Silliman's Papers
The documents page for danielsilliman.blogpsot.com.Thursday, April 21, 2005
Addendum I: Eriugena and Spinoza
The comparison between Eriugena’s pantheistic answer and Baruch Spinoza’s monistic answer looks to be a profitable and intriguing consideration for further study. While the two are different, they attempt a similar feat and face similar complications and reactions. Both of them answer the problem of the One and the Many with an ontological explanation of how everything that is, is God. Both are insistent on the transcendence and unboundedness of God. Both of them are deeply religious while being defined as outside of orthodoxy.
Spinoza was excommunicated from his synagogue as a young man, and lived outside of any religious community or tradition. It is in this exile that he develops what might be considered one of the most compelling ontological approaches to the problem of the One and the Many by making the case that Being is One and the One is God, and God manifests himself to himself modally. Spinoza aggressively denies pantheism, stating that he denies the possibility of anything other than God. He is not a pantheist but a monist, arguing that all is God only understood under the idea that all is one. Because of his ontology of monistic modalism, his contemporaries named him a “heretic,” an “atheist.” Yet, he was also describes as a philosopher who was “intoxicated by” and “drowning in” God.
Attempting to explain the nature of the multitude of beings, 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, God, is infinite.
Spinoza’s argument for God’s transcendence takes the form of claiming that nothing besides God can be imagined. He writes, “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. First, he says that if God is absolutely infinite, then there can be no limitations on him for a limited thing isn’t absolutely infinite. Second, he says that there can be no other things since God contains all attributes and two distinct things cannot share attributes, so God thus possesses every actual and possible attribute, and no substance other than God could exist.
The comparison between Eriugena’s pantheistic answer and Baruch Spinoza’s monistic answer looks to be a profitable and intriguing consideration for further study. While the two are different, they attempt a similar feat and face similar complications and reactions. Both of them answer the problem of the One and the Many with an ontological explanation of how everything that is, is God. Both are insistent on the transcendence and unboundedness of God. Both of them are deeply religious while being defined as outside of orthodoxy.
Spinoza was excommunicated from his synagogue as a young man, and lived outside of any religious community or tradition. It is in this exile that he develops what might be considered one of the most compelling ontological approaches to the problem of the One and the Many by making the case that Being is One and the One is God, and God manifests himself to himself modally. Spinoza aggressively denies pantheism, stating that he denies the possibility of anything other than God. He is not a pantheist but a monist, arguing that all is God only understood under the idea that all is one. Because of his ontology of monistic modalism, his contemporaries named him a “heretic,” an “atheist.” Yet, he was also describes as a philosopher who was “intoxicated by” and “drowning in” God.
Attempting to explain the nature of the multitude of beings, 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, God, is infinite.
Spinoza’s argument for God’s transcendence takes the form of claiming that nothing besides God can be imagined. He writes, “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. First, he says that if God is absolutely infinite, then there can be no limitations on him for a limited thing isn’t absolutely infinite. Second, he says that there can be no other things since God contains all attributes and two distinct things cannot share attributes, so God thus possesses every actual and possible attribute, and no substance other than God could exist.
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