Comparison of the Views of Spinoza and Leibniz on the Nature of God - Assignment Example

Compare and evaluate the views of Spinoza and Leibniz on the nature of God. Knowledge for Spinoza must be, strictly speaking, knowledge of God. As Gods knowledge, it must entail absolute certainty, perfection, and completeness. Any intermediate forms of knowledge, such as inadequate knowledge or knowledge which involves no contradiction, do not count at all. One either has the adequate idea as truth, or one has the inadequate idea as falsity. Since knowledge of God involves his eternal and infinite essence, one must conceive an idea in its most perfect form so that it can be equated with Gods knowledge. In general, the human mind is capable of forming only inadequate ideas. If one can form the adequate and perfect idea, then absolute knowledge of God is viable. For Spinoza, to conceive an idea in its most adequate form, the mind needs, first and foremost, to undergo a long and strenuous process of self-transformation, the aim of which is to render itself adequate to the infinite intellect. Thereafter, the mind is able to intuit the concrete essence of a thing as Gods knowledge. Gods essence is eternal and infinite. By contrast, human knowledge is temporal and finite. To reach Gods knowledge, the human mind must transcend itself to the extent that it grasps Gods eternity and infinity. On knowing Gods essence, humans are, to a certain extent, as infinite and eternal as God is. In what ways can humans know the infinite and eternal aspects of Gods essence? Insofar as one knows the first causes of things, one understands the infinite of Gods essence as substance. Such formulation is not very illuminating. How are the first causes of things related to the infinite aspect of Gods essence? Even if infinity is tantamount to the first causes of things, how can one practically experience actual infinity so as to comprehend Gods essence? Spinoza suggests two kinds of infinity, the infinite of imagination and the infinite of reason. Presumably, the two infinities are related: one has to grasp, say, the infinite of imagination before proceeding to the infinite of reason. Within the context of infinity, God’s essence is eternity. Eternal existence is conceived to follow from the essence of the thing. Gods essence necessarily involves his existence; to know a things essence as Gods knowledge entails grasping its eternal existence as well. Humans exist and endure in time. How can they know Gods essence and enjoy his eternal existence? As finite modes, things are caused to exist. Things subsist in time; they come into existence and go out of existence. Through conceiving ideas, humans know things as actually existing. What does it mean that things exist eternally and finite humans can experience them as eternally existing? Spinoza claims that things may be conceived by humans in two ways, either under duration or under eternity. The essence of a thing can be conceived as given in duration, subsisting through its interactions with other things. Owing to their finite nature, humans cannot know the entire causal history of things. They are incapable of comprehending the essence of the thing under duration. If humans are to know the essences of things, they have to conceive things under eternity. For Spinoza, one conceives essence as eternal in two ways. One knows essence either discursively through reason or intellectually through intuition. God’s essence can be known and, indeed, is both eternal and infinite as far as Spiniza is concerned. Leibniz claims that God is the ultimate ground of matters motion (and thus indirectly of matters form), and paradoxically, the ultimate physical cause of sin - and all creatures. These claims alone are insufficient to determine Leibnizs view about divine nature because Gods ultimate causal contribution is ambiguous. It is an open question whether Gods contribution is immediate or mediated, that is whether God directly intervenes as a causal force or God indirectly acts as a causal force through or by means of some other agent. In his early philosophy, Leibniz seems committed to divine direct action in the form of continuous creation. God is the producer of all things and his nature is that of ultimate reason. This view of God’s nature does nit allow for occasionalist concurrence. God must produce the whole because there are difficulties in isolating a "unit" of concurrence because any act can be divided into infinity of smaller acts. Leibniz is committed to a person who acts and a God who produces. As such, he is properly called a theo-mechanist. In the early years Leibniz entertains occasionalism as a way to mitigate the tension between these commitments, but ultimately, f he rejects the immediate, interventionist model of divine action that occasionalism entails. Compare and evaluate the arguments for skepticism offered by Descartes and Hume In the Meditations, Descartes pushes scepticism to such an extreme that it turns against itself and in the end cannot but give way to truth. As long as I am thinking, I am sure that I exist. At that moment, I can no longer be skeptical about my existence. True enough, scepticism is kept at bay for the moment and the existence of the cogito is beyond doubt. Nevertheless, scepticism revives and becomes intractable when Descartes comes to prove the existence of the external world. Similarly, in order to build science on a solid foundation, Descartes is anxious to avoid errors whenever possible. Error cannot be attributed to God because of his omnipotence. Instead, the will is to blame for passing judgment on something which is not yet clearly and distinctly perceived. Error is a cognitive sin for Descartes, a creation of the mind which needs to be rectified before one can have access to truth. As for ideas, Descartes stresses their representational value. By means of the natural light of reason, the mind intuits the content of an idea, the clarity and distinctness of which assure us that we possess a true idea. A clear and distinct idea is necessarily true because it is guaranteed by God that the object of the idea must exist in the external world. Descartes doubts all things about which there can be the slightest uncertainty. Instead of checking each belief to see if it admits of doubt, he examines the foundations on which all beliefs depend. This is what Descartes sets out to do in the Mediations. To found science on an indubitable ground requires that all beliefs, not some, must be certain. For Descartes, all sciences form a unified whole that can be held in the mind. Descartes is committed to the idea that all scientific beliefs form a system; the system either holds up or collapses as a whole. Hence, he makes it a point to search for a principle which can be applicable to all sciences. In order to attain knowledge of absolute certainty, Descartes follows, in the Meditations, two different stages of doubt. The first stage of sceptical arguments serves to get rid of all his dubious ideas, which he held in the past. Thereafter, Descartes introduces the dream argument and the hypothesis of the evil genius as the second stage of scepticism. The point is to correct his natural bias toward taking dubious ideas as certain. Doubts like the hypothesis of the evil genius and the dream argument are designated by Descartes as hyperbolic or metaphysical. Even though these suppositions are improbable, they serve to cure the mind of excessive reliance on the senses. Descartes first denies all sense experience as the source of certainty in belief about the physical world. He discards the argument of insanity as improbable, for as the meditator, he cannot identify himself with a madman. Otherwise, the project will be self-defeating. Instead, he uses the dream argument. It turns out that the mathematical sciences have an element of indubitable certainty that no argument seems to shatter. The simple and general objects in mathematics are true under all circumstances. The dream argument leads only to a modest scepticism. It calls into doubt all particular sense beliefs and the existence of composite objects. It leaves intact simple and universal truths like those of mathematics, which are real and true. In raising the hypothesis of the evil genius, Descartes pushes scepticism to such an extreme that even mathematical truths are not immune from doubt. The evil genius is so powerful that he deceives the meditator even in regard to things of which one is most certain. For example, perhaps there are no extended bodies, no shape, size, or place. The evil genius makes the meditator go wrong whenever he adds two and three or counts the sides of a square. Under the threat of the evil genius one can be deceived, not only in sense perception of earth and sky, but also in the understanding of simple natures and mathematical propositions. Indeed, all simple natures and mathematical truths are nonempirical; they are beyond sensible experience. They are simple truths par excellence. All the same, they are called into doubt. Indeed, in all the arguments in the First Meditation go against different versions of one principle; they are set up by Descartes to shatter the faith in truth-conferring nature. It is this truth-conferring nature that Descartes calls into doubt in his sceptical arguments. In this respect, Descartes is not far from Hume. With his theory of belief Hume successfully gives a psychological account to all knowledge claims. Instead of calling such claims into doubt, Hume regards this truth-conferring character as human nature. Hume’s scepticism is based on his assessment of the nature of inductive reasonings. Hume sees it in the following way. When an individual renders a judgement on the basis of experience, there is a certain probability that this judgment will be in error, due to a possible faulty understanding of the nature of the thing. But if the individual reflects on the likelihood that the initial judgment is correct, he introduces a new possibility for error, since he relies on his understanding of his own rational faculties to render this second judgment. Thus, each new possibility of error diminishes the likeliness that each succeeding judgment is true. According to Hume, this means that each resulting judgment has an increasing probability for being false, especially when one is reflecting on topics like causality and necessity. Thus, it is readily apparent that Hume is fully cognizant of our human propensity for fallibility, or our ability to reason about the ideas we have in our minds. While a sceptic, Hume is not a complete one. Hume steps away from the precipice of total scepticism because of two considerations. The first is a recognition that sceptical conclusions themselves, being products of our reason, might also be wrong, and so the very scepticism that calls into question the belief in causality and substance and immortal souls, also raises doubts about sceptical conclusions. In addition, however, Hume discovers that there is a strong propensity found within human nature itself which does not allow such epistemological despair. The truth is that one simply does not find oneself truly rejecting all belief and reasoning. The common life that we all experience does not permit the totalizing scepticism to preoccupy our minds. The movement away from complete scepticism to a more qualified version is, despite the differences between them, eventually articulated by both Descartes and Hume. Compare and evaluate the views of Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza on the connection between mind and body. Spinozas materialistic conception of mind as the idea of body asserts an essential link between mind and body. This conception stresses the abilities and limitations of the mind as a function of its bodys abilities and limitations. What the mind can think relies solely on the ways in which its body can be affected. In the case of Spinoza, it will never happen that the mind can imagine the nonexistence of its body. Descartes stresses the importance of the method of doubt, by which he is able to detach himself from the sensible world and grasp all pure and metaphysical truths. In the eyes of Spinoza, methodological doubt is more a hindrance to reach the metaphysical truths simply because it is far-fetched. The notion of body in Spinoza is rarely discussed, and as far as Spinozas theory of knowledge is concerned, one might consider the issue marginal. Actually, Spinoza does not formulate the issue into a theory though he proclaims that the mind and the body are on a par. This does not mean that Spinoza does not discuss the connection between them as a reading of his philosophy indicates that Spinoza always has the notion of body in mind even though he does not articulate the notion and put it in focus. The reason might be that few things can be attributed to the body in conceptual terms except that it is extended; it is always in a certain proportion of rest and motion; and it is the object of the mind. Within Spinozas theory of knowledge, how can the mind cross over from inadequate ideas to adequate ideas? In what way can the finite human mind, which is by nature only capable of forming inadequate ideas, succeed in overcoming its own nature and forming adequate ideas? Indeed, Spinoza would say that Descartes project does not go far enough. The itinerary of the quest for truth is only half way done in Descartes. It is true that Descartes goes to great lengths to illuminate the self such that it attains a state of self-transparency. But the body is still left in the dark. Spinoza makes it a point to complete the Cartesian project, illuminating the body as well. Time and again, Spinoza claims that under a species of eternity, the essences of the mind and the body are one and the same. From Spinozas perspective, it is workable that both the body and the mind can, in their own ways, reach the level of self-transparency. Malebranche disagrees. Descartes’ notorious claim that the mind is better known than body1 has been the subject of repeated criticisms, with Malebranche contending that, to the contrary, the body is better known than the mind. Malebranche accepts the fundamental Cartesian precepts, including mind-body dualism. But he argues that Descartes position on knowledge of the mind is inconsistent. Malebranche agrees with Descartes that the existence of the mind is better known than that of body, but he vehemently denies that the nature of the mind is better known. This denial is based on his view that we lack a clear idea of the mind. To deny that we have a clear and distinct idea of the mind would be devastating within a strictly Cartesian framework Descartes held that knowledge without ideas is impossible. If we had no idea of the mind then we would be incapable of knowing it. Most significantly, it would be impossible to demonstrate that the mind is really distinct from the body. Descartes thinks that a clear and distinct idea of the mind is a necessary condition for this proof. As such, Malebranches argument threatens to undermine Cartesian dualism at its very roots. To further explain this, it is important to note that Descartes’ and Malebranche respective theories of ideas differ in important ways. The most significant difference is that for Descartes ideas are purely psychological entities, while for Malebranche ideas exist “in” God. Thus, his well known claim that “we see all things in God.” This is typically referred to as the doctrine of Vision in God. Malebranches claim that we lack a clear idea of the mind does not entail that an idea of the mind does not exist. Malebranche thinks that ideas serve as the archetypes for divine creation, Finite minds exist, and as such there must be an idea of the mind in God in virtue of which these minds were created. Malebranche contends that we lack epistemic access to the idea of the mind. In light of the doctrine of vision in God, what Malebranche should say, strictly speaking, is that we lack access to the idea of the mind that resides in God. Within Malebranches philosophical system, unlike Descartes, the conclusion that we lack a clear idea of the mind does not entail that we possess no knowledge of the mind at all. He distinguishes between knowledge through idea and knowledge through consciousness This distinction lies at the heart of Malebranches critique of Descartes doctrine of the mind. He thinks that we have knowledge through idea of body; however, in the case of the mind we know it through consciousness, and because of this, our knowledge of it is imperfect. This is to say that our knowledge through idea of body reveals the nature of body, but our knowledge through consciousness of the mind does not reveal the nature of the mind- This commits Malebranche to the position, in direct opposition to Descartes, that the nature of body is better known than the nature of mind. As indicated in the preceding, therefore, all three philosophers have engaged in the exploration of the nature of the mind and body and the relationship between them. Despite similarities, however, their positions on the question raised is distinct, one from the other. Read More