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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2025
1 The Object and its Recognition
The represented order of time is the condition under which the external object can appear. Temporality makes both its separation from other objects and the very consciousness of which it is the object visible. This order of time is contingent on memory. In Ethics V, 29 Schol., Spinoza makes a clear distinction between the two types of ‘things’ our mind can conceive:
We conceive things as actual in two ways: either insofar as we conceive them to exist in relation to a certain time and place, or insofar as we conceive them to be contained in God and to follow from the necessity of the divine nature.
The constitution of things in relation to a ‘certain time and place’ is the central question of this chapter: that is, the constitution, for us, of the external object as such. This object is something external to us as much as it is our own body and mind (as paradoxical as this may seem). We know that
[t]he idea of any mode in which the human Body is affected by external bodies must involve the nature of the human Body and at the same time the nature of the external body.
The idea of the affection represents this affection (corporeal trace) and attributes its cause back to an external reality, that is, to the experienced affect (Joy or Sadness), which depends on the activation or depletion of one's power (puissance) to act. Imagination is the recognition of an object understood as external and real to which stable properties are attributed, such as being, form (more or less harmonious or beautiful), colour, consistency, quantity, temperature, etc., as if the idea were, in a mirroring fashion, the objective reflection of an independent reality. Granted, every thing can be grasped in its being. But we must not confuse the being that is its very essence (and which can only be known according to the third kind of knowledge) and the being attributed to an object ‘in relation to a certain time and place’. In the second case, this being is the same ‘genus’ under which we place all individuals in Nature, by convenience but also due to some confusion.
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