Ethics

Overview

The Ethics is around three hundred pages and it is written like a geometry textbook. Five parts, each opening with definitions and axioms and proceeding through numbered propositions, each with a demonstration, and many followed by corollaries and by scholia, which are short prose notes where Spinoza explains himself, argues with opponents and occasionally shows feeling. The scholia are where most readers actually live.

He finished it around 1675 and did not publish. The reaction to his earlier Theological-Political Treatise had been so violent, and rumours of an atheist book in progress so persistent, that he withheld it. It appeared at the end of 1677, months after he died of a lung illness at forty-four, probably worsened by the glass dust from the lenses he ground for a living.

He had been expelled from the Amsterdam Jewish community at twenty-three, by a writ of herem unusual in its ferocity, for opinions that are not specified in the document. He never joined another religious body, refused a professorship at Heidelberg because it came with conditions, and lived quietly in rented rooms.

Reading the geometric form is the practical difficulty. The honest advice is that you cannot verify every demonstration and should not try on a first pass. Read the definitions and axioms of each part, then the propositions as statements, and read every scholium and every preface and appendix carefully. That is where the argument is explained rather than proved.

The argument

Part I: God. Spinoza defines substance as what exists in itself and is conceived through itself, and then argues that there can be only one such thing. Two substances could not share an attribute, nothing outside substance could produce or limit it, and so substance is infinite, unique and self-caused. He calls it God, or Nature, and the phrase, Deus sive Natura, is the whole scandal in two words.

Everything else, including you, this page and every thought, is a mode: a modification of that one substance, not a separate thing. Of the infinite attributes through which substance expresses itself we know two, thought and extension, and these are not two things but one thing described two ways, which dissolves Descartes’ mind-body problem by denying that there are two substances to connect.

This God has no intellect or will resembling ours, no purposes, and makes no choices; things follow from its nature as the properties of a triangle follow from its definition. The appendix to Part I is the most accessible thing in the book and is a sustained attack on teleology: people project purposes onto nature because they act for ends themselves, then invent gods who arranged the world for them, and then have to explain storms and disease, which they do by inventing divine anger. Spinoza calls the whole apparatus a sanctuary of ignorance.

Part II: mind. The human mind is the idea of the body. Mental and physical are one thing under two descriptions, so there is no interaction to explain and no question of one causing the other.

Then a theory of knowledge in three kinds. The first is imagination, built from sensory encounters and hearsay, which is confused and the only source of falsity. The second is reason, which grasps what is common to things and is always true. The third is intuitive knowledge, which proceeds from an adequate idea of God’s attributes to an adequate idea of particular things, and is what Part V is aiming at.

Part III: the emotions. The famous preface announces the method: previous writers have treated human passions as faults or absurdities outside nature, and he will treat human actions and appetites as if they were lines, planes and bodies.

At the centre is conatus, the striving by which each thing endeavours to persist in its own being, which is nothing other than its actual essence. From it he derives three primary affects, desire, joy and sadness, and defines the rest as compounds. Joy is the transition to greater power, sadness to less; love is joy with the idea of an external cause; hatred is sadness with one. He then generates dozens of emotions, including some nobody had named, with the flat precision of a taxonomy.

Part IV: bondage. Why we are at the mercy of our feelings. A passion is an affect of which we are not the adequate cause, arising from inadequate ideas, and it can only be checked by a stronger affect, never by an act of will or by knowing better in the abstract. Reason helps by producing its own affects, and by locating what is genuinely useful to us. Spinoza’s answer to what that is: other people, since nothing is more useful to a human being than another human being living under the guidance of reason, and he argues that a society of rational people would be cooperative for reasons of self-interest correctly understood. It is here that the free man is said to think of nothing less than death.

Part V: freedom. The remedy is understanding. We are passive toward what we do not comprehend; when we form a clear idea of an affect it ceases to be a passion, because the mind is now the adequate cause of its own state. Freedom therefore is not the absence of causes, which is impossible, but being determined by one’s own nature.

The final propositions turn to what Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God, an understanding of things under the aspect of eternity, and to the claim that something of the mind is eternal. Readers have argued since about what he means and whether it is consistent with everything before it. The book ends on the proposition that blessedness is not virtue’s reward but virtue itself, followed by a single sentence: all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

How to read it

Read the appendix to Part I first, out of order. It is prose, it is fierce, and it tells you what the geometry is for.

Then read the definitions and axioms of Part I, the propositions as statements, and all the scholia. Come back for the demonstrations later, if at all.

Read the preface to Part III and then the definitions of the affects at the end of it. The taxonomy of emotions is the part of the book that has aged best and it is readable on its own.

Get a companion. Stuart Hampshire’s short study and Steven Nadler’s introduction are both good, and Nadler’s biography explains the expulsion and the world Spinoza lived in.

Do not read God as a synonym for a personal deity being politely relocated. Spinoza’s contemporaries called him an atheist and they had a case; Novalis later called him a God-intoxicated man and he had one too. Working out which is right, or why both feel apt, is the best question the book offers.

Questions it raises

• If there is only one substance and you are a mode of it, in what sense are you a thing at all?
• Spinoza denies free will and writes an ethics. What is left for an ethics to do?
• An affect can only be overcome by a stronger affect, and understanding is said to produce one. Does knowing why you are angry actually reduce the anger?
• The appendix to Part I explains away purposes as human projection. Can that account handle our own purposes without dissolving them too?
• Part V claims something of the mind is eternal. Is that consistent with Part II, and is it a consolation to anyone?
• Was Spinoza an atheist? Both answers have distinguished defenders, and the disagreement may be the most interesting thing about the book.