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Spinoza’s Three Kinds of Cognition:Imagination, Understanding, and Definition and Essence in theTreatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
Spinoza distinguishes three kinds of human cognition, let’s say, imagination, reason, and intuition. Although I think his handling of the trichotomy is stable across his writings, I want to focus on the TdIE presentation because certain things concerning definition and essence come out especially clearly there.[1]
What Spinoza has his eye on is what we might think of as the quality of human cognition. More specifically, his classification has to do with how cognition or thought is ordered. In particular, the trichotomy concerns the difference between its being superficially ordered and its reflecting the world’s deep structure. He does think that certainty accompanies such well-ordered cognition: when I understand and see why something is the way it is, Spinoza holds I am certain and I know I cannot be mistaken. But that is not his focus. His focus is on understanding itself.
Here’s how Spinoza introduces the bottom level of cognition. (By the way, although the TdIE lists four headings, I am, following the Ethics (2p40s2), going to collapse the first two headings into a single bottom level):
1. There is the perception we have from hearsay, or from some sign conventionally agreed upon.
Spinoza gives as examples my knowledge of the date of my birth and of who my parents are.
2. There is the perception that we have from casual experience; that is, experience that is not determined by the intellect, but is so called because it chances thus to occur [casu sic occurrit], and we have experienced nothing else that contradicts it, so that it remains in our minds unchanged.
Spinoza gives as examples my knowledge that I shall die, my knowledge that oil feeds fire and water extinguishes fire, and my knowledge that a dog is barking animal and man is a rational animal.
Spinoza describes the second kind of cognition as follows:
3. There is the perception we have when the essence of a thing is inferred from another thing, but not adequately. This happens either when we infer a cause from some effect or when an inference is made from some universal which is always accompanied by some property.
I’m going to key on the idea that this cognition involves essence. More specifically, this cognition involves an inference from some feature of a thing to its essence, so it corresponds to a posteriori cognition, in the pre-Kantian sense of a posteriori. It is “outside in” cognition, cognition from the surface to an underlying causal structure.That is, the cognition involves the movement from property, effect, or consequence to essence, cause, or ground.
Spinoza gives several examples of this (in §21). One that I think is especially helpful is this:
When we clearly perceive that we sense such-and-such a body and no other, then from this, I say, we clearly infer that the soul is united to the body, a union which is the cause of such-and-such a sensation. But from this we cannot positively understand [non absolute inde possumus intelligere] what is that sensation and union.
Spinoza thinks that fact of sensation shows that I am united to a body. He may even think that it tells me a little bit about what the soul is: namely, whatever the soul is—that is whatever its essence turns out to be—it must be such that it grounds its union with the body. This alone, however, would make for a quite blank and abstract characterization of the mind’s nature, as Spinoza emphasizes. In footnote g, he explains:
For by this union we understand nothing beyond the sensation itself; that is, the effect from which we inferred a cause of which we have no understanding.
And in footnote h, Spinoza warns that although such conclusions are certain, they must be treated with “great caution,” because:
When things are conceived in this abstract [abstracte] way and not through their true essence, they are at once confused by the imagination. For to the things that they conceive abstractly [abstracte], separately, and confusedly, men apply terms which they use to signify other more familiar things.
Spinoza holds that while this kind of cognition does provide understanding, the understanding it provides is limited. Because the understanding of what the soul is left mostly blank—because we do not conceive the soul through its “true essence”—it will be very easy to make the mistake of associating with it all sorts of things that do not belong to it.
And here’s how Spinoza characterizes the third kind of cognition:
4. Finally, there is the perception we have when a thing is perceived through its essence alone, or through knowledge of its proximate cause.
This kind of cognition is “inside out,” in that it goes from underlying basis to outward feature. It is a priori cognition, again in the old sense, that is, from essence, cause, or ground to property, effect, or consequence. He gives a few examples. The one I find most helpful is this: “from the fact that I know the essence of the soul, I know that it is united to the body.” If I know, for example, that what the (human) mind is is the idea of the (human) body within the infinite idea of God, then I’ll see that the mind must be united to the body and how it is united (i.e., as an idea to its object).
The distinction between the first kind of cognition, on the one hand, and the second and third kinds, on the other, is, roughly, the distinction between imagination and understanding. In the Ethics, Spinoza tells us that the lower form of cognition follows the “the order and linking of affections of the human body” and the second two forms of cognition follow “the order of the intellect” (2p18s). The first kind of cognition is ordered imagination-wise; the second two kinds are ordered understanding-wise. I want to begin by taking up the contrast between imagination and understanding.
Part 1 Imagination versus Understanding
In the TdIE (§51), Spinoza warns the reader the he will “not here be giving the essence of every perception, explaining it through its proximate cause, for this belongs to Philosophy.” This is in contrast to the Ethics, where Spinoza tells us quite a bit about what imaginative cognition is. I’m going to draw on the Ethics account, because it helps to fill out Spinoza’s picture.
My body exists in the plenum, along with other bodies. When other bodies bump into my body, they sometimes leave a dent in my brain. When this occurs, there is an idea of the brain dent in my mind. This follows from Spinoza’s account of what the mind is, a difficult topic that, I presume, he wished to set aside for purposes of the TdIE. According to Spinoza, the nature of the dent is more a function of my body than the foreign body, but, even so, the idea of the dent does “tell” me something about the foreign body (2p16c). The dents themselves, and, so too, the ideas of the dents, are associated in various ways. For example, if my body gets dented by light reflected from a piece chocolate cake at the same time my olfactory system is impacted by aroma in the air, then the two images will be associated in my brain and the ideas of those images will be associated in my mind. I think this means, for example, that when I picture the cake on the table, I will also recall its aroma. Spinoza allows that the mechanisms he provides are somewhat speculative, but thinks that they are good enough for his purposes, and suspects that they are not far from the truth (see 2p17cs).
Let’s suppose my belief that oil feeds fire arises from casual experience, that is, from past associations of oil’s being poured on fire with fire’s increasing.[2] Spinoza’s main idea seems clear enough: in such a situation I don’t understand why oil feeds fire, I have no insight into the matter. What would having that involve? For Spinoza, it would require perceiving oil through its essence, and perceiving fire though its essence, which, he thinks, would make manifest why oil has the effect on fire that is does. And this is something that dent cognition does not do.
Let’s suppose, instead, that I have acquired my belief that oil feeds fire “from hearsay, or from some sign conventionally agreed upon,” say, through some combination of reading textbooks and being told so by teachers. In this case, the situation is more complicated, but Spinoza’s basic point remains the same. The relevant associations are more complex in that they now include linguistic dents, an intricate network of associations of sound traces and inscription traces left on my brain.[3] But if I rely on external testimony for the view and don’t myself grasp the essence of fire and the essence of oil, then I don’t understand why oil feeds fire.[4]
Connection between subject and predicate runs through essence
Spinoza’s own examples of hearsay raise some interesting questions. Recall, they include things like knowing who your parents are and the date of your birth. It is perhaps consistent with the presentation of the three kinds of cognition that Spinoza holds that your cognition of when you were born or who your parents are is irredeemably consigned to the bottom level. I doubt that this is in fact Spinoza’s view. I think that he thinks there is a sort of understanding of such matters available at least to certain intellects, if not to us. But, what would it mean for me to understand these things—to have insight into them in the way that I might conceivably have insight into oil’s feeding fire?[5]
I would like to pursue this question in a couple of steps. First, I want to consider some suggestive remarks that help to bring out the role that the plenum physics and essence are playing in Spinoza’s thinking; and then, I want to consider Spinoza’s treatment of things whose essences don’t include existence.
In §62, in the course of a discussion of “fictitious ideas,” Spinoza offers an analysis of what happens when someone makes a statement like “men are suddenly changed into beasts.” Spinoza writes:
[T]hat this is a statement of a very general kind, such that there would be in the mind no conception, that is, no idea or connection [cohaerentia] of subject with predicate. For if there were such, the mind would at that time see the means and cause, the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ such a thing took place [quo et cur tale quid factum]. Then again, no attention is given to the nature of subject and predicate.
It is interesting to see Spinoza couch his discussion in terms of the connection of a subject with a predicate; I believe this is rather unusual for him. Here is what I think his point is.
Let’s say someone, fresh from A Midsummer’s Night Dream, reports that Bottom was turned into an ass. Spinoza regards such a statement as general,[6]because she has “no idea of the connection of the subject with the predicate.” Moreover, it is only because she has no idea that she is able to form this fiction.
Well, what sort of thing would give her an idea of the connection? Evidently, some sense of the “means and cause” of the transformation or “the ‘how’ and the ‘why’” of this event’s taking place. This, in turn, Spinoza implies, requires paying attention to the nature of Bottom—probably both the nature of the pre-transformation human being and the nature of the post-transformation ass. Now, for Spinoza, understanding Bottom’s pre- and post-transformation natures involves knowing the pre-transformation plenum structure and the post-transformation plenum structure; and having the “how” and the “why” involves understanding how basic principles of the plenum gave rise to such a transformation—i.e., “the means and the cause.”
As I mentioned, this is part of Spinoza’s account of how we form fictitious ideas. His ultimate point is that as we understand these matters better—as we understand what the human Bottom is, what the donkey Bottom is, and what the “how” and the “why” would have to look like—it will eventually become impossible for us to entertain this fiction; the plenum order won’t support such transformation.[7] This last point reinforces something that Spinoza said earlier in the TdIE, at §58:
the less men know of Nature, the more easily they can fashion numerous fictitious ideas, as that trees speak, that men can change instantaneously into stones or springs, that ghosts appear in mirrors, that something can come from nothing, even that gods can change into beasts or men, and any number of such fantasies.
The better we understand Nature, the harder it is for us to make sense of fictions. Before I have studied chemistry, it might have been easy for me to entertain the fiction of water unfrozen at ten degrees below zero, but after I study chemistry such a fiction becomes unintelligible.
There are two points I want to pull out of this discussion, for the moment. First, the connective tissue between subject and predicate comes via their nature, which I am taking in this context, to be their essences. Second—encouraged by Spinoza’s comment about the need to see “the means and cause, the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ such a thing took place [quo et cur tale quid factum],” I think we ought to understand these natures in terms of plenum theory. In other words, plenum theory gives Spinoza his picture of what these essences look like and, through that, what a connection of subject with predicate looks like.[8],[9]
Existence and the Order of Nature
To the extent that things concerning you can be traced back to your essence (which I am taking here to be your geometrico-kinetic constitution), we have some idea of what it means to have insight into those things and their relation to you. But not everything about you can be traced back to your essence. In particular, your existence cannot be traced to your essence. So, what might cognition of the third kind of your existence look like?
There’s a notion that surfaces at a couple of points in the TdIE that I think is helpful here, namely, the order of Nature.[10] In §40, Spinoza says “the better [the mind] understands the order of Nature, the more easily it can restrain itself from useless pursuits.” This idea of the order of Nature comes up again in §65:
if the existence of thing is conceived is not an external truth, [in order to avoid to determine whether our idea is true and not a fiction] we need only to ensure that the existence of the thing is compared with its essence,[11] while at the same time attending to the order of Nature.
In order to tell whether my idea of an individual is a true or a fiction, I need to see whether that individual’s essence fits into the order of Nature.[12] Spinoza’s appeal to the order of Nature in the TdIE is similar to an appeal to the “order of universal corporeal Nature” in 1p11d2 of the Ethics:
But the reason for the existence or nonexistence of a circle or a triangle does not follow from their nature, but from the order of universal corporeal Nature. For it is from this latter that it necessarily follows that either the triangle necessarily exists at this moment [iam] or that its present [iam] existence is impossible.
The article “the” in “the triangle” is not found in the Latin, of course, but it is clear that Spinoza in talking about the existence of some individual triangle, at some particular place and time (as the two iam’s indicate). And what he is saying here is its existence is settled by the “order of universal corporeal Nature.”
That can seem puzzling. We sometimes tend to think of the Nature’s order as generic, so that it is comprised by some set of basic laws. I think there is a stratum of Spinoza’s metaphysics that corresponds to this level. Such structure is due either to the attributes of substance itself, or the immediate infinite modes (“motion and rest”). The existence or nonexistence of the triangle is consistent with these very general features of the universe.
However, as we have seen, there is another layer of structure, what Spinoza calls the order of Nature, which is consistent only either with the existence or the triangle or with its nonexistence (but not both). I think this stratum corresponds to the mediate infinite mode that Spinoza calls the face of the whole universe in Letter 64. He links this mode to the conception of “the whole of Nature” as “one individual whose parts—that is, all the constituent bodies—vary in infinite ways without any change in the individual as a whole.” This individual exhibits an order, but a fully determinate one. Whether the triangle exists depends on whether its essence is integrated into that determinate order.
To return to our question, then, what might it mean for an intellect to have insight into the date of your birth? A full understanding of your appearing on the seen when you did, requires locating you within the face of the whole universe, and then tracing backthe face of the whole universe (or the infinite individual) to God’s or substance’s essence. In order to do this, one would have to have a purchase on the face of the whole universe, that is, on “the whole of Nature” conceived as “one individual” with all its “constituent bodies.” This is something that lies beyond us, but not beyond God or Nature.[13]