Nature (Natura) plays a role in Spinoza’s philosophy that is fundamental and all-inclusive. Although he does not use any term translatable as “naturalism,” he has frequently been characterized as a “naturalist” by others – beginning with G. W. Leibniz – and it has become commonplace for commentators to apply the term to him, either in general or on a particular topic, either with or without explanation.

The term ‘teleology’ – from the Greek telos, meaning end, purpose, or goal – was not coined until well after Spinoza’s death, and different authors have used the term in somewhat different ways. Spinoza himself writes not of teleology but of existing or acting “for the sake of an end [propter finem]”; of “striving” or “endeavor [conatus]”; and of being a “final cause [causa finalis].” The concept of a final cause derives ultimately from Aristotle, for whom final causes are just one of four kinds of cause (along with efficient, formal, and material causes) that stand in complex relations to one another. At a minimum, however, final causes explain by implicating something – an end, purpose, or goal – that is subsequent to what is explained. How best to characterize kinds of causes and the relations among them was an important question for many early modern philosophers, including Spinoza.

Ethics, for Spinoza, is knowledge of “the right way of living.” That ethics is central to his philosophical project is unmistakable from the title of his most systematic presentation of his philosophy: Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata). While that work seeks to demonstrate a broad range of metaphysical, theological, epistemological, and psychological doctrines, they are selected for inclusion, at least in large measure, because of the support he takes them to provide for his ultimate ethical conclusions. Many of those conclusions are distinctive and provocative, and many of his reasons for them are innovative and intriguing. This chapter begins by providing an outline of Spinoza’s ethical theory, including is naturalistic foundations; its primary terms of ethical evaluation; the nature and causes of bondage to the passions; the prescriptions of reason; the way to freedom and autonomy; and eternity, intellectual love of God, and blessedness. It then considers four important questions for Spinoza’s ethical theory: the nature and motivational force of ethical judgments; the conditions for ethical responsibility; the role of altruism in ethics; and the value of life and the harmfulness of death.

Introduction to the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza

The second half of Ethics, Part 5, presents Spinoza's theory of the participation of human minds in the eternal. Although this theory constitutes the culmination of the Ethics, it has often proven opaque to even its most attentive and penetrating readers. Edwin Curley has written candidly, “In spite of many years of study, I still do not feel that I understand this part of the Ethics at all adequately” (1988, 84). Jonathan Bennett memorably declared this part of the Ethics to be “an unmitigated and seemingly unmotivated disaster” and “rubbish which causes others to write rubbish” (1984, 357, 374). Spinoza's central doctrines in this portion of the Ethics include the following: “1. There is in God an idea of the formal essence of each human body. / 2. An idea of the formal essence of the human body remains after the destruction of the human body, and for this reason there is a part of the human mind that is eternal. / 3. The wiser and more knowing one is, the greater is the part of one's mind that is eternal.” Each of these three central doctrines seems, on its face, to be inconsistent with the rest of Spinoza's philosophy; in fact, for each of the three doctrines, there are two different ways in which it seems inconsistent with the rest of his philosophy.

Introduction

Spinoza identifies the minds or souls of finite things with God's ideas of those things. Margaret Wilson famously suggests that this identification prevents Spinoza from giving an adequate account of the human mind: