Lia Levy

This chapter argues that the Ethics includes versions of the views about sensation and its role in the production of knowledge that are present in the TIE and the KV. ‘Idea of an affection’ replaces the earlier terms for sensation. A sensation is a modification of the mind closely associated with a modification of body and explained in terms of the mind-body relation. In the KV, Spinoza continues to treat sensation as the immediate perception of corporeal modification and continues to take the inference from sensation to the union of mind and body as a valid one. The KV is the earliest source of Spinoza's view that the idea-object model accounts for the mind-body relation. The only occurrence of sensatio in the CM might seem to tell against an account of sensation as something different from imagination. Accounts of reason and imagination in the Ethics considerably advance Spinoza's theory of knowledge.

In this chapter, I assess Spinoza’s explanation of his definition of desire at the end of the third part of the Ethics, wherein we find a peculiar expression: “causa conscientiae,” “the cause of consciousness” (E3deffaff1). Surprisingly, this phrase has not been taken into much consideration in the recent revival of interest in Spinoza’s view of this aspect of human experience.2 A careful study of this text will shed some fresh light on Spinoza’s general discussion of consciousness and provide a new answer to the question of why, according to Spinoza, philosophy ought not to start with the indubitable act of thinking of a self-conscious subject.3 This new answer, which differs from the usual – and also undoubtedly correct – one, makes no use of Spinoza’s conception of the true order of understanding, and therefore that of true philosophy, but relies rather on the sense and limits of the conception of consciousness that can be apprehended from the analysis of this passage.

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