Guide to Spinoza on Final Causes
Spinoza
Commentary on the Appendix to Book I of The
Ethicsof Spinoza
Points of interest in
Spinoza on Final Causes
This guide is intended to help you find your way through the "Appendix
to Book I" of Spinoza's masterpiece, The Ethics, in which Spinoza
attacks final causes. You should begin by reading the Appendix, and then,
on the second reading, go back and forth between this guide and the
various sections of the Appendix which it points you to. This will help
you to pick out the parts of Spinoza's discourse, and to see what is
important about them. There are some exercises along the way which may
also help you to understand this difficult reading.
First of all, what is a final cause? One answer is that a final cause
is one of Aristotle's four causes - material, formal, efficient and
final. To understand these different kinds of cause, consider a statue.
The material - say bronze - of which the statue is made is its material
cause. The form of the statue - say Venus - is its formal cause. The
efficient cause is the sculptor who makes the statue, and the final cause
is the purpose for which he makes the statue - e.g. to amuse the Pope.
One might attribute final causes to things, e.g. my heart is beating more
rapidly in order to increase circulation; or people, e.g. she is
exercising for her health; or on a more cosmic level to God, e.g. He made
the seas for fish to live in.
Part of the revolt against Aristotle in the 17th century, involves
reducing these four causes, including final causes, to one - efficient
causality. Spinoza is part of that revolt. And yet, there is another
strand of thought in the 17th and 18th centuries which makes much out of
final causes, and is at the heart of the new mechanical philosophy. The
teleological argument for the existence of God is an argument which
combines final causes with the mechanical philosophy. It says that the
world is like a vast machine. Every machine has a maker, the world is a
machine, so the world too must have a maker. Every machine is made for a
purpose, and the purpose of the world machine is to satisfy the needs of
man, the most important creature on the earth. Spinoza clearly intensely
dislikes final causes, and since he rejects the notion of a creator God,
he has no use for the teleological argument. Part of the Appendix to Book
I of the Ethics is an attack on the notion of final causes on which the
teleological argument depends.
Spinoza begins by noting that he has stated various truths about God in
Book I of the Ethics and that it is his aim to remove various prejudices
which prevent people from seeing these truths. All of these prejudices
depend on a belief in final causes!
So, Spinoza is going to show 1. Why most people are satisfied that it
is true that there are final causes and why nature compels us to embrace
this doctrine. 2. That the doctrine of final causes is false. And 3. How
from belief in this doctrine prejudices have arisen regarding good and
evil, merit and sin, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and
ugliness and other things of this kind! Surely, we must wonder what is
the connection between the doctrine of final causes, and such a set of
remarkable terms.
Now let's make a guess: How are we going to get from a belief in final
causes to views about good and evil, merit and sin, praise and blame. One
possibility is this: Spinoza thinks there is a connection between final
causes and free will. Free will h as all kinds of connections with good
and evil and merit and sin. If you believe in free will then you hold
that one can be held responsible for acts, good or bad, which are freely
done, and so rightly praised or blamed, punished or rewarded. But Spinoz
a does not believe in free will -- so it may be that all the consequences
which follow from a belief in free will he regards as prejudices. Still,
this guess or hypothesis does not explain the connection between final
causes and order and confusion, bea uty and ugliness very well. Nor does
it tell us what the connection between free will and final causes is. So,
we want to see if there is a connection between free will and final
causes, and we may expect that there is something else going on in additio
n which will explain the other pairs of terms.
The first paragraph of the section I. (on Pg. 110) nicely confirms our
guess. First, Spinoza says, men are born in ignorance of the causes of
things and (here comes the something else in addition) they all want to
seek their own advantage, and are conscious of this appetite. Spinoza
may have got this idea from reading Hobbes. From these two assumptions
about our nature if follows that:
- Men think they are free,
because they are conscious of their own volitions and appetites, but know
nothing of the causes which dispose them to wanting and willing as they
do. (This is the classical determinist analysis of why people are deluded
when they think they have free will.)
- Men act always on account of an end, namely on account of their own
advantage, which they want. Hence, they consider all natural things as
means to their advantage.
Spinoza writes:
Furthermore, they find, both in themselves and outside themselves-- many
means that are very helpful in seeking their own advantage, for example,
eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun
for light, the sea for supporting fish...Hence they consider all natural
things as means to their advantage. So, looking at the universe as the
means to my end (my own advantage) I come to hold that the universe must
have been made for that purpose. And if it was made for that purpose , it
did not make itself but rather was made by a ruler of Nature, endowed with
human freedom, who had taken care of all things for men, and makes all
things for their use.
This is a classic statement of the teleological argument (in Greek
telos means end). Furthermore Spinoza claims that "they infer the
temperament or character of the gods from their own. He continues (top of
Pg. 111):
Hence they hold that the gods made all things for man in order to bind men
to them and be held in the highest honor. So each tried different ways to
get God to love him above the rest, and to direct the whole of nature
according to their blind desire and insatiable greed. Thus this
prejudice was turned into superstition.
The discussion now continues about how people who are captured by this
superstition deal with counter-instances to the claim that Nature does
everything for man. In effect, Spinoza turns to the problem of evil. If
Nature is made for us then why are there are so many inconveniences,
"...storms, earthquakes, diseases and the like."? Spinoza continues
(middle of Pg. 111):
These, they maintain, happen because the gods are angry with them on
account of the wrongs done to them by men...And though their daily
experience contradicted this, and though infinitely many examples show
that conveniences and inconveniences happen i ndiscriminately to the pious
and the impious alike, they do not give up their long-standing prejudice.
Why? Too much work to think of another scheme! "So, they maintained it
as certain that the judgment of the gods far surpasses man's grasp."
Spinoza remarks that this alone would have kept the truth hidden from
human beings for eternity were it not th at mathematics showed men another
standard of truth, which has nothing to do with final causes.