A secularização dos afetos religiosos nos escritos de Spinoza: esperança e medo, amor e generosidade

Positioning himself as «natural philosopher» in the treatment of the passions, Descartes initiates a secularization of affects or emotions. Surely with regard to this he is followed by Spinoza. In both cases, the philosophical approach of affection is to release them from a moral perspective, secularizing in this manner the emotions: separated from morality, their explanations are no more attached to religion, since the moral is based on the idea of transcendent God. At this point, Spinoza goes further than Descartes at the secularization of emotions, because in Spinoza God is naturalized, God sive natura. Generosity, for example, does not depend on a God endowed with good will, but on the natural exercise of human reasoning as part of the rationalized Nature. So that even the intellectual love of God would not be a substitute for religious moral impulse: to Spinoza, this love, as well as generosity and friendship, is in necessary order of nature, neither depending on a divine free will, nor being reducible to human will exclusively.