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Spinoza and Consciousness

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 Spinoza and Consciousness

STEVEN NADLER

Most discussions of Spinoza and consciousness-and there are not many-

conclude either that he does not have an account of consciousness, or that he does

have one but that it is at best confused, at worst hopeless. I argue, in fact, that people

have been looking in the wrong place for Spinoza's account of consciousness, namely,

at his doctrine of 'ideas of ideas: Indeed, Spinoza offers the possibility of a fairly so-

phisticated, naturalistic account of consciousness, one that grounds it in the nature

and capacities of the body. Consciousness for Spinoza, I suggest, is a certain com-

plexity in thinking that is the correlate of the complexity of a body, and human con-

sciousness, for Spinoza, is nothing but the correlate in Thought of the

extraordinarily high complexity of the human body in Extension. In this respect,

Spinoza anticipates the conception of mind that is presently emerging from studies

in the so-called 'embodied mind' research program. Moreover, this research pro-

gram, in turn, may hold out hope for a clearer understanding of some of Spinoza's

more difficult claims.

There are three heroes in the story of consciousness in the seventeenth

century, at least before Leibniz comes on the scene and introduces his

distinction between perception and apperception: Descartes, Arnauld,

and Spinoza. The first two may appear to be obvious candidates for this

honour, and with good reason. But it is generally believed that Spinoza,

while he has much to say of value regarding the nature of the mind

itself and its relationship to the body, even foreshadowing contempo-

rary neuroscientific accounts of certain types of mental states,1 none

the less fails miserably to offer a coherent account of consciousness.

In fact, while I am not willing to say that Spinoza has an explicit and

perfectly consistent account of consciousness, I shall argue that he was,

still, well ahead of his time in this domain as well. Spinoza does indeed

have an explanation of consciousness, a rather sophisticated one that

depicts consciousness, like all elements of the mind for Spinoza, as

deeply grounded in certain functional aspects of the body. In this respect,

I shall suggest, Spinoza anticipates the conception of mind that is pres-

ently emerging from studies in the so-called 'embodied mind' research

program. Moreover, this research program, in turn, may hold out hope

for a clearer understanding of some of Spinoza's more difficult claims.

1 See Damasio 2001.

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576 Steven Nadler

1.

Descartes' contribution to the understanding of consciousness, at least

according to the familiar story, consists in recalling philosophical atten-

tion in the early modern period to consciousness itself, isolating it as a

datum for investigation. He identifies consciousness or awareness

through the formulation of the cogito and proceeds to examine its

properties and its scope. First, he shows that consciousness is a phe-

nomenon that is independent of the body. While there are many con-

scious states that bear an intimate causal connection to bodily states,

the conscious states themselves are modes of the mind, of thinking sub-

stance; and there are many conscious states that bear no relationship to

the body whatsoever. This means that an explanation of consciousness

has no grounding in the body itself. Second, Descartes recognizes that

conscious states are distinguished by intentionality, or their directed-

ness toward an object. This is reflected in what he famously calls the

`objective reality, or representational content, of our ideas. Third, Des-

cartes claims that consciousness is a universal feature of mental states.

Whatever is a mode of thought, whatever belongs to the mind as a

thinking substance, is conscious. Thus, in the geometrical demonstra-

tion appended to the 'Second Set of Replies, Descartes defines 'thought'

as 'everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately

aware of it' (Descartes 1974-83, Vol. 7, p. i6o; Descartes 1985, Vol. 2,

p. 113).

From the phenomenological point of view, it is Antoine Arnauld,

Descartes' Jansenist disciple in philosophical matters and for a long

time known (at least in the Anglo-American philosophical world)

mainly for being the author of the 'Fourth Set of Objections' to the

Meditations and the so-called Port Royal Logic, who takes the study of

consciousness to a deeper level. He, more than his mentor, is interested

in the structure and function of conscious states, and especially the way

in which they are both known in consciousness and make known exter-

nal objects. He begins by noting that 'thought or perception is essen-

tially reflective on itself, or, as it is said more aptly in Latin, est sui

conscia. For I am never thinking without knowing that I am thinking. I

never know a square without knowing that I know it' (Arnauld 1775,

p. 204). He then distinguishes between what he calls 'virtual reflection'

and 'express reflection. Virtual reflection is the individual mental act's

awareness of itself, and is found essentially in every mental act. This is

the locus of consciousness per se. Express reflection, on the other hand,

is what happens when one mental act is made the explicit object of

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 577

another, second-order mental act. Virtual reflection explains why, when

I think about x, I know I am thinking about x; express reflection

explains why I can think about my thinking about x and make it the

primary object of my attention (Arnauld 1775, pp. 203-5). Moreover

and contrary to his philosophical arch-nemesis Malebranche, and pos-

sibly even Descartes also insists that intentionality or object-

directedness is not only a feature of all mental states, but is in fact the

defining mark of the mental, of conscious states generally (Arnauld

1775, p. 184).2

All of this is important and interesting from a phenomenological

point of view. But what all this descriptive work really does is set the

challenge, one that has been haunting the philosophy of mind ever

since: how is one to explain consciousness? What gives rise to it? And

why are some beings conscious while others, apparently, are not? While

contemporary philosophers and neuroscientists continue to wrestle

with these questions, they were, in fact, first raised directly for Des-

cartes by Gassendi, in his tedious but, it must be said, sometimes

insightful objections to the Meditations. Gassendi wants to know what

exactly is that thing that thinks, and what is the nature of its substance

that allows it to be a thinking thing?

When you go on to say that you are a thinking thing, then we know what you

are saying; but we knew it already, and it was not what we were asking you

to tell us. Who doubts that you are thinking? What we are unclear about,

what we are looking for, is that inner substance of yours whose property is

to think. Your conclusion should be related to this inquiry, and should tell

us not that you are a thinking thing, but what sort of thing this 'you' who

thinks really is. If we are asking about wine, and looking for the kind of

knowledge which is superior to common knowledge, it will hardly be

enough for you to say 'wine is a liquid thing, which is compressed from

grapes, white or red, sweet, intoxicating', and so on. You will have to attempt

to investigate and somehow explain its internal substance, showing how it

can be seen to be manufactured from spirits, tartar, the distillate, and other

ingredients mixed together in such and such quantities and proportions.

Similarly, given that you are looking for knowledge of yourself which is su-

perior to common knowledge (that is, the kind of knowledge we have had up

till now), you must see that it is certainly not enough for you to announce

that you are a thing that thinks and doubts and understands etc. You should

carefully scrutinize yourself and conduct a kind of chemical investigation of

yourself, if you are to succeed in uncovering and explaining to us your inter-

nal substance. If you provide such an explanation, we shall ourselves doubt-

less be able to investigate whether or not you are better known than the body

2 For an examination of Arnauld on consciousness and intentionality, see Nadler 1989.

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578 Steven Nadler

whose nature we know so much about through anatomy, chemistry, so

many other sciences, so many senses and so many experiments. (Descartes

1974-83, Vol. 7, pp. 276-7; Descartes 1985, Vol. 2, pp. 192-3)

It might seem easy to accuse Gassendi of making a category mistake

here. After all, Descartes' point is that, because of the essential differ-

ences between mind and body, we cannot possibly provide a mechanis-

tic or 'chemical' investigation of the mind's activities. But this would be

to miss Gassendi's point. What he wants is not a mechanistic account of

consciousness. Rather, he wants an account of consciousness that

makes the cause and origin of consciousness and its properties as clear

as a mechanistic or chemical account does for wine and its properties.

Such an account of consciousness need not be framed in terms of mat-

ter and motion, but it must do the same kind of explanatory work and

incorporate the study of consciousness into the domain of the natural

(but not necessarily the physical) sciences. It is an important challenge

that Gassendi issues here, a request for the scientific basis of conscious-

ness, and it is a shame that Descartes does not take it more seriously.3

Spinoza, I believe, does take this challenge seriously, more so than any-

one else of his time.

2.

First, let me offer a brief review of Spinoza's conception of the nature of

the human mind itself and its relationship to the human body. In

Spinoza's metaphysics, there is, of course, the one, infinite, eternal, nec-

essarily existing substance (`God, or Nature'); this substance has infin-

itely many attributes, but we have knowledge of only two of them:

Thought and Extension. Whatever else exists is either an infinite or a

finite mode of substance-or, more specifically, an infinite or finite

mode of one of the attributes of substance.

Every finite mode of every attribute has a corresponding mode under

the attribute of Thought. This is the upshot of IIP3:4 'In God, there is

necessarily an idea, both of his essence and of everything that necessar-

ily follows from his essence.' For our purposes, what this means is that

for every finite mode of the attribute of Extension that is, every indi-

vidual material body-there is a corresponding finite mode-or

3 Descartes does, it seems, miss Gassendi's point and accuses him of making a category mistake;

see Descartes 1974-83, Vol. 7, pp. 359-6o; Descartes 1985, Vol. 2, pp. 248-9.

4 My references to the Ethics employ the standard notation, with the following abbreviations:

P = proposition, Dem = demonstration, s = scholium, d = definition, a= axiom, NS = Nagelate Schrif-

ten.

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 579

`idea'-in Thought. That idea has that body as its object, and is its

`mind. This is true of macro-bodies and their corresponding ideas, but

it is also true of the constituent material parts of any macro-body, each

of which is itself a body and thus will have a corresponding idea within

the macro-idea (or mind) of the macro-body. (Note that this doctrine

also implies that for every finite mode of the attribute of Thought, there

is a corresponding finite mode or idea in Thought; or, in other words,

for every idea, there is an idea that has that first idea as its object.) The

explanation for this correlation between bodies and states of bodies, on

the one hand, and minds and states of minds, on the other hand, is, of

course, Spinoza's monism: 'a mode of extension and the idea of that

mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways ... For

example, a circle existing in nature and the idea of the existing circle ...

are one and the same thing, which is explained through different

attributes' (IIP7s).

What this means is that every single body in nature has a corre-

sponding idea or mind. As Spinoza says, referring to the propositions

he has established about the basics of the human mind-body relation-

ship, 'the things we have shown so far are completely general and do

not pertain more to man than to other Individuals, all of which, though

in different degrees, are nevertheless animate. For of each thing there is

necessarily an idea in God' (II1313s). And any events in any particular

body will be expressed modally by affections in that body's mind. Or, to

paraphrase Spinoza, whatever happens in the object of the idea consti-

tuting a mind will be perceived by that mind, or there will necessarily

be an idea of that thing in the mind. All bodies, in other words, have

representational states associated with them; and what those represen-

tational states are of, at least in the most immediate sense, what they are

expressions or reflections of, are the corresponding states of the correl-

ative body.'

It follows from this that the human mind is nothing but the mode in

Thought that corresponds to the mode in Extension that is the human

body. Or, more simply, the human mind is nothing but the idea of the

human body (IIPii; II1313). It is constituted by being the idea of a par-

ticular kind of extended entity, one that is generically-as a parcel of

extension and a certain relatively stable ratio of motion and rest among

its parts-no different from any other kind of extended entity. And

given the parallelism, what is true of the individual considered as a

' There has been much debate in the Spinoza literature on the differences and relationship be-

tween what an idea is 'of' (what it represents) and what is its 'object'; see, for example, Radner 1971

and Della Rocca 1996.

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 580 Steven Nadler

body under Extension will also be true of that individual considered as

an idea or mind under Thought.

We thus have the following setup: all physical bodies in nature are

animate in the sense of having associated minds or representational

states. And the human mind is simply an expression in Thought of the

same thing that expresses itself in Extension as a human body.

Here is where our troubles begin.

3.

There are two main schools of thought when it comes to the question of

Spinoza's philosophy and the problem of consciousness. One school

says that Spinoza has an account of consciousness, but that it is deeply

flawed, even a failure.6 The other school says that there is no account of

consciousness in Spinoza, or at least nothing coherent enough to qual-

ify as an account of consciousness.' Thus, one scholar insists that there

is 'not a trace' of a theory of consciousness in the Ethics (Bennett 1984,

p. 191). I do believe that this latter school is wrong. Although I am not

prepared to argue that there is a single coherent and fully detailed and

totally successful account of consciousness in Spinoza, I do believe that

Spinoza does have at least a program for explaining consciousness,

although it may be difficult to see how its various elements cohere. I

also believe that it is not, in fact, the program that is most often identi-

fied in his philosophy as such.

For my purposes, I shall understand the notion of a 'conscious being'

to mean a being who has conscious states. And I am going to purpose-

fully leave the notion of 'conscious state' as ambiguous between two

different meanings: the first meaning is that of a phenomenal state, a

raw qualitative awareness or subjectivity akin to what Thomas Nagel

has called 'what it is like to be'.8 The second meaning is that of a mental

state that one is at the same time aware of being in, thus importing an

element of self-consciousness. I intend my discussion of Spinoza on

consciousness to apply to consciousness understood in either or both of

these senses. This is an ambiguity in Spinoza's text itself. For example,

6 Curley 1969, pp. 126-29; Curley 1988, pp. 71-3; Matheron 1994; and Wilson 1999. What is par-

ticularly interesting is how few contributions to the question of consciousness in Spinoza there re-

ally are.

' See Bennett 1984, pp. 184-91; Della Rocca 1996, p. 9; Matson 1971; and Miller forthcoming.

8 Tyler Burge (2007, pp. 383-4), following Ned Block, calls this 'phenomenal consciousness' (to

distinguish it from what he calls 'access consciousness'), and insists that it is 'the core notion of

consciousness.

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 581

when Spinoza explains that 'desire can be defined as appetite together

with consciousness of the appetite' (IIIPlis), he seems to understand

consciousness in the phenomenal or qualitative sense. But elsewhere,

he clearly has self-consciousness in mind (VP39s).

Now the first thing I would insist upon as a working assumption is

that being conscious for Spinoza is not identical to simply having or

being an idea.' Merely having an intentional state is not ipso facto to

have a conscious state. This is true even if, for Spinoza, all intentional

states, all mental states are indeed conscious states; even if they are all

necessarily conscious states; and even if every individual in nature is, by

virtue of having a mind corresponding to its body, not only animate

but also conscious. Many things that Spinoza says appear strongly to

support this distinction between idea and conscious idea.' However, be

that as it may, my main point in this paper does not depend on the

truth of this claim, although, as we shall now see, it is an essential prem-

iss for what seems to be the more popular way of understanding what

consciousness consists in for Spinoza.

The most natural reading of Spinoza's view of consciousness the

one that is almost unanimously found in the secondary literature (or at

least among those writers who do think that Spinoza does indeed have

an account) is that according to which consciousness is tantamount

to having an idea of an idea." Given the terms of Spinoza's ontology,

this aspect of his system does indeed seem perfectly well-suited for

making sense of the awareness of ourselves and of our mental states (as

well as the awareness of the objects of those mental states) in which

consciousness consists.

Spinoza first introduces the notion of ideas of ideas (ideae idearum)

in IIP2od and IIP21 as yet another consequence of the universal paral-

lelism. It is something that follows from the fact that (according to

IIP3) there is an idea in God for every affection or mode of every

attribute, including the attribute of Thought. Just as there is an idea for

every mode of Extension, every body, so too is there an idea, or a mode

of Thought, for every idea or mode of Thought, with the former having

the latter as its object.

9 Wilson (1999, pp. 134-5) agrees with this; so does Curley (1969, p. 128). On the other hand,

that being conscious is identical to having an idea for Spinoza has been argued for by Garrett 2008.

1- For example, in IIIPus, where it is suggested that an affect in the mind (i.e. an idea) may, at

least in principle, not be attended by consciousness.

11 This is the view adopted by Curley, Wilson, and Matheron, in the works cited above. Bennett

(1984, p. 188), on the other hand, insists that the 'idea of idea' doctrine is a theory of self-knowl-

edge, but not a theory of consciousness or awareness.

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 582 Steven Nadler

IIP2o: There is also in God an idea, or knowledge [cognitio], of the human

mind, which follows in God in the same way and is related to God in the

same way as the idea, or knowledge, of the human body.

Dem.: Thought is an attribute of God (by ITN, and so (by IIP3) there must

necessarily be in God an idea both of [NS: thought] and of all its affections,

and consequently (by IIPii) of the human mind also. Next, this idea, or

knowledge, of the mind does not follow in God insofar as He is infinite, but

insofar as He is affected by another idea of a singular thing (by IIP9). But the

order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of

causes (by IIP7). Therefore, this idea, or knowledge, of the mind follows in

God and is related to God in the same way as the idea, or knowledge, of the

body, q.e.d.

In the scholium to IIP21, after demonstrating that 'this idea of the mind

is united to the mind in the same way as the mind is united to the body,

Spinoza notes that 'the idea of the mind ... and the mind itself follow in

God from the same power of thinking and the same necessity. For the

idea of the mind, i.e., the idea of the idea, is nothing but the form of the

idea insofar as this is considered as a mode of thinking without relation

to the object. And what is true of the mind qua idea of the body is also

true of every idea within (or constitutive of) the mind: each is also

attended by an idea of an idea (i.e. an idea of itself). In IIP22, we are

told that 'the human mind perceives [percipit] not only the affections of

the body, but also the ideas of these affections'; but the ideas of the

affections of the body just are the constitutive ideas of the mind, and so

for the mind to 'perceive' them is just for each of them to be the object

of an idea. Finally, IIP23 states that 'the mind does not know itself,

except insofar as it perceives the ideas of the affections of the body.

Sometimes the 'ideas of ideas' doctrine is interpreted as meaning

that every idea is the object of a distinct, second-order idea. But this, I

believe, cannot be right. Spinoza claims that there is, at some level, an

identity between the idea of an idea and the idea that is its object. Just

as an extended body and the idea of that extended body are one and

the same thing conceived under two different attributes, so too the

idea of the mind or of any other idea and the idea that is its object 'are

one and the same thing [una eademque] which is conceived under one

and the same attribute, viz. Thought' (IIP2is). This does not necessar-

ily mean that the idea of an idea and its idea-ideatum are numerically

identical as modes of thinking. But Spinoza does explicitly say that an

idea of an idea and its idea-ideatum are `united'; the idea of an idea is

nothing but the 'form of the idea, and thus is in one sense inseparable

from it. This is certainly an obscure element of Spinoza's thought, but

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 583

it seems to mean that the occurrence of an idea of an idea is part of

the same event as the occurrence of the idea, that one cannot exist

without the other in so far as they both constitute essential elements

of the idea-event-in short, there cannot be an idea without an idea

of an idea. By contrast, a second-order idea would presumably be dis-

tinct from the idea that is its object, with the latter capable in princi-

ple of existing without the former. Perhaps, if Spinoza's ideas of ideas

are to explain consciousness although I shall argue that they are

not-it will have more in common with what Arnauld means by 'vir-

tual reflection' namely, the self-reflexivity that is intrinsic to and

accompanies every idea-rather than the 'explicit reflection' that

requires a second-order idea directed at the first. However, according

to the 'ideas of ideas' doctrine, there presumably still is a second idea

involved,' albeit one that occurs at the same level or order as the

original idea and is inseparable from it (just as the mind and the

body, while identical and inseparable, are still two different modal

expressions).

There is some highly suggestive evidence that Spinoza sees the 'ideas

of ideas' doctrine as an account of consciousness. Perhaps the most

explicit of these appears in IVP8. In this proposition, Spinoza argues

that 'the knowledge of good and evil is nothing but an affect of Joy or

Sadness insofar as we are conscious of it [ejus sumus consciir. The

affects of joy or sadness are, respectively, increases or decreases in an

individual's striving or power of acting; and we call an external thing

`good' or 'evil' in so far as we perceive that it affects us with joy or sad-

ness. Knowing that something is good or evil, then, is a matter of cog-

nizing the affect that it brings about-or, in Spinoza's words, having an

idea of the joy or sadness in the mind that is the correlate of the affect in

the body caused by the external thing. To explain what this idea of a

mental affect is which he here identifies with being conscious of the

affect he refers the reader back to IIP21, where he explains the notion

of an idea of an idea.

Much of the discussion over Spinoza's 'ideas of ideas' doctrine as an

account of consciousness has orbited around the question of the extent

of consciousness for Spinoza. Whether one is willing to accept the

`ideas of ideas' doctrine as his account of consciousness has often

depended on whether one is also willing to attribute to Spinoza two

particular theses: first, the thesis that every thing in nature is a con-

scious being, or that all minds or all ideas correlated with all bodies are

12 In fact, there will be an infinite number of ideas involved, since an idea of an idea, because it

is a mode of Thought, will itself be the object of an idea, and so on ad infinitum.

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 584 Steven Nadler

conscious minds; and second, the thesis that all states or ideas in the

human mind are conscious states or ideas. Descartes, we know, rejects

the first thesis but accepts the second. But what about Spinoza?

There is a great deal of debate on this set of issues. Some commenta-

tors believe that Spinoza does indeed intend to distinguish between

conscious and non-conscious minds and between conscious and non-

conscious ideas in the human mind; and some of these further believe

that Spinoza successfully establishes that distinction, while others think

that, while he intends to maintain it, he fails to offer a coherent way of

doing so!' Others argue that Spinoza does not intend any such distinc-

tion, and is perfectly willing to accept the universality of conscious-

ness.14

The reason why this is relevant to the issue at hand is that if Spinoza

does indeed want a distinction between conscious and non-conscious

minds, and between conscious and non-conscious ideas in the human

mind, then the 'ideas of ideas' doctrine will not serve him well as an

account of consciousness!' The 'ideas of ideas' doctrine is universally

valid: it applies equally to all ideas in Thought, regardless of whether

the corresponding bodies of these ideas are human bodies or some

other variety. Every idea in Thought is associated with an idea for

which it is the ideatum.

If one believes that the 'ideas of ideas' doctrine is the closest that

Spinoza comes to offering an account of consciousness, then one must

accept that for Spinoza all minds, all beings in nature, are conscious,

and that all ideas or mental states in the human mind are conscious.

But perhaps this conclusion, as odd as this may seem, can be given an

acceptable and harmless interpretation, similar to the way in which

Spinoza's claim about everything in nature having a mind and therefore

being animate is often rendered palatable.

However, there is a further, more serious problem for this approach

to consciousness in Spinoza. For even if Spinoza is willing to recognize

consciousness throughout all of nature, well beyond the human

domain, surely he will want at least to distinguish between degrees of

consciousness, at least among different kinds of individuals. Not only

B Curley (1969, pp. 126-8), for example, initially argues that Spinoza does successfully make the

distinction. However, recognizing the validity of Wilson's critique of his explanation of this dis-

tinction (Wilson 1999), he later realizes that such a reading is untenable (Curley 1988, p. 72). Wil-

son thinks that Spinoza intends to uphold such a distinction, but has no coherent way of doing so.

14 For example, Garrett 2008.

15 In fact, this is precisely why Bennett (1984, p. 188) rejects the 'ideas of ideas' doctrine as

Spinoza's account of consciousness, just because it leads to an 'absurdly excessive' conclusion

about the extent of consciousness in nature.

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 585

would it be extremely counterintuitive to deny such differences in

consciousness could he really want to say that a tree is as conscious as

a human being?-but that Spinoza wants such a distinction is clear

from VP31s and VP39s, where he speaks of individual human beings

achieving a greater or lesser degree of self-consciousness; and surely if

there can be a difference in degree of self-consciousness within and

among human beings, there will be an even greater difference in degree

in consciousness between human beings and other things. Indeed,

Spinoza does speak of the human mind 'surpassing' other minds

(IIPl3s), and presumably one of the ways in which it does so is because

of the nature of its consciousness. Thus, it would seem that if any inter-

pretation of Spinoza's account of consciousness leads to the conclusion

that all beings are equally conscious and in the same way, and that all

ideas in the human mind are equally conscious, then I say so much the

worse for that interpretation.

But that is precisely where the 'ideas of ideas' account leads. Just as

every body in Extension has a corresponding idea in Thought in the

same way and to the same degree, so every mind, in so far as it is an

idea, is accompanied by an idea of an idea, equally and to the same

degree, as is every idea in every mind. I do not see how the 'ideas of

ideas' doctrine can account for differences in degrees of consciousness

throughout nature; but this would seem to be precisely one of the

things it must do.16

In the light of these problems and confusions, a number of scholars

have been driven to conclude that there is simply no coherent account

of consciousness in Spinoza, and especially that he does not distinguish

between being conscious and simply having an idea.'

4.

Does Spinoza have a consistent and coherent, full-blown account of

consciousness? Probably not. I am inclined to agree with Jon Miller

(forthcoming) when he writes that 'the prospects for a robust and

coherent Spinozistic theory of consciousness [are] dim. One of the

difficulties relates to that ambiguity in the notion of 'conscious state'

that I mention above. It is often not clear whether Spinoza means by

16 Garrett (2008), for one, rejects the 'ideas of ideas' doctrine as an account of consciousness in

Spinoza just because it is unable to account for differences in degrees of consciousness.

' Thus Wilson (1999, p. 133) denies that (Spinoza's theory of "minds" can admit of rational dis-

tinctions between conscious and non-conscious entities, or between conscious and non-conscious

states of a particular individual'; and Bennett (1984, p. 189) insists that while Spinoza 'urgently

needs a theory of [conscious] awareness ... unfortunately the Ethics does not contain one.

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 586 Steven Nadler

consciousness simply the raw phenomenal awareness that characterizes

so much of human mental life, or also self-awareness, and this obscu-

rity in what exactly he would be trying to account for makes it hard to

identify what the account is.18

However, despite such problems, there is something that, in their

despair, almost all commentators on Spinoza seem to have missed-

namely, the path that Spinoza opens to a true science of consciousness.

What we find in Spinoza, in fact, are some very suggestive remarks for a

particular kind of project, one that represents a naturalistic account of

consciousness that is precocious in so far as it points the way to just the

kind of empirical, scientific inquiry into consciousness that character-

izes contemporary neuroscience and (some) recent philosophy of

mind.

To make sense of Spinoza's understanding of consciousness, one

must look beyond the 'ideas of ideas' doctrine, I argue, and toward a

couple of remarks scattered in various parts of the Ethics. Two passages,

especially, are crucial. The first occurs at II1313s, and takes as its starting

points the already established parallelism between the human body and

the human mind guarantees that in so far as the human body

has certain properties and capacities, so does the human mind-and

the additional claim that the human body is indeed 'more excellent'

than any other kind of body in nature. Here is what Spinoza says in the

first passage:

In proportion as a body is more capable [aptius] than others of doing many

things at once, or being acted upon in many ways at once, so its mind is more

capable than others of perceiving many things at once. And in proportion as

the actions of a body depend more on itself alone, and as other bodies concur

with it less in acting, so its mind is more capable of understanding distinctly.

(III313s)

This, Spinoza concludes, will help us understand the way in which the

human mind 'surpasses' other minds in nature and the 'excellence' of

this one kind of mind over all others.

The second passage is at VP39s:

Because human bodies are capable [apta] of a great many things, there is no

doubt but that they can be of such a nature that they are related to minds which

have a great knowledge of themselves and of God ... He who, like an infant or

18 It might be suggested that the 'ideas of ideas' doctrine is intended to explain self-conscious-

ness rather than mere phenomenal consciousness; after all, when he introduces the doctrine, he

explains that 'as soon as someone knows something, he thereby knows that he knows it ...'

(IIPzis). But when Spinoza later appears to relate consciousness to bodily complexity, as I discuss

below, it is also clear that what is at stake is a person (or, rather, a mind) being 'conscious of itself'

(VP39s)

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 587

child, has a body capable of very few things and very heavily dependent on ex-

ternal causes, has a mind which considered solely in itself is conscious [conscia]

of almost nothing of itself, or of God, or of things. On the other hand, he who

has a body capable of a great many things, has a mind which considered only

in itself is very much conscious of itself, and of God, and of things.

The second passage tells us that not only is the human mind 'more

excellent' than other minds because its body surpasses other bodies in

its own aptitudes or capacities, but that the mind of any individual

human being becomes more excellent as its body becomes more active

and develops greater aptitudes or capacities.

But what exactly is this higher 'excellence' of the mind that so

depends on the greater capabilities of the body? The second passage

itself tells us: it is consciousness or self-awareness; or, rather, a higher

degree of consciousness. Here, and not in the 'ideas of ideas' doctrine,

is where we are going to find Spinoza's account of consciousness. Or,

more accurately, these texts offer us the seeds or outline of an account.

To be sure, these particular passages are rather cryptic. Moreover, they

have been noted by others in connection with the question of con-

sciousness, but usually only to be dismissed as unhelpful or puzzling.'

But I want to suggest that, in fact, they hold the key: human or higher

consciousness for Spinoza is nothing but the mental correlate of the

superlative complexity of the human body.

Any body for Spinoza is individuated by the particular and stable

ratio of motion and rest among the particles and collections of particles

of matter composing it. It is the body it is because its parts, while per-

haps in motion relative to each other (or to groups of each other), none

the less maintain the same basic kinetic relations.

Definition: When a number of bodies, whether of the same or of different

size, are so constrained by other bodies that they lie upon one another, or they

so move, whether with the same degree or different degrees of speed, that they

communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall

say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all together

compose one body or individual, which is distinguished from the others by

this union of bodies. (Spinoza 1925, Vol. 2, pp. 99-10o; Spinoza 1984, p. 46o)

The human body is no different from any other kind of body in this

regard. However, as the passages above indicate, it does surpass other

bodies by its superior capacities. And I suggest that these greater capac-

ities of the human body are to be understood as (or reducible to) that

19 Thus, Wilson (1999, p. 137) insists that 'Spinoza offers us no way at all of understanding why

the adult body's fitness for many things should be linked to consciousness in the adult mind. Gar-

rett (2008, p. 9) similarly notes that these passages ' [do] not seem to offer a promising approach to

distinguishing degrees of consciousness in the imagination.

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588 Steven Nadler

body's greater number of kinds of parts and greater number of kinds of

motion/rest relationships among those parts-in short, greater

complexity relative to other kinds of body.

The human body is a magnificent machine with a wide variety of

parts and motions. And this variety goes deep, since the body's largest

parts are themselves richly and intensively composite, constituted out

of further composite parts, and so on. 'The human body is composed

of a great many individuals of different natures, each of which is highly

composite' (IIPost.1). Above all, the human body is endowed with a

brain and neurological system more intricate, multi-faceted, adaptable,

active, and responsive than what is found in any other physical existent.

In short, the human body is simply a more complex parcel of extension

than any other finite mode of that attribute. Or, at least, this is how I

think Spinoza regards it.

Now the passages quoted above (II1313s and VP39s) make no direct

mention of complexity; they refer primarily to what a body is 'more

apt' or 'more capable' of. But for Spinoza, a body's aptitudes are a func-

tion of the constitutional makeup of the body: its material parts and the

ratios of motion and rest between them (that is, their structures and

motive relationships). Thus, what the human body's greater aptitude

relative to other types of body amount to is its greater complexity. This

is why Spinoza insists in introducing the so-called 'Physical Digression'

of Part Two that to understand the difference between the human body

and other kinds of body and just how the former surpasses the latter, it

is necessary to investigate its greater aptitudes, and that to understand

these it is above all necessary to understand what body is, and what it is

about one kind of body's extended nature that distinguishes it from

another kind of body. In the Short Treatise, he says that 'the differences

between [one body and another] arise only from the different propor-

tions of motion and rest, by which this one is so, and not so, and this

and not that' (Spinoza 1925, vol. 1, p. 52; Spinoza 1984, p. 95). In the Eth-

ics, this approach is subtly manifest in Spinoza's insistence that an indi-

vidual body 'retains its nature ... so long as each part retains its motion,

and communicates it, as before, to the others, adding-in a clause that

seems to draw a direct connection between the constitutive complexity

of a body and its passive capabilities 'by this we see how a com-

posite individual can be affected in many ways, and still preserve its

nature' (II, Lemma 7). The upshot, then, is that the references of IIPl3s

and VP39s to the human body's superior aptitudes or capacities should

be understood as references to its superior complexity as a parcel of

extension.

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 589

Turning now to consciousness: on the account I am suggesting, con-

sciousness is simply the reflection within thought of a body's internal

relations in extension (just as the mind itself is the reflection in thought

of the body's basic reality). It is a matter of complexity, flexibility, and

responsiveness in an individual's thinking essence, the thinking

turned upon itself and its objects in a particular way-reflecting or

expressing (in a different attribute) the complexity, flexibility, and

responsiveness of that individual's body. More to the point, the human

being's greater degree of consciousness (relative to other finite beings),

in turn, is nothing but the correlate within a finite mode of Thought

(i.e. the human mind) of the greater complexity, flexibility, and respon-

siveness in Extension of the human body. Just as the human body is

composed of a rich diversity of parts and relations among those

parts deeper and relationally richer than what is

found in any other kind of body-so the human mind is composed of

a rich diversity of ideas corresponding to those bodily parts and

motions, and an equally rich diversity of relations among those ideas

also corresponding to the relations among the bodily parts. And any

individual idea in that mind holds within itself a superbly rich concate-

nation of sub-ideas and relations (corresponding to the body's sub-

parts and their relations). Consciousness, on this view, just is that rich

tangle of idea-relationships found within the human mind and within

any particular idea in the mind, a mental reflection of the rich tangle of

material relationships found in the human body. This complexity that

makes an idea conscious occurs within the first-order idea itself; it does

not require a second-order idea directed at the first. While the 'ideas of

ideas' account does not, as I have mentioned, require a second-order

idea either, the approach for which I am arguing does not even require

an 'idea of an idea, that is, an idea that has another idea as its object.

The complex of ideas and of idea-relationships that I am attributing to

Spinoza as an explanation of consciousness is not necessarily the rela-

tionship of intentionality that characterizes the 'idea of an idea' relation

(although that may indeed be one of the many kinds of relationships

among ideas that make up consciousness).

Admittedly, this is all very vague and sketchy. But here is one way of

cashing it out. Consider what Spinoza says in the passage from IIN3s:

the more capable the body is the more 'capable [the mind is] than oth-

ers of perceiving many things at once. One way of looking at this is that

the mind's increased ability to perceive many things at once is con-

sciousness in the sense that consciousness is a kind of perceiving many

things at once. Take my conscious awareness of an apple, for example.

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 590 Steven Nadler

Is it not, at the same time and through the same act, both the percep-

tion of the apple and an awareness of the perception of the apple? It is a

way in which thinking is turned upon itself. Or, if what is in question is

self-consciousness, 'thinking many things at once' can be construed as

perceiving both the apple and myself perceiving the apple.

Notice that this account does not require that only human beings are

conscious for Spinoza. All bodies have some degree of complexity, and

this will be reflected in the corresponding complexity of their correlate

minds. So if consciousness is just the correlate complexity in thought of

the body's complexity in extension, then there may certainly be a con-

tinuum of consciousness among minds in nature and a sense in which

all minds have some degree of consciousness. But the increased con-

sciousness that Spinoza must does characterizes mature

human minds is a function of the increased complexity, initiative,

motions, and activity and responsiveness that characterizes the mature

human body. So unlike the 'ideas of ideas' account, this interpretation,

while possibly implying that all minds are conscious to some degree,

does not imply that all minds are conscious to the same degree.

On the other hand, maybe Spinoza, while he is willing to attribute

minds to all things in nature, does not want to attribute consciousness

to them as well. In this case, we can regard consciousness as an emer-

gent property that certain mental systems take on only when their cor-

relate bodies possess a particular minimal level of complexity and

activity. Perhaps there is a threshold level of complexity in the body

that, once reached, the corresponding level of complexity in the mind is

consciousness. In this way, Spinoza can consistently claim that only

human beings have consciousness without violating either the parallel-

ism or the universality of animateness in nature. This, however, would

not fit well with what Don Garrett has called Spinoza's 'incremental

naturalism, or the view that there are no leaps in nature, that important

explanatory properties and relations are not simply present-or-absent,

but rather are pervasively present throughout all of nature in greater or

lesser degrees (Garrett 2008, p. 18). For that reason, I believe any talk of

emergence for Spinoza should ultimately be rejected.

Note, too, that the account I am suggesting also explains Spinoza's

remark about infants having lesser degrees of consciousness of self than

adults, since their bodies, while possessing much of the right neurolog-

ical hardware, have not yet quite activated all of the human body's

motions and capacities or realized all of its relational potentialities. In

this way, there may indeed lie here a reply to Margaret Wilson's chal-

lenge for any Spinozistic account of consciousness that relies on the

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 591

remarks about bodily complexity, when she insists that 'Spinoza offers

us no way at all of understanding why the adult body's fitness for many

things should be linked to consciousness in the adult mind' (Wilson

1999, p- 137).

Just to be clear on what I am claiming: the greater complexity of the

human body does not causally explain consciousness in the mind. This

would violate the causal and explanatory separation that exists between

the attributes of Thought and Extension in Spinoza's parallelism; no

mode of Thought can be causally affected by a mode of Extension, and

no state or property of a mode of Thought has its causal explanation in

a state or property of a mode of Extension. 'The modes of each attribute

have God for their cause only insofar as he is considered under the

attribute of which they are modes, and not insofar as he is considered

under any other attribute' (IIP6). Rather, what I am claiming is that for

Spinoza, human consciousness just is the greater complexity of the

human body as this is manifested under the attribute of Thought.

5.

There has been only one other attempt seriously to relate consciousness

to Spinoza's remarks on bodily capacity, but it results in a Spinozistic

account of consciousness different from what I offer above. Garrett,

relying on precisely the same passages I have cited, argues that for

Spinoza consciousness is to be identified with the power of an idea. He

notes that, according to 1111)6, 'each thing, insofar as it is in itself, strives

to persevere in its being, and that this striving to persevere that charac-

terizes every singular thing-its conatus-represents that thing's

power as well as its perfection. 'The degree of a singular thing's power,

Garrett says, 'is the degree of its perfection, which is also the degree of

its reality', and different singular things have different degrees of

perfection / reality/ power / conatus (Garrett 2008, pp. 13-14). Moreover,

what is true of different things they be minds or bodies-is

also true of the same thing over time. The power or perfection of any

individual varies as that individual experiences increases or decreases in

its conatus. These changes in conatus just are, according to Spinoza (in

IIId3 and Illpost.i), the passive and active affects (depending, respec-

tively, on whether the change in power is brought about by external

things or comes from an individual's own causal resources).

According to Garrett, the passage from IIP13s cited above is to be

understood in terms of these differences and variations in power. What

it means to say the human mind is 'more excellent' than other minds,

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 592 Steven Nadler

and that it is 'more capable than others of perceiving many things at

once' (just because its body 'is more capable than others of doing many

things at once, or being acted upon in many ways at once') is that it has

a greater power of thinking than other minds; it also follows that its

own power of thinking can undergo an increase or a decrease. Moreo-

ver, he notes, this is true of particular ideas within the human mind.

`The more power an idea has to determine how the singular thing

whose idea it is does or does not exercise its power or conatus at a given

time, the greater will be the power of thinking of that idea in that par-

ticular mind at that particular time' (Garrett 2008, p. 15).

Garrett concludes that degrees of power of thinking are to be identi-

fied with degrees of consciousness, an identification that, he says, is

`almost irresistibly implied' by IIPl3s and VP39s. If (as IIPl3s says) a

mind's degree of reality or perfection or power of thinking increases in

proportion as its body is more capable of doing many things at once;

and if (as VP39s says) an individual's mind is more conscious of itself

and of other things to the extent that it has 'a body capable of a great

many things, then, on Garrett's view, consciousness must be the same

as the perfection or power of an idea (Garrett 2008, p. 23). This inter-

pretation, he insists, can explain why some minds in nature enjoy a

higher degree of consciousness than others and what distinguishes

human consciousness from the kinds of consciousness that must be

found elsewhere in nature (the human mind, because of its body's

superior capabilities, has a greater power of thinking); why any particu-

lar mind can be more or less conscious at different times (as its power

of thinking varies); and why some ideas are more conscious than others

in a given mind.

Although both Garrett and I, relying on the same passages, relate

consciousness for Spinoza to the body's constitution, the difference

between our two accounts should be clear. For Garrett, consciousness is

a function of (because identical with) a mind's power of thinking

(which is an expression in Thought of its body's power of persevering),

whereas I argue that consciousness is a function of (because identical

with) a mind's internal complexity (which is an expression of its body's

complexity). Moreover, on Garrett's account (but not on mine) it fol-

lows that every idea in the mind is conscious simply by virtue of being

an idea (and thus in so far as it represents some finite expression of the

power of thinking).

Strictly speaking, all that Garrett is warranted in concluding from his

argument and the central passages in question is that degrees of con-

sciousness and degrees of power of thinking in a mind vary proportion-

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 593

ately, but not that consciousness is itself identical to power of thinking.

Simply because a and b are both shown to vary directly according to

variations in c, it does not follow that a is identical to b; rather, their

correlated variations are due to their having a common cause or foun-

dation. If I have a case of poison ivy, an increase or decrease in the red-

ness of my rash will invariably be accompanied by a proportionate

increase or decrease in itchiness; but it does not follow that the rash's

colour and its itchiness are identical. These just happen to be two con-

comitant symptoms of one underlying state of affairs (the infection).

Similarly, all that seems implied by the conjunction of IIP13s and VP39s

is the conclusion that an increase or decrease in consciousness and an

increase or decrease in power of thinking are both a reflection (in

Thought) of an increase or decrease in something in the body (in

Extension), but not the conclusion that consciousness is the same thing

as power of thinking.

Things are, of course, complicated by Spinoza's parallelism, which

implies that if a and b in the mind are both parallel to c in the body,

then both a and b are identical to c, and thus (by the transitivity of

identity) a and b are themselves identical. If both consciousness and

power of thinking are parallel to one and the same bodily feature, then

Garrett is right and consciousness and power of thinking are the same

thing. However, on my reading, for Spinoza there are two relevant

things in the body (a c and a d, if you will): one parallel to conscious-

ness (bodily complexity) and one parallel to power of thinking (bodily

power of persevering); and increases or decreases in these bodily fea-

tures are reflected by parallel increases or decreases in, respectively,

consciousness and power of thinking. But because the degree of the

body's power of persevering its ability to initiate action and respond

effectively to external forces is determined by the degree of its com-

plexity (that is, an increase in c determines an increase in d), there will

be a proportionate variation or correlation (but not an identity)

between an increase in a, the mind's consciousness (as c, bodily com-

plexity increases) and an increase in b, the mind's power of thinking (as

d, bodily power increases). The same thing (bodily complexity) whose

increase brings about a directly correlated increase in consciousness also

indirectly brings about an increase in the mind's power of thinking

(understood as the mind's ability to resist the power of outside forces

the passions-and its causal autonomy as it 'depends more on itself

alone' (IIP13s)), by giving rise to an increase in the body's power of per-

severing.

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 594 Steven Nadler

What this shows is not only that, on the basis of those passages, Gar-

rett concludes more than he is justified in concluding, but also that his

account does not go deep enough in explaining what consciousness is

for Spinoza and what constitutes its grounding in the body. I agree with

Garrett that where there is an increase in a mind's perfection or power

of thinking, there is an increase in consciousness; and that this increase

in the mind's power is a reflection of an increase in its body's power.

This correlation follows from III313s and VP39s. But the question is, why

is there this correlation between consciousness and power of thinking?

My account provides an explanation without making the logical leap

(from correlation to identity) that I believe Garrett makes. An increase

in a body's power (relative to other bodies and relative to the same

body's condition at another time-for example, as an infant) is the

result of an increase in that body's structural complexity and in the

complexity's activation. In the mind, there will, for that increase in bod-

ily complexity, be a direct corresponding increase in the complexity of

thinking (i.e. consciousness); there will, for that increase in bodily com-

plexity, also be an indirectly corresponding increase in the power of

thinking that directly corresponds to the increase in the body's power of

persevering, which itself is brought about by the increased bodily com-

plexity. Complexity in the body explains20 a parallel complexity in the

mind (consciousness); higher complexity in the body also brings an

increase in the body's power, which explains a parallel increase in the

mind's power (resistance to passions). Thus, the more conscious a mind

is, the more active and powerful it is, not because consciousness is iden-

tical with power but because both of these features of the mind are

grounded (directly, in the case of consciousness; indirectly, in the case of

power of thinking) in the same fact about the body, namely, its com-

plexity.

It might be objected on Garrett's behalf that, as we have seen, in

VP39s Spinoza draws the direct line from consciousness not to bodily

complexity, but to the body's being 'capable [aptum] of a great many

things' (and similarly in IIPi3s, from the superiority of the human

mind to the human body's being 'more capable than others of doing

many things at once'). But what exactly Spinoza is referring to here by

`capability' is ambiguous. Garrett believes that it is bodily power and

perfection. But, as should be clear from my analyses above, I claim that

in these passages the notion of the body's capability or aptitude is, in

fact, a reference to intricacy of structure and flexibility of activity and

20 Given Spinoza's elimination of causal relations across the attributes, the type of explanation

here cannot be a causal one.

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 595

response (understood most plausibly as neurological complexity). This

is further supported by Spinoza's claim in IIN3s that the superiority of

the human body consists not only in its higher capability of doing

many things at once, but also in its higher capability of being acted on

in many ways at once. It is difficult to see how, on Spinoza's terms,

something has more power or perfection by virtue of being more capa-

ble of being acted upon or suffering passive affects; by contrast, it is

easy to understand how a more structurally complex individual is capa-

ble of being affected in a greater variety of ways by outside influences.'

6.

Of course, many questions remain questions for which there may not

be clear and ready answers. Among these, there is the question of how

the account of consciousness that I am attributing to Spinoza relates to

the 'ideas of ideas' doctrine. It seems hard to believe that Spinoza's talk

of ideas of ideas has nothing whatsoever to do with his understanding

of consciousness, so natural seems the fit between the two. This incre-

dulity is only strengthened by texts such as IVP8, examined above. But

since every idea is equally endowed with an idea of an idea, there can be

no direct connection between this doctrine and bodily complexity,

which comes in degrees.

It may be that the solution to this question lies in a subtle feature of

Spinoza's language. Notice that when he introduces ideas of ideas in the

passages quoted above from IIP2o-22, Spinoza speaks not of awareness

or consciousness, but knowledge and perception. (The same could be

said, in part, of IVP8, although here he also explicitly uses the word 'con-

scious'.) Through an idea of an idea, the mind 'knows' itself and it 'per-

ceives' the ideas of the affections of the body. Perhaps, in Spinoza's mind,

there is a difference between consciousness or conscious awareness

(whether self-consciousness or conscious awareness of one's states and of

things), on the one hand, and a cognition of oneself and of one's mental

states.22 What that difference is, however, seems very hard to articulate.23

An even more intractable question arises at the heart of my account

of consciousness in Spinoza. Suppose we know what bodily complexity

21 The rest of the paragraph of III)13s suggests that what is a function of increased power in the

body (`as the actions of a body depend more on itself alone ...') is not consciousness, but adequate

understanding or knowledge (` ... so its mind is more capable of understanding distinctly').

22 thanks to Dan Garber for suggesting this approach to the question.

23 Bennett (1984, p. 188) tries to do something along these lines, but not, as far as I can see, very

clearly.

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596 Steven Nadler

is, since (according to Spinoza) it can be understood clearly in terms of

extended parts, relations of distance, and degrees of motion and rest.

But what exactly is that mental complexity that is its correlate? Can we

say anything more about it than that it is consciousness, or are there

identifiable relations among our ideas (and especially among the sub-

ideas of any conscious idea) that provide its proper analysis? The idea of

an idea represents one kind of relationship that can exist among

ideas-a relationship of intentionality-but what may be the others?

Conversely, once we have identified the relevant relations among our

ideas, it is a further question how exactly they constitute that qualitative

state of experience we recognize as consciousness.

This latter issue is, of course, Chalmers's 'hard question' about con-

sciousness transposed to the realm of Spinoza's attribute of Thought. It

is one thing to refer to the structures and dynamics that obtain among

ideas that are a reflection of structures and dynamics of the body; it is

another thing entirely to understand how these amount to conscious

awareness (Chalmers 1995). In response to Chalmers, Spinoza might,

on my reading, reply that the question is misconceived. To ask how cer-

tain structural relations among our ideas-a reflection of correlative

structures in the body (the brain and the nervous system) -`give rise'

to consciousness would, Spinoza might insist, be to fail to grasp his

reductive move.24 Consciousness is not generated or caused by or oth-

erwise related to complexity in thinking. Rather, it just is that complex-

ity among and within our ideas -`perceiving many things at once'-

and nothing more. The adequacy of this response, however, will

depend not only on whether Spinoza can specify what exactly is the

complexity and relations among our ideas that constitute conscious-

ness, but also and perhaps more problematically-whether he can

use those persuasively to explain the qualitative feel of consciousness.

Yet another question emerges in connection with VP31, which

directly relates self-consciousness to what Spinoza calls 'the third kind

of knowledge'-an intuitive understanding through adequate ideas of

the essences of things and how they relate to God-and an increase in

self-consciousness to an increase in such knowledge: 'The more each of

us is able to achieve in this kind of knowledge, the more he is conscious

of himself and of God, i.e., the more perfect and blessed he is.' How can

degrees of consciousness have any relationship to the degrees of clarity

and distinctness or adequacy among our ideas?

24 in turn, would likely reply by denying the plausibility of Spinoza's reductionism

and insisting that it, like other varieties of reductionism, fails to capture exactly the intuitive fea-

tures of our conscious lives that an account of consciousness is supposed to capture.

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 597

7.

Consciousness, for Spinoza, is, like anything else in nature, a perfectly

natural phenomenon. It is not, as he complains others would have it, a

`dominion within a dominion, bearing only a contingent relationship

to what happens in the physical world around it. Human consciousness

is deeply embedded in the nature of the human body. It is not, of

course, reducible to bodily events. Spinoza was clearly not a thorough-

going materialist about the mind. The mental is a real category of

things, necessary for making sense of an entire aspect of reality. But as

Curley (1988) has argued, Spinoza does have materialist tendencies in

so far as the nature of the human mind and its functions are grounded

in the nature of the human body. Perhaps we can call it an explanatory

materialism, without thereby implying that mental phenomena or

events are causally explained by physical phenomena or events.

Even more helpful here, however, might be Garrett's notion of incre-

mental naturalism. As he puts it, Spinoza's project is to treat such cru-

cial elements of human life as desire, belief, and consciousness as

already present in more rudimentary forms throughout all of nature, so

that human beings can be seen as particularly complex and sophisti-

cated expressions of nature rather than as something arising from the

introduction of non-natural elements.

If I am right, then Spinoza does have the beginnings of an account of

consciousness. More accurately, given the limitations of what Spinoza

appears to offer us, his naturalism about the mind opens the way to a

science of consciousness that is more than just phenomenology. Under-

standing consciousness will, in a crucial way, require understanding just

those features of the body of which it is the mental correlate. In particu-

lar, it will involve understanding what are the specific complexities in

the human body's makeup that are the ground of human consciousness.

Spinoza's great contribution to the study of consciousness would thus be

his belief that the key to understanding the nature of consciousness lies

in the investigation of the body, and particularly in what I see as his sug-

gestion that there is a neurobiological basis for consciousness.

These features of Spinoza's philosophy of mind allow us to see a way

in which Spinoza anticipates some of the approaches to mental phe-

nomena that contemporary philosophers of mind, and especially

embodied mind researchers, take approaches that, in turn, might

help to resolve some questions raised by Spinoza's sometimes cryptic

remarks about the mind and consciousness.'

25 I am indebted to Larry Shapiro for discussing these issues with me.

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598 Steven Nadler

Although the claim that the mind is embodied is subject to various

interpretations,26 the common assumption seems to be that minds and

bodies are so thoroughly integrated that the hope that one might study

the mind independently of the body begins to lose coherence. This is

not merely an epistemological concern generated by limitations that

confront empirical scientists. Rather, the point is that the mind is

something like the reflection of the body. Our thoughts, perceptions,

and states of conscious awareness have the properties they do not just

because of the occurrence of certain events in our nervous systems,

but-if researchers like Damasio (1994) and Lakoff and Johnson (1999)

are correct because of the form our body has (for example, the fact

that our posture is vertical, that we have four limbs, two eyes, etc.) and

because of certain conditions of systems in our body that one ordinarily

would never have connected with our mental lives (for example, our

viscera). In short, according to the thesis of embodied cognition,

human minds and human consciousness are what they are because

human bodies are what they are. Like Spinoza, embodied mind theo-

rists reject what has been called 'body neutrality, or the idea that the

nature of the mind and consciousness can be explained without any

reference to the hardware with which it is connected.' Of course, the

challenge for proponents of this theory, as it was for Spinoza, is to

defend the claim that any such integration of mind and body is not just

a matter of causal interaction-a position with which even Descartes

would have had no complaint.'

Of present interest is how Spinoza's philosophy of mind might con-

tribute to and in turn benefit from research in embodied mind. Some

of Spinoza's claims (for example, that minds and bodies are simply

finite modes of two of God's infinitely many attributes) would obvi-

ously have no place in the contemporary study of mind. But his sugges-

tion that minds and bodies are two expressions of a single substance

might provide embodied mind researchers with a conceptual apparatus

from which they can begin to articulate more exactly the nature of the

relationship between mind and body and in a way that makes clearer

how, on their view, the connection goes beyond a simple causal one.

26 Shapiro 2004.

' The term 'body neutrality' was coined by Shapiro (2004) to describe a thesis held by certain

functionalists.

28 Ned Block (2005), for example, has charged some embodied mind advocates with confusing

the radical idea that bodies are in some sense constitutive of minds with the less exciting idea that

bodies causally influence minds.

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 Spinoza and Consciousness 599

Reciprocally, Spinoza scholars might find within embodied mind

research the tools to evaluate some of the elements of Spinoza's philos-

ophy of mind. With respect to the topic of this paper, for instance, how

exactly is bodily complexity to be measured? By the number of limbs?

Number of cells? Number of neurons? Spinoza says that for every part

of the human body there is a corresponding idea in the mind. But do all

parts of a body make an equally relevant contribution to the complexity

that determines the degree of consciousness of that mind, or are some

parts more important than others? I have conjectured that for Spinoza

the primary complexity is neurological, but recent work in embodied

cognition holds a much more extensive position. Moreover, to what

extent should the bodily complexity relevant for the sophistication of

mind and consciousness take into account a body's interaction with its

environment? Are a body's external relations to other bodies a part of

its complexity?' Spinoza's remarks about the relations between body

parts in terms of a ratio of motion and rest are very abstract and go

hardly any distance toward answering such questions. But these are just

the kinds of questions for which one should expect answers if Spinoza's

account of consciousness, as well as the embodied mind research pro-

gram, is to bear fruit.

However successful Spinoza's account of consciousness is, and how-

ever relevant to the embodied mind program it proves to be, the fact

that that program might well offer empirical support for some ele-

ments of Spinoza's philosophy of mind suggests that Spinoza intended

his philosophy of mind sketchy as it is-to make contact with the

methods of natural science. Does this mean that Spinoza provides an

answer to Gassendi's challenge? Not quite. There are still too many

questions left unanswered. But my reading of Spinoza implies that he at

least took the challenge seriously-unlike Descartes, who dismissed it

as a misguided expression of Gassendi's materialist ways."

29 I am very grateful to Maria Seidl, Stefanie Gri.ine, and Julia Borcherding for this insight (and

others) in their commentary on my presentation of this paper to the Leibniz Prize Research

Project's workshop in Berlin.

' My thanks to Larry Shapiro, Don Garrett, Michael Della Rocca, Elliott Sober, and two anony-

mous referees for this journal for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am

also grateful to Ed Curley, Dan Garber, and Jon Miller for sharing their thoughts on the issues; and

to audiences at the conferences 'Spinoza and the Sciences, held at the Royal Netherlands Academy

of Sciences, Amsterdam (June, 2007); 'Transformations of the Mind: Philosophical Psychology

from 1500-1750, held at Humboldt University, Berlin (June, 2007); and 'Spinoza Day, held at Prin-

ceton University (May, 2007).

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 600 Steven Nadler

STEVEN NADLER

Department of Philosophy

University of Wisconsin-Madison

5185 Helen C. White Hall

600 North Park St.

Madison, WI 53711

USA

smnadler@wisc.edu

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