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59. - Eternity of Mind

from E

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2025

By
Steven Nadler
Edited by
Karolina Hübner  and
Justin Steinberg
Karolina Hübner
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Justin Steinberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
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Summary

In Part Five of the Ethics, Spinoza claims that there is something that “pertains to the mind’s duration without relation to the body” (E5p20s), and that “the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains that is eternal [aeternum]” (E5p23). However, there seems to be nothing personal about this eternal aspect of the mind. While it might be possible to individuate one eternal mind from another – by virtue of their respective ideas and their representational contents and through each mind’s “formal essence” as the idea in Thought of a particular body in Extension – the eternal mind is not an immortal “soul” or self that, via consciousness and memory, is the postmortem continuation of the person in this lifetime. The eternity of the mind is certainly not something that encourages thinking about death and the afterlife, much less something in which one might find comfort or that should be an object of hope or fear. While some scholars do regard Spinoza as trying to accommodate a traditional doctrine of personal immortality (e.g.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon , pp. 149 - 151
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Recommended Reading

Donagan, A. (1973). Spinoza’s proof of immortality. In Grene, M. (ed.), Spinoza: A collection of Critical Essays (pp. 241–58). University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Garber, D. (2005). ‘A free man thinks of nothing less than of death’: Spinoza on the eternity of the mind. In Mercer, C. & O’Neill, E. (eds.), Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter and Metaphysics (pp. 103–18). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Grey, J. (2014). Spinoza on composition, causation and the mind’s eternity. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 22, 446–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lloyd, G. (1996). Spinoza’s version of the eternity of the mind. In Grene, M. & Nails, D. (eds.), Spinoza and the Sciences (pp. 211–33). Springer.Google Scholar
Matheron, A. (1994). La vie éternelle et le corps selon Spinoza. Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 120(1), 27–40.Google Scholar
Moreau, P.-F. (1994). L’expérience et l’éternité. Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Nadler, S. (2001). Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parchment, S. (2000). The mind’s eternity in Spinoza’s Ethics. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 38(3), 349–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steinberg, D. (1981). Spinoza’s theory of the eternity of the human mind. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 11, 35–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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