Ethics

The most radical book of the seventeenth century, written so carefully that it took a hundred years for anyone to admit they agreed with it. Spinoza argues that there is one thing, that it is not a person, that we are parts of it, and that understanding this is the only freedom available.

Date: 1677
Author: Baruch Spinoza
Region: The Dutch Republic
Language: Latin

The translation record

1677 Dutch, anonymous Published simultaneously with the Latin Attested
1883 English, R. H. M. Elwes Public domain Attested
1994 English, Edwin Curley The scholarly standard; in copyright Attested

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Reply — Answers a named earlier work
Form: Treatise
Method: Geometric — Definitions, axioms and propositions in order
Transmission: Suppressed — Held back, banned or circulated privately before print
Standing: Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Years back to what it answers: 36 years

Banned by the Dutch authorities within a year of publication, treated as a synonym for atheism for a century, and one of the most actively worked-on texts in philosophy today.

What the book says

A book about how to live, written in the form of a geometry textbook, with definitions, axioms, propositions and proofs, and the word demonstrated at the end of each. Part one establishes that there is only one substance. A substance is what exists in itself and is conceived through itself; two substances could not share an attribute; and a substance with all attributes leaves nothing for a second one to be. That single substance is what Spinoza calls God or Nature - not a person, not a maker standing outside the world, but the one thing there is, of which everything else is a modification. Part two applies this to mind and body, which are not two things interacting but the same thing under two attributes, thought and extension. Part three treats the emotions as effects with causes, to be studied like lines and planes rather than deplored. Parts four and five are the ethics proper: we are unfree to the extent that we are pushed about by passions whose causes we do not understand, and free to the extent that we understand them, because an emotion understood is no longer the same emotion. The last part describes the intellectual love of God, which is the mind's understanding of itself as part of the whole.

What it argues

That everything follows necessarily from the nature of what exists, and that freedom is understanding rather than exemption. Nothing is contingent; nothing could have been otherwise; God does not choose because choosing implies an alternative and there was none. Human beings are not, as Spinoza puts it, a kingdom within a kingdom - we are not exceptions to nature but instances of it, and the sense that we act freely comes from being aware of our desires and unaware of their causes. The ethical consequence is not fatalism. An emotion that is understood is thereby changed, because the understanding is itself a state of the mind, and a person who grasps the causes of their anger is no longer moved in the same way. Blame and merit dissolve; the project of becoming less pushed about does not.

What it answered

Descartes, structurally, and the whole picture of a God who legislates and a soul who obeys. The theological argument had been made in his earlier book: scripture is a historical document to be read like any other, prophets were people with strong imaginations, miracles reported are events not understood, and religion's function is obedience rather than truth. The Ethics does the metaphysics that position requires.

How it argues

In the geometrical order, which is a philosophical claim rather than a stylistic choice. If everything follows necessarily from the nature of things, then the right form for describing it is one in which each proposition follows necessarily from what precedes. The effect on a reader is peculiar: the demonstrations are hard to follow and the scholia - long informal notes attached to propositions - are where Spinoza says what he means, often with heat. Most readers live in the scholia and take the proofs on trust, which is not what he intended and is how the book is usually taught.

The moment

Amsterdam and The Hague, in the most tolerant state in Europe and not tolerant enough. Spinoza was expelled from his Jewish community at twenty-three in terms of unusual violence, ground lenses for a living, declined a professorship at Heidelberg on the grounds that it would constrain him, and published almost nothing under his own name. His earlier book was condemned by Calvinists, Catholics and Jews alike. He held the Ethics back and died at forty-four, probably of a lung disease from glass dust.

How it travelled

Underground for a century, then everywhere. The posthumous works were banned by the States of Holland in 1678; Spinozist became a term of abuse meaning atheist, applied to people who had not read him. In the 1780s a public quarrel in Germany over whether Lessing had been a Spinozist made him suddenly central, and Goethe, Herder, Hegel and Schelling all engaged with him. Nineteenth-century readers made him a saint of philosophy. In the twentieth century Deleuze and others revived him again, and he is now among the most intensively studied figures of the period.

The strongest objection

That the geometrical form conceals rather than secures. The demonstrations depend on definitions that are stipulated at the outset, and a reader who does not grant the definition of substance is not compelled by anything that follows - which means the apparatus of proof is doing less work than its appearance suggests. Critics from Leibniz onward have said that the first fifteen propositions decide everything and are themselves undefended. The related objection is ethical: if no one could have acted otherwise, it is unclear what remains of the difference between improving oneself and simply changing, and Spinoza's answer, that understanding is itself the improvement, is elegant but leaves the notion of the better doing work his metaphysics has not obviously earned.

Why read it

Read the appendix to part one, which is a few pages of plain prose and contains the whole attack on purpose in nature, and then the scholia throughout parts three and four. The proofs can be sampled rather than followed on a first reading. Curley's translation is the one to use, and a companion is not a luxury.

Where to read it

First printed: 1677
First in English: 1883
Digitised: Yes

Published in the Opera Posthuma of 1677 with the author's name reduced to initials, and simultaneously in Dutch. The Vatican later acquired a manuscript copy, rediscovered in 2010, which differs from the printed text in places.

Elwes' 1883 English is public domain. Curley's is the scholarly standard and is in copyright.

Where it stands

Live. Spinoza is a working reference point in metaphysics on substance and modality, in philosophy of mind on the identity of mental and physical, and in ethics on whether responsibility survives determinism. The revival is not antiquarian; people argue with him as a contemporary.

On quoting this book

The Latin is public domain and Elwes' English is too, but the technical vocabulary in that version is misleading at the points that matter. Nothing is quoted.

Contested

Whether Spinoza is an atheist who used the word God tactically or a genuine pantheist has been argued since publication and remains open. Whether the geometrical method is essential or a presentational choice is disputed. The manuscript copy found in the Vatican in 2010 differs from the printed text at points and has reopened questions about what the posthumous editors did. And the reasons for his expulsion from the Amsterdam Jewish community at twenty-three are not documented; the ban survives, the grounds do not.