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Death and destruction in

Spinoza's ethics
a
Wallace Maison
a
University of California , Berkeley
Published online: 29 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Wallace Maison (1977) Death and destruction in Spinoza's
ethics , Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 20:1-4, 403-417,
DOI: 10.1080/00201747708601825

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 Inquiry, 20, 403-17

Death and Destruction in Spinoza's

Ethics

Wallace Maison
University of California. Berkeley

An exposition of Spinoza's views of the cause and cure of death. He holds death
to be disruption of mind/body which need not involve becoming a corpse; amnesia
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counts. It follows that his criterion of personal identity includes memory, so

Spinozistic immortality is impersonal. The cause of death is always something
external, for nothing can destroy itself. (This principle, however, is not universally
true; Spinoza was led to it by mistaken physics.) Suicide is irrational. Fear of
death is to be overcome by realization that since adequate ideas are eternal, to the
extent that they consitute our minds we are eternal also. (But if so, isn't suicide
rational after all? And since language depends on memory, the eternal understand-
ing of adequate ideas is non-linguistic and non-symbolic; what then can it be?)

A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is not a
meditation upon death but upon life (IV P67).1

Notwithstanding this famous dictum, the subject of death comes up some

two dozen times in the Ethics - twice as often as geometry. Psychobio-
graphers will observe that Spinoza sometimes uses examples involving
death or fear of death when another kind of illustration would have served
just as well, e.g. the stone falling from the roof and killing the passerby (I
Appendix); the avaricious but timid (and Aristotelian) man who throws his
riches into the sea to avoid death (III ad fin.); and the unfathomable
behavior of the suicide (II P49 S).2 But most of the references are not of
this offhand sort, comprising rather, when assembled, a remarkable
thanatopsis: what death is, how it comes about, the madness of suicide,
and the overcoming of fear of death.

I. What Death Is
Spinoza purports to define death (of the body at any rate) in IV P39 S, but
he really gives us a theory: 'acquisition by the body's parts of a different
proportion of motion and rest to each other.' The actual definition of death
 404 Wallace Maison

is close to the surface in V P23: death is the destruction of the body.

Likewise death of the mind, insofar as it does or can die, is its destruction,
its 'ceasing to affirm the present existence of the body', which accompa-
nies the destruction of the body although not caused thereby (III Pli S).
This conception of death is of course in opposition to the Platonic and
Cartesian notion of separation or release of the animating principle, with
consequent bodily destruction.
One might think that Spinoza would not accept this definition, inasmuch
as he asserts emphatically that death does not necessarily involve 'being
changed into a corpse' (IV P39 S). But Spinoza's view, expressed in the
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same place, is that the body can undergo disintegration in other ways
besides becoming a corpse. Let us then turn to the theory set out in this
very strange scholium.
Only in an extended or relaxed sense can we speak of a 'theory' in
connection with Spinoza's various references to 'proportion of motion and
rest'. The physico-physiological interlude between Propositions 13 and 14
of Part II is programmatic, a sketch of the terms in which a physical theory
ought to be expressed. In Lemma I, 'Bodies are distinguished from one
another in respect of motion and rest, quickness and slowness, and not in
respect of substance', the Hobbesian physics is taken over en bloc, as is
done also in declaring motion and rest to be the immediate infinite mode
under extension (Letter 64). All physical differences, then, are really
differences in motion and rest. Consequently the difference between a
body before death and after is a difference in the 'proportion of motion and
rest' that the parts have to each other. This tells us nothing, however,
about what in particular that difference is.
One might naively suppose it to be that the live body is (roughly) all
motion, the dead one all rest. Spinoza now proceeds to state, in the
language of paradox avoidance, a violent paradox: 'I dare not deny', he
says, 'that the human body, though the circulation of the blood and the
other things by means of which it is thought to live be preserved, may,
nevertheless, be changed into another nature altogether different from its
own'. I.e. if it is 'changed into another nature', then it has died, regardless
of whether the metabolism has gone to zero. Experience, he continues,
seems to teach that the body may very well die without being changed into
a corpse; for 'it happens sometimes that a man undergoes such changes
that he cannot very well be said to be the same man, as was the case with a
certain Spanish poet' afflicted with amnesia.
 Death and Destruction 405

Now, a doctor who signed a certificate stating 'Cause of death: amnesia'

would be vulnerable to criticism. It is safe to say that he would not dare to
do it. But Spinoza would not dare not to. Why not?
Spinoza claims that the pre-amnesiac Spanish poet 'cannot very well be
said to be the same man' as the Spanish poet after the attack of amnesia.
This amounts to saying that personal identity cannot continue through loss
of memory; in other words, continuity of memory is at least a necessary
condition for personal identity according to Spinoza. The second illustra-
tion reinforces this point: we are told that the adult believes that he was
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once a baby only because he infers it 'from what he sees of others'. This
claim must rest on a contention that the adult does not remember having
been a baby. So personal identity does not stretch from babyhood to
maturity any more than across the gap of amnesia. And where there is a
discontinuity in personal identity, there is a death, Spinoza is committed
to saying; though he makes no comment on the obvious fact that we do not
equate growing up with dying.
How is it that this claim about the death of the body is justified by appeal
to a non-bodily criterion of personal identity? There is no difficulty here
for Spinoza, of course, since the body is the mind. If, then, there is mental
discontinuity, there must necessarily be bodily discontinuity also. The
bodily change, the 'acquiring of adifferent proportion of motion and rest',
is conjectured to be the obliteration of memory traces (IIP17 C, Demon-
stration); in the Scholium he declares that although he thinks his account is
true, it is sufficient for his purpose to have shown how memory might be
produced even if in fact it has some other cause. For whatever cause there
might be, it would have to be some sort of physical alteration, some kind of
brain trace.
The importance of IV P39 S lies not so much in its eccentric notion of
death as in its laying down of memory as the criterion of personal identity.
And that is important because it settles the question, still sometimes
disputed, whether the immortality promised in V P23 can be in any way
personal. It cannot. Memory is a necessary condition of personality; and
memory, we are repeatedly told (III Pll S, V P21), perishes with the
body.3 This does not mean that an impersonal immortality, the survival, or
(to speak more safely) the failure to lapse into non-being, of some consti-
tuent of the personality, may not be a desideratum. The proof of its reality
consoled Spinoza.
 406 Wallace Maison

II. How Death Comes About

Spinoza's central teaching about causes of death is that they are all
external - nothing actively compasses its own destruction. The doctrine is
set out in a continuous passage of some length (III P4 to P10) importantly
supplemented by the assertion in IV Preface that the endeavor to self-pre-
servation is a constant force, and, in the demonstration of IV P4, the
explicit affirmation of what might seem to be the reductio of the doctrine,
that if a man were to be affected by nothing external, 'he could not perish,
but would exist for ever'.4
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Presumably Spinoza conceived this doctrine to be a special application

of the law of inertia, which is proved a priori (II Lemma III C) by applying
the principle of sufficient reason in negative form: a body unaffected by
other bodies and at rest could not subsequently be in motion, 'for from its
rest nothing could follow than that the body should remain at rest'; and
similarly if it is in motion it cannot subsequently be at rest. III P4, 'A thing
cannot be destroyed except by an external cause', is said to be 'self-evi-
dent'; nevertheless a short argument is supplied, resting not on sufficient
reason but on a distinction of positive and negative:

[T]he definition of any given thing affirms and does not deny the
existence of the thing; that is to say, it posits the essence of the thing
and does not negate it. So long, therefore, as we attend only to the
thing itself, and not to external causes, we shall discover nothing in it
which can destroy it.

Another paradox, the candid reader is apt to say. A host of counter-

examples immediately arise. What about suicides? Degenerative dis-
eases? Mere old age? And what is the sun other than a sequence from gas
cloud through normal yellow star to red giant to white dwarf to black hole?
Why should it not pertain to the essence of the mayfly that it lasts for one
day, of man that his years are three score and ten?
But it does not befit a great philosopher to be fazed by counter-exam-
ples. Spinoza would calmly remark that he had thought of all these and
many more. After all, the law of inertia itself is so easily shot down in this
way that it took nineteen centuries to get from Aristotle to Galileo. If you
have demonstrated a proposition, then whatever seems to contradict it
must be false or based on misunderstanding. So, as to old age, it is not in
 Death and Destruction 407

fact known to this day what the 'mechanisms' of aging are, or whether any
creature ever dies of old age simpliciter. Mayflies are very weak, hence
easily destroyed by the agencies that are always there (IV Axiom). But it is
more to the point to consider the nature of composite bodies, and what
causes are external and what internal.
'Composite body' is defined (II, after Lemma 3) as 'a number of bodies
. . . pressed together... so that they lie one upon the other, o r . . . are in
motion with the same or with different degrees of speed, so that they
communicate their motion to one another in a certain fixed proportion
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. . .' It is hard to think of any aggregate that would fail to satisfy this
definition. And yet every such body is said to endeavor to preserve itself,
and is destructible only by external causes.
This scheme can be made to work for some initially unpromising
examples, for instance, a rush hour subway crowd: its jampackedness
will certainly continue until relieved by an 'external cause', e.g. the
approach of the end of the line and consequent departure of more pas-
sengers than boarding by new ones. Taking sweatiness and surliness as
essential characteristics of such a 'body', the one may be destroyed by air
conditioning, the other by playing heavenly music over the PA system; but
these are externals again, and if they break down, the basic endeavor of
the crowd will reassert itself.
Nevertheless, as a general principle III P4 is plainly false. The sun will
perish, and it is possible, indeed highly probable, that it will perish by
burning itself out, by depleting its nuclear and then its gravitational ener-
gy. These processes can in no way be deemed 'external' or 'not pertaining
to the sun's essence', unless by sheer stipulation, which would empty the
principle of all content. And the sun is surely a thing with an essence and a
definition if anything is.
As it happens, Spinoza briefly mentions a case similar in principle: the
Candle example of TdlE. There he says:

[T]he mind may turn itself to contemplation of the candle alone,

regarded in itself: so that afterwards it will conclude that the candle
contains no cause of its own destruction; furthermore, that if there
were no bodies around it, this candle, and even the flame, would
remain immutable . . .

Although Spinoza lived before Lavoisier and in consequence did not

 408 Wallace Maison

understand combustion, the question may still be raised why he should

have made so extraordinary an assertion, which seems to deny that a flame
requires fuel. It is clear what Spinoza's answer would have been: The
flame is matter in motion; unimpeded motion, by the law of inertia,
continues forever; but the only thing that can impede motion is contrary
motion by other bodies; therefore, if there are no other bodies, the motion
£ the flame) must go on forever. And without consuming the candle; the
role of fuel in ordinary flames (Spinoza must have thought) is only to
replenish the impeded motion, to restore the correct proportion of motion
and rest. This interpretation is borne out by II Postulate 4, 'The human
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body needs for its preservation many other bodies by which it is, as it
were, continually regenerated', and its use in the demonstration of IV P39,
where we are told that these 'other bodies' are needed to 'preserve the
proportion of motion and rest which the parts of the human body bear to
each other', thus to 'preserve the form of the human body'.5 So it seems
that Spinoza (or some authority in physics on whom he relied) was guilty
of erroneously generalizing the law of inertia, like the botanists who, after
the discovery of the circulation of the blood, proclaimed the circulation of
the sap.
This is the only case I know of where Spinoza was led astray in philo-
sophy on account of mistaken science. Fortunately no modus tollens
damage is done to Parts I and II, since the principle, 'a thing cannot be
destroyed except by an external cause', though listed as a Proposition, is
really an axiom; it is declared 'self-evident' and nothing previously
established is cited in its demonstration. The argument given for it may
stand as a warning, if any be still needed, of the unreliability of reasoning
based on distinction between what is 'positive' and what 'negative'.
However, the wreckage in the posterior three-fifths of the Ethics is very
extensive: nearly every subsequent proposition in III has III P4 among its
logical ancestors, nor is there any considerable portion of IV and V
independent of III. It would be worth someone's while to see how much of
the affected doctrine can be reconstituted on some other foundation.6 The
task should not be hopeless; the sun and the candle flame left to them-
selves preserve themselves so far as they Perhaps it would suffice for
Spinozistic purposes to establish, or postulate, that structural changes
occur spontaneously only when energy to maintain the status quo is no
longer available.
 Death and Destruction 409

III. Suicide
The first mention of suicide in the Ethics is incidental, in IIP49 S, where
Spinoza is dealing rather contemptuously with the conundrum known as
'Buridan's ass'. Admitting it to follow from his identification of will and
intellect that a man both hungry and thirsty, and placed in exact equi-
librium position with respect to the satisfaction of each appetite, would
perish of hunger and thirst; and imagining his voluntarist opponent to ask
triumphantly and rhetorically what might be thought of such a man,
Spinoza brushes him off with the haughty reply, 'I do not know; nor do I
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know what ought to be thought of a man who hangs himself, or of children,

fools, and madmen'. The last three, Wolfson informs us, 7 are Talmudic
and Maimonidean stock examples of unintelligent and irresponsible
agents; but the 'man who hangs himself is Spinoza's own addition to the
list.
Suicide is next mentioned at IV P18 S, where we are being told 'what it is
which reason prescribes to us'. The account, which 'is all true as necessa-
rily as that the whole is greater than its part', is summed up in four
precepts: (1) Happiness is the preservation of one's own being. (2) Virtue
is desired for its own sake. (3) Suicides act madly, against their own
natures. (4) Reasonable men live sociably injustice and harmony. - One
senses an incongruity in this passage. For one thing, the counsel not to kill
oneself is an obvious corollary of the first precept, to preserve one's own
being. For another, this advice is not on the same level of sublimity, so to
speak, as commendation of virtue as good in itself and the promise that
reason will create the good society. It is not quite as if Spinoza had stuck in
an exhortation to always eat a good breakfast - something that reason also
no doubt prescribes - but it is in that direction, Spinoza's psychobiogra-
pher will not overlook these nuances, and will inquire into the repercus-
sions of the Uriel da Costa affair.
The last and fullest treatment of suicide is in the scholium to IV P20. The
proposition itself is in general terms:

The more each person strives and is able to seek his own profit, that is
to say, to preserve his being, the more virtue does he possess; on the
other hand, in so far as each person neglects his own profit, that is to
say, neglects to preserve his own being, is he impotent.
 410 Wallace Maison

The demonstration is likewise general and simple, following from Spino-

za's definitional equation of human virtue, essence, power, and endeavor
to persevere in being. It is unlikely that an unprepared reader would find in
these any allusion to suicide; 'neglecting to preserve one's own being'
suggests carelessness about one's health, perhaps rashness in war or
dangerous occupations and sports. It would be odd to describe the act of a
man jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge as 'neglecting to preserve his own
being' Çsuum esse conservare negligit'). Nevertheless Spinoza conflates
them all. What they have in common is their irrationality. The Scholium
speaks only of the suicide, the man who 'refuses food or kills himself.
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Such a man, we are told, by no means does so 'from a necessity of his

nature, but only when forced by external causes' : sheer physical force, for
example, or 'desire to avoid a greater evil by a less'. This last remark, if it
stood alone, might suggest that Spinoza would admit the possibility of
there being a fate worse than death: disgrace, say, or Job's boils. But the
illustration given, of the case of Seneca, indicates that he meant only that
one kind of death might be worse than another. Besides such obvious
compulsions, he goes on, there may be 'external hidden causes' which 'so
dispose the imagination and affect the body as to cause it to put on another
nature contrary to that which it had at first' - which, as we have seen, is by
Spinoza's criterion to have compassed the individual's death already. In
legal terminology, the suicide is (perhaps temporarily) insane; Spinoza
diagnoses the psychosis as schizophrenia. There must always be an exter-
nal cause, apparent or hidden, for:

[A] very little reflection will show that it is as impossible that a man,
from the necessity of his nature, should endeavor not to exist, orto be
changed into some other form, as it is that something should be
begotten from nothing.
This doctrine is a consequence of the principle that nothing is self-de-
structive, which as we have seen is not universally true. However, it
follows also from the suggested modification ofthat principle, that if things
destroy themselves it is only by using themselves up; and the suicide is, by
definition, not yet used up. In any case, grand principles apart, a man who
kills himself does so because he believes, rightly or wrongly, that extinc-
tion is preferable to the miseries the world is inevitably going to inflict on
him; certainly an 'external cause'. The difficulty is only that the same
could be said of everything that anybody does: we do not bombinate in a
 Death and Destruction 411

vacuum, we do what we do in response to some problem that the world

sets us. Spinoza provides us with no means for sorting out with any
confidence those things that follow from the necessity of our nature, from
those that are compelled by external causes. There is a big difference
between being active, positive, creative, or aggressive, on the one hand,
and being passive, conventional, merely-carrying-out-orders, letting-
things-slide on the other; but Brutus, Cleopatra, and Hemingway are not
to be put into the second bin. Whatever their faults, they were not flabby
characters.
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Spinoza's thought, however, is something like this. The formal essence

of any thing, including an individual man, is (not a Leibnizian 'complete
concept' but) a specification of the particular power of that thing, the
information that will suffice to fill out the blanks in infinitely many hypo-
theticals of the form 'If the thing is put into context it will interact to bring
about situation S '. The power or virtue of a thing (or man) just is its ability
to make a difference in the situation in which it is, while not itself suffering
a (debilitating) change: i.e. to preserve its own being. In principle we can
determine, by a method of agreement procedure, what the power of a thing
is, at least relative to a context. As a result of some encounters, the
individual's power will be increased;8 by others, weakened, i.e. in subse-
quent encounters the individual will exert less power than it would have,
had this encounter not taken place. The deleterious encounters are those
in which the individual 'suffers'; past a certain point of intensity, the
'proportion of motion and rest' is altered, and the individual as such
perishes. In these terms we can see why Spinoza deems it impossible that
death, or indeed any reduction in the individual's power, could proceed
from the nature of the individual - why that is 'as impossible as that
something should be begotten from nothing'. That would amount to ener-
gy destroying itself. And so, perhaps contrary to our intuitions, we are
obliged to regard Cleopatra and her company as in the crucial respect en-
tirely passive, not significantly different, then, from the spiritless victim
surrendering without a flight.

IV. Fear of Death and How to Overcome it

'Fear of death' labels several emotional states which are distinct and
which even can be opposed to one another, for example: (1) Fear of the
 412 Wallace Maison

pain involved in dying. (2) Fear of extinction. (3) Fear of hell fire (unpleas-
ant non-extinction. (4) Fear of the consequences of one's death, e.g.
impoverishment of the family. Spinoza draws no such distinctions,9 al-
though some would be relevant and helpful to his doctrine, e.g. the fact
that the suicide overcomes the first kind of fear is the reason why people
commonly attribute a sort of courage to him. Presumably Spinoza was not
concerned with fears 3 and 4, and clearly his attention was chiefly directed
to fear 2, of extinction. There is, however, one difficult passage in IV P68
S, where we are told, in dubious exegesis of Genesis ii 17, that 'God forbad
free man [viz. Adam] to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and
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warned him that as soon as he ate of it he would immediately dread death

rather than desire to live'. Since to dread extinction, and to desire to live,
are very much the same thing, or at least complementary, it is hard to see
what contrast could be intended if dread of death does not mean, here,
dread of death-pangs. However, this passage should be read in conjunc-
tion with IV P67 and especially IV P63 S:

The sick man, through fear of death, eats what he dislikes; the healthy
man takes a pleasure in his food, and so enjoys life more than if he
feared death and directly desired to avoid it.

Spinoza is contrasting enjoyment of living, on the one hand, and on the

other, (mere) fear of extinction, which he regards as an essentially nega-
tive affect, compatible with a joyless and sickly existence.10
The importance of this distinction emerges if we ask what, after all, is so
dreadful about extinction? The Epicurean answer is, Nothing; to be dead
is to feel nothing, therefore no pains, therefore nothing bad. And we might
have expected Spinoza to take this 'philosophical' line, in view both of his
partiality to the Atomists (Letter 56), and of the very Epicurean V P21,
'The mind can imagine nothing, nor can it recollect anything that is past,
except while the body exists', which certainly follows from his general
position on mind and body if anything does. But in fact, of course,
Spinoza's consolation to the moribund is anything but Epicurean. At least
part of the reason is that the two are concerned to overcome different •
fears. Epicurus's target is the fear of non-extinction, of one or the other of
various Hellenistic hells. In such a case, to be promised extinction is to be
consoled. Spinoza does not deign to refute such superstitions. His remedy
is intended for the man who fears extinction as the deprivation of good.
 Death and Destruction 413

And what he holds out is the eternal continuance of what the reasonable
man regards as good, viz. knowing things by the second and third kinds of
knowledge. Just as the Viking was promised post mortem mead, the
Spinozist is assured he need never cease to think adequate ideas.
Notwithstanding the long and continuing controversies11 over Spinozist
immortality, Spinoza is quite clear about what it consists in, and how and
why. We are told again and again (V P33, P38, P39, P40 C) that the eternal
part of the mind is 'the intellect through which alone we are said to act' (V
P40 C). This is the part of the mind that consists of adequate ideas, derived
through the second and third kinds of knowledge, and has no reference to
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duration (I Def. 8; II P44 C2; V P29 and S). The clearest summary
statement is in V P23 S, which begins by specifying further what the
eternal something (of [V P23]) is: 'This idea which expresses the essence of
the body under the form of eternity . . .' Some commentators seem to
have read this as if 'expressing the essence' were a kind of de-
scribing, and in consequence have inferred that Spinozist im-
mortality is a sort of eternal DNB entry stored in God rather than in
an earthly library. But the essence of anything is its power; the power of
the intellect is to know; therefore what expresses the essence of the
intellect is the adequate and eternal ideas that comprise it.12
From my individual standpoint, here and now, this intellect is an ideal
limit. I am certainly far from the knowledge of all of nature. But it is a
matter of degree. The more I know, by the second kind of knowledge
(demonstrative science) and third (intuitive science), the more my aware-
ness becomes identical with that intellect, as Spinoza demonstrates in Part
V from P23 to the end.
After asserting the eternity of the intellect Spinoza continues:

It is impossible, nevertheless, that we should recollect that we existed

before the body, because [1] there are no traces of any such existence
in the body, and also [2] because eternity cannot be defined by time, or
have any relationship to it.

Wolfson says13 that it is 'quite evident' that this is argued against Plato; but
if so, then Spinoza misunderstood Plato, whose doctrine oí anamnesis by
no means includes any claim that we remember a pre-natal state. The 'no
traces' clause reminds us rather that the pre-existence of the mind, such as
it was, had no more to do with memory and imagination than (V P21) our
 414 Wallace Maison

post mortem being will have. The second clause points out that timeless
truths bear no dates.14

Nevertheless we feel and know by experience (sentimus experi-

murque) that we are eternal. For the mind is no less sensible of those
things which it conceives through intelligence than of those which it
remembers, for demonstrations are the eyes of the mind by which it
sees and observes things.

Here Spinoza says, as plainly as anyone can, that our eternity is something
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we don't have to wait for death to experience - we experience it here and

now. And the reason he gives for saying so defines what the feeling and
experience is: it is conceiving things through intelligence, demonstrating
things. So, for example, someone reading Spinoza's book with under-
standing is feeling and experiencing the eternal existence of his mind right
then and there. And, Spinoza assures him, this kind of feeling and expe-
rience will not cease when the body is destroyed.
Why not? The answer, which is epistemological, is to be gathered from
the many passages (e.g. in II P43 Demonstration and Scholium) in which
knowing is equated with having a true idea existing in the mind. But the
mind is nothing over and above ideas (IIP48 S). Therefore, if the ideas are
eternal, the mind is too, to that extent.
This, which might be called the plug-in theory of a priori knowledge, is
of course that which Aristotle endorsed: 'In general, mind when actual-
ized is the same as the things that it is thinking of,15 and from which he
immediately inferred the eternity of the active intellect.
We have seen that this eternity is not personal. How then can it be a
consolation? Spinoza's fullest answer is set out in V P39 S, the gist of
which is that human development consists in progressive de-emphasis of
the sensuous component of the mental life and concomitantly increasing
dominance of intellectual recognition. The former is personal and tempor-
al; the latter, impersonal and atemporal or 'eternal': the pleasure I take in
strawberries and cream is mine, temporary, and distinct from your merely
similar gustation; but when I understand Boyle's Law, my intellect is
Boyle's Law, and so is yours when you do; moreover, this understanding
is delightful (V P32), indestructible (V P37), and immune to suffering (V
P38). So if, before bodily death, I manage to occupy myself as much as
possible with understanding things - by acquiring a body fit for
 Death and Destruction 415

many things, V P39 - there will be few pangs of transition. Death

will merely complete the process of elimination of all that pertains
to 'memory or imagination', which by then will be 'scarcely of any mo-
ment'. Or as Socrates put it so concisely, 'the true philosophers, Simmias,
are always occupied in the practice of dying, wherefore also to them least
of all men is death terrible'.16
The naive reader might have thought that the noble pronouncement
quoted at the head of this paper expressed a sentiment diametrically
opposed to this allegedly philosophical thanatomania; and in support of his
reading he might have pointed to the condemnation of suicide as irrational
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(so different from Socrates's Pythagorean supersition) and the good word
said for the good things of life in IV P45 C2 S. Alas, no. In the end, the
difference between life and death reduces to this, that in life one is
continually vexed by inadequate ideas, all of which cease at death. We
must keep on looking, if our search is for a philosopher who will join us
with all his heart in the toast L'chaim.

V. Two Loose Ends

1. The essence of man is his endeavor to persevere in being (III P7). But
also, the essence of the mind consists in knowledge (V P38) and its highest
virtue is to understand things by the third kind of knowledge (V P27),
which knowledge is not affected by death (V P38). How, then, can suicide
be irrational? It would seem to be a 100 % efficient way to clear away the
inadequate ideas at one fell swoop.
2. It is evident, and explicitly noted by Spinoza (IIP18 S, IIP40 S2) that
language is an affair of 'memory and imagination', of 'knowledge of the
first kind'. So when death, 'like a purifying fire',17 has abolished our
memory and imagination, the knowledge of the second and third kinds in
which we continue to rejoice is wordless. Let us suppose that Spinoza at
this moment18 is plugged in to Boyle's Law. He is eternally understanding
Boyle's Law. But not as Boyle's Law - it is an accident of history,
preserved only in the memory, that the truth in question is thus tagged.
Nor as 'Pressure of a confined gas varies inversely with volume' - that is
words. Nor can he be picturing the atoms of a gas as in violent motion and
colliding with the walls of the container - that is 'imagination'. What is it
like, then, to eternally apprehend Boyle's Law? Here indeed is something
whereof one cannot speak.
 416 Wallace Maison

NOTES
1 I.e. Ethics, Part IV, Proposition 67. In referring to the works of Spinoza I use the
abbreviations (which are virtually self-explanatory) of E. M. Curley, Spinoza's Meta-
physics (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969), except that I omit the
E; all references in the text are to the Ethics except a few to the Improvement of the Un-
derstanding (TdlE) and two to Letters. I have used the White translation, with a few
modifications.
2 Cf. the condemnation of 'the objects pursued by the multitude' on the sole ground that
they 'cause the death not seldom of those who possess them, and always of those who are
possessed by them', TdlE near beginning.
3 Strictly, what is shown is that if Spinoza affirms personal eternity, then he contradicts the
doctrine of our Scholium. But one ought not to impute contradiction unless the offending
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proposition is expressly stated or inescapably entailed, and it will be agreed that such is
not here the case.
4 Cf. the eternal candle, TdlE, discussed below.
5 The only other use of II Postulate 4 is in IV P18 S, in support of the claim that we need
friends.
6 That is, it would be worth the while of someone who is concerned with how much truth is
to be found in the Ethics, and who does not dismiss the logical apparatus as a mere facade.
7 Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, Schocken, New York 1934 (reprinted
1969), Vol. II, pp. 178 f.
8 Cf. the enumeration of the sciences, including Medicine and Mechanics, requisite for the
improvement of the understanding; TdlE near beginning.
9 In the 13thand39th Definitions of the Affects (III), Spinoza definesm e t u sand timor (both
rendered by 'fear' in the White translation) quite differently. But when in IV and V he
comes to write of fear of death, he apparently uses the words as synonyms (e.g. mortem
metueret, IV P68 S, illustrates the same point made by timore mortis, IV P63 S), and
sometimes incompatibly with his definitions (e.g. V P38 and P39; cf. definition of timor).
10 Nevertheless, it is worth noting that here again Spinoza has mentioned death where he
need not have done so. The hypochondriac's typical fear is not of death, in all starkness,
so much as of the miseries of illness.
11 The exegesis I shall now present is of course far from original, being close to (among
others) that of John Wild in his Introduction to Spinoza Selections (Charles Scribner's
Sons, New York 1930), and might deserve the title of orthodox interpretation, were it not
for the disagreement of Wolfson with some particulars in it, notably on the question of
personality.
This paper is not a suitable place for discussion of recent divergent views, notably those
of Donagan; but I believe that my text, read together with the references, will at least
indicate the grounds of my contrary opinions.
12 To be sure, Spinoza said 'essence of the body under the form of eternity' ; but that does not
alter the case, since body under the form of eternity can be nothing other than the
extensional expression of the mind under the form of eternity (II P7), and the latter is the
intellect. Or to put it the other way around, in terms of the distinction of two kinds of
conception made in V P29 S: My body exists for a while in relation to a fixed time and
place, and my mind conceives it as so existing; this conception is perception and memory.
But also, my body is real in the sense that the 'fixed and eternal things' (TdlE), the laws of
(God's) nature, necessarily and eternally imply its existence. To conceive of its existence
in this way, i.e. to regard it as embedded in the whole nature of things, is to conceive it
under the form of eternity. That conception is an eternal (complex) idea, which Spinoza
calls the intellect.
 Death and Destruction All

13 Op. cit., II 296.

14 Which is not to say that it is false or meaningless to assert that they are true at a certain
time.
15 De Anima III 7, translated by J. L. Creed in Renford Bambrough (Ed.), The
Philosophy of Aristotle, Mentor Books, New York 1963.
16 Phaedo 67E.
17 Wild, op. cit., p. lvii.
18 I take it as obvious that MarthaKneale is right in claiming that it makes sense to speak of
eternal truths as being true now or yesterday.
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