Spinoza's Account of Blessedness Explored through an Aristotelian Lens

Abstract

In this article, I examine whether Spinoza's account of blessedness can be identified with a contemplative ideal in the Aristotelian tradition. I first introduce the main features of the Aristotelian life of contemplation and its difference from the life of practically oriented virtues — a difference that is grounded in Aristotle's distinction between praxis and theoria. In highlighting the commonalities between Spinoza's two kinds of adequate cognition — that is, intuitive knowledge and reason — I show that there is no room for a similar distinction in Spinoza, which will enable us to identify intuitive knowledge and its attendant blessedness exclusively with the theoretical activity.

Résumé

Dans cet article, j'examine si la description spinozienne de la béatitude peut être identifiée à un idéal contemplatif dans la tradition aristotélicienne. Je présente d'abord les caractéristiques principales de la vie contemplative telle que définie par Aristote ainsi que sa différence avec la vie des vertus orientées vers la pratique — une différence fondée sur la distinction d'Aristote entre praxis et theoria. En mettant en évidence les points communs entre les deux types de connaissance adéquate de Spinoza — c'est-à-dire la connaissance intuitive et la raison —, je montre qu'il n'y a pas de place pour une distinction similaire chez Spinoza, ce qui permettra d'identifier la connaissance intuitive et la béatitude qui l'accompagne exclusivement avec l'activité théorique.

1. Introduction

I pass now to explaining those things which must necessarily follow from the essence of God, or the infinite and eternal being — not, indeed, all of them, for we have demonstrated (IP16) that infinitely many things must follow from it in infinitely many modes, but only those that can lead us, by the hand, as it were, to the knowledge of the human mind and its highest blessedness. (Ethics, Preface to Part II, my italics)¹

This is how Spinoza prefaces Part II of the Ethics. After having introduced the general features of his metaphysics of God in Part I, Spinoza informs his readers in this brief preface that he is narrowing down his focus to one particular member of those things that follow from the essence of God: the human being. This passage, as Henry Allison (1987, p. 84) puts it, provides a clear indication of the ultimately practical orientation of Spinoza's thought and sets the agenda not only for Part II, but for the rest of the Ethics. The remainder of Spinoza's masterwork involves an account of the human mind, human affects, human bondage to passive affects, and a search for the conditions of human freedom and happiness, the culmination of which is blessedness (beatitudo). For Spinoza, blessedness is a powerful affective state that arises exclusively from a special kind of adequate cognition: intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva), which, by definition “proceeds from an adequate idea of certain attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of the essence of things” (EVP25D). Although Spinoza explicitly considers intuitive knowledge as “the greatest virtue of the mind” (EVP25) and “the greatest human perfection” (EVP27D), he gives a frustratingly limited account of what this cognition and its attendant blessedness consist in. We are thus left to our own devices to interpret what exactly he has in mind.

According to a recent reading, Spinoza's blessedness bears an affinity to the ideal of contemplation in Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition. Steven Smith (1997), for instance, has interpreted Spinoza as identifying the highest human happiness “exclusively with the contemplative ideal” (p. 142). John Carriero (2014), in explicitly invoking Aristotle, has stated that in the Ethics “alongside with the ‘mundane’ or ‘naturalistic’ project, there is also what we might think of as a [Nicomachean Ethics], Book X project — that is, a ‘visio dei’ project” (p. 22), which Carriero takes to regard blessedness.² These interpretations, however, have thus far amounted to little more than suggestions and they deserve further elaboration and consideration. If correct, they would imply that Spinoza's account of blessedness could be aligned with a long Aristotelian tradition, according to which the highest happiness consists in a theoretically excellent yet practically useless contemplative ideal that is beyond human goods. Furthermore, insofar as these interpretations take the Ethics to include two distinct projects, they would suggest that there is a break within Spinoza's masterwork.

In this article, I will examine whether Spinoza's account of blessedness can really be identified with a contemplative ideal in the Aristotelian tradition. In Section 2, I introduce the main features of the Aristotelian life of contemplation and its difference from the life of practically oriented virtues — a difference that is grounded between Aristotle's distinction between praxis and theoria. In Section 3, I show that there is no room for a similar distinction in Spinoza, which will enable us to identify intuitive knowledge with the theoretical activity. To this end, I highlight the commonalities between intuitive knowledge and reason, which is the other kind of adequate cognition that Spinoza introduces in the Ethics. In Section 4, I turn to the differences between Spinoza's two kinds of adequate cognition, which appear to indicate a discontinuity within the Ethics. I argue that, contra this appearance, there is no substantive break between reason and intuitive knowledge insofar as the ethics in the Ethics is concerned. Throughout the article, I will assume that the goal of Spinoza's ethics is to discover what human freedom consists in and how we — human beings — can attain it, given the constraints that are due to our finite modal status in the Spinozistic universe.³ As will be clear by the end of my article, I consider this a unified goal that is grounded in a single, continuous project, which cannot be completely appreciated without including Spinoza's theory of blessedness in the picture. Even though my focus here will be on the Aristotelian ideal of contemplation specifically, it is important to note that the contemplative life is an ideal that was developed in both Plato's and Aristotle's philosophies.⁴ As I will propose in Section 5, Spinoza's account of blessedness bears more similarity to Plato's account than it does to Aristotle's.

2. Aristotle's Account of Happiness

As is well known, the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) presents us with Aristotle's account of the ultimate good for human beings, which he identifies as happiness or eudaimonia. There has been a long-standing debate over what some perceive as an ambivalence or inconsistency in Aristotle's conception of happiness. For, after expounding on the morally virtuous life in the first nine books, in Book X, he appears to break with this theme in suggesting that the life of theoria or contemplation is the perfect happiness or happiness in the primary degree, while the life of practically oriented virtues is instead merely secondary. In this article, I will not delve into the controversial issue as to whether there really is an inconsistency in Aristotle's account of happiness.⁵ Instead, I will highlight two relatively uncontroversial and interrelated features of Aristotle's thought that ground his account of the superiority of the life of theoria over the life of practically oriented virtues.⁶

The first feature has to do with Aristotle's separation between the divine and the human.⁷ In Chapters 7 and 8 of Book X of NE, Aristotle distinguishes between the life of practically oriented virtues and the life of theoria by calling them “the life man will live insofar as he is man” and “the life man will live insofar as something divine is present in him,” respectively. According to Aristotle, the latter kind of life “would be too high for man” since it is the life according to reason (nous) — and nous, being the divine element in us, is superior to our composite nature, just as its activity is superior to that which is “the exercise of the other kind of virtue,” that is, moral virtue. Since moral virtues are in many ways bound up with the passions and the embodied soul, they belong to our composite nature. Although it is clear that, for Aristotle, the excellence of nous is a thing separate from the compound of body and soul (NE1178a24), he unfortunately has little to say about the nature of the activity and excellence of nous.⁸

What we do know is this: theoria, for Aristotle, is the paradigmatic activity of God, whose form is pure and without matter, and in a state of pure actuality.⁹ Aristotle's Metaphysics teaches us that the divine intellect is eternally thinking (1075a10), and that contemplation is continuous for God. By contrast, in human beings, contemplative activity is subject to choice, intermittence, and coupling with other activities. Yet it is still the best, most continuous, most pleasant (NE1177a23), and most self-sufficient (NE1176b5, 1177a27, 1177b21) activity in which we can engage. The ideal of contemplation has been taken to refer to a life chiefly (but not necessarily exclusively) devoted to contemplative activity. It is usually taken to be a life of pure thought wherein the contemplator herself is as self-sufficient (autarkes) as a human being can be. And the kind of self-sufficiency here is one that enables the contemplator to isolate herself from others and engage in theoria. Theoria constitutes perfect happiness and surpasses all other activities in blessedness, for it is the most akin to the activity of God in that it involves using what we can call the ‘divine’ aspect of our rationality.¹⁰ The secondary happiness, by contrast, involves dealing with “things human” (NE1141b8–10) using what we can call the ‘human’ aspect of our rationality, which brings us to the second related feature of Aristotle's thought: that is, his demarcation between two different kinds of rational activity having two modally different sorts of objects.

In order to explain this second feature, we need to invoke Aristotle's partition of the soul, according to which the soul has rational and non-rational parts. The non-rational part includes appetitive and nutritive parts, which we share with animals and plants respectively. The rational part is further divided into contemplative and deliberative parts (NE1139a1–15). On the one hand, the contemplative rational part corresponds to the divine aspect of our rationality or the separable nous that contemplates the unchanging, necessary principles of the universe. On the other hand, the deliberative rational part is the human aspect that guides our appetites and passions that arise from the non-rational appetitive part. The appetitive part, albeit non-rational, can be deemed rational insofar as it responds to deliberation and choice and this process grounds the formation of moral virtues according to Aristotelian ethics. Importantly, for Aristotle, in addition to moral virtues or virtues of character, there are also intellectual virtues or virtues of thought including theoretical or philosophic wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom (phronesis). Whereas theoretical wisdom indicates the excellence of the contemplative rational part, practical wisdom indicates the excellence of the deliberative rational part.

In Aristotle's words, sophia is “scientific knowledge, combined with intuitive reason, of the things that are highest by nature. This is why we say Anaxagoras, Thales, and men like them have philosophic but not practical wisdom, when we see them ignorant of what is to their own advantage, and why we say that they know things that are remarkable, admirable, difficult, and divine, but useless; viz. because it is not human goods that they seek” (NE1141b3–9, my italics). Unlike theoretical wisdom, practical wisdom is centrally related to human goods in that “it is thought to be the mark of a man of practical wisdom to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect … but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general” (NE1140a25–30). Practically wise people have a keen perception in that they can see what is good for themselves and what is good for human beings in general. According to Aristotle, practical wisdom comes about as a result of teaching and experience and one cannot be a morally virtuous person — that is, just, courageous, temperate, etc. … — without practical wisdom or (conversely) practically wise without being morally virtuous.¹¹

Aristotle's aforementioned demarcation between the divine and the human directly bears on his delineation of practical wisdom. In his words, “… it is absurd to think that Political Science or [Practical wisdom] is the loftiest kind of knowledge, inasmuch as man is not the highest thing in the world” (NE1141a2).¹² Theoretical wisdom is the knowledge of the things that are highest by nature. It involves knowledge of necessary, scientific first principles, and what we can deduce from them. Practical wisdom — unlike theoretical wisdom — “is concerned with things human and things about which it is possible to deliberate” (NE1141b8–10, my italics). And, according to Aristotle, we can deliberate only about matters that admit of being otherwise, i.e., what is contingent and not what is necessary and invariable. Thus, it is the contingencies and the variable conditions of life that make possible practical wisdom.

In sum, Aristotelian life of contemplation is grounded in theoria, which (a) is the distinctive activity of the (most)¹³ divine element in us, that is, nous, and (b) exclusively involves the understanding of divine things that are necessary.¹⁴ The morally virtuous life, by contrast, is grounded in praxis and practical wisdom, which concerns “things human” — that is, human action in the realm of the contingent.¹⁵ Given this, can we plausibly attribute (a) and (b) to Spinoza's intuitive knowledge and its attendant blessedness so we can consider it a contemplative ideal in the Aristotelian sense?

3. Is Spinozistic Blessedness an Aristotelian Contemplative Ideal?

In what follows, I will present three reasons that suggest that Spinozistic blessedness cannot be identified with an Aristotelian contemplative ideal. These reasons have to do with how Spinoza conceives of the distinction between the divine and the human, modality in relation to objects of knowledge, and the intellect as “the better part” (EIVPAppendixXXXII) of us. I begin with the first reason.

For Spinoza, as is well known, God is the only substance; it is “a being absolutely infinite … consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence” (1D6). Everything else is in God as a mode or an affection of God. Singular things —for example, human beings, chairs, carrots, and animals — are all finite modes by which God's attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way (EIP25C and EIID7). The difference between God and human beings is thus one between an absolutely infinite substance and its finite modes. It is also the difference between a free cause and its effects. For Spinoza, “God alone is a free cause. For God alone exists only from the necessity of his nature … and acts from the necessity of his nature …” (EIP17C2). Everything else, including human beings, follow from and are caused by God (EIP16, EIP16C1).

Importantly, that Spinoza conceives of these differences between God and human beings does not mean that he takes the former to be the transcendent cause of the latter. For him, God is the immanent — not transcendent — cause of everything. In his words, “God must be called the cause of all things in the same sense in which he is called the cause of himself” (EIP25S). This, as Spinoza explains, follows clearly from the fact that singular things “express in a certain and determinate way, God's power, by which God is and acts” (EIIIP6D, my italics).¹⁶ Accordingly, on Spinoza's view, the power of singular things is that very power by which God is the cause of himself.¹⁷ As Spinoza puts it,

The power by which the singular things (and consequently, [any] man) preserve their being is the power itself of God or Nature (by IP24C), not insofar as it is infinite, but insofar as it is explained through the man's essence (by IIIP7). The man's power, therefore, insofar as it is explained through his actual essence, is part of God or Nature's infinite power, that is (by IP34), of its essence. (EIVP4D)

All this shows that, despite the aforementioned differences, the ontological gap between the divine and the human does not exist in Spinoza in the way it does in Aristotle. For Spinoza, from an ontological point of view, human beings are not different in kind from the rest of nature, which he famously identifies with God. Accordingly, human actions and affects are not a separate, inferior kind of phenomena that are subject to different, less precise rules than the loftier divine phenomena. On the contrary, they need to be explained by the universal laws and rules of nature, which are the same everywhere. In Spinoza's words,

… Nature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere one and the same, that is, the laws and rules of Nature, according to which all things happen, and change from one from to another, are always and everywhere the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, namely, through the universal laws and rules of Nature.

The affects, therefore, of hate, anger, envy, and the like, considered in themselves, follow with the same necessity and force of Nature as the other singular things … Therefore, I shall treat the nature and powers of the affects, and the power of the mind over them, by the same method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies. (Preface to EIII, my italics)

Spinoza expresses a similar idea in EIIP7 and its scholium, in which he establishes an important feature of attributes and modes. After stating in EIIP7 that “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things,” Spinoza explains in the following scholium that “… whether we conceive Nature under the attribute of extension, or under the attribute of thought, or under any attribute, we shall find one and the same order, or one and the same connection of causes, that is, that the same things follow one another” (EIIP7S). In Spinoza's system, then, just as there is no ontological gap between the divine and the human and between the human and the rest of nature, there is also no substantial divide between the extended body and the thinking mind. Since there is only one substance, that is God or nature, and since nature is always the same, we shall find one and the same order, or one and the same connection of causes under any attribute. And, in this order, there is no room for contingency, which brings us to the second reason that suggests that Spinozistic blessedness cannot be identified with an Aristotelian contemplative ideal. This second reason has to do with how Spinoza conceives of modality.

Recall that, according to Aristotle, theoria differs from praxis in that it exclusively concerns that which is eternal, necessary and unchanging, rather than contingent affairs of human life. The ability to navigate well things human in the realm of contingency indicates a certain kind of knowledge and wisdom — that is, practical wisdom. In order to compare this to Spinoza and appreciate how modality plays out in the Spinozistic epistemology, we need to first introduce his classification of cognition. In the Ethics, Spinoza distinguishes three kinds of cognition (cognitio)¹⁸: opinion or imagination (opinio vel imaginatio), cognition of the first kind; reason (ratio), cognition of the second kind; and intuitive, cognition of the third kind. In EIIP40S2, Spinoza describes cognition of the first kind as arising from two main sources: 1) from a mutilated and confused perception of singular things that have been represented to us through the senses, which Spinoza also calls knowledge from random experience (experientia vaga), and 2) from signs (ex signis), such as from the fact that we recollect things through our memory or imagination. In the same scholium, he defines reason and intuitive knowledge as follows:

It is clear that we perceive many things and form universal notions … from the fact that we have common notions and adequate ideas of properties of things. This I shall call reason (rationem) and the second kind of knowledge. In addition … there is (as I shall show in what follows) another, third kind, which we shall call intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva). And this kind of knowing proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the … essence of things. (EIIP40S2)

For Spinoza, neither memory or imagination, nor sense-perception can provide us with an understanding following the order of the intellect. Instead, imagination or cognition of the first kind is the only cause of falsity (EIIP41) and consists in inadequate and confused ideas on which the passions depend (EIIIP3). These confused ideas offer a relative and partial picture of how things presently seem to us from a given perspective at a given moment in time.¹⁹ Unlike imagination, reason and intuitive knowledge are both “necessarily true” (EIIP41) and consist in adequate ideas.²⁰ They both consist in regarding things as sub specie aeternitatis (EIIP44C2D), i.e., knowing things by conceiving of them under the aspect of eternity or from the point of view of eternity, i.e., without any relation to time. Moreover, they both lead to understanding,²¹ which provides power over the harmful passions.

After this brief introduction, we can now compare Spinoza's account to that of Aristotle and see how different it is from the latter. According to Spinoza, both kinds of adequate cognition — that is, both reason and intuitive knowledge — consist in regarding things “truly …, namely, as they are in themselves, that is, not as contingent but as necessary” (EIIP44D). Furthermore, for Spinoza — unlike Aristotle — there's no wisdom or adequate cognition that is associated with contingency. For Aristotle, practical wisdom requires not only a general understanding of happiness, but also deliberating about and choosing the particular means to achieve happiness, which presupposes that we have free will.²² For Spinoza, by contrast, “deliberation of the mind, or free decision” (consensum vel animi deliberationem seu liberum decretum) is a fiction (EIIP48), for it assumes that we can deliberate about and choose our actions in a free undetermined way.²³ In Spinoza's metaphysics, there is no realm of contingency or the possibility of an underdetermined will in reality. As he clearly puts it “In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way” (EIP29). While he does not deny that we perceive things as contingent, he considers this to be an epistemic flaw: “But a thing is called contingent only because of a defect of our knowledge” (EIP33S). In other words, “… it depends only on the imagination that we regard things as contingent, both in respect to the past and in respect to the future” (EIIP44C). So, just as believing that we have free will is an error that depends on imagination, regarding human actions as contingent also depends on imagination and its inadequate ideas.

In sum, then, in the Spinozistic picture, knowledge of necessity and the unchanging nature of things is tracked by both reason and intuitive knowledge, not just by intuitive knowledge. And regarding things as contingent is relegated to a lower state of cognition — that is, imagination, which is inadequate knowledge as it lacks a causal understanding of nature. Whereas Aristotle famously recommends seeking different levels of precision in different sciences, and explains that practical knowledge cannot be and should not be expected to be as exact as theoretical knowledge (NE1094b23–27, see also NE1104a1–7), Spinoza draws no such line.²⁴ Any cognition that lacks precision in this picture, according to Spinoza, would do so because it depends on imagination and involves privation of knowledge or understanding. And, by contrast, any cognition that tracks necessity and precision depends on the intellect, which brings us to the third reason that Spinozistic blessedness cannot be identified with an Aristotelian contemplative ideal.

As seen earlier, for Aristotle theoria is the activity of the nous or the intellect, which he takes to be the (most) divine thing in us. Now, let us see what Spinoza says about the intellect. As he describes the intellect, he calls it the “part of us which is defined by understanding,” “part of the mind that is eternal,” (EVP40C) and “the better part of us” (EIVPAppendixXXXII).²⁵ When Spinoza calls intellect the better part of us, however, he does so by contrasting intellect to imagination — not by contrasting intellect to a different kind of rationality, as Aristotle does. This is because, for Spinoza, intuitive knowledge does not exclusively constitute the intellect, nor do intuitive ideas alone form the part of the mind that is eternal. According to Spinoza, reason and intuitive knowledge both constitute the intellect (EVP40C) — that is, the “part of the mind that is eternal” (EVP40C).

Furthermore, it is important to note that, despite the fact that the word “part” appears here, Spinoza does not really assign parts to the mind in the way Aristotle divides or compartmentalizes the soul. As we have seen before, Aristotle identifies the governing aspect of an individual with the deliberative subset of the rational part, while attributing a divine quality to the contemplative subset of the same. Both of these rational subsets are distinguished from the non-rational part — including the appetitive subset — that we share with animals. In the Spinozistic picture, by contrast, the mind is not constituted of different natures or parts, such as divine, human, and animal; it is simply formed of ideas, in which our mental power resides. For Spinoza, as Michael Della Rocca (2008, p. 125) puts it, ideas constitute the only source of our volitions²⁶ at the mental level.²⁷ More specifically, our mental power to believe something, to reach a judgement, or to act on a judgement does not reside in a separate faculty (facultas) that can be called “the will” — a notion that he takes to be a fiction (EIIP48S).²⁸ Since there is no will over and above ideas, we do just as our ideas determine us to do.²⁹ Consequently, whenever two opposing ideas exert power at the same time, we end up doing what the more powerful one determines us to do, not what a separate governing part dictates over an inferior animalistic part. In Spinoza's system, then, the Aristotelian distinction between a governing practical part and contemplative theoretical part does not exist. Nor does the corresponding distinction between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom or, even more fundamentally, the distinction between moral and intellectual virtues.

For Spinoza, whereas the better part of us or the intellect is constituted by adequate ideas, this does not mean that we have a worse part in us. Unlike Aristotle, who takes passions as arising from the non-rational or animalistic appetitive part of the soul, Spinoza does not think that we have a lower, non-rational, inferior part in us that houses the passions. For Spinoza, passions are just inadequate ideas that are caused in part by external things, which he contrasts with adequate ideas that are caused from within. So, in lieu of innate inferior tendencies or appetites in the Aristotelian picture, we have an ineliminable externality in the Spinozistic one.³⁰ For Spinoza, we all have inadequate ideas and we are all subject to passions (albeit to different degrees), simply because we are all finite modes that are externally determined by other finite modes.

These three reasons suggest that, for Spinoza, intuitive knowledge does not enjoy a distinctive privilege over reason in constituting the intellect alone or exclusively involving the understanding of divine things that are necessary, rather than human things that are contingent. Since the relatively clear distinction that Aristotle draws between theoretical and practical rationality does not exist in the Spinozistic picture, it does not appear that we can plausibly identify Spinoza's blessedness with a contemplative ideal in the Aristotelian sense. The reasons I have presented in this section — especially the second and third reasons — highlight the commonalities between reason and intuitive knowledge. Whereas it is crucial not to overlook what is common to these two kinds of adequate cognition, there are also differences between them that may turn out to be problematic for my reading in suggesting a discontinuity in Spinoza's account. Therefore, before we can reach a final verdict, we need to consider some of these differences, which bring us to the fourth section.

4. Spinoza's Distinction between Reason and Intuitive Knowledge

As seen earlier, reason by its definition, constitutes a way by which we can “perceive many things and form universal notions” (EIIP40S2, my italics) based on our apprehension of common notions and adequate ideas of properties of things.³¹ Common notions, which Spinoza calls elsewhere “the foundations of our reasoning” (EIIP40S1), are adequate ideas that represent permanent and pervasive features of nature such as common properties of bodies including “extension” and “motion and rest” (EIIL2D).³² They express an objective universality rather than an illusionary and fictional universality, in that they represent real agreements in nature, which are expressions of God's power and his eternal and infinite nature.³³ When we understand things through common notions, we attain a causal understanding of things and obtain a detached and objective viewpoint from which we can rise above our imaginative knowledge of things (including ourselves), and thereby, remove our errors.

Despite the aforementioned qualities that reason shares with intuitive knowledge, there are significant differences between these two kinds of adequate cognition, which together explain why Spinoza considers intuitive knowledge more powerful than reason. With respect to its method, intuitive knowledge is a more direct and immediate form of cognition than reason. Whereas reason deduces its conclusions from common notions, intuition grasps the truth in an immediate and direct manner, “in one glance” (EIIP40S2), without having to appeal to any such mediation. Furthermore, intuitive knowledge differs from reason both in terms of its foundation and its representative content.³⁴ Recall that intuitive knowledge, by definition starts “from an adequate idea of certain attributes of God” (EVP25D), which is nothing but an adequate knowledge of the essence of God itself.³⁵ According to Spinoza, the foundation of intuitive knowledge is “the knowledge of God” (EVP20S), namely, adequate knowledge of God's eternal and infinite essence. Intuitive knowledge consists in inferring from this foundation adequate knowledge of the essence of things.³⁶ Whereas intuitive knowledge thus reaches adequate knowledge of the essences of things, reason can afford us with only a limited understanding of singular things, including ourselves, through their common properties. And common properties of things, for Spinoza, “do not constitute the essence of any singular thing” (EIIP37). Notably, whereas Spinoza describes reason as a “universal” knowledge, he describes intuitive knowledge as the “knowledge of singular things” (EVP36S). As I see it, this is because intuitive knowledge relates to the essences of singular things, which are not really distinguished from singular things themselves (EIID2). As seen earlier, for Spinoza, every singular thing is a certain and determinate expression of God's essence or power. The essence of a singular thing is its actual essence, which Spinoza identifies as the power or “striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being” (EIIIP7). It is a partial expression of God's infinite and eternal essence or God's very power manifested in a finite form (EIVP4D). Attaining intuitive knowledge of singular things is thus just our intuitive, “in one glance” (uno intuitu) (EIIP40S2) grasp or seeing of the relation of God's essence to their essences, which gives rise to our highest happiness, that is, blessedness.

Having given this brief account of intuitive knowledge and its difference from reason, I will further elaborate on the respective foundations of these two kinds of adequate cognition: that is, knowledge of God and common notions. In EIIP47, Spinoza states that “the human mind has an adequate knowledge of God's eternal and infinite essence,” which means that the foundation of intuitive knowledge is already available to us. In the scholium that follows Spinoza explains why, despite the availability of this foundation, most people do not have true knowledge of God. In his words,

But that men do not have so clear a knowledge of God as they do of the common notions comes from the fact that they cannot imagine God, as they can bodies , and that they have conjoined the name God to the images of things which they are used to seeing, Men can hardly avoid this, because they are continually affected by external bodies. (EIIP47S, my italics)

As seen in this passage, the fact that we can imagine bodies helps to enhance the clarity of our knowledge of common notions. Common notions represent properties of actually existing bodies, which we not only adequately cognize but also can vividly imagine. Hence, imagination can sometimes facilitate rather than obstruct common notions by adding to their intellectual evidence some sensible evidence. Unlike common notions, “the knowledge of God,” which comprehends the essence of God, cannot be imagined in any way.³⁷ By thus distinguishing the knowledge of God from common notions, Spinoza makes use of a distinction between those things that can be imagined, like the bodies, and those that can never be imagined, like God. In a famous letter to Lodewijk Meyer (Letter XII), Spinoza makes a similar distinction as he warns against the failure to distinguish between “that which we can apprehend only by the intellect and not by the imagination,” and “that which can also be apprehended by imagination” (Letter XII, my italics). As Spinoza states, “… there are many things which we cannot at all grasp by the imagination, but only by the intellect (such as Substance, God, Eternity, etc.)” (Letter XII). Once we use Spinoza's distinction in Letter XII to make sense of Spinoza's point in EIIP47S, we see that, whereas the essence of God can be apprehended only by the intellect, common properties that are represented by common notions can be apprehended by not only intellect, but also by imagination.

The connection between reason and imagination can also be seen once we examine some of the ethical functions that Spinoza attributes to reason in Part IV and the beginning of Part V. This segment of the Ethics includes his view of reason as the ground of collaborative morality among human beings and his account of reason's remedies for the harmful passions. To begin with the former, according to Spinoza's account of collaborative morality, i.e., sustained mutually beneficial cooperation among human beings, rational understanding of ourselves and one another through our shared aspects leads to the comprehension that for a human being there is nothing more valuable than another human being, who lives according to the guidance of reason (EIVP35C1). Notably, as we saw earlier, even though from an ontological point of view “things human” do not carve out a special domain grounded in reality, Spinoza bases his whole doctrine of collaborative morality on the species-bound notion of human nature. For instance, in order to explain why there is nothing more useful to a man than another man, he says the following: “insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason, they must do only those things which are good for human nature, and hence, for each man, that is (by 31C), those things which agree with the nature of each man” (EIVP35D, my italics; see also EIIIP57S and EIVP37S1). As I read Spinoza, human nature indicates the adequately cognizable affinities and commonalities among human beings, including most particularly the capacity to reason or to be determined by adequate ideas.³⁸ Human nature is thus not a concept of imagination; it does not correspond to a partial and subjective perception of the likeness between ourselves and others through imagination. Such a partial and subjective perception is related to Spinoza's doctrine of the imitation of the affects, which is designed to explain how we can feel compassion for others, feel their joys and sorrows, even when we have not experienced any prior affect for them, simply because they are “like us.”³⁹ Even though Spinoza does not present “likeness” as something to be adequately cognized in this context, it is plausible to suggest that our perceptual/imaginative grasp of the likeness between ourselves and others and the resultant fellow-feeling can sometimes facilitate our rational cognition of the commonalities and affinities that we share with our fellow humans and allow us to reach agreement on ends.

To turn to reason's second ethical function, knowledge of the affects is one of the chief remedies for the passions that Spinoza introduces in the first half of Part V of the Ethics.⁴⁰ For him “an affect which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it” (EVP3). In other words, when we manage “to approach [ourselves and our emotions] from the outside” (Yovel, 1992, p. 164) through the mediation of common notions and attain knowledge of our affects through these notions, we can turn these passions into active affects, according to Spinoza.⁴¹ In this remedy, reason engages with imagination in that passions that are supposed to be adequately known and, thereby, turned into active affects are inadequate ideas of imagination. To the extent that passions are inadequate ideas of imagination, they involve “privation of knowledge” (EIIP35) — that is, they are errors. Once we form a clear and distinct idea of an affect, which is a passion, it “ceases to be a passion” (EVP3). This is because the error that the passion involves is removed and replaced by adequate ideas, thereby integrating the affect into a new and entirely internal causal chain.⁴² Imagination comes into play in a more active role when perfect knowledge of our affects is unavailable to us. In Spinoza's words,

The best thing, then, that we can do, so long as we do not have perfect knowledge of our affects, is to conceive a correct principle of living, or sure maxims of life, to commit them to memory, and to apply them constantly to the particular cases frequently encountered in life. In this way our imagination will be extensively affected by them, and we shall always have them ready. For example, we have laid it down as a maxim of life (see IVP46 and P46S) that hate is to be conquered by love, or nobility, not by repaying it with hate in return … (EVP10S, my italics).

On my reading of Spinoza, to the extent that these maxims are grounded in the laws of nature, which, as we have seen, are always and everywhere the same, they do not carve out a specific domain that exclusively applies to contingent and changing human actions. However, as this passage suggests, even though these maxims of life are grounded in reason to the extent that they are rules of reason, they may need to be applied to particular cases with the help of imagination.⁴³

This brief analysis of the connection between reason and imagination and what I earlier stated about the un-imaginability of the knowledge of God may suggest that there is a break between reason and intuitive knowledge insofar as their relation to imagination is concerned. While I do not deny that there is a significant difference between reason and intuitive knowledge in this regard, I do not consider this difference to indicate a problematic break in the Ethics. On the contrary, I think that reason and intuitive knowledge are on a continuum insofar as the ethics of the Ethics is concerned, which brings me to the final section.

5. Spinoza's Blessedness as a Useful Ideal of Contemplation

Spinoza's ethical project provides an account of “the mind's power over the affects and its freedom” (EVP42S). For Spinoza, our highest freedom or blessedness consists in “perfecting the intellect,” which is “nothing but understanding God, his attributes, and his actions, which follow from the necessity of his nature” (EIVApp4). However, unlike Aristotle's theoretically excellent yet practically “useless” ideal of contemplation, Spinozistic blessedness is described as something “especially useful” (EIVApp4). After introducing the definition of intuitive knowledge in Part II of the Ethics, Spinoza promises that he will speak of the “excellence and utility” (EIIP47S) of this superior kind of cognition in Part V. He keeps his promise and provides an account of the excellence and utility of intuitive knowledge in the second half of Part V. In this admittedly and frustratingly concise account, what we learn is that blessedness “is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself” (EVP42) and that it not only consists in perfecting the intellect but also, at the same time, is centrally connected to the practical quest of moderating and restraining the passions. In Spinoza's words, “the more the mind enjoys blessedness, the more it understands … that is, the greater the power it has over the affects, and … the less it is acted on by evil affects” (EVP42D). At the very end of the Ethics, after discussing the affective power of blessedness, Spinoza states: “with this I have finished all the things I wished to show concerning the mind's power over the affects and its freedom” (EVP42S). This suggests that he sees his ethical project in the Ethics as a continuous one that is complete only once he finishes presenting his account of the intuitive knowledge in the second half of Part V.

Before I conclude, some clarification on the usefulness of blessedness is in order. According to my reading of Spinoza, as I show in detail in Soyarslan (2014), blessedness provides such an effective power in the face of the passions because it constitutes the culmination of human freedom, a transformative ascent consisting of three stages. In the initial stage of this ascent, which is the imaginative stage, we are in bondage to the harmful passions and we are prone to errors, such as thinking that we have free will due to our ignorance of the universe and our place in it. In this “ordinary life” (TdIE, [3]), we are in a fluctuating state of mind, since we are mostly affected by ordinary love, the objects of which are external and transient goods like honour, sensual pleasure, and wealth. In the second stage, which I call the ‘rational stage,’ we are more powerful, connected, and active than we are in the imaginative stage. For we are now able to understand things, including ourselves and our emotions, as they are, remove the errors of imagination via common notions, and form relatively stable connections with our fellow humans by adequately cognizing our similarities qua human. Despite the significance of these achievements and the fact that reason constitutes a way of understanding things according to the order of the intellect, however, the rational stage does not constitute the peak of the ascent. The ascent culminates in the intuitive stage, wherein we gain a new self-awareness or insight, which, in turn, is brought about by the realization of how we relate to God. This insight is not just beyond the pursuit of the aforementioned external goods. It is also beyond an objective and detached knowledge of nature and our place in it and beyond an identification with humanity, which are both achievements of the rational stage. This is an insight into our very metaphysical existence and our eternity as modes of God.

For Spinoza, “the more each of us is able to achieve in this kind of knowledge, the more he is conscious of himself and of God that is, the more perfect and blessed [we are] …” (EVP31S).⁴⁴ Being conscious of ourselves and of God means seeing or grasping in one glance the relation between God's essence and our essence. It consists in inferring from the foundation of intuitive knowledge — that is, knowledge of God — the adequate knowledge of our essence or our power. When I intuitively grasp my power as a manifestation of God's power, I achieve a deep causal understanding, which is marked by an experienced character. This is not a random, sense-perception-based experience, but an intellectual experience of being in God, of our eternity. Our “blessedness, or freedom” consists “in a constant and eternal love of God” (EVP36S), which Spinoza calls intellectual love of God. While ordinary love is directed to transient things and fluctuates because of this, the intellectual love of God does not fluctuate easily as its object, God, is an eternal and unchanging being. When the mind is affected by this love and blessedness, it reaches a peaceful state that does not easily fluctuate. Notably, blessedness, for Spinoza, is not only a state of perfect joy, it is also one of peace of mind. The blessed or wise person is one who is “conscious of himself, and of God, and of things … never ceases to be, but always possesses true peace of mind” (EVP42S).

This state of true peace of mind, however, is not one that carries us beyond good and evil. The very fact that blessedness is the highest good for us suggests that it is not a transcendent state that is beyond good and evil; it is a state of perfection that is relative to us. In attaining blessedness we do not/cannot thereby achieve complete freedom or self-determination and move beyond good and evil. Relatedly, that the foundation of intuitive knowledge cannot be imagined does not mean that imagination is out of the picture when we attain intuitive knowledge and blessedness. This is because, as I mentioned earlier, as finite modes determined by other finite modes, we are always externally determined to a certain extent, which means that in each human mind some ideas are necessarily mutilated and confused ideas of imagination and insofar as the mind has these ideas, we are ineliminably acted on — that is, subject to passions. The mind of an intuitive knower is no exception to this. Given Spinoza's doctrine of power of ideas, no ideas — not even the intuitive ones — can provide boundless power in the face of passions, even though the imaginative part constitutes the smallest part of the mind.

On my reading, even though the transformative ascent does not culminate in a change in our ontological status qua finite modes, it does bring about a significant change in perspective: we are able to focus on the right objects of desire in accordance with the order of the intellect as we also come to terms with the implications of our ineliminable weakness qua finite modes.⁴⁵ The new insight that is brought about by the intuitive stage thus helps reorder our desires in the most effective way as it involves the greatest power of the human mind, i.e., blessedness. Moving from love and pursuit of transient objects in ordinary life to the pursuit of the perfection of the intellect and intellectual love of God is almost like accomplishing the very Socratic mission of turning around of the soul towards the right objects of desire.

In the Republic, Socrates tells Adeimantus that “someone whose mind is truly directed to things that are has not the leisure to look down at human affairs and be filled with malice and hatred as a result of their disputes. Instead, as he looks at and contemplates things that are orderly and always the same, that neither do injustice to one another nor suffer it being all in a rational order, he imitates them and tries to become as like them as he can” (Plato, 2004, 500c, my italics). I think that if we are to liken Spinozistic blessedness to a contemplative ideal, perhaps it should be to the Platonic one rather than the Aristotelian ideal. Recall that, according to Aristotle, the life of contemplation is perfect happiness, since it is directed at the knowledge of divine things and thus consists in a disinterested pursuit of truth. For Plato, by contrast, contemplating the forms or “things that are” (Plato, 2004, 500c) is not just a theoretical, but also a practical endeavour insofar as it involves their imitation as well. Even though Plato is similar to Aristotle in distinguishing different parts or aspects of the soul, including the rational part, he does not make a further distinction between practical and theoretical aspects of rationality and wisdom, as Aristotle does.⁴⁶ The rational part of the soul, according to Plato, desires knowledge or truth tout court and the virtue that is associated with the rational part is wisdom (sophia). Sophia consists in knowledge of the forms and the imitation of their order in acting and ruling.

Plato's philosopher king is the epitome of wisdom — the person who has achieved the dialectical ascent and understands the reality as it is, without the involvement of images; that is, the philosopher king is someone whose mind is truly directed to “things that are.” Notably, in order to illustrate his idea of dialectical ascent in the Republic, Plato offers his analogy of the divided line, where he makes a distinction between two modes of cognition — that is, dianoia and noesis (Plato, 2004, 510b). We learn there that the former makes use of unproven hypotheses and images, whereas the latter does not. This appears to be strikingly similar to what Spinoza suggests in EIIP47S, as we have seen earlier, about how reason and intuitive knowledge relate to imagination in terms of their foundations. While a detailed analysis of this similarity is beyond the scope of this article, intuitive knowledge seems to be similar to noesis in that it does not make use of any images, as it does not have an object that is imaginable. It is grounded in the highest thing we can know — that is, the knowledge of God — that can reasonably be considered a first principle in Spinoza's epistemology. As it descends from this first principle to the knowledge of essences of things including ourselves, intuitive knowledge brings about the most powerful affective and cognitive state any finite mode can attain: the peace of mind and the perfect joy of the wise person.⁴⁷ Even though Spinoza's wise person is not a philosopher king, she is someone who has achieved something “excellent yet so rare to attain” (EVP42S): namely, a very “useful” kind of wisdom, which, once achieved, will complete her transformative journey by changing the way she thinks, acts, and desires at once.