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Making God Go Away and Leave Us Alone*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Vance Maxwell
Vance Maxwell
Affiliation:
Memorial University of Newfoundland
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Extract

The title of this critical notice is provoked by a remark Professor Armour makes in Chapter IX, “Metaphysics and the Resolution of Conflict,” of Being and Idea. If we become Spinozists, “Perhaps the concept of God will emerge clearly and orient our lives, or perhaps, on the other hand, we will be able to see how to make God go away and leave us alone” (p. 98). As the title indicates, I shall argue here that Armour's book achieves the latter, and not the former, end.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Fall 1996 , pp. 805 - 820
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1996

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References

Notes

1 Hegel, G. W. F., Lectures on the History of Philosophy, translated by Haldane, E. S. and Simson, F. H. (New York: The Humanities Press, 1974). Cf. Vol. 3, p. 257.Google Scholar

2 By “the real Spinoza,” I mean the textual Spinoza. Spinoza's texts are the ultimate source of both real understanding of him and legitimate disputation about him. Hence, my point against Armour is not dogmatic, and it will become obvious as we proceed.

3 “1. Spinoza's system is one-dimensional [all determination is dissolved in the Absolute]. 2. The specific therefore has no positive status [determination is negation]. 3 The attributes of thought and extension are chosen arbitrarily [they do not arise from an opposition but rather empirically]. 4. The system is not finally reunified [thought and extension are only unessential forms of the Absolute]. 5. The idea of mode does not follow clearly from that of substance and attributes [only indeterminate variety determines the attributes]. 6. The idea of emanation through attributes and modes is a kind of downward path to obscurity lead[ing] away from clear and distinct ideas [the emanations of substance lead away from its clear purity to increasing obscurity].” Armour omits Hegel's famous and pivotal criticism that substance is not subject.

4 Armour holds that if one starts with parts, “The notion of an ultimate totality [class or set] cannot be generated without paradox from the notions of its parts.” But “if one starts from the concept of totality, then one can generate non-paradoxical notions of part and of the part-whole relation” (p. 77). Russell's paradox: the class of all classes which are not members of themselves is and is not a member of itself. As we shall see, though, none of this applies to Spinoza or to Spinoza-Hegel.

5 Armour cites four reasons: (1) Spinoza's monism, characterized as “extreme” and “essentially mental”; (2) the centrality of thought, in that it “has one element corresponding to each element of every other attribute”; (3) after J. C. Murray, the intelligibility (through Thought) of the real; (4) after Murray, the fact that, for Spinoza, knowledge, though “provoked by sensation, is ultimately intellectual in kind” (pp. 59-60).

6 Armour calls ideas “symbols,” “relations,” “things related,” “states of intellect,” “reflexive orders bearing knowledge,” “specimens of intelligibility.” The simile in multis? A good question. Armour vaguely platonizes the ultimate ideas as formal causes. He also Aristotelianizes Extension, calling it a “capacity” (p. 156) to be informed, i.e., “space” (p. 12) to be filled. Yet Spinoza disclaims any debt to Plato or Aristotle, rejecting both Platonic idea and Aristotelian genus as universals which are “nothing” (Short Treatise on Good, Man and His Well-being, Bk. 1, chap. 6). For Spinoza, particulars alone are real.

7 Thus, in the Propositions alone, “God” occurs at least forty-four times after Prop. 13 of Pt. 1, and “substance” once, in Prop. 10 of Pt. 2. Hereafter, I use the standard notation: e.g., Ethics 1.P13Corl = Ethics, Pt. 1, Prop. 13, Corollary 1. Also, my translations of Spinoza's Latin refer by volume, page, and line of text to the Gebhardt, edition, Spinoza Opera (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1925);Google Scholar e.g., Gebhardt, Vol. 2, p. 77, line 10 = [G2, 77(10)].

8 Hegel, , Lectures, pp. 252–90.Google Scholar

9 Hegel, , “Remark: Philosophy of Spinoza and Leibniz,” in Hegel's Science of Logic, translated by Miller, A. V. (New York: Humanities Press, 1976), pp. 536–40.Google Scholar

10 Hegel, Lectures. He writes: “Spinoza's earlier definitions have also the infinite already implied in them, for instance in the case of the cause of itself, inasmuch as he defines it as that whose essence involves existence. Notion and existence are each the beyond of the other; but cause of itself, as thus including them, is really the carrying back of this 'beyond' into unity. Or 'Substance is that which is in itself and is conceived from itself; that is the same unity of Notion and existence. The infinite is in the same way in itself and has also its notion in itself; its notion is its Being, and its Being is its Notion; true infinity is thus to be found in Spinoza” (p. 263). Armour is oblivious to this true infinite: in Spinozan-Hegelian terms, his “infinite” is the divisible infinite of imagination—the indefinite—not that of thought, which is complete and indivisible.

11 Hegel, , Science of Logic, p. 536.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., p. 538. Hegel then criticizes Spinoza: “but these three are only enumerated one after the other, without any inner sequence of development, and the third is not negation as negation, not the negatively self-related negation which would be in its own self the return into the first identity, so that this identity would then be veritable identity.” Beyond quoting this summary statement, I cannot go here. My sole concern is to show Armour's mistreatment of Hegel's commencing philosophy with Spinoza.

13 Hegel, , Lectures, pp. 259–60.Google Scholar

14 Thus he writes: “If Spinoza had further developed what lies in the causa sui, substance with him would not have been rigid and unworkable” (Lectures etc., p. 259). Specifically, while Spinoza grasps determination as negation, he does not grasp it as the negation of negation (n. 12 and Hegel's “Remark”).

15 lP29Sch, the text that Armour misquotes. Spinoza in fact says: “by natura naturans we must understand that which is in itself, and conceived through itself, or the attributes of substance, which express eternal and infinite essence, that is God insofar as He is considered a free cause. By naturata I understand all that follows from the necessity of God's nature or from each of God's attributes, that is all the modes of God's attributes in sofar as they are considered as things which are in God and without God can neither be nor be conceived” ([G2, 71(5-16), “attributes” and “modes” italicized]).

16 Thus, had Armour really returned to Spinoza, he would, first and foremost, have rejected Hume on efficient causality. And, in this connection, Whitehead's critique of Hume (not his doctrine of the deficient primordial nature of God [p. 114, n.9]) and his doctrines of “causal efficacy” and “symbolic reference” would have caught Armour's attention. Cf. Process and Reality (The Free Press, 1979), chap. 8, pp. 168–83.Google Scholar

17 In Epistle L to Tschirnhaus, Spinoza writes: “So also when I define God to be a supremely perfect being, since this definition does not explain the efficient cause (for I understand the efficient cause to be internal as well as external [intelligo enim causam efficientem tarn internam, quam externam]) I shall not be able to derive from it all the properties of God, as I can when I define God as a Being, etc. See Definition 6, Part 1, Ethics” ([G4, 271(2-7)]). But the same is clearly implied in Ethics 1.D1 with Ax4; 1.P16.Cor2, 17.Corl; 1.P20,34; and throughout his philosophy.

18 Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (TdlE) 33-34. And, in reflection, an idea as real or actual thing (essentia formalis) is the ideatum of another representing idea (essentia objectiva). Since he emphasizes it, I return briefly to Armour on reflection.

19 Spinoza, , Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, translated by Wolf, A. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963). Cf. Pt. 1, chap. 1, p. 16.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., Pt. I, chap. 3, pp. 41-42: “As it is usual to divide the efficient cause in eight divisions, let me, then, inquire how and in what sense God is a cause.” Now since substance-attributes are indivisible (Ethics 1.P12, 13), Spinoza means, by “divide” and “divisions,” “distinguish” and “distinctions” respectively.

21 Epistle 50, [G4, 239(7-10)].

22 Epistle 34, [GA, 179(14-15)].

23 The major intellectual problem of our time is surely the collapse of truth into fiction, and of reality into supposition. In this matter, Armour collapses intellect into imagination, ignoring or unaware of Spinoza's distinguishing and separating active intellect and passive imagination throughout his thought. Hence, Armour “solves” the problem by merely countering the supposition of atomism with the supposition of a substantial whole which, as a set of ideas (or attributes), is itself an inert plurality.

24 “Ideas of ideas are not necessary for knowledge, only for knowing that you know. And knowing that you know, while essential to knowledge, is not identical with it” (p. 159). Note that (1) Armour contradicts himself: since “ideas of ideas” = “knowing that you know,” Armour both denies and affirms that “knowing that you know” is necessary for knowledge; (2) In Ethics 2.P21 .Sch, Spinoza writes: “For as soon as one knows something, by that very fact he knows that he knows” ([G2, 109(21-2)]). Clearly, he identifies knowing (idea) with knowing that one knows (idea ideae), whether adequately or inadequately (Ethics 2.P21).

25 “4. By an adequate idea I understand an idea which, in sofar as it is considered in itself, without relation to its object, has all the properties or intrinsic characteristics of a true idea.

Explication: I say intrinsic so as to exclude what is extrinsic, namely, the correspondence of the idea with its ideatum [object]” ([G2, 85(3-9)]).

26 An important antidote to these is argued by Pols, Edward, the eminent American philosopher, in his recent book, Radical Realism: Direct Knowing in Science and Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 1992).Google Scholar Cf. chap. 7 especially, “First Philosophy and the Reflexivity of Direct Knowing.”

27 I thank Dialogue's editor, Steven Davis, and the referee for comments and advice.