In the fifth and final section of Ethics, Spinoza presents a love of God which refers to knowledge of the third kind. This love possesses the epithets “eternal” and “intellectual” and there is nothing in nature that could cancel it. At the same time, it is de facto a matter of love, an affect which in the book’s third section does not feature prominently, but is instead defined as a passive state of mind. If one, in addition to this, views man’s conatus as predominantly a self-referential autonomous project and nature as the context in which the maintenance of one’s own self-preservation is the only regulative principle, it seems that love is merely an enslaving obstacle for the actualization of a rational and autonomous life. This essay’s intention is however to observe how Spinoza introduces three concepts for three types of love which constitutes a hierarchy: communi amore, amor erga Deum and amor Dei intellectualis. The essay shows how each of these takes a specific relationship to a respective level of knowledge and how this enables a questioning of self-preservation as an exclusive self-referential individualistic project.

Keywords: Spinoza, Ethics, love, knowledge, existence, conatus.