Experience and Emotion

According to Spinoza, human experience consists in the endeavor to persist in one's being.  So, Knowledge is part of that endeavor, determining what promotes it and what hinders it, in order to harness the former and to eliminate the latter.  Thus, Sense-Experience, the focus of prominent Philosophers of the era and beyond, is of only derivate interest to Spinoza.  More relevant to his project are the increases and the decreases of one's strength in the endeavor, which, on the basis of his Parallelism, have Mental and Bodily aspects.  Thus, unlike most Dualist Philosophers, he can conceive Pleasure and Pain as Ideas of Bodily conditions, i. e. of increases in strength and decreases of strength, respectively.  Furthermore, because he defines Emotions as derived from Pleasure and Pain, he can conceive them as not irreducible experiential data, as is common to most systems of Psychology and Morality, but as fluctuations in strength, to be either reinforced or resisted, via Knowledge of their causes.  Two notable applications of this concept of Emotion are to Sympathy and to Hope, each of which, containing a Pain component, can be weakening experiences.  The concept thus entails significant objections to the advocacy of one or the other Emotion, e. g. by Hume and Kant, respectively, which, even if recognized, are difficult to counter on the basis of a concept of Emotion as an irreducible experiential component.