Zane Perdue on Spinoza’s Ethics
The Keystone of Spinoza’s Ethics1
Skimming Spinoza’s Ethics, I recently noticed something that escaped me during my first reading of it: Book III, ‘Of the Affects’ is the only section in which there are no axioms. The definitions are followed immediately by postulates and then propositions. What then, does this axiomatic gap signify?
It is significant that God/Nature, the Mind, Human Bondage, and Human Freedom are worked through from the starting point of axioms but not the Affects, not the passions or drives. Immediately preceding the definitions of Book III, it is claimed that ‘I shall treat the nature and powers of the affects, and the power of the mind over them, by the same method which, in the preceding parts, I treated of God and the mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.