Correcting an Error

Issuing a correction about Spinoza, based on a catastrophically bad YouTube segment from yours truly

A few days ago, I released a video (in collaboration with Joseph Folley) where we did something very silly: we created a tier list of classic philosophy books. It’s in the nature of such a video that you’re going to be superficially describing many of the books — even though it was a 4-hour video, we covered close to 30 books, which meant the discussions were not particularly in-depth.

For reference, this is the video:

Some of these books we knew better than others. We both are quite familiar with The Republic, and I think you see that in our discussion; the same is true for Nicomachean Ethics. Sometimes, one of us knew the subject matter better than the other — for instance, Joe knows Schopenhauer much better than me, and so he took the lead in that segment.

In one of my segments, which was on Spinoza’s Ethics, I made a series of catastrophic mistakes, to the point where one commenter suggested that I had never read Spinoza. That’s not right, but I think it was a fair conclusion to draw given how bad my description of Spinoza’s view was.

What do you do when you much such a mistake on a video that could get hundreds of thousands of views? All YouTube will let me do is delete a segment using their very simple editor. That’s ineffective for two reasons. One, it hides the original mistake. Two, it doesn’t offer a the correct information in its place.

So, I’m writing this to offer a correction. I’ll be linking to this post in a pinned comment and putting the link in the description as well.

I’ll explain first how the mistake happened, then I’ll explain what I’m going to do to prevent that from happening in the future, and then I’ll try to accurately present Spinoza’s view in outline as a correction to what I said in the video.

How it happened, and what I’m changing in my process

Prepping for a video like this is difficult. That’s not an excuse — after all, if you want to do something like that, you should be prepared for the work it requires. Revisiting all of these works individually would take months, perhaps even years, which was unrealistic for any particular YouTube video.

As it happens, I’ve been reading Frederick Copleston’s History of Philosophy recently as part of my research for another video. These are good volumes, and generally highly regarded.¹ A few days before recording, I had read the Spinoza chapters (not for this video), but that made me feel confident that I could gloss Spinoza well enough for the video.

I didn’t take notes on what I read. I simply read it, and then I assumed that would be enough. When it came time to explain Spinoza’s view, I took the lead, confident that I could do it from memory.

Of course, if I had been able to do that, I wouldn’t be writing this post. I made a series of errors, including saying ‘modes’ many times when I should have said ‘attributes,’ and in fact omitting attributes from the explanation entirely. If you know anything about Spinoza’s Ethics, you’ll immediately see a problem. I’ll explain in more detail in the next section, but you get the idea.

I would describe that portion of the video as catastrophic, laughably bad, and deeply embarrassing. The commenter who pointed out the errors wrote:

Have some respect for yourself, for your watchers, and for the philosophers who have not dedicated their life to their work to have it butchered, centuries later, by a random and lazy YouTuber.... Don't be a pedant; you're better than that.

And I think that’s basically correct. Making an error like that betrays a lack of respect for my audience, myself, and for philosophy itself. When the commenter wrote ‘You’re better than that,’ my thought was: No, I’m not, but I would like to be. That’s why I’m writing this.

Here are the mistakes I made:

• I should have consulted the primary source, at the very least for the definitions of substance, mode, and attribute.²

• I should have made notes when I read a secondary source (along with the primary source) to use in the video. I could have then consulted the notes during the recording process.

• If I spotted an error in the editing process, I could have fixed it there.

• Above all, I should not have presented falsehoods so confidently. If I was unsure about something – as I clearly should have been, since I didn’t accurately describe the view – I should have said that I was unsure or chosen not to discuss Spinoza at all in the video.

From the description of the error, the preventative steps are easy enough to guess:

1. I’ll always check the primary source; if that requires more time, I’ll do more research before making the video.

2. I’ll take notes and double-check them before using them.

3. Above all, I’ll say ‘I don’t know’ more often.

I’ll also look into fact-checking in the editing process; I need to see how other educational YouTubers handle this.

I’ve made mistakes on camera before, but never one as embarrassing as this. I’m hoping that by making myself write this up publicly, I’m also incentivizing myself to not make such an egregious mistake in the future.

The mistake

The whole section was sloppy, but I think that the most egregious mistake – and the mistake I’ll focus on here, as it is emblematic of the overall issue – is that I completely omitted attributes from an explanation of Spinoza’s metaphysics. I instead only referred to modes. This goes beyond a simple terminological slip — it isn’t Spinoza’s view, and in fact is nonsense given Spinoza’s definitions.

Going back to the commenter who pointed this out, they write (slightly edited):

You confuse modes and attributes. The definitions of both modes and attributes are in the first page of the first part of the book. You haven’t even gone past the very first page of the Ethica and decided to make a video about it? You say mind and body are two modes of the same thing; this, in it of itself, literally doesn’t mean anything at all. What you should have said is that mind and body were two attributes of the same substance. You have to do better!

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To make that a little clearer, I’ll include the relevant definitions from Part 1 of the Ethics.

Definition 3: By substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e. no concept of any other thing is needed for forming a concept of it.

Definition 4: By attribute I mean that which an intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence.

Definition 5: By mode I mean affections of a substance or that which is in another thing through which it is also conceived.

We also need to look at one of the propositions from Part 1, particularly about particular things. In the Corollary to Proposition 25, Spinoza writes (bold added):

Particular things are simply affections of God’s attributes or modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a specific and determinate way.

‘Particular things are… modes by which attributes are expressed’ being the key phrase here. Particular things are modes of an attribute.

Steven Nadler puts it better than I can in this SEP article:

Particular and individual things are causally more remote from God. They are nothing but “affections of God’s attributes, or modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way” (Ip25c). More precisely, they are finite modes.

This is the important thing to remember: particular things are finite modes.

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We’re now in a position to see what I got wrong. Earlier, I said that I relied on a secondary source, namely the multi-volume history from Frederick Copleston. Here’s a representative passage from the Copleston volume, specifically about the mind and body:

…the human body is man considered as a mode of the attribute of extension, and the human mind is man considered as a mode of the attribute of thought.³

But here’s what I said (one example, lightly edited):

If Spinoza is right about the underlying metaphysics, he solves the problem of mind-body interaction, because it becomes two modes of the same thing.

Here, I am saying that Spinoza dissolves the problem of mind-body interaction, focusing on the mind and body of some particular person (‘the same thing.’)

That isn’t right, and in fact as a matter of definition cannot be right. A particular thing is a mode for Spinoza. When I said it was ‘two modes of the same thing,’ I was literally spouting nonsense. The mind and the body are two attributes of the same substance. They are not two modes of the same thing, which would (when translated into more Spinozist terminology) be two modes of the same mode. Which is, again, nonsense given Spinoza’s definitions.

This was the most egregious error in the section, but I now wish I could go through and redo the entire thing.

Going forward

To some, this might seem like an overreaction. I made a mistake in a YouTube video and I’ve now sent an email to approximately 42,000 people telling them (and posting the link in the video comments). Others might think this just further evidence that I’m a hack.

I fear the second reaction is closer to the truth. When you start growing an audience online, there is a temptation to talk about things beyond your actual knowledge. You start thinking that something is interesting simply because you said it. This is something I always told myself I wouldn’t do. And overall, I think I’ve done a decent job of that — I’ve made mistakes, but none that caused me this much grief. But I did it this time. I spoke very confidently about a philosopher without doing the requisite work to earn that confidence.

I may not be a hack, but I certainly acted like one in that segment. For that, I apologize.

I want to produce high-quality educational content on YouTube, even when I’m making a slightly silly video like a tier list. But that comes with a lot of responsibility, too; I shirked that responsibility there.

I’ll do better in the future.

1. I am not attributing my error to Copleston. I am attributing my error to me quickly reading Copleston, assuming that I knew what I was talking about, and then confidently talking out of my ass.

2. I always tell people to refer to primary sources. So, this wasn’t just a mistake — I was being a hypocrite! I should have followed my own advice.

3. From The Rationalists, volume 4 of Copleston’s History of Philosophy.