Spinoza
Section II: Nature does not aim at an end
We now come to section II. (bottom of Pg. 111) So Spinoza has explained
why men are inclined to believe that all things act for an end. He is now
going to show that Nature has no end set before it and that "final causes
are nothing but human fictions ." Spinoza claims he has already
established this by showing the origin of the prejudice, and that in the
body of Book I he has established that "all things proceed by a certain
eternal necessity of Nature, and with the greatest perfection" Spinoza
goes on to argue that the doctrine of final causes takes away God's
perfection -- for if God acts for the sake of some end, then he
necessarily wants something that he lacks, and to say that God lacks
something is to say that It is not perfect. Another point Spinoza makes is
that those who assign ends to all things reduce all things to ignorance -
because if we trace the causes of any given event back, we end with the
will of God, "that is the sanctity of ignorance." This is so because if
God has free will like humans, once we trace the chain of causes back to
God's will, there will be no reason or explanation of why one thing was
chosen rather than another. (This is the point of the example of the man
who dies from a stone falling off the roof as he walks by.) Spinoza
remarks (top of Pg. 113) that similarly "...when they see the structure of
the human body, they are struck by foolish wonder, and because they do not
know the causes of so great an art, they infer that it is constructed, not
by mechanical, by divine, or supernatural art..." (The wonders of the
construction of the human body are often used to motivate the teleological
argument.) So, anyone who tries to investigate causes in nature as any
intelligent educated person should, and seeks to understand and not
wonder at them "is generally considered an impious heretic and denounced
by those who the people honor as interpreters of Nature and the gods."
Section III: Good and evil, and the nature of
skepticism
In the third section we come to Spinoza's explanation of those
remarkable pairs of terms, good and evil and so forth. The basic point
about good and evil, is that people take things which are in their
interest as good and those which are not as evil. Thus they define good
as whatever conduces to health and worship of God. He says (Pg. 113) that
those whose condition he has analyzed "do not understand the nature of
things, but only imagine them, affirm nothing concerning things, and take
the imagi nation for the intellect..." So, here we have the Cartesian
distinction between sense, imagination and intellect used to explain the
errors of those who have not reached true understanding! Spinoza
continues with the other examples he proposes to explain (those which do
not depend on free will which he proposes to treat later) -- and the
explanation for all the rest is roughly the same. In each case, people
take what is of advantage to them as the standard (See Pg. 114 first
paragraph for a clear summary of this point). Thus, Spinoza says (bottom
of Pg. 113) that things "which we can easily imagine are especially
pleasing to us, men prefer order to confusion, as if order were anything
in Nature more than a relation to our imagination."
What is really interesting about this discussion is the treatment of
relativity of views and the skepticism it engenders. Spinoza treats this
as simply yet another case of mistaking the imagination for the
understanding! (See the three paragraphs on Pp. 114-5 which start "All of
those things show sufficiently...")