Michael LeBuffe

Spinoza denies at E1p5, on the basis of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, that two different substances can have the same nature. He argues at E1p8s2 and E2p10s that different human beings do have the same nature and that this justifies the conclusion that human beings are not substances. I argue that these commitments, together with further commitments in moral psychology and ethics, suggest that on Spinoza’s view human nature is real and that it is a single thing, which is a component of each individual human being. Where Spinoza writes that to the extent that human beings live from reason we agree in nature (E4p35), he means that in so acting we are one thing.

This chapter defends an interpretation of Spinoza's theory of error, on which the traditional identification of adequate ideas and true ideas in Spinoza is questioned. Although all ideas of imagination are confused, only those ideas of imagination that are themselves caused by other ideas of imagination may be false. This reading of Spinoza helps to explain his understanding of the mechanisms that underlie his prescriptive ethics; his relation to Descartes and Cartesian theories of error; and the importance of self-knowledge and intellectualism to his theory of human virtue. Any mind's ideas of imagination have two partial causes, external objects and the mind itself. Although these ideas will always remain confused to a degree, a better knowledge of the self can make them less confused, and less likely to lead to cognitive or practical error.

Spinoza is best regarded, not as a psychological egoist but as a kind of psychological hedonist. Bondage to passion is in part a person's inability to recognize the means to perseverance. It is argued in the chapter, however, that the most severe problem associated with bondage is a failure to recognize that _laetitia_, or joy, the affect that human minds associate with the ends of their desires, is obtained only where the power of a mind's striving to persevere in being increases. In such cases, we may seek ends altogether different from perseverance. Bondage, then, presents human minds with two tasks: to develop from self-knowledge a conscious desire to persevere in being, and to attain the means the means to perseverance.

This chapter defends an interpretation, informed by the results of earlier chapters, of Spinoza's puzzling claims about the mind's eternity in Part 5 of the _Ethics_. It is argued that Spinoza writes about the eternal part of the mind in temporal terms, as a thing that is immortal and that can change during life, because he takes people typically to understand eternity as sempiternity. Freedom, on Spinoza's account, is a more complete efficacy of a mind's adequate ideas during the course of a person's life. Because the eternal part of the mind does not change intrinsically in time, the degree of freedom that one can attain is a function of one's ability to overcome the influence of harmful passions.

This chapter defends an interpretation of Spinoza's theory of representation, the obscurity of which in Spinoza might otherwise present a problem for our understanding of how passions represent objects and so lead to error. In response to arguments by Wilson and Della Rocca, it is argued that Spinoza takes an idea of imagination to represent an external object in virtue of a causal relationship between that object and the affection in the human body that is identical to the idea. Representation is thus an extensional notion in Spinoza in the sense that it does not restrict the thought content of an idea. Nevertheless, Spinoza does characterize the thought content of ideas of imagination: human minds imagine external objects “as present” to them.

This chapter defends an interpretation of two accounts of value from the first half of the _Ethics_. The Providential Account from the Appendix to Part 1 of the _Ethics_ is presented as an account of the meaning of ‘good’ that is false but that people often hold and have a natural disposition to hold. Desire Satisfaction and Hedonic accounts, from _Ethics_ 3p9s and 3p39s respectively, are projective theories: they do not characterize people's understanding of ‘good’ but only describe the sorts of things that people find good. People always find what they desire and associate with _laetitia_ to be good, but, as the Providential Account shows, they do not often understand the good in these terms.

This chapter describes the metaphysical doctrines in the _Ethics_ that are most important to Spinoza's moral theory, including substance monism, necessity, determinism, mind–body parallelism, the denial of teleology in nature, and naturalism. It is argued that Spinoza's metaphysical doctrines are generally connected to his moral theory in four different ways. They show that central notions of received morality, including the notions of a providential God and of free will, are based upon false beliefs. They constrain Spinoza's revisionary moral theory. They form a basis for some of the revisionary theory's central arguments. Finally, God, as characterized by the metaphysical doctrines of Part 1 of the _Ethics_, is that the knowledge of which is the highest good of the mind.

This chapter defends an interpretation of Spinoza's claim that the knowledge of God is mind's highest good. Spinoza understands his _summum bonum_ in a traditional, Aristotelian sense: it is the best complete good. However, like Hobbes, Spinoza takes whatever is good to be instrumental, so it is unclear how he could take any good to be complete. It is argued that the usefulness of the knowledge of God for perseverance indicates but does not constitute its value. The chapter also attempts to reconcile Spinoza's intellectualism with the value that he places on biological life. Spinoza's association of the knowledge of God with self-knowledge suggests that it is the sort of knowledge that can give a mind the conscious desire to survive. The threat that suicidal and other harmful desires pose to those who are deeply in bondage to passion shows that this sort of knowledge does indeed have significant value as a means to biological survival.

This chapter introduces Spinoza's theory of _conatus_ or striving. It is argued that, despite a number of important historical precedents in Descartes, Hobbes, and the Stoics, Spinoza's theory is highly distinctive. One attractive interpretation, due principally to Curley, is that Spinoza's claim that we strive to persevere in being amounts to a kind of psychological egoism on which we all consciously desire, as much as we can, to persevere in being. The chapter raises questions about psychological egoism; about the relation between human desire and the affects, which are changes in the power of striving; and about the relation between perseverance and the affects in the ends of human desire.

This chapter defends an interpretation and assessment of Spinoza's formal definition of ‘good’ and of the other value terms prominently used in the _Ethics_. It is argued that Spinoza rejects the Providential Account of value and constructs his formal definitions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ at _Ethics_ 4d1 and 4d2 on a pragmatic basis. The Providential Account, because it based upon false claims about teleology in nature, interferes with the attainment of what human beings find valuable. The definition of the ‘good’ as what we know to be useful to us, by contrast, is based upon true claims and helps human beings to attain value. Pragmatism in Spinoza's formal theory of value helps to explain the variety of normative language in the _Ethics_ and to build a Spinozistic response to Hume's objection that one cannot derive ‘ought’ claims from ‘is’ claims.

In this chapter, it is argued that the explicit prescriptions to understand your passions and to remain cognizant of the active affects that oppose passions, which begin Part 5 of the _Ethics_, are adaptations of Cartesian rules for avoiding cognitive error in sense perception. The chapter offers interpretations of Spinoza's accounts of imagination, representation, inadequacy, confusion, and error. The connection between sense perception and imagination may be found in Spinoza's theory of imagination: both sensory ideas and human passions, on Spinoza's account, are ideas of imagination. So the techniques that apply to the control of sensory ideas will be similar to those that apply to the control of passion.

Spinoza claims at _Ethics_ 3p9 that the mind strives to persevere in being and is conscious of its striving. In this chapter it is argued that these claims do not imply a form of psychological egoism on which each person consciously desires to persevere in being to the extent that he can. Spinoza is committed to the view that each mind is conscious of its striving, but he is not committed to the view that this consciousness is veridical. Insofar as human minds strive from inadequate ideas, their desires are not restricted to the end of perseverance, which is best understood as the characteristic effect of human action as a total efficient cause.

This chapter defends a classification, derived from an understanding of bondage, of the different kinds of normative claims in the _Ethics_ and of how each contributes to freedom. The classification suggests that Spinoza offers, in the end, a modest and cautious theory about how an ordinary person should live. His normative ethics includes: very few explicit prescriptions that human minds should follow in order to control passion to the extent that we can; descriptions, in a variety of language, of goods that different people in different situations might find useful to perseverance; and descriptions of what the free man does, which help people to diagnose their own conditions and to know whether, in given situations, they act freely.

This book defends a comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's enlightened vision of human excellence, including his theories of good and evil, virtue, perfection, and freedom. Spinoza holds that what is fundamental to human morality is the fact that we find things to be good or evil, not what we take those designations to mean. When we come to understand the conditions under which we act—that is, when we come to understand the sorts of beings that we are and the ways in which we interact with things in the world—then we can recast traditional moral notions in ways that help us to attain more of what we find to be valuable. For Spinoza, we find value in greater activity. Two hazards impede the search for value. First, we need to know and acquire the means to be good. In this respect, Spinoza's theory is a great deal like Hobbes's: we strive to be active, and in order to do so we need food, security, health, and other necessary components of a decent life. There is another hazard, however, that is more subtle. On Spinoza's theory of the passions, we can misjudge our own natures and fail to understand the sorts of beings that we really are. So we can misjudge what is good and might even seek ends that are evil. Spinoza's account of human nature is thus much deeper and darker than Hobbes's: we are not well known to ourselves, and the self‐knowledge that is the foundation of virtue and freedom is elusive and fragile.

This learned, elegant book builds an interpretation of beatitude in Spinoza’s Ethics through interaction with a range of primary texts, including prominently the Zhuangzi, as well as secondary literature on Spinoza. Douglas’s focus is the promise that Spinoza’s doctrine of beatitude offers for eluding what is worst about death.The book starts with an account of beatitude that will serve as a foil. Chapter 1 sets out André Comte-Sponville’s account of beatitude in Spinoza, advertised as a Stoic account, on which one attains beatitude by developing a sort of desire that is immune to hope: without hope and with the right sort of desire, we lack unfulfilled desires and so are happy (12). Douglas argues that, on this... Read More.

Chapter 5 addresses the provisional morality of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE). The young Spinoza proposes that even as one works at emending the intellect, one should live by certain rules, which one must assume to be good. One should accommodate ordinary ways of speaking and living to the extent that one can without compromising one’s project. One should enjoy pleasures in moderation. Finally, one should seek instrumental goods only insofar as they are necessary for health and social acceptability. In order to explain shifts in Spinoza’s views about the way that individuals should live while pursuing the good, the chapter traces developments in his accounts of ideas and of the relationship between the philosopher and society.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes directly influenced and, possibly, was also influenced by Spinoza. Hobbes and Spinoza were both aware of the advanced science of mid‐seventeenth‐century Europe and of the uncomfortable fit of that science with traditional moral and religious doctrines. Spinoza defines ‘appetite’ in terms of striving and ‘desire,’ in turn, in terms of appetite. The basis for Spinoza's theory of desire in an account of causation implies that the distinction between activity and passivity may be incremental. For both Hobbes and Spinoza, the emotions are basic enough to psychology that a theory of them amounts to a theory of human nature: it tells us what, in a very basic way, human beings are like. The chapter addresses the authors’ views on the question of whether and how human beings can change. It presents consequences of the philosophers’ accounts of human nature for their ethics and politics.

This guide has an introduction and five chapters, one for each of the parts of Spinoza's Ethics. The Introduction includes background material necessary for productive study of the Ethics: advice for working with Spinoza's geometrical method, a biographical sketch of Spinoza, and accounts of important predecessors: Aristotle, Maimonides, and Descartes. The chapters that follow trace the Ethics in detail, including accounts of most of the elements in Spinoza's book and raising questions for further research. Chapter 1, "One Infinite Substance," covers central arguments of Spinoza's substance monism. Chapter 2, "The Idea of the Human Body," follows Spinoza's detailed metaphysics of ordinary objects, his theory of mind, and his epistemology. Chapter 3, "Desire, Joy, and Sadness," works from Spinoza's broad theory of finite activity in the striving to persevere in being to his detailed accounts of human action and passion. Chapter 4, "Bondage to Passion," emphasizes Spinoza's formal theory of value, his intellectualism in ethics, and particular claims about value that follow from these commitments. Chapter 5, "The Power of the Intellect," begins with Spinoza's criticism of Descartes's account of our ability to control passion and moves to Spinoza's own theory, which emphasizes reason, the eternal part of the mind, and human blessedness.

In his Political Treatise, Spinoza repeatedly compares states to human beings. In this interpretation of the comparisons, I present a progressively more restrictive account of Spinoza’s views about the nature of human beings in the Ethics and show at each step how those views inform the account of states in the Political Treatise. Because, like human beings, states are individuals, they strive to persevere in existence. Because, like human beings, states are composed of parts that are individuals, states' parts also strive to persevere in being. Finally, because in states, as in human beings, a change to the power of striving of a part can be at the same time a change to the whole that differs in kind, strong states can be bad for their citizens and states that serve their citizens well may nevertheless be weak. Spinoza’s principal project in the Political Treatise is to design states that are stable and good for their citizens. This account of the comparisons shows why that project is so difficult: one cannot design a good state simply by designing a stable state.

Baruch, or Benedictus, Spinoza (1632–77) is the author of works, especially the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise, that are a major source of the ideas of the European Enlightenment. The Ethics is a dense series of arguments on progressively narrower subjects – metaphysics, mind, the human affects, human bondage to passion, and human blessedness – presented in a geometrical order modeled on that of Euclid. In it, Spinoza begins by defending a metaphysics on which God is the only substance and is bound by the laws of his own nature. Spinoza then builds a naturalistic ethics that is constrained by, and to some extent is a product of, his strong metaphysics. Human beings are individuals that causally interact with other individuals and are extremely vulnerable to external influence. They are not substances. Moreover, human beings are bound by the same laws that bind all other individuals in nature, so Spinoza presents accounts of goodness, virtue, and perfection that are consistent with these perfectly general laws. Spinoza’s principal influences include René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes (see hobbes, thomas), Moses Maimonides (see maimonides, moses), the Roman Stoics (see stoicism), and Aristotle (see aristotle). Although his innovative philosophical views undoubtedly contributed to the strong writ of cherem, or ostracism, that Spinoza received from the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656, his work nevertheless also shows the influence of the study of Scripture and of Jewish law.