BENEDICT SPINOZA AND MONISM, RATIONALISM, DEDUCTIVISM, AND DETERMINISMBenedict Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) lived out his life as a lens grinder in Amsterdam.[xxxvii]He was relatively obscure and uninfluential during his lifetime.TheEthics, his most important work,[xxxviii]was published posthumously.The title of his work reflects his central aim:he wished to establish a way of life that was ethically correct and satisfying.In this context, psychology was a necessary step toward ethics.Methodologically, Spinoza was both rationalistic and deductive.Sharing Descartes' enthusiasm for a geometric ideal, Spinoza began with self-evident axioms from which he proposed to deduce the nature of reality.He presented his views in geometrical form, that is, each new point was derived from preceding points.His conception of science admirably reflects his rationalistic method.The order of natural objects and the order of knowledge of them are coextensive; "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things."[xxxix]Spinoza's views are firmly rooted in his conception of God.[xl]God is infinite and is the only substance.Thought and extension are but attributes of God.To think of "things," ie., the objects of the world as we know them, is incorrect; instead of things, there are modes of substance, and whatever is, is a modification of the one substance that is God.A body is an abstraction, a finite way of regarding the infinite substance that is God.The human mind is no more than an aspect of the mind of God.[xli]Man is a unitary individual and has the modes or forms of attributes of body (extension) and mind (thought).[xlii]To Spinoza, mind and body are not separate, as they are to Descartes.They are one; they are two aspects of the same reality.Neither body nor mind is autonomous; man has modes of the attributes of both extension and thought.This is a form of parallelism --monistic parallelism.Every bodily event coexists with and is coordinate to a mental event.Body and mind correlate, but they do not cause one another any more than the convex side of a glass causes the concave.Apparent interaction arises from ignorance on our part and shows only the coincidence of actions; it is a matter of appearance, not a reflection of reality.[xliii]Spinoza clearly states that it follows from this that the body cannot determine the mind to think nor can the mind determine the body to motion or rest.Unlike Descartes, Spinoza thought of the mind as an automaton, a term he explicitly applied to it.[xliv]Mind and body both were to be studied deterministically, Spinoza was perhaps the first modern thinker to view the world, including man, from a strictly deterministic standpoint.Both mind and body are of equal status, and both are subject to natural law.[xlv]Spinoza saw clearly that his deterministic view of man required that there be laws of nature which are applicable to man.He mentions, for example, remembering by similarity and by contiguity as examples of the laws which we should seek.[xlvi]Time and again he tells us that the will is not free.[xlvii]The mind has no free will; it is determined by a cause that in turn is determined by another cause, and so on.Thisdeterminismbrought Spinoza to something of a dilemma.How can man be ethically influenced -- and ethics is after all, his main theme -- if there is strict determinism?Throughout his works the answer is offered that man's nature may be improved by improving his understanding and by encouraging him to follow ethical principles that may be learned.The behavior of ignorant man is determined from without while the wise man can act in line with greater knowledge of nature.Acting in the light of necessity is man's highest freedom,[xlviii]and freedom is one with necessity.In contrast to Descartes' view of the mind as primarily cognitive, Spinoza emphasizes theconativeor drive aspect of mental life.Central to Spinoza's psychology is the concept ofconatus, something similar to what we would call an impulse toward self-preservation.[xlix]The striving for self-preservation is desire when it is conscious of itself; it is appetite when it is not.[l]In another place he speaks of man being led more by "blind desire" than by "reason."[li]When unconscious desire is coupled with his emphasis on conation in general and his acceptance of determinism, it is hardly surprising that Spinoza should be seen as anticipating Freud.[lii]But although this may be of some incidental interest, it must be pointed out that Spinoza's thinking was arrived at from a perspective vastly different from that of Freud; and although he was familiar with the works of Spinoza,[liii]Freud shows no evidence of a direct influence.GOTTFRIED W. LEIBNIZ AND MOLECULARISM, MONISM, CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS MENTALISMGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), one of the inventors of the calculus, was also a philosopher, scientist, historian, diplomat, logician, and lawyer, and after his death, a leading intellectual force in Europe.[liv]Among his many concerns, he investigated the issue of body-mind relationships.Leibniz's unique contribution to our understanding of the nature of the mind is to be found in the theory of the "monad," his term for the individual units of all substances, indicating that he was guided by a molecular prescription.He held that the world consists of an infinite number of monads.[lv]As a unit, each monad is unextended.Extension is rejected by Leibniz as an attribute of substance, and this leaves the monads -- all monads-- with mind as their essential attribute.Each monad is a psychic entity. In denying substance, he denied the reality of matter also, and in its place substituted an infinity of monads.Although mental, each of the monads has some of the properties of a physical point, and when collected into an aggregate, they create an appearance of extension.[lvi]The tree and the stones of everyday life, although appearing to the senses as objects, are actually aggregates of monads, and in themselves are not phenomenal.Thus, Leibniz satisfied the need for an explanation of at least the appearance of extension in the world.Each monad acts independently, but is crated by God to act in pre-established harmony with other monads.[lvii]The monads may appear to interact, but they do not.This takes the place of the untenable position that they influence one another.[lviii]There is no causality between monads.There is no causal relation between monads, not even between those of the mind and those of the body.For our present discussion this is most important.Non-interaction of body and mind is but a special case of the parallelism of monads.Mind and body follow their own laws but show perfect agreement, and give the impression of interaction.But actually there is a parallelism.The situation is similar to the interplay of the instruments of a symphony orchestra, in which each player follows the score and yet gives the impression of one instrument responding to another.In a similar manner God composed the score, which is then played out according to pre-established harmony.Stripped of the trappings of the monads, Leibniz's conception of parallelism was a forerunner of the doctrine of parallelistic dualism or psychophysical parallelism that was to be so important to Wilhelm Wundt and others of the early introspectionistic psychologists.To Leibniz, all units of the world are endowed with life and motion and so are somewhat akin to consciousness.Even lifeless matter is only relatively unconscious; it has the least possible degree of consciousness.[lix]Living organisms are composed of monads with varying degrees of consciousness.Mental events, that is to say, the activity of monads, have degrees of clarity ranging from the totally unclear to the most definitely conscious or clearly grasped.[lx]To Leibniz, this was more a matter of focal and peripheral attention than of consciousness as we would use the term.[lxi]Nevertheless, in view of the closeness of meaning, it was later seen as a conception of the continuum of consciousness-unconsciousness. At one extreme there are mental events of which we are totally unconscious, while at the other extreme are those that are clearly grasped or to use the technical term, apperceived.The degree of consciousness is a relative matter.[lxii]The supposedly unconscious has the possibility of becoming conscious.There are lower degrees of consciousness --petitesperceptions, to use Leibniz's term.These, when actualized, are apperceived.Hearing the roar of the surf is apperception, because it is the sum of all the drops of water we would not be conscious of if they were heard only one by one.The sound of a single drop is unconscious perception; sum up many drops at once and there is apperception.