Spinoza’s infinite attributes

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Can someone kindly remind me why it’s necessary that there are infinite attributes?

The whole of his framework works without it being infinite attributes.

We could edit it to say all possible attributes and not a lick of his framework loses its power.

What niggles my tithers is that this one detail seems like an unnecessary blemish in a sea of necessity.

For example, all that is, let’s call that God-as-nature. Fine so far.

We don’t get how that can have a first cause so as far as we can conceive this GaN is causa sui. Fine. That implies GaN is eternal. Fine.

But here’s where you lose me: it has infinite attributes and this is because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be self sufficient and perfect.

Huh? Back up

It seems like the necessary point would be that it contains all possible attributes. That is sufficient. Not infinite attributes. That’s possible but not necessary. If it is necessary I don’t see how he arrives at that.

I see zero reason why this has to be infinite attributes for the whole wonderful subsequent system to work.

Also I don’t see how he geometrically arrives at this metaphysical commitment of infinite attributes.

Spinoza is still the best framework I know of; I feel like it subsumes all other frameworks and perspectives, and is thus the king daddy of philosophy.

I think this way, even if substance doesn’t contain infinite attributes. That part feels like a non sequitor and can be totally jettisoned without hurting the important parts of the philosophy like the implications of hard incompatibilism and Conatus, and the expansiveness of self as we recognize more and more the truths of the Spinozan framework.

But I feel like this one thing is an annoying flaw. Not fatal, but odd. What am I missing?

Please don’t answer with quotes from Ethics or links elsewhere. I’ve read it all.

1 Like
2

Your ‘All’ is a Totality as opposed to involving the idea of true infinity.

Spinoza states in 1D6, “God is a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.”

Your totality has a begin and end, or would merely be endless in nature, while Spinoza’s ideas are based on the concept true infinity. And it is important to take notice of the fact that the concept ‘substance’ is a reference to what others call God, and thus the reference ‘infinite number of attributes’ is special in that regard, since it is applied to a concept that according to Spinoza is absolutely infinite of nature, and thus fundamentally unknowable.

Spinoza about those infinite attributes: “We can only grasp a finite number of its [substance] attributes through human understanding.”

How did you come to like Spinoza so much?

3

Infinite is supposed to indicate independent, non-contingent…

There are no wholes outside brains… the concept of infinity is how our brains deal with continuity and multiplicity.

No absolutes = no indivisible, immutable, singularity.
Yet our brains must reduce everything to a level that it can process and store.
It must convert dynamic, interactivity into a static ‘thing’.

Reduce the infinite into the finite.
The brain interprets existence…its “attributes” referring only to perceived energy patterns.
It cannot perceive chaotic energies.
So, in theory, how a mind can Interpret existence is endless.

4

Yeah that’s not helpful but I’m grateful nonetheless. So guys I know about Spinoza, this isn’t for lack of background on every piece of his framework.

I have no problem accepting that substance is eternal, and that humans can access and understand only two of its attributes, 1) idea/thought and 2) extension.

What strikes me as arbitrary is substance having infinite attributes. It’s not that I don’t get it, but given his geometric a priori kind of style, this is the one part I don’t like/need.

I understand that the thing we are describing “all there is” by definition, and eternal, by definition.

To me, the infinite attributes and modes seems tacked on haphazardly. Substance can be self-sufficient without having infinite attributes.

An infinite set of numbers doesn’t need to contain every number, so I don’t see why Spinoza’s substance is assumed to be infinite in every way, assumed to be “perfect” just by virtue of being causa sui and “all there is.”

My sense is for everything else in ethics he arrives at it making statements that are self-evident and unassailable, but this one detail of infinite attributes, not just infinite, but infinite attributes particularly, is a metaphysical commitment he is coming into Ethics with, and it’s not well-explained why it can’t just be finite attributes. We know there is at least one, mind, and we like to think there’s also extension, fine. Maybe.

But we don’t know which else there are and his system doesn’t require substance to have infinite attributes. It’s just not in any way required for the rest of the system to work.

Some goofy clown named Dunamis turned me onto Spinoza 20 years ago and I recall he was really jazzed by it; and that stayed with me.

Over the decades I read and researched Spinoza here and there and liked it, and just liked Spinoza himself, there’s a cool sort of audio book/reenactment of him getting excommunicated. Lou Grant plays the judge.

I’ve always assumed free will is incoherent but never thought much about it, but when Sam Harris and Sapolsky kept talking about it, it knocked me out of my dogmatic slumbers and think about free will a lot.

I mean, I don’t know what free will means, but I reject basic desert / ultimate moral responsibility or what Galen Strawson calls U-freedom. (Ultimate freedom).

There’s a philosopher, Gregg Caruso, who does a great job on the ramifications and how being aware of a hard incompatibilist stance it will lead to some conclusions about how we’re going to treat each other better in the justice system, and social systems. I reject Dennett’s compatibilism and I reject Kane’s libertarian free will.

I spent some time comparing Spinoza to every other philosophy and concluded that it subsumes them all.

It terms of Kant, the categorical imperative is valuable (and beautifully stated) but Kant’s “compatibilism” doesn’t work.

I think Spinoza’s is a more complete framework that works with what we know today, subsumes Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger, Bergson, Sartre, Wittgenstein, etc. It’s arrived at honestly, unlike Leibniz or Kant who for some reason begin with premises like a personal God or U-freedom. This may explain why Einstein liked Spinoza, all I know it checks all my boxes.

But every time I read it I think, “why does it have to have infinite attributes, that’s not true. He made that part up.”

Spinoza is a gift. It’s a deeply satisfying conception of reality and a plausible one.

5

Schopenhauer offers a metaphysics that ‘corrected’ Kant, and was adopted by Nietzsche, differing only in how he dealt with what was presented.
Buddhism was the inspiration.

Placing the Will “outside causality” is where I part ways with Aurthur.

All is energy.

Dunamis was overly obsessed with Spinoza.
Gratification does not prove anything.
An elegant worldview appeals to an organism’s addiction to order.

6

maybe he’s talking quality, completeness without quantifiable limit

7

It would be impossible to examine this matter further, and most forthrightly, without defering to the text itself and quoting one Spinoza, Benedict. For how are we to grasp what is meant by the phrasing ‘infinite attributes’ lest we analyze the axiomatic nature of the language itself, deducing the axioms and premises with which the statement is supported?

8

He forbade it in the OP.

9

Like Marge, i always kinda wondered about that too. If i had to guess, he’s meaning ‘infinite’ in this sense, maybe; there’s nothing to restrict or prevent something from being or happening unless it is illogical. He’s thinking that whatever is possible will happen, and that given the nature of eternity and substance, there is an ‘infinite’ number of ways any combination of logically consistent ‘things’ can and will happen. Sumthin like that. An attribute is a logical collection of properties of substance, and there’s a gazillion of em. Logical collections, i mean. Somewhere there’s a green unicorn listening to Foo Fighters in a subway if such a thing isn’t illogical. I don’t know if it is… I’m just saying it’ll happen if it isn’t.

10

“Omnis determinatio est negatio” —every determination implies negation. The empirical world is inexhaustible in its attributes. “When fullness is taken from fullness, fullness still remains.” But, all that is a mere phenomena of Being itself, which is beyond the senses. Science teaches us this. It defines its own boundaries. It can unfold the universe infinitely and yet never arrive at the thing-in-itself as Kant elucidated.

11

And yet in Jesus dwells the fullness of the godhead …bodily.

“And the Logos became flesh…”

“…FULL … of grace (works of love) and truth.”

12

If God is omnipresent, It is fully present in everybody and everything which is what Spinoza believed, by the way. That’s why he was anathematized as a heretic and a pantheist by the conventional thinkers of his synagogue.

13

In him we live and move and have our being, but he can remove his concurrence from us if we are not thinking, moving, valuing in alignment with self=other (him). To put us on the same level of Jesus is to make God perfectly responsible for our evil, rather than just permissively (to allow us to concur with self=other) — and fails to fully grasp what he did/said on the cross.

I highly doubt that’s what Spinoza meant by anything he said. I have a hunch he was at worst a panentheist. NOT a pantheist.

I have a hunch so many philosophers have been bungled and are rolling in their heavenly abodes with laughter… or moral outrage appropriate to the situation.

14

“I highly doubt that’s what Spinoza meant by anything he said”

U can actually be certain that’s not what he meant.

Here’s a good little summary from: Spinoza on Jesus | Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed

"Thus, it would be a stretch to say that Spinoza’s identification of the spirit of Christ with the idea of God is in agreement with the words of John 1, and even more of a stretch to say that he is in agreement with the ‘consubstantial with God’ of the Nicene creed. There seems to be little room in Spinoza’s thought for a God who can become incarnate as a human being; it must have been in tacit response to the Christian understanding of Jesus that he wrote in one of his letters (LVI), “A triangle, if only it had the power of speech, would say in like manner that God is eminently triangular”.

15

Spinoza wrote plenty about it so we don’t have to guess. Whereas, Jesus wrote nothing, so we do.

16

I will explore that in more depth later but for now I must leave you this:

17

Need more context. Please?

image
image750×1334 168 KB

18

It might help your understanding to reflect that “infinite” has two meanings.

  1. endless
  2. Of unknown size or magnitude.

Spinoza is not meant to say that the attributes are without end , but to say that there are many attributes beyond our knowledge and understanding.

19

What’s so silly is that u think quoting some guy called John the baptist is going to persuade an atheist to reconsider his position.

20

.
…when good threads are derailed with ‘straw man’ arguments… who’s got time for dat! :woman_shrugging:
.

What Spinoza meant, ain’t rocket-science… I’ve never read Spinoza, but I’m very sure/certain the guy knew what he meant.

Did he state otherwise/his concerns over his inquiry? then… sure…