Reflective Knowledge

This chapter describes Spinoza's obscure “ideas of ideas” doctrine and his claim that “as soon as one knows something, one knows that one knows it, and simultaneously knows that one knows that one knows, and so on, to infinity”. Spinoza holds that the human mind is a representation of the body: the “objectum of the idea constituting the human mind” is the human body. Suppose ideas are essentially self‐reflexive, and that this reflexive awareness, the “idea of the idea,” makes the objectively‐real representational content present to mind. The chapter also suggests that Spinoza holds that adequate ideas come, by nature, with reflective knowledge. Reasoning through the Ethics is one way to come to the adequate ideas that silence doubts about the veridicality of one's adequate ideas of bodies. The “human mind has an adequate cognition of God's eternal and infinite essence”.