The Three Categories of Affect: Mental, Physical and Psychophysical

Establishing a typology of affects according to their constituting principle and the relationship they have with mind and body appears, at first glance, to be a pointless and arduous undertaking. It is pointless because Spinoza does not engage in this type of inventorying exercise. Above all, he draws three main distinctions with regard to affects: between actions and passions, between primitive affects and combinations of them, and between good and bad, according to their effect on the power of acting. It is arduous because it would be impossible to review all the physical, mental and psychophysical affects, given that listing them would be endless since there can be infinite combinations of emotions within natura naturata.

Spinoza, however, does not reject the principle of differentiating the affects according to their relationship with mind and body, since he uses it to justify his omission of the definitions of cheerfulness, pleasure, melancholy and pain. He does not trouble himself either with the false problem of a comprehensive list, because his aim is not so much a complete as a sufficient inventory of the affects. Without naming them one by one, he nevertheless covers all the affects since, despite their limitless number and specific characters, he knows that they all boil down to kinds of desire, joy or sadness. That is why, following Spinoza's example, it is not a question of drawing a complete picture but, rather, of identifying whether an affect is physical, mental or psychophysical according to the dominant or equivalent role mind and body play in its formation. To that end, it is a good idea to follow Spinoza's classification system and use the three affects he calls ‘primitive, or primary’ (primitivos, seu primarios), to understand how all the other affects are generated and their relationship to the mind or the body. On this basis, it is possible first to distinguish the affects expressly related to both.