#memoriesofaspinozist

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Sad Mondays #6b i)

Author: Magda Wisniowska – February, 2021.

Spinoza’s Universe Now we need to understand how Spinoza believes God’s causality works to produce a universe. (Beth Lord, Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics, 38)

The first of our diagrams can be found in Beth Lord’s guide to Spinoza’s Ethics, in the short section ‘Spinoza’s Universe.’ It aims to visualise how God’s causality works in the production of the universe, acknowledged by Lord as one of the most impenetrable topics of the Ethics. The topic is difficult for two reasons. First of all, Spinoza wants his lack of precision to reflect the understandable limitations of human knowledge. After all, there is only so much a finite mind can know of an infinite and all-encompassing God. Secondly, his very general account is intended to allow for any future scientific advances. I therefore begin to write this most reluctantly, the abstraction of what I want to present is as appealing to me as it is forbidding to most readers. 

To begin then in the most abstract of fashions, at stake in this section is the relationship between what Spinoza calls ‘God’s attributes' and the ‘modes’ in which our universe is expressed in this attribute. It concerns all the things that follow from any of God’s attributes, the effects of God’s causality when he is considered as one attribute. At this point we do not know what are these consequences of the attribute, these things, and these effects might be. We are only told that they can be eternal or finite, immediate or mediated. So accordingly, what follows from the absolute nature of God’s attributes, is the infinite and eternal thing. This is the effect of God’s causality as one attribute in the ‘immediate infinite mode.’ In turn, what follows from the immediate infinite mode, the modified effect of God’s causality is the ‘mediate infinite mode.’ Finally, we learn that what we find most graspable — all the finite things we know and recognise — come at the very end, as modes by which God's attributes are expressed in ‘a certain and determinate way.’ To offer examples of things produced immediately by God and things produced by mediation, Lord refers to the explanation given by Spinoza in his letter to Georg Hermann Schuller, 

The examples you ask for of the first kind are: in the case of thought, absolutely infinite intellect; in the case of extension, motion and rest. An example of the second kind is the face of the whole universe, which, although varying in infinite ways, yet remains always the same. (Letter 64)

There is plenty to unpack here, not the least beginning with the idea of causality. If in the Ethics, God is presented as the cause of the universe, this would seem to vindicate Kleinherenbrink’s critique: Spinoza’s is indeed a philosophy of interiority as it puts God at the heart of things. But to do so, would be to overlook the fact that for Spinoza, there is only one Substance, one God, one Nature. As Beth Lord makes abundantly clear, Spinoza’s God is not a creator in a Cartesian or even artistic sense. He is not separate from what he creates. God cannot act on something other than God —he cannot create something other than himself — because there is only one God and he encompasses everything (37). God’s causality here is not ‘transitive’ but ‘immanent’ (ibid.). God is the cause of itself and God is the cause of all things the same way he is the cause of itself (Ethics, P25S).

Thus we have to understand that Spinoza’s immanent God is both the cause and the effect of the universe, as the effects of God’s causality remains in God (Lord, 37). God is in the things he causes. As the cause of himself, he is the power of self-actualisation; as the effect of himself, he is also what he has actualised. It is not so much that Spinoza’s is a philosophy of interiority, rather that he presents a universe in which interiority and exteriority have no meaning: God is all things and God is within all things. 

The second idea we have to consider before proceeding, is that of the ‘attribute.’ Once again, Spinoza’s definition is very different from the perhaps more familiar Cartesian one, where it is defined as an essential property of a substance. For Spinoza, the attribute is ‘what the intellect perceives of the substance as constituting its essence’ (Ethics, D4). This does not mean that his definition is in any way subjective, that the attribute has something to do with how any individual intellect might perceive it. Instead, attributes are meant to be the different ways in which substance can be perceived (see Lord, 21).  As Lord argues, we can never perceive pure substance as such. Our sensory experience and thought is not such that would allow us to grasp ‘bare being’ (ibid.). Instead, we perceive being as either a physical body or a thought, an extended thing or a thinking thing.  Potentially however, it is implied that there might be any number of attributes, which we, with our limited human minds, cannot, at this point in time, conceive. 

What I want to consider here is the idea of causality in the attribute of extension — how God’s causality works to produce extended things or physical bodies. As I have already noted, there are different ways in which we can perceive the essence of substance as the extended thing or physical body. There is the finite and infinite way, the immediate and mediated. If we perceive physicality immediately, as in, most directly, taking into account the infinity of the attribute, then, as Spinoza says in his letter to Schuller, we perceive it as motion and rest. In its immediate infinite mode, this is what the body comes down to: nothing more than activity and its lack.  In terms of an interiority that isn’t, we can say that infinite motion and rest are caused by the attribute of extension’s infinite nature, meaning, infinite extended being includes, causes and expresses itself as these infinitely variable fluctuations of activity (see Lord, 39). 

On the other hand, if we perceive infinite physicality in its mediated mode, then we encounter something else, we confront what follows from the infinite immediate mode.  In Spinoza’s letter to Schuller, this is the universe’s ‘face,’ the face as it were, of God. Again it is worth noting that this example differs from the one Kleinherenbrink used to dismiss certain interpretations of Deleuze, which present him as a philosopher who sees reality as one continually flowing process. For Kleinherenbrink, this philosophy of interiority is like a tablecloth with its ‘sharp twists and folds’ (32). As he says, ‘discrete things’ might seem to be here and there, ‘but it is actually tablecloth all the way down’ (ibid.). But how often do we come across a tablecloth just lying on its own? A tablecloth always covers something, a table, a surface, a plane. Whatever folds and bumps we perceive on the fabric are the result of what we do not see, what the tablecloth hides. This is not the case with Spinoza’s face of God. The expressions that animate its features belong to the face. We cannot separate the face and its expression.  

For me, Spinoza’s face of God is Deleuze and Guattari’s Abstract Machine. One only needs to compare the two descriptions. This is Spinoza’s in a later section of the Ethics. He writes, 

And if we proceed in this way to infinity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one individual, whose parts, that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole individual. (IIL7S) 

As Beth Lord explains, each individual in Spinoza’s universe is made up from other individuals and in turn, forms further individuals, in a series of ever increasing complexity. So for her, 

…multiple cells and microorganisms make up a fish; multiple fishes, plants, stones and water make up a river; multiple rivers, mountains and land make up the earth; multiple planets make up the universe, and so on. (40)

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari repeat Spinoza’s description almost word for word. They write,

Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities. The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations. (254)

An individual for Deleuze, is an infinite multiplicity, just as the whole of Nature is an infinite multiplicity. This ever expanding collection of individual multiplicities is the Abstract Machine, abstract, real, and individual. God is the cause of this Machine but not in Kleinherenbrink’s sense of relations being internal to the one term, individual modes reducible to the one substance. The Machine is the face of God, the one countenance with an infinite variety of expressions. No matter how these might change, the face remains one and the same. Even Kleinherenbrink begins his critique of interiority by acknowledging Deleuze’s ontological equality of all entities, whether these are ‘physical, chemical, fictive, organic and digital,’ to call them a machine. ‘Everything is a machine’ (2). In a Thousand Plateaus, these are Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Memories of a Spinozist,’ the machinic memories of the face of God. 

Here is the first diagram, following Beth Lord.