Indeed, since he builds his account of morality on top of a thoroughly naturalistic conception of the world, and of humanity’s place in it—and since our desire not to be mastered by our passions remains as strong today as it was in the 17 th century—Spinoza’s moral philosophy remains alive for us today. Unfortunately, after this picturesque passage, Spinoza does not go on to consider what our dependence upon our environment might entail with regard to our treatment of it. W]e ought to think about and meditate frequently on the common wrongs of men, and how they may be warded off best by nobility.

Given this fact, Spinoza thinks, it makes little sense to try to explain moral claims like “Suicide is a sin” by appeal to such commandments. When Spinoza characterizes the “free man,” someone who lives wholly according to the guidance of reason, we should therefore expect only partial continuity with traditional conceptions of morality and virtuous living. Some, such as Naess (1977), have gone further than this, arguing that Spinoza’s system provides a hospitable metaphysical background for ecology. If so, then the description of the free man may best be seen as a guiding ideal, a character that ordinary people should aspire to be like, at least insofar as they are able.

These criticisms deal with fundamental disagreements about the ultimate nature of reality and whether it is to be affirmed or denied. This approach to overcoming a passion does not eliminate the affect that constitutes the passion, but merely eliminates that feature of the affect in virtue of which it constituted a passion. In the third part of the Ethics, Spinoza argues that all things, including human beings, strive to persevere their perfection of power in being unaffected.

Spinoza takes this consequence to be absurd, for it is in our interest to bring others into as much agreement with our natures as possible (E4p31c), which living deceitfully would prevent. Schopenhauer, who detested these three philosophers to varying degrees of intensity, [39] also had a similarly ambivalent relation to the Dutch philosopher. The reason for this is that although his aim is to set forth “the right way of living” (E4app, G II/266) and to explain “what freedom of mind, or blessedness, is” (E5pref, G II/277), his accounts of these things depend upon certain key metaphysical principles that he feels must be established first. As a result, anything good that we might be led to do out of pity (for instance), we could just as well have been led to do by reason. Indeed, since everything in nature is a mode of God, in Spinoza’s view, the skilled philosopher can revive and meditate upon the idea of God on the basis of any experience whatsoever; every experience can occasion a train of thought that leads the mind back to its greatest good, and the joy that it brings.For this reason, seventeenth-century texts on moral philosophy tend to be more akin to self-help books than to twenty-first century moral philosophy.