02.18.09

Reinventing The Sacred

Posted in Philosophy, Science at 5:29 pm by nemo

Discussion of Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing The Sacred, at The Gurdjieff Con

James said,
15.02.09 at 3:29 pm ·
I have been harsh towards Kauffman, but I think he deserves credit for trying to rescue the “God” concept from the Judeo-Christian baggage (for some reason Spinoza didn’t succeed here). Nobody would care if the non-anthropomorphic philosophical concept of the Greeks, Plotinus, etc. had won the day.

As I note at the linked post at The Gurdjieff Con the Spinozism latent in Kauffman’s book/formulation is almost as problematical. It is correct that Kauffman’s approach could resolve much of the confusion in Judeo-Christianity, but at a price.
The ‘flat’ reality proposed by science, and Spinoza, suffered its classic collision during the period of the German Enlightenment, witness the responses in Kant, then Hegel.

For me, the Kantian framework challenges this ‘flat’ nature in Spinoza, in a way that could in some higher system reconcile the two. And Hegel perhaps attempted to produce that higher system. But I think Kant hit the nail on the head, in many ways, with his preoccupation with freedom in the context of Newtonian physics.

Kauffman should acknowledge, at least, that science has stopped, and that this is philosophy, and not expect that Spinozism is going to be science and the dialectical wake of Spinoza is mere philosophy.
I am suspicious that self-organization is philosophy too, ideology in fact.
At one point we are dealing with molecules, the next moment we are dealing with Kauffman’s defense of ‘free markets’ with the same theory!!??

Kauffman’s approach has some highly attractive features, but everything you hope to accomplish with the ‘god’ concept will fail and generate its inexorable dialectic.
I am no Hegelian, not by a long shot, but here the ‘inexorable dialectic’, pace Hegel, itself becomes the object of consciousness, not the sterile god/no god dialectic prior to its ‘third’ aspect, in the progression of ideas as the history of philosophy. It is that history that replaces the dilemma of god/no god in the projected ‘sublation’ of the dialectical sequence in a higher unity. Thus spake Hegel.
His point is significant: to choose a spinozistic ‘god’ definition as a polarity with another view of divinity (e.g Judeo-Christian) simply ignites that dialectic, and the result is….
Still, Kauffman’s perspective has its uses, and interest.
But I think noone is going to listen to a scientist on the sacred.
The picture is too stripped of its crucial issues. What happened to freedom, self, soul, the occult, ….
Kauffman is more broad minded that the reductionists, but relative to the history of religion he has a weak hand.

This criticism is better directed toward the New Atheists, perhaps, who ignite this dialectic powerfully, and lose all their momentum in that.

Meanwhile, beside the abuse of theory for economics, Kauffman’s attack on Kantian ethics, with no explanation, or any citation of the literature, is egregious, and causes me at least to stand back in surprise, asking ‘who is this guy’? Not another Nietzschean down-slide via the anti-Kant route, please.
Kant’s ethical theory is distinct, yet connected, from his basic critique of metaphysics, and is in fact itself a kind of metaphysics. Its success or failure doesnt’ change the fact of the tremendous importance of the Kantian system for any reconsideration of religion.

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