The science and politics of the efficient cause in Hobbes and Spinoza (Thomas Hobbes, Benedictus de Spinoza, Rene Descartes)

This work comprises a parallel and comparative reading of the thought of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza in light of their shared critical project: the rejection of both a divine or transcendent model of political order (emblematized for both in the appeal to prophetic insight) and the Ancient and Scholastic metaphysics of formal and final causes, which they believe to be implicated in the constitution of such a political understanding. Read through this critique, the philosophical systems of Hobbes and Spinoza can be understood as divergent efforts to provide grounds for the rational construction of political order through a metaphysics and/or physics of solely efficient causes. These efforts are, in turn, contextualized as attempts to resolve ambiguities and tensions in the Cartesian science of efficient causes and to unify and expand the scope of this science such that it can provide a science of specifically human action, the subject matter of politics. Particular attention is paid, therefore, to the necessity, and the difficulty, of providing new conceptions of both nature and reason that, while remaining within the restriction on any causes but efficient ones, could place reason within (and not “behind” or “prior to”) nature, while nevertheless allowing rational certainty about the orders of nature and political life. In the reading of Hobbes, the focus is on the doubled priority of sensation, as the origin of all knowledge, and motion, as the universal cause of all understanding; in the reading of Spinoza, on the role of “essence” as both existing power and foundational idea. Despite the divergence paths of these two thinkers, their systems are shown to produce and share one central physical and metaphysical ambiguity of their own: that between an idea of natural things as determinate efficient causes and an idea of their power, at least in the case of human (that is, rational) beings, as expansive. This ambiguity is shown to inform their very notions of a rational political order, and so to determine the trajectory of a modern world in which the tension between stability and expansion becomes the central dilemma.