Readers of Spinoza's philosophy have often been daunted, and sometimes been enchanted, by the geometrical method which he employs in his philosophical masterpiece the Ethics. In Meaning in Spinoza's ...Method Aaron Garrett examines this method and suggests that its purpose, in Spinoza's view, was not just to present claims and propositions but also in some sense to change the readers and allow them to look at themselves and the world in a different way. His discussion draws not only on Spinoza's works but also on those of the philosophers who influenced Spinoza most strongly, including Hobbes, Descartes, Maimonides and Gersonides. This controversial book will be of interest to historians of philosophy and to anyone interested in the relation between form and content in philosophical works.
The method of philosophizing of those whosimply look for scientific knowledge, withoutany particular question being proposed, ispartly analytic and partly synthetic.Hobbes, De CorporeIn this chapter ...and the next I will be providing some historical context for understanding Spinoza's mos geometricus. We can better understand the Ethics by taking account of some of the many intellectual currents feeding it. But it is important that one not view influence as providing a rigid map, as ruling out many interesting things Spinoza could have said. This is a danger in Quentin Skinner's well-known maxim: “No agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done.” Skinner is, of course, quite careful in formulating his maxim as “be brought to accept,” but the problem is in defining what this means. If in our case “brought to accept” means to rule out the assumption that Spinoza's theories should be evaluated as if a seventeenth-century Dutchman grasped quantum physics, this is, of course, reasonable. But, if it means that I should define what Spinoza was capable of saying in terms of what others said around him, this might have the negative consequence of stripping Spinoza of the capacity to say original things. Such an evaluative procedure also assumes that philosophers make complete sense to themselves and always know what they are doing, which is clearly not always the case.
This chapter introduces some important concepts in Spinoza's philosophy that will be drawn upon extensively in subsequent chapters. In the Ethics it seems as if every concept is quite literally ...interconnected with every other concept, and there is no way to explain the part without reference to many other parts and the whole. Trying to understand the Ethics we are in the position of our worm in the previous chapter, trying to make sense of a whole through the parts yet at the same time recognizing that all the parts are interconnected through principles that seem out of our reach.In order to cope with this problem, many of the best-known works on Spinoza are written as commentaries on the Ethics as a whole. By commenting on the Ethics section by section, Spinoza's terminology and concepts can be introduced in the narrative sequence in which they arise. This is, of course, very advantageous, but it makes it difficult to concentrate on a specific issue – like Spinoza's method. For this reason I pursue only two partially satisfactory alternatives. In this chapter I treat a few key concepts in order that discussion of them does not unduly detract from the larger narrative; and then, as the book proceeds, I introduce technical issues and technical problems.
Here readers will doubtless come to a standstill and they will imagine many things that will give them pause. This is why I ask that they continue with me, stepping slowly, and that they move forward ...and not judge until they have read everything through.EthicsiipiisSpinoza's discussion of method in the TIE concludes with his incomplete attempt to provide a means by which to discover adequate definitions. Why are definitions so important for Spinoza? In order for a philosophy to be rational and adequate it must be grounded in a “true and legitimate definition” (TIE 99). This would hold for many philosophers other than Spinoza, notably Hobbes. It also seems to be a given of deductive or Euclidean modes of philosophizing. Weigel, Leibniz's teacher and enthusiast for the mos geometricus, emphasized that the Euclidean method, unlike the account of science that Aristotle gives in Physics, moves from known to unknown. Rather the Euclidean method was consistent with Aristotle's Analytics, and Weigel argued that it could lead to a reconciliation of the old and new wisdom. For Spinoza, the mos geometricus is a process that gets at things and ideas, and in so doing provides us access to the logical and metaphysical structure of the world we inhabit. And any geometric demonstration must begin with definitions. So definitions are the crucial wedge that moves us beyond our part of nature, our limitations, and opens up the understanding to those things excellent, difficult, and rare.
The Emmet's Inch & Eagle's MileMake Lame Philosophy to smile.William Blake, Auguries of InnocenceIn order to understand why Spinoza embraced the geometrical method in the Ethics it necessary to ...reflect on the general contours of his philosophy. It is also important to have a sense of what Spinoza's method – geometrical or otherwise – is trying to get at, what Spinoza is seeking to discover with it. The purpose of this chapter and the next is to set the stage for the chapters that follow, while at the same time developing a few basic questions about Spinoza's method. The first section of this chapter provides a brief sketch of Spinoza's Ethics and introduces some of Spinoza's key definitions and concepts. The middle sections will present a problem in Spinoza's Ethics: “What does it mean to be a part of nature?” “Part of nature” is one of Spinoza's most potent concepts but it needs careful interpretation in order not to render it inconsistent with other aspects of Spinoza's philosophy, particularly his criticisms of anthropomorphism and teleology. The final section of the chapter will consider Spinoza's system from the “emmet's inch” or the bottom-up perspective, as opposed to the “eagle's mile” or top-down perspective of Part I of the Ethics and the first section of this chapter.
I have now examined the two main early modern sources for Spinoza's method, Hobbes and Descartes. We have seen the importance of synthesis and analysis, the different ways that they could be ...construed, the different functions ascribed to them, and finally the problems of reconciling them in a method not grounded in the imagination. But something is still lacking in this picture, there seems to be much more to the structure of Spinoza's method that has not been discussed: the didactic features of Spinoza's presentation and his attempts to instruct his readers. For Descartes this was, of course, the basic purpose of synthesis, and it was an important part of synthesis for Hobbes and Zabarella as well. In examining Maimonides and Gersonides I will stress some different didactic aspects of Spinoza's method. I would like to say at the outset that I in no way consider Spinoza to be a Maimonidean. I am interested in Maimonides for three reasons. First, part of Spinoza's own method (and I mean method broadly, not just the mos geometricus) seems to be a rejection of Maimonides, so by examining Maimonides we can learn about Spinoza. Second, in rejecting Maimonides, Spinoza still seems to hold on to some basic features of Maimonides' method. Third, Maimonides was also extensively criticized by Gersonides, whose affinities with Spinoza I have already emphasized. There are further affinities with Gersonides to be explored in the final section of this chapter.
In the last two chapters I have discussed a number of issues preliminary to considering Spinoza's method. In chapter 1, I discussed the analogy of the worm in the blood and the problem of how we – ...natural beings – come to understand nature. In chapter 2, I considered a number of key concepts that all have bearing on the solution that Spinoza proposed to the worm's problem, specifically on Spinoza's definition of God. In this chapter and the three that follow it I will present what Spinoza and some philosophers who Spinoza drew on have to say about method. By “method” I understand what the Scholastics called a “via” and Spinoza calls a mos, a way or means to discover those truths “that can lead us, by the hand as it were, to the knowledge of the human Mind and its highest blessedness” (II “Preface”). For Spinoza this via is intertwined with what I call an “emendative therapy.” Why and that they are interconnected is the concern of this chapter.The first two sections concern the idea of “emendation” in Spinoza's Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione. In these sections I will try to show that in the TIE Spinoza draws on and alters Francis Bacon's theory of mental tools, Gersonides' theory of emendation, and Descartes' account of innate ideas, and uses them for his own ends. The final section will emphasize that emendation is the crucial first step to understanding Spinoza's account of definition and the mos geometricus.
This final chapter is concerned with explicating what Spinoza refers to as the scientia intuitiva or the third kind of knowledge. The scientia intuitiva has pride of place among Spinoza's three kinds ...of knowledge due both to its importance and difficulty. In the Ethics and the KV he related it to love of God and the part of us that is eternal. He emphasized it in the TIE as well, although in both the TIE and the KV he referred to it as the “fourth kind of knowledge” (Spinoza collapsed the first two sorts of knowledge described in the KV and the TIE into one category, imagination, in the Ethics).What is the third kind of knowledge? In the Ethics the third kind of knowledge is distinguished from the first kind of knowledge – imagination including memory and testimony, and from the second kind of knowledge, reason. After considering these other sorts of knowledge Spinoza described the third kind of knowledge as “a kind of knowing which proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the NS: formal essence of things” (iip40s2, CW 478). In the TIE Spinoza described it in similar terms: “a thing is perceived through its essence alone” and we know we are engaged in intuitive knowledge when “from the fact that I know something, I know what it is to know something” (TIE 22).
