Parmenides and Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Monism and Accept the World of Relations, at least for the sake of the Good

I want to start with a movie: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.¹

This 1964 film, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and starring Peter Sellers in multiple roles, satirizes the Cold War defense establishment. It tells the story of a renegade base commander, General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, who takes advantage of a malfunction in the communications system to send his wing of B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union. When the President of the United States is alerted to this dire state of affairs by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Buck Turgidson, played by George C. Scott, he tries to make a deal with his Soviet counterpart, Premier Kissov, for a limited proportional response, but is startled to discover, as his advisor, the former Nazi scientist, Dr. Strangelove, informs him, that the Soviets have recently activated a “Doomsday” device, whose purpose is to deter a single attack by immediately triggering a conflagration that would destroy the entire world. After failed attempts to thwart the attack, whether by the visiting British officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, at Burpelson Airbase, or by the Soviet Air Defense system, the defense officials gathered in the War Room are left to contemplate their only option, which is to gather top government officials in a deep underground shelter, where they will work to repopulate the world. At the end, one bomber, piloted by Major T. J. “King” Kong, manages to get through to deliver the payload and trigger Armageddon. The final scene is of Dr. Strangelove getting out of his wheelchair, exclaiming ecstatically, “Mein Führer, I can walk!,” which then cuts to scenes of giant nuclear mushroom clouds exploding in the air accompanied by the melancholy song, “We'll meet again.”

This is a great movie, undoubtedly a classic, and you should see it, if you haven't already. But why am I bringing it up here? The answer is that, in my view, it perfectly illustrates the nature of acosmism. As I was reading Michael Della Rocca's recent book, The Parmenidean Ascent, this was the story that almost immediately came to mind. At first, I tried to ignore it, thinking that it was just a glib association, but when it came back again, I realized that my philosophical unconscious was speaking to me and that perhaps I should pay attention to it. Here are some of the points of comparison.

The main point is the doomsday principle of deterrence. Half measures don't add up to much. If you want to preserve the world, then you must threaten to destroy it completely.

There is the mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove, whose very name embodies the paradox. He is one of the designers of the system itself, the Parmenides figure. One thing to note is that in the movie, this character has a dubious past, as a servant to a totalizing Reich, and also a weak character. In contrast to Major Kong, who has the simple-minded audacity to carry out his world-destroying duty, we learn in the end, when it becomes apparent that no-one can stop the renegade bomber, that Dr. Strangelove is not committed fully to the principle that he has articulated. He is secretly a “tamer” who, even as the rest of the world has been destroyed, embraces the idea that a small group of elites will survive in a deep mine, stocked for the duration of a radioactive future, whose only purpose will be to breed a new race of people to repopulate the world.

There is the instigator, General Jack D. Ripper: who unleashes the whole thing via a pathological concern for purity focused on his fear of fluoride being added to the water. Despite his paranoia, he can be quite reasonable. He asks the right questions. If we have devoted so much time and energy to developing this project, and we have a functioning system in place, then why not use it? The modern rationalist.

Ripper's counterpoint is the Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, who tries to reason with Gen. Ripper through appeals to common sense. The “tamer” par excellence, the British philosopher of common sense. He is doomed to be ineffectual.

Then there is the loyal soldier: Major T. J. “King” Kong, who commands the B-52 that eludes the Soviet air defense system. Played by the well-known former rodeo performer and star of Westerns, “Slim” Pickens, Kong is single-mindedly driven by his duty. When the bomb doors of the plane he is piloting become stuck, he descends into the belly of the beast to fix the problem. He literally rides the bomb to its target, whooping with joy, as he initiates the doomsday scenario and the end of the world. This image is the epitome of the “happy suicide of thought,” as the philosopher F.H. Bradley labeled the ideal.

The most important character of the film, of course, is the Bomb, a.k.a., the PSR (Principle of Sufficient Reason). It is the technology that not only gets the job done but determines the values of the system of which it is the heart.

What is the purpose of the satire? Let us remember that, although the movie gleefully recounts how the world is destroyed, that the purpose of the system was deterrence, that is, to preserve the world. At its margins, then, the film considers some obvious and important questions: What would a world without any living beings within it look like? What would the value of such a world be? Some would argue that these questions are not really the point of the film, though. The real issue is to highlight the inefficacy of the instrument chosen to protect the world. Both critics and proponents of deterrence share the same concerns. While a critic would point out the folies of deterrence, as it raises the chances that the very world we want to protect might be destroyed, a proponent would just say, on the very same grounds, that we simply need to correct and improve the systems that we have in place. It is a debate about the means and not the ends.

Of course, along these lines, Kubrick also wants to point out the hypocrisy, which is revealed among those that benefit from the system. The secret taming strategy of the inventors of the system reveals that they do care about finite existence. What is problematic about it is that it shows that they only value their own lives and not those of everyone else who will be destroyed.

But the subversive purpose of the satire might be something more sinister than either questioning the instrumental value of a system of deterrence or pointing out the hypocrisy of its advocates. Rather, the point of the film is something else entirely, namely, that the technology of the system is no longer an instrument to preserve some other set of values—say the glories of mid-century American capitalism or the Soviet version of communism—but itself the true meaning of the system. We need an elaborate system to maintain the bomb, but the ostensible purpose of the weapon—to prevent war—is belied by the fact that the key to the whole principle of deterrence is destruction itself. That, Kubrick suggests, is the ultimate value of the system, as the true heroes of the film demonstrate in their actions, when they embrace it.

Hegel's critique of Spinoza is not comedic in form but straightforwardly philosophical. He aims to show that Spinoza's pantheism—the view that nature and God are one—leads to a perverse effect—the denial that all things in the world except for God are real—in other words, acosmism. Nonetheless, the comparison to Kubrick's film is useful in two ways. For one thing, the film, as I hope to show, reveals something about the structure of Hegel's argument. For another, Hegel's argument shares some elements of literary satire in its reliance upon ironic effects and an implicit moral and social critique. In contrast to Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, however, Hegel's version of satire is far less bleak. You might see what I mean if I distinguish between two traditional kinds of satire: one that assumes a moral vision and of which it is in service; and another one that is darker and calls into question the possibility of moral value itself. Hegel offers the first version. As Yitzhak Melamed reminds us, Hegel's reading of Spinoza depends on, but also starkly differs from that of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (79).² Like Hegel, Jacobi wants to use Spinoza's views as a kind of warning, though his fear is more extreme. Jacobi thought that Spinoza had obliterated not only the finite (“Individual things, therefore, so far as they only exist in a certain determinate mode, are non-entia” [220]) but the infinite as well,³ at least in the sense that the infinite, which Jacobi thinks can have neither intellect nor will (222), has any resemblance to a traditional idea of God, which leads to the conclusion that Spinoza is not only an atheist (“Spinozism is atheism” 233) but also a nihilist.⁴ Hegel, in contrast, accepts Spinoza as a kind of religious thinker, albeit one who has gone horribly wrong. As he writes, “The charge of Atheism, which used often to be brought against philosophy (that it has too little of God), has grown rare: the more widespread grows the charge of Pantheism, that it has too much of him.”⁵ For Hegel, it is pantheism that leads to acosmism.

The problems with pantheism have been discussed in detail by many scholars. In a nutshell, Hegel thinks that for Spinoza the only thing that actually exists is a single substance.⁶ It is simple yet contains both thought and extension. There are, what he calls, two determinations of substance within itself, one that is universal and has being for itself, the other that is the particular and has being only in a dependent way. Hegel thinks that many of Spinoza's distinctions—among attributes and between attributes and modes—are not justified but only presupposed. He seems to endorse as a fundamental principle the notion that “all determination is negation,” even though it is unclear in the way and the extent of its application in Spinoza's system. Crucially, Hegel thinks that Spinoza fails to explain how the finite can be derived from the infinite. Not only are the consequences of Spinoza's view problematic, but so it its justification. Of course, there is a great deal of debate over these claims. Some scholars would disagree with them as a caricature of Spinoza's system, others would suggest that they have some merit. The one charge that I want to focus on, though, relates to the metaphysics of his morals.

What stands behind and motivates Hegel's critique of pantheism is his own substantive view of the metaphysical basis of morality. When he makes his critique of pantheism through showing how acosmism (the denial of finite subjects) results from it, he already has an alternative conception of morality, based primarily on his notion of subjectivity for God and for us, as finite beings, that is informing his arguments. For Hegel, the problem with Spinoza in this regard is that the fundamental ontological principle, substance, does not exhibit the principle of subjectivity. His idea of substance is abstract, not vital and alive (154). To be clear, I am not saying that Hegel simply has some arbitrary moral standpoint that he contrasts with that of Spinoza. He thinks that he has a rational justification for his view of divine and finite subjectivity and the moral and political system that follows from it. The point is that if we accept Spinoza's view, that reason leads us to an undifferentiated God, which undermines the possibility of meaningful moral life, then we must have an inadequate view either of reason itself or the fundamental concepts that reason has discovered. For Hegel, the project of explanation is never distinct from its moral content.

In this, he explicitly compares Spinoza's view to and categorizes it as an example of “Oriental” thought and religion.⁷ As Paul Franks remarks, Bayle had already made the association of Spinoza with the Orient, and it subsequently became a commonplace among other thinkers (154). In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel is reported to have said, “Spinoza was a Jew by descent, and what found expression in the form of thought in his philosophy is in general on the oriental intuition according to which everything finite appears merely as something transient, as something vanishing” (cited by Franks, 531). The static and undifferentiated substance is not a God to be venerated. Rather, he is an abstract version of a despot who treats his subjects either as tools or as non-existing. The subjects, in turn, with this strange conception of themselves act as if they don't exist, that is, as slaves.

Thus, for Hegel, acosmism is the parody of a proper order. It is the parody of a religious system, in which God directs the world providentially; the parody of a philosophical system in which actions are determined through the activity of subject; and the parody of a moral and political system, in which freedom is the reigning value. It is true that Spinoza claims that he defends a robust concept of freedom at the core of his system, but he has a hard time defending himself due to his attack on free-will and divine providence.

This is a good point to transition back to a discussion of Michael Della Rocca's book, The Parmenidean Ascent.⁸ Della Rocca and Hegel share some important features. Both Della Rocca and Hegel share an interest in Spinoza and Acosmism. But they also differ in several respects. For one thing, while Della Rocca is an engaging writer, Hegel produces a lot of turgid prose. More significantly, Della Rocca exhibits little or no satirical intent. Although he has a good sense of humor, which he frequently exhibits, he is deadly earnest in his embrace of Acosmism. (Interestingly, though Spinoza is clearly in the background, as he mentions in a couple of places, there is little or no systematic discussion of Spinoza. That is perhaps because, on his reading at least, Spinoza is not one of the tamers so common among interpreters. Spinoza is the only rationalist who could be read as living up to his own principles and doesn't belong among the list of failures that he gives us).

Della Rocca specifies that the “crux” of this failure, as F. H. Bradley understood, is the “rationalist argument against the reality of the relevant kind of relation, and hence against the reality of differentiated substance, action, knowledge, or meaning” (xvi). The idea, then, is that if we follow the demands of reason, we can explain the world without relying on any primitives, falling into an infinite regress, or getting trapped in a vicious circle, by doing away with all relations and the differentiated experience of the world that follows from them.

The fact that he has reserved it for another occasion is a sign that he is also aware of the importance of the topic. I would argue that the domain of the moral is not just one of many philosophical issues to which we can apply the PSR but connected in a special way to the employment of the PSR itself.

Whether this answer is sufficient—and I suspect that Della Rocca does not think that it is—is something that I return to at the end. But the point of bringing it up now is that I think that it is a problem that Spinoza does consider to be at the heart of his project. In Della Rocca's essay on Bradley's Appearance and Reality, he does link Bradley and Spinoza, but besides pointing out that Spinoza also seems to approve the idea of the overcoming of relations through knowledge of the One, he does not consider Bradley's own moral philosophy or suggest what the implications of Bradley's view might be for his own.⁹ I want to suggest that until we provide an account of the moral motivation of the project itself, that is, of the moral content of the PSR, then we cannot be satisfied with this gesture of throwing away the ladder.

Let us turn now to Spinoza. There has been a resurgence of interest in the acosmic reading of Spinoza and debates over the degree of its application within Spinoza's system. Some have argued for the reality, albeit qualified, of the finite individual in the system¹⁰; others for its ultimate unreality.¹¹ Here I want to focus on the moral question of the acosmic reading. First, I want to say something about the development of Spinoza's system and how that sheds some light on how he conceives of the nature of the highest good. Then I will turn to his analysis of the meaning of the good and how that bears on the nature of the highest good.

Just a bit later, he announces that he has an idea of the true good (§12), and then in the following section he tells us in three steps in what this highest good consists. First, we have to realize that “good and bad are said of things only in a certain respect” and that from the point of view of the eternal nothing is in itself good or bad.¹⁴ Second, we must recognize that, due to our weakness, we do not grasp the point of view of the eternal, and hence “man conceives a human nature much stronger and more enduring than his own” (TdIE, §13). (An important corollary to this point is that we come to realize that we could acquire this nature and that we seek the means to do so.) Third, we realize that this ideal human nature “is the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature” (TdIE, §13).

We find an apparently similar tri-partite structure in the last two parts of the Ethics. First, in the preface of Part IV, Spinoza notes that, “As far as good and evil are concerned, they also indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than modes of thinking, or notions we form because we compare things to one another” (E4pref). Second, despite these limitations, we desire to form a model of human nature, whose very purpose is to provide a common standard of good.¹⁵ An adequate idea of this model, some have argued, can be found in the discussion of the “free man” at the end of Part IV.¹⁶ And then this model, in turn, is a stepping stone to the knowledge of God that serves as the basis of what Spinoza in Part V of the Ethics calls our “blessedness” [beatitude]: “From this we clearly understand wherein our salvation, or blessedness, or Freedom, consists, viz. in a constant and eternal Love of God, or in God's Love for men” (E5p36c).

But there are also some important differences between the early and later works, both in fine details and in the larger conceptual scheme. The language that Spinoza uses differs. In the TdIE, it is “true good,” which doesn't appear in the Ethics, but rather “certain good.” And, although we do see the “highest good” (E5p19dem) mentioned in both places, we now see descriptions of it that seem to emphasize the individual state of mind, such as the “highest satisfaction” [summa acquiescentia] (E5p38s) or blessedness, as we just saw (E5p36c). Spinoza only uses the word “union” [unionis] with God in the TdIE. In the Ethics, there is no such explicit conjunction between the individual and nature. We do find phrases like “God's love of men and the mind's intellectual love of God are one and the same” (E5p36c), which some might argue is more or less equivalent with the idea of a union. As we have seen, scholars disagree over whether the object of the third kind of knowledge is a finite essence or an infinite essence. Yet the fact that we need to argue for an interpretation of the highest good at this point indicates that there is at least a prima facie problem with any simple conception based on the dissolution of the individual.

The persistence of a gap between the finite individual and the infinite is suggested not only in the slightly different conceptual vocabulary utilized, but also in the amount and kind of work that is required to close the gap. In the early texts, Spinoza takes what might be considered as a neo-Stoic approach to ethical life, in which we arrive at the highest good primarily through the correction of our false judgments. There is room for the cognitive therapy of the passions, which he treats rather stoically as mistaken ideas, but there is little or no discussion of social and political life.¹⁷ When we do come across political language, it is as a metaphor for our abject lack of autonomy, as is clearly seen in the Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being (Korte Verhandeling, or KV) where he writes, “it follows from this [the fact that we are part of nature and are determined by its laws] that we are truly God's servants—indeed, his slaves—and that our greatest perfection is to be such necessarily” (KV, Part 2, ch. 18.1; C127).

However, as I and others have argued, Spinoza's engagement with politics, expressed in the composition and publication of the TTP, changed his conception of the ethical project.¹⁸ Spinoza does not merely require the philosopher to correct his ideas and conduct a cognitive therapy of the passions, he also enjoins him [and I am using the gendered term to remind us that Spinoza due to his prejudice excluded women as rational political agents] to participate in political life as a condition of the ethical life. We see this concretely in the adoption of Hobbesian concepts of the conatus (the desire to preserve oneself, E3p6), the claim that the foundation of virtue is self-preservation (E4p18s), the requirement of the freeman to engage with the state (E4p70s and especially E4p73), and the striking claim in the penultimate proposition that, “Even if we did not know that our Mind is eternal, we would still regard as of the first importance Morality, Religion, and absolutely all the things we have shown (in Part IV) to be related to Tenacity and Nobility” (E5p41).

These observations are interesting, but they are only suggestive, open to interpretative differences, and hardly decisive. Here I want to propose a sketch of a philosophical reading of Spinoza's conception of the good that places it more squarely in the acosmic tradition, but, as we shall see, with a twist. The basic idea is that the idea of the good that Spinoza proposes is fundamentally relational, but that it is only possible to understand this fact with certainty once we understand the point of view of the infinite, which itself is amoral. There are three points that support this claim:

The good does not exist independently of us, whether in God, in nature, or in some third realm; rather, it is a projection of our desire onto the world.¹⁹ On this level, our understanding of the good will prove to be unendingly relational, due to our shifting relations with the external world and even our shifting relation to our self, which proves to be far less stable or given than we had imagined it.²⁰

2) The attempts to ground these individual, relational conceptions of the good in a model of human nature, which can be either inadequately or adequately conceived, do add a layer of certainty, especially when they are adequate. When Spinoza defines the good at the beginning of Part IV, he writes, “By good I shall understand what we certainly know to be useful to us” (E4d1). Likewise, “By evil, however, I shall understand what we certainly know prevents us from being masters of some good” (E4d2). The useful could be just what we desire, hence the definition is consistent with the ontology of desire and value in Part III. Spinoza knows that this is a radically unstable definition, lacking any certainty, even from the point of view of the individual. Hence, when he provides an additional explanation, and writes, “On these definitions, see the preceding preface [208/18-22],” he refers us back precisely to the discussion of models of human nature, which are supposed to provide a stable, because intersubjective, basis for our value judgments.

However, even these models are always relational in some sense. In the case of an inadequate model of human nature, then we are faced with the problem that we are just conflating a set of particular experiences and the ideas of those experiences into a single idea that we falsely label as a “universal” (see E2p40s1).²¹ In the case of an adequate model, the idea is more certain because it is based on properties that reason discerns are in the part and whole, i.e., common notions. Nonetheless, the idea is still relative to the set of properties in nature that we construct as “human,” which in turn are relative to other classifications of properties in the natural world. In other words, a meaningful, true idea of human nature, depends on the existence of particular properties and the differences with other patterns of properties in the world, all of which leads us to consider the order and system of nature itself that produces this infinite differentiation.

3) We can come to the realization through reason that Nature (or God) does not contain any intrinsic value. There is both a negative and positive aspect of this realization. The negative view is expressed clearly in the appendix to Part 1 of the Ethics. There, Spinoza argues that our traditional conceptions of God, his attributes, and His relation to nature are mostly due to an anthropomorphic projection of our mostly mistaken self-conceptions onto the order of nature itself. If we can argue for a positive conception of God that does not include these anthropomorphic properties, then we can not only understand that God does not have these properties but that he cannot have them. Two adjacent passages in the Ethics provide the best evidence that Spinoza thought something like this. First, Spinoza writes that “from this [i.e., that knowledge of evil is inadequate knowledge], it follows that if the human mind had only adequate ideas, it would form no notion of evil” (E4p64c). But this is inadequate because it is consistent with the long theological and philosophical tradition of seeing evil as a lack or something that has no reality at all. Thus, Spinoza makes a second, more comprehensive point: “If men were born free, they would form no concept of good and evil so long as they remained free” (E4p68). Those who reason call into question the human projections of value onto nature and know that, since the definition of good is relational, a being that did not have relations would not have any conception of the good, and yet we also know, from the starting point of our own experience, that we inevitably form conceptions of good and evil, and we can see on the basis of reason that it is our nature to do so. When we glimpse the perspective of God, then we see the infinitely perspectival and, insofar as we use models of various kinds, the recursive nature of the good.

The conclusion is that when we understand that our own sense of value is relational and that God does not have any fundamental values that might ground them in any deeper sense than the complex patterns we experience in nature, then we can embrace the idea of an infinitely qualified sense of value, in which we sometimes manage to agree with one another but more often than not disagree. In other words, we have an explanation of our moral world.

The reason appears to be that the very nature of an explanation requires an ultimate how, which an endless regress can in principle simply never satisfy.

However, hopefully, now we can see that a commitment to this explanatory condition leads to an unpalatable dilemma when it comes to the nature of the Good, at least in Spinoza, namely, that it couldn't be conceived except as infinitely relational.

The nature of the good in Spinoza's system is obviously a very complex topic, and my purpose here is hardly to give even a basic let alone an exhaustive account of it. Nonetheless, the scant few texts I have cited should allow me to make a couple of observations that are germane to the problem of the moral aspect of acosmism.

Spinoza can't be committed to the independence of some conception of the good that precedes, logically speaking, the system itself. Nor can he be committed to the entire dissolution of the idea of the good in either the unification of the individual with God (as in the early writings) or the intellectual love of God (in the later writings, which, as I have argued, are more ambiguous about the status of the subject). Somehow, we must avoid this Scylla and Charybdis and search for an alternative, one that allows us to maintain the paradox that we have discerned at the heart of the system. That is, we achieve the highest good when we realize that there is no ultimate good, that is, a good that is unqualified.

I said at the beginning that I thought we could use the logic of deterrence in Dr. Strangelove to help us understand some of the problems of acosmism. Let me now suggest in conclusion that we can use it as the blueprint for a solution to the moral problem. Let's call it the reverse Strangelove paradox: instead of saying that we need to threaten to destroy the world to save it, let us say that we need to embrace the world in order to destroy it. Or call it, if you'd like, the Parmenidean descent, which, as Della Rocca notes, is a possible translation of the Greek katabasis, though one he rejects for both rhetorical and philosophical reasons.²² What we discover when we follow the PSR and ascend to the level of substance is that the world of finite beings is essential to the possibility of making sense of the highest good. And so we must, following the discovery of the logic of the Good, or what the PSR reveals about what the nature of the good is, namely, the endless recursive definition of it in terms of finite relations, descend back into the midst of endless relations precisely to find a reason to accept the One. Thus, contrary to Della Rocca's Wittgensteinian point, we cannot do away with the ladder. Rather, we must embrace it.

The good for any finite thing is always defined in relation to itself and to other finite things (even if we conflate them into an imaginative universal or discover some true property that they share in common). However, what we discover as we know the nature of God is that what is One, the infinite substance or nature or God, does not have any relations in its essence. For that reason, Spinoza thinks that substance is, as Nietzsche would later put it, “beyond good and evil.” But if we are to be motivated to pursue the demands of reason, we must seek the good for us, that is, as finite beings. So, instead of throwing away the ladder, and doing away with morality altogether, which Spinoza recognizes would be the case (and I don't know if Della Rocca thinks this or not), the paradoxical result is that we must cycle back from the One to the Many, which is the very source of the motivation to achieve this state of knowledge. If this is true of morality, then perhaps this dynamic might be true of every other domain as well. Instead of doing away with the many, the search for the One motivates us to return to our finite natures.²³ Whether we take this seriously or as yet another fictional satire, will be the subject of the sequel.²⁴