Spinoza, Plato, Empowerment

Some passages in the Ethics encourage a Platonist interpretation of Spinoza's "knowledge of God". That, for Spinoza, such knowledge is intuition; that the knowledge of God entails understanding the eternity of God; and that such knowledge qualifies as the highest virtue, suggest a similarity of his 'knowledge of God' and the Platonist 'contemplation of the Good'. However, the differences are significant. First, whereas the Platonist 'Good' is supernatural, the Spinozist 'God' is Nature, qua dynamic creativity. Second, while, Platonic Forms are generally interpreted as simple, for Spinoza, the idea of God entails God's causality. Third, while for Plato, the idea of the Good is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of Virtue, for Spinoza, the knowledge of God is not necessary to virtuous conduct. More generally, every idea has an effect, according to Spinoza, which means that, unlike the contemplation of the Good for Plato, the knowledge of God is not an end-in-itself. Rather, like all knowledge, it promotes an increase in the activity, and a decrease in the passivity, of the knower. In other words, for Spinoza, the knowledge of God is empowerment more than enlightenment, and Spinoza is as much a Baconian as a Platonist or a Cartesian.