Even though I got a tremendous amount out of reading Brook Ziporyn's long argument against monotheism, I find it difficult to know who exactly I would recommend it to. The book is an odd combination of tones and subject matter.
On the one hand, as we might expect from a divinity school professor, he has written a deeply academic book whose language and references are likely to be totally obscure for most folks. There are in-depth discussions of Spinoza and Nietzsche, as well as long excursions on negative theology, Plotinus, Hegel, Aristotle, and most of the rest of the Western philosophical cannon. Ziporyn's wide range of breezy references mostly takes for granted that the reader has much more than a passing familiarity with this material. But, to make matters worse (at least from an accessibility perspective), Ziporyn's specialty is ancient Chinese religious philosophy, especially Taoism and Tiantai Buddhism. So he also discusses these traditions, albeit (in the main text) in less detail and usually as a foil to the Western authors. Together, this already makes the book a rather special case within philosophy or religious studies, as it requests if not requires familiarity with Eastern authors usually left out of the standard curriculum.
On the other hand, Ziporyn doesn't write as a standard dry academic. I appreciated the obvious passion he brought to the whole book, which in reality is more of a religious work than a strictly philosophical one. Ziporyn isn't just surveying the comparative terrain, but clearly taking a side and attempting to convince us that the Western monotheist tradition we've come to accept as inevitable is actually a complete dead end from a spiritual perspective. Indeed, his core thesis, reiterated exhaustively, is that the belief in a single transcendent God is precisely what blocks access to the real depths of spiritual life. While I appreciated this clarity (probably not least because I agree with it), the polemic style of the book might be dismissed by other academics. And even for a more general reader like myself, that style often lends itself to a repetitiveness and a soaring grandeur of mystical vision that make the book much less concise than it could be. Ziporyn doesn't write like a standard academic. But that doesn't mean he's a good writer or careful editor. Many of his nested clause-heavy sentences, with their inevitable parenthetical remarkations -- frequently filled with dashes and clunky words meant to mean what other words already mean -- leave the reader bewildered, lost in a sea of twisting prose that attempts, sometimes even with a modicum of success, to convey the surprising depth of a vision of the world that initially seems to bring logic to a paradoxical halt, but ultimately has the power to liberate us. If reading about it does not kill us first. I don't mind some style. But, I beg you, learn the craft of writing.
Nevertheless, while I'm hard pressed to think of someone I know who will genuinely enjoy this book, I found it absorbing enough to invest nearly 4 months reading it quite carefully. Ziporyn articulates many of the same conclusions I have come to in comparing the Western philosophical tradition to what I have been learning through my meditation practice and study. Since he states the conclusions forcefully and in detail, the book crystallized a number of observations for me, though in different terms than I might have chosen. The root problem with the Western worldview, as Ziporyn sees it, is that it regards conscious purpose and control as the ultimate category of explanation, the ultimate, and sole, source of meaning in the world. In the first half of the book, he traces this view all the way back to Anaxagoras's idea of Nous as Arche -- that the world is ordered by purposeful mind, a force which is categorically distinct from it.
Naturally, there are other ways to articulate this problem -- as the contrast of a true and an apparent world, as an assumed subject-object duality, as a privileging of identity and essence over difference, or even simply as the logic of the excluded middle. The advantage of Ziporyn's version lies in its directness. We all have an experience of the feeling of control and purpose. Our foot only moves when we intend it to. Or so we believe. We imagine a little person in our head who is the real us, connected, as if with marionette strings, to the body. Intellectually, we know this image is ridiculous, and yet we live as if it were true almost all the time. It's only with a lot of practice and retraining that we can begin to look through this objective illusion and realize that there is no 'inner self' who controls and decides. Meanwhile, if we fail to see how this illusion arises, we end up projecting it everywhere. We imagine that other people have little people inside them as well. And not only humans, but also, animals, weather, inanimate natural objects, my malfunctioning computer, and even corporations can be seen in this same way. In short, we are almost always unreformed animists who believe that the world is filled with unseen spirits. In fact, this illusion is so strong that we project it not only onto specific things in the world, but onto the world as a whole. And that's how we come to the idea of God -- a being who plans and controls everything the same way we think we plan and control ourselves, a universal spirit. So Ziporyn's A-theism is most easily understood as an extension and corollary of An-atta, the Buddhist concept of not-self.
Why is this belief in inner selves, whether our own or the universe's, such a counterproductive idea? The real problem is that whenever this belief appears, it closes the door to investigation. It gives us that satisfying feeling of concluding our chain of reasoning about why things happen. Instead of investigating how my little person came to form its particular will to move my foot, I simply assume that this being is somehow unconditioned, completely separate from the world, possessed of 'free will' and the ability to decide 'for itself'. That is, the personal Self is literally a personification of our ignorance of conditions, and, as Spinoza memorably pointed out, the will of God works the same way.
For example, if a stone has fallen from a roof onto someone's head and killed him, they will show, in the following way, that the stone fell in order to kill the man. For if it did not fall to that end, God willing it, how could so many circumstances have concurred by chance (for often many circumstances do concur at once)? Perhaps you will answer that it happened because the wind was blowing hard and the man was walking that way. But they will persist: why was the wind blowing hard at that time? why was the man walking that way at that same time? If you answer again that the wind arose then because on the preceding day, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to toss, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will press on - for there is no end to the questions which can be asked: but why was the sea tossing? why was the man invited at just that time? And so they will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, that is, the sanctuary of ignorance. (Ethics 1, Appendix)
So the problem is not that the belief in the existence of purpose and control is 'wrong' because there isn't 'really' any such thing. The Self is an objective illusion. Like an optical illusion or optical effect, it doesn't disappear just because we know intellectually that it is not what it appears to be. Something, after all, keeps appearing, and keeps us projecting our ignorance of how we are constructed onto the world. The point is not that the Self, in particular, is not real, but simply that it is not the final word in every explanation. Indeed, the Self is just as real as anything, and none of these things are the final word, none of them exist self-sufficiently on their own. No thing, not even God, not even the thing we call "nothing", can be assumed as the ground of every explanation, because explanation and investigation don't need to stop. The world of experience isn't 'really' any one way at all, and the more we look at it, the more we'll find in it, not least because the looking is itself part of that same world. So the most important thing the idea of not-self restores to us is an openness to experience as it changes moment by moment. When we leave behind the idea of the single homuncular controller we unfold a much more fascinating, if more uncertain, pluralist world.
Similarly, Ziporyn's problem with God is not so much his putative existence, but the uniqueness of that existence. The danger of mono-theism lies not in the 'theism' but in the 'mono'. And the problem with believing in purpose and control lies not in believing that these categories exist when they don't, but in believing that they are the ultimate categories of all possible experience, that nothing can escape them. These beliefs are just a way of straight-jacketing experience at the outset, of deciding the answer before we begin the search. Instead of investigating the world we simply assume that it conforms to the divine plan, just as we simply assume that our will operates in an unconditional vacuum.
At this point, certain readers may be nodding along and thinking that of course this is correct. God and Self are not empirical concepts and we must give them up if we want to scientifically investigate reality. We moderns are atheists because we are materialists above all. But this is not at all what is being said here.
In much the same way that Nietzsche traces a history of nihilism that (surprisingly) begins with Plato, Ziporyn counts modern atheist materialism as a late-breaking form of monotheism. Ziporyn isn't a materialist at all, and his argument against God is not a corollary to a more general argument against spiritual entities that cannot be scientifically verified. Instead, as we've seen, he objects to the monotheistic God precisely on spiritual grounds. The problem with the concept of God is the way it makes the divine plan the central, unique, and ultimate explanation of how the world works. The problem with God is his monopolization of the spiritual world. The monotheist God creates everything from nothing and governs this creation as sovereign Lord. He is the ineffable world homunculus.
What goes unappreciated in this belief is the way that it requires a passive matter or world to respond to the creator's orders. Yet this is the essence of our idea of control, which requires a strict separation between controller and controlled, a strict hierarchy between the little person in our head, and the body whose strings they pull on. Modern materialism claims to deny the first part of this equation, while preserving the second intact, and this is what leads it into insoluble contradiction. Because what are the inviolable physical laws which govern the universe but a lingering form of God? And what is the supposed inertness of matter if not a relic of the categorical separation between God and his creation. Secular atheist materialism does not allow us to escape the problem of a single real world introduced by monotheism, but on the contrary compounds this problem into the rampant Scientism which dominates our current worldview. It is ultimately a form of nihilism that undermines the very assumptions that make it possible. Scientism may deny the reality of purpose and teleology and meaning all it likes, but where would materialism be without the concept of active immaterial laws that demand obedience from passive material subjects. Since we often hear the claim from secular materialists like Dawkins or Harris that monotheist spirituality is the direct negation of atheist materialism, and that we must choose one or the other, we might wonder what exactly we are left with if we simultaneously give up on both as ultimately derived from the same misguided root. What happens when we leave behind the idea of the necessary dichotomy of controller and controlled, of active mind and passive matter?
The answer, in Ziporyn's terms, is Atheist Mysticism. As befits a form of mysticism, this is less a particular doctrine than a way of approaching experience. The latter half of the book explores three Western thinkers who articulate distinct versions of what Ziporyn is talking about: Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille. The idea is not that these philosophies are all equivalent, but simply that each of them explores what can happen when we remove the idea that the only source of order and meaning in the universe is a conscious control that transcends it. What really holds them together positively is that these are all philosophies of immanence, and hence forms of non-dualism. For fundamentally, what we give up when we give up the illusion of control is the illusion that we are separate from the world. And when we extend this giving up infinitely in all directions, as it were, and give up on that great Self in the sky as well, we give up the idea that anything is separate from everything else. We give up the idea that there is an inherent place or nature of each thing as part of a plan or order outside itself. In the end, we give up on the idea that each thing is only itself, self-identically. This obviously leads us to a pretty paradoxical place, because we end up saying that each thing is really everything else, everything it is not -- or, perhaps stated more clearly, that anything is a mode of everything together just as Spinoza claims we are all modes of being of God, that is, ways that God is.
With this observation, we can finally see the nature of the mysticism that results from removing the idea of purpose and control from the world. We really do find the whole world in a grain of sand. This goes far beyond the obvious (yet still important) realization that the sand is part of the world. Here instead the sand becomes the whole world, and the whole world becomes the sand.
One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things. One has combined "everything" (le "tout"): the indefinite article, the infinitive-becoming, and the proper name to which one is reduced. Saturate, eliminate, put everything in. (ATP, 280)
Strange as it sounds, this is what happens when don't separate the creation from the creator as the monotheist God requires us to do. We leave behind the idea that everything was created as a tool of God, to have a particular role in a particular plan he carries around like a blueprint in his head. And we leave behind the idea that the world is as it appears to us tool using chimps -- filled with stuff that, miraculously, 'really is' just what we want happen to want to use it for. In short, we leave behind the idea of an exclusive unity of the world, a transcendent unity that stands apart from it and organizes it. In its place we find an immanent and inclusive unity, one that includes all distinct and seemingly separate things as inseparable aspects of that unity, and sees that unity as necessarily expressed only within itself, precisely as those distinctions which unfold it without limit. The idea of an absolute infinity, an infinity that embraces everything, even its seeming opposite, even finitude. This is the mystical atheist vision -- a unity that can only be revealed as diversity.
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