Josefine Klingspor

How are we to think of causality in a monistic world? In particular, how do we apportion causal power between the many things existing in the world and the One thing of which the world fundamentally consists, or as Spinoza would put it, between modes and the one substance of which all of us are modes, namely God or Nature? Spinoza has a distinctive response to this question, and it is one that evolves radically over the course of his philosophical career. Between his first and final works on metaphysics, the Short Treatise (ca. 1660) and the Ethics (1670s), Spinoza goes from embracing a competitive model of finite and divine power to rejecting that model in place of a deeply non-competitive one: He goes from arguing that we have no power of our own because God has all power to arguing that our power just is a particular quantum of God’s power. The aim of this paper is to understand the reasons for and significance of this evolution, both for our understanding of Spinoza, and for our understanding of what causality can be in a monistic system.

Spinoza’s philosophy develops in striking ways over the course of his philosophical career. In his first work on metaphysics, the Short Treatise, Spinoza insists that humility is one of the highest virtues and that human beings have no power of their own. But in his final work on metaphysics, the Ethics, Spinoza bluntly declares that humility is not a virtue and argues that our essence simply consists in power. This essay demonstrates the interconnectedness and significance of these apparently distinct shifts. I argue that Spinoza’s re-evaluation of humility is a consequence of his re-thinking of human power and that attention to these shifts puts the debate over acosmism in a new and surprising light.