39 pages • 1 hour read
Baruch SpinozaEthics
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1677A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5 Summary: “Of Human Freedom”
Part 5 details how we can overcome our bondage to the affects using our mind.
All of us have the power to master our affects and passions, to limit their influence over us. To do this, we must “take special care to know each affect clearly and distinctly” (164). Mentally separating a passion from its external cause is a good step toward destroying the passion. In this way, greater knowledge and understanding—the use of reason—helps us overcome our bondage.
An affect is evil only insofar as it prevents the mind from thinking clearly. An affect that prevents us from thinking clearly is contrary to our nature and thus evil. As long as an affect is not of this type, we retain our ability to think and understand things while under the influence of the affect.
An affect that causes us to think about many things is better than an affect that makes us obsess over one thing. Since we do not have control over all our affects, the best course of action is to live by “a correct principle of living, or sure maxims of life,” and “apply them constantly to the particular cases frequently encountered in life” (167). This way, “our imagination will be extensively affected by them, and we shall always have them ready” (167). An example of such a maxim is that “hate is to be conquered by love […] not by repaying it with hate in return” (167).
Spinoza turns to questions of God. God is without affects or passions because he has only adequate ideas. Thus, strictly speaking, God does not love or hate anyone, so there is no point in our striving to make God love us. God’s love is the highest good and cannot be tainted by any evil affect, such as envy or jealousy. The greatest virtue of the mind is to know God and understand all things by the third kind of knowledge, which proceeds from a knowledge of God and sees things in relation to him. This knowledge of God leads to an “intellectual love of God” (175), which is “blessedness” and our greatest pleasure and happiness. This intellectual love of God is found in God himself: Since he is infinite and perfect, and knows himself to be his own cause, he loves himself with an infinite love. We must love God in return.
The mind can only function united to the body. Nevertheless, something of the human mind survives the body’s death and is eternal. This is because the idea of our mind exists eternally in God. We are subject to passions only as long as the body endures.
Nothing in nature can take away our blessedness, or intellectual love of God. Bad affects and fear of death are diminished the more we understand things by the second and third kinds of knowledge. Having a powerful body “capable of a great many things” (178) also makes our mind stronger, more ordered, and eternal. That is why we strive to have a “sound mind in a sound body” (178). The more power we have in thinking and acting—as opposed to being acted upon by outside forces—the more perfect and happier we are as human beings. Finally, blessedness is not the reward of virtue; blessedness is virtue itself. While this way of life is hard, it is worth the effort to pursue it.
Part 5 Analysis
Spinoza anticipated his discussion of blessedness in the Appendix to Part 4. Here, it becomes the main subject of Part 5. We see that the Ethics is partly as an instruction book on how to live a happy life.
Previous philosophers and theologians (e.g., Thomas Aquinas) spoke of blessedness (or the beatific vision of God) as the goal and end of human life. Spinoza puts his own twist on this idea. As a rationalist, Spinoza forms an idea of blessedness that is strongly connected with reason and knowledge. He says that blessedness is “nothing but that satisfaction of mind which stems from the intuitive knowledge of God” (155). This blessedness comes from perfecting the intellect and understanding. Specifically, this means overcoming false ideas, such as divine reward and punishment, and embracing the idea that all things and events flow necessarily from God’s eternal essence. Blessedness comes from the third kind of knowledge, which sees all things in relation to God.
The man of reason will understand the true nature and cause of all things, and this will lead to peace and happiness. He will not be troubled by what happens to him, because he will understand that it was all eternally determined by God and could not have happened any other way. Too often we suffer because we do not understand our motivations and passions; understanding them better will help us overcome them. For Spinoza, freedom is attained through guidance by reason.
Many commentators have tried to determine what Spinoza believed about immortality. Although he does not affirm the traditional religious doctrine of the immortality of the soul, Spinoza suggests that some part of the mind remains after death and is eternal insofar as it exists within the mind of God. Spinoza affirms that “we feel and know by experience that we are eternal” (172). Although our imagination and bodily sensation perishes, the intellect endures. Spinoza adds that even if we did not know the mind to be eternal, we would still consider it necessary to live a life of virtue and reason.
Rather than being a reward for virtue, blessedness is virtue itself. Spinoza offers his version of the adage “virtue is its own reward.” We should not desire God to reward us for our good deeds; instead, we should rest in the knowledge of truth and God himself. In pursuing virtue, Spinoza again asserts that we should concentrate on the positive aspects of things—“acting from an affect of joy” (167—instead of dwelling on the negative.
Another of Spinoza’s startling claims is his assertion that God is without passions, that God does not love or hate. This is in keeping with his impersonal view of God and flies in the face of traditional religious doctrine as embodied in such sayings as “God is love.” Spinoza derives this claim from his proposition that affections are derived from inadequate knowledge and involve a passage from one degree of perfection to another. Since all God’s knowledge is adequate, and since he possesses all perfection, it follows that he cannot have passions. To claim that God does not embody love upsets the theological basis of Christianity, and this is one of the statements that would have most disturbed Spinoza’s contemporaries.
