Commenting on Spinoza's The Ethics, the masterwork of this 17th century rationalist, historian Will Durant begins;
"Page one plunges us at once into the maelstrom of metaphysics. Our modern hard-headed (or is it soft-headed?) abhorrence of metaphysics captures us, and for a moment we wish we were anywhere except in Spinoza. But then metaphysics, as William James said, is nothing but an attempt to think things out clearly to their ultimate significance, to find their substantial essence in the scheme of reality,—or, as Spinoza puts it, their essential substance; and thereby to unify all truth and reach that “highest of all generalizations” which, even to the practical Englishman, 36 constitutes philosophy. Science itself, which so superciliously scorns metaphysics, assumes a metaphysic in its every thought. It happens that the metaphysic, which it assumes, is the metaphysic of Spinoza."
Metaphysics is an unfortunate word. It might appear difficult and perhaps esoteric, but it's only abstract in that it's the exploration of our most fundamental paradigm. Are there universal laws and if so which ones? Fundamental atoms? Causality? Free will? Consciousness? A personal God? Or a pantheon of gods? Each of our individual worldviews, religions and philosophies contains assumptions around these, however unconscious, and in the extent that we explore these assumptions each of us are metaphysicians. Furthermore, this knowledge informs our action; any idea of "what should I do?" is derived from your understanding of "what is?". In this way Spinoza's text is not only a landmark in it's metaphysics but also the ethics for which it is named.
Spinoza's desire to remove personal biases through rigorous geometrical logic makes The Ethics incredibly hard reading. Will Durant's commentary gives a highly engaging and illustrative introduction to Spinoza's life, his ideas and their contextualisation in the landscape of western thought. Below I have included an extract which I find remarkable; not only because it tackles some of the greatest metaphysical problems of our or any day, but that the result of such a rational process gives a picture so very congruent with the one described through the highly intuitive process of the religious mystics and existentialists.
"Finally, “neither intellect nor will pertains to the nature of God”, 52 in the usual sense in which these human qualities are attributed to the Deity; but rather the will of God is the sum of all causes and all laws, and the intellect of God is the sum of all mind. “The mind of God,” as Spinoza conceives it, “is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time, the diffused consciousness that animates the world.” 53 “All things, in however diverse degree, are animated.” 54 Life or mind is one phase or aspect of everything that we know, as material extension or body is another; these are the two phases or attributes (as Spinoza calls, them) through which we perceive the operation of substance or God; in this sense God—the universal process and eternal reality behind the flux of things—may be said to have both a mind and a body. Neither mind nor matter is God; but the mental processes and the molecular processes which constitute the double history of the world—these, and their causes and their laws, are God.
But what is mind, and what is matter? Is the mind material, as some unimaginative people suppose; or is the body merely an idea, as some imaginative people suppose? Is the mental process the cause, or the effect, of the cerebral process?—or are they, as Malebranche taught, [165] unrelated and independent, and only providentially parallel?
Neither is mind material, answers Spinoza, nor is matter mental; neither is the brain-process the cause, nor is it the effect, of thought; nor are the two processes independent and parallel. For there are not two processes, and there are not two entities; there is but one process, seen now inwardly as thought, and now outwardly as motion; there is but one entity, seen now inwardly as mind, now outwardly as matter, but in reality an inextricable mixture and unity of both. Mind and body do not act upon each other, because they are not other, they are one. “The body cannot determine the mind to think; nor the mind determine the body to remain in motion or at rest, or in any other state,” for the simple reason that “the decision of the mind, and the desire and determination of the body ... are one and the same thing.” 55 And all the world is unifiedly double in this way; wherever there is an external “material” process, it is but one side or aspect of the real process, which to a fuller view would be seen to include as well an internal process correlative, in however different a degree, with the mental process which we see within ourselves. The inward and “mental” process corresponds at every stage with the external and “material” process; “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” 56 “Thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same thing, comprehended now through this, now through that, attribute” or aspect."
- Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers (1926)
My previous blog post on Will Durant, the Pullitzer prize winning historian, is here.