Spinoza's Ethics by Michael LeBuffe

Author:Michael LeBuffe
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

3.1.1 Should We Call Spinoza a “Naturalist”?

I apply the label “naturalism” to the doctrine of 3 Preface and take the view to include two commitments. First, Spinoza expresses metaphysical naturalism, the view that, in his terms, because nature and its laws are everywhere the same, there are no things that are not governed by its laws. Spinoza expresses this commitment by invoking the analogy of natural law to the laws of states in 3 Preface. Any entity that we might think is governed by special laws or is exempt from these laws, he asserts, is not. In particular, human beings are not “a dominion within a dominion.” If all things are governed by universal determinism and necessity, for example, we are also. Second, Spinoza expresses methodological naturalism, the view that all things are to be explained in the same way and by the same method. Because “naturalism” is a label for positions that philosophers today take to be plausible or at least important, the application of “naturalism” to Spinoza’s positions amounts to a suggestion that the positions are among those in the Ethics that hold enduring philosophical interest. Are these two positions recognizably the same as those that continue to matter to philosophers today? Alexander Douglas has suggested powerfully that they are not. Here I defend the use of the label. The issue matters, I think, for our understanding of Spinoza’s enduring importance to philosophy.

Most frequently, recent philosophers who have espoused metaphysical naturalism so understood have been physicalists. On their strong and highly restrictive account of what is generally true, it is generally true that things are physical. In the face of hard cases—the intentionality of thought or the relevance of numbers to our understanding of the world, for example—these naturalists do not admit exceptions: everything is physical, so, if they are things, thought and numbers are physical.

Even if physicalists are metaphysical naturalists, however, there is no need to take metaphysical naturalism to be simply equivalent to physicalism. What makes physicalists metaphysical naturalists is, first, that their metaphysics includes the claim that all things are natural and, second, that, on their account of nature, the first claim is highly restrictive: to say that all things are natural is to say something that matters. Spinoza’s account of nature is highly restrictive in ways that differ from physicalism, but it is also highly restrictive. Notably, nature, on Spinoza’s view, excludes any uncaused existent, any unexplained existent, or any alternative possibility. Indeed, these commitments are more highly restrictive than many views that advertise themselves as physicalist. To be sure, nature, on Spinoza’s account, includes a wide variety, perhaps even an infinite variety, of finite entities. All of these entities are determined and necessitated, however, and no entity of a given attribute interacts with any entity of another attribute. The statement of naturalism at the Preface to Ethics 3 suggests that Spinoza is particularly concerned to show that these general truths apply to human desire, good, evil, and virtue. In doing so, I think

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