Huston Smith (1919 - 2016) schreef div. voorwoorden voor boeken over #Spinoza

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 (Trouw 9 januari 2017)

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]

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:

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