I've been re-reading Book I of Spinoza's Ethics in preparation for teaching History of Modern Philosophy. He defines 'God' as follows: (Book I, Def. 6) "By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence." The two attributes he discusses are, of course, thought and extension. I started wondering why he would simply define 'God' in such a way that God is extended. I came up with what seems to me to be an interesting argument. If the argument is correct, it's an argument for either pantheism or panentheism (the latter is the view that nature is a part of God). It's inspired by some brief comments Spinoza makes in the scholium to Proposition 10 of book 1 and, as far as I've been able to tell in a brief scan of the literature, it hasn't shown up in the literature at all. I'm interested to see what you all think about it.
Here's the argument:
1. God is a perfect (i.e. the greatest possible) being.
2. A perfect being will have all property-kinds that are intrinsically good.
3. Being extended (or being physical/material) is an intrinsically good property-kind.
--------
C. God is extended (or physical/material).
(1) sounds good (it's certainly an axiom of Anselmian theism). (2) sounds plausible because if a being lacks an intrinsically good property-kind P, then that being would not be the greatest possible being because there could be a being that had it (along with all the other great-making properties), and that being would be more perfect than the being that lacked it. Elucidating precisely the concept of a property-kind is probably a bit tricky, but I intend it to be a fairly broad notion. Having a mind is one kind of property and being extended or material is another kind. I leave it this broad because I suspect there will be problems with saying that a perfect being will have every intrinsically good property because some properties will be incompatible (e.g. having limited freedom and having maximal freedom, being four feet tall vs. being six feet tall). Premise (3) also strikes me as plausible. A rock and a plant have some intrinsic value/goodness to them; a universe with these things is to some degree better than a universe without them, and not just because of what these things can do for us. I know there are people who deny (3), e.g. W.D. Ross, who wrote in The Right and the Good, "the value of material things appears to be purely instrumental, not intrinsic" (p. 141). I guess I just don't share Ross's intuition, but I'm willing to grant that sufficient disagreement about (3) may well render it unjustified. Christians, Jews, and Muslims would seem to have motivation to accept (3) from Genesis where, after each day of creation, God looked upon his creation and "saw that it was good" (NIV). This sounds like an acknowledgement of intrinsic value in the creation (although I'm sure there are those who will make some fancy interpretive moves and try to read it as though God sees value in his creation simply in virtue of its being his creation).
If the argument works, it is neutral, considered in itself, about whether pantheism or panentheism is true. Perhaps material reality (or some part of it) is only part of God (this is panentheism), or perhaps God is somehow identical to all (or part of) material reality (this would be pantheism). God might even have the freedom to create his own material attributes, on this view, depending on whether God is the greatest possible being contingently or by necessity. If God is necessarily the greatest possible being, then arguably he couldn't freely choose to not be material, and so being material would somehow flow necessarily out of his essence. (I'm conceiving of freedom in the libertarian way; if we instead suppose that God is free only in the sense that he has no outside constraints, then of course matters would be different).
Although (1)-(3) sound pretty plausible, I don't believe the conclusion. But, I can't identify a clear problem with the argument. What do you all think? Also, are any of you aware of an argument like this in the literature?
Hm.It may not appear in the literature, but I've actually written an essay along these lines I was thinking of submitting somewhere:
http://community.haskell.org/~gwern/wiki/Ontological%20argument.page
or
http://community.haskell.org/~gwern/static/Ontological%20argument.pdf if PDFs float your boat.
"Premise (3) also strikes me as plausible. A rock and a plant have some intrinsic value/goodness to them; a universe with these things is to some degree better than a universe without them, and not just because of what these things can do for us. I know there are people who deny (3), e.g. W.D. Ross, who wrote in The Right and the Good, "the value of material things appears to be purely instrumental, not intrinsic" (p. 141). I guess I just don't share Ross's intuition, but I'm willing to grant that sufficient disagreement about (3) may well render it unjustified. Christians, Jews, and Muslims would seem to have motivation to accept (3) from Genesis where, after each day of creation, God looked upon his creation and "saw that it was good" (NIV). This sounds like an acknowledgement of intrinsic value in the creation (although I'm sure there are those who will make some fancy interpretive moves and try to read it as though God sees value in his creation simply in virtue of its being his creation)."
I guess I'll raise some worries about (3). I certainly don't have the intuition that every rock has intrinsic value in virtue of its extension. (I _certainly_ don't have the intuition that if at t we measured the physical world and at t+n we measured again and saw that it contained just one more rock in it that we discovered that the physical world was better than we could have known at t by any degree at all. If we discovered extra an extra bunny, that's a different matter.)
As for the motivation, one response is simply to say that God could see that the creation was good because God could see that God was creating it. (Of course, as Ricky Gervais notes, there's something fishy about doing a bit of creating with the lights off, flipping them on, and then judging that you're own work is brilliant. We'd all like to be our own critics.) I suppose it's plausible that anything that God creates will have value in virtue of that fact and I don't see any tension between saying that the material is the medium that is instrumental to the realization of that value and that value has nothing to do with matter, extension, etc... because it is a value had by unextended and immaterial substances like souls (not that I believe in those). In fact, couldn't you just as easily argue for the immateriality of God by replacing (3) with:
3'. Being unextended (or being immaterial) is an intrinsically good property-kind.
Don't we have intuitions about immaterial and unextended things having value that are similar to your intuitions about the values had by rocks and flowers?
Maybe the thought is that because God could 'see' that the things were good that they had to be good intrinsically. Then, since the things seen were material/extended, the goodness of the material/extended things were intrinsic. This is interesting, but can't we can have non-inferential perceptual knowledge of properties that aren't intrinsic? Examples: seeing that something is near rather than far; seeing that something is a right hand and not just a hand or a hand that is to the right of me; seeing that a is brighter than b.
"A perfect being will have all property-kinds that are intrinsically good."
Oops, hit post too early.
Can't there be properties, F and G, such that x's having F is good intrinsically, y's having G is good intrinsically, and it is impossible for something to have F and G?
Hey Josh,
Interesting post.
Isn't (2) false? Here's a property kind - having a very attractive female human physique. And here's another - having a very attractive human male physique. But, nothing could simultaneously have both.
Call it the Brangelina objection.
:-)
Hi Joshua,
Premise (3) says this:
"3. Being extended (or being physical/material) is an intrinsically good property-kind."
The defense of (3) is this:
"A rock and a plant have some intrinsic value/goodness to them; a universe with these things is to some degree better than a universe without them, and not just because of what these things can do for us.... God looked upon his creation and "saw that it was good" (NIV). This sounds like an acknowledgement of intrinsic value in the creation."
Consider two claims:
3*: For any physical/material/extended object, that object is intrinsically good.
3**: For any physical/material/extended object, that object is intrinsically good and one of the features of the object that makes it intrinsically good is its being physical/material/extended.
It seems to me that in order to get to the conclusion of the argument, 3** to be true. But it also seems to me that the motivations cited for 3 at most establish only 3*.
Consider Robert Adams idea that an object is intrinsically valuable to the degree to which that object is similar to God. Suppose that God is not physical/material/extended. It is still possible to accommodate the motivation given for 3. A rock is similar to God in some respects. God exists. The rock exists. So the rock is similar to God to some degree. So the rock is intrinsically valuable to some degree. So 3* isn't enough to get to the conclusion of the argument.
Thanks for the comments, everybody!
Gwern: Thanks for linking to your essay. I look forward to reading it.
Regarding premise (3):
Nancy, you're exactly right that the argument needs 3** and indeed that was how I intended 3 to be interpreted. There are other ways, aside from Adams, to try to get around 3** while granting that extended things have intrinsic value. For example, you might think that being, or simply existing is an intrinsic good, and so extended things are intrinsically good, but not in virtue of being extended, but simply in virtue of existing. I think, though, that 3** is plausible. Here's an argument (this is also directed at Clayton's doubts about 3): a world consisting of an abstract object and a material object seems better than a world consisting of two abstract objects. If existence is what bears intrinsic goodness, then there shouldn't be a difference between the value of these worlds. But, there is (or so it seems to me). It isn't clear how material objects resemble God in any other way than existing (on the view that God is not extended), so their value must consist in something other than mere existence and resemblance to God. Perhaps the world with abstracta and material objects is more valuable because it is more diverse and diversity is an intrinsic good. But, it isn't clear that diversity would be any good unless the objects themselves possessed intrinsic good. A diverse class of value-neutral objects doesn't seem any better than a non-diverse class of value-neutral objects (unless we simply enjoy diversity in itself, but then diversity would be extrinsically good, which isn't an option in the two worlds I'm imagining). Now, perhaps you don't share my intuitions about these worlds, and from what Clayton wrote, my guess is that at least he probably wouldn't. The issue may just come down to a disagreement of intuitions, and I grant that that might be the ultimate undoing of this argument. But, since I (at least right now), have the intuitions I do, 3 still looks plausible to me.
Regarding Dale's Brangelina objection: This worry is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote: "Having a mind is one kind of property and being extended or material is another kind. I leave it this broad because I suspect there will be problems with saying that a perfect being will have every intrinsically good property because some properties will be incompatible (e.g. having limited freedom and having maximal freedom, being four feet tall vs. being six feet tall)." So, I made the principle about property kinds instead of any particular property. Could it be impossible for a being to have all intrinsically valuable property kinds? Clayton, in effect, raised this question when he asked whether the argument would also entail that God would be immaterial because being immaterial is intrinsically valuable. But, I'm not sure that being immaterial is intrinsically valuable. To say that something is immaterial is just to say that it is not material, and there doesn't seem to be any motivation for thinking that not having the attribute of materiality is also intrinsically valuable. Immaterial things would be intrinsically valuable in virtue of either existing or in virtue of their essence, whatever that would be. For instance, a dualist would say that an immaterial mind is valuable in virtue of being a mind, not in virtue of being immaterial.
In fact, a real staunch Cartesian dualist who thinks that thought and extension are substance kind-defining properties and so that no substance can have both would say that nothing can have all intrinsically valuable properties because no substance can have both thought and extension. Such a view, if well-motivated, could provide a way out of this argument. But, such a view would also require rejecting constitutionalist views according to which substances could be composed of other substances (because, according to a kind of constitutionalist view, God could be composed of an immaterial mind and the extended world).
It seems to me that extension is a property that limits the extended object to a location. If so, then being at a location may be a positive property, but being extended is limiting, and hence not positive. The following solution to your puzzle about extension is then available: God is omnipresent, but not extended.
It may also be the case that being physical/material is a way of being limited. To be honest, I don't really know what it means to be physical/material. Maybe it just means being subject to the laws of physics? If so, then it is a way of being limited.
Alexander schreib:
> It seems to me that extension is a property that limits the extended object to a location. If so, then being at a location may be a positive property, but being extended is limiting, and hence not positive.
But objects are also aggregates; if I have one chunk of cheese and one mountain of cheese, isn't the latter less limited? Would a mountain range of cheese be still less limited in location?
Saying 'limited in location' sounds a like a synonym for 'volume'; broaden the small limits of the chunk of cheese to the limitless, and you get exactly this pantheistic plenum (or Being, to get Parmenidean).
The infinite hunk of cheese, if it has volume, is still limited by a spatial mode of existence, perhaps.
Moreover, the infinite hunk of cheese has the following limitation: only a part of it is here, and only a part of it is there.
Suppose you remove these two limitations. The hunk isn't limited by a spatial mode of existence, and it is wholly present everywhere. Then I don't know that it's right to call the hunk "extended". It may be that the right think to say is that it's "omnipresent". And it's not pantheistic or panentheistic to say God is omnipresent, is it?
Joshua,
One might think that (2) is false (granting that being extended is or falls under an intrinsically good property-kind) because of the incompatibility between having this property-kind and having others that are more valuable; I am thinking of properties concerning unity, fundamentality, and independence. If God is extended then he has spatial parts.
If having a spatial part entails having a temporal part, then God couldn't be (as a whole) timeless. A wholly timeless mode of existence might be taken to be more valuable than either a wholly temporal or partly timeless / partly temporal one in virtue of being more unified.
If God has spatial parts that he did not create, then God is not as independent as he would be if he had no uncreated parts; because his existence depends on something non-identical with him (every part considered individually). Being (more) independent might be taken to be more valuable.
Also, if God has non-created spatial parts, this suggests he is a composite object; and hence is not as fundamental as something else (parts). Being more fundamental might be taken to be more valuable.
If God created his spatial parts, then he must have a mode of existence that is non-extended in addition to the extended one (out of which he created); again raising the unity issue.
Regarding an infinity of being through infinite spatial extension; it seems possible that there be two spatiotemporally disconnected spacetimes (and if two, infinitely many). If so (and if God can be extended in multiple spacetimes), then an extended God would either not have as much being as he could have (in virtue of only taking up one spacetime) or would be disconnected from himself (a kind of lack of unity).
I do not think Spinoza would agree with 2. He did think that God was the greatest possible being, but in an important sense there is only one being and that is God. That being is made up of an infinite number of attributes - we, as individuals are not individual beings, but actually individualated modes of the attributes that constitute the greater being. Also, if I remember Spinoza correctly, attributes are neither good or bad, they simply are. It is the individual modes that are good or bad so that God would be the total of all the attributes individuated through the various modes, both the good and the bad. One of the issues Spinoza had with a theistic conception of God, if I remember correctly, was the idea that a perfect being would not and could not be limited and that therefore there could exist nothing outside of, or apart from, God. If extended (material) things existed apart from God, then that would be a limitation. I think this is the reason why he denies creation, etc. If God is perfect where would he put a creation? Besides given his psycho-physical parallelism, an extend thing is the same as the mental thing - God represented as a mode of extension and as a mode of thought.
"Suppose you remove these two limitations. The hunk isn't limited by a spatial mode of existence, and it is wholly present everywhere. Then I don't know that it's right to call the hunk "extended". It may be that the right think to say is that it's "omnipresent". And it's not pantheistic or panentheistic to say God is omnipresent, is it?"
Hi Alex, interesting comment. Though the upshot of what you say here is that an extended God can be considered as omnipresent as an immaterial God can. Doesn't this open the door further to the possibility of a pantheistic/panentheistic God as a maximally great being?
The argument is interesting, though of course more would need to be said about what constitutes a property-kind. (Why wouldn't any class of properties whatsoever be a property-kind? But this abundant notion of property-kinds is surely not what Spinoza's after.) However, I'm not happy with the claim that the argument is on behalf of Spinoza's metaphysics. It's made clear in the course of the Ethics that he doesn't think good and evil are absolute, but are rather relative to a given individual's needs and desires. (E.g., book 4, def 1: "By good I shall understand what we certainly know to be useful to us.") With that in mind, there's no way he could also take up the argument you're advancing. Attributes are metaphysically prior to individuals, so it doesn't make sense to say they're intrinsically good or bad.
There is an analogous argument that Spinoza could make, however:
1. God is omnipotent.
2. An omnipotent being will have every fundamental property-kind.
3. Being extended is a fundamental property-kind.
--------
C. God is extended.
By fundamental, I mean something like Lewis's notion of the "perfectly natural," the kinds of properties with which a complete and non-redundant ontological inventory of the world could be given, which can explain causation, and so forth.
Premise 2 is the tricky one, then. I think this is his defense of it: Suppose that an omnipotent being, call it the Outsider, is causally responsible for some phenomenon that is explained by a certain set of fundamental properties, call it EXT. Then if the Outsider does not have any of the properties of EXT, the phenomenon in question cannot be fully explained by the Outsider. We might appeal to the actions of the Outsider, claiming that its actions effect the causal relationships between things instantiating the properties of EXT without the Outsider needing to have any of those properties. But Spinoza seems to think that this course just sets up an explanatory regress. (This seems to me to be one of the arguments he's glossing in Ip15s, paragraph 1.)
I guess the main thing I have against the argument you present is just that Spinoza doesn't share your conception of good/evil as absolute, and instead relies on an argument based on how extended phenomena can (and can't) be explained.
To John A. and John: I agree that Spinoza could not use the argument I have developed. I didn't intend to develop an argument that Spinoza would like (although I can see, given how I started the original post, how one would think that was my goal). Rather, I was interested in seeing if there was an interesting argument that God is, by nature, extended and Spinoza's definition of God (along with the scholium to proposition 10 of book I) were simply catalysts for my interest. His argument in the scholium doesn't seem to me very persuasive, so I tried to come up with something better.
Dan: That's a nice move. But, for other properties, if perfection requires that a thing have it, then we don't seem to complain that God becomes more complicated or less unified. Indeed, we might think that his properties are all unified under goodness (or perfection). I wonder if there's a way of conceiving of God's nature that would both evade your move and deal with Alex's worry. Suppose we think of God as having a body (the universe), which he created. Thus, his spatial parts are dependent on his will. But, he is also fully present at each part of his body in virtue of his ability to directly act on any part of his body. God and the world (his body) would then seem pretty tightly unified. Perhaps perfection requires unity, but this might seem like unity enough.
Alex: I've tried to address your reply in my above comment to Dan. I also don't really know what it means to be physical/material, but wouldn't it be enough for my argument to simply point to some material stuff, say "that's what I'm talking about" and then report that my intuition is that being that kind of stuff is intrinsically good?
Thanks again to everybody for your comments; they've been very helpful and fun to think through!
Joshua:
I think that every material being is intrinsically good, but that isn't the same as saying that the materiality of it is good. I think every person with a broken arm is intrinsically good, but it doesn't follow that the person's broken-armness is intrinsically good.
I also think that the unity required is actually: simplicity.