Idea and essence in the philosophies of Hobbes and Spinoza

Front matter

IN THE PHILOSOPHIES OF HOBBES AND SPINOZA

BY

ALBERT G. A. BALZ

Introduction

It might appear presumptuous to assert that Hobbes and Spinoza have been persistently misunderstood, were not the results of present-day investigations into the history of philosophy affording a continual justification of a mistrust of our histories of philosophies as commonly written. Some one has said that most exegesis is really eisegesis — and Hobbes and Spinoza have suffered from a habit of reading into their words meanings foreign to their thought. When a contemporary writer translates Hobbes's "phantasm" into "state of consciousness," or extols Spinoza as the first great expositor, if not the originator, of psychophysical parallelism, a belief in the frequent misinterpretation of their doctrines is sharpened. The most persistent misrepresentations of these two philosophers depend upon misreading their psychology or, more precisely, upon according to them a type of psychological doctrine which was alien to their ways of thought. We are so habituated to a psychology of psychical, mental, or conscious states, that we commit the error of endowing these thinkers with a psychology similarly based upon the conception of psychical existence. The purpose of the following essay is to show that this conception is inapplicable to Hobbes and Spinoza, to indicate the misrepresentations which result from applying it to them, and to point out the true character of their teaching.

It is a fact not without significance that psychology for a long time after the inception of the modern era remained an integral part of philosophy and that the latter differentiation of psychological from epistemological and even metaphysical questions was unknown to investigations of that earlier day. A fairly definite assignment of the psychological field and the disentanglement of the problem and methods of psychology from those of epistemology and metaphysics are relatively recent achievements. We have come to look upon psychology as a distinct science, with varying appreciation of the degree of its filiation with epistemology and other properly philosophical subjects. Such a distinction was not characteristic of early modern philosophers. What we today would call the psychological doctrines of a Descartes or Locke, as distinguishable from their epistemological and metaphysical doctrines, were for them inextricably bound up with the latter. The modm em historians' separation of their epistemology from their psychology does not represent discriminations and classifications of which they were cognizant. Whatever may be the degree of interdependence of psychology and philosophy, it is not a negligible fact that such men as Locke and Descartes did not differentiate two such orders of questions, of standpoint, and of purpose. The latter-day philosopher may avail himself of psychological research in the solution of epistemological problems, just as he may have recourse to any or all the sciences. There he is utilizing the results of study in a field that he recognizes as distinct despite its degree of affiliation. Such a mode of thought is evidently inapplicable to a time when the relative independence of psychology had not- been achieved.

Several interesting considerations, consequently, confront the student of historical systems. In the first place, since philosophy represents the matrix from and in which psychology developed through a long period, this latter science, even in its present relative independence, rests upon old metaphysical and epistemological notions that have persisted in more or less attenuated form throughout the transformations of psychology itself. Early modern "psychological" investigations were most often initiated under the auspices of what we today would regard as an irrelevant metaphysics, in hoped-for substantiation of antecedent philosophical doctrines; and such psychology naturally developed in the directions assigned to it by impelling interests which to-day would be regarded as extraneous and falsifying. Psychological doctrine was thus often shaped by metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and even religious needs and purposes. The character of psychology, when it began to assert its independence, was determined by the character of its heredity. Inevitably it carried over, generally without deliberate recognition, a number of fundamental presuppositions and the general outlook of certain influential philosophies. Its terminology, since it was derived in the main from philosophical sources, continued to have the implications and connotations of the terms in general usage in the doctrines that represent the commencement of modern psychology. As a result, in modern psychological terminology there linger the traces of meanings which the terms properly possessed only in the setting of the historical systems wherein their signification was fixed.

The chief of these inherited doctrines in our psychology is the theory of the duality of existence. On the one hand, we find, there is a field of existence which is psychical and immaterial; on the other hand, there is a field which is physical and material. The attributes that define the two fields are related as logical contradictories. The immaterial, psychical order of existence is the truly ^psychological' realm; it is the order of mental states, of psychoses, of states of consciousness or,

INTRODUCTION 3

in more emotional language, of soul and spirit. The other order of existence comprises the bodily, the physical, the physiological, and the material. All existence is then matter and physical changes, including neuroses; and soul, spirit, or consciousness, including the series of psychoses. This doctrine of the duality of existence forms a presupposition and a point of departure for most of our psychological teaching, and the results of research are formulated in terms of the doctrine. It is generally accepted as a postulate. Or if the doctrine be expressly rejected as foreign to the science, it creeps into results surreptitiously through the well-nigh unavoidable connotations of terms which derive their import from the doctrine or from the philosophical sources wherein the doctrine itself originated.

For this reason our psychology has been in the main a science of mental states. The customary definitions of psychology as the science of mental or conscious states are the natural result of the view that existence is dual. More recent definitions of psychology, in which conduct or behavior, rather than mind or consciousness, is the defining term, apparently promise freedom from the assumptions involved in other definitions. In the end, however, the promise is seldom fulfilled, for the dualistic doctrine reappears in circuitous ways, as indicated by the resurgence of problems that the new standpoint was designed to avoid.

The facts of psychological observation and experiment and their explanatory formulae gravitate, accordingly, in one of two directions. They are either in and of a field of psychical or spiritual existence or in and of an opposed field of material existence. Concordantly, we have two sets of terms, or two sets of meanings of terms, in which the duality of existence persists in direct denotation or indirect connotation. The manner in which a single term, such as "sensation," refers on occasion to either type of existence illustrates how the double usage perpetuates the dual view.

The customary formulation of the duality is the principle, generally taken as heuristic rather than as final, of psychophysical (or psychoneural) parallelism. To a strict parallelist, the dual character of existence is ineluctable. If he wishes to be metaphysical, and treats the parallelism as fact and not as an expedient postulate, he may seek the unification of the two series of existents by reducing them to contrasted manifestations or appearances of one underlying reality. The interactionist opposes the parallelist, not primiarily by denying the duality of existence, but by asserting the possibility of reciprocal influence between the two fields. Both schools really maintain the same tenet of the incommensurability of the psychical and the physical.

It will hardly be doubted that our psychology — and one might venture to add, common sense — derives its dualistic constitution from the circumstances of its history. It is rooted in a lengthy philosophical tradition. But historical systems are many, and not all of them participate in the conceptions which became the guides of the growth of psychology. There is consequently the danger of an erroneous expounding of historical systems through the indiscriminate transference of the tenor and significations of our own psychology to the words of our predecessors. Because of this we are led to attribute to philosophies of widely differing purport a resemblance they do not really possess, and to the succession of doctrines a filiation of meaning that is foreign to it.

As has been asserted, Hobbes and Spinoza particularly have suffered from such misapprehensions. The misrepresentation of their meaning rests essentially upon the introduction into their psychology of that dual view of existence which is characteristic of modern psychology. From this distortion of their psychological tenets there ensues a correlative distortion of their epistemological and metaphysical opinions. When we have equated the mental, the spiritual, the conscious, and the psychical, or have taken these terms as referring to a single spiritual principle or substance, and from this equation have derived the content for the Hobbeistic and Spinozistic phraseology, we have started our study of their systems with the assumption that the notion of existence as dual is, either obscurely or patently, a regulative force in their philosophies.

With respect to Hobbes, it may be asserted that the failure to comprehend him begins with the attempt to square his thought and terminology with the later distinction between epistemology and psychology. In one sense, Hobbes may be said to have had no "psychology" at all. What we call psychological facts were to him a part of the subject-matter of physics, and in no essential way different from the rest of that subject-matter. The peculiar character of the problems and standpoint, implied in our minds by the notion of psychology as a distinct science, was beyond his ken. If we should think of all "psychology" as nothing but physiology, and of physiology as a branch of physics, subservient to the latter's laws, illustrative of its principles, and happening to be concerned with the activities of a living organism, we would be near the view-point of Hobbes. His metaphysics is in the main physics, and his "psychology" a study of certain physical facts that happen to be of peculiar importance because the knower is a sentient organism. The name "psychology," in so far as it connotes a science established on the foundations of psychophysical parallelism or whose field of investigations is wholly or even partly the psychical, is improperly applied to the teachings of Hobbes. When the word is divested of these connotations, we are, of course, at liberty to speak of Hobbes's psychology.

Hobbes's philosophy, therefore, has no concern with mental states in so far as the phrase signifies conscious processes in a psychical realm of

INTRODUCTION 5

existence. Hobbes is no more concerned with mental or spiritual entities or states than the modern physicist. His devotion to the rising mechanical natural philosophy brought psychological facts within the sphere of a dynamics of nature, rather than relegated them to a separate realm. This statement the treatment of Hobbes will substantiate.

Spinoza, to a greater extent than Hobbes, is customarily misconstrued, and for much the same reason. Certain peculiarities of expression favor an incorrect rendering of his theory when his writings are approached, as generally happens, with the conception of a duality of existence in mind. The common approach is to pass from the dualisms of Descartes to Spinoza as to one self-appointed for the task of the unification of the dualisms. As with Hobbes, the most common failures to apprehend Spinoza's doctrine originate in the fallacy of ascribing to his thought the notion of psychical existence as one of its leading elements. The doctrine of attributes, the series of ideas in thought and of things in nature, are readily turned into psychophysical parallelism by interpreting the attribute of thought as defining spiritual existence (after analogy with the finite thinking substance of Descartes) and ideas as signifying psychical elements of existence, the series of which constitute the thought attribute. We have then a series of psychical thought existents opposed to a material and physical order of existents. The consequence is that there are two fields of existence, and their incommensurability follows from the contradictoriness of their predicates. Spinoza's dictum concerning the order and connection of ideas as the same as the order and connection of things is accordingly hailed as an explicit formulation of psychophysical parallelism.

One of the purposes of the following essay is to demonstrate the untenability of these several constructions. But at the very outset, a verbal obstacle must be circumvented. The misinterpretations of Hobbes and Spinoza, it is maintained, originate in that assumption of two separate fields or kinds of existence which comes to be implied by so many philosophical terms. From the negative side, the thesis of this essay is an insistence that the notion of spiritual substance and the conceptions derived therefrom must be eradicated from any interpretation of Hobbes and Spinoza which is to be adequate and exact. But in making this insistence it is verbally difficult to avoid translating the writer's discontent with the misconstructions just outlined into terms of a reaction by Hobbes and Spinoza themselves against the notion of dual existence and its derivatives. The danger is that in a furtive manner our philosophers will be represented as consciously recognizing a dualistic position as the antithesis of their own doctrines, against which they were in deliberate revolt, and the overthrow of which constituted a strong motive for the development of their own thought. One designing to furnish an exposition of Hobbes's and Spinoza's doctrines that will reveal the untenability of expositions that begin with dualisms of substance or existence, faces the somewhat delicate task of escaping the presentation of Hobbes and Spinoza as themselves essentially interested in combating such dualisms, and as propounding their systems in refutation of notions concerning spiritual substance and existence as dual.

The point is that a dualism of substances, or of body and soul, or of existence (Cartesian or otherwise), can not justly be exhibited as the point of departure for these two philosophies. The temper of the two systems does not own an active antagonism to these dualistic tenets as the animating agency that quickened the thought of the two men into vigorous life. The impelling influences lie otherwhere, as will appear in the sequel. It may, of course, be pointed out that Hobbes does repudiate spiritual substance, and that Spinoza asserts the oneness of substance. But it is more faithful to the spirit of these thinkers to state that the one found the conception of spiritual substance to be at variance with his own position and foreign to its character, and, therefore, dismissed it as a superstition, while the other started with certain convictions of the oneness of substance and its nature, and consequently was indifferent to and generally neglectful of whatever dualistic or pluralistic beliefs came under his survey. This is historically more authentic, and as interpretation more scrupulous, than to see in the notions of spiritual substance and of the dual character of existence the great ideas against which Hobbes and Spinoza reacted, and in the rebound from which they were led to their several speculations. The picture of Hobbes as rebelling against Descartes's dualism, and of Spinoza as coming to relinquish it as untenable, which, without this precautionary warning, this essay might be regarded as presenting, may color the relations of the three with a certain attractive consecutiveness, but it would scarcely be historical. Such consecutiveness is more apparent than real and exact.

There is a different way of stating the point. It is hardly possible to avoid using the terms "physical," "material," and the like in a treatment of Hobbes and Spinoza. Such terms, however, are to most readers freighted with connotations of two contrasted orders of existence, and an effort is required to strip them of such implications. Now it is maintained that the significance and content of such terms when used by Hobbes and Spinoza, are not derived from a contrast between substances, or between body and mind, or between types of existence. The words are not loaded with such allusions, and when used in expounding the two philosophies must be deprived of them. And so the writer wishes to make clear that in using these terms there is no intention of attributing to the two thinkers any such latent meanings. To guard against this the words will generally be inclosed within quotation marks. Whatever reaction against these ideas is involved in the expo-

INTRODUCTION 7

sition which follows is directed against such implications as are frequently conveyed in orthodox accounts of these philosophers. The negative side of the thesis to be presented refers to what the writer conceives to be such misinterpretations.

The thesis advanced has a negative and a positive aspect. The negative side consists in a denial that either philosopher was actuated by the conception of existence as dual, or that the notion of the "psychical" or "spiritual" played an influential r61e in their speculations. Neither thinker conceived of idea or of thought as a "psychical" or "spiritual" entity, state, or process. The problems, consequently, of relating two opposed fields of existence and of demonstrating the correspondence in cognition of "immaterial" soul states or ideas to "material" changes in another sphere of existence do not arise as genuine problems in their systems.

The positive side of the thesis may be rendered as follows: First, it is maintained that Hobbes and Spinoza conceived of existence as one, and that this order of existence is, as we should say, the "physical." Existence is just existence, nature, the field of physical science, of "natural philosophy." Both men are content to take existence and nature as it is described by science. This is the metaphysical position. Secondly, with reference to psychological doctrine, it is asserted that with both investigators psychology is purely physiological in character. "Psychological" facts are to them just exactly what they turn out to be as physiological functions or processes — and they are just that and nothing more. Their psychology is a doctrine of the operation of the animal spirits, or in more recent phraseology, of processes in the nervous system. For Hobbes, what we should call "mental states" are physical effects; and Spinoza's opinions are essentially in agreement with those of Hobbes. Their respective psychologies are to them parts of physics; for them the distinctions between physics, physiology, and "psychology" are matters of expedience, implying no ultimate and irreducible diversity in the nature of the phenomena to be investigated.

The last element of the thesis concerns the epistemological teachings connected with such metaphysical and psychological views. With respect to Hobbes, the brain state is related to extra-organic object as effect to cause. This relation affords us knowledge of probability, unscientific or conjectural knowledge. Scientific or genuine knowledge depends upon the signification and use of the terms of discourse.

With regard to Spinoza, it is maintained that by "idea" in the epistemological sense he means logical essence. In so far as there is a "psychological" account of the idea and of thinking, ideas and thinking are explained in physiological terms as truly as the phantasm in Hobbes's teaching. With reference to knowledge the term "idea" signifies a logical entity, the pure concept. It is a truth. Spinoza's classification of ideas is logical, not psychological. All "things," happenings, events, are "physical." The correspondence of the order and connection of ideas with the order and connection of things is, therefore, a harmony of ideas or the logical truths of things as deductively ordered and systematized about and under the concept of substance, with the system of events that makes up all existence or nature. In short, his basic principle is that the coherent logical system of concepts corresponds to the orderly system of nature.

PART I

The general revolt against scholasticism assumed too many forms to enable one to summarize it in a phrase. In some quarter or other reactions against every element of the doctrine of the school occurred. The movement towards the inductive and experimental investigation of nature, of which Francis Bacon was the protagonist, was by no means limited to him. Moreover, this movement can not be taken as signalizing the whole meaning of the revolt. The rebellion had its religious, moral, metaphysical, artistic, and political, as well as "scientific," moments. Only as a very general transformation of view-point, of desire, purpose, and insight, can the new currents of thought be called one.

Thomas Hobbes affords an interesting example of participation in a common dissatisfaction and repudiation of the scholastic standpoint with striking divergences from the philosophical endeavors of other prophets of the new era. Hobbes's intimacy with Bacon suggests the picture of a relation of master and follower between them, but such a picture is assuredly misleading. Toennies ^ and Robertson ^ both object to such a depiction of the relationship of the two men. The true intellectual progenitor of Hobbes is Galileo. Galileo had destroyed the medieval concept of purpose as a category applicable to nature. The conception of nature as a system of mechanical forces measurable in terms of mathematics took captive the imagination of Hobbes, and was at least instrumental in the clarification of his thought, if it did not determine its course. Toennies ^ declares that the epistemological question of the time was whether knowledge attaining the level of the certainty of mathematics, of geometrical demonstration from axioms and definitions, was possible, and how it was possible. When Hobbes, relatively late in life, made the acquaintance of Euclid, it was this problem that was formulated in his mind. It was the natural consequence of Galileo's work. Galileo regarded mathematics as the indispensable prelude to philosophical study ^ and Hobbes shared the opinion. The former, according to Toennies, really inaugurated the age of mathematical deduction. Such deduction was to become

* "Anmerkungen iiber die Philosophic des Hobbes," Vierieljahrsschrift fiir wissenschaftliche Philosothie, Vol. 3, 1879, PP. 459-460.

2 "Hobbes," Blackwood's Philosophical Classic?. ' ibid, p. 461.

* cf. Toennies, ibid, p. 456.

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Hobbes's ideal of method. Bacon can hardly be said to have grasped this epistemological problem ; and the correlative ideal of method was not a part of his thought. In the light of this, therefore, Bacon can not be regarded as the immediate forerunner of Hobbes. Seth remarks that Hobbes's quarrel with scholasticism "concerns the subject-matter, not the method, of that philosophy. He does not join in Bacon's protest against the scholastic habit of anticipating nature, of deducing facts from theories; he has no thought of substituting a scientific induction for the deductive rationalism of scholastic philosophy. So far as the question of method is concerned, he is the opponent rather of Bacon than of the schoolmen; for him science, as such, is rationalistic or deductive, not empirical and inductive. Rational insight, not empirical knowledge, is his scientific ideal." ^

It was, then, the teleological character of the old physics that was a chief point of reaction for Hobbes. The mechanistic character of the new physics implied a difference in procedure. In place of the older process of the classification of qualities, the study of nature in terms of quantity was inaugurated. This change in the character of physics literally meant the application of mathematics to nature. So that the new epistemological problem, the new conception of nature, and the geometric ideal of method are elements of one movement.®

A detailed account of the sources and of the arising and maturing of Hobbes's thought is out of place here. His attitude toward the doctrine of the plurality of substances and the cognitive correspondence of idea and object are our first concern.

When nature is conceived as a vast mechanical system, nature is but one substance. But, unlike Descartes, Hobbes does not rule the "mind" out of nature and devise a second substance in which the mental life may be conceived as taking place. Human nature is a part of nature; it is a product of the san;e forces; it is regulated by the same laws as nature itself. The reduction of qualities to quantities applies in the sphere of the psychological since that is but an integral part of the whole physical system. Hobbes speaks, to be sure, of the "two principal parts of man," body and mind. But no duality of substance is intended. Mind is defined only by an enumeration of "mental" faculties. There is but one substance, body. "The word body, in the most general acceptation, signifieth that which filleth, or occupieth some certain room, or imagined place; and dependeth not on imagination, but is a real part of the universe. For the universe, being the aggregate of bodies, there is no real part- thereof that is not also body."^ Spirit, according to Hobbes, originally meant air, or breath, and comes to mean

6 English Philosophers and Schools of Philosophy, p. 58. » cf. Toennies, ibid.

7 Works of Hobbes, Molesworth edition, 1839, Vol. 3, Leviathan, pt. 3, ch. 34; all references are to this edition.

HOBBES II

incorporeality from having originally indicated subtle body. "Matter is the same with body; but never without respect to a body which is made thereof. Form is the aggregate of all accidents together . . . spirit is this fluid, transparent, invisible body."^ The notion of an incorporeal substance is a contradiction in terms, a vain idea induced by apparitions, hallucinations, and dreams. It is a sort of mental hobgoblin. Hobbes uses the terms "ghost" and "incorporeal substance" in juxtaposition, and is serious in so doing. ^ From Hobbes's objections to Descartes it appears that he was either unable to understand Descartes's notion of the immateriality of thought or, what is more probable, perversely refused to comprehend it. In this Gassendi resembled Hobbes. The notion of immateriality, at least in the sense of the immateriality or ideality of form, was a commonplace to those imbued with the scholasticism of the traditional education of that age. Descartes's soul substance represents not so much an innovation and a novel distinction, as a renovation of a time-honored conception, coupled with a more explicit comprehension of the implications of the reduction of a plurality of substances to two. To Hobbes and Gassendi, archheretics of the age, Descartes appeared the victim of a great superstition, as bad as that of belief in occult powers. On the one hand, in their eyes, he was proclaiming allegiance to the new science of nature; on the other, he was asserting the validity of a nonsensical notion that was one of the rankest growths of scholasticism.

The animus of Hobbes's strictures on the notion of incorporeal substance was derived not so much from a devotion to a monism of substance as from a conviction of the worthlessness of the concept of substance as such. He does, of course, speak of body substance, but concerning this single substance he really has little to say. At bottom, he is of the opinion that any and every notion of substance is vain, empty, and unfruitful. Its serviceableness, in so far as it has any, is in its use as a limiting idea. The phenomena of nature, and these include the phenomena of human nature, are motions. The science of nature is essentially the science of dynamics or mechanics — a mathematical quantitative investigation of the sequence of physical events. The new conception of nature serves, for Hobbes, all the purposes formerly served by the concept of substance. The thought of nature as a dynamical system is so fundamental with Hobbes that he seems well-nigh to confound pure mathematics with its applied forms. The true relationship between mathematics and physical science is obscured in his thinking through the discovery that nature possesses a sort of mathematical structure. And it is this vision that fructifies his thought, rather than the notion of the oneness of substance. As has been indicated, he desired to

8 Answer to Bishop Bramhall, Vol. 4, p. 309.

9 De Cor pore. Vol. i, pt. 4, ch. 25, p. 399.

give knowledge of nature the certainty of geometry. The practical identification of geometry and mechanics raises the laws of motion to the rank of geometrical axioms and definitions, and mechanics, as the science of all nature, thereby attains, in his mind, a position comparable to the deductive, demonstrative certainty of geometry. ^^ Motion thus becomes the chief category of his thought while the concept of substance lapses from mind. For once science as the study of motion is launched, the notion of body retreats from sight ; and one could properly say that the notion of substance takes the form of the conception of nature as a uniform, mechanical system. This opinion is corroborated by the fact that Hobbes seems at little pains to determine the nature of substance. Having served its purpose as a counter blast to pluralisms and dualisms of substances, it becomes a shadowy sort of metaphysical background for science. Owing to this fact, Hobbes's philosophy is sometimes called phenomenalistic. Space and time are phantasms. Accidents do not "inhere" in bodies, but are our ways of conceiving body. All accidents can be thought away from body, save magnitude. The accidents of body are phenomena of motion, and science is knowledge of these accidents. Thus natural philosophy deals with a world of motions and accidents, the relation of which to substance remains unsettled; and it so remains, probably, because Hobbes thought of the problem of this relation as vain and fruitless. Had he not regarded the notion of substance as empty, he must have raised questions concerning the relation of motion to substance. But in the main, questions of that type are left to one side.

It is noteworthy that Hobbes's psychology is developed largely in the interest of physics. Of the psychology of sensation and perception, at least, this is true. As all psychological process is really motion, psychology is a branch of physics. A brief survey of his psychology will indicate this.

The subject of sense is the sentient itself. And it is of prime importance to observe that this "subject of sense" is neither consciousness, nor soul, nor mind, but, in Hobbes's own phrase, "some living creature." Sense is motion in the sentient. All qualities "called sensible, are in the object, that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversely." ^^ These motions are propagated on into the organism. But this motion meets an "outward" motion, and this clash of motions is sense. "Sense is a phantasm made by the reaction and endeavor outwards in the organ of sense caused by an endeavor inwards from the object, remaining for some time more or less." ^^ "Neither in us that are pressed, are they (qualities) anything