Consider an alternative account centered on the context for the case of near sun misper-ception in Spinoza’s earlier period.9 In the passage from TIE 30 quoted above, Spinoza suggests that misperception generates a tendency toward belief revision that most suits successful striving – that benefits one’s conatus. Spinoza continues as follows, “And if some-one, after doubting, acquires a true knowledge of the senses and of how, by their means, things at a distance are presented, then the doubt is again removed” (TIE: 30). What the tendency toward belief revision motivates in unclear, but seems to be tied to acquiring ‘a true knowledge’ or a more adequate idea, i.e. questioning, investigating, and gaining un-derstanding. Spinoza seems to argue that doubt undermines itself by provoking behavior that rids the subject of doubt. However, the purpose is not intellectual contentment but rather contending with one’s conatus. The connection between misperception, doubt, and knowledge is also presented in Spinoza’s other discussion of misperceiving the sun in TIE:
Or after we have come to know the nature of vision, and that it has the property that we see one and the same thing as smaller when we look at it from a great dis-tance than when we look at it from close up, we infer that the sun is larger than it appears to be, and other things of the same kind (TIE: 21).
9 See fn 5.
This passage makes the specific claim that misperception leads to greater understanding, which leads to consequent correction of misperception.
Spinoza’s four discussions of misperceiving the size of the sun exemplify “doubt”, a cog-nitive state that he defines as agnostic and disinterested in nature, caused by recognized lack of knowledge. In the Ethics, Spinoza emphasizes the doubtful mind as in a state of equilibrium between ideas. “This constitution of the Mind which arises from two contrary affects is called vacillation of the mind, which is therefore related to the affect as doubt is to the imagination” (E3p17s). For the early Spinoza, doubt is, “nothing but the suspension of the mind concerning some affirmation or negation, which it would affirm or deny if something did not occur to it” (TIE: 80). Doubt “always arises from the fact that things are investigated without order” (TIE: 80). Yet, it must be noted that in the context of doubt, misperception generates some form of doxastic and/or epistemic content as things are “investigated”. Doubt, being a doxastic state, though a confused one, promotes a novel basis for appreciating misperception distinct from Bennett and Shapiro as doubt motivates inquiry. How?
The account of doubt in Ethics provides a clue for how it motivates inquiry: doubt is a sad state of mind, instigating a natural tendency to rid ourselves of doubt upon its ar-rival. However, given the disordered state provoked by doubt’s vacillation, doubt also has a neutralizing affect on the perceiver lacking “doxastic power” to motivate the perceiver to rid themselves of doubt. Thus, it must be that doubt is not resolved without some extrinsic motivating force, or “affective power”. For instance, the negative affects associated with the sun’s proximity or distance like feeling too hot or too cold would produce an affective power to rouse investigation.10
Imagine a naïve country person running towards the sun in hopes of gaining warmth and realizes that the sun is giving them a literal cold shoulder. They might begin to doubt their belief in the sun’s nearness based on the sensory appearance – they might find them-selves in a state of vacillation over the location of the sun. This doubt motivates a recon-sideration of sensory belief – to question, investigate, and attempt to understand why and how approaching the near appearance of the sun failed them. In a word, the country per-son would acquire an intellectual belief in the sun that is distinct from the sensory belief, an intellectual belief that benefits behaviour consistent with the country person’s welfare.
We might state this doubt-based version of passionate misperception as follows:
1) We perceive non-existent things (e.g. a near sun).
2) Belief in non-existent things is an error.
3*) When cognitive faculties are influenced by a privation of knowledge, doubt is pro-duced.
4*) Doubt generates behavior of acquiring knowledge to produce more beneficial be-havior.
5*) Thus, when perception errs, more beneficial behavior is produced.
10 See Steinberg 2017 for further discussion of doxastic and affective power.
Doubtful passionate misperception provides a basis for Spinoza’s otherwise beguiling ac-count of misperception.
I am not the first to think of Spinoza’s account of error as prompting revision. Lenz (2013) arrives at a similar conclusion when considering Spinoza’s later work. “What we have now are rather conflicting beliefs. And eventually it will be the emotionally and cona-tively stronger belief (that is: the one having the greater affective force with regard to our striving) that overpowers the other one” (Lenz 2013, 49). Della Rocca calls such beliefs
“winning beliefs”, arguing that the alternative losing beliefs remain a “live psychic force”
(Della Rocca 2003, 210).11 The result is, again, not some intellectual discovery of “truth” as normally understood, but rather belief shifting from being less adequate to more adequate in terms of how the perception benefits conatus.12 As Morrison (2015) argues, “‘[A]dequate’
and ‘true’ are just different ways of picking out the same kind of idea, and therefore the real definition of adequate idea is the same as the real definition of true idea” (Morrison 2015, 91).
Bennett’s and Shapiro’s accounts of error suggested problems with treating Spinoza’s account of perception as non-doxastic. For, perception has behavioral consequences that might be contrary to a perceiver’s conatus – a naïve perceiver may act on their sensory idea of the near sun and engage in hapless, if not dangerous behavior. But, this leaves a significant problem of explaining how doxastic states are not in error when produced by misperceptions. I have followed Lenz (2013) in suggesting that misperceptions produce an important doxastic state of doubt of suspended belief that produces more reliable and thus beneficial behavior. I conclude by considering a further tension when doubt leads to belief revision: holding persisting contrary ideas simultaneously.
Conclusion
I have argued that Spinoza’s theory of perception recognizes that the adequacy of an idea is relative to its intellectual content. For example, were naïve country people to understand the process by which sight is achieved and the relevant planetary knowledge of our solar system, they would acquire a more adequate idea of a distant sun, though also maintaining the less adequate yet persisting perceptual experience of the near sun. But, this is an odd consequence as both less adequate “near sun” and more adequate “distant sun” perceptions exist simultaneously. One possible way to avoid the existence of simultaneous yet contrary perceptions is to distinguish between the manner in which intellectual and sensory content is presented: say, between “objective” and “subjective” manners. The early Spinoza suggests
11 Steinburg (2017) has recently demonstrated some problems with this ‘dominance’ model of belief, as Spinoza presents cases where, all things being equal, a subject believes a weaker idea over the stronger.
12 Tóth (2016) also presents Spinoza’s account of error in terms of ‘inadequate’ belief. “So, the imagina-tion, the product of inadequate causaimagina-tion, as a representation is not true or false in itself” (Tóth 2016, 86).
this response, arguing, “we know that those activities by which imaginations are produced happen according to other laws, wholly different from the laws of the intellect, and that in imagination the soul only has the nature of something acted on” (TIE, 86). Here, the
‘laws’ of the intellect and sensory contents are what distinguish their perceptions, allowing them to be simultaneous yet contrary.
To understand this possible strategy, the analogous example of perceiving sunrises and sunsets is informative. With respect to the sky gazer impressed with a geocentric experi-ence, the sunrise and sunset are, lawfully, impressed on the mind. It is only the intellect that informs the sensory experience with a Copernican view – a distinct set of laws – that reshape the experience to be dual in nature: the earth in rotation orbiting the sun intellec-tually, the sun in orbit of the earth experientially. Yet, by including the intellect in sensory perception, we do not have the resources to account for how passionate misperception can produce reliably beneficial behavior.
We are left with the following situation. Just as the Copernican sky gazer perceives the sun to rise and set, so too is the perceiver, informed of the great distance of the sun intellectually while maintaining the ‘country persons’ experience of the near sun has two simultaneous but contrary cognitive contents and are ‘of two minds’ about the sun.
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