203 / 298
Vico’s Ring
203
about the epistemological crux: the complex and fraught process
of determining the “subject(s)” (
re
) in the first place, and why
and how a given statement would pertain to one subject rather
than to another;
mutatis mutandis
, the same would apply to judg-
ing what is «ambiguous» or «obscure» or «appear[s] to contradict
one another»
431
. Viewed from the perspective of Spinoza’s tax-
onomy of knowledge, however, any recognition of high-level in-
tellectual interaction as being involved already in basic data col-
lection would have resulted in direct ontological conflict with the
other two kinds of knowledge
432
. On the other hand, in Bacon’s
framework, there is no denial of, or silence on, the role of the in-
tellect as early as the stage of initial data gathering, as outlined in
Novum Organum
433
. When Bacon describes the preparing of «ta-
bles», he says that the particulars about phenomena «must be
disposed and arranged», or, in keeping with his busy bee meta-
phor, «digested». «The tabulating activity involves a measure of
construction, since order cannot simply be “read off” from the
data»
434
. Thus, already Bacon clearly understood and theorized
that all scientific observation, from the very initial phase, is in
some way “theory-laden”
435
. In this respect, what was “modern”
in the early modern period, has lost none of its modernity in the
interim
436
.
After thus outlining the procedure for acquiring the first kind
of knowledge, Spinoza moves to the next stage, which consists
of eliciting the «meaning (
sensus
)», which is the second kind of
knowledge. At this place in his exposition, Spinoza does not yet
go further into how this may be done, except noting that it can
be elicited from the «context (
contextu
)». As he will subsequently
illustrate with Moses’s teaching that «God is jealous», Spinoza al-
ready here conveys that the real or main issue for him is not the
inquiry into «meaning» in the usual understanding of semantics,
as the very first sentence (in its Latin original) seems to propose,
but the separation of «meaning» from «truth»: «[…] I term a pro-
nouncement obscure or clear according to […] the context, and