Journal of the History of Philosophy

How the arguments of Spinoza's Ethics work might seem obvious. Even if Spinoza's exposition is not perfect, and some suppressed premises might have to be recovered, it seems clear enough that the demonstrations are supposed to show, in Euclidian fashion, how truths about the basic structure of nature—as well as truths about how to live—follow from axioms and uncontroversial definitions. If readers keep their imagination and emotions from sullying their reasoning, they will see the force of the demonstrations and be convinced.

In his engaging, highly original book, Garver argues that the Ethics is not a linear march through timeless truths, but rather a complicated drama that works precisely because its "characters," the human beings described in the Ethics, as well as the people reading the Ethics, have the imaginations they do. We readers may approach this drama with scholarly detachment, but we may also find ourselves provoked by the same difficulties we see the characters encounter, which in turn may transform us in just the ways we see the characters transformed.

Understanding the Ethics means following a story of how human beings can go from desiring self-preservation (as all people, by nature, do) to also desiring to live rational, ethical lives. The plot is complex, since, according to Garver, the latter desire cannot arise from the former. For self-preservation, inadequate ideas—various predilections, coping mechanisms, and tendencies to form social attachments—suffice; the desire to have adequate ideas and know things is not a desire following from an inborn striving to persevere in being. Yet human imagination can, with its characteristic deflections, get people to adequate ideas without those people ever aiming to get to them. This is what Garver calls, in a nod to Hegel's cunning of reason, the "cunning of the imagination."

Garver's book consists of two parts. In the first part, Garver describes the stage set in Ethics Parts I–III. Spinoza presents what look like incommensurable systems. First, there is a system of God, infinite modes, and adequate ideas—where adequate ideas are, on Garver's view, infinite modes. Second, there is a system of inadequate ideas and finite things striving to persevere in their being. The presence of this deep divide raises hard questions. Given the finitude of our minds, how could we even have adequate ideas (including the adequate idea of God), if adequate ideas are infinite? And why would we even want adequate ideas? Adequate ideas are universal, non-perspectival truths, and there seem to be no schemata to tether those truths to our experiences as particular finite beings who care about particular finite beings.

In the second part, Garver explains how these systems can be unified and how beings like us can come to desire adequate ideas. Importantly, the ascent to adequate ideas "can only be affective and must be social" (211). In infancy, we track the sources of pleasures and pains and begin, by imagination and emotion, to construct an objective social world. The [End Page 613] construction of this world opens us up to frustration and heartbreak, but it also prepares the mind to have adequate ideas of a truly objective, mind-independent world. Collaborative sociability also prepares the mind, prefiguring "the relation within a person between reason and passion, in which reason acting on the passions makes them more rather than less powerful as it makes them more rational" (101). As the imagination leads us into new ways of interacting, we think about ourselves and the world in increasingly nuanced ways.

As the story goes, we might recognize that despite Ethics I–III, there is concourse between the infinite and finite. In human bondage, the topic of Ethics IV, the finite constrains the infinite. In human freedom, the topic of Ethics V, the infinite acts on the finite and the finite becomes infinite. Adequate ideas may eventually cease to feel like an alien presence in the human mind and instead be seen as one's own...