to reason. If it is instead something, it will be a certain being. If it is a being, or is such only in the mind, then it cannot constitute any real difference with respect
to the thing outside the mind. Or else it is a true being for itself outside the mind,
and in this case, either it is perfectly identified with the nature and then, since
the nature is that mode, it is not possible that it constitutes a difference; or else
it is a being different from the nature, absolutely, and then it can only be really
or relatively composed with it, and then the relation between substance and its
accidents will be something real, which is false. . . . (p. 36)
Thomas of Argentina’s response constitutes perhaps the most subtle attempt to
define the peculiar place of mode between being and nothing, between the log-
ical and the ontological:
The mode is nothing, but it is something that expresses the nature itself: and thus
a thing, which is to say a nature. And moreover, mode and nature do not mean
the nature and something [ natura et aliquid ] but the nature itself diversified by means of something [ per aliquid ], which is a real mode, because it really follows on a variation made in the nature itself. (Ibid.)
א Eucharistic transubstantiation produces the paradox of accidents without sub-
stance (the bread and wine under transubstantiation are accidents without substance)
and of a substance without accidents (the body of Christ). It is a matter of a problem that radically calls into question the categories of ontology and, by obligating him to rethink the traditional definition of accident, suggests to Giles his recourse to the notion of mode.
3.9. Between real distinction—which is in things—and that of reason—
which is in the mind—Scotus had introduced the formal distinction, which
was something less than a real distinction and more than a distinction of reason.
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Scotus’s disciples had inscribed in this category the distinction between essence
and existence, nature and supposition, quantity and substance. Picking up on
a tradition that had been in the process of consolidating from Giles to Cajetan,
Suárez calls this distinction modal and constructs upon it a true and proper
theory of modes:
I maintain that there is, in created things, a distinction—which is actual and
corresponds to the nature of things before any operation of the mind—that is
not as great as that which intervenes between two things or completely distinct
essences. It can be called real, because it derives from things and not from an
extrinsic intellectual denomination; yet to better distinguish it from the real dis-
tinction, we can call it . . . more properly a modal distinction, because it always
runs between a thing and its mode. (Suárez 2, p. 255)
The modal distinction entails that the reality of created things is defined not
only by the entity, which Suárez calls substantial or radical, but also by “real
modes, which are something positive and grasp entities by themselves, confer-
ring on them something that is outside essence in its totality, insofar as it is
individual and existent in nature” (ibid.). Among these real modes, Suárez lists
the inherence to substance of a quantity or quality, the union of substantial form
with matter (this is Leibniz’s problem in the correspondence with Des Bosses)
and “existence or personhood with respect to the common nature” (p. 256).
Mode is therefore an affection of the thing, “which determines its ultimate
state and its reason for existing, without, however, adding to it a new essence but
only by modifying it” (ibid.). Once again, it is a question of defining a paradoxi-
cal state of being, insofar as it is totally deprived of an essence of its own and yet
is really distinct from that to which it adheres as a mode, namely, by modifying it.
Thus this mode as we have defined it is really distinguished from the thing of
which it is a mode . . . but is not properly distinguished from that of which it
is a mode like one thing from another thing [ ut res a re]; it is distinguished by
a lesser distinction, which is more properly called modal. Lesser, both because
mode, considered in itself, is not properly a thing or entity and therefore cannot
be distinguished as one thing from another; and also because this mode is thus
intimately [ intimite] joined to the thing of which it is a mode, which no power
could ever make to exist without the latter, as if its conjunction implied an
identity. . . . (p. 257)
The idea of mode was invented to render thinkable the relation between essence
and existence. These are distinct and at the same time absolutely inseparable.
Their relation is, however, asymmetrical, because, as Suárez specifies a little later,
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in the modal distinction, “the separation of one element from the other is not
reciprocal, which means that one extreme can remain without the other, but not
vice versa . . . and this defines modal being, which cannot subsist by itself nor
be separated from that of which it is a mode” (p. 263). That is to say, in the dis-
tinction a hierarchy is implied that, if one conceives existence as a mode, entails
a reversal of the Aristotelian priority of the hypokeimenon in favor of essence.
Precisely this priority of essence, however, renders individuation, which is to
say, the passage from essence to existence, incomprehensible. If one conceives
singular existence as the mode of a preexistent essence—which Suárez avoids
doing—individuation becomes incomprehensible. If existence is in fact abso-
lutely inessential and adds to essence nothing but a modification, if essence can
be without its mode, why and by virtue of what is essence to be brought into
existence or be modified?
3.10. The elegance with which Scotus resolves the problem of individuation
found its legendary form in the concept of haecceity. Scotus conceives individu-
ation as the addition to common nature or form not of another form or essence
but of an ultima realitas, an ultimacy of the form itself. Singular existence does not, that is to say, add anything to the common form other than a haecceity (or
ecceity [It., eccoità]—as one, thinking of the Christological ecce homo, could translate Scotus’s ingenious term haecceitas). “Ecceity” is not something other than the essence but only its ultimate reality, in which it can be offered up for display (for
this reason Suárez will see in it a mode). In form or mode there is not a principle
by virtue of which it is individuated: here one has only an ultimacy of form, the extreme modification that allows one to say: behold the man, or else: this is my body.
But for this reason it is necessary, according to Scotus, that the common form or
nature be in itself indifferent to any singularity whatsoever or, as Scholastics will re-
peat after him, that “it is not repugnant to it to be supposed with any singularity.”
Here one clearly sees that once essence and existence have been divided (or,
as happens in Christian theology, their coincidence is admitted only in God), it
is then necessary to seek in essence what permits—or at least does not prevent—
its individuation. This is the meaning of the indifference or non-repugnance of
which Scotus speaks. As Avicen
na had already said, equinitas est equinitas tantum, horsehood is only horsehood; it is indifferent to both generality and singularity
and has in itself nothing that is opposed to being individuated in haecceity.
Radicalizing and at the same time critiquing Scotus’s position, Suárez affirms
that essence does not need any ulterior principle to be individuated. Certainly
it is possible to distinguish individual existence from common essence, but this
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difference is not modal, as for Scotus, but purely a difference of reason, and it
does not have a foundation in the thing distinct from its essence. For this reason,
to the question whether “being this or that being (that is, singular existence)
adds some mode . . . distinct from the being itself, so that this certain being, or
substance, according to the nature of the thing is formally distinguished, insofar
as the substance adds a mode, which is not included in the concept of being”
(p. 82), Suárez responds negatively. The essence of a singular being already con-
tains its possible individuation and does not have need of any real supplement,
not even the inessential adjunct that is mode.
3.11. Even if one thinks the relation between essence and singular existence
on the model of the Aristotelian relation between potential and act, possible and
actual, individuation remains problematic. What drives the possible to produce
itself in ecceity, to actually realize itself in act in this or that singularity?
In a famous passage from Book Theta of the Metaphysics (1047a 24–25), Ar-
istotle laid out (but not resolved) the problem in the enigmatic formulation
according to which: “That is potential for which, if the act of which it is said
to have potential is verified, nothing will be potential not to be.” If essence and
existence have been divided like potential and act, nothing is more problematic
than their relation.
For this reason, just as Scotus had to suppose in essence an indifference or
non-repugnance to singularity, so also Suárez must postulate in essence or com-
mon nature an aptitudo to being produced in a certain singular existence. “The
intrinsic principle from which the individual difference of a substantial form
derives is the very essence of the form, to the extent to which it has a certain
aptitude to inform matter” (p. 185). In the same sense, insofar as it is possible, es-
sence “has a certain aptitude, or non-repugnance, to being produced in a certain
being” (Courtine, p. 302). “The aptitude of possible things to exist is nothing
other than a certain non-repugnance on their part and, on the part of the cause,
signifies a potential to produce them” (ibid., p. 319).
Aptitude is certainly more than indifference or non-repugnance; but what it
can consist in, what inclines or disposes an essence to individuation, is not easy
to explain once one thinks, as does Suárez, that it already contains all it needs
and that the difference between essence and existence is only one of reason.
When Leibniz, several decades later, defines existence as a “demand” of essence
and, in the correspondence with Des Bosses, writes that the bond that defines
the existence of composite substances “demands the monads, but does not es-
sentially entail them,” it is with this same problem that he is seeking to contend.
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It is not surprising, then, that in another passage of the Disputations, Suárez
must have recourse to the concept of expression to somehow account for the
conceptual difference between essence and existence. The determination of
being in singular existence, he affirms, must not be understood according to
the mode of a composition but only as a more expressive mode of conceiving
the entity ( per modum expressioris conceptionis). Essence and singular existence
are not, that is to say, two really separate concepts, but they differ only “insofar
as one is more determinate than the other [ unus est magis determinatus quam
alio] . . . insofar as in one the thing is conceived more expressively [ per unum expressius concipitur res]” (Suárez, p. 101).
What this supplement of expressivity is with respect to Scotus’s haecceity or
Giles’s mode, Suárez does not specify. But it is certain that this passage is like a
passing of the baton that announces the decisive gesture with which Spinoza will
write that particular things “are nothing but modes wherein the attributes of God
find expression in a definite and determinate way” (Spinoza 2, 1, prop. 25, cor.).
3.12. At this point we can better understand what is at stake in the corre-
spondence between Leibniz and Des Bosses with which we began. The stakes
are genuinely ontological. It is a matter of thinking the singular existence of
a body, that is, of something that the development of ontology had rendered
problematic. Des Bosses takes up the position, for him more reassuring, of the
modal tradition: existence is not an entity but a mode of being, which does not
add to the essence anything but a modification. He agrees with Leibniz that the
monads on their own can only constitute an aggregate and that they are there-
fore in need of a bond: but this bond is only a mode of the dominant monad
(that which gives form to the body, the essence), and not, as Leibniz maintains,
something absolute and substantial. Against this modalistic conception of the
unity of an existent body, another tradition had reacted, which objected to the
modistae that “it is absurd that there should be any formally distinct entity by
means of which form is united to matter; therefore, it is absurd that there should
be a modal union” (Boehm, A., p. 51).
Leibniz—who had made his debut in 1663 with a dissertation On the Princi-
ple of Individuation, in which he had made his own the thesis of Suárez accord-
ing to which “every individual is individualized by means of the totality of its
essence”—now introduces, in order to explain the unity of composite substance,
something more substantial than a mode or a difference of reason, which, taking
up again a concept already widely used by the Scholastics, he calls vinculum
substantiale, substantial bond. But what is in question here is not whether the
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1171
principle of individuation is a mode or a substantial bond so much as a trans-
formation of the fundamental concepts of ontology. What is decisive, from this
perspective, is the concept of demand, which Leibniz had already elaborated at
the end of the 1680s in his text De veritatis primis. The bond is an active prin-
ciple, which “demands the monads,” just as, in the text on the first truths, exis-
tence is defined as “a demand of essence.” The “non-repugnance” of Scotus and
the “aptitude” of Suárez have now become a demand. Existence is not a mode of
essence or a difference of reason alone: it is a demand.
It is this transformation of ontology that we will seek to follow and to de-
velop from a new perspective.
3.13. Some decades before the years in which the correspondence unfolded,
the model of a modal ontology had been elaborated by a philosopher with whom
&nbs
p; Leibniz maintained a relation that has rightly been defined as “a mixture of ad-
miration and repugnance” (Friedmann, p. 277): Spinoza. And it is certain that
this aspect of Spinoza’s thought seemed to the majority of his contemporaries
just as unacceptable as his supposed atheism, if Bayle, subjecting him to ridicule,
could write that “in Spinoza’s system, those who say that the Germans killed ten
thousand Turks express themselves badly, unless they mean: God, modified in
the Germans, killed God modified in ten thousand Turks” (ibid., p. 187). In any
case, whether Bayle was right or wrong, the problem of the relation between
substance and the modes is one of the cruxes of Spinozan hermeneutics.
Spinoza’s radical ontological thesis is well known: “Nothing exists except
substance and modes” ( praeter substantias et modos nihil existit; Spinoza 2, 1,
prop. XV, proof.). It has been stated that Spinoza’s novelty does not consist in
the definition of substance but in that of modes; and nevertheless, even though
in the Cogitata (1, 1) he had distinguished modes from accidents (“The accident
is only a mode of thought and exists solely with respect to thought, while the
mode is something real”; Spinoza 3, p. 120), the definition of the modes closely
follows the traditional definition of accidents: the modes are “affections of sub-
stance; that is, that which is in something else and is conceived through some-
thing else” ( in alio est, per quod etiam concipitur; Spinoza 2, 1, def. 5). (With a significant variation, the corollary of proposition XXV defines particular things
as “affections of the attributes of God; that is, modes wherein the attributes of
God find expression in a definite and determinate way.”)
One of the problems with which Spinoza’s interpreters must always contend
is the fact that substantially new thoughts are expressed in the terminology of
the philosophy of his time. As we have seen, the latter, which derived from
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the Scholastic tradition, distinguished between essence and existence and be-
tween common nature and individual supposition and made use of the concept
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