著者

木島 泰三

出版者

法政大学文学部

雑誌

法政大学文学部紀要 = Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters, Hosei University (ISSN:04412486)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.80, pp.47-63, 2020-03-13

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Previously, we have argued that Spinoza posited a form of agent-causation theory. This article applies this reading to Spinoza’s theory of ideas to clarify how Spinoza’s theory of ideas and his theory of conatus are interrelated and unified.After reviewing our reading of Spinoza’s theory of causation and action, we asked the question, “What is it like for a human mind to be the idea of its body?” To answer this, we considered the essence of ideas in general in Spinoza’s Ethics. According to this book, the essence of ideas is affirmation. Spinoza also says that conatus is the essence of every particular thing and that a human mind’s first conatus is the affirmation of its body’s existence. In another passage of Ethics, Spinoza says conatus is given to us as will, appetite, or desire. From there, it seems to follow that our will, appetite, or desire constitute the empirical content of the affirmation that our minds perform as the ideas of our bodies.However, it is still unclear how the “affirmation” that constitutes the essence of our minds as ideas, is related to the affirmation that constitutes the essence of the particular ideas we possess. To clarify this matter, we consider Spinoza’s earlier writing, “Metaphysical Thoughts (Cogitata Metaphysica),” which will be referred to as CM below. In this writing, Spinoza argues that our mental affirmation (or negation) is an “action of thought,” and this concept corresponds to the “idea-formation” in his Ethics. Although CM mainly attempts to explicate Cartesian metaphysics, it implies a non-Cartesian conception of volition. Its non-Cartesian element is a thesis according to which volition does not merely approve or disprove of an idea given by intellection but rather volition forms an affirmative or negative idea.This conception of volition or affirmation as idea-formation and “action of thought” allows us to apply Spinoza’s theory of causation and action to his theory of ideas. First, we can conclude that the affirmations of ideas that we make in our mind are our actions to form ideas, which are “affections of our minds” as well as the “ideas of the affections of our bodies.” These “actions of thought” follow from both our conatus as immanent cause together with external determinants as transitive causes. Thus, we can consider the affirmations of ideas in our minds as the consequents from the conatus of our minds.Subsequently, we have clarified how our minds as ideas are related to the ideas in our minds. Nevertheless, it is still not very clear how “aboutness” or intentionality of ideas or its affirmations plays a role in our minds. We shall deal with this problem in our next article, “idea and conatus in Spinoza: III.”