Conceiving something through another

Tl;dr version: to conceive one thing through another is to predicate something of a subject

By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed 1d3.

By mode I understand the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived 1d5.

Whatever is, is either in itself or in another 1a1.

What cannot be conceived through another, must be conceived through itself 1a2.

There’s nothing more fun than realising that a concept (or turn of phrase standing in for a concept), or conceptual distinction, that you’ve been happily deploying is one that actually you’re not entirely sure what it means. Spinoza’s Ethics is great for this. What makes it all the more entertaining is that it’s often the case that you do understand a lot of things about a particular concept, or distinction, and knowing some of the things has made you think you know all the things. So with no further ado, my latest, oh crap example: the couplet “to be conceived through another”, and “to be conceived through itself”. So the thing here, is, is that I do undertand the work that this conceptual distinction is doing. It’s marking the distinction between substance-attributes on the one hand and modes on the other. That I get. What I don’t absolutely get is just what the phrase “to be conceived through another” actually means. Or to put it slightly differently, what exactly is it that we do when we conceive one thing “through another”. I’ve been quite happily not thinking very much about this, precisely because it is clear that what the distinction marks, is the difference between substance and modes. But I’m not sure that I ever have “conceived one thing through another” and more concerningly, I’m not sure precisely how I would even go about doing that. So, having preambled my ignorance, what could Spinoza be intending by this phrase?

[side-note, this is the second example I’ve recently come across of a philosophical term where you can describe the formal characteristics of a concept, without being able to operationalise it, just how common is this?]

I suppose that I should admit that the kind of opposition ‘everything is either conceived through itself, or through another’ is the sort of attempt to exclude middles that we should be cautiously suspicious of (Hegel’s Lords, Russell’s Barbers, or Quine’s Rabbits might all object). However, Spinoza is clearly mostly happy with it. And what he means by it, is today’s task, not whether he should be happy with it. I say ‘mostly happy’ because he does couple it with the claim that to understand an effect, you have to understand its cause. This would cause a regress were it not for the self-explanatory explainer i.e. something that can be conceived through-itself. Substance does not just express itself in the modes, it also conceptually grounds them.

But this is still just stacking up more formal descriptions of the opposition. How, though, does one go about conceiving one thing through another.

Clearly we need to get some clarity on just what Spinoza might mean by this claim.

So let me point out something obvious but I think it’s an imporant first step. We need to keep in mind that when we talk about modes, this is always a short hand for ‘modification of substance’. When I conceive a finite body, even if I remind myself that what I am conceiving is a finite modification of substance under the attribute of extension, it does not feel like this is either enough, nor exactly on the mark, to count as conceiving one thing through another.

OK, so when we say that a mode is a modification of substance, what kind of statement is this? For the scholastics, this would be a metaphysical statement, which is not the same as a logical statement. The equivalent logical statement would have the form ‘subject + accident’ (I’m just ignoring the whole, difficult and varied set of debates over the difference between accidents and modes).

Do we find this kind of metaphysical / logical distinction in Spinoza? I think this is one way we can read the difference between 1a1 and 1a2:

Whatever is, is either in itself or in another 1a1. (metaphysical statement)

What cannot be conceived through another, must be conceived through itself 1a2. (logical statement)

There are statements about how things are, and there are statements about how we think about how things are and (because monism+rationalism=naturalism) we don’t need to worry about whether these two things map.

I think this is it: to conceive one thing through an other, is just to predicate something of a subject. In the same way as we can say that everything is either a substance or a modification of a substance (metaphysical statement), we can say that everything is either said of a subject or of a predicate of a subject (logical statement) and to say something of a predicate, in as much as a predicate is always a predicate-of-a-subject, is just to conceive one thing through another. You can’t just say ‘greens’ you have to say ‘the tree greens’. To think ‘greens’ without a subject of the predicate is to not think at all.

Technical footnote: I’ve been running together saying things and thinking things in an unacceptably cavalier manner. Spinoza is quite clear (and this is an utterly standard view that he takes on) that there are many things we can say (or write) that we can’t actually think, e.g. the chimera, or goat-stag. We can write ‘there is a goat-stag drinking a bourbon the bald kind of France bought him’ but we can’t actually think that because we can’t think self-contradictiory things (which the goat-stag is). This is also why I can write ‘greens’ but can only conceive ‘the tree greens’.