Abstract

Our everyday notion of freedom is an innate prejudice. It is based on our inadequate knowledge of the causes of things and on our tendency to accord too much credence to the way things appear, that is, to the way that things outside ourselves affect us. Imagination, the lowest kind of knowledge, is the source of falsity and error, and it lies at the origin of human bondage to affect. The imagination can be deployed in the service of attaining a relatively freer existence through imagining ourselves as acting like the free man held up by Spinoza in E4Pref as a model of human nature. The free man embodies the sure maxims of life to a perfect degree. Spinoza explicitly says that the free man is noble and tenacious, that is, he possesses the active affects described under the virtue of strength of character.