Fall New (Falling Leaves) Moon
The card gods were good to me tonight. Until I took over and started getting frisky. I tried to make a hand work where the force was not with me. Still, a good night with plenty of good conversation with men I’ve come to know well.
Bill Schmidt and I had dinner at Pad Thai, as we have for many of the evenings before the game. Bill’s reading a book about Spinoza and one by Spinoza. Spinoza’s an interesting guy in many ways. An apostate Jew. A monist, which is a hard position to defend. An optics maker, a lens grinder by trade.
Bill linked Spinoza’s work and mine, generous of him to think of the two of us in anyway linked. But the connection is fair, I think. When I left the Christian faith behind, I left behind a medieval approach to questions of metaphysics. That approach is text based rather than experience based. In the Christian instance experience is viewed first through the lens of scripture, and through the particular interpretative schema you bring to it. So by the time you get to reality, the gap is already pretty wide.
Christians are not the only ones with this inclination: Islam, Judaism, but, too, as the scholar Bill read points out, anyone who reads the texts of another as the first line of inquiry when faced with philosophical or theological or political or ethical questions.
Where Spinoza and I come together is in having rejected that text based, medieval model of scholarly inquiry. We both turn instead to nature, to lived experience, so the mediation is left to the senses rather than texts. This makes for a different sort of thought, with very different evidence for what we believe is the case.
Spinoza takes his inquiry deep into the nature of nature, building his thought systematically. I’ve never been able to hold myself to one line of inquiry long enough to work systematically, but I have had insights recently that seem to follow some of Spinoza’s. For example, in thinking just yesterday and today about the nature of political commitment, I’ve come to realize that ethics and political thought come after our political values, rather than from them deductively.
What I mean is that what you feel is fair, just, equitable, decent, honest, valuable for yourself and your community, comes first, informed by any of a number of inputs from personal history to family imprint to community of identification and place and era of birth. Only later do we seek out socialism or compassionate conservatism or democracy or autocracy as more systematic elaborations of our apriori sensibilities. We may then use them to enhance or inform nuances of our political beliefs, but they do not create them.
I’ll stop here with this thought. This is why political debate does so little to change minds and hearts.