Of everything whatsoever a cause or reason must be assigned, either for its existence, or for its non-existence — e.

In so far as it has adequate ideas it is necessarily active, and in so far as it has inadequate ideas, it is necessarily passive. Egyed also offers a suggestion about the possible relation of Schopenhauer's philosophy to two different strains of Buddhist philosophy: Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. Spinoza's naturalism can be seen as deriving from his firm commitment to the principle of sufficient reason ( psr), which is the thesis that everything has an explanation.As should not be surprising given his ethical egoism, Spinoza is not sympathetic to the thought that we ought to worry ourselves about either our treatment of animals or of the environment.

It is the passive feelings (or "passions") which are responsible for all the ills of life, for they are induced largely by things outside us and frequently cause that lowered vitality which means pain. That being said, Spinoza’s views about animal ethics can be applied more or less directly to the environment as well. Spinoza is making the metaphysical claim that each thing is possessed of an inner force, by which it continuously reasserts its own existence. However, in spite of this anti-realist metaethics, Spinoza endorses an intellectualist version of ethical egoism: reason dictates that we seek our greatest good, and this greatest good is understanding.At the highest stage of knowledge, that of "intuitive knowledge", the mind apprehends all things as expressions of the eternal cosmos. Yet Spinoza thinks the moral realist’s story is exactly backwards: “we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (E3p9s; cf. In his view, these character traits are not really virtues even if they do occasionally cause us to pursue the good, for they are only accidentally connected to the pursuit of the good.

However, as Kober (2013, 58–9) notes, one of the consequences of Spinoza’s views is that important conceptual tools of ecology lose their purchase. For each attribute is only infinite of its kind; the system of all attributes is absolutely infinite, that is, exhausts the whole of reality.For Spinoza, God or Nature—being one and the same thing—is the whole, infinite, eternal, necessarily existing, active system of the universe within which absolutely everything exists. The moral categories, good and evil, are intimately connected with desire, though not in the way commonly supposed. The banks of the Ganges were their spiritual home; there they would have led a peaceful and honoured life among men of like mind. Actions of the mind are adequate ideas, which increase its power of acting, while passions of the mind are inadequate, confused ideas, which decrease its power of acting.