Emotions: pesky little things aren’t
they? Some bring joy; others anguish, with a whole host of different
feelings betwixt the two. Think of the first time you fell in love,
or got a present you really wanted, or passed an exam or driving
test. Now, think of a saddening event. Thence, think of how you felt
before and after. A whole host of emotions plague us, day in day out:
to be torn in all directions is the natural human condition.
For a certain Mr Baruch de Spinoza, who
believed that we are all defined through a non-religious God who
ultimately controls all things in the universe, emotions are
beautiful, logical things. This is because God is defined by logic:
he is self-causing and his essence is this self-causation – he must
thus continue to produce things to continue to exist. Logical, no? If we are thus created by a logical God, and so is everything
else – every imaginable thing: plants, cars, muscles, thoughts,
pens and paper, musings and eyebrow raises – emotions, too, are
logical. ‘Emotions can be
treated and explained through logic, as if they were geometry’,
to paraphrase the good man.
Power of acting; definition of emotions
How though, do we get to this idea?
What, first of all, is an emotion? Spinoza tells us in the following
statement to define it as the modes of a body by which the body’s
ability to act is increased or decreased, the perceptions of these
and the resultant reaction.
Let us take the following example to
understand Spinoza’s idea better: I am punched in the face. I see
it coming, I feel it – my face feels it and my mind registers it
simultaneously. I now stumble back: I cannot act, or be, as well as I
could before the punch. I feel anger – my power of acting, of
moving, of doing anything, may be better than before, but still not
as good as before I was punched. Emotions cannot be controlled by us,
says Spinoza – they are logically defined.
Spinoza gives us two base emotions,
upon which all others are constructed: joy and sadness. It is through
emotions that we can see how the environment is working for us.
Emotions are the link between our inner state and the outer world. We
can only find our ‘power of acting’ indirectly through the
emotions – it can never be grasped directly.
We constantly desire to maintain a
joyous, happy state – as everyone, of course, likes to be happy. We
thus attempt to repel things that will have the ability to make our
power of acting decrease – be it a sad event in our lives, an
argument with somebody or a punch in the face; we always strive for
the happier ones, as these give us a bit more ‘oomph’ and
confidence.
Conatus
The notion of the ‘power of acting’,
Spinoza takes yet a step further. Spinoza notes that we all have a
certain drive within us: a desire and striving to stay alive. As we
are all ultimately created by God, and he, as noted above, must
necessarily create to keep existing, he leaves a little imprint of
his power in all things, including humans: the desire to survive, the
power of self-preservation at whatever cost. This power, he coins as
the term ‘Conatus’.
The Conatus is in all things: it can be
as obvious as someone running at us with a knife and us fleeing, or
as abstract as an electron figuratively turning away from a proton or
neutron. Self-preservation is what makes us, us. We do not want to be
destroyed, hence we run – this is at our very being.
As the mind and body are simultaneously
aware of each other through perceptions of the outside world (as one
hits the body, the mind registers it and vice versa) and as the body
cannot come into contact with something that would destroy it,
neither then, can the mind. This means that the mind cannot
think of anything that would destroy it: it cannot comprehend or even
have a vague notion of death. To have a vague notion of death, would
equate to its feeling of death through the body and it cannot do
this, for if it had felt that, it would, by definition, be dead and
thus unthinking. As a result, for Spinoza – the mind can only feel
incredible highs and the depths of sadness, but nothing beyond that:
death is not an option.
A few questions...
This also means that suicide is not an
option – how is this explained? Spinoza would say that we can be
killed, but only through an external cause, from an outside object.
The mind would have no idea that we would die if someone stabs us: it
would only sense threat. Can suicide ever exist in a Spinozian world?
Spinoza goes on to elaborate on every
conceivable emotion in over 40 pages, all based upon the base
emotions of happiness and sadness. Is it right to say that these are
the basic emotions that we all feel?
Spinoza says that our basic desire for
self-preservation makes us who we are. Is there not more to us than
this?
Joe Sturdy
