Imagination and the Road to Reason Sample Clauses

Imagination and the Road to Reason. Achieving reason, the best for ‘man’, is one of the goals of the path the individual takes in the Ethics. What is this standard, ‘reason’? Is it objective, is it external to human pursuits, or is it rather constructed? Reason, for Spinoza, is nothing more than what is best for humans, what is best for ‘us’ as individuals. Achieving reason means coming to understand what is best for an individual, whether that individual is a human or a political state. Individual practices and community customs may strive for what is best for them, but they do not necessarily succeed in preserving themselves in the best way. When an individual follows reason, or when a state has laws which conform to reason, then they are in fact preserving themselves in the best way. A certain threshold of understanding, both of the individual itself and of the forces which affect that individual, is necessary for reason to be achieved. This is why, for Spinoza, the road to reason leads through the affects. To achieve what is best for us, we need to understand how we are affected by the world. We can, of course, accidentally act in a way that is best for us, but really understanding the forces by which we are affected, we are more likely to be able to tell what increases our power and what decreases our power, and thus what is actually best for us. Spinoza’s distinction between the passive and active affects is important for understanding his ‘road to reason’. The passive affects or what we might understand as the negative affects, sadness, etc., signal a decrease in our power and thus signal that whatever just happened might not be such a great thing for us. The active affects, joy, and its relatives signal an increase in power, providing us with the understanding that something that just happened yielded some good for us. Seeking joyful experiences increases our power. With this increased power we have the resources to understand even our passive affects, even those things which cause us pain. This step of understanding our passive affects makes them active, turns our passive experiences into active ones. Even when we suffer, if we understand why we felt pain, with this increased knowledge we can avoid these experiences which diminish our power and happiness. Individuals, Spinoza writes, who are affected by joy desire to preserve this joy.188 Individuals preserve their joy by imagining and surrounding themselves with those things they love, and excluding from their minds things that the...