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).