Tommaso Campanella et Benedict Spinoza

…this unity [of knower and known] is only possible if the subject and object, the knower and the known, are of the same nature; they must be members and parts of one and the same vital complex. Every sensory perception is an act of fusion and reunification. We perceive the object, we grasp it in its proper, genuine being only when we feel in it the same life, the same kind of movement and animation that is immediately given and present to us in the experience of our same Ego. From this, Panpsychism emerges as a simple corollary to [Campanella’s] theory of knowledge.

Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy

When a number of bodies of the same or different magnitude form close contact with one another through the pressure of other bodies upon them, or if they are moving at the same or different rates of speed so as to preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves, these bodies are said to be united with one another and all together to form one body or individual thing, which is distinguished from other things through this union of bodies

Spinoza, Ethics 2 p13 a2 d)

 A Comparison of Seldolm Considered Affinities

Spinoza	Campanella
Panpsychism	Panpsychism
Two Attributes of Extension and Thought which are expressed modally, the essence each is a conatus	Three Primalities of Potentia, Sapientia, Amor
All determination is negation: (letter 50)	All limitation is non-being
Ideas participate in otherness; the affective imagination	To know is to be: cognoscere est esse
Universals are confused knowledge	Universals are confused knowledge
The power to act is a degree of Being (the General Definition of the Affects)	A Plotinian Aristotelianism, degree of Being
Passions involve a confused idea of external cause	Illate knowledge (of other things) confuses the soul’s innate knowledge
Falsity as privation; Theory of Affects; affectuum imitatio	Cognoscere est esse; Amor est esse; Operari est esse
Perception is belief; Intellect and Will are one action	Sensation is both a perception and a judgment of a passion
Aristotle’s potency and act collapsed into vector of Being	The principle of Being and the principle of operation collapsed
Use of Scotus’s formal distinction to delineate the Attributes	Use of Scotus’s formal distinction to delineate the Primalities
Potientia means power, not just capacity	Potentia means power, not just capacity
Substance’s essence includes existence, modal essences do not	God’s essence includes existence, modal essences exist ab extrinseco
The immanent/transitive causal distinction: God and the modes	Immanent/transitive causal distinction; self vs. other
Power understood as both the capacity to affect and be affected	Potentia activa, potentia passiva/receptiva
The perfection/imperfect distinction essendi	Potentia essendi
All things expressed in Thought and Extension	The difference of sensation is not one of essence, but by mode
To love is the increase in perfection accompanied by the idea of an external cause	To love is to be: amor est esse
Object of the mind vs. external determination	The mind does not measure but is measured
Self-knowledge is expressive in ideas of varying adequacy, all which have the body as their object	Self-knowledge is the nature of Being and Truth (Augustine)
The object of the mind is the body; a body is a communication ratio of parts; self and the other (must) form a ratio, and thus share an essence/conatus	In knowing, the knower becomes the known through the sharing of an essence
The world is determined	No contingency of accidents to substance
The false is privation	Evil is privation (Augustine)
All ideas true in the mind of God	All ideas true in the mind of God

The above is a brief conceptual juxtaposition of some of the features of the thought of Campanella and Spinoza, meant as points of departure for an eventual theorization (some preliminary thoughts toward which put forward here and here). I do not find all of these points of convergence equally fruitful. Some of them reach back into a shared reference to Scholasticism (the divisins in which both thinkers attempted to synthesize), and some extend into the roots of a Augustinian/Plotinian Neoplatonism of Being. The crossbeams of the crux of Campanella’s potential contribution to the analysis of Spinoza’s thought are, a.) A comparison of Campanella’s Three Primalities and Spinoza Two Attributes and conatus, and b.) the application of Campanella’s assimulative cognoscere est esse  to Spinoza’s affectuum imitatio and his communitarian, bodily assemblage concept of knowledge. If to know something is to become that something, and sociability is grounded in the experiential, shared affectio  of “a thing like us” and the forming of composite, affective bodies, Campanella’s sapientia transformations are Spinoza’s epistemic increases in power.