The Role of God in Spinoza's Metaphysics (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Role of God in Spinoza's Metaphysics Steve Parchment Sherry Deveaux . The Role of God in Spinoza's Metaphysics. Continuum Studies in Philosophy. London-New York: Continuum, 2007. Pp. vii + 142. Cloth, $110.00. Arguably, to understand the role of God in Spinoza's metaphysics is to understand the whole of Spinoza's metaphysics. Despite its title, however, Deveaux's book is dedicated to the less ambitious task of addressing three questions about Spinoza's system: (1) what is the relation between God and the attributes? (2) What is the essence of God? (3) What is the true conception of God? Since, strictly speaking, the answer to (3) is simply knowledge of the answer to (2), it is the first two questions that are crucial. To answer these, Deveaux examines three interpretations of Spinoza's account: that God is essentially connected to a system of trans-attributive modes (a view ascribed to Jonathan Bennett); that God is a collection of infinite attributes (a view primarily associated with Edwin Curley); and that God is a unity of attributes, taken somehow without distinction (a view primarily associated with H. F. Hallett). After judging each interpretation unsatisfactory, Deveaux then offers her own theory of Spinoza's God, one which, she claims, both answers her three initial questions and avoids the weaknesses of the other three readings. As for her critique, one of the main problems Deveaux finds is that the three interpretations conflict with the adequacy of our idea of God. Spinoza maintains in his Ethics that we have an adequate and true idea of God and the attributes of extension and thought (IIP38–47) and that true ideas must correspond with their objects (ID6 ). But on the Bennett reading, the trans-attributive modal system, and thus the essence of God it constitutes, are incomprehensible for any intellect, whether finite or infinite; the Curley reading renders an adequate idea of God impossible for finite intellects; and the Hallett reading makes our adequate ideas of distinct attributes illusory. For the most part, Deveaux's criticisms are effective, but her own interpretation, developed in the last two chapters of her book, is more problematic. Deveaux contends that, given Spinoza's definition of "pertaining to the essence" in IID2 , individual attributes cannot pertain to the essence of God. This is certainly plausible, since, by IID2 , x pertains to the [End Page 486] essence of y if and only if x and y are mutually conceptually dependent (that is, x and y are merely conceptually distinct). Thus, if each individual attribute pertained to the essence of God, the attributes themselves could not be conceptually independent of each other (contrary to Spinoza's own explicit assertion in IP10 ). Instead of the pertaining-relation, Deveaux believes the correct account of the relation between attributes and God's essence can be extracted from Spinoza's assertion that attributes "express" the divine essence. She construes this relation as such that x expresses y if and only if (1) x is not identical to y, (2) x is not caused by y, and (3) y can be conceived through x. The problem with this suggestion, however, is that, if attributes are distinct (and not just merely conceptually distinct) from the divine essence, then they must be caused by it (IP16 ) and so conceived through it (IA4 ); on the other hand, if God's essence is conceived through one or more of these distinct attributes, God's definition lacks the conceptual independence requisite for a substance (ID3 ) and so Spinoza's monism collapses. Deveaux's attempt to clarify this relation with the analogy that attributes are to God's essence as the mind and body of a human being are to the essence of that human being taken as "the mode itself" (109) only creates more puzzles, as it seems to imply a return to the trans-attributive modes she had previously rejected. Regardless of these difficulties, Deveaux's conclusion that the divine essence must be defined apart from individual attributes (whether as indeterminate being or infinite power) is an important one, and, if not the above expression-relation, some consistent interpretation must be offered that accounts both for the...