The Ethics is a book by the philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. Spinoza's friends published it after his death, in 1677. The work is notable, not only because it presents radically new theories across a range of fields -- metaphysics, theology, psychology, and ethics -- but also for the unusually rigorous approach it takes to defending them. Much of the book is written, in the style of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, as a series of geometrical proofs of numerous philosophical points, accompanied by definitions, axioms, demonstrations, and corollaries, as well as intervening stretches of friendlier prose (scholia).
The book is divided into five parts. Each begins with a glossary of key concepts and a list of axioms. The titles for each part are taken from Edwin Curley's standard translation of Ethics into English.
Contents |
The major claims of part 1 are as follows. First, there is only one substance: an eternal and infinite God. Second, the whole universe exists "in" God; nothing exists outside of him. Third, the universe, down to its last detail, couldn't possibly have been any other way than it actually is. On the last point, Spinoza asks us to think of the relationship between a triangle and its angles. From the nature of the triangle, it follows that its angles measure 180 degrees. Similarly, it follows from the nature of God that everything happens in the way that it does. In an appendix to this part, Spinoza criticizes the views that God has human characteristics, and that nature has an overall purpose.
Scholars have puzzled over Spinoza means when he says that everything exists "in" God. Some scholars (e.g., Edwin Curley) have argued that the non-divine things -- called modes -- are simply the effects of the substance. Others (e.g., Jonathan Bennett, Yitzhak Melamed) say that modes are more like features of the substance.
God (Nature) is a thinking thing, as well as being an extended thing. The way that ideas are related in a mind is the same as the way that things in the world are related to each other. Ideas of particular external things (modes) depend on the constitution of both the thinker's body and the external things. Association of ideas occurs after two bodies have been thought at one time. A mind knows an external body only as an idea of modifications of the mind's own body. True ideas (ideas that agree with their objects) are ideas that refer to God (Nature). Reason regards all things as necessary. Because a mind's wishes are always the effect of a previous cause, there is no freedom of the will.