Ethics (Penguin Classics)

Product Information

Spinoza considers how the affects, ungoverned, can torment people and make it impossible for mankind to live in harmony with one another. Some, such as Naess (1977), have gone further than this, arguing that Spinoza’s system provides a hospitable metaphysical background for ecology.

This conclusion is primarily a result of the conatus doctrine, since that doctrine forces Spinoza to deny that anyone can kill himself, strictly speaking. How Spinoza came to influence Schopenhauer is not clear, but one might speculate: it could have come from his exposure to Fichte's lectures, from his conversations with Goethe or simply from being caught up in the post- Kantian attempt to rethink the critical philosophy. All inadequate ideas have external causes (E3p1), so all passions are guaranteed to have external causes as well.

They take 'thought' to refer to the activity that is characteristic of minds, namely thinking, the exercise of mental power. One factor that determines the force with which an emotion strikes us is whether we conceive of its cause as present. Thus, to strip away the confusion from a passion would require one somehow to strip away some of its causes. This aspect of Spinoza's philosophy — his naturalism — was radical for its time, and perhaps even for today.

Still, his engagement with Spinozism is evident throughout his writings and attentive readers of his chief work may indeed note his ambivalence toward Spinoza's philosophy. If so, to follow the dictates of reason is just to be caused to behave in certain ways, which sits awkwardly alongside the thought that such dictates are prescriptive in any ordinary sense. Spinoza spends the latter sections of part of the Ethics developing a virtue theory of a fairly traditional sort, outlining which character traits and behaviors are virtues, and which are vices, in the conception of morality he has developed. Spinoza puts forward a small number of definitions and axioms from which he attempts to derive hundreds of propositions and corollaries, such as "When the Mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it", [2] "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death", [3] and "The human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which is eternal. Spinoza next links up his ethics with his theory of knowledge, and correlates the moral progress of man with his intellectual progress.This approach to overcoming a passion does not eliminate the affect that constitutes the passion, but merely eliminates that feature of the affect in virtue of which it constituted a passion. Spinoza’s reason for denying this is his pessimistic view of the prospects for humans overcoming all of their passions. In this way, a person may intentionally use irrational processes (memory and imagination) to safeguard his ability to act rationally: “he who will observe these [rules] carefully…and practice them, will soon be able to direct most of his actions according to the command of reason” (E5p10s, G II/289). Unlike many other authors in this period, however, Spinoza was strongly opposed to anthropocentrism and had no commitment whatsoever to traditional theological views. Schopenhauer, who detested these three philosophers to varying degrees of intensity, [39] also had a similarly ambivalent relation to the Dutch philosopher.

In this interpretation, premise (1) is Spinoza’s nod to the commonly held principle that ought implies can: you can be morally bound to do only something that you are able to do. Because of our need for one another’s aid—whether to study philosophy or gain security—we have reason to live together with others in society. Spinoza’s alternative approach was to stick to the most general definition: a substance is something that is “in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed” (E1d3). Perhaps the major difference between the Spinozist and the Hobbist approaches to egoism is that Spinoza provides a metaphysical argument for the view, in contrast to Hobbes’ psychological argument. The banks of the Ganges were their spiritual home; there they would have led a peaceful and honoured life among men of like mind.Locke, Hume, Leibniz and Kant all stand accused by later scholars of indulging in periods of closeted Spinozism. The moral realist, as Spinoza sees it, holds that in cases of moral judgment, we first recognize something to be good (for example), and then this results in our forming a desire for that thing.

This is another way in which rational affects gradually become stronger and eventually may overpower the passionate affects. Another way in which Spinoza attempts to make his moral theory easier to put into practice is by providing a virtue theory based on it.For an egoist, the question as to what is good for an individual is crucial, for the answer to this question will determine what that individual ought, morally, to do.