Passionate love in Spinoza's Ethics

Abstract

In the Ethics, Spinoza proposes an original definition of love, according to which it is a joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause. This definition replaces that one of the Short Treatise –of more traditional characteristics– according to which love is the enjoyment and union with an object. In the Ethics, the definition of the types of love is no longer based on the loved objects, but on the kind of knowledge by which the soul thinks of the loved thing. The focus is no longer on the perishable or imperishable of the loved things, but is located in the inadequacy or adequacy of the lover’s ideas. Therefore, the specificity of passional love does not seem to be grounded in the quality of its objects, but in the fact that it takes place when the individual is guided only by inadequate ideas. The mechanisms of the imagination are fundamental elements to give account of passional love, and the psychic conflicts it generates can be explained through their functioning. In addition, this interpretation will allow us to oppose to passional love a kind of love that arises from adequate knowledge, making an internal differentiation within the latter, depending on whether it involves ideas of the second or the third kind of knowledge.