Summary: Ethics (page 2)

Attributes are not independent beings; they have no existence in themselves. By contrast, the subject that bears an attribute—man himself—is a substance. That which cannot be taken away from him without causing his disappearance belongs to his substance.

Substance is what stands beneath accidents (sub = beneath, tenere = to stand).

Since Aristotle, these terms have carried this meaning: man (as substance) possesses various attributes (or accidents), such as beauty, height, or naivety. Spinoza, however, radically overturns this perspective. For him, man is no longer a substance subsisting in itself.

He is, in reality, nothing more than an attribute, an accident, of the only substance that truly exists: God, or in other words, Nature.

Of course, man is not the only one affected by this ontological shift. The totality of being—everything that exists—is nothing more than an attribute of God.

With the Stoics, man was certainly conceived as a mere part of the Whole, the cosmos. However, he still retained the status of a substance among other substances. Here, this is no longer the case.

We can now understand why Spinoza asserts that everything that exists is in God, and nothing can either be or be conceived without God ¹.

God is the cause of all things, but not in the traditional sense—he is not a creator who brings things into being through intellect and infinite will. To attribute such faculties to God is to humanise him. At best, we may grant him these faculties metaphorically, but we must then recognise that both will and intellect, when applied to God, signify something entirely different from what humans ordinarily understand by these terms ². Spinoza makes this point strikingly clear: God's actual will and intellect diverge from our traditional conception of will and understanding just as much as the zodiacal Dog (the constellation Canis Major, or Greater Dog) differs from the animal.

In reality, God is the cause of all things not in the sense that he decides everything, but in the sense that everything necessarily follows from his nature.

Spinoza adopts a resolutely deterministic perspective: for him, every event, far from occurring by chance, arises from a cause, which itself stems from a prior cause, which in turn is merely the effect of an earlier cause, and so on. By tracing this chain of causes back, we inevitably reach the first cause, the cause of itself (causa sui): God.

Thus, every human being, every entity, every event is a necessary effect of God's nature in its historical unfolding. Nothing is contingent; nothing happens by chance:

In the nature of things, there is nothing contingent; rather, everything is determined by the necessity of the divine nature to exist and to act in a precise manner ³.

Spinoza refers to singular things as "contingent"—not in the sense that they occur without cause, but because their cause lies not within themselves but in other causes or subsequent events. Only God is not contingent, for as a self-caused being, he contains his own cause within himself.

Spinoza thus distinguishes between two aspects of nature:
Naturing Nature (natura naturans): God himself, the self-causing principle from which all things arise.
Natured Nature (natura naturata): The totality of attributes and modes generated by this dynamism, which remain within God.

Here is Spinoza’s precise definition of these two terms:
Naturing Nature: That which is in itself and is conceived through itself; in other words, the attributes of substance, which express an eternal and infinite essence.
Natured Nature: Everything that follows from the necessity of God's nature, or from his attributes, or from the modes of his attributes, insofar as they are considered as things that exist in God ⁴.

Since beings flow necessarily from God's perfect nature, they are themselves perfect, as are the events that unfold in the world: Things have been produced by God with supreme perfection, for they necessarily follow from the most perfect nature that exists ⁵.

¹ Part I, prop. 15
² I, prop. 17
³ I, prop. 29
⁴ I, prop. 29, note
⁵ I, prop. 33, note 2