Today, after watching Ridley Scott’s version of the Moses story, Exodus: Gods and Kings, a few connections started to form –mainly around my recent scratching at the surface of Spinoza’s explanation of God as substance. But before I go into this, I need to make clear that I, as far as my beliefs, am an agnostic: an atheist that hedges their bets. Therefore, consider all the following talk of God as a compositional convenience (given the material I am working with (and metaphorical in nature.
I would also start by pointing out something brought to my attention during my short tryst with the Unitarian church. It was something Scott got close to when his version of the burning bush described God as saying “I am” as compared to the “I am God” that we’re traditionally told it said. What connected with that is something one of the guest speakers at the church explained. He pointed, first of all, to the difficulty of translating that particular passage. He then went on to point out that many experts came to realize that what was actually being said was “I am Being”. And here we get a translation that is more philosophy-friendly if you will, specifically towards the philosophy of Spinoza.
And I would point out that my interpretation of this has to do with my inability, at this point in my process, to separate Spinoza’s notion of substance and the concept of Being. Furthermore, I cannot help but bring in Spinoza’s understanding of God as not acting out of Free Will (as such would suggest that God could make other choices which would put into question His perfectness (but its very nature in terms of the plagues that God incurred on Egypt and Ramses.
What makes the connections so exciting to me is that you can’t help but feel that Scott may have been acting from some influence from Spinoza in that everything seemed to be resulting from the nature of Egypt and Ramses at the time rooted in and as an expression of the Spinozian understanding of God always acting out of its own nature.
What makes it even more exciting for me (that which I may get an article out of (is the connection we can see between what happened in Egypt and what we are dealing with as concerns man-made climate change. We first have to consider the deterministic nature of the relationship between God and man in Spinoza’s model in that both are acting out of the nature of God. In this case though, it is as if we are acting out of some conflict within the nature of God in order to resolve it.
The thing that should scare us, though, is how that process of resolution will affect our individual lives or the individual lives of our children and grandchildren.
That said, what I also hope to bring into this is the fractal causality at work in Spinoza’s Substance as well as Deleuze and Guatarri’s BwO as compared to a linear one which allowed Spinoza, not having gotten past it (think Newton, to talk about infinite regress as did Deleuze.
And I would also point to the influence the Moses story (being a Jewish one (might have been having on Spinoza without him realizing it. It may well have been that the Jewish church excommunicated him for understanding the story of Moses better than they did.