Ethics

⚖The case for it

Spinoza writes ethics as geometry: definitions, axioms, propositions, proofs, each depending on the last, which readers call a “perfect marriage of form and content” with real “charm and allure to anybody who loves symmetry and order.” Parts III and IV on the emotions are where it pays, a taxonomy of affects readers say explains their own lives better than they expected going in. “We feel strongly because we understand dimly.” The determinism reads as liberating rather than bleak, replacing blame with causes, and God identified with Nature still startles. Readers return to specific propositions years later.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The axioms get asserted rather than earned, so the structure “smuggles in a buffet of unearned metaphysical assumptions” while looking like mathematics. Plenty of readers admit “I skipped all the text under the heading Proof” and read only the scholia, where the actual thinking sits. Parts I and II on God and mind are the slog and Part V on freedom is worse. Without a companion or a reading group the book “appears to be written in some kind of code.” Detractors file the inherited vocabulary as a “musty pageant of scholastic theo-jabber.”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings