Spinoza on Human and Divine Knowledge

Here’s a seemingly compelling (albeit simplified) story about Spinoza’s epistemology: substance, or God, is the ultimate subject of everything, with the physical world being God’s “body” and the world of thoughts being God’s “mind”. On this understanding, God’s “mind” contains all true thoughts or all genuine knowledge, just as God’s “body” contains all real physical objects. In which case, when it comes to epistemology, the human difference—indeed, the difference of any finite perspective—consists wholly in error, of some kind. Where our knowledge is fully adequate, there is no difference between human and divine knowledge, as human knowledge is simply a part of God’s knowledge that we’ve managed to grab onto properly and hold within our own minds. But where our thought differs from God’s, it differs only in being confused and incomplete. Seen in this way, then, human knowledge is nothing but an impoverished version of God’s knowledge. The human perspective differs in no positive respect; its difference consists wholly in negation—it adds only lack and limitation. In other words, it adds nothing at all. If the human perspective adds nothing, then, it must be fully reducible to God’s knowledge without loss, given that there is literally nothing to be lost. In contrast to this story, we argue in this chapter that the human perspective is not fully reducible—i.e., that something would indeed be lost in the absence of the human perspective. This means that the human epistemological difference consists in more than nothing—that what is lost is more than just lack and limitation, that what is specific to the human perspective is not just error. It means that what is ineliminable in human epistemology is or entails something positive in itself