"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf"
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Spinoza pulls the rug out from under moral certainty with the calm precision of someone doing geometry. The line isn’t a paradox for its own sake; it’s a demolition of the idea that “good” and “bad” live inside objects like permanent labels. Music doesn’t carry goodness the way gold carries weight. It lands in a listener, hits a particular body and mind, and becomes something else entirely.
The examples are doing more work than they seem. “Melancholy” and “mourning” are neighboring states, but Spinoza treats them as different kinds of vulnerability: one finds a strange companionship in music, the other finds it intolerable. The deaf person isn’t a cheap punchline; they’re the cleanest proof that value is not a property of the thing but a relation. No perception, no impact, no moral coloring. Indifferent doesn’t mean “who cares,” it means “no relevant contact.”
Context matters: Spinoza is writing against a culture eager to moralize nature and emotions, to treat pleasure and pain as cosmic verdicts. His broader project in the Ethics argues that our judgments of good and evil track our appetites, our power to act, our particular condition, not some external moral order. The subtext is bracingly anti-self-righteous: if your “bad” is someone else’s “good,” the problem isn’t that the world is inconsistent; it’s that you mistook your perspective for the universe.
It’s also a political move. Once value is understood as situational, you’re pushed toward understanding causes rather than condemning people. Spinoza’s cool relativism isn’t permissive; it’s diagnostic.
The examples are doing more work than they seem. “Melancholy” and “mourning” are neighboring states, but Spinoza treats them as different kinds of vulnerability: one finds a strange companionship in music, the other finds it intolerable. The deaf person isn’t a cheap punchline; they’re the cleanest proof that value is not a property of the thing but a relation. No perception, no impact, no moral coloring. Indifferent doesn’t mean “who cares,” it means “no relevant contact.”
Context matters: Spinoza is writing against a culture eager to moralize nature and emotions, to treat pleasure and pain as cosmic verdicts. His broader project in the Ethics argues that our judgments of good and evil track our appetites, our power to act, our particular condition, not some external moral order. The subtext is bracingly anti-self-righteous: if your “bad” is someone else’s “good,” the problem isn’t that the world is inconsistent; it’s that you mistook your perspective for the universe.
It’s also a political move. Once value is understood as situational, you’re pushed toward understanding causes rather than condemning people. Spinoza’s cool relativism isn’t permissive; it’s diagnostic.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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