From Bondage to Freedom by Michael LeBuffe

Author:Michael LeBuffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

AN EXTENSIONAL SENSE OF ‘CONSCIOUS’ AT CLAIM 3

Spinoza uses terms related to consciousness in both intensional and extensional senses in the Ethics, and we must rely upon a reading of 3p9 and its demonstration to determine the most likely meaning of ‘conscious’ in Claim 3. Attendance to the demonstration of 3p9 strongly suggests that we read the occurrence of ‘conscious’ at Claim 3 as an extensional use. At the demonstration to 3p9 Spinoza relies upon 2p23 for evidence that mind is necessarily conscious of its striving. If 2p23 were to support a reading of Claim 3 as containing an intensional use, under which consciousness of one’s striving to persevere amounts to consciously desiring to persevere, it would have to be a very robust doctrine, establishing that the mind’s experience of itself is veridical. However, Spinoza’s position at 2p23, as we have seen, is a far more modest doctrine that, like 3p30, explicitly states the limitations of our self-knowledge:

2p23: The mind does not know itself except insofar as it perceives ideas of affections of the body.

Because, by 2p19, one’s knowledge of one’s own body is limited and susceptible to error, 2p23’s finding that a mind’s knowledge of itself is limited by its knowledge of body suggests that one’s knowledge of one’s own mind will also be limited and susceptible to error.12 Such a proposition could hardly be the source of a doctrine on which the mind’s perception of its striving to persevere is veridical. It is reminiscent, instead, of Spinoza theory of imagination, on which representation of the causes of the body’s affections is largely extensional. We may fail to represent the external causes of affections in our ideas of them, and, as Spinoza emphatically remarks in 2p17, we may fail altogether to recognize the ways in which our own bodies contribute to the content of partially caused ideas. Again, as the diagram of imagination from chapter 2 shows, human nature and external things contribute in similar ways to the production of ideas of imagination, including, presumably, passionate desires. So there is no reason to think that the nature of one’s own body is any better known in such ideas than the nature of external bodies.

Spinoza’s reference at Claim 3 back to these propositions in Part 2 constitutes positive evidence that Claim 3 is a thesis about the extensional object of our conscious desires, not about what we are aware of in desiring. The reliance of 2p19 upon 2p7, Spinoza’s doctrine of causal parallelism, and 2p23’s reference to the causal nature of body (by way of 2p16) both suggest that Spinoza is relying upon a point about the causal effects of body on body and using 2p7 to show us the implications of that view for our understanding of the causal effects of mind on mind. Because the language of 2p23 and the propositions it depends upon is causal, the use of 2p23 at 3p9 suggests that 3p9 likewise concerns the underlying basis and not the cognitive content of conscious states. In particular, it is not a candidate for an explanation of the teleology involved in desire.

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