Spinoza's God has Parts: The Mereological Reading of the Substance-Mode Relation

Although there are several passages in which Spinoza ascribes parts to God, scholarship has refused to take these texts seriously. The reason for this refusal lies in four key characteristics of God that seem to contradict mereological complexity: (i) indivisibility, (ii) infinity, (iii) perfection, and (iv) simplicity. But are these properties really incompatible with mereological complexity? (i) Given Spinoza’s position that abstract quantity is ‘divisible’ and real quantity is ‘indivisible’, ‘indivisibility’ cannot be understood as the complete absence of parts without saying that for Spinoza all mereological complexity is merely ‘abstract’. Furthermore, a close reading of Spinoza’s texts on indivisibility and mereology show that he is merely rejecting the existence of separable parts. (ii) Another popular argument is that God’s infinity forbids him from having parts due to the famous paradoxes of infinity. However, this is not the conclusion that Spinoza takes from these paradoxes. Spinoza says infinity, at least in one of its conceptualizations, can have parts ‘without contradictions’. The argument of letter 12 is similar to Crescas’ argument against the paradox of infinity. I shows that infinity, rightly conceived, can be limited and have parts without any contradictions. (iii) But maybe God’s mereological complexity is impossible because of his perfection? Mereological complexity is then said to imply a form of passibility which contradicts God’s autonomy and perfection. However, Spinoza argues that ‘being acted on’ only constitutes imperfection if the actor is external. When God acts on himself, his passibility is not an imperfection. Since Spinoza reconceives parts as variations and modifications of the whole, mereological complexity coincides with a form of self-affection which is a perfection rather than an imperfection. (iv) Finally, Spinoza’s specification of the notion of ‘simplicity’ shows that, in his mereological model, parts do not contradict simplicity. All issues barring us from taking Spinoza seriously when he writes that God has parts have thus been resolved.