AustLit

Spinoza’s accounts of causation and free will follow directly from his metaphysics. More specifically, Spinoza’s monistic worldview dictates that all movement is necessitated by prior causes, and as such the behaviour of all things, including human thought, is pre-determined. Free will is regarded as an illusion.

Spinoza’s major causal claim is that there is no contingency in nature. God, as he has established, is the one and only substance. God’s existence is not contingent on external factors. Rather, God exists necessarily (IP11). As God is the only substance, all things are modes of God (Spinoza and Curley 2016: 13). Thus, these modes also exist necessarily. That is, a mode’s existence and behaviours is necessitated either by God’s nature itself or by some prior cause. In the latter case, this prior cause was necessitated by another cause, and so on. The original impetus, the first domino in the causal change, is the infinite and self-creating God. In Spinoza’s words, ‘all things have been caused from the necessity of the divine nature not only to exist but to exist in a certain way, and to produce effects in a certain way’ (Spinoza and Curley 2016: 14). Furthermore, things could not exist or behave in a different manner to the way they do. As all things are the product of God’s nature, to think of a different order of things is to think of a God of a different nature (Spinoza and Curley 2016: 16). But God, in the way defined, has been shown to be the only substance that could exist (IP14). Thus, the idea of a different or equally-existent God is absurd.

As modes of God, thoughts and volitions are necessitated in the same way as anything else. Humans are not exempt from the causal chain. Rather, Spinoza considers ‘acts of the will, such as human choices and decisions, [as] natural events with natural causes, just as are (for example) collisions of billiard balls’ (Spinoza and Curley 2016: 14). The reasoning here is the same as it is for any aspect of nature. A volition is a mode of God. A mode will only exist if it is caused, and this cause will only exist if it too is caused, and so on. So, any volition or act of the will is necessitated by a causal chain. Thus, the will and its effects only exist by necessity. Any sense of free will is an illusion grounded in an ignorance of causality.