One
is the Loneliest Number: Monism in Spinoza
Is Spinoza a monist? It might seem obvious
that he is. After all, he says
explicitly that "there is only one substance", God or Nature. However, Spinoza also says on at least two
occasions that God is not properly called "one." How are such reservations about applying
numerical notions to God compatible with Spinoza's alleged monism? I address this question by exploring some
well-motivated and philosophically insightful intricacies in Spinoza's
conception of number. By this means, I
arrive at some surprising conclusions not only about the apparent one-ness of
substance, but also about the apparent many-ness of finite things for Spinoza. Not only is God not genuinely one, but finite
things are not genuinely many. This
reading revives important aspects of traditional readings of Spinoza that go
back at least to Harry Wolfson's magisterial reading of Spinoza as an heir to
earlier Jewish thought and also rehabilitates the much-derided but insightful
Hegelian interpretation of Spinoza.
Michael Della Rocca grew up in Brooklyn, New
York. After receiving his B.A. from
Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley,
he moved to Yale University where he has taught since 1991 and is currently
Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy.
He is the author of two books on Spinoza, Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza (Oxford
1996) and Spinoza (Routledge
2008), and of numerous articles in early modern philosophy and in contemporary
metaphysics. He is currently embarked on
a new project entitled The Parmenidean Ascent which argues for a radically monistic view
of the world while challenging the basic methodologies prevalent in
contemporary philosophy.