CONCEPT
Passions and Actions
Spinoza's distinction between affects experienced without understanding their causes (passions) and affects experienced with adequate understanding (actions) — the fulcrum of his ethics and the diagnostic instrument for productive addiction.
In Part III of the Ethics, Spinoza defines an affect as a change in the body's power of acting together with the idea of that change. The crucial distinction that follows is between passions and actions. An affect is a passion when its cause is external and inadequately understood — the person in its grip is acted upon by forces she does not comprehend. An affect is an action when its cause is internal and adequately understood — the person grasps why she experiences what she experiences, and this grasp transforms her relationship to the affect from passive suffering to active engagement. The same affect — the same joy, the same sadness, the same desire — can be either a passion or an action depending exclusively on the adequacy of understanding. The distinction is not between different kinds of feeling but between different relationships to feeling, and it is the fulcrum on which Spinozist freedom turns.
