Narrative as the Means to Freedom

Abstract

One of the differences between imaginative and rational practices, Spinoza claims, is that only the first depend on and make use of narratives. For example, whereas the imaginative revelations recorded in Scripture often take a narrative form, reasoning deals with the demonstrative relations between adequate ideas. Whereas imagining engages with particular things and events, reasoning operates at a general level. The chapter challenges this view by examining some of the ways in which reasoning, as Spinoza conceives it, not only develops out of imagining but continues to incorporate it. Philosophers rely on an imagined idea of a completely cooperative form of life to motivate their pursuit of cooperation and freedom.