ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand why Spinoza shifts from adopting Descartes’s list of six primitive passions in the Short Treatise to replacing them with the three primary affects he marks in the Ethics: joy (laetitia), sadness (tristitia), and desire (cupiditas). The chapter situates Spinoza’s account of the primary affects in historical context to show how taxonomies of primitive or primary passions highlight structural features of a philosopher’s account of cognition or thought, and so how shifts in these taxonomies reflect substantial differences in a philosopher’s conception of mind. With this framework, we can understand Spinoza’s shift in taxonomy from the Short Treatise to the Ethics as a critique of Descartes’s conception of cognition, and in particular to the place of consciousness in his conceptions of thought. While Descartes considers consciousness an intrinsic feature of thought, for Spinoza, thinking is intrinsically representational but is not intrinsically conscious. This interpretation helps to explain Spinoza’s dismissal of wonder as an affect and his denial of the primacy of love and hatred, and how each of the three affects he considers primary has its distinctive role within his own account of mind.
