La geometría del poder en Spinoza

Michael Della Rocca

VILJANEN, Valtteri. Spinoza’s Geometry of Power, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, 208 pp.

It was an early instance of that very effective rhetorical move, "You're as bad as Spinoza". Leibniz charged in his "De Ipsa Natura" (1698) that, by denying power to finite entities, the occasionalism of Malebranche and other Cartesians "seems with Spinoza to make of God the

very nature of things, while created things disappear into mere modifications of the divine substance".^[1] The general worry here is that the occasionalists, like Spinoza, were guilty of removing any genuine nature from finite things and thus were guilty of stripping from them any causal power. In rejecting occasionalism, Leibniz --as is well-known-- contends that finite things and substances in general or, to use a term he was then beginning to use at this point, "monads" have a nature of their own and have causal power that stems from that nature. Leibniz rightly sees his own view as, in many ways, a return to a pre-Cartesian view of the natures of substances, a view replete with teleology and final causes and all that good Aristotelian-Scholastic stuff. For Leibniz (and his illustrious pre-Cartesian predecessors), all causal power is a function of the essences or natures of things and, by eliminating the essence or nature of finite things, Spinoza --as well as the occasionalists-- were guilty of saddling us with a world of inert objects.

This characterization and criticism of the occasionalists and of Cartesians may or may not be fair -- that's another story. But whether this is a fair criticism of Spinoza is the story of Valtteri Viljanen's book, and it is one of the book's great virtues that it explains just how wildly off-base this criticism of Spinoza is. Far from denying that things have essences and power, as an occasionalist might, and far from attributing causal power to things only as, at best, an extrinsic property of those things not grounded in their natures (as Descartes and other mechanists might have done), Spinoza, in an Aristotelian spirit, attributes robust causal power to objects as flowing from their essences. Thus, speaking of God, Spinoza says, "From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes (i.e. everything which can fall under an infinite intellect)" (E1p16). As Viljanen stresses, the demonstration of this proposition "turns on the tenet that 'the intellect infers from the given definition of any thing a number of properties that really do follow from it (i.e., from the very essence of the thing)''' (p. 41). Similarly, for Spinoza, particular objects that are mere modes of God also have natures that determine (at least in part) the properties of those things. As Spinoza says of bodies, "All modes by which a body is affected by another body follow both from the nature of the body affected and at the same time from the nature of the affecting body" (E2ax1 after le3). Viljanen aptly sums up Spinoza's view with the slogan, "things are essential causers of properties" (p. 41).

Spinoza: El principio de razón suficiente (en inglés)

Michael LeBuffe

DELLA ROCCA, Michael. Spinoza, Routledge, New York, 2008, 341 pp.

Spinoza is at once an excellent introduction to Spinoza's philosophy and a major contribution to Spinoza scholarship. The book's central theme, the prominence and systematic importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) in Spinoza’s thought, contributes to both of these qualities. For undergraduate philosophy students it serves as a working interpretative thesis through which some of the most difficult claims of Spinoza's philosophy -- for example, that self-destruction is impossible, or that conceptual dependence just is causal dependence -- may be evaluated and understood. For Spinoza scholars, Della Rocca's claim that Spinoza is driven to a particular kind of argument by the demand for explanation and a concomitant rejection of brute facts offers an appealing, unifying interpretation of the Ethics and elements of Spinoza's political philosophy. Rigorous treatments of Spinoza's philosophy, either because they tend to tackle the difficult claims of the Ethics in isolation from one another or because they devote themselves to one subject while bracketing others, tend to de-emphasize an important test for the plausibility of an interpretation of one of Spinoza's positions: its consistency with other positions in the book and its usefulness as a tool in helping us to understand those positions. Della Rocca's emphasis on the PSR reverses this trend. On Della Rocca's account, Spinoza's insistence that absolutely everything is intelligible explains important elements of his metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, ethics, political theory and eschatology. Spinoza will challenge scholars who disagree with Della Rocca to develop equally clear and well-grounded alternative accounts of what is characteristic of Spinozism, a formidable task.

The book is well-organized and offers several features that make it accessible to those who are new to Spinoza. Each chapter has a clear structure and includes, at the end, a summary and well-chosen suggestions for further reading. Chapter One introduces the PSR, focusing on its "twofold use" in the Ethics (which Della Rocca takes to characterize Spinoza's rationalism) and arguing that Spinoza's naturalism follows straightforwardly from the PSR. Della Rocca holds that E1p11d2 (that is, Ethics, Part 1, Proposition 11, Demonstration 2) contains the clearest instance of the PSR in Spinoza's writings: "For each thing there must be assigned a cause or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence." The twofold use of the PSR, to which I will return below, is first, a demand for an explanation of a given fact, and second, an explanation of the fact at issue in terms of explanation itself. Naturalism -- which here means the view that all things, including all human beings, are governed by the same principles -- follows from the PSR, according to Della Rocca, because any local principles, such as any principles which applied to human beings alone, would be inexplicable. Chapter One also includes a brief biography.