[lit-ideas] Re: The 'Near-Eastern' influences on the Greek philosophy, sc...

  • From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: 09 Apr 2004 22:44:37 PDT

>[T]he Middle Eastern Monotheists' insistence that the Creator is 
somewhere else than inside His Creation and of a radically different 
nature from His Creation. Assimilating this notion in Western 
philosophy made it possible to envision causes that are fundamentally 
different from their effects and not mere abstractions from the 
"natural" categories perceived by our naive senses.<

I don't know quite how to respond to this because I don't know exactly what sort
of thing John is proposing. The sacred writings before the Common Era suggest
that God causally intervenes in the world; that he (for so he is characterized)
has conversations with humans; and that he has a face, and even a body, although
his anatomy is not richly delineated. 

God _usually_ is elsewhere, but does his being elsewhere give us a new notion of
causation? It isn't clear to me that it does: the phenomena and events God
brings about (floods, whirlwinds, e.g.) are 'natural' phenomena, and if the
_way_ in which God brings them about isn't clear, it is at least as clear as the
stories about the causes of such phenomena in the pre-Socratics. How God brings
things about in terms of pushes and pulls is never spelled out, that is, how he
makes it happen that there is a flood is explained by saying that he makes it
rain for an unusually long time--but how he makes it rain is obscure. Still, one
can wonder how God makes _anything_ happen if there is no causal nexus between
him and the world. And if there is such a nexus, God must establish some sort of
causal contact, so to speak, with the world. 

The same thing might be asked about Descartes' Evil Genius: how does he bring it
about that Descartes is universally deceived unless there is a possible world to
which Descartes has no access? Yet, if there is such a possible world, the Evil
Genius must somehow bridge the gap between it and our world. This is how things
stand with God (on certain views)--there must be a wormhole in Creation through
which godly transmissions pass. Of course, on other views (Leibniz's,
Spinoza's), God does not intervene in the world at all. Spinoza calls an appeal
to God's will as the first event in a chain of causes  'the sanctuary of
ignorance.' [Ethics, I, Appendix] Things happen in the world because of the
operation of the laws of nature, and God plays no causal role in activating this
law or that. So there is at least one Western philosopher who does not think God
acts in mysterious ways.

Still, is it likely that by placing God in a different realm of being Western
thought found a new way of conceiving causes such that they were 'fundamentally
different from their effects'? I take John to be saying that causes could
afterwards be thought of as different in kind from their effects--as Leibniz
might have said, an explanation of why there are catfish can't just invoke
catfish all the way down--but what it is to be different in the required sense
isn't clear. In one way electrical impulses are different from human beings, but
in another way they are not; both exist in the natural world (unlike numbers),
and although they are different sorts of things, they causally interact in a
(now) fairly non-mysterious way. Kant's noumena, again, although 'fundamentally
different from' phenomena, insofar as they are logically incapable of being
perceived directly, bring about phenomena: that is their metaphysical job. To
say that there is a world behind appearances meant one thing to Locke, and
another thing to Kant. Whether either of their views (or Murray Gell-Mann's)
comes close to expressing what John has in mind, I do not know. I would, of
course, like to find out.

Robert Paul
Reed College
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