Sometimes academics want ‘impact.” We want to ‘make a difference’ in the world, now and after we die. According to Terror Management Theory scholars, desire to make lasting change may be rooted in a fear of death. A kind of surrogate immortality. But the aim to see one’s impact externalised for posthumous significance stems from a thwarted understanding of nature. Everything we do is both the product of infinite events in space and extending back infinitely in time, while also having infinite and eternal ramifications. The entire history of the universe in its every detail was necessary to bring forth the uniqueness of each particular thing existing now, and each thing contributes essentially to its endless extended ripples and permutations. Perceiving the scope of one’s power in changing the world gets corrupted when detached from awareness that this very power is itself nature’s power, present and effective regardless and independently of whatever evaluations humans place on who or what has ‘impact’. One’s existence necessarily is equally infinitely significant and insignificant. Rather than feeding into the seeking of personal immortality, this realisation destroys the foundation of the ego, and offers in its place a deeper matrix within which to conceive oneself and others. In other words, every one of us cannot help but have an eternal impact.
All things are immortal, forever a part of what the world is, has been, and will become, and the thread-lines between these. And yet, all things in existence change, echoing, reflecting, refracting, varying… And so, “she lives on in our hearts” is her soul fractalising out in a hundred different forms, that themselves change even as our memories of her recur. By great great grandchildren, her effects are now in rhythm and melody instead of voice and image, and gone is a conscious association with her being. She has also merged with the rhythm and melody of countless others. Merged not in the sense of dissolution, but as contributing through interplay, dialogically, in ways now implicit. She lives on not only in the mind or behaviour of other humans, but in all things. The reason why no two things in the universe are identical, and the reason why there is necessarily ‘experimental error’ in scientific experiments (however precise), is because each thing is stitched into space and time in its own particular place. The conditions are different, which means the weight of the entire universe –past and present– offers to each being something absolutely unique, while in turn each gives back its uniqueness, reshaping nature through its arising. She has forever influenced ever forest she’s walked through or stream she’s waded in. We forever change everything we interact with, and to varying extents, we interact with everything. This sounds like a ‘spiritual’ pronouncement, and perhaps it is. But it is implied but the insights humans have gleaned from centuries of empirical investigation into how things hang together, from evolutionary process to ecological relation, and beyond.
Spinoza tells us an increase in our power to act is experienced as joy. But he also says everything is interconnected and he denies free will. This seems like a contradiction, but only from the point of view that conceives ‘power to act’ egoistically. This is the same partial lens that seeks personal immortality. The power to act individually is ultimately increased by recognising that one’s individuality is the process and product of nature. It frees us from judgment of self and other entrapments that limit exploration of what we are as existences arising uniquely in the world.
One acts– as a unique but interconnected activity of nature itself. The more one is able to act -be an activist (as Naess calls it in “Spinoza and the Deep Ecology Movement” (3250)), the more one experiences joy. It is joyful to act according to our own interests and abilities. It enlivens and energises to act in the way nature has uniquely gathered in us, and which it has given for us to contribute back into it. This means acting towards those things which attract us to action, because what we can care about or have compassion for is also unique to us. Active care is a form of what Spinoza calls amor intellectualis (loving understanding); it is love towards another particular being that is itself a unique expression of infinite nature, and the love is developed through more deeply caring for this being and in so doing, understanding it ever more deeply.
Because our actions have infinite consequences, we cannot predict them. This does not mean that strategising for ‘impact’ is altogether pointless. But it comes with big warnings. First, we may be misled about what we think is worth prioritising. Second, strategising can lead us to close off to the impact we actually have. When discussing means and ends, Gandhi says ‘the means are everything.” What happens when we focus on ends in academic impact? Chasing publication citations can lead to fear of getting scooped, a hermit-like avoidance of exploring ideas with colleagues, an advertising attitude towards our work, or a jealousy of the fecundity of others. Even if these approaches make sense for maximising citation impact (and they may well not), it is not necessarily the case that an academic has their influence measured well through such metrics. The means aren’t only everything, they are also everywhere — scattering effects outward with our every gesture, pause, or movement. We do not know how we influence the world, but the clues and feedback needed to responsively attend are often in concrete encounter. If we choose some arbitrary and abstract spatiotemporal level as the domain for intended impact, we background what we currently interact with. Our students, family, colleagues, as well as our own values or nascent vulnerable ideas ignored by impatient ends-based thinking. Why do we hold onto certain stories of how we causally affect the world, and what are the effects of those stories? What keeps us caring about such things even if we know they are illusions? We should be vigilant about such questions if we choose to orient our power around particular aims we think worth achieving.
If the individual is expressing, and an expression of, the whole of nature, we can develop understanding love / loving understanding towards nature through focusing on individuals, and our quality of relationship with them. The actual things we meet in our moment to moment lives are the primary points of contact of our infinite power. We meet the world and respond best to its rich and dynamic textures just where we are. It is a mistake to instrumentalise or bypass those we encounter for imagined effects “down the road,” because how we affect the world now now affects the quality of subsequent reverberations. We only treat “down the road” as generalities, calculations, or statistical games which silence the infinity within us and others, which only appears in our commitment to the particulars.
How can I be an activist in loving attention to this person, this idea, this work? How can I help understand and support the infinite uniqueness coming forth in those I encounter, nascent with power and vulnerability, recognising also that my own uniqueness is also dependent on their flourishing? How and when do I teach in this way? I propose several interconnect approaches. The first is developing a metacognitive practice of realising when one has shifted into treating present particulars as means to an end, and remembering how flows of actual effects are backgrounded by such thinking. This might involve forming a community with others who can remind us, with the practice becoming a cultural norm. The second involves practices of attending to the uniqueness and becoming of the particulars we encounter. This does not mean ignoring how they are similar to others, because seeing similarity also foregrounds difference (affifi 2019). This may range from relatively passive appreciation of another, to actively engaging it. Third, we need to critically uncover how the perceived topology of our impact in the world has been contorted by systemic values and beliefs that do not serve humans or the earth. Because these values and beliefs have found their way into the 21st Century’s academic’s identity, we need to consciously create alternative spaces where we normalise pluralistic and process-focused approaches to conceiving our role and effect in the world.
Spinoza teaches that we share kinship with all. Even those we merely tolerate and even hate are all born of the same nature that births us too, and the same billions of years of interactions are working themselves out to produce all of us. We share this moment of space and time together, astonishingly so, in the midst of the countless dark miles in every direction. We sit around a campfire together, so to speak, and are each the kinds of beings that can appreciate its warmth and comfort. Our shared kinship softens rivalry. And yet, we each also manifest our shared heritage differently, because we are both manifesting nature’s process from slightly different positions in its manifold.