Eternity and the Bondage of Time Whitehead and
Eternity and the Bondage of Time: Whitehead and Spinoza on Grace and Affliction in Simone Weil David Banach Saint Anselm College This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. . This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heartrending harmony. . The whole creation is nothing but its vibration. Simone Weil, Waiting For God, 124.
The One and the Many Whitehead, Spinoza, and Simone Weil, like all thinkers in the Platonic or Neo-Platonic tradition, explain Manyness as arising from Unity and returning to Unity. p The Many arise from One and return to One. p Grace is a metaphysical feature of this sort of world, where thinking beings are at once one and separate from the source of being. p
Two Directions Sun Metaphor in Plato Return trip fueled by trip down. p
Themes from Simone Weil to be elucidated p p Creation was a withdrawal by God to allow created things to exist. A separation of self from self. There are two stages of Grace: a descending motion and an ascending. God’s act of love in creation crosses the infinite distance of space and time and our acts of attention and decreation reunite what had been separated. Affliction is an expression of divine love that is coextensive with the suffering of thinking things.
Simone Weil on Creation p p “On God's part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation. God and all his creatures are less than God alone. God accepted this diminution. He emptied a part of his being from himself. ” (Waiting for God , 144) “His love for us is love for himself through us. Thus, he who gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of not being. Our existence is made up only of his waiting for our acceptance not to exist. He is perpetually begging from us that existence which he gives. ” (Gravity and Grace, 33) “It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him. . Necessity is the screen set between God and us so that we can be. ”(33) Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual. At each moment our existence is God’s love for us. But God can only love himself. His love for us is love for himself through us. Thus, he who gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of not being. (Gravity and Grace, 32)
The Way of Nature and Gravity p “When a man turns away from God, he simply gives himself up to the law of gravity. Then he thinks that he can decide and choose, but he is only a thing, a stone that falls. ” (Waiting for God, 127)
Two Stages of Grace p “Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace, and the descending movement of the second degree of grace. ” (Gravity and Grace, 4)
Two Degrees of Grace We are incapable of progressing vertically. We cannot take a step towards the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us. (Waiting for God, 132) p A day comes when the soul belongs to God . . Then in its turn it must cross the universe to go to God. The soul does not love like a creature with created love. The love within it is divine, uncreated; for it is the love of God for God. (132) p
Two Degrees of Grace God Man p Descends Ascends p 1. Man is lifted away from things towards God by affliction or joy. p 2. Man attends to things despite affliction and God (in things) is reunited with God (in himself) through us. p
Simone Weil on Affliction p p "At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. " (Human Personality, (315) Time’s violence rends the soul: by that rent eternity enters. (Gravity and Grace, 83) God is crucified from the fact that finite beings, subject to necessity, to space and time, think . . as a thinking, finite being I am God crucified. (89) The mutual love of God and man is suffering. (Gravity and Grace, 89)
Simone Weil on Affliction p p p Limitation is the evidence that God loves us. Gravity and Grace, 105) Extreme affliction. . . is a nail whose point is applied to the very center of the soul whose head is all the necessity spreading throughout space and time. . The infinite distance separating God from the creature is entirely concentrated into one point to pierce the soul in the center. (Waiting for God, 133) In this marvelous dimension, the soul. . . can cross the totality of space and time and come into the very presence of God. (134)
Simone Weil on Attention "Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized. Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love. " (Grace and Gravity 64) p “Attention taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. ” (Gravity and Grace, 117) p
Simone Weil on decreation “May God grant me to be nothing. In so far as I become nothing, God loves himself through me. (Gravity and Grace, 34) p I must withdraw so that God may make contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves. It is tactless for me to be there. . I deprive God of contact with all that in so far as something in me says ‘I’. (Gravity and Grace, 41) p
The Part of You That Suffers The part of you that suffers is the most important part of you, the part that cannot forget from which direction the light shines. p It reminds us that God is waiting to enjoy the world (his own self estranged) through our eyes. We need only get out of the way. p
II. Spinoza Obvious affinities p World Subject to Necessity and without final causation. (“Metaxu”) p Intuition or Third Kind of Knowledge (Ethics II, 40, note 2) and Attention (“Contemplation of the Divine”) p Acquiescence and Decreation p Human Bondage and Affliction p
II. Spinoza on Freedom and Bondage All Humans are essentially in bondage to the necessity of the world as felt through their body. (Ethics, IV, 4) The very condition of our being as separate selves is inadequate knowledge through our body. p All Humans have the capability within each perception of forming adequate ideas, sub species aeternitatis, and, thereby gaining freedom from the limitations of self. (Ethics, V, 4) p
Emanation by Limitation
God for Spinoza God is a substance of infinite attributes, two of which we have some awareness of: Thought and Extension. p Ideas of the essences of things as the are in themselves are modes under the attribute of thought. These are what we think of when we have adequate ideas. p
Things actually existing p God’s ideas of things not as the exist in his mind but only through the sequence of causal relationships they have to other things. This is how we conceive of things inadequately.
Mind is God’s idea of the Body Ethics II, 19 p The Human Mind is God’s idea of the Body as actually existing, that is, through its relation with the causal network of actually existing things. p I come to exist as a mind by God’s act of self-limitation or setting himself in bondage within the limits of my body. p
The Mind of a Finger p My idea of the word limited to the interactions it has with my finger
Stages of Withdrawal 1. God separates parts or aspects of himself into essences. p 2. God limits these to their relations within the casual sequence of the actual world. p 3. God sets himself into bondage within a particular body. p
Difference and Unity at the same time The very act by which we come into existence as a separate mind is what p (1) We must overcome to form adequate ideas and become free. (Stage 2 for Weil) p (2) Maintains the identity within the single substance of God that allows for the possibility (Stage 1) p
III. Whitehead p Alfred North Whitehead: English and American. 1867 -1947 Process philosophy p Actual entities are drops of becoming. p
III. Whitehead: Two kinds of Becoming Values are expressed as synthetic unities in time. p Being expresses itself in two ways: 1. open ended, eternal process in pursuit of possibilities. p 2. the completion of finished finite actualities, or actual occasions or entities. p
Two Kinds of Process in Whitehead Transition: movement from one constituted moment of time to another. A series of totalities. The passage of time p Process: non-temporal process within the internal constitution of an actual entity. Only reaches totality when process comes to an end as the actual entity is appropriated into an other. p
Dripping Drops dripping drops
Two Natures of God Consequent- God’s coextensiveness with each instant of finished time of the universe. Constitutes the history of the universe in time. (Objective Immortality) p Primordial- The drip that never drops. The primordial process which never reaches totality and the repository of all possibility (eternal objects). p
Prehension in Whitehead Physical Prehension: The other enters into the internal constitution of an actual entity, in causal relations. An actual entity is constituted by its relations to the rest of physical reality. p Conceptual Prehension: The apprehension of form or potentiality. Acts as a lure for feeling. p
Conceptual Prehension and Space The many possibilities, or lures for experience, are graded for relevance by the particular perspective in space and time granted by the way the entity is embedded in reality. p You feel the possible through the focus of the lens of actuality and the way it limits you. p
Stages of Process 1. Physical Prehension: A being finds itself situated in a web of necessity and constituted by those relations. p 2. Novel Synthesis: A being feels the lure of potentialities within the Primordial nature of God from which it was closed off. p 3. Death and Rebirth. The Many become One and are increased by one. Each being comes into existence only by sacrificing itself back into the primordial Process. p
Parallels Spinoza Whitehead Weil Eternal Essences Primordial Nature of God Actual Existence Consequent Nature of God Necessity Intuition Conceptual Prehension Attention, Grace Acquiescence Relativity Decreation
Affliction is placement in space and time p p It is the very source of our particular existence, its placement in space and time, that separates it from Being and renders it subject to Necessity. Affliction focuses all of space and time on the single point of our existence. This act of self limitation by God is the supreme gift. We feel it as Joy only when chance brings the workings of Necessity into harmony with our particular nature. But we can feel it always as affliction. Consciousness of the gift of existence is affliction, and coming to this consciousness is the purpose of creation.
A problem to consider from Whitehead What constitutes the reality of creatures. Is acquiescence or attention something we do, or something God does? p Whitehead’s account of creative synthesis fueled by eternal values is implicit in Spinoza and Weil, but may not be consistent with other aspects of their thought. p
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