Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan by Anthony T. Kronman

Author:Anthony T. Kronman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

DESCARTES’ DIVINE PHYSICS

Spinoza’s metaphysics has two principal sources. The first is the tradition of medieval Aristotelianism that he studied as a youth, in the writings of Maimonides and others.20 The second is the work of Descartes.

To say that Descartes was a champion of the new mechanical physics that Galileo had pioneered a generation before is an understatement. Descartes not only made a substantial contribution of his own to the study of the laws of motion (and of optics as well). He sought to put the discipline of physics as a whole on a new and more solid foundation.

Descartes’ Meditations is today viewed as a freestanding work. We think of it as a response to the perennial challenge of philosophical skepticism and assess it in these terms. But in Descartes’ own mind, it had a more specific aim. The goal of the Meditations is to expose and defend the ground on which the growing edifice of modern physics is based, so that those engaged in it may proceed with confidence that their deepest assumptions about the nature of the world are well founded.21 In this sense, even Descartes’ metaphysics is subordinated to the advancement of the new science of nature he so enthusiastically embraced. To the end of his life, this remained his principal aim.

Spinoza was an attentive and admiring reader of Descartes. His first published work (the only one published in his lifetime under his own name) was a commentary on the first two parts of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, presented in what Spinoza calls “the geometric manner.”22 At the beginning of his commentary, Spinoza reminds the reader that Descartes’ ambition was to lay “the solid foundations of the sciences,” and that his method of radical doubt is merely a means to this end. He then goes on to explain the basic principles of Cartesian metaphysics—the nature of God, mind, body, truth and error—and in light of these to outline and elucidate Descartes’ account of the laws that govern the movement and interaction of bodies in the physical world.

Spinoza’s friend, Lodewijk Meyer, wrote a preface to the Principles of Cartesian Philosophy in which he cautions the reader to “note” that Spinoza’s commentary is an attempt to give a strictly accurate account of Descartes’ teachings, and that “no one should conclude that he [Spinoza] here teaches either his own views or only those of which he approves. For although he holds some of [Descartes’] doctrines to be true, and admits that some are his own additions, there are many he rejects as false, holding a very different opinion.”23

Indeed one might go further and say that all the most distinctive features of Spinoza’s metaphysics emerge from his criticism of Descartes. This is shaped by two related ideas that he inherited from the veiled paganism of certain of the Jewish writers he studied as a boy. The first is that God and the world are the same. The second is that the order of being is continuous and graded, not radically disjunct, as it must be in every metaphysics that assumes the world to have been created by a God beyond it.

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