The Physics of Spinoza’s Ethics

Abstract

Since my title might appear to announce a somewhat narrow theme, I want to begin by locating the inquiry to be undertaken here within a broader setting. The supreme problem for the interpreters of Spinoza, in my judgment, is set by the first word in the title of his most noted work: Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata.1 Why did Spinoza give his work this title? Hampshire's remark,2 that the title Ethics is just and essential must have struck most readers as itself just; but whence does the title derive its justice? Surely, so all must feel, it is not simply an instance of synecdoche, masking an irreducible heterogeneity of content. If, then, the work has some sort of unity, both in its content and its unfolding development, what is responsible for this unity? What draws together into a manifest whole the seeming diversity of themes to which the book is addressed?3 To employ a Kantian distinction, the question of fact seems sufficiently and finally answered by Spinoza's own decision to give his work this name, but the quaestio juris still remains: what are the conditions of possibility that make this decision adequately conceivable? Spinoza himself provides a valuable initial clue in a clause in his letter to Blyenbergh of June 3, 1665: Ethics, which, as everyone knows,

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