Philosophy and the Mirror of Technology: Spinoza’s Religion – Interview with Clare Carlisle

The central goal of this series is to explore the evolving relationship among faith, science and philosophy, with a focus on the import of modern physics and technology. In the introductory post, I explained that my interest in Spinoza reflects a hope that his unique philosophy could help fill a void in our secular culture.  I’m honored to discuss a new book by Clare Carlisle that goes to the heart of my project. Spinoza’s Religion is a bold reevaluation, revealing his inclusive vision of religion for the modern age.  It makes a powerful case that Spinoza’s philosophy is vital for our restless, modern world – accommodating the alternatives of faith and philosophy. I also recommend Clare’s recent biography of Kierkegaard, Philosopher of the Heart, and I’m thrilled to discuss her new, important work today.

Clare, thank you so much for your willingness to contribute to the series!  I would like to start with the central challenge of the book: to reconsider the concept of religion.  As you discuss, Spinoza has been interpreted in very different ways – as an atheist or practicing a broad form of theology, drawing on other Western thinkers.  To ground this discussion, please outline Spinoza’s alternative vision, highlighting how he breaks from, but still overlaps with, the Judeo-Christian tradition. 

Spinoza was an heir to both Jewish and Christian culture – in Amsterdam he grew up in a Jewish community within a Protestant society – yet he distanced himself from both these religions.  He did not want to be a member of a religious institution with strict, prescriptive codes of belonging and belief.  He feared – quite rightly – that a religious affiliation would inhibit his philosophical work.  At the same time, he was deeply influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas, and he was also pragmatic in adapting his own philosophy to a broadly Christian culture.  

When we think about Spinoza’s intellectual inheritance, it’s important not to reify a tradition like “Christianity.”  What we call Christianity has always, right from the start, been multicultural and diverse, an eclectic mixture of Jewish and Greek and Roman philosophies, and often full of the tensions that come with this eclecticism; it subsequently absorbed Islamic influences too, and of course as Christian teachings spread to different regions they blended with local folk traditions.  So by situating Spinoza in a broadly Christian context, we’re not cutting him off from all those diverse religious and philosophical currents.  On the contrary, he was very resistant to the Christian churches’ efforts to seal themselves off from cultural forms perceived as “other”, which in fact meant denying or suppressing their own heritage.

In my book I argue that for Spinoza, being religious does not mean belonging to a sect or faction, defined in terms of orthodoxy or orthopraxy.  Instead, he retains a conception of religion that was common in the medieval period: religion is a virtue, which involves living in the right relation to God.  This virtue can be practiced inside or outside a recognized religious institution.  Spinoza is far from being an individualist, both metaphysically and ethically, so even if a person pursues their religion in a non-conventional context, this pursuit will still be collective, supported by perhaps a small group of like-minded people.

Exploring this alternative form of religion, is it fair to also characterize it as a new way to think about philosophy?  Perhaps, to use your description, as a philosophy of a religious life, or some combination of the two?  In this vein, please discuss how Spinoza is, therefore, reminiscent of Kierkegaard, in seeing religion as a way of life.  How he rejects orthodoxy and the objectification of religion and views it as a practice itself – the “how” vs. the “what”.  

My book begins by exploring the connection between philosophy and “spirituality,” a concept I develop from Foucault and Souriau.  An objectified conception of religion, understood in terms of orthodoxy – explicit allegiance to a formal creed – rose to prominence during Spinoza’s lifetime, largely as a consequence of the institutionalized Christian sectarianism that followed the Protestant and Catholic reformations of the 16^th century.  So this is a distinctively modern notion of “religion,” and I see Spinoza as resisting this kind of religion at its inception.  Similarly, Kierkegaard in the 19^th century was battling against this objectified religion, which was by then deeply entrenched in European culture.  Spinoza and Kierkegaard are very different thinkers in many ways, but I see them as connected in this resistance to objectified religion.  Spinoza’s insistence that religion is a virtue – as you put it, a way of life – resonates with Kierkegaard’s view that religion is a matter of “how” rather than “what.”  It is a matter of how you orient your life; how to relate to yourself, to other people, and to God; how you think and feel and act.  The depth and authenticity of a person’s religious life is not decided by what they believe or which church they go to.  What matters is their relationship to these things.  Kierkegaard called this relationship “earnestness,” “inwardness,” or “passion” – words that signify different but connected aspects of the relation to God.  This is not to say that belief and belonging is irrelevant: these things can be significant expressions of “how” religiousness is lived – but they are not the thing itself, they are not constitutive of “religion.”

Further expanding on this notion of the ethical life, you describe how Spinoza was not only personally receptive to different religious practices, but also rejected the dogma of his era.  Can you discuss how his vision is accommodating, consistent with science, but also oriented toward a life characterized by justice and loving-kindness.  As you consider his modern relevance, is the fundamental ethical case, incorporating ancient virtues, as important as the compatibility with our scientific world?

Spinoza, like many of his early modern contemporaries, rejected scholastic metaphysics, with its elaborate ontological categories and its emphasis on teleology as a lens for understanding nature.  Prioritising natural rather than supernatural explanations for how things exist and act was, of course, entirely supportive of the development of modern science.  

In the ethical sphere, this shift away from the medieval worldview involved a streamlined concept of virtue.  Spinozist virtue is immanent rather than instrumental: virtue is its own reward, not a means to rewards in either this life or the next.  And virtue simply means power, replacing a thickened, moralizing conception of virtue laden with specific moral codes.  This is not to say that virtue cannot be expressed through adherence to a moral code, but it is not constituted by this adherence – just as religion could be expressed through a specific tradition, but is not constituted by, and exclusive to, that particular tradition.  As you say, Spinoza argues that a virtuous life is necessarily characterized by justice and loving-kindness, and he emphasized certain New Testament texts that support this view.  This allowed him to present his ethics as consistent with the essence of Christian teaching, while also arguing that virtue can be practiced in any cultural context.

Moving to Spinoza’s philosophy, and drawing another possible parallel with Kierkegaard on the phases of the self, can you please expand on how Spinoza frames three forms of knowledge.  Please discuss how religion is a combination of ethics and metaphysics in his system – with different degrees of virtue reflecting forms of cognition and human experience, culminating in the intellectual love of God.

Spinoza identified three kinds of knowing, each of which has a particular affective quality.  The first kind of knowing is imagination; the second kind is reason; the third kind is intuition.  In my book I suggest that imagination is characterized by instability and fluctuation, which has an affective quality of restlessness, agitation, anxiety.  Reason, by contrast, brings emotional stability.  Intuition has an immediacy that makes it kind of timeless: it gives us an experience of eternity, which brings deep peace or rest.  

To illustrate the distinction between reason and intuition, imagine solving a mathematical problem.  Reason takes you through a series of steps required to find the solution.  As you solve it, you have a joyful awareness of your own understanding.  This awareness is intuitive knowing.  You’ve not done any extra work or followed any additional steps to reach this awareness; it arrives effortlessly, accompanying the rational process.  Of course this is just an illustration; we can experience intuitive knowing in many different contexts.  For example, in a therapeutic setting, you might work with your therapist to understand your own psychological patterns: this is a process of rational understanding, but it can also be accompanied by a feeling of “ah yes, now I understand!”  That feeling of one’s own insight into truth is another example of intuition.

I’m not sure how much this has to do with Kierkegaard’s three-fold analysis of existence as aesthetic, ethical and religious.  I would need to think more about that. Kierkegaardian religiousness, like Spinozist intuition, is characterized by a recognition of one’s relation to God and dependence on God.  But what that means, and how it is expressed, might not be the same thing.  Spinoza thinks that we relate to God intellectually, whereas Kierkegaard emphasizes a passionate longing for God as the fundamental mode of relation.

You are absolutely right, though, that Spinoza’s religion is a combination of metaphysics and ethics.  The way these combine looks different depending on whether we’re reading the Ethics or the Theologico-Political Treatise.  My book gives priority to the Ethics, where the intellectual love of God is an intuitive understanding of being-in-God.  Spinoza thinks that ethical life – justice and loving-kindness – flow naturally and necessarily from this insight.  One reason for this is that understanding one’s own being-in-God is really inseparable from understanding that everything is in God, so that being-in-God is known as a common nature that we share with all things.

Delving further into his philosophy, can you outline his core principle – governing ontology, epistemology and ethics – that “whatever is, is in God”.  That the notion of “being-in-God” is the highest ideal of human life.  Please explain how this is a relation of sharing, or participation – which has a Western theological foundation.  Also, because it has been construed as radical, please explore how his participatory notion is different, in that it rejects a Thomistic doctrine of creation ex nihilo and a traditional view that individuals are substances (with a beatific vision in the afterlife).

Well I think your question has summarized my argument extremely well!  As you say, Proposition 15 in Part One of the Ethics – “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God” – is right at the heart of my reading of the text.  I show that this proposition underpins Spinoza’s entire system: this is factually true insofar as he keeps referring back to it throughout the Ethics.  I see the principle of “being-in-God,” as I call it, as Spinoza’s fundamental thought.  Of course, this is a theological idea as well as a philosophical idea.  I think that E1p15 shows that philosophy and theology are inseparable, for Spinoza.  

The question, then, is what does it mean to be in God?  E1p15 indicates that this is a relation of causal and conceptual dependence.  God makes us exist, and makes us intelligible; God makes everything exist, and makes everything intelligible.  We could describe being-in-God as a panentheist principle. One difficulty there, though, is that panentheism is sometimes seen as a marginal theological position, perhaps bordering on heresy, and certainly not an orthodox view.  For a Spinozist, of course, there’s nothing wrong with unorthodoxy per se, but in fact this idea of being-in-God is absolutely central to the mainstream Christian tradition that Spinoza inherited.  It is articulated by theologians such as Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas – the architects of western Christianity.  This is not to say that these thinkers are Spinoza’s sources; my point is simply that being-in-God – and the question of what this means – is central, not peripheral, to theological tradition.  Last year Yitzhak Melamed and I ran a symposium on Panentheism and Religious Life with experts on Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, and the Kabbalah, and it was clear that being-in-God is fundamental to these different theistic traditions.  I had suspected this, but it was nice to have it confirmed by experts in those fields.

In any of these traditions, different theologians will find different answers to the question of the meaning of being in God – different doctrinal formulations that make sense of this principle.  Aquinas’s formulation involves a doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which Spinoza opposes.  Aquinas also develops the meaning of being-in-God through his concept of participation, which has both biblical and Platonic roots.  I was intrigued to see that Spinoza also uses the verb “participate” to describe the way we share in the divine nature.  Again, I’m not arguing that Aquinas was his source here.  But it is important to recognize that when Spinoza used the verb “participate,” this concept was saturated with a theological meaning that he must have been aware of.  I think we have to take Spinoza’s concept of participation together with his concept of expression.  To say that we participate in the divine nature perhaps means the same thing as saying that we are expressions of the divine nature.  God expresses, we participate: are these two ways of describing the same activity?

It’s also important to note that participation and expression are categories for understanding being-in-God not only as a doctrine, but also as a practice.  For example, devotional rituals can be ways of performing – and thereby expressing – a sharing or communion in divine nature.  Contemplative practices like meditation, yoga and prayer can also be understood in these fundamentally Spinozist terms.

Moving to a key aspect of your book, I would like to explore the way Spinoza has been misunderstood.  Please discuss a critical clarification: how the “catch phrase” for Spinoza, Deus sive Natura (equating God with nature), can be misleading – and has led to claims of atheism.  In particular, you note how Spinoza should not be viewed as a pantheist.  Can you describe his panentheism, where God and nature are not equivalent, and there is an asymmetrical relationship between God and the universe. That is, both immanent, in grounding everything, yet transcendent, as ontologically different and not fully accessible.  The distinction, for me, is captured by your statement that human beings are constituted by their participation in only two of an infinite number of attributes – thought and extension.

Again I think you’ve summarized my argument very well here.  In my book I undertake a close reading of the passages where Spinoza uses the phrase “God or Nature” and show why, in the context of the overall architecture of the Ethics, these passages do not amount to a robust metaphysical claim that would make Spinoza a pantheist.  At the very least, “God or Nature” must be interpreted in light of Spinoza’s more fundamental principle of being-in-God.  This is not to say that we should simply dismiss the phrase “God or Nature.”  We should neither dismiss it, nor take it as the key tenet of Spinozism.  I see “God or Nature” as proposing alternative names for the reality traditionally named as God.  In fact, Spinoza is offering us three alternative names for this reality: “God,” “Nature,” and “God or Nature.”  I see this as a very inclusive gesture that invites a broad diversity of religious, atheist and agnostic beliefs into Spinoza’s philosophical vision.  I also suggest that “God or Nature” names a question and an ambiguity, and living with this question is just part of what it means to read Spinoza.

In the context of how he is misunderstood, please help frame Spinoza in the discipline.  Specifically, I would like to explore how he differs from other Rationalists, in the sense that he viewed cognition as tied to our embodiment, our affective experience and duration.  To this extent, he reflects the thoroughgoing naturalism of Nietzsche.  I think it’s fair to say there is not much difference between his concept of conatus and Nietzsche’s will-to-power, which leads, as part of Spinoza’s complete system, to see virtue as the mind at peace.  As you note, the emphasis is on the mind’s capacity for repose – resting in itself and, at the same time, in God.  Please contrast Spinoza with the Rationalists of his time – the progenitors of our modern age.

As you suggest, Spinoza’s rationalism is embodied, and this contrasts with the rationalism of Descartes, which seems to be disembodied.  It also contrasts with the more embodied philosophy of Hume, which distances itself from rationalism.  I wouldn’t overstate the similarity between Spinoza and Nietzsche, though as you say there are certain continuities between them.  I don’t see Nietzsche as oriented to rest, for example.  Reading Spinoza is a restful experience, whereas reading Nietzsche tends be exhilarating, agitating, and irritating.  This is partly to do with literary style – Nietzsche can be insightful, and he’s a great writer, but he is too histrionic and obnoxious for my taste.  But also it’s to do with the fundamentally ethical character of Spinoza’s thought, which I don’t think Nietzsche shares.  Nietzsche’s political and cultural influence has often been pernicious, and I don’t think the same is true of Spinoza’s influence – although of course Christian readers who accused him of atheism, and Jewish readers who accused him of betraying his people, thought otherwise.

I would like to further explore how Spinoza differs from the enlightened mindset and its mechanistic view of the world.  Please contrast his view that human beings are entirely dependent on God vs. our modern age of individualism, with the ideals of autonomy and free choice.  How, for Spinoza, our deepest happiness is not about production, wealth or competitive success – but in knowledge. 

There is a simple metaphysical response to this question, which is to point out that for Spinoza human beings are not substances, but modes of substance – and the only substance is God.  This means, by definition, that we are causally and conceptually dependent on God.  It also means, by definition, that we are not autonomous and self-sufficient.  Whatever freedom and power we possess comes from our being-in-God.  We are free only insofar as we share in the freedom of “God or Nature.”  Our modern age of individualism, with its ideals of autonomy and free choice, takes Cartesian metaphysics rather than Spinozist metaphysics as its basic ontological framework.  This means that modernity is both more permeated with Christian ideas – which Descartes only partially purged from his philosophy – and more vulnerable to modern critiques of religion, than it would have been if Spinoza’s metaphysics had been allowed to lay the ground for modernity.  Obviously these are complicated claims, and anyone who is interested in the full argument can find it in my book.

Finally, moving to specific questions I will raise in subsequent posts, I would like to explore Spinoza’s conception of immortality, especially the immediacy of intellectual knowledge and the notion of the mind’s eternity. I will later make the case that it’s consistent with modern physics and the theory of “non-locality”. Can you explore how scientia intuitiva is a virtue that is cultivated under “a species of eternity”, with a joyful awareness of being-in-God.  How it is a kind of accomplishment or transformation, at once ethical and ontological.  Again, it seems appropriate to draw parallels with Kierkegaard.  When you suggest that it can collapse a human being’s finite life and the eternal life of God, is it fair to say that this highest form of knowledge is the opposite of the risk (and abdication of reason) that characterizes Kierkegaard’s faith?   

The idea of participation is helpful here.  Spinoza suggests that we can participate more or less in the divine nature, and this suggestion that participation is a matter of degree contrasts with his absolute claim that everything is in God.  Participating in divine nature means participating in eternity, and the more we participate, the more we are eternal.  In my book I link this to a kind of immanent eschatology, sometimes called “realized eschatology,” that we find in the First Letter of John, which was one of Spinoza’s favourite New Testament texts.  The author of this ancient text wrote that eternal life is not merely some kind of heavenly reward, but a condition of existence that we can access here and now.  (This is not in itself to deny that there might also be some sort of port-mortem immortality, though Spinoza does not go in this direction.)  

We can compare the experience of eternity that comes with intuition, which as I said has an immediate, timeless quality, and a doctrine of personal immortality based on imaginative thinking.  We might imagine ourselves, with all our personal attributes, being resurrected and living forever.  Spinoza rejected this doctrine, and replaced it with a less personal account of eternity which, I think, rests on a fundamental nonduality between human and divine consciousness.  This nondualism is quite subtle and hard to grasp, and again I’d refer readers to my book to find the full argument.  I should mention that I’ve been influenced by the Indian school of Advaita Vedanta, which opened my mind to this way of interpreting Spinoza.  The account of human eternity put forward at the end of the Ethics seems to promise an experience of deep peace or rest, and perhaps it was even rooted in this kind of experience.  Experiences like these can indeed be transformative, as religious practitioners in different traditions will attest.

As you say, Kierkegaard found that the life of faith involves great existential risk, and this seems to be quite foreign to Spinoza’s religion.  Indeed, at the beginning of my book I discuss the opening of Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, where he outlines the risk – the grave “danger” – of not pursuing his philosophical and spiritual path.  Having said that, when I wrote my biography of Kierkegaard I came to see that he did experience moments, however brief, of resting in God, and this possibility was for him the highest human happiness, and a hugely reassuring sign of divine grace.

I would like to end with a question that I also discussed with Michael Della Rocca at the beginning of this series.  Can you please speculate about how Spinoza might view our technological revolution and, specifically, the replication of the mind with artificial intelligence?  Secondly, to foreshadow another one of my future posts, do you think Spinoza would view technology as a part of nature?  

I know very little about artificial intelligence, and I haven’t thought much about it.  Spinoza – unlike Kierkegaard – was very interested in contemporary science, and I can imagine that he would have been impressed by the intellectual achievements that have made possible new technological innovations.  However, Spinoza’s worldview is deeply ethical, deeply concerned with human flourishing.  Perhaps he would have been concerned to see technological “progress” becoming detached from human flourishing, and harnessed more to the kind of transient ambitions – the pursuit of wealth, for example – that he set aside at the beginning of his philosophical career.  Or perhaps I am just projecting my own concerns onto Spinoza.  In answer to your second question, for Spinoza everything is part of nature.

Clare Carlisle

 

Clare Carlisle is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. She studied philosophy and theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, gaining her BA in 1998 and her PhD in 2002, and she remains grateful to Trinity College for the scholarship that supported her doctoral studies. Her travels in India after completing her PhD deepened her interest in devotional and contemplative practices. She is the author of six books, most recently On Habit (Routledge, 2014), Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (Allen Lane / Penguin / FSG, 2019), and Spinoza’s Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2021). She is currently writing a book on the life and philosophy of George Eliot, titled The Marriage Question.

Charlie Taben

Charlie Taben graduated from Middlebury College in 1983 with a BA in philosophy and has been a financial services executive for nearly 40 years.  He studied at Harvard University during his junior year and says one of the highlights of his life was taking John Rawls’ class.  Today, Charlie remains engaged with the discipline, focusing on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. He also performs volunteer work for the Philosophical Society of England and is currently seeking to incorporate practical philosophical digital content into US corporate wellness programs. You can find Charlie on Twitter @gbglax.