You might prefer Heidegger's interpretation — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't prefer it, I cited it because he makes a similar point to that made in the OP, in respect of the geneology of the idea of 'substance' in the modern philosophical sense.

I've read the relevant excerpts and understand what he's saying. And don't overlook that Heidegger originally trained for the Catholic priesthood before taking up philosophy, I'm sure he was thoroughly conversant with scholastic philosophy.

Yet you presume to tell others that you know what they have or haven't read. — Wayfarer

I seem to remember that you said you had not studied Spinoza, and were not familiar with his work. You have never quoted him directly as far as I recall. If my assumption that you haven't read his works is incorrect then I'll own that.

In the Ethics (which I did study as an undergraduate) Spinoza finds lasting happiness in the intellectual love of God, which is the vision of the one infinite Substance (which could equally well be understood as Being) underlying everything and everyone. This is not the love of a subject in the personal sense, but the joyous recognition that all finite things, including our own minds, are expressions of the one infinite reality that is. — Wayfarer

Perhaps Spinoza's substance could be understood as being if being were understood to be natura naturans or nature naturing. In the Ethics Spinoza writes: “By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” Now 'being' in its basic meaning simply refers to existence or the attribute of existing, so you would need to qualify the concept as Spinoza does in that sentence in order to make it fit.

And the other point is that Spinoza's God is not separate from nature or transcendent of it, but is wholly immanent. There is no transcendence for Spinoza, no eternal life for mortals, no afterlife and no personal or caring God. Spinoza was a determinist: he believed free will to be an illusion and even denied that God has free will. If God is being for Spinoza it is infinite, eternal, necessary being, and it is only mortal creatures who experience anything, and the only immortality to be hoped for is to be an idea in the eternal substance.

What you wrote could just as well apply to a materialist (and I believe Spinoza was a materialist). It is not a being underlying everything or everyone in the sense of being separate from or greater than materiality (as I read Spinoza at least), but a being immanent in everything and everyone, and that is an important difference. If we say that 'substance' means to stand under, I think that should be read as referring to the hidden constitution, otherwise transcendence might be evoked since to be what is understood to separately beneath might equally be understood to be separately above, and I don't believe that was Spinoza's intention at all.

I believe Spinoza was a materialist — Janus

Spinoza is not a materialist in the modern reductionist sense. He held that reality expresses itself equally through both Thought and Extension, so rejecting reduction of mind to matter. His God-or-Nature is not a personal deity, but neither is it mere physical substance. Spinoza’s philosophy is closer to what we would now call neutral monism or double-aspect theory, where mind and body are modes of one infinite Being. ‘Substance’ in Spinoza is not something measurable by way of objective analysis, in the way that material substance is (or at least, was) thought to be.

Recall the original intent of this thread. It is to argue that the philosophical term ‘substance’ derived from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, is often confused with the everyday meaning of ‘substance’ as ‘a material with uniform properties’. What I’m saying is that, mainly due to Descartes’ description of mind as ‘res cogitans’, this leads to the oxymoronic conceptions of ‘thinking thing’ or ‘spiritual substance’. And a lot of confusion, and much bad philosophising, hangs off that equivocation.

I don't agree. Spinoza can be read as thinking that material substance has the potential for both the attributes of extension and cogitation. Your "modern reductionist materialist" and "a material with uniform qualities" is a straw man, because no one denies the fact of cogitation or that matter has many attributes and diverse forms., just as Spinoza's God has infinite attributes and modes; they are facts to deny which would be ridiculous. The materialist simply says that matter in certain configuration can feel and think just as matter in certain configurations is measurable.

The materialist simply says that matter in certain configuration can feel and think just as matter in certain configurations is measurable. — Janus

So perhaps you might find a passage in Spinoza which supports that contention.

I never claimed that Spinoza thought in such modern terms, but merely that his philosophy is not inconsistent with that modern conception.

Spinoza never used the term ‘material substance’. His term is simply Substantia—“that which exists in itself and is conceived through itself” (Ethics I, Def. 3), known to us through the attributes of Thought (cogitatio) and Extension (extensio - although there are infinitely many more attributes). Reducing that to ‘material substance’ is just the kind of problem the original post is addressing. Furthermore there’s nothing in physics which meets Spinoza’s definition of substantia - everything known to physics is relational, contingent, and defined in terms of something else. (For that matter, there’s nothing in physics corresponding to Aristotle’s ‘ouisia’, either.)

It's as though you don't read what I've written. :roll:

Spinoza is pretty close to most modern materialists in terms of thinking existing states being exhausted to existing, their empirical relations and non-empirical relations (together, those modes under the attribute of extension); there are no "supernatural", no transcendent forces or "mystery" causes in Spinoza's account of existing states and their causal influence.

Substance is very different for Spinoza though, it's not a reference "material substance" in the sense of a modern materialist (or even an older one for that matter, in terms of a materiel or idea dichotomy). Spinoza realised that those trying to form a substance dichotomy made an error. They mistook something that belonged of all, the one absolutely infinite Substance, for that which be confined only to the material or idea. To correct this error, Spinoza posits a very different substance. One that is not constrained or limited to one sort of thing (e.g. the material or idea), but one that is equally true of all things.

In this respect, he is very different from a lot of modern materialists. While Spinoza is in large agreement with most of them (no supernatural, transcendent forces or "mystery" causes), and whole agreement about existing states with some (non-reductive materialists), he does differ in having a more metaphysically rich reality than most of them. He understands the world to possess more sorts of things than just the material.

Reality doesn't just have material things or relations of material things as a most modern materialists would say. It also has other aspects, such as Substance, the attribute of thought, modes under the attribute of thought, and the infinite number of (for Spinoza at least) unknown attributes, which are not the existing/material states of reality. .

Spinoza can be read as thinking that material substance has the potential for both the attributes of extension and cogitation. — Janus

Spinoza never used the term ‘material substance’. — Wayfarer

What did I miss?

Extension and cognition are different in any case. The former is a sort of thing that exists (i.e. when something is present or true by existing), while the latter is a sort of thing in terms of how it appears in thought (i.e. a meaning, a concept, a logical distinction) and isn't true by something existing or not.

For "material substance" to have extension and cognition doesn't make sense. If you are talking about existing states, all of them are necessarily modes under the attribute of extension, for their presence depends on what exist or not. Material states in this sense cannot be cognition. A materiel state is given by that it exists (mode of extension), never by how it appears in cognition.

Substance is neither the attribute of extension nor cognition, but an entirely different thing that occurs in parallel to them. In this respect, Spinoza has no "materiel substance", He has a Substance given with material states (modes under the attribute of extension), if we are to describe the relation of Substance to material states. .

What did I miss? — Wayfarer

'Can be read as' does not equate to 'used the term'. I already explained that I am not claiming that Spinoza thought precisely in modern materialist terms, but that his philosophy is not inconsistent with modern materialism.

Materialism in the form I favour is the position that there is nothing beyond the material universe we find ourselves inhabiting and that the mind and body are not separate things. Spinoza said: "The mind is the idea of the body" and he saw mind and the body as one and the same thing conceived in two different ways: under the attribute of thought and under the attribute of extension.

Spinoza equated God with the Universe, the whole of Nature and thought God was the one and only substance, infinite, eternal and self-causing. The same could be said of matter, so his view is consistent with materialism. He denied there was any afterlife, or anything transcendent of the Universe. That is also obviously consistent with materialism.

I'm not responding to you again if you fail to address the actual points I've made or try to dismiss what I say by labelling it as this or that.

Material states in this sense cannot be cognition. A materiel state is given by that it exists (mode of extension), never by how it appears in cognition. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Material states can be extended and/ or they can be cognitive. The body is a material state, or preferably process, and it is cognitive, so...

They are extended, they are never cognitive..

If you speak about a state/mode under the attribute of cognition, you are not longer talking about in material terms. You've switched to talking about how the state/mode appears to thought. No longer are you describing the fact something exists, but rather that a state/mode has a certain meaning of logical distinction.This is not an existing state.

Let's say we take the mode of an atom. If I describe it under the attribute cognition, I'm talking about its meaning that has nothing to do with existing- the fact this atom is logically distinct, has meaning in language and thought, etc.-, aspects of this atom which are true no matter what exists.

Heh, I got in before the edit.

An existing body state is not cognition here. Spinoza's attribute of cognition is not referring to the existence of our minds, experiences or their causes.

Being existing states, this sense of the modes of our mind, experiences and their causes are under the attribute extension:: they are all material states.

Cheers, it seems we agree― I don't have anything further to add.

A book on the subject of this thread: Heidegger, Neoplatonism, and the History of Being: Relation as Ontological Ground, James Filler

This book argues that Western philosophy's traditional understanding of Being as substance is incorrect, and demonstrates that Being is fundamentally Relationality. To make that argument, the book examines the history of Western philosophy's evolving conception of being, and shows how this tradition has been dominated by an Aristotelian understanding of substance and his corresponding understanding of relation. First, the book establishes that the original concept of Being in ancient Western philosophy was relational, and traces this relational understanding of Being through the Neoplatonists. Then, it follows the substantial understanding of Being through Aristotle and the Scholastics to reach its crisis in Descartes. Finally, the book demonstrates that Heidegger represents a recovery of the original, relational understanding of Being.

YouTube dialog on the book between the author and John Vervaeke