Aurelia Armstrong, Spinoza and Nietzsche Contra The Stoics

The Passions, Power, and Practical Philosophy: Spinoza and Nietzsche Contra the Stoics
Author(s): Aurelia Armstrong

Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies , Vol. 44, No. 1, Special Issue: Nietzsche and the
Affects (Spring 2013), pp. 6-24
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.44.1.0006
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The Passions, Power, and Practical Philosophy
Spinoza and Nietzsche Contra the Stoics
Aurelia Armstrong
Abstract: This article reviews the influence of Stoic thought on the development
of Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s ethics and suggests that although both philosophers
follow the Stoics in conceiving of ethics as a therapeutic enterprise that aims at
human freedom and flourishing, they part company with Stoicism in refusing
to identify flourishing with freedom from the passions. In making this claim,
I take issue with the standard view of Spinoza’s ethics, according to which the
passions figure exclusively as a source of unhappiness and bondage from which
we must be liberated. I argue that, in fact, Spinoza anticipates Nietzsche and
breaks with the Stoics in offering a more positive assessment of the role of pas-
sion in a flourishing life. The reading pursued here takes Spinoza’s divergence
from the Stoic account of the passions to be a consequence of his insistence on
the immanence of human being in nature. I outline Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s
conception of immanence and suggest that it entails a common understanding
of our nature as dynamic power or desire, which is simultaneously expressed
as a capacity to act and be acted on, to affect and to be affected. The recogni-
tion of the complex relationship between passive and active power requires a
revaluation of our vulnerability and openness to what can affect us and leads
each philosopher to a consideration of the ways in which the passions might be
made to support our striving to increase our power and to realize an essentially
limited freedom and precarious flourishing.
Though surprisingly little has been written about the relationship between
Nietzsche’s and Spinoza’s practical philosophy, a survey of the literature reveals
general agreement regarding the grounds for a comparison of their e thical p rojects.
Both are described as adhering to the idea that the quest for human perfectibility
is only possible within the horizons of immanence. For Yirmiyahu Yovel, this
amounts to their common commitment to an ethics of self-overcoming, “whereby
the immanent natural principle (conatus in Spinoza, will to power in Nietzsche)
shapes itself into something higher than its raw givenness.”1 This view is echoed
by Richard Schacht, who sees Spinoza’s attraction to Nietzsche as lying in the
former’s attempt “to do justice to our capacity to transcend our merely natural
Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2013.

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
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The Passions, Power, and Practical Philosophy 7
existence by way of its transformation,” but without appealing to transcendent

values and without transcending nature.2 In short, the suggestion is that Nietzsche
and Spinoza are committed to a form of ethical naturalism, one that proceeds
by way of practices of self-formation or self-transformation and that aims at the
attainment of an enhanced form of human life characterized by an affirmative
attitude toward existence, a love of necessity or “fate.”
While the secondary literature on Nietzsche’s relation to Spinoza does not go
much beyond identifying this shared ethical ethos, the characterization of this
ethos does reveal its common ancestry in the ancient Greco-Roman conception
of philosophy as therapeia. Pierre Hadot argues that for the ancients, philosophy
is understood as a way of life or spiritual exercise rather than as a purely abstract-
theoretical activity.3 The exercises recommended by the philosophies of classical
antiquity are oriented to the practical project of “training people to live and to
look at the world in a new way.”4 Hadot suggests that with the absorption of
philosophia by Christianity, philosophy’s role was reduced to that of furnishing
theology with conceptual material and that it is not until Nietzsche that philosophy
becomes once again a concrete attitude and way of seeing the world.5 In making
this claim, however, Hadot overlooks the early modern revival of the classical con-
ception of philosophy as an approach to life that contributes to human flourishing
and thus as a therapeutic enterprise. This oversight is especially understandable
in Spinoza’s case. Spinoza’s intellectual debts to ancient philosophy are over-
looked by the majority of interpreters, who argue that he was mainly influenced
by his contemporaries, especially Descartes. Among those scholars who have
examined the influence of the Hellenistic tradition on Spinoza, however, there is
general agreement that Spinoza’s philosophy can be most fruitfully understood as
a reworking of Stoicism. The recognition of the particular importance of Stoicism
to Spinoza resonates with recent scholarly interest in Nietzsche’s debt to the Stoic
tradition and points to a common source in light of which it might be possible to
compare and evaluate their respective approaches to ethics.
That Spinoza and Nietzsche are united in their endorsement of key Stoic
themes is readily apparent. There are, in fact, three major themes identified in the
literature as points of convergence between Spinoza and Nietzsche that suggest
the influence of Stoicism on their thought. The first concerns the Stoic reconcili-
ation of a naturalistic perspective with an ethical perspective, and it appears in
their common acceptance of modified versions of the Stoic doctrines of radical
determinism, or “fatalism,” and amor fati. We can understand the significance
of these related themes in general terms as a way of articulating the dual nature
of human being as both an entirely natural, material being, subject to the same
necessities as the rest of the natural world, and at the same time as a being capable
of transfiguring and even perfecting that nature, precisely through an understand-
ing of natural necessity and an acceptance of its own nature as “a piece of fate.”
The second theme that dominates the secondary literature is the Stoic critique

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8 Aurelia Armstrong
of pity, or the unegoistic emotions, which both Spinoza and Nietzsche endorse
and develop in different contexts and which Nietzsche explicitly associates with
both Stoicism and Spinoza.6 The final theme, which is the primary focus of this
article, concerns the place of the passions in the philosophical therapy that some
have claimed both Spinoza and Nietzsche endorse.
According to commentators, Spinoza and Nietzsche follow the Stoics in
conceiving of ethics as a form of cognitive psychological therapy that provides
techniques and strategies whereby we can change our beliefs, thought processes,
and affective states in order to free our selves from the false evaluations of
external events that are the cause of emotional turmoil. This conception of philo-
sophical therapeutics entails a diagnosis of the passions, which are understood by
the Stoics to be the primary obstacle to human flourishing, and presents them in
terms that evoke their susceptibility to remedy. For the Stoics, it is the passions,
or pathê (literally “things that one undergoes” in contrast to actions or the things
that one does), that are the sole source of human unhappiness and bondage. In
undergoing passions, we are subject to external influence, to the vicissitudes of
fortune over which we have little or no control and which are, for that reason,
potential sources of pain, frustration, disappointment, and emotional instability.
The key to Stoic therapy lies in recognizing that while what fortune metes out is
not “up to us,” the attitude we adopt toward acts of fortune is.7 Once we realize
that the sources of suffering are not external things and how they happen to affect
us but rather our own irrational judgments about the value of externals, the way
is open to us to refuse assent to those of our value judgments that are the cause
of our passions and irrational desires and thereby to free ourselves from violent
and excessive emotions and from the false estimation of the value of external
things on which those emotions depend. The Stoic belief that the good life—the
life of virtue, freedom, and happiness—is a life free from passion is reflected and
expressed in the high value that Stoicism places on psychological independence,
tranquility of mind, self-control, and self-sufficiency. What ground is there for
thinking that Spinoza and Nietzsche endorse Stoic psychotherapy and thus the
view that human flourishing requires the extirpation of the passions?
There does appear to be a profound correspondence between the central mes-
sage of Spinoza’s Ethics—that freedom is achieved by mastering the passions—
and the Stoic view. Spinoza tacitly admits this debt to the Stoic tradition when
he describes human bondage in strongly Stoic terms as “man’s lack of power
to moderate and restrain the affects,” noting that “the man who is subject to
affects is under the control, not of himself, but of fortune” (EIVpref).8 Firmin
DeBrabander argues that Spinoza is like the Stoics in considering the passions
the principal obstacle to human flourishing and in casting them as amenable
to intellectual therapy.9 Spinoza also agrees with the Stoics that the passions
are inadequate ideas of external things and that, as such, they may be amended
through rational understanding. According to the standard reading of Spinoza’s

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ethics, then, Spinoza’s view is profoundly Stoic in its presentation of rational

understanding as the key to liberation from bondage to passive affects. Rational
understanding of nature is liberating because it enables us to replace the inad-
equate ideas that underpin the passions with adequate ideas and corresponding
active affects that follow from and depend on our own power rather than the
power of external causes. While passions signal our capacity to be affected by
the external world, our receptivity to external influence, and thus our passivity,
rational understanding makes us more active, independent, and self-determining.
Moreover, because when we act on the basis of adequate understanding we act
in ways that are reliably self-preserving or empowering, this type of understand-
ing is also experienced as an intense and secure form of joy. Insofar as we are
rational, Spinoza tells us, we are powerful, virtuous, free and able to enjoy a
peace of mind and a species of joy that are immune from the vagaries of fortune.
Even this brief description of the standard view of Spinozist ethics as a
form of psychotherapy makes the parallels with Stoicism obvious and striking.
Indeed, according to Alexandre Matheron, “of all the great classical philosophers
Spinoza is the one whose teaching best lends itself to a point-by-point comparison
with Stoicism.”10 But although there is much textual evidence to support a Stoic
reading of Spinoza’s ethical project, this reading fails, in my view, to capture
the more positive strains in his treatment of the passions and so fails to grasp
how his conception of therapy diverges decisively from the Stoic model. Before
considering the nature of this divergence, we need to familiarize ourselves briefly
with the way in which Nietzsche’s more complex and ambivalent relation to
Stoicism has been addressed in the literature. We will then be in a position to raise
the issue of the relationship between their respective understanding of the nature
of the passions and their approaches to the role of the passions in ethical life.
There are at least two different claims made about Nietzsche’s Stoicism that
are relevant to the question of how he conceives the passions and their impact on
human flourishing. First, there are those who argue that Nietzsche appealed to
the Stoic tradition primarily as a way of engaging critically with the deployment
of the passions in a morality of pity. Martha Nussbaum is a key proponent of this
position. She describes Nietzsche’s project as an effort “to bring about a revival
of Stoic values of self-command and self-formation within a post-Christian and
post-Romantic context.”11 According to Nussbaum, Nietzsche’s critique of pity
demonstrates his “acceptance of the full Stoic position regarding the extirpation
of passion.”12 In fact, she argues that Nietzsche goes even further than the Stoics
by embracing “asceticism,” which is evident, she claims, in his rejection of the
value of external goods to human flourishing and in his celebration of a radical,
self-protective Stoic “hardness” that denies human vulnerability and finitude.
This reading is distinctive in its claim that a commitment to Stoic values is an
abiding feature of Nietzsche’s thinking. By contrast, Michael Ure’s exploration
of the Stoic influences on Nietzsche’s philosophy identifies significant changes

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10 Aurelia Armstrong
in Nietzsche’s attitude toward Stoicism during different phases of his thinking.13

Ure argues convincingly that in the late 1870s Nietzsche draws heavily on
Stoicism in his efforts to develop a new philosophical therapy for suffering as
an alternative to the failed antinatural strategies for treating human suffering
and vulnerability that he associated with metaphysics and religion. On Ure’s
account Nietzsche adopts a conventional form of Stoic therapy in Human, All
Too Human and Daybreak, which turns on the Stoic insight that the sources of
misery are not external but internal, and he proposes as the cure for this mis-
ery the Stoic strategy of changing our value judgments. This mainly positive
appraisal of Stoic therapeutics gives way, in the early 1880s, to a more critical
stance, which Ure interprets as a sign of Nietzsche’s growing misgivings about
the Stoic idea that “eudaimonia turns on the achievement of apatheia.”14 On
the basis of his reading of The Gay Science, Ure sees Nietzsche’s increasingly
critical attitude toward Stoicism as a sign of his rejection of the Stoic ideal of
flourishing as requiring freedom from passion. These two readings provide
strong evidence that Nietzsche accepted central tenets of the Stoic theory of the
passions and experimented with a Stoic model of therapy in his efforts to give
new meaning to human suffering, even if, on the second reading, he ultimately
rejects the conventional Stoic model.15
If we follow the standard reading of Spinoza’s ethics, according to which
passive affects or passions figure exclusively as sources of human unhappiness
and bondage from which we must be delivered, then we might naturally be led to
conclude that Nietzsche’s increasingly critical attitude toward the Stoics on just
this point must include Spinoza and that Nietzsche breaks with his philosophical
forbears in his more positive assessment of the role of passion in a flourishing
life. Without denying the importance of the Stoic ideal of human flourishing to
the development of Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s views, I nevertheless argue that
it is Spinoza who first challenges the Stoic tradition’s conception of the nature
and goals of therapy and that he does so in ways that reveal a deep affinity with
Nietzsche’s philosophical perspective. The basis of this affinity is a shared
commitment to the principle of the immanence of human being in nature. On
Yovel’s account, this principle implies three basic conceptual commitments:
“(1) Immanence [or this-worldly existence] is the only and overall horizon
of being; (2) it is equally the only source of value and normativeness and (3)
absorbing this recognition into one’s life is a prelude—and precondition—for
whatever liberation (or, emancipation) is in store for humans.”16
Since Stoic philosophy also embraces these principles and has been described
as belonging to a tradition of immanence, we need to begin with a brief exposition
of Stoic ethics, as well as the metaphysics on which it is based, in order to grasp
the conceptual grounds for Spinoza’s criticisms of Stoicism. These criticisms,
I argue, turn on the claim that Stoic ethics falls foul of the version of immanence
that Spinoza and Nietzsche endorse.

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Stoic Therapy: Virtue as Apatheia
The Stoic ideal of virtue is founded on a particular metaphysics of nature.17 To

be virtuous is to live in agreement with nature. In the Stoic conception, nature,
or “fate,” is rationally ordered, necessitarian, providential, and divine. To live
in accordance with nature is to actively accept what happens as necessary, as
fated, as the will of God. Moreover, since nature unfolds according to a divinely
ordained providential plan, which is rational and, therefore, beneficial, every-
thing that occurs can be understood not only as teleologically ordered but as
ultimately ordered for the benefit of human beings, who may thus be said to
enjoy a privileged place in the cosmos. This privilege, however, is not apparent
from the perspective of one’s ordinary human aspirations for personal survival,
happiness, and success. Much of what happens is not within our control and may
conflict with personal goals and desires. The Stoics thus suggest that detach-
ing ourselves from this limited personal perspective and appraising our lives
from the standpoint of the whole are central to the attainment of virtue. It is by
evaluating what happens from the universal point of view that we bring our will
into alignment with “the will of fate.” The acceptance of what happens as fated,
which is supported by the conception of nature as providentially ordered, brings
freedom from the passions that poison the lives of those who remain attached
to external things and who therefore desire things to be other than they actually
are. The Stoic sage can endure the assaults of fortune in a way that the passion-
ate man cannot because his soul is in harmony with the cosmos—that is, he
rationally pursues the ends that nature prescribes in the knowledge that its ends
are ultimately appropriate to his rational nature, considered as part of the whole.
Marcus Aurelius nicely sums up the attitude of detachment that is central to this
therapeutic strategy: “You must consider the doing and perfecting of what the
universal Nature decrees in the same light as your health, and welcome all that
happens, even if it seems harsh, because it leads to the health of the universe,
and the welfare and well-being of Zeus. For he would not have allotted this to
anyone if it were not beneficial to the Whole.”18
For the Stoics, as we have seen, the passions—defined as excessive impulses
to seek or avoid something—are the primary obstacle to our telos, or agree-
ment with nature. To be in the grip of a passion is to accord excessive value
to things that make no contribution to our virtue. That we may be in the grip
of passions raises the question of what power we have to bring about our own
virtue and happiness. The Stoic response to this question, as I have noted,
is to appeal to the distinction between that which is a function of our free
rational choice, and thus “our own doing,” and that which is not. As Epictetus
explains, “Some things are up to us, while others are not up to us. Up to us
are conception, choice, desire, aversion, and, in a word, everything that is our
own doing; not up to us are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in

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a word, everything that is not our own doing. Furthermore, the things up to us
are by nature free, unhindered, unimpeded; while the things not up to us are
weak, servile, subject to hindrance, and not our own.”19
Epictetus’s distinction between what is “up to us” and “not up to us” is framed
in terms of the distinction between the rational soul and everything external to
it, above all the body and the web of dependencies in which it is caught. Our
capacity to determine ourselves depends on the power of the rational soul to
freely assent to or withhold assent from impressions. It is this cognitive power
that enables the soul to exert control over passion and, indeed, in the case of the
sage, to ensure that no passion ever takes root in it. As Derk Pereboom explains,
in the Stoic conception, “passions do not happen to an agent. Rather, whenever
an agent has a passion, it has in a sense been chosen by that agent. And accord-
ingly, an agent can avoid struggling against passions altogether, because simply
by exercising its power of assent, she can prevent any untoward passion from
coming to exist at all.”20
The Stoics thus propose two therapeutic strategies for extirpating the passions,
one that affirms our power of voluntary, rational assent and one that affirms
divine determinism. Each strategy stages the relation between self and world
slightly differently. To affirm the power of voluntary assent as the source of
freedom from the passions is to accord to the soul, but not the body, a power to
transcend its determination by the external world. In Epictetus’s formulation,
the body is associated with that which is external, alien, and superfluous to the
self. The true locus of the self is the active, rational soul, which must struggle
for inner purity and intellectual liberation from body, world, passivity, and pas-
sion. This strategy assumes a rigid boundary between self and world, one that
isolates and insulates the (mental) self in such a way as to allow it psychologi-
cal independence and self-sufficiency “unperturbed by the distractions of the
body.”21 What counts as the self is thus radically narrowed, and it is set against
a hostile external world whose assaults it must heroically endure. This opposi-
tion between self and world is overcome, however, in the self’s identification
with the whole. Since it is only from the perspective of the part, or particular
individual, that things appear as external forces, as hindrances to the realization
of personal desires, identification with the whole promises a total liberation from
external determination and, thus, from the very possibility of passion. In effect,
the full realization and affirmation of the rational will’s deeper unity with the
rationality of nature dissolves the boundary between the will and fate and with
it the distinction between internal and external causes, which is the conceptual
precondition for the experience of external determination, passivity, and passion.
John Sellars has argued that these two strategies represent, in fact, two distinct
stages on the path of philosophical progression toward the ideal of the sage, and
he associates the final stage of Stoic ethics—which consists in dissolving the
boundary between oneself and the rest of nature by identifying one’s own will

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with the will of the cosmos or fate—with the affirmative ethics of Spinoza and
Nietzsche.22 While it is true that Spinoza envisages progress in ethical perfection
as a matter of gaining an understanding of ourselves as parts of a more encom-
passing whole and that he views this process as involving an expansion of the
boundaries of atomic individuality, his affirmation of the strict immanence of
human being in nature precludes the possibility of a total liberation from external
determination and, therefore, from the passions.23 It is this aspect of the Stoic
view, which he aligns with Descartes’s position, that Spinoza singles out for
criticism in his only explicit reference to Stoicism in the Ethics. The Stoics, he
says, imagine that the affects “depend entirely on our will, and that we can com-
mand them absolutely. But experience cries out against this” (EVpref). What
follows from such voluntarism, as Spinoza astutely observes, is a tendency to
treat the passions as vices or diseases of human nature, which moralists “there-
fore bewail, or laugh at, or disdain, or (as usually happens) curse” (EIIIpref).
To suppose that human beings can acquire an absolute freedom—that man “has
absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself”
(EIIIpref)—is to conceive of man in nature “as a dominion within a domin-
ion” (EIIIpref). Against this anthropomorphic position, Spinoza insists that it
is impossible “that a man should not be a part of Nature, and that he should be
able to undergo no changes except those which can be understood through his
own nature alone, and of which he is the adequate cause” (EIVp4). The strict
integration of human being in nature means that we are necessarily acted on by
external forces and therefore necessarily subject to passions. In sum, Spinoza
charges Stoic ethics with falling foul of the principle of immanence in at least
two respects. In identifying virtue with apatheia, or total freedom from passion,
it elevates the virtuous person above nature, and in imagining the attainment
of virtue as a function of the rational soul’s voluntary control over its affects, it
accords to the soul, but not the body, a power to transcend determination and so
both denies the soul’s natural status and problematically restricts what counts
as the self to the active, rational soul or mind.
Spinoza’s refusal of human exceptionalism is thoroughly endorsed by
Nietzsche. Like Spinoza, Nietzsche rejects “soul atomism” (BGE 12) and vol-
untarism as manifestations of a metaphysics that abstractly opposes man and
world (see GS 346). Nietzsche mounts his keenest criticisms of the Stoics,
however, against their account of suffering. In advocating measured endurance
and rational indifference toward the external world, which is experienced as the
source of unwanted suffering, Stoic ethics reveals itself to be motivated by the
desire to escape vulnerability and pain. When interpreted in terms of this desire,
the Stoic ideal of apatheia appears as a denial of the fundamental character of
life as productive struggle and growth. I suggest that for Nietzsche, openness
toward the world and increased capacity for being acted on and affected are the
marks of a healthy, life-affirming form of existence and therefore that he must

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reject not only a Stoic ethic of heroic endurance but also the dissolution of the
boundary between self and world on the same grounds because both postures
express a negative evaluation of our capacity to be affected. In turning now to
consider the alternative metaphysics and ethics that Spinoza and Nietzsche put
forward, I argue that their ethic is distinguished from a Stoic ethic by virtue
of its incorporation of a positive assessment of the value of the capacity to be
affected into its ideal of human freedom and flourishing.
Joyful Passions as a Condition of Flourishing: Spinoza
Spinoza and Nietzsche are united in their insistence on the radical immanence
of human beings in nature (see BGE 230). For both, nature is to be understood
in terms of a single principle of dynamic power—conatus in Spinoza and will
to power in Nietzsche— a striving or desire for expansion and growth, an effort
to develop one’s cognitive and corporeal forces in the direction of increasing
the power to act, that is necessarily conditioned by the activity of other things.
In other words, the activity and growth of particular individuals in nature is
always a function of both acting and being acted on, of affecting and being
affected. To exist, to be a living thing, is to strive to increase one’s power in and
through (affective) exchanges with an environment. The principle of the radical
immanence of the human in nature thus entails the impossibility of transcending
one’s relations, in other words, the impossibility of eradicating passivity and,
therefore, the passions, since these are the affective and ideational markers of
our susceptibility to being affected by the external world. It is on the basis of
this theoretical foundation that Spinoza and Nietzsche develop their ethics or
practical philosophy. For both, ethics provides guidance for maximizing power
or activity; that is, for realizing an essentially limited but expandable freedom for
a self conceived as necessarily embodied and embedded in a natural and social
environment within which it strives more or less effectively for self-development
and growth. An ethics that focuses on power enhancement rather than on the
achievement of a fully realized freedom or psychological independence from
external determination opens up the possibility of a more positive assessment
of the passions, insofar as it allows for a distinction to be made between that
which promotes one’s power and that which diminishes it. In terms of these
criteria, only those passions that harm us, that deplete our power, that prevent
us from becoming more active will count as bad. To the extent that certain kinds
of passivity and passion are the condition for activity or help to augment it, they
can be good.24
This idea of a special cooperation between activity and passivity is at the heart
of Spinoza’s rethinking of the affects and their role in ethical life. Although
Spinoza follows the Stoics in drawing a distinction between rational action as

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self-caused activity and passion as external determination, he makes it clear that

in the strict sense “God alone is a free cause. For God alone exists only from the
necessity of his nature . . . and acts from the necessity of his nature” (EIp17cor2).
All other beings, or finite modes, are “determined to exist and act by another
and to produce an effect in a certain and determinate manner” (EIp17). God (or
nature) alone, as an infinite being, is completely self-determining because there
is nothing outside him that could limit him (EIp17). In claiming that finite beings
are subject to strict determinism, Spinoza is not denying them a limited freedom
and activity. He is claiming, rather, that the capacity of finite modes to exist and
to act is necessarily conditioned by the activity of other existing things.25 We can
understand Spinoza’s position here as an attempt to unsettle the false dichotomy
between total passivity on the one hand and activity as self-origination and con-
trol on the other. For Spinoza, finite beings are neither completely active nor
completely passive. Rather, their activity is caused both by the action of other
things on them and by their own power of acting, that is, by the immanent power
of God or nature, which acts through each thing. It is because the essence of
natural individuals is potentia agendi et patiendi that human power is expressed
as conatus, that is, as the inherent striving of the individual for self-maintenance,
expansion, and growth through exchanges with an environment. That is, the activ-
ity of finite individuals is a function of being affected in order to affect (i.e., to
act). What Spinoza denies is that our powers of acting and thinking could ever
be unconditioned and therefore that an individual could ever be the originating
or sole cause of any activity. For Spinoza, we can produce the effects of which
we are capable or develop those powers of thinking and acting that follow from
our nature or essence only in collaboration with other individuals to whom we
are related as parts of larger wholes. And this is because our power as individu-
als is “infinitely surpassed by the power of external forces,” so that if we are to
persist and thrive, we must augment our powers through cooperative and mutually
empowering interactions with external things.
This vital interplay between our capacity to act and be acted on, to affect and
be affected, is one of the most strikingly original aspects of Spinoza’s ethics.
For Spinoza, our receptivity, or openness to what can affect us, both leaves us
vulnerable to those passions that undermine the striving for self-determination
and increases our power of acting. As Hans Jonas observes, although our capacity
to be affected may expose us to disempowering, destructive passions and desires,
it is nevertheless the case that “only by being sensitive can life be active, only
by being exposed can it be autonomous.”26 It is in his theory of the affects that
Spinoza articulates the link between the power of acting and affectivity. Spinoza
defines affects as “affections of the Body, by which the Body’s power of acting
is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas
of these affections. Therefore, if we can be the adequate cause of any of these
affections, I understand by the affect an action; otherwise a passion” (EIIIdef3).

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Spinoza distinguishes here between activity and passivity in terms of the

distinction between adequate and partial causation. We are said to act or to be
active when we are the adequate cause of our thoughts, actions, and emotions,
that is, “when something in us or outside us follows from our nature, and can be
understood through it alone” (EIIIdef2). We are, on the other hand, said to be
passive when what we do, think, and feel is not explicable solely in terms of our
own nature but must also be explained by the influence of external causes. This
distinction between actions and passions is complicated, however, by a division
internal to the category of passive affects, between those that correspond to an
increase in the body’s power of acting and those that involve a decrease in this
power. Spinoza develops this distinction in terms of the primary affects of joy
and sadness. He defines joy as “that passion by which the mind passes to a greater
perfection” and sadness as “that passion by which it passes to a lesser perfec-
tion.” Spinoza understands by perfection “the essence of a thing” (EIVpref).
The essence of the mind consists in its activity, that is, in the fact that it thinks
adequately or understands (EIVp26d). So, in the case of joyful passions, which
are the affective indicator of an increase in power or perfection brought about
by an external cause, the power of thinking adequately is augmented by external
things. If the path of ethical perfection is understood in terms of the transition
from relative passivity to increased activity, then we can say that anything that
reliably promotes our joy and protects us from sadness would be regarded by
Spinoza as contributing to whatever activity, perfection, or virtue (these are
synonyms for Spinoza) we are capable of achieving. Thus, against the Stoics
and their rejection of the value of external things to human flourishing, Spinoza
is able to assert not only that “we can never bring it about that we require noth-
ing outside ourselves to preserve out being” but furthermore that “our intellect
would of course be more imperfect if the mind were alone and did not understand
anything except itself. There are, therefore, many things outside us which are
useful to us, and on that account to be sought” (EIVp18schol).
But it is not just the mind’s increased perfection and activity that concerns
Spinoza. Or, rather, in a move that further distances him from the Stoics, Spinoza
asserts that physical well-being and increased perfection are the preconditions
for an individual’s securing an increased capability for being affected and affect-
ing and therefore of thinking.27 This contention follows from his understanding
of the substantial identity of mind and body. For Spinoza, mind is the idea of
body and monitors in awareness the series of states of its body object (EIIp11).
The more complex the body, the greater its capacity to be affected by other
bodies. A defining feature of highly complex and powerful bodies is, therefore,
“a capacity for being acted on in many ways at once” (EIIp13schol). Spinoza
links the body’s increased capacity for being affected and affecting with an
increase in the mind’s powers of perception and thought (EIVp38dem). If we
want to perfect our intellect, we must do more than simply provide the body

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with basic necessities: “Indeed, the human body is composed of a great many
parts of different natures, which require continuous and varied food so that the
whole body may be equally capable of doing everything which can follow from
its nature, and consequently, so that the mind may also be equally capable of
conceiving many things” (EIVappXXVII).
It is by expanding a body’s favorable, empowering contacts with its environ-
ment so that it has more things in common with other bodies that the mind related
to this body becomes more capable of thinking adequately, that is, of forming
adequate ideas of its affections and affects.28 And it is because Spinoza’s eth-
ics is concerned with the empowerment and liberation of the whole person as a
union of mind and body that he rejects the Stoic reification of mind. For Spinoza,
liberation cannot be conceived in purely psychological terms, cannot be thought
of simply as a mental liberation from the passions, for the simple reason that our
minds are not separable from our desires, bodies, and situatedness. On the con-
trary, our minds are determined by desires that express our body’s material and
social relations. As a consequence, cognitive therapy alone cannot liberate us.
Or, more precisely, the transformation of our desires, values, and beliefs entails
the transformation of material conditions, since they are in fact expressions of
the same reality. It is for this reason that Spinoza presents the path of ethical
liberation as realized in a process of increasing our power through broadening
our cognitive and corporeal engagements with the world. It is on the basis of
a diverse and rich set of relations with other beings in nature that we become
capable of deepening our understanding of the affective relations that determine
us as parts of a more encompassing whole. While Spinoza agrees with the Stoics
in affirming independence of mind as the goal of therapy, he departs from the
Stoics in refusing to construe independence as a function of transcending our
affective attachments and relations with the world.29
Spinoza’s recognition of the interdependence of passive and active power
and of how an increase in the one entails an increase in the other implies a
revaluation of our vulnerability, receptivity, and openness to what can affect
us—a revaluation that appears especially in his consideration of the ways in
which the passions themselves might be made to support our striving to increase
our power.30 He suggests that by building on and optimizing joyful pleasures
and desires we may increase our power, perfection, and virtue. Consider in
this regard his claim that “the greater the joy with which we are affected, the
greater the perfection towards which we pass” (EIVP45schol), so that “if a man
affected with Joy were led to such a great perfection that he conceived himself
and his actions adequately, he would be capable—indeed more capable—of the
same actions to which he is now determined from affects which are passions”
(EIVP59dem). Although passive joys and desires are an increase of our power
brought about by an external cause, Spinoza nevertheless recommends a thera-
peutic strategy that builds on and redirects such pleasures and desires rather

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than advocating an approach that would restrict, control, or eliminate them. He

can do so because he understands joy as an increase in activity, an increase in
our striving. Desires arising from joy are strengthened by joyful affects, by the
power of external causes. Because human power is augmented by the power
of an external cause in the experience of joy, Spinoza is able to accord a role
to passive joy in his account of the transition to freedom. It is not surprising,
therefore, to find joy emphasized in Spinoza’s summary of his remedies for
passivity in the final part of the Ethics, where he exhorts us to “attend to those
things which are good in each thing so that in this way we are always determined
to acting from an affect of joy” (EVp10schol). That Spinoza diverges decisively
from the Stoics in according value to human passivity is ultimately confirmed
in his theory of the highest good. For Spinoza, our highest good is to know and
love God. As Matthew Kisner explains, “such knowledge counts as a kind of
joy because knowing God increases our power, and as a kind of love because it
comes about, at least partly, from an external cause, God, expressed as the prior
modes that are the ultimate source of all our power. In this way, Spinoza claims
that the thing of greatest value and the goal of an ethical life is an understanding
of ourselves as dependent on and passive to God.”31 In the understanding and
affirmation of our passivity and our determination by the whole we become as
powerful, active, and joyful as we can be.
The Value of Suffering: Nietzsche
Like Spinoza, Nietzsche recognizes and affirms the complex interplay between
the capacity to affect and to be affected as fundamental to life, to growth in power,
and to “health.” It is in just these terms that he frames his criticisms of the Stoic
therapeutic model. When he claims that the Stoics “were consistent when they
[. . .] desired as little pleasure as possible, in order to get as little displeasure as
possible out of life,” he makes it clear that his own instincts tend in the opposite
direction: “To this day you have the choice: either as little displeasure as pos-
sible, painlessness in brief . . . or as much displeasure as possible as the price for
the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been
relished yet” (GS 12). Here Nietzsche hints at two therapeutic strategies for deal-
ing with the pain and suffering that are the inevitable lot of vulnerable, natural
creatures. The Stoic strategy, of which Nietzsche is largely critical in The Gay
Science, is characterized by its negative evaluation of our capacity to be affected:
it recommends a general loss of sensitiveness as the remedy for pain and suffer-
ing. But this leads, Nietzsche argues, not to the augmentation of life’s forces, to
joy and activity, but to their depletion and impoverishment. The reduction of our
capacity for suffering also reduces our capacity for joy. Nietzsche elaborates on
these criticisms of the Stoic account of suffering in a companion note from 1881:

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I believe that we do not understand Stoicism for what it really is. Its essential
feature as an attitude of the soul—which is what it originally was before being
taken over by philosophy—is its comportment toward pain and representations
of the unpleasant: an intensification of a certain heaviness and weariness to the
utmost degree in order to weaken the experience of pain. Its basic motifs are
paralysis and coldness, hence a form of anesthesia. The principal aim of Stoic
edification is to eliminate any inclination to excitement, continually to lessen
the number of things that might offer enticement, to awaken distaste for and to
belittle the value of most things that offer stimulation, to hate excitement as an
enemy; indeed, to hate the passions themselves as if they were a form of disease
or something entirely unworthy; for they are the hallmark of every despicable
and painful manifestation of suffering. In summa: turning oneself into stone as
a weapon against suffering and in future conferring all worthy names of divine-
like virtues upon a statue. [. . .] If a Stoic attains the character he seeks—for the
most part he already possesses this character and therefore chooses this phi-
losophy—the loss of feeling reached is the result of the pressure of a tourniquet.
I am very antipathetic to this line of thought. It undervalues the value of pain (it
is as useful and necessary as pleasure), the value of stimulation and suffering. It
is finally compelled to say: everything that happens is acceptable to me; nothing
is to be different. There are no needs over which it triumphs because it has killed
the passion for needs. (KSA 9:15[55], pp. 652–53)32
In articulating the reasons for his antipathy to the Stoic strategy of extirpation,
Nietzsche reiterates his view that Stoicism undervalues pain, stimulation, and
suffering. Peter Groff argues that this criticism is potentially misleading insofar
as it serves to cover over a deeper affinity between Nietzsche and the Stoics. To
see this affinity we need, Groff says, to distinguish between eliminating suffering
and banishing sorrow. While suffering can be understood as “an inescapable
fact of embodied existence[,] . . . sorrow is merely one optional interpretation
of that experience. In other words, sorrow and joy both have to do with one’s
interpretation and evaluation of the meaning and value of suffering.”33 Groff
argues that the Stoics and Nietzsche are actually united in their acknowledgment
of the impossibility of eliminating suffering but not sorrow.
No one could argue with Groff’s claim that Nietzsche’s fundamental orienta-
tion toward existence is “not one of recoiling, sadness, or regret, but rather one
of affirmation, gaiety, cheerfulness, and joy” or, in other words, that Nietzsche
refuses to interpret suffering as an objection to existence.34 A close reading of
the 1881 note, however, reveals that, contra Groff, Nietzsche does believe that
a Stoic attitude toward existence constitutes an effective way of minimizing
existential suffering and that it also expresses a sorrowful rather than a joyful
or “life-affirming” interpretation of existence. Moreover, it is clear from what
Nietzsche says both in this unpublished note and in published comments that he
does not object to Stoic therapy on the grounds that it works to deaden painful
affects. On the contrary, he recognizes that under certain circumstances resorting
to radical measures like anesthesia and extirpation in the struggle against unbear-
able suffering or debilitating passions like fear is an essential expedient for the

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preservation of life (see GS 306). The fact that Nietzsche does not criticize Stoic
therapy as a way of managing the passions under conditions of duress helps to
clarify the real target of his criticism. For Nietzsche, the folly of Stoic ethics is
in turning a useful strategy for dealing with destructive or debilitating passions
into an ideal of human flourishing. It is the Stoic ideal of virtue as freedom from
passion, along with the interpretation and evaluation of existence that undergirds
this ideal, that Nietzsche calls into question.
Nietzsche evaluates this ideal from the perspective of promoting the enhance-
ment and growth of human power. For Nietzsche, power is essentially a mat-
ter of growth and expansion, a matter of increase and “becoming more.” In a
remarkable echo of Spinoza, Nietzsche characterizes happiness as “[t]he feeling
that power increases, that resistance is overcome” (A 53).35 In other words, hap-
piness or joy is the affective marker of successful striving to increase power
against resistance, whether internal (other drives and affects) or external. This
conception of the mechanism of power increase is clearly at play in Nietzsche’s
objections to the Stoic ideal of virtue. In denying value to stimulation, suffering,
and passion, Stoicism also denies what is for Nietzsche a fundamental condi-
tion for growth in activity and joy; namely, openness to being affected. Insofar
as Stoic ethics advocates withdrawal, endurance, and indifference toward the
world, it closes the door to valuable sources of stimulation and struggle, thus
impeding rather than promoting human freedom and flourishing.
We can deepen our understanding of Nietzsche’s critique of Stoic ethics if
we consider the way he characterizes the desire that animates it. The desire
for redemption from a world that is experienced as the source of unwanted
suffering is typical, Nietzsche claims in GS 370, of those who suffer from the
impoverishment of life. Those lacking in strength and vitality typically seek
either “enclosure in optimistic horizons” as a means of insulating the self from
a world perceived as the source of suffering or some form of affective discharge
that serves to numb pain. The need for such measures betrays an incapacity to
affirm “growing and struggling life” (GS 370), or life in its character as growth
and struggle. The selection of radical expedients like extirpation in the struggle
against a desire or passion is characteristic of “those who are too weak-willed,
too degenerate to impose moderation upon it” (TI “Morality as Anti-Nature,” 2).
By contrast, “openness towards pain and suffering, perceived as necessary for
growth and production” is the mark of healthy, strong natures that enjoy an excess
of life, that are strong enough to be open to the contingencies of the world, that
are strong enough to be porous rather than hard.36 In this light, Stoic insensitiv-
ity, detachment, and self-control no longer seem to be valuable attributes, to
represent heroism or strength. On the contrary, they appear as signs of weakness,
as forms of self-protection that express a fear of the world and its contingencies.
Insofar as the Stoic ideal of virtue gives expression to a desire to be free from
passion and suffering, Nietzsche pronounces it “hostile to life.”

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Herman Siemens argues that Nietzsche’s distinction between impoverishment

and excess serves to distinguish a bad from a good form of therapy. The differ-
ence between the two does not turn on the criterion of effectiveness as pain relief
but rather is determined by the degree to which a particular therapeutic strategy
exhibits an ability to “affirm life as it is.” Following Spinoza, Nietzsche suggests
that to affirm life as it is means affirming the belonging together of pleasure
and displeasure, of health and sickness: the simultaneous growth in passive and
active power. An ethic of self-control that emphasizes the attainment of a fixed
and final second nature, of a health and activity definitively freed from sickness
and passion, cannot be life affirming. It would, thus, as R. O. Elveton observes,
“be a mistake to read Nietzsche as offering a new version of an ethics of self-
control.”37 Elveton sees Nietzsche’s opposition to the mastery of self-control
recommended by Stoicism as entailing a rejection of the Stoic erection of “a
fixed boundary between a clearly identifiable ‘mine’ and ‘not-mine.’”38 While
Stoic self-control depends on the assumption of the externality of the world
and consequently imagines self-realization as independence, self-sufficiency,
and retreat into the inner citadel, Elveton reads Nietzsche as urging acceptance
of the world that is “as a world that profoundly extends into my own ‘depths,’
challenging me to rethink and reinterpret my ‘interior’ life.”39 To accept the
world as extending into one’s depths is, I would argue, to expand the boundaries
of the self to encompass its affective relations with the world, which is exactly
what Nietzsche does. Nietzsche follows Spinoza in conceiving of the self as
inclusive of its desires, drives, and affects. The self is not a “doer behind the
deed,” not a thing that thinks, desires, and feels, but is the activity of thinking,
desiring, and feeling. What Nietzsche adds to this Spinozist view is an apprecia-
tion of the internal multiplicity of the self, which he expresses in terms of the
“metaphor” of the “soul as the social structure of the drives and the emotions”
in their relations to one another (BGE 12). This process of internalization of
affect and subsequent expansion of the inner world ironically owes something
to the Stoic insight that our affects depend on our judgments about the value of
things. This dependence of the affects on cognition internalizes my relations to
the world and, for the Stoics, enables me to assume responsibility for my affec-
tive responses. But while Nietzsche follows the Stoics in conceiving of affects as
felt inclinations and aversions that, as such, express judgments of value, he also
embraces Spinoza’s denial of the existence of a faculty of the will, distinct from
intellect and desire, that would allow us to manipulate or control our affects. We
are left, then, with an internal multiplicity of often conflicting drives and affects
that we cannot surmount, transcend, or ultimately control. On these seemingly
unpromising grounds Nietzsche develops an alternative account of flourishing
as self-mastery. The virtue we are now called on to exercise is that of creatively
shaping and transforming the inner world. For this form of self-creativity to
result in the enhancement of power, in growth and fertility, it must not weaken

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or excise the passions. Instead, Nietzsche exhorts us to put the passions, “those
impetuous torrents of the soul that are so often dangerous and overwhelm-
ing” (KSA 13:14[163]), into service and subject them to “a protracted tyranny”
(KSA 12:1[122]), so that they may be turned to our advantage, becoming sources
of strength and vitality instead of suffering.40 Creation is, thus, “the great redemp-
tion from suffering” (Z II: “On the Blissful Islands”).
University of Queensland
a.armstrong@uq.edu.au
Notes
I would like to thank Keith Ansell-Pearson and Michael Ure for their encouragement and for
critical feedback on this paper. I am also grateful to Tom Gibson for invaluable editorial assistance
and suggestions, and to Juliana Mercon and John Atkins for thoughtful comments.
1. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 190.
2. Richard Schacht, “The Spinoza-Nietzsche Problem,” in Desire and Affect: Spinoza as
Psychologist, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (New York: Little Room Press, 1999), 213.
3. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault,
(Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995), 102.
4. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 107.
5. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 108.
6. See, for example, GM P:5. In this article, I cite the following translations of Nietzsche’s
works: Carol Diethe’s translation of On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994); Walter Kaufmann’s translations of The Gay Science (New York:
Vintage, 1974), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: Penguin, 1978), and Beyond Good and Evil
(New York: Vintage, 1966); Kaufmann’s and R. J. Hollingdale’s translation of The Will to Power
(New York: Vintage, 1968); and Hollingdale’s translation of The Twilight of the Idols, in Twilight
of the Idols and The Antichrist (New York: Penguin, 1968).
7. Epictetus, Handbook 1.1–3, quoted in John Sellars, “An Ethics of the Event: Deleuze’s
Stoicism,” Angelaki 11. 3 (2006): 162.
8. I cite Edwin Curley’s translation of the Ethics from The Collected Works of Spinoza
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). When referring to the Ethics I use the standard
abbreviations: a Roman numeral to refer to the part, “D” for “definition,” “A” for “axiom,” “p”
plus an Arabic numeral for a proposition, “cor” for “corollary,” “dem” for “demonstration,”
“schol” for “scholium,” “pref ” for “preface.”
9. Firmin Debrabander, Spinoza and the Stoics: Power, Politics and the Passions (London:
Continuum, 2007), 17. On Spinoza’s relationship to Stoicism, see also P. O. Kristeller, “Stoic
and Neoplatonic Sources of Spinoza’s Ethics,” History of European Ideas 5.1 (1984): 1–15,
Susan James, “Spinoza the Stoic,” in The Rise of Modern Philosophy, ed. Tom Sorrell (Oxford,
UK: Clarendon Press, 1993), 289–316, and Alexandre Matheron, “Le moment stoïcien de
l'éthique de Spinoza,” in Le stoicisme aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, ed. Jacqueline Lagrée (Caen:
Presses Universitaires de Caen, 1994), 147–62.
10. Alexandre Matheron, “Le moment stoïcien de l'éthique de Spinoza,” 147.
11. Martha Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy,
Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals,” ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 140.

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12. Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy,” 154.

13. Michael Ure, “Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Trilogy and Stoic Therapy,” Journal of Nietzsche
Studies, no. 38 (2009): 60–84.
14. Ure, “Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Trilogy and Stoic Therapy,” 72.
15. On Nietzsche’s relationship to Stoicism, see Thomas Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading
of Epictetus,” Nietzsche-Studien 32 (2003): 429–34, R. O. Elveton, “Nietzsche’s Stoicism:
The Depths are Inside,” in Nietzsche and Antiquity, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester, NY: Camden
House, 2004), 192–203, Peter S. Groff, “Al-Kindi and Nietzsche on the Stoic Art of Banishing
Sorrow,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, no. 28 (2004): 139–73, Donald Rutherford, “Freedom as a
Philosophical Ideal: Nietzsche and His Antecedents,” Inquiry 54.5 (2011): 512–40, and Michael
Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2008).
16. Yovel, The Adventures of Immanence, xi.
17. The following summary of Stoic metaphysics and ethics is drawn from a number of
sources, including Derk Pereboom, “Stoic Psychotherapy in Descartes and Spinoza,” Faith
and Philosophy 11.4 (1994): 592–625, Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and
Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. chaps. 9 and
10, and John Sellars, Stoicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
18. Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1983), 40.
19. Epictetus, Handbook, 1.1–3, quoted in Sellars, “An Ethics of the Event” 162.
20. Pereboom, “Stoic Psychotherapy in Descartes and Spinoza,” 615.
21. Sellars, “An Ethics of the Event,” 163.
22. Sellars, “An Ethics of the Event,” 164.
23. For a discussion of the way in which Spinoza’s treatment of the self as inclusive of its
relations challenges atomic individualism, see Aurelia Armstrong, “Autonomy and the Relational
Individual in Spinoza and Feminism,” in Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza, ed. Moira
Gatens (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 43–63. See also Michael Collier,
“The Materiality of Morals: Mind, Body, and Interests in Spinoza’s Ethics,” Studia Spinozana
7 (1991): 285–308, and Heidi M. Ravven, “Spinoza’s Individualism Reconsidered: Some Lessons
from the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being,” in Spinoza: Critical Assessments of
Leading Philosophers, vol. 1, ed. Genevieve Lloyd (London: Routledge, 2001), 387–410.
24. Matthew Kisner, in Spinoza on Human Freedom: Reason, Autonomy and the Good Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), claims that Spinoza’s ethics is best understood
as directed at expanding human freedom and power rather than as exclusively concerned with
psychological liberation from the passions. On his reading, achieving the ethical goal of freedom
requires evaluating the passions according to whether they harm or promote human activity.
25. See Spinoza’s statement of determinism in EIp28: “Any thing which is finite and has
a determinate existence, can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it
is determined to exist and produce an effect by another cause, which is also finite and has a
determinate existence, and so on.”
26. Hans Jonas, “Spinoza’s Theory of Organism,” in Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. Marjorie Grene (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973), 273.
27. For the Stoics, as Nussbaum explains, “items that are not fully under the control of the
agent—such as health, wealth, freedom from pain, the good functioning of bodily faculties—have
no intrinsic worth, nor is their causal relationship to eudaimonia even that of an instrumental
necessary condition.” At best, such items are “preferred indifferents” that make no contribution to
virtue (The Therapy of Desire, 359–60.)
For an excellent discussion of how physical well-being and increased perfection are
prerequisites of our affecting and being affected, see Ursula Goldenbaum, “The Affects as

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a Condition of Human Freedom in Spinoza’s Ethics,” in Spinoza on Reason and the Free Man, ed.
Yirmiyahu Yovel and Gideon Segal (New York: Little Room Press, 2004), 155.
28. See E11p39 where Spinoza observes that “the mind is the more capable of perceiving
many things adequately as its body has many things in common with other bodies.”
29. See Heidi Ravven, “Spinoza’s Ethics of the Liberation of Desire,” in Women and Gender
in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004), 81.
30. The controversial claim that Spinoza envisages a role for the passions in a life of virtue
is defended by Goldenbaum in “The Affects as a Condition of Human Freedom in Spinoza’s
Ethics” and also by Matthew Kisner in “Spinoza’s Virtuous Passions,” Review of Metaphysics
61.4 (2008): 759–83.
31. Kisner, Spinoza on Human Freedom, 240.
32. Quoted in Elveton, “Nietzsche’s Stoicism,” 200.
33. Groff, “Al-Kindi and Nietzsche on the Stoic Art of Banishing Sorrow,” 154.
34. Groff, “Al-Kindi and Nietzsche on the Stoic Art of Banishing Sorrow,” 154.
35. See also Nietzsche’s characterization of freedom in TI “Expeditions of an Untimely Man”
38: “How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be
overcome. [. . .] One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance
is constantly being overcome.”
36. Herman W. Siemens, “Nietzsche’s Agon with Ressentiment: Towards a Therapeutic
Reading of Critical Transvaluation,” Continental Philosophy Review 34.1 (2001): 73.
37. Elveton, “Nietzsche’s Stoicism,” 201.
40. Translated as The Will to Power, §383, §384.

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The Passions, Power, and Practical Philosophy: Spinoza and Nietzsche Contra the Stoics

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Spinoza and Nietzsche Contra the Stoics

Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2013.

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existence by way of its transformation,” but without appealing to transcendent

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ethics, then, Spinoza’s view is profoundly Stoic in its presentation of rational

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in Nietzsche’s attitude toward Stoicism during different phases of his ­thinking.13

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Stoic Therapy: Virtue as Apatheia

The Stoic ideal of virtue is founded on a particular metaphysics of nature.17 To

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Joyful Passions as a Condition of Flourishing: Spinoza

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self-caused activity and passion as external determination, he makes it clear that

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Spinoza distinguishes here between activity and passivity in terms of the

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than advocating an approach that would restrict, control, or eliminate them. He

The Value of Suffering: Nietzsche

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Herman Siemens argues that Nietzsche’s distinction between impoverishment

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12. Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy,” 154.

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in Nietzsche’s attitude toward Stoicism during different phases of his thinking.13