It is well-known that Spinoza’s view of the mind-body relation is framed within the first two parts of the Ethics. But it is the road to interpretive anguish to infer from this (as many do) that but for a dip now and then into later parts of the Ethics for such things as the clarification of terms, everything crucial to understanding the basics of this view is to be found through careful readings of Parts I and II. The framework of the account is there, to be sure, but filling in the framework with minds recognizable as our own is another matter altogether. One will be convinced of this after reading the essays in Desire and Affect: Spinoza as Psychologist.

An essential element in Spinoza’s account of the mind-body relation, his theory of the affects, doesn’t appear until Part III of the Ethics, and we are almost sure to get the intended relation of mind to body wrong without it. What we discover in Part III is much more than mere help with difficult Spinozistic terminology. The abstractions of the earlier parts are brought down to earth: in Spinoza’s descriptions we can begin to discern the workings of what look like our minds. For instance, Part II tells us in an axiom (it is part of the geometric manner of the Ethics to start with what is axiomatic, and then to build upon that) that “we feel that a certain body is affected in many ways.” And who would disagree with that? But, however agreeable, this axiom is neither clear nor solid, and by the time we get to the twelfth proposition of Part II, we are doing a good deal of interpretive squirming. Not until Part III, “On the Origin and Nature of the Affects” will we able to sit still again, for it is here that we discover what Spinoza thinks is involved in “feeling a body to be affected.” And what we find makes a great deal of difference.

Edited by Yirmiyahu Yovel, Desire and Affect is the third in a series, each volume dedicated to one of the five parts of the Ethics. It is (perhaps obviously) devoted to Ethics Part III, “On the Origin and Nature of the Affects.” Together, the essays in this volume tacitly present an overwhelming case for the importance of Spinoza’s theory of the affects in a full account of his view of the mind-body relation. At the same time, the essays collectively display an extremely interesting and well-worked out cognitivist model of the emotions. The book offers several papers which show a (perhaps surprising) relevance of Spinoza’s theory to contemporary psychology. Indeed, in his “Spinoza and Current Theory of Emotion,” Nico Frijda concludes with the thought that if motivation has to do with the desire to exercise that which one is capable of doing, then “Spinoza’s analysis of the ultimate source of emotions may well come closest to a satisfactory account of human emotion and motivation.

“By affect,” writes Spinoza, “I understand affections of the Body by which the Body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections.” In this definition, Spinoza directs our attention to those bodily alterations which involve in some way or other a gain or loss in the body’s power to act. Which are these? Consider the succession of bodily events–and thus bodily changes– that take place, from eardrum to brain, when one hears a sound. If hearing the sound makes no difference to one’s power of acting–if it is no cause of disruption or confusion in one’s capacity to act–then nothing qualifying as an affection of the body has occurred, nor has an affect (i.e., the combination of bodily affection and awareness of it) occurred. On the other hand, a disruption which takes a moment to accommodate and rebound from will involve a decrease, followed by an increase, of bodily power to act. And in the mind this will be felt, as a succession of emotions: sadness then pleasure. These changes involving emotional awareness of the body are the ones Spinoza is interested in, for they constitute the only mode of communication that exists between mind and body. All that the mind gets is an awareness of the change of bodily power of acting, an awareness that comes in the form of felt sadness or pleasure. How small a class of events is this? That depends on what occurs in response to ordinary, moment by moment bodily surface irritations: how much of what we take in is surprising? how much passes without need for adjustment? (An interesting consequence of Spinoza’s view is that a mind whose body’s power to act never alters–perhaps due to a total mastery of its environment–will have no awareness of its body, and it will therefore feel no emotions. For an affection of the body consists in an increase or decrease in its power, or capacity to act. And if our body is not affected in that way, then our minds will not register any awareness of bodily change, and we will not experience any affects.)

The best and most useful essays of the book lie in the second of the four sections in Desire and Affect, called “Affects, Body, and Mind,.” The jewel of the book is there–Aaron Ben-Ze’ev’s, “Emotions and Change: A Spinozistic Account.” Ben-Ze’ev explores Spinoza’s “systematic account of the emotions…focusing on the role of change in the generation of emotions and the various factors determining emotional intensity,” and tries to show that “the basic contentions of Spinoza are confirmed by psychological evidence.” Donald Davidson’s contribution–his Jerusalem Spinoza Lecture–is there, too. For anyone familiar with Davidson’s view, there is little new here–it is a Davidsonian interpretation of Spinoza’s view of the mind-body relation. Repetition or not, it is good to see it finally spelled out by Davidson himself. But also, importantly for the student of Spinoza worried about mind-body interaction, Davidson offers a saving idea–that for Spinoza determination is something more than mere causation; it is explanation. Thus, when we worry over how Spinoza could possibly think both that “The Body cannot determine the Mind to thinking, and the Mind cannot determine the Body to motion, to rest or to anything else…” and claim at the same time that mind and body are one and the same thing differently expressed, we have an answer: since mind and body are identical, a mental event will obviously be causally related to its bodily correlate. But it may nonetheless be impossible to explain the effects of the bodily event in terms of mental events: mental events are explained according to different principles and in different terms. Thus: mind-body identity without reductionism. The essay is a must-read if only to see that very point carefully spelled out, for if it is correct, it overcomes what has been a significant stumbling-block for understanding Spinoza. Other essays in this section are less exciting but still very helpful in coming to appreciate Spinoza’s account.

From the first section, which deals largely with questions concerning the conatus–the desire to preserve one’s own being, Michael Schrijvers’ essay “The Conatus and the Mutual Relationship between Active and Passive Affects in Spinoza” may be the most useful, especially for its apparently successful attempt to take the teleology out of the conatus. The first two sentences get right to the point: “Spinoza, in his theory of the human affects, does not undertake a phenomenological description, as Aristotle did. It is not the conscious quality of certain mental states that interests him, but rather the necessary conditions for their occurrence.” This echoes the book’s opening quotation from Spinoza: “Therefore, I shall treat the nature and powers of the Affects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies.” Except for Schrijvers’ essay, the entries in Section I contribute little to our understanding of the theory of the affects. But two other essays in this first section are nonetheless extremely interesting. Osamu Ueno pursues a provocative line of thought, finding in Part III of the Ethics an account of “how we have come to be entrapped in an imaginary ego and why we cannot help getting entangled in conflicting relations with others.” And Yovel pursues questions that surely nag at many readers of Spinoza: how could Spinoza take seriously the attempt to find some sort of bliss or salvation in the pursuit of science? How can the pursuit of scientific understanding be a road to salvation when the ultimate object of understanding is apparently our status as physical objects in a physical, mechanistic world? Why isn’t this, instead, the road to depression? In Yovel’s words, “Spinoza unites in a single synthesis the ancient ideal of the sage with a modern philosophy of nature and politics…. Spinoza expected philosophy–and a natural philosophy at that–to lead to the highest spiritual ideal, which Christianity calls salvation, but which Spinoza prefers calling blessedness…”

The best essays will be interesting mainly to those who have spent some time trying to understand Spinoza’s Ethics. Davidson’s is an exception to this–indeed, his essay might even serve as an introduction to Spinoza–but it is nonetheless technical and requires, like the other good ones, very careful reading. There is at least one, Richard Schacht’s “The Spinoza-Nietzsche Problem,” which is easily readable, but which doesn’t really fit in the book, precisely because of its shallowness; it is unlikely to be of interest to readers trying to understand Spinoza’s thought. But for the most part these are scholarly essays, sometimes hard-going, and sometimes presupposing a familiarity with the main themes and problems in interpreting Spinoza. And, for the most part, they comprise a very good book.

Categories: Philosophical