Active Action

In Spinoza's affect theory, an action is an affect whose cause is internal and adequately understood. The person who acts understands why she does what she does. She experiences the same change in her body's power of acting that characterizes any affect, but she grasps the cause, and this grasp transforms the character of the experience from passive suffering to active engagement. The same affect that would be a passion in the person who does not understand becomes an action in the person who does. The distinction is not between different kinds of affect but between different relationships to affect. Action is not the absence of feeling or the cessation of desire. It is feeling comprehended — desire understood — passion transformed into the mode through which an adequate mind engages the world.