North American Spinoza Society NASS MONOGRAPH #6 (1997) Ideas, Affects and Causality Gideon Segal Hebrew University Spinoza Bibliography: 1990 StevenBarbone Lee Rice Marquette University Copyright, 1997, North American Spinoza Society Baltimore, Maryland Contents Ideas, Affects and Causality Gideon Segal,Hebrew University................................................................................................. 3 Spinoza Bibliography: 1990 StevenBarbone & Lee Rice,Marquette University...................................................................... 21 Ideas, Affects and Causality Gideon Segal Hebrew University (Jerusalem) Abstract Against many of the standard interpretations I offer two argu- ments to showthat Spinoza could not have ascribed transitive causal- ity to mind. These are followed by three additional considerations: (1) an outline of a hermeneutic for Spinoza’s apparently physicalistic treatment of mind; (2) an interpretation of conatus within a non-physi- calistic model; and (3) a note on the difficulties regarding the temporal nature of the mind. Manywriters interpret Spinoza’stheory of mind as one that ascribes causality to the mind, and especially to the realm of affects. By ‘causality’ Irefer here roughly to the kind of transitive relations which, under the laws of ‘motion-and-rest’, govern all extended Nature.1 Thus Wartofsky writes that ‘‘. . . not only the bodily affections but those of the mind as well are to be included in the science of mechanism. The continuity of sensory percep- tion, emotion, and thought is to be reaffirmed.’’2 Similarly, Hampshire speaks of states of mind as causally explained by interaction with external things, implying in this connection transitive causality.Only when exercis- ing ‘pure thought’ is the mind free of transient causes.3 A similar position 1. E2, Scholium before P14. Cf. also Ep64. Unless otherwise mentioned, quotations are from Curley’stranslation (E.M. Curley, tr. & ed.,The Collected Works of Spinoza,Vol. I, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988). Occasionally the Gebhardt edition of Spinoza’swriting is cited (C. Gebhardt, ed.,Spinoza Opera, im Auftrag der Heidel- berger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitaetsverlag, 1972). E.g., GI112/7-9, meaning: Gebhardt vol. I, p. 112. lines 7-9. References to the Ethicscontain an Arabic number for part (e.g., E2) and employthe following abbrevia- tions: AD (Affect Definition), GenDA (General Definition of the Affects), Ax(iom), Def(inition), Schol(ium), Dem(onstration), Exp(planation), Pref(ace), P(roposition), Lem(ma), and Cor(ollary). 2. Max Wartofsky, ‘‘Action and Passion: Spinoza’s Construction of Scientific Psychol- ogy,’’inM.Grene, ed.,Spinoza — A Collection of Critical Essays(Doubleday Anchor, Garden City,1973), 332. 3. Stuart Hampshire, ‘‘Spinoza’sTheory of Human Freedom,’’The Monist55 (1971), 554 and 563. Gideon Segal -4- Ideas, Affects, Causality with regard to the relations between ideas is held by Yoveland Delahunty.4 Last but not least, Bennett interprets Spinoza’s parallelism to mean that, if x causes y then the idea of x causes the idea of y.5 His whole treatment of the mental field as psychological rather than logical leaves no doubt that the causality he sees in Spinoza’s theory of mind is of a transitive nature, rather than, say, the type of causality Spinoza terms ‘immanent’. Against all these interpretations of Spinoza’s theory of mind, I argue in this paper that Spinoza could not have ascribed transitive causality to ideas. I shall defend this contention in two separate arguments. First, I try to show that Spinoza’s mind-body parallelism (and, in fact, thought-extension parallel- ism generally) runs into grave difficulties if we try to construe the relations between ideas as causal ones, and that these difficulties do not arise if we take these relations to be logical in the sense to be explained below. Sec- ond, I claim that the way Spinoza understands transitive causality makes it inapplicable to the mental realm, and that this is clearly evident in his treat- ment of seemingly causal relations in the mind. In the remainder of the paper I add three further considerations: (a) an outline of a hermeneutic for the mechanistic vocabulary Spinoza uses with regard to the mind; (b) sug- gestions as to how we should understand conatus, the striving to persevere in existence, within my interpretation; and, finally, (c) a grave difficulty challenging Spinoza’stheory of mind as I interpret it. 1. The NatureofMental Relations Ideas are purely cognitive entities, which can have only relations of content between them. I am reluctant to describe these relations as logical ones, though in a sense they are; for ‘logical’ connotes relations of strict implication between them, which is not what I think Spinoza intended to ascribe to them. An example would be appropriate here. Having seen Peter at dawn, I recall dawn upon seeing Peter again.6 This does not mean that the idea of Peter in my mind is the cause of my new idea of the dawn. 4. R. J. Delahunty,Spinoza(Routledge & Keg anPaul, London, 1985), 197-8; Yirmiyahu Yo v el, ‘‘The Infinite Mode and Natural Laws in Spinoza,’’ inY.Yovel, ed.,God and Nature: Spinoza’s Metaphysics, ‘‘Spinoza by 2000 — The Jerusalem Conferences,’’ Vol. I (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), 95 fn7-8. 5. Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 127. 6. Cf. E2P44Schol. Ideas, Affects, Causality -5- Gideon Segal Rather,the idea of Peter and that of dawn form a complexidea in my mind so that my thought of Peter is a thought of someone whom I (once, yester- day, in my dream, etc.) met at dawn, and in that sense my idea of Peter implies my idea of dawn. Aswe shall see, anyspecifically causal explana- tion of this associative relation between ideas is relegated by Spinoza to the attribute of extension, leaving only relations of content on the level of thought. Thus, although pairs of ideas associate with each other in a way that may seem to imply some sort of transitive causality, they in fact form together complexideas. Now it must be admitted that the causal interpretation of the mental realm integrates well into Spinoza’s thought-extension parallelism, which takes the modal orders under God’s attributes to be correlative to each other. Since the order and connection of modes is the same under all attributes [E2P7 & E2P7Schol], and, moreover, each mode is in reality (by E2P7Schol) the unity of its aspects under all the attributes, it may seem plausible to construe the modal order under all attributes as a duplication of their transitive order under the attribute of extension. Spinoza does indeed use the word ‘cause’ to denote the relation between ideas, e.g., in E2P9Dem, and in various cases he speaks of the realm of affects in quasi-mechanistic terms. However, this is far from sup- porting a transitive causal interpretation of the mental realm, for Spinoza’s use of the term causa may be adaptive, according to the requirements of the various contexts. While some kind of causality is apparently ascribed by Spinoza to the mental realm, this obviously cannot be of the sort that governs modes of extension. There is no doubt as to Spinoza’s denial of anyphysical mechanism to the mental realm. Such mechanism is reducible to the billiard-ball model, whose basic principles Spinoza describes in the physical section following E2P13. He also applies this model to the human body, but its laws of motion-and-rest cannot be implicated to modes of thought. This is the gist of Spinoza’s attack on Descartes’ pineal gland hypothesis in E5Pref. Adhering to the originally Cartesian doctrine of thought-extension dualism, Spinoza turns its principles against ‘‘that most distinguished Man,’’ insisting that the powers of mind and body can in no way be compared, and that motion, which is the central feature of bodily mechanism, is thoroughly incommensurable with will [E5Pref, GII280/13-16]. This still leavesthe possibility of attributing a ‘softer’ kind of transi- tive causality to the mind. Couldn’t it be that a thought of an imminent meeting causes someone to feel joy, in the same manner as the shaking of Gideon Segal -6- Ideas, Affects, Causality hands transmits warmness to his palm? Given Spinoza’s parallelism, this seems natural. When pain arouses in its sufferer a feeling of aversion, the pain-aversion relation appears to be a link in a psychological transitive- causal chain, correlative toasimilar link in a physiological causal chain in the body,say the body’srecoiling caused by a brain’sstimulation when the pain is being felt. The causal relation of aversion to pain is correlative, in the attribute of thought, to the causal relation of recoiling to the brains reaction (in the presence of pain), in the attribute of extension. It should be noted that by this example we have apparently illustrated E2P7: ‘‘The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.’’ An horizontal arrowdenotes causation, and a vertical arrowcorrelation: pain -------> av ersion | | | brain’s reaction -------> recoil Fig.1 However, it can be easily shown that Spinoza did not think of the relation between pain, which in its mental aspect he calls ‘sadness’ [E3P11Schol], and aversion in causal terms. In AD9 he defines aversion as follows: Av ersion — sadness accompanied by the idea of some- thing which is the accidental cause of sadness. Thus, pain (‘sadness’) cannot be said tocauseav ersion, in anymeaning of causation that can be associated with transitive causality. In transitive cau- sation the cause and the effect are external to each other, whereas here the ‘cause’ forms part and parcel of the ‘effect’, which is obviously absurd. To see, then, what according to Spinoza is the relation between pain, i.e., ‘sadness’ in its mental aspect, and aversion, let us recall what sadness is. By E3P11Schol sadness is a passion by which the mind passes to a lesser perfection (than before). However, in GenDA and its explanation Spinoza explicates the nature of this passage in the mind to a lesser perfec- tion as simply an idea by which the mind affirms a passage of its body to a lesser force of existing. Wethus get the following Spinozistic definition of sadness: Ideas, Affects, Causality -7- Gideon Segal Sadness — an idea, by which the mind affirms a weaken- ing of its body’sforce of existing. Substituting the definiens in this definition of ‘sadness’ in the definition of av ersion (AD9 quoted above), we get the following definition of the mental aspect of aversion (to aid the following discussion I mark the two ideas involved in the definition I(1) and I(2)): Av ersion — [sadness, i.e.,] an idea I(1), by which the mind affirms a weakening of its body’sforce of existing, accompanied by the idea I(2) of something which is the accidental cause of this weakening. What relation do we have here between aversion and pain (i.e., sadness in its mental aspect)? — it is a relation a complexidea has to one of its ingre- dients. For aversion is a unity containing two ideas, I(1), i.e., sadness, and I(2). Does this rule out any use of the term ‘cause’ to denote the relation between sadness and aversion? Not at all. As I said before, Spinoza uses causain a wide range of applications, adapting its meaning to the pertinent context (I give anexample below).7 Is the relation pattern that we have seen to exist between aversion and sadness paradigmatic to the mental domain? I think the answer is affir- mative, and I also believe that this pattern characterizes all relations between ideas (including affects), i.e., between modes of thought. To see that this is so, we need to look at E2P7, which sets up the doctrine that identifies the order and connection of ideas with the order and connection of things, and at its demonstration. Leaving aside God’sattributes of which human beings are ignorant, I take E2P7 to mean, basically, that the ordering of connections between ideas, i.e., modes considered under the attribute of thought, is the same as the ordering of connections between extended things.8 Now, E2P7Dem is hardly anything more than a citation of E1Ax4: Dem.: This is clear from E1Ax4. For the idea of each thing caused depends on the knowledge of the cause of which it is the effect. 7. Later I shall deal with Spinoza’sample use of mechanistic terminology in the mental domain. Gideon Segal -8- Ideas, Affects, Causality E1Ax4 reads: The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause. Note that in E2P7Dem Spinoza substitutes ‘idea of the thing caused’ for ‘knowledge of the effect’. But since E2P7 indeed deals with ideas, and not with knowledge, it would seem natural to similarly replace the second occurrence of ‘knowledge’ by ‘idea’. We would then have E2P7 demon- strated upon the dependence between the idea of effect and the idea of its cause. I shall not undertake here to try to explain the much discussed demonstration of E2P7. My interest focuses on the kind of dependence between ideas spoken of in the demonstration itself. Returning to E1Ax4, from which this dependence is derived, we find it correlative to involve- ment. This is an identity between the order of ‘involvement’ of ideas and the causal order of ‘things’ (or causes),9 is illustrated in Figure 2, as fol- lows: 8. Note that, while E2P7 reads, ‘‘The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things,’’ three out of four quotations of it in E2 — E2P9Dem, E2P19Dem, E2P20Dem, but not E2P9CorDem — substitute ‘causes’ for ‘things’. Thus in E2P9Dem we read: ‘‘the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of causes.’’ That ‘the order of idea’ is paralleled in this version with ‘the order of causes’ seems to imply that there are no ‘causes’ in the attribute of thought, for otherwise ‘the order of causes’ would include the order of ideas, hence stating their being parallel to each other would have been pointless. This of course does not prove the interpretation I defend, yet it adduces to its plausibility. 9. See note 8 above. Ideas, Affects, Causality -9- Gideon Segal idea of idea cause of effect | | cause -------> effect Fig.2 The sameness of orders of ideas and things stated by E2P7 is thus a corre- lation between: (a) causal relations linking modes of extension, and (b) relations of involvement that hold between ideas. Applying this correlative structure to the pain-aversion relation we get the following correlation:10 pain aversion | | brain’s recoil reaction Fig.3 (Compare this correlation between bodily causal relations and mental rela- tions of involvement with the one shown in Figure 1 above.) Interestingly,inv olvement is, logically speaking, a transitive relation. Thus, whatever is inv olved in our idea of an object by which we are 10. With this interpretation we have slightly deviated from the literal definition Spinoza givestoaversion, according to which aversion is pain (sadness), and not only involves it. Another thing to note is that Spinoza’s explicit treatment of aversion ignores the repellence from the object of aversion, which apparently is what aversion is all about. However, the tendencytoavoid (or abolish) the object of aversion is a modification of the averted person’sconatus. See E3P28. The way an affect modifies conatus is briefly referred to in fn 20 below. Gideon Segal -10 - Ideas, Affects, Causality affected, i.e., an object of emotion, forms in turn part of the content of this affect itself. This fact is responsible for the endless variety of affects, according to the specific nature of their objects.11 Thus we can think of Spinoza’s mind-body parallelism as a correlation between two transitive orders: a logically transitive order of involvement between ideas under the attribute of thought, and a physically transitive order of causes governed by the laws of motion-and-rest under the attribute of extension. It should be noted here that this interpretation of the correlation between the order of ideas in the mind and the order of bodily modifications is fruitfully expanded to Spinoza’s general doctrine of parallelism. To see this we should look again at the correlative causal chains shown in Figure 1. I duplicate it here, with a slight change made for the sake of simplicity, and ascribe the pain and aversion to a person P: M:1 = P feels pain M:2 = P feels aversion P:1 = P’snervous system is modified ‘pain-wise’ P:2 = P recoils M:1 ----> M:2 | | | P:1 ----> P:2 Fig.4 Nowlet us try to takeone step back in these parallel chains, supposing that the modification of P’s nervous system is an effect of Q’s hitting him. Giventhis link in the physical causal chain, what is the transitive link in the mental causal chain? The candidate ready at hand is the mental correlate of the movement of Q’sbody,i.e, Q’smentally setting about hitting P.Weget the following correlation between two causal chains (much simplified, skipping causal steps that are not important for our discussion): 11. E3P56Dem. This howeverdoes not require that while having an emotion I should be conscious of all that is involved in my emotional situation.