here<\/a>), the actuality of modes rather than the reality of the attributes as substance. Aristotle, by contrast, did understand substance as a conceptual determination, and hence in understanding this determination one can subsequently affirm, for example, that a dog, as dog and unlike a human being, cannot be happy since a dog is not rational. Spinoza\u2019s ontology of substance is therefore a truly affirmative ontology of immanence since substance cannot be conceived by way of anything other than itself (hence by anything transcendent) nor does it entail any negation. It is no wonder then that Deleuze frequently referred to himself as a Spinozist.<\/p>\n\n
But what then is the relationship between substance and the attributes if it is not one of conceptual determination? I\u2019ll make two passes, two arguments, to attempt to answer this question. The first will be Deleuze\u2019s largely Gueroult-inspired answer. The second I\u2019ll attempt to tease out of Spinoza\u2019s texts alone. In Deleuze\u2019s review essay of Gueroult\u2019s first volume on Spinoza\u2019s Ethics<\/em>, Deleuze argues that what is important about Gueroult\u2019s approach is that it doesn\u2019t begin with the idea of God (God enters the scene with the sixth definition and the ninth, tenth and eleventh propostions). Does this mean that the first six definitions and eight propositions are inessential to Spinoza\u2019s project \u2013 mere preliminary work Spinoza simply had to get out of the way before the real work began? For Gueroult and for Deleuze the answer is a definitive \u2018no\u2019. When the answer is yes, Deleuze argues, we get<\/p>\n\n
\n\u2026two misreadings of the attribute: 1) the Kantian illusion that makes attributes forms or concepts of the understanding, and 2) the neo-Platonic vertigo that makes attributes already degraded emanations or manifestations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n
It is at this point where the nature of the attributes as conceived through themselves, or the \u2018logic of real distinction\u2019 in contrast to the logic of numerical distinction, comes into play. The attributes are indeed really distinct from one another but they are not numerically distinct. We have difference without negation, or with the attributes we have what Deleuze will call a substantive multiplicity:<\/p>\n
\n
\nThe logic of real distinction is a logic of purely affirmative difference and without negation. Attributes indeed constitute an irreducible multiplicity, but the whole question is what type of multiplicity. The problem is erased if the substantive \u2018multiplicity\u2019 is transformed into two opposed adjectives (multiple attributes and one substance).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n
We are back with the problematic, with a substantive multiplicity, and thus to understand God as absolutely infinite substance we need also to understand how God is related to the problematic, to substantive multiplicity. We gain a sense of how Deleuze and Guattari understand this relationship when they claim, in A Thousand Plateaus<\/em>, that God is a lobster, a double articulation. It is all too easy to underestimate the philosophical importance of this claim. We see it at work in the context of Deleuze\u2019s essay on Gueroult, for example, where the first eight propositions correspond to the first articulation; or, as Deleuze puts it, \u2018the first eight propositions represent a first series through which we ascend to the differential constitutive elements\u2019 \u2013 the attributes. As Deleuze had stressed earlier in the essay, there is \u2018no ascension from attributes to substance\u2026to absolutely infinite substance\u2019; rather, there is an ascension through a \u2018regressive analytic process\u2019 to the \u2018differential constitutive elements\u2019 themselves, to the substantive multiplicity. Then there is the second articulation, the second series found in the 9th<\/sup>-11th<\/sup> propositions \u2018through which,\u2019 Deleuze argues, \u2018the idea of God integrates these elements and makes clear it can be constituted only by all these elements together.\u2019 The attributes, as a multiplicity of incommensurable and really distinct entities, come to be integrated by the power of causa sui whereby \u2018essence is the cause of the existence of substance and the cause of the other things that derive from it.\u2019 To clarify (I hope), the \u2018regressive analytic process\u2019 arrives at the attributes as constitutive elements by deriving them from the affirmation of infinite substance as conceived only through itself, showing that any determinate modification or affection of substance is not conceived through itself but through another, and hence the really distinct multiplicity of attributes; and then the integration of these attributive substances constitutes the existence of an absolutely infinite substance \u2013 God. Understood in this way, God as the power of causa sui is both the condition that enables the regressive analytic process that leads to a multiplicity of really distinct attributes \u2013 first articulation \u2013 and the conditioned that is the integration of this multiplicity \u2013 second articulation. God is self-caused, as Spinoza argues, or God is a lobster, a double articulation, as Deleuze and Guattari argue.<\/p>\n\n
I now want to make the second pass, the second articulation so to speak, and in doing so hopefully clarify my take on Deleuze\u2019s reading of Spinoza. First, I must admit a fondness for H.F. Hallett\u2019s interpretation of substance as \u2018absolutely indeterminate,\u2019 or we might say objectively indetermined to refer to an earlier post. Hallett\u2019s reading is by no means the consensus reading, but there are two important things going for it. First, since God is defined as absolutely infinite (1D6), God can in no way be limited or be in any way determinate, for reasons mentioned above. This is also why God is absolutely infinite rather than infinite in its own kind, as the attributes are, since this would require being a determinate form of infinite and hence a form that could<\/em> (when understood conceptually by way of the understanding \u2013 namely the infinite mode of understanding) be related to what it is not, what is other than it. Our second reason follows from a claim Spinoza makes in a letter to Jelles (letter 50) that anyone who \u2018calls God one or single has no true idea of God\u2019 because, as we\u2019ve already noted, all determination is negation. With this in place let\u2019s turn to the scholium to 2P7 \u2013 the proposition that sets forth the famous parallelism of ideas and things. In the scholium to this proposition Spinoza says that \u2018the thinking substance and the extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under that.\u2019 To clarify by way of an example, Spinoza claims that a \u2018circle existing in nature and the idea of the existing circle, which is also in God, are one and the same thing, which is explained through different attributes.\u2019 Despite the two ways of conceiving a circle, as an extended circle actually existing in nature or the idea of this circle, they each reflect \u2018one and the same order, or one and the same connection of causes.\u2019 Spinoza then reminds the reader that the idea we have of the circle is only as a mode of thought, a mode caused by another mode, and so on to infinity, and the circle as extension is caused by another mode, the drawing hand, and so on. He concludes this scholium by stating that \u2018God is really the cause [of the parallel order of causes] insofar as he consists of infinite attributes. For the present, I cannot explain these matters more clearly.\u2019 Gueroult will argue that this missing explanation is to be found in 2P21S and in 3P2S, but what one finds there is simply a reference to 2P7S and not an explanation of the manner in which God is \u2018really the cause\u2019 of the parallel order of mental and physical causes. Needless to say, there has been a large body of literature devoted to trying to make sense of 2P7 and provide the explanation Spinoza doesn\u2019t offer.<\/p>\n\n
It is at this point where Deleuze\u2019s emphasis upon God\u2019s essence being God\u2019s power as self-cause, as double articulation, or what I would call the power of self-ordering becoming, comes in as a possible explanation. As absolutely indeterminate substance, God as the power to exist is, in the first articulation, the power to exist in infinitely many ways, and hence the absolutely indeterminate is drawn into an infinite number of ways of actualizing the absolutely indeterminate \u2013 that is, the multiplicity of attributes that are neither one nor multiple. In the second articulation these ways are actualized as a series of infinite causation, whereby determinate existents require the existence of an other determinant existent, and so on \u2013 for example, the series of the modes of thought and the series of the modes of extension.<\/p>\n
\n
To bring this already long post to an end I want briefly to tie some of the points to what was said in earlier posts by addressing a few questions (I\u2019m not being exhaustive here of course):<\/p>\n
\nIs God a being, or can we read Heidegger\u2019s ontological difference into Spinoza\u00a0\u00a0 whereby God is the Being that is not to be confused with any beings?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n
\n
\n
Put bluntly, no, God is a being. However, as the double articulation makes clear, coupled with Hallett\u2019s reading of Spinoza, God is a being whose essence is the power to exist (see 1P11S), and this power is absolutely indeterminate. This is in sharp contrast to Aristotle for whom essence is not an absolutely indeterminate power to exist but rather a determinate form of existence. There is no place for causa sui in Aristotle\u2019s thought. Therefore, while God is the singular and unique being whose essence entails \u2018an absolutely infinite power of existing,\u2019 this power of existing, as Deleuze notes, is neither predetermined by ideas or models in the understanding nor is it a power separate and distinct from ways of existing, from attributive substances. God\u2019s being contains no other reality than the attributes, and yet God\u2019s being exceeds our everyday understanding of beings insofar as it consists of an infinite number of attributes while we are only aware of two (thought and extension). This brings me to the second question. <\/span><\/p>\n\nIs God the anhypothetical absolute that serves as the foundation for Spinoza\u2019s deductive method (his Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata)?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n
\n
Yes, but here too the axiomatic method that begins with God as an anhypothetical absolute supervenes upon the regressive analytic that resulted in a multiplicity of attributes that are neither one nor multiple. To restate this in earlier terms, the second articulation that gives us God as an integration of the multiplicity of attributes does indeed give us a foundation for the axiomatic method, but since it is a foundation that supervenes upon the problematic and objectively indeterminate multiplicity of attributes, this axiomatic method that follows will be both necessary for and insufficient to the task of determining the objectively indetermined (or the absolutely indeterminate). To restate this point we could take the title of this post, questions of substance. A question of substance is not exhausted by the answers it receives \u2013 these answers supervene upon the question, and hence they are not arbitrary answers, but they do so without eliminating the question, the problematic, itself. And finally,<\/p>\n
\n
\nWhat is the role of the common notions?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n
A full answer to this question would entail addressing Spinoza\u2019s three kinds of knowledge (and Deleuze\u2019s essay \u201cSpinoza and the three \u2018Ethics\u2019\u201d if we are to continue to track his reading of Spinoza), but it is brought up at a crucial point early on in the Ethics<\/em>, in the long scholia of 1P8 (\u201cEvery substance is necessarily infinite\u201d). Spinoza argues in reference to 1P7 (\u2018It pertains to the nature of substance to exist\u201d) that \u2018if men would attend to the nature of substance, they would have no doubt at all of the truth of P7. Indeed, this proposition would be an axiom for everyone, and would be numbered among the common notions.\u2019 If we would only attend to the nature of substance, but we don\u2019t! Instead, we attend to the random encounters of our everyday lives, to the casual relations between modes and the haphazard patterns of our experiences. In short, we are too focused upon the singular and determinate aspects of our particular lives to \u2018attend to the nature of substance\u2019 itself. It was for a very similar reason that Spinoza abandoned the TIE, as the previous post argued, when Spinoza \u2018discovers and invents\u2019 the common notions. Recalling that the ethical project of TIE was to acquire an eternal knowledge by way of the knowledge of our determinate minds and any singular, determinate truth, we can now see why this failed and why the common notions was seen as key to a solution. Any effort to attain knowledge of the eternal based upon the axiomatic and determinate alone will fail precisely because it supervenes upon the problematic multiplicity of attributes. One cannot axiomatically deduce an answer to a question of substance! With the common notions in hand, however, the first kind of knowledge, the determinate and singular knowledge of our bodily lives in the world (the knowledge that keeps us from seeing that \u2018it pertains to the nature of substance to exist\u2019) is drawn into a problematic common knowledge (second kind of knowledge) that then comes to be actualized as the third kind of knowledge, the knowledge that finally releases us from things which are \u2018liable to many variations and which we can never fully possess.\u2019 Much more is needed here, I realize, but hopefully the general idea of how this would go is clear enough.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To treat Spinoza\u2019s understanding of substance and how substance in turn relates to the attributes, God, and the modes, is far beyond the scope of a single post \u2013 perhaps even an entire manuscript \u2013 but a few suggestions will be offered that follow through on arguments made in previous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deleuze","category-spinoza"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t