Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine

CHAPTER 3 A Psychodynamic Theory of Affects

spinoza’s theory of affects represents one of the most innovative parts of his philosophy. It preWgures in a crucial way what Freud called the drama of the narcissist blow meted out to the ego.1 Although the theory of affects presents a radical and consistent attack against conventional conceptions of self, mind, body, and soul, it seems that this challenge has gone largely unnoticed in the historiography of philosophy.2 Nevertheless, Spinoza’s systematic examination of the role and functioning of the affects has profoundly informed modern theorizing in moral philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics. Philosophy has traditionally viewed emotions and passions as some sort of disturbance if not nuisance to the project of understanding the mind and achieving ethical perfection.3 This has not only been true for Plato, Aristotle, and the classic philosophical tradition they engendered. Even the age of new science, which—following the cue of Epicureanism —was eager to mark its radical break with classic philosophy, did not bring about much change in this respect. While Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Hobbes gave attention, for the Wrst time, to the importance of the emotions and passions as an issue central for a sound comprehension of human nature, their philosophies did not provide a sufWcient explanation of the operative nexus between the emotions, the passions, and the mind. But if this nexus did indeed exist, as these philosophers claimed, adequate examination of it seemed warranted. 45 c h a p t e r 3
a psychodynamic theory of affects The classic dichotomy dividing human soul into the higher faculty of the active mind and the passive animal drive associated with the body made it impossible to theorize how emotions and passions would affect the mind in more than coincidental ways. In the classic Platonic image of cage and prisoner,4 the mind’s autonomy was conceptually locked in the idea of human nature divided into mind on the one hand and body on the other. This view, however, skewed the determining role that the stirring dynamics of the emotions and passions played in guiding if not controlling human life. Spinoza not only recognized the need to address this problem but realized that philosophical anthropology had to be grounded in an understanding of human nature that would no longer seek to separate the psychological aspects from the ontological substratum that undergirds them. This departure from the traditional mind-body dichotomy allowed Spinoza to address emotions and passions in the face of their unmitigated ontological signiWcance. As a consequence, emotions and passions are seen as natural forces and no longer to be feared as irrational. Determining human actions in a natural way, they can now be understood to follow a logic of their own. As a result, affects present for Spinoza a natural part in the constitution of rationality.5 To control them requires not only a better psychological grasp of their functioning but an ontologically consistent conception of the mechanics, or more precisely, the psychodynamic economy, that regulates mind and body. This emphasis on the embeddedness of the mind within an ontological framework makes it possible to consider emotions and passions as more than merely by-products of our material existence. Based on the Wrst two parts of the Ethics—a universal ontology and a theory of knowledge production—the second half develops a theory of the passions that reconWgures the traditional view of action and agency from the bottom up. While the conventional distinction between action and passion rests on a particular conception of autonomy and heteronomy , Spinoza questions the very assumptions on which these distinctions are based. In reformulating the concepts of freedom and necessity on the grounds of a reconstructed metaphysics, Spinoza pushes the discussion to the point of almost complete reversal of the traditional meaning of these two concepts. Acknowledging the degree to which human agency is steeped in the realm of passions, Spinoza’s project of the liberation from dependence on, and even servitude to, the passions marks a critical turn.6 46 spinoza’s modernity Theories of human nature, from Plato to Descartes and Hobbes, have always assumed a clear and distinct difference between autonomy and heteronomy. But this was only possible by presupposing a preexistent, indestructible, unchangeable inner core of a self or ego, however this might be deWned. Exposing the problematic assumptions of this presupposition , the Ethics refutes such positing of the ego as a Wrm and invariable point of...