Eternity and the Bondage of Time: Whitehead and Spinoza on Grace and Affliction in Simone Weil

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Eternity and the Bondage of TimeWhitehead and
Spinoza on Grace and Affliction in Simone Weil

• David BanachSaint Anselm CollegeThis infinite
  distance between God and God, this supreme
  tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this
  marvel of love, is the crucifixion. . . . This
  tearing apart, over which supreme love places the
  bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across
  the universe in the midst of the silence, like
  two notes, separate yet melting into one, like
  pure and heart-rending harmony. . . . The whole
  creation is nothing but its vibration. Simone
  Weil, Waiting For God, 124.

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The One and the Many

• Whitehead, Spinoza, and Simone Weil, like all
  thinkers in the Platonic or Neo-Platonic
  tradition, explain Manyness as arising from Unity
  and returning to Unity.
• The Many arise from One and return to One.
• Grace is a metaphysical feature of this sort of
  world, where thinking beings are at once one and
  separate from the source of being.

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Two Directions

• Sun Metaphor in PlatoReturn trip fueled by trip
  down.

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Themes from Simone Weil to be elucidated

• Creation was a withdrawal by God to allow created
  things to exist. A separation of self from self.
• There are two stages of Grace a descending
  motion and an ascending.
• Gods act of love in creation crosses the
  infinite distance of space and time and our acts
  of attention and decreation reunite what had been
  separated.
• Affliction is an expression of divine love that
  is coextensive with the suffering of thinking
  things.

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Simone Weil on Creation

• On God's part creation is not an act of
  self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation.
  God and all his creatures are less than God
  alone. God accepted this diminution. He emptied a
  part of his being from himself. (Waiting for God
  ,144)
• His love for us is love for himself through us.
  Thus, he who gives us our being loves in us the
  acceptance of not being. Our existence is made up
  only of his waiting for our acceptance not to
  exist. He is perpetually begging from us that
  existence which he gives. (Gravity and Grace,
  33)
• It is God who in love withdraws from us so that
  we can love him. . . . Necessity is the screen
  set between God and us so that we can be.(33)
• Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.
  At each moment our existence is Gods love for
  us. But God can only love himself. His love for
  us is love for himself through us. Thus, he who
  gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of
  not being. (Gravity and Grace, 32)

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The Way of Nature and Gravity

• When a man turns away from God, he simply gives
  himself up to the law of gravity. Then he thinks
  that he can decide and choose, but he is only a
  thing, a stone that falls. (Waiting for God, 127)

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Two Stages of Grace

• Creation is composed of the descending movement
  of gravity, the ascending movement of grace, and
  the descending movement of the second degree of
  grace. (Gravity and Grace, 4)

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Two Degrees of Grace

• We are incapable of progressing vertically. We
  cannot take a step towards the heavens. God
  crosses the universe and comes to us. (Waiting
  for God, 132)
• A day comes when the soul belongs to God . . . .
  Then in its turn it must cross the universe to go
  to God. The soul does not love like a creature
  with created love. The love within it is divine,
  uncreated for it is the love of God for God.
  (132)

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Two Degrees of Grace

• God Man
• ?Descends Ascends?
• 1. Man is lifted away from things towards God by
  affliction or joy.
• 2. Man attends to things despite affliction and
  God (in things) is reunited with God (in himself)
  through us.

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Simone Weil on Affliction

• "At the bottom of the heart of every human being,
  from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is
  something that goes on indomitably expecting, in
  the teeth of all experience of crimes committed,
  suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil
  will be done to him. It is this above all that
  is sacred in every human being." (Human
  Personality, (315)
• Times violence rends the soul by that rent
  eternity enters. (Gravity and Grace, 83)
• God is crucified from the fact that finite
  beings, subject to necessity, to space and time,
  think . . . . as a thinking, finite being I
  am God crucified. (89)
• The mutual love of God and man is suffering.
  (Gravity and Grace, 89)

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Simone Weil on Affliction

• Limitation is the evidence that God loves us.
  Gravity and Grace, 105)
• Extreme affliction . . . is a nail whose point is
  applied to the very center of the soul whose head
  is all the necessity spreading throughout space
  and time. . . . The infinite distance separating
  God from the creature is entirely concentrated
  into one point to pierce the soul in the center.
  (Waiting for God, 133)
• In this marvelous dimension, the soul . . . can
  cross the totality of space and time and come
  into the very presence of God. (134)

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Simone Weil on Attention

• "Among human beings, only the existence of those
  we love is fully recognized. Belief in the
  existence of other human beings as such is
  love." (Grace and Gravity 64)
• Attention taken to its highest degree, is the
  same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and
  love. (Gravity and Grace, 117)

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Simone Weil on decreation

• May God grant me to be nothing. In so far as I
  become nothing, God loves himself through me.
  (Gravity and Grace, 34)
• I must withdraw so that God may make contact with
  the beings whom chance places in my path and whom
  he loves. It is tactless for me to be there. . .
  . I deprive God of contact with all that in so
  far as something in me says I. (Gravity and
  Grace, 41)

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The Part of You That Suffers

• The part of you that suffers is the most
  important part of you, the part that cannot
  forget from which direction the light shines.
• It reminds us that God is waiting to enjoy the
  world (his own self estranged) through our eyes.
  We need only get out of the way.

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II. Spinoza

• Obvious affinities
• World Subject to Necessity and without final
  causation. (Metaxu)
• Intuition or Third Kind of Knowledge (Ethics II,
  40, note 2) and Attention (Contemplation of the
  Divine)
• Acquiescence and Decreation
• Human Bondage and Affliction

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II. Spinoza on Freedom and Bondage

• All Humans are essentially in bondage to the
  necessity of the world as felt through their
  body. (Ethics, IV, 4) The very condition of our
  being as separate selves is inadequate knowledge
  through our body.
• All Humans have the capability within each
  perception of forming adequate ideas, sub species
  aeternitatis, and, thereby gaining freedom from
  the limitations of self. (Ethics, V, 4)

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Emanation by Limitation
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God for Spinoza

• God is a substance of infinite attributes, two of
  which we have some awareness of Thought and
  Extension.
• Ideas of the essences of things as the are in
  themselves are modes under the attribute of
  thought. These are what we think of when we have
  adequate ideas.

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Things actually existing

• Gods ideas of things not as the exist in his
  mind but only through the sequence of causal
  relationships they have to other things. This is
  how we conceive of things inadequately.

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Mind is Gods idea of the Body

• Ethics II, 19
• The Human Mind is Gods idea of the Body as
  actually existing, that is, through its relation
  with the causal network of actually existing
  things.
• I come to exist as a mind by Gods act of
  self-limitation or setting himself in bondage
  within the limits of my body.

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The Mind of a Finger

• My idea of the word limited to the interactions
  it has with my finger

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Stages of Withdrawal

• 1. God separates parts or aspects of himself into
  essences.
• 2. God limits these to their relations within the
  casual sequence of the actual world.
• 3. God sets himself into bondage within a
  particular body.

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Difference and Unity at the same time

• The very act by which we come into existence as a
  separate mind is what
• (1) We must overcome to form adequate ideas and
  become free. (Stage 2 for Weil)
• (2) Maintains the identity within the single
  substance of God that allows for the possibility
  (Stage 1)

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III. Whitehead

• Alfred North Whitehead English and American.
  1867-1947
• Process philosophy
• Actual entities are drops of becoming.

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III. Whitehead Two kinds of Becoming

• Values are expressed as synthetic unities in
  time.
• Being expresses itself in two ways1. open
  ended, eternal process in pursuit of
  possibilities.
• 2. the completion of finished finite actualities,
  or actual occasions or entities.

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Two Kinds of Process in Whitehead

• Transition movement from one constituted moment
  of time to another. A series of totalities. The
  passage of time
• Process non-temporal process within the internal
  constitution of an actual entity. Only reaches
  totality when process comes to an end as the
  actual entity is appropriated into an other.

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Dripping Drops
dripping
drops
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Two Natures of God

• Consequent- Gods coextensiveness with each
  instant of finished time of the universe.
  Constitutes the history of the universe in time.
  (Objective Immortality)
• Primordial- The drip that never drops. The
  primordial process which never reaches totality
  and the repository of all possibility (eternal
  objects).

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Prehension in Whitehead

• Physical Prehension The other enters into the
  internal constitution of an actual entity, in
  causal relations. An actual entity is constituted
  by its relations to the rest of physical reality.
• Conceptual Prehension The apprehension of form
  or potentiality. Acts as a lure for feeling.

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Conceptual Prehension and Space

• The many possibilities, or lures for experience,
  are graded for relevance by the particular
  perspective in space and time granted by the way
  the entity is embedded in reality.
• You feel the possible through the focus of the
  lens of actuality and the way it limits you.

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Stages of Process

• 1. Physical Prehension A being finds itself
  situated in a web of necessity and constituted by
  those relations.
• 2. Novel Synthesis A being feels the lure of
  potentialities within the Primordial nature of
  God from which it was closed off.
• 3. Death and Rebirth. The Many become One and are
  increased by one. Each being comes into existence
  only by sacrificing itself back into the
  primordial Process.

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Parallels
Spinoza Whitehead Weil
Eternal Essences Primordial Nature of God God
Actual Existence Consequent Nature of God Necessity
Intuition Conceptual Prehension Attention, Grace
Acquiescence Relativity Decreation
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Affliction is placement in space and time

• It is the very source of our particular
  existence, its placement in space and time, that
  separates it from Being and renders it subject to
  Necessity.
• Affliction focuses all of space and time on the
  single point of our existence.
• This act of self limitation by God is the supreme
  gift. We feel it as Joy only when chance brings
  the workings of Necessity into harmony with our
  particular nature. But we can feel it always as
  affliction.
• Consciousness of the gift of existence is
  affliction, and coming to this consciousness is
  the purpose of creation.

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A problem to consider from Whitehead

• What constitutes the reality of creatures. Is
  acquiescence or attention something we do, or
  something God does?
• Whiteheads account of creative synthesis fueled
  by eternal values is implicit in Spinoza and
  Weil, but may not be consistent with other
  aspects of their thought.