Explicatio and Imperium: on the continuity between the ontological condition and the political existence

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues,Lisete
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://scielo.pt/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0807-89672012000200013
• topic: Spinoza; Ontology; Politics; Political Community; Ex communi

Taking the overlap between the ethical account of human existence and the political plane of action as a fundamental backdrop, this paper intends to show the ontological character of Spinoza’s account of the fundaments of the political existence. Explicatio and imperium are the two terms from which the argued continuity is perceived. We propose to do it by exploring the essential connection between Spinoza’s ontological fundaments and their expression as the category of political existence. In this sense, the human existence, taken ontologically as explicatio, as an enduring effort of unfoldment, narrative, expression of the natural force through which the human being begins to exist and tries to persevere in existing can be understood through its connexion with the political category of imperium, and, necessarily, vice versa. Notwithstanding the diversity of concrete social and political life forms, the necessity of human existence inside any form of common law and among the common society of men is deduced from that same ontological condition. The notion of imperium sprouts from the same process of perseveration in existence of the collective body that is naturally constituted, accordingly with the elemental dictates of reason. This continuity between the ontological conditions of existence and the political reality itself can be a useful tool to understand Spinoza’s contribution to think the political community, by introducing an immanentist thinking of its reality, definition and processuality, doing without any transcendent order of pre given ends.