![]() ![]() Ideas and physical bodies, or “things,” are related by affect. If something is close to a happy object then it can become happy by association. you are given something by somebody whom you love, then the object itself acquires more affective value: just seeing it can make you think of another who gave you that something. This ordering of relations remind me of what Sara Ahmed says about affects being “sticky.” This is about resonance or resonance capability ( Resonanzfähigkeit). Related entities, or “finite things,” resonate, thus forming order from disorder.Īffect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects. Encounters and the modifications in which they result are complex events, complex productions of order. Because Spinoza adheres to a strict determinism, this placing of emotions in the broadest possible context carries with it the obligation to consider the intersection of multiple chains of causation. ![]() Affects occur between finite things on the basis of their mutual relations, in the context of an infinitely productive Nature. Spinoza avoids what we moderns would understand as the opposition of emotion and cognition, by insisting that affects are emergent orderings of the relational field made up in the encounter between manifold finite beings. His project is thus perhaps closer to those contemporary explorations of the production of order from disorder in physical and social worlds.īy describing affect as all modifications of finite things, which result in increases or decreases of the potential to act, Spinoza dislodges “the emotions” from the realm of responses and situations and ties them firmly to action and encounters. What takes place as an affect (an emotion) is an ordering of the relations between bodies and between ideas that shows forth as a decision or a determination for action. This is described in the basic distinction between affects of “joy” or “euphoria” ( laelitiae) that increase power or those of “sorrow” or “dysphoria” ( tristitiae) that decrease power. 3).Īffect, as an emergent property of the encounter, takes the form of either an increase or diminishment of the finite individual’s power to act. “By EMOTION (affectus) I understand the modifications of the body by which the power of action of the body is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time the idea of these modifications.” (E. Spinoza describes the outcome of encounters in terms of emotion or affect: As such, the precise kind of modification experienced depends upon the exact nature of relations that are possible between two individuals qua complex bodies. Modifications occur in encounters between the individual and other finite things (themselves manifold). There is no room for transcendental explanations in Spinozism. The proximate cause of a finite thing is always another finite thing rather than an omnipotent intervention or a mysterious act of will. God alone is causa sui or cause-of-itself (being infinite, there is logically nothing outside God upon which God might depend). Spinoza, then, makes a distinction between the formal cause (God/Nature) and the proximal cause of a modification (an encounter with another finite thing). for ethical reasons, Cartesianism interiorizes or individualizes the emotions, which thereby become merely symptomatic of more or less tolerated “leakages” in the rational disciplining of our individual lives. The apparent conviction within psychology, demonstrated by endless debates between physiological psychologists and cognitivists, naturalists and constructionists, that emotions must be either biological systems (aspects of extension) or cognitive, linguistic, and social processes (aspects of thought) bears testimony to the grip Cartesianism exerts. Brown & Paul Stenner (2001). “Being Affected: Spinoza and The Psychology of Emotion.” International Journal of Group Tensions, Vol.
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