Ethics (Penguin Classics)

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However, since non-human animals differ in nature from us, reason dictates that we “consider our own advantage, use them at our pleasure, and treat them as is most convenient for us” (ibid). Likewise, although in the context of his metaphysics, Spinoza treats evil and sin as functions of an individual’s power; when he is writing about such things in the context of civil society, he provides a very different picture. This topic is the subject of ongoing scholarly inquiry—responses to the problem have been proposed by Kisner (2011, 118) and Steinberg (2014)—and it is closely related to the issue (flagged at the outset of this article) that Spinoza’s conception of ethics is in many ways quite different from our own. Nevertheless Spinoza’s presentation of these claims suggests that he takes them to be desirable ways of living, because they derive from “strength of character, that is, [from] tenacity and nobility” (E4p73), the primary virtues. For Spinoza, reality means activity, and the reality of anything expresses itself in a tendency to self-preservation — to exist is to persist.

However, if she thinks snakes are present, that fact serves to fuel her fear; and if she thinks them absent, her fear is greatly diminished.

He rejected the specious simplicity obtainable by denying the reality of Matter, or of Mind, or of God. As a result, anything good that we might be led to do out of pity (for instance), we could just as well have been led to do by reason.

Yet Spinoza was also very interested in another issue that is moral only in the more archaic sense that it pertains to the good life: namely, the means by which humans may (to some extent) achieve mastery over their passions. However, insofar as we are concerned for the well-being of ourselves and other humans, and we recognize that well-being to depend upon the environment, it will be rational for us to preserve the environment—not for its sake, but for ours. Spinoza considers how the affects, ungoverned, can torment people and make it impossible for mankind to live in harmony with one another. However, Spinoza also argues that humility, repentance, and pity—character traits highly esteemed by traditional religious authorities—are not virtues, for they are “useless” and “do not arise from reason” (E4p50, 53, and 54). Spinoza does not explicitly attempt to resolve this problem in the Ethics, though commentators have attempted to do so on his behalf in a variety of ways (Garrett 1990, 228–33).

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Since all passions are confused ideas—indeed, this is a core component of the definition of a passion—the most straightforward way to eliminate a passion is to eliminate the confusion that is the basis for that passion.But in view of the intimate way in which Extension and Thought express themselves conjointly in the life of man, Spinoza considered it necessary to conceive of Extension and Thought not as detached realities, but as constituting one organic whole or system. Indeed, Spinoza argues, there can be only one substance, God (E1p14), and everything else is merely a mode of God (E1p15).

Spinoza’s argument for ethical egoism in this sense depends upon psychological egoism, and so it may seem reminiscent of Hobbes’ rationale for the similar conclusion that “of the voluntary acts of every man the object is some good to himself” (L I. Spinoza was engaging with a tradition that held: God exists outside of the universe; God created the universe for a reason; and God could have created a different universe according to his will.At the highest stage of knowledge, that of "intuitive knowledge", the mind apprehends all things as expressions of the eternal cosmos. One puzzle that this argument raises is the apparent conflict between Spinoza’s claim that a perfectly rational being would always act honestly and his claim that such a being would never do anything that brought about its own destruction.