Free Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein Page B

Spinoza, a thing to be cast off into the mists of unreality, outgrown as one stretches outward into reality. Escape from it in order to save it. (But then, if we truly escape from it, why care about it enough to want to save it? Is the way to his salvation barred by paradox? Are we in Woody Allen Land again?) The distinctive singular self is not what we ought to think about. It is not even what we ought to be .
    Spinoza wrote the only story of himself of which he would have approved, and it is called The Ethics .
    This is the way his self-approved memoir begins: “Definition 1: By that which is self-caused I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.”
    That is as personal as he wanted his story to get (see the next two pages to see how his story continues). It doesn’t sound, on the face of it, as if it is about Spinoza at all, and it isn’t, on the face of it. It is of the whole world that he is speaking in that definition of the causa sui , the vast system of logical implications that is the necessary expression of necessary existence itself. Spinoza is, as each of us is, but one of the implications in the implicative order that is the world. So, in a sense, Spinoza is implicitly speaking of himself in that first definition. To the extent that he—that any of us— becomes rational, he will cease to identify with that one implication and identify instead with the vast implicative order itself.
    So the causa sui is where he begins The Ethics . But the causa sui is not where he begins, Baruch Spinoza, who sought topurge his point of view of the personal, to become one with the radical objectivity that he dubs Deus sive natura . But that passive identity, the one he aimed to discard? That is the one I’m searching for now, the identity come to him by way of the contingencies of external causality. What were those contingencies that passively shaped him, a passivity he sought to wrest back and dissolve in the pure activity of philosophy? How far back must we go to get a sense of the man who did not identify himself with Deus sive natura —the purely personal part that was left over, dangling outside of the rational enterprise, the finite modification, the isolated implication, the son and brother and teacher and friend? The Jew.
    THE ETHICS.
    ____
    PART I. CONCERNING GOD.
    D EFINITIONS .
I. BY THAT which is SELF-CAUSED , I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.
II. A thing- is called FINITE AFTER ITS KIND , when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body.
III. By SUBSTANCE , I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself; in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.
IV. By ATTRIBUTE , I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.
V. By MODE , I mean the modifications * of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.
VI. By GOD , I mean a being absolutely infinite — that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.
Explanation .—I say absolutely infinite, not infinite after its kind: for, of a thing infinite only after its kind, infinite attributes may be denied; but that which is absolutely infinite, contains in its essence whatever expresses reality, and involves no negation.
VII. That thing is called free, which exists solely by the necessity of its own nature, and of which the action is determined by itself alone. On the other hand, that thing is necessary, or rather constrained, which is determined by something external to itself to a fixed and definite