Baruch SpinozaThinkers

An Affect is a bodily and mental state. Related to emotions and feelings, but more bodily. These include pleasure or joy, pain or sorrow, desire or appetite (i.e. Laetitia, tristitia, cupiditas).

Affect is a potential increase or decrease of the power to act. It is so structured that common moral codings are disrupted. For example, pain need not be equated with the negative or with diminished power. On the contrary, pain can serve as a power to weaken or to make us stronger.

An Affect is either an action or a passion. It is an action when the cause of an event lies within us. It is a passion when we are passive and being acted upon.

Affect is indeed a mode of thought, but one that doesn«t represent something, as an idea does, but that does something.

The Affect is not reducible to an intellectual comparison of ideas. It is constituted by the lived transition or lived passage from one degree of perfection to another, insofar as this passage is determined by ideas... but in itself it does not consist in an idea, but rather constitutes affect.

An Affect is only able to be restrained by another stronger affect that is opposite to the first.

Affect functions to remove politics from moral considerations by conceiving of humans as beings for whom virtue and power, or right and power, are initially understood as one and the same.

An Affect is that force by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished.

Affect is that imaginative, unconscious (and thus both mental and somatic) force or striving that determines how the body will represent to itself the various possibilities that it may have at any time to both preserve itself and increase its own power.

Affect is the continuous variation of the power of acting, which, in other words, is what it means to be alive.

Affect is the quality of the collision, grasped through the metaphor of movement... the movement of forces colliding with one another.

An Affect is when something happens to us rather than us to it... that is, when we are under control not of ourselves, but of fortune such that though we see the better, we feel compelled to follow the worse.