177 / 298
Vico’s Ring
177
le)» (Id.,
Spinozas Idee der Scientia intuitiva und die Spinozanische Wissenschaftskonzep-
tion
, in
Spinoza
, cit., pp. 135-150, p. 143).
342
There is a lively debate among Spinoza scholars about his intended
function(s) for «imagination (
imaginatio
)». See A. V. Garrett,
Meaning in Spino-
za’s Method
, cit., pp. 182-186, and also more recently I. Gaspari,
Immaginazione
produttiva e profezia fra Maimonide e Spinoza
, in «Teoria», 2012, 2, pp. 169-197;
online at
<www.rivistateoria.eu>. Gaspari sees two sides to (Spinozan) imagi-
nation: «Si tratta di due aspetti fondamentali anche per comprendere la conce-
zione spinoziana dell’immaginazione, e per fornirne un resoconto che non
appiattisca il suo carattere polisemico, variegato, sulla sola asfittica definizione
di “primo genere di conoscenza” (This has to do with two fundamental
aspects [i.e. receptive as well as productive modalities] needed also in order to
understand Spinoza’s concept of imagination, and to give an account that
does not gloss over its polysemic, multifaceted character, sitting atop the me-
rely bland definition as “ first kind of knowledge”)» (
ibid.
, p. 196). As Gaspari
has shown in his article, Spinozan «imagination» plays a multiple role; howev-
er, this also means that it involves multiple semantic and epistemic domains
which need to be kept separate heuristically. In particular, whatever aspects
imagination assumes in various contexts (such as in Spinozas “psychology” or
“anthropology”),
pace
Gaspari, they should not be assimilated to Spinoza’s
“epistemology”. Polysemy, in this respect, in fact can be taken just to mean
that distinct concepts happen to share the same lexical exponent, rather than
ascribing many possible meanings to the same lexical term, and then compos-
ing a many-layered complex of meanings out of them.
S. Zac took the following view: «On pourrait aussi se demander si le spi-
nozisme exclurait une imagination, qui ne serait pas subordonnée aux deu-
xième mais au troisième genre de connaissance, à l’amour intellectuel de Dieu.
Il est tentant de soutenir que la connaissance prophétique, selon Spinoza, a
des consonances avec la “science intuitive” ou, autrement dit, qu’elle en est le
scheme imaginative. Mais il ne faut pas, à mon avis, céder à cette tentation
(One could also ask oneself whether Spinoza’s ideas excluded an imagination
which would not be subsumed under the second but under the third kind of
knowledge, under the intellectual love of God. It is tempting to maintain that
prophetic knowledge, according to Spinoza, has affinities with the “intuitive
knowledge”, or, stated differently, that the latter comprises the imaginative
modus. But, in my opinion, this temptation should be resisted)» (Id.,
Spinoza et
l’interprétation de l’écriture
, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1965, p. 178).
343
See A. V. Garrett,
Meaning in Spinoza’s Method,
cit., pp. 51-52. For an in-
quiry into the possible historical roots of Spinoza’s tripartite epistemic archi-
tecture in medieval Kabbalah, see H. W. Braun,
Spinoza and the Kabbalah
, in