Richard
Mason
Proposition 23 of Part V
of the Ethics says:
The human mind cannot be absolutely
destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal.
A demonstration is
offered. The scholium to the proposition adds that 'we feel and experience that
we are eternal'.
These views seem to form
the apex of Spinoza's system, coming almost at the end of the Ethics as the apparent culmination of a
long series of connected propositions. Although they are not particularly
emphasised -- Spinoza left his readers to decide what mattered -- it would seem
strange to imagine that they were not of importance to him.
To commentators, these
views form the apex of his system in another way: as a pinnacle of difficulty,
or a stumbling-block for the understanding. Some [1] have just give up on
Spinoza at this point, believing that he had extended himself beyond any
rational defence or explanation of his position, lapsing into paradox or
mysticism. Others have avoided the real problems of interpretation with
rhetoric. Even Pollock, normally so lucid, offers no better than this:
Spinoza's eternal life is not a
continuance of existence but a manner of existence; something which can be
realized here and now as much as at any other time or place; not a future
reward of the soul's perfection but the soul's perfection itself. In which, it
is almost needless to remind the reader, he agrees with the higher and nobler
interpretation of almost all the religious systems of the world [2].
In addition to the
general difficulty in seeing what Spinoza meant, and how it could be fitted
into a general understanding of his thinking, there are at least two particular
points where his opinion in Ethics V,
23
Understanding eternity
has seemed to conflict with other important views that he expressed: where he
has seemed inconsistent as well as, perhaps, unintelligible.
First, most readers of
Part II of the Ethics have assumed
that mind and body must exist together: 'The object of the idea constituting
the human mind is the body - i.e. a definite mode of extension actually
existing, and nothing else' [3], and so on. That view has often seemed (and
often seems to students exasperated by Descartes) to resolve the paradoxes
created by an immaterial spirit, affected by and affecting the extended body
while retaining a capacity for immortality. Admittedly, although Spinoza may
have evaded the problems of body-spirit dualism, he did land himself with the
apparently awkward consequence that individual things, not just people, are
'animate, albeit in different degrees' [4] -- but otherwise, what he said in
Part II of the Ethics about the
constitution of people looked fairly sensible. So how could something of the
mind 'remain' when the body was destroyed? That seems to be in direct conflict
with the view that mind and body must go together.
Secondly, his thinking
about time was elusive and never collected into a single coherent statement. He
followed a conventional enough distinction between endless duration -- the
experienced passage of time -- and timelessness or eternity [5]. The eternal
'does not admit of "when" or "before" or "after" [6].
A natural reading is that the eternal truths of geometry and philosophy will be
timeless, with no 'before' or 'after', in contrast with human experience:
eternity 'cannot be explicated through duration or time, even if duration be
conceived as without beginning or end'.7 In the Demonstration to Ethics V, 23, we see that 'we do not
assign duration to the mind except while the body endures'. Yet we are said to
'feel and experience' that we are eternal. Feeling and experiencing hardly
sound relevant to the eternal truths of mathematics or philosophy. And even if
they were, what we might call their human relevance would seem to be left as
problematic. The type of eternity embodied or expressed by the eternal truth of
the theorem of Pythagoras is hardly a type that might offer any consolation,
hope or even interest to anybody except a Pythagorean. If eternity is
distinguished from experienced duration, how could we experience eternity?
Maybe there is some
religious interest in any philosopher who claims to demonstrate that part of
the mind is eternal -- though, even more than with Spinoza's demonstrations for
the existence of God, we are not thinking of proofs to convince the wavering or
the unfaithful. It might be imagined that the eternity of the mind was of
special personal significance, and that a demonstration of it was a central
motive behind his work; but there is not a word of evidence for that view, and
no hint of it in his letters or in his mature writings other than the Ethics.
As with his remarks
about Jesus, these problems might seem to be incidental in terms of his
narrowly philosophical interest to us. That is a view that he did something to
encourage himself. As we have seen, his passage on eternity in Part V of the Ethics appears before two concluding
propositions, which tell us that 'even if we did not know that our mind is
eternal', the philosophical and moral conclusions of the remainder of the book
would still hold. The overt reason for that conclusion is to underline that
punishment and reward in an after-life have no part to play in moral philosophy
-- deep scorn is poured over such an idea -- but it does not take a great deal
of suspiciousness to say that Spinoza may also have been hedging his
conclusions on eternity with a proviso that they were logically optional to his
other views. So, philosophically, it might not look too harmful to disregard
them.
