Spinoza — Ethics (1677), Part I

Benedict de Spinoza, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, published posthumously in 1677. Read here in R. H. M. Elwes's English translation (1883), Project Gutenberg ebook 3800, Part I Concerning God in full plus its Appendix. The spoke's third primary philosophical text, after critique-of-pure-reason and meditations-on-first-philosophy, and — as the growth edge kept noting — the cheapest of the remaining ones, because it is out of copyright twice over.

The form is the argument

Part I is 8 definitions, 7 axioms, 36 propositions, each proof citing the numbered definitions, axioms and earlier propositions it stands on. baruch-spinoza has described this as "treating metaphysics like Euclid"; reading it shows the stronger thing. Nothing enters after the definitions. Monism is not asserted anywhere in Part I. It is derived, in five steps, from what "substance", "attribute" and "God" were stipulated to mean at the top:

Def. III — substance is "that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself."
Def. VI — God is "a being absolutely infinite — that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes."
Prop. V — "There cannot exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or attribute."
Prop. XIV — "Besides God no substance can be granted or conceived."
Prop. XV — "Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be conceived."

So the famous doctrine is a consequence of the definitions, and someone who rejects it has to reject a definition rather than a conclusion. That is what a wiki summary of "substance monism" cannot convey, and it is the point of the geometrical order.

What the summary layer flattens

The baruch-spinoza page — written from Wikipedia — says the Ethics holds "there is only one infinite substance." True, and it reads as a claim about how many things there are. The text is doing something else: Def. III makes substance a thing conceivable through itself alone, and Prop. XIV then observes that only one candidate could satisfy that. The count is downstream of a criterion for independence. The tertiary layer keeps the count and drops the criterion, which is the same loss this spoke recorded for Kant (modal) and Descartes (factual) — a third kind: structural.

Freedom, redefined before it is discussed

Def. VII does the work that Part I's determinism later depends on: a thing is free when "it exists solely by the necessity of its own nature, and of which the action is determined by itself alone", and constrained when determined by something external. Freedom is therefore self-determination, not the absence of determination — so Prop. XXIX's "Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature" does not contradict God's freedom. Only God is free, on this definition, because only God is determined by nothing external.

Note what that does to the standard opposition between free will and determinism: Spinoza does not take a side, he redefines the term so that the question dissolves. The move is legislated in a definition before any proposition can be argued about it.

The Appendix, which is not geometrical at all

Part I ends by dropping the apparatus entirely and arguing in prose that final causes are a human projection. The diagnosis: "all men are born ignorant of the causes of things" while conscious of their own desires, so "men think themselves free inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire." From that alone he derives teleology, and then the prejudices about "good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and ugliness."

Two things worth carrying. First, this is an error theory about the origin of a belief, which is a different kind of argument from anything in the 36 propositions — Spinoza is explaining why his readers will resist him, not proving them wrong. Second, the same illusion of freedom named here is the positive definition of freedom from Def. VII seen from inside: people are conscious of the volition and not of the cause.

For the disputes this spoke tracks

How many substances? The spoke files this as Descartes (two) against Spinoza (one). With both primaries now held, the disagreement is sharper than a count: Descartes reaches two substances from what can be doubted, Spinoza reaches one from what can be conceived through itself. They are answering different questions with the same word.
Can reason reach truth? Part I is the strongest statement of rationalism's premise in the corpus: Ax. VI, "A true idea must correspond with its ideate or object", is asserted as an axiom and never argued for. The whole edifice rests on it.

Edition note

The standing rule from critique-of-pure-reason and meditations-on-first-philosophy applies again, and this time it is easy. Scholarship cites the Ethics by part, definition/axiom/proposition number (E1p14, E1app) — a scheme internal to the text, identical across translations and independent of pagination — so unlike Kant's A/B numbering and Descartes' AT pagination, a free edition loses nothing citable here. Elwes's Victorian English is the only cost: "modifications" for affectiones, "ideate" for the object of an idea.

baruch-spinoza · rationalism · rene-descartes · meditations-on-first-philosophy · critique-of-pure-reason · mind-body-problem · western-philosophy · synthesis