The Best for Man’ 120. Spinoza came to the question of the passions through his quest to find the ‘best for man’. 121 Spinoza begins this search as a personal project in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, where he explains how he came to try to investigate this question. Spinoza writes, “I realized that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good and evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good.”122 When he looked to moral philosophers for their judgments on these matters, he found only a litany of how ‘man’ failed, how humans were weak and depraved, with little hope of living up to the standards set by the God of the moral philosophers. Spinoza came to believe that the ‘utopian’ morals that these philosophers constructed were meant to be out of human reach, yielding further denigration of the passions, and providing no incentive or guidance as to how to truly understand human motivations or affects. When he looked into the world to see those things that humans called good, Spinoza found that there were as many ‘bests’ as there were minds to judge.123 Many of the ends and goals which humans pursue seemed to be positively destructive, 124 and could not really be described even as ‘good’. However, Spinoza came to understand that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ were relative to an individual’s judgment; there was no ‘best’ for humans when viewed from the point 120 Spinoza uses the phrase ‘best for man’, taking ‘man’ to be a general term for humans. When I invoke this idea from Spinoza, I use the phrase, ‘best for humans’. 121 I will, in this chapter, continue to use the traditional ‘passions’ until Spinoza’s conception of the affects has been presented. 122 TIE [1]. 123 “Because each one judges from his own affect what is good and what is bad, what is better and what worse (E3P39S) it follows that men can vary as much in judgment as in affect,” E3P51S; “Each one, from his own affects, judges or evaluates, what is good, and what is bad, what is better and worse and finally what is best and what is worst,” E3P39S; Difference in judgment leads to difference in actions: “Because of this inconstancy of man’s nature and judgment, and also because he often judges things only from an affect, because the things which he believes will make for joy or sadness, and which he therefore strives to promote or prevent, are often only imaginary,” E3P51S; Each person has a di...
