Why Pantheism Drives Me Nuts

A Q&A to help clarify a fascinating worldview

I’ll admit that for a while now I’ve been struggling to comprehend the philosophical (or religious) doctrine of Pantheism—the idea that the Universe and nature are one and the same. Part of the struggle is due to my respect for some of the great minds who have defended it over the years up to and including the present. I’m intrigued by it in that it often sounds familiar to the Kabbalistic explanation of reality that I am more familiar (and comfortable) with. But at the same time, it often strikes me as only the shell of the full picture—a good depiction of the body of an idea that’s lacking a soul.

What follows is a Q&A between myself and my friend Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes. The questions were sparked by the excellent piece he wrote for us last week entitled Pantheisticon: John Toland’s Cosmic Mass and he was kind enough to take the time to answer them for me. Feel free to add your own questions and comments by clicking the button. 👇

You write of the Universal Mind that it "is not a personal one that cares for humanity but more like an intrinsic organizing intelligence." If so, in what way is it any better or more valuable to us than gravitation or covalent bonding? Why should we care about it? 

A pantheistic immanent impersonal universal mind, such as we find in certain ancient thinkers as well as certain moderns, cares not for you nor need you care for It. Yet just as gravity and covalent bonding explain other phenomena, so too can the notion of a Universal Mind help explain other issues. For instance, it may give fresh insights into the mind-matter problem: viewing consciousness as a top-down exogenous phenomenon of receptivity, rather than the now-traditional bottom-up endogenous generative one. Furthermore, if such a Universal Mind is also teleological, in a loosely Hegelian or Bergsonian way, its importance will lie in providing none other than the meaning of life and a real basis of ethics.

2. You define  A ‘Deist’ as one ‘who acknowledges the existence of a God upon the testimony of reason, but rejects revealed religion." Does that suppose that the Deist has made a thorough study of all of the forms of religion that claim a revelation and found them all wanting?

This was simply the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘Deist’, but I would add that the term also generally includes the belief that God created the world, is thus separate therefrom, and let it run by itself without any divine intervention, therefore again excluding acceptance of miracles, etc. On this second meaning, Deism could not be Pantheism, as God is immanent rather than transcendent for the latter – though on the first definition, Pantheism could be a form of Deism (though, as stated below, Pantheism can also potentially be revealed). As to whether there is a supposition that a Deist has studied all the forms of religion to come to his position, I’d say that this is practically impossible considering the amount of study involved (though Toland and Spinoza did their fair share). But the basis of Deism is not one of checking purported revelations, but of creating a new epistemic basis (reason, experiment) through which purported revealed religious claims, all claims in fact, are judged. This is historically the basis of the Enlightenment, and the means by which the Church was emasculated.

3. What sort of evidence would convince a deist (or a pantheist) that some form of revelation occurred? 

One might divide revelation into two main types: public and private. If we take ‘Pantheism’ to mean that which Raphson (in 1697) and Toland (in 1705 and 1720) first defined it as – generally as Spinozism and reason-based deific belief – then public revelation (e.g. a publicly-attested miracle) would have to pass stringent tests such as whether the witnesses were not already of the faith thereby fortified through the revelation, the number of witnesses, that there were no other possible causes of the purported revelation, even if these be beyond current scientific knowledge (e.g. mass hallucination), etc. 

However, with regard to private revelation, Pantheism can conform. Deleuze wrote that the Pantheism of Spinoza can either be fathomed rationally by long periods of concerted study, or it can be a revelation: “[Anyone] can receive a sudden illumination from him, a ‘flash’. Then it is as if one discovers that one is a Spinozist” (1970). Even Spinoza, the archetypal modern Pantheist, speaks of the possibility of revelation of union with this universal God, a revelation he identifies with the term “glory” in the scriptures (Kavod in Hebrew). Moreover, the pantheistic “unity” that many modern-day psychonauts report occasioned by psychedelic drugs may be seen as such a revelation, as Alan Watts argued. Yet a revelation will not persuade others – for them reason through metaphysics will be required, at the very least.

4. What is the ultimate purpose of the pantheist's vision of the universe? What's it all for? 

This depends upon which Pantheist one considers. For Spinoza, there is no ultimate purpose of the universe, no universal telos. But the purpose driving any particular being, he calls conatus: to survive and develop. Moreover, for a certain type of human being, the aim is to achieve tranquillity of mind by gaining the cognitive freedom that realizes that everything is as it must be. For other pantheistic thinkers who are not determinist or fatalist but instead push novelty, creativity – such as Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead – the purpose of the universe is the evolution of organisms to greater forms of complexity, power, love, and beauty. Bergson ends his last book (1932) by stating that there is an “essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.” Ultimately the question concerning the purpose of the universe is a question of the existence of wider forms of teleology, and that itself is related to the question of the existence of wider forms of mind, extending to a possible universal mind, because we know there is a connection between purposes (teloi) and consciousness in ourselves. 

5. Why does our reality contain so much pain and suffering? 

There is a place for pain and suffering: their function can be a vital mechanism for allaying danger to oneself and others (e.g. fear as a motivating factor for fleeing or fighting; a sting to move away one’s arm), and for the development of individual, group, and species – one tolerates suffering if is for what one considers a greater cause: for instance, the artist’s work, the parents’ sacrifice, the athlete’s training, the philosopher’s condemned pursuit of truth (Socrates, Bruno, Spinoza). As with all mechanisms, suffering can malfunction – here we find severe depression, pointless anxiety, repressed envy, etc. where the suffering becomes impotent and leads to no change, or becomes causative of further suffering. Remedies here can be internal (drugs, therapy) and/or external (political revolution, etc.). In Pantheism, God is not considered omnibenevolent, and good and evil are not generally considered to be objective, so there is no problem of evil to be addressed in regard to pain and suffering.

6. What would the implications be for Pantheism if the Universe began to exist?  

For most Pantheists East and West, the universe is considered bidirectionally temporally infinite because ‘God’ is by definition a perfect being, and so finitude (temporal or otherwise) would disturb that notion. However, there are many varieties of Pantheism, and it seems theoretically possible that a universe could be temporally finite and yet also have a universal mind (which I consider to be the essence of Pantheism). All (pan) would still be God (theos), regardless of Its duration (though this would not be classic Pantheism, and would gain a new name). For logical reasons, most Pantheists would likely reject the theory of a temporally-begun universe, a ‘Big Bang’, a theory incidentally proposed by a monotheist: Roman Catholic priest, George Lemaître. 

7. On the pantheistic view does it matter what we do ethically? If so, why? 

Roman Catholicism, and Christianity more widely, has mostly condemned Pantheism itself as unethical, thus ‘ethically’ burning Bruno alive and banning the books of Spinoza. We see that ‘ethics’ has many meanings, and there is no one type of ethics that pertains to all types of Pantheism. Moreover, the type of Pantheism conditions the type of ethics adopted. Spinoza’s great work is entitled the Ethics because the pantheistic metaphysics he argues for promotes the virtue ethics of achieving a good life: peace of mind and recognition of truth are considered by him to be ultimate ethical aims which are achieved by understanding his metaphysics. But this is not the good life for all people. For Spinoza, “good” and “evil” are merely subjective terms that hold no universal import: “With regard to good and evil, these terms indicate nothing positive in things considered in themselves ... . For one and the same thing may at the same time be both good and evil or indifferent” (E:IVpref). 

For the Pantheist, generally speaking, due to there being no transcendent God or realm of ideals, there is no ultimate external standard by which to morally judge that which happens. There will be societal standards, but as there are many societies, these standards will still be relative. But rather than falling into a nihilistic abyss, Pantheists have at least two ways out: one subjective, the other objective. Firstly, by deifying Nature, Pantheists are often ecologically-minded, subjectively ethically concerned with the well-being of Nature, valuing an ecocentric rather than anthropocentric form of ethics. Secondly, objectively, if a Pantheism is teleological, contra Spinoza, any such cosmic telos will be able to determine a normative ethics (such as the promotion of complexity), as means to that end. But again, determining the ethics depends on determining such metaphysics, and we humans are not (at least, not yet) privy to such truths one way or the other.