The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion

Clayton Crockett, B. Keith Putt, Jeffrey W. Robbins

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780253013934
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

What is the future of Continental philosophy of religion? These forward-looking essays address the new thinkers and movements that have gained prominence since the generation of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and Levinas and how they will reshape Continental philosophy of religion in the years to come. They look at the ways concepts such as liberation, sovereignty, and post-colonialism have engaged this new generation with political theology and the new pathways of thought that have opened in the wake of speculative realism and recent findings in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Readers will discover new directions in this challenging and important area of philosophical inquiry.

PART I

THE MESSIANIC

1 Is Continental Philosophy of Religion Dead?

John D. Caputo

JACQUES DERRIDA IS dead. Now they are all dead—all the soixant-huitaires.¹ So, is it over? Is Continental philosophy—and by extension, Continental philosophy of religion—as we know it dead? For a younger generation of philosophers, the so-called theological turn is the last straw. If the religious turn is where Continental philosophy ends up, supplying a final place for religion to hide before the “singularity” arrives,² then Continental philosophy is dead. If it is not, the first order of business is to kill it off. What good is Nietzsche’s death of God, if we still have to deal with religion? This critique goes well beyond the familiar attack on Continental philosophy by analytic philosophy. It seeks to replace both “unconcealment” and “language games” with a more ruthless realism, a more materialist materialism, a more uncompromising objectivism, aiming to put an end to Continental philosophy as we know it. When I say “as we know it,” I mean the program announced by Kant when he says “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” That is what Quentin Meillassoux, who is spearheading this attack, calls “fideism,” delimiting the reach of the mathematical sciences in order to leave the door open for religious faith,³ resulting in Continentalists who wear thick glasses and find their way with a stick, moving about in the shadows where religion carries out its dark business.

I think there is a legitimate complaint here. The Kantian path in postmodernism is an abridgement that reduces it to apologetics. That is why I pursue a Hegelian route, even as I criticize the lingering alliance of Hegel with classical theology.⁴ What is called the death of God by Hegel, unnerving though it be to classical theology, is really a moment in the infinite life of God. God’s plasticity, pace Malabou, cannot possibly include explosion, annihilation, or extinction. But if the new cosmology proposes the death of the universe in total entropic dissipation, and if God’s life is inscribed in space and time, as Hegel insisted, then God’s death, too, is final. The entire history of the universe is an explosion (the Big Bang) of which we are the debris. Nonetheless, I think the new critics do not see what they have stumbled upon. They are like someone who finds a Picasso in the attic but does not know anything about painting. Their nihilism is not without value, and it is not for nothing—but they know nothing about that. They identify our being-nothing, our cosmic precariousness, but they are know-nothings about the value of nothing, about what I call here the grace of nihilism or the nihilism of grace. My hypothesis then is this: there is a religion without religion in Continental philosophy that is articulated in a radical theology of grace, of the grace of chance and the chance of grace, which I will call being-for-nothing. The new critics are a nail in the coffin of Continental philosophy of religion in the Kantian mode, but not in its more radical Hegelian mode.

Physics as Metaphysics and the New Wonder

These new critics cannot be answered in the standard way, by cupping our ears and shouting “scientism,” for two reasons. First, physics is the new metaphysics. It is the study of the universe as if there were no living things.⁵ The difference between the sun, the figure of the good in Plato’s allegory, and the flittering shadows on the wall is only a matter of velocity—its transience is so drawn out that we do not notice that it too is flaring up and dying off. Physics is the study of a real without a good, a real we have no reason to presume has any care for us, and all the metaphysics we are likely to get. Continental philosophy has made a profitable living out of the critique of metaphysics, but if metaphysics means an account of things beyond physis (“life,” “birth”), a world without life, before or after life, then physics is more and more doing the heaving lifting in what was called metaphysics in the past, and metaphysics never gets any further than physics. When contemporary theoretical physicists speculate that at bottom what we call the physical universe is composed of vibrating filaments called superstrings, I very much doubt that the traditional metaphysicians, unequipped with either mathematics or experimental evidence, have anything to add. The cosmic schema to which contemporary physics at present subscribes is not far from the youthful Nietzsche’s fable about a distant corner of the universe in which proud little animals invented words like “truth.”⁶ I will call the fantastic voyage from the Big Bang to entropic dissipation the “basic schema,” the largest overarching context, the ultimate setting or, to employ an expression Laruelle picked up from Marx and Engels, the context “in the last determination” of human life. Not that it really is the last, but that it is the latest. The most likely hypothesis, according to physicists today, is that the universe is headed for total destruction, when a “trillion trillion trillion years from now,” as Brassier says, the “implacable gravitational expansion” will have pushed the universe “into an eternal and unfathomable blackness.”⁷ The lights will have gone out in Heidegger’s Welt even as Wittgenstein’s language games will prove to have been played with dead languages, resulting in a wordless, worldless void, eerier than the one with which Genesis began.

Second, physics is the new wonder. Contemporary cosmology is stealing philosophy’s wonder. It has taken possession of the very ground in which philosophy is supposed to plant its roots—wonder and the imagination. We do not need to be swept up in the Tao⁸ or the “wow” of physics to concede that contemporary physicists are out-imagining, out-wondering, out-wowing the philosophers. Not only do physicists know more mathematics than the philosophers, but they also have more imagination and produce more stunning views of reality. Our desire for the impossible (whose aporetic structure is Derrida’s central intuition) is more and more satisfied by the counterintuitive advances made by the special and general theory of relativity and quantum theory. Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible is well named.⁹ The events of quantum mechanics are “absurd,” says Richard Feynman, and the strange results of speculative cosmology today quite outstrip the extraordinary events recounted in the Scriptures, so that what is impossible for human beings is possible in the quantum world. The thirst for an “other world”—of which the literary-imaginative structures of heaven “above” and hell “below” are almost irresistible figures—is alive and well. This thirst, however, is being quenched today by other means. The Platonic “super-sensible,” the theological “super-natural,” and the mystical “super-essential” are giving way to superstrings. Heaven is giving way to the heavens, to the extraterrestrial, to the galaxies far, far away. The mythic structure of two-worlds metaphysics and its Platonic metaphorics is becoming increasingly incredible with each passing revolution of the earth around the sun.

Coping with Correlation

When it comes to natural science, Continental philosophy has spent most of its energies in a Kantian mode of critically delimiting science—trying to contain it, not to study it, and trying to deny knowledge (science) in order to make room for phenomenology or cultural analysis (or whatever we are doing that year). Consequently, it is badly positioned to deal with the current criticism that the “outbreak” of religion has brought to a head. I emphasize that I am not describing the new physics in terms of scientific “reductionism.” Science is not reductionism but an explosion of wonder and imagination, of the possibility of the impossible. I am not trying to reduce theology to science or science to theology. I am not trying to reduce anything but to adduce the work of imagination in the collaboration between the theological and the scientific. I want to do so by examining what has sparked the sell-off in Continental philosophy, that is, “correlation” and “fideism.”

Suppose that physics is metaphysics in the sense of dealing with the real, where the real is taken to mean what is there as if we were not there—as if we had never been born or had all perished in some cosmic catastrophe. Even so, when we are there, when we are real, the real has, for precisely that time, acquired another stratum of reality with a texture and complexity all its own that merits and requires our attention. That may seem too obvious for words, but it bears repeating in view of Meillassoux’s criticism of “correlation,” a view so “fundamentalist” about objectivism as to accuse the likes of Foucault and Derrida of creationism!¹⁰ If the speculation about superstrings is experimentally confirmed, that will be the much sought-after “theory of everything” (TOE), uniting relativity and quantum theory. But physics will remain in an important way “incomplete,” and we must be careful about how we understand its incompleteness and not fall into the egregious mistake made by Meillassoux. Physics is related to the study of life at large and of human life in particular, not as “being” is related to “appearance” or as the “thing in itself” is related to some supposedly subjectivist “correlation,” but as the physical basis of things is related to everything that is built upon that basis, as the founding stratum is related to the strata that are founded upon it. Physics provides the basic schema of what everything is at bottom, but not of every relationship found within the real. It is the theory of everything material but not of everything that matters. Physics may well seek the theory of “everything” but not of everything about which we need a theory. Granted, physics governs everything, but it does not give an account of every way in which things can be approached. The basic reason the roof leaks when it rains ultimately goes back to string theory. But by the time you got from string theory back to the roof, the house would be soaked. Life and human life are no less real than the subject matter of physics. Even if human and animal bodies are short-timers in the cosmic scheme of things, they are fascinating moments in which the universe shows what it is made of, what we are made of. I advocate not a reductionistic materialism but an open-ended materialism, just as Žižek thinks that matter is all, but the all is a non-all, and as Malabou describes a “reasonable materialism” that does not turn life into a cybernetic or neurological program.¹¹ Derrida, Žižek, Malabou, and I are all “materialists” in the sense that we do not think there are two worlds, one in space and time, the other transcending space and time.¹² That is why I would supplement physics with a “poetics,” while Malabou emphasizes transformational “plastics,” and Žižek introduces “parallax shifts.”

The real is the “absolute” in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Back to the Future
• Part I. The Messianic
• Part II. Liberation
• Part III. Plasticity
• List of Contributors
• Index