How to Understand De Intellectus Emendatione

De How to Understand Intellectus Emendatione' PAUL D. EISENBERG THE VERY TITLE of Spinoza's Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (hereinafter abbreviated as TDIE or referred to simply as "the treatise") poses some difficulty for the translator or, at least, for the "interpreter" of the treatise. To begin with, what exactly is the meaning of emendatio (or, in the ablative, emendatione)? The most obvious, and accordingly the most frequently employed, English translation is 'improvement'; indeed, even in the Nagelate Schri[ten, 2 emendatio is rendered by Verbetering: 'improvement' or 'a making better'. But some of the English-speaking commentators on the Tractatus or some of the translators of it into English have employed other words to translate emendatio--words which, usually, have not differed much or at all in basic meaning from 'improvement'. So, for example, Sir Frederick Pollock in his Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (London, 1880; 2nd ed., 1899) translated emendatio by 'amendment'; and Andrew Boyle in his translation of the treatise (which first appeared, together with a translation of the Ethics, in 1910) rendered emendatio by 'correction'. Now, there could be no question about the acceptability of any of these translations were it not for the fact that throughout the treatise (and in his later writings) Spinoza tends to treat the intellectus ('understanding')--but, as I shall indicate soon, there is a problem also, although by no means so grave a one, about the proper translation of this term a 1 This article was written before I learned that a Lexicon Spinozanum in two volumes (prepared by Emilia Gianeotti Boscherini) was soon to be published in the International Archives o[ the History of Ideas. Since I have not yet had an opportunity to consult that work or to consult with the lexicographer herself, I do not know to what extent the relevant entries in that lexicon have anticipated or helped to clarify the problems which are discussed in this article. 2 The 1677 Dutch translation of Spinoza's Opera Posthuma. 3 Although, as I have said, the very title of Spinoza's TDIE poses some difficulty for the translator of the work, the difficulty is not fundamentally one of translation, but of interpretation. That is, the problem does not arise from the alleged fact that, although Spinoza had available to him in Latin two words, emendatio and intellectus, which are perfectly apt for conveying his doctrine, there are in English or, for that matter, in other modem Indo-European languages no terms the denotations and connotations of which are even roughly those of the original Latin terms. On the contrary, the problem arises from the fact that Spinoza's "real" doctrine in the treatise itself appears to be that the intellectus (as distinct, e.g., from the mens humana) is incapable of anything that might rightly be called an emendatio in the, or in any, ordinary sense of that Latin term itself. When--or if-the translator of the treatise becomes aware of that fact, he finds himself confronted with the [1711 172 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY --not as something which stands in need of improvement or which can be improved , but as something which is perfect in its own right. Thus again and again in the treatise he speaks of the need for distinguishing between the intellectus and other things which are or may be "in the mind"---often he refers to these other things as (so to speak) collected in the imagination (imaginatio), or as its products; and once the imagination and its components and products are carefully described and so distinguished from the intellectus or, as certain passages in the treatise suggest, once they are not only distinguished from the intellectus but also eliminated from the mind, then there will remain nothing but true and adequate knowledge of things. 4 But neither this process or activity of distinguishing intellectus from imaginatio nor the process of elimination of imaginatio could properly be characterized as the 'improvement', or as resulting in the 'improvement', of the intellectus itself. Rather, those processes would constitute or result in an improvement of the mind (considered as that which, at least in its unimproved state, "contains" both the intellectus and the imaginatio). But...