Love, God, and perfection in Spinoza: Comments on Steven Nadler

In building his account of human blessedness in Ethics 5, Spinoza offers two closely related conceptions of the love of God: the love toward God and the intellectual love of God. While Steven Nadler maintains that these loves are different affects, I argue that these are different descriptions of the same thing: any instance of the active affect that is a love toward God is at the same time an instance of the intellectual love of God. Spinoza’s views about society and its importance for education and human perfection are, I argue, nicely compatible with this account of the love of God, which suggests that all human beings possess, albeit in different degrees, the same sort of knowledge of God.