From a Summer Notebook
Posted on January 25, 2007
Filed Under Philosophy |
I was reading Nadler’s masterful biography of Spinoza last summer & jotted the following in my notebook:
Unlike Spinoza, I don’t believe there is any point of view outside the world, but, damn, his refutation of teleology is powerful!
Flipping through that notebook earlier this morning looking for a note about something else, I was stuck again by the power of Spinoza’s argument against teleology:
Spinoza’s fundamental insight in Book One is that Nature is an indivisible, uncaused, substantial whole — in fact, it is the only substantial whole. Outside of Nature, there is nothing, and everything that exists is a part of Nature and is brought into being by Nature with a deterministic necessity. This unified, unique, productive, necessary being just is what is meant by ‘God’. Because of the necessity inherent in Nature, there is no teleology in the universe. Nature does not act for any ends, and things do not exist for any set purposes. There are no “final causes” (to use the common Aristotelian phrase). God does not “do” things for the sake of anything else. The order of things just follows from God’s essences with an inviolable determinism. All talk of God’s purposes, intentions, goals, preferences or aims is just an anthropomorphizing fiction. [Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy]
I think Spinoza needed God — that external point of view — for historical & cultural reasons, not logical ones.
Comments
One Response to “From a Summer Notebook”
I’ve not read the text, but your description of Spinozan necessity seems similar to the view of nature found in early Greek poetry, especially Hesiod’s Theogony. There’s really no end, just the establishing of forms succeeded by other forms. That’s probably not a very good summary. Anyway, provocative.