Step 11: why Spinoza matters

Viola Cordova’s PhD thesis talks about parallels between Indigenous (in her case, Navajo) thought and Spinoza’s. The work dates back to the 1990s - in other words, to a time when most Philosophy departments in the USA would have had little understanding of Indigenous worldviews. Cordova used Spinoza’s ideas to help build bridges - not in the sense that she was asking for contemporary Western validation of her ideas, but in the sense that she was helping contemporary Westerners approach something which must have felt entirely unfamiliar at the beginning.

Looking back on Leroy Little Bear’s elements of philosophical unity in diversity between Indigenous worldviews in step 4, and looking back on their relationship with Vine Deloria’s thinking in step 10, it is not surprising that the parallels identified by Cordova are, first and foremost, Spinoza’s ideas about the individual at the same time being part of a network constituting the whole, and about this network being sacred. Relatedly, Cordova stresses the importance of Spinoza’s richer conception of reason: for Spinoza, as for Indigenous worldviews, our intellect is not separate from our bodies and emotions. We don’t have to choose whether we either want to be rational or whether we want to feel: rather, for Spinoza, as for Indigenous worldviews, our heads, hearts, and bodies work best when we are brave enough to let them work together.

We don’t usually think about it this way in the contemporary West, because our worldview is mostly based on Descartes’ thinking, with a clear line drawn between body and mind. We are, just now, catching up again, though: Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score topped our bestseller lists a few years ago, referencing a vast body of contemporary Western research beginning to remind us that the line we have let Descartes draw between body and mind is anything but a given.

—> Do you remember where to go if you need exact references? Step 1 and step 2 will tell you where to find them.

Again relatedly, Spinoza says something that sounds very much like the PRATEC project in step 5 and step 6: PRATEC talk about the joy of working on and with the land as they live in mutually responsive relationship with it. Spinoza, too, makes a direct link between our acting on our connectedness with the network we are embedded in and our experiencing our activity as joyful. Reason (and, relatedly, joy!), for Spinoza, includes this sense of connectedness, and whatever partial understanding of the network we may educate ourselves to achieve. (Spinoza, too, is aware that we are always, necessarily, going to be left with a blind spot in this regard.) Spinoza’s way of talking about this connectedness is that our individual life force - our conatus - then chimes with the conatus of the whole.

Brian Burkhart’s jazz analogy, and Ella Fitzgerald’s and her band’s improvisation on Mack the Knife, have just told us something quite similar.

We have seen that the contemporary West tends to operate under a mostly Cartesian paradigm, separating body from mind and the sacred from the material and the individual from other individuals. Spinoza, with his different view, tends to be given less airtime - and when he is, he may well be criticised.

Let’s look at some of the main objections.

Firstly, Spinoza has been criticised for his alleged egoism and, relatedly, for his alleged anthropocentrism. Although I disagree with these assessments, I find them understandable up to a point, because it is easy to take some of Spinoza’s wordings that way - at least before we consider that Spinoza lived at a very different time, and in a culture which did not yet have 500 years’ worth of life according to a largely Cartesian paradigm in its shared experience.

Spinoza’s wordings in question, looked at from our present-day point of view, at first glance seem to tell us that we can do whatever suits us. At times, this only relates to our behaviour towards other species; at other times, it relates to our behaviour towards anyone. If this was what Spinoza was really telling us, it would be difficult to see what it has to do with Brian Burkhart’s jazz! However, commentators have been able to cast light on this. Genevieve Lloyd, for example, urges caution: the charges of egoism and of anthropocentrism only stick if we look at what “suits us” before we are able to act from reason. Spinoza, on the other hand, talks about what suits us once we are able to act from reason - and, for Spinoza, this reason includes our connectedness within the network of the whole. Spinoza’s individual acting from reason is not looking for individual advantage at the expense of everyone else. Rather, Spinoza’s individual acting from reason is looking for a form of balance where the individual helps the whole and vice versa - in fact, a form of balance that sounds quite like Brian Burkhart’s jazz.

Secondly, Spinoza’s philosophy has been accused of being deterministic. Other commentators (for example, Stuart Hampshire in his introduction to Spinoza’s Ethics) disagree with this interpretation. Again, I am with the latter. Hampshire points out that Spinoza distinguishes between two types of events: one type which, as Newton’s apple, will necessarily follow a logical sequence of predictable steps, and another type, which may play out differently and which will take shape in context.

In other words, Spinoza is very close to some of the ideas discussed in step 6 - of our being able to create conditions which will make it easy for certain balances to co-occur, but which will not necessarily exclusively relate to causal sequences of events and which will, because of this, not necessarily magic up whatever it may have been that we thought we could make a billiard ball universe do. The most noticeable difference is that he doesn’t refer to this thinking as a “participationalist paradigm” - but then again, why would he? In his day, there wasn’t the same need to use a term that clarified the difference between his ideas and a purely representationalist paradigm, because our understanding of ourselves as being somehow removed from the shared becoming of the world didn’t really take hold until later.

It is this shared becoming, now, which next deserves our attention, because it is from within this shared becoming that we in the contemporary West may be able to regenerate some ways of relating to non-humans at eye level, and in the process re-learn how to become better neighbours to the Indigenous humans who already do.