Ethics (Penguin Classics)

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For Spinoza, reality means activity, and the reality of anything expresses itself in a tendency to self-preservation — to exist is to persist. So it may seem that Spinoza will have a problem making the distinction between what we think is good and what is genuinely good for us. Since the model is an idealization, the judgment that something is good or evil does not involve any commitment to objective, mind-independent qualities of goodness or evilness. Since God had to exist with the nature he has, nothing that has happened could have been avoided, and if God has fixed a particular fate for a particular mode, there is no escaping it. Though this topic was of central importance to Spinoza, the pride of place he awarded it in his Ethics reflects the fact that seventeenth-century conceptions of moral philosophy were, in subtle but important ways, different than our own.

But in this case, as in the case of Extension, Spinoza conceives of the finite modes of Thought as mediated by infinite modes. Schopenhauer, who detested these three philosophers to varying degrees of intensity, [39] also had a similarly ambivalent relation to the Dutch philosopher. In fact, within the German philosophical sphere, Spinoza's influence on German idealism was remarkable. The author argues that "Schopenhauer's ambivalence toward Spinoza's philosophy is a reflection of an inner tension within his own doctrine of the denial of the will-to-live, and that his criticisms of Spinoza are related to his rejection of the standpoint of affirmation.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. So, in Spinoza’s view, we have a purely metaphysical argument that it would be “contrary to Nature” for someone not to seek his own advantage. 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). For Spinoza, God or Nature—being one and the same thing—is the whole, infinite, eternal, necessarily existing, active system of the universe within which absolutely everything exists.

The solution appeared to him more perplexing than the problem, and rather unscientific in spirit as involving a break in continuity. The first argument draws out the a priori incoherence that would be involved in the very idea of objective moral qualities, while the second is based upon the empirical premise that different people may judge a thing to have contrary moral qualities. Reason dictates that we seek out the companionship of other humans because they share our nature, and what is good for us is good for them.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. g. if a triangle exists, a reason or cause must be granted for its existence; if, on the contrary, it does not exist, a cause must also be granted, which prevents it from existing, or annuls its existence. One of the philosophical problems with Spinoza’s version of ethical egoism has to do with whether, and to what extent, Spinoza’s view can really be a moral theory at all. These two views are compatible, however, since Spinoza’s approach to developing his positive moral theory is to reduce normative claims to considerations of self-interest in a manner reminiscent of Hobbes (Curley 1988, 119–124).