Pandemonium

We ended our "Pantheologies" course with a bacchanal. Inspired by the cave shrines of Pan, we transformed the tame whiteboards of our classroom into something entirely different. Initially, one wall was to be about pan and the facing wall about theos, but someone had the 

idea to project a yule log onto the theos wall, and when we noticed it reflect in the pan wall, someone else turned the lights down ... and we were in Lascaux and outer space and in the presence of angels and demons with Pan and Schrödinger's cat and Margulis' blue-green algae 

and the Shekinah and the tree of life . Initially, each student claimed a marker pen, a turf and a topic but as time went on the creativity continued to flow and mix, an explosion of ideas and intra-actions worthy of the "pluralistic pantheism" we'd been reading about.

Leaving the room and then returning, with the lights on, to discover what they had co-created, all were astonished: what a range and variety of gifts students bring to a class, if they have occasion to share it! We filmed a "guided tour" and then erased it together. Cathartic!

Pluralistic Universe

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, the author of Pantheologies, visited our class today and it was suitably pluralistically in person! Although she was zooming in we decided to meet in person, having perfected a hybrid community over the course of the semester with our classroom (and sometimes others, as no other class meets Friday mornings on Lang's fourth floor) as well as my laptop, which over the course of the semester has hosted most of the students when covid precautions prevented them from attending in person, swinging this way and that as discussion moved around our table and sometimes even leaving the room to join a group working in another. (After all this hosting it hardly feels like it's just mine anymore, to tell the truth.)

From her home office Mary-Jane shared the laptop - projected today also on a larger screen - with a student on a deep sea research vessel (currently near Hawa'ii) and was passed around the room to meet each member of the class, one of whom is never without her canine companion, before we moved to an extended Q&A the class had prepared. (Look closely at the image above and, in the image from the media console in the corner of the room, you can see the laptop, as well as yours truly taking a picture of the screen, albeit mirrored.) 

Since we were using the laptop speaker (to avoid reverb), Mary-Jane's thoughtful responses, sometimes funny, sometimes moving and always incisive, were heard from each corner of the room as different students framed different questions. It all made for a three-dimensional encounter students said felt markedly different from other virtual class visits they'd experienced. More, it lived out the pluralism Rubenstein takes from James' ongoing overlapping Pluralistic Universe where Things are 'with' one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. 

Peckish for peccary

 

The semester is wending its way to a close - three more weeks, can it be? - including our seminar devoted to Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters. Next week the author joins us (virtually) so we spent today's class recapping and refreshing - and rediscovering what a brilliantly constructed argument it is, too.

Our mechanism was a quiz, generated by the class itself, which identified key arguments, figures and tropes. Students had each been charged with sending me 2-3 questions and I selected a baker's dozen (arranging and, I'll admit, adding a few too). At the start of class, students were given the questions (13 and a bonus) and tasked with writing brief responses to eight of their choosing. We'd spend half an hour like this, and another half hour going through the questions. As if! Working through the questions took almost our whole 2.5 hour class! Students had also been asked to generate a 2-3 page synopsis of the book, so the discussion was synthetic and illuminating: we were considering this rich complicated book as a whole, from a variety of angles, with plenty of enjoyable deep dives.

One of the most enjoyable discussions came near the end: 

11. What is a peccary? (Trick question!) 

It was one of my plants, and I placed it between student-generated questions on how Rubenstein's pluralistic pantheism deals with the problem of evil and another on the affective, ethical and symbol benefit she finds in thinking our buzzing symbiotic world divine. So... what's a peccary? And what's the trick? 

This is a peccary at the San Diego Zoo but the question isn't (just) about this animal ("don't call it a pig"!). It led us to Rubenstein's discussion of the "Amerindian perspectivalism," the name given for the distinctive worldview of Tupi other Amazonian peoples according to which all species regard themselves as human. Accordingly, they identify other things related to them by the same names we use for things related to us in the same way way: a predator they might call jaguar, a prey animal might be peccary, an enjoyable intoxicant beer. This means that where a human like you or me will see a peccary as a peccary and a jaguar as a jaguar, the peccary will see itself as human and see us as jaguars, while jaguars will see themselves as human and us as peccaries. Or something like that... since all these words melt through our fingers as we try to hold them. How do we know we're not peccaries?

I'm not as entranced by the delirious weirdness of "Amerindian perspectivism" as some are, so I didn't really understand what it was doing in her book ... until today. Playing out the slippery undecidability of sorting humans from peccaries with the class, I got its equivocal charm and how it serves her "hypothetical pluralistic pantheism." Humans and/or peccaries and/or all the other symbiotic agents with whom we make the world are right to feel at home in the world, and wrong only when they forget that all the others have valid claims to knowing what's going on, too, which are and are not just like ours. (The Tupi don't forget; you stay away from what seem to you jaguars, and you hunt what seem to you peccaries, all with the respect that is due one's relations. That we all collectively maintain the world is understood.) For getting beyond anthropocentrism, it's too little and too much! But, I saw, it opens up some of the affects of humility and awe and flow which Rubenstein thinks make pluralist pantheism ethically and spiritually viable and valuable.

The 13th century picture above isn't of peccaries; the Bodleian Library, in one of whose books it appears, says it's hedgehogs among grapes. But it's the picture Pantheologies has on its cover and I'm going to say that, just as those vines are also kin to the sky and the earth, those animals may know themselves to be more than hedgehogs. Rubenstein's pantheologies are teeming with possibilities, most beyond our grasp and yet not beyond our awed awareness and participation.

 A student's key to peccary perspectivism

Omnibus

In our seminar on Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies today, we finally reached the closing section of the book. The section, called "Theos," completes a trajectory begun with "Pan," "Hyle" and "Cosmos," and most of it concerns the debates about Einstein's faith in "Spinoza's God" and how Bohr points beyond it to something more like the pluralist pantheism she's exploring, with cameos from other scientific luminaries, as well as theologians Bonhoeffer and Tillich (with lesser lights fulminating). Very exciting but also very, well, abstract. The little burst in the book's final pages of rich indigenous and womanist insights into interdependence and the divinity of change only accentuates the aridity of what precedes it. 

While several found the book's denouement "epic," discussion really got going when one student reported that reading the book had from the start been an uncomfortably "disembodied" experience for her, and she had come to the conclusion that the author's "personal god" was not hers. Another student told how she'd tried to find out what Rubenstein's beliefs were in an online search and had been frustrated to find almost nothing. I told them this was the sign of a professional scholar of religion, a little different from the understandings of scholarship in the service of art, activism and diversity of voices widespread at our school. I find Pantheologies suffused with a distinctive voice and critical sensibility, but to some of these students it just seemed like discussion of other people's ideas. 

Happily, other students wanted to discuss these ideas - especially Einstein's plaintive "faith in reason" and the kindred desire for a fixed ultimate reality beyond the hurly burly of experience and change. A mystically inclined student spoke of "stillness," and I averred that there was none in the world Rubenstein conjures (unless it's like the stability co-created by the gajillions of symbiotic species of Gaia) and that her ultimately very Jamesian book should make us suspect claims to and for fixed, ultimate, unchanging realities as efforts to stop, order, or step out of our teeming world. This is a hard teaching, and I'm sure we'll be discussing it more in the coming weeks.

But the desire to know Rubenstein's "personal God" generated some interesting discussion too. "Personal God" isn't a term Rubenstein uses (though she discusses and dismissed Tillich's use of it) but came rather from the student's sense that everyone's deepest ideas must be rooted in their bodies, their lives. Others noticed the consistent invocations of feminist, anti-racist and ecological concerns throughout the book, but acknowledged that they didn't get a sense of the author's life. 

I directed the class to a passage which I thought gave a glimpse of the author's lived life which happens also to question the anthropocentrism of "personal" questions. It's in the parentheses of the second long sentence of this 3-sentence paragraph from page 182:

I'm pretty sure, I said, that we're hearing about the non-hypothetical challenge of an ecofeminist's putting up a wood-frame house for her family and dogs and cats and having to decide what to do about a colony of termites in the ground. The "thoughtful deliberation" she menions was real and difficult and necessary in that place and time, and is real and difficult and necessary all the time in different ways. Could we think about Rubenstein's dicussions of James, Spinoza, Bruno, Margulis, Einstein, Bohr and Octavia Butler as resources for doing this in a more sensitive way? The word "omni-personal" typifies the paradoxical task: it's as abstract a term as they come and yet it seeks to name the ongoing reality of a world always more animated, more relational and more locally embodied and co-created than we can ever truly grasp. 

Pantheologies tries to help us clear away the preconceptions - especially the preconception humans are the only persons, and that divinity is likewise "humanoid" - that get in the way of participating in the world. It doesn't supply the termites; they're already there. It also doesn't tell us how to negotiate coexistence with them, but it makes us more likely to recognize their claim on existence, their co-responsibility for sustaining the world we share, and to try to find ways of thriving together. A book can't make us embodied (any more than the many books that try to make us disembodied can do that) but it can help us realize we are embodied, and this book (for which embodied also means divinely entangled) does that, no?

My presentiment of divinity (let's say that instead of "personal God") is also not Rubenstein's. I find her delight in "holographic" perspectivalism and her emphasis on the fearful as well as grateful affects of wonder off-putting and hard to reconcile with the stupendous symbiosis of Gaia. But that seems less significant than a shared resonance with the open-ended pluralism we both learn from James and recognize in the figures and narratives of traditions from around the world, though I don't see them in all the places she does - and of course James still relies on a humanoid understanding of persons, too. As ever in the pantheistic mutivers there is work to do!

Sixteenth century, hello!

Spent part of this week unexpectedly in the sixteenth century. 

Letting Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies guide a course of reading is delicious. Students are preparing presentations on three areas she touches on in her chapter on "Matter" this week and I'm prepping too. Fun to return to the Preoscratics and Lucretius, nice to have a reason finally to read the essay where A. Irving Hallowell coins the phrase "other-than-human 'persons'," but the greatest delight was having a chance to read Giordano Bruno's dialogue On Cause, Principle, and Unity, 1584, which is both more intellectually radical and more enjoyable as a piece of writing than I could have imagined. Who knew that the "new animism" has this European precedent?!

But an earlier 16th century text was the star of another occasion, a short series of lectures on "Philosophy in an Age of Imperial Decline" by the always compelling Cornel West. Here he is being introduced by our university president, Dwight McBride, in the 12th Street Auditorium in what may be The New School's first big public event

in two years! The 16th century text Cornel commended was Erasmus' Praise of Folly. Published in 1511, not twenty years into what he calls the Age of Europe (1492-1945), Cornel read this text as foreseeing the catastrophes which colonial expansion would bring to peoples around the world, and the intellectual bankrupty it will produce in the colonial metrople. Cornel used this to provide a tradition for philosophers trying not to accommodate themselves to the ideologies of empire - religious or secular, professional or commercial. Its "holy folly" is consonant with the "tragicomic" stance of Chekhov and the Blues, which define a way to keep striving for justice and joy even while recognizing calamity will never end.

Heady, and historic themes!

Spinoza?

Spinoza was a guest star in one of my classes today, the first time in decades. The long maligned and now endlessly celebrated Dutch Jewish philosopher is central to the modern history of "pantheism," and so plays an important part in Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies, focus of one of my classes this semester. Students are required to trace some of Rubenstein's important sources, and so we had two back-to-back presentations on Spinoza today, one on the Ethics and one on the Theological-Political Tractatus. One presentation started with this image, which was new to me, and which I took for something recent and second rate. Rediscovered less than a decade ago, it turns out it may be the only portrait for which Spinoza sat, though the evidence for it is circumstantial. It's dated to 1666 and probably by one Barend Graat, known to have known people Spinoza knew, but the pagan Roman background is improbable. Still, it looks like a graduate student in philosophy and that was enough for my students. 

I've long resisted Spinoza's charms, since he was he has so often been contrasted (always favorably!) with Leibniz, my dissertation subject, but there is a nerdy "charisma" to him, as one student presenter put it today. Pantheologies gives pride of place to Spinoza, too. In what she calls a "faithful betrayal," Rubenstein argues that the pantheistic view Spinoza lays out is more pluralistic than he could imagine, given 17th century science. I'm (so far) resisting the temptation to say that if you want a pluralist Spinoza you need look no farther than Leibniz. 

But isn't Leibniz in the American philosophical canon in part because William James - another star of Pantheologies - thought he offered a pluralistic alternative to the Spinozan monism of Josiah Royce? (That claim, made in an essay by Bruce Kuklick called "Seven thinkers and how they grew," was the basis of the last class I taught in which Spinoza came up, "Spinoza, Leibniz, Royce and James," in a different life long ago.) I'm not quite ready to trot out the "Monadology," but Leibniz' - quite Spinozan - theory of the "striving possibles" seems like something Rubenstein's "hypothetical pluralist pantheist" might like.

Panorama

The "Pantheologies" class had a field trip today to look for representations of Pan at the Metropolitan Museum. While satyrs abound, Pan figures are relatively few, and it was fun to seek them out (with the help of the online collection guide). This dynamic 1st century Roman marble statue and the contemporary 

marble mask

are in the main hall and quickly found us. Each seemed a little crazed by the nubile statues they couldn't touch, though the mask, which a student had described as menacing but looks more confounded, especially from the side, reminded us that we can't read the affect of ancient figures.

This late 4th century BCE Greek bronze box mirror, in one of the adjacent galleries, was a little harder to find, and is beautiful in ways mainly found in much later art, from a time when the human form was considered safe from animal transforma-tions. But the real fun came 

with tracking down a blissed out little late 5th-4th century BCE Peloponnesian statuette (which might not even be Pan!). In part this was because the deserted mezzanine gallery it was in proved a vast collection of glass cases overflowing with works of all kinds, and it wasn't with all the other bronze figurines! By the time an intrepid student found it with other archaic works from Boeotia, Laconia and Euboea, we had been exposed to myriad beings mixing animal, human and divine forms. This terrific entourage reminded us of the porosity of all these categories. Pluralistic pantheism indeed!

Concatenation of systems

The Pantheologies course was trippy today! It was a first week of "dig deeper," where teams of students had been charged with tracking down some of the sources and inspirations of our class text, Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies. I wasn't sure what they'd have to offer after just a week, since sources are hard to find on short notice and group projects are usually a bridge too far - indeed, this is but wek 3 of a semester whose first two weeks were in the aspic of zoom - but they delivered! Even the group whose assigned book, Grace Jantzen's unjustly neglected Becoming Divine (1999), is nowhere available on short notice, being too old to be digitized and the only local library copy being listed as missing, managed to reconstruct the argument from other sources. The presentations (each group had collaborated on a deck of powerpoint slides) were overwhelmingly rich, especially as I insisted on their being presented back to back without a break. By the time of our well-deserved break, Pantheologies was floating atop a churning sea of American cultural queasiness about pantheism, feminist philosophy of religion, pluralist pragmatism and the impish and unnerving figure of Pan.

But this was just the start. After the break, one of our gifted research librarians was scheduled to show us how to read references. During the break I showed her the powerpoints and she said "I guesss I'm not needed here!" but we decided it was always worth a review. She's prepared by reading our class text and in short order what had to some (not all) seemed familiar research tips became more and more exciting for the worlds of references and discussions and debates to which this book was inviting us. Who knew how much would be turned up by searches of databases, reviews, etc.? Most fun was learning that you need to use asterisks for certain searches, as there may be typos in catalog entries - case in point, the elusive Becoming Divine is listed in one library as Becoming Diving!! Most exciting were the citation indexes, which could show us who else was citing the works Rubenstein was citing - and what other things they tended to cite. I've always tried to introduce students to the idea that scholarship is a conversation, but it's never offered a rush like this.

It all resonates with Pantheologies, too, whose description of a "pluralist pantheist" world - an open, relational and self-exceeding concatenation of systems that are themselves open, relational and self-exceeding (24) - seemed an uncannily apt description also of the worlds of interconnected works the librarian had shown us. More, one group had shared the ideas, from William James' A Pluralistic Universe, undergirding Rubenstein's pluralist pantheism. Unlike the "monistic pantheism" which holds everything connected in a single all-comprehending unity (which we may or may ont one day grasp), "pluralistic pantheism" understands everything to be connected and related, yes, but not everything with everything else. Relations and connections overlap and are still being formed. There may be never be a final all-inclusive collection. In the meantime there is discovery, creativity! Was I the only one to feel that spirit in our classroom?

I believe!

Letting Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies open new worlds for us - we're alternating weeks reading her book and reading sources she cites - is turning out to be a wonderful education. As part of this week's digging into the sources of her project, as outlined in her introducion, I had occasion to return to William James' A Pluralistic Universe, which I don't think I've looked at since graduate school. 

Rubenstein takes the idea of a "pluralist pantheism" from this book, even as, she argues, James isn't ultimately willing to go there. She's right but no matter. James of all people would expect others to see farther, and the vista is splendid. I'll doubtless have occasion to dwell on some of James' pluralist thoughts, with which I resonate deeply. But here's a gem, from the book's last pages, which ties together all his thinking about religion going back to "The Will to Believe." What he calls the "Ladder of Faith" is the way, he proposes, that anyone arrives at believing anything - and why it matters that we do. 

A conception of the world arises in you somehow, no matter how. Is it true or not? you ask. 

It might be true somewhere, you say, for it is not self-contradictory. 

It may be true, you continue, even here and now. 

It is fit to be true, it would be well if it were true, it ought to be true, you presently feel. 

It must be true, something persuasive in you whispers next; and then—as a final result— 

It shall be held for true, you decide; it shall be as if true, for you. 

And your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making it securely true in the end.

James, William. A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy [London: Longman, Green, 1909], 328-29

God's work

Two sessions in, I realize I haven't told you anything about the new course I'm teaching this semester. It's a deep dive into a single book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein's recent Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (you might remember my delighted discovery of the book last year) and already taking interesting shape. Students come from a fun variety of academic backgrounds. Last week I asked them to introduce themselves by indicating what in the course description had piqued their interest, underlined here: 

Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (2018), one of the most exciting recent works in the philosophy of religion, queers the history of western religious thought by challenging centuries of anxious rejections of “pantheism”—the identification of world and divinity. Pantheologies explores the liberatory potential of a “pluralist pantheism” blurring long-hallowed distinctions in religion, philosophy and science, exposing the gendered and racialized assumptions structuring canonical views of the world and its meanings. Rubenstein’s investigations bring into spirited conversation Baruch Spinoza and Donna Haraway, Giordano Bruno and William James, Lynn Margulis and Albert Einstein, Amerindian perspectivalism and Paul Tillich, the “new animism” and the prodigiously boundary-transgressing figure of Pan. In this single-text class we work our way through Rubenstein’s rich and multifaceted argument, following up references and extending her insights in our own thought and work.

Today we dove into the book itself, discussing the introductory chapter where Rubenstein maps out her project. Students had written thoughtful responses online beforehand, which gave us much to work with. What's meant by pantheism, how is it different from panentheism and atheism, why has it been so vociferously criticized throughout western intellectual history, and what are the practical implications of Rubenstein's "pluralist" pantheism? These are lofty questions and the chapter we read is just an introduction; we'll get deeper into all of these in the coming weeks. Our modus operandi is to spend a week reading a chapter and another week researching some of its important sources and interlocutors - for this opening section teams will be exploring Grace Jantzen, whose argument for pantheism as a form of feminist theology is one of Rubenstein's inspirations; William James, source of the idea of "pluralist" pantheism; a book about the sinister racial underpinnings of the pantheism of the 19th century "American renaissance"; and the figure of Pan.

Today's most interesting discussion, however, came from a student's surprise that Rubenstein of all people still "capitalizes the word 'God'." Who'd have thought there was so much to be said about God vs god (vs G-d), its connection to divinity or Divinity, sacred or Sacred, Earth or earth? (I reminded the class that this was a very modern English problem; there is no capitalization in many languages, and in English even a few centuries ago all nouns were capitalized, as they still are in German.) Rubenstein prefers the word divinity for the very reasons the student was surprised, but from Jantzen took the lesson that the metaphysical and ethical implications of the notion of a transcendent male God make this a term which needs to be reclaimed and revalued; left alone, as seen in many garden variety atheisms, it lives on, unquestioned as the only possible thing divinity could be. But if it's a bad description of what divinity is, mired in human limitations and cultural biases, pantheistic unpacking may be God's work!

An interesting tangent to this discussion was what pronouns to use for divinity. (In recent years we've all thought a lot about pronouns and their powers and dangers - though in the human context.) I told how I'd at one point started using "His" instead of "his," knowing it to be a kind of theological coming-out. Now, like many do, I use "God's" - human understandings of gender should have no place here - but it feels a little contrived. Better Wil Gafney's gloriously unwieldy she, he, they, One who is three, seven, twelve, many? Rubenstein, not working within biblical tradition, challenges us to stare down all conceptions of “humanoid” divinity. Maybe it would be better to use the plural "their"? ("Their"?) There may be occasions for the impersonal "its," too. But also, depending on your kind of pantheism, "my" and "our." Head spins ahead!

Teach teach teach

Whew, three syllabi done! It's more work than it used to be, now that all classes live on the LMS (learning management system), but that positions us well for any bumps we might encounter along the way. Like the fact that our first 2 weeks are going to be online again! Still, two 3-course semesters back to back are making for a tiring year. At least I get to choose what I teach, and each of these classes will be a rewarding experience, whether taught for the first time or a repeat.