-What are you writing now?
- I'm writing about you.
- Yeah? What are you saying?
- I was at the cafe across the street, and the fellow sitting next to me reading a history of science book turned out to be a professor of the subject.
- You talked together? Where do I come in?
- As expert in the skill he said I had to learn: getting money. I'd explained your vigorous self promotion, raising millions of dollars, you were not an idiot like me writing stories and thinking one day someone might pay a dollar for them.
- He called you an idiot?
- No. He was impressed by the fact I'd corresponded with the famous Chomsky. The professor was working on Spinoza, and Spinoza's ideas were the basis of the neuro-scientist Damasio's work, who was at the beginning of my Chomsky correspondence*. I told you about all this.
- Remind me about Damasio.
- Feelings are ideas about the body's continual efforts of adjustment to the world.
- And Spinoza?
- Emotion is an idea about the body. But unlike Damasio, Spinoza believed that we as individuals were ideas about the whole world, and the whole world was in effect God.
- I haven't read Spinoza, but he is respected by all the best people. Why is that?
- Well, compare Damasio. He argues that our mental world is caused by, is a kind of picture of the physical thing we are.
- And Spinoza says?
- The same, except he takes account of the fact that we don't only have feelings about our body, we have feelings about our body and the whole world.
- Doesn't Damasio agree?
- He says we have ideas of our body's response to the world, to the particular part of the world there at that time to be responded to and causing physical effects.
- And Spinoza says we respond to the whole world? Which is God?
- Yes.
- How do we respond to God?
- A feeling is not only about the body, but also about what we can do with our body in relation to the world outside, how we can change our feelings from worse to better. We can learn our different feelings relation to each other and to the world only because the world as a whole happens to be organized in such a way that allows it, only because the world as a whole is organized in relation to our lives as a whole. It didn't have to be that way. The world does allow it because the world is God. The way the world as a whole is organized is reflected in the form stories take in our lives. Our mental world includes much more than ideas about our body's current relation to the world.
- What for example?
- Love. Beauty. Justice. Unlike the neuro-scientist, Spinoza understood that the body couldn't by itself provide the ideas of the mind.
- What did the professor say? Did you tell this to him, or to Chomsky?
- I tried to tell both of them. I said that in the mental world you find two irreconcilable experiences, of wholeness and of parts, a distinction for which you can't find an equivalent in the material world. For Spinoza we are sort of God's thoughts, the whole world his body. Whatever you think of this idea, it is a more accurate and complete description of our experience than the neuro-scientist's.
- But if our body's changing relation to the world creates our feeling, what does our changing relation to the whole world...
- To God...
- What does our changing relation to God create in us?
- The story of our loss of love and return to love.
- And the professor said?
- He had to go back to work. And that I should go to work selling my stories. I said it wasn't my job to do that, and we got into a new discussion of how making money becomes an end in itself. I went back to the difference between the neuro-scientist and Spinoza. If our feeling, our relish in making money, is only an idea of our body's relation to the world, then there's nothing wrong with it. Our feeling, our relish in making money, is caused by the increasing and decreasing power money provides to adjust our relations to the world. Our love of making money is neurologically explained.
- That's great!
- No, it's wrong.
- Why?
- Because Spinoza was right: among the ideas of our mental world is the idea that the world allows us to manipulate our relation to the world in such a way to bring us to a sense of the world as a whole.
- To love.
- Yes.
- You're saying that people who love making money for its own sake live in the world of the neuro-scientist. What did the professor say?
- He had to go back to work.
- Then it was an insult when you said I'm an expert in getting money.
- I've only known you for a couple of days.
- The money making is for the work. It's all about the work.
- I understand that. But does your work express the whole world?
- God?
- Yes.
- Why does it have to?
- Let's say someone's life is not a good work of art. That it is a life like is common now in this place we find ourselves where no one pays attention to beauty, to the end arts are practiced as means to bring us to. People feed the cats we see on the streets everywhere, and do you know why I think they do it now when they didn't a few years before? The cats show the beauty the people collectively lack.
- My pictures are beautiful.
- But are they pictures of God?
- Why should they be?
- Because money-getting looks like using people as means to the end of getting money out of them. To protect yourself from that fatality you should put the whole world into the art you are raising money for.
- You don't know what my life has been.
- I'm not criticizing you. I'm reacting to the advice you gave me how to do what you do: to not talk about my difficulties, people don't want to hear it, to talk only about my work. Good advice, probably, but if I edit out my personal story the transaction becomes for me unbearably ugly, the particular never moves out into the whole.
- You can't eat philosophy, you know.
- I know.
*Noam Chomsky & Mental Things
