Ethics

Ethics by Baruch Spinoza (1677)

Spinoza’s Ethics proceeds by definitions, axioms, and propositions to argue that there is only one substance: God, an absolutely infinite being whose essence necessarily includes existence. Substance is self-caused, eternal, infinite, indivisible, and cannot be produced by anything external. God possesses infinite attributes, of which thought and extension are named; all things are modes of these attributes. Nothing can exist or be conceived apart from God, who is the indwelling, efficient, and first cause of all things. Everything follows from the necessity of the divine nature in a fixed order. God acts only through the laws of his own nature and is free only in the sense that nothing external constrains him. Divine power and divine essence are identical. There is no contingency in nature: finite things are determined by other finite causes in an infinite chain, while all things ultimately follow from God. Nature viewed as active is God or the attributes expressing infinite essence; nature viewed as passive is the totality of modes that follow from God. The work rejects the belief that God acts through free will, pursues ends, or arranges nature for human benefit. Final causes arise because people know their desires but not the causes determining them. They mistake useful things for purposes designed for them, imagine divine rulers with human passions, and explain adversity as punishment. Ideas of good and bad, beauty and ugliness, order and confusion, praise and blame are likewise shown to depend largely on human imagination, bodily disposition, and utility rather than on the nature of things. Perfection belongs to things according to their own power and nature, not according to their service or offense to mankind. Thought and extension are attributes of God. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things: a body and the idea of that body are one and the same individual expressed through different attributes. The human mind is the idea of the human body, and it perceives whatever happens in that body. Since the body is complex and affected by other bodies, the mind can perceive many things, but it ordinarily knows itself, its own body, and external bodies only through modifications of its body. Imagination occurs when the mind regards bodies once affecting it as present, even when they are absent. Memory is an association of ideas following the association of bodily modifications. Such perceptions are fragmentary and confused because they reveal more about the constitution of one’s own body than about external things themselves. Falsity is not something positive in an idea but a privation of knowledge contained in inadequate ideas. Adequate knowledge arises from what is common to bodies and equally present in whole and part. Common notions ground reason, while imagination and knowledge from experience or symbols constitute the first kind of knowledge. Reason is the second kind; intuition, proceeding from adequate knowledge of God’s attributes to the essence of things, is the third. The first kind alone produces falsity; the second and third are necessarily true. A true idea includes awareness of its own truth. Reason understands things not as contingent but as necessary, under a form of eternity. The human mind has no absolute free will. Every volition is determined by another cause, and will is not a faculty separate from ideas: each affirmation or negation belongs to the idea it affirms or denies. Will and understanding are therefore one and the same. The belief in freedom comes from consciousness of actions joined to ignorance of their causes. Human emotions are treated as natural phenomena. The mind is active insofar as it has adequate ideas and passive insofar as it has inadequate ones. Mind cannot determine body, nor body mind; their states correspond because they are the same thing conceived under thought and extension. Every individual strives to persist in its being, and this endeavour is its actual essence. In the mind this endeavour is will; in mind and body together it is appetite; desire is appetite accompanied by consciousness. Pleasure is a transition to greater perfection, pain a transition to lesser perfection, and desire one of the three primary emotions. Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause; hate is pain accompanied by such an idea. The mind seeks images that increase its power and resists those that diminish it. Because associated images revive associated emotions, things can accidentally become objects of love or hate through sympathy, antipathy, resemblance, or remembered circumstances. Past and future things affect people through their images as present things do. Hope is inconstant pleasure concerning a doubtful future or past outcome; fear is corresponding inconstant pain; confidence and despair arise when doubt is removed; joy and disappointment concern outcomes once doubted. Love and hate extend to whatever helps or harms their objects. Pity is pain at another’s hurt; approval is love toward one who benefits another; indignation is hatred toward one who injures another; envy rejoices at another’s harm and grieves at another’s advantage. People imitate the emotions of those they regard as like themselves. This imitation produces compassion, emulation, benevolence, ambition, and the wish that others share one’s own loves and hatreds. Pride is pleasure from thinking too highly of oneself; over-esteem and disdain concern excessive or insufficient estimation of others. Rivalry for something only one can possess produces envy. The desire for reciprocal love can become jealousy: a wavering compounded of love, hatred, and envy when a loved object is imagined as bound to a rival.

By Baruch Spinoza · First published 1677 · Genre: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ethics · 5 chapters · 110,215 words

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I. By that which is self-caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.

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philosophy · metaphysics · rationalism · ethics · God · nature · substance monism · determinism · free will · mind-body relation · emotions · reason

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