Representation and Consciousness in Spinoza’s Naturalistic Theory of the Imagination

Spinoza identifies the minds or souls of finite things with God’s ideas of those things. Margaret Wilson famously suggests that this identification prevents Spinoza from giving an adequate account of the human mind: Descartes’s position on the mind-body issue is notoriously beset with difficulties. Still, [his] theory of res cogitantes does recognize and take account of certain propositions about the mental that seem either self-evidently true or fundamental to the whole concept. These include ... that the mind (in a straightforward and common sense of the terms) represents or has knowledge of external bodies; that it is ignorant of much that happens in “its” body; that having a mind is associated with thinking and being conscious; that mentality is recognizable from behavior of a certain sort, and the absence of mentality from “behavior” of other sorts. Will not Spinoza’s theory of “minds” simply fail to be a theory of the mental if it carries the denial of all or most of these propositions? More specifically, will it not fail to make sense of the specific phenomena of human mentality by attempting to construe the human mind as just a circumscribed piece of God’s omniscience? (Wilson 1980: 111)