"The human mind does not know the human body itself, nor does it know that it exists, except through ideas of affections by which the human body is affected."
Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, (IIP19).
"The mind knows the body through its ideas of the affections of the body. The mind cannot know the body directly; it is in no way the scene of knowledge production. All that it knows it comes to know, whether erroneously or correctly, through the ways in which the body is affected by other bodies that enable ideas to understand the body's capacities only as they operate and are subjected to encounters that transform it. The body is not a thing, even an extended thing, as Descartes defines it, because it is a process of encounters that change bodies and enable them to undergo new affects and new encounters. Likewise, the mind is not a thing, even a thinking thing, because ideas undergo encounters with other ideas, and particularly other ideas generated by the affections by which the body is affected. Each involves cohesive processes that center around a body, made of many capacities to act and be acted on."
Elizabeth Grosz, "Spinoza, Substance, and Attributes", The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism "Spinoza, Substance, and Attributes" (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 67.
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