92. - Ideas of Ideas

Summary

Spinoza’s doctrine of ideas of ideas complements another doctrine developed in Part Two of the Ethics, the doctrine of the parallelism of ideas and bodies. Spinoza argues that in God (conceived as thinking substance), there are necessarily ideas of God’s essence and of everything following with necessity from God’s essence (E2p3), where the “order and connection” of these ideas “is the same as the order and connection of things” (E2p7). There is a parallelism of ideas and bodies: there are, in God, ideas of everything following from the attribute of Extension, and the order and connection of these ideas is the same as the order and connection of bodies. Since there are also ideas of everything following from the attribute of Thought, there is also a parallelism within thought. This is to say that, in God, there is an idea of each idea, and the order and connection of these ideas of ideas is the same as the order and connection of the ideas of bodies: the idea of the idea of a body follows in God and is related to God in the same way as the idea of the body (E2p20).