Issue 25: Inner Motion, Outer Order

This issue continues my five-part exploration of Spinoza, turning now to one of the most demanding and revealing aspects of his philosophy: emotion. Spinoza treats emotion with the same rigor he applies to nature, stripping away mysticism and moralism to show its underlying structure — a geometry of expansion and contraction, of movements that either widen or restrict our capacity to act.

In the main essay, The Geometry of Emotion, I follow this line of thought to its consequences: how joy, sadness, desire and fear are not mysteries to be decoded, but intelligible modulations of power; how clarity, rather than control, becomes the true foundation of freedom.

In Narrative Layers, I reflect on these ideas through the lens of photography — on how emotion shapes perception, how images persist beyond the moments they record, and how the silent grammar of photographs mirrors Spinoza’s description of inward movement. If the main essay examines the mechanics of emotion, the photographic reflection shows how those mechanics become visible.

Thank you for reading, and for following this ongoing study. Two more issues will complete the Spinoza cycle before the next series begins.

—Jorge

This leads naturally into Spinoza’s idea of precision. He treats emotion structurally, almost mathematically. Can a photographer approach emotional response with comparable clarity? Perhaps only partially. We can articulate certain principles, certain shared patterns of perception, but emotions themselves cannot be measured; there is no instrument capable of quantifying their intensity. And yet photography invites rigorous attention. Its silence demands analysis. Still, divergence remains essential. Not everything needs to align. Some photographers think clearly and speak clearly; others produce clarity without words. Originality often arises at the edges, where people do not conform to the dominant frameworks. Precision, in this sense, does not eliminate mystery; it sharpens it.

Mysticism is something else entirely — the fog, the aura, the non-verbal posture that conceals emptiness. Photography has its share of that, but it also contains a deeper kind of mystery, one that resists verbalisation without becoming obscure. The image is silent, but not mute. It communicates through tension, through arrangement, through presence. Real mystery is accessible through observation, presence, and thought. It is not an excuse for vagueness but an invitation to look more deeply. The real enigma of photography is that it reveals far more than it can say, and what it cannot say becomes the ground for thinking.

But photography also carries moral weight. Because it deals with real bodies, real conditions, real vulnerability, it inevitably intersects with morality. Nudity, consent, war, poverty — all these enter the frame. The gallery may forgive what social media prohibits. Beauty softens what would otherwise provoke resistance; ugliness exposes what we try to avoid. Photography becomes a negotiation between courage and restraint, between curiosity and responsibility. It is one of the few spaces where we can confront certain realities without needing to defend our reactions aloud. This silence allows a certain honesty. But it never removes the ethical tension underneath.

And then comes Spinoza’s most potent idea: conatus — the effort to persist. Persistence is everywhere in photography. The photograph is itself a form of persistence, an extension of reality. Things that have ceased to exist continue, for a while, through the image. As Spinoza says the mind is the idea of the body, perhaps the photograph is the idea of the world — its extension into form. Sometimes it feels as if reality uses the photographer as its medium, its instrument of continuation. Here, power is not domination but direction. The joy I feel when photographing is not the joy of imposing myself on the world, but the joy of having a direction, of being aligned with what I love. Sadness enters when I cannot act, when external forces diminish my ability to move. Desire appears when I see a possible path: a project, a book, a form, or even simply the future of photography itself — its place in a world increasingly shaped by generative images.

Emotion, in this sense, becomes a navigation tool rather than an obstacle. It shows where I am situated within the larger order of things. When an emotion becomes intelligible, it does not disappear; it becomes clear. It aligns rather than distorts. This is Spinoza’s definition of freedom: not control, but lucidity. To understand one’s emotional movement is to stand more firmly inside the world, not above it. Photography operates in the same way. It is a geometry of attention, a way of seeing inward movement reflected in outward form. The image becomes a brief alignment of inner and outer motion — a moment of coherence in the flow of uncertainty. And perhaps that is the real persistence: not the survival of things, but the survival of clarity itself.