9*. How Can a Man Be Free? Spinoza’s Thought and That of Some Others

I will begin with what everyone must know who has studied Spinoza a little. You will see in the end why I speak of this.

Spinoza believed that God is the sole substance, and, qua substance, exists necessarily because it belongs to substance to exist per se. Compare the Aristotelian notion that it belongs to substance to exist not in another thing (as shape for example is the shape of something). We might put the point by saying that it belongs to substance to exist on its own. But what does this imply, if it doesn’t imply that any substance exists necessarily? The scholastic avoidance of this is found in the word ‘convenit’ = ‘it is proper for’. It is proper for anything that would be a substance if it existed, to exist on its own and not in another thing. We might indeed read this into the phrase ‘it belongs to’, but we have then to insist that this ‘belonging to’ does not imply necessary existence. Unicorns don’t exist, but if they did exist they’d be substances: ‘unicorn’ has the grammar of a substance-name.

I suppose that Descartes would have accepted this. Spinoza not. For him, the per se existence of substance entailed its necessary existence, and more yet, namely that there was only one substance.

He also thought that that one necessary being produces infinitely, so that all possibilities are ‘produced in actuality’ by him. He—God—is the source of the possibility of whatever is possible. So this philosopher rejects the doctrine that God, through or by an exercise of freedom of will, creates the actual world, choosing from among possibilities what shall come to be.

It hangs together with this doctrine of Spinoza’s that will itself is identical with intellect, at least in God: will is the being thought of of what we would be inclined to say is primarily thought of, and this is, further, itself therefore willed.

God’s thoughts are all necessary because it is his nature to think of everything logically possible (as we would be inclined to say) and this thinking of them makes the objects of the universe actual. God’s thought is thus not simply of his own existence and attributes.

This should not make us forget that according to Spinoza God is cause of himself—causa sui. What Spinoza frequently calls ‘nature’ is not among the attributes of God. He does indeed speak of God’s own nature, and that nature he calls natura naturans, by contrast with natura naturata. This scholastic distinction is between the nature that ‘natures’, i.e. confers their natures on everything besides itself, and nature that is ‘natured’, i.e. has its nature conferred upon it. (Spinoza more prominently adopts this distinction in the Dutch writing ‘God, Man and his Well-being’.)

When he says ‘Deus sive natura’, ‘God or nature’, this means ‘God, i.e. nature’ and he is referring primarily to natura naturans. God’s attributes are identical with him, being infinite and eternal. All other things are finite or finite† modes of his attributes and are natura naturata. The only infinite attributes of God which we can grasp (from their modes in created things) are thought and extension.

Spinoza argues that God is free in making come to be whatever else can be thought of, not because he acts by freedom of will, choosing e.g. among possible worlds, but because nothing can prevent and nothing can compel his action. For we must always remember that his action comprises all the infinite possibilities that there are, and is necessary from his nature.

I infer from this that God’s freedom, as Spinoza understands it, is a freedom that we may also ascribe to numbers. Nothing can either compel or prevent them in the matter of their relations to other numbers; every such thing, however, that can be true is true. As for what might be called empirical facts about numbers, e.g. that such-and-such is the number of people in this room at present, this too in Spinoza’s belief will have been necessary in the nature of things: but, while that means it could not have been prevented, also it could not have been ‘compelled’ either. It was merely necessary.

Nevertheless, this ‘freedom’ would hardly impress us. I suspect that this is at least partly because numbers are not substances, as God is. The necessity of his being and making all else that is possible also be, is a necessity on the part of a being that has infinite thought and infinite extension. The character of being a thinking being makes us readily accept that it is free in its actions even if the freedom is nothing but the impossibility of being either compelled or hindered by anything else. Numbers are not thinking beings and therefore the impossibility of any feature of them being compelled or hindered does not easily suggest that they are ‘free’. But there is another aspect of the limited kind of mathematical objects that most interested Spinoza—namely geometrical objects. He thought that they ought to be defined genetically—i.e. by what makes them come to be—in the explanations of them. One might then not agree that nothing compels them, natural as that thought is to us.

I must, then, somewhat moderate my comparison of Spinoza’s God’s freedom and an analogous ‘freedom’ of mathematical objects. Nevertheless, everything essential about them is necessary, and that necessity can be compared with the necessity that attaches to everything about Spinoza’s God. The necessity of his nature by which the natura naturans is all that he is and does all that he does—it is that very necessity, with no external source, which is freedom, the freedom of the divine and only substance. That substance, Spinoza says, is the only ‘free cause’.

After this beginning, I can come to the subject of my talk, given in the title: ‘How can a man be free?’ I will not dwell on Spinoza’s rather curious conception of the human mind as itself the idea of one’s own body, interesting as that is. Nor yet upon his rather faulty way of defining the various emotions or passions. I will only remark that if you want to give a definition of, say, hate or admiration, you need to take the formula ‘A hates x’ or ‘A admires y’ and explain it in a way that brings the variables (x, y) into the definition. Spinoza gives us a lot of definitions of ‘affects’, but he observes no such rule. Nor can the faultiness be remedied, as someone suggested, by simply introducing as explanation of ‘A loves x’, ‘x causes A joy’ or something of that sort. Spinoza’s major fault is this: he does not observe the distinction between the object and the cause of an emotion. Between the cause of one’s admiring x, say, and the respect in which one admires x.

Indeed, we can say of him more generally than that, that he is dominated by an all-embracing conception of causality. And here I have an acknowledgement to make: I am grateful to him for giving us a single axiom in the opening of Part IV of the Ethics, the part with the title ‘De Servitute Humana’ and the subtitle offered as alternative: ‘De Affectuum Viribus’. In English: ‘On Human Bondage, or the Power of the Passions’. I translate the second bit like that rather than ‘the Strength of the Emotions’, precisely because of the connection with human servitude or bondage. We should not fail to notice that Spinoza mentions God as having affectus. (See e.g. Part V p.36 Sch.) Used of human beings, the word covers all the affects or emotions. But we quickly learn that Spinoza distinguishes between affects that are, and ones that are not, passions, passiones. And God is possessed by love of his own being and nature, which could not be a passion.

I will come back to this, but for the moment my interest lies in the sole axiom, which he supplies after giving a number of definitions. These are of good and bad, of the contingent and of the possible, of mutually contrary effects, of an end (an object) of action, and of virtue and power. After all this, he produces his solitary ‘axiom’: it is a very remarkable one. It runs: ‘Nulla res singularis in rerum Natura datur, qua potentior et fortior non detur alia. Sed quacunque data datur alia potentior, a qua illa data potest destrui.’

I translate: ‘Among the objects of Nature there is none such that there is not another more powerful and stronger than it, by which it can be destroyed.’

This is offered to us to accept, as one accepts axioms. (I wonder why I should believe it.) It is put to use in the ‘demonstration’ of proposition 3 of this Part IV: ‘The strength by which a man continues in existence is limited and the power of external causes infinitely exceeds it’: ‘Vis, qua homo in existentia perseverat, limitata est, et a potentia causarum infinite superatur.’ The argument from the axiom is obvious. As Spinoza puts it: ‘Given any man, there is something, call it A, which is stronger than he is, and given A there is something further, call it B, stronger than A and so on ad infinitum: accordingly, if a man’s power is defined (bounded) by the power of something else, it is infinitely exceeded by the total power of external causes.’

What we have here is a pretty abstract formulation of Spinoza’s determinism about nature, together with a conversion of it into the particular thesis that, given any object in the realm of objects, there is always something stronger than it. We may be reminded of St Anselm’s answer to Gaunilo, who treated Anselm’s argument in Proslogion 2 as an argument for something greater or better than everything else in the world; Anselm says: ‘You may point to something which you think is greater than all the other things—but I can then think of something that would be greater still.’ But, for Spinoza, what can consistently be thought of must exist, being itself a possible thing; everything possible exists necessarily, because God can cause it and he necessarily causes everything that is in his power to cause.

As a rigid, formal, determinist, Spinoza has no belief whatever in what most people would think they meant by ‘freedom of the will’. Upon the whole, human beings will be dominated by those of their affects which he calls ‘passions’ (‘passiones’). These are precisely the affects in which a man is moved by external causes. If he is moved in his actions by external causes, he is not an ‘adequate cause’ of his actions. An ‘adequate cause’ is a cause such that the action it produces is produced truly by it: a man is an adequate cause when he acts ‘ductu rationis’, i.e. is led by reason. For an adequate cause is a cause such that the causality of its effects by it is perfectly intelligible from a consideration of its own nature.

It should not be thought that in that case a man cannot be an adequate cause of his consumption of food, for whose availability he is dependent on others. He may still be ‘led by reason’ in taking and eating it, and his action in doing so is intelligible as an act of reason, i.e. as in the relevant sense rendered intelligible as being an exercise of his rationality. (Contrast breathing.)

The understanding of this causality makes the effect ‘intelligible’. Reason, or the idea of reason, is in Spinoza’s view also an adequate idea in a rational being.

Although nothing can equal God’s ‘liberty’ as a ‘free cause’, nevertheless the thought and action according to reason of a thinking being, who is as such a finite mode of God’s infinite attribute of thought, comes as near as possible to the freedom attributed to God.

Here I should pause to consider the notion, so dominant in much seventeenth century philosophy, of an ‘adequate idea’. I think it is clear that it is historically derivative. It is derived from the famous definition of truth as adequatio intellectus et rei, the mutual measuring-up of thought and thing. Or, we might more clearly translate it as ‘thought and thing fitting one another’. This definition is attributed by Aquinas to the Rabbi Isaac, a philosopher of the great Jewish–Muslim period. I have heard that the Rabbi Isaac—Isaac Israeli— himself derived it from Avicenna. Be that as it may, it is certainly the source of our term ‘adequate’ as a term of ordinary language. In the seventeenth century we find ‘adequate idea’ as a frequent term used by some philosophers. It is prominent in John Locke, whose chapter on adequate ideas is far from clear—it is inadequate!

Spinoza, however, gives a definition of an adequate idea in terms of truth, which we may say is historically going round in a circle. The fourth definition of Part II of the Ethics runs: ‘By “adequate idea” I understand an idea which, so far as it is considered in itself, without its relation to its object, has all the properties or intrinsic denominations of a true idea.’

The interesting thing about this definition and the thoughts connected with it is that ‘idea’ is mentioned as a term standing for something possibly considered quite apart from its object. Spinoza goes on positively to explain the term ‘intrinsic’ as applied to denominations, saying he is using it to exclude what is extrinsic, namely the accommodation (convenientia) of an idea cum suo ideato, i.e. with what it is an idea of. We have here an example of Spinoza’s psycho-physical parallelism: ideas, considered in themselves, i.e. intrinsically, have the properties they have quite independently of their being ideas of anything actual.

If Spinoza is to be considered a forerunner of another philosopher, that philosopher is Hume. Hume’s definition and explanation of— for example—voluntary movement clearly give only exterior relations of an impression with the movement of the body (or, indeed, mind) which the impression accompanies; but he cannot stop himself from saying that ‘we produce’ the movement in question, and that phrase really raises the whole question again.

Hume indeed puzzled much about the relation of impressions and ideas to what we nowadays call ‘the external world’. His belief in the external things which they supposedly represent is decidedly sceptical. I think Spinoza did not so puzzle: he was a plain psychophysical parallelist. We can already see this in his regarding the relation of an idea cum suo ideato—i.e. with what it is an idea of—as an external relation. I believe—but without much learning in the matter—that admirers of Spinoza tend to lack awareness of the problematic character of his thought at this point.

Man is essentially part of ‘nature’—i.e. of the natura naturata; nevertheless in respect of his possible freedom—in respect of his becoming free, if he does—he comes as near as possible, in Spinoza’s philosophy, to the freedom attributed to God.

Spinoza rejects any ordinary idea of free will, on the part of God or man. Here he accords with a very common opinion on the part of modern Anglo-American philosophers, at least as far as concerns man; for such philosophers usually have no belief in God. We have seen what Spinoza calls God’s freedom. In the case of man, he rejects the idea of the mind as a sort of kingdom within a kingdom, i.e. not a part of law-governed nature. I think we are right to take his talk of laws here as much the same as ours when we talk of ‘scientific’ laws.

Spinoza despises Descartes—from the first so much admired by him—for believing that men are free in respect of their passions, that man has a sort of metaphysical control of them. ‘Not at all’, Spinoza says. The affects which he calls ‘passions’ have causes external to human minds. They exist necessarily under the influence of their external causes and in respect of them a man is therefore in a condition of bondage.

Nevertheless, there is such a thing as becoming free. Here we should note that Spinoza’s Part V, entitled ‘De Libertate Humana’, certainly reads like the writing of one who is exhorting and encouraging human beings to think, act and live as he thinks a free man will. We might find this odd as he does not abandon his determinism. We ought not to do so: what happens happens necessarily, and one of the things that happen is that Spinoza in effect exhorts to virtue. It may also happen that his exhortation is of no effect, and it may happen that it is effectual. Its being effectual contains no implication or indication that he is wrong in his determinism, or in his belief in common human bondage.

The reason why Part V of the Ethics is exhortatory, in reality as well as in appearance, is that Spinoza, while far from abandoning his determinism, is all the same enthusiastic about virtue (which he identifies with power) and also about ‘the intellectual love of God’.

Of this last I will say only this: his best explanation of what he calls ‘the third kind of knowledge’ is an example. Namely: there is a proportion between 1 and 2. What has that proportion to 3? One has immediate perception here. Such ‘perception’ is intellectual—what else? Well, it occurs with joyful pleasure. This is love. If a man has such a perception of the being and nature of God, this is joyful and is a minimal likeness to the divine life, in God’s knowledge and understanding and love of his own nature and existence.

We should note that Spinoza’s thought here has nothing to do with repentance or humility (or petitionary prayer). He despised repentance and humility. It is noteworthy that he shares a common view that humility is thinking yourself worse than you are. He does not consider the view that humility is truthfulness about oneself. This view is not common but exists in some thinkers.

We may find a certain sublimity in Spinoza’s idea of coming as it were to share in or imitate the divine life in a way which is not given to man—is not there in him—simply qua thinking being. The impression lessens when we remember about the divine life in this philosophy (a) that the life in respect of thought is an essential attribute of the natura naturans; but is not the same attribute as God’s infinite extension. And (b) we must remember that God, the one and only substance, cannot but be the adequate cause of everything else. Nothing ‘can either be or be conceived without him’, as Spinoza says repeatedly. This, of course, includes extension. Giving this as an infinite attribute of God probably helped Spinoza’s excommunication by the leading members of Amsterdam Jewry. But God’s ‘adequate causation’ of everything in the universe does obviously, in Spinoza, involve extension in God. He deals with the arguments against it which refer to extension’s involving divisibility, by thinking that the infiniteness of extension in God does not do so. This can be supported by reflecting that half of infinity would still be infinity.

Now, as adequate cause of everything else, God is also the adequate cause of man as a thinking being. This adequate causality is reflected in the adequate causality by a man of those thoughts and actions of which his reason is an adequate cause. So far as I know, Spinoza did not believe in angels (who are invoked in his excommunication), but thought man to be the only created thinking being. Man’s life and actions are on the whole little rational, certainly not guided by reason as Spinoza conceives possible. Only when he is in this manner guided by reason is he an adequate cause of his thoughts and actions. That means that upon the whole man does not act as an ‘adequate cause’, does not act ‘according to his nature’, which is a nature with reason. So his actions are not the actions properly and intelligibly proceeding from reason.

Man, qua rational, is not, we must say, a mere thinker, a haver and contemplator of thoughts. He can be ‘led by reason’ and to be so, which is for him to act according to his nature, is for him to be a minimal reflection of that adequate causality of things which is wholly given in the divine nature. When this happens there is in him also the analogue of God’s love in perceiving his own existence and nature.

For man’s actions to be intelligible in a way in which they are so long as he is guided by his passions, and is the object of infinite external causes—is human bondage.

But being guided by his essential nature, which is reason, he understands reason and loves it, and this can lead him to that intellectual perception of, and love of, truth and reason in God. This is the possible freedom and real happiness, of which no other created being is capable.

Nevertheless, a quite particular doubt arises here. We saw that there is no difference between thought and will in God. But this is especially connected with God’s own thinking being of everything possible, which makes possible things actual. Whether or not a distinction between thought and will is also denied in man, man’s ‘adequate causation’ cannot reflect God’s in being of everything he can think of. To that extent, then, the distinction between thought and will in the man, free through being guided by reason, must be admitted.

Here we have to reflect on the connection between action and truth. We might test what some sorts of animal other than man are able to do, and conclude that chickens, for example, are able to discriminate objects, otherwise similar, which differ in colour. If the objects are eatable by chickens, we might note that the ones of green or purple colour were nevertheless eaten by a chicken which would readily eat stuff of the same kind but neither green nor purple. It is also a familiar fact that an imprisoned bird will fly against transparent glass as if it apparently gave the possibility of escape. I do not know how much some people would attribute ‘practical thinking’ to such a bird. One would wonder whether one could teach it as it were to understand words of warning or encouragement, reproof or satisfaction. We do know that human beings, if some few years old, are normally able to get to understand such expressions and may act accordingly.

Thinking about this, and especially about more grown-up humans, we are approaching the topic of ‘practical reason’. As a first generalisation, we may readily introduce the concept of good and harm, which ought to lead us to think of desirability and undesirability, misbehaviour and ‘sensible’ action.

I have observed that Aristotle upon the whole thinks desirability is a key notion here. At any rate, it would seem that a ‘rational’ animal, i.e. a human being, will operate in getting and avoiding things with highly intelligible conceptions of good and bad. I would not claim that this supposition is obviously correct; however, if it seems to have no sense in it at all, one will think that the human behaviour one is contemplating is not worth much consideration—less, at any rate, than the behaviour of some ‘inferior animals’.

I have remarked that in the writings of St John the Apostle he speaks occasionally of people whose actions, or some of them, are ‘not true’. This is a more tantalising way of speaking than it is to say that someone ‘does not walk in the truth’. That is fairly easy to understand, coming as it does in the writing of a Christian apostle. But how can he speak of doing, or not doing the truth? The Greek verb used is ‘poiein’, which rather commonly has or includes the notion of producing. Some people might be very puzzled at this—do I produce (or do) truth by my actions? It sounds like nonsense.

True. But Aristotle has a different general point to make. We can ask: Was it a good idea to do such-and-such with the purpose of getting a good reputation?

We need not discuss this in any special detail. For Aristotle has a general view which we should look at. If you are acting, and that would include making something (if that is what your action is), then you must have it as an end that you should do it well. He gives us the abstract Greek word eupraxia—a general term for doing well. Anyone who acts (prattei) has that objective (unless, we may say, he is bloody-minded enough not to care). Acting well—and the Greek word eupraxia includes the sense of ‘doing well’ when we speak of someone doing well in some business or in health—this end, eupraxia, is the actual end of any action, at any rate of any poiesis (production). If it is the, or an, end of any action or behaviour supposed by the agent to be sensible or good, then Aristotle can tell us that ‘doing well’ is the objective of the rational life that is led by a human being.

Admittedly, the idea of production of truth does not seem to fit in very well. My own experience has led me to outrage philosophical audiences by maintaining that I can produce truth. E.g. I may say ‘I am going to stand on this table’, and then I produce truth in what I said by doing that. People protest: ‘You can’t talk like that. Truth is eternal. If you do stand on the table, it was always true (before you did it) that you would stand on the table when you did. ‘

I understand this impulse about truth. Nevertheless, in such a case I do make something true, which I had said I would do.

Aristotle apparently appeals to the fact that if you are purposefully making something, you have some sort of end in doing so. You may, as I suggested, be aiming at getting your work admired, but some purpose you must have in having that aim.

Thinking about this, we are approaching the topic of practical reason. Man, to be sure, is essentially part of ‘nature’—i.e. of natura naturata, or as we might say, he is part of the created world. Nevertheless, in respect of his possible freedom—in respect of his becoming free, if he does—he comes as near as possible, given Spinoza’s philosophy, to the freedom attributed to God. Why not, then, also in Aristotle’s philosophy?

I think no conception of ‘free will’, as Spinoza contemptuously regards it, can seriously get in Aristotle’s way.

 

* Reprinted with the permission of Professor Josef Seifert from Aletheia. An International Yearbook of Philosophy, Vol.7 (2002): 21–30.

† The original typescript, though not the printed text, reads ‘infinite’ here.