The Scary Old Couple

Spring is still springing, but the days are getting warmer.

While my mulberry tree is still berrying (somewhat), the days are warm enough now that the berries rot before they ripen (or ferment, which is always funny when the birds and squirrels get drunk!). I still have little kids knocking on my door asking if they can pick mulberries; but I have to tell them the mulberries are bad now.

It has always been my dream to be the eccentric old lady that all the neighborhood kids are scared of. Every neighborhood needs its scary old witch (or warlock), it's a tradition! And ever since I was little and heard my first Scary Old Lady(tm) story, I wanted to be the Scary Old Lady(tm). Not the "Get off my lawn!" type, but the type the kids tell ghost stories about ("...and every Halloween, little Timmy's voice can still be heard echoing from the witch's house!"). There's probably a true horror story in all those urban legends, but the witch and warlock when I grew up were my neighbors.

We lived right next to an incredibly old Cajun man and his wife. You never saw them go out their front door--except on Sunday mornings, of course!--and they always had their groceries delivered. All the kids were kind of scared of them, both because they never really saw them, but especially because you could never quite understand their wonderful Cajun accents. But in back--they had this enormous garden full of tomatoes and peppers and green beans and onions and even onion grass (that somehow hopped over onto our property) growing in their back yard. We had a brick wall instead of a fence between our houses, and I would sit on the wall in the summer and watch them shuffle around the garden taking care of their beloved plants. I don't know if they had children anywhere, but those plants were family to them. And sometimes they would give me a tomato, or some fresh green bean pods, and I would eat them right there, raw--even the beans!

I never jumped down into their yard to sneak a tomato, though. They were still the Scary Old Couple.

A couple years before we moved, the wife had brain surgery. She couldn't get around as well, but she would still move around through the garden, just as diligently but with much more effort. Her hair was shaved off, and she had this horrifying sickle-shaped scar on her head; she terrified me, but also made me really sad. Not long after that, she died. The old man let the garden die, too, and pretty soon I never saw him anymore, either. Just a back yard full of boxes of earth with dried sticks. I have no idea if I ever knew their names.

So now you know why I want to be the Scary Old Lady of the neighborhood.

Instead, I have a wonderfully productive mulberry tree in my front yard, and I go out and pick berries where all the kids can see, and pretty soon I'm mobbed by adorable little brats who want to know everything there is to know about mulberries, and spiders, and birds, because somehow they've learned that I'm not a Scary Old Lady, I'm the walking nature encyclopedia who lets you pick fresh berries from her tree.

(I secretly love it.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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."