Spinoza, Lovelock and God.
Over the weekend Aeon magazine posted a superb essay by Professor Beth Lord, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.
https://aeon.co/essays/even-the-anthropocene-is-nature-at-work-transforming-itself?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=65127f1a3a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_05_18_07_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-65127f1a3a-69414985
In this essay Beth Lord tackles some incredibly large questions which resonate throughout the history of philosophy, especially from the period of the1660's in Europe, right through to Lovelock and his writings from the 1960s on Gaia: this hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the Earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.
I had previously been alerted to Spinoza by an earlier essay posted by AEON some years ago which detailed the story of his excommunication and shunning by the Jewish Community in his home town. This bit of history had taken me by surprise. I had not thought until then of other religions banning and shunning their members for thinking outside the prescribed teachings except in reference to the Catholic Church in which I was raised. Now I understand that all established religions consider those who question their teachings as heretics, but my own knowledge came from from the reference of Catholicism which has a grand history of torture to induce recantation, of burning witches and heretics, and of excommunication.
Now let me examine "excommunication"! In my school days we were taught that if you were excommunicated from the Church you were a goner! It didn't just mean that no-one would talk to you any more, but that you could go to Hell if you died as a non-believer because you could not receive the sacrements. And the only way back was to repent and get absolution from a Bishop or higher authority. I don't know if the Jewish commune of Spinoza's day went quite so far, but he was certainly banned and shunned. And although modern Jewish clerics have made some effort to reinstate him, he's still on the outer.
So Spinoza's life story struck a huge chord with me as did Martin Luther's when I read it away from the influence of my upbringing. And I have never forgiven the Church for allowing Joan of Arc to be burnt at the stake as a witch. I know she was not the only one to be treated so horribly but she remains an icon for all the women who were killed in that manner.
What Beth Lord does very well in her essay is to connect up the pathways opened up by Spinoza in his "Ethics" with the theory proposed by James Lovelock in our time. This has particular relevance for all of us today as we struggle with our planet being torn apart by various forces which many of us consider to be "bad" or even "evil" forces. But Spinoza saw all of the world as a single universe, and considered that whatever was in the universe was neither good nor bad: in his mind the Universe is "indifferent". We attribute the "good" or the "bad", and we also give "God" the attribute of good, despite the problem that if God created the Universe and if it included "bad" events or deeds, then God created those too.
Now I'm not going to jump into this philosophical morass. I merely wish to introduce you to Beth Lord's fine essay which leads up to our time, with a particular emphasis on the contributions of Spinoza and Lovelock.
I have selected just this short section to give you an idea of how complex her essay is:
"Seen in this way, what we designate as the climate crisis is just one sequence of nature’s infinite variations. What appears as a massive and devastating upheaval from our perspective is business as usual for infinite and eternal nature. Since we were not free to avert it, we are not morally responsible for the changing climate, rising sea levels or extinction of species, and we should get over our feelings of guilt and blame. Indeed, we should get over all our sad passions, for once we understand that God is the source, ground and cause of all things, we understand that God is the cause of our sadness."
I hope this post may raise some serious discussion among our friends. It has certainly taken me by surprise... I've not been able to get it out of my thoughts all day today.
"So why should I feel so fucking guilty... I haven't done anything yet!"
Thanks Woody Allen!
PT
"Since we were not free to avert it" But we were!!!!!.
ReplyDelete"Since we were not free to avert it" But we were!!!!!.
ReplyDeleteHello Geoff,
ReplyDeleteIt is at least arguable!
How could you have averted the Spanish Flu?
And could you or I have averted the murders of Aborigines by our colonial ancestors?
And despite all my pitiful personal efforts to prevent global warming by engaging many strategies, I have been unable to prevent it.
pt
I think the argument is weak. I have an aligned belief that we are all art of a complex yet infinitely related whole, which contains within it polarities which create flux or change, as we might more easily see it. I am even happy to call this "God." I do not think, however, that we are exempt of power. We all carry the power, not to affect the past directly but we do, for example, have the power to demystify it and with this allow change and the power that yields change in for the better or for the worse. I am not a buddhist as I have taken task to the passivity of the practice however there is great wisdom in many places and only today I was listening to a guided practice by Tsoknyi Rinpoche, in this link I shall include titled, "Befriending Our "Beautiful Monsters": A Guided Practice to Work with Difficult Emotions."
ReplyDeleteI think all emotions are of great value. Fear, helps us simply run when we need to. Anger to assert ourselves and change. Guilt a reminder that our responsibilities lie beyond the sphere of our own egos, if we wish for the "collective" or God world to be a better place. This IS in our hands, every one of us! To me absenting guilt is a sure way to build a truly guilty conscience.
Feelings of guilt that we assume that are not the result of our actions or inactions, a surrogate guilt, like the German peoples post the final solution, can be the outcry of a nation healing and putting right setting up boundaries and making art and memorialising the cultural guilt is super valuable stuff. With Climate change threatening so many species on the planet and potentially lowering quality of life for the poor and disenfranchised that live in poverty where heavy rainfalls will reduce their crops and reduce their chances of survival through flood or famine. I do not want to simply wash away responsibility from activating change and playing powerless, when I know individuals throughout history have done such things as break down chronic racism, (Martin Luther King,) Get women the vote, make reparation to deeply harmed indigenous cultures and so on and so on...
If we live riddled with guilt, we are likely to have been traumatised. If one believes in the unconscious, as most people do these days as it is to this we attribute states like dreaming and many and varied psychopathies which are acknowledged within the most sanctified arenas of our culture , namely the legal system as defined through politics; the pathway to freedom of guilt is not through essentially repairing from the outside in but through exploring the brokenness of the inside worlds, or "shadow" as it is termed in Jungian psychology. To do this is to heal the compass of our being and then allow more fully the acknowledgement of "God" or Gaia, by stepping up and allowing the greatest good we can affect. This is the world I want. Not one that says god made it all so I'm signing out. If God is everything then we have responsibility to the "God" in us.
https://www.scienceandwisdomofemotions.com/stream/befriending-our-beautiful-monsters-a-guided-practice-to-work-with-difficult-emotions/
ReplyDeleteDear Unknown, whoever you may be, thank you for the best reasoned and expressed response to any of the blogs I've ever posted so far. I hope you might consider creating a blog or two of your own to post on this site. Although I'm drawn to much of what you have stated I am also drawn to what Beth Lord describes as the philosphical position taken by Spinoza 350 years ago, and the more recent arguments presented by Lovelock. I do not think either of them would condone what we call evil behaviour, or behaviour which is bad for the planet. Let's stay on the latter... I'm sure that each of these thinkers would encourage their readers and people who debate with them to "do good" and to avoid "doing harm or evil". And yet I feel they both say that this has nothing to do with belief in a "divine entity" or supernatural being with immense power and intelligence. I'm also certain they would say what we accept as good behaviour and good practice, or what we call "bad or evil", is not dependant on the existence or directives of a "godhead", i.e., no God telling Moses on the mountain via lightning strokes on stone tablets what are the rules which must be obeyed.
ReplyDeleteAnother way of seeing this is as follows: any person like me who may consider himself or herself as an atheist should always do the right thing, whatever that may be and whatever field of action that might be, an atheist has no permission to do wrong in any way, must not harm another person or do harm to nature. I can hold to these precepts without any need to rely on a spiritual entity such as a divine creator of the universe and without any organised religion setting the rules.
Let's come back to today with rampant Covid. Some people put forward what they call their personal freedom as an excuse to not wearing masks in public and to totally disregard directions for the control of the virus in their community. I ask these people "Do you stop at red traffic lights or do you just drive straight through every red traffic light?" Because this law which requires every responsible member of society to take care on the road is a curtailment of personal freedom for the good of all road users, all pedestrians, in fact for the entire community. However, every community should know of the need to establish such rules (laws) for good behaviour on the roads before the rules are encased in law... it should have been obvious from the very moment of the invention of the motor car that such rules would eventually have to be enshrined for the public good. That's because a lot of people in our enlightened modern world do not seem to understand such a concept as giving up some personal freedoms for the common good.
Now I've certainly said enough here, far more than I intended to say, and I welcome you "Unknown" for posting a comment which foreced me to state my position!
MANY THANKS!
Hi Peter, It's Em, from Kyneetown. Thank you for the compliment but I think I rather ramble on. All global questions aside and notions of our individual responsibility to work for the common good. Traffic lights have always bothered me. Since I was little it always seemed like I could trust my senses over a system that didn't account for those who couldn't. To add to this I love a challenge and welcome being thrown into the heart of Rome in car that goes from zero to one hundred in a mere second.
DeleteHowever, my comment stands Emily... yours is the best response I've had to any blog so far. A close friend asked me if this Sppinoza/God post was just meant to be provocative, and I told him yes, I was trying to provoke a response. And it worked. I'm still hopeful that you and a few others may one day take up the offer to post something on this site. Why are my friends so shy?
ReplyDelete