Dr John Mohan Razu
Notions of God continues to keep triggering human mind, intellect, and heart. Over centuries, people across faiths, belief systems, and religions have been grappling with these questions: who is God, why to worship, and why to believe in to that God, and what is the use of that God in my life and living? Barouch Spinoza, a rare and undoubtedly one of the greatest modern philosophers turned Judaism upside down with his scintillating mind and critical applications went deep into Judaism first and then to Christianity by delving, deep into the holy texts.
Barouch Spinoza did not get into the polemics that revolve around questions that relate to God and his/her existence or the questions Friedrich Nietzche raised: ‘God is dead’ created such profound civilizational rupture. Nietzsche had not raised questions about the existence or non-existence of God, but was warning the modern humanity, intoxicated by reason, science, and power; totally scripted of the moral and spiritual undergirding that once was foundational. As against this background Nietzzsche feared that nihilism would run amok resulting in ethical collapse as the world immersed with hatred, fractured discourse and moral decadence.
It is fascinating to observe both the worlds where two minds talking about God quite differently and approached the Godhead from diverse philosophical frameworks. Spinoza a 17th Century philosopher who cuts deep into Judaism and Christianity in particular slice Torah and the Testaments (old and new) scathingly critiquing the fallacies, interpretations, miracles, and raising sharp question of Yahweh and Torah and then the others books including the New Testament. By and large, he did not question the existence of God, but the institutionalized religion that centers God meaning God is nature and nature is God as both are identical.
Nietzsche, a 19th Century, German philosopher regarded Spinoza as a “precursor” shared a number of similarities, but questioned free will, teleology, the moral world order, and the existence of evil. Spinoza’s contribution to philosophy and the notion of God is so unique and mind-boggling. His system of pantheism is the belief that God and Universe are identical meaning “all is God and God is all” and thus views cosmos as a single, self-organizing divine unity, rather than a separate Creator.
He asserts that God’s presence is in the world (immanence), departing from the traditional view of ‘transcendence’) that separates God. Spinoza finds divinity in nature, philosophy, science and many others promoting reverence to the natural world. His pantheistic ideas seem to be sprouting from his notion of God as one substance and everything else as its expression. For Spinoza God is the sum total of existence which includes nature, laws, and host of others. Therefore, Universe and God are seen one and not separated, as so views as unified whole.
Philosophers have always been delving into a quest knowing about truth. Truth will have to be based on evidence, scientific enquiry, proof, logicality, rationality, facts, and so on. Contemplation shall never become postulate or substitute for truth. This is why Spinoza rejects ‘transcendence’ because he argues that God is part of, as God views everything as sacred. Whereas Nietzsche was more concerned to the world he lived was totally enmeshed with negativism completely ravaged by all kinds devastating and ransacking moral sense and ethical values. If ethics or morals gets destroyed it is obvious that religions enjoined with moral and ethical grounds could easily be shaken and thus be demolished.
This is why Spinoza and Nietzsche become so relevant to our context we live both globally, nationally, and locally. In the last few years, we have been witnessing the ways with which indiscriminate crossing of red-lines. International laws and covenants that the comity of nations agreed upon and stringently observed for the last 80-years have totally been busted. United Nations’ charters, multilateral treaties and agreements have gone on a spin.
For instance, the wars and conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and parts of Africa, Asia, and South America where the empires are dictating and not the UN charters. American imperial forces went inside Venezuela kidnapped the president and his wife and now are being prosecuted in the United States. The rants of the political executive of America to taking over Greenland for security reasons; threatening Iran for ‘butchering’ the Iranians; launching Venezuelan modes of operation in Cuba, Mexico, and other South Americas as they are backyards of United States. Trading with those countries that America prohibits hiking of tariffs by 25%.
Politics of transnationalism and intimidation of interventionalist grammar are conspicuously seen amidst the empires that intends to take take-over parts of those countries and by ways of offering security and protection bargain with the two-third world the rare minerals and natural resources and sometimes forcibly appropriate the fertile territories. Across the world brutality is rationalized, suffering becomes normalized, and interventions seem to be the order of the day. Faith in shared values appear fragile and futile, and force and power are the only dictate.
In such a context we tend to believe from the rumblings of Nietzsche God is not just dead, but abandoned humanity. Over and above, a question that arise: how come except some others have become so numb or mute spectators to the violence happening both to the nature and hapless people? This despair in the words of Spinoza is ‘consciousness’ represents a ‘degree of awareness’ that varies with the mind’s power and ability to understand its own bodily states, which increases with intellectual, rather than imaginative knowledge’.
Consciousness for Spinoza is higher levels of mind’s awareness of the things happening in and around us. This is why we wonder how come many are not at all concerned to many things happening around them. When we read history reveals such painful things that hardly gets into many while a few responds and go deeper into the reasons. This type of indifference or apathy challenges some of our claims such as faith, compassion, solidarity, and many others. The outbursts like genocides, spewing venom and vengeance, inciting communal violence and Islamophobia and many others are abnormal and thus exceptional to human characteristics.
In such horrifying state, faith should provide ethical guidance and self-awareness that help people to live and act responsibly in a problematic, imperfect world. Nietzsche believed that in the absence of God, humanity ought to evolve values which is a necessity and obligatory. At the same time, despite centuries of skepticism, violence, and betrayal, belief in God has not been obliterated, because God is just, while the world is not. Faith ought to become a moral compass of humanity. For Spinoza in his Theological-Political Treatise faith is not about adopting philosophical truths but about holding beliefs that enable obedience to God which mandates acting with justice and charity.
