Issue 23: The Geometry of Freedom

For the next few issues, I’ll be writing a five-part series inspired by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.
Each essay will approach his thought from a different, complementary angle — exploring freedom, unity, emotion, politics, and imagination as parts of a single vision of life and reason.

The main essay in each issue will focus on my own reading of Spinoza’s ideas — their structure, coherence, and possible relevance today.
The Narrative Layers section will then mirror that same essay through the lens of photography: a reflection on how those philosophical concepts resonate with the act of seeing, framing, and creating images.

Rather than merging these two approaches into one text, I’ll keep them separate — so that their dialogue can be felt across the page, in the tension and harmony between thinking and seeing.
Philosophy on one side, photography on the other — two distinct but converging ways of understanding necessity, freedom, and the geometry of being.

Freedom, for me, has less to do with control than with presence. The more I attend to what stands before me — not to what I expect or imagine — the freer I feel. Presence is the alignment of inner and outer necessity: the world arranges itself, and I am simply there to recognize it. In that moment, the act of photographing ceases to be a conquest and becomes an act of reconciliation. The subject matter opens only when I stop insisting on my own mental image.

Spinoza’s claim that necessity is not a cage but the geometry of being finds a literal echo in the geometry of the photographic frame. The rectangle imposes its structure, but inside it, infinite variations unfold. Lines, shapes, and rhythms arrange themselves as if revealing the invisible logic of the visible world. Composition is not control but dialogue: order appearing out of necessity, not invention.

Blindness, in Spinoza’s sense, is ignorance of causes — the refusal to see the pattern in what moves us. In photography, blindness is more than the absence of sight; it is the unwillingness to look without prejudice. We suffer when we refuse to see things as they are — people, spaces, objects — because we then fight against the very reality we inhabit. Seeing clearly, on the other hand, restores proportion. It turns fear into curiosity and judgment into comprehension. To photograph is to practice this clarity: to replace the imagined with the seen.

Every photograph is born from the tension between two landscapes: the external and the internal. The observer is part of what is observed; the world looks back. The image that emerges belongs to neither fully — it is a dialogue between the geometry of things and the geometry of the self. In this sense, the act of seeing is a form of participation in a larger intelligence that surpasses the mind yet lives through it.

Desire, too, finds its place here. The desire to make a photograph is not a distortion of thought but its extension — an instinct that seeks form, coherence, direction. Photography gives shape to feeling. It channels energy into structure, turning the formless restlessness of emotion into the clarity of an image.

Seen this way, necessity and freedom are not opposites but two vantage points on the same act of seeing. From a distance, I sense the chain of causes that brought this light, this object, this instant together. From within, I feel the impulse to press the shutter — will as participation. The difference is perspective, not substance. When my thought, my feeling, and the world align, I experience that fleeting moment when understanding and necessity coincide — when freedom becomes indistinguishable from vision.