ABSTRACT
Baruch Spinoza was born in the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in the Protestant Netherlands. Inspired by Descartes, Spinoza became one of the leading rationalist philosophers of the early Enlightenment. His most famous work is his Ethics in which he opposed the dualism between body and mind espoused by Descartes. Spinoza closely studied the emotions (‘affects’) in Part III of Ethics. Spinoza argued and explained how ‘striving’ underpinned human emotions such as love, hate, joy, sadness, etc. In the fourth part, Spinoza analysed human passions and presented these as aspects of the mind that direct the subject to either seek the cause of pleasure or avoid the source of pain. For Spinoza, ‘affects’ exercised a ‘bondage’ over humans and, uncontrolled, these could undermine the harmony of interactions between humans. Although his work is now considered a milestone in Western philosophy, it was condemned by the Catholic Church and he was also expelled by his Jewish community.
