Ethics

What It Is

Latin, and the title tells you the method. Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata: ethics demonstrated in geometrical order. Spinoza built it like Euclid, so nothing is asserted before it has been derived. Five parts: God, the mind, the affects, human bondage, the power of the intellect.

Fourteen years in the writing, on and off. In 1675 he took it to Amsterdam to publish, heard that theologians were putting it about that a book of his proving there is no God was already at the printer, and carried the manuscript home. It appeared in the Opera Posthuma in 1677, months after he died at forty-four, with only his initials on the title page. The next year the States of Holland banned everything he had written as profane, atheistic and blasphemous.

There is no opponent in it, and nobody to warm to. Then come the scholia, notes hung off certain propositions where Spinoza drops the apparatus and speaks plainly, sometimes with contempt. All the heat is there.

Why It Matters

He ground lenses for a living. At twenty-three he was expelled from Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community by the most violent writ of herem it ever issued, never since lifted. For a century afterwards, Spinozist was the worst thing one European could call another.

Then the name changed sides. In 1785 Jacobi made public that Lessing had confessed to being a Spinozist, and the scandal put Spinoza at the centre of German philosophy for a generation. George Eliot made the first complete English version in 1856, and no one would print it for another hundred and twenty-five years. Nietzsche sent Overbeck a postcard in 1881: I have a precursor, and what a precursor.

The book asks whether a person who understands what he is can be free, and it puts hatred, envy and pity through the same apparatus. Whether anyone can really look at his own hatred that way is what you are left arguing about.

Before You Read

Ten to fourteen hours, spread over weeks. The sentences are short and the words ordinary; the difficulty is elsewhere. The book gives you nothing to hold on to but the order it was built in.

Do not read every proof on the first pass. Take Part 1's definitions and axioms slowly, since everything later stands on them, then read the propositions and scholia and let the demonstrations go by. The prefaces and appendices are continuous prose, and the most direct writing in the book.

The physics dropped into the middle of Part 2 is where most readers stall, and the catalogue of the affects closing Part 3 is a dictionary. Move briskly through both. An evening with Descartes first does more than any commentary.

Which Translation to Read

• Edwin Curley (Penguin Classics, 2005) — recommended. The translator other Spinoza scholars quote. This is his complete Ethics, reprinted from A Spinoza Reader (Princeton, 1994), with an introduction by Stuart Hampshire. Exact where exactness decides the argument, and it costs almost nothing. The cost: it is the bare text, without the glossary-index and notes that make his Princeton edition navigable, and Hampshire's introduction is brief. View on Amazon →
• Samuel Shirley (Hackett, second edition 1992, edited by Seymour Feldman). The most readable Spinoza in English, printed with the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and selected letters. The cost: Shirley smooths, and his easier English hides the joints where the argument strains.
• Edwin Curley, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I (Princeton, 1985). The same translation with everything attached: four earlier works, the letters of those years, and a glossary-index that takes his technical vocabulary term by term. The cost: 752 hardcover pages, priced as the research tool it is.

Take the Penguin Curley to read the book, the Princeton Curley to work on it, and Shirley if you would rather be carried than held to every word. Avoid the free Victorian translations online: they go vague exactly where the argument turns on a word. Easton Press bound one of them in leather, which tells you what the handsomest copy on the shelf is worth.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Hampshire's introduction afterwards. It sets out the system whole, which is what you do not want before the book has built it for you. The same goes for every summary of Spinoza. No great book is easier to summarise, and no summary is worth less.

Read it twice. Letting the demonstrations go is fine on a first pass and a mistake on a second. Read for the conclusions and skip the machinery and you have the shape of the book without its force. The second pass takes half the time, and it is the one where you notice that a book with no warmth on its surface was written to do a reader good.