Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine

CHAPTER 2 Understanding Understanding: Spinoza’s Epistemology

about the time spinoza drafted the outline for his epistemological theory in his treatise On the Improvement of the Understanding (Tractatus de intellectus emendatione et de via qua in veram rerum cognitionem dirigitur), Johannes Vermeer, his peer in age, painted The Art of Painting or Artist’s Studio (1665/66).1 Staging the paradoxical situation of representing the act of self-reXection, Vermeer paints himself painting, but with a twist. Painting himself from the back, an angle of vision that remains otherwise inaccessible, Vermeer inverts the conventional form of the artist’s self-representation facing the viewer. The scene visualizes the theme of spatial arrangement. The viewer’s gaze is allowed a look into an otherwise closed space, set off by a heavy curtain pulled back for the viewer’s convenience. The artist faces the canvas, paying full attention to the model, a woman dressed as an allegory and/or muse. Fanfare, book, and the blue color of her dress and hat all convey a wealth of possible meaning. The model’s eyes, half closed, take up the theme, the problem of inside/outside, of margins, borders, and boundaries. A huge map, dominating the back wall, representing the demarcation of frontiers, continues the theme of borders and margins. The formulaic, sparsely furnished room nevertheless appears well equipped, as if to illustrate the painting’s theme of traveling the borders between the Wnite and the inWnite. Here, everything represents a transitional point and part of an inWnite continuum. The mood is introspective, 33 c h a p t e r 2
understanding understanding Spinoza’s Epistemology Johannes Vermeer van Delft, Artist's Studio (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien) tranquil, contemplative. The canvas in the picture shows the painter’s Wrst brushstrokes depicting the model’s blue hat. From there the viewer’s eye wanders to the “original,” if it can be called that. The difference in color and shape between the posing model and her hat’s representation makes one wonder. The colors of the model’s hat (which the artist is in the process of painting) are less intense and the shape is different, even though the viewer’s angle of vision follows the painter’s line of sight. Rather than merely reproducing from “nature,” the artist’s very Wrst brushstrokes mark the difference between the object and its representation . The portrait, the picture intimates, will not be the representation of the model. The model only serves as stand-in for the artist’s imagination , which leads his hand and uses the staged scene to assist his inspiration . The scene thus suggests a reversal of the relationship between model and artist: it is no longer the artist who is inspired by the muse but rather he who inspires the model to represent a muse.2 Vermeer’s self-portrait addresses the problem of representation in a manner that visualizes Spinoza’s concerns. For, according to Spinoza, imagining and representing truth is not simply a part of an anamnetic method of recovering what already exists “out there” but a process of constructing knowledge by deploying the mind’s capacities to form, associate, and examine ideas. Just as painting the allegory/muse of art or history3 amounts to reinventing and reconstructing the subject on canvas, so Spinoza conceives of the production of knowledge as dependent solely on the consistency of its constituent ideas. The scene’s staging of the embedded, enveloped existence (curtain, map, the character of light) and the meditative yet creative mood, concentrated and full of potential, staging the artist’s aura of creativity, visualizes Spinoza’s epistemological project. Vermeer’s painting produces its enchanting force by staging the paradox of truth and representation in a contemplative manner.4 Whether or not On the Improvement of the Understanding is indeed the inaugurating work of Spinoza’s philosophy (as some scholars have suggested),5 Spinoza certainly views the question of the relation between epistemology and metaphysics, between ethics and politics, as a central concern. This poses the question of the place of the epistemological treatise with regard to the “philosophy proper,” the “Principia philosophiae,” as Spinoza Wrst had planned to call the Ethics.6 Is On the Improvement of the Understanding a propaedeutic introduction to philosophy as it Wnds its Wnal shape in the Ethics, or does it already present, as it initiates Understanding Understanding 35 the search for truth, an element of that philosophy itself? The fact that no Wnal...