Spinoza on Science and Stress

SCOTT’S GIFT: A PHILOSOPICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

By Dick DeShaw

              Thoughts on substance. Here’s how I describe the substance of my life: The lives of human beings are like the fractals of a rocky shoreline (see Benoit Mandelbrot). The symmetrical patterns we seldom see, define the whole of what we are. Carl Jung called these patterns, ‘synchronism.” These patterns are the expression of energy (what the ancient Greeks called, ‘demonstration,’ i.e. knowledge inside us.  This is, by the way, how Spinoza described science, i.e. …”the eyes of the mind.”

            Let me demonstrate with some patterns in my life:

1) In high school I am required to take one math course. I take Geometry. It is Euclidian Geometry, stripped of all its flesh. It is boring. I skip classes to play on the golf team.  I get a D. Afterward I avoid math like the plague.

2) An abortive math attempt in pre-med at university, caused by an unavoidable math requirement. I receive an F.

3) After marrying, I return to university majoring in psychology. There’s a humanities requirement, either English or Philosophy. As a poor speller, I choose philosophy though I don’t know what it is. In that first class the heaven’s opened!  I add a second major in philosophy.

  A favorite teacher influences me towards phenomenology and American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce.

4) Apply to University of Waterloo graduate school in philosophy. Birth control method fails and I leave, taking a social worker job.

5) Return to university at York, (after three years as a social worker), running a group home with my wife and three children. I major in sociology and get an M.A.

6) Decide to pursue a PhD in Social & Political Thought to combine my sociology and philosophy background. I take a class from Brady Polka who introduces me to Baruch Spinoza. The start of the Emendation of the Intellect leaves an indelible imprint on the synapses of my brain. Especially, “…to change my plan of life …was forced to seek a remedy…like a man suffering from a fatal illness…”

7) I move to Kingston with my wife, buy a house, live upstairs and run the first floor as an out of print bookshop. I work with prisoners for a street organization till it loses its grant and teach sociology part-time for St Lawrence College while completing my dissertation long distance.

   Running into problems with the sociologists on my committee (they didn’t want KANTent), and not seeking the advice of my chairman, Brady Polka (which I should have done), I shove my completed dissertation into a shoe box and become a prison guard.

While working midnights in prison, I read Charles Sanders Peirce, who leadsme to the study of logic, mathematics and science. I write several articles on prisons using mathematical models. These are published and republished in a Russian journal of science, two textbooks, the American Journal of Corrections, The Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen and The Whig Standard.

9) Having the bookshop gives me first choice of all philosophy, math and science as well as the opportunity to sell books from my library, particularly all the works of Heidegger and Sartre. I had moved on from phenomenology.

  One day the Queen’s university physics department called. It concerned the library of a physics professor, H.M. Cave, who had died. He had studied in Vienna when quantum theory got its start. We were given his books. What he had was a classic collection of science and math. Among his books were the 3 volume Dover edition of Euclid’s Elements, translated and annotated by Thomas L. Heath. I put Euclid on my shelf and ignored him.

10) Reason didn’t help me cope with the stress of prison. After a prisoner stabs me, I am labeled with PTSD (Post Trauma Stress Disorder) and put on disability. I bring home the “…suffering from a fatal illness…” 

  Reading a book on quantum theory, I seek to understand the mathematical logic, topos theory. My wife goes on line and finds me four topos theorists in Siberia. They refer me to a European philosopher who has written a paper on quantum foam, topos, knots and Spinoza.

  Fascinated, I get out my Spinoza Selections, edited by John Wild. I begin to see Spinoza’s writings as a ‘how to’ deal with inadequate thinking caused by my PTSD.

11)  Reestablish my friendship with Brady Polka and ask him about more complete translations of Spinoza. He refers me to Samuel Shirley: Spinoza’s Complete Works. My daughter buys it for me at Christmas.

  For the first time I read all of the ‘Short Treatise On God, Man and His Well-Being.’  My Selections , edited by Wild, primarily dismissed this work as ‘the immature Spinoza, as many philosophers do. I find it fascinating.

12) My wife’s father is dying in Washington state. We stay with her brother who has an adopted son, Scott, with Duchane’s syndrome. While the disease has ravished his body and taken away his ability to speak, he can type with two fingers, albeit painfully, to communicate with me. I spend much of our visit with him, sharing what I am learning from Spinoza.

  The last day of our visit, a delivery truck arrives with a book for me: A Spinoza Reader, edited and translated by Edwin Curley. It is a gift from Scott which he ordered as a surprise for me, over the internet while we talked. We go to my sisters and in quiet moments, I read the Ethics. Spinoza’s work stops being a ‘how to,’ and becomes living flesh and spirit when I read: 

  “The first thing which constitutes the actual being of a human mind is nothing but the idea of a singular thing which actually exists.” (Ethics, Prt II, Prop. 11, p. 122 in Curley’s Spinoza Reader).  I call this proposition: Scott’s Gift.  My wife’s brother gives us a ’94 jeep and we drive it back across Canada to Kingston. Shortly afterward, her father dies.

   In our discussions, mine verbal and Scott’s typed onto a computer screen with two fingers, we discussed how the universe is like a quantum computer with us as part of the programming. I told Scott that Spinoza says this programming does not stop when we die. Since computers gave Scott the continuing ability to lead his life in some fashion, he loved that thought.

  Several months after the death of my wife’s father, Scott decided to let himself go into the programming of the universe, rather than be placed on a machine which would have to do his breathing for him.

13) I get Vol I of Curley’s The Collected Works of Spinoza.  I consider Shirley more a poet of Spinoza translations and Curley the scholar.  Together they made me see that Spinoza formulated his theory of knowledge in the Emendation and the Short Treatise.  Curley especially opened up the Short Treatise for me.

  After writing these works, Spinoza, as Gilles Deleuze says, ‘expressed,’ his ideas in his later works, especially the Ethics. Spinoza never leaves the foundations of knowledge that he formulated in the Emendation and Short Treatise but he gives them flesh in ethics, hermeneutics, religion and politics.

14) Reading Spinoza, I realize that while he was influenced by Descartes, Hobbes and others, his theory was warp and woof a demonstration of Euclid’s Common Notions.  I pull down my Euclid’s Elements and begin to read it for the first time. Heath was an excellent scholar. His notes place you back in the ideas and currency of Euclid’s times. He put back on Euclid the flesh that mathematicians have stripped off.  As both Euclid and Spinoza said, the common notions of equality and ‘the whole is greater than the part,’ are the foundations of thinking. This is substance.

  Equal is the glue that holds together logic, mathematics and ethics. I suggest that Spinoza cannot be understood without seeing the influence of Euclid’s Common Notions in his thinking.  They are recurring themes.

  Finally;   ‘A point is that which has no part,’ is the essence of Spinoza’s idea of God, (Eternity = Now) and the essence of human life. Buddha discovered this as ‘Nirvana.’

  Later on I also found, in a neglected book on my shelf, that Euclid’s Common Notions were the foundations of George Boole’s, The Laws of Thought that created the mathematical language of computers.

  Euclid, Spinoza and Boole are the heroes of my thinking along with contemporary thinkers; Seth Lloyd (Programming the Universe) and a neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio  (Looking for Spinoza).

  I suspect my  nephew Scott smiles and approves of how I have used the gift he gave me.

(Orginally published as ‘Tilting At Windmills’ in Globe & Mail, June ‘97)

I met him way before he was stabbed, teaching Sunday school in a rundown church in a poor rural neighbourhood. There were a lot of kids around whose futures didn’t include reform school because of him. Big ears, skinny but sincere and always learning. I married him as soon as I was old enough and we immigrated to Toronto during the Vietnam War. The Mennonites had set up a teenage hostel through Children’s Aid. During the early seventies, if you ran away, underage from anywhere in Canada and came to Toronto, we got you until your parents or somebody anted up the fare to bring you home.

  Counselling kids in trouble with the law, prowling the back lanes behind Rochdale for runaways, learning how to handle social workers, we worked as a team.  Meanwhile, he was studying at York [University] – an M.A. doctoral studies, a disseration. After the hostel, I joined McGraw-Hill Ryerson who were bringing out Roger Caron’s award-winning book ‘ Go-Boy’[about being a con]. But Roger was still in prison, in the hole and the company needed someone to go tell him they wanted to publish only the first half of the book he’d written. [Second half later published as 'Bingo.' since first half won award but nobody knew that would happen then] My husband went down, looking like one of Jason’s Argoauts listening to the Sirens singing on the rocks. The same sort of seduction.

  That was behind our move to Kingston [Ontario] with its eight federal penitentiaries, although he went back to Children’s Aid and I opened a bookstore. “Visiting our graduates,” he called it whenever CAS sent him behind bars to see a father or mother. He taught a course for guards at the community college and he began to lean in the direction of the prisons when the wind was right. But he was still working on the dissertation. One day he came out of his study. “I quit,” he said and handed the dissertation to me, neatly wrapped up ina shoe box. “Think I’ll go down and knock on the gate. Maybe they can use another guard.”

  “Sadistic guard,” I said. “You hardly ever see the career mentioned without an adjective like that. Everybody knows what guards do. All the prison biographies say so.”

  “Not much different than being a parent,” he said, and he went off to fill out an application. Three months later he was sitting in a limestone tower with a gun, watching the sun come up over the harbour. Two guards had recently been murdered in the kitchen of his institution. Drugs poured in as though this was a pharmacy wholesaler. Brew made of fermented oranges, ketchup and sometimes potatoes was being cooked in bags all over his range. This combination of pills and stills is lethal inside.

  He was right about the CAS graduates. Two former clients and a boy we’d once had in our hostel turned up, as though the universe were offering a second crack at them. Meanwhile, staff positions were being cut back while con privileges increased. (’Con’ or ‘con game’ is what most prefer to be called). Knives were allowed in calls for crafts. Security was decreased when the prison decided to have guards do case work on computers while watching inmates, rather than hire more staff.

  He had urine thrown on him from a cell. He was Maced and regularly threatened. He found so many brews when he searched that the cons began calling him, ‘the Nose.’ One night, a spaced-out con threatened a group of guards with a knife. My husband stepped between them and deflected a blow meant for his belly with his left hand. Later that same evening, the alarm bell rang for a cell fire. With adrenalin still popping from the stabbing, he ran down the range through thick smoke and carried out the dead weight of a con, half again his size.

  He was off three months. X-rays couldn’t show the worst damage from the incident. During that time a fellow guard had half his finger bitten off. Cons phoned another guard’s home to say that their father had been killed inside. Effigies of guards were made and left hanging on the range.

  And then one day, when a concrete truck cut in front of us and he tried to run it off the raod in our little tin can of a car, I found he wasn’t reading any more, hadn’t in quite a while. There’s a technical name for it, a stress trauma discovered in Vietnam, and, as those soldiers found, the problem is in the same place.

  We run into cons all over our samll prison town. Sitting with him at an outdoor cafe, I see two men walk by who say, “Hi, boss. Buy us a coffee?” and sit down. A third comes up who has left his teeth inside, not expecting to be away from the institution very long. Others come by the bookstore sometimes, talking about trying to stay out, to stay clean.

  He’d been in great shape when he joined up. But now, even with daily workouts, his spine is permanently injured. Sometimes it paralyzes him and he falls. He’s been diagnosed with sleep apnea and sleeps on a machine. His toes are broken and rigid, requiring special shoes. His glands don’t work right anymore from all the Mace.

  The recent trouble at Prison for Women [Now closed}, spawned a group for offiers who had a need to talk about their situation. When it finished, they offered his prison the same opportunity. Eventually a group that included him, met ina basement to talk, smoke, tell war stories and at some point, things that were even more personal. There were tears. Those officers murdered in the prison kitchen looked over their shoulders. There was a video camera at the last session. Perhaps a tape might help someone else.

  Afterward, they let the wives come in. One of the questions that came up then is how it feels to wonder whether each day will be your husband's last, without the consolations of society's approval that cops get. Sometimes I think guards have inherited the contempt that used to surround the occupation of hangman, with no real understanding of what it is they do.

    "Write a summary of what came out of the group," someone [asked] him. “What did it accomplish?” – “It demonstrated that post-traumatic stress is the norm for prison guards, not the exception,” he wrote. “All of us are quite wary of  ‘therapeutic professionals.’

  [His] article [was returned] yesterday. “No, not so,” they had pencilled over ‘post-trauma.’ “Not true’ over the line about being wary. Granted the piece wouldn’t do much for recruitment of new officers. “Since the group, I have been able to step back and look at management policies with a sense of detached, quixotic bemusement instead of personal betrayal,” [his] piece concludes.

  Quixote, eh? Which makes me Sancho Panza, something I’ve suspected since we started this journey way back in the U.S. With the wisdom of that fat little sidekick, I can point out that sadistic prison guards are a Hollywood invention, necessary for filming inmate memoirs perhaps, those doctored stories from individuals we were once anxious to see behind bars.

  Guards are men and women who don’t expect good news from administration or the press. They go into prison in the dark on a daily basis, hoping to provide a little light. And the windmills are bigger now than when we started this journey. Unlike Cervante’s story, however, they are not the wrong target.

This was written by my wife, Rose DeShaw, when I still worked in prison.

            (From left to right: Gord Bishop, my son’s best friend & support, me and Louis) About 2 weeks ago, my youngest son, Louis died of natural causes. He was 41. We are of course sad but after the past 26 years, our tears were already mostly shed. There is also great relief for him. He is out of his suffering. For the past 3 years he was in and out of hospitals, trying to overdose.
 In an article on Einstein, a writer for the Ottawa Citizen said: “…everything in the universe, including us, are condensed energy, waiting to be liberated back into the universe.” 
 Louis has been liberated. He was a 41 year old in the body of a 90 year old whose brain had never evolved since adolescence, due to drug use.
 We do feel blessed in that Louis returned to us as our child, phoning 4 or 5 times a day for comfort, these last few months. Much of these past years he had been alienated from us. So we got our son back before he died.
 My wife Rose and I have fled far from the religion of our youth with good reasons. (after all, both our sons were molested by a choir master in the church). However, I think my wife’s relation to God has always been more natural than dogmatic. She finds consolation in truth.
 I on the other hand, have striven to make logical sense of the concept which the word, ‘God,’ symbolizes. I have spent much time in the wilderness of abstract thought.
 As my quote earlier suggests, I find my consolation in science and philosophy which come together in Spinoza. I am not too fond of hermeneutic apostates who blaspheme science, even though I was once one of them.
 Proposition 29 in Part 5 of Spinoza’s Ethics has been my special consolation in this time:
  “We conceive things as actual in 2 ways:  Either insofar as we conceive them to   exist in relation to a certain time and place [Spinoza knew about relativity long    before Einstein discovered its scientific expression] or insofar as we conceive    them to be contained in God and to follow from the necessity of the divine    nature. But the things we conceive in this second way as true or real, we     conceive under a species of eternity and their ideas involve the eternal and    infinite essence of God.”
 Dem. P30  “Eternity is the very essence of God…”
 As I reflect about my son’s life, I realize that Democritus’’ saying: “to live badly is to spend a long time dying,” is only what Spinoza calls a “being of reason,” and to apply notions like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are only relative positions of time and place. His true or real essence was in the necessity of nature/God.
 Nature sent my wife and I affirmation of that fact. After we put Louis’ obituary in the Kingston paper, we got a card of sympathy from his kindergarten and first grade teacher, Joyce O’Shea. 
 Our memories of Louis are cluttered with much of what is relatively called, ‘bad,’ but understanding, is, as Spinoza says, “…the eyes of the mind,” which come from the truth or real under a “species of eternity.”
 While I have found consolation in science and philosophy, I have found that what I have discovered is not applicable for most people. Spinoza, who was only 5 years older than Louis when he died, wrote a book when he was about my son’s age, as an attempt to reason with the Dutch people about religion and politics.  This was after they killed their democratic leader.
 It wasn’t well-received, not even by Cartesian philosophers. (Treatise on Theology & Politics).  In it, Spinoza said, ‘common people’ do not operate by what he called, ‘the light of reason,’ but rather by stories taken from experience. Scripture, he said, was not written to enlighten the ‘common people’ but rather to call them to obedience in loving God and treating their neighbours as themselves.  (Matthew 22:31-40).
 When Spinoza wrote this, he was mad at ‘common people,’ because they killed Jan de Witt, the political leader and friend of Spinoza. He interrupted his writing of the Ethics to write the Treatise. When he returned to writing to Ethics and the negative reaction to the Treatise his method of exposition. (Deleuze calls it, ‘expression.’) – his method had changed from abstract to practical. He never got to storytelling but probably would have if he had achieved maturity.
 Spinoza’s immature and decidedly academic approach to ‘common people,’ in the Treatise was because he forgot, in his anger, the foundation of his philosophy was in Euclid’s Common Notions (axioms of thinking) of equality and the whole is greater than the part. He returned to his foundation in Part 2-5 of the Ethics.
 The common notions of equality and part/whole are the foundations of all human thinking (what the early Greeks called, ‘demonstration’), and possessed by every human, no matter how developed their intellect. Abstract thinking is not everyone’s skill but we all possess the common notions as the foundation of our understanding. The true and real stories of human experience demonstrate this fact. This is why the teachings of humankind, as Spinoza said, tell stories from experience.
 Bertrand Russell, whose method of logic I adore, labeled Spinoza a ‘mystic.’ What Russell didn’t realize, was that his faith in reason and logic was also mysticism. As finite beings, we tell stories of our fluxations in time and space out of the infinite and eternal ‘now’ that we experience.
 One more thought: It takes abstract thinking and academic hubris to ignore the common notions as the foundation of our common thinking. The history of academia?
Louis has been redeemed into the natural.

Hi, Owen. I think it’s wonderful that you are discussing philosophy in highschool. I didn’t discover philosophy until my third year in university.  When I did – the heavens opened.
  While I originally spent much time in existentialist thought (and certainly experienced, ‘angst,’) I am presently focused on Baruch Spinoza, Euclid, George Boole, the scientist Seth Lloyd and the neuroscientist , Antonio Damasio.
  When sharing philosophers, you will find that often they have gone on, as Wittgenstein said, ‘to language games on holiday.’ When speaking to your English class, as much as possible, use your ordinary Australian words.
 Doing my B.A., I once wrote an existentalist paper describing the dump in our small college town where my wife and I worked metals to make money for food while we went to school. Got an A + on it.
  This weekend, I worked at a Music Festival doing a presentation which I called, The Old Philosopher. (I can do this because I am 72).

  I had a box in which was a skull with an exposed rubber brain on which were rubber maggots, and a loaf of bread.   I explained to those who came up that the bread represented our life and was NOW.
  I told them each slice of bread was like an incident in their life – both happy and sad. 
  I made 2 piles of bread – things they felt hate for and things they loved.
  Then I told them inside the box was the cause and sometimes the cure for all the world’s problems.
  They would stick their hand in and feel around.
   I asked them what they felt. Sometimes they identified it as a brain.
  Then I’d open the box to reveal the brain with the maggots.
       “This is a brain filled with hate,” I said. “And it causes all the world’s problems.”
   Then I went back to the piles of bread which I reminded them was NOW, and I said: “An old philosopher (Spinoza) said every time we thing about something in the ‘hate’ pile, we bring hate back into the NOW. the place we presently occupy. Things like anger, guit, greed and the rest, only have the power we give them. They produce the emotions that cause hate in the world.
  But we can stop thinking about the ‘hate’ pile and focus on the other pile, the ‘love.’ Here we find truth, beauty, science and so forth.
  It doesn’t hurt to memorize quotes from thinkers you appreciate and focus on these when the ‘hate’ pile seems to be taking over your thinking.
  This is a simplified version of Spinoza’s ideas. He is quite complex when you read him.
  While very simple, the presentation with the brain and the bread was quite effective on that summer afternoon.
  Think of something you can do using ordinary language that can show ideas to your audience.
   Let me know how you do. Have a happy slice of NOw doing your presentation.
 
Dick DeShaw

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Ironically, when reason failed me, I could only find solace in the writings of a man who has been called a ‘rationalist;’ however, after making repeated and failed runs at being an academic and ending up in prison, what made me a kindred spirit with Baruch Spinoza was not reason, but stress disease.

Addiction to adrenalin highs as a prisoner guard, bottomed out in despair after a prisoner tried to kill me and some years later, I found a young prisoner who had hung himself on Mother’s day.

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As a stress-damaged prison guard (retired), I found the answer to why the world is so f****ed up from a stress-damaged seventeenth century philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza. His answer is simple: stupid (or as he calls it, inadequate) thinking. Spinoza says the universe we live in makes sense. Our thinking does not. He explored the reason in his philosophy.

Why do I use the ‘F’ word? When I was a prison guard, I found that the two most common words used by prisoners were ‘respect,’ and ‘f***.’ A prison is a very f****ed up place. Anger and despair hang like a morbid tapestry on the walls.

The prisoners respond to their situation with F.T.W. (F*** The World).

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In 1992, a prisoner tried to stick a shiv in my gut. I caught the thrust with my hand. The cut, while superficial, went deep into my soul. The adrenalin addiction I had acquired as a guard, became Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I lost my faith in life. It was not till I discovered Baruch Spinoza’s God Of Science that I found the way to recovery. By the 17^th century, a new description of God was emerging from the womb of human understanding. This was the God Of Science. The church did its best to make this a still birth. However, early fathers of Humanism sneaked a bastard version out of the midwife’s hands.

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