Summary: Ethics (page 10)

Conversely, forming a clear and distinct idea of the object of one of our passions is enough to strip it of its power over us: An affect that is a passion is a confused idea ¹.

To take a simple—if not simplistic—example: suppose I am madly in love with someone unattainable. Forming a clear idea of the beloved is enough to diminish my desire, or at least to weaken its intensity. Likewise, if I become fully aware of my love (rather than merely suffering it subconsciously), it will begin to dissolve:

An affect is all the more in our power, and the mind suffers from it all the less, the more it is known to us ².

Thus, freedom arises from knowledge: This, then, is the thing to which we must first of all apply ourselves—to know clearly and distinctly, as far as we can, each of our affects ³.

One and the same desire leads a person either to act or to be acted upon, depending on whether it stems from an adequate or inadequate idea. If we form adequate ideas of all our desires, we will no longer be at their mercy; instead, we become the agents of our own desires.

This is fundamental, for as Spinoza states in Proposition 40: The more perfection each thing has, the more it acts and the less it suffers, and vice versa ⁴.

He who attains knowledge attains freedom—but also love: He who clearly and distinctly understands himself loves God, and all the more so the more he understands himself and his affects ⁵.

God, for his part, is exempt from joy and sadness—since he cannot transition to greater or lesser perfection—and consequently from love or hate: God, strictly speaking, loves no one and hates no one ⁶.

To understand God, we must understand singular things. And if God is reached through the third kind of knowledge—as previously defined—that is, through reason and from the perspective of eternity, then the love that arises from it must also be eternal: The love that arises from this knowledge is necessarily eternal ⁷.

It is therefore this third kind of knowledge that enables us to attain happiness and full freedom.

Yet Spinoza attributes to God an infinite intellectual love of himself, which might seem to contradict this. However: The mind's intellectual love of God is a part of the infinite love with which God loves himself ⁸.

The human mind is not entirely destroyed with the body; something of it remains—the eternal part of the mind: the intellect, the mark of our perfection, for it is through the intellect that we act. What perishes is the imagination, by which alone we are said to suffer ⁹.

Happiness is not the reward of virtue—it is virtue itself: It is not because we thwart lustful pleasures that we enjoy [bliss]; but on the contrary, it is because we enjoy it that we can thwart lustful pleasures ¹⁰.

In short: Beatitude consists in love towards God, which arises from the third kind of knowledge and relates to the mind insofar as it acts ¹¹.

Spinoza closes the Ethics by drawing a distinction between the wise and the ignorant:

From this, it appears how much stronger and better the wise man is than the ignorant, who acts only out of lustful appetite. For the ignorant, beyond being agitated in countless ways by external causes, never possesses true satisfaction of soul. Moreover, he lives almost unconscious—both of himself, of God, and of things—and as soon as he ceases to suffer, he also ceases to be.

The sage, by contrast, is conscious of himself, of God, and of things with a certain eternal necessity, and never ceases to be ¹².

¹ V, prop.3, demonstration
² ibid. corollary
³ V, prop.4, note
⁴ V, prop.40
⁵ V, prop.15
⁶ V, prop.17, corollary
⁷ V, prop.33, demonstration
⁸ V, prop.36
⁹ V, prop.40
¹⁰ V, prop.42
¹¹ ibid. demonstration
¹² ibid.