The exciting adventures of Benjamin O'Neil

So here's a paper about Spinoza that I recently wrote. It's pretty awful, but I figure since I posted the last paper I wrote for philosophy here, I might as well post this one too.

In Part I of the Ethics, Spinoza maintains that nothing could have been otherwise than it actually is because everything happens does so as a result of God’s Essence. Thus, “Nothing in nature is contingent, but all things are from the necessity of the divine nature determined to exist and to act in a definite way.” (IP29) Additionally, Spinoza claims that “It follows, secondly, that God alone is a free cause.” (IP17C2) These two claims seemingly contradict each other, yet Spinoza expects them to be consistent. Although this contradiction seems to exist on the surface, in the end Spinoza is able to remedy the problem in the end by defining God using both of these claims together.
Before we can dive into the problem of whether or not Spinoza’s two claims contradict each other, we must first explain what Spinoza means when he says that God is a free cause. Spinoza claims that he has “proved that nothing can be or be conceived without God,” and so “God acts solely from the laws of his own nature and is constrained by none.” (IP17) He then follows this with the second corollary, stating “For God alone exists solely from the necessity of his own nature and acts solely from the necessity of his own nature. So he alone is a free cause.” (IP17C2) These arguments, taken together, mean that God’s nature necessitates Him, and that He is caused by Himself. However, to make these claims, we must first backtrack and utilize the previous two propositions. Spinoza’s basis for these assertions comes from his claim that “whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be conceived without God.” (IP15) This claim is important for clearing up how our existence relates to God: we are simply modes of Him, as is everything else. Without God, we could not exist, nor could we conceive of anything external to ourselves. This claim is bolstered in Spinoza’s next proposition, “from the necessity of the divine nature, there must follow infinite things in infinite ways (that is, everything that can come within the scope of the infinite intellect.)” (IP16) Moreover, the first corollary to this proposition is vital to the idea of God being a free cause, stating, “hence it follows that God is the efficient cause of all things that can come within the scope of the infinite intellect.” (IP16C1) These ideas all point to the fact that there is God alone, that He is the only substance that there is, and that everything else is merely a mode of Him. However, to really affirm the idea of Him being a free cause, we must determine that there is no outside force that acts upon God. Spinoza states later in the Ethics that “will cannot be called a free cause, but only a necessary cause.” (IP32) While this proposition is seemingly unrelated to the idea of God being a free cause, we find the support that we need in the first corollary, “hence it follows, firstly, that God does not act from freedom of will.” (IP32C1) This allows us to conclude that being a free cause means that there are no outside factors that influence God and that His existence is dependent solely upon His own nature.
There is an apparent contradiction between the claims that nothing in nature is contingent and God alone is a free cause. The idea that nothing in nature is contingent means that there is a definite way for all things to exist and act. (IP29) This means that everything in nature is already determined, and that there is no other possible way for things in nature to occur. This claim is further supported by a later proposition, “things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case.” (IP33) If these two statements are taken together, then it forms a strong argument that is hard to refute regarding multiple ways for nature to exist. In this proposition he states that,
“If things could have been of a different nature of been determined to act in a different way so that the order of Nature would have been different, then God’s nature, too, could have been other than it now is, and therefore this different nature, too, would have had to exist and consequently there would have been two or more Gods, which is absurd.” (IP33)

The contradiction arises from accepting this statement as true. By accepting this, it becomes false to say that God is identical with all of nature, which is what Proposition 17 is purporting. It would be impossible for God to be a free cause and have Him be confined in one nature. In addition to only being able to ever exist in one nature, Proposition 33 suggests that there is no way for God to change what that nature is. There is a way around this problem though: he could change the characteristics of the nature by changing His modes/attributes, which is what he is identical to, rather than nature. This is the only way around the contradiction; by accepting modes as a mechanism that are able to be changed, God can take on many forms and change without changing nature itself.
Spinoza expects these two claims to be consistent for the reason that was stated above: the solution to the contradiction is explaining different things in nature by using modes. This way, there is only one nature (God) but there are infinitely many attributes that comprise the different objects that we see in the world around us. By using this system, Spinoza avoids contradicting his own propositions, yet is able to explain how there are many unique objects in the world.
Spinoza’s main conclusion is that God’s essence is the cause for everything that happens. He proposes two ideas: the first that nothing in nature is contingent (IP29) and the second that God is a free cause (IP17C.) It seems that these two ideas are contradictory, in that the first suggests that there can only be one nature, while the other is nearly impossible to satisfy without entertaining the idea of infinitely many natures. Spinoza dances around this issue by using attributes, which allow him to pass off the differences in nature as different attributes of a single substance (God,) thereby avoiding any potential conflict between these two ideas.