Spinoza and Reflection

Spinoza's proposition, in the Ethics, that "the idea of the mind is united to the mind in the same way as the mind is united to the body", is often interpreted as his attempt to incorporate a concept of Reflection into his system. Several difficulties seem to challenge that attempt--distinguishing an idea of an idea from the initial idea; the generation of an infinite recursion; and, an apparent violation of his Parallelism thesis, i. e. an idea of an idea is a connection that seems to have no correlate between things. Still, some commentators, e. g. Wolfson, seem to regard that incorporation as significant enough to gloss over those apparent inconsistencies. However, in so doing, they miss the primary function of the Spinoza's introduction of the concept. As he puts it in On the Improvement of the Understanding, "in order to know, there is no need to know that we know", and, conversely, the main theme of the propositions that succeed the above one in the Ethics is that the reflection of an inadequate idea does not transform it into an adequate one. In other words, the potential inconsistencies are irrelevant to the main purpose of the introduction of the concept, which is to repudiate theories in which Reflection has a privileged status, e. g. Cartesianism and Aristotelianism.