In Advayavada Buddhism we are very interested in the 'God sive Nature' understanding of existence propounded by the Dutch philosopher Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza (1632-1677). 'Spinozism is a monistic approach to philosophy in which all reality is held to consist of one only substance, usually termed God or Nature, of which both material things and thought (e.g. body and mind) are matching attributes, mirroring each other', an ontological parallelism or correlation we can wholeheartedly support. However, according to Spinoza in the final pages of his Ethics (EVP22ff), the one substance can allegedly retain or retrieve a something from the mind of a human being that no longer exists in time, meaning that, according to Spinoza, the human mind has a temporal and a non-temporal part, which is, of course, dualism plain and simple. Spinoza states moreover that this non-temporal something of the human mind, and which is somehow to be retained or retrieved by the one eternal substance, can furthermore grow in size during the lifetime of the human being (EVP38 and 39), which is contradictory. We believe instead that sentient beings are the only part of the whole of reality which has become capable of knowledge, and what man and other sentient beings have in common with the rest of existence is not thought of any kind, but rather their conatus, the innate striving or drive to persevere successfully in being of all things, in Advayavada Buddhism the 'fourth' sign or mark or basic fact or feature of overall existence, which is understood and experienced, from the human standpoint, as 'progress', and which is similar to Te, the 'virtuous power' of the Tao in Taoism.
I accept, indeed share, that existence, God, or Nature, has two aspects, or
attributes: (physical) things, and (non-physical) thought, the latter ranging,
say, from patterns to cognition and the human intellect (capable of viewing
reality sub specie aeternitatis). What I do not accept is that the
whole of existence has anything like the human intellect, or that a part
of our human intellect is in any way non-temporal and soul-like as implied in
the last propositions of the Ethics. I wonder, in fact, whether these concluding
propositions of the Ethics might not be apocryphal. (John Willemsens)
Spinoza's last 'twenty'
propositions in the Ethics, as translated by Edwin Curley (listed here, for
quick reference, without demonstrations, etc.):
EVP21: The
mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the
body endures.
EVP22: Nevertheless, in God there is necessarily an
idea that expresses the essence of this or that human body, under a species of
eternity [sub specie aeternitatis].
EVP23: The human mind cannot be
absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is
eternal.
EVP24: The more we understand singular things, the more we
understand God.
EVP25: The greatest striving of the mind, and its
greatest virtue is understanding things by the third kind of knowledge.
EVP26: The more the mind is capable of understanding things by the
the third kind of knowledge, the more it desires to understand them by this kind
of knowledge.
EVP27: The greatest satisfaction of mind there can be
arises from this third kind of knowledge.
EVP28: The striving, or
desire, to know things by the third kind of knowledge cannot arise from the
first kind of knowledge, but can indeed arise from the second.
EVP29:
Whatever the mind understands under a species of eternity, it understands not
from the fact that it conceives the body's present actual existence, but from
the fact that it conceives the body's essence under a species of eternity.
EVP30: Insofar as our mind knows itself and the body under a species
of eternity, it necessarily has knowledge of God, and knows that it is in God
and is conceived through God.
EVP31: The third kind of knowledge
depends on the mind, as on a formal cause, insofar as the mind itself is
eternal.
EVP32: Whatever we understand by the third kind of knowledge
we take pleasure in, and our pleasure is accompanied by the idea of God as a
cause.
EVP33: The intellectual love of God, which arises from the
third kind of knowledge, is eternal.
EVP34: Only while the body
endures is the mind subject to affects which are related to the passions.
EVP35: God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love.
EVP36: The mind's intellectual love of God is the very love of God by
which God loves himself, not insofar as he is infinite, but insofar as he can be
explained by the human mind's essence, considered under a species of eternity;
that is, the mind's intellectual love of God is part of the infinite love by
which God loves himself.
EVP37: There is nothing in Nature which is
contrary to this intellectual love, or which can take it away.
EVP38:
The more the mind understands things by the second and third kind of knowledge,
the less it is acted on by affects which are evil, and the less it fears death.
EVP39: He who has a body capable of a great many things has a mind
whose greatest part is eternal.
EVP40: The more perfection each thing
has, the more it acts and the less it is acted on, and conversely, the more it
acts, the more perfect it is.
EVP41: Even if we did not know that our
mind is eternal, we would still regard as of the first importance morality,
religion, and absolutely all the things we have shown (in Part IV) to be related
to tenacity and nobility.
EVP42: Blessedness is not the reward of
virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we enjoy it because we restrain our lusts; on
the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them.
Stuart Hampshire, in the Introduction to Benedict de Spinoza's Ethics, translated by Edwin Curley, London 1996: That the mind or soul should survive by itself when the life of the body has ended is, for Spinoza, an unintelligible supposition: it suggests that the soul or mind is an individual, or quasi-substance, rather than a distinguishable aspect of the activity of an individual, who is a person. But in a famously obscure passage (Book V, Proposition 23) Spinoza asserts that 'The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal'. He adds 'we feel and know by experience that we are eternal'. The claim is that, in so far as our thought is disconnected from memory and imagination, and is knowledge of eternal and necessary truths, our thought is disconnected from the limitations of time, and in this thinking we are united with the eternal aspect of Reality (God or Nature) as thought. We make this transition from thinking of ourselves as particular things in the constantly changing face of Nature, each with a particular standpoint and location in time, to thinking of ourselves as being, in our thinking, parts of the eternal framework of Reality.
Edwin M. Curley, in The Immortality of the Soul in Descartes and Spinoza, University of Michigan website: Nor is the human mind a substance. It is rather a collection of modes of thought whose identity over time as the same collection is a function of the identity over time of the collection of modes of extension which constitute the human body. The body can remain the same body over a period of time during which it changes, during which some of the modes of extension which constitute the body are replaced by others, so long as the relations of motion and rest which the parts have to one another remain more or less constant during that period of time. The body has a certain tendency to maintain a constant ratio of the motion of its parts to one another. When it succeeds in doing that, it persists as one complex mode of extension. When it fails, it ceases to exist as that particular body. Its success in maintaining that ratio is constantly threatened by surrounding bodies which may disturb the ratio. The mind's duration as the particular mind it is depends on its body's success in maintaining the ratio of motion and rest among its parts. Man, whether conceived as a thinking thing or as an extended thing, is a part of nature, constantly striving to maintain itself [conatus], but constantly at risk of being put out of existence by some stronger force in its environment.
This does not seem to be particularly promising soil in which to grow a theory of the immortality of the soul, and I do not in fact think it will support any very traditional theory of immortality. What survives the destruction of the body, for Spinoza, is not the mind as that complete complex entity which was the reflection in thought of its body and endured as the thing it was so long as the body endured as the thing it was. It is only a portion of the mind which Spinoza proclaims to be eternal. That portion of the mind cannot retain any sense of itself as an individual existing over time, with those memories of its past which are essential to its continued identity as the same person. Continuity of memory is destroyed when the traces in the brain which record past experiences are destroyed. What survives must be something quite impersonal, with which we cannot really identify, and about whose fate we cannot deeply care. Nor is it important that we should. Spinoza is opposed to the Cartesian idea that we require the hope of reward and fear of punishment in the afterlife to motive a preference for the right over the useful. The reward of virtue is not blessedness in the world to come, but virtuous living itself (EVP42).
George Santayana, in the Introduction to Spinoza's Ethics, translated by Andrew Boyle, 1910, London 1938: Immortality, in a similar fashion, was transformed by Spinoza from something temporal and problematic, an endlessly continued existence, into something timeless and intrinsic, a quality of life. It was not the length of a man's days that made him immortal, but the intellectual essence of his thoughts. The spirit shared the fate of the objects with which it identified itself. The soul absorbed in transitory things was itself transitory. One absorbed in eternal things was, to that extent, eternal. But what, we may ask, are eternal things? Nothing, according to Spinoza, is eternal in its duration. The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations. Yet all things are eternal in their status, as truth is. The place which an event fills in history is its inalienable place; the character that an act or a feeling possesses in passing is its inalienable character. Now, the human mind is not merely animal, not merely absorbed in the felt transition from one state of life to another. It is partly synthetic, intellectual, contemplative, able to look before and after and to see fleeting things at once in their mutual relations, or, as Spinoza expressed it, under the form of eternity.
To see things under the form of eternity is to see them in their historic and moral truth, not as they seemed as they passed, but as they remain when they are over. When a man's life is over, it remains true that he has lived; it remains true that he has been one sort of man, and not another. In the infinite mosaic of history that bit has its unfading colour and its perpetual function and effect. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would; for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains. The fact of him is a part forever of the infinite context of facts. This sort of immortality belongs passively to everything; but to the intellectual part of man it belongs actively also, because, in so far as it knows the eternity of truth, and is absorbed in it, the mind lives in that eternity. In caring only for the eternal, it has ceased to care for that part of itself which can die. But this sort of immortality is ideal only. He who, while he lives, lives in the eternal, does not live longer for that reason. Duration has merely dropped from his view; he is not aware of or anxious about it; and death, without losing its reality, has lost its sting. The sublimation of his interest rescues him, so far as it goes, from the mortality which he accepts and surveys. The animals are mortal without knowing it, and doubtless presume, in their folly, that they will live forever. Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathises so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though that sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Steven Nadler, in Spinoza's Ethics, An Introduction, Cambridge 2006: Any body is nothing but a specific ratio of motion and rest among a collection of material parts. Its unity and individuality consist only in a relative and structured stability of minute bodies. And this is what is reflected in its essence, its eternal being. At this level, no question whatsoever is raised about whether the body actually exists in nature or not. Because it is outside all duration, making no reference to time, this essence of the body is eternal.
Now the essence of a body as an extended mode is in God (or Substance) under the attribute of Extension. It is 'eminently' contained within Extension as one of its infinite potentialities or possible generations. It is, in other words, just one out of infinitely many ways of being extended, and thus belongs as an eternal finite mode within Extension's immediate infinite mode. Given Spinoza's general parallelism between the attributes of Extension and Thought, and given the resulting and more particular parallelism in a human being between what is true of the body and what is true of the mind, there are, then, likewise - and necessarily - two aspects of the human mind, which is nothing other than the idea of the body. First, there is the aspect of the mind that corresponds to the durational existence of the body. This is the part of the mind that reflects the body's determinate relationships in space and time with other bodies surrounding it. Sensations and feelings - pain, pleasure, desire, revulsion, sadness, fear, and a host of other mental states - are all expressions in the mind of what is concurrently taking place in the body in its temporal interactions in the world. I feel pain when I stub my toe. These passions belong to the mind to the extent that the human being is a part of "the order of nature" and, through his body, subject to being affected by the world around him.
The parallelism also requires, however, that this part of the mind comes to an end when the duration of the body comes to an end, that is, at a person's death. When the body goes, there are no more pleasures and pains, no more sensory states. All the affections of the body of which these sensations, images, and qualia are mental expressions cease at death - the body is no longer "in the world" responding to its determinations. Thus, their correlative expressions in the mind cease as well. But there is another part of the mind - namely, that aspect of it that corresponds to the eternal aspect of the body. This is the idea or expression in the attribute of Thought of the body's extended essence; and just as the body's essence is an eternal finite mode in the immediate infinite mode of Extension, so the idea of the body's essence is an eternal finite mode in the immediate infinite mode of Thought, that is, in the infinite intellect. If the essence of the body, once its durational existence is over, is simply a possible but non-existing material thing in Extension, so the eternal part of the mind just is the idea of such a non-existing material thing. Like its correlate in Extension, this aspect of the mind is eternal. It is, therefore, a part of the mind that remains after a person's death.
from Spinoza, Summary of his Philosophy, History of Modern Philosophy, University of Leeds website: Descartes believed he had discovered a proof of the natural immortality of the soul. Spinoza's philosophy has no room for immortality - less even than Hobbes's. The only sense in which the soul can be said to be immortal is that the idea of the body is eternal, as one component of the infinite system of ideas which constitutes God's attribute of thought. But this is an immortality without life or consciousness. For Spinoza, we have only one brief life (in his case, all too brief), in which to overcome demeaning, passive emotions, and to achieve as deep an intellectual vision as possible of all things in God (or Nature).
from Spinoza, History of Philosophy, chapter 56, University of Notre Dame website: We come now to the third stage in the moral emancipation of the human mind, namely, to that in which man attains to the intellectual love of God and the blessed immortality. In the fifth part of the Ethica Spinoza teaches that the mind, arriving at the culminating stage of intellectual development (scientia intuitiva) wherein it sees all things in God, "can bring it about that all bodily affections and images of things are referred to the idea of God" (EVP14). When this state is reached all passion ceases, and emotion and volition are absorbed in the knowledge and love of God (amor intellectualis Dei). This intellectual love of God is the highest kind of virtue, and it not only makes man free but also confers immortality. For this love has no relation to the body or to bodily states, and consequently it cannot in any way be affected by the destruction of the body. But here it naturally occurs to us to ask: What has become of the principle that to every mode of thought there corresponds a mode of extension? When the body perishes, what extension mode corresponds to the eternal thought which is bliss and immortality? Spinoza answers that, while the mode of extension which is the human body conditioned by time and space perishes, there remains the essence of the body which is conceived under a form of eternity [sub specie aeternitatis]. At the same time the sensitive and imaginative part of the soul perishes with the actual body, so that the ultimate conclusion is that both body and soul are partly mortal and party immortal (EVP20ff).
We must not overlook the fact that in his Ethica Spinoza speaks of the eternity rather than of the immortality of the soul; and by eternity he does not primarily mean unending duration, but a kind of rational necessity by which a thing forms, once for all, an integral part of the universe, although, of course, what is necessarily a part of the universe cannot cease to exist. Moreover, this eternity or deathlessness is a condition into which the soul enters in this life. "The immortality which is sanctioned by Spinoza's principles is not a quantative, but a qualitative endowment - not existence for indefinite time, but a quality of being above all time" (Caird, Spinoza, p.291). Spinoza does not conceive immortality as originally and equally inherent in all men; he conceives it as something to be acquired by each man for himself, and as capable of being acquired in different degrees.
from Benedict De Spinoza, Eternity of the Mind, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy website: Spinoza's comment that a person who has attained the intellectual love of God "never ceases to be" is perplexing to say the least. It signals a commitment to the view that in some fashion or another the mind, or some part of it, survives the death of the body (EV23). At first sight, this appears to be a violation of Spinoza's anti-dualist contention that mind and body are one and the same thing conceived under two different attributes. On the basis of this contention, one would expect him to reject the survival of the mind in any fashion. That he asserts it instead has understandibly been a source of great controversy among his commentators.
At least some of the problem can be cleared away by taking account of a crucial distinction that Spinoza makes between the existence of the body and its essence. The existence of the body is its actual duration through time. This involves its coming to be, the changes it undergoes within its environment, and its eventual destruction. By contrast, the essence of the body is non-durational. It is grounded in the timeless essence of God, specifically as one among the innumerable particular ways of being extended.
The importance of this distinction lies in the fact that, by appealing to the parallelism doctrine, Spinoza can conclude that there is a corresponding distinction with respect to the mind. There is an aspect of the mind that is the expression of the existence of the body, and there is an aspect of the mind that is the expression of the essence of the body. Spinoza readily concedes that the aspect of the mind that expresses the existence of the body cannot survive the destruction of the body. Such, however, is not the fate of the aspect of the mind that expresses the essence of the body. Like its object, this aspect of the mind is non-durational. Since only what is durational ceases to be, this aspect of the mind is unaffected by the destruction of the body. It is eternal.
Matthew Stewart, in The Courtier and the Heretic, New Haven 2005: The intellectual love of God is the same thing as the knowledge of God contained in the first part of the Ethics. Spinoza identifies it as "the third kind of knowledge", or "intuition", in order to distinguish it from sense experience ("the first kind") and reflective knowledge that arises from the analysis of experience ("the second kind"). To know his God in the third way, Spinoza claims, is the same thing as to love God. Furthermore, this love is greater than any other possible love, and can never waiver. Since the individual is just a mode of God, the intellectual love of God is God's way of loving itself.
At this point, where we reach the long sought union of man and God (or Nature), Spinoza goes on to say, we achieve a kind of immortality. Contrary to what he seems to imply in his philosophy of mind, Spinoza now contends that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body" [EVP23]. The eternal part of the mind, it turns out, is the "intellect" - the faculty with which we grasp the eternal truths of philosophy. The immortality Spinoza offers here, however, is not of the kind that would provide much solace for the superstitious: we take with us no personal memories of who we were or what we did in our journey to the eternal ideas, and we receive no rewards other than those that come from having such beautiful thoughts in the first place. In fact, Spinoza's immortality doesn't really occur "after" life; it is something more like an escape from time altogether. By immortality Spinoza means something like the union of the mind with ideas that are themselves timeless.
The end point of Spinoza's philosophy - the intellectual love of God, or blessedness - transfigures all that precedes it. It can sometimes sound paradoxical and more than a little mystical. It is the union of the individual and the cosmos, of freedom and necessity, of activity and passivity, of mind and body, of self-interest and charity, of virtue and knowledge, and of happiness and virtue. It is the place where all that which was previously relativized in Spinoza - the good, which was relative to our desires; freedom, which was relative to our ignorance; self-knowledge, which was relative to our imperfect perceptions of the body - suddenly reappears in the form of absolutes: absolute good, absolute freedom, and absolute knowledge.
It cannot be overlooked that Spinoza assigns a stupefying onus to the faculty of reason. It is one thing to say that reason can help bring order and acceptance to our emotional lives; it is quite another to say that it may lead us to supreme, continuous, and everlasting happiness in an eternal union with God. Spinoza's ambition for philosophy was, by any measure, extreme.
Will Durant, in Spinoza, The Story of Philosophy, Andrey Maidansky website: As such parts of such a whole we are immortal. "The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but there is some part of it which remains eternal" (EVP23). This is the part that conceives things sub specie aeternitatis; the more we so conceive things, the more eternal our thought is. Spinoza is even more than usually obscure here; and after endless controversy among interpreters his language yet speaks differently to different minds. Sometimes one imagines him to mean George Eliot's immortality by repute, whereby that which is most rational and beautiful in our thought and our lives survives us to have an almost timeless efficacy down the years. Sometimes again Spinoza seems to have in mind a personal and individual immortality; and it may be that as death loomed up so prematurely in his path he yearned to console himself with this hope that springs eternally in the human breast. Yet he insistently differentiates eternity from everlastingness: "If we pay attention to the common opinion or men, we shall see that they are conscious of the eternity of their minds; but they confuse eternity with duration, and attribute it to imagination or memory, which they believe will remain after death" (EVP34S). But like Aristotle, Spinoza, though talking of immortality, denies the survival of personal memory. "The mind can neither imagine nor recollect anything save while in the body" (EVP21). Nor does he believe in heavenly rewards: "Those are far astray from a true estimate of virtue who expect for their virtue, as if it were the greatest slavery, that God will adorn them with the greatest rewards; as if virtue and the serving of God were not happiness itself and the greatest liberty" (EIIP49SIVA). "Blessedness", reads the last proposition of Spinoza's book, "is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself" (EVP42). And perhaps in the like manner, immortality is not the reward of clear thinking, it is clear thought itself, as it carries up the past into the present and readies out into the future, so overcoming the limits and narrowness of time, and catching the perspective that remains eternally behind the kaleidoscope of change; such thought is immortal because every truth is a permanent creation, part of the eternal acquisition of man, influencing him endlessly.
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(updated 12 March 2007)