39 pages • 1 hour read
Baruch SpinozaEthics
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1677A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2 Summary: “Of the Mind”
Spinoza discusses the aspects of God’s essence that help explain the human mind.
All things can be classified as extended things or modes of thinking. God is both an extended thing and a thinking thing. Bodies express God’s essence “in a certain and determinate way” (33) in being extended things. As a thinking thing who is infinite, God can “think infinitely many things in infinitely many modes” and “can form the idea of his essence and of all the things which necessarily follow from it” (33). In a manner of speaking, God thinks all things into existence.
Unlike God, man’s existence is not necessary; his essence does not involve existence. In other words, God is a substance, but man is not. Man’s essence reflects God’s, consisting of certain “modes of God’s attributes” (38). The human mind is “part of the infinite intellect of God” (39). So, when we think or perceive, it is God thinking or perceiving through us. However, compared to God, we perceive only “partially, or inadequately” (39).
The first thing the human mind is aware of is the body. This proves that man consists of a mind and a body. All bodies are of the same substance and are differentiated only by their speed or slowness and other attributes. A body is moved only by another body, which is in turn moved by another body, and so on. Thus, motion and rest in bodies is caused by motion and rest in other bodies. When the human mind perceives bodies external to it, the information is filtered through its own body; sometimes what we perceive tells us more about our own body than about the external body. When the mind considers bodies in this way, it is imagining (using the imagination).
The mind knows the body, and knows itself, only through the affections (feelings and sensations) of the body; and the human mind knows other bodies only through the affections of its own body. Because of this filtering through another medium, our ideas about the affections of our bodies are by nature not “clear and distinct” but “mutilated and confused” (51). In other words, our feelings do not have the clarity of intellectual knowledge. It is from this inadequate or partial knowledge, or privation of knowledge, that error or falsity arises. Spinoza further discusses how we experience the affections in Part 3.
The activity of the mind consists in having ideas of things. Our reasoning is founded on common notions, or principles that are evident to everyone. These principles are rooted in the mind of God, who is “the essence of the human mind” (55). Our knowledge passes through three stages:
- Knowledge of the first kind: opinion or imagination. This kind of knowledge is based on sense experience, memory, and imagination.
- Knowledge of the second kind: reasoning. This kind of knowledge uses common notions to arrive at truth.
- Knowledge of the third kind: intuitive knowledge. This kind of knowledge sees things directly as they exist in the essence of God.
Knowledge of the first kind admits of error, while the second and third kinds are necessarily true. From knowledge of the second kind (reason), we understand that things are necessary, not contingent. The idea that things are contingent is due solely to our imagination.
Since the human mind can perceive itself, its own body, and external bodies, it also has “an adequate knowledge of God’s eternal and infinite essence” (61). Thus, the knowledge of God is available to all. The reason we do not have as clear a knowledge of God as we do of external bodies is because he cannot be imagined as easily as they can; thus, we often ascribe to God physical things that we are familiar with.
From the knowledge of God, we can deduce knowledge of many other things, because all things are in God’s infinite essence. This also means that reason necessarily looks at things from the perspective of eternity. Thus, reason will lead us to knowledge of God. Because the human mind is a phase of God’s mind, this means that human will (by which we act) is not free but is instead determined by God’s will. There is no absolute faculty called “will,” only particular instances of willing. The will does not exist separately from the thing being willed. Willing and the intellect are the same thing.
Toward the end of Part 2, Spinoza draws some practical consequences from what he has been discussing. These involve the idea of determinism, the theory that all facts and events are the result of natural laws, which he introduced in Part 1. Because our thoughts and ideas follow from God’s attribute of thought, there is no absolute free will in the mind. We do not have freedom of choice in what to think; instead, the mind is compelled by the truth of the ideas themselves. The will and the intellect are the same; thinking is the same as choosing what to think. Thus, Spinoza emphasizes that the human mind is part of nature, not independent of it.
Part 2 Analysis
From his consideration of God in Part 1, Spinoza passes to a consideration of the human being in Part 2. However, God’s attributes are also involved in this discussion. One of Spinoza’s most startling claims is that God is both a “thinking thing” and an “extended thing.” Since by extended thing Spinoza means something that takes up space, this implies that God is material or is identical with matter. This is how many of Spinoza’s contemporaries interpreted the claim.
Spinoza’s point is that thought and extension are the two basic essences or natures that we know of, and that God embodies both. All things are either physical bodies (extension) or ideas (thought). These two modes of being have nothing in common and do not interact; they obey separate laws. For instance, when a body or physical object moves, it does so because it has been caused to move by another body, and so on to infinity. And similarly, every idea or mental process follows the laws of thought and logic.
In considering human thought and the relation between the mind and the body, Spinoza is responding to issues raised by René Descartes. Descartes famously claimed that self-awareness—the fact that we are conscious of ourselves thinking—is proof of existence and knowledge: cogito, ergo sum. Spinoza echoes Descartes’s saying: “Man thinks; or, to put it differently, we know that we think” (32). Descartes also tried to solve the problem of how two very different entities, the mind and body, are united and interact with each other. Spinoza solves the problem by positing that mind and body are not two substances (only God is substance) but two expressions or modes of the human person, both of which express the essence of God. In fact, Spinoza conceives of God primarily as a thinking being who contains in himself the ideas of all things. The ideas in our minds are in a sense contained within God’s mind.
In Part 2 Spinoza also examines how we arrive at knowledge. We have many ideas in our minds, but not all of them are complete and accurate perceptions of the way things are. In fact, many of our ideas are vague imaginings or sensory perceptions that may be more or less inaccurate. These Spinoza calls “inadequate ideas.” Adequate ideas, by contrast, are formed in an orderly and rational way and reflect the true essence of things; following Descartes, Spinoza uses the phrase “clear and distinct” to describe these ideas.
Spinoza thus posits that there are three kinds of knowledge. First, there is random sense experience. Second, there is rational knowledge, whereby we carefully reason first from principles (common notions, or ideas everyone agrees on) then to conclusions. Finally, there is intuition, or a direct vision of the truth as it relates to God. This is the highest kind of knowledge. It consists in seeing things in a timeless and universal way, under the “aspect of eternity” (sub specie aeternitatis) and as they relate to God’s attributes.
As an example of how we can be misled by the first kind of knowledge, Spinoza discusses how the sun appears to be only about 200 feet away (53-54). This is because our bodily limitations deceive us and cause us to see things only in relation to our body. It is only by scientifically investigating the matter, through the use of reason, that we discover the true distance of the sun.
Spinoza’s confidence in human cognitive power is so strong that he believes we can have an adequate knowledge of God’s essence (61). This is another example of Spinoza’s belief that human reason is limitless and can potentially know all things. There is no mystery in the universe; things only appear mysterious because we lack knowledge, but their mystery can be solved through rational thought.
Spinoza also discusses how the doctrine of determinism affects how we live (67-68). Once we accept that all things happen necessarily, we will be at peace with our lives and content with what we have; we will not seek divine rewards or fear divine punishments, and we will have more goodwill toward our fellow man. Once again, Spinoza reveals a practical purpose to his writing, showing that his metaphysical ideas have applications in everyday life.
The first two parts of the Ethics are the most difficult, dealing with highly abstract metaphysical questions. In the remaining parts, the discussion becomes more concrete and down-to-earth as Spinoza turns to consider human emotions and actions; he will synthesize these ideas with the metaphysical claims he makes in Parts 1 and 2.
