Sketch of a History

...stration of Proposition 27, Part III Referring to Part III of Spinoza's Ethics, which deals with the origin and nature of the affects., speaks most clearly about the matter right at the beginning. Regarding the relationship of Spinoza's doctrine to that of Descartes Latin: Cartesius, I refer here to what I have said in The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2, p. 639 (3rd ed., p. 739). However, by proceeding from the concepts of Cartesian philosophy, not only has much obscurity and opportunity for misunderstanding entered into Spinoza’s presentation; he has also thereby fallen into many glaring paradoxes, obvious falsehoods, even absurdities and contradictions. Because of this, the much that is true and excellent in his doctrine has received a highly unpleasant admixture of the utterly indigestible, leaving the reader tossed back and forth between admiration and annoyance.

In the respect under consideration here, however, Spinoza's fundamental error is that he drew the dividing line between the Ideal and the Real, or the subjective and the objective world, from the wrong point. Specifically, extension extension: the property of taking up space, which Descartes and Spinoza considered the primary attribute of physical matter is by no means the opposite of representation representation: the world as it appears to our minds; the mental image or "idea" we have of the world, but rather lies entirely within it. We represent things as extended, and insofar as they are extended, they are our representation: but whether anything is extended—or indeed whether anything exists at all—independent of our representing, is the question and the original problem. This was later solved by Kant, to an undeniably correct extent, in that extension, or spatiality, lies solely and exclusively within the representation and thus belongs to it, since all space is merely the form of that representation. Consequently, no extended thing can exist independently of our representation, and quite certainly none does.

Spinoza’s dividing line, therefore, fell entirely within the ideal side, and he remained stuck at the world of representation. He thus considers this world—characterized by its form of extension—to be the Real, and consequently to exist independently of being represented, that is, to exist in itself. He is then, of course, right to say that that which is extended and that which is represented—that is, our representation of bodies and these bodies themselves—are one and the same (Part II, Prop. 7, Scholium). For certainly things are only extended as things represented, and only representable as things extended: the world as representation and