Spirit of Amsterdam Festival
An evening of philosophy and music on Spinoza’s philosophy of nature and the divine, and on what pantheism, animism and Daoist cosmology might have to say to each other.
The Spirit of Amsterdam Festival, launched for the city’s 750th anniversary, opens Amsterdam’s churches, mosques, temples and synagogues to art, music and ritual. It is not a religious festival, but one about belief, meaning and connection. On a wintry night in November we gathered in the Uilenburgersjoel (sold out).
We began with Spinoza’s turbulent life in Amsterdam. That the very community which excommunicated him in 1656 now welcomed us into their building to share his ideas was a full-circle moment.
Then his philosophy: pantheism, God as nature, natura naturans and natura naturata. From there I shared ideas I have been working on for some years: the parallels between Spinoza’s pantheism and animist and Daoist cosmologies, and how the idea of the divine as nature unfolding resonates with modern science, from the Big Bang and quantum theory to the Gaia hypothesis.
The red thread: the universe is not a fixed thing, once created by the divine or devoid of it, but a living process, a constant expression and movement of the divine. Process metaphysics, in other words, and a case for re-enchantment through a marriage of the ancient and the new. Spinoza is a good place to start.
Throughout the evening, the metaphysical sounds of Phantom Wizard on the piano filled the room.