The Idea of the Idea, Consciousness, and Human Experience in Spinoza’s Ethics

This chapter defends the claim that Spinoza had a theory of consciousness against Garber (2021). The claim that Spinoza’s idea of the idea is the form of the idea, not because it represents the formal reality of the lower-order idea (Bennett 1984), but rather because it refers to the way in which a subject’s mind takes a representation of some modification of her body as representing something external, is defended by a comparative close reading of E2p21s in the context of Descartes’s definition of idea. This reading can account for the apparently different uses of the term ‘consciousness’ in Spinoza’s Ethics identified by LeBuffe (2010). Following Newlands (2020), it is argued that consciousness plays a constitutive role in Spinoza’s theory of the self. If Spinoza’s philosophy is a philosophy for humans, then it is a philosophy of consciousness rather than a philosophy of being.