Abstract:
The scope of this article is to explain the logic of the production of passions through the imaginative conatus in Spinoza. This logic involves the understanding of the primitive affections of joy, sadness and desire that will compose the passions for which we are determined to think and act, and at the same time, produce the illusion of freedom of undetermined choice. We will see how this logic of the imaginative conatus, when suffering the vacillation of mind, will produce the contingent and possible modalities that are responsible for the illusion of indeterminate choice, that is, of free will. We will try to demonstrate that the experience of freedom as the power of opposites for which men believe to determine the ends for which the appetite/desire changes in passions is reduced to the experience of the vacillation of mind. This illusion of undetermined freedom arises because men do not adequately know their essence (conatus), a fact that leads them to identify the efficient causes of the production of affections as final causes.
Keywords:
Freedom; Passions; Affections; Possible; Contingent; Spinoza