INTRODUCTION
This Latin masterpiece is a logic nerd’s wet dream: a Euclidean proof built upon definitions and axioms. I will provide a brief overview of the Ethics and my interpretation of the free man’s quest to love God.
.
.
.
RESOURCES
Edwin Curley’s Translation (pp. 121-312)
David S. Leon’s (Much Funnier) Summary:
Introduction – 2000 words
Part I: Of God – 8000 words
Part II: Of the Mind – 9000 words
Part III: Of the Affects – 12,000 words
Part IV: Of Human Bondage – 13,000 words
Part V: Of Human Freedom – 10,000 words
Stanford Encyclopedia’s Entry - 10,000 words
Metaphysics Video - 20 minutes
.
.
.
KEY CONCEPTS
Concerning God or Nature
Monism: Spinoza defines substance as what exists in itself and is conceived through itself. Spinoza’s God, or Nature (Deus sive Natura), is a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each expressing eternal and infinite essence—not an anthropomorphic being.
Nature of God: God is the infinite, self-caused, and indivisible substance of the universe. Everything exists within God as a) modes or b) affections of God's infinite attributes.
Determinism: Everything follows causally and necessarily from the divine nature. Free will does not exist in the traditional sense but rather stems from an incomplete understanding of the causes of events.
Attributes: Humans can only understand two of God’s infinite attributes: thought and extension. There is no causal interaction between the two (they are closed systems), but they operate in parallel—every physical body corresponds to a particular idea.
“A mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways” (IIp7s).
Modes: Modes cannot exist independently; they exist in and are conceived through substance (i.e. they are finite and dependent on substance for existence).
Finite modes could be a rock, a chair, or a person.
Infinite modes could be the physical universe (infinite mode of extension) or the entirety of logical and mathematical truths (infinite mode of thought).
Concerning Knowledge and Passions.
Knowledge
Inadequate Ideas (First Kind): Imaginative knowledge is based on sensory experiences and imagination. It provides a partial, subjective, and often confused understanding of the world, leading to falsehoods and errors.
Reason (Second Kind): Adequate ideas are formed rationally, revealing the essences of things by understanding their causal and conceptual connections to God's attributes, and presenting things as necessary, not contingent. They show not only that a thing exists but also what it is, how, and why it exists.
Intuition (Third Kind): Intuition is a direct and immediate understanding of the essences of things sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity). This is the highest form of knowledge.
Conatus and Power: Conatus is a being’s drive to persist, and this existential inertia is the essence of any being. Power is the actual capacity to act and bring about effects that fulfill conatus:
For an object with low power (e.g. a rock) conatus may be expressed as striving to maintain its structure
For a creature with higher power (e.g. dandelions) conatus includes survival, growth, and reproduction
For a creature with even higher power (e.g. humans) conatus can mean physical survival, mental well-being, and intellectual fulfillment.
Affects
Affects: increases or decreases in our power of acting. All affects are passive or active, and actions can be based on either.
Passive Affects (Passions): arise from external causes and inadequate ideas.
Active Affects: arise from adequate ideas.
Reason can change passive to active affects, thus increasing power and conatus by aligning actions with true nature.
"An affect which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea thereof" (Vp3).
Primary Affects: I like to think of these as primary colors whose combinations form all others.
Joy (Laetitia): Joy is an affect by which the mind passes to a greater perfection or an increase in power. It is a positive affect that enhances one's conatus and leads to feelings of pleasure and contentment.
Sadness (Tristitia): Sadness is a passion by which the mind passes to a lesser perfection or a decrease in power. It is a negative affect that hinders one's conatus and leads to feelings of dissatisfaction and distress.
Desire (Cupiditas): Desire drives individuals to seek out things that they believe will increase or preserve their power of acting.
Desire is a particular expression of conatus; it is a way in which conatus is directed towards specific goals or objects.
Examples of Secondary Affects
Hope: An inconstant joy arising from the image of a future event whose outcome is uncertain.
Hate: Sadness accompanied by the awareness of its cause.
Fear: An inconstant sadness arising from the image of a future event whose outcome is uncertain.
Jealousy: A combination of love (joy) and sadness, often involving a perceived threat to a valued relationship.
Benevolence: the desire of benefiting one whom we pity.
Concerning Human Bondage
The Artificer and Perfection: A house is “perfect” if it is built to the artificer’s plans, so one who does not know the intention of the builder cannot determine its perfection (but most judge it anyhow).
Once we understand the necessity of things, we realize it is all perfect—that Nature cannot “fall short.”
Good and Bad: “Good” is whatever increases one’s power of acting (i.e. passes one to a higher level of perfection).
“Evil” or “bad” is whatever reduces it.
Thus the same thing—at the same time—can be good, bad, and indifferent for different people.
Egoism: All beings naturally seek their own advantage—to preserve their own being and increase their power—and it is right for them do so. Thus altruism (helping others at one’s own expense) does not exist.
Bondage: A man subject to the passions is in bondage since the subjects of passions are completely beyond our control.
Concerning Virtue and Freedom
Virtue: The path to restraining and moderating the affects is through virtue.
Freedom: Through virtue, we will be “free” to the extent that whatever happens to us will result not from our relations with things outside us, but from our own nature.
Knowledge is a Prerequisite: because we do not know whether changing a passive affect to an active one through adequate understanding increases or decreases power unless we have already done so.
The Free Man: bears the gifts and losses of fortune with equanimity and does only those things that he believes to be the most important in life.
He behaves in a manner that is typically regarded as ethical or even altruistic, but his actions do not arise from pity (or any other passion) but rather self-interest. His rational benevolence helps others achieve relief from passions through understanding, making them more like him and thus more useful to him.
He does not fear death. Nor does he hope for heaven. He knows that the soul is not immortal in a personal sense, but the more the mind holds true and adequate ideas (which are eternal), the more of it remains within God’s attribute of thought after the body's death.
The wise man is hardly troubled in spirit, but being, by a certain eternal necessity, conscious of himself, and of God, and of things, he never ceases to be, but always possesses true peace of mind. (Vp23s)
His intellectual love for God brings him Blessedness.
.
.
.
PATH OF BLESSEDNESS
Blessedness is wonderful. I understand it as the highest form of joy and serenity.
So how do we get there? The last proposition of the Ethics, Vp42, tells us there’s a path of blessedness and not a path to blessedness:
Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we enjoy it because we restrain our lusts; on the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them.
This is also why I think, while the five remedies for affects set out in Vp20s are alright, the true path is climbing the “Knowledge Scale” to Intuition.
We climb from Passion to Reason mainly through adequate ideas (i.e. understanding the what, how, and why), but the jump to Intuition is quite confusing. Spinoza tells us to understand things sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, but what does this mean?
The third kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of certain attributes of God [e.g. thought and extension] to an adequate knowledge of the essence of things, and the more we understand things in this way, the more we understand God .
I believe intuition ≡ blessedness. One achieves the highest joy if and only if one feels amor intellectualis Dei, an intellectual love for God. The key word here is feels.
I’ll discuss more in The One.
.
.
.
This post is part of Core Reading.