Spinoza's philosophy as a way to start a dialogue about diversity between High School students

Abstract

In the curriculum of the Common National Base for Secondary Education in Brazil, the promotion of ethics and human rights is a constituent category of the Human Sciences program in general and in Philosophy in particular. In light of this directive, this article reports on an experience of approaching to issues of ethnicity, gender and sexuality in 2nd year high school classes at the IFPR Colombo campus (state of Paraná, Southern Brazil). The experience was based on a reading of selected elements from Spinoza’s Ethics and Theological-Political Treatise. The theoretical foundation for the thematic approach based on Spinoza consists of an interpretation of the concepts of Mode, Attribute and Substance, the latter understood as the most perfect. If, for the author, the Substance shows itself in different modes and with different attributes, and each being is a different mode of the same Substance, that is, God, then: a) if the human being is a mode of the Substance and the Substance is most perfect, it cannot be said that he or she is at fault before God for being as he or she is, and; b) if the order of Nature is also most perfect (because God, sive Natura), gender differences, ethnicities, bodies and sexualities are only modes of the attribute extension: to affirm them as sins or faults is to say that Substance is not Perfect.