Thomas McPartland on Modernity and Classicist Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Footnotes:

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

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

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

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

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

Nietzsche on Unconscious Influences of Philosophy

After such self-questioning, self-temptation, one acquires a subtler eye for all philosophizing to date; one is better than before at guessing the involuntary detours, alleyways, resting places, and sunning places of thought to which suffering thinkers are led and misled on account of their suffering; one now knows where the sick body and its needs unconsciously urge, push, and lure the mind – towards sun, stillness, mildness, patience, medicine, balm in some sense. Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, a final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not illness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes frighteningly far – and I have asked myself often enough whether, on a grand scale, philosophy has been no more than an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. Behind the highest value judgments that have hitherto guided the history of thought are concealed misunderstandings of the physical constitution – of individuals or classes or even whole races. All those bold lunacies of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as symptoms of certain bodies [....] I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of the term – someone who has set himself the task of pursuing the problem of the total health of a people, time, race or of humanity – to summon the courage at last to push my suspicion to its limit and risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all 'truth' but rather something else – let us say health, future, growth, power, life... [...]

A philosopher who has passed through many kinds of health, and keeps passing through them again and again, has passed through an equal number of philosophies; he simply cannot but translate his state every time into the most spiritual form and distance – this art of transfiguration just is philosophy. We philosophers are not free to separate soul from body as the common people do; we are even less free to separate soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, no objectifying and registering devices with frozen innards – we must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and maternally endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and disaster. Life – to us, that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame, and also all that wounds us; we simply can do no other.

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Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. by Bernard Williams, trans. by Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5–6.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of History

All of history is being and relation and the multifaceted ways in which the two dimensions of reality work together.

The history of errors consists in neglecting relations. The history of discovery consists in establishing them.

Politics and religion consist in right relations. Virtue is established by its relation to the rule of right reason. Right reason is relational thinking about two extremes.

Diagram of Ens Reale

Ens Reale (Greek: φύσις [physis]; mind-independent being):

Esse (To exist):

-In

--Alio (another): Accident

--Se (itself): Substance

-Ad (towards/for): Relation

Hence although relation is grouped within the accidents because it isn't substance, relation is unlike any accident insofar as it does not exist intrasubjectively but suprasubjectively, dependent upon subjectivities as its foundation yet above them. Accidents properly speaking are intrasubjective determinations that specify the substance as an individual.

Ockham's reduction of relation to similarity existing between subjectivities that possess intrasubjectively a same quality or determination (accident) is a reduction of relation as suprasubjective to intra- and inter- subjective. Relation therefore loses its proper characteristic and becomes an expression of the multiplication of some similar quality or being; if two or more beings share this quality, there is relation in the shared quality.

Relation, interestingly, is characterized precisely by its indifference to the orders of ens reale and ens rationis, mind-independent and mind-dependent being. A relation may exist even if its fundament or terminus exist either in ens reale or ens rationis; hence whether the relation is a "real relation" or just a "logical" one. For example, a relation of fictions is still a relation even though fictions are related; hence even though the fundament and terminus are within ens rationis, the relation is real (not as in "real relation" but simply as existing). But an individual that is a fiction is precisely not an individual because an individual is that which exists independently of ens rationis. Relation bridges the gap and is therefore also the bridge between culture and nature.

Relation is also the bridge between subjectivity (individuality of substances, ens reale) and objectivity (ens reale that has become an ens rationis through the awareness of a cognitive or quasi-cognitive power). Something becomes an object precisely by coming into relation with a subject that possesses some power of awareness.

Cf. John Deely, Purely Objective Reality (2009), ch. 2.

Dr. Rudi te Velde on the Concept of God

There is something in Thomas' conception of God as ipsum esse per se subsistens that does not fit very well into the picture of 'classical theism.' Classical theism, as it is usually understood, tends to view God as an absolute entity existing independently of the world. The theistic God looks more like a being, a 'self-contained substance' above and apart from the world, than the pure actuality of subsistent being itself. From Thomas' perspective, this would mean that the independence of God, as over against the world of finite beings, is conceived wrongly. It is as if the character of subsistence, attributed to a theistically conceived God, is a logical expression by means of which we think of God as separated from the world, as a distinct reality, while Thomas intends to express by subsistence that the being of God is separated through itself from all other beings. The difference is crucial. For Thomas, God is not 'separated' from the world as a subsistent entity conceivable apart from his causal relationship to created beings; it is as cause of all beings that God 'separates' himself from all his effects by distinguishing those effects from himself. In this sense the 'concept' of God is, in truth, the concept of the relationship of God and world, conceived as an ordered plurality of diverse beings, each of which receives its being from the divine source of being. For Thomas there is no way of thinking of God concretely outside this relationship. The independence, or absoluteness, of God characterizes the way He relates as cause to all other things; it is the independence of the perfect goodness of God, who is not under any obligation or necessity to fulfill himself by creating, but who acts out his own goodness, establishing all other things in being by letting them share in his own perfection.

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Source: Rudi te Velde, Aquinas on God: The "Divine Science" of the Summa "Theologiæ" (Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006), 85.

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.

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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.

Memo: Grace and Nature, Unconscious Affect and Spiritual Emotion

If I could have the opportunity, I would like to study the intersection of unconscious affect and spiritual "emotions."

It would also be interesting to see the extent to which grace depends on nature. For example, if a person very advanced in holiness were to suffer such a brain injury that they lost all sense of morality or self control, what would be the implications for the relationship between grace and nature?

The Never-Ending Argument and Service Work

The desire to end the discourse, to have the final say, is the same dynamic that feeds a never-ending argument. A never-ending argument is neither constructive nor dialogical; open, rational discussion, while creating space for voicing disagreement, clarification, and proof, is not argumentative even if it may continue on forever. An argument, on the other hand, misses the point of what was being discussed; it is an act of battering each other with crystalized concepts cut off from their proper referent in reality.

Both of these phenomena are rooted in a form of solipsism, an overemphasis on esse in, the substance itself as an atom, disconnected from those around us.

Personal transformation is a positive manifestation of esse in; it acknowledges and respects the individual and seeks to improve it by admitting its poverty. The admittance of poverty, or in other words, humility, is also the necessary foundation for mutual transformation, the transformation of individuals in a network, a corporate body, a society. The collective transformation of esse in through esse ad, being towards or for another, enriching the other with each of our respective riches.

What, then, becomes of the status of service work when an individual who serves others at the same time treats other individuals with contempt, impatience, condescension, etc.? It's a contradiction. How might it be explained? The service, the movement to enrich another, whether it be an individual or collective, somehow loses its proper referent. Service properly speaking must always acknowledge and respect the other, in spite of disagreements and annoyances. But if service loses its proper referent, the impetus of service, which is esse ad, returns to esse in, or solipsism. Service then becomes an unconscious form of self serving.

In order to avoid the selfishness that creeps into service, it is therefore necessary to always return the referent of service to its proper object, the other in poverty, in need of enriching, and this referent must extend to all without discrimination with respect to the sharing of qualities of mutual support: patience, generosity, gentleness, kindness, consideration, affirmation. Of course, the extent of this support depends on context and circumstances, but the willingness to share and its equal distribution irrespective of persons is the condition by which esse ad refuses to remain esse in. It is the condition required to avoid the never-ending argument. It is the condition required to be willing to have an ongoing discussion, to resist the desire to have the last word.

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:

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.