Spinoza challenged the older philosopher’s segregation of mental substance from material substance, arguing instead that mind and matter were not two separable substances but simply two different attributes, or aspects, of one and the same substance, which he called Deus, sive Natura, “God, or Nature.” This unitary substance could appear either as matter, on the one hand, or as mind, on the other, depending upon the vantage we viewed it from. Just as, according to Spinoza, the vast and originating power that his contemporaries called “God” was nothing other than the creative dynamism and intelligence of Nature itself, so the human mind was simply the specific sensitivity and sentience of that part of nature we recognize as a human body. Every material body or thing, for Spinoza, had its mental aspect—all things were ensouled. The human body was the outward, material aspect of the human mind, as the mind was nothing other than the internal, felt experience of the body. “The mind and the body are one and the same thing …” (...) Still, in one important respect Spinoza remains ahead of even those researchers who today claim his heretical insights as their own. Most of those who now assert the centrality of the body in any understanding of the mind—those who argue that it is really the body as a whole, and not an isolated brain, that is the true locus of awareness—still remain trapped within the confines of an unnecessary presumption. It’s a presumption that lingers as our deepest inheritance from the Cartesian tradition: the assumption that awareness, or mind, is a special possession of our species, a property that isolates humankind from the rest of material nature. (...) Very few of those participant in the current “turn toward the body” seem to notice the wider, more subversive implications of their work. While they assert that the entirety of the body is integral to the mind, surely (they assume) it is only the human body that has this privilege, and not the body of an elk, or an aspen grove, or the dense flesh of the ground itself. Surely the gushing body of a river, or the ebb and flow of the breeze, has no real part in intelligence! It is here that their timidity contrasts with the far-seeing audacity of Spinoza. He alone saw that the human mind could never be reconciled with the human body unless intelligence was recognized as an attribute of nature in its entirety. To Spinoza, every sensible phenomenon had its own mental aspect; every tangible body within the material world was also an idea within the vast, encompassing intelligence that was known inwardly (to some) as God and outwardly (to all) as nature.
David Abram, Becoming animal
