Emotion Which Is Suffering Ceases To

This appears in Part V of the Ethics (1677), in Spinoza's account of how adequate ideas transform passions into active emotions. For Spinoza, passions are forms of suffering precisely because they are confused — we do not fully understand their causes. Once we form a clear and distinct idea of an emotion (its cause, its place in the causal order of nature), it ceases to be a passive passion and becomes something we actively understand, thereby losing its power to torment us. Baruch Spinoza's approach anticipates later developments in cognitive therapy by centuries.