Material Causality and Extension

Spinoza repudiates Teleological Causality, and classifies divine creativity as Efficient Causality.  But how the latter, which since Aristotle has entailed a substantive distinction between Cause and Effect, can obtain in the case of a single Substance is unclear.  Now, his Substance is immanently dynamic. So, what he calls an 'attribute', which usually connotes a static property a-temporally possessed by a static substratum, is better expressed as 'power', as it is rendered at Ethics, II, vii.  Thus, Substance's Attribute of Thought is better expressed as the Power of Thinking, and its Attribute of Extension is better expressed as the Power of Extending, or equivalently, as Spinoza presents it at Ethics, II, vii, "action".  But, as has been previously discussed, to extend is to vary a given, i. e. by adding to it, and, hence, can be classified as Material Causality, as defined here.  Meanwhile, insofar as the function of Thinking is to maintain connectivity in creativity, it can be classified as Formal Causality.  Hence, his Parallelism consists in Formal Causality-Material Causality complementarity, usually recognized as Form-Matter complementarity.  Accordingly, the Knowledge by which, in his doctrine, passivity is transformed into activity, is not contemplative, but technical, i. e. consisting in how one might effectively conduct oneself.  Conceiving this crucial phase of his doctrine as Empowerment is difficult on the basis of traditional interpretations of Efficient Causality and Extension.