The universe is a nothing but a nexus of causes and effects which can be explained in terms of motion. Therefore, what follows below is true of all things, including human and non-human things. There is no human exceptionalism in Spinoza: all human activities “follow from the same necessity and force of nature as the other singular things” and thus must be treated “by
8 Interest is also shown by recent international conferences on the topic: e.g., “Spinoza et les arts”, May 15–17, 2014, Paris, and “The Arts of Spinoza + Pacific Spinoza”, May 26–28, 2017, Auckland. Interstices:
A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts plans to publish an issue with papers from the latter.
the same method”, allowing us to “consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies” (3Pref). Hence, Spinoza says that “paintings […]
should be able to be deduced from the laws of nature alone” (3P2Sch). If sexual jealousy, in its all-too-human messiness, can be explained by Spinoza as if it were lines, planes, and bodies (as at 3P35), and if methods akin to natural science can be applied to revelation and the history of the Jewish people (as in the TTP), then art ought to be susceptible to the same method.9
Spinoza says that “there must be, for each existing thing, a certain cause on account of which it exists […] For example, if 20 men exist […] there must necessarily be a cause why each [particular man] exists. But this cause […] cannot be contained in human nature itself, since the true definition of man does not involve the number 20” (1P8Sch2). Since
“knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause” (1Ax4), each thing (including each person) must be understood as a whole composed of parts, one which does not precede in time, or otherwise exist independently of, its causally determined parts.
The existence of actual particular things “does not follow from the nature of these things, but from the order of the whole of corporeal nature” (1P11Dem). I take these passages to affirm that essence is individual, rather than there being a shared essence typically called
“human nature”.10 That is, a person is nothing other than the many parts which make her up, their motions (causally affected by external objects or “corporeal nature”), and the interactions of these parts’ motions.
Under the attribute of extension, the simplest physical bodies are distinguished only by their motion (2Lem1). When many of these small bodies “communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all together compose one body or individual, which is distinguished from the others by this union of bodies” (2Def, II/100). Such individuals can then become
9 Mignini says much the same (Mignini 1981), showing that aesthetic imagination neither itself gives adequate knowledge, nor is it pure chaos which is utterly immune to analysis. Insofar as all affection or sense experience (imagination) is causally determined, there is truth to it at the level of what really hap-pens to our body. There are adequate ideas in God of the external object, of the human body, and of their causal interaction. That is, all experience is in principle knowable in some way (5P4), including aesthetic experience as a species of imagination. Since all imagination (including aesthetic experience) causes pleasure or joy when it truly increases our power of acting, through it we could in principle gain some information about ourselves. Thanks to Olivér István Tóth for an illuminating discussion of Mignini.
10 A Spinozist aesthetics need not rely on a universal human essence, making it a promising alternative to Kantian aesthetics based on universal faculties. However, there is debate whether essence in Spinoza is individual or universal. Hübner summarizes the debate and presents her own subtle position on
“resemblance” or what humans have “in common” (Hübner 2014, 2016), which is reason (the ability to have adequate ideas) and is universal. But Spinoza’s nominalism denies that universal terms, includ-ing “man”, can have any adequate content (1Appx, 2P40Sch1, and 4Pref). Essence is also defined as a thing’s striving “to persevere in its being both insofar as it has inadequate ideas and insofar as it has adequate ideas” (3P7–9) which differs for each person (3P57). Hübner acknowledges such passages but establishes her claim using others. However, despite the textual support, there are difficulties with rea-son as human essence. It is said to be our real essence, yet held up as an ethical model of what we are not yet. It is said even of those who are highly irrational. It is said to be universal, yet each has it in different degrees or ways. Finally, you and I shaking hands (or undergoing the same affect) have a resemblance, yet these are not said to be our essence.
composed into larger, more complex individuals called “composite individuals” (2L7Sch).
A human body is itself composed of many such composite individuals. All of these com-posite individuals, taken together and including all their interactions, define what a thing truly is. Spinoza calls this the ratio, the characteristic fixed proportion of motion and rest or “certain and fixed manner” (2L7Sch) in which a thing moves: what the thing can really do and characteristically does is a combination of all the part-individuals’ motions which interact to form the whole-individual.
After affirming that every thing strives to persevere in its existence (3P6), Spinoza then identifies essence with such striving and every actual effect which follows from it. “So the power of each thing, or the striving by which it (either alone or with others) does anything, or strives to do anything […] is nothing but the given, or actual, essence of the thing itself”
(3P7Dem). So, a thing’s essence is just the striving to preserve the sum total of its various motions, the relations between its various ideas, or the interactions of its affects. This striv-ing defines all that one is and all that one can do. I am nothstriv-ing but my power of actstriv-ing which is my conatus; that power is determined by the whole complex ratio of all interact-ing parts that make up my body. (The same is true for the mind of that body, but we will restrict our discussion to the attribute of extension.) Then Spinoza identifies striving with desire at 3P9Sch. Thus, affections and the modifications of desire or striving that follow from them are modifications to the very core essence of what one is, rather than incidental fluctuations in one’s accidents.
This complexity is also what makes humans relatively unique. That is, the ratio defines each individual thing as a unique balance of various motions, and the generally high level of complexity of human ratio distinguishes humans from other things. Spinoza has told us that composite individuals are made up of parts which are themselves individuals, that hu-mans are made up of very many highly composite individuals as our parts (2P15Dem), and that the whole of the universe is itself an even more highly composite individual (2Lem-7Sch). Individuality, then, as the complex ratio of motion and rest of very many interacting parts, is not unique to humans – “below us”, our organs are individuals, and “above us”, the universe itself is an individual.11
For the things we have shown so far are completely general and do not pertain to man more than to other individuals […] However, […] the difference between the human mind and the others, and how it surpasses them [is] that in proportion as a body is more capable than others of doing many things at once, or being acted on in many ways at once, so its mind is more capable than others of perceiving many things at once (2P13Sch).
Humans are themselves nothing but natural objects. Spinoza denies any specific qualitative content to human individuality – but we do excel other things solely by the complexity
11 See Ep. 32 for the important “worm in the blood” analogy, which elaborates how individuals can be nested within other larger individuals.
of our bodily motion (or, under the attribute of thought, by the number, persistence, and complexity of our ideas).