Frog Pond Philosophy by Donnelley Strachan Donnelley Ceara Jennings Bruce

Author:Donnelley, Strachan,Donnelley, Ceara,Jennings, Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2017-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Spinoza: Healing Reality

With respect to organic and humanly organic life, Cartesian modes of thought leave us in a philosophic cul de sac. A chief stumbling block is the conception of “substance” as “that which needs nothing other in order to exist.” With such a definition, organisms logically and ontologically cannot be substances, for by their fundamental mode of metabolic existence, they essentially require something outside themselves in order to exist. For organisms, individuality (understood as one mode of relatedness to the world) must emerge out of a primordial striving. Organisms must win, and continue to win, their own individuality, integrity, and independence in and through their interaction with the natural world outside themselves.

To conceive philosophically these fundamental and interconnected themes of “individuality” and “relatedness,” it is necessary to move beyond Cartesian modes of thought. This was clearly seen by Spinoza. For both logical and ontological reasons, Spinoza abandoned Descartes’s dualism and his assertion of multiple substances in favor of a radical monism. There can be only one being or entity that requires “nothing else in order to exist” and that is causa sui (cause of itself). This is God or Nature (Deus sive Natura) as a whole, acting out of the necessity of its own purely active and dynamic being, characterized by an infinity of attributes of which we humans know only thought and extension.

With this move to a one-substance cosmology, Spinoza philosophically allows for a fundamental reconceptualization of organic life, including human life. Biological organisms and human beings are no longer ontologically separate: animals are not merely natural mechanisms and humans are not essentially detached minds above and outside the natural and material world. Rather, both are considered finite modifications or internal articulations of the unbounded active being of Nature (God), with a “modal” rather than “substantial” existence.

It is with the conception of modal existence that Spinoza philosophically combines the themes of individuality and relatedness. The essence or fundamental character of each finite mode or being (each concrete natural entity) is an endeavor to persevere in its own individual being. This is its “conatus,” the ontological basis of its individuality, which necessarily implies dynamism, activity, and recurrent effort. Since by ontological necessity all finite modes are causally interconnected and directly or indirectly interactive in the one infinite system or realm of Nature, conative existence can be pursued only in relation to other worldly entities. Concrete individuality must be an ongoing, dynamic affair, won within a relatedness to the world. In short, an organism’s particular and individual existence is internally related to the world.

This conception systematically opens up new and important possibilities for philosophic explanation and intelligibility. For example, Spinoza conceives all organisms, including humans, as ontologically unified or “one.” And this oneness is comprehensible both cognitively and materially, under the attributes of both thought and extension. This is an ontological monism, conjoined with conceptual or intellectual pluralism. This is Spinoza’s famous “psychophysical parallelism.” What is conceived to happen causally under the attribute of extension (“body”) also and correlatively happens causally under the attribute of thought (“idea of body”) and vice versa.

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