Sprigge - The Mind of Spinoza's God

The Mind of Spinoza's God
Author(s): T. L. S. Sprigge
Source:
Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly /
:
50 (July 2001), pp. 253-272
Published by: S. H. Bergman Center for Philosophical Studies
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T. L. S. Sprigge
The Mind of Spinoza's God
1. My topic is the mind of God, for Spinoza. This can only be discussed,
however, in connection with some reflections upon Spinoza's notion of God
at a still more general level, and also with some interpretative work on
Spinoza's doctrine of the attributes.
It is possible that there is no interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy, more
particularly of the Ethics, which can present it as a fully coherent and
comprehensive system without dropping some of its claims, and substituting
(perhaps not very different) others. It may be, however, that there are several
interpretations which present it as such a system, differing from each other in
the particular claims which are dropped or replaced. If so, and it seems rather
likely that it is so, what favours one of these interpretations rather than
another? It would presumably count in favour of one such interpretation over
another that it drops less, perhaps also that it seems likely to be the one which
Spinoza would most have favoured had he been persuaded that something
must be dropped. We may or may not also think that an interpretation which
brings his system nearer to philosophical truth should be favoured.
I shall take it that all these are reasons for favouring one interpretation
over another, but that no a priori mode of weighting these different
considerations is possible. If one includes in this the attempt to bring it as
near to philosophical truth as possible, that, in effect, means favouring an
interpretation which brings it closer to one's own outlook than some
alternatives. Provided not too much weight is given to this over other
considerations I think it acceptable.
2. A first question is this: Does "God" as Spinoza uses the expression stand
for the one Whole which includes everything else, thus includes not just the
* All quotations from the Ethics are from the translation by Samuel Shirley
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982). The few passages quoted in Latin are from the
Gebhardt edition.
253
Iyyun The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 50 (July 2001): 253-272
254 T. L. S. Sprigge
essence of God, (along,1 of course, with his attributes) but also all his modes,
both finite and infinite? Or does it stand only for his essence, and what
follows from it absolutely and eternally, but for none of its finite modes and
perhaps not even for its infinite modes? (This may be equivalent to the
question whether "God" stands only for Natura Naturans and not also for
Natura Naturata.)
Commentators now usually seem to take the second alternative, but there
are still defenders of the first.2
I believe that the question is less important than it has seemed. Compare
the question with one about a human person, on the standard view, from
which, of course, Spinoza diverges, that a person is an individual substance.
Well, on this standard view I am a mental substance (which may or may not
also be a physical substance) which at one time thinks this and at another
time thinks that, at one time feels this and at another time feels that. Now
suppose I inclined to solipsism and expressed myself by saying "Nothing
exists except me." Would I be led to think this false by reflecting that after
all I had thoughts and feelings? I do not believe so. For in suspecting that
nothing existed except myself, I obviously meant nothing except myself
along with my thoughts and feelings. And it makes no real difference
whether this is because "myself' refers to my thoughts and feelings as well
as to their subject, or whether it is just being tacitly assumed that I meant
"apart from my thoughts and feelings."
This being so, it makes no real difference whether we interpret Spinoza
as saying that nothing exists except God and his modes, in the sense that
nothing exists except God (which of course includes his modes) or in the
sense that nothing exists except God (and additionally, of course, his
modes).
For this reason I do not mind too much whether we take "God" as used
by Spinoza to refer to God, besides which nothing exists except his modes,
or God, including his modes.
1 I use the awkward expression "along" at this point so as not to imply any
particular view of how the attributes stand to the essence. Referring to Spinoza's
God as "he" seems an unfortunate necessity (that does not apply, of course, in Latin).
1 speak sometimes below of "the divine mind," when referring to God qua infinite
mind, partly to be able to use "it."
2 For example, Frank Lucash in "Ambiguity in Spinoza's Conception of
Substance," Studio Spinozana 7(1991): 169-180.
The Mind of Spinoza 's God 255
3. I now move on to some questions about the two known attributes of God,
as Spinoza conceives them, namely, Thought and Extension.
The attribute of Extension would seem to consist in certain laws governing
the extended world together with certain structural features which must
pertain to it. Then the infinite modes of extension are (i) the actual processes
of motion and rest and (ii) the face of the whole universe, that is to say, the
extended world itself in which motion and rest occur, and which is thereby in
constant change according to these laws and as constrained by those structural
features. (See Epistle 64.) Similarly the attribute of thought would seem to
consist in certain laws governing the world of thought together with certain
structural features which must pertain to it. Then the (or is it an)3 infinite
thought mode is a mental reality which always possesses these structural
features (and is in that sense immutable) though it is in constant change
according to these laws and as constrained by those structural features.
Spinoza's name for this infinite mode of thought is the infinite intellect of
God (see especially E2pl lc and Epistle 64) of which the human mind is a
part.4 (This whole notion of the infinite modes and their relation to their
attributes is so problematic, and, I believe, so differently interpreted by much
more scholarly persons than myself that I say all this with some trepidation).5
Commentators, such is my impression, often use the expression the "attribute
of extension" to stand for its mediate infinite mode, the face of the whole
universe, and the "attribute of thought" to stand for its single infinite mode, the
infinite intellect. I may sometimes follow them in this, as it can make for a less
clumsy terminology. We can always be more precise when there is call for it.
3 See next note.

4 It is unclear whether God's intellect and the idea Dei are distinct infinite modes,
the latter derived from the former, or the same thing. Taking them as identical fits
better with E2p48s and other texts.
5 Edwin Curley evidently holds that for Spinoza there is no such thing as God's
intellect. (See his notes to Elpl7 and Elp30.) But surely Spinoza holds that a divine
intellect exists, though as an infinite mode (pertaining to Natura Naturata) rather than
an attribute (pertaining to Natura Naturans)? If Spinoza here seems a little doubtful as
to whether "intellect and will do indeed pertain to the essence of God" his concern
may be partly because for him they are infinite modes (or at least the intellect is) and
partly because he quite properly thinks that they must be a very different kind of thing
from ours. See section 11 below. Epistle 64 contains Spinoza's clearest assertion that
"absolutely infinite intellect" is an infinite mode of God. (Spinoza: The Letters, trans.
Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), p. 229 / Gebhardt IV, 278.)
The face of the whole universe, as infinite mode of the attribute of

extension, is conceived as an infinite physical plenum; a plenum, however,
which is articulated into an infinite number of distinguishable extended
objects each with its own conatus to keep its essence actualized (through
shifting cicumstances) as its existing self. But although the activity of each
such object follows from its own essence in its current circumstances, its
essence, existence and circumstances all follow from the divine essence and
its own overall conatus as active in its present phase as that necessarily
follows from its previous phases. We are not far wrong if we say that this
"face of the whole universe" is simply the physical world, fairly much as we
commonly think of it, or at least as seventeenth-century scientists thought
of it. In short, it consists in lots of interacting extended objects, on various
different scales, such as trees, planets, animals, microbes, and so forth.
4. But what is the attribute of thought, or more strictly the infinite intellect
(E2pl lc) or absolutely infinite understanding of God?
One view favoured by certain commentators is that the attribute of
thought, or more strictly its infinite mode, is simply the Total Truth about
everything, and that the Idea of any particular thing is simply the Truth about
it. This interpretation appeals to philosophers who themselves hold that even
if the world had contained no consciousness there would still have been, not
just the world, but also the truth about it.
Now I do not know whether Spinoza thought it a possibility that there
was once no animal life, but if he had, he would surely not have concluded
that at that stage the attribute of thought was not expressed in infinite and
finite modes. And the appeal of this interpretation (for such commentators)
is that it allows Spinoza to hold this without his being saddled with what
they think the outrageous view that every finite physical thing has a mind
(God's idea of it) in any remotely psychological sense, since this "mind" is
just the truth about it.
George Santayana was a philosopher who particularly insisted that there
would be a truth about the world, distinguishable from the world itself, even
if the world contained no consciousness.6 And he implies that for Spinoza
6 See especially George Santayana, The Realm of Truth (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1938). He relates this to Spinoza at Spinoza's Ethics & De
Intellectus Emendatione, trans. A Boyle, Introduction by George Santayana
(London: J. M Dent and Sons, 1910), xviii-xix, though his usual judgement is that
The Mind of Spinoza's God 257
sometimes the attribute of Thought was the Total Truth of things in this quite
unpsychological sense of truth. And this appears to be the view of E. M.
Curley, in his first book.7
Now whatever the merits of this as a philosophical view about truth, I am
most doubtful whether it really does justice to what Spinoza meant by the
attribute of Thought, or its infinite mode, the intellect of God. Putting it
simply, I am convinced that he meant something "more mental" than this.
The idea that our mind is just the truth about us as physical beings is a very
strange one, but if that is what the attribute of Thought, or the intellect of
God, is, then that is what our mind must be.
Another view which I have come across is that the attribute of Thought
is simply the totality of all mental phenomena, conceived as the mental states
of men and animals, with no unity other than that of a collection or
mereological sum. But this leaves the attribute of Thought, or rather its
infinite mode, extraordinarily gappy, since there will be no thought analogue
to anything except animals (or perhaps just parts of them). And how is that
compatible with the order of ideas being the same as the order of things?
And quite apart from the gaps, it deprives what is left of the Infinite Mode
of Thought of any such unity as pertains to the mediate Infinite Mode of
Extension, i.e., the face of the whole universe.
Not that much less plausible is the view that there is a mental side to every
physical thing which possesses its own conatus and that the infinite mode of
Thought is simply the mereological sum of all these mental states. For
though that does not leave the mental as gappy as does the previous view, it
still robs it of the unity which pertains to the physical.
To make the point more clearly, let us consider the unity of the physical.
Surely Spinoza thought of there being an infinite space, or rather extended
plenum, with no ultimate breaks between any one part and the neighbouring
parts which surround it. True, it is articulated into individuals, each with its
own conatus, but the whole which these individuals make up is more of a
unit than they are.
Some philosophers, indeed, have thought that a concrete thing which is
it was for Spinoza rather the total realm of essence (of all possible forms of being as
following from pure Being itself), wrongly conceived as somehow all actualized at
their due position in the physical flux.
1 Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1969).
8 "we shall readily conceive the whole of Nature as one individual whose
partsthat is, all the constituent bodiesvary in infinite ways without any change
in the individual as a whole" (E2pl3 lemma 7 scholium). Something corresponding
must be true, if Spinoza is right, of the system of finite minds. Consider, for example,
"certum est, ideas inadaequatas ex eo tantum in nobis oriri, quod pars sumus alicujus
entis cogitantis, cujus quaedam cogitationes ex toto, quaedam ex parte tantum
nostram mentem constituunt" (TIE Gebhardt 11,28 / Bruder 73).
9 See e.g. E2pl lc. "Hence it follows that the human mind is part of the infinite
intellect of God."
Consider now the description of a body doing something, say "body X

moving in a circle round body Y." Then to convert this into a description of
something mental corresponding to it one simply substitutes "Idea of body
X moving in a circle round body Y." Suppose now another physical
description of some body as "body A eating body B." Then we convert this
into a description of the corresponding mental state of affairs by substituting
"Idea of body A eating body B."
The thesis is not simply that you get some kind of description of the
mental modes like this, but that you get a complete and adequate description
thereof to which nothing is lacking.
If this were so, there would not be two separate mental tasks, the one to
learn about body, the other to learn about mind. And the whole idea that one
must study things either under the attribute of Thought or under the attribute
of Extension, but not combine them, would become bogus. For really there
would be nothing to be learnt through a study of the mind other than to
express one's knowledge of the physical with a slight verbal alteration. Apart
from which it would be a very implausible view, unworthy of Spinoza.10
There are two remaining alternatives. Either some very complex operator,
I mean one which transforms the meaning of the expressions which follow it
in some very complex hard-to-learn way, would do the task, or no operator
at all would do so. I realize, of course, that simplicity and complicatedness
are a matter of degree, but the distinction I have in mind is between an
operator the meaning of which it would be very simple for human minds to
learn and one which it would be very difficult for them to learn, and this
distinction is clear enough to make my point.
The possibility that there is no such operator at all seems tantamount to
saying that the order of ideas is not the same as the order of things. So the view
we must attribute to Spinoza is that there is some very complicated such
operator. And I suggest that its meaning would be bound to have elements which
seem a bit ad hoc, that is, do not all follow from some rather simple formulation.
Compare this matter of an operator which changes descriptions of physical
states into descriptions of the corresponding idea, or mental phenomenon,
with an operator which converts sentences in English, used to describe
themselves (by being placed in inverted commas) into descriptions of
10 And it hardly accords with Spinoza's assertion that the nature of thought "is quite
removed from the concept of extension" (E2p49s). See also E2p7s.
German sentences. And let us suppose first that it is of that very simple kind
which only requires the briefest of explanations to be intelligible. Call this
operator "the G symbol," pronounced Big G and written thus: G. Now it is
clear that the introduction of such an operator, if that was all there was to it,
though it would change the expression "snow is white" from being a
description of a certain English sentence into a description of the German
sentence "Schnee ist weiss," would not be of any use as a way of translating
English into German. "Snow is white" would not become a German sentence
with the same, or indeed any other, meaning when replaced by "G: Snow is
white." All it would give you is an otherwise unidentified German sentence
as having the same meaning as "Snow is white." Similarly, referring to a
mental state as the idea of a certain physical state, using the "Idea of'
operator, would not tell you what that mental state was, so to speak, in itself.
The question whether there is a more complicated operator than "G," the
meaning of which would enable you to find a German translation of each
English sentence, is essentially the question whether a translation
programme for converting English into German on a computer is possible. I
believe that some advance towards designing such translation programmes
has been made but that the translations are still very crude. Still, it seems
likely that such programmes will be designed one day. What is more, one is
inclined to think that there must be such a programme which an English
speaker who learns German is moving towards mastering.
But there is a sense in which such programmes must contain a large ad hoc
element. I am referring, among other things, to the fact that the programme
must incorporate a dictionary the set of entries in which (as opposed to small
subsets of them) have no overall unifying rationale.
There are, of course, additional problems about translation, namely, how
far there is a determinate answer to the question how a sentence in English
is best translated into one in German, the lack of precise synonyms between
the two languages, and so on. However, let us assume that there is a
programme which can so deal with that and some related problems that it
will yield what we could agree to be the uniquely correct translation of each
English sentence into German and back again.11
11 Even if Quinean considerations might require some qualification of this, each

person who learns to speak a new language on the basis of his native language
would seem to utilize some such syntactic operator.
This seems to me quite a good model for the relation Spinoza supposed
to hold between the different attributes. There is a formula, however
complicated, such that if one mastered it, one would know what mental state
of affairs must accompany any given physical state of affairs. On the other
hand, just as the two languages remain qualitatively different, however
deterministically translatable into each other, so the two attributes are
qualitatively different, though precisely corresponding in the sense that there
is a highly complicated formula for deducing the occurrence of something
in the one attribute from an occurrence in the other attribute.
6. This metaphor of different languages can serve our purposes in

understanding Spinoza further still, so I am inclined to suggest. For may we
not regard the attribute of Thought, and whatever goes on in it, as the
language in which God describes to himself what is going on in the attribute
of extension? God, on this view, knows everything which happens in the
physical world but his knowledge takes the form of his constant description
to himself of what is going on in it in the language of what we might call
mentalese to use an old expression for a perhaps modified purpose? The
expressions in divine mentalese for those states of animal bodies which
underlie sense experience must be roughly what some today call "qualia,"
though this must be understood as covering structures as they are
experienced, e.g., visual, as opposed to purely geometrical, circles.
This allows neatly for the way in which the two attributes correspond to
each other and yet are different. The one consists in bodies moving about in
various ways, the other consists of a description of their movements in
mentalese.
Thus my mind is God's description in mentalese of what my body is up

to.
Among several helpful implications of this model is the light it casts upon
the thorny problem of how one's mind can be God's idea of one's body and
yet it be impossible to discover by introspection all, or even any very
accurate, accounts of what one's body is doing or suffering. (See E2p24,
E2p28, whose relation to E2pl21 find somewhat puzzling.)
For we can suppose that the divine mind describes the world of extension
to itself at different levels of detail. Thus it certainly describes to itself every
detail of what is going on inside my body. However, it also supplies itself
with a more overall account of how my body is prospering and relating to
other things. In short, the divine idea of my body as a whole is not itself
articulated in the way in which my body is.12 That divine description of my
body which is my mind is a gross overall description and does not include
all the details of what is happening, or does so only by the vaguest of
adumbrations.13 On the other hand, every thing which goes on in my body
may be supposed to be such that, without it, that gross overall description
would have to be a bit different, even though it does not specifically refer
to it.
A further advantage of this account is that it explains why knowledge of

the physical is so different in many ways from knowledge of the mental.
They are at least as different, qualitatively, as German and English. One can
be fluent in one while being quite ignorant of the other. This parallels the
fact that some people understand minds better while others understand
bodies better.
It also clarifies a matter which irritates many present-day readers of

Spinoza though it corresponded just to their own way of looking at things
for many nineteenth-century idealists. I refer to the Spinozistic claim that
what is falsehood in us is truth in God, because in God it belongs in the right
larger context. (See E2pl7s, E2pp32-35, E4pl and E4p2.) A crude way of
putting this point is that if God says to himself in mentalese "This body is
behaving very much as though its eyes and brain were registering the fact
that there is a winged horse in front of it," the part of his thought which
belongs to my mind may be solely the last nine words, "there is a winged
12 Thus our emotions are God's symbols for the increase or decrease of its power of
activity. "Now the idea that constitutes the specific reality of an emotion must
indicate or express the state of the body or of some part of it, which the body or some
part of it possesses from the fact that its power of activity or force of existence (vis
existendi) is increased or diminished, assisted or checked" (E3 General Definition
of the Emotions).
13 According to E2pl5 the idea of my body (which constitutes my mind) is
composed of ideas of all its parts. This seems to cast doubt on the above. Still, it is
difficult to see how E2pl5 can be made compatible with the fact that the human
mind has only a very inadequate idea of its parts. See also the puzzling E2pl9: "The
human mind has no knowledge of the body, nor does it know it to exist, except
through ideas of the affections by which the body is affected," and its proof. See
also E2pp22-23. Either we are missing some subtlety in Spinoza's text, or the best
interpretation we can give must clash with E2pl5. (The notion of unconscious mind
might help, but I am reluctant to make Spinoza as unCartesian as that.)
horse in front of it." This sentence, taking "it" to refer to my body, is false
as an occurrence in my mind, but it is true, we may suppose, in the divine
mind in the sense that it is part of a true sentence it says to itself in mentalese.
7. I have been rather equivocating as to whether one's mind is one's

consciousness or whether it also includes unconscious mental processes. I
am inclined to think that Spinoza is sufficiently Cartesian, and perhaps
sufficiently sensible, to mean the former but, if he does not, then we can
simply say that my conscious mind is a smaller bit of God's description to
himself of what my body is up to than is my mind as a whole. What so to
speak cuts out one bit of God's description so that it exists as an apparently
distinct mind is problematic on either view, of course, but it is essentially
the unitary conatus of that which it describes.
If this analogy is at all revealing we should think of God as being a
genuinely conscious being fully aware of what is going on in that physical
world whose history, together with his description of it, is a process going
on within himself. Of course, his thoughts stream out of him with a necessary
logic absent in human thought considered in isolation. (Elppl6-17, etc.) Just
as the goings on in the physical world are not the result of a divine choice,
so his thoughts reflect no choice on his part. But this is because where a
process of thought is entirely logical there is no possible room for choice on
the part of a perfect intellect. As to the question whether this subjects God to
a kind of logicised Fate, see at the end of E1 p33s2.
8. But now we must consider the somewhat problematic matter of the sense
in which the processes of the divine thought are about the processes in the
physical world rather than a kind of conceptual music which is sufficient
unto itself. For surely it cannot consist in ideas of the physical world without
being about that physical world, and, in the case of each finite bit (mode) of
it about a particular bit of it. However, the relation of aboutness seems to be
a relation holding between the world of divine thought and the world of
divine extension. Yet there are supposed not to be relations between the two
since (1) in some sense they are the same; (2) we cannot, or should not, use
concepts pertaining to both in an attempt to describe any one fact. (See
E2p7s.)
It may be suggested that, before considering how God's ideas are about
their object, we should examine first the way in which human ideas can be
about the physical world, and even about particular physical things. But I
prefer to concentrate on how the divine thought is about the physical, and
even about particular things within it, since the aboutness of human thought
must be (for Spinoza) derivative from the aboutness of the divine thought,
being essentially a matter of what external object God is aware of our body
as interacting with.14
So how is a certain developing idea in God's mind his idea of my body,
as a real physical thing? It is striking that the problem here is the same as
that which divides present theorists about the mental or propositional content
of human thoughts into so-called externalists and so-called internalists. The
former hold that what makes my thought a thought to a certain effect, in
particular a thought about some particular thing, is a matter of its external
relation to something which lies outside my mind, while the latter hold that
what I am thinking is settled entirely by what goes on inside my mind.
The most usual form of externalism holds that what my thought is about,
and how it characterizes it, is a matter of how my thought as a mental, or
perhaps brain, process has been caused.15 A rather rough and ready form of
externalism might say the following. What an idea is an idea of is a matter
of what directly, in a certain sense of "directly," caused it and how it
characterizes it is a matter of the usual cause of things (ideas) like itself.
Thus, I am thinking of a horse if my idea is caused by a particular horse, in
the specially direct way, and I am thinking of it as a horse rather than a cow,
if it has a character normally pertaining to ideas caused by horses rather than
by cows.
If we interpreted the aboutness of the divine thought in an externalist way
we would not be able to appeal to the notion of causation, since there is no
trans-attribute causation. It would have to be rather a correspondence at
every moment between the place that each idea and its object has within its
14 See E2pl lc and E3p2s.

15 See, for example, T. Brge, "Individualism and the Mental," in P. French et al.
(eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy 6 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1979). G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
J. McDowell, "On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name," Mind 86 (1977):
159-85. H. Putnam, "Meaning and Reference," Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973):
699-711. Jerry Fodor, A Theory of Mental Content (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
However, my account adapts externalism to a form more suitable as a model with
which to compare Spinoza's position.
own attribute, or infinite mode, that is, between the former's place in the
structure of the divine intellect and the latter's place in the face of the whole
universe. (This assumes that there are real temporal relations between the
attributes; if there are not, a more complicated account of such
correspondence is required.)
Though the relation between a divine idea and its object would be in a
sense ideal (turning on an isomorphism between the structure of the physical
and of the mental) it would still be external, since there would be no
aboutness in the divine ideas themselves and they would be related to their
objects only as this might be seen from the outside, if only there could be
(which of course there cannot be) an outside view on the relation between
the attributes, in particular that of thought and extension. (It should be added
that this account would have to be modified in the case of ideas of ideas.)
The trouble about this externalist approach to the divine thought is that it
seems to leave God unaware of what it is he is really thinking about (and
how he is characterizing it, though the distinction hardly applies here) since
this is determined by what lies outside his own mind (i.e., a physical world,
isormorphic with, but external to it). The fact that this seems a feature of the
modern externalist account of human thinking does not help here.16
But might we interpret the aboutness relation in a more internalistic way?
Then we would have to suppose that each individual was identified in God's
thought by a description uniquely applicable to it. There is a problem,
however, as to how the divine mentalese would possess its meaning. Does
not God need some kind of ostensive definition of the more basic predicates
of mentalese if he is really to ascribe the right properties to the right things?
Of course, saying he needs this is only a manner of speaking since
Spinoza's God obviously has no needs. All I mean is that we must attribute
to him something rather like ostensive definitions of the most basic
expressions of his language. But these require an awareness of the extended
other than by description of it, and that seems to bridge the two attributes in
a way supposed to be ruled out. For there is nothing in Spinoza's account to
suggest that God's ideas of things are based upon some more immediate
16 Attempts, of the kind made by Crispin Wright, to meet this point seem to me
specious. (The suggestion is that I know that "p" means p in my thought, because
when I say " 'p' means that p" the external factors similarly determine the meaning
both of " 'p'" and of "p".)
mode of acquaintance with them. Indeed, E2p9c,d precisely deny this17 while
E2p21 distinguishes between a first-level idea and the idea of that idea
precisely in that the latter is not concerned with what the former is about.18
9. But should we not be making use of the distinction between something

existing objectively in a mind, in particular in the divine mind, and its
existing formally, and see the link between them as consisting in the fact
that it is the same thing existing in two different ways? This, however, seems
merely a name for the fact we are trying to understand rather than an
explanation of the fact's nature.
The true solution must surely lie in taking seriously the idea dimly
grasped, according to Spinoza, by certain of the Hebrews, namely that things
and God's thought of them are somehow the same. (See E2p27s.)
One way of interpreting this would be to make use of the notion of an
intentional object. We can then say that the physical world exists as a system
of intentional objects in God's mind and that the (infinite mode of the)
attribute of thought (so far as it consists in ideas of the physical, rather than
concerns some other attribute unknown to us) consists in the divine mental
acts by which, using mentalese, these intentional objects are constituted (in
a somewhat Husserlian manner).
10.1 see a good deal going for this interpretation. Among other advantages
it makes the right kind of contrast between the divine mind and its objects,
on the one hand, and us and our objects, on the other, by so to speak being
an idealist about the one and a realist about the other.
However, it makes Spinoza far closer to absolute idealism than it is
probably appropriate to read him as being.
There must, I think, be some more intrinsic relation of pointing which
holds between God's idea of a thing, and the thing itself. God's idea of
something must, I suggest, be the thing itself somehow presenting itself
immediately to God. Then, as presenting itself to God's consciousness, it
17 "Therefore, the knowledge of what happens in an individual object is in God only

in so far as he has the idea of that object" (E2p9d).
18 "For in fact the idea of the mind that is, the idea of an idea is nothing other
than the form {forma) of the idea in so far as the idea is considered as a mode of
thinking without relation to its object" (E2p21s).
will be the idea of the thing, while apart from its thus presenting itself it will
simply be the thing.
Now may we not suppose that a complex object presents itself to God
both as articulated into all its smaller parts and as a whole? In short, may
not God have an awareness both of its details, and of its gross overall
character? If so, the idea of the whole may count as the mind of that whole,
while being distinct from the ideas of the details which will only be the
minds of the details, and no part of the mind of the whole.19
The suggestion is that somehow the physical world exists at various
different levels of detail, and presents itself to God at each of these different
levels.
I do not find this quite satisfactory, but at least it is an effort to solve the
relation of of which holds between God's idea of something and the thing
itself.
Insofar as I am a Spinozist myself I carry this a bit further and say that
God experiences each thing from within itself, and the character of the
wholes which they make up from within those wholes (in a manner which
drops the clear presentation of the details of its parts). Thus every finite
mode is experienced from within, and that, and the synthesis of them all in
one experience, is God's awareness of it, and thus pertains to the attribute
of Thought. Besides this there is the purely structural aspect of the world
which things constitute together, when viewed, doubtless by God as well as
us, more externally and less intimately. Physical descriptions of things, on
this view, specify their structure or their position in the structure of their
environment or that of the physical world in general.20 But this is more a
way in which Spinozism can be developed to meet certain difficulties than a
view one can attribute to Spinoza as a historical thinker.
11. Whatever solution there may or may not be to the problems I have been
developing, it seems to me impossible to deny that God, for Spinoza, has a
unitary consciousness of the world. Otherwise the extended world is unitary
19 Spinoza says that "the component parts of the human body do not pertain to the
essence of the body itself save in so far as they preserve an unvarying relation of
motion with one another" (E2p24d). Perhaps our consciousness is God's idea of
the travails of our formula.
20 This is true of descriptions of the more scientific kind; more ordinary descriptions
doubtless say something rather about how the things affect us.
in a way in which the mental world is not, and this goes utterly against the
notion that somehow they are the same thing, or at least expressions of the
same divine essence.
But am 1 not simply ignoring the scholium to Elp 17 in which Spinoza

says that "neither intellect nor will pertain to the nature of God" and that,
even if they did, the intellect of God would no more resemble the human
intellect than does the constellation called "the dog" resemble the dog that
barks? However, the apparent denial here that there is any communality to
"intellect" as ascribed to man and to God is possibly overstated. Obviously
they must on any account be very different, and on Spinoza's account
especially so, but that is compatible with their genuinely belonging to a
common category. Besides which comparison of E2pl and E2p2 makes it
clear that God is as genuinly a thinking thing as he is an extended thing.21
And as for the utter difference of any postulated divine intellect from a
human intellect on which he insists so strongly, my account, I believe, does
justice to it. For our interpretation shows how in the case of God there is no
possible contrast between the way things are and the way they are thought
to be, whereas the existence of such a distinction is obviously intrinsic to
human thought. Relatedly, there is a kind of apartness between our ideas
and their objects, whereas in the case of God's ideas they are certainly in
some sense the same things.22
21 Note in this connection that "will and intellect bear the same relationship to God's
nature as motion-and-rest" (Elp32c2), which shows surely that just as there is a
unitary cosmic process of motion and rest so there is a unitary cosmic mental
process. In Elp33s2 Spinoza speaks of all philosophers whom he has read as
granting that the intellect and will of God are "not distinct from his essence," but I
doubt that this is intended to abrogate Spinoza's own view of the infinite intellect
and will as infinite modes rather than as strictly identical with God's essence.
22 Santayana may have it about right. "If ... we proclaim the universal presence of
spirit in matter, at least we should not forget the dictum of Spinoza that the mind of
the universe resembles the human mind as the dogstar resembles the barking animal,
in name only. Man lives on food, reproducing himself precariously, dying, and
struggling not to die. His experience is all born of pressure and care. But a universe
lives on itself, without habitat or neighbours; its mind would therefore be entirely
free and automatic, subject to no external stimulus and addressed to no external
object. As Sirius and a dog are parts of the same realm of matter, so a universal mind
and the human mind would fall within the same category of spirit, and deserve that
title. But they would be as different, within that sphere, as it is possible to be." George
Santayana, The Realm of Spirit (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), p. 37.
12. A word should now be given to the supposed other attributes of which
we are not aware.
Perhaps the world as conceived under each of these other attributes is

what we call the system of physical things conceived differently, but just as
correctly, in virtue of alternative ways in which it can be organized into
distinct gestalten and thus with different laws relating its basic units. This is
an interpretation close, I seem to recall, to one once presented by Samuel
Alexander.
The worlds of these different attributes would relate to each other rather
as a language in which the basic referents were what for us are "mere stages,
or brief temporal segments"23 of our things and the laws of nature would be
similarly somehow transformed. They would be alternative patterns which
the world genuinely exemplifies but which we cannot see all at once, just as
we cannot simultaneously see an ambiguous drawing in two different ways,
but must switch from one to another.
13.1 should like to relate my interpretation of the attributes to the old

question of the objective versus the subjective interpretation thereof. The
latter is now almost universally reviled. But it had one great advantage over
the objective view, namely, that it liberates Spinoza from a common
objection to Elp4 and Elp5 and their proofs.
Since Leibniz, Spinoza has been accused, in these two propositions and
their proofs, of ignoring the possibility that there might be two substances
with some, but not all, attributes in common. Spinoza argues first that two
substances could not be distinguished by their affections or modes, since to
have different affections or modes they would have to be, so to speak,
already distinct substances, just as people cannot be in different bodily states
unless they are already different people. Thus what distinguishes them must
be their attributes.
His argument would be unproblematic if he had said that, if not

distinguished by their affections, substances must be distinguished by their
essence, for the meaning of essence being what it is, we could not then ask
why they might not have had some essences in common and some not so.
23 W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: M.I. T. Press, 1960), p. 51. But
would such things have their own conatus this being surely for Spinoza a
trans-attribute concept?
But (in Elp4) he actually speaks of their being distinguished by their

attributes in the plural.
To avoid the apparent third alternative of some but not all attributes in
common, Spinoza needs the following missing proposition, let us call it
proposition Elp2a:
Two substances which have one attribute in common must have all
attributes in common.
Now if the subjective interpretation of the attributes were correct then this
proposition could be established quite easily. It seems obvious that an
attribute could not be the phenomenal appearance of an essence E[ if it
could equally function as the phenomenal appearance of essence E2. This
shows that one attribute in common implies an essence in common. But
equally an essence in common implies all attributes in common. For how
could there be things sharing the same essence yet the essence in one case
be able to present itself phenomenally by an attribute by which it could not
be phenomenally presented in the other case? It can hardly be an inessential
feature of an essence that it can be phenomenally presented to intellect in a
particular way.
Now I do not accept the subjective view, for it mistakenly supposes that
the attributes hide rather than reveal the essence which they present.
However, neither do I agree with the objective view, which seems to regard
the attributes as really just compounded as an aggregate to constitute the
essence. For that gives us no notion of why there should not be compounds
of attributes which had partly the same attributes as its components while it
had partly different ones.
The third alternative, which seems to me the right one, is that the
attributes are, each of them, a positive revelation of the essence of substance,
that is, one genuinely correct way of conceiving and understanding it.24
This alternative provides, like the subjective view and unlike the objective
view (for which the one substance, or its essence, is simply a compound of
all the attributes),25 an argument for accepting the missing proposition,
24 For more on this see my "Spinoza: His Identity Theory," Philosophy through its
Past, ed. Ted Honderich (Pelican, 1984).
25 If substance or its essence is merely a compound of its attributes it is difficult to
see why the presence of one of them implies the presence of the rest of them, or why
their processes should run parallel to each other. It may be said that Spinoza's
expression "consisting of infinite attributes" (substantiam constantem inflnitis
Elp2a, that one attribute in common implies all attributes in common.

For it seems obvious that an attribute could not be the revelation of an
essence E, if it could equally function as the revelation of essence E2. This

shows that one attribute in common implies an essence in common. But
equally an essence in common implies all attributes in common. For how
could there be things sharing the same essence yet the essence in one case
be able to reveal itself by an attribute by which it could not be revealed in
the other case? It can hardly be an inessential feature of an essence that it
can be revealed to intellect in a particular way, that is, by a particular
attribute.
14. A word now on God's intellectual love of himself (E5p35.) He is aware

of the whole world of natura naturata as streaming forth from his essence
and pertaining to him as his modes infinite and finite. This produces intense
pleasure in him not, indeed, the passive emotion of pleasure which is
denied of him in E5pl7 but the active form of it identified in E3p58 which
reads: "Besides the pleasure and desire that are passive emotions, there
are other emotions of pleasure and desire that are related to us in so far as
we are active." And it is as the cause of this pleasure that he loves himself
with active intellectual love. This, again, is not love in the sense of
Spinoza's main definition thereof "as pleasure with the idea of an external
cause," since he is not his own external cause, but love of self in the sense
of acquiescentia in se ipso, i.e., "self-contentment" (Shirley) or "self
esteem" (Curley), as defined in E3p30s and at E3def.aff.25, though this
sounds lacking in the intensity which must surely characterize divine
self-love.26
attributis) (Eld6 and elsewhere) suggests a compound, but it is equally true that his
talk of each attribute as expressing the essence, reality or being of substance
{realitatem, sive esse substantiae exprimit, lplOs) coheres better with the subjective
or my own present account. This is true even if we refer to it as a "unified
compound," leaving aside what "unified" can mean. See A. Wolf, "Spinoza's
Conception of the Attributes of Substance," in S. P. Kashap (ed.), Studies in Spinoza
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 17-18.
26 "Self-contentment is pleasure arising from a man's contemplation of himself and
his power of activity" (E3def25). See also E5p27d (adeoque qui res hoc cognitionis
genere cognoscit, is ad summam humanam perfectionem transit, & consequenter
... summa Laetitia afficitur) and E5p36s (where he speaks of animi acquiescentia,
quae revera a Gloria ... non distinguitur).
It may be objected that really God's love of himself is simply the fact that
among his finite modes are minds which love him.27 This may be supported
by reference to E5p36, where Spinoza says that
the mind's intellectual love towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God
loves himself.
However, we should read this, the second sentence of the proposition, in the
light of the first:
The mind's intellectual love towards God is the love of God wherewith God loves
himself not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he can be explicated through
the essence of the human mind considered under a form of eternity.
Surely the implication is that God also loves himself in so far as he is

infinite.28 In that case there is what might almost be called a transcendent
aspect to God as the ultimate rejoicing unity of the world which is no mere
aggregate of the enjoyments of finite things.
In section 6 I have spoken as if the divine mind were following the
development of events in time. This, however, is a matter of controversy. Is
it not better to think of the whole of infinite cosmic history as timelessly
present to it as a whole? I leave this issue open, beyond remarking that much
must turn on the interpretation of E5p29s, and whether there is or is not some
kind of division between God's awareness of history as unfolding
temporally and his awareness of all things as following from his essence.
The main point is that God enjoys the whole necessary process and that,
if Spinoza is right, our highest satisfaction must lie in sharing in that joy,
either by appreciating the way the power of God expresses itself in other
things or flows through us.29
University of Edinburgh
27 That is, with the love spoken of in E5pp 1516.

28 Besides which, even natural phenomena remote from human beings are surely
enjoyed by God through his ideas of them as following necessarily upon one another
within him.
29 "the more we are affected with pleasure, the more we pass to a state of greater
perfection; and consequently the more we participate in the divine nature"
(E4Appendix31).

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The Mind of Spinoza's God

Iyyun The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 50 (July 2001): 253-272

3 See next note.

The face of the whole universe, as infinite mode of the attribute of

1 Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University

Consider now the description of a body doing something, say "body X

11 Even if Quinean considerations might require some qualification of this, each

6. This metaphor of different languages can serve our purposes in

Thus my mind is God's description in mentalese of what my body is up

A further advantage of this account is that it explains why knowledge of

It also clarifies a matter which irritates many present-day readers of

7. I have been rather equivocating as to whether one's mind is one's

14 See E2pl lc and E3p2s.

9. But should we not be making use of the distinction between something

17 "Therefore, the knowledge of what happens in an individual object is in God only

But am 1 not simply ignoring the scholium to Elp 17 in which Spinoza

Perhaps the world as conceived under each of these other attributes is

13.1 should like to relate my interpretation of the attributes to the old

His argument would be unproblematic if he had said that, if not

But (in Elp4) he actually speaks of their being distinguished by their

Elp2a, that one attribute in common implies all attributes in common.

essence E, if it could equally function as the revelation of essence E2. This

14. A word now on God's intellectual love of himself (E5p35.) He is aware

Surely the implication is that God also loves himself in so far as he is

27 That is, with the love spoken of in E5pp 1516.

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