DOUGLAS NUNES VIEIRA

We can interpret the Ethics as the book in which Spinoza encourages us to carry out a practical reflection upon life, a reflexive movement contrary to the mastery of passions and ignorance of ourselves. In this research, we intend to demonstrate that, in this work, repentance is not reduced to one of the most bitter pains we experience, being considered one of the necessary conditions for carrying out this reflective exercise. At the beginning of Ethics III, repentance will have an important function: to reorient the reader in the sense of turning to himself in order to reinterpret his life in the light of the metaphysical theses developed in Ethics I and II. Turning to the things we repent means, therefore, not judging them as a saint or a wise man who associates them with some imperfection of human nature, but understanding that they follow from the common laws of nature. In nature, there are things which are powerful enough to submit us to forces contrary to ourselves, inducing us to perform acts we repent. However, there are also those things we desire so much that they consequently determine the way we judge ourselves. In the Ethics, repentance is the pain that constitutes in us an imaginary judgment by which we submit ourselves to the judgment of our parents as well as that of other beings whose bodies are similar to ours. In this sense, repentance is a useful pain for social life, as it leads everyone to judge themselves for their reprehensible acts without being carried away by the desire for revenge, preventing us from living in a lawless land.