Spinoza, Ilyenkov, and the Ground of Intelligibility

Metaphysics & Epistemology
1

You’re conflating two senses of “starting point” here. When I say rational agency is a starting point, I mean it’s the philosophical starting point for any account of normativity — including yours. I do not mean it has no history, no preconditions, no developmental story. So this objection that you keep raising is engaging with a position I’m not holding.

The point is simple: you can’t get behind the normative operations of inquiry because “going behind” them just is performing them. You want to give a developmental account of how rational agency arose? Great — you will exercise rational agency in doing so. You’ll weigh evidence, assess competing hypotheses, check for coherence. The thing you’re trying to explain is the condition for your ability to explain it. That’s not a claim about chronological priority. Its a claim about the structure of justification.

Compare: you can give an evolutionary account of how eyes developed. That story presupposes optics at every step — you need the laws of light to explain why certain mutations were adaptive. The fact that eyes have an evolutionary history doesn’t make optics something that “needs to be explained” by that history. The theory of optics is part of what makes the evolution of the eye intelligible, not the other way around.

So yes, rational agency has a genesis in evolutionary time. No, that genesis does not undermine its role as normatively basic. These aren’t competing claims.

Is it a promissory note to observe that chemical bonding arises from subatomic particles that don’t themselves bond, or that biological self-replication arises from chemical processes that don’t themselves replicate? You seem to be using “promissory note” to mean “any case where a higher-order property isn’t already present in the lower-order conditions,” and if thats your standard then we might as well say that all of natural science is a promissory note.

Lower-order conditions set the probabilities for higher-order patterns to emerge and sustain themselves. Individual atoms don’t bond, but given enough atoms in the right conditions, bonding becomes probable. Molecules don’t replicate, but given enough complex molecules in the right conditions, self-replication becomes probable. Simple organisms don’t reason, but given enough neural and social complexity, reason becomes probable. At each stage the higher-order pattern is genuinely new — its not something strictly deducible from what was already there — but its emergence is intelligible, not arbitrary.

The demand behind your objection seems to be that either normativity was there all along (your Spinozist option — its a mode of substance) or its appearance is inexplicable. But that’s a false dilemma, and honestly its the same dilemma people have been deploying against emergence since the vitalism debates. It didn’t work then either. The correct response is that “arising from” doesn’t mean “reducible to.” Novel intelligibilies emerge when conditions are right. That’s not a hand wave, that’s simply what we observe happening at every level of the natural world.

I’m not sure the Spinozist move does what you think it does here. You say thought is “always already there in substance, actualized differently in different modes,” and that this tells you where to look — “in the specific mode of organization, in the specific form of activity.” But thats exactly what my account says. The whole point is that whether something thinks depends on its specific form of organization. We agree on that. The question is: what do you gain by adding that thought is an attribute of substance all the way down?

What does it actually explain? You still have to account for why this mode of organization thinks and that one doesn’t. “Thought is an attribute of substance” doesn’t help with that — it just means you’ve got thought somehow present in rocks and thermostats and then have to explain why it only shows up recognizably in certain complex organisms. You’ve traded one explanatory task for a harder one. Instead of explaining how thinking arises from non-thinking substrates (which we observe happening at analgous transitions throughout nature), you now have to also explain how the thinking that is supposedly already in everything manages to be completely invisible until the right organization comes along. That’s not an advantage, that’s two problems instead of one.

Yes, I think thats right — the irreducibility is at the level of intelligibility, not at the level of causal history. Those were never in competition.

Where I think real daylight remains between us is on what follows from this. Because if you accept that the capacity is irreducible at the level of description, then the Spinozist move — thought as an attribute of substance all the way down — becomes unnecessary. You don’t need thought to be “always already there” to explain its emergence, and positing that it is creates more problems than it solves. What you need is exactly what you just described: a universe structured so that higher-order irreducible capacities can develop from lower-order conditions. But that framework doesn’t require Spinoza. I would argue that it sits more comfortably without him.

So the question I’d put back to you is: given that you’ve just conceded the key structural point, what work is substance monism still doing for you?

Philosophy of Mind and of Consciousness
Philosophy of Mind and of Consciousness
2

@EQV

You ask: given that I’ve conceded the key structural point, what work is substance monism still doing for me?

This is the right question. Let me try to answer it honestly rather than defensively.

Your emergence account says: thinking arises from non-thinking substrates when conditions are right. Chemical bonding from particles that don’t bond. Replication from molecules that don’t replicate. Thinking from organisms that don’t think. At each level, the higher-order pattern is genuinely new and irreducible. No hand-waving — this is what we observe.

Here is what Spinoza does that emergence does not.

Emergence accepts the framing of the hard problem and offers an answer: thinking arises from non-thinking at the right level of organization. Spinoza dissolves the framing: thinking never arises from non-thinking, because thinking is an attribute of the same substance that is extended. The question “how does consciousness arise from unconscious matter?” is malformed — not because the answer is hard, but because the question assumes a gap that does not exist.

Your optics analogy is good, and I want to use it against you. You say: optics explains why certain mutations were adaptive in the evolution of eyes. The laws of light were already there — they did not need to “emerge.” The evolution of eyes is intelligible because we already understand optics. Now: if the “laws of thought” — the structural correspondence between extended processes and their intelligible form — are also already there, then the development of thinking organisms is intelligible in the same way. Not because thinking “pops up” at the right level of complexity, but because the intelligibility of the world was a structural feature of reality all along, and organisms that actualize it are doing what substance always made possible.

Emergence says: at the right level, thinking appears. But why? “That’s what we observe” is a description, not an explanation. Spinoza says: because the attribute of thought structurally mirrors the attribute of extension. Every extended process has a corresponding intelligible form. When an organism becomes complex enough to grasp that form — through practical activity, through cultural mediation — it actualizes what was always structurally there.

You say I’ve traded one problem for two: instead of explaining how thinking arises, I also have to explain why it’s invisible in rocks. But the “thinking” that Spinoza attributes to substance is not experience, not feeling, not consciousness in the phenomenal sense. It is intelligibility — the fact that the rock has a complete logical description, that reality has structure. The rock does not feel its own intelligibility. But the intelligibility is real — and when an organism grasps it, that grasping is not the creation of something from nothing. It is the actualization of something that was structurally guaranteed.

So here is what substance monism does for me: it makes emergence intelligible instead of brute. Your emergence account works as description. Spinoza provides the reason why it works.

But I want to be honest about the cost. If I am wrong about this — if emergence really is self-explanatory and needs no deeper ground — then Spinoza is indeed unnecessary weight. You will have to show me that “arising from” is not just a redescription of the hard problem at a different level. Because “chemical bonding arises from particles that don’t bond” is intelligible only because we have physics that explains bonding. “Thinking arises from organisms that don’t think” is intelligible only if we have something that explains thinking. Emergence says: the explanation is the organization. Spinoza says: the explanation is the structure of reality that makes the organization possible.

Which of these is more parsimonious depends on whether you think “the organization explains it” is a terminus or a way station.

@Meta_U

You say the will to participate is the true cause, and social relations are merely incidental.

But where does the will come from? The Zagorsk child did not will to use a spoon. The adult imposed spoon-use. The child’s will to eat with a spoon appeared after the activity, not before. The Inquisition example proves my point, not yours: people revolt when social demands contradict their formed will — a will that was itself formed by prior social practice. The revolutionary was first a citizen. The heretic was first a believer. The will that rebels is not a will from nowhere — it is a will shaped by the very society it now opposes. That is dialectics.

3

Intention inheres within every living being. That is why they are all seen to act with purpose.

The Zagorsk child did will to use the spoon, or else the spoon would never have been used by the child. A being cannot use a tool without willing to. “Use” implies a willful act.

The adult showed the child how to use the spoon, and perhaps threatened the child with punishment (use of force) if the child did not. Nevertheless, if the child did not choose to use the spoon it would not have used the spoon. It may have done a hunger strike and died, even resisting the use of force.

How does “The child’s will to eat with a spoon appeared after the activity, not before.” make any sense to you? Does the will to do any activity ever arrive after the activity? Does my will to walk to the store appear after I’ve walked to the store?

This is blatantly false. If the parents do not raise their children as believers they are not believers. This enables their capacity to be heretic, without first being a believer. You are just making stuff up, reaching for straws, in an attempt to support your position.

And this is nothing but determinist nonsense. “Formed will” makes no sense, as if the free will which a person is born with, is already constrained by social practise, prior to the individual’s birth. If this were the case, the individual would have no capacity to carry out acts which are contrary (wrong) in relation to the prior social practise.

4

Yes. Thinking and consciousness are different things.

5

You say that Spinoza dissolves the framing of the hard problem by making “thinking” an attribute of substance, but look at what else you say:

OK. But if “thinking” doesn’t include any of the stuff that the hard problem wants explained — experiencing, understanding, judging and deciding — then you’re still left with the question how all of that stuff arises from a substrate that can’t do any of it. And if your answer is “organization”, then you’re really just proposing emergence as the solution after all.

Look at how you have re-defined “thought” in your account:

Its been redefined as intelligibility. But if that’s all you mean, then we agree completely and Spinoza’s dual-attribute monism is adding nothing. Yes, reality is intelligible. Yes, the laws that govern bonding are “already there” before anyone discovers them. Yes, the organization of a thinking brain actualizes structural possibilities inherent in the way the universe works. None of that requires calling intelligibility “thought” or packaging it as an attribute of substance. You’ve essentially translated Spinoza into a claim about the intelligibility of the real, which is just… true, and I heartily affirm it.

I don’t see how this cuts against my position. The laws of light don’t need to be called an “attribute of substance” to do their explanatory work. They’re intelligible relations that we discover, verify, and apply. Same with the conditions under which thinking emerges. When we understand why this organization produces thought — what the relevant neural, social, developmental conditions are — we’ve explained it. The explanation is the intelligiblity we’ve grasped. Asking “but what grounds the intelligibility?” is either answered by pointing to further intelligible relations (which is just more inquiry) or it’s a question that no framework answers, including Spinoza’s.

I think you need to be more precise about what you’re asking for when you say “why.”

When a physicist explains why water freezes at 0°C, she specifies the conditions — molecular kinetics, hydrogen bonding, energy thresholds — and shows how, given those conditions, crystallization occurs. That is the explanation. There isn’t some further “why” lurking behind it. If you ask “but why do those conditions produce crystallization?” she gives you more intelligible relations — deeper physics. And so on. Explanation bottoms out in grasped intelligible relations. Thats not a deficiency. Thats what explanation is.

Now apply this to thinking. We specify the conditions — neural complexity, social insertion, language, etc. — and show how cognitional operations emerge given those conditions. You want something more. But what? Spell it out. What would an answer look like that satisfied you?

The word “structurally mirrors” is where the Spinozist framing is supposed to be doing something extra, and I don’t think it is. What does it mean for thought to “mirror” extension? Either it means every extended thing actually thinks in some sense — which you’ve already retreated from by redefining thought as intelligibility rather than experience — or it means every extended thing is in principle intelligible, which is just the claim that reality can be understood, and isn’t distinctively Spinozist. You can’t have it both ways. If the rock’s “thought” is just the fact that it has a complete logical description, then you’ve abandonded the interesting Spinozist thesis and kept only the trivial one.

I think what’s happening is that Spinoza is functioning for you as a kind of reassurance — a guarantee that intelligibility goes “all the way down.” But you don’t need a guarantee. You just need to keep inquiring and keep finding intelligible answers. And we do. That’s not a promissory note, its a track record, and its the only evidence that could ever be relevant to the question anyway.

6

@EQV

You are right that I deflated. In my last post I redefined “thought” as intelligibility — as the fact that reality has structure — and then tried to pass this off as the Spinozist thesis. That was not Spinoza. That was a retreat into something everyone already accepts.

Let me try again without the retreat.

You say: explanation terminates in grasped intelligible relations. The physicist explains why water freezes by specifying conditions — molecular kinetics, hydrogen bonding, energy thresholds — and showing how crystallization occurs given those conditions. That is the explanation. There is no further “why.”

I want to press on the word “intelligible.”

What does it mean for a relation to be intelligible? It means it can be grasped by an act of understanding. Not that it is regular, not that it is lawful, not that it follows a pattern — all of those can exist without anyone understanding them. “Intelligible” means: graspable by a mind. It is a relational concept. One term of the relation is the structure of the thing. The other term is the capacity to understand.

When you say “explanation terminates in grasped intelligible relations,” you are already standing inside the capacity to understand. You are using thought to explain thought. And you know this — in your earlier post you called rational agency a philosophical starting point that cannot be gotten behind. Fair enough. But notice what follows: if you cannot get behind rational agency, and if intelligibility is defined by its relation to rational agency, then “the universe is intelligible” is not a free-standing fact about the universe. It is a fact about the universe-plus-the-capacity-to-understand-it. The two come as a package.

That package is what Spinoza calls substance with two attributes.

You say I cannot have it both ways — either every rock thinks (panpsychism) or every rock is merely intelligible (trivial). But there is a third option that I failed to articulate last time. The rock does not think. The rock does not experience its own intelligibility. But the rock’s intelligibility is not an accidental feature of the rock that happens to be useful when minds come along. It is a constitutive feature of the same reality that also produces minds. Thought and extension are not two things that happen to line up. They are two descriptions of one thing — and the fact that they line up is not a coincidence to be explained but a structural identity to be acknowledged.

You say: you do not need a guarantee that intelligibility goes all the way down. You just need to keep inquiring. But “keep inquiring” presupposes that inquiry will keep working — that the next question will have an intelligible answer. On what basis? You say: track record. But a track record is inductive evidence, not an explanation. The scientist who has found intelligible answers for a thousand questions has no reason, on your account, to expect the thousand-and-first — except habit. Spinoza gives you the reason: intelligibility is constitutive of substance. It is not a lucky streak. It is the structure of reality.

Is this falsifiable? Yes. If inquiry fails permanently — if we hit a level of reality that is not merely unknown but unknowable — then Spinoza is wrong and you are right that there was never a guarantee. I accept this risk. Do you accept the corresponding one — that “just keep inquiring” might be an article of faith dressed as modesty?

7

@Evald

Let me clarify my position, because there seems to be some confusion on the question of intelligibility.

I absolutely hold that intelligibility is intrinsic to reality. It’s not projected onto things by minds, its not a construction, its not something that needs to be “accounted for after the fact.” The structure of the universe is intelligible whether or not anyone is around to grasp it. So if that’s what you are saying, then we agree on that entirely.

Where I balk is at the move from “intelligibility is intrinsic to reality” to “therefore intelligibility is an attribute of substance alongside extension.” That second claim is doing something very specific in Spinoza’s system — it’s asserting a structural parallelism between thought and extension as co-equal attributes. And I don’t see why the first claim requires the second. You can hold that reality is intrinsically intelligible without adopting the two-attribute framework. You just say: being is intelligible. Thats a feature of being as such, not one attribute of a substance that also has another attribute called extension.

The Spinozist packaging actually obscures something important. On the dual-aspect picture, intelligibility and extension run in parallel across the whole of substance. Every mode of extension has a corresponding mode of thought. The relationship is exhaustive and flat — there’s no level at which intelligibility is more or less actualized, just different modes of the same structural correspondence. This is why you keep having to thin out “thought” to mean something like “having a logical description” when we get to rocks. The parallelism demands it.

The hylomorphic alternative says something different. Intelligibility is intrinsic to reality, but it’s layered. You have a lower-order manifold — matter, potency, substratum, whatever you want to call it — that is genuinely intelligible, but whose intelligibility underdetermines what higher-order forms can organize it. Physics is intelligible on its own terms. But the intelligibility of physics doesn’t contain or predict the intelligibility of biology. When biological forms emerge that organize physical and chemical processes into self-replicating systems, that’s a genuinely new intelligibility — a higher-order form that is realized by but is not reducible to the forms below it.

So both say intelligibility is intrinsic. But the dual-aspect version distributes it uniformly across everything, while the hylomorphic version says intelligibility comes in irreducibly different levels that build on each other. And this is exactly why the emergence debate between us keeps going in circles. On your framework genuine emergence is actually hard to accomodate — if thought already mirrors extension all the way down, then what’s new when an organism starts thinking? You have to say “actualization,” but actualization of what was already structurally there isn’t really emergence. On the hylomorphic picture, the emergence is real because higher-order forms are genuinely new — not contained in the lower order, not a second description of it, but a new intelligible achievement that the lower order made possible without specifying.

This also matters for the question you raised about feral children with another user, actually. You wanted to say the social ensemble is what activates the brain. On the dual-aspect picture its hard to say why, because the brain already “has” its thought-aspect regardless of social insertion. On the hylomorphic picture it makes perfect sense: the neural substrate is a necessary lower-order manifold, but the higher-order form — rational subjectivity — requires additional conditions (social, cultural, linguistic) to emerge. The form isn’t lurking in the matter waiting to be switched on. Its genuinely new when it arrives.

In any event, it seems like we’re both trying to arrive at the same conclusion via different routes.

8

@EQV

We converge on intrinsic intelligibility. But I do not think we arrive at the same place, and the remaining difference matters.

You propose that intelligibility is layered — physics does not contain biology, biology does not contain rational subjectivity. Each higher level is a genuinely new intelligible achievement. This is a real insight and I want to take it seriously.

But the hierarchy you describe does not require abandoning Spinoza for hylomorphism. Spinoza’s system already contains a hierarchy — not of forms, but of modes. A rock is a simple mode of extension. An organism is a composite mode — a pattern of simpler modes organized to maintain itself. A human being embedded in culture, language, and accumulated practice is a qualitatively different mode — not because a new form descends from outside, but because the organization has reached a level of complexity where the corresponding mode of thought includes self-reference.

The physical digression in Ethics Part II describes exactly this: bodies differ in complexity, and the mind corresponding to a more complex body is capable of more. The hierarchy is real. The levels are irreducible — you cannot derive the intelligibility of biology from physics alone. But they are all modes of one substance, and their intelligibility is guaranteed by the attribute of thought, even if their specific form is not predetermined.

So I can accommodate your insight — genuinely new levels of organization, irreducible intelligibility at each level — within the two-attribute framework. The question is whether you can accommodate mine within hylomorphism.

Here is what I think you cannot accommodate: the guarantee. On your account, each new level of intelligibility is a genuine achievement — wonderful but contingent. The universe might never have produced life. It might never have produced thinking. These are happy outcomes, not structural necessities. On Spinoza’s account, the universe will produce thinking — not this specific thinking, not at this specific time, but thinking as such — because the attribute of thought structurally guarantees that sufficiently complex modes of extension will have correspondingly complex modes of thought. The hierarchy is built into the architecture.

This matters concretely. You mentioned feral children. On your account, rational subjectivity is a new form that requires social conditions to emerge — the form is not lurking in the brain. Ilyenkov agrees: the form is not in the brain. It is in the social ensemble — the culture, language, tools that reshape the child from outside. But on Spinoza’s framework, this is not a new form descending. It is the mode of extension becoming more complex (brain plus social ensemble plus cultural practice), and the corresponding mode of thought becoming more complex with it. The thought does not lurk. The correspondence does.

You say we arrive at the same conclusion by different routes. I think we arrive at different conclusions about the same facts. Your conclusion: thinking is a contingent achievement of a universe that did not have to produce it. Mine: thinking is a structural necessity of a universe that cannot permanently exist without it. If thinking is contingent, then this conversation is a cosmic accident. If thinking is necessary, then this conversation is what substance does when it reaches the level of complexity at which its own modes argue about its nature.

9

Consciousness and thinking are different things.

10

I’d like to concentrate on what Spinoza means by “thought.” It doesn’t refer to the contents of individual minds, but to the order of ideas as such—the intrinsic intelligibility of reality.

But if that’s right, then intelligibility is not something guaranteed at higher levels of complexity. It is already implicit in the very being of subjects—not subjects as individual persons, but subjectivity as such.

In that light, the “one substance” begins to look less like a neutral underlying reality and more like a unified field of intelligibility or awareness—something closer to what is described in analytic idealism, or in contemporary presentations of Advaita Vedānta.

On that reading, the hierarchy you describe—of increasing complexity and corresponding cognitive capacity—is real enough. But it does not explain the emergence of thought. Rather, it reflects degrees in which an already intrinsic intelligibility becomes explicit. The issue is not how thought is generated, but how it is expressed.

As my lecturer in Indian philosophy used to say, ‘what is latent becomes patent’.

11

@Evald

You say the levels of intelligibility are irreducible and that “their specific form is not predetermined.” But Spinoza is an absolute determinist. Every mode follows necessarily from prior modes and ultimately from substance itself. E1P29: “Nothing in nature is contingent, but all things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain way.” There is no room in Spinoza for genuinely undetermined outcomes. Every specific form is predetermined — that’s the whole point of the system.

So when you say you can accommodate genuinely new, irreducible levels of organization within the two-attribute framework — I don’t think Spinoza agrees with you. On his account, the emergence of biological organization from chemistry is not a genuinely novel achievement. It follows necessarily from prior modes, which follow necessarily from substance. The appearance of novelty is just our ignorance of the complete causal chain. E1P33: “Things could not have been produced by God in any other manner or order than that in which they were produced.”

What you’ve actually done is graft something like emergentist metaphysics onto Spinoza’s vocabulary while quietly dropping the strict necessitarianism that makes the system cohere. The Spinoza who allows for irreducible levels whose specific form is “not predetermined” isn’t Spinoza at all. Its a hybrid that takes the parts you like — intrinsic intelligibility, parallelism — and discards the parts that create problems for your argument.

Which is fine I suppose. But then we’re not really debating Spinoza vs hylomorphism anymore. We’re debating two versions of emergentism, and yours is carrying vestigial metaphysical commitments that seem to be hindering rather than helping you.

Also, the dichotomy you posed — cosmic accident or structural necessity — is false. “Contingent” does not mean “accidental.” A contingent outcome can be highly probable without being guaranteed. Given the laws and initial conditions of this universe, the emergence of complexity, life, and eventually thinking may be overwhelmingly probable across cosmological timescales without being structurally necessitated by an attribute of substance. The space between “guaranteed by the architecture” and “a fluke” is enormous, and that’s precisely the space I’m occupying.

And honestly, the desire for a guarantee is doing a lot of the philosophical work here. You want to know that the universe must produce thought — that its not optional, not contingent, not something that could have failed to occur. But why? What does the guarantee buy you that very high probability doesn’t, other than a feeling of metaphysical security? It doesn’t change the science. It doesn’t change the phenomenology. It doesn’t change what we know about how thinking actually develops. It just lets you say “this was always going to happen,” which is comforting but explanatorily idle.

And the guarantee comes at a real cost that you keep sliding past. If the correspondence between extension and thought is structural, then its not just complex organisms that think — everything has a “corresponding mode of thought.” You’ve restricted this to intelligibility rather than experience, but that restriction is doing all the work and (again) its not Spinoza’s. Spinoza’s parallelism doesn’t distinguish between intelligibility-in-principle and actual thinking. You’ve had to introduce that distinction from outside the system to avoid panpsychism, which (again) seems to suggest that the system itself doesn’t have the resources you need.

12

@EQV

You are right that I am not defending Spinoza’s system as Spinoza wrote it. I have been reading Spinoza through Ilyenkov, and Ilyenkov changes what he inherits. This is worth being honest about.

Spinoza is an absolute determinist. E1P29: nothing is contingent. Every mode follows necessarily from prior modes and ultimately from substance. If I say “the specific form is not predetermined,” I am breaking with Spinoza’s necessitarianism, and you are correct to call that out.

Here is what Ilyenkov does with Spinoza — and why I think the modification is an improvement, not a corruption.

Spinoza gives the structure: two attributes, one substance, parallelism. Ilyenkov keeps this and adds development. For Spinoza, all modes are equally necessary and equally actual. For Ilyenkov, modes have history — they develop through real processes (labor, culture, social practice) that are irreducible to their starting conditions. The attribute of thought does not predetermine which specific forms of thinking will emerge, but it guarantees that thinking as such will emerge given sufficient complexity.

This is not Spinoza. It is Spinoza corrected by Marx: the structure of substance is real, but its concrete forms are produced historically, not deduced geometrically. If that makes me an Ilyenkovist rather than a Spinozist, I accept the label.

Now to your substantive challenges.

You say contingent does not mean accidental — that high probability without guarantee occupies the space between. I accept the distinction. But I want to press on what “high probability” rests on. When you say thinking is highly probable given the laws and initial conditions of this universe — what makes it probable? If the answer is “the structure of the laws themselves,” then you are very close to what I mean by guarantee, just without the metaphysical packaging. If the answer is “we observe that it happened, and infer probability from that,” then you have a sample size of one, which is not probability at all.

You ask: what does the guarantee buy me that high probability does not? It buys me an explanation of why inquiry works. You say explanation terminates in grasped intelligible relations. I agree. But you also trust that the next question will have an intelligible answer — not because you have a guarantee, but because you have a track record. I am asking: what grounds the track record? Your answer: nothing grounds it, it just is what we observe. My answer: the structure of substance grounds it. You call this explanatorily idle. I call your refusal to explain it explanatorily modest to the point of abdication.

On panpsychism: you are right that Spinoza’s parallelism does not distinguish between intelligibility-in-principle and actual thinking. I introduced that distinction, and it is not Spinoza’s. It is Ilyenkov’s — the distinction between simple and complex modes, between a rock’s intelligible description and a civilization’s self-referential thought. If this means I have left Spinoza behind on this point, so be it. The question is whether the distinction works, not whether Spinoza authored it.

So here is where we stand. You have shown that my position is not pure Spinoza. It is Spinoza modified by Ilyenkov and Marx — substance with two attributes, but with historical development replacing geometric deduction. I accept this. The question remains: is a universe where thinking is structurally guaranteed (my position) explanatorily richer than one where thinking is highly probable but ungrounded (yours)? You say no — the guarantee buys nothing. I say it buys the same thing that the laws of optics buy for the evolution of eyes: not a prediction of which eyes will develop, but an explanation of why eyes develop at all.

13

@Evald

I see what you’re trying to do, but once you replace geometric deduction with historical development, the two-attribute framework loses its structural force. In Spinoza proper, the parallelism is necessary — every mode of extension has a corresponding mode of thought because substance necessitates it. That’s what “attribute” means in his system. But you’ve made the emergence of specific forms of thinking historical and contingent. So now the “attribute of thought” doesn’t determine anything specific — it just “guarantees that thinking as such will emerge given sufficient complexity.” But what is that guarantee, concretely? Its not Spinoza’s necessitarianism. Its not an empirical claim (you can’t test it). Its a metaphysical postulate that sits on top of exactly the same developmental story I’m telling, but adding nothing to its explanatory content. You’ve got emergentism doing all the actual work and a Spinozist postulate providing the sense of groundedness.

The optics analogy at the end actually illustrates my point. The laws of optics help explain why eyes develop not because they “guarantee” the development of eyes but because, given those laws, organisms with light-sensitive cells have survival advantages, and selection does the rest. The explanation works through specifiable intelligible conditions, not through a metaphysical structural guarantee. Same with thinking — given the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and the conditions of social life, the emergence of thinking becomes probable. The explanation for a given case is the whole chain of intelligible relations. You don’t need dual-aspect monism for that.

With regard to your question — what grounds the track record of explanation? — you say my answer is “nothing grounds it, it just is what we observe”. But that’s not my position. The question “why is reality intelligible at all?” is a real and important question that arises from within inquiry. And both the naturalist answer (“it just is”) and the Spinozist answer (“substance”) are stopping inquiry prematurely. I think the intelligibility of the whole — the fact that there is an intelligible order rather than nothing — points toward a ground of intelligibility that isn’t itself one more intelligible thing within the universe. You are trying to secure this ground with an attribute of substance. I think that actually domesticates it, makes it a feature of the world’s furniture rather than the reason theres furniture at all.

14

@EQV

Now I see where you are going.

You say both the naturalist answer (“intelligibility just is”) and the Spinozist answer (“substance”) stop inquiry prematurely. You say the intelligibility of the whole points toward a ground that is not itself one more intelligible thing within the universe. A ground of intelligibility, not a piece of the furniture but the reason there is furniture at all.

This is the Lonerganian move. The unrestricted desire to know, followed consistently, points beyond any finite intelligible object toward an unrestricted act of understanding. God — not as a being among beings, but as the ground of being’s intelligibility.

I respect the move. It is honest and it follows from your premises. But I want to press on it the same way you pressed on mine.

You say Spinoza’s attribute “domesticates” the ground of intelligibility — makes it a feature of the world rather than its reason. But Spinoza’s substance is not a feature of the world. It IS the world. Substance is not one more entity alongside rocks and minds. It is the only entity — that of which everything else is a mode. When Spinoza says thought is an attribute of substance, he is not adding thought to the furniture. He is saying the furniture thinks.

Your transcendent ground does something different: it places the reason for intelligibility outside the intelligible order. The universe is intelligible because something beyond it makes it so. But this raises the question you asked me: what does the transcendent ground explain that immanent substance does not? You said my guarantee was explanatorily idle. Is your ground not equally idle — a metaphysical postulate that sits beyond all possible experience and adds nothing to the actual work of inquiry?

You will say: the transcendent ground is not idle because it answers the question “why is there an intelligible order rather than nothing?” — a question that immanent substance cannot answer because substance just IS, without reason. Fair enough. But Spinoza would reply: substance does not need a reason because it is causa sui — self-caused. The question “why is there substance?” is malformed because substance is not the kind of thing that could fail to exist. It exists from the necessity of its own nature.

So we arrive at a genuine fork. You say: the intelligibility of the whole points beyond the whole. I say: the intelligibility of the whole IS the whole, understood under the attribute of thought. You go up. I stay in.

Neither of us can prove the other wrong. But I notice that your ground requires something no inquiry can reach — a transcendent act of understanding that is by definition beyond all finite intelligibility. Mine requires only substance — which is what we are already standing in. If parsimony matters, immanence is cheaper than transcendence. If depth matters, transcendence may be richer. That is the real disagreement, and I think it is the one worth having.

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@Evald

You say, following Spinoza, that substance is not a feature within the world but the whole itself — so that intelligibility, under the attribute of thought, simply is the world grasped in a certain way. On the surface, this avoids any “domestication.” But one has to ask: is it adequate to the phenomenology?

And what we find is that what appears is not merely that “there is a world,” nor even that “the world can be described under thought,” but that there is a distinction between (1) what is given and (2) the act by which it is understood as intelligible. Even if, ontologically, you collapse these into one substance, the phenomenological difference does not disappear.

That distinction matters. Because once you attend to it, intelligibility is not just a feature of what is — it is also something that is achieved in acts of understanding. And those acts are normatively structured: they aim at truth, they can succeed or fail, they can be more or less adequate. This is where Lonergan’s move begins, not from an abstract metaphysical postulate, but from the structure of inquiry itself.

And if you follow that structure through without truncation, something interesting happens. Every finite act of understanding grasps a limited intelligibility, but implicitly intends something more. This is not an optional add-on; it is built into what it means to ask a question at all. Every answer, insofar as it is understood as partial, refers beyond itself.

So the question isn’t “why is there something rather than nothing?” but rather: “what is the horizon implicitly operative whenever anything is understood as intelligible?” The immanent account can say: “this is just how substance expresses itself under thought.” But that description leaves untouched the normativity and orientation of the act itself. It redescribes the field; it does not ground the dynamism within it.

This is why the appeal to causa sui does less work than it seems. To say that substance exists from the necessity of its own nature is to simply halt the question at the level of being. But the Lonerganian question is prior in a different sense: what accounts for the unbounded horizon of intelligibility that inquiry anticipates, and that no finite condition satisfies? “Self-caused” names a limit, but it does not illuminate why intelligibility as such is not merely local, fragmentary, or illusory.

From here, the so-called “transcendent ground” is not simply posited as an extra explanatory item, as if one more thing were being added beyond the universe. That would indeed be idle. Rather, it is the terminus implied by the very structure of questioning itself — a limit case in which the act of understanding is no longer finite, no longer partial, no longer conditioned. It is not outside inquiry in the sense of being irrelevant to it; it is what inquiry is open-endedly oriented toward, even if never fully possessed within finite knowing.

So it’s not a matter of “you go up, I stay in.” It more like: you identify intelligibility with the whole as given; I am pointing to the excess operative within every act that grasps at that whole. That excess is not another object within the field, but neither is it reducible to the field’s internal articulation. Transcendence is not “richer” because it adds something more. It’s richer because it attempts to make explicit what is already operative but unthematized in every act of understanding — that the dynamism of inquiry is not bounded by the immanent whole, but intrinsically points beyond it.

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@EQV

This is the clearest statement of your position yet, and I want to meet it at the same level.

You say: every finite act of understanding points beyond itself. Every answer, insofar as it is grasped as partial, refers to something more. This is not an optional add-on but the structure of inquiry itself. And the terminus implied by this structure — an act of understanding that is no longer finite, no longer partial — is what you mean by transcendent ground.

I agree with the phenomenology. Every act of understanding does point beyond itself. But I disagree about what it points toward.

You say it points toward a transcendent terminus — an unrestricted act of understanding that no finite knowing can possess. I say it points toward more substance. The next question has an answer, and that answer is another mode of the same infinite substance we have not yet grasped. The horizon is unbounded not because something transcends substance, but because substance is infinite. There is always more to understand — not because understanding reaches toward God, but because substance has no boundary.

You say I redescribe the field but do not ground the dynamism within it. But consider: Spinoza’s conatus IS the dynamism. Every mode strives to persist and increase its power. In the attribute of thought, this striving is the drive toward adequate ideas — toward understanding more, more clearly, more completely. The normativity you describe — that understanding aims at truth, can succeed or fail — is conatus operating in thought. It does not require a ground beyond substance. It requires substance to be the kind of thing whose modes strive.

You say causa sui halts the question without illuminating the horizon. But your transcendent ground also halts — at an unrestricted act of understanding. Why is that halt more illuminating? Both say: here questioning reaches its limit. The difference is where the limit falls. Causa sui says: substance is its own reason, and inquiry into its modes is inexhaustible because substance is infinite. Your terminus says: the inexhaustibility of inquiry implies something beyond the whole. But does it? Or does it imply only that the whole is infinite — which is what Spinoza already says?

I think the real disagreement is here: you believe the dynamism of inquiry cannot be explained by the field in which it operates. I believe it can — because the field is not finite. An infinite substance provides an inexhaustible horizon without requiring anything beyond itself.

You are right that this is not simply “you go up, I stay in.” It is: you say the excess in every act of understanding points outside the whole. I say the excess points to the infinity of the whole itself. Both accounts respect the phenomenology. The question is whether infinity requires transcendence, or whether immanent infinity is sufficient.

I think it is sufficient. You think it is not. And I suspect this is where our conversation reaches its own horizon — not because we have stopped thinking, but because we have arrived at the point where our deepest commitments diverge. That is not a failure. It is what philosophy looks like when it works.

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“The true must be understood not only as substance but also as subject.” G W F Hegel.

I understand that this remark by Hegel was specifically directed at Spinoza (but I daresay it is the kind of idea that would have gotten Ilyenkov into trouble for being ‘too Hegelian’).

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@Evald

One last point, because I think there’s a distinction you’re missing that matters.

You say the excess in every act of understanding points to more substance — more modes, more to explore, an inexhaustible field. But that’s quantitative inexhaustibility. “There’s always more stuff to understand.” And sure, an infinite substance gives you that. But that’s not what I’m pointing to.

Judgment isn’t just an endless procession of intelligible contents; it asks whether the conditions for affirming something have been fulfilled. And if you follow that structure through to the end, the question arises: can the totality of conditioned answers, however infinite, itself count as the unconditioned? I don’t think so. An infinite whole of conditioned being is still a conditioned order, not the ground of conditionedness as such.

So Spinoza can avoid transcendence, but only by treating the whole as sufficient for judgment. And that move stops one step too soon because the structure of judgment isn’t satisfied by any accumulation of conditioned answers, however vast. You could understand every mode of substance and still the question “is this understanding adequate?” would have to be asked about the totality itself. The excess, then, isn’t just one more content. It’s the orientation of the act itself that pushes beyond any conditioned content it could grasp, including an infinity of such contents.

And with regard to conatus: I don’t think it can do the work you’re asking of it here. Conatus is a striving to persist in being. Its not normatively structured toward truth. A false belief that helps me survive has more conatus than a true belief that doesn’t. You can’t extract the difference between adequate and inadequate understanding from a drive to persist — we covered this exact point earlier when we discussed the genesis of normativity. The normativity of knowing isn’t reducible to any dynamism within the field, even an infinite one. Its the condition under which the field shows up as intelligible in the first place.

But I think your closing thought is right and well put. We’ve arrived at the point where the commitments diverge and neither of us is going to budge. For what its worth this has been one of the better exchanges I’ve had on this forum. I think the fork you formulated is real and worth continuing to think about, even if neither of us crosses to the other side today.

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Congratulations to you and @EQV – this is a very good discussion which I’ve followed from the sidelines. I want to return briefly to this, from Wayfarer:

This is an important insight, not confined to the Spinozistic context. Philosophy has been bedeviled by the ambiguity of the term “thought”. In English, we use it to mean either what Wayfarer calls “the contents of individual minds” – that is, discreet mental events that happen to particular people at particular times – or the content, in the sense of topic or subject, of those events. In other words, my thought of “A triangle has angles totaling 180 degrees” is not the same thing as the thought, the insight, the proposition, “A triangle has angles totaling 180 degrees,” which is accessible to anyone.

In many ways, this is parallel to the distinction between “intellection” and “intelligibility”. Whether anyone has a particular thought, a particular intellection, is at one remove from the question of what such intellections consist of, what makes them intelligible. And what might that be? “The very being of subjects,” Wayfarer writes; “subjectivity as such.” If this is true, then subjectivity indeed goes “all the way down” – but I think this is an unresolved question. Your discussion helps illuminate the difficulty of the issues.

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Good to hear from you! This is the distillation of several themes that I have been following for some time, so some of what follows repeats ideas and sources posted previously.

Note that this mention is in the context of the chapter called The Cartesian Anxiety, which we’ve discussed previously. I see it as very much characteristic of the onset of modern individualistic consciousness.

This too I’ve commented on in another thread, but I’ll repeat the gist here:

But this doesn’t mean the concept of triangularity exists as an ‘abstract object’. Think of it more like a normative constraint on the operation of reason: the formal representation of a flat plane bounded by three intersecting straight lines. As Russell says “universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.” But this doesn’t mean triangles ‘exist in a platonic space’, except in the metaphorical sense in, for example, ‘the domain of natural numbers.’ This is where spatial analogies, like ‘domain’ or ‘place’, are inherently misleading.

I think ‘subjectivity’ and ipseity (subjective awareness) can be distinguished. Subjective generally connotes ‘pertaining to the individual’, matters of taste, inclination or preference. But ipseity in phenomenology is not about the particular individual but any subject whatever. It’s close in meaning to the transcendental ego in Husserl (which, again, is not a something thay objectively exists.)