59. - Eternity of Mind

Summary

In Part Five of the Ethics, Spinoza claims that there is something that “pertains to the mind’s duration without relation to the body” (E5p20s), and that “the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains that is eternal [aeternum]” (E5p23). However, there seems to be nothing personal about this eternal aspect of the mind. While it might be possible to individuate one eternal mind from another – by virtue of their respective ideas and their representational contents and through each mind’s “formal essence” as the idea in Thought of a particular body in Extension – the eternal mind is not an immortal “soul” or self that, via consciousness and memory, is the postmortem continuation of the person in this lifetime. The eternity of the mind is certainly not something that encourages thinking about death and the afterlife, much less something in which one might find comfort or that should be an object of hope or fear. While some scholars do regard Spinoza as trying to accommodate a traditional doctrine of personal immortality (e.g.