Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza's Ethics

"Yes. This is Curley’s book, Behind the Geometrical Method: a Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics . It’s relatively short, only about 130 pages, and it’s a nice accessible introduction to the main themes of Spinoza’s philosophy. He doesn’t devote a lot of time to the political stuff or even the religious stuff. It’s focused mainly on the Ethics . There’s a chapter on God. There’s a chapter on the human being – about the mind-body relationship. And then the third chapter’s on human well-being, which is moral philosophy. You’re not going to get the full sense of Spinoza’s very broad system, but I think it’s a nice entry portal to the basic ideas of the Ethics . He describes it as a reading of Spinoza’s Ethics , not of Spinoza’s whole philosophy. I think partly it’s a way to ensure that he’s establishing his conclusions with mathematical certainty. No. In fact, he was under no illusions about that, either. But, one of his views is that nature is governed by an absolute necessity. He’s not just a causal determinist: he’s a necessitarian. For him things could not possibly have been any other way because events are causally determined. The laws of nature themselves are also absolutely necessary. So, what better way to capture the relationships that exist in nature than by a body of propositions that are themselves related by logical necessity? I think he also just thought it was an effective way to convey fairly complex ideas in a clear and distinct manner. Descartes did it, too. You mentioned Hobbes. In his response to the second set of objections in Hobbes’s Objections to the Meditations, Descartes presents some of the conclusions in the Meditations in a geometric format. True, yes, and a geometer. Remember, too, that Spinoza was a Cartesian, at least in his early years. He was inspired by Descartes and his first published work was that summary of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy . So, he may have been inspired by Descartes’s own attempt to present philosophical matters in geometrical format. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Curley’s other book, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation , has been very influential and it’s hard to write about Spinoza’s views on God and nature without taking into account his important interpretation. There’s the question of whether he is a pantheist or an atheist, but also the technical vocabulary that Spinoza uses. Spinoza says that whatever is, is in God, and he uses this Cartesian language of ‘substances’, ‘attributes’ and ‘modes’ and says that ordinary things in the world are ‘modes’ of God or substance. What does he mean? In what sense are all things ‘in God’? ‘Modes’ we usually think of as properties inhering in a substance. This book might be the substance and the green is the mode. So, when Spinoza says ‘whatever is, is in God’ and ‘God is the only substance’ are we supposed to think that we are just pimples on God’s skin, that we are ‘in God’ as properties are in God? And Curley argues that that’s just awkward metaphysics. Now, I think that’s not an objection to a reading of Spinoza to say, ‘well that makes him awkward’, because Spinoza is awkward. He is trying to get us to radically rethink the way we look at the world. So, there’s a lot of debate about how we are supposed to understand this relationship between finite things, which includes ourselves, and infinite eternal substance—God. And in his book on Spinoza’s metaphysics, Curley tries to reinterpret it in terms of laws and facts and to make it seem a little bit more palatable to our modern scientific philosophical way of thinking. I think it’s brilliant, but I don’t think it’s the right way to read Spinoza."