スピノザと主観性の消失

Abstract

Descartes' methodological procedure of doubting even evident ideas is often called 'hyperbolic doubt'. The purpose of this paper is to understand the core of Spinoza's criticism of hyperbolic doubt and his own methodological stance in contrast with that of Descartes. Descartes' method is, in a word, externalistic. Externalism lies in prescription or ethics for gaining a special point of view from which to reflect on all our beliefs neutrally, without any bias. Such an externalistic point of view might be called 'subjectivity', according to Makoto Yamamoto, when we look at the history of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant to Husserl. Hyperbolic doubt is a concrete version of externalism, and Descartes aims at the externalistic point of view or subjectivity by doubting even evident ideas with the so-called 'Deceiving God' hypothesis. Spinoza's criticism against hyperbolic doubt, therefore, is to be interpreted as an attack on the Cartesian effort to gain an external point of view. The core of his criticism is that the supposed external unprejudiced point of view is nothing but an illusion, because the 'Deceiving God' hypothesis, on which hyperbolic doubt has to be based, is not a clear and evident idea at all. Doubting evident ideas is to be regarded as a mental confusion caused by attending to such a confused hypothesis, and the point of view gained by that doubt is not at all neutral but quite prejudiced. Spinoza's own method is internalism, which says that the truth of evident ideas is justified with the very evidence of the ideas. But what is the evidence of ideas? For him, the evidence of an idea is just its deductive connection with other ideas, and so an idea isolated from the deductive network has no evidence at all. In this respect Spinoza's internalism can be called 'wholistic internalism'. Additionally, Spinoza considers this network of evident ideas to have an autonomous power to extend itself by deducing other evident ideas step by step. The author concludes the paper by comparing his results with a couple of studies on Spinoza by other scholars.