Everyone knows perfection is absurd
Because it is both impossible and necessary
Reality is perfect, because perfection is reality itself, apart from which nothing exists. God, or nature, is this substance, the perfect reality.
Along with substance, there are its attributes and modes. These are the three most important categories of Spinoza’s ontology, which the first part of his Ethics (1677) is devoted to. The remainder of the book explores his ideas on the human mind, feeling, power, the intellect, freedom and bliss, all rooted in this ontology.
Historically, Spinoza came right after Descartes, whom he was profoundly indebted to. He sought to resolve the disparity that Descartes left unthought, namely the connection between the two substances (which I’ve written about here). Spinoza reduced Descartes’s two substances to one: the underlying fundamental unity of reality. The duality of mind and extension would be demoted to the status of attributes of God, instead of being substances in themselves. For Spinoza, mind and body are one in God. The discrepancy of Descartes’s distinction between a created substance and an uncreated substance was eliminated. Spinoza held that being is, and that non-being is absolutely not.
In the post-Cartesian 17th century, this Sephardic Jew, violently banned from his Portuguese diaspora in the Netherlands, stepped forth to respond to Descartes with a modern iteration of Parmenidean monism.
Substance
In his substance monism negativity is prohibited. There is no such thing, there is only being, only the affirmation of the absolute power of nature. All that exists is God, who is infinite. Anything finite is a mere passing away and finds fulfillment only in its extinguishment in God, the all-engulfing substance. Here in the Ethics we see the minimal distinction between infinite substance and finitude:
“Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else.”1
God is not caused by another, is not opposed by another, but is in himself, which means that he is his own cause. Modes, in contrast, are in something else. Modes are not caused by themselves but are caught up in the causal chain which is traced back to what is in itself, substance.
Besides monism, another popular way to identify Spinoza is as a pantheist, meaning ‘everything is God’. And while I believe there is merit to this label — insofar there’s no actuality for Spinoza that is not God — here, I’ll introduce another -ism to highlight a key division in his philosophy.
I call this acosmist-panentheism (AP).
Central to Spinoza’s Ethics, and therefore AP, is that it maintains that:
God is everything that is not (acosmism).
Everything is in God (panentheism).
God is everything that is not. Not everything is God, but God is the first cause of everything. God is in everything without directly being everything. So God is in everything and everything is in God. But what then, is everything?
I’ll unpack how the triad of substance, attribute, and mode answer this.
Both the terms acosmism and panentheism have been used to describe Spinoza’s system, but they have not been considered together. Before going deeper into the meaning of AP, I will address a common and false presumption. Spinoza’s system is contrary to what many “scholarly debates” seem to yearn for not a complete system unto itself. This is noteworthy because it relieves us of the fascination with the seeming incommensurable difference between the simplicity of his monism/pantheism on the one side, and the complexity of its intricate system on the other side. Neither Spinoza nor any scholarly debate can complete Spinoza’s system because it’d lose what makes it characteristically his, namely the manner in which it is incomplete. Trying to get the true meaning behind Spinoza’s convoluted logic, as well as seeing our cognition as lacking in the face of this complicated book, fails to take Spinoza’s project for the unfinished result that it is. Similarly to how Spinoza is dissatisfied with the split of the substances in Descartes, we’re going to turn this around on Spinoza himself and see how this split is reproduced in his acosmist-panentheism.
Let us take an example of how this split is made apparent:
“[T]he human mind is part of the infinite intellect of God; and therefore when we say that the human mind perceives this or that, we are saying nothing else but this: that God — not insofar as he is infinite but insofar as he is explicated through the nature of the human mind, that is, insofar as he constitutes the essence of the human mind — has this or that idea.”2
There are two ways God appears in this passage: (1) as infinite and (2) as constituting the essence of the human mind. What this division entails is that knowledge of God’s infinity can only be attained by knowledge of God as an attribute — specifically as mind. There’s no direct access to substance, we get to apprehend its essence only as it constitutes itself as an attribute.
In addition to that, to intuitively know God is not one’s own doing. It is God’s activity: our knowledge of God is God’s knowledge of himself. God loves himself with our intellectual love for him. Not by us imagining his presence, but by understanding him as the eternal cause of everything. Our intellectual love for God is nothing but God’s love for humans, for what is godlike in the human mind, for what of the human mind partakes in his infinity. For Spinoza, this intellectual love is nothing but infinite bliss, over against which anything that comes to an end is null:
“[D]eath is less hurtful in proportion as the mind's clear and distinct knowledge is greater, and consequently the more the mind loves God.”3
“[T]he human mind can be of such a nature that that part of it that we have shown to perish with the body is of no importance compared with that part of it that survives.”4
Bodily life is null in the face of eternity, the continuation of the intellect in God.
This is Spinoza’s acosmist God, to whom everything finite is starkly opposed, at an infinite distance to his infinity. Substance is not everything because everything comes to pass, unlike substance. God as the eternal cause of things, is the truth that precedes everything and lives on beyond their inevitable demise. In this way too, he is the everything that is not — infinity.
Acosmism, God being in everything as the first cause is itself the difference between substance and the finite. This difference shows it to be independent from, and causally prior to finitude.
The panentheist side points to this everything being in God, and: that the very difference between everything and God is in God himself. God is present in finitude as it comes to pass and God is infinity in which everything finite is. He is the cause of the passing that itself does not pass, immanence:
“God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things.
All things that are, are in God, and must be conceived through God, and so God is the cause of the things that are in him, which is the first point.”5
So, God is everything that is not. He is everything’s ending, the point at which every finite individual thing reaches its eternal truth. Any finite individual thing is not substance, but a mode of it. Either in the attribute of thinking (as thoughts) or extension (as bodies).
Is it fair to say then, that God resides within things, and emerges at their termination? No. Let us take one of his concrete examples:
“Further, water, in so far as it is water, is produced and corrupted; but, in so far as it is substance, it is neither produced nor corrupted.”6
As a mode, water is finite; as substance, it is infinite.
The cosmos, a mode, is not substance. Substance is the infinite cause of the finite. Or, put differently: we can’t comprehend any mode on its own terms because a mode is that which is in another. Only when we understand the mode which is in something else that is not in another, do we come to know what is in itself, what causes the mode and itself, God.
All over the Ethics, Spinoza argues against the anthropomorphic God, against imagining God as a human person:
“God is without passive emotions. Again, God cannot pass to a state of greater or less perfection, and so he is not affected with any emotion of pleasure or pain.”7
God is the infinite perfection which does not become less or more real. Spinoza’s predecessor Descartes held that philosophy is concerned with relative degrees of reality. He did not believe its job was to critically examine knowledge of the absolute nature of God. Since the belief in him came down from divine revelation, Descartes granted God’s infallibility. Spinoza on the other hand does not at all shy away from continually making absolute statements about God and his perfection. The eternity, or unchanging nature of substance means that it cannot pass over into greater or lesser states of perfection. God is and has always been the zenith of perfection. And since God and nature are the same, Spinoza considers perfection and reality to be synonymous. Yet, Spinoza still subscribes to the view that there are relative degrees of reality in the following way:
“It may be objected that in understanding God to be the cause of all things we thereby consider God to be the cause of pain. To this I reply that insofar as we understand the causes of pain, it ceases to be a passive emotion; that is, to the extent it ceases to be pain. So insofar as we understand God to be the cause of pain, to that extent we feel pleasure.”8
In short, by understanding God to be both the cause and end of individual things, we know the latter to have its truth in the fullness of his eternal perfection. God, at a distance to the imperfect finite, endlessly persists beyond it, contains the unity of all individual things: as the cause of their finite existence and ultimately their annihilation.
So does Spinoza regard individual things to exist in any meaningful sense at all? It does not seem to be the case:
“Since in fact to be finite is in part a negation and to be infinite is the absolute affirmation of the existence of some nature, it follows from Proposition 7 alone that every substance must be infinite.”
If what is, is in part negation, what exists is in fact the part of God that is not. What exists, is what is of God that is not him. And right here lies the kernel of AP: the finite is severed from itself insofar as its truth is what in it makes up its infinity, which is where it ceases to be finite and is one with substance. The finite, as being in another, that is, the fact that it does not ground itself in itself, means that its existence is akin to the utter obliteration of itself: vacuity. The issue that emerges here for Spinoza is that there’s no way such non-being can be, because according to him only being is. He asserts that “there does not exist a vacuum in nature.”9 But how can we distinguish between vacuum, this void, and God?
Pain
Spinoza’s stubborn exclusion of the void while affirming God as the perfect unchanging nature into which everything ceases to be is ambiguous to say the least. The fact that this remains unacknowledged by Spinoza results in his inability to take note of the speculative logic of some of his assertions. For instance, for Spinoza, truth is the standard of itself as well as for what is false. Even though he works with the logic of the coincidence of opposites contained by one of the terms (truth contains the truth versus false opposition), he does not take note of this fact itself. Another example important to understand the disparity in AP is his idea of human perfection. Human perfection as this affirmative determination contains its opposite within itself. Contrary to God, whose perfection does not undergo transition and is purely and completely perfect; for man, there are degrees of perfection. Consequently, man is more real the more he transitions to perfection:
“II. Pleasure is the transition of a man from a less to a greater perfection.
III. Pain is the transition of a man from a greater to a less perfection.”10
In man, perfection must be distinguished from itself. There is God’s eternal and complete perfection and the human transition:
“I say "transition," for pleasure is not perfection itself. If a man were to be born with the perfection to which he passes, he would be in possession of it without the emotion of pleasure. This is clearer in the case of pain, the contrary emotion. For nobody can deny that pain consists in the transition of a state of less perfection, not in the less perfection itself, since man cannot feel pain insofar as he participates in any degree in perfection. Nor can we say that pain consists in the privation of greater perfection, for privation is nothing, whereas the emotion of pain is an actuality, which therefore can be nothing other than the actuality of the transition to a state of less perfection; that is, the actuality whereby a man's power of activity is diminished or checked.”11
This means that properly speaking, pain does not exist. It is merely transitory. But it is also an actuality of diminishing that limits us. Substance, as impersonal and eternal, does of course not undergo passions or feelings like pain. It is active of its own accord, by its own power, and this necessity is its own free causality that is not short of anything.
In substance, existence and essence coincide: what makes it what it is (essence) is the same as the fact that it is (existence). There is no difference that is a difference for it, since the nothing that is in it is transition of no importance. Does that mean that substance qua the infinite immanence of nature is severed from the transient human being, this finite mode? Spinoza attempts to solve this rift by connecting substance and mode with what he terms attribute:
“Our mind, insofar as it understands, is an eternal mode of thinking which is determined by another eternal mode of thinking, and this again by another, and so on ad infinitum, with the result that they all together constitute the eternal and infinite intellect of God.”12
Each one of our thoughts is a finite mode insofar as they are taken to be individual things. Thinking as an eternal attribute is to be distinguished from this as it is the expression of God’s essence. Our mind is a part of God, and the further we go on to comprehend each link in the logical chain of causes, the closer we come to know God’s inner workings. But as we transition, we are not with him, as there is no importance to finite transience. That which is transient in immanence does not exist, only unchanging knowledge gets at truth as such.
Immanence is eternal.
If we claim pain exists, we do it from the perspective of finitude, from the perspective that God is not. On the other hand, if we claim pain does not exist, there is no actuality of transition: all that is is God as the cessation of existence. The immanence of substance is simply unchanging absolute negation. Feeling pain is feeling impossibility, God’s inexistence.
This is starting to sound absurd.
Natura
Another way to go about the ambiguity of God and existence in the Ethics is by going into the following two terms that overlap with the three categories of Spinoza’s ontology.
Substance and attributes are on the side of natura naturans (creating nature). Modes are on the side of natura naturata (created nature). Substance and its attributes are both infinite, whereas modes can be infinite (God’s intellect) or finite (the human).
In natura naturans existence and essence coincide which is not the case for natura naturata. In the latter, essence and existence are split.
Essence is understood here as the property of a thing that is not accidental but which makes it what is, without which it cannot be understood. The essence, or definition of the human is not the same as the existence of the human. The existence of the human is not necessary, because the essence of the human does not entail that it exists. The human exists only insofar as it persists, insofar as God makes up the power of the duration of its existence.
Spinoza defines essence as follows:
”I consider as belonging to the essence of a thing that, which being given, the thing is necessarily given also, and, which being removed, the thing is necessarily removed also; in other words, that without which the thing, and which itself without the thing, can neither be nor be conceived.”13
Further on, he argues that the fact that substance exists does not mean the human must exist. Substance is self-causing independence, power of which its existence and essence are the same. Humans are dependent on this, but could just as well not exist.
Now, if existence is determinate in the mode of the finite human body for example, then in this strict sense it follows that God does not exist, or more precisely, that God is beyond determinate existence:
“Since determinate denotes nothing positive, but only the privation of existence of that same nature which is conceived as determinate, it follows that that whose definition affirms existence cannot be conceived as determinate.”14
Understood in this way, Spinoza’s notion of substance is identical to Eyn Sof. In Kabbalah, Eyn Sof is God qua infinite and unnameable. Everything finite that falls under the negation of existence does not affirm existence as positive, but the infinite as positive. To put it simply: God’s positive infinity is the same as his indeterminacy. Equating determinacy with existence is a contradiction that affirms God’s unspeakable affirmative infinity:
“If this be denied, conceive, if possible, that God does not exist: then his essence does not involve existence. But this is absurd. Therefore God necessarily exists.”15
God exists necessarily and eternally. Finite modes exist imperfectly, which means not at all: “For inasmuch as his essence excludes all imperfection, and involves absolute perfection, all cause for doubt concerning his existence is done away, and the utmost certainty on the question is given. This, I think, will be evident to every moderately attentive reader.”16
Necessity
If the human is not necessary (does not have substance for its essence), does that mean the opposite is true? Is his existence contingent? Does contingency exist in the first place? The more imperfect something is, the further it is from God, the deeper it is in the natura naturata. And therefore, the more dependent it is on the necessity of God:
“Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.”17
The human is necessary. The finite modes are necessary after all. But isn’t that impossible? That would mean God does not exist, because it entails that God’s existence and essence are in unity as panentheist (as he contains everything within himself) yet become split in natura naturata. The existence which he is not is within himself. God is not the cosmos, and has this finitude, this inexistence of himself in himself. But this is absurd! Because it will bring us to conclude that contingency is not, yet impossibility is. The impossibility of anything that determines itself apart from God exists in God. And of course, we know that this existence is impossible apart from God, who determines it out of his own necessity. Contingency doesn’t exist, because impossibility is necessary:
“If they be not conditioned by God, it is impossible, and not contingent, that they should condition themselves; contrariwise, if they be conditioned by God, it is impossible, and not contingent, that they should render themselves unconditioned. Wherefore all things are conditioned by the necessity of the divine nature, not only to exist, but also to exist and operate in a particular manner, and there is nothing that is contingent.”18
It’s not that Spinoza believes that impossibility exists, but there is no other way to reconcile the actuality of God within himself having any kind of incongruity with himself. So in the meantime, I’m going with the necessity of impossibility to stitch things back up.
But hold steady — we’re not leaving contingency behind. Spinoza explains it with the terms necessity and impossibility. Necessity is what it is, by virtue of its essence or cause. Either its existence and its essence are one, as natura naturans, or because of its efficient cause has brought about a particular mode. Impossibility then is what contradicts itself in terms of its essence, or because there is no external cause to bring it forth. Simply put: there is no cause that is external to it, that is different from it, that is contained in it, and of which it is the effect.
“[B]ut a thing can in no respect be called contingent, save in relation to the imperfection of our knowledge.”19
Okay. Yes Baruch, that’s also a way to go about it.
Now hear me out.
Not knowing whether a thing’s essence is contradictory, or not being able to fully trace the chain of causes leading up to an effect, manifests as the appearance of contingency, which consequently is necessary because it exists (at the very least as an appearance). Contingency exists where our knowledge is imperfect. But this is at the same time impossible since the necessity of contingency means that there is an existence that is unified with its essence insofar as its essence is in opposition to its existence.
Contingency is necessary because there is no way in which the human mind (imperfection) is directly God (perfection). God necessarily contains both determinate inexistence (impossibility) and indeterminate existence (contingency). This is absurd!
But maybe this absurdity is where freedom lies. Substance is the efficient cause of itself, but not only this. God is free, is free to cause himself the way he does. Of course, God is impersonal and operates perfectly and out of necessity without regard for our imagination and the possibilities (contingencies) we attribute to him. Freedom cannot not merely lie in our imagined contingency. If God is free, it is to be regarded as necessary.
Freedom
God is free, the mind is not. God’s necessity is self-caused, the mind cannot be its own free cause because it is caught up in external causality. The mind is dependent on what is outside of it. God contains everything within himself. But freedom is possible for Spinoza, which means none other than that it is impossible and necessary. Not in the sense that we can freely determine ourselves from within ourselves as if free will exists independently from God. No, we can act free only insofar as we understand God. Understanding nature increases our freedom because adequate ideas enable us to not undergo our passions (slavish emotions). When we understand God’s chain of necessity, we are in touch with reality. We find freedom in this because it allows us to be active in reality since we’re not overpowered by the appearance of contingencies that makes us helplessly passive. We understand what and how things happen. Understanding God is the first step to act according to what is necessary. That is to say, to align with God’s immanence, the chain of himself within himself whether finite or not. But human potency is limited, so naturally we cannot always adequately act in alignment with God.
Even so, Spinoza assures us we can still be free:
“For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavor of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.”20
As he goes on to explain further in the text, this freedom is equal to bliss. To recapitulate: the more we act according to necessity, the freer we are, and there where our knowledge fails us, we have bliss, because we can be satisfied with knowing that the necessity of incomprehensible external causes that appear as contingent is our own imagination. Adequate ideas, or concepts grasping factually existing objects, are not mere imagination. When knowledge fails, imagination makes up for it:
“[I]t is only through our imagination that we consider things, whether in respect to the future or the past, as contingent.”21
Understanding the necessity of being overpowered by contingency is what satisfies us because truth sets us free by aligning us with how nature is ordered. In other words, the necessity of contingency is a purely logical way to formulate the necessity of imagination supplementing conceptual thought. First, freedom seems to be attainable thanks to the mind having an adequate idea of God, so that we can act in accordance with nature’s causal necessity. But since my knowledge cannot cover the entire chain of necessity, this must be supplemented by grasping the truth that imagination will fill out the gaps of necessary causality with the appearance of contingency and possibility.
God is fully rational and perfect, and it is possible to align with his immanence. So we strive toward freedom. But our striving is imperfect, otherwise there would be no imagined appearance of the possibility of freedom. Which, when ridden of imagination, is metaphysically identical to the necessity of impossibility.
This is absurd. First, he claims we can be free once we act in accordance with God by comprehending adequate ideas. Then his possibility is excluded because our finite mind cannot comprehend all and our imagination fills in the gaps of causality with the appearance of possibility and contingency. Yet, to comprehend this last fact as such unites our striving toward freedom with freedom itself; with being content with knowing the truth of the impossibility of freedom. At this point, striving to be one with nature’s order is itself being one with nature’s order.
This necessity of impossibility, the actuality of contradiction, is the absurdity of God.
The logic Spinoza is working with her operates analogously to Žižek’s description of speculative closure:
“[T]he Lacanian ‘Real’ ultimately denotes such a non-mediated leftover which serves as a support of the symbolic structure in its formal purity. Yet the paradox of identity resides in the fact that it is precisely through this remainder of the Real – through this supplementary remark which maintains its non-identity and openness – that the system […] achieves its identity with itself.”22
Our finite mind cannot know everything adequately to achieve total freedom (in alignment with necessity). Therefore freedom is to know imagined contingency to be necessary. That is Spinoza’s ‘non-mediated leftover’ which solves the impossibility of having necessity and freedom coincide in a smooth alignment. This absurd solution is — far from being negligible — a crucial moment in Spinoza’s system.
We should read the word absurdity in this light; both as a supplemental leftover as well as in the etymological sense of being misaligned. Not in the negative sense, but in the same way as we should read the declarations of things being ‘self-evident’, or that ‘everyone knows’. These are all stopgaps that tie formal logic up and express the extent to which a system goes to be internally coherent. We’re to take note of what necessary impossibility is patched up in the closure such statements perform.
Power
“God's power is identical with his essence.”23
The nature of striving necessarily involves the appearance of contingency at the moment of inadequate knowledge. The finite mind is overpowered by what is not subject to the split between existence and essence, namely substance.
Power is a prerequisite to strive. For Spinoza, power is the ability to exist, the ability of a thing to endure. How do things cease to exist? When the power to endure is annulled by another power that opposes it. This intrinsic self-preservation of all things is called conatus:
“[T]he power or conatus by which it endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing but the given, or actual, essence of the thing.”24
As long as something is not destroyed by an external cause it preserves itself indefinitely. Neither substance nor any mode can self-destruct, because that would mean a thing would not agree with its definition. Put in another way, if a thing’s existence would be opposed by its unchanging essence it would contradict itself, and that would be absurd.
Hence, Spinoza argues that self-destruction is impossible. Suicide is not the act of killing oneself, but happens due to external causes getting the best of the subject. Self-harm is in the same category. Spinoza rejects human free will in the first place because the only freedom is knowledge of God’s necessity, the continuation of what endures. Without a free will and the impossibility to turn against oneself, self-destruction is totally ruled out.
Therefore, the human being cannot change, his power is to endure. He is strong insofar as he persists in himself, it makes him virtuous. Only the weak man changes. He fails to endure, he is dominated by external causes:
“No virtue can be conceived as prior to this one, namely, the conatus to preserve oneself.”25
As we’ve seen, contentment with truth as the power to know necessity is freedom. It’s to revel in the thought of the power of oneself and God. Humility, arising from the contemplation of one’s weakness, is not virtuous at all but comes from succumbing to external causes. According to Spinoza’s theory of power, one’s weakness is not one’s own, it is rather the lack of one’s own endurance against external causes: “The mind’s conatus, or power, is the very essence of the mind.”26 We can only affirm and think its own positive activity. In contradistinction to Descartes’s self-doubt, Spinoza gets rid of the hysterical and feeble despair of the cogito, and immediately identifies mind as positive; Not as a substance in itself, but as enduring in its existence and disregarding frailty and doubt as external to it. Doubt is not allowed to be equated to my existence, because my existence falters there by the doing of an external power. This begs the question of how God has brought about the very phenomenon of death, or of ceasing to exist.
Out of the acosmist-panentheism ontology, we get a vitalistic naturalism that cannot — because it refuses to — think death:
“A free man, that is, he who lives solely according to the dictates of reason, is not guided by fear of death, but directly desires the good; that is, to act, to live, to preserve his own being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own advantage. So he thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.”27
Spinoza’s self-affirming power is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s master morality that unconditionally says yes to itself without reservations; yes to its power, yes to its life. Nietzsche was deeply inspired by Spinoza. Nevertheless, he critiques him in the Gay Science on the question of power. Nietzsche writes that the power of striving is not out for self-preservation, but:
“The struggle for survival is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life; the great and small struggle revolves everywhere around preponderance, around growth and expansion, around power and in accordance with the will to power, which is simply the will to life.”28
For Nietzsche, the will to power is not about sustaining oneself in the face of external danger. On the contrary, it is more like pushing oneself into one’s own fire, so that one emerges anew out of it with an even greater power to overcome the next (self-)restriction. Such is the true impulse of one’s strength that tends toward overcoming the human. In contrast to Spinoza’s rigid opposition between life and death, Nietzsche thinks them in an amoral and visceral unity:
“What is life – life, that is: continually shedding something that wants to die: life: that is; being cruel and inexorable against anything that is growing weak and old in us, and not just in us. Life — therefore means: being devoid of respect for the dying, the wretched, the aged? Always being a murderer? And yet old Moses said: ‘Thou shalt not kill.”29
In Nietzsche’s will to power, dominating others is subordinate to self-overcoming. One kills oneself for oneself to become who one is. And even though Nietzsche’s metaphysics of power is different from Spinoza’s, his ideal of ever strengthening one’s power and staying true to the earth is thoroughly Spinozan.
Nietzsche’s formulation of amor fati that turns each “thus it was,” into a “thus I have willed it,” is undoubtedly inspired by Spinoza. Specifically by combining and changing two notions. First, Spinoza’s amor intellectualis dei, which is the highest virtue, bliss and freedom, our infinite intellectual love for God. Second, Spinoza’s ideal of becoming a “free man,” who as we’ve seen, strives to perfectly align with God and to endure in it within the scope of our intelligence and external causes. Which everyone knows is absurd. Nietzsche critiques Spinoza’s intellectual love for God because he holds it to be death preaching; it is all too otherworldly, not true to the earth. Nietzsche’s amor fati stays true to Spinoza’s move to consider God as immanent, while rejecting Spinoza’s belief of an intellectual love that endures beyond the body in an afterlife. Turning each “thus it was,” into something of my own will, is virtually the same as Spinoza’s freedom qua aligning with necessity by comprehending the truth of causality as God’s doing. It is an integral feature that Nietzsche incorporates into the notion of amor fati. Where they differ is that while Spinoza rules out final causality as anthropomorphism, Nietzsche’s “return to the earth” affirms humanization for the metaphysical principle of will to power to immanently overcome the human for the Übermensch.
Besides the question of power, Nietzsche accuses Spinoza’s emphasis of self-preservation to come out of his distress. I find it to be quite cheap, though not unappealing. But isn’t the same true for Nietzsche’s will to power? After God’s death, only the immanence of self-overcoming nature is alive, but is this deified Will not coming out of Nietzsche’s own distress, or worse, the panic-stricken inversion of his miserable impotence?
Fate
Anyhow, Spinoza adamantly holds that non-being is not. Death and powerlessness are nothing in another, let alone in themselves.
Only the power of God is.
In the late 18th century, Friedrich Jacobi kicked off the pantheism controversy which led to a re-popularization of Spinoza in Germany. He coined the term nihilism to describe what he saw as the inevitable result of Spinoza’s philosophy.30 He rejected Spinoza’s pantheism on the grounds of its denial of transcendence. He claimed that the immanent nature of God in Spinoza led to a fatalism whereby no individual free will or divine final cause could guarantee meaning and purpose from above. He considered this intrinsically amoral absolute atheism to be the logical end conclusion of enlightenment rationality.
The status of everything in acosmist-panentheism, amounts to nothing within God. All that is is God’s eternal immanence; nothing supernatural, no miracle, no revelation, no religious authority can plausibly represent God’s mandate anymore. God has no human-like will. After Spinoza, all that remains is the power of fate as divine and the ethics of rational freedom.
Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, his attempt to remedy the death of God with the eternal return and amor fati should be considered in this light.31 The usual readings of Nietzsche as the anti-Christian thinker par excellence or the protestant rebel within Christianity fail to see the fundamental spinozism in Nietzsche which can be elucidated by Hegel’s critique of Jacobi in his History of Philosophy:
“[T]he allegations of those who accuse Spinoza of atheism are the direct opposite of the truth; with him there is too much God.”32
Similar to Spinoza, Nietzsche’s God lives on as the power of nature. In addition to Spinoza having too much God and not being atheistic enough, Hegel argues that the flip side of this is that Spinoza is atheistic regarding Spirit.
The difference between Hegel’s Spirit and Spinoza’s God is clear in their views on love. For Spinoza, love is reducible to joy stemming from an external cause.33 In other words, for Spinoza love is reducible to power. For Hegel in contrast, love is a self-originative contradiction that is irreducible to power.34
The impact of Spinoza on Nietzsche and Deleuze (and contemporary culture at large!) can’t be underestimated. What is crucial here on the question of power is that Hegel teaches us that power is never straightforwardly itself but always supplemented by symptoms dealing with sex and death in the face of which we confront our fundamental impotence. And yet, all hinges on grasping the absolute not only as the omnipotence of God, but also the ‘more’ in Spirit that is not reducible to nature while also not being another transcendent realm on top of it.
In Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze though, we find their fundamental anchor points in conatus, the will to power, and a life respectively.
A life, as Deleuze’s formulation of his ultraspinozism:
“We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.”35
Seems psychotic? No, it is the ethical law as amoral joy beyond good and evil. As we’ve seen, virtue and its reward, striving and alignment are one in the Ethics. Freedom and bliss are one in the fullness of life that does not think about death.
Death may occur, but nonetheless...
Spinoza’s God does not need subjects. The truth of our activity as subjects is nothing but our capacity to instrumentalize ourselves for the power of God’s self-serving love. To be more precise: in Spinoza, the truth of us is our alignment with the impersonal power whose fate we are subordinate to.
Feelings
In the Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze lineage
“there is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an anonymous force.”36 (Deleuze, Practical Philosophy)
Nietzsche’s will to power beyond good and evil is a variation of Spinoza’s idea that the will is prior to that which constitutes the good. I will the good, but not because it is good as such, but it is good because I will it. As I’ve already said above, doubt, this despair in limbo is a sign of weakness for Spinoza. It is a lack of the mind’s power. In Descartes, the cogito, the despairing doubter, attests to the certitude of its existence. Opposed to this, we have Spinoza claiming that:
“Things are of a contrary nature, that is, unable to subsist in the same subject, to the extent that one can destroy the other.”37
The subject cannot self-destruct because there is no positive existence of doubt. There are just different emotions and desires that mutually conflict, each of which tries to endure and overtake the other. But the free man is not enslaved anymore to the passions, he does not undergo them but he is active because he knows God. He does not simply know God’s essence as infinite substance, which, as such, is of course indeterminate. He knows that he is within God’s immanence, within degrees of reality. He knows that:
“we acquire a greater and more perfect knowledge of God as we gain more knowledge of natural things.”38
And if we imagine the good to be prior to the will, we fail to understand that:
“No emotion can be checked by the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as it is true, but only insofar as it is considered an emotion.”39
If we want to vanquish unwanted emotions, we can only do it by overriding it with other emotions. We can defeat the weaker emotions with stronger emotions that are truer because they are closer to the knowledge of God’s perfection.
“An emotion cannot be checked or destroyed except by a contrary emotion which is stronger than the emotion which is to be checked.”40
With my knowledge of the ways of God, I can strive to align with what empowers the emotions that will liberate me from the passions and lusts that I am enslaved by. By submitting to God, I can liberate myself.
“Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. We do not enjoy blessedness because we keep our lusts in check. On the contrary, it is because we enjoy blessedness that we are able to keep our lusts in check.”41
Not only do divine necessity and human freedom align in the virtuous free man. Also blessedness itself is liberation because the biggest enjoyment is more powerful over all lesser ones. It liberates us from being enslaved by the passions. Virtue is bliss is freedom is love for the eternal and infinite power of God.
As Deleuze says in his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy:
“[In part V of the Ethics] there is no longer any difference between the concept and life.”42
In other words, there is no difference that makes any difference. All is the same to the indifference of divine nature. Life is one with God, the human being is the instrument of His self-love. Spinoza’s “free man” is perfectly aligned. And insofar as one strives to become oneself, to be more happy, more free, more virtuous and more knowledgeable, more perfect — the more one forgets that the process of self-perfecting has always been completed; that God and the subject are always already aligned in the transparent absurdity that the subject is in God the substance, because God himself necessarily contains his own impossibility within him, he ceases to exist by entering himself.
Spinoza’s improper place
Spinoza’s Ethics is great for succeeding to show the following:
His ontology is a distilled form of a modern secularized God qua nature that is non-subjective. One that is still very much alive in contemporary culture, both artistic and scientific.
He reproduces the Cartesian split between mind and body, but not as two substances that have an ambiguous relationship to God (their origin) but by thinking God as containing the opposite of himself in himself, acosmist-panentheism.
He oscillates between speculative determinations that contain their opposite within themselves and being inclined to make conclusions that he ultimately recoils from by calling them absurd.
His belief in the adequate nature of the mind to know God leads to the necessity to seal his system regarding necessity and freedom, i.e. freedom is aligning with necessity and knowing the impossibility to do so.
He shows how immanence itself is all too transcendent in its attachment to eternal necessity opposed and independent from individuality.
Today, Spinoza’s ontology is worthwhile to work through to see the spontaneous spinozan motives that are present in our culture. Take speech acts. Visible at those moments in his texts where he extrapolates his logic and comes up against a contradiction pushing him to exclaim: “But this is absurd!”
In such speech acts, declarations actualize what is declared by the act of declaration itself. The author does not justify his declaration with a neutral reason. He declares something to be the case, actualizing it at once. Such a phenomenon is enabled by the position from which one speaks. The speech act can only come from a particular — and authoritative — subjective position.
To put it in Spinozese: in speech acts, existence and essence coincide, they are their own cause. The essence of the speech act is that its existence is true: “Hereby, I close the meeting.” As it is said it is done. Yet, in the act, the necessary role of the particular subjective position is obscured at the same time. Consequently, the declaration retains the appearance of a judgment based on an external cause. Psychoanalysis does a good job of demystifying such commonplace yet subtle phenomena:
“As Lacan repeatedly points out, ‘primordial’ speech acts are single exclamations, as a rule curses or vulgar words (‘Shit’, ‘Wow!’ . . .), which play a very specific role: they are neither statements about things and processes that are going on in reality (like ‘a storm is coming from the north’), nor are they expressions of our inner reaction to external events (fear, anger, joy . . .). At their most basic, they express our lack of a proper place in the symbolic order in which we dwell.”43 (Žižek, Against Progress)
There was no proper place for Spinoza. Not in Portugal, not in the Synagogue in Amsterdam, not in the reformed Church in the Hague, not at the University of Leiden, or the one in Heidelberg. Spinoza repudiated authority because he couldn’t rely on it, it did not resonate with him because it did not address him.
His cause lay elsewhere. The very first definition in the Ethics functions as Spinoza’s minimal philosophical speech act: Substance is causa sui. The unconditioned, independent eternal truth is Spinoza’s cause because it is its own cause. This definition of substance as its own cause self-authorizes itself. As I’ve explored in my series on the ‘I’, this circular logic is absurd.
In contrast to his formal definition of substance qua causa sui, Spinoza’s exclamations of absurdity have a negative connotation. Still, they are declarative speech acts without which the formal logic could not achieve coherence. For his opponents, it did not matter. Substance or absurdity, or better yet, their coincidence in Spinoza’s passionate drive — his true cause sui if there ever was one — were out of place and uncalled for.
Just after he died in 1677, even mentioning or citing Spinoza in one’s texts could get one arrested or fined in the freest republic in Europe — let alone disseminating or publishing his works.
During his life in Holland, the unmarried Jew was grinding lenses. But he was far from a lone hermit. In the last period of his life in The Hague when he didn’t work to sustain himself, he exchanged thoughts in letters to his many friends and followers all over Europe. Or he turned to his circle of close friends in the area — consisting of atheistic misfits — to discuss philosophical and political matters. He worked on his texts like the Ethics and his secular political treatises.
In his view, the fact that he could not depend on any external authority, caused him to fall back to the only worthwhile cause: the self-causing cause of God’s intellectual love. And even though Nietzsche was right to see Spinoza’s amor intellectualis dei as not being true to life in this world, I claim instead that Spinoza was not true to another immortality, one that is also not reducible to Nietzsche’s will to power. This immortality is nothing but the death drive as
helps to clarify:“But not the sublime immortality of a heavenly afterlife as theological residue, but rather the undead and indestructible drive body in the form of an “embarrassing monstrosity”. This idea is explicitly linked to Freud’s death drive:”44
“The compulsion to repeat introduces an obscene infinity or “immortality” — not spiritual immortality, but an immortality of “spirits”, of the living dead.”45
Spinoza’s passionate drive, the immanent immortality in this life, is far from the positivistic vitalism we find in his own work and many of his admirers. This immortal drive comes out most clearly in the speech acts discussed above. The drive is immortal and indestructible as substance qua causa sui, and it is embarrassing and monstrous at the moments of his exclamations of absurdity.
The immortal drive, this absurd void-god that Freud introduced back in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, can simply not be thought insofar as we take philosophy to be a meditation on life that seeks to unify itself with the notion of experiential fullness, which itself is nothing but a symptom of that immortal drive that repeats itself in a circular motion — with, for, or against its non-mediated leftover.
In response to the impossibility of being embodied in any official institution, Spinoza chose to embody the impossible position of acosmist-panentheism; the stance that maintains that the death of God is contained by this same God. Of course, he rejected the Christian idea of incarnation in the process. He chose to identify himself with God’s instrument, to deem anything dubious or finite to be negligible impotence at an infinite distance to perfection.
On the one hand, Spinoza’s aesthetically pleasing sadism, in the form of his ontology that sought to break with the Cartesian paradigm, was a necessary patricide. Along with his rejection of worldly love, it makes up the naturalist vitalism of the Ethics.
On the other hand, the author Spinoza, as viewed from the standpoint of the Ethics, shows something that everyone already knows. That is to say, that the subject regarded from the perspective of substance is absurd.
I hope to have shown that whenever Spinoza is referred to as a monist/pantheist or a complicated thinker with a self-consistent (or self-enclosed) system, we are glossing over what makes him great. That is, the improper place he occupied, the place of necessary impossibility manifesting as the cursing subject, the causa sui of the immortal drive wherein the height of substance and ridiculous absurdity are one.
“And we should go to the end here: one of the signs of such an authentic Master is that he swears – there is no authority without curses. Swearing is here not a ‘personal touch’, not an obscenity signaling the presence of a private person, it is an immanent feature of the engaged Master. Only experts do not need to swear, and that’s why their authority is much more dangerous.”46 (Žižek, Against Progress)
Spinoza’s strength as a thinker, is that he fails to seal up his own formal system and inserts gaps of knowledge with non-mediated speech acts that stain the entirety of the Ethics with zealous engagement. Inconceivable without the drive and far from a dispassionate attitude, this dislocated subjective involvement is a rarity indispensable to think ontology, ethics and politics today.
Ethics, Part I Axiom I. (e1a1)
from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm#chap02
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p. 858. Spinoza, B. and Morgan, M.L. (2002) Spinoza: Complete works. Indianapolis: Hackett.
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p. 60. Žižek, S. (2024) Against progress. Bloomsbury UK.
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p. 292. Nietzsche, F.W. and Kaufmann, W. (1974) The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs. New York: Vintage Books.
p. 100. Nietzsche, F.W. and Kaufmann, W. (1974) The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs. New York: Vintage Books.
Check out Dylan Shaul’s excellent video to learn more about the pantheism controversy:
Check out
’s video that contextualizes Nietzsche’s philosophy regarding the death of God:From Hegel’s History of Philosophy, see: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpspinoz.htm
“Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause.” e3d6
For more on love, see this podcast episode with
on my paper on the topic in Logic for the Global Brain:p. 257. Deleuze, G., Boyman, A. and Rajchman, J. (2001) Pure immanence: Essays on a life. New York: Zone Books.
p. 128. Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
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p. 428. Spinoza, B. and Morgan, M.L. (2002) Spinoza: Complete works. Indianapolis: Hackett.
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p. 130. Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
p. 79. Žižek, S. (2024) Against progress. Bloomsbury UK.
Žižek, S. 2011. The Limits of Hegel. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 493.
p. 84. Žižek, S. (2024) Against progress. Bloomsbury UK.