The living thing as it is present to my looking seems to be richer, fuller, more interesting than it can possibly be when it is reduced to a definition in speech, but this is a confusion. All that belongs to the living thing that is not implied by the definition of its species belongs to it externally, as a result of its accidental interactions with the other things in its environment. The definition attempts to penetrate to what it is in itself, by its own activity of making itself be whole and persist. There is nothing fuller than the whole, nothing richer than the life which is the winning and expressing of that wholeness, nothing more interesting than the struggle it is always waging unnoticed, a whole world of priority deeper and more serious than the personal history it must drag along with the species-drama it is constantly enacting. The reduction of the living thing to what defines it is like the reduction of a rectangular block of marble to the form of Hermes: less is more. Strip away the accretion of mere facts, and what is left is that without which even those facts could not have gained admittance into the world: the forever vulnerable foundation of all that is in the world, the shaping, ruling form, the incessant maintenance of which is the only meaning of the phrase self-preservation. Indeed even the bodily material of the living thing is present in the world only as active, only as forming itself into none of the other things it might have been but just this one thoroughly defined animal or plant. And this, finally, is Aristotle's answer to the question, What is form? Form is material at work according to a persisting definiteness of kind. Aristotle's definition of the soul in De Anima, soul is the being-at-work-staying-the-same of an organized body, becomes the definition of form in Book 8 of the Metaphysics, and is, at that stage of the inquiry, his definition of being.

Book 9 spells out the consequences of this clarification of form. Form cannot be derivative from or equivalent with material, because material on its own must be mere possibility. It cannot enter the world until it has achieved definiteness by getting to work in some way, and it cannot even be thought except as the possibility of some form. Books 7-9 demonstrate that materiality is a subordinate way of being. The living body does not bring form into the world, it must receive form to come into the world. Form is primary and casual, and the original source of all being in the sensible world must be traced beyond the sensible world, to that which confers unity on forms themselves. If forms had no integrity of their own, the world and things could not hang together and nothing would be. At the end of Book 9, the question of being has become the question of formal unity, the question, What makes each form one? In the woven texture of the organization of the Metaphysics, what comes next, at the beginning of Book 10, is a laying out of all the ways things may be one. Glue, nails, and rope are of no use for the problem at hand, nor, any longer, are natural shapes and motions, which have been shown to have a derivative sort of unity. All that is left in Aristotle's array of possibilities is the unity of that of which the thinking or the knowing is one.

This thread of the investigation, which we may call for convenience the biological one, converges in Book 12 with a cosmological one. The animal and plant species take care of their own perpetuation by way of generation, but what the parents pass on to the offspring is an identity which must hold together thanks to a timeless activity of thinking. The cosmos holds together in a different way: it seems to be literally and directly eternal by way of a ceaseless repetition of patterns of locomotion. An eternal motion cannot result from some other motion, but must have an eternal, unchanging cause. Again, Aristotle lays out all the possibilities. What can cause a motion without undergoing a motion? A thing desired can, and so can a thing thought. Can you think of a third? Aristotle says that there are only these two, and that, moreover, the first reduces to the second. When I desire an apple it is the fleshy apple and not the thought of it toward which I move, but it is the thought or imagining of the fleshy apple that moves me toward the apple. The desired object causes motion only as an object of thought. Just as the only candidate left to be the source of unity of form among the animals and plants was the activity of thinking, so again the only possible unmoved source for the endless circlings of the stars is an eternal activity of thinking. Because it is deathless and because the heavens and nature and all that is depend upon it, Aristotle calls this activity God. Because it is always altogether at work, nothing that is thought by it is ever outside or apart from it: it is of thinking, simply. Again, because it is always altogether at work, nothing of it is ever left over outside of or apart from its work of thinking: it is thinking, simply. It is the pure holding-together of the pure holdable-together, activity active, causality caused. The world is, in all its being most deeply, and in its deepest being wholly, intelligible. So far is Aristotle from simply assuming the intelligibility of things, that he requires twelve books of argument to account for it. All being is dependent on the being of things; among things, the artificial are derived from the natural; because there is a cosmos, all natural things have being as living things; because all living things depend on either a species-identity or an eternal locomotion, there must be a self-subsisting activity of thinking.

The fact that there are a Book 13 and a Book 14 to the Metaphysics indicates that, in Aristotle's view, the question of being has not yet undergone its last transformation. With the completion of Book 12, the question of being becomes: What is the definition of the world? What is the primary intelligible structure that implies all that is permanent in the world? Books 13 and 14 of the Metaphysics examine the only two answers that anyone has ever proposed to that question outside of myths. They are: that the divine thinking is a direct thinking of all the animal and plant species, and that it is a thinking of the mathematical sources of things. The conclusions of these two books are entirely negative. The inquiry into being itself cannot come to rest by transferring to the divine source the species-identities which constitute the world, nor can they be derived from their mathematical aspects. Aristotle's final transformation of the question of being is into a question. Books 13 and 14 are for the sake of rescuing the question as one which does not and cannot yield to a solution but insists on being faced and thought directly. Repeatedly, through the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that the deepest things must be simple. One cannot speak the truth about them, nor even ask, a question about them, because they have no parts. They have no articulation in speech, but only contact with that which thinks. The ultimate question of the Metaphysics, which is at once What is all being at its roots? and What is the life of God?, and toward which the whole Metaphysics has been designed to clear the way, takes one beyond the limits of speech itself. The argument of the Metaphysics begins from our direct encounter with the sensible world, absorbs that world completely into speech, and carries its speech to the threshold of that on which world and speech depend. The shape of the book is a zig-zag, repeatedly encountering the inexpressible simple things and veering away. By climbing to that life which is the being-at-work of thinking, and then ending with a demonstration of what that life is not, Aristotle leaves us to disclose that life to ourselves in the only way possible, in the privacy of lived thinking. The Metaphysics is not an incomplete work: it is the utmost gift that a master of words can give.

Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza (1632- 1677)

Life

Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza (1632-1677) was the son of a Jewish merchant from Amsterdam. His father and grandfather were originally Spanish crypto-Jews -- that is, Jews who were forced to adopt Christianity in post-Islamic Spain, but secretly remained Jewish. He was educated in traditional Jewish Curriculum. His father died when he was 21, after which he was embroiled in a lawsuit with his stepsister over his father's estate. Spinoza won the suit, but nevertheless handed virtually all of it over to his stepsister. Shortly after, Spinoza's budding theological speculations prompted conflict with Jewish leaders. Spinoza publicly contended that the scriptures do not maintain that God has no body, that angels exist, or that the soul is immortal. After failed attempts to silence him, he was excommunicated in 1656. For a time Spinoza was associated with a former Jesuit who ran a school for children. Spinoza used this as an opportunity to further his own education and to supplement his income by teaching in the school. At this time he also learned the trade of lens grinding for glasses and telescopes.

In his late twenties, he supervised a discussion group on philosophical and theological issues. As his own ideas developed, he went on retreat from Amsterdam for three years to formulate them in writing. At a cottage in Rijnsburg, he wrote A Short Treatise on God, Man and his Well-Being, and On the Improvement of the Understanding. He also composed a geometric version of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy, which friends encouraged him to publish. Part of the purpose of the work was to pave the way for publishing his own thoughts which were critical of Cartesianism. By producing such a work, he could not be accused later of not understanding Descartes. The work appeared in 1663 and was the only writing of Spinoza's published with his name on it during his life. Further developing his own ideas, over the next two years Spinoza composed his greatest work, The Ethics. In 1663 Spinoza left Rijnsburg and moved near The Hague. Hoping to publish the Ethics, and anticipating controversy, he wrote and published anonymously his Tractatus Thologico-Politicus (1670) which defends the liberty to philosophize in the face of religious or political interference. After a self- initiated and failed diplomatic mission to France, Spinoza and he was forced to give up hopes of publishing the Ethics. He died in 1677 from a lung disease, the result of breathing dust from lens grinding.

Spinoza's Pantheism and Method in the Ethics

As directed in Spinoza's Will, the Ethics was published posthumously along with some of his other works (1677). The Ethics is about 200 pages in length and in five parts:

1. Concerning God

2. The Nature and Origin of the Human Mind

3. The Nature and Origin of the Emotions

4. Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions

5. The Power of the Understanding, or Human Freedom

Its most visibly distinguishing feature is its style of composition modeled after Euclid's geometry. Each of the five parts opens with a brief list of definitions and axioms, and from these a series of propositions (or theorems) are deduced. Spinoza initially composed the first parts of the Ethics in dialog form, but rejected this for the more precise -- and unfortunately more difficult -- geometric method. In general, geometric proofs are designed so that if we accept the definitions and axioms at the outset, and deductions from these are properly made, then we must accept the concluded propositions. However, as Leibniz observed, even though Spinoza's system follows this style, it nevertheless lacks mathematical rigor. Consequently, we must look at the content of Spinoza's complete system and accept or reject it on its own merits, rather than from the success of the various deductions.

In Part One of the Ethics, "Concerning God," after presenting a short list of definitions and axioms, Spinoza deduces 36 propositions which explain the nature of God. The most important of these is Proposition 14, which expresses Spinoza's pantheism: "Besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived." The term "pantheism" (literally all-God) means that God is identical to the universe as a whole. For example my car, my house, and even I myself are all parts of God. Other Western philosophers before Spinoza advocated pantheism, including Xenophanes, Parmenides, Plotinus, and Meister Eckhardt. However, the vast majority of Western philosophers and theologians strongly rejected this view in favor of a transcendent concept of God which holds that God is distinct from his creation. Indeed, some theologians maintained that God has the attribute of separateness thus being completely separate from the rest of the universe, including the physical world and humans. Spinoza's argument for pantheism in Proposition 14 is as follows:

Proposition 5. There cannot exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or attribute.
Proposition 11: God (defined as a substance consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality) necessarily exists.
Therefore, Proposition 14: Besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived.

The intuition behind Spinoza's argument above can be expressed simply. Two separate substances cannot share the same attributes (P 5). God has every actual and possible attribute (P 11). Thus, no other substance can exist. To illustrate Spinoza's point, imagine an infinitely long list of qualities such as "consiousness" and "three-dimensionality." For Spinoza, each attribute on this list can be assigned to only one substance or thing. So, substance 1 might exclusively have the attribute of "consciousness," and substance 2 might exclusively have the attribute of "three- dimensionality." However, God has already been assigned all attributes on the list, and no attributes are left to assign to other substances. Since a substance can't exist if it doesn't have any attributes, then God is the only substance which exists.

As noted, Spinoza opens part one of the Ethics with a list of definitions and axioms. His list of definitions are as follows:

1. By that which is self-caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.

2. A thing is called finite after its kind, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body.

3. By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.

4. By attribute, I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.

5. By mode, I mean the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.

6. By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite -- that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality. ...

7. That thing is called free, which exists solely by the necessity of its own nature, and of which the action is determined by itself alone. On the other hand, that thing is necessary, or rather constrained, which is determined by something external to itself to a fixed and definite method of existence or action.

8. By eternity, I mean existence itself, in so far as it is conceived necessarily to follow solely from the definition of that which is eternal.

Initially, the most important of the definitions below are those of substance, attribute, and mode. Substance, for Spinoza, turns out to be the totality of the universe. An attribute is an all- encompassing property of the universe, such as being three dimensional. Spinoza commentators give various explanations of "attribute" and its relation to "substance." Jonathan Bennett notes that that "An attribute for Spinoza is a basic way of being -- a property which sprawls across everything... [that pertains to that substance]." Edwin Curley notes that for Spinoza the totality of a thing's attributes constitutes its substance. A mode (or modification) is a more confined property of the universe, or how an attribute appears on a smaller level. For example, the shape of a tree is a modification of the universe's larger attribute "three-dimensionality."

Like definitions, axioms are also foundational elements from which propositions are derived. Rather than defining key terms, though, Spinoza's axioms stipulate some foundational fact about the world.

1. Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else.

2. That which cannot be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself.

3. From a given definite cause and effect necessarily follows; and, on the other hand, if no definite cause be granted, it is impossible that an effect can follow.

4. The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause.

5. Things which have nothing in common cannot be understood, the one by means of the other; the conception of one does not involve the conception of the other.

6. A true idea must correspond with its ideate or object.

7. If a thing can be conceived as non-existing, its essence does not involve existence.

God is the Only Substance

The first step in Spinoza's argument for pantheism is to prove Proposition 5 that two substances cannot share the same attribute. The only way to distinguish two substances is by noting differences in their attributes or differences in their modes. Suppose, though, that two substances had the same attributes, but different modifications. For example, suppose there were two universes in which both were three-dimensional (i.e. same attribute) but one had trees and the other did not (i.e. differing modes). Spinoza argues that these differences in modification are not relevant. A substance has its own identity before it is modified. That is, the universe is what it is before it has trees or not. Thus, the only properties which truly distinguish one substance from another are broad attributes, not narrow modes. Thus, if two universes have precisely the same attributes, then they are the same universe.

Spinoza's next task is to prove the existence of God (Proposition 11). The central premise in his argument is Proposition 7: existence belongs to the nature of substance. He concedes that readers may have difficulty in comprehending Proposition 7. We see natural objects such as trees come into and go out of existence, and we assume that substances also come into and go out of existence. Spinoza argues that we would not make this confusion if we kept in mind the difference between modes and substances. Modes, such as properties of trees, do indeed come and go out of existence. Spinoza continues noting that we can also conceive of non-existent modes such as the properties of a unicorns. Again, though, we cannot conceive of a non-existent substance. Continuing with background material for his proof of God, Spinoza argues that an absolutely infinite substance has infinite attributes, each of which must be conceived through itself. Having made these points, Spinoza offers his proof for God:

Prop. XI. God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists.
Proof. -- If this be denied, conceive, if possible, that God does not exist: then his essence does not involve existence. But this (by Prop. vii.) is absurd. Therefore God necessarily exists. ...

Spinoza's proof is an ontological argument in the style of Anslem's and Descartes'. Like Anselm, Spinoza gives his argument in the form of a reductio ad absurdum:

1. (a) The idea of God is that of substance with infinite attributes, each of which is eternally and infinitely essential (Def. 6)

2. (b) Suppose that God does not exist

3. (c) Then existence is not part of his essence

4. (d) However, existence belongs to the nature of a substance

5. (e) Therefore, God exists

More simply, his argument is that God exists since (a) God is a substance, and (b) existence belongs to the nature of a substance. Spinoza continues by giving three additional proofs for God's existence (which will not be explored here). All four proofs are based on the common notion that God's existence necessarily follows from his nature.

Having proved that (a) no two substances can have the same attributes (Proposition 5), and (b) God exists with infinite attributes (Proposition 11), Spinoza proceeds to conclude that God is the only substance (Proposition 14). Again, The proof for this is as follows:

1. (a) There cannot exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or attribute (Proposition 5)

2. (b) God (defined as a substance consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality) necessarily exists (Proposition 11)

3. (c) Therefore, besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived (Proposition 14).

Spinoza continues by making clear that Proposition 14 implies pantheism.

o Corollary I -- Clearly, therefore: 1. God is one, that is (by Def. vi.) only one substance can be granted in the universe, and that substance is absolutely infinite, as we have already indicated (in the note to Prop. x.).

o Corollary II. -- It follows: 2. That extension and thought are either attributes of God or (by Ax. i.) accidents (affectiones) of the attributes of God.

o Prop. XV. Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

If all things are part of God, then the three-dimensional universe itself is part of God. This means that, in some sense, God has a body. However, Spinoza criticizes those who anthropomorphize the nature of God's body by maintaining that it is finite, and even susceptible to having emotions (given the fact that human emotions are the result of a human body). Spinoza harshly rejects both of these limitations on God's physical nature. However, the vast majority of western philosophers reject the notion that God has a three-dimensional body of any sort. He presents two traditional criticisms of the view that God has a body. First, there are absurdities involved when we consider quantity to be infinite. For example, one foot has twelve times the infinite number of points that one inch does. Second. God is active, and divided matter is passive. The two are thus incompatible. In response, Spinoza argues that the key error in all of these arguments is the assumption that extended substance is composed of parts. Instead, he maintains that the notion of extended substance must be drawn from the more foundational notion of infinite quality, and infinite quality cannot be measured.

In the remainder of Part I of the Ethics, Spinoza derives various properties of God. He summarizes these properties in the opening paragraph of the Appendix to Part I.

Appendix. In the foregoing I have explained the nature and properties of God. I have shown that (1) he necessarily exists, (2) that he is one, (3) that he is, and acts solely by the necessity of his own nature, (4) that he is the free cause of all things, and how he is so, (5) that all things are in God, and so depend on him, that without him they could neither exist nor be conceived, and (6) that all things are predetermined by God, not through his free will or absolute fiat, but from the very nature of God or infinite power. I have further, where occasion offered, taken caret to remove the prejudices which might impede the comprehension of my demonstrations. Yet there still remain misconceptions, not a few which might and may prove very grave hindrances to the understanding of the ordering of things, as I have explained it above. I have therefore thought it worth while to bring these misconceptions before the bar of reason.

The principal misconception about God that Spinoza wants to address in the Appendix is that God acts purposefully and directs events in nature towards a definite goal. For Spinoza, God does not do this.