You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The philosopher Baruch Spinoza [1632-77], a some what younger contemporary of Descartes, is famous for being what philosophers call an “ethical naturalist.” He saw himself as putting the mind back into nature. The mind is as natural as the body is, he insisted (Turner, 2003, p. 472).1 Part of what that means is that in his Ethics he offered what we today
would call a moral psychology. That psychology was based on a view of the mind and body as one thing rather than as two separable things barely holding together, as Descartes had claimed. Spinoza proposed that our mind, first and foremost, minds the body. He intuited that even, or perhaps especially, our ethical capacity bubbles up from the deepest layers of ourselves, our most primitive selves, rather than being a product of either God or of reason alone. Ethics thus begins with our most basic urge for bodily survival and the maintenance and enhancement of organic integrity. It is an overwhelming and overriding desire—Spinoza calls it the conatus—that informs and is expressed in