Spinoza´s philosophy beyond the body-machine: the parallelism in question

Abstract

We intend to analyze some passages from Ethics in order to understanding a renowned Spinozian quote: what´s a body capable of? Traditionally, the mind has dominion over the body. Everything which becomes real through creation or innovation comes from an action of the mind over the body. The body being nothing more than the field of necessary and mechanical relations, or worse, the place of sins, freedom would come by the subjection of the body the mind. The mind could not be active unless the body were passive. For Spinoza, this traditional point of view ins completely inverted, and, based on this inversion, we can figure out the meaning of the quote: "what´s a body capable of?" According to Spinoza, body and mind must be active or passive together. The body has a prominent role. It´s also capable of creating. It is one of the fulcrums of freedom as well. That is what we intend to discuss in the present article. And, if much has been written on how, in the XVII century, the body ceases to be the place of sickness and of sins to become the place of necessary and mechanical relations, the innovation in Spinoza consists precisely in going beyond the body-machine concept. However, the reach of this undertaking is closely linked to a certain tradition of commentators who defend paralelism in the relation between body and mind. The reflection upon parallelism is, therefore, necessary for the understanding of how the meaning of the Spinozan quote brings forth the unfolding of a whole new horizon, which lays open, at long last, for both body and freedom.