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Horst Steinke
158
arguing the issue performatively, that is, since Spinoza dealt with
the highest levels of philosophical ideas in the work, perforce he
must have believed in the power of language to express these
ideas. Consistent with this premise, Fløistad detaches language
from the environment of the first kind of knowledge, and makes
it attachable to the two high forms of knowledge
369
. Thus, the
putative polarity between «words» at one end of the spectrum
370
,
and «ideas, the mind, intellect» at the opposite end that Spinoza’s
texts seem to convey, fades away.
Instead of strictly choosing between the Savan and Parkin-
son/Fløistad positions, it is possible to acknowledge merits as
well as problems in each interpretation. Savan’s interpretation
has the merit of taking seriously Spinoza’s explicit excoriation of
language, but then has to take recourse to internal textual «con-
tradictions» as support that are only assumed, that is, not explic-
itly identified as such
371
; furthermore, Savan does not provide an
account of how we can have access to knowledge (of the second
and third kinds) if not by language
372
. The opposite stance ap-
proaches
Ethics
without reservations about its semantic and phil-
osophical integrity, and is able to claim that nowhere does Spi-
noza himself cast doubt on his own use of language
373
. The price
paid for this neat account, however, is the dissolution, disintegra-
tion of the delineations explicitly drawn by Spinoza himself, as
exemplified in the excerpts quoted above.
It seems therefore that we are at an impasse with respect to a
coherent perspective on Spinoza’s language philosophy, at least
based on the evidence considered thus far. However, Spinoza
himself may point out the direction in which to pursue an expla-
nation, starting with the programmatic title of his magnum opus,
Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata
. In preceding sections of this
work, the focus was concentrated on the problem of the nature
of the “geometric method”, generalized as deductive logic, and
Spinoza’s non-negotiable commitment to it as truth-preserving.
However, the «ordine geometrico», the geometry-like method of