The Substantial Essence in Spinoza's Ontological Argument

Spinoza is standardly thought to understand a being whose essence involves existence as a being that necessarily exists.God exists because His nature says so, with nary an argument for His nature.I argue that this interpretation is mistaken, and that Spinoza includes between his definition of God and argument for His necessary existence an argument for the necessity of His essence.Spinoza then provides three a priori arguments for God's existence that rely crucially on His essence, and his second and third arguments illustrate the mechanism by which God's essence necessitates God.God's essence, I argue, plays a considerably stronger role in Spinoza's ontological argument than scholars have typically understood.keywords Spinoza, substance, essence, ontological argument, E IP7, reason, power descartes appears to intentionally distance his a priori argument for God from the conceptual orientation of earlier arguments by insisting that God's true and immutable nature is something that is real whether he conceives it or not.I find within me countless ideas of things which even though they may not exist anywhere outside me still cannot be called nothing; for although in a sense they can be thought of at will, they are not my invention but have their own true and immutable natures. 1 Descartes's idea of a triangle, for instance, is a conception of a true and immutable nature that may be conceived whether any actual triangles do or ever have existed, and that is neither invented by nor dependent on his mind.Descartes argues that his idea of God also refers to a true and immutable nature and that whatever we 1 René Descartes, AT VII.64/CSM II.44.For a conceptualist approach, see Anselm, for instance: "it is one thing for an object to exist in mind, and another thing to understand that an object actually exists. . . .And surely that-than-which-a greater-cannot-be-thought cannot exist in the mind alone [Aliud enim est rem esse in intellectu, alium intelligere rem esse. . . .Et certe id quo maius cogitari nequit, non potest esse in solo intellectu]" (Proslogion, 116-17, my translation).Translations of Descartes are from John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes.In citing Descartes, I include the pagination for the source of the passage in Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, before the location in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch.I use the standard AT and CSM abbreviations to refer to these works, followed by volume and page number.