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 The concept of the political in Spinoza’s Ethics

  The primary text of Baruch Spinoza’s short theoretical corpus Ethics isnot a work on politics, but it is necessarily political nevertheless. The givennecessity, on the one hand, is determined by compositional nature of Ethicsitself, which in geometrical order demonstrates ordine geometricodemonstrata! the topography of metaphysics within which every particularthing of reality in in"nity of interdependencies is represented by indexes of communicative intensities, that is always already signed by the political, andon the other hand, the constitution of practical anthropology in Ethics  viathe logic of practicality itself, in the process of thinking about the politicalsub#ect is essentially a productive instrument in order to explicate reasonsfor the impossibility of normative nature for pre$political propositions. %n

essay aims through these two thoughts brie&y to thematize the concept of the political in Ethics.

'n the beginning, we should note that Ethics is exposed exactly as atopography of metaphysics in which as Spinoza writes human actions andappetites will be considered as if it were an investigation into lines, planes orbodies '''( )reface!. The given topography is not interested in showing whatis something that is( for Ethics, something that is, from the very beginning isconsidered to be precise and knowable, *nothing exists external to theintellect except substances and their a+ections writes Spinoza '( -!, everyother being either is or is not, sometimes it is and sometimes it is not. ven

the man is wrapped into these endless &uctuations between being andnonbeing because his essence and existence is never one and the same./e0she is the defective reality of unrealized potentialities. Spinoza isinterested to "nd out not something that is, but how is it that something is./is mental, bodily and intuitive forces are intended towards explicating andshedding light to the principle of *howness”  of being.

  1onceptualization of *howness of being gives us material for detectingthe registers of the political in Ethics. The "rst such a register we face iswhen Spinoza di+erentiates entities of reason entia rationis! from those of imagination entia imaginationis!. The reason is permanently intended

towards imagining things rerum imagines!, but it proceeds it independentlyfrom its ob#ect ideatum!, to say it otherwise, the paradoxical nature of 2images of imagination2 is that they do not include the ob#ects they imaginewithin themselves and because of this, they always lack the reality that infact is the fundamental determination of Ethics because *the more reality orbeing a thing has, the more attributes it has '( 3! and vice versa.

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  xtension into reality is a progression for every single thing, it actualizesthe ade5uate forces within a thing. Being on this way is manifested inapproaching totality of interdependences through appropriation of communicative instruments. The extension of a thing into reality appears tobe localization of a thing within communicative intensity, which on the plane

of reality is represented as an in"nite process of changeability betweenade5uate and inade5uate forces. The reality of a thing is constituted in theprocess of becoming, which is in"nite and independent from externalinstances. This process is an absolute immanence, immanence that from thevery beginning determines the thing’s dynamics of pro#ection from physicalexistence to the future ethical one. The given pro#ection lacks evidentialexpressions and for a simple reason so, for Spinoza there are no evidentexpressions as such. There is nothing in itself #ust or un#ust, good or bad,composed or simple, but everything is produced on the basis of communicative experimentation with reality in order to be reproduced oncemore. 6e are experimenting with reality and in this procedure we constitute

the horizon for actualization of our potentialities.

 This procedure of communicative experimentation is political because itorganizes itself only through a positive a7rmation of reality. The higherintensity of communicative experimentation is the broader and morereasonable forms of composition within gained reality we experience. Thepractical solidity of forms are de"ned by true ideas, articulated throughcommon notions notiones communes! which are e5ually in the part as in thewhole ''( 89! and which by the force of knowledge enlightened by reasonendlessly compose us to each other. The nature of common notions is signedby constant aspiration towards extending the limits of commonality and

concerning the domain of the political it never implies mere homogenizationof being but radical and in"nite enhancement of the processes of individuation and singularization that is never an isolated particularity but ahard desire for becoming a part of the whole.

 The primary concept of Ethics  is nothing more than necessity togenerate desire for becoming a part of the whole. :nly through this totalityare we capable in actualizing and extending the ade5uate forces within usand accordingly, only through becoming part of it, we experience as a fact of life, the most fundamental political message of Ethics that *;an is a god toman /omo homini