Ping Pong 11; Making Sense of the Exception

  In the last rant I examined in detail the status of miracles in the work of Malebranche and Pascal. The latter presents a theory which in effect allows miracles a level within creation as the wild fire that takes up mass phenomena and makes them sing differently. Malebranche argues by contrast, for a much quieter and more personal miracle, one that ties my thoughts to the world, and so allows me to interact with it. The latter move asserts that humanity’s mind, and its very ability to grasp the world is itself miraculous. However there remains something problematic in this move, for all its deep appeal. Once one has allowed that the tying up together of world and mind is a mystery, then all hope of understanding or exploiting the actual level in which we are articulated into being, is lost. Moreover such an explanation prevents us from ever really expanding what or how are in the world, and reworking what we feel our minds to be (and so what our being is) in the light of what we can do within that world… A miracle therefore both respects a difference, and yet makes that same difference absolutely irrevocable and therefore rather unproductive. Perhaps Malebranche’s contemporaries thought that there might be another way to do this difference. A way that allowed one either to understand the miraculous through how it allowed us to extend what we are into the world; Or alternatively, which allowed us to understand how the world might itself extend oddly into our actions, and make new miracles in the most seemingly natural of actions. The former argument is found in the writings of Spinoza, whilst the latter forms one of the main planks by which Leibniz sought to grasp the world.

  Spinoza, in a letter to a friend whose son had recently died, considered in detail the problem of prophecy. His friend had had a vision or dream, before ever his son was ill, that the son would soon die, and was now gaining a bitter kind of comfort from that dream. This son might be no more, and yet at least, the father’s dream showed there was more to the world than met the eye. So that perhaps the death of his son might have a wider significance or might only be the death of a body. Spinoza, as the arch rationalist has problems with such an argument. He rejects the appeal to the mystical implicit within this argument, and yet does not want to reject out of hand the line of thought which his friend is clearly gaining so much comfort from.

  Moreover this is a very deep problem according to Spinoza. It goes far beyond comforting a friend. For in attempting to understand the mystical or the spiritual, one needs to divide out three rather different elements. Firstly there is the creative power, which allows something odd, something daffy to appear in the world, be it prophecy or a ghost or a trick of the light. Secondly, and on rather a different level, there is what this  event then allows to happen. That is, what oddity or additional event is dependent upon this unlooked for happening. Finally, there is the interpretation of this event as something miraculous (and therefore pertaining to some will other than that of humanity, that is to some divinity or divine essence).

Spinoza’s argument is that this last move both misplaces and undersells the nature of the miracle. What was something uniquely odd, was the extending of a human mind in the world, and the finding within humanity of an additional resource or new (and strangely odd) contour. It is then this oddity, this creative power, which allowed us to be other than we were, that must be allowed to stand from the scaffold of the miraculous. That is, it must be allowed to stand free from any attempt to subsume the miracle within the will of a divine creator, and thereby lose its unique sense, within the purpose of some divine mind. For Spinoza therefore the sin of the mystical is that it risks closing down thought just at the moment when one has been challenged to think, when one has been challenged to make the world different.

  The Substantive element in the miracle is not the divine (un)rationalization but the strange complicity which exists between the mind and elements in the world. - A complicity that will allow the mind to predict what it cannot know, and so extend its orbit or ability to affect (and be affected) by the world. Spinoza argues therefore to his friend that that friend’s very love for his son allowed him to understand more deeply the nature of his son, and what perturbed him. A love that then allowed the father a grasp on the son’s (sad) future.

  This complicity of mind and world is a factor which of course we have all become all too aware of in the centuries between Spinoza and us. As it is between these two, that medicine and our attempts to grasp a world transformed by the medical is created. What needs to be borne in mind here is that Spinoza is effectively allowing for and articulating a difference between elements within the body and their overall effect within the mind (and the body as a whole) even as he argues that at some level or other the two must be caught up within each other and complicitous within each other. A medicine is therefore critically different from a mere chemical. Medicine is judged always by its effect elsewhere, in the body as a whole, and never on the particular chemical reaction.

   Now this gap needs to be understood in two rather different ways. On the one hand it is clear enough that Spinoza’s gap, allows one the space in which to perform medical experiments in the first place. One might experiment with the world of chemicals and their effects upon each other, and yet running across that experiment is always the mystery of the complicity between these named elements and the body itself. This mystery is, after all, what actually allows the (partially) understood interactions between contrasting chemicals to have an eventual result (for example the relief of depression). Medicine becomes then the science of an intervention at one level, in the name of a miracle elsewhere. Additionally it is a long established fact within medicine that one must listen to the extra effects that every drug intervention has. Many cures therefore started as cures for something else. Their usefulness is therefore always something of a serendipity: the moment when an odd consequence (a cure unlooked for) erupted into the world.

  On the other hand, we have become very aware of the deep problem in our understanding of the human, which is posed by these miracles. What we are, and what we can do constantly shifts. Our desire to change the world then explodes across the domain of chemicals or organic matter. The desire for ‘saviour siblings’ or cloned pets enters into our minds. The problem here is, as Spinoza is utterly aware, that this level of (re)-creation is other than morality, in that it allows or challenges the very nature of humanity. Humanity in the miraculous in the extension of what it is, courtesy of a hidden complicity, really does become other than it was. The old rules by which morality was assessed or judged (rules that were set up within the orbit of a certain human, with a certain series of abilities) become unable to define the axis by which one might judge the miraculous. Or to put it otherwise, the moral, will need to weave a web of intention and purpose over the oddity (or almost randomness) of a change or complicity of mind and body, and force it to be accountable to an external agenda… Morality therefore loses sight of the sheer creative (albeit destructive) power of the miracle to disjoin humanity, and force it into other ways of being in the world.

  Therefore for Spinoza the miracle was the moment that the relations of mind to its body allowed some change in the physical world (which would nonetheless be part of the settled order of things) to have strange new consequences within the mind (and so being) of a human. The exterior world might of itself be predictable and set within a chain of determined causes, and yet the effect of this predetermination upon the mind itself, still leaves room for new acts of creation, and new possibilities to be born. The mind therefore explodes itself across the world, and uses that world to make what it is and what it might do.

  However Spinoza’s move is only possible because at a very deep level he is happy to argue that the soul is itself a creation of the physical world. If that world changes, what the soul is, and what it can be, utterly slips its meaning. This move is profoundly unsettling, as it robs morality (and its handmaiden religion) the right to speak time and time again, on the grounds that it always must simplify the problem just at the moment where the difficulty needs to be allowed to stand.

  Leibniz took up this challenge, and worked out a way in which one might understand rather differently the connection of mind and action, so that one could create a domain within which one might talk of the moral again. In essence Leibniz reverses the Spinoza move. For Spinoza the miraculous happens at the point at which the mind (and the human body) erupts from the settled order of creation, and demands that that order is pulled in a new way. Leibniz counters this by arguing (as Spinoza at another level of course accepts) that it is a mistake ever to tear humanity from the settled order of creation. The true nature of the miracle does not pertain to some fleshy point within reality, (a moment of sub-creation, where humanity and its body tumble into existing), but rather to the texture of reality itself. In particular the strangeness of the fabric of reality which appears to be comprised of the endless interplay and interchange of events, one across the other. The Miracle is therefore held within the nature of the unintended (unattended) consequence, and the creative power of peculiar constellations of events to work slow miracles elsewhere.

  A life becomes then about resolving and re-solving these consequences in a variety of subtle moves and changes. A life is therefore pockmarked by the change in the nature of the events which populate it. Weeks or occasions will feel all encompassing at one point of time, and yet will fade into insignificance or rather, will appear a part of another ‘tale’ and yet will reserve the right to remerge into significance at some later time (our own childhood stalks the childhood of our children).

  The event is therefore the moment that possibilities enter into the world. That is, new ways in which what has been, might endlessly alter that which appears to be so very settled. Nowhere is this currently felt so strongly as in the world of modern politics and media. Take the career of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister. This is a career that seems likely to be defined in a single event (or even a non-event): the non-election of last Autumn. This event that never was, by allowing Brown to appear indecisive, and obsessed with publicity (he is a politician after all!), opened up an entirely different way to view his time in government. Or rather it allowed all the stories about his perpetual infighting with Blair and his cronies, and his chronic indecision (and luck) to re-surface and to appear to be the ‘truth’. They thereby eclipsed all the other stories which had up to that time dominated, of his competency as a chancellor and his ability to run a successful economy. Whether this eclipse would have been permanent if it was not for Northern Rock, the rocketing price of oil, and the credit crunch, is of course another matter. It was then that other events (and the strange doings of money lenders in the Mississippi Delta) which then allowed the event of the non-election, its significance and power. This last fact of course offers the politicians their endless hope. That is, the fact that because events have a habit of transforming our take on other events, it means that up until the moment of voting no decision is (quite) final. Each story might then be rewritten, and an apparent disaster become an eventual triumph.

  Leibniz answers Spinoza by in effect normalizing the miracle. The Miracle is not the moment of complicity of body and mind, but rather then the interplay of events, though which the world is endlessly recreated and reformed. It is this move which then allows Leibniz to suggest that as events endlessly change the world, it is possible to envisage a divine creator who chose one world over all the others. This world was necessarily the richest and most creative of all the ones possible. Morality could thereby enter in on the level of creation. But more importantly (for Leibniz), this move allows one to define the true nature of human morality. That morality, is composed of making oneself truly worthy of living within the richest of all possible worlds. That is, the world which endlessly resonates beyond one’s own identity, allows one’s most treasured thoughts to be thought otherwise, in the interest of this otherness. Morality therefore comes down to accepting that one is caught up within a world replete with other entities and numerous sliding events: And is moral when one allows this richness and creative diversity its own reality beyond the orbit of our perception.

  In a very deep sense Leibniz and Spinoza argue then, on the importance of the other in defining the nature of a miracle. Where they differ is in exactly what that other is. Is it the juxtaposing of body and extended substance or is it merely events? If it is the former, the attempt to weave a consistent morality needed to be sacrificed in the interests of genuine creativity (a creativity that transgressed any one definition of humanity). If the latter, the very invasion of the other implicit in creativity was seen as the founding point of morality. And yet both these moves create rather a deep problem in one’s understanding of the human. Spinoza explicitly allows human desire to warp across the world, and so humanity to be in a flux. While in partial contrast, Leibniz implicitly at least, makes every substance or monad (even the human body, which Spinoza kept) be caught up in, and endlessly have to address everything else within the universe. ‘Humanity’ understood as a soul which operates as a centre of gravity for experience and so to the world is therefore in both visions of the miraculous, lost. Next weeks’s Rant will return to Britain and Locke’s attempt to make good this loss.