Notes on Spinoza’s Critique of Aristotle’s Ethics: From Teleology to Process Theory

Notes on Spinoza’s Critique ofAristotle’s Ethics: From Teleology to

Process Theory

Heidi M. RavvenHamilton College

(published in Philosophy and Theology, Volume IV, #1, Fall 1989,pp. 3 –32)

Abstract

I argue that Spinoza’s ethical theory may be viewed as a transformation of Aristotle’s teleologicalaccount which has been corrected of several fundamental flaws that Spinoza found in Aristotle. Theresult of Spinoza’s redefinition of ethical activity is a developmental account of ethics which has close kinship with the views of process theoreticians.

Introduction

Spinoza’s understanding of ethics was profoundly indebted to Aristotle’s teleological doctrine. Yet, at the same time, Spinoza transformed the Aristotelian material in two ways: (1) he reinterpreted and applied in new ways Aristotle’s doctrine of teleological activity; and (2) he corrected what he judged to be fundamental flaws in Aristotle’s account—its dualism and its one-sided intellectualism. As a result, Spinoza came up with somethingquite new. What Spinoza came up with would seem to be in many respects at the cutting edge of ethical theory today.

In this paper I attempt to show how precisely some of what is new in Spinoza’s ethical theory is rooted in but goes beyond Aristotle’s teleological ethical theory. I show how Spinoza modified this Aristotelian concept to develop: (a) a process theory of ethics that Spinoza explicates in

terms of what we now call systems theory; (b) a concept of psychic internality and its relationship to psychological well-being and personal and intellectual integrity; (c) a conative and cognitive approach to ethics combined, which integrates beliefs and affects and sees them both as in a process of development; (d) a concept of ethics as the ultimate and universal, all-encompassing human activity and not as merely a subordinate endeavor or a compartmentalized arena. I show in this paper that regarding all these characteristics of his new conception of ethics Spinoza is indebted to Aristotle’s concept of teleological activity. Yet it is Spinoza’s genius to be inspired by Aristotle in such a way that he transforms the Aristotelian theory profoundly.

I argue that it is from an understanding of Aristotle’snotion of teleological activity and of Spinoza’s modification of it that precisely the unique and central features of Spinoza’s ethical theory, which I have identified above, can be seen to emerge. After developing the precise notion of activity as Aristotle presents it—as, roughly, the perfected functioning intrinsic to a living being or practice (NE I, 1, 1094a1-6) [14, 13])—I show that,although Aristotle identified activity par excellence with the formal, thinking self-caused cause of the world, the necessary existent is transformed by Spinoza into the ubiquitous, immanent process—or activity—of reality itself. It is purged of its exclusively noetic and formal character,and activity is seen as having priority over its content—mental and material—which is its expression. Activity is thewhole of which the content of knowledge is the part. This ismy first point.

Second, it is the causative—and never passive—characterof the divine activity, which also entails its independence and self-sufficiency, that forms the metaphysical basis for both Aristotle’s and Spinoza’s concept of the voluntary as action originating in the internal workings of the person. Spinoza transforms this one Aristotelian characteristic

among several of the perfect and perfecting activity into the cornerstone of his ethics. Ethics is, thus, for Spinoza defined by the internality of the process alone, which is itautonomy. The degree of the internality of the source of an action becomes the criterion of ethics. Moreover, internality is developed by Spinoza in terms of systems theory. Internality is the well-functioning and single and integrated—or hierarchically organized—focus of the whole. It is the integrity of the system. It is the state of the process, and only derivately and instrumentally the content,which defines ethical values.

Third, Spinoza applies the Aristotelian understanding of teleological activity—i.e., the degree to which the origin of an action is internal to a person—to motivation aswell as to actions. He thereby derives an objective and intrinsic criterion of proper motivation. Fourth, Spinoza identifies self-sufficient activity or process as the human essence, which he identifies with desire. Desire or the conatus, qua activity, spans affect and belief. The progressive transformation of activity to internally caused through the active process and power of reason constitutes ethical development. This development involves a transformation in both beliefs and affects; it is conative and cognitive. Ethics is the rational self-transformation ofdesire and it results in systemic integrity, one of whose expressions is rational consistency and another joy.

In conclusion, I show that a consequence of this creative reworking of the Aristotelian notion of (perfecting) activity is that the medieval Aristotelian notion of the human ascent to the divine knowledge is attributed by Spinoza not to the search for theoretical knowledge but to the ethical ascent, the ascent toward cognitive and conative self-development. Ethics takes the place of the knowledge of God as redemptive because the human essence is thereby brought to full activity in and as the immanent divine activity itself. Ethics, and not theoretical knowledge considered alone, but precisely as

perfected activity or desire, completes the human striving for God. I conclude that this analysis clarifies why ethics,and not metaphysics and epistemology, is central for Spinoza: ethics in the Spinozistic account as it transforms Aristotle’s theory of activity, is the larger whole under which both knowledge and the body are subsumed. Therefore, ethics is not merely personal or interpersonal, nor merely rule bound or calculative of goods. It is also redemptive and beatific. Furthermore, ethics is an ascent, or, what we would call in contemporary terminology, developmental. It isthe process that embraces the entirety of the human being: namely, the integration of—systemic organization of—reason and affect and body.

Spinoza’s Identification of the Problem

Aristotle’s concept of telos as activity includes both the notion of an ongoing essential process and the notion ofa self-caused cause. Activity designates the actual perfecting and perfection of the formal dimension of all things and of form as such—or God—itself. Activity thus has an ethical aspect insofar as it identifies the normative andthe essential dimension. Perfection in the Aristotelian view, and in contrast with the Platonic, is a dynamic state of maximal functioning. In Aristotle’s biological model, each type of thing or species and also each practice has an activity proper to itself which is perfected in its highest functioning. Aristotle’s “telos” is, therefore, a dynamic steady state and neither a static nor an external goal.

At the same time, Aristotle combines with this notion of telos a concept of self-causality and self-sufficiency that finds its complete exemplar only in God. God alone is fully cause and self-caused. All other beings are caused—both brought into being and impinged upon—by causes externalto themselves as well as self-caused by their internal teloior natures.

It is upon these two intertwined Aristotelian concepts that Spinoza sets to work. Spinoza observes, as Aristotle does not appear to, that if God alone is fully self-caused, all other beings are not merely dependent upon God for theirexistence, i.e., upon an efficient causal series outside themselves, but also cannot exercise their teloi or essencesfully or at all times and in all respects. They are prevented from doing that by the impingement of external beings and circumstances upon them. This inherent human passivity and weakness in the face of the external world confronts Spinoza as a problem (E4P3&4). Aristotle’s human being would seem to have an essence, an activity, and a goal, yet one that cannot, in fact, be fully realized. Perhaps Aristotle does not really confront this problem because he waffles on who is truly a self-mover, God or the human being. Spinoza turns to Aristotle’s own theory of activity to solve this problem. Spinoza suggests that the divine activity is both immanent (human) and transcendent (divine)1. It is the whole and also constitutes the divine-human relation, which is in theory and in potential at least, therefore, an identity. Not only is the content of reason the same in God and in the human being and is that which unites them, as Aristotle claims, but for Spinoza it is the process that is one and the same in God and in the world. I argue in this paper that Spinoza emphasizes the identity in process (mental and physical) of God and the world over the identity in rational content of the human mind and God, as Aristotle did.2 Thus, for Spinoza human beings can participate fully in the divine freedom.

1 For other accounts that acknowledge the dynamic quality of Spinoza’s metaphysics see, e.g., [6, chs. 2 & 3], [6.5, 35ff], [8, ch. IV, esp. 48-74], [16, 527-553]. None of these accounts precisely argues, as I do here, that Spinoza claimed the priorityof activity over its content, intellectual and material.2 See, e.g., [De Anima, III, 431a1], regarding the identity of knower and known. The identity on the level of process of God andthe world is also the innovation upon Aristotle that Hegel adoptsin his metaphysics and carries out as the process not only of being but also as the dialectic of coming to be or becoming.

By claiming the identity in process of God and the world, Spinoza thereby addresses the dualism between intellectual and moral psychic functions and virtues in Aristotle’s account of ethics. Spinoza resolves the dualism through a more consistent application of Aristotle’s conceptof activity. Spinoza’s innovation here, too, is to focus on the activity or process of virtue and knowledge even more than on its content. As a result, Spinoza shows the moral and the intellectual virtues to be one and the same activityseen from two different perspectives—the affective and the intellectual—respectively. In act, and not only in rational content, God and human being are one. In fact, only in the achievement of identity of human and divine activity, which is Spinoza’s new definition of ethics, are the dualism between God and human being, and human passivity, overcome. Again, Spinoza’s focus on the divine activity, or process, over its intelligible content, resolves the dilemma. Spinoza’s thrust seems to have been to render Aristotelian metaphysics and ethics as a process theory.

Aristotle’s Concept of Teleological Activity

Aristotle describes the teleological activity or the activity that marks full “actuality”, in contrast to the “movement” that is exclusively a means to an end, as follows; that movement in which the end is present is an action. “Actuality,” Aristotle claims, is a process whose end is the perfected process itself and not a state of affairs external to that process. The means is not differentin kind from the end, he argues, but means and end coincide and the means is retained in the end and is intrinsic to it.

Since of the actions with a limit none is an end but all are relative to the end, e.g., the removing of fat …this is not an action or at leastnot a complete one (for it is not and end); but that movement in which the end is present is an action. E.g., at the same time, we are seeing and have seen, are understanding and have understood,

are thinking and have thought …At the same time weare living well and have lived well, and are happyand have been happy …Of these processes, then, we must call the one set movements, and the other actualities. For every movement is incomplete – making thin, learning, walking, building; …But it is the same thing that at the same time has seen and is seeing, or is thinking and has thought. Thelatter sort of process, then, I call an actuality,and the former a movement. (Met. IX, 6, 1048b17-34; see NE I, 1, 1094a1-6). See [13].)3

Aristotle goes on to characterize every species as having its own good which is its embedded end and characteristic activity. That is to say, all natural things belong to categories defined by activities of this kind in which the end is intrinsic to the means (NE X, 5, 1176a3-10). Human beings are defined by such a process or activity.Both the final process and its coming to full actuality define, for Aristotle, the good. The good is, therefore, relative to the end or species. For the human being it is reason. Thus, for Aristotle, it is not the human being as a whole—as a biological, emotive, and rational being—that defines the human activity but rather what Aristotle considers the characteristic and highest human activity, thinking. In this way, Aristotle derives his ethics directlyfrom his metaphysics (NE I, 7, 1097b26-1098a17).

(J)ust as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the ‘well’ isthought to reside in the function, so would it be for man, if he has a function…Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man…There remains, then, an active

3 See also [13], where MacIntyre makes the distinction central tohis new concept of ethics as deriving from practices and communities of practice. Practices are those activities whose ends are intrinsic to the means.

life of the element that has a rational principle …And, as ‘life’ of the rational element has two meanings, we must state that life in the sense of activity is what we mean…human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, andif there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

Now Spinoza’s first innovation is to define the human being not in terms of one favored activity and goal—i.e., one particular content—but in terms of activity or process as such, one of whose expressions or manifestations is rationaland the other bodily. Hence, for Spinoza the human essence is “conatus”, and neither mind nor body alone, but their totality as an ongoing, self-perpetuating and self-asserting, process. [22]4

The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actualessence of the thing itself…The power of anything,or the conatus with which it acts or endeavors to act, alone or in conjunction with other things, that is (Pr.6,III), the power or conatus by which it endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing but the given, or actual essence of the thing. [E3P7 and Dem]

Hence, Spinoza seems to take even more seriously than Aristotle, Aristotle’s own claim to define all species their

4 Harry A. Wolfson [22, II, 195-196] identifies the origin of theconcept of the principle of self-preservation in the Stoics, Peripatetics, Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Dante, Telesius, and the other philosophers of the Renaissance. Moreover, he writes, “At the time of Spinoza, the principle of self-preservation became a commonplace of popular wisdom, so much so that in the Hebrew collection of sermons by his teacher Rabbi Saul Levi Moterra one of the sermons begins with the statement that ‘Nature, mother of all created beings has implanted in them a will and impulse to strive for their self-preservation.’”

activities, rather than by external goals. For in defining intellect as the essential human activity, Aristotle has implicitly—and often not so implicitly—set other human processes, namely appetitive, motive, and even moral, as subordinate, and in the final analysis, instrumental to the rational, theoretical end (NE X, 7, 1177a29-1177b4 and 1178a5-8). Since the human telos is contemplative reason alone all other virtues both have instrumental aspects in and of themselves (former passage) and also must in the end be instrumental to reason since “reason more than anything else is man” (latter passage.) Spinoza takes the bodily and the non-theoretical human processes—the motive, the appetitive, and the emotive, and the moral—as parts or aspects of the one human activity. Moreover, for Spinoza, the goal of activity is even more completely than for Aristotle the activity itself: it has no particular content except that following upon the well-functioning and well-ordering or the process itself. For Aristotle, the goal of aparticular activity is the perfection of that function or practice. For Spinoza, however, the goal is not any particular content but activity as such. Spinoza comes to define both the true and the good in terms of their processes: the true is the order of ideas and the good is the order of emotions,—good emotions originate in the self and are consequent upon the true order of ideas (E2P7). In regard to both ideas and emotions, activity is the criterionof value (E3Def.3 and P22&23).

To understand how Spinoza arrives at the latter conclusions we must now turn to the elaboration of a second aspect of Aristotle’s concept of teleological activity: it is quintessentially self-caused caused. In this sense, activity is the opposite of passivity (rather than, as before, the opposite of static and extrinsic): it is to act from internal motivation rather than to be acted upon. Activity in this sense is synonymous with self-sufficiency and autonomy.

Self-causation, Perfected Activity, and Thought

Aristotle combines his theory of the embedded perfecting and perfected activity of the telos with a theoryof causation. The essential, as a potentiality to be developed to complete and full functioning, constitutes, according to Aristotle, the ultimate source of all movement and change. The realized telos is quintessentially causative—both self-causing and other-causing. It is precisely such an eternally and necessarily realized or actual telos that Aristotle identifies as the divine cause of the world (DeAnima III, 7, 431a3ff; MET XII, 5, 1071a29-36). While allparticulars can (in theory) be active in the sense of realizing their immanent function, only God can be active inthe sense of cause and never caused, i.e., as truly self-caused.

Thus, according to Aristotle, God is the one self-sufficient cause (MET XII, 5-9; Phys. VIII). The world in the Aristotelian conception is other-caused because it cannot exist on its own. Nature depends for its existence not on its own agency but on that of a first cause in the series, an uncaused cause or God (MET. XII, 7, 1072b13).5 5 Spinoza does not have a causal series originating in God in theexact way that Aristotle conceived it. According to Aristotle, the causal series began (or ended) with God as the first efficient cause. The series was therefore necessarily finite in scope though infinite in time, he argued (Physics VIII, ch. 6, 260a1-10) or else there would be no beginning. Thus, Aristotle’s series consists entirely of particular causes (which are also somehow universal, too, qua formal). For Spinoza, on the other hand, the series of finite causes is infinite (E2P9). At the sametime, God’s causality, expressed in the infinite attributes and modes, is that of general (scientific) laws. E.M. Curley points out [4, 64], “What Spinoza’s philosophy seems to require, for finite things, is both an infinite series of finite causes and a finite series of infinite causes terminating in God. Curley concludes: “(T)he singular facts which exist any given moment aredetermined by the previously existing singular facts and by certain general facts but that neither the previously existing

God depends for existence and essence upon the divine natureof thought alone (MET. XII, 7), while all particulars come into being through no nature or agency of their own but ultimately depend for their existence upon God. Their principles of activity—motivations and essential natures—although originating ultimately in God, are, on the other hand, their own consequent upon their immanent formal dimension (MET., XII, 5). Hence, they have a limited capacity to be the sources of their own activity (Phys. VIII, 2, 253a12-15). God is the cause of all causes, in Aristotle’s conception (MET., XII, 5, 1071a26-36).6

Eternal substance as actuality, however, like the formsof particulars, is—unlike Plato’s Forms, as Aristotle pointsout—precisely active, the ultimate source of all motion and change (MET. XII, 61071b14-19). For Aristotle it is the formal character of substance that is not only in a perfect process that is its essential nature but is as such the cause of all others outside itself. It is caused and self-caused and never caused. Actuality is a state of activity for Aristotle and substance is actuality as such and thus quintessentially active, and as such causative.

Spinoza’s concept of the divine substance follows Aristotle’s account quite closely. For Spinoza substance is precisely “causa sui” (E1Def.1), self-caused cause. Spinoza explains causa sui as “that whose essence involves existence(E1Def.1),” thereby recalling Aristotle’s own designation,

singular facts nor the general facts alone suffice to determine what facts now exist. The previously existing singular facts giveus the infinite series of finite causes. The general facts give us the finite series of infinite causes, terminating in God.”6 Aristotle was always ambivalent about whether to give priority on the basis of independence to concrete particulars as substanceor to a principle of form (or even, at times, to matter). He, therefore, designated a number of things as substance having first defined substance as that which is independent and upon which all things, including itself, depend. See (Met., 1070b35-1071a1) and (Categories V, 2a11-13).

“a principle whose very essence is actuality” (MET. XII, 6, 1071b20). God is the essentially, necessary existent (E1Def.1), and “that which exists solely from the necessity of its own nature” (E1Def.7) and thus completely self-dependent or free (E1Def.7),7 while, on the other hand, “theessence of things produced by God does not involve existence(E1P24). The latter are dependent for their existence on God. Spinoza’s God is, therefore, precisely the two characteristics we have isolated in Aristotle: quintessentially causative (and not passive or dependent) and quintessentially actual (God’s essence is his existence)and as such active. For, “God’s power is his very essence.” (E1P34)

At the same time, Spinoza, like Descartes his predecessor, uses the framework of the traditional discussion to challenge and modify traditional conceptions in the light of the (then) modern science. Descartes, unlikeSpinoza, uses the term causa sui to affirm “the utterly willful, arbitrary, motiveless, indifferent and incomprehensible liberty characterizing divine omnipotence.”Both Descartes and Spinoza eliminate any final causes as attributable to nature but only efficient ones and thereby open up the possibility of an infinite universe [19, 69-70].It is regarding the point that it is form—qua actuality—thatis the source of activity that Spinoza parts company with the Aristotelian tradition in his perhaps most radical departure from the theological-philosophical conception. In attributing Extension (a modernization of Aristotle’s matter) as well as Thought (a modernization of Aristotle’s form) to God (E1P14C2), Spinoza at the same endows Extension, and not only thought with causative activity (self-activity) [22, Vol. 1, P237]. In doing the latter, Spinoza clearly relies on the Aristotelian understanding of God as both quintessentially active and also and as such thesource of all natural change (although precisely, for 7 Regarding existents as necessary in themselves or necessary as caused by another, namely by another individual and ultimately byGod, see E1P33Schol1.

Aristotle, incorporeal.) In doing this, Spinoza is most influenced by the realist, Platonic side of Aristotle, the Aristotle of the medieval theological-philosophical tradition. That tradition based itself especially on Aristotle’s (Met., XII) and on (NE X). The medievals claimedthat God is generative of levels of being outside the divineself through God’s noetic act of pure intellect, a mind thinking all forms. At the same time, Spinoza takes a nominalist position regarding universals. He can reconcile the two positions insofar as he claims that God is not only extended but also immanent. And he does precisely that, claiming that the closing of the gap between God and the world follows directly from the attribution of extension to God (E1, P15, & DEM). As a consequence, those universals that Spinoza would admit as legitimate—the infinite modes ofsubstance and perhaps the attributes and not the species andgenera of particulars—refer to a concrete embodied whole, namely extended nature which is perfected activity, causative, and also cause. Aristotle went to great lengths to prove that the eternal substance could and had to be boththe initial (efficient) cause of all motion (and, therefore,of existence) and itself immaterial (MET., XII, 6, 1072b13-29), since in his understanding matter was the source of allpassivity and corruption and, thus, necessarily, ephemeral. Form, for Aristotle, was the goal of all processes of becoming but also precisely their initiator. And form was essentially—in God and in humanity—thought, as both the object of knowledge and as the thinking process itself. Thus, the divine causality was the generative activity of thought thinking its own true ideas. Thought is active in possessing its object; it is not a passive mirroring of the object, Aristotle argued (MET., XII, 7, 1072b13-29). Moreover, thought, as the proper divine activity, is “life” according to Aristotle, and engenders both the pleasure consequent upon all proper functioning and the pleasure of the highest activity of all (NE X, 7&8, Eesp 1178a8). That God is pure thought, however, and the activity of thinking raises the questions, how is intellect causative of anythingbut intellect, i.e., of anything outside itself? How can it

be the first cause of the world, i.e., of matter and of particulars composed of matter and form? I see here not onlythe classic problem of how to derive a composite, material world from a single, uniform, incorporeal source, but also asecond dilemma. If intellect thinks its own thoughts, it is then, essentially, self-related and its causing of the world(outside itself)—if that is possible at all—is secondary andeven incidental to its essential activity, thinking. The (efficient) causative activity of thought, on the one hand, and the content and purpose of thought, its perfection of its immanent telos, on the other, seem to be in unresolved tension. Aristotle’s claims of the efficient (causative) andformal causality of God are not compatible. Aristotle’s God cannot consistently be both the particular first efficient cause of the series of causes and also essentially perfectedactivity as form (i.e., mental or ideal).

Aristotle attempted to resolve the tension between the noetic content and the causative activity of God by arguing that the unmoved mover generates the world insofar as the divine is an object of contemplation and desire. God’s contemplative activity is essentially self-related and only causative through the apparent ‘love’ it inspires, thereby giving rise to the eternal circular motion of the spheres, which, in turn generate all motion (MET., XII, 7, 1071b1-12). That the mind is active in thinking is Aristotle’s brilliant insight. Yet, Aristotle fails to connect the generativity of the divine mind—and the perfected activity as such, the universal telos—with how things come to be in acogent account. The gap that Aristotle posits between divineand sublunar causality is not overcome by his most contrivedof ruses, the love of the spheres.

Now one might expect that Spinoza, in wishing to resolve the dilemma, why is the actual causative, would simply have divorced the concept of perfected activity, the actual, from the notion of causation. Spinoza could have separated the causative from the immanent, internal actual (i.e., perfected activity). He does not do that. Rather, he

keeps the identity and instead divorces both from their Aristotelian identification with form and intellect exclusively. It is the divine activity that is both its own perfect process and also the self-caused efficient cause of all things, according to Spinoza. However, neither characteristic is attributable, as both were according to Aristotle, to form alone and to thought alone.

Spinoza attributes extension to God and thereby not only posits a complete continuity between God and the world,which offers a response to the classical problem of explaining the origin of a material world from an immaterialsource. Spinoza also attempts thereby to resolve the second problem, the dualism between perfected activity and causative activity, between thought and act, in the very nature of the Aristotelian God (and human being, as we shalllater see). God’s self-causation and self-relation are, precisely, the world—as manifested empirically in extension and thought.8 Or, as commonly noted by both early and more recent scholars, the world is taken up into God. Hegel, for example, alleges that Spinoza’s doctrine entails “Acosmism.”[9, 281-282]: “Spinozism might really just as well or even

8 Aristotle was, it seems, still partially subject to what he identified as Plato’s error, the placing of (the) form(s) in a transcendent Beyond, with no clearly defined relation to the empirical world of which it is the source and the explanation. The love of God as the source of the relation harks back, too to Plato’s unsatisfactory solution. He leaves us wondering, as did Plato how an independent formal principle that is essentially self-related, its own telos, can be a principle explanatory of reality let alone a first efficient cause. This theory clearly belongs to the Platonic side of Aristotle. His embodying of form in particulars and their designation as primary substance attempts to get around precisely this Platonic problem. The neoplatonized Aristotelian tradition attempted to clarify the relation between God and the world by interposing a series of intermediaries between the immaterial eternal God and material particulars and by making God’s mind explicitly the formal as well as the final and efficient cause. Spinoza rejected this inadequate solution, too. See, e.g., [17, 131-132].

better have been termed Acosmism…the allegations of those who accuse Spinoza of atheism are the direct opposite of thetruth; with him there is too much God,” Hegel writes.

Spinoza’s modern understanding of extension, in part influenced by Descartes, enabled him to posit an extension that was not merely an imaginative (and therefore inadequate) representation but one that could be grasped theoretically and intellectually as indivisible and eternal (E1P15S). But yet, extension was for Descartes, as matter was for Aristotle, inert and in need of an outside cause of motion. It was Spinoza who took extension up into the divine(perfected) activity itself. He thereby made it possible (and necessary) for extension to be an efficient cause. Moreover, he thereby gave priority to the divine activity over its noetic content and formal nature. Spinoza enlarged the scope of the divine causa sui to subsume under it both formal-intellectual and material processes. As a result, thecausative-(perfected) active process is rendered more fundamental—prior and all-inclusive—than the formal content.The latter is reduced to the partial and derivative, an expression and manifestation of the essence rather than the essence in its truth and totality itself. To (perfected) process as such the highest value and the greatest scope aregranted. Spinoza carried this method through systematically:for Spinoza all dimensions and relations of the divine and the human are to be explained by, and to be reconciled in and by, God’s active power. In (E1P34) Spinoza claims that “God’s power is his very essence.”

Spinoza’s identification of extension and thought in God’s power creates the possibility of a first cause that islegitimately and essentially efficient while at the same time universal because it is immanent in all things. It is the source of the material world and, at the same time, of thought. It is itself essentially generative while not beingany less conceptual. In making both extension and thought precisely two different expressions of the one divine (self-) causation, Spinoza establishes substance, causa sui,

as logically prior to and inclusive of both of them.9 God orNature is activity and thought is one of the (infinite) forms—all identical in essence but conceivable under different attributes—it takes. The process (or activity), i.e., the order—and the order is dynamic and not static—of ideas and things is its own content both as thought and as extension. The process is explanatory of thought as constituting it as well as vice versa.10 Act or power has priority over its expression, and consequently over thought and extension because it is inclusive of both and is that byreference to which they must be understood. Thought and extension, therefore ought to be understood as particular (i.e., smaller universals, infinites in their own kind) manifestations of the divine activity or power. Spinoza 9 It is an unresolved problem of Spinoza scholarship whether theattributes are subjective or objective, that is to say merely conceivable by the limited human intellect as distinguishable aspects of substance, each constituting its essence in one way, or rather as each distinct, in fact. Wolfson argues [22, II, 142-157] that the attributes, unlike the modes are intended by Spinoza to be subjective, i.e., intramentally distinguishable only, and therefore, in reality, full identical with substance. In either case, Spinoza’s claim of the self-causation of all the attributes, not only of intellect in the activity of thought but also of extension, suggests the priority of the larger unity. In fact, the claim that I am making of the priority of activity overits expressions in the attributes, would seem to solve the problem and also be consistent with Wolfson’s claim of the subjectivity of the attributes, but not with his claim of their total identity with substance.10 There is another abiding problem in the Spinozist philosophy regarding the identity of the attributes. Thought and extension cannot be co-extensive because thought knows extension and also itself. Moreover, if the other attributes are knowable in principle—if not by a limited human mind then by the divine mind—as they must be because they are all identical in substance by definition, then thought’s infinity is as extensive as substance itself and not merely infinite in its own kind as an attribute isby definition. This problem lends itself to an idealist resolution and, perhaps, interpretation of Spinoza. Regarding idealist interpretations of Spinoza see, [1], [7], [8], and [20].

expresses the priority of the divine activity over the divine as object of knowledge as follows:

(T)hat God can form the idea of his own essence and everything that necessarily follows, therefromwas inferred solely from God’s being a thinking thing, and not from his being the object of his own idea. (E2P5Dem)

God’s power is nothing but his essence in action. (E2P3S)

Teleology, Process Theology, and Systems Theory

I have just shown how Spinoza transforms Aristotle’s teleological conception of the divine and human activities into a process theology and metaphysics by systematically eliminating any particular content of the process as its goal. The goal of the process is its own well-functioning; it is perfected activity itself. That is causa sui in God and the conatus in the human being. All of the latter parts of the Ethics are, in fact, precisely devoted to a theory ofhow to raise and develop the human conatus to the activity of the divine causa sui. This is the sense in which Spinoza’s ethical theory is developmental and I will addressthis issue in further detail below.

However, before I go on to address Spinoza’s ethical theory as such, the question arises, has Spinoza transformedAristotle’s metaphysics, and thereby his ethics, into a process theory and in doing so forsaken Aristotle’s teleology completely. Spinoza explicitly (in the Appendix toPart I of the Ethics) rejects a crude teleological doctrine.Spinoza is careful to avoid the teleological errors he so adamantly rejects, the attribution to nature of human motives. Perhaps it is to counteract any temptation of a careless reader to attribute to God a particular purpose or external good rather than strict internal necessity and

indifference that Spinoza never explicitly says in so many words that the particular conatus is the modal expression ofthe divine causa sui. He states the general principle in (E1P24C) that “God is the cause not only of the coming into existence of things but also of their continuing in existence…So it is not their essence which can be the cause of either their existence or their duration but only God, towhose nature alone existence pertains (P14Cor1).” And in (E1P25), that “God is the efficient cause not only of the existence of things but of their essence.” This divine powerimmanent in things is precisely the conatus, (E2P45S):

the force [“vis”—a synonym for conatus] by which each perseveres in existing follows from the eternal necessity of God’s nature. (E1P24C)

Yet, there is a growing consensus among scholars that Spinoza’s rejection of teleology was not total but rather represents a higher, i.e., more sophisticated, reconstruction of it. Spinoza’s rejection of the Aristotelian identification of the human telos with intellect alone, makes possible a new kind of teleology. ForSpinoza, the telos is not one characteristic (intellect) of the totality of human and divine characteristics—an allegedly highest one. Rather, the telos is the well-functioning of the entire system. The process as such and asa totality becomes its own goal. Intellect and body are two of the infinite characterizations and aspects of the processbut none by itself is its adequate description.

Some scholars have argued—and, I think quite plausibly—that the divine immanent and efficient causality is not teleological in the traditional theological sense of aiming toward a particular divine and human good or purpose. Yet itis teleological in the sense that a biological system is: itis a systematic totality composed of a hierarchy of subsystems, each more complete and independent than its components. Spinoza has transcended both the traditional theological notion of causality and also the mechanistic

notion—the modern science of his day—with a systems theory approach. In General and Social Systems [3, 14, 15, and 17],for example, F. Kenneth Berrien defines a theory of system that is to cover biological, physical, chemical, mathematical, psychological, social and other systems.

A system is defined as a set of components interacting with each other and a boundary which possesses the property of filtering both the kind and rate of flow of inputs and outputs to and fromthe system. It has been customary to distinguish between open and closed systems: open systems are those which accept and respond to inputs (stimuli,energy, information and so on) and closed systems are those which are assumed to function within themselves.

We are compelled to view all real systems as open, recognizing that the degree of openness may vary among systems…(S)ystems stagnate and then disintegrate when appropriate inputs diminish or are eliminated.

It would seem that using these terms, Spinoza’s God is both open and closed—or, rather, God is where openness and closedness converge insofar as God includes all inputs within the divine self. In God, all external stimuli no longer exist as such, but are integrated into the system as its own. Therefore the system is closed. Yet the system is not closed because it is not closed to the outside but internalizes the outside in its entirety. Moreover, the causality of the system is both physically generative of itsown perseverance or continuity, qua extension, and is also the information embodied in the system, qua thought.

The inputs to a system are the energies absorbed by the system or the information introduced into it…Energy which can do useful work is equivalent to information. [3, 24-25] (see [12].)

The system can be described adequately in alternative physical and mental accounts. That causa sui is the definingprinciple of a biological-type system has a sound basis in Spinoza in (E2P13S2):

We thus see how a composite individual can be affected in many ways and yet preserve its nature [by the mutual relation of motion and rest (Lemma 5)]. Now hitherto we have conceived an individual thing composed solely of bodies distinguished fromone another only by motion-and-rest and speed of movement; that is an individual thing composed of the simplest bodies. If we now conceive another individual thing composed of several individual things of different natures, we shall find that this can be affected in many other ways while still preserving its own nature. For since each one of its parts is composed of several bodies, each single part can therefore (preceding Lemma), without any change in its nature, move with varying degrees of speed and consequently communicate its own motion to other parts with varying degrees of speed. Now if we go on to conceive a third kind of individual thing composedof this second kind, we shall find that it can be affected in many other ways without any change in its form. If we thus continue to infinity we shallreadily conceive the whole of Nature as one individual whose parts—that is, all the constituent bodies—vary in infinite ways without any change in the individual as a whole.

The notion of activity as the self-ordering and self-integrating process of a system encompassing everything is consistent with other aspects of substance. Cause and causedare co-extensive yet conceptually separable: Natura Naturansand Natura Naturata, substance and its modes, respectively (E1P29S). Natura Naturans would seem to be equivalent to the

system of nature as ‘closed’ and Natura Naturata equivalent to the system as ‘open’. Causa sui is, thus, self-causing intwo senses: in the first sense of being the initial (logically prior, not temporally antecedent) cause or causalsystem that exists necessarily and independently of everything else. It is self-caused cause in a second sense, also, in being itself the result as well as the cause. It causes itself. Cause and effect are not successive but rather the cause is immanent in the effect (E1P18). There isno passive recipient of the cause. All of nature is self-ordering energy or a process of ordering and integration. There is no force of disintegration or entropy in Spinoza’s conception. Disorder is a reordering, i.e., a transition to another ordered state. If there is a counterforce, a disordering process as such, Spinoza’s monism falls apart. Entropy on the universal scale, and a Freudian type “death wish” on the psychological, would call into question Spinoza’s most basic assumptions (see [15, 33-40]). All of nature is the process of its self-becoming, or, more precisely, of its active self-being. Spinoza’s extension of causa sui to all of nature eliminates all contingency, passivity, and resistance (E1P29). God is no longer existentbeyond nature but rather is the dynamic necessity immanent in nature. God’s eternity and necessity are nature’s own—essentially as Natura Naturans and modally as Naturata. Yet the divine immanent necessity is not non-purposive. There isa telos here. Thus, Errol Harris [8, 128-130] argues that Spinoza’s conception of causa sui is implicitly teleologicalbut not in the bad sense that Spinoza himself argues againstbut rather in the sense that:

there is another better sense of teleology which is not vulnerable to Spinoza’s attack, and which is implicit in all his own thinking. It is a conception of teleology which is not exclusive of efficient causation and which is compatible with, not contradictory of, mechanism…(The) determination of function in the part by the principle of the whole is the key characteristic

of teleological process…This is the nature of teleological activity properly understood: it is aprocess generating a totality, in which every phrase and detail is constituted and directed by the principle or organization (or structure) universal to the system that is being generated and fully realized only in its completion. It is apattern of form and action in which every nuance is determined by the requirements of the whole. When this is the case adequate explanation always proceeds from the whole to the part, from the universal principle of organization to its diversemanifestations in the course of its realization.11

Spinoza has developed a model of a system whose goal and activity is perfected self-generation, self-perpetuation in dynamic equilibrium or a steady state.

Activity as the Human Essence:The Conative Human Being

For Spinoza the human being is fundamentally an organized dynamic system: a microcosm and also a subsystem of the world. For Aristotle, the self-identity and self-causality of discrete particulars is due to their forms, i.e., their essences or natures which are their species and genera [21]. In positing the priority of the divine activityover the divine thought, Spinoza establishes the basis for his nominalism, thereby depriving particulars of their separate essences (and goals) according to species (E1P24&25). All particulars essences, Spinoza claims, are modal expressions of God’s causa sui; they are essentially 11 See [2, 89]: Braithwaite, Ernest Nagel, George Sommerhoff, andMorton Beckner…all adopt the strategy of regarding an activity aspurposive only when its goal-seeking character is the outcome of relatively independent, dovetailing processes. Sommerhoff, for example, defines “purposive behavior” with the help of a concept he terms ‘directive correlation’.

(divine) energy, equally expressible in terms of thought or extension. The common basis of the God-world relation is profoundly changed as a result. In the Aristotelian tradition it is the rational (formal) content of things and God’s mind that is their common ground and that is the basisfor the divine and human unity as knowers of the formal content of reality. For Spinoza, however, the basis of the divine-world and divine-human relation is not knowledge as such or, rather, before all else. It is, rather, the divine self-causality as the immanent divine self-organizing, self-perpetuating and self-generating energy or activity. One andonly one of the expressions of the divine activity is knowledge or thought both in the human being and in God.

Spinoza clearly recognizes that the unresolved tension between self-movement and knowledge—i.e., activity and its formal content and goal—is even further intensified in Aristotle’s account of the human being. Although according to Aristotle all animals (and among them human beings) are self-movers, the human being is also essentially rational. Among the faculties of the human soul that Aristotle enumerates—nutritive, appetitive, sensory, locomotive, and thinking—appetite or desire is of a low, sub-rational order.The latter comes into play in practical thinking as the wishfor an object as the end and initiator of action. Yet it is absent from the quintessential speculative activity of mind (De Anima, III, 9, 433a27-433b3).

Neither can the calculative faculty or what is called ‘mind’ be the cause of such movement, for mind as speculative never thinks what is practicable it never says anything about an objectto be avoided or pursued, while the movement is always in something which is avoiding or pursuing an object…Something else is required to produce action in accordance with knowledge; the knowledgealone is not the cause.

As a result, desire is for action. But when the mind functions quintessentially as itself in speculative thought,it is not an initiator of activity in the normal sense at all, according to Aristotle (NE VI, 1139a35-1139b5).

Intellect itself…moves nothing, but only the intellect which aims at an end and is practical …for good action is an end, and desire aims at this. Hence choice is either desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire, and such an origin of action is a man.

It has an activity divorced from all its other functions andfrom desire. Qua theoretical mind, the human being, like thedivine mind, is not an initiator of anything outside its owntruth. Now I have shown that this is the rift that Spinoza heals by unifying the macrocosm as identical attributes—distinguishable only subjectively—expressing one divine activity. Spinoza also heals the Aristotelian rift in the human personality by unifying concrete particulars as centers of activity or conatus/desire—manifested simultaneously in mind and body.

According to Spinoza and unlike Aristotle, in human beings and all other particulars the striving for self-maintenance is their immanent divine essence (E3P7). Desire or “conatus” precisely defines “the actual essence of the (i.e., each) thing itself.” In human beings and animals thisis experienced as desire,12 Spinoza identifies the particular conatus for self-persistence with the impetus toward self-caused activity.13 The striving for survival,

12 Spinoza’s claim that the degree of complexity of bodies is directly proportionate to their capacity for experiencing with any clarity and distinctions (E2P13Schol1) frees him from the charge, if it is one, of panpsychism.13 It is interesting to note that Hegel, who also conceives ethics, in part, as the self-development of desire through reason, sets the desire to survive and the desire to act autonomously in conflict. In his Lordship and Bondage in the

which is essential to every living being, is identified by Spinoza with the concept of (teleological) activity as he has inherited it and modified it from Aristotle. Spinoza’s concept of activity—and of conatus—therefore, entails a striving for the perfection of identity and increased self-causality or self-assertion, essential characteristics of Aristotle’s telos, as well as for mere bodily survival. In fact, the Aristotelian background precisely clarifies why Spinoza’s conatus has the aims it does, when Spinoza attributes to it merely that of self-persistence.

The conatus expresses itself—in fact, the same self simultaneously—in the two media, the mental and the physical. The bodily conatus and the conatus of the mind aretwo expressions of one reality and individuality (E3P11). Thus, here on the microcosmic level, as on the macrocosmic, activity, which is internal causation, is prior to all otherphenomena, all of which display an intrinsic continuity and are to be explained in terms of it as its diverse manifestations.14 In this way, Spinoza has, with regard to

Penemenology of Spirit, the two are presented as antithetical andin need of reconciliation. The desire to survive is for Hegel, here, the origin of the willingness to be passive and accept outside coercion. Acceptance of domination is the price for survival. One conception of the human project in Hegelian terms is as the reconciliation of these two antithetical desires. For Spinoza the desire for self-persistence plays itself out as the desire for activity or autonomy.14 David R. Lachterman [11, 81-89], explains that Spinoza’s principle of the divine immanence makes possible the reconciliation of the inner contradiction in the Cartesian understanding of the conatus as both the tendency of a body to move in a straight line and as that which defines an individual body. There is a principle of homogeneity between macro and microphenomena that entails both individuation and the reconciliation or integration of parts in the whole. There is therefore no rectilinear motion except as an expression of the conatus—not as a discrete Cartesian inertia. We may conclude that Spinoza’s development of a theory of organism and of system theory is as a reaction to problems in the Cartesian account.

particulars, as he did regarding God or the whole, claimed the priority of activity over both mind and body and also posited activity as the basis of their identity. In this way, Spinoza has also overcome Aristotle’s identification ofthe ultimate reality or actuality as the strictly mental while, he, at the same time maintains the importance and theuniversality of the mental.

The upshot is that the human being is no longer prior to all else the “rational animal” (i.e., in aspiration and ideal, above desire) but rather essentially ‘conative’—whichis, like, not unlike, all things great and small—because Godis causa sui, essential activity and self-caused cause. Rationality in the human being and divine alike is only one expression of self-causation which in the human being is desire itself. That the human essence is conatus with its two arenas of expression, mind and body, plays itself out asthe center of Spinoza’s psychology and ethics. In God, the priority of the divine activity over its expressions entailed the identity of thought and extension as alternative expressions of one phenomenon. So, regarding thehuman person, from the conatus follows the identity of mind and body, on the one hand, and that of will (or, better, affect) and intellect, on the other, as two simultaneous andcomplete (in their own kind) expressions of one self-activity. All are expressions of one basic power and process. There is no intellect above desire as Aristotle’s theoretical intellect is. All intellect, as an expression ofthe immanent divine activity, is also essentially conative. Desire or activity, in principle, therefore, integrates mindand body, reason and emotion.

Process Ethics: The Development of PsychicInternality and Freedom of Motivation

The notion of (perfecting) activity is correlated withthat of self-causation as the starting point for a description not only of God, for Aristotle, but also of the human being (De Anima, II, 1; MET., XII, 5). Spinoza, too, as we have seen, begins with the concept of the human being as, at least a partial, self-mover. A corollary of Aristotle’s concept of the divine substance as alone self-sufficient and the source and principle of all motion and change in the world, is his designation of its existence as necessary by its own nature (MET., V, 5, esp. 1015b10-16). In contrast, that which depends on it is contingent in itself because the essences of particulars neither compel nor prevent their existence. The source of their existence (and necessity) is outside themselves in God (ibid.). They are, as a result, subject to external necessity which is compulsion. Internal necessity alone can be designated as free and that is attributable to God alone (ibid.). Aristotle in this way identifies internal necessity—and therefore perfected activity—with freedom from external compulsion. Freedom, par excellence, is attributable to God alone. Yet, human beings, according to Aristotle, can, in principle, achieve their telos: the perfected activity of the theoretical intellect.

Aristotle goes on to develop his notion of human freedom or voluntary, self-caused activity, on the analogy of the divine freedom: insofar as human beings can be said to be free at all—and that is in a limited sense since theirvery existence, unlike God’s is externally determined—they are free insofar as they act strictly from their internal causes to complete their teloi in and by full activity. As such, they are, like God, self-movers, self-caused. Voluntary action, and within it, rational choice, are the expressions of self-movement. Internal causality, thus, for Aristotle, covers both self-causality or movement and

teleological activity. Aristotle’s account of voluntary action is the human analogy of the divine self-causality andinternally originating, self-dependent activity.

The voluntary would seem to be that of which the moving principle is the agent himself. (NE III, 1,111a23-24)

(rational) choice seems to relate to the things that are in our own power. (NE III, 2, 111b28-29)

Inner causal necessity and freedom are, thus, compatible notions while external causal necessity is compulsion.

The compulsory seems to be that whose moving principle is outside, the person contributing nothing. (NE III, 1, 1110b16-18)

Now Spinoza follows this Aristotelian account of the divine and human freedom quite precisely, identifying the totally and necessary self-caused (God) with the totally free, and the partially internally caused (the human being) with the partially free (E, I, Def. 2&7). The fully self-caused cause(God) is alone endowed with full (perfected) activity or freedom while the human being, and all other particulars, are both partially the sources of their own activity and arealso subject to external causes; they are partially passive.Yet, because Aristotle remains ambivalent about what ought to be truly designated as substance, i.e., as truly independent, namely, concrete particulars or the cause of causes, while Spinoza argues for the existence of only one, universal substance, that which is subject to no external limitation, Spinoza thereby sets the stage for endowing the human being with a freedom and perfected activity commensurate with God’s own. Spinoza expands the possibilityand scope of human freedom, insofar as the human essence is the immanent divine activity (in modal form), while for

Aristotle the human and divine merely share the same rational content.

Moreover, for Spinoza, while not for Aristotle, actions originating strictly from the internal in the human must be expressions of the perfected activity of the human essence. This is because for Spinoza the active is co-extensive with the voluntary or the free. For Aristotle, however, perfected activity is co-extensive only with the intellectual since the human telos is not perfected activityas such but rather the perfected activity of the theoreticalintellect alone. Thus, for Spinoza, the ethical is defined precisely by the state of the process—its relative activity—alone without any necessary reference to the content. For Aristotle, on the other hand, ethical actions are evaluated by their adherence to rational goals, either practical or theoretical. Reason independently sets the content of these goals.

In adhering to the Aristotelian definition of internalcausation, or the active telos, as the criterion of the voluntary,15 Spinoza’s deterministic account does not preclude human activity as free in that sense, although it is at the same time necessary. Yet, it would appear that theSpinozist monistic philosophy of mind would precisely preclude any ethics insofar as human action would seem to follow as inevitably from one’s conatus, one’s internal motivations or nature, as a cat instinctively catches a bird. It would thus seem to be a given without the possibility of development or ideals. However, by identifying substance (in the part and in the whole) in totoas self-caused systemic well-functioning, perfected activity, Spinoza is able to claim both the naturalistic determination of all choices and also a series of gradationswithin self-causation itself that makes improvement and

15 Although even animals act voluntarily, according to Aristotle,only human beings deliberate rationally and act from choice. (NE III, 2, 1112a15-17): “choice involves a rational principle and thought.”

development possible. For an identity with the divine freedom or activity is a distant but still theoretically realizable goal for a person, according to Spinoza. Consequently, he takes the position that all non-compelled actions are voluntary—as Aristotle argued—but some—unlike Aristotle’s claim—are more voluntary than others. That is, there are gradations within the voluntary that enable the ascent to (or development of) divine-like activity or freedom.

From the divine perspective, there is only full activity because there is no entity or principle outside of God or Nature that could compel an action and determine it as passive. Things follow necessarily from the divine activity or power. Any particular, on the other hand, is subject to external causes as well as to internal ones. It is Spinoza’s great insight to attribute the Aristotelian criterion of internality, i.e., the voluntary or activity, to motivations as well as to actions. As a result, motivations, which are all in one sense within the person—asare the actions that follow from them necessarily—can yet, in another sense, be evaluated according to an internal criterion of the relative internality of their causes. That is to say, some motives are more voluntary than others, according to Spinoza. This is the case because some motivations, according to Spinoza, indicate internal activity and others internal passivity. Hence, external causality or compulsion is attributable to certain motivations even though all motivations are, in another wider sense, internal. Some motivations are passive, according to Spinoza. Emotions attributable to a series of causes not internal to the mind, i.e., emotions whose causesare unknown or falsely attributed, are undertaken in passivity to the external world (E3, P3, 8 Dem & S).

Hence, one can distinguish a spectrum of actions from the totally compelled to the totally internally caused or active. Internal motivations fit in this spectrum, too, on ascale whose endpoints are the completely reactive, socially

or accidentally determined, on the one side, to the rationally ordered on the other. These motivations are analyzable in terms of the beliefs about the causes of pleasure, pain, and desire, of which they are in part composed. Beliefs about causes arising from the arbitrary common order of experience are acquired passively and uncritically while those beliefs are active whose order or connections are inherent in and coherent with the beliefs themselves, i.e., they form a rational series or coherent explanation. To be motivated by the universal rational causal order of one’s own mind—rather than by arbitrary external and historical happenstance—is to be internally motivated and, therefore, active rather than passive. Rationality is an expression of inner activity while irrational belief is always passive and reactive. Thus, not only the vast realm of the voluntary—all internally motivated actions—as for Aristotle, but also the criterion of value or ethics for Spinoza, is explicated in terms of self-activity.

Self-activity finds its full expression in rational self-knowledge. Because internal causality or the voluntary is subject to inner gradations within which full self-activity of motivation is a goal and ideal, the latter can be realized only in that state of emotion and desire which has its series of causes within itself. That state of full internal causality is only accomplishable precisely in and as full self-knowledge—both retrospective and prospective. It can be accomplished only in the beliefs about the causes of emotions that constitute self-knowledge. When in and through self-knowledge the full series of causes is incorporated completely within the self and originates in the self, rather than passively mirroring the arbitrary happenstance of individual experience, the person has achieved activity. Hence, rational self-knowledge is the process of the becoming active of the conatus (or the self-in-process). It is also, as such—as I shall argue in furtherdetail below—the self-development or self-fulfilling processof desire (the conatus) towards its own self-causality or

empowerment. It constitutes the ideal and human project for Spinoza.

Thus, ethics for Spinoza is to be defined and explicated only in terms of its process. Moreover, that process implies its own criterion of perfection or value—itsfull activity or internality of causes—which can be used as a criterion of proper motivation and therefore of ethical actions. Spinoza proceeds in the latter sections of the Ethics (especially in The Definition of the Emotions in PartIII and in Part IV) to perform in regard to a large number of motivations—emotional attitudes—precisely the detailed working out of this theory. As a further consequence of his theory of activity, ethics for Spinoza can and ought to be defined as the self-development of desire through knowledge or the education of desire [see 18].

The Education of Desire: The Integration of Affectsand Beliefs, Systemic Integrity

For human beings, there is an expression of the conatus that spans body and mind: it is emotion (E3 General Definition of the Emotions, Explication). Emotion is composed of the bodily affections plus the ideas of those affections (E3 Def. 3). More specifically, it consists of the three primary affections (pleasure, pain, and desire) (E3P11S) and the ideas of the causes of the latter. Hence, emotion is (and refers to) a state of the whole person. (Spinoza argues that emotions register the changes in the state of the conatus of a person.) As a person’s body experiences pain or pleasure, the conatus is frustrated or enhanced respectively (E3P11).

Thus, emotions are nothing other than the signs that register—through the primary emotions of pleasure, pain, anddesire—the changes in the state of activity, its increase ordecrease, of the conatus, together with the beliefs about the causes of those changes (E3 Def. 3). The conatus to

persist in its own being is experienced by a person as the desire to further—promote or protect—the self. This desire for self-furthering is the ultimate motivation and meaning of all emotions. Since emotions involve implicit beliefs about their causes and are intelligible as attitudes and compulsions to act based on these beliefs, emotions can be in error. Pleasure and pain can be judged to derive from seeming causes rather than from their real causes and the consequent emotions—emotions according to Spinoza are alwaysdirected at objects—can be misdirected [18]. Desire, which is always for self-preservation, arises in response to the emotions—whether rational or irrational. We may infer from Spinoza’s account that the conatus is never experienced directly but always as mediated through belief. Therefore, desire is prone to error and in need of education.

Practical decisions, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, are species or manifestations of the conatus and can, therefore, be explicated in terms of desire in the general sense of self-preservation and emotion. In fact, they ought to be explicated as such because they are in factone activity, not two. Beliefs,16 as expressive of the conatus, involve feeling tones (emotions) and conversely, emotions are the way beliefs (about the body’s affections) feel—they are attitudes—and can be explicated in terms of their cognitive content. Beliefs and emotions are alternative descriptions of the state of activity (or power or desire) of an organism.

With this identification of ideas and emotions, Spinoza resolves the abiding dualism of the Aristotelian account. Aristotle distinguished between the mind as the final cause or end (theoretical intellect) and the mind as means (practical intellect). In the human mind, as in the

16 That Spinoza’s “ideas” are prepositional rather than pictorialand express affirmation and denial, i.e., make claims that are attitudinal and dispositions to action, is both widely held by interpreters and borne out by the text. As a result, “idea” is often better rendered in English as “belief.”

divine mind, the theoretical activity is the object of desire, but the motive force to choose that activity must come from elsewhere. Aristotle, thus, retains a dimension ofGod and the human being beyond all desires and purpose. Theoretical mental activity is of a totally disinterested and separate nature. In the human person, it is discontinuous with not only all bodily life but with all other psychic faculties (De Anima II, 2, 413b24-29).

(M)ind or the power to think…seems to be a widely different kind of soul, differing as what is eternal from what is perishable; it alone is capable of existence in isolation from all other psychic powers. All the other parts of the soul…are…incapable of separate existence though of course distinguishable by definition.

Moreover, the mental activity involved in the moral life, according to Aristotle, is completely instrumental to the chosen ends. Rational deliberation in practical intellect concerns means alone. Only in theoretical intellect does themind think according to its own criteria of truth and falsity, i.e., in affirmation and negation, rather than in terms of pursuit and avoidance, which are the essential characteristics of desire (in any of its forms as appetite, choice, and wish) (M.E. VI, 2 1139a21-31).

Aristotle’s account of ethical reasoning betrays this dualism. According to Aristotle, that the human being is an unmoved mover whose causes of activity are internal to itself, i.e., is capable of voluntary action, establishes only the possibility of an ethical life but not its actuality: that is to say, its determination and goal. Freedom sets the stage for activity determined by desire butis neither desire nor the determination of desire in any specific direction. Aristotle considers actions resulting from the (internal) motives of a person (or animal, for thatmatter) to be voluntary. The irrational act is as self-caused as the rational, he claims, for,

the irrational passions are thought not less humanthan reason is, and therefore also the actions which proceed from anger or appetite are the man’sactions. It would be odd, then, to treat them as involuntary. (NE III, 1, 1110b1-4)

Thus, in the Aristotelian account, freedom is directionless and must be directed from outside itself, on the one hand, and, on the other, the aim has no practical, compelling force. Reason is a possible goal of action but does not compel the will.

Spinoza, in holding the priority of desire, places knowing within desire itself; knowing cannot be without inherent purpose(s) insofar as it is an expression of the conatus for self-persistence and activity (E2P19Dem & Cor.).Spinoza thereby abolishes the distinction between theoretical and practical intellect. Voluntary or internal causation is, consequently, not an open field for Spinoza asit is for Aristotle, but, as an expression of desire, compels choices. Hence knowledge is active for Aristotle as (self-referential) thinking, on the one hand, and as the goal and object of desire, on the other. Spinoza, however, argues (E3, P2S) that, “mental decisions are nothing more than the appetites themselves, varying therefore according to the varying disposition of the body.” Desire compels choice because nothing intervenes between motive and act, knowledge and emotion. Will is simply desire conscious of itself as a compelling motivation to act. Deliberation and desire are not two separable acts of mind but one act of a mind-body (E3P2S).

While thinking is a species of desire in all its manifestations, reason, at the same time, enables desire to have a goal and an inner development. Because the conatus can manifest itself rationally, desire is capable of the self-transformation which is its education. Self-educated desire is both an intellectual and an emotional goal. A

corollary of Spinoza’s identification of emotions or motivations, qua expressions of the conatus, as subject to degrees of internality and activity, is that rationality is a criterion not only of truth but also of personal psychological autonomy and integrity. Internal determinationis both precisely truth and activity, which entails psychic well-being (E2P29Cor. & S). Spinoza thus claims that,

In so far as (our mind) has adequate ideas it is necessarily active; and in so far as it has inadequate ideas it is necessarily passive. (E3P1)

Activity or autonomy is experienced as well-being (E3P53 & 54). Integrity is the internal causality and consistency of the system. Intellectual and psychological criteria are largely co-extensive since the source and order of ideas indicate the relative activity of the system which is its state of desire and emotion. Reason makes possible the activity of the mind: first, the internality of the causes of actions and emotions can be attained through and manifested in the beliefs about those causes that, in part, constitute emotions; second, the power of rational inference—“affirmation and denial” (E2P48S) in Spinoza’s terminology—from which internal consistency follows is the manifestationin thought of, and also betrays the power of thought to create, the internal activity and systemic ordering which isthe integrity of the system. It is reason as process, as thefullest manifestation of the activity or conatus of the person, which Spinoza focuses on. That is the process of thinking and only instrumentally its content. The process ofreason is only one side of the many-sided phenomenon of human perfected activity, all of which together constitute, according to Spinoza, the conatus (or desire) in its perfected state, or precisely ethics.

Beatitude and Redemption

Activity is the ideal inherent in the conatus: the desire for self-persistence aims at self-activity and at is increase [8, 103]. It aims at self-empowerment. It aims to respond to the environment through the nature of its own structure, which is extensionally defined as a dynamic equilibrium of motion and rest, and defined in mental terms as the rational self-knowledge that includes within itself its complete causal order. Emotion spans both sides as the accompanying feeling tone of the system—namely, joy. The traditional ethics of good and evil actions is completely replaceable—and ideally to be replaced—by the process criterion of the relative activity of the system. This criterion is, I have tried to demonstrate, precisely Spinoza’s modification and transformation of Aristotle’s teleological activity. According to Aristotle the goal and good of each species is the highest activity of its own special form and the outcome of its internal nature (NE II, 5, 1106a15-23).

In eliminating from teleological activity the notion of special (and species) forms,—in subordinating rational (and extensional) content to process—Spinoza substituted thedivine activity itself as immanent in and essential to each thing, thereby making each thing’s divine active process itsown goal. Spinoza also thereby make all things in essence and potential God. As G.H.R. Parkinson puts it, “the conatuswith which each thing, insofar as it is itself, endeavours to persevere in its own being, is really God’s ‘conatus’” [16, 544-545]. Human activity, as a result, can be achieved only in the human-divine relation, which is the relation of the individual conatus to the immanent universal causa sui or divine activity. The conatus can only reach full activityas the divine freedom or activity itself.

The last chapter in Spinoza’s critique and transformation of Aristotle’s concept of teleological activity regards the divine-human relation. As human beings strive toward self-caused activity, they accomplish thereby ethical relations to self and other [See 18] precisely

because that conscious striving is itself the fulfillment ofproper motivation or freedom. The development of this focus,rather than foci upon other pleasures and avoidance of pain,is the education of desire which is the ethical ascent. Thisascent and its accomplished activity is not only human perfected process but is also redemptive, for Spinoza, because it is in line with the organized systemic functioning of the whole.

Because the human essence is brought to full activity in and as the (immanent) divine activity itself in ethics, ethics is redemptive. It is the arena for the religious communion of the human and divine, of which theoretical knowledge is only a subordinate part. Ethics, therefore, is and fulfills the whole self and partakes of the divine.

The epistemic ascent, which developed in religious terms Aristotle’s notion of the identity in rational contentof the divine and human teloi in the neoplatonized Aristotelian religious philosophies of Spinoza’s medieval predecessors, it transformed by Spinoza into the ethical ascent or a developmental ethics. The traditional union of the human mind with God’s mind in and through the development of an identity of content—in theoretical and, especially, metaphysical knowledge—is transformed by Spinozainto an identity on the level of process. Ethics—and what wewould now identify as psychological growth and fulfillment—takes the place of knowledge. Thereby the stage is set not only for 1. a new conception of theology—a process theology and metaphysics; 2. but also a new ethics—a process ethics and a developmental psychology of ethics; and 3. a new conception of the human being—a human being for whom ethics (the education of desire or the psyche), and not knowledge, is global and final. Spinoza therefore not only sets the agenda for much contemporary thinking about ethical theory. Spinoza is a precursor or a model for some—e.g., process theorists, psychological ethical development theorists, theorists of desire like Hegel and Freud—and its perhaps an antidote to others—e.g., strictly cognitive theorists,

metaethicists of language, and all compartmentalizers. He also set the stage for modern liberal theology and perhaps, especially for Judaism, whose salient modern reforming feature was the replacement of ‘homo religiosus’ by ‘homo ethicos.’ Ethics, and not ritual or even a philosophical knowledge hidden in sacred texts, constituted the ascent to the divine. And ethics was, of course, universal.

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