James Thomas - Intuition and Reality: A Study of the Attributes of Substance in the Absolute Idealism of Spinoza

First published 1999 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

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Copyright James Thomas 1999

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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-32692-7 (hbk)

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This book is an extended reflection on the problem of Spinozas attributes, a reflection which centres on idealist readings of the Ethics. But to say this is to make it sound both more distant and arcane and more settled in its course than the book really is.

Spinozas problem of the attributes is a response to issues which remain very central in our affairs. Spinoza was in an obvious sense what he claimed to be: a Cartesian. Yet he grasped at once that Descartes philosophy had in it the seeds of destruction a destruction which threatened not only Descartes own project, but also the roots of the civilization which produced it and the sciences on which Descartes pinned nearly all of his hopes. For his philosophy appeared to separate mind from body, to separate the sciences from the humanities and to leave values in a special limbo from which rational reflection was excluded. Descartes himself was not unaware of these things, and much of his last writing and some of his final letters are devoted to the notion which he had first set forth clearly in his Meditations : the notion that there is behind all our experience and all our concepts a unifying infinite and that our connection with this infinite must drive us to an ethics of generosity which would be equal to our place in such schemes.

Yet many Cartesians at once plunged into endless disputes about mind and matter and, having made that distinction, into disputes about whether or not the ideas which are in our minds could truly represent a world beyond us. These problems still plague us, and thinkers have very often seen in Descartes philosophy a blatant scientism which would leave the humanities as a kind of powerless reflection on the inner life.

Spinozas theory of the attributes was an attempt to put the pieces back together again. If one takes Descartes seriously one can read him (as he himself hinted) in the light of Eustachius a Sancto Paulo. Such a reading leaves him not so far from Spinoza. Dr. Thomas notes these things in passing, but he is in no doubt and should not be that the problems needed to be worked out, and need still to be worked out.

Spinozas theory of the attributes is, therefore, no small matter. It cannot safely be left to a handful of experts, for in it are the pieces which we must use to solve our own basic problems. It must therefore be laid out in a way in which a wide range of intelligent thinkers can grasp it. Hegel said that a philosopher must first be a Spinozist if he is to be of any worth at all. There is a case for such a view. Dr. Thomas has made it more readily possible for any philosopher to grasp the issues.

The idealist reading of the problem essentially makes unity possible by making thought play a decisive role in the system. (We only know one other attribute, extension, but Spinoza believed that there were infinitely many more.) Dr. Thomas shows us, however, that there are several lines which an idealist thinker can take in examining this situation and that all of them pose problems. He carefully reviews all the evident alternatives and sometimes he breaks new ground in these reviews, for instance in comparing and contrasting Timothy Sprigges views with my own in a way which reveals both in a new and useful light.

It is not, however, so much in the reviews of texts that the value of Dr. Thomass book lies as in the way in which he exposes the idea of a kind of continuous discourse which surrounds these problems. I would argue that in the nature of things some questions which we want to put to Spinoza cannot be answered by reference to his text. The text is not a collection of mathematical symbols but a discourse which deploys concepts which are in wide use both in technical philosophy and in ordinary discourse. Spinoza does not mean by God, cause or, indeed, attribute anything which is likely to be in the mind of a citizen plucked at random from the street in Amsterdam or the Hague then or now.

Spinozas philosophical problems arose precisely because ordinary modes of discourse failed to capture the ideas needed to respond to the new problems of the Cartesian age. The scholastics had thought that we were directly acquainted with, at least, parts of the surfaces of things. The new sciences had made clear that the break between appearance and reality was very great and the Cartesian ideas of idea strove to fill the gap. Descartes employed representative ideas but he also used ideas, like those ofGod and the self, which were directly constitutive of reality.

Spinoza moved to close the gap between ideas and their objects (or better still to deny that there was a real gap) through the notion of adequate ideas and through his delineation of the role played by the attribute of thought. Malebranche strove to develop further the notion of constitutive ideas so that we might know the world by sharing in the ideas of God. All this philosophical activity required a reworking of the concepts of thought and a venture into discourse which remains imperfectly explicated.

It is the cluster of problems associated with the role of thought and thoughts relation to whatever else there is that occupies Dr. Thomas. The concepts were significantly new while the language in which they were expressed was very old and laden with philosophical baggage, and so the possible interpretations are many. Furthermore, the ongoing discourse which culminated in the works of Spinoza and Malebranche neither began nor ended with these great thinkers. Jean Terrasson was moved by both Descartes and Malebranche and suggested that philosophy must be a kind of continuous discourse.

This gave rise to two theses which are surely refuted by the whole structure of Dr. Thomass admirably lucid book. On one view philosophers like Spinoza and Malebranche lapse into nonsense because they have, indeed, departed from ordinary language not so much in creating new words or jargon but, as the Wittgensteinians thought, in putting bits of language to uses for which they were not designed. Thus, the Oxford ordinary language philosophers would have been inclined to say that thinking is an activity, a kind of behaviour. To speak of thought is just to speak of certain kinds of descriptions of that activity. When Spinoza talks about the attribute of thought and puzzles over the place of thought in being, he seems to make the modes of thought one of the kinds of thing in the world. They become parallel entities, harnessed to the modes of extension. The ordinary language philosophers would say he is misusing language. Different theories about how this ontology is to be construed are all hopeless, for they are all based on misuses of language. What Dr. Thomass analysis of the many readings of Spinoza makes clear is that Spinozas arguments can be carried on intelligibly because they do indeed respond to a genuine puzzle having to do with the ways in which our knowing activities mesh or fail to mesh with reality.