Ethics by Baruch Spinoza

First published:Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata, 1677 (English translation, 1870)

Type of work: Philosophy

The Work

A geometric demonstration of ethics is a novelty in the history of thought, but Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics is famous not because of, but in spite of, its novelty of method. The principal advantage of the method is that it reveals Spinoza’s thought as clearly as possible. Although the demonstrations may not satisfy critics who concern themselves only with definitions and logical form, they are strongly persuasive for those who, already committed to the love of the good and of God, need clarity and structure in their thoughts.

Spinoza begins with definitions, proceeds to axioms (unproved but acceptable), and then moves to propositions and demonstrations. If one wishes to find fault with Spinoza’s argument, any place is vulnerable: One can quarrel about the definitions, doubt the truth of the axioms, or question the validity of the demonstrations. To reject the book, however, one would need to question the integrity of Spinoza’s spirit.

It has long been regarded an error in philosophy to attempt to deduce what people ought to do from a study of what people do, but what Spinoza attempts is a deduction of what people ought to do from a study of what must be, according to his definitions and axioms. The primary criticism of his method, then, is not that he errs—although most critics find errors in Spinoza—but that he tries to use logical means to derive ethical truths. The criticism depends on the assumption that ethical truths are either matters of fact, not of logic, or they are not truths at all but, for example, emotive expressions.

Spinoza begins Ethics with definitions of cause, finite, substance, attribute, mode, free, eternity, and God, the last term being defined to mean “Being absolutely infinite, that is to say, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” To understand this definition one must relate it to the definitions of the terms within it—such as “substance,” “finite,” and “attribute”—but one must also resist the temptation to identify the term, so defined, with any conventionally used term. Spinoza’s God is quite different from other conceptions. The point of the definition is that what Spinoza means by God is whatever is “conceived through itself” (its substance), has no limit to its essential characteristics (has infinite attributes), and maintains its character eternally. As one might suspect, the definition of God is crucial.

The axioms contain such logical and semantical truths as “I. Everything which is, is either in itself or in another”; “II. That which cannot be conceived through another must be conceived through itself”; “VI. A true idea must agree with that of which it is the idea”; and “VII. The essence of that thing which can be conceived as not existing does not involve existence.” At first, the axioms may be puzzling, but they are not as extraordinary as they seem. Axiom number 7, for example, means only that anything that can be thought of as not existing does not, by its nature, have to exist.

The propositions begin as directly implied by the definitions: “I. Substance is by its nature prior to its modifications” follows from the definitions of substance and mode, and “II. Two substances having different attributes have nothing in common with one another” is another consequence of the definition of substance. As the propositions increase, the proofs become longer, making reference not only to definitions but also to previous propositions and their corollaries. For those interested in technical philosophy, the proofs are intriguing, even when they are unconvincing, but for others they are unnecessary; the important thing is to understand Spinoza’s central idea.

Proposition 11 is important in preparing the way for Spinoza’s main contention: “XI. God or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.” Although one may be tempted to seize upon this proposition as an instrument to use against atheists, it is necessary to remember that the term God is a technical term for Spinoza and has little, if anything, to do with the object of religious worship.

Proposition 14 makes the startling claim that “Besides God no substance can be nor can be conceived.” A corollary of this proposition is the idea that God is one; that is, everything that exists, all of nature, is God. Individual things do not, by their natures, exist, but only through God’s action, and God is not only the cause of their existence but also of their natures (24, 25). Readers might expect, consequently, that a great deal of the universe is contingent; that is, it depends upon something other than itself and need not be as it is. Spinoza argues in proposition 24 that “In Nature, there is nothing contingent, but all things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain manner.” Consequently, the human will is not free but necessary (32). This was one of the ideas that made Spinoza unpopular with both Jews and Christians.

Having used part 1 of Ethics to develop the conception of God, Spinoza goes on in part 2, after presenting further definitions and axioms, to explain the nature and the origin of mind. He concludes that “In the mind there is no absolute or free will.” (48). In part 2, he also develops the idea that God is a thinking and extended being.

In part 3, “On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions,” Spinoza argues that emotions are confused ideas. “Our mind acts at times and at times suffers,” he contends in proposition 1 of part 3; “in so far as it has adequate ideas, it necessarily acts; and in so far as it has inadequate ideas, it necessarily suffers.” One should note that Spinoza defines emotion as any modification of the body “by which the power of acting of the body itself is increased, diminished, helped, or hindered, together with the ideas of these modifications.”

By this time, Spinoza creates the idea that God, as both thinking and extended substance, is such that all nature is both thinking and extended (since everything that is must be part of God). Another way of expressing this idea is that everything that exists does so both as body and as idea. Thus, the human being exists as both body and idea. If the human being, as idea, does not adequately comprehend the modifications of the human body, the mind suffers.

In part 4, “Of Human Bondage: Or, Of the Strength of the Emotions,” Spinoza defines the good as “that which we certainly know is useful to us.” In a series of propositions, he develops the ideas that each person necessarily desires what is considered to be good; that in striving to preserve his or her being, a person acquires virtue; and that the desire to be happy and to live well involves desiring to act, to live, “that is to say, actually to exist.” In this attempt to relate freedom to one’s will to act, and in the identification of the good with the striving toward existence, Spinoza anticipated much of the more significant work of the twentieth century existentialists.

In proposition 28 of part 4, Spinoza writes that “The highest good of the mind is the knowledge of God, and the highest virtue of the mind is to know God.” This claim is prepared for by previous propositions relating the good to what is desired, the desire to action, action to being, and being to God. Because of the intricacy of Spinoza’s argument, it becomes possible for him to argue that to seek being, to seek the good, to use reason, and to seek God are one and the same. To use reason involves coming to have adequate ideas, having adequate ideas involves knowing the nature of things, knowing the nature of things involves knowing God.

It might appear that Spinoza’s philosophy, for all its references to God, is egoistic, in that this crucial phase of his argument depends upon the claim that all people seek to preserve their own beings. A full examination of part 4, however, shows that Spinoza transcends the egoistic base of action by arguing that to serve the self best, one uses reason; but to use reason is to seek an adequate idea of God and, consequently, to seek what is good for all people. In fact, Spinoza specifically states that whatever causes people to live in harmony with one another is profitable and good, and that whatever brings discord is evil.

A person’s highest happiness or blessedness, according to Spinoza, is “the peace of mind which springs from the intuitive knowledge of God.” This conclusion is consistent with Spinoza’s ideas that humanity’s good consists in escaping from the human bondage of the passions, that to escape from the passions is to understand the causes that affect the self, that to understand the causes involves action, and that action leads to God.

When, through rational action, people come to determine themselves, they participate in the essence of all being; they become so at one with God that they possess an intellectual love of God, which is humanity’s blessedness and virtue. The eternal is known only by the eternal; hence, in knowing God, one becomes eternal—not in a finite or individual way, but as part of God’s being.

Spinoza is usually bracketed with René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as a rationalist philosopher. Eschewing the approach of the classic philosophers and the Scholastics alike, Spinoza relies almost exclusively on reason, devoid of any imaginative or theological superstructures, to develop his system of metaphysics. Like Descartes, he finds the method of the mathematician the best approach to philosophical inquiry; in identifying and developing the logical relationships between statements about the world, he is able to show how all things are related causally. Unlike Descartes, however, he does not hesitate to question traditional notions of God and construct a metaphysics that eliminates the need for a conventional deity.

The system Spinoza presents in all of his writings, but especially in Ethics, has been described alternatively as pantheistic and atheistic. Although he makes frequent references to God, Spinoza is not simply another in the line of Scholastic philosophers who, like St. Thomas Aquinas, devoted his life to proving the rationality of theological belief. Spinoza’s God is not a personal, transcendent being on whom all creation depends; for Spinoza, God is equivalent to Nature, an infinite substance in whom all finite substances reside. God and all that people generally consider creation are actually one. A similar monism characterizes Spinoza’s view of mind and body; these two aspects of human nature, often described as dualistic components of humanity, are, for Spinoza, merely different modes of expressing the essential “oneness” of humanity—which, in turn, is simply an expression and extension of the infinite substance, which he calls God.

Within his highly structured mathematical approach, Spinoza devotes considerable attention to the notion of human desires and emotions. Reversing the traditional Aristotelian notion that people innately desire what is good, Spinoza argues that whatever one desires becomes viewed as a good. A large part of the central sections of Ethics is devoted to explaining how people may overcome emotions and desires to reach a genuine understanding of what is truly good, and come to some appreciation of the infinite.

This complicated and highly theoretical system of metaphysics was castigated by Spinoza’s contemporaries, and, for more than a century after his death, his works were little more than footnotes in the history of philosophy. His insistence that God is simply a part of nature and not a distinct being worthy of reverence led to charges of atheism; his complex analysis of philosophical questions, organized in the form of geometric propositions, caused many in the seventeenth century to dismiss him as too obscure. Not until the rise of romanticism did his ideas—with their overtones of pantheism and insistence on the essential unity of all reality—become popular with thinkers and writers. Then they were embraced enthusiastically by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England. Since the eighteenth century, Spinoza has risen in stature to become one of the most revered thinkers in European philosophy. He has been linked with the Stoics, who also found little real freedom in human activities and believed that much of human behavior was determined by forces that people simply could not identify. He also has been described as a kind of Socrates, working diligently to uncover the truth despite the hardships he experienced in his own life.

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