Spinoza Benedictus de - Persistence through Time in Spinoza

Persistence through Time in Spinoza

I would like to thank many scholars for their generous support over the past few years. First, I would like to thank Jan Cover, Daniel Frank, and Mike Jacovides for their great help in working out the ideas presented in this book while studying at Purdue. This book also benefited at different stages by the work of numerous anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank my fellow Purdue Spinoza scholars Chris Martin and Thad Robinson for many wonderful conversations. I learned a great deal about Spinoza from both of them. Finally, I would like to thank my beautiful and brilliant wife, Rebecca, for her love, support, and help in understanding the finer points of Descartess philosophy.

Some of this material has been published elsewhere. A few paragraphs from my paper Spinoza on the Incoherence of Self-Destruction, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17(3) 2009: 507523 are reprinted in chapter 2. A version of chapter 3 was previously published as Spinoza on the Illusion of Temporal Passage, Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly (59) 2010: 4762. A version of chapter 4 has also been published as Spinoza on Conatus and Persistence Through Time, Journal of Philosophical Research, 37: 51-72. I would like to thank these journals for permission to reprint this material.

This book concerns ordinary cases of persistence through time in Spinozas metaphysics. In this first chapter, I begin by outlining (i) the problem of persistence, (ii) Spinozas theory of bodies, (iii) the three general solutions to the problem of persistence (endurance, perdurance, and exdurance), and (iv) the central argument of this book. My goal in this chapter is to make the relevant background material accessible to the non-specialist. I will, therefore, largely sidestep technical scholarly disputes and citations. I reserve these issues for the following chapters.

The problem of persistence arises from the acceptance of four mutually inconsistent theses all of which seem to be true:

1. Consistency Thesis: No body can have incompatible properties. That is, no body x can both have and not have some property F.

2. Identity Thesis: If x is identical to y, then x and y have all of the same properties.

3. Change Thesis: All changes involve incompatible properties. That is, a body x changes when it goes from having property F to not having F (or vice versa).

4. Survival Thesis: Bodies survive change. The body x which has property F at time t1 is identical to the body x which does not have property F at time t2.

These four theses generate a paradox because although they are all highly intuitive, it seems as though they cannot all be true. Consider, for example, a candle which goes from being straight at time t1 to being bent at time t2. Has the candle survived this change in shape? It seems as though it could not have. In order to survive the change the candle at time t2 must be identical to the candle at time t1 (by the Survival Thesis). But then (by the Identity Thesis) the straight-candle and the bent-candle must have all of the same properties. But the straight-candle and the bent-candle cannot have all of the same properties because the properties of being straight and being bent are incompatible (by the Change Thesis) and no thing can have incompatible properties (by the Consistency Thesis). To claim that the candle has survived this change is to commit ones self to a contradiction by claiming that something has incompatible properties (i.e., is both straight and bent). Thus, to avoid the contradiction it seems as though we must say that the candle has been destroyed by the bending and a numerically distinct (but similar looking) new candle has been created.

The conclusion that the candle has not survived the bending is strange. But if this reasoning is correct, then the consequences of this strange conclusion are quite troublesome. For example, the same kind of reasoning could apply to every change (no matter how small) that anything undergoes. Thus, we would be committed to claiming that nothing can survive any change. All change destroys the thing changed! To see just one weird consequence of this conclusion consider a person, named Bob, who is filling out the paperwork to take out a loan from a bank at 10:30am while seated in a chair. At 10:31 Bob signs the forms, stands up, shakes the bankers hand, and receives the check. After receiving the check Bob claims to not be the person who was sitting in the chair a moment ago (how can he be, being seated and being standing are incompatible properties?) and thus he, the standing Bob, is not responsible for the loan that other guy signed for. Certainly no one is responsible for a loan that someone else took outno matter how much that other person resembles you! Unless the guy in the chair who signed for the loan is identical to the guy now standing, the guy now standing is not responsible for the loan. But the conclusion that standing-Bob is not responsible for the loan that sitting-Bob signed for is ridiculous. Thus, there must be something wrong with the initial line of reasoningone of the four highly intuitive theses must be false. But which one? A theory of persistence is a theory which explains how it is possible for bodies to persistence through (at least some) changes without being destroyed. A theory of persistence must do two things: (i) it must explain which of the four intuitive theses is false and (ii) it must explain how some kind of persistence or survival is still possible without that thesis.

The problem of persistence is a particularly difficult problem for Spinoza. The problem is tricky because Spinoza argues for a unique theory of bodies whereby they are modes or modifications of space (i.e., substance). In this section I outline Spinozas unique theory of bodies in an intuitive way and show why the problem of persistence is such a difficult problem for him to solve. I am not concerned here with refuting alternative scholarly interpretations (although I will note a few important controversies in passing). Instead my aim is to introduce the non-specialist to the core ideas of Spinozas theory of bodies.