Finding Oneself in God

Abstract

This chapter argues that the cognition Spinoza calls “intuitive knowledge” (scientia intuitiva) is a confluence of two powerful intuitions, each of which can be understood as a Spinozistic version of a well-known Cartesian intuition. The first component intuition is an extension of Descartes’s Fifth Meditation ontological argument: that is, for Spinoza, given a clear and distinct idea of God, one does not just intuit, with the Cartesian Meditator, that God necessarily exists, but also that all of God’s effects are necessary, infinite, eternal modes, that perceived finite, enduring things and infinite, eternal modes are one and the same essences conceived in different ways, and that everything can be conceived under different attributes. The second component intuition modifies the Cartesian cogito, in which one proceeds directly from a first-personal experience of thinking to the knowledge that one exists as a thinking thing. For Spinoza, one can proceed from the first-personal experience of understanding the monist structure of reality (i.e. from the experience of having the first intuition) to the knowledge that one’s own mind, insofar as it understands, exists as an infinite, eternal mode in God. Scientia intuitiva is thus a metaphysically self-locating thought: one does not just understand a metaphysical structure—one has a first-personal understanding of oneself as within that structure. This interpretation helps clarify the different sorts of salvation Spinoza presents in the Ethics and TTP.