Ethics (Penguin Classics)

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In E3p4, which he references in his argument for egoism, Spinoza argued, “No thing can be destroyed except through an external cause. For Spinoza, Substance is not the support or bearer of the Attributes, but the system of Attributes — he actually uses the expression "Substance or the Attributes. He also endorsed a version of ethical egoism, according to which everyone ought to seek their own advantage; and, just as it did for Thomas Hobbes, this in turn led him to develop a version of contractarianism. Spinoza holds that everything that exists is part of nature, and everything in nature follows the same basic laws.

Thus, to strip away the confusion from a passion would require one somehow to strip away some of its causes. Wolf's, "Spinoza, the Man and His Thought", 1933; Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, William Heinemann, 2003, esp. The second premise entails psychological egoism, for it entails that each person will seek his own advantage at all times. Perhaps the major difference between the Spinozist and the Hobbist approaches to egoism is that Spinoza provides a metaphysical argument for the view, in contrast to Hobbes’ psychological argument.Spinoza next links up his ethics with his theory of knowledge, and correlates the moral progress of man with his intellectual progress. The confusion a passionate affect involves is not intrinsic to that affect, in Spinoza’s view, and when that confusion is stripped away, the affect nevertheless remains.

Man, according to Spinoza, is active or free in so far as any experience is the outcome solely of his own nature; he is passive, or a bondsman, in so far as any experience is due to other causes besides his own nature. But many things do have contrary moral qualities at one and the same time, with respect to different observers. Insofar as the production of our “pleasant food and drink” turns out to cause injury to the environment upon which our neighbors (or we ourselves) depend, the practice would be open to moral criticism. However, Hobbes reaches this view on the basis of his account of the psychology of voluntary acts: a voluntary act proceeds from the will, and a person’s will is just the last appetite that strikes him after a process of deliberation (L I. Passionate affects may be very strong for as long as their cause is present, but rational affects—in particular, the desire for knowledge and the love of God—have innumerably more and greater causes, and so rational affects will “flourish more often, and engage the mind more” than passionate ones (ibid).But these facts suggest a fourth way in which we may diminish the force of our passions, namely by means of “the multiplicity of causes by which affections related to common properties or to God are encouraged” (E5p20s, G II/293). Finally, to aid us in the pursuit of understanding, which is often hindered by our passions, Spinoza provides a series of “remedies” by which the force of the passions may be mitigated.

Man does not desire a thing because he thinks it is good, or shun it because he considers it bad; rather he considers anything good if he desires it, and regards it as bad if he has an aversion for it. Spinoza rose clearly into view for anglophone metaphysicians in the late nineteenth century, during the British craze for Hegel.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. This aspect of Spinoza's philosophy — his naturalism — was radical for its time, and perhaps even for today. However, in at least one of Spinoza’s accounts of confusion, to say that an idea is confused is to say that it is partly determined by external causes (E2p29s).

Locke, Hume, Leibniz and Kant all stand accused by later scholars of indulging in periods of closeted Spinozism.Some, such as Naess (1977), have gone further than this, arguing that Spinoza’s system provides a hospitable metaphysical background for ecology. Nor is the conatus to be confused with the metabolic processes of a living organism, since Spinoza takes the principle to govern (what we ordinarily consider to be) non-living things as well as living ones. Spinoza reasons that if a perfectly rational being acted deceptively, he would do so “from the dictate of reason” (because, presumably, that is how a perfectly rational being does anything); but then it would be rational to act in that way, and “men would be better advised to agree only in words, and be contrary to one another in fact” (E4p72d). Nothing comes to pass in nature, which can be set down to a flaw therein; for nature is always the same, and everywhere one and the same in her efficacy and power of action; that is, nature's laws and ordinances, whereby all things come to pass and change from one form to another, are everywhere and always the same; so that there should be one and the same method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature's universal laws and rules. This should be borne in mind when we turn, in section 3, to considering Spinoza’s account of how to overcome our passions.