza asserts that:
God is the efficient cause, not only of the existence of things, but also of their essence. [E1p25]
Spinoza then argues at E1p25d that:
If you deny this, then God is not the cause of the essence of things; and so (by E1a4) the essence of things can be conceived without God. But (by E1p15) this is absurd. Therefore, God is also the cause of the essence of things, q.e.d. [E1p25d]
Spinoza is arguing from the fact that were God not the efficient cause of the essence of things, then these things could be conceived of without God. In other words, because these are indeed conceived through God, God must be their cause. This has been called, following Garrett, “the conception implying causality doctrine.”16
Last, but not least, comes the question of inherence relations. “It is commonly agreed,” as Yitzhak Melamed notes, “that inherence implies causality; the point of contention is whether causality implies inherence.”17 In other words, is there such a thing as a special causal relation, for Spinoza, which has the distinguishing trait of being such that an inherence relation is implied by it? The obvious path to drawing such a distinction among types of causal relations is between immanent and transient (or transitive) causation. On such a reading, for Spinoza, q inheres in its cause p and is therefore a state of p iff p is the immanent cause of q. This would putatively allow us to write off cases where, for instance, the effect, on a commonsensical understanding, does not inhere in the causal agent, such as with respect to a table and the carpenter that crafted it. By maintaining that the carpenter is only a transient cause of the table and that Spinoza is willing to admit where necessary a distinction between causal relations that do imply inherence and those that do not, the table need not be held to inhere in the carpenter as a property or state of her, in flagrant contradiction to commonsense.18 Modes, on the other hand, being such that they are immanently caused by substance, would, however, inhere in substance, as so many properties or states of it.19
What is of note at present is that E1a4 can, on some readings, be construed as involving a subtle distinction between causation relations that do and that do not involve inherence relations.
Returning to Peterman’s discussion, on her reading, E1a4 is also flexible enough to accomodate cases wherein there are and are not inherence relations at work. Recall that Parallelism is demonstrated by appealing to E1a4. The appeal to E1a4 tells us: knowledge of some body involves knowledge of those other bodies in which it inheres; and, moreover, knowledge of some idea involves knowledge of those other ideas in which it inheres; and, finally, the fact that these two accounts of knowledge of effects as involving knowledge of causes can be conceived independently of one another means that “the order and connection” of causes and effects is structurally identical across attributes. But that the Idea-of the body involves the natures of the causes of the body, other bodies, is also true by virtue of E1a4, as per E2p16d. For Spinoza, however, this cannot mean that the Idea-of the body involves such bodily causes by virtue of an inherence relation, since ideas do not inhere in bodies. In other words, for Idea-of to work, Spinoza needs E1a4 to additionally mean something like: knowledge of an effect contains, as part of its content, those things which are involved in the effect as its causes, even when an inherence relation is metaphysically impossible.
By way of conclusion, I think some remarks on how Idea-of is central to other, more wide-ranging matters in Spinoza’s philosophy would be helpful for the Spinoza-curious reader. Spinoza avails himself of this account to resolve a series of questions, some of which we have already encountered in other forms, such as: why is it that when we have representations of other bodies than our own, we are in fact forming an idea of our body in so far as these other bodies affect it? Moreover, since to have an idea of a body is to have an idea of what explains its properties, why is it that when we have an idea of our body, part of what we are doing is having an idea of the ways in which other bodies are affecting our own body? Last of all, what does this paradoxical aspect of embodiment say about the possibility of our forming adequate knowledge?
For Spinoza, the more the body interacts with other bodies and is diversely affected by them, the more the mind will have ideas of the body, and of other bodies via the body, and of their various “agreements” [convenientiae], “differences” [differentiae], and “oppositions” [oppugnantiae], according to E2p29s. This suggests that the mind can only have adequate knowledge by somehow making use of this material the body gives it. If we look at E2p13s, Spinoza’s makes his general view about this clear:
I say this in general, that in proportion as a Body is more capable [aptius] than others of doing many things at once, or being acted on in many ways at once [ad plura simul agendum vel patiendum], so its Mind is more capable [aptior] than others of perceiving many things at once. [E2p13s]
Spinoza’s point is that the more variegated are the affections of which the body is capable, the more the mind has ideas or is “perceiving many things at once”; and the more variegated are the mind’s ideas, then, the more material it has to work with as it strives to piece together its understanding of things and its place in them. Hence, by grounding his philosophy of mind in both embodiment and intentionality—which, in unison, give us his theory that ideas are representational of the body itself—and by showing that this, in turn, points the way to a genuine intellectualist ethics, in virtue of the fact that the mind relies on the information provided by the body to measure its agency in interactive scenarios, Spinoza relies on Idea-of to make the pivot from a philosophy of mind to an ethical theory. Furthermore, insofar as Idea-of is used by Spinoza to describe how mental content consists of representations of the body and its affections, and since the body and its affections are always, for Spinoza, caught up in a network of relations with other bodies and their affections, therefore, Spinoza conceives of the mind as somehow fundamentally interactive. In this respect, Spinoza is putting Idea-of to a profoundly anti-Cartesian use.20
For Spinoza, because the mind is the idea of the body the mind can have a great range of representability and a wealth of mental content. Perhaps, however, it is because there is an idea for the body that is the mind that the mind does not lose itself in this vast horizon and remains anchored. Still, even if Spinoza hopes later to package these two accounts of the mind-body problem back together into one story of things, Peterman’s analysis is compelling. The “order of reasons,” as Alquié already showed us, is not so neat after all. Idea-of appeals to something intuited and felt and lived, as Descartes himself maintained, as Alquié would have been certainly happy to note, and as Peterman has underlined once more.21
Notes
1 See Jonathan Bennett, Learning from Six Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–10.
2 Ferdinand Alquié, Le rationalisme de Spinoza (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981).
3 Ibid., 93–106.
4 The term “metaphysical experience” figures prominently in Alquié’s writings on Descartes. See, for example, Ferdinand Alquié, La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950).
5 See the Conclusion to Alquié, Le rationalisme de Spinoza.
6 For more about this, see Charles Ramond, “Deleuze lecteur de Spinoza: La tentation de l’impératif,” in Spinoza contemporain: Philosophie, Éthique, Politique, ed. Charles Ramond (Paris: Harmattan, 2016), esp. 149 and 152.
7 For the canonical representation of Martial Gueroult’s holistic method at work, see Martial Gueroult, Spinoza 1: Dieu (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1968). For more about this method, see Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza et la méthode générale de M. Gueroult,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 47, no. 4 (1969): 426–437 and Knox Peden, Spinoza contra phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014), esp. ch. 2. In an important recent debate about first-order and second-order matters in Spinoza scholarship, Michael Della Rocca has characterized his own approach to the history of philosophy as “holistic” in opposition to Daniel Garber’s putatively “atomistic” approach. See Daniel Garber, “Superheroes in the History of Philosophy: Spinoza, Super-Rationalist,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53, no. 3 (2015): 507–522; Michael Della Rocca, “Interpreting Spinoza: The Real Is the Rational,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53, no. 3 (2015): 523–536; and Daniel Garber, “Some Additional (But Not Final) Words,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53, no. 3 (2015): 537–540. For more about this debate, see Jack Stetter, “Revisiting the Della Rocca-Garber Spinoza Debate,” in La philosophie ventriloque, ed. Valérie Debuiche (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires AMU, forthcoming).
8 By parallelism here I mean inter-attribute parallelism. For more on Spinoza’s doctrine of the so-called parallelism of the attributes, see esp. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Thought: Parallelisms and the Multifaceted Structure of Ideas,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86, no. 3 (2013): 626–683. Following Melamed’s insight, it is misleading to speak of “parallelism,” in virtue of the fact that Spinoza has two distinct doctrines of parallelism, namely, “ideas-things parallelism” and “inter-attribute parallelism.” The latter gives us the identity of the causal order of all attributes, whereas the former suggests that modes of Thought, unlike modes of other attributes, are unique in virtue of their corresponding to the causal order of things writ large. Melamed sees this metaphysical anomaly as further mirrored in the “multi-faceted structure of ideas” and the priority or “primacy” of Thought, that is, the fact that, for Spinoza, only Thought is “all-encompassing,” and only an idea can “distinctly represent each of the infinitely many modes that parallel it.” Melamed notes that this priority relation, however, is especially unusual, inasmuch as other attributes are not dependent on or grounded in the attribute of Thought.
9 In a similar vein, Margaret Wilson writes that, on Spinoza’s account, our ideas are “bits of God’s omniscience.” See Margaret Dauler Wilson, “Spinoza’s Causal Axiom,” in Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 147.
10 One issue in the literature concerns whether this is a good identification, since Spinoza never spells out the nature or scope of consciousness, ostensibly a basic feature of the mind. For a recent presentation of the debate around whether Spinoza actually has a theory of consciousness, see Eugene Marshall, The Spiritual Automaton: Spinoza’s Science of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Daniel Garber has recently challenged the view that Spinoza has a theory of consciousness in a talk (“Y a-t-il une théorie de la conscience chez Spinoza?”) given for the Séminaire Spinoza à Paris 8, available online at: www.spinozaparis8.com.
11 I thank Dan Garber for drawing this text to my attention.
12 Cf. Gueroult, Spinoza 1, 242–243. Gueroult also claims that “first of all, the knowledge of the human body that the mind is must be logically anterior to the knowledge of the human body that the mind has, because the mind would not be able to perceive the affections of this body, nor, consequently, its body, if the mind was not already there so as to perceive them.” (Our translation.) Gueroult then proceeds to characterize the former as “congenital” and the latter as “acquired by experience,” and further, he maintains that the former is the “container” of all ideas of affections of the body and an “empty form,” considered in itself, and in contrast to the latter, which is the “empirical content” of our understanding. He concludes these considerations remarking that even if the former is logically anterior and “congenital” in a sense, experience begins at birth, and, consequently, neither is “chronologically” anterior.
13 Again, see Yitzhak Melamed, “Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Thought,” for a discussion of how this suggests that different and distinct parallelisms are at work.
14 I write “one important feature” as a caveat, so as to point to the fact that, for Spinoza, an arguably equally important feature of our ideas is that we can measure their “reality” (or “excellence” or “perfection”) without looking at their representational content. Of special note here is Spinoza’s discussion at E2p49s of how ideas themselves “involve affirmations.” Likewise, Spinoza’s definition of an adequate idea as possessing the “intrinsic properties” of a true idea (E2d4) suggests that although all our ideas, being ideas in our mind of our body, may possess “aboutness” as an essential feature, ideas considered in themselves need not be taken to be “about” anything at all. For more about Spinoza on affirmation, see Charles Ramond, “Affirmation verbale et affirmation de la pensée dans la théorie spinoziste de la connaissance,” in Architectures de la Raison: Mélanges offerts à Alexandre Matheron, ed. Pierre-François Moreau (Fontenay-aux-Roses: ENS Éditions, 1996). See also, in the present volume, Knox Peden’s contribution and Pascale Gillot’s response, both of which touch on the overlapping matter of Spinoza’s theory of truth as a correspondence theory and as a coherence theory.
15 See Don Garrett, “Spinoza’s Conatus Argument,” in Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes, ed. Olli Koistinen and John Biro (New York: Oxford, 2002).
16 Ibid.
17 Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 92. See also Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “Spinoza on Inherence, Causation, and Conception,” The Journal of the History of Philosophy 50, no. 3 (2012): 365–386.
18 See the discussion of this in Michael Della Rocca, “Rationalism run amok: Representation and the reality of emotions in Spinoza,” in Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays, ed. Charlie Huenemann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
19 But see, in the present volume, Edwin Curley’s contribution, “Spinoza’s Metaphysics Revisited,” where he advances a radically different understanding of mode in Spinoza.
20 At E2p23, Spinoza writes that “the mind does not know itself, except insofar as it perceives the ideas of the affections of the body.” This means that the mind’s knowledge of itself is not immediate but is mixed with the knowledge it has of bodies. Descartes, on the other hand, held that the mind has a privileged epistemic access to itself, unmediated by bodies: the cogito doctrine tells us so much. See, for example, Descartes’s Second Replies (to Mersenne), where Descartes notes that when we say “I think, therefore I am, or I exist,” we see this by a “inspection on the part of the mind alone” [une simple inspection de l’esprit] [CSM II 100/AT VII 140]. The inspectio mentis suggests that the mind’s thinking is intuitively known by the mind. Since the mind is nothing but a res cogitans, therefore, the mind knows itself intuitively.
21 Great thanks are due to Michael Della Rocca, Dan Garber, Steve Nadler, Alison Peterman, and Charles Ramond for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.