So I said a fantastic book I'd started reading, called Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters, seemed like the kind to change your life. Well, after taking a big intoxicating swig each day for a week, I've finished it! Has my life changed?
First I need to say that it made me green with envy. Such sweep, such brilliant interweaving, such wit! And it brought together many things I've been interested in, thinking thoughts to their conclusion which I hadn't gotten around to - or dared to. It has William James on pluralism at the beginning, Lynn Margulis and Donna Haraway and Deborah Bird Rose in the middle, and Octavia Butler on "God is Change" at the end, and these aren't even the main figures discussed, which include Spinoza, Bruno and Einstein! It also integrates insights from feminist, queer, post-colonial, anti-racist and new animist literatures - and Christian theology, too. Stitching it all together are a series of delightful cameos by the polymorphous figure of Pan. A friend tells me this book represents to him what philosophy of religion, which many have written off as dead, should be. My thought was that this sort of work was what the Gifford Lectures were designed for, showing the affinities and synergies of science and religion in a new key. It's a reminder, too, of how exciting work in the history of ideas can be.
The larger project of the book is to make pantheism - the identification of the universe and divinity (a term Rubenstein favors over God) - thinkable. This is startlingly hard to do as, she shows, much of western thought has been premised on its unthinkability. Certainly, a particular version of pantheism - with James she calls it "monistic pantheism" - is thinkable, if almost always only in caricaturing the perceived dangers of others' ideas, but it's not what she's after. "Pluralistic pantheism" focuses on the immanence of divinity in the universe, rather than positing any sort of unity, and it's wild. In her careful readings of Spinoza, Einstein and even James, she finds thinkers whose thought was pointing toward such a pluralistic pantheism who were ultimately unwilling to complete the thought, falling back into some sort of monism or, worse still, what she dubs "mantheism": God is immanent, not in the material universe, but rather in one (allegedly) exclusive conscious corner of it (37).
Perhaps these thinkers are blinkered by the limits of western imagination - at least since the later Stoics shut down their pluralistic pantheism and Christians followed. Rubenstein introduces the "new animist" idea that personhood isn't a human monopoly - we are surrounded by what Irving Hallowell called "other-than-human persons" - then takes it further. These persons (which, with the new materialism, Rubenstein argues include the supposedly "inanimate") sympoeitically constitute each other in relations. This world of relations, glimpsed at various points by various thinkers and given a scientific pedigree by relativity and Karen Barad's Bohrian concept of "intra-action," is one of the things Rubenstein's "pantheologies" propose.
Another pantheological proposal is that the universe necessarily eludes our totalizing imagining because it is perspectival. Rubenstein grabs Spinoza at both ends: deus, sive natura is only the tip of the iceberg, since God has an infinite number of attributes, not just two. But these attributes, while infinite, are also in some way contingent, as the "modes" through which they manifest somehow manage to be. It's dizzying and delirious and disconcerting ... and divine. Pantheism, reclaimed from the panic of the polemicists and from the hesitation of its prophets, discloses a world of vibrant stuff which makes most theisms seem human all too human. And it's better than atheism, she argues, because it generates awe, mutual responsibility, and wrests reality from the dead hand of monotheistic hierarchies and their soulless secularized successors (184-87).
It's an exciting book, and I thrilled to learn new things, revisit old ones, and see them brought into such a dynamic and multi-faceted conversation. In recent years I've drifted away from intense engagement with the western intellectual history, and this book both showed profound new problems within it and introduced a community of heretics and visionaries who demonstrated you could do brilliant things with its terms, monstrous and wondrous things neither boosters nor critics have thought of. Maybe all those things I used to know may serve some purpose in this decolonial Anthropocene era after all, I found myself thinking, gratefully. Maybe the energetic affinities I've sensed with material from other traditions and perspectives are more than figments of my halting imagination.
But has this book changed my life? It's too early to tell but for now my life seems, for better or worse, mostly unchanged. This is less because so many of the sources, historical and contemporary, engaged in Pantheologies had already seemed promising to me than because its synthesis of them isn't the one I was getting around to making - or resisting making.
This wouldn't surprise Rubenstein, who calls her book Pantheologies precisely to avoid suggesting her perspective is the only one! The point isn't just to start thinking about what a pluralistic pantheism might be, but to invite us to the world(s?) of pluralistic pantheisms. A part of her argument, braided from threads of Spinoza, particle-wave relativity and Amerindian perspectivism (of which more below), is that no account can ever be final, or finally reconciled with all others, and part of the upshot of this is that this should ground a new kind of wonder and engagement.
I get it, sort of, but I don't find myself in the wonder she describes, and not, I think, because I am wedded to the bad old views she helps us see through. (I should hedge my bets here: I'm sure I remain unconsciously beholden to many such problematic perspectives, and am anticipatorily grateful for how Rubenstein's insights will further liberate me from them as they take root in my thinking.) Perhaps it's a difference - to use another notion of James' - of philosophical temperament. The difference in wonders became clear for me in her comfort with something I find simply baffling, the aforementioned Amerindian perspectivism. Here's how she describes it:
as [Eduardo] Viveiros de Castro explains, any being that can call itself a subject "sees itself as a member of the human species" and sees others as nonhuman predators or prey. So, according to the Jurana (Tupi) people of central Brazil, when a jaguar looks at a jaguar, she sees a human being. When that same jaguar looks at a Tupi man, however, she sees a monkey, or perhaps a peccary. ... As it turns out, every other ontic grouping, no matter how mundane, works the same way. From a vulture's perspective, what the Adhanika (Campa) people call maggots are actually grilled fish; from a jaguar's perspective, blood is beer; from a tapir's perspective, mud is a hammock. ... In other words, there are no "substances" at all ... every term is akin to the designation "mother-in-law": any thing is only what it is from the perspective of the one for whom it is that thing. So, as [Tânia Stolze] Lima points out, a Jurana person will not say that it rained yesterday, but that "to me, it rained." After all, in this multiperspectival social system, where "peccaries" see flutes in the things that "humans" judge to be coconuts, it would be hard to say whether it rained from anyone's perspective other than "mine." (137)
I've tried to wrap my mind around "Amerindian perspectivism" before and failed, so maybe I'm just jealous that it makes sense to her. I know there are flocks of scare-quotes in her recounting that everything understands itself as human, and in the familiar sorts of relationships humans have with prey and predators, pleasures and pains: this would be another "mantheism," surely, not obviously better for being attributed to all beings. And it's fantastically suggestive to bring this together with relativity, etc., a shooting the moon of the ultimate significance or insignificance of the human. But the cachet of Viveiros de Castro's fashionable "multinaturalism" bothers me to no end, and I am confused at Rubenstein's comfort with it. With Margulis I want to protest that microbes do not see themselves as members of the human species. And I don't think it's a holdover from the bad old days to want to believe that, for all our different places in the emergent wonders of symbiotic creativity, it rains on all of us alike. Does that make me, ultimately, a monistic pantheist? Perhaps my recoil at certain and comprehensive views, however multiple or perspectival, aligns me rather with the polytheism of James' piecemeal supernaturalism? Pantheism's messiness seems too orderly to me.
I'll keep pondering Pantheologies' arguments, and have generated a significant list of must-reads from its remarkable bibliography. I can't wait to read Rubenstein's other books. But for now, the divinity of the world remains for me piecemeal, opaque.
