Proclus and Ontology

Introductory Remarks Concerning the Ontological Distinction Between the One and the Many:

For Proclus, there is an essential, necessary ontological distinction between the One and the many. This distinction must not be understood in terms of a difference of degree or proportion but rather one in terms of kind or attribution. Thus, the many bear certain “qualities” that are attributed to them by their participation in some higher mode of being, and ultimately participation in the primal Unity.

For the many, essence precedes existence. This comes from the many’s origin in the One. Proclus claims that effects resemble their causes and that any appearance of the many was in some way pre-existent in the One from which it preceded. This leads to the  obvious claim that while essence precedes existence in the many such is not the case with the One. Rather, in the One, essence is existence and existence is essence. Said axiom is the defining ontological distinction of the One. This is the One’s simplicity. The many on the other hand, by virtue of its/their essence preceding its/their existence in the “mind” of the One (although “mind” here must not carry conscious connotation for the very fact that Proclus would also claim that the One transcends such), is ontologically distinguished by its complexity. Thus, two categories of ontology – simplicity and complexity – are what constitute the ontological difference between the One and the many.

Dualism in Neo-Platonism?:

From the above remarks it could be noted that an apparent dualism has emerged: one between simplicity in the One and complexity in the many. However, for Proclus no such dualism is maintained. Rather, there is a sense in which the many (as represented by lower modes of being – ie., human souls, animals, plants, inanimate bodies, and formless matter) are mirrors of the higher modes of being and ultimately the One. In other words, the lower, banal things show us the higher modes of being. This is understood as “theurgy.” Thus, for Proclus the material world is not opposed to the divine, but rather is shot through with divine luminosity. As such, the apparent dualism between simplicity and complexity evanesces through the participatory relationship between the One and the many.

Emanation and Reversion:

Still, the argument could arise that the mysterious vagueness of “methexis” (participation) does nothing to really nullify the now deemed “apparent” dualism contained in the ontological distinction between the One and the many. At this point, it may be helpful to note Proclus’ teaching on emanation and reversion. All things emanate from the One. The One is the primal cause of all that exists. In the many therefore (because effects resemble their causes) the One is ever-present (although not in full). This presence of the One in the many is also what causes the many to desire the One. By such desiring, the many strive(s) for its/their unity from whence it/they came. This process is known as reversion. All things at once emanate and revert to/from the One. This means that the lower modes of being, while being far from the One in virtue of emanation are nevertheless close to the One in their reversion – and so too with all other essents. So while all things have their origin (emanation) in the One, such an origin must not be understood in terms of a point-action event that moves from its beginning to some other end, but rather in terms of perennial participation which ultimately leads to a reversion back into the One. The One is thus the material, formal, efficient, and teleological cause of All.

Concluding Remarks and Questions :

While a true interaction with the above would require much more space (and time) the questions that follow will (hopefully) be the beginning of a series of posts dedicated to Neo-Platonic philosophy, it’s adoption/adaptation in early christian tradition (notably in Psuedo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas, and Nicholas of Cusa), and a series of posts on oppositional theories of being as found in Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Marleau-Ponty, Marion, and others. Of course, suggestions by readers (in the form of additional questions to explore, critiques, and/or supplemental information) are encouraged.

1. What are some implications of the One transcending both existence and non-existence?
2. Is it necessary to postulate the One “behind” the many? In other words, is there a need for theurgy or is there a way to postulate some form of authentic “materialism” without falling into a crude atheistic reductionism?
3. If there is no ontological difference between the One and the many, what keeps one from embracing pantheism? Would such be undesirable?
4. What implications does the Incarnation have on such discussions? For instance, does the Incarnation show us that the material can exhibit the divine? Or is there a more collapsed, flattened view of the Incarnation that would be better suited to help us understand the relationship between matter and non-matter?
5. In what way might Husserl’s tripartite formula, “ego, cogito, cogitatum,” aid us in seeking to establish a “beyond within our midst” without having to look behind the veil.
6. Is it possible to claim that “existence precedes essence,” along with Sartre, from within a theological framework? What might this look like?
7. How might Marion’s phenomenological reduction, “As much reduction, as much givenness,” help to provide an alternative model of being than the one supplied in the Neo-Platonic tradition?

Interracial Couple Denied Marriage License

I was shocked and appalled to read this article. To be confronted with this sort of blatant racism in this day and age – at such a high judicial level – reminds me that there is much to be done before we can really start flippantly throwing around terms like “progress,” “liberation,” and “equality” as if we have achieved such.

The most ridiculous part of the article is that the “Peace Officer” actually believes that he is doing a good thing for society by preventing interracial marriage while simultaneously claiming that he “[tries] to treat everyone equally.”

Name that Author…

Just for shits and giggles:

“If the human reality is a social reality, society is human only as a set of Desires mutually desiring one another as Desires. Human Desire, or better still, anthropogenetic Desire, produces a free and historical individual, conscious of his individuality, his freedom, his history, and finally, his historicity. Hence, anthropogenetic Desire is different from animal Desire… in that it is directed, not toward a real, “positive,” given object, but toward another Desire. Thus, in the relationship between man and woman, for example, Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other; if he wants “to possess” or “to assimilate” the Desire taken as Desire – that is to say, if he wants to be “desired” or “loved,” or, rather, “recognized” in his human value, in his reality as a human individual.”

No Google searches!

Unfortunately, I can’t promise a free book to the winner like Ben does, but perhaps I’ll just offer a beer on me if/when the winner decides to travel to Nottingham.

Experimentation, Aporia, and Open-endedness in Aristotle’s Metaphysics

In this morning’s seminar on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Dr. Karen Kilby pointed out that many contemporary critics of Christianity bemoan the influence that the language and conceptual framework of thought in Aristotle’s work has had on much of Christian history – especially in the formation of the early church creeds. In particular, the issue of substance/essence/form/ousia in book “Zeta” of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is what caused much discussion in the seminar today. Although specifying what Aristotle meant when he employed such terminology is interminably difficult, it is not so difficult to realize the influence of this metaphysical discussion on the early church fathers. For example, when the early church father’s (in the east) declared that God is one in essence (ousia) and yet distinct in persons (hypostasis) they adopted such language directly from the cultural background of the day and thus attempted to not only use the Aristotelean language of substance/essence/form/ousia but also to, in certain ways, redefine (sublimate) such terms.

This has caused much concern among some contemporary theological circles that might seek to “rescue” some sort of “uncontaminated” christianity from the grips of a tradition that has been so deeply imbedded and influenced by Greek philosophy. To what extent Greek philosophy has influenced christian doctrine is – as I’m becoming more aware – a debate that is so vast and exhausting that I will not begin to address it here. However, one quick note that Dr. Kilby made in passing that was quite interesting to me was that those theologians that decry any Greek-influenced christianity may have a an improper view of the progress of thought, as well as over-ambitious view of Aristotle’s definitional intentions. The point that she made was really quite an apparent one: Aristotle did not write a book of dogmatic facts; rather, he was experimenting with language, thought, and concepts. Thus, his writings (especially as they are just a compilation of his student’s notes) should not be viewed by anyone – church father, early church theologian, contemporary theologian, whoever – as concrete facts about how things are. Rather, they should be viewed as the experimental teachings of a philosopher who was seeking knowledge – not one who claimed to have found it.

Husserl – “A Genuine Theory of Knowledge”

In light of a recent discussion between Troy and myself I figured I’d post a (rather large) quote from Husserl regarding his epoche:

“Consequently, a genuine theory of knowledge makes sense only when it is transcendental and phenomenological. In that case it does not deal with meaningless conclusions from an alleged immanence to an alleged transcendence, the so-called things-in-themselves, but instead deals exclusively with the systematic exposition and clarification of the act of knowledge. By means of this clarification the act of knowledge is understood, through and through, as an intentional act. In this way, every type of being, whether real [reales'] or ideal [ideales], is understood as a formation which is constituted in this particular act of transcendental subjectivity. This type of understanding is the highest conceivable form of rationality. All erroneous interpretations of being originate in a naive blindness for the horizons which

co-determine the meaning of being. The ego’s genuine self-disclosure — carried through in careful evidence and hence concretely — leads to a transcendental idealism, but one in a fundamentally new sense. It is not a psychological idealism. It is not an idealism which purports to derive a meaningful world from meaningless sense data. Nor is it a Kantian idealism, which, by being a limiting conception, had hoped to leave open the possibility for a world of things-in-themselves. Our idealism is nothing other than a consistently carried through self-disclosure, that is, in the form of a systematic egological science, of any meaning of being which makes sense to me, the ego. This idealism is not the construction of playful arguments; it is not as if we were engaged in a dialectical struggle with realisms, where idealism is the prize that must be won. It is an idealism, rather, which follows from a genuinely worked-out analysis of meanings as these appear (to the ego in experience) in the transcendence of nature, of culture, and of the world in general, which is, in turn, the systematic disclosure of the constituting intentionality itself. The proof for this idealism is found in the active exercise of phenomenology itself [emphasis his].”

- Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures, 33-34

Sloterdijk on American Christianity

“With increasing success comes increasing entropy. Under its influence, the universalist potential of faith is confirmed and simultaneously pensioned off by the great church organizations. Entropic phenomena are also unmistakably responsible for the changing face of faith in the USA, where, as Harold Bloom incisively observed, the last fifty years have seen a reshaping of Protestant Christianity into a post-Christian ‘American religion’ with pronounced Gnostic, individualistic and Machiavellist aspects. Here, the faith of the Father has almost entirely disappeared, while the narcissistic realm of the Son no longer tolerates resistance. If there were an American trinity it would consist of Jesus, Machiavelli and the spirit of money. The postmodern credo was exemplified in exemplary fashion by the Afro-American actor Forest Whitaker when he gave his speech of thanks upon receiving the Oscar for the best leading role in 2007, closing with the words: ‘And I thank God for always believing in me.’”

- Peter Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal, 68.

Meillassoux, Correlationism, and the Fate of Theology after the Speculative Turn – Part III: Theology and the Necessity of God

According to Meillassoux, correlationism has developed into two distinct strands: the transcendental (represented by Kant) and the speculative (represented by Hegel). In Meillassoux’s own words: “…the correlation can be posited as unsurpassable either from a transcendental (and/or phenomenological) perspective, or a speculative one. It is possible to maintain the thesis according to which all that we can ever apprehend are correlates, or the thesis according to which the correlation as such is eternal.”[1] The former of these two types of correlationism falls directly under the critique of the ancestral: if the thought-being correlation is understood to be logically primary, then the ancestral cannot be known. However, it is the latter of these two that seems to escape this inconsistency: “In this latter case, which is that of the hypostasis of the correlation, we are no longer dealing with correlationism in the strict sense of the term, but with a metaphysics that externalizes the Self or the Mind, turning the latter into the perennial mirror for the manifestation of the entity… the ancestral statement presents no particular difficulty: the metaphysician who upholds the eternal-correlate can point to the existence of an ‘ancestral witness’, an attentive God, who turns every event into a phenomenon, something that is ‘given-to’…”[2]

For our purposes, we will call this the ‘theological account for the ancestral’. The theological account for the ancestral has two main theses: 1) Along with correlationism, the thought-being correlation (being-as-givenness) is logically primary to all other relations; and 2) Over against the sciences, there has never been a period anterior to givenness. As Meillassoux makes clear, the eternal-correlate is able to sufficiently think both the arche-fossil and ancestrality. However, the fallout of this consistency is that the correlation itself must be hypostatized – it must be given flesh. In the religious tradition, this hypostatization is generally referred to as God.

If we take for granted the fact that Meillassoux’s critique of the Kantian philosophical tradition is accurate, then the theological account for the ancestral is the only live, historical option. According to Meillassoux, Cartesianism best represents the circularity of the God-proof: “Since he conceives of God as existing necessarily, whether I exist to think of him or not, Descartes assures me of a possible access to an absolute reality – a Great Outdoors that is not a correlate of my thought.”[3] In this way, the absolute necessity of God guarantees the knowability of the ancestral. There has never been a time anterior to givenness as such, so the thought-being correlation is effectively considered to have been in place from eternity-past.

Obviously, the fact that the theological account for the ancestral hinges on the ultimate accuracy of the ontological argument is less than desirable for the theologian.[4] According to Meillassoux, once the Gordian knot of Cartesian certainty has been cut, the absolutization of the correlation (previously mentioned as represented by Hegel) is all that is left. For Hegel, the idea of the in-itself itself is the problem in Kant. The in-itself is therefore unthinkable, and all that remains is the relation between subject and object. Thus, “a metaphysics of this type may select from among various forms of subjectivity, but it is invariably characterized by the fact that it hypostatizes some mental, sentient, or vital term…”[5] Meillassoux mentions Hegel’s Mind, Schopenhauer’s Will, Schelling’s Nature, Nietzsche’s Power, and Deleuze’s Life as all possible candidates for this absolutization of the correlate.

From the theological perspective, it is easy to see how God can fit this role. It follows naturally then that whenever God is understood theologically as the hypostatized absolute term that governs all knowledge, any and all forms of materialism are rendered impossible: “The primacy of the unseparated has become so powerful that in the modern era, even speculative materialism seems to have been dominated by these anti-rationalist doctrines of Life and Will, to the detriment of a ‘materialism of matter’ which takes seriously the possibility that there is nothing living or willing in the inorganic realm. Thus, the rivalry between the metaphysics of Life and the metaphysics of Mind masks an underlying agreement which both have inherited from transcendentalism – anything that is totally a-subjective cannot be.”[6]

For Meillassoux, this de-absolutization of metaphysics has led to a strict fideism in contemporary philosophy. “It then becomes clear that this trajectory culminates in the disappearance of the pretension to think any absolutes, but not in the disappearance of absolutes; since in discovering itself to be marked by an irredeemable limitation, correlational reason thereby legitimates all those discourses that claim to access an absolute, the only proviso being that nothing in these discourses resembles a rational justification of their validity… by forbidding reason any claim to the absolute, the end of metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the religious.”[7] It is Meillassoux’s claim that we must reconstruct the ability to again think the absolute without falling back into ideological dogmatism (in our particular case, classical metaphysical theology).[8] In this way, he proposes that we, like Kant, must move beyond both the dogmatism of the ideological absolute and the skeptical fanaticism of various fideisms.

This as-of-yet unpresented third option works through the form of immanent critique. According to Meillassoux, the dialectical movement made from Kant to Hegel needs to be re-made. Just as Hegel’s (and all other strong correlationist’s) critique of Kant ended in the absolutization of the very principle critiqued (i.e. the antinomy between the in-itself and the for-us is absolutized into One entity), so the contemporary philosopher must absolutize the very principle that marks out strong correlationism from its Kantian heritage: in this case, the absolute, radical contingency of the in-itself. As Meillassoux explains, “…instead of construing the absence of reason inherent in everything as a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that this absence of reason is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity. We must convert facticity into the real property whereby everything and every world is without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason. We must grasp how the ultimate absence of reason, which we will refer to as ‘unreason’, is an absolute ontological property, and not the mark of the finitude of our knowledge.”[9]

But what prevents the correlationist from making the same criticism of this absolutization as he did of the absolutization of the ideological dogmatist (i.e. Leibniz or Descartes)? The agnostic correlationist will claim the following: “The speculative thesis is no more certain than those of the realists or the idealist. For it is impossible to give a reason in favour of the hypothesis of the real possibility of every envisageable… eventuality, rather than in favour of the necessity of one among those states proposed by the dogmatic hypothesis.  Thus, both the speculative and the metaphysical theses are equally conceivable, and we cannot decide between them.”[10] For Meillassoux, the answer to this quandary must come from within the correlationist circle; that is, in the fact that the agnostic correlationist, while disallowing the knowability of any objective scenario, must allow its thinkability. “The correlationist does the opposite of what she says – she says that we can think that a metaphysical thesis, which narrows the realm of possibility, might be true, rather than the speculative thesis, which leaves this realm entirely open; but she can only say this by thinking an open possibility, wherein no eventuality has any more reason to be realized than any other. This open possibility, this ‘everything is equally possible’, is an absolute that cannot be de-absolutized without being thought as absolute once more.”[11] The correlationist’s epistemological ‘nothing’ of the in-itself is thereby transformed into a positive ontological ‘something’ – the absolute possibility of any thing. The correlationist is caught in the trappings of her own circle: “…one cannot think unreason – which is the equal and indifferent possibility of every eventuality – as merely relative to thought, since only by thinking it as an absolute can we de-absolutize every dogmatic thesis.”[12]

With this absolutization of facticity intact, Meillassoux charges the reader to risk his bold claim: we must reject the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason, and subsequently affirm its negated predicate. Instead of “everything exists for a reason X”, we must state “everything exists for unreason, or for no reason whatsoever.” As Meillassoux explains, “We are no longer upholding a variant of the principle of sufficient reason, according to which there is a necessary reason why everything is the way it is rather than otherwise, but rather the absolute truth of a principle of unreason. There is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not to be and /or be able to be other than it is.”[13] Consequently, our query becomes: can theology take hold of this charge?

It will be our contention that theology must make this forward movement toward a reconceived metaphysics if it is to last. The absolutist dogmatics of scholastic theology have clearly been defeated by Kant and his progeny, and the various fideisms of post-critical theologians from Hamann to Von Balthasar have ultimately proven ineffective in attempting to ground the reality of science and knowledge (i.e. they are bad metaphysics). If theology is to move beyond this impasse, it must, like Meillassoux, affirm the radical contingency of everything. In theological terminology, it must think the contingency of God. All traditional Christian theology has affirmed that the world is unnecessary for the being of God. Our assertion will be the converse: God is unnecessary for the world.

“Man can be human without God. There is no doubt that man can do that. He can live without experiencing God. He can speak, hear, think, and act without speaking about God, without perceiving God, without thinking about God, without working for him. And he can do all of that very well and with great responsibility. The human person can well live without God, can listen attentively, think acutely, act responsibly… Man can be human without God. One can!”[14] At first glance, one would expect these words to come from the pen of Pierre Laplace or Friedrich Nietzsche, or perhaps even from a late 20^th century ‘death of god’ theologian. Instead, this recent advocacy for the metaphysical non-necessity of God comes from the German theologian and heir to Karl Barth’s theological legacy, Eberhard Jüngel.

Jüngel agrees with modern atheism that God is not necessary. However, this move is more a theological repositioning than an academic surrender. Jüngel asserts that the proposition “God is necessary” is “not worthy of God”[15], since, in this formulation, God’s existence is simply a function of human need. When construed in this fashion, as humanity “comes of age”, it slowly realizes that it no longer needs God to perform these functions, and eventually this ‘God of the gaps’ is dismissed altogether (e.g. Laplace’s dictum, “I have no need of that hypothesis”). In this way, “proof of the necessity of God is the midwife of modern atheism.”[16] As many modern materialists have noted, only within the realm of philosophical monotheism was modern atheism born.[17]

Paradoxically, then, for Jüngel, atheism is correct in asserting the possibility of human existence without God. Like Meillassoux, Jüngel argues that its crucial mistake occurs in assuming the necessity of this godless humanity. Over against both theism and atheism, Jüngel argues that “God is not necessary… He is more than necessary.”[18] In Meillassoux’s terms, if God exists, his existence is factical, a brute actuality without ties to absolute necessity.

In order to explain the meaning behind this difficult statement, Jüngel prioritizes the freedom of God, saying that this freedom is ‘self-determination’. The uniqueness of the Christian understanding of God is that this self-determination is founded upon the humanity of Jesus. Therefore, “God comes to God, but with man. God’s humanity belongs to his divinity.”[19] This is an act that pours forth from the boundless love of God, not from metaphysical necessity.

Jüngel goes on to explain how this notion of freedom, when combined with Barth’s centralization of the doctrine of election in the Triune life of God, necessitates the non-necessity of God: “This self-determination, if it really is a decision of love which desires to come to itself with another one and only with that one, implies the freedom of God and man as opposites of each other. If God has created man as the one elected for love, then man is what he is for his own sake. For one is loved only for his sake or not at all… If then man is the one elected for love, he is what he is in a relationship to God which is determined by freedom. This relationship could only be diminished by any talk of the necessity of God for man.”[20]

In essence, the convergence between the arguments of Meillassoux and Jüngel is found in the latter’s point that there is nothing in man that warrants God. Meillassoux would simply extend this to say that, if God exists, then there is nothing in the world that necessitates this fact. God does not fulfill a purpose latent within the nature of mankind or the world. In this way, we can say with Jüngel that God is more than necessary. Down to His very nature (because of the primacy of election), he is pure gift.

Thus, Meillassoux allows us to construe God in terms where he is not metaphysically necessary to the world. God is the one who is revealed through the miracle of revelation and worshipped as the one who delivers from sin, and it is only in these terms that God’s necessity and aseity are to be understood. Jüngel grounds these doctrines in terms of gracious and free action, in terms of the being of God known primarily as ‘love’. “Thus the traditional attributes of self-determination, omnipotence and transcendence are now construed on the basis of a theology of gracious personal action rather than on metaphysical necessity, and are accordingly transformed in their meaning.”[21]

The way in which this understanding of God differs from the theology of metaphysical necessity is explained as follows: “In place of the God who is in heaven because he cannot be on earth there comes the Father who is in heaven in such a way that his heavenly kingdom can come into the world, that is, a God who is in heaven in such a way that he can identify himself with the poverty of the man Jesus, with the existence of one brought from life to death on the cross.”[22]

The key in this theological move is its metaphysical import. As discussed earlier, the Cartesian circle (where God is invoked to secure the accuracy of sense perception) has been the dominate form of ‘metaphysical guarantee’ for almost all forms of pre-critical philosophical dogmatism, and it does not require much of an intellectual leap to realize that dogmatic theology often falls under the same charge (especially in the theological account for the ancestral). From Plato to Aquinas to Descartes and beyond, it has been the key feature of every absolutist dogmatism to utilize the God-hypothesis in order to shelter its own particular metaphysical realism from the onslaughts of skepticism. With Kant, there is a clear sea change as this guarantee is no longer ontologically, but transcendentally conceived – it is the universal breadth of mental categories that safeguards knowledge. As has been made clear, the subsequent rise of strong correlationism is a reaction to the supposed naïveté of this Kantian optimism.

Meillassoux summarizes the unholy pact between correlationism and theology thusly: “If the strong model of correlationism legitimates religious discourse in general, this is because it has failed to de-legitimate the possibility that there might be a hidden reason, an unfathomable purpose underlying the origin of our world. This reason has become unthinkable, but it has been preserved as unthinkable; sufficiently so to justify the value of its eventual unveiling in a transcendent revelation.”[23] Correlationism, in making the in-itself simultaneously unthinkable yet always possible has allowed speculative absolutism to re-enter the fray through the avenue of an always-potential transcendent revelation that will finally reveal the true nature of the real (and, presumably, a new theological account for the ancestral).[24] In contrast, it has been our thesis that both Meillassoux and Jüngel are willing to accept the “gratuitousness of the given”[25] which refuses the dogmatism of every variant of the principle of sufficient reason in order to affirm the absolute necessity of everything’s non-necessity. By taking this position, we must reject both the principle of sufficient reason as well as the theological account for the ancestral. Along with orthodox theology: God may be understood without reference to the world (vis-à-vis its contingency). Along with modern science: the world may be understood without reference to God (vis-à-vis God’s non-necessity). In this way, a metaphysical theology that follows the speculative turn would be both orthodox (the contingency of the world) and modern (the univocity of being).[26]

From here, it seems as though the practice of theology has three prospective options: 1) Revive ideological dogmatism by reconfiguring the absolute metaphysical necessity of God over against the correlational critique[27]; 2) Accept the correlational circle and proceed to organize a dogmatic theology around an unfounded absolute (what Meillassoux calls ‘fanaticism’)[28]; or 3) Move beyond both of these terms (‘dogmatism’ and ‘fideism’) by accepting the challenge of developing a ‘non-metaphysical absolute’ completely devoid of an ontological guarantee (i.e. in theology’s case, the necessary God). It is our contention that the stream of orthodox theology stemming from Karl Barth and finding its principal expositor in Eberhard Jüngel is, to our knowledge, the only theological tradition capable of taking up this challenge, for it is the only tradition in orthodox theology willing to think the non-necessity of its founding principle; the brute, gratuitous facticity of God.

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[1] Ibid., 10.

[2] Ibid., 10-11.

[3] Ibid., 29.

[4] We will take for granted the fact that Kant has sufficiently dismantled Descartes’ argument for the necessity of God in the fourth section of the third chapter of the transcendental dialectic entitled Of the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God in The Critique of Pure Reason.

[5] Meillassoux, After Finitude, 37.

[6] Ibid., 38.

[7] Ibid., 44-45.

[8] Meillassoux’s position is that we must find this absolute in the absolute contingency of everything including the laws of nature, save the law of non-contradiction. Following his teacher Alain Badiou, Meillassoux posits mathematics as the proper discourse of absolute contingency. For our purposes, we will not delineate the particulars as to how Meillassoux constructs this “mathematical ontology”, as it must not be considered an absolutely necessary move for either the philosopher or the theologian (although the author considers it to be an option worth considering).

[9]Meillassoux, After Finitude, 53.

[10] Ibid., 57.

[11] Ibid., 58.

[12] Ibid., 59.

[13] Ibid., 60.

[14] Eberhard Jüngel, God as Mystery of the World, (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), 20.

[15] Ibid., 25.

[16] Ibid., 19.

[17] Slavoj Zizek, “Towards a Materialist Theology,” Angelaki 12 No. 1 (2007), 25.

[18] Jüngel, God as Mystery, 17.

[19] Ibid., 37.

[20] Ibid., pg. 39.

[21] Colin Gunton, The Possibilities of Theology, ed. John Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 17.

[22] Jüngel, God as Mystery, 284.

[23] Meillassoux, After Finitude, 63.

[24] This form of absolutist fideism, where the always potential ‘irruption’ of God into the world is foundational, is in the author’s opinion a form of ‘revelational positivism’. Whether or not Jüngel himself falls into this trap of is beyond our purposes. Suffice it to say that, ultimately, we are simply utilizing Jüngel’s notion of the “more than necessary God” as a ‘line of flight’ from where theology might begin to think Meillassoux’s radical contingency.

[25] Meillassoux, After Finitude, 63.

[26] Here I reference the phrase coined by Bruce McCormack in regard to Karl Barth’s bridging of the gap between orthodoxy and modernity (see Bruce Mccormack, Orthodox and Modern (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008).).

[27] This can be loosely associated with the revival of the ‘Biola school’ of evangelical apologetics.

[28] Here, I have in mind the Radical Orthodoxy school of theology. Incidentally, this notion of theology as an ‘unfounded master discourse’ is precisely how Jamie Smith describes RO (James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 60.).

Meillassoux, Correlationism, and the Fate of Theology after the Speculative Turn – Part II: Correlationism and the Ancestral

The opening chapter of Meillassoux’s After Finitude begins with a discussion pertaining to the classic distinction between primary and secondary qualities in metaphysics. According to Meillassoux, the shift that occurred in what is commonly called modern philosophy was an alteration in precisely this distinction.

Pre-critical metaphysics was resolutely realist in its conception of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities: from Plato to Leibniz, primary qualities inhered within the things themselves (the thing-in-itself), while secondary qualities required some form of givenness (whether conscious or otherwise) to obtain. Meillassoux uses the example of the sensation of burning oneself on a candle to illustrate the difference: “When I burn myself on a candle, I spontaneously take the sensation of burning to be in my finger, not in the candle. I do not touch a pain that would be present in the flame like one of its properties: the brazier does not burn itself when it burns.”[1] So, secondary qualities clearly need a subject to actualize them. Colors are seen, and do not exist as colors without an intentional subject. Pain is felt, and cannot be felt without this same subject. But what about properties like size, weight, and shape? Classically conceived, these properties inhered within things themselves, and required no subject in order to obtain. So goes pre-critical metaphysics.

Meillassoux gives the name ‘correlationism’ to the critical turn in modern philosophy that rejects this thesis of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. According to the modern philosopher, this “is an indefensible thesis because thought cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is ‘in itself’ to the world as it is ‘for us’, and thereby distinguish what is a function of our relation to the world from what belongs to the world alone. Such an enterprise is effectively self-contradictory, for at the very moment when we think of a property as belonging to the world in itself, it is precisely the latter that we are thinking, and consequently this property is revealed to be essentially tied to our thinking about the world. We cannot represent the ‘in itself’ without it becoming ‘for us’, or as Hegel amusingly put it, we cannot ‘creep up on’ the object ‘from behind’ so as to find out what it is in itself – which means that we cannot know anything that would be beyond our relation to the world.”[2] Thus, we understand the correlate here referred to as the correlation between thought and being – and its place in modern philosophy as the trump card against naïve metaphysical dogmatism (i.e. the knowability of the in-itself).

Therefore, the difference between objective representation (statements of fact) and subjective representation (statements of value or feeling) becomes simply two different forms of subjectivity: those that can be universalized and those that cannot. Consequently, science becomes concerned with intersubjectivity, as opposed to adequation, as correspondence to primary qualities as the mode of truth is supplanted by communitarian consensus.[3] As a result, according to Meillassoux, “one could say that up until Kant, one of the principle problems of philosophy was to think substance, while ever since Kant, it has consisted in trying to think the correlation.”[4]

This move towards the primacy of the thought-being correlation was made by Kant in order to stave off what he called dogmatism – the attempt to ground reason in the thing-itself, as opposed to his own method of transcendental reduction, made in the Critique of Pure Reason, which effectively moved the absolutes of pre-critical metaphysics (time and space) from the object to the transcendental subject. Time and space are not (necessarily) properties of things-in-themselves, but categories of the mind meant to shape phenomena into sensible impressions.

Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism is not one of questioning its historical worth – without a doubt, Kant’s ability to assuage Hume’s skepticism while staving off metaphysical dogmatism is truly revolutionary – but of its internal consistency. Meillassoux’s question is this: If the thought-being correlation is to be considered primary in philosophy, then how can one think of a time when one of these two was not? “How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life – posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world?”[5] Meillassoux calls ancestral any thing or event that is dated to have preceded the emergence of thought, and arche-fossil any contemporary thing that traces back to an event anterior to terrestrial life.

Meillassoux’s claim is that any and all forms of correlationism are unable to consistently accept the findings of modern science as regards ancestral events (such as Big Bang cosmology, evolutionary theory, and radioactive decay) while simultaneously holding to the primacy of the thought-being correlation. For example, as regards the dating of the accretion of the earth, the scientist will adopt an instinctively realism: “the accretion of the earth preceded the advent of humans by x number of years”. On the other hand, the correlationist must resort to the critical gesture: “The present community of scientists has objective reasons to consider that the accretion of the earth preceded the emergence of hominids by x number of years.”[6] This scientific statement trades on universal intersubjectivity, and not adequation, making it useless for anything save the social sciences. It then becomes clear why “scientists are much more likely to side with Cartesianism than with Kantianism…”[7]

Correlationism’s attitude towards the ancestral is summed up well in Husserl’s words: ““The existence of nature cannot be the condition for the existence of consciousness since Nature itself turns out to be a correlate of consciousness: Nature is only in being constituted in regular concatenations of consciousness.”[8] In other words, it is impossible for any form of correlationism to think the possibility of the emergence of one of the terms of its primary correlate. In this way, the correlate takes the place of the pre-critical God – that which subsists in-itself and is casua sui. To think of the coming-into-being of thought should be as much heresy for the correlationist as thinking the coming-into-being of God is for orthodox theology. That which ultimately guarantees meaning (or even the lack thereof) cannot be said to have at some time been not.

In this way, Meillassoux likens this correlationist circle (where the thought-being correlation must originally be thought) to the reactionary attitude towards science exhibited by biblical creationists who, when confronted with evidence of an old earth, “reply unperturbed that God also created at the same time as the earth 6,000 years ago those radioactive compounds that seem to indicate that the earth is much older than it is – in order to test the physicist’s faith. Similarly, might not the meaning of the arche-fossil be to test the philosopher’s faith in correlation, even when confronted with the data which seem to point to an abyssal divide between what exists and what appears?”[9]

For Meillassoux, the reality of the ancestral realm poses this challenge to modern philosophy: how to conceive of a time in which the given as such passes from non-being into being.[10] If, as Kant held, the absolutes (space and time) are not properties of the things themselves, but categories of the mind, then how can science “think a world wherein spatio-temporal givenness itself came into being within a time and a space which preceded every variety of givenness?”[11] Thus, we have the problem of the ancestral: the arche-fossil invites us to get outside of our minds and to grasp the in-itself, but the critical conscience warns us of imminent dogmatism if we accept.

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[1] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (London: Continuum, 2008), 1.

[2] Ibid., 3-4.

[3] Ibid., 4-5.

[4] Ibid., 6.

[5] Ibid., 10.

[6] Ibid., 15.

[7] Ibid., 13.

[8] Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (Berlin: Springer, 1983), 116.

[9] Meillassoux, After Finitude, 18.

[10] Ibid., 21.

[11] Ibid., 22.

Meillassoux, Correlationism, and the Fate of Theology after the Speculative Turn – Part I: Introduction

Okay, so this is proof that I’m not dead (yet). In fact, I’m simply working dilligently on my MTh thesis; although some might consider such a task as teetering on the edge of life’s flimsy grip (and I would certainly hesitate to disagree). In any case, I would like to pick up blogging again as I finish up my school work, so I’ve decided to begin a new, relatively short series concerning a matter I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: namely, how to think about theology given the recent speculative turn in continental philosophy. Ever since I first got my grubby hands on Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude, I’ve had a strong desire to attempt to correlate its (allegedly) revolutionary critique of Kantian anthropocentrism with certain Barthian tracks of theological thought (of the ‘revisionist’ variety, of course). Here is the introduction:

Part I: Introduction

In the Preface to Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude, Alain Badiou reminds the reader that, as Bergson maintained, “…a philosopher only ever develops one idea. In any case, there is no doubt that the philosopher is born of a single question, the question which arises at the intersection of thought and life at a given moment in the philosopher’s youth; the question which one must at all costs find a way to answer. This is the category to which we must assign this book by Quentin Meillassoux.”[1]

Truly a weighty introduction if there ever was one. Yet, Badiou’s claim is not meant to ‘raise the stakes’, or to pick an academic fight, but to point the reader to the historical significance that Meillassoux’s argument entertains. Is Kant’s reply to Hume the only alternative to skepticism? Is there a path that allows us to accept Hume’s contention concerning the contingency of the laws of nature and the ability to think the absolute? If so, was Kant’s Copernican Revolution, ultimately, a fraud? Essentially, if Meillassoux is right, then the last 300 years have witnessed a fundamentally incoherent philosophical trajectory. As Badiou himself puts it: “Meillassoux’s proof – for it is indeed a proof – demonstrates that there is only one thing that is absolutely necessary: that the laws of nature are contingent. This entirely novel connection between contrary modalities puts thought in a wholly other relation to the experience of the world; a relation which simultaneously undoes the ‘necessitarian’ pretensions of classical metaphysics as well as the ‘critical’ distribution of the empirical and the transcendental… It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy, hitherto conceived as the history of what it is to know; a path that circumvents Kant’s canonical distinction between ‘dogmatism’, ‘scepticism’ and ‘critique’. Yes, there is absolute logical necessity. Yes, there is radical contingency. Yes, we can think what there is, and this thinking in no way depends upon a supposedly constituting subject.”[2]

As Meillassoux makes abundantly clear in his work, the contemporary ‘return to religion’ in Continental philosophical discourse is a direct result of post-Kantian philosophy’s emphasis on the constitutive subject. According to Meillassoux, what he calls ‘correlationism’ is the philosophical tendency to privilege the thought-being correlation over all other relations (that is, being must be thought before it can be being). This hegemonic anthropocentrism, and its consequent movement towards interiorization and further self-alienation, is to blame for the faux-spirituality of much of the ‘return to religion’.

It will be our contention that the religious turn in Continental philosophy has little to offer to the theological realm, and that, consequently, theologians should welcome Meillassoux’s “critique of Critique.” We will come to see that Meillassoux’s work has opened up a space for theology[3], and that the alleged “Speculative Turn”[4] is a boon for the return of metaphysics to both philosophical and theological discourse. The end of the postmodern era is nigh, and it is about time that so-called “contextual theologians” realized it.

In this paper, we will attempt to show, through a thorough analysis of Meillassoux’s After Finitude, why theology has something to gain from the advent of speculative realism. Subsequently, we will briefly outline why Eberhard Jüngel’s notion of the “more than necessary God” is the best theological complement to Meillassoux’s reconception of metaphysics. Through this experiment, we will see that a new way forward for philosophical-theological dialogue is emerging; a path that goes beyond the linguistic and religious turns to something entirely new. This speculative turn is at once the rejection of our shared Kantian heritage as well as a return to the object-oriented thinking of pre-critical metaphysics. However, this movement is nothing like contemporary ecumenical theology’s simple “return to the fathers.” Meillassoux’s notion of radical contingency opens the door for a wholly new way of experiencing what he calls ‘The Great Outdoors’. In the end, we will come to the conclusion that the theological tradition following in the footsteps of Eberhard Jüngel has nothing to fear in thinking the world after finitude.

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[1] Alain Badiou. Preface to After Finitude, By Quentin Meillassoux (London: Continuum, 2008), vi.

[2] Ibid., vii.

[3] Meillassoux’s own work has shown this to be true, as his as-of-yet unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Divine Inexistence, is clearly meant as a work of ‘speculative materialist’ theological innovation.

[4] The Speculative Turn is a phrase that has come to denote the philosophical zeitgeist that has risen from the speculative realist/materialist thinkers of the last half-decade. This includes Meillassoux, Graham Harmann, Bruno Latour, Ray Brassier, Alberto Toscano, and Ian Hamilton Grant among others. The journal, Collapse, is the hub of the movement.

To Celebrate the End of the Term…

… here’s a preview of a few of the bands I’m planning on seeing while back in L.A. this summer.