Ethics
1677
Spinoza wrote this book in secret, knowing it would destroy him. It did. Published posthumously in 1677, the Ethics presents a cosmos in which God and Nature are one being, everything follows from necessity, and human freedom comes not from willing otherwise but from understanding what must be. Using the cold geometry of definitions, axioms, and proofs, Spinoza builds from the nature of God (which is the same as the nature of the universe) through the structure of the mind, the mechanics of human emotions, our bondage to passion, and finally the strange liberation that arises when reason grasps our place in the whole. It is a system of terrifying consistency: every emotion, every thought, every event follows inevitably from what preceded it. And yet, paradoxically, it is also one of the most hopeful works in philosophy, because Spinoza shows that clear understanding of necessity is itself a kind of freedom. The prose has the austere beauty of mathematics, each proposition locking into the next with mechanical precision. Five parts, 250 propositions, one vision. This is not a book to read casually. It is a book to live inside.
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“Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.””
— Benedictus de Spinoza
“Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.””
— Benedictus de Spinoza
“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.””
— Benedictus de Spinoza
“A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.””
— Benedictus de Spinoza
“Minds, however, are conquered not by arms, but by love and nobility.””
— Benedictus de Spinoza
“It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another.””
— Benedictus de Spinoza
“We feel and experience ourselves to be eternal.””
— Benedictus de Spinoza
“The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.””
— Benedictus de Spinoza
“I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically... the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.””
— Benedictus de Spinoza
