Ethics

This part deals with the affects: our feelings, emotions, and imagination. Spinoza laments the fact that most accounts of the affects treat them in a disdainful manner rather than seeking to understand them as a part of the universal laws of nature. Spinoza aims to correct this by treating the affects in a rational way, “just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies” (69).

First, Spinoza distinguishes between instances in which we act and instances in which we are acted upon. The latter are characteristic of the passions, because we experience them as something that happens to us—something we undergo—rather than something we have control over.

Our mind has both adequate and inadequate ideas, the latter of which are “mutilated and confused” (70). Our actions proceed from adequate ideas, while our passions proceed from inadequate ideas. Thus, our affects reflect confused ideas of things rather than clear intellectual knowledge. The more inadequate ideas we have, the more we are affected by passions; the more adequate ideas we have, the more active our mind will be, and the more our reason will dominate our passions.

The body and the mind cannot control each other’s actions; the body’s power of operation resides only in the body, and the mind’s power in the mind. It follows that we do not possess absolute freedom of will that allows us to choose various actions. Rather, our actions are ultimately determined by our affects, which are determined by nature. The decisions of the mind “are nothing but the appetites themselves, which therefore vary as the disposition of the body varies” (73).

Spinoza’s belief in the all-embracing power of nature and God’s infinite essence leads him to stake an important claim: All finite things strive, by their own power, to preserve their being. The instinct of self-preservation is the strongest force we know. In fact, this instinct constitutes the very essence of all things; there is nothing that does not want to continue to exist.

Our experience of the affects consists, first, in a sense that our body’s power of acting, or our mind’s power of thinking—rooted in our basic instinct of self-preservation—is being increased or diminished; and second, in a sense that our mind is passing to a greater or lesser perfection. When we experience a joyful emotion, our powers are increased, and we pass to a greater perfection; when we experience a sad emotion, our powers are diminished, and we pass to a lesser perfection. The mind strives to imagine things that increase the body’s power of acting; in other words, it strives to imagine joyful affects and to shut out sad ones.

Spinoza discusses in extensive detail the various affects and passions and how they relate to the self, to things in the world, to other people, and to the dimensions of time past, present, and future. His discussion centers on joy, sadness, and desire, as well as love and hate, and how they interact with various objects toward which we feel those emotions. One of Spinoza’s major claims in this section is that “hate is increased by being returned, but can be destroyed by love” (93). It follows that “hate completely conquered by love passes into love” (93). Spinoza also discusses hope and fear as “inconstant” (uncertain or wavering) emotions that derive from love and hate.

Toward the end of the section, Spinoza concludes that all emotions that relate to the mind’s power of acting can be reduced to joy or desire; sadness is nothing but the negation of the mind’s power of acting. Part 3 concludes with a long catalogue of the affects, providing definitions of each. The force behind all the affects is desire, which is “man’s very essence, insofar as it is conceived to be determined […] to do something” (104). Prior to desire is appetite, which is seen at its most basic level in man’s striving for self-preservation.