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Theories about Consciousness
in Spinoza’s Ethics
Michael LeBuffe
Texas A&M University
Spinoza contends that there is an idea in the human mind of anything
that happens in the human body, and he argues subsequently that every-
thing that he has shown about human beings applies generally to all indi-
viduals.1 So every individual also has a mind, and there is an idea in its
mind of anything that happens in its body. There is some textual evi-
dence in the Ethics suggesting that Spinoza follows Descartes in closely
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Paul Hoffman. A version was presented at
the New England Colloquium in Early Modern Philosophy. Thanks to Alison Simmons,
Jeff McDonough, and the conference participants for their comments. Thanks also to
Daniel Garber for sharing his opinions about the timing of Descartes’s correspondence
in 1641 and to two anonymous referees for the Philosophical Review . Han van Ruler was
very generous with his time and skill in nding the edition of Descartes’s correspon-
dence that Spinoza owned, verifying its contents, and providing from it the transcription
of Descartes’s response to Hyperaspistes that appears in note 22. I am grateful for his
help.1. For the former doctrine, see Ethics 2p12: “Whatever happens in the object of the
idea constituting the human mind must be perceived by the human mind, or [ sive ] anidea of that thing will necessarily be given in the mind; that is, if the object of the idea
constituting a human mind is a body, nothing can happen in that body that is not per-
ceived by the mind.” For the latter, see 2p13cs: “For these things that we have shown are
completely general and pertain no more to men than to other individuals.” In this essay,
I refer to passages in Spinoza’s work, when it is necessary to do so, by reference to the
volume number, page number, and line number. For example, “Spinoza 1972, 2/95 12”
abbreviates volume 2, page 95, line 12 of Spinoza 1972. More often, as here, I refer in
an abbreviated form to the formal apparatus of the Ethics . For example, “2p13cs” abbre-
viates Ethics , part 2, proposition 13, corollary, scholium. All translations in this essay are
my own.
Philosophical Review , Vol. 119, No. 4, 2010
DOI 10.1215/00318108-2010-013
© 2010 by Cornell University
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associating ideas with consciousness.2 Under the supposition that all
ideas are conscious, however, Spinoza’s characterizations of human
beings and all other individuals have strong, unattractive implications:not only am I conscious of absolutely everything that happens in my body;
all stones, tennis balls, toasters, apples, and frying pans are also conscious
of absolutely everything that happens in their bodies.3 In order to avoid
these implications, Spinoza needs a theory of selective consciousness, a
theory about which minds and which ideas in minds are conscious.
Sympathetic scholars have argued that such a theory may be found
in the very few remarks about consciousness that Spinoza makes in the
Ethics . There are two different proposals, which derive from two different
groups of remarks. In parts 3 and 4 of the Ethics , Spinoza introduces afew claims about our consciousness of ourselves. The demonstrations of
these propositions all refer to a series of propositions in part 2 concerning
ideas of ideas. One proposal, then, is that Spinoza distinguishes between
ideas of ideas and other ideas, taking only the former, and therefore only
minds that have the former, to be conscious.4 A second proposal empha-
sizes a group of remarks, most of which are in part 5, about the ways
in which minds vary. On this proposal, which admits of slightly different
2. At the demonstration to 4p8, Spinoza argues for his characterization of the mind’s
consciousness of its affects by referring to 2p21 and 2p22. In those propositions, however,
he discusses ideas in minds and does not mention consciousness. This uneasy transition
is noted in Bennett 1984, 190–91. A similar point, tracing Spinoza’s argument for a claim
about consciousness in 3p9, is made in Wilson 1999, 134–35. The Cartesian precedent is
important because, although Spinoza is not himself a Cartesian, he typically makes clear
and direct arguments against central Cartesian doctrines wherever he breaks with them in
the Ethics . See, notably, Spinoza’s rejections of free will at 2p48, of the distinction between
will and intellect at 2p49c and s, and of the doctrine of the pineal gland and Descartes’s
account of the control of passions at 5 preface. Spinoza’s relative silence about conscious-
ness thus invites an interpretation on which he accepts Descartes’s denition of thought
(Principles of Philosophy 1.9, AT 8–1, 7; CSMK 1, 195) as, “all of those things that we are
conscious of arising in us, insofar as we are conscious of them.” See also Descartes’s def-
initions of ‘thought’ and ‘idea’ in his Second Replies (AT 7, 160–61; CSMK 2, 113). ‘AT
8–1, 7’ abbreviates Adam and Tannery’s Oeuvres de Descartes (Descartes 1971), volume 8–1,
page 7. ‘CSMK 1, 195’ abbreviates John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch,
and Anthony Kenny’s The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Descartes 1991), volume 1,
page 195. References to CSMK are provided as a convenience wherever possible.3. Curley (1969, 127–29) presents this problem and emphasizes 2p12 as its primary
source. Wilson (1999), who emphasizes Cartesian precedents, and Bennett (1984, 188–
91) both argue that Spinoza lacks a satisfactory response. The objects deemed least likely to have a robust mental life, with stones edging out apples as the popular favorite, are
drawn from Spinoza himself (letter 58, which I quote in section 1); Wilson 1999, 139,
n. 2; Garrett 2008; Nadler 2008; and Della Rocca 2008, 110–17.4. This view was originally defended by Curley (1969, 127–29).
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formulations, Spinoza holds a theory of selective consciousness on which
more powerful and complex minds, such as human minds, will be more
conscious than weaker, simpler minds.5
I do think that a sympathetic reading of the Ethics requires
attributing to Spinoza a theory of selective consciousness. However, I also
think that the severity of the problem—together with other pressing con-
cerns6—pushes readers to nd a direct account of selective conscious-
ness in Spinoza’s remarks about consciousness where there is none. I will
argue here that both groups of remarks are best understood not as the-
ories of selective consciousness but as theories about consciousness and
knowledge. The rst group of remarks has its basis in an account of the
ways in which our awareness of ourselves is inadequate. Self-knowledgeis an especially valuable good for Spinoza. These remarks both make the
point that self-knowledge is not simply available to introspection and also
show why self-knowledge is so valuable: where it is not supplemented by
self-knowledge, our imperfect awareness of ourselves can mislead us in
dangerous ways. The second group of remarks emphasizes quite a dif-
ferent point: the knowledge that characterizes the minds of the most
powerful or virtuous people is conscious.7 One might think, especially
in light of the value that Spinoza gives self-preservation, that a powerfulperson is one who knows many things and so is able to apply knowledge
usefully in a variety of circumstances. Spinoza may not reject the view
that knowledge is useful in this way, but his remarks in part 5 suggest
that such a store of knowledge is not a mark of virtue. What is distinctive
about a virtuous mind, rather, is the extent to which it is characterized by
conscious knowledge.
Because the thesis that Spinoza’s remarks about consciousness
constitute theories about the epistemological status of certain elements
5. Garrett (2008) defends a version of this interpretation emphasizing power.
Nadler (2008) defends a version emphasizing complexity.6. Spinoza is sometimes thought to anticipate views about mind that are widely held
today. This is a theme, for example, of Della Rocca (2003) and Nadler (2008), who also
argues that Spinoza anticipates important theories of consciousness. So the inherent
interest of the subject of consciousness can push readers to seek a direct account of selec-
tive consciousness in the Ethics . Another source of pressure is Spinoza’s place as a pivotal
gure between Descartes, who famously denes thought in terms of consciousness, and
Leibniz, who famously distinguishes between thought and consciousness. It is natural to
look to Spinoza for insight into this transition. Wilson (1999), Bennett (1984, 189–91),
and Della Rocca (2008, 108–18) helpfully emphasize a comparison of Spinoza’s views
about consciousness to those of Descartes and Leibniz.7. Spinoza identies power and virtue at 4d8.
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of conscious experience is something of a departure, I will start with an
analysis of the central passages, which I hope will show that my interpre-
tation is a plausible alternative to the interpretation of those passages as
theories of selective consciousness. The detailed argument of sections
2–6 will then rely upon an important precedent in Descartes—one
different from and more subtle than his association of ideas and
consciousness—and a variety of textual evidence drawn from the theory
of mind in the Ethics . After establishing this interpretation of Spinoza’s
remarks about consciousness, I will return in a concluding section to the
issue that originally brought these passages to the attention of critics. I
will introduce some implications that Spinoza’s remarks about conscious-
ness, properly understood, do have for an understanding of his viewsabout selective consciousness, and I will argue on the basis of these points
that the most promising interpretation, that of Don Garrett, should be
rened.
1. Spinoza’s Uses of ‘Conscious’
Suppose that in some mind, there is an idea, I, and that I has an object, O,
so that we will say (following, roughly, Spinoza’s characterization of truth
as the correspondence of ideas with their objects at 1a6) that I is true to
the extent that it corresponds to O. To say, “The mind is conscious of the
sun,” can mean (at least) three different things, any of which arises most
naturally in a discussion of consciousness and knowledge. First, it may be
an intensional use, referring to I, which implies that the mind is thinking
about the sun, for example, by believing something about the sun. On
this use, ‘the mind is conscious of the sun’ could be true even if O is
not the sun (for example, if the mind is inuenced by a clever painting,
and we, for independent reasons, take the painting to be O). Second, it may be an extensional use, referring to O, which implies that O is the
sun, regardless of what the mind thinks in having the idea. On such a
use ‘the mind is conscious of the sun’ will be true whenever O is the sun,
even if I includes no thoughts about the sun. I have sometimes thought,
when the sun is badly obscured by fog, that I am looking at the moon;
despite my error, it is nevertheless true that I am conscious of the sun in
these cases, in the extensional sense. Either of these rst two senses are
naturally used in cases where one wants to emphasize a failure or possiblefailure to correspond between I and O, that is, a failure of the mind to
know. Finally, it may be a knowledge use, referring to the correspondence
between I and O. On this use, which admits of degrees, the claim means
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that the mind, in virtue of I, knows something about O. Suppose that the
sun seems to me to be about two hundred feet above me in the sky. I may
be conscious of the sun, in this sense, insofar as I recognize the sun and
grasp its shape and its direction; my consciousness may also be limited,
however, insofar as the sun has other properties that I am not aware of
or that I mistake. This last sort of use may be less familiar than the rst
two in discussions of mind, but it is common enough in English today:
the American public is gradually becoming conscious of the importance
of preventative health care.
Spinoza’s uses of the Latin terms for ‘conscious’ (‘conscius ’ and
‘conscientia ’) are confusing because he employs all three senses and does
not distinguish among them. However, he does use different senses where one might expect to nd them: intensional and extensional uses
occur in passages where Spinoza emphasizes failure or possible failure
to know in a mind’s conscious states, and knowledge uses occur where
Spinoza emphasizes a mind’s veridical awareness.
Spinoza’s intensional uses are typically informal and incautious.
They are important rhetorically but do not often arise in the central argu-
ments of the Ethics . A phrase that he repeats frequently in appendices and
scholia is such a use: “Men are conscious certainly of their actions andappetites, but they are ignorant of the causes by which they are deter-
mined to want something.”8 Here, Spinoza clearly means that men are
aware of I, their actions and appetites. Knowledge of a thing, however,
depends upon and involves knowledge of its cause (1a4); so, in denying
that men know the causes of their appetites, Spinoza is denying that in I,
men know O. An odd illustration of this kind of ignorance, and another
intensional use, is from a letter to Schuller from 1674:
Suppose, please, that a stone thinks while it continues to move and it knows that it strives as much as it can to continue to move. Surely this
stone, since it is conscious only of its own striving and is not at all indif-
ferent, will believe itself to be wholly free and that it perseveres in motion
from no other reason than the fact that it wants to.9 (Spinoza 1972, 4/266
13–17)
8. For instances of this phrase, see Ethics 2p35s at Spinoza 1972, 2/117 15–16; 3p2s
at 2/143 30–33; and 4 preface 2/207 13–15. I App. at Spinoza 1972, 2/78 17–20 is very
similar. See also Spinoza 1972, letter 58 to Schuller, 4/266 19–20, which closely follows
the passage I quote in the main text.9. Notable intensional uses that I do not introduce in the main text include part 4,
App. 32: “if we are conscious that we have done our duty . . .”; and, from 3p30’s demon-
stration: “Man is conscious of himself as a cause.”
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Extensional uses are more prominent in the Ethics . A clear exam-
ple, which will be important in a different context in section 6, occurs
at 5p34s: “[Men] are conscious certainly of the eternity of their mind,
but they confuse this with duration and attribute it to the imagination,
or memory, which they believe remains after death.” Here I is a belief
about immortality, but O is something different, eternity. Like Spinoza’s
statements about appetite, this statement concerns a misperception of
self. If Spinoza consistently used ‘conscious’ with an intensional sense,
he would say that men are conscious of a belief in their own immortality
but ignorant of the object of that belief, their own eternity. But Spinoza
is inconsistent. He writes here that men are conscious of eternity but
misrepresent it in their conscious thoughts.The remarks that I consider, together, to constitute a rst theory
about consciousness in the Ethics are extensional uses. At 3p9, Spinoza
writes: “The mind, both insofar as it has clear and distinct ideas and also
insofar as it has confused ideas, strives to persevere in being; it does so for
an indenite duration; and it is conscious of this, its striving.” We have
already seen that Spinoza takes there to be a gulf between our conscious
desires and the objects of those ideas. So, even if Spinoza here uses the
designation ‘conscious’ in an obscure way, we should anticipate a view on which our conscious awareness of ourselves fails to be veridical or, in
some other way, fails to be knowledge.10 I think that the demonstration
to 3p9 shows that this use is extensional: “Because the mind (by 2p23) is
necessarily conscious of itself through ideas of affections of the body, the
mind is therefore conscious of its striving.” The proposition that Spinoza
refers to, 2p23, is a claim limiting the mind’s knowledge of itself: “The
mind does not know [cognoscit ] itself except insofar as it perceives ideas of
affections of the body.” Because some perception of ideas of affections
of the body will fail to amount to knowledge, 3p9 suggests, our aware-
ness of our own striving may likewise fail: when I consciously desire noth-
ing other than prot or glory (4p44s), for example, that desire is nev-
ertheless, extensionally, a consciousness of my striving to persevere in
10. I accept the view that Spinoza takes there to be ideas in human minds that are false
in the sense that they misrepresent their objects (LeBuffe 2010, 79–86). This, however, is a
controversial interpretation of the Ethics , and there are texts that are difcult to reconcile
with it, notably 2p33: “There is nothing positive in ideas on account of which they may
be said to be false.” The qualication in the main text is added in order to accommodate
other kinds of ways of falling short of knowledge in Spinoza, of which the most important
is the suggestion at 2p35 that inadequate ideas are false only in the sense that they are
fragmentary and partial.
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being. A mind that desires from knowledge of its own nature, by contrast,
will always desire perseverance or its means.11
Just as we are extensionally conscious of our own striving in our
desires, so we are extensionally conscious of changes to our striving in our
conscious thoughts about good and evil. Spinoza introduces this claim
at 4p8:
4p8: The cognition of good and evil is nothing other than an affect of
laetitia or tristitia insofar as we are conscious of it.
Dem.: We call “good” or “evil” that which is useful to, or harmful to, pre-
serving our being (by 4d1 and 4d2), that is, (by 3p7), what increases or
decreases, aids or restrains, our power of acting. Insofar, therefore (by the denitions of laetitia and tristitia from 3p11s) as we perceive any-
thing that affects us with laetitia or tristitia we call that same thing good
or evil. Therefore, the cognition of good and evil is nothing other than
the idea of laetitia or tristitia , which follows necessarily (by 2p22) from
the affect of laetitia or tristitia itself. And this same idea is united to the
affect in the same way that the mind is united to the body (by 2p21); that
is, (by 2p21s) this idea is not distinguished from the same affect, or (by
the General Denition of the Affects), from the idea of the affection of
the body, except merely conceptually. Therefore, this cognition of goodand evil is nothing other than the affect itself insofar as we are conscious
of it.
Good or evil in this discussion is certainly what I am aware of, but Spinoza
writes that when I am aware of good or evil what I am conscious of is an
affect of laetitia or tristitia itself.12 This distinction shows that Spinoza’s
sense is extensional: insofar as I am conscious of affects, I form beliefs
about good and evil. Just as I am extensionally conscious of my striving
to persevere insofar as I desire, so I am extensionally aware of changes inmy power of striving insofar as I nd something good or evil. The demon-
stration to 4p8, in its reference to ideas of ideas of the body’s affections
at 2p21 and 2p22, suggests that my awareness of those changes is likewise
likely to fall short of knowledge. For example, as Spinoza argues at 4p64,
11. I offer detailed accounts of conscious desire and striving in Spinoza in LeBuffe
2004 and 2010, 99–142.12. ‘Laetitia ’ and ‘tristitia ’ are Spinoza’s most general terms for those affects that are,
respectively, an increase or a decrease in a thing’s power or, what is the same thing, its
perfection. Spinoza denes them at 3p11s and again in his second and third denitions
of the affects listed at the end of part 3. The terms are highly technical as they are used
in the Ethics . I leave them untranslated because I think that any of the likely translations
(such as, for ‘laetitia ’, “happiness” or “joy”) can be misleading.
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has degrees and that a higher degree is qualitatively better, as we would
expect from a knowledge use: I corresponds more closely to O in the
mind that is more conscious of itself. Here, then, Spinoza presents a sec-
ond theory about consciousness. Human virtue and perfection do con-
sist in knowledge. The knowledge that is characteristic of more perfect
human minds, however, is conscious. So, beyond simply knowing itself,
God, and things, a more perfect mind is aware in its knowledge.
A great deal remains to be said about Spinoza’s discussions of con-
sciousness. I do hope that the discussion of this section gives us some
reason to think that Spinoza offers one theory about consciousness at
3p9, 4p8, and the propositions about ideas of ideas upon which those
claims depend and that he offers a second theory about consciousness at 5p31s, 5p42s, and related propositions. I do not expect this brief analysis
to be immediately convincing as an interpretation, however. Its principal
point is to show that there is some reason to think that neither group of
remarks is well understood as a theory of selective consciousness. In all of
these passages, Spinoza is interested in defending claims about human
awareness rather than an account of what does and does not have con-
sciousness. By way of contrast, note what clearly is a theory of selective
apperception in Leibniz:So, it is good practice to distinguish between perception, which is the
internal state of a monad that represents external things, and appercep-
tion, which is consciousness, or reexive awareness [connoissance reexive ]
of that internal state and which is not given to all souls, nor at all times to
the same soul.14 (Leibniz 1875–90, 6:600)
Leibniz here offers a thesis on which only some minds have states of
reexive awareness and only at some times. We may perhaps be able
to draw a similar theory out of Spinoza, and I agree with recent criticsthat doing so would be helpful for the understanding and evaluation of
Spinoza’s theory of mind.15 Such an endeavor should start, however, with
an understanding of Spinoza’s very different project in the Ethics .
14. This passage is from “Principles of Nature of Grace,” sec. 4.15. Curley (1969, 126–29), Wilson (1999), Bennett (1984, 184–91), and Garrett
(2008), whose article is a response to Wilson, all emphasize the need for a theory of
selective consciousness in Spinoza. Nadler (2008) is perhaps a bit different insofar as he
discusses selective consciousness in Spinoza primarily for the purpose of advertising the
respects in which Spinoza anticipates recent theories in the philosophy of mind.
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2. Descartes on Developmental Psychology
The detailed case for the claim that Spinoza’s remarks constitute two
theories about consciousness and knowledge starts with Descartes’s viewsabout developmental psychology. I think that in his account of veridical
awareness in part 5 of the Ethics , Spinoza follows Descartes, so I will intro-
duce some of Descartes’s views as a background against which we might
interpret Spinoza.16
Descartes developed his views on developmental psychology
between 1640 and 1641. Gassendi’s objections to the immaterialist
account of mind in the Second Meditation may have moved Descartes
to consider the issue. Gassendi had noted (AT 7, 261–62; CSMK 2, 182)that, whereas Descartes suggests that the self is something independent
of the body, the self at least seems to change just as the body changes:
when the body is weak, the self is weak; as the body grows, so does the
self. Descartes responds by arguing that Gassendi’s observations do not
require the conclusion that the self changes with the body.17 Although
the mind does not work as well in the body of an infant as it does in the
body of an adult (AT 7, 354, 4–10; CSMK 2, 245),
It does not follow . . . that the mind is made more or less perfect by the body. Your inference here is no better than if, from the fact that a
craftsman does not work well when he uses a bad tool, you were to infer
that he stumbles into knowledge of his craft from the quality of good
tools.
16. Many of Descartes’s views about mind are unclear and many—including those
that will be of interest here—are difcult to reconcile with views that he offers elsewhere.
So attributing a single, orthodox position on mind to Descartes is difcult. Moreover,
there is strong, direct textual evidence that many of Spinoza’s positions about mind are
efforts to refute Descartes’s positions or to improve upon Descartes’s arguments. Notable
explicit criticisms of Descartes in the Ethics include the discussion of human will at 2p49
and, especially, its scholium (and see the related discussion in Meyer’s introduction to
Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy ,” Spinoza 1972, 1/132) and the discussion of the doc-
trine of the pineal gland at the preface to part 5 of the Ethics . So, it is especially risky
to say that Spinoza follows Descartes. I do so here only in a very limited sense: as his
criticisms of Descartes show, Spinoza developed his views about mind in response to
Descartes; in trying to show that he could explain certain features of mental life better
than Descartes could, Spinoza adopted a number of Descartes’s assumptions about what
is to be explained by a theory of mind and even some of Descartes’s views about why ourexperience is the way it is.
17. Because I mean to mark development in Descartes’s views over a short, intense
period, it will be useful to keep track of dates: Descartes sent Mersenne the nal pages
of his response to Gassendi on June 23, 1641 (AT 3, 384; CSMK 3, 184).
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Descartes’s metaphor implies that his explanation for Gassendi’s obser-
vations is better. Like a master craftsman with a bad tool, the mind has
virtues that it cannot reveal in difcult circumstances, when the body is
weak. The mind does show itself to have these virtues, however, when the
body is stronger.
In an August 1641 letter to Gassendi’s anonymous champion,
Hyperaspistes, Descartes offers a somewhat more detailed account of
how the mind operates while it is attached to a weak body by consid-
ering infants’ thoughts. Hyperaspistes did not like Descartes’s dismissive
claim that Gassendi’s theses about the self do not follow from the fact that
infants’ minds perform worse than adult minds. In a letter to Descartes
in July of 1641 (AT 3, 400, lines 1–4), he paraphrases the offending pas-sage, “‘From the fact that the mind works less perfectly in an infant than
in an adult, it does not follow that it is less perfect’” and offers a sim-
ple and convincing response: “It does not follow either that it is not less
perfect.” Descartes’s reply is, appropriately, more conjectural and cau-
tious. He provides examples of the sorts of ideas he supposes infants and
other minds immersed in weak bodies to experience. What is particu-
larly important for the purpose of a comparison to Spinoza, Descartes
also introduces his views about the kinds of ideas a mind can come toexperience when it has more freedom:
I do not convince myself that the mind of an infant meditates on meta-
physical things in its mother’s womb; to the contrary, if I am permitted to
conjecture on a thing that is not well known, our experience suggests that
our minds are attached to our bodies in such a way that they are nearly
always acted upon by them; and although in an adult and healthy body,
a strong mind enjoys some liberty to think of things other than those
that are brought to it by the senses, the same liberty will not be found
in the sick, nor in the sleeping, nor in children; and generally the more
tender the age, the less liberty. It seems most tting for us to hold that a
mind recently united to the body of an infant is occupied solely with the
confused perception or feeling of pain, titillation, heat, cold and similar
ideas, which arise from this union and, as it were, mixing. Nevertheless, it
has within itself the ideas of God, of itself, and of all other truths that are
said to be known through themselves, in the same way that adults have
these same ideas when they are not attending to them. (AT 3, 423–24;
CSMK 3, 189–90)
Descartes here makes infancy an important but not unique state of cor-
poreal weakness, and he characterizes the sort of knowledge that, in his
reply to Gassendi, he had suggested a mind attached to a weak body has
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but cannot express. He argues that a mind attached to such a body always
has within it ideas of God, of itself, and of self-evident truths, but that—
because it is wholly occupied with the ideas that arise in it in virtue of its
attachment to the body—such a mind will not have the freedom to attend
to them. As our bodies become more powerful, however, we do gain some
measure of that freedom. Thus the mind of a healthy adult, although it
also will often be absorbed in sensation, can contemplate these ideas that
do not arise from its union with the body.
3. Grounds for Comparison
Spinoza clearly does not accept all of Descartes’s views about infants.Notably, he does not accept the view that Descartes formulates most
clearly in the Principles (1:71) and that may serve as a basis for the method
of doubt that Descartes applies in the Meditations : the view that our expe-
rience as infants is the rst and principal cause of all error.18 Spinoza is
much more concerned about the inuence, at any stage of a person’s
life, of present and powerful causes of passion. Nevertheless, I think it is
appropriate to use Descartes’s exchange with Hyperaspistes as a source
of clues to understanding assumptions about consciousness that are held
but not explicitly defended in the Ethics .19 What little we know about
18. Here is the relevant passage from Principles 1:71, which Descartes wrote at roughly
the same time as his exchanges with Gassendi and Hyperaspistes (AT 8–1, 35–36; CSMK
1, 218–19): “Here the rst and principal cause of all error may be recognized. In our
earliest years, our mind was so closely bound to the body that it had freedom for no
thoughts other than those through which it was aware of what was affecting the body.”
Broughton 2002, 28–32 drew my attention to the importance of this position for the
interpretation of Descartes’s method of doubt.19. Important recent discussions of the relation between theories of ideas in Spinoza
and Descartes include Cottingham 1988; Curley 1988 (especially chapter 1); Della Rocca
2003; and, in the context of a discussion of Spinoza’s theory of consciousness, Nadler
2008. It is not incorrect to say that Descartes, in some respects, does offer an account of
consciousness in tension with Spinoza’s views. Nadler (2008, 576, 584) correctly empha-
sizes the Cartesian doctrine of the transparency of the mental, for example, as a view that
may be different from Spinoza’s. Given the complexity and variety of Descartes’s views, it
is unsurprising that Descartes could be both the source of an important view about con-
sciousness in Spinoza and also a gure against which Spinoza may be usefully contrasted.
Indeed the tension between Descartes’s account of developmental psychology, which I
argue here was adapted in the Ethics , and his doctrine of the transparency of the men-
tal was brought to Descartes’s own notice. It arises explicitly in the “Conversation withBurman” (AT 5, 149–50; CSMK 3, 337–38) and may also be important to an exchange
with Hobbes. In his reply to Hobbes’s objections (AT 7, 189; CSMK 2, 132), Descartes
offers an account of innate ideas that may be generally consistent with the transparency
of the mental, on which for an idea to be innate in us is for us to have the ability to recall
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and pictorial imagination, ideas of the sort that concern Descartes in his
discussions of infants. Spinoza’s examples describing sensory ideas of the
sun are very similar to Descartes’s. This one occurs at 4p1s (Spinoza 1972,
2/211 18–2/212 1):
For example, when we look at the sun, we imagine it to be about two
hundred feet away from us. In this we are misled so long as we remain
ignorant of its true distance. But when its distance is learned, the error is
removed, not the imagination, that is, the idea of the sun that explains its
nature only insofar as the body is affected by it. And so, although we come
to know its true distance, we shall nevertheless imagine it as near to us. For
as we have said in 2p35s, we do not imagine the sun to be near just because
we are ignorant of its true distance but because the mind conceives thesun’s size insofar as the body is affected by the sun. Thus, when the rays
of the sun falling upon the surface of the water are reected toward our
eyes, we imagine it just as if it were in the water, even if we know its true
place. And so it is with the rest of the imaginations by which the mind is
misled, whether they indicate the natural constitution of the body or that
its power of acting is increased or diminished. They are not contrary to
the true, and they do not disappear in its presence.
I will have more to say about this passage in the discussion of the powerof ideas to restrain one another in section 5. In the present context, what
requires emphasis is the point that Spinoza is describing what it is like
to have a visual experience: generally, the mind conceives of external
objects insofar as the body is affected by them. When I look up at the sun,
it seems to me to be close; when I see it reected in the water, it seems
to me to be in the water. It is natural to interpret this as a description of
conscious experience, that is, of what it is like to see the sun.
Ideas of imagination also include a number of different sorts of
ideas that, like sensory ideas, arise in the manner described at 2p16
and 2p17. Such ideas include thoughts about the past and future; lan-
guage comprehension and other kinds of conventional association; and,
what is most important to the argument of the Ethics , passions. At 2p44s
(Spinoza 1972, 2/125 27–2/126 3), Spinoza describes thoughts about the
future:
Suppose, then, that there was a child who saw Peter for the rst time
yesterday at dawn, but saw Paul at noon and Simon in the evening. And
suppose that today again he saw Peter at dawn. It is clear from Proposition18 that as soon as he sees the light of dawn, he will imagine the sun in the
same route through the sky that he saw the day before. Or he will imagine
the whole day, and, together with dawn, Peter; with noon, Paul; and with
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evening, Simon. That is, he will imagine the existence of Paul and Simon
with relation to a future time.
At 2p18s (Spinoza 1972, 2/107 16–17), Spinoza describes the compre-hension of language: “From the thought of the utterance ‘ pomum ’ a
Roman immediately will fall into the thought of fruit.”23 Finally, to take
up the case of passion, at 3p47s (Spinoza 1972, 2/176 16–23), Spinoza
describes a particular kind of the joy that we feel when we imagine that
a thing we hate is destroyed:
This same thing is what causes men to rejoice when they remember some
evil that is now past, and why they enjoy telling stories about dangers from
which they have been freed. For, when they imagine some danger, they consider it as if it were in the future and are determined to fear it, a deter-
mination which is then restrained, once more, by the idea of freedom,
which they have joined to the idea of this danger because they have been
freed from it. This makes them feel safe once more, and so they rejoice
once more.24
To contemplate an object as present or in the water; to imagine the sun
in the sky or Simon at dusk; to hear ‘ pomum ’ and fall into the thought of
fruit; to rejoice at the memory of escaping danger—these are all naturally understood as kinds of conscious thinking. I suppose that a philosopher
might have a theory of unconscious conceiving, unconscious seeming,
unconscious language comprehension, or unconscious recollection and
rejoicing, but I would expect such a theory to be, like Leibniz’s theory
of petite perceptions, philosophically motivated, explicitly introduced,
and defended. Because Spinoza does not do any of these things, it is best
to understand him to be characterizing conscious experience in these
passages.
5. Distraction in the Conscious Experience of Weak Minds
The next point to be shown is that, on Spinoza’s view, the consciousness
of ideas of imagination in weak minds distracts them from the conscious
23. Spinoza includes perception from signs among ideas of imagination at 2p40s2.24. The point that passions are ideas of imagination may be inferred from the end
of 4p1s (quoted above): passions, by 3p11, are the ideas of imagination that indicate
an increase or decrease in the body’s power of acting. Alternatively, the point may be
established by Spinoza’s characterization of passions as confused and inadequate ideas
in his General Denition of the Affects (Spinoza 1972, 2/203–4) together with his iden-
tication (for example, at 2p41’s demonstration) of all inadequate and confused ideas
with ideas of imagination.
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experience of other ideas. The most important source of this view in the
Ethics is 3p1, which associates the mind’s activity as a total cause with
its adequate ideas and its passivity, or its activity as a partial cause, with
its inadequate ideas: “Our mind does some things but undergoes other
things, namely, insofar as it has adequate ideas, it necessarily does some
things, and insofar as it has inadequate ideas, it necessarily undergoes
other things.” Ideas of imagination are all inadequate ideas (2p40s2).
That does not mean that a mind does not act at all insofar as it has them;
on the contrary, Spinoza assures us at 3p9 that human minds act both
insofar as they have adequate ideas and also insofar as they have inad-
equate ideas.25 It does mean, however, that inadequate ideas have par-
tial causes outside the human mind and that, therefore, they reect insome way the activity of external causes as well as the activity of the mind.
External causes, however, can surpass the causal power of any individual
human mind (4p3), and this explains, in a general way, why weak minds
may be dominated by them. Wherever a mind has two ideas that, if unre-
strained, would produce opposed effects, the stronger will restrain the
weaker. The weaker a mind is, the more potential there is for the power
of external things in ideas of imagination to restrain its adequate ideas.
As a result, ideas of imagination typically dominate weak minds.The principal question for the present purpose is whether Spinoza
understands this domination as something manifest in the experi-
ence of weak minds. There is good textual evidence that he does.
Spinoza’s account of imagination from part 2 of the Ethics includes some
discussions—notably the example, quoted above, of his ideas of the sun—
that are naturally understood in terms of the opposed power of human
minds and external objects in the conscious experience of sensory ideas:
in the rst case, looking at the sun makes it seem two hundred feet away,
and (presumably because of the power of the external idea) I consider
it to be two hundred feet away. Supposing that my true idea of the sun’s
distance is stronger than my idea of imagination, when I come to have
that second idea, I no longer consider the sun to be two hundred feet
away. Spinoza’s characterization of the mind’s activity and passivity at the
beginning of part 3 allows him to be more explicit. At 3p37, for exam-
ple, he argues that desire that arises from tristitia or laetitia , or else from
hatred or love “is greater to the extent that the affect is greater.” A view
on which the robustness of consciousness is a function solely of a mind’sown power could make sense of the claim that desire is greater to the
25. This point is clearest in the demonstration to 3p9.
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extent that laetitia is greater (so long as the affect in question increased
the power of the whole person). Laetitia just is an increase in the power
of striving, and desire just is striving, on Spinoza’s accounts of them, so it
would follow from such a view that a person who has experienced laetitia
will desire more greatly. Spinoza also includes tristitia in his claim, how-
ever. That point suggests that desire can be greater, in some sense, even
as the power of the mind is weakened. (Tristitia , as the discussion in sec-
tion 1 has indicated, is a decrease in the mind’s power.) The greatness of
this desire cannot be explained by an increase in the mind’s power. An
explanation is available, however. Because passions have partial causes
outside of the mind, Spinoza can attribute an increase in the intensity
of a desire in a weak mind to an increase in the inuence of externalcauses.26
The most explicit characterizations of the power of external
causes on human minds in the Ethics are those that begin Spinoza’s
account of bondage to the passions in part 4; 4p5 and the demonstra-
tion to 4p9 are especially important. Spinoza offers a general account of
the power of passions, which emphasizes the point that the power of any
passion is in part a function of the power of its external causes, at 4p5:
“The power and growth [incrementum ] of any passion, and its persever-ance in existing, are not dened by the power with which we strive to
persevere but by the power of an external cause compared with ours.”27
The demonstration to 4p9 shows that Spinoza takes degrees of conscious-
ness and degrees of power to be covariant in ideas of imagination:
An imagination is more intense [intensior est ] so long as we imagine
nothing that excludes the presence of the external thing; therefore an
affect the cause of which we imagine to be present to us is more intense, or
stronger, [intensior, seu fortior est ]thanifwedidnotimagineittobewithus.
Here, Spinoza refers back to the most basic feature of consciousness in
imagination as he characterizes it at 2p17 and 2p17s, the representation
of a thing as present, and so makes it clear that “intensity” qualies our
26. See 3p11 and its scholium for Spinoza’s characterization of laetitia and tristitia
and the identication of these affects with changes in power. See 3p9s and the rst of
Spinoza’s “Denitions of the Affects” at the end of part 3 for characterizations of desire
in terms of striving.27. Garrett, who also relies upon 4p5, makes both the point that the power of an idea
is a function of the power of its causes (2008, 15) and also the point that the degree of
consciousness of an idea is the degree of its power (2008, 24).
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experience of the object. Then, he explicitly equates greater intensity
and greater power.28
Where he describes minds dominated by ideas of imagination,
Spinoza, as we would expect from his general remarks about the power
of ideas and consciousness, takes our conscious states to be dominated
by passion. The scholium to 4p44 is a good example:
But when the greedy man thinks of no other thing besides prot or money
and the ambitious man of glory and so on, they are not believed to be mad
because they are often troublesome and are estimated to deserve hatred.
But really greed, ambition, lust and so on are species of madness, even
though they are not counted among the diseases.
Just as it is most natural to take Spinoza’s accounts of ideas of imagination
to describe conscious experience, so it is most natural to take his accounts
of the domination of the mind by external causes to describe conscious
experience: the greedy man is overwhelmed by passion and that is why
he consciously thinks of no other thing besides prot.
The discussions of human minds in part 5 of the Ethics show that
for Spinoza, as for Descartes, to be more free to contemplate adequate
ideas of the self, God, and things is, just to that extent, to have adequate
ideas that are more powerful than ideas produced in us by the inu-
ence of external things. This passage is from 5p20s (Spinoza 1972, 2/293
28–35):
That mind is most acted on whose inadequate ideas constitute the great-
est part, so that it is distinguished more by that which it undergoes than by
that which it does. And on the other hand that mind acts the most whose
adequate ideas constitute the greatest part, so that, although there may be
as many inadequate ideas in it as there are in the other, it is nevertheless
more distinguished by those that are ascribed to human virtue than by those that reveal human weakness.
If Spinoza’s remarks about consciousness at 5p39s are interpreted in
light of this passage, we can see that he takes a mind associated with a
weak body, such as an infant’s mind, to be characterized by inadequate
ideas and a mind associated with a strong body to be characterized by ade-
quate ones. Like Descartes, then, Spinoza strongly associates a decrease
in the awareness of ideas that arise from the inuence of external things
28. ‘ Fortis ’, which I translate, “strength,” is associated with a more common term for
power, ‘ potentia ’ (Spinoza also frequently uses ‘vis ’) at 4a1. The terms are closely associ-
ated in the propositions that open part 4, notably at the demonstration to 4p7.
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on us with an increase in the awareness of our knowledge of God, the
self, and things. The end of 5p39s makes it clear that to strive for the one
is just to strive for the other:
In this life, therefore, we strive most of all to change the body of an infant,
as much as its nature allows and prots from it, into a different body,
which is t for more things and which is related to a mind that is more
conscious of itself and God and things; and so we strive also that every
thing that is related to its memory or imagination is, in relation to the
intellect, of hardly any importance.
Spinoza’s language at 5p20s does not explicitly characterize the con-
scious experience of inadequate ideas. However, the arguments I haveoffered for the claims that ideas of imagination are typically ideas that we
consciously experience and that more powerful ideas are more intensely
conscious suggest that this passage should be understood to do so. Those
with the weakest bodies have conscious states dominated by inadequate
ideas; those with the strongest bodies have conscious states dominated by
adequate ideas. References to conscious experience in the argument of
part 5, outside of 5p39s, conrm this interpretation. Just as a mind over-
whelmed by a single passion thinks of nothing else besides the object of
its lust, so a mind that is distinguished by adequate ideas “scarcely fears
death” (5p33s) and “is hardly troubled in spirit” (5p42s). To be more
conscious of the self, God, and things is, for Spinoza, at the same time to
possess a mind whose conscious experience is less inuenced by external
things.
Thus far, I have argued that Spinoza takes many different ideas
of imagination, including many that are ideas of bodies, to be conscious;
that these ideas often oppose our other ideas of the self, God, and things;
and that, to the extent that external things are more powerful thanus, these ideas prevent adequate ideas from occupying our attention as
completely as they might. These points can help us to understand why
Spinoza should think it especially worth emphasizing, at 3p9 and 4p8,
the point that ideas of ideas are conscious. Such ideas are an awareness
of the self that may oppose and so restrain self-knowledge, which is a
particularly important good in the account of the Ethics .29 As Spinoza
29. Spinoza emphasizes self-knowledge, as we have seen, in his remarks about con-
sciousness at 5p31s, 5p39s, and 5p42s. Other important passages include 4p52, where
Spinoza argues that the best among the active affects, acquiescentia or self-contentment,
arises from self-knowledge; 4p56, where he makes self-knowledge necessary for the pos-
session of any other virtue (“He who is ignorant of himself is ignorant of the foundation
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argues at the demonstration to 2p29, the awareness that we have of our-
selves through ideas of ideas is an awareness of ideas that are inadequate:
ideas of the body’s affections. So the ideas in which we are aware of such
ideas are also inadequate. If I fail to be aware of my own desires as what
they are, a consciousness of my striving for perseverance in being, then
I may consciously desire something other than perseverance. This is the
hazard that 3p9 exposes. If I fail to understand that things are good just
insofar as they increase my power of acting and evil just insofar as they
decrease it, then I may err in my judgments about where I can expect to
attain good or avoid evil. This is the hazard that Spinoza emphasizes at
4p8. Ideas of ideas are exceptional not because they are conscious and
other ideas are not but because they are conscious and inadequate, andtheir object, the self, is an especially important thing to know well.
6. Knowledge of the Self, God, and Things
The nal point to be established, if Spinoza follows Descartes, is that
the knowledge that characterizes the conscious experience of a mind
associated with a powerful body is always in the mind, even when the
body is weak. This, one might think, would be the most difcult point to
establish. Spinoza identies the human mind with the human body, so
he is committed to some version of Gassendi’s thesis that the self grows
stronger and weaker as the body does. This position, which is implicit at
5p39s, is clearest in the Ethics at 2p13s (Spinoza 1972, 2/97 8–13):
To the extent that a body is more able than others to do or to be acted
on in many ways at once, to that same extent its mind is more able than
others to perceive many things at once; and to the extent that a body’s
actions depend more on itself alone and other bodies coincide with it
less in acting, to that same extent its mind is more able to understanddistinctly.
If capability in a mind were, for Spinoza, solely a function of the number
of ideas in it that constitute knowledge—that is, of the number of its
adequate ideas—then 2p13s would commit Spinoza to the view that as a
body grows stronger, its mind gains new adequate ideas.
We have already seen, however, that Spinoza has the resources
for defending a view on which the capability of the mind is not solely
and consequently of all virtues . . . such a person does not act from virtue at all.”); and
part 4, appendix 4, the classic statement of his intellectualism, where Spinoza emphasizes
adequate knowledge of the self in characterizing the ends of the highest rational desire.
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a function of the number of its adequate ideas; its inadequate ideas are
expressions both of its activity and also of the activity of external things
on it. So a mind, on Spinoza’s account, may be more capable or active
to the extent that its inadequate ideas are less inadequate, that is, to the
extent that those ideas express the mind’s activity more and the activity
of external things less. Important passages in part 5 of the Ethics suggest,
moreover, that Spinoza’s understanding of the way in which the mind
grows stronger must not include any view on which it gains new ideas.
They commit Spinoza to the view that any adequate ideas in minds are
always, indeed eternally, in them. At 5p31s, Spinoza writes,
It should be noted here that, although we are now certain that the Mindis eternal, to the extent that it conceives things from the standpoint of
eternity, nevertheless so that what we want to show may be explained more
easily and better understood, we shall consider [this same part of the
mind] as if it were now beginning to be and now beginning to understand
things from the standpoint of eternity, as we have done up to this point—
which we may do without danger of error, provided that we take care to
conclude nothing except from evident premises.
Then, at 5p34s, in a sentence I have quoted above as an example of an
extensional use of ‘conscious’, Spinoza explains why claims about theeternal part of the mind might be more easily understood if they are
couched in terminology that makes them seem durational: “[We shall see
that men] are conscious certainly of the eternity of their mind, but they
confuse this with duration and attribute it to the imagination, or memory,
which they believe remains after death.” Although Spinoza may in places
write as though human minds acquire new adequate ideas as they become
more powerful, the scholia at 5p31 and 5p34 suggest that this is only a
technique that Spinoza uses in order to accommodate a common humanconfusion about the eternal. Spinoza holds that all adequate ideas are
ideas by which we understand things from the standpoint of eternity.30
30. The strongest argument for this claim that all adequate ideas are ideas under-
stood from the standpoint of eternity is indirect. At the demonstration to 5p38, Spinoza
writes that the more the mind knows things by the second and third kinds of knowledge,
the more of it remains, and he refers to 5p23 in making the argument. At 5p23, Spinoza
identies the part of the mind that remains with the eternal part of the mind; at 5p31s,
as we have seen, he characterizes the eternal part of the mind as that part that it has
to the extent that it conceives things from the standpoint of eternity. So the part of themind that remains is both the part that is composed of the second and third kinds of
knowledge and the part that the mind has to the extent that it conceives things from
the standpoint of eternity. All adequate ideas, though, are knowledge of the second or
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So 5p31s implies that adequate ideas, understood strictly, do not come
into minds.31
I take these passages, which indicate that Spinoza takes any ideas
that are adequate in a mind always to be there, to be authoritative. Other
critics might disagree, on the grounds that Spinoza suggests in numerous
places that human minds can acquire new adequate ideas but in only
one place, 5p31s, suggests that the eternal part of the mind does not
acquire new ideas.32 This reasoning is not convincing. It is not, after all,
a question of whether Spinoza holds one or another of two inconsistent
positions, both of which have some textual support. In such a case, it
would be appropriate to admit that there are conicting texts or, in some
cases, be inclined to hold that the position he defends most often or in
third kinds, by 2p40s2 or, more explicitly, the demonstration to 2p41. So all adequate
ideas are understood from the standpoint of eternity. Other important passages, from
which one might perhaps build a more direct argument, include 2p44c2, where Spinoza
claims that what is understood by reason is understood from the standpoint of eternity,
and 4p62 and 4p62s, where Spinoza at least seems to refer to adequate understanding
and understanding from the standpoint of eternity interchangeably. These, however, are
difcult passages.31. There is evidence in Spinoza’s theory of ideas for the view that all minds possess
adequate ideas of which they are not necessarily aware. It may be found at 2p38c, where
Spinoza writes that because all bodies agree in certain things, there are common notions
that are perceived adequately by all, and at 2p46, where Spinoza writes that any idea
involves adequate knowledge of God’s essence. What I am suggesting here, that minds are
not necessarily conscious of ideas that are adequate in them and that conscious knowl-
edge and not merely knowledge is a mark of power and virtue, makes these assertions
more palatable, insofar as I attribute to Spinoza a view on which many minds, although
they have these ideas, are not aware of them. Wilson (1999, 137) and Garrett (2008, 9)
discuss the puzzle that these passages raise.32. I confess, though, that I do not know which passages they might emphasize.
Spinoza might seem to make a claim that the mind can form a clear and distinct concept
of any of the body’s affections at 5p4. Spinoza qualies 5p4 immediately in the passages
that follow it, however. What is more important, there is no explicit reference to new ade-
quate ideas where one might expect to nd it in the Ethics : in the discussion of knowledge
in part 2. To my knowledge, among recent critics of Spinoza, only Della Rocca (2003, 205
and 2008, 114–15) is appropriately doubtful about whether, on Spinoza’s view, a mind can
acquire adequate ideas. Others seem suspiciously close to asserting that Spinoza holds
that we can. Notably, Nadler (2006, 268) writes, “The more adequate ideas one acquires as
a part of his mental makeup in this life—the more he ‘participates’ in eternity now—the
more of him remains after the death of the body and the end of his durational aspect.”Garrett (1996, 282) writes, “One brings within the scope of one’s own mind adequate
knowledge which has always been and will always be eternal in God.” Other works that
seem at least at risk of attributing this view to Spinoza without reason include Bennett
1984, 362; Wilson 1996, 131; Nadler 2001, 122; and Garber 2005, 108.
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the most important arguments is his considered position. This dispute is
different. Where Spinoza writes that it is not strictly accurate to write as
though a mind can begin to understand things from the point of view of
eternity, he also explains why he often makes use of this conceit. So this
interpretation is one on which all of the relevant passages are consistent.
The alternative is to insist on reading a number of passages as accounts on
which we gain new adequate ideas, even though Spinoza explicitly writes
at 5p31s that they are not to be understood in this way; then concluding
that his statements are inconsistent; and then taking one group to be more
important than the other. It is not defensible.33
7. Selective Consciousness
Scholars who have investigated Spinoza’s uses of ‘conscious’ have turned
to them for a theory of selective consciousness. We have seen here that
these passages are not well read as straightforwardly providing such a
theory. Spinoza’s references to ideas of ideas at 3p9 and 4p8 describe ways
in which our awareness of ourselves can fall short of knowledge. Spinoza’s
other uses of ‘conscious’ in part 5, at 5p31s, 5p39s, and 5p42s, concern
the way that knowledge does characterize the conscious experience of
the most powerful human minds. They suggest that Spinoza’s is not a
dry intellectualism, in which the point of building knowledge is to ll
a storehouse of information. Rather, vivid and irresistible passion drives
the weak-minded and knowledge characterizes the conscious thoughts of
the virtuous mind.
Nevertheless, the project of nding a theory of selective conscious-
ness in the Ethics is an important one. One might well think, following
Margaret Wilson (1999, 133–38), that to be a genuine theory of mind at
all any theory needs to address the questions of which minds and whichideas in minds are conscious, and Spinoza’s commitments to naturalism
and a theory of mind that attributes mind to all singular things make
these questions particularly pressing for him. I shall conclude, then, with
an account of the implications that Spinoza’s theories about conscious-
ness do have for his theory of selective consciousness. The most impor-
tant of these is that there may be no good Spinozistic sense in which one
may talk about the degree of consciousness of a mind.
33. In LeBuffe 2010, 77–98 and 209–24, I defend in detail the view that Spinoza can
account for the increase in power of a human mind in terms of changes in its inadequate
ideas.
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As a preliminary, we may set aside the interpretation, most fully
defended by Edwin Curley (1969, 126–29), on which Spinoza takes the
only conscious ideas to be ideas of ideas and the only conscious minds
to be minds that have such ideas.34 It has already received a great deal
of criticism, which tends to focus on the tension that such a view would
create with Spinoza’s naturalism and with other tenets of his philosophy
of mind. The principal objection is that Spinoza identies the idea of the
human body, the human mind, with the idea of the mind at 2p21s, and
the reason he supplies for making this identication, from his identi-
cation of ideas and their objects at 2p7s, would seem to apply generally
to all ideas. Because all ideas are at the same time ideas of themselves,
on this objection, the point that ideas of ideas are conscious does not allow us to distinguish ideas or minds that are conscious from ideas or
minds that are not. So it is not a good candidate for a theory of selective
consciousness.35 I have added here, in section 4, reason for concern that
I nd more immediately moving: Spinoza clearly considers a wide variety
of ideas of bodies—passions that we associate with external bodies and
visual ideas, for example—to be conscious. He simply does not restrict
consciousness to ideas of ideas in the way that this theory of selective
consciousness would require. A recent, different interpretation is more promising, but the dis-
cussion of 5p39s here shows how it may be rened. Don Garrett has
defended a detailed interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of imagination
that addresses a number of fundamental problems in Spinoza’s theory of
mind by emphasizing incrementalism in Spinoza’s naturalism. On Gar-
rett’s account of selective consciousness (Garrett 2008, 23–24), which is
based principally upon Spinoza’s theories of striving, power, and confu-
sion, Spinoza takes ideas and minds to be more conscious to the extent
34. Substantial discussions and criticisms of the ideas of ideas view may be found in
Wilson 1999; Bennett 1984, 184–91; Matheron 1994; Levy 2000, 224–38; and Nadler 2008.35. This objection is well put in Nadler 2008, 582. One may nd a somewhat similar
argument (which relies upon Spinoza’s insistence that his arguments about the human
mind in the rst propositions of part 2 apply to all minds) in Wilson 1999, 135. Although
I nd the objection important, I do not endorse it here because I am not altogether
sure that Spinoza’s account of inadequate ideas does not permit a response: inadequate
ideas are fragmentary and confused; although, to be sure, any given idea is also an idea
of itself in the mind of God (or considered as an adequate idea), that same idea may
be fragmentary in a nite mind (or considered as an inadequate idea) in the sense that
it is not also an idea of itself. If this sort of response is available to Spinoza, then the
objection does not show that the ideas of ideas interpretation fails as a theory of selective
consciousness.
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that they are more powerful. It is important to note that there are really
two distinct claims here: rst, an idea is more conscious to the extent
that it is more powerful, that is, to the extent that it inuences the self-
preservatory activity of the mind in which it arises; second, a mind is more
conscious to the extent that it is a more powerful self-preserver.
A puzzle arises from these two claims. The identication of levels
of consciousness in ideas with levels of inuence on a mind suggests that
different ideas in a mind can have different levels of consciousness, and
indeed Garrett (2008, 24) takes this to be one of the respects in which
Spinoza’s theory of consciousness is an attractive theory. The identica-
tion of the level of consciousness of a given mind with its power suggests
that more powerful minds are more conscious than less powerful minds,and Garrett (2008, 23) takes this also to be attractive. Perhaps both the-
ories are attractive in some way, but are they attractive together? Minds
can only be conscious in their ideas, for Spinoza, who takes everything
mental to be an idea. We may suppose, then, that, because having a cer-
tain degree of power in a mind does not require having a certain degree
of power in each of its ideas, a more powerful mind might have some
ideas that have a lower level of consciousness than some ideas in a less
powerful mind. Without further qualications on Spinoza’s theory, what is to stop us from conceiving of a more powerful mind all of whose ideas
are less conscious than those in a less powerful mind? In such a case, one
might wonder what it means to say that the more powerful mind is more
conscious.
There are at least three strategies by which one might try to avoid
this problem: one might drop the claim that more powerful ideas are
more conscious; one might drop the claim that more powerful minds are
more conscious; or perhaps the view that some minds are more conscious
than others can be qualied in ways that make the troubling possibility
seem remote or that rule it out. The rst strategy is surely the least promis-
ing. The association of the power of ideas with degrees of consciousness
has deep roots in the Ethics , including 3p1, 4p5, and other passages that
I have discussed in section 5. One might, with some ingenuity, pursue
the third strategy and try to show that, even if their ideas vary in degrees
of consciousness, there is some general sense in which more powerful
minds are always more conscious than less powerful minds. Perhaps, for
example, Spinoza requires that more powerful minds always have someideas that are more powerful than all ideas in less powerful minds. Or
perhaps we should say that the consciousness of ideas in a given mind
is additive, such that more powerful minds are always more conscious,
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as a whole, than less powerful ones. Certainly these strategies or strate-
gies like them might work as a means of discriminating between human
minds and dramatically less powerful minds, such as the minds of ten-
nis balls, and it is here especially that reference to the great complexity
of the human body and the difference in kind between human bodies
and simpler bodies that Spinoza refers to at 2p13s can help Spinoza to
show that ideas in one kind of mind may differ dramatically from ideas
in another.36 Although I will not rule the strategies out even as means
of showing that some human minds are more conscious than others, I
am less condent about their prospects for minds that are so similar in
complexity and in power.37
The interpretation of 5p39s developed here offers a means of escape, however, that is more immediately promising as an interpretation
of Spinoza, that yields an account of the consciousness of human minds
more attractive than that which Garrett proposes, and that we should
therefore pursue rst: Spinoza does not hold that minds are more con-
scious to the degree that they are more powerful. The argument of sec-
tions 2–6 has shown that 5p39s is misrepresented whenever it is used as
evidence that Spinoza does hold such a view. That passage is the best and
perhaps the only evidence that can be cited on its behalf. Garrett (2008,23) misrepresents 5p39s in just this way, citing it as evidence that Spinoza
“claims that an individual’s mind is more conscious to the extent that it
36. Spinoza’s naturalism, which emphasizes incremental differences among things,
makes it risky to discriminate between kinds of mind. I think that at least one such distinc-
tion is warranted by the denition of body (Spinoza 1972, 2/99–2/100), on which there
are two kinds of composite bodies. Some bodies are rightly called a single composite
body because they “are so restrained by others that they press on one another.” Others
are rightly so called because they, “move in such a way . . . that they communicate their
motions to one another in a certain xed ratio.”37. Both strategies face the problem that the power of ideas in a mind is in part a
function of external causes. Spinoza’s accounts of the ways in which the causes of ideas
contribute to ideas’ power are not detailed enough to show that, in virtue of the power
of external causes, a given weaker mind might not have an idea more highly conscious
than any idea in a given more powerful mind, so long as the power difference is not
dramatic. While it seems reasonable to think that, ordinarily, a more powerful mind will
be more conscious, in the additive sense, than less powerful minds, this same fact—the
contribution to the power of ideas in a mind from external causes—suggests that more
powerful minds need not always be more conscious in this sense either. Nadler (2008)
offers an account of consciousness in Spinoza on which minds are more conscious to theextent that they are more complex. Although I do not agree with the thesis—for rea-
sons that I give in footnotes below—I agree that the greater complexity of human bodies
(and so minds) is very important for distinguishing their mentality from the mentality
corresponding to simple bodies.
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has ‘a body capable of a great many things’.”38 Spinoza does not write at
5p39s that more powerful minds have a higher degree of consciousness.
He writes that such minds are more conscious of themselves and of God and of things . That qualication, which is missing from Garrett’s restatement
of the evidence, indicates, I have argued, that Spinoza is characterizing
a mind’s conscious knowledge—understood on a correspondence the-
ory of truth as in part a relation between its conscious ideas and their
objects—and not a quality of experience, like intensity, that might plau-
sibly be thought to indicate consciousness or degrees of consciousness
without further discussion.39
38. Nadler (2008, 587) makes a similar assertion. He quotes the discussion of devel-opmental psychology in 5p39s and then writes, “But what is this higher ‘excellence’ of
the mind that so depends on the greater capabilities of the body? [The extract from
5p39s] itself tells us: it is consciousness or self-awareness; or, rather, a higher degree of
consciousness.” Nadler’s view associates consciousness in minds with complexity, rather
than power, so it is similar in important respects to Garrett’s: human minds become more
powerful, for Spinoza, as they become more complex, so the material implications of the
views for a theory of degrees of consciousness in human minds are the same. I emphasize
Garrett’s view here because I nd the interpretation of Spinoza on which power explains
consciousness to be better than the view that complexity does. While complexity is surely
important as a means of accommodating the variety of experience in extremely pow-erful minds, such as human minds, the fact that power does not track complexity in
all things makes complexity merely a contributing factor to the level of consciousness
of ideas even in highly complex minds. For example, a boulder exerting its power on
my body can, in Spinoza’s terms, produce a very powerful corporeal image; the idea of
imagination of the boulder that arises in me when it lands on my foot will likewise be
one of my most powerful and highly conscious ideas, and it will have its power and high
degree of consciousness in large part because of its powerful external cause. The power
of the external cause, however, cannot be explained in terms of its complexity. In short,
one may properly attribute degrees of consciousness, in Spinoza, only to ideas, and the
degree of consciousness of an idea is wholly a function of the power of its causes not their
complexity.39. There is a strategy on which one can acknowledge the central point—that 5p39s
concerns conscious knowledge and not selective consciousness—but then resist my con-
clusion that there is no basis for a theory of selective consciousness for minds here
by arguing that degrees of conscious knowledge, for Spinoza, just are degrees of con-
sciousness. Under this strategy, one might point to systematic differences between the
phenomenal characteristics of the sorts of ideas that characterize weak minds and the
phenomenal characteristics of the sorts of ideas that characterize powerful minds: like
Descartes, Spinoza will hold that the ideas that distract weak minds are confused and
obscure, whereas the ideas of more powerful minds are more clear and distinct. On this
objection, if more confused ideas are less conscious, then less powerful minds, becausethey tend to have ideas that are more confused, will tend to be less conscious as well. As
Garrett recognizes (2008, 20–21), however, the incrementalism of confusion is not one
that Spinoza can exploit in the service of a theory of selective consciousness. Clarity and
distinctness certainly track an idea’s epistemological standing, and some propositions
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There is better textual support for an interpretation of Spinoza on
which as a mind’s power varies so does its potential . More powerful minds
and less powerful minds vary, on this view, not by being more and less
conscious simply, but by having different capacities for ideas. At 3p1c,
Spinoza refers to the susceptibility of weaker minds to passion: “From
this it follows that a mind that has more inadequate ideas is susceptible
[obnoxiam ] to more passions and, on the other hand, a mind that has
more adequate ideas acts more.” Similarly, at 2p13s—the passage that,
after 5p39s, is the most important to Garrett (2008) and also to Nadler
(2008)—Spinoza characterizes more powerful minds in terms of their
capacities: as bodies are more powerful, minds are more able (aptior )
to perceive and to understand. More powerful minds are not necessarily more conscious than weaker minds; they are rather capable of having
more powerful, more highly conscious ideas.
This revision of Garrett’s view is, in a way, slight. After all, Gar-
rett defends a view on which Spinoza takes ideas and minds to be more
conscious to the extent that they are more powerful. I have acknowl-
edged the importance of the evidence that Garrett cites in support of
his claim about ideas, and all that I have suggested is that he is wrong
about minds. If it is slight, however, the revision is nevertheless not triv-ial. It helps us to avoid the puzzle that Garrett’s interpretation raises, and
it yields an account of the difference between more and less powerful
human minds that is more attractive. Its greater capability implies that
a more powerful human mind can have more intense experiences than
other minds; for example, it stands to reason that some powerful exter-
nal forces will destroy less powerful minds where they will merely have a
powerful, robustly conscious effect on similarly situated but more power-
ful minds. The mark of more power among minds whose power is very
similar is not, however, a more intense experience of the world. Typically,
the comparison to Descartes suggests, Spinoza will expect a less powerful
of part 5 (5p5–5p9) of the Ethics give us reason to think that a clear and distinct idea
ceteris paribus is conscious in a mind with greater constancy than an obscure and con-
fused one. It is not clear that there is any further sense, however, in which one could say
that on Spinoza’s account clear and distinct ideas are more conscious than obscure and
confused ones. On the contrary, like Descartes who frequently acknowledges (AT 8a, 34;
CSMK 1, 218; AT 7, 30; CSMK 2, 20; AT 7, 75; CSMK 2, 52) that ideas of imagination are ina way more vivid than other ideas and takes our habitual reliance on confused ideas to be
the principal obstacle to knowledge, Spinoza continually emphasizes the extent to which
the conscious experience of ideas of imagination, especially passions, characterizes our
mental lives and inuences our behavior.
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human mind to have ideas that are just as intensely conscious as the ideas
that characterize a more perfect human mind. What greater power in a
mind gives one, on a view that emphasizes a correspondence between
power and capability, is not (necessarily or regularly) more intense ideas
but ideas that are more completely caused by oneself.
On the view that minds are more conscious to the extent that they
are more powerful, a baby or another relatively weak person experiences
the world in a way that lacks intensity, and, as a body becomes more pow-
erful, experience becomes more and more intense. That is an unattrac-
tive and implausible theory of selective consciousness. I cannot remem-
ber being a baby, but I can remember being relatively powerless. It did
not seem dull at the time. Fortunately, we should not attribute such a view to Spinoza. It is better to understand Spinoza’s account of the devel-
opment of human minds, as he does at 5p39s, in terms of knowledge.
A relatively weak person’s experience of the world can be very intense.
However, because such a mind’s ideas are in large part effects of external
causes, they tend to be very inadequate. A more powerful mind’s experi-
ence of the world may be no more intense than a baby’s—the intensity of
experience is in large part a function of a person’s particular situation in
the world—but because that person’s mind is a more powerful cause of itsown ideas, it will be more aware of its adequate ideas and its inadequate
ideas will be less inadequate. That is, the experience of more powerful
minds will be more fully characterized by knowledge.
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Des Cartes, Renatus. 1661–84. Brieven, Aan veel hoggeachte lieden van verscheide
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