Avenues from the written Ethics back to the unwritten “Philosophy”

First of all, let me express my gratitude to the editors of the Journal of Spinoza Studies for the invitation to contribute to the first issue of the journal. I belong to the community of so-called “continental” philosophers, and accordingly, my interpretation of this task may be slightly different from an analytic interpretation. What the authors of this first issue of JSS are expected to do is not to present arguments regarding some well-discussed topics, but rather to map the most exciting avenues for future Spinoza research. My own way of doing this will be to propose a holistic vision concerning Spinoza’s philosophy. The main focus will be on the Ethics, but I will also touch upon some general methodological issues along the way. I will present a vision of Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole, as well as some consequences of this vision. My main contention is that Spinoza’s frame of mind is Neo-Platonic: his system of philosophy presupposes a primordial vision in the sphere of a not-yet-explicated, implied unitary wisdom—i.e., what is before any articulation by conceptual and linguistic means. So understood, Spinoza follows the logic of Plotinus’s “On the three primary levels of reality.” I then consider the articulated Ethics and distinguish the layers of language-based cognition in Spinoza’s œuvre, in order to decipher the proper messages of particular passages more successfully. Basically, the Ethics sub specie aeternitatis should be distinguished from the Ethics sub specie vitae cottidianae. I compare the corresponding difference of these manners of thought and speech to the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic methods in Descartes. I maintain that Spinoza coupled the “synthetic” argumentation of the propositions and demonstrations with the series of other types of texts; in so doing he integrated the “analytic” part into the “synthetic.” I adopt the distinction of the TTP between Euclidean-style and Biblical-style books. Given that the Ethics is not written entirely in the Euclideanstyle, I maintain that its major part allows for, and even calls for, investigation via the hermeneutical 2773-0107