Who Feels Where:
Part 1 : Affects and Passions.
1)It is perhaps best to start in Spinoza. Spinoza gives us, in the definition of affects attached to book 3 of ethics a complex we of affects, which he endlessly inter-related: affects spring new affects, s thy are accompanied by ideas (and the idea of those ideas0. And yet running across these affects is a fissure. Spinoza is very careful to arrange his definitions of affects (rather than desires) into two groups. On the one hand there are the affects which relate to external causal reality, and on the other, those bound up in the body alone. The difference might appear sophistry – and Spinoza does not make too much of it (he is after all the thinker who argues that ones knowledge of ones body is one and the same as the knowledge one has of the outside world – both are conditioned in affects), and it is a distinction which surely has a peculiar double resonance.
2) Spinoza if must be remembered is the thinker who suggested that affects can always be shard across individuals. This is because all affects are ultimately based upon shifts and changes within the body, and these changes are effectively shared between different individuals. In imagining your pain I really feel it (although with less intensity – perhaps. Affects are therefore doubly related to external causes. Not only is something caused in me from the beyond, but also, in causing that things, I catch up other elements that are beyond me – and that will resonate with this feeling (or a least the effects these feelings produce within me).
3)But on the other hand Spinoza is also the rigid thinker who suggests that one can have an adequate idea of joys and desires, but not of pain. Pain is merely the transition towards nothing, and not worthy of an idea. And yet he also maintains that unless the mind is torn by contrary affects one can at some level always form an adequate idea of a thing. This adequate idea will then be rooted in what we are, and what must not be torn away – that is the body. I is in the body, in its little stage of thoughts and pains, that one fins ones pain, and gains mastery of it.
4)The difference between positive ideas of the negative, and the positive are therefore immense. To think a positive idea is to be open up to other elements of nature, which enter into ones own ability to generate ones own power (and therefore ones own essence). It is therefore to indulge in a love, which finds satisfaction in the mere present of the loved object.. To look on it – is to feel the joy. Pain by contrast seal the mind in itself. To think of something one hates, is to loose sight of it, and oneself it is to be torn asunder in the thought. Far better, as one hates, to localize that hate in the local pains of the body, and not to confuse them with the world at all at least then one has a chance of rephrasing the hate for oneself – and who knows (Spinoza asks in book 4) maybe for the hated objects itself. For if one meets hate with love, and understanding, I one attempts to heal oneself, and ones own body as it is hated, from the pain of that hate, then one will also be doing the hater a favour which might be repaired.
5)Now this line is a distinctly wavy one. Pain might seal one in ones own body directly, and yet, that sealent opens p another option. One can imagine ones own image, as a hate object in another’s mind. This object can then be transformed, as the pain realized, and to turned into a love (3/43). It is therefore not utterly true that hate seas one in oneself, in itself. And yet the condtions for moving beyond oneself remain the same as they do for joy. One needs to imagine all of another’s mind, and see what one is in th whole. The pain one causes therefore in another relates to what they are (and not what is directly shared). And yet one is taking this poison, having this viewpoint, from position which allows the mind of another, and ones own mid to be the same, and then treats each thought as if they were solvable in the same act. That is, in allow the other to have their pain lifted, in allowing them to love that hich one hated, one also loves them.
6) Pains therefore naturally from a passions which is apparently sealed within the body, ones and for all, through the prism of t body itself, and to an affect, which is pitched between me and my hater. We both hate together (even though we hate one another), and can therefore as we are together learn other things than hatred.
7)The opposite trail as one loves. Love by itself is positive. One loves and that is enough. That is one is dragged out of ones own mind, and thinks of another, and yet ht same love can so easily collapse into either arrant selfishness or blind and foolish worship.
8)One worships the loves object, as soon as the idea of it alone is enough to provoke the passion of joy. To think it, and rethink it irrespective of the other things one is, becomes the blind desire of the mind A stubborn affect. On is then caught in a peep show of show, and looses sight of what one is… Indeed this loss is in this argument very very real one: One is no longer (quite) what one thought one wad -, as one slips into being merely a stubborn affects which thinks upon that other.
9)On the other hand, to love, is always to risk pulling the loved objects into the mind utterly. I is therefore to risk having the object soley as ones own, and thereby forgetting that it belongs to and through itself. To love is therefore to feel jealousy, ownership, anger and all that other galxy of feelings.
10)Love might start therefore utterly positive – in a fair exchange, and yet the minute one wraps that love up in an ownership – the minute one has it for ones own, an not as a things shared the darkest of thoughts emerge.
11) Hence it is the cardinal test of affects as they are understood as they are, that is as a positive force, that they can be shared, and shared utterly positively. To feel jealousy might be natural and even inevitable and yet it is already to have been lost on a dark path which will left to itself destroy the love.
12)Love catches one up in the strangest of paradoxes therefore In itself it is positive, and life transforming. One right this transformation is something everyone need share – and yet the very power of this transformation becomes lost in the byways of passions.
13)To love is therefore to necessarily have to police oneself. The problem is of course here that in the rich series of explosions that we call love numerous pitfalls emerge. That is numerous places one could be doing a thing otherwise.
14) One might say to oneself – it will be alright to love, as long as that love is useful for another (which keeps that love active), only to find that what is useful shifts, and changes – and therefore ones own use can very easily be clipped or changed.
15)One might say it is alright to love as long as we are learning. And yet where each learning leads minds will itself vary, and might once again lead one to places quite apart – places that ae difficult to follow one another o (although never simply impossible). One might say I will love from afar, and yet be haunted in jealous. One might, one might.
16)The problem is a very real one, as to own love is to have been lost to it. Love as an affect, exists in the thought another has in transforming ones own mind. That thought cannot really belong to ones nature – and all attmeots to make it belong are lost.
17)This last point forces one up against what remains only implicit in Spinoza- the deep division between affects and passions. An affect is pitched in that curious realm of empathy, which exists between individuals. Its starting point is the fact that one truly owns what they are: they do not own the body, or nature or even their own feelings. On the contrary as I exist feelings of others are constantly entering into my mind. I feel them in the blind urgency of the utterly unsaid. They are merely there for me o deal with. It is in this realm that love begins (although not where it ends). There are never lovers in a room, or rather their should not be, merely but rather a Love that sits in the room, and demands others to react to it.
18)Passions is however a rather different reality. Passions relate not to the sense my body is pitched beyond itself, and its own body, but rather to myself as I am in my body. They are a purely empirical phenomena. I mean they are emotions as directly perceived in me – as I own for myself.
19)Hatred starts of at least as a passion. It relate to he mind which hate. This is not to say that once formed others might not adopt that hatred, and run with it. Hatred certainly become an affect, and yet it does not start that way. It rather starts in the world of private experience (and good and evil). A world in which something help, other hinder, and the mind reacts accordingly. To hate is start therefore in owning.
20)Hatred therefore, although more that capable of leading to dark paths of itself own, as it is tranfigred into an affect, offers als a path to rendemption, which jealousy itself never does.
21) Perhaps the contrast here is about where the difference lies. Each passion is complex n the min. As one looks on love it is also joy, lust, friendship… Each passion scillitates into numerous other passions, and with them other desires. The problem with passions is therefore to invent a language capable of actually owning what we otherwise merely possess.
22) The problem with affects is rather different. An affect constantly changes as its very nature. That is what affects, which bind up minds do: one needs then not to develop a language of owning and containing, but merely a language of the storm and wind.To feel is to allow oneself to be caught up and changes through ones contemplation of another (and to allow that other also to be changed in the same process). There is utterly no point screaming at the affect – low down for God sake, for the affect would merely reply – to slow is to be lost. I am the movement, I am that change, that pitch between you two, that you can only grasps in tumbling into another. I am what I am, and ha is it.
23) In short a life of affects is storm, and a life of passions is quiet. We need both.
Where does one start o feel passionate from?
1)passions are, as mentioned before an empirical probe. They start with that thornest of empirical problems- the problem of where to begin. Can I blindly assert myself as the starting point? Or must I always begin with others – and if so where and what others.
2)Spinoza himself is interested only in the first of these issues. He does not trust a simple assertion of the ego and e rights of consciousness. The reason sis simple enough. What is mine, what expresses my ego is a striving to live this striving of course catches up the mind in everything else (for what elese is such a desire). To move from such a catching up into life to a statement that one simply is and has a might to be and to feel, would feel then like the daftest of moves.
3) Ones essence leis not in actual existence (2/10) but rather in the advancing and augmenting of elements of the world as one actual is this catching of course involves a world seen from an angle or focus point. And yet this focus point is never simple, and never exact: As one has adequate ideas one shares what one is, and that one is with everything and everyone else. One is that they also are. The adequate ideas therefore, which are always necessarily present, involve us necessarily sharing that which we are even though we will in the process assert own existence as well – the focus is me and them together).
4)To attempt to regroup a mind on a single point of focus, a point to own passions with , is for Spinoza plain daf. One must want to be, and that desire is not to want to ME.
5) Spinoza is therefore very had of affects which inappropriately assert individual existence. He loathes pride and vanity (his portraits of then are surely some of the funniest and darkest moments in philosophy – I for one have met many of his men of pride, often if truth be told in academia).
6)Behind this distain is that very simple fact that the man of pride, as he slips into an affect becomes a monster, one wants everyone to acknowledge his own existence, and doe so all the time. Pride and prima-doners run very close together.
7)Pride therefore in its attempt to own or possess what is actually shared between all people places ad things, forms almost the negative point to a affect. To be pride, and straddle affects is to want more than you can have: is to desire ones ego, ones self is everywhere, and therefore it drive it into nowhere, and to destruction.
8)The rationlist man of affects therefore wants to minimise the generation of the self which feels pride, and which can therefore own those oddest possessions of the mind – its passions.
9)But if ones remains in the empirical orbit, it is clear that other things are also possible: what if, after all as appears reasonable enough, passions start within the body, and need not be understood as dragging one away from it, which is very much the manner we possess them. How can one won passions that state of in me?
10)Perhaps here one can do no better than start with Hume wonderfully quixotic hypothesis that the best place to start ones consideration of passions lies in pride. For Hume suggests it is only in feeling proud that I truly get to grasp at the what I am.
11) The move here is beautifully complex. In thinking of an object beyond myself, that is in having an idea of another, the mind grasps feels joy. And yet this another is not any old other, if I am to feel pride, it is another which my thoughts, and that strange idea I have about myself as existing are peculiarly associated. The idea which could have no empirical content the idea of the self, comes then in thinking of this thing, to be associated with objects and the feeling derived from those objects n the real world. Moreover in having this feeling a joy linked to the first joy, and yet distinct from it, a joy of pride is bon in the mind.
12)Pride is therefore a passion: That is a certain species of joy ,a feeling of delight, which is recognisable is itself. It is not therefore to be understood simply as an affect: that is as something which pulls the mind into other thoughts, and which thereby seeks to insinuates itself into anothers feelings. On the contrary it is there present – a feeling like everything else.
13)A pride as passion is also strangely modest in it beginning. To merely wants o own what was itself own, and not, as Spinoza king of the affects suspects, seek to posses what it can never really own. It modestly starts with what is already necessarily its possessions, and hopes, against hope that this is good enough.
14)Its problem is not therefore how do I insist that I have a right to what I m. But rather the far more agonised question, of how one actually enjoys that which one has found oneself already to possess. How that it is one uses ones on possession, to allow one, to exist in their shadow.
15) To start with the perceiving body, and the feelings of the perceiving body (and there is something gloriously glandular in Hume’s account), is to start with feelings that ones posses, and yet which appear to belong to another, and to attempt to invent a feeling within oneself, a certain blend of ideas and joys, in which they can be felt to belong to oneself(and to do so even if that self needs to be resurrected from the oblivion of unreality Hume has placed it in).
16)Pride is therefore for Hume the great holding function. If I can feel pride, or if I can feel shame, then I own the feeling as my own. I m in control of it – and can use it to be myself with (and therefore use it to be useful with).
17)Once I own pride, I can slip into understanding feeling of love, which then as a passion (and not an affect) centre the feeling of love around the mind of the loved object (nd the joy they produce in ones own mind). To think them, is therefore o think a joy, and a love associated with that joy, as one thinks of what they have done.
18)However oneself is not simply excluded in this hought. On knows the joys here as ones own 9as they can all be dawn of into a pride). In thinking the other, one attributes those joy to that other, and so loves them, for themselves and for their actins, and yet does so from ones own perspective – from the dimensions of ones own mind
19).Pride therefore straddles love. I love as elsewhere I am also feeling pride in that love. In that feeling of pride I restrict the passion of love, I prevent it tumbling simply into being an affect, and therefore into all the dark passages of the of mind, for if I cannot feel proud of a love, it is worth nothing.
20)Moreover for Hume this last move is very important, as Love explodes into other feelings, other thoughts the mind therefore must work, ad work hard (using here all the resources of morality) to pull a mind back in gear – that is to pull it back towards love and through love pride,: To pull it back into that happy state were it can own the possession it is replete with.
21)Passions, that is pitching the thoughts within a body, ad therefore owning them within a mind, matter. The Passion performs the oddest of miracles. It turns what was so negative and destructive, what was so hated and useless in Spinoza- pride, into a proactive force. The force is of course a rather strange affair. It isnot an affect (and must be kept as far as possible away from affect), and yet as a passion allows a mind a stand or moral point in which passions can be fixed.
The Alternavite root.
1)Spinoza of course has his own answer to the last problem. His starting point (5/1) is the body and the mind. Remake your body he suggests, and your mind must follow; or remake your mind and your body also will follow.
2)Disciplining a min was therefore a matte of learning certain rules, which allowed on to pitch oneself beyond the current set of circumstances and situations.
3) One must therefore take care not to insinuate a self too early. Rather one must meditate upon the history, ancient and modern, personal and impersonal, and through these meditations understand how ones own feelings fit within a far wider pattern – and how the might be thought otherwise.
4)Nor does Spinoza disagree that a man of reason does not have a love of esteem of others. On the contrary Spinoza says of course he does. esteem can therefore arise from reason, a man considers his own power of acting, and what he can and indeed is achieving with it. Spinoza will go even so far as to say that this love of esteem is the highest good a man can hope for (4/52).
5)And yet there is a clear difference. The love of esteem for Spinoza arises in man of reason alone, as they think of how they have and are going to act within others (and with themselves). One loves not then oneself first but ones actions, around which a self arises (in the thoughts of others). its starting point is therefore collective, in the action, and then only individual (in the result – in the being well thought of in ones own mind and in anothers)
6)Hume of course ill agree that pride (or love of esteem) generates he idea of a self, certainly, and yet does not so carefully link it to actions which benefit others and the actor (that is action of collective reason): the Self is then in Hume the point of the process. As I have a self I contain everything. For Spinoza it is rather the effect (although it is also , he chirpily accepts a power motivating factor)., and yet it is good, and proper (and the highest joy) only as it is genuinely active: that is as it is genuinely engaging with others, an not as it is in itself (as pure goal lyinging the body/mind). In back to proposition Spinoza will sing the praise of the love of esteem which follows on from reason, why dismiss the vanities of pride (4/.57-58).
7) That is generating a self, generating a feeling of pride tied to being a body is never enough, to justify pride. Nor (and here is far closer to Hume) is merely the thinking of ones own power enough, if that thought slips (as it almost invariably does) in fantasy and illusion, and therefore spawns prides (and the desires that other recognise what remains utter fantasy).
8)Spinoza aware as he is of the dangers a passion, slip into an affect, and an affect demand that this fantasy is driven into reality- that it comes what is real, has no such scruple.
9) Likewise Spinoza hates humility. To be humble is to be doubly sad. The mind needs to acts from reason, and not because it has been hit. Of course Spinoza does make the very important concession that if one cannot hae reason, than it is alright to be humble, and better than the alternative. That is, if one really cannot become a citizen of affects I is better to be humble (as long as that humility remains a passion, and does not tumble into an Uriah Heep affect), than anything else (like it is better to pity). It is just that the passion itself will not produce in a mind an affect which allows reason to flourish, and so ought, for Spinoza to be condemned.
10)Hume the empiricist would no doubt agree with everything here that is passionate. A mind that learns its Spinoza rules, and feels pride. What of course he rejects as unknown is the affects transforming power. it is better he suggests given that I am in a body, and a body is bound up in hidden springs to simply accept ht hose springs are hidden.
11)It is the better therefore to pitch an ethics on the feelings of my own body, and in thse feelings pride has an imporant role to play. Bpride alone cn (with its adjunct humilty) sit in judgement over my feeling.
12)Hume would pause here. He likes judgment to more than Spinoza. He starts again; Pride will h says if not judge then assess, and assess a feeling according to what it itself contains. The aim of ethics to be able to be proud of ones actions at each and every point.
13)Pride is therefore the positive razor to insert into feelings. It tests against itself not just a feeling, but also all those feelings that spin of that feeling. If it can remain proud (and contain the thoughs in itself), it knows it acts well. Pride allows one to own feelings from within,
14)Spiniza is comfortable enough wit this, as he noted=s the effect will be very much the same as the love of esteem. He merely regrets that empiricism (the first type of knowing, which was always about the body anwy0needs to deny the second,when they should be cooperating. But he could at least fall silent now.
15)We have ended rather oddly. In dialogoe (but where else to end). The point is though simple enough without the fantasy. Passions are feelings as they are tied to the body: That is as they empirically occur within what I am. The challenge is always in the face of these passions to breed an ego which is capable of owning them – that wants them for its very own.
16)For Spinoza he breeding of such a mind is a perilous, but not (if done with due are a dangerous experiment – even if it is one he for one, king of the affect as he is, would wish to avoid.