God and Nature: Spinoza's Metaphysics (review)

98 SHOFAR Fall 1993 Vol. 12, No. 1 God and Nature: Spinoza's Metaphysics, edited by Yirmiyahu Yovel. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991. 253 pp. $71.43. The Jerusalem Spinoza Conferences, organized by the Spinoza Research Program. (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) and the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute, comprise a proposed series of seven biennial meetings, each devoted to a single theme in Spinoza's philosophical system. God and Nature: Spinoza's Metaphysics issues from the First Jerusalem Spinoza Conference (April 1987) on Ethica I. Its list of contributors-a distinguished group ofinternational scholars-and the sharp philosophical edge to its essays makes this book representative of an ongoing, increasingly active research program in Spinoza's philosophy. (It is especially nice to have one more paper from the late Alan Donagan, who died in 1991 and to whom the volume is dedicated.) This is by all measures a philosophy book: readers trained and interested primarily in historical Spinoza studies, or in the history of ideas, may find it less rewarding than, say, Yovel's Spinoza and Other Heretics (see Shofar 9:4 [1991), pp. 125-27); casual non-scholars will almost certainly find it tedious and heavy sledding. For any philosopher seriously interested in Spinoza generally, and in Part I of the Ethics more specifically , the book is. rich and indispensable reading. An unfortunate but familiar drawback to many edited collections is a lack of evenness-a disappointing mixture of very good and sometimes very poor essays on topics displaying too little by way of common themes to connect them. This book contains a refreshingly high proportion of very good and important papers, and a focus on Ethics I keeps the other problem mostly at arm's length, with unifying threads running across many if not all of the essays. Here is one way of tracing out the threads. Spinoza's masterpiece is called the Ethics: how strange it should then seem for its foundation in Ethics I to be an exercise in the traditional metaphysics of substance, essence, attribute, and mode. Herman De Dijn's paper on "Metaphysics as Ethics" aims to explain how the ethical system developed in later parts of the Ethics must on Spinoza's count be grounded in scientia naturalis of a distinctively early modern sort, wherein science and metaphysics are closely linked. But Spinoza's grounding looks to be jeopardized straightaway in his Appendix to the first Part: "I have explained God's nature and properties: that he exists necessarily; ... that he is and acts from the necessity alone of his nature; ... that all things have been predetermined by God, not from freedom of the will or absolute good pleasure, but from God's absolute nature...." Pierre Macherey ("From Action to Production Book Reviews 99 of Effects: Observations on the Ethical Significance ofEthics I") focuses on the connection between agere (to act) and operare (to produce effects) in the first Part of Spinoza's work, as a means toward reconciling freedom and determinism; Jacqueline lagree ("From External Compulsion to Liberating Cooperation: A Reply to Macherey") extends this effort. Determinism, if not so jeopardizing of our moral intuitions after all, pales alongside the threat of necessitarianism against our related but distinct intuition that at least some states of affairs could have been otherwise than they are. A number of important scholars have argued that, despite appearances, Spinoza is committed to the denial of necessitarianism-to a denial that our world is the only logically possible one. In an extremely interesting and important paper ("Spinoza's Necessitarianism"), Don Garrett argues that Spinoza is indeed committed to necessitarianism and not to its denial. In at least three crucial spots, Garrett's argument leans heavily on a treatment of the central concepts of substance, essence, attribute, and mode: two of these are motivated explicitly by Jonathan Bennett's work, but the most insightful renders the traditional antinecessitarian deployment of EIp28d mute by showing that both the infinite and the local, temporary finite modes are necessary-the latter because it should be contradictory in Spinoza's system to conceive of a substance whose attributes express anything less than all possible reality and perfection through finite modes. These same fundamental concepts, at the...