Spinoza’s Special Distinctions

Spinoza scholarship is riddled with questions about distinctions. Recent scholarship suggests that Spinoza might be using a particular kind of distinction whose exact understanding is a (if not the) key to many of the tantalizing but obscure claims that Spinoza seems to hold. Let’s call this distinction “Spinoza’s special distinction.” I argue that Spinoza uses not one but three kinds of special distinctions because he understands attributes as cognitions without idea. I first discuss the Scotistic and Suárezian models of Spinoza’s distinctions presented in recent years. I then argue that the attributes derive from an activity of substance and not from an activity of an intellect. They are therefore cognitions without idea. Attributes are the same as substance, but in relation to an intellect—not unlike to Spinoza, the idea of the circle is the circle (E2p7s, PUF 46/26–27) in relation to an intellect. The perception of the attributes in fact is divine action, seen from the receptive end, which is why it is receptive and not passive. Spinoza’s special distinctions, then, are necessitated by substance itself. The attribute/attribute distinction fits Spinoza’s definition of real distinctions, which I call real perceptions. The substance/attribute distinction cannot count as a real distinction—I call it a real perception. Furthermore, Spinozistic versions of the distinctions of reasoned reason are really distinctions as adequate conceptions. I conclude that Spinoza uses distinctions of reasoned reason, perceptual distinctions and real perceptions, each with a particularly Spinozistic flavour.