Abstract
This article offers an overview of Marilena Chaui’s reading of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP). Chaui has published numerous books and essays on Baruch Spinoza. Her two-volume study The Nerve of Reality is the culmination of a decades-long engagement with the Dutch philosopher, and her research has been a valuable resource for generations of Latin American scholars. From this extensive output, we focus on Chaui’s main texts on the theological-political, concentrating on her analysis of the concept of superstition and the philosophical language of the TTP, which Chaui calls a “counter-discourse”. Spinoza’s enduring relevance for the interpretation of contemporary phenomena is clarified by Chaui’s analysis of the TTP, which establishes a fundamentally political understanding of superstition.
Highlights
This article seeks to introduce readers to the work of Brazilian philosopher MarilenaChaui, with particular focus on her valuable contributions to the study of the TractatusTheologico-Politicus (TPP)
Already a professor and researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo (USP), in October 1967, Chaui arrived at Clermont-Fernand University to continue conducting research for her dissertation, under the direction of Victor Goldschmidt
In the preface to Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus (TTP) and in several letters, Spinoza clearly explains the factors that led him to write the work, which can be summarized in two objectives: to demonstrate that there is no form of speculative truth in the Scriptures, but only moral and religious teachings; and to explain the contradictions in prophetical narratives being not divine mysteries, but products of precise material conditions related to cultural, historical, linguistic, psychological, and political variations, by means of a historical, critical, and philological method
Summary
This article seeks to introduce readers to the work of Brazilian philosopher Marilena. Chaui studies the application of the imagination and desire in Spinoza, where what is at stake is the adequate comprehension of a given people’s imaginative regime and their singular ingenium This perspective is concerned with the anthropological and symbolic realm, wherein certain beliefs, habits and customs thrive and are reproduced, wherein the anthropological and symbolic universe of the Hebrew social body constitutes the material base for the development of a specific political field and a form of State. That is, on this second point, Chaui explores the Spinozian notion of imagination by considering its productive quality, which allows us to grasp, in a more adequate way, the relations of power, authority, and obedience of a determined social body. The TTP, is the lens that Spinoza’s philosophy offers to readers to uncover the mysteries of a given reality
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