The unity of substance and attribute in Spinoza

Abstract

ABSTRACT Spinoza argues that there is one substance, God, with at least two distinct attributes. On Objective Interpretations, the “attributes” are what God conceives of God’s own essence. Because God truly conceives the attributes as distinct, it must be that they are in some sense distinct. However, several of Spinoza’s texts suggest that God is identical with God’s attributes. How can one God be identical with two or more distinct attributes? I will argue that no Objective Interpretation can plausibly make sense of Spinoza’s identification of substance and attributes. I argue that the solution to this Identity Puzzle is understanding that “attributes” are what the finite human intellect conceives of God’s essence. Though we can conceive God’s attributes as distinct, they are not thereby ontologically distinct. On my interpretation, the distinction we conceive between the attributes is a distinction in the reasoning we use to arrive at a highly adequate idea of God. While we may use distinct attribute names for God to mark the distinct origins of this idea in our reasoning, these names do not correspond to a distinction in God. In this way, each of the attributes is identical with God.