Expressionism in Philosophy

Spinoza

Gilles Deleuze, Martin Joughin

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781942130642
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In this remarkable work, Gilles Deleuze, the renowned French philosopher, reflects on one of the thinkers of the past who most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration of the tasks of philosophy. For Deleuze, Spinoza, along with Nietzsche and Lucretius, conceived of philosophy as an enterprise of liberation and radical demystification. He locates in Spinoza "a set of affects, a kinetic determination, an impulse" and makes Spinoza into "an encounter, a passion." Expressionism in Philosophy was the culmination of a series of monographic studies by Deleuze (on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Proust, Kant, and Sacher-Masoch) and prepared the transition from these abstract treatments of historical schemes of experience to the nomadology of Capitalism and Schizophrenia ( Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, co-authored with Félix Guattari). Thus, Expressionism in Philosophy is both a pivotal reading of Spinoza's work and a crucial text within the development of Deleuze's thought.

PART ONE

The Triads of Substance

CHAPTER ONE

Numerical and Real Distinction

Expression presents us with a triad. In it we must distinguish substance, attributes and essence. Substance expresses itself, attributes are expressions, and essence is expressed. The idea of expression remains unintelligible while we see only two of the terms whose relations it presents. We confuse substance and attribute, attribute and essence, essence and substance, as long as we fail to take into account the presence of a third term linking each pair. Substance and attribute are distinct, but only insofar as each attribute expresses a certain essence. Attribute and essence are distinct, but only insofar as every essence is expressed as an essence of substance, rather than of attribute. The originality of the concept of expression shows itself here: essence, insofar as it has existence, has no existence outside the attribute in which it is expressed; and yet, as essence, it relates only to substance. An essence is expressed by each attribute, but this as an essence of substance itself. Infinite essences are distinguished through the attributes in which they find expression, but are identified in the substance to which they relate. We everywhere confront the necessity of distinguishing three terms: substance which expresses itself, the attribute which expresses, and the essence which is expressed. It is through attributes that essence is distinguished from substance, but through essence that substance is itself distinguished from attributes: a triad each of whose terms serves as a middle term relating the two others, in three syllogisms.

Expression is inherent in substance, insofar as substance is absolutely infinite; in its attributes, insofar as they constitute an infinity; in essence, insofar as each essence in an attribute is infinite. Thus infinity has a nature. Merleau-Ponty has well brought out what seems to us now the most difficult thing to understand in the philosophies of the seventeenth century: the idea of a positive infinity as the “secret of grand Rationalism” — “an innocent way of setting out in one’s thinking from infinity,” which finds its most perfect embodiment in Spinozism.¹ Innocence does not of course exclude the “labor of the concept.” Spinoza needed all the resources of a novel conceptual frame to bring out the power and the actuality of positive infinity. If the idea of expression provided this, it did so by introducing into infinity various distinctions corresponding to the three terms, substance, attribute and essence. What is the character of distinction within infinity? What sort of distinction can one introduce into what is absolute, into the nature of God? Such is the first problem posed by the idea of expression, and it dominates Part One of the Ethics.

At the very beginning of the Ethics Spinoza asks how two things, in the most general sense of the word, can be distinguished, and then how two substances, in the precise sense of that word, must be distinguished. The first question leads into the second, and the answer to the second question seems unequivocal: if two “things” in general differ either by the attributes of their substance, or by its modes, then two substances cannot differ in mode, but only in attribute. So that there cannot be two or more substances of the same attribute.² There is no question that Spinoza is here setting out from a Cartesian framework, but what must be most carefully considered is just what he takes over from Descartes, what he discards and, above all, what he takes over from Descartes in order to turn it against him.

The principle that there are only substances and modes, modes being in something else, and substance in itself, may be found quite explicitly in Descartes.³ And if modes always presuppose a substance, and are sufficient to give us knowledge of it, they do so through a primary attribute which they imply, and which constitutes the essence of the substance itself. Thus two or more substances are distinguished and distinctly known through their primary attributes.⁴ From this Descartes deduces that we can conceive a real distinction between two substances, a modal distinction between a substance and a mode that presupposes it (without in turn being presupposed by it) and a distinction of reason between a substance and the attribute without which we could have no distinct knowledge of the substance.⁵ Exclusion, unilateral implication and abstraction correspond to these as criteria applicable to corresponding ideas, or rather as the elementary data of representation^a which allow us to define and recognize these varieties of distinction. The characterization and application of these kinds of distinction play a crucial part in the elaboration of the Cartesian system. Descartes no doubt drew on the earlier efforts made by Suarez to bring order into this complicated area,⁶ but his own use of the three distinctions seems, in its very richness, to introduce many further ambiguities.

An initial ambiguity, admitted by Descartes, concerns the distinction of reason, modal distinction and the relation between them. The ambiguity comes out in the use of the words “mode,” “attribute” and “quality” themselves. Any given attribute is a quality, in that it qualifies a substance as this or that, but also a mode, in that it diversifies it.⁷ How do primary attributes appear in this light? I cannot separate a substance from such an attribute except by abstraction; but as long as I do not make it something subsisting by itself, I can also distinguish such an attribute from the substance, by considering it just as the substance’s property of changing (of having, that is to say, various different shapes or different thoughts). Thus Descartes says that extension and thought may be distinctly conceived in two ways: “insofar as one constitutes the nature of body, and the other that of the soul”; and also through distinguishing each from their substance, by taking them simply as “modes” or “dependents.”⁸ Now, if in the first case attributes distinguish the substances that they qualify, then it surely appears, in the second case, that modes distinguish substances with the same attribute. Thus different shapes may be referred to this or that body, really distinct from any other; and different thoughts to really distinct souls. An attribute constitutes the essence of the substance it qualifies, but this doesn’t prevent it from also constituting the essence of the modes which it links to substances sharing the same attribute. This dual aspect generates major difficulties in the Cartesian system.⁹ Let it suffice here to note the conclusion that there exist substances sharing the same attribute. In other words, there are numerical distinctions that are at the same time real or substantial.

A second difficulty concerns real distinction considered alone. It is, no less than the other forms, a datum of representation. Two things are really distinct if one can conceive one of them clearly and distinctly while excluding everything belonging to the concept of the other. So that Descartes explains the criterion of real distinction to Arnauld as the completeness of the idea alone. He can quite rightly claim never to have confused things conceived as really distinct with really distinct things; and yet the passage from one to the other does appear to him to be perfectly legitimate — the question is, where to make this passage. In the progress of the Meditations we need only proceed as far as a divine Creator to see that he would be singularly lacking in truthfulness if he were to create things differing from the clear and distinct ideas he gives us of them. Real distinction does not contain within it the ground of things differing, but this ground is furnished by the external and transcendent divine causality that creates substances conformably to our manner of conceiving them as possible. Here again, all sorts of difficulties develop in relation to the idea of creation. The primary ambiguity attaches to the definition of substance: “A thing that can exist by itself.”¹⁰ Is there not a contradiction in presenting existing-by-itself as itself being simply a possibility? Here we may note a second conclusion: God as creator effects our passage from substances conceived as really distinct to really distinct substances. Real distinction, whether between substances with different attributes, or those with the same attribute, brings with it a division of things, that is, a corresponding numerical distinction.

The opening of the Ethics is organized around these two Cartesian conclusions. Where lies the error, Spinoza asks, in supposing several substances sharing the same attribute? He refutes the error in two ways, using a favorite style of argument: first through a reductio ad absurdum, and then through a more complex proof. If there were several substances with the same attribute, they would have to be distinguished by their modes, which is absurd, since substance is in its very nature anterior to its modes, none of which it implies (this is the short way, taken at I.5). The positive demonstration comes further on, in a scholium to Proposition 8: two substances with the same attribute would be only numerically distinct — and the character of numerical distinction is such as to exclude the possibility of making of it a real or substantial distinction.

According to the Scholium, a distinction would not be numerical if the things distinguished did not have the same concept or definition; but in that case the things would not be distinct, were there not an external cause, beside the definition, which determined that they exist in such a number. So that two or more numerically distinct things presuppose something outside their concept. Thus substances could only be numerically distinct through the operation of some external causality that could produce them. But only by holding conjointly a number of confused ideas can we claim that substances are produced. We say they have a cause, but that we do not know how this cause operates; we imagine that we have a true idea of these substances, since they are conceived in themselves, but we are unsure of the truth of this idea, because we do not know, from the substances themselves, whether they exist. This amounts to a criticism of the odd Cartesian formula “what can exist by itself.” External causality does make sense, but only in relation to the existence of finite modes: every existing mode may be referred to another, precisely because it cannot exist by itself. To apply such causality to substance is to make it operate outside the terms that legitimate and define it — to propose its operation in a sort of void, and quite indeterminately. In short, external causality and numerical distinction share the same fate of applying to modes, and to modes alone.

The argument of Scholium 8 has, then, the following form: (1) Numerical distinction requires an external cause to which it may be referred; (2) But a substance cannot be referred to an external cause, because of the contradiction implied in such a use of causal principles; (3) So two or more substances cannot be distinguished in numero, and there cannot be two substances with the same attribute. The structure of the argument here differs from that of the first eight proofs, which runs: (1) Two or more substances cannot share the same attribute, for they would then have to be distinguished by their modes, which is absurd; (2) So that a substance cannot have a cause external to it, for to be produced or limited by another substance it would have to share the same nature or the same attribute; (3) So that there cannot be numerical distinction in any substance, of whatever attribute, and “Every substance must be infinite.”¹¹

On the one hand, one deduces from the nature of numerical distinction that it is inapplicable to substance; on the other, one deduces from the nature of substance its infinity, and thus the impossibility of applying to it numerical distinctions. In either case, numerical distinction can never distinguish substances, but only modes that involve the same attribute. For number expresses in its own way the character of existing modes: the composite nature of their parts, their limitation by other things of the same nature, their determination from outside themselves. Number thus goes on ad infinitum. But the question is, can it ever reach infinity itself? Or, as Spinoza puts it: even in the case of modes, is it from the multitude of parts that we infer their infinity?¹² When we make of numerical distinction a real or substantial distinction, we carry it to infinity, if only to ensure the convertibility that then becomes necessary between the attribute as such and the infinity of finite parts which we distinguish in it. Great absurdities then follow: “If an infinite quantity is measured by parts equal to a foot, it will consist of an infinitely many such parts, as it will also, if it is measured by parts equal to an inch. And therefore, one infinite number will be twelve times greater than another.”¹³ The absurdity does not, as Descartes thought, lie in hypostatizing extension as an attribute, but rather in conceiving it as measurable and composed of finite parts into which one supposes it convertible. Physics here intervenes to support the principles of logic: the absence of a vacuum in nature means simply that division into parts is not real distinction. Numerical distinction is division, but division takes place only in modes, only modes are divisible.¹⁴

There cannot be several substances with the same attribute. From which one may infer: from the viewpoint of relation, that one substance is not produced by another; from the viewpoint of modality, that it belongs to the nature of substance to exist; and from the viewpoint of quality, that any substance is necessarily infinite.¹⁵ But all these results are, so to speak, involved in the argument relating to numerical distinction, and it is the latter that brings us back around to our starting point: “There exists only one substance of the same attribute.”¹⁶ Then, from Proposition 9 on, Spinoza’s objective seems to shift. It is no longer a question of demonstrating that there is only one substance for each attribute, but that there is only one substance for all attributes. The passage from one theme to the next seems difficult to grasp. For, in this new perspective, what implication should be assigned to the first eight propositions? The problem is clarified if we see that the passage from one theme to the other may be effected by what is called in logic the conversion of a negative universal. Numerical distinction is never real; then conversely, real distinction is never numerical. Spinoza’s argument now becomes: attr...