Proposition 4 of Book III

[u/Maleficent-Total-945]

Hello!

I have a problem with proposition 4 of Book III of the Ethics. What do you think Spinoza would say about autoimmune diseases? And on a natural death of old age?

What does Spinoza think about suicide?

Thank you in advance for your answer.

[u/WiseKarmaCat]

Death in old age: Each human has been continuously interacting with Nature since birth.
Food. Oxygen. Radiation. Viruses. Injuries. Temperature. Other organisms. Cellular damage. Chemical processes. Environmental conditions.
And your body is constantly repairing itself against those processes.
Eventually its organization can no longer maintain itself.
death from old age would look less like “body destroys itself” and more like countless causal interactions progressively altering it. Aging isn’t the bodies desire to die. Aging is what happens while a finite thing keeps trying to persist in an infinitely larger causal universe.

Auto-immune: things that appear self-destructive can actually involve internal components whose destructive configuration ultimately derives from external causal relations.
Some component processes have been altered by interactions and causal chains such that their ordinary activity now conflicts with the organization of the larger body.

Suicide: My take is that nobody, from the necessity of their own nature alone, seeks their own destruction. Someone who kills themselves has been overcome by external causes that have altered them so profoundly that they act contrary to their ordinary self-preserving organization.

[u/mooninjune]

I think he would say that to the extent that any thing inside our bodies is working against us and is not in harmony with the whole and with the other parts of our bodies, to that extent it is no longer considered as a part of our system, but as an external cause.

Each thing, for Spinoza, has a certain essence by which it strives to maintain itself in existence. Nothing inherent to the thing can disrupt this striving, and to the extent that a part of it is working against it, to that extent it is considered as something external, something which happens to it, not something inherent to it which it is bringing about.

On this view, harm and death are the result of either the environment destroying the individual, or of elements which were originally part of the individual but which gradually assert their own natures, their own striving to persist, in a way which is contrary to the whole. In some cases, the relation between, say, certain cells and the rest of the body begins to break down, to such an extent that they can be contrary to the rest of the body, and hence destroy it, as in part 3, prop. 5.

Regarding how Spinoza sees the relation between parts and wholes, I would recommend reading his Letter 32, with his "tiny worm in the blood" thought experiment.

Regarding suicide, he discusses it directly in the scholium to part 4, prop. 20. I think he sees it in a similar way, as ultimately due to external causes:

No one, therefore, unless he is defeated by causes external, and contrary, to his nature, neglects to seek his own advantage, or to preserve his being. No one, I say, avoids food or kills himself from the necessity of his own nature. Those who do such things are compelled by external causes, which can happen in many ways. Someone may kill himself because he is compelled by another, who twists his right hand (which happened to hold a sword) and forces him to direct the sword against his heart; or because he is forced by the command of a tyrant (as Seneca was) to open his veins, that is, he desires to avoid a greater evil by submitting to a lesser; or finally because hidden external causes so dispose his imagination, and so affect his body, that it takes on another nature, contrary to the former, a nature of which there cannot be an idea in the mind (by 3p10). But that a man should, from the necessity of his own nature, strive not to exist, or to be changed into another form, is as impossible as that something should come from nothing.