The Disconnect Between Catholic Academics and Daily Living

One of my personal complaints against Catholic philosophy and theology for the past 100 years or so has been its increasingly academic, specialized nature and consequently its lack of immediate application to daily Catholic living. Of course, there are many counterexamples to this sentiment, but even in many of those counterexamples, one will find the same specialized, technical handling hindering its consumption by a wider, literate lay audience.

For example, take the notion of the universal call to holiness, promoted officially in Lumen Gentium, ch. 5. Bishop Sheen famously said we have entered the age of the laity. Paul VI and John Paul II promoted the same notion when they advocated repeatedly for evangelization efforts to be taken up by the lay faithful, which is tied up with the universal call to holiness since the soul of the apostolate is sanctity and the end point of evangelization is sanctity. In this ongoing academic discussion, what have we instead witnessed? Decades and decades (if not over a century) of theological disagreements over the exact nature of the development of the spiritual life and its application to apostolic work, all under the heading of spiritual theology. These are necessary debates, to be sure, but what certain, concrete conclusions may be drawn from them and given to the layman for use? Instead, many will find it much easier and more practical to read one of the classic works of spirituality, such as the Introduction to the Devout Life or the Spiritual Combat or a book of meditations by St. Alphonsus. In other words, the theological battles of the 20th century that led to the promotion of this idea that we are in the age of the laity and that the laity have a newfound responsibility to promote the causes of Our Lord through the sanctification of the world have no palpable application for actual laypeople living in the world. They must return to older works by the Saints and Doctors who had no such theological concerns in order to begin to live in a manner that the 20th century theologians have called for. Hence the disconnect between academic, specialized life and concrete lay life. 

Or take another example, the case of aesthetics. Especially in the past few decades, we have heard touted the famous line, "Beauty will save the world." Bishop Barron has been an ardent proponent of this approach to evangelization--we draw people in by beauty. Peter Kreeft has mentioned that he was partly converted by the beauty of older Catholic Churches (never mind that he was also converted by a serious reading of the Church Fathers). Yet when one skims through the academic literature conducted by Catholic philosophers and theologians on aesthetics, one is left scratching his head whether we stand on firm ground by upholding such an approach or what such a pithy phrase even means metaphysically, let alone in its concrete application to a methodology for evangelization. In the conversation between Bp. Barron and the Protestant philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig, Craig almost scoffed at the idea that we can merely evangelize through beauty. Craig's experience (and his reference to sociological data to support his experience) is that people leave the faith or question the faith because they perceive it to be intellectually bankrupt. The moral bankruptcy of ecclesiastical figures then "seals the deal" on their leaving the practice of religion. In Craig's estimation (and many of his colleagues who have spent decades in Christian philosophy and evangelization work), people need the assurance and proof that the Christian faith has deep, intellectual anchors, and that these anchors have real application to daily living. While beauty might appeal and draw a person in, that intuitive attraction needs to be fleshed out conceptually if the person is to stay since intuitions, like emotions, are fleeting, but convictions rest on habits of thinking.

Hence in Barron's approach, one can see that a "Catholic" commentary on culture and the arts is interesting and provides much food for thought, it doesn't actually explain why the Catholic faith is true or how the Catholic conception of religious life applies to daily living. A commentary on a movie or a song may serve a springboard for an interesting conversation and may open one's aesthetic appreciations, it is hard to perceive that such an approach would have anything close to the corrective effects that Craig's and other apologists' approach has been, which directly addresses the errors of thinking in modern society and how these errors in turn trickle down into wider culture.

To be fair, the approaches of Barron and Craig are not mutually exclusive, and these two men are approaching their goals based on their very different experiences. It is conceivable that some complementary, third way or tiered method of evangelization that makes use of both approaches may be conceived and developed, but this very need to do so, and the technical precision with which it must be done for philosophical and theological accuracy, affirm my initial contention: the theology of evangelization is fundamentally disconnected from the practice of it.

The Church in fact had encountered this difficulty with Catholic Action. Fervent Catholic men and women leading political causes on behalf of Christ the King ended up being more political than Catholic, and the Church was often pressed into the difficult decision of how to support these movements in the midst of very difficult political maneuvering from the 19th century and on. Reflecting on the role of Catholic Action, perhaps one may say that the multifaceted causes that feed political and social movements are almost impossible to fully analyze especially in the moment, and an apostolic effort to steer or influence those movements, to avoid getting lost in the uncertainty of the present, must remain firmly grounded on the supernatural foundation of prayer, trust in God, and sacrifices. And the fruits of one's efforts may not be seen in one's lifetime since these movements were centuries in the making.

And for a third example, it has often been remarked that Catholic morality has nothing to do with daily life. What this sentiment typically means is something twofold: 1) the Church has nothing to do with how I conduct my private or public life; and 2) the convoluted, casuistic reasoning of theological writings has little application for my daily living since there is no one to translate that reasoning into concrete norms suitable for a lay audience.

Of course, the first half of the sentiment is completely wrong and predicated on the success of post-Enlightenment liberalism + the way of life made possible by industrial, technical, medical advances (=modernity), but the second half is often reflecting a truth. The moral reasoning that upheld Catholic living increasingly not only disagreed with modern moral sentiments, but it also increasingly had nothing to do with how modern moral frameworks conceived and articulated themselves and hence nothing to do with how people went about their daily moral decision-making once those frameworks trickled down into popular culture. These are points far better articulated and discussed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his works for the past 40 years. 

In other words, the arguments of Humanae Vitae literally have nothing to say to the "modern man" (whatever that means). It is inconceivable to a modern person how metaphysical and theological arguments around the nature of the marital act could have conclusions against acts like contraception since the marital act is not even conceived as reserved to marriage, and certainly not with any outdated metaphysical or theological accoutrements.

Pro-life arguments often take a mostly secular line of reasoning and not even from natural law considerations but arguments from the science/biology of conception, the application of a liberal society's conception of human rights and dignity, etc. One can retroactively or anachronistically apply natural law "tailoring" to those argumentative approaches, but for the pro-life movement to have such widespread support, it must fundamentally appeal to modern sentiments: liberalism, science, dignity, rights, etc. These all make the most sense within a Catholic metaphysics, but they cannot be articulated as such by the widespread; otherwise we would lose the support of the Evangelicals and pro-life secularists, and the movement would most likely fall apart. Hence one even has the paradox that abortion is conceivable as a "right" only within a liberal paradigm and yet one argues against that right using the same paradigm that makes it possible. Within a Catholic milieu, there would be no possible way of thinking that one had a "right" to abortion and hence no need to argue against it using the same conceptual framework.

But regardless, moral arguments from the Catholic tradition are stereotypically caricaturized as debates on "how many angels dance on the head of a pin." To summarize: they are useless, impractical, academic, convoluted, etc.

This all of course being a long-winded preface to my next consideration, the morality surrounding the Covid vaccine. To be continued...

Aleister Crowley on the Signs of the Age of Horus

Horus rules the present period of 2,000 years, beginning in 1904. Everywhere his government is taking root. Observe for yourselves the decay of the sense of sin, the growth of innocence and irresponsibility, the strange modifications of the reproductive instinct with a tendency to become bi-sexual or epicene, the childlike confidence in progress combined with nightmare fear of catastrophe, against which we are yet half unwilling to take precautions.

Consider the outcrop of dictatorships, only possible when moral growth is in its earliest stages, and the prevalence of infantile cults like Communism, Fascism, Pacifism, Health Crazes, Occultism in nearly all its forms, religions sentimentalized to the point of practical extinction.

Consider the popularity of the cinema, the wireless, the football pools and guessing competitions, all devices for soothing fractious infants, no seed of purpose in them.

Consider sport, the babyish enthusiasms and rages which it excites, whole nations disturbed by disputes between boys.

Consider war, the atrocities which occur daily and leave us unmoved and hardly worried.

We are children.

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Source: Aleister Crowley, The Book of Law and the Book of Lies (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2017), 7.

The Book of Law, of which the above is an excerpt, was originally published in 1938.

Michael Crichton on the Noble Savage and Romanticized Nature

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.

How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.

There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man's invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does inbdeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.

More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.

In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.

And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you'll have infections and sickness and if you're not with somebody who knows what they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.

The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It's all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it's uninformed talk. Farmers know what they're talking about. City people don't. It's all fantasy.

One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven't the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can't conceive the real power of what we blithely call "the force of nature." They have seen the ocean. But they haven't been in it.

The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.

But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it-and if you don't, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.

Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it wasn't deep---maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back double time to get help, it'd still be at least three days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And in three days, I'd probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slip could be deadly.

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Source: Michael Crichton, "Remarks to the Commonwealth Club" (presentation, San Francisco, CA, September 15, 2003).

Can the Descent of Modern Society Reverse?

To act as though man made history by his own purposes and decisions is a kind of spiritual blindness which bears within it its own downfall.

[xxxix] And it is precisely this spiritual blindness which is characteristic of modern civilization, a kind of hubris which leads to the frustration of social idealism and society’s turning away from those principles it professes to be following, in order to promote their opposite. Has there ever been a society which set a higher store on the ideals of humanitarianism than our own, and has there ever been one which, at the same time, allowed for the killing off of such countless millions of unborn infants? And has there ever been a culture which so repeatedly emphasized its concerns for the rights of man, and at the same time meekly acquiesced in the obliteration of those rights by totalitarian regimes in all parts of the world?

Written thirty-five years ago, in the midst of World War II, the following judgment of Christopher Dawson has a direct relationship to the condition in which the whole of the modern world finds itself today:

But this is just the truth which the modern world has denied. It has put its trust in the “arm of flesh”; it has believed the word of man rather than the Word of God. It has reversed the whole hierarchy of spiritual values so that our civilization has been turned backwards and upside down, with its face toward darkness and nonentity and its back to the sun of truth and the source of being. For a short time—whether we reckon it in decades or centuries is of small importance—it remained precariously skating on the thin ice of rationalism and secular humanism. Now the ice has broken and we are being carried down the flood, though we may delude ourselves that the forces that have been released are of our own creation and serve our will to power. 

Is it possible to reverse this process? No human power can stop this progress to the abyss. It can only come about by a profound movement of change or conversion which brings the human spirit once more into vital relation with the spirit of God. (The Judgment of the Nations [London: Sheed and Ward, 1942], 157)

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Source: John J. Mulloy, “Preface to the 1978 Edition”, in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxxviii–xxxix.

When Society Loses Its Higher Spiritual Ordering

Our own civilization, as Dawson points out, is one which has increasingly ignored the significance of the religious element, whether through prophecy or through the consecration of its social institutions to religious ends. The result is a widespread sense of spiritual dissatisfaction, which leads participants in the culture to look upon it with distrust and hostility. This not only withdraws from society the psychological support which it needs, but also, it leaves society vulnerable to movements of violence against its social structure and the values it embodies. “When the prophets are silent and society no longer possesses any channel of communication with the divine world, the way to the lower depths is still open and man’s frustrated spiritual powers will find their outlet in the unlimited will to power and destruction” (Religion and Culture [London: Sheed & Ward, 1948], 83).

[…] [xxxvii] But while society needs religion for its survival, it cannot return to religious belief simply by an act of the will, as a means of recovering its spiritual roots. This arises from the very nature of religion, from the fact that there is a basic difference between the motivations of religious feeling and those of political purpose. “It is useless to judge a religion from the point of view of the politician or the social reformer. We shall never create a living religion merely as a means to an end, a way out of our practical difficulties. For the religious view of life is opposite of the utilitarian. It regards the world and human life sub specie aeternitatis. It is only by accepting the religious point of view, by regarding religion as an end in itself and not as a means to something else, that we can discuss religious problems profitably” (Christianity and the New Age [London: Sheed & Ward, 1931], 172).

Now this conception of religion is so opposed to the modern attitude that it is difficult for modern man to accept it or appreciate its force. He is always asking whether religion serves this or that purpose, has this effect or that on the social order or on human behavior, as a way of deciding whether its existence is justified. It is man’s will rather than God’s which is taken as a standard, man’s conception of human welfare, not life seen in the light of eternity, which forms the basis for judgments concerning the significance of religion.

Yet this is discernment only on a superficial level; and even history itself testifies how limited and earthbound such ideas of human welfare and human destiny turn out to be. There is, as Dawson points out, an unpredictable character to events and outcomes in history which goes quite counter to rational calculations and makes the standards of a purely human judgment strikingly inadequate. “The real meaning of history is something entirely different from that which the human actors in the historical drama themselves believe or intend” (Religion and the Modern State [London: Sheed & Ward, 1935], 81). As an example of this, Dawson cites the contrast between the expectations of the Liberals concerning the purposes of the French Revolution and the harsh realities of the Revolution itself.

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Source: John J. Mulloy, “Preface to the 1978 Edition”, in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxxvi.

Culture Is Incarnational

Rationalists, [Dawson] realized, misunderstood religion precisely because they misunderstood culture as well. Indeed they misunderstood both for the same reason: their thin and etiolated behaviorism denied the possibility of a grander vision of man. Allowing religion no other purpose than the [xxiii] sanctification of social or private compulsions, they closed off an entire realm of man’s being. This represented, of course, the collapse of the very empiricism they claimed to uphold. A conclusion was contrived, then evidence adduced to support it: hardly a triumph of the investigative arts. Yet the circularity should not surprise us. With their functionalist view of culture and religion no other conclusion was available to them.

Dawson’s recognition of culture as a bearer of truth was the insight of an anthropologist but also, in a more profound way, that of a Christian. His understanding of man in society was, in the deepest sense, incarnational. […] Man grasps the divine in diverse, sometimes prosaic, ways. His spiritual insights come mediated through the materiality of the everyday. He understands the blessedness of the ordinary: the common meal, the shared sorrow, the unburdened heart. Slowly, too, he begins to understand the truth beyond these smaller moments: that the God who enters human history reveals Himself in living cultures, authentic communities. His face shines in material and sacramental ways, evident to those with eyes to see. This is not to say that culture itself is religion. Nor is it to say that one culture is much the same as another. Least of all is it to propose that human culture contains the entirety of the divine revelation. It is, however, to acknowledge that culture matters more profoundly than even cultural historians realize.

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Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxii–xxiii.

The Religion of Enlightenment Utopianism

Late-eighteenth [xxi] and nineteenth-century utopianism was more absurd than most. But wherein lay the absurdity? Not so much in the ignorance of human history as in its faux religiosity. The great abstractions—Liberity, Equality, Fraternity; Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness—always came in threes. They were secular trinities amply supplied with creeds, priests, keepers of orthodoxy, heresy-hunters, the fervent faithful. All they lacked was self-knowledge, awareness of themselves as profane theologies. Indeed, nowhere was this more apparent than in their understanding of religion itself. Philosophes fashioned a “purely rational philosophy of religion based on the abstract generalities . . . common to all forms of religion. For deism is nothing but the ghost of religion which haunts the grave of dead faith and lost hope” (Dynamics of World History, 88). It never occurred to the builders of the new society hat the religion they concocted—of society itself—was not enough. Such things cannot be concocted anyway, put together as from some recipe book of socially useful devotion. Real religion, Dawson argued, must “embody itself in concrete forms appropriate to the national character and the cultural tradition” (88) of a people. The late-eighteenth-century version was manifestly ersatz.

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Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xx–xxi.

When Idea Becomes Ideology

But patterns of thought, and patterns within thought, are also organic. If civilizations grow and decay, the same might be said of philosophical systems. They become rigid, hard and unyielding, forgetful of their first impulses. A theory becomes a Truth; an idea becomes an Ideology. […] Consider Dawson’s account (in “Progress and Decay in Ancient and Modern Civilization”) of the revolutionaries and reformers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All of them believed in “the coming reign of the great abstractions—Humanity, Liberty, and Progress” (57). The phrase is pure Dawson, capturing at once the naïveté and dogmatism of the revolutionary generation. Promoters of enlightenment never understood that worship of rationality was itself irrational; that systematic and compulsory optimism was a guarantee of pessimism and gloom. They never understood that their contempt for history was itself historically rooted, the product of a particular time and place. The slow, vegetable growth of human communities meant nothing to them. All that mattered was mechanics. A new society, precise as a piece of clockwork, promised the happiness to which all men were entitled.

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Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xx.

Secularism Destroys True Individuality

It would be hard to offer a better description of secularism than “religious emotion divorced from religious belief.” Nor are we likely to find a more accurate account of the spiritual vanity characteristic of the contemporary world. There is, perhaps, only one serious difference between Dawson’s day and our own. When he wrote, half a century ago, he complained of a secularism that was essentially collective. Democracy, nationalism and socialism are movements larger than the individual. This is their point. Nowadays, the secular mind fixates on the purely personal, shrinking from the social. Its preoccupations are curiously private: the cult of the body, authenticity, sexual license, the New Age in all its mystic vapidity. Secularism has become the numinosity of the narcissist. Postmodern man elevates a monstrance and sees at its center a mirror.

There is an obvious irony here. This self-worship is ignorant of the sources of the self. It prizes a rootless individualism, undifferentiated from place to place. In the name of local truths—my right, my body, my opinion—it banishes localism, replacing it with compulsory cosmopolitanism, the standard self-absorptions of Everyman. In the name of distinctive identity it produces identical “individuals.” Yet it is in the local and regional where a person is formed and made. Dawson, the most urbane of thinkers, was unsettled by this derogation of the provincial and the parochial. He knew that cosmopolitanism—the same citified culture the world over—produced homogenous [sic] [xx] cities, homogenous citizens. Urban man, deracinated and despiritualized, forgot the sources of his moral vitality: family, region, local clay. As with early civilizations, so with late: the closer to the land the better.

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Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xix–xx.

Thomas McPartland on Modernity and Classicist Culture

[12] If we accept the penetrating analysis of Louis Dupré, as early as the fourteenth century we witness the beginnings of modernity. The medieval synthesis was dissolving, and neither the self-assertion of modernity, argued by Hans Blumberg, nor the second wave of modernity (the Enlightenment), nor the post-modern era has fundamentally changed the intellectual situation. According to Dupré, "Modernity is an event that has transformed the relation between the cosmos, its transcendent source, and its human interpreter. To explain this as an outcome of historical precedents is to ignore its most significant quality—namely, its success in rendering all rival views of the real obsolete."[1] In fact, what has taken place is a complicated process of decline and progress. The situation is irreversible in the sense that to reverse the decline is not to restore the prior intellectual situation because this would be to ignore the progress (which would be a form of decline). To be sure, it is quite correct to see the decline as beginning in the Late Medieval period with the nominalist critique of conceptualism (participating in what we have called the dialectic of dogmatism with skepticism). The hierarchical cosmos became an autonomous network of relations created by the arbitrary fiat of a [13] voluntarist deity separate from the world, and human beings began to take on the trappings of the voluntarist deity. The world was no longer a mirror of mind but the product of—perhaps blind—will. The deity was the distant voluntarist creator, or the removed Deist creator, or simply the hypothesis to be discarded. This epistemological confusion only continued with a repetition of the dialectic of dogmatism and skepticism in the antagonism of rationalism and empiricism, their canceling out in the Kantian critique and its retreat from metaphysics, the post-Kantian dialectic of positivism and romanticism as the dominant theme of nineteenth and twentieth century intellectual history, leading to the inexorable exhaustion of post-modernism with its denial of the self, an objective world, and perhaps transcendence. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, the climate of opinion was such, as Voegelin recounts, that a Wilhelm Dilthey, a man of philosophical bent, "refrained for a decade from publishing because he deemed the effort useless."[2] And to this decline in the cultural superstructure Voegelin would add the decline in the cultural infrastructure of symbol and sentiment with the neo-gnostic construction of modernity as the self-salvation of humanity. Lonergan would offer his more restrained recounting of the "longer cycle" of decline.[3]

Still, decline has been mated to progress. For along with the disintegration have come new differentiations of consciousness. Modern science has isolated the causes it investigates and developed an heuristic procedure to carry on those investigations. This specialization of intelligence has been complemented by the development of the hermeneutical and historical sciences in the past two centuries. The differentiations of consciousness associated with the Scientific Revolution and the "historical revolution" have led to the differentiation of nature from history. As the key to the Age [of] Theory, we might argue, was the "discovery of the mind," so the key to its emerging successor, the Age of Interiority, is the "discovery of the self" (or subject). The Age of Interiority, of course, is itself an ideal-type. If the contemporary situation is the product of decline and progress, then the fractures of modernity have been intensified by the new differentiations [14] of consciousness. At the same time, the earlier "discovery of the mind" has not disappeared and the problems and excesses and temptations of the Age of Theory have not disappeared, including the appeal of the "classicist culture."

Let us, by way of conclusion, expand on these comments.

We cannot return to an earlier view of nature as a static hierarchy permeated by mind nor to the modern romanticist intuition of the vitality of nature, which protests too much against the truncated rationalism of the modern idea of nature, thereby accepting its ground rules of what reason is. Unfortunately the autonomy of differentiated scientific inquiry has been purchased with the coin of faulty epistemological assumptions. The confrontation theory of truth was the framework for formulating the notion of nature as consonant with the heuristics of scientific method. Nature thus became a machine to be dominated by world alien human observers (Descartes), or a machine that could crush the independence of human objects (scientific materialism), or a merely phenomenal reality that could preserve human autonomy (Kant). To be sure, Leibniz sought to reintroduce teleology in natural process and a kind of historicity, taken up later by Whitehead, but his project was thwarted by his conceptualist metaphysics—decisively criticized by Kant for issuing mere analytic a prior [sic] judgments. [...] A contemporary effort to reintegrate nature, human being, and divinity, while respecting the differentiated field, cannot do so without resolute commitment to objectivity and a renewed focus on epistemology. Most varieties of existential phenomenology and Post Modern [sic] thought have failed to do this. Needless to say, classicist culture has nothing to offer here but utter obscurantism. We need to create, in Lonergan's words, [15] "a pure line of progress" retrospectively, separating modern insights from faulty epistemological assumptions and reconstructing the epistemological framework.

The modern discovery of self has been accompanied by numerous versions of an "ersatz self," catalogued [sic] in abundant historical detail by Charles Taylor. It is instructive to note that there is a current version of the "self" dominant in Western popular culture and in political discourse. The self, so conceived, is the self-creation of a voluntaristic agent, and the very activity of self-creation, or self-making, is its own end, for the process bestows meaning on human existence. [4] This goes beyond even the earlier romantic journey of finding one's unique, true self. The self is not found—but must be created. And this self-creation is the goal to which all culture and politics must be subordinate. In the modern secular utopia the purpose of the polity is to ensure the conditions of self-creation. By definition, minority life styles are to be protected; by definition, the majority culture is tyrannical. All issues from the most complex constitutional disputes to concerns over the status of marriage must be analyzed solely from the perspective of the view of the self. Such is the dominant temperament and sentiment of the times. There is a clear and present danger lurking here. For, the immanentization of a liberal Christian moralism notwithstanding (which confers a kind of dignity on the project), the status of this self is not altogether different from that of Plato's "democratic soul" in the Republic, and the "logic" of the situation heads toward a devolution of selfhood [sic] into the "tyrannical self," as the contemporary drug and techno culture would intimate. This view of the self, in fact, is a product of a crude voluntaristic subjective idealism. It is a massive counterposition, which must be exposed and rejected without compromise, for its smothering intensity prohibits rational debate. The classicist mentality may be nurtured in this soil as a reaction, but it is not equal to the task of critique, and indeed it would simply be co-opted as just another viewpoint created as a project of self-making! By contrast, sufficient reflection on the normative process of cognitive, moral, and spiritual self-transcendence would establish the validity of a basic [16] horizon beyond solipsism and narcissism and enter the world of authentic selfhood–and indeed the universe of being.

Also prevalent in popular culture today is neo-atheism, a movement nourished by positivism and certain post-modern efforts. To be sure, the movement is singularly lacking in originality; it regurgitates stock arguments from Victorian anthropology, Feuerbach's projection theory (rooted in naive realism!), Marx's one paragraph critique of religion, Freud's own version of projection theory, based on his so-called "reality principle," and, in general, simplistic materialist and reductionist philosophies, culminating in claims of neuroscience; while it dogmatically denies the validity of philosophy in the age of science. But its massive impact cannot be reversed by thinkers—including many contemporary theologians—who contain religious discourse within language games, or subtexts, or opinions. God is absent from modern culture. Philosophical discourse—and arguments—about God are not arcane if they are purged of antiquated science and conceptualist metaphysics, that is, if they are completed [sic] divorced from classicist culture. In our post metaphysical age, metaphysics still matters! It must, of course, be a metaphysics at home with a universe of emergent probability and the discovery of the self.

In summation, classicist culture is the result of certain tendencies within the Age of Theory. But as long as the dynamics of basic horizon are overlooked and a premium is placed on the products of thinking, as long as the defects of materialism, reductionism, relativism, nihilism, hedonism, and atheism are apparent, and as long as philosophical skepticism is rampant, then classicist culture will have a perennial appeal. We do not live in a positivist universe where the putative third stage of history has supplanted the earlier stages. The Age of Interiority has not superseded the Age of Theory any more than the Age of Theory has superseded the Age of Myth. The discovery of the self has not abrogated the discovery of the mind any more than the discovery of the mind has abrogated the efficacy of myth as a representation of mystery. What is imperative in the Age of Interiority is the integration of selfhood, objectivity, and myth. And classicist culture cannot even adequately conceive of this enterprise, let alone execute it.

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Footnotes:

1.Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 249; see Hans Blumberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983).

2. Eric Voeglin, Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 57.

3. Insight, 5th ed., Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 251-253.

4. See Emil Fackenheim, "Metaphysics and Historicity," in The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity, ed. John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), chap. 8.

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Source:Thomas J. McPartland, "'Classicist Culture': The Utility and Limits of an Ideal-Type," Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies N.S. 1, no. 1 (2010): 12–16.

Repost: The Progressive Condition: The Cynical Art of Michel Houellebecq

“What we have today is the hegemonic figure of the liberal subject who, like Nietzsche’s Last Man, is concerned only with the pursuit of private pleasures + ideals of happiness.”

– Slavoj Žižek

Michel Houellebecq is known for his abrasive and vulgar wit, as a pamphleteer of literature; a pornographer of the neoliberal market place of ideas in its darker contours, a sexploitative tourist of the flyways within a global system that has lost itself among the labyrinths of its own economic nightmares; and, as a man who has been accused of obscenity, racism, misogyny and Islamophobia among other things. But beyond the surface tension of the mediasphere hype he is more a product of our free-market era than its perpetrator or victim. One might even suggest that he incarnates the Progressive Condition that is both our glory and possible demise: he is the Last Man in its hollowed out core tumbling toward that narrative aporia beyond which none of us will remain human.

As Ben Jeffery will put it Houellebecq’s narratives inhabit that space in the negative undertow of the enlightenment, a realm where “we are able to see ourselves as merely creatures, rather than God’s creatures, and nature as purposeless matter, rather than divine plan. Humans are just animals, and, unsurprisingly, that knowledge gives precedence to biological impulse; to strength, health and beauty over weakness, infirmity and repulsiveness – and it makes self-interest paramount” (Jeffery, Ben (2011-11-16). Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (p. 15). NBN_Mobi_Kindle. Kindle Edition). This notion of rational self-interest has been one of those elements that that runs through most thought for the past two-centuries, a thematic or leit-motif of our Progressive Condition.

The original progressives held the consistent conviction that a “public interest” or “common good” really existed (Nugent, Walter (2009-12-04). Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Kindle Locations 258-259). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition). In our time this notion has taken on the fabric of a lie, a fiction that democrats continue to support in theory, republicans laugh at, but in practice both agree is just that: a nice idea that is best left in the shadows or hinterlands of the public unconscious. It’s in this society of moral bankruptcy and decay that Houellebecq situates his characters. They are much like himself (and much of his fiction comes right out of his life) cynical in the sense of Diogenes: a street art that shits on the most respectable citizens as if this was just the natural order of existence. As Sloterdijk in his Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (English: Critique of Cynical Reason) will inform us of Cynicism after Diogenes:

Its insights disclose the questionable and ridiculous aspects of the grand, serious systems. Its intelligence is floating, playful, essayistic, not laid out on secure foundations and final principles. Diogenes inaugurates the Gay Science (Nietzsche) by treating serious sciences in a tongue-in-cheek manner. How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot stand satire is false. To parody a theory and its proponents is to carry out the experiment of experiments with it. (Critique of Cynical Reason, translation by Michael Eldred; foreword by Andreas Huyssen, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 288)

So that Houellebecq’s humor is both subtle and full of satiric intent, tongue-and-cheek cynicism that neither takes itself seriously nor expects to be taken seriously. Against a postmodern nihilist reading of his works one might actually see in it a critique of our eras Progressive Condition. Sloterdijk believed that this condition of our time was best typified by the difference between ancient and modern forms of cynicism, suggesting that unlike ancient Greek Cynicism the modern one no longer stands for values of the natural and ethical kind that bind people beyond their religious and economically useful convictions. Rather, it has become a mode of thought that defines its actions in terms of a “final end” of a purely materialistic sort and reduces the “ought” to an economic strategy aimed at maximizing profit. This new grittier market realism, what Mark Fisher will call “Capital Realism“, and Ben Jeffery as simply – “Depressive Realism” underlies most of Houellebeq’s novels and stories. His satires are for the most part taken at face value rather than as ironic and satirical statements about our eras cynicism in its rawest forms.

As Houellebecq will say through one of his characters: ‘Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. More than at any time or in any civilization, human beings are obsessed with aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it ticks inevitably towards the end). This weighing up of pleasure and pain which, sooner or later, everyone is forced to make, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide.’ (Jeffrey, pp. 15-16) This pop-cult psychoanalysis of our condition as a Freudian pleasure/pain dialectic that leads to suicide is seen almost everyday in various pop-cultural spheres: musicians, artists, performers, etc. committing suicide through drugs, self-inflicted wounds, et. al..

In his book on H.P. Lovecraft he will relate the basic condition of our era:

For humans of the end of the twentieth century, this cosmos devoid of hope is absolutely our world. This abject universe, where fear spreads in concentric circles from the unnameable revelation, this universe where our only imaginable destiny is to be crushed and devoured, we recognize absolutely as our mental universe. (Michel Houellebecq. Translated by Robin Mackay. H.P. Lovecraft Against the world, against life, Believer Books; First Edition edition (May 1, 2005))

This is the world according to Houellebecq, our world in its downward devolution into that strange and twisted thing it is. A market world where the maximization of everything is accelerating us into that disjunctive era where the lines between the human and inhuman blur, and we enter the machinic phylum like “dogs in the street barking”.

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Source: S.C. Hickman, "The Progressive Condition: The Cynical Art of Michel Houellebecq," Alien Ecologies blog, June 12, 2015, accessed July 18, 2015, http://darkecologies.com/2015/06/12/the-progressive-condition-the-cynical-art-of-michel-houellebecq/.

Pope Francis on the Technocratic Paradigm

106. The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit. It is the false notion that “an infinite quantity of energy and resources are available, that it is possible to renew them quickly, and that the negative effects of the exploitation of the natural order can be easily absorbed”.

107. It can be said that many problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.

108. The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same. Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic, and those who are surrounded with technology “know full well that it moves forward in the final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the human race”, that “in the most radical sense of the term power is its motive – a lordship over all”. As a result, “man seizes hold of the naked elements of both nature and human nature”. Our capacity to make decisions, a more genuine freedom and the space for each one’s alternative creativity are diminished.

109. The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominate economic and political life. The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings. Finance overwhelms the real economy. The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilated, and we are learning all too slowly the lessons of environmental deterioration. Some circles maintain that current economics and technology will solve all environmental problems, and argue, in popular and non-technical terms, that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market growth. They are less concerned with certain economic theories which today scarcely anybody dares defend, than with their actual operation in the functioning of the economy. They may not affirm such theories with words, but nonetheless support them with their deeds by showing no interest in more balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations. Their behaviour shows that for them maximizing profits is enough. Yet by itself the market cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion. At the same time, we have “a sort of ‘superdevelopment’ [sic] of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation”, while we are all too slow in developing economic institutions and social initiatives which can give the poor regular access to basic resources. We fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth.

110. The specialization which belongs to technology makes it difficult to see the larger picture. The fragmentation of knowledge proves helpful for concrete applications, and yet it often leads to a loss of appreciation for the whole, for the relationships between things, and for the broader horizon, which then becomes irrelevant. This very fact makes it hard to find adequate ways of solving the more complex problems of today’s world, particularly those regarding the environment and the poor; these problems cannot be dealt with from a single perspective or from a single set of interests. A science which would offer solutions to the great issues would necessarily have to take into account the data generated by other fields of knowledge, including philosophy and social ethics; but this is a difficult habit to acquire today. Nor are there genuine ethical horizons to which one can appeal. Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology, itself viewed as the principal key to the meaning of existence. In the concrete situation confronting us, there are a number of symptoms which point to what is wrong, such as environmental degradation, anxiety, a loss of the purpose of life and of community living. Once more we see that “realities are more important than ideas”.

111. Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best ecological initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic. To seek only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system.

112. Yet we can once more broaden our vision. We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering. Or indeed when the desire to create and contemplate beauty manages to overcome reductionism through a kind of salvation which occurs in beauty and in those who behold it. An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance?

113. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere. This is not to reject the possibilities which technology continues to offer us. But humanity has changed profoundly, and the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness.

114. All of this shows the urgent need for us to move forward in a bold cultural revolution. Science and technology are not neutral; from the beginning to the end of a process, various intentions and possibilities are in play and can take on distinct shapes. Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.

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Source: Pope Francis, "Laudato Si' ('On Care for Our Common Home')," Papal Encyclical, promulgated May 24, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.

Repost: Pope Gregory XVI: A 19th Century Environmentalist

Well, I’ll admit that the title of this essay is not just a little inaccurate – if we take “environmentalist” in the narrow sense we understand it today. But if we understand “environment” more broadly – as those conditions that surround us and influence us – then, I think, calling Pope Gregory XVI an “environmentalist” is not too far off the mark.

Indeed, Gregory took the “environment” of his day very seriously; some might say, too seriously. One might think, in fact, that he fit well the stereotype of the modern environmentalist – that he lacked balance and perspective, confusing the essential with what is merely external and contingent. For, he vehemently opposed republican government and would accept no lay participation in the government of his Papal States. His 1832 encyclical, Mirari Vos condemned liberty of conscience and the freedom to publish any and all opinions. He stood resolutely against every revolution in his time – even the rebellion of the Catholic Poles against their persecutor, the Orthodox tsar of Russia. Why, Gregory XVI was so reactionary that he even forbade the building of a railroad and the installing of gas lights in the the Papal States! He despised railroads. He called them chemins d’enfer (“roads to hell”) – a pun on the French chemin de fer, “iron road.” (This, of course, suggests that Gregory had a sense of humor, which he did. Those close to him knew him to be jovial, friendly, and a lover of good conversation – thus demonstrating that even reactionaries can be fun.)

It is in his opposition to the modern technology of his day that this pope most closely approximates, at least, the caricature of the modern environmentalist. Such an environmentalist, at the very least, would see a severe curtailment in the use and development of certain forms of technology (such as air conditioning or the automobile) because they harm the natural environment and human health. The more subtle among them may even point to the effects of such technology on human culture. Certainly, Pope Gregory XVI was not thinking of air pollution or climate change when he excoriated trains. What he objected to, and what he thought inexorably bound up with the expansion of the technology of his day, were habits of mind and morality that most modern environmentalists take as self-evident truths. In a word, what Gregory objected to was Liberalism.

This Liberalism was not simply the “liberalism” of the U.S. Democratic Party; indeed, it encompasses the fundamental ideals that lie behind the American political order itself, as well as the those of most nations on earth today. At the basis of this Liberalism is the premise that man’s most natural state is one of radical freedom and autonomy; that human community is a construct to preserve individual freedom, and thus not proper to man as man. Forms of community, including political community, are thus artificial and have the character of an imposition, even if a necessary imposition. But if they are necessary, they are only so because they protect and preserve individual freedom. The limit of human aspiration remains absolute autonomy – even if it can never be fully attained.

Individual liberty is the only absolute for Liberalism. Its limitation can only be justified by liberty. Public order thus becomes the only excuse for law and government – not the common good; for, the expressions of liberty – freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of choice – imply that it is the individual who determines the content of the good. Law and government delineate a space wherein each individual can exercise maximum autonomy, nothing more.

In opposing Liberalism, Gregory was not condemning human liberty as such. It was this pope, for instance, who in his 1839 apostolic letter, In Supremo Apostolatus, sternly condemned enslavement and the slave trade. Gregory understood that freedom is proper to man; what he condemned was the principle of fundamental human autonomy. Gregory operated out of the Catholic social and political tradition that saw organized communal life as a given for man, as an expression of human nature – man as a social and political animal. Based as it is in human nature, the organized communal life has a goal or purpose, which is none other than the good of man as man: the inculcation of virtue, understood not simply as moral rectitude but the perfection of all human faculties – physical, moral, intellectual, and, ultimately, spiritual. It was in defense of this tradition that Gregory exercised all the powers of his mind and heart.

To appreciate this, one need not agree with everything Gregory XVI did and said. One certainly need not share his disdain for railroads and gas lights. [His successor, Blessed Pius IX, in his reign established both these technologies in the Papal States, as well as a lay advisory senate for their governance – for which he was dubbed (mistakenly) the “Liberal pope.”) But, I think, we might be indulging in a bit of disdain ourselves if we simply laugh off Greogry’s pun, chemins d’enfer. It may be, in his rejection of the “modern” technology of his day that Gregory was on to something. He may have understood implicitly what one of his successors on Peter’s Throne has stated explicitly:

We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.

Thus, Pope Francis (Laudato Si’, 107) – arguably a pope of a very different stamp than Gregory XVI. But though Gregory would very likely find some of Francis’ comments and actions appalling (and might think they justify his detestation of railroads), he might discover, in Laudato Si’, kindred sentiments. Gregory forbade the building of railroads because he saw them as avenues by which Liberalism might infiltrate the Papal States. The technology of the period was an expression of a conviction that rose with Francis Bacon’s ipsa scientia est potestas (“knowledge is power.”) It was the notion that knowledge is ordered, not to contemplation, but to craft – to subduing the world for the utility of human freedom. In other words, the function of knowledge and therefore technology is to set us free from the limitations of nature, just as politics is to set us free from the limitations imposed by all tradition, custom, and authority. Such technology, in the words of Francis, “create[s] a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups.” The powerful groups of Pope Gregory XVI’s day were those that sought the overthrow, not only of the Church, but of the human culture that Church had protected and fostered. And their boast was the power their technology gave them over the powers of nature.

[...] what is demanded is a re-evaluation of technology, of its power to influence human life and culture and a reining in of its pretensions. As Laudato Si’ (114) puts it, we “need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.”

Both Francis and Gregory XVI call us to walk the narrow way to true human fulfillment, not simply hitch the next ride on the chemins d’enfer.

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https://monsalvaesche.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/pope-gregory-xvi-a-19th-century-environmentalist/

Repost: Steven Shaviro, "Speculative Realism – A Primer"

[Introduction to the article]

A conference held at Goldsmiths College in 2007 is regarded as the founding moment of Speculative Realism; its earliest protagonists were Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. [...]

One salient point of agreement between these positions is the recourse to, or revision of, Kantian thought. They argue that the primacy of epistemology over ontology that has dominated philosophy since Kant leaves it stuck in perpetual scrutiny of the conditions of thinking. The Speculative Realists, by contrast, assume that the world is independent in some way of our conceptualizations of it. The very fact that the “thing in itself” is unknowable, as Kant declared, is supposed to make it suitable as an object of speculation. An operation Shaviro describes as a leap into fundamental uncertainty.

[The article itself]

Modern Western philosophy – at least since Immanuel Kant published his “Critique of Pure Reason” in 1781 – has tended to privilege epistemology over ontology. Ontology is concerned with the nature of being, with defining, on the most basic level, what is. Epistemology, in contrast, is concerned with how we know whatever it is that we know. It scrutinizes the grounds and limits of our ability to know the world. To say that epistemology must come before ontology is simply to point out that, in order to make assertions about what the world is like, we must be able to give grounds for these assertions, to explain how we can know that they are true. Kant observed that the philosophy of his time was unable to provide such grounds. Either it was dogmatic, claiming to discover metaphysical necessity by pure logical deduction, untethered to observation or empirical evidence; or else it was sceptical, grounded in empirical facts and in subjective experience, but unable to generalize beyond these particular facts and that immediate experience. Against both of these tendencies, Kant insisted that philosophy must start by scrutinizing, and thereby accounting for, its own foundations. If it failed to do this, and instead launched directly into metaphysical speculation, then only nonsense would result. For Kant, and for most philosophers ever since, we can only claim to know something (rather than just believing something blindly) when we can explain how we have come to know it, and what justifies our claims that it is true.

In principle, this priority of epistemology over ontology seems unexceptionable. But in practice, it has become quite problematic. For it means that we end up talking not about things in the world that we encounter, but rather about our own process of encountering them. Kant insists that “things in themselves” are unknowable; all we can really be sure of is phenomena – how things appear to us. In the centuries since Kant, this has become a sort of common sense. Today we take it for granted that we can never see things as they really are, because we can never escape the distorting lenses of our own impositions on the world. Today, these impositions have gone beyond Kant’s categories to include such things as language, our particular cognitive mechanisms, and our cultural biases and ideologies.

Epistemological reflection is important, because it makes us aware of our own prejudices and otherwise unquestioned assumptions. But at the same time, ironically, such reflection makes it nearly impossible for us to escape from these biases and assumptions. We are trapped inside our own perspectives, unable to take a view from any where else. Now, it is indeed important and necessary for us to worry about the danger of making over everything – other people, other living entities, and other things in the universe – in our own image. But the price we pay for averting this danger is that we end up speaking only about, and only to, ourselves. When this process is pushed far enough, we come to believe that the world is just an arbitrary social or linguistic construction, that it consists only of what we ourselves have put into it. For the late-twentieth-century postmodern philosophy of thinkers such as Richard Rorty, and, in a more subtle/complex way, Jacques Derrida, there is no way to escape from this straighjacket: All we can do is point it out, and deplore it. We can never get beyond ourselves, so as to encounter something genuinely different.

The twenty-first-century revival of philosophical speculation is an effort to break free of this dilemma. It seeks to undo the Kantian privileging of epistemology – but it does this for very Kantian reasons. Kant’s own promotion of epistemology, and his ban on metaphysical speculation, came out of his effort to avoid both the Scylla of dogmatic rationalism, and the Charybdis of empiricist scepticism. The current inversion of Kant, with its demotion of epistemology, comes out of a similarly inspired effort to avoid both the Scylla of blind logocentrism and ethnocentrism, and the Charybdis of infinite deconstruction and auto critique. Kant denounced speculation because it overstepped the bounds of all possible knowledge. For today’s new speculative thinkers, in contrast, speculation is necessary precisely because of the limits of knowledge. There is so much that is real, but that we cannot ever possibly know. Twenty-first-century speculation begins where our solid knowledge ends. Far from making dogmatic claims, this new form of speculation paradoxically explores the space of the ungraspable, and the time of the unpredictable.

In 2007, four philosophers presented their work at Goldsmiths in London under the banner of Speculative Realism: Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Iain Hamilton Grant. They partly knew each other and each other’s work. While they have occasionally been perceived as a relatively homogenous group, several of them have since renounced the rubric of Speculative Realism; and indeed, the differences among these thinkers are so great that they cannot be said to comprise a single philosophical school. Yet, the label of Speculative Realism is still useful, to indicate that these thinkers at least share an important starting point. In Harman’s words, “all it takes to be a speculative realist is to be opposed to ‘correlationism’, Meillassoux’s term for the sort of philosophy (still dominant today) that bases all philosophy on the mutual interplay of human and world.”

Speculative Realism insists upon the independence of the world, and of things in the world, from our own conceptualizations of them. It rejects the Kantian thesis that the order of the world depends upon the way that our minds (or our languages, or our cultures) work to structure it. And it also rejects the phenomenological assumption of a primordial reciprocity or correspondence between self and world, or subject and object, or knower and known. Reality is far weirder than we are able to imagine. Things never conform to the ideas that we have about them; there is always something more to them than what we are able to grasp. The world does not fit into our own cognitive paradigms and narrative modes of explanation. “Man” is not the measure of all things. This is why speculation is necessary. We must speculate, to escape from our inveterate anthropocentrism and take seriously the existence of a fundamentally alien, nonhuman world.

There is not one predetermined form of speculation. [...] There is no formula to guide the process of such speculation. Each of the speculative realist thinkers proposes a different way to speculate about the world, as it exists unknowably apart from us.

Ray Brassier, in his book “Nihil Unbound”, doesn’t altogether reject Kant’s epistemological concerns, his insistence upon categories and regulative ideals – or what today we would more likely call norms of rationality – that govern the ways in which we can legitimately talk about the world. But Brassier goes beyond Kant, and engages in a form of radical speculation, when he detaches these norms from Kant’s implicitly human-centered focus. For Brassier, Kant’s categories, such as causality, are not structures that our own minds impose upon the world, in order to give it some intelligible order. Rather, these methods and assumptions are forced upon us from outside, as we seek to approach things that are alien and opaque to our minds. Rationality is terrifyingly inhuman. Physical science allows us to conceptualize a world that is not in any sense made to our measure. But the scientific project can never be complete or final, as the world is ultimately non-conceptual and unconceptualizable. Our ideas of things can never match up to the things themselves. For Kant, this meant that we were relegated to – but also safely grounded within – the realm of phenomena, or mere appearances. But for Brassier, as we incessantly approach (but never finally reach) things in themselves, we are divested of everything that we used to take for granted. The cosmos is radically blank and indifferent, once it has been stripped of all the meanings, values, and narratives that we have vainly striven to impose upon it. Our comforting presuppositions are dissolved, and only ungrounded speculation is left to us.

In his important book “Après la finitude”, Quentin Meillassoux, who was a student of Alain Badiou in Paris, turns Kant inside out and renews the need for the sort of ontological speculation that Kant rejected, in an entirely different way from Brassier. Meillassoux opens a frontal assault upon the “correlationist” assumptions of Kantianism and phenomenology. He insists upon what he calls ancestrality: The indubitable existence of the universe prior to humanity, or to any form of life, and thereby prior to any possibility of being observed, interpreted, or evaluated. Kant establishes “transcendental conditions of experience,” which must logically precede (because they are always already presupposed by) any form of existence whatsoever. But Meillassoux argues that these conditions themselves could only have come into existence at some point in the history of the world; before their emergence, the universe already existed, but was not in any sense of the term “given” to us or organized according to our categories. In other words, the correlation between mind and world established by Kant is itself contingent, rather than necessary. And from this insight, Meillassoux further deduces that radical contingency is the one and only universal necessity. It is absolutely necessary, he says, that the world has the capacity to be other than it currently is. Things can happen for no reason whatsoever. Even socalled [sic] “laws of nature” may arbitrarily change or disappear. In this way, Meillassoux claims to discover truth by means of speculation – or better, to establish the truth of speculation. Where Kant said that “things in themselves” were unknowable because of the limitations of our own powers of understanding, Meillassoux says rather that this unknowability is itself a positive characteristic of things in themselves – and that we can know this to be the case with absolute certainty.

Graham Harman’s version of Speculative Realism, which he calls object-oriented ontology, takes yet another approach to the being of things apart from us, referring to thinkers such as Bruno Latour and Manuel De Landa. In a number of speculative works, including “Guerilla Metaphysics” and “The Quadruple Object”, Harman revises Kant, and reintroduces the need for speculation, by both extending and exploding one of Kant’s most basic claims. Where Kant says that we can not know things in themselves because we can only experience them in terms of the frameworks that we ourselves impose upon them, Harman generalizes this situation to all entities in the cosmos. It is not just human beings, or rational beings, who apprehend the world in particular, limited ways. The world contains a multitude of objects, and none of these objects has access to any other object (or even to itself) in more than a superficial manner. For Harman, Kant is right when he insists upon finitude, or the unsurpassable limits of our knowledge. But Kant is wrong when he claims to establish human-centered structures that are complete and certain, at least within those limits. We don’t impose conditions upon the world, so much as we are trapped within our own limited ability to make sense of the world. Kant says that we must not speculate about things that we cannot know. Harman replies that, precisely because we cannot know things in themselves, the only thing that is left to us is to speculate. We cannot grasp objects cognitively; but we can allude to objects through metaphor and other aesthetic practices. In this way we can cherish things, even though we do not fully understand them. And such is the route of speculation: “the real is something that cannot be known, only loved.”

Iain Hamilton Grant, who, like Brassier, was a student of Nick Land, presents still another version of speculation in his “Philosophies of Nature After Schelling”. In Kant’s own philosophy, the “transcendental conditions of experience” are pre-existing structures to which all cognition must and needs to conform. But Grant, following the post-Kantian philosopher Friedrich Schelling, insists that these structures themselves cannot be taken as simply given, but need to be generated in some way. The transcendental – that which comes before all experience, and establishes the conditions for experience – must itself be an ongoing process, rather than just a static product. For Grant as for Schelling, therefore, the “transcendental” can only be identified with the infinite, ongoing productivity of nature itself – rather than with the finite human mind, which is just one product of nature. Speculation is necessary, for all these thinkers, because it is the only way in which we can seek to trace the forces, powers, and events that generate our bodies and minds, but that remain forever beyond our minds’ and bodies’ grasp.

In sum, the speculative realists all find ways to circumvent Kant’s prohibition of metaphysical speculation. They work to resist the anthropocentrism that results from Kant’s privileging of epistemology over ontology. For Meillassoux and for Brassier, the way to overcome the constraints of Kantian epistemology is to realize that the limitations upon possible knowledge discovered by Kant are not inscribed within our own cognitive faculties, so much as they are already features of things in themselves, which are irreducibly contingent (Meillassoux) or non-conceptual (Brassier). For Harman and for Grant, meanwhile, the privilege accorded to human cognition must itself be put into question. Human perception and understanding are less special than we generally believe; for they belong to a much broader spectrum of processes of relation and causal influence. What I do when I contemplate a ball of cotton is not far different from what dye does when it colors a ball of cotton, or for that matter from what fire does when it burns a ball of cotton. For Harman, these are all instances of “vicarious contact” between distinctly separate entities. And for Grant, they are all transformations that are driven by, but that also halt and reify, the incessant productivity of Nature. Epistemology cannot be given priority, because understanding and knowing are themselves caught up within larger movements for which they cannot themselves account. All these thinkers take up speculation, not as a way to discover higher “dogmatic” truths, but rather as a way to explore what Meillassoux calls the “Great Outdoors” of existence, a realm far too vast and weird, and radically uncertain, to be subsumed by our own values and norms.

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Source: Steven Shaviro, "Speculative Realism – A Primer," Terremoto 2 (June 1, 2015), accessed June 6, 2015, http://terremoto.mx/article/speculative-realism-a-primer/.

Markus Gabriel on Why the World Does Not Exist but Unicorns Do

I agree with certain versions of the famous Kantian line of thought according to which existence is not what I call a proper property. In the first step of the overall argument, by a “proper property” I mean a property reference to which puts one in a position to distinguish an object in the world from other objects in the world. Existence certainly is not a property that divides the world up into two realms: that of the existing things on the one hand and that of the non-existing things (things lacking the feature of existence) on the other hand. That would be a weird world-picture.

Against this background, Kant has argued that existence is world-containment, that is, the world’s property to contain spatiotemporal individuals. On this construal, existence is precisely not a proper property of individuals. To assert that some object x exists is to say something about the world, namely that x is to be found in the world. However, this immediately raises the question whether the world itself can exist on this model? Is the world contained by the world? What exactly is the relation of containment supposed to be? Is the world some kind of set or a mereological whole? Would it even make sense to say that the world is a spatiotemporal individual located within the world and to be met with in it? What kind of totality is the world? All of Kant’s answers hinge on his notion of the world as the “field of possible experience” (CPR, A 227/B 280f.).

This creates all sorts of problems. Yet, what is right about his view is that to exist is a property of a field or a domain and not an ordinary discriminatory property of objects we encounter within the domain. As I read him, Kant distinguished between questions concerning the existence of individuals (which he takes to be a function mapping individuals onto the field of possible experience) and questions concerning the world itself. The latter, metaphysical questions, for him, are famously unanswerable.

If this is right, the question is what we mean when in metaphysics we search for the furniture of reality or the fundamental structure of the world. If “the world” is explicitly or implicitly modeled along the lines of a huge spatio-temporal container inhabited by the totality of individuals, this creates the problem that it is entirely unclear in what sense such a container is supposed to exist. Kant thought that a realist container model – according to which the world is a big mind-independent object encompassing all entities – should be replaced by a transcendetanl idealist horizon model according to which the world is not an object of enquiry at all – neither a big container nor a “big physical object” (David Lewis) –, let alone one of the individuals to be met with within the world. This ultimately means that the world is not an extant entity grounding our claims to objectivity, realism etc., but a kind of necessary fiction or a “natural illusion,” as Kant puts it.

However, this only postpones the problem: if the world is a horizon, we might still wonder whether it exists and what this would mean. The problem is that Kant seems to be committed to a very substantive metaphysical account, namely a form of metaphysical fictionalism according to which the illusion of the existence of the world is a purportedly natural, that is to say, inevitable side-effect of human thought, a feature of conceiving of things “from the human standpoint” (CPR, A 26/B 42).

Even though I do not buy Kant’s own ontology (his transcendental idealist view of existence), I employ arguments found in the tradition of ontology or rather metaontology departing from Kant in order to argue against the coherence of metaphysics as a first-order investigation into the world in its entirety, reality as a whole, the universe as the place where everything takes place etc. Notice how sloppy most contemporary metaphysicians are when it comes to characterizing their subject matter: words like “the universe,” “the world,” “reality,” “the cosmos” are often used interchangeably and without further clarifications. In my view, those totality words do not refer to anything which is capable of having the property of existence.

In this context, I try to revive the tradition of metaontology and metametaphysics that departs from Kant. As has been noticed, Heidegger introduced the term metaontology and he also clearly states that Kant’s philosophy is a “metaphysics about metaphysics.” I call metametaphysical nihilism the view that there is no such thing as the world such that questions regarding its ultimate nature, essence, structure, composition, categorical outlines etc. are devoid of the intended conceptual content. The idea that there is a big thing comprising absolutely everything is an illusion, albeit neither a natural one nor an inevitable feature of reason as such. Of course, there is an influential Neo-Carnapian strand in the contemporary debate which comes to similar conclusions. [...]

Generally, I draw a distinction between metaphysics and ontology. In this context, metaphysics1 is the theory of absolutely everything there is, whereas ontology is the somewhat more modest systematic investigation into the meaning of “existence,” or rather into existence itself (among other things: by way of giving an account of the meaning of existence terms in various languages). Metaphysics1 has no object, it is an empty discipline in need of a suitable error theory. For this purpose I draw on ontological considerations and try to work out an ontology that does not require the existence of the world in the metaphysical1 sense of the term. Of course, there are other ways of looking at metaphysics. For instance, you might think that there is metaphysics2, a discipline which draws a broad distinction between how things really are and how they appear to us under species-relative conditions. As long as this does not lead back to metaphysics1, the theory of totality, I am fine with this. However, it is obviously not easy to draw the line between metaphysics1 and metaphysics2. There is also metaphysics3, where one is a metaphysician if one believes that physics is not a theory of absolutely everything because there are non-physical things. My ontology can be seen as contributing to metaphysics2 and metaphysics3 while constantly trying to be cautious not to get entangled in metaphysics1.

Not all forms of pluralism are alike. What matters here are the details. The brand of ontological pluralism I am advocating is realist in nature. There really is a plurality of domains regardless of the additional fact that we are able to epistemically individuate those domains (say by an adequate scientific division of labor, where each discipline attempts to carve some domains out of the plurality of domains at their joints). Concepts like “conceptual schemes,” “language games,” “world-making” play no role in my account. My name for domains is “fields of sense,” a term I mainly introduced to highlight their distinction from both sets and domains of objects where the latter can be understood in purely extensionalist terms as collections of objects such that for each of them we – or some ideal observer – can refer to it with a logical proper name. The “sense”-part in “fields of sense” stems from a realist interpretation of Fregean senses according to which Fregean senses are what we capture in a true thought which grasps that things are such-and-so. Things being such-and-so is generally as mind-independent, ontologically and epistemologically objective as anything could be.[...] Fields of sense are like domains of objects with the additional feature that they are intensionally individuated. What it is for something to exist in a field of sense is a function of the descriptions that objectively hold good of the objects to be encountered in the field. [...]

This precisely does not mean that we construct the plurality of fields or that they are somehow essentially tied to features that only exist as a consequence of the existence of conceptual schemes brought about by intentionally gifted animals like us. Otherwise put: we do not make it the case that there is no all-encompassing domain or big physical object of which everything is a part. It is not that the world would have been just one unity or totality had we not divided it up in the course of history. There never was, is or will be an entity or domain corresponding to our “oceanic feeling” of belonging to a gigantic scene where absolutely everything is located or takes place.

Notice that I do not deny the existence of the universe, which I define as the object domain (the field of sense) investigated by the ensemble of our best natural sciences. The universe might very well be some kind of big physical object or a cosmos. However, it does not encompass absolutely everything there is (is not metaphysically maximal), as what it is for something to exist in the universe (to be physical, say) does not apply to lots of things that actually exist, such as numbers, unicorns in my dreams, witches in Faust, or the Federal Republic of Germany. To suppose otherwise is to engage in metaphysics1 in an objectionable sense, that is, to look not just for a formally unified (formally univocal) existence property, but to inflate it with properties specifically individuating objects in the physical universe. To borrow a nice phrase from Huw Price who defends what he calls a “functional pluralism” somewhat similar to some of the things I believe: the univocity of the logical device of quantification, the existential quantifier should not mislead into assuming that there is a “single arena, as it were, and a single existential quantifier, bullishly surveying the whole.” (Naturalism Without Mirrors, p. 13)

The ontology of fields of sense (OFS) is committed to a combination of ontological pluralism, ontological realism and metametaphysical nihilism. It is a view of reality according to which all sorts of things are real (in their respective fields of sense) without there being a single reality to which all real things belong.

As far as I can tell, all of this is far enough from Rorty and Goodman even though they sometimes say things which sound similar to what I am supporting. However, I totally reject the antirealist or constructivist ambitions clearly present in Rorty and in the metaphor of world-making in Goodman. Goodman defends a kind of anthropocentric irrealism. In Ways of Worldmaking he presents a picture of his view: “We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds.” OFS on the contrary neither states that we are confined to ways of describing nor offers a description of “our universe”. There is no sense in which I believe that our concepts are profoundly shaped by parochial features of our life form or our various cultures in such a way that we can never grasp things in themselves, but only “our universe”. I therefore disagree with a postmodern interpretation of Nietzschean perspectivism based on claims such as that “the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these.“ (Gay Science 374) Rorty and Goodman, as I read them, would subscribe to the view that “we cannot look around our own corner.” (Gay Science 374) I wholeheartedly disagree. [...]

First of all, OFS is a form of deflationary ontological pluralism. This does not mean that only the existence of unicorns is deflated whereas hands or fingernails exist in a more full-blown sense. There just is no “full-blown sense” of existence, such as “physical existence” or “real existence”. Many ontologists in recent times held or hold that some version of ontological permissiveness is acceptable or even unavoidable (I am thinking of work of Kit Fine, Étienne Souriau, Jonathan Schaffer, Amie Thomasson, Graham Harman and Bruno Latour). Commitment to the existence of unicorns is just not as substantive or even outright crazy as it looks if we take it for granted that there really only are those things that the imaginary discipline of physics tells us exists. I am saying “imaginary discipline,” because there is no such thing as the single discipline of physics. “Physics” or “science” still often count among philosophers (particularly among metaphysicians) as empirically grounded forms of metaphysics that get to the bottom of things (the ultimate grounding level). This is neither clearly a consequence of any actual finding of physics to date nor could it be given that we are dealing with metaphysical interpretations of terms such as “particle” or “to consist of” when we claim, for instance, that tables consist of particles and then wonder whether tables even so much as exist. Of course, tables exist and, as far as I know, so do electrons. Reference to electrons might be crucial for an explanation of why we do not fall through tables. Electrons are an element in any account of the solidity of medium-sized dry goods. But none of this is any evidence for the view that existence is somehow primarily, exclusively or even paradigmatically a physical or more broadly natural feature. Unicorns really exist, for instance, in the coloring book Unicorns are Jerks some of my graduate students gave me as a Christmas present a couple of years ago. They even have a determinate shape: think, for instance, of the unicorn in the movie The Last Unicorn. God clearly exists in the Bible and there are many Gods in the Bhaghavad Gita. This does not mean, imply or entail that there is a “dude” out there in the universe, most of the time hidden from our view (why does he hide?) and endowed with magical noetic fingers he can use in order to build universes out of nothing, turn himself into a speaking burning bush or what have you. I call this view the religion of the additional dude. This religion (which I do not take to be identical with any of the traditional religions that were created before modernity) is indeed just outrageously crazy. No point arguing against it. The additional dude does not exist. God is nowhere to be found in the universe hidden behind the Milky Way or in a black hole.

Ontological permissiveness is often charged with overpopulation. Yet, it is misguided to quote Occam here in order to cut off Plato’s beard. Occam only said that we should not multiply what there is beyond necessity, not that we should define things out of existence because we prefer deserts to jungles or slums (as Quine’s unfortunate metaphors suggest). I do not see what is objectionable about admitting that there are citizens, numbers, Republics, dictators, movies, witches etc. It might be part of our epistemology of some of those entities that we realize that their existence somehow depends on our recognition, games of make-believe, deeply routed illusions or what have you. It is a plausible thesis of social ontology that there would have been no republics had no one ever been around to believe that there are republics. But this does not mean that there are no republics!

Of course, then, there are non-spatio-temporal objects. We might be wrong about which objects actually belong to this category and in many cases there is room for debate (are occurent thoughts spatio-temporal objects, such as certain neuronal patterns? What about ghosts in gothic novels, are they supposed to be spatio-temporal?). But I have never seen even a minimally convincing case to the effect that to exist is to be a spatio-temporal object. I believe the burden of proof is not on the ontological pluralist per se, but on the metaphysical monist, where metaphysical monism is the view that there is exactly one location for everything existing such that this rules out that there are numbers, unicorns, witches, and republics in one principled stroke. To conclude this answer with a nice paper title from Graham Harman (another ontological pluralist): “I am also of the opinion that materialism must be destroyed.” [...]

[T]he age of the world-picture for me is at least as old as the axial age, as Karl Jaspers has named the period from roughly 800 to 200 BC in which the major metaphysical concepts have been shaped in many parts of the globe. What clearly happened at that time was that the originally mythological idea of a totality of what there is was turned into a fruitful scientific concept. It was useful for humanity to figure out that what there is significantly transcends their home town, local culture and gradually: their continent, planet, our entire galaxy etc. We continually expanded our conception of what there is into the possibly infinite depths of the universe while at the same time exploring the equally infinite depths of other fields of sense (mathematics, literature, art, etc.).

The idea that there is an all-encompassing whole, a sphere of being (as Parmenides’ metaphor has it) in my view is a relic from the past. However, it shapes our understanding of the lines of conflict in the contemporary global order. Many would subscribe to the view that there is a scientific world-view in conflict with other world-views (in particular, in conflict with a religious world-view). In addition, many would also subscribe to the view that each of us has locally entrenched value systems ultimately harking back to world-views – think of expressions like “modern Western civilization,” “Asian values” etc. This does not automatically amount to problematic forms of relativism, as one might suspect. Nevertheless, I think all of this is profoundly ideological in a bad sense and mixed up with the metaphysical idea that there is a reality out there into which we humans are thrown at some point in the evolution of species on our planet. We seem to awake to a scene which is already out there. In my book Why the World does not Exist I call this the idea of “the world without spectators”. This gives rise to the idea that the world without spectators is the real world, the one we can only reach by erasing ourselves from reality as we know it, which trivially is the world as grasped by the spectators. [...]

There is a widespread, but misguided holistic assumption according to which we are introduced into the space of reasons from a parochial point of view (as Westerners, Chinese, Christians, Germans, Californians or whatever) such that we cannot help but adhere to some kind of overall world-view transmitted from generation to generation by institutions. I think that the reality of world-views is nothing but the ideological use made of the idea that there are many world-views which compete with each other. The struggle of world-views (the “clash of civilizations”) as a matter of fact exists, but here it is important to understand that its existence is ideological.

Beyond the technical details of the ontology I am still spelling out by defending it against objections coming from various directions in philosophy, I believe that the no-world-view (the view that the world does not exist) can also serve as a therapeutic tool in the context of ideology critique. [...]

I have no problem admitting that there are hard facts and I honestly try to steer clear of fictionalism in ontology. Let us say that a hard fact is a maximally modally robust fact where a fact is maximally modally robust if it had obtained (if the objects involved in it would have existed) had there never been epistemic agents at all, that is creatures endowed with the relevant capacities for truth-apt thought. There are many facts of this kind: that the sun is bigger than the earth is such a fact, and also that 2+2=4. Again, there is room for debate in specific cases, but no room for a general denial of the existence of maximally modally robust facts. The metaphysician (as in metaphysics1) would have to make a case to the effect that there really only are maximally modally robust facts or that there is a metaphysically1 relevant sense in which there is a totality of facts with a ground floor consisting of the maximally modally robust facts. There have been manifold attempts in the history of metaphysics to make such a case, but in my view they all fail in that that they reduce entities beyond necessity. In contradistinction to the current (mis-)interpretation of Occam’s razor we can sum this up by reminding ourselves that if Plato really had a beard (I do not know), then his beard certainly existed at some point. Accordingly, one can rephrase Plato’s beard and make it look more serious by attaching a pseudo-Latin slogan to it: entia nec sunt reducenda nec eliminanda praeter necessitatem (neither reduce nor eliminate entities without really good reasons!). The default position is one on which things we all take to exist really exist. The metaphysician1 is forced to make a revisionary case.

I believe that there are local cases which speak in favor of some forms of theoretical reduction and of straightforward elimination (some behavioral aspects of puberty can be theoretically reduced, better explained by, hormonal changes than by “folk psychoanalysis”; there have never been any witches in Germany outside of the Carnival season and even the Carnival witches did not have the magical powers Martin Luther famously attributed to them in his famous speech on Exodus 22:18: “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live”). The overall problem with metaphysics1 is that it typically ends in overgeneralizations such as: everything is water, deep down there are only elementary particles out of which everything is made; everything that exists can be discovered by idealized science; there are only mental contents; etc. Local reduction or elimination can be justified, but one must not overextend locally justified procedures. That color experience exists as an effect of electromagnetic waves stimulating photoreceptors should never motivate the conclusion that there are no tables and trees, but only elementary particles arranged table- or treewise. [...]

Yet, the biological preconditions of consciousness are not sufficient for a description of consciousness given that we are not brains in a vat (or brains in a skull for that matter). In the philosophy of mind, I argue that there is no adequate description of phenomenal consciousness that is not at the same time a description of intentional consciousness and the latter brings with it that thoughts, meanings (and many other things such as colors and republics) “just ain’t in the head,” to quote Putnam’s famous externalist credo.

According to OFS, though, the reason why we should be aware of the external contribution to internal happenings is not that they are literally coming from somewhere else (from outside of our ectoderm). I am currently spelling out a much broader form of externalism according to which everything about which we have truth-apt thoughts we can share with others just is not in the head where the reason for this is ontological and not metaphysical (it is not just because there are natural kinds out there that language is anchored in a non-subjective realm). By the way, Kant’s beautifully written book Dreams of a Spirit Seer is a real treasure for contemporary philosophy of mind. His own version of making fun of homuncularism deserves to be quoted at length here: “The soul of a man has its seat in the brain, and its abode there is indescribably small; there it exercizes its sensitive faculty, as the spider in the centre of its web. The nerves of the brain push or shake it, and cause thereby that not this immediate impression, but the one which is made upon quite remote parts of the body, is represented as an object which is present outside of the brain. From this seat it moves the ropes and levers of the whole machinery, causing arbitrary movements at will. Such propositions can be proved only very superficially or not at all”. In my view, there is no hard problem, but not because there are only easy problems, but because the entire setup of the questions driving the mind-brain-problem in its mainstream shape is indeed profoundly flawed. OFS is an important part of the cure, because it dissolves the idea that we have to fit everything that there is (all phenomena) into a single framework such as the framework of entities for which we legitimately assume that they are subject to push-and-pull-causation (if such there be). [...]

A major problem when it comes to taking a stance on the issues related to the family of terms “physicalism,” “materialism,” “naturalism” and their possible opposites, is that those terms are not clearly defined or rather that there is a vast plurality of views that count as “physicalistic” or “naturalistic”. What most of these terms when expressed by contemporary philosophers of the last hundred years or so have in common is a commitment to three ideas:

(1) the strictly metaphysical idea of the unity of reality (the world).
(2) the view that there should be a privileged form of knowledge carving the world at its joints.
(3) the identification of reality in its entirety/the world with nature.

Roughly, then, physicalism adds
(4) the privileged form of knowledge is (futuristic) physics.
and materialism commits to some version of
(5) whatever is natural is material/energetic.

On this construal, naturalism is the combination of (1), (2), and (3); physicalism of (1), (2), (3), and (4) and materialism of (1), (2), (3), and (5).

Of course, there are many other positions that go by these names and they are often logically independent from the ones roughly characterized here. For instance, “naturalism” typically also refers to one of the following two continuity theses:
(Biological continuity thesis) Human animals are entirely continuous with the rest of the animal kingdom. We have no feature that puts us outside of the realm described by biology.
(Epistemological continuity thesis) All knowledge is continuous with scientific knowledge (where the latter is understood as some way of construing theories on the basis of empirical input).

Again, there are more views out there than I could possibly cover here. For instance, Marx and Engels should certainly count as materialists, but their historical-dialectical materialism does not accept (5), which is why their view in the former country of East Germany was distinguished from “petty-bourgeois materialism (kleinbürgerlicher Materialismus),” which was widespread in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. The latter basically defended (1), (2), (3), (4), (5) as well as both continuity theses and therefore represents the most ambitious (and least coherent) form of materialism I can imagine.

In any event, for a position to count as “realist” it is not required that it is committed to any of these. In my work, in particular, I have been advocating the idea that one should strive to be a “realist in all departments” (as Davidson once put it) without believing that the realism-inducing features of our beliefs put us in contact with “the world” such that we need to understand this expression as a commitment to the unity of reality.

The claim that there are numbers, thoughts, republics and God (in the Bible or in people’s faith) and that this does not entail that they cannot be integrated into a single conception of reality as a whole because there is no such thing as reality as a whole is not supernaturalist. In order to see this, it might be crucial to remind ourselves of the history of the naturalism/supernaturalism-distinction which is really theological. There is an interesting (albeit controversial) book by Henri de Lubac Surnaturel. Études Historiques (1946) in which he reconstructs the history of the term natural and how it became opposed to supernatural within the history of theology. Even though there have been forms of materialism in Ancient Greek thought (and elsewhere, for instance, in India), which certainly denied the existence of Gods on the ground that they were made up by humans (Xenophanes, later echoed by Feuerbach etc.), these views do not seem to rely on the metaphysical idea of the unity of reality.

Some thinkers (I am thinking of Max Weber, Hans Blumenberg and Heidegger here) have argued that the modern naturalistic version of the unity of reality (the “disenchantment of the world”) actually has theological roots. They all see it as a result of first reserving magical powers to God (whereby the natural is disenchanted) and then by subtracting God from the world-picture. Naturalism would then only look like a plausible version of the unity of reality because we have pushed a lot of what actually exists into the mind of God and thereby made it look magical (famous candidate notions here are: freedom, pure reason, values, knowledge of things in themselves and so on). And what do we mean by “nature” anyway? If “the natural” is the unified category of what exists regardless of how we take it to be (the “mind-independent” to use an even more muddled notion), then a naturalist would be a crazy denier of the existence of what only exists because we take it to be a certain way (like republics, romantic love, maybe: qualia).

In one word: I reject the entire opposition of “naturalism” and “supernaturalism,” because this distinction is a piece of theology. It is often overlooked here that Max Weber did not say that modernity is “the disenchantment of the world” and that this somehow relates to secularization or naturalism. On the contrary, Weber argues that the disenchantment of the world begins with the monotheistic rejection of magic. In a certain sense, many a diagnostic of modern nihilism (including Nietzsche) has made the point that the allegedly disenchanted conception of nature (naturalism in the vague sense in which some people declare to have respect for “science”) is a theological construction.

I would, therefore, like to think that OFS is neither naturalistic nor supernaturalistic, as I not only reject the unity of reality claim, but a fortiori the claim that reality is unified by there only being natural entities/facts (whatever “natural” might mean here). [...]

The human being, as we know it from its oldest extant texts, can be characterized as the “God-positing consciousness,” as Schelling puts it. By this he means that human beings have a conception of the whole that is at the same time a conception of how they fit into this whole. What a given culture or text presents as divine does not refer to a quasi-scientific posit introduced in order to make sense of natural phenomena. The divine is rather a name for a conception of the whole in which human beings do find a place. Our ancestors did not wonder whether thunder was caused by Zeus or was something else (like an electromagnetic meteorological phenomenon). They really were not like us in that the very notion of scientific explanation as we conceive of it had not been invented at all. Schelling wholeheartedly rejects the extremely naïve conception of mythology one can later find at the end of Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism according to which Homer’s Gods are “cultural posits” designed to establish cognitive order among the phenomena. They are not at all part of an empirical theory. The view that we are subjects that find themselves in opposition to a (natural) world order of which we try to make sense by any means is itself a mythological view. One way of looking at Schelling’s project of a history of self-consciousness is to read it as a genealogy of the very idea of such a distinction between mind and world. He argues that this distinction comes very late in the history of humanity and that it would be anachronistic to think of the forging of many of the concepts we owe to the longest past of human history in terms of a subject trying to make sense of nature by means of empirical theories. [...]

Scientistic epistemology assumes that there is a domain of objects out there that we are trying to describe by building theories on the basis of the deliverances of our senses. While this may be a good enough characterization of something we sometimes do, it is a gross overgeneralization when it comes to knowledge-acquisition and justification on a more global human level. If we go to a museum and defend the knowledge claim that Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a much better painting than the (admittedly amusing) veggie paintings of the Italian renaissance artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, we are not thereby trying to make sense of sensory input in the way envisaged if we take ourselves to be the kind of thought-mongering creatures confronted with glimpses of an external reality that still inhabit the grey zone in contemporary philosophy between epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of perception. Or if we defend the knowledge claim that liberal democracy is a better political order than North Korean dictatorship we do not thereby create models of a given reality out there on the basis of sensory input. The senses are entirely overrated in scientistic epistemology (not to speak of the problem that it is often based on problematic construals of what the senses and their deliverances are, construals to some extent corrected by McDowell and subsequent discussions). In my view, post-Kantian idealism argues that Kant overrated the role of sensory input for knowledge-acquisition or rather for the very concept of knowledge. Knowledge – post-Kantian idealism argues – is not paradigmatically represented by empirical knowledge of the external world. Isolating that part of our knowledge from our overall body of knowledge (to which knowledge about art, religion, politics, social facts in general etc. belongs) and privileging it in our epistemological account of our standing with respect to what there is is the mistake that post-Kantian idealism is trying to avoid.

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Source: Markus Gabriel, interview by Richard Marshall, "Why the World Does Not Exist but Unicorns Do," 3:AM Magazine website, May 10, 2015, accessed May 30, 2015, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/why-the-world-does-not-exist-but-unicorns-do/.