Love and Knowledge

Freud and Spinoza

Abstract

In this article, a reflection is made on the relation between love and knowledge in Freud and Espinosa, taking as the nucleus of the analysis the theses of Freud in his famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci. It is tried to show that the Freudian opposition between love and knowledge, opposition that lets itself be captured in the concept of sublimation, does not have place in the thought of Espinosa. In the Spinoza’s theory of the affects, such the opposition undoes; and it is above all through the concept of Amor Dei Intellectuallis, presented in Part V of his Ethics, that Spinoza reveals that instead of opposition, there is rather the full realization of the love as the action of the mind that knows itself in the heart of immanent Nature.