Spinoza vol 2 ebook Part 1: Life and Death in Spinoza’s Ethics and Letter 32: Introduction

Part 1: Life and Death in Spinoza’s Ethics and Letter 32     

Introduction

In section 1, shall examine the topic of life and death in Spinoza’s Ethics with a focus on EVp38 as well as Spinoza's Letter 32 to Oldenburg and EVp41 and its scholium. I suggest that EVp38, including its demonstration and scholium, is a concise yet pivotal passage in Spinoza’s Ethics which gives us an overview of his philosophy of life and how to combat a fear of death.  So, I wish to examine it in greater depth and analyse it together with some further related propositions which give a picture of Spinoza’s views on living well, attitudes to death and how to use our intellect during our lifetime to enhance the immortality and eternity of our soul after death. 

I shall start with the proposition:

“Quo plures res secundo et tertio cognitionis genere Mens intelligit, eo minus ipsa ab affectibus, qui mali sunt patitur, et mortem minus timet.” (EVp38, accents omited^[i])

Below is my interlinear translation options of the above to provide the possible literal meanings of these Latin words: 

Put together as a sentence, my suggested translation is:

Therefore the more objects/things/properties/matters the mind/intellect/reason/judgement understands/ realises from second and third varieties of knowledge, the lesser the degree one actually suffers oneself from affects which are anything of the evil/malicious/harmful kind/degree and the less [one] dreads/fears death [being annihilated/a corpse]. (My literal transl of EVp38)

This sentence contains several important points which I shall now examine in turn over the course of this section. 

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[i] Benedict de Spinoza and Henri Krop, Spinoza Ethica, 8th edition (Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam : Prometheus, Bert Bakker, 2015), 506.