2 - How God acts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
Summary
At the beginning of the Appendix to Part i of the Ethics, Spinoza summarised his conclusions up to that point in one long sentence:
I have now explained the nature and properties of God: that he necessarily exists, that he is one alone, that he is and acts solely from the necessity of his own nature, that he is the free cause of all of things and how so, that all things are in God and are so dependent on him that they can neither be nor be conceived without him, and lastly, that all things have been predetermined by God, not from his free will or absolute pleasure, but from the absolute nature of God, his infinite power.
The first part of this summary – on the ‘nature and properties of God’ – has been discussed in the previous chapter. We must now turn to the second part: how God ‘acts solely from the necessity of his own nature’.
Once again, it is worth stressing at the start that we do not know the roots of Spinoza's motivation. If a question could be characterised in the abstract – without any reference to who asked it, when or why – it would be, how does God relate to the world in terms of action? This is a question which has appeared in innumerable forms in different religious traditions, for differing reasons; to the extent that there is an obvious risk of misrepresentation in thinking of a single, continuing question. We can see some of the contexts in which Spinoza was working in the 1660s and 1670s.
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- The God of SpinozaA Philosophical Study, pp. 51 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997