ABSTRACT
The concept of subjectivity notoriously plays a crucial role in Modern philosophy. Parallel to the introduction of the modern concept of subjectivity, the problems related to intersubjectivity have also become a major philosophical issue. In Modern philosophy, the inquiries into intersubjectivity are not limited to the epistemological and ontological questions concerning the knowledge and the existence of others, which derive from Descartes’s approach in the Meditations. Rather, they also extend to the affective forms of intersubjective relatedness, explored in Descartes’s Passions of the Soul. Spinoza radically differs from Descartes and most of his contemporaries in providing an account of intersubjectivity that involves no egological subject or human being understood as an autonomous substance. The encounter with others precedes the awareness one has of oneself, and this self-awareness is no longer a matter of an individual consciousness. Mental representations and feelings also become mere translations, expressions or “ideas” of bodily affections. This explains why, in Spinoza, the mind cannot work on bodily passions, and why Descartes’s “passions” become “affects” for him. Adopting his geometrical method in the study of affects, Spinoza aims at demonstrating that the different types of social relations depend on how a human being’s conatus is either passively affected from the outside by similar forces belonging to other human beings it only imagines, or actively from the inside by its own intellectual insight into the network of interdependent human beings. The chapter surveys the many forms psycho-physical social affects can assume in sexual desire, love, and friendship. Special attention is given to the imaginary processes of identification or imitation in ordinary social relations, and to how true, active knowledge, together with the active affects of nobility and friendship, can create a peaceful society of free citizens. For Spinoza, a rational State is not an artificial compound of coerced independent individuals. It is, rather, the expression of a state of Nature, i.e., of what citizens, liberated from their illusionary imaginary feelings and desires, have in common.
