Quotation
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“I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.”
Baruch Spinoza · Rationalism · Early modern · 1677
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the preface as a method for the passions: actions and appetites are natural events, to be understood as geometry understands lines, without laughter or tears as a substitute for causes. He is not saying cruelty does not matter. He is saying indignation is a bad theory of it. A rival reading hears a coldness that cannot support any ethics, but parts four and five are full of claims about power and bondage; The sentence opens part three, on the origin and nature of the affects.
Did Baruch Spinoza really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Edwin Curley's translation of the preface to part three of the Ethics. Human actions are to be studied as natural effects, without mockery standing in for causes. This wording is a translation.
Where it comes from
Ethics III, preface
Approximate date: 1677.
How to use it
A disciplinary hearing in a college in Leicester can spend its hour on how outrageous an act was and still not know which affect produced it or what would change the next one. The preface would treat the act as something with causes, the way a surveyor treats a line. The hearing can still set a consequence; It cannot claim to have understood the act because it has been appalled.
A mindset reading
Geometry here is a discipline of explanation, not a claim that people are diagrams and therefore unimportant. The risk is real: causes can be used as a hiding place from judgement. He thinks the more common hiding place is judgement that never reaches a cause; The preface aims at satire of human nature that explains nothing, not at a ban on evaluating what people do.
Understand the philosophy
The key term is the affects, emotions and desires as changes in the body's power to act and in the ideas of those changes. Part three derives them from striving rather than treating them as invasions from outside nature. Curley's English keeps the comparison with lines, planes, and bodies, which matches the form of the whole book. Understanding, on this preface, is the alternative to mockery.
- ethics
- mind
- knowledge
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the preface as a method for the passions: actions and appetites are natural events, to be understood as geometry understands lines, without laughter or tears as a substitute for causes. He is not saying cruelty does not matter. He is saying indignation is a bad theory of it. A rival reading hears a coldness that cannot support any ethics, but parts four and five are full of claims about power and bondage; The sentence opens part three, on the origin and nature of the affects.
Did Baruch Spinoza really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Edwin Curley's translation of the preface to part three of the Ethics. Human actions are to be studied as natural effects, without mockery standing in for causes. This wording is a translation.
Which work is it in?
Ethics III, preface Approximate date: 1677.