Spinoza’s Ethical Practice in All the Light We Cannot See

Abstract

This thesis seeks an ethical way to advance towards the love of eternal and infinite things that Spinoza pursued in All the Light We Cannot See, an American novel published by Anthony Doerr in 2014 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the following year. It is an attempt to examine Spinoza's Conatus as an individual's effort to maintain and sustain life, and that Conatus inevitably includes desire. However, Spinoza sees life pursuing this desire as something that can restrain life and give suffering, but the effort to achieve the third perception leads human beings find bliss, which is the final path to freedom. This paper examines the main character‘s choices and efforts to continue his life, and try to find out whether they have entered the path of freedom in the Spinozist sense. The first section briefly examines how Spinoza explained Conatus and the road to bliss. Werner's Conatus is examined in the second section, and how he perceives three different perceptions Spinoza distinguished in the third section. And in the last section, it will look at how Werner's perception of God's intellectual love is embodied.