Standing Together – Part 1

 

There’s an old adage that you can choose your friends but you can’t choose
your family. Well, that’s kind of true, although many people decide to cut
themselves off from family, either individual family members or the full
breakfast. But how about the communities we participate in? I’m not talking
about that vague (non)entity sometimes described as ‘the Community,’ but the
many separate, intersecting and concentric circles in which we move, live and
breathe, and which, to a greater or lesser extent, make us what we are.

Jews are often characterised, sometimes negatively stereotyped, as belonging
to a community that is not only close but closed. The ultimate exclusive
private members club, we seem to make little effort to welcome those who want
to join, even holding a tradition that a rabbi should make three attempts to
dissuade a potential convert. And that’s before they can even be considered for
acceptance as a pilgrim on the long and sometimes arduous journey towards
membership of the Jewish People

Including inclusivity from the start

And so it might seem surprising that in the long series of speeches by the
prophet Moses that make up the biblical Book of Deuteronomy (or Devarim),
one particular passage stands out as flying in the face of this cherished
exclusivity. In fact, Moses makes the boundaries of the community seem so
permeable, or should I say expansive, as to seem to disappear
altogether.

You stand this day, all of you, before the Eternal your God — your
tribal heads, your elders, and your officials, every householder in Israel,
your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper
to waterdrawer— to enter into the covenant of the Eternal your God, which the
Eternal your God is concluding with you this day, with its sanctions;
in order to establish you this day as the people of the Eternal, and in order
to be your God, as promised you and as sworn to your fathers Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob. I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but
both with those who are standing here with us this day before the Eternal our
God and with those who are not with us here this day. (Deuteronomy
29:9-15)

Granting Rashi his interpretation of the ‘woodchopper’ and the ‘waterdrawer’
as being male and female servants respectively and noting that the phrase ‘the
stranger within your camp’ includes pretty much everyone else, we have a covenantal
community made up of…well…everyone. God is making a deal with men and
women, adults and children, tribal elders and plebeians, priests and laypeople,
Israelites and resident aliens – all and sundry.

Far from a homogenous, ethnic monoculture, this people is, to use the Hebrew
phrase, an erev rav or ‘Mixed Multitude’, a phrase used in Exodus 12: 39 to
encompass those who were not Hebrews, but who made their own escape from Egypt,
perhaps taking advantage of the chaos when Pharaoh allowed Moses to lead the
Israelites out of Egypt. And just in case anyone’s missing from the list, the
passage throws in not just those standing there that day but those who are not
with them that day. Logically, that would seem to include absolutely everyone
who exists, ever existed or ever will exist – although commentators have
interpreted it as meaning specifically that the covenant is binding on those of
the People of Israel born later, in other words all of the descendants of
Jacob, both biological and spiritual up to the present and beyond.

Far from exclusive, we have Moses, arguably the founder of Jewish faith,
opening the floodgates to pretty much anyone who wants to come to the party, so
long as they accept that in doing so they are equally bound by all the terms
and conditions, whether they have ticked the box or whether they have not
ticked the box. All they have to do is to decide to show up and stand with the
people before God. Stand with us and you’re in.

According to Rabbi Sheila Shulman in her sermon ‘All of You’, it is this
‘decision, on the deepest level, to include herself or himself in, or not’ that
determines whether a person is part of the Jewish Community – Klal Yisrael.
It is not down to presumed gatekeepers, who may wish to exclude, for
example, converts, LGBT people or patrilineal Jews, but ultimately the
individual themselves who by ‘deciding with their whole being that he or she is
part of [the Jewish People], by linking up their whole being to the history,
the experience, the continuing life, of this unique people.’ By emphasising a
sense of ‘oneness; as uniqueness rather than homogeneity,
Rabbi Shulman opens up the seemingly paradoxical idea that diversity is a
condition for unity rather than an obstacle to it. After all, why even mention
‘unity’ if we are talking about a set of identikit members?

Or course divisions inevitably give rise to disagreement, discussion and
debate – all forms of discourse and deliberation to renew and replenish the
community’s mores and culture. But what should be a community’s attitude to the
alienated member, who at once both attempts to exclude others while refusing to
participate in the deliberative process? Should we try to include the person
who seems only to desire exclusion, both of others and, if only unconsciously,
themselves?

Tolerating the intolerant

This problem is related to the famous (or infamous) Paradox of
Tolerance. In what might be one of the most influential footnotes in
intellectual history, the philosopher Karl Popper
questioned the liberal belief that all strands of opinion should be tolerated
in a free society. As a side remark to his exegesis of Plato’s critique of
democracy, Popper writes:

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must
lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even
to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant
society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be
destroyed, and tolerance with them. – In this formulation, I do not imply, for
instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant
philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them
in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we
should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may
easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational
argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers
to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to
answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefor
claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We
should claim that any movement preaching intolerance and persecution as
criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to
kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

(The Open Society and Its Enemies)

Although we might baulk at the criminalisation of movements, presumably only
on the basis of their ideology, it should be remembered that Popper, an
Austrian with Jewish ancestors who lived through the rise of the Nazis and the
Second World War, had witnessed the dangers of a laissez-faire
approach, the so-called ‘market place of ideas.’ To stretch this economic
metaphor, Popper seems to be stating a principle analogous to Gresham’s Law,
that bad money – or in this case bad ideology – drives out good.

Inclusive values

In a community, such as a synagogue, which does not have the mechanisms of
courts and gendarmerie, how can the intolerant individual or faction be
resisted, beyond simply sending them into exile, suspending their membership or
perhaps, removing them permanently (as in what happened to a particular intellectual hero of mine)?

It seems to me that an inclusive community has two possible
approaches to the problem: one therapeutic and the other preventative. The
first of these would involve rehabilitating the person, explaining what is
required and expected of each member of the community and conversely, what they
can expect from their colleagues or comrades. And if this sounds too much like
the Soviet-era euphemism of re-education, remember that therapy is a
two-way process and in this case, the intolerant individual might, by the persuasive
expression of their views, change the community for better. But that is the
risk we take in any genuine dialogue, the end point is never fixed if entered
into in a spirit of openness; it always involves uncertainty.

However, dialogue requires speech that is respectful and responsible.
Parties must enter into a relationship, giving attention to the other, however
painful this might be. And perhaps most importantly, those who dissent from the
ethical norms of the community must take personal ownership of their views, not
represent them as those of some ill-defined ‘silent majority’ or a vague notion
of ‘tradition’, a vague, intangible legacy of which they are the self-appointed
executors, interpreters and advocates.

And although taking ownership of any counter-cultural opinions always requires
courage, the alternative (anonymous missives or trolling on social media)
precludes the possibility of dialogue, an encounter that, given trust, openness
and indeed, the admission of a grain of doubt, can recast conflict as the
engine of ethical and spiritual growth. Writing poison pen letters or graffiti
on lavatory walls – that ain’t it!

And as for prevention? Communities need to make their values explicit and
understood. Like the ancient biblical tradition of Hakhel, reading the Torah to the people every seven years, there must be some contractual mechanism beyond checking the box stating ‘I
agree to the terms and conditions.’ Such a procedure or constitution would hold
members, both new and old, to broad, fundamental principles to which they have
given considered and explicit consent. These values will always undergo
editing, revision and redefinition, deletions and additions. But by stating
clearly the boundaries of where a community stands, even while positions are
shifting, the community enables new entrants to make an informed choice as to
whether they want to come inside.

Living Community

A community whose collective opinions are frozen in time is dead, its
life-blood clotted. This is not to say that everything is negotiable. I happen
to believe that intolerance, homophobia, racism and xenophobia are wrong. So I
choose to belong to groups defined by how they surpass even the ideal of
tolerance, valuing acceptance and celebrating a diversity that is the warp and
the weft, the secret of the strength of such communities. But if we give up on
the messy and sometimes painful business of dialogue, either by stepping
outside and throwing rocks in or by excluding the difficult person who perhaps
just doesn’t know how to speak our language, then we condemn the community to
atrophy and death.

Since I started to write this post I have seen the opening up of new and
bitter division both within the Anglo-Jewish community and beyond. People are
told they are either with us or against us, but this is a classic
all-or-nothing fallacy: in many cases the binary is artificial, ignores
gradation, nuance and perhaps mischaracterises certain pairs of viewpoints as
polar opposites when really they have more in common.

Can we take a stand, bravely and respectfully remaining in dialogue
with those who disagree with us? Have we the courage to choose to be part of
the cut and thrust, the ebb and flow that makes for a living, breathing
community? I hope that we will choose wisely, choosing life so that we, our
communities and our children can live.

Now read on

• Sheila Shulman, Watching for the Morning: Selected Sermons (London: BKY) 2001
• Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge) 1995

An example of a Community Ethos for the Jewish Community founded by Rabbi Sheila Shulman can be found at https://www.bky.org.uk/ethos

 

 

On the Need for Hope

This is an edited version of a sermon I gave at the South London Liberal Synagogue on 21st October 2023, the anniversary of my bar mitzvah according to the Hebrew Calendar. This was two weeks after the Hamas massacres of 7th October and after the seige and bombing of Gaza had begun.

Book of Noah, artist unknown. This print was a gift. If anyone knows the name of the artist (or can make it out), let me know!

Today I want to talk to you about hope, what it is and why it matters so much.

There’s an old joke that goes like this. Every Jewish festival, perhaps all of Jewish history can be summed up in three short sentences:

They tried to destroy us.

We survived.

Let’s eat.

The portion of the Torah I read to you concerns an important moment in the narrative of the book of Genesis. After surviving 365 days in the darkness of the Tevah, an Ark only 150 metres long, stuffed with hundreds of braying, mooing, barking and screeching animals (and that’s just what came out of their mouths), Noach and his sons emerge on the top of Mount Ararat, squinting against the sun, into a strange new world. Everyone they know, apart from their immediate family, including the families of Noach’s daughters-in-law, have been killed by the maboul, a word translated as ‘the Flood’ but in fact only applying to this particular event, an apocalyptic catastrophe so unique and horrific that it cannot be likened to anything else.

How would they be feeling at this moment? Joyful to finally be released from captivity into the fresh air? Maybe. A little apprehensive about what was going to happen next? Probably an understatement. I think they would not just be anxious but absolutely traumatised. And as evidence, what is the first thing that Noach does? He plants a vineyard, self-medicates with alcohol and then vents his rage on his son Ham.

Rashi, the great medieval commentator questions why God feels the need to promise Noach that He would not send another Maboul a flood to destroy the World. He writes:

[God] said this because Noah feared to fulfil the duty of propagating the species until the Holy One, blessed be He, promised him that he would not again destroy the world and this promise God made. He said to Noach, “If you are still anxious, I am willing to give to My promise the permanence and strength of a covenant and I will give you a sign.

So God gives Noach this reassurance and if we believe that God keeps his promises, then perhaps we can be reassured too. And as a reminder we have a beautiful sign, the keshet, God’s bow in the sky, which appears from time to time and even has its own blessing:

Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech Haolam, Zocher Habris V’ne’eman Bivriso V’kayam B’ma’amaro.

Blessed be the Lord our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who remembers the covenant, and is faithful to His covenant, and keeps His promise.

For me the rainbow is always a good omen (in as much as I believe in omens), but I’m not sure whether we recite the blessing to remind ourselves or to remind God. In the Talmud we are told that the rainbow is not so much a promise as a warning, an injunction to all humankind to repent. According to Tractate Ketubot (77b), In the generation of a truly righteous person, no rainbows are seen.

Clearly, we do not live in such a generation. These are scary times when good people seem to be few and far between. They were scary before the terrible events of two weeks ago – there was even then the possibility of another pandemic, of more war, of catastrophic climate change.

I once asked my father why he was an only child, why his parents didn’t have more children after him, and his reply really stuck with me. He said that after the horrors of the First World War, many people said in England, Germany and across Europe, that they didn’t want to bring children into the world to be cannon fodder. They had given up hope for the future.

And if that really was the reason, my grandfather, himself a veteran of the German army, captured in 1916 and held in a British prisoner of war camp, could be excused for his pessimism. In fact, it many ways it turned out to be worse. Much worse

Although my grandparents escaped from Berlin, arriving with their nine-year-old son Manfred at Liverpool Street Station in the spring of 1939, other members of the family were less fortunate. Despite the efforts of my grandfather to help them emigrate to a safe country, his brother Georg and his aunt Roschen died in the Auschwitz death camp. His sister Margot and her 13-year-old daughter Ruth were murdered in the notorious massacres of Jews in the forests outside of Riga in Latvia.

May their memory be a blessing.

They tried to destroy us.

The Hebrew word for the Ark is tevah and this word is used again later in the Torah – not for the Ark of the Covenant, the Aron Haberit, that’s a completely different Hebrew term. At the beginning of Exodus, tevah is the word for the basket in which a desperate mother places her infant son then casts it adrift among the reeds on the bank of the Nile to be discovered and adopted by an Egyptian princess. And so the foundling child survives a massacre of innocent children and grows up to be the greatest prophet and founding figure of the Jewish faith.

My grandparents had to leave so much behind in Berlin. The Nazis stripped them of almost everything they owned, save a few personal possessions including two gold rings, forged from the scrap dental gold collected in my grandfather’s dental laboratory in Berlin. But they were able to bring the most precious thing of all, their 9-year-old son Manfred who (as is so common in these stories) was given a new name, Dennis.

The name Dennis means ‘follower of Dionysius’, the Greek God of wine and fertility. And along with my mother Eadie Kirstein who he met at Dental School my father took the mitzvah to be fruitful and multiply quite seriously and had four children, who grew up to become my brother, a professor of infectious diseases, my sister, an author of several English-language textbooks and a consultant trainer to language schools and  programmes internationally, and my baby sister, a professor of physics, who beat cancer to be admitted this summer as a fellow of the Royal Society.

They tried to destroy us.

We survived.

The remarkable fact of Jewish survival is proof that we are doing something right. And if we could bottle it, that would be a business. Maybe we can and I’d like to use up the last few minutes of this drash to suggest what some of the ingredients might be.

We are not afraid of differences of opinion. Some might say we are not afraid enough of differences of opinion. But the fact that rabbinic Judaism is premised on a principle that “These and these are the words of the Living God” means that (with some notable and unfortunate exceptions) we embrace diversity in opinion and so avoid the word excesses of groupthink. And that diversity of our thought is matched by the diversity of our people. We are progressive and we are orthodox; Ashkenazi and Sephardi, gay and straight, black and white, metaphorically all the colours of the rainbow, united, if nothing else, by a common love of argument.

But whatever else the secret of our survival might be, it seems to me that it is not enough to survive biologically. We have to survive with our moral integrity intact. In the worst times, some people will do anything to survive to protect themselves and their families and I get that. I hope I never have to face that kind of dilemma.

When we are attacked by people who want to destroy us, killers with no respect for the value of human life, we may be tempted to fight, as it were, fire with fire. But, as my friend Sam Lebens, a British-born Israeli rabbi and philosophy professor, said recently, ‘We are better than that. We must always continue to care about the innocent people caught up in a mess that was not of their choosing.’ Or to quote a line of Pirkei Avot which I’ve heard from Rabbi Nathan Godleman many times, ‘where there are no human beings, be a human being.’ Or, to put it more colloquially, where no one is behaving with integrity, with mercy, with compassion, where no one is acting like a mensch, be a mensch.

And this brings me back to hope, because the ability to hope in darkest of times, is one of the great gifts of the Jewish people, perhaps the true secret of our longevity as a people. Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a survivor of Auschwitz recalled how he berated his father, Géza Gryn, for using their ration of fat to make an improvised Chanukah lamp, there in that place of one long night. His father told him, “You and I have seen that it is impossible to live up to three weeks without food. We once lived almost three days without water; but you can’t live at all without hope.”

I have come to agree with Géza Gryn that hope is essential for survival. And when I say ‘hope’ I don’t mean blind optimism: “Everything is going to be fine.” I don’t mean magical thinking: “If we can believe (against all the evidence) that everything is going to be fine, it will be”. We can be totally realistic about a situation – and there’s a lot to be realistic about, right now – but still strive to do something about it. So what I am talking about here is not hoping for the best, but hoping that by making the utmost effort, with a litte luck and perhaps infinite grace, we might just make at least a small difference. If we perform just one small act of lovingkindness, it might tip the delicate balance in the favour of the survival of life on earth.

The prohibition against murder that God places on Noach, his sons and through them, to all humankind is premised on the fundamental principle that all humans are made b’tzelem Elohim – in the image of God. Nothing matters more, nothing comes nearer to the divine than the life of a human being. Nothing is more valuable; nothing else comes close. As my mother repeated again and again when I was growing up, ‘Things don’t matter; only people matter.’

In our tradition, the concept of Pikuach Nefesh (watchful concern for life), is a kind of ‘prime directive’ which overrides almost any other religious duty when a human life is at risk. Even the most devoutly orthodox Jew will and must drive someone to the hospital on the Sabbath, in a medical emergency or even when it only might be a medical emergency.

By putting life first, our people have somehow managed to last. We don’t just love life, but celebrate life, and even drink ‘to life’.

There is a story about Rabbi Yisroel Salanter a rabbi in Vilna in the nineteenth century. The details are debated, but here’s the essence of the legend as told by Louis Ginzberg.

In the year 1848, when there was a cholera epidemic, Salanter, after having taken counsel with a number of physicians, became convinced that in the interest of the health of the community it would be necessary to dispense with fasting on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Many a Rabbi in this large community was inclined to agree with his view, but none of them could gather courage enough to announce the dispensation publicly.

When he saw, however, that none of them would act in this case, he thought self-assertion to be his highest duty. Many years later, he would to dwell on this episode and thank with great joy his Creator for having found him worthy to be the instrument of saving so many lives.

This is what he did. He affixed announcements in all synagogues, advising the people not to fast on the day of atonement. Knowing, however, how reluctant they would be to follow his written advice he, on the morning of the Day of Atonement at one of the most solemn moments of the service, ascended the reader’s desk. After addressing a few sentences to the Congregation in which he commanded them to follow his example, he produced some cake and wine, pronounced the blessing over them, ate and drank.

They tried to destroy us.

We survived.

Let’s eat.

Reading Further…

My Noach Source Sheet (Sefaria)

Parashat Noach at My Jewish Learning

Alex Douglas – The Philosophy of Hope: Beatitude in Spinoza (2023)

 

Love Naturally

Thank you everyone who came to my Coffeehouse discussion on Spinoza last Monday at Rosslyn Hill Chapel. I was really challenged by the questions, and impressed by the engagement with the ideas of a sometimes difficult philosopher who lived over three hundred years ago.

Something I always try to do is to persuade people that, despite appearances to the contrary, Spinoza was not a simple pantheist, someone who reduces God with the totality of Natural entities, or the universe conceived materially. I quoted this passage from Spinoza’s letter to Oldenburg:

All things I say are in God and move in God, and this I affirm together with Paul and perhaps together with all ancient philosophers, though expressed in a different way, and I would even venture to say, together with all the ancient Hebrews, as far as may be conjectured from certain traditions, though these may have suffered much corruption. As to the view of certain people that the Theological-Political Treatise rests on the identification of God with Nature (by the latter of which they understand a kind of mass of corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken (Letter 73 to Henry Oldenburg, 1675?).

Spinoza’s reference to Paul is to Acts 17:28: “…though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ as even some of your own poets have said.”

This close relation is echoed in a passage from the First Letter of John (4:13) which Spinoza quotes on the title page of his Theological-Political Treatise:

By this we know that we remain in God and that God remains in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

Someone asked whether Spinoza’s conception God was really just the same thing as Nature, at least Nature more broadly conceived. This could be encapsulated in the expression deus sive natura, “God or Nature” used in the Ethics, Preface to Part Four.

The problem I think  is that unpacking Spinoza’s concept of Nature is just as hard as understanding his definition of God. He draws a distinction, based on medieval scholastic terminology between the active, creative power of Natura naturans (“Nature naturing”) and Natura Naturata (“Nature natured”), the passive, created aspect. The first he identifies with God and His attributes, the second with the finite modes – the individual beings that make up the world. This second aspect seems to correspond with our contemporary use of the word Nature, but while the modes (finite objects and ideas) depend on God for their existence, they do not completely constitute God. But how should we understand the relation between the two?

A clue to the resolution of this might be found in the medieval Jewish compilation, the Yalkut Shimoni (Gathering of Simon):

Why do we use a pseudonym and call the Holy One ‘place’ (makom)? Because He is the place of the world and the world is not His place. (Remez 117).

Spinoza’s God contains the world but is not a being in the world – or merely the world itself. Nature is entirely in God, caused by God and can only be understood through the concept of God. However as God acts from the “necessity of His own being” in causing the world, then God cannot exist without Nature also existing, any more than Nature can exist without God. This intimate connection, a kind of sameness perhaps, between two seemingly distinct concepts is a key motif in Spinoza. Perhaps just as he asserts the identity of, as well as the explanatory disconnection between, mind and body, he also understands that there is both identity and difference between God and Nature.

Perhaps what really matters is that we, as finite beings, reflect on and recognise how we participate in God, particularly in God’s infinite love, and live our lives accordingly. Spinoza’s notion of the “infinite love of God” encapsulates not just God’s love of Himself and of human beings, but our love of God.

 As the previous verses in John’s letter urge:

Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us (I John 4:11-12).

The Idea of the Body: Spinoza on Mind and Emotion

 

This is an edited version of a talk I gave at Pinner Philosophy Group on 14 May 2018

Here, in the first part of the 21st century, we all seem to be suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance. On one hand, the philosopher of mind David Papineu has declared, ‘We are all physicalists now’.[1] Only a minority of philosophers – and perhaps no natural scientists – endorse substance dualism: the view that mind and body are distinct substances, or completely different types of stuff. It seems that we all subscribe to a form of monism, holding that there is only one substance or type of substance, just one single reality.

Or do we? Edwin Curely has suggested that Cartesian dualism is ‘educated common sense’[2] – simply the way that adults in our culture conceive of the world in terms of the mental and the physical.

In 2006, in a tragic turn of events, a British man, John Hogan pushed his two children from a balcony in Crete and then jumped after them, following an argument with his wife. Hogan and one of the two children survived, but his six-year-old son sadly did not. Joannis Nestoros, a professor of psychiatry from the University of Crete, conducted a series of interviews with Hogan (who was later found not-guilty of murder on grounds of insanity). He said, ‘The situation will not reoccur, the only possibility is self-harm and suicide because of the guilt. His body did this, not his brain – he wasn’t himself that night.’[3]

 

Framing the mind-body problem

On the 16 May 1643, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia began a lengthy correspondence with Descartes. In her first letter, she raised a problem with his ‘real distinction’ between mind and body, which Descartes held to be different substances:

So I ask you please to tell me how the soul of a human being (it being only a thinking substance) can determine the bodily spirits, in order to bring about voluntary actions. For it seems that all determination of movement happens through the impulsion of the thing moved, by the manner in which it is pushed by that which moves it, or else by the particular qualities and shape of the surfaces of the latter. Physical contact is required for the first two conditions, extension for the third. You entirely exclude the one [extension] from the notion you have of the soul, and the other [physical contact] appears to me incompatible with an immaterial thing.[4]

Descartes’ attempt to explain how such mind-body interaction could take place, eventuated in his Passions of the Soul where he claimed that the mode of interaction could be explained through the operations of the pineal gland, which he designated the ‘principle seat of the soul’.

[T]he machine of the body is so composed that, merely because this gland is moved diversely by the soul or any other cause there may be, it drives the spirits that surround it toward the brain’s pores, which guide [the spirits] through the nerves into the muscles, by means of which it makes them move the members.[5]

Like Elisabeth, Spinoza failed to see how it could be possible that a thinking substance, a mind, could interact with the extended or physical substance, the body. Descartes’ putative solution, which Spinoza called ‘a hypothesis more occult than any occult quality’, cuts little ice:

Again, I should like very much to know how many degrees of motion the mind can give to that pineal gland, and how great a force is required to hold it in suspense. For I do not know whether this gland is driven about more slowly by the mind than by the animal spirits, or more quickly […] And, of course, since there is no common measure between the will and motion, there is also no comparison between the power, or forces, of the mind and those of the body. Consequently, the forces of the body cannot in any way be determined by those of the mind (V Preface).

 

A monist solution

According to Spinoza’s version of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), everything must have a cause.

For each thing there must be assigned a cause, or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence (IP11D).

It is important to note that the ‘cause’ and ‘reason’ are not distinguished here but conflated as terms which are almost equivalent. Because attributes can only be conceived through themselves, it follows that each mode can only be explained under one attribute (IIP6). Putting this together with the PSR, it follows that each mode will form part of a causal chain of modes of the same attribute.

Spinoza gives very little space to arguing for the parallel relation between modes of extension and modes of thought, boldly asserting that it follows clearly from IA4, the axiom which states:

The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause.

However, perhaps we can fill in the gaps. Let us say the relata of an instance of a cause and an effect to be two modes of extension E₁ and E₂ respectively. Now, according to IIP3, there is an idea in God of everything that follows from his essence. Therefore there must be ideas, modes of thought that correspond to E₁ and E₂. We can call these T₁ and T₂ respectively. Given the explanatory dependence asserted in IA4 (‘The knowledge of an effect depends on the knowledge of its cause’), the knowledge of the thing E₂, that is to say the idea T₂, depends on the knowledge of E₁, which is to say the idea T₁. So we arrive at a correspondence relation between modes of extension and modes of thought.

As each effect is itself a cause, the chains continue ad infinitum:

… → T₁ → T₂ → T₃ →…

… → E₁ → E₂ →E₃ →…

Of course the relations of cause and effect might involve one cause with several effects and vice versa, creating a network of causal nodes. But what is important is that the network of ideas is isomorphic with the network of things: there are two corresponding systems with a one-to-one relation between modes of extension and modes of thought mapping causal and explanatory chains in one onto causal and explanatory chains in the other. [6]

Spinoza states this succinctly:

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things (IIP7).

This central proposition expresses a theory often referred to as Spinoza’s parallelism, a term which conjures up the image of two distinct rails, which always follow one another but never meet. In one way this image is helpful, as Spinoza rules out interaction between modes of different attributes as I shall later explain. However there is another equally important sense in which it is misleading. From the premise that there is only one substance, comprehended sometimes under one attribute and at other times under another attribute, Spinoza holds that similarly, ‘a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways’ (IIP7S).

So what we have now is not two entities running on parallel rails. Rather we might think of a single causal/logical chain of interacting bodies/ideas, perhaps more like a monorail, a single process that can be viewed from different sides, in different ways, manifesting itself to us under two different attributes (mind and extension). The view that an object (or ‘formal’ being) is identical to the idea (or ‘objective’ being) that represents it is grounded in the medieval scholastic conception of ideas as having what they called esse intentionale. This is a form of being that objects have in thought, so that an idea and its object have, as Lloyd suggests, ‘a kind of sameness’.[7] Spinoza gives an example of a circle that exists in nature and the idea of the circle (IIP7S). Both are in God or Nature and are identical to each other. The difference only pertains insofar as they are conceived either under the attribute of extension or the attribute of thought.

 

The identity of mind and body

Spinoza now applies his conception to the relationship between the human mind and the human body. The human mind is a finite idea, and one that must have as its object an existing finite thing (IIP11).

Spinoza’s argument rests on two axioms – claims for which he does not argue, taking them to be self-evident:

We feel that a certain body is affected in many ways. (IIA4)

We neither feel nor perceive any singular things, except bodies and modes of thinking. (IIA5).

Since as embodied human beings we are aware of the ways in which our body is affected (IIA4) and can feel nothing other than the body or the mind itself, the object can be no other than the human body:

The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, or a certain mode of extension, which actually exists, and nothing else (IIP13).

A human being (‘man’) is an individual that consists of a complex mode of thought, the human mind, and a complex mode of extension, the human body (IIP13C). However, rather than these being two distinct parts of each individual human, their relation is once again one of identity:

The mind and the body are one and the same individual, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension (IIP21S).

There remains the vital question of how the causal and explanatory relation between the modes of different attributes is to be understood. The conception of an attribute cannot involve the conception of any other attribute (IP10). It follows that a mode of a given attribute can only have God for its cause, as expressed under the same attribute (IIP6). A causal relation between modes of different attributes would contradict this, requiring one attribute to be conceived through another. This entails what has come to be called Spinoza’s ‘explanatory barrier’ between the attributes:

The body cannot determine the mind to thinking, and the mind cannot determine the body to motion, to rest, or to anything else (if there is anything else) (IIIP2).

In this way, the problem of interaction simply does not arise for Spinoza in the same way as it does for Descartes. All the same, Spinoza is quick to admit that his audience will find this claim counter-intuitive:

They are so firmly persuaded that the body now moves, now is at rest, solely from the mind’s command and that it does a great many things which depend only on the mind’s will and its art of thinking (IIIP2S).

Spinoza is not daunted by the task of overcoming his readers’ firm persuasion. He claims the evidence of our experience supports his arguments. For example, sleepwalkers perform actions when asleep that they would not do when awake, so demonstrating that the body is capable of acting from its own nature alone. So in the face of our Cartesian intuitions, Spinoza insists that it is simply not the case that bodily movements arise from the mind or that the mind animates the body. Even if contemporary science could not yet account for the way the body functions, there is no reason in principle that the movements of the body could not be given a purely physical explanation. As he points out, ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do, that is, experience has not yet taught anyone what the body can do from the laws of Nature alone’ (IIIP2S).

It is key to Spinoza’s project that the laws of Nature should be understood as applying universally, in the human sphere just as they do everywhere else:

Therefore, I shall treat the nature and powers of the affects, and the power of the mind over them, by the same method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies (IIIPref).

 

The Affects

Spinoza aims to address the tensions in Cartesianism by naturalizing human psychology. He sets out to show that the mind, as the idea of the body, is subject natural laws, just like the rest of nature:

The affects, therefore, of hate, anger, envy, and the like, considered in themselves, follow with the same necessity and force of Nature as the other singular things. […] I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies. (III Preface)

Spinoza describes and explains the passions using the psychological language of beliefs and desires. However, it must be remembered that for Spinoza, each of these ideas, is an idea of some thing, and that thing exists in the body (IIP13).

Spinoza defines a passion twice, the first time in the definitions of Part III:

By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections.

Therefore, if we can be the adequate cause of any of these affections, I understand by the affect an action; otherwise a passion (IIID3).

There are two key features of the way Spinoza defines a passion. Firstly, it is a change that the individual undergoes, either positively, by becoming more capable (passing to a greater perfection or having a greater power of acting), or negatively, becoming less capable (passing to a lesser perfection or having a lesser power of acting). Secondly, while affects can be both actions and passions, Spinoza understands the passivity of the passions, as determined by the fact that their cause comes, at least in part, from outside the individual. Actions on the other hand have their cause wholly caused within the individual.

This can also be understood under the attribute of thought. As distinct from an action, the passion is caused by both an idea in the mind (which must be an idea of a state or change of the body), and an idea that exists outside it: the idea of an external object:

The actions of the mind arise from adequate ideas alone; the passions depend on inadequate ideas alone (IIIP3).

This conception of a passion in terms of ideas is elaborated in Spinoza’s second definition of a passion, which incorporates both its mental and physical aspects:

An affect which is called a passion of the mind is a confused idea, by which the mind affirms of its body, or of some part of it, a greater or lesser force of existing than before, which, when it is given, determines the mind to think of this rather than that (III General Definition of the Affects).

Spinoza identifies a passion (under the attribute of thought) as a confused or inadequate idea. But an idea in the mind must always be an idea of something in the body, and for Spinoza, the idea’s corresponding object is the increase or decrease in the perfection of the body, and so also, its power of acting.

 

The Primary Passions and the Conatus

Spinoza lists three primary affects: desire, joy and sadness. Central to his psychology is the concept of conatus, the essential striving of a thing, including the human individual, to persevere in its being (IIIP6). When related to the mind and body together, Spinoza terms this striving “appetite” and he explains desire, the first of the affects, as “Appetite together with consciousness of the appetite” (IIIP9S).

Things can both increase or diminish the body’s power of acting and correspondingly the mind’s power of thinking. This accounts for the other two primary passions. Joy is the passage from a lesser to a greater perfection, and sadness, the passage from a greater to a lesser perfection (IIIP11; III Definitions of the Affects II & III).

 

Love, hate and anger

Spinoza explains the secondary passions through relations between primary passions and ideas, as can be seen, for example, in his definition of love:

Love is a joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause (III Definitions of the Affects VI).

For Spinoza, it seems, no physiological description is needed. Each passion can be explained as a species of desire, joy or sadness, defined by its relation to an idea or belief.

According to Spinoza, the mind both strives to persevere in its being and is conscious of this striving (IIIP9). Therefore, when the mind imagines things that diminish the body’s power of action (which might include apprehension through the senses as well as forming a mental image), then it strives to recollect that which excludes the existence of such things. Given his definition of love as a joy (an increase in power) with an imagined external cause, if follows that the lover will wish to continue to imagine or experience the beloved object, and so,

We see, then, that one who loves necessarily strives to have present and preserve the thing he loves (IIIP13S).

Spinoza makes little reference to the physiological aspects of passions, and anger is no exception. Rather he defines it in terms of two other passions: desire, a primary passion, and hate, which is produced in a similar pattern to love, but by the combination of the opposite primary passion (sadness), along with a belief:

Hate is sadness with the accompanying idea of an external cause (IIIP14).

Spinoza takes a view here of the affected (or impassioned) individual as being, in some sense rational. If he hates someone, that is if he has the idea of that person as the cause of his sadness, he will desire and strive to remove that cause (IIIP39). The definition of anger then, takes hate as the cause or motive of a species of desire:

Anger is a desire by which we are spurred, from hate, to do evil to one we hate (III Definitions of the Affects XXXVI).

Spinoza’s quasi-mathematical approach to understanding emotion should not be seen as purely an attempt to create a systematic science of human affects for its own sake. Towards the end of the Ethics, we learn that humans can achieve at least a degree of freedom from negative emotions, not through sheer force of will, but by the power of understanding. It is by virtue of our knowledge we attain power over our passions.

In particular, we need to understand that excessive love towards an object that is impermanent (for example riches and fame) can only lead to bondage to negative passions:

Next, it should be noted that sickness of the mind and misfortunes take their origin especially from too much love toward a thing which is liable to many variations and which we can never fully possess. For no one is disturbed or anxious concerning anything unless he loves it, nor do wrongs, suspicions, and enmities arise except from love for a thing which no one can really fully possess.

From what we have said, we easily conceive what clear and distinct knowledge – and especially that third kind of knowledge, whose foundation is the knowledge of God itself-can accomplish against the affects. Insofar as the affects are passions, if clear and distinct knowledge does not absolutely remove them, at least it brings it about that they constitute the smallest part of the mind. And then it begets a love toward a thing immutable and eternal, which we really fully possess, and which therefore cannot be tainted by any of the vices which are in ordinary love, but can always be greater and greater and occupy the greatest part of the mind and affect it extensively. (VP20S)

Why should any of this matter today? After all, we have much more sophisticated understandings of brain functions, a neuroscience informed by experiments using fMRI scans and are equipped with the means to alter mood with psychotherapeutic drugs. Why do we continue to study the somewhat opaque writings of a seventeenth century lens-grinder, and attempt to makes sense of his difficult and sometimes obscure ideas on the mind-body relation

 

The brain’s mappings of the body

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has throughout his career questioned the ‘Cartesian common sense’ that would separate mind and body, reason and emotion as binary opposites. In this he was inspired by Spinoza’s notion that both the mind and the body were parallel attributes of the very same substances. He writes

Spinoza was serving notice of his opposition to the view of the mind-body problem that prevailed in his time. His dissent stood out in a sea of conformity. More intriguing, however, was his notion that the human mind is the idea of the human body. This raised an arresting possibility. Spinoza might have intuited the principles behind the natural mechanism responsible for the parallel manifestations of mind and body […] I am convinced that mental processes are grounded in the brains’ mappings of the body, collections of neural patterns that portray responses to events that cause emotions and feelings. Nothing could have been more comforting than coming across this statement of Spinoza’s and wondering about its possible meaning.[8]

You too may still be wondering what Spinoza meant by ‘the mind is the idea of the human body.’ But perhaps, like me it is this kind of wonder that drives your engagement with philosophy – the love of and search for wisdom or understanding. I hope that I have been successful, if not in making crystal clear what Spinoza meant in IIP13, at least in sharing some of my own sense of wonder about how one great philosophical minds understood the mind and its identity with the body.

 

Notes

All quotations from Spinoza’s Ethics are from the translation by Edwin M. Curley, published in Penguin Classics. Also available in E.M. Curley (A Spinoza reader: The Ethics and other works. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994) and The collected works of Spinoza Vol I (Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1988).

[1] David Papineau, ‘Physicalism and the Human Sciences’ http://www.davidpapineau.co.uk/uploads/1/8/5/5/18551740/physicalism_and_the_human_sciences.doc accessed 1.6.18

[2] Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)

[3] ‘Mum tells of balcony death plunge’ Wales Online, 22.01.2008 https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/mum-tells-balcony-death-plunge-2203944 accessed 15.05.18

[4] Lisa Shapiro (Ed.), The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Rene Descartes (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007), p.62.

[5] Rene Descartes, Passions of the Soul, Tran. Stephen H. Voss, (Indianapolis: Hackett,1989), p.38.

[6] I paraphrase Jonathan Bennett, (‘Spinoza’s Mind-Body Identity Thesis’, Journal of Philosophy, 1981, Vol 78, No 10. pp 573-584). However, this picture still omits all but the two known attributes. Whatever other attributes there are, there must be a similar relationship between their modes and ideas of their modes.

[7] Genevieve Lloyd, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and the Ethics (London: Routledge,1996), p.49

[8] Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. London : Heinemann, 2003

Immortality as a language game

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Or life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

(Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.4311)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) held that the meanings of words could only be understood within ‘forms of life’. We don’t simply come to use language by a teacher pointing to an object, a chair for example, and saying, ‘chair.’ This misconception, that words had meanings that could be understood outside their wider context was, for Wittgenstein a mistake:

Naming appears as a queer connection of a word with an object.—And you really get such a queer connection when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word ‘this’ innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.

 

“Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” – Wittgenstein

We know someone is adept at communication when they use language correctly, hence Wittgenstein’s famous slogan: ‘meaning is use.’ There are rules for using a language within every domain, rules for what Wittgenstein called a ‘language game’, to draw attention to the fact that speaking a language is part of a rule-bound activity, or of a form of life. He gives a number of disparate examples of language games, including:

 

Forming and testing a hypothesis— Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams— Making up a story; and reading it— Play-acting— Singing catches— Guessing riddles— Making a joke; telling it— Solving a problem in practical arithmetic— Translating from one language into another— Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.

For Wittgenstein then, to understand someone, we have to know which language game our interlocutor is playing, and be at least open to playing by and have a tacit understanding of the same rules. The same also goes for the rules or ‘grammar’ of religious belief.

Suppose someone were a believer and said: ‘I believe in the last Judgement’, and I said, ‘Well, I’m not so sure. Possibly.’ You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us. If he said ‘There is a German aeroplane overhead’, and I said ‘Possibly. I’m not so sure’, you’d say we were fairly near.

It may seem on the surface that the person who speaks the last Judgement is making a scientific claim, but this is a misconception. There is a particular (religious) language game in play here, and we only confuse matters by interpreting his remarks as if they were part of another language game, that of science. Asking if there will be a Last Judgement within the context of the scientific language game is absurd as asking if a violinist has scored more points than the conductor during a performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto.

The Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion D.Z. Phillips (1934-2006) claims that it makes no sense to ask for proof of validity of religious beliefs once they are understood as language games: ‘philosophy is neither for nor against religious beliefs,’ he writes. ‘After it has sought to clarify the grammar of such beliefs its work is over.’ Phillips sums up his view by listing examples of religious rituals and suggests their possible significance or functions:

A boxer crosses himself before the fight; a mother places a garland on a statue of the Virgin Mary; parents pray for their child lost in a wreck. Are these blunders or religious activities? What decides the answer to this question is the surroundings, what the people involved say about their actions, what their expectation are, what if anything, would render the activity pointless, and so on. Does the boxer think that anyone who crosses himself before a fight will not come to serious harm in it? Does the mother think that the garland’s value is prudential? Do the parents believe that all true prayers for the recovery of children lead to that recovery? If these questions answered in the affirmative, the beliefs involved become testable hypotheses. They are, as a matter of fact, blunders, mistakes, regarding causal connections of a kind. […] But perhaps the activities have a different meaning. Perhaps the boxer is dedicating his performance in crossing himself, expressing the hope that it be worthy of what he believes in, and so on. The mother may be venerating the birth of her child as God’s gift, thanking for it, and contemplating the virtues of motherhood as found in the mother of Jesus. The parents may be making their desires known to God, wanting the situation which has occasioned them to be met in Him. The beliefs involved are not testable hypotheses, but ways of reacting to and meeting such situations.

In the same way, for Phillips, those who assess talk of immortality of the soul as if it rested on a claim about duration beyond death are really missing the point. Rather, the meaning of eternal life, for those who speak of it is not ‘something which happens after human life on earth is over’ but ‘the reality of goodness, that in terms of which human life is to be assessed.’ For Phillips then the question of the immortality of the soul is an ethical one, and not one of assessing a quasi-scientific or metaphysical belief.

The soul which is rooted in the mortal is the soul where the ego is dominant […] The immortality of the soul by contrast refers to a person’s relation to the self-effacement and love of others involved in dying to the self. Death is overcome in that dying to the self is the meaning of the believer’s life […]. I am suggesting then, that eternal life for the believer is participation in the life of God, and that this life has to do with dying to the self, seeing that all things are a gift from God, that nothing is ours by right or necessity.

The Wittgensteinian approach to religious statements is not without its critics. Stephen Law points out that it is disingenuous to claim that the believer has a different relation or approach to her creedal statements than her atheist opponent. And it certainly appears that many sincere Christians, Muslims and Jews do believe quite literally in a life after death. Even if we take the view that there views are simply naïve compared to a more sophisticated philosophical theology, would that not be, to say the least, a little patronising? Can we really accept that for example, a regular church goer does not believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead?

Over eight centuries ago, Maimonides could write in his Essay on the Resurrection about the common people who he describes as needing:

precept after precept, precept after precept, now here, now there [Isa. 28:13]. The sense of it is that they understand but little, the comprehend a bit, a little here, a little there. But the right thing to do is to address each group according to its capacity.

However, if written today, such statements might be considered unacceptably elitist. And yet, literalism seems to be a blunt tool for interpreting religious beliefs and texts, and perhaps an anachronistic one at that. Looking back to the way that generations of religious philosophers have interpreted and reinterpreted sacred texts  bearing in mind the Talmudic adage that the “Torah speaks in the language of human beings.” We see that at least as far back as Philo of Alexandria (c.20 BCE – c 40 CE), scriptural passages were read as allegories or parables. We might, therefore, be taking an unduly narrow approach if we dismiss texts and mythologies describing life after death as merely prevalent forms of pseudoscience.

 

 

Why nothing matters

I don’t speak because I have the power to speak; I speak because I don’t have the power to remain silent. – Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935)

In my dialogues there are no answers. But sometimes a question is the flash of an answer. – Edmund Jabès (1912-1991)

This is the revised text of a talk I gave at CANAL gallery, Haggerston on 18 March 2017 in response to the exhibition ‘What kind of hole am I?’ work by Bol Marjoram.

For the next ten minutes I want to talk to you about nothing. About two kinds or better, two aspects or senses of nothingness.

The first is instantiated by lacunae or absences, and conveniently enough, these are illustrated both literally and metaphorically, in and by the holes in Bol’s books.

As he says,

Please direct your attention towards the holes, it is the holes that matter.

The second kind of nothingness, presents me with a stiffer task, as I can do more than gesture towards what I might call ‘absolute’ nothingness: which I will identify with a kind of infinite potentiality, ultimate emptiness – a nothing that lacks nothing.

To see what I mean by that, accept my invitation to look through the holes and beyond.

So the first kind of nothingness goes hand in hand with what is felt to be lacking there. It’s a privation of whatever it may be that we might normally, perhaps tacitly expect to be present.

It can provide a kind of relief, as when the workman digging up the road with a pneumatic drill outside our bedroom one Saturday morning, stop to take a tea break. Rushing to the bar at the interval in the middle of an intense or agonizing theatrical performance.

It can show up as boredom: waiting for something to happen. Diverse responses to composer John Cage’s ‘4’33”’ (1952) a piece with no notes, range from the dismissive, through the perplexed to the contemplative. But what is essential to this piece is its boundedness. It is finite and must necessarily be performed within the four and half minutes – plus three seconds – of a concert programme. And of course, there is not total silence. Audience members breathe, cough, fidget, and giggle nervously between the movements. Like the two-minute silence at the cenotaph, its power lies not so much in itself but in that it disrupts and by doing so draws attention to the normal, the unnoticed, the conventional course of things.

Or this nothingness can present itself as dangerous, as when we have to mind the gap, or find ourselves in a state of anxious boredom, with nothing to be but a fertile market for snack foods to fill our bellies, and brain candy (Candy Crush Saga) to fill our minds.

Perhaps it is for this that nothing is more subversive than nothing: conspiracies of silence, silent protests, strikes, civil disobedience which is markedly non-action, the not-doing what is required by the state.

The nihilistic seventies movement known as punk took as its emblem the safety pin; re-pairing deliberate rips in clothes, holes emphasized by –visible mending. The material lacunae visualized a deliberate absence of musicianship, practice, denying the finished smooth surfaces demanded by the despised overproduced prog rock supergroups.

Or think about the revolutionary work of Lucio Fontana, such as Spatial Concept Waiting (Tate Modern) which is nothing more – and nothing less – than an incision of the canvas, puncturing the two-dimension into a three-dimensional space. In 1968 Fontana told an interviewer that, ‘my discovery was the hole and that’s it. I am happy to go to the grave after such a discovery’. The morbid, eschatological illusion may not be entirely accidental, as we shall see.

So often the presence of the missing is felt more strongly than if it were present. Valentine Schmidt’s beautiful photographs of the Berlin Olympic Village seem to me to be haunted by figures conspicuous by their absence: the triumphant athletes of an illusory and transitory Aryan master race and the ghosts of those – the aunts and uncles I never got to see – oblivious then to the death camps waiting for their arrival.

For the American rabbi Richard Rubenstein, the ultimate absence at Auschwitz, is that of a providential personal god, whose deafening silence in the face of horrendous evils announces the breaking of the thread uniting heaven and earth. He writes, ‘We stand in a cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any power beyond our own resources. After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God.’

This death of God, understood perhaps as the same death of other grand narratives – continuous scientific progress, the triumph of rationality – is no less felt at the personal level.

Maybe we’ve experienced the very nadir of the ground beneath our feet giving way, when we experience an existential crisis, perhaps brought on by abandonment, bereavement, or betrayal.

In these moments we may fall into a pit of despair but if we have the grace, we can fall not into but through it, dropping down further into a reconfigured identity, a bottomless falling that is exhilarating, terrifying and beautiful. [The phrase ‘touching the void’, springs to mind]

There! Right there

There we find, if we don’t overlook it, an experience of what Rubenstein calls holy nothingness, a nothingness lacking nothing, an ‘indivisible plenum so rich that all existence derives from his very essence…the nothing is not absence of being but superfluity of being.’ Rubenstein is drawing on ancient mystical tropes. The Jewish Kabbalists spoke of Ayin, the Buddhists ‎śūnyatā, while the medieval Scottish philosopher John Duns Scotus (c.1266-1308) referred to that which ‘when it is thought through itself, neither is nor was nor will be. For in no existing thing is it understood, since it is beyond all things…When it is understood as incomprehensible on account of its excellence, it is not improperly called ‘nihil’ (that is ‘nothing’) ”.

So, this second aspect of nothingness is a nihil or nothing or emptiness so perfect, so unbounded, eternal and unchanging that it can contain an infinite space of possibility.

Deep down we may experience a yearning for this ultimate nothingness, the desire for annihilation which when conceived pathologically, Freud called Thanatos a death-instinct, a drive to return to the state of inanimacy in which we once rested from the origin of the cosmos.

If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal  reasons–becomes inorganic once again–then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones”.

(Beyond the Pleasure Principle)

The metaphysical poet and preacher John Donne saw something dark, even satanic in nothingness, declaiming that while small could become great, acorns grow into oaks,

[A]bsolutely nothing, meerly nothing, is more incomprehensible than any thing, than all things together. It is a state (if a man may call it a state) that the Devil himself in the midst of his torments, cannot wish.

But when conceived positively, this desire can motivate a kind of self-transcendence or what the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (following Spinoza) called Self-Realization! a movement out of the narrow ego, towards an identification with whole ecosystem in which we are constituted – or put more paradoxically perhaps, falling in love with life itself.

And what of the holes. Pay attention to the holes and then look through and beyond them. Perhaps they are not just lacunae, gaps in the materiality of the work, but portals. Step inside them. As the Sufi mystic Rumi writes:

People are going back and forth across the threshold
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

Nothing but nothing, nothing else is inexhaustible. Nothing will never let you down. As Lao Tzu says of the ‘root of Heaven and Earth’ or the Tao or Way, ‘use will never drain it’.

In fact, for this sage, nothing is that without which

nothing

can be

anything:

Thirty spokes
Share one hub.
Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand, and you will have the use of the cart. Knead clay in order to make a vessel. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand, and you will have the use of the vessel. Cut out doors and windows in order to make a room. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand, and you will have the use of the room.
Thus what we gain is Something, yet it is by virtue of Nothing that this can be put to use.

What kind of hole am I? Bol Marjoram runs alongside This Heaven: Valentine Schmidt until 1st April 2017 at CANAL60 De Beauvoir Crescent
London N1 5SB

020 7923 9211
0786 606 3663

open Thur – Sat 1-6pm during exhibitions
or by appointment

www.facebook.com/canalprojects
www.facebook.com/haggerstonriviera
@Canal_London

Bibliotherapy

Burbea, Rob, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on emptiness and dependent arising (West Ogwell: Hermes Amara Publications, 2014)

Cohn-Sherbok, Dan, Holocaust Theology: a reader, (Exeter : University of Exeter Press, 2015)

Donne, John, ‘Twenty-Six Sermons (25) Preached at the Spital’, 1622

Duclow, Donald F., ‘Divine Nothingness and Self-Creation in John Scottus Eriugena’ in his Masters of Learned Ignorance: Eriugena, Eckhart, Cusanus (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)

Freud, Sigmund ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVIII (Toronto: Hogarth Press, 1955) pp.7-64.

Jabès, Edmond, From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1991)

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching trans. D.C. Lau, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003)

Marion, Jean-Luc, God Without Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)

About nothing

For reasons that will become apparent, I’m contemplating the idea of emptiness at the moment. And perhaps something more empty than emptiness, more absolute than mere negation, more devoid of anything and everything than just void.

What I’m talking about is perhaps what the Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein refers to as Holy Nothingness, the infinite God, which can be in no sense a thing such that it might resemble the finite things of this universe. This conception of God would reject even such understandings, found in say, Tillich and Aquinas, of the Divine as ‘being itself’. Rather, it makes Him out to be, if anything, infinite potential, ultimate non-being. So, as Rubenstein explains, the very absence of anything, makes for ‘an indivisible plenum so rich that all existence derives from his very essence. God as the nothing is not absence of being but superfluity of being.’(1)

For the next four weeks I’m going to explore some ideas around nothingness, absence, lacunae, silence. So, watch this (empty) space.

三十輻，共一轂，當其無，有車之用。埏埴以為器，當其無，有器之用。鑿戶牖以為室，當其無，有室之用。故有之以為利，無之以為用。

Thirty spokes

Share one hub.

Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand, and you will have the use of the cart. Knead clay in order to make a vessel. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand, and you will have the use of the vessel. Cut out doors and windows in order to make a room. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand, and you will have the use of the room.

Thus what we gain is Something, yet it is by virtue of Nothing that this can be put to use.

Lao Tzu (551-479 BCE) Tao Te Ching, trans. D.C. Lau (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963).

Jewish philosophers think the afterlife

10.30am, Saturday 23rd July 2016

This session is hosted by Beit Klal Yisrael

When we wonder whether there is life beyond the frontier of death, what kind of life are we talking about? Would a life without end be a life worth living, especially if it was lived in the body in which we died? In this session, we will be investigating how three (arguably) Jewish philosophers might have attempted to make sense of the widely held notion of the eternal soul.

We will not, I’m afraid, be investigating the empirical evidence for life after death, such as past-life memories and near-death experiences. The thesis I wish to explore is that when considered carefully, the possibility of immortality need not rest on a belief in personal survival at all. Rather, attaining or realizing eternity is concerned with the here and now, how we understand and act in this world rather than what will befall us in the world to come. In other words I wish to interpret the tradition of afterlife as an ethic for living, for as Spinoza put it, ‘A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not death’ (Ethics IVP67).

However, there are a number of preliminary questions we may wish to examine before or during the session, including:

• What is ‘Jewish’ and what is ‘philosophical’ about Jewish Philosophy? Are Maimonides, Spinoza and Wittgenstein, Jewish philosophers?
• Can reason penetrate mysteries such as what happens to us after death?
• What traditional Jewish beliefs are there concerning the afterlife? Does progressive Judaism have anything to say?
• Why might we wish to imagine there is life after death?
• What kind of language do we use when we express religious beliefs: scientific, allegorical, metaphorical or mythical?

 A draft handout and a reading list for the session can be found here

10.30 – 14.00 Saturday 23rd July

Essex Unitarian Church, 112 Palace Gardens Terrace, London W8 4RT – Nearest Tube: Notting Hill Gate

(Ring bell for the library which is downstairs. Regretably there is no disabled access.)

Please bring something to eat and drink for a light vegetarian shared lunch

On being unreasonable

There is a much-quoted polemic by the early theologian Tertullian (c. 160-220 CE) which encapsulates a seemingly eternal tension between philosophy and religion, faith and reason:

What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from the porch of Solomon, who had himself taught that “the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart.” Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief.

This antagonism between faith and reason was earlier played out in the death sentence passed on Socrates for refusing to recognize the state deities, and later in Spinoza’s expulsion from the Amsterdam Jewish community. As the pendulum swings in the opposite direction, we witness the continuing ascendancy of Western European secularism and, as it reaches its zenith, New Atheism. For myself, and in my conversations with friends, both atheist and theist, from deeply secular to doggedly religious, this dilemma is often experienced as the pull of the noetic against the tug of the affective: the voice that demands, “Why can’t you explain what you mean?” and the one that replies, “Why don’t you shut up and listen?” It’s worth remembering, however, that the division does not correspond neatly with the division between religious believer and secular atheist. Among people of faith and even within the minds of adherents, there is conflict and cognitive dissonance – which is at the same time a visceral unease –  between the God of the philosophers and scholars, and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

I started the philosophy of religion course I am teaching at the London School of Philosophy by looking at three ways at looking at religion. Functional definitions concentrate on the role religions play in society, for example by binding individuals together in cooperative wholes. Traditional and especially analytic philosophy of religion tends to focus on the substantive aspects, viewing religions as if they were constituted by sets of beliefs which can be analysed, dissected and measured against a standard of evidential warrant and rational justification. This approach demands that statements such as ‘There is a God’ are supported by rational arguments – or at least by an account justifying the redundancy of such arguments.

However some writers claim that religions should not be viewed as if they were a system of doctrines at all. One example is the Wittgensteinian philosopher D.Z Phillips (1934 – 2006), who suggests that the substantive conception of religion  misses the point. Rather, he claims, religious language, expresses a heartfelt need, existential anxiety or deep wondering:

To ask whether God exists is not to ask a theoretical question. If it is to mean anything at all, it is to wonder about praising and praying; it is to wonder whether there is anything in all that. This is why philosophy cannot answer the question ‘Does God exist?’ with either an affirmative or a negative reply […] ‘There is a God’, though it appears to be in the indicative mood, is an expression of faith.

~Religion without Explanation

Reading Phillips might point us towards such an expressive conception of religion, a third way of viewing religion as an affective response to our deepest questions and yearnings. This is what the theologian Paul Tillich called our “Ultimate Concern”.

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man’s ultimate concern. Man, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those which condition his very existence, such as food and shelter. But man, in contrast to other living beings, has spiritual concerns — cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. Some of them are urgent, often extremely urgent, and each of them as well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for a human life or the life of a social group. If it claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of him who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfilment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name.

~Dynamics of Faith

Martin Buber makes perhaps the the most radical, almost ascetic, demand of our understanding of religion, that it can only be attained, not in examining the doctrinal belief but in the act of encounter:

Philosophy errs in thinking of religion as founded in a noetic act, even if an inadequate one, and in therefore regarding the essence of religion as the knowledge of an object which is indifferent to being known. As a result, philosophy understands faith as an affirmation of truth lying somewhere between clear knowledge and confused opinion. Religion, on the other hand, insofar as it speaks of knowledge at all, does not understand it as a noetic relation of a thinking subject to a neutral object of thought, but rather as mutual contact, as the genuinely reciprocal meeting in the fullness of life between one active existence and another. Similarly, it understands faith as the entrance into this reciprocity, as binding oneself in relationship with an undemonstrable and unprovable, yet even so, in relationship, knowable Being, from whom all meaning comes. [Italics mine]

~Eclipse of God: Studies in the relation between religion and philosophy

It is important to note that Buber is not suggesting that this encounter is purely subjective and that with which it takes place is ‘mind-dependent’ or a mere idea or social construct. Rather, what he elsewhere refers to as the Eternal Thou is real even if undefinable. Buber insists, “Many true believers know how to talk to God but not about Him. If one dares to turn toward the unknown God, to go to meet Him, to call to Him, Reality is present.”

So do we have to choose between the two: set aside our Aristotelian rational souls in order to apprehend an ultimate reality promised by religion, or alternatively pull back from the abyss, refusing the Leap of Faith to sacrifice our deepest yearnings on the unstable altar of the Enlightenment?

Yesterday I serendipitously encountered a possible solution, or at least a rephrasing of the problem,  in my reading of two books:  one was Letters to a Buddhist Jew by Akiva Tatz and David Gottlieb, the other the Book of Genesis. Towards the end of the narrative of the Flood, we read that Noah blessed two of his sons (though rather unfairly it seems not Ham, whose son Canaan is cruelly cursed), namely Shem and Japheth.

And he said,

  “Blessed be the LORD

  The God of Shem;

  Let Canaan be a slave to them.

  May God enlarge Japheth

  And let him dwell in the tents of Shem;

  And let Canaan be a slave to them.” (Genesis 9:26-27)

Now tradition has it that Japheth was the ancestor of the Greeks. The early rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel interpreted this as sanctioning the Bible being translated into Greek, while no translation into any other language was permitted. And the nineteenth-century Hassidic rabbi Tzaddok HaCohen quoted ‘Japheth will dwell in the tents of Shem’, as being fulfilled when, after the Hasmoneon victory over the Greeks, the Jews were able to integrate Greek philosophy into their own culture. But HaCohen also believed that the Jewish exile had a Divine purpose, to absorb ‘points of essence’ from the host cultures, this being a reading of the mystical idea of Tikkun, the reclamation of the hidden, divine sparks in order to restore the world to harmony.

So rather than faith/reason we have a different duality, that of host/guest, where the same person or the same tradition alternates between the two different roles, or can even perform both simultaneously – in relation to the stranger within its midst as well as to the greater nation within which it is a stranger. Some would say that we are ultimately guests of the Infinitely Great on whose land each one of us is merely a resident alien.

Richard Kearney in his provocative book Anatheism: Returning to God After God takes as an exemplar the first patriarch Abraham. Despite being, in the words of Psalm 119, “a stranger on this earth”, Abraham offers hospitality to the three divine ‘men’, angels perhaps, at the Terebinths of Mamre (Genesis 18). In the face of theophany, he humbly offers them water and bread. And perhaps as his reward, the angels announce the future arrival of another stranger, the child Isaac that his elderly and barren wife Sarah will bear.

For the atheist, openness to the unknown other does not mean embracing ‘the delirious delusions of theism’. Nor for the agnostic or the reflective theist, does it enthrone a new belief or religion. ‘It simply invites us to see what has always been there a second time around.’

Can we take the risk, gambling all that we have, yet knowing we can never possess the prize, even if we knew what it was?

Kearney suggests:

For in surrendering our own God to a stranger God, no God may come back again. Or the God who comes back may come back in ways that surprise us.

A man of substance

Thank you to everyone who came my class on Baruch Spinoza at the London School of Philosophy. We focused almost entirely on Spinoza’s metaphysics, his argument for substance monism, that there is only one substance, God, and that everything that exists is in God. As so often with a great philosopher, it’s almost impossible to provide an adequate introduction in a single session. This is why I chose Spinoza’s conception of God as the one substance, as the topic of the class: it doesn’t do justice to the breadth of his ideas, but his monism is fundamental to them all.

The most difficult aspect to our modern, post-Kantian sensibilities is the way that Spinoza purports to prove the existence of God from a definition: the necessary existence of substance. In a letter to his friend Ludovic Meyer, Spinoza wrote:

The first things that I should like to be noted about Substance are the following–First, that existence pertains to its essence, that is, that its existence follows from its mere essence and definition.

We recall that Spinoza defined substance as not depending on anything else for its existence or for it to be conceived. Consequently he argued that it must be causa sui – the cause of itself. And if the cause of itself, then it must exist necessarily. These kind of ontological arguments now seem to us, to say the least, unconvincing. But perhaps Spinoza is not trying to convince any of his contemporary readers, let alone a twenty-first century (new) atheist. Maybe as a Jew, even after his expulsion from his community, he took God’s existence as a given, as obvious as the existence of the universe, of reality or of being itself. One could counter that perhaps nothing exists, but in that case, you’re really not playing the game –  you’re no longer doing metaphysics.

The question I’ve been pondering these last few days whether we need metaphysics at all to philosophize. If what draws us to philosophy is some kind of existential dissatisfaction, a nagging doubt that we are only living, and not living well, then why not cut to the chase,  bypass the seemingly unanswerable ‘What is?’ and go directly to the more pressing question of ‘What is it we should be doing?’

In the structure of the Ethics, Spinoza very approximately follows the conception of philosophy of his great predecessor René Descartes. Using a memorable analogy, Descartes wrote in the Principles:

Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals. By “morals” I understand the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom. (9B:14).

When Spinoza finally gets to the ethics of the Ethics, we see why the unity of Substance and the fact not only of our own inclusion as a ‘part of Nature’ but also of the essential – and metaphysical – interconnection of all humans, gives firm support to a creed of cooperation and a spirit of brotherly love.

 To man, then, there is nothing more useful than man. Man, I say, can wish for nothing more helpful to the preservation of his being than that the minds and bodies of all would compose, as it were, one mind and one body; that all should strive together, as far as they can, to preserve their being; and that all, together should seek for themselves the common advantage of all (IVP18S).

What is more, Spinoza, somewhat optimistically, describes a virtuous spiral by which the more we seek knowledge and attain it, the  more we wish to share it with others:

The good which everyone who seeks virtue wants for himself, he also desires for other men; and this desire is greater as his knowledge of God is greater (IVP37).

Throughout the Ethics, there appears to be a consistent blurring of the boundaries of the conventional self. For the person seeking freedom, this is not so much something that is achieved but realized through the (self-)knowledge of our metaphysical status as mere modes participating in the Divine substance. Spinoza’s God is not then a distinct and distant being; nature is not an object, not even a unique object to which any countable noun could refer. I rather agree with Arne Næss that if we could really see through an only apparently separateness between individuals, then acts of kindness, generosity and compassion would seem to us not altruistic, but self-interested, an identification with a larger whole that transcends not only ourselves but even family and community.

A more recent Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas expresses such a view beautifully:

Monotheism is not an arithmetic of the divine. It is the perhaps supernatural gift of seeing each human person as being absolutely similar to the human person in the diversity of the historical traditions which each person continues. It is a school for xenophilia and antiracism.

(‘Monothéisme et langage’ in Difficile liberté)