Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

After Finitude and Fideism comes Speculative Christianity?

Quentin Meillassoux is an important philosopher, as Graham Harman notes—not because he is “plausibly right about so many things,” but because his work “offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure.”

Leon Niemoczynski (After Nature) has recently highlighted the theistic implications of Meillassoux’s project, asking why so many Speculative Realists have ignored the religious dimensions of his anti-correlationism. Adam at An und für sich likewise observes that Meillassoux’s ontology of radical contingency—pushed to its limit in The Divine Inexistence—yields a reformed Christian incarnationalism in which human value derives not from a past incarnation but from a hoped-for future resurrection.

In an earlier post, I suggested that Meillassoux “dismisses fideism to re-affirm its object through the apotheosis of reason.” Philosophies of the Absolute cannot avoid inquiry into divinity. Whether explicitly atheistic, as in Ray Brassier’s eliminativism or Levi Bryant’s materialism (Larval Subjects), or explicitly theistic, as in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, metaphysical systems cannot simply ignore the presence of the divine in the universe. They must either explain away spiritual experience by reducing it to indoctrination—and the persistence of religion to biopolitical, psychological, or ideological factors—or else discover God within cosmogenesis. A scheme that chooses the purely reductive route abandons the aspiration to a comprehensive account of reality in favor of a partial one. It ceases, in that sense, to be properly metaphysical, having prejudicially disqualified the miraculous in favor of the mundane. Metaphysics is the (perhaps endless) attempt to articulate a systematic discourse concerning both the limits (immanent, finite aspects) and the freedom (transcendent, infinite aspect) of the Absolute. Immanence and transcendence are not opposites; transcendence is the superlative of immanence. The infinite does not oppose the finite; it contains and implies it.

Meillassoux’s appeal to the contingency of facticity in After Finitude leads, in The Divine Inexistence, into ethical questions surrounding the contingency of the creative Act itself. If everything is absolutely contingent, then the world-creating Act is gratuitous as well—creatio ex nihilo, creation for no reason whatsoever. Precisely for this reason, everything remains possible, even for our seemingly irredeemable world. Despite the anthropodecentric gesture of After Finitude, The Divine Inexistence appears to affirm, in a way reminiscent of Kant, that the human being “is born to be [nature’s] ultimate end.” Yet, as Kant immediately cautions, “such an end must not be thought in nature” (Critique of Judgment). This tension points toward the divine’s entry into the world—or at least its natal emergence within the incarnate human soul.

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4 responses to “After Finitude and Fideism comes Speculative Christianity?”

  1. Adam Robbert Avatar
    Adam Robbert

    I appreciate that you’re opening up this avenue of discussion further, Matthew. However, I am unconvinced that we have to choose between either the “mundane” and the “miraculous” particularly insofar as we have no genuine basis for generating a concept of the “purely mundane” or the “purely miraculous.” I would also say that it is not the case that the miraculous has been “prejudicially eliminated” when it seems that Brassier et al. are taking a serious look at the possibility of metaphysics not anchored in the divine through a process of reason, rather than an appeal politics. These are ontological arguments and, I would say, not simply the motives of an a priori atheism but rather the consequence of certain movements in thought. Not that I agree in the end, but this I think is a fairer assessment than to continually say, ‘these folks don’t agree with me, they must be prejudicially conditioned.’

    Basically, I think the theological question is open and so I appreciate the work of interpreting contemporary theory in terms of theological questions. I’m just not convinced that the options you offer above are large enough to (re)capture the religious dimension. In this sense, I think Whitehead actually cracks the door open to something bigger; not a panentheism where God transcends a world he is completely immanent to, but the much more radical image of a God who transcends the World that itself transcends God (“It is as true to say that the God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God. It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God” p. 348).

    Whitehead paints a much wilder interplay of the God-World binary and in this way lets us think a step further than the predictable narratives of sacred-secular, god-world, miracle-mundane where, “Neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion” (p. 349). In other words, not only does God escape a World that escapes God but there is no final moment within which it is revealed which is which! To my knowledge this line of thinking is only partly thought in the (jewish) Derrida for whom the postponement of justice (Christ) is indefinite and the (christian) Whitehead for whom this is state of postponement is a cosmological attribute of things, rather than something completed by the human. If I were a theologian, thats where I would be heading.

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    1. Matthew David Segall Avatar
      Matthew David Segall

      Hey Adam,

      When I made the comment about the prejudicial dismissal of theology and spirituality from metaphysics, I was not rejecting such positions just because I don’t like them. I make such statements only because I think I’ve done the ontological heavy lifting to back it up in other posts. In this particular case, I think this essay on Whitehead’s naturalistic panentheism provides a strong argument against atheism for cosmological and anthropological reasons: https://footnotes2plato.com/2010/12/09/religion-and-the-modern-world-towards-a-naturalistic-panentheism/

      I certainly agree with your portrayal of Whitehead’s metaphysics as a kind of “wilderness theology,” a theme I’ve explored before. I also just recently posted this video response to our own Adam Hudson, wherein I try to argue for the irrelevance of the question “does god exist?” in the hopes of shifting our attention away from ontology and into ethics, where the question becomes “how can mobilize a religious vision to make society more just?”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXq58lzT1Ig

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      1. Adam Robbert Avatar
        Adam Robbert

        Well — I’m certainly sympathetic to the move towards ethics! And even more so to questions regarding how to mobilize religious communities to ethical aims.

        I guess I just have two small qualms then: (1) I’d argue that Whitehead is not a panentheist, but something bigger (see above), and (2) For someone who is trying to mobilize, you sure spend a lot of time on the ontological arguments!

  2. Whitehead, Eternal Objects, and God | Footnotes to Plato Avatar
    Whitehead, Eternal Objects, and God | Footnotes to Plato

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