semi-automatic waffle

unpack what makes Spinoza think such intuitive knowledge is even possible and why he thinks most people rarely achieve it.

Great—this goes right to the heart of why the Ethics is both austere and strangely hopeful.

I’ll take the two parts in order, but you’ll see they’re tightly connected.

I. Why Spinoza thinks intuitive knowledge is even possible

At first glance, scientia intuitiva sounds implausible: how could a finite mind grasp itself and other singular things “under the aspect of eternity”? Spinoza’s answer depends on three structural commitments of his system.

1. The mind is already in God

For Spinoza, the human mind is a mode of God’s attribute of thought (Ethics II, prop. 11). This is not metaphorical. It means:

Every idea in your mind is literally a part of God’s infinite thinking.
Adequate ideas are ideas God has insofar as he constitutes your mind.

So intuitive knowledge is not a matter of reaching up to God.
It is a matter of becoming aware of what the mind already is.

The possibility is built into the ontology: if the mind were outside God, intuition would be impossible; since it is in God, intuition is latent.

2. Adequate ideas are self-validating

Spinoza rejects the need for an external criterion of truth. An adequate idea “agrees with its object” and also shows its own truth (Ethics II, prop. 43).

This matters because intuitive knowledge is not inferred step by step. It is:

a direct grasp of causal dependence,
accompanied by certainty that does not need proof.

Reason shows that things follow from God.
Intuition sees how this thing does.

3. Eternity is not endless time

A crucial move: eternity ≠ infinite duration (Ethics I, def. 8).

Eternity means:

existence conceived through essence alone,
not measured by before and after.

Your body is temporal.
But the essence of your mind—what it is to be this mode of thought—can be understood eternally.

Intuitive knowledge does not require escaping time; it requires changing the way time is conceived.

4. The mind can form adequate ideas of itself

Spinoza insists that the mind can have adequate ideas of:

its own essence,
its own power of understanding,
and its place in the causal order (Ethics V, props. 21–23).

Once the mind understands itself adequately, it necessarily understands itself as an expression of God. At that point, intuitive knowledge is not an extra achievement—it is a transformation of self-understanding.

II. Why most people rarely achieve it

If intuitive knowledge is structurally possible, why is it so rare? Spinoza’s answer is not elitist in the usual sense; it is psychological and political.

1. Imagination dominates ordinary life

Most people live primarily in the first kind of knowledge:

they experience things as contingent,
they interpret events through hope and fear,
they explain causes through final ends (“this happened for a reason”).

This mode of understanding is constantly reinforced by daily life, language, religion, and politics. Imagination is not a failure—it’s how finite beings survive—but it keeps attention fixed on particulars as temporal and personal, not as necessary.

Intuition requires loosening that grip.

2. The affects resist understanding

Passive affects are self-reinforcing:

fear seeks narratives that justify fear,
resentment feeds on imagined injury,
hope depends on uncertainty.

Even reason threatens these affects; intuition dissolves them. So there is internal resistance. Spinoza thinks people often avoid adequate understanding because it undermines cherished emotional structures.

This is why superstition persists even when better explanations are available.

3. Social conditions work against it

Spinoza is blunt: political and religious institutions often depend on ignorance.

Obedience is easier to secure through fear than understanding.
Theological language encourages anthropomorphic images of God.
Moral systems built on reward and punishment reinforce imagination.

A life that makes intuitive knowledge possible requires:

leisure,
security,
relative freedom of thought,
and emotional stability.

These are historically rare.

4. Reason itself is already demanding

Even the second kind of knowledge is uncommon. Most people never fully acquire stable common notions or consistently adequate ideas. Since intuitive knowledge presupposes reason, its rarity is compounded.

Spinoza never suggests that everyone can—or will—reach blessedness. He thinks human lives differ greatly in power (potentia), and understanding follows that power.

5. Intuition cannot be commanded

This is perhaps the deepest point.

Intuitive knowledge is not a technique, practice, or method you can simply apply. It arises when:

adequate ideas become sufficiently integrated,
the mind understands itself as their cause,
and joy accompanies that understanding.

You cannot decide to intuit. You can only live in ways that make it more likely.

III. The quiet radicalism

What’s striking is how unspectacular Spinoza makes the highest human good.

No visions.
No miracles.
No rupture with nature.

Blessedness is just the mind understanding itself truthfully—and feeling joy in that truth.

Most people don’t reach it not because it’s supernatural, but because it requires a kind of life—intellectually, emotionally, socially—that is hard to sustain.

If you want, next we could look at whether Spinoza himself thought he had achieved intuitive knowledge—or whether Ethics is meant to induce it rather than describe it.

look at whether Spinoza himself thought he had achieved intuitive knowledge and whether Ethics is meant to induce it rather than describe it.

This is one of the most interesting—and revealing—questions you can ask about Spinoza, because the text itself never settles it explicitly. You have to triangulate from tone, structure, and a few very careful remarks.

I’ll take the two parts together, since Spinoza’s own stance and the Ethics’ function turn out to be inseparable.

I. Did Spinoza think he had achieved intuitive knowledge?

Short answer: probably yes—but cautiously, impersonally, and without any appeal to authority.

1. The conspicuous absence of first-person testimony

Spinoza never says “I have attained blessedness” or “I intuit God.” This is deliberate. Such claims would:

invite authority-based belief (which he despised),
provoke theological hostility,
and undermine the impersonality of demonstration.

For Spinoza, truth does not gain weight from who says it.

But the absence of confession is not the absence of conviction.

2. The confidence of Part V

Part V of the Ethics has a noticeably different tone:

arguments are shorter,
demonstrations lean heavily on previously established propositions,
conclusions are stated with unusual serenity and finality.

When Spinoza writes things like

“We feel and experience that we are eternal” (Ethics V, prop. 23, schol.),
he is not offering a hypothesis. He is reporting something presented as phenomenologically available.

The “we” is doing work here—but it is a didactic we, not merely rhetorical.

3. Intellectual love of God as an achieved standpoint

Spinoza claims that:

the intellectual love of God is eternal (Ethics V, prop. 33),
it cannot be destroyed with the body (prop. 23),
and it constitutes the mind’s highest perfection.

These are not framed as distant ideals. They are presented as consequences of understanding—understanding Spinoza appears to possess in order to articulate them coherently.

Most interpreters think Spinoza regarded intuitive knowledge not as a permanent mystical state, but as something intermittently achieved. That fits his psychology: the finite mind fluctuates in power.

So the best reading is: Spinoza believed he had intuitive knowledge at times, without claiming unbroken blessedness.

II. Is the Ethics meant to induce intuitive knowledge rather than merely describe it?

Yes—and this is arguably the key to the book.

1. The geometrical method is not neutral

The more geometrico style is often read as cold or rigid. But its function is deeply practical:

it trains the reader to follow necessity,
it suppresses imaginative associations,
it forces attention away from personal narratives and toward causal structure.

Reading the Ethics properly is already an exercise in reason. It disciplines the mind into adequacy.

2. The reader is being re-formed, not informed

Spinoza does not argue for intuitive knowledge in the abstract. He builds the reader toward a point where intuitive insight becomes possible.

By the time you reach Part V, you have been led to see:

that everything follows from God’s nature,
that the mind is part of that order,
that joy accompanies adequate understanding,
and that eternity is not duration.

At that point, certain propositions no longer function as descriptions—they function as occasions.

The book cannot give you intuitive knowledge. But it can put your mind in a position where it may occur.

3. Why Spinoza refuses to “teach” intuition directly

Spinoza never gives instructions like “now intuit this.” That would contradict his system:

intuition cannot be commanded,
it cannot be transmitted by testimony,
and it cannot be verified externally.

The Ethics therefore does something subtler: it removes obstacles—false ideas, emotional confusions, anthropomorphic habits—until the mind can see for itself.

4. The final proposition is performative

The last line of the Ethics is famous:

“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

This is not a moral exhortation. It is a quiet acknowledgment of limits—human limits, historical limits, affective limits.

But it is also a kind of reassurance: rarity does not mean impossibility.

III. A suggestive way to read the Ethics

One compelling interpretation is this:

Parts I–II: de-theologize the world
Parts III–IV: de-moralize the emotions
Part V: reorient self-experience

The book does not say, “Here is blessedness.”
It tries to make the reader capable of recognizing it if it occurs.

Whether Spinoza thought you would achieve intuitive knowledge is another matter. He was not optimistic about humanity in general. But he did think that a text, rigorously constructed and patiently read, could sometimes tip a mind over a threshold.

If you want, we could end by asking whether this makes Spinoza closer to a philosopher, a therapist, or a quiet spiritual writer who refused the language of spirituality.