In Ethics (E) part 3, proposition 30, Spinoza gives an account of reflexive affects such as self-esteem (gloria), shame (pudor), penitence (pœnetentia), humility, and despondency (ab-jectio) in terms of imitating the affects of others. The affects of others that are imitated are forms of joy and sorrow with an idea of the cause as ‘external’ (to oneself – another person), which makes them forms of love or hatred (as Spinoza defines love and hatred in E3p13 and in defs.6 and 7 at the end of E3). So we might suppose that these reflexive affects are also forms of love or hatred. Indeed, this comports with patterns of use in natural lan-guage; we readily speak of self-love or self-hatred. About these affects, Spinoza comments (in the demonstration of E3p30):1
Dem: He who imagines that he affects others with Joy or Sadness will thereby (by p27) be affected with Joy or Sadness. But since man (by 2p19 and p23) is con-scious of himself through the affection by which he is determined to act, then he who has done something which he imagines affects others with Joy will be affected with Joy, together with a consciousness of himself as the cause (cum conscientia sui, tanquam causâ), or, he will regard himself with Joy, and the converse, q.e.d.
Even though Spinoza immediately goes on to say that the joy and sadness that constitute the imitated affects are “species of love and hatred”, he argues that because love and hatred
1 All quoted English translations of Spinoza’s texts come from Curley, Edwin. (ed. and trans.) 1985.
The Collected Works of Spinoza. 2 Vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, unless otherwise noted.
Citations for quoted texts will subsequently be bracketed in text, along with page and vol. location in Gebhardt, Karl. (ed.) 1925. Spinoza Opera. 4 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. I will use the following standard, short reference to Spinoza’s writings; Ethics: E2p47s, Appendix = app, Axiom = ax, Corollary
= c, Definition = def, Definition of emotion = def.em., Proof = pr, Explanation = exp, Lemma = lemma, Proposition = p, Postulate = post, Preface = pref. Scholium = s.
“have reference to external objects” (Sed quia Amor, & Odium, ad externa objecta referen-tur…), different names must be assigned to the reflexive affects that imitate the love and hatred of others for oneself. The reflexive affects that Spinoza is about to define are, as he describes them in the exposition of E3def.em.24, affects “together with an idea of an inter-nal thing as the cause” (quos idea rei internæ comitatur, tanquam causa). And it seems that this sets them apart from love and hatred as affects: joy and sadness “accompanied by an external cause”. It seems to follow that the reflexive affects must somehow both “have refer-ence to an external cause” yet are also constituted as a group by the fact that they affects
“together with a consciousness of (one)self as the cause”. It is clear enough that ‘internae’, as Spinoza uses the term in the scholium, should be taken to mean “with a consciousness of oneself as the cause”. So the ‘set up’ for definitions of reflexive affects, both in E3p30 and in the exp. of E3def24 gives rise to both unresolved textual and conceptual issues.
Schol.: Since Love (by p13s) is Joy, accompanied by an external cause (concomitante etiam ideâ causæ externæ), and Hate is Sadness, accompanied also by the idea of an external cause, this joy and sadness are species of Love and Hate. But because Love and Hatred are related to external objects (ad objecta externa referentur), we shall signify these affects by other names. Joy accompanied by an internal cause (con-comitante ideâ causæ internæ), we shall call love of esteem (gloriam), and the Sadness contrary to it, Shame (pudorem) – I mean when the joy or sadness arise from the fact that the man believes he is Praised or Blamed. Otherwise, I shall call joy accompanied by the idea of an internal cause (concomitante ideâ causæ internæ), Self-esteem (acqui-escentiam in se ipso), and the Sadness contrary to it Repentance (pœnetentia) (Latin and italics inserted).
Spinoza’s remark about the names of the affects clearly bears some weight, since he takes pains at a later point in E3, in the explication of def. 24, to note for his reader that he is moving on, at that point, to define other affects which are “accompanied by the idea of an internal cause” (Hinc ad alios transeo, quod idea rei internæ comitatur, tanquam causa).
Then follow definitions for self-esteem (acquiescentia in se ipso) (XXV), humility (humilitas) (XXVI), penitence (pœnitentia) (XXVII), pride (superbia) (XXVIII), despondency (abjec-tio) (XXIX), love of esteem (gloria) (XXX), and finally, shame (pudor) (XXXI) – the very affects that were his subject matter in E3p30s and following.
The issue about the names of affects tracks Spinoza’s deployment of this distinction between affects ‘accompanied by’ an idea of the cause as something ‘external’, and those accompanied by the idea of the cause as something ‘internal’.2 The trouble, both with the text and conceptually, seems to arise in his deployment of this distinction between ‘inter-nae’ and ‘externae’, as well as in questions about whether ‘have reference to external objects’
(ad objecta externa referentur – E3p30s), and ‘accompanied by the idea of an external cause’
2 I note here that earlier readers of Spinoza have noted the conceptual issue raised by Spinoza’s language.
See Boros 2007, 15. Boros points out the ambiguity of “accompanying” (trans. for concomitante) in ln.18, E3p30, as translated by Curley.
(concomitante etiam ideâ causæ externæ – E3p30s, E3p13s, E3def.em.6 & 7) should be taken as equivalent in meaning, and opposite ‘together with consciousness of oneself as cause’
(concomitante ideâ sui, tanquam causâ afficietur – E3p30) and ‘accompanied by the idea of an internal cause’ (quod idea rei internæ comitatur, tanquam causa). So it behooves Spinoza’s readers to consider what work this ‘internae/externae’ distinction is doing more generally, and to question any intuition that this distinction is exclusive (in the sense that an affect can only actually have an ‘external’ or ‘internal’ cause).
E3p30 is among the many of Spinoza’s texts that are haunted by an unclear relationship between an affect having an ‘external’ or ‘internal’ cause, in fact (de re), and being ‘accom-panied with an idea (de dicto) of’ an ‘external’ or ‘internal’ cause. Spinoza’s language in E3p30dem is that the love and hatred “have reference to” external objects. We might, after all, infer that according to Spinoza’s metaphysics, since a cause is represented in its effects, even when its effects are images in the mind of a subject (as we see in E2p17, for example), being caused by an ‘external’ cause implies that the idea in the mind of the subject must be an idea of an ‘external’ thing. But we should resist this inference, however intuitive it might seem. The causal account that Spinoza actually goes on to give of the reflexive affects after he turns to “the mind’s consideration of itself and its power of acting” in E3p53, and which he goes on to define after E3def.em. 24 (down to E3def.em.31) is an account in terms of external causes. We should also note that in the exposition of E3def.em.28 (pride), he also emphasizes that if we want to understand how it is possible for someone to think ill of one-self, we must attend solely to the opinions of others. Yet, as the explication of E3def.em.24 makes clear, subjects of the reflexive affects that Spinoza goes on to define take something about themselves or their actions as the cause of their pain or joy.
If follows that it not clear that when Spinoza claims, in E3p30s, that love and hatred
“have reference to” external objects, he should be interpreted only as making a straight-forward causal claim. And when (if these are the words he actually used), he goes on a few lines later in the scholium to describe love of esteem (gloria), shame (pudor), self-esteem (acquiescentia in se ipso), and penitence (poenitentia) as “accompanied by an idea of an in-ternal cause”, we likely should not interpret him as making a claim about the actual cause, or its ‘location’ with respect to the subject. Indeed, Spinoza’s language suggests that we should treat his deployment of the ‘internal/external’ distinction in E3p30 as claims about subject’s idea (de dicto) of the cause, and not the actual (de re) cause, of the affect. What sets apart the reflexive affects that Spinoza defines after E3p30 (for which that proposition is a preface), and after def. 24, are that their cause is taken by subjects to be ‘internal’ though the proximate cause is actually and necessarily ‘external’ to them. Indirect support may be inferred from Spinoza’s claim (in E2p17s) that the nature of a subject’s body is a ‘cause’ – albeit an ‘inadequate cause’ of the ideas that the subject forms of ‘external’ bodies, as well as the causal effects of another body upon a subject’s own body.
If there is any doubt that Spinoza takes the actual (proximate) causes of the reflexive affects that he sets out to define after E3p53 and E3def.em.24 as ‘external’, consider the following: Spinoza accounts for subjects’ vulnerability to forming some such ideas in terms of the ‘weakness’ of their own minds or ‘spirits’ (in E3p54ff). Note that this outcome
fol-lows from the fact that they are forms of sorrow (tristitia), which are necessarily cases of subjects’ ‘cognizance’ of their conatus being weakened by a cause that is necessarily ‘exter-nal’ (E3p11). Two critical outcomes follow. (i) Though subjects form an idea of the cause of reflexive affects as (something) internal, to the degree that these affects are ‘the affection by which he is determined to act’, the actions they cause will be ‘seen’ under the illusion of
‘freedom’ – where the proximate cause is actually external and internal (the condition of the subject’s own body/mind), but it is only taken to be internal. (One cannot ‘weaken’ oneself according to Spinoza’s conatus doctrine: E3p4, E3p10, among other places.) (ii) It actually matters that in the scholium of E3p30, Spinoza speaks of (and Curley aptly translates) the reflexive affects accompanied by the idea of an internal cause. His claim is not about the ac-tual cause, but the subject’s idea of the cause.