The Spiritual Automaton: Spinoza’s Science of the Mind by Eugene Marshall (review)

In this engaging book Eugene Marshall defends an interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of consciousness—on which ideas are conscious just insofar as their power becomes causally involved in a mind’s conatus (119, 130, 133)—together with some important implications of this interpretation for our understanding of Spinoza’s theories of bondage and freedom. The book is admirably clear and well-structured: each of its six chapters contributes to Marshall’s case.

Chapter 1 offers a useful introduction to the whole work together with an initial account of Spinoza’s theory of ideas that focuses on the epistemological status of inadequate ideas, that is, on their role as the first kind of cognitio in the Ethics. So it sets the stage well for Marshall’s controversial account of the second kind of cognitio in chapter 2.

In turning to adequate ideas, Marshall responds principally to a concern raised by Michael Della Rocca. Marshall defends the view that, on Spinoza’s account, it is possible for human minds to have adequate ideas. He argues that each human mind has adequate ideas of common notions and of the essence of God. Emphasizing such ideas is helpful, Marshall argues, because they do not, like ideas of external singular things in the world, clearly come to us by sensation. On Marshall’s view, they are innate. Because he limits the scope of adequate ideas in a human mind in this way, Marshall is able to respond to Della Rocca’s concern. While this conservatism is friendly to Spinoza, however, it might be difficult for it to account for passages in the Ethics such as IIp39 and Vp4 in which Spinoza seems to suggest that human minds can come to have new adequate ideas. The similarity in kind of the ideas described in IIp39 to the common notions also raises questions about the innateness of these ideas and their independence from sensation.

Chapter 3 concerns human activity: conatus and the human affects. Because Marshall distinguishes between a mind that merely possesses an adequate idea (which may be innate and latent) and one whose action is caused by an adequate idea, he can also distinguish between adequate ideas and active affects: “when an adequate idea causes the mind to act, the mind is an adequate cause. And when it does so, the idea becomes an active affect” (96). This view in Marshall’s account of consciousness becomes the source of a distinction between those of our ideas that are conscious and those that are not. Because consciousness is affectivity, a latent adequate idea is not conscious, but one that causes me to act, and so becomes an affect, is conscious.

Chapter 4, which is the heart of the book, develops this theory of consciousness explicitly. Marshall defends the view that for an idea to be conscious is for it to become involved in the conatus of the mind. This theory allows Marshall to address many of the puzzles that Spinoza’s theory of mind has raised for commentators. Notably, it offers a theory of selective consciousness: only ideas that are involved in the conatus of the mind, and so only minds that have such ideas, are conscious.

Chapters 5 and 6 build on Marshall’s account of minds and, specifically, on his account of consciousness. Bondage, he argues in chapter 5, which also includes related discussions of will and akrasia, is a failure to act on adequate ideas. Chapter 6 offers an interpretation of Spinoza’s eschatology. An important claim (227–28) is that Marshall’s theory of consciousness explains well Spinoza’s assertion that human minds are not conscious after the death of their bodies.

Marshall can distinguish his “consciousness as affectivity” view from the view, associated with Don Garrett, that all ideas are conscious to the extent that they have power only if he can show that “an idea’s being powerful is not sufficient for its being conscious” (133) and that powerful ideas...