The Concept of Consciousness in Spinoza’s “Ethics”

Abstract

In the article, the author analyzes the concept of consciousness in Spinoza’s “Ethics”. For this purpose, three theoretical approaches to consciousness in the philosophy of this author are consistently distinguished and described. The first way consists in the denial of any elaborated concept of consciousness, due to which we can neither answer the question of what it consists in nor distinguish
conscious beings from non-conscious ones. According to the second approach, the conversation about consciousness is placed in the context of ideas about ideas (lat. ideae idearum), where it is associated with reflexivity and second-order awareness peculiar to higher-order ideas. The third approach is singled out by the author of the article as the most promising one. Within its framework, an idea is defined as conscious if it leads to a change in the essential aspiration (lat. conatus) of a being, and the more endowed with consciousness it is, the greater the range within which it is able to vary its aspiration, which in turn correlates with the complexity of its body.