Is There a Place for Individuals in Spinoza’s Philosophy?
Individuals play a central role in Spinoza’s Ethics. My talk asks whether Spinoza’s individual is robust enough to resist elimination, reduction or absorption, given other central aspects of his metaphysics.
My strategy is first to outline Spinoza’s concept of an individual. Second I will describe three aspects of
Spinoza’s metaphysics that appear to undermine his individualism (I use the term ”individualism” to refer to an ontology in which individuals are fundamental). These three aspect are Spinoza’s causal determinism, his reductionism and his monism. Finally, I will argue that it is probable Spinoza’s individualism can withstand each of these threats (I say “probable” because in the case of
reductionism I am tentative).
Spinoza distinguishes between a thing (res) and an individual (individuum). The term “res” occurs several hundred times in the Ethics, whereas “individuum” and its cognates occur only 53 times (according to one scholar). Individual, then, is a technical concept which serves a specific function in Spinoza’s metaphysics.
All entities in Spinoza’s ontology have a physical and a mental aspect, each aspect paralleling but irreducible to the other. In defining individual I will in the first place focus on its physical aspect, as indeed does Spinoza. I will begin by saying something about Spinoza’s notion of a thing (res).
A thing is a conglomeration of matter that occupies space and is distinct from other things. Individuals are a subset of things, since they too are conglomerations of matter. But we can distinguish individuals from mere things. Thus a stone, a hair clipping, and a raindrop are mere things. The distinguishing characteristic of mere things, as opposed to is individuals, is that mere things lack the organizational complexity that permits homeostasis.
All things, including individuals, are composed of basic units of matter which are themselves mere things. Spinoza leaves it open whether these basic units are infinitely divisible or not, so they should be called corpuscles rather than atoms (in keeping with 17th century terminology).
All things, including corpuscles, have inherent in them a force that tends to preserve their existence. This force Spinoza calls conatus. Though the claim is controversial, I believe that conatus when applied to mere things is equivalent to inertia, a principle Spinoza utilized in his physics. In the case of mere things, then, conatus takes the form of resistance to change in motion.
Now I turn in more detail to the concept of an individual.
As I said, an individual is a collection of things that have a stable organizational structure capable of homeostasis, that is, feedback mechanisms that return an individual to a healthy equilibrium.
The prime example of an individual is an organism, and the organism Spinoza is most interested is the human being. Complex individuals consist of collections of other individuals, and collections of collections of individuals. These collections of collections are themselves organized in stable homeostatic structures.
Each individual has inherent in it its own conatus. An individual’s conatus is a force that mechanically (i.e. non-teleologically) pushes the individual to maintain and enhance its own existence. It does this through its constituent homeostatic structures. So the heart, qua individual, has a homeostatic structure enabling it to maintain its existence. The circulatory system, another individual of which the heart is a part, has a homeostatic structure that allows it to maintain its existence qua circulatory system. A human being consists of many complex individuals, such as the circulatory system, which work together to maintain his or her existence.
An individual is inevitably buffeted by external forces that cause disequilibrium. If such forces are powerful enough they destroy the individual by overcoming its drive to maintain itself.
Humans, through their reason, can grasp the best way to maintain equilibrium in their lives. When a person successfully acts according to this understanding, then she is an agent and is self-determined. In acting successfully to maintain her existence, an individual feels herself to be most fully an individual. She is acting in accord with her deepest need, which is to persevere and enhance her existence.
I turn now to the first aspect of Spinoza’s metaphysics that appears to undermine his individualism.
Spinoza holds that every state or event is determined to be as it is by preceding causes. These causes in turn are determined by other causes, and so on ad infinitum.
But Spinoza’s concept of an individual requires the distinction between the individual as self-determined, or exercising her own agency, and the individual as buffeted by forces outside himself. But now the principle of causal determinism might appear to undermine this distinction. For given causal determinism every event or state must ultimately be traced to causes external to the individual. It follows, it seems, that the individual’s own agency is itself the effect of forces outside the individual. What then happens to the distinction between being self-determined (an agent) and being buffeted by external forces?
Spinoza has the resources to meet this threat to his individualism. According to Spinoza we never adequately explain a state or event by merely tracing its causal history, for such an explanation can never be complete. Rather an adequate explanation always consists of a deductive argument which shows how an event follows deductively from natural laws. How does Spinoza use this model of explanation to explain the distinction between agency and passivity?
Consider the following example:
Assume, as Spinoza says, that all things in the universe strive at the deepest level of their being to maintain and enhance their existence.
Say further I come to understand this fact, and draw the conclusion that I therefore necessarily strive at the deepest level of my being to maintain and enhance my existence.
Now assume my experience further tells me that to hate others is very likely to diminish any person’s ability to maintain their existence, and therefore my hating others is likely to diminish my own ability to maintain and enhance my existence.
Understanding these two truths, assume I am caused by this recognition to act so as to avert my hating others. Spinoza’s argument is that in this case I am an agent. I’ve understood where my deepest desire lies, and I have followed a deductive argument that causes me to act in accord with that desire. Note that the causal chain which explains my ability to follow a deductive argument, which ultimately may lie outside myself, is not relevant to whether I am an agent in this case.
Say on the other hand that in spite of accepting that hatred is counter to my own deepest desire, I continue to find myself hating others. In this case, to explain my hatred I must refer to factors external to my conatus and my reasoning process. In this case, I am passive and buffeted by causes external to myself.
As we see, then, Spinoza gives an account of agency and passivity (and I believe a plausible one) that renders impotent the first threat to his individualism.
I turn now to the second internal threat to Spinoza’s individualism, his reductionism.
We have seen that individuals, from the physical point of view, are composed of corpuscles. In fact, for Spinoza, an individual is identical to a conglomeration of corpuscles suitably organized. This suggests the possibility of explanatory reduction from the physical point of view. Spinoza sometimes says that if we really had a complete physics, and understood all the powers of matter, we would be able to explain the properties of individuals, however complex.
In modern science, we have a model for this kind of reduction. It seems, for example, that molecular
properties can be explained in terms of atomic properties plus the laws of physics. For example, given that we know water is H20 we have the capacity to explain the properties of water in terms of the properties of hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
If this is reductionist story about water can be generalized, then we could plausibly say that H20 is
nothing but atoms organized in a particular way, and thereby, Quine-like, eliminate molecules from our basic ontology.
Analogously, if we could explain the behaviour of individuals through the physical laws governing corpuscles, then we would have eliminated individuals from our ontology.
So far Spinoza’s corpuscular theory seems to suggest that his individualism could be undermined by his
reductionism.
But note that, for Spinoza, an individual is also a mind, and according to him the mind has laws of its own that are not reducible to physical laws.
This isn’t to say that for every mental state wouldn’t also be a corresponding physical state, say a brain state. Rather, it is to say that the brain qua mental states follows mental laws that are not translatable into physical laws. It follows that if an individual to going to be reduced to its parts, then the mental states of a given individual must be reduced to the mental components of its parts. This in turn means that the mental dimension of the corpuscles must have the capacity to explain the mental states of an individual like a human, assuming Spinoza’s pansychism is true.
But now a human’s mental states consist of thoughts, intentions and emotions. More than 350 years after Spinoza’s death there is no science that shows any indication of how such a reduction could take place, or even that such a reduction makes sense. Given this, there is reason to doubt that corpuscular (or atomic) theory could yield reductionist explanations of an individual’s mental states. But if the mental aspect of individuals can’t be reduced to the mental states of corpuscles, then the elimination of individuals from Spinoza’s ontology fails.
I end this section by pointing out that my argument here is not an a priori one. It is not logically impossible, as far as my argument goes, that such a scientific reduction will prove possible at some future date. My argument is just that, given our present state of knowledge, such a reduction seems highly unlikely. But this is a projection into the future, and therefore not certain. My conclusion,
therefore, must remain somewhat tentative.
I turn now to the third internal threat to Spinoza’s individualism, his monism.
On one common view, monism is the view that the only thing in the world that is real is the universe as a whole. Finite individuals like humans are an illusion. In some traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, there is the view that we are identical to the universe as a whole, and so our sense of individuality is an illusion. For Parmenides and Bradley, two important Western monists, there is the view that, if we think clearly, we see that the concept of a finite individual is contradictory and thereby
illusory.
I deny that Spinoza is a monist in either of these senses. Certainly he believes that individuals are dependent on the universe as a whole. But this does not amount to his believing that individuals are illusory.
I find at least three different ways Spinoza talks of the universe qua universe: 1) That the universe is a single, unitary, indivisible substance. 2) That the universe is the set of all natural laws that explain both the existence and behaviour of individuals. 3) That the universe is a set of individuals and mere things that cohere such that the total amount of motion and rest in the universe is conserved.
Each of these ways of conceiving the universe plays a part in Spinoza’s philosophy. Moreover, none of the three perspectives is reducible to the other(s). It is true that in the first way to see the universe (as an indivisible whole) individuals are, as it were, transcended. But this way of seeing the universe does not exclude the other two ways of seeing the universe, and in these latter two perspectives individuals are central.
Spinoza is often portrayed as a mono- or monist- maniac, a god intoxicated man. But I think it is more correct to see him as a radical perspectivalist. For Spinoza, there are non-reducible perspectives from which to see the universe qua universe. But all of these perspectives are human perspectives, even the perspective of the universe as an indivisible whole. They are all the perspectives of individual human beings seeking to preserve and enhance their existence.