Quotation
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“People think themselves free, because they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and do not think of the causes by which they are determined.”
Baruch Spinoza · Rationalism · Early modern · 1677
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the appendix as a diagnosis of a prejudice: people call themselves free because they feel their wants and do not see the causes of those wants, and from that ignorance they invent purposes in nature. Consciousness of a volition is not insight into what determined it. A rival reading thinks he is denying that deliberation happens, but deliberation, on his view, is real and caused. The passage is prose, in the appendix to part one, after the geometrical proof of necessity.
Did Baruch Spinoza really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Edwin Curley's translation of the appendix to Ethics, part one. Consciousness of appetite is not knowledge of a cause. The appendix diagnoses a prejudice. This wording is a translation.
Where it comes from
Ethics I, appendix
Approximate date: 1677.
How to use it
Choosing a sandwich in York station feels like a clean act of freedom, and the feeling is real as consciousness of appetite. The question is which causes are missing from the feeling: habit, price, the last advert, a body that wants salt. Naming them does not make the sandwich unreal; It makes the word free, if it meant uncaused, a report of ignorance rather than a report of the choice.
A mindset reading
The sentence is not a taunt that nobody chooses. It is a claim about what the feeling of choosing fails to contain. Explanation is not the same as excuse, and he separates understanding a cause from approving the act; Freedom, later in the book, is acting from adequate ideas, not the absence of causes; The appendix is the negative moment of that redefinition.
Understand the philosophy
The key term in the appendix is final cause, the habit of explaining events by purposes, which he traces to ignorance of the causes of our own appetites. People think they are free because volitions are conscious and their determinants are not. Curley's English is the guide. The appendix is the clearest continuous statement of why his necessity starts as an account of prejudice rather than as a sermon.
- freedom
- mind
- knowledge
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the appendix as a diagnosis of a prejudice: people call themselves free because they feel their wants and do not see the causes of those wants, and from that ignorance they invent purposes in nature. Consciousness of a volition is not insight into what determined it. A rival reading thinks he is denying that deliberation happens, but deliberation, on his view, is real and caused. The passage is prose, in the appendix to part one, after the geometrical proof of necessity.
Did Baruch Spinoza really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Edwin Curley's translation of the appendix to Ethics, part one. Consciousness of appetite is not knowledge of a cause. The appendix diagnoses a prejudice. This wording is a translation.
Which work is it in?
Ethics I, appendix Approximate date: 1677.