Relationality,alterity and universality: a theology for universal consciousness

To see the whole cosmos as a single mind is being taken more seriously in science and philosophy than it was in the past (when it appeared to be more science fiction than science fact). It is now seen by many to make more sense of human existence than does the still powerful scepticism of scientific and philosophical reductionists who reduce the self to almost a no-thing and the universe to purposeless energy and mass. At the same time, accepting universal consciousness puts up challenges to both ‘God’ and to any system of ethics derived from God. The purpose of this article is to work, as it were, in reverse – from the self to the other and from the other to transcendence itself, ending with the humanism of God.

The self in relationship

Western philosophy has long had a problem with the idea of the self as a person in relation to other persons and to God. This elemental experience of being human, always central to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions, puts too much reliance on human reports of inner experience, which are not verifiable by experiments or by rational deduction. Oliver O’Donovan, in his survey of the disappearance and possible return of theological ethics, locates the problem in the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, which places the Absolute too high and far away and leaves human experience without roots or boundaries in natural law and a teleology of cosmic history. ¹ By the early twentieth century, such idealism had gone out of fashion in Anglo-American philosophy, reducing the scope of the self and its relationships to near irrelevance.

In one of the most influential works of British philosophy of the twentieth century, Gilbert Ryle set out to demolish what he called ‘the Official Doctrine’, set in place by Descartes, that the mind is a different kind of substance than the body and in some sense above and beyond the body. As Philip Goff explains in Galileo’s Error, the ‘mind–body problem’ goes back to Galileo and his separation of science and consciousness. All that is not reducible to quantitative terms – sensation, emotion, imagination – Galileo put to one side, thus creating what Goff calls the problem of consciousness, that science thereafter had licence to ignore how we think and feel and imagine (including ‘God’). ² When Descartes formalized this position in terms of philosophy, he created what Ryle dubs ‘the ghost in the machine’, seeing mind as a separate entity from the body, but also the controller of it. As Ryle puts it, Descartes ‘couldn’t accept, as Hobbes accepted, that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork’. ³ What Ryle was after, above all, was to clarify language, so that mind, soul and consciousness described nothing more than particular workings of the intellect, the most complex – and therefore the highest – operations of the mind–body complex. ⁴ With Galileo’s error of putting consciousness aside from science, Descartes’ formalizing of the status of the mind as other than the body, and Ryle’s reduction of the mind to the ‘clockwork’ of bodily structures, the notion of the self was ripe for disintegration.

Meanwhile, in science, first physics removed free will, replacing it with a sensation of freedom arising out of the complexity of pre-set choices available to humans compared with other animals. As Brian Greene summarizes it: ‘We need to recognize that although the sensation of free will is real, the capacity to exert free will – the capacity for the human mind to transcend the laws that control physical progression – is not.’ ⁵ Even this illusion of free action, of a self, is not stable. Peter Godfrey-Smith, reading the self as a narrative we recount to ourselves, opts for Derek Parfit’s view of the self. ‘Like Parfit, I doubt that the kind of deeper sameness of a person over time that Nagel believes is real, and I agree that this recognition can change our view of survival and mortality.’ ⁶ The bonds between the different sections of our self-narrative over time are loose and unreliable. Our connectivity is with the generations before and after us, but our illusion of selfhood is untrustworthy and evanescent.

The myth of the self in philosophy takes a different form in the solipsism of Ludwig Wittgenstein, illustrated in his Private Notebooks 1914–1916. This is his diary of life as a soldier in the Austrian army, where he struggles with the concept of the ‘I’, concluding that a philosophy of the self is founded on ‘the idea that the world is my world’. ⁷ Wittgenstein states this as a rational decision of an adult mind, not the first conception of the world of newborn children (where it makes sense). As an adult perception it runs contrary to the human experience, from the womb onwards, of being in relationship: the world is not my world, but our world, the world of one of the planet’s most communicative species. ⁸ We are not only semiotic, but also (and perhaps consequentially) relational persons, interacting constantly with one another, with the environment and with some notion of transcendence.

Alterity: the significance of the other

This is important beyond the boundary of academic argument: to bring in the other as a moral presence is to change the terms of the contract between the self and God (or the ‘Good’). Now it is another’s needs that begin to define who I am. The great exponent of the ethics of the other is Emmanuel Levinas, who united ethics and his own experience of the Second World War and the Shoah to produce a remarkable vision of the other, or, more precisely, the otherness, the alterity, of another human being as the beginning of moral obligation. ⁹ For Levinas, the primary source of ethics is the naked face of the other (‘naked’ here meaning stripped bare, concealing nothing). ¹⁰ Nothing more and nothing less.

Levinas has not been taken up by theological ethics, largely, I think, because of the complexity of his thought, but also because of the extreme submission he requires of the moral agent before the face of the other – an obligation without sympathy (on either side) and without reciprocity, which Levinas regards as implying a stance of condescension, or of a desire to control the other. This state of not imposing myself upon the other, but of laying myself open to who or what the other is, to the needs that are to be met, Levinas calls ‘the radical passivity’ of the moral agent. ¹¹ The moral subject stands alone before the other, without God or even philosophical transcendence.

As a citizen of Jewish origin conscripted into the army, Levinas survived the Shoah by being taken as a prisoner of war of the German army, which kept some Jewish prisoners away from the SS. ¹² In France, his entire family perished under the Vichy government’s application of the Nazi race laws. This deep personal experience of evil as the denial of the humanity of the other, with the persisting trauma of survivor’s guilt, informs his submission to the moral obligation created by one and all others. The refusal of moral obligation he calls ‘the absolute freedom of play’ ¹³ – that is to say, the freedom of adults pretending to have the freedom of ‘child’s play’ (which in reality is a learning process for the child).

Levinas puts his best hopes in youth, the youth of France in May 1968, ready to recognize the inauthentic and to protest against it. In his praise of youth in the third essay, ‘Without identity’, he claims that any responsibility towards the other extends even to accountability for the other’s moral responsibility towards me and towards all others. What both the moral agent and the other are involved in is an offering of education – or moral choice – to the subjectivity of the human person, a sort of taming of the all-consuming Ego, a movement from ‘the Ego [Moi]’ to the simple, receptive ‘me [moi]’. ¹⁴ While there is a challenge to the individual moral subject, no one can be saved alone from the rule of the Ego over the self, from a destructive interiority. Levinas regards the recognition of, and submission to, the moral obligation created by the naked face of the other as the beginning of moral consciousness and therefore the beginning of the self as a moral being, before any question of personality or ‘essence’. ‘Prior to consciousness and choice, before the creature collects himself in present and representation to make himself essence, man approaches man.’ ¹⁵

For Levinas, this recognition of the other is the primary moral principle, coming before metaphysics, the meta-ethic that is the measure of all ethics. It is the beginning of responsibility, the moral subject forced into recognition of a process larger than the self. That Levinas overplays the element of ‘submission’ is beyond question – it is the overstatement of a position in order to make a point, with all of Levinas’s interior passion behind it. This overstatement is arguably also in play in his utter rejection of reciprocity, the danger of making a claim upon the other – condescension, control, possession – without learning the lesson of the naked face, the ‘alterity’ (otherness) and ‘illeity’ (a term Levinas invented to signify the nature of the other – one might say the ‘thusness’ of a human being). If Levinas is guilty of hyperbole in the theory of radical passivity, he is also open to challenge in his total rejection of reciprocity. This complete rejection, in effect, of any hope of knowing another person led him to question Martin Buber’s use of the ‘I and Thou’ relationship as a claim to reciprocity – a charge that Buber rejected. ¹⁶ Levinas is important because his ethic of the naked face brings into philosophy and theological ethics both the horrors of, and the necessary response to, war and the Shoah. Nevertheless his assertion of radical submission of the moral subject and his rejection of reciprocity, together with the presence that is also an absence of the other, tend towards an ethic of alienation of the self from the other, rather than an ethic of mutual knowledge and acceptance. The lone moral subject is heroic but unrelated to any common human project. If anything, the lesson of Levinas’s alterity is that a relational ethic cannot be built on the other alone, without recognition of the third who walks beside us, the transcendent, the Spirit universally present in human affairs.

Universality: of consciousness or of Spirit?

If scientists and philosophers are wary of transcendence for the sake of Occam’s razor, theologians can also be wary of universal consciousness or universal Spirit for the opposite reason: that the end of theological dualism takes away too much from the concept of the divine. This stripping away is necessary, so that we can see, not the naked face of God, but the inadequacy of our own conception of transcendence. Universal Spirit is a kind of meta-theology, a reality behind all religious practices. To strip away the detail from God leaves us free to assert that the ultimate single form of the cosmos is Spirit. It is necessary to change only one word, ‘consciousness’, into ‘Spirit’ to achieve a unitary theory of substance, purpose, Good and transcendence. There is a positive theology of universal consciousness that arises out of the Christian story (and out of other religious stories), but it is not very close to the traditional structure of systematic theology. It concerns the centrality of the Spirit as the force that drives the life of the universe, and it requires an enlarging of the theological mindset, to begin the consideration of God at the scale of the entire cosmos. We are then face to face with a universe that is glorious and dangerous in equal measure, in which we occupy a not very significant portion of space-time, and in which there may or may not be other conscious life. For this beginning, the two philosophers – Levinas and Goff – offer complementary starting points for a pre-ethical force: ‘the Good’ in Levinas, and a universal mind (the universe itself) seeking ‘value’, which is the Good, in Goff. Between these two concepts a sense of transcendence, in the form of Spirit, begins to emerge.

Levinas is reticent about describing God, perhaps because of his Talmudic scholarship. At the end of ‘Signification and sense’ he refers to ‘the God who passed by’ (Exodus 33.22–23). ¹⁷ The naked face of God cannot be seen directly, because the sight would overwhelm and destroy the viewer. God is therefore seen only in the ‘trace’ left behind in time and space. What is seen in the trace is not God’s fullness but his ‘illeity’. The trace carries only the ‘thusness’ of God or of the other; it is not a presence, an epiphany. Going towards God is not a matter of encounter with God, but of going towards others who stand in that same trace of God.

In ‘Humanism and an-archy’, Levinas comes at God from a different direction. In a discussion of the possible objection that the radical passivity created by the obligation to the other, the submission of the self, brings a form of servitude of the moral agent, Levinas brings into play a Good that exists before all being. This underlying force is ‘value without anti-value that is inescapable’. It causes the human being as moral agent to accept responsibility for the other – and ultimately for all others. ¹⁸ The presence of this Good, coming from before time and being, comes to the moral subject as a form of election, neither chosen nor not chosen. This Good, says Levinas, can be given a name, ‘by abuse of language’, the name of God. Note how Levinas continues his reticence: the naming of God is not necessarily his own act – rather, it is a general human possibility – but the presence of transcendence is now inescapable.

If we move from the scale of the self and the other to the scale of the self and the universe, Philip Goff offers another clue to the nature of transcendence. In Why?, now more open to the possibility of religious experience, Goff describes a schema of a cosmic consciousness that comes very close to being a theology. He first drives ‘consciousness’ down to the level of particles, which purposively create the superstructure of solid objects and of living beings. Goff then notes that ‘many theoretical physicists are inclined to think that the building blocks of reality are not particles but universe-wide fields, and that particles are simply local vibrations within those fields’. ¹⁹ The notion of a field rather than a particle already suggests a way of understanding the universe as Spirit rather than consciousness. But Goff goes further. Below the level of these fields he posits a deeper power, a ‘fundamental mind’ which is the bearer of the fields. This ‘mind’ is the universe itself. This theory is directly parallel to Levinas’s concept of the value without anti-value which is the Good or even God.

Goff then argues that this cosmic consciousness is purposive in that it ‘recognizes and responds to considerations of value’, so that the conscious universe is ‘essentially driven to try to maximise the Good’. ²⁰ Evil then arises from the necessary limitations or boundaries of a physical construct. Goff thus arrives at a cosmic form of utilitarianism, but, like Levinas, without attempting to define the nature of ‘value’ or of ‘the Good’.

In this double context of a power creating value, ‘God’ then becomes the ‘transcendence’, the creating power, the source, which is beyond our imagination and beyond comprehensive theologizing. This indefinable power, in creating a cosmos, performs a kind of kenosis, a lowering of self – or of the energies of self – to the point where living beings can bear the knowledge and the impact of the light. This is universal Spirit, the kenotic form of God, not a separate entity but a presentation of the face, which we can call ‘the humanism of God’. All our forms of understanding God, which are necessary and true in their own contexts, point to this one central fact: that the transcendence communicates with us in forms of love which we cannot fully define or reciprocate.

Richard A. Cohen gives a definition of Levinas’s ‘humanism’ as ‘the belief in the irreducible dignity of humans, a belief in the efficacy and worth of human freedom and hence also of human responsibility’ – which perhaps reflects Cohen’s own calm thought, rather than Levinas’s passionate philosophical poetry, but which stands well as a definition of a humanism of God. ²¹ This is not quite the ‘humanity of God’ of Karl Barth. Barth’s summary is: ‘In Jesus Christ there is no separation of man from God or of God from man.’ ²² As a Christological statement this is true, but Christology is only one of many paths to universal consciousness, the consciousness of the Spirit. As Oliver O’Donovan admits, the hope of the whole of humanity joining in the community of the Church, ‘the first fruits of the human race’, is a distant vision. ²³ The Spirit of the transcendence, on the other hand, is an ever present reality, energizing everything that lives and holding together everything that has form – the energy field of the cosmos, the beginning and the end of time. This is close to Goff’s own theological position of apophatic theology, the approach to God through a theology of not-knowing – not of the absence of God but of a recognition that human reason and even human spiritual experience cannot bring us directly into the full presence of the transcendence. ²⁴ Religious believers tend to prefer to personalize God in some way, but the way of unknowing, the way of committing the self to a darkness and an immensity beyond all knowledge, is the form of a theology for the present time. The form of God is then the creating and pervading Spirit, of which the universe is made – the representation of the transcendence into our space-time. The humanism of God we learn from the presence of the Spirit with us as we open ourselves to the alterity of the other. The possibility of encounter with the transcendent is recorded by mystics of many sorts, but open daily to anyone who has the inclination to listen in a moment of silence. The alterity of God, the fact of not knowing the fullness of the God that the Spirit represents, warns us not to take our theologizing too seriously. A theology for the present time will need to be open, free of compulsion and division, and aware of human experience as the high road to God. ²⁵

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