In Spinoza's Ethics, he writes, "Things could not have been produced by God in any way or in any order other than that in which they have been produced." (I, P33). One implication of this statement is a necessary movement towards increasing complexity.
As God unfolds, the permutations increase in what appears a Bach-like set of fugues. These permutations unfold in a specific order, despite the seeming randomness. Further, the unfolding is constructive for the specificity that follows.
As a person who is drawn to simplicity, I am at odds with God - not my best stance. The increased complexity that I see as a characteristic of evolution is not some mistake; the increased complexity allows for that occasional quantum leap that we see in physics, biology, invention and art.
While there is nothing wrong with my desire to rely on proven formulae, there is everything wrong with my occasional desire to go back to the "white picket fences of the 50s "- as it is based in my desire to "play God."
1 comment:
I doubt that Spinoza would agree that complexity increases. While it would seem that each particular present thing causes others and they all ramify forward towards infinity, would it not also be true that each present thing represents a convergence of past causes, ramifying backwards towards infinity? So another way to look at Deus sive Natura may be that it is and always has been infinitely complex. There is no reason to think it started from simplicity with something like the physicists' Big Bang and has been growing more complex ever since. Some species evolve, others retrogress; all ultimately become extinct--truly simple. The Fifties were not really any simpler than the present day. They are, to borrow from Robert Frost, "a time made simple by the loss of detail, burned, dissolved and broken off...", at least in our minds.
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