In Existing Beings or Men
I saw no God nor heard any in a finite organical perception, but my senses discovered the infinite in everything.
Since nothing that exists could exist without you, does this mean that whatever exists does, in this sense, contain you? If this is so, since I too exist, why do I ask you to come into me?
Something I’ll come back to periodically is religion and God because this has been an interest with emotional resonance my entire life. And, really, should that be a surprise on a blog that takes its name, at least in part, from a hostility to Dawkins’ The God Delusion? Most relevant to this discussion is Spinoza and his conception of God as an immanent system that embraces all things whilst being complicated by them. Certainly, the argument is out there that Spinoza is essentially an atheist and his notion of a unity of all things is so far from what is traditionally called God, that he might have been better off not calling it God at all.1 But I don’t think this is correct for a few reasons. First, Spinoza used reason to challenge religion and its appeal to revelation to justify its perverse morality and obsession with power structures. Second, Spinoza wanted to genuinely reconceive what God is, from the point of view of a properly immanent metaphysics. And, finally, God and the religious impulse has a reality of its own that must be expanded and transformed so God (the word, a signifier of a kind of experience) doesn’t become synonymous with a particular kind of transcendent metaphysics (although this might be a losing battle by this point in Western history).
Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether the disjunct between the old and new testaments could be read as a political parable for fleeing transcendence and capitalist hubris in favour of a commitment to the world and its diversity. I mean, Jesus and the apostles were anarchists who wanted to destroy the state and build the world anew. Their heaven does not transcend the world per se, it transcends a world where all people and relationships are necessarily referred to their economic value. The world they want to build is one in which people and relationships are functions of the world and its diversity. But that’s a project for another day. As a first step, here’s something I wrote in response to Claire Carlisle’s Spinoza’s Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics (2021). Carlisle argues that Spinoza is a panentheist. I disagree. But the pantheism/panentheism distinction is crucial for laying out what is at stake in conceiving an immanent God, something I want to do.
I recently finished Clare Carlisle’s Spinoza’s Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics (2021), and I really want to take her to task for forcing a theological (Christian) interpretation of Spinoza that is really quite inappropriate. To her credit, I do not think this is done in bad faith as her project seems to stem from a real fondness and affection for Spinoza’s philosophy and his way of living his philosophy as well as an existential question that is too often overlooked: what is it to express the divine nature? What is it to understand oneself substantively as a mode of God? Too often, I think people bring other ethical, moral, and political questions to Spinoza, and so they don’t ask the question at the heart at the heart of Spinoza’s ethics/Ethics: what is it to participate in the modification of God? Sadly, I think Carlisle plays fast and loose with the famous EIP152 (“whatever is, is in God...”) in her attempt to offer a response to this question. She puts Spinoza in a lineage with Augustine and Anselm to take “in God” literally, while a more sophisticated reading of Book 1 would’ve helped unpack the existence of modes as expressions of God and not individual beings contained in God. The consequence of reading beings as individuals contained in God, rather than independent expressions, is that she can read Spinoza as a panentheist. (As she is a theologian, I wonder what Carlisle would make of Deleuze’s comment that transcendence/immanence is the line that separates theology from philosophy.) I don’t think that Spinoza is panentheist; however, that reading of Spinoza might be possible and I could be wrong. If such a reading of Spinoza were to be compelling, however, it would need a much more nuanced reading than Carlisle offers. (If I were cynical, I might wonder if Carlisle’s target audience is people who aren’t particularly familiar with Spinoza; she seems to rely on Spinoza’s correspondence, biography, Christian tradition, and the problems with translating Latin, all to avoid getting into the weeds of the Ethics.)
The version of panentheism that Carlisle attributes to Spinoza revolves essentially around an asymmetry between substance and the modes. To be fair, there is an asymmetry between substance and the modes, although the nature of this asymmetry and what it entails is perhaps one of the questions that define Spinoza scholarship. Indeed, even for Deleuze’s reading, the modes still rest on the identity of God “as though on something other than themselves.”3 Carlisle’s account of this asymmetry “does not mean spatial containment nor does it mean being part of a whole... [it] is an ontological relation of dependency, which involves being ‘caused by’ God and being ‘conceived through’ God” (57). This is a central claim in Spinoza’s Religion, and it is one we will return to momentarily.
Carlisle’s reading seems sophisticated, even if at times she appears to play fast and loose with the association between Spinoza and his rejection of moral normativity and prescriptivism; since she considers “participation in the divine nature” as a “normative ethical principle” (Spinoza in Carlisle, then Carlisle herself 137), rather than a description of ontological facts, it would have been nice to see this put next to Spinoza’s necessitarianism. If everything is in God, and God is perfect, then how can we meaningfully say that a thing ought to be other than it is? Surely this implies that within God is a thing which is less perfect than it could be, which is absurd. Simply, one needs to offer a sophisticated account of how ontology, epistemology, and ethics come together in Spinoza, and how that gives rise to normative principles without saying something as absurd as a modal expression of God can and ought to be other than it is. And I don’t think Carlisle offers anything near the sophisticated analysis of the Ethics that is needed.
But that is not my main problem. My main problem is the transcendence of God that her panentheistic reading smuggles in. To her credit, again, Carlisle refers to EIP18 to acknowledge that God does not cause things the way a creator God is commonly thought to cause things; to be ‘in God’ is to be caused immanently. However, she then argues that this immanence is synonymous with a kind of transcendence that affirms “the difference between creator and creation” (62). ‘Panentheism’ is thus a way to “interpret divine transcendence” (63). I must admit that I do not know how Carlisle could make this argument other than by making two moves. First, she cites EIP29S on natura naturans versus natura naturata (63-64) and E4P4 (66) to argue that; creating and things created are really distinct; and second, that since modes are quantitatively distinct, if they were identical to God, we would be introducing number into God which, by EIP13, is absurd. So, God does not really share an identity with things and those who interpret Deus sive natura to mean this are confusing an “imprecise” (67) conflation with the “super proposition” EIP15 (50).4 For the remainder of the “being-in-God" chapter she turns to Christian theology (instead of Spinoza’s own texts) to flesh out the epistemic and ethical significance of this panentheism. As noted, I do not think Carlisle offers a sufficiently sophisticated reading of Spinoza to justify this interpretation. However, if the ‘how’ of her arguments is unclear, the ‘why’ certainly is not:
If we assume that Deus sive natura simply reduces God to a familiar, modern notion of nature, stripped of any theological meaning, then we lose the conception of God (or natura naturans) as ontological ground which is so integral to Spinoza’s, with its deep commitment to the intelligibility of being (186).5
At first, I want to say that I agree with this; if this passage fell out of the sky, unconnected to anything, I would happily acknowledge that it coincides with my own reading of Spinoza. But ideas don’t just fall out of the sky, they have contexts and connotations, and that is why I take issue with this. The modern, familiar notion of nature, whatever that may be, didn’t exist in the 17th century. Perhaps we could argue that deism (with its mechanical universe set in motion by a God who doesn’t intervene – an idea necessary to the contemporary atheistic view of nature) was on the horizon and Spinoza played a part in in enabling it to grow. However, to argue that a modern, empirical notion of nature is a possible interpretation of Deus sive natura is specious at best. When Spinoza writes “I do not separate God from nature as everyone known to me has done” (Letter 6), I would argue that he has more in common with something William Blake wrote 130 years later: “God only acts and is in existing beings or men” (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 16). Spinoza’s goal was not to produce an ascetic, nearly nihilistic, refusal of this world in favour of a religion where meditating on one’s belonging to a supernatural creator is of primary importance. His project was the denial of such supernature in favour of exploring the ontology, epistemology, and ethics that follow from raising nature to the level of God: of seeing divinity in this world and the beings who populate it.
This seems like the place to divert momentarily and jot down some thoughts about Blake and my desire to invite his spirit into every nook and cranny of The Transcendence Delusion and Gynandromorphology. I first encountered Blake when I was 19, and, having completed a PhD in philosophy some two-and-a-half decades later, nothing and no one has affected me as profoundly or as totally as Blake has; he haunts every idea I have, and his perverse formulation of Christianity underscores my romantic embrace of all manner of religious ideas. Against Blake’s rejection of vainglorious philosophy and science with their soulless obsession with analysis and disinterest in the irrational creativity that vitalises the world, I think Blake would have sympathy for what I want to do. I started with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but let’s begin with one of his most quoted passages, the opening of Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a grain of Sand And Heaven in a Wildflower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
Those are all nice sentiments but, taken out of context, (as so much of Blake is), it loses its function of holding the metaphysical project of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell alongside the naïve eithics of Auguries of Innocence or the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Let’s start with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and why I would put it alongside Spinoza (and Deleuze, and Bergson &c). A theme running through The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is that God is not a supernatural being understandable apart from the world, hence Isaiah being unable to see or hear God “in a finite, organical perception” (plate 12). Instead, Isaiah’s “senses discovered the infinite in everything”. But what does this mean? Well, to begin, it is not infinite in the quantitative sense of being really large (or infinitesimally small, for that matter). Blake is clear: “there is no other God” than existing beings or men. Now, the context of the “no other God” line (plates 22-23) is talking about Jesus as “the greatest man”; however, given the bestiaries of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Auguries, or Songs of Innocence I think there is a case to be made that God is in all things and we need not be constrained by human exceptionalism even though Blake probably was one. So, there is no God other than the beings who exist in the world, but God is not himself a being; God is, to borrow a term from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, the infinite that subsists or inheres in all actually existing beings. The question that remains is, what is this infinite? Of what does it consist? The answer, as Ezekiel puts it during his dinner date with Blake and Isaiah, is that this infinite is the “creative genius” as the first principle from which all others are derived. We must not read this creative genius as a psychological phenomenon, as the German Romantics did, mistaking it for a natural kind found in the powers of the greatest individuals. Like Spinoza, Blake was a true metaphysician, and, like the idea of God in Spinoza, the creative genius is no thing in its own right – it has no actuality, no objectivity – but is the formal being of all actual beings. It is the labour of ages that creates a little flower (plate 9), it is the heaven we see in a wildflower and the eternity that inheres in an hour. Of course, it is not enough to try and build this into a system; this would leave us with only the priesthood and abstract philosophy derived from the creative genius: the autophagous monkeys that produce the analytics on which we lose our time; the devouring priesthood that enslaves the vulgar.
Blake’s hero is not the philosopher who produces edifices of analytics through systematic reasoning, it is the dancing child who is able to kiss joys as they fly; the Jesus Christ who, acting from impulse not from rules, inculcated the forgiveness of sins and who sleeps in beams of light. Lest this turn into “hello tree, hello sky” dippiness, let us ask, what does any of this have to do with Spinoza?
If we return to Carlisle’s pantheism/panentheism motif and hold onto Blake’s God, then it casts a new light on Spinoza’s God. If we assume that Carlisle actually gave Deleuze a fair reading before she rejected his Spinozism and its influence as “pernicious” (62), assuming, that is, that she made a good faith effort to understand his reading before she insulted it in such a public way – then we know, in no uncertain terms, that whatever God is, she is not transformed or substantively modified by the relations between her attributes. From the point of view of the “greatest, most excellent creature” and the quantitatively different “least creature”, the sense in which they modally express the affections of God is the same (69). (This idea of a scale of creatures from greatest to least is straight from Spinoza; however, it is a broad and complex discussion that Carlisle ought to have elaborated so that increasing or decreasing one’s power – a central problem – is informed by the normativity that she claims to find in books four and five of the Ethics.) We know then that there is no modification of God; whatever Spinoza means when he calls modes “the affections of substances” (EID5), he cannot mean that a substance is transformed, because God transcends the creatures that are in him. This then constitutes a rejection of Blake’s God insofar as Carlisle’s God must act or be in a way that is beyond what actually exists.
This is the consequence of our different readings of Spinoza; Carlisle does not have Blake to make sense of the ethical dimensions of Spinoza’s project. Spinoza is famous for discussing a being’s increase and diminution of power, but Carlisle seems to take the meaning of it for granted. She quotes EIVP46S5: “The greater the joy with which we are affected, the greater the perfection to which we pass, that is, the more we participate in the divine nature” (137). Carlisle does a good job of reading the Ethics next to the Theological-Political Treatise to cash out this participation in the divine nature as a loving-kindness to our proverbial neighbours (95-100). This sounds good (genuinely; that compassion and love for others is synonymous with participating in the divine is a compelling ethical principle), and, if one is inclined towards Christian ethics, her discussions of the letters of John and James might intensify that sympathy. However, because of the panentheism at the heart of her reading of Spinoza’s metaphysics, our love for our neighbours exists for the sake of our belonging to a supernatural being. That is, it is a nihilistic love. Insofar as our fellows are in-God in the same sense in which we are, loving God and loving our fellows is the same act; however, from an ontological point of view, we, our fellows, and our love, is of or towards a distinct object that does not share our world. Because God is supernatural then one’s ethics necessarily set out from normative principles; because one’s metaphysics sets out from a denial of this world, one’s ethics cannot emerge from this world.
But if we return to Blake, we see that an ontology of immanence, an ontology in which “God only acts and is in existing beings or men”, then we see that ethics, far from normative principles, turns on a concern with transformation (a much more Spinozist theme is the synonymous question about the transformation of the power of acting). We see this in proverbs like “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise”, “excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps” or, perhaps Blake’s most famous proverb, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”.6 Blake’s concern is not with normative principles (indeed, his greatest man, Jesus Christ, acts “from impulse, not from rules”), but the conditions under which things (organic beings) transform qualitatively. Wisdom does not always follow from folly, but when it does, it is not because the latter follows the correct principle, but because its power of acting is intensified to a point beyond which it transforms. But this transformation is not something limited to this or that individual being; it is a function of the ongoing transformation in how God, qua poetic genius, is expressed: “if others had not been foolish, we should be so”. (Indeed, the obsession with opposition in Blake’s work makes us wonder about the place of Jakob Boehme and the dialecticism at the heart of this ongoing transformation, but this can wait for another day.)
A metaphysics where what exists does so only insofar as it participates in a supernatural being (literally, a being that exceeds and escapes nature), can only motivate behaviour through submission to a principle that transcends it. If, however, we take a less nihilistic position in our conception of the world (a position motivated by empiricism’s first principle: that what actually exists cannot be explained by reference to ontological abstractions; that ideas – including God – must begin from, and end with, the actual world) then our ethics is not submission to principles, it is concerned with the conditions of the transformation of actual beings. And, of course, the metrics of these transformations are always immanent to a place and time. Our position going forward is then that to transform the beings in the world, and our relations with them, we must not search for correct principles, we must jettison transcendence and come to understand what it would mean for the world, as it actually is, to be raised to the level of God.
See for example the preface of Charlie Huenemann’s Spinoza’s Radical Theology: The Metaphysics of the Infinite (Routledge, 2014). While Huenemann doesn’t really advocate for this position, he thinks it through in more detail than I can here.
Citations of Spinoza’s Ethics are abbreviated in line with convention:
E Ethics Def Definition
P Proposition L Lemma
D Demonstration Post Postulate
S Scholium Pref Preface
C Corollary App Appendix
A Axiom Def Aff Definition of Affects
Exp Explanation
Roman numerals after E refer to one of the five parts of the Ethics, Arabic numerals refer to particular definitions, propositions, lemmas, etc. For example, EIP25S refers to Ethics, part one, proposition 25, scholium.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 40.
I hate this notion that the Ethics contains propositions and “super propositions” that trump the former. I just feel like it’s a pop-literary thing to do, and an absurd claim to impose on any philosopher without argument, let alone a work as obsessively precise as the Ethics.
It’s funny, when I think of 20th century philosophy, and its Nietzschean obsession with groundless grounds, and foundationless foundations I feel as though Carlisle has recognised what is at stake and fled back into the comforts of traditional theology.
These are taken from the eponymous “Proverbs of Hell” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plates 7-10.