On a first visit to a friend’s house, you ask directions at one junction, then ask again after the bridge. Later, drawing a route for someone else, you do not reproduce the sequence of your questions. You make a map they can take in at once.

Part IV of the Ethics ends with an appendix. Spinoza explains why it is needed. His account of right living has not been arranged for an easy view of the whole. He proved its elements here and there, in the order that made deduction convenient. Now he wants to gather them into main points.

At the end of Part III he had restated definitions because there were matters to notice. Here the difficulty is the arrangement. What works for moving from one proof to the next may not show the reader the overall shape.

Thirty-two chapters

The appendix gathers its points into thirty-two short chapters. The first relates our striving and desires to the necessity of our nature. The last returns to the limits of human power.

Between them come relations with other people: concord, friendship, flattery, shame, marriage, money, food and the care of the poor. The subjects of daily life occupy the summary of a deductive work.

Some chapters direct us to earlier scholia, but the references do not proceed neatly in order. Chapter Fifteen points to the scholia of Propositions Thirty-Seven, Forty-Six and Seventy-Three; Eighteen to Seventy and Seventy-One; Twenty-Two returns to Fifty-Seven; Twenty-Five to Thirty-Seven again.

Much of the appendix gathers earlier material. Other passages make matters newly concrete: Chapter Seventeen assigns care of the poor to society as a whole; Chapter Twenty asks when marriage accords with reason. These are not merely new headings placed over a copied sequence of proofs.

From “I” to “we”

In the introductory sentences Spinoza speaks of what I have said, what I have demonstrated, what I intend to gather. The short chapters themselves move repeatedly into “we.”

Chapter Thirty-One preserves a striking “my”: nobody but an envious person takes pleasure in my weakness and misfortune. It recalls the scholium to Proposition Forty-Five.

In that scholium, the sentence follows a personal declaration: this is my reason, and this is how I have persuaded myself. In the appendix, the lead-in is instead a backward-looking “as we have said.”

The claim is gathered into a collective summary. The small possessive remains, but its approach has changed.

At the end

Chapter Thirty-Two begins with our limited power. External causes surpass it immeasurably. Yet we can bear what goes against our interests more calmly if we know we have done what we could, that avoiding it lay beyond our power, and that we are parts of nature following its order.

If we understand this clearly and distinctly, the part of us defined by understanding—our better part—can find rest in that recognition.

The chapter closes by bringing that part’s striving into agreement with the order of the whole of nature, insofar as these things are rightly understood.

The map is not a promise that every obstacle disappears. It lets us see together what the scattered route was leading through.