Ethics and Opinion

In contemporary academic syllabi, Spinoza is typically classified as a 'Continental Rationalist', set in opposition to the 'British Empiricists'.  But this classification is doubly misleading.  First, the highest kind of Knowledge in his doctrine is Intuition, not Reason.  Second, in sharp contrast with the others in these sequences, including Kant, in whom they culminate, the opposition is not to Sense Experience.  Rather, the antithesis within Spinoza's doctrine is between Adequate Knowledge and Inadequate Knowledge, and the prototype of the latter is Opinion, e. g. "hearsay".  Thus, insofar as liberation from Emotional Bondage, according to the doctrine, is achieved via conduct on the basis of Adequate Knowledge, the implicit source of that Bondage is behavior on the basis of Opinion.  Arguably, his focus on the Theological uses of Intuition, only clutters this aim of the doctrine, which is perhaps more clearly delineated in the development of a Method in Improvement of the Understanding.  But his priorities are perhaps best expressed in the structure of his Theologico-Political Treatise, in which an exposure of Theological Opinion is preparatory to the development of a Political Philosophy based on individual Freedom. Accordingly, the targeting of Opinion as the source of the weakness that the doctrine would correct makes society, not the individual Mode, its scope.  The work thus has more in common with the Republic than with the Theatetus, the Meditations, the Monadology, or even the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.