Comments On Alexander Douglas’ The Philosophy of Hope: Beatitude in Spinoza (Routledge, 2023)
Published in Res Philosophica, Vol. 101, No. 3, July 2024, pp. 619–627
https://doi.org/10.5840/resphilosophica20241013128
© 2024 Brook Ziporyn • © 2024 Res Philosophica
The Rediscovery of the Superdeterminate:
Alexander Douglas and the Meeting of
Spinoza and Zhuangzi
Brook Ziporyn
University of Chicago
Here in this slender book of scarcely more than a hundred pages, Alexander Douglas has accomplished many remarkable things.
Front and center among these is the vigorous recovery of the properly religious dimension of Spinoza’s thought, taking his doctrines of beatitude and deathlessness not as perfunctory and possibly incoherent window-dressing (or afterthoughts, or defensive decoys), but as the centerpieces of his intellectual project. This excavation illuminates the long-obscured indigenous European tradition of emphatically nontheistic spirituality, making clear the crucial inner connection between Spinoza’s controversial critiques of most of the entailments of mainstream Western religion (for which he had been so excoriated by his contemporaries), and the prospect of deathless bliss and love—between the “demonic atheist” and the “God-intoxicated man.” It is not that Spinoza manages to squeeze in some makeshift immortality and beatitude in spite of denying that existence has a purpose, that there is an intentional design behind what we perceive as the order of the world, that the distinct conscious personalities as which we identify ourselves are immaterial souls exempt from the instability of all natural things, that these souls are endowed with a special faculty called “free will” which is the ultimate cause of our decisions and actions, that we will rightly be held accountable for its choices after death by a judge meting out rewards and punishments. On the contrary, for Spinoza it is only by denying such premises that the real beatitude and the real immortality become thinkable.
A more specialized but equally important achievement of the book is the detailed interpretive analysis of the structural architecture of the Ethics, reconciling the tensions between Spinoza’s seemingly contrary assertions of 1) the equal perfection of all things, 2) the meaninglessness of the idea of perfection, and 3) the need to establish a model of perfection for ourselves. The great discovery here lies in discerning the ambiguous role of the “imitation of affects” (E3p27) operative in the interpersonal mimetic structure of metaphysical desire—the global desire for being for which all particular desires are mere proxies. By recognizing the self-imposed model of perfection proposed in Ethics 4 as a stopgap measure, utilizing a pre-existing disease of the imagination against itself, a new level of subtlety is revealed in Spinoza’s method, clarifying the tricky relation between Parts 3, 4 and 5 of that masterpiece. The focus on metaphysical desire, the desire for identity, and the excavation of the significance of the shift from “self-acquiescence” (acquiescentia in se ipso) to “soul-acquiescence” (acquiescentia animi) opens up a key point which hides in plain sight in the arc of the Ethics: all desire is desire for self, and every possible determinate self-image is an inadequate idea, a figment of the imagination, a failure to understand what is established in the opening pages of that work: there are no finite (i.e., determinate) things, and thus no finite and determinate selves, whatsoever. If the question is what something or someone is, rather than how they are being whatever it is they are, no determinate answer is sufficient.
This points us to the even larger payload of Douglas’s book. God is absolutely infinite substance, infinite in infinite ways, unrestricted by any negation or limitation whatsoever, since whatever we might imagine limiting it would have to be simply more of itself. But if “determination is negation,” as Spinoza claims, this would seem to imply that God is absolutely indeterminate. Interpreters have often tried to find ways to avoid this obvious conclusion. Douglas rightly embraces it, unflinchingly. But his breakthrough lies in understanding what indeterminate actually means for Spinoza: the absence of all determinations is not the voiding of all contents, but rather, precisely as the absence of any limitation, the impossibility of the negation or exclusion of any possible contents. Being “indeterminate” just means being nothing in particular, not being any one thing as opposed to another thing, which is another way of saying “being everything without exception.” The term he coins for this kind of indetermination, “superdeterminatation,” is an immensely helpful addition to our metaphysical vocabulary. Crucially, it helps us distinguish clearly, and with no room for equivocation, the difference between this Spinozistic type of “none-and-yet-all” motif and the type of “none-and-yet-all” attributed to God by many theologians in the theistic traditions, i.e., the idea that God transcends and is therefore devoid of all finite determinations, and yet contains them all “eminently”—what Leibniz called the hypercategorematic infinity of God. As Douglas puts it, “Spinoza’s superdeterminate being does not eminently embrace all determinations while remaining beyond them; it simply is determined by them and not beyond them at all.” (p, 66) On this reading, with which I concur, Natura Naturans and Natura Naturata—nature as cause and nature as caused–are both Natura, and both are therefore the Nature referred to in Spinoza’s infamous “Deus Sive Natura.” As long as this causality is adequately understood, and the effect is not viewed in isolation from its true cause, both are eternal and infinite—the first in virtue of its essence, the second in virtue of its cause (Letter 12). In this sense, God is not just the necessary cause of all possible things; these effects he thereby causes are also God, as long as we don’t abstract them from Substance and imagine them to be independent substances in their own right—the commonsense notion of particular things which Spinoza (rightly) regards as absurd. There are no things in that sense: what we call finite things are really modes—“ways” of expressing their cause, God or Nature or Substance or Absolute Infinity. There are difficult philosophical subtleties involved here, which makes Douglas’s elucidation of the Spinozistic pushback against Leibniz and the entire tradition he represents on this point especially priceless. God is the immanent and not the transitive cause of all modes (E1p18), causing both their existence and their essence (E1p25), and could not exist if the act of causing any one of them were lacking (E1p33c2). He causes all these things in exactly the same manner as he causes himself (E1p25s), i.e., as an existence that follows from his essence. In the case of God, his existence is identical to his essence (E1p20); in the case of individual things considered as separate, the essence from which they follow (God) differs from their existence (E1a7); but if seen correctly, as modes of God rather than in separation from God, their existence is God’s existence, for nothing else exists: thus their existence is also identical to the infinite essence of God (E1d8). God is thus not merely the cause of all these infinite contents but rather also the infinite results so caused. But crucially, he is both cause and effect indivisibly and choicelessly: he is not an aggregate of these contents, does not remain aloof as a transitive cause to his own effects, and does not cause them through a voluntary act of choice among alternatives, causing the realization of some possibles but not others. They all follow directly from and remain immanent to his infinite nature, which is indivisible necessary illimitable immanent power of causality itself (E1p34). Hence it is not that Spinoza’s infinite is one entity, which is beyond all determination, while the contents it embraces are other entities, which in some special way are included in or belong to it. Rather, each is a “version” of God (to borrow Douglas’ word for a parallel situation, cf. p. 68): “a fixed and determinate expression” of a way of being infinite, i.e, of being indeterminate. (E1p25c) Infinity is what they are; finitude is how they are. Eternally illimitable and indeterminate infinity is what each determinate content is; each determinate content is one way of being this eternally illimitable and indeterminate infinity. What we are confronted by here, then, is the literal synonymity between “no determinations” and “all determinations,”—and perhaps even between determination per se and indetermination per se, a question to which we will return.
But to get there, the implications of this none=all equation are worth considering in more detail. For this is where the encounter with Daoism becomes crucial. And that is the next big achievement of Douglas’s book: the meeting of Spinoza and Zhuangzi, and the synergy of mutual illumination that ensues. This is a meeting long in the offing, a love-match that has been waiting to happen. I too have struggled to fix these two up over the years, and for me the effortless conjugation of the two is both the most surprising and the least surprising of Douglas’s contributions. It is surprising because of how elegantly and economically the task is accomplished, given the cultural, conceptual and stylistic distances involved: leaving aside the completely disparate philosophical contexts and conceptual vocabularies, just the tone and style of these two philosophers could not be more at odds. The hyper-rationality of Spinoza’s geometric method certainly stands in sharp contrast to the whimsical playfulness and imaginative abandon of the Zhuangzi. A superficial reading of both would cast Spinoza as a somber hyper-rationalist methodically hawking apodictic absolute knowledge, and Zhuangzi perhaps as goofball irrationalist scoffing at every possible claim to stable or demonstrable knowledge that doesn’t immediately bleed into the opposed positions it was set on excluding. But at the same time, the match-up of the two is singularly unsurprising to anyone who has spent serious time working with both texts. The confluence of intuitions animating these two writers, specifically with respect to transformation and death, but even more foundationally on the basic metaphysical structure of superdetermination just summarized, is picked up by Douglas, and this, by his own account, provides him with the key that unlocked the meaning of beatitude and deathlessness in the sublime final pages of the Ethics. It is no small feat to communicate this confluence to readers familiar with only one or the other of these thinkers, or neither, but Douglas has done so with stunning lucidity and grace.
In fact, strange as it may seem, that none=all equation, the none-and-yet-all motif, is such a widespread assumption in ancient Chinese intellectual history that it almost amounts to a truism; we find this motif directly assumed and rhetorically invoked without comment or argument all over the place in the early Chinese philosophical canon. There are ways to excavate the reasons for this, built into the baseline definitions and conceptual grammar baked in to the foundations of this body of discourse, and it has many implications for the contours of later philosophical development, as I and others have tried to unravel elsewhere; those explanations are speculative and subject to dispute, but the widespread prevalence of this rhetorical figure should be luminously obvious from even a casual acquaintance with the core classical texts. The structure is there already in Confucius’ Analects, in an ethical register, as when Confucius speaks of himself as being無可無不可: “approving nothing and disapproving nothing,” (Analects 18:8) not describing a state of neutrality and indifference aloof from all alternatives, but rather an ethical condition of adaptive situational timeliness enabling any and every act of approval and disapproval: precisely by having no single fixed standard of approval, there is nothing he definitively excludes from approving: the lack is precisely the abundance. Many centuries later, the same structure is in full ontological flower throughout Chinese Buddhism, almost a cliché already by the time it is expressed succinctly in Chinese apocrypha like the Wuliangyijing 無量義經in formulae like, 如是無相，無相不相, 不相無相，名為實相: “This absence of all characteristics is such that no characteristic does not characterize it: it is characterized by every characteristic. Not restrictively characterized by its absence of characteristics, it is called the Characteristic of the Real, the Real Characteristic.” But the earliest locus classicus for the explicit statement of this none=all structure as a self-conscious and universal principle is perhaps to be sought in the founding text of Daoism, the Daodejing, in the famous formula wuwei er wubuwei 無為而無不為, usually translated, “Doing nothing but leaving nothing undone.” The implications of this formula are cast in new light in the aftermath of Douglas’ intervention, a powerful example of the mutual illumination effected by the encounter of these two systems of thought. For the wei in that formula means not only “to do,” “to do for a purpose,” “to construct,” but also “to be identified as, to take the role of, to function as.” Read in that light, we are confronted with very structure of indetermination as superdetermination–the simultaneity and coextensivity, nay literal synonymity, of the two–as applied specifically to the question of being, of identity, of metaphysical desire: “not being anything in particular, but thus being everything without exception.”
We might begin to understanding the intuition behind this trope by viewing the relation between “nothing” and “something” here as a mereological one, a whole/part relation rather than a blunt either/or between a total void and a positive existence. “Nothing” only functions as a name for the indetermination of the all-inclusive whole, which cannot be specified because it is not one-sidedly restricted to any one half of a pair of opposite predications–the premise being that predication per se is a matter of pairing with and excluding a possible opposite predication. But the next step is to see that, in Spinoza’s language, this “whole” is infinite and indivisible: it cannot be divided into “parts.” In the indigenous Chinese conceptual language, the same point is reached through the one-many structures built into the discursive assumptions of all the early thinkers, among whom neither atomism nor a teleology outside of nature is ever proposed: beings are not assembled to reach to composite whole; rather, an identifiable entity is something carved out of a prior whole, divided down into individuation. The Zhuangzian intervention concerning this shared assumption is to show not only that these divisions are infinitely variable, but also they hold the divided things together just as much as they divide them; indeed, they join them precisely through this contrasting division, which destabilizes their separate contrasted identities and enables their transformations into one another. Each determination is inalienably coupled to its negation, its opposite, and thence to the negation of the new whole formed by this couple, and so ad infinitum, each determination thereby inextricably bringing with it all other determinations. So in both the Spinozistic and the Daoist case, we might say that it is not just that the “nothing” exists only as a name for the all-inclusive whole: the “something” also exists only as a name—albeit another kind of name–for the all-inclusive whole. Here too we approach the full-blown synonymity of determination and indetermination.
But the fact that this structure is so prevalent in traditional Chinese thought, and is seemingly taken as an obvious truism requiring no justification, immediately invites speculation about what exactly prevents this from being the case in non-Chinese thought—until Spinoza. What some have called the “Parmenidean distinction” between being and nothingness, their imagined mutual exclusivity, rooted in a conception of absolute nothingness that in no way involves or is involved in being, never occurs in China, and as such there is no possible conception of indetermination that is not itself also a determination. Presence itself is understood simply as determination, and determination is understood, ala Zhuangzi, as the contrasting of a “this” and a “that,” the mutual exclusion and limitation of the determined “this” and whatever such a determination defines and identifies itself by excluding. The negation of determination thus signifies only the absence of the mutual limitation or exclusion of contrasting determinations, not the literal “absence of all determinations,” which is on this conception impossible, since “absence of determinations” too would be contrasted to “presence of determinations,” and thus would be exactly as determinate as any other determination. The presuppositions that obscure this relatively simple inference, such that for so many non-Chinese systems, “nothingness” or “lack of determinations” or “transcendence of all determinations” can indeed be thought to exclude something (indeed, to exclude everything), are what now demand investigation—a story that is long in the telling but very revealing of the hidden premises underlying both theological notions of infinity and modern secular notions of finitude, both of which are exploded by the Spinoza/Zhuangzi axis unveiled in Douglas’ work.
This way of addressing the problem brings us to another topic of great relevance to Douglas’ project: the Identity of Indiscernibles. For another way of putting the none=all structure assumed in Daoist and so much other traditional Chinese thinking is simply to say that, if we start from certain ontological premises about what “determination” is (namely, that to be is to be determinate, and to be determinate is to be limited, to be conditioned by existence in relation to something external to it, to be non-all), then no difference between “none” and “all” is discernible, and thus that they are identical. The theological and metaphysical premises of pre-Spinozistic European philosophy seem to have been engineered precisely to avoid this conclusion, keeping absolute plenitude of being and absolute privation of being cleanly separate even when, inevitably, it becomes apparent that there is no way to grant determinacy to either one, and thus no way to distinguish them. For it would seem that the avoidance of this conclusion, instead trying to find some way to understand determinate identity as something more and other than simply contrast and limitation, is necessary for many other key motifs of this mainstream post-Platonic Western thinking to get off the ground. One is the possibility of finite substances: the idea that something that can be both definite and also exist independently, standing apart from all other things without ceasing to be what it is. Another is the possibility of a determinate identity of the infinite: the idea of an Absolute Being that is unconditioned and ineffable but is also something in particular in that it excludes something else—for example, God as someone or something that someone or something else is not. Another is the possibility of nothingness to the exclusion of Being: the idea that some sort of intervention is needed in nothingness to ensure the existence of anything at all, hence making worrisomely meaningful that notorious question of Leibniz, so beloved to Heidegger, about “why there is anything at all”—a nonsensical non-question for the Chinese thinkers mentioned above, as for Spinoza, equivalent to asking “Why aren’t circles square?” Another is the insistence that the unconditioned absolute must be, specifically, Good, the Good, which by definition must be distinguishable from the bad, lest, it is thought, nihilism and relativism and immorality immediately ensue.
Remarkably, dogged attempts to preserve tenets of this kind, and to stave off the identity of None and All which would undermine them all, continue even when the indetermination of both ends is clearly recognized, and the absolute plenitude is therefore no longer even described as “Being.” We see this already brought to a head in Plotinus, the source of the Neo-Platonic model that continues to structure the forms of apophaticism that inform most of monotheistic hypercategorematic versions of the none-and-all motif even after these assumptions are doubled-down on and further intensified by the requirements of the revealed theisms of the Abrahamic traditions: the ineffability of the One (=the Good), beyond “Being,” and the qualitylessness of matter, beneath “Being,” are supposed to remain distinct, at all costs, even though there is no consistent way to distinguish two absences of determination from one another. They are meant to be the top and the bottom of the ladder, the highest and lowest in value—what an embarrassment if they turn out to be indistinguishable! And this problem has arguably haunted the theological traditions that succeed Plotinus in various ways in all the Abrahamic traditions, just as the premises put in place to avoid it have arguably continued to haunt post-theological secular thinking.
I won’t repeat what I have written elsewhere on this question–on the costs of the Platonic and theological worship of the Good and the universal teleological structures that this entails. Instead, I’d like to return to the question of Identity of Indiscernibles. Douglas’ final vision of the Spinozistic-cum-Zhuangist perspective on immortality can been stated as entailing a denial of the reverse principle, the Indiscernibility of Identicals (as Douglas himself suggests in this Précis of the book)—the idea that something cannot be discernibly different from itself. Each thing, when understood without abstraction from its immanent cause, is a version of God—not merely an effect of God, or a part of God, but a way of being God. God is indivisible, infinite, indeterminate, immanent causal power expressed as every possible determination, each of which is nothing but a fixed and determinate (i.e., finite) way of expressing this infinite indivisible indeterminate causal power. He is these infinite finite ways of being infinite; determination pertains to the manner of expressing, superdetermination to what is thereby expressed. But given that God is superdeterminate, might we then also say that each of his determinations is itself, in a sense, also superdeterminate? Here we come back to the possible synonymity even between determination and indetermination per se. As Douglas’ account makes sparklingly clear, immortality for Spinoza is a matter of adjusting our conception of self, away from the imagined fixity of any determinate identity, recognizing ourselves as a particular way of being the only thing that anything can be– infinite, indivisible, eternal, infinitely diverse transformation—while also, necessarily, taking shape as some particular one of these infinitely diverse transformations at any given time and place. Both must always be going on. If so, we might say that even to be merely a particular one of these is also to be more than one: “walking the two roads” of finitude and infinitude at once, to use a Zhuangzian idiom. To be is to be superdeterminate, and recognition of this means seeing that we never die, for anything we may become—even a bug’s arm or a rat’s liver, to use Zhuangzi’s own charming examples—is this true self we always were, superdetermination always expressing itself in infinite forms. This means not only seeing that this present form is only one among these infinite forms, but simultaneously also that this being of one entails that this same being that we are is also every alternate one. Far from a continued existence of what we presently identify as ourselves, real immortality lies in recognizing our identity as being the only thing which anything can be, which is the one thing which is all things, the endless transformation of the all into the all.
Contrary things are thus God, and God is always contrary to himself: though identical, he is always necessarily also distinguishable from himself. You and I are both God. God is identical in each case, and yet can be distinguished, since you and I are distinguished, even contrary, and indeed it is this incoherent copresence of all these contrary identities that is the God to which we are both identical. The identical can in fact be distinguished from itself, since we are both God, and yet I am not you. The application of the transitive property (i.e., I am God and you are God, therefore I am you) is thus denied in this case, and with it the Indiscernibility of Identicals. That is the point I am querying here: need it be? Am I so definitively not you? Strictly speaking, the distinction between you and I is only another modal distinction, as opposed to a full existential distinction: we are two different ways of determinately expressing the same thing, i.e., superdetermination. It cannot be a distinction between actual entities, i.e., between substances, of course: there is only one of those. But the distinct modes of this substance bear a necessary and not a contingent relation to one another; none can be removed without removing the substance of which they are the modes, with all the other modes being equally necessary to its being what it is. As long as the modes are seen rationally—i.e., not as substantial entities in their own right but as modes inseparable from the indivisible infinite substance of which they are modes—they necessarily require each other: God cannot be God unless both A and B are modes of him, unless characterized by both A and B. A cannot be a mode of God unless B is also a mode of God, for any A and B. And since God is what A and B in fact are, may we say that A is a mode of what B is, and B is a mode of what A is? A is not B. But if A is really A-to-Z, and B is also really A-to-Z, then A is B and B is A, although only because each of them inalienably entails the very difference between A and B, between themselves and their contraries. A is B as A, and B is A as B. This, in any case, is the direction that some of Zhuangzi’s intellectual heirs in later Chinese thought take, on the basis of the shared premises just discussed: not only is each thing in some sense the absolute, but each thing is in some sense every other thing, yet only because each thing remains as multifarious within itself, as intrinsically contrary to itself, as the absolute is. I am not sure if Douglas would be willing to attribute this further “omnicentric” step to Spinoza; I think a case can be made for both a yes and a no. But it meshes well with his superb account of beatitude in Spinoza—which, as a bonus, also serves as an excellent reading of sagehood in Zhuangzi: my being what I am, dwelling not less but more deeply in the particularity of my present being than I do when mesmerized by my everyday self-regard (the latter being wholly an inadequate construct of my mimetic imagination), dwelling intensely in my difference from all others, my distinctness, my perspectival specificity, is precisely what opens me up to the necessary copresence and inescapable intertransformation of my incoherently superdeterminate specificity with every other possible incoherently superdeterminate specificity. My perspective precisely qua my own perspective, in its distinction from all others, in distinguishing itself and therefore simultaneously not only positing and enabling but also connecting to and opening into every other perspective, is then the key that discloses the ineluctable interpenetration with every other conceivable transformation—my finitude and my infinity converging at the axis of Dao that constitutes every single moment of sentient experience, always and everywhere walking the two roads of finitude and infinity, of determination and superdetermination. However far we may be willing to go on these two roads, and their inalinable intertwining, we have many reasons to be grateful to Alexander Douglas for this brilliant work.