Emotion and Power:From He Lin and Zhang Xianglong's Interpretation of Spinoza
The paper revolves around the exploration of the relationship between the essence and existence of the singular entity in Spinoza's philosophy.It reaffirms the interpretive paradigm of"intuition"by He Lin and Zhang Xianglong regarding Spinoza,and revalidates this paradigm on the basis of the dynamic essence of the singular entity and the consequential relation between affect and power.Commencing with the elucidation of the trans-attributive character of the dynamic essence through the interpretation of the essences of God and the singular entities,this paper contends that it is necessary to start from this trans-attributive dynamic essence in order to address the long-standing issue of the relationship between the essence and existence of a singular thing in Spinoza studies.Reason,grounded in universals,cannot truly recognize the actual essences of the singular,while affect is incapable of providing a species of eternity.This paper seeks to resolve this dilemma by investigating the relationship between affect and power,unfolding in several steps.Firstly,it extracts the pivotal element of the"bending and stretching of power"from Spinoza's definition of affect.Secondly,as an idea related to the bending and stretching power,affect contributes to the adequate idea(intuitions)of the dynamic actual essence of a singular entity.Thirdly,the affect concerning the idea of a singular entity necessarily bears temporality.The contribution of reason,the second kind of knowledge,lies in removing this temporality and introducing a species of eternality essential for intuition.The conclusion introduces two new perspectives.Firstly,it clarifies the three so-called"primary affects"of sadness,joy,and desire through a comprehensive examination of the bending and stretching of power.Secondly,it advances Spinoza's theory by resorting to the doctrine of affects in the philosophical tradition of the theory of qi,represented by Liu Zongzhou.In Liu Zongzhou's framework,happiness,anger,sadness,and joy constitute a cyclical pattern of a unified qi and the bending and stretching of yin and yang.This paper disclosed the indeed existent cyclical relationship of strength and weakness among various emotions,interpreting all emotions as direct perceptions of the distinct proportions of power's bending and stretching.
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