---
date: '2023-11-30'
description: and on Spinoza's Ethics.
id: Questions about Spinoza
modified: 2026-06-05 15:08:08 GMT-04:00
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title: Questions about Spinoza
created: '2023-11-30'
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> \[!question\]- Question
>
> In the Appendix to Ethics Part One (pp. 180-85), Spinoza criticizes the idea “that God directs all things to some definite end” and “that God has made all things for man and has made man to worship God.” (181)
>
> He goes on to raise and answer three questions [^reference-text]:
>
> 1. Why do people believe such things?
> 2. Why are these beliefs mistaken?
> 3. What is the connection between these mistaken beliefs and wrong ideas about good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and other qualities?
>
> Using your own words, explain what Spinoza says to each of these points. Brief quotations are appropriate, but your explanation of the arguments should be in your own terms, and should be complete, that is, explaining all of his points.
>
> In conclusion, say what if anything we can learn from this discussion. Is his point one that still needs making, or have we left the mistakes Spinoza refutes behind? Or maybe you think they are not mistakes, or that his criticism is faulty

[^reference-text]: excerpt from pp. 180-185

    With these demonstrations I have explained God’s nature and properties: God exists necessarily; God is unique; God exists and acts solely from the necessity of the divine nature; God is the free cause of all things (and I have shown how); all things are in God and depend on God in such a way that without God they can’t exist or be conceived; all things have been precaused by God, not from freedom of the will or absolute ·whim or· good pleasure, but from God’s absolute nature or infinite power.
    Further, I have taken care, whenever the occasion arose, to remove prejudices that could prevent my demonstrations from being grasped. But because many prejudices remain that could—that can—be a great obstacle to men’s understanding my way of explaining how things hang together, I have thought it worthwhile to consider those prejudices here, subjecting them to the scrutiny of reason. All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on the common supposition that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end. Indeed, people maintain as a certainty that God directs all things to some definite end, this being implicit in their view that God has made all things for man and has made man to worship God.
    So I shall begin by considering this one prejudice, asking first why most people are satisfied that it is true and so inclined by nature to embrace it. Then I shall show its falsity, and finally show how from this prejudices have arisen concerning good and evil, merit and wrong-doing, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and ugliness, and other things of this kind.

    (1) Of course this is not the place to derive my explanations from the nature of the human mind. It will suffice here to build on two things that everyone must admit to be true: that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, and that all men want to seek their own advantage and are conscious of wanting this.
    From these premises it follows that men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their choices and their desires, are ignorant of the causes that incline them to want and to choose, and thus never give the faintest thought —even in their dreams!—to those causes. It follows also that men act always on account of a goal, specifically on account of their advantage, which they seek. Putting these two together, men are in a frame of mind from which efficient causes —that is, real causes—are almost totally absent, and which is saturated by thought about final causes, goals or ends or purposes. So the only explanations they look for are ones in terms of final causes—in asking ‘Why did that happen?’ they are asking ‘For what purpose did that happen?’—and when they have heard that they are satisfied, having nothing more to ask. But if they can’t get such explanations from others they have to turn to themselves, and to reflect on the ends by which they are usually led to do such things; so they necessarily judge the temperament of other men from their own temperament.
    Furthermore, they find—both in themselves and outside themselves— many means that are very helpful in seeking their own advantage: eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for light, the sea for supporting fish, and similarly with almost everything else whose natural causes—that is, whose efficient causes—they are not curious about. This leads them to consider all natural things as means to their own advantage. And knowing that they had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to think there was someone else who had prepared these means for human use. So they inferred that one or more rulers of nature, endowed with human freedom, had taken care of all things for them, and made all things for their (human) use.
    And since they had never heard anything about the character of these rulers, they had to judge it from their own characters; so they maintained that the Gods direct everything for the use of men in order to bind men to them and be held by men in the highest honour! So it has come about that each man has thought up—on the basis of his own character—his own way of worshipping God, so that God might love him above all the rest, and direct the whole of nature according to the needs of his blind desire and insatiable greed. Thus this prejudice changed into superstition, and struck deep roots in men’s minds. This is why everyone tried so hard to understand and explain the final causes— the purposes—of all things.
    But while trying to show that nature does nothing in vain (meaning: nothing that isn’t useful to men), they seem to have shown only that nature and the gods are as mad as men are! Look at how they ended up! Along with many conveniences in nature they couldn’t avoid finding many inconveniences—storms, earthquakes, diseases, etc. They hold that these happen because the gods—whom they judge on the basis of themselves—are angry with men for wronging them or making mistakes in their worship. And though their daily experience contradicted this, and though countless examples showed that conveniences and inconveniences happen indiscriminately to the pious and the impious alike, that didn’t lead them to give up their longstanding prejudice. It was easier for them to put the gods’ reasons for· this among the other unknown things whose uses they were ignorant of, thus remaining in the state of ignorance in which they had been born, than to destroy that whole construction and think up a new one.
    So they maintained it as certain that the gods’ judgments far surpass man’s grasp. This alone would have caused the truth to be hidden from the human race for ever, if mathematics hadn’t shown them another standard of truth. It could do this because it isn’t involved in the final-causes muddle, because·it is concerned not with ends but only with the essential properties of figures. In addition to mathematics there have also been a few other things (I needn’t list them here) which have enabled a few men to notice these common prejudices and be led to the true knowledge of things.

    (2) That is enough on what I promised in the first place, namely, to explain why men are so inclined to believe that all things act for an end. I don’t need many words to show that nature has no end set before it, and that all final causes are nothing but human fictions. I think I have already sufficiently established it, both by my explanation of the origins of this prejudice and also by the propositions by which I have shown that everything happens by a certain eternal necessity of nature and with the greatest perfection.
    Still, I shall add this: this doctrine about ends turns nature completely upside down. For what is really a cause it considers as an effect, and conversely what is an effect it considers as a cause. What by nature comes first it makes follow. And finally, what is supreme and most perfect it makes imperfect.
    The first two points are self-evident. Again, this doctrine takes away God’s perfection. For if God acts for the sake of an end, it must be that God wants something and therefore lacks something. And though the theologians and metaphysicians distinguish different kinds of ends, that doesn’t help them with the present difficulty. They say that God did everything for God’s own sake and not for the sake of the things God was going to create. For before the creation that they believe in they can’t find anything for the sake of which God could act— except God! And so they have to admit that God willed to make things happen as means to things that God wanted and lacked. This is self-evident.
    I should also mention that the followers of this doctrine about ends, wanting to show off their cleverness in saying what things are for, have called to their aid a new form of argument: instead of reducing things to the impossible, they reduce them to ignorance! Their resorting to this shows that no other way of defending their doctrine was open to them.
    For example, if a slate falls from a roof onto someone’s head and kills him, they will argue that the slate fell in order to kill the man. Here is how their argument goes: If it didn’t fall for that purpose because God wanted the man to be killed, how could so many circumstances have come together by chance? You may answer that it happened because the wind was blowing hard and the man was walking that way. But why was the wind blowing hard just then? Why was the man walking by just then? If you answer that the wind arose then because on the preceding day, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to toss, and that the man had been invited somewhere by a friend, then we will ask: Why was the sea tossing? Why was the man invited at just that time?
    And on it goes! They won’t stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, which is the haven of unacknowledged ignorance.
    Similarly, when they see the structure of the human body, these people are struck by a foolish wonder; and because they don’t know the causes of this elaborate structure they conclude that it is constructed not by mechanical processes but by divine or supernatural skill, and constituted as it is so that the parts won’t injure another.
    So it comes about that someone who seeks the true causes of ‘miracles’ and is eager (like an educated man) to understand natural things, not (like a fool) to wonder at them, is denounced as an impious heretic by those whom the people honour as interpreters of nature and of the gods. For the denouncers know that if ignorance is taken away and replaced by real knowledge of mechanical processes, then foolish wonder is also taken away, depriving them of their only means for arguing and defending their authority. Enough of this; I now pass on to what I decided to treat here in the third place.

    (3) After men convinced themselves that whatever happens does so on their account, they had to judge as most important in each thing whatever is most useful to them, and to rate as most excellent all the things by which they were most pleased. So they had to develop the notions: good, bad, order, confusion, warm, cold, beauty, ugliness, in terms of which they ‘explained’ natural things. I shall briefly discuss these here.
    Whatever contributes to health and to the worship of God they have called ‘good’, and what is contrary to these they call ‘bad’. Those who don’t understand the real nature of things, and have only a pictorial grasp of them, mistake their own imaginings for intellectual thought; they really have nothing to say about things, but in their ignorance of things and of their own natures they firmly believe that there is an order in things. When a number of items are set out in such a way that when they’re presented to us through the senses we can easily imagine them—can easily depict them to ourselves— and so can easily remember them, we say that they are ‘orderly’; but if the opposite is true we say that they are ‘disorderly’ or ‘confused’.
    And since the things we can easily imagine are especially pleasing to us, men prefer ‘order’ to ‘confusion’, as if order were something in nature more than a relation to our imagination! They also say that God has created all things to be orderly (thus unknowingly attributing imagination to God, unless they mean that God has disposed things so that men can easily imagine them). Perhaps they won’t be deterred—though they should be— by the fact that we find infinitely many things that far surpass our imagination, and many that confuse it on account of its weakness. But enough of this.
    The other notions are also nothing but various states of the imagination; yet ignorant people consider them to be chief attributes of things. This is because, as I have already said, they believe that all things were made for their sake, and call the nature of a thing ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘sound’ or ‘rotten’ and ‘corrupt’, according to how it affects them. For example, if the motion the nerves receive from objects presented through the eyes is conducive to health, the objects that cause it are called ‘beautiful’; those that cause a contrary motion are called ‘ugly’. Those that move the sensory apparatus through the nose they call ‘pleasant-smelling’ or ‘stinking’; through the tongue, ‘sweet’ or ‘bitter’, ‘tasty’ or ‘tasteless’; through touch, ‘hard’ or ‘soft’, ‘rough’ or ‘smooth’, etc.; and finally those that affect us through the ears are said to produce ‘noise’, ‘sound’ or ‘harmony’. Some men have been mad enough to believe that God is pleased by harmony!
    All these things show well enough that each person has judged things according to the disposition of his own brain; or rather, has accepted states of the imagination as things. So it is no wonder (I note in passing) that we find so many controversies to have arisen among men, and that they have finally given rise to scepticism. For although human bodies are alike in many ways, they still differ in very many. And for that reason what seems good to one seems bad to another; what seems ordered to one seems confused to another; what seems pleasing to one seems displeasing to another, and so on.
    I pass over the other notions here, both because this is not the place to treat them at length and because everyone has experienced this variability sufficiently for himself. That is why we have such sayings as ‘So many heads, so many attitudes’, ‘Everyone is well pleased with his own opinion’, and ‘Brains differ as much as palates do’. These proverbs show well enough that men judge things according to the disposition of their brain, and imagine things rather than understanding them. For if men had understood natural things they would at least have been convinced of the truth about them, even if they weren’t all attracted by it. The example of mathematics shows this. So we see that all the notions by which ordinary people are accustomed to explain nature are only states of the imagination, and don’t indicate the nature of anything except the imagination.
    Many people are accustomed to arguing in this way: If all things have followed from the necessity of God’s most perfect nature, why are there so many imperfections in nature? why are things so rotten that they stink? so ugly that they make us sick? why is there confusion, evil, and wrong-doing? I repeat that those who argue like this are easily answered. For the perfection of things is to be judged solely from their nature and power; things are not more or less perfect because they please or offend men’s senses, or because they are useful or harmful to human nature.
    But to those who ask ‘Why didn’t God create all men so that they would be governed by the command of reason?’ I answer only: ‘Because God had the material to create all things, from the highest degree of perfection to the lowest’; or, to put it more accurately, ‘Because the laws of God’s nature have been so ample that they sufficed for producing all things that can be conceived by an unlimited intellect’ (as I demonstrated in 16)—that is, producing everything that is conceivable or possible.

In reading Baruch [[thoughts/Sphinoza|Spinoza]]‘s “Ethics,” particularly his repudiation of teleology and the anthropocentric conception of divine power, I contrast these views with Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil.” Spinoza, with his staunch rationalism, argues that misconceptions about the divine lead to a skewed understanding of morality and aesthetics. For Spinoza, morality is less about adhering to external moral codes and more about aligning oneself with an understanding of God’s nature. [[thoughts/Philosophy and Nietzsche|Nietzsche]] shares his scepticism of conventional [[thoughts/moral|morality]] but does without God altogether. I posit that Spinoza’s point still needs making, because purpose-based explanation is a default of the human mind rather than a stage we passed through, and that our moral values should draw strength from personal conviction but also be grounded in a rational understanding of ourselves, informed by psychology and anthropology.

### (1) Why people believe that nature acts for an end

The genesis of teleological beliefs, according to Spinoza, is human ignorance and the desire to seek personal advantage. He builds on two premises: _“all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, and … all men want to seek their own advantage and are conscious of wanting this.”_ Because individuals are conscious of their desires but ignorant of what causes them, they think themselves free. Because they always act for their advantage, they explain everything by its purpose: “Why did that happen?” means “For what purpose?”, and once they have an answer they stop asking.

They then find, in themselves and around them, many things useful to them that they did not make: eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, the sun for light, the sea for supporting fish. Since they did not provide these means themselves, they infer that someone else did, one or more rulers of nature with human freedom who arranged everything for human use. Having no information about the character of these rulers, they judge it from their own: the gods must want to be honoured, and each person invents a way of worshipping that will make God love them above everyone else. In this way the prejudice became superstition.

The inconveniences of nature, such as storms, earthquakes and diseases, should have refuted it. Instead people explained them as the gods’ anger at wrongs or at mistakes in worship, and when daily experience showed that misfortune falls on the pious and the impious alike, they placed the gods’ reasons among things beyond human grasp rather than give up the belief. Spinoza says this would have hidden the truth from humanity forever _“if mathematics hadn’t shown them another standard of truth”_, since mathematics is concerned not with ends but with the essential properties of figures.

### (2) Why these beliefs are mistaken

Spinoza first argues that attributing purposes to nature inverts the true order of cause and effect. By assuming that events occur for a specific end, people treat what is an effect as a cause, and what comes first by nature as coming after. Spinoza also challenges the notion of divine purpose: if God acted for an end, God would want and therefore lack something, contradicting divine perfection. Saying God acted for God’s own sake does not help, because it still makes creation a means to something God lacked. He asserts that everything in nature occurs out of necessity and follows from God’s nature, not from a divine intention or goal.

He then shows how the doctrine defends itself. Its followers, instead of reducing an opponent’s view to the impossible, reduce it to ignorance. If a slate falls from a roof and kills a man, they say it fell in order to kill him. Answer that the wind was blowing and the man was walking past, and they ask why the wind blew just then and why the man was walking there just then, and they keep asking for the causes of causes _“until you take refuge in the will of God, which is the haven of unacknowledged ignorance.”_ The same move appears when people see the structure of the human body: not knowing its causes, they are struck by _“a foolish wonder”_ and conclude it was built by supernatural skill. Finally, anyone who looks for the natural causes of miracles is denounced as a heretic by those whom the people honour as interpreters of nature, because if ignorance is replaced by knowledge of mechanical processes, wonder goes with it, and so does their authority. Spinoza’s argument here was radical for his time, and he did not publish the _Ethics_ in his lifetime; it appeared after his death in 1677.

### (3) How these beliefs distort good and evil, beauty and ugliness

Spinoza extends his critique to human morality and [[thoughts/aesthetic value|aesthetics]]. Once people believe everything happens on their account, they judge as most important in each thing whatever is most useful to them, and call “good” what contributes to health and the worship of God. “Order” is the same mistake: we call things orderly when they are arranged so that we can easily imagine and remember them, and prefer order to confusion as if order were something in nature rather than a relation to our imagination. Beauty, ugliness, sweetness, harmony and the rest are likewise names for how objects affect our senses. They are _“states of the imagination”_ that arise from how things affect individuals rather than from any quality of the things themselves.

Since human bodies differ, what seems good or ordered or pleasing to one person seems bad or confused or displeasing to another, which is why these judgments produce so much controversy and finally scepticism (“so many heads, so many attitudes”). Things that are understood, as in mathematics, do not divide people in this way. This also answers the objection that a perfect God would not have made a world with rot, ugliness and evil: _“the perfection of things is to be judged solely from their nature and power”_, not from whether they please or offend human senses.

### What we can learn

Nietzsche read this appendix as an ally. In a postcard to Franz Overbeck of 30 July 1881 he wrote, “I have a precursor, and what a precursor!”, and listed the doctrines they shared: Spinoza denies free will, purposes, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Nietzsche’s own version of point (3) is the line _“There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena”_ ([[thoughts/Philosophy and Nietzsche#Beyond Good and Evil|Beyond Good and Evil]], §108).

Where they part is in what replaces purpose. For Spinoza everything follows from the necessity of God’s nature, which can be understood. For Nietzsche the universe is not a cosmos ordered by providence or natural law but a play of forces and wills, and he reads moral values as expressions of the [[thoughts/Will#power.|will to power]]. Moral systems are tools by which groups exert influence over others through “herd instincts” (§202). He even turns Spinoza’s argument against Spinoza: the instinct of self-preservation is one more “superfluous teleological principle”, which “we owe to Spinoza’s inconsistency” (§13). So where Spinoza traces our value judgments to imagination and utility, Nietzsche traces them to power.

Does the point still need making? Spinoza’s story of ignorance and advantage is a hypothesis about human psychology, and psychology has tested it. Kelemen, Rottman and Seston (2013) gave professional physical scientists statements such as “trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe”. Under time pressure the scientists accepted 29% of these purpose-based explanations, against 15% when they had as long as they liked. Teleology is the mind’s default and has to be overridden each time, which is close to Spinoza’s claim that we are “inclined by nature to embrace it”. The foolish wonder at the body also outlived him. William Paley’s _Natural Theology_ (1802) argued from the design of the eye to a designer, the argument “intelligent design” still makes, and it was answered the way Spinoza said it should be, with efficient causes: Darwin’s natural selection (1859). The slate argument survives as “everything happens for a reason”.

This is also where the thesis about values comes back. Spinoza does not abolish “good”; in Part IV he redefines it as _“what we certainly know to be useful to us”_ (IV, Definition 1). The judgments he criticises in the appendix go wrong because they project our advantage onto nature, not because they track our advantage. Values can draw strength from personal conviction, as Nietzsche wants, and still be checked against what psychology and anthropology tell us about what is in fact useful to beings like us. Spinoza’s mistake to avoid is the one that turns a fact about us into a fact about the world.

### References

1. Spinoza, B. (1677). _Ethics_, Appendix to Part I and Part IV (J. Bennett, Trans.). Early Modern Texts.
2. Nietzsche, F. (1966). _Beyond Good and Evil_ (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1886)
3. Nietzsche, F. (1881, July 30). Postcard to Franz Overbeck. In W. Kaufmann (Ed. & Trans.), _The Portable Nietzsche_ (1954). Viking.
4. Kelemen, D., Rottman, J., & Seston, R. (2013). Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies: Purpose-based reasoning as a cognitive default. _Journal of Experimental Psychology: General_, 142(4), 1074-1083.
5. Paley, W. (1802). _Natural Theology_.