God and Nature Exist in Relationships

God and Nature Exist in Relationships

‘Nature does not exist!’ says philosopher Slavoj Žižek, which seems a statement so daft that only a philosopher could have said it. The issue is not about the physical existence of Nature, but how we know about that Nature and bring that Nature into our social existence through an intellectual, moral, and social mediation. It is the precise nature, status, and purchase of that mediation that is at issue. Whilst Nature (like God) may exist in its irreducibility outside of human praxis, the ‘Nature’ that is drawn into relation with human beings will always be in some way a construction. It is this construction, intellectual and social, that is at issue. The relation to Nature is always mediated. It is when those mediations go missing that we lose reality and are instead being presented with constructions claiming normative force. Without mediation, that force is unwarranted and illegitimate. Nature (and God, Reason, and Humanity) may exist as ideal forms, realities independent of human praxis, but in being named and framed for entry into human society they become constructed and mediated. It is this that is being contested. Without appropriate mediation these constructions are projections which lack a referent. It is in this sense that I would respond to Žižek’s claim that Nature does not exist. To clarify the complicated philosophical issues at stake here, I refer readers to the much deeper commentary I offer on Nietzsche’s death of God and Berkeley’s idealism in A Home and a Resting Place: Homo Religiosus 2018c. (Ch 2 “Nietzsche on Interpretation”; ch 3 “Foundations, Facts, and Interpretations.”) My view is to affirm with Marx that the universal metabolism of Nature exists and, further, that ontological disputation over its status and proof is idle and takes attention away from important issues of how we know and relate to Nature in partnership (That is also my view on God). Lose that partnership, practice, and mediation, and we are confronted with a pure, unmediated construction, an empty signifier without a referent. That ‘Nature’ does not exist as anything more than a projection. It is this ‘Nature’ that is being used as an unanswerable, illegitimate authority.

The point I am driving at may seem so arcane as not to exist, let alone be of any significance. The people who can’t see it need to look harder until they do, because this point is actually of the utmost significance. Everything hinges on this. The point is so significant that I don’t need to exaggerate. So I shall put it in suitably restrained form and say that the loss of mediation in knowing and being in the world at the heart of modern scientism is the greatest single mistake ever made in human history, a mistake which, if left uncorrected, will doom civilization to oblivion. In an attempt to clarify what is at stake here, I shall relate the emphasis I place on the necessity of mediation to Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ emphasis on relationships in ‘the great partnership’ between humanity and God:

Something of immense consequence is being asserted here. Genesis, the book of 'first things', is about matters that have not just chronological but also axiological priority. We are told about relationships first because they matter most. There are two aspects to God in the Bible, for which it uses different names. There is Elohim, the God of creation, Spinoza's and Einstein's God, the God of nature and nature's laws. But there is, holier still, Hashem, the God of relationships, the God who loves and is the ground of love, the God who brings the universe into being in love.

Ultimately, that is what the faith of Abraham is about: love as the supreme creative force within the universe. It is love as loyalty, love as a pledge of mutual responsibility, love as the commitment of two persons to share their lives and destinies, love as the redemption of solitude.

The faith of Abraham makes two monumental claims: first, that the relationship between God and humanity is a matter of love, not power; second, that you can build a society on the basis of love, love of neighbour and stranger, that leads us to care for their welfare as if it were our own. These remain, even now, aston­ishing ideas, and one would say that they were wildly Utopian were it not for the fact that the faith of Abraham has lasted longer than any other known civilisation. Its adherents may have fallen short time and again, but they never quite lost their sense that there was something moving and humane about this ideal and the demand it makes of us.

Sacks The Great Partnership 2011: 164

Not ontological foundations and philosophical proofs nor even scientific facts, but relationships which bring Nature (and God) to life matter. Relationships come first and last because they are the things which bring the world to life. The missing mediation returns us to the passive and inert, the world as an external, objective datum. This is Elohim, the God of Creation as the physical universe. This is the God of Spinoza which Einstein avowed. This is the God of science and natural philosophy. To understand what is missing in this God, let us scrutinize the statement Einstein made in praise of the God of physical creation:

"I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

Einstein to Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, 24 April 1929

Those who think scientific reason and factual knowledge constitute the sum total of meaningful knowledge, with questions of value, meaning, and significance, let alone love and belonging, being non-sensical, think this view the height of wisdom. It is the height of folly. Far from being the height of intelligence, it misses out entirely the realm of personal, emotional, and relational intelligence. The view eliminates entirely the affective and social dimensions of human life. Nature as a domain of impersonal laws may well be indifferent to human concerns, but human beings can never be so indifferent. A civilization that seeks to mirror such a Nature in its social arrangements and practices will be cold and inhuman, entirely deficient of the personal touch and interpersonal connections. Nature is sacred in the Creation but, beyond the impersonal laws of nature there is, holier still, Hashem, the God of relationships. This is the personal God who is concerned out of love with ‘the fate and the doings of mankind.’ Hashem is the God of Love and the Ground of Love, the God who brings the universe into being in love and continues to move all things in love. That God, as Dante well understood, provides the affective power to ‘turn’ human beings, in a way that statements of natural facts concerning nature’s laws do not.

The world is struggling to create a partnership ethics on the basis of Nature and its laws. It hasn’t worked and cannot work for the very reason that such an ethics only has half a God, Elohim, the God of the physical universe and its laws. The view is missing the affective force of Hashem, the God of relationships and love. The personal quality is absent insofar as modern ethics is environmentalist, and cannot be restored by a naturalism mediated by a disenchanting science.

I quote Jonathan Sacks here not to press the claims for a recovery of God and religion – although I do make that case elsewhere at length – but to emphasize the importance of relationships to recover the affective and social dimensions with respect to the missing mediation at the heart of contemporary scientistic environmentalism. That environmentalism is a systematic impersonalism that fails to turn, motivate, and move human beings. Sacks writes of love as the supreme creative force within the universe. A disenchanting science denies precisely this view, leaving us instead with an objectively valueless and meaningless universe. That view leaves us without love in any reciprocal sense. We are enjoined to love something, an inanimate ‘thing’, that is indifferent to us, not so much relating to an object as becoming subservient to it. The notion lacks affective power and, of course, has failed to motivate. There is, thus, an attempt to force compliance. Max Weber characterized the modern rationalized world as a techno-bureaucratic order that ‘proceeds without regard to persons.’ It is an order modelled on an impersonal, indifferent Nature, which is all that is left after Nietzsche’s “death of God.” Weber wrote in a state of gloom and pessimism. We live in ‘godless and prophetless times,’ he wrote. He was entirely without hope, seeing the socialist alternative merely as an extension of this rationalized servitude, ‘housing for the new serfdom,’ as he put it. It seems that this housing is the political ideal of a modern environmentalism modelled on nature’s laws. It is precisely this that I am concerned to contest. The loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework as a result of the “death of God” is being overcome in an entirely illegitimate manner with the insertion of the ‘Nature’ imagined in the manner of disenchanting science, leading us to a thoroughly inhuman, impersonal order. Entirely lost is love as loyalty and as a pledge of mutual responsibility. I argue for the restitution of power to the social body from which it originated, and its re-organisation and diffusion as social power. That is the view Marx laid out in his critique of alien power. I would also temper this legitimate concern with the practical reappropriation of power with the truth that relationship, at the most sacred level we are enjoined to serve, is a matter not of power but of love. From that, it follows that, as Jonathan Sacks writes, ‘you can build a society on the basis of love, love of neighbour and stranger,’ and that it is this Greater Love ‘that leads us to care for their welfare as if it were our own.’ Those who demand strategies, programmes, and plans mobilizing governmental, fiscal and technological power have a wealth of means, but will fail for want of love ordered to true ends. If it comes to a contest between power and love, it would seem that power would win every time. But to the extent that such power is an expansion of means bought at the expense of a diminution in meaning, it will fail for want of affective content. The commitment to the Greater Love would seem utterly utopian ‘were it not for the fact that the faith of Abraham has lasted longer than any other known civilisation.’ That Love goes deep and hence has the more enduring quality. We are enjoined to become God’s partners in Creation. We may well have fallen short of that commandment and failed to live up to its promise, but that promise is never-ending. There is indeed something moving and humane about this embrace of the Greater Love and the demands it makes of us.

A disenchanting science makes existentialists of us all, having as individuals to project meaning and value upon an objectively meaningless and valueless world. The problem is that if the world is indeed meaningless and valueless, then our choices too must be similarly empty and arbitrary. There is no good reason to choose one end instead of another, other than personal preference. That makes clear the extent to which it is inadmissible and impossible to ground an authoritative ethic on Nature conceived as an exclusively physical universe, whose laws, in being formulated apart from relationships, have nought to do with moral laws. The attempt to create an overarching and authoritative moral framework on the basis of such Nature is illegitimate. Nature and its physical laws lack moral force in this way. The attempt to proceed from statements of fact through natural science to moral statements lacks proper mediation. There is a need, in other words, to join the two concepts of God as one and put Hashem and Elohim together and thereby bring the physical and the moral, the cognitive and the affective, in unison.

Emphasize the physical universe at the expense of the moral universe, and you lose the personal. And herein lies the problem with the ‘Nature’ whose laws are being delivered to the political realm with authoritative normative force. These laws are impersonal, indifferent to human beings, hence they fail to motivate and move. Rather than learning the lesson and coming to supply the missing mediation, the advocates of a scientistic ‘non-politics’ press the truth formulated in the realm of physical objects even harder in the personal world of subjects. The lack of a genuine normative force and social force therefore impels a reliance on institutional, legal, and technological force to deliver us to the push-button order of a world that proceeds without regard to persons. The advocates of environmental action proceed directly to an illegitimate authoritative force without supply the necessary affective, moral, social, and democratic mediation.

Just as there are two concepts that make for the one God, so there are, as Jacob Bronowski writes ‘two parts to the human dilemma.’ The first dilemma ‘is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine.’ That push-button de-politicization and de-moralization generates monsters wherever it takes hold. I don’t care for the view increasingly expressed that climate change is an overriding priority, not least on account of the blind eyes being turned to objections to this politically nebulous ‘climate action’ in the process. When an end is stated so vacuously in political and social terms, without a supporting argument on how to get from here to there with respect to institutions, practices, policies, and consent, then it is an invitation to the powerful means which exist becoming so enlarged as themselves to constitute the end.

The second dilemma ‘is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilisation, into a regiment of ghosts - obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.’ (Bronowski 2011 ch 11 ). This second dilemma follows inevitably from the first.

‘This,’ Bronowski writes, ‘is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.’

‘We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.’

Bronowski 2011 ch 11