Imagination and bondage in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise

Abstract

Passing through finalistic prejudice, superstition, the manipulation of sense of the scriptures, and the imagination and its consequences within the political experience, we intend to show how – based on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise - the common experience of potency growth is inaccessible to individuals because it is colonized by prejudices and passive affections through a system of imaginative implications and the impossibility of expressing immanent social conflicts in society, making them voluntarily obey a regime of oppression.