Love and knowledge: Freud and Spinoza

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 oposition between love and knowledge, oposition 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 oposition 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 oposition, there is rather the full realization of the love as the action of the mind that knows itself in the heart of immanent Nature.