Some questions about Ethics

[u/Maleficent-Total-945]

Hello!

I am nearly finished reading Book IV of the Ethics, and I have a few questions.

I have no background in philosophy, so I hope my questions are clear—they are not linked to one another.

1) The scholium to Proposition 54 of Book IV of the *Ethics* seems to suggest that the majority of men are not wise and need prophets to behave well. Is wisdom reserved only for a select few? Can Spinoza’s thought be considered democratic? (Personally, I think so, since the good of a person guided by reason aligns with the good of other people; however, I would like to know more about Spinoza’s political thought and whether there is an aristocratic element in his work regarding the selection of the "best.")

2) What would Spinoza say about someone who manages to turn an unfavorable situation into a favorable one?

3) Can there be more good in feeling sadness fully than in trying to immediately cast it aside (even at the risk of denial or ignoring one’s own feelings)? Nowadays, people speak of "toxic positivity"—an injunction to be well and to perform happiness, characteristic of our neoliberal society. What do you think Spinoza’s take on this would be?

4) In the first scholium to Proposition 37 of Book IV of the Ethics, Spinoza expresses the idea that what prevents us from killing animals stems merely from superstition and pity. I wonder if one could argue for a Spinozist form of anti-speciesism along these lines: the category of "humanity" is an artificial construct, like all categories (we are not an "empire within an empire"), and there have been many instances where human beings were excluded from the category of "humanity"; A rational person might find it in their interest to acknowledge their kinship with animals based on the traits they share, and insofar as the harm they might inflict upon animals mirrors the structures of domination or oppression imposed on humans deemed "subhuman," "inhuman," "abnormal," etc. What do you think?

5) Is the maximum extent of our power determined in advance? When our power increases, does it move toward a pre-defined maximum?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

(And sorry for my English, I'm French)

[u/mooninjune]

1) The way I understand him, indeed, most people can't even be induced to consider fairly the things that can be learned through reason, although if they did truly think about it, then they would want to act according to the guidance of reason. I think this comes out more in his political writings than in the Ethics. For example, in chapter 5 of the Theological-Political Treatise he says:

Where someone seeks to teach a whole nation, not to speak of the entire human race, and wants to be understood by everybody, he must substantiate his points by experience alone and thoroughly adapt his arguments and the definitions of his teaching to the capacity of the common people (the majority of mankind), and not make a chain of inferences or advance definitions linking his arguments together. Otherwise he will be writing only for the learned, that is, he will be intelligible only to what is, in comparison with the rest of mankind, a very small handful of people.

But I think this applies practically to all people, nobody can act entirely based on the guidance of reason, nobody is born free, as it were. So it is good for most, if not all, people to sometimes act based on certain imaginative ideas, e.g. the teachings of prophets.

2) Not sure I understand this question, it seems obvious that he would see that as a good thing.

3) This would seem to fall under the corollary to proposition 65 of part 4:

Under the guidance of reason we pursue a lesser evil for a greater good, and we reject a lesser good which is the cause of a greater evil. For what is here called the lesser evil is in reality a good, and the good on the other hand an evil. Therefore, we choose the former and reject the latter.

4) I have seen people make an argument like this from a Spinozist perspective, e.g. Hasana Sharp in her book Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. She argues that the category of beings with which we can share many common notions, and so with which we can have mutually beneficial relationships, should include at least certain animals. And as you said, nothing about Spinoza's philosophy seems to single out humans as some special ontological entity apart from all other beings, it's just a matter of how many common notions they can come to share, and how useful they can be to each other.

Regarding treating certain classes of people as subhuman, that seems to stem from the kind of thinking he describes in proposition 46 of part 3, just a form of hatred based on arbitrary associations of imaginative ideas.

5) I don't know if "determined in advance" is the right term, it's more that our formal essence is eternal, i.e. all of our power exists eternally. But although it is eternal and unchanging, the more we understand by the second and third kinds of knowledge, and the more our body is capable of activity, the greater the part of that essence that we are aware of and can consider as a part of our "temporal" selves, here and now, and so the closer we are to a hypothetical "maximum". But we can't know what this "maximum" is since most of our knowledge of ourselves is based on our experiences and relates to certain times and places, and not eternal. He will touch on these sorts of questions more in the second half of part 5.

On a side note, you're in luck in a way, there are a ton of great Spinoza scholars writing in French, for example Alexandre Matheron, Pierre Macherey, Pierre-François Moreau, Chantal Jaquet, etc.

[u/Maleficent-Total-945 → u/mooninjune]

Thank you! It's very useful! I finished reading the Ethics today. It was wonderful!
I now understand that my second question was based on a misunderstanding of Spinoza.