We will now introduce, after Descartes, Derrida, and Damasio, the fourth participant in our discussion: Spinoza. Why this order? What is striking when we read book 3 of the Ethics is that no individual subject properly speaking ever appears to be the locus of affects. It is not a subject—the word is not used by Spinoza—who is affected. The processes of affections and emotions take place at an entirely ontological level that does not require the power or the autonomy of human subjectivity.
In his preface, Spinoza precisely develops a critique of Descartes’s conception of passions considered as affects of the human subject proper, a subject that exists as an independent substance “outside Nature.” Spinoza writes: “Most of those who have written about the emotions (affectibus) and human conduct seem to be dealing not with natural phenomena that follow the common law of Nature but with phenomena outside Nature. They appear to go so far as to conceive man in Nature as a kingdom within a kingdom.… They assign the cause of human weakness and frailty not to the power of Nature in general, but to some defect in human nature.”1 The critique of Descartes becomes explicit a few lines further: “I know, indeed, that the renowned Descartes, though he too believed that the mind has absolute power over its actions, does explain human emotions through their first causes, and has also zealously striven to show how the mind can have absolute control over the emotions.”2 Spinoza contests the idea of an autonomous mind controlling its own defects, which are also its own affects: “But my argument is this: in Nature nothing happens which can be attributed to its defectiveness, for Nature is always the same, and its force and power of acting is everywhere one and the same.… Therefore the emotions [affects] of hatred, anger, envy, etc., considered as themselves, follow from the same necessity and force of Nature as all other particular things.”3
Affects do not belong to the human mind as such but appear as natural ontological phenomena, the causes of which have to be rigorously determined. Because there is no such thing as “defect” in nature, affects cannot proceed from a failure; and, the human mind has no independence. This also implies that the mind and body are not two distinct instances, but two expressions of the same substance, which is Nature, Being, or God.4 This substance expresses itself through its own attributes (thought and extension) and modes (finite beings).
If affects are affects of Nature, if they do not belong to the human subject as such, and if Nature is equivalent to God and therefore to Being, it implies that affects are always affects of Being. This is exactly what Deleuze says when he declares: “Be it as it may, every affection [affect] is affection of essence. Thus the passions belong to essence no less than the actions; the inadequate ideas [belong] to essence no less than the adequate ideas.”5
Are we facing, with Spinoza, an “ontological generosity” (to use Derrida’s phrase) that is not related to human subjectivity? Are we confronted with a genuine theory of heteroaffection? It seems that Deleuze and Damasio agree on that point: the Spinozist theory of affects exceeds the realm of consciousness and subjectivity. Deleuze brings to light a theory of a nonsubjective autoaffection in Spinoza, an element that seems to confirm the similarity of his reading to Damasio’s. There is a deconstructive gesture in Spinoza before “deconstruction.”
Damasio’s and Deleuze’s readings differ nevertheless on many points. First, Deleuze’s reading is not anti-Cartesian, but insists, on the contrary, upon a certain unexpected proximity between Spinoza and Descartes. Second, and more profoundly, the ontological value of affects in Spinoza is not interpreted in the same way by these two authors. For Deleuze, analyzing affects at the ontological level means that every being, including God, is affected in some way, which blurs the importance of human subjectivity and locates affectivity at the very heart of essence and ideas. For Damasio, “ontological” is another name for “biological.” To situate affects at an ontological, nonsubjective level is the prefiguration of the neutral and anonymous biological processes of mapping body and mind together through neuronal activity.
General Structure of Book 3
Book 3 of Spinoza’s Ethics, “Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Affects,” comprises two parts. The first part comprises the fifty-nine propositions; the second is formed by a conclusion entitled “Definitions of the Emotions [Affects].”6
Affects and Conatus’s Variability
Propositions 1–5
The three first definitions characterize (1) what an “adequate cause” is (a cause whose effect can be clearly and distinctly perceived, in opposition to situations when the effect is not clearly and distinctly perceived as belonging to a cause, which are “inadequate causes”); (2) the distinction between passivity and activity; (3) what an affect is. “By emotion (affectus),” Spinoza writes, “I understand the affections of the body by which the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these affections.”7
The link between inadequacy, affects, and passivity, induced by these three propositions, has to be understood in a way totally different than that of the traditional mode of understanding passions. Again, we should not regard passions as weaknesses in and of human nature. In that sense, if we have to admit a certain passivity due to affects, it cannot be the result of movements of the body, inadequately caused, on the soul. An action of the body cannot be regarded, contrary to what Descartes affirms, as a passion in the mind. It is equally useless to try to isolate a specific kind of passion that is a passion of the soul, or mind, proper.
Our body is a determined set of relations of movement and rest, and our mind is the idea of our body. Body and mind are two expressions of the same nature, one expressed through the attribute of extension, the other through the attribute of thought. It is hence impossible to consider actions of the body as causing effects in the mind. The same argument prevails when it comes to ideas: We have clear ideas and confused ideas, says Spinoza in proposition 9. But, if we say that our confused ideas come from our bodies, then we go back to Descartes’s explanation of passions as defects that have to be referred to the weakness of human nature. Body and mind are always affected together and in the same way.
How can we understand this point? The theory of the conatus answers this issue. Its presentation makes the difference between Spinozist and Cartesian developments of affects and passions even clearer and stronger. Here is the definition of the conatus: “Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being.” The conatus is an ontological tendency that implies persistence and perseverance in one’s being: “The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.”8 This tendency is one and the same with life itself, with the drive to survive and the preservation instinct. Both the body and the mind endeavor to persist in their own being, as Spinoza shows in proposition 9. This tendency is common to them both. The conatus, however, is not to be regarded as a third term, contrary to the Cartesian theory of the soul-body union as a third substance. The conatus is one tendency that can be envisaged differently if one looks at it from the bodily side or from the mind’s side. There is therefore no such thing as an inner feeling of the unity between body and mind; the conatus is never subjectivated.
How, then, can we define affects? We saw that they could not be regarded either as bodily actions causing the mind to be passive or as passions of the mind alone. What is it, then, that is affected? If the conatus is an ontological tendency of the mind and the body jointly, affects cannot be actions of the body or passions of the soul. They are necessarily affects of the conatus itself in its entirety. They therefore have to be considered variations of intensity in and of the conatus.
The conatus appears as the “power of acting” of a “thing.” This power—one would say today “empowerment”—is variable; it can be increased or diminished, assisted or checked. Whatever its disposition, our conatus is always affected in a certain way, always attuned. “Whatsoever increases or diminishes, assists or checks, the power of activity of our body, the idea of the said thing increases or diminishes, assists or checks the power of thought of our mind,” writes Spinoza.9 Therefore, passions cannot be considered as defects but as different degrees of variation of our power of acting.10 In effect, this tendency is modulable depending on what causes desire and on what kind affective echo accompanies this cause. Inadequate ideas are those that diminish the power of acting; adequate ideas, on the contrary, increase and strengthen it.
Propositions 11–52: Joy and Sorrow
How can we understand the variability of the conatus? There are two fundamental modalities of attunement, from which all other affects are derived, joy (laetitia) and sorrow (tristitia).11 Joy characterizes the active affects, those that allow the passage to a “greater perfection.” It means that joyful affects cause a greater desire and confer on the individual strength, courage, curiosity, wonder, and the will to act and to think. Sorrowful affects, by contrast, imply boredom, hatred, envy, anguish, and melancholy; they alienate the power of acting and check it in various ways: nostalgia, depression, despondency. Again, the conatus is not a rigid instance or a blind drive. On the contrary, it “undergoes considerable changes.”
We are now able to understand what Spinoza calls “passivity.” Passivity proceeds from sorrowful affects and the reduction of our empowerment. As Deleuze writes: “If we manage to produce active affections, our passive affections will be correspondingly reduced. And as far as we still have passive affections, our power of action will be correspondingly ‘inhibited.’”12 Hence, what constitutes the capacity to be affected and the locus of affects themselves is the difference between acting and suffering, a difference open to their inversely varying proportion. Affirmative or negative affects are not affects of a subject, but modifications of an ontological structure, which implies that it is not an “I” that is passive or active, but the conatus that, like a musical instrument, is played with more or less intensity.
In “Definitions of the Emotions,” at the end of book 3, Spinoza summarizes: “Joy is man’s transition from a state of less perfection to a state of greater perfection. Sorrow is a man’s transition from a state of greater perfection to a state of less perfection.”13 Spinoza admits the continuous change of the power of acting, which he also defines as the “force of existing.” Now, what causes joyful and sorrowful affects? How can we explain their difference? We are, of course, always affected by objects, or, more precisely, by “encounters.”
Deleuze declares:
Spinoza employs a Latin word that is quite strange but very important: occursus. Literally this is the encounter. To the extent that I have affection-ideas I live chance encounters: I walk in the street, I see Peter who does not please me.… When I see Peter who displeases me, an idea, the idea of Peter, is given to me; when I see Paul who pleases me, the idea of Paul is given to me. Each one of these ideas in relation to me has a certain degree of reality or perfection. I would say that the idea of Paul, in relation to me, has more intrinsic perfection than the idea of Peter since the idea of Paul contents me and the idea of Peter upsets me. When the idea of Paul succeeds the idea of Peter, it is agreeable to say that my force of existing or my power of acting is increased or improved; when, on the contrary, the situation is reversed, when after having seen someone who made me joyful I then see someone who makes me sad, I say that my power of acting is inhibited or obstructed.
This passage helps us to understand the nature of the conatus as it is common to the mind and the body. To affirm that the mind is the idea of the body means that every movement of the body is translated into the realm of thought as an ideal instance. When I encounter someone I don’t like, my body feels a counterreaction, the urge to stop moving, to withdraw or make a detour. This checking of my mobility has its ideal counterpart: the idea of this person has little perfection or reality. There is a strict correspondence between the interruption of movement and a low degree of ideal reality. Sorrow is the very name of this correspondence, as joy signifies the unity between bodily activity and ideal integrity and degree of perfection.14
We are determined to look for every kind of encounter that is able to increase the power of acting and to flee from everything that threatens to destroy it. But, we don’t know why such and such encounter will have such and such effect. We can only imagine what this effect will be.15 Therefore, Spinoza declares: “It is clear from the above considerations that we do not endeavor, will, seek after or desire because we judge a thing to be good. On the contrary we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor, will, seek and desire after it.”16 Desire is not our decision. We never know how extended it is, how far it can go. Our judgments follow the ontological law of desire, which is never ours but the very mark of an ontological and natural striving toward duration and perfection.
52–59: On Wonder
Wonder comes to appear as the fundamental and most important joyful passion. Surprise and astonishment solicit the power of acting in a very creative way. It is attraction to singularity: “To an object that we have previously seen in conjunction with others or that we imagine to have nothing but what is in common to many other objects, we shall not give as much regards as to that which we imagine to have something singular.”17 The singularity of an object creates a greater desire to look for it; in consequence, it increases the power of striving and thriving. Indifference to novelty and singularity appears, by contrast, as a reactive and depressing trend that restricts the vitality of the conatus.
As in Descartes, but for different reasons, wonder is presented as the key to virtue. The last words of the Ethics insist upon the difficulty of leading a virtuous philosophical life: “but all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare [sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt],” Spinoza concludes.18 “Excellent” translates the Latin praeclarus, which also means famous, beautiful, striking—in other words, and literally, wonderful. “Difficult” things are singular and rare. For Spinoza, “difficult” does not mean complicated. It is not the contrary of simplicity but of easiness and facility. Difficult things are simple: noncomposed, frank, entire, total. Simplicity is not facility, which, on the contrary, means commonness, usualness, and vulgarity. Wonder is the affect that helps us to differentiate simplicity (and, thus, difficulty) from facility. It reveals to us the beauty of difficult things and attunes our mind to their scarcity and rarity. Again, it is not the mind that affects itself and appraises itself through wonder. Wonder is the call of being, the tendency to turn the conatus toward the ontological beauty of the necessity of things.
Definition of the Emotions (Affects)
Still, we cannot be satisfied with our definitions of affects as ontological affects. A particularly important issue remains. We explained the relation between activity and passivity in insisting upon the conatus’s variability, and we saw that this variability was not controllable: We never know how far our own conatus is extended. We may therefore consider that we are “heteroaffected” by our conatus. However, these explanations are valid as far as the modes (i.e., finite creatures) are concerned. To affirm, with Deleuze, that an affect is always an affect of essence seems to makes sense only for mortals. If it is true that Nature is everywhere one and the same, that man is not an empire within an empire, and that affects do not proceed from any individual or particular defect, then we have to understand how God himself, or Nature, may also be affected to the extent that there cannot be any variability of infinite desire—and there is, of course, no divine conatus.
Let’s go back to the variability of conatus and the power of acting. In Expressionism and Philosophy, Deleuze declares: “Spinoza suggests … that the relation which characterizes an existing mode as a whole is endowed with a kind of elasticity. What is more, its composition, as also its decomposition, passes through so many stages that one may almost say that a mode changes its body or relation in leaving behind childhood, or on entering old age. Growth, aging, illness: we can hardly recognize the same individual. And is it really indeed the same individual? Such changes, whether imperceptible or abrupt, in the relation that characterizes a body, may also be seen in its capacity of being affected, as though the capacity and the relation enjoy a margin, a limit, within which they take form and are deformed.”19
How can such an “elasticity” be attributed to God? Is it not the property of the modes only? How can Being be considered as passive, “elastic,” that is, affected? We started this chapter with the Deleuzian affirmation that an affect, for Spinoza, is always an affect of essence. Do we have to understand that the infinite essence is also changeable? Or, can we reduce its mode of being affected to a pure and simple divine autoaffection? If it is so, finite affects (heteroaffection of the conatus) would be defective copies or reflections of a primary autoaffection—and Spinoza would be more Cartesian that we think!
Maps Between Affects and Concepts
Unless a kind of autoaffection outside any subjectivity can exist, an autoaffection is a movement internal to essence. Such an affection is not a feeling, but rather is the opening of a space in Being, of a map, a surface of inscription. The finite conatus is the finite modality of such an ontological mapping, of this spacing without subject or consciousness. Such will be Deleuze’s answer. Damasio also will place the issue of mapping at the center of Spinoza’s thought. As we will see, however, the two authors, Deleuze and Damasio, don’t understand the terms maps and mapping in the same way.