Reposted from: https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/gregory-on-the-envy-and-the-communicability-of-the-divine-good/
Showing posts with label materialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label materialism. Show all posts
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Repost: St. Gregory on Envy and the Communicability of the Divine Good
Saturday, July 18, 2015
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.”
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:
– 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:
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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/.
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/.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Some Inconsistencies of Eliminativist Materialism on Intentionality
[The following is a brief debate between an eliminativist materialist regarding human intentionality and a realist with some follow up comments from others.]
[...] What really happened when you 'read my comment' is some photons from your monitor entered your eyes, stimulated your retina to emit action potentials that entered your brain, causing a cascade of neurological activity that eventually resulted in some neuromotor activity involving your hands and a keyboard. For the sake of brevity let's call this, as well as actual talking, writing, listening etc language related behavior. The fact that you perceive another thing perform a language related behavior does not in and of its self [sic] prove that that other thing is a person or has qualia or intentional stances. You have perceived your own body performing language related behaviors. You have perceived through introspection that your body is animated by a person or a soul or a spirit that has intentionality. You have perceived through introspection that your language related behavior is made possible by your person or soul or spirit. Therefore you infer that other entities that perform language related behaviors have a person or soul or spirit. That inference is only as good as your introspective self-perception of your own person or soul or spirit. So we come back to the question Scott Bakker asked in the Scientia Salon essay. How good is your introspection?
Even if I grant your introspective access to your own person or soul or spirit you don't have introspective access to the person or soul or spirit of any other entity. All you have regarding other entities is the same sensory access you have to any other physical object. That sensory access allows entities to predict and manipulate the actions of other entities. Nobody denies the utility of this folk psychology within the problem ecology of human social interaction. Whether sensory perception of other humans or introspective perception of one's self is useful for determining if human beings are different in kind from insects or rocks or wisps of gas in interstellar space remains to be seen.
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Source: Michael Murden, January 12, 2015 (8:35 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421123719547#c6194622446704249448.
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If the whole argument is going to be based on the claim that intentionality is by nature unperceivable [sic], this needs to be established, not merely stated as if it were obvious; it is not, in fact, obvious, and is actively denied by quite a few positions. The notion that any appeal to intentionality depends entirely on introspection is little more than rhetorical sleight of hand, an attempt to rig the argument without actually putting reasons on the table.
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Source: Brandon, January 12, 2015 (8:53 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421124815511#c9071637458603993425.
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What really happened when you 'read my comment' is some photons from your monitor entered your eyes, stimulated your retina to emit action potentials that entered your brain, causing a cascade of neurological activity that eventually resulted in some neuromotor activity involving your hands and a keyboard.
In other words, what happened is that some things happened that can only possibly be known by deliberately designed experiments whose achievement of their ends could be recognized in experience and used as part of causal reasoning to create theories which could be confirmed about the world.
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Source: Brandon, January 12, 2015 (9:01 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421125304116#c8577801872991552212.
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[...] Have you ever perceived another person's intentionality? Did you perceive it through your physical senses or through some other modality? If so what was that other modality? I granted Scott's ability to perceive his own intentional states, although merely for the sake of argument. I denied his ability to perceive the intentional states of others. Are you claiming to be able to do so? Are you psychic? Can you read minds?
Regarding the 'read my comment' comment if the light were reflected from a sheet of papyrus in Egypt 3000 years ago the argument would be the same. The question of what happened is separate from the question how one determined what happened. The speed of light in a vacuum is independent of the means used to measure it. A scientist conducting neurolinguistics experiments is just an object interacting with other objects. You can't directly perceive his intentions. You can only infer them from his actions, unless you are psychic. And if you have some other method besides introspection for perceiving your own intentionality what is that other method?
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Source: Michael Murden, January 12, 2015 (10:16 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421129811627#c5545533361839985761.
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Have you ever perceived photons, action potentials, neurophysiological cascades, the speed of light in a vacuum? Did you perceive them through your physical senses or some other modality? If so what was that other modality? And why are you repeatedly talking as if Scott said anything about introspective awareness being required?
You seem not to have read my comment very carefully; I didn't say anything about my own views, but pointed out (1) that your assumption is not in fact obvious and (2) that it is quite often actively denied. To take just one example out of a great many, Edith Stein's The Problem of Empathy is a book-long argument that it has to be denied. Thus you cannot reasonably go around pretending that you can get away with just stating it as if it were obvious.
You also seem to have missed the point of my second comment, which is that your claim about 'what really happened' does not in fact address the issue, which is that all these things you are claiming 'really happened' -- that usually means you are claiming that you know they happened, but since you are eliminating intentional language you must mean something else that you failed to state -- need to be reached in an eliminativist way. Most people get to them in an intentionalist way: they take them to be reached by scientific inquiry (both 'scientific' and 'inquiry' are terms appealing to intentionality) using experiments about various things ('experiment' being a term appealing to intentionality) that are deliberately designed ('deliberately' and 'designed' being terms appealing to intentionality) to achieve certain ends of inquiry (which is an appeal to intentionality) so that hypotheses and theories about the world (both 'hypothesis' and 'theory' being terms appealing to intentionality) which can be confirmed or disconfirmed (confirmation and disconfirmation are both forms of reasoning about how theories relate to what they are about, and therefore are appeals to intentionality) by reasoning about the possible causes of experimental effects ('reasoning about' being a phrase appealing to intentionality).
In short, your position commits you to the claim that what everyone calls science, including its complex of intentionality terms -- experiment, theory, hypothesis, confirmation, disconfirmation, prediction, correctness, model, etc. -- is not anything that really exists. So merely talking about neurons, photons, the speed of light in a vacuum, gets you nowhere, since these terms usually are regarded as meaningful and worth using only because everyone else subscribes to intentionalism with respect to scientific inquiry, which the eliminativist is committed to rejecting.
Thus despite your attempt to smear my pro-science view with the term 'psychic', you are the one actually appealing to clairvoyance: things happen in the world, which you can't actually claim to know anything about (because 'knowledge' is an intentional term) and this causes things to happen, which you treat as happening in your brain, that you don't actually know anything about, and your reason for holding this is not scientific (since 'scientific' is an intentional term) but just because things are happening that you don't know anything about and cannot give any reasons for. Unless, of course, you have an eliminativist account of what's really going on in the specific scientific experimentation that establishes all of these scientific concepts you are using, one that does not involve any of the intentionality that permeates how everyone else understands it?
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Source: Brandon, January 12, 2015 (10:49 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421131799898#c536722236875251083.
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(1) The EMists position themselves as cutting-edge pro-science. But, paradoxically, actual scientific practices, and anything that gives us reason to scientific theories as reasons for anything (much less EM itself), vanishes completely. Almost everyone, including scientists doing science, interpret scientific practice in terms of intentionality. In the 1990s there was a vehement series of quarrels in philosophy of science that often get described as the Science Wars, between scientific realists and postmodernists. The latter got labeled as an anti-science view. But the postmodernists were doing with science exactly what the EMists think should be done with it: they eliminated all the intentionality-laden terms scientists like to use for what they are doing (truth, consistency, prediction), or else deflated them in various ways, and just talked about patterns of cause and effect. Even some of the justifications for doing this are exactly the same.
(2) The EMists position themselves as pricking any idea that human beings are special. But because they tend to present themselves as seeing through the human illusion, they repeatedly fall into the trap of talking as if they had an immediate God's-eye view of what the universe must be independently of any human perspective. This was part of what I was pointing out with my comments to Michael Murden, whose account kept appealing to what was 'really happening' in terms that are usually only regarded as having any value for describing what is 'really happening' on the bases of reasoning explicitly involving intentionality. (Certainly prediction and confirmation are both always understood to be reasoning appealing to intentionality.) This wouldn't be a problem if they could give a non-intentionality account of how the science works, but they have no model for doing so. Without such a model, they could only know their position is right by a sort of clairvoyance. They see themselves as giving an account of 'what really happens', but cut out any obvious way by which they could actually know 'what really happens'.
(3) This leads to the weird situation that they tend to justify their position on grounds that on their own view they apparently can't treat as justifying anything. And this is where the 'tu quoque' issue that these EMists, at least, seem obsessed with, arises -- of course, people are not, in fact, engaging in tu quoque but either (a) pointing out that EMists haven't given something that they need to give or (b) raising worries about epistemic self-defeat that need to be addressed. Either of these, of course, can only be handled by giving an eliminativist account of the grounds for thinking that eliminativism is true -- which they keep trying not to have to give.
(4) And we see in the comment noted by Jeremy Taylor that at least some of them explicitly formulate their position in terms that eliminates any possibility of taking their position to be true, coherent, or reasonable; and yet they still keep trying to claim that everyone else is engaging in logical fallacies, is saying something false, or does not have reasons for their view.
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Source: Brandon, January 14, 2015 (3:07 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421276831305#c5948348892429904358.
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EM (or [Paul] Churchland at least) acknowledges that truth will have to be dispensed with. There must be a successor concept to truth, one that doesn't presuppose intentionality. But until that successor notion is given, what exactly is EM trying to accomplish? Its proponents know that they can't say, "EM is true." So what on earth do they want to say about their theory? If EM has an acknowledged reliance on a replacement of truth, which has not yet been given, how can I hope to make sense of it? I will grant that, if you give me the new concept, I'll attend to it and see if it is adequate. But until then, what do you want me to do? Why are we having this conversation? We can acknowledge together that we aren't so naive as to say that the goal is that I "believe" EM.
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Source: Greg, January 16, 2015 (7:42 a.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421422972531#c2593694274113175137.
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It's as thought one of the easiest arguments against EM is trying to believe it. Because then you realize that you can't believe it and aren't supposed to. So then you look for the alternative: Maybe it's true, even though I can't believe it. But that's not right either, since we need to replace truth. So then we hope: EM is ______ even though it's not true. But what is ______? It's some "nice" relation that holds between EM qua theory and reality. But can it even be a relation, or are relations intentional?
This might be why EM rhetoric relies so much on science posturing and charges of illusion and question begging. It can't be said "This theory is true" or "These true statements provide evidence for this theory". So rather one 'argues' for EM indirectly, without enjoining people to 'belief'. But I can't understand how I could ever "accept" EM. Here is Bakker:
I think this is the most important topic of our day, and not only that, I out and out hate the consequences of my own view!
What are the consequences of EM? There can't be consequences of EM being true. If there are consequences, they are consequences of EM being ______ (to be filled in with truth's successor concept). So without that successor concept we don't even know what the relation is between EM and reality; there are no consequences of which we are aware.
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Source: Greg, January 16, 2015 (8:08 a.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421424511307#c4999321254701894055.
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[...] EM will also have to give an account of just how, if EM is true, "terms" can have "senses" at all.
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Source: Scott, January 16, 2015 (8:28 a.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421425708238#c4000786231632866561.
[...] What really happened when you 'read my comment' is some photons from your monitor entered your eyes, stimulated your retina to emit action potentials that entered your brain, causing a cascade of neurological activity that eventually resulted in some neuromotor activity involving your hands and a keyboard. For the sake of brevity let's call this, as well as actual talking, writing, listening etc language related behavior. The fact that you perceive another thing perform a language related behavior does not in and of its self [sic] prove that that other thing is a person or has qualia or intentional stances. You have perceived your own body performing language related behaviors. You have perceived through introspection that your body is animated by a person or a soul or a spirit that has intentionality. You have perceived through introspection that your language related behavior is made possible by your person or soul or spirit. Therefore you infer that other entities that perform language related behaviors have a person or soul or spirit. That inference is only as good as your introspective self-perception of your own person or soul or spirit. So we come back to the question Scott Bakker asked in the Scientia Salon essay. How good is your introspection?
Even if I grant your introspective access to your own person or soul or spirit you don't have introspective access to the person or soul or spirit of any other entity. All you have regarding other entities is the same sensory access you have to any other physical object. That sensory access allows entities to predict and manipulate the actions of other entities. Nobody denies the utility of this folk psychology within the problem ecology of human social interaction. Whether sensory perception of other humans or introspective perception of one's self is useful for determining if human beings are different in kind from insects or rocks or wisps of gas in interstellar space remains to be seen.
---
Source: Michael Murden, January 12, 2015 (8:35 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421123719547#c6194622446704249448.
---
If the whole argument is going to be based on the claim that intentionality is by nature unperceivable [sic], this needs to be established, not merely stated as if it were obvious; it is not, in fact, obvious, and is actively denied by quite a few positions. The notion that any appeal to intentionality depends entirely on introspection is little more than rhetorical sleight of hand, an attempt to rig the argument without actually putting reasons on the table.
---
Source: Brandon, January 12, 2015 (8:53 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421124815511#c9071637458603993425.
---
What really happened when you 'read my comment' is some photons from your monitor entered your eyes, stimulated your retina to emit action potentials that entered your brain, causing a cascade of neurological activity that eventually resulted in some neuromotor activity involving your hands and a keyboard.
In other words, what happened is that some things happened that can only possibly be known by deliberately designed experiments whose achievement of their ends could be recognized in experience and used as part of causal reasoning to create theories which could be confirmed about the world.
---
Source: Brandon, January 12, 2015 (9:01 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421125304116#c8577801872991552212.
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[...] Have you ever perceived another person's intentionality? Did you perceive it through your physical senses or through some other modality? If so what was that other modality? I granted Scott's ability to perceive his own intentional states, although merely for the sake of argument. I denied his ability to perceive the intentional states of others. Are you claiming to be able to do so? Are you psychic? Can you read minds?
Regarding the 'read my comment' comment if the light were reflected from a sheet of papyrus in Egypt 3000 years ago the argument would be the same. The question of what happened is separate from the question how one determined what happened. The speed of light in a vacuum is independent of the means used to measure it. A scientist conducting neurolinguistics experiments is just an object interacting with other objects. You can't directly perceive his intentions. You can only infer them from his actions, unless you are psychic. And if you have some other method besides introspection for perceiving your own intentionality what is that other method?
---
Source: Michael Murden, January 12, 2015 (10:16 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421129811627#c5545533361839985761.
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Have you ever perceived photons, action potentials, neurophysiological cascades, the speed of light in a vacuum? Did you perceive them through your physical senses or some other modality? If so what was that other modality? And why are you repeatedly talking as if Scott said anything about introspective awareness being required?
You seem not to have read my comment very carefully; I didn't say anything about my own views, but pointed out (1) that your assumption is not in fact obvious and (2) that it is quite often actively denied. To take just one example out of a great many, Edith Stein's The Problem of Empathy is a book-long argument that it has to be denied. Thus you cannot reasonably go around pretending that you can get away with just stating it as if it were obvious.
You also seem to have missed the point of my second comment, which is that your claim about 'what really happened' does not in fact address the issue, which is that all these things you are claiming 'really happened' -- that usually means you are claiming that you know they happened, but since you are eliminating intentional language you must mean something else that you failed to state -- need to be reached in an eliminativist way. Most people get to them in an intentionalist way: they take them to be reached by scientific inquiry (both 'scientific' and 'inquiry' are terms appealing to intentionality) using experiments about various things ('experiment' being a term appealing to intentionality) that are deliberately designed ('deliberately' and 'designed' being terms appealing to intentionality) to achieve certain ends of inquiry (which is an appeal to intentionality) so that hypotheses and theories about the world (both 'hypothesis' and 'theory' being terms appealing to intentionality) which can be confirmed or disconfirmed (confirmation and disconfirmation are both forms of reasoning about how theories relate to what they are about, and therefore are appeals to intentionality) by reasoning about the possible causes of experimental effects ('reasoning about' being a phrase appealing to intentionality).
In short, your position commits you to the claim that what everyone calls science, including its complex of intentionality terms -- experiment, theory, hypothesis, confirmation, disconfirmation, prediction, correctness, model, etc. -- is not anything that really exists. So merely talking about neurons, photons, the speed of light in a vacuum, gets you nowhere, since these terms usually are regarded as meaningful and worth using only because everyone else subscribes to intentionalism with respect to scientific inquiry, which the eliminativist is committed to rejecting.
Thus despite your attempt to smear my pro-science view with the term 'psychic', you are the one actually appealing to clairvoyance: things happen in the world, which you can't actually claim to know anything about (because 'knowledge' is an intentional term) and this causes things to happen, which you treat as happening in your brain, that you don't actually know anything about, and your reason for holding this is not scientific (since 'scientific' is an intentional term) but just because things are happening that you don't know anything about and cannot give any reasons for. Unless, of course, you have an eliminativist account of what's really going on in the specific scientific experimentation that establishes all of these scientific concepts you are using, one that does not involve any of the intentionality that permeates how everyone else understands it?
---
Source: Brandon, January 12, 2015 (10:49 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421131799898#c536722236875251083.
---
(1) The EMists position themselves as cutting-edge pro-science. But, paradoxically, actual scientific practices, and anything that gives us reason to scientific theories as reasons for anything (much less EM itself), vanishes completely. Almost everyone, including scientists doing science, interpret scientific practice in terms of intentionality. In the 1990s there was a vehement series of quarrels in philosophy of science that often get described as the Science Wars, between scientific realists and postmodernists. The latter got labeled as an anti-science view. But the postmodernists were doing with science exactly what the EMists think should be done with it: they eliminated all the intentionality-laden terms scientists like to use for what they are doing (truth, consistency, prediction), or else deflated them in various ways, and just talked about patterns of cause and effect. Even some of the justifications for doing this are exactly the same.
(2) The EMists position themselves as pricking any idea that human beings are special. But because they tend to present themselves as seeing through the human illusion, they repeatedly fall into the trap of talking as if they had an immediate God's-eye view of what the universe must be independently of any human perspective. This was part of what I was pointing out with my comments to Michael Murden, whose account kept appealing to what was 'really happening' in terms that are usually only regarded as having any value for describing what is 'really happening' on the bases of reasoning explicitly involving intentionality. (Certainly prediction and confirmation are both always understood to be reasoning appealing to intentionality.) This wouldn't be a problem if they could give a non-intentionality account of how the science works, but they have no model for doing so. Without such a model, they could only know their position is right by a sort of clairvoyance. They see themselves as giving an account of 'what really happens', but cut out any obvious way by which they could actually know 'what really happens'.
(3) This leads to the weird situation that they tend to justify their position on grounds that on their own view they apparently can't treat as justifying anything. And this is where the 'tu quoque' issue that these EMists, at least, seem obsessed with, arises -- of course, people are not, in fact, engaging in tu quoque but either (a) pointing out that EMists haven't given something that they need to give or (b) raising worries about epistemic self-defeat that need to be addressed. Either of these, of course, can only be handled by giving an eliminativist account of the grounds for thinking that eliminativism is true -- which they keep trying not to have to give.
(4) And we see in the comment noted by Jeremy Taylor that at least some of them explicitly formulate their position in terms that eliminates any possibility of taking their position to be true, coherent, or reasonable; and yet they still keep trying to claim that everyone else is engaging in logical fallacies, is saying something false, or does not have reasons for their view.
---
Source: Brandon, January 14, 2015 (3:07 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421276831305#c5948348892429904358.
---
EM (or [Paul] Churchland at least) acknowledges that truth will have to be dispensed with. There must be a successor concept to truth, one that doesn't presuppose intentionality. But until that successor notion is given, what exactly is EM trying to accomplish? Its proponents know that they can't say, "EM is true." So what on earth do they want to say about their theory? If EM has an acknowledged reliance on a replacement of truth, which has not yet been given, how can I hope to make sense of it? I will grant that, if you give me the new concept, I'll attend to it and see if it is adequate. But until then, what do you want me to do? Why are we having this conversation? We can acknowledge together that we aren't so naive as to say that the goal is that I "believe" EM.
---
Source: Greg, January 16, 2015 (7:42 a.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421422972531#c2593694274113175137.
---
It's as thought one of the easiest arguments against EM is trying to believe it. Because then you realize that you can't believe it and aren't supposed to. So then you look for the alternative: Maybe it's true, even though I can't believe it. But that's not right either, since we need to replace truth. So then we hope: EM is ______ even though it's not true. But what is ______? It's some "nice" relation that holds between EM qua theory and reality. But can it even be a relation, or are relations intentional?
This might be why EM rhetoric relies so much on science posturing and charges of illusion and question begging. It can't be said "This theory is true" or "These true statements provide evidence for this theory". So rather one 'argues' for EM indirectly, without enjoining people to 'belief'. But I can't understand how I could ever "accept" EM. Here is Bakker:
I think this is the most important topic of our day, and not only that, I out and out hate the consequences of my own view!
What are the consequences of EM? There can't be consequences of EM being true. If there are consequences, they are consequences of EM being ______ (to be filled in with truth's successor concept). So without that successor concept we don't even know what the relation is between EM and reality; there are no consequences of which we are aware.
---
Source: Greg, January 16, 2015 (8:08 a.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421424511307#c4999321254701894055.
---
[...] EM will also have to give an account of just how, if EM is true, "terms" can have "senses" at all.
---
Source: Scott, January 16, 2015 (8:28 a.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421425708238#c4000786231632866561.
Incoherence Objection against Eliminative Materialist Theories vis-a-vis Intentionality
Here’s one way to summarize the objection:
1. Eliminativists state their position using expressions like “truth,” “falsehood,” “theory,” “illusion,” etc.
2. They can do so coherently only if either (a) they accept that intentionality is real, or (b) they provide some alternative, thoroughly non-intentional way of construing such expressions.
3. But eliminativists reject the claim that intentionality is real, so option (a) is out.
4. And they have not provided any alternative, thoroughly non-intentional way of construing such expressions, so they have not (successfully) taken option (b).
5. So eliminativists have not shown how their position is coherent.
Now, exactly how does this argument beg the question? Which of the premises presupposes that intentionality (of any sort) is real? In fact the argument not only does not presuppose this, but it leaves open, for the sake of argument, the possibility that the eliminativist may find some consistently non-intentional way to state his position. It merely points out that eliminativists have not actually succeeded in providing one. The only way to rebut this argument, as I have said, is actually to provide such an account.
Of course, I also think that the eliminativist in fact cannot in principle provide such an account. But that judgment is not itself a premise in the argument, and someone could in principle accept the argument (i.e. steps 1 - 5) even if he disagreed with me that the eliminativist cannot in principle make his position coherent. So, again, there is no begging of the question.
I also fail to see how it is relevant that philosophers who affirm intentionality disagree over how to flesh out an account of human nature that affirms intentionality. (And the number of such accounts is nowhere remotely close to “thousands -- or even “hundreds” or indeed even “dozens” -- but let that pass.) What does that have to do with the question of whether eliminativism is coherent? All the eliminativist has to do is provide a way of stating his position without explicitly or implicitly using any intentional notions. Whether failed attempts to do so (like Churchland’s and Rosenberg’s) end up surreptitiously appealing to this specific form of intentional psychology or instead to that specific form is hardly to the point. What is to the point is that they end up surreptitiously appealing to some form or other of intentionality. The trick is to avoid appealing to any of them, and no one has pulled the trick off.
Source: Edward Feser, January 13, 2015 (5:16 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421198176883#c7873339741497488449.
1. Eliminativists state their position using expressions like “truth,” “falsehood,” “theory,” “illusion,” etc.
2. They can do so coherently only if either (a) they accept that intentionality is real, or (b) they provide some alternative, thoroughly non-intentional way of construing such expressions.
3. But eliminativists reject the claim that intentionality is real, so option (a) is out.
4. And they have not provided any alternative, thoroughly non-intentional way of construing such expressions, so they have not (successfully) taken option (b).
5. So eliminativists have not shown how their position is coherent.
Now, exactly how does this argument beg the question? Which of the premises presupposes that intentionality (of any sort) is real? In fact the argument not only does not presuppose this, but it leaves open, for the sake of argument, the possibility that the eliminativist may find some consistently non-intentional way to state his position. It merely points out that eliminativists have not actually succeeded in providing one. The only way to rebut this argument, as I have said, is actually to provide such an account.
Of course, I also think that the eliminativist in fact cannot in principle provide such an account. But that judgment is not itself a premise in the argument, and someone could in principle accept the argument (i.e. steps 1 - 5) even if he disagreed with me that the eliminativist cannot in principle make his position coherent. So, again, there is no begging of the question.
I also fail to see how it is relevant that philosophers who affirm intentionality disagree over how to flesh out an account of human nature that affirms intentionality. (And the number of such accounts is nowhere remotely close to “thousands -- or even “hundreds” or indeed even “dozens” -- but let that pass.) What does that have to do with the question of whether eliminativism is coherent? All the eliminativist has to do is provide a way of stating his position without explicitly or implicitly using any intentional notions. Whether failed attempts to do so (like Churchland’s and Rosenberg’s) end up surreptitiously appealing to this specific form of intentional psychology or instead to that specific form is hardly to the point. What is to the point is that they end up surreptitiously appealing to some form or other of intentionality. The trick is to avoid appealing to any of them, and no one has pulled the trick off.
---
Source: Edward Feser, January 13, 2015 (5:16 p.m.), comment on Edward Feser, "Post-Intentional Depression," Edward Feser blog, January 11, 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421198176883#c7873339741497488449.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Repost: D. Stephen Long, "The Theological Danger of Church Marketing"
[4] The local church must avoid a marketing strategy that targets the unchurched, because there are no such people as "the unchurched," and to think that there are is to have already committed a serious theological mistake. To use the term unchurched is to subordinate the mission and the witness of the church to the logic of the market.
The "unchurched" is a category invented by sociologists and advertising executives; like other such categories—Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennium Generation, etc.—it seeks to describe in neutral terms broad sociological target audiences in order to convince these target audiences they need certain products. If you are to be a successful Baby Boomer, for example, you need to drive a SUX or a minivan, and [...] use Michelin tires if you love your children. Generation Xers have different needs and wants, and we must understand them. Some drink Coke; some drink the Uncola. Some are churched; some are "unchurched."
The "Unchurched" Error
The term "unchurched" produces a new target audience that will inevitably require a different kind of gospel. We do not call our target audience "sinners," "the unbaptized," "the lost," or even "the world." The "unchurched" lose the theological status of those former categories precisely because, consistent with corporate America, we wouldn't want to offend our target audience. We target the "unchurched" instead and ask them to become "churched." And I fear—not always, but on the whole—we promise this on their own terms, falsely promising self-fulfillment. That is a long way from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's claim "when Christ bids someone, 'Come and follow,' He bids that person 'come and die"" (The Cost of Discipleship [New York: Touchstone, 1995], 89). "Church" itself becomes a consumer item that persons need for their own self-fulfillment. This works against the Christian tradition of conversion and replaces it with manipulative market relations.
So I ask, can the commission, "Go and church the unchurched by developing a market strategy that draws upon the best sociological expertise and uses the market as well as any Fortune 500 company," fulfill or even be consistent with the church's commission, "Go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that Jesus has commanded?"
The Specificity of the Gospel
Now those who argue for a marketing approach that targets the unchurched surely envision their work as being consistent with our Lord's Great Commission. The theological argument that is almost always used to justify this is that we must make the gospel relevant in our context through an incarnational ministry.
But notice what we already have had to do to our theological language to justify this practice. Can the term "incarnation" be used in such a context? The Incarnation is a specific particular event; it is God assuming Jewish flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, who is then crucified and bodily raised from the dead. Any appeal to the incarnation [sic], if it is theologically warranted, must have a direct relationship to the risen body of Christ. But once we justify a marketing strategy, the Incarnation often loses its particular bodily significance and becomes vacuous, meaning something like using the best available technological means to present some idea of the Gospel. Almost always, virtual reality replaces the material reality of the Incarnation in such justifications.
Another theological argument to justify using a market strategy is that we should use the [5] wisdom of our age to express the Gospel, just as Paul did in his. But can the logic of the market be that wisdom? Before using Paul's "all things to all people," we must ask, "Is the logic of the global market a hindrance or merely neutral to faithful Christian living?" Make no mistake about it, if you say: "yes, we should use a marketing strategy," you are inviting the logic of the Global Market into the sanctuary of the church, and the logic of the market is like a cancer. It grows and it grows, solely for the sake of growth, taking over everything in its midst.
Now, we are not yet at the place of other cultural industries. We don't yet stop in the midst of a service and say, "And before I begin, let me remind you that today's sermon is brought to you by the good people at Starbucks." But we are not that far off. The dangers are more real than many of the church growth experts want to believe.
I am convinced that the logic of the market is a threat to the Church's mission, because growth replaced faith. Growth is important as a secondary concern for the life of the Church. The first concern is faith, because Jesus said to Peter, not multiply my sheep, but "feed them." And He said, "The question when I come back is, will I find faith?" I am convinced the global market is a threat to the church and should be kept out of the sanctuary. Even if some good could come from the influence of the market, we must be scrupulous. [...]
Christianity is a local particular culture with a specific kind of language that has to be passed on from generation to generation. Christianity is a democracy of the dead founded in the communion of saints where no single generation has the right to say, "We have to do it differently, because our context is so new and unique." And I know, as Joseph Schumpeter, has taught us, that the logic of the market is what he called "creative destruction." It seeks to destroy the old, always for the new and improved. The logic of the market claims that it will provide the wealth of nations if we are obedient to it. It replaces Christian eschatology.
So for that reason, even if some good would come from it, the local church must avoid a marketing approach that targets the unchurched.
---
Source: D. Stephen Long, "The Theological Danger of Church Marketing," Discernment (Spring/Summer 2005): 4–5, accessed January 11, 2015, http://brandon.multics.org/library/Stephen%20Long/long2005danger.pdf.
The "unchurched" is a category invented by sociologists and advertising executives; like other such categories—Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennium Generation, etc.—it seeks to describe in neutral terms broad sociological target audiences in order to convince these target audiences they need certain products. If you are to be a successful Baby Boomer, for example, you need to drive a SUX or a minivan, and [...] use Michelin tires if you love your children. Generation Xers have different needs and wants, and we must understand them. Some drink Coke; some drink the Uncola. Some are churched; some are "unchurched."
The "Unchurched" Error
The term "unchurched" produces a new target audience that will inevitably require a different kind of gospel. We do not call our target audience "sinners," "the unbaptized," "the lost," or even "the world." The "unchurched" lose the theological status of those former categories precisely because, consistent with corporate America, we wouldn't want to offend our target audience. We target the "unchurched" instead and ask them to become "churched." And I fear—not always, but on the whole—we promise this on their own terms, falsely promising self-fulfillment. That is a long way from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's claim "when Christ bids someone, 'Come and follow,' He bids that person 'come and die"" (The Cost of Discipleship [New York: Touchstone, 1995], 89). "Church" itself becomes a consumer item that persons need for their own self-fulfillment. This works against the Christian tradition of conversion and replaces it with manipulative market relations.
So I ask, can the commission, "Go and church the unchurched by developing a market strategy that draws upon the best sociological expertise and uses the market as well as any Fortune 500 company," fulfill or even be consistent with the church's commission, "Go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that Jesus has commanded?"
The Specificity of the Gospel
Now those who argue for a marketing approach that targets the unchurched surely envision their work as being consistent with our Lord's Great Commission. The theological argument that is almost always used to justify this is that we must make the gospel relevant in our context through an incarnational ministry.
But notice what we already have had to do to our theological language to justify this practice. Can the term "incarnation" be used in such a context? The Incarnation is a specific particular event; it is God assuming Jewish flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, who is then crucified and bodily raised from the dead. Any appeal to the incarnation [sic], if it is theologically warranted, must have a direct relationship to the risen body of Christ. But once we justify a marketing strategy, the Incarnation often loses its particular bodily significance and becomes vacuous, meaning something like using the best available technological means to present some idea of the Gospel. Almost always, virtual reality replaces the material reality of the Incarnation in such justifications.
Another theological argument to justify using a market strategy is that we should use the [5] wisdom of our age to express the Gospel, just as Paul did in his. But can the logic of the market be that wisdom? Before using Paul's "all things to all people," we must ask, "Is the logic of the global market a hindrance or merely neutral to faithful Christian living?" Make no mistake about it, if you say: "yes, we should use a marketing strategy," you are inviting the logic of the Global Market into the sanctuary of the church, and the logic of the market is like a cancer. It grows and it grows, solely for the sake of growth, taking over everything in its midst.
Now, we are not yet at the place of other cultural industries. We don't yet stop in the midst of a service and say, "And before I begin, let me remind you that today's sermon is brought to you by the good people at Starbucks." But we are not that far off. The dangers are more real than many of the church growth experts want to believe.
I am convinced that the logic of the market is a threat to the Church's mission, because growth replaced faith. Growth is important as a secondary concern for the life of the Church. The first concern is faith, because Jesus said to Peter, not multiply my sheep, but "feed them." And He said, "The question when I come back is, will I find faith?" I am convinced the global market is a threat to the church and should be kept out of the sanctuary. Even if some good could come from the influence of the market, we must be scrupulous. [...]
Christianity is a local particular culture with a specific kind of language that has to be passed on from generation to generation. Christianity is a democracy of the dead founded in the communion of saints where no single generation has the right to say, "We have to do it differently, because our context is so new and unique." And I know, as Joseph Schumpeter, has taught us, that the logic of the market is what he called "creative destruction." It seeks to destroy the old, always for the new and improved. The logic of the market claims that it will provide the wealth of nations if we are obedient to it. It replaces Christian eschatology.
So for that reason, even if some good would come from it, the local church must avoid a marketing approach that targets the unchurched.
---
Source: D. Stephen Long, "The Theological Danger of Church Marketing," Discernment (Spring/Summer 2005): 4–5, accessed January 11, 2015, http://brandon.multics.org/library/Stephen%20Long/long2005danger.pdf.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Repost: "Titanism 101"
The titanic orientation of our contemporary humanity is a theme continually referred to and explained by Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg. It might be useful to readers to have their vision applied in simple form to a few concrete aspects of our modern world.
According to one interpretation, the etymology of the ancient Greek word "titan" expresses the notion of an "over-stretcher" or over-extender. This expresses the titans' lack of a sense of measure when it comes to expressing power. Put in Nietzsche's terms, titans are motivated by a blind and insatiable will to power: always more to the point of extreme, without a conception of balance, of a point of sufficiency or equilibrium that can be reached and then maintained over time. The gods, who the titans periodically overthrow and briefly manage to keep out of the picture, represent this sense of balance and equilibrium.
It is already clear from this description how civilization in the last couple of centuries has become ever more titanic, beginning in the west but now reaching global extension. According to Jünger, our period is the next return of the titans after that of Imperial Rome. I believe we are slowly starting to understand the dangers of titanic arrogance in man and, at least theoretically and in restricted circles, contemplating a retreat from its unsustainable, inescapably catastrophic approach to existence and also the manner in which the next phase may emerge, a return of order-restoring "gods".
Here then are some superficially explained examples of titanism as it presently manifests.
Economic growth, environmental rape, unhappiness
Along with the intrinsically connected theme of the environment, the stagnant economy is the crisis of the day in the US and Europe, that is, in the titanic avant-garde of our world. It has long been taken for granted that nothing is more important to human welfare than continuous, unlimited economic growth, that higher GNPs and incomes are the critical measures of a country's all-significant entry into modern times and indeed measures of its citizen's physical wellbeing and even happiness. Given this assumption, there is no limit to the level of wealth to be achieved - this is most apparent in the richest western countries where a higher level of material comfort can hardly be imagined, yet growth is still the obsession. Indeed, a vicious circle of ever-intensifying, futile effort is created in this cul-de-sac: as the elusive happiness promised by politicians and scientists remains always around the next corner, behind the next technological improvement or economic upswing, we grow more and more desperate and run even faster down this alley, at whose end not salvation but spiritual and environmental catastrophe await us.
At some point, we titanic westerners also seek patronizingly to aid the "underdeveloped" world with our superior knowledge, though the process actually resembles more an infection of the innocent with our poison, with the seeds of discontent. If such initiatives seem (naively) well-meaning, at a deeper level they function for us as a necessary distraction from our spiritual desperation at the dilemma of "where to go now, now that we have everything and are more miserable than ever."
It may seem that there is no more to criticize in these material ambitions than their futility in providing happiness - given a basic level of comfort and sustenance, happiness is only ever a product of inner harmony and meaning, and not physical luxury. But in fact they bring serious material dangers with them, since economic growth at all costs entails a constantly increasing consumption of energy and natural resources (see F.G. Jünger's The Failure of Technology), to the point of environmental bankruptcy and nest-spoiling. Enter our environmental crisis, nothing more than the inevitable consequence of titanic over-extension and lack of measure. The tragedy here is that titans - we - do not learn through experience, we simply become its victims: we only stop when self-provoked catastrophe stops us dead in our tracks. From Ernst Jünger´s Aladdin's Problem: "We will either be saved by the poet or by fire".
But even the worst imaginable environmental catastrophe would not be the most tragic result of our titanic pretensions: the real tragedy is that they distract us from the spiritual efforts to be made in our personal lives and therefore lead to increasing inner poverty, personal meaninglessness and unhappiness. We put all our hopes in a material salvation and forget the fundamentally spiritual, internal basis of all deeper fulfillment. Indeed, those on the cutting edge of titanism, our wealthy western countries, are undoubtedly not the richest in happiness, and they are almost certainly the most spiritually bankrupt. Aladdin's Problem, "Soon there will be nothing left but the sound of Sheol".
Science
From being a source of spiritually meaningful knowledge in ancient times, science has been degraded by our titanic culture into a mere tool for driving economic growth and invention for its own sake, that is to say, science has been degraded into technology and an insatiable amassing of knowledge. Most scientists would be surprised to hear of times when science sought an absolute knowledge that had spiritual meaning for people, that aided them to achieve inner happiness and not merely physical comfort.
For today's titanic science is interested in knowledge only to the degree that it increases worldly or material power, or, when that is not applicable, as in astronomy for example, that is provides egotistical self-gratification, material to lord it over other titans involved in the same race to nowhere - by the very nature, Titans are competitive. (A low level expression of this is the curious pride the man on the street feels in his knowledge of trivia, which is absolutely useless in every sense except as a potential competitive measure: "I know more than you" - however useless such unintegrated abstract knowledge is.)
This titanic faith in technological science as a cure-all whose saving power always lies tantalizingly around the next corner, with the next technical innovation, is not just arrogant or naive, it can also be deadly; for invention per se has no preference for good or evil ends, and, in an age of spiritual decline, the latter may even emerge more readily than the former. Moreover, when the accidents inevitably happen, they take on technically-empowered proportions: the sinking of the Titanic was an early sign, one with unique symbolic value, but many others have since taken place, including for instance the technical ability of the Nazis to kill and dispose of human beings so efficiently. In this respect, we can only thank our lucky stars that the atomic machinery has never really gotten out of our control.
Art and Culture
As F.G. Jünger points out in The Failure of Technology, titans are incapable of art since they lack its basic prerequisites, a sense of measure. In fact, contemporary art limits itself, with rare exceptions, to pure innovation, novelty, and more often than not has a quite abhorrent effect by its disproportions. Like everything titanic, it aims at a dynamic effect, to be didactic or pornographic, to attract or repel - it has no understanding of the stasis that true art evokes (a la Stendhal effect).
If it has a genuine purpose in the greater process, which surely it does, then for the moment at least, it must be that of the compost heap on which the old used-up forms of old are decomposed and from whose rich substrate new forms can one day sprout. But let us be objective about which stage we are at now - when the new forms emerge, it will already signal the end of the titanic period.
As Ernst Jünger points out in Aladddin's [sic] Problem, human culture as such cannot be developed in a titanic society, since culture is based on our treatment of the dead and titans are patently not interested in the dead or anything that has to do with the past and with tradition - they only want to express power and that implies a break with static models of the past; they live with an existential centre of gravity in becoming and not being. The continuity and being-beyond-time implied by remembrance of the past, by graves and cults of the dead is of no interest or meaning to them.
In this same book, Ernst Jünger speculates that the emergence of a new cult of the dead will be a sign that culture can take root again - and we add that this will necessarily also mark the death throes of our present titanic phase.
"Extremism"
In the essay "Mut und Übermut" from Das Abenteuerliche Herz (2nd Edition), Ernst Jünger speaks of having lost his taste for certain words combined with the prefix "super" (über). As he explains, this prefix has a strong connotation of will power, a belief that the supreme achievement comes from the most intense application of will, and not wisdom - that is, as a result of titanic effort.
(Aside: the fate of the Superman actor Christopher Reeve may be another foolishly clear sign from Cassandra of the destiny of titanic mankind, similar to that other prophecy of hers which Jünger regularly mentions, the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic.)
The trend towards the superlative, in words and actions, has only progressed since that essay was written - today I would suggest that the equivalent word, the appropriate one for the next stage in the pursuit of more, is the adjective "extreme". "Super" has lost its power and now we are forced to use the next and last possibility, the extreme. Thus, in the media, in the lifestyles and productions of the west, we see this word appearing everywhere: extreme sports, extreme sex, extreme nutrition, extreme technology, extreme performance, my toothpaste is even called "extreme mint"!
A seemingly trivial social development that is in fact a frightening omen for our titanic civilization - because the extreme of any linear development (i.e one that does not follow or believe in cyclical patterns) must represent the last stage. There is nowhere to go after this word appears, there can be nothing beyond the extreme, except a precipitous plummet from the cliff we have so fanatically scaled.
Salvation?
This end must logically come, to some unknown degree catastrophically, even if in reality the meta-historical processes involved are not linear but cyclical, so that "the end" is actually only the low point that marks the beginning of a new cycle. Our titanic will power is such that it will drive us to that end without slowing down, and it will thus be more or less disastrous in a material sense. If this much is clear, then the only real task we have today is not to attempt a redemption of the material state of affairs, whose fate is essentially sealed, but rather to prepare spiritually for a passage through the curtains of fire and for the new world that must born on the far side.
In this respect, it may be we in the west who have the main role, for he who leads the way into the pit or cul-de-sac of material power will also be the one who first realizes its futility and so finds the way out.
Ernst Jünger often said that although he might be a pessimist in the short term, "ultimately" he was an optimist. The gods always return - at some point. He ascribed the 21st century to the titans, the 22nd to the gods - for myself, I am not sure that things can last that long.
According to one interpretation, the etymology of the ancient Greek word "titan" expresses the notion of an "over-stretcher" or over-extender. This expresses the titans' lack of a sense of measure when it comes to expressing power. Put in Nietzsche's terms, titans are motivated by a blind and insatiable will to power: always more to the point of extreme, without a conception of balance, of a point of sufficiency or equilibrium that can be reached and then maintained over time. The gods, who the titans periodically overthrow and briefly manage to keep out of the picture, represent this sense of balance and equilibrium.
It is already clear from this description how civilization in the last couple of centuries has become ever more titanic, beginning in the west but now reaching global extension. According to Jünger, our period is the next return of the titans after that of Imperial Rome. I believe we are slowly starting to understand the dangers of titanic arrogance in man and, at least theoretically and in restricted circles, contemplating a retreat from its unsustainable, inescapably catastrophic approach to existence and also the manner in which the next phase may emerge, a return of order-restoring "gods".
Here then are some superficially explained examples of titanism as it presently manifests.
Economic growth, environmental rape, unhappiness
Along with the intrinsically connected theme of the environment, the stagnant economy is the crisis of the day in the US and Europe, that is, in the titanic avant-garde of our world. It has long been taken for granted that nothing is more important to human welfare than continuous, unlimited economic growth, that higher GNPs and incomes are the critical measures of a country's all-significant entry into modern times and indeed measures of its citizen's physical wellbeing and even happiness. Given this assumption, there is no limit to the level of wealth to be achieved - this is most apparent in the richest western countries where a higher level of material comfort can hardly be imagined, yet growth is still the obsession. Indeed, a vicious circle of ever-intensifying, futile effort is created in this cul-de-sac: as the elusive happiness promised by politicians and scientists remains always around the next corner, behind the next technological improvement or economic upswing, we grow more and more desperate and run even faster down this alley, at whose end not salvation but spiritual and environmental catastrophe await us.
At some point, we titanic westerners also seek patronizingly to aid the "underdeveloped" world with our superior knowledge, though the process actually resembles more an infection of the innocent with our poison, with the seeds of discontent. If such initiatives seem (naively) well-meaning, at a deeper level they function for us as a necessary distraction from our spiritual desperation at the dilemma of "where to go now, now that we have everything and are more miserable than ever."
It may seem that there is no more to criticize in these material ambitions than their futility in providing happiness - given a basic level of comfort and sustenance, happiness is only ever a product of inner harmony and meaning, and not physical luxury. But in fact they bring serious material dangers with them, since economic growth at all costs entails a constantly increasing consumption of energy and natural resources (see F.G. Jünger's The Failure of Technology), to the point of environmental bankruptcy and nest-spoiling. Enter our environmental crisis, nothing more than the inevitable consequence of titanic over-extension and lack of measure. The tragedy here is that titans - we - do not learn through experience, we simply become its victims: we only stop when self-provoked catastrophe stops us dead in our tracks. From Ernst Jünger´s Aladdin's Problem: "We will either be saved by the poet or by fire".
But even the worst imaginable environmental catastrophe would not be the most tragic result of our titanic pretensions: the real tragedy is that they distract us from the spiritual efforts to be made in our personal lives and therefore lead to increasing inner poverty, personal meaninglessness and unhappiness. We put all our hopes in a material salvation and forget the fundamentally spiritual, internal basis of all deeper fulfillment. Indeed, those on the cutting edge of titanism, our wealthy western countries, are undoubtedly not the richest in happiness, and they are almost certainly the most spiritually bankrupt. Aladdin's Problem, "Soon there will be nothing left but the sound of Sheol".
Science
From being a source of spiritually meaningful knowledge in ancient times, science has been degraded by our titanic culture into a mere tool for driving economic growth and invention for its own sake, that is to say, science has been degraded into technology and an insatiable amassing of knowledge. Most scientists would be surprised to hear of times when science sought an absolute knowledge that had spiritual meaning for people, that aided them to achieve inner happiness and not merely physical comfort.
For today's titanic science is interested in knowledge only to the degree that it increases worldly or material power, or, when that is not applicable, as in astronomy for example, that is provides egotistical self-gratification, material to lord it over other titans involved in the same race to nowhere - by the very nature, Titans are competitive. (A low level expression of this is the curious pride the man on the street feels in his knowledge of trivia, which is absolutely useless in every sense except as a potential competitive measure: "I know more than you" - however useless such unintegrated abstract knowledge is.)
This titanic faith in technological science as a cure-all whose saving power always lies tantalizingly around the next corner, with the next technical innovation, is not just arrogant or naive, it can also be deadly; for invention per se has no preference for good or evil ends, and, in an age of spiritual decline, the latter may even emerge more readily than the former. Moreover, when the accidents inevitably happen, they take on technically-empowered proportions: the sinking of the Titanic was an early sign, one with unique symbolic value, but many others have since taken place, including for instance the technical ability of the Nazis to kill and dispose of human beings so efficiently. In this respect, we can only thank our lucky stars that the atomic machinery has never really gotten out of our control.
Art and Culture
As F.G. Jünger points out in The Failure of Technology, titans are incapable of art since they lack its basic prerequisites, a sense of measure. In fact, contemporary art limits itself, with rare exceptions, to pure innovation, novelty, and more often than not has a quite abhorrent effect by its disproportions. Like everything titanic, it aims at a dynamic effect, to be didactic or pornographic, to attract or repel - it has no understanding of the stasis that true art evokes (a la Stendhal effect).
If it has a genuine purpose in the greater process, which surely it does, then for the moment at least, it must be that of the compost heap on which the old used-up forms of old are decomposed and from whose rich substrate new forms can one day sprout. But let us be objective about which stage we are at now - when the new forms emerge, it will already signal the end of the titanic period.
As Ernst Jünger points out in Aladddin's [sic] Problem, human culture as such cannot be developed in a titanic society, since culture is based on our treatment of the dead and titans are patently not interested in the dead or anything that has to do with the past and with tradition - they only want to express power and that implies a break with static models of the past; they live with an existential centre of gravity in becoming and not being. The continuity and being-beyond-time implied by remembrance of the past, by graves and cults of the dead is of no interest or meaning to them.
In this same book, Ernst Jünger speculates that the emergence of a new cult of the dead will be a sign that culture can take root again - and we add that this will necessarily also mark the death throes of our present titanic phase.
"Extremism"
In the essay "Mut und Übermut" from Das Abenteuerliche Herz (2nd Edition), Ernst Jünger speaks of having lost his taste for certain words combined with the prefix "super" (über). As he explains, this prefix has a strong connotation of will power, a belief that the supreme achievement comes from the most intense application of will, and not wisdom - that is, as a result of titanic effort.
(Aside: the fate of the Superman actor Christopher Reeve may be another foolishly clear sign from Cassandra of the destiny of titanic mankind, similar to that other prophecy of hers which Jünger regularly mentions, the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic.)
The trend towards the superlative, in words and actions, has only progressed since that essay was written - today I would suggest that the equivalent word, the appropriate one for the next stage in the pursuit of more, is the adjective "extreme". "Super" has lost its power and now we are forced to use the next and last possibility, the extreme. Thus, in the media, in the lifestyles and productions of the west, we see this word appearing everywhere: extreme sports, extreme sex, extreme nutrition, extreme technology, extreme performance, my toothpaste is even called "extreme mint"!
A seemingly trivial social development that is in fact a frightening omen for our titanic civilization - because the extreme of any linear development (i.e one that does not follow or believe in cyclical patterns) must represent the last stage. There is nowhere to go after this word appears, there can be nothing beyond the extreme, except a precipitous plummet from the cliff we have so fanatically scaled.
Salvation?
This end must logically come, to some unknown degree catastrophically, even if in reality the meta-historical processes involved are not linear but cyclical, so that "the end" is actually only the low point that marks the beginning of a new cycle. Our titanic will power is such that it will drive us to that end without slowing down, and it will thus be more or less disastrous in a material sense. If this much is clear, then the only real task we have today is not to attempt a redemption of the material state of affairs, whose fate is essentially sealed, but rather to prepare spiritually for a passage through the curtains of fire and for the new world that must born on the far side.
In this respect, it may be we in the west who have the main role, for he who leads the way into the pit or cul-de-sac of material power will also be the one who first realizes its futility and so finds the way out.
Ernst Jünger often said that although he might be a pessimist in the short term, "ultimately" he was an optimist. The gods always return - at some point. He ascribed the 21st century to the titans, the 22nd to the gods - for myself, I am not sure that things can last that long.
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Source: "Titanism 101," Ernst Jünger Blog, July 21, 2011, http://www.ernst-juenger.org/2011/07/titanism-101-junger-brothers-view-in.html.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Garrigou-Lagrange on Evolution and Inequality in Creatures
This problem of the origin of multitude, discussed by Plato in the dialogue entitled Parmenides, reappears in modern evolution in the following form: How did the distinction of things, mineral, vegetative, animal, and human, arise from the primitive, homogeneous being? How did vegetative life, sensation, and intellection arise? The evolutionists try to conceal the difficulty by saying that the distinction of things appeared only slowly and progressively. But metaphysically speaking it makes little difference whether these distinctions appeared slowly or suddenly, whether they appeared only after a thousand years, or six days, or suddenly. This question of time, as also with regard to creation, is of minor consequence. The important question, abstracting from time, is how a multitude can originate from the primitive unity. This question is similar to that other important question asked in the next article: If God is infinitely good and the cause of all things, what is the cause of evil?
Reply. St. Thomas shows that this problem of the origin of the multitude of things is insoluble without the idea of free creation. His reply is that the distinction of things and multitude are from the intention of the first agent, who is God.
Proof from authority. "In the beginning God created heaven and earth. . . . And He divided the light from the darkness. . . . And God made a firmament, and divided the waters that were under the firmament, from those that were above the firmament." This is a popular expression of the truth, accommodated to the intelligence of the Israelites, who thought of the heavens as a solid firmament. But when it is revealed that the heavens (which you think of as a solid firmament) are created by God, it is not revealed that the heavens are a solid firmament, for in the revealed proposition the verb "is" refers to "created" (the heavens are created) and not to "solid." Hence it may be that some error is mingled in the subject of the proposition without making the proposition erroneous in its formal meaning, that is, with regard to the verb "is" and those things to which "is" refers. On other occasions it is more clearly stated that God created visible and invisible beings and that God "ordered all things in measure and number and weight."
In the body of the article St. Thomas presents and then refutes two theories: the ascending evolution of the materialists and the descending evolution of Avicenna.
The theory of the ancient materialists was that the distinction of things arises by chance according to the movement of matter. This opinion was held by Democritus and later by Epicurus. Modern materialists with their theory of evolution were unable to add anything to this ancient theory; they were unable to explain how the first nebulae, the incandescendent stars, the habitable earth could come from primitive homogeneous matter except by chance or by the activity of some unknown forces, and the appearance of vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual life remained for them an insoluble enigma. They would be forced to admit that more proceeds from less and that the perfect proceeds from the imperfect, and they find themselves at a loss how to explain the multitude and diversity of organisms except by chance. But to say that these things are by chance is no explanation, but rather an absence of explanation, for chance is a cause <per accidens> which presupposes a cause ordered <per se> to one effect, and if there is no cause <per se> there can be no cause <per accidens>. A man digging a grave could not accidentally find a treasure if he were not <per se> digging in the earth and if some one else had not buried the treasure.
St. Thomas points out that Anaxagoras approached a solution of this problem when he admitted an intelligent cause that orders the universe, but at the same time Anaxagoras thought that a distinction pre-existed in eternal matter, that is in the homeomeriae.
Reply. In his reply to the materialists St. Thomas presents two arguments which apply equally to the ascending evolutionism of modern materialists.
1. If there is any distinction from matter, this distinction should be referred to some higher cause. Why? Because matter is created by God, as we have said above, for matter is not a being in itself. Matter is moved and perfected and therefore it is moved and perfected by another; matter does not move or perfect itself, it does not confer on itself vegetative, sensitive, or intellectual life; it is not its own action or its own being. Matter is always in potency to other determinations and it is not related to being, the ultimate actuality of all things, as A is to a. This argument also applies to Plato's dualism.
2. Matter is because of the form, and the form is not because of the matter. But the distinction of things takes place through the specific forms. Therefore the distinction is not on account of matter but conversely matter is on account of the distinction of things. Matter is the principle of individuation and is ordered to the multitude of species.
This second argument applies also to evolutionism, for there can be no evolution with a tendency to something definite and congruous without some finality. Otherwise the direction of such a tendency would be without any reason, and no tendency would ever attain to the constitution of any of our organs, the heart, the head, the eye, etc. John of St. Thomas restates these two arguments against materialism as follows:
1. Act is simply prior to potency, and therefore matter, which is the potency to a higher act, is not uncreated, nor is it therefore the first cause for the distinction of things, for example, the distinctions of vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual life, which matter cannot produce because it is inferior to them. Matter is merely the real capacity for receiving a perfection.
2. Potency is referred to act and is because of act, or matter is because of the form and on account of the diverse forms, and therefore it is not the cause of the specific distinction of the forms. Matter is because of the distinction of these forms.
The first conclusion therefore is that the specific distinction of things cannot be explained by a material cause.
2. The second theory refuted by St. Thomas might be called descending evolutionism. It calls to mind Plotinus' emanatism. This second theory was advanced by Avicenna, who tried to explain the specific distinction of things by efficient causes. Avicenna declared that God in understanding Himself produced the first intelligence (Plotinus' <logos>, the second <<hypostasis>>); then, when the first intelligence understood itself, it produced the soul of the world (Plotinus' third <<hypostasis>>, the god of the Stoics).
Modern pantheists, who support a descending evolution rather than an ascending evolution, try to explain the distinction of things in almost the same way. Spinoza tried to derive two infinite attributes from the divine substance: cogitation and infinite extension, besides the finite modes of cogitation and extension. But because he rejected free creation he was unable to derive the finite modes from an infinite substance, and therefore he simply stated without proof that these finite modes come into being successively from eternity in some necessary way.
In trying to explain the distinction of things Schelling began with the Absolute, but because he rejected the revealed truth of free creation he spoke of a fall of the Absolute by which the Absolute became the world in some kind of descent. Hegel, who supported an ascending evolution, ridiculed Schelling's dream of the fall of the Absolute, but Hegel's position is no less ridiculous, for according to Hegel God is becoming in the world but He does not yet exist and will never properly be, as Renan said.
Reply. To this second theory of the emanatists, St. Thomas replied that creation belongs to God alone and the total being of anything cannot be produced except by creation from nothing, and creation is not emanation, for in creation God is the sole efficient and final cause, but in no sense the material cause. Hence God does not become the world nor is the world made from God. Avicenna's second <hypostasis>, therefore, if it is created, cannot create a third, and the third cannot create something inferior to itself.
Furthermore, St. Thomas replies, according to Avicenna the totality and distinction of things would not derive from the intention of the first agent but from a concourse of many active causes. This concourse of causes, however, must come about by chance if it does not come from the intention of the first cause. But chance, since it is a cause <per accidens>, presupposes a cause ordered <per se> to its effect and therefore it cannot be the first cause of the specific distinction of things. Manifestly the distinction between vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual life in the world does not come from chance. In other words, there would be no finality in the world, and natural agents would tend to something determined and fitting without any reason, the order in things would be derived from an absence of order, more would come from the less, and the more perfect would come from the imperfect. Nor can it be said that the distinction in things comes from the form of secondary causes, for these forms do not exist of themselves and they themselves are distinct from one another and thus their own distinction must be explained.
Nor can it be said that the cause of the distinction in things is God inasmuch as He operates by a necessity of His nature. This argument was answered in the reply to the first difficulty and was refuted above: "It is of the nature of a natural agent that it produces one effect, because a nature (determined to one thing) operates in one and the same way unless it is impeded (for example, the vital principle in a plant operates in the same way in the same circumstances). This is because a natural agent acts according to its specific being, and as long as it is such a being it acts only in this one way. Since the divine being is infinite. . ., it cannot be that it acts by a necessity of nature unless it were to cause something infinite in being, which is impossible. The divine being, therefore, does not act by a necessity of nature, but the effects determined by its infinite perfection proceed according to the determination of its will and intellect."
The second conclusion, therefore, is that the distinction of things does not come from God as acting by a necessity of nature.
Until this point St. Thomas has not considered the opinion that the distinction of things comes from God as operating by a necessity of wisdom, an opinion espoused by the absolute optimism of Plato and by Leibnitz in modern times. Here is an attempt to explain the distinction of things, which is assumed to be necessary, by a final cause. In this instance the necessity of the distinction of things is not metaphysical or physical but moral. St. Thomas says: "Plato supposed that it was due to the goodness of God as understood and loved by God Himself that He should produce the most perfect of worlds. This could, of course, be true if we consider only those things that are and not those things that could be. This universe is the best of those that are, and the fact that it is the best is due to the goodness of God. But the goodness of God is not obligated to this universe in such a way that God could not make a better or worse universe." "Whenever the end is proportionate to the things that are made on account of that end, the wisdom of the maker is limited to some determined order. But the divine goodness is an end disproportionately exceeding created things. Therefore the divine wisdom is not determined to some order of things."
The third conclusion, therefore, is that the distinction of things does not come from God operating by a necessity of wisdom.
By eliminating the material cause, natural efficient causes, and the final cause that implies the necessity of the production of things, we come to the positive conclusion: the distinction of things arises from the free intention of God the Creator.
The proof may be somewhat easier if we join this last section of the article with the reply to the first difficulty, in which the divine liberty is affirmed.
A free agent can produce distinct effects according to whatever distinct forms he understands. But God, as a free agent, wished to manifest His goodness through diverse creatures. Therefore the distinction of things is explained by the intention of God the free Creator. and this distinction can have no other cause.
Explanation of the major. An agent that acts by its nature acts by the form by which it is, and this form is only one for each agent. Therefore such an agent acts only in one way. A free agent, however, acts according to a form received in the intellect.
Explanation of the minor. God is a voluntary and free agent. It does not conflict with God's unity and simplicity that He understands many things, for the multitude of things understood by God do not effect a real distinction in Him. Since God can understand many things, He can also make many things.
God, however, wished freely to manifest His goodness by diverse creatures. Why? St. Thomas explains in the last section: "Because by one creature the divine goodness cannot be adequately represented, God made many different things so that whatever is lacking in one to represent the divine goodness will be supplied by another."
The validity of this solution. This solution is of faith. From the philosophical viewpoint it is necessary, for the ascending evolution of the materialists and even of Hegel is repugnant both to the principle of causality (more cannot be produced by the less) and to the principle of finality (every agent acts according to the end to which it is ordered) and, moreover, ascending evolution does not explain the distinction of things. Similarly, descending evolution fails to explain the distinction of things for, if God operates by a necessity of nature, He will necessarily produce only one effect.
Similarly the absolute optimism of Plato and Leibnitz does not take into account the disproportion between any created universe and the divine goodness, which is to be manifested. We must, therefore, have recourse to the liberty of God the Creator, or we must, with Parmenides, deny all multitude and all distinction in things. In the end the solution is that the most eminent unity of God virtually contains the infinite multitude of possible things, from which God freely chose the things He wished to create.
The higher unity differs from the lower unity in the fact that it virtually contains the multitude; the higher the unity the richer its content, for, as Dionysius said, "those things that are divided in inferior beings are united in the higher beings." This is especially clear when we ascend from one order to another; the vital principle of the plant virtually contains all the acts of agents lower than itself. Similarly, the faculty of vision, which in itself is simple, extends itself to a spreading panorama; the central sense in the common sense unites the objects of the particular senses; the intellect knows the universal, which virtually contains the individual. Great musicians, like Mozart, hear the melody they are composing completely at one time and they often express the whole theme virtually in the prelude of the composition. Great philosophers reduce the whole of philosophy to a few sublime principles. When the saints arrive at the unitive way they unite in this unity various virtues. In a still higher plane, the unity and simplicity of God virtually contain the infinite multitude of possible beings, and from this multitude God chooses those that He wishes to create. By the divine liberty, then, we are able to solve the problem of how a multitude proceeds from the supreme and most simple principle. Plato and Aristotle were not able to offer a solution because they had not attained to the idea of free creation.
Second Article: Whether The Inequality Of Things Is From God
State of the question. Many men cannot understand how the inequality in things can come from God. The Manichaeans tried to explain this inequality by two, opposite principles, and Origen, trying to rectify their error, explained that in the beginning God created only intellectual beings and that all these beings were equal. Some of these sinned and as a punishment they were united to bodies. In modern times some thinkers have declared that that great inequality among animals, whereby the strong devour the weak, cannot come from God. They ask why there should be such a great inequality in the intellectual and moral aptitudes of men. This is the language of egalitarianism. As we shall see in the body of the article, it is a materialistic theory that does not take into account the subordination of the forms of agents and ends.
These unfortunate inequalities, says Schopenhauer, cannot come from a good and omnipotent God, and he concludes that God is not omnipotent and that the principle of all things is some kind of will that is always trying to persevere in being. This attempt is always associated with sorrow and is like an insatiable thirst. Therefore in his pessimism he concluded, that this desire for life must be eradicated so that we may come to that negative bliss which is the ending of all sorrow.
Schopenhauer's difficulties can be reduced to the difficulties proposed at the beginning of the present article: the best God should have made the best things, and therefore all equal, otherwise, according to the third objection, it would be an injustice for God to distribute His gifts unequally to creatures.
Reply. The reply is that the divine wisdom is the cause of the distinction of things for the sake of the perfection of the universe, and therefore the divine wisdom is also the cause of inequality.
1. Proof from authority. "Why doth one day excel another, and one light another, and one year another year, when all come of the Lord? By the knowledge of the Lord they were distinguished." In the canticle, "All ye works of the Lord, bless the Lord," we see the inequality of creatures, each of which in its own way praises the Lord. The description of the creation in the Book of Genesis shows the inequality of creatures, and the Fourth Council of the Lateran declared that "God at one time and in the beginning of time established both creatures, the spiritual and corporeal, and then the human creature, as it were a common being constituted by spirit and body."
2. Proof from reason: a) by the refutation of Origen's theory; b) positively.
a) In opposing the Manichaeans, Origen declared that God in the beginning had created spiritual beings, who were all equal. Those that sinned were bound to bodies, and the greater the sin the closer the union with matter. Some of these beings did not sin, and these now constitute the different grades of angels according to their different merits. In this way Origen combined the doctrine of original sin with the Platonic myths about the pre-existence of souls.
St. Thomas replies: "The totality of corporeal beings would then not be because of the communication of God's goodness to creatures but for the punishment of sin. But this is contrary to the words of Genesis, "And God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good." St. Augustine exclaims: "What could be more stupid than to say that by this sun, as there is but one in the world, God was concerned not with the splendor of beauty or the welfare of corporeal things, but that this sun came to be because one soul sinned?"
What could be more stupid than to say that the stars are in the sky, that the pure air exists, that the rose, the lily, the dove, the lamb were made because someone sinned? St. Augustine is speaking formally when he says, "what could be more stupid," for it is stupidity, opposed to the wisdom which explains the beauty of even the sensible world as a manifestation of God's goodness, while this theory explains all this by sin, not by the highest cause but by something that is less than nothing. Schopenhauer's doctrine is even greater folly when he speaks of a fall of the Absolute or of God. He tries to explain the inequalities and sorrows of the world by a primitive, non-omnipotent, or rather impotent will. The first cause is subsisting being itself and therefore omnipotent, because operation follows being, and anything that is able to possess the nature of being is comprised in the object of divine power, which can effect anything that has no repugnance to being.
b) The positive proof is from the principle of finality, out of which is drawn the corollary of the principle of the subordination of ends, forms, and agents, against materialistic egalitarianism. Leibnitz adopted St. Thomas' argument but exaggerated it, as we shall see. St. Thomas' argument can be reduced to the following: The specific or formal distinction is more important than the material or numerical distinction, because matter is on account of the form and the individuals in any species of corruptible beings are for the conservation of the species. But the formal distinction always requires inequality, since the forms of things are subordinate like numbers, ascending from the elements to mixed beings, to plants, and to animals, and in each instance one species is found more perfect than the others, for example, the diamond or radium among minerals, the rose among the flowers, and man among the animals. Therefore the inequality of beings is required for the perfection of the universe so that in different ways the wisdom of God might make known His goodness.
The major is evident, since matter is because of the form, according to the principle of finality that the imperfect is on account of the perfect. In the same way the many individuals of the same species of corruptible being are for the conservation of the species. Excluding the subsisting spiritual soul, individuals are ordered to the preservation of the species. Thus individuals pass away but the species remains; it is negatively eternal in the sense that it prescinds from the here and now, and thus it is somehow above time, representing the divine idea, the idea of rose, of lily, of lion, etc. Therefore, St. Thomas says, the hen gathers the chicks under her wing and defends them against the hawk because the hen naturally loves the good of its species more than its own good.
The major therefore is certain, namely, the formal or specific distinction is more important than the material or numerical distinction; any material individual of this or that species is of minor importance. This, however, is not true of a person, because the soul of the person is subsisting and immortal and thus is of greater value than the species of lion or horse.
The minor. But the formal distinction requires the inequality or subordination of forms. This is affirmed with a serene mind and not lugubriously as was the case with Origen. On this point St. Thomas differs entirely from the pessimism of Schopenhauer. But it should be noted that the holy doctor is speaking here of the primary distinction and inequality existing prior to sin; he is not now speaking of how after original and actual sin this inequality is often increased and causes that miserable state of servitude in which so many men spent their entire lives before the spread of Christianity.
The primary inequality of things pertains to their natures independently of sin, for, as Aristotle says, "the species of things are subordinate like numbers." For numbers vary by the addition or subtraction of unity and the species of things differ by the addition or subtraction of a specific difference. For example, a substance is incorporeal or corporeal, and here there is inequality; similarly, the corporeal substance is living or inanimate; if living, it is sensitive or not; if sensitive, it is rational or not. Everywhere we find the inequality and subordination of forms as with numbers.
Hence St. Thomas says, "In each of these we find one species more perfect than the others," for example, man among the animals, and the animals that have both internal and external senses are superior to the animals that do not possess all the senses, as the oyster and the sponge, which appear to have only the sense of touch. So there is also a certain subordination among plants and flowers and among minerals; the diamond, or perhaps radium, seems to be the most precious of minerals.
These considerations are valid against materialism and mechanism, which take into consideration only quantity and not quality. If quality is something prior to quantity, the variation of heat from the tenth to the twentieth degree is perhaps greater than between the twentieth and thirtieth degrees. Materialism looks at everything as if it were in the same horizontal plane, as if, for instance, animals were machines and as if the human soul were not essentially superior to the soul of the brute. This is absolute egalitarianism, which reduces everything to the lowest plane.
Spiritualism, on the other hand, considers everything as in a vertical line, inasmuch as the species of things are subordinated in a hierarchy for the splendor of the universe, because those things that are united in God can be only divisively in creatures and because the formal distinction requires inequality. Many modern writers do not understand this subordination, confusing it with coordination, for example, when they compare the first cause and the second cause with two men rowing a boat.
The conclusion is confirmed by the solution of the objections.
Reply to first objection. The most perfect agent produces his perfect total effect, but he produces it with a subordination of parts, for example, with the subordination of organs and functions in the plant and animal organisms. The animal would be less perfect if all its parts were equal, if all, for instance, had the dignity or importance of the eye.
Thus the universe is more perfect with angels, men, animals, plants, minerals than if there were only angels and all the angels were equal. Here was Origen's error. According to St. Thomas the angels could not be equal, for in the angels there is a particular subordination of forms since the angels are pure subsisting forms. Since individuation takes place through matter, there can be only one individual in each angelic species. Michael is the only individual in his species. Hence among the angels we have a perfect hierarchy or subordination.
Reply to second objection. In the Blessed Trinity there is equality according to the processions <ad intra> by which the entire divine nature is communicated. The Word and the Holy Ghost are equal to the Father. On the other hand there must be inequality in the procession <ad extra> because the creature is an inadequate manifestation of the divine goodness and many subordinate creatures are required.
Reply to third objection. The primitive inequality is not unjust since it is because of the perfection of the universe. This Origen was not able to understand.
Thus some are born inclined to fortitude and must acquire meekness, others inclined to meekness must acquire fortitude. Each must ascend the mountain of perfection by traversing the various parts of the mountain. The justice of God is not commutative, regulating the changes among equals, but it is distributive according to the requirements of the common good. God is His own law. Cajetan remarks: "Therefore God is just in condescension in order to manifest His goodness."
Leibnitz exaggerated this doctrine of inequality when he denied matter in his monadology and reduced all substance to spiritual monads which are subordinated as are the angels in St. Thomas' doctrine. Leibnitz held that there could not be in the world two beings absolutely similar because God would have created these perfectly similar beings without reason, just as a man would have two perfectly similar copies of the same edition of Virgil in his library without reason.
Reply. Two perfectly similar individuals can exist, especially in succession, for the preservation of the species and they are distinguished from each other by matter marked by quantity, as in the case of two drops of water or two perfectly identical twins. We concede only that there cannot be two angels perfectly similar in species, and this would also be true of men if they were monads without matter.
St. Thomas does admit a certain individual inequality of souls in the same human species: the soul of Christ is higher even in the natural order than the soul of Judas, but this inequality is not unrelated to the body, although on the other hand a body is better disposed because of a higher individual soul, since causes are mutually causes to each other in different genera of causes.
Reply. St. Thomas shows that this problem of the origin of the multitude of things is insoluble without the idea of free creation. His reply is that the distinction of things and multitude are from the intention of the first agent, who is God.
Proof from authority. "In the beginning God created heaven and earth. . . . And He divided the light from the darkness. . . . And God made a firmament, and divided the waters that were under the firmament, from those that were above the firmament." This is a popular expression of the truth, accommodated to the intelligence of the Israelites, who thought of the heavens as a solid firmament. But when it is revealed that the heavens (which you think of as a solid firmament) are created by God, it is not revealed that the heavens are a solid firmament, for in the revealed proposition the verb "is" refers to "created" (the heavens are created) and not to "solid." Hence it may be that some error is mingled in the subject of the proposition without making the proposition erroneous in its formal meaning, that is, with regard to the verb "is" and those things to which "is" refers. On other occasions it is more clearly stated that God created visible and invisible beings and that God "ordered all things in measure and number and weight."
In the body of the article St. Thomas presents and then refutes two theories: the ascending evolution of the materialists and the descending evolution of Avicenna.
The theory of the ancient materialists was that the distinction of things arises by chance according to the movement of matter. This opinion was held by Democritus and later by Epicurus. Modern materialists with their theory of evolution were unable to add anything to this ancient theory; they were unable to explain how the first nebulae, the incandescendent stars, the habitable earth could come from primitive homogeneous matter except by chance or by the activity of some unknown forces, and the appearance of vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual life remained for them an insoluble enigma. They would be forced to admit that more proceeds from less and that the perfect proceeds from the imperfect, and they find themselves at a loss how to explain the multitude and diversity of organisms except by chance. But to say that these things are by chance is no explanation, but rather an absence of explanation, for chance is a cause <per accidens> which presupposes a cause ordered <per se> to one effect, and if there is no cause <per se> there can be no cause <per accidens>. A man digging a grave could not accidentally find a treasure if he were not <per se> digging in the earth and if some one else had not buried the treasure.
St. Thomas points out that Anaxagoras approached a solution of this problem when he admitted an intelligent cause that orders the universe, but at the same time Anaxagoras thought that a distinction pre-existed in eternal matter, that is in the homeomeriae.
Reply. In his reply to the materialists St. Thomas presents two arguments which apply equally to the ascending evolutionism of modern materialists.
1. If there is any distinction from matter, this distinction should be referred to some higher cause. Why? Because matter is created by God, as we have said above, for matter is not a being in itself. Matter is moved and perfected and therefore it is moved and perfected by another; matter does not move or perfect itself, it does not confer on itself vegetative, sensitive, or intellectual life; it is not its own action or its own being. Matter is always in potency to other determinations and it is not related to being, the ultimate actuality of all things, as A is to a. This argument also applies to Plato's dualism.
2. Matter is because of the form, and the form is not because of the matter. But the distinction of things takes place through the specific forms. Therefore the distinction is not on account of matter but conversely matter is on account of the distinction of things. Matter is the principle of individuation and is ordered to the multitude of species.
This second argument applies also to evolutionism, for there can be no evolution with a tendency to something definite and congruous without some finality. Otherwise the direction of such a tendency would be without any reason, and no tendency would ever attain to the constitution of any of our organs, the heart, the head, the eye, etc. John of St. Thomas restates these two arguments against materialism as follows:
1. Act is simply prior to potency, and therefore matter, which is the potency to a higher act, is not uncreated, nor is it therefore the first cause for the distinction of things, for example, the distinctions of vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual life, which matter cannot produce because it is inferior to them. Matter is merely the real capacity for receiving a perfection.
2. Potency is referred to act and is because of act, or matter is because of the form and on account of the diverse forms, and therefore it is not the cause of the specific distinction of the forms. Matter is because of the distinction of these forms.
The first conclusion therefore is that the specific distinction of things cannot be explained by a material cause.
2. The second theory refuted by St. Thomas might be called descending evolutionism. It calls to mind Plotinus' emanatism. This second theory was advanced by Avicenna, who tried to explain the specific distinction of things by efficient causes. Avicenna declared that God in understanding Himself produced the first intelligence (Plotinus' <logos>, the second <<hypostasis>>); then, when the first intelligence understood itself, it produced the soul of the world (Plotinus' third <<hypostasis>>, the god of the Stoics).
Modern pantheists, who support a descending evolution rather than an ascending evolution, try to explain the distinction of things in almost the same way. Spinoza tried to derive two infinite attributes from the divine substance: cogitation and infinite extension, besides the finite modes of cogitation and extension. But because he rejected free creation he was unable to derive the finite modes from an infinite substance, and therefore he simply stated without proof that these finite modes come into being successively from eternity in some necessary way.
In trying to explain the distinction of things Schelling began with the Absolute, but because he rejected the revealed truth of free creation he spoke of a fall of the Absolute by which the Absolute became the world in some kind of descent. Hegel, who supported an ascending evolution, ridiculed Schelling's dream of the fall of the Absolute, but Hegel's position is no less ridiculous, for according to Hegel God is becoming in the world but He does not yet exist and will never properly be, as Renan said.
Reply. To this second theory of the emanatists, St. Thomas replied that creation belongs to God alone and the total being of anything cannot be produced except by creation from nothing, and creation is not emanation, for in creation God is the sole efficient and final cause, but in no sense the material cause. Hence God does not become the world nor is the world made from God. Avicenna's second <hypostasis>, therefore, if it is created, cannot create a third, and the third cannot create something inferior to itself.
Furthermore, St. Thomas replies, according to Avicenna the totality and distinction of things would not derive from the intention of the first agent but from a concourse of many active causes. This concourse of causes, however, must come about by chance if it does not come from the intention of the first cause. But chance, since it is a cause <per accidens>, presupposes a cause ordered <per se> to its effect and therefore it cannot be the first cause of the specific distinction of things. Manifestly the distinction between vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual life in the world does not come from chance. In other words, there would be no finality in the world, and natural agents would tend to something determined and fitting without any reason, the order in things would be derived from an absence of order, more would come from the less, and the more perfect would come from the imperfect. Nor can it be said that the distinction in things comes from the form of secondary causes, for these forms do not exist of themselves and they themselves are distinct from one another and thus their own distinction must be explained.
Nor can it be said that the cause of the distinction in things is God inasmuch as He operates by a necessity of His nature. This argument was answered in the reply to the first difficulty and was refuted above: "It is of the nature of a natural agent that it produces one effect, because a nature (determined to one thing) operates in one and the same way unless it is impeded (for example, the vital principle in a plant operates in the same way in the same circumstances). This is because a natural agent acts according to its specific being, and as long as it is such a being it acts only in this one way. Since the divine being is infinite. . ., it cannot be that it acts by a necessity of nature unless it were to cause something infinite in being, which is impossible. The divine being, therefore, does not act by a necessity of nature, but the effects determined by its infinite perfection proceed according to the determination of its will and intellect."
The second conclusion, therefore, is that the distinction of things does not come from God as acting by a necessity of nature.
Until this point St. Thomas has not considered the opinion that the distinction of things comes from God as operating by a necessity of wisdom, an opinion espoused by the absolute optimism of Plato and by Leibnitz in modern times. Here is an attempt to explain the distinction of things, which is assumed to be necessary, by a final cause. In this instance the necessity of the distinction of things is not metaphysical or physical but moral. St. Thomas says: "Plato supposed that it was due to the goodness of God as understood and loved by God Himself that He should produce the most perfect of worlds. This could, of course, be true if we consider only those things that are and not those things that could be. This universe is the best of those that are, and the fact that it is the best is due to the goodness of God. But the goodness of God is not obligated to this universe in such a way that God could not make a better or worse universe." "Whenever the end is proportionate to the things that are made on account of that end, the wisdom of the maker is limited to some determined order. But the divine goodness is an end disproportionately exceeding created things. Therefore the divine wisdom is not determined to some order of things."
The third conclusion, therefore, is that the distinction of things does not come from God operating by a necessity of wisdom.
By eliminating the material cause, natural efficient causes, and the final cause that implies the necessity of the production of things, we come to the positive conclusion: the distinction of things arises from the free intention of God the Creator.
The proof may be somewhat easier if we join this last section of the article with the reply to the first difficulty, in which the divine liberty is affirmed.
A free agent can produce distinct effects according to whatever distinct forms he understands. But God, as a free agent, wished to manifest His goodness through diverse creatures. Therefore the distinction of things is explained by the intention of God the free Creator. and this distinction can have no other cause.
Explanation of the major. An agent that acts by its nature acts by the form by which it is, and this form is only one for each agent. Therefore such an agent acts only in one way. A free agent, however, acts according to a form received in the intellect.
Explanation of the minor. God is a voluntary and free agent. It does not conflict with God's unity and simplicity that He understands many things, for the multitude of things understood by God do not effect a real distinction in Him. Since God can understand many things, He can also make many things.
God, however, wished freely to manifest His goodness by diverse creatures. Why? St. Thomas explains in the last section: "Because by one creature the divine goodness cannot be adequately represented, God made many different things so that whatever is lacking in one to represent the divine goodness will be supplied by another."
The validity of this solution. This solution is of faith. From the philosophical viewpoint it is necessary, for the ascending evolution of the materialists and even of Hegel is repugnant both to the principle of causality (more cannot be produced by the less) and to the principle of finality (every agent acts according to the end to which it is ordered) and, moreover, ascending evolution does not explain the distinction of things. Similarly, descending evolution fails to explain the distinction of things for, if God operates by a necessity of nature, He will necessarily produce only one effect.
Similarly the absolute optimism of Plato and Leibnitz does not take into account the disproportion between any created universe and the divine goodness, which is to be manifested. We must, therefore, have recourse to the liberty of God the Creator, or we must, with Parmenides, deny all multitude and all distinction in things. In the end the solution is that the most eminent unity of God virtually contains the infinite multitude of possible things, from which God freely chose the things He wished to create.
The higher unity differs from the lower unity in the fact that it virtually contains the multitude; the higher the unity the richer its content, for, as Dionysius said, "those things that are divided in inferior beings are united in the higher beings." This is especially clear when we ascend from one order to another; the vital principle of the plant virtually contains all the acts of agents lower than itself. Similarly, the faculty of vision, which in itself is simple, extends itself to a spreading panorama; the central sense in the common sense unites the objects of the particular senses; the intellect knows the universal, which virtually contains the individual. Great musicians, like Mozart, hear the melody they are composing completely at one time and they often express the whole theme virtually in the prelude of the composition. Great philosophers reduce the whole of philosophy to a few sublime principles. When the saints arrive at the unitive way they unite in this unity various virtues. In a still higher plane, the unity and simplicity of God virtually contain the infinite multitude of possible beings, and from this multitude God chooses those that He wishes to create. By the divine liberty, then, we are able to solve the problem of how a multitude proceeds from the supreme and most simple principle. Plato and Aristotle were not able to offer a solution because they had not attained to the idea of free creation.
Second Article: Whether The Inequality Of Things Is From God
State of the question. Many men cannot understand how the inequality in things can come from God. The Manichaeans tried to explain this inequality by two, opposite principles, and Origen, trying to rectify their error, explained that in the beginning God created only intellectual beings and that all these beings were equal. Some of these sinned and as a punishment they were united to bodies. In modern times some thinkers have declared that that great inequality among animals, whereby the strong devour the weak, cannot come from God. They ask why there should be such a great inequality in the intellectual and moral aptitudes of men. This is the language of egalitarianism. As we shall see in the body of the article, it is a materialistic theory that does not take into account the subordination of the forms of agents and ends.
These unfortunate inequalities, says Schopenhauer, cannot come from a good and omnipotent God, and he concludes that God is not omnipotent and that the principle of all things is some kind of will that is always trying to persevere in being. This attempt is always associated with sorrow and is like an insatiable thirst. Therefore in his pessimism he concluded, that this desire for life must be eradicated so that we may come to that negative bliss which is the ending of all sorrow.
Schopenhauer's difficulties can be reduced to the difficulties proposed at the beginning of the present article: the best God should have made the best things, and therefore all equal, otherwise, according to the third objection, it would be an injustice for God to distribute His gifts unequally to creatures.
Reply. The reply is that the divine wisdom is the cause of the distinction of things for the sake of the perfection of the universe, and therefore the divine wisdom is also the cause of inequality.
1. Proof from authority. "Why doth one day excel another, and one light another, and one year another year, when all come of the Lord? By the knowledge of the Lord they were distinguished." In the canticle, "All ye works of the Lord, bless the Lord," we see the inequality of creatures, each of which in its own way praises the Lord. The description of the creation in the Book of Genesis shows the inequality of creatures, and the Fourth Council of the Lateran declared that "God at one time and in the beginning of time established both creatures, the spiritual and corporeal, and then the human creature, as it were a common being constituted by spirit and body."
2. Proof from reason: a) by the refutation of Origen's theory; b) positively.
a) In opposing the Manichaeans, Origen declared that God in the beginning had created spiritual beings, who were all equal. Those that sinned were bound to bodies, and the greater the sin the closer the union with matter. Some of these beings did not sin, and these now constitute the different grades of angels according to their different merits. In this way Origen combined the doctrine of original sin with the Platonic myths about the pre-existence of souls.
St. Thomas replies: "The totality of corporeal beings would then not be because of the communication of God's goodness to creatures but for the punishment of sin. But this is contrary to the words of Genesis, "And God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good." St. Augustine exclaims: "What could be more stupid than to say that by this sun, as there is but one in the world, God was concerned not with the splendor of beauty or the welfare of corporeal things, but that this sun came to be because one soul sinned?"
What could be more stupid than to say that the stars are in the sky, that the pure air exists, that the rose, the lily, the dove, the lamb were made because someone sinned? St. Augustine is speaking formally when he says, "what could be more stupid," for it is stupidity, opposed to the wisdom which explains the beauty of even the sensible world as a manifestation of God's goodness, while this theory explains all this by sin, not by the highest cause but by something that is less than nothing. Schopenhauer's doctrine is even greater folly when he speaks of a fall of the Absolute or of God. He tries to explain the inequalities and sorrows of the world by a primitive, non-omnipotent, or rather impotent will. The first cause is subsisting being itself and therefore omnipotent, because operation follows being, and anything that is able to possess the nature of being is comprised in the object of divine power, which can effect anything that has no repugnance to being.
b) The positive proof is from the principle of finality, out of which is drawn the corollary of the principle of the subordination of ends, forms, and agents, against materialistic egalitarianism. Leibnitz adopted St. Thomas' argument but exaggerated it, as we shall see. St. Thomas' argument can be reduced to the following: The specific or formal distinction is more important than the material or numerical distinction, because matter is on account of the form and the individuals in any species of corruptible beings are for the conservation of the species. But the formal distinction always requires inequality, since the forms of things are subordinate like numbers, ascending from the elements to mixed beings, to plants, and to animals, and in each instance one species is found more perfect than the others, for example, the diamond or radium among minerals, the rose among the flowers, and man among the animals. Therefore the inequality of beings is required for the perfection of the universe so that in different ways the wisdom of God might make known His goodness.
The major is evident, since matter is because of the form, according to the principle of finality that the imperfect is on account of the perfect. In the same way the many individuals of the same species of corruptible being are for the conservation of the species. Excluding the subsisting spiritual soul, individuals are ordered to the preservation of the species. Thus individuals pass away but the species remains; it is negatively eternal in the sense that it prescinds from the here and now, and thus it is somehow above time, representing the divine idea, the idea of rose, of lily, of lion, etc. Therefore, St. Thomas says, the hen gathers the chicks under her wing and defends them against the hawk because the hen naturally loves the good of its species more than its own good.
The major therefore is certain, namely, the formal or specific distinction is more important than the material or numerical distinction; any material individual of this or that species is of minor importance. This, however, is not true of a person, because the soul of the person is subsisting and immortal and thus is of greater value than the species of lion or horse.
The minor. But the formal distinction requires the inequality or subordination of forms. This is affirmed with a serene mind and not lugubriously as was the case with Origen. On this point St. Thomas differs entirely from the pessimism of Schopenhauer. But it should be noted that the holy doctor is speaking here of the primary distinction and inequality existing prior to sin; he is not now speaking of how after original and actual sin this inequality is often increased and causes that miserable state of servitude in which so many men spent their entire lives before the spread of Christianity.
The primary inequality of things pertains to their natures independently of sin, for, as Aristotle says, "the species of things are subordinate like numbers." For numbers vary by the addition or subtraction of unity and the species of things differ by the addition or subtraction of a specific difference. For example, a substance is incorporeal or corporeal, and here there is inequality; similarly, the corporeal substance is living or inanimate; if living, it is sensitive or not; if sensitive, it is rational or not. Everywhere we find the inequality and subordination of forms as with numbers.
Hence St. Thomas says, "In each of these we find one species more perfect than the others," for example, man among the animals, and the animals that have both internal and external senses are superior to the animals that do not possess all the senses, as the oyster and the sponge, which appear to have only the sense of touch. So there is also a certain subordination among plants and flowers and among minerals; the diamond, or perhaps radium, seems to be the most precious of minerals.
These considerations are valid against materialism and mechanism, which take into consideration only quantity and not quality. If quality is something prior to quantity, the variation of heat from the tenth to the twentieth degree is perhaps greater than between the twentieth and thirtieth degrees. Materialism looks at everything as if it were in the same horizontal plane, as if, for instance, animals were machines and as if the human soul were not essentially superior to the soul of the brute. This is absolute egalitarianism, which reduces everything to the lowest plane.
Spiritualism, on the other hand, considers everything as in a vertical line, inasmuch as the species of things are subordinated in a hierarchy for the splendor of the universe, because those things that are united in God can be only divisively in creatures and because the formal distinction requires inequality. Many modern writers do not understand this subordination, confusing it with coordination, for example, when they compare the first cause and the second cause with two men rowing a boat.
The conclusion is confirmed by the solution of the objections.
Reply to first objection. The most perfect agent produces his perfect total effect, but he produces it with a subordination of parts, for example, with the subordination of organs and functions in the plant and animal organisms. The animal would be less perfect if all its parts were equal, if all, for instance, had the dignity or importance of the eye.
Thus the universe is more perfect with angels, men, animals, plants, minerals than if there were only angels and all the angels were equal. Here was Origen's error. According to St. Thomas the angels could not be equal, for in the angels there is a particular subordination of forms since the angels are pure subsisting forms. Since individuation takes place through matter, there can be only one individual in each angelic species. Michael is the only individual in his species. Hence among the angels we have a perfect hierarchy or subordination.
Reply to second objection. In the Blessed Trinity there is equality according to the processions <ad intra> by which the entire divine nature is communicated. The Word and the Holy Ghost are equal to the Father. On the other hand there must be inequality in the procession <ad extra> because the creature is an inadequate manifestation of the divine goodness and many subordinate creatures are required.
Reply to third objection. The primitive inequality is not unjust since it is because of the perfection of the universe. This Origen was not able to understand.
Thus some are born inclined to fortitude and must acquire meekness, others inclined to meekness must acquire fortitude. Each must ascend the mountain of perfection by traversing the various parts of the mountain. The justice of God is not commutative, regulating the changes among equals, but it is distributive according to the requirements of the common good. God is His own law. Cajetan remarks: "Therefore God is just in condescension in order to manifest His goodness."
Leibnitz exaggerated this doctrine of inequality when he denied matter in his monadology and reduced all substance to spiritual monads which are subordinated as are the angels in St. Thomas' doctrine. Leibnitz held that there could not be in the world two beings absolutely similar because God would have created these perfectly similar beings without reason, just as a man would have two perfectly similar copies of the same edition of Virgil in his library without reason.
Reply. Two perfectly similar individuals can exist, especially in succession, for the preservation of the species and they are distinguished from each other by matter marked by quantity, as in the case of two drops of water or two perfectly identical twins. We concede only that there cannot be two angels perfectly similar in species, and this would also be true of men if they were monads without matter.
St. Thomas does admit a certain individual inequality of souls in the same human species: the soul of Christ is higher even in the natural order than the soul of Judas, but this inequality is not unrelated to the body, although on the other hand a body is better disposed because of a higher individual soul, since causes are mutually causes to each other in different genera of causes.
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Source: Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Trinity and God the Creator, EWTN, http://www.ewtn.com/library/theology/trinity1.htm, ch. 21, articles 1–2.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Repost: Adrian Johnston on Secularizing Materialism
I have copied the following very illuminating and fascinating introduction by Dr. Adrian Johnston because I believe it is one of the clearest accounts of the real philosophical distinction between atheism and theism and their implications. The thinkers discussed in Johnston's work have been the intellectual giants of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the atheism propounded here is perhaps the most sophisticated and consistent form around today (perhaps because its lofty academic language isn't easily transmitted via polemical soundbites à la Richard Dawkins and also perhaps because it proposes a reconsideration of the notions of humanism and science that are almost entirely at odds with popular, cultural forms of atheism). One, among many others, insight that Johnston particularly drew out and put the lie to for me was the idea that there is only mechanistic materialism as the possible worldview for atheism, and not only this, but mechanistic materialism simply is impossible to hold today with any rigor if we actually take seriously what science is revealing to us (I was already starting to think, thanks to studies in postmodernism and a growing appreciation for the particular, something along these lines about the relationship between atheism and materialism, but I didn't know how to clarify and backup my intuitions). I find this a startling and somewhat iconoclastic admission on Dr. Johnston's part because atheism popularly conceived is so entrenched in 18th century thinking and religiosity that to think that there could be any other form is perhaps comparable to that classic cinematic moment when Dorothy leaves black and white and enters the colored world in The Wizard of Oz.
It seems to me that this form of thinking should be thoroughly understood especially by priests because it provides a lucid framework to understand the materialist pulses developing in Western culture today; its a-theology should serve via contrast to draw out more sharply the profundity of authentically Catholic thought and how faith affects everything.
It confirms my suspicions about what seems to have been the uncritical assimilation of Continental thought into both Catholic and Protestant theology in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, namely, a blurring of what is proper to materialist and immaterialist worldviews. The results of this attempted appropriation have had, some would argue, disastrous results; others have seen it as a needed liberation from the past. Still others have distinguished theological reactionism to the rise of Enlightenment modernity from a purer form of Medieval theology to which we ought to return and without going so far as to advocate antiquarianism by means of highly speculative reconstructions of very early Christian thought, i.e. being faithful to St. Thomas Aquinas above and beyond the whole mess of modern thought beginning with Descartes.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't say that I am utterly denouncing that there could and should be a conversation of thought, but what actually happened was an immature appropriation was churned out into applied faith that has damaged Catholic culture in the West. The eagerness to apply these new developments, the "New Theology"—hindsight gives us a better examination.
Despite Johnston's rigor, Dr. Simon Wortham's review of Johnston's book (here: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/the-pigs-head) rightly points out that Johnston uses seemingly self-conflicting language in his call for a purge of materialism from religious traces; i.e. Johnston uses deeply religious language to call for a break from religious influence. On the other hand, off the top of my head, two responses to Wortham's criticism can be proffered: 1) perhaps a more sympathetic reading of Johnston's text would imply a tongue-in-cheek style being employed; 2) perhaps it is to a certain degree impossible to avoid the borrowing of language that historically and conceptually is often religiously affiliated, much like it is impossible avoid facing Kant even if one is ignorant of Kant's philosophy.
But actually Johnston's synthesizing of the insights from these thinkers that materialism has often assumed a religious nature is far from being a new insight, nor unique to any of the thinkers he discusses. Christian apologists have noticed the tendency right from the beginning of the Enlightenment. E.g., "To-day we seem to have a humanism which sets out to be itself a religion, and to answer every aspiration, to fulfil [sic] every requirement for the completeness of man" (Gerald Vann, On Being Human [New York, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1934], 10).
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Preface: Clearing the Ground: The First Volume of Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism
[xiii] Lacan also contends, using such examples as eighteenth-century French materialism and Darwinian evolutionary theory, that the sciences of modernity, although ostensibly atheistic, actually are suffused with theological images and sensibilities. These disciplines and their practitioners tend to imagine material Nature in fashions revealing that this fantasized cosmic One-All, this totalizing big Other ruling the entirety of creation with its unbreakable laws, is a thinly veiled replacement for the presumably dead-and-buried God of monotheisms. This unambiguously indicates that, from a Lacanian perspective, the hegemony of the [xiv] religious goes so far as not only to continue competing with the scientific long after early Enlightenment predictions bet on its demise, but even to encompass and shape the seemingly secular and atheistic positions of its self-deceived adversaries delusionally fighting in vain.
Thus, for any materialism indebted to Lacan—this would include the materialisms advocated by Žižek, Badiou, Meillassoux, and me—it is far from enough simply to annex philosophically and speculatively embellish upon the resources and results of one, several, or all of the sciences, be they formal or empirical. In addition, a thoroughgoing theoretical critique of the residual vestiges of religiosity, its lingering ideational and ideological traces, hiding within these fields and their prevailing (self-)interpretations is requisite. Neglecting to carry out this philosophical exorcism dooms any aspiring materialist to remain haunted by ancient specters, to stay in the grip, whether knowingly or not, of stubbornly recalcitrant, resilient ghosts. In Lacan's eyes, an authentically atheistic materialism has yet to be forged (although, especially starting in 1845 with the criticisms of Feuerbachian materialism, Marx and the tradition that comes to bear his name takes giant steps in this direction—admittedly, Lacan tends to overlook most of the Marxist corpus). Žižek, Badiou, and Meillassoux, each in his own way, aspire to accomplish this challenge bequeathed by the French Freud. And yet, as perhaps another symptom of the current conjuncture, the "post-secular" turn in continental philosophy unfortunately has spread from its congenial loci of origin in phenomenology and certain strains of existentialism to infect Lacanian, Žižekian, and Badiouian circles (although Lacan, Žižek, and Badiou are avowed atheists, the fact that they indulge in sophisticated, sensitive treatments of, for instance, Christianity appears to be enough to encourage believers to latch onto them, perhaps attracted by the prospect of being able to dress up their dogmatic faith and rituals in the trendy, sexy attire of the latest avant-garde theoretical vocabularies imported from exotic Europe). [...]
Part 1: Jacques Lacan: Between the Sacred and the Secular
[13] Chapter 1: Conflicted Matter: The Challenge of Secularizing Materialism
§1 Emerging Cracks: The Birth of a Truly Atheistic Materialism
Materialism, the brute insistence that there is nothing alien to matter, appears to offer no place whatsoever to anything even vaguely intangible or spiritual. It denies that there are ineffable entities or forms set apart from the immanence of incarnate beings. Badiou characterizes this basic position of vehement opposition vis-à-vis all varieties of idealism as "a philosophy of assault." More specifically, materialist philosophies throughout history exhibit a common hostility toward religiosity insofar as the latter appeals to the supposed existence of some sort of extraphysical, immaterial dimension of transcendent (ultra-)being. From Lucretius to La Mettrie and beyond, the natural world of the material universe is celebrated, in an anti-Platonic vein, as a self-sufficient sphere independent of ideas or gods. A properly materialistic ontology posits matter alone—nothing more, nothing less.
And yet, despite the clarity and simplicity of this rejection of spirituality in all its guises, a rejection functioning as an essential defining feature of any and every species of materialism, periodic critical reminders seemingly are necessary in order to ward off the recurrent tendency to backslide into idealism through blurring the lines of demarcation between materialism and what it rejects. A century ago, V. I. Lenin, in his 1908 text Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, issues just such a reminder [....] One of [the book's] priceless virtues is Lenin's unflinching insistence on the indissoluble, black-and-white border strictly separating materialism from idealism. Lenin tirelessly uncovers, exposes, and critiques a number of subtle and not-so-subtle efforts to disguise and pass off idealist notions as materialist concepts, efforts to soften the stinging antispiritualist, irreligious [14] virulence of this ruthlessly combative philosophical stance. Just as Søren Kierkegaard maintains that agnosticism ultimately cannot distinguish itself from atheism—for Kierkegaard, as for Blaise Pascal, not choosing to believe (i.e., agnosticism) is still tantamount to choosing not to believe (i.e., atheism)—so too does Lenin contend that there is no genuine middle ground between materialism and idealism, with any compromise or negotiation between the two amounting, in the de facto end, to a disingenuous, obfuscating betrayal of the materialist position in favor of idealist tendencies.
To resuscitate the heart of materialism today, another such Leninist gesture is urgently called for in light of recent philosophical trends seeking to render materialist thinking compatible with such orientations as Platonism and Judeo-Christianity. Materialism is at risk of, as it were, losing its soul in these confused current circumstances, since it is nothing without its denial of the existence of deities or any other ephemeral pseudothings utterly unrelated to the realness of the beings of matter. Succinctly stated, a nonatheistic materialism is a contradiction in terms. When, for instance, the objects/referents of theology, mathematics, and structuralism are spoken of as though they are equally as "material" as the entities and phenomena addressed by the natural sciences, something is terribly wrong. At a minimum, this muddle-headed situation raises a red flag signaling that the word "matter" has become practically meaningless. Dangerous dilutions of materialism, dilutions resembling the then contemporary trends of Machism and empirio-monism denounced by Lenin in 1908 as means for weakening and subverting materialism, are part of the contemporary scene in the theoretical humanities. Another materialist effort at assault is required once more, a stubborn, unsubtle effort that single-mindedly refuses to be distracted and derailed from its task by engaging with the seductive nuances and intricacies of elaborate systems of spiritualism however honestly displayed or deceptively hidden. In light of Lacan's insistence that the truth is sometimes stupid—one easily can miss it and veer off into errors and illusions under the influence of the assumption that it must be profoundly elaborate and obscure—a tactical, healthy dose of pig-headed, close-minded stupidity on behalf of materialism might be warranted nowadays.
Strangely enough, in a session of his famous seventeenth seminar on The Other Side of Psychoanalysis given during the academic year 1969–1970, Lacan utters some rather cryptic remarks that predict a resurfacing of the need for a new purifying purge of the ranks of materialism, enabling the line separating it from idealism to be drawn yet again in a bold, unambiguous fashion. Therein, he advances a surprising thesis—"materialists are the only authentic believers" (this thesis is later [15] echoed in the twentieth seminar of 1972–1973 as well as foreshadowed by discussions in the seventh seminar of 1959–1960 about the concealed presence of God in evolutionism). Of course, what renders this quite counterintuitive claim initially so odd is the deeply ingrained association between materialism and atheism. At its very core, does not materialism constitute a rude, violent attack upon the conceptual foundations of all religions? Do not the diverse manifestations of this philosophical discipline—in 1970, Lacan clarifies that the materialism he has in mind here is that of the eighteenth century in particular (i.e. that elaborated by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Denis Diderot, and the Marquis de Sade, among others)—share an antipathy toward faith in anything above and beyond the de-spiritualized immanence of the material universe? This very last word ("universe"), insofar as it implies a vision of material being as the integrated organic totality of a cosmic One-All, contains the key to decoding productively Lacan's startling assertion that the materialism usually hovering around and informing the natural sciences—the naturalism espoused during the eighteenth century arguably continues to serve, more often than not, as (to quote Althusser) the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists—represents a disguised body of religious belief despite itself.
Through the example of Sade (in particular, select passages to be found in his Juliette), Lacan explains that the materialists of the eighteenth century end up making matter into God (and doing so, it might be noted, in certain ways resonating with the ancient atomism of Lucretius). Material being becomes something eternal, indestructible, and omnipotent (the first two of these three features allegedly being embodied, in Sade's writings, by the immortal body of the torturer's victim, a fantasized flesh able to endure indefinitely an infinite amount of pain). Lacan views the Sadian flux of nature, with its intense processes of becoming, as the basis for a monotheism-in-bad-faith resting on foundations not so different from those of the enshrined religions spurned by the ostensibly atheist libertine. Apart from Sade's views on nature, Lacan also emphasizes again and again how Sade's practical philosophy (specifically his ethics) involves the pseudotransgressions of a perverse subject; this subject's vain, petty pleasures either secretly strive to sustain the existence of a God-like big Other serving as a locus of moral judgment in relation to his or her perverse activities or pretend to be placed at the service of this Other's enjoyment. In the case of Sade avec Lacan, the supposedly vanquishing divinity of monotheistic religion returns with a vengeance in the guise of a system of nature at one with itself, a cosmos harmoniously constituting the sum total of reality (much like the murdered primal father of Freud's Totem and Taboo, who is endowed with [16] even greater potency when reincarnated in the form of a body of prohibitory laws). God is far from dead so long as nature is reduced to being the receptacle for and receiver of his attributes and powers. It is not much of a leap to propose that the scientism accompanying modern natural science as a whole, up and through the present, tends to be inclined to embrace the nonempirical supposition of the ultimate cohesion of the material universe as a self-consistent One-All (hence, in the twenty-fourth seminar, Lacan's assertion that science, even in the current era, relies upon "the idea of God"). In this resides its hidden theosophical nucleus. Lacan's claims regarding Sade and eighteenth-century materialisms, materialisms still alive and well today, imply a challenge to which a novel contemporary constellation involving alliances between factions within philosophy, science, and psychoanalysis can and must rise: the challenge of formulating a fully secularized materialism, a Godless ontology of material being nonetheless able to account for those things whose (apparent) existence repeatedly lures thinkers onto the terrain of idealist metaphysics.
§2 "You've Got to Break Some Eggs to Make an Hommelette": Lacan and the Materialist Legacies of Eighteenth-Century France
Sade isn't the only example of the disavowed or repressed religiosity Lacan imputes to the materialism of eighteenth-century France. The contemporaries La Mettrie and Diderot are, in peculiar manners, more productive to examine here. The Lacan of the 1950s is understandably rather critical of La Mettrie's mechanical materialism, despite sympathetically viewing La Mettrie as a precursor of cybernetics (of course, cybernetics is the parent discipline of what comes to be cognitive science—and, at the time, Lacan sees cybernetics as moving along lines similar to his antihumanist accounts of the symbolic-linguistic structuring of the unconscious and subjectivity). In particular, he is wary of La Mettrie's grounding of the human creature's machine-like being in the physical stuff of the natural, organic body. For Lacan, psychoanalysis, starting with Freud himself and continuing through ego psychology and object-relations theory, recurrently expresses the craving for the reassurance that there's a solid biological foundation (as bodily energy, instinctual forces, etc.) underpinning the conceptual scaffolding of metapsychology. Due to this craving, something akin to the mechanistic materialism of La Mettrie allegedly exerts an attractive pull on the imaginations of analysts. Lacan is opposed here not so much to the mechanistic [17] depiction of humanity—during this early period of le Séminaire, he often portrays his quasi-structuralist antihumanism as likewise, so to speak, in-humanizing human beings such that they come to resemble machines run by the programs of impersonal symbol systems—but to the naturalizing materialism of La Mettrie (and, by extension, the Diderot who unreservedly tethers the soul [l'âme] to the body). He contends that analysts who surrender to the temptation to hypothesize biological grounds for the phenomena addressed by analysis succumb to an illusion, misrecognizing the Symbolic dimension of the non-biological, structural dynamics of signifiers as the Real dimension of the natural flesh of the human animal. From a perspective concerned with the distinction between materialism and idealism, it seems that Badiou is not without a certain amount of justification for accusing this Lacan of "idéalinguisterie," an antimaterialist, macro-level idealism of the symbolic order in which a transindividual, semidematerialized formal network autonomously dictates the functioning of its subjected subjects.
However, La Mettrie's materialism merits closer examination in light of my agenda to forge a thoroughly atheistic materialism using select resources from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the natural sciences. On the one hand, La Mettrie cannot be exculpated in the face of charges (leveled by Lacan, among others) that he promotes a vulgar naturalism according to which the only real reality is that of physical bodies. He is indeed largely guilty of striking such a stance. And yet, on the other hand, despite his endorsement of a reductive monism of unified, conflict-free corporeal substance—La Mettrie speaks of everything as having been shaped out of "but one dough" and of "the material unity of man"—he subsequently veers, somewhat inconsistently, in the direction of a Spinozistic dual-aspect monism (the inconsistency being the fact that Baruch Spinoza's monistic God-substance is neither thinking nor extended substance, with both the ideas of minds and the parts of bodies being two aspects [i.e., "attributes"] of this one neither-mental-nor-physical substance). [...] He goes on to declare that "man is a machine, and ... in the whole universe there is but a single substance differently modified." It is somewhat unclear whether this "single substance" is still strictly corporeal in nature, especially if, as in Spinoza's rationalist metaphysics, "thought" and "matter" are two different modifications of a single, universal substance. Perhaps [18] La Mettrie's 1747 assertions, whether intentionally or unintentionally, open onto the enigma/problem of constructing a materialism that can affirm, at the same time, both a monism of matter as well as a distinction between matter and mind without invoking a God-substance as a medium inexplicably sustaining an all-encompassing unity-in-difference. In this vein, Lenin insists, "That both thought and matter are 'real,' i.e., exist, is true. But to say that thought is material is to make a false step, a step towards confusing materialism and idealism." The difficulty would be to formulate a materialist distinction between the physical and the mental without simply reducing the latter to the former, a difficulty Badiou too identifies when, in his 1982 Theory of the Subject, he depicts materialism as resting on two axioms in tension with each other: first, the monist thesis "There is the One" (i.e., the "thesis of identity"), meaning that, ontologically speaking, there is only matter as "the primitive unity of being"; and, second, the posited hegemony that seems to contradict the first monist thesis by maintaining that "There is the Two" (i.e., the dualist thesis that there is a distinction between that which is material and that which is not). Or, as the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter admits, neither monism nor dualism is an unproblematic ontological option. Anyhow, apropos La Mettrie, Lacan would point out that what still remains religious in his thinking is the insistence on the fundamental self-consistency of nature as an undivided cosmic totality.
Diderot's 1769 D'Alembert's Dream contains an explicit affirmation of the unified oneness of a natural All as the sole real being to be hypothesized by a defensible ontology. Through the mouth of d'Alembert, Diderot proclaims:
In the context of a discussion of philosophy and religion apropos eighteenth-century French materialism, one cannot pass over in silence the figure of the egg forcefully invoked by Diderot in D'Alembert's Dream. After discussing with d'Alembert an imagined thinking clavichord, a "philosopher-instrument" akin to La Mettrie's machine-man, Diderot cries out, "Look at this egg: with it you can overthrow all the schools of theology and all the churches in the world." Given Lacan's contention regarding the displaced religious beliefs allegedly harbored by the superficially irreligious rhetoric of these eighteenth-century discourses drawing on the sciences of their time, one might take Diderot's exclamation with a grain or two of salt. Furthermore, the fact that this same egg-example features in the entry for "Spinozist" in the Encyclopédie adds to such Lacanian suspicions (despite, admittedly, the many philosophical and historical complications associated with classifying Spinoza as a religious thinker and his omnipresent God as at all related to the deities of the mainstream monotheistic religions). Nonetheless, Diderot is not entirely incorrect to see in his egg a vision of an explosive materialism with devastating implications for theosophical doctrines resting upon any God as an enveloping, self-consistent One-All, be these beliefs avowed (as in religion) or disavowed (as in eighteenth-century mechanistic materialism).
For Diderot, the significance of an egg is that it purportedly embodies a point of transition from what seems to be inanimate and insensate (i.e., the egg itself) to what is readily acknowledged as animate and sentient (i.e., the creature born out of the egg). He concludes that, in order to explain this apparently miraculous genesis of perceiving and feeling life out of what looks to be lifeless, inert matter, one must "entertain a simple hypothesis that explains everything—sensitivity as a property common to all matter or as a result of the organization of matter." The two prongs of this hypothesis are not the same or equivalent claims: the former careens in the direction of a sort of pan-psychism positing sentience as an element ubiquitously distributed across the entire material universe, whereas the latter (as will be seen later) points in the direction of secular(izing) paths subsequently traversed by the life sciences in general and the neurosciences in particular. From a Lacanian [21] standpoint, the religious impulse still operative in Diderot's supposedly anti-religious gloss on the example of the egg is manifested by the insistence upon a smooth continuity between different types and states of matter, an imagined continuity behind which lurks the specter of being as one vast cosmic wholeness (and, obviously, this religious-spiritualist impulse is further revealed by the flirtation with pan-psychism).
The atheistic potentials of Diderot's egg reside in two features of this object: one, eggs create the appearance of a sudden emergence (or, apropos the egg as a metaphor for the rapport between matter and mind, this also involves the emergence of appearance itself); two, emergences from eggs require cracks (i.e., the splitting open and shattering of eggshells). Regardless of the authorial intentions of Diderot circa 1769—Diderot's pseudoemergentism ultimately posits a supposed continuity (rather than discontinuity) underlying the transformative dynamics of life—this image-example of the egg thus shelters within itself a picture of processes in which antagonisms, fissures, and tensions within the Real of material being provide openings through and out of which explode phenomena and structures whose genesis marks an abrupt rupture with what came before (i.e., the prior movements and substances, with their laws and logics, preceding this discontinuous emergence). And, like Diderot, Lacan too has an egg in hand, namely, his "hommelette" starring in the well-known myth of the lamella. In line with the broader psychoanalytic motif of subjectivity as fractured and split, this broken man-egg (or, more accurately, man-omelet) can be construed, among other things and specifically with reference to the egg of Diderot, as a metaphor for the rough edges of natural discontinuities that allow for and enable the materially emergent subject's denaturalizing of its own nature.
On several occasions, Lacan proposes that, whereas the smooth material-temporal continuum of evolutionary theory (like the Spinoza-inspired materialisms of Sade, La Mettrie, and Diderot) is a fundamentally theological notion despite its outwardly atheistic appearance (i.e., nature takes on the features and qualities of God), only the originally Christian notion of creation ex nihilo, of abrupt emergences that cannot be reduced to or predicated by a prior substantial ground, is appropriate to a thinking that really is done with all things religious. He maintains that "the creationist perspective is the only one that allows one to glimpse the possibility of the radical elimination of God," and that "a strictly atheist thought adopts no other perspective than that of 'creationism.'" At this point, the obvious question to be asked and answered is: What does Lacan see as the essence of atheism proper?
On three particular occasions during the course of his teaching, [22] Lacan provides exemplary explanations for what he, as a psychoanalyst, understands to be the true core of an atheistic stance. In a 1963 session of the tenth seminar, he raises the questions of whether practicing analysts should themselves be atheists and whether patience who still believe in God at the end of their analyses can be considered adequately analyzed for the purposes of determining when to terminate treatment. Referring to obsessional neurotics, with their unconscious fantasies of an omniscient Other observing each and every one of their little thoughts and actions, Lacan implies that such analysands would need to move in the direction of atheism in order to be relieved of those symptoms tied to this belief in the "universal eye" ("oeil universel") of a virtual, godlike observer of their existences. He then immediately goes on to assert that "such is the true dimension of atheism. An atheist would be someone who has succeeded at eliminating the fantasy of the All-Powerful." Interestingly, right after this remark, he mentions Diderot and casts into doubt whether this exemplary French materialist really can be considered a true atheist. Insofar as Diderot, along with his fellow materialists of the period, replaces an all-powerful God with an all-powerful Nature—this Nature is also all-knowing to the extent that it is made into the repository of every possible answer to any query capable of satisfactory "scientific" formulation—he cannot be said to be authentically atheist in the eyes of Lacan. Lacan's version of the experience of analysis involves a "psychoanalytic ascesis" entailing "atheism conceived of as the negation of the dimension of a presence of the all-powerful at the base of the world." That is to say, traversing the fantasy of an omnipotent and omniscient big Other, whether this Other be conceived of as God, Nature, the analyst, or whatever, is an unavoidable rite of passage in the concluding moments of an analysis seen through to a fitting end.
Lacan rearticulates these indications regarding atheism even more decisively and forcefully in the sixteenth and seventeenth seminars. In the sixteenth seminar, Lacan alleges that being an atheist requires putting into question the category of the sujet supposé savoir [translation: the subject supposed to know] (not only as incarnated in the transference-laden figure of the analyst, but also as any Other presumed to vouch for the maintenance of an overarching horizon of final, consistent meaning). Without letting fall and enduring the dissipation of the position of the subject supposed to know, one remains, according to Lacan, mired in idealism and theology; he equates belief in such an Other-subject with belief in God. As Lacan succinctly states, "A true atheism, the only one that would merit the name, is that which would result from the putting in question of the subject supposed to know." The following academic year, in the seventeenth seminar, he bluntly asserts that "the pinnacle of psychoanalysis is well and truly [23] atheism." Whereas the Lacan of the tenth seminar indirectly insinuates that undergoing the end of analysis (including traversing those fantasies linked to the transferential status of the analyst as an instantiation of an Other supposedly "in the know") results in an atheistic loss of faith in any kind of Almighty, here, in 1970, he directly declares this outcome to mark the apex of the analytic experience.
§3 Toward a Conflict Ontology: Freud, Mao, and the Ubiquity of Antagonism
Apart from clinical practice, what makes psychoanalysis, at the most foundational theoretical level, a Godless discipline? More specifically, how might psychoanalytic theory make a crucial contribution to the formulation of a scientifically informed materialism that doesn't rest upon an either implicit or explicit set of theosophical-ontological suppositions regarding some sort of internally integrated On-All? The key Lacanian slogan for an atheistic materialism might appear to be his delcaration that "le grand Autre n'existe pas." The nonexistence of the big Other is indeed a tenet central to Lacan's above-delineated characterizations of genuine atheism. However, this tenet by itself doesn't guarantee a materialism that would be fully secularized according to Lacan's own criteria for what would count as a thoroughly God-forsaking ontology. Although the absence of the big Other precludes imagining an ordering of reality from above, it doesn't foreclose the possibility of hypothesizing the return of a mellifluously orchestrated material universe, a unified natural world, through bottom-up dynamics and processes. A mechanistic materialism akin to that of La Mettrie or Diderot readily could resurface via such hypotheses (as Lacan would remind readers at this juncture, evolutionism is not shy about positing a continuity from below causally enchaining together vast, web-like networks of organisms and environments—God lives on, even if not in a traditional, top-down embodiment). To support an atheistic materialism, the declaration "The big Other does not exist" requires supplementation by another thesis: in the absence of every version of this Other, what remains lacks any guarantee of consistency right down to the bedrock of ontological fundaments. Strife, potential or actual, reigns supreme as a negativity permeating the layers and strata of material being.
The positing of conflict as ubiquitous and primary is precisely what makes psychoanalysis a Godless discipline. In, for instance, both The Future of an Illusion and his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, [24] Freud depicts the antireligious thrust of analysis as merely of a piece with a larger demystifying scientific worldview. Apart from Lacan's arguments to the contrary sketched above (i.e., the materialisms of the natural sciences are not automatically atheist, even when presented as such), the subsequent course of sociocultural history also contains ample evidence that the advancement and coming-to-power of the Weltanschauung of the sciences is far from having succeeded at shunting religions to the marginalized fringes of collective life. If anything, rather than the religion-science relationship being a zero-sum balance in which the waxing of one entails the proportional waning of the other, the aggressive incursions of the sciences routinely have met with a correspondingly robust counter-aggression from religious quarters.
Lacan's contentions that religion is anything but finished are based upon this observed persistence of religiosity in a scientific world. He often discusses religion in the context of its relations to both science and psychoanalysis (and he at least agrees with Freud that analysis invariably results in a demystification effect in relation to religion). According to Lacan, the religious provides a shock absorber of meaning (sens) cushioning the blows issuing forth from the inroads made into the meaningless material Real by the scientific—with this being necessary when neither of the fetishes furnished by science, neither its imagined hypothetical God's-eye view as the regulative ideal of exhaustive explanation nor its numerous by-products in the form of technogadget toys, proves to be satisfactory enough. Incidentally, especially given the seemingly unstoppable, death-drive-like march of science coupled with religion's role as the provider of sufficient sense to sustain those caught up in this march, psychoanalysis is unlikely to have much luck gaining a hearing amidst the breathless hustle-and-bustle of this ever-accelerating frenzy. Like science, psychoanalysis divests reality of meaning through revealing the nonsensical Real composing and shaping this reality. But, unlike science, it refuses to offer the compensations of either the promise of total knowledge or objects of pleasurable consumption. In this situation, analysis cannot hope to compete with the mass appeal of religion, particularly under the conditions of late capitalism and the ways in which science and religion interact within it. Nonetheless, what makes psychoanalysis, this theoretical-practical configuration quietly limping alongside the interlinked movements conjoining science and religion, utterly atheistic is not, as per Freud, its allegiance to the Enlightenment worldview of scientific-style ideologies. Rather, its placement of antagonisms and oppositions at the very heart of material being, its depiction of nature itself as divided by conflicts rendering it a fragmented, not-whole non-One, is what constitutes the truly irreligious core of psychoanalytic metapsychology as a force for merciless desacralization.
[25] Conflict is an omnipresent motif/structure in Freud's corpus. However, in some of his later, post-1920 texts, what becomes much clearer and more apparent is that, from a Freudian perspective, irreconcilable discord and clashes arise from antagonistic splits embedded in the material foundations of human being. Although there are numerous problems with the fashions in which Freud biologizes psychical life, there is also something invaluable in his naturalization of conflict in terms of the war between Eros and the Todestrieb raging within the bodily id, namely, a germinal ontological insight that shouldn't suffer the fate of the proverbial baby thrown out with the bathwater of Freud's scientistic biological reductionism. Freudian psychoanalytic metapsychology here contains the nascent potentials for the formulation, in conjunction with select resources extracted from today's natural sciences, of a conflict ontology, a theory of the immanent-monistic emergence of a disharmonious ontological-material multitude or plurality. [...]
The basic ingredients for creating a new, entirely atheistic materialism are to be drawn not only from Freud's tacit indications pointing in the direction of a possible conflict ontology—Mao Tse-Tung's version of the distinction between mechanistic and dialectical materialisms is of great importance in this task too. For Engels, the mechanistic materialism of eighteenth-century France is limited by two interrelated flaws: a reductionist neglect of various logics other than those depicted in the laws of mechanics proposed by the physical sciences of the time, as well as a resulting inability to grasp the dynamics of processes of historical becoming in an ever-changing universe (these flaws, as Engels concedes, are necessary features of a materialism grounded in a historical context in which Newtonian mechanical physics is the cutting edge of the natural sciences). In his 1937 essay "On Contradiction," Mao further illuminates the nature of the distinction between these two materialist orientations:
What makes Maoist dialectical materialism particularly useful in the present context is its emphasis on the pervasiveness of dynamic contradiction, even down to the raw flesh and bare bones of nature itself. More specifically, Mao's account of causality in the context of elaborating his form of dialectical materialism can be interpreted as putting in place a foundational requirement to be met by any materialism acknowledging some sort of distinction between matter and mind (i.e., any nonmechanistic, noneliminative materialism). In Theory of the Subject, Badiou demands a materialism that includes, as per the title of this book, "a [27] theory of the subject." Such a materialism would have to be quite distinct from mechanistic or eliminative materialisms, insofar as neither of the latter two leave any space open, the clearing of some breathing room, for subjectivity as something distinguishable from the fleshy stuff of the natural world. However, a materialist theory of the subject, in order to adhere to one of the principal tenets of any truly materialist materialism (i.e., the ontological axiom according to which matter is the sole ground), must be able to explain how subjectivity emerges out of materiality—and, correlative to this, how materiality must be configured in and of itself so that such an emergence is a real possibility.
This explanatory requirement is precisely one of the issues at stake in Mao's discussions of internal and external causes. [...]
Along Maoist lines, constructing a theory of subjectivity entirely compatible with the strictures of a thoroughly materialist ontology (a project called for by Badiou himself) necessitates, in the combined lights of psychoanalytic metapsychology and dialectical materialism, two endeavors: first, delineating the materiality of human being as conflicted from within, as a point of condensing intersection for a plethora of incompletely harmonized fragments; second, exploring how the endogenous causes of these conflicts immanent to the materiality of human being can and do interact with exogenous causal influences. As Mao rightly underscores, the latter by themselves (i.e., purely external variables) are ineffective. What makes the kinetics of dialectical materialism possible is an external activation of potentials intrinsic to the internal configurations of certain beings.
§4 From Dialectical to Transcendental Materialism: Malabou, Neuroscience, and Images of Matter Transformed
The groundbreaking work of Catherine Malabou brilliantly brings to the fore these very issues through a simultaneous engagement with both dialectical materialism and cognitive neuroscience. Echoes of those aspects of Maoist thought mentioned above can be heard in her insistence, in the context of discussing Hegel's dialectic, Heidegger's destruction, and Derrida's deconstruction, that externally overriding something requires this thing's complicity in terms of its "plastic" inner structure, a structure embodying the "schizoid consistency of the ultra-metaphysical [29] real" as the nondialectical ontological origin/ground of dialectics (i.e., being itself as inconsistent and conflict-ridden). Entities must possess the proper "ontological metabolism" in order to be open to and affected by encounters with alterities. Malabou's 1996 doctoral thesis on Hegel, The Future of Hegel, concludes with a reference to the life sciences as offering the resources for the development of an ontology ready to meet the explanatory-theoretical demands pronounced by the dialectical materialist tradition in ways that this tradition itself thus far hasn't been able to accomplish on its own.
These 1996 gestures in the direction of natural science come to full fruition in Malabou's revolutionary 2004 book What Should We Do with Our Brain?—this title echoes the French translation of Lenin's What Is to Be Done? (Que faire?)—a book centered on a reading of today's cognitive neurosciences as spontaneously generating and substantiating a dialectical materialist ontology (and this whether they realize it or not). Without the space presently to do adequate justice to the entire range of complex, convincing arguments advanced in this text, several points made by Malabou deserve to be noted here as stipulations for a thoroughly secularized materialism sensitive to the breakthroughs and insights achieved by the sciences of nature. Focusing on the biological level of human being, she correctly notes that the widespread notion of genetic determinism, according to which the physical body is entirely shaped and controlled by genes, is simply inaccurate, a falsifying distortion of the facts. The truth, rather, is that a "genetic indetermination" (i.e., genes determine human beings not to be entirely determined by genes) and the neural plasticity linked to this indetermination ensure the openness of vectors and logics not anticipated or dictated by the bump-and-grind efficient causality of physical particles alone. In other words, one need not fear that bringing biology into the picture of a materialist theory of the subject leads inexorably to a reductive materialism of a mechanistic and/or eliminative sort; such worries are utterly unwarranted, based exclusively on an unpardonable ignorance of several decades of paradigm-shifting discoveries in the life sciences. No intellectually responsible philosophical materialism can justify ignoring the evidence unearthed in these highly productive fields of adjacent research—unless, of course, what is secretly or unconsciously desired is a spiritualist ideology disguising itself in the faded-fashion garb of a now awfully dated antinaturalism.
A chorus of voices on the empirical side of discussions of the brain (i.e., neuroscientists and cognitive scientists) speak as one in support of the basic, fundamental premises underlying the effort underway here to appropriate the resources of the neurosciences for the delineation [30] of a reinvigorated materialist ontology (an appropriation informed and guided by a combination of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology and the resources of European philosophy from the end of the eighteenth century through the present). To begin with, not only do some researchers in the neurosciences see the notorious nature-nurture distinction as dialectical—it has even been suggested that the very distinction itself is invalid due to the utter inextricability of what is referred to by these two inadequate terms and the irresolvable undecidability that thereby results (in the area of psychopathology, Kandel, a vocal neuroscientific advocate on behalf of a new rapprochement between psychodynamics and the life sciences, suggests scrapping the old distinction between biological and nonbiological mental disorders). Most of the resistance to having anything to do with the life sciences, a resistance widespread within the worlds of Lacanianism and continental philosophy, is due to the misperception that embracing these sciences inevitably leads to the crudest forms of reductionism (i.e., genetic determinism, epiphenomenalism, etc.). But, as Benjamin Libet observes, vulgar reductive materialism is scientism (as pseudoscientific ideology), not science.
In fact, these scientists are at pains to stress that their disciplines are not rigid frameworks within which the natural, on the one hand, and the cultural-historical-social, on the other hand, are to be strictly opposed, with the fixed, frozen essences of the former alway trumping the subservient (epi)phenomena of the latter. As Lesley Rogers puts it, "the idea of biology as immutable is largely incorrect." And, as Joseph LeDoux explains, a material-neuronal conception of the subject neither is opposed to nor demands the elimination of theories of nonbiological subjectivity. There are numerous arguments for why the neurosciences and the biology on which they rest are not reductive, only some of which can be outlined briefly in the context of the current discussion. The dialectic between innate nature and acquired nurture, if one still can use these terms, permeates even the level of genetics (and, much reductionism and the opposition it generates lean on a fatally flawed picture of genetics). LeDoux helpfully points out that nature-nurture interaction is operative from the very beginnings of life, given that the developing embryo takes shape in a womb connected to a maternal body that itself is entangled in vast mediating networks of more-than-biological configurations and interactions (not to mention the Lacanian analytic caveat that both conception and what leads up to it are woven into elaborate, knotted webs of influential factors conscious and unconscious). Although the genotype sets in place certain loose, broad parameters establishing a wide bandwidth of possibilities and permutations for what [31] the phenotype can actualize/express (what Changeux calls a "genetic envelope"), in no way could it be said in any straightforward manner that anatomy is destiny (to invoke an oft-misinterpreted Freudian one-liner). Especially within the brain, the genetic is significantly modulated by the epigenetic (i.e., experience, learning, socialization, etc.). Furthermore, such complications are not confined exclusively to the "nature" half of the nature-nurture distinction—the life sciences are also in the process of calling into question the "nurture" half, a process prompted by a realization that the notion of "environment" is incredibly hazy, insufficiently precise to serve as a concept for rigorous reflection. Considering these rudimentary, ground-zero truths in the life sciences, no sort of standard reductionism is in the least bit tenable insofar as the mind-bogglingly complex number of variables converging on a multi-determined brain and body render in advance any one-sided depiction of these matters intellectually bankrupt.
Furthermore, certain aspects of genetics properly conceived are crucial for an adequate appreciation of the neurosciences. The link Malabou mobilizes, in her discussions of the philosophical implications of brain studies, between what she accurately describes as "genetic indetermination" and neural plasticity is indeed empirically well-established. The brain is genetically programmed to be open and receptive to reprogramming (which includes alterations of gene expression at the phenotypic level) through learning experiences in relation to the contextual vicissitudes of exogenous contingencies. This determined lack of determination, this preprogramming for reprogramming, is an important aspect of what is meant by characterizing the brain as "plastic." Neuroplasticity is considered by those working in the life sciences to be an incredibly significant feature of the development and functioning of human brains. LeDoux identifies the plastic synaptic connections of neurons, hardwired for rewiring, to be the precise material points where nature and nurture collide, the crossroads at which genetics and epigenetics are folded into assemblages that are theoretically unsliceable [sic] tangles of hyperdense complexity. He even goes so far as to conjecture that neuroplasticity in humans is an "exaptation," namely, something that starts out as an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation in response to certain environmental pressures and problems but eventually becomes, so to speak, transfunctionalized, derailed from its initial means-ends pathways and expropriated for other projects that are nonnatural vis-à-vis strict evolutionary considerations. (However, LeDoux's use of the term 'exaptation' deviates from its meaning as initially defined by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth S. Vrba.)
At a more general level (and in line with the previously [32] enumerated requirements of a Lacan-inspired atheistic materialism), Malabou describes the "ontological explosion" of the mental out of the neuronal—"out of" is intended in two senses, both as immanently arising from and as autonomously exceeding through escape from—as event-like, a sharp break requiring (as Mao would put it) the "internal causes" of the ontological-material plasticity of the human biological body. More-than-biological "external causes" (again in the Maoist sense) are able to have their mediating effects on individuals thanks not only to bodily plasticity in Malabou's precise sense—for her, the plastic designates, at the same time, both the receptivity of the malleable and the resistance of the congealed, namely, a literal contradiction in the fragmented flesh—but also because of the antagonisms and discordances materialized in the embodied being of humans. She maintains that "the historico-cultural shaping of of the self is not possible except starting from this natural and primary economy of contradiction." She proceeds to claim that "there is a cerebral conflictuality, there is a tension between the neuronal and the mental" (i.e., although the mental emerges out of the neuronal, the former comes to be at odds with the latter—this immanent genesis of the thereafter-transcendent-as-separate is the core concern of transcendental materialism). Malabou pleads for a "new materialism," a "reasonable materialism" that neither indefensibly ignores the sciences of material being (especially the neurosciences as relevant to a materialist theory of subjectivity unafraid of [...] dirtying its hands with actual, factual matter) nor uncritically accepts the ideological distortions of these sciences by those seeking to exaggerate one side of plasticity at the expense of the other (i.e., to promote pseudoscientific visions of humanity either as rigidly fixed in place by an evolutionary-genetic-neural determinism or as infinitely flexible according to the insistence of the social constructionism arising from late-capitalist economic-political machinations). For Malabou, as for me, "a reasonable materialism seems to us to be one which poses that the natural contradicts itself and that the thought is the fruit of this contradiction."
§5 A Weak Nature, and Nothing More: The True Formula of a Fully Atheistic Materialism
At this juncture, closely examining Lacan's 1975 interview entitled (by Jacques-Alain Miller) "The Triumph of Religion" ("Le triomphe de la religion") in light of the preceding discussions concerning the philosophical establishment of an atheistic materialism shaped around the conjunction of metapsychology and the neurosciences will be especially [33] fruitful. Early on in this text, Lacan speaks of a difference between "that which goes" ("ce qui marche") and "that which does not go" ("ce qui ne marche pas"), the former being the "world" (as the normal run of things in familiar Imaginary-Symbolic reality) and the latter being the Real (as excluded from and disruptive of the running of this reality). He notes that psychoanalysts concern themselves with this Real as what does not fit into the smooth movements of quotidian reality. The analyst's presence testifies to this Real-that-does-not-go, quietly witnessing and marking those occurrences in which it surfaces (such as, during an analysis, in unintended double-entendres, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, acting out, and so on). He or she occupies this position and remains there as a "symptom" of that which resists going with the flow of the everyday world. However, a cultural "cure" for psychoanalysis, as itself a symptom of the "discontent of civilization of which Freud has spoken," is readily available: religion as a means of repressing the symptoms (including analysis itself) of the unworldly Real that disrupts worldly reality.
Lacan goes on to warn against equivocating between the symptom and the Real. He argues thus:
Toward the end of "The Triumph of Religion," Lacan pronounces a couple of additional utterances regarding the Real. After denying that he is a philosopher proposing an ontology—my philosophically guided ontologization of the version of the Real presently under discussion thereby deviates from Lacan's position in this respect—he emphatically rejects the suggestion, made by the interviewer, that his register of the Real is akin to Kant's sphere of noumena. Lacan protests:
In two coauthored articles, Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano provide exemplary, superlative readings of some of the crucial subtleties contained in "The Triumph of Religion." In that text, Lacan, despite his openly avowed atheism, perplexingly declares Christianity to be "the one true religion." Chiesa and Toscano helpfully clarify that what this actually means is that, from a Lacanian perspective, the Christian religion is the least false of the various religions. The reason for this has to do with Lacan's earlier assertions to the effect that whereas evolutionary theory unwittingly continues to be theosophical by virtue of its reliance upon an omnipotent, all-embracing material-historical continuum (i.e., a seamless, uninterrupted One-All of Nature), creationism, especially the Christian notion of creation ex nihilo, inadvertently opens the door to the founding of a materialism without God:
In "The Triumph of Religion," Lacan speaks of various cures for anxiety. Specifically, he suggests that a range of conceptions of humanity function in this capacity: "Against anxiety, there are heaps of remedies, in particular a certain number of 'conceptions of man,' of what man is." This applies not only to religion, which Lacan has in mind in this context—it is also relevant to a speciously scientific scientism that genuine science is in the process of demolishing. More specifically, misrepresentations of the "man of science" as either inflexibly determined by the efficient mechanical causes of evolution and genetics or flexibly malleable as an infinitely constructible and reconstructible social, cultural, and linguistic being are often promoted by the biopolitical ideologies of "democratic materialism" described so well by Badiou. A materialism based on science as opposed to scientism and faithful to the furthest-reaching consequences of Lacan's dictum according to which no big Other of any sort exists (including almighty Nature as well as God) has no place in it for the different pseudoscientific images of humanity advertised by today's reigning biopowers.
The time has come to pronounce the true formula of atheistic materialism: there is just a weak nature, and nothing more. All that exists are heterogeneous ensembles of less-than-fully synthesized material beings, internally conflicted, hodgepodge jumbles of elements-in-tension—and that is it. What appears to be more-than-material (especially subjectivity and everything associated with it) is, ultimately, an index or symptom of the weakness of nature, this Other-less, un-unified ground of being. The apparently more-than-material consists of phenomena flourishing in the nooks and crannies of the strife-saturated, underdetermined matrices of materiality, in the cracks, gaps, and splits of these discrepant material strata.
Fear-driven antinaturalism, responsible for much of the resistance of continental philosophy and European psychoanalysis to a sustained engagement with the life sciences, tacitly accepts the notion of a strong nature as Almighty, as an overdetermining, omnipotent cosmic Substance. If Lacan is indeed correct that the ostensibly atheistic materialists of eighteenth-century France remain, in reality, religious believers despite themselves, then continental European antinaturalists and their followers are also, regardless of whatever they might say, adherents of fideism—they have faith in a natural big Other, even if this faith manifests itself through perverse rejections of and rebellions against [38] this Other. Moreover, such antinaturalists, in accepting the image of a strong nature while simultaneously wanting to preserve the affirmation that there is something in excess of this same nature, are forced to rely upon a spiritualist metaphysics of one sort or another in the form of strict, rigid ontological dualisms (however avowed or disavowed). If an atheist, as Lacan claims, is he or she who acknowledges the nonexistence of the big Other, then anyone accepting an image of natural being as an ultra-powerful One, whether reductionist materialists or their reactive and reactionary opponents, is, in the end, no different in kind than the most fervent of the faithful.
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Source: Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), xiii–38.
It seems to me that this form of thinking should be thoroughly understood especially by priests because it provides a lucid framework to understand the materialist pulses developing in Western culture today; its a-theology should serve via contrast to draw out more sharply the profundity of authentically Catholic thought and how faith affects everything.
It confirms my suspicions about what seems to have been the uncritical assimilation of Continental thought into both Catholic and Protestant theology in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, namely, a blurring of what is proper to materialist and immaterialist worldviews. The results of this attempted appropriation have had, some would argue, disastrous results; others have seen it as a needed liberation from the past. Still others have distinguished theological reactionism to the rise of Enlightenment modernity from a purer form of Medieval theology to which we ought to return and without going so far as to advocate antiquarianism by means of highly speculative reconstructions of very early Christian thought, i.e. being faithful to St. Thomas Aquinas above and beyond the whole mess of modern thought beginning with Descartes.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't say that I am utterly denouncing that there could and should be a conversation of thought, but what actually happened was an immature appropriation was churned out into applied faith that has damaged Catholic culture in the West. The eagerness to apply these new developments, the "New Theology"—hindsight gives us a better examination.
Despite Johnston's rigor, Dr. Simon Wortham's review of Johnston's book (here: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/the-pigs-head) rightly points out that Johnston uses seemingly self-conflicting language in his call for a purge of materialism from religious traces; i.e. Johnston uses deeply religious language to call for a break from religious influence. On the other hand, off the top of my head, two responses to Wortham's criticism can be proffered: 1) perhaps a more sympathetic reading of Johnston's text would imply a tongue-in-cheek style being employed; 2) perhaps it is to a certain degree impossible to avoid the borrowing of language that historically and conceptually is often religiously affiliated, much like it is impossible avoid facing Kant even if one is ignorant of Kant's philosophy.
But actually Johnston's synthesizing of the insights from these thinkers that materialism has often assumed a religious nature is far from being a new insight, nor unique to any of the thinkers he discusses. Christian apologists have noticed the tendency right from the beginning of the Enlightenment. E.g., "To-day we seem to have a humanism which sets out to be itself a religion, and to answer every aspiration, to fulfil [sic] every requirement for the completeness of man" (Gerald Vann, On Being Human [New York, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1934], 10).
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Preface: Clearing the Ground: The First Volume of Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism
[xiii] Lacan also contends, using such examples as eighteenth-century French materialism and Darwinian evolutionary theory, that the sciences of modernity, although ostensibly atheistic, actually are suffused with theological images and sensibilities. These disciplines and their practitioners tend to imagine material Nature in fashions revealing that this fantasized cosmic One-All, this totalizing big Other ruling the entirety of creation with its unbreakable laws, is a thinly veiled replacement for the presumably dead-and-buried God of monotheisms. This unambiguously indicates that, from a Lacanian perspective, the hegemony of the [xiv] religious goes so far as not only to continue competing with the scientific long after early Enlightenment predictions bet on its demise, but even to encompass and shape the seemingly secular and atheistic positions of its self-deceived adversaries delusionally fighting in vain.
Thus, for any materialism indebted to Lacan—this would include the materialisms advocated by Žižek, Badiou, Meillassoux, and me—it is far from enough simply to annex philosophically and speculatively embellish upon the resources and results of one, several, or all of the sciences, be they formal or empirical. In addition, a thoroughgoing theoretical critique of the residual vestiges of religiosity, its lingering ideational and ideological traces, hiding within these fields and their prevailing (self-)interpretations is requisite. Neglecting to carry out this philosophical exorcism dooms any aspiring materialist to remain haunted by ancient specters, to stay in the grip, whether knowingly or not, of stubbornly recalcitrant, resilient ghosts. In Lacan's eyes, an authentically atheistic materialism has yet to be forged (although, especially starting in 1845 with the criticisms of Feuerbachian materialism, Marx and the tradition that comes to bear his name takes giant steps in this direction—admittedly, Lacan tends to overlook most of the Marxist corpus). Žižek, Badiou, and Meillassoux, each in his own way, aspire to accomplish this challenge bequeathed by the French Freud. And yet, as perhaps another symptom of the current conjuncture, the "post-secular" turn in continental philosophy unfortunately has spread from its congenial loci of origin in phenomenology and certain strains of existentialism to infect Lacanian, Žižekian, and Badiouian circles (although Lacan, Žižek, and Badiou are avowed atheists, the fact that they indulge in sophisticated, sensitive treatments of, for instance, Christianity appears to be enough to encourage believers to latch onto them, perhaps attracted by the prospect of being able to dress up their dogmatic faith and rituals in the trendy, sexy attire of the latest avant-garde theoretical vocabularies imported from exotic Europe). [...]
Part 1: Jacques Lacan: Between the Sacred and the Secular
[13] Chapter 1: Conflicted Matter: The Challenge of Secularizing Materialism
§1 Emerging Cracks: The Birth of a Truly Atheistic Materialism
Materialism, the brute insistence that there is nothing alien to matter, appears to offer no place whatsoever to anything even vaguely intangible or spiritual. It denies that there are ineffable entities or forms set apart from the immanence of incarnate beings. Badiou characterizes this basic position of vehement opposition vis-à-vis all varieties of idealism as "a philosophy of assault." More specifically, materialist philosophies throughout history exhibit a common hostility toward religiosity insofar as the latter appeals to the supposed existence of some sort of extraphysical, immaterial dimension of transcendent (ultra-)being. From Lucretius to La Mettrie and beyond, the natural world of the material universe is celebrated, in an anti-Platonic vein, as a self-sufficient sphere independent of ideas or gods. A properly materialistic ontology posits matter alone—nothing more, nothing less.
And yet, despite the clarity and simplicity of this rejection of spirituality in all its guises, a rejection functioning as an essential defining feature of any and every species of materialism, periodic critical reminders seemingly are necessary in order to ward off the recurrent tendency to backslide into idealism through blurring the lines of demarcation between materialism and what it rejects. A century ago, V. I. Lenin, in his 1908 text Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, issues just such a reminder [....] One of [the book's] priceless virtues is Lenin's unflinching insistence on the indissoluble, black-and-white border strictly separating materialism from idealism. Lenin tirelessly uncovers, exposes, and critiques a number of subtle and not-so-subtle efforts to disguise and pass off idealist notions as materialist concepts, efforts to soften the stinging antispiritualist, irreligious [14] virulence of this ruthlessly combative philosophical stance. Just as Søren Kierkegaard maintains that agnosticism ultimately cannot distinguish itself from atheism—for Kierkegaard, as for Blaise Pascal, not choosing to believe (i.e., agnosticism) is still tantamount to choosing not to believe (i.e., atheism)—so too does Lenin contend that there is no genuine middle ground between materialism and idealism, with any compromise or negotiation between the two amounting, in the de facto end, to a disingenuous, obfuscating betrayal of the materialist position in favor of idealist tendencies.
To resuscitate the heart of materialism today, another such Leninist gesture is urgently called for in light of recent philosophical trends seeking to render materialist thinking compatible with such orientations as Platonism and Judeo-Christianity. Materialism is at risk of, as it were, losing its soul in these confused current circumstances, since it is nothing without its denial of the existence of deities or any other ephemeral pseudothings utterly unrelated to the realness of the beings of matter. Succinctly stated, a nonatheistic materialism is a contradiction in terms. When, for instance, the objects/referents of theology, mathematics, and structuralism are spoken of as though they are equally as "material" as the entities and phenomena addressed by the natural sciences, something is terribly wrong. At a minimum, this muddle-headed situation raises a red flag signaling that the word "matter" has become practically meaningless. Dangerous dilutions of materialism, dilutions resembling the then contemporary trends of Machism and empirio-monism denounced by Lenin in 1908 as means for weakening and subverting materialism, are part of the contemporary scene in the theoretical humanities. Another materialist effort at assault is required once more, a stubborn, unsubtle effort that single-mindedly refuses to be distracted and derailed from its task by engaging with the seductive nuances and intricacies of elaborate systems of spiritualism however honestly displayed or deceptively hidden. In light of Lacan's insistence that the truth is sometimes stupid—one easily can miss it and veer off into errors and illusions under the influence of the assumption that it must be profoundly elaborate and obscure—a tactical, healthy dose of pig-headed, close-minded stupidity on behalf of materialism might be warranted nowadays.
Strangely enough, in a session of his famous seventeenth seminar on The Other Side of Psychoanalysis given during the academic year 1969–1970, Lacan utters some rather cryptic remarks that predict a resurfacing of the need for a new purifying purge of the ranks of materialism, enabling the line separating it from idealism to be drawn yet again in a bold, unambiguous fashion. Therein, he advances a surprising thesis—"materialists are the only authentic believers" (this thesis is later [15] echoed in the twentieth seminar of 1972–1973 as well as foreshadowed by discussions in the seventh seminar of 1959–1960 about the concealed presence of God in evolutionism). Of course, what renders this quite counterintuitive claim initially so odd is the deeply ingrained association between materialism and atheism. At its very core, does not materialism constitute a rude, violent attack upon the conceptual foundations of all religions? Do not the diverse manifestations of this philosophical discipline—in 1970, Lacan clarifies that the materialism he has in mind here is that of the eighteenth century in particular (i.e. that elaborated by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Denis Diderot, and the Marquis de Sade, among others)—share an antipathy toward faith in anything above and beyond the de-spiritualized immanence of the material universe? This very last word ("universe"), insofar as it implies a vision of material being as the integrated organic totality of a cosmic One-All, contains the key to decoding productively Lacan's startling assertion that the materialism usually hovering around and informing the natural sciences—the naturalism espoused during the eighteenth century arguably continues to serve, more often than not, as (to quote Althusser) the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists—represents a disguised body of religious belief despite itself.
Through the example of Sade (in particular, select passages to be found in his Juliette), Lacan explains that the materialists of the eighteenth century end up making matter into God (and doing so, it might be noted, in certain ways resonating with the ancient atomism of Lucretius). Material being becomes something eternal, indestructible, and omnipotent (the first two of these three features allegedly being embodied, in Sade's writings, by the immortal body of the torturer's victim, a fantasized flesh able to endure indefinitely an infinite amount of pain). Lacan views the Sadian flux of nature, with its intense processes of becoming, as the basis for a monotheism-in-bad-faith resting on foundations not so different from those of the enshrined religions spurned by the ostensibly atheist libertine. Apart from Sade's views on nature, Lacan also emphasizes again and again how Sade's practical philosophy (specifically his ethics) involves the pseudotransgressions of a perverse subject; this subject's vain, petty pleasures either secretly strive to sustain the existence of a God-like big Other serving as a locus of moral judgment in relation to his or her perverse activities or pretend to be placed at the service of this Other's enjoyment. In the case of Sade avec Lacan, the supposedly vanquishing divinity of monotheistic religion returns with a vengeance in the guise of a system of nature at one with itself, a cosmos harmoniously constituting the sum total of reality (much like the murdered primal father of Freud's Totem and Taboo, who is endowed with [16] even greater potency when reincarnated in the form of a body of prohibitory laws). God is far from dead so long as nature is reduced to being the receptacle for and receiver of his attributes and powers. It is not much of a leap to propose that the scientism accompanying modern natural science as a whole, up and through the present, tends to be inclined to embrace the nonempirical supposition of the ultimate cohesion of the material universe as a self-consistent One-All (hence, in the twenty-fourth seminar, Lacan's assertion that science, even in the current era, relies upon "the idea of God"). In this resides its hidden theosophical nucleus. Lacan's claims regarding Sade and eighteenth-century materialisms, materialisms still alive and well today, imply a challenge to which a novel contemporary constellation involving alliances between factions within philosophy, science, and psychoanalysis can and must rise: the challenge of formulating a fully secularized materialism, a Godless ontology of material being nonetheless able to account for those things whose (apparent) existence repeatedly lures thinkers onto the terrain of idealist metaphysics.
§2 "You've Got to Break Some Eggs to Make an Hommelette": Lacan and the Materialist Legacies of Eighteenth-Century France
Sade isn't the only example of the disavowed or repressed religiosity Lacan imputes to the materialism of eighteenth-century France. The contemporaries La Mettrie and Diderot are, in peculiar manners, more productive to examine here. The Lacan of the 1950s is understandably rather critical of La Mettrie's mechanical materialism, despite sympathetically viewing La Mettrie as a precursor of cybernetics (of course, cybernetics is the parent discipline of what comes to be cognitive science—and, at the time, Lacan sees cybernetics as moving along lines similar to his antihumanist accounts of the symbolic-linguistic structuring of the unconscious and subjectivity). In particular, he is wary of La Mettrie's grounding of the human creature's machine-like being in the physical stuff of the natural, organic body. For Lacan, psychoanalysis, starting with Freud himself and continuing through ego psychology and object-relations theory, recurrently expresses the craving for the reassurance that there's a solid biological foundation (as bodily energy, instinctual forces, etc.) underpinning the conceptual scaffolding of metapsychology. Due to this craving, something akin to the mechanistic materialism of La Mettrie allegedly exerts an attractive pull on the imaginations of analysts. Lacan is opposed here not so much to the mechanistic [17] depiction of humanity—during this early period of le Séminaire, he often portrays his quasi-structuralist antihumanism as likewise, so to speak, in-humanizing human beings such that they come to resemble machines run by the programs of impersonal symbol systems—but to the naturalizing materialism of La Mettrie (and, by extension, the Diderot who unreservedly tethers the soul [l'âme] to the body). He contends that analysts who surrender to the temptation to hypothesize biological grounds for the phenomena addressed by analysis succumb to an illusion, misrecognizing the Symbolic dimension of the non-biological, structural dynamics of signifiers as the Real dimension of the natural flesh of the human animal. From a perspective concerned with the distinction between materialism and idealism, it seems that Badiou is not without a certain amount of justification for accusing this Lacan of "idéalinguisterie," an antimaterialist, macro-level idealism of the symbolic order in which a transindividual, semidematerialized formal network autonomously dictates the functioning of its subjected subjects.
However, La Mettrie's materialism merits closer examination in light of my agenda to forge a thoroughly atheistic materialism using select resources from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the natural sciences. On the one hand, La Mettrie cannot be exculpated in the face of charges (leveled by Lacan, among others) that he promotes a vulgar naturalism according to which the only real reality is that of physical bodies. He is indeed largely guilty of striking such a stance. And yet, on the other hand, despite his endorsement of a reductive monism of unified, conflict-free corporeal substance—La Mettrie speaks of everything as having been shaped out of "but one dough" and of "the material unity of man"—he subsequently veers, somewhat inconsistently, in the direction of a Spinozistic dual-aspect monism (the inconsistency being the fact that Baruch Spinoza's monistic God-substance is neither thinking nor extended substance, with both the ideas of minds and the parts of bodies being two aspects [i.e., "attributes"] of this one neither-mental-nor-physical substance). [...] He goes on to declare that "man is a machine, and ... in the whole universe there is but a single substance differently modified." It is somewhat unclear whether this "single substance" is still strictly corporeal in nature, especially if, as in Spinoza's rationalist metaphysics, "thought" and "matter" are two different modifications of a single, universal substance. Perhaps [18] La Mettrie's 1747 assertions, whether intentionally or unintentionally, open onto the enigma/problem of constructing a materialism that can affirm, at the same time, both a monism of matter as well as a distinction between matter and mind without invoking a God-substance as a medium inexplicably sustaining an all-encompassing unity-in-difference. In this vein, Lenin insists, "That both thought and matter are 'real,' i.e., exist, is true. But to say that thought is material is to make a false step, a step towards confusing materialism and idealism." The difficulty would be to formulate a materialist distinction between the physical and the mental without simply reducing the latter to the former, a difficulty Badiou too identifies when, in his 1982 Theory of the Subject, he depicts materialism as resting on two axioms in tension with each other: first, the monist thesis "There is the One" (i.e., the "thesis of identity"), meaning that, ontologically speaking, there is only matter as "the primitive unity of being"; and, second, the posited hegemony that seems to contradict the first monist thesis by maintaining that "There is the Two" (i.e., the dualist thesis that there is a distinction between that which is material and that which is not). Or, as the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter admits, neither monism nor dualism is an unproblematic ontological option. Anyhow, apropos La Mettrie, Lacan would point out that what still remains religious in his thinking is the insistence on the fundamental self-consistency of nature as an undivided cosmic totality.
Diderot's 1769 D'Alembert's Dream contains an explicit affirmation of the unified oneness of a natural All as the sole real being to be hypothesized by a defensible ontology. Through the mouth of d'Alembert, Diderot proclaims:
You talk of individuals, you poor philosophers! Stop thinking about your individuals and answer me this: Is there in nature any one atom exactly similar to another? No ... Don't you agree that in nature everything is bound up with everything else, and that there cannot be a gap in the chain? [...] There is but one great individual, and that is the whole. [...] [A]nd you talk about essences! Drop your idea of essences. Consider the general mass.From the perspective of a Lacanian consideration of the division between religious and atheistic materialisms, the latter entails insisting that there [19] indeed are "gaps" subsisting within the natural world of the material universe, that it is not the case that "everything is bound up with everything else" in the form of some sort of homogenous continuum. La Mettrie and Diderot (as well as Sade) follow in the footsteps of Spinoza insofar as they subscribe to the philosophical fantasy of substantial being as an exhaustively integrated and entirely self-cohering field devoid of real ruptures or splits. Nature is here imagined to be a clockwork machine whose gears and mechanisms hum away as components smoothly synched up with each other in a seamless system of grand-scale organization, a symphonic part-whole harmony or perfect symbiosis between microcosm and macrocosm. Later in D'Alembert's Dream, the character Bordeu asserts, "Nothing that exists can be against nature or outside nature." On a particular reading, this assertion regarding the uninterrupted internal consistency of the natural world might sound slightly dissonant with some observations made by this same character at a previous moment in the dialogue. Earlier, Bordeu states: "There may be only one center of consciousness in an animal, but there are countless impulses, for each organ has its own." He continues:
The stomach wants some food, but the palate doesn't, and the difference between the palate and the stomach on the one hand and the complete animal on the other is that the animal knows that it wants something whereas the stomach or palate want something without knowing it. Stomach or palate is to the complete being much as the brute beast is to man. Bees lose their individual consciousness but keep their appetites or impulses. An animal fibre [sic] is a simple animal, man is a composite one.The human being is "composite" to the extent that he or she is a hodgepodge of opposed desires driven by a disparate jumble of incompletely organized organs. Bordeu's remarks suggest that human nature, as built up out of multiple components, is shot through with inconsistencies and tensions right down to the material bedrock of the organic body, a body therefore containing nonorganic dimensions that themselves are not simply inorganic (something that the sciences of the twenty-first century make much more glaringly evident than those available to the thinkers of the eighteenth century). This can be interpreted so as to indicate, apropos Bordeu's later assertion quoted above ("Nothing that exists can be against or outside nature"), that naturalizing human being (i.e., not allowing humans to stand above-and-beyond the natural world in some immaterial, metaphysical zone) correlatively entails envisioning nature as, at least in certain instances, being divided against itself. An unreserved naturalization of humanity must result in a defamiliarization [20] and reworking of those most foundational and rudimentary proto-philosophical images contributing to any picture of material nature. The new, fully secularized materialism (inspired in part by Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis) to be developed and defended in Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism is directly linked to this notion of nature as the self-shattering, internally conflicted existence of a detotalized material immanence.
In the context of a discussion of philosophy and religion apropos eighteenth-century French materialism, one cannot pass over in silence the figure of the egg forcefully invoked by Diderot in D'Alembert's Dream. After discussing with d'Alembert an imagined thinking clavichord, a "philosopher-instrument" akin to La Mettrie's machine-man, Diderot cries out, "Look at this egg: with it you can overthrow all the schools of theology and all the churches in the world." Given Lacan's contention regarding the displaced religious beliefs allegedly harbored by the superficially irreligious rhetoric of these eighteenth-century discourses drawing on the sciences of their time, one might take Diderot's exclamation with a grain or two of salt. Furthermore, the fact that this same egg-example features in the entry for "Spinozist" in the Encyclopédie adds to such Lacanian suspicions (despite, admittedly, the many philosophical and historical complications associated with classifying Spinoza as a religious thinker and his omnipresent God as at all related to the deities of the mainstream monotheistic religions). Nonetheless, Diderot is not entirely incorrect to see in his egg a vision of an explosive materialism with devastating implications for theosophical doctrines resting upon any God as an enveloping, self-consistent One-All, be these beliefs avowed (as in religion) or disavowed (as in eighteenth-century mechanistic materialism).
For Diderot, the significance of an egg is that it purportedly embodies a point of transition from what seems to be inanimate and insensate (i.e., the egg itself) to what is readily acknowledged as animate and sentient (i.e., the creature born out of the egg). He concludes that, in order to explain this apparently miraculous genesis of perceiving and feeling life out of what looks to be lifeless, inert matter, one must "entertain a simple hypothesis that explains everything—sensitivity as a property common to all matter or as a result of the organization of matter." The two prongs of this hypothesis are not the same or equivalent claims: the former careens in the direction of a sort of pan-psychism positing sentience as an element ubiquitously distributed across the entire material universe, whereas the latter (as will be seen later) points in the direction of secular(izing) paths subsequently traversed by the life sciences in general and the neurosciences in particular. From a Lacanian [21] standpoint, the religious impulse still operative in Diderot's supposedly anti-religious gloss on the example of the egg is manifested by the insistence upon a smooth continuity between different types and states of matter, an imagined continuity behind which lurks the specter of being as one vast cosmic wholeness (and, obviously, this religious-spiritualist impulse is further revealed by the flirtation with pan-psychism).
The atheistic potentials of Diderot's egg reside in two features of this object: one, eggs create the appearance of a sudden emergence (or, apropos the egg as a metaphor for the rapport between matter and mind, this also involves the emergence of appearance itself); two, emergences from eggs require cracks (i.e., the splitting open and shattering of eggshells). Regardless of the authorial intentions of Diderot circa 1769—Diderot's pseudoemergentism ultimately posits a supposed continuity (rather than discontinuity) underlying the transformative dynamics of life—this image-example of the egg thus shelters within itself a picture of processes in which antagonisms, fissures, and tensions within the Real of material being provide openings through and out of which explode phenomena and structures whose genesis marks an abrupt rupture with what came before (i.e., the prior movements and substances, with their laws and logics, preceding this discontinuous emergence). And, like Diderot, Lacan too has an egg in hand, namely, his "hommelette" starring in the well-known myth of the lamella. In line with the broader psychoanalytic motif of subjectivity as fractured and split, this broken man-egg (or, more accurately, man-omelet) can be construed, among other things and specifically with reference to the egg of Diderot, as a metaphor for the rough edges of natural discontinuities that allow for and enable the materially emergent subject's denaturalizing of its own nature.
On several occasions, Lacan proposes that, whereas the smooth material-temporal continuum of evolutionary theory (like the Spinoza-inspired materialisms of Sade, La Mettrie, and Diderot) is a fundamentally theological notion despite its outwardly atheistic appearance (i.e., nature takes on the features and qualities of God), only the originally Christian notion of creation ex nihilo, of abrupt emergences that cannot be reduced to or predicated by a prior substantial ground, is appropriate to a thinking that really is done with all things religious. He maintains that "the creationist perspective is the only one that allows one to glimpse the possibility of the radical elimination of God," and that "a strictly atheist thought adopts no other perspective than that of 'creationism.'" At this point, the obvious question to be asked and answered is: What does Lacan see as the essence of atheism proper?
On three particular occasions during the course of his teaching, [22] Lacan provides exemplary explanations for what he, as a psychoanalyst, understands to be the true core of an atheistic stance. In a 1963 session of the tenth seminar, he raises the questions of whether practicing analysts should themselves be atheists and whether patience who still believe in God at the end of their analyses can be considered adequately analyzed for the purposes of determining when to terminate treatment. Referring to obsessional neurotics, with their unconscious fantasies of an omniscient Other observing each and every one of their little thoughts and actions, Lacan implies that such analysands would need to move in the direction of atheism in order to be relieved of those symptoms tied to this belief in the "universal eye" ("oeil universel") of a virtual, godlike observer of their existences. He then immediately goes on to assert that "such is the true dimension of atheism. An atheist would be someone who has succeeded at eliminating the fantasy of the All-Powerful." Interestingly, right after this remark, he mentions Diderot and casts into doubt whether this exemplary French materialist really can be considered a true atheist. Insofar as Diderot, along with his fellow materialists of the period, replaces an all-powerful God with an all-powerful Nature—this Nature is also all-knowing to the extent that it is made into the repository of every possible answer to any query capable of satisfactory "scientific" formulation—he cannot be said to be authentically atheist in the eyes of Lacan. Lacan's version of the experience of analysis involves a "psychoanalytic ascesis" entailing "atheism conceived of as the negation of the dimension of a presence of the all-powerful at the base of the world." That is to say, traversing the fantasy of an omnipotent and omniscient big Other, whether this Other be conceived of as God, Nature, the analyst, or whatever, is an unavoidable rite of passage in the concluding moments of an analysis seen through to a fitting end.
Lacan rearticulates these indications regarding atheism even more decisively and forcefully in the sixteenth and seventeenth seminars. In the sixteenth seminar, Lacan alleges that being an atheist requires putting into question the category of the sujet supposé savoir [translation: the subject supposed to know] (not only as incarnated in the transference-laden figure of the analyst, but also as any Other presumed to vouch for the maintenance of an overarching horizon of final, consistent meaning). Without letting fall and enduring the dissipation of the position of the subject supposed to know, one remains, according to Lacan, mired in idealism and theology; he equates belief in such an Other-subject with belief in God. As Lacan succinctly states, "A true atheism, the only one that would merit the name, is that which would result from the putting in question of the subject supposed to know." The following academic year, in the seventeenth seminar, he bluntly asserts that "the pinnacle of psychoanalysis is well and truly [23] atheism." Whereas the Lacan of the tenth seminar indirectly insinuates that undergoing the end of analysis (including traversing those fantasies linked to the transferential status of the analyst as an instantiation of an Other supposedly "in the know") results in an atheistic loss of faith in any kind of Almighty, here, in 1970, he directly declares this outcome to mark the apex of the analytic experience.
§3 Toward a Conflict Ontology: Freud, Mao, and the Ubiquity of Antagonism
Apart from clinical practice, what makes psychoanalysis, at the most foundational theoretical level, a Godless discipline? More specifically, how might psychoanalytic theory make a crucial contribution to the formulation of a scientifically informed materialism that doesn't rest upon an either implicit or explicit set of theosophical-ontological suppositions regarding some sort of internally integrated On-All? The key Lacanian slogan for an atheistic materialism might appear to be his delcaration that "le grand Autre n'existe pas." The nonexistence of the big Other is indeed a tenet central to Lacan's above-delineated characterizations of genuine atheism. However, this tenet by itself doesn't guarantee a materialism that would be fully secularized according to Lacan's own criteria for what would count as a thoroughly God-forsaking ontology. Although the absence of the big Other precludes imagining an ordering of reality from above, it doesn't foreclose the possibility of hypothesizing the return of a mellifluously orchestrated material universe, a unified natural world, through bottom-up dynamics and processes. A mechanistic materialism akin to that of La Mettrie or Diderot readily could resurface via such hypotheses (as Lacan would remind readers at this juncture, evolutionism is not shy about positing a continuity from below causally enchaining together vast, web-like networks of organisms and environments—God lives on, even if not in a traditional, top-down embodiment). To support an atheistic materialism, the declaration "The big Other does not exist" requires supplementation by another thesis: in the absence of every version of this Other, what remains lacks any guarantee of consistency right down to the bedrock of ontological fundaments. Strife, potential or actual, reigns supreme as a negativity permeating the layers and strata of material being.
The positing of conflict as ubiquitous and primary is precisely what makes psychoanalysis a Godless discipline. In, for instance, both The Future of an Illusion and his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, [24] Freud depicts the antireligious thrust of analysis as merely of a piece with a larger demystifying scientific worldview. Apart from Lacan's arguments to the contrary sketched above (i.e., the materialisms of the natural sciences are not automatically atheist, even when presented as such), the subsequent course of sociocultural history also contains ample evidence that the advancement and coming-to-power of the Weltanschauung of the sciences is far from having succeeded at shunting religions to the marginalized fringes of collective life. If anything, rather than the religion-science relationship being a zero-sum balance in which the waxing of one entails the proportional waning of the other, the aggressive incursions of the sciences routinely have met with a correspondingly robust counter-aggression from religious quarters.
Lacan's contentions that religion is anything but finished are based upon this observed persistence of religiosity in a scientific world. He often discusses religion in the context of its relations to both science and psychoanalysis (and he at least agrees with Freud that analysis invariably results in a demystification effect in relation to religion). According to Lacan, the religious provides a shock absorber of meaning (sens) cushioning the blows issuing forth from the inroads made into the meaningless material Real by the scientific—with this being necessary when neither of the fetishes furnished by science, neither its imagined hypothetical God's-eye view as the regulative ideal of exhaustive explanation nor its numerous by-products in the form of technogadget toys, proves to be satisfactory enough. Incidentally, especially given the seemingly unstoppable, death-drive-like march of science coupled with religion's role as the provider of sufficient sense to sustain those caught up in this march, psychoanalysis is unlikely to have much luck gaining a hearing amidst the breathless hustle-and-bustle of this ever-accelerating frenzy. Like science, psychoanalysis divests reality of meaning through revealing the nonsensical Real composing and shaping this reality. But, unlike science, it refuses to offer the compensations of either the promise of total knowledge or objects of pleasurable consumption. In this situation, analysis cannot hope to compete with the mass appeal of religion, particularly under the conditions of late capitalism and the ways in which science and religion interact within it. Nonetheless, what makes psychoanalysis, this theoretical-practical configuration quietly limping alongside the interlinked movements conjoining science and religion, utterly atheistic is not, as per Freud, its allegiance to the Enlightenment worldview of scientific-style ideologies. Rather, its placement of antagonisms and oppositions at the very heart of material being, its depiction of nature itself as divided by conflicts rendering it a fragmented, not-whole non-One, is what constitutes the truly irreligious core of psychoanalytic metapsychology as a force for merciless desacralization.
[25] Conflict is an omnipresent motif/structure in Freud's corpus. However, in some of his later, post-1920 texts, what becomes much clearer and more apparent is that, from a Freudian perspective, irreconcilable discord and clashes arise from antagonistic splits embedded in the material foundations of human being. Although there are numerous problems with the fashions in which Freud biologizes psychical life, there is also something invaluable in his naturalization of conflict in terms of the war between Eros and the Todestrieb raging within the bodily id, namely, a germinal ontological insight that shouldn't suffer the fate of the proverbial baby thrown out with the bathwater of Freud's scientistic biological reductionism. Freudian psychoanalytic metapsychology here contains the nascent potentials for the formulation, in conjunction with select resources extracted from today's natural sciences, of a conflict ontology, a theory of the immanent-monistic emergence of a disharmonious ontological-material multitude or plurality. [...]
The basic ingredients for creating a new, entirely atheistic materialism are to be drawn not only from Freud's tacit indications pointing in the direction of a possible conflict ontology—Mao Tse-Tung's version of the distinction between mechanistic and dialectical materialisms is of great importance in this task too. For Engels, the mechanistic materialism of eighteenth-century France is limited by two interrelated flaws: a reductionist neglect of various logics other than those depicted in the laws of mechanics proposed by the physical sciences of the time, as well as a resulting inability to grasp the dynamics of processes of historical becoming in an ever-changing universe (these flaws, as Engels concedes, are necessary features of a materialism grounded in a historical context in which Newtonian mechanical physics is the cutting edge of the natural sciences). In his 1937 essay "On Contradiction," Mao further illuminates the nature of the distinction between these two materialist orientations:
While we recognize that in the general development of history the material determines the mental and social being determines social consciousness, we also—and indeed must—recognize the reaction of the mental on material things, of social consciousness on social being and of the superstructure on the economic base. This does not go against materialism; on the contrary, it avoids mechanical materialism and firmly upholds dialectical materialism.Mechanistic materialism is nondialectical to the extent that it admits solely a unidirectional flow of causal influence from matter to mind. For [26] a materialist such as La Mettrie or Diderot, mental life and every socio-cultural thing collectively connected with it can be only impotent, ineffective epiphenomena, residual illusions discharged by biophysical substances seamlessly and inextricably bound up with the world of nature and the englobing universe of matter. That is to say, matter dictates its laws to mind, and never the other way around. As Engels observes, this "old materialism," in its ahistoricism, fails even to ask, let alone answer, questions as to how human brains are shaped and transformed by forces and factors operative within historical dimensions. And, as Mao indicates, dialectical materialism, unlike its mechanistic philosophical predecessor, admits a bidirectional flow of causal influences between matter and mind (i.e., a dialectic, albeit one in which the two poles involved are not perfectly equal or evenly balanced). In particular, Mao's version of dialectical materialism allows for exceptional circumstances when the mental tail can and does start reciprocally wagging the physical dog, when the determined starts affecting the determinant. The young Maoist Badiou, in his 1975 text Theory of Contradiction, stipulates that one must adhere to two principles in order to be a dialectical materialist: materialism requires granting that material things usually occupy the determining position in most situations; and dialectics (as nonmechanistic) requires granting that this default position of material dominance is vulnerable to disruption, negation, or suspension. A key aspect of the Badiouian Mao's ontology is its axiomatic proposition that there is only a conflict-plagued One-that-is-not-One as a plane of material immanence, both natural and historical, fragmented from within by the pervasive negativity of scissions and struggles. Additionally, by contrast with accepted (but erroneous) notions regarding the Hegelian dialectic, Maoist dialectics treats any instance of cohesion, stability, or unity, any resting point, as a temporary, transitory moment, an ephemeral outcome, in a process of interminable, opposition-driven historical becoming, a trajectory of perpetually renewed division and fissuring. The kinesis of struggle is primary; the stasis of peace is secondary, exceptional, and fleeting.
What makes Maoist dialectical materialism particularly useful in the present context is its emphasis on the pervasiveness of dynamic contradiction, even down to the raw flesh and bare bones of nature itself. More specifically, Mao's account of causality in the context of elaborating his form of dialectical materialism can be interpreted as putting in place a foundational requirement to be met by any materialism acknowledging some sort of distinction between matter and mind (i.e., any nonmechanistic, noneliminative materialism). In Theory of the Subject, Badiou demands a materialism that includes, as per the title of this book, "a [27] theory of the subject." Such a materialism would have to be quite distinct from mechanistic or eliminative materialisms, insofar as neither of the latter two leave any space open, the clearing of some breathing room, for subjectivity as something distinguishable from the fleshy stuff of the natural world. However, a materialist theory of the subject, in order to adhere to one of the principal tenets of any truly materialist materialism (i.e., the ontological axiom according to which matter is the sole ground), must be able to explain how subjectivity emerges out of materiality—and, correlative to this, how materiality must be configured in and of itself so that such an emergence is a real possibility.
This explanatory requirement is precisely one of the issues at stake in Mao's discussions of internal and external causes. [...]
As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated to and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism. It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another.Soon after this statement, he further elaborates:
According to materialist dialectics, changes in nature are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in nature. Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society ... Does materialist dialectics exclude external causes? [28] Not at all. It holds that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become operative through internal causes.This last claim is then immediately repeated for the sake of emphasis: "It is through internal causes that external causes become operative." The early Badiou of Theory of Contradiction endorses these assertions made by Mao. And, in resonance with Lacan's above-glossed remarks apropos the religiosity nascent within the linear continuity of evolutionary theory, Badiou highlights, in this same 1975 treatise, the nonevolutionary character of the models of historical-material change offered by Leninist-Maoist dialectical materialism, models centered on discontinuous, sudden "ruptures," leap-like transitions from quantity to quality [....]
Along Maoist lines, constructing a theory of subjectivity entirely compatible with the strictures of a thoroughly materialist ontology (a project called for by Badiou himself) necessitates, in the combined lights of psychoanalytic metapsychology and dialectical materialism, two endeavors: first, delineating the materiality of human being as conflicted from within, as a point of condensing intersection for a plethora of incompletely harmonized fragments; second, exploring how the endogenous causes of these conflicts immanent to the materiality of human being can and do interact with exogenous causal influences. As Mao rightly underscores, the latter by themselves (i.e., purely external variables) are ineffective. What makes the kinetics of dialectical materialism possible is an external activation of potentials intrinsic to the internal configurations of certain beings.
§4 From Dialectical to Transcendental Materialism: Malabou, Neuroscience, and Images of Matter Transformed
The groundbreaking work of Catherine Malabou brilliantly brings to the fore these very issues through a simultaneous engagement with both dialectical materialism and cognitive neuroscience. Echoes of those aspects of Maoist thought mentioned above can be heard in her insistence, in the context of discussing Hegel's dialectic, Heidegger's destruction, and Derrida's deconstruction, that externally overriding something requires this thing's complicity in terms of its "plastic" inner structure, a structure embodying the "schizoid consistency of the ultra-metaphysical [29] real" as the nondialectical ontological origin/ground of dialectics (i.e., being itself as inconsistent and conflict-ridden). Entities must possess the proper "ontological metabolism" in order to be open to and affected by encounters with alterities. Malabou's 1996 doctoral thesis on Hegel, The Future of Hegel, concludes with a reference to the life sciences as offering the resources for the development of an ontology ready to meet the explanatory-theoretical demands pronounced by the dialectical materialist tradition in ways that this tradition itself thus far hasn't been able to accomplish on its own.
These 1996 gestures in the direction of natural science come to full fruition in Malabou's revolutionary 2004 book What Should We Do with Our Brain?—this title echoes the French translation of Lenin's What Is to Be Done? (Que faire?)—a book centered on a reading of today's cognitive neurosciences as spontaneously generating and substantiating a dialectical materialist ontology (and this whether they realize it or not). Without the space presently to do adequate justice to the entire range of complex, convincing arguments advanced in this text, several points made by Malabou deserve to be noted here as stipulations for a thoroughly secularized materialism sensitive to the breakthroughs and insights achieved by the sciences of nature. Focusing on the biological level of human being, she correctly notes that the widespread notion of genetic determinism, according to which the physical body is entirely shaped and controlled by genes, is simply inaccurate, a falsifying distortion of the facts. The truth, rather, is that a "genetic indetermination" (i.e., genes determine human beings not to be entirely determined by genes) and the neural plasticity linked to this indetermination ensure the openness of vectors and logics not anticipated or dictated by the bump-and-grind efficient causality of physical particles alone. In other words, one need not fear that bringing biology into the picture of a materialist theory of the subject leads inexorably to a reductive materialism of a mechanistic and/or eliminative sort; such worries are utterly unwarranted, based exclusively on an unpardonable ignorance of several decades of paradigm-shifting discoveries in the life sciences. No intellectually responsible philosophical materialism can justify ignoring the evidence unearthed in these highly productive fields of adjacent research—unless, of course, what is secretly or unconsciously desired is a spiritualist ideology disguising itself in the faded-fashion garb of a now awfully dated antinaturalism.
A chorus of voices on the empirical side of discussions of the brain (i.e., neuroscientists and cognitive scientists) speak as one in support of the basic, fundamental premises underlying the effort underway here to appropriate the resources of the neurosciences for the delineation [30] of a reinvigorated materialist ontology (an appropriation informed and guided by a combination of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology and the resources of European philosophy from the end of the eighteenth century through the present). To begin with, not only do some researchers in the neurosciences see the notorious nature-nurture distinction as dialectical—it has even been suggested that the very distinction itself is invalid due to the utter inextricability of what is referred to by these two inadequate terms and the irresolvable undecidability that thereby results (in the area of psychopathology, Kandel, a vocal neuroscientific advocate on behalf of a new rapprochement between psychodynamics and the life sciences, suggests scrapping the old distinction between biological and nonbiological mental disorders). Most of the resistance to having anything to do with the life sciences, a resistance widespread within the worlds of Lacanianism and continental philosophy, is due to the misperception that embracing these sciences inevitably leads to the crudest forms of reductionism (i.e., genetic determinism, epiphenomenalism, etc.). But, as Benjamin Libet observes, vulgar reductive materialism is scientism (as pseudoscientific ideology), not science.
In fact, these scientists are at pains to stress that their disciplines are not rigid frameworks within which the natural, on the one hand, and the cultural-historical-social, on the other hand, are to be strictly opposed, with the fixed, frozen essences of the former alway trumping the subservient (epi)phenomena of the latter. As Lesley Rogers puts it, "the idea of biology as immutable is largely incorrect." And, as Joseph LeDoux explains, a material-neuronal conception of the subject neither is opposed to nor demands the elimination of theories of nonbiological subjectivity. There are numerous arguments for why the neurosciences and the biology on which they rest are not reductive, only some of which can be outlined briefly in the context of the current discussion. The dialectic between innate nature and acquired nurture, if one still can use these terms, permeates even the level of genetics (and, much reductionism and the opposition it generates lean on a fatally flawed picture of genetics). LeDoux helpfully points out that nature-nurture interaction is operative from the very beginnings of life, given that the developing embryo takes shape in a womb connected to a maternal body that itself is entangled in vast mediating networks of more-than-biological configurations and interactions (not to mention the Lacanian analytic caveat that both conception and what leads up to it are woven into elaborate, knotted webs of influential factors conscious and unconscious). Although the genotype sets in place certain loose, broad parameters establishing a wide bandwidth of possibilities and permutations for what [31] the phenotype can actualize/express (what Changeux calls a "genetic envelope"), in no way could it be said in any straightforward manner that anatomy is destiny (to invoke an oft-misinterpreted Freudian one-liner). Especially within the brain, the genetic is significantly modulated by the epigenetic (i.e., experience, learning, socialization, etc.). Furthermore, such complications are not confined exclusively to the "nature" half of the nature-nurture distinction—the life sciences are also in the process of calling into question the "nurture" half, a process prompted by a realization that the notion of "environment" is incredibly hazy, insufficiently precise to serve as a concept for rigorous reflection. Considering these rudimentary, ground-zero truths in the life sciences, no sort of standard reductionism is in the least bit tenable insofar as the mind-bogglingly complex number of variables converging on a multi-determined brain and body render in advance any one-sided depiction of these matters intellectually bankrupt.
Furthermore, certain aspects of genetics properly conceived are crucial for an adequate appreciation of the neurosciences. The link Malabou mobilizes, in her discussions of the philosophical implications of brain studies, between what she accurately describes as "genetic indetermination" and neural plasticity is indeed empirically well-established. The brain is genetically programmed to be open and receptive to reprogramming (which includes alterations of gene expression at the phenotypic level) through learning experiences in relation to the contextual vicissitudes of exogenous contingencies. This determined lack of determination, this preprogramming for reprogramming, is an important aspect of what is meant by characterizing the brain as "plastic." Neuroplasticity is considered by those working in the life sciences to be an incredibly significant feature of the development and functioning of human brains. LeDoux identifies the plastic synaptic connections of neurons, hardwired for rewiring, to be the precise material points where nature and nurture collide, the crossroads at which genetics and epigenetics are folded into assemblages that are theoretically unsliceable [sic] tangles of hyperdense complexity. He even goes so far as to conjecture that neuroplasticity in humans is an "exaptation," namely, something that starts out as an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation in response to certain environmental pressures and problems but eventually becomes, so to speak, transfunctionalized, derailed from its initial means-ends pathways and expropriated for other projects that are nonnatural vis-à-vis strict evolutionary considerations. (However, LeDoux's use of the term 'exaptation' deviates from its meaning as initially defined by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth S. Vrba.)
At a more general level (and in line with the previously [32] enumerated requirements of a Lacan-inspired atheistic materialism), Malabou describes the "ontological explosion" of the mental out of the neuronal—"out of" is intended in two senses, both as immanently arising from and as autonomously exceeding through escape from—as event-like, a sharp break requiring (as Mao would put it) the "internal causes" of the ontological-material plasticity of the human biological body. More-than-biological "external causes" (again in the Maoist sense) are able to have their mediating effects on individuals thanks not only to bodily plasticity in Malabou's precise sense—for her, the plastic designates, at the same time, both the receptivity of the malleable and the resistance of the congealed, namely, a literal contradiction in the fragmented flesh—but also because of the antagonisms and discordances materialized in the embodied being of humans. She maintains that "the historico-cultural shaping of of the self is not possible except starting from this natural and primary economy of contradiction." She proceeds to claim that "there is a cerebral conflictuality, there is a tension between the neuronal and the mental" (i.e., although the mental emerges out of the neuronal, the former comes to be at odds with the latter—this immanent genesis of the thereafter-transcendent-as-separate is the core concern of transcendental materialism). Malabou pleads for a "new materialism," a "reasonable materialism" that neither indefensibly ignores the sciences of material being (especially the neurosciences as relevant to a materialist theory of subjectivity unafraid of [...] dirtying its hands with actual, factual matter) nor uncritically accepts the ideological distortions of these sciences by those seeking to exaggerate one side of plasticity at the expense of the other (i.e., to promote pseudoscientific visions of humanity either as rigidly fixed in place by an evolutionary-genetic-neural determinism or as infinitely flexible according to the insistence of the social constructionism arising from late-capitalist economic-political machinations). For Malabou, as for me, "a reasonable materialism seems to us to be one which poses that the natural contradicts itself and that the thought is the fruit of this contradiction."
§5 A Weak Nature, and Nothing More: The True Formula of a Fully Atheistic Materialism
At this juncture, closely examining Lacan's 1975 interview entitled (by Jacques-Alain Miller) "The Triumph of Religion" ("Le triomphe de la religion") in light of the preceding discussions concerning the philosophical establishment of an atheistic materialism shaped around the conjunction of metapsychology and the neurosciences will be especially [33] fruitful. Early on in this text, Lacan speaks of a difference between "that which goes" ("ce qui marche") and "that which does not go" ("ce qui ne marche pas"), the former being the "world" (as the normal run of things in familiar Imaginary-Symbolic reality) and the latter being the Real (as excluded from and disruptive of the running of this reality). He notes that psychoanalysts concern themselves with this Real as what does not fit into the smooth movements of quotidian reality. The analyst's presence testifies to this Real-that-does-not-go, quietly witnessing and marking those occurrences in which it surfaces (such as, during an analysis, in unintended double-entendres, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, acting out, and so on). He or she occupies this position and remains there as a "symptom" of that which resists going with the flow of the everyday world. However, a cultural "cure" for psychoanalysis, as itself a symptom of the "discontent of civilization of which Freud has spoken," is readily available: religion as a means of repressing the symptoms (including analysis itself) of the unworldly Real that disrupts worldly reality.
Lacan goes on to warn against equivocating between the symptom and the Real. He argues thus:
The symptom is not yet truly the real. It is the manifestation of the real at the level of living beings. As living beings, we are settled, bitten by the symptom. We are sick, that is all. The speaking being is a sick animal. "In the beginning was the Word" says the same thing.By virtue of the human being's irreparable transubstantiation into a speaking being (i.e., a parlêtre), this "living being" becomes a "sick animal." What begins with the genesis of "the Word"—throughout "The Triumph of Religion," Lacan plays with this Christian notion/motif—are illnesses constitutive of the human condition. Additionally, Lacan's distinction between symptom and Real involves a few nuances worthy of attention. To begin with, the living being's animality is associated with the Real itself. And this Real not only introduces dysfunctions into the world of Imaginary-Symbolic reality—it comes to be worked and reworked, written and overwritten, by its own manifestations (in the form of symptoms) within this logos-inaugurated reality. A Real beyond, beneath, or behind its own symptomatic manifestations is caught up in a dialectical entanglement with these same manifestations. In view of this, Lacan continues:
But the real real, if I can speak thusly, the true real, is that which we are able to accede to via an absolutely precise way, which is the scientific way. It is the way of little equations. This real there is the exact one which eludes us completely.[34] The Real underlying and making possible both the emergence of speaking beings out of living beings as well as the symptoms (as sinthomes) of these thus-afflicted animals is not some ineffable je ne sais quoi, some mysterious noumenal "x." For Lacan, "the real real," this "true real," is precisely what the ways of the sciences enable to be accessed lucidly and rigorously in its truth. Of course, Lacan's mention of "little equations" in the quotation above hints at a conception of science according to which the hallmark of scientificity is mathematical-style formalization—the greater the degree of mathematical-style formalization, the greater the degree of scientificity [....] But, in addition to the ample evidence scattered throughout his teachings that Lacan sometimes associates the Real with things fleshly and corporeal (and not just mathematical/formal), the block quotation just prior to the one above associates the Real with the living animality of the human organism, an animality that gets hopelessly entangled with the mediating matrices of symbolic orders (these two quotations are situated one immediately after the other on the same page of "The Triumph of Religion"). Hence, perhaps the science Lacan is thinking of here is not just the mathematized physics of quantum mechanics, but an adequately formalized science of life. If so, then one of the important consequences entailed by this is that there could be a scientifically shaped treatment of a genuine Real-in-the-flesh as a precondition for the immanent surfacing out of this animal materiality of something different, other, or more than this materiality (i.e., the parlêtre as a denaturalized, but never quite completely and successfully denaturalized, living being).
Toward the end of "The Triumph of Religion," Lacan pronounces a couple of additional utterances regarding the Real. After denying that he is a philosopher proposing an ontology—my philosophically guided ontologization of the version of the Real presently under discussion thereby deviates from Lacan's position in this respect—he emphatically rejects the suggestion, made by the interviewer, that his register of the Real is akin to Kant's sphere of noumena. Lacan protests:
But this is not at all Kantian. It is even on this that I insist. If there is a notion of the real, it is extremely complex, and on this account it is not perceivable in a manner that would make a totality. It would be an unbelievably presumptuous notion to think that there would be an all of the real.Badiou, appealing to a combination of the Galilean modern scientific mathematization of natural matter and the mathematical infinitization of infinity itself in Cantorian trans-finite set theory, insists that there is [35] no cosmic wholeness of Nature since there is no grand unifying One. Lacan likewise rejects the idea that it would be possible to make an "All" of the Real, to encompass it in the enveloping form of an integrated totality. Presumably, one of Lacan's reasonable assumptions underpinning this denial of Kantianism is that Kant's noumenal realm of things-in-themselves is fantasized by Kant as an ontological domain of entirely consistent being subsisting outside the contradiction-plagued epistemological domain of subjective cognition. What is more, insofar as Lacan contends that scientific thought provides a direct path of entry into the inconsistent, detotalized, and not-All Real, he, unlike Kant, maintains that one can transgress the ostensible "limits of possible experience" so as to lay one's hands on material being an sich [i.e. in itself]. Interestingly, Lacan proceeds to speculate that the inconsistency of the Real might involve its "laws"—the sciences are responsible for delineating these structuring principles—evolving, that the ordering framework of this register might be fundamentally unstable, moving about and drifting. Not only is this speculation now a part of astrophysical thinking about the rapid evolutionary congealing of the laws of physics out of the Big Bang—in his 2006 book After Finitude, Meillassoux, partially through both a break with Kantian and post-Kantian idealist "correlationism" as well as an ensuing ontologization of Hume's epistemology (with its recasting of conceptualizations of causality), argues for envisioning brute being in and of itself as absolutely contingent and lawless, its law-like patterns and regularities always potentially capable of change. [...]
In two coauthored articles, Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano provide exemplary, superlative readings of some of the crucial subtleties contained in "The Triumph of Religion." In that text, Lacan, despite his openly avowed atheism, perplexingly declares Christianity to be "the one true religion." Chiesa and Toscano helpfully clarify that what this actually means is that, from a Lacanian perspective, the Christian religion is the least false of the various religions. The reason for this has to do with Lacan's earlier assertions to the effect that whereas evolutionary theory unwittingly continues to be theosophical by virtue of its reliance upon an omnipotent, all-embracing material-historical continuum (i.e., a seamless, uninterrupted One-All of Nature), creationism, especially the Christian notion of creation ex nihilo, inadvertently opens the door to the founding of a materialism without God:
Lacan, a self-processed atheist, repeatedly refers to Christianity as "la vraie religion." To cut a long story short, according to Lacan, Christianity [36] is the "true religion" insofar as, more than any other religion, it comes nearest to the materialistic truth of the creation ex nihilo of the signifier: "In the beginning was the Word." The ex nihilo of the logos, or better, the logos itself as the ex nihilo, is the specific feature that, for Lacan, differentiates Christianity from other monotheistic religions that are also creationist.Just as a kernel of religiosity resides in the heart of supposedly atheistic evolutionary theory, so too does a kernel of atheism reside within the heart of supposedly religious Christianity. But, one might ask: given the counterintuitive ring to this series of propositions, what qualifies the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo as both atheist and materialist? And what antireligious advantages does this concept drawn from the inner sanctum of a particular religion have over the desacralizing ontology of transcendence-stifling immanence implicit in evolutionism? Chiesa and Toscano offer the following elucidating explanations:
Why would Christian creationism, based as it is on the logos as the ex nihilo, contain in nuce [i.e. "in a nutshell"] a form of atheistic materialism? Lacan's theory of the emergence of the signifier ex nihilo is both materialistic and atheistic since it is grounded on the assumption that language, and the symbolic order, is unnatural rather than supernatural, the contingent product of man's successful dis-adaptation to nature. Such an unnatural dis-adaptation, which obviously dominates and perverts nature, can nevertheless only originate immanently from what we name "nature" and thus contradicts the alleged continuity of any (transcendentally) "natural" process of evolution.Elsewhere, they repeat the above almost verbatim, to which is appended the declaration that "nature is per se not-One"—a declaration rooted in the various statements regarding the notion of nature made by Lacan, including ones contemporaneous with "The Triumph of Religion." (Joan Copjec similarly refers to Lacan's "proposal that being is not-all or there is no whole of being," invoking the Lacanian theme of the "deficit of the world," its "incompleteness"). Chiesa and Toscano, while illuminating how Lacan extracts an atheistic materialism from the ex nihilo of Christianity, even describe "the (supposed) primitive 'synthesis' of the primordial real" as having "been broken due to a contingent 'material' change that is immanent to it." The twist the reworked materialism of this project adds to these very insightful comments is the assertion that the "primordial real" of natural matter is not synthesized, that, insofar as subjects exist in the first place, it is always-already "broken"—with this [37] brokenness, this self-shattered status of a disharmonious nature devoid of any One-All, being a material condition of possibility for the immanent genesis of subjectivity out of the conflict-ridden groundless ground of materiality.
In "The Triumph of Religion," Lacan speaks of various cures for anxiety. Specifically, he suggests that a range of conceptions of humanity function in this capacity: "Against anxiety, there are heaps of remedies, in particular a certain number of 'conceptions of man,' of what man is." This applies not only to religion, which Lacan has in mind in this context—it is also relevant to a speciously scientific scientism that genuine science is in the process of demolishing. More specifically, misrepresentations of the "man of science" as either inflexibly determined by the efficient mechanical causes of evolution and genetics or flexibly malleable as an infinitely constructible and reconstructible social, cultural, and linguistic being are often promoted by the biopolitical ideologies of "democratic materialism" described so well by Badiou. A materialism based on science as opposed to scientism and faithful to the furthest-reaching consequences of Lacan's dictum according to which no big Other of any sort exists (including almighty Nature as well as God) has no place in it for the different pseudoscientific images of humanity advertised by today's reigning biopowers.
The time has come to pronounce the true formula of atheistic materialism: there is just a weak nature, and nothing more. All that exists are heterogeneous ensembles of less-than-fully synthesized material beings, internally conflicted, hodgepodge jumbles of elements-in-tension—and that is it. What appears to be more-than-material (especially subjectivity and everything associated with it) is, ultimately, an index or symptom of the weakness of nature, this Other-less, un-unified ground of being. The apparently more-than-material consists of phenomena flourishing in the nooks and crannies of the strife-saturated, underdetermined matrices of materiality, in the cracks, gaps, and splits of these discrepant material strata.
Fear-driven antinaturalism, responsible for much of the resistance of continental philosophy and European psychoanalysis to a sustained engagement with the life sciences, tacitly accepts the notion of a strong nature as Almighty, as an overdetermining, omnipotent cosmic Substance. If Lacan is indeed correct that the ostensibly atheistic materialists of eighteenth-century France remain, in reality, religious believers despite themselves, then continental European antinaturalists and their followers are also, regardless of whatever they might say, adherents of fideism—they have faith in a natural big Other, even if this faith manifests itself through perverse rejections of and rebellions against [38] this Other. Moreover, such antinaturalists, in accepting the image of a strong nature while simultaneously wanting to preserve the affirmation that there is something in excess of this same nature, are forced to rely upon a spiritualist metaphysics of one sort or another in the form of strict, rigid ontological dualisms (however avowed or disavowed). If an atheist, as Lacan claims, is he or she who acknowledges the nonexistence of the big Other, then anyone accepting an image of natural being as an ultra-powerful One, whether reductionist materialists or their reactive and reactionary opponents, is, in the end, no different in kind than the most fervent of the faithful.
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Source: Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), xiii–38.
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