ABSTRACT
In what follows I try to show that Spinoza modelled his project of rational psychology, in some of its major respects, upon Descartes's metaphysics of matter. I argue further that, like Descartes, who paid for the rationalization of the science of matter the price of having to leave out of his description non-quantifiable qualities, so Spinoza left out of his psychology the non-rationalizable aspects of emotions, i.e. whatever in them could not be subsumed under common notions. He therefore was left with the cognitive aspects of emotions, keeping outside of his report the inner feeling which accompanies them. Spinoza's psychology, I claim, disregards any noncognitive aspect of emotions. 1
For most of us, emotions seem to be of a distinct nature among mental states and events. In particular, being affected by an emotion is, phenomenally speaking, a different sort of experience than having, or entertaining, a thought. Indeed, an emotion can - though perhaps it must not - involve cognition. Thus, when I love someone, I can state her look, demeanor or moral virtues as causes of this feeling. But even so, love has more to it than the cognition that provides it with an object, a reason or a causal basis. Love, and similarly other emotions, seem to have an inherent hard-core mental content peculiar to each, a content which is purely experiential, one that cannot be transcribed in words or any other means of expression that usually conveys cognitive content. Not that people cannot express their feelings - they can and they do so successfully. But there is an ineliminable gap between the content expressed and what is originally experienced. This gap is manifested in the fact that the person to whom an emotion is expressed 266does not know what the thing expressed is, unless she or he had at least once experienced a similar feeling - which fact shows that, while conveying the cognition involved in the emotion, the expression also indicates to the listener an inexpressible experiential content bound with this cognition. The listener is then supposed to regain acquaintance with the emotion out of his own inner resources - for its hard-core experiential content cannot be imparted from outside. Thus, when I say: 'I lost my hat yesterday', you gather a piece of information you did not have before I expressed it. But when I say; 'I am very frustrated having lost my hat yesterday', a feeling is successfully indicated to you if you know its kind from your own inner experience in the past. A propositional or any other cognitive content cannot replace the unique feeling one has when affected by frustration, love, envy or disappointment. Hence by expressing such content one can at best draw a recollection in the listener of his own past love, envy etc. That attempts to express an emotion often involve metaphorical usage, is a further indication of the inaptness of a report about the cognitive content involved in the emotion to conveying what the emotion truly is. Had there been to emotion nothing beyond the cognition it involves, such usages would probably have been less frequent.
Now, we should distinguish two major assertions comprised in this depiction of the affective realm. One is that, having an emotion essentially involves an inner irreducible feeling that neither words, nor any other means of communicating an experiential content, can express. The other is that this hard-core content is peculiar to emotions, and that it is either lacking in other types of mental occurrences such as cognitions, or that, if other mental occurrences do similarly involve an experience not reducible to cognizable content, it is different in kind from the content involved in emotions.
Coming now to Spinoza, my main point in the present paper is the following: there is no textual evidence allowing us to suppose that Spinoza would have denied that emotions - a term I will use henceforth to denote the mental aspects of Spinozistic affects, i.e. the affects considered under the attribute of thought 2 - do involve an inner feeling, irreducible to cognitive 267content. Furthermore, since the presence of such experiential content is a matter of everyday mental life, immediately accessible to any normal person, we must suppose that its denial never occurred to him as a plausible claim (if he ever gave it any thought at all). However, according to Spinoza, emotions, i.e. affects considered as modifications of our mind, are nothing but cognitions of bodily occurrences of a certain kind. Being affected by joy, love, envy, etc. is in fact having, in each case, an idea with a particular content; therefore, our inner experience of an affect or emotion is in fact our inner experience while having a certain cognition that constitutes this emotion. What we feel when we are joyous, envious etc. is an awareness of a cognitive content specific to each affect.
Thus Spinoza would reject the second of the two assertions mentioned above, i.e. he would deny the peculiarity of the inner experience of emotions. Our experience of being aware to the cognitive content that constitutes an emotion is specific to each occurrence of an emotion, but it is not of a special kind distinguished from our experience of awareness to any other cognitive content, which as such is necessarily accompanied by the inner experience of awareness to it.
Before pursuing my main argument, one preliminary qualification should be met with regard to the nature of the affects. Taking the emotions to be nothing but cognitions might seem to disregard their dynamic aspect, an aspect so central to Spinoza's metaphysical account of the modal realm. However, it should be born in mind that cognition, rather than a state of the mind, is itself imbued with dynamism. In fact, Spinoza emphatically claims this when, defending his definition of idea as 'a concept of the Mind that the Mind forms because it is a thinking thing' (2def3,exp), he explains that he preferred the term 'concept' (conceptus) to 'perception' (perceptio) specifically because the former 'seems to express an action of the Mind' whereas the latter does not. It thus turns out that to have an idea is to conceive of a 268cognitive content, or simply to cognize, and this should be taken to signify an activity rather than the mere having or inclusion of a content as part of some static mental inventory. Consequently, by claiming that emotions are cognitions, I grant them the active nature the latter have qua Spinozistic concepts; later on, when I treat Spinoza's definition of the affects, the specific content of their dynamic nature, in both its mental and bodily aspects, will come to the surface. 3
I start my argument by describing what I believe is a central motivation in Spinoza's theory of affects, namely, his adoption of Cartesian methodological principles, which originally operated in Descartes's metaphysics of matter. I will then try to show that it is by way of adapting these principles to his theory of mind that Spinoza reached his cognitivistic psychological theory.
