Two Utopian Visions of a 1600 Year Civilization in One Page, Research Time, 13/07/2018

One of the reasons I wanted to review Raphael Sassower’s new book formally* was that it’s relevant to my own major book of political philosophy – the messianically in-progress Utopias.

Few images of Jesus better communicate the essential idea of the
Incarnation better than Buddy Christ – He really is one of us.

* Which these blog posts are most definitely not. I’ve already outlined the review formally speaking, and know which points I’ll be covering. No specific critiques or interpretations that I’ll be throwing down in the review at the end of this month will be included in these blogs. It’s a compliment to Raphael that I consider his book complex enough to sustain more than one take. As all books should if they’re worth the paper or the hard drive space.

Concepts of prosperity all tend to focus on building a more perfect society. This refers at least to concepts in the Western tradition, in which I grew up and which until recently dominated the popular imaginary of most of Earth. To prosper is a joyful wealth, joy in wealth. Prosperity is a wealth about which you need no longer worry, a secure wealth.

How individualistically you read those last couple of sentences tells me a lot about your ethics and personality. The progressive political movements of contemporary Westerners share a common ground in their economic philosophy – we no longer believe that the prosperity of individuals in a community is the same as the community’s prosperity.

We ask how many individuals are prospering. We measure highest achievements, averages, create ranks, tax brackets. But if those prosperous individuals become wealthy from dynamics that keep others poor and suffering – whether intentional, systemic, or both – you don’t have a prosperous community.

Never mistake the prosperous man for a sign of a prosperous
community.

In a single page from his introduction, Sassower lays out the religious and ontological framework that – broadly speaking** – Christian civilization has centred in thinking. Put very broadly, the Christian engagement with time is a sublime and terrifying teleology.

** This is based on a note from page 6. Literally the first chapter of The Quest for Prosperity. We’re still talking in broad strokes before more detailed examinations of the concepts. It always annoys me to meet academics who’d quibble over the details of clearly broad ideas to accuse an author of sloppiness. People with enormous institutional authority acting as if their research was to poke needless holes in the work of their colleagues. It’s called contributing to the current debates.

The Christian Bible is organized as the history of existence, and so conceives of the passage of time itself in human, Biblical terms. Christianity’s foundational and focal idea is the event of the Incarnation – when God literally becomes a creature, and that creature is human. Given that, you conceive all of existence as being for the sake of humanity.

Humanity’s existence and development is the purpose of the universe. How is that purpose framed? By utopias.

When the first skyscrapers of the United States
were built, popular culture conceived them as a
great achievement of human (and Western)
culture – the towers of our living paradise. Now
they're a sign of gentrification, condo crises, the
marginalization of poor people to distant suburbs,
the longest commutes, stress, misery.

Time begins with Eden – the pure presence of God with humanity on Earth. Time ends with Heaven – Earth’s corruption is cleansed and God now lives with humanity on Earth as one of us in this newly pure world. God the Creator is now God the Neighbour.

Jesus built my hot rod. Literally.

It’s not only time that happens in the middle of those two utopias – perfect existence at the beginning and perfected existence at the end. A Christian framework of thinking understands that middle temporality as purposeful suffering. We suffer now so that we can live in the utopia of Heaven.

Time becomes a process toward perfection, and the suffering of the present is an investment in achieving that perfection. You can secularize*** Christian utopian time, ending up with a teleology of technological progress. Human scientific, technological, industrial, and capitalist endeavour end with achieving paradise on Earth.

*** That’s how I want to understand secularity when I’m examining the religious aspects of Utopia’s argument. I may not engage with this too much, but it’ll be in the background. Faith: dogmatic religious belief. Atheism: pushing the logic of materialism to its limit (like Spinoza, or some readings of Kabbalah). Agnostic: Fucked if I know. Secular: retaining the concepts, the frameworks for understanding, of faith, but dropping reference to the dogma.

Heaven.

What’s the Point If We Can’t Be Perfect? Research Time, 10/05/2018

I want to pick up on the point I was talking about on Monday’s post. Aporias – the endpoint of Jacques Derrida’s greatest works. Those moments where, as you examine a concept or work through an argument, the idea itself escapes from you. And it escapes because you know it so well.

It’s a very profound idea. Paul Patton writes about aporia very well, delivering a critique of the idea that equally implicates the main trend among Jacques Derrida’s work. In the words of Canada’s most famous and equally annoying scholar, post-modernism.

A lot about Derrida was erased in his popular
uptake. His most famous books are his early ones,
the ones that made the biggest shocks when they
dropped. I've met a few Derrida fans who don't
know what to make of his later work, who don't
understand why he would have made such a
puzzling turn to ethics. They're always the
ones who have to be reminded where Derrida
came from – that he was a black Algerian Jew.

I mean post-modernism in its popular reception – among barely original academics, and many in areas of real life who were familiar with only a vague outline of the major messages of Derrida’s work. It was the notion that we aren’t even able to express truth in language.

This is the general reception of the aporia in Derrida’s work. He took many different approaches to the same concept throughout his career – absolute truth. Derrida followed through on one of Nietzsche’s central projects – he wanted to develop a way of thinking that followed atheism to its logical endpoint.

No matter how limited human reason might be in the world – goes the traditional Western idea – there still is an absolute truth about the nature and order of the world. That’s God’s truth, the word that expresses being itself.

So here’s Derrida thinking through whether truth is possible when God is truly dead to you. When there is no Word. His later work considered that idea in an ethical context – How does absolute truth emerge from our ordinary experience with other people?* From our ordinary experience with other people – love, friendship, being asked for help.

* And the answer was already in ancient Jewish teachings. Please never forget that Derrida was Jewish, a religion with a long-running culture of mystical scholarship that is both pantheist, atheist, and monotheist.

I think the philosophical tradition among its keepers in the university sector – at least that sub-section called Continentals – would have been better off if this end of Derrida’s career came first. As it is, it was his nature as an academic – a historian of philosophy as well as a philosopher – messed with the reception of his idea.

The first half of Derrida’s career focussed on the history of philosophy – so he was examining all the traditional arguments and works where the godly concept of absolute truth appeared as a serious aim. He brought those concepts to aporia to demonstrate the real untenability of absolute truth without some point in your thinking where you take it as given.

So you made all the traditional arguments trying to arrive at the truth of some philosophical concept like justice or knowledge as going nowhere by their nature. Derrida wasn’t a nihilist – he was a phenomenologist, an atheist, a Jew, a historian, and a deeply ethical person.

But when you reveal the emptiness of absolute truth without also giving people at least a clue to where it actually occurs in the material world, you end up with nihilists. Your sequel came too late.

That’s the heart of Paul Patton’s critique of Derrida – his big argument at the start of his most purely philosophical book. It was the interpretation that he used to shock other academic philosophers out of their thrall to Derrida and onto Deleuze.

Deleuze makes aporia – the most unsettled but most profound state of philosophical thinking – into his starting point. Aporia is a particularly solemn way of catching hold of that total chaos where there’s no reliable truth or fact – chaos.

Derrida’s early philosophy was about revealing how our comforting and dogmatic truths reduce themselves to chaos. Deleuze starts his philosophy crafting order from chaos.

A very oversimplified story. But all polemics are.

When God Becomes a Triumph of the Will, Research Time, 16/01/2018

Here’s an interesting way my colleague Morteza Hashemi’s recent work found itself contributing a really important point to my own ongoing research.

In the off-kilter ontological chapters that will take up the strange middle section of Utopias, I’ll work from two core concepts – time as lived duration, and the univocity of being. Morteza’s work has really helped me with that univocity concept.

Christianity is a religion of contradictions – it's what makes the theology
and ontology so fascinating and strange. Now, those contradictions
make it very difficult for me to adopt Christianity as my own path to
engage with the divine. But the story of Jesus himself is beautiful
and deranged, one of the most profoundly bizarre myths humanity
has developed. While I can't sign on to that myth, I love the story.

Short form – the concept of being’s univocity is the conception of existence as entirely immanent. No realms of being somehow separate from each other – material, energy, spirit, whatever other kinds of being that exist – everything can commingle, interact.

This concept began, in its most intense trajectory, with John Duns Scotus. Reading this old book of essays on Gilles Deleuze’s influences, the essay on Scotus mentions that the 13th century writer was never able to see his concept of univocity through to its natural conclusion.

That conclusion? Atheism. Or at least a pantheism that’s functionally indistinguishable from the best kinds of atheism.

If you lay down as a foundation for your thinking that existence has only one plane, then you are in the same way that God is. God doesn’t become a being in a transcendent realm – God becomes a force in the world* who’s present through action.

* Or the force of the world, if you’re going to see is through to its end.

Morteza’s book traced how later generations of thinkers saw that concept through to its end. That was, for me at least, the most fascinating exploration of Theism and Atheism in a Post-Secular Age. The ground of atheism is found in this remarkably pious Christian concept.

Univocal existence applies the ethical lessons of the Christian concept of Incarnation to the complete ontology of the divine. The ethical meaning of Christianity is that God loves humanity so much that God became a person who’d be sacrificed for our onto-theological redemption. God becomes us and dies to save us.

One of the several artistic representations of John Duns Scotus, the
first great philosopher Scotland contributed to the Western tradition.
I like this image best because of how ordinary it makes him. A
skinny monk with big ears and male pattern baldness.

What matters in this context isn’t God’s law or reason, but God’s will, God’s desire, God’s yearning. God becomes an emotional force of love in the world, an immanent power. God’s will is in instant-to-instant sustaining of existence. God’s will that the universe exists permeates existence itself.

God becomes the same as the substance of existence itself, meaning that God and the world is the same. We’re expressions of God’s will because God’s energy is the energy that drives material existence. But now God and existence are the same, two ways of talking about the same thing.

If you want to speak strictly ontologically about existence, you say ‘being.’ If you want to speak ethically about existence, you say ‘God.’ The will of God is literally the development of the world. If you simply want to stop talking about God, you can without losing everything. When God is existence, then the totality of existence is always already God.

That's atheism – there’s no God over and above existence. What happens in the world is God’s will because God’s will is literally all the events, processes, and developments of existence. God becomes superfluous when being is univocal.

Where Morteza’s book kind of deflated me was when we got past this and started engaging the two major schools of popular atheism today. The aggressive, reductive atheism of Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, and others like them is a dead end of empty spite and resentment.

But the major alternative is Alain de Botton’s existentialism as self-help. Morteza calls it tourist atheism. As much as I like the attitude – a joyful acceptance of the world’s plurality of thinking about the divine – ‘tourist’ really is the best label.

There’s nothing profound happening in this atheism either. It’s nicer, because you’re not being a belligerent prick. But it’s ultimately an obnoxious way of seeing the world in superficialities.

If, over the next decade or so, I can build any reasonable profile for myself as an intellectual author, I want to promote an atheism where you can still think about the divine as a profound, awe-inspiring topic.

It can be done. Just follow the univocity of being through to its natural end. See where you end up.

On What There Isn't, Research Time, 22/12/2017

Here’s another takeaway from the chapter in What Is Philosophy? about the nature of science – Atheism is ridiculous.

Now, I’m not talking about the many different schools of thoughtful, philosophically rigorous, conceptually beautiful atheism that people have discussed and believed in for millennia.

Forget about Bertrand Russell’s arguments for skepticism. Forget Nietzsche’s disturbingly ethical rejection of Christianity, on grounds that it was a morality that made people weak and resentful. Leave the Hellenic Cynics behind.

He's just so smug. Frankly, all the trolling jerks and fascists are so
insufferably smug. Have fascists ever been quite so irritating as
they are today?

I’m going to come back to Spinoza, because of course I am.

Think about that shrill atheism of people like Richard Dawkins.* Dawkins own second, longest, and most annoying wave as a public intellectual began with his advocacy for atheism in the early 1990s. Deleuze was writing What Is Philosophy? He knew who Dawkins was, and would have heard talk of his new books.

* Canadian politics sidebar. Do you think Jordan Peterson might be shooting to become the Richard Dawkins for the revanchist set? Dawkins courted a populist college kid atheism of thinking religion was stupid. Peterson’s demo simply thinks the same about women’s rights. I think a severe category shift just happened.

Science and religion don’t need to be hostile to each other. They are pretty much all the time, but it’s not necessary.

I think the secret is in the ideology of Western science that’s grown up around it for the past couple of centuries. It goes – Science can investigate the entire universe, discovering the truth in the material world and proving religion empty dogma. The Galileo Myth, you could call it.

Galileo the person is totally absent from this mythic version of him so many of us learned, if not in school, then on PBS. His estate eventually licensed his image for use in the cleaned-up PIXAR-perfect movie version of his life.

The general method of science is to describe the world as it is in the greatest possible detail. Its domain is the entire universe.

Deleuze has the very rare clarity to say that this means science will inevitably fragment disciplines fractally ad infinitum – and that’s great! We need scientific knowledge to find out more and more about the world. We need scientific knowledge to help us figure a way out of this economic-ecological-political clusterfuck we’re in as a global civilization.

Pictured: A proper atheist. I only wish official portraits of
Spinoza depicted him as how brown he really was. The
man was born in Amsterdam to a family of Portuguese-
Jewish immigrants. Put him in a time machine, he would
likely fit in fine walking around Marrakech or east LA.

But that truth contradicts the today’s cult of populist atheism. Because populist atheism has two founding Myths – Galileo and Einstein. Well, more like Galileo’s Myth and Einstein’s Word.** E=mc2

** Fitting that the Man be Catholic and the Word be Jewish. Moses heard the Word and Christ had become the Man.

The ideology of populist scientific atheism has twin foundations. 1) Science’s truth stands against religion’s dogmas; 2) The most universal truth of science will be simple enough to put on a T-shirt.

I remember reading Stephen Hawking talk about the theory of everything having as simple a heart as E=mc2. These days, I can’t believe someone apparently so smart could be so naive.

When you understand the world in more and more detail, it doesn’t make things simpler. It makes things more complicated. There are so many domains of knowledge – what there is to be learned gets denser and denser. Each scientific discipline is a different domain of knowledge.

Real scientific investigation – discovering more about the world – will never unify all the domains because such an investigation moves in the opposite direction as simplicity and unity.

Empirical knowledge expands and proliferates – even the most arcane theoretical work relies on the empirical reality of having to make sense of our everyday world.

What about religion? God isn’t something you find like you find the Higgs Boson, building an experiment to detect God by a predicted ancillary affect. God isn’t even something you find like your car keys, remembering that they slid off the table where you threw them coming home and you thought you’d pick them up later.

You want to know how you discover God? Read Spinoza. Second time you read it, start with Book One. First time you read it, start with Book Five and go backwards. You find God in learning more about the world, and how to move with ease, happiness, and joy within it.

You realize that when a real atheist says, “I believe only in material reality,” he is literally saying, “I believe only in God.” Substance. Material reality, of which we’re each a flickering little quirky process.

The Shock of Your Own Emptiness, Jamming, 08/11/2017

Sorry I never updated yesterday. It’s just been busy, hectic, a little stressful at times, and a long Facetime conversation with my colleague on the horror film project got away from me.

I was originally going to make another pass at the idea I was talking about over the weekend. How Medieval Christian Europeans* found themselves adrift and alone in the universe, once they understood how much they needed technologies to pry open the world.

Christian European culture experienced a profound culture shock as
people slowly began to realize that the only friends humanity
could have in the world were the friends we made ourselves.

* Arendt, in The Human Condition, talks about mankind and humanity here. But she’s only ever referring to a Western and European cultural transition – tracing conceptual continuity from Polis-era Greeks to Medieval Christian Europeans to Industrial Capitalist Europeans. That was her area of expertise, but it’s important to keep the concepts’ limits in mind.

Our intuitions and perceptions weren’t adequate to the way the world really was. The guarantee that the world was God’s creation and so was made for us disappeared. Culturally, Westerners came to a terrible realization – God was not looking out for them. They were on their own.

This is what proper atheists mean when we say that God is dead. These aren’t the reductive, arrogant, idiotic r/atheism crowd who thinks Stefan Molyneux is a genius. I'm talking about the atheists who understand that there could be and likely is a divine presence in the world, but admits to herself that God is indifferent to us.

That’s a much more profound atheism than the more popular, “Religion is stupid! And you’re stupid!” style of atheism. An atheism that God herself would respect. Atheism as a challenge to God – Why do we matter nothing to you?

Here’s another idea that Arendt traces from this shock – technophilia. Here’s how she does it. When we could think of the world as creation, our intuitive ways of exploring it – everyday experience and contemplative meditation – were adequate to that world.

An artist's rendition of Isaac Asimov's Trantor – a planet whose entire
surface was covered in a vast urban cityscape. A world made
wholly into a human creation.

Throw that out, and you realize that our only grip on the world is with our technology. It’s a tentative, desperate grip, but it’s better than nothing. When God is dead (to you), you can’t rely on any kind of natural harmony between humanity and the world. When you realize that there never was any harmony at all, your senses and thoughts feel very unreliable.

Here is where you understand that René Descartes’ thought experiment of radical doubt wasn’t arising in a cultural vacuum.

The image of radical doubt – a conception of our world as a fundamentally mysterious place, where we’re at a deep and serious disadvantage even for survival – was the beginning of existentialism. It was an empty world, where we had no friends but the ones we made ourselves.

Worse yet, if we were alone in the world, then we owed no one in the world our loyalty or trust but ourselves. So instead of looking after a creation that was made for us, we came to think of ourselves as masters of Earth. Chew up the world and build a human creation from it all.

If the world as it appeared on its own wasn’t really made for us, we’d make the world for us ourselves. Yeah, that’s working out well.

The Shock of Your Own Inadequacy, Research Time, 06/11/2017

No, this post isn’t about the first time you experienced erectile dysfunction and get your minds out of the gutter.

Really, I’m taking a second pass at the idea I was talking about earlier this weekend. That idea of alienation coming up in The Human Condition. It’s useful and intriguing, and I want to make sure I have a good handle on how to express it. I think I have a better grasp on the how right now.

When I was a young boy, I read Steven Hawking's A Brief History of
Time. There, I read that the ultimate goal of science was to develop
a theory of everything, a mathematical system that could explain
and predict every phenomenon in the universe in simple formulae.
Hawking should be ashamed of writing such propaganda.

Mathematics are, in some context, important to all sciences. Calculus, geometry, statistics, plain old arithmetic – whatever. If you want to give a quick and dirty one-sentence* definition of science, call it ‘Systematic knowledge emerging from understanding mathematical descriptions of things, systems, and processes.’

* Inevitably inadequate, but making an accurate-enough gesture for us to say that, yeah, it’s true I suppose.

Put that in your introductory-level philosophy of science textbook and smoke it.

Okay, that was the last joke. So Hannah Arendt tries to explain how a profound alienation from nature, the world, and our experience can arise from how central mathematics is to our knowledge.

The mathematical tools of the different sciences give us a better ability to understand natural processes – atomic energy fields, cellular and organic processes, ecological development, cosmological events – than we can get from our ordinary observation of the world.

Go to the typical grade school example – which I don’t think ever gets unpacked the way it really deserves – of geocentric vs heliocentric models of the solar system. We look up in the sky and we see the sun and other heavenly bodies circling us.

But describing their actual motion in our sky takes some convoluted math. So Copernicus, Erasmus, and others developed a heliocentric model with simpler math. It was always an as-if hypothesis just to ease up on the headaches astronomers suffered.

If I could focus on one of the many philosophical and metaphysical
screwups of Christian thought, it's that the common interpretation of
Noah's myth in this tradition is that creation exists for us as we are.
The meaning of the rainbow is that everything is illuminated already.
I much prefer the Jewish tradition, which is much more honest about
how we still have to work for our knowledge.

Mathematics is a technological creation – it’s a human tool, a complex assemblage of symbols and rules. So any knowledge that we produce with mathematical tools isn’t a direct encounter with the world – mathematics mediates our knowledge of the world.

That was fine when we were just coming up with imaginary models to simplify our models of a more complex world – the migraine-inducing calculations of planetary paths in the geocentric model. But then it turned out that the mediated abstract models of visceral experience were true, and our ordinary experience of the world distorted how nature really was.

Arendt talks about Galileo and the astronomical tradition that followed him, but Robert Boyle and the Royal Society’s development of the experimental laboratory was equally important. Mathematics was the symbolism, and the laboratory was the institution and site, of mediated knowledge.

Mediated knowledge was much more effective, more powerful, than knowledge through direct experience of the world. Necessary conditions of humanity’s industrial revolution included that mediated knowledge.

Our own tools, techniques, and technology were the medium of that knowledge. This was a profound cultural shock to the Europeans who developed the modern epoch of mathematics and the institution of the laboratory. My debt here is to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller’s philosophical history of knowledge.

The power of mediated knowledge over direct experience of the world
was such a shock to Medieval Christian European society that its
success felt like falling back into the Cave. A God whose nature
requires complex mathematics and wrangling results out of a
laboratory to understand isn't nearly as kind and close to us as
Medieval Christian thinking held. All the philosophical attempts
to overcome mediation in knowledge – I think of Hegel's Absolute
and popular evangelical literalist disdain for science – you can
understand as desperate refusals to accept a distant God.

Before this cultural realization of the power of mediated knowledge, Europeans had a view of the world in which every moment of ordinary wandering through the world brought you closer to God.

The medieval Christian conception of worldly knowledge was that our world was creation. Creation was God’s expression, and humanity was the element of creation who God made creation for.

Creation’s purpose was for humans to understand it and live harmoniously in nature. So the popular conception of nature in European Christian culture was as an open book. Creation was something through which we understood God and our relationship to Him. We’re built to understand creation intuitively because creation was made for us.

The success of mediated knowledge demonstrates that creation wasn’t made for us. The most accurate knowledge of the world emerges from using these complicated tools, technology that requires years of training and education to use properly. The world is much more opaque than an entire sub-continent’s culture of our ancestors understood.

People in Medieval Christian European culture thought of themselves as Fallen, that they had to work to understand God and creation again. The success of technology – mathematical symbols and the laboratory – in understanding the world demonstrates to a Medieval European Christian that we’re Fallen much farther than we thought.

We may as well have Fallen into hell.

Contradictory Heritage, A History Boy, 08/09/2017

I have a pretty stand-offish relationship with Theodor Adorno. I think it’s a result of my first exposure to him. That came through an older university librarian I knew by the philosophy department circles back in my undergrad years at Memorial.

He was the philosophy specialist in the library’s procurement, and his own PhD research focussed on Adorno. CD was a smart guy, and although I found him a little pretentious, he was a good person to hang out with. I have to say, though, he wasn’t very good at selling Adorno to me.

I reconsidered his work as I got older, but never really made the jump to studying his philosophy in full. Mostly, it was because I was working on a totally different tradition and approach in Western philosophy during my doctorate – informing environmentalist ethics through philosophy of biology and ecology, with a leg up from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the conceptual framework.

Remember, freshmen, there is no art without suffering.
No education without folly.
No philosophy class without a surly smart-ass.

But I think it was also because of his reputation. I’m not usually one to cower in front of a reputation, but with Adorno, I did. His work wasn’t just philosophy to me – it was an edifice. I came to that image through the Adorno specialists and students I knew – they treated him like a figure of awe.

Nein broke that image for me. He injected some levity into Adorno for me, and made him and his work more approachable. I don’t want to read some unapproachable edifice. I want to read a thinker.

So I’ll probably hit up some Adorno soon. I’ll soon be transitioning away from looking at left-wing philosophy as it’s more traditionally defined. But after a walk along the path that I’m heading for, I think I’ll go back to some Adorno, no matter how strange his work might be.

How strange might that work be? Well, here’s Perry Anderson’s take on it. This is probably what I admire most about Anderson’s writing and thought. He’s a historian of ideas who can genuinely grapple with the real strangeness of some ideas and still find witty and concise ways of explaining it.

Maybe it helped that I was already familiar with the context. I mean, I haven’t read much Adorno myself, but I’ve read almost everything else that influenced him. So it’s not like I have no idea what kind of concepts are flying around there.

Here are the concepts that Anderson throws down to explain the underlying ontology of Adorno’s philosophical writing. Same goes for the rest of the Frankfurt School more generally.

He describes Frankfurt School thinking as on the same plane as these following two philosophical frameworks. One is the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. Anderson describes this as adapting the metaphysics of Christian salvation to the human relationship with the material Earth. So the path to humanity’s redemption from our fundamental corruption is a kind of devotion to harmonious material nature.

Schelling is another German philosopher who I
could just never get into. Everything I heard about
his ideas, even from people who loved his work,
made me think I would hate it all. I haven't heard
anything much different yet.

The City of God becomes the City of Man when it’s no longer a city, but a forest. And we must treat it as such.

Two is Heidegger’s critique of technology, his account of the technological attitude as the rupture of man from nature. This rupture is the ongoing social, cultural, and philosophical goal of dominating the Earth – we dominate Earth to make commodities from it, and we define our lives through our commodities, our stuff.

In the words of the Frankfurt School’s marxist heritage, capitalism is the rupture of humanity from Earth, from nature. So a liberated society, in Adorno’s thinking* is a reconciliation of humanity and Earth.

* According to Perry Anderson.

It’s a beautiful vision. As someone who holds environmentalist political and ethics values, I definitely like it. Despite the way Anderson’s account tends to reify nature. Actually, that’s a serious problem for me. By pulling Schelling’s Christian salvation narrative into an immanent material relationship – humanity and Earth – you turn the planet into God.

Earth isn’t God. It’s Earth. If you believe it’s God, you’re making a serious mistake. God as a Christian concept was designed as the ultimate Other – the Fall means that humanity’s nature is utterly and totally anathema to the Divine. That we’re virtually like poison to divinity.

If this is really the underlying metaphysics of the Frankfurt School, I can’t even say they’re radical left anymore. To make a Christian God of Nature is making an idol out of a word that shouldn’t even be capitalized.

There’s an even deeper conservatism underneath the ideas of what the radical right today call the communist conspiracy of the modern era.

Come Together III: In Perfect Harmony, Research Time, 17/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . An impossibility is an inspiration. It is Eden. Heaven on Earth. Rather, it’s Earth becoming Heaven.

That’s the movement Rousseau makes from the reality of humanity to its perfection. In real life, we’re a bunch of incurably corrupt, inescapably ignorant bastards. But in our perfected state, we damn near perfectly understand the common interest of our whole community, and are kind enough always to act on it.

Submitting completely to an authority that speaks with the voice of God
has never been a request that turns out well for anyone of whom it's
asked. Usually, it's a submission to slavery, as when Indigenous
Canadian children literally had Christianity beaten into them.

This is the mind-set of the individual when the will of a community is expressed as the general will. The harmony of thought across the whole society isn’t somehow imposed from above.* It’s a perfectly harmonized expression of every individual spontaneously.

* I haven’t read nearly enough Rousseau scholarship to say authoritatively whether my hypothesis is generally on target. Nor would I really want to, even if I had time. It’s not like I would have had time as a professor either – I’d have had budget meetings to attend with the associate vice-deans.

When he says that “Gods would be needed to give men laws,” he isn’t talking about God as a person standing over obedient humans. This isn’t any divine absolute despot, giving orders to which you submit.

If that were the kind of god that was on order, then Rousseau is quite the totalitarian. That’s what it means to submit all of human existence to the orders of an authority. But I’m taking Rousseau as a thinker of radical freedom, and it’s easy to do so if you just think of God in that line differently.

Remember that he’s said that the only true laws that a legislature could write were rules and institutions written as the expression of the general will. Only when the entire community (politicians and bureaucrats included) act in perfect harmony and love spontaneously is any legislation a truly legitimate law.

In any case less perfect than that, the laws are just rules backed up by threats of punishment (like jail time) or rewards (like tax credits). The law has only moral significance.

No ethical significance. The general will is the immanent expression of a community itself. Now you see it.** I’m using Rousseau in Utopias as part of a tradition of political materialism, whose fulcrum is Spinoza.

Well, hello there, good sir.

** And so do I.

I have one question for any of my scholar friends who might come across this. I may actually just write a former professor of mine who I remember has published academic articles on Rousseau. I’m not sure how believable this reading is. Maybe I should call it an appropriation. I feel like that’s a more accurate term for what I’m doing with the historical research for this book.

One of the problems with Rousseau is that he knew his audience too well. This is what makes it difficult – as a scholar or just an attentive reader – to be sure he’s really thinking what you think you read in his writing.

So when he uses terms like “the sovereign” or tosses off flourishes like that line above about gods, he sounds like he’s referring to monarchs and God the Father. Because that’s what his audience of reasonably intellectual literate people in 1760s Europe thought of when they heard those terms.

It’s how Rousseau’s own audience thought of power, authority, kingship, and the divine. This conception of divinity as a perfect material expression would have gotten someone strung up for some hardcore heresy.

Geneva was a Calvinist country at the time, and that is not a religious authority known to tolerate leniency. At the time, “Spinozist” was an insult you hurled at someone when you wanted to destroy their reputation. Materialism of Spinoza’s expressive, free kind was considered just as corrosive as atheism.

So how plausible would it be for me historically to make Rousseau a chain link in a semi-underground Spinozist tradition? Should I even care about plausibility to the scholarly community when I don’t even plan on making Utopias a scholarly book? . . . To be continued

Going to Church With the Irish, Jamming, 05/09/2016

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading a book by Colum McCann, one of Ireland’s most critically acclaimed living writers. Quite appropriately for Let the Great World Spin, I found it accidentally. 

Around Canada Day, I saw a couple of books that had been left behind on top of a ledge in my building’s side porch. The next day, they were still there, so that was enough time to presume the original owners didn’t want them. So they’re mine now.

McCann’s seemed like the most interesting book, so I gave that a go first. It’s a touching story, told in a very engaging style. I'll describe that style using a very long, pretentious phrase, then break it down into what it actually means.

First-person polyphonic coincidental juxtaposition.

Philippe Petit about to start tightrope walking between
the World Trade Center towers.

The coincidence. Let the Great World Spin tells the story of two concurrent events – Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers on 7 August 1974, and a shattering tragedy involving a 19 year old prostitute and her friend Corrigan, an Irish monk experiencing a peculiarly intense period of his lifelong crisis of faith.

The juxtaposition. Petit’s walk is a remarkable and famous historical event. McCann’s book was written in 2009, and included an epilogue taking place in 2006. To a 21st century reader, even this explicit acknowledgement is more than we need to feel how the brutal destruction of the towers haunts the narrative.

Most of the actual storytelling in Let the Great World Spin describes the life of two unremarkable prostitutes – a mother and daughter – and the people involved in the fatal accident. Few lives could be as pathetic and abject as these.

First-person polyphonic. The first chapter, one of the longest, is the story of the monk, told by his older brother. In his voice, we see most of the material circumstances of his brother’s and the prostitutes’ lives, told as a fairly straightforward story. He moves to New York from Ireland, moves into his brother’s apartment in the Bronx, and gets to know everyone. 

Then we cycle through other characters’ perspectives. A wealthy WASP woman having a meeting with her support group of other mothers – from a wide range of social, racial, and economic backgrounds – who’ve lost children to the Vietnam war. Her friend in the support group Gloria, the group’s only black member. 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Philippe Petit in The Walk.

Her husband, a Jewish circuit judge who sentences the mother prostitute on a robbery charge and delivers Petit’s comically honorific sentence of a $1 fine and a free performance in a city park. That older prostitute herself as she sits in prison regretting pretty much everything she's done in her entire life. The failing, cocaine-addicted artist who meets the monk’s brother after the day of Petit’s walk. The monk’s lover, a co-worker at a seniors’ home.

There are three short chapters from the perspective of Petit himself. Some short chapters from people who don’t interact with the prostitute’s story at all. A teenage phreaker tapping into pay phones talking to people at the site of the walk. The freelance photographer who takes one of the iconic shots of the walk.

That's probably the greatest strength of the book as far as technique goes – he’s spot on with the cadences and character of so many different voices. Irish Catholics with a complicated relationship to their faith – yeah, of course he can write one of those.

But black New Yorker street prostitutes? Hispanic teenage photographers? Silicon Valley geeks who call pay phones in Times Square for fun? I’m especially impressed that he can express such convincing voices for the interior monologues of women – that’s a task where I’ve seen so many male writers fall on their faces. 

There are limits to polyphony as well, and I’m glad McCann stays within them. I don’t think polyphony can construct a coherent narrative if voices change from frequently than chapter-by-chapter or section-by-section. Any faster than that – among paragraphs, sentence to sentence, or even within a single sentence – and the result is a maelstrom.

Let the Great World Spin author Colum McCann.

More poem than narrative. And very difficult to do well. I’d say the only one who really did – at least among those I’ve read – was Finnegans Wake. 

Yes, I have to be one of those people who mentions James Joyce in any discussion of Irish literature. Because he and McCann both deal with a theme that resonates quite strongly with me – an exploration of how Catholicism shapes a subjectivity.

I’m not a Christian – I consider myself more aligned to Judaism today than ever. But I grew up in a very Catholic country, Newfoundland. I count former priests and nuns among my friends and family. And there’s a wonderful idea in the Catholic philosophical and moral tradition that McCann’s book explores.

The most abject and spat-upon of people in just as holy in the eyes of God as the most historically significant and fantastic because they all contribute to building the same complex and beautiful world that is God’s unfolding creation.

That's why the remarkable and inspiring achievement of Philippe Petit is juxtaposed with the sordid and filthy lives of these prostitutes. Unfolding their narratives together shows the equivalent dignity of both.

That's a fundamentally democratic idea, profoundly democratic too, since the notion applies to ordinary life and the divine simultaneously. 

If Irish literature is going to have a popular definition, I’d prefer that its Catholicism grapple with themes that lend dignity to humanity. If only to demonstrate that we deserve it.

Were There Ever Really Any Great Atheists? A History Boy, 11/07/2016

There's a longer series about the nature of history in the works, but that will start tomorrow, because I've had a very tiring weekend. Today, I want to write something a little more personal. Just a small topic like my relationship with God in a few hundred words.

In particular, there’s a passage in Neoreaction: A Basilisk* that got me thinking about this part of my life. He talks about a typically long, rambling post by Mencius Moldbug, one of the intellectual leaders of the American neoreactionary movement – called “How Dawkins Got Pwned.”

* I've written about Phil Sandifer’s latest book before, and I may see if I can write a review later on this summer for the Reply Collective. It may also include some other parts of my interview with Phil from this Winter. And I may also try to sell other versions of it up the chain to different publications. Anyway . . . 

Anyone who refuses to bow to such a cruel,
authoritarian God, no matter the suffering
that refusal would cause yourself, will
necessarily be a hero.

Now, I'm not about to start parroting the ramblings of Mencius Moldbug. You know a little bit too much about my actual political beliefs to think I’m very vulnerable to his ideas. But Curtis Yarvin is still a smart person who, at least when filtered through someone else’s analysis, can make a fascinating insight or three.

In this case, it’s about Richard Dawkins, and the aggressive, contemptuous, rage-aholic New Atheist movement where he sits at the head. Now that Chris Hitchens is dead, anyway. 

As a younger man, I’d meet quite a few friends who were atheists in this loud, frothing sense. Religious belief, goes the convert’s intensity, was a delusion and a disease. A mental and social sickness. A profound stupidity of sincere belief that a magic invisible man who lives in the sky is your perfect authority to be followed.

I don't need to go into any great detail about why this kind of argument is flawed. Essentially, it’s just a big straw man. Taking millennia of philosophical development about what divinity’s nature could be, and casting it as a childish failure of people still dazzled by an adult-targeted version of the “Where’s the Ball?” game for infants.

I don't think I’ve ever been able to accept that massive reduction of intellectual history. To say that there were no valuable ideas or concepts in all this philosophy? To accuse them of stupidity? 

No. Anyone with respect for philosophical history at all must accept the legitimacy of thought and writing about the nature of God and the divine more broadly.

Yet I am an atheist. I was raised an atheist, and that’s always been my default way of thinking about divinity. Even though I believe in divinity and have embraced a relationship with Judaism as part of my family and identity. As an atheist, wouldn’t that seem incompatible.

You might think that no matter what reason I’ll give in the last few paragraphs of this post, I’m an idiot for saying so. That’s frankly your problem. 

He's just a very angry man.

It lies in this key idea that Sandifer dug out of Mencius Moldbug – that Richard Dawkins isn't just a straight-up atheist. He’s an Anglican-Calvinist atheist.

In other words, the self-declared neoreactionary spotted a fellow traveller. He correctly pegged Dawkins’ own beliefs about the nature of the divine as a product of reaction. Angrily turning against the Anglican and Calvinist traditions and beliefs in which he was raised.

This is why Dawkins’ period of peak cultural influence found his religious attitudes so aggressive, oversimplifying, shrill, and dismissive. They weren’t attitudes of a positive, productive identity – they were reactions, pure negations of beliefs.

Because I was raised atheist, my atheism has never needed that aggression. Or that strident refusal to bend, to make what would even risk appearing to anyone else as a compromise.

It’s not an issue for me to say that the material world itself has some divinity, some majesty to it. It’s not an issue for me to say that divinity can arise from profane sources. Like – in the Jewish philosophical tradition – the divine manifesting in ethical principles and good actions themselves. 

A reactionary’s God is the authority figure that sits above us all, judging, punishing, and commanding us. An atheist’s God can be the divinity that arises when people are kind to each other, in each act that treats each other with dignity. That God is no authority, but the grace that emerges from our own nature and the world.

Never Give Up and Never Give In, A History Boy, 08/04/2016

Yesterday at Adam Riggio Writes:

Human politics driven by our ideals puts us at war with the cosmos itself. It means that the ideal of human politics is to demand a better world than the universe is able to give you – if I can’t find it in the world as it is, I’ll build it.

It’s the demand to God herself – I won’t submit to your theodicy; I won’t justify the raw deal of human suffering. My ideal is a world where everyone lives in peace and happiness. Where a single crying child is too much pain to be right, to be justified.

For a Dostoyevsky fan, I've never been that into Crime
and Punishment, though I do love it. It's a beautiful
book and a fantastically intense character. But I
found the characters themselves tended to become
ciphers for ideas a little too easily. The Wikipedia
page gives a pretty good sign of how irritatingly
up-front the book is about this breakdown.

Hmmm. Where have I heard that before?

This week’s posts have become a very unexpected series. They aren’t even really a series, as I’ve typically presented these things. Just picking up from the end of one post, moving in a tangent that it suggests, and then repeating the same from another tangent. Today is more of the same. And I hope it’s a little illuminating.

I’ve talked about my love of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels on the blog before, and how much he’s influenced my political thinking. Today, I want to tease out how it makes sense for a strict Russian Orthodox Christian monarchist to have influenced views and ideas like mine.

Begin with the beginning. Dostoyevsky was a radical anti-monarchist revolutionary and atheist. And he got caught. He expected to be executed, because this was 1840s Russia, of course. But the Czar played kind of a cruel trick on him and his co-conspirators. 

Dostoyevsky was led out to a firing squad field, and the execution was proceeding entirely according to protocol. Then as the guns were about to fire, the squad put down their weapons and the drill sergeant announced that their death sentences were commuted by royal decree to several years in Siberia. This isn’t a myth – it was a real event that happened.

That moment of facing the certainty of his own death, seemingly within minutes and seconds, rekindled Dostoyevsky’s faith in God. And he was a dedicated Orthodox Christian and grumpy royalist for the rest of his life. A life he spent tortured by alcoholism and gambling addiction, as well as building one of humanity’s most legendary writing careers. 

Akira Kurosawa made one of the few attempts to adapt
Dostoyevsky's sprawling epic of our interior lives, the
novel of his that first hit my soul, The Idiot.

Because Dostoyevsky didn’t become one of those unfortunate religious converts whose works become an excuse to spout dogma. This isn’t Kirk Cameron we’re talking about here. 

What was most important to Dostoyevsky were the crises themselves – depicting in his art narrative and mental moments of the same terrifying intensity as he experienced up against that wall as a young man. Characters with the singular uniqueness as he felt in that moment when he knew he was going to die – there was never going to be another like him.

The list of Dostoyevsky characters that affected me over the years began with Prince Lev Myshkin in The Idiot, and Parfyon Rogozhin as well. One was the most beautiful vulnerability I had ever seen in a fictional character, and the other was a remarkable, malevolence that would make a heart burn with blackened flame.

After I read The Idiot, I thought that if I could ever create a character in fiction or film with the same intensity and singularity of Myshkin, even if only once, it would be worth all the work to devote at least a part of my life to make art.

I actually read Ivan Karamazov’s monologue about why he’s an atheist before I read the entire book. It was one of the readings from an undergrad course I took on philosophy of religion, presented as a straightforward argument for atheism. 

A poster for the 1969 Russian film
adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov.
It was co-directed by the actors who
played Dmitri and Ivan after the death of
original director Ivan Pyryev, Mikhail
Ulyanov and Kirill Lavrov.

It’s probably the best argument for atheism that exists – it certainly blows away anything Hitchens or Dawkins may have written. It justifies and contributed to my belief that only someone with a deep and complex relationship with the divine can actually explain the deepest philosophical and ethical meaning of atheism.

Essentially, I hold that atheism. It’s an atheism that still believes in God. If you believe that’s contradictory, then you’ve been reading too much Dawkins and you think all you need to do to be a thorough atheist is not go to church and act like scientific knowledge is absolutely perfect.*

* Let’s not get into the contingency of scientific knowledge existing simultaneously with its systematic reliability, or we’ll be here for a whole damn book. And if you want me to write that book, you can subsidize it directly now.

Simply not believing in God because scientific knowledge can’t prove God’s existence is a kind of alienation from the divine. You’re alienated because you may once have expected something to be there that isn’t and never will be.

Ivan Karamazov’s is the atheism that embodies the most robust alienation from God – the ethical. It refuses to accept the legitimacy of the world’s ultimate goodness in the fact of suffering and destruction. 

Theodicy, traditionally speaking, is the moral justification of God’s existence and goodness. Speaking very simply and quickly, it justifies the order and history of the universe as the overall product of God’s plan. All the suffering, cruelty, and destruction of the world is a function of God’s love.

It’s a refusal that the world could be better than it is. The human dedication to political ideals is a profound engagement with reality – a refusal of reality as it exists and an overwhelming desire to rewrite reality. That reality is the reality of God – Reality is the material expression of God. If you have a problem with reality as it is, then you have a problem with God.

Ivan Karamazov is Dostoyevsky the revolutionary. Learning who really murdered his father is Dostoyevsky’s moment in front of the firing squad. The desire to change the world for the better is real. The rage at the world is real. That rage has to build a new world.

Justifying Idealism, Composing, 07/04/2016

Yesterday at Adam Riggio Writes:

A map of the universe where Earth is one planet among many is more complicated than the geocentric spheres. But it’s more accurate, and a more diverse and fascinating universe to explore than a geocentric reality could ever have been.
So it goes for the more complicated political universe with many diverse, intersecting, and conflicting axes of freedom and liberation. It’s much more complex to navigate. If you thought easy answers were tough in the liberal individualist model of politics, then this model with so many different axes of freedom is even harder.

Why would anyone want to do something that’s hard?

Mostly because it’s necessary. The libertarian – the most intense traditional liberals in the world, really – argument that you can still be free in absolute poverty is based on a paltry, one-dimensional conception of freedom. 

This has been another week where each entry returns
to the same ideas just a little differently, trying to find
the best way to express them. Literally composing my
ideas, day by day, thought by thought.

To be free is freedom from the authoritarian control of a sovereign state, and there’s no distinction between the oppression of a secret police service and an income tax agency. You may barely afford to eat, but if you live in a society without a state tax authority, you’re free because no government coerces you.

I call shenanigans. Shenanigans because the deprivation of poverty genuinely ruins lives. Not just the immediate material deprivations of poverty, but the erosion of opportunities to dig yourself out of poverty that living hand-to-mouth creates. The inability to save. The inability to eat healthily. The inability to access housing. The heightened vulnerability to catastrophic results from otherwise minor accidents.

Many people around the world are increasingly sick of an economic regime that facilitates such incredible inequality that more people are stuck in inescapable poverty traps. 

The Copernican Revolution of political thinking is about redefining politics so that political discussions can include these economic issues, first and foremost. To do that, we need an expansive understanding of what a properly political conversation is.

We’ve become too accustomed to thinking of politics as being solely about the interplay of private and public – working out what areas of life are proper to individuals and what are proper to the government.

What is the political? It’s every relationship between people that helps constitute society. Every aspect of human life constitutes our political life. The domain of politics is life itself. You understand this and all that libertarianism just falls away. It’s just inadequate to the problems we face and the solutions we need.

We can forget the most valuable contribution that libertarianism brings to political thinking – how horrifyingly dangerous the state is. But that’s only one aspect of a universe of political importance and power. 

An artist's representation of a startled Copernicus.

The original Copernican Revolution – you know, the one the actual Nicolas Copernicus* started – transformed our image of the cosmos from a home built specifically for humanity into a complex assemblage where humanity lives. That cosmology alienated God from humanity because it implied that God had more complex priorities than human development.

* Or rather, Mikolaj Kopernik, for those of you like me who think Latin is kind of snooty and Slavic languages generally sound extra-badass.

Kant, like all reactionaries who believe themselves progressive, wanted to preserve the material truth of a world more complex than humanity, but restore the moral authority of a God that cares only for humanity.

But the problem with an image of God as a moral authority is that it seems an unjustly one-way relationship. Living in a manifestly unfair world, prayer and piety alone isn’t exactly effective in building a more just society. If we expect justice and fairness to arise naturally, it will never arrive. 

The strong will continue to eat the weak, unless the weak find new ways to make themselves strong. But that strength has to be new kinds of power that undercut the strength of the already-strong. Our ideals have to be about remaking society – changing each of our minds – so that violent coercion is literally not effective anymore.

Human politics driven by our ideals puts us at war with the cosmos itself. It means that the ideal of human politics is to demand a better world than the universe is able to give you – if I can’t find it in the world as it is, I’ll build it.

It’s the demand to God herself – I won’t submit to your theodicy; I won’t justify the raw deal of human suffering. My ideal is a world where everyone lives in peace and happiness. Where a single crying child is too much pain to be right, to be justified.

Hmmm. Where have I heard that before?

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Doom Prophets V: People I Miss and Seeing God, A History Boy, 24/02/2016

Continued from last post . . . The last two names on Antonio Negri’s list of the visionaries of modernity’s self-destruction are the two I don’t know as well. There’s Max Weber and Franz Rosensweig.

From what I know of their work, I can give a hypothesis of what role they’ll play in Utopias’ analysis of modernity’s implosion. They both try to redeem Western humanity, given that Western humanity’s major cultural project and theme – modernity, the industrial revolution, the nation-state and nationalism, colonial conquest of Earth – turned into an undeniable disaster of bloodshed, destruction, and horror.

Not only do my ideas apparently resemble
Max Weber, but I even have similar hair
when I cut it short. And that's a seriously
awesome beard.

So . . . yeah. That’s a bit of an issue for those of us who consider Western culture part of our heritage (whether we like it or not). Grappling with that heritage in many weird ways – that’s what Utopias will do.

Weber is an interesting figure to me. My gaps regarding his philosophy is pretty ironic, as my old friend The Yalie has said that my own perspective, especially in some of the early philosophy-related posts on Adam Writes Everything, reminded him very much of Weber.

So why didn’t I ever read his work until recently, when a copy of The Vocation Lectures has been sitting on my bookshelf for about two years now? Because I haven’t taken a sociology course since I was 18 years old, and disciplinary boundaries severely affected what I was exposed to and what I could spare time to devote to, for much of my time in the academy.

That’s why I’m looking forward to diving into Weber, and his apparently optimistic vision (a rarity among Negri’s list of doom prophets). 

But the thinker on that list that I’m most looking forward to diving into is Rosenzweig. I only have a little knowledge of his work, most of what came from my old rebbe Arnold. 

Arnold wasn’t a real rabbi – he wasn’t accredited, and I’m actually not sure how much yeshiva he attended over the years. Most of his career he spent as a documentary filmmaker. I’ve seen his award shelf at his old house in Manuels. He was a soft,* thoughtful, sardonic, and wise man.

* And seriously overweight, which was a likely contributor to his death at 70 back in 2011, which I consider premature, given modern medical science and preventative care.

I sometimes wish I could still talk to Arnold, as someone else who’s gone through some difficult economic times as a young man and still lived a fulfilling creative life. In my more stressful times, I really could have used one more friend like him, an intellectual who succeeded in life by living it largely on his own terms. 

Arnold knew Talmud better than the one rabbi at the one synagogue in St. John’s, and he’d sometimes school the official head of that city’s Jewish community in the more esoteric, less doctrinaire elements of the Jewish intellectual tradition.

Rosenzweig died of ALS just before
his 43rd birthday. In his last years,
he was able to communicate only by
blinking his eye yes or no as his wife
read the alphabet for him, one
painstaking letter at a time.

He introduced me to Rosenzweig and Martin Buber through the Jockey Club meetings that I used to organize at Memorial University’s Philosophy Department. I only read a few chapters by these inspiring thinkers, copied and sent around for our discussions. 

Arnold helped me understand the concepts in millennia of Jewish thought as Rosenzweig gave them voice. And there was more there than Negri’s cursory mention of a failed redemption suggest. 

In The Star of Redemption and the guiding philosophy of Rosenzweig and Buber’s phenomenological translation of the Torah into German, that compelled me – a committed atheist – to understand a deeper kind of atheism that could understand how the divine rises from existence, from life, and from thought. 

“There is no God in Judaism,” I remember Arnold saying, to provoke scorn as much as to provoke thought. “The divine is the ethics.”

Those papers that Arnold gave me, excerpts from Rosenzweig’s work and articles about him, are gone now. Lost in my move from Hamilton to Toronto just over a year ago. 

But the memory remains. And the Amazon Cart that still has The Star of Redemption in it, just waiting until I can find room in the budget again. It’s moved up closer and closer to the top of my list. Living in a Jewish household now has helped. 

That vision of God in my friend Arnold’s Judaism – the knowledge of an amateur Talmudic scholar whose intelligence was so deft, he could school the rabbi himself – is the only God that I could ever accept. 

I don’t think I’ll ever fully convert to Judaism – I’d be too argumentative with the Orthodox rabbis, and I’d eventually take things too far – they’d either kick me out of class, give me a job, or send me to a kibbutz. But those ideas in Rosenzweig’s work and my conversations with Arnold made the only route by which I’ve ever experienced God. 

And God will be in Utopias. As well as in our utopias.