Spinoza by Richard H. Popkin

Author:Richard H. Popkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Chapter Seven

The Ethics

From 1661 onward, along with these other projects, Spinoza had been working on his masterpiece, the Ethics, in geometrical form. He seems to have found this method an exciting way to present philosophy without any misunderstandings, strictly in terms of accepted truths and rational demonstrations. No footnotes or citations of authorities were necessary. Hence, Spinoza used the geometrical method (see p. 50) as a way of clarifying his differences with Descartes and, above all, as a way of presenting his own philosophy in the Ethics, which he finally completed in 1675.

From his correspondence we can see this ongoing project developing and reaching completion. Resulting in its being banned, there had been such an outcry against the Tractatus that Spinoza decided to forgo the pleasure of seeing the Ethics published in his lifetime lest it cause even more opposition. He set it aside, making careful arrangements for it to be published shortly after his demise.

There is no introduction to the Ethics and the name of the author is only given with the initials BDS. The reader of the work who knows geometry starts with the definitions and the axioms and then can study the derivation of the theorems. As we shall see, this austere, strictly geometrical presentation soon requires some additional data in the form of notes and explanations. As the work unfolds, more and more expository material appears to make sure the reader has grasped the point. Clues that might have helped, such as references to other philosophies, are rare, leaving it to later scholars to find possible sources of various items that occur in the development.

It is amazing that the core of Spinoza’s metaphysics is worked out in Part 1 in the first fifteen propositions, covering ten pages. Spinoza’s pantheism is then presented as the stark conclusion to the logical examination of what follows from the nature of substance. Starting from some definitions of substance – God, attribute, mode, that which is self-caused, and that which is finite in its own kind – Spinoza then, in a series of very short proofs, establishes that God as substance necessarily exists. In proposition 14 Spinoza writes that “there can be, or be conceived, no other substance but God,” and in proposition 15, “whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.”91 I shall comment on the logical sequence from the definitions to these monumental conclusions later on. Right now I should like to discuss the strong pantheistic cosmology that is presented here.

There has been a long tradition in philosophy and in Judeo-Christian theology of trying to explain the world in terms of what its causes may be, tracing it back to being an effect from an all-powerful deity. Spinoza’s reading abolishes any distinction between the cause and the effect. Whatever is, is God and is in God. One finds antecedents of this in some of the Neoplatonic and mystical Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers from John Scotus Erigena, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, St. Bonaventura, and Meister Eckhart.

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