Proper Element and Foreign Element (KV II, 26)

In the Short Treatise, Spinoza poses the problem of passage or transition through contraries. Victory over the passions logically cannot precede the knowledge and love of God-Nature: a relation of succession, a simple temporal juxtaposition of contraries, would be an absurdity, for the ignorant would find themselves in the situation of needing to cease being ignorant before they gained knowledge. One will here recognise the old Socratic paradox of learning. Contraries cannot coexist, but only the presence of the second term can make the first pass away: ‘only knowledge is the cause of the destruction [of ignorance]’. This paradox is delicate, because it has the air of a sophism: the contraries here are not two things of a different nature, but the absence and presence of one and the same thing (knowledge); consequently, to say that knowledge chases off ignorance is just a turn of phrase, since it chases off nothing other than its own absence. Except that ignorance, far from being a nothingness or an empty space, corresponds to a ‘mode of knowledge’ that falls under what we might call a subjective polarisation; this explains the necessity of a rupture, of a change of life, there where common sense instead sees a progression. This is to say that igno-rance and knowledge are even more opposed than contraries. If there is an opposition, or incompatibility, it is because ignorance is a state of confused perception of things that gives rise to its own illusion concerning the true and the good, and sustains a particular kind of life based on this erroneous evaluation. Whence the dramatic dimension of the Short Treatise and the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect: the ascent toward knowledge contains an intimate struggle between two rival subjective principles.

Commentators have always privileged the version found in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, often emphasising that it has the character of a stylistic exercise inherited from Roman stoicism. The Short Treatise, however, makes use of a striking image: that of one's ‘element’.