Spinoza, according to popular opinion, would have written on the topic of sexual love only deplorable platitudes, heavily influenced by the prejudices of his time and lacking a serious philosophical foundation: what he was once celebrated for, we reproach him for today; or, at best, we excuse it. Or he might have even, as some believe, outdone the prevailing puritanism: sexuality, as such, profoundly repulsed him, and women horrified him. The second of these two claims, if we stick to the manifest content of the texts, has no real basis; if we invoke their latent content, this claim would require, in order for it to be established with minimal rigour, a study whose theoretical possibility we will not contest, but which, in fact, has not yet been undertaken. The first claim, by contrast, obviously seems correct: that men love women for their beauty and cannot bear that they attach themselves to others, that they desire them more the more admirers they have, that the jealousy of the male is exacerbated by the representation of the pudenda and the excrementa of his rival, that sensual attachment is unstable and conflictual,that it often turns to obsession, that Adam loved Eve because of the similarity of their natures, that one who remains unmoved by the gifts of a courtesan does not commit the sin of ingratitude, that only free men and women get married, and only if they wish to have children – well, there you have it, and there really is nothing sensational about all of that. Now these eight passages, if we include as well the two definitions of the libido, are the only ones, unless I am mistaken, where Spinoza explicitly treated the question! There would thus only be, it seems, a negative balance sheet to be drawn up.

This, however, would be moving too quickly. After all, nobody will dispute that Spinoza was hardly in the habit of writing about anything carelessly. We have not finished tracking down in Spinoza so-called banalities that, once re-inscribed within their argumentative context, take on an unexpected meaning. Why would this not be the case here as well? Of course, we can never be too certain, but is it not better, all things being equal, to give the author of the Ethics the benefit of the doubt?