The terrible writer Spinoza has a famous line of “God or Nature”, it is understood to mean that god and nature are the same thing. It is used heavily in vital materialism meaning “the belief that matter itself has vitality and a life, no matter how lifeless it may appear to be”. Using Spinoza’s theology, this modern vital materialist view makes everything from a plastic lid to an electric current to a human being alive. The intention of this is twofold, first two promote a new philosophy/theology on what life is as well as reforming perspectives for political purposes. The political purpose is a broadly environmentalist view but is intended to anthropomorphise all matter, so we respect it. Essentially animating all matter as an “actant” on the world and not a passive subject to human whims.

Philosophically and Theologically, I 100% agree with this notion. This returns the definition of life in full circle back to the goat Aristotle, pretty much negating 3000 years of philosophy. God is a language that we use to represent nature and is the singular connecting force between all things in the world, a 6th sense which we must train to harness. This might make me seem like a bit of a werido as it stands in stark contradiction to J. L. Mackie “argument from queerness”, but that discussion is for another day.

Politically and humanly I find this an issue. In a reasonable world we can not understand the spirit, if all matter has a spiritual quality then there are always questions that we can’t answer. While this may be the case we are here to fix systems and progress the world (what I believe to be the function of politics) and we can not reform systems without a comprehensive understanding of it. We can not afford to treat systems as nebulous. As the German philosopher I reference a lot says “to be radical is the grasp things by the root”. Political discourse is already to distributed to add these embellishments upon matter. We only started the environmental movement when we began to understand the damage we were doing to the world, not when we recognised that all life stems from nature and destroying it is equivalent to the destruction of this amorphous idea of life. Just like we get closer with someone the more we know about them, the more we understand all matter (everything or the 10,000 things in 老子 words) the more intimate we will be with it and the better we will treat it.

In short, this is quite a rushed article from some in class reading, but the point is change happens from reason, science and understanding not philosophy. While philosophy is powerful in how it can shape thought and how it fundamentally created all knowledge in the world, in a globalised world suffering from the destruction of babel (not speaking the same language) numbers and equations are what will progress the world.