Generositas sive Amor

2. Generositas sive Amor “Stages on Love’s Way” • The Aesthetic • Love (amor): “pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause” (E3p13s) • The Ethical • Nobility (generositas): “the desire by which each person, in accordance with the dictate of reason alone, endeavors to help other men and join them to him in friendship” (E3p59s) • The Religious • The intellectual love of God (amordeiintellectualis); pleasure accompanied by the idea of God as cause

3. Part Three: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions • Definitions • Emotion: affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, and at the same time the ideas of these affections • Conatus: Prop. 6: Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persevere in its being. • Three primary emotions: • Desire: the very essence of man • Pleasure: man’s transition from a lesser to a greater perfection • Pain: the opposite of pleasure

4. The Dynamics of Love and Hate • Love and Hate defined in e3p13s • Prop. 43: Hatred is increased by reciprocal hatred, and conversely can be destroyed by love. • Prop. 48: Love and hatred towards (for example) Peter is destroyed if the pain which the latter, and the pleasure which the former, involves is joined to the idea of another cause; also, each of the two is diminished in so far as we imagine Peter not to have been the sole cause of either.

5. Courage: desire by which each person endeavors to preserve his own being by the dictate of reason alone Temperance, sobriety, presence of mind in danger Nobility: desire by which each person endeavors to help others and join them to him in friendship Modesty, clemency Fortitude (E3p59s)

6. How does Spinoza understand the terms “good” and “bad”? • E3p39s: “pleasure” and “pain” respectively • These are relative terms; each person judges in accordance with his own emotions. • E4: Preface: These indicate nothing positive in things themselves; they are simply ways of thinking. • An example: music

7. Nevertheless, Spinoza retains these terms. • “Good” will mean whatever we know with certainty to help us become an exemplar of human nature or a free person. • An exemplar “endeavors to lead all others by reason (and) is not led by impulse, but acts humanely and benevolently, and is self-consistent in the highest degree” (E4p37s1) • A free person is determined by reason and would consequently only know good and desire the good of all, since “the knowledge of what is bad is inadequate knowledge” (E4p64; cf. E5p10s).

8. “A free person hates no one, is angry with no one, envies no one, is indignant with no one, despises no one, and is far from being proud” (E4p73s). • We can also note that a free person would avoid the emotions of compassion, pity, humility, and repentance, since all of these are passions based on pain.

9. More on the free and wise person • Makes use of things and delights in them as much as he can • Renews and refreshes himself with moderate and pleasant food and drink, and also with scents, plant, dress, music, sports, and theatre…without harming anyone else (E4p45s) • Shows fortitude and nobility (E4p46, E4p73s, E5p10s) • Doesn’t fear death (E4p67, E5p38) • Is powerful and possesses true contentment of the mind (E5p42s)

10. Passions Inadequate ideas: desires defined through power of external things Servitude: human weakness in moderating and checking the passions The power of external forces infinitely surpasses our own power Actions Adequate ideas: desires following from our nature alone Freedom: act according to the necessity of one’s own being; man’s essence is his virtue/ power (E4def8) We have no absolute rule over the passions, but two individuals in union are more powerful than one (E4p18s) Servitude vs. Freedom

11. The Power of the Intellect • The way leading to freedom (i.e., virtue, happiness, blessedness, salvation, contentment) involves the power of reason checking and controlling the emotions. • Separation of emotion and thought (belief) • E5p2: If we remove a disturbance of the mind, i.e. an emotion, from the thought of an external cause, and join that disturbance of the mind to other thoughts, then the love or hatred towards the external cause, as well as waverings of the mind that arise from these emotions, will be destroyed.

12. Comment: This explains how we may rationally understand emotions and opens the way for a form of cognitive therapy. If thought (belief) is an essential component of emotion, and we can destroy or weaken the belief, then we will weaken the emotion. Cf. E3p43 this means that two wrongs never make a right and that only “positive energy” can overcome “negative energy.” Cf. E5p10s

13. E5p3: An emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it. • E5p6: In so far as the mind understands all things as necessary, so far it has a greater power over the emotions, or, it suffers less from them. • E5p15: The person who understands himself and his emotions clearly and distinctly loves God, and the more so, the more he understands himself and his emotions.

14. Summary of the Remedies for the Emotions (E5p20s) • Adequate knowledge of the emotions • Insofar as we lack perfect knowledge we should follow fixed rules of life that are certain (E5p10s) • Separation of emotions from thoughts of external causes • The order in which the mind can arrange and interconnect its emotions

15. Towards an Intellectual Love of God • E5p24: The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God. • E5p25: The highest endeavor of the mind, and its highest virtue, is to understand things by the third kind of knowledge. • Such knowledge involves conceiving things “under a species of eternity”: things conceived as timelessly related to a timeless God; not everlasting existence (E5p29)

16. E5p32: Whatever we understand by the third kind of knowledge we are pleased with, and this is accompanied by the idea of God as its cause. • Corollary: From the third kind of knowledge there necessarily arises the intellectual love of God. • E5p42: Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself. Nor do we enjoy blessedness because we restrain our lusts; on the contrary, it is because we enjoy it that we can restrain our lusts. • Comment: Spinoza thus rejects life-denying religions preparing for some future state; the primary aim of ethics should be joyous living here and now.