Spinoza`s Notorious Eternity Doctrine

Spinoza's Ethics contains a doctrine of the eternity of the mind that is notoriously difficult to understand. The difficult consists in two apparent tensions. The first is between IIP7s and VP23, and the second is between VP23 and VP38s:

IIP7s: [...] whatever can be perceived by infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance pertains entirely to the one soul substance. Consequently, thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, comprehended now under this attribute, now under that. So, too, a mode of Extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, expressed in two different ways. .......

VP23: The mind cannot absolutely be destroyed along with the body but something of it remains, which is eternal. .......

VP38s: The greater the number of things the mind knows by the second and third kind of [necessarily true] knowledge, the greater the part of it that survives. IIP7s affirms that the body and the mind are ontologically identical yet VP23 suggests a puzzling asymmetry between mind and body. The mind has an eternal part but VP23 says to nothing of the eternality of the body. Next, the eternal part of the mind referred to in VP23 is often taken to be the mind's eternal essence, which, evident from IIP7s again, is nothing more than the eternal idea-correlate of the body, or, the eternal idea of the body conceived under the attribute of thought (VP23s.) But if this is the case, then it is difficult to make sense of VP38s which states that the part of the mind that is eternal is enlarged by the acquisition of necessarily true knowledge. This then, is the second tension. In this essay I put forward an interpretation of the Eternity Doctrine (ED) under which neither tension arises. It differs from other interpretations of the ED insofar as others tend to try to resolve these tensions on the basis of a widely accepted interpretation of other doctrines of the Ethics, this reading involves a subtle but informative reinterpretation of three central doctrines. This may seem to be an impractical strategy, but in practice it isn't; my interpretation is nothing more than a clarification based on my own reflections on the modal system to which I believe Spinoza must be committed. In §I I posit what I think must be Spinoza's modal commitments by reflecting on the nature of truth pertaining to his type of Necessitarian universe. With this in mind, I give a novel interpretation of Spinozistic essences, which in turn suggests a new perspective on an important aspect of Spinoza's epistemology. This provides a platform from which to criticize one of the more widely accepted views of Spinozistic essences and epistemology. All this is the content of §II. In §III I offer an interpretation of the ED that does full justice to Spinoza's modal commitments. The upshot may be that Spinoza's Ethics has always been misunderstood. I would normally be inclined to reject an interpretation of a particular doctrine that had these far-reaching consequences, but the perspicuity that my interpretation lends to the Ethics as a whole makes it worthy of consideration.