The Determinacy of the Substance in Spinoza

In Spinoza scholarship, particularly in interpretations that explicitly or implicitly draw on the Hegelian reading of Spinoza, it has often been argued that substance is something indeterminate, since neither the attributes nor the modes are capable of determining its nature. On the one hand, it is maintained that, in order to serve as the substratum of a multiplicity of different attributes, substance cannot coincide with any one of them and therefore cannot be determined by any of them. On the other hand, it is argued that, since modes are nothing other than affections of substance, they cannot contribute to determining it. The thesis of the indeterminacy of substance consequently leads to a reduction of the attributes to intellectual forms and of the modes to evanescent entities. Spinoza’s philosophy would thus amount to an “acosmism,” insofar as it would deny the multiplicity of essences and entities that populate the world. For the same reason, it would amount to an empty monism. In this contribution, I will first address the problem of the determinacy or indeterminacy of substance by reformulating what I take to be the most compelling solution to the longstanding dispute over the attributes. I will then turn to the alleged evanescence of modes, arguing that it does not entail a denial of the multiplicity of things as such, but only the rejection of a particular way of conceiving them. Adopting a methodology that combines close textual reading with theoretical analysis, I argue that Spinoza’s monism is not an empty monism, but rather a dense monism: the substance is by no means indeterminate, but is instead defined by its attributes, understood as essence of the substance, and expressed through its modes, understood as properties of the substance.