Work · Spinoza
Ethics
1677 · Geometric proofs
God-or-Nature, proved like Euclid: definitions, axioms, and propositions, all the way to blessedness.
5
Parts
1677
Published
Geometric
Method
The climb from God to human freedom
The five Parts read as one ascent. Spinoza starts at the top of reality, the single infinite substance he calls God or Nature, works down into the human mind and its emotions, hits bottom in the bondage of the passions, and climbs back out through understanding to a freedom that arrives as the intellectual love of God.
The shape of the argument
Part I
Concerning God: there is only one substance, infinite and necessary, and it is God, or Nature.
Part II
The mind: thought and extension are two attributes of that one substance, so the mind is the idea of the body, not a separate thing.
Part III
The emotions, derived like theorems from the conatus, the striving by which each thing persists in its own being.
Part IV
Human bondage: being ruled by the passive emotions, swung by outside causes the mind does not understand.
Part V
Human freedom: understanding turns passion into power, ending in the intellectual love of God and blessedness.
The cast
Spinoza — proves a whole ethics in geometrical order, then withholds it until after his death
The geometric method — definitions, axioms, propositions, and Q.E.D.: the claim that how to live is as necessary as a theorem
Descartes — the foil: two substances and a free will, both of which Spinoza takes out
The famous bits
God, or NaturePart I
One infinite substance is all there is, and Nature is the name for how it expresses itself.
The geometric methodThroughout
Definitions, then axioms, then numbered propositions, each proved and closed with Q.E.D.
The illusion of free willPart III
People feel free only because they see their choices and stay blind to the causes behind them.
The bondage of the passionsPart IV
Being governed by emotions whose causes one does not understand is not weakness but being out-muscled.
The intellectual love of GodPart V
The highest knowing carries a joy directed at the whole of which the mind knows itself a part, and that joy is blessedness itself.