Defending Pantheism

[Belacqua]

But a pantheist is one who rejects both of these and bestows the title "God" upon something more deserving. And something that's real.

I do not agree that a God can be something without consciousness and willfulness, deserving or otherwise.  That's why I think pantheism is unreal.  There's no there there.

According to the quotes from Spinoza that Vulcan offered before, pantheism is clear that we shouldn't snip apart the parts of the universe and pretend they are independent. Everything is merely a portion of the whole, and if it seems somehow isolated that is a limitation of our perception. 

If that's true, then humans are a part of the universe. And humans have consciousness and willfulness. Therefore, the universe has consciousness and willfulness. How those things manifest and appear to us can vary -- and we know so little of the whole universe that it may well manifest differently elsewhere. But the universe does have consciousness, because we are conscious. 

And I like your new picture, by the way.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, the universe actually exists. We can look around and see it (and -man!!- isn't it fucking amazing!?). We don't have to resort to reading ancient scriptures to find evidence that the pantheistic God exists. It is immediately available to the senses. It contains more power and love than any god a theist ever imagined. And it really is the source of all our joy, sorrow, indispensable moments, and numinous feelings.

As misplaced as a pantheist's reverence may be, at least is is aimed toward something that exists.

Is it, though?  Or is it the same sort of trait-making that got those silly theists in trouble in the first place?  The universe exists, sure enough.  But is the universe an existent manifestation of immanent divinity?  That is, after all, the difference between "just the universe" and the pantheistic god.  If we take this away, it's no longer pantheism.  

Consider this.  If I wanted to convince you that christ existed, and that you believed in christ ..I could
Name my cat jesus, point at my cat, and shout qed.

You wouldn't find it a compelling argument for christ, though, just a cat.   You could very accurately remind me that it's not the existence of cats that you doubt, but of christ.  In this way, the "just the universe" argument for pantheism is both less-than-compelling, and self defeating.  

Beyond that, a thing doesn't have to be a manifestation of divinity in order to be the source of power or love, or joy, sorrow, indispensible moments, and numinous feelings.  Alot of those are not proper properties of "the universe" but of agents within the universe, humans specifically.  Far from resolving the noted mistake of other forms of theism, pantheism compounds and reasserts those mistakes by the same name.   This amounts to a subtle anthropomorphization of divinity all the same, as the source of [insert human shit here], manifesting in the immanence of divinity (with all of the baggage carried by those propositions).  In truth, it really is no different than any other god claim, no more or less credible on account of how it's gods are different from others. All of the gods are different from each other. If the whole of the case for pantheism is that all of these things that others misattributed to beings they called gods, so then we should call the universe a god..well..that's not a case for pantheism at all.

I asked the only question that pantheism could answer to establish the veracity of it's claim. Why should I regard the universe as a manifestation of immanent divinity? "It exists" doesn't answer that question. So do I. So does cat jesus. So does a rock. I don't doubt that the universe exists, I know that it isn't a god, lol.

We already covered that before here. Pantheists don't anthropomorphize God. Below is a quote I've shared before. It is Spinoza's reasoning for why people think that God must be anthropomorphic. Here he really is trolling the theists.

Insomuch as pantheism eschews that sort of thing, it heads in a better direction than other forms of theism, though it isn't completely free of the tendency.    

Maybe he was trolling a little bit. But the religious trolled him more than he ever trolled them. He was expelled from his Jewish community for having "dangerous ideas." He was attacked with a knife by a fanatic who shouted "heretic!" He was compelled to publish his greatest work posthumously. His books were banned across Europe. And this is a guy who everyone, even his outspoken critics, noted was a modest, gentle, and nonviolent person. He turned down teaching positions at prestigious schools so that he could concentrate on completing his work in philosophy. He supported himself by grinding lenses. If they really valued humility and righteousness, you'd think the Christians might have held him in high esteem. Instead he was attacked in the street by ranting bigots. He didn't troll them. They trolled him.

Sure.  It was a pretty rough time to be a heretic, lol.  

So, anyway. Post is long. Below I've included a passage from the Ethics that covers some of the supra-atheist thinking that he did. What do you make of it? Does it sound like straight atheism to you?

We've already established that spinoza uses terms like god in novel ways, and doesn't always mean exactly what he writes.  So, you know, I'm not going to hold any of the more batty things quoted against him.

[Alan V]

I do not agree that a God can be something without consciousness and willfulness, deserving or otherwise.  That's why I think pantheism is unreal.  There's no there there.

According to the quotes from Spinoza that Vulcan offered before, pantheism is clear that we shouldn't snip apart the parts of the universe and pretend they are independent. Everything is merely a portion of the whole, and if it seems somehow isolated that is a limitation of our perception. 

If that's true, then humans are a part of the universe. And humans have consciousness and willfulness. Therefore, the universe has consciousness and willfulness. How those things manifest and appear to us can vary -- and we know so little of the whole universe that it may well manifest differently elsewhere. But the universe does have consciousness, because we are conscious. 

And I like your new picture, by the way.

It would be nice if we all formed a unity with the universe, but alas I do not think it is true.  At best we share an isolated environmental system and our atoms.  Our consciousnesses are all discrete from one another.

Thanks.  The picture is a detail of a painting I created, after Odilon Redon of course. And I changed my username because I am no longer enough of a Thoreauvian. It became inaccurate.

[The Grand Nudger]

Kitchens are full of knives.  That doesn't mean that a kitchen has a sharp edge. There are six sentient beings in this house, that doesn't make the house sentient. I see someones playing fast and loose with a mereological assertion as an artifact of possessive tense in english rather than it being a valid or true assertion.

[Belacqua]

It would be nice if we all formed a unity with the universe, but alas I do not think it is true.

Apparently Spinoza wrote a zillion pages with an argument that we should consider the universe as a unity. 

I don't know what that argument is yet, so I'm not willing to decide. It looks as though @vulcanlogician is the only one of us who's read Spinoza, so he might be willing to describe the argument.

[The Grand Nudger]

Theres a good summary here

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza-attributes/

this is just the conclusion of the article.

With the collapse of the divide between created substances and the infinite substance, attributes play a new role for Spinoza; traditional divine attributes are eliminated while attributes traditionally associated with created substances (Extension in particular) are attributed to the infinite substance. Furthermore, with the elimination of this divide and the establishment of the infinite substance as the only substance, Spinoza hopes that attributes account for variety in the substance without jeopardizing its unity. All interpreters and readers of Spinoza are forced to wrestle with making sense of this double role since it sits at the very core of his metaphysics. It is vital to realize that this endeavor is necessarily and beautifully linked to other fundamental aspects of Spinoza’s metaphysics such as the “real distinction” between the attributes, the proclaimed identity of the substance and its attributes, the nature of the conceiving intellect in the definition of ‘attribute’, the nature of this intellect’s conceptions (illusory or not), the number of attributes, the structure of 2P7 and its scholium, and finally the nature of the union of mind and body. These inter-connections are a reflection of the fully systematic nature of Spinoza’s metaphysics.

[vulcanlogician]

One of my philosophy professors went to college with the author of that article!

[The Grand Nudger]

Nice.  

For those that don't want to read the whole thing, it's not so much that spinoza argued for unity, as that he built his metaphysics outward from the assertion in a thorough fashion.  He didn't really need to come up with the broad strokes of it, he was working within an existent tradition to that effect, but wanted to make a single crucial alteration to it.

[vulcanlogician]

Nice.  

For those that don't want to read the whole thing, it's not so much that spinoza argued for unity, as that he built his metaphysics outward from the assertion in a thorough fashion.  He didn't really need to come up with the broad strokes of it, he was working within an existent tradition to that effect, but wanted to make a single crucial alteration to it.

What I was talking about with unity was Spinoza's assertion that "Determination is negation." This deals with the separation of an object from the entire whole.

The "unity" discussed in the article has to do with Spinoza's merging of mind and body into one substance. Spinoza was a monist, and his metaphysics was a rejection of Cartesian dualism. Instead of Descartes' two substances: body (with extension) and mind (with consciousness/thought)... Spinoza proposed that mind and body are in fact different attributes of a single substance. To Spinoza there was one primary substance which he (annoyingly?) named God.

In the least complicated way possible: to Spinoza, sates of the mind...(ie. various emotions, thoughts, feelings etc.) corresponded to states of the body. There is no state of mind that exists without a corresponding physical state. This may seem like "no duh" to us moderners, but you have to remember that Spinoza immediately followed Descartes and wrote this stuff when everybody still had "Descartes fever." Pretty impressive that he nailed the refutation when Cartesian dualism was still hot out of the oven.

[The Grand Nudger]

To clarify, lol -Spinozas all and attributes were a direct rejection of the sort of unity endemic to western thought at the time, wherein the divine substance and the created substance were distinct, with mans relationship to "the all" circumscribed by a creative act and in partaking of the divine substance,  in descartes dualist view...generally speaking, intellect and body as representatives of the divine and created substance.

Spinoza thought that was trash, lol.   His assertion that there was only one substance was in direct response to the idea of a mind-body separation..and even more broadly, the notion that reason and emotion could somehow be fundamentally separated from each other.  In short, he intuited that the mind existed for the body, and that for all of our rational puffery, reason itself was shot through with emotional pleas and baggage as a consequence of our perceptual limitations.

(ha, you got to it before I did, props)