Westar Fall 2015 Manning: Strategic Atheism 125

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1 Westar Fall 2015 Manning: Strategic Atheism 125 Background Briefing Paper for Session II: Reclaiming A Strategic Atheism Russell Re Manning (Bath Spa University) NB. This is an unpublished paper delivered in August 2015 at Ultimate Concern: Paul Tillich, Buddhism, Confucianism at Hong Kong Baptist University Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned 1 There is hardly a word in the religious language, both theological and popular, which is subject to more misunderstandings, distortions, and questionable definitions that the word faith. It belongs to those terms which need healing before they can be used for the healing of men. Today the term faith is more productive of disease than of health. It confuses, misleads, creates alternately scepticism and fanaticism, intellectual resistance and emotional surrender, rejection of genuine religion and subjection to substitutes. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that the word faith should be dropped completely... 2 #1 Finding God Through Atheism: Lessons in Correlationism, part 1. As Nietzsche knew only too well it is the theologians blood that runs through the veins of continental philosophy and whereas the analytic tradition presents a blank rejection of theology, its continental cousin by contrast simply cannot get enough theology. Indeed, one suggestive way of tracing the development of continental philosophy is to present it as a series of atheisms/atheologies; as a set of strategies for thinking through the death of God, so provocatively announced by Nietzsche. What matters, of course, about Nietzsche s pronouncements is not that he seeks to deny the existence of God (that question, so beloved of analytic philosophers of religion, barely features at all in continental discussions), but that he calls upon modern man to recognise the consequences of living in a post- theological epoch. A recognition that he warns has not (yet) been acknowledged: It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests [such] that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti- metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. But what if...god should prove to be our most enduring lie? (Nietzsche 1974, 344) 1 Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, ix. 125

2 Westar Fall 2015 Manning: Strategic Atheism 126 Part of the reason, of course, why, for Nietzsche, the death of God though a past occurrence still lies in the future is that theology (i.e. that Christian faith that was also the faith of Plato ) lies at the very foundations of Western thinking itself. More insidiously still, Nietzsche suggests that the theological is lodged even within the very ways of thinking that philosophy makes use of in its attempt to think through the death of God: I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. (Nietzsche 2005, 170) What it is, in effect, that Nietzsche is concerned with is that the sharp divorce between faith and reason required by Kant s critical turn and summarised by his famous remark that he had to deny knowledge to make room for faith (B xxx) cannot in fact be sustained. Faith and reason are too intimately intertwined to enable a true atheism in continental philosophy, in spite of the repeated attempts to imagine such. To oversimplify the story tremendously, I want to suggest two main types or stages of post- Kantian atheism, both of which are afflicted by Nietzsche s predicament: imitative and residual (terms derived from Watkin 2011). Imitative atheism explicitly rejects theology and its categories but implicitly imitates these very categories by replacing God with a supposedly atheistic placeholder, such as Man or Reason. Imitative atheism is clearly visible in Feuerbach s anthropotheism as well as in Comte s secular religion of humanity. It also haunts Nietzsche himself and finds expression in Heidegger s attempt to wrestle fundamental ontology free from its theological corruption. Imitative atheism takes the Kantian either/or seriously, but in seeking to displace God ends up only ever replacing the divine. By contrast, residual atheism seeks, with a heroic or despairing asceticism, to make do with the meagre residue left over after the departure of God (Watkin 2011, 5). Rather than the attempt to dethrone theology, residual atheism aims instead to think without theology, to reject any recourse to theological substance within philosophy. It is, as Foucault puts it in response to any attempt at an idolatrous humanism un rire philosophique, c est- à- dire, pour une certaine part, silencieux (Foucault 1990, 354). This philosophical laugh in the face of imitative atheism remains however, itself entangled within the very parasitism that it denounces: In limiting itself to the sensory world as opposed to the suprasensory, the immanent as opposed to the transcendent, residual atheism finds itself just like imitative atheism defined in terms of that which it seeks to escape. (Watkin 2011, 6) 126

3 Westar Fall 2015 Manning: Strategic Atheism 127 Derrida provides a clear example of this tendency of residual atheism in his repeated insistence that deconstruction resist the very conceptuality of theology, for instance in his affirmation that deconstruction is not equivalent to negative theology precisely because it refuses to speak of God at all. In so doing, however, Derrida remains under the shadow of the theological; thinking always in the wake of God, never truly after God. Or better, perhaps, Derrida is located before God, en attendant Dieu, if you will, as figured in his later notion of a justice that is perpetually to come. It is hardly surprising that some are impatient with such residual atheism. Alain Badiou, for instance, declaims: A thinking that is entirely to come! How irritating is this post- Heideggerian style of perpetual announcement, of the interminable to- come; this sort of secularised prophecy never ceases to declare that we are not yet in a position to think what is to be thought, this pathos of having- to- respond to being, this God who is lacking, this waiting before the abyss, this posture of gazing far into the mist and saying that we see the indistinct approaching! How we long to say: Listen, if this thinking is still entirely to come, come back and see us when at least a piece of it has arrived! (Badiou 2004, ET Watkin 2011, 19). Rather than imitating theology or thinking in its wake, a new generation of new materialists are seeking instead to take up Nietzsche s demand and follow through on the death of God more rigorously than before. I ll come back to this in a moment. But before I do, I want to pause to draw attention to the theological consequences of this story of atheisms in continental philosophy. As Christopher Watkin notes, it is no surprise that the failure of continental philosophers finally to be rid of God has occasioned a theological turn, understood, as he puts it as theology s colonisation of residual atheism by exploiting its gesture of making room (Watkin 2011, 8) Referring to Levinas and Marion, Watkin suggests that neither of the dominant atheistic tendencies in continental philosophy succeed in undermining theology root and branch in fact, ironically, theology and its categories are safely sealed off, preserved intact, as it were, ready to return wholesale and pronounce the era of the post- secular. I don t want to dispute Watkin s assessment of the colonising strategies of the post- secular, but I do wonder whether it might not be possible to extend the analysis further and to avoid the seeming implication that theology spent the best part of the twentieth century in aspic. In brief, my suggestion is that the history of modern theology might be thought of as a series of theological responses correlations, if you will to the dominant atheistic tendencies of continental philosophy. Now, I by no means want to present this as a complete reading of the history of twentieth- 127

4 Westar Fall 2015 Manning: Strategic Atheism 128 century theology, but I do want to suggest that there are important dynamics of an interplay between philosophy and theology that can be overlooked, if the history of modern theology is presented (as it recently seems to be) as a self- contained narrative; by which I mean the claim that the history of theology is driven by internal dynamics of development. Of course, I equally have no desire to return to those older histories of modern theology that read everything through a nineteenth- century crisis of faith. To substantiate this somewhat (and inadequately), I want to suggest that there are two dominant tendencies in modern theology that correlate to the two dominant atheisms characteristic of continental philosophy. In both cases, there are what we might call minority and majority options. Remember of course, that correlation does not mean simply response as Paul Tillich defines it, correlation explains the contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence. (Tillich, 1951, 60) As such, then, theology has not remained statically indifferent to the atheistic ambitions of its philosophical interlocutors, but instead can be thought as taking up the Kantian invitation of making room by taking into itself the atheistic aspirations of the philosophers. In brief, in correlation to the atheistic humanism of the imitative tendency two styles of theological humanism emerge. The more accommodationist is the so- called liberal Kulturprotestantismus of the turn of the century that sought a form of anthropotheism in its attempts to forge a humanist theology. [Quests for Historical Jesus Albert Schweizer s critique] The other style is a line that unites Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and the assertive neo- orthodox of the early 20 th century, most famously encapsulated in Karl Barth s Romerbrief. [fell like a bombshell into the playgroud of the liberals] Whilst these two types clearly differ in important respects, my claim here is that there is a discernible tendency in Barthian neo- orthodoxy towards a theological humanism through an insistence on the priority of Christology for theology. Whilst the liberal theologians seek to bring Nietzschean humanism into theology by transforming theology into a human science, those in the Schleiermacher- Barth line correlate imitative atheism by theologising humanism. A similar dynamic can be seen in later twentieth- century theological correlations to residual atheism and its attendant linguisticism. From the early explicit death of God theologies to the various iterations of so- called postmodern or secular theology, the theological correlation to atheistic linguisticism is clear. By linguistifying (urgh!) theology, theologians from Altizer to Cupitt and Taylor to Caputo have sought to relocate theology within the residue occupied by their atheist philosophical contemporaries. At the same time, and parallel to the earlier neo- orthodox moves, there is a tendency within post- liberalism and radical orthodoxy to correlate to residual atheism precisely by theologising language itself. 128

5 Westar Fall 2015 Manning: Strategic Atheism 129 You can, I hope, see where this is going. Just as imitative and residual atheisms are correlated to forms of theological humanism and theological linguisticism, so too I suggest that the new forms of material atheism emerging in contemporary continental philosophy occasion, correlatively, a new theological materialism. But I get ahead of myself. I need first to give an outline of the new materialism of contemporary continental philosophical atheism. #2. A New Materialism: Lessons in Correlationism, part 2. One helpful way of characterising contemporary continental philosophy is as a rejection of the linguistic apophaticism of the dominant post- structuralism that determined the later twentieth century as the era of postmodernity. Central to this is a dual- faceted turn to materialism and a renewed attempt to think through the death of God. It is also, interestingly, marked by an engagement with the natural sciences (including mathematics) that confounds the easy ascription of the continental/analytic divide as an arts/sciences split. Nature, matter & the real are key notions and they are located within a philosophical framework that privileges immediacy and presence over the postmodern obsession with difference and alterity. Furthermore, these philosophies aim to be politically engaged, combining a fierce anti- capitalism (itself nothing new within continental philosophy, of course!) with an applied concern with issues surrounding global climate change. Key thinkers here are Alain Badiou, Jean- Luc Nancy, and those associated with so- called speculative realism, centrally Quentin Meillassoux. Related thinkers include others such as Slavoj Žižek, Adrian Johnston, Catherine Malabou and Jane Bennett. Christopher Watkin usefully designates these philosophers as post- theological and in so doing highlights one of the most significant features of their thought for theologians, namely their fierce resistance to the turn to religion and yet their simultaneous foregrounding of religious ideas. He writes, with reference to Badiou, Nancy and Meillassoux in particular: The prefix post- is merely an indication of chronology: to think in the West today is to think after God, with concepts and a tradition bequeathed by theology and theologically informed thinking, and even if the aim of such thinking is to be atheological it cannot avoid the task of disengaging itself from the theological legacy. (Watkin 2011, 13) Hence the striking prevalence of religious and theological themes within these rigorously atheistic philosophies. In essence, what these philosophies attempt is a reversal of the post- secular strategy of the colonisation of the secular: materialist 129

6 Westar Fall 2015 Manning: Strategic Atheism 130 atheism seeks to colonise theology and hence finally to rid grammar of God. Watkin continues: It is this integration that makes the new post- theological though truly new; it is a turn to religion in order to turn the page on religion...what post- theological integration attempts is not to oppose theism but to occupy it, not to expel theism but to ingest it, taking terms and patterns of thought previously associated with theism and reinscribing them... (Watkin 2011, 13-14) One way of getting closer here is to understand this form of continental philosophy as a flat- out rejection of the Kantian critical turn. Quentin Meillassoux in particular has taken aim at the very heart of the Kantian project itself. Meillassoux charges that Kant s claim to have inaugurated a Copernican revolution in philosophy is fundamentally inaccurate. Far from the Copernican idea of displacing humanity from the centre of the cosmos, what Kant in fact achieves is the most uncompromising anthropocentrism possible. This, Meillassoux calls correlationism and he is unflinching in his rejection of it. For Meillassoux: Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another (Meillassoux 2008, 5) This is to say, what Kant denies to subsequent thinking is the possibility of a genuine realism in which the material per se can be present to thought. By dislodging the Kantian correlational posture Meillassoux seeks to provide the possibility of an anti- humanist metaphysical scientific realism or otherwise put, the possibility of imaging the real as just simply what it is: a pure objectivity, or in his terms, facticity. Freed from Kantian correlationism, Meillassoux claims a new answer to the fundamental theological and philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing and that this answer is both theological and atheological: metaphysical problems are revealed always to have been genuine problems, since they do admit of a solution. But their resolution depends on one precise and highly constraining condition that we begin to understand that in reply to those metaphysical questions that ask why the world is thus and not otherwise, the response for no reason is a genuine answer. Instead of laughing or smiling at questions like where do we come from?, why do we exist?, we should ponder instead the remarkable fact that the replies from nothing. For nothing really are answers, thereby realising that these really were questions and excellent ones at that. There is no longer 130

7 Westar Fall 2015 Manning: Strategic Atheism 131 mystery, not because there is no longer a problem, but because there is no longer a reason. (Meillassoux 2008, 110) Having thus, as he sees it, freed philosophy from its theologically- determined correlationism, a genuinely godless materialism can be proposed, according to which a robustly atheist response can be given to the basic question of existence, thereby deflating any notion of ultimacy by affirming the non- paradoxical necessity of contingency. Here, then, we do seem to be beyond both imitative and residual forms of atheism. Meillassoux s materialism is not a displaced divinity nature is rather thought of in its pure naturalness nor is it a nihilism lurking in the shadow of God nature is thought of in its material reality as the thing- in- itself that it is. Unlike the moral outrage that animates anglo- phone so- called new atheism (and thus obscures its real metaphysical significance), this newer atheism is squarely and unapologetically post- theological in its atheism. And, of course, it is precisely this that makes it so interesting for theology. Conclusion Rather than running scared of such newer atheism, theology should, I suggest, see this development as a new opportunity. If not perhaps the good luck of theology that Tillich claimed existentialism to be, the rise of materialist atheism in contemporary continental philosophy nonetheless opens up the possibility for new theological correlations. Just as previous atheisms informed the development of theological humanisms and theological linguisticisms, so now the possibility seems to present itself for a new theological materialism in correlation to post- theological materialism. As before, I suggest, that we look for accommodationist and resistance approaches. The first looks to materialise theology; that is to re- present theology as materialist. Finally to shake off the theological notions of supernaturalism this post- theological theology, if you will, will seek further to radicalise the immanentist tendencies of secular theology. Clayton Crockett and Jeff Robbins recent co- authored book, Religion, Politics and the Earth. The New Materialism (2012) is perhaps a first step in this direction. Here Crockett and Robbins present a manifesto for the earth, understood as the kind of compressed chaos that can and must be valued in and for itself. Against theological impositions of sovereignty and alterity, which play out in practical terms as the ecological crisis of capitalism, they propose that theology be brought down to earth and the material become the determining criterion of ultimacy. The other approach will seek to re- colonise the post- theological via a theologising of the material. My suggestion here is that such a theological materialism provides opportunities for a renovation of the tradition of natural theology. By taking the material as the material for theology, such a natural theology will attempt to think 131

8 Westar Fall 2015 Manning: Strategic Atheism 132 theologically through and with the things that we encounter in all their real thinglinesses. This must, I think, be more than a theology of nature. A theology of nature adopts a certain theologically- determined interpretation as normative for its encounter with the world. As such, a theological materialism motivated by a theology of nature will always begin with God and then turn to the material, which is precisely the move that a materialist atheism disallows. Instead a natural theology must begin with the things themselves and make the case that only a theological materialism can deliver the realism that the philosophers are seeking. To some extent this simply repeats the traditional function of natural theology to enquire into the existence and nature of God on the basis of the world as we experience it. Just as Meillassoux et al. dislodge the Kantian subject from natural philosophy, so the natural theologian is tasked in developing a theological materialism to reach back behind Kant and to shatter the limits placed on speculative knowledge of the divine. No longer must theology make room for itself as faithful. Indeed, it is here that the root of the destructive rejection of natural theology in favour of so- called revealed theology lies. In the place of the failed opposition between natural and revealed theology an alternative contrast presents itself; namely between natural and faithful (or positivist) theologies. The guiding thought here is that what natural theology lacks is not so much revelation but faith. Such natural theology is not so much a human theology (of the bottom- up kind so derided by its Barthian critics), but a faithless theology. It is, to put it another way, a theology that has thrown off all religious (and secular) certainties in disgust. For such a natural theology, recalling the earliest explorations in natural theology in ancient Greece, God is a problem for thought (Jaeger 1947: 4). It is this that Paul Tillich describes as absolute faith : the courage to be as rooted in the God above God, a state that Tillich describes as: On the boundary of man s possibilities. It is this boundary. Therefore, it is both the courage of despair and the courage in and above every courage. It is not a place where one can live; it is without the safety of words and concepts, it is without a name, a church, a cult, a theology. But it is moving in the depth of all of things. (Tillich 1952: ) 132