“Spinoza on Error: Analysis and Critique” (Michael Witte, 2007)

In the scholium to proposition 35, in book II of his Ethics, Spinoza gives a relatively complex example to illustrate his account for the “origins of human falsity,” through the error whereby men “think themselves free.” He recounts briefly, over this four-sentence span, the error involved in thinking the idea of free will (that is, ‘will’ as it exists within the traditional notion of autonomous human agency). Momentarily granting this statement without hesitation (taking Spinoza at his word, but otherwise disregarding the context of his argument), one might then refer to this thought of human agency as a ‘false idea,’ accepting that, insofar as it constitutes an error, such a thing as a will, or its idea in any proper sense, cannot actually exist. However, the implied negativity that comes with the assertion of a “false idea” (or, of what amounts to the same, of an ‘untrue idea’) leads one astray from the thesis that all ideas are contained within the infinite virtual (i.e., “God”), and are thus true ideas (cf. Pr. 32, II). Questions then arise for the legitimacy of this idea of will—what object could the idea of the will agree with? If, for instance, there is no ‘external’ will for the idea to agree with, does this idea not merely agree with itself, as error? Taken in this way, the idea of the will comes to resemble the absurdity that Spinoza cites in the proof of proposition 33, book II: thus the ‘idea-of will-as-error’ here resembling “a positive mode of thinking which constitutes the form of error or falsity,” which otherwise becomes impossible to imagine. If, from the preceding proposition (Pr. 32, II), there cannot contain error within God, nor could anything be conceived externally from him (cf. Pr. 15, I: “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God”); then it must follow that nothing can be said of error so that its form can come to obtain positive existence in any particular idea (even, as it happens, in the idea of error itself, which, as idea, exists within God). The question, now apparently riddled with contradiction, remains: insofar as man is capable of thinking in err and insofar as his ideas are a mode of cognition, belonging to God, how then does his error relate to God, or, further, how and where does error exist within the idea of God?

The critique of this initial strategy outlined above—of locating how error arises within certain ideas—works on a similar premise against that which Spinoza’s account of error relies: that is, the ‘error’ of the strategy evoked in the above paragraph begins with the “effect,” isolated or taken out of its proper context: of beginning with “error,” taken in the form of absolute error, and working backwards. This is the problem that comes with thinking of falsity in terms of an absolute privation: taking the effect—that is, the idea of the will—as a case of error in-itself, without examining the effect’s proper cause: how the idea comes to be. In the case of the example from Schol. Pr. 35, II, Spinoza explains, “Men are deceived in thinking themselves free, a belief that consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.” Therefore, the idea of autonomous agency so occurs in the cognition of man’s actions without reference to the true causes of these actions—that is, in thinking of his actions in isolation, or as arising spontaneously. And so, it follows, the idea of thinking in terms of absolute privation, the ‘error’ as found in the strategy above, occurs in the cognition of man’s ‘thinking-in-error’, without reference to the cause of this thinking-in-error. That is to say, the error is a product of the strategy of thinking itself, as opposed to its belonging to any particular element, any idea, investigated within said strategy. Therefore, what these errors have in common is their existence as “beings-of-reason”: i.e., there is no referent; there is nothing positive in ideas which constitute the form of falsities: “[…] for minds, not bodies, are said to err and to be deceived […]”.

Hence, as Pr. 35, II, states, “Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge which inadequate ideas, that is, fragmentary and confused ideas, involve.” The question for Spinoza’s account of error becomes “What is the nature of an inadequate idea, and to what is this nature opposed?” First, what is an adequate idea, so that there can be such things as ‘inadequate,’ fragmented or confused ideas? Perhaps the question could be worked out further in terms of Spinoza’s example, in the Scholium of Pr. 35. This idea of man’s freedom, writes Spinoza, comes as the effect of his privation of knowledge, or as his lack of ideas appropriate for understanding the action’s true determining cause: thus, his inability to link the cause of his action with its effect. In the case of his error, why this man necessarily “chooses” what he does cannot be seen as the product of an indeterminate free will once taken in light of the cause or set of causes that restrict(s) his choice—a relationship of cause and effect that, for Spinoza, if not adequately understood through our mind, then is at least comprehensible through an infinite intellect. Given that the human mind is part of the infinite intellect of God (Cor. Pr. 11, II), God—insofar as he is explicated through the human mind—constitutes the essence of the human mind in its cognition; and “insofar as [God] has the idea of another thing simultaneously with the human mind,” the human mind perceives that thing only partially or inadequately. In the example of man and his agency, the insistence on the indeterminacy of his actions, by virtue of his will, amounts to saying that he could choose otherwise than he does, and that the potential for this choice is at any given moment in time actually indeterminate, and therefore actually unpredictable—which amounts further to saying that all of that which is potential is not necessarily already actualized in the infinite scope of God, that there exists any number of un-actualized or un-actualizable potentials in the supposedly infinite, or, further, that there is potential for which the infinite has not yet been conceived, or does not yet understand through itself. Thus follows Pr. 7, II, that the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things, in terms of an infinite modal structure. Man’s existence in thought exists analogously with his existence in extension, his essence as constituted by definite modes of God’s attributes; so when one says, for instance, that “man perceives such and such a thing,” this can be taken to mean that God has this or that idea, not insofar as he constitutes man or his idea, but in that he is affected by an infinity of different ideas.

Thus the argument implicit in Spinoza’s example against the prospect of man’s freedom relies on the same foundation that occupies his response to the questions surrounding this notion of error, as it concerns potentiality and (specifically in the case of error) negativity. This foundation, in short, comprises the thesis that God necessarily produces that of which he understands of himself, including as well the forms through which he understands himself, which are likewise infinite. It follows that in God there is no ‘possibility’: God’s potential is always-already fully actualized. Explained through Spinoza’s example of willful agency, it should be noted that the “inadequate knowledge” refers not in the negative to something nonexistent (the will, or freedom), but rather, to an actually existing effect (human action). It would seem from this account that an adequate knowledge of God—that is, a ‘true’ knowledge of why man is determined to act in the way that he does—relies first on the cognition of the actual constitution of man as he exists and acts within nature; hence, a knowledge of the human body, and consequently the human mind, that accounts for its particular determinations (why it is restricted to act or to think in the way that it does). It is therefore the role of reason to locate and define the human body in terms of its existence within its immanent system, and further, the role of intuition to find everything that is common within this order of things, within the attribute, ergo to make sense of these immanent modalities in nature as they exist within the idea of God.

Thus it follows: the idea of the body, as that which constitutes the formal being of the human mind (Pr. 13, II), is itself composed of very many individual component parts (Postulate 1, II). Therefore analogous to how the human body retains its essence (or its pattern of motion and rest) as conceived through the attribute of Extension, the composite form of the human mind affects and is affected by the bodies that it perceives as external to its form. And it follows (Cor. 2 Pr. 16, II) that the ideas that this body has of external bodies indicates more so the constitution of its own body, and of the idea of that mind perceiving, than can it give an accurate account of the nature of those external bodies, affecting and being affected by the body in question. However, insofar as the mind regards the affections of the human body, it can be said to imagine these other bodies as external and present (Schol. Pr. 17, II); and if one is to take the image that the mind creates of these external bodies, writes Spinoza, they would, “[if] looked at in themselves, contain no error.” The imagination, then, at first glance, is that which posits the human subject at the center of every perception, and in so doing, distances that subject from its objects—thus isolating meaning within these images of ‘external’ bodies according to its perceived “ends.” But to the extent that these images are not errant, but inadequate, their inadequacy comes from the fact that the true order of things can only be explained through the determination of a cause, through an explanation of a cause-effect relationship, which is otherwise missing in the singular image.

The imagination then, and the appearance of the singular image in human cognition, plays this role in errant thinking, or in the origin of falsity—though, as is stressed, this origin is not in the image itself, but occurs in the “order and linking” of the images. That the human mind is conditioned to think according to the affections of the human body—here, memory enters the picture—it can, as it were, jumble the cause of one occasion, or one affection, with another distinct ‘event’, or pattern, within thought (just as there exists distinctly different patterns in the plenum). Despite this possible ‘error’ in linking cause to its effect, the images themselves are “real.” The matter, rather, occurs in how thoughts affect other thoughts, patterned or habituated within the causal chain of bodies: “So everyone will pass on from one thought to another according as habit in each case has arranged the images in his body” (Schol. Pr. 18, II). At this point in the Ethics we have arrived at two distinct forms of thinking, which appear to create a hierarchy: thinking (a) in terms of the singular image, and (b) in terms of images as related to a causal nexus. Spinoza refers to these forms of cognition as knowledge of the first and second kinds, respectively, for which he goes on: “Knowledge of the first kind is the only cause of falsity” (Pr. 41, II).

Thus relating to Spinoza’s critique in the earlier questions of negativity in error is the observation that the imagination is not merely responsible for the first kind of knowledge, but by so bringing forth the mind’s abstract singular image, allows for cognition of the second kind—i.e. provides the images for rational explanation. (And provided that this rational explanation comprises such abstract singular images, and can, in this sense, be said to consist of an ‘intermediate abstraction,’ a third kind of knowledge can be discerned: the intuition of the attributes, dealing directly with the knowledge of first causes). Therefore, returning to Spinoza’s example in Schol. Pr. 35, II, the idea of the will cannot correspond in any comprehensible way to the ideas of the bodies involved (the human body and the affected/affective bodies), except insofar as that idea is caused into existence by the human subject’s lack of an explanation, his/her thinking of images according only to perceived “ends,” thus reinforcing the subject/object divide indicative of the first kind of knowledge. What makes thinking solely in terms of the first kind of knowledge “inadequate,” therefore, is not the image itself, but only when cognition behaves in this order of ‘image-thinking’. These images of the affections of the human body—in the sense that God has the idea of the human body, or knows the human body, only by means of which he is affected by other ideas, and not insofar as he constitutes the nature of the human mind—remain fragmentary or inadequate sources for explaining the nature of the human mind, its body, or of external bodies, when taken in isolation. Therefore the falsity that consists in thinking in the first kind of knowledge, occurs whenever the mind “perceives things from the common order of nature, that is, whenever it is determined externally—namely by the fortuitous run of circumstance—to regard this or that” (Schol. Pr. 29, II), and not, Spinoza continues, when such ‘facts’ of nature are determined “internally”—when the human body is equated not at a distance from the objects that the mind perceives, but considered rather internally within those patterns, can it regard the true agreement of this seemingly external order. It follows that error exists not as a definite mode or ‘pattern’ within the order, but rather constitutes the gap that separates the fragmentary, temporally-bound process of man’s understanding from the eternal process through which God conceives himself and is thus actualized in nature.

The image, according to Spinoza, though it can conform to a plethora of meaning, is always an effect, representing the mark of one body on another. These images therefore do not have objects as their direct referent, but rather refer to a confused mixture of bodies acting and interacting. Knowledge of the second kind requires knowledge of this affective state of bodies, of the mode, as opposed then to the first kind of knowledge which makes fetish of the individual composite bodies as standalone entities. Knowledge of the first kind therefore is victim to the bias of subjectivity (that the human mind has a body), while knowledge of the second kind takes into account this very bias, so as to create a more rational picture of how bodies interact. Accordingly, the true order of things, if one is to access it, relies on an explanation rather than merely cognition. A contemporary example of this sort of “explanation” can be demonstrated in the metaphor for how a mind is to interact with the image of a topological ‘curved’ model of space, such as the moebius strip or klein bottle. Any specific viewing position that the spectator takes before the moebius strip will amount only to a distorted picture of the whole. Only through walking around the strip, so as to collect data concerning the curvature of its shape, can this spectator begin, by a gestalt of images, to construct an idea of how this model exists in space. This gestalt, as procedure, for Spinoza, would be an example of how this second kind of knowledge works in thought (opposed—albeit still analogous—to how cause/effect is conceived of bodies in extension)—i.e. the placement of the spectator within the process of his/her own thinking, explicitly laid out in the procedure necessary for understanding the model: that is, the forced operation of taking into account the effect of one thought on another.

Thinking intuitively of this example of the moebius strip, one might come to object that, in order to ascertain the “truth” of its shape, this spectator must first travel through the “wrong answer” of the strip (the distorted image, or several). Then, therefore, the objection goes: according to how the strip ought to be understood, is not this earlier image, in itself, necessarily “wrong”? Spinoza’s answer to this question returns to his comments on the nature of the imagination, and how the finite image fits within the infinite intellect. There is, in other words, nothing negative about the image. How could the actual, and therefore true, constitution of the moebius strip be composed of a collection of ‘untrue images’, somehow hanging together? The relative truth of the image, or images, must then be meant in a different context. For example, what is often cited as ‘negativity’ in classical film theory is not anything, or the content of any particular frame, that can be said to be “negative” or empty (even a structuralist film like Peter Gidal’s Room Film, often cited as “negative,” indexically records something: white walls, a flickering lamp, etc.). Rather, ‘negativity’ in this sense is nothing other than a ‘positive’ divergence from a particular narrative (in the case of a classical Hollywood film, anything that distracts from the protagonist’s action). For instance, there is the famous scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Suspicion, when a detective momentarily obsesses over a modernist painting in the film’s background (a painting otherwise unimportant to the outcome of the film’s murder mystery), and, in so doing, pulls the camera with him to observe this painting (which has no precedent, nor conclusion, in the storyline). As much as this shot can be said to be ‘negative’ for the film’s narrative, it can very well be conceived as ‘positive’ within the context of a different narrative. In the case of Gidal’s Room Film, the “narrative” that is interrupted is the generic expectation of what filmed content ought to achieve in the cinema. However, per “structuralist film,” Room Film’s interruption is via convention to an alternate discourse, albeit to an institutional discourse, rather than a popular one. Therefore, it cannot be said to be truly “negative” in the sense that we are describing.

The sort of narrative distortion that occurs in both of these examples—how Hitchcock distorts the narrative of his own film, or how Gidal seeks to distort a popular convention—requires an interaction (or attempts to force an interaction) with its spectator that is ultimately similar to the type of second kind or relational thinking that Spinoza endorses in book II of his Ethics: in conceiving how the mind becomes inscribed in the very image of the body it perceives (i.e. how the ideas of the mind are in ways analogous to the affections of the body). It is therefore an anamorphotic effect discerned by man as occurring at the heart of reality itself—a relationship between the subject and object that becomes clear once the singular image is seen for its distortion, the specific viewpoint from which the remaining reality is blurred. As in, for instance, the famous example of the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, it is the ‘stain’ that forces the spectator to recognize his placement as spectator: to see, as it were, the effect of his/her gaze in the interpretation of these external events (the film, the painting, or just about any object in reality). This ‘stain’ is the result of the mind’s activity—its ‘positing’ of reality via the image—in light of its irreducible finitude or bias. The penchant to see this stain within the image thus forms the background for the second kind of knowledge, cognition that seeks to make ‘sense’ through the acknowledgment of an internal principle.

Bridging the gap between the two previous examples, the moebius strip and the necessarily ‘positive’ albeit easily distortable/manipulated film image is the example of the historical development of virtual reality. One of the first successful simulation apparatuses—Ivan Sutherland’s Head-Mounted Display System, or HMD—was the first of its kind to conceive of a principle of computer-generated ‘virtual reality’ based on the necessity of a mechanism that conforms and continually adjusts to the subject’s, or the spectator or user’s, natural bias of vision—that is, the sense of parallax that comes with viewing three-dimensional objects in motion via binocular vision. The HMD apparatus, at least theoretically, would completely and effectively restrict vision within a certain representation of reality by means of this machine’s ability to “represent” the parallax view: to capture the subjective truth of vision. So whereas in classical cinema the illusion of perspective is upheld by the logic of continuity editing (the constant phasing-in of subject position according to the camera’s identification with a certain character and his/her orientation to the depicted space), Virtual Reality must incorporate this ‘lie’ by a more direct means of identification: the perspectival ‘lie’, in other words, is the central ‘truth’ built into the very logic of the machine and its representation. Hence, the blind-spot for the first kind of knowledge, that which leads to error/falsity in man’s thinking, is the fact that man remains within his representation, the understanding of which informs the background of the second kind of knowledge, the intermediate abstraction by which man understands his images through their interrelation in the mode. By Spinoza’s distinction, therefore, what might separate the real (which contains not only the subject’s truth, but all truth whatsoever) from virtual reality’s rather meager representation of the real, would be the difference between ‘virtual reality’ and the ‘reality of the virtual’: the real, hence, is inconceivable except without the gap that separates man’s representation from the actual reality that produces it: the undifferentiated image itself. ‘Error’ therefore cannot consist in outright “false belief,” since it is through this belief—insofar as the imagination rules over both the first and, albeit indirectly, the second kind of knowledge—that man has access to what is real: that is, his ideas, by necessity, exist within God.