Introduction: The Plane of Immanent Power
Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy represents one of the most radical moves in modern thought, and even a rupture that is often overlooked: to think being not under the shadow of a transcendent authority, but solely within its own internal laws. The formula “God or Nature” is generally remembered for its theological shock effect; yet Spinoza’s intention is not to contain God within the world or to deify the world. Spinoza brings “substance” down from a transcendent throne and makes it intelligible within an immanent order. The meaning is clear: the explanation of being cannot be displaced outside being; ethics and politics likewise should seek no foundation other than this immanent ground.
Seen from this perspective, the backbone of his thought is concentrated in two different faces of the idea of “power”: potentia and potestas. The first is a being’s capacity to act, its power, its capability; the second is the form through which these capacities are socially and institutionally organised. Yet if we distinguish these two terms only lexically, we miss Spinoza’s project. For in Spinoza, “power” is not simply the domination of one will over another; power is measured by what a being “is capable of doing.” Political power, in turn, concerns how this capacity is coordinated and within which regimes of affect it is sustained.
In this first essay, I will unfold the ontological framework of potentia through conatus (perseverance), affectus (affect), the distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas, notiones communes (common notions), and mind–body parallelism. It is here that Spinoza’s understanding of freedom as not a “freedom of choice” but an “understood necessity” comes into focus; virtue is conceived not as a list of prohibitions, but as an increase in the capacity to act. The second essay will address potestas, the institutional architecture of this ontology of immanent power: the proposition right = power, the idea of multitude and democracy, the religion–censorship–sadness cycle, and the criteria of institutions that produce fearlessness.
Conatus and Potentia: The Ontological Core of the Capacity to Act
The clearest point of entry into Spinoza’s thought from within is the concept of conatus. Every being perseveres in its existence; this perseverance cannot be reduced to a simple instinct for survival. Conatus is the orientation of essence toward action; it names the relation between what a being is and what it is capable of doing. The essence of a thing is not catalogue information, but a vector: a power realised within particular encounters, particular arrangements, and particular speeds and intensities.
Spinoza’s ethics is therefore not constructed as a system of commandments, but through the increase and decrease of the capacity to act. What is “good” is not what is commanded by an external order, but what accompanies an increase in capacity; what is “bad” is what interrupts that capacity. This apparently simple distinction removes morality from the comfortably internalised list of prohibitions; ethics becomes the engineering of capability.
It is precisely here that potentia enters: potentia is conatus in its activated form; it is not merely perseverance in living, but the actual expansion of possibilities for action. A body and a mind can become capable of more only through the establishment of particular encounters, habits, and arrangements.
Spinoza’s mind–body parallelism is decisive here. The proposition “the order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas” does not describe a relation between two different substances; it speaks of two appearances of a single order under two attributes of the same nature. The path to better thinking therefore does not consist merely in thinking more; living better requires transforming bodily arrangements, rhythms, and practices. An advance in understanding also finds its counterpart in an advance in the ways the body enters into relations; conversely, bodily deprivations narrow the horizons of the mind. Potentia is therefore as much a matter of bodily and social organisation as it is a level of mental capacity.
Spinoza’s often misunderstood claim—that freedom is not the liberty to “do whatever one wants”—appears paradoxical without this ontological background. What Spinoza reveals is the distinction between “freedom” and “arbitrariness”: freedom is the power to be the adequate cause of one’s own action. If an action is constituted through the understood laws of the subject’s nature, that is, through adequate ideas and common notions, then that action is free; if it is merely a reaction to external impulses, it belongs to contingency. The increase of potentia is therefore the real symptom of freedom. Becoming capable of more does not merely mean increasing the number of available choices, but being able to establish the causes of action within oneself.
The Economy of Affects: Joy, Sadness, and Adequate/Inadequate Ideas
Spinoza’s theory of affectus (affect) makes perceptible and intelligible how potentia increases and decreases. Affect is the emotional register of a change in the power of the body–mind arrangement to act. Joy (laetitia) marks an increase in capacity; sadness (tristitia) marks a decrease. This apparently simple definition overturns the traditional schema that places emotions in opposition to reason. Emotions are not the enemies of reason; they register the pulse of the power to act. Encounters that produce sadness render the subject passive; encounters that produce joy activate it. Ethics is therefore not the knowledge of suppressing emotion, but of transforming the conditions of emotion.
The distinction between activity and passivity must be read together with Spinoza’s epistemological distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas. Inadequate ideas (ideae inadequatae) are products of fragmentary perceptions whose causes remain external; they leave the subject exposed to random external impulses. Adequate ideas (ideae adequatae) grasp the causal relations of encounters from within; they rationalise affects. This rationalisation does not dry up emotion; on the contrary, it makes it enduring.
What Spinoza calls “rational joy” is not an abstract form of self-deception, but the durable strengthening of the capacity to act through common notions and together with others. At this point, notiones communes (common notions) play a crucial role. The ideas we develop concerning the common structures of bodies and the general determinations of nature allow us to situate singular experiences within a broader network of causality. The circulation of common notions is not merely the circulation of knowledge, but the circulation of power. Beyond knowing individual truths, establishing connections among truths makes joy more enduring.
Spinoza’s economy of affects makes it unnecessary to appeal to a “mystical this-ness” in order to explain singularity. The singularity of a subject does not arise from a hidden and inexplicable seal within its essence, but from the specific organisation of its qualities and relations. As a person’s emotional rhythms, habits, modes of encounter, patterns of knowledge, and bodily arrangements establish different connections, the profile of their capacity to act also changes. Singularity is not a mysterious privilege, but a differential arrangement; in Spinoza’s system, this arrangement is accompanied by the two dimensions of “expression”: the rhythms of the body and the ideas of the mind. Together, they provide a practical map for how joy can be made enduring and sadness transformed.
From here we can turn to one of Spinoza’s frequently misunderstood recommendations: “not to be a slave to the emotions.” This does not mean becoming emotionless. For Spinoza, emotionlessness is not even possible, because affect is the inevitable register of changes in the power to act. The issue is to activate affect through an understanding of its causes and through adequate ideas. The point is not to suppress anger, but to comprehend the network of causes that produces it and transform anger into another arrangement of encounters—in short, to transform emotion.
This transformation is not always a call for individual inner discipline; it often requires common notions developed with others, shared practices, and networks of solidarity. Spinoza’s ethics is therefore not an ethics of “virtue alone,” but an ethics of “becoming stronger together.”
Freedom and Virtue: Between Fortitudo and Generositas
It is easy to distort Spinoza’s conception of freedom through the concepts of contemporary debates on liberty. The distinction between negative freedom (non-interference) and positive freedom (self-realisation) does not fully correspond to Spinoza’s immanent philosophy. He defines freedom as the power of the subject to be the adequate cause of its own action.
On the one hand, this definition requires the removal of external obstacles, because external coercion disrupts the causal order of action and renders the subject passive. On the other hand, it does not reduce freedom merely to the removal of obstacles, because even when obstacles disappear, action can still be carried along by contingency unless adequate ideas and common notions have been established. Freedom is realised on this double plane: the liberation of external conditions and the understanding of the internal causal order. This is precisely why the concept of “understood necessity” is liberating in Spinoza: necessity is not a fate that draws us in like a vortex, but the order through which action becomes intelligible to itself.
The understanding of virtue also acquires a double architecture here. In the Ethics, Spinoza conceives the two faces of virtue through fortitudo and generositas. Fortitudo is often translated as “courage” or “fortitude,” but its primary content is the subject’s power to preserve and develop its own conatus. It is the capacity continually to improve one’s bodily and mental arrangements, adequate ideas, and connections established through common notions—in other words, the infrastructure of the capacity to act.
Generositas is translated as “generosity,” but in Spinoza it carries a meaning far more concrete than a moralistic call for self-sacrifice: the desire to increase the potentia of others. Being capable of acting together requires an investment in the increase of others’ power. A subject’s potentia cannot become enduring through isolated accumulation; common notions and rational joy become stronger through sharing. Virtue in Spinoza’s ethics therefore establishes not a balance but a relation of identity between self-realisation and social responsibility: to strengthen oneself is to become stronger together with others.
Within this framework, Spinoza’s analysis of affects such as love, hatred, envy, and fear is not merely a form of “moral psychology.” Sadness-producing affects such as envy proceed together with insufficient knowledge and poor institutional arrangements; active affects such as compassion, benevolence, and friendship become enduring within networks established through adequate ideas and common notions. Spinoza is also an “engineer of affects”: he shows ways of transforming the causal order of affects through adequate ideas and bodily practices. This transformation does not operate through the coercion of a particular ascetic programme, but through the attraction of understood benefit. Ethics is thus nourished not by the tension of prohibitions, but by the lightness of rational joy.
Finally, the form freedom takes within the relation between individual and society must also be noted. In Spinoza, individual capacity is not independent of social networks; social networks, in turn, cannot endure unless they sustain the individual’s power to act. Education, language, culture, work, health, public space—each of these constitutes both the rhythms of a society’s “body” and the capacity of its “mind” to produce concepts.
This is the institutional counterpart of mind–body parallelism: the potentia of a society depends simultaneously upon the effectiveness of its infrastructures and the circulation of its concepts. Freedom in Spinoza is therefore not merely a matter of “limiting the state”; the real question is what the state and institutions increase—fear or potentia. This question inevitably leads us toward the architecture of potestas, the subject of the second essay.
Interim Conclusion and Transition: The Horizon of Potestas
The picture developed so far shows that ethics and anthropology in Spinoza are connected to a single principle: the increase of potentia. Conatus is the orientation of essence toward action; potentia is the activation of this orientation; affects are the pulse of this activation; adequate ideas and common notions are the means through which activity becomes enduring; freedom is the power to be the adequate cause of one’s own action. Virtue becomes concrete in the combination of fortitudo and generositas, through practices that increase both the individual’s power and the power of others.
This ontology of immanent power connects ethics with the architecture of living together without reducing it to a rhetoric of “self-realisation.” For potentia is not merely an individual merit, but a power collectively produced and sustained within institutional arrangements.
It is precisely at this point that potestas enters the scene. In identifying right with power (jus = potentia), Spinoza conceives political power not as the source of evil, but as a necessary framework organising the power of the multitude. Yet the legitimacy of potestas is measured by its fidelity to its source, potentia multitudinis—the multitude’s power to act.
Institutions gain legitimacy when they function by producing fearlessness rather than fear; when they multiply the circulation of thought instead of censorship, the sharing of possibilities instead of scarcity, and rational joy instead of sadness. The second essay will be devoted to the details of this architecture: the conception of multitude and democracy, the theological–political critique, the censorship–superstition–domination cycle, and the criterion of “institutions that produce fearlessness.”
For now, one reminder is sufficient: in Spinoza, freedom is not a feeling, but an increasable capacity; the real measure of this capacity lies in the ability of individuals and institutions to produce common power. Every arrangement that fails to increase potentia, however noble it may appear, opens the door to regimes of sadness. Spinoza therefore places a simple but distinguishing question at the centre of contemporary political debate: Does this relation, this law, this institution increase or diminish the potentia of the multitude? The answer shows that ethics and politics can be weighed on the same immanent scale.
