Ethics — Part 4
- 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:
- ~22,500 words · 107 passages
Cite this work
- APABaruch Spinoza. (n.d.). Ethics — Part 4. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/baruch-spinoza/ethics-part-4
- MLABaruch Spinoza. Ethics — Part 4. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/baruch-spinoza/ethics-part-4.
- ChicagoBaruch Spinoza. Ethics — Part 4. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/baruch-spinoza/ethics-part-4.
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.
sees that it is carried through to the end, which its author had purposed for it. But if a man sees a work, the like whereof he has never seen before, and if he knows not the intention of the artificer, he plainly cannot know, whether that work be perfect or imperfect. Such seems to be the primary meaning of these terms. But, after men began to form general ideas, to think out types of houses, buildings, towers, &c., and to prefer certain types to others, it came about, that each man called perfect that which he saw agree with the general idea he had formed of the thing in question, and called imperfect that which he saw agree less with his own preconceived type, even though it had evidently been completed in accordance with the idea of its artificer. This seems to be the only reason for calling natural phenomena, which, indeed, are not made with human hands, perfect or imperfect: for men are wont to form general ideas of things natural, no less than of things artificial, and such ideas they hold as types, believing that Nature (who they think does nothing without an object) has them in view, and has set them as types before herself. Therefore, when they behold something in Nature, which does not wholly conform to the preconceived type which they have formed of the thing in question, they say that Nature has fallen short or has blundered, and has left her work incomplete. Thus we see that men are wont to style natural phenomena perfect or imperfect rather from their own prejudices, than from true knowledge of what they pronounce upon. Now we showed in the Appendix to Part I., that Nature does not work with an end in view. For the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature, acts by the same necessity as that whereby it exists. For we have shown, that by the same necessity of its nature, whereby it exists, it likewise works (I:xvi.).…