Spinoza wrote his Ethics in Latin, a language nobody spoke anymore, using a severely logical method of argument. The last thing he wanted was to make his presence felt, or to write about himself. The way he wrote his Ethics was rather like the way he lived, determined to remain obscure, uncompromised by a recognizable identity in the public world. The impersonal purity of his Ethics, then, couldn’t have been more self-expressive. The book wasn’t published in his lifetime, partly because it would have been recognized as his book. In his obscurity, he was too well known.
Leonard Michaels, “Writing About Myself”
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