Against Entia Imaginationis, with Imagination: Toward a New Conception of Religion in Spinoza

From ancient times to the present day, philosophy, which makes a distinction between objects of knowledge and belief, has distinguished itself as a field of activity concerned not with things that are subject to time and space, but with those that cannot be otherwise under the form of eternity, or those that truly are. When it comes to the conversion of the ontological and epistemological horizon into the ethical realm, concepts such as goodness, the human good, and justice—even though they are framed according to time and space—are considered to be concepts that can be actualized as desires arising in the mind or intuited under the form of eternity. This points to two interdependent scenarios: recognizing an event or phenomenon within the context of time and space and comprehending it within the context of eternity. Two distinct cognitive faculties are at work in these two scenarios. For Spinoza, one of these is imagination; the other is reason. This article examines the function of imagination in Spinoza. Spinoza concludes that concepts such as ‘Being’, ‘God’, and ‘religion’, which are constructed on the basis of ideas acquired from random experiences in a fragmented or inadequate manner, must be removed from the mind. In contrast, by connecting the aspect of imagination that enables common life to reason, we arrive at a conception of God that arises entirely from reason, in which humans can know themselves adequately under the guidance of reason, and at a related conception of ‘religion’.