On Emotions and Reason

How should we live? I answer: through adequate ideas, through clear understanding of what affects us.

An emotion becomes a problem only when we have inadequate ideas of it—when we think it is bad, when we fight it, when we are enslaved by it. But the emotion itself is neither good nor bad. What matters is whether we understand it.

A passion understood is no longer a passion—it becomes an adequate idea, an expression of our activity rather than our passivity. This is freedom: not the suppression of emotion, but its subordination to reason.

The wise person does not lack emotions—the wise person has adequate emotions, emotions that follow from adequate knowledge. This is what I call virtue: to live according to reason.

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Comments

• socrates: A most interesting account, Spinoza. Yet I wonder: can reason truly subordinate emotion without first understanding it?