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174 ChAPter seven Matching Content [Intellectual objectivity is] the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives . . . in the service of knowledge. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Toward a Genealogy of Morals, III, §12 the minimalist metaphysics we have been examining envisions us as inseparably bonded bodies and minds thrown into a world that consists of other bodies and other minds and, in the last analysis, nothing else. It remains to see how Spinoza and Wittgenstein take account of these absolutely fundamental facts, as well as whether and to what extent their approaches match each other in the corresponding respects. Having landed on Spinoza’s Attributes, it is from here we have to start. Spinoza’s Attributes Spinoza defines what he means by Attribute early in the Ethics: “By attribute I mean what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence” (E I def4). We saw that he defines God as “consist[ing] of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence” (E I def6) and that Substance is identical to God. From His side, God expresses His essence through each of His infinitely many Attributes, while from the other side, as it were, the intellect perceives that essence through the same Attributes. Spinoza distinguishes perception from conception: “conception seems to expresses an activity of the mind” whereas “perception seems to indicate that the mind is passive to its object” (E II def3ex). Now since Substance—and hence its essence—“can be conceived only through itself” (E I def3), an Attribute that expresses this essence “must [also] be conceived only through itself” (E I p10). It follows that an Attribute is epistemically isolated: whatever it might include can be conceived—and hence known, understood, and explained—only in terms of items belonging to that Attribute alone and in the matching content 175 language pertaining to it exclusively.1 At the same time, “all [the infinitely many Attributes expressing God’s essence] have always been [in God] simultaneously,” and hence “no attribute could be produced by another” (E I p10s). It follows that Attributes do not generate others or interact causally with one another; each Attribute is causally isolated as well. In short, there is no way Attributes might combine or mingle. Each is perfectly self-sufficient along both the epistemic and the causal dimensions, expressing in its own way the perfect self-sufficiency of God. Seen from one side, then, Attributes are the independent channels through which God expresses Himself and deploys His power; from the “opposite” side, they are the channels through which God is perceived by the intellect and His power is borne by the products of that power. This means that the Attributes are not objective ingredients that add up to compose God or Substance: the same all-inclusive Substance expresses itself in its entirety and deploys all its undivided power through each of them in exactly the same manner and to exactly the same extent. Nevertheless, the Attributes are not subjective appearances presenting Substance as the perceiving intellect makes it out to be but leaving it inaccessible in itself. The perceiving intellect is a product of the all-powerful Substance, and hence its perception is objective in exactly the same manner and to exactly the same extent that Substance, which produces it, is objective. Substance does not hide its “in itself” from its products, and there is no loss in objectivity by the intellect’s perception of Substance under one Attribute or another. As Spinoza puts it succinctly, “the human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God” (E II p47). We may thus say that the Attributes are the infinitely many objective perspectives Substance determines, the objective perspectives along which Substance deploys its power while simultaneously allowing the intellect to perceive it objectively , as it is (Conant 2005, 2006). A necessarily inadequate metaphor might be helpful. Because we are objectively confined to the surface of the Earth, we can perceive only one face of the Moon—or equivalently, the Moon expresses itself with respect to us through only one face—although we (assuming or having demonstrated that it is a perfect sphere) know that the Moon possesses infinitely many such faces. We know, in addition , that each of these faces is objectively different from the others in that it is offered to perceivers situated at objectively different places; that to the extent that the...

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