Abstract:

Spinoza’s doctrine of parallelism, expressed in the claim that ‘the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’ (E2p7), is traditionally understood as running uniformly across all attributes. There would be, on this view, an isomorphic causal chain within each of God’s infinitely many attributes, with a one-to-one correspondence between modes (Aquila, 1978; Friedman, 1983; Della Rocca, 2008; Marshall, 2009; Morrison, 2017). My paper challenges this long-standing assumption, to argue that Spinoza’s parallelism is rather meant to hold only between two attributes at a time: Thought, and that which is represented in Thought. I call this view Ideas-Things Parallelism (ITP) following Melamed (2013; Deleuze, 1990).

My defense of ITP focuses on the representational relation obtaining between an idea and its object, tracking Spinoza’s consistent framing of parallelism in those terms (E2p7, E2p20, E2p21, etc.). This relation is essentially dyadic: it pairs a single mode or object under one attribute, with its idea or representation in Thought. Since it admits only two relata, Spinoza’s parallelism simply cannot extend to additional modes under other attributes, as the traditional reading claims.

This construal allows for an elegant and textually grounded explanation of two associated features of Spinoza’s parallelism. The first is that modes belonging to ‘unknown’ attributes are the objects of ‘other kinds’ of minds, distinct from minds representing modes of Extension (KV app.2; Ep.66); this claim is in tension with the perfect isomorphy of traditional interpretations, yet ITP easily explains it through the distinct instances of the representational relation between each pair of object-idea. The second is Spinoza’s identity claim (‘a mode of Extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing’, E2p7s); while traditional interpretations must rely on obscure ‘attribute-neutral features’ to account for it (Bennett, 1984; Della Rocca, 1996), ITP does so straightforwardly through the representational relation, such that the idea of a thing just is that thing existing ‘objectively’ in Thought (Garrett, 2017; Hubner, 2022).

Importantly, ITP should not be understood as a second kind of parallelism, somehow superadded to the traditional one (contra Melamed, 2013), but rather as Spinoza’s sole parallelism. Beyond philosophical considerations to this effect, I show that passages usually taken to support a traditional reading are instead better read as supporting ITP. Most prominent is Spinoza’s assertion that ‘whether we conceive Nature under… Extension, or under… Thought, or under any other attribute, we shall find one and the same order’ (E2p7s). While traditionally understood as claiming an isomorphy between all attributes, I contend that it instead establishes one between (i) the conception or idea, and (ii) ‘Nature’, or the object conceived. This reading is clearly advantageous as it preserves the overall logical continuity of the passage, and makes use of the same conceptual resources that ground Spinoza’s parallelism more generally.

Accordingly, my paper calls for a deep reassessment of Spinoza’s parallelism, not as cutting across all attributes, but rather as holding between two attributes only, via the representational relation between ideas and their objects.