S
Spinoza’s Ethics Teachings
María Jimena Solé
UBA (Universidad de Buenos Aires/Buenos
Aires University), CONICET (Consejo Nacional
de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas/The
National Scientific and Technical Research
Council), Buenos Aires, Argentina
In the Theological Political Treatise (TTP), Spi-
noza posits that “the goal of Philosophy is nothing
but the Truth” (G III/179). This characterization is
completed by the first pages of the Treatise of
Emendation of the Intellect (TdIE) in which Spi-
noza presents his own motives for taking recourse
to philosophical inquiry. In these pages, Spinoza
states that the inquiry into the question of whether
there exists a true good was brought about by his
experience of a sense of futility related to most
ordinary life events. This experience made him
ask whether there was a good which, in itself,
manages to affect the spirit and which would
give him “the greatest joy, to eternity” in a con-
sistent way (G II/5). The need of the search for the
truth was, then, imposed on him as a result of what
we could call a life experience.
But the desire to find the true good implied
a complete change in his way of living. He had
to give up the pursuit of what people generally
associate with highest goods: wealth, honor, and
bodily pleasures, as these are ostensible and inse-
cure assets that distract the mind and leave those
# Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018
M. A. Peters (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory,
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who pursue them in a permanent state of dissatis-
faction. Moreover, he says, they often end up
putting the life of the person pursuing them at
risk when they are sought after as goods in them-
selves and because they amount to certain evils.
Instead, Spinoza writes, “love toward the eternal
and infinite thing feeds the mind with a joy
entirely exempt from sadness. This is greatly to
be desired, and to be sought with all our strength”
(G II/7). Spinoza admits, however, that he is not
capable of enforcing such change. He recognizes
that he cannot stop being affected by greed, lust,
and glory.
So, how does one succeed in changing one’s
form of living in accordance with the require-
ments of philosophy? How does one leave behind
the vulgar mode of living which relates happiness
to the concepts of wealth, honor, and pleasure in
order to completely turn oneself into a reflection
of the true good, to the search for authentic hap-
piness? Spinoza’s answer points to the possibility
of replacing the vicious circle threatening to ren-
der philosophy inapplicable with a virtuous circle
that constantly reinforces its own necessity. He
writes,
I saw this, however: that so long as the mind was
turned toward these thoughts, it was turned away
from these things, and was thinking seriously about
the new goal. That was a great comfort to me. For
I saw that those evils would not refuse to yield to
remedies. (G II/7)
Spinoza affirms that the moments dedicated to
reflection –which were rare and short at first, but
2 Spinoza’s Ethics Teachings
increasing in frequency and duration as the nature
of the true good became known to him – was what
allowed him to discover a first, fundamental truth:
that there is no good or evil, no perfection, or
imperfection in nature, because “everything that
happens happens according to the eternal order,
and according to certain laws of Nature” (G II/8).
Philosophy – the search for the truth through
reason – which Spinoza had started out by pre-
senting as necessary for making life bearable – as
a means to combat the futility of mundane events –
reveals itself, in the end, as something valuable in
itself. Thus, Spinoza identifies the “highest good”
with the acquisition of a human nature that is more
stable (less exposed to the fluctuations of the
passions) and more perfect (more powerful).
This nature consists in the knowledge of nature
and its union with the human being.
The practical preoccupation (to achieve happi-
ness and to find a good that provides a lasting joy)
produces a necessity to assume a theoretical atti-
tude (to investigate whether the true good exists)
which, in turn, implies in itself a change in con-
duct. The modification of one’s form of life is thus
produced in a double way. Exercising a rational
investigation provides evidence for encountering
the true good in that very same rational investiga-
tion. Because, while reflecting, we conquer –
albeit in brief instances only – a state of true
happiness. Moreover, the truths that we discover
due to the rational meditation – that there is no
good or evil in nature, for instance, or that the
goods pursued by ordinary people usually comes
with adverse ethical effects – make us alter the
way by which we value the world. In addition,
they remove obstacles impeding our acquisition
of the true good. Understanding and happiness
reveal themselves as integral aspects of each
other. To find the highest good, one must under-
stand nature, and while one understands, i.e.,
thinks rationally about and acquire a true under-
standing of nature, one possesses the
highest good.
Spinoza then asks what we must do in order to
acquire the understanding of nature which is con-
stitutive of a human nature that is stable and
coincides with her highest good. What shall we
do, that is, in order to be able to philosophize?
“But before anything else,” he responds, “we must
devise a way of healing the intellect, and purifying
it, as much as we can in the beginning, so that it
understands things successfully, without error and
as well as possible” (TdIE, G II 15). Spinoza goes
on to reflect on the means to understanding: its
method and the notion of certainty. The first result
of this reflection, which is what Spinoza occupies
himself with during the remaining parts of the
TdIE, is that there is no criterion for certainty
different from that of the truth. He writes that
“for the certainty of the truth, no other sign is
needed than having a true idea” (G II/15). There-
fore, Spinoza affirms while implicitly discussing
with Descartes, the true method “is not to seek a
sign of truth after the acquisition of ideas, but the
true Method is the way that truth itself, (. . .), or the
ideas (all those signify the same) should be sought
in the proper order” (G II/15).
It is important to note that the method so
described is not a prelude to philosophy. It is not
a means for examining already acquired ideas by
way of an extrinsic condition. Authentic method,
Spinoza argues, is the path through which one
searches for true ideas. Thus, to purify the way
in which one comes to understand or acquire
knowledge is not a precondition for philosophy.
On the contrary, we could think of the actual
method for purifying the mind and freeing it of
error as philosophy in itself.
Philosophy, for Spinoza, is a practice, a search,
a path, leading to truth and happiness. To this end,
and in so far as the Ethics Demonstrated in Geo-
metric Order (Ethics) is the most complete and
mature exposition of Spinoza’s philosophy, we
should not understand its lessons as being limited
to that of the true nature of nature and human
nature. Its more authentic lesson should be con-
sidered as consisting in something more: some-
thing that points to neither the knowledge that we
already possess nor the truths that we already have
discovered but to the means by which it is possible
to recognize these truths as such and to produce
new understandings.
It is not hard to find within the argumentative
chains of the Ethics signs of this idea. The spirit of
Spinoza’s philosophy does not merely consist in
being a particular positive doctrine but rather,
Spinoza’s Ethics Teachings
something more. Among other places, we could,
for instance, highlight E1app; E2p47s and 49 s;
E3pref., E4pref., and E5 pref. Next, a brief anal-
ysis of these passages will follow.
In the appendix to Part One, Spinoza says that
he has already explained the nature of God and his
properties. He points out that as often as he has
had the opportunity, he has intended to remove all
such prejudices that could impede the correct con-
ception of his demonstrations. However, since
there still remains many prejudices “that could,
and can, be a great obstacle to men’s understand-
ing the connection of things” (G II/77), he dedi-
cates a few pages to examine these prejudices and
to teach the readers how to remove them. Spinoza
denounces the existence of an original prejudice –
“that men commonly suppose that all natural
things act, as men do, on account of an end”
(G II/78) – from which many other prejudices
emerge (like the idea of a free will, the transcen-
dental, personal, and providential idea of God
who rewards and punishes his creatures and who
has created nature for the benefit of human
beings). The appendix is dedicated, first, to dem-
onstrating why the majority of human beings are
prone to accept these prejudices and, then, to
refuting all of them in turn and to show how
they all are connected to a common epistemolog-
ical error. Spinoza states, then, that in so far as any
prejudice of this kind still remain with the reader,
“they can be corrected by anyone with only a little
meditation” (G II/83).
Only by removing the errors grounding the
prejudices of the mind is it possible to begin to
grasp the highest truth; a notion of God who exists
and acts in virtue of the necessity of his nature and
who necessarily produces infinitely many finite
modes which all inhere in him. None of the truths
about God and nature which Spinoza has exposed
during Part One of the Ethics can be affirmed by
those individuals whose rational understanding is
blurred by the prejudices mentioned in the appen-
dix. Spinozism reveals itself in this moment as the
process of recognizing that truth implies the effort
of liberating oneself from the errors which blur the
mind and which, in turn, are rooted both in tradi-
tional knowledge as well as in the finite nature of
the human mind.
3
Part Two of the Ethics is focused on the nature
of the human mind and body and in the midst of its
demonstrations Spinoza continues the explicit call
for liberation of the harmful effects of prejudices,
especially those which emerge from the confusion
among images and ideas. In the scholium to
E2p47 which affirms that all human beings pos-
sess an adequate idea of God’s nature, he explains
why human beings are prone to misunderstand the
nature of God. The reason for this, according to
Spinoza, lies in the fact that humans “cannot
image God, as they can bodies, and that they
have joined the name of God to the images of
things which they are used to seeing” (G II/128,
emphasis in original).
Spinoza uses this idea in order to demonstrate,
in the following propositions, that the will and the
understanding are one and the same thing.
According to E2p49s, most people ignore the
true nature of the will because they confuse
images, words, and ideas of things with each
other. In effect, those who do not distinguish
between ideas and images consider that ideas are
like “mute pictures on a panel” and they do not
recognize that ideas, in so far as they are ideas,
always implies a certain affirmation or negation
(G II/132). “But these prejudices,” Spinoza holds,
“can easily be put aside by anyone who attends to
the nature of thought, which does not at all
involve the concept of extension. He or she will
then understand clearly that an idea (since it is a
mode of thinking) consists neither in the image of
anything, nor in words” (GII/132).
The preface to Part Three of the Ethics re-
affirms the need of abandoning certain generally
accepted prejudices as a necessary condition for
a radical change in one’s way of thinking. In the
first lines of this preface, Spinoza denounces as a
prejudice the conception of “man in nature as a
dominion within a dominion” (G II/137). He adds
a second prejudice: the idea that the cause of
human impotence and inconsistency rather than
being natural lies in a vice of human nature which
people subsequently will “bewail, or laugh at, or
disdain, or (as usually happens) curse” (G II/137).
It is having this vision of the human nature that
hinders people from recognizing human beings as
finite modes that inhere in substance just like all
4 Spinoza’s Ethics Teachings
other existing beings and as modes with essences
that are nothing but a striving to increase in power
to be. In the striving for perseverance and increase
in power, the common affects of love, hate, fear,
and hope all play fundamental roles. Human
affective life – which the majority humans erro-
neously understand as arbitrary and impossible to
decode – can indeed be unfolded, just as all other
aspects of life, in accordance with necessary laws
which explain and permit humans to understand
and, this way, manage the affects.
In the preface to Part Four of the Ethics, Spinza
offers a generic explanation of the origin of the
traditional conception of the notions of perfection,
imperfection, good, and evil. He does so, in order
to prove that these conceptions emerge from inad-
equate ideas which are the results of a comparison
between things, natural and man-made, and uni-
versal models of these same things, fabricated in
accordance with one’s own experience and incli-
nations. To attribute these ideas to the things, we
perceive amounts to a misinterpretation of reality
and leads to a falso transcendental ethics. But
there is no absolute and true good which all crea-
tures ought to strive for. Each one must learn to
recognize on one’s own what is authentically good
for oneself.
Throughout Part Four of the Ethics, Spinoza
dedicates himself at explaining a path toward the
good and wellbeing which is independent from
the method of universal models of good, evil,
perfection, and imperfection. He provides evi-
dence of the claim that what is truly good to
each and every one in each and every instance is
what increases one’s power to act. By doing so,
Spinoza comes to affirm that “knowledge of God
is the Mind’s greatest good; its greatest virtue is to
know God” (E4p28) and that “there is no singular
thing in Nature that is more useful to man than a
man who lives according to the guidance of rea-
son” (E4p35c1). The striving to understand – the
decision to live according to reason – cannot be
the result of an external imposition; it cannot be
the effect of a passive obedience of a heterono-
mous law. Everyone must on one’s own come to
understand the ethical-political goal of striving
toward more understanding which is common to
all of humanity. The search for the true good is
always and unfailingly an act of freedom. There-
fore, it is absolutely necessary to detach oneself
from the harmful prejudices that there is an abso-
lute good and evil in nature and that finite things,
in themselves, can be more or less perfect.
The prejudices toward which the Ethics’ final
Fifth Part is dedicated to banish are probably also
those that are most rooted in human nature. Spi-
noza spends the preface of Part Five combating
the idea that the mind has absolute power over the
affects – an idea which he attributes to the Stoics
as well as to Descartes. Accepting the well-
established belief in the Mind’s complete domi-
nation of the body, Spinoza argues, stops us from
recognizing the fundamental ethical lesson taught
by Spinoza: that the only remedy for passions is
true understanding and that virtue consists in
nothing but intellectual knowledge and the under-
standing of nature and ourselves (cf. E5preface).
In the same preface, Spinoza also confronts
another of the common prejudices with respect
to human happiness which keep human beings in
a state of bondage in relation to passive affects. He
writes here of an extended belief which is hard to
combat precisely because it is being fostered by
most traditional religions. It is the idea that the
individual mind is immortal and that true happi-
ness consists in God’s reward after death to the
pious. As such, it is perhaps the principle obstacle
for a practical application of Spinoza’s ethics. In
the penultimate proposition of Part Five, after
having demonstrated in geometrical order what
authentic eternity of the mind and the true love
of God amount to, Spinoza affirms that the mind’s
eternity is not of relevance for moral decisions.
Even if we are not aware of the eternity of our
minds, he says, we will consider our spirits’ sta-
bility and generosity (which is what the rational
teachings aim at) essential for achieving the
increase in power which all of us seek naturally.
The Ethics, the work which embodies
Spinoza’s philosophy, is the rational exposition
of a system. It consists in an ordered and exhaus-
tive unfolding of the fundamental concepts of
ontology, gnoseology, anthropology, politics, and
ethics. But it does not end with that. In addition,
and more importantly, the Ethics is the appeal to
all of us to individually and by our own powers
Spinoza’s Ethics Teachings
approach and construct the path which is conduc-
tive for discovering each of these fundamental
concepts and the truths that follow from them.
This discovery, conditioned as it is by our own
production of true ideas (the activity that leads to
knowledge and understanding), is the only way in
which we can get to accept these fundamental
concepts and make them our own.
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