The initial therapeutic step in moving toward a more rational
existence, one less troubled by the passions, is to diminish the
strength of those passions by changing one’s beliefs about their
causes. Ordinarily, a person’s love (or hatred) is directed at a single
object, because of his belief that it is that object that has brought
about some improvement (or change for the worse) in his condition.
But to focus all of one’s attention on just that one object is to be
guided by inadequate knowledge, since that object is just one finite
link in an infinitely extended chain of causes. It is thus, at best, only
a partial factor. Spinoza says that
It may appear that Spinoza is here recommending that one com-
pletely separate the idea of the affect from any external cause
whatsoever and think of it only in connection with other ideas in
the mind. This would seem to have the result that thoughts and
desires so transformed cease altogether to be outwardly directed;
and since love (and hate) are always directed at external things – the
presumed causes of joy (and sadness) – they would consequently
disappear. Passions would thereby be replaced by knowledge. This
transformative reading is often suggested by Spinoza’s language: he
speaks on occasion of the “removal” of a passion (VP20s), or of an
affect “ceasing to be a passion” (VP3). However, it sometimes seems
that what Spinoza is saying is that one should separate the affect
from the idea of any single external cause and look at it in the
grander causal scheme of things. In this way, the intense love or
hatred that is directed at one thing becomes more diffuse and
weaker as it is spread out over many things. “If an affect is related
to more and different causes which the mind considers together with
the affect itself, it is less harmful, we are less acted on by it, and we
are affected less toward each cause, than is the case with another,
equally great affect, which is related only to one cause, or to fewer
causes” (VP9). In this case, the affect remains a passion but has been
dissipated or weakened.

More generally, the remedy against strong passions that Spinoza
is proposing is the pursuit of an adequate knowledge of those affects.
He argues, in VP3, that “an affect which is a passion ceases to be a
passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.” When one
perceives adequately and truly what the causes of an affect are and
why one is experiencing it, a partial, accidental, and passive cogni-
zance of one’s own condition is replaced by fuller insight, and a
feeling is replaced by understanding. Where one once was undergo-
ing a passion, one is now active, since knowledge (adequate ideas)
represents a condition of activity. “The more an affect is known to
us, then, the more it is in our power, and the less the mind is acted
on by it” (VP3c). This transformation in our condition is some-
thing we can do with any passion. “There is no affection of the
body of which we cannot form a clear and distinct concept” (VP4).
What Spinoza is recommending here is that instead of allowing
ourselves to be passively affected by things, we should take the
initiative and transform ourselves into active beings by striving for
a knowledge of ourselves, especially of the ways in which our
bodies (and, correlatively, our minds) respond to and are affected
by things.

The result of such a process is a re-ordering of our ideas. They are
no longer connected according to the order of random experience,
but instead reflect the true causal order of things.
Instead of a mind filled with ideas set by the “common order of
nature,” there is a mind in which ideas have a rational ordering,
what (as we have seen) Spinoza calls “the order of the intellect.”

Now because the order and connection of affections of the body
must be a reflection of the order and connection of ideas in the
mind, this transformation of the mind from passivity to activity,
from emotional responses to understanding, is paralleled by a cor-
relative transformation of our physical condition. “So long as we are
not torn by affects contrary to our nature, we have the power of
ordering and connecting the affections of the body according to the
order of the intellect” (VP10). The body thereby becomes more
resistant to the influences of external things – and especially more
resistant to sadness, a decrease in its powers – and more governed by
the mind itself, since its affects are now set systematically (according
to the order of reason) and not just haphazardly. “By this power of
rightly ordering and connecting the affections of the body, we
can bring it about that we are not easily affected with evil affects.
For (by VP7) a greater force is required for restraining affects
ordered and connected according to the order of the intellect than
for restraining those which are uncertain and random” (VP10s).
Spinoza’s point is that the more one knows about oneself and about
one’s reactions to things (the affects), the more control one can
exercise over those reactions – which, in effect, cease to be reactions
and become actions, anchored as they now are in adequate ideas.

But VP1–P4 leave the reader wanting to know more about how
this reordering of ideas and affects and setting them in connection
with their adequate causes is supposed to lead to a weakening of the
passions and the strengthening of resistance. Spinoza says that “we
can devise no other remedy for the affects which depends on our
power and is more excellent than this, which consists in a true
knowledge of them. For the mind has no other power than that of
thinking and forming adequate ideas” (VP4s). It is fine to talk in
general terms of knowledge, virtue, power, and activity replacing the
passivity and “bondage” that characterizes a life guided by the senses
and imagination. Somehow the clear and distinct knowledge of
things is supposed to give us a greater control over our emotions.
But what exactly does the person with adequate ideas of the affects see
that the uninformed person does not? And what does it do for him?
VP10 provides only some clarification about the power of knowledge
versus the passions. What we really need now is one of those useful
scholia in which Spinoza leaves his technical language behind and
appeals to something familiar from experience to explain more clearly
what it is we know and how it effects the desired transformation.

Fortunately, he does not disappoint. He reminds us in VP6 that
what adequate knowledge provides is an understanding of the
necessity of things, of the fact that any bodily or mental event is
“determined by an infinite connection of causes to exist and produce
effects.” He then claims that “insofar as the mind understands all
things as necessary, it has a greater power over the affects, or is less
acted upon by them.” This is because when a person sees the
necessity of something, he is less moved or troubled by it. His desire
or anxiety, his hope or fear, are diminished by the perception that
the attainment or loss of that thing is not subject to his will but
necessitated by an infinite number of causal factors.

Spinoza has shown that all of the human emotions, in so far as
they are passions, are constantly directed outward, toward things
and their tendencies to affect us one way or another. And aroused by
our passions and desires, we seek or flee those things that we believe
cause joy or sadness. Such is the life of bondage. It is, as we know, a
troubled existence. He says that it is a kind of disease to suffer too
much love for a thing that is mutable and never fully under our
power, even when we do, for a time, have it within our possession.
When a person sees the necessity of all things, however, and espe-
cially the fact that the objects that he values are, in their comings
and goings, not under his control, that person is less likely to be
overwhelmed with emotions at their arrival and passing away. We
see that all bodies and their states and relationships – including the
condition of our own body – follow necessarily from the essence of
matter and the universal laws of physics; and we see that all ideas,
including all the properties of minds, follow necessarily from the
essence of thought and its universal laws. When we come to this
level of understanding, we realize that we cannot control what
nature brings our way or takes from us, and consequently we are
no longer anxious over what may come to pass and are no longer
obsessed with or despondent over the loss of our possessions. Here is
the scholium we have been waiting for:
A person who sees the necessity of things regards them with equa-
nimity, and is not inordinately and irrationally affected in different
ways by past, present, or future events. He will bear the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune with self-control and a calm mind.
The resulting life is more tranquil, and not given to sudden disturb-
ances of the passions. With this scholium, Spinoza makes good on a
promissory note that he had introduced at the end of Part Two,
where he insists that his doctrine
Spinoza’s proposed solution to the power of the emotions and the
predicament to which they give rise is an ancient one: focus on what
is within. Since we cannot control the external objects that we tend
to value and that we allow to influence our well-being, we ought
instead to try to control our evaluations and responses themselves
and thereby minimize the sway that objects and the passions have
over us. We do this, as we have just seen, by re-ordering our ideas.
We can never eliminate the passive affects entirely. But we can,
ultimately, counteract them, understand and control them, and
thereby achieve a certain degree of relief from their turmoil. Despite
Spinoza’s critique of the Stoics for their belief that the wise person
can completely master the passions, his own account recalls the
doctrines of thinkers such as Seneca and Epictetus:
Spinoza adopts a common Stoic notion – that the wise person lives
“according to nature” – when he insists that for the person who has
achieved the proper level of understanding, recognizes the necessity
of things, and accordingly modifies his desires, “the striving of [his]
better part agrees with the order of the whole of nature.”

A clear and distinct perception of my own place in nature and of
the determinism that governs all natural things will lead not to some
kind of fatalistic resignation, but to a satisfaction with my cognitive
achievement as being what is truly in my best interest. It will also
lead to an ability to bear things with equanimity, as I experience a
release from the anxieties to which outwardly directed desires that
are based on a false belief in the freedom and contingency of things
give rise. In other words, knowledge and understanding, which, as
we have seen, Spinoza identifies with virtue, lead to tranquility and
self-control. The virtuous person, the individual who follows “the
order of nature,” will experience “true peace of mind” (VP42s); by
contrast, the ignorant person is “troubled in many ways by external
causes.”

Incidentally, through this discussion of knowledge as the remedy
for the passions, it should now be clear that a number of terms in
Spinoza are co-extensive and refer to the same ideal human condition.
We can set up the following equation for Spinoza:

virtue = knowledge = activity = freedom = power = perfection

Necessarily, the more virtuous a person is, the more knowledge he
has, the more free, active and powerful he is, and the more he has
achieved of human perfection.

Originally Posted By Optimiscm⏩

Originally Posted By proudmanlet⏩

Originally Posted By proudmanlet⏩

Originally Posted By Dirtymanjames⏩

Originally Posted By Cheeky****t⏩

Originally Posted By proudmanlet⏩

Originally Posted By Cheeky****t⏩

Originally Posted By Cheeky****t⏩

Originally Posted By SpeedCheeser⏩

Originally Posted By PineappleMuffin⏩

Originally Posted By AlexSays⏩

Originally Posted By proudmanlet⏩

Originally Posted By proudmanlet⏩

Originally Posted By AlexSays⏩

Originally Posted By proudmanlet⏩