Modification and Temporality

In Spinoza's concept of Experience, 'affection' is sometimes rendered as 'affect', but more frequently as 'modification', an apparent interchangeability that obscures a significant distinction between the two. Whereas an 'affect' usually connotes a discrete event, a 'modification' entails a transition from one status to another, i. e. the latter, but not the former, is conditioned by the antecedent state of the affected entity. But, Spinoza, in other contexts, attributes to the sources of affections the capacity to increase or decrease the strength of an affected body. Hence, in his system,'modification' is more appropriate than 'affect'. The implicit structure of Perception in his system therefore distinguishes his theory of it from the Lockeian tradition--which, as has been previously discussed, pervades beyond Empiricism--because that tradition treats every new mental datum as independent of what precedes it. Accordingly, Spinoza's concept of Experience implicitly entails a concept of Temporality as cumulative, i. e. it conceives the new mental datum M as the idea of a modification of bodily condition A, by influence X, producing new bodily condition B. In other words, it conceives every new condition to be in part constituted by its antecedents.