ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a new conception of the relation between eternity and time in the Ethics, which will be supported by a new reading of all of Spinoza's references to this issue. It demonstrates that his approach to eternity and time is similar to his approach to the other oppositional elements in his system, such as: staticity and dynamicity, unity/multiplicity, and infiniteness/finiteness. Abolishing the truth-value of time in his philosophy is perplexing: he turns his back on a foundational category in human knowledge by claiming that it is merely a result of human imagination. However, time does not characterize only the human imagination, but also the rest of the territories of human experience. The attributes are eternal in that they express the essence of the substance. Both the finite and the infinite modes are also eternal in that they necessarily follow from the substance and thus their existence, like the existence of the substance, is necessary or eternal.
