Understood in itself and through itself: On Spinoza’s theory of substance

Abstract

The paper argues that Spinoza considers the inherence relation of substance and mode as being in need of explanation, and that he attempts to analyze it as a relation of conceptual implication. In the first part, I sketch the argument that leads Spinoza to substance monism, explaining the relation of substance, attribute, and mode in more detail. In the second and third parts, I argue that Spinoza explains both the relation of cause and effect and the inherence relation of substance and mode as relations of conceptual implication. Here the problem arises that there are cases of causal relations which are not at the same time inherence relations, namely causal relations between modes. To solve this problem, I propose to clarify Spinoza’s definition of mode in such a way that x is a mode of y only if the concept of x is contained in the concept of y and y is a substance. It follows that there can be no modes of modes — a position that Spinoza can be shown to actually hold. In the final section, I take a brief look at Leibniz’s reception of the Spinozan theory of inherence and at how Leibniz must modify it to avoid Spinoza’s monistic consequences.