Words have a definite meaning only from their use.
—Spinoza, TTP xii, 11
Once I heard a friend, a specialist in ancient philosophy, say: “I don’t care how a translator translates a term, so long as he always translates it the same way.” I take this as hyperbole, expressing a strong preference for consistency, which would often have to give way, in practice, to a more flexible policy. A good choice in one context may be very bad in another. So a conscientious translator, however strongly inclined toward consistency, will find it hard to be strictly consistent. But a modest version of my friend’s principle seems reasonable: a translator of philosophical treatises should generally try to translate the principal terms of the text as consistently as she can without being seriously misleading.
To see why consistency might be important, consider praejudicium, a term which occurs frequently in Spinoza’s works, as it does in those of Descartes, who once wrote that the praejudicia of childhood—the prejudices of childhood, as I would translate it—are the chief cause of error, and that the remedy for this is to try to set them all aside.1 A popular translation of Spinoza, admirable in many ways, uses a wide variety of different English expressions to render praejudicium: sometimes simply “prejudice,” of course, but also “misconception,” or “preconception,” or “false assumption,” or “dogma,” or “bias,” or “biased dogma,” or “prejudgment,” or “unorthodoxy,” or “set of attitudes.” It’s hard to believe that each of these choices can be justified as capturing some particular nuance of praejudicium in the context in which it occurs. But even if they could, we would lose something important by this elegant variation. Praejudicium is a big issue for Spinoza, as it was for Descartes. If the translation obscures how frequently that term occurs, the reader may not realize just how big an issue it is. She also may not realize the extent to which Descartes and Spinoza share a common preoccupation.
That’s one reason for seeking as much consistency as possible in the treatment of key terms. Here’s another: it will be important, at some stage, not just to see that Spinoza is very worried about prejudice, but also to see what kinds of opinion he would include under that heading. I suppose most of us would agree with the general proposition that prejudice—understood, let’s say, as a belief too easily embraced, unsupported by the evidence, and perhaps even contrary to the evidence—is not a good thing. We may still differ about what beliefs are examples of prejudice. Many of us, prior to reading Spinoza, might not think all the beliefs he would call prejudices are unreasonable to believe. His list would include some very common opinions: that everything has some purpose, that God has created everything for some end, that he created man to worship God. These examples come from the Appendix to Part I of the Ethics. In the Preface to the TTP, Spinoza mentions a number of others: that the clergy deserve the highest honor, that religion consists in mysteries, and that in interpreting Scripture, we must assume it is everywhere true and divine. Only when we see what beliefs Spinoza considers to be prejudices can we appreciate the implications of his attack. And we will not easily see that if the translation obscures the range of things he thinks come under that heading.
So there’s good reason to translate the central terms of a philosopher’s work as consistently as you can. That’s why I originally began this Glossary-Index. I wanted to be as consistent as I could in my treatment of key terms. Since I did not always remember the choices I had made, I needed to keep track of them. Early on, realizing how frequently I found it necessary to depart from a one-to-one correspondence,2 I decided that it would be good to share this information with my readers. I was already indexing the terms as they occurred in the Latin text, and recording the English terms I used to translate them. If I made this information available to my reader, that might help her see how Spinoza uses his language, bringing together the different passages in which he uses a given Latin term, and making the connection between those passages transparent when a variety of translations would otherwise obscure the connection. It seemed to me that if I explained in the Index how the terms in Spinoza’s text are correlated with the terms in my translation—and in addition used the Glossary to comment on translation issues and Spinoza’s usage—this might reduce some of the problems inherent in translation. Making this information available might also help the reader find alternatives in cases where she feels that I did not make the best choice. In some cases, it might even be helpful to think of the options not chosen as in a way present, even if not made explicit in a particular passage.3 Here are the principles I’ve followed in constructing my index:
1) I’ve tried to record the most philosophically interesting uses of the most important terms in Spinoza’s philosophical vocabulary. If a term occurs very frequently, I take that as prima facie evidence that it is important, though I may be selective in the occurrences I record. For example, the term pars, normally translated “part,” occurs quite frequently, and in some uses has considerable importance for Spinoza’s philosophy. Letter 32 illustrates this abundantly. Other uses are of no philosophical interest. For example, in TTP xii, 39, Spinoza uses the phrase maxima hominum pars to express the idea that most men would not do something. So I include the former instances, but not the latter. Generally I do not index terms which occur rarely, preferring to use a footnote to explain their meaning, if that seems necessary. But if a term is important enough, I may index it, even if it occurs infrequently. Sometimes the fact that an important term occurs infrequently is interesting in itself. (Conatus would be an example.)
2) Normally I group etymologically related terms together, except when I think this will produce too cumbersome an entry. This has the advantage, often, of bringing together terms whose close relationship is obvious in the language of the text, but not in the language of the translation. Index entries generally begin with a noun, followed by related verbs, adjectives, and so forth. But where a verb or adjective occurs much more frequently than any noun related to it, the entry may begin with the verb or adjective.
3) Phrases involving two or more words—e.g., aeterna veritas—are generally indexed as subentries under the noun in the phrase (or the more important noun, in a phrase which contains two nouns). But I have tried to avoid multiplying subentries, and do not include the Dutch translations of these phrases.
4) The primary initial purpose of the Glossary was to enable readers to go from the English of the translation to the Latin of the index. Sometimes the English term is so similar to the Latin it translates that someone looking in the index for a word very like the English term would quickly find the right term. So looking for a word that looks like “absurd” would quickly lead to the right result. In those cases I create a Glossary entry for the English term only if I have something to say about Spinoza’s use of the corresponding Latin term. But often the relation between the English term and the Latin it translates is not obvious. To take a straightforward example, I use two English terms, “repeal” and “disregard,” to translate the Latin abrogare, depending on whether the action of abrogation is taken by a legal authority or by a citizen subject to that authority. In neither case will looking for a word similar to the English words quickly lead you to the right Latin term.
5) References to specific passages of biblical books will be indexed under Biblical and Talmudic References. But references to entire books of the Bible appear in the Index of Proper Names.
6) I italicize occurrences of formal definitions, quasi-definitions (where Spinoza uses sive to indicate something like an equivalence), and passages where the word or phrase attracts attention in a note. Where Spinoza gives different definitions in different places, my policy is to make each definition an italicized entry.
7) I continue the policy adopted in Volume I of recording the terms used by Spinoza’s seventeenth-century Dutch translators, taking the terms used in the TP and Correspondence from the NS, wherever possible, and those used in the TTP from De Rechtzinnige Theologant. I do think it’s useful to see how Spinoza’s contemporary Dutch translators dealt with his Latin, particularly when they found it necessary to use a variety of different words. But I do not claim to have recorded all the terms they used.
8) Since I’m placing the Annotations to the TTP on the Gebhardt page which the annotation annotates, I index the terms which occur in those notes as if the term in question occurred on the page annotated.
There are certain important words of frequent occurrence which require some explanation, but which I haven’t attempted to index, or create a glossary entry for. The prime example is sive (or seu), which I standardly translate by an italicized “or.” Sometimes, at least, Spinoza uses this connective to indicate a kind of equivalence, or (as I put it above) “something like” an equivalence, between the terms or phrases sive links. Put thus generally and vaguely, I suppose this is a proposition most commentators on Spinoza would accept.4 But as I noted briefly inVolume I (p. xv) we can’t always take sive to indicate a simple equivalence. Here I’ll attempt to say something more about Spinoza’s use of this important term.
(i) Sometimes Spinoza’s use of sive does mark an unproblematic equivalence. For example, at III/177/4–5, Spinoza writes that
no doctrines pertain to the catholic or universal faith which can be controversial among honest men.
Here “universal” (universalis) is just what “catholic” (catholica) means in this context. A decent dictionary would tell us that “universal” is a candidate translation; considerations of context would quickly narrow the field to this meaning.
(ii) Sometimes what we have is arguably an equivalence in which the second disjunct provides an alternate phrasing which offers what we might now call “an analysis” or theoretical definition of the term with which it’s linked, language which is supposed to give us a deeper understanding of what the first disjunct means (or at least, what it means in Spinoza’s philosophy). This seems to me the right way to view the use of sive in Definition 5 of Part I of the Ethics:
By mode I understand the affections of a substance, or that which is in another, through which it is also conceived.
How helpful this explanation actually is will depend, of course, on how well we understand what it is for one thing to “exist in” another or “be conceived through” another. But I think this usage of sive occurs quite frequently in Spinoza. (E I D1 might provide another example.)
(iii) Sometimes sive introduces an alternate way of putting things which does not involve an equivalence, but is arguably more precise than the initial way, as in:
subjects are . . . under the control of the Commonwealth, insofar as they fear its power or threats. (III/287/12–14)
or
both a state which one city alone controls, and especially a state which several cities control, is everlasting (aeternum), or can’t be dissolved or changed into another form by any internal cause. (III/358/10–12)
This is one standard Latin usage. Cf. the OLD 9b.
(iv) Sometimes we have what is clearly neither an equivalence nor a clearer or more precise way of putting things:
This alliance remains firmly established so long as the reason for making the alliance—the fear of loss or hope of profit—continues to motivate both parties. (III/290/11)
or
if every descendant of the King were permitted to marry or to have children. (III/316/3–4)
We need to be aware of this possibility, if we’re not to take the mere use of sive to entail more than it actually does.
(v) And sometimes, though Spinoza may even say explicitly that one thing is the same thing as another, we should probably regard this as a persuasive definition, that is, an attempt, by stipulation, to get us to regard as equivalent two things whose identity is not obvious. Here’s an example which occurs in TTP xiv:
The teaching of the Gospel . . . contains nothing but simple faith: to trust in God, and to revere him, or (what is the same thing), to obey him. (xiv, 8)
Other examples which might fall in this category—though in these cases there is no explicit affirmation of the identity of the two things—include the reference to the “natural power, or Right, of men” (III/277/15) and the reference to “the King’s sword, or right” (III/319/6). In each of these cases the purpose of the identification seems to be to clothe the first disjunct with the aura of the second.
This has an interest which goes beyond the particular cases so far mentioned. The most important examples of the use of sive, from the standpoint of understanding Spinoza’s philosophy, occur in the Preface to Part IV of the Ethics, where he twice uses the famous phrase Deus seu natura (II/206/23, 26–27). Nowhere else in his works does Spinoza use this language. What does he mean by it? I don’t think we know, at this stage of our studies. But to decide what it might mean we need to examine, with some care, Spinoza’s many uses of sive. I hope that this edition will advance a discussion which needs to take place by organizing some of the necessary data.
Another problematic word of frequent occurrence is quatenus. In company with other translators I normally translate quatenus by “insofar as.” But lately I have come to think that this may be misleading. Quatenus is ambiguous. Of the various possible meanings recognized in the OLD the two which seem most relevant are: (1) “to the extent to which” indicating scope (and implying that there is some limit to the scope); and (2) “inasmuch as” or “seeing that,” implying causal force. (Cf. OLD B7 and B8.) I believe Spinoza scholars tend to assume quatenus has the first meaning. I have thought this myself, though without, it now seems to me, carefully thinking out the implications of this interpretation. But I now think there are contexts where that interpretation is impossible, and the second is clearly indicated: e.g., III/58/9. (Surely it is not the case that man is only to some extent a part of nature.) I have not tried to resolve this ambiguity in my translation, partly because of the difficulty of deciding, in many cases, which interpretation is best, and partly because I suspect that the English “insofar as” may have the same ambiguity. See the discussion of this term in the Continuum Companion 2011.
In Volume II, my resource of first resort in investigating the possible meanings of Latin terms has generally been the Oxford Latin Dictionary. But as helpful as that work is, I have found myself frequently consulting the Brepolis Database of Latin Dictionaries, which includes not only Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary (still quite useful) and Forcellini’s Lexicon, but also a number of dictionaries recording later Latin usage, like DuCange’s Glossarium and Chauvin’s Lexicon philosophicum. For Dutch the dictionary I have gone to first is Jansonius’s Nieuw Groot Nederlands-Engels Woordenboek (2nd ed., 3 vols., 1972). Where Jansonius did not help, I consulted Van Dale’s Groot Woordenboek van de Nederlandse Taal (14th ed., 3 vols., 2005).