If you’ve ever wanted a complete scientific roadmap for how to live, a modern philosophy to go by, a lens through which to understand a complex world, a foundation, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is as good as you’ll find.

Today, you’ll discover how to see yourself as part of something bigger, something infinite and awe-inspiring. How to see the world scientifically. What this means for reducing negative emotions, leading a more content, fulfilled, rational, meaningful, and joyful life. He asked questions like: why are we so dogmatic? What makes us irrational? Why do we live as slaves to our emotions and others’ opinions. We’ll find out why some of the most influential thinkers to have lived admired Spinoza. Einstein said if he believed in god it was ‘Spinoza’s god’ and Hegel said that ‘you are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all’. We’ll look at what made Spinoza one of the first truly modern and radical thinkers, why he was the first modern psychologist, and how he revolutionised how we think about concepts like god and nature. In short, and I think this is no exaggeration, the world we inhabit now would not have taken the path it has without Spinoza.

This is also the story of a man, lost in the forest, searching for the way out.

I don’t want to dwell too much on Spinoza’s life – except to say he has a good claim on being one of the most consequential philosophers to have ever lived, but he was also, as Bertrand Russell wrote, ‘the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers’.

He was one of the first Enlightenment advocates for real democracy, and was the first to really criticise the bible as just a text. He was vilified for his perceived atheism and excommunicated from the Jewish community where he lived, with the community saying that, ‘the Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses’. Despite being ostracised, he searched his entire life for what he called the ‘true good’.

He wanted to find out how to live an ideal and virtuous life. How, ultimately, to be free.

Before we get into the juicy bits, we have to do the grunt work. We have to map out Spinoza’s idea of the universe. Then we can understand our place in it. It might sound a bit complicated at first, but bare with me – if you get this, or just let it wash over you, and stick with it, it will change how you think. Give me a few minutes to get through the complicated stuff and then we’ll get to the interesting stuff – and it should all come together.

If you could condense Spinoza’s metaphysics – his first principles – into one sentence it would be this: being is one. Put another way, the many is one.

What that means is actually quite simple: everything – us, the forest, animals, the stars, and the laws of physics are many things part of one thing: nature.

We forget this, of course. We think of ourselves as independent, as separate. But we also know we’re not – especially in the modern period. We know we’re made of atoms, we know we need food, water, oxygen, energy from outside us to sustain those atoms. We know that we rely on wood, and tools, and gravity, and, of course, each other. We know about the circle of life, the interdependent ecosystem that the animal kingdom lives within, and we know that one thing affects another – in short we know that everything is connected.

This is Spinoza’s foundation. But he goes further. He reminds us that this should actually change how we think.

So how does he understand this ‘many things’ in ‘one nature’ truth? Well, he wants to lay it out logically and represent it in a kind of mathematical pattern so that we can use it to build more complex ideas with.

So instead of many things and one nature, he says there are three parts to the universe: substance, attributes, and modes.

We usually think of substances as the different things in the universe – air, deer, wood, us, plasticine. Its just the stuff things are made of.

Attributes are the ways we experience substances. Spinoza says there are two attributes that we know of: extension and thought – we have actual material trees and the ideas of trees in our heads.

A mode is the form or shape the substance takes. The substance wood, for example, takes the shape of oaks or chairs or doors. It’s the substance of wood in different modes.

But wait, Spinoza wants to be more specific. A substance, he says, if it is to be defined properly, should be an independent thing.

He provides definitions: ‘by ‘substance’ I understand: what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e. that whose concept doesn’t have to be formed out of the concept of something else’.

So let’s take a leaf, say. Is it a substance? It is only a substance in itself if it’s independent, if it’s conceived through itself, if it doesn’t have to be formed out of something else. But it does. It is dependent on the branch, and the tree. So is the tree a substance? Well, no, because it is formed out of the soil, the air, the birds that disperse its seeds.

A substance should be an independent thing. Yet thinking through this thought experiment, everything is in some sense determined and dependent, and an extension of things outside of it.

So if we’re defining substances strictly it turns out there is only one: Nature.

Trees, people, plants, animals, they’re all different modes, different shapes, of matter.

Spinoza saw nature as god. In fact, he usually wrote ‘god or nature’ – they’re one and the same thing.

Why is this? Well, he thought of it like this:

God is meant to be infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent, omniscient, a law-maker and law-giver. But if that’s the case he can’t be outside of nature. If he’s not part of nature – if he’s not everywhere at once – he can’t be omnipresent, he can’t be infinite. He must, to be those things, be part of everything, with nothing inseparable from him.

God couldn’t be outside of the universe, Spinoza realised, he was the universe.

The ultimate laws were gravity, mathematics, the laws of physics, of cause and effect, so god, knowing all, seeing all, controlling all, had to not just be part of those laws but actually be those laws, as if they were an extension of his body.

Today, this is called pantheism.

Spinoza was writing at the beginning of the Enlightenment and during the scientific revolution. He was trying, in some way, to square an old universe with a new one: one of science, reason, experimentation. He saw that all things, if you studied them carefully, were implicated and affected by everything else. Everything was part of one big ordered ecosystem, although he didn’t have that word to use yet.

It was a revolutionary, modern, scientific view.

He wrote that ‘in Nature there is nothing contingent; all things have been caused by the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way’.

A storm pushes me one way, the wind pushes my boat. Berries draw me towards eating them. The tree grows depending on the rain and the sun, the deer is frightened in a different direction when startled. We have desires we can’t control.

We are all like billiard balls, set off by causes outside of us.

Spinoza’s universe is a description of a singular fact: everything is connected. Being is one. To understand ourselves, we must understand the natural world we are a part of.

There’s a phrase that comes up often in scholars’ discussions about Spinoza’s universe: it unfolds.

Cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect – this is the root of everything. A seed unfolds into a tree, that pang of hunger unfolds into the making of a meal, the desire for sex unfolds into a new human life, this path unfolds through the woods, and the cloud unfolds in the sky. The universe – since the big bang – has unfolded into an infinity of different shapes and modes.

Spinoza says that ‘I shall consider human actions and appetites as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies’.

What does this mean? That we can conceptualise, trace, and map lines through our appetites, actions, and ideas – they are caused by something before them and they in turn were caused by something before that.

He writes, ‘the infant thinks that he freely wants the milk, the angry child that he freely wants vengeance, and the timid one that he freely wants to flee. The drunkard think it is from a free decision of the mind that he says things which when he sobers up he regrets having said’.

This forces us to confront a frightening proposition: are we free at all?

Spinoza says that all the evidence points to no: ‘in the mind, there is no absolute, or free, will, but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity’.

We only think we’re free because our consciousness sits between one of those causes and effects – between for example, the pang of hunger and the decision to eat. But we see the effect of something like hunger or desire and see that effect as volition, as a voluntary action.

Let me explain:

I just heard a lion over there – in the English countryside – so I decide to go this way. Am I choosing freely? When moving my leg this way was caused by the effect of the lion’s roar.

Everything is cause and effect. However, we rarely reflect on the long line of causation. All action is caused by something external.

Just because we watch over our own appetites, ideas, and actions as they enter and leave our minds, we think we’re free.

The French philosopher Giles Deleuze wrote that ‘consciousness is only a dream with one’s eyes open’. Consciousness, in other words, is being sat over the top of the waterfall, watching mental stuff fly over.

Spinoza writes: ‘a body in motion moves until another body causes it to rest; and a body at rest remains at rest until another body causes it to move’.

Now, here’s the interesting bit:

How things – modes, objects, us, ideas, whatever – are affected by other things depends on the natures of each thing. The bird affects the tree in a different way than the rain, this berry affects me in a different way to a friend – but everything affects everything else in some specific way.

That’s the scientifically-minded approach to this: to understand how things affect other things. That’s the key to the universe.

As he says, ‘it is clear that we are driven about in many ways by external causes, and that, like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and fate’.

He says that we have ‘inadequate ideas’ about the effects of things. The trick of life, of course, is to have adequate ideas.

Okay, imagine for a moment those lines of cause and effect running through the universe.  Deleuze calls those lines the plane of immanence. The bird is something to the tree, the tree to the soil. The lion to the person running. There is a line that can be drawn from my first videos to writing this one to this forest.

When we think in terms of lines, we realise that everything in the universe it relative to something else. All is a web.

This, again, has radical consequences that should change how we think. It means that nothing is good or bad in itself, but only relative to something else. The lion is bad for me so I run from it. The berry is good for me so I’m drawn to it.

We tend to think of things as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, true or not true. We attach properties to objects and think of them as being certain things. This is red, it is tasty, or it is poisonous. Or that person is cheerful, intelligent, or interesting. Or that argument is a good or bad idea.

But we forget that it is always us that’s attaching the property – the goodness or badness, the ugly or beautiful, the wise or unwise – so that these appraisals of objects, ideas, or people aren’t actually properties that are in the thing but are descriptions of a relationship. Everything is relative.

And the consequences of thinking like this get even more radical: if things can’t be defined by their properties, but only by relations, they must be understood only in their capacities to do things to other things and or have  things done to them by other things.

Spinoza calls it simply their ‘capacity to affect and be affected’.

Oh look a giraffe – in the English countryside. Why does it have a long neck? The reason is not within the giraffe, a property of the giraffe – but in it’s relationship to eating from trees, or drinking water, or fighting with other giraffes.

This applies to everything.

Deleuze writes that ‘beings will be defined by their capacity for being affected, by the affections of which they are capable, the excitations to which they react, those by which they are unaffected, and those which exceed their capacity and make them ill or cause them to die’.

Okay, now things are getting interesting. If everything is about relationships, capacities to affect or be affected, cause and effect, then how should we think about our relationship to the things around us? What do we want to surround ourselves with? What do we want to avoid?

The answer is quite simple: we should want to surround ourselves with perfection. We should try and organise our experience of the world so that we encounter things that will affect us positively.

The things we call good, the things that our relationship with affect us positively, we, of course, like, we approve of, we want more of.

A good shelter has the affect of sheltering us from the rain – great start. This is why Spinoza sees goodness and perfection as synonymous. But more than this, he says by perfection and goodness he just means existing. What does this mean?

Well, a house that exists for longer is more perfect than one that’s destroyed in a storm. A person that lives longer has a body that’s more perfect than one that dies from disease.

A plant that gives us more energy is more perfect than one that doesn’t. God – or nature – is more perfect because it exists longer than an individual tree or a single animal.

Things generally want to exist for as long as possible, so whatever helps that thing achieve that is more perfect in its relationship with it than something that doesn’t.

Spinoza says simply: ‘whatever helps us to attain that perfection, we shall call good, and whatever hinders our attaining it, or does not assist it, we shall call evil’.

And we try to arrange our ideas of the world in this way as well. in such a way as to achieve this perfection: ‘after men began to form universal ideas, and devise models of houses, buildings, towers, etc., and to prefer some models of things to others, it came about that each one called perfect what he saw agreed with the universal idea he had formed of this kind of thing, and imperfect’.

Okay, so lines of cause and effect run through everything and everything has different capacities to be affected by and affect other things. Let’s think about those affections.

Look – a gorilla, in the English country side. I hear the gorilla, see the gorilla, feel fear, the gorilla’s capacity to beat me in an arm wrestle affects me, and I’m pushed – affected – into run.

Spinoza says that, ‘unpleasure is a man’s passing from a greater perfection to a lesser’.

Now, again, this applies to everything. Our sad, angry, fearful, hungry, annoyed, stressed, anxious, frustrated feelings about things are signals that something is affecting us in a negative way. That we’re passing into a lesser state of perfection.

Think about hunger. You’re literally decomposing. So the hunger pushes you to eat for sustenance. Stress is based on the fear that, I don’t know, if you don’t finish this task you’ll be judged poorly by others and it will hurt your career.

On the other hand, he says, ‘pleasure is a man’s passing from a lesser perfection to a greater’.

Like the term ‘unfolding’ for the universe, and the ‘lines’ of cause and effect, our emotions and feelings are signals of a potential ‘passage’ to a better or worse condition, a reaction to objects we encounter.

Spinoza calls feelings, emotions, and passions, ‘the affects’, because they affect us. He thinks that all emotions boil down to three, from which all the others derive:

Joy, sadness, and desire.

And they’re all related to Spinoza’s idea of perfection: joy is the experience of our condition being improved. Sadness our condition worsening. Anger, fear, hunger, feeling cold are all ‘sad affects’. Whereas ‘love’ or ‘confidence’ are examples of the ‘joyful affects’.

But remember, everything is relative. The affects are always about something – in that line of cause and effect. So he says that ‘a full account of the nature of each passion must bring in the nature of the external object by which the person having the passion is affected’.

Again, it’s the relationship we have to focus on. We try to organise our lives rationally around how often we’ll encounter, use, or avoid these things. We want the shelter for more warmth and less rain, we want the good ideas about raising our child or choosing new hobbies, we want to avoid the things that make us sick.

So how does this relate to Spinoza’s big idea, the thing he spent his entire life trying to discover: finding what he called the ‘true good’ of being free?

Okay, so we’re affected by things, we want to be affected by good things, we want to become more ‘perfect’ in Spinoza’s words, everything’s a relationship. How do we begin to bring all this together?

First Spinoza is an ‘ethical egoist’. That means that what is good and bad for us, individually, guides us in what we do, how we think and act.

He said that reason ‘demands that everyone love himself, seek his own advantage… and absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can’.

He called this an organism’s ‘conatus’, which he defines in various ways at various times as the organisms ‘striving’, ‘endeavour’, ‘tendency’, ‘force’, and ‘power of acting’. It applies to the plant as much as to our ideas.

Every organism strives to increase its conatus – to exist for longer, to achieve a better state of perfection.

He says simply that ‘each thing, as far as it can by it’s own power, tries to stay in existence’.

Because of our conatus, we have a desire for things that increase our well-being – food, sex, love, shelter, good ideas – and an aversion to those things that decrease it – poison, violence, lions, and gorillas.

But how does our conatus guide us in doing this? What are we doing? Of course, we have those natural urges, of course some things are better for us and others not. But as usual with Spinoza, he takes the insight one step further: in knowing that the lion is bad for us and the berry good, we’re doing something else too: we’re understanding those lines – the affections – the causes and effects in the world.

The conatus needs to understand, to comprehend, so as to increase it’s power of doing the right thing to live longer. This is why Spinoza is a rationalist: understanding is the key to everything.

Understanding is the key to freedom.

How can Spinoza argue that we’re all pushed around by affections out of our control, and argue that we can be free? Remember, he says ‘it is clear that we are driven about in many ways by external causes, and that, like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and fate’.

It’s that tossing about that he wants to address.

The affects, passion, and emotions are passive, they happen to us. Like the wind hitting a sail, a wave crashing over the ship. I see a cake and my mouth salivates and I eat it. I feel like an idea is a good one so I do it. I think the sound is bad so I run.

But often our ideas are mistaken about whether those affects are really helping us.

What we want to do is understand the real causes and effects of what we do. We want to know what really caused that sound that sound in the woods before we run, if that cake is really what I want to improve my condition, if that idea really is accurate.

Spinoza says that just relying on feelings and affects is basically a state of slavery because were pushed around by them, not understanding and choosing for ourselves.

Instead of being passive we want to be active.

He writes, ‘the difference is between a man who is led only by an affect or by opinion, and one who is led by reason. For the former, whether he will or no, does those things he is most ignorant of, whereas the latter complies with no one’s wishes but his own, and does only those things he knows to be the most important in life, and therefore desires very greatly. Hence, I call the former a slave, but the latter, a free man’.

Okay, so what does being active actually entail?

Someone who is active is guided by their conatus – the desire for longevity, joy, and perfection – and they should be what Spinoza calls the adequate or sufficient cause of what they’re doing. To do this we use our reason to study the causes and effects of those relationships between things. We want to understand those affects on us, and the effect they in turn have in the future.

Adequate ideas are ‘clear and distinct’ knowledge about what increases a person’s conatus because a person has studied the causes and effects of things.

Okay, an example. Inadequate knowledge is eating because you desire to, because you’re hungry. It might have a good effect, it might not. This berry might actually poison me.

Adequate knowledge, however, is eating in a rational way, knowing the nutrients, where it grows and what goes into it, and the effect it has in the long-term, how it contributes to health, when you’ve had too much.

Spinoza writes, ‘when a rational being is truly active insofar as he is moved by the knowledge he possesses, the things he does are guided by a true understanding of what is in his own best interest and thus bring about an improvement in his condition’.

In other words, the free, active, reasonable person is driven by ‘self-determination’.

Being active and reasonable requires thinking through the causes and effects of things sufficiently enough to be able to overcome our simple passions and emotions.

In knowing that I’m hungry, or that I can store them, that this berry contributes to my vitamin C intake, I’ve done the research, I know how much I need, then I’m acting, in picking and eating it, actively, and not passively.

An adequate idea of what to do takes into account all the factors – if we do this reason will overcome weaker impulses or misguided ideas.

Deleuze writes that ‘once we have attained adequate ideas, we connect effects to their true causes, and consciousness, having become a reflection of adequate ideas, is capable of overcoming its illusions, forming clear and distinct ideas of the affections and affects it experiences’.

Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler gives the example of the choice between staying home and studying or going out partying with friends.

In the moment, going out might have a stronger affect on your desire.

But if we consider all the factors about our finances, or the job we get from the effect of staying in studying, we might come to the decision that its more rational to stay in and study. Alternatively, we might decide that we need a night off, because we’re over-worked.

Spinoza is not saying one thing is better than another: only that we have to consider our options and really understand the effects of our choices. We have to use our heads.

Nadler writes that: ‘a person is therefore free when his adequate ideas are more powerful, affectively speaking, than his passions or inadequate ideas’.

For Spinoza, freedom is about reason, and someone who is free is someone who acts ‘according to the dictate of reason’.

He says that ‘the only thing that reason makes us try to get is understanding’.

Spinoza spends a lot of time in his Ethics commenting on virtue, vice, emotions, and feelings and trying to understand their relationship to reason. He is a rationalist, after all: he wants to make the case that using our reason will direct us without error along the correct path.

A vice, for example, is ‘an immoderate love or desire for eating, drinking, sexual union, wealth and esteem’.

These might bring pleasure in the short-term but are harmful over a longer period.

Fortitude, for Spinoza, is a virtue above all others. He says: ‘from the guidance of reason we want a greater future good in preference to a lesser present one, and a lesser present evil in preference to a greater future one’.

Fortitude is the act of working hard, looking forward, thinking broadly, investing our time in understanding how the world works so that we can reap future rewards.

But here’s the beautiful bit. Everything in Spinoza connects. Remember how for Spinoza god is nature. God is in everything. And god is perfect. Nature just is. It’s the unfolding line of cause and effect that runs through everything, it’s the fact that the many are one, all is one substance.

He says to overcome and choose the rational thing, to live with fortitude, we must look to god – to Nature – to see what lasts, what works, what’s most perfect and most beautiful to increase our own conatus as a species in relationship with the rest of nature.

He wants to look from what he describes as the ‘perspective of eternity’.

Think about how people give up smoking when they have kids. Or maybe get more humble and tolerant from travelling the world. The wider the view, the more long-term orientated you become. You look at causes over the perspective of a longer period of time.

Looking to eternity is the most godly way of thinking, looking at everything from a god’s eye view, the perspective of eternity. At what causes what over the long-term.

He says ‘perfecting the intellect is nothing but understanding God, his attributes, and his actions, which follow from the necessity of his nature’.

To take one more example. Think about growing a plant to eat. We learn from god – nature – by watching, by experiencing, seeing what happens when it rains, what soil it grows best in, with which nutrients and in what amount of sunlight. Or in building a house, we look for the strongest wood that’s the best insulator and lasts the longest. Spinoza says simply that everything in life works in the same way.

He says: ‘he who understands himself and his affects clearly and distinctly loves God, and does so the more, the more he understands himself and his affects’.

Spinoza says a few things about the ‘free person’s character’, and talks at length about different virtues, emotions, and vices, but fundamentally, the person led by reason and guided by nature will have two things:

• Strength of character: that’s the fortitude, the striving, the will to understand the world.
• And they’ll be active – choosing by reason – not passive – pushed by affections.

Spinoza was influenced by the stoics of Ancient Greece and Rome. Instead of relying on capricious and unpredictable joys like sensual pleasure and fears or anger, ultimate freedom, he says, is grounded in reason. And from this will come a joyful serenity that arises from knowledge that doing the rational correct thing should pay off in the end.

Joy, remember, is the feeling of an increase in our conatus, an increase in power. So Spinoza’s ethics is grounded in increasing an active, in control, rational joy.

But because we’re part of the universe, we’ll also take joy from seeing the affections and relationships of the world for what they are.

He says ‘a person who sees the necessity of things regards their passage with calm and composure’.

Getting frustrated and angry at the universe is the result of seeing the world through the lens of inadequate ideas. Imagine getting angry with the lion, blaming the lion for wanting to eat you. It’s not the lions choice, not her fault, she’s not morally responsible. Spinoza says we should look at the rest of the world in this way too.

Seeing from the ‘perspective of eternity’ means looking at how different affections, different causes and effects, affect things with different levels of power. He says ‘the power of an effect has its limits set by the power of its cause’.

So the power of the lion biting your leg has cause in the lion’s hunger. We don’t get angry, upset, or frustrated with the lion personally.

Now imagine asking for directions in the street and the person ignores us. We get a little frustrated. But then we discover the person speaks a different language, or is deaf, or is scared of us because they were harassed on the street last week. There are causes we didn’t consider that have a powerful effect on the person. And when we look from the ‘perspective of eternity’ it becomes difficult for us to direct our negative emotions at single people, ideas, or objects. It becomes unreasonable.

Spinoza says, ‘if we separate an emotion-affect from the thought of an external cause and join it to other thoughts, then the love or hate toward the external cause is destroyed, as is the mental instability arising from these affects’.

Powerfully, we should think of all of the causes of things – again, giving us a god’s-eye view, but also lessening the blame or negative emotion we feel towards one thing or one person.

As Steven Nadler writes, ‘this view serves to distribute the causal responsibility for the affect widely and dilute its power significantly, perhaps taking away its strength altogether. The intensity of the affect is weakened as it becomes less focused on one particular individual and more on a long sequence of necessitating causes’.

The same applies to our own negative emotions, our own problems. We must have knowledge about their causes, and their effects, otherwise we are slaves to them. Because, ultimately, we want to increase the joyful affects and decrease the negative ones.

Spinoza says, ‘so someone who is led solely by his love of freedom to moderate his affects and appetites will try his hardest to come to know the virtues and their causes, and to fill his mind with the joy that comes from the true knowledge of them; he will not think about men’s vices, or disparage men, or take pleasure from putting up a show of being a free man. If you observe these carefully (they aren’t difficult) and regularly put them into practice, you will soon be able to direct most of your actions according to the command of reason’.

If you follow his advice, Spinoza says, you’ll find your way out from the confusion of the forest of affects. You’ll be able to see the wood through the trees. You’ll see the bigger picture, the one from eternity, the god’s-eye view. You’ll have perspective. And Spinoza’s ethics have been applied to many areas and I’ve only scratched the surface but it boils down to this – reflect on the causes of things.

But, you may be wondering, what has this got to do with morality? His most famous work is called Ethics after all. Spinoza’s picture of the world seems to be quite self-centred. So before we end I want to touch on what Spinoza says about community, morality, and benevolence.

For Spinoza, morals can only be grounded on the simple fact that every organism and being wants to increase their own conatus.

Spinoza’s morality (or benevolence) is based on the idea that it is rationally wise to surround oneself with people who are also rational – as rational people, he says, will want the same things as one another.

He says ‘there is nothing more useful to a man than a man. Men, I repeat, can wish for nothing more helpful to their staying in existence than that all men should be in such harmony that the minds and bodies of them all would be like one mind and one body; that all together should try as hard as they can to stay in existence; and that all together should seek for themselves the common advantage of all’.

The opposite of a joy grounded in understanding and an increase in conatus is a life lived under the influence of the sad passions. So it’s only logical to want to minimise negativity. We assemble the world rationally in order to avoid the sad passions. We create assemblages of medicines, technologies, norms and values, entertainment, information, family and friends – we have a species’ ‘common ideas’. He says, ‘the body has been affected most forcefully by what is common to all the men’.

We all want to preserve the things that are good for our nature. And many of those things are common to us all.

And if we’re arguing, angry, suspicious, and fearful rather than joyful, calm and rational, we’re increasing the sad passions, and that shouldn’t be anyone’s foundational goal. Moreover, two heads are better than one when it comes to tasks, and the rational person should always want to convince the other to their own cause, to be rational too.

Take the example of working out how to grow an apple tree. The more people working on the problem, with the same goal, the better it will be. Scholars have been critical of Spinoza’s view here, but I think his point is that we should come together positively and ground any debate or competition in joy rather than negativity.

I’m not going to summarise, it’s impossible to. I’ll leave you with the last few lines of the Ethics: ‘the road to these things that I have pointed out now seems very hard, but it can be found. And of course something that is found so rarely is bound to be hard. For if salvation were ready to hand and could be found without great effort, how could it come about that almost everyone neglects it? But excellence is as difficult as it is rare’.

Sources

Steven Nadler, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightening: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750

Giles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics

Beth Lord, Spinoza’s Ethics

Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment

Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy