Susan James - Spinoza and the relationship between the body and the mind

Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, explores Spinoza’s philosophy of the embodied mind.

About Susan James

"I’m a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College in London.
Most of my work is about early modern philosophy, particularly the social and political aspects of philosophy in that period. My most recent book is called Spinoza on Learning to Live Together."

The relationship between the body and the mind

Spinoza is very interested in this question of the relationship between the body and the mind, and he approaches it at several levels. To understand the significance or the interest, perhaps, of his view, it’s useful to consider who his opponents are. He rejects the materialism of his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, who says that our thoughts are just motions – material things. Spinoza never doubts that bodily motions and thoughts are ontologically of quite different types and that one cannot be reduced to the other.

The other giant figure who looms in the landscape and who Spinoza opposes is Descartes, who famously thinks of the human being as a composite made up of two substances: a body and a mind. Spinoza rejects the idea that it’s enough to think of one’s body and one’s mind as these two separate entities which are somehow stuck together.

Key Points

• Spinoza rejects the idea that it’s enough to think of one’s body and one’s mind as two separate entities, which are somehow stuck together.
• He says that the first idea that constitutes your mind is an idea of your body. The body is there from the start and the existence of the mind depends on the existence of the body.
• Spinoza is emphatic that our body is affected by other bodies; the other bodies, the external world, are there from the start.