## 1. The Human Being as Part of Nature




In the Preface to Part III, Spinoza states his view that all things
alike must be understood to follow from the laws of nature: 



> The laws and rules of nature, according to which all things
> happen, and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere
> the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of
> whatever kind, must also be the same, viz. through the universal laws
> of nature.



 Many philosophers have treated the human mind as an exception to
otherwise universal natural laws, as a thing that is conscious, that
is capable of good and evil, or that can be an uncaused cause of
action, for example. Spinoza though insists that human beings are not
"outside nature." Any features or deeds of human beings that seem
exceptional, then, must have for Spinoza some explanation in terms of
universal, natural laws. That is, if there is any sense at all in
saying that a human being is aware, does good, and is free, then
there must be universal, natural laws that justify and explain these
designations.




Spinoza's thesis (IIIp7) that the essence of any finite mode,
including any human mind (IIIp9), is a striving (*conatus*) to
persevere in being is an attempt to give an account of nature under
which human beings with their apparent peculiarities are natural.
Spinoza argues that all finite modes strive to persevere in being
(IIIp6), and he uses an analysis of human striving to explain the
conscious experience of desire, human freedom, and good and evil in
terms that might apply to any finite modes. Desire, as Spinoza
understands it, just is striving together with consciousness of
striving (IIIp9s; the human experience of desire is discussed in more
detail in Section 2.1). An action of a human mind cannot be free, for
Spinoza, in the sense of being determined by a faculty of will that is
itself undetermined (IIp48; see also letter 58, to Schuller). There is human freedom for Spinoza,
however, in the sense of freedom from external interference: I am free
in producing some effect (that is, in doing something) to the extent that the effect
follows from my essence, or, in other words, to the extent that it is the effect
of my striving. (For discussions of action and human freedom,
see IIId2 and V Preface.) 'Good' and 'evil'
are labels that describe natural properties in the sense that they
describe changes that might occur in any particular things at all
(although we reserve the labels for these changes when they occur in
human beings). Although scholars debate the precise meaning of these
identifications, an increase in the power with which a mind strives is
good, for Spinoza, and a decrease evil (see IIIp11s, IIIp39s and IV
Preface). Because the striving thesis thus makes central
contributions to Spinoza's accounts of consciousness, of human freedom
and of good and evil, it is of great importance to Spinoza's
psychology and ethics. One might raise questions about the validity of
Spinoza's argument to the doctrine, about its plausibility as an
account of the nature of particular objects, or about its plausibility
as an account of human nature. The subsections which follow address
these issues in turn.


### 1.1 The Argument to the Striving Doctrine




Spinoza's argument to IIIp6 is uncharacteristically insulated from the
rest of the *Ethics*. As Spinoza presents the argument at
IIIp6d, it depends principally upon IIIp4, a proposition which Spinoza
takes to be self-evident, and IIIp5 which derives from IIIp4 alone. The
argument also involves, less directly, IP25C and its gloss at IP34. 



> I Proposition 25 Corollary: Particular things are nothing
> but affections of God's attributes, or modes by which God's attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way. 
> 
> 
> 
> I Proposition 34: God's power is his essence itself.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> III Proposition 4: No thing can be destroyed except through an
> external cause.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> III Proposition 5: Things are of a contrary nature, i.e., cannot be
> in the same subject, insofar as one can destroy the other.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Therefore, III Proposition 6: Each thing, as far as it can by its own
> power, strives to persevere in its being.
> 
> 
> 




A thing's essence may not be absolutely equivalent to its nature for
Spinoza, since a thing such as a square circle has a nature but cannot
exist (Ip11) and one might interpret Spinoza as holding that anything
which has an essence might exist (IId2). Still, the two terms might be
taken interchangeably here because Spinoza is only describing
existents. If this assumption is correct, then perhaps Spinoza's
reasoning runs like this:



> Particular things are expressions of power,
> since they are modes of God's attributes (Ip25) and God's attributes
> constitute God's essence (ID4) and God's essence is his power (Ip34).
> It is self-evident that nothing can be destroyed except through an
> external cause (IIIp4), so an apparent particular thing which is
> self-destructive is in fact at least two (IIIp5). The power a genuine
> particular thing expresses, then, must therefore be directed toward its
> own perseverance in being (IIIp6).



*Pace* Spinoza, the claim at IIIp4 that no thing can be
destroyed except through an external cause is not clearly self-evident.
Even assuming IIIp4 to be true, however, one might raise questions
about Spinoza's argument. Why is it that, just because a thing does not
strive to destroy itself, that thing must therefore strive to persevere
in being? A thing might, it seems, not strive for anything, or perhaps it
might strive to do something which is neither perseverance nor
self-destruction. Spinoza's use of IP34 and Ip25c seems intended to
rule out the first of these possibilities. Although Spinoza's term
'express' (*exprimere*) is notoriously unclear, it
may mean something like "is a particular form of." In that case,
because particular things are expressions of God's essence, his power,
they must be particular forms of power. So there cannot be a thing
which does not strive at all or, in other words, there cannot be a
thing which is not any expression of power at all.




The second version of the objection, the version which notes the
possibility that a particular thing as described in IIIp4 might strive
for something other than either self-destruction or perseverance,
remains a challenge to sympathetic readers of the *Ethics*
however. The rejection of IIIp6 and an insistence that at least some
thing does not strive to persevere in its being, where perseverance in
being is understood as a particular end among many possible options,
is perfectly consistent with the truth of IIIp4. After all, not
striving to persevere in being, which IIIp6 rules out, is not the same
thing as striving not to persevere in being, which IIIp4 rules out. A
sympathetic reader of Spinoza might try to resolve the difficulty
through an understanding of what it means to strive to persevere in
being, under which striving to persevere in being comes to mean just
the same thing as striving to do something other than destroy oneself,
in particular, striving to maintain a present state. (See Curley 1,
109, for an interpretation similar to this one.) This reading comes
closer to making the argument from IIIp4 to IIIp6 seem valid, but it
raises a new problem: that of reconciling this interpretation of
striving with Spinoza's accounts of human motivation which follow from
IIIp6. For Spinoza consistently regards sane human beings as finite
modes who, beyond merely not trying to kill themselves, actively try
to preserve themselves. People do not merely resist changes to
whatever state they are in; they strive to change their states in
order to know more and in order to live with a greater force. One of
the main problems Spinoza faces, then, is reconciling the most
plausible version of IIIp6 as an account of the natures of ordinary
objects (under which IIIp6 is a principle of inertia) with the most
plausible version of IIIp6 as an account of human nature (under which
IIIp6 is a version of psychological egoism).


### 1.2 The Striving Doctrine as an Account of the Natures of Particular Objects




Despite worries that one might have about the validity of Spinoza's
argument, the doctrine has at least some claim to plausibility as an
account of the nature of particular things. The *Ethics* stands
badly in need of some account of what finite modes are, after all, and
IIIp4 provides at least one interesting way of distinguishing genuine
objects from mere constructs: if the thing in question destroys itself
it is not a genuine object. Thus, by IIIp4, a thing that destroys
itself--one might think a lit candle or a time bomb such a
thing--is not a genuine object but a thing which does not destroy
itself is. To the extent that IIIp4 makes most of the things we
intuitively consider genuine objects genuine objects, it captures
ordinary views. To the extent that it rules out some clear class of
things that we intuitively consider genuine objects (lit candles and
time bombs), it represents a controversial philosophical thesis. The
plausibility of the doctrine depends on whether we find that there
really is reason to find basic metaphysical differences in kind
between "things" which tend to destroy themselves and things which do
not. One strategy for defending the plausibility of IIIp4 may be to
investigate what Spinoza means there by an "external cause."
Spinoza's various claims about essences, properties, and accidents
suggest that at least some of the cases of destruction that we might
consider self-destruction are, for Spinoza, destruction by external
causes (Garrett, 2002, pursues this strategy), a suggestion that is supported by Spinoza's account of suicide later in the *Ethics* at IVp20s. The class of things which tend to destroy themselves may be different from, and narrower
than, one might think it is on a first reading of IIIp4.




IIIp6 introduces, perhaps, a slightly different thesis about what it
means to be a particular thing: a particular thing is one which
strives to persevere in being. IIIp6's dependence upon IIIp4 suggests
that this thesis means that any object will remain in the same state
unless external causes affect it. Such a thesis appears to be a
principle of inertia, and, indeed, Spinoza seems to invoke a principle
of inertia in the terms he uses at IIIp6.
'*Conatus*' is a technical term of Cartesian
physics, referring to an object's motion. Spinoza himself uses the
term in this way in his exposition of Descartes's *Principles of
Philosophy*. (Compare, for example, Descartes's
*Principles* II, art. 37, III, art. 56 and III, art. 58 to
Spinoza's exposition IIp14c, IIID3 and IIp17,
respectively). Moreover, at IIIp6, in addition to using the term
'*conatus*' again, Spinoza also uses the same
phrase that he uses in framing a different principle of inertia at
IIp14 of his exposition of Descartes's physics: "as far as
it can by its own power" *quantum in se est*. This phrase
is also one that Descartes himself uses at *Principles* II,
art. 37. (Note however that there is some controversy over how this
phrase is to be understood: see Curley's footnote to IIIp6 in
his translation and Garrett, 1999, note 2.) So there is a good textual
basis for the conclusion that IIIp6 indeed has this meaning.




Apart from the question of how a principle of inertia can give us an
understanding of human nature, this interpretation of IIIp6 raises a
difficult question about Spinoza's use of the striving doctrine. One
might object that IIIp6, understood as a restatement of a principle
of inertia, extends a physical principle to mind without sufficient
clarity. In stating their versions of a principle of inertia in physics, both Descartes and Spinoza are careful to limit the claim to a claim about bodies.
Spinoza, for example, in his definition of *conatus ad motum*,
IIId3 of his exposition of Descartes, writes:



> By striving for motion we do not understand any thought,
> but only that a part of matter is so placed and stirred to motion, that
> it really would go somewhere if it were not prevented by any
> cause.




In addition to characterizing matter, however, IIIp6 is a foundational
claim about the nature of mind and, in particular, about human
psychology. There is a basis, in Spinoza's metaphysics, for thinking
that whatever is true about bodies is true about minds also in some
sense (and see IIIp10 and IIIp11 for Spinoza's account of striving and
the mind/body relation). Striving in physics, however, is understood
as a tendency to a certain kind of motion, and motion seems, if
anything does, to belong to bodies alone. So Spinoza needs to supply
an account of the mental correlate to the physical "striving for
motion." But IIIp6 leaves open the question of what it means for
a mind to strive. On this objection, the striving doctrine uses a kind
of metaphorical language, the term 'striving', where a
precise and literal account of what it is that is characteristic of
mind is required.


### 1.3 The Striving Doctrine as an Account of Human Nature




Spinoza's naturalism benefits rhetorically from his use of the term
'*conatus*' to describe the essences of human
beings and other finite modes alike. For the term is not only a
technical term of Cartesian physics. Cicero uses the term in *De
Natura Deorum* (and other Roman and Greek Stoics use close
cognates) in a psychological sense, referring to human desire, and
Hobbes in his physiology uses the term to refer to the physical causes
of human desire (*Leviathan* VI). So
'*conatus*' has both broad, physical and
specifically human, psychological connotations which help to make the
gap between nature and the human mind appear narrow.




Whether Spinoza successfully capitalizes on his rhetorical skill,
however, and draws a plausible account of the nature of the human mind
out of his general account of the essences of finite modes depends upon
IIIp9:



> III Proposition 9: Both insofar as the mind has clear and
> distinct ideas, and insofar as it has confused ideas, it strives, for
> an indefinite duration, to persevere in its being and it is conscious
> of this striving it has.




IIIp9 suggests that Spinoza is a psychological egoist of some sort.
That is, it suggests that he believes that what human beings desire to
do is to secure their own interests (construed here as perseverance in
being). Indeed Spinoza goes on to define desire at IIIp9 as human
striving (or appetite) together with the consciousness of striving. So
clearly human desire for Spinoza is part of the striving for
perseverance in being and thus shares its character.




There is some question, however, about what variety of psychological
egoism Spinoza holds. Desire might be part of a striving for
perseverance, after all, without all desires being desires for
perseverance. One might have a strong instinctual desire for things
which are instrumental to perseverance in being without desiring
perseverance itself, for example. Or one might desire perseverance in
being but also desire other kinds of things.




IIIp9 might be supposed to support a very strong version of
psychological egoism, orthodox egoism (perhaps Delahunty, 221, holds
this view). Orthodox egoism, is the view that human beings are always
consciously selfish. Under this view, A consciously desires only those
objects which benefit A, B desires only those objects which benefit B,
and so on for all human beings. At IIIp9, Spinoza writes that the
human mind seeks to persevere in being both insofar as it has clear
and distinct ideas and insofar as it has confused ideas. It is natural
to understand this claim to mean something like the following:



> Sometimes people do things which conduce to their
> perseverance and other times people do things which fail to so
> conduce. In both types of case, though, people desire to
> persevere. When I do something that fails to help me to persevere,
> it's because the ideas on which I based my action were confused; that
> is, I thought I knew what would help me to persevere, but I was
> wrong. When I do something that does help me to persevere, though
> (unless I have simply been lucky in acting from an inadequate idea),
> it is because I acted on clear and distinct ideas or, in other words,
> genuine knowledge about what would help me to persevere.




The categorical language Spinoza uses in the Appendix to Part I
provides explicit support for this interpretation of IIIp9: "men act
always on account of an end, viz. on account of their advantage, which
they want." Moreover there are other important passages in Spinoza's
works which are strongly compatible with the interpretation of Spinoza
as an orthodox egoist. These include *Ethics* IVp8d, and his
political writings, especially *Ethics* IVp36s2, and his
*Political Treatise*, chapter 2)




Other evidence suggests that Spinoza is not an orthodox egoist,
however. In particular, there is reason to question whether the
argument of the *Ethics* commits Spinoza to the account of
actions following from confused ideas that the interpretation of IIIp9
above attributes to him. Part of IVp44s concerns those agents who are
the most confused. That passage is useful because it describes
explicitly the conscious thought-processes that precede action:



> Though men are liable to a great many affects, so that one
> rarely finds them to be always agitated by one and the same affect,
> still there are those in whom one affect is stubbornly fixed. For we
> sometimes see that men are so affected by one object that, although it
> is not present, they still believe they have it with them. When this
> happens to a man who is not asleep, we say that he is mad or insane.
> Nor are they thought to be less mad who burn with Love, and dream, both
> night and day, only of a lover or a courtesan. For they usually
> provoke laughter. But when a greedy man thinks of nothing else but
> profit, or money, and an ambitious man of esteem, they are not thought
> to be mad, because they are usually troublesome and are considered
> worthy of Hate. But Greed, Ambition, and Lust really are species of
> madness, even though they are not numbered among the
> diseases.




In this scholium (and in several other notable passages, including III
Definition of the Affects XLVIII and IVp20s) Spinoza describes a
variety of possible ends of human action, none of which is
perseverance in being. Moreover, lest one think that the greedy man
seeks profit because he mistakenly believes that it leads to
perseverance, Spinoza emphasizes the point here that it is always one and
the same object that obsesses these men. A man seeking profit because
he believes that it leads to perseverance may be obsessed with two
objects, profit and perseverance, not one.




IVp44s suggests that Spinoza holds a different kind of view,
predominant egoism, the view that most people, most of the time
consciously desire perseverance in their own being. The particular
type of predominant egoism that IVp44s suggests introduces important
aspects of Spinoza's ethical theory: if the most confused
people, people addled by greed or lust or ambition, are those who
always seek something other than perseverance in being, then perhaps
Spinoza's view is that, for any of us who act on some similar
sentiments occasionally, we do so just to the extent that we also have
confused ideas. Thus human beings are predominantly egoistic because,
by and large, we act rationally. It is rational to seek to persevere
in being (see also what "reason demands" at IVP18S). So if
we were always rational, we would always pursue our own preservation,
and orthodox egoism would be true, for Spinoza. But we are not
orthodox egoists, on this interpretation of Spinoza as a predominant
egoist, just because we are not fully rational. To the extent that we
have confused ideas, we may indeed consciously pursue ends other than
perseverance in being. On this interpretation of Spinoza, there is a
right (or at least a rational) end to pursue--perseverance in
being--and other ends are wrong (or at least irrational).




IVp20 provides support for this interpretation of Spinoza's
predominant egoism:



> IV Proposition 20: The more each one strives, and is able,
> to seek his own advantage, i.e., to preserve his being, the more he is
> endowed with virtue; conversely, insofar as each one neglects his own
> advantage, i.e., neglects to preserve his own being, he lacks
> power.




Here Spinoza explicitly admits that a person may "neglect his own
advantage." So IVp20 apparently contradicts the orthodox egoism of I
Appendix. Moreover, IVp20 states that, to the extent that a person
does seek perseverance in being, that person is virtuous. Virtue has a
metaphysical connotation in the *Ethics*. A thing's virtue is
just the same as its power (IVd8). But the term undeniably has moral
connotations as well. So IVp20 suggests, as IVp44s does, that
consciously trying to preserve oneself is right and neglecting to
preserve oneself is wrong.




IIIp9 admits of various interpretations. However, the weight of the
textual evidence supports the view that he is a predominant, not an
orthodox, egoist. Any particular human desire, even a desire
that is not a desire for perseverance in being or its means, must on
Spinoza's view be related to perseverance in being in some way (by
IIIp6 and IIIp9s). Spinoza's discussion of desires for things other
than perseverance in being in passages such as IVp44s and IVp20
suggests moreover that such desires are part or product of confusion.
So passionate desires, for Spinoza, are often desires for things other
than perseverance in being, although they may be confused desires for
perseverance as well (see IVp63s2 and other discussions of
fear). Recent debates about whether the ends of human desire are
really important to his psychological theory and about how Spinoza
understands human consciousness are likely to lend further support to
this view by showing how these passages and others like them may be
reconciled with Spinoza's more basic commitments in metaphysics and
mind.



***Further reading***: For discussion of IIIp4,
see Matson 1977 and Garrett 2002. For interpretations of Spinoza's
argument from IIIp4-IIIp6, see Curley 1988; Della Rocca 1996;
Garrett 2002 and Lin 2004. For discussions of historical sources of
the striving doctrine, see James 1993, Wolfson 1934, and LeBuffe
2010a, pp.101-102. Youpa 2003 offers an account of self-preservation
in Spinoza. For Spinoza's physics and his use of
Descartes, see Lachterman 1978, Peterman 2015 and 2017, and Schliesser 2017. Most book-length interpretations of the
*Ethics* include detailed accounts of Spinoza's view of human
nature. For discussion of IIIp9, see LeBuffe 2004 and 2010a, Chapters
5-7. Some of the best general discussions of psychological
egoism come in the context of the interpretation of Hobbes, to whom
Spinoza is sometimes compared. For these, see Kavka 1986 and Hampton
1986.


## 2. The Affects




Spinoza's account of the affects (*affectus*) of the human mind
is a response to one of the central problems for his naturalism. It is
an attempt to show how the wide range of desires and emotions of the
human mind can be produced by something which follows the order of
nature. At the start of Part III (see also Chapter 2 of his
*Political Treatise*), Spinoza notes that traditional accounts
of the passions, with the exception of Descartes's, have rested on the
assumption--one wholly baseless in Spinoza's view--that
human beings are a separate "dominion" within the dominion of nature,
with different kinds of constituents and governed by different sorts
of laws. Spinoza's project continues what he finds to be Descartes's
important innovation: seeking "to explain human affects through their
first causes." So his account of the affects may be most profitably
compared to Descartes's in his *Passions of the Soul*. It may
also be usefully compared to accounts in the writings of Hobbes
(especially *Leviathan* VI), a contemporary who shared many of
Spinoza's philosophical commitments, or to some of the "traditional
accounts" which Spinoza faults, such as Aquinas's *Summa
Theologiae*. (Aquinas's treatments of the passions appear mainly
between Ia75 and 2a2ae189.)




Spinoza, though, because he denies freedom of the will, is more
thorough than Descartes in his commitment to naturalism. This
commitment makes the task Spinoza undertakes in the *Ethics* an
even more dramatic revision of traditional understandings of the
passions than that which Descartes produced. So Spinoza, even more
than Descartes, is open to the sort of objection which traditional
authors, those to whom it seems beyond question that human beings are
outside nature, might raise: how can the full range of human
psychological phenomena be produced by natural causes? For the
argument of the *Ethics* to succeed, Spinoza must produce,
first, an account of how human desires and emotions might be a part of
nature as he has presented it in the *Ethics* and, second, a
description of those human desires and emotions which is plausibly
complex, that is, plausibly consistent with our experience of
ourselves. The subsections which follow address these issues in turn.



### 2.1 The Affects and Striving




The human affects, for Spinoza, are a part of nature insofar as each
can be redescribed in terms of striving, a property which all
particular things in nature share. Desire and its varieties are
striving itself, under a certain description. Human passions are for
Spinoza changes, that is, increases or decreases, in the power with
which we, or parts of us, strive. Active affects are all increases in
the power with which we strive.




Spinoza introduces the first of his primary affects, desire, at
IIIp9s, directly after introducing the doctrine of human striving,
which, in its most general form, he calls appetite.



> III Proposition 9, Scholium: ...Between appetite and
> desire there is no difference, except that desire is generally related
> to men insofar as they are conscious of the appetite. So desire can be
> defined as appetite together with consciousness of the
> appetite.




Thus Spinoza identifies human desire with human essence and especially
with consciousness of one's essence, the striving for perseverance in
being. Spinoza's theory of consciousness is notoriously difficult, and
it is not clear which ideas in a human mind are conscious or the
extent to which things other than human beings have consciousness. For
human beings, at least, however, what seems to us to cause us to act,
our desire, does, on Spinoza's view, do just that. If I am asked for
the proximate cause of my action in picking up my coffee cup, for
example, I will respond that it was my desire for the coffee. In
identifying the cause of human action, striving, with conscious
desire, then, IIIp9s vindicates common sense to a degree. Had Spinoza
identified desire with something other than striving, then he would
have committed himself to the view that my desire does not in fact
cause me to pick up the cup. (Desire for Spinoza, in its narrow
definition at IIIp9s, is both psychological and physical, and in its
broader definition at III, Definitions of the Affects I, it may be
either. This example therefore, perhaps despite appearances, need not run
afoul of Spinoza's denial of mind-body interaction.)




IIIp9s, then, goes a long way toward showing how the universal
striving doctrine can be the basis for an account of human desire. A
serious problem remains, however. Although we tend to see desire as
the proximate cause of action, we tend also to conceive of desire as
involving teleology or final causes. If desire causes me to pick up
the cup, how does it do so? The common-sense answer is
teleological: I have, as an end, coffee, and I am, in a sense, drawn
toward it. Spinoza is well-aware of the fact that we commonly
suppose that there are teleological causes of our actions, and some accounts of appetite in the *Ethics*, notably IVd7, seem to incorporate teleological notions. However, Spinoza also explicitly denies that appetite is anything other than an efficient cause. This passage is from Part IV's Preface:



> What is called a final cause is nothing but a human
> appetite insofar as it is considered as a principle, or primary cause,
> of some thing. For example, when we say that habitation was the final
> cause of this or that house, surely we understand nothing but that a
> man, because he imagined the conveniences of domestic life, had an
> appetite to build a house. So habitation, insofar as it is considered
> as a final cause, is nothing more than this singular appetite. It is
> really an efficient cause, which is considered as a first cause,
> because men are commonly ignorant of the causes of their
> appetites.




Spinoza does not clearly deny, here, that there are teleological causes of
action. (For arguments against the view that Spinoza denies all
teleology, see Garrett 1999 and Lin 2006. Carriero 2005 is an influential argument that Spinoza does deny all teleology.) He does, however, identify such causes
with efficient causes. He needs to show, then, how the ends of human
action relate to the processes of efficient causation. 




For this task, Spinoza introduces the other primary affects and a
number of psychological laws associated with them. He introduces the
primary passions at IIIp11s.



> III Proposition 11, Scholium: We see, then, that the mind
> can undergo great changes, and pass now to a greater, now to a lesser
> perfection. These passions, indeed, explain to us the affects of Joy
> [*laetitia*] and Sadness [*tristitia*]. By Joy,
> therefore, I shall understand in what follows that passion by which the
> mind passes to a greater perfection. And by Sadness, that passion by
> which it passes to a lesser perfection.




The perfectionist language Spinoza uses is important for an
understanding of the basis for ethics that he finds in psychology.
Here, however, it may be understood in terms of striving. An increased
power to persevere in being is for Spinoza a transition to greater
perfection and a decreased power is a transition to lesser perfection
(see IIIp11, the end of IV Preface, and especially III, Definitions of
the Affects, III, Exp.). So, although this generalization is
complicated by Spinoza's definitions that refer passions either to
parts of the body or to the body as whole, joy is the passion one
experiences in the transition to an increased power to strive, and
sadness is the passion one experiences in the opposite
transition. Spinoza thus provides, in his account of the affects, the
basis for an explanation of how it is that introspection into our
conscious experience of desire might fail to bring us accurate
knowledge of our own psychological processes. Our conscious
experience in forming our desires, has an emotional component: we experience
joy and sadness and varieties of these. But we may be unaware of why
we feel joy or sadness or why, really, we desire what we desire. So
Spinoza writes repeatedly, in the context of his criticisms of
teleological reasoning and the introspective experiences of free will
or mind/body causation (e.g., at IIIp2s): "men are conscious of their
actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined."




Spinoza characterizes the apparent teleology in desire at IIIp28:



> We strive to promote the occurrence of whatever we imagine
> will lead to joy, and to avert or destroy what we imagine is contrary
> to it, or will lead to sadness.




Spinoza reserves the term 'imagine' [*imaginor*]
for the description of conscious states, so IIIp28 describes, at least
in part, the objects of desire. If I imagine that coffee will lead to
joy, then I will desire that joy and so that coffee. IIIp28, strictly
speaking, is not an exhaustive characterization of objects of desire.
It implies only that we desire anything which we imagine will lead to
joy and are averse to whatever we imagine will lead to sadness and not
that we might not have other kinds of desires also, desires unrelated
to either joy or sadness. A review of the particular forms of desire
Spinoza catalogues in Part III (see, notably, IIIp27c3s, IIIp29s,
IIIp40c2s,IIIp41, and IIIp56s) suggests, however, that the view is
still stronger than the limited claim of IIIp28: it seems that Spinoza
does hold that anything I desire will be a thing which I imagine will
lead to joy and that anything I am averse to will be something which I
imagine will lead to sadness.




What may seem on introspection, then, to be a wholly teleological
cause of action, the end represented by an object of desire, is for
Spinoza a peculiar manifestation in consciousness of striving, which
in turn is an efficient cause of action. I reach for the cup of
coffee, I may think, just because the joy that I anticipate in the
coffee "pulls" me to it; in fact, however, I reach for the coffee
because my characteristic striving (perhaps as a partial cause in
combination with other partial causes such as the memory of past
cups--IIIp36) has that effect. It "pushes" me toward the cup.


### 2.2 The Variety of Affects




Perhaps the psychological view that Spinoza introduces at IIIp28 is
susceptible to the sort of objection which one might raise against
psychological hedonism, the view that human beings only desire
pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and what is instrumental to these
things. It may seem to some people that IIIp28 is not consistent with
their own experience of their motives in acting. So, someone with a
strong sense of justice might say: 



> It's not that I like Jones or would get any joy from having
> him walk. I think the guy's a jerk, and I hate to think of him out on
> the street. But I want him to be released from prison. He simply did
> not do what he's been convicted of, so he should be set
> free.




On the basis of introspective observations like this one, one might
complain that, even if Spinoza's account of the affects can be shown
to be consistent with the general theory of striving as it is
presented at IIIp6, still the theory of affects is not itself a
realistically complex account of human desire, since it cannot account
for desires like this one in which, on the face of it, one anticipates
sadness in the desired end. The plausibility of Spinoza's view depends
upon the extent to which it can reasonably redescribe this desire, and
other similarly troubling desires, in ways which are consistent with
IIIp28.




Spinoza attempts to show that there are many varieties of joy, sadness,
and desire. Thus he might attempt to address the complaint by showing
that its author offers a slightly inaccurate description of the
situation:



> The author denies liking Jones. Let us suppose even that
> he hates Jones. Even so, that does not mean that the author
> anticipates no joy at all in Jones's release. Knowing that his
> society is just in at least this one case may reassure the author
> inasmuch as it gives him reason to think that he might be fairly
> treated himself. That is, it might be a kind of hope (IIIp18s2) which
> motivates the desire. Or perhaps there are people the author likes,
> his fellow citizens generally perhaps, to whom he wishes a similar
> peace of mind. The author may want the release in order to find a kind
> of joy, whether it be out of his ambition to please them or simply out
> of his human kindness (IIIp29s) or nobility (IIIp59s), in the
> well-being of these other people.




Far from insisting that there is one particular kind of emotion that
moves people, Spinoza writes that there is an innumerable variety of
affects:



> III Proposition 56: There are as many species of Joy,
> Sadness and Desire, and consequently of each affect composed of these
> (like vacillation of mind) or derived from them (like love, hate, hope,
> fear, etc.), as there are objects by which we are
> affected.




IIIp51 assures us, moreover, that the same object might affect
different people, or even the same person at different times, in
different ways. So Spinoza protects himself from the charge that IIIp28
is obviously false (albeit at the risk of forwarding an unfalsifiable
psychological claim) by arguing that, despite the seeming simplicity of
that proposition, it cannot be falsified by the great variety of
conscious human motives.




Although Spinoza repeatedly insists that the variety of affects is
innumerable, he nevertheless does characterize, in his own terms, many
of the traditional passions, each of which is a kind of joy,
sadness, or desire. A few of Spinoza's
particular accounts are notable.



**Pity** (*commiseratio*) is for Spinoza a species
of sadness, sadness that arises from injury to another (IIIp22s), and
so to feel pity, on Spinoza's view is to experience a decrease in
one's own power to persevere in being. If continued perseverance in
being is what virtuous agents seek, then, Spinoza will be committed to
the view that pity is not a virtue. Indeed, Spinoza writes at IVp50c,
"A man who lives according to the dictates of reason, strives, as far
as he can, not to be touched by pity." So Spinoza stands apart from
traditional Christian views on this subject (and also on the subjects
of humility and repentance), and with Hobbes who conceives of pity in
*Leviathan* VI as a kind of grief and so a decreasing of human
perfection. This revisionary tendency in his thought is tempered,
however, by IIIp54, where he presents pity, and also the other
traditional Christian virtues of humility and repentance, as, if not
genuine virtues themselves, at least means to virtue, by which people
are made more able to come to learn to follow the dictates of
reason.



**Self-esteem** (*acquiescentia in se ipso*) which
Spinoza introduces at IIIp30 as Joy accompanied by the idea of oneself
as an internal cause becomes an important part of Spinoza's ethical
theory, a species of which is even blessedness (*beatitudo*,
see IV, App. 4), the highest form of human happiness. Human beings, as
finite modes, cannot on Spinoza's view avoid affecting and being
affected by external objects. Nevertheless, Spinoza's emphasis on
self-esteem and, in his ethical theory, on self-knowledge suggests
that to the extent that we are able to bring about effects, including our
own emotions, as whole or adequate causes of those effects we are more free and
better off. His remarks concerning the impossibility of controlling
the passions and the desirability of controlling them nevertheless to
the extent that we can (V Preface) similarly emphasize the ethical
importance of self-knowledge and freedom from external influences.



**Fear** (*metus*) and **wonder** (*admiratio*), together with the theory of the imitation of affects, are notions that are fundamental to Spinoza's accounts of human society. Reasonable citizens (or all citizens insofar as they are reasonable) will willingly obey the rules of the state (IVp37s2, IVp73). Fear, in the *Ethics*, seems to be government's most valuable means of bringing passionate citizens to cooperate and obey: at IVp37s2, Spinoza suggests that states should rely on threats. In the *Theological Political Treatise*, however, Spinoza's accounts of religion, and particularly of miracles and scripture, suggest that devotion *devotio*, a passion associated with wonder at *Ethics* IIIp52s, is a better political motive than fear. In Chapter 5, for example, Spinoza writes of Moses's introduction of religion into the Hebrew state:



> Two things in particular forced this on him: the stubborn mentality of the people (because it would not allow itself to be compelled solely by force) and the threat of war. For if war is to go well, it is better to encourage the soldiers than to frighten them with penalties and threats. In this way they will be eager to distinguish themselves for excellence and nobility of spirit rather than merely to avoid punishment.




The theory of the imitation of affects informs these and other accounts of social dynamics in Spinoza. Human beings tend, he argues, to imitate the affects of those that we take to be similar to ourselves (IIIp27), and we tend, when we feel a given affect toward a person whom we take to differ from us, to feel that same affect toward that person's whole class or nation (IIIp46). Spinoza grounds these doctrines on a series of claims about our associative tendencies at *Ethics* IIIpp14-24. 




Finally, **active joy** and **active desire**
which Spinoza introduces at IIIp58 represent a separate class of
affects notable both for their novelty against the background of
traditional accounts of the passions and also for their importance to
Spinoza's ethical arguments of Parts IV and V. On traditional accounts
of the passions, even Descartes's (*The Passions of the Soul*,
I.1), actions and passions are the same thing, regarded from different
perspectives: when A does X to B, X is an action for A but a passion
for B. For Spinoza, however, anything which follows in a person where
that person is an "inadequate" or partial cause of the thing, is a
passion, and anything that follows where a person is an "adequate" or
total cause of the thing is an action. Thus Spinoza's class of active
affects places a strong emphasis on people's roles as total causes of
what they do; because it becomes for Spinoza ethically important that a
person be active rather than passive, that emphasis raises a host of
questions about the extent to which a person, a particular thing
interacting constantly with other things and indeed requiring some of
them for sustenance, can come to resist passion and guide himself by
means of joy and the active desires. 




Because joy and sadness as introduced at IIIp11s are passions, all
of the desires arising from them or species of them are passive as
well, that is, they are not desires which arise from a person's
striving alone but only as a partial cause in combination with other,
ultimately external causes. Active joy, which must include at least
some types of warranted self-esteem, and active desires, among which
Spinoza lists at IIIp59s tenacity (*animositas*) and nobility
(*generositas*), are wholly active however; that is, they are
emotions and desires that people have only insofar as they are adequate
causes, or genuine actors. (Notice that sadness cannot ever be an
active emotion. People cannot, insofar as they are active bring it
about that their power of acting is decreased, so passive sadness,
unlike passive joy and desire, has no active counterpart.)




Of these active affects, the most important for an interpretation of
Spinoza's ethics and political philosophy is likely
nobility. Spinoza's predominant egoism, together with some of his
still stronger statements of psychological egoism such as that at I
Appendix, suggest that individuals are not, or are not often,
altruistic. Moreover, his ethics, with its emphasis on self-esteem and
self-knowledge appears in ways to be an individualistic one: the good,
when I attain it, is a perfection of myself, not of society or the
world. However, Spinoza does offer an argument (IVp37) for the view
that any good that I want for myself I will have reason to want for
others as well, and, in the *Ethics*, this argument forms the
basis of morality and the state (IVp37s1 and s2, respectively). This
is also a theme of the opening sections of the *Treatise on the
Emendation of the Intellect* (see, especially, Spinoza (1), II/8
23-II/9 3). Nobility is the active affect most closely related to
Spinoza's views about morality and the state. As Spinoza defines it,
it is a wholly active desire to join others in friendship and to aid
them. It helps to supply, in Spinoza theory of the affects, a basis
for the view that aiding others is virtuous and rational.



***Further reading***: Recent interpretations of
Spinoza's theory of consciousness include Miller 2007, Garrett 2008,
Nadler 2008, LeBuffe 2010c, and Marshall 2014. For a discussion of
Spinoza's rejection of Cartesianism and of the theory of action that
follows from his theory of ideas, see Della Rocca 2003. For
discussions of Spinoza's theory of affects in a comparative framework,
see Voss 1981 and 1993, Hoffman 1991, and James 1997. For discussions
of the relationship between striving and the affects, see these works
and also Della Rocca 2008a, which is critical of Spinoza's view,
LeBuffe 2009, Davidson 1999, and Schrijvers 1999. Bennett 1990, Curley
1990, Della Rocca 1996, Garrett 1999, and Lin 2006 discuss Spinoza's
views on teleology. For a discussion of the connection between the
affects and desire in 3p28, see LeBuffe 2010a, Chapters 5-7 and
Della Rocca 2008b pp. 156-172. Voss 1981 and 1993 offers an
interpretation and a history of Spinoza's accounts of particular
affects. Lloyd 1994 offers accounts of various particular
affects. For discussions of self-esteem, see Rutherford
1999 and Carlisle 2017. For discussion of fear and wonder, see LeBuffe 2015 and 2018, Chapter Four. For accounts of imitation of affects, see Della Rocca 2008b, Chapter 4 and Shapiro 2017. For discussion of nobility, see Youpa 2020, Chapter 10. 


## 3. The Psychological Basis for a Theory of Value




Spinoza's insistence that human beings not be treated as a dominion
within a dominion includes a commitment to ethical naturalism also.
Just as he insists that the human mind must be explicable in terms of
the laws which govern nature, so he insists that ethical properties,
which he sometimes characterizes as human "modes of thinking," be
explicable in terms of natural ones. The theory of the affects serves
Spinoza's ethical naturalism by introducing explanations of ethical
concepts, most importantly the concepts of good, evil, and perfection,
in psychological terms. In his ethics, Spinoza in some way "retains
these words," although he may be understood to do so under some formal
refinement or revision of them (See IV Preface). So his discussions of
good and evil and of human perfection in Part III provide the basis for
the formal ethical argument which follows in Parts IV and V. 


### 3.1 Good and Evil as Modes of Thinking




Before defining 'good' and 'evil' formally,
Spinoza at IV Preface regards good and evil as labels, "modes of
thinking," that human beings apply to things but which really reveal
little about the things to which they are applied: 



> As far as good and evil are concerned, they also indicate
> nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they
> anything other than modes of thinking, or notions we form because we
> compare things to one another. For one and the same thing can be good,
> and [evil], and also indifferent. For example, Music is good for one
> who is melancholy, [evil to] one who is mourning, and neither good nor
> [evil] to one who is deaf.




The phrase "nothing positive in things" means perhaps that an
observer of people would find that 'good' and
'evil', as people use them are two place predicates rather
than one place predicates. If Martha calls music evil, then, what that
indicates to one who knows about the human use of these terms is that
the music is evil to Martha. Moreover, since the same music can be good
or evil for different people, or for people in different states, the
two-place predication reveals more about Martha than about the music.
It must be some fact about the person, rather than some fact about the
thing called good or evil, that is of central importance to the
understanding of the label.




IIIp9s suggests that the fact about the person which the label
reveals is her conative state:



> It is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither
> want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the
> contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will
> it, want it, and desire it.




Spinoza finds that the designation of a thing as good follows from a
person's conative state: Martha is averse to music and therefore she
calls it evil. Should the music become good to another person, or
perhaps Martha herself in different circumstances, it would not be
because the music has changed, but because the person's conative state
is different: she desires the music. (This analysis of the good is
similar to Hobbes's at *Leviathan VI*. Maimonides, another of
Spinoza's influences, also has a similar analysis:
*Guide of the Perplexed*, III, 13.)



IIIp39s builds upon IIIp9s. There Spinoza writes that, "each
one, from his own affect, judges, or evaluates, what is good and what
is [evil]...So the greedy man judges an abundance of money best,
and poverty worst. The ambitious man desires nothing so much as esteem
and dreads nothing so much as shame." However, IIIp39s also uses
Spinoza's theory of the affects to introduce new definitions of
good and evil:



> By good here I understand every kind of joy, and whatever
> leads to it, and especially whatever satisfies any kind of longing,
> whatever that may be. And by evil, every kind of sadness and especially
> what frustrates longing.




IIIp28, the proposition establishing Spinoza's doctrine that human
beings desire whatever will bring joy and are averse to whatever will
lead to sadness, allows Spinoza to connect the objects of any human
desire with joy or the avoidance of sadness. So, if it is true that we
call a thing good only if we desire it, then it will also be true that
anything we call good will be joy or what leads to it. Understood in
this way, IIIp39s simply restates the doctrine of IIIp9s in light of
IIIp28.




However, Spinoza might be extending rather than merely restating his
position at IIIp39s. Every kind of joy we experience is not presumably
a result of conscious desire, and Spinoza allows at IIIP39s that these
instances of joy (i.e., those which do not satisfy any kind of
longing) are also good. On this view, not only is whatever Martha desires good
for her, but, in addition, anything which she does not desire but
which nonetheless might bring her joy will also be good. Perhaps, for example, Martha will take delight in a view that she never anticipated, a serendipitous good. IIIp39s, so understood, identifies the good and evil for a person with broader
classes of things, and makes possible an analysis of good and evil in
terms of something other than an individual person's current
desires. Because, in giving an account of the right way of living in
Parts IV and V, Spinoza presumably urges people to desire and do
things in a way different from what they desire and do already, this
broadening of the application of the terms 'good' and
'evil' (to apply to things other than what people
presently desire or are averse to) contributes to the plausibility of
his ethical naturalism.


### 3.2 The Psychological Basis for Perfectionism




The meaning of 'perfection' (*perfectio*) in
various passages of the *Ethics* is obscured by the fact that
Spinoza uses the term both in what he takes to be its common meaning
and also in a narrow, formal sense. In some passages, such as IV
Preface, Spinoza treats perfection, like good and evil, to be a label
that people apply to things, to be explained in terms of those
people's use of the label: people call a thing perfect which conforms
to the model of the thing that they create for themselves. In other
passages, however, Spinoza treats perfection as whatever is "positive"
or "real" in a thing, a genuine property, and this concept forms part
of his formal apparatus (IId6).




Both senses of the term occur in Spinoza's analysis of human
perfection. At IV Preface Spinoza invokes a concept of perfection
based upon a model of human nature that we set before ourselves. And
Spinoza describes perfection of the human mind in terms of its power
of thinking, as we have already seen, at IIIp11 and its scholium: the
mind's power of thinking is its perfection; joy is an increase in that
power or a passage to a greater perfection; and sadness is a decrease
in that power or a passage to a lesser perfection.




Thus Spinoza has two different accounts of human perfection which
might contribute to the perfectionist language of the ethical argument
that he develops in various ways in Parts IV and V. Although the first
account contributes to both Spinoza's formal definitions of good and
evil and also, probably, to the "free man" propositions of Part IV, it
is perhaps the second account which is of greater importance. It,
after all, resonates with Spinoza's account of the good at IIIp39s,
and so comes to form part of a consistent moral view: if the good is
any form of joy (IIIp39s) and joy is the passage to a greater
perfection (IIIp11s), then the good is whatever makes us more
perfect. On the other hand, the first account might imply a different
set of norms from IIIp39s: it seems that we may have different models
of human nature that we set before ourselves, and that they may or may
not include the various things that give us joy. Perhaps the formal
account of perfection at IId6 and later at IIIp11 give Spinoza a means
of reformulating the idea of perfection as a model of human nature in
a way which reconciles the two senses of the term: the ideal we set
before ourselves will be a person who possesses the greatest possible
power of action. This would be, in effect, to correlate our
systematically distorted ways of perceiving ourselves--as free
agents pursuing as an end a model of human nature--with the
causes that really determine our actions.


Of course, the question of what an outside observer may infer from
another person's use of moral language, for example that what a person
finds good is something in which she anticipates pleasure or that
makes her more powerful, is different from the questions of what a
person using moral language takes that language to mean or what
Spinoza takes moral language to mean. The analyses discussed here
invite reductionist interpretations, on which, for example
"good" just means pleasant, but the thesis that people
consistently find pleasant things good is perfectly consistent with
any number of different theses about what they mean by that
designation and about what it really means to be good. Reconciling
Spinoza's psychological theses about moral language use in Part III of
the *Ethics* with what appear to straightforward, richer and
non-reductive theses about morality in Parts IV and V is one of the
biggest challenges facing interpreters of Spinoza.



***Further Reading***: Curley 1988, Delahunty
1985, Garrett 1996, Yovel 1999, LeBuffe 2010a, Chapters 8 and 9, and
Kisner 2010 offer accounts of Spinoza's ethical language as it relates
to his psychology. For a discussion of Spinoza's views on perfection,
see Garrett 1996, Allison 1987, Wolfson 1934, LeBuffe 2010c, and Carriero 2011.