Narrações, ou seja, histórias mentais da natureza: Ser, ser-poder e poder-ser em Espinosa

Abstract

Benedict Spinoza constructed his philosophy with the goal of expressing reality as absolute positivity. With the conception of an immanence of God in the natural order, his thought confronts centuries of a metaphysical tradition in which the being, to a greater or lesser extent, has always distanced itself from the material order. This distance is reflected in a fracture between thinking and saying what is. Spinoza's Ethics, as demonstrated according to the geometric order, aims at the correspondence between cognition and discourse for the freedom and affirmation of the human as singular, reconciling being, thinking, saying, and acting. However, like any philosophical enterprise, Spinoza's also presents difficulties and even insufficiencies, which we point out as tensions. This dissertation aims at the conceptual narrative (the “mental history”) of these tensions based on three contributions: that of being, of being-power, and of power-to-be. As for being, after illustrating the antecedents of Spinoza's philosophy (Maimonides' negative theology, Leo the Hebrew's syncretic mysticism, Pieter Balling's enthusiastic Cartesianism), we come to Descartes and his mathesis universalis, the main inspiration for the geometry of Ethics. By examining the Short Treatise, the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione and Spinoza's magnum opus, I point out the syntactic (expository inadequacies) and semantic (conceptual lapses and ellipses) gaps in the scope of being, the last

of which is the relationship between individual and collective salvation, moving on to being- power and the Theological-Political Treatise. The tension in this treatise is already in the title,

conjunction and disjunction of two spheres, in which, through the appropriation of being as the word of God, the theological aspires to the exercise of the political. The exegetical method applied to Scripture with the aim of separating meaning and truth, and consequently philosophy and theology, results in a tense interpretation of ambiguous disambiguation. This is what is seen in the analysis of prophecy, the vocation of the Hebrews, but especially in the question of miracles, collective salvation and Christ. The ambiguity of language is also evident in the political sphere, where Spinoza deals with a natural law terminology inspired by Hobbes, but in order to refute it by maintaining the tension of law as a power, the object of the final contribution of this dissertation, that of power-to-be. In the Tractatus politicus, having largely overcome contractualism, the tension will be between the initial Machiavellian realism, with its disapproval of the utopian ideal of Moresian origin, and the idealism underlying the rational formulation of the State, be it monarchical, aristocratic or democratic. The ought-to-be, an ontological and historical determination, conceals the ought-to-be, the aspiration to the “absolute State”, which is ultimately a rational fiction. All the research was done based on bibliographical research, prioritizing, in order, the works of Spinoza, the works of philosophers in dialogue with him, and the works of commentators. After the “conceptual narrative” of

tensionalities, it is concluded that the relationship between being, being-power, and power-to- be in Spinozism leads to the fourth concept, the ought-to-be, as a nucleus of tension, a knot of

thought, only untied in the future, in power-to-be as becoming, a task of our time.