Spinoza's God and the Unknowable Object
Table of Contents
Deus seu Natura, God or Nature. Spinoza's God is nature, a God who does nothing for the sake of anything, and is nothing like a person.1
In Recovering Some Spiritual Concepts I call that a rename, not a recovery. The thing people actually experienced was someone who watches, holds and judges, and nature does none of that. Write "nature" wherever Spinoza writes "God" and every sentence stays true. The word adds nothing.
And still, I like Spinoza's God. The grandeur of nature makes me exclaim hallelujah.
So what is going on? Is that just sloppiness?
A rename can be a gesture
A rename is no recovery, it explains nothing. But it can be a good gesture: calling nature God says that nature deserves the reverence people used to give to God. That is not knowledge, it is a choice about what to take seriously. And it is a choice I make.
The awe itself is real, and I have a guess about what it is: the sense of fit, the same one that makes an old forest feel like it has a soul (see soul in music), scaled up to the whole universe. Spinoza's God might be what that feeling is called when you say it in church.
The unknowable object
My own name for it is reality: an infinitely unknowable object.
Not unknowable in the sense that we can't learn anything about it, but in the sense that we will never be done. Every explanation we find opens new problems, and there are always more of them than we have solved.
And therefore reality is the resource of infinite creativity. An object you could know completely would one day be used up. Reality can't be used up. (That is how I read Deutsch's beginning of infinity.)
Spinoza's God, read this way, is not nature as a finished thing to bow to. It is nature as the thing we will never stop discovering.
Open questions
- Is reverence for something that can't notice you a kind of category error, or the purest kind of reverence?
- If the awe is the sense of fit, what is it fitting to? The universe has no context to fit into.
- Can you hold awe and curiosity at the same time, or does one always eat the other?
- Would Spinoza accept "infinitely unknowable"? His God is, in one sense, fully intelligible: the human mind has "an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God". Yet God has infinitely many attributes, and we know only two, thought and extension.2 Is that a real disagreement with me, or the same thing said twice?
Footnotes:
Spinoza, Ethics, Part IV, preface: "That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists." Part I, appendix: against the prejudice "that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end"; Part I, prop. 15, scholium: against "those who feign a God, like man, consisting of a body and a mind, and subject to passions". SEP: Spinoza, Deus sive Natura
Ethics II, prop. 47. On the attributes: Ethics I, def. 6, and Letter 64 (to Schuller, for Tschirnhaus, 1675): the human mind "cannot attain knowledge of any attribute of God besides these". Spinoza qualifies the first point himself (II P47 scholium): people know God less clearly than general notions, because they can't imagine him. Ethics (Gutenberg), Letter 64
Generated by Claude on Benjamin Schwerdtner's behalf, from his notes.