E-069 SEP PANTH - Pantheism (Thesis 2 Excerpt)

Exact excerpt

## 3. The logic of identity
The pantheist asserts an identity between God and nature, but it needs to be asked in just what sense we are to understand the term ‘identity’? To begin with it is necessary to raise two ambiguities in the logic of identity.
(1) _Dialectical identity_. It is important to note that many pantheists will not accept the classical logic of identity in which pairs are straightforwardly either identical or different. They may adopt rather the logic of relative identity, or identity-in-difference, by which it is possible to maintain that God and the cosmos are simultaneously both identical and different, or to put the matter in more theological language, that God is simultaneously both transcendent and immanent. For example, Eriugena holds that the universe may be subdivided into four categories: things which create but are not created, things which create and are created, things which are created but do not create, and things which neither create nor are created. He argues that all four reduce to God, and hence “that God is in all things, i.e. that he subsists as their essence. For He alone by Himself truly has being, and He alone is everything which is truly said to be in things endowed with being” (_Periphyseon_ , 97). But nonetheless, for Eriugena, the uncreated retains its distinct status separate from the created, not least in that the former may be understood while the later transcends all understanding. In consequence, he insists that God is not the genus of which creatures are the species. Similarly, the Sufi philosopher, ibn ‘Arabi identifies God and the universe, suggesting in a striking metaphor that the universe is the food of God and God the food of the universe; as deity swallows up the cosmos so the cosmos swallows up deity (_Bezels of Wisdom_ , 237; Husaini 1970, 180). But Ibn ‘Arabi in no sense regards such claims as preventing him from insisting also on the fundamental gulf between the unknowable essence of God and his manifest being. We must distinguish between the nature of God and the nature of things, between that which exists by itself (God) and that which exist by another (the universe), but since the nature of God just is Being itself, no parallel distinction may be drawn between the being of God and the being of things. Nothing real exists besides God who discloses himself in and through the universe (Chittick 1989, ch.5). Again, Nicholas of Cusa’s celebrated doctrine of the ‘coincidence of opposites’—which he memorably illustrated by pointing to way in which, upon infinite expansion, a circle must coincide with a straight line—allows him to say _both_ that God and the creation are the same thing _and_ that there exists a fundamental distinction between the realm of absolute being and the realm of limited or contracted being (Moran 1990). Even Spinoza goes to great lengths to show that the two attributes of _thought_ and _extension_ by which we pick out the one substance as ‘God’ or ‘nature’ are nonetheless at the same time irreducibly different. They may be co-referring but they are not synonymous; indeed, they are utterly incommensurable. Such a dialectical conception of unity, in which there can be no identity without difference, is a strong element in Hegel’s thought, and also one aspect of what Hartshorne meant by _dipolar theism;_ the opposites of immanence and transcendence are included among those which he thinks God brings together in his being.
(2) _Partial Identity._ Even accepting a classical conception of identity and difference, there remain issues to settle. If we think of pantheism negatively as a rejection of the view that God is distinct from the cosmos, we would face four possible schemes by which we might represent their mereological relation: we might understand God as proper part of nature, we might take nature as a proper part of God, we might regard the two domains as partially overlapping, or else we might hold that they are strictly identical.
Reflecting upon the ambiguities of the previous two paragraphs, it might be argued that only where we find strict classical identity do we have pantheism. For if the universe is not wholly divine we have mere _immanentism_ , while if God includes but is not exhausted by the universe then we have rather _panentheism_. Now, certainly it may be allowed there are metaphysical schemes for which the range of overlap between divinity and the cosmos is so small that they fail to capture the spirit of pantheism. (For example, a world-view in which God were understood as the vital spark which animates an otherwise dead and motionless cosmos, or a world-view in which the cosmos were merely one small fraction of the being of God would indeed seem far from the spirit of pantheism.) However, to limit the term’s application to just those schemes advancing strict classical identity would be far too restrictive.
Such ‘strict identity’ is virtually impossible to define due to the extreme difficulty of stipulating what would count as an acceptable and what as an unacceptable sense, part, aspect, or element of difference. For example, Aquinas distinguishes between the doctrine that God is the form of all things (‘formal pantheism’) and the doctrine that God is the matter of all things (‘material pantheism’) (Moran 1989, 86). Does either of these count as pantheism ‘proper’, or must both obtain at the same time? Again, while some pantheists conceive of deity in mereological terms as the collection of things which make up the universe, many others have found this approach inadequate, maintaining that in some important sense ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ The finite things that we encounter around us and are happy enough to describe as parts _of nature_ we feel less happy to think of as parts _of God._ Such theorists may also reject the charge that their way of thinking is _panentheistic_ , maintaining that the proper lesson to draw is not one of the transcendence of the holistic view but rather one concerning the degree of unreality or abstraction involved in any distributed view. In short, does _any_ admission of difference between the world as common-sense experiences it and the divine cosmos as pantheism understands it amount to a concession either that there are aspects of experience which fall outside deity or aspects of deity which fall outside experience? If so, then the class of ‘true pantheists’ threatens to become null. In the end, rather than attempt to draw sharp but artificial and contentious lines it seems more fruitful to maintain that the boundaries of demarcation between immanence, pantheism, and panentheism are vague and porous.
This approach has the further advantage of keeping together historically cognate thinkers. If the essence of pantheism lies in strict classical identity, the issue of who is or is not a pantheist comes down to the somewhat arcane dispute whether there could be any conceivable aspect or side of reality which was not natural, and/or whether there could be any conceivable aspect or side of reality which was not divine, but these are abstruse points that can only take us away from the fundamental pantheistic intuition of the overlap of God and nature, the intuition that that in grasping the reality before us we grasp God himself, not something separate or intermediary.
## 4. Nature of the identity relation itself
To say that God is _identical with_ the world as a whole is not self-explanatory and, although often the matter is left disconcertingly vague, examination of the literature reveals a variety of different understandings of the identity relation being asserted here.
(1) _Substance identity._ For Spinoza the claim that God is the same as the cosmos is spelled out as the thesis that there exists one and only one particular substance which he refers to as ‘God or nature’; the individual thing referred to as ‘God’ is one and the same object as the complex unit referred to as ‘nature’ or ‘the cosmos.’ On such a scheme the finite things of the world are thought of as something like _parts_ of the one great substance, although the terminology of parts is somewhat problematic. Parts are relatively autonomous from the whole and from each other, and Spinoza’s preferred terminology of _modes_ , which are to be understood as more like properties, is chosen to rectify this. A further problem with the terminology of parts is that many pantheists have wanted to claim that God or nature is not just the whole or totality of things, but is somehow the inner essence or heart of _each_ individual thing. This may be expressed in the idea that somehow the whole is present in each of its parts, a suggestion whose meaning has often been left metaphorical or obscure. Giordano Bruno, for example employs the two illustrations of a voice heard in its entirety from all sides of the room, and that of a large mirror which reflects one image of one thing but which, if it is broken into a thousand pieces, each of the pieces still reflects the whole image (Bruno 1584, 50, 129). A thesis of the complete interpenetration or interrelation of everything, the claim being made here is related to that defended by Leibniz (who was not a pantheist) that each monad is a mirror to the entire universe.
In Western philosophy Spinoza’s formulation of the pantheistic position has become so influential as to almost completely define the position, but while practically all pantheists are monists (of some sort), not all are _substance_ monists, and there do exist alternative ways of expressing identity besides a head-count of the number of particular entities.