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Being and Power: An Examination of Spinoza’s Philosophy

Lecturer: Jon Rubin

Originally Taught: Evening Sem 1 2026

Atheist Jew of Voorburg, or Novalis’ Gottbetrunkener Mensch (God intoxicated man)? A precursor to Nietzsche’s most radical ideas on living beyond good and evil, the “purest sage” (HATH §258) or the pale, vampiric, consumptive spinner of metaphysical webs (GS §372)? The most radical, democratic egalitarian, or the racially fearful thinker who ended his last, unfinished, work in a morass of misogyny? Provocative thinker of the body, or conservative espouser of the “life of the mind”? 

To understand Spinoza’s thought, his status as a ‘Savage Anomaly’, we must, above all else, not try to reconcile these oppositions, nor imagine a middle ground.

It is Wolfson’s description of Spinoza as, “the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns” (a necessarily true idea, parading as a paradox) that perhaps makes sense of why Spinoza’s thought, and the reception of his thought, is so torn between extremes. To take up the first duality (atheist or god-intoxicated), in order to offer one example: yes, he thought the proper subject of metaphysics was God (a positively Ancient position) but he also thought God was nature, knowable through reason, experience, and experiment.

In the end, the only thing we can do is to actually read his work, and decide for ourselves and this is what this course will enable.

This will be a twelve week, two part course. The first part of the course will serve as a more general introduction and overview of Spinoza’s Ethics. The first week, will begin by providing the missing background philosophical theory and context, without which, despite the claims to be geometrically demonstrated, the Ethics remains nearly impossibly impenetrable. The next five weeks will cover each of the five Books of the Ethics, at the end of which we should have a good, high level grasp of how the text functions and its overall aims and preoccupations.

The second part of the course will be a more detailed examination of six puzzles in Spinoza’s philosophy: 

  1. the nature of perfection;
  2. the ontological argument for the existence of God;
  3. Spinoza’s epistemology, the problem of truth, adequacy and intuition;
  4. the ethics in Spinoza’s ethics, “A free man thinks about death least of all, and his wisdom is not a meditation on death, but on life”;
  5. the problem of love and friendship; 
  6. the question of the eternity of part of the mind, after the body’s death.

Lecture breakdown:

Core Key texts for the whole course:

Primary texts:

  • Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1985. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I. Translated by Edwin M. Curley. Vol. 1. Princeton University Press.
  • Spinoza, Benedictus de. 2016. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume II. Translated by Edwin M. Curley. Vol. 2. Princeton University Press.

PART ONE

Week 1) A terminological tangle: the Ethics purportedly proceeds using the ‘geometrical method’. Tragically, Spinoza is very bad at it, leaving many key terms undefined, or defining terms only after having copiously used them. This first week will be explaining these key terms, their historical background, and some of the ways in which Spinoza’s use of these terms is novel. These terms include: substance, attribute, mode, essence, form, nature.

Key texts:

  • Lord, Beth. 2010. Spinoza’s Ethics. Indiana Philosophical Guides. Indiana University Press.

Week 2) Book One: God

Book One of the Ethics sets up the framework for the rest of the work. We need to see how there must necessarily be a substance (whatever one of those it), consisting of an infinity of attributes (whatever they may be), expressed in an infinity of modes (you get the point), that acts necessarily in accordance with its essence (the hardest one of all).

And why this is God.

Key texts:

  • Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1985. ‘Book One of the Ethics: Of God’. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, translated by Edwin M. Curley, vol. 1. Princeton University Press.
  • Gueroult, Martial. 1968. Spinoza. I. Dieu. Vol. 1. Aubier-Montaigne. Copac.

Week 3) Book Two: Minds, Bodies, and Knowing

Book Two of the Ethics begins by tackling the mess Descartes had left behind: namely the status and composition of bodies, minds, and their relation to one another. Having provided his own, unique, solution to this problem, Spinoza also lays out his account of knowledge and the ways and reasons we fail to know.

Key texts:

  • Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1985. ‘Book Two of the Ethics: Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind’. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, translated by Edwin M. Curley, vol. 1. Princeton University Press.
  • Gueroult, Martial. 1974. Spinoza. II. L’Âme. Vol. 2. Georg Olms. Copac.

Week 4) Book Three: Passions and Actions, understood geometrically

In his earlier work, Spinoza’s account of the passions was derived from Descartes’ Passions of the Soul. In the Ethics, he completely reworks his account of the affects. Importantly, this is an demonstration not just of how and why we suffer from passionate affects, but also of the existence and function of active affects in which we find the first account of our freedom.

Key texts:

  • Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1985. ‘Book Three of the Ethics: Of the Origin and nature of the Affects’. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, translated by Edwin M. Curley, vol. 1. Princeton University Press.
  • Armstrong, Aurelia. 2013. “The Passions, Power, and Practical Philosophy: Spinoza and Nietzsche Contra the Stoics.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (1): 6–24. https://doi.org/10.5325/jnietstud.44.1.0006.
  • Look, Brandon C. 2007. “Perfection, Power and the Passions in Spinoza and Leibniz.” Revue Roumaine de La Philosophie 51 (1–2): 21–38.

Week 5) Book Four: The Free Man: From the individual to the State and back again.

Book Four demonstrates the necessity of our social existence. This social existence on the one hand offers the greatest of benefits as the most useful thing for anybody is another person. On the other hand it threatens the greatest of dangers, as the “mob is terrifying if not terrified”.

Key texts:

  • Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1985. ‘Book Four of the Ethics: Of Human Bondage, or the Powers of the Affects’. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, translated by Edwin M. Curley, vol. 1. Princeton University Press.
  • Richardson, Janice. 2009. ‘Chapter Three: Spinoza’. In The Classic Social Contractarians. Ashgate Publishing.
  • Vardoulakis, Dimitris. 2020. “Preamble.” In Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism. Spinoza Studies. Edinburgh University Press.

Week 6) Book Five: from philosophical therapy to God-drunkenness (Gottbetrunkener). Book Five of the Ethics continues where Book Four had left off: how is it that we are able to become: more wise, more free, more unbothered by both hope and fear. What is the relationship between ethics, freedom, and knowledge? The second half of Book Five, is, to put it politely, somewhat divisive.

“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”: what does it mean for part of our mind to be eternal? This is the most difficult part of the whole Ethics. It is likely the real reason he was thrown out of the Jewish community Amsterdam. Given Spinoza’s earlier demonstration (Week 3) that our mind and our body are “the same individual”, how can even a part of one, survive the total destruction of the other? It is a doctrine which on the one hand is, “Rubbish which causes others to write rubbish”; on the other hand, it is the crowning doctrine of Spinoza’s whole philosophy. The point and pinnacle of his thought, that is pursued from his earliest work till his last. Whichever side you take on this divide, the point of this lecture is to make it as intelligible as possible, just what Spinoza’s position was. 

Key texts:

  • Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1985. ‘Book Five of the Ethics: Of the Power of the Intellect, or on Human Freedom’. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, translated by Edwin M. Curley, vol. 1. Princeton University Press.
  • Adler, Jacob. 2014. “Mortality of the Soul from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Spinoza.” In Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by Steven Nadler. Cambridge University Press.
  • Deleuze, Giles. 1990. ‘Chapter 19: Beatitude’. In Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, by Gilles Deleuze, translated by Martin Joughin. Zone Books.

PART TWO

The second part of the course tackles specific problems in Spinoza’s Ethics.

Week 7) Degrees of reality, essence, and perfection: making sense of becoming better. Just what is the ethics in the Ethics? For a book called ‘Ethics’, there is not a lot that is recognisable as ethics. Not a single trolley to be seen! Rather than offering impossible algorithm to implausible thought experiments, Spinoza is concerned with a simpler task: what does it mean to be better, and how do we achieve this?

(“Imagine a self-help guide, with no self and less help”)

Key texts:

  • Pasnau, Robert. 2021. ‘Qualitative Change’. In The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy. Routledge.
  • Richardson, Janice. 2020. ‘Spinoza’s Conception of Personal and Political Change: A Feminist Perspective’. Law and Critique 31 (2): 145–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-019-09255-6.

Week 8) Getting to God as quickly as possible, or everything you wanted to know about the ontological argument, but were afraid to ask Kant. As Deleuze following Gueroult pointed out: Spinoza does not begin with God. Rather, the first sixteen propositions of the Ethics get to God as quickly as possible. But does Spinoza offer anything that is describable as an ontological argument? He certainly ascribes necessary existence to substance. Does this mean that his philosophy can be rejected as confused dogmatism?

Does Kant truly offer a confutation of ontological arguments, or a rebuttal in refutation-drag?

Key texts:

Week 9) Spinoza and the “Maker’s knowledge tradition” or why the passions and the State are knowable but chemistry may not be. One of the bedrocks of the Ethics is that there are three different kinds of “knowledge”, or thinking. Spinoza is annoyingly unhelpful in his explanations of what kinds of things would count as falling under each type. Is he a proto-experimentalist combined with critical theorist? or something more rationalist-hued? 

Key texts:

  • Curley, Edwin M., trans. 1985. ‘LETTER 6. Comments on the Most Noble Robert Boyle’s Book on Niter, Fluidity and Solidity’. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I, by Benedictus de Spinoza, vol. 1. Princeton University Press.
  • Gaukroger, Stephen. 1986. ‘Vico and the Maker’s Knowledge Principle’. History of Philosophy Quarterly 3 (1): 29–44. JSTOR.

Week 10) Seeing, and approving the better, but following the worse. Spinoza’s answer to why it’s not just this timeline that’s the worst.

“… video meliora, proboque, 

deteriora sequor …”

Spinoza quotes these lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Medea is lamenting her desire for Jason, which she rationally knows is wrong, but still can’t help herself. So much meaning and philosophical depth is packed into these five words:

“ … I see the better, approve it;

I follow debasements …”

Why would Spinoza so love these lines? Note, that we are still not in a contemporary ethical scene; we know what the right thing to do is. The problem is that we fail to turn understanding into action. For a rationalist, can there be any more frightening scenario? 

Key texts:

Week 11) The Power of Love: the passion, the perversion, the perfection, of this most problematic of emotion.

Love, as a passion, is remarkably simple for Spinoza: it is the affect of joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause. But simply turning from the idea of an external cause to an internal one, is insufficient to become wise. Spinoza is immersed in the seventeenth century angst about pride and other forms of deleterious self-love. But all passions can become actions. How then should we understand both the rational and the intuitive forms of love?

Key texts:

  • Carlisle, Clare. 2017. “Spinoza’s Acquiescentia.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (2): 209–36. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2017.0027.
  • James, Susan. 2012. ‘Spinoza on the Passionate Dimension of Philosophical Reasoning’. Emotional Minds: The Passions and the Limits of Pure Inquiry in Early Modern Philosophy, 71.
  • Harvey, Warren Zev. 2014. ‘Ishq, Hesheq, and Amor Dei Intellectualis’. In Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by Steven Nadler. Cambridge University Press.

Week 12) “Spinoza’s Heresy” just what is the final goal of Spinoza’s Ethics? And why did it get him kicked out of the Jewish community?

I will return to the problems with the second half of Book Five of the Ethics.

Key texts:

  • Adler, Jacob. 2014. ‘Mortality of the Soul from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Spinoza’. In Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by Steven Nadler. Cambridge University Press.
  • Nadler, Steven. 2001. Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind. Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press.

The MSCP acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land — the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation — and pay respect to elders past and present.