SEARCH FOR A METHOD

The most striking thing that any reader approaching the Ethics for the first time notices is its unusual, even forbidding appearance. Rather than the even-flowing prose broken up into familiar paragraphs and organized into manageable chapters that one expects from a classic, reader-friendly treatise, one finds, instead, an intimidating array of definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations, and corollaries. It is almost as if one has stumbled upon a mathematical or scientific text rather than a philosophical masterpiece. Although it lacks the rigorous symbolic notation of the calculus, the Ethics nonetheless at first glance looks more like Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy than Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy (all three were originally written in Latin).

It is not just neophytes who have been put off by the format of the Ethics. The famous French philosopher Henri Bergson, writing early in the twentieth century, insists that “the formidable apparatus of theorems and the tangle of definitions, corollaries, and scholia, this intricate machinery and this crushing power are such that the newcomer, in the presence of the Ethics, is struck with admiration and terror as if standing before an armored dreadnought.” More recently, one seasoned Spinoza scholar refers to the work's presentation as a “charmless apparatus of demonstrations,” and suggests that Spinoza would have been better off without such an unnecessarily formal encumbrance.