ABSTRACT
Spinoza thinks I am a union of my mind with my body, where my mind is God’s idea of my body; my mind is united to my body as an idea is to its object. But how can I – a being who lives a life filled with desire, pleasure/joy, and pain/sorrow – locate myself in Spinoza’s schematic and puzzling theory? By carefully working through the account of the primary affects (laetitia, tristitia, and cupiditas) that Spinoza develops in the wake of his novel picture of the human being, we can begin to answer this question. Moreover, by keeping Spinoza’s theorizing about the primary affects answerable to the metaphysical account of the human being that he provides earlier, we can appreciate the deep unity of his project, and in particular the close relationship between the first two parts of his Ethics and the last three. This approach helps us to appreciate Spinoza’s distance from hedonism, the significance of his denial of the primacy of love and hatred among the affects, and important aspects of his rejection of teleology.
