Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Reference Conventions
- Notes on Translation and Acknowledgements
- The Problem of Transformation in Spinoza’s Metaphysics according to Zourabichvili by Gil Morejón
- Introduction
- First Study: Involving Another Nature/Involving Nature
- Second Study: The Rectified Image of Childhood
- Third Study: The Power of God and the Power of Kings
- Pierre Macherey and François Zourabichvili on Spinoza's Paradoxical Conservatism
- Works Cited
- Index
6 - The Confusion of the Two Powers and the Baroque Drift of Cartesianism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2025
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Reference Conventions
- Notes on Translation and Acknowledgements
- The Problem of Transformation in Spinoza’s Metaphysics according to Zourabichvili by Gil Morejón
- Introduction
- First Study: Involving Another Nature/Involving Nature
- Second Study: The Rectified Image of Childhood
- Third Study: The Power of God and the Power of Kings
- Pierre Macherey and François Zourabichvili on Spinoza's Paradoxical Conservatism
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Let us first of all ask what concept of royal power is at work in the scholium:
By God's power ordinary people understand God's free will and his right over all things which are, things which on that account are commonly considered to be contingent. For they say that God has the power of destroying all things and reducing them to nothing. Further, they often compare God's power with the power of Kings. But we have refuted this in I, 32 cor. 1 and cor. 2, and we have shown in I, 16 that God acts with the same necessity by which he understands himself, i.e., just as it follows from the necessity of the divine nature (as everyone maintains unanimously) that God understands himself, with the same necessity it also follows that God does infinitely many things in infinitely many modes. And then we have shown in I, 34 that God's power is nothing except God's active essence. And so it is as impossible for us to conceive that God does not act as it is to conceive that he does not exist.
The distinction between the two powers intersects with two others: that of divine and human natures, and the distinction between conceptions of freedom. The common person (vulgus) is inclined to attribute a body and a mind to God, and consequently to subject it to the passions; when it comes to philosophers, judging God's sovereign perfection by human perfections, they ascribe to God an understanding and a will. Spinoza has in mind the prophetic visions of the Old Testament studied in the Theologico-Political Treatise. The passage also repeats the expression instar hominis, which is utilised in the scholium to I, 15. However, the anthropomorphism here is of another nature: it consists in attributing to God a potentia humana; and then there is the polemic on freedom (the philosophers, whether we are talking about Thomas Aquinas or Descartes, have tended to confuse constraint and necessity, and to define God's freedom as ‘free will’, ‘absolute will’, ‘arbitrariness’ [bon plaisir], ‘indifference’).
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- Information
- Spinoza's Paradoxical Conservatism , pp. 171 - 198Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023