Ethics Exposed

12 min read

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V

Part V: Of the Power of the Intellect, or on Human Freedom

Freedom achieved through understanding Nature’s necessity; culminates in intellectual love of Nature.

Part 5 Important Concepts

The Power of the Intellect

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Why This Matters

Spinoza begins by demolishing Descartes’ theory of mind-body interaction via the pineal gland. The idea that the immaterial mind can move matter through a tiny gland is “more occult than any occult quality” the Scholastics proposed. Instead, Spinoza insists: the power of the mind is defined ONLY by understanding. We don’t control affects by willpower acting on the body, but by forming clear and adequate ideas. The Stoics were wrong that we can simply command our passions; experience refutes this. But they were right that practice matters—not practice of willing, but practice of understanding. This part shows how knowledge itself is freedom.

Understanding Necessity Brings Freedom

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Why This Matters

This is the therapeutic core of Spinoza’s ethics. When we understand that something happens NECESSARILY—that it could not have been otherwise given the causal order—our emotional response to it weakens. We rage at what we imagine might have been different; we accept what we know must be. Seeing events as necessary doesn’t make them good, but it removes the sting of “if only.” An affect toward something we imagine as free (contingent) is greater than toward something necessary. Therefore: the more we understand the necessity of all things, the greater our power over affects. This is not resignation but comprehension—and comprehension brings peace.

Love of Nature

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Why This Matters

When we understand ourselves and our affects clearly, we necessarily love Nature—because Nature is the cause of our understanding and our joy. This is not religious devotion to a personal deity but intellectual love of the infinite substance of which we are modes. Crucially, this love CANNOT be corrupted by negative affects. We cannot hate Nature (since all hate involves sadness about an external cause, but Nature is the cause of our joy in understanding). We cannot be jealous (Nature doesn’t love us back in a personal way). We cannot be disappointed (we don’t expect reciprocation). This love is the most stable affect possible.

The Eternal Part of the Mind

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Why This Matters

Spinoza’s doctrine of eternity is NOT personal immortality. The imagination—memory, anticipation, personality—perishes with the body. But insofar as the mind consists of adequate ideas (understanding), it participates in eternity. Ideas, considered as true, are eternal truths in Nature’s infinite intellect. When you understand the Pythagorean theorem, that understanding is not YOURS in a personal sense—it’s the eternal truth itself, expressed through your finite mode. The “something eternal” that remains is not your individual soul but your participation in the impersonal eternity of reason. This is cold comfort for those wanting personal survival, but Spinoza thinks it’s the only coherent notion of eternity.

The third kind of knowledge

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Why This Matters

Spinoza distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: (1) Imagination—knowledge from random experience, hearsay, confused ideas; (2) Reason—knowledge from common notions and adequate ideas of properties; (3) Intuition (scientia intuitiva)—knowledge proceeding from adequate idea of Nature’s attributes to adequate knowledge of the essence of things. The third kind grasps singular things in their necessity, seeing them as following from Nature’s essence. It produces the highest self-satisfaction and the greatest joy. It is rare and difficult—but it represents the peak of human flourishing, where understanding particular things becomes a form of knowing Nature directly.

Intellectual Love of Natureof Nature

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Why This Matters

This is Spinoza’s mystical climax. From the third kind of knowledge arises “intellectual love of Nature” (amor intellectualis Dei)—a joy accompanied by the idea of Nature as cause. But here’s the stunning move: this love IS Nature’s love of itself. When you understand something truly, that understanding is Nature understanding itself through you. Your intellectual love of Nature is part of the infinite love with which Nature loves itself. You are not separate from Nature loving Nature—you ARE that love, expressed in a finite mode. This dissolves the boundary between human and universal, making flourishing not a reward FROM Nature but participation IN Nature’s self-knowledge and self-love.

Flourishing Is Not the Reward of Virtue, But Virtue Itself

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Why This Matters

The Ethics ends with its most famous proposition: flourishing is not a reward for virtue but IS virtue itself. We don’t restrain our lusts in order to be happy later—we ARE happy when we understand, and that happiness gives us power over lusts. This inverts the religious picture where morality is a burden rewarded after death. For Spinoza, understanding IS joy, virtue IS power, and flourishing IS the activity of knowing Nature. The wise person “never ceases to be, but always possesses true peace of mind.” The way is hard—“all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”—but it is the only path to genuine freedom and peace.

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Preface

I pass, finally, to the remaining Part of the Ethics, which concerns the means, or way, leading to Freedom. Here, then, I shall treat of the power of reason, showing what it can do against the affects, and what Freedom of Mind, or blessedness/flourishing, is. From this we shall see how much more the wise man can do than the ignorant. But it does not pertain to this investigation to show how the intellect must be perfected, or in what way the Body must be cared for, so that it can perform its function properly. The former is the concern of Logic, and the latter of Medicine. Here, then, as I have said, I shall treat only of the power of the Mind, or of reason, and shall show, above all, how great its dominion over the affects is, and what kind of dominion it has for restraining and moderating them. For we have already demonstrated above that it does not have an absolute dominion over them. Nevertheless, the Stoics thought that they depend entirely on our will, and that we can command them absolutely. But experience cries out against this, and has forced them, in spite of their principles, to confess that much practice and application are required to restrain and moderate them. If I remember rightly, someone tried to show this by the example of two dogs, one a house dog, the other a hunting dog. For by practice he was finally able to bring it about that the house dog was accustomed to hunt, and the hunting dog to refrain from chasing hares.

Descartes was rather inclined to this opinion. For he maintained that the Soul, or Mind, was especially united to a certain part of the brain, called the pineal gland, by whose aid the Mind is aware of all the motions aroused in the body and of external objects, and which the Mind can move in various ways simply by willing. He contended that this gland was suspended in the middle of the brain in such a way that it could be moved by the least motion of the animal spirits. He maintained further that this gland is suspended in the middle of the brain in as many varying ways as there are varying ways that the animal spirits strike against it, and moreover, that as many varying traces are impressed upon it as there are varying external objects which drive the animal spirits against it. That is why, if the Soul’s will afterwards moves the gland so that it is suspended as it once was by the motion of the animal spirits, the gland will drive and determine the animal spirits in the same way as when they were driven back before by a similar placement of the gland.

Furthermore, he maintained that each will of the Mind is united by nature to a certain fixed motion of this gland. For example, if someone has a will to look at a distant object, this will brings it about that the pupil is dilated. But if he thinks only of the pupil which is to be dilated, nothing will be accomplished by having a will for this, because nature has not joined the motion of the gland which serves to drive the animal spirits against the Optic nerve in a way suitable for dilating or contracting the pupil with the will to dilate or contract it. Instead, it has joined that motion with the will to look at distant or near objects.

Finally, he maintained that even though each motion of this gland seems to have been connected by nature from the beginning of our life with a particular one of our thoughts, they can still be joined by habit to others. He tries to prove this in The Passions of the Soul I.

From these claims, he infers that there is no Soul so weak that it cannot—when it is well directed—acquire an absolute power over its Passions. For as he defines them, these are … perceptions, or feelings, or emotions of the soul, which are particularly related to the soul, and which {NB} are produced, preserved, and strengthened by some motion of the spirits (see The Passions of the Soul I, 27).3 But since to any will we can join any motion of the gland (and consequently any motion of the spirits), and since the determination of the will depends only on our power, we shall acquire an absolute dominion over our Passions, if we determine our will by firm and certain judgments according to which we will to direct the actions of our life, and if we join to these judgments the motions of the passions we will to have. Such is the opinion of that most distinguished Man—as far as I can gather it from his words. I would hardly have believed it had been propounded by so great a Man, had it not been so subtle. Indeed, I cannot wonder enough that a Philosopher of his caliber—one who had firmly decided to deduce nothing except from principles known through themselves, and to affirm nothing which he did not perceive clearly and distinctly, one who had so often censured the Scholastics for wishing to explain obscure things by occult qualities—that such a Philosopher should assume a Hypothesis more occult than any occult quality. What, I ask, does he understand by the union of Mind and Body? What clear and distinct concept does he have of a thought so closely united to some little portion of quantity? Indeed, I wish he had explained this union by its proximate cause. But he had conceived the Mind to be so distinct from the Body that he could not assign any singular cause, either of this union or of the Mind itself. Instead, it was necessary for him to have recourse to the cause of the whole Universe, i.e., to God/Nature.

Again, I should like very much to know how many degrees of motion the Mind can give to that pineal gland, and how great a force is required to hold it in suspense. For I do not know whether this gland is driven about more slowly by the Mind than by the animal spirits, or more quickly; nor do I know whether the motions of the Passions which we have joined closely to firm judgments can be separated from them again by corporeal causes. If so, it would follow that although the Mind had firmly resolved to face dangers, and had joined the motions of daring to this decision, nevertheless, once the danger had been seen, the gland might be so suspended that the Mind could think only of flight. And of course, since there is no common measure between the will and motion, there is also no comparison between the power, or forces, of the Mind and those of the Body. Consequently, the forces of the Body cannot in any way be determined by those of the Mind.

To this we may add that this gland is not found to be so placed in the middle of the brain that it can be driven about so easily and in so many ways, and that not all the nerves extend to the cavities of the brain. Finally, I pass over all those things he claimed about the will and its freedom, since I have already shown, more than adequately, that they are false.

Therefore, because the power of the Mind is defined only by understanding, as I have shown above, we shall determine, by the Mind’s knowledge alone, the remedies for the affects. I believe everyone in fact knows them by experience, though they neither observe them accurately, nor see them distinctly. From that we shall deduce all those things which concern the Mind’s blessedness/flourishing.

Axioms (2)

  1. Part V Axiom 1 - If two contrary actions in same subject, change must occur
  2. Part V Axiom 2 - Power of effect defined by power of its cause

Propositions (42)

If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still, it can be found.

And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard. For if salvation/freedom were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

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