I... think I've been underestimating Spinoza.
[insert red-faced look here]
I'm reading a book called The Philosophy of Spinoza, edited by Joseph Ratner. Dunno why Ratner's not listed as author--even though he's essentially translating Spinoza into non-geometrical (a.k.a. understandable!) form, he's also providing an explanation of what the heck Spinoza meant. So I guess "editor" here means "translator, and then some!"
Anyway. Ratner says that just because Spinoza likes determinism, that doesn't mean he's saying that people don't have what us normal muggles usually mean by "free will." Which I really should have seen because I already recognized that Spinoza's "free will" does not mean the everyday freedom to choose--and therefore this ain't your daddy's determinism, either.
What's rather freakily (and humblingly) ironic is that Spinoza already combined free will and determinism--and did it in essentially the same way that I thought I'd come up with. Determinism--which for Spinoza is simple causality, not fatalism--is necessary for us to be able to make choices.
Now here's where it gets extra spooky, and I fall in love with Spinoza all over again:
Free will depends upon determinism because humans are as much a part of nature as everything else. Our free will is part if our nature in much the same way that, say, gravity is a part of the nature of planets.
The important thing to remember, though, is that even for Spinoza the future isn't written. Things proceed from nature (gravity if you're a planet, free will if you're a human), but there is no pre-written ending. Spinoza's determinism has nothing to do with teleology.
Ratner then proceeds to explain something else I've been thinking about--eschatology. The Christian worldview, he says, is what's fatalistic. The ending is already written, and nothing we can do could change that. Which is bad news for free will. (Enter Rozencrantz and Guildenstern...)
It's amazing and humbling and incredibly heartening to see Spinoza (and Ratner) making the very argument that had been simmering inside me for some time. Maybe there are no new ideas, but sometimes that's a wonderful thing.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Do we deserve our democracy?
We're used to hearing about voting rights in connection to women and minorities--but early in the history of the US, only (male) landowners were allowed to vote. There were a variety of reasons for this (such as social and economic class discrimination), but one of the more interesting ones was quality of education. Before the advent of public education, often only landowners were wealthy enough to afford a real education.
And education was important to the Founders. Public education was a topic close to Thomas Jefferson's heart--though universities were considered by some to be too elitist for true democracy. Without education, people were not good citizens.
This idea goes all the way back to ancient Greece, where full citizens were expected (albeit through the evils of slavery and grossly unequal classes) to have enough daily leisure time to educate themselves. If you were a farmer, for instance, you might not be allowed citizenship--because you didn't have enough time for the duties of citizenship.
Today, our schools are a ramshackle version of the Founders' ideals. Yes, we require the education of every child, no matter the race, class, or gender. But the quality of that education is seriously lacking, compared with the quality of education available in some other countries. It has degenerated even from when I was a kid, and not only allowed but encouraged to question the textbooks and teachers. At the schools I grew up in, for instance, you would fail the section on the literature assignment if the teacher caught you using Cliff's Notes. This was because you were supposed to come up with your own interpretation of the author's intent, and God help you if you couldn't think for yourself. These days? These days, they call them Spark Notes, and they are an official source for the officially accepted interpretation.
So my question is this: If education was so important to the founders, why is today's system so broken? (Don't even get me started on standardized testing!). Why do all of our candidates promise to fix education, while all of our legislators--once they're in office--do things like create mandatory standardized tests, not to mention cutting school budgets as often as possible?
I'm the last person to believe in conspiracy theories--but if you told me that the progressive lowering of our educational standards was deliberate, I'd be tempted to believe it.
Look at our political climate today. No one is really saying much of substance. We've become used to being fed sound bytes. Few people of any political leaning actually use critical thinking skills today. Why? Maybe we've lost the ability. Critical thinking is a skill that has to be taught. It used to be taught, but isn't anymore.
And that's a good thing for our politicians. Why stand on logic or real principal, when you can sway thousands of people with a few easily remembered catch phrases and tag lines? You don't need a good economic plan--all you really need are enough votes.
The Founders believed that education--good education--was vital for a healthy democracy. Why don't we, anymore?
And education was important to the Founders. Public education was a topic close to Thomas Jefferson's heart--though universities were considered by some to be too elitist for true democracy. Without education, people were not good citizens.
This idea goes all the way back to ancient Greece, where full citizens were expected (albeit through the evils of slavery and grossly unequal classes) to have enough daily leisure time to educate themselves. If you were a farmer, for instance, you might not be allowed citizenship--because you didn't have enough time for the duties of citizenship.
Today, our schools are a ramshackle version of the Founders' ideals. Yes, we require the education of every child, no matter the race, class, or gender. But the quality of that education is seriously lacking, compared with the quality of education available in some other countries. It has degenerated even from when I was a kid, and not only allowed but encouraged to question the textbooks and teachers. At the schools I grew up in, for instance, you would fail the section on the literature assignment if the teacher caught you using Cliff's Notes. This was because you were supposed to come up with your own interpretation of the author's intent, and God help you if you couldn't think for yourself. These days? These days, they call them Spark Notes, and they are an official source for the officially accepted interpretation.
So my question is this: If education was so important to the founders, why is today's system so broken? (Don't even get me started on standardized testing!). Why do all of our candidates promise to fix education, while all of our legislators--once they're in office--do things like create mandatory standardized tests, not to mention cutting school budgets as often as possible?
I'm the last person to believe in conspiracy theories--but if you told me that the progressive lowering of our educational standards was deliberate, I'd be tempted to believe it.
Look at our political climate today. No one is really saying much of substance. We've become used to being fed sound bytes. Few people of any political leaning actually use critical thinking skills today. Why? Maybe we've lost the ability. Critical thinking is a skill that has to be taught. It used to be taught, but isn't anymore.
And that's a good thing for our politicians. Why stand on logic or real principal, when you can sway thousands of people with a few easily remembered catch phrases and tag lines? You don't need a good economic plan--all you really need are enough votes.
The Founders believed that education--good education--was vital for a healthy democracy. Why don't we, anymore?
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
What's perfect?
A lot of our modern ideas about "perfection" come from Plato. If you're familiar with him, you'll recognize his Forms. Whether the Forms exist in some Platonic realm (like the mind of God), or whether they're archetypal ideas everyone is born with, that Form is perfect.
The Ideal Man is a perfect man; every living, breathing man is a pale shadow of that perfection. There's no way any of us can be the ideal human--but somewhere, whether in the mind of God or as a mental archetype, there exists the Ideal Man.
Aristotle came back by saying that not only was there no Platonic Realm of Forms, but that no one was born already implanted with archetypal Forms. Once you saw enough people, you'd have an image in your head to recognize that bipedal, featherless animal as a human*. The same with a horse, a table, or a tree. If you'd never seen a dolphin, you'd have no dolphin Form in your head.
* [Unless Diogenes gave you a plucked chicken, in which case you'd be confused for life.]
Ever since then, our Western cultures have been obsessed with perfection. Athletes pursue it; employers expect it; religion says it only exists in the Being of God. Considering that this blog is about religious philosophy (particularly pantheism), let's take a look at that third claim.
Parmenides had an idea about perfection. Remember that he was a monist: Existence was unified, unchanging, and infinite in time and space. All this birth and death and change happening around us was a result of our puny human minds' imperfection. Both Heraclitus and Empedocles, though, decided that perfection was change: Heraclitus said there was nothing but change, while Empedocles' complex and beautiful cosmology was an ever-changing dance of elements and forces.
Much later, after Christianity (via Thomas Aquinas, among others) reclaimed Plato from those heathen Muslims (without whom we probably wouldn't even have Plato anymore), we came to see perfection as something to look forward to in the next life. This world was created by God, and thus separate from God, and therefore perfection could not exist within the world.
But here's the thing--if perfection actually existed, it would be useless. Imagine living the "perfect" life: Nothing would ever change! You could never grow old, true, but then you would never have children, either. No chance of going out to the movies, because you can't move (movement, after all, being change). There's no such thing as time, so you'd never have the pleasure of reading a good book. And forget sex--you could have foreplay, or climax, but never both. Perfection means you might see the Pearly Gates, but you can never walk through; you could stand on the streets paved with gold, but you'd see the same view for all eternity.
But if God is reality, as pantheism asserts, then we're left with two possibilities: Either there is no such thing as perfection--or else perfection includes birth, death, and change. If God is reality, then everything about life as we know it comes from the nature of God. God is birth, God is death, God is change. Reality, even with all its happiness and awfulness, is already perfect--or nothing is.
It's not a comforting view of perfection, but pantheism isn't a comforting view of God.
If God is reality, and we are part of that reality, then we are also part of God. Each of us is a tiny incarnation of the divine. So we can see ourselves as part of a pre-existing perfection, sit back, and twiddle our thumbs till we die. Or we can decide that, since we are each an incarnation of God, we have both the power and the responsibility to affect our little corner of the eternal unfolding of existence. If we're part of creation, we're also partners in it.
The Ideal Man is a perfect man; every living, breathing man is a pale shadow of that perfection. There's no way any of us can be the ideal human--but somewhere, whether in the mind of God or as a mental archetype, there exists the Ideal Man.
Aristotle came back by saying that not only was there no Platonic Realm of Forms, but that no one was born already implanted with archetypal Forms. Once you saw enough people, you'd have an image in your head to recognize that bipedal, featherless animal as a human*. The same with a horse, a table, or a tree. If you'd never seen a dolphin, you'd have no dolphin Form in your head.
* [Unless Diogenes gave you a plucked chicken, in which case you'd be confused for life.]
Ever since then, our Western cultures have been obsessed with perfection. Athletes pursue it; employers expect it; religion says it only exists in the Being of God. Considering that this blog is about religious philosophy (particularly pantheism), let's take a look at that third claim.
Parmenides had an idea about perfection. Remember that he was a monist: Existence was unified, unchanging, and infinite in time and space. All this birth and death and change happening around us was a result of our puny human minds' imperfection. Both Heraclitus and Empedocles, though, decided that perfection was change: Heraclitus said there was nothing but change, while Empedocles' complex and beautiful cosmology was an ever-changing dance of elements and forces.
Much later, after Christianity (via Thomas Aquinas, among others) reclaimed Plato from those heathen Muslims (without whom we probably wouldn't even have Plato anymore), we came to see perfection as something to look forward to in the next life. This world was created by God, and thus separate from God, and therefore perfection could not exist within the world.
But here's the thing--if perfection actually existed, it would be useless. Imagine living the "perfect" life: Nothing would ever change! You could never grow old, true, but then you would never have children, either. No chance of going out to the movies, because you can't move (movement, after all, being change). There's no such thing as time, so you'd never have the pleasure of reading a good book. And forget sex--you could have foreplay, or climax, but never both. Perfection means you might see the Pearly Gates, but you can never walk through; you could stand on the streets paved with gold, but you'd see the same view for all eternity.
But if God is reality, as pantheism asserts, then we're left with two possibilities: Either there is no such thing as perfection--or else perfection includes birth, death, and change. If God is reality, then everything about life as we know it comes from the nature of God. God is birth, God is death, God is change. Reality, even with all its happiness and awfulness, is already perfect--or nothing is.
It's not a comforting view of perfection, but pantheism isn't a comforting view of God.
If God is reality, and we are part of that reality, then we are also part of God. Each of us is a tiny incarnation of the divine. So we can see ourselves as part of a pre-existing perfection, sit back, and twiddle our thumbs till we die. Or we can decide that, since we are each an incarnation of God, we have both the power and the responsibility to affect our little corner of the eternal unfolding of existence. If we're part of creation, we're also partners in it.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Nicholas Cusanus: Christian Panentheist and Pantheist
Nicholas Cusanus (or Nicholas of Cusa, or Nicholas Cryfts) was born in Kues in 1401, in what is now Germany, the son of a wealthy merchant. During his education in both the liberal arts and in canon law, he met and mingled with mathematicians, physicians, and humanists--a group that, at the time, was dedicated to bringing back the Greek ideals of the good life.
He never took a formal education in either philosophy or theology, but that did not stop him from educating himself. Among other Greek philosophers, Cusanus studied Parmenides (via Proclus and Plato). He also studied Dionysius (also called Pseudo-Dionysius), whose theology was both mystic and strongly Neoplatonic.
One of his first contributions to us was proving that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. (Not surprising, perhaps, for a man who later became a controversial bishop.) The Donation of Constantine was--supposedly--the document by which Constantine gave the western part of the Roman Empire over to the authority of the pope. Cusanus was one of the first churchmen to realize that it was fake.
Cusanus' real notoriety began after a diplomatic trip from Rome to Constantinople. He played a part in one of the many embassies seeking reconciliation between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. This desire for reconciliation, or (re)union of opposites, played a large part in his later philosophy and theology.
On the way home from Constantinople, Cusanus reported being struck with something like a vision. From this experience, he produced "On Learned Ignorance," his first philosophical treatise. This was not a "leave your brain at the church door" support of deliberate ignorance: This was going beyond the "pure reason" that Kant critiqued.
Science and reason, Cusanus explained, could only take us so far: it can only tell us about the base, physical side of things, but nothing of the spirit. Once we hit the borders of what's possible with reason, we must take the leap into "learned ignorance." Ignorance, because to go beyond the human, we must go beyond human reason. Learned, because we seek (and learn about) God by going beyond the limits of (but not abandoning) human reason.
Cusanus didn't write in philosophical language; instead, he used familiar philosohical ideas (such as Neoplatonism) and some unfamiliar (for his times) religious metaphors to produce something that both combined and transcended philosophy and theology.
Take the phrase, "learned ignorance." It's a union of opposite concepts. This was something that captured Cusanus--the thought that opposites could, in some way, be part of a larger, unified whole that was simply too immense for humans to understand. Here we see the first hints of the pantheism he was later accused of proposing.
It's probably not surprising that Cusanus' philosophy followed in the Neoplatonics' footsteps. The three books of "On Learned Ignorance" were devoted to God, the world, and Christ: a Neoplatonic series symbolizing the One, the emanated creation, and the return of the created to the creator.
Also not surprising for a Greek-influenced thinker, Cusanus starts with Man as the measurer. Unfortunately, he says, God cannot be measured: there is no possibility of measurement between the finite and the infinite. There's no need to measure, though. Because this is Neoplatonic quasi-philosophy, the infinity of God and the finitude of creation are contained and reflected in each other--another example of Cusanus' love of the unity of opposites.
Here we come to the heart of Cusanus' theology: The creator and the creation are, on some level, unified. This is one of the ideas that led his writings to be called pantheistic. He uses the twin metaphors of "enfolding" and "unfolding": Creation is a finite point enfolded within the infinite Being of God; at the same time, the unfolding of the created universe is, in some way the Being of God.
Of course, these ideas are not only pantheistic; they are also panentheistic (the universe is part of God, but God goes beyond the universe). The whole of creation is present in each creature. And in the same way, so is God. Each creature is both the image of creation, and the image of the creator: Each individual, to Cusanus, embodies the unification of opposites that he seems to love. Each individual becomes Christ-like, through his own existence as the unification of creation and creator.
This unification goes beyond the God-human relationship. It's also embodied in the human-human relationship. If I contain the whole creation, then I also contain the reality of other people; so that anyone I meet is already within me--and I'm already within everyone I meet. I cannot, in any existential way, be truly separate from anyone else, because the union of opposites which takes place in and through God means that no one is truly separate from anyone else.
For Cusanus, the union of opposites was the very definition of Christ. For God to become Man, for Man to become God, for Creator to become creation and vice versa, was the centerpoint of his faith. The union of God and Man in Christ was not an original or singular event, but a hidden truth about the nature of reality.
Cusanus' ideas went beyond philosophy and theology: not surprisingly, he tried to unify the two. This was both a product of his understanding, and of the times, as there was a debate going on about whether philosophy was a branch of theology, or vice versa (though both sides mostly agreed that philosophy should be used to the same ends as theology, supporting the cultural power of the Church). He also went beyond both pantheism and panentheism, merging them into something that had never been seen before.
His philosophy goes way beyond what I've sketched out here, of course. But the unification of opposites is the heart of everything he presents. One of his later works, "On the Peace of Faith," brings this home in a startlingly modern way. This is a story of several people from a variety of faiths--Greeks, Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc.--meeting in Heaven and discovering that, though their religious languages and ceremonies seem different, they all have the same core of unified truth. Christ the unifier is secretly present even in non-Christian faiths, he says; and therefore all faiths are, at heart, the same.
Nicholas Cusanus died in 1464, a cardinal and part of Pius II's papal curia. Most of him was buried in the church of St. Peter in Chains, in Rome. His heart, though, was buried in his hometown of Kues, in the chapel he set up to serve as a hospice for the elderly. The chapel, and hospice, still exist today, along with the library of his works.
He never took a formal education in either philosophy or theology, but that did not stop him from educating himself. Among other Greek philosophers, Cusanus studied Parmenides (via Proclus and Plato). He also studied Dionysius (also called Pseudo-Dionysius), whose theology was both mystic and strongly Neoplatonic.
One of his first contributions to us was proving that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. (Not surprising, perhaps, for a man who later became a controversial bishop.) The Donation of Constantine was--supposedly--the document by which Constantine gave the western part of the Roman Empire over to the authority of the pope. Cusanus was one of the first churchmen to realize that it was fake.
Cusanus' real notoriety began after a diplomatic trip from Rome to Constantinople. He played a part in one of the many embassies seeking reconciliation between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. This desire for reconciliation, or (re)union of opposites, played a large part in his later philosophy and theology.
On the way home from Constantinople, Cusanus reported being struck with something like a vision. From this experience, he produced "On Learned Ignorance," his first philosophical treatise. This was not a "leave your brain at the church door" support of deliberate ignorance: This was going beyond the "pure reason" that Kant critiqued.
Science and reason, Cusanus explained, could only take us so far: it can only tell us about the base, physical side of things, but nothing of the spirit. Once we hit the borders of what's possible with reason, we must take the leap into "learned ignorance." Ignorance, because to go beyond the human, we must go beyond human reason. Learned, because we seek (and learn about) God by going beyond the limits of (but not abandoning) human reason.
Cusanus didn't write in philosophical language; instead, he used familiar philosohical ideas (such as Neoplatonism) and some unfamiliar (for his times) religious metaphors to produce something that both combined and transcended philosophy and theology.
Take the phrase, "learned ignorance." It's a union of opposite concepts. This was something that captured Cusanus--the thought that opposites could, in some way, be part of a larger, unified whole that was simply too immense for humans to understand. Here we see the first hints of the pantheism he was later accused of proposing.
It's probably not surprising that Cusanus' philosophy followed in the Neoplatonics' footsteps. The three books of "On Learned Ignorance" were devoted to God, the world, and Christ: a Neoplatonic series symbolizing the One, the emanated creation, and the return of the created to the creator.
Also not surprising for a Greek-influenced thinker, Cusanus starts with Man as the measurer. Unfortunately, he says, God cannot be measured: there is no possibility of measurement between the finite and the infinite. There's no need to measure, though. Because this is Neoplatonic quasi-philosophy, the infinity of God and the finitude of creation are contained and reflected in each other--another example of Cusanus' love of the unity of opposites.
Here we come to the heart of Cusanus' theology: The creator and the creation are, on some level, unified. This is one of the ideas that led his writings to be called pantheistic. He uses the twin metaphors of "enfolding" and "unfolding": Creation is a finite point enfolded within the infinite Being of God; at the same time, the unfolding of the created universe is, in some way the Being of God.
Of course, these ideas are not only pantheistic; they are also panentheistic (the universe is part of God, but God goes beyond the universe). The whole of creation is present in each creature. And in the same way, so is God. Each creature is both the image of creation, and the image of the creator: Each individual, to Cusanus, embodies the unification of opposites that he seems to love. Each individual becomes Christ-like, through his own existence as the unification of creation and creator.
This unification goes beyond the God-human relationship. It's also embodied in the human-human relationship. If I contain the whole creation, then I also contain the reality of other people; so that anyone I meet is already within me--and I'm already within everyone I meet. I cannot, in any existential way, be truly separate from anyone else, because the union of opposites which takes place in and through God means that no one is truly separate from anyone else.
For Cusanus, the union of opposites was the very definition of Christ. For God to become Man, for Man to become God, for Creator to become creation and vice versa, was the centerpoint of his faith. The union of God and Man in Christ was not an original or singular event, but a hidden truth about the nature of reality.
Cusanus' ideas went beyond philosophy and theology: not surprisingly, he tried to unify the two. This was both a product of his understanding, and of the times, as there was a debate going on about whether philosophy was a branch of theology, or vice versa (though both sides mostly agreed that philosophy should be used to the same ends as theology, supporting the cultural power of the Church). He also went beyond both pantheism and panentheism, merging them into something that had never been seen before.
His philosophy goes way beyond what I've sketched out here, of course. But the unification of opposites is the heart of everything he presents. One of his later works, "On the Peace of Faith," brings this home in a startlingly modern way. This is a story of several people from a variety of faiths--Greeks, Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc.--meeting in Heaven and discovering that, though their religious languages and ceremonies seem different, they all have the same core of unified truth. Christ the unifier is secretly present even in non-Christian faiths, he says; and therefore all faiths are, at heart, the same.
Nicholas Cusanus died in 1464, a cardinal and part of Pius II's papal curia. Most of him was buried in the church of St. Peter in Chains, in Rome. His heart, though, was buried in his hometown of Kues, in the chapel he set up to serve as a hospice for the elderly. The chapel, and hospice, still exist today, along with the library of his works.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Choice and Determinism
Spinoza was wrong.
There, I said it.
And he was also right.
In saying that God was the only entity with truly free will, Spinoza was lessening the importance of human life and individual choices. He was lessening the importance of our existence. Granted, he had a somewhat different idea about what “free will” actually was--one that was tied up in his hard determinism.
He said that the only being that was truly free was one unlimited and undetermined by outside forces. All of us puny humans are shaped, limited, and determined by everyone and everything around us. Therefore--according to Spinoza--we aren’t free. It’s not just that our decisions are shaped by our surroundings, they depend on them. (The fact that I can decide what to eat for lunch is determined by my biology: I have a stomach, not chlorophyll.)
Spinoza’s basic definition of God was that God was everything that existed. Since God can be acted upon by no “outside” forces (like biological evolution has acted on us), God’s decisions are truly free in a way ours can never be.
Although I disagree with his consignment of our freedom to choose, I don't disagree with him saying that we are constrained by, and part of, a deterministic universe. In fact, I think determinism is what makes choice possible at all.
First off, let’s just dispense with the idea of “free will.” Truly “free” will simply doesn’t exist, at least not for us (though maybe for Spinoza’s God it does). We cannot will ourselves to grow wings, jump off a building, and soar away into the sunset. But we can choose, based on who and what we are, and the type of world we live in--so when I fail to sprout wings and make a smear on the pavement below, I'm responsible for the poor judgment and that rather bad choice.
Spinoza, meet Fichte. (Don’t you wish sometimes that great historical figures actually could meet? Think about the party that would happen, if only we could get Socrates and Ben Franklin together!)
Recall that cool definition of self that Fichte liked: I am created, in a way, by everyone and everything around me. It’s a negative definition--not value-negative, but more like the negative space inside a cup, which defines the shape of the water inside.
Our choices depend on the world around us. They’re created by the world around us. (So far the hard determinist is still with me...) But if the world around us didn’t exist, we would have no choices to make. There would be no consequences. There would be nothing for us to style “free will.”
Spinoza was no fatalist, though. He left that to a guy named Leibniz.
Leibniz came up with this really weird brand of fatalism in which everything in the outer world was scripted to happen in thus and such a way, our internal reactions were also scripted to happen in thus and such a way, and the two completely separate realities were set in motion at exactly the same "time" (kind of like two chains of dominoes that fall at the same rate but never interact). Gravity and the banana peel were scripted to be there, and my experience of falling down was scripted to be there--but the reason the two seemed to interact was that the outer "cause" and the inner "experience" were pre-written to happen at the same moment.
And then, because that wasn’t enough, he essentially created an infinity of universes when he created what he called “monads.” This is one of the more confusing philosophical critters out there, but I’ll give it a shot.
A monad is kind of like a unit of experience. Not an “I went to the grocery store” unit of experience, but the “I” in the experience. Everything is full of monads--full of first-person (so to speak) experiences. The table really does experience being a table. There are an infinity of monads in the universe, with different forms of monads having more or less experience (what we might call intelligence). Each cell in our body is a monad, but all our body monads are ruled by a soul monad, which naturally experiences more than a single cell can.
The greatest monad on the hierarchy is God, which experiences all things at once.
On a “Wow!” note, Leibniz anticipated quantum physics and string theory when he invented an early version of the holographic principle. Each monad contains all the information that the entire universe does--but it can only access a little of it, because each monad is essentially a point of view. The holographic principle (which mainly has to do with black holes and information loss) says kind of the same thing--each quantum packet contains all the information in the universe, creating an effect kind of like that of a traditional hologram, in which a two-dimensional surface looks like a three-dimensional picture.
Leibniz’s fatalism (an even harder fatalism than traditional eschatology) comes about when he says that a monad’s experience coincides with what happens in the world--but that the two are completely unconnected. Where Paley’s God was a grand watchmaker, Leibniz’s God was a domino setter.
But both Leibniz and Spinoza shorted the importance of choice when they declared it essentially nonexistent (for humans, anyway).
Determinism allows for spontaneity--as weird as that sounds. A cause could have several possible effects, but not all of these effects necessarily happen. Take the utter weirdness of quantum physics, where either the particles are "deciding" (so to speak) which path to take, or they're just taking all possible paths and creating alternate universes along the way!
In a way, we're like those quantum particles. We decide which path we'll take. But there wouldn't be a path to take if that path (bear with my shoddy metaphors) wasn't stable enough to take us down it. If cause-and-effect didn't happen, choice would have no consequence. The freedom to choose has to have a framework to happen in, just like we have to have bodies in order to act, just like we have to have an outer environment in order to have an internal existence.
A deterministic universe makes choice possible. I’m not saying that such a universe was created specifically as a framework for human choice-ridden lives; I’m simply trying to say that choice and determinism aren’t opposed at all. We can choose to be better people, though we often fail--and because we can choose, we're responsible for our choices, and for the consequences that come out of them.
There, I said it.
And he was also right.
In saying that God was the only entity with truly free will, Spinoza was lessening the importance of human life and individual choices. He was lessening the importance of our existence. Granted, he had a somewhat different idea about what “free will” actually was--one that was tied up in his hard determinism.
He said that the only being that was truly free was one unlimited and undetermined by outside forces. All of us puny humans are shaped, limited, and determined by everyone and everything around us. Therefore--according to Spinoza--we aren’t free. It’s not just that our decisions are shaped by our surroundings, they depend on them. (The fact that I can decide what to eat for lunch is determined by my biology: I have a stomach, not chlorophyll.)
Spinoza’s basic definition of God was that God was everything that existed. Since God can be acted upon by no “outside” forces (like biological evolution has acted on us), God’s decisions are truly free in a way ours can never be.
Although I disagree with his consignment of our freedom to choose, I don't disagree with him saying that we are constrained by, and part of, a deterministic universe. In fact, I think determinism is what makes choice possible at all.
First off, let’s just dispense with the idea of “free will.” Truly “free” will simply doesn’t exist, at least not for us (though maybe for Spinoza’s God it does). We cannot will ourselves to grow wings, jump off a building, and soar away into the sunset. But we can choose, based on who and what we are, and the type of world we live in--so when I fail to sprout wings and make a smear on the pavement below, I'm responsible for the poor judgment and that rather bad choice.
Spinoza, meet Fichte. (Don’t you wish sometimes that great historical figures actually could meet? Think about the party that would happen, if only we could get Socrates and Ben Franklin together!)
Recall that cool definition of self that Fichte liked: I am created, in a way, by everyone and everything around me. It’s a negative definition--not value-negative, but more like the negative space inside a cup, which defines the shape of the water inside.
Our choices depend on the world around us. They’re created by the world around us. (So far the hard determinist is still with me...) But if the world around us didn’t exist, we would have no choices to make. There would be no consequences. There would be nothing for us to style “free will.”
Spinoza was no fatalist, though. He left that to a guy named Leibniz.
Leibniz came up with this really weird brand of fatalism in which everything in the outer world was scripted to happen in thus and such a way, our internal reactions were also scripted to happen in thus and such a way, and the two completely separate realities were set in motion at exactly the same "time" (kind of like two chains of dominoes that fall at the same rate but never interact). Gravity and the banana peel were scripted to be there, and my experience of falling down was scripted to be there--but the reason the two seemed to interact was that the outer "cause" and the inner "experience" were pre-written to happen at the same moment.
And then, because that wasn’t enough, he essentially created an infinity of universes when he created what he called “monads.” This is one of the more confusing philosophical critters out there, but I’ll give it a shot.
A monad is kind of like a unit of experience. Not an “I went to the grocery store” unit of experience, but the “I” in the experience. Everything is full of monads--full of first-person (so to speak) experiences. The table really does experience being a table. There are an infinity of monads in the universe, with different forms of monads having more or less experience (what we might call intelligence). Each cell in our body is a monad, but all our body monads are ruled by a soul monad, which naturally experiences more than a single cell can.
The greatest monad on the hierarchy is God, which experiences all things at once.
On a “Wow!” note, Leibniz anticipated quantum physics and string theory when he invented an early version of the holographic principle. Each monad contains all the information that the entire universe does--but it can only access a little of it, because each monad is essentially a point of view. The holographic principle (which mainly has to do with black holes and information loss) says kind of the same thing--each quantum packet contains all the information in the universe, creating an effect kind of like that of a traditional hologram, in which a two-dimensional surface looks like a three-dimensional picture.
Leibniz’s fatalism (an even harder fatalism than traditional eschatology) comes about when he says that a monad’s experience coincides with what happens in the world--but that the two are completely unconnected. Where Paley’s God was a grand watchmaker, Leibniz’s God was a domino setter.
But both Leibniz and Spinoza shorted the importance of choice when they declared it essentially nonexistent (for humans, anyway).
Determinism allows for spontaneity--as weird as that sounds. A cause could have several possible effects, but not all of these effects necessarily happen. Take the utter weirdness of quantum physics, where either the particles are "deciding" (so to speak) which path to take, or they're just taking all possible paths and creating alternate universes along the way!
In a way, we're like those quantum particles. We decide which path we'll take. But there wouldn't be a path to take if that path (bear with my shoddy metaphors) wasn't stable enough to take us down it. If cause-and-effect didn't happen, choice would have no consequence. The freedom to choose has to have a framework to happen in, just like we have to have bodies in order to act, just like we have to have an outer environment in order to have an internal existence.
A deterministic universe makes choice possible. I’m not saying that such a universe was created specifically as a framework for human choice-ridden lives; I’m simply trying to say that choice and determinism aren’t opposed at all. We can choose to be better people, though we often fail--and because we can choose, we're responsible for our choices, and for the consequences that come out of them.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Self? Awareness?
One of the basic differences between living and non-living matter is that living matter has the ability to replicate itself. Some biologists think this ability to replicate is the beginning of something like life (although as I understand it, simple things like viruses may not qualify as living).
Another important difference between life and non-life is awareness.
Fichte's concept of self goes something like this: "The 'I' posits itself." For those of us who don't speak Fichtese, this means something like an awareness of "me" and "not me."
Very simple life forms can tell this difference: amoebas prey on paramecia, for example--but they don't eat their own organelles. On the other hand, the organelles (like mitochondria) in our own cells are thought to have evolved from once separate single-celled critters that the ancestors of our cells tried to eat. Instead of digestion, though, cooperation and symbiosis took place.
In short, this sort of awareness of "me" vs. "not me" is vital (literally) for life to survive. It's one of the early bases for what we call consciousness. Even organisms we don't tend to think of as "aware" have very rudimentary "senses" (for lack of a better word). A flower follows the path of the sun; tree roots will burst through metal and ceramic pipes to get to the water inside; some jellyfish can seek out their prey, despite their lack of eyes. This isn't woo-woo stuff like ESP, it's simply a sort of awareness that depends on sensory systems or reactions that humans don't have.
A rock, on the other hand, doesn't need this sort of awareness. It doesn't consume or reproduce, so it doesn't need to tell the difference between itself and everything else. The same is true of everything from atoms to galaxies. Non-living matter has no biological need for self-awareness.
But here's where it gets spooky: From the "observer effect" and "entanglement" of quantum physics, all the way up to the "emergent consciousness" idea (which I'll admit to being in love with), something like awareness has been postulated as happening in non-living systems.
Here we go back to Fichte's concept of self. Self, to Fichte, is defined by everything that isn't it. In a way, my I-ness would not exist without an environment, other creatures, and other people around me. I'm limited by "what I am not," which means that "what I am not" defines me. Without an outside, there would be no inside; without objective reality, there would be no subjective experience.
For pantheists like Spinoza and the early Stoics, this division is both essential and illusory. Although our minds are brief, personal experiences of life, our ability to reason is a very small, very limited part of the divine Mind or Logos.
In a way, consciousness causes the sense of separation--because it's the awareness of inner versus outer existence—that religion has always tried to overcome. But that separation is what creates us. Everything depends on everything else: we eat, we breathe, we live in the world, connected to everything. We feel separated from what defines us as ourselves.
Fichte’s student and partner-in-crime, Schelling, took this relationship and ran with it. Because Shelling had moral problems with Spinoza’s hard determinism (for good reason), he rearranged pantheism into something vital and alive, using Fichte’s idea of self.
For Schelling, the “I” experienced a subjective life within a larger objective existence. Using Fichte’s positing trick, he showed that subjective experience also limits objective existence. Subjective and objective were two sides of the same coin, in the same way that Spinoza’s Mind and Matter were.
Humans aren't unique in their self-awareness (the standard test being whether an animal can recognize itself in a mirror), but we are pretty special. And we have something that goes beyond just self-awareness--we have an awareness of our self-awareness. (Like our other qualities, this isn't a difference of kind, but of degree.) Because of this dual awareness, we can make judgments about ourselves, our friends, and the world we live in.
One of these possible judgments is what, exactly, constitutes "me."
The usual (surface) concept of self is simply my body and my mind. Dig a little deeper, though, and "me" turns out to include my home and family, my friends, even my job. These are all things that, like Fichte's positing I, help define a self. They belong, not necessarily in the inner circle (so to speak) of self-hood, but in a close second circle.
Add on a third, wider circle, and even the world I live in is a part of my self. I have no direct control over this part of my "self"--but I certainly wouldn't be "me" if I lived on Mars, for instance.
(Even people I hate have helped shape who I am. So I must include them in another--hopefully very thin--circle around my inner self.)
And finally, the universe as a whole: neither I, nor my home, nor my friends and family, nor anything that defines me in any way, would exist without the Earth, the sun, the galaxy, the universe. This is the final, outermost circle, with a circumference of infinity. This is the Self my little piece of self inhabits, the great "I Am" that shapes, determines, and limits my tiny posited "I."
Another important difference between life and non-life is awareness.
Fichte's concept of self goes something like this: "The 'I' posits itself." For those of us who don't speak Fichtese, this means something like an awareness of "me" and "not me."
Very simple life forms can tell this difference: amoebas prey on paramecia, for example--but they don't eat their own organelles. On the other hand, the organelles (like mitochondria) in our own cells are thought to have evolved from once separate single-celled critters that the ancestors of our cells tried to eat. Instead of digestion, though, cooperation and symbiosis took place.
In short, this sort of awareness of "me" vs. "not me" is vital (literally) for life to survive. It's one of the early bases for what we call consciousness. Even organisms we don't tend to think of as "aware" have very rudimentary "senses" (for lack of a better word). A flower follows the path of the sun; tree roots will burst through metal and ceramic pipes to get to the water inside; some jellyfish can seek out their prey, despite their lack of eyes. This isn't woo-woo stuff like ESP, it's simply a sort of awareness that depends on sensory systems or reactions that humans don't have.
A rock, on the other hand, doesn't need this sort of awareness. It doesn't consume or reproduce, so it doesn't need to tell the difference between itself and everything else. The same is true of everything from atoms to galaxies. Non-living matter has no biological need for self-awareness.
But here's where it gets spooky: From the "observer effect" and "entanglement" of quantum physics, all the way up to the "emergent consciousness" idea (which I'll admit to being in love with), something like awareness has been postulated as happening in non-living systems.
Here we go back to Fichte's concept of self. Self, to Fichte, is defined by everything that isn't it. In a way, my I-ness would not exist without an environment, other creatures, and other people around me. I'm limited by "what I am not," which means that "what I am not" defines me. Without an outside, there would be no inside; without objective reality, there would be no subjective experience.
For pantheists like Spinoza and the early Stoics, this division is both essential and illusory. Although our minds are brief, personal experiences of life, our ability to reason is a very small, very limited part of the divine Mind or Logos.
In a way, consciousness causes the sense of separation--because it's the awareness of inner versus outer existence—that religion has always tried to overcome. But that separation is what creates us. Everything depends on everything else: we eat, we breathe, we live in the world, connected to everything. We feel separated from what defines us as ourselves.
Fichte’s student and partner-in-crime, Schelling, took this relationship and ran with it. Because Shelling had moral problems with Spinoza’s hard determinism (for good reason), he rearranged pantheism into something vital and alive, using Fichte’s idea of self.
For Schelling, the “I” experienced a subjective life within a larger objective existence. Using Fichte’s positing trick, he showed that subjective experience also limits objective existence. Subjective and objective were two sides of the same coin, in the same way that Spinoza’s Mind and Matter were.
Humans aren't unique in their self-awareness (the standard test being whether an animal can recognize itself in a mirror), but we are pretty special. And we have something that goes beyond just self-awareness--we have an awareness of our self-awareness. (Like our other qualities, this isn't a difference of kind, but of degree.) Because of this dual awareness, we can make judgments about ourselves, our friends, and the world we live in.
One of these possible judgments is what, exactly, constitutes "me."
The usual (surface) concept of self is simply my body and my mind. Dig a little deeper, though, and "me" turns out to include my home and family, my friends, even my job. These are all things that, like Fichte's positing I, help define a self. They belong, not necessarily in the inner circle (so to speak) of self-hood, but in a close second circle.
Add on a third, wider circle, and even the world I live in is a part of my self. I have no direct control over this part of my "self"--but I certainly wouldn't be "me" if I lived on Mars, for instance.
(Even people I hate have helped shape who I am. So I must include them in another--hopefully very thin--circle around my inner self.)
And finally, the universe as a whole: neither I, nor my home, nor my friends and family, nor anything that defines me in any way, would exist without the Earth, the sun, the galaxy, the universe. This is the final, outermost circle, with a circumference of infinity. This is the Self my little piece of self inhabits, the great "I Am" that shapes, determines, and limits my tiny posited "I."
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Pantheism and Panpsychism
Pantheism, if you've just joined us, is the doctrine that everything in existence--all of reality--forms a unified, divine Being. God is nature, God is existence, God is reality.
Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is an inherent characteristic of reality. Animism, pantheism, panentheism, and transcendentalism are all systems that may include panpsychism.
Panpsychism can be a sort of "top-down" theory in which the universe unfolds from a "world soul." For instance, Spinoza's panpsychism is a sort of dualistic monism in which Mind and Matter are two sides of the same coin--two aspects of the same infinite, universal Being, and therefore both parts of how the universe came to exist. Spinoza was a sort of materialist panpsychist.
Panpsychism can also be an emergent process in which the basic particles from which reality is built have some sort of conscious awareness. Gottfried Liebniz described a world formed, not by one Substance, but by an infinite number of substances, which he called "monads." Each monad could be described as a "point of view," rather than a mode or attribute; thus the world was a collection of ideas, rather than bare physical matter. Each monad had "holographic" properties: each bit contained not only its own point of view, but all the information in the entirety of reality. An individual human soul was a monad: although we contain all the universe, we're only conscious of our little piece of it.
P.A. Zizzi's "Emergent Consciousness" (or "Big Wow"--I like that one!) combines these top-down/bottom-up theories. The early universe, she says, achieved consciousness in a brief time between inflationary periods, when the "laws of nature" became set--possibly as a result of this "conscious event." Because of this early consciousness, the very nature of the universe had the necessity of consciousness embedded in it (a variation of the anthropic principle). So the emergence of biological consciousness become possible (or even inevitable) because of this early "conscious event."
Many of the names associated with panpsychism, like Spinoza or Whitehead, were also associated with pantheism or panentheism. The two systems agree very easily. In Spinozan pantheism especially, Mind is an intrinsic aspect of Reality, of God. Mind and Matter are indistinguishable except for viewpoint: God is reality; God has an aspect of infinite Mind; Matter can be seen as the ideas of Mind; Mind can be seen as the orderliness of Matter.
Pantheism doesn't necessarily entail panpsychism, or vice versa. But they're very friendly neighbors.
Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is an inherent characteristic of reality. Animism, pantheism, panentheism, and transcendentalism are all systems that may include panpsychism.
Panpsychism can be a sort of "top-down" theory in which the universe unfolds from a "world soul." For instance, Spinoza's panpsychism is a sort of dualistic monism in which Mind and Matter are two sides of the same coin--two aspects of the same infinite, universal Being, and therefore both parts of how the universe came to exist. Spinoza was a sort of materialist panpsychist.
Panpsychism can also be an emergent process in which the basic particles from which reality is built have some sort of conscious awareness. Gottfried Liebniz described a world formed, not by one Substance, but by an infinite number of substances, which he called "monads." Each monad could be described as a "point of view," rather than a mode or attribute; thus the world was a collection of ideas, rather than bare physical matter. Each monad had "holographic" properties: each bit contained not only its own point of view, but all the information in the entirety of reality. An individual human soul was a monad: although we contain all the universe, we're only conscious of our little piece of it.
P.A. Zizzi's "Emergent Consciousness" (or "Big Wow"--I like that one!) combines these top-down/bottom-up theories. The early universe, she says, achieved consciousness in a brief time between inflationary periods, when the "laws of nature" became set--possibly as a result of this "conscious event." Because of this early consciousness, the very nature of the universe had the necessity of consciousness embedded in it (a variation of the anthropic principle). So the emergence of biological consciousness become possible (or even inevitable) because of this early "conscious event."
Many of the names associated with panpsychism, like Spinoza or Whitehead, were also associated with pantheism or panentheism. The two systems agree very easily. In Spinozan pantheism especially, Mind is an intrinsic aspect of Reality, of God. Mind and Matter are indistinguishable except for viewpoint: God is reality; God has an aspect of infinite Mind; Matter can be seen as the ideas of Mind; Mind can be seen as the orderliness of Matter.
Pantheism doesn't necessarily entail panpsychism, or vice versa. But they're very friendly neighbors.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Immanence and Transcendence vs. Pantheism
First, some definitions:
Immanence: This isn't a misspelling of "imminence," though the two words are related. "Imminent" means close by or about to happen. "Immanent" refers to the idea that God is always nearby. An immanent God is one that inhabits the world, intervenes in history and human life, and is always with us. The theological system that most often includes immanence is "panentheism" (two doors down from pantheism). Most versions of traditional theism, including some flavors of paganism, are panentheistic and talk about an immanent God/gods, deity which is somehow part of the universe.
Transcendence: This idea talks about God being partly or wholly separate from the universe, human life, and history. Most traditional theistic systems also include an aspect of transcendence. Deism* is one of the only common theistic traditions to view God as entirely transcendent: God created the world--wound the clock, so to speak--and then left it to run on its own.
Most versions of traditional theism operate under a combination of immanence and transcendence. God exists outside the universe, but he also moves and acts within it.
And now, the catch:
These terms don't apply the same way--if at all--in pantheism.
Oddly enough, you really can't say that God is immanent in the world, in a pantheistic system. Being present in something implies that the presence is not the same as the thing. I occupy my house, but my being and the house's being aren't the same thing. God also does not intervene in events, for the same reason. God is history, God is the world, God is everything and everyone living. The existence of God and the existence of the universe are one and the same thing.
Nor can you say, in pantheism, that God transcends the universe (or else your system is no longer pantheistic!). But you can't say that God doesn't intervene in the world, either, since the pantheistic God is existence. That would be like saying I have nothing to do with my little toe.
On the surface, these two terms would seem to apply perfectly to pantheism. God is fully immanent, of course!--except that implies that God is substantially different from the universe. And there is that feeling of religious awe that "transcendence" often means, though this is a transcendence (of sorts) of human emotion, rather than of divine Being. Both ideas are originally based around the biblical God of Western belief. Trying to fit them into pantheism is rather like expecting a python to wear a football jersey.
---------------
* This is where I go on a short American history spiel and say that both Jefferson and Franklin were deists, and that although both were theists, neither believed in the divinity of Jesus. They fell under the "deism" umbrella, not just in their belief that Jesus was simply a very good man, but in denying that God intervened in human history (other than by inspiring prophets like Jesus). Jefferson, in fact, rewrote the Gospels in a way, by cutting out all the references to miracles, including the virgin birth and the resurrection. He published it as The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, though these days it's often simply called The Jefferson Bible.
Washington may have also been a deist, though he never came out about specific beliefs. (Some of his presidential speeches were written by Alexander Hamilton, a thoroughgoing Christian, which only confuses things more.) The one thing we can say about Washington was that, when pressed about giving props to Christ, he would deftly change the subject; and when the priest of his family church told him he was setting a bad example by coming to church yet not taking communion, he simply quit coming to church.
Immanence: This isn't a misspelling of "imminence," though the two words are related. "Imminent" means close by or about to happen. "Immanent" refers to the idea that God is always nearby. An immanent God is one that inhabits the world, intervenes in history and human life, and is always with us. The theological system that most often includes immanence is "panentheism" (two doors down from pantheism). Most versions of traditional theism, including some flavors of paganism, are panentheistic and talk about an immanent God/gods, deity which is somehow part of the universe.
Transcendence: This idea talks about God being partly or wholly separate from the universe, human life, and history. Most traditional theistic systems also include an aspect of transcendence. Deism* is one of the only common theistic traditions to view God as entirely transcendent: God created the world--wound the clock, so to speak--and then left it to run on its own.
Most versions of traditional theism operate under a combination of immanence and transcendence. God exists outside the universe, but he also moves and acts within it.
And now, the catch:
These terms don't apply the same way--if at all--in pantheism.
Oddly enough, you really can't say that God is immanent in the world, in a pantheistic system. Being present in something implies that the presence is not the same as the thing. I occupy my house, but my being and the house's being aren't the same thing. God also does not intervene in events, for the same reason. God is history, God is the world, God is everything and everyone living. The existence of God and the existence of the universe are one and the same thing.
Nor can you say, in pantheism, that God transcends the universe (or else your system is no longer pantheistic!). But you can't say that God doesn't intervene in the world, either, since the pantheistic God is existence. That would be like saying I have nothing to do with my little toe.
On the surface, these two terms would seem to apply perfectly to pantheism. God is fully immanent, of course!--except that implies that God is substantially different from the universe. And there is that feeling of religious awe that "transcendence" often means, though this is a transcendence (of sorts) of human emotion, rather than of divine Being. Both ideas are originally based around the biblical God of Western belief. Trying to fit them into pantheism is rather like expecting a python to wear a football jersey.
---------------
* This is where I go on a short American history spiel and say that both Jefferson and Franklin were deists, and that although both were theists, neither believed in the divinity of Jesus. They fell under the "deism" umbrella, not just in their belief that Jesus was simply a very good man, but in denying that God intervened in human history (other than by inspiring prophets like Jesus). Jefferson, in fact, rewrote the Gospels in a way, by cutting out all the references to miracles, including the virgin birth and the resurrection. He published it as The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, though these days it's often simply called The Jefferson Bible.
Washington may have also been a deist, though he never came out about specific beliefs. (Some of his presidential speeches were written by Alexander Hamilton, a thoroughgoing Christian, which only confuses things more.) The one thing we can say about Washington was that, when pressed about giving props to Christ, he would deftly change the subject; and when the priest of his family church told him he was setting a bad example by coming to church yet not taking communion, he simply quit coming to church.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Eschatology vs. Free Will
There's a problem here, like the old saying in math class about apples and oranges. Eschatology is one of those ridiculously complicated words that mean something fairly simple: the belief in and philosophy around the end of the world, or where history is headed. (Okay, so maybe not so simple.)
Something about the human psyche demands an end-of-the-world story. Most major civilizations around the world had stories about what would happen, how the world would end, and what kind of world would come after. A lot of them held that the world was destroyed and recreated, over and over again, in a timeless cycle, based on how degraded or evil humanity had become; a new Earth would then be created, with a shiny new humanity ready to inhabit it.
Christianity's no different. From the hardest fundamentalist to the loosest liberal, many if not most Christians have a religious expectation of a Second Coming, a New Jerusalem. It might be literal, as in the Left Behind series; or it might be a metaphoric story about the hope that history is tending towards the perfection of humanity. Either way, history is being guided by a divine hand to some distinct future goal.
That means that every choice we make, for good or for ill, must lead to that final heavenly goal. There is no way around it. There is no possibility of escaping the last days, whether they come next week or two million years from now. History will play out in such a way that everything winds up for the best. The end of the story has already been written.
But if we already know (approximately) how history will turn out, where does that leave free will?
Here, have some time travel:
Suppose you want to go back in time and assassinate Hitler. Unfortunately, even time travel must follow physics. Once you've gone back in time, you must have always gone back in time, which means that the situation that caused you to go back in time has just become a done deal. In other words, when you go back in time, you've predetermined the future. (Maybe someone tried to go back in time to assassinate Hitler, which is why no one was ever able to assassinate him...)
This also goes into the "omniscience" of a personal God. If God knows everything that's going to happen, therefore the future is predetermined. There's a little wiggle room here, since this predestination is only from God's point of view; from our puny human point of view, we still have yet to make the choices God knows we're going to make. (So the apples become oranges in another dimension?)
Either way, though, if history has a set ending, then our free will is either an illusion, or a farce. If God influences our choices to lead to history's happy ending, then free will is a lie. If, on the other hand, God influences nature and physics (all those miracles in the Exodus story, for example) to shape history around our choices, then free will is useless.
[There's an entire subtopic about the horror of "miracles," but that can wait.]
All this is tied up, in most traditional versions of theism, with the idea that God will come swooping in to save the day. (And if you know why "swooping is bad," you get a cookie!) Or the millennium. Or all of human history. It's out of our hands. Which is nice, because now we don't have to take responsibility for each other or for the rest of the planet. God will do it for us--probably by inspiring us to do his holy work, but hey--we just have to wait for that inspiration to strike.
Do away with the eschatology. There is no set ending. It's entirely possible that we will be responsible for our own extinction. It's also entirely possible that we will learn to manage our resources and get along with each other and with the natural world around us. Either way, it's our responsibility now, because there is no promised land except the one we make for ourselves.
Something about the human psyche demands an end-of-the-world story. Most major civilizations around the world had stories about what would happen, how the world would end, and what kind of world would come after. A lot of them held that the world was destroyed and recreated, over and over again, in a timeless cycle, based on how degraded or evil humanity had become; a new Earth would then be created, with a shiny new humanity ready to inhabit it.
Christianity's no different. From the hardest fundamentalist to the loosest liberal, many if not most Christians have a religious expectation of a Second Coming, a New Jerusalem. It might be literal, as in the Left Behind series; or it might be a metaphoric story about the hope that history is tending towards the perfection of humanity. Either way, history is being guided by a divine hand to some distinct future goal.
That means that every choice we make, for good or for ill, must lead to that final heavenly goal. There is no way around it. There is no possibility of escaping the last days, whether they come next week or two million years from now. History will play out in such a way that everything winds up for the best. The end of the story has already been written.
But if we already know (approximately) how history will turn out, where does that leave free will?
Here, have some time travel:
Suppose you want to go back in time and assassinate Hitler. Unfortunately, even time travel must follow physics. Once you've gone back in time, you must have always gone back in time, which means that the situation that caused you to go back in time has just become a done deal. In other words, when you go back in time, you've predetermined the future. (Maybe someone tried to go back in time to assassinate Hitler, which is why no one was ever able to assassinate him...)
This also goes into the "omniscience" of a personal God. If God knows everything that's going to happen, therefore the future is predetermined. There's a little wiggle room here, since this predestination is only from God's point of view; from our puny human point of view, we still have yet to make the choices God knows we're going to make. (So the apples become oranges in another dimension?)
Either way, though, if history has a set ending, then our free will is either an illusion, or a farce. If God influences our choices to lead to history's happy ending, then free will is a lie. If, on the other hand, God influences nature and physics (all those miracles in the Exodus story, for example) to shape history around our choices, then free will is useless.
[There's an entire subtopic about the horror of "miracles," but that can wait.]
All this is tied up, in most traditional versions of theism, with the idea that God will come swooping in to save the day. (And if you know why "swooping is bad," you get a cookie!) Or the millennium. Or all of human history. It's out of our hands. Which is nice, because now we don't have to take responsibility for each other or for the rest of the planet. God will do it for us--probably by inspiring us to do his holy work, but hey--we just have to wait for that inspiration to strike.
Do away with the eschatology. There is no set ending. It's entirely possible that we will be responsible for our own extinction. It's also entirely possible that we will learn to manage our resources and get along with each other and with the natural world around us. Either way, it's our responsibility now, because there is no promised land except the one we make for ourselves.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Problems in Personal Theism
Traditional Western theism rests on a couple distinct principles: First, God is a Person; in other words, God is something like you and me, but infinitely greater. Second, God is external to the universe/the world/creation. This varies, as some strains have God both within and outside of, a sort of one-foot-in-each-existence sort of thing; but all traditional forms of personal theism have a God which transcends the universe.
These two basic ideas create a whole mess of problems. The problem of evil is fairly easy to tackle, especially since it's so popular these days. God as defined as a Person has the qualities of Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omnibenevolence--God is viewed as all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. So how can evil exist? All kind of theodicies have been created to solve this unsolvable problem, the most distasteful of which implies that the terrible things which happen to us are for our own good. Another argument is that God, being good, created the best possible universe in which free will could be found. I've never found any adequate explanation for the paradoxes of human nature, within personal theism. (Original sin, or "it's our fault" is not adequate!) Evil exists because of a basic flaw in the universe, which can be traced to human nature, which was created by--oh, wait.
A more palatable explanation for evil is that it's an intrinsic part of the universe--there's no getting around it--but that God is part of the universe, and therefore suffers with us. This comes from process theology, a type of panentheism, which is a close cousin of pantheism. (The major difference between pantheism and panentheism is that the latter still views God as personal, and in some way transcendent.)
Now bring in that "personal" part. A person has moral views, has aesthetic tastes, has emotions like love or anger. Therefore a personal God would have infinitely greater views, tastes, emotions. And we, his creations, had better figure them out.
The argument against a personal God is, very simply, a moral one. Socrates was quoted as questioning whether something was good because God declared it to be so, or if God declared something good because it always had been.
If the former is correct--something is good because God declares it to be so--then absolutism is the ultimate form of relativism. There is nothing truly good or evil, only what God's opinion, God's culture (if you will) declares to be true. God could always change his mind, and then where would we be?
But if the latter is true--God declares something good because it is good, from all eternity--then God is an abomination. Any God worth the name should be willing and able to prevent torture, murder, rape. The fact that he could prevent these things but doesn't--or might save some and leave others to their fates--means that God (if he's not a divine weakling) is both capricious, and complicit in these evil acts. If goodness is absolute, then even God must obey. But he obviously doesn't.
No matter which of these is taken as true, we're left hanging on divine whim.
The second principle--that God is external--is simpler to deal with, from a metaphysical standpoint. Oddly enough (being the basis of the majority of personal theism) a perfect pantheistic ontology is found in Exodus: "I am that I am." Spinoza rephrased this with his arguments concerning God and Substance. The pantheistic view simply says that God is existence. Everything which exists is a part of God. Nothing can exist outside of existence--because then it wouldn't be "existence." The very concept of "existence" denies the possibility of anything external to it. Even if a heaven is postulated, it must still be part of existence. Bring in alternate "planes of existence" or "modes of being," it's still all part of a single, unified Existence.
The philosophy of pantheism is, quite simply, based on the essence and nature of existence. There is and can be nothing but existence. There is and can be nothing but God.
This also avoids the two major problems with personal theism. Because evil is part of existence, it's also part of God. Once we acknowledge God as amoral (not immoral), and once we acknowledge God as impersonal, we are released from the fear and threat of suffering being the commandment or whimsy of a divine father. Because evil and suffering take place naturally, we're free to deal with them ourselves, to the best of our ability.
We must not wait for a second coming or divine rescue from what we've made of the world. This is our responsibility.
These two basic ideas create a whole mess of problems. The problem of evil is fairly easy to tackle, especially since it's so popular these days. God as defined as a Person has the qualities of Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omnibenevolence--God is viewed as all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. So how can evil exist? All kind of theodicies have been created to solve this unsolvable problem, the most distasteful of which implies that the terrible things which happen to us are for our own good. Another argument is that God, being good, created the best possible universe in which free will could be found. I've never found any adequate explanation for the paradoxes of human nature, within personal theism. (Original sin, or "it's our fault" is not adequate!) Evil exists because of a basic flaw in the universe, which can be traced to human nature, which was created by--oh, wait.
A more palatable explanation for evil is that it's an intrinsic part of the universe--there's no getting around it--but that God is part of the universe, and therefore suffers with us. This comes from process theology, a type of panentheism, which is a close cousin of pantheism. (The major difference between pantheism and panentheism is that the latter still views God as personal, and in some way transcendent.)
Now bring in that "personal" part. A person has moral views, has aesthetic tastes, has emotions like love or anger. Therefore a personal God would have infinitely greater views, tastes, emotions. And we, his creations, had better figure them out.
The argument against a personal God is, very simply, a moral one. Socrates was quoted as questioning whether something was good because God declared it to be so, or if God declared something good because it always had been.
If the former is correct--something is good because God declares it to be so--then absolutism is the ultimate form of relativism. There is nothing truly good or evil, only what God's opinion, God's culture (if you will) declares to be true. God could always change his mind, and then where would we be?
But if the latter is true--God declares something good because it is good, from all eternity--then God is an abomination. Any God worth the name should be willing and able to prevent torture, murder, rape. The fact that he could prevent these things but doesn't--or might save some and leave others to their fates--means that God (if he's not a divine weakling) is both capricious, and complicit in these evil acts. If goodness is absolute, then even God must obey. But he obviously doesn't.
No matter which of these is taken as true, we're left hanging on divine whim.
The second principle--that God is external--is simpler to deal with, from a metaphysical standpoint. Oddly enough (being the basis of the majority of personal theism) a perfect pantheistic ontology is found in Exodus: "I am that I am." Spinoza rephrased this with his arguments concerning God and Substance. The pantheistic view simply says that God is existence. Everything which exists is a part of God. Nothing can exist outside of existence--because then it wouldn't be "existence." The very concept of "existence" denies the possibility of anything external to it. Even if a heaven is postulated, it must still be part of existence. Bring in alternate "planes of existence" or "modes of being," it's still all part of a single, unified Existence.
The philosophy of pantheism is, quite simply, based on the essence and nature of existence. There is and can be nothing but existence. There is and can be nothing but God.
This also avoids the two major problems with personal theism. Because evil is part of existence, it's also part of God. Once we acknowledge God as amoral (not immoral), and once we acknowledge God as impersonal, we are released from the fear and threat of suffering being the commandment or whimsy of a divine father. Because evil and suffering take place naturally, we're free to deal with them ourselves, to the best of our ability.
We must not wait for a second coming or divine rescue from what we've made of the world. This is our responsibility.
Monday, March 22, 2010
I [heart] metaphysics!
Here, have an ontological argument from Spinoza's Ethics:
Proposition 11. God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.
Demonstration. If this be denied, conceive, if it be possible, that God does not exist. Then it follows that His essence does not involve existence. But this is absurd. Therefore God necessarily exists. Q.E.D.
For newbies, an ontological argument is taken to be a statement purporting to "prove" the existence of God. (Think of a geometrical "proof" and you've got the idea.) And on some level, that's exactly what it is. But the other purpose for the ontological argument is that it serves as the foundation for a specific theology. It's the statement of a worldview, usually with God at the center.
The basis of Spinoza's theology is not God's existence; it's that God is existence. The proof of God's existence is that existence, well, exists. At the same time, it's a statement about the divine nature of existence.
***
One of the basic premises of pantheism, especially as constructed by the Stoics, is that one of God's attributes (even the main one, depending on who you ask) is Reason. Justin Martyr, a Stoic of the Christian tradition, decided that since Christ was the embodiment of Logos, anyone who ruled their life through the use of Reason was a good Christian. This even included pre-Christian philosophers like Heraclitus and Socrates. (A popular theory among Jewish and Christian philosophers of the time was that the early Greeks had somehow gotten their hands on the Torah, and that's why Greek philosophy made so much sense!)
Spinoza developed this further by explaining (in his usual convoluted way) that Reason and reality are just two sides of the same coin.
From part 2 of the Ethics:
Proposition 7. the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.
... [E]verything which can be perceived by the infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance pertains entirely to the one sole substance only, and consequently that substance thinking and substance extended are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute and now under that. Thus, also, a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing expressed in two different ways ... .
[Gesundheit.]
Spinoza, of course, lived shortly after Descartes, who (in)famously decided that mind and body were completely separate--thus creating a paradox that philosophy wasted hundreds of years trying to solve (a guy named Malebranche, for instance, turned God into a phone switch operator between mind and body). Spinoza's two-sided coin doesn't say that mind and matter coincide, or are connected, or are best buddies. They're the same sentence, spoken in two different languages.
Unlike in classical theism, Logos doesn't come in to redeem the world; Logos is the world.
Marcus Aurelius says, "Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."
***
In the Appendix to the first part of his Ethics, Spinoza has this to say:
...[I]t is commonly supposed that all things in nature, like men, work to some end; and indeed it is thought to be certain that God Himself directs all things to some sure end, for it is said that God has made all things for man, and man that he may worship God. ... This is the reason why each man has devised for himself, out of his own brain, a different mode of worshiping God, so that God might love him above others, and direct all nature to the service of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice.
Thus has this prejudice been turned into a superstition and has driven deep roots into the mind--a prejudice which was the reason why everyone has so eagerly tried to discover and explain the final causes of things. The attempt, however, to show that nature does nothing in vain (that is to say, nothing which is not profitable to man), seems to end in showing that nature, the gods, and man are alike mad.
[Pause for three cheers!]
To broaden/deepen/support that, a verse from the Tao te Ching:
Nature is not kind;
It treats all things impartially.
The Sage is not kind,
And treats all people impartially.
Nature is like a bellows,
Empty, yet never ceasing its supply.
The more it moves, the more it yields;
So the sage draws upon experience
And cannot be exhausted.
The most important part of pantheist theology: God is not a Person.
As a last, rather funny note, here's what Spinoza thought about the devil, from his Short Treatise on God:
If the devil is a thing which is entirely opposed to God and has nothing from Him, he is absolutely indistinguishable from the Nothing of which we have already spoken. But, if we suppose with some that the devil is a thinking thing, who neither wills nor does anything whatever that is good, he is certainly most miserable, and if prayers could help him we ought to pray for his conversion.
Proposition 11. God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.
Demonstration. If this be denied, conceive, if it be possible, that God does not exist. Then it follows that His essence does not involve existence. But this is absurd. Therefore God necessarily exists. Q.E.D.
For newbies, an ontological argument is taken to be a statement purporting to "prove" the existence of God. (Think of a geometrical "proof" and you've got the idea.) And on some level, that's exactly what it is. But the other purpose for the ontological argument is that it serves as the foundation for a specific theology. It's the statement of a worldview, usually with God at the center.
The basis of Spinoza's theology is not God's existence; it's that God is existence. The proof of God's existence is that existence, well, exists. At the same time, it's a statement about the divine nature of existence.
***
One of the basic premises of pantheism, especially as constructed by the Stoics, is that one of God's attributes (even the main one, depending on who you ask) is Reason. Justin Martyr, a Stoic of the Christian tradition, decided that since Christ was the embodiment of Logos, anyone who ruled their life through the use of Reason was a good Christian. This even included pre-Christian philosophers like Heraclitus and Socrates. (A popular theory among Jewish and Christian philosophers of the time was that the early Greeks had somehow gotten their hands on the Torah, and that's why Greek philosophy made so much sense!)
Spinoza developed this further by explaining (in his usual convoluted way) that Reason and reality are just two sides of the same coin.
From part 2 of the Ethics:
Proposition 7. the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.
... [E]verything which can be perceived by the infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance pertains entirely to the one sole substance only, and consequently that substance thinking and substance extended are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute and now under that. Thus, also, a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing expressed in two different ways ... .
[Gesundheit.]
Spinoza, of course, lived shortly after Descartes, who (in)famously decided that mind and body were completely separate--thus creating a paradox that philosophy wasted hundreds of years trying to solve (a guy named Malebranche, for instance, turned God into a phone switch operator between mind and body). Spinoza's two-sided coin doesn't say that mind and matter coincide, or are connected, or are best buddies. They're the same sentence, spoken in two different languages.
Unlike in classical theism, Logos doesn't come in to redeem the world; Logos is the world.
Marcus Aurelius says, "Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."
***
In the Appendix to the first part of his Ethics, Spinoza has this to say:
...[I]t is commonly supposed that all things in nature, like men, work to some end; and indeed it is thought to be certain that God Himself directs all things to some sure end, for it is said that God has made all things for man, and man that he may worship God. ... This is the reason why each man has devised for himself, out of his own brain, a different mode of worshiping God, so that God might love him above others, and direct all nature to the service of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice.
Thus has this prejudice been turned into a superstition and has driven deep roots into the mind--a prejudice which was the reason why everyone has so eagerly tried to discover and explain the final causes of things. The attempt, however, to show that nature does nothing in vain (that is to say, nothing which is not profitable to man), seems to end in showing that nature, the gods, and man are alike mad.
[Pause for three cheers!]
To broaden/deepen/support that, a verse from the Tao te Ching:
Nature is not kind;
It treats all things impartially.
The Sage is not kind,
And treats all people impartially.
Nature is like a bellows,
Empty, yet never ceasing its supply.
The more it moves, the more it yields;
So the sage draws upon experience
And cannot be exhausted.
The most important part of pantheist theology: God is not a Person.
As a last, rather funny note, here's what Spinoza thought about the devil, from his Short Treatise on God:
If the devil is a thing which is entirely opposed to God and has nothing from Him, he is absolutely indistinguishable from the Nothing of which we have already spoken. But, if we suppose with some that the devil is a thinking thing, who neither wills nor does anything whatever that is good, he is certainly most miserable, and if prayers could help him we ought to pray for his conversion.
Friday, March 19, 2010
They had time-traveling email!
There's this... thread... line of thinking?... idea that keeps popping up?... that runs through a series of philosophers.
Start with the Greeks, before Socrates. Everyone wanted the complexity of the world around them to be reduced to something simple. Either everything really was simple (and the complexity was an illusion), or everything came out of a simple First Cause.
Supposedly Greek philosophy started with a guy named Thales, who managed to accurately predict a solar eclipse using math rather than magic. Everyone gasped and was amazed and got in on the fun. And then Parmenides came along.
Parmenides said that either something exists, or nothing exists; no in between. But if existence is, y'know, existence, then change is impossible. After all, once things start changing, then the things in existence will eventually no longer exist--but nonexistence is impossible, if existence exists. (Or something like that.) Everyone else either said, "Holy crap, he's right!" or "No way in Hades!" and frantically tried to explain how things could exist while changing (or change could exist without things). Some of 'em decided (along with Parmenides) that the world around us is an illusion; others (like Heraclitus) decided that change is itself the only thing that exists. Meanwhile, the proto-science nerds were busy trying to figure out what the primal element was that gave rise to everything else.
For instant, Empedocles, my favorite early philosopher, invented the dark and light sides of the Force. He developed a complex system of change/existence, in which four elements--earth, air, fire, water--and two forces--Love and Strife--keep the cosmos going in a constantly changing cycle, eerily similar to early Big Bang/Big Crunch theories.
This kept going until Plato jumped in. He took all these simple-to-complex ideas and codified them into one theory: God Did It. God is the simple; from him comes the complex. In a rather complex system of its own. Everything we see around us--people, cats and dogs, trees, tables, etc.--all resemble other members of their species/class of objects because all of them are simply echoes of the Idea of Man, the Idea of Cat, the Idea of Dog, the Idea of Tree, the Idea of Table. (You get the idea.) These ideas--or Forms--exist in the mind of God, and only there are they perfect. All this ridiculous complexity, change, death, disease--everything unpleasant takes place because this world is an imperfect reflection of the perfect existence in the Intellect of God.
[If this sounds awfully Christian, it's because Aquinas jumped on the Neo-Platonic bandwagon and introduced Catholicism to Plato. First they called him a heretic; then when they finally figured out what he was saying, they called him the Doctor of the Church.]
Then comes Plotinus. He liked Plato so much that in the process of passing on, illuminating, and expanding Plato's ideas, he turned the system into something all his own. God, the First Cause, he called the One. Nothing simpler than One-ness, right? He thought that through a series of "emanations," everything came into being. This wasn't a creation event that happened through time, though; it's more like a reality ladder. You've got the One, which organizes itself into Intellect and Spirit. Intellect is the realm of ideas, similar to the Forms of Plato. Intellect contemplates the One, and creates Forms. Spirit is what the Forms do. Spirit contemplates Intellect, and produces the world of the senses. Our job as sensory beings is to turn back through Spirit and Intellect and eventually return to the One.
[Plotinus was used by, and fought against, both Gnostic and Orthodox Christians. He had a helluva time walking a fine line between them, while owing allegiance to neither.]
This philosophy seems to disappear (or else I'm just not reading widely enough) until Maester Eckhart. He was a German mystic theologian who was tried for heresy, but died before the verdict came down. He also believed in a source similar to Plotinus' One, from which all creation proceeded (but this time in a Christian package). All people shared in the divine soul, since everyone was descended from this single source. By turning inward and contemplating one's own soul, a person could meet God. No priests necessary.
[Gee, I wonder why he was tried as a heretic...]
Then enter Benedict Spinoza. He's like Plotinus' little brother. He's a philosophical descendent in the Greek tradition, all the way down from Parmenides. Spinoza, of course, says that the only thing in existence is God--which in accordance with Parmenides is unchanging. He then proceeds to rewrite Plotinus, using attributes and modes instead of Intellect and Spirit. Only one thing exists--because if more than one thing existed, both things would be limited by each other, and would in effect cancel each other out. (Or something like that.) This one thing has attributes of existence, infinity, mind, motion, and extension (it's the eternal adjective club). These attributes in turn embody themselves in modes, which is basically Idea condensed into what we would call reality (a cluster of deterministic nouns).
[Oddly enough, Spinoza was kicked out of his synagogue for talking about this stuff.]
A few more centuries down the line, we run headfirst into Fichte, and then Schelling. Fichte was the reincarnation of Spinoza, in the same way that Kant was the reincarnation of Parmenides. However, Fichte turned Spinoza's determinism on its head by saying that, since you have to start with a first principle, then human freedom (the existential kind) makes a dandy one. Not surprisingly, he ran into all sorts of trouble. No matter how many iterations of his system he published (last count was two million three hundred thousand and one), no one could understand what he was saying. Then they accused him of atheism (not quite a capital offense any more, but you'd lose your job, your paycheck, and your reputation over it), then he almost single-handedly invented German National Socialism by characterizing the German people as the best embodiment of the divine (thereby committing the worst theological error a pantheist can), and everyone conveniently forgot about him.
...Except for his student, Schelling. Schelling was to Fichte what Jung was to Freud. Everything starts out flowers and chocolate, then they start fighting over money, and pretty soon they're sleeping in separate bedrooms and not speaking to each other.
In another desperate attempt to remove Spinoza's uncomfortable determinism from the budding idealism, Schelling wound up reinventing Empedocles. Instead of Love and Strife, though, he made all existence a push-pull between the unconscious and the conscious, the objective and subjective, deterministic nature and existentially free mind. This muddy dualism hid an underlying monism that said that determinism and free will were, yet again, just two sides of the same coin. (So much for trying to get rid of Spinoza.)
All of which is to say, there really are no new ideas. Every new genius philosophy is the reincarnation of somebody else a thousand years or so ago. Schelling was Empedocles. Kant was Parmenides. Avatar was Dances With Wolves.
But for the real mind-bending stuff, read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations right next to the Tao te Ching. Somehow these two guys, inhabiting different eras, cultures, languages, and sides of the planet, wrote down almost the exact same ideas about religion, government, and human nature.
Start with the Greeks, before Socrates. Everyone wanted the complexity of the world around them to be reduced to something simple. Either everything really was simple (and the complexity was an illusion), or everything came out of a simple First Cause.
Supposedly Greek philosophy started with a guy named Thales, who managed to accurately predict a solar eclipse using math rather than magic. Everyone gasped and was amazed and got in on the fun. And then Parmenides came along.
Parmenides said that either something exists, or nothing exists; no in between. But if existence is, y'know, existence, then change is impossible. After all, once things start changing, then the things in existence will eventually no longer exist--but nonexistence is impossible, if existence exists. (Or something like that.) Everyone else either said, "Holy crap, he's right!" or "No way in Hades!" and frantically tried to explain how things could exist while changing (or change could exist without things). Some of 'em decided (along with Parmenides) that the world around us is an illusion; others (like Heraclitus) decided that change is itself the only thing that exists. Meanwhile, the proto-science nerds were busy trying to figure out what the primal element was that gave rise to everything else.
For instant, Empedocles, my favorite early philosopher, invented the dark and light sides of the Force. He developed a complex system of change/existence, in which four elements--earth, air, fire, water--and two forces--Love and Strife--keep the cosmos going in a constantly changing cycle, eerily similar to early Big Bang/Big Crunch theories.
This kept going until Plato jumped in. He took all these simple-to-complex ideas and codified them into one theory: God Did It. God is the simple; from him comes the complex. In a rather complex system of its own. Everything we see around us--people, cats and dogs, trees, tables, etc.--all resemble other members of their species/class of objects because all of them are simply echoes of the Idea of Man, the Idea of Cat, the Idea of Dog, the Idea of Tree, the Idea of Table. (You get the idea.) These ideas--or Forms--exist in the mind of God, and only there are they perfect. All this ridiculous complexity, change, death, disease--everything unpleasant takes place because this world is an imperfect reflection of the perfect existence in the Intellect of God.
[If this sounds awfully Christian, it's because Aquinas jumped on the Neo-Platonic bandwagon and introduced Catholicism to Plato. First they called him a heretic; then when they finally figured out what he was saying, they called him the Doctor of the Church.]
Then comes Plotinus. He liked Plato so much that in the process of passing on, illuminating, and expanding Plato's ideas, he turned the system into something all his own. God, the First Cause, he called the One. Nothing simpler than One-ness, right? He thought that through a series of "emanations," everything came into being. This wasn't a creation event that happened through time, though; it's more like a reality ladder. You've got the One, which organizes itself into Intellect and Spirit. Intellect is the realm of ideas, similar to the Forms of Plato. Intellect contemplates the One, and creates Forms. Spirit is what the Forms do. Spirit contemplates Intellect, and produces the world of the senses. Our job as sensory beings is to turn back through Spirit and Intellect and eventually return to the One.
[Plotinus was used by, and fought against, both Gnostic and Orthodox Christians. He had a helluva time walking a fine line between them, while owing allegiance to neither.]
This philosophy seems to disappear (or else I'm just not reading widely enough) until Maester Eckhart. He was a German mystic theologian who was tried for heresy, but died before the verdict came down. He also believed in a source similar to Plotinus' One, from which all creation proceeded (but this time in a Christian package). All people shared in the divine soul, since everyone was descended from this single source. By turning inward and contemplating one's own soul, a person could meet God. No priests necessary.
[Gee, I wonder why he was tried as a heretic...]
Then enter Benedict Spinoza. He's like Plotinus' little brother. He's a philosophical descendent in the Greek tradition, all the way down from Parmenides. Spinoza, of course, says that the only thing in existence is God--which in accordance with Parmenides is unchanging. He then proceeds to rewrite Plotinus, using attributes and modes instead of Intellect and Spirit. Only one thing exists--because if more than one thing existed, both things would be limited by each other, and would in effect cancel each other out. (Or something like that.) This one thing has attributes of existence, infinity, mind, motion, and extension (it's the eternal adjective club). These attributes in turn embody themselves in modes, which is basically Idea condensed into what we would call reality (a cluster of deterministic nouns).
[Oddly enough, Spinoza was kicked out of his synagogue for talking about this stuff.]
A few more centuries down the line, we run headfirst into Fichte, and then Schelling. Fichte was the reincarnation of Spinoza, in the same way that Kant was the reincarnation of Parmenides. However, Fichte turned Spinoza's determinism on its head by saying that, since you have to start with a first principle, then human freedom (the existential kind) makes a dandy one. Not surprisingly, he ran into all sorts of trouble. No matter how many iterations of his system he published (last count was two million three hundred thousand and one), no one could understand what he was saying. Then they accused him of atheism (not quite a capital offense any more, but you'd lose your job, your paycheck, and your reputation over it), then he almost single-handedly invented German National Socialism by characterizing the German people as the best embodiment of the divine (thereby committing the worst theological error a pantheist can), and everyone conveniently forgot about him.
...Except for his student, Schelling. Schelling was to Fichte what Jung was to Freud. Everything starts out flowers and chocolate, then they start fighting over money, and pretty soon they're sleeping in separate bedrooms and not speaking to each other.
In another desperate attempt to remove Spinoza's uncomfortable determinism from the budding idealism, Schelling wound up reinventing Empedocles. Instead of Love and Strife, though, he made all existence a push-pull between the unconscious and the conscious, the objective and subjective, deterministic nature and existentially free mind. This muddy dualism hid an underlying monism that said that determinism and free will were, yet again, just two sides of the same coin. (So much for trying to get rid of Spinoza.)
All of which is to say, there really are no new ideas. Every new genius philosophy is the reincarnation of somebody else a thousand years or so ago. Schelling was Empedocles. Kant was Parmenides. Avatar was Dances With Wolves.
But for the real mind-bending stuff, read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations right next to the Tao te Ching. Somehow these two guys, inhabiting different eras, cultures, languages, and sides of the planet, wrote down almost the exact same ideas about religion, government, and human nature.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Ishtar, Parmenides, and Kant (oh my!)
Since comparative religion/mythology has become popular, a lot of folks are familiar nowadays with the myth of Ishtar traveling through the gates of Death.
Ishtar, the goddess of love, goes to visit her sister Ereshkigal, the goddess of death. This is not a simple jaunt across town, though. Ishtar has to go through a series of gates; to pass through each one, she's got to give up one of her garments--the last being her crown. Figures that a myth about a sex goddess would incorporate a striptease... Anyway, it turns out that Ereshikigal is kind of a bitch (who'da thunk it?), and since Ishtar's nekkid, she's also powerless.
Everyone on Earth stops having sex.
This is where it gets a little confusing. In some versions of the story, she's there to rescue her dead husband, Tammuz; in others, Tammuz comes to pry her from Ereshkigal's evil clutches. Either way, Ishtar manages to get out, but either she or Tammuz wind up having to spend half the year with Death from that point on. Hence the seasons, and later on we get Ceres quasi-rescuing Persephone from Hades, and Orpheus' failure to rescue Eurydice.
The important part of this myth, of course, is the striptease. (No, really.) As Ishtar goes further and further into the realm of Death, she gradually loses all of her power. In other words, Love is powerless over Death. (A new religion later developed which had some verses about God being love, and the gates of death being broken. Same themes, radically different message.)
***
Fast forward a thousand years or so to a guy named Parmenides.
Parmenides lived right at the hairy edge when explanatory myth was beginning to give way to natural philosophy. People started investigating the causes of natural events, instead of just writing stories about gods to explain where winter came from. Sometimes these philosophers had rather weird explanations, but they were kind of the first scientists, in that they wanted to explain things as natural, rather than supernatural.
Parmenides wrote a rather strange poem in which hegets kidnapped by aliens receives an invitation to visit the realm of Night. But instead of having to strip at each gate, the guardians of each gate bow down to him, the gates opening (with trumpets blaring and lions roaring and stars dancing and all sorts of CGI effects). And instead of being captured by the goddess, he is bestowed with the light of reason.
Love may have no power over Death, but Reason trumps Ignorance every time.
Night tells Parmenides that there are two ways to go about gaining knowledge of things. You can study the things which exist, or you can study the things which do not exist. Unfortunately, knowledge of that which does not exist is reserved for the gods. But humans can study what does exist, and gain knowledge that way.
In essence, Parmenides is using a myth to knock over mythology, by having Night (who hides all knowledge) show him how to gain understanding. It's a primer for a philosophical method, buried in mythological verse. The most important thing this method said is that appearances can be deceiving. The whole thing about "what exists" and "what does not exist" is just as deceiving, because the idea of existence he's talking about isn't what we normally think of. When Night says that humans can only study what exists, she means that humans can only study what we perceive to exist.
Parmenides was a monist who declared that time, death, change, and everything around us--including us--are all illusion. Many of the natural philosophers who followed him scrambled to either prove him right or prove him wrong. Except Empedocles, who got to have it both ways.
***
Fast forward another two and a half thousand years to a gentleman named Immanuel Kant. Kant distinguished between phenomena and numena--our sensory experiences of things, and things as they exist in themselves. He was basically saying the same thing as Parmenides: We can study what we can perceive, but there is an existence beyond what we can perceive which we will never reach--not even through Parmenides' much-vaunted Reason.
Because we can't experience the numenal world, we essentially take it on faith that our sensory world mirrors reality. All our science, all our reason, all our physical understanding, is based on a leap of faith. We've come back full circle to Ishtar at the gates of Death.
Parmenides' monism was based on faith. Everyone's philosophy is based on faith of some sort. We all start at the gates of Death.
Ishtar, the goddess of love, goes to visit her sister Ereshkigal, the goddess of death. This is not a simple jaunt across town, though. Ishtar has to go through a series of gates; to pass through each one, she's got to give up one of her garments--the last being her crown. Figures that a myth about a sex goddess would incorporate a striptease... Anyway, it turns out that Ereshikigal is kind of a bitch (who'da thunk it?), and since Ishtar's nekkid, she's also powerless.
Everyone on Earth stops having sex.
This is where it gets a little confusing. In some versions of the story, she's there to rescue her dead husband, Tammuz; in others, Tammuz comes to pry her from Ereshkigal's evil clutches. Either way, Ishtar manages to get out, but either she or Tammuz wind up having to spend half the year with Death from that point on. Hence the seasons, and later on we get Ceres quasi-rescuing Persephone from Hades, and Orpheus' failure to rescue Eurydice.
The important part of this myth, of course, is the striptease. (No, really.) As Ishtar goes further and further into the realm of Death, she gradually loses all of her power. In other words, Love is powerless over Death. (A new religion later developed which had some verses about God being love, and the gates of death being broken. Same themes, radically different message.)
***
Fast forward a thousand years or so to a guy named Parmenides.
Parmenides lived right at the hairy edge when explanatory myth was beginning to give way to natural philosophy. People started investigating the causes of natural events, instead of just writing stories about gods to explain where winter came from. Sometimes these philosophers had rather weird explanations, but they were kind of the first scientists, in that they wanted to explain things as natural, rather than supernatural.
Parmenides wrote a rather strange poem in which he
Love may have no power over Death, but Reason trumps Ignorance every time.
Night tells Parmenides that there are two ways to go about gaining knowledge of things. You can study the things which exist, or you can study the things which do not exist. Unfortunately, knowledge of that which does not exist is reserved for the gods. But humans can study what does exist, and gain knowledge that way.
In essence, Parmenides is using a myth to knock over mythology, by having Night (who hides all knowledge) show him how to gain understanding. It's a primer for a philosophical method, buried in mythological verse. The most important thing this method said is that appearances can be deceiving. The whole thing about "what exists" and "what does not exist" is just as deceiving, because the idea of existence he's talking about isn't what we normally think of. When Night says that humans can only study what exists, she means that humans can only study what we perceive to exist.
Parmenides was a monist who declared that time, death, change, and everything around us--including us--are all illusion. Many of the natural philosophers who followed him scrambled to either prove him right or prove him wrong. Except Empedocles, who got to have it both ways.
***
Fast forward another two and a half thousand years to a gentleman named Immanuel Kant. Kant distinguished between phenomena and numena--our sensory experiences of things, and things as they exist in themselves. He was basically saying the same thing as Parmenides: We can study what we can perceive, but there is an existence beyond what we can perceive which we will never reach--not even through Parmenides' much-vaunted Reason.
Because we can't experience the numenal world, we essentially take it on faith that our sensory world mirrors reality. All our science, all our reason, all our physical understanding, is based on a leap of faith. We've come back full circle to Ishtar at the gates of Death.
Parmenides' monism was based on faith. Everyone's philosophy is based on faith of some sort. We all start at the gates of Death.
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