Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

SPINOZA: METAPHYSICS AND KNOWLEDGE 271
child. In these cases, the cause is outside the effect, and of course Spinoza’s
substance, God, is not outside the modes. However, this does not prevent
Spinoza from calling God the efficient cause of what is in him; God, as he
explains in a letter (Ep 60, G iv, 271) is an internal efficient cause, or, as he says
in Proposition 18 of Part I of the Ethics, God is the ‘immanent’ cause of things.
This means that Spinoza has to reject the idea of a creative deity, as understood
by theistic philosophers. 71
Efficient causality was traditionally distinguished from ‘final’ causality. A
‘final’ cause, for Aristotle, is the end or purpose for the sake of which something
is done—as, for example, health is the cause of taking a walk (Physics II, 3, 194
b32–195 a3). Spinoza insists that, although we can and indeed must think of God
as an efficient cause, we cannot ascribe final causality to God. In this respect he
is in partial agreement with Descartes. In the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes
had declared that ‘It is not the final but the efficient causes of created things that
we must inquire into’ (Pt I, 28; CSM i, 202). So far, Spinoza would have agreed;
but he would not have agreed with Descartes’s reason for the assertion.
Descartes does not deny that God has purposes, but is content to say that we
cannot know God’s purposes (ibid.; cf. op. cit., Pt III, 2; CSM i, 248). For
Spinoza, on the other hand, the notion of a purposive God has no sense. Such a
concept, he says, would be inconsistent with the perfection of God; 72 for if God
were to act on account of an end, he would necessarily be seeking something that
he lacks (Appendix to Part I of the Ethics, G ii, 80). But, as an absolutely infinite
being, God can lack nothing.
Not only does Spinoza think that the concept of final causality cannot be
applied to God, but he also thinks that it cannot be applied to finite beings such
as ourselves. This thesis is not only of intrinsic interest, but also leads to a deeper
understanding of Spinoza’s views about God’s causality. Spinoza would concede
that finite beings, unlike God, can in a sense be said to have purposes; but, he
would say, such purposive activity has to be explained in terms of efficient
causation. In order to understand Spinoza’s position, it is necessary to consider
what he says about the ways in which things follow from God as a cause. He
says that some modes follow from the absolute nature of God; these are the socalled
‘infinite modes’ (cf. pp. 288–9). Finite modes, on the other hand, cannot
follow from the absolute nature of God (for that would make them infinite);
instead, they must be determined by God, in so far as God is conceived as
modified by some mode (Ethics, Pt I, Proposition 28). The upshot of this is
(ibid.) that each particular thing is determined by some other particular thing, and
that by another, and so on to infinity. This may seem to make each finite mode
the helpless plaything of external forces—something which is merely pushed
about. But in an important note to Proposition 45 of Part II, Spinoza indicates
that this is not so. This note shows that there is a dual causality in God, or that
there are two distinct ways in which a thing’s existence and nature follows
necessarily from something else. What Spinoza says is that although each
particular thing is determined by another to exist in a certain way, yet ‘the force