Silliman's Papers

Spinoza’s God: The One, The Necessarily Existent
By Daniel Silliman
December 11, 2003
For Donald Turner
Modern Philosophy

Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy is always and everywhere centered around and grounded in his idea of God. He was described by contemporaries as “a man intoxicated by God” and as “drowning in God,” which are strange descriptions for a man who began his philosophical search by getting excommunicated from his Jewish community in Holland for being an atheist. Since one can hardly move in Spinoza’s philosophy without bumping into Spinoza’s God, let us consider that God in light of evidence for existence, the problem of the one and the many, and foundationalisnm.

Spinoza offers four arguments for the existence of God, his versions of Anselm’s Ontological argument, hinging on the nature of existence. We will consider here the first and fourth proof.

For Spinoza, either God doesn’t exist or God exists necessarily with a non-existence is inconceivable.
1) The essence of substance involves existence.
2) Anything whose essence involves existence cannot be conceived as nonexistent.
3) God is a substance.
4) Therefore God exists.
If we say God’s non-existence is conceivable, then we say that the idea of God involves existence and non-nonexistence, this being absurd, God cannot not exist. He reworks Anselm’s argument so that existence depends from the essence of substance: Anselm’s Platonic preference for existence – it is more perfect to exist than to not exist – sharpened and put up as the primary premise. Still, this seems to go astray at a few key points. P1 seems more susceptible to the sandwich counter than Anselm ever was. P1 seems overly susceptible to arguments like “everything that exists necessarily exists, since the essence of substance is existence and the things that exist must exist.” It doesn’t seem clear that P3 isn’t begging the question. God is a substance, which means by definition that God exists which means that we have defined God, in P3, as existing, which is what we wanted to prove. Why should I accept P3? It doesn’t seem to recommend itself to any but the convinced and the counter – God is not a substance – seems more intuitively inline with theism’s traditional separation of God and God’s creation.

Moving past internal problems, even the conclusions is weaker than we need it to be, since it doesn’t seem to say that God exist but for something to be God, that something would have to exist. There is no distinction here between a type of substance called God which in English is called sandwich and the type of God we were worried about in the first place. To back pedal from this, we’d want to bring in Anselmian language about a that-which-that-which-none-greater-can-be-conceived. Spinoza’s first proof is a nice accessory to Anselm’s ontological proof, but it doesn’t stand independent.
The second proof we will consider is move conscious of invoking infinity to establish God’s existence, the locus of this argument is Anselm’s “greater.”
1) Existence is a power.
2) The more reality a nature has, the more power it has.
3) Things of an absolutely infinite nature has infinite reality
4) Therefore, absolutely infinite things have infinite power of existing.
5) Therefore, absolutely infinite beings must exist.
The reason to except P2 and P3 is a Platonic one: It is the chain of being, the Platonic preference for existence. Thus what we end up with from Spinoza does not seem to be able to operate independently of Anselm’s proofs.

Curiously, the one of the main attacks on Anselm’s deducted God is exactly the distinction between Anselm and Spinoza. Anselm, who was declared a Saint by the Catholic Church and didn’t want to prove God so much as to show how the method worked, remained within Christian Orthodoxy and was accused of producing a God that was faceless and impersonal, a God who was finally unable to save us from the human problems but rather existed apart in a cold logical space doing nothing. Anselm could not accept this as a result, and separated his proved God from the God of the faith. Spinoza, not restrained by an orthodoxy, accepted the faceless and impersonal God as the only one logically possible.

We move here to our second route of considering Spinoza’s God, his declaration that God is One and the One is all. Spinoza is unique among his Modern contemporaries for rolling his argument back to the ancient question of the one and the many, concluding all is one, and explaining the world from there. This metaphysical problem considers the taxonomical quandary of the existence of a whole and or particulars. How can the whole be whole if it is divided? How can the particulars be particulars if they are whole? What is the relationship between the One and the Many? Most want there to be some way of answering the question so that we maintain both the whole and the parts, so that we have a single leaf but also have leaves. Most want to establish a relationship such that, to steal from the left field of Trinitarian philosophy, the One is Three and the Three are One. But this talk seems to many to be outside the bounds of logic, and they are forced to side with the whole-less many or the distinction-less whole.

Spinoza, starting with the proof of God’s existence depending from God’s absolute infinity, accepts the consequences of infinity in a Parmenides-style monism. For Spinoza there is only One and the One is all, is God. He doesn’t take this up lightly, but for two reasons:
First, if God is infinite, then there can be no limitations on him for a limited thing isn’t infinite.
Second, there can be no other things since God contains all attributes and two distinct things cannot share attributes. God is absolutely infinite and thus possesses every actual and possible attribute, which will not allow any substance other than God to exist.

As Spinoza’s proposition 14 of the Ethics states the monism: “Besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived.” For Spinoza, there is only One.
That-which-none-greater-than-which-can-be-conceived works out to that-which-than-which-none-other-can-be-conceived. Otherwise there would be something greater.

Some have attempted to pin Spinoza a pantheist, but that misses the point by talking about the All as Many. Spinoza is a monotheist who denies that anything other than his God exists. It is only then that he insists that every particular you point to is, indeed, God. But in doing this he denies their particularness. Attempting to explain the nature of the multitude of “things,” Spinoza gives us modes, that is, ways the One manifests itself in finite ways. There is only One, which exists through itself, and all attributes are attributes of the One. “Whatever is,” he writes, “is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.” Finitude is modal where substance is infinite. The substance is greater than the sum of modes and is beyond the many finite modes. The substance, that is God, is infinite and has infinitely many attributes, and can be divided into the kinds of mind and body. We know thinking things and extended things, which are both one substance and the substance is God.

Still, this only moves our problems of wholes and particulars back. The question remains as to how these modes relate to the One. Indeed, some of the answers recreate the questions. For example, if the absolutely infinite manifests in finite modes, it is therefore interacting with those modes, relating to them, and therefore defined and limited by them. The One turns on itself, creating the Many within and spawning again the questions of limitations on the infinite and now inner taxonomical questions.

If we ask “Where is your God Spinoza?” the “heretic” “atheist” who is “intoxicated by God” will answer in these ways, telling us his God is the God who necessarily exists and his God is the Substance, the One that is all. If his God fails, his God fails here and can only fail here – fail to necessarily exist and fail to be one. This offers us new ways of getting into these philosophical issues and new ways to measure Gods and to look again at first methods.