The second line of thought to be explored in order to derive an ontol¬ogy and an ethics from Paul's letters brings us to the themes of time and event. Moreover, this line allows us to address in more detail the sense of exception at stake in Paul's dialectic. The importance of time, tempo¬rality and event in the contemporary European philosophical reflections on being hardly needs to be stated. Emblematic in this respect are the titles of Heidegger's Being and Time and Badiou's Being and Event, but many more books with less iconic titles and many more authors may be added to these. Elsewhere, I have extensively examined and assessed how the critique of the ontotheological constitution of metaphysics has guided contemporary continental ontology in the direction of reflec¬tions on the event, so I will not repeat this analysis here. However, in this chapter, I do want to show why, amid the many sources available from ancient culture, it is Paul, rather than, say, Plato or Aristotle, who offers the philosophical means to think event and time in such a way that these provide a genuine alternative to the ontotheological paradigm. Moreover, I argue that the alternative arising in this way significantly contributes to the other dialectic legacy of Paul pursued in this study.

For clarity's sake, let me add that this also means that I am less interested in the role that the philosophical reflection on time and event play in the conceptualisation of the end of history, which framed several approaches to Paul in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The naturalisation of the mind

William James’s1 warning, issued at the beginning of his treatise on psychology, against inappropriate metaphysical interpretations of the data of early experimental psychology, was welcome in his time and it remains so today. Indeed, it is even more valid since the experimental method has proven its productivity in biology and is now being effectively applied in the cognitive neurosciences.

We have seen how these sciences set out to apply the methods of the natural sciences to what was traditionally an object of philosophical, metaphysical and epistemological reflection: the domain of the mind, its feel¬ings and its activities of sensory and intellectual cognition. Until recently, psychology was part of the philosophical rather than the scientific curriculum. For the cognitive sciences, by contrast – and in this they follow the evolution of biology – the mind or the mental, no more than life, should not be allowed to escape the empirico-logical method of the physical sciences, that is, of objective – in the sense of reproducible – observations and experimentations, alongside their logical and, if possible, mathemati¬cal ordering. This is the programme of the ‘naturalisation of the mind’, to which one cannot but subscribe if one adopts the perspective of Spinoza's philosophy.

This programme was proposed at the end of the nineteenth century, yet it is only in recent decades that it has recorded its most spectacular successes. Three concomitant developments have contributed to this: the progress in neurophysiology made possible by the physical and chemical exploration technologies of the human body as it acts, and of the brain in particular; the sciences and technologies of information; and the biological sciences, which have become physicochemical as well as biological, and which still serve as a point of reference. These successes derive from a reductionist method that has proven its efficacy.

The Pauline political issue par excellence is the establishment of a new people of God. Hence, the question of community goes at the heart of it. With an eye to Rom. 13, it is often suggested that Paul wants to leave the authority of the Roman Empire largely untouched. As, for instance, Wright summarises: ‘Most have assumed that Romans 13 means that Paul was politically quiescent.’ Yet, his continued identification with groups that count for nothing in the existing socio-political order of the world grants these letters political and revolutionary potential. How should we understand this identification, and what kind of community is established by it?

A basic idea of our modern legal system, as expressed by Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is that ‘All are equal before the law’. Yet, who exactly is, and who determines who is, this ‘all’ or ‘everyone’? Who shares in this community of equals before the law? A Pauline approach to community departs from the viewpoint that the ‘all’ is not all and that, despite any pretence of the socio-political order to represent and do justice to ‘all’, there are those excluded from this ‘all’. They are exception and outcast. In this sense, the Pauline approach to community is the socio-political analogue of the ontological issue we addressed in Chapter 3 concerning the kosmos and the non-beings that are symptomatic of the crisis of this kosmos.

Schmitt's genealogy of the legal order provides a rather disturbing answer to the above questions. Equality before the law reflects the homogeneity of the political community.

With the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, necessity and causality emerged from the mists of theology. After becoming mechanical and then mathematical, these notions have continued to haunt philosophy until the present day, with the indissociable question of free will following them like a shadow. Spinoza's particular and radical doctrine in the Ethics provides valuable landmarks for following these developments. Its ontological, epistemological and anthropological dimensions translate, among other things, into a conception of a relation of identity between the body and the mind as a special case of the identity between an ‘idea’ and its object.

As we have seen, to each body qua mode of extension is united an idea qua mode of thought. This union reproduces at the level of each mode the union of attributes in substance. From this it follows, among other things, that the term ‘idea’ in the Ethics has a number of meanings that are not usually associated with it. On the one hand, Spinoza gives an explicit definition of the ‘idea’: ‘By idea I understand a concept of the Mind that the Mind forms because it is a thinking thing’ (Ethics II, Def. 3). On the other hand, however, we also learn that the mind – which according to this definition forms the ideas – is itself ‘the idea of an actual existing body’, and that this applies to human beings as well as to all other indi¬viduals (Ethics II, 13, Schol.). And since the human body is composed of a great number of parts that are themselves highly composite bodies, the idea that constitutes its mind is itself composed of just as many parts, and parts of parts, as the body is – that is, of just as many ideas as are naturally united with these bodily parts (every idea is united with its body).

Twentieth-century biology has undergone two major revolutions: that of molecular genetics in the 1960s and that of epigenetics and biocomplexity at the end of the century, followed by the development of the contemporary cognitive neurosciences. These scientific advances raise old philosophical questions in new forms. The most obvious are questions about the relation between the living and the inanimate, and between the body and the mind – but these are not the only ones. To these questions, Spinoza's philosophy from the seventeenth century surprisingly offers more pertinent solutions than most recent philosophies established in subsequent centuries. Yet these solutions are very rarely invoked, not only by contemporary biologists, neu¬robiologists and psychologists, but also in nearly all of the philosophical debates outside of those of the small circles of Spinoza scholars, which constitute a minority within existing philosophy departments.

One reason for this situation is without doubt the need to overcome the difficulties of understanding Spinoza's Ethics. Spinoza not only uses a language that is in many instances anachronistic, borrowed as it is from scholasticism: it also provides answers to philosophical questions that seem counterintuitive and paradoxical to his readers. Examples include the question of purposiveness in nature, which the observation of living beings suggests to us; the relation between body and mind; the role of intention in voluntary action; of freedom and determinism; truth and error; and many more. To these eternal questions of philosophy, continuously revived across the centuries in conjunction with changes in scientific developments and knowledge, Spinoza proposes disconcerting answers, which frequently contradict settled solutions and common sense. Very often, Spinoza's solutions cut through the matter at hand as through a Gordian knot, reformulating standard philosophical problems such that they end up appearing as false problems.

A contemporary philosopher, Donald Davidson, referring explicitly to Spinoza,1 has developed, under the name ‘anomalous’ monism, a monism of body and mind that we can only express with the help of two different languages, without a law or a general rule for translating one into the other.

Yet we shall see how he too stumbles on the question of psychophysical causation, of the physical upon the mental and vice versa. Like many philosophers of science, Davidson resorts to the formal notions of emergence and supervenience to analyse the problems of reductionism and psychophysical causation in the context of the contemporary sciences. Yet there is no agreement on the meanings to be given to these notions in their application to various fields. This is because metaphysical questions, such as the physical closure of naturalism and the question of free will, are often inserted into these analyses, as is precisely the case in Davidson.

We must therefore examine some uses of these notions as we find them in the contemporary philosophical literature.

The causality of the physical upon the mental is framed today in terms of emergence and supervenience, and the question of this causality is taken up anew in relation to physicalist reductionism, albeit not without misun¬derstandings, since the term ‘physical’ means either what is material (ontological reductionism) or what is describable by physics (epistemological reductionism, sometimes called ‘intertheoretic’ reductionism).

‘The mind emerges from the brain’ is the more sophisticated expression of Cabanis's famous formula ‘The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile’.

All of this can be summed up in the phrase: we are not conscious of the con¬scious activities of our brain, which the technologies of brain exploration allow us to disclose and identify.

As we have seen, the cerebral activities that accompany access to consciousness emerge against the backdrop of unconscious activities that precede them and are even their indispensable conditions. Yet the expressions of our conscious subjective states, whether for ourselves or for others, including for the experimenter in the cognitive neurosciences, necessarily draw on our everyday language and its meanings. Put differently, they describe states of affairs that signify something about ourselves and the external world. Yet what they express in this way often has a fictional character relative to an objective reality, which an external observer can appreciate in the form of the conditions that allow the subject to express what she is conscious of. These expressions thus appear as more or less illusory interpretations of what the subject perceives within and around herself; interpretations that sometimes express deeply held beliefs. As we shall see, certain pathological and experimental situations make this phenomenon particularly evident.

Yet the interpretative activity of our consciousness also appears in normal conditions insofar as it always involves the projection of meaning – a function of what I earlier called ‘machines for producing meaning’. These machines are operative even when what we say or believe is not merely illusory or delusional but, on the contrary, claims the privilege of rationality.

Polysemy

On various occasions in this book, we have encountered the notion of the conatus, this peculiar and central notion in Spinoza's philosophy, which in various forms traverses all parts of the Ethics. It appears at the beginning of the third part, on the origin and nature of the affects. Insofar as it takes the form of desire, the conatus plays the role of a primitive affect, together with joy and sadness, from which all other affects arise; and we have seen that affects are a privileged place for the observation of the mind–body union, following the definition of the affect as ‘the affections of the Body by which the Body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections’ (Ethics III, Def. 3). Joy and sadness are defined precisely as passages from a lesser perfection to a greater perfection and vice versa, as well as, respectively, the increase and diminution of the power of acting.

Yet the conatus first appears without any explicit reference to affective life, as a dynamic property of ‘each thing’, whether human or nonhuman, living or nonliving.

Its basic ‘canonical’ form, so to speak, is formulated in the third part of the Ethics:

The striving (conatus) by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing. (Ethics III, 7)

To further clarify why dualism poses a particular problem for any present-day philosophical attempt to renew the legacy of Paul, it is imperative to discuss Nietzsche, for whom the problem of dualism is, ultimately, a problem of nihilism. Given the German philosopher's influ¬ence on European thought, it is hardly surprising that his reflections on the apostle are often referred to and are object of separate study. In the turn to Paul, Nietzsche's remarks on the founder of Christianity tend to serve as a counterpoint to clarify which version of Paul philosophers would like to bring to the fore. In the introduction, I already referred to Blanton writing that Nietzsche ‘failed radically to transform […] the ongoing cultural and political functions of the Pauline legacy’. This remark basically captures the mood of the present-day philosophical assessment of Nietzsche's Paul. Let me begin this chapter by admitting that my own approach also uses – or abuses? – Nietzsche in this way. Yet, I do think that, at particular points, Nietzsche did portray the apostle quite accurately. Let us therefore consider what he captured and what he distorted in his portrayal of Paul. This chapter is devoted to this consideration by addressing, first, Nietzsche's judgement on the onto¬logical dualism he perceives in the apostle; second, the peculiar polemic in which he is engaged with the founder of Christianity; and, third, the particular implications of these two issues for his interpretation of pistis or faith. The last section of this chapter is devoted to Foucault's reappraisal of ancient philosophy in contemporary European thought, in order to show how this facilitated a reappreciation of Paul after Nietzsche's devastating critique. The details of this reappreciation are explored in the following chapters.