ABSTRACT
For Benedict Spinoza, the good life centres on understanding ourselves as integral parts of the totality of being. The Ethics offers descriptions of expansive lives of joy and hope, along with alternative descriptions of shrunken lives of despondency, bitterness or despair. Those descriptions reflect Spinoza's understanding of the nature of human existence. In the concluding sections of the Ethics, Spinoza claims that such a life, in its highest form, involves a mind coming to understand itself as an eternal idea in 'the mind of God'. Spinoza's 'eternity of the mind' is not located in a paradisal hereafter, to be attained through virtuous living. Spinoza himself saw the truth that are parts of a totality as more than a commonplace – even apart from its ultimate realization in the eternity of the mind. Spinoza's tantalizing themes of interconnection might lead us to deeper reflection on the ways in which human thought itself is just a speck within an immense totality.
