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Spinoza’s God as Nature: an engineer’s reading of Ethics Part I

Pieter de Jong Fellow
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God & the argumentsModern EuropeanRationalismBaruch Spinoza#pantheism#substance
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I came to the Ethics (published 1677, after Spinoza's death) because of the geometrical form: definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations. It looks like a specification document.

Part I argues that substance is what is in itself and conceived through itself; that there can't be two substances with the same attribute; that substance is infinite; and therefore that there is exactly one substance, God, with infinitely many attributes, of which we know two: thought and extension. Everything else is a mode of God. The phrase Deus sive Natura, God or Nature, appears later, in Part IV, but Part I already commits him to it.

As an engineer I love the rigour and distrust it at the same time. If the definitions are chosen well enough, the conclusions are almost guaranteed. Many commentators think Proposition 5 (no two substances share an attribute) is where the argument slips.

Is this God in any religious sense, or is it nature with a grander name?

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  1. Reza Tehrani

    Fellow

    People often compare Spinoza with Ibn Arabi and the "unity of being" (wahdat al-wujud), a term his later followers used. The resemblance is real but limited. For the Sufis, everything is a self-disclosure of a God who still loves and is loved. Spinoza's God does neither in the ordinary sense.

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  2. Aoife Brennan

    Fellow

    I'd say it isn't God in the religious sense. Spinoza denies that God has a will or acts for purposes; the appendix to Part I mocks the idea that nature was made for us. A God who can't be prayed to, who doesn't love anyone in particular, seems to me to be the universe under another name.

    1. Pieter de Jong

      Fellow

      That's the obvious reading, Aoife, but Part V talks about the intellectual love of God, and says God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love, of which our love is part. It's a strange love, but he doesn't drop the word.

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  3. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    Compare Advaita, often lumped together with Spinoza. In Spinoza the modes are entirely real, as expressions of substance. For Shankara the many things are appearances superimposed on Brahman. Both are "monisms", but they disagree on the very thing that matters most.

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  4. Layla Haddad

    Fellow

    Spinoza argued critically with Maimonides in the Theological-Political Treatise, especially about whether reason should govern the interpretation of scripture. Reading Part I next to the Guide for the Perplexed shows how much of his vocabulary is inherited from medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy.

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