159 / 298
Vico’s Ring
159
presentation of
Ethics
– marking it as a work of rare genius per-
haps more so than any other aspect – can also be seen in a dif-
ferent light, namely, intended as a way of presenting the logic of
his system without recourse to language. The operative term here
is «intended», so the issue at this time is not whether the objec-
tive was actually achieved or even achievable. Spinoza himself
made a distinction between Euclid’s writings on geometry, and
language:
Euclid, whose writings are concerned only with things exceedingly
simple and perfectly intelligible, is easily made clear by anyone in any
language, for in order to grasp his thought and to be assured of his
true meaning there is no need to have a thorough knowledge of the
language in which he wrote. A superficial and rudimentary knowledge
is enough
374
.
Euclid’s
Elements
, of course, consists of text and diagrams,
and so it is significant that Spinoza de-emphasizes, not the dia-
grams, but the text as such, and with it language, such that even
minimal knowledge of Greek, or any language, by extension,
would suffice to grasp the «true meaning». Taken to its logical
conclusion, the need for language, and its value, becomes vanish-
ingly small, and in the limit, tends to zero
375
. Euclid’s proposi-
tional/logical apparatus («things exceedingly simple and perfectly
intelligible») is thus taken to be categorically different from lan-
guage, and not subject to or dependent on language
376
. Viewed in
relation to this epistemological paradigm, the internal organiza-
tion of
Ethics
takes on special meaning: its Euclidean “format”
377
is a claim to communicating the second and third kinds of
knowledge in the only way commensurate with true philosophy,
that is, outside language
378
. If this interpretation is correct, it
adresses the problematic aspects in the opposing views outlined
above. First of all, Spinoza’s explicit relegation of language to the
first kind of knowledge with all its limitations and inadequacies is
upheld; whatever inconsistencies are present in
Ethics
, they are