It was a truth universally acknowledged until at least 1807 that while words and worlds may change, philosophical truths must not. When the unchanging substantial forms of the ancients and medieval were evicted from nature, nature lost its foothold on permanence and so could no longer be a source of philosophical truth. The last redoubt for unchanging truth was therefore the mind, which was (and, alas, still is) amenable to being construed as static, a domain of unchanging truths.
This, I think, was a trap; but it was one which philosophers were, and are, glad to be in. When you are caught in that trap not only is the mind static, but what comes into it from outside—experience—is also just so much static: static on the line. Experience is then a set of random vibrations which is too unstable to convey anything meaningful; its changes are worthy only of being ignored. Of all the philosophers who fell into this trap around this time, I will discuss two: the Static Twins, Locke and Spinoza.
Arriving at his own thought via a critical confrontation with Descartes, Spinoza pushes a characteristically vehement modern rejection of ousiodic forms: they are “clearly absurd”, “childish and frivolous.”[1] Which leaves him with the companion notion of substance, which is just an ousia with a boundary but without a disposing form (see Metaphysics and Oppression). And here Spinoza goes decisively beyond Descartes, for he claims that to be a substance, a thing must be wholly independent of everything else—even of God. Cartesian finite substances, dependent on God alone, therefore, cannot exist. Instead we have “modes,” which inhere in a single divine substance (Ethics Prop. 14). If the divine substance is unchanging and so static, the modes are static in the other sense: so fleeting that their changes can be ignored, leaving only their unchanging nature as “experience.”
The universe for Spinoza is of infinite extension, which does not keep him from saying that it, and all the things it contains, are “in” God as in another (Ethics I Prop. 15). Spinoza’s God has in fact the widest of boundaries, for they contain everything that is. They are therefore strictly inviolable, for there is nothing outside to violate them. What was implied in Descartes (#18) is manifest in Spinoza: the entire universe is included within the boundaries of a single giant ousia. And not merely the extended universe: for in denying finite substances, Spinoza is taking issue with Descartes’ view that individual minds are, though to a lesser degree than God, substantial in nature.
The extended and intellectual universes are thus ontologically parallel for Spinoza, and both show a radical absence of nesting. For Aristotle, individuals are nested in ousiodically structured households and households within ousiodically-structured poleis. For Spinoza, as for other moderns, no ousia is contained within another ousia. The absence of nesting is, apparently, a defining characteristic of modern philosophy (#18).
The inherence of modes in the divine substance is therefore total: the modes amount merely to its own parts, and nothing can act upon anything except as the divine power ordains. In this way the divine substance not only generates its modes but orders them, thus exercising perfect disposition over the entire universe. Ousiodic disposition thus finds its most thoroughoing form in Spinoza’s determinism, just as boundary found its widest conception in the infinitude of the physical universe.
The state, like the individuals it contains, is a mode and so has a divine right to exist and to act:
It is clear…that the right of the state or sovereign is nothing but the right of nature itself, and as such determined by power; not however by the power of a single individual, but by that of a people which is guided as if by one mind. In other words, it is clear that what is true of each man in the state of nature is true likewise of the body and mind of the whole state–it has as much right as it has power and strength. Hence the more the commonwealth exceeds a citizen or subject in power, the less right he has. ..and consequently a citizen does nothing and possesses nothing by right unless he can defend it by the common decree of the commonwealth. (Tractatus politicus III.2)
Might doesn’t make right; it is right. An individual, being much weaker than the state, cannot oppose it. The sovereign alone has the power/right to regulate the conduct of individual citizens, and to provide for the defense of the state from outside forces. But the state itself is a mere mode, and its actions, like all actions of modes, are ultimately caused by the divine substance. Thus relocated to the divine, supersensible level, ousia is in a position to structure the human world.
If only the divine substance can truly act, for example, only the divine substance can be truly free. As did Descartes, Spinoza has defined substance in terms of independence, and this means that substance for Spinoza is associated with freedom: to be free is to be able to act from one’s own nature alone (Ethics I Def. 7). Since only God is independent of all other things, only He acts in that way (Ethics I Prop. 17)
The final part of the Ethics, “Of Human Freedom,” is then devoted to showing how the human mind, in becoming free, assimilates itself to God’s. This turns out to mean, as the “Preface” to Part Four tells us, controlling the affects. Spinoza here has just told us that emotion is merely confused thought, and it is thought, not emotion, which is an attribute of God. We control our affects by converting them from emotions into thoughts: from confused ideas into clear and distinct, or even “adequate” ones (Ethics V Prop. 3). Adequacy, in turn, means seeing individual things, the objects of our ideas, in their full causal context, which is ultimately that of all creation. The vision of a thing in the context of all creation is, of course, God’s. As our finite mind gains ever more adequate cognition, it becomes more like God’s mind, approximating the inviolable boundaries and perfect disposition of the divine ousia–a name Spinoza never says.
[1] See Benedict Spinoza, Part I of “Appendix Concerning Metaphysical Thoughts”, in Spinoza, Parts I and II of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, at Spinoza, Opera (C. Gebhard, ed.) Heidelberg: Winter, 4 vols. 1925, I 249; Spinoza, “Letter to Oldenburg of July 1663, IV 64; the pagination is givn marginally in The Collected Works of Spinoza (Edwin Curley, ed.) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.