Spinoza’s Doctrine of Affect in Cultural-Historical Psychology

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Spinoza regarded life as an active play of affects, and human freedom as the taming of passions by means of the concepts of reason. Following him, Lev Vygotsky treats affect as the alpha and omega of mental development. The key theme of Vygotsky’s last manuscripts is the same as in Spinoza’s The Ethics: man’s path to freedom via the reasonable mastery of his affects. Vygotsky defines freedom as the affect in the concept; in the last years of his life, he investigated the processes of synthesis of emotional and intellectual forms in the child’s psychical development. Following Spinoza, Vygotsky defines affect as a dynamogenic state of the body, increasing or decreasing its capacity for action. Thus, affect acts as the intrinsic driving force behind the behaviour of all living beings. In the Spinozist view, psychology is the science about production of affects in the process of object-oriented activity and about exchange of affects in the process of communication of living beings. Vygotsky did not have time to carry out his project of the new psychology of man, and his successors refused or failed to continue this work. Aleksey Leontiev, Vygotsky’s closest disciple and associate, denounced his turn to Spinoza and returned to the phenomenological treatment of affect as a form of experiencing activity. As a consequence, Vygotsky’s problem of the relation between affect and intellect proved to be unsolvable. The philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, who adhered to the Vygotsky school, linked the beginning of psychical activity to the formation of images of the external world, losing sight of affect and, thus, of the problem of freedom as understood by Spinoza. Resuming Vygotsky’s apex psychological project and studying the evolution of the psyche, based on the concept of freedom as the active mastery of human affects and communication relationships, form two growth points of cultural-historical psychology.