![]() ![]() The heroic mismatch between Spinoza’s style and his subject matter can take some getting used to, but – like Krafft-Ebing’s deadpan accounts of the uses of boots, whips and spurs – it also has a quirky kind of charm. ![]() (by P13S), we shall thereby rejoice in or be saddened by its presence and so (by P28) we shall strive to do whatever we imagine others to love or to look on with joy, etc., QED. Here, for example, is his account of ‘ambition’, or the yearning for public approval:įrom the fact that we imagine others to love or hate something, we shall love or hate it too (by P27), i.e. He presented his analysis in terse, impassive Latin, beginning with explicit axioms and definitions, proceeding through numbered propositions and scholia, and drawing conclusions ‘in the geometric style’. ‘These turmoils move me neither to laughter nor even to tears,’ he said, ‘but to philosophising.’ With philosophy’s help he cast a cold eye on servitus humana, or ‘human bondage’, arguing that our ‘vices and absurdities’ were not anomalies or aberrations but, like the rest of our ‘affects’, part of the ordinary course of nature. B aruch Spinoza was fascinated by human follies, and in the Ethica he set out to examine them dispassionately. ![]()
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