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.