The Ethics

"The seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza takes up, once again, after a long interruption known as the Middle Ages, the Greek philosophers’ project of grounding all ethical and political questions on reason’s foundations, keeping religion, in particular, out of it. Because, of course, that is what had happened during the Middle Ages: ethical questions were relegated to religion. His magnum opus is called the Ethics, and it makes every claim for reason that’s ever been made, including the claim that reason can ethically, even spiritually, transform us. And he wrote the Ethics in reason’s favored form: strict proofs, in the fashion of Euclid, starting with axioms and definitions and proceeding to theorems, which then serve as the axioms of the subsequent theorems, the whole thing knitted into one logically cohesive system. “Like Socrates, Spinoza’s advocacy of reason put him in mortal danger.” Spinoza, like Plato , had good reason to think that most people would not feel the appeal of his rationalist project. His own family members were Jews from Portugal, who, because the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition was still raging, had lived as crypto-Judaizers and eventually escaped to Amsterdam, where Spinoza was born. And then Spinoza’s Jewish community of Amsterdam placed him in cherem , a kind of Jewish excommunication, when he was only twenty-four, because of his philosophical inclinations. Like Socrates, Spinoza’s advocacy of reason put him in mortal danger. I think this is one of the reasons that he wrote as he did, so as to dissuade most people from studying his proofs, which carry us to such surprising ways of seeing the world and seeing ourselves. And yet, though he didn’t dare to publish the Ethics while he lived, it did find its way into publication and into the intellectual bloodstream of Europe. People had to read it in order to refute it, and slowly they were transformed by it. It’s a book that has everything to do with the emergence, in the eighteenth century, of the European Enlightenment."