Benedict Spinoza, "Ethics": summary, main points

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The masterpiece of modern ethics, Spinoza's Ethics, was completed in 1675. However, the author delayed publication after he was told that it would cause an even greater scandal than his Theological-Political Treatise. In the end, the book was published on the initiative of the friends of the Dutch philosopher a few months after his death, in 1677.

Axiomatic method

The main tenets of Spinoza's Ethics are presented in the form of a geometric proof in the style of Euclid's Elements, although the more immediate inspiration was probably Proclus's Institutio Theologica ("The Fundamentals of Theology"), an axiomatic presentation of Neoplatonic metaphysics compiled in V in. The author apparently believed that the geometric presentation of ideas would be clearer than the traditional narrative style of his early work. So he started with a set of definitions of key terms and a number of self-evident "axioms" and deduced "theorems" from them.or statements.

I part of Spinoza's "Ethics" does not contain introductory or explanatory materials to help the reader. Apparently, the author initially considered it unnecessary. Nevertheless, towards the middle of Part I, he added various notes and observations to make the reader understand the significance of the conclusions to which he arrived. By the end of Part I, the content of Spinoza's Ethics was supplemented with polemical essays and introductions to various topics. Thus, the form of the work as a whole is a mixture of axiomatic evidence and philosophical narrative.

Inspirations

Spinoza's "Ethics" is based on three Jewish sources that were probably familiar to the author from his early intellectual life.

The first is the "Love Dialogues" by Leon Ebreo (also known as Yehuda Abrabanel), written at the beginning of the 16th century. Spinoza's library had a copy of this book in Spanish. It is the source of the key phrases that the Dutch philosopher uses at the end of Part V to describe the culmination of human intellectual activity, namely the observation of the world "from the point of view of eternity", with "intellectual love of God" as its ultimate goal.

Spinoza also used at least one argument from the 15th-century Spanish Jewish philosopher Hasdai ben Abraham Crescas, whose critique of Aristotle was printed in the mid-16th century in Hebrew.

Finally, the author seems to have had access to The Gates of Heaven by Abraham Cohen de Herrera, the most philosophically sophisticated Kabbalist of the 17th century. A student of Isaac ben Solomon Luria and an early member of the Amsterdam community, Herrera knew a great deal of ancient Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophy, and was familiar with Kabbalistic thought. Heaven's Gate - his main work, which was distributed in Amsterdam in Spanish - appeared in Hebrew in an abridged version in 1655

Ontology and "Ethics" of Spinoza

The book is an ambitious and multifaceted work. It is ambitious because it refutes all the traditional philosophical concepts of God, the Universe and man of that time. The method of the Dutch philosopher is to demonstrate the truth about the Supreme, nature, man, religion and the common good, using definitions, axioms, consequences and scholia, that is, mathematically.

Benedict Spinoza's "Ethics" is indeed the best summary of his philosophy.

Although the work covers theology, anthropology, ontology and metaphysics, the author chose the term "ethics" because, in his opinion, happiness is achieved by liberation from superstitions and passions. In other words, ontology is seen as a way to demystify the world and allow a person to live intelligently.

"Ethics" summary

Spinoza begins by defining 8 terms: cause of self, finite in its kind, substance, attribute, mode, God, freedom and eternity. Then follows a series of axioms, one of which supposedly guarantees that the results of logical demonstrations will be true with respect to reality. spinoza fastcomes to the conclusion that the substance must exist, be independent and unlimited. From this he proves that there cannot be two substances with the same attribute, since then they would limit each other. This leads to the monumental conclusion from Theorem 11 that the Supreme, or substance, which consists of countless attributes expressing an infinite and eternal essence, must exist.

From the definition of the Creator as a substance with countless attributes and other judgments about the essence, it follows that apart from God, no substance can be imagined, nor can there be any substance (theorem 14), everything exists in God, without which nothing can exist representable, nor exist (Theorem 15). This is the core of Spinoza's metaphysics and ethics. God is everywhere and everything that exists is a modification of God. He is known to people only by his two attributes - thinking and extension (the quality of possessing spatial dimensions), although the number of His attributes is infinite. Later, in Part I of the Ethics, Spinoza establishes that everything that happens necessarily follows from the nature of God, and that there can be no unforeseen circumstances in it. The section ends with an attached polemic about the misunderstanding of the world by religious and superstitious people who think that the Almighty can change the course of events, and that the course of events sometimes reflects divine judgment on human behavior.

God or Nature

Under the Supreme, the author means an absolutely infinite being, a substance thatconsists of countless attributes expressing an infinite, eternal essence. God has no limit, necessarily exists and is the only substance in the universe. There is only one substance in the Universe - the Most High, and everything is in Him.

The following is a summary of Spinoza's Ethics about God:

1. By nature, substance is primary to its states.
2. Substances with different attributes have nothing in common.
3. If something has nothing to do with the other, then they cannot be the causes of each other.
4. Things differ in attributes of substances or modes.
5. Substances of the same nature can exist in nature.
6. Substance cannot be produced from another.
7. Substance inherent existence.
8. Substance is necessarily infinite.
9. Thing with more reality or being has more attributes.
10. Attributes of one substance must be represented through themselves.
11. God, or substance, which consists of an infinite number of attributes expressing an eternal and infinite essence, must exist.
12. No attribute of a substance can be represented by a concept from which it follows that this substance can be divided.
13. Absolutely infinite substance is indivisible.
14. No substance other than God can neither exist nor be represented.

This proves that the Creator is infinite, necessary and without reason, in three easy steps. First, Spinoza argues that two substances can share an essence or attribute. Then heproves the existence of a substance with innumerable attributes. It follows that its existence excludes the existence of any other. Because in this case there must be an attribute. However, God already has all the attributes. Therefore, there is no other substance besides Him.

God is the only substance, so everything else exists in Him. These things, which are in the attributes of the Almighty, the author calls modes.

What are the implications of this concept of God? In the Ethics, Spinoza sees Him as the immanent, universal cause that ensures the continuity of everything that exists. This represents a break with the God of Revelation, who is presented as the transcendent cause in the world. According to Spinoza, the world necessarily exists because the divine substance has the attribute of existence, whereas in the Judeo-Christian tradition God could not create the world.

Proposition 29: Nothing in nature is accidental, everything is determined by the necessity of the action and existence of nature in a certain way.

However, there are differences in how things depend on God. Some parts of the Universe are directly and necessary controlled by the Creator: these are infinite modes that include the laws of physics, the truths of geometry, the laws of logic. Individual and concrete things are causally more distant from God. The final modes are violations of the attributes of the Almighty.

The Metaphysics of the Creator of Spinoza is best summarized by the following sentence: "God or Nature." According to the philosopher, nature has two sides: active andpassive. First, there is God and his attributes, from which everything else follows: these are Natura naturans, that which nature creates. The rest, appointed by the Almighty and his attributes, is Natura naturata, what nature has already created.

Thus, Spinoza's fundamental insight in Part I is that nature is an indivisible whole, without cause, essential. There is nothing outside of it, and everything that exists is part of it. A unique nature, one and necessary, is what Spinoza calls God. Because of its inherent necessity, there is no teleology in the universe: nothing must end. The order of things simply follows God with unbreakable determinism. All talk of the plans, intentions, or purposes of the Almighty is simply anthropomorphic fiction.

Spinoza and Descartes

In the second part of the "Ethics" Benedict Spinoza considers two attributes through which people understand the world - thinking and extension. The latter form of understanding develops in the natural sciences, and the former in logic and psychology. For Spinoza, unlike Descartes, it is not a problem to explain the interaction between mind and body. They are not separate entities causally interacting with each other, but simply different aspects of the same events. Spinoza accepted Descartes' mechanistic physics as the correct way to understand the world in terms of extension. Separate essences of the body or spirit are "modes" of substance: bodily - in terms of the attribute of extension, and mental - thinking. Since God is the only substance, thenall essences of body and spirit are His modes. Since the modes are created by nature and are transient, the Supreme, or substance, is eternal.

Man

II part is devoted to the ethics of the personality of Spinoza, the origin and nature of people. The two attributes of God that we know are stretching and thinking.

If the Supreme is material, it does not mean that He has a body. Indeed, God is not matter itself, but an extension of its essence, since extension and thinking are two different attributes that have nothing in common. The modes of extension are the physical organs, and the modes of thought are the ideas. Since they have nothing in common, the spheres of matter and mind are causally closed systems and are heterogeneous.

One of the pressing problems of 17th-century philosophy, and perhaps the most famous legacy of Descartes' dualism, is the problem of the relationship between two radically different substances, such as mind and body, the question of their union and their interaction. Briefly, in the Ethics, Spinoza denies that man is a combination of two substances. His mind and body are expressions of one thing: man. And since there is no interaction between mind and body, there is no problem.

Knowledge

The human mind, like God, has ideas. Spinoza analyzes the composition of man in detail, since his goal is to show that he is part of nature, in contrast to those who think of man as an empire within an empire. This has serious ethical implications. First, it means that people are deprived of their freedom. Since the mind and events in consciousness are ideas existing in a causal seriesideas that come from God, our actions and our will are necessarily predetermined, like other natural events. Spirit intends to desire this or that for a reason that is determined by another reason, and so on ad infinitum.

According to Spinoza, nature is always the same, and its power to act is the same everywhere. Our feelings, our love, our anger, our hatred, our desires, our pride, are governed by the same necessity.

Our affects are divided into active and passive states. When the cause of an event lies in our own nature, more precisely in our knowledge or adequate ideas, then it is an action. But when something happens for an inadequate reason (outside of our nature), then we are passive. Since the Spirit is active or passive, Spinoza says that the mind increases or decreases its capacity to be. He calls conatus, a kind of existential inertia, our tendency to persist in being.

Freedom is the rejection of evil passions, those that make us passive, in favor of joyful passions that make us active and therefore autonomous. Passions are associated with knowledge, ideas sufficient for human storage. In other words, he must free himself from our dependence on feelings and imagination, from what influences us, and rely as much as possible on rational abilities.

Joy enhances our power to act. All human emotions, because they are passive, are directed outward. Awakened by desires and passions, we seek or avoidthose things to which we attribute the cause of joy or sadness.

The Path to Freedom

Physical modes, which are biological, have a property different from simple extension, namely conatus ("tension" or "effort"), the desire for self-preservation. Unconsciously, biological fashions are also driven by the emotions of fear and pleasure in acting in a certain way. People as biological modes are in a state of slavery as long as they act exclusively emotionally. In Part V of the Ethics (Freedom of Man), Spinoza explains that freedom is achieved by understanding the power of emotions over man's actions, by rationally accepting things and events that he does not control, and by increasing his knowledge and improving his intellect. The highest form of knowledge consists of the intellectual intuition of things in their existence as modes and attributes of eternal substance, or God. This corresponds to the vision of the world from the point of view of eternity. This kind of knowledge leads to a deeper understanding of God, who is all things, and ultimately to intellectual love for the Supreme, a form of bliss that constitutes a rational-mystical experience.

Virtue and happiness

Virtue, according to Spinoza, is the path to happiness. It is to live, knowing nature. The mind lives according to conatus and seeks what is good for us. Finite knowledge, or knowledge of the third kind, refers to the understanding of the essence of things, not their temporal dimension, but from the point of view of eternity. Ultimately, it is the knowledge of God that leadshappiness, which is the goal of man.

In short, Spinoza's "Ethics" is similar to Stoicism, which claims that worldly vanity distracts us, and only fatalism can free us from sorrow. The wise understand what is an integral part of nature and are pleased with it. He is free and independent, because, following nature, he is in perfect harmony with it, knowing God.