ABSTRACT
Introduction To the casual observer it would be very strange if nothing was said about ethics in a book that claims to be talking, at least in part, about Spinoza’s Ethics. In the eyes of the trained philosopher, however, this might not be so strange at all. Most of the issues dealt with in the Ethics do not obviously connect to ethics. Rather, the book appears to be talking about ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. It is true that Spinoza does explain to us how we can lead more harmonious or even more virtuous lives. We can do so by reducing the intensity of our passions (Ethics, IV). But even when Spinoza explains to us how we can gain a kind of freedom in a completely causally determined world through the reduction of our passions, and an acceptance of the inevitability of the course of events, we are not easily swayed into believing that the subject matter at hand actually is ethics.1 At least, this is not the case in the traditional sense. And this is exactly where it gets interesting. It does not appear to be an accident that Jonathan Israel, in his impressive tome Radical Enlightenment, argues for a much greater influence of Spinoza on the advent of a radical enlightenment in Europe in the 16th and 17th century, but that which was so radical about Spinoza was his theology, or, perhaps, the lack of it (Israel, 2001). The ethical components of his philosophy seem to have been too difficult to ferret out, or, at the very least, they took a backseat to the more obviously radical parts of Spinoza’s thought. The threat of the implied atheism was of much greater concern in the 17th century than anything Spinoza might have had to say about ethics. Does this mean that all the literature that has been produced on the Ethics, but that does not deal explicitly with ethics, is misguided? Quite the contrary is the case. It is exactly in the topics that are not explicitly ethical that Spinoza’s ethics is hidden. One might say that the ethics ‘drops out of’ the rest of his philosophy.
