Abstract

Although the idea of a specific nature seems to be incompatible with the rejection of universals in the second part of Spinoza’s Ethics, the notion of human nature is yet clearly used by this philosopher for both descriptive and normative purposes. We can notice this ambiguity, in particular, by examining how the question of human nature is introduced in two famous extracts of his works: at the end of the prologue of The Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and in the preface of the fourth part of the Ethics. On the one hand, Spinoza presents the improvement of human nature as a central goal of his ethical project; on the other hand, he deconstructs, in the foregoing passages, notions such as perfection, imperfection, good and evil, which seem to disqualify those same aims as derived from inadequate ideas. In order to sort out the meaning of those issues, this paper’s leading hypothesis will be that there’s a tension, in Spinoza’s reflection on human nature, between a critical analysis of the inadequate idea of this nature, which comes from imagination, and an attempt to form, by using reason, an adequate idea of it, and to make it play a lead role in the philosophical program and more specifically in its ethical and political stakes.