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What has this to do with Spinoza? He seems, on the face of it, to have no style at all, as we confront the very scholastic Latin of the Ethics. But you have to be careful with people who supposedly “have no style”; as Proust noted, they’re often the greatest stylists of all. The Ethics appears at first to be a continuous stream of definitions, propositions, proofs, and corollaries, presenting us with a remarkable development of concepts. An irresistible, uninterrupted river, majestically serene. Yet all the while there are “parentheses” springing up in the guise of the scholia, discontinuously, independently, referring to one another, violently erupting to form a broken volcanic chain, as all the passions rumble below in a war pitted against sadness. The scholia might seems to fit into the overall conceptual development, but they don’t: they’re more like a second Ethics, running parallel to the first but with a completely different rhythm, a completely different tone, echoing the movement of concepts in the full force of affects.

And then there’s a third Ethics, too, when we come to book Five. Because Spinoza tells us that up to that point he’s been speaking from the viewpoint of concepts, but now he’s going to change his style and speak directly and intuitively in pure percepts. Here too, one might imagine he’s still proving things, but he’s certainly not continuing in the same way. The line of proof begins to leap like lightning across gaps, proceeding elliptically, implicitly, in abbreviated form, advancing in piercing, rending flashes. No longer a river, or something running below the surface, but fire. A third Ethics that, although it appears only at the close, is there from the start, along with the other two.

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