The Passions as Misunderstood Power

How every passion is a deformation of the conatus, not an alien force inside us.

I.

We speak of passions as though they were invaders: "I was overcome by anger," "Fear gripped me," "Desire took hold." The language implies that a passion is something foreign that enters from outside and seizes control. Spinoza's analysis shows that this is exactly wrong. A passion is not an alien force. It is our own power, our conatus, our striving to persist, expressed under conditions of inadequate understanding. The anger is not an invader. It is us, confused.

This reframe is practically important because it changes how we relate to our own emotions. If a passion is an invader, the proper response is resistance, suppression, warfare against oneself. If a passion is our own power misdirected, the proper response is understanding, redirection, the conversion of passive affect into active emotion through the acquisition of adequate ideas.

II.

The conatus is the fundamental drive of every thing to persevere in its being. In human beings, this drive manifests as desire, appetite, and the entire range of affects that accompany our interactions with the world. When we understand the causes of our striving, we act. When we are driven by causes we do not understand, we are acted upon. The striving is the same in both cases. What differs is the degree of understanding that accompanies it.

Anger is the striving to remove an obstacle, accompanied by the idea that the obstacle is caused by an external agent. Fear is the striving to avoid a perceived threat, accompanied by an uncertain idea of the threat's nature and likelihood. Envy is the striving to possess what another possesses, accompanied by the inadequate idea that the possession would increase our power. In every case, the core is conatus. The confusion is in the idea.

III.

This is why suppressing a passion by force rarely works. You cannot suppress your own striving without damaging yourself. The energy of the passion is your energy. To try to eliminate it is to try to eliminate a part of your own nature. What you can do is understand it: trace the anger to its source, examine the fear for its hidden assumptions, interrogate the envy for what it tells you about your own unexamined desires.

When you understand a passion adequately, it ceases to be a passion. It becomes an action. The same energy that drove you blindly now drives you with clarity. You are still angry, in the sense that you recognize an obstacle and wish to remove it. But you are no longer angry blindly. You see the obstacle clearly, you understand your own reaction, and you can choose a response that actually serves your interests rather than merely expressing your affect.

IV.

The practical test of this doctrine is simple. The next time you feel a surge of anger, do not try to suppress it. Do not try to express it either. Instead, ask what the anger is trying to accomplish. What obstacle does it perceive? What is the perceived threat to your power? Is the perception accurate, or is it distorted by inadequate ideas about the situation, the other person, or yourself?

If you can answer these questions, the anger has already begun to transform. It is no longer a blind force driving you toward a reaction. It is information, and information can be used. This is the movement from passion to action, from being acted upon to acting, from servitude to freedom. It is not easy, but it is not mysterious either. It is the application of understanding to the raw material of one's own nature.

V.

This doctrine has a further implication: there are no intrinsically bad emotions. Every affect is an expression of the conatus, and the conatus itself is always good, because it is the essence of the thing. What makes an emotion harmful is the inadequacy of the idea that accompanies it, not the energy of the striving itself. Hatred is harmful because it is accompanied by an inadequate idea that the destruction of the hated object would increase one's power. Love, when it is based on adequate understanding, is the opposite: the joy of recognizing something that genuinely increases one's power.

The goal is not to eliminate the passions. The goal is to understand them so completely that they become actions: expressions of our nature that we direct rather than expressions of external causes that direct us. A fully rational person would still have emotions. They would simply be adequate emotions, grounded in understanding rather than confusion, and they would increase power rather than diminish it.