1 The Spiritual Automaton and the Practical Subject

‘Every idea that in us is absolute, or adequate and perfect, is true’, says Ethics II, 34. The adequate idea as absolute idea affirms absolutely (or perfectly) what it is as an idea (as a mode of the attribute of thought): infinity in act. In and through it, the unity of substance intensively expresses itself in its complete actuality. Insofar as it has adequate ideas, the mind can be understood as a ‘spiritual automaton’, following the expression from the TdlE, 85. This formulation must be reserved to describe the spontaneity of the mind, its productive activity rather than its passivity. When the mind is forced into action by the automatism of Habit, memory and imagination, it loses its status as an automaton, that is, its autonomy. This spontaneity is not that of a freely willing subject. It is a ‘free necessity’ by which the mind, insofar as God is its essence, produces ideas according to its own intensity. The adequate idea expresses a power (puissance) of thought, identical in us and in God. It expresses a way of thinking (a mode of production of ideas) that is identical with that of God. The standpoint of adequation and identifica-tion, in us and in God, of the productive force and the mode of production it involves, clarifies the relationship between truth and essence in the third kind of knowledge (according to Ethics II, 40 Schol. 2). Yet Spinoza thinks of an idea of the second kind of knowledge (a ‘common notion’ is an idea of the bodies’ properties and therefore not of its essence) as an absolute and perfectly adequate idea. In which sense, then, does a common notion also constitute a spiritual automaton?

The ‘spiritual automaton’, in the TdlE, is intrinsically linked to the specific laws of production of the true idea as it is conceived through the fourth type of perception. It is possible to keep the formulation of the spiritual automaton for the Ethics (which does not use it again), not only in relationship to ‘intuitive Science’ but also to reason, knowledge of the ‘second kind’. In fact, although the common notions do not express the singular essence of a thing, they express properties that are truly common to two, several or all bodies.