07.17.08
Posted in Religion, Philosophy at 11:15 pm by Dan Jensen
I’ve been a wilderness lover since the summer my brother David and I first rode our bicycles into the Sierra Nevada, but I never did think much of Henry David Thoreau, until I suddenly fell in love with him.
To me, Thoreau was just some New England liberal garden-naturalist who might have liked to walk Robert Frost’s “Road Less Traveled”. He was no John Muir.
I’m not sure that I ever really read Walden until I was about 40 years old, after I had just read some Nietzsche and some books on Zoroastrianism.
What an eye-opener! The author of Walden was a mystic, a radical individualist, a wit, and a metaphysician. I was most taken by his usage of the word “moral”, and saw in him shades of Nietzsche and Zoroaster, and maybe a touch of Heraclitus.
Since losing my religious faith, I had become more and more convinced that faith must come from within, as asserted by Emerson in his radical essay “Self-Reliance”. This doctrine was clearly something that Thoreau had taken to heart, but there was much more to him than that.
“Our whole life is startlingly moral,” he said. That is just what I had been yearning to hear. I was attracted to the idea of an ethical metaphysics, that is, a way of looking at the world as fundamentally moral, rather than material or “spiritual” (non-material?). I had begun to understand that everything that we observe seems to be perceived aesthetically. Couple that with our ever-present sense of intention, and you might see a world that “is startlingly moral”; both value-laden and intentional.
One of the great expressions of this idea in human culture can be found in Zoroastrianism. This Iranian religion stood out among the classical schools of thought as one that saw the world morally rather than metaphysically. They saw everything composed of good and/or evil. Their metaphysics, if it can be called metaphysics, is usually called “cosmic dualism.” It is based upon the idea that the world is essentially a cosmic conflict between good and evil.
Thoreau often seemed to see the world as a moral landscape, but he did not view Nature as a moral guide. At times, he would confess that his beloved Nature could be quite cruel, and he could sound a lot like a Zoroastrian:
“Are there not two powers?”
—Journal, Jan 9, 1853
Tauber hits upon this aspect of Thoreau:
Thoreau appreciates the terrifying otherness of nature, an insight that McGregor (1997) has argued was pivotal to Thoreau’s existential and literary development.
Walden startled me. I had just read a work by Nietzsche using the character of the Persian Prophet Zoroaster as the protagonist in a modern moral drama, and next thing I know I’m reading from what I thought was an environmentalist who sounds something like a prophet of ethical metaphysics, like an American Zarathustra!
Curiously, it turns out that Zarathustra (AKA Zarathushtra ), little that we know of him, was also an environmentalist. One of the causes closest to his heart appears to have been sustainable agriculture.
Funny that Thoreau features Zoroaster in one of the paragraphs of Walden:
“The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, …”
Thoreau seemed to think of himself as a prophet of sorts, perhaps the Prophet of Concord. I must admit that hadn’t occurred to me, though, until I read a certain book on Thoreau.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I was rummaging through a used book store in Berkeley and stumbled onto Alfred I. Tauber’s book Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing (2001). My eyes must have popped out. If they did, I was too startled to notice. I had found someone who was willing to discuss the ethical metaphysics and epistemology of Thoreau.
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Upon doing the reading, I was not disappointed. The book is difficult at times, but it is generally accessible, and quite thorough. Tauber clearly took great pains to address Thoreau’s philosophy of value in the context of the enlightenment, romanticism, positivism, existentialism and phenomenalism.
Tauber’s central theme is Thoreau’s view of science. Tauber presents Thoreau as a Romantic naturalist confronted by the onset of positivism, and the dualistic subject-object metaphysics that positivism rested upon, both of which dominated science before the advent of Quantum Mechanics, and still have a strong influence on the modern mind. To Tauber, Thoreau is a poet-naturalist attempting to rescue science from the new objectivism of his time.
“… a theme explored here, is that objectified knowledge must be made meaningful. This was the program enunciated by Michael Polanyi, and, I have argued, this was also Thoreau’s own project.” —Tauber, Epilogue
The only major theme that Tauber appears to overlook is the central role of simplicity (purity) in Thoreau’s mysticism and philosophy (another peculiar parallel between Zoroaster and Thoreau). This may be because the psychology of simplicity, as important as it was to Thoreau, was off-topic for Tauber as a philosopher of science.
Further Reading:
Robert Kuhn McGregor, “A Wider View of the Universe: Henry Thoreau’s Study of Nature” (1997)
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06.25.08
Posted in Philosophy, Politics at 12:44 pm by Dan Jensen
Here’s Alan Saunders, host of the Australian program The Philosopher’s Zone, reflecting on the influence of Heraclitus on Australian philosophers John Anderson and John Passmore.
I find that what Passmore talks about most is not so much Anderson as Anderson’s lectures on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and in fact not so much Anderson’s lectures on Heraclitus as Heraclitus himself. About Anderson, I’m still a bit in the dark, but Passmore has convinced me of why Heraclitus mattered to him and why Heraclitus ought to matter to me.
As presented in ‘Memoirs of a Semi-Detached Australian’, Heraclitus is a philosopher of flux: change, the conflict of contrary things, is the essence of life. We cannot impose order from above; order emerges, in the way that it should emerge in democratic societies, when, as Passmore puts it, ‘contrary interests achieve a degree of balance without losing their distinctiveness.’
“Balance” is an apt enough term, I suppose, but I might have used “harmony.” The key here is that socially and politically, there is no one universal foundational truth. Truth is emergent.
Saunders continues, explaining how Heraclitus saw us as distinct, yet entangled to the point that we compose a kind of social organism that transcends individualistic notions such as active and passive individuals.
But however distinct we may be, we are inevitably entangled in all that lies around us. We can be spectators, says Passmore, but even a spectator can have an effect on the game: the way I look at you may have consequences for you and your behaviour.
Such a social dialectic has been infamously misinterpreted by Marxists to undermine the individual in society. Where they have failed to follow a truly dialectical model is in imposing a universal foundation upon society, and not allowing change to emerge organically, in a free society. The individual must be defended against all powers, whether those powers be kings or mobs, for the collective to thrive.
And what I see when I see you, or what you see when you see me, will be the result of whatever information we have and our earlier histories, all of which makes for a complex tangle of relations, which is why, Passmore remarks, Heraclitus warns us to expect the unexpected. We can never possess certain knowledge or make entirely reliable predictions.
This is a useful philosophy to have. I for one find it entirely congenial, and it tends to encourage a certain pluralism, or at least anti-dogmatism, of outlook…
See Ockham’s Razor, Aug 22, 2004
I agree with Saunders, though I do regret that dialectical thinking has too often been made the servant of dogmatism. Self-professed dialecticians since Hegel have oft as not failed to go the distance with the Heraclitean dialectic, and settled for the comfortable security of foundationalism. By employing dialectical thinking as a philosophical PR representative for universals, they have missed the point at best, and have at worst been guilty of philosophical deceit.
This reminds me of how Heraclitus, having evident respect for the genius of Pythagoras, called him “the prince of impostors.” Pythagoras was a mathematical genius who has had great influence on western thought, science, and Heraclitus as well, but who enslaved his genius to a dogmatic agenda.
“Pythagoras son of Mnesarchus pursued inquiry further than all other men, but choosing only what he liked from these compositions, made a wisdom of his own: much learning, artful knavery.” —Heraclitus
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06.16.08
Posted in Philosophy at 9:40 pm by Dan Jensen
I admit to having been baffled by Nietzsche’s references to the doctrine of “eternal return” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. What did he mean when he asked how believing in such a doctrine would impact our lives? What difference would it make, I wondered, if I occurred once or a million times? From the perspective of eternity, is an identical repeat any kind of return at all? It seems no different to me than living once in eternity.
Ironically, I like that old Stoic doctrine of eternal return and conflagration. I guess I just like the idea that God just torches everything every once in awhile and starts afresh. But I do get the feeling that this doctrine worried many Stoics with respect to its impact on notions of personal immortality. How? I suppose many of them feared that their souls would burn up with everything else, and that couldn’t be much fun. One Stoic proposed that souls are spared. I suppose that many didn’t mind the spiritual burns so long as they got to come back.
Who am I to say, but I think they might have been missing the point.
The whole thing seems to have started with Heraclitus, who was big on fire as a primal substance, and also liked to stress the periodicity of things. But he may have meant fire as a fundamental political substance, or perhaps a fundamental moral substance. We cannot be certain that he was the material philosopher that some of his Ionian contemporaries were.
I like to think of the Logos of Heraclitus as a metaphor for political, spiritual, moral, and physical reality. I think it applies quite nicely.
One of the great strengths, I think, of Heraclitus is that he used the fire of opposition to deny all duration and individuality, to the point that all is so ephemeral that all individuality melts into a singular, universal Unity. This is similar to the principle of emanation in Neoplatonism, but it hinges upon an oppositional, harmonic dynamism not present in Neoplatonism.
Heraclitus criticizes the poet who said, ‘would that strife might perish from among gods and men’ [Homer Iliad 18.107]’ for there would not be harmony without high and low notes, nor living things without female and male, which are opposites. —Aristotle
People do not understand how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There is a harmony in the bending back, as in the cases of the bow and the lyre. — Heraclitus
The critical difference between Heraclitus and Plotinus is that Heraclitus took unity a step further. He saw all things in harmonious opposition, such that their most essential characteristics could not be extracted or isolated from anything else. A neoplatonist might see himself as a unique emanation of God, whereas Heraclitus seems to have seen existence as without such a center. We are not mere emanations, but equally central aspects of reality. Taking this thought the distance, “we” are ultimately one and the same.
Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one. — Heraclitus
That is a form of immortality that I can hang my hat on. Of course I still fear death and value my needs over the needs of others, yet I find in Heraclitus an unsurpassed philosophy for counteracting the pangs of self and change.
In this sense, conflagration can have a unifying, immortalizing influence on thought, but it really seems that the Stoics were altogether too dogmatic about it, and lost what seems to have been the spirit of Heraclitus to that dogmatism.
But then again, who are we to correct the Stoics on Heraclitus? They must have been much more familiar with him than we are. Is it possible that they were not as dogmatic as they seem from two millennia away? Perhaps Heraclitus was more dogmatic than he seems to me. Hard to know. Still, it is enough that those words of his that have survived the ages have inspired these kinds of reflections in others, and given us one of the great philosophical terms of antiquity: Logos.
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05.08.08
Posted in Philosophy, Politics at 1:52 pm by Dan Jensen
Awe, come on! A little anarchy never hurt nobody! Be a devil! Give it a try, won’t you? Just this once.
This here is your real scarlet letter. It stands for some pretty nasty ideas:
anarchy, for starters. Likewise, we have
atheism, the theological equivalent of anarchism. Then there’s that rarely-employed synonym for anarchy:
autonomy. Back in New England it was said to represent adultery, but today it might better represent
adulthood.
Thar be fearsome ideas off to port, Captain!
That’ll be the Forbidden Zone, where men are forced to think for themselves.
I recently encountered a rather engaging discussion of anarchism on the Aussie radio show The Philosopher’s Zone, one of my favorite podcasts. The featured guest was Professor Robert Paul Wolff of the University of Massachusetts, a notable philosophical anarchist and author of In Defense of Anarchism.
Listening to Professor Wolff reminds me of reading Henry David Thoreau, who, disgusted with slavery, aggression against Mexico, and other crimes of his democratic government, wrote “Civil Disobedience” and passages such as the following:
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then?
There comes a time when a man asks himself whether it is moral to submit to an immoral king, an immoral majority, or an immoral God. Most of us seem all too willing to delegate all moral agency to the mob, the state, or to God. Why are we so afraid of grappling with morality? Perhaps we’re too lazy to want to make difficult decisions about right and wrong. Perhaps we are afraid of the responsibility that moral anarchism places upon us.
Isn’t it high time for us to grow up?
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05.07.08
Posted in Philosophy at 1:12 pm by Dan Jensen
I just finished the book Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. Though I bought the book with a specific interest in learning just how much bony fish there is within us, I want to say at the outset that it has been an enjoyable read in general as a book about the joy of science. I hear so much about the battles between scientists and those who fear science that it’s nice to hear a scientist simply write about what he loves. I know: there are lots of such books out there to be sure; still, this one strikes a chord that I first remember hearing in Carl Sagan.
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I remember my father saying “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” a number of times during my youth. This lyrical slogan-like phrase indicates that our formation in the womb reflects our formation as a species. It wasn’t until several years ago that I finally looked the phrase up, and found it to be quite outmoded. I still like the sound of it, but it does miss an important point: it’s not so much that we evolved from, say, fish, but rather that we remain as fish to this day.
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The fact that we have undergone a multitude of changes does not change the fact that we are modified fish. Many aspects of our anatomy and physiology bear this out. It’s not like all our fish parts were replaced by amphibian parts when we left the water, but rather our fish parts were generally transformed or even reassigned.
Why fish? It’s not that we aren’t amphibians and reptiles as well, but the fish holds a special place for two reasons:
- Fish represent the aquatic origins of life.
- The famous fishiness, albeit temporary, of the human embryo.
It’s not just that we can look at bony fish and note our resemblance to their basic skeletal layout. They do have a spine, head, and limbs. They do have our basic camera-type eye. They do have nostrils. They also have three ear canals that give them a sense of acceleration in three dimensions. Still, it’s much more than that. Remarkably enough, we have retained our gills, in a morphological sense at least. The gills of the embryo are gills that guide the formation of our head and neck.
It’s tempting to think of our inner fish as something we’ve left behind, but who’s to say there’s no going back? Look at our cousins the whales. They stand as proof that the water is not so irrevocably lost to us.
Another less-fishy reflection from the book that resonates with me is the notion that life is self-building. We tend to see creatures as buildings that are built by some builder, but when we look deeply into the formation of creatures, we are struck by how they actively build themselves out of a mere blueprint. And what of the blueprint? That too is continually recreated and redesigned by the living.
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05.06.08
Posted in Philosophy at 10:37 pm by Dan Jensen
A book I’ve been reading, “Your Inner Fish”, just reminded me that Carl Sagan once said, and I don’t know if he was the first, that looking out at the stars is like looking into the past.
It has occurred to me on a number of occasions that there is no qualitative difference between looking at the stars and looking at anything else. The only difference is quantitative. Everything that we see, or even experience, is in the past. Come to think of it, even our “current” sensations are of past events.
What, alas, do we experience other than the past?
I guess I must be showing my age.
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01.09.08
Posted in Religion, Philosophy at 8:15 pm by Dan Jensen
Agnostic Religion
Only God exists; He is in all things, and all things are in Him.
Sufi pantheism, as defined in a footnote to the Seven Valleys of Baha’u'llah
We have previously considered that Islam’s strength is that it forbids idolatry, that is, associating partners with God, and that Islam’s weakness is that its object of worship, Allah, is unknowable, and that this leads to agnosticism. The Islam of Muhammad is a religion of practices and politics, rather than beliefs or mystical experiences.
Forbidden Yearnings
From fairly early on, Muslims began to seek ways to develop relationships with God, and ideas of gnosis began to develop. Sufism was being born. This was a uniquely Muslim form of mysticism, inasmuch as it was a mystical response to a non-mystical religion.
It ought to surprise no one that a mystical religion in a realm where heretics are murdered would be based upon secret knowledge. Severe penalties for apostasy and heresy may have forced mystics to appear more cryptic than they might otherwise have seemed.
The problem with secret knowledge is that it tends to favor the enlightened over the unenlightened. Such favoritism encourages idolatry, so it is easy to see that Islamic mysticism ran the risk of violating what is perhaps the fundamental principle of Islam. Mysticism must not be exclusive if it is to be true to Islam. It must permit no secrets. Unfortunately, secret knowledge was sometimes necessary for survival.
Unity of Being
“I am Truth.” — al-Hallaj
What if we are God? Pantheism provides a possible solution to the problem of non-idolatrous worship. Each individual knows truth in his or her own context. No hero worship is necessary. Muhammad is only a man, no better than any other. Worship is possible, because God is knowable, but idolatry has no place. Perhaps that is what the Sufis ibn `Arabi, Bayazid Bistami, and al-Hallaj were thinking when they made their contributions to the doctrine cited above, generally referred to as Wahdat-ul-Wujood (”Unity of Being”).
Emanation vs. Existence
A metaphysics of emanation is an alternative to pantheism worth considering, but emanation seems to be a construct derived from an unnecessary, artificial distinction between Creator and Creation. Why must I regard myself as a created object, when I possess an existential sense of a will that is my own? Perhaps that is the Will of God that I feel, but even then: why should I presume that Will is not my own?
Existentially speaking, I am no object. I am no emanation, shadow, or reflection.
I do not think of the world as a mere fact. It does possess will, and it does possess a sense of good and bad. This is why I recognize it as divine. For this very reason, I can be neither a strict atheist nor a theist. Pantheism seems to be the most natural view of the world as we experience it.
Omnipotence and Freedom
In Sufi Islam, the only true reality is God, and that the world is but a shadow of that reality. Generally, Islam regards the world as a deterministic effect of God’s will, which is not too different than a shadow. According to the Qur’an, even the most fundamental decisions are made according to the will of God, insha’Allah. Though it presumes a human capacity to choose, it also asserts that unbelievers only continue in their disbelief because God blinds their eyes. Thus the omnipotence of God trumps human freedom.
When it comes down to it, divine omnipotence and human freedom are incompatible. The only way to reconcile the two is to regard them as one and the same thing. Human will is divine will, and human freedom is divine freedom. Why not embrace such a simple and logical assertion? No gnosis necessary; it is really quite intuitive. Of course it requires a deep, subconscious notion of freedom that runs beneath our self-awareness and is ultimately a single Will, but it still allows for freedom. As God is free, so are we.
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Posted in Religion, Philosophy at 9:42 am by Dan Jensen
I recently wrote here about the strict monotheism of Muhammad. It occurred to me that the ultimate logical end of monotheism is free thought and tolerance; something of the sort that one might expect from a Unitarian congregation. In this sense, Islam is essentially a modern religion. Existentially, Islam seems quite primitive and barbaric, but its unitarian foundation may give us hope for it.
On the other hand, there’s a spiritual problem that arises from strict monotheism. It begins with this logic:
He [God] does not reveal Himself to anyone in any way. God reveals only His will.
Isma’il Ragi al Faruqi
Strict monotheism requires that no man can rightly claim knowledge of God’s essence, therefore the rightful perspective toward divinity is agnosticism. Christian Unitarianism has taken a path toward agnosticism. Might Islamic unitarianism do the same? Rationally, this may be a good thing, but I find it spiritually threatening, because it creates an impassible divide between man and God.
This is perhaps the principle reason why I cannot be a Muslim. There are, or course, no lack of particular objections that keep me at a distance from Islam, but this agnosticism, this cold isolation from God, is a fundamental philosophical problem.
Monotheism need not be agnostic, but gnosis comes at a high price: idolatry. So long as a man can gain knowledge of God, he can become a partner of God, which is the unforgivable sin of Islam. It is indeed a sin: but it is a sin unique to soft monotheism.
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12.28.07
Posted in Philosophy, seeker at 6:00 pm by Dan Jensen
This blog got its name “Idol Chatter” for a reason, or even a couple of reasons. First of all, the blogger is a rather militant unitarian (note lowercase ‘u’). Secondly, he tries not to take his own chatter too seriously.
By “unitarian” is here meant anyone who recognizes the tendency of leaders, doctrines, and ideologies to become idols that stand in the way of our search for truth. Idolatry, according to this school of thought, is a mighty sly shape-shifting devil. As a former Unitarian minister once challenged us:
“We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of the idolatry.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Similarly, a Greek philosopher once cautioned:
“It is wise to listen not to me, but to the Logos, …” — Heraclitus
I use the term “unitarian” because this cautious mode of thinking is embodied in the Unitarian tradition, in which some Christians long ago determined that worshiping Jesus is missing the message of Jesus, who did not forbid blasphemy against himself, but rather forbade blasphemy against “the spirit”. It is the spirit of the message that gives life, he said, not the flesh of the messenger; not even the letter of the message.
In this sense, we can see that Jesus, whom some identify with the Logos, was not so different from Nietzsche’s anti-prophet Zarathustra:
“All the names of good and evil are parables: they do not declare, but only hint. Whoever among you seeks knowledge of them is a fool!” — Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The Great Iconoclast
Imagine if you will a medieval man, centuries after Christ, who was familiar with Judaism and Christianity. Imagine that this man was impressed by the Judaic aversion to idolatry, but also recognized Christ as a man—or messenger—of Truth. Imagine that he rejected the Trinity, and the notion that Jesus is God. Imagine that this man became quite well known for his opinion that Jesus is not God, such that we might consider him the first Unitarian. Imagine that he was a man of his time, and realizing the efficacy of power, mustered an army and ordered that army to pursue idolators and smash idols to the ends of the earth.
Let us call this man, for lack of a better name, Muhammad. Maybe this man was so single-minded about smashing idols that he might be called a prophet. Perhaps he was such a dedicated Unitarian that he rejected the very possibility of any religion other than the religion of Unitarianism, going so far as to call himself “the Seal of the Prophets”:
“Muhammad is not the father of any man among you, but he is the Apostle of God, and the seal of the prophets: and God knoweth all things.” Qur’an (Rodwell translation)
Let us further imagine that this man was seen by by his enemies as a militant religious fanatic and his followers as a crusader for his god Allah. Perhaps we can imagine that they had him wrong. Perhaps we can imagine that he was after something more fundamental, and that the rest—his doctrines, methods, and even his personal beliefs—was all circumstantial.
The man in the painting is not going bowling. If we look closely enough, we find that even Muhammad was an idolator; but who isn’t? Shall Muslims be permitted to rise above the man? Not if they continue to idolize him.
It is commonly understood that Islam means “submission”, but submission to what? Submission to Islam? Certainly not. That would be circular, would it not? It has always been understood to mean “submission to God”; but what is God? Is God to be taken as the Islamic image of God, “Allah”, or is God to be taken as that ultimate, unknowable creative essence behind—or within—things? Perhaps the core meaning of Islam is “submission to no idol, however subtle”.
“Seek knowledge even unto China” — Muhammad
If we were to take this as the essence of Islam, could this not be a religion of the future? Could we go so far as to say that Islam is faith in Reason? If this seems like too much of a stretch, can we at least see how Islam might be seen as a medieval attempt to free humanity of idolatry?
Let the true Muslims step forward to smash the idols of Islam.
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02.24.07
Posted in Religion, Philosophy at 8:38 pm by Dan Jensen
One of the great themes in religion is compensation for virtue (not to be confused with another great theme: compensation for misfortune).
The classical model of compensation for virtue, Heaven and Hell, is perhaps best attributed to Zoroaster. This model may not seem terribly enlightened, but we should recognize that it was probably conceived for the sake of virtue itself. This doctrine has dominated western religion over the last 2500 years or so, but the general idea of compensation is more universal. It is quite natural to expect, or at least hope for, some kind of payback.
But payback has its price.
In more reflective circles, there has been a long-running dissatisfaction with the concept of compensation. What is the good of virtue if one expects payment for it? Should not the virtue be the reward? Otherwise, what virtue is there in virtue?
The idea goes back at least two millennia, and has taken several forms:
- Virtue is its own reward.
- The deed is its own reward.
- Worship is its own reward.
- Work is worship.
Perhaps it’s a stretch to bind these equations, but I believe they share a common thread that justifies the grouping. The link between (1) and (2) is obvious.
The oldest explicit reference to this idea that I am aware of occurred in the first century C.E.:
Virtue herself is her own fairest reward. - Silius Italicus
This sentiment probably owes a lot to Stoicism, but I am unaware of any Stoic making this specific statement of equivalence between virtue and reward.
This equation was restated brilliantly in a corollary by the famous Seventeenth Century fisherman Izaak Walton:
Doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant that it will prove to be, like virtue, a reward to itself.
The Talmud is known to have made a similar equivalence: the deed is its own reward. This form of the equation was also employed by William Shakespeare, amoung others.
In the seventh century, the Imam Ali, who is generally considered the patriarch of Shi’ih Islam, couched the concept in religious terms:
A group of people worship God for the sake of reward. That is the worship of merchants. A group of people worship God from the fear or punishment. That is the worship of slaves. But a group of God’s servants worship Him solely out of gratitude and thankfulness. And this kind of worship is special to free men.
Nahj al-balaghah, trans. by Fayd al-Islam, p. 1182
Merchants and slaves indeed! Quite an insightful statement. Here we see how equation (3) corresponds to (1) and (2). Worship has no rightful reward; it is its own reward.
It is peculiar that a religion that puts so much emphasis on fear of God, Heaven, and Hell has produced statements such as this.
Here, I think, is where equations (2) and (3) come together to produce (4): The deed is its own reward, and the same goes for worship; therefore, the deed is worship, or as St. Benedict put it, work is worship.
To put it inn more abstract form:
d = r ; w = r ; => d = w
This proves nothing, of course; but I think you might understand the point of the transitive logic: virtue, [virtuous] action, and worship are one and the same, and it follows that, to be an agent of virtue, that is, to love and worship the Good with ones whole being, is itself the ultimate reward.
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