Spinoza’s Ethics and the Problem of Transcendental Cognition

Abstract

The article makes an attempt at comparing two perspectives from which philosophical cognition starts – a perspective which can be encountered in Spinoza’s Ethics and a perspective which can be encountered in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In the first case, a finite subject of the philosophical cognition embarks on the cognition of the substance (Nature, God), that is, reality in its comprehensiveness; in the second case, a finite subject of philosophical cognition reflects upon the totality of the field of possible experience (empirical cognition), uncovering the conditions of its possibility. Both kinds of cognition consist in a pursuit to comprehend what is necessary and strictly universal. I claim that as much as the source of the cognition at stake is, on Spinoza’s account, provided by the intuitive grasp of the ontological identity of the subject and the whole of the reality (substance, Nature, God), on Kant account, indicating the source or the ground of the transcendental cognition proves more difficult (if not impossible), even though it might be granted that as in Spinoza’s cognition of the substance, also in the cognition which furnishes the judgments of the Critique of Pure Reason, intuition plays the decisive role.