SPECTATORS OR PARTICIPANTS
The passage that really got me interested in philosophy came from Plato discussing the ideal world of forms.
"how can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?"
The philosopher possesses a naturally harmonious mind.
Order, regularity, purpose, number – harmony. I’m thinking Pythagoras here, the ‘music of the spheres’ (Pythagoras).
This seemingly poetic passage is packed with all manner of philosophical complexities.
Who can this spectator be? Outside time and existence or inside? Subject or object? A subject would be inside the world as participant-creator.
The spectator of all time and existence implies the intellectual appreciation of reality as the one single substance. This is Spinoza.
Despite Spinoza's determined geometric efforts, his metaphysical system exhibits many profoundly poetic features.
The notion of the spectator of all time and existence savours a little of Spinoza’s freedom as the rational or intellectual appreciation of reality as one single substance - Deus sive Natura – God and Nature as interchangeable and all life united as one within the one single substance. The difference is that Plato’s spectator is on the outside whereas Spinoza’s reason is on the inside.
For Spinoza, the aim of the wise should be to rise above the illusory perspective which sees things sub specie durationis to achieve that ‘absolute viewpoint’ which sees the universe as God sees it sub specie aeternitatis ('under the aspect of eternity'). Only with the intellectual love of God/Nature will human beings be truly free. Thus the basis of Spinoza’s ethics is an objective, 'selfless' view of the world.
Spinoza was building on the philosophy of Descartes, who had founded knowledge upon the certainty of the thinking subject, the ‘I’ of ‘I think therefore I am’ (Cogito ergo sum).
Spinoza argues that Descartes’ ‘clear and distinct ideas’ represent the world not from the point of view of the subject, the cogito, but from the 'point of view' of God ‘under the species of eternity’ (sub specie aeternitatis).
The task of philosophy was to achieve ‘adequate’ knowledge by ascending from the point of view of the subject, Descartes’ cogito, to the 'absolute conception' of the world, i.e. to the conception of the world from no point of view within it.
And this is the role of reason. In the Ethics, Spinoza argues that 'It is of the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain species of eternity’.
Every human body is part of the one body of God/Nature, thus in harming others, we harm ourselves. The happiness of each of us depends on the happiness of all. The universe cannot be explained by reference to anything else - even God, because it is God. The universe is thus without meaning, yet at the same time is its own meaning.
Thus, adequate knowledge consists in the elimination of the subject from the description of what is known. Spinoza sees life from the point of view, not of the subject, an ‘I’, whose problems arise from his individual circumstances, but of a pure and disinterested reasoner, for whom the human individual is nothing but a mode of God/Nature, governed by the laws which govern everything.
So much medieval sophistry?
Here is Stephen Hawking’s conclusion to A Brief History of Time:
‘If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God.’
Hawking asks: 'Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?' Such argument suggests the inevitable conclusion: the universe must be the way it is, and had to be created, because no other universe (or lack of one) was possible. Spinoza would certainly have recognised this metaphysical argument.
As a supreme metaphysical idea, Spinoza's Deus sive Natura belongs in the Big Bang category. Its Euclidian mathematics may have been superseded, but its compelling beauty remains undeniable.
For Spinoza, reason enables us to ascend to the absolute conception of what seems to be a given divine/natural harmony. From being passive parts of the one substance we become active elements. But the activity of reason seems to be limited to the appreciation of the laws of the one substance God/Nature.
This conception seems to define freedom as the appreciation of necessity, the rational understanding of natural laws which embrace us as part of the natural world. It is a view which seems remarkably similar to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, nature as a self-regulating organism of which we ourselves are a part.
From this perspective, the self and its particular concerns would be dwarfed by the power of Nature as a whole.
Which begs the question of our role and our place within the whole. Is there such a thing as creative human agency or do we merely identify with natural laws of the single substance God/Nature.
Which begs the question of creative human agency and moral choice. If freedom merely the recognition of necessity in the form of the natural laws of the single substance God/Nature? Does our rational appreciation of God/Nature make us spectators or participants?
Are we really spectators or do we have a role in bringing this harmony about in a creative univere? What about being participatants? Is our rational appreciation ascending to the absolute conception our only activity?
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was to argue decisively that this purging of all reference to the subject is neither possible nor desirable: the world is my world and your world, it is our world, created by conceptual capacities innate to the human mind and therefore stamped indelibly with the mark of self-awareness.
This is the point about Plato’s ideal Forms, the notion that concepts are innate and enable human beings to organise the world around them, to classify experience.
Our intellectual appreciation of God/Nature is an understanding of something that is in part a human artefact that is shot through which human consciousness and purpose and design.
Spinoza’s notion of power raises questions of knowledge as self-knowledge, creation as self-creation? What if this God/Nature is a human artefact, the product of reason and labour? Think back to Plato and his notion of innate concepts.
Nietzsche refers to the ‘death of God’ as a tragedy. The collapse of an absolute foundation for morality means that we must, in some way, become gods ourselves. Humankind should only have such powers that it can creatively live up to. Are we capable of bearing the responsibility that comes with such power of self-creation?
Mary Warnock argues that we don’t need God to determine morality but that we can determine our morality in relation to society. It’s hard to see how we can avoid relativism or historicism. Which ‘society’? Society changes according to time and place. The values of society in Nazi Germany may well not be the most moral.
By arguing that we get morality from society there is a danger of identifying morality with the particulars of time and place, a political ideology, party or state, a social movement.
We need the absolute conception to avoid the relativism that comes from attaching morality to particulars, giving us a code that transcends the particular and enables us to identify our particular interests with a greater purpose.
There are ways we can find a social foundation for morality. Biologists refer to reciprocal altruism, behavioural norms within the group. Aristotle defines wo/man as a zoon politikon, a social animal, who can individuate himself/herself only in relation to others in society, in a politikos bios, a public life. This conception avoids the relativism of particular time and place by affirming a human essence that exists and unfolds itself as potentiality. Here, the universal is the universal human essence possessed by each and all on account of being human. (There are issues of the social conditions of such realisation emerging historically with specific social relations - what potentialities are capable of being realised differs in time and in place),
The American physicist Frank Tipler makes this suggestion: 'People talk of God as the creator of life. But maybe the purpose of life is to create God.'
This is the territory of theology. Tipler, however, argues that the stated aim of physics is to describe the Universe in its entirety.'If it is to succeed in this task, clearly it must also describe any Supreme Being living in the Universe. It therefore follows that theology must eventually be shown to be a branch of physics.'
Theoretical physicist advances the idea of the participatory universe, in which everything is the observer and everything is the observed. ‘The electron, in so far as it responds to a meaning in its environment, is observing the environment. It is doing exactly what human beings are doing. The word 'observe' means to gather, to pay attention. So the electron is observing us. It is gathering information about us, about the whole universe. It is gathering in the universe and responding accordingly. Therefore it is observing, if you take that in its literal sense.’
So if you ever wondered what it is like to be an electron, Bohm gives you at least some idea! According to Bohm, the field of information is essential to what an electron is. And this information is not a usual notion of physics, such as energy or electric charge. Instead, he sees it as '... a condensed form of meaning, which has to be unfolded.' Thus, insofar as meaning has some inherent subjectivity, so do quantum processes, at least in a very elementary way. But do we then have to say that stones think?
Bohm answers:...
'I am not attributing consciousness as we know it to nature ... matter may not have the same sort of consciousness that we have, but there is still a mental pole at every level of matter... And eventually, if you go to infinite depths of matter, we may reach something very close to what you reach in the depths of mind. So we no longer have this division between mind and matter.'
The proposal that meaning plays an objective role even at the quantum level opens up a new way of conceiving the unity of mind and matter. And it is just this kind of unity that a coherent world-view should provide. This kind of view makes it possible to understand how we can be at the same time conscious subjects and material objects. It also articulates the holistic implications of quantum theory: we are internally related to other people, to nature, to the whole of the cosmos.
This raises questions of knowledge as self-knowledge, creation as self-creation? What if Spinoza’s God/Nature is a human artefact, the product of reason and labour? Think back to Plato and his notion of innate concepts as actively shaping the world. I want to look at philosophers who see the world around us as a human creation.
We are moving now onto a terrain occupied by philosophers like Vico, Kant, Hegel and Marx.
VICO’S NEW SCIENCE
Vico – verum ipsum factum - the condition of knowing something is to have made it.
The central epistemological thesis of this work, usually known in its abbreviated form as the verum-factum theory, which holds the identity of the true with what is made or done.
To know the truth of something it is necessary to have made it.
Now, making is an activity and, as such, requires a subject The world of history is the world of human beings and therefore a human creation. The state and politics, trade and commerce, war and peace, etc are all the product of creative human agency; the world of nature is the province of God.
Creating is an activity and that it thus logically requires a creator.
This raises the question of the Creation and the Creator.
God did not create life, it is the purpose of life to create God.
To repeat - the American physicist Frank Tipler
'People talk of God as the creator of life. But maybe the purpose of life is to create God.'
In making this claim, Tipler is stretching physics way beyond its widely accepted boundaries and striking deep into the territory of theology. They think it is important to draw a line in the sand between what is science - the possibility of life surviving for ever at the Omega Point -and what is theological speculation.
Tipler, however, makes no apology for his claim. He points out that the stated aim of physics is to describe the Universe in its entirety.
'If it is to succeed in this task, clearly it must also describe any Supreme Being living in the Universe,' he says. 'It therefore follows that theology must eventually be shown to be a branch of physics.'