The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion

18.

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 the sense of the world that is there whether we mind it or not, but it is not a world without minds. Physics opens its doors for business by means of a decontextualization (removing us from the picture), but decontextualization is followed by recontextualization. The absolute is drawn into a relation, a perplexing situation that is well described (as the realists to their credit recognize) by Levinas (of all people) when he speaks of a relation whose terms are continually absolving themselves from the relation, a conundrum familiar to any Jewish theologian—ever since Yahweh told Moses to mind his own business (Ex 3:14). Derrida called it a relation without relation, which we might extend to a correlation without correlation. Correlation does not, pace Meillassoux, reduce the universe to the dimensions of our world or dissolve its autonomy. On the contrary, the ever-expanding universe becomes the ever-widening world of which we are an irreducible, if increasingly minuscule, part, a point first noticed by Pascal. Correlation means not that the universe belongs to us but that we belong to it. Correlation does not reduce the world to us, but releases us from our contraction to ourselves, and the more we learn about the universe, the less contracted we are. A medieval realist like Aquinas said that a knowing being differs from a non-knowing being because the latter is contracted to itself and the former is expanded into and becomes all things (an Aristotelianism that Meillassoux reads backwards, as if Aristotle has said all things become us). I distinguish cosmos or universe from world or life-world, that is, the place where we live. The universe is the ultimate or widest sphere of decontextualization, while the world is the widest context. The universe is the determination in the last instance in its order, just as the world is the determination in the last instance in its order, and these two orders are not adversaries but correlates. I think that Hegel saw this but, as the young Hegelians complained, in an upside-down way.

The problem of epistemological correspondence cannot in principle arise in any adequate account of correlation, because we are the very issue of the correlation. As Heidegger (no worldless subject) and Wittgenstein (no private language) well realized in strictly philosophical terms, we do not have to build a bridge to the world. In fact, we cannot. If the bridge were not already there, we would never be able to build it because we would not even exist. We do not construct a correlation, because the correlation constructs us. We are plants, sprouts shooting up from the local conditions in which we have been produced, in just the way that vegetation started to shoot up when the ozone layer grew thick enough to shield the earth from the ultraviolet rays of the sun, and in just the way that that the color spectrum available to our vision has been fixed by the astronomical composition of our sun, which has set the terms of light sensitivity that we call sight. Anyone who asks whether or why what is going on in us correlates with what is going on out there is asking the wrong question. We are out there, and we are the correlation. "Immer schon" as Heidegger liked to say. Accordingly, physics needs to be supplemented by biology, and biology by the study of anthropos, not in cleanly separated strata, but in a continuum of complexity that allows for gaps when thresholds are surpassed, following along the lines described by Žižek’s notion of parallax gaps. Matter is all, but this all is a non-all, admitting of countless complexifications all the way from supposedly inert bodies—an intolerable notion if mass and energy are simply different expressions of the same thing—to human-animal bodies, in which the energy of so-called inert bodies is intensified, as Deleuze would put it.

What we call in English the humanities belongs to the study of the real, of human reality, and its subject matter is as real as real can be. The humanities cultivate the disciplinary eyes and ears to follow the tracks of human life’s finer, more complex correlations, these more deeply contextualized strata of reality, in their finer lacings and interlacings—as when Husserl spoke of a need for a vocabulary describing things that are notched, scalloped, and lens-shaped.¹³ The authentic notion of correlation lies in the relations among the anthropological, the biological, and the physical strata, requiring us to understand the finer and nonformal features of the relationships that emerge among human beings and between human beings and the nonhuman universe that precedes and engenders them and will survive their demise. That is why we require the collaboration of neuroscience and Continental philosophy of the sort we see in Catherine Malabou.

Derrida’s work is crucially situated between physics and anthropos, between nature and culture. The most fundamental point made by Derrida—superficially the most literary of the Continentalists—is that life is structurally inhabited by death, not only by being shot through by an inescapable mortality, but by being already marked and inscribed by the neutral, automatic, and technical structure of différance. Derrida’s earliest philosophical argument was made against Husserl’s phenomenology of the Lebenswelt, where he insisted precisely upon the impersonal-anonymous structures of spacing that inhabit the life of living speech. Of Grammatology is a deconstruction of the nature/culture divide in Rousseau and his modern anthropological followers where différance is shown to be the dead differential technology in living speech. If the very physis of the human zoon is logos, and if logos presupposes différance, and if différance is techne, then human nature is from the inside out always already technological. He adduced a materialist point in Husserl against Husserl, when Husserl made the Origin of Geometry dependent upon the technology of writing.¹⁴ We have never been purely human; there has never been any pure human life. The principle of life in living things is not the anima, the soul, but death, that is, a structure of anonymity. There is nothing about différance that restricts it to the human. Indeed, as a structure of spacing and timing, différance also provides a way of thinking about the nonhuman merely physical universe. The correlation, then, is the chiasmic intertwining of the human and the nonhuman.

From Fideism to Faith

I agree with Meillassoux’s critique of Kant, and I count myself among those who practice a philosophy of religion that descends from Hegel (through Tillich), not from Kant (through Barth).¹⁵ Kant was engaged in damage control, a retrenchment that staves off knowledge in order to keep ethics safe (ethics being as much religion as Kant could abide). Kant opens the door to a half-hearted epistemological postmodernism, an apologetic use of Continental philosophy,¹⁶ keeping the powders of faith dry as the waters of modernist critique rise. Kantian postmodernism is a skepticism that provides a cover for fideism,¹⁷ illustrated in the saying of Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus, who claims that just because the world is not a system for us does not mean it is not a system for God.

I prefer not to take this Kantian/Kierkegaardian approach to keeping faith safe but, on the contrary, to approach faith by exposing it in all its insecurity and vulnerability. Indeed, I prefer to go back to Hegel’s critique of the rationalists,¹⁸ who debated about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul while maintaining that the juicier theological doctrines, like the Trinity and the Incarnation, are matters of faith and revealed theology. For Hegel, all the life of religion lies in the so-called contents of revelation. Philosophy is above all nourished by a reflection upon the meaning of the Trinity and the Incarnation, which are the real or absolute truth in the form of a Vorstellung of the truth, a truth whose head could be cleared only by the philosophical Concept (Begriff). But I am a Hegelian without the Concept, who thinks we need to take religion lock, stock, and barrel in all its theological richness, but without the guidance of a Concept capable of decoding Vorstellungen into the absolute truth. What I call radical hermeneutics means that the Vorstellung goes all the way down. Religion, in my view, is a Vorstellung, a work of imagination,¹⁹ not of the Concept no more than of a supernatural being in the sky but of the event. Religion gives narratival form and flesh to underlying events—like the promise, forgiveness, hospitality, justice, hope, expectation—and to faith. I treat religious beliefs and practices as a theopoetics, a poetics of the theos, or the theios, a way of describing what is going on in our lives under the name of God, the gods and/or the divine. The several religions are for me so many ways to poetize the world, similar to the way Merleau-Ponty said that the several languages are so many ways to sing the world. As a result, it makes no more sense to ask what is the true religion than to ask what the true language is. What Francois Laruelle calls non-theology, using theology to give it a human meaning, is analogous to what I am calling theopoetics.²⁰ The landscape of human experience is for Laruelle a plane of immanence, against the dualism of the Gnostic world that he is trying to reinvent, to put it in Derridean terms. His use of the categories of heresy and Christ, his attempt to find their human meaning, is, if punishingly opaque, I think highly instructive and belongs to the structure of what I would call a radical theology.

So I rise to the defense of faith, but not of fideism. Fideism is a negative and apologetic strategy, a way of saying you cannot prove me wrong so I am free to believe ______________, whereas faith is an affirmation. Faith, foi, is not a confessional belief (croyance), not a creedal assertion, and has nothing to do with having faith in a world behind the scenes. I confess a circumfessional and primal faith in what I call the event. The philosophy of religion is an explication of the event, a radical theology (and a form of radical hermeneutics), a theology of the event, above all of the theos, of the name of God, while the various confessional and historical religious traditions are so many Vorstellungen of events.

A Nihilism of Grace

Now let us turn to the cold, disenchanted, demythologized, disappointed, scientific, realistic, rationalistic, materialistic brio of Brassier’s Nihil Unbound in all its apocalyptic fury. Let us unbind nihilism and let it all hang out. Let us expose ourselves to the terrible trauma of the real, our heads bloodied but unbowed by this degree zero of being-nothing, which boils away both substance and subject, dissipating everything fideistic and correlational. Let us leave behind the luxurious plenitude and lush planes of the Lebenswelt for the thermal equilibrium of unbound entropy, where being-in-itself is nothing-for-us, nothing to us and we nothing to it. What is being degree zero to me or I to it that I should weep for being-nothing?

Now what? At this point, I am inclined to say that Brassier is too much of an Augustinian for my tastes, specifically a City of God Augustinian I hasten to add, not a praying-weeping circumfessional Confessions Augustinian. Like Augustine he believes that if a thing does not last forever, it has no true (or lasting) reality, and if it perishes, it has no true (or lasting) value, thereby embracing classical metaphysical assumptions that go back to Plato and the City of God. Like John Milbank, he thinks anyone who denies the existence of the God of Augustinian theology is a nihilist. They both agree that the only thing that could seal the bond of being is the God of classical metaphysical theology, and they differ only in their assessment of nihilism, in their contrasting desire to bind or unbind nihilism, to bind nihilism with the bond of being or to unbind the nihil from being’s bonds.

I think the truth is exactly the opposite. The only things that can be valued or treasured are mortal, finite, transient and temporal, their very impermanence being the reason we hold them dear.²¹ We hold them dear by holding them fast, and we hold them fast because we know that we cannot hold on to them forever. Their transiency intensifies their existence. The impermanence of things gives them a haunting bittersweetness, casting a patina of mortality over what is held closest to our heart. If something lasted forever, it would soon enough lose its fragrance, be drained of meaning and emptied of value, and we would be exposed to something worse than a sickness unto death, namely, a sickness unto undeath, what Blanchot and Levinas call the impossibility of dying. Where the youthful Nietzsche concludes his sketch of cosmic nihilism by saying and nothing will have happened, the Zarathustra of the mature Nietzsche responds, Was that life? Well then, once more! Life elicits the joyful affirmation of Nietzschean Jasagung, a Franco-German oui, oui, a joyful Joycean yes I said yes.

So the faith whose cause I take up is neither the fideism that rankles Meillassoux, nor the ethical faith that Kant tried to make safe, nor especially the confessional faith that the orthodox believe will save them, but it is the unsafe faith, the foi, that animates or, I should say, that haunts what, following Derrida, I call a religion without religion. This faith, which cannot immunize itself against un-faith, fails to be either safe or saving. It begins and ends in the circumfession that nothing keeps us safe, that the stars do not know we are here. It does not deny the law of entropy and makes no pretense of being the secret word that wins the prize of a trip to the other world outside space and time. This faith confesses that we are all disasters, dis-astered. This little star of ours we call the sun is not the image of the Good or the One but one among many, only one of innumerable suns in countless galaxies, in a universe that may be but one of many universes. But unlike Brassier, I take this very final setting of the sun to be at the same time the setting of a certain faith. I take this impossible thought that the earth and sun and galaxy and universe are hurtling to entropic death to be the condition of the possibility of faith.²² Here faith functions not in opposition to un-faith but in utter dependence upon it, so that there would be no reason for faith if we were not so deeply unbelieving, in just the way that hope is hope only when things are hopeless. But faith in what? In life, which is never simply life, but life-death, and in resurrection, of which the magical resuscitation of Lazarus, the resurrection of Jesus, and the various versions of reincarnation scattered around philosophy and religion are so many Vorstellungen. Resurrection, as Cixous says of Derrida after his death sentence of pancreatic cancer, is a reprieve, being given more life, more time, being reborn when all is lost, which, being temporary, is all the more precious. Faith means faith in the grace of the moment, of the hour, of the day, of the lifetime. The menace posed by the prospect that time is running out is what constitutes its value. The very thing that makes faith in life possible also makes it impossible. This faith is a believing in life. The word belief comes from love, lieben. So belief means what we love to think. We believe in what we love, and what we love is life, more