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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2025
Joy (laetitia) is, with sadness (tristitia) and desire (cupiditas), one of Spinoza’s three basic affects or emotions. Spinoza defines joy, generally, as a person’s passage to greater perfection (E3DA2, E3p11s) and associates joy closely with the good (see, for example, E3p39s, E4p8, E4p41, TIE[1]). Passive forms of joy are those that arise, in part, through the influence of things external to us. Spinoza takes passive forms of joy to be good in themselves, although they may be indirectly evil (E4p41–44). Active forms of joy, by contrast, have no external causes: a person is the adequate or total cause of her own joy. Active forms of joy are both important means of mitigating the harms of other passions (E5p10s) and intrinsic goods (E4p52s, E5p40). This entry begins with an account of the foundation for Spinoza’s theory of joy in his accounts of causation in finite things and proceeds to accounts of passive joy and active joy.
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