Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA 293
principle unanalysed. He wants to understand how it is that we are moved to act.
To this purpose he introduces the concept of ‘affectus’, apparently in a rather
innocent way by identifying it as pathè, passion pertaining to the irrational part
of the soul. But, as we shall see, he makes out of this ‘passion’ the basic concept
of action. ‘Affect is a movement of the sensuous desire, when by a non-natural
bodily modification directed at a good object or a bad one, suggested and judged
by the imagination, this is made to be sought for or that is made to be evaded.’
Affects are not natural faculties of the soul, but functions or ‘movements’ of a
natural faculty. Indeed, the seat of the affects is the facultas appetens, the
desiring faculty. The principle of movement is the faculty of knowing, and the
effect of movement is the modification of heart and body (the faculty of acting).
Affects, so to say, represent a conceptual unity between knowing, desiring and
acting, thereby suggesting that the three faculties are really aspects, and not
parts, of the soul. In a subsequent rebuttal of the Stoic analysis of ‘affectus’,
Burgersdijk exhibits his fundamental move away from Aristotle’s psychology.
Indeed, referring to the passage in the Tusculanae Disputationes where Cicero
suggests the translation of pathè by ‘disturbances’ (perturbationes) instead of by
‘illness’ (morbi), Burgersdijk points out that the Stoic notion of ‘affectus’ is
wrong. That is, Burgersdijk continues one step further on the Ciceronian path of
naturalizing pathè to a central psychological concept, by transforming it to the
one motivational link between desire and action. Although being a Calvinist,
Burgersdijk defends free will (liberum arbitrium). According to his simplified
version of the history of philosophy, the Stoics reduced everything to
providence, fate and the unchangeable concatenation of causes; the Peripatetics
affirmed free will and denied divine providence. The Christians combine
providence and free will, because they believe that ‘God rules individual things
by secondary causes each according to the mode of their own nature, in such a
way that necessary things happen by necessity, and free things freely such that
whatever has to follow from their actions is produced freely’. Will itself is
defined as the faculty to follow what is good and to shun what is evil; it is a blind
capability (potentia caeca) because it depends on the direction of the practical
intellect.
We shall have ample opportunity to refer to Burgersdijk’s moral philosophy
when we discuss Spinoza.
Velthuysen’s naturalistic programme
In 1651 the young medical doctor Lambertus van Velthuysen published an
anonymous book entitled A Dissertation written as a Letter on the Principles of
the Just and the Decent (Epistolica dissertatio de principiis justi ac decori). One
would misunderstand this title if it did not contain the supplement: ‘containing a
defense of the treatise De Cive of the most eminent Hobbes’. But neither is it just
a defence of Hobbes. In the book, Velthuysen introduces three separate topics:
first a teleological conception of morality, second a description of the rules of