Spinoza worked on his Ethics, his masterpiece, for the last fifteen years of his life, but he knew it would never be published while he was alive; he therefore arranged for its posthumous publication. The book describes a world system that in one sense is God and in another sense has no need of God for its existence, and the doctrine was radically unacceptable to Spinoza’s contemporaries. We read the Ethics today not so much for its metaphysical system as for its solid common sense—and for its extraordinary form and style.
In fact, Spinoza had two styles, very different from one another. The first is his standard prose style, which he adopts in only a few places in Ethics—alas, too few! Paragraphs of notes and commentaries are sprinkled throughout the text and they are always welcome because of their special charm and humanity. The Fourth Book of Ethics, with its famous title “Of Human Bondage,” is particularly rich in prose comments and asides. The book deals with the power our passions hold over us; our passions enslave us, says Spinoza, hold us in bondage. In the Fifth Book, the last, titled “Of Human Freedom,” Spinoza shows how, by the intellect’s understanding alone, without the help of anything outside the mind (without the help of God—it is no wonder that he was excommunicated by the Jews and his works declared anathema by the Christians), the passions can be overcome and happiness found in a quiet life of peace and contentment. All this is summed up on the last page of the work, in a paragraph that for its sweetness is justly famous:
I have finished everything I wished to explain concerning the power of the mind over the affects and concerning its liberty … If the way which, as I have shown, leads hither seem very difficult, it can nevertheless be found. It must indeed be difficult since it is so seldom discovered; for if salvation lay ready to hand and could be discovered without great labor, how could it be possible that it should be neglected almost by everybody?But all noble things are as difficult as they are rare.
Spinoza’s other style is astonishing to those who come upon it without warning. Descartes had said that all knowledge was, if not mathematics, then based on mathematics, and his “method,” to put it very simply, was to mathematicize everything. Spinoza concluded that metaphysics and ethics, like physics and the other natural sciences, ought to benefit from the Cartesian way of looking at things, and the Ethics is therefore in geometrical form. Axioms and definitions are laid down, propositions are stated and proved, and each proof ends with “Q.E.D.” But the text does not treat such simple entities as points and lines, triangles and circles. Instead, it deals with God and His creation, the angels and the world of material things, man and his intellect and will, and his bondage to and freedom from his passions.
That Descartes’s geometrical method is inappropriate to the science (if it is that) of ethics may never have been apparent to Benedict de Spinoza. It is doubtless apparent to us from the very beginning. Spinoza’s attempt, however, has a certain splendor and is worth noting as a minor monument along the highway of the history of thought. We should remember, too, that Cartesianism, the prevalent disease of modern thought, has invaded still other realms where it does not belong: politics, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.
I do not recommend Spinoza’s Ethics because it is a failure; I recommend it because it succeeds, despite its form, in expressing with singular force Stoic arguments about freedom and virtue. Socrates had said in the Phaedo that “no evil can come to a good man, in life or in death.” By “good man” he meant one who was in control of himself and therefore safe from internal treachery; there could be no real danger from outside, for the worst tyrant could not touch a good man’s soul. This basic Stoic tenet, which is Spinoza’s, too, may not be wholly true, but there is a rich kernel of truth in it. Courageous men and women are always more or less stoical and no one is finally so free of coercion as he who is willing to die rather than be coerced. Such is the true Stoic—a noble breed, though rare.
To be appreciated, the Ethics does not have to be read in its entirety. Read the introductory passages to each of the five books, the statements of the propositions, and all of the lengthy prose comments (Lemmas). From time to time scan a proof. Some of the terms will seem very odd; anything you know about Scholastic philosophy, for example, will come in handy. But Spinoza is not inaccessible, he is just strange. Both wonderful and strange, as befits the creator of something that is both difficult and rare.
chapter seven
The Age of Reason…
The later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of a hundred years, more or less—has often been called the Age of Reason. I’m not sure how accurate a term that is. True, the Renaissance was pretty much over and done except in Germany, where the Thirty Years War delayed everything for a long generation. It was a time when Europeans, for the most part, were feeling their way, looking backward with very little regret and forward with some trepidation. The idea of the sanctity of kings was being questioned, and there were shadows of an emergent capitalism based not on the ownership of land but instead on an incipient money economy.
At the same time there was a deep nostalgia for the Augustan Age, so-called, of the early years of the Roman Empire. The literary hero was not so much Virgil as were Juvenal and Horace, whose satirical and critical writings (notably Ars Poetica—The Art of Poetry) were taught in every school and helped shape the culture for a hundred and fifty years.
John Dryden and Alexander Pope were particularly influential. Pope especially mined Horace’s Art of Poetry in several famous works. His mastery of the heroic couplet—rhymed iambic pentameter couplets—was imitated by everyone, as he himself had imitated Dryden’s. When he died in 1744, it seemed that they would endure for all time. However, in twenty years they had practically disappeared. It was not the first time nor would it be the last when a literary fashion bloomed and was then discarded in a short period of time.
You will see that in the title of this chapter the word “Reason” is followed by ellipses. By this device I am trying to suggest that although reason was the idea of the time, revolution was also lurking there in the shadowy future (see Chapter 8).
ISAAC NEWTON
1642–1727
Principia
Isaac Newton was born in 1642, the son of a small farmer who died before his birth. The boy’s upbringing and schooling were both irregular, but his native brilliance, although usually hidden, emerged often enough so that he managed to be accepted at Trinity College, Cambridge. There is no record of his career as a student, but it is known he read widely in mathematics and science. He studied Euclid but found him trivial; he later returned to the Elements and mastered the work in a few hours. Descartes’s Geometry inspired him to do original work. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1665; he was twenty-two but he had already discovered the binomial theorem.