ABSTRACT
To live well, in a condition of continuous change: that is the ideal for human life articulated in Spinoza’s Ethics. Spinoza insists that there are things more important than a long life; that to change from an infant body to a corpse is not the epitome of “unhappiness”; that a long life spent without knowledge of self, of God and of things, may be a more unhappy outcome than early death. Spinoza equates virtue with a joy that centres-even in its highest form-on the present. This joy is a transition to greater activity: the transformation of inadequate modes of knowledge into more adequate ones. The idea of virtue as residing in increased power of reason is of course neither novel in
itself nor surprising in a seventeenth-century philosopher so strongly associated with rationalism. What is more unusual-and perhaps more surprising-is the firm grounding of this rationalist ideal in the strengthening of bodily powers.
