16. Ethics of B. Spinoza

Axiomatic method of proof of morality

The main attitude of the thinkers of the New Age assumed the derivation of morality from nature, which often became its reduction to natural science knowledge.

Benedict Spinoza (1635-1677) turns ethics into natural philosophy (his main work "Ethics" is the doctrine of substance). One of the fundamental thesis in his works is the thesis of the rational essence of man.

The problem of the individual and the general in his ethics acquires a pronounced epistemological coloring, and good and evil are explained in the context of utilitarianism. The most important for understanding the ethics of Spinoza and the ethical basis of his philosophy were the provisions on the human body as an object of the soul, on the relationship between the order of ideas and the order of things, on the three kinds of knowledge, the essence of which is in the imagination, which is the main cause of falsity, on reason and intuitive knowledge.

Spinoza depicts a person as realistically as possible. Each of us seeks not only to preserve his being, but also to expand it by increasing his power,

The improvement of a person is accompanied by joyful feelings, and the decrease in perfection is accompanied by sadness and displeasure. Desire testifies to the active beginning of a person.

Spinoza believes that the key to understanding human actions lies in his nature, his state of passions. Therefore, ethics, in turn, must proceed from the natural laws of behavior, from which certain actions follow with the same necessity with which "it follows from the nature of a triangle that its three angles are equal to two right angles." The main basis of virtue, the thinker believes, is the desire for self-preservation.

The awareness of benefit is the driving force behind human behavior. Good is identical with the benefit of man, and evil - with that which hinders the benefit. There is no good or evil in nature, these are all human situations.

No thing can be destroyed without the action of an external cause, therefore a person's desire for self-preservation is the overcoming of passive states. Overcoming them, a person is freed from the power of affects, lives according to the laws of self-preservation. The very path of transition from passive to active affects is the path of virtue, moral perfection. What is determined by the passive states can also be determined by the mind. Virtue is in the transition from one level of determination to another. As a result, the selfishness that drives human behavior becomes moral only when it becomes rational selfishness.

Spinoza believed that the program of human behavior consists in rationally intuitive love for God. Reason in relation to affects is not only a repressive ground. It can achieve its goal only when it replaces the feelings and itself acts as an affect.

The ultimate goal of man is bliss, which consists in the intellectual love of God. Spinoza seeks to create a universal ethics, the subject of which is the individual.

Author: Zubanova S.G.

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