The Nature and Meaning of Conception Sub Specie Aeternitatis

Conception sub specie aeternitatis only makes sense within the framework of a philosophy which allows for the real possibility of thinking that things are at the same time eternal and durational. It is therefore unsurprising to note that it does not appear in Metaphysical Thoughts where the soul is not eternal, but immortal, and does not escape the ranks of duration, endless though it may be. It is no more surprising that the phrase has no antecedent in a good number of authors prior to Spinoza and that research into this subject has not been very successful, for it is the mark of a doctrine that implies the recognition of an actual (effectif) ontological status of duration and eternity without reducing them to relative and subjective points of view.

Such a conception is reducible neither to true knowledge in general nor to that of the second or third type. Due to the specificity of its object, it overlaps with them only in part. It is the counterpart to a conception sub duratione and concerns an object that can be doubly apprehended. In support of this hypothesis, we must observe that it only concerns things and does not apply to God. Unlike things, substance cannot conceive things as actual in two ways, for substance has no relation to time and place. It does not therefore lend itself to a multiplicity of approaches, as do modes which, due to the nature of their existence, can be envisaged under the angle of either duration or eternity.

The structure of Part V well confirms the fact that a conception sub specie aeternitatis is the counterpart to one sub duratione due to the fact that things have this double property of being both durational and eternal. Indeed, the last section of the Ethics contains, by Spinoza's own admission, two parts as articulated in the scholium to proposition 20: the examination of what concerns present life and the analysis of what concerns ‘the mind's duration without relation to the body’. The phrase only appears when Spinoza decides to turn his attention exclusively to the mind's eternity. It is also striking to note that even within that second division, knowledge sub specie aeternitatis continues to be thought in opposition to a conception sub duratione, whether it concerns the essence of things or their actual existence.