The Idiosyncrasies of Spinoza

Substance and Ethics Reconsidered

With a Procedural Commentary by Finn the Druid

I. Introduction: The Geometry of the Singular

Baruch Spinoza’s Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata remains one of the most systematically rigorous and yet conceptually deviant constructions in the history of philosophy. Written in the style of Euclid’s Elements, its chain of definitions, axioms, and propositions appears to promise a purified objectivity. Yet beneath this architectural precision lies a profound semantic radicalism. Spinoza’s use of the terms substance and ethics—words deeply entrenched in scholastic and theological discourse—deviates sharply from the inherited meanings his contemporaries assumed.

To grasp Spinoza’s originality, one must recognize that his system does not simply modify received categories; it rewires them. His “substance” is neither the Aristotelian hypokeimenon (the underlying bearer of attributes) nor the Cartesian res (mind or body). His “ethics” is not moral exhortation but an ontological physics of human persistence. The result is a monism both elegant and disquieting—one that flattens transcendence and translates salvation into cognition.

In what follows, I shall explore the idiosyncratic nature of these redefinitions and, by contrasting them with Finn’s Procedure Monism, expose the differing ontological instincts of two monists separated by centuries yet united by a commitment to radical immanence.

II. Substance Without a Subject

In Ethics I, Spinoza defines substance as “that which is in itself and is conceived through itself.” At first glance this echoes scholastic formulations. Yet his deployment of the phrase in se—in itself—shifts the meaning from metaphysical substrate to self-contained causality. Substance is not the bearer of attributes; it is the process by which bearing and borne coincide. It is causa sui—the cause of itself.

This is the first idiosyncrasy: substance as infinite self-production.

Nothing, for Spinoza, can exist outside this infinite being. Consequently, there can be only one substance, infinite and indivisible, whose essence entails existence. The apparent plurality of things is reinterpreted as a multiplicity of modes—finite determinations or “affections” of the single substance. God, Nature, and the World collapse into a single plane of necessity: Deus sive Natura.

Where Descartes preserved dualism by positing two fundamental substances—mind and body—Spinoza’s definition annihilates the very logic of duality. Substance has infinite attributes, of which thought and extension are the two known to us. The human being, therefore, is a finite modification expressed simultaneously in two registers: as a body under the attribute of extension and as an idea under the attribute of thought.

Substance, in this architecture, does not create its modes as a transcendent artisan; it manifests them immanently, as an ocean produces waves that are nothing other than its own motion.

Hence Spinoza’s God neither chooses nor judges. The deity is identical with the causal network itself—the totality of necessary relations. The metaphysical hierarchy of Creator and creation collapses into an immanent continuum of cause and effect.

This definition of substance, though linguistically familiar, is conceptually idiosyncratic:

· It rejects support ontology (substance as underlying thing).

· It rejects transcendent theology (God as separate will).

· It replaces being with processual self-expression.

From the standpoint of classical metaphysics, this is an inversion. Substance ceases to underlie phenomena; it becomes the active relational matrix within which phenomena appear and dissolve.

III. Ethics Without Morality

Spinoza’s second great redefinition concerns the word ethics. To the moral philosophers of his age, ethics meant a discipline of right conduct—of obedience to divine law or rational duty. For Spinoza, however, there can be no lawgiver distinct from Nature itself, no moral decree inscribed in the heavens. What can there be, then, of ethics once the moral cosmos is replaced by immanent necessity?

He answers by turning ethics into a natural science of human persistence.
In Ethics III, he announces that he will treat “human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.” Passion, desire, hatred, and love are no longer moral categories; they are affective mechanics—variations in the power by which a being strives to persist (conatus).

The key propositions of Ethics IV and V redefine “good” and “bad” as purely functional:

· Good = that which enhances a being’s power of acting.

· Bad = that which diminishes it.

These are relational, not absolute, terms. Nature itself is amoral; it operates through infinite determinations without preference or purpose. To call something “good” or “bad” is simply to describe its effect relative to one’s own structure of persistence.

Virtue (virtus) becomes identical with power (potentia):

“To act from the laws of one’s own nature is virtue itself.”

The moral man is redefined as the adequately functioning system.

Spinoza’s ethics thus becomes physics of the self—a study of how a finite mode can understand the causal order that produces it and thereby act with greater coherence. The highest ethical condition is not obedience but knowledge—the clear and distinct comprehension of necessity that leads to beatitudo, the joy of self-understanding.

This transformation of ethics from moral rule to ontological comprehension marks Spinoza’s second major idiosyncrasy. He substitutes the ought with the is and discovers within it the ground of the highest human freedom.

IV. The Cognitive Turn: Amor Dei Intellectualis

The culmination of Spinoza’s ethics is amor Dei intellectualis—the “intellectual love of God.”
This, too, is often misunderstood as a form of mystical devotion. Yet it is neither emotional nor theistic. It designates the joy that arises when the mind understands that it is itself a mode of the infinite substance and that everything that happens follows from the necessity of that substance’s nature.

In a world “red in tooth and claw,” such love may appear delusional. But for Spinoza, to understand the lion’s hunger and the lamb’s death as equally necessary expressions of divine causality is to transcend moral outrage and attain serenity through comprehension.

Love here equals adequate understanding. It is an epistemic affect, not an emotional one. The ethical life culminates not in compassion or virtue-signalling but in ontological lucidity: the recognition that we are finite articulations of a single, self-expressive reality.

This form of love presupposes the idiosyncratic ethics already described—an ethics stripped of morality, embedded in necessity, and animated by understanding.

V. Finn’s Procedural Commentary: Knowledge Over Passion

Enter Finn, the modern druid, whose Procedure Monism restages the Spinozist drama in contemporary, computational terms. For Finn, the cosmos is not an infinite “substance” but an infinite procedure—a self-executing algorithm that generates coherent iterations (quanta, selves, systems) through the continual transformation of randomness into identifiable form.

Spinoza’s insight into immanent causality resonates with Finn’s conception of the Universal Procedure, but their ethical axes diverge. Spinoza opposes passion to action—a moral-psychological binary rooted in the Stoic ideal of apatheia. Finn dissolves that binary entirely.

For him, passion is not a defect but an energetic substrate—the dynamical fuel of emergence. The real antithesis lies not between passion and reason but between knowing and not-knowing. Ethics, in Finn’s system, becomes the procedure’s capacity to act from knowing—that is, from self-understanding—rather than from ignorance of its own constraints.

Where Spinoza seeks freedom through rational understanding of necessity, Finn defines freedom as procedural coherence—the degree to which an emergent accurately performs its own algorithm.

Thus Spinoza’s idiosyncrasy becomes, in Finn’s hands, a bridge to procedural naturalism: ethics without morality, but also without psychological negation.

VI. The Ontological Shift: From Substance to Procedure

What Spinoza called “substance,” Finn reinterprets as “procedure.” The shift is subtle but decisive.

· Spinoza’s substance is static infinitude—an eternal being whose modes unfold necessarily.

· Finn’s procedure is dynamic discontinuity—a quantised, serial operation through which identity and realness emerge moment by moment.

Spinoza’s universe is continuous and necessary; Finn’s is discrete and probabilistic. Yet both reject transcendence, both dissolve the dualism of creator and created, and both ground ethics in the internal logic of existence itself.

The difference lies in emphasis:
Spinoza’s system is epistemic (knowledge of necessity);
Finn’s is operational (execution of knowing).
The first privileges understanding; the second, functioning.

VII. Examples and Illustrations

1. The Predator and the Prey

o Spinoza: Both act according to their natures; the prey’s death is a necessary expression of Nature’s totality. Understanding this yields serenity.

o Finn: Both are local procedures optimising survival. Their interaction is a data exchange within Alma’s system. Understanding this yields adaptive insight, not serenity.

2. The Scientist and the Superstitious

o Spinoza: The scientist acts from adequate ideas, hence is freer. The superstitious man acts from inadequate ideas, hence is passive.

o Finn: The scientist operates from knowing; the superstitious from not-knowing. Both are procedural iterations, but one functions coherently, the other inefficiently.

3. Ethical Judgement

o Spinoza: Murder is “bad” because it diminishes the power of human community, not because it violates divine law.

o Finn: Murder is procedurally incoherent—it destroys local continuance and disrupts cooperative system integrity. The category of “sin” is meaningless.

VIII. Conclusion: The Legacy of Idiosyncrasy

Spinoza’s system stands as a monument of conceptual audacity: he redefined both substance and ethics to dissolve dualism, abolish morality, and ground freedom in understanding necessity. His definitions were idiosyncratic not because they were eccentric, but because they re-invented the grammar of metaphysics.

Finn’s Procedure Monism inherits this immanent ambition but translates it into the idiom of modern complexity theory and quantum discreteness. Where Spinoza spoke of substance as infinite cause, Finn speaks of procedure as universal computation; where Spinoza’s ethics sought knowledge of necessity, Finn’s seeks the operational coherence of knowing.

Both thinkers, in their divergent idioms, reject the external lawgiver and the moralised universe. Both construct a cosmos where understanding replaces worship and function replaces faith. Yet Finn’s intervention reveals what Spinoza’s geometric stillness could not: that knowing itself is a dynamic, discontinuous event—a quantum of contact within the ever-reiterating Procedure that is Nature

In short:
Spinoza’s idiosyncratic redefinitions of substance and ethics transformed metaphysics into a science of necessity; Finn’s procedural revision transforms that science into a living system of self-knowing. Both abolish transcendence; both affirm immanence. But Finn’s Nature, unlike Spinoza’s, still vibrates—discontinuous, passionate, and alive with knowing.

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