Ethics, Well-Being, Knowledge

At heart, Spinoza's Ethical doctrine is an update of Aristotle's.  The highest good of the doctrine is Well-Being, understood as Health, as much as as Happiness.  Knowledge is an ingredient in the doctrine in two respects.  First, it distinguishes what is truly conducive to Well-Being from what is mistakenly taken to be.  One source of error is Sense-Experience, which is inadequate as an indication of what is truly healthful, e. g. sensory stimulation.  Another is superstition, a main variety of which is Religion, the neutralizing of which is the primary function of the Pantheistic elements of the doctrine.  The application of Bio-Chemistry to Medicine is an example of how Knowledge can conduce to Well-Being.  Now, the source of such Knowledge is Reason.  But, there is a second respect in which Knowledge conduces to Well-Being in Spinoza's doctrine, as well as in Aristotle's, regardless of the scientific advances available to the former.  By applying Knowledge to one's behavior, one is also self-determining, the awareness involved in which is Intuition in Spinoza's doctrine.  So, since self-determining is self-creating, Intuition is constituted by the awareness that one is a Mode of immanent creative Substance, aka 'God', so-called primarily to neutralize the more common use of the term in the promotion of superstition.  So, the more usual classifications of the Ethics as Epistemology, Metaphysics, and/or Theology, tend to distract what the title of the work plainly expresses to be its primary topic.