Fighting Tyranny with Joy—Affective Love and Love of God in Spinoza’s Philosophy

I argue that Spinoza’s philosophy has room for active affective love. Love is active if it is partly determined by the object of love (which is necessary for it to qualify as love) and follows from the lover’s nature (which is necessary for it to be active). Unlike passive affective love and active love of God, active affective love is not constituted by a relation to the loved one that would demand the positive reappraisal of harm caused by the loved one to the lover but rather by a joyful relation between the lover and the loved one. Spinoza rejects Descartes’s definition with respect to affective love and follows it with respect to love of God, which implies that for Spinoza only God, but no political leader, is the appropriate object of a kind of love that demands the positive reappraisal of harm caused by the loved one to the lover. Active affective love is possible if the reason for the joyfulness of the loved one’s effect on the lover is in the lover’s nature and not in external circumstances. Read in the context of contemporary philosophy, Spinoza’s theory opens up the interesting possibility of what I call theistic polyamory.