Like most philosophies of th seventeenth centrury, Spinoza philosophical has the nottion of substance at its heart. This concept can be traced back to Aristotle, who asked, “ what is it about an object that stays the same when it undergoes change?” Wax, for example, can melt and change its shape, size, color, smell, and texture, and yet still remain wax, promoting the question: what are we referring to when we speak off “ the wax” ? since it can change in every was that we can perceive, the wax must also be something beyond its perceptible properties, and for Aristotle this unchanging thing is the Wax’s “substance” more generally, substance is anything that has properties – or that which underlies the world of appearance.
Spinoza employs, “substance in a similar ways definig it as that which is self explanatory – or that which can be understood by knowing its nature alone, as opposed to all other things that can be known only by there relationship with other things. For example, the concept “cart” can only be understood with reference to other concepts such as motion, transport, and so on. Moreover for Spinoza there can only be one such substance, for there were two understanding one would entail understanding its relationship with the other which contradicts the definition of susbstance. Further more, he argues, since there is only one such substance, there can, infact, be nothing but that substance and everything else is in some sense a part of it. Spinoza’s position is known as “substance monism”, which claims that all things are unltimately aspects of a single thing, as opposed to “substance dualism”, which claims that there are two kinds of things in the universe most commonly defined as mind and matter.
For Spinoza then substance underlies our experience, but it can also be known by its various attributes. He does not specify how many attributes substance has, but he says that human beings, atleast can conconcieve of two – namely, the attribute of extension (Physicality) and the attribute of thought (Mentality). For this reason Spinoza is also known as an attribute dualist, and he claims that these two attributes cannot be explained by each other, and so must be included in any complete account of the word. As for substance itself, Spinoza says that we are right to call it God or nature – that self explaining thing which, in human form, sees itself under the attributes of body and mind.
