Gary asked:

What do moral and aesthetic notions like 'good' and 'bad', 'beautiful' and 'ugly', 'ordered' and
'confused' really signify according to Spinoza? And why do we use them?

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For Spinoza, moral and aesthetic concepts are obscure "inadequate ideas" and cannot be true. A
moral emotion or an aesthetic judgement is not arrived at scientifically, but is a response to the world,
which Spinoza would say is a modification of the body. Because moral and emotional judgements are
externally caused by something outside the body affecting the body, they do not belong within a
system of logical thought and the concepts involved cannot be clarified logically. It follows that we
cannot say what they really signify. This is not a drawback to Spinoza's theory, because it actually is
the case that we don't have clear ideas of what we mean by beauty and good.

Because such concepts are inadequate ideas, they do not belong within a coherent system of thought
and it follows from this that we cannot even say that moral and aesthetic judgements are true and
false because, for Spinoza, the truth and falsity of propositions is determined by logical coherence
with a system. Philosophers today grapple with the problem of trying to show how value judgements
can be taken as true and Spinoza would have predicted that this is a waste of time.

Nor is it problematic that Spinoza gives no guidance as to how we might distinguish similar concepts,
such as elegant and beautiful. We use each concept when a different impact has been made upon us
and this doesn't admit of an explanation. On Spinoza's view there is no explanation of "inadequate
ideas". Explanations are deductive. The philosophies of aesthetics and ethics are devoted to attempts
to find definitions and explanations, without much success — as Spinoza would have predicted.

Because we use value concepts when there is an impact upon us from the outside world, it follows
from Spinoza's metaphysics that there are attributes of things and events in the world which cause us
to respond in a certain way. It is our body, which belongs to the causal chain of nature, which is
affected. Because the mind is passive in respect to external events there is no logic in the mind to
account for why we use "elegant" rather than "beautiful". When we use these terms we are caused to
do so by the object. Furthermore, we do not even use a common term. Each person is affected by
external causes differently: this brings problems for moral and aesthetic agreement, but allows for
argument, of which there is more!

Rachel Browne