stupid bloody Latin
OK, so is “ideam Dei” meant to mean
1) the idea of God in the sense of a representation of God “ooh Lord, you are so huge”
or
2) God’s idea, i.e. the idea which God has. Content of which is as yet undetermined – and it may strictly speaking not have any content because it may not be representational at all. The form of Justice does not resemble justice.
or
3) some (un)holy mixture of all three?
is it the lightning, or the flash?
Very short post:
The idea that we should understand the relationship between the attributes on the model of the relationship between languages, i.e.
the mind is the idea of the body
is like saying
snow is white iff la neige est blanche
which is what TC Mark argues (Mark, Thomas Carson. 1977. ‘The Spinozistic Attributes’. Philosophia 7 (1):55–82. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2008.0753.)
Just occurred to me that this idea fixes another problem in how to understand the Ethics.
There’s this problem about the ‘privileging of the attribute of Thought’. Actually there are two problems, but this post is just about one of them. The idea is, is that ideas represent bodies. But ideas also represent modes in other attributes. So we need a new idea for each attribute – and there are an infinite number of them. So although the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of causes/things, we have an infinite number of ideas that represent modes of attributes we do not perceive.
It’s one of the messier bits of the Ethics. Now we can maybe get round this, so long as the infinities we are dealing with are all countable. Maybe. But that’s still a really messy solution. But it occurred to me today that this whole mess of a problem rests on a really challengeable premise (and one that I’m hopefully about to show is false).
So let’s return to the analogy from above.
Let’s say that the attribute of Extension is English and the Attribute of Thought is French. What the parallelism means is that every sentence in English can be translated into French. What the problem around the privileging of the attribute of Thought says is that if we have some new attribute, Henry, then we need a whole new set of ideas to represent them.
But let’s say Henry is German. What this means is that we could have a mode of Henry, ‘der Schnee ist weiß‘ and we need a new mode of Thought, a new idea to repreent this mode of Henry. Except, and I’m sure you’re already ahead of me, no you don’t, because ‘der Schnee ist weiß‘ is already being represented by ‘snow is white’.
Schematically, we have this:
Extension / English modes: the mind
Thought / French: l’esprit
Henry / German: der Verstand
What we don’t need then is a new idea to handle all the new sentences / modes in the new language / attribute.
What we would need, and don’t currently have, is a way of matching / translating between English and German or French and German. This is why Spinoza needed to prove that the mind is the idea of the body. Ontological monism tells us that every idea is a body and vice versa, but we have to then work out, or prove which ideas are which bodies. The same thing with any new attribute – we would have to find out and prove with attribute of Henry matches up with (is the same thing as) our body and our mind.
But what we don’t need are a whole new set of ideas to represent all the modes in all the rest of the attributes. Which is great. And means that we no longer have one of the problems that seemed to privilege the attribute of Thought. [for those of you still curious, bodies exist, and act, ideas exist, act and think – this seems to give a power that Extension does not and could not have to ideas. How to fix that problem is the subject of a much lengthier paper I’m currently working on. This post is basically a footnote to that paper!]
affectum imitatio 