Spinoza study notes

materials

background & overview

I listened to the audiobook to get a feel for his writing flow. I read Ethics over five days. I skipped the proofs after the first few weren’t relevant. I watched lecture videos after. I summarized the propositions highlighted by ChatGPT as well as the ones that seemed important to me.

My prompt to ChatGPT:

you are a philosophy tutor/mentor and I am a student. I am going to read Spinoza’s Ethics. What propositions are the ones worth focusing on the most?

Answer (expand) -->

Spinoza’s Ethics is structured with a series of propositions that build upon each other, so understanding the foundational ones is crucial. Here are some of the most important propositions to focus on:

Part I: Concerning God


Proposition 1: “A substance is prior in nature to its affections.” Proposition 5: “In nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute.” Proposition 7: “It pertains to the nature of a substance to exist.” Proposition 11: “God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists.” Proposition 14: “Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.” Proposition 15: “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.”

Part II: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind


Proposition 1: “Thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking thing.” Proposition 7: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” Proposition 11: “The first thing which constitutes the actual being of a human mind is nothing else than the idea of a particular thing which actually exists.” Proposition 13: “The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, or a certain mode of extension which actually exists, and nothing else.” Proposition 43: “He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt the truth of the thing perceived.”

Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions


Proposition 4: “Nothing can be destroyed except by a cause external to itself.” Proposition 6: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” Proposition 9: “The mind, both insofar as it has clear and distinct ideas and insofar as it has confused ideas, strives to persevere in its being for an indefinite duration and is conscious of this striving it has.” Proposition 59: “To every action to which we are determined from an emotion which is a passion, we can be determined by reason without that emotion.”

Part IV: Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions


Proposition 18: “A desire which arises from a true knowledge of good and evil can be extinguished or checked by many other desires which arise from the emotions by which we are bound.” Proposition 24: “To act absolutely in conformity with virtue is in us, nothing else but acting, living, and preserving our being (these three signify the same thing) by the guidance of reason, from the foundation of seeking one’s own advantage.” Proposition 28: “The striving to preserve oneself is the first and only foundation of virtue.”

Part V: Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Liberty


Proposition 10: “As long as we are not torn by emotions contrary to our nature, we have the power of arranging and associating the affections of the body according to the order of the intellect.” Proposition 20: “The more an emotion is known to us, the more it is within our power, and the less the mind is passive to it.” Proposition 24: “The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God.” Proposition 42: “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we enjoy it because we control our lusts, but because we enjoy it, we are able to control our lusts.”

takeaways

Spinoza has been the easiest read for me of all the philosophers so far. I feel like I had already thought through a lot of what’s in Ethics, the new ideas were mostly small nuances. And I found some thought patterns that I had experienced, but hadn’t yet seen in other philosophers. It was like reading a class-mates’ marked assignment, where we both got an 80% grade. Wittgenstein got 110%.

Conatus. Wow, finally I found this concept that I’ve had in mind and been writing about for a while now. I thought will-to-power was the closest to this concept, but I knew will-to-power was a bit different. Glad I finally found it. I haven’t read Neitzche yet, but I suspect he differentiates instead of connects Conatus and will-to-power.

I did the “define the emotions” exercise by myself a year or two ago. I didn’t know it was a common thing to do. I went the route of defining them based on the Conatus. So instead of using pleasure and pain as a proxy for the Conatus, I directly pointed out how each emotion helped a given being survive. I treated many of them as more standalone emotions.

Using pleasure and pain as the basis for the definitions of all the other emotions seems just a little off. I agree that they are the closest terms to the concept “contributing to or detracting from Conatus”. But colloquially, they have a lot of other connotations that don’t correspond to that definition, and they also don’t cover the expansiveness of that definition. I don’t think the pleasure or pain signals need to be triggered in order to experience a given emotion, but Spinoza’s definitions suggest that you do.

I felt like the proofs were just excuses to say the things he knew he already wanted to say. I’m kinda biased by having just reading Hume, but they were weak and depended on stretching definitions, axioms, and previous propositions. So I mostly just skipped them. In writing them, he probably encountered a lot of interesting side-effects and it probably improved his thinking, but I doubt it affected the main thrust of the direction he was trying to express.

reading notes

Ethics

Part I: Concerning God

Definitions

  1. Self-caused: when a thing’s “essence” include its existence.
  2. Finite: when a thing is limited by another thing of the same nature.
  3. Substance: stuff where conception can be formed independent of any other conception.
  4. Attribute: a quality of substance, where the mind deems it essential to the nature of substance.
  5. Mode: the modifications of substance.
  6. God: a substance consisting in infinite attributes, each with eternal and infinite essentiality.
  7. Free: existing solely by the necessity of its own nature, where action is self-determined.
  8. Eternity: existence itself.

Axioms

  1. Everything that exists, exists in itself or something else.
  2. Stuff that can’t be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself.
  3. There’s such thing as cause and effect.
  4. Knowledge of an effect depends on knowledge of a cause.
  5. Things which have nothing in common are not involved in the conception of one-another.
  6. A true idea must correspond with some real object that it represents.
  7. If a thing can be conceived as not existing, its “existence” is not part of its essence.

Propositions

Proposition 1: “A substance is prior in nature to its affections.”

A substance comes before its applications.

Proposition 5: “In nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute.”

Two substances can’t have the same set of attributes.

Proposition 7: “It pertains to the nature of a substance to exist.”

Existence is part of the essence of substance.

Proposition 11: “God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists.”

There is one substance, God, which has infinite attributes, and necessarily exists.

Proposition 14: “Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.”

Other than God, no substance can be created or thought about.

Proposition 15: “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.”

Everything that exists is a part of God or a mode of God’s attributes. Nothing can be thought of as existing independent of God.

PROP. XXIV. The essence of things produced by God does not involve existence.

Things that aren’t God are not self-created.

PROP. XXV. God is the efficient cause not only of the existence of things, but also of their essence.

God creates the essence of things - reason/definition of their existence.

PROP. XXVIII. Every individual thing, or everything which is finite and has a conditioned existence, cannot exist or be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned for existence and action by a cause other than itself, which also is finite, and has a conditioned existence; and likewise this cause cannot in its turn exist, or be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned for existence and action by another cause, which also is finite, and has a conditioned existence, and so on to infinity.

Any finite thing has a finite cause for existence, regressing infinitely. God underlies this possibility. The nature of the universe is deterministic and causal.

PROP. XXX. Intellect, in function (actu) finite, or in function infinite, must comprehend the attributes of God and the modifications of God, and nothing else.

The content of the “mind substance” is God.

PROP. XXXII. Will cannot be called a free cause, but only a necessary cause.

Free will doesn’t have a free cause. It has a necessary cause. (traditional free will isn’t really a thing)

PROP. XXXIII. Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order different from that which has in fact obtained.

The universe is deterministic.

Appendix

Part II: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind

Definitions

  1. Body: mode which expresses in a certain determinate manner
  2. Stuff belonging to the essence of a thing: when the stuff is given, the thing is given too. When the stuff is taken away, the thing is removed. Stuff that’s necessary for the conception of the thing.
  3. Idea: mental conception formed by a thinking mind.
  4. Adequate idea: an idea that has the properties of a true idea, even when it isn’t tied to an object.
  5. Duration: existing continuously with some undetermined beginning and end.
  6. Perfection: reality
  7. Particular things: things that are finite, with specific boundaries, and their existence depends on external conditions or causes. Multiple particular things can work together to produce a single effect, and can be collectively considered as one particular thing.

Axioms

  1. A given human does not have to exist. The essence of a human does not involve necessary existence.
  2. A human thinks.
  3. An idea can exist without thinking about other things. Some modes of thinking, like feelings, need another idea to have the thinking about.
  4. We perceive that a given body is affected in different ways.
  5. The particular things that we perceive and feel are bodies and modes of thought.

Propositions

Proposition 1: “Thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking thing.”

Thought is an attribute of God. God thinks. Everything is part of God, including things that think and their thoughts.

PROP. II. Extension is an attribute of God, or God is an extended thing.

Spatial reality is part of God.

Proposition 7: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”

The order and structure of ideas parallel the physical reality of the world.

Proposition 11: “The first thing which constitutes the actual being of a human mind is nothing else than the idea of a particular thing which actually exists.”

The starting point of mental activity is the idea of some particular thing existing.

Proposition 13: “The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, or a certain mode of extension which actually exists, and nothing else.”

The human mind is an idea. The idea is of the body’s current state and interactions. The idea does not focus on abstract ideas or other entities.

PROP. XV. The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.

The human mind is one idea made of many ideas.

PROP. XXVI. The human mind does not perceive any external body as actually existing, except through the ideas of the modifications of its own body.

The human mind experiences external bodies via the ideas of the modifications of its own body.

PROP. XXVII. The idea of each modification of the human body does not involve an adequate knowledge of the human body itself.

The “modifications” that the human mind experiences don’t require the human mind to fully understand the human body.

PROP. XXIX. The idea of the idea of each modification of the human body does not involve an adequate knowledge of the human mind.

The “modifications” that the human mind experiences don’t require the human mind to fully understand the human mind.

PROP. XXXII. All ideas, in so far as they are referred to God, are true.

The nature of God is the truth. Humans can have inadequate (false) ideas.

PROP. XLI. Knowledge of the first kind is the only source of falsity, knowledge of the second and third kinds is necessarily true.

Imagination/opinion can be false. Reason and intuitive knowledge are true. Because imagination/opinion relies on partial information and subjective interpretations of experiences.

PROP. XLII. Knowledge of the second and third kinds, not knowledge of the first kind, teaches us to distinguish the true from the false.

Reason/opinion/imagination teach us to distinguish the true from the false. Intuitive knowledge doesn’t.

Proposition 43: “He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt the truth of the thing perceived.”

When someone has a true idea, it comes with clarity and distinctness of the idea, so the person knows it is true.

PROP. XLIV. It is not in the nature of reason to regard things as contingent, but as necessary.

Reason understands things through their causes. Things are deterministic and reason unpicks how that is the case.

PROP. XLVIII. In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.

There is no free will because of determinism. But there is an infinite regress of causes.

Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions

Definitions

  1. Adequate cause: a cause whose effect can be clearly and distinctly perceived.
  2. Inadequate / partial cause: a cause whose effect cannot be understood by itself.
  3. To act: to be the adequate cause of some effect.
  4. To be passive: the be a partial cause.
  5. Emotion: modifications of the body, where the “active power” is increased or reduced, aided or constrained.

    Propositions

PROP. III. The activities of the mind arise solely from adequate ideas; the passive states of the mind depend solely on inadequate ideas.

Decisions and conscious thoughts are clearly perceived. Other kinds of more passive mental activity depend on unclear perceptions.

Proposition 4: “Nothing can be destroyed except by a cause external to itself.”

Things will continue to exist until some outside force destroys it.

Proposition 6: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.”

Every thing tries to survive. The Conatus.

PROP. VII. The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.

The Conatus is part of every thing’s essence.

PROP. VIII. The endeavour, whereby a thing endeavours to persist in its own being, involves no finite time, but an indefinite time.

The Conatus has no finite ending time.

Proposition 9: “The mind, both insofar as it has clear and distinct ideas and insofar as it has confused ideas, strives to persevere in its being for an indefinite duration and is conscious of this striving it has.”

The mind is aware of the Conatus. This is called the will for just the mind and the appetite for the mind-body.

PROP. XIII. When the mind conceives things which diminish or hinder the body’s power of activity, it endeavours, as far as possible, to remember things which exclude the existence of the first—named things.

Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause: Hate is nothing else but pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause. We further see, that he who loves necessarily endeavours to have, and to keep present to him, the object of his love; while he who hates endeavours to remove and destroy the object of his hatred.

He’s saying that love and hate follow from logically applying the Conatus to objects external to the body.

Proposition 59: Among all the emotions attributable to the mind as active, there are none which cannot be referred to pleasure or desire.

Every emotion is reducible to survival activity, pursuing the Conatus. A signal the survival is happening as intended, and a signal that some activity must be pursued to ensure a better chance of survival.

Definition of the emotions

  1. Desire: the essence of a human. Pursuing a particular activity.
  2. Pleasure: a signal that a human transitioning to greater perfection. Pleasure isn’t the perfection itself.
  3. Pain: a signal that a human transitioning to lesser perfection.
  4. Wonder: the conception of a thing that doesn’t seem to be connected to other concepts.
  5. Contempt: when something is so “meh” that the mind focuses on the qualities that the thing is lacking, instead of the qualities the thing has.
  6. Love: pleasure, along with the idea of an external cause.
  7. Hatred: pain, along with the idea of an external cause.
  8. Inclination: pleasure, along with the idea of something that accidentally causes pleasure.
  9. Aversion: pain, along with the idea of something that accidentally causes pain.
  10. Devotion: love towards a thing we admire.
  11. Derision: pleasure from observing a quality we hate in an object we hate.
  12. Hope: inconsistent pleasure arising from the idea of something in the past or future, where the details are unclear.
  13. Fear: inconsistent pain arising from the idea of something in the past or future, where the details are unclear.
  14. Confidence: pleasure arising from the idea of something certain.
  15. Despair: pain arising from the idea of something certain.
  16. Joy: pleasure along with the idea of something in the past that is consistent with our hope.
  17. Disappointment: pain along with the idea of something in the past that is inconsistent with our hope.
  18. Pity: pain along with the idea of an evil that happened to someone we identify with.
  19. Approval: love towards someone who has done good.
  20. Indignation: hatred towards someone who has done evil.
  21. Partiality: thinking too highly of someone we love.
  22. Disparagement: thinking too lowly of someone we hate.
  23. Envy: hatred induced by the pain of another’s good fortune or pleasure in their evil fortune.
  24. Sympathy: love induced by the pleasure of another’s good fortune or pain in their evil fortune.
  25. Self-approval: pleasure coming from the contemplation of self and its power of action.
  26. Humility: pain arising from contemplating your own weakness of body or mind.
  27. Repentance: pain along with the idea of some action we freely chose.
  28. Pride: thinking too highly of one’s self, with love.
  29. Self-abasement: thinking too lowly of one’s self, with hate.
  30. Honour: pleasure along with the idea of our actions that we think were praised by others.
  31. Shame: pain along with the idea of our actions that we think were disapproved by others.
  32. Regret: desire or appetite to possess something, while remembering it can’t be had any longer.
  33. Emulation: desire of something caused by our conception that others have the same desire.
  34. Gratitude: desire coming from love, to provide something good to someone who has provided something good to us.
  35. Benevolence: desire to provide something good to someone we pity.
  36. Anger: desire to injure someone we hate.
  37. Revenge: desire to injure someone who has injured us.
  38. Cruelty: desire to injure someone we love or pity.
  39. Timidity: desire to avoid a greater evil by going through a lesser evil.
  40. Daring: the desire to do something dangerous which is comparable to our fear of it.
  41. Cowardice: retraction of desire for something dangerous where we feel comparable fear.
  42. Consternation: desire of avoiding evil is beaten by amazement at the evil.
  43. Courtesy: desire of acting in a way that pleases others and doesn’t displease them.
  44. Ambition: immodest desire for power.
  45. Luxury: excessive desire.
  46. Intemperance: excessive desire and love of drinking.
  47. Avarice: excessive desire and love of riches.
  48. Lust: desire and lust for sex.

All emotion is oriented towards making a mind-body’s likelihood of continued existence increase more or decrease less.

Part IV: Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions

Definitions

  1. Good: stuff that’s definitely useful.
  2. Evil: stuff that definitely gets in the way of good.
  3. Contingent: when existence is not part of a thing’s essence.
  4. Possible: when a thing has a cause, but the cause is not determined.
  5. Conflicting emotions: emotions that draw a person in opposite directions of the same kind.
  6. End: a desire or sake for doing something.
  7. Virtue: a person’s nature/essence that can be understood through the laws of that nature.

Axioms

There’s always something else in nature that’s stronger.

Propositions

PROP. X. Towards something future, which we conceive as close at hand, we are affected more intensely, than if we conceive that its time for existence is separated from the present by a longer interval; so too by the remembrance of what we conceive to have not long passed away we are affected more intensely, than if we conceive that it has long passed away.

Recent events affect us more intensely.

Proposition 18: “A desire which arises from a true knowledge of good and evil can be extinguished or checked by many other desires which arise from the emotions by which we are bound.”

You can turn off feelings of good or evil about something.

PROP. XXII. No virtue can be conceived as prior to this endeavour to preserve one’s own being.

The Conatus.

Proposition 24: “To act absolutely in conformity with virtue is in us, nothing else but acting, living, and preserving our being (these three signify the same thing) by the guidance of reason, from the foundation of seeking one’s own advantage.”

The Conatus. You can’t do anything but pursue it. It’s deterministic and impossible not to.

Proposition 28: “The striving to preserve oneself is the first and only foundation of virtue.”

The Conatus. [although it’s more subtle than just preserving yourself - it can extend to further purposes]

PROP. XXXIV. In so far as men are assailed by emotions which are passions, they can be contrary one to another.

Passions drive us in conflicting directions.

PROP. XXXV. In so far only as men live in obedience to reason, do they always necessarily agree in nature.

Reason aligns us.

PROP. XLV. Hatred can never be good.

[disagree. Hatred enables good systems. Destruction and death is necessary for life.]

PROP. LXXIII. The man, who is guided by reason, is more free in a State, where he lives under a general system of law, than in solitude, where he is independent.

When a person is guided by reason, they’re better off in a collective state than as an independent hermit.

Appendix

I. All our endeavours or desires so follow from the necessity of our nature, that they can be understood either through it alone, as their proximate cause, or by virtue of our being a part of nature, which cannot be adequately conceived through itself without other individuals.

Everything we do comes from nature, being a cause or part of nature. That means it involves others.

III. Our actions, that is, those desires which are defined by man’s power or reason, are always good. The rest may be either good or bad.

Our own actions are always good. Others’ aren’t necessarily.

IV. Thus in life it is before all things useful to perfect the understanding, or reason, as far as we can, and in this alone man’s highest happiness or blessedness consists, indeed blessedness is nothing else but the contentment of spirit, which arises from the intuitive knowledge of God: now, to perfect the understanding is nothing else but to understand God, God’s attributes, and the actions which follow from the necessity of his nature. Wherefore of a man, who is led by reason, the ultimate aim or highest desire, whereby he seeks to govern all his fellows, is that whereby he is brought to the adequate conception of himself and of all things within the scope of his intelligence.

It’s most useful to understand our nature.

V. Therefore, without intelligence there is not rational life: and things are only good, in so far as they aid man in his enjoyment of the intellectual life, which is defined by intelligence. Contrariwise, whatsoever things hinder man’s perfecting of his reason, and capability to enjoy the rational life, are alone called evil.

Good things help us understand our nature. Bad things prevent us from understanding our nature.

IX. Nothing can be in more harmony with the nature of any given thing than other individuals of the same species; therefore (cf. vii.) for man in the preservation of his being and the enjoyment of the rational life there is nothing more useful than his fellow—man who is led by reason. Further, as we know not anything among individual things which is more excellent than a man led by reason, no man can better display the power of his skill and disposition, than in so training men, that they come at last to live under the dominion of their own reason.

We are most in harmony with others of our species.

XI. Yet minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high—mindedness.

People are won over with love and understanding.

Part V: Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Liberty

Axioms

  1. When two opposing actions happen in the same subject, the conflict forces the subject to change until the actions are no longer in conflict.
  2. When the essence of an effect is defined by the essence of its cause, then the power of the effect is defined by the power of its cause.

Propositions

PROP. III. An emotion, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion, as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea thereof.

Once we form a clear idea of an emotion we’re having, we can turn it off.

PROP. IV. It is impossible, that man should not be a part of Nature, or that he should be capable of undergoing no changes, save such as can be understood through his nature only as their adequate cause.

Change is inevitable in a person.

PROP. V. The power and increase of every passion, and its persistence in existing are not defined by the power, whereby we ourselves endeavour to persist in existing, but by the power of an external cause compared with our own.

The way our emotions change over time are shaped by external circumstances and not the Conatus.

PROP. VII. An emotion can only be controlled or destroyed by another emotion contrary thereto, and with more power for controlling emotion.

Emotions can only be controlled or destroyed by equal and opposite emotions. [I strongly disagree. Doesn’t prop 3 disprove this?]

PROP. VIII. The knowledge of good and evil is nothing else but the emotions of pleasure or pain, in so far as we are conscious thereof.

Good and evil are just subjective pain and pleasure. There’s no objective good and evil.

Proposition 10: “As long as we are not torn by emotions contrary to our nature, we have the power of arranging and associating the affections of the body according to the order of the intellect.”

As long as we don’t have crazy emotions going on, we can rationally choose how to behave.

PROP. XXI. The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.

Whole minds are as mortal as the body they are parallel to.

PROP. XXIII. The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is eternal.

Parts of minds are immortal.

Proposition 24: “The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God.”

Particular things are what make up nature. The more we understand the particular thing, the more we understand nature.

Corollary.—Hence it follows that the part of the mind which endures, be it great or small, is more perfect than the rest. For the eternal part of the mind (V. xxiii. xxix.) is the understanding, through which alone we are said to act (III. iii.); the part which we have shown to perish is the imagination (V. xxi.), through which only we are said to be passive (III. iii. and general Def. of the Emotions); therefore, the former, be it great or small, is more perfect than the latter. Q.E.D.

Conatus is a measure of perfection. It is the ultimate aim.

Proposition 42: “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we enjoy it because we control our lusts, but because we enjoy it, we are able to control our lusts.”

Living the right way increases our ability to control our emotions. Living virtuously is living happily - happiness is not a reward.

12 Jun 2024