Spinoza thus poses the question of transition a second time. The interest of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect for our inquiry is as follows: 1. The problem is that of the incompatibility of two instituta vitae. 2. Each of these is characterised by a particular type of ‘love’ (or a particular type of the determination of striving). 3. The primitive institutum that we must mourn betrays a state of tendential transformation.

The Logic of Ethical Transition: Conversion and Dilemma

The interest of the prologue of the Treatise on the Emendation is that it tells a story of transition. We know that the first sentence, which is of exceptional density, introduces the reader to a double temporality of caesura (‘Postquam me experientia docuit …’) and delay (‘constitui tandem inquirere …’, repeated insistently at the start of the second sentence: ‘Dico, me tandem constituisse …’). Pierre-François Moreau has recently shown that the two statements that seem at first glance to constitute the content of the empirical lesson do not refer to the same moment: ‘Postquam me experientia docuit, omnia, quae in communi vita frequenter occurunt, vana, et futilia esse …’ and ‘cum viderem omnia, a quibus, et quae timebam, nihil neque boni, neque mali in se habere, nisi quatenus ab iis animus movebatur …’ are separated, in subjective chronology, by a whole unstable period referred to by the adverb tandem. Léon Bruncshvicg already underscored that this introductory sentence summarises by itself the entire trajectory described in the prologue. We are even more willing to subscribe to Moreau's conclusion insofar as the second statement reappears in §9, right at the same time as the discovery, and in the comedown after the paroxysm of §7. The initial caesura is thus a double trigger, and it includes a concrete duration that leads the subject of the initial empirical lesson, who kicks off the process, to the ‘emendation’ properly speaking and announced in the title. This lesson, in fact, which no doubt induces a tendency to be disaffected with regard to the preoccupations of everyday life, does not yet suffice to carry out what is announced as a necessary renunciation (‘rejectis caeteris omnibus’), which presupposes – just as in the Short Treatise, ignorance and the passions are not rejected prior to the advent of knowledge, for it is knowledge that pushes them back – a positive conversion of affectivity toward another type of object.