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How to Make the Passions Active: Spinoza and R.G. Collingwood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2019

Alexander Douglas
Alexander Douglas*
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews
*
axd@st-andrews.ac.uk
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Abstract

Most early modern philosophers held that our emotions are always passions: to experience an emotion is to undergo something rather than to do something. Spinoza is different; he holds that our emotions – what he calls our ‘affects’ – can be actions rather than passions. Moreover, we can convert a passive affect into an active one simply by forming a clear and distinct idea of it. This theory is difficult to understand. I defend the interpretation R.G. Collingwood gives of it in his book, The Principles of Art. An affect, it turns out, is passive when it is ambiguous whether we or somebody else is the subject of the affect. An affect is active when we fully accept the affect as our own. Here, I outline Collingwood's interpretation and then develop it further.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 85: Passions and the Emotions , July 2019 , pp. 237 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2019 

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References

1 Collingwood, R. G., The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

2 Jaquet, Chantal, L'unité du corps et de l'esprit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2015)Google Scholar; James, Susan, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Collingwood, R. G., The New Leviathan; Or, Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (Oxford University Press, 1942), ch.2Google Scholar.

4 Collingwood, The Principles of Art, ch.10, §1.

5 Anscombe, G.E.M., Intention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

6 Collingwood, The Principles of Art, 217.

7 Collingwood, The Principles of Art, 218, slightly misquoted in the lecture.

8 Ruskin, John, Modern Painters (New York: National Library Association, 2009), 3.154Google Scholar.

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10 Girard, René, A Theatre of Envy (Leominster: Gracewing Publishing, 2000), ch.9Google Scholar.