Freedom in Spinoza as an Onto-Epistemological Basis in the Confrontation of Ethical-Political Suffering

Abstract

The aim of this article is to focus, based on Spinoza’s philosophy, on the concept of "ethical-political suffering", necessarily articulating it to the concepts of “good encounters” developed by Gilles Deleuze and Spinoza’s “power of acting”. For that, we weave a reflection on the concept of freedom for this author, going through his masterpiece, Ethics, articulated with some of his readers and interlocutors. We argue that recognizing the ontological and epistemological basis of these concepts allows us to demarcate an ethical and political direction that can contribute with Critical Social Psychology in Brazil. The idea of freedom as an ontology claims life expansion as a human foundation or as a desire that moves us in search of encounters that increase our possibilities of singular and collective existence. The restriction of this desire is at the genesis of the ethical-political suffering.