Ontology and Ethics

Between ontology and ethics, there is no difference in kind, no gap, and no complex mediation, but a continuity: the being of man is entirely co-extensive with that of nature. If Spinoza is the highest expression of philosophy, or the ‘prince of philosophers’, it is because he realised that the greatness of thought, and the human conatus, consisted not in its ability to distinguish and abstract itself from the plane of nature, and posit its own being on the basis of a being (whether itself, or God) in excess of nature, but to express nature in its infinity. His greatness, in other words, consisted in his ability to associate the power of the human with the infinite power of nature, and to distinguish the power in question from an expression of transcendence. I would like to begin this chapter by considering some of the practical consequences of Spinoza's ontology for the existence of modes, and especially for the human being as one such mode, or one such expression, of Substance. The rest of the chapter will show the extent to which Deleuze's thought after Expressionism in Philosophy remains indebted to Spinoza.

The discourse concerned with modes, and their various and peculiar ways of being (and modes are nothing but ways in which the substance is, or comports itself) is what Spinoza calls ethics. Ethics is entirely different from morality.