1

Joshua Caminiti
17/11/2015
3. Knowledge and Truth
Essay

(b) Why, and with what success, did Spinoza distinguish three levels of cognition?

Despite the highly abstract, formalistic nature of the Ethics, one is often left with the
impression that Spinoza’s work is something to be lived rather than analysed, and this comes out
most forcefully for the first time in a place one would least expect it: his theory of knowledge. If we
desire a firm understanding of Spinoza’s tripartite division of the ways of knowing, it would be
helpful first to outline his conception of truth/falsity and how this is related to his concept of the
adequacy/inadequacy of ideas. After treating of each of the three ways, I would like to devote the
remainder of this essay to considering the distinction between his second and third kind. The third,
the scientia intuitiva, is best understood as the vehicle to the ultimate goal of the Ethics, that is a
“secular salvation”1 which relates to our summum bonum and “highest virtue”, that is, “Dei cognitio”
(IVP28).
Spinoza presents us with a correspondence theory of truth when we take together IA6,
IID4, and IIP43S, such that an idea is true iff it is in perfect agreement with its object. We see that
in his demonstration to IIP32, ideas, “insofar as they are related to God, are true” for the simple
reason that “all ideas which are in God agree entirely with their objects” (cf. IP7C). This agreement
between idea and ideatum he denotes as the “extrinsic denomination” of a true idea, and he does
not really explicitly develop his notion of the other, “intrinsic denominations” of a true idea.2
However, in IIP7S we learn, of course, that an idea and its object are one and the same thing, and
we might be led naturally to the conclusion that “every idea without qualification must agree with its
object”3, but for Spinoza it is crucial that this is only true of ideas “insofar as they are related to
God”. Indeed, on account of his parallelism, it seems as though all ideas are necessarily true, for,
in that an idea belongs to the infinite intellect, it cannot but agree with its object, for God’s idea of
an extended object will always agree with it, and be identical to it. It is precisely because all ideas
belong to God that Spinoza wants to avoid saying that ideas are false by some positive feature
(IIP33, IIP43S), and so we must turn to considering those ideas insofar as they relate to a human
mind in order to see how falsity operates in Spinoza (see IIP36D). Unlike God, the human mind
can form ideas that fail to agree properly with its object: simply because every idea in the mind will
necessarily have a corresponding mode, this does not mean that the “mode that corresponds to
the idea will be the object that the idea purports to represent. Thus, there is a mode in Extension
that corresponds to my idea of a unicorn, but it is not a real unicorn; rather, it is a state of my body,
viz., the motions in my brain that correlate to the imaginative idea in my mind.”4 Most importantly,
however, our ideas fall into falsity when they are inadequate in some important way, that is, falsity
is a privation of truth (IIP35), incomplete in that they fail to account for the full causal order and
context of the object (see IA4), which is found in the divine mind. Inadequate ideas are false, and
adequate ones (those ideas that do account for this full causal situation) are true.5 Put in simpler
terms, “to have an adequate idea of a thing is to have a complete explanation of it.”6
How, then, can human minds ever escape inadequacy and arrive at truth, seeing as our
finite intellects would be unable to comprehend the totality of the causal framework of any one of
our ideata? Indeed, Spinoza believes we cannot have true ideas of the affections of our bodies,
neither of our bodies themselves, nor, most shockingly, of our own minds (IIP12, IIP19, IIP23).
How can we ever hope to achieve what Spinoza demands in IIP43S, following from IIP11C, that is,
that our minds ideas must be “true as that God’s ideas are”? In IIP25 we learn that sensory-based

1
Yovel, p. 154
2
Steinberg, p. 147
3
Wilson, p. 108
4
Nadler, p. 162
5
Spinoza writing to Tschirnhaus (Letter 60): “Between a true and an adequate idea, I recognise no
difference but this, that the word ‘true’ has regard only to the agreement of the idea with its object,
whereas the word ‘adequate’ has regard to the nature of the idea in itself.”
6
Steinberg, p. 148-9
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and perceptual ideas fail to provide true knowledge of external things at all, and we would find
ourselves mired in inadequacy until hope emerges in IIP38 with his presentation of “common
notions”, which play a crucial role in his second way of knowing (ratio). These common notions are
those things which are common to all members of an attribute, equally as in a part as in the whole,
and they can be conceived adequately simply by virtue of the agent being the sort of being that it
is. Drawing from IIP13L2, he concludes in IIP38C that “there are certain ideas or notions common
to all men”; the lemma states “All bodies agree in certain respects”, that is, insofar as they are all
extended. Common notions are adequate representations of their objects— they are carefully
distinguished from essences of singular things (IIP37) and ordinary universals (which are a fiction,
IIP16C2). Spinoza does not provide us with specific common notions, but, thinking of those things
that are common to all bodies, Nadler proposes an illuminating, non-exhaustive list which includes
shape, size, divisibility, mobility, the principles of geometry and laws of motion and rest—“whatever
is involved in the attribute of Extension and its infinite modes.”7 These things are possessed by
bodies simply because they are bodies, and, being in the body, the mind (the idea of the body) has
an adequate idea of it, since the body possesses these features not as modifications but simply
due to the fact that it is a body. These adequate common notions provide us with a bedrock, as it
were, out which can be inferred any number of further adequate ideas, for “Whatever follows in the
mind from ideas which are adequate in the mind are also adequate” (IIP40) since these adequate
ideas belong to the divine intellect, and any ideas derived from them are therefore caused by God
(IIP40D).
With this preliminary material out of the way, which, as presented, I find to be perfectly
coherent, let us turn to Spinoza’s threefold division of the ways of knowing in IIP40S2. The division
is really fourfold, but enclosed in three, as “knowledge of the first kind” includes both “knowledge
from fortuitous experience” (experientia vaga) and knowledge from symbols (ex signis), or,
“imagination” and “opinion”. This is the same way of knowing discussed as inadequate in IIP29C,
that knowledge which runs “after the common order of Nature”, where “both types of knowledge of
the first kind involve associations resulting from fortuitous encounters with sensible individual
things and sensible signs.”8 It is described by Spinoza as “the only cause of falsity”, and it pertains
to “all those ideas which are inadequate and confused” (IIP41,D). This is evident simply by the
definition of the first kind of knowledge, which, arising simply from isolated perceptions of the
world, fall woefully short in providing us with the proper causal and conceptual explanation required
of adequate, that is, true, ideas. To say that we perceive any body is, moreover, only to describe
our own bodies being affected, it is a “necessarily subjective” route to knowledge, and “illusory
insofar as it is taken to be representative of the nature of things beyond the state of the body”.9 The
knowledge gleaned from them is famously described as “like conclusions without premises”
(IIP28D): we get individual ideas, but we know nothing about why they are the case. It is the cause
of two notable errors: firstly, value-concepts like “good” or “beauty” or even “warm” and “cold”,
which are merely properties of our own responses to other things which we then project on to them
(I app). Secondly, ordinary universals “owe their origin to the inability of the body to form more than
a certain limited number of images at once”, and, when we exceed our limit, they coalesce into
“imaginative universals” which “indicate the constitution of our own body more than the nature of
external bodies”10 (cf. IIP16C2). This first way of knowledge serves a very important role in
Spinoza’s system: not only does it explain why falsity exists in the first place, in doing so it both
allows him to dismember the above concepts to which he is opposed and lead us on to a more
perfect way of attaining actual, adequate knowledge, in the second and third kinds.
The second way of knowing is described as “reason”, and, as we noted earlier, is based
entirely on common notions (IIP40S1). It arises “from the fact that we have common notions and
adequate ideas of the properties of things”, and he cites IIP38C; IIP39 & C; and IIP40 here, from
which we learn that reason deals with those things common to all bodies, those things common to
the human body and those that customarily affect it, and those things that follow from these
common things. Like the third kind, the knowledge produced by reason is “necessarily true” (IIP41),
though we should take a moment to understand how reason is understood to operate, and whether

7
Nadler, p. 175
8
Wislon, p. 116
9
Steinberg, p. 150
10
Ibid.
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it applies to particulars or remains general. According to IIP44, “It is of the nature of reason to
regard things as necessary, not as contingent”, and it also regards things sub specie aeternitatis,
without, however being able to explain the essences of particular things (IIP44C2D). To see things
as eternal is not to ignore time, but goes hand-in-hand with seeing them as necessary, for it is
simply to understand things as following from “the very necessity of God’s eternal nature” (IIP44),
and therefore to grasp a thing sub specie aeternitatis is to regard it as necessitated through God.
Where the first kind of knowledge is responsible for both the illusion of contingency and free will,
reason sees thing as necessary, that is, as connected with each other (not “fortuitously” but sub
specie aeternitatis), and thus places the items of its consideration under the laws of nature and
their proper causal framework. IIP45 shows that reason can refer to singular things— however,
though it does not yield us the essence of those things (IIP44C2D), it does “provide the conceptual
and explanatory framework within which the truth of singular things can be apprehended”11 from
common notions and their derivatives.
The third kind of knowledge is the most important, but also the most mysterious, and
commentators seem to univocally express frustration over the brevity with which Spinoza treats it.
It is “clearly a matter for the happy few”12, not a very ‘public’ way, and it “proceeds from an
adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of the
essence of things” (IIP40, VP25D). The scientia intuitiva (henceforth SI) is not “one intuitive vision
of the whole universe”, for no one man can know this; rather, Spinoza states that men do know
things by SI, and that this knowledge is of various individual items (cf. IIP40, VP36S). SI is, along
with reason, also necessarily true (IIP41), and “does not abolish its ordinary form (ratio) but is
taken to express the same metaphysical truth in a complimentary and deeper way”;13 it
presupposes reason, it is as if reason passes the baton to SI. We need to look carefully at the
example provided in IIP40S2 here, regarding the problem of the fourth proposition, which, when
seen “with one intuition…only simply sees the answer, without conscious use of any general
rule”.14 The difference between the second and third ways of knowing “is to be framed not really in
terms of content or information but in terms of their respective forms”: where reason is “discursive
and involves inferring the effect from its causes—and especially the higher, eternal causes—much
as a conclusion is logically derived from premises”, SI, by contrast, is something of an “immediate
perception of the connection between causes and effecting, resulting in a singular conception of
the essence of a thing”, that is “a kind of epistemic compression of information”.15 However,
intuition is still ultimately inferential, as we find in IIP47S: “Hence we see that the infinite essence
and eternity of God are known to all. But since all things are in God and are conceived through
God, we can deduce from this knowledge very many things which we know adequately, and so
form that third kind of knowledge.”16 Where reason is abstract, intuitive knowledge is concrete, it
proceeds from “an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain of the attributes of God to an
adequate knowledge of the essence of things.”17 Reason is restricted to generalities, unable to
explain particular essences (IIP44C2D), whereas intuitive knowledge does give “an adequate
knowledge of the essence of things” (IIP40S2). In VP36S, the knowledge afforded by SI brings with
it the intellectual love of God, and in this actually “it is God who is thinking and loving”18, it shows
how the human mind depends directly from God, and this knowledge is derived from ‘the essence
of a single thing’ (i.e. the human mind).
Any understanding of SI needs to be significant enough such that it can fulfil the
soteriological-epistemological power we find above and ascribed to it in e.g. VP20 (its “foundation
is the knowledge of God itself”); or VP32C (“From the third kind of knowledge there necessarily
arises an intellectual love of God”). For this reason, I find Wilson’s understanding that SI is simply
“reductive” insofar as it divulges to us the essence of any individual as a reduction in terms of the

11
Nadler, p. 180
12
Yovel, p. 154
13
Ibid., p. 156
14
Parkinson, p. 182
15
Nadler, p. 181, emphasis mine
16
Emphasis mine
17
Parkinson, p. 182
18
Ibid., p. 186
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common fundamental properties19 to be insufficient to this end, and I would like to turn to Yovel’s
explication which truly brings out the ultimate purpose of Spinoza’s theory of the ways of knowing.
He relates reason to the “horizontal” (transitive) line of causality (found in IP28, where a thing is
understood to be produced by other infinite things in an endless chain of external causation), and
SI to the “vertical” (immanent) line of causality (found in IP16&IP18-25, where particular things are
derived directly from God as their immanent cause, logically particularised). Horizontal causality
“realises” vertical causality “by translating its inner logical character into external mechanistic
terms.”20 This is quite dense, and might be explained this way:

To explain A in horizontal terms is to say that it is determined by B, C, D, as its mechanistic

causes in operation with law L

To explain A in vertical terms is to say that A is determined by the logical necessity of the
law L as it is in God (where the mechanistic causes B, C, D, and their actions
instantiate L)

Where reason gives us the causal “premisses” (B, C, D) to the “conclusion” of our knowledge, SI
proceeds directly from God (his laws, those things which express his inner necessity whereby he
particularises himself), as it were, to his particularisations in individual things. For Spinoza,
particular essences exist actually (formaliter) in the mind of God, as ideas of the infinite intellect (cf
IP16&C), and, when seen vertically, God’s particularisation into individuals appears eternal and
necessary. A thing’s essence is, crucially, “ontologically equivalent to the process of its
determination”: this is because, as we have observed, essences cannot be universals, and the way
in which we might characterise the essence of particular thing (per IID2) is simply by the “logical or
metaphysical “point” which belongs exclusively to it in the overall map of being”.21 The finest
example of SI at work can be seen in the mind’s ability to understand the essence of its own body
sub specie aeternitatis— this knowledge comes from relating its object directly to its immanent
cause, God.22 Our understanding under the SI of any essence proceeds from the fact that the mind
“conceives the body’s essence under a species of eternity” (VP29), and the SI therefore is said to
“depend[] on the mind, as on a formal cause, insofar as the mind itself is eternal” (VP31), and
when the mind operates insofar as it is eternal, under the SI, it arrives at an adequate knowledge
of God and “is capable of knowing all those things which can follow from this given
knowledge…that is, of knowing things by the third kind of knowledge” (VP31D). A knowledge of
essences lays bare the true nature of things, and offers a grand insight into the internal design of
nature and the infinite intellect, and this is where the distinctive cognitive advantage of the SI is to
be located. Reason only tells me the “lawlike ways in which transitive causes produce their effects
in endless chains”—an “adequate explication” of IP28—SI steps in to illuminate the verticality of
IP16, it grasps things “according to their particular essences as they immanently issue from God”.23
Like everything else in the Ethics, but particularly directly here, Spinoza’s theory of the
ways of knowing is oriented towards the ultimate goal of knowing God, and achieving a form of
mediated self-knowledge thereby, in which consists the “blessedness” (VP31S) of a human being.
With his characteristic elegance and all-embracing scope, I think Spinoza presents us with an
altogether coherent and workable epistemology which goes hand-in-hand with his metaphysics,
down the path to the salvation of mankind. It should not, I think, particularly worry us that
understanding the scientia intuitiva proves itself to be a stubbornly difficult task— after all, it is
designed so as to be the finest fruit of Spinoza’s epistemological theory which in turn yields that
great bounty of the intellectual love of God. Given that I myself have not quite experienced this
intellectual love of God (at least in Spinozistic terms), this means I have not meaningfully, or at
least consciously, operated along the third way of knowing, and so the best I might do is attempt to
frame it theoretically and forever at arm’s length. The theological, almost mystical tenor of

19
Steinberg, p. 154-5
20
Yovel, p. 157-8
21
Ibid., p. 162
22
Wilson, p. 130
23
Yovel., p. 166
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Spinoza’s epistemology is best captured by Yovel, who importantly expands upon the easier, more
banal understanding of intuition as simply inference without rules or something to that effect.

Bibliography

Edwin Curley, A Spinoza Reader (Princeton: 1994)

Steven Nadler: Spinoza’s Ethics An Introduction (Cambridge 2006)

G.H.R.Parkinson, Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge (Clarendon Press: 1954)

D.Steinberg, ‘Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics’ in O.Koistinen (ed) Cambridge Companion to

Spinoza’s Ethics, pp.140-66

M.D.Wilson, ‘Spinoza’s theory of Knowledge,’ in Garrett (ed) Cambridge Companion to Spinoza,

pp.89-141

Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, Vol.I : The Marrano of Reason. (Princeton: 1989)