The Explainability of Experience

The Explainability of Experience: Realism and Subjectivity in Spinoza's Theory of the Human Mind by Ursula Renz first appeared in German (Renz 2010) and was awarded the Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize in 2011. It was translated by the author into English. The first, but not the only, admirable feature of the book is that it does not read as a translation. The long wait for the translation was indeed well worthwhile.One of the more striking features of Spinoza's metaphysics is that its most fundamental doctrines have been interpreted in diametrically opposing ways. A canonical example is Spinoza's being accused of being a materialist and atheist (see, e.g., Conway 1996: chap. 9) only to be interpreted later as an idealist and accused of denying any reality to finite things (as did Hegel; see, e.g., Hegel 2010: 328). A second but not independent example is the well-established debate as to the nature of the attributes of substance, as either objective or subjective. Recent scholarship has by and large favored, and with some notable exceptions, a realist, objectivist interpretation of Spinoza's metaphysics. A cornerstone of this interpretative thrust is to take the sub specie aeternitatis perspective, or, more colloquially, God's point of view as the paradigm of knowledge. That is to say, it favors what might be called a divine epistemology over a human one. An important function of the divine epistemology for this kind of interpretation is securing the coveted objectivity and realism for Spinoza's metaphysics. Commentators, thus, have been reluctant to place the human mind at the center of Spinoza's epistemology. This tendency can be traced to their linking the human view point with the merely subjective and therefore illusory. Consequently, the human point of view is seen as undermining the desired results of objectivity and metaphysical realism.Against this backdrop, one can come to appreciate the originality and courage of Renz's interpretation. Renz boldly aims to make the human mind the epistemic core of Spinoza's epistemology while arguing that he holds a realist metaphysics. The key to this approach is recognizing that Spinoza's rationalism requires that subjective experience be explainable. That there is subjective experience is undeniable, and since it has being it must therefore be explainable. It is helpful to note that on the alternative view, namely, favoring God's point of view, it seems impossible to give a satisfying account of subjective experience.1 On the kind of view Renz argues against, it is constitutive of the divine perspective that it lacks subjectivity. Therefore, even if we were somehow able to derive a limited, human perspective from the divine one, what we would not be able to do is derive a “subjective” point of view—precisely because there is no subjectivity in the divine perspective. One of Renz's major contributions to the scholarly debate is her insistence and meticulous argumentation for the centrality of the human perspective for Spinoza's overall project. Renz describes her own project as developing the thesis that subjective experience is explainable, and looks at Spinoza's Ethics “as a model for a philosophical approach that corroborates our thesis” (12). She describes Spinoza's contribution to the philosophy of mind as offering “an attempt to outline an integrative model of a theory of the human mind, thereby laying the theoretical foundation for the argument that subjective experience—including its biological, historical, epistemic, and social determinants—is explainable” (16).The book is divided into four sections. In the first section Renz explains what she takes to be Spinoza's ontological premises. She argues for three important points. The first is that Spinoza disassociates the concept of substance from that of subject; the second is that the distinction between mode and substance is a categorical one and ought not be understood as an inherence relation; and finally, by looking into the concept of the individual, Renz argues for the surprising conclusion that “a body's individuality is a sufficient condition only for being thought of as animated, not for being attributed a mens” (60). To be a mind and not only an idea requires further that “an individual must be able to relate events to itself and, in conjunction with that, it must be able to have ideas about itself and its bodily affects” (61).The second section of the book is devoted to an articulation of the ontological status of the mental. I take Renz here to offer a subtle double-pronged answer to the idealist. First, Renz correctly argues that in part 2 of the Ethics we do not get a deduction of the human mind from the essence of God. The idealist recognizes that this cannot be done—no finite thing can be deduced from the essence of God, and hence the idealist concludes that finite things can have no being. Renz concludes from this (as I do; see Shein 2020) that saving the reality of the human mind requires that one deny the legitimacy of the deduction of the finite from the infinite. She goes on to argue that “our mental life reflects rather than constitutes the basic structure of reality” (65), and thus avoids collapsing all of reality into thought—another salient consequence of idealist readings of Spinoza.The third section of the book can be seen as motivated by the following general worry: If human minds were merely ideas, that is, modes, that inhere in the divine intellect, there would be no way to explain subjective experience. Furthermore, they would be prone to dissipating into infinite thought, since there would be nothing inherent to them to differentiate them. One of Renz's central claims is that if subjective experience is to be explainable (as required by Spinoza's rationalism), then there has to be more to a mode of thought than being only an idea. More has to be true of it in order for it to be a subject or a mind. This is coupled with careful argumentation that, although we may speak of God as having ideas, God is not a knowing subject. The fundamental intuition here is that experience is always from a particular point of view, and that is precisely what God lacks. A challenging passage for Renz is 2p11c,2 where Spinoza states that the human mind is part of the infinite intellect. Her meticulous discussion of this passage is illuminating and original. She offers a way of reading passages that seem to allude to God as a knowing subject as statements of Spinoza's commitment that all is intelligible, that is, as reflections of his commitment to rationalism and a kind of mental holism. In other words, one need not be forced into attributing paradoxical subjectivity to God; one need admit only that, in principle, all is knowledge.The final section of the book is dedicated to explaining the representational content of the mind. Here we find a careful analysis of the nature of images and affections. Naturally, doing so is the culmination of the project of explaining subjectivity. With this analysis in hand, Renz explains key epistemological concepts, such as common notions, adequacy, and intuitive knowledge, and what it means to produce a successful explanation. She concludes the book by signaling the practical, ethical, and political implications of taking subjective experience to be explainable.I wholeheartedly agree with Renz's keen observation that the human mind cannot be derived from the essence of God. The case can be made more broadly that no finite mode can thusly be deduced.3 Furthermore, I concur that this does not commit Spinoza to idealism. It does, however, require taking subjective experience as fundamental. It is clear that part of what Renz wishes to secure via the focus on subjective experience is the particularity of the subject, all the while acknowledging both that it is enmeshed in an infinite causal network and that the mind takes its body as object. In other words, for Renz, subjective experience points to the finite nature of the mind. Although I agree that this is the case, I take that to be only part of the story. The clearest way to appreciate this is by thinking about bodily sensations. To sense my body as affected in many ways (2a4) is to, at once, both sense how other bodies impinge on my own—that is, determine my body—and sense that my body counterdetermines those bodies. In other words, it is to sense how I actively determine the surrounding bodies. This dual aspect of subjective experience explains not only the sense in which I am determined or finite but also the sense in which I actively determine all the other bodies. This activity, I have argued, can be understood only as a kind of infinity. This dual aspect, rather than focusing only on its finite aspect, helps make better sense of part 5 and the sense in which the mind is eternal.In the preface to the English edition, the author notes that, although the original had come out almost ten years earlier, her position has not deviated, and hence, for the most part, she has not added references to more recent literature. Although this choice is understandable in the face of the daunting translation project, it is somewhat lamentable since recently there has been interesting work done on central issues which Renz discusses. I would have been interested, for example, in seeing Renz's engagement with Alison Peterman's view on Spinoza's extension (Peterman 2015), Sanem Soyarslan's position regarding essences (Soyarslan 2016), Julie Klein's position on Intuitive Knowledge (e.g., Klein 2014), and the work of Karolina Hübner (e.g., Hübner 2015), who has published on many of the same questions the book addresses. This however, does not detract from the fact that the book is an outstanding contribution to the study of Spinoza's epistemology

Epistemology · German idealism · Hegelianism · Interpretation (philosophy) · Materialism · Metaphysics · Objectivism · Objectivity (philosophy) · Realism · Subjectivity · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought · War, Ethics, and Justification

• Anne Conway

  Open Access•Anne Conway, Allison P Coudert et al.•Anne Conway•1996

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