I shall post a link to my little book on Spinoza. It is a short and tightly reasoned piece, very clear and cogent. Bertrand Russell described Spinoza as the ‘noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers.’ ‘Intellectually,’ Russell continues, ‘some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.’ (Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy). And, indeed, I was very much taken with Spinoza and his self-contained ethical system that takes us far away from body-spirit dualism and notions of a personal God.
Spinoza and the Rule of Reason: An Introduction to Spinoza’s Philosophy of Freedom, Peter Critchley
https://www.academia.edu/657434/SPINOZA_AND_THE_RULE_OF_REASON
Spinoza is wonderful, I loved his system. And you can read the painstaking, precise and logical way that Spinoza sets out his ‘supreme’ system of ethics. The book is written from preparatory notes for an ambitious work on Spinoza and Freedom. I never got beyond the preparation, for the reason that I had a profound feeling that something was amiss, that there was a lack somewhere, that something was missing. If human beings were passionless, emotionless, impassive, beings, capable of so ordering their affairs that no troubles and no misunderstandings could arise, then Spinoza's Ethics would indeed be supreme. And I do still argue that human beings should live by what Spinoza called ‘adequate ideas’ and should identify, expose and reject ‘inadequate ideas.’ Such is the purpose of the philosophical project after all – to defetishise the world and penetrate the murk and bias with which fetish systems of thought, politics and power cover the world. So I remain proud of my little book on Spinoza. And I heartily recommend Spinoza to the great public. ‘The more man is guided by reason, the more he is free’, argued Spinoza. I agree. But it begs the question of what reason is, how it relates to the non-rational and the arational – does it respect or devalue those things as it sets about uprooting the irrational – and just what freedom entails.
Spinoza gives his answers, and they are indeed profound. I enjoyed his philosophy immensely.
So why did I put Spinoza down and never get back to picking him up again? I felt there was something missing, and where there were hints of it, it was denigrated or devalued as in some way ‘inadequate.’ This didn’t ring true to me then, and I now know that it isn’t true. Spinoza has one half of life, what I could provocatively call the easy and the boring half, the half which can be encompassed by reason. If I say ‘half’ it is for a reason. There are two concepts of God in the Hebrew Bible - one is the God of Creation, the God of physical causality and explanation. This is the God of the scientists, the God of the impersonal universe and all its doings. And then there is the God of relationships, the God of Love. This is the personal God. When asked about whether he believed in God, Albert Einstein affirmed the former and denied the latter:
“I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind... “ (to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929).
That sounds very reasonable, and very many people would express support for that view. But before committing themselves one way or another, they should be clear as to just how much they would be losing in choosing ‘Spinoza’s God’ – they would be gaining a certain factual knowledge of the physical world of cause and effect – the things that make physical existence possible – but losing so much that makes life meaningful and worthwhile.
Let me explain. There are two concepts of God in the Hebrew Bible, Elokim and Hashem. Elokim is the impersonal God of physical Creation. Pursue scientific knowledge alone, to the neglect of other forms of knowing the world, knowing life and knowing yourself, and you will indeed discover the God of Spinoza and Einstein. But such knowledge of the natural world alone is only one half of the whole story of Creation. Hashem is the other concept of God, the personal God of revelation and of human relationships. This is the God that we see in the face of the other, the God that is not, and could never be, indifferent ‘to the fate and the doings of mankind’. The God of Spinoza/Einstein is an impersonal God, a self-subsistent God/Nature interested in knowledge of the physical world, disinterested in human affairs. And the point of such knowledge would be? Let’s presume that the human species one day achieves complete knowledge of the whole of nature and its operation – what changes? Nature may be indifferent to the fate and doings of humankind, but the personal God isn’t – and neither are the individual men and women composing humanity. Hashem, the God of Love and of personal relationships, is ‘the name’ – this is the God which personalises existence and finds meaning, love and loyalty in the phenomenology of intersubjective experience. And I don’t see how any ethics that ignores such experience can be considered human, let alone supreme. The God that really makes a difference is found in relationship with others; we see the greater Love of the divine Other in the personal face of the human other.
For centuries, these two halves of God were held together in unity to give us an integral view of the whole world of which we are a part, and in which we live. The God of Aristotle and the God of Abraham were as one, and science and religion, the worlds of fact and of value, were conjoined. As indeed they should be. To live as whole beings, we need to live in the whole world. The scientific revolution which began in the seventeenth century marked the parting of the ways between fact and values, stripping the world of purpose, meaning and value, and setting science and religion at loggerheads. The world could no longer hold the impersonal and the personal together, splitting God, and the world, into two, to the detriment of both sides of the divide.
In fine, we find God in much more than the rational knowledge of the natural world, in relationship with others and in the meanings and experiences through the presence of others in our lives. Here is where we create warm, affective bonds, ties and loyalties with others, interconnections that sustain and nourish us in our lives. And that presence of others is the presence of the personal God.
And it is worth making this point very clear indeed, because in the phoney modern war between science and religion, there are those so motivated by a loathing of religious faith as to keep hammering a very crude point concerning truth, fact and evidence that entirely misunderstands the nature of reason, its extent and its limits. The extremely crude assumption being made is that anything that is not rational is necessarily irrational. Hence religious faith is equated with ‘blind faith’ and hence something to be condemned. I haven’t time to waste unpacking caricatures, I have better things to be doing. But those things in life that are not rational may be covered under the rubric of the non-rational and the arational. To assert reason defined in terms of fact and evidence is to be guilty of the crudest scientism which would denigrate the importance of so many areas that give life its human quality, art, music, literature … and, indeed, religion. As for religious faith as ‘blind faith’, such an identification is made out of pure blinkered bigotry, (wilfully) ignorant of the commitment to ‘fundamental truth’ in natural law, a body of thought which affirms that the human intellect is capable per se of knowing the natural moral law. The liberal ideological reaction against fundamental truth lies at the bottom of such bigotry, and mires the world in a fact-value dualism that rents asunder what are naturally joined in a whole world. Assertions of religious faith as ‘blind faith’ here are beneath contempt, expressions of stupidity or ignorance or prejudice – I’d suggest all three.
Eric Voegelin makes short work of such identification of the religious with the irrational:
'One can hardly engage in a serious study of mediaeval Christianity without discovering among its "values" the belief in a rational science of human and social order and especially of natural law'.
Voegelin thus draws attention to the fact that 'this science was not simply a belief, but it was actually elaborated as a work of reason'. In doing so, he identifies an uncomfortable truth about liberal modernity, a truth which reveals modernity to have generated an enlightenment that blinds us to certain truths and realities:
'In order to degrade the politics of Plato, Aristotle or St Thomas to the rank of "values" among others, a conscientious scholar would have to show that their claim to be a science was unfounded'.
Voegelin’s incisive comments bring the deleterious consequences of the separation of fact and value to the surface, forcing the modern psyche to face up to its much vaunted knowledge and truth as partial, its assertions of possessing the whole truth to be misguided, bigoted and irrational. The atheist/liberal ‘rationalists’ who take their stand on evidence and fact never acknowledge the claims of the rational science of human and social order to which Voegelin refers. I doubt they even know of its existence. That ignorance is born of an earlier prejudice. But their instincts for self-preservation are in fine order, for their intellectual self-image – however inflated – could never survive real engagement with irreducible moderate realist philosophy. It is easier to deny its existence or dismiss it as irrational blind faith and carry one reinforcing one’s own prejudices.
And is such rational science indispensable in giving us the certainty we crave? I say reason and faith are held in unison, rather than opposed one to the other. The loss of one is the loss of the other, in that they exist and thrive in relationship, the absence of one skewing the nature of that relationship. But we need to be clear on this assertion of reason over faith – the relation between God and man/woman is one of moral commitment, trust and loyalty, not one of rational certainty.
There's a lot of politics going on at the moment in the world, and I'm seeing people, even (former) friends, exchanging cross words with each other. I think we have the relation wrong when we see politics as something so absolute that we cannot disagree with each other without falling out. Politics is all about disagreement, I would have thought. We remain together through a unity with something larger that transcends particular division. It should be noted that the collapse in the belief in something larger than the political world in a given time and place is leading us to divinise politics, with the result that legitimate political difference comes to assume an altogether more divisive and visceral form, that of struggles between good and evil, in which our side is incontrovertibly right and the other side is irredeemably evil. There is little room for forgiveness here (and, heaven knows, the world of politics stands in desperate need of forgiveness ...) We need that something above and outside us, drawing us into relation with each other and keeping us connected. If we are equal to that One thing, then we are equal to each other, and can remain unified through all the trials and tribulations of life. The relation between God and man/woman is one of moral commitment, trust and loyalty, of binding ties, not one of rational/scientific/political certainty. If we push the latter at the expense of the former, then we will become unglued, separating things that belong together, turning against one another in the process. "When two or more are gathered together in my name ..." = the personal God, the God of Love and of relationships.
The God of Spinoza/Einstein is the God of the scientists and the philosophers, the God of natural theology, the God of Reason. That is the God that Deists recognise. But we need the whole God, not a God divided into two concepts, setting us at intellectual war, forcing us to take particular stands on fact or value, science or religion. We need both concepts together in order to come into relation with the whole God, thus overcoming intellectual mediation.
The difference between the God of Scientific Reason and the God of Love is the difference between the impersonal and the personal. And that difference is a difference between a contradiction and a cry. You can resolve contradictions by reasoning and thinking, by what Spinoza called "adequate ideas", by what Descartes called "clear and distinct ideas". All conceptually brilliant, I don't doubt, having immersed myself in them. Such work validates the worth and the dignity of philosophy. But you can't wipe tears away by thinking. A cry is not a contradiction, it goes much deeper. The Bible is studded with references to wailing and weeping. ‘By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.’ (Psalms 137:1). ‘So David and his men wept aloud until they had no strength left to weep.’ (1 Samuel 30:4). The Bible is populated by men and women, kings, prophets and ordinary folk, weeping for their losses. (http://www.net-burst.net/hope/weeping.htm). Such people could never be consoled by Spinoza's proofs and axioms, no matter how brilliant. Those people of the Bible are you and I. Should we give up lamentation and reconcile ourselves to things we cannot change? Accept necessity, no matter how inhuman it feels? My head can entertain the idea and see the sense of acceptance. But my heart isn’t in it. It could mean Spinoza is right and I am wrong. In my book on Spinoza, I set out the reasons why that may well be the case. But I continue to like that philosophy which has a tear in its eye and a hurt in its heart. Because with those feelings come the joy as well. Only the hollow heart is without a hurt.
Wittgenstein was right - philosophy leaves the world unchanged. But that was analytical philosophy polishing its glasses (Spinoza's trade was polishing lenses). So I don't doubt the intellectual brilliance of Spinoza, and I hope my little piece made that brilliance clear. But for me the cognitive has also to be the affective. Being fair, I do argue that the two go together for Spinoza too. But I want the missing aspect of God. I like Rousseau. He brings philosophy back to its origins - how to live well and live well together. Knowing, being, feeling and willing go together for Rousseau. He affirmed a simple faith in God, a faith that doesn’t require all the impressive proofs of a rationalist deductive metaphysical system. And he's right. Ethics, writes Rousseau, is ‘the sublime science of simple souls.’ Rousseau is right.
David Lay Williams has an excellent book out called “Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment.” He shows how Rousseau affirmed transcendent norms as against a modern philosophy which, in the aftermath of Thomas Hobbes, dissolved into conventionalism, materialism, atomism, relativism and, frankly, nihilism. This backs my own reading of a tradition of “rational freedom”, showing how Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx reworked transcendent norms, values and truths, reaching back to Plato and Aristotle to recover objective foundations on rational grounds. But there is something missing. I have felt it all the time I was working in this tradition. The moderns were trying to piece together a common ground that has been fractured through the separation of reason and culture from ethics and ontology. A self-legislating reason or self-creating labour is not enough to give us objective foundations – the true, the good and the beautiful are much more than anthropomorphic projections. And emotionally something is missing too. Rousseau replaced the Biblical doctrine of the Fall with the idea of the social fall, giving human beings the task of taking social redemption into their own hands. But this could lead a man with profoundly human intentions and motivations to draw some terribly inhuman conclusions, such as justification for the death penalty. If we secularise theodicy and thus take God’s justice into our own hands, and attempt to vindicate that divine justice through our own fallible hands in the world of politics, then we divinise that world, and turn political struggles into struggles of good and evil, demonising those who fall short of such an elevated standard of justice. Rousseau’s fate gives evidence of a profound truth, that attempts to resolve divine justice into temporal terms risk the dissolution and perversion of spirituality, eliminating its essential qualities of mercy and forgiveness, and turning it into its opposite. ‘Theodicy, the attempt to vindicate God's justice in a world of evil, is compelling evidence that in the translation of Abrahamic spirituality into the language of Plato and Aristotle, something is lost. What is lost is the cry.’ (The Great Partnership, Jonathan Sacks 2011 Hodder 141)
‘To what avail lamentation in face of historical necessity’, wrote Marx, dismissing the concerns of people at the loss of their communities, traditions, customs, and lands. Marx had his sights set on the progressive socialist future that lay beyond the necessary economic modernisation of capitalism. Marx’s ideal is attached to the means of its realisation, so he wastes no time crying over changes that, in a historicist sense, cannot be resisted.
I just think that that view is inhuman. Intellectually and morally, it is dubious, certainly, risking a presentation of contentious and indeterminate events as inevitable. But even if certain things are inevitable, even if things have now become unalterable historical fact, it doesn’t stop crying over the fact that some things are just plain wrong. I want a philosophy with a tear in the eye. A tear that expresses a free will that is independent of time and place, that will indeed lament whatever Hegel’s ‘slaughter-bench’ of history, sacrificing the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and virtues of individuals, decrees. A cry expresses an emotional intelligence, and reason is all the poorer, and more inhumane, when it loses that affective component. When reason unfolding in the historical process is an affront to human dignity, standards of justice and common decency and all that makes life worth living, then lamentation is the appropriate response, not least because the tyrants who have done so much to make and disfigure history have all too often been the proponents of false necessities and fixities. The first tears of the infant are prayers, wrote Rousseau, and they are to be wiped away by the prompt and just satisfaction of legitimate needs. Rousseau would have been wise to have not strayed too far in his political logic from his basic doctrine concerning the justice that is engraved on the human heart.