Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677), a philosopher who preferred to grind and polish lenses rather than to lecture in the university, confronted the distorted beliefs of his time and sought to correct them by means of a fine-tuned geometric form of writing. His master work, the Ethics, published posthumously, proves beyond all doubt that we can achieve a blessed state of happiness by a peculiar mix he calls “intellectual love,” and this state can be achieved without institutional religion or any other ritual or magic.
Spinoza is the great champion of concrete life in modern times. It is interesting that philosophy, religion, myth, and ideology often focus on denying the simple facts of life by inventing alternative stories—predicated on the fear of death—that grip our imagination and occupy our mind. Like Socrates, Spinoza diverges from this tradition and constructs his philosophy around the notion that “a free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.”1 Spinoza’s main interest is to make life noticeable in its natural, simple everydayness. In Spinoza’s work, life is no longer a mysterious stream, a divine gift, or an essence, but the concrete web of connections in which we are always immersed. In part the leveling of all forms of existence to a common plane explains why Spinoza is relevant to contemporary thought and practices, from biology to philosophy and art. In part, this equalizing, which denies external moral judgment and pre-established hierarchies, is still difficult for most of us to accept.
The Ethics partakes in the age-old task of philosophy—raising the question of how we live and bringing the shape of our life to consciousness. Its emphasis on life as it happens places the Ethics on a collision course with monotheistic religions, whose narratives depend on a transcendent divine force. While in modern times transcendent religion has lost its gripping power, Spinoza’s ideas are still radical because he denies that individual subjects can know otherworldly truths or act freely outside the chain of necessity. We might find parts of his view appealing and parts appalling, but the argument stems from his uncompromising emphasis on this life and this world and nothing beyond.
Spinoza’s work is an anomaly. Even today readers confront it with a mixture of reverence and fear, as his pronouncements strike us as both alien and clear. He invented his own style of writing that mimicked the form of Euclidian geometry. He begins by offering a set of definitions and axioms, moves on to propositions and explanations, and ends with the triumphant QED associated with traditional Euclidian proofs.
In his personal life he challenged some of the most cherished beliefs of his times and ours. He rejected the appeal to an external source of value, and with that he refuted the duality of the material and the spiritual, the eternal and the temporal, the necessary and the contingent. For more than a century after his death, his name was synonymous with atheism and wickedness. He published two books in his lifetime—the first, on the philosophy of René Descartes, did not include his own beliefs. And the second, on matters of theology and politics, was published anonymously and under the name of a false publisher. The Ethics, undoubtedly his masterwork, was brought to print only after his death. Inasmuch as it was and still is influential, it is also an eccentric book that does not sit neatly within the traditional history of philosophy. On the one hand, it returns to the ancient tradition of doing philosophy as a practice and a way of life and, on the other, it does so with a modern vocabulary borrowed from the new science and philosophy of the time.
Spinoza’s Secret Life and Texts
Eighteen years after the death of his mother and two years after the death of his father, Baruch d’Espinoza, then twenty-eight, was banished from the Jewish community of Amsterdam. The city’s relatively new and still fragile collection of immigrants consisted mostly of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity at the time of the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. Their persecution, nevertheless, persisted. For more than a century, the converted were harshly interrogated about the depth and sincerity of their beliefs. Spinoza’s parents had been such Marrano Christians—the term for Jews who had to live under false pretense as Christians. When the city council of Amsterdam offered citizenship to “Portuguese merchants” in 1598, thousands of crypto-Jews left for the city where they could openly practice a religion they only vaguely remembered.
Many readers of Spinoza link his radically free and independent spirit to his experience with the pretense and irrationality associated with organized religions. His philosophy can be read as a persistent attempt to tear down the veil of myth, irrational fear, and messianic hope that sustains prejudice. Spinoza embraces the world as it is—a world free from higher purposes or an observing, judging God. It is a vision that is as radical as it is simple.
Spinoza’s Amsterdam was one of the most liberal cities of Europe, the financial capital of a vibrant new republic enjoying its first golden age. In the year of his birth the great painter Johannes Vermeer and the scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, who developed the microscope, were born in Delft. Spinoza came from a family of traders who used their network of connections across the Iberian peninsula and North Africa to exchange goods. They kept a house alongside a prosperous canal in what was gradually becoming the Jewish quarter. In 1639, when Spinoza was seven, Rembrandt bought a house across the street after marrying the niece of his art dealer who lived next door.
The young Spinoza was well educated in religion and commerce, spoke Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Latin, and received training from non-Jewish teachers in science, philosophy, politics, and classical literature. It is unclear when his religious doubts began, but from his own account in the (unfinished) Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect we know that he found no solace or happiness in the life of a well-to-do merchant. Gradually, he distanced himself from the Jewish community and focused increasingly on the new philosophy of Descartes as well as on physics, optics, and geometry.
The leaders of the Jewish community in Amsterdam were concerned about his circle of secular acquaintances and rumored atheistic beliefs and asked him to repent. When he refused, they issued a harsh statement of condemnation that amounted to an excommunication. Spinoza’s life in Amsterdam became very difficult after this pronouncement. A fanatic reportedly tried to kill him, and he was cut off from his family and source of income. He moved frequently, staying mostly in boarding houses, and kept almost no property.
His first philosophical work concerned the interpretation of Descartes in his own unique geometric fashion (the Principles of the Philosophy of René Descartes, 1663, in Latin). It is customary to relate Spinoza to Descartes or position the two on opposing sides of a philosophical argument: Descartes the philosopher of transcendence and dualism versus Spinoza the immanent monist. But this construction can oversimplify important nuances. Descartes accepted the rule of the Church in all matters concerning value and the salvation of the soul, whereas Spinoza enlists religious terminology and passion for a new secular religion that couples reason and salvation in this world. In 1670 his Theological-Political Treatise was released by a fictitious publisher without the author’s name. The book raises harsh questions about the way in which organized religions cultivate prejudice, irrationality, and the fear of freedom. Instead, the book offers steps to achieving enlightenment that include both practicing reason and appropriating good customs and habits that arise from tradition and institutions associated with the state.
Spinoza was eventually revealed as the author of the Treatise, and the “heretic Jew” became the target of extraordinary criticism from many factions. Jews, Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans, liberals, and Cartesians competed to condemn him the most harshly. For the rest of the seventeenth century the words Spinozism and Spinozist were used as insult and threat.
His greatest and most comprehensive work, the Ethics, developed over the course of his mature life as a thinker. Letters to friends in 1661 touch upon important themes from the book and mention a study group that took shape around early drafts. The ideas of the Ethics, however, remained hidden from mainstream society. The book famously rejects an appeal to an otherworldly reality. It denies an external creator and asserts that nature contains both the cause and explanation of itself. Such a claim could not be made public even in the moderate and liberal Dutch republic.
Spinoza lived an ascetic life and rejected offers for financial help from his close circle of friends as well as a position of philosophy professor at the famous German university of Heidelberg. He did so to maintain his absolute freedom to think and create. He worked as a lens crafter and died at the age of forty-three—probably of a pulmonary disease. A year later his friends brought his complete writings to publication. Even though the house and place of publication remained unmentioned, the author himself received full credit.
Radical Simplicity
Many commentators mistake the secrecy associated with Spinoza’s life and writings to be a feature of the texts themselves. British philosopher Stewart Hampshire holds that “Spinoza never intended to communicate his real meaning, or the more significant part of his philosophy, to his contemporaries, except a few close friends.… [He] believed that his contemporaries could not even try to understand his thought, because its conclusions were evidently incompatible with their deepest religious loyalties and moral prejudices. Being fully understood would cause a horrible scandal and it would destroy all tranquility in his life. In fact, he could not afford to be understood.”2
It is indeed one of the most common claims in the literature on Spinoza. The notion that Spinoza did not want to be understood reinforces the difficulty many readers experience in accessing his writing. Spinoza is indeed difficult, but not because his writing is. His philosophy is uncompromising—it begins with a few claims we might intuitively accept and leads to positions many of us find jarring. The problem is that the transition from the one to the other follows like a logical, geometric proof. Whereas Spinoza does not shy away from the results of his strict reasoning, most readers feel that the results might be too far-fetched and feel inclined to domesticate the text by reinterpretation.
This chapter assumes a different Spinoza—a straightforward thinker who speaks freely and directly and whom we should take at face value. With this reading we can follow Spinoza in a way that challenges our own metaphysical baggage. Are we willing to accept his radical emphasis on the concreteness of life without any limits or promises of another world? If so, are we willing to accept his denial of human freedom, as it is customarily conceived? And will we follow Spinoza’s logic to the point of integrating ourselves in a community of others, animate and inanimate, renouncing our individuality and our privileged position?
The first part of the Ethics, “On God,” begins with a set of propositions:
D3: By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself.
D4: By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence.
D6: By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.
While these ideas would have been intuitively acceptable to a seventeenth-century philosopher, to us such talk of God as one substance with infinite attributes can seem a bit alienating. But the core notion is familiar: Spinoza argues for the complete identification of God and nature. “That eternal and infinite being we call God or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists,” he writes (IV, preface). This famous sentence—omitted from the first Dutch translation—presents the radical but intuitive premise from the outset. The single substance that exists in infinite ways—God or nature—is the totality of things in this world.
This set of definitions states the obvious: everything is everything, and there is nothing apart from it. Everything must be conceived through itself (I, D3). We can only know the whole (substance) through our limited perception (attributes) (I, D4). The totality represents “God,” “Nature,” or the infinite, and we—as finite beings—are modes of this infinite, all-inclusive eternal (I, D6).
The consequences of this set of assertions are surprising. Spinoza’s basic intuition in the first part of the Ethics asserts that God cannot be separated from what is. God does not create the world but is identical to it in its totality and infinity. This view threatens organized religion, because many perceive it to downgrade God to the level of the material world. Seen a different way, Spinoza’s claim is merely an elevation of nature. Both descriptions, however, are lacking since they employ a value hierarchy Spinoza rejects. The identification of God and nature creates a new concept of God and a new concept of nature on an equal, united foundation.
According to Spinoza, there is only one substance that can be approached in infinite many ways. Of these we humans know only two—extension and thought. We perceive physical entities that extend in space and we approach the world intellectually as a set of ideas or meanings. Spinoza does not stop to elaborate on our finite limitation, and there is no way of measuring what we cannot know. But humility must accompany our attempts to know the world. There is an internal, immanent limit to human knowledge, not because there is a transcendent world beyond the one we inhabit, but because this one is infinite.
Spinoza’s monism lays out what philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls “a common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all individuals, are situated.”3 All that there is, in its totality, is a continuous weave of interconnectedness. This can either sound mystical or simply self-evident: everything is everything and there is nothing else. It can also explain some of the more stupefying statements in the first part of the Ethics concerning the necessity of this world. In Spinoza’s twenty-ninth proposition he tells us, “In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way” (I, P29). And, as if to infuriate us even more, Spinoza continues, “Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced” (I, P33). On the one hand, it seems absurd that Spinoza would deny God the freedom to create the world differently. But this becomes clear if we remember that God is the totality of things. God does not play dice, as Einstein would say later.4 This is so because God is actualized in this world by the totality of all things. He (or she or it: Spinoza repeatedly ridicules the personification of God as a kind of superhuman being) does not maintain an identity outside of this world, a platform from which to will it differently. In that respect God too is bound by the necessity of this world.
God as a willing, active agent is dropped from Spinoza’s explanation: nature has no external purposes, and there are no fixed values beyond the totality of this world. But Spinoza’s claim is even stronger. It affirms our existence here in the happening world and emphatically asserts, “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing” (II, D6). What exists is perfect. This does not mean that we must accept everything as it is, but that we need to view things as they are without the veil of myth, external purposes, or prejudice. The world as it is includes no judgment and no essential “good” or “evil.” It is simply what it is—though viewing it as such is no simple feat. Since there is no external perspective and no “outside world” to compare this one with, we can logically conclude that it lacks nothing. It is perfect.
The Blushing Face of God
Apart from the rejection of the duality of creator and created, Spinoza rejects another famous duality—that of the mind and the body. The separation of these two is a fundamental tenet of the Judeo-Christian conception of humanity and remains strong even today, if under secular guise. According to Spinoza, mind, spirit, or soul (I use these indiscriminately to encompass a wide range of associations) is nature’s self-expression. In other words, it is one of the forms of “God” or “Nature.”
This notion resembles naturalism, but naturalism typically involves a further conclusion: that all the mental, spiritual, moral, or religious phenomena can be reduced to material processes. Spinoza does not share this reductive view. For him, the mental and the physical are two aspects of one and the same substance.
Humans can understand only two attributes of the world as we encounter it—extension and thought—which are parallel and equal expressions. Neither is higher and neither reduces to the other. Descartes thought the two are distinct things—a thinking thing and an extended thing—and this conclusion led to many problems. If they are distinct, how do they relate? How does a thought influence the body, and how does the body trigger thought? Where exactly is the seat of the “soul” or of “consciousness,” and can the body know? These are just a few variants on the mind-body problem that haunt the dualist account like ghosts in the machine.
In the second part of the Ethics, “On the Nature and Origin of the Mind,” Spinoza offers an alternative view that addresses some of the shortcomings of mind-body dualism. It too is jarringly simple: mentality and materiality (or thought and extension) function like adjectives in a sentence. They clarify aspects of the subject, but they need not overlap, intrude on, or originate from each other. “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things,” Spinoza writes (II, P7). This proposition can be misleading since it prompts many readers to look for systematic relations between the two orders. But this misconception only proves the strength of the dualist mindset. We can follow Spinoza’s terminology, but not the insight behind it. Perhaps thought and extension function like adjectives, but then we want to know how the two relate. This classic dualistic problem is misplaced. There is no gap between thoughts and things that must be closed by inventing some systematic relation. The two are expressions of the same. Spinoza explains this proposition by reminding us: “the thinking substance and the extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under that” (II, P7, S).
The monist must face some trouble as well. If there is only one substance, which we apprehend under two attributes, what is the status of particular things? How can we make sense of the fact that the world as we know it is made of separate and distinct objects? And how do those things—sand on the beach, flowers, you, me—relate to one another? Spinoza’s answer is that they are the “modes” of the one substance. They are properties or qualities that substance can gain or lose without any substantial change. Modes are different from attributes because modes represent nonsubstantial configurations of nature. The scientific laws of nature are infinite modes (explaining the relations between material objects), and individuals are finite modes. Finite things do not exist necessarily—in other words, existence is not an essential part of their essence. Instead, finite things are modes of God or nature and represent part of the continuum of all substances that express God and nature. But it is important to remember that God or nature do not exist apart from these expressions. There is no hierarchy and no depth in Spinoza’s system. Finite things are as important as God, since God exists in and through them.
What are we then? We are a blush on the face of God. As he argues, “the human mind is part of the infinite intellect of God” (II, P11, C). We are made of the one eternal substance—mind and matter—that is part of the whole; therefore, we help comprise the whole. How can we understand that? A blush is a mode. For a face to have a blush means that it acquires a particular tint. These are not two things: the face and the blush, standing in a certain relation; rather, we have a single thing, a face, and it is blushing.
Happiness Now
This conclusion offers us a glimpse of Spinoza’s ethical doctrine as it comes to affirm and celebrates life in this world. After all, the book is not a metaphysical treatise, and reading it as such makes it unduly dull and difficult. Instead, the Ethics is a guide to leading a fulfilled and happy life. And, indeed, in concluding the book’s second section, Spinoza describes four beneficial results of his philosophy:
1. It grants “complete tranquility of mind” since we come to understand “that we share in the divine nature.” According to Spinoza, the more we recognize this continuity and communal perspective, the more we extend onto the world, the more we achieve happiness, freedom, and blessedness.
2. “It teaches us what attitude we should adopt regarding fortune.” Recognition of the larger continuity of the world helps make individual fortunes or misfortunes less significant.
3. It “assists in our social relations.” It teaches us to be content with ourselves and frees us from harboring grudges, envy, or bitterness when we compare our fate to that of another.
4. Finally, it leads to a political commonwealth in that it at once maintains order and protects freedom.
Clearly, Spinoza wants to affect the reader, and part of his message involves spurring individual and social change. This change is not abstract or moral—it does not establish objective good and evil against a set of universal rules. Instead, it is ethical—that is, it offers a framework for the classical idea of “the good life” or happiness. The message includes several simple assertions. First, we are not separable from our relations with others and with the world. Second, there is no soul that hovers besides life or a transcendent, score-keeping God. (Likewise, neither rewards nor punishments await us in another world.) Third, the value of our actions lies in the doing itself, since life as whole has no purpose outside of itself. Finally, following this ethical route leads not only to individual happiness and peace of mind but also to a better community of individuals.
It is important to note that Spinoza does not reject a personal or subjective point of view. He only recommends learning to see things differently—sub specie aeternitatis—as part of a continuum or “under a certain form of eternity” (II, P44, C 2). Eternal for Spinoza is not the religious notion of the everlasting. Rather, the eternal is achieved when we move away from linear temporality, which is based on our subjective experiences and is marked by our beginning and ending. In Spinoza, eternity represents a wholesome and organic sense of transformation and perfection that affects the totality of things all at once. This state enables us to look at things beyond our subjective perspectives and experience ourselves as part of a much greater composition. My life and death mean something different for my parents, my children, the city in which I live, or from the point of view of nature as a whole. Spinoza’s Ethics helps us move between these different levels so that we can settle within a position that sustains our happiness—not rejecting our individual being but not being locked in it.
Spinoza’s monism denies the opposition between a sense of “me” and “not-me” as well as the opposition between this opposition and the assertion of a distinct individuality. It is like being immersed in a game, knowing oneself as a player but losing oneself in the totality of its dynamic relations. At those moments, which are experienced as instances rather than as stretches of progressive time, we participate in the harmony of existence. On this level of perfection our actions can be described as both necessary and free, and we experience ourselves equally as distinct and as part of a larger community. The immanent monism of the Ethics is about achieving this state of mind-body attunement, which includes the self and the infinity of this world. It is here that we can hear the ethical resonances of Spinoza’s absolute affirmation of this world in its perfection: “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing.”
The rest of the Ethics will tackle the difficulties that stand in the way of integrating ourselves into this larger composition. And there are many. We are educated and trained to think about ourselves as unique, separate entities, competing with others. A form of heightened individualism has taken hold, at least in Western cultures, and intensified since the time of Spinoza. It might be that recent developments—discoveries made in neurobiology or the experience of social networks—allow us to return today and realize the relevance of Spinoza to our everyday experience of living. But our cultural history, our language, as well as our economic, political, moral, and legal systems still insist on separating us from each other. This complex of forces helps explain why the Ethics sounds alternatively so intuitive and so alien.
Picturing the Geometric Soul
In all, Spinoza proves himself to be an acute and sensitive observer of the richness of human psychology. We can follow his formulations in their minute details or we can try to extrapolate in broad strokes, in the way that stepping back from a painting allows greater clarity in understanding the whole. The geometric design serves this purpose. It conveys graphically the idea of an ordered totality that can be accessed almost at any given moment and produce the same results. The Ethics thus develops to an unprecedented level the potential of a book to become an object of a meditative gaze. In this way it can be compared to a painting or a face. We have to take in the expression, character, or worldview as a whole before we observe them analytically or progressively. The geometric design, therefore, serves to integrate the individual within a whole, and it elicits the set of relations from which individual details emerge. The Ethics shows rather than tells the reader its one most important insight—the interweaving of all particulars into one scheme.
The great Dutch painters who were working alongside Spinoza contributed to the same great revelation. Their new realistic style of painting embodied spiritual meaning in everyday scenes that spoke directly and immediately to nonexperts. Vermeer’s portraits showed the beauty of solitary housemaids, pouring milk, peering through a window, or staring straight ahead. And Rembrandt, living across the street from Spinoza, transplanted classic religious scenes onto the streets of Amsterdam. Dutch paintings from these years celebrate life in its concreteness. The textures of the garments, the shapes of the objects, and the light coming through an open window are bursting with life. These masterworks, like the Ethics, provide a vision of the eternal in the everyday.
The geometric method seemed adequate so long as we were considering God or the mind in a more or less abstract manner. But now that we have reached the level of human psychology, the text requires a more personal perspective. After all, the emotions are nothing if they are not “felt” somehow from within, and Spinoza’s Ethics requires this force in order to motivate a change toward the picture of happiness it paints.
The text will therefore maintain its geometric view while relaxing the attempt to provide proofs for emotions: “Therefore, I shall treat the nature and powers of the affects, and the power of the mind over them, by the same method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies” (III, preface).
The form of the exposition follows the function. The essential element in reaching a state of calm happiness is ascending to a position from which our emotional states are seen as lines, planes, and bodies and are experienced as an overall connected system of relations. We need to be able to take them in as a whole: not only this fear or that anger but rather what brought about this fear, what emotions and actions followed, and to whom these reactions are related. This form of explanation is not only linear or progressive but also backward, sideways, and in motion, since actions shape the position from which the past and the future are interpreted. For Spinoza, appreciating this connectivity means becoming active with respect to one’s emotions, and “becoming active” means understanding the causes and the properties of our psychophysical states. In today’s psychological jargon, we might say that Spinoza calls on us to own how we feel, and that means not to be carried under the sway of our immediate passions but to understand and so transform them.
For Spinoza, individual freedom is not an unexplained action without precedents or causes. Rather, freedom means the ability to act in accordance with one’s situation. Freedom is not the opposite of necessity but the opposite of compulsion. It is a form of liberation—where an individual feels at one with the world, without expectation, judgment, fear, or hope.
A central feature in Spinoza’s program is the replacement of the idea of a free, desiring subject with a more relational and biological form of striving, which he terms conatus. In the most general sense, conatus—or striving—is the very force of life that sustains and defines us: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being” (III, P6). From the moment that a thing exists, it strives to persevere by maintaining or affirming its existence. Perseverance is more than survival, of course; survival is a necessary condition. Spinoza is realistic in asserting that whatever exists strives to exist and increase its power of existence. Taken by itself, this proposition can be misleading since it begins with “each thing” and then endows the thing with a mysterious power of striving, as if living is an extra force added to the material world. The next proposition balances this impression: “The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing” (III, P7). The form of striving that we take is who we are in essence. Here we begin correctly, with life, and it is life that takes different shapes of striving. Life individuates itself into different individuals who then express and experience themselves as different forms of striving. The form of striving is “nothing but the actual essence of the thing.”
We can compare Spinoza’s conatus with Freud’s notion of libido, which serves to describe a similar undefined energy of life. For both thinkers (and therapists, in their different ways) we become free only when we understand and embrace this life force that shapes us. By taking responsibility for it, we make it our own. Both the therapeutic and philosophical approaches are morally neutral; their struggle is against forms of repression that restrict our libido or conatus by appealing to external or abstract set of considerations. The “good” is explained as an affirmation of existence and is expressed as an increase in activity and freedom. The more we take responsibility for our nature, the more active, free, and happy we become.
Now, as individuals, we know our form of striving only partially. But when the striving becomes self-conscious, not only of its objects but of its particular form as one form of life, it affirms its own existence. This is Spinoza’s famous “intellectual love”—this desiring desire, this affirmation of affirmation, this passion that knows itself as both knowledge and love. Spinoza calls this state of happiness, perhaps ironically, after his own first name, Benedictos in Latin, Baruch in Hebrew: “the blessed one.”
The Highest Desire
Self-conscious striving—the striving that strives to know itself—is Spinoza’s definition of philosophy. It is the love of knowledge.
The last section of the Ethics returns us to the original intent of the book—to serve as a modern guide to the perplexed who want to find meaning and happiness in this life, rather than appeal to external causes or purposes. The book is a spiritual exercise, not a metaphysical theory: “And he who will observe these rules carefully—for they are not difficult—and practice them, will soon be able to direct most of his actions according to the command of reason” (V, P10, S).
The rules are not difficult. They consist mostly in expanding the region of knowledge and allowing us to know ourselves as one integrated mind-body, within an ever-growing environment of life. Because the knower and the known are one and the same, at the highest point our desire to know turns into love, and the love is nothing but the desire to know. To love life fully is to want to know it fully—this is our ultimate end, our highest desire: “So the ultimate end of the man who is led by reason, that is, his highest desire, by which he strives to moderate all others, is that by which he is led to conceive adequately both himself and all things which can fall under his understanding” (IV, appendix, 4).
The lover of wisdom is a lover of this world, and truly knowing oneself means experiencing oneself as interwoven into the fabric of this world. The odd couple, love and knowledge—just like the creator and the created, mind and body, or necessity and freedom—are integrated within the movement of life that the Ethics charts. This is why Spinoza can argue that “a free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death” (V, P67). “Meditation on life” feeds our intellectual curiosity and enriches our practical and emotional embodiment in it. It is a manifestation of what Spinoza poetically terms intellectual love, that is, the infinite passion to know that binds everything together.
The Ethics is an enveloping text. By the time we finish it, we realize that we had the vision in place long ago and that the reasoning returned, each time with a different perspective, to the same field of existence. The reading takes us progressively from one argument to the next amid the whole, which exists simultaneously like a geometric proof. With Spinoza we reach the eternal in and through time, though time itself changes with this experience. Likewise, we achieve perfection by meditating life in its concreteness and the life we encounter changes in this very process.