  Finally, active joy and active desire which Spinoza introduces at IIIp58 represent a separate class of affects notable both for their novelty against the background of traditional accounts of the passions and also for their importance to Spinoza’s ethical arguments of Parts IV and V. On traditional accounts of the passions, even Descartes’s (The Passions of the Soul, I.1), actions and passions are the same thing, regarded from different perspectives: when A does X to B, X is an action for A but a passion for B. For Spinoza, however, anything which follows in a person where that person is an “inadequate” or partial cause of the thing, is a passion, and anything that follows where a person is an “adequate” or total cause of the thing is an action. Thus Spinoza’s class of active affects places a strong emphasis on people’s roles as total causes of what they do; because it becomes for Spinoza ethically important that a person be active rather than passive, that emphasis raises a host of questions about the extent to which a person, a particular thing interacting constantly with other things and indeed requiring some of them for sustenance, can come to resist passion and guide himself by means of joy and the active desires. 