This book (available from that link as a complete ebook from Project Gutenberg) is the best-known work by rationalist philosopher Baruch [a.k.a. Benedict de] Spinoza, and represents perhaps one of the most singularly ambitious acts of holistic thinking in the history of the western modernist tradition: to devise a completely cohesive logical explanation of basic metaphysics, epistemology, metaethics and ethics based on axioms (like Euclid did for geometry, a field widely known for its similar level of complexity to All Of Philosophy). Parts of this book were core readings for a module on the rationalists I took in second-year of undergraduate (wow that was a long time ago now), and something about Spinoza seemed more endearing and/or accessible than the other rationalists whose books I acquired cheaply (in the days before I became wholly reliant on the university library and only bought books I wanted for personal use) - so I kept reading it after the module finished, but it's fairly dense and there were lots of other things I was reading so it fell by the wayside; until September 2016, when I went in pursuit of meaty things to read alongside my [then]-new writing project and this fit the bill - only for my bag containing this book to be stolen from a house party in Manchester that same month when I was only thirty or so pages in (it was a whole ordeal); fortunately, it showed up the next day discarded in a cupboard as apparently the party-crashing thieves had only needed a bag to chuck people's phones left on charge in and were happy to leave behind a classic work of holistic rationalist philosophy. Crazy, huh?
Anyway - onto the book itself.
Spinoza lays out his axiomatic philosophy in five sections: on God (which explores the metaphysical nature of all reality and considers how this operates in component parts, including humans), on the mind (which explores from these metaphysical standpoints how self-awareness must be made possible and what the nature of its being is, as in humans), on the human mind's being intrinsically connected to physical existence and therefore subject to all manner of 'affects' (emotional-mental micro-reactions that underlie and inform rational agency) and what these are, how this plays out psychologically, and finally how individuals can transcend their affects to live by reason and find true freedom.
Now, the intricate detail arguments of how effectively comprehensively cohesive a system of philosophical thought this all is is a question far beyond me, and if you want an answer (probably read this first anyway) then google John Cottingham or just read some of the Stanford commentaries about Spinoza's work and how it stood up to later criticism but basically, while it may be riddled with slight twinges of illogic and feature occasional propositions that do not clearly follow from previous axioms or propositions and seem to spring 'rationally' out of nowhere, likewise the explanations and corollaries and scholiums in each point often seem to harbour nested presumptions that certainly haven't been justified by the previous work - and fair enough, as it was a gargantuan task, attempting to literally distill the nature of reality and the good life into a provable, axiomatic, impenetrably logical system - and the sheer sincerity with which Spinoza goes about this effort is testament to the (in my opinion) incredibly strong ethical centre, and therefore transcendent moral drive, of his work. Cynical readers may think I'm just starting to slap words together willy-nilly with no regard for whether it's a tangibly-meaningful phrase, and well, they'd be half-right. What I was trying to say is that Spinoza inevitably gets a lot of the details and mechanics not-quite-spot-on, presumably because he's not omniscient (although, if you take his metaphysical arguments seriously, there is a case to be made for his being God, at least a bit*); however the general thrust of Ethics elucidates a world that is ordered, rational, explicable, where unity and humility and togetherness and reason are implicitly better than assuming one is already right regardless of psychological context - and these basic thrusts form the heart of his work, axioms and propositions and syllogisms devised and twisted around these to try to form as cohesive and self-supporting system of rational explanation as possible but never quite succeeding because he was, as I am, as you are, a finite being, intrinsically incapable of grasping the nature of the infinite or eternal, let alone penning comprehensive descriptions of its function and nature, but let the tautological nature of some basic truths preclude their being taken by faith as irrationality: that reason and compassion and joy and freedom are good things to be sought in our own and others' lives, and that these facts have some cosmic significance for, at the very least, us, who knows them.
My edition's text was translated by Edwin Curley and, in prose if notsomuch argument, was actually extremely readable (and it gets easier as it goes along): if you love mindblowing hypotheticals but never even actually read a philosophy book before, Spinoza's Ethics could be an interesting and weird but manageable and inspiringly nice ride.
* I could do a whole post on religious nitpicking with Spinoza - he was denounced as a heretic by his contemporaries, and while there is much of interest and much to like in his philosophy, it certainly does not reflect stable Christian theology, and is more like quasi-humanist transcendental pantheism if anything.
Anyway - onto the book itself.
Spinoza lays out his axiomatic philosophy in five sections: on God (which explores the metaphysical nature of all reality and considers how this operates in component parts, including humans), on the mind (which explores from these metaphysical standpoints how self-awareness must be made possible and what the nature of its being is, as in humans), on the human mind's being intrinsically connected to physical existence and therefore subject to all manner of 'affects' (emotional-mental micro-reactions that underlie and inform rational agency) and what these are, how this plays out psychologically, and finally how individuals can transcend their affects to live by reason and find true freedom.
Now, the intricate detail arguments of how effectively comprehensively cohesive a system of philosophical thought this all is is a question far beyond me, and if you want an answer (probably read this first anyway) then google John Cottingham or just read some of the Stanford commentaries about Spinoza's work and how it stood up to later criticism but basically, while it may be riddled with slight twinges of illogic and feature occasional propositions that do not clearly follow from previous axioms or propositions and seem to spring 'rationally' out of nowhere, likewise the explanations and corollaries and scholiums in each point often seem to harbour nested presumptions that certainly haven't been justified by the previous work - and fair enough, as it was a gargantuan task, attempting to literally distill the nature of reality and the good life into a provable, axiomatic, impenetrably logical system - and the sheer sincerity with which Spinoza goes about this effort is testament to the (in my opinion) incredibly strong ethical centre, and therefore transcendent moral drive, of his work. Cynical readers may think I'm just starting to slap words together willy-nilly with no regard for whether it's a tangibly-meaningful phrase, and well, they'd be half-right. What I was trying to say is that Spinoza inevitably gets a lot of the details and mechanics not-quite-spot-on, presumably because he's not omniscient (although, if you take his metaphysical arguments seriously, there is a case to be made for his being God, at least a bit*); however the general thrust of Ethics elucidates a world that is ordered, rational, explicable, where unity and humility and togetherness and reason are implicitly better than assuming one is already right regardless of psychological context - and these basic thrusts form the heart of his work, axioms and propositions and syllogisms devised and twisted around these to try to form as cohesive and self-supporting system of rational explanation as possible but never quite succeeding because he was, as I am, as you are, a finite being, intrinsically incapable of grasping the nature of the infinite or eternal, let alone penning comprehensive descriptions of its function and nature, but let the tautological nature of some basic truths preclude their being taken by faith as irrationality: that reason and compassion and joy and freedom are good things to be sought in our own and others' lives, and that these facts have some cosmic significance for, at the very least, us, who knows them.
My edition's text was translated by Edwin Curley and, in prose if notsomuch argument, was actually extremely readable (and it gets easier as it goes along): if you love mindblowing hypotheticals but never even actually read a philosophy book before, Spinoza's Ethics could be an interesting and weird but manageable and inspiringly nice ride.
* I could do a whole post on religious nitpicking with Spinoza - he was denounced as a heretic by his contemporaries, and while there is much of interest and much to like in his philosophy, it certainly does not reflect stable Christian theology, and is more like quasi-humanist transcendental pantheism if anything.
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