Religiewetenschapper Huston Smith kreeg zijn eerste religieuze ervaring door
hallucinerende paddestoelen. Sindsdien bestudeerde hij alle religies met
evenveel interesse en pleitte hij voor interreligieuze tolerantie. Van zijn standaardwerk The Religions of Man (1958), later The World's Religions, werden meer dan drie miljoen exemplaren
verkocht (
Smith was born in Suzhou, China to Methodist missionaries and
spent his first 17 years there. He taught at the Universities of Colorado and
Denver from 1944–1947, moving to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri
for the next ten years, and then Professor of Philosophy at MIT from 1958–1973.
While at MIT he participated in some of the experiments with entheogens that
professor Timothy Leary conducted at Harvard University. He then moved to
Syracuse University where he was Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and
Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Philosophy until his retirement in 1983 and
emeritus status since. he lived in the Berkeley, CA area, as
Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley.
During his career, Smith not only studied, but practiced Vedanta
Hinduism, Zen Buddhism (studying under Goto Zuigan), and Sufism for over ten
years each. He is a notable autodidact.
As a young man, Smith, of his own volition, after suddenly
turning to mysticism, set out to meet with then-famous author Gerald Heard.
Heard responded to Smith's letter, invited him to his Trabuco College (later
donated as the Ramakrishna Monastery) in Southern California, and then sent him
off to meet the legendary Aldous Huxley. So began Smith's experimentation with
meditation, and association with the Vedanta Society in Saint Louis under the
auspices of Swami Satprakashananda of the Ramakrishna order.
Via the connection with Heard and Huxley, Smith eventually
experimented with Timothy Leary and others at the Center for Personality
Research, of which Leary was Research Professor. The experience and history of
the era are captured somewhat in Smith's book Cleansing the Doors of
Perception. In this period, Smith joined in on the Harvard Project as well, an
attempt to raise spiritual awareness through entheogenic plants.
He has been a friend of the XIVth Dalai Lama for more than forty
years, and met and talked to some of the great figures of the century, from
Eleanor Roosevelt to Thomas Merton.
He developed an interest in the Traditionalist School formulated
by Rene Guenon and Anana Coomaraswamy. This interest has become a continuing
thread in all his writings. [goodreads]
Het Spinozisme
beschreef hij niet als een soort godsdienst. Wel schreef hij in The
Worlds Religions: “Among Western philosophers, Spinoza stands closest to the Buddha on the
mind’s potential. Spinoza’s dictum—“to understand something is to be delivered
of it”—comes close to summarizing his entire ethic. The Buddha would have
agreed. If we could really understand life, if we could really understand
ourselves, we would find neither a problem. Humanistic psychology proceeds on
the same assumption. When “awareness of experience is fully operating,” Carl
Rogers writes, “human behavior is to be trusted, for in these moments the human
organism becomes aware of its delicacy and tenderness towards others.” The
Buddha saw ignorance, not sin, as the offender. More precisely, insofar as sin
is our fault, it is prompted by a more fundamental ignorance—most specifically,
the ignorance of our true nature." [p. 109-110]
ZIJN VOORWOORDEN voor boeken over Spinoza
● Huston Smith schreef het voorwoord voor het boek dat Siegfried Hessing redigeerde: Speculum spinozanum 1677-1977 [London [e.a.]: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977 [1978]
● Huston Smith schreef het voorwoord voor het boek dat Siegfried Hessing redigeerde: Speculum spinozanum 1677-1977 [London [e.a.]: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977 [1978]
Ook schreef hij het voorwoord voor
● Neal Grossman, Healing the Mind: The Philosophy of Spinoza Adapted to a New Age [Plainsboro: Susquehanna University Press, 2003]. Opnieuw uitgegeven als The Spirit of Spinoza: Healing the Mind [Princeton, NJ: ICRL Press, 2014 - cf. blog van 27-05-2014: "Spinoza gezien als spirituele psychotherapeut"] Dit laatste, vooral vanaf § III interessante, voorwoord neem ik hier over:
● Neal Grossman, Healing the Mind: The Philosophy of Spinoza Adapted to a New Age [Plainsboro: Susquehanna University Press, 2003]. Opnieuw uitgegeven als The Spirit of Spinoza: Healing the Mind [Princeton, NJ: ICRL Press, 2014 - cf. blog van 27-05-2014: "Spinoza gezien als spirituele psychotherapeut"] Dit laatste, vooral vanaf § III interessante, voorwoord neem ik hier over:
Foreword
I
Neal Grossman was a student of mine while I was
teaching at M.I.T., which means that I have known him for forty-some years.
Only during the latest of these years, however, did he tell me of an experience
that dates back to when he was fifteen or sixteen years old, one that I find so
prescient of the book in hand that I can think of no more appropriate way to
open this foreword than to relate it.
Neal
was exploring the streets of Boston one summer afternoon when he found himself
passing its public library, and with nothing better to do he entered. Dazed by
its seemingly endless corridors of books, he wandered down one of them, and
there his eye fell on Plato's Dialogues. He had heard of Plato, and to satisfy his curiosity
he pulled the book from its shelf, took it to a reading table, and let it fall
open. Mirabile dictu, what then greeted him was the most famous passage in all
of the Dialogues,
the Allegory of the Cave, which together with Moses' vision of Mount Sinai in
flames is one of the twin foundations of Western civilization. When he came to
the end of the allegory with its moral that education is not what most people
take it to be but instead should be “to put true knowledge into souls that do
not possess it, as if inserting vision into blind eyes,” he found that tears
were streaming down his cheeks.
II
When Grossman reported that episode, I heard it as a
harbinger of the book in hand, but to bring out the full force of that book I
need to say something about the years that intervened between the afternoon I
have recounted and the writing of this book.
Innately intelligent and in search of truth, which our
culture assumes [-7-] can be most assuredly
found in science, Grossman entered M.I.T., where his undergraduate major was
physics. That institute requires its undergraduates to take 20 percent of their
courses in humanities and the social sciences, which led him to my two courses
on world religions. There he found echoes of Plato's idea of a domain more
ultimate than the physical universe, and he staked out as his life's project to
investigate whether the concept of a transcendent reality was compatible with
our best scientific understanding of the world. To qualify for it he entered
the then-strongest graduate program in history and philosophy of science in the
country, at the University of Indiana, and when his doctorate was in hand the
University of Illinois at Chicago hired him to teach that subject. Ten years
later, having satisfied himself with regard to the basic compatibility of physics
and spirituality, he lost interest in the philosophy of science per se and
turned to teaching those philosophers whose first ambition was to change
people's lives.
Healing the Mind is the first printout of that
switch in his career, and to put the matter bluntly it is one of the very few
books that makes me regret that I am not still in the classroom, where I could
teach from it. It has taken its author a decade to get it published, for it
falls between two stools. Academic presses wouldn't touch it—even though
Spinoza scholars gave it flying colors for its understanding of Spinoza—because
of its New Age mentality and the exercises Grossman includes to open readers to
where Spinoza's ideas can enter the lives they are actually living, thus
effecting the improvement that Spinoza hoped for. Meanwhile, New Age presses
all assumed that Spinoza was too heady for their audiences. Had Grossman
compromised on either of these fronts, this book would have been issued years
earlier, but true to the book's message, its author refused to compromise, even
if that meant that his book would never be published. That it has been
published warrants our thanks to both its principled author and its publisher,
who saw the promise in Grossman's deft handling of the splice between ideas and
their impacts on life.
This foreword could
appropriately end here, but my own love for Spinoza leads me to extend it to
point out the exalted character of this book's subject.
III
Spinoza's given
name was Benedict, which is the Latinized equivalent of the Hebrew baruch, meaning blessing or
benediction. (Latin was the intellectual language of Spinoza's Europe and the
one in which he wrote.) This [-8-] makes his name translate into English as
Blessed Spinoza. No epithet was ever more appropriate, for as Bertrand Russell
pointed out in his History
of Western Philosophy, “Spinoza is the noblest and most loveable of the
great philosophers.” This is true, but it leads to what I have elsewhere dubbed
the Spinoza anomaly, which is, Why is Spinoza so loved and respected but so
little followed? Today there are Platonists, Thomists, Kantians, and
Wittgensteinians, but few if any philosophers who call themselves Spinozists.
There is an easy
way to resolve this anomaly, which I shall note only to put it behind me.
According to this superficial resolution, Spinoza is loved because his life was
exemplary, and he is not followed because his metaphysics is thought to be mistaken.
If he was not mistaken in trying to construct a metaphysical system in the
first place, as many philosophers today would contend, he was clearly mistaken
in the way he went about devising it. Given the excitement attending the birth
of modern science in the seventeenth century, we can understand why the
geometrical method excited him, but too much has happened in the three hundred
years that have followed to allow us to take it seriously. Geometrics have
become multiple, logic turns out to be dead-end in paradoxes, and all efforts
to find bedrock foundations on which logic's ladder might be planted
unshakably— foundationalism—have led to quicksand. Percepts shift with their
contexts (Gestalt psychology), facts reflect the theories that sponsor them
(science and cognition generally), and there appear not to be any elementary particles from
which nature is constructed (particle physics).
I call the
foregoing resolutions of the Spinoza anomaly superficial because they
trivialize the truth component in what we esteem, a move that is particularly
unseemly for philosophers. It assumes that the not-less-than-holy life Spinoza
lived was unrelated to the truth he saw. (Not-less-than-holy; I will fill in
that epithet. By birth a man in exile and by temperament a recluse, Spinoza
showed not the slightest bitterness in the face of the centuries of persecution
his people had suffered and his excommunication by his own Jewish community in
Amsterdam. Whatever the matter at hand, he always brought to it a mind free of
attachment to self, party, or nation.) Or, if we prefer to hew to the cognitive
grounds for our admiration of him, it assumes that coherence alone suffices to
win our respect, whereas outside the formal sciences we know that it does not
suffice—if it did we would honor paranoids, for their logic tends to be
impeccable; it is their premises that are out of touch with reality. To reduce
metaphysics to a game well played is to rob it (and ultimately all philosophy)
of its basis and importance. The mind that is fed “wholly with joy … unmingled
with sadness” (On the Improvement
of the Understanding) is not a mind applauding a [-9-] logical victory. We need an explanation of the Spinoza anomaly that avoids
the travesty of disjoining the respect we accord a philosopher from the
question of whether he was right.
I suggest the following. Philosophers sense that Spinoza
was right, but do not follow him because they do not understand how he reached
his conclusions. The arguments that carried him to them, while logically impeccable, have not delivered his conclusions to many other philosophers,
which is another way of saying that they have not found them existentially
compelling. This way of putting the matter may seem as paradoxical as the
anomaly I introduce it to resolve, but of course it isn't. Right and left, our
instincts for truth outstrip the reasons we adduce to justify them—we always
know more than we can explain how we know it. Insofar as we claim the opposite
we exhibit what might be called “the European mistake”: the mistake of thinking
that it is the role of the sage to explain things from zero, whereas in fact
his vocation is first to see and then to cause to see; that is, to provide a
key. The classic error of Western rationalism is to assume that metaphysical
conclusions are no stronger than the arguments adduced to support them; and
that they collapse the moment weaknesses in those arguments are exposed, an
exposure that is easily accomplished, because the premises of metaphysical
proofs invariably elude everyday consensual experience. The truth is the
reverse. Rather than being the causes of certainty, metaphysical arguments are
their results. This makes the certainty in one sense subjective, but at the
same time it is objective if it prolongs realities that are independent of our
minds.
In calling the mistake just cited Western I mean, of
course, that it is the recent Western mistake; our very word theory derives from theoria, a term originally drawn from the theater and implying
vision. Like Plato, Spinoza saw something. Had his mysticism been ecstatic we
might be inclined to say that he experienced something, but because it was
immaculately intellective—gnostic, or jnanic as Vedantists would say—it is better to
say that he saw, or perhaps sensed, something (saw captures the
clarity of his controlling insight, sensed captures its intuitive character, the
difficulty of conveying it to persons who have had no direct contact with it).
A moment ago we were citing Gestalt psychology and particle physics to document
the mind's inability to arrive at empirical indubitables. For the phenomenal
world this is plain fact, awash as that world is in relativity and change—in maya, to reach again for a Vedantic term. But beneath this remorseless flux
Spinoza detected something permanent. This is not the place to try to say what
that something is—the book does that better than I could. It is enough here to
say that he saw as clearly as man ever has what Substance is and how it is
related to accident, grasping at the same time that everything participates in
both while being always accident in relation to the one and [-10-] only
Substance that empowers it. In doing so he understood the nature not only of
authentic religion but also of metaphysics in the etymological sense of that
word. As for philosophers, they sense that he had hold of that meaning, however
little they may be able to follow his approach to it or blaze an alternative
route.
This is my suggestion regarding the Spinoza anomaly.
Philosophers do not call themselves Spinozists, because the way he articulates
his insight is, for the most part, not the way they would do so; it is too
colored by thought patterns of a bygone era. But metaphysical systems are not
mirror images of reality; they are symbols—fingers pointing at the moon, as
Ch'an Buddhists would say. And Spinoza's finger, we sense (many of us do, at
least), was precisely and accurately angled. That is why we honor him. He
points us toward truth of a mode that, to the degree that we succeed in
embodying it, can free us as it freed him.
I speak of degree, and it is important to close with
this, for truth that is as existential as the kind Spinoza was immersed in is
not simply accepted or rejected; it is appropriated incrementally. Sufis liken
three stages in the acquisition of gnosis to hearing about fire, seeing fire,
and being burned by fire. Comparably, one can respond affirmatively to Spinoza
by assenting to what he says, seeing what he saw, and being consumed by what he
saw. George Eliot was onto these distinctions when she wrote, “Spinoza says
from his own soul what all the world is saying by rote.” And (if I may venture
this conjecture) it was alertness to the importance of these degrees of
assimilation that caused the author of this book to insist that it include the
exercises he devised to knead Spinoza's outlook into the lives his students, if I may
put the matter that way. He would prefer not to have his book published rather
than to forgo the opportunity he saw to make Spinoza live in the lives
of his students and thereby ennoble them.
Not many can rise to the point of being “burned” by
Spinoza's vision, for it involves recognizing one's individuality as a cosmic
accident. But Spinoza himself is living proof that it is possible to catch
sight of something so majestic—a Good beyond all goods—that at the mere sight
of it one loses personal desires, forgets oneself in its contemplation, and
adds a new dimension to the treasures of the soul. Spinoza has been faulted
because his Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) is impersonal—transpersonal would
be a better word. His audience is a different breed, or again better, a level
of the soul that everyone possesses but that is too deeply buried in most
people for them to detect on their own. It is the level at which one glimpses
the Absolute, that cold, remote, emotionless Beyond where nothing stirs, where
there is no agitation, where there is only that immaculate, almost unreachable
height of the aloneness of God.
On completing his second reading of Spinoza's Ethics Goethe said, “I [-11-]
have never seen things so clearly, or been
so much at peace.” Welcome, dear reader, to Healing the Mind. I know of no other book that rivals this one in its resources for helping
you to make Goethe's words your own.
HUSTON SMITH
"hallucinerende paddestoelen" en dat schreef Trouw? Nu weten we sinds Spinoza dat alles denkt en uitgebreid is, maar dit gaat toch wat ver. Je vraagt je af hoe de denker gecommuniceerd heeft met de paddenstoelen.
BeantwoordenVerwijderenOké, bedoeld zal zijn "hallucinogene of psilocybine paddestoelen"
BeantwoordenVerwijderenIk ben het niet met je eens, Howard, dat "we sinds Spinoza weten dat alles denkt". Zoals Spinoza het formuleert in 2/13s: van alles bestaat in God een idee... Hij zegt niet "älles denkt".
Zoals hij het formuleerde:
Nam ea quae hucusque ostendimus, admodum communia sunt nec magis ad homines quam ad reliqua individua pertinent, quae omnia quamvis diversis gradibus animata tamen sunt. Nam cujuscunque rei datur necessario in Deo idea cujus Deus est causa eodem modo ac humani corporis ideae atque adeo quicquid de idea humani corporis diximus, id de cujuscunque rei idea necessario dicendum est [2/13s]
Zoals Van Suchtelen het vertaalde:
Want wat wij tot dusver hebben uiteengezet was van zeer algemeenen aard en betrof den mensch niet méér dan de overige enkeldingen, die immers allen, hoewel in verschillenden graad, bezield zijn. Van ieder ding toch bestaat noodzakelijk bij God een voorstelling [idee], van welke God de oorzaak is op dezelfde wijze als hij oorzaak is van de voorstelling [idee] des menschelijken Lichaams, zoodat al wat wij gezegd hebben over de voorstelling [idee] van het menschelijk Lichaam, noodzakelijk eveneens moet gelden voor de voorstelling [idee] van elk ander ding.
Dan heb ik bezield verward met denken? Elk object heeft een idee van zijn/haar lichaam. Ik lees verder in 2/13S: naarmate een lichaam beter in staat is om veel tegelijk te doen of te ondergaan, zijn geest meer tegelijk kan begrijpen. Ik zou daaruit concluderen dat elke geest wel iets van het lichaam kan begrijpen, zelfs het meest simpele. En dus kan denken? Waar zit precies de fout?
BeantwoordenVerwijderenVan elk object bestaat - bij/in God - een idee van het lichaam. Jij maakt daarvan: "Elk object HEEFT een idee van zijn/haar lichaam."
BeantwoordenVerwijderenWat je verder zegt te lezen in 2/13s is een interpreterende vertaling van Henri Krop van
"Hoc tamen in genere dico quo corpus aliquod reliquis aptius est ad plura simul agendum vel patiendum, eo ejus mens reliquis aptior est ad plura simul percipiendum;"
De oude Van Suchtelen vertaalde vaak lettelijker, zoals hier:
"Wel merk ik in het algemeen nog op dat, naarmate eenig Lichaam geschikter dan andere is om velerlei tegelijk te doen of te ondergaan, ook zijn Geest geschikter dan andere zijn zal om velerlei tegelijk in zich op te nemen;"
Lees hier ook eens de vertaling van Corinna Vermmeulen.
Vervolgens schrijf je "dat elke geest wel iets van het lichaam kan begrijpen, zelfs het meest simpele." Terwijl Spinoza juist concludeert dat we van ons lichaam alleen verwarde kennis hebben.
Dus ja, "Waar zit precies de fout?"