Questions about Spinoza

Remarque

1. excerpt from pp. 180-185

   With these demonstrations I have explained God’s nature and properties: God exists necessarily; God is unique; God exists and acts solely from the necessity of the divine nature; God is the free cause of all things (and I have shown how); all things are in God and depend on God in such a way that without God they can’t exist or be conceived; all things have been precaused by God, not from freedom of the will or absolute ·whim or· good pleasure, but from God’s absolute nature or infinite power. Further, I have taken care, whenever the occasion arose, to remove prejudices that could prevent my demonstrations from being grasped. But because many prejudices remain that could—that can—be a great obstacle to men’s understanding my way of explaining how things hang together, I have thought it worthwhile to consider those prejudices here, subjecting them to the scrutiny of reason. All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on the common supposition that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end. Indeed, people maintain as a certainty that God directs all things to some definite end, this being implicit in their view that God has made all things for man and has made man to worship God. So I shall begin by considering this one prejudice, asking first why most people are satisfied that it is true and so inclined by nature to embrace it. Then I shall show its falsity, and finally show how from this prejudices have arisen concerning good and evil, merit and wrong-doing, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and ugliness, and other things of this kind.

   (1) Of course this is not the place to derive my explanations from the nature of the human mind. It will suffice here to build on two things that every- one must admit to be true: that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, and that all men want to seek their own advantage and are conscious of wanting this. From these premises it follows that men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their choices and their desires, are ignorant of the causes that incline them to want and to choose, and thus never give the faintest thought —even in their dreams!—to those causes. It follows also that men act always on account of a goal, specifically on account of their advantage, which they seek. Putting these two together, men are in a frame of mind from which efficient causes —that is, real causes—are almost totally absent, and which is saturated by thought about final causes, goals or ends or purposes. So the only explanations they look for are ones in terms of final causes—in asking ‘Why did that happen?’ they are asking ‘For what purpose did that happen?’—and when they have heard that they are satisfied, having nothing more to ask. But if they can’t get such explanations from others they have to turn to themselves, and to reflect on the ends by which they are usually led to do such things; so they necessarily judge the temperament of other men from their own temperament. Furthermore, they find—both in themselves and outside themselves— many means that are very helpful in seeking their own advantage: eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for light, the sea for supporting fish, and similarly with almost everything else whose natural causes—that is, whose efficient causes—they are not curious about. This leads them to consider all natural things as means to their own advantage. And knowing that they had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to think there was someone else who had prepared these means for human use. So they inferred that one or more rulers of nature, endowed with human freedom, had taken care of all things for them, and made all things for their (human) use. And since they had never heard anything about the character of these rulers, they had to judge it from their own characters; so they maintained that the Gods direct everything for the use of men in order to bind men to them and be held by men in the highest honour! So it has come about that each man has thought up—on the basis of his own character—his own way of worshipping God, so that God might love him above all the rest, and direct the whole of nature according to the needs of his blind desire and insatiable greed. Thus this prejudice changed into superstition, and struck deep roots in men’s minds. This is why everyone tried so hard to understand and explain the final causes— the purposes—of all things. But while trying to show that nature does nothing in vain (meaning: nothing that isn’t useful to men), they seem to have shown only that nature and the gods are as mad as men are! Look at how they ended up! Along with many conveniences in nature they couldn’t avoid finding many inconveniences—storms, earthquakes, diseases, etc. They hold that these happen because the gods—whom they judge on the basis of themselves—are angry with men for wronging them or making mistakes in their worship. And though their daily experience contradicted this, and though countless examples showed that conveniences and inconveniences happen indiscriminately to the pious and the impious alike, that didn’t lead them to give up their longstanding prejudice. It was easier for them to put the gods’ reasons for· this among the other unknown things whose uses they were ignorant of, thus remaining in the state of ignorance in which they had been born, than to destroy that whole construction and think up a new one. So they maintained it as certain that the gods’ judgments far surpass man’s grasp. This alone would have caused the truth to be hidden from the human race for ever, if mathematics hadn’t shown them another standard of truth. It could do this because it isn’t involved in the final-causes muddle, because·it is concerned not with ends but only with the essential properties of figures. In addition to mathematics there have also been a few other things (I needn’t list them here) which have enabled a few men to notice these common prejudices and be led to the true knowledge of things.

   (2) That is enough on what I promised in the first place, namely, to explain why men are so inclined to believe that all things act for an end. I don’t need many words to show that nature has no end set before it, and that all final causes are nothing but human fictions. I think I have already sufficiently establish- ed it, both by my explanation of the origins of this prejudice and also by the propositions by which I have shown that everything happens by a certain eternal necessity of nature and with the greatest perfection. Still, I shall add this: this doctrine about ends turns nature completely upside down. For what is really a cause it considers as an effect, and conversely what is an effect it considers as a cause. What by nature comes first it makes follow. And finally, what is supreme and most perfect it makes imperfect. The first two points are self-evident. Again, this doctrine takes away God’s perfection. For if God acts for the sake of an end, it must be that God wants something and therefore lacks something. And though the theologians and meta- physicians distinguish different kinds of ends, that doesn’t help them with the present difficulty. They say that God did everything for God’s own sake and not for the sake of the things God was going to create. For before the creation that they believe in they can’t find anything for the sake of which God could act— except God! And so they have to admit that God willed to make things happen as means to things that God wanted and lacked. This is self-evident. I should also mention that the followers of this doctrine about ends, wanting to show off their cleverness in saying what things are for, have called to their aid a new form of argument: instead of reducing things to the impossible, they reduce them to ignorance! Their resorting to this shows that no other way of defending their doctrine was open to them. For example, if a slate falls from a roof onto someone’s head and kills him, they will argue that the slate fell in order to kill the man. Here is how their argument goes: If it didn’t fall for that purpose because God wanted the man to be killed, how could so many circumstances have come together by chance? You may answer that it happened because the wind was blowing hard and the man was walking that way. But why was the wind blowing hard just then? Why was the man walking by just then? If you answer that the wind arose then because on the preceding day, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to toss, and that the man had been invited somewhere by a friend, then we will ask: Why was the sea tossing? Why was the man invited at just that time? And on it goes! They won’t stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, which is the haven of unacknowledged ignorance. Similarly, when they see the structure of the human body, these people are struck by a foolish wonder; and because they don’t know the causes of this elaborate structure they conclude that it is constructed not by mechanical processes but by divine or supernatural skill, and constituted as it is so that the parts won’t injure another. So it comes about that someone who seeks the true causes of ‘miracles’ and is eager (like an educated man) to understand natural things, not (like a fool) to wonder at them, is denounced as an impious heretic by those whom the people honour as interpreters of nature and of the gods. For the denouncers know that if ignorance is taken away and replaced by real knowledge of mechanical processes, then foolish wonder is also taken away, depriving them of their only means for arguing and defending their authority. Enough of this; I now pass on to what I decided to treat here in the third place.

   (3) After men convinced themselves that whatever happens does so on their account, they had to judge as most important in each thing whatever is most useful to them, and to rate as most excellent all the things by which they were most pleased. So they had to develop the notions: good, bad, order, confusion, warm, cold, beauty, ugliness, in terms of which they ‘explained’ natural things. I shall briefly discuss these here. Whatever contributes to health and to the worship of God they have called ‘good’, and what is contrary to these they call ‘bad’. Those who don’t understand the real nature of things, and have only a pictorial grasp of them, mistake their own imaginings for intellectual thought; they really have nothing to say about things, but in their ignorance of things and of their own natures they firmly believe that there is an order in things. When a number of items are set out in such a way that when they’re presented to us through the senses we can easily imagine them—can easily depict them to ourselves— and so can easily remember them, we say that they are ‘orderly’; but if the opposite is true we say that they are ‘disorderly’ or ‘confused’. And since the things we can easily imagine are especially pleasing to us, men prefer ‘order’ to ‘confusion’, as if order were something in nature more than a relation to our imagination! They also say that God has created all things to be orderly (thus unknowingly attributing imagination to God, unless they mean that God has disposed things so that men can easily imagine them). Perhaps they won’t be deterred—though they should be— by the fact that we find infinitely many things that far surpass our imagination, and many that confuse it on account of its weakness. But enough of this. The other notions are also nothing but various states of the imagination; yet ignorant people consider them to be chief attributes of things. This is because, as I have already said, they believe that all things were made for their sake, and call the nature of a thing ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘sound’ or ‘rotten’ and ‘corrupt’, according to how it affects them. For example, if the motion the nerves receive from objects presented through the eyes is conducive to health, the objects that cause it are called ‘beautiful’; those that cause a contrary motion are called ‘ugly’. Those that move the sensory apparatus through the nose they call ‘pleasant-smelling’ or ‘stinking’; through the tongue, ‘sweet’ or ‘bitter’, ‘tasty’ or ‘tasteless’; through touch, ‘hard’ or ‘soft’, ‘rough’ or ‘smooth’, etc.; and finally those that affect us through the ears are said to produce ‘noise’, ‘sound’ or ‘harmony’. Some men have been mad enough to believe that God is pleased by harmony! All these things show well enough that each person has judged things according to the disposition of his own brain; or rather, has accepted states of the imagination as things. So it is no wonder (I note in passing) that we find so many controversies to have arisen among men, and that they have finally given rise to scepticism. For although human bodies are alike in many ways, they still differ in very many. And for that reason what seems good to one seems bad to another; what seems ordered to one seems confused to another; what seems pleasing to one seems displeasing to another, and so on. I pass over the other notions here, both because this is not the place to treat them at length and because everyone has experienced this variability sufficiently for himself. That is why we have such sayings as ‘So many heads, so many attitudes’, ‘Everyone is well pleased with his own opinion’, and ‘Brains differ as much as palates do’. These proverbs show well enough that men judge things according to the disposition of their brain, and imagine things rather than under- standing them. For if men had understood natural things they would at least have been convinced of the truth about them, even if they weren’t all attracted by it. The example of mathematics shows this. So we see that all the notions by which ordinary people are accustomed to explain nature are only states of the imagination, and don’t indicate the nature of anything except the imagination. Many people are accustomed to arguing in this way: If all things have followed from the necessity of God’s most perfect nature, why are there so many imperfections in nature? why are things so rotten that they stink? so ugly that they make us sick? why is there confusion, evil, and wrong-doing? I repeat that those who argue like this are easily answered. For the perfection of things is to be judged solely from their nature and power; things are not more or less perfect because they please or offend men’s senses, or because they are useful or harmful to human nature. But to those who ask ‘Why didn’t God create all men so that they would be governed by the command of reason?’ I answer only: ‘Because God had the material to create all things, from the highest degree of perfection to the lowest’; or, to put it more accurately, ‘Because the laws of God’s nature have been so ample that they sufficed for producing all things that can be conceived by an unlimited intellect’ (as I demonstrated in 16)—that is, producing everything that is conceivable or possible. ↩