have common attributes provided one or more is different. “Leibniz is right, it
would seem, and Spinoza can reply only that he is indeed assuming that a
substance has only one attribute.” (Nadler, S. 2006), Nadler goes on to claim this
would be problematic for the later ninth proposition “The more reality or being
each thing has, the more attributes belong to it” (Spinoza, Ethics (1677) 1P9),
which Spinoza is using as evidence of Gods reality, as he argues that with a
greater number of attributes comes more essence.
However, there seems to be a misconception of Spinoza’s claim here, and
he could instead reply thus, that there is a linguistic misconception over his
meaning of substance, and is using the term ‘substances’ by convention as
opposed to the singular substance. For by Spinoza’s account there can only be
one substance, once the attributes are removed, or this maybe better put that
there is only one substance with all possible attributes. Proposition 5 is merely
stating that you can’t have two cases of an identically attributed substance, as
there is in fact only one substance, and two objects with the same attributes
would in fact be two examples of the same substance. The question remains
though, does Spinoza mean to imply God can exist simultaneously in different,
opposing ‘modes’ say both angry and benevolent.
Some modern scholarship has been focused on the ambiguous distinction
between the reality of substance against the reality of attributes, as Spinoza’s
substance seems to have no features other than eternal unity, and he defines
attributes by “what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its
essence” (Spinoza, Ethics (1677) 1d4). This has lead scholars in two main
directions, subjectivists who define attributes as “what the finite intellect
perceives of substance as if (but not in fact) constituting its essence” (Shein, N),
for example as the subjectivist Hegel claims, “it is only reality in view of the
understanding” (Hegel, G. 1837). By this definition, the infinite substance itself
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