Nikolai Biryukov
Spinoza was, by universal
recognition, one of the most influential modern philosophers, if not from the
strictly professional standpoint (his legacy contained nothing that could be
properly called a school), but, at
least, culturally. He was seen as the principal modern exponent of the idea of
God as identical with nature. But there was another idea, distinct from
pantheism (though, by no means, unrelated to it) that was considered Spinozist par
excellence: that of fatalism. It is to Spinoza that Denis Diderot’s Jacques (Jacques le fataliste et
son maître) attributes the ideas he
learned from his anonymous captain, the ideas that whatever happens, all
events, past, present and future, are “written up above”, in “a great scroll”
which is unrolled a little bit at a time.
But do Spinoza’s writings
warrant this attribution? Was Jacques’ captain right in calling himself
Spinoza’s follower? According to Jacques, the captain argued from determinism,
and Spinoza was certainly a determinist. But was Spinoza a fatalist? He seems
to have rejected contingency (Ethics, Proposition 29 of
Part 1), but did he deny freedom?
Did he equate determination and predestination?
The principal text is, of
course, Definition 7 from Part 1: “That thing is
called free, which exists solely by
the necessity of its own nature, and of which the action is determined by itself alone. On the other hand, that thing is necessary, or rather constrained,
which is determined by something external to itself to a fixed and
definite method of existence or action” (translated by
R. H. M. Elwes; italics added).
Vocabulary itself indicates that Spinoza did not deny freedom. Moreover, he
seems to have had no reason to deny it in the name, as was often done, of
determinism, for he did not oppose freedom as something indeterminate to
necessity as synonymous to determination. A free thing and a necessary thing
are both determined, the difference between the two lying in the character of
determination (by itself or by something else), but not in the presence or
absence thereof. It is constraint or compulsion that are
the opposites to freedom, not necessity.
One might argue, however,
that all these deliberations only make sense when applied to God (and even to
Him not without reservations – as Proposition 33 of Part 1 suggests),
but are of no avail, as far as ordinary natural things are concerned. Did not
Spinoza claim that “that which has not
been conditioned by God cannot condition itself to act”
(Proposition 26 of Part 1)? And does this not mean that there are no
free things in the world (in Spinoza’s sense of the word, i.e. things that are
determined by themselves alone)
except God? I will not deny that this interpretation of Spinoza’s statement is
possible, but I would argue that it is not necessarily the only correct one.
For even if, according to Spinoza, God is the only thing (inasmuch as one may
call a thing that which the sum total
of all things) that is absolutely
free, it does mean that it would be meaningless to use the term relatively and
distinguish between things that enjoy greater or lesser freedom. For nothing in
Spinoza’s writings vindicates the assumption that God is the one and only
constraint of all things, that things cannot be constrained by other things,
too, and hence cannot be meaningfully called free (of that external
constraint), if they are not.
To show that these are not
mere scholastic subtleties let us compare two situations. Suppose someone is
hit by a falling brick. Is the incident necessary or contingent? If we are
determinists, we would certainly assert that it is necessary, for bricks do not
fall without cause (whatever it were) and, after they have started falling, do
not fall randomly but “obey” laws of mechanical movement. On the other hand,
neither the cause that has made the brick fall, nor the laws of mechanical
movement determine the presence of the would-be victim on the spot where the
brick would (has) hit him. Of course, according to the
tenets of determinism, the victim has not arrived on the spot without a cause
of his own, and hence his presence there is necessary, not contingent. But
reference to that cause would not explain why, having arrived where he should
have arrived, he has come across a brick there, for whatever has caused him to
come, has not caused the brick to fall, just like whatever has caused the brick
to fall, has not caused the victim to come. Is this not what we accident? And are accidents not accidental?
But the sum of two
necessities is necessarily itself a necessity, one might argue. Is it? Here comes
the comparison. Suppose the cause of the brick’s fall is neither deterioration
of masonry, nor a gust of wind, not the combination of the two (i.e. natural
events that in themselves have nothing to do with the person of the victim, his
destination, his timing, etc.), but a malicious intent: suppose someone has
aimed the brick to hit the victim. To an uniformed
external observer the two situations might appear identical, but they are not.
Whereas in the first case (of accidental
hit) the two movements, that of the brick and that of the victim, are independent of each other and simply
“intersect”, in the second case (of intentional
hit) the movement of the brick is coordinated with the movement of the victim,
so that the two movements not just “intersect”, but make up a complex pattern
of interdependent processes that follows its own “logic” or its own “law”. Does
not this “logic” explain the hit as
something that has had to be a hit,
whereas in the former case the hit has merely happened?
Now, which of these imagined
situations exemplifies nature as a whole? Have we any reason to assert that all natural processes are intrinsically
interdependent? Do we know something
that would warrant such an assertion? I doubt. And if we do not, would it not
be violation of the principle of sufficient reason to assert it? I think it
would. Now, to come back to Spinoza, did the Dutch thinker see natural
processes as intersecting or as interdependent? I do not know. Both
interpretations seem plausible, for both imply mutual determination, albeit of
characteristically different kinds. If the world is made up of intersecting but
originally independent processes, insofar as these processes follow their own
ways, they may be called relatively free,
in the Spinozist sense of the word. Insofar as some of these processes make up an
integrated whole, we have a hierarchy of independent and dependent processes;
the former, relatively free; the
latter, constrained; however, insofar
as these complex entities are not all-comprising and there exists a number
(plurality) of them, they (complex entities) may be considered as relatively
free. Insofar as (the extreme case) all
processes were intrinsically linked to make up one universal integrated whole,
we would have (live in) a world that it would be more appropriate to call superdetermined,
rather than simply determined.
One might thus distinguish
between, at least, two varieties of determinism: a strong one and a weak
one. Weak determinism asserts that whatever happens is caused and that cause
necessitates the effect (or some other, non-causal, necessity); strong
determinism is not satisfied with this assertion, but goes further to assert
that whatever happens can be traced to just one universal cause (or other necessitating
agency). If, speaking in causal terms, we define freedom as a capacity to start
a new causal chain, strong determinism would allow for only one properly free
agent; it is thus indistinguishable from fatalism. Weak determinism, on the
other hand, by allowing for a plurality of free agents, preserves whatever we
need to account for our possession of scientific knowledge (the notion of
necessity), but evades fatalism with its characteristic identification of
determination and predestination.