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Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion

Downloaded by [University of South Florida] at 11:27 05 April 2017

To Margie
sine qua non
 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge
and Religion
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Richard Mason
Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK
 First published 2007 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Richard Mason 2007

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Richard Mason has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Mason, Richard, 1948 – 2006
Spinoza : logic, knowledge and religion
1.Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632-1677 2.Logic 3.Knowledge, Theory of 4.Religion
– Philosophy
I.Title
199.4’92

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mason, Richard, 1948 – 2006
Spinoza : logic, knowledge, and religion / Richard Mason.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7546-5734-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677. I. Title.

B3998.M37 2007
199’.492–dc22
2006008830

iSBn 13: 978-0-7546-5734-7 (hbk)

 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: Understanding Spinoza 1

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Part I Logic

1 What had to be so 11

2 How things happen 41

3 Concrete logic 57

4 One thing after another 75

Part II Knowledge

5 Dealing with Descartes 89

6 Intelligibility 109

7 Belief 123

8 Spinoza, Davidson and objectivity 141

Part III Religion

9 Reducing religion? 163

10 Two views of faith 173

11 A revenge on Jewish Law? 193

12 On not being a Christian philosopher: the difference in Spinoza 205

Bibiography 215
Index 221
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Downloaded by [University of South Florida] at 11:27 05 April 2017
 viii Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion

Acknowledgements

Some of the chapters in this book have been published in journals, or in

other books, over a period of about twenty years. Others owe their origins to
conferences or seminars. The author has been grateful for help and comments
from Michael Della Rocca, Herman De Dijn, Nicholas Hammond, John
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McDade, Yitzhak Melamed, Piet Steenbakkers, Steven Smith and Margie

Mason. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following publishers,
from which material has been reprinted. Very extensive changes, corrections
and additions have been made to the initial versions, but there has only been
a limited attempt to engage in debate with subsequent writers. References to
Spinoza have been standardised, to Shirley’s Complete Works.

Chapter 1: What had to be so: from – ‘Spinoza on Modality’, Philosophical

Quarterly, vol. 36, July 1986, pp. 313–342 (Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,
Oxford).

Chapter 2: How things happen: from – ‘How things happen: divine-natural

law in Spinoza’, Studia Leibnitiana, Band XXVIII/1, 1996, pp. 17–36 (Franz
Steiner Verlag GmbH).

Chapter 3: Concrete Logic: from – ‘Concrete Logic’, in Spinoza: Metaphysical

Themes, in Olli Koistinen and John Biro, eds, Oxford University Press,
2002, pp. 73–88 (Oxford University Press, New York).

Chapter 4: One thing after another ... from – ‘Spinoza on the Causality of
Individuals’, Journal of the History xxiv, 2, April 1986, pp. 197–210 (The
Johns Hopkins University Press).

Chapter 5: Dealing with Descartes: from – ‘Ignoring the demon? Spinoza’s

way with doubt’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. xxxi, 4, October
1993, pp. 545–564 (The Johns Hopkins University Press).

Chapter 6: Intelligibility: from – ‘Intelligibility: the basic premise?’ Iyyun,

The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 50, July 2001, pp. 229–244.

Chapter 7: Belief: from - ‘Spinoza and the Unimportance of Belief’, Philosophy,

vol. 79 no 2, 2004, pp. 281–298 (Cambridge University Press).
 Introduction

Understanding Spinoza

His own view of understanding was straightforward, and maybe not too
thoroughly considered: ‘It is when a thing is perceived by pure thought,
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without words or images, that it is understood’. It was also unambiguously

simplifying:

The laws and rules of nature according to which all things happen and change
from one form to another are everywhere and always the same. So our approach
to the understanding of the nature of things of every kind should be . . . one and
the same; namely, through the universal laws and rules of nature.

And the application to interpretation of writing was no more complicated:

I hold that the method of interpreting Scripture is no different from the method
of interpreting nature, and is in fact in complete accord with it. For the method of
interpreting nature consists essentially in composing a detailed study of nature
from which, as being the source of our assured data, we can deduce the definitions
of the things of nature.

Where does this get us with an understanding of Spinoza’s work? His attitude
in his correspondence suggested that he did not see much of a problem.
When asked to explain or amplify he tended to merely repeat or emphasise,
in accordance with his perceptual metaphor for understanding. The mind is
brought into contact with what is understood, and understanding just takes
place, like seeing.

This seems unpromisingly dogmatic. No reason was ever given for the
uniformity of understanding. The idea that we should understand our politics
or emotions – or the work of a philosopher – in exactly the same way as we
understand geometry is hardly self-evident. (Gadamer wrote, referring to
Spinoza, that a ‘logically consistent application’ of the ‘method of the natural
sciences’ as the only norm for the truth of the human sciences ‘would amount

 Theological-Political Treatise IV, p. 55: res intelligitur, cum ipsa pura mente extra verba et
imagines percipitur. All References to Spinoza are from the translations by Samuel Shirley, in
Spinoza: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), by the sections in the Ethics and mainly
by page or chapter number elsewhere.
 Ethics III, Preface.
 Theological-Political Treatise VII, p. 89.
  Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
to their self-annihilation’.) Nevertheless, there is some interest in seeing the
varieties of understanding which should have been excluded by Spinoza’s
own simplifying visual model: in seeing how he could not think he might be
understood.

First, and very clearly, he would have seen little value in our trying to
understand his overt or implicit intentions: what we might think he was
aiming to achieve. The scope of his denial of ends or final causes has been
debated; but as far as the understanding of intentions was concerned,
the position was relatively straightforward. ‘By the end for which we do
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something, I mean appetite’: what we believe to be ends or objectives are

better understood as desires. And our understanding of desires will always
be inadequate; that is to say, to some degree partial or incomplete. Although
this seems an abstract point, its relevance to our understanding of Spinoza
is direct. In important areas of his work we have almost no idea of what he
was trying to achieve, or why, since he left no record of his intentions. One
fundamental example is the identification of God with nature, which has
been seen as pantheism, panentheism, atheism, reductionism, naturalism,
materialism, spiritualism and probably much else as well. In reality, we can
see that this identification did resolve some logical issues – if, for example,
you think God must be infinite, then the identification of God with nature
seems hard to avoid – but speculation on what Spinoza hoped to achieve by
it seems fruitless. We can reconstruct a context of problems in which it made
sense, but no more.

An equally central example is provided by his attitudes towards Christianity

and Judaism. The Theological-Political Treatise contains both some standard
Christian objections to Judaism and a few traditional Jewish problems with
Christianity. Commentators have tried to measure the balance between
these. This is a field where even the discovery of some supposed record
of Spinoza’s ‘real intentions’ – an unpublished letter confessing a covert
fondness for Christianity, for instance – would make almost no difference.
And in fact, Spinoza’s silence on his intentions throughout his mature work
fits well with his psychological theorising. He was cautious about our grasp
of our own beliefs – this is a theme of Chapter 7 – and that can be taken to
include beliefs about what we think we are doing, and why, as well as both
his and our beliefs about why he wrote what he did.

A second supposed way of understanding Spinoza may be equally dubious.

Like Descartes, he saw no profit in definition by classification. (‘What is a

 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trs. W. Glen-Doepel, J. Weinsheimer, D. G.

Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1993 edn), p. 19.
 Ethics IV, Definition 7.
 Understanding Spinoza 
man? Shall I say ‘a rational animal’? No; for then I should have to inquire
what an animal is, what rationality is . . .’) Questions such as: was Spinoza a
rationalist (nominalist, atheist, liberal, Platonist, Christian . . .)? may provide
exercise for students, but have a value which is mainly negative.

Similarly, but maybe more controversially, understanding through location in

history, or in a series of historical influences, can be less helpful than might be
imagined. This may be because in Spinoza’s particular case, the more closely
he is studied, the less well he seems to fit a historical niche that may look
suitable for him. One example is discussed in Chapter 2, where his concept
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of natural law may seem to represent a tidy step on the path from theological
to scientific explanation. Further study reveals a less comfortable position.
Much more widely, there is the attempt by Jonathan Israel to identify Spinoza
as the progenitor of an important tradition in radical thought, and the efforts
elsewhere to recruit him, for better or worse, as an originator of what would
become liberal or secular Judaism. Undeniably, these can have a polemical
value today, and any study of the effects or reception of a philosopher’s work
can be helpful in its own right. Whether a comparable contribution can made
to the understanding of Spinoza is less evident. Enlightenment writers,
particularly from the liberal or radical end of the spectrum, could be sure to
find encouragement in his work. But there are difficulties both of detail and
principle. Spinoza himself did not think that practised religions were going
to fade away under the light of reason, nor did he ever suggest that they
should do. He regarded religious traditions as natural, social or historical
phenomena, where understanding was at least as important as criticism.
This alone makes his identification difficult as an Enlightenment prophet or
forerunner. More generally, a retrospective understanding through effects or
reception may cloud any view of genuine intentions. The use that was made
of Spinoza’s work can be debated, but this may tell us little about the use that
he had in mind, or – more important – could have had in mind, or – worse
– the questions he could have been trying to answer.

His own view of understanding was given explicitly: ‘We ought to define and
explain things through their proximate causes’. In physical or psychological
terms, individual events or thoughts could be understood by seeing the chain
of other events or thoughts that led to them. In intellectual terms, ideas could
be understood through the ideas that led to them, as reasons-or-causes. This

 Second Meditation, in Philosophical Writings, trs. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch,

A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 and 1991), II, p. 17.
 Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza
and Other Heretics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Steven B. Smith, Spinoza,
Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
 Theological-Political Treatise IV, p. 426.
  Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
implied an unorthodox view of originality. Strictly, there could no more be
a new idea than an uncaused event. The most that might be expected would
be a new appreciation of where a set of existing ideas might lead. This would
give some support for Wolfson’s thesis, that nearly all of Spinoza’s philosophy
can be found in the work of his predecessors. More constructively, it could
be argued that some of Spinoza’s basic metaphysical theorising did indeed
just take seriously and consistently some of the routine claims made by his
predecessors: that God was infinite, for example; but his predecessors were
less robust in facing the consequences.
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We need not conclude that the only acceptable understanding of philosophers

is through the genealogy of their theories, or through the analysis of how
their theories fitted together (through ‘rational reconstruction’, perhaps10).
At least in the case of Spinoza, we need not feel so confident of a settled view
on what he had to say. Until that is resolved there may be no need to worry
about his intentions, the historical location of his thought, or how to classify
it. This book contains many examples, from his use of modal terms such
as necessity and possibility, through his understanding of natural law and
Cartesian doubt, to his position as a religious reductionist.

***

The book covers three themes: logic, knowledge and religion.

Part I, Logic, deals with some of the central apparatus in Spinoza’s system:
his understanding of necessity and possibility (which had considerable
advantages over Leibniz’s); his view of natural law; the nature of his basic
objects and their connections; and the links he made between the infinite and
finite. The first three chapters argue that Spinoza took a radically different
position on modality from anything familiar today. For him, necessity was
seen as primary, in terms of having a cause or reason. Contingency and
possibility were seen as secondary, as needing explanations. Logic, as far
as he thought about it at all, was taken in unusually concrete (de re) terms,
where the objects related were not thoughts or propositions but things
(res), and the relations between them were not implications but versions of
causes-or-reasons. This had important consequences for the much-contested
transition between first philosophy or metaphysics and natural philosophy
or physics. Spinoza also reached valuable conclusions about natural laws.
Commentators have seen no difficulty in attributing to him a view of law

 H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934).

10 The term is Rorty’s, from ‘The historiography of philosophy: four genres’, in Philosophy
in History, R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner, eds (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984).
 Understanding Spinoza 
as immanent in reality, while at the same time regarding law as ‘logical’,
or ‘nomological’, somehow ‘governing’ how events happen. His own view
was more consistent and more extreme. Laws could not be outside nature,
because nothing could be outside nature. So we read of ‘laws, or nature’.11
His approach avoided problems about the status and force of natural laws
that were to beset the philosophy of science. Chapter 4 offers an answer to
one of the trickiest questions in the interpretation of Spinoza’s metaphysics:
the relation between nature, infinite modes and finite modes. Although
at first this looks unappetisingly technical, it has serious implications for
the interpretation of God-or-Nature and for our reading of Spinoza as a
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pantheist, panentheist or reductionist.

Part II, knowledge, deals largely with Spinoza’s attitude to Cartesian

scepticism, an area where he has often been seen as too peremptorily
dogmatic. It is correct that he repudiated the subjective starting-point for
the method of doubt, never regarding ‘What should I believe?’ as the first
question in philosophical inquiry. But he had many reasons for this. His
thinking on the possibility of doubt was rooted in his thinking on possibility
explored here, in earlier chapters. His repudiation of metaphysical doubt
as essentially non-natural was grounded in the solid naturalism of his
metaphysics. Chapter 8 argues that both Spinoza and Donald Davidson
rejected a subjective, Cartesian starting-point and seemed to share a view
that objective knowledge acts – perhaps transcendentally – as a condition for
experience or judgement; but Spinoza turns out to be far more extreme in his
divergence from Descartes, whereas Davidson never managed to shake off
the problems entailed by Kantian idealism.

Chapter 6 looks at the intelligibility of nature – or some version of a principle

of sufficient reason – which has sometimes been seen as a fundamental
premise behind Spinoza’s metaphysics. Certainly, he thought that nature
was intelligible; but not because it possessed some (secondary?) quality of
intelligibility, and not because of the penetrating power of human reason.
Both of those positions might be seen as symptoms for diagnosing Spinoza
as a rationalist philosopher. Actually, his view was that an unintelligible
thing, event or assertion could be no more constructible than an uncaused
thing, event or assertion.

Spinoza’s attitude towards belief, on which he wrote very little directly, is

explored in Chapter 7. In religious terms, he seems to have given precedence
to orthopraxy over orthodoxy: not an entirely new or unexpected position
in his Jewish background. More generally, in philosophical terms, in his
thinking about knowledge, one conclusion may have been that the notion

11 Letter 32, p. 848, to Oldenburg: leges, sive natura.

  Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
of belief cannot be strong enough to bear the weight that may be put upon
it. Our beliefs must be subjective; our knowledge must be objective; and the
bridge between the two must be unexpectedly one-way. Knowledge could
be grounds for belief in a way in which belief could not be grounds for
knowledge.

Part III, religion, unravels some of the consequences for the belief and practice
of religion: a topic which plainly occupied a great deal of Spinoza’s attention,
and which has attracted endless speculation, but where his intentions may
remain permanently unknown. Possibly the best we can do is to keep as
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closely as we can to what he actually said (of course in its known context)
and to conclude that this is all we can say about his ‘real’ views. One example
– but a crucial one, once again – is his balance between God and nature.
Much depends on this – whether or how we see him religiously (as a
pantheist, panentheist, and so on), metaphysically (as a theology- or science-
based thinker), and, presumably, personally (as a God-obsessed man or as a
hard-boiled scientist). The textual evidence – examined mainly in Chapter 9
– is striking, in that we can see no clear picture of nothing-but reductionism
from God to nature, and, if anything, more reduction in the other direction.
This should present a problem for anyone inclined to take him easily as a
naturalist, although it presents no easy answer on whatever positive view
he did adopt.

His attitude towards his own native religion has been the subject of sometimes
bitter debate, tangled with ongoing questions about Jewish identity. He has
been credited with the invention of a liberal, modern Judaism, as well as
abused for undeniable personal animus against contemporary Jewish law
and practice. In fact, his attitude towards law (in a political sense) appears
to have been clouded by too rigid an understanding of its necessity and
absoluteness, as argued in Chapter 11. This may have been explicable, if not
justifiable, in a hostile rigidity which he had experienced himself from the
Amsterdam synagogue.

His attitude towards Christianity is even more opaque, to the extent that
assertions about what he ‘really thought’ seem unrealistic in the absence
of further documentation. It does seem unlikely that he harboured secret
Christian beliefs because there is no imaginable reason why he should have
kept such beliefs secret: life would have been a great deal easier for him. He
also adopted attitudes which would be difficult to fit into the most liberal
understanding of Christianity in later centuries, and certainly not at his time.
Some of these points are pursued in Chapters 10 and 12. Here, the main
interest is in how different a non-Christian perspective can be, leading to
further thought on how extensively mainstream philosophy may have been
affected by its Christian background.
 Understanding Spinoza 
The links between the themes in the three parts of the book should not need to
be emphasised. Few today should feel happy about ignoring the Theological-
Political Treatise as a work of philosophy, to be considered alongside the Ethics,
and probably representing more of Spinoza’s considered position than his
earlier works.12 (In fact, a serious problem in reading the Treatise has always
been in seeing how much of it depends on positions defended in full only
in the Ethics.) His contribution towards making science possible, in offering
an ideology and a method, as well as a plausible step from metaphysical
premises to the first assumptions for physics, had a close analogy with making
religion possible, though hardly in a form that appealed to many contemporary
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practitioners. Religious practice was to be explained, if not justified or

vindicated, through ‘history and language’. It was a natural human activity
which could be understood at varying stages of sophistication.13 Some the
themes here run right through the parts of the book. The understanding of
God, or nature is intimately related to how God was supposed to exist and act,
with what kind of necessity; to the boundaries in the scope for knowledge
and for belief, and to any understanding of contemporary religion. Similarly,
law had physical-natural and political-religious dimensions (which Spinoza
tried to marry not altogether successfully). If there is any single conclusion to
be drawn from the disparate chapters here it could be the not surprising one
that Spinoza was an unusually systematic philosopher. Logic, knowledge
and religion could not be prised apart.

12 See E. M. Curley, ‘Notes on a Neglected Masterpiece (II): The Theological-Political Treatise

as a Prolegomenon to the Ethics’, in Central Themes in Early Modern Philosophy, J. A. Cover and
M. Kulstad, eds (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990).
13 Theological-Political Treatise XIV, p. 519; the classic study is Alexandre Matheron, Le Christ
et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1971).
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Logic
PART I
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 Chapter 1

What had to be so

Spinoza’s views on modality – on possibility, necessity, contingency, essence

and so on – seem so straightforward that they need no explanation:
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Nothing in nature is contingent, but all things are from the necessity of the divine
nature determined to exist and to act in a definite way.

and:

Things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other
order than is the case.

If we could clearly grasp the whole order of nature then everything would
be seen as equally necessary. And nothing is contingent unless because of
‘the deficiency of our knowledge’.

The metaphysical theses which seem to be implied by such views on modality

are the ones which proved exceptionally repugnant to Leibniz and to many
subsequent writers. The loss of a contrast between necessity and contingency
seemed to amount to an overwhelming determinism, depriving even God of
freedom, and to lead to a rigid monism: in nineteenth-century terms, to the
notion that all relations must be internal; and in twentieth-century terms to
the notion that all true propositions must be necessarily true. Spinoza did
not base his system explicitly on any views about modality or logic, but it
might surely not take much argument to show how the main features of the
system looked as though they had what we now see as a logical basis.

The aim of this chapter is to explore this basis with the intention of making
some sense of it. Most of the chapter will be taken up with a study of central
modal notions. The wider intention is to consider Spinoza’s approach to
modality more generally, and to show that is has some real interest.

 Ethics I, 29 and 33.

 Ethics I, 33 Scholium.
 12 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
Jonathan Bennett has written that ‘Spinoza was no logician; his modal
thinking seems to have been neither skilful nor knowledgeable’. Whatever
we make of this, the first point to be noted – and there will be much more
on its significance later – is that Spinoza had almost no direct interest in
logic, and still less in anything resembling modal logic. His only reference
to logic in the Ethics was to mention in passing that it was not relevant to
his concerns. His attitude was reflected in a casual approach to the terms
in his system that we might regard as logically fundamental. His basic
connectives – cause, conceive through, involve, exist through, determine, express
– were never properly explained. The terms at the heart of his modal system
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– essence, necessary, possible – got explanations only in the most sketchy form,
and then only when the exposition was unable to go on without some kind
of elucidation. Most glaringly, essence was defined only at the beginning of
Ethics Part II, despite its use in some of the most crucial assertions in Part I.
Contingent and possible were defined only at the beginning of Part IV.

Such an apparent lack of concern for logical propriety differed radically from
the attitude to be shown by Leibniz. It might seem more understandable if
Spinoza had unreflectingly accepted the logical apparatus of his day and
had used it without a thought for strict definition. But this was far from the
truth. We can see from his early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect that
his thoughts on the nature of essence and definition were scarcely orthodox
or conventional; and in fact much of the very little he did say about essence
was to hint that his concept of it was unusual. Edwin Curley has done a
good deal to alert us to Spinoza’s innovative use of metaphysical terms, and
there can be little doubt that this gives a more accurate reading than the
account given by Wolfson of a wholesale adoption by Spinoza of existing
late medieval terminology.

Our opening assumption may well be that Spinoza’s views on modality

look straightforward. The notion of a completely determined and universal
necessity at least seems intelligible and consistent, even if we hardly
feel inclined to give it serious consideration. There is no need to cite the
innumerable passages where he assured us of the invariable application of
divine or natural necessity, of the impossibility of things or events resulting
from acts of free will or miraculous providence. This is all familiar enough.

 J. F. Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),

p. 124.
 Ethics V, Preface.
 Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, §95; Ethics II 10 Corollary Scholium.
 E. M. Curley, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1969); Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza.
 What had to be so 13
It may be familiar, but it is greatly oversimplified. The best way to get a
fairer view is by going straight to what have been seen as the complicating
paradoxes in Spinoza’s modal system. There are four areas of difficulty:

(i) First, and most important, there is the view that Spinoza was not even
successful in his own terms in abolishing a contrast between necessity and
contingency. Bennett put this clearly:

Many of Spinoza’s philosophical moves are invalid if there is no contingency: for

example, his uses of a thing’s essence, meaning those of its properties it could not
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possibly lack, are flattened into either falsehood or vacuous truth if there are no
contingent truths; because then every property of every thing is essential to it.

And from one of Spinoza’s accounts of contingency we can certainly see how
it might be connected with essence:

I call individual things contingent in so far as, in attending only to their essence,
we find nothing that necessarily posits their existence or necessarily excludes it.

Essence was clearly required for central parts of Spinoza’s system. In

Aristotelian terms, we may find it hard to see how we could have essence
without accidents, and accidents without contingency. And in fact Bennett
widened his point to a more general line of criticism, implying that the denial
of contingency would lead to the thesis that this is the only possible world,
and saying that this thesis makes it ‘hard to do good philosophy’.

(ii) There are also Spinoza’s puzzling suggestions that some kind of
contingency did exist, or at least that necessity was not entirely universal.
For example:

The essence of man does not involve necessary existence; that is, from the order of
Nature it is equally possible that a certain man exists or does not exist.10

And shortly after we are told that it would be ‘absurd’ to suppose that man
(or a man) should exist by necessity.11
But if ‘all things are from the necessity of the divine nature determined
to exist and to act in a definite way’,12 how is it that the existence of this or
that man is not a matter of necessity? Spinoza’s view was not that we do not
know that the essence of man does not involve necessary existence, but that

 Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, p. 114.

 Ethics IV, Definition 3.
 Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, p. 114.
10 Ethics II Axiom 1.
11 Ethics II 10 Demonstration.
12 Ethics II 29, quoted above.
 14 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
it simply doesn’t. That view can be generalised to any individuals, and to the
assertion that their existence did not follow from their essence: ‘The essence
of things produced by God does not involve existence’.13

(iii) Any element of contingency in the existence of individuals is puzzling

enough within Spinoza’s system, but it was made even more problematic by
an apparent contradiction well noted by Bennett. Alongside the view that
this or that man might or might not exist there is this passage:

The reason for the existence or non-existence of a circle or a triangle does

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not follow from their nature, but from the order of universal corporeal Nature.
For it is from this latter that it necessarily follows that either the triangle necessarily
exists at this moment or that its present existence is impossible. This is self-
evident . . .14

Bennett’s point here was that the difficulty ‘cannot be reconciled by any
supposed difference between triangles and men’.15 To say the least, some
explanation from Spinoza would have been helpful.

(iv) Finally, there was what looks like an extremely opaque account of
possibility. The explicit definition at Ethics IV, Definition 4:

I call individual things possible in so far as, in attending to the causes by which they
should be brought about, we do not know whether these causes are determined
to bring them about.

Which seems to concur (in as much as we can penetrate the obscure

expression) with the thought that possibility – or contingency – derives
purely from some shortcoming in our knowledge.

But a more troublesome view appeared in one of the trickiest passages in

the Ethics – Part II, 8 – where Spinoza set himself the task of accounting for
what he called ‘the ideas of non-existing individual things or modes’.16 The
thesis from the heart of his philosophy of mind, that each idea must have a
matching object, created a problem for him about any thoughts we may have
about objects which do not exist. Even more painfully, he was faced with the
possible existence of infinite numbers of ideas which (as it were) no one has,
and which clearly could not match any existing objects. As so often, he used
a geometrical example:

13 Ethics I, 24.
14 Ethics I, 11 Demonstration 2.
15 Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, p. 121.
16 These also appeared at Ethics I, 8 Scholium 2, no more clearly.
 What had to be so 15
The nature of a circle is such that the rectangles formed from the segments of its
intersecting chords are equal. Hence an infinite number of equal rectangles are
contained in a circle, but none of them can be said to exist except in so far as the
circle exists . . .

And what he went on to say about the rectangles that do not exist was
curious

nor again can the idea of any one of these rectangles be said to exist except in so
far as it is comprehended in the idea of the circle.
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And in the Corollary to which these remarks were intended to be an

explanatory note, he had said that when individual things do not exist

except in so far as they are comprehended in the attributes of God, their being as
objects of thought – that is, their ideas – do not exist except in so far as the infinite
idea of God exists.

This looks like a back door account of possibility. Possible worlds were ruled
out as firmly as might be expected (at Ethics I, 33), but here we get the notion
of rectangles which might (but actually do not) exist. If these rectangles could
exist as ‘comprehended in the attributes of God’ (whatever that meant), why,
we may wonder, could we not explain all other possibilities in the same sort
of way? Why – much like Leibniz – could not Spinoza say that the actual
world exists now and that the ‘infinite idea of God’ comprehends all other
possibilities? The account of possible geometrical constructions in Ethics II,
8 seems to bear little relation to the stern denial of possibility elsewhere.
Spinoza seemed to need some possible objects, just as he seemed to need
contingency, while excluding both from his metaphysics. And the treatment
of possibility was crucial, of course. Leibniz at one time felt it was the
cardinal problem in this area. He was to write that he had pulled back from
the precipice in ‘the opinions of those who hold everything to be absolutely
necessary’ exactly by considering ‘those possible things which neither are
nor will be nor have been’.17

***

Enough should have been said to show the points of difficulty. Instead of an
outright repudiation of contingency or possibility, or the simple reduction of
these notions to epistemological terms, we can see that Spinoza seemed to feel
some need for genuine modalities: perhaps for the existence of individuals

17 ‘On Freedom’ (c. 1679), in Philosophical Papers and Letters, L. E. Loemker trs. (Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1969), p. 263.
 16 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
that in some way was not entirely necessary and for the possible existence of
things that could be conceived without existing.

What can be made of all this? It should be possible to show that Bennett was
mistaken in his assessment of Spinoza’s modal thinking as ‘neither skilful nor
knowledgeable’, but we do have to concede that the exposition of his modal
thinking was lacking in skill. If we are to make sense of his views it can only
be with a fair amount of speculation. It may be helpful to start by ruling out
some interpretations or approaches which are not correct. Such a strategy has
the incidental benefit of supporting one of the central themes of this chapter:
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that Spinoza’s modal thinking was almost diametrically opposed in every

respect to recent thinking. The distance we have to travel to understand it
is a measure of the extent of our own assumptions or preconceptions about
modality.

To begin generally: it should be evident that no sense can be made of Spinoza’s

views in purely de dicto terms. Regrettably, this was not appreciated by two of
his more rigorous recent commentators, Bennett and Curley. Bennett wrote
in de dicto terms throughout his chapter on necessity in his Study of Spinoza’s
Ethics – about ‘the remarkable conclusion that there are no contingent
truths’, about ‘Spinoza according an absolutely necessary status to a system
of propositions’, about ‘a certain class of propositions all of whose members
are absolutely necessary’ and so on.18 Curley went more overtly down the
same path, noting that Spinoza talked about ‘the necessity or impossibility
of things, rather than truths’, but adding, ‘. . . this need not prevent us from
translating what he says into talk about truths and developing a general
account of necessary truth that will accord with Spinoza’s intentions’.19

The force of the point here has to be emphasised. Not only did Spinoza omit
to express his views in de dicto forms of standard modal logics: his claims were
uniformly and relentlessly de re. As Curley said, it was things that were given
modal values. We do not see propositions (necessary or otherwise) following
from each other, and we scarcely see any mention of necessary truths. We do
find things causing things – not even events or states of affairs. Things were
the basic terms for Spinoza’s apparently logical relations, as where A causes
B, and where B is ‘conceived through’ A. The only explanatory definition
given for necessity in the Ethics says that ‘a thing is said to be necessary, or
rather constrained, if it is determined by another thing to exist and to act
. . . ’20 In view of this we need to ask whether a largely or wholly de dicto
reading can – as Curley asserted and Bennett took for granted – ‘accord with

18 pp. 111–114.
19 Spinoza’s Metaphysics, p. 88.
20 I, Definition 7.
 What had to be so 17
Spinoza’s intentions’, or whether something fundamental might be lost in
the de re to de dicto translation.

This is not a marginal point of interpretation. If Spinoza’s claims are taken

in de dicto terms then we run immediately into severe paradoxes. If, for
example, Ethics I, 29 (‘Nothing in nature is contingent . . .’) is read in a de
dicto sense, as a claim about contingent propositions, and in terms of any
standard modal logic, we end up with the claim that all (true) propositions
are necessary, which is inferred as equivalent to a claim that no propositions
can be contingent. If we then take a true proposition such as that John Doe
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exists, this should be necessarily true. Yet, as we have just seen, Spinoza said
that it would be absurd to claim that man (or a man) necessarily exists. So all
propositions would be necessary, but some would not.

Two initial responses may or may not be convincing, depending on the

amount of sympathy we might feel willing to extend to Spinoza. For one
thing, we may not think he was too good at logic, but can we really imagine
that he could have held opinions that were so glaringly contradictory? (Some
have.21) The statement that ‘from the order of Nature it is equally possible
that a certain man exists or does not exist’22 follows only a few pages after
the assertion that nothing is contingent. That is certainly paradoxical and
it does need some explaining, but it can hardly have been an oversight or
a mistake. Any interpretation that puts Spinoza in such a position needs
to be considered with some care. Nor, again, should we fail to remember
how far he was from any talk of propositions or necessary and contingent
truths. There was no room in his ontology for any third realm of thoughts
or propositions between his attributes of extension and thought. And to
portray modalities in linguistic, rather than propositional, terms would be
even further from his approach. So far as he could be said to have had any
views at all on language or meaning, he would probably have said that our
use of language tends to reflect our inadequate grasp of reality.23 If we want
to restate his views on modality in de dicto terms then we must be clear that
this would be wholly alien to him, to the extent that it could not even be
achieved within the framework of his metaphysics.

But these points are persuasive rather than conclusive. We may concede
(as Curley did) that Spinoza chose to write only about things, rather than
propositions or sentences. We may concede that a de re to de dicto translation
would not be faithful to his intentions, and would be out of place in his

21 R. J. Delahunty, Spinoza (London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 164–165.

22 Ethics II Axiom 1.
23 See Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, §§88–89; D. Savan, ‘Spinoza and Language’,
Philosophical Review 67, 1958.
 18 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
ontology. But is still would not follow that such a translation falsifies his
claims or invalidates his arguments. This needs to be shown separately, and
more will be said on it later in this chapter, as well as in Chapter 3, from a
different angle. In the meantime it can just be noted that there is a strong
prima facie case against a uniformly de dicto reading of Spinoza on modality.

***

Bearing this in mind, we can now go on to look directly at some specific

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views on modality which Spinoza did not hold – in some cases despite
appearances to the contrary. First: he did not seek to account for modality in
terms of facts about concept-inclusion or analyticity (and still less in terms
of facts about thoughts or language-use). Nor could he have held any theory
which sought to explain necessity in terms of the relations between subjects
and predicates. He did write of the ‘connection of subject with predicate’ in
the mind in the early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,24 but this was
no part of any discernible logical theory, and there was nothing like it in the
Ethics.

More controversially, he could not have accepted any notion of partial,

relative or hypothetical necessity. This has some interest because it is an
interpretation presented by Curley, for understandable reasons and because
it suggests some aspects of the views of Leibniz. In plain terms, Curley
believed that Spinoza wanted all truths to be necessary in one sense, but
some truths to be not-necessary in another sense:

All propositions are either necessarily true or necessarily false. This will hold
both for existential and for non-existential propositions. But, restricting ourselves
to truths, not all truths are necessary in the same sense. Some are absolutely
necessary in the Leibnizian sense that their denial is explicitly or implicitly self-
contradictory: their truth follows from the essence or definition of the subject. But
others are only relatively necessary. Their denial does not involve a contradiction,
either explicitly or implicitly. Their truth, rather, is grounded in the fact that they
follow logically from other propositions which are true, propositions which give
an efficient causal explanation of them.25

This passage was cast in a de dicto form which duly brought Curley to an
impasse that he acknowledged himself: only necessary propositions can
follow from necessary propositions.26 As Bennett, too, reminds us, if Spinoza
is supposed to have believed that a secondary, hypothetical type of necessity
was available (derivative from real, absolute necessity) then he was up

24 §62.
25 Spinoza’s Metaphysics, pp. 89–90.
26 Spinoza’s Metaphysics, p. 107.
 What had to be so 19
against the hard facts of modal logic. If all truths are said to be necessarily
interconnected and if the basic truths are said to be necessary, then all other
truths must be necessary as well, and there is no more to say about it.

Curley’s way out from this was to suggest that the proposition that God exists,
together with what he called ‘all nomological general truths’, should be seen
as absolutely necessary, whereas singular truths and accidental general
truths should be seen as absolutely contingent but relatively necessary. But
his discussion took as the main problem the necessity of nomological truths
rather than the relative necessity of singular truths.27 He said nothing to help
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himself with the central modal difficulty of even ‘relatively’ necessary truths
following from ‘absolute’ necessities. There are difficulties from Spinoza as
well. The terminology of general and particular truths is out of line with his
mature position in the Ethics, and Curley was only able to cite a passage from
the earlier Short Treatise to help his interpretation, a passage on general and
particular modes, which do not appear at all in the Ethics.28 His line was that
singular truths (in Spinoza’s terms, those about finite modes) follow jointly
from absolute truths (about infinite modes) and other singular, relatively
necessary truths. This point will be considered at length in Chapter 4. The
principal argument against it has to come from Spinoza’s own words at Ethics
I, 21 and 28, which were stated with impressive exactness: whatever follows
from the attributes of God has to be infinite and eternal (i.e. necessary), and
finite individuals must follow only from other individuals, not therefore
from some combination of necessities and individuals.

These propositions from Part I of the Ethics are all that should be needed to
shut the door on relative or hypothetical necessity. Spinoza saw the issue
well enough. In his own de re terms, Ethics I, 21 can be taken as implying
that if A necessarily exists and if A is the cause of B, then B necessarily exists.
That directly subverts any idea of relative necessity. The only passage in the
Ethics which might give rise to such an idea is one of the few which tried to
explain necessity at all:

A thing is termed ‘necessary’ either by reason of its essence or by reason of its

cause. For a thing’s existence necessarily follows either from its essence and
definition or from a given efficient cause.29

This will need more careful consideration later, but we can see that the two
‘reasons’ for the necessity of a thing do not imply anything about different
degrees or types of necessity. Bennett reached this point by means of reductio
ad absurdum. We suppose that necessity ‘by reason of’ a cause was meant to

27 Spinoza’s Metaphysics, p. 93ff.

28 Spinoza’s Metaphysics, pp. 116–117, referring to Short Treatise II, 5.
29 Ethics I, 33 Scholium 1.
 20 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
be somehow secondary to necessity ‘by reason of’ essence. But we cannot
construct any notion of secondary necessity which has the force required of
Spinoza’s necessity. So the notion of secondary necessity is not tenable. So
relative or hypothetical necessity ought to be put to one side.30

If we cannot get any help from relative necessities in interpreting Spinoza,

any notion of possible worlds may seem equally unfruitful. Taking, for
example, the strong declaration by David Lewis:

I believe that there are possible worlds other than the one we happen to inhabit.
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If an argument is wanted, it is this. It is uncontroversially true that things might

be otherwise than they are.31

We can see that for Spinoza, far from being uncontroversially true, this
might well have been unambiguously false. In terms of seventeenth-century
theology, he definitely held the view that it would be false to claim that God
could have caused the world to differ in any way from its actual state, in
all its detail. It would be false to say that God could have had any choice of
worlds at all.

These points are stressed in terms of falsity to bring out the distance between
Spinoza’s approach and any approach from the perspective of questions
about the meanings of modal terms. One imagines that Spinoza would not
have cared to deny that sentences such as ‘Jan de Wit might not have been
assassinated’ could have been used meaningfully. Nor, of course, would he
have been concerned with discovering the truth-conditions for the use of
such sentences. In so far as he could be said to have had any point of contact
with that sort of approach, then it could only have been to deny that the
conditions suggested by counterfactuals could ever obtain. Accounting for
modality would not be a matter of giving an analysis or description of how
the use of modal language operates.

***

Possibility

But what about the hazy outline of some theory of possibility mentioned
already (in Ethics II, 8)? If there are ideas of possible (but non-existent) things
somewhere in the ‘infinite idea of God’, then are we not half way along the

30 A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, pp. 123–124.

31 Counterfactuals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), p. 84.
 What had to be so 21
road towards possible worlds and all that they imply for the destruction of
Spinoza’s metaphysics?

This is the place to look at his account of possibility.

Here, the picture is made more cloudy than it might be by an evident

development in thinking between the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
and the Ethics. In the Treatise, the emphasis was placed on the psychological
question: what is it to feign (fingere) something that is actually not the case,
either because it does not exist as we feign it or because it is impossible?
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Spinoza’s reply to that question has a notable parallel, based on parallel

reasons, in Wittgenstein’s assertion ‘Thought can never be of anything
illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically’.32 Spinoza
believed at the time of the Treatise that we cannot properly conceive a non-
existent or impossible thing. If we think that we do conceive a thing which
we believe to be possible (‘by its very nature, neither its existence nor its non-
existence implies a contradiction . . .’33) then in fact we are only assembling
images rather than conceiving a true idea. If we think we that we conceive
something impossible, such as a square circle or a non-existing God, then we
are still more fundamentally mistaken. We think we conceive a ‘simple idea’,
but in reality if a fictitious idea were simple ‘it would be clear and distinct,
and consequently true’.34 The implicit thought here must have been similar
to Wittgenstein’s: in some way we cannot represent to ourselves a thing (state
of affairs) that is contradicted by the necessary structure of reality (logic).
Possibility was therefore elucidated by Spinoza in the Treatise in terms of
a priori psychology. What we would call a counterfactual hypothesis was
reduced to some kind of psychological account in terms of imagining or
conceiving, perhaps with a constraint at the limit of logical possibility.

Spinoza did not say why, or how far, he shifted from that view, but his
approach to possibility in the Ethics was different. The element of psychology
vanished: that is, any attempt to tell us what we cannot conceive, the attempt
to analyse simple or complex thoughts, the interpretation of possibility
in terms of human imagination or conception. What Spinoza wrote about
having an idea in the long Scholia to Ethics II 40 and 43 suggests that he did
hold to his earlier view that an inadequate or false idea cannot be properly
conceived by the mind; but what he said about possibility was no longer
given a solely psychological basis. In the Ethics he seemed to get down to
the central metaphysical question: what is it for there to be other possible

32 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness trs. (London: Routledge,

1961), 3.03.
33 §53.
34 §64.
 22 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
states of affairs? In his example (in Part II, 8, cited already), we can have one
geometrical construction but we are aware, and cannot realistically deny,
that we might as well have had an infinite number of other constructions
which do not exist.

The discussion can be shortened by simplifying the example. We might

as well say that two moveable straight lines AB and CD now cross at E,
although we know that they might be sited differently to cross at F, G, H
and so on to infinity. (And Spinoza’s thought on infinity, in Letter 12 and
Ethics I, 15 Scholium, does show that he recognised the possibility of infinite
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points on lines of finite length.) The view that the lines might have crossed
at F when they actually cross at E is the view that there is an infinite causal-
explanatory chain that would have led to F instead of E. To suppose that
the causal order might be other than it is, even in the smallest detail, is to
suppose a different order of nature, and that is not allowable. Here we see
the familiar outcome of what Bennett called Spinoza’s causal determinism.
Part of what Spinoza would have to say about an assertion that AB and CD
might have crossed at F would be that, because of the universality of causal
explanation, and because of the unity of nature, then if I believe that the
lines might have crossed at F then my belief must be mistaken. What we
might call a critical strand in his account can be read as giving an explicit
display of the conditions which create the world as it is. For him, these
conditions consisted of the assumptions of the universality of explanation
and of a single order of nature. What he did succeed in showing (if he was
consistent) was where these conditions led, and that did have a genuinely
critical value in the challenges it could present to rival accounts. To make
explicit the corollaries: if any things or events are to be placed outside the
scope of causal explanation (e.g. by way of free will or divine intervention)
then either the universality of explanation or the unity of nature will have to
be sacrificed. And that is just what Leibniz found out. His price of ‘inclining
without necessitating’ and other possible worlds.

But this is only part of the story. We are still left thinking (at the very least)
that it begs the question as it stands. After all, why shouldn’t we suppose that
a wholly different causal order might have occurred, therefore supposing a
different order of nature or, if we like, another possible world? The most
thoroughgoing causal determinism does not entail anything about the status
of non-actual possibilities. Our two lines might have been drawn to cross
at F instead of at E: the whole of history might have been different so that
one outcome followed rather than the other. I can still ask: what about the
order of nature ending with F instead of E – is that another possible world,
or what?
 What had to be so 23
This takes us towards what might be called Spinoza’s positive account of
possibility in his puzzling references to the rectangles ‘comprehended’ in
the idea of a circle or in ‘the infinite idea of God’. The reading which must
come first to mind is a theory that looks like Leibniz in prototype. Infinite
possibilities do not exist in the actual world but only as thoughts which God
might have. So we may not quite have possible worlds, but there may be
thoughts of possible worlds in God’s mind – God’s mind, not mine because
there will always be possibilities beyond the capacity of my enumeration.

But such a reading could at most be only partly helpful. Whatever Spinoza
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could have meant by an idea in the infinite idea of God, it cannot have
been much like the field of divine choice that Leibniz tried to portray. The
terminology is not reassuring, though. When we read about non-existent
possibilities being comprehended in the idea of God, we want to reach for
the kind of questionnaire on modality suggested by Nicholas Rescher. In
what way should we consider non-actual possibilities? Not in linguistic
or propositional terms – what we might say about reality. Nor in conceptual
terms – what we might think about reality, because a self-evident feature of
Spinoza’s geometrical example is that we cannot think of infinite possibilities.
So possibility is not to be located in how we talk or think. Is it then to be seen
realistically, in terms of some dispositional or modal properties of objects or
reality – in this example, in the capacity of two moveable lines to cross at an
infinite number of points? But we can see how readily that might lead back
to an ontology of possible worlds.35

The ‘infinite idea of God’ was one of Spinoza’s terms for what commentators
have called his infinite modes.36 These were ‘those things immediately
produced by God’ as well as ‘those things produced by the mediation of
some infinite modification’ – ‘all things that follow from the absolute nature
of any attribute of God’.37 Under the attribute of extension the infinite mode
of motion and rest was said to follow. Under the attribute of thought there
was the ‘absolutely infinite intellect’ and the ‘idea of God’ or even ‘an infinite
power of thinking’ in nature which ‘in so far as it is infinite, contains within
itself the whole of Nature ideally’.38 That kind of terminology hinders rather
than helps an interpretation. In some way we can probably say that Spinoza’s
infinite modes were meant to allow for the existence of infinities in the world
in some sense that differed from the unqualified infinity of God or nature.

35 N. Rescher, ‘The Ontology of the Possible’, in The Possible and the Actual, M. J. Loux, ed.
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 180.
36 See for example Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, p. 180.
37 Letter 63, Ethics I, 21.
38 Letter 32.
 24 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
There will be more on this in Chapter 4, but for now there can be some
tentative steps towards an interpretation. Spinoza is well known for running
together necessity and causality – more on this later, too – but a corollary
that has not been so well noted was the conflation of modal (or ‘logical’)
possibility and normal, practical possibility. There was no room in his system
for a distinction between what can be conceived as possible (as we might
wish to add, logically) and what is causally or practically possible. And in
fact this should be obvious. If the laws of nature are taken as universal and
necessitating, then whatever is the case can only be the case within them. To
be possible cannot be to exist or subsist in some shadowy realm of possibilities,
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but is simply to be an available outcome within the framework of nature and

natural law. In this way, continuing with the same example, if AB and CD
are non-parallel, then F, G, H . . . are available intersections. If AB is parallel
to CD then an intersection is impossible: the facts of plane geometry do not
allow one. This is one way in which the possible intersections of the lines may
be seen without the need for possible worlds or for a regress of possibilities,
each requiring further explanation. The possible points on the line will be
seen as those which can be constructed. One point will be actual, others will
be actual if the construction is differently executed. Spinoza would have
liked this to have applied outside geometry, too. If the antecedent causes had
been different, I might have been walking my dog instead of writing this.
But whatever the antecedent causes I could not be hovering unsupported
in space, or writing unsupported at the bottom of the ocean. Possibilities
become what is possible – what can happen – in a literal way.

We now need to distinguish two questions:

(a) What is the ontological status of non-actual possibilities?

and

(b) How can there be concepts of non-actual possibilities?

In a conceptualist account of modalities, these questions would not be

separable. Non-actual possibilities would be concepts of possibilities.
Spinoza’s answer (a) has just been sketched. Possible things have to be seen
as available outcomes from the laws of nature. These outcomes are available
because nature is as it is. Space, for example, has the character of infinite
extension and division. Issues about the existence of possible things should
therefore not arise. If possible things did exist then our having concepts of
them might seem less of a problem. (And one of the considerations that
have commended possible worlds to philosophers is the fact that they seem
intelligibly conceivable, at least to some.) If possible things do not exist then
Spinoza would seem to have a problem.
 What had to be so 25
It was this problem – related to (b) – that led to the need for the ‘infinite idea
of God’. If we are not encumbered by Spinoza’s strict parallelism of ideas
and objects then the problem would not be particularly worrying. Given the
rest of an account of possibility, we might just say that our thoughts about
non-actual possibilities can be given some kind of psychological explanation,
if we feel that an explanation is needed. The problem of how I think about
something that does not exist may be a genuine philosophical problem, but
it is no more pressing than the most general problem of how I think about
something that does exist, or anything at all. But Spinoza looks to be in real
trouble. If ‘The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and
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connection of things’,39 then we need to know about the things that should
match the ideas of objects that do not exist.

The cryptic section of the Corollary to Ethics II, 8 has been quoted already,
saying that individual possible things do not exist

except in so far as they are comprehended in the attributes of God, their being as
objects of thought – that is, their ideas – do not exist except in so far as the infinite
idea of God exists.

One interpretation might be that a possible idea is one that is deducible from
other ideas, just as a possible thing is one which can be caused within a
framework of natural law. In this way, the ‘infinite idea of God’ can be read
unmystically as being no more than the range of thoughts which is, as we
might say, logically available. Given an identification of possible ideas with
the ideas of possible things, we are led back to the view that there can be
thoughts of things that are possible, but not of things that are not.

This may be tidy, but it does not resolve all difficulties. Such a reading may
help with the rescue of Spinoza’s compressed statements on possible objects
and possible thoughts. Reverting to the original terminology, we may say
that the nature of the extended world – the infinite mode of ‘motion and rest’
– will allow for an infinite range of outcomes within natural laws. Matching
such outcomes will be an infinite range of concepts or ideas which make up
the ‘infinite idea of God’. But this demystification will only go so far. It will
do little to explain Spinoza’s view that part of the mind is eternal, which
comes up in Ethics V, 23 and which is said there to have some basis in Part II,
8 Corollary, which is the section now under examination.

Two other short points about possibility need to be made. First, Spinoza’s
approach may have barred him from the traditional Aristotelian
interdefinitions of necessity and possibility which are fundamental to all
standard modal logics: Necessarily p = not-possibly-not-p, and possibly p =

39 Ethics II, 7.
 26 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
not-necessarily-not-p. If Ethics II, 8 does suggest a rudimentary account of
possibility then it is not of this kind. The rectangles contained in the circle
but not actually existing are possible in the sense that they can be constructed
within the laws of geometry, but each existing rectangle, for Spinoza, must
have reasons which necessitate its existence, just as the non-actual, possible
rectangles must have reasons which explain their non-existence. A possible
thing is not a thing that might not exist.

Secondly, all this is about possible things because Spinoza was as uniformly
de re on possibility as on necessity. The commonplace modal inference: p
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entails possibly-p would be problematic for him because it could not fit into
his system. The notion that a proposition might be possible or possibly true
had no place, not because all propositions had to be necessary but because
possibility was not relatable to propositions (or anything like them) at all.
And the de re inference A exists entails possibly-A exists could only have a
sense within the constraints outlined.

***

Necessity

This discussion of possibility should have done something to clarify Spinoza’s

general thinking about modality. Specifically, it ought to have shown that his
modal views could not have rested on any thought about possible worlds.
As a conclusion stated like that it should be no surprise, but the ramifications
may be of some interest. In particular, the suggestion has been that for
Spinoza, necessity and possibility were unrelated to an unusual degree.

But what view of necessity did he hold? In the early Treatise a necessary
thing was one where ‘its nature implies that it would be a contradiction for
it not to exist’. In the Ethics, as we have seen a thing can be necessary either
because of its essence or its causes or reason. The only definition has been
cited already, where a thing is necessary if it is determined to exist and act
by another thing.40 Necessity, of course, applied to things, not truths. We are
concerned not with what must be the case but with what must be.41 That
seems plain enough, but its consequences were radical. If we believe that de
re and de dicto modalities are intertranslatable – and particularly, that de dicto
modality is to be preferred – then Spinoza’s approach looks suspect from the
start. We may want, for example

40 Treatise §53; Ethics I, 33 Scholium 1 and I Definition 7.

41 See the author’s Before Logic (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), Ch. 3.
 What had to be so 27
A exists necessarily

to be understood in terms of

The proposition that A exists is necessarily true

and if we think of necessity primarily in terms of necessary truth then this

seems natural. Our most elementary thought about necessity may be: a
necessary proposition is a proposition which must be true. But then Spinoza
did not start from there. His approach was ontological, in the explanation of
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existence, not of truth. For him, the must of necessity was not must be true, but
must have a cause or reason. To be necessary was to be necessitated, and to be
necessitated was to have a cause or reason which necessitates. A thing was
therefore necessary either because its own essence was its cause or reason
for existence or because its existence had some other cause or reason. For
something to have its own cause or reason – to be causa sui – was literally
for it to be self-explanatory; that is to say, no further explanation could be
sought or found.

An important tenet in Spinoza’s system was the principle that every thing
must have a cause or explanation – see Chapter 6 – although, typically, this
was not stated as an axiom, but was taken for granted in passing –

For every thing a cause or reason must be assigned either for its existence or for
its non-existence

and

For each single existent thing there must necessarily be a definite cause for its
existence.42

The evident corollary was that nothing could be uncaused. The implications
were worked out in the Short Treatise:

It remains to be seen now whether there are in Nature any accidental things,
that is to say, whether there are any things which may happen and may also not
happen. Secondly, whether there is any thing concerning which we cannot ask
why it is.
Now that there are no accidental things we prove thus: That which has
no cause to exist cannot possibly exist; that which is accidental has no cause:
therefore . . .
The first is beyond all dispute; the second we prove thus: If any thing that
is accidental has a definite and certain cause why it should exist, then it must

42 Ethics I, 11 Demonstration 2; I, 8 Scholium 2.

 28 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
necessarily exist; but that it should be both accidental and necessary at the same
time, is self-contradictory; Therefore . . .43

The argument against contingency is that everything must have a cause, and
it was just in that sense that contingency had to be excluded.

But what about the status of individuals – the finite modes such as the man
in the Ethics who might as well exist as not exist? The outline of Spinoza’s
reasoning seems fairly clear. The existence of finite modes did not follow
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from their essence. It was determined only by other finite modes in an

infinite series of antecedents. It is at this point that we can locate one of the
main difficulties in a de dicto reading. Bennett reached a stumbling-block. He
wrote that Spinoza

did not properly face up to the questions: If each particular proposition is

derivable only from particular propositions, how can any of them be, in itself,
necessary. And if none are necessary, then isn’t there at least one great fact which
has no explanation?44

It should now be clear where this is wrong. Spinoza was not making assertions
about the truth of propositions, or their necessity. Where it is appropriate to
talk about the necessity of individuals, then such necessity consisted wholly
in the fact that their existence could be fully explained by the existence of
other individuals. The existence of a mode ‘in itself’, in Bennett’s words, lay
not in the necessary truth of what might be said about it, but in the fact that
its existence had to have an explanation, or could not be without one.

While in this area, we can note that Spinoza’s system would have allowed
him a Leibnizian theory of contingency. He might have said that where the
explanation of an individual’s existence is of infinite length (as it has to be
for all finite modes) then the full details will be beyond understanding,
and hence our knowledge of the reason for any individual’s existence will
be defective. Contingency would then indeed be explicable in terms of a
deficiency of knowledge. If per impossibile we could see the full reason for
any individual we would see how its existence was really necessitated.

It is not clear whether we are entitled to read this into Spinoza’s words,
although it does look consistent with them. As an account of the modal status
of individuals it would have some advantages over Leibniz’s. The notion of
an unknown series of causal antecedents is a good deal less opaque than
that of the infinite analysis of a logical subject. Spinoza, too, kept rigidly

43 Short Treatise I, 6, p. 54.

44 A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, p. 123.
 What had to be so 29
to language about the causes of individuals in terms of things. He avoided
confusion between individuals and the ideas or concepts of individuals.
With Leibniz there was ambiguity between what was said to be contained
in the idea or concept of a man and what belonged to an individual man
in person. Modality hovered awkwardly between being a property of a
man as individual (or individual substance?) and being the property of the
concept of the man, or even of the concept of man together with some form
of individuation. This ambiguity can be dispelled, if at all, only by lengthy
defensive exegesis. For Spinoza the modality of individuals ought to have
been clear. The existence of an individual is necessitated by the existence of
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other individuals. This had nothing to do with concepts. It was de re logic

in an extreme form, as a kind of ontology, where things cause or explain
things.

Spinoza’s views on necessity were not limited to what he might have thought
about individuals. He resorted to geometry where he needed examples, as
where we read that from God’s supreme power or infinite nature

an infinity of things in infinite ways – that is, everything – have necessarily flowed
or are always following from that same necessity, just as from the nature of a
triangle it follows from eternity to eternity that its three angles are equal to two
right angles.45

Now Spinoza’s position on the nature of universals is almost as hard to

discern as his position on modality, and there is no need to be sidetracked
into it here. But whatever the standing of universals we can see that he was
prepared to assign modal properties to them in much the same way as with
individuals. An actual, individual triangle drawn on a piece of paper would,
like any other individual object, have reasons explaining its existence. But as
a triangle ‘from the nature of a triangle’ it would also be related necessarily
to other geometrical figures.

***

Spinoza’s thought on what we might now be willing to take as genuine

necessities seems to be disappointingly thin. A theory can just about be
reconstructed, though with an ominous lack of textual support. What
might be considered to be the facts of geometry, for instance, might have
been explained by some basic facts about the spatial world, most probably
through a system of axioms and theorems. Beyond the fundamental level it
would presumably seek to use the framework of Euclidean geometry and the
physical postulates in Part II of the Ethics to develop a system of necessities

45 Ethics I, 17 Scholium.
 30 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
in nature, along the lines of Descartes’s Principles. But unfortunately it is the
fundamental level that is interesting and here there is a painful gap. This was
a point which worried Spinoza’s most acute correspondent, Tschirnhaus,
who asked how the variety of things in the world might be reached from
the concept of extension. Spinoza’s response looked exceptionally unhelpful,
saying only that Descartes’s definition of matter in terms of extension was
defective and suggesting ‘it must necessarily be explicated through an
attribute which expresses eternal and infinite essence’.46 The point might
have been that the facts of geometry and then physics should be derivable in
surveyable steps from some basic features of the world. While we could not
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in principle survey the infinite series of causes which explain the existence
of an individual, a knowledge of geometry ought to enable us to explain
the necessity of geometrical facts from our knowledge of the nature of the
world considered as extension. And when we get to the nature of the world –
however that would be seen, in terms of basic axioms or some comprehensive
Spinozistic definition – then this would need no further explanation because
it would be self-explanatory – causa sui ­– which in this case would just be to
say that no further explanation would be available. The facts of geometry
would be necessary not in virtue of being necessarily true of the world but
just because they would be explained by other facts about the world which
would be explained by other facts which in due course would become self-
explanatory.

The central element in this position was simple. Necessity was taken as a
fundamental notion, literally requiring no explanation. To be necessary
for Spinoza was to have an explanation. It was a brute fact for him that
everything had to have a reason. He tells us that if we start from there, then
it is the empiricists’ view of the world that falls apart ‘so it is little wonder
that they have contradicted themselves on all sides’.47 To try and explain the
nature or basis of necessity is therefore to miss the point. To switch into his
terms, the causality of nature did not need to be underwritten by any other
form of cause or explanation – and here again was the sense of causa sui. This
theme is taken up further in Chapter 6.

***

Essence

What about essence? Bennett took the view that Spinoza really needed a
distinction between necessity and contingency, even though he thought he

46 Letter 83.
47 Ethics II 10 Corollary Scholium.
 What had to be so 31
did not, to allow himself a workable concept of essence. That looks like a
telling point. It can be divided into two lines of criticism:
(a) Spinoza wrote about essence. We read that in terms of essential properties,
which seem to require non-essential properties, which in turn seem to require
some genuine sense of contingency;

and

(b) Spinoza distinguished between the essence and the existence and action
of things in a way that seems to lack justification. He wanted a contrast
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between what things are and how they are. The essence of man was necessarily
related to the order of nature – it was an ‘eternal truth’48 – while the particular
state of an individual man had to have an infinite explanation unrelated to
that essence. The implication was that there had to be some properties of
individuals which could not be part of their essence.

The second line of criticism can be put in several ways: in terms of seventeenth-
century difficulties about the distinction between essence and existence; in
terms of a distinction between internal and external properties or between
necessity and contingency; or as an epistemological question of how we tell
what belongs to an essence and what is to do with the existence and action
of individuals. Against all this, this was the explicit account of essence in the
Ethics:

I say that there pertains to the essence of a thing that which, when granted, the
thing is necessarily posited, and by the annulling of which the thing is necessarily
annulled; or that without which the thing can neither be nor be conceived, and,
vice versa, that which cannot be or be conceived without the thing.49

Bennett had no time for this. He wrote it off in sweeping terms:

The definition is poorly stated, but it is clear what Spinoza means to say: the essence
of x is that property which must be possessed by x and cannot be possessed by
anything else – it is a qualitative necessity and sufficient condition for something’s
being x. (Spinoza’s definiens, which omits ‘property’ and ‘qualitative’, implies
that the essence of x is x, so ‘the essence of’ means nothing.)50

Bennett was certainly right that Spinoza omitted any mention of properties
in his definition. But this is not to be explained by negligence or lack of skill
in logic, but by the explicit claim in the Treatise that the essence of a thing
ought never to be confused with any of its properties:

48 Ethics I, 17 Corollary 2 Scholium.

49 Ethics II, Definition 2.
50 A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, p. 61.
 32 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
For a definition to be regarded as complete, it must explain the inmost essence of
the thing, and must take care not to substitute for this any of its properties.51

In his mature work Spinoza did not think at all in subject-predicate, object-
property terms. Bennett wanted the notion of essence to be understood in
terms of essential properties which (we suppose) belonged necessarily to
their objects. But, as well as being contradicted by Spinoza’s own words,
such a view would be at odds with the rest of his metaphysics, as we shall
see shortly.
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It was not just a clumsy mistake that the definition of essence in the Ethics
was not stated in terms of essential properties. Spinoza could well have been
turning his face against the fundamental Aristotelian analysis of essential
and accidental properties of individuals and trying to get down to the simple
ontological thought that the essence of a thing is what makes it what it is.

But then this looks too simple. How could it be made to work? First we
can consider the interrelation of terms in Spinoza’s modal system. The
Aristotelian connection between essence, nature and definition was retained,
at least in outline. For Spinoza, the essence of something was also its nature
(‘desire is the very essence, or nature, of each individual . . .52). And if the
essence of something necessarily involves x, then x belongs to its nature. If x
belongs to something’s nature, then x follows from its definition, since ‘the
true definition of each thing involves and expresses nothing beyond the
nature of the thing defined’.53

All this looks like what we might expect: an orthodox form of what we now
call essentialism: the essence of something expresses its nature or definition.
Much less orthodox-looking was a strong and explicit relationship between
essence and the central Spinozistic notion of causality. We have seen that the
essence of something cannot be conceived without it, and vice versa. For
Spinoza, if B is conceived through A then A must be the cause or explanation
of B (A and B will involve each other).54 And, sure enough, the statement of
the essence or nature of something has to be the statement of its proximate
cause, because for ‘a created thing’ a definition should ‘include its proximate
cause’, and ‘We ought to define and explain things through their proximate
causes’.55 Neatly, an uncreated thing, that is to say God or nature, is conceived
through itself and is therefore the cause of itself, and its existence is said to
follow from its essence: it exists by definition.

51 §95.
52 Ethics III, 56 Demonstration.
53 Ethics I, 8 Scholium 2.
54 Ethics II, 49 Demonstration.
55 Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect §96; Theological-Political Treatise IV, p. 426.
 What had to be so 33
The divergence from Aristotle immediately seems baffling. We may feel, as
often, that Spinoza has just gone too far: his notion of causality could not
carry so much metaphysical weight. His illustrative examples were usually
unhelpful, and his elucidations of his concept of essence are no exception. In
the Treatise he contrasted what he saw as a defective definition of a circle with
a perfect one. If a circle is defined as ‘a figure in which the lines drawn from
the centre to the circumference are equal’ then, he said, ‘it is obvious that
such a definition by no means explains the essence of a circle, but only one of
its properties’. A correct definition would be ‘a figure described by any line
of which one end is fixed and the other moving’, since, ’this definition clearly
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includes the proximate cause’. But the only difference between these two
definitions that strikes the eye is that the latter gave a practical method by
which a circle might be constructed (but so did the first, in a way), or might
be adapted more readily into a function determining a circle. Yet that notion
of proximate causality (practical production) would hardly ever work in any
other circumstances where it might be needed. At any rate, the only clear
point was the insistence that ‘the properties of things are not known as long
as their essences are not known’,56 which does bring out the distance between
essence and properties. The account of essences in the Ethics seems to be out
of line with this example. If – doing our best not to mention properties – we
say that a circle is a figure with equal radii, then the concepts of circle and
figure with equal radii were related in exactly the same way as circle and figure
described by any line of which one end is fixed. . . . We understand the pairs
of notions ‘through each other’ in apparently identical ways. What can be
made of this? Either Spinoza chose his example badly or he had not thought
out the rigorous definition of essence which appeared in the Ethics at the
time when he wrote the unfinished Treatise.

The curious notion of something both causing or explaining and being caused
or explained by something else may give the best hint. The existence and
action of individuals, as we have seen, was determined by other individuals.
That form of explanation was temporal and asymmetrical. A man is caused
to exist by his ancestors but does not cause them to exist. Again, as noted,
God does not belong to the essence of man. Man cannot be conceived without
God, but God can be conceived without man. That is to say, God is the cause
of man but man is not the cause of God. The position between essences was
different. Existence, eternity and infinity all belonged to the essence of God.
Decoded for modern tastes this can read: the concepts of necessary being,
eternal being and infinite being are all coextensive with the concept of God.
These concepts explain the concept of God and the concept of God, in some
sense explains them. (This may partly account for the sense of claustrophobic
circularity which some readers feel in the first pages of the Ethics. It may be a

56 §§95–96.
 34 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
mistake to look for any logical priority among these terms.) The explanation
– or causality, as Spinoza would have it – was atemporal and symmetrical.
The intention seemed to be to say that the essence of something is what
was constitutive of it or, we might say, what makes it what it is, adopting
Spinoza’s causal language almost in a literal way.

Enough should have been said to show why Spinoza did not need to employ
(or presuppose) notions of essence and accidents which would correspond
to the Aristotelian notions of necessary and contingent properties. That
apparent parallel would be misconceived in more than one way. The view
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of essence in the Ethics was far from a conventional one, and did not need to
rely on a modal distinction between the necessary and contingent properties
of things.

A still more fundamental point is that Spinoza’s concept of essence was not
what might be called a primary modal concept. It was one which depended
on the primary notion of necessity or causal explanation. The order is
significant. A realist logician who believes in de re modalities might be
expected to think along these lines: things – or some things – have essences,
which means that some of their properties must belong to them, and the
necessity by which these properties belong to the things is explained by – is
‘in virtue of’ – their essences. So if we ask how we account for necessities
then at least part of an answer will be that some necessities are explainable
in relation to some facts about essences. (Why is 6 necessarily > 5? Because
the nature or essence of 6 includes an internal or necessary property of
being >5.) A logician who accepts (or gives priority to) de dicto modalities
can be landed with the same position, but with respect to bits of language or
concepts instead of numerical objects. At least some necessary propositions
may be said to be necessarily true because they relate something about the
essences, necessary features or internal properties of concepts or elements
of language-use. The view that necessary truths are necessary because they
are analytic is an example, even where analyticity is held to be a matter of
convention or decision – the point is that necessity is allegedly explained in
virtue of concept-inclusion or meaning.

Spinoza’s perspective was very different. His metaphysics would let him
say that the more fundamental modal notion was neither essence nor
necessary truth, but the notion of being caused or explained. In place of the
realist picture of necessities as necessary truths which are true in virtue of
what they say about the essences of things or about uses of concepts, we
see a more compact and elegant view. To be necessary is to have a cause
or sufficient explanation. In particular, essence may be seen as definable in
terms of explanation or causality. The dependence of necessity on essence
is reversed and clarified. If we think that truths are necessary in virtue of
 What had to be so 35
what they say about the necessary features of the world then we end up with
a circular confusion. What are necessary features? Those which belong by
necessity . . . Spinoza could get out of this, although it would be far-fetched
to imply that he saw the issue in such terms. He did not need the realist
premise that necessities are necessary in virtue of anything.

In passing we can also note that his thinking on essence kept him free from
the snare of difficulties where individuals may be said to possess necessary
properties. We must be only too aware of the problems brought about by
questions such as: Was it part of the essence of Spinoza that he had black
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hair? It should be clear by now why such questions would be blocked. Yes,
if we like, in de dicto terms we can say that it was necessary that Spinoza had
black hair. But that would only be a misleading way of saying that a chain
of necessitating causes could in principle be given which would explain the
blackness of Spinoza’s hair. It need not mean that the blackness of his hair
was part of ‘the essence of Spinoza’. Essences were not like that. For the sake
of thoroughness, perhaps the reasoning behind this point should be spelled
out. There could be no individual essences because Spinoza’s concept of
essence had nothing to do with individuation. The distinction between
individuals would be regarded (in technical terms) as ‘modal’ rather than
‘real’.57 Whatever the difference between (say) two men, it could not be a
difference of essences.

Now for the second line of criticism, (b) above: the need to distinguish
existence from essence. Taking the kind of example Spinoza liked, all looks
well. The essence of a circle was given by its definition and was presumably
related to the essences of other figures in a rational system. The existence of
a particular circle was determined by an infinite series of other particulars
which (taken all together, the ‘order of universal corporeal nature’58) explained
how it came to be how and where it was. There seems to be no problem in
separating essences from existence (though of course this would be to leave
aside any question about the nature of universals). But, once more, outside
geometry the story looks less good. Spinoza was not encouraging. He wrote
in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect of perceiving things through
their essence alone, citing the example that when he knew the essence of the
mind then he knew that it was united to the body; but he added that things
known in that way were ‘very few’.59 Natural science and philosophy were
supposed to proceed by making discoveries about the essences of things and
their interrelationships. What must have been required for any Spinozistic
investigations must have been to know how we are able to tell what belongs

57 Ethics I, 15 Scholium.
58 Ethics I, 11 Demonstration 2.
59 §22.
 36 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
to the essence of anything. Of course, we can try the thought-experiment of
seeing whether something can be conceived without its would-be essence
and vice versa. But will we get a clear answer? And how to tell if it is right?

The replies to these questions would take us into Spinoza’s notion of truth
as its own standard. Here there has been a step from logic or metaphysics to
epistemology. Truths about essences may be discovered a posteriori, but their
certainty is underpinned by nothing more than their own self-evidence. Only
one line needs to be pursued in this discussion of modality. The distinction
between essence and existence has been seen by some as being closely related
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to the distinction between necessity and contingency. Leibniz, for example,

made this explicit:

Propositions of essence are those which can be demonstrated by the resolution

of terms; these are necessary, or virtually identical, and so their opposite is
impossible, or virtually contradictory. The truth of these is eternal . . .. Existential
or contingent propositions differ entirely from these. Their truth is understood a
priori by the infinite mind alone . . .60

The issue of how we distinguish essence from existence therefore looks as

if it is mirrored in the problem of how to draw a line between necessity and
contingency.

The angle of attack here needs no elucidation. Spinoza got some protection
by means of his demonstration to Ethics I, 29. This was meant to buttress the
conclusion that nothing in nature is contingent (quoted at the beginning of
this paper). One impression is that Spinoza looks like Quine upside-down.
The distinction between contingency and necessity was undermined, but
then contingency collapsed into necessity instead of the other way around.
If Spinoza had been trying to argue that all contingent truths were really
necessary truths in the sense that we might understand such a claim today,
then we can see how such an impression might be justifiable. If we were
supposed to think that the proposition that Spinoza’s hair was black is
modally equivalent to the proposition that the angles of a triangle add up to
180°, then we might well feel that some useful contrast had been lost.

But this chapter should have explained what would be wrong with that
reading. The Demonstration to Ethics Part I, 29 was in the form of a dilemma
which sought to account for the modality of both individuals and essences.
Individuals were necessitated, or sufficiently explained, only by other
individuals. The necessity of essences was related to (the) divine nature
‘considered absolutely’, which we may take to include the basic axioms of

60 ‘Necessary and Contingent Truths’ (c1686), in Philosophical Writings, G. H. R. Parkinson

and H. Morris, eds (London: Dent, 1973), p. 98.
 What had to be so 37
geometry and natural philosophy. Spinoza’s removal of contingency took
the form of arguing that all contingencies must have explanations of one
sort, all necessities must have explanations of another, and the fact that both
were explained led to the conclusion that nothing was unexplained: that is,
that everything was necessary. Epistemological difficulties might well have
caused problems for Spinoza in any attempt to distinguish essence from
existence in individual cases. But any lack of capacity to see a clear line need
not mean that the ground on each side cannot be staked out independently.
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***

Conclusions

This ends the detailed commentary on Spinoza. There is more to be said

about the significance for the assessment of his work, and about some wider
points of interest.

The first aim can be covered briefly. The intention has been to show
how Spinoza formulated a reasonably coherent, if unfamiliar, account
of modalities. We tend to think of Leibniz as the first modern theorist of
modality, and it is undeniable that his overt interest in the subject was far
greater than Spinoza’s. But if Spinoza’s account really was coherent then it
compared favourably with Leibniz’s in several ways. We get by without a God
who has to make choices (with all the attendant theological problems) and
with no need for possible worlds. Instead of the dubious notions of concept-
or subject-predicate inclusion and analyticity, we see the less opaque notion
of causal explanation. If only this much is fair then Spinoza deserves more
attention.

There are also some conclusions of wider interest. Earlier, the distance we
need to travel to reach Spinoza was noted. In some ways we may feel that the
change of perspective in looking through his eyes is almost to see everything
in reverse. Assumptions now taken for granted were simply inverted. We
tend to see necessity as requiring explanation, whereas he saw contingency
as the challenge. We tend to regard de re modality with caution, where he
ignored de dicto modality almost completely. We assume a symmetry of
definition between necessity and possibility which could have no place in
his metaphysics.

One reaction could be just to say that he got everything wrong. Or – the same
in practice – to think that his views bear so little relation to later ones that
they are irrelevant beyond their historical curiosity. Naturally, there is no
way of proving that a philosophical theory should be interesting, but a few
 38 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
strands can be picked out which might turn out to be more promising than
they seem at first.

To begin: the primacy of necessity in Spinoza’s system needs to be

appreciated. Hidé Ishiguro noted that for Leibniz, the status of contingency
was the problem, rather than necessity.61 In Spinoza this attitude had reached
its consistent extreme. For him, his form of necessity needed no defence:
it was self-evident and logically primary. He believed that a cardinal error
had been to have overlooked this and to have taken the ‘objects of sense’
as fundamental.62 In bare summary that presents the most commonplace
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textbook contrast between rationalism and empiricism. We need to see the

extremity of his attitude to bring it into sharp focus. Empiricists may take
brute contingent facts for granted; they just are. For them, necessity can pose
an acute challenge, calling for reduction or explanation. The aim, obviously,
would be to provide some account in terms of contingent or empirical facts
– perhaps of some special or privileged status – to account for the apparent
absoluteness of necessity. When this is turned on its head, the assumptions in
it are made more explicit. Spinoza took necessity as clear and primary. In the
end for him necessities were causa sui – their own sufficient explanation. Since
the necessary was for him the explained, the problem for him was what he
saw as contingency – the prospect that there might be things which were not
explained or which were outside any unified system of explanation. He had
necessities as brute facts in the sense that they were self-explanatory quite
literally, and he had contingencies explainable in terms of them. Like much
of his metaphysics this looks like a trick with mirrors, because we end up
with a result that more was explained – contingencies in terms of necessities
and necessities ultimately in terms of the self-explanatory order of nature.
We may be forced to ask: why prefer one set of brute facts to another?

And then there was his attitude towards possibility. What we might think
of as ‘logical possibility’ was squeezed out of the picture. Spinoza’s position
was much closer to pre-philosophical common sense – as anyone will admit
who has ever tried to explain to novices that it is logically possible to fly
unaided to the moon, or whatever. We may wish to say that we can represent
to ourselves situations which are not possible in nature and which involve
no contradiction (in Spinoza’s terms). But in the absence of some very
specific assumptions about meaning, the fact that we can say or think things
about situations implies nothing about the existence or possible existence of
those situations. Spinoza would not deny the capacity of the imagination,
or language, to portray unlikely states of affairs. What he did was to offer

61 H. Ishiguro, ‘Contingent Truths and Possible Worlds’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, IV,
1979, p. 357.
62 Ethics II, 10 Corollary Scholium.
 What had to be so 39
a theoretical framework which drained that capacity of significance. It is
an interesting irony that the limit to possibility for Hume was discovered a
priori, by thought-experiment, where for Spinoza it had to be determined by
real, practical experiment. Rorty suggested that the invention of the mind
by Descartes furnished philosophers with their own special territory.63 More
plausibly, the concept of logical possibility might be argued to be the basic
instrument in the philosopher’s laboratory. Spinoza’s exclusion of it implies
that the only way to find out what is possible can be to see what happens
in the world, not to think about it. If this is right it would cut away the
foundations of modern philosophy at least as radically as anything Rorty
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had in mind.

The lesson may still have some application outside philosophy, as seen in
this unguarded piece of popular science:

The desire to explain the constants has been one of the driving forces behind efforts
to develop a complete unified description of nature, or ‘theory of everything’.
Physicists have hoped that such a theory would show that each of the constants of
nature could only have one logically possible value. It would reveal an underlying
order to the seeming arbitrariness of nature.64

Here, not just ‘logical’ but also ‘possible’ is redundant and misleading. The
suggestion that how nature is must be a matter of logic tells us nothing, while
attempting to explain the straightforward (the facts of nature) in terms of the
wildly controversial (the force and nature of logic). If the constants of nature
could only have one value, then it adds nothing to say that they could only
have one possible value. That is what possibility is.

The fact that Spinoza’s necessity and possibility were not symmetrically
interdefinable makes it hard to relate his work to the terms of present-day
modal logic. But from the rest of what has been said, it should be plain that
it is hard to see almost any of his thinking on modality in terms of logic at
all. The expected subject-matter of logic – propositions, inference, validity,
entailment – were all absent. In their place we find not even states of affairs
or events but things causing or explaining other things. A full statement of
Spinoza’s modal system might look as much like a formalised version of
mathematical physics as a system of modal logic.

Underlying that was Spinoza’s concrete, de re approach. There is no workable

sense to be made of any notion of necessity relating to propositions or
sentences in his system, despite the occasional references to eternal truths.

63 In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
64 ‘Inconstant Constants’, J. D. Barrow and J. K. Webb, Scientific American, 292/6, June 2005,
p. 33.
 40 Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion
The evident reason was that his ontology had no room for anything between
ideas and their objects. Equally, Spinoza would not have seen it as worthwhile
to examine any picture of reality that might be revealed by the nature of
language or the actual structure of thought. One outcome is that we may
put aside the problems of realist semantics – of finding anything in virtue
of which necessary truths are said to be necessary, for example. The price
to be paid was that modality became something like a feature of things, not
something dependent at all on concepts or language. This will be pursued
in Chapter 3.
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 Chapter 2

How things happen

Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities:
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there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Once
you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for
only against a world of purposes does the word ‘accident’ have a meaning.
Nietzsche

No one has ever doubted that Spinoza argued for the immanent causality
of God: ‘God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things’. How
things happen is not to be explained supernaturally, by anything outside
nature, but within it.

In the Theological-Political Treatise, and to some extent in the Political Treatise

– but scarcely at all in the Ethics – we hear about divine laws or natural
laws. And it is plain, given Spinoza’s identification of God with nature, that
these are identified with each other: the laws of God are the laws of nature,
‘the universal laws of Nature according to which all things happen and are
determined are nothing but God’s eternal decrees, which always involve
eternal truth and necessity’.

Although it should be obvious that divine and natural law were meant to
be the same – divine law was naturalised, removing from physics any need
to mention God, even in prefatory passing – it is far less obvious how law
was meant to be understood, and what its status was meant to be, within
Spinoza’s ontology. There is an odd contrast – although this may be just
striking, rather than significant – in the juxtaposition of some of the most
evident, least contentious elements in the interpretation of Spinoza with
some of his most difficult and controversial passages. To mention only
three of these – all the subject of massive commentary and footnoting – the
section on the ‘fixed and eternal things’ in the Treatise on the Emendation of the

 The Gay Science III §109, Josefine Nauckhof, trs. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 110.
 Ethics I, 18.
 Theological-Political Treatise III, p. 417.
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