lillian on Nostr: ultimately, i think Spinoza's great failing in his affective theory is an ...

ultimately, i think Spinoza's great failing in his affective theory is an underestimation of hope. hope is not just the other side of fear. hope is a message and a gate. it conveys a need which is intelligible to love, which allows love to answer. in broken conditions of life which involve both joy and suffering, hope sums up that brokenness and creates a condition of openness to comfort. and in the absence of fear, hope still persists as openness, a continual supplication for perfections which an entity does not know to expect. hope inhabits eternity because eternity is the fullness of existence, and it is hope, dovetailing into faith, which opens wide the gate to that plenitude

and in fact, the Ethics is incomprehensible without hope. it is a book which responds to Spinoza's hope that he and others can find an eternal basis for joy, and it is the hope of a reader which allows them to continually take that joy into themselves. you can get nothing from Spinoza if you do not lay aside despair; the moment you lay aside hope, you get nothing further. if love is joy accompanied by the knowledge of its cause, hope is joy which does not yet know its cause, and so prepares love's way