Showing posts with label Spinoza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spinoza. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Belief

The first time I heard my father pronounce,
"When we die, we're meat for the worms,"
I was about ten. He repeated the wisdom
occasionally. He thought "preachers"
were hustlers. Ma ran away from her 

evangelical minister father when she 
was 18. He was a bigot and a creep. 
She never worshipped publicly again,
thought of Heaven, I think, 
as an earned vacation. She gave me
her leather-bound Bible, Oxford U.
Press, all of Jesus's words in red. 

I joined the Catholic Church
at age 45, but my "worship" consists
of giving food to the parish's
food bank and trying to be kind. My
wife's the real Catholic and prays for me,
in both senses of "for." As to God,

who knows? Believing isn't knowing.
Nor is atheism. I'm too busy fearing
humans--of every belief, including
atheism, to fear God.  It never surprises
me to see that another American 
Christian has turned out to be evil.
Sometimes evil and popular.

After my college
History of Philosophy class, taken
at age 17, I never stopped thinking
Spinoza had it right: God equals
everything there is, but probably
no more. A cold view, true. 
Of course, the Jews expelled him,
the Christians condemned him,
and Leibniz envied him. 
Spinoza made a living grinding lenses. 

It's a true fact, as we say
in the American West, 
that the body disintegrates.
Aging gives it a head start. 
The universe is too big, 
dynamic, and complicated
for us to understand
all the way, but I say to science:
keep trying.

We should concentrate on peace, 
equity, and care of Earth. Make these
our primary worship. Keep it
simple-like, you know?


hans ostrom 2022

Sunday, February 13, 2011

A Spinoza/Rubber Bands Re-Post

So someone in the Netherlands re-posted something from this blog--a brief homage to my favorite philosopher, Spinoza, followed by a poem I'd written about rubber bands and in which I mentioned Baruch--or Benedict.

A Spinoza/Rubber Bands re-positng doesn't happen every day. Well, at least not to me.  Yes, yes, I know there are more pressing matters out there, but still: Spinoza, rubber bands, re-posting.

And thanks to those folks in the Netherlands.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

One Thing Is Certain


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One Thing Is Certain


One thing is certain--or is it two? Here
comes a snow-plow pushing letters into words
into phrases into sentences and snow on
and ice forth. Soon a large drift
of meaning looms beside the road.

Minds drive by on their way to
the ski-resort. One thing is certain--
or is it zero? At least something
exists--substance, not the greatest
name to attach to a thing that seems
to have preceded perception and
naming, but as Old Spinoza knows,

a semi-infinite number of pieces fly
off Substance and just beg to be numbered
and named--stars and socks, allergies
and anthems. Certain things are one.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Friday, May 8, 2009

Philo-Silly

So we have a two-day "Reading Period" between the end of classes, a weekend, and final-exams. Given the rhythms of the academic year, this "Reading Period" is more often a period in which to collapse, or take in some oxygen, get silly, or otherwise recover. I know academia looks easy, but it's a bit of a long haul from late August through end-of-May, at least for the gray matter.

I decided to get silly and write some doggerel about philosophy, in the spirit of Reading Period, and recalling certain blue-book exams I took many moons ago. Or maybe it's catterel. Cats do tend to get that look on their faces that suggests, "I'm afraid I cannot possibly consider your request, as it conflicts with my ontology."

Philo-Silly

You can't shake Zeno's hand.
Socrates: a syllogistic man.
Look for Plato in a cave--
but only ideally, you knave.
According to Aristotle,
bottle embodies Bottle.
Nietzsche was a Super guy
who went a bit cuckoo--why?
Just to spite us, Heraclitus
said change will always change us.
Enough with playing games,
said William (not Hank) James:
How do ideas work all day,
and Say affects Do in just what way?
Sartre made a kind of cafe art
out of making meaning: to start,
you say that things are just absurd.
In the Beginning, was the Word.
Marx was one classy, bearded dude
who thought the Ruling Class was rude.
Descartes thought, thus thought he was.
Cogito, ergo Doritos, Cuz.
Spinoza knows a thing called God--
the only Substance--how very odd.
Sophie and Phil went up the hill,
then took Fig Newton's gravity pill.
Be, know, think, define, and do--
philo-silly on the nutshell. Whew.


Hans Ostrom

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Rubber Bands














Based on the minimalist research I've done, I can write with 10% certainty that rubber bands are the product of the mid-19th century and may have been patented in Australia first.


Rubber Bands


I bought a bag of rubber bands. What a paltry
confession! The purchase paid retail homage (one
dollar) to simple binding and flexibility in this age
of monstrous, rigid packaging. I thought of all those
times we searched a whole abode like jonesing addicts
for just one thing: paper clip, shoe lace, thumb tack,
rubber band. Benedict Spinoza proved to my

satisfaction that anything which is, is an attribute
of the only substance (God), which includes
rubber bands, which in repose are lazy bracelets
and flaccid circles. I admit I bought a bag

of rubber bands because they were so much
themselves for so little money. Like cats,
rubber bands stretch profoundly and then
return to their original composure and serenity.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Dabbling in Philosophy

I'm an amateur philosopher--at best. Dabbler is more like it. Like almost every other person who has earned degrees in English, I dipped into philosophy as important background to and context of literature, and I took a two-semester "History of Philosophy" course--but philosophers tend not to like such courses because (so the argument goes) they are more of a tour of ideas than a course in "doing" philosophy. Getting ready for written doctoral exams in 18th & 19th century British literature and Modern British & American poetry, I also read some philosophy, but mostly in connection with specific literary works, poets, and novelists, and not all that systematically.

Having established the absence of preparation and credentials, then, I shall proceed to provide details that will further liquefy, if not atomize, my status in this regard.

My favorite philosopher is Spinoza. I've been reading him (his work) ever since I took that history of philosophy course, and I plunged into Ethics again about a year ago. --Not exactly light reading. But the line of argument is elegant, and the thinking is cool, as in chilly. God is the substance, goes one part of the argument, and everything else (pieces of reality large and small) comprises attributes of God. Evil springs from human misguidedness and mis-perception, not from Satan.

The poet in me likes the fact that Spinoza earned his living as a lens-grinder in the Netherlands, where his Jewish community excommunicated him. Later, a colleague encouraged him to become a Catholic. Unfortunately, the colleague's argument (I take great liberties with the paraphrasing here) was something like "all the popular people in Europe are converting to Catholicism!" Spinoza politely told the fellow that when he (the friend) came to his senses, he would know how ridiculous the invitation and the argument were.

Stuart Hampshire's work on Spinoza has been quite good at getting me as close to understanding Spinoza as I'll ever get. Spinoza has tended to get mis-used quite a bit. The 19th century, for example, wanted to turn him into a mystical pantheist, but that wasn't his argument at all. ("That is not it at all," to quote Eliot.)

Aristotle's my second favorite philosopher, although I know his non-philosophical work better: his writing on poetics (especially on tragedy, of course) and the timeless On Rhetoric. As long as I can remember, I've always preferred his work to Plato's. If Ari were alive today, he'd probably be a scientist or a social scientist, for he was the great empiricist. He seems to have been interested in everything and capable of taking apart everything and having a look. The world was data; data were the world. Even the guesses he made that turned out all wrong were very good hypotheses, even the crystal-sphere stuff.

Hume I love, too. He seems to have taken great joy in disrupting arguments and explaining how the logical connections people thought they were making were neither logical nor connections. --A latter-day Zeno, in my opinion.

I have to give Descartes his props. He came up with the greatest "hook" in philosophy, after all--and kept it to three words. And his thinking certainly swept Europe by storm.

Wittgenstein is fascinating, especially his evolution--going from mocking any "philosophy" that wasn't essentially phrased mathematically to embracing (or at least this is how I misinterpret it) something akin to rhetoric, wherein premises and definitions can function even as we acknowledge that they're contingent or constructed. The book about the famous (and famously mis-remembered or multiply remembered) "poker" episode with Popper, Ludwig, and Bertie Russell is entertaining.

I wish I liked Plato more, but I don't feel quite so bad after having read a biography of A.E. Housman (classical scholar), who read Plato as an undergraduate, decided what Plato had to say was a useless way of explaining the world, and never changed his mind.

I always found it ironic that Plato wanted to expel poets from his utopian kingdom because I see him primarily as a dramatist, a writer of little plays in which Socrates is the hero and, like professional wrestling champions, always "wins" the rigged contests. And the parable of the caves is lovely poetry. I enjoyed I.F. Stone's book on Socrates, especially how Stone criticizes Socrates without defending the death-sentence given him, even if Socrates had the choice of leaving the city rather than facing death.

And how cool is it that Aristotle and Plato just had one name--just like some celebrities nowadays? "The Philosopher formerly known as 'Plato.'"

Among the legion of philosophers whose work I never "got" are Leibniz and Kant. Or maybe I did "get" part of Kant and just didn't think it went anywhere. He seems to want to deny reality--but not really. He seems to waffle (a technical term in philosophy). Without a doubt, I grossly oversimplify when I remark that "the categorical imperative" seems like a very ornate version of the golden rule. When I got to the "monads" in Leibniz, I started laughing, and I apologize--for that for thinking that Berkeley is Plato Redux.

It's hard to overestimate Hegel's revolutionary (so to speak) ideas about history, but damn, his work is often impenetrable (to me, a mere poet, critic, and dabbler).

I could never quite connect with Nietzsche's work, either. I probably just needed a better philosophy professor--a better or more systematic introduction to his work. Or maybe I just imbibed too much of Aristotle-on-hubris to be anything other than suspicious about what appears to be the glorification of the will. What we think of as "the will" seems like something useful selected by evolution; it provides persistence and focus, among other things. But does it provide a worthy basis for understanding the world fully, for doing well and doing good? I don't know. But then Nietzsche wanted to move past good and evil--so there's that. I need to give Nietzsche at least one more try. This time maybe I'll confer with a Nietzsche-expert who happens to work on the same corridor as I.

I reckon the stuff I've read on Zen Buddhism doesn't really qualify as philosophy--or does it? Zen Buddhism seems to me to have anticipated almost all of Existentialism, but I'd wager there are some strong counter-arguments to that position. Anyway, my favorite Zen writer is Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

Certainly St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are more properly classified as theologians than as philosophers, but it is fascinating to watch their minds work as they reason on behalf of God and Christianity. When I read them, I feel as if I'm wandering around in a forest, not lost, by any means, but also not going in a straight line, the way one does with Descartes, say.

If he were alive, Spinoza wouldn't care that I became a Catholic several years ago because he wouldn't know or care who I was--I, a trivial micro-attribute. How to reconcile my great interest in Baruch's work with my Catholicism is an interesting problem--but also above my pay-grade.

Now that I have defamed several philosophers, my work is done here. Goodnight Baruch, wherever you are; by definition, you are with God--or is it of--God?

Thursday, January 24, 2008

What's The Matter With God?


I was reading a fine blog I've added to my list--it's called the Hyperborean--in which the author was discussing agnosticism, more specifically agnostic materialism, which might be defined as a state of accepting what science tells us about reality (a.k.a. matter) and of not believing much else, except that we have to keep on keeping on (breakfast, job, sleep, blogging, philosophy, golf, video poker, scratching itches, etc.) The blog included a nice paraphrase of an observation by Lyotard (French writers get all the great names, those bastards--emphasis on the second syllable):

"As Lyotard wrote in The Postmodern Condition, even the story we tell ourselves about the progress of science to deliver mankind from veils of ignorance has failed to foster the confidence that we really know what we're talking about when we try to explain what matter is made out of."

Put another way, it's amusing to observe Science coming up with new explanations that not only replace old explanations but also sometimes replace the premises of old explanations. "Did I say the visual model of the atom was 'planetary'? I'm sorry. I meant to say that it wasn't planetary; also, trying to draw a model of an atom is folly. There. Now we can proceed!"

Since I'm self-centered and a poet (was that a redundancy I just heard go off?), the Lyotard/Hyperborean idea made me think of a short poem I've posted here before:

Units: An Introduction

Everything is made
of little units, which
are made of even smaller
units. The smallest units,
undetectable by us, are
reality. All units larger
than these are rearrangement,
illusion, phony structure.
They constitute a kind
of molecular cinema
watched by us and
understood by God,
who is exempt from
the unit-arrangement.

--Hans Ostrom

And then I thought of the "agnostic" context of Hyperborean's blog, so I recalled a self-interview poem (I refer the reader to the comment concerning "self-centered" above):

Self-Interview on the Subject of God

Have I seen evidence of God?
I think so. Have I seen
God? I don’t know. Will
I see God? I think so. How
will I know? Oh, I’ll know.
What does God have to do
with anything? Well, God
has to do with everything, so
anything must be no trouble
for God. Do I have doubts?
Yes. Are my doubts a threat
to God? Be serious. On what
basis do I believe in God? Yes.

--Hans Ostrom


When asked, I describe myself as a Catholic because I became one in 2000, but because I arrived late to the Judeo/Greco/Roman/Jesuit party, and also for temperamental reasons, I'm a Catholic of the Keep It Simple, Stupid variety (my name for it, not the Pope's, in case you hadn't guessed): Apostle's Creed, Mass, the Lord's Prayer and what else Jesus had to say (he wasn't meek; remember: he was a threat to all established power in sight), social justice, and keep a close, unamused eye on your self-importance (especially, but not exclusively, if you're a self-centered poet). That's it. Nothing fancy. If the Vatican writes my parish and orders that something in the Mass should be done this way and not that way, my parish and I make the adjustment and move on.

My parish is a Jesuit one, therefore suspect, socially minded, and quirky. A person who moved to another parish in Tacoma was once quoted as saying, "I'm sick of St. Leo Parish--all they do is talk about helping poor people!" The Parish did not take the remark personally but had a good collective belly-laugh at the ironic truth. A colleague told me that some 25 years ago, he went to Mass at St. Leo, and a person from the Puyallup Nation "processed" (walked) into the Mass with the priest, in full head-dress, etc. The colleague found this outlandish, distasteful, risible, and wrong and apparently hasn't been back to St. Leo since. I don't quibble with his choice, and I'd only observe that the parish no doubt simply had invited the man to be a guest that day. I doubt if anyone in attendance except my colleague saw anything remarkable, disruptive, or radical about the guest's presence; that is, it would not have been seen as a protest an act of heresy or a quasi-political performance. Mass would have proceeded apace.

I spend almost no energy on the disputes that often seem to fracture and distract the Church, and I leave the serious Judging up to God (including who is in God's favor and who isn't; for instance, I would never assume that anyone who is not a Christian or a Catholic wouldn't be in God's favor; to do so would be mightily presumptuous, obviously, as would assuming that Christians/Catholics are in God's favor). I have to confess--no, not that kind of confession, which Catholics don't do much any more, by the way; they reconcile--that I'm also influenced by the writings of Baruch Spinoza (who amused neither the official Catholics or the traditional Jews of his era, and maybe not of this day, either), Dorothy Day (the Catholic Worker Movement; she was decidedly un-meek [wink], too); Henry J. M. Nouwen; The Cloud of Unkowing; and Jack Miles, who wrote God: A Biography, one thesis of which is that the arrival, appearance, work, life, and death of Jesus represented "a crisis in the life of God." I'll let Jack explain that one.

Keep It Simple, Stupid. Today I'll need to get help to construct the Latin for that. It will make a nice pairing with Rene's (I told you they got all the great names) Cogito, ergo sum.

God works in mysterious ways, for at least two reasons. First, why on Earth (so to speak) wouldn't God's ways be mysterious to us? Second, look what God has to work with. Just ask Lyotard.

By the way, to any poets, self-centered and otherwise, out there who derive pleasure from writing poems based on prompts or "challenges" given to them: a self-interview poem, on almost any topic and certainly in any form, comes highly recommended.

(poems from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006).