The book

Spinoza lived in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. He did not publish the Ethics during his lifetime. In 1677, the year he died, friends published his posthumous writings. The author’s name appeared on the title page as initials, B. D. S. A Dutch edition appeared that year as well.

The full title announces an Ethics demonstrated in geometrical order and divided into five parts.

The parts concern God; the nature and origin of the mind; the origin and nature of the emotions; human bondage, or the power of the emotions; and the power of the intellect, or human freedom. The book’s destination is already visible in that sequence, but it takes a long route to reach it.

Geometrical order

The arrangement resembles a geometry book. Definitions establish the terms. Axioms state what will be taken as given. Propositions follow, each with its demonstration. Corollaries spell out consequences. Across the five parts there are 259 propositions.

But that is not all the book contains. Between the formal steps come scholia: remarks in which the author stops to explain, anticipate a reader or argue at greater length. There are prefaces, too, and appendices to Parts I and IV. The voice of the book cannot be found in the propositions alone.

A few terms before we go further

We need only enough vocabulary to avoid stumbling at every line. In Part I, substance is what is in itself and conceived through itself. A mode is in something else and conceived through that other thing: a modification of substance. An attribute is what the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance. God is an absolutely infinite being, a substance of infinitely many attributes.

Spinoza goes on to argue that no substance other than God can exist or be conceived, and that whatever exists is in God. Of the infinitely many attributes, the discussion concerns thought and extension. A human body is a mode of extension; the human mind is the idea of that body.

This God does not act for the sake of an end. In the preface to Part IV, Spinoza says that the eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts by the same necessity by which it exists. Forms of that pairing—God or Nature—occur four times in Part IV.

The later parts turn toward our lives. Part III treats emotions as events within nature and identifies three primary affects: desire, joy and sadness. Part IV calls our inability to govern the affects bondage. Part V asks what understanding can do about them. That is the route toward the freedom named in its heading.

Texts and renderings

The Chinese manuscript works from a publicly available Latin transcription without an identified printed base edition. For publication, the passages are checked against The Latin Library’s Latin text, with the relevant part linked after each essay. That transcription, too, should not be mistaken for a newly established critical edition.

The English is written afresh for these readings. Passages from Spinoza are rendered for the argument at hand rather than copied from a modern translation. Exact wording can be checked against the linked Latin.

The readings that follow

These essays look at the shape of the book. In a work that proceeds from definitions through demonstrations, where does the author speak up again, and what does he do when he does?

An optional note places SAE beside the passage. It is a comparison, not a demonstration of one system by the other, and it can be skipped. The first task is to listen to this book on its own terms.