The Arena of Passions and The Mirror of Reason: A Spinozist Inquiry into Collective Rationality and Public Discourse

This study argues that while modern civilization has achieved an unprecedented level of control over physical reality, its public sphere has increasingly deteriorated into a hyper-conflictual space—an exclusive Arena of Passions. The paper traces the epistemological origin of this asymmetry to the linguistic turn in modern philosophy, which privileged discursive interpretation over causal engagement with reality, thereby weakening the conditions for shared rationality. Building on Spinoza’s ontological naturalism, this study distinguishes between the ontological finitude that necessitates the formation of solidarity bodies and the pathological transformation that occurs when such formations become moralized. It argues that while collective solidarity emerges as a natural response to epistemic limitation, problems arise when this condition is distorted into a Will to Solidarity—defined as the collective impulse to universalize a group’s local moral code and project it onto others. When this impulse acquires academic, technological, and institutional leverage, it becomes structurally consolidated into what the paper terms Structured Solidarity (Layer 2). The Moralized Critical Framework (MCF) is analyzed not as a contingent ideology, but as a symptomatic manifestation of this general mechanism through which affective drives are stabilized into unfalsifiable epistemic monopolies. Rather than approaching moral conflict as a normative problem, the paper proposes an ontological reconfiguration that reduces moral “ought” to causal relations. Employing Spinoza’s geometrical method and a hard incompatibilist account of agency, it derives a set of ontological premises and operational variables—Negentropy Efficiency (η), Information Complexity (I), Causal Work (W), and the Coefficient of Adequacy (A)—to formalize collective conatus within social systems. On this basis, the study introduces The Mirror of Reason as a conceptual architecture for understanding rational coordination beyond moralization. By modeling alignment as a problem of causal adequacy rather than moral learning, the paper outlines a framework through which epistemic deadlock may be transformed into a condition of rational coexistence and evolutionary solidarity.