Summary: Ethics (page 7)

Spinoza uses the terms appetite and desire interchangeably but provides this important clarification: desire is simply an appetite of which man is conscious: Desire is appetite with the consciousness of appetite ¹.

This effort—desire, in other words—is so fundamental that it is nothing other than the very essence of man ².

If we desire or want something, it is not because we judge it to be good:

On the contrary, if we judge something to be good, it is precisely because we strive for it, want it, aspire to it, or desire it ³.

The mind can undergo significant changes, transitioning to a state of either lesser or greater perfection. This brings us to Spinoza’s famous definition of joy:

By joy, then, I shall mean a passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection ⁴

Sadness, conversely, refers to the opposite affect.

For Spinoza, the three primary affects are gladness, pain, and desire—the first two corresponding to joy and sadness but relating to both mind and body.

From Spinoza’s definition of joy, the definition of love naturally follows: Love is nothing but joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred is nothing but sadness accompanied by the idea of an external cause ⁵.

Spinoza defines a vast number of affects, which arise from the combination of the three primitive affects—hope, fear, despair, emulation, and so on—and formulates several psychological laws. For example: If we imagine that someone loves, desires, or hates something that we also love, desire, or hate, then, by the same token, we will love, desire, or hate that thing with greater constancy ⁶.

In conclusion, the author of The Ethics offers a general definition of affects, in which he reiterates: Desire is the very essence of man, insofar as it is conceived as determined, as a result of some affection of itself, to do something ⁷.

Here, desire is understood in its broadest sense, encompassing appetites and wills.

Part IV: Of Human Servitude, or: Of the Strength of the Affects

Servitude, in Spinoza’s terminology, refers to man's powerlessness to control or counteract the affects. In this book, Spinoza devotes himself to studying this phenomenon, as well as the role that the affects of good and evil play in it.

He begins by examining how the concepts of perfection, good, and evil are formed within us.

The concept of perfection arises from the experience of striving towards a goal and achieving it. We always judge something’s perfection in relation to an end:

For example, if someone sees an unfinished structure and knows that the author’s intention was to build a house, he will say that the house is imperfect; conversely, he will call it perfect as soon as he sees that the work has reached the end that its author had intended for it ⁸.

On the other hand, if we do not know the purpose of the work’s author, we will not know whether it is perfect or not.

People then go on to create universal concepts—such as those of towers, houses, and so on—and call perfect whatever aligns with the universal idea of the thing. They take these ideas to be the models of reality. Moreover, they believe that nature itself has these ideas in mind and follows them as models. When something does not conform to this conceptual model, they assume that nature has failed or sinned ⁹.

However, as Spinoza has already demonstrated in the appendix to Part I, nature does not act for the sake of an end—finalism is a prejudice. The determinism at work in nature establishes causal relationships but does not imply the existence of final causes.

¹ III, prop. 9, note
² ibid.
³ ibid.
⁴ III, prop. 11, note
⁵ III, prop. 13, note
⁶ III, prop. 31
⁷ III, affects definition
⁸ IV, preface
⁹ ibid.