Any Future Metaphysics or Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Others make inquiries; Spinoza offers answers. His close is a
triumph, a portrait of the serene “wise man” who “suffers scarcely any
disturbance of spirit, but . . . always possesses true spiritual contentment” [Ethics, V, Prop. 42, Scholium].
Such an ending insists upon a third characteristic—despite the cool
formality of its geometrical presentation, the Ethics is at the last a psalm,
a hymn of praise to a God it takes an intellectual to love. Beneath its formidable armature, the Ethics unveils a standard commedia—before the
enduring contentment of wisdom, the Amor intellectualis Dei, there is
Spinoza’s version of Dante’s dark wood, the error and confusion of “man
at the mercy of his emotions.” The fourth part of the Ethics is titled “Of
Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions.” Only the final, fifth
section is devoted to “On the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom.” Before paradise there is purgatory, the questing climb to knowledge worthy of the name.
Here, however, no helpful Virgil or Beatrice leads the way. Each
thinker is on her or his own, “a head,” as Samuel Beckett put it, “aban-
doned to its ancient solitary resources.” Those resources, for Spinoza
perhaps more than for any other thinker, prove sufficient, though far
from solitary. By the time he puts down his pen he’s reasoned himself
to a tranquil ecstasy, put his finite intellect in touch with the infinitely
faceted unfolding of Being he calls God: “The mind’s intellectual love
towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself.”
[Ethics, V, Prop. 36]
The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is very different. If the Ethics ad-
dresses itself to sustained pursuit of individual well-being, the Tracta-
tus lays out the social conditions most conducive to this pursuit. How
should states be organized to best support the free philosophizing of
citizens? The austere geometrical abstraction of the Ethics is replaced
by a more or less standard essay format, at times sharply polemical. If
the title seems today a bizarre conflation—what’s “theological” about an
essay in political theory?—the essay itself is strikingly more accessible,
with a clear sense of participation in an ongoing dialogue. There are
frequent references to scripture, both Old and New Testament, as well as
to classical authors.
The centrality of political concerns is made clear in a subtitle, “wherein
it is shown that freedom to philosophise can not only be granted without
injury to Piety and the Peace of the Commonwealth, but that the Peace of
