RATIO AND ACTIVITY:SPINOZA'S BIOLOGIZING OF THE MIND IN AN ARISTOTELIAN KEY

For Spinoza and Proportion Conference5-6 May 2015, University ofAberdeen

Heidi M. RavvenHamilton College

“[T]he basic and most important element of our mind is the conatus (Pr.7, III) to affirm the existence of our body.”

(Ethics, IIIp1o dem)

“Whatsoever increases or diminishes, assists or checks, the power of activity of our body, the idea of the said thing increases or diminishes, assists or checks the power of thought of our mind.”

(Ethics, IIIp11)

“[T]he Mind has no other power than that of thinking and forming adequate ideas.”

(Ethics Vp4s)

“The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”

(Ethics, IIp7)

INTRODUCTIONProportion is for Spinoza the unique ratio, the internal

relations that individual bodies maintain and express that

enables them to both constitute and retain their identities

amidst the constant forces of change by which they are

affected. That Spinoza is describing a dynamic steady state,

we learn, when he tells us that an “Individual so composed

[of others] retains its nature … so long as each part

retains its own motion, and communicates it, as before, to

the others” (Ethics IIp13Lemma7). So ratio is the source of

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their coherence as the singulars they are. In the Ethics,

but not in the earlier Short Treatise, Ratio also enables them

to form and become composite individuals, which in turn are

nested within larger such individuals to infinity. Because

of the operation of proportion, the force of maintaining

steady ratio, the whole of nature, Spinoza famously says,

can be understood to be one individual.

But if we should further conceive a third kind of Individual, composed [of many individuals] of this second kind, we shall find that it can be affected in many other ways, without any change of its form. And if we proceed in this way to infinity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one Individual, whose parts, i.e., all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole Individual.

(Ethics II p13Lemma 7s)

Yet in the earlier Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being,

Spinoza does not articulate an account of composite bodies

nested in nature to infinity as he puts forth in the Ethics.

Instead, ratio and proportion are explanatory only of

particular bodies while Nature has universality and eternity

only as idea and within Thought. “[S]ince Nature or God,”

Spinoza writes, “is one being … which contains in itself all

essences of created things, it is necessary that of all this

there is produced in thought an infinite Idea, which

contains in itself objectively the whole of Nature” (Short

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Treatise, Appendix II, Curley p. 153). “Soul,” Spinoza

concomitantly points out here, (Short Treatise, chapter xxiii,

Curley, p. 140), “is an Idea which is in the thinking thing,

arising from the existence of a thing which is in Nature.”

So before Spinoza developed the account in the Ethics, he

experimented in the Short Treatise with a far more traditional

dualist account, one that pitted ephemeral bodily

particulars against the eternity and universality of soul

and God.

Soul can be united either with the body of which it isthe Idea, or with God, without whom it can neither exist norbe understood. From this, then, one can easily see that:

1. if it is united with the body only, and the body perishes, then it must also perish; …

2. if it is united with another thing, which is, and remains, immutable, then, on the contrary,it will have to remain immutable also.(Short Treatise, chapter xxiii, Curley, p. 141)

Accordingly the soul is faced with a choice between union

with the ephemeral natural body narrowly conceived or union

with the non-corporeal infinite and eternal God. Corporeal

objects, ephemeral particulars, on the one hand, and Eternal

God, or the ideas of all natural things within God, on the

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other, are pitted against each other rather than integrated

as they are in the mature theory.

We shall now try to explain the union we have with [God] by Nature and by love. We have already said there there can be nothing in Nature of which there is not an ideain the soul of the same thing. And as the thing is more or less perfect, so also are the union of the Idea with the thing, or [instead] with God himself …

And because the body is the very first thing our soul becomes aware of –for as we have said, there can be nothing in Nature whose Idea does not exist in the thinking thing, the idea which is the soul of that thing—that thing must, then, necessarily be the first cause of the idea.

But this idea cannot find any rest in the knowledge ofthe body, without passing over into knowledge of that without which neither the body nor the Idea itself can either exist or be understood. Hence, as soon as it knows that being, it will be united with it by love.

To grasp this union better and infer what it must be, we must consider the effect [of the union] with the body. In this we see how by knowledge of and passions toward corporeal things, there come to arise in us all those effects which we are constantly aware of in our body …; and so (if once our knowledge and love come to fall on that without which we can neither exist nor be understood, and which is not at all corporeal) the effects arising from thisunion will, and must be, incomparably greater and more magnificent. For these effects must necessarily be commensurate with the thing with which it is united.

When we become aware of these effects, we can truly say that we have been born again. For our first birth was when we were united with the body. … But our other, or second, birth will occur when we become aware in ourselves of the completely different effects of love produced by knowledge of this incorporeal object. This [love of God] isas different from [the love of the body] as the incorporeal is from the corporeal.

(Short Treatise, chapter xxii, Curley, pp. 139-140)

So it is within this early dualist context that Spinoza

introduces the bodily proportion and ratio account of

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particular bodies, an account that we shall see is modified

to transcend and integrate its dualisms in the Ethics.

Jacob Adler has argued that Spinoza’s notion of

proportion and ratio especially in the Short Treatise, reflect

the influence of both the Aristotelian tradition,

particularly the early third century philosopher Alexander

of Aphrodisias, and also of seventeenth century academic

medicine and personality psychology, which was still largely

within the tradition of Galen. Alexander of Aphrodisias,

the most important commentator on Aristotle until the

thirteenth century Averroës, was famous for his radical

psychological theory that the soul emerged from the harmony

or attunement of bodily parts and functions. Adler shows

convincingly that Spinoza could have had, and likely would

have had, knowledge of Alexander’s theory from a number of

sources, some of which were in his library. I won’t repeat

his argument for that claim here. Yet Adler goes on to

quote a passage of Alexander in which he writes:

The soul is not a particular kind of blend [terperamento] of bodies—which is what harmony is—but a powerthat emerges above a particular kind of blend [temperamento] of bodies analogous to the powers of medicinal drugs, which

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are assembled from a blend [immixtione] of many [ingredients]…[T]he mixture, composition and proportion of such drugs --…it might turn out is 2:1, another 1:2, and another 3:2—bear some analogy to a harmony. The power, however, which emergesfrom the blend of drugs exhibiting the harmony and proportion is not likewise a harmony, too … The soul is also of this sort. For the soul is the power and form that supervenes on the blend [temperamento] of bodies in a particular proportion, not the proportion or composition of the blend [temperamento].1

The account in the Short Treatise, more than the account of

Ratio in the Ethics, bears a remarkable similarity to this

passage of Alexander, Adler points out in passages from the

Short Treatise which he cites:

6. This knowledge, Idea of each particular thing that comes to exist, is, we say the soul of this particular thing.

7. Each and every particular thing that comes to exist becomes such through motion and rest. …

8. From this proportion of motion and rest, then, there comes to exist also this body of ours, of which … there must exist a knowledge, Idea, etc. in the thinking thing. This Idea, knowledge, etc., is also our soul. …

12. So if such a body has and preserves its proportion –say of 1 to 3—the soul and body will be like ours now are; they will, of course, be constantly subjectto change, but not to such great change that it goes beyond the limits of 1 to 3; and as much as it changes, the soul also changes each time. …

14. But if other bodies act on ours with such forcethat the proportion of motion [to rest] cannot remain 1 to 3, that is death, and a destruction of the soul, insofar as it is only an Idea, knowledge, etc. of a body having the proportion of motion and rest.2

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Adler concludes that in both Spinoza’s Short Treatise account

and Alexander’s account, “the soul comes to be when the

elements composing the body are mixed in a certain

quantitative proportion.”3 And of course the scandalous

corollary of the Alexandrian position, not lost on later

Jewish philosophers and others in that tradition, was that,

on that basis, it could be argued that an individual’s soul

perishes with the body – a consequence that Spinoza both

embraces and finds a dualistic answer to in the Short Treatise.

The implications for psychic functioning of the

proportion theory become even clearer when we follow Adler

again in his illumination of the Galenic psychophysical

account lurking just beneath explicit formulation. Galenic

medicine was based on harmonizing the four humors (blood,

phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile), which were also the

bases of personality types (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric,

and melancholic). So the four humors provided not only an

account of illness in terms of bodily imbalances but also a

character psychology. Both health and mental health depended

upon harmonizing psychophysical components. Adler points

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out that we now know that Spinoza attended lectures in

medicine at Leiden. He goes on to recount how Spinoza, in a

Cartesian modernizing modification, came to reduce the four

humors to two, identifying them as motion and rest. Susan

James points out that Spinoza’s ratio of motion and rest is

a new seventeenth century version of the ancient notion of

equilibrium.4 Adler then provides evidence and argument

that the ‘ratio’ Spinoza refers to (inspired by Alexander of

Aphrodisias) is integrated into a Galenic account of the

harmony or balance at the basis of temperament per se and as

specified in the particular balances that produce unique

temperaments.5 So Spinoza’s sources, the traditions of

Alexander and Galen, both offer engaging theories of the

forces operating in physical objects that Spinoza recruits

and is struggling with in the early treatise. By the time

of the writing of the Ethics, we discover that Spinoza has

transformed the account of physical objects so that it is

far better integrated. It no longer represents one stand

out option against another from a different set of sources –

Leone Hebreo and a certain Platonist or Avicennian tendency

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in Maimonides come to mind as inspiring the transcendent

love of God side.

So the first thing we see when we look at the Ethics

passages on proportion and ratio is that Spinoza has

developed an account of embodied Nature as component objects

nested within others to infinity. Nature as Body now has a

scope as wide and eternal as Nature in Thought. In

addition, the simple theory of the soul as uniting to the

world of things through its own body’s corporeal passions

or, alternatively, to the eternal world of ideas through the

love of God, has been replaced with a much more embodied

account of the mind, one that integrates features of bodily

proportion and ratio into mind or psyche itself. It is to

some features of the taking up organic processes into mind

to which I now turn for the rest of this paper.

As we know, Spinoza in the early Short Treatise maintained

that all thinking was passive but in the later Ethics,

Spinoza has come to hold that Imagination is passive but

Ratio and Intuition are active. I propose here that

Spinoza’s rethinking of mind as conatus with the capacity

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for achieving an active psychophysical engagement with the

world captures and expresses mentally the dynamic character

of the harmony of objects, which the earlier account of

cognitive passivity and the choice between two loves of the

Short Treatise did not. Spinoza has not yet in the latter, it

seems, come up with an account that fully biologizes the

mind, while maintaining its mental character. In the

earlier work, the mind is passive to the body, suggesting a

kind of proto-psychobiology; but the mind is also

independent of the body in its figuring of universal content

as the love of the mental detached from its actual source in

discrete objects. The Ethics, however, captures the person as

a single process described in two ways, physically and

mentally, both expressing the common character of dynamic

self-maintenance and self-ordering, the conatus of mind and

body as one thing. The conatus theory replaces the earlier

mythic account of the two opposing loves.

With the theory of the activity of mind (as well as of

body), Spinoza is now able to maintain that the body and

mind both engage in (and are defined by) an ongoing process

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of ordering and connecting things/ideas, an account of mind-

body precluded by the earlier exclusively mental passivity

to body or to God, take your pick. Second, the theory of

Activity, of active conatus, provides a way to maintain and

reconcile the mental individuation of subjects (of minds),

and not just the physical individuation of objects, with

their universality defined as their place in, universal

constitution by, and explanation via Nature. That

reconciliation had been impossible on the mental level

according to the theory of the Short Treatise, since mental

passivity would imply the subsuming of mental individuation

in universality and an ultimate overriding of the individual

mind. In the Ethics, however, Intuition is characterized by

the singular perception being reconceived actively within

its complete causal explanation within God or Nature. “The

mind can bring it about,” Spinoza writes (E Vp14), “that all

the affections of the body [that’s the definition of the

emotions, by the way]… be related to the idea of God.”

Moreover, “[h]e who clearly and distinctly understands

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himself and his emotions loves God, and the more so the more

he understands himself and his emotions” (E V p. 15).

Hence the Ethics account, in contrast with that of the

Short Treatise, solves the problem of individual immortality

(although not of individual perdurance), and it does so in

both Extension and Thought insofar as the nested components

and homeodynamic internal and eternal self-ordering of

universal Nature as universal individual finds expression in

Intuition (as well as in material nature). In Extension,

nesting cashes out as the relation of component bodies

within bodies to infinity, while in Thought, the model is

internalized: the individual as the experience of the

singular body nests itself within its explanatory infinity

of causes, now constituted or reconstituted by and within

one’s own mind. We might gloss this as the view (and the

feel) of the universe from this unique spot, which I occupy.

Delving into some of the Aristotelian background of

Spinoza’s concept of Activity may help us understand how and

why it does so much work for him.

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Turning to Activity and Passivity in the Seventeenth Century

Susan James, in Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth

Century Philosophy (Oxford, 1997) traces the dichotomy of

activity/passivity to its origins in Aristotle’s causal

model of an active formal principle and a passive matter or

material principle. Then James delineates the ways

seventeenth century philosophers broke with Aristotelian

metaphysics and physics–in particular jettisoning the

theories of formal-substantial essences and of final

causality. Nevertheless, they retained the passive/active

dichotomy transforming it in the light of the new

mechanistic science, especially in theories of the emotions.

On the Aristotelian account, emotions were thought to

span body and soul and were held to be states of body and

soul as a composite; they were bodily changes with their

accompanying feelings.6 The Aristotelian psycho-physical

account of the emotions was retained by seventeenth century

mechanical theorists along with the distinction between

active and passive. The Aristotelian tradition had located

the emotions in the ‘sensitive’ part of the soul, the part

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devoted to perception and appetite. While the 17th century

philosophers followed the Stoics in rejecting discrete parts

or faculties of the soul each with its separate function,

they nevertheless retained the Aristotelian understanding of

perception and appetite as representing two types of

receptive posture toward the external world.

Descartes’ Account of Activity and Passivity

For Descartes, passive and active characterize the

poles of relation of a unified soul to its body. All the

functions of the soul were thought to be aspects of its

conscious thinking--understanding, willing, imagining,

remembering, sensing, and emotional feelings. The union of

body and mind is a relation of agent and patient, or patient

and agent--and complex permutations thereof. Thus passivity

and activity identify the direction of causality between

body and mind in any given behavior. The passivity of one is

necessarily inversely proportional to the activity of the

other, since it indicates both the source of the impetus of

the given motion and its recipient. Descartes held that

willing and understanding occur in the soul alone and thus

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represent its activity, whereas some other modes of thinking

--sense perception, the passions, some memories and

imaginings-- result from interactions of mind and body.7

Thoughts are either passions or actions depending on whether

they originate in the soul and are initiated by it—these are

the “volitions”--or originate outside it and are thus

passively received and represented by it—these are the

“passions.”8 Thus for Descartes –and for Spinoza who comes

to follows his lead on this in the Ethics--passion and action

designate internal psychic states of relative mental weakness or strength in

initiating thoughts. (In contrast with the Short Treatise where

thought is always passive and the body in Ratio displayed a

kind of initiative or activity.) For Descartes (but not for

Spinoza) when the body affects the soul, the soul is

passive, and vice versa. Spinoza came to follow Descartes

in holding that cognitive passivity consists in the mind’s

determination in part by its own past experiences. It is

that aspect of it that was thought to be open to

modification for both philosophers.9

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Descartes’ theory of the passions draws a line between

our passive perceptions and our active volitions. Our

perceptual passivity and our passions thus expose part of us

as, in a sense, exterior to what is the ‘true’ locus of self.

The activity/passivity dichotomy redraws the boundary

between self and other, self and world, and relocates it

within the customary bounds of the person—the skin. Since

only volitions are identified by Descartes as truly ‘our

own,’ or ourselves, what counts as the self is radically

narrowed for him–a solution with Stoic echoes. For it is

the will alone, according to Descartes, that makes us able

to have some control over the often-unsettling waves of

emotion that arise. The will is the movement that the mind’s

judgment initiates. It reverses the direction of passivity

from the mind’s pervasion by painful passions to its mastery

of them. Volition is the activity of the mind, par excellence, for

Descartes. Virtue thus consists in judging what is best and

then acting with complete resolve on those judgments. Our

virtue is our strength of will.10 Active emotions, that is

emotions that originate strictly within the soul as if the

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soul were without connection to the body, are the ideal for

Descartes.11 Descartes’ active virtue suggests a kind of

psychological independence from external circumstance--a

Stoic virtue--that will also characterize Spinoza’s account

of virtue as activity. Yet for Spinoza activity does not,

of course, originate in the freedom of the will.

Spinoza’s Account of Activity and Passivity

Perhaps it is Descartes’ theory of an active mind as

the source of virtue that inspired Spinoza to reject his

former theory of the mind’s ubiquitous passivity either to

the body or to God. Nevertheless, while Spinoza comes to

identify ‘activity’ with virtue, he rejects Descartes’

account of virtue as the exercise of mental will over one’s

body and world,12 and also, of course, he comes to reject in

the Ethics the Cartesian dualism of mind and body locked in a

struggle for dominance.13 Spinoza breaks with the Cartesian

theory in that for him active and passive come to be

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attributable to body and mind as one entity. They are active

or passive as the relative condition of a single thing in

relation to its environment and not as a composite entity in

never-ending internal and external struggle. “Because mind

and body are the same thing described under different

attributes,” Susan James remarks, “they can only act or be

acted on together.”14

Spinoza replaced Descartes’ theory of an active mental

capacity to exercise will power over a passive body (and

thereby over the external world) with a theory of an active

striving toward psycho-physical self-organization and self-

coherence in all organic beings. Here we see Spinoza

recruiting and integrating Alexandrian Aristotelian and

Galenian theories, into a reclaimed Aristotelian

Active/Passive distinction. Spinoza also integrated into

this account both the Aristotelian theory of the necessary

self-causality of God and his doctrine of the conatus. The

latter notion was adapted in part from Hobbes’ materialist

conception of a basic human striving for power, the power to

maintain bodily stability in the face of external

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onslaught.15 In this Spinoza was influenced by both Hobbes’

and Descartes’ understanding of an inertial power16 inherent

in things to resist being destroyed by external forces.17 He

of course identifies the conatus as each individual thing’s

essence,18 glossing it as desire,19 the desire of the

organism as a whole, manifested in both physical and mental

expressions, to resist the external forces of

disintegration. It is at once a self-organizing principle

and an erotic self-self and self-other relation. The desire

expresses itself in thought with the same causal necessity

and order it does in extension.

Echoes of Aristotle

Spinoza followed Aristotle in adopting an understanding

of human well being, as a type of ‘activity’ that fulfills

the whole person. “Actuality ” or Activity, Aristotle

claims, is a process whose end is the perfected process

itself and not a state of affairs external to that process.

The means is not different in kind from the end, he argues,

but means and end coincide and the means is retained in the

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end and is intrinsic to it in fulfilling the process. In

the Nicomachean Ethics and in the Metaphysics Aristotle writes:

That movement in which the end is present is an action. E.g., at the same time, we are seeing and have seen, are understanding and have understood, are thinking and have thought … we areliving well and have lived well, and are happy andhave been happy …Of these processes, then, we mustcall the one set movements, and the other actualities.

(Met. IX, 6, 1048b17-34; see NE I, 1, 1094a1-6). See [13].)20

In Aristotle’s biological model, each type of thing or

species and also each practice has an activity proper to

itself which is perfected in its highest functioning. His

notion of activity is a dynamic steady state and neither

static nor an external goal. Aristotle goes on to

characterize every species (and also all professions) as

each having its own good, which is its intrinsic end and

characteristic activity or function, and this includes the

human species.21 The achievement of a characteristic

process, its coming to full actuality or activity, defines,

for Aristotle, the good. As a consequence Aristotle defines

a different good for each natural species, and also for

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different human practices. Human beings also have an

overriding good as a species, which is, of course, reason.

(J)ust as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the ‘well’ isthought to reside in the function, … Human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

Virtue is defined by a normative activity, which is in

a state of dynamic well-being characterized by maximal

functioning. Activity also designated the perfecting and

perfection of what Aristotle identified as the formal

dimension of things and even of God. With God in mind,

Aristotle added to his understanding of a characteristic

normative activity the claim of self-causation and self-

sufficiency, attributions only appropriate to God, who alone

is complete cause and self-causing. All other beings are

partially caused, that is, passive—both brought into being

and impinged upon—to causes external to themselves as well

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as self-caused by their internal natures whose ends are the

well functioning of their defining activities.

Spinoza observes, as Aristotle does not appear to, that

if God alone is fully self-caused, all other beings are not

merely dependent upon God for their existence, i.e., upon an

efficient causal series outside themselves, but also cannot

exercise their internal nature freely, for they are

prevented from doing that by the impingement of external

beings and circumstances upon them. This inherent human

passivity and weakness in the face of the external world

Spinoza takes as his central problem (E4P3&4). Yet Spinoza

turns to Aristotle’s own theory of activity to solve this

problem by proposing that the divine activity, in contrast

with species-specific activities, is both immanent in all

things and transcendent.22 Hence, not only is the content

of reason the same in God or Nature and in the human being

and is that which unites them, as Aristotle claimed, but for

Spinoza it is the activity that is one and the same in God and

in the world, or as he puts it, ‘Nature is everywhere the

same’ and ‘the order of things is the same as the order of

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ideas’. In emphasizing the identity in process (mental and

physical) of God and the world over the identity in rational

content of the human mind and God’s mind, as Aristotle

did,23 and as Spinoza did in the Short Treatise, Spinoza in the

Ethics solves the problem of how human beings can (in

principle) participate fully in the divine activity, which

for Spinoza constitutes their freedom.

Building partially upon Aristotle, Spinoza proposes an

account of human well-functioning and well-being that aims

to render body and mind active together, through the

transformation of a person’s psychophysical state, which is

to say, through the activation of that which he held (like

Aristotle) spans body and mind, namely, the emotions. In

using the active power of rational (that is, intuitive)

thinking to trace the causes of one’s own emotions, one’s

own mind would become active, initiating and internalizing

(as constitutive of oneself) its own causal series, thereby

integrating what had been external causes into ourselves and

ourselves ultimately into Nature as expressions of nature.

Imaginative cognition, in contrast, retained externality in

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its operation, in its passivity to external determination by

associations that are those of the external world, now taken

in as one’s own mind’s content and process. But when it came

to active intuitive thinking, each of us, our body and mind

as one entity, could internally integrate the world in the

discovery of our own causal constitution to infinity, at the

same time conatively striving to maintain our mind’s

coherence as well as the body’s—a dynamic equilibrium

metaphorically captured by the notion of maintaining a Ratio

or one’s own unique Proportion, which captures for Spinoza a

psychophysical internal power of self-ordering coherence in

body and mind, and also as nested within universal nature.

When functioning optimally the mind actively integrates in a

self-ordering dynamic process its expanding and unified

account of its own causes. The body at the same time enacts

its own integrity or activity, its maximal well-functioning,

in its enactment of its own proportion or ratio, which

integrates changing environmental conditions into itself and

itself within its infinite nested natural expanse.

Spinoza’s notion of activity thus brings together a number

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of disparate elements, some of which recall the Aristotelian

proto-biological account of virtue and its later development

in the Aristotelian tradition.

THE END

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“If the parts composing an Individual become greater or less, but in sucha proportion [proportione] that they all keep the same ratio [rationem] of motion and rest to each other as before, then the Individual will likewise retainits nature as before, without any change of form.”

(Ethics II p13Lemma 5)

“If certain bodies composing an Individual are compelled to alter the motion they have from one direction to another, but so that they continue their motions and communicate them to each other in the same ratio [ratione] as before, the Individual will likewise retain its nature without any change of form.”

(Ethics II p13Lemma 6)

“In proportion as a Body is more capable than others of doing many things at once, or being acted on in many way at once, so its Mind is more capable than others of perceiving many things at once. And in proportion as the actions of a body depend more on itself alone, and as other bodies concur with it less in acting, so its mind is more capable of understanding distinctly.”

(Ethics II p13s)

“[W]e see how a composite Individual can be affected in many ways, and still preserve its own nature. So far we have conceived an Individual which is composed only of bodies which are distinguished from one another only by motion and rest, speed and slowness, i.e., which is composed of the simplest bodies. But if we should now conceive of another composed of a number of Individuals of a different nature, we shall find that it can be affected in a great many ways, and still preserve its nature. …

(Ethics II p13Lemma 7s)

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1 Quoted in Jacob Adler in “Mortality of the Soul from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Spinoza,” in Steven Nadler, editor, Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, chapter 1. Pp. 13 – 35): Adler p. 252 Quoted in Adler: pp.13-143 Adler, p. 254 EIIP13 Lemma3 Ax. 2Def. and Lemma55 See Adler’s essay for an extended argument and evidence about the origin of Spinoza’s account of the ‘ratio of motion and rest’ as producing and maintaining individuals and individuation, in the work of the third century C.E. Aristotelian philosopher and commentator on Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias.6

Passion and Action, 657 Passion and Action, 918 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 17 quoted in Passion and Action, 919 So, too, Beyssade, in “De L’émotion Intérieure chez Descartes à l’Affect Actif

Spinoziste” (in E. M. Curley and P. F. Moreau, eds., Spinoza: Issues and Directions (E.J.

Brill: Leiden/New York /Kobenhavn /Köln: 1990), 18010 Passion and Action, 19911 Beyssade, 18112 Passion and Action, 124 - 12513 Passion and Action, 152: “There is … a further crucial connotation of the

opposition between activity and passivity which is all but obliterated in Spinoza’s

philosophy: the association of mind with activity and passivity with body. … [T]his

remained influential among those mechanical philosophers who conceived bodies,

including human ones, as passive because they have no power to move themselves, and

who contrasted this feature of the material world with the capacity of human minds

to will. For Spinoza, however, there can be no such asymmetry. The body and mind

are one thing viewed under two attributes. Moreover, the conatus is a single power

manifested in both attributes; whatever bodily events constitute the body’s

striving to persevere in its being are matched by ideas that constitute the same

striving in the mind.”14EIII P11 Susan James’s reading agrees with mine here. See Passion and Action, 15515 Passion and Action, 134; and 77 where James writes: “Hobbes … identifies endeavour

with the motion of the internal parts of a body.”

16 Lee Rice comments (private communication) that the “conatus was widely used in

17th century physics for what we now call inertial mass (it was used by Huyghens).

And Spinoza's sense of conatus, or so Gueroult argues, is closer to Huyghens than

to Hobbes. The general law of conatus ("every being tends....") is just the mental

equivalent of the physical law of inertia given following E2P13.”17 See Passion and Action, 77 – 78: “Both philosophers are suggesting that the

internal motions of bodies conform to comparatively stable patterns of motion which

are not necessarily destroyed by impact, so that a body’s capacity to resist change

survives many of its interactions.”18 EIII P7 Lee Rice comments that Spinoza’s claim of the identity of the conatus

with an individual’s essence is “what Einstein calls the central claim. When

reworked by Einstein, it becomes the principle of equivalence (gravitational and

inertial mass are identical) in general relativity. It was the ultimate vindication

of Leibniz/Spinoza over Newton (for whom the two concepts are only equal in force,

but not equivalent).”19 EIII Defs. of the Emotions#120 See also MacIntyre who makes the Aristotelian distinction central to his new concept of ethics as deriving from practices and communities of practice. Practices are those activities whose ends are intrinsic to the means.21 NE X, 5, 1176a3-1022 For other accounts that acknowledge the dynamic quality of Spinoza’s metaphysics see, e.g., [6, chs. 2 & 3], [6.5, 35ff], [8, ch. IV, esp. 48-74], [16, 527-553]. None of these accounts precisely argues, as I do here, that Spinoza claimed the priority of activity over its content, intellectual and material.23 See, e.g., [De Anima, III, 431a1], regarding the identity of knower and known. The identity on the level of process of God and the world is also the innovation upon Aristotle that Hegel adopts in his metaphysics and carries out as the process not only of being but also as the dialectic of coming to be or becoming.