In the history of Western thought, human beings have long occupied a somewhat ambiguous and ambivalent position in the world – in aspiration, perhaps, like gods, yet all too earthly in the limitations and vulnerabilities of their lives. The possession of reason has been the pivot of that tension. It has been seen as the distinguishing mark that separates humanity from the rest of Nature. Yet its own separation from lesser aspects of being human is complex and contested.

Unease in the sense of human superiority in Nature has its correlate in reason’s uneasy relationships with other aspects of mental life, which make would-be gods unavoidably human. I have argued that Spinoza’s insistence that human minds do not transcend what later came to be called ‘nature without’ involves a radical challenge also to familiar, but troubled, assumptions about the status of reason in ‘nature within’. There are human situations that demand rational understanding, yet also challenge the resources of intellect acting alone.

In Ethics III Spinoza continues his treatment of reason, now addressing its inter-relations with emotion as well as with imagination. The integrative model that emerges bears, in interesting ways, on some of the complexities of current concern with climate change emotion.