Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

SPINOZA: METAPHYSICS AND KNOWLEDGE 273
inferred from these. Such a position is consistent with the supposition that there
could have been other laws, or that the initial state of the universe could have
been different. For Spinoza, on the other hand, both the laws and the initial state
are necessary, in the sense that no others are strictly speaking thinkable.
Spinoza’s chief concern in the Ethics is with the human being, and more
specifically with the human mind. It has already been seen that Spinoza, contrary
to Descartes, argues that the human mind is not a substance; on the positive side
he argues that, just as the human body is something highly complex, so also is
the human mind. More precisely, the human mind is an idea which is composed
of many ideas (Ethics, Pt II, Proposition 15). Spinoza’s account of the human
mind is much more elaborate than his account of the human body, and falls into
two main sections. The first of these, which occupies much of Part II of the
Ethics, concerns topics which belong to the theory of knowledge—namely, the
nature of a true idea, and of the kinds of knowledge. The second section, which
begins in the course of Part III, concerns the human mind as something which is
appetitive and has emotions. Our primary concern in this chapter is with the
topics that belong to the theory of knowledge.
Spinoza speaks both of ‘true ideas’ and ‘adequate ideas’; these are closely
related. He says of a true idea that it must ‘agree with’ its object; an adequate
idea is a true idea which is as it were abstracted from its relation to its object and
considered only in respect of its internal properties. 75 In speaking of truth as
‘agreement’, Spinoza might seem to have in mind some version of the
correspondence theory of truth. It will be recalled that, for Spinoza, to have an
idea involves making a judgement (p. 290); so one might suppose him to mean
that my idea of (say) an existent Peter is true when my judgement that Peter
exists corresponds to a certain fact, namely, Peter’s existence. In fact, however,
this is not so; when Spinoza speaks of a true idea he is speaking not so much of
truth as of knowledge.
Perhaps the first hint of this is given in Proposition 43 of Part II of the Ethics,
where Spinoza says that ‘He who has a true idea, knows at the same time that he
has a true idea.’ This may seem to be a glaring error; Plato, one may object, was
obviously right when he said (Meno, 97a) that to have a true belief that this is the
road to Larissa is not the same as knowing that this is the road to Larissa.
However, the appearance of paradox vanishes when it is realized that Spinoza is
using the term ‘true’ in a special sense. A passage from the early Tractatus de
Intellectus Emendatione is relevant here. Spinoza says (G ii, 26) that
If anyone says that Peter, e.g., exists, but does not know that Peter exists,
his thought is, as far as he is concerned, false— or, if you prefer, is not true
—even though Peter really does exist. The assertion ‘Peter exists’ is true
only with respect to a person who knows for certain that Peter exists. 76
That this was also Spinoza’s view in the Ethics is indicated by the note to
Proposition 43 of Part II, which states that to have a true idea is to ‘know