Spinoza and Teleology

Spinoza and Teleology

At this stage we should consider a couple of objections to such a teleo-mechanistic account, the first of which comes from Jaegwon Kim, who claims that it is not at all clear that teleological and mechanistic explanations can happily.

Two essays: "Mechanism, Purpose, and Explanatory Exclusion" (1989) and from "The Non-reductivist's Troubles with Mental Causation," in Heil and Mele's Mental Causation (pp. 189-210). Kim is not the first to argue for such exclusion, though he may be the most successful. See e.g. Charles Taylor's Kim forcefully argues for the "principle of explanatory exclusion" according to which "no event can be given more than one complete and independent explanation" (1997, 258). According to Kim, if mechanistic explanations are entirely sufficient without any appeal to teleological concepts, teleological descriptions are explanatorily bankrupt, at best. If this principle of explanatory exclusion is reasonable, it would seem that Spinoza's commitment to mechanism would force him to relinquish teleology.

Yet, for highly interesting reasons, Spinoza's account is not affected by the principle of explanatory exclusion. Kim's argument is aimed at those who believe that one and the same event is may be explained in two different ways. However, it seems to me that Spinoza's causal/explanatory barrier between thought and extension requires that we distinguish between a physical event and its parallel mental event, in which case we are speaking of two distinct explicanda.

How to square with Della Rocca's token identity?! Kim himself admits that his argument dÐ'§1: Spinoza's critique of teleology: mitigated or unmitigated.

Recent scholarship is divided as to whether Spinoza can admit human teleology into his mechanistic (nonteleological) view of nature. Jonathan Bennett, the most outspoken proponent of the ateleological reading of Spinoza, contends that Spinoza precociously advances a "nonteleological theory of human motivation" (1984, 215). And, as if to convince us of the reasonableness and significance of his reading, he adds "miss that and you miss most of what is interesting in Part 3" (ibid.).

If Bennett is correct, however, we must condemn Spinoza for indulging in a great deal of misleading language. Indeed, we may wonder whether Spinoza's austere mechanistic determinism allows for practical reason at all, let alone an ethics. James Martineau, for example, contends that because Spinoza repudiates teleology, there is "a total failure of all ethical conditions" in his system. He claims that Spinoza cannot speak of what one ought to do, since "there isÐ'...no provision in Spinoza's universe for personal causation or command of an alternative, or action for an end as distinguished from action from a force" (Types of Ethical Theory, pp. 369-72Ð'--cited in McShea 172-3). If Martineau is correct about what a total denial of teleology entails, the nonteleological reading of Spinoza would clearly carry with it a rather significant cost.

The irony then is that whereas Bennett claims that if we fail to read Spinoza ateleologically, we "miss most of what is interesting in Part 3," if we accept this reading, we have to reject almost all of part III!

Others, such as Edwin Curley and Don Garrett, have tried to show that Spinoza's account of human purposiveness is perfectly consistent with his mechanistic worldview. And while I am largely on their side of the divide, I'm not sure that they have sufficiently worked out precisely how it is that Spinoza or anyone can allow for teleological explanations within a mechanistic conception of nature. Bennett's challenge is a formidable one. Before we make any start at meeting it, let's turn to the text itself, so that we might see what exactly Spinoza's critique of teleology consists in and whether it can coexist with an account of human purposiveness.

Ð'§ 2 Analysis of salient passages (for and against)

There are several pieces of textual evidence that seem to indicate that Spinoza denies all teleological explanations. For instance, in the appendix to Ethics I, Spinoza boldly states that "Nature has no end set before it, and all final causes are nothing but human fictions" (II/80). Bennett takes this claim at face value, as a wholesale denial of teleology, which, as he puts it, "count[s] against any kind of teleologyÐ'--against Ð''He raised his hand so as to shade his eyes' as well as against Ð''Elbows are formed like that so that men can raise their hands'" (1984, 215). Indeed, it certainly seems that this is an unmitigated rejection of final causes.

However, Curley has argued, on careful philological grounds, that this passage could be interpreted to mean that "all final causes we are apt to ascribe to (God or) Nature are nothing but human fictions" (1990, 40). I shall not attempt to determine whether or not this is philologically plausible, but will simply note that Curley's reading is in keeping with the thrust of this appendix, which has as its target the end-directness of Nature as a whole, or divine providence, and not human purposiveness. Nowhere is this distinction more apparent than when Spinoza claims near the outset of the appendix that "all the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end" (II/78).

It seems to me that what Spinoza is denying is simply the claim that the concept of a natural telos does some explanatory work over and above that which is done by efficient causes, as if nature has an end before itself that somehow guides the flow of events.

Curley (1990, pp. 44-46) fills in some of the Aristotelian background, aptly referring to Maimonides as an exemplar of this teleological tradition. If we look at any of the passages where Spinoza criticizes final cause, we will find that he is taking issue not with end-directedness per se, but with the supposition that they can be offered in place of efficient causes. We see this for instance in his critique of freedom. Spinoza cites two reasons that humans believe themselves to be radically, or indeterministically, free. The first is simply that we are ignorant of the (efficient) causes that shape our intentions. From this ignorance, we Ð''take refuge' in the notion of radical freedom. Ironically, according to Spinoza, the other reason for this assumption of radical freedom is that "men act always on account of an end, namely, on