Spinoza on Beings of Reason [Entia Rationis] and the Analogical Imagination
Michael A. Rosenthal
Introduction
In the Preface to Part 4 of the Ethics, Spinoza writes, “As far as good and evil are concerned, they indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than modes of thinking [cogitandi modus] […] But though this is so, still we must retain these words” [G II 208]. It is particularly puzzling that in a treatise whose goal is to discover the highest good in human life Spinoza casts doubt on the most basic terms of this pursuit. I propose to explore the metaphysical and epistemological basis of this purported solution in more detail through an examination of a related set of terms, including “beings of reason [entia rationis],” “beings of the imagination [entia imaginationis],” and “fictitious ideas.” In an appendix to his classic work on Spinoza, Martial Gueroult pointed out that primary among the functions of “beings of reason” is to regulate our conduct.1 But, since they do not represent anything real and are not rational ideas but assemblages of the imagination, how exactly do they serve this function?
These terms are discussed and defined in early texts, including the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,2 the Short Treatise,3 and the Metaphysical Thoughts.4 These texts are significant for many reasons, but in part because they show the formation of Spinoza’s system through his critical engagement with his contemporaries.5 Although Spinoza rejects some of the key metaphysical distinctions that underlie the late scholastic account—in particular the distinction between “real being” and “being of reason”6—and the number of overt references to this terminology drop precipitously in the Ethics, I think that the notion of “being of reason” persists in Spinoza’s project in other forms. Indeed, it helps us make sense of some of the most puzzling claims that we encounter, such as claims that value terms have no reference to really existing things yet remain useful.
Even as scholars have noted the regulative role of entia rationis, fewer have actually specified the mechanism that explains how they can play this role. In a recent article, Karolina Hübner has argued that beings of reason are among those entities, like universals, that are “constructed” by the intellect in some way.7 What I want to do in this chapter is specify the nature of the construction. I shall argue that Spinoza borrows from Suarez the idea that beings of reason are analogical. In Spinoza there is a double analogy at work. First, there is the analogy established between the model and its examples. Second, there is the analogy between the model and the natural world. The regulatory function of beings of reason depends upon the possibility of the similarity of the imaginative entity to an actual being. Thus, contrary to the claims of scholars like Tad Schmaltz8 and Gilles Deleuze,9 Spinoza has not completely eliminated analogous relations from either his metaphysics or his epistemology. Indeed, I shall claim that the case of beings of reason sheds light on the nature of the imagination itself in the Ethics. In particular, I want to show how the structure of an imaginative object depends on the kinds of analogy that we find in the structure of a “being of reason.”
I. Beings of Reason and the Metaphysics of Analogy
The metaphysical status of “beings of reason” was a topic of debate long before Spinoza, and he is certainly aware of at least some of these disputes. The most important passage on this topic can be found at the very beginning of the Cogitata Metaphysica, which he appended to Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, and published in 1663. After defining “Being” as “whatever, when it is clearly and distinctly perceived, we find to exist necessarily, or at least to be able to exist,” he then goes on to distinguish between “chimeras,” “fictitious beings,” and “beings of reason.” A chimera cannot exist because it contains an explicit contradiction in its nature. It is, as he goes on to explain in Chapter 3, a “verbal being,” because it can only be expressed in words (and not in the intellect or the imagination); for example, the words “square circle” do not express anything that is possible or conceivable. A fictitious being may not contain a contradiction, but it also does not exist, because it is the arbitrary—that is, through the will alone—joining of two, unrelated terms, such as the traditional example of the “goat-stag” (or hircocervus). A being of reason [ens rationis] is “nothing but a mode of thinking, which helps us to more easily retain, explain, and imagine the things we have understood.” (More on the epistemological functions of entia rationis below.) Spinoza is worried here that philosophers mistake the modes of thinking for things themselves. This leads Spinoza to assert that “being is badly divided into real being and being of reason.”
To understand this elliptical comment, we need to take a brief detour and try to see with whom Spinoza is arguing. Although Descartes’s use of this idea is significant, it is brief and does not show any deep acquaintance with the scholastic treatises in which it had been extensively discussed.10 When Spinoza discusses the term in the Metaphysical Thoughts, appended to the Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, to which we will return below, he attempts to develop the idea in a more systematic way. In fact, it is likely that Spinoza adopted his discussion not from Descartes directly but from some of his contemporaries, the Dutch Cartesians, figures like Burgersdijk and Heereboord.11 What Spinoza does, along with these other sources, is to engage more directly with the scholastic sources of Cartesian terminology. And what they had in mind was the work of the Jesuit scholastic philosopher, Francisco Suarez.
In Metaphysical Disputation 54, Suarez discusses entia rationis in detail.12 A full analysis of this complicated text is beyond the scope of this chapter, but I believe that a summary of its key points is vital to understand what Spinoza is doing in the early texts and indeed throughout his work. Suarez wavered over whether to include a section on beings of reason in his work at all. The subject of a treatise on metaphysics must be real beings. But beings of reason are by definition not real beings but what he calls “shadows” of being. As Suarez writes in the prologue, “Since beings of reason are not true beings … they are not intelligible through themselves” [57]. Suarez argues that the cause of a being of reason is the intellect alone and that beings of reason are real only to the extent that they are objects of understanding. While some of his interlocutors had on similar grounds argued that a discussion of beings of reason was useless, because they had no being in things themselves (something substantial or in substance), Suarez nonetheless claimed that “cognition and knowledge of these [beings] is necessary for human instruction” [Prologue, 57]. Indeed, they are necessary to metaphysics itself, natural philosophy, logic, and even theology.
There are several kinds of being of reason. The first is what we can call a “positive” kind, which is a relation created between two or more things, as the two examples already given show. This relationship is not based on any intrinsic qualities of the two things but rather is extrinsic, or based on the fact that the two qualities have been placed together. And although the relationship apparently refers to something real, that reference is improper (improprius), for the relationship is only analogical. A further relevant distinction among these so-called positive beings of reason is that between possible and impossible entities. Possible beings are those whose existence is not necessary but also not impossible. For instance, we may think about a golden mountain, which is possible, if not real. Impossible beings of reason are those whose nature contains a contradiction. A square circle, for instance, is by its very nature impossible. The other two kinds of being of reason are negations and privations. These are purely mental entities that appear to have being but in fact do not. A privation of some quality is not itself a being of reason, but only becomes one when it becomes an entity that makes a positive claim, as if there is something that is not [III, 6]. Examples are “nothing,” “absence,” “evil,” “death,” “blindness,” and “silence.”13
The reason why they can be useful, even if they are not real, is that they are understood by comparison to true and real beings: “For what is fictitious (fictum) or apparent must be understand by comparison to what truly is” [Prologue, 58]. Although they exist only objectively in the intellect, beings of reason gain their value through their analogical relation to real things.
In other words, their being is understood only in relation to the being of real things. A classic example of a being of reason is a goat-stag (hircocervus), a chimera formed from the compound of the ideas of two real things. Likewise, the idea of a smiling meadow involves the joining of a smile with a meadow, a being that does not exist yet seems to signify something with meaning to us. Of course, neither the goat-stag nor the smiling meadow exist as real beings, but their component parts do and so the reality of the being of reason is found by analogy to what is real.14
With his brief comments in the Cogitata Metaphysica, Spinoza inserts himself into a complex debate, not only over “beings of reason” but over the nature of divine predication itself.15 The problem in a nutshell is this: when we attribute qualities to God—God is just, merciful, etc.—do the words mean the same thing as when we use them to refer, say to a just or merciful king? In other words, are the terms univocal, pointing to God’s intrinsic qualities or essence, or merely equivocal, pointing to the purely extrinsic qualities that we observe yet may have no meaningful relation to his essence? The problem takes on a metaphysical dimension when we ask whether these qualities exist in the same way in the different instances of their use. In general terms we can ask whether the meaning of “exists” in “God exists” and “man exists” is equivocal, fundamentally different, or univocal, the same? If the relation were merely equivocal, then we could not compare our nature to God in any sense. God remains wholly unknowable. If the relation were univocal, then the worry is that we are reducing God’s nature to ours. Aquinas attempted to solve this problem by introducing (via Aristotle) a third kind of relation, which strictly speaking is neither equivocal nor univocal but analogical. That is, the terms we use to describe God are extrinsic to his nature, but yet they point to his nature in a non-arbitrary manner.16 As we have just seen, Suarez follows Aquinas to some extent here, and his view on entia rationis echoes his view on this larger subject.17 The beings of reason do not pick out the intrinsic qualities of things, yet they are not entirely superfluous either. They can surely mislead us, but they nonetheless point to something real without claiming to be real themselves.
On the one hand, Spinoza rejects anything that seems equivocal in his metaphysics. He sides with the Scotist view that being is knowable via reason and thus that our true ideas refer directly (or intrinsically) to the nature of God. There is one God whose essential nature ought to and can be defined univocally through reason. On the other hand, Spinoza still wants to make careful distinctions among equivocal terms and defend the meaningfulness and value of some of them. Hence, whereas fictions and chimeras are problematic, albeit for different reasons—the former are possible yet merely involve arbitrary connections or extrinsic relations, while the latter are simply impossible—beings of reason are different.
Instead of eliminating the analogy of being from his system, Spinoza reconceives it in terms of his metaphysical naturalism, or commitment to univocal explanation. At the level of rational explanation, there is no need for equivocal or analogical explanations. That is, from the God’s eye point of view, all the finite modes of substance act and can be explained in terms of the infinite modes of God itself, which is the combination of the laws of nature as they are expressed through the total of finite modes. But from the point of view of the modes themselves, which are, by definition, only parts of the total sum of modes, all understanding will be partial, based on the comparison of one part of the system to another or to the putative whole. Just as the action of finite modes is limited by the effect of other modes on them, so too is the understanding of each mode, expressed as an idea of its own body, partial in relation to the whole. It understands itself not only as it acts in terms of its own nature but also as it is acted upon by other bodies. Some of those actions may be experienced as stimuli to action, but they are conceived always in relation to other things. Hence, given the inevitability (and ubiquity) of these partial conceptions of the world, we need to learn how to discriminate between them, prevent their misuse, and promote their limited epistemological value.
II. The Relation of Part to Whole as a Being of Reason
The relation of beings to reason to the broader structure of analogia entis helps us make sense of a very difficult question in Spinoza’s metaphysics, that of the relation of part to whole. It should not surprise us that Spinoza uses the idea of beings of reason in his early work to explain this problem. We find the crucial passage in the Short Treatise, in the second chapter of part 1, on the topic of “What God Is.” Spinoza has concluded that “extension is an attribute of God,” and he is aware that many think that this view is inconsistent with God’s perfection. They would argue that if God is extended, then God is divisible, which undermines his uniqueness and simplicity. To which Spinoza replies: “That part and whole are not true or actual beings, but only beings of reason; consequently in Nature … there are neither whole nor parts” [§19]. In the Second Dialogue of the Short Treatise, Theophilus says that “the whole is only a being of reason” [C I 78/G I 32–33].18
The very same arguments are repeated in the crucial scholium to E1p15, in which Spinoza claims that “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.” The difference is that instead of using the term “being of reason” to discuss the relation of part to whole, he says that these ideas are a product of the imagination rather than the intellect. Of course, this new terminology poses the same problem as before: if the intellect refers to what is real, God’s infinite nature, then what status ontologically do the imaginative ideas of part and whole have? Do they simply refer to nothing? If so, are we better off doing away with these ideas altogether? Spinoza’s admonition in the Cogitata Metaphysica that “Being is badly divided into real being and being of reason” should lead us to consider another way of reading this passage.
The distinctions we have examined above, between univocal, equivocal, and analogical terms, can clarify Spinoza’s intent here in the Ethics just as they did in the earlier works. Spinoza seems committed to the idea that the modes of thinking that involve part and whole do not refer univocally to God. That is, they are not true ideas of something that really exists. If they were, then they would be ideas of independently existing finite beings, like Cartesian substances, and we have reason to believe, at this point in the argument of the Ethics, that this is false, that there is only one substance. In contrast, these modes of thinking are not nothing either. If the parts were nothing more than equivocal beings, then they would, properly speaking, refer to nothing and we could do away with all mention of them. The existence of parts would be an illusion. However, if the modes of thinking that refer to parts and whole are analogical in nature, then beings of reason function in a different way. They are not merely fictions, arbitrary constructs of the will, which do not refer to anything real. The structure of analogical thinking is that these terms stand not in a direct relation to things but in an indirect relation. The imaginative ideas that finite minds have refer primarily to other finite ideas, the extrinsic relations that they have with other finite beings, which, as we shall see below, we conceive partially and inadequately. Nonetheless, those relations stand ultimately in God, and so the extrinsic relations refer indirectly to intrinsic reality of the world.
To be more specific: from the point of view of a finite being we have ideas of innumerable discrete or finite objects, which we can call X, Y, Z, etc. There are not real distinctions between these objects but modal distinctions. The collection of all these objects we call “the whole,” which once named gives meaning to the notion of “part,” a term that belongs to each of the objects in the “whole.” These terms are neither real nor modal but distinctions of reason. Each part is analogous in that sense to the other parts, even if they are of different kinds.19 The “whole” in turn, constituted from the point of view of finite modes, stands in analogous relation to God as it actually exists. From God’s point of view, finite things exist not as really distinct but rather only as modes of God. From the point of view of finite modes, we say that finite things are “in” God as “parts” constitute a “whole.” We can represent these relations schematically as follows:
The relation of part to whole is not how things really are in God’s nature, but an analogy made by finite things to the metaphysically real nature of God.20
When Spinoza rejects the standard dichotomy between real being and being of reason, he is not rejecting the value of a being of reason. Instead, he is pointing out a possible misuse of the distinction, one that leads to positing something that is not real as real. But with that caveat in mind, we can still use the beings of reason in certain ways. That is what we shall turn to next.
III. Beings of Reason and Knowing Things by Analogy
Spinoza now tries to explain how precisely Beings of Reason can help know the world, although in this apparently mundane account we find a rejection of one of the most basic principles of Suarez’s Aristotelianism. We find this account in CM I, ch. i and also in the TIE and letters from this period. Their first function is to retain ideas. This requires an act of memory by which we retain some particular idea by linking it to something similar or putting it under a single name.21 Philosophers have frequently availed themselves of this function of a being of reason through the construction of classes of objects through ideas like species, genus, etc.22 What Suarez would have taken as true ideas about real things in the world Spinoza reduces to a mnemonic device. Their second function is to explain things through serving as a mode of comparison. The examples Spinoza offers are time, number, and measure. The same topic is also discussed in the well-known “Letter 12 on the Infinite.”23 As he writes there, “From the fact that when we conceive Quantity abstracted from Substance and separate Duration from the way it flows from eternal things, we can determine them as we please, there arise Time and Measure—Time to determine Duration and Measure to determine Quantity in such a way that, so far as possible, we imagine them easily” [C I 203]. The third function is to imagine non-entities positively as beings, especially in the case of imagining negations of things as having real being, like darkness, blindness. Like the prior mode, this one functions in much the same way as Suarez outlined.
Spinoza also adopts Suarez’s view that there is an analogical basis in the deployment of beings of reason. He expresses this in terms of the mental activity of feigning an explanation. In the TIE Spinoza discusses when we feign ideas, which is nothing other than attributing existence to that which has no existence [§52]. Spinoza describes the activity of feigning in just the same way as he describes the different sorts of entia rationis. We can feign the existence of an impossible thing, like a square circle, or we can feign the existence of a possible thing. It is worthwhile to note that when Spinoza speaks of feigning in the TIE he offers us not objects but narratives: “E.g., I feign that Peter, whom I know, is going home, that he is coming to visit me, and the like. Here I ask, what does such an idea concern? I see that it concerns only possible, and not necessary or impossible things” [§52]. We can expand the domain of beings of reason to include fables and other narratives, such as in Descartes’s Le Monde, which of course is explicitly framed in this manner, or Biblical narratives that play such an important role in the Theological-Political Treatise and the development of Spinoza’s political thought.24 A story is not just a simple analogy but a compound of analogies whose own structure, its plot or moral, we might also describe as a being of reason.
The apparent power of feigning is undermined by its inherent tendency to mislead:
The less men know Nature, the more easily they can feign many things, such as, that trees speak, that men are changed in a moment into stones and into springs, that nothing becomes something, that even Gods are changed into beasts and into men, and infinitely many other things of that kind. [TIE §58]
It would be best if we did not have to feign at all. God, who, if he exists, must be omniscient, “can feign nothing at all” [§54]. Spinoza thinks that it is possible to acquire true ideas and to deduce other true ones methodically from those with which we began. In this way we would replace possible truths (and the doubt that accompanies them) with necessary ones.25 Despite the ways in which a Being of Reason can help us in our practical concerns, Spinoza reminds us that they are limited and potentially a cause of error. We ought to recognize Spinoza’s attempt to trim Suarez’s beard with Occam’s razor! He cautions the reader not to confuse beings of reason with real beings, and notes that beings of reason do not tell us what is true and false but only what is good or bad for us. Spinoza ridicules both Platonic and Aristotelian notions of form [CM I, ch. i] and he does not have much use for their taxonomies of matter either in terms of genus and species. This is also true in the case of universals. In several places, Spinoza attacks what many philosophers took to be a central idea.26
As we saw above in the case of metaphysics, Spinoza preserves the various functions of beings of reason in his later works and also generalizes them, incorporating them into a larger theory of the imagination. Spinoza defines the imagination as the idea of the affections of other bodies on one’s own. They are “partial” because they express only one point of view of the complex set of events that constitute the world. They are “confused” because the individual finite subject does not easily distinguish the cause of the action from the effect. They are “inadequate” because they lack the systematic and law-like nature of “adequate” or rational ideas.
Although each inadequate idea or “image” is discrete, they are invariably linked together in chains and combinations of various sorts. In his categorization of the kinds of knowledge, Spinoza actually distinguishes between two kinds of the imagination, what he calls “singular things” and “signs.”
From what has been said above, it is clear that we perceive many things and form universal notions:
I. from singular things which have been represented to us through the senses in a way that is mutilated, confused, and without order for the intellect (see E2p29c); for that reason I have been accustomed to call such perceptions knowledge from random experience;
II. from signs, e.g., from the fact that, having heard or read certain words, we recollect things, and form certain ideas of them, which are like them, and through which we imagine the things (E2p18s). These two ways of regarding things I shall henceforth call knowledge of the first kind, opinion or imagination. [E2p40s2]
There is of course a basic kind of similarity that is built into the very structure of the representation of bodies in ideas. But what is more important for our purposes is the way in which these simple forms of representation become conjoined together into more complex forms of associations. Spinoza recognizes that implicit in the signs we use—the words that stand for the images—is some principle of “likeness” that links together disparate images into signs that stand for something. How are these inadequate ideas grouped together?
We can use the scholastic theory of analogy to account for the various ways in which images (or inadequate ideas) can be associated with one another. If the association is purely random, or equivocal, then the signs are really no different from individual ideas. We will be able to learn nothing at all about the world. If they are associated via an act of will based on some artifice, that is some rule that links two ideas together without any reference to an internal principle, then we have something like a poetic metaphor, an artifice that follows some principle that we have constructed. What we will learn, if we examine these signs, is nothing more than the artifice itself that constructed the connection in the first place. If the association is based on some principle that seems to be internal to the things, then the sign will claim something more. It will claim to know the essence of things.
But this is where, Spinoza thinks, we have to be exceedingly careful. For only reason, not the imagination, can rightly claim to know the internal properties of finite modes. This is the peculiar danger of philosophy. It uses the principle of likeness, itself based on ideas of extrinsic rather than intrinsic qualities of things, to claim knowledge of the essences of things. This is where Spinoza criticizes the “universals” that have been constructed by other philosophers:
These notions they call Universal, like Man, Horse, Dog, and the like, have arisen from similar causes, namely, because so many images (e.g., of men) are formed at one time in the human body that they surpass the power of imagining. [E2p40s2]
In other words, what seems like reason is really the imagination in action—Analogy instead of deduction. We have mistaken equivocal terms for univocal ones. Philosophy, the quest for certain knowledge, is undermined. An explanation using these equivocal terms will not lead to agreement but foster disagreement and discord, because each person understands the meaning of the explanations using these terms in different ways. If the idea of man, for instance, is formed on the basis of a principle of analogy, using either a partial set of ideas as its basis, or a single idea derived from experience that serves as the primum analogatum and helps us pick out others as lesser examples of the model, then we mistake the partial and particular for the truly universal. Writ large, these are, in effect, the very same reasons why we should reject analogical explanation when it comes to knowledge of God or substance. What is actually particular is being substituted for what is supposed to be universal.
There is a further, related complication. We started with the assumption that there are images of discrete objects. But since there are no metaphysically simple parts in Spinoza’s system—that is, really distinct objects—then how do we form ideas of them?27 There is, of course, a metaphysically adequate idea of them: they are modes of substance. But from the point of view of finite beings, we more often than not have inadequate or confused ideas of these modes. How are these inadequate or imaginative ideas of discrete objects constituted? First, we must rely on the all-important distinction of reason between “part” and “whole,” a distinction which functions on two levels. It makes the distinction between God conceived as the “whole” and God conceived as “parts of the whole.” Then, within this totality of infinite parts in the whole there are relative parts and wholes, which are purely relational. In other words, if the human body is conceived as the “whole” then all that constitutes it are its “parts.” Of course, the whole human body is, conceived in a different relational scale, just a part, say within a society, which in turn is a part within nature.28 But how do these relative notions of part and whole become fixed as discrete objects within an ever-changing field of motion and rest? There is an adequate idea of the finite mode in Spinoza’s system, which commentators have attempted to explicate in a variety of ways.29 And, of course, that idea expresses the true nature of the object. But the question that faces us is how the imagination conceives of something (inadequately) as a discrete object, an idea that will only bear an analogous relation to the true object. Here the two-step process of the imagination sketched in E2p40s2 becomes important. There are perhaps infinitely many discrete and inadequate ideas produced by the imagination. They are as various as the relations a finite mode can have with others, which is infinite. But we don’t experience the world simply as a shifting field of infinitely many unique objects. Because we pick out similarities between the objects of the imagination we are almost always engaged in the process of grouping them in stable kinds, which we designate through names and signs. There is an unending interplay between the unique object and its kinds. Because both are inadequately conceived (albeit in different ways) the experience of either imaginative singularity or imaginative kinds (like universals) is always unsatisfactory. We need to make sense of shifting particulars and so we name them via some focal point of similarity in an analogous relation. Yet these kinds are inevitably unsatisfactory because they never account for infinite relational complexity of experience.
Does this mean that we need to reject the imagination as a path to knowledge? Of course, if we were God, then we could rely on reason alone. However, as finite beings, we cannot act solely according to the God’s eye perspective and inevitably are in the world of the imagination and passions. We have seen how, if we explain the mechanisms of the imagination in terms of the doctrine of analogy, we can make sense of typical philosophical errors, such as the substitution of our particular experience for the universal. We can also use it more positively to explain the utility of the imagination.
If we inscribe the equivocal world of images within the univocal world of universal law, then we can use analogical explanation as a bridge from the imagination to reason. Let’s take a look at the famous example of the proportional that Spinoza uses to illustrate the kinds of knowledge:
I shall explain all these with one example. Suppose there are three numbers, and the problem is to find a fourth which is to the third as the second is to the first. Merchants do not hesitate to multiply the second by the third, and divide the product by the first, because they have not yet forgotten what they heard from their teacher without any demonstration, or because they have often found this in the simplest numbers, or from the force of the Demonstration of P7 in Bk. VII of Euclid, viz. from the common property of proportionals. But in the simplest numbers none of this is necessary. Given the numbers 1, 2, and 3, no one fails to see that the fourth proportional number is and we see this much more clearly because we infer the fourth number from the ratio which, in one glance, we see the first number to have the second. [E2p40s2]
The merchant has at hand a procedure that links the numbers in a relation determined not by demonstration (as the rational person would have) but by likeness to a rule that he learned by imitation. It turns out that there is a rational truth to the matter, one known by the competent mathematician, but the merchant approximates it through a procedure that has been honed, not by ratiocination but by experience and the use of analogy to organize that experience. The fact that the merchant uses the imagination—and more particularly an analogy—does not mean that the solution is wrong. It is neither chimerical nor fictional. The solution to the problem is not, strictly speaking, true, because it was not arrived at through reason. But it is an approximation of the truth, based on analogical principles. The extent of approximation can be measured independently by reason. But it can also be determined indirectly, through experience. Deleuze notes that, in the case of reason, “the application of common notions implies, in general, a strange harmony between reason and the imagination, between the laws of reason and those of the imagination.”30 The same “strange harmony” also applies in reverse, albeit less predictably.31 The imagination can arrive at something approximating the truth through analogy. The pragmatic value of analogical reason bears directly on the use of beings of reason in Spinoza’s ethical theory.
IV. Beings of Reason and Doing the Right Thing by Analogy
In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza writes that he “resolved at least to try to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good, capable of communicating itself, and which alone would affect the mind, all other being rejected—whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity” [§1]. Spinoza rejects sensual pleasure, wealth, and honor, and says that, like a man suffering illness, in the “greatest danger,” he must seek a remedy for his situation [§7]. The highest good is “the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature” [§13]. But because our natures are weak, subject to error and the lures of the passions, it is not easy to arrive at this good directly. Hence Spinoza outlines a means to that end, which he calls the “true good”: man conceives a human nature much stronger and more enduring than his own and “seeks means that will lead him to such a perfection” [§13]. However, just before he proposes the means to his remedy, he adds an important qualification:
To understand this [the true good and the highest good] properly, it must be noted that good and bad are said of things only in a certain respect, so that one and the same thing can be called both good and bad according to different respects. The same applies to perfect and imperfect, especially after we have recognized that everything that happens according to the eternal order, and according to certain laws of nature. [TIE, §12]
There does not appear to be anything that is intrinsically good; rather, what is good and what is perfect (as well as their opposites) involve a contingent relation to a subject, who makes a judgment about that relation.
In KV, I, ch. x, Spinoza provides a somewhat more detailed account of the status of “good” and “evil” in terms of scholastic vocabulary.
[1] Some things are in our intellect and not in Nature; so these are only our own work, and they help us to understand things distinctly. Among these we include all relations, which have reference to different things. These we call beings of reason.
[2] So the question now is whether good and evil should be regarded as beings of reason or as real beings. But since good and evil are nothing but relations, they must, beyond any doubt, be regarded as beings of reason. For one never says that something is good except in respect to something else that is not so good, or not so useful to us as something else. So, one says that a man is bad only in respect to one who is better, or that an apple is bad only in respect to another that is good, or better. None of this could possibly be said if there were not something better, or good, in respect to which [the bad] is so called.
[3] Therefore, if one says that something is good, that is nothing but saying that it agrees well with the universal Idea which we have of such things. But as we have already said, things must agree with their particular Ideas, whose being must be a perfect essence, and not with universal ones, because then they would not exist.
[4] As for confirming what we have just said, the thing is clear to us, but to conclude what we have said we shall add the following proofs.
All things which exist in Nature are either things or actions. [KV, I, ch. x/C I 92/G I 49]
Hence the terms “good/evil” and “perfect/imperfect” do not refer to anything that is real in the world, an entity, but rather refers to a relation that is constructed by our intellect.
We find almost the exact same structure in the Preface to Ethics Part 4, albeit with a slightly different order of presentation. First, he notes that “perfection and imperfection … are only modes of thinking, that is, notions that we are accustomed to feign because we compare individuals of the same species or genus to one another” [G II 207]. He then goes on to say that “as far as good and evil are concerned, they also indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than modes of thinking, or notions we form because we compare things to one another.” Nonetheless, despite these conceptual limitations, “still we must retain these words” because we want to form a model of human nature that helps us become more prefect, and “good” is what “certainly is a means” to come closer to that model and “evil” as that which does not [G II 208].
Thus, we find many of the same features of the early works in the Ethics. The model of human nature has several epistemic functions that were associated with the entia rationis. It is based on the collection and retention of many images of human beings, which it blends together into an “ideal” for the sake of comparing subsequent instances. It uses a normative notion of perfection to perform that task, a notion that is really nothing better than a feigned ideal. Once the ideal model has been formed it serves as the focal point for others who are categorized in this class, that is, similar enough to the model that they are classified as members of this kind. This, as we have noted earlier, is an instance of the most prominent kind of analogy, the so-called analogy of attribution.
The model of human nature also shares the same basic metaphysical structure that we have investigated above. It does not refer to a real entity—even if it sometimes appears to those who use it that it does in the form of a universal. It is not an entity with a single meaning. But neither does it refer to nothing, that is, to the endless play of equivocation of pure fiction. The structure of the model gives sense to the multiple meanings that it evokes, depending on the particular set of experiences of its users, through the very idea of a primary analogue, to which the others are subordinate. It becomes the basis of a “family resemblance” that once constructed organizes subsequent experience in light of its focal point. The model is real as a mode of thought that bears an analogous relation to what is really real and known by reason.
Finally, the model of human nature bears a pragmatic relation to truth and can be either bolstered or undermined via experience. This is a crucial point and requires underlining. Although we can talk about the metaphysical and epistemological structure of beings of reason, their justification is found in practice rather than theoretical knowledge, for which they are not suited. The criterion of success of the model is not how much better we know the world, but how much better we manage to succeed in our striving. Spinoza makes this clear in relation to the moral “beings of reason.” He defines “good” at the beginning of Ethics Part 4 as “what we certainly know to be useful to us” [E4d1]. We can see how the value of a model of human nature can be determined not by its theoretical truth (although that might affect its “certainty” and ultimate value, as Spinoza thinks that true knowledge is most useful), but by its utility. Indeed, even if we are not certain about the truth of a model it can nonetheless help organize our fragmented experience into a more coherent whole that can improve our power of striving. The adequacy of the model will be judged primarily in these terms. Moreover, this pragmatic notion of value also obtains for the other non-moral beings of reason, such as measures of time, classification of kinds, and rules of thumb, like informal methods of solving mathematical problems.
Notes
1 Martial Gueroult, Spinoza 1: Dieu (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1968), 415.
2 TIE, §51, footnote about the “fictitious idea.”
3 KV, I, ch. x [C I 92–93/G I 49].
4 CM I, ch. i [C I 299ff/G I 233].
5 Filippo Mignini has recently surveyed the notion of fiction in Spinoza’s work, focusing on the precedents of Descartes and Bacon. See Filippo Mignini, “Fictio/Verziering (e) in Spinoza’s Early Writings,” in The Young Spinoza: A Metaphysician in the Making, ed. Yitzhak Y. Melamed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Scholars—including Jacob Freudenthal, Wim Klever, and more recently Robert Schnepf—have also analyzed these terms and sketched the relation of Spinoza to some of the late scholastic sources on this topic. See: Jacob Freudenthal, “Spinoza und die Scholastik,” in Philosophische Aufsaetze: E. Zeller gewidmet (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1887); Wim Klever, “Remarques sur le Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (Experientia vaga, paradoxa, ideae fictae),” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 71, no. 1 (1987): 101–113; Robert Schnepf, “Von Der Naturalisierung Der Ontologie Zur Naturalisierung Der Ethik: Spinoza’s Metaethik Im Context Spätscholastischer Enthia-Moralia-Theorien,” Studia Spinozana 16 (2008): 105–128.
6 See CM I, ch. i [C I 301/G I 235].
7 Karolina Hübner, “Spinoza on Essences, Universals, and Beings of Reason,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96, no. 2 (2015): 58–88.
8 Tad Schmaltz, “The Disappearance of Analogy in Descartes, Spinoza, and Régis,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2000): 85, 113. Henri Krop also suggests that Spinoza has returned in a sense to the doctrine of the analogy of being, but he does not specify in what way. See Henri Krop, “Ens,” in The Continuum Companion to Spinoza, ed. Wiep van Bunge et al. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).
9 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 46–49. In Deleuze, Spinoza: philosophie pratique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981), 87–88, his discussion of “analogie” in the article on “éminence” is instructive. He notes the important role of analogy in the early works, but his claim is that the idea of common notions in the Ethics replaces it.
10 See, however, Jean-Luc Marion, La théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981).
11 I owe this point to Roger Ariew. See Roger Ariew, Descartes and the First Cartesians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and Ariew, “Descartes and Leibniz as Readers of Suarez: Theory of Distinctions and the Principle of Individuation,” in The Philosophy of Francisco Suarez, ed. Benjamin Hill and Henrik Lagerlund (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
12 Francisco Suarez, On Beings of Reason (De Entibus Rationis): Metaphysical Disputation 54, trans. John P. Doyle (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1995).
13 See Doyle, 31. Privation is the lack of something in a subject, which it would naturally have, while negation is the absolute lack of something (32).
14 Thus, as John P. Doyle points out in his introduction to the 54th Disputatio, this analogical relationship can also be expressed as a metaphor (23). The meadow is not really smiling but the semi-circle of blooming flowers makes it seem as if it were. Because the entities have this analogical relation to real being, they can guide us (or perhaps more often than not, misguide us), albeit indirectly, in the world. For further discussion see David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1986).
15 Wolfson claims a Hebrew source for these distinctions and disagrees with Freudenthal, who says that there are no sources for these distinctions (between ens fictum, ens chimera, ens rationis, and ens realis) in Jewish philosophy. See Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), vol. 1, 161–162, esp. footnote 3. And Freudenthal, “Spinoza und die Scholastik.”
16 They are similar without being identical. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defined “analogy” as the relation of proportion of comparison to two relations (i.e., four terms) [1131a31-32]. Among others, Paul Ricœur sees the tradition of analogia entis as going back to Aristotle. However, some scholars have argued that Aristotle himself did not see any connection between the discussion of homonymy and analogy. Hence, the tradition’s reliance on this proof text apparently would be mistaken. See Paul Ricoeur, La métaphore vive (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), 344–356. See also Christopher Shields, Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 10, note 3.
17 See Disputation 28 in Francisco Suarez, The Metaphysical Demonstration of the Existence of God: Metaphysical Disputations 28–29, trans. John P. Doyle (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004). See also E. J. Ashworth, “Suarez on the Analogy of Being: Some Historical Background,” Vivarium 33, no. 1 (1995): 50–75.
18 The context here is more complicated and illustrates the ways in which Spinoza wants to appropriate scholastic discourse for his own purposes. In the First Dialogue, the character Lust claims that Reason’s view is that God is the whole outside of its parts, which leads to a kind of reductio, in which Lust, citing a scholastic distinction, says that “the whole is a second notion, which is no thing in Nature, outside of human thought” [KV, I, 1st dialogue, §10/C I 75/G I 30, l. 5]. Reason replies that Lust is only using “ambiguous words—the usual practice of those who oppose the truth.” But Spinoza does not want to give up on the utility of the idea of a “being of reason.” In the Second Dialogue, Theophilus comes back to the part–whole relation and distinguishes the use of one being of reason, the “whole” from another, the “universal”: “To this we may add that the whole is only a being of reason and differs from the universal in these respects” [C I 78/G I 33]. For some comments on this, see Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, vol. 1, 326–327.
19 As Spinoza notes in KV, I, 2nd dialogue, “The universal includes only parts of the same kind, whereas the whole includes parts of the same kind and of another kind” [C I 78/G I 33].
20 Melamed points out that it was common in the seventeenth century to argue that modes are not parts of substance, “to make it clear that the entity at stake cannot exist independently of its subject.” If we interpret the part–whole relation as an analogy, then we can preserve the metaphysically true idea that modes are not really parts, while allowing for the imaginative experience in which parts appear to be relatively independent of the whole that they constitute.
21 Spinoza gives an account of memory in E2p17c and a physiological account of it in the demonstration to this corollary.
22 “Still, these modes of thinking cannot be called ideas, nor can they be said to be true or false, just as love cannot be called true or false, but [only] good or bad. So when Plato said that man is a featherless biped, he erred no more than those who said that man is a rational animal. For Plato was no less aware than anyone else that man is a rational animal. But he referred man to a certain class so that, when he wished to think about man, he would immediately fall into the thought of man by recalling that class, which he could easily remember. Indeed Aristotle erred very seriously if he thought that he had adequately explained the human essence by that definition of his. Whether, indeed, Plato did well, one can only ask. But this is not the place for these matters” [CM I, ch. i/C I 301].
23 See Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “On the Exact Science of Nonbeings: Spinoza’s View of Mathematics,” Iyyun, The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, 49 (2000): 3–22.
24 Spinoza’s view of literature here, echoed by his discussion of Orlando Furioso in the TTP, ch. viii, §61 [G III 110], which he describes as a mere trifle, seems unduly pessimistic. But it is counterbalanced somewhat by his view of historical narratives (or chronicles), including those of the Bible, which he thinks can point analogically to some moral truths, i.e., a better way of life.
25 See also E1p15s for frequent uses of “feigning.”
26 See E2p48s, for instance.
27 In a note, Deleuze criticizes the view of Rivaud (in Albert Rivaud, “La Physique de Spinoza,” Chronicon Spinozanum 4 (1924–1926): 24–57), who argues that the notion of “completely simple bodies” does not make sense in an infinitely divisible space. Deleuze claims that “the reality of simple bodies lies beyond any possible perception.” In other words, simple bodies (or modes) are grasped through the intellect but not the imagination. See Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism, 381, note 11. Deleuze writes: “Modes … are something more than phantoms of the imagination, something more than things of reason.” Still, the problem remains how the imagination conceives of discrete bodies.
28 Spinoza makes this point in the important scholium to E2le7.
29 For Deleuze, a mode’s essence is an “a determinate degree of intensity, an irreducible degree of power” (Expressionism, 202). For Curley, it is a finite effect. For Melamed, it is property of substance. I don’t think that the truth of one account or another of Spinoza’s metaphysics of mode directly affects my account of the imaginative view, as long as one can make an analogy between the inadequate (or imaginative idea) and the adequate idea. As we shall see below, the possibility that this inadequate idea can lead us indirectly to the adequate idea will depend on the truth of the rational account of Spinoza’s metaphysics.
30 Deleuze, Expressionism, 294.
31 It can also serve as a bridge not only through its results but via the joyous emotions that it produces when experience confirms the analogical rule. As I have argued elsewhere, Spinoza does not think that wonder—the affect produced by a singular unexplained event—is the mechanism that spurs scientific inquiry. See Michael A. Rosenthal, “Miracles, Wonder, and the State in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise,” in Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise: A Critical Guide, ed. Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Michael A. Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Instead, as Deleuze emphasizes, it is joy that stimulates further inquiry. Now in the case of reason there is a clear internal ladder or spiral linking knowledge to joy, as each success builds to another in the chain of deduction. This has led some commentators, such as Matheron, to argue that there is a kind of automatic process at the heart of Spinoza’s system that once begun has a necessary internal dynamic. However, in the case of analogical reasoning, with its inherent pitfalls, there is no such process. Because the relation to the truth is indirect, based on extrinsic relations, there is nothing necessary about its progress. Still, once some success is found, the joy it produces can lead some at least to consider what caused the success, and this might lead the merchant to become a mathematician.