Ethics — Part 2
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~18,100 words · 86 passages
Cite this work
- APABaruch Spinoza. (n.d.). Ethics — Part 2. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/baruch-spinoza/ethics-part-2
- MLABaruch Spinoza. Ethics — Part 2. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/baruch-spinoza/ethics-part-2.
- ChicagoBaruch Spinoza. Ethics — Part 2. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/baruch-spinoza/ethics-part-2.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
A complete system — God, the mind, the affects, freedom — demonstrated as if it were geometry: definitions, axioms and propositions culminating in the idea that freedom is understanding necessity.
Context and history
Spinoza finished the Ethics around 1675 and gave up publishing it in his lifetime: the scandal of his 'Deus sive Natura' — God and Nature as one and the same — would have buried him. It appeared in 1677, months after his death, in the Opera Posthuma, and was banned almost at once. Its author had lived in The Hague grinding lenses, excommunicated from Amsterdam's Jewish community at twenty-three with an anathema of unrevoked severity. For a century 'Spinozist' was an insult; afterwards, for German idealism and many more, the mountain against which every philosophy must measure itself.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
which should be reflected on first, inasmuch as it is prior both in the order of knowledge and the order of nature, they have taken to be last in the order of knowledge, and have put into the first place what they call the objects of sensation; hence, while they are considering natural phenomena, they give no attention at all to the divine nature, and, when afterwards they apply their mind to the study of the divine nature, they are quite unable to bear in mind the first hypotheses, with which they have overlaid the knowledge of natural phenomena, inasmuch as such hypotheses are no help towards understanding the divine nature. So that it is hardly to be wondered at, that these persons contradict themselves freely. However, I pass over this point. My intention her was only to give a reason for not saying, that that, without which a thing cannot be or be conceived, belongs to the essence of that thing: individual things cannot be or be conceived without God, yet God does not appertain to their essence. I said that "I considered as belonging to the essence of a thing that, which being given, the thing is necessarily given also, and which being removed, the thing is necessarily removed also; or that without which the thing, and which itself without the thing can neither be nor be conceived." (II. Def. ii.) XI. The first element, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is the idea of some particular thing actually existing. >>>>>Proof--The essence of man (by the Cor. of the last Prop.) is constituted by certain modes of the attributes of God, namely (by II. Ax. ii.), by the modes of thinking, of all which (by II. Ax. iii.) the idea is prior in nature, and, when the idea is given, the other modes (namely, those of which the idea is prior in nature) must be in the same individual (by the same Axiom). Therefore an idea is the first element constituting the human mind.…