Conatus is the linchpin of Spinoza’s ethical system. This concept bridges Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance, his definitions of the affects, and his ethics proper. In this paper, I argue that conatus addresses a core problem in the Ethics: how to have ethics in a world of absolute necessity. I begin this paper by explaining conatus as it relates to metaphysics. In the second section, I focus on conatus and the affects. In the third section, I turn to Spinoza’s ethics proper and specifically his conception of good and evil. In the fourth section, I focus on the principle of moderation. In the fifth and final section, I conclude by showing how conatus relates to Spinoza’s doctrine of necessity.
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An Articulation of Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit
For Hegel, philosophy requires systematic exposition. It should not be a matter of feeling or intuiting. Nor should philosophy undertake the task of “edification,” a kind of “fog” of “inflamed inspiration.” Rather, philosophy has as its aim material completion that opposes “utterly vacuous naiveté in cognition.” This kind of systematic, complete, ultimate truth is not in substance but in subject, namely the universal individual, the world spirit. Science consists not in an end, but rather in the reflection: the process is of absolute importance.
Continue reading “An Articulation of Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit“Ethos Between Ethics and Ethology: Middlemarch and Spinoza
In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the narrator writes with empathy and concern for the human characters she conjures. In a famous passage early in the book, Eliot writes of the narrator’s task:
I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. (91)
The “particular web” in this case is the fictional village of Middlemarch. Eliot’s novel is a study of the behavior of some of this village’s inhabitants, yet the “web” that is Eliot’s overriding concern is the universe and everything that inhabits it. It is her ultimate aim to expand the horizons of her readers and their knowledge of emotions, an aim that drives her provisional focus on a particular web of human lots. In other words, Eliot’s ethology (or “the science of the formation of character,” as John Stuart Mill described it in 1843) establishes an ethics. In this essay, I explore Eliot’s concerns with ethos in both its forms to elaborate on her non-humanist humanism: that is, how she puts the human front and center without demeaning the non-human. As I will show, Eliot’s overriding concern for human flourishing is undergirded by theological and ontological commitments to the more-than-human.
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