Introduction: Dialecticising New Atheism
From Real Speculations
The following article is the Introduction to my latest book Real Speculations. The article engages a “dialectical critique of New Atheism” in the attempt to frame the way our intellectual discussion about civilisation in the 20th century has developed, and where we may find the frontier of this discussion in the years to come. To pick up a copy of the book, see:
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Part 1: Dawkins Meets Kurzweil?
When I was growing into my intellectual consciousness (~2005, 19 years old), the public debates of the time centred around New Atheism and its rejection of Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms. The best-selling popular intellectual book the year I started my undergraduate degree was New Atheist Richard Dawkins The God Delusion,1 which forwards the hypothesis that a supernatural creator God is unlikely to exist (improbable):2
“The argument from improbability is the big one[, which], properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.”
He often framed his work on the improbability of God in the zeitgeist of progressive American culture. In the same way that people deviating from the heterosexual norm were being encouraged to “come out” as LGBT+ to redefine normality, Dawkins suggested people hiding their lack of faith, or their extreme doubt in a higher supernatural agency, should as a moral imperative “come out” to redefine religious normality:3
“Indeed, organising atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to ‘come out’, thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.”
In “coming out”, Dawkins hope was that a critical mass of atheists would win a culture war against religion, shifting its classification from a dimension of human culture that deserves respect, admiration and political benefits in liberal society, into a dimension of human culture that deserves a new classification on the level of a delusion:4
“The word ‘delusion’ in my title has disquieted some psychiatrists who regard it as a technical term, not to be bandied about. Three of them wrote to me to propose a special technical term for religious delusion: ‘relusion’. Maybe it’ll catch on. But for now I am going to stick with ‘delusion’, and I need to justify my use of it. The Penguin English Dictionary defines a delusion as ‘a false belief or impression’. [...] The dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word defines a delusion as ‘a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder’. The first part captures religious faith perfectly.”
In opposition to such “relusional” personal belief in a higher power, Dawkins forwards the idea that we should work with our “evolutionary apprenticeship” in “Middle World” (between the micro-macro cosmos). This means attempting to break with the limited capacities given to us by evolutionary processes, which adapt and condition us to the day-to-day realities that we sense and perceive as given, and strive for both an intuitive and mathematical understanding of the very small (subatomic world), very large (galactic superclusters), and very fast (light), i.e. environments which are totally alien to our evolutionary history:5
“Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World, tear off our black burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive – as well as just mathematical – understanding of the very small, the very large, and the very fast? I genuinely don’t know the answer, but I am thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.”
Although Dawkins never developed this as a world historical project, it is in many ways a desire that is being carried out in the scientific universe, probably most notably in the desires and activities of transhumanists. Transhumanists precisely seek to radically extend their cognition: to think of humanity as taking intelligent control of our evolution precisely to rise above the way our minds have been conditioned by historical evolutionary processes. In the most grandiose visions of the transhumanists, this will lead to a spiritual process in which we basically become God-like in our cognitive capacities. To frame this in Dawkins’ aforementioned project, this not only involves the intuitive and mathematical understanding of the counter-intuitive micro and macro scales of existence, but also the capacity to manipulate these scales, to circumvent the speed of light to travel at will throughout the macro scales, and being able to harness energy manufactured from the level of the micro scales, allowing us to infuse the entire cosmos with our cognition.
Here is the idea from the most famous transhumanist of our time, Ray Kurzweil:6
“In the aftermath of the Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst. It will achieve this by reorganising matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation to spread out from its origin on Earth.
We currently understand the speed of light as a bounding factor on the transfer of information. Circumventing this limit has to be regarded as highly speculative, but there are hints that this constraint may be able to be superseded. If there are even subtle deviations, we will ultimately harness this superluminal ability. Whether our civilisation infuses the rest of the universe with its creativity and intelligence quickly or slowly depends on its immutability. In any event the “dumb” matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence[.]
This is the ultimate destiny of the Singularity and of the universe.”
Here we can see most directly the unlikely connection between the atheistic work of Dawkins and the futurist work of Kurwzeil. Dawkins is asking us to shed our relusions for a confrontation qua apprenticeship with our cognitive limitations, and Kurzweil is outlining the techno-scientific pathway whereby this apprenticeship could be actualised into the infinite.
In many ways one could take liberties with Dawkins own work by framing it in philosophical terms as a type of Spinozan pantheism, or at least he opens the conversation in that direction. Spinozan pantheism is a doctrine that supports the idea that Nature or the Universe at large is already the manifestation of God’s substance. Thus, for Dawkins, through understanding the strangest dimensions of Nature/Universe (the very small subatomic realm, very large super-galactic realm, very fast speed of light barrier), we break the limits of our own “Middle World” cognition, and enter into the vast limitlessness of God “itself”. In this context, one could also take philosophical liberties with Kurzweil’s work, and suggest that he is desiring an immanent union with this substance, and expressing it in the form of an Absolute Image on the level of the destiny of the whole universe to become unified with but also transforming this substance. This is an idea I shared directly with philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who used it to help frame his philosophical work on the technological singularity, and referring to this specific drive as a “gnostic turn”.7
What is at stake in this issue is how to think of the truth as the relation or the unity between subject and substance, or as stated perfectly by Hegel:8
“In my view, [...] everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”
Here we cannot jump into full absolute knowledge of the destiny of the cosmos as filling substance with our subjectivity. This is just an image based on a prediction of our current knowledge. In other words, we cannot stand on our own shoulders and leap into the future with full knowledge, but rather must tarry with the moment to moment historical process as it is unfolding, and surprising us, in that unfolding. This is what is at stake in raising our cognition to the historical moment that certainly requires such efforts.
Part 2: Including Myself as Subject
During the earliest years of coming into my intellectual consciousness, I would not have been able to describe Dawkins’ New Atheist movement in connection to transhumanism, nor his worldview in such philosophical terms. I rather embodied the movement and worldview for several years as a classical reductionist and materialist evolutionary scientist, without a background in futurism and philosophy. I appreciated the rational clarity and cosmic scope of the evolutionary perspective, the way it allowed me to situate my being in relation to the fundamental origins of the cosmos, life, and humanity. This worldview gave a “big picture”, a picture of a scale and size that I felt matched the dignity of my being and my thinking, and also a breath of fresh air in comparison to the specialised professional disciplines that I felt too narrowly limited my being and thinking.
Throughout this time, I absolutely tended towards a passionate intellectual defence of evolutionary science over fundamentalist religion. Fundamentalist religion seemed to base truth on belief, or in psychoanalytic terms, the unmediated immediacy of unconscious wish-fulfillments, as opposed to empirical evidence of reality. To be specific, the central issues in the early 21st century culture war between evolution and religion orbited whether or not the universe was created or designed by a supernatural being, and whether or not the results of the origin of the universe in the evolutionary process were being intelligently and spiritually guided. The evolutionary point of view forwarded the idea that the entire process could be explained naturally, even if there were still crucially important details about the origin of the universe and life and language that were still unknown. The fundamentalist religious perspective, in contrast, forwarded the idea of “Intelligent Design”, that the entire process originates in God and is guided by God throughout. While you can still find prominent intellectuals debating in this way, the major zeitgeist of the culture war by the 2020s, has moved elsewhere.
For me at the time, although I totally aligned with the evolutionary perspective, in exploring all aspects of evolutionary thinking, from reductionist to emergentist perspectives, I came to see evolution itself confronting religious themes in the ideas of technological singularity.9 To be specific, it seemed to me that the technological singularity opened up both the possibility to create new universes, and opened up the possibility of humans guiding evolution intelligently and spiritually. From this perspective, I started to hold the view that both the evolutionary perspective as grounded in reductionist scientific materialism and the fundamentalist religious perspective, were incorrect, pointing towards an as yet unarticulated higher order discourse. The evolutionary perspective was simply incomplete because it had yet to account for the processes of human history and the human role in the cosmos. When we include the human process and role in the cosmos, new possibilities for thinking about the universe and evolutionary design, appear.10 In contrast, the fundamentalist religious perspective was simply incorrect because it was backwards or upside down: it is not that God created the universe and guided it throughout its evolution, it is that God was emerging through our evolutionary process, God was becoming through human subjectivity.
In this way, my perspectives on both spirituality and religion began to sharply differ from the hard line of a Dawkins form of New Atheism, even if I still appreciated the basic motivations at work in that intellectual moment. If Dawkins was unconsciously operating on the Spinozan dream that God was Nature, I started to think that what was missing from this dream was the role of human subjectivity. In other words, the big picture needed to more deeply integrate or unify with my “I”.11 Here I also started to drift from the hard line of Kurzweilian transhumanism and started to gravitate towards the tradition of continental philosophy that stems from Kant, Hegel, and the German Idealists, and as taught by the Slovenian school, led by philosophers Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, and Mladen Dolar. The central idea was that of the transcendental a priori which prevents us from understanding universal substance in-itself, whether as evolutionary history or transhuman future, without considering the way in which this universal substance is always already constituted by us now:12
“It all begins with Kant, with his idea of the transcendental constitution of reality. In a way, one can claim that it is only with this idea of Kant’s that philosophy reached its own terrain: prior to Kant, philosophy was ultimately perceived as a general science of Being as such, as a description of the universal structure of entire reality, with no qualitative difference from particular sciences. It was Kant who introduced the difference between ontic reality and its ontological horizon, that a priori network of categories which determines how we understand reality, what appears to us as reality.”
From this standpoint we are challenged to think through even the structures of universal being or substance, as thought before Kant, as forms of “relusions”, to use Dawkins' term. In other words, not only is the fundamentalist notion of Intelligent Design a relusion being transcendentally constituted by that form of explicitly religious subjectivity, but we might even say that philosophers, from Plato to Spinoza, as well as scientists, from Dawkins to Kurzweil, were/are also operating in forms of a relusion. In contrast to relusions, Hegel’s philosophy, as the pinnacle of Kant’s transcendental turn, forces us to confront the present moment of totality as a radical crack, gap or imbalance where the becoming of our own contradiction is the becoming of reality itself:13
“Kant [fully exposes] a crack, a series of irreparable antinomies, which emerges the moment we want to conceive reality as All[.] And does not Hegel, instead of overcoming this crack, radicalise it? Hegel’s reproach to Kant is that he is too gentle with things: he locates antinomies in the limitation of our reason, instead of locating them in things themselves, that is, instead of conceiving reality-in-itself as cracked and antinomic.”
Here I gained new insight into my own contradictions between religion and evolution, evolution and transhumanism. I started to speculate about how we can think of spirituality and religion as a phenomenon wedded to our historical and structural being. What is at first obvious is that we can no longer rely on or emphasise either a fundamentalist or a deconstructive view of religion, but neither can we even rely or emphasise an evolutionary teleological view of religion. All such points of view fail to understand religion as a transcendental horizon constituted by the contradictions of subjectivity itself. In the tradition of German Idealism, and especially in the work of Hegel, stemming first from his Phenomenology of Spirit, there is more an emphasis that religions are necessary transcendental illusions that need to be identified without contradiction, before being transgressed via self-relating negativity, in order to know the truth inclusive of one’s own contradictory coming-to-be a knowing subject. We can apply this logic to the fundamentalists, but also the deconstructionists and the evolutionists, either of the reductionist or emergentist variety.
Thus, in this frame, the evolutionary metaphysics itself could be understood as a type of religious transcendental illusion, or big Other of Nature or the Universe, that needs to be transgressed in order to work with the “I” as a knowing subject. In many contemporary philosophical discourses, this pre-Kantian, ultimately Spinozan, disposition is still a common relusional and non-dialectical point of view. In Dawkins terms, of his ultimate project of an “evolutionary apprenticeship” in “Middle World”, where we confront the limitations of spacetime on the levels of the very small (subatomic), very large (galactic superclusters), and very fast (speed of light), what we find is an idea wedded to the presupposition of spacetime itself. In Kurzweil’s terms, of extending and expanding our cognition so as to transform the entire cosmos, we also get the idea of wedding our cognition to this spacetime substance. What neither approach is the dimension of the transcendental constitution of spacetime itself by subjectivity, and the capacity to work with this subjectivity itself, opting instead for a type of relusion that may well be historicised by future subjectivity. Was the universe created by an intelligence? Is the human being destined to infuse its spirit in substance? Perhaps these are questions that can only be answered by working with the real contradictions of historical subjectivity, i.e. in this work we do create the universe, and we do infuse spirit in substance, right now.
Part 3: Dialectical Historicity of New Atheism: Abstract
My aim here is to attempt a proper historical dialectical positionality between my efforts in this book, and the historicity of the New Atheist movement. This effort is both one of respect, and one of concern for moving the conversation in a direction that avoids regression to what the New Atheists were primarily concerned by: religious fundamentalism. At the same time, there are questions about religion that still linger and are left unresolved by the New Atheists, which require a new philosophical orientation. For both Dawkins and the New Atheist movement, their worldview seemed (and still seems) to operate on the principle that “science and reason” could (can) replace “spirit and religion”. Dawkins takes a “memetic” view based on an analogy with genetics, that memes are units of cultural information that represent a new form of evolutionary process:14
“But do we have go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primaeval soup, but already achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. [...]
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”
The influence of the mimetic view has birthed an entire field of study in evolution that specifically focuses on this new kind of replicator which has its origin in genetics, but at the same time leaves genetics behind. To be specific, evolutionary change can occur at a much faster rate on the level of brain to brain when compared to body to body. This creates an incredible tension, uniquely embodied by human beings, of the split between body and brain on the level of replication of the body and replication of the idea.15 From Dawkins point of view, he uses this memetic stance in the split between forms of evolution to compare God to a literal “mind virus”, transmitted brain to brain via sophisticated cultural mechanisms, and which resolves and promises the impossible desire:16
“When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitise my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitise the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking — the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realised physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous system of individual men the world over.
Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent ‘mutation’. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? [...] The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficial plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary.”
What he often frames as the “antivirus” to the relusion virus is Enlightenment rationality and its secular application within an empirical horizon. This Enlightenment movement preceded but overlapped with the Scientific Revolution in figures like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and John Locke, and is often perceived to end or culminate in the works of Immanuel Kant.
What unified the Enlightenment was an undermining of both the madness and war of monarchy and religious authority, with both an emphasis on the scientific method and the reductionist paradigm, as well as a general secular political sensibility orbiting liberalism and socialism. Thus we see a movement away from centralised power justifying its existence with mad reference to supernatural authority (or a “relusion”), and towards a sense that we can peacefully liberate ourselves socially in this world with both a scientific and humanistic spirit. In many ways our general cultural zeitgeist is still dramatically influenced and conditioned by the Enlightenment. As mentioned, Kant’s work is often perceived as its pinnacle and culmination, for both his historical positionality at the end of the political revolutions up-ending traditional systems, but also his philosophical courage and intellectual commitment to thinking for oneself, and maturing the understanding. In his own words:17
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: [...] Have courage to use your own understanding!”
Thus, from the Enlightenment onwards, there is already this idea that we have an “antivirus” against the imaginary of religion, and there is the idea that we can combat supernatural beliefs in a higher entity, which are not based on rational cognition, as well as verified with empirical evidence. Moreover, there are political stakes for this move, since ultimately such an antivirus fundamentally changes the coordinates of social organisation. In short, for Enlightenment rationalists, the pathway out of the darkness of the imaginary and into the light of the real, takes the precise form: the unity of rational cognition and empirical evidence.
However, as mentioned in the previous section, what this move leaves out is not what ends with Kant (recognising the precise form of Enlightenment), but what starts with Kant (the processes, consequences and results of Enlightenment):18
“What changes with the Kantian revolution[?]: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excess of animal lust and divine madness; only with Kant and German Idealism does the excess to be fought become absolutely immanent, located at the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for that core is the night, the “night of the world”, in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason dispelling the surrounding darkness).”
Moving from the start of Enlightenment, towards analysis of its processes, consequences and results, is meta-Hegelian in its core being, essence and concept.19 But this move was missed by those thinkers who simply identified with the immediacy of the Enlightenment gesture itself. When we start, as opposed to end, with the work of Kant, we have to tarry with the work of the German Idealists, culminating in Hegel, but also ultimately opening up to the materialist dialectic with figures like Karl Marx.20 What we encounter here is a detailed exposition of the limits of reason (as antivirus) to get us to the real. In reaching the limits of reason we encounter something disturbing: the immanence of madness at the core of subjectivity as real, but also the brutal necessity of war on the level of the historical horizon of human civilisation as real. Thus, what Enlightenment rationalists never sufficiently grapple with, is the fact that the Enlightenment project itself, as an actual process, led directly into a confrontation with the real of madness at the core of our own psyches (perhaps properly recognised by the Freudo-Lacanian lineage of psychoanalysis),21 as well as the World Wars, as a brutal real that our civilisation has still not learned how to process or internalise.22 As a result, we may still be dealing with structural problems that were identified by figures like Hegel or Marx, even if we find ourselves in a dramatically different historical context in terms of the modes of industrial production (e.g. artificial intelligence) and international connectivity (e.g. global internet).
Thus, the German Idealist tradition, as well as the Marxist tradition — that is the traditions that end Enlightenment — opens up, not a return to a higher positive supernatural entity, but a darkness or a negativity, internal to the reason of the human social body itself. We could say that rationality is haunted by the truths of subjectivity itself, as well as the real of history, where these truths find expression in dimensions that break conventional reasons. Consequently, for both the German Idealists and the Marxists, there is a recognition of the importance of Enlightenment rationality, but at the same time, this form of rationality can itself become a “virus” (to use Dawkins term); if it conceives of itself as “All”, i.e. as an unproblematic totality; and in the process obfuscate the madness at the core of subjectivity, as well as the necessity of war on the level of historical civilisation that cannot be resolved through reason alone. For Hegel, Kant himself covered over these cracks, clearly visible in his own project, in the idea of “perpetual peace” capable of overcoming the irreducible nature of contingency to break the walls of a necessary reason.23
As it relates to New Atheism, we find a very small difference of perspective on religion as history, that I think makes a big difference. This is a difference between scientific materialism, which can rest on the Enlightenment ideals, and dialectical materialism, which must break these ideals in considering their real processes and results. Whereas scientific materialism would like to use reason to deconstruct religion out of existence as an imagistic relic of our irrational past, dialectical materialism recognises the truth of a process that includes both identification with religion as an image, as well as its transgression. Here we have to make a key distinction with Dawkins memetic theory of religion, which clearly rests on the idea of imitation (mimesis, desire), and oppose it to the function of identification (which points towards the necessary self-overcoming of reduction to mimetic desire). The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan perhaps brings to light the stakes of this difference better than anyone else:24
“[Freud] demonstrated this function [of the image] through analytic experience the process of identification. The latter is quite different from the process of imitation, which is distinguished by its partial and groping form of approximation; identification contrasts with imitation not simply as the global assimilation of a structure but as the virtual assimilation of development implied by that structure in a still undifferentiated state.”
Consequently, the difference between Dawkins Enlightenment theory of religion and Lacan’s post-Enlightenment theory of religion, is that, for Lacan, the function of religious belief involves, not just a partial virus (meme) that “parasitises” the individual towards its own propagation, but the subject’s entire identity, the whole person as a developmental process, from an undifferentiated state towards a differentiated state. Thus, for Lacan, as for Hegel, something like religion serves a transcendental, and not just an evolutionary function, for the subject to build its own identity, as well as transgress that identity, that is, to be capable of differentiation. The subject builds identity with mimetic desire informed by imitation, but the subject overcomes or transgresses this identity towards the level of the drive, which is capable of neutralising the pathological effects of mimesis.
Moreover, considering that the negativity of historical subjectivity — its madness and war — is a part of the truth, we necessarily have to tend towards this dialectical analysis, as opposed to either the deconstructive or evolutionary analysis, if we want to include within the truth, the coming-to-be of knowing. We simply need to recognise, as already mentioned, that figures like Dawkins or Kurzweil, are themselves examples of religious belief disguised as rational totalities and cosmic visions of substance. Their religious beliefs are perhaps representing a positive mechanism for differentiation within the scientific universe. But their religious beliefs are also something that must be transcended on the level of a negative mechanism of defence against both their own madness, and the intractable issues that we find when we really pay attention to the battle between Enlightenment ideals of rationality, and the real of world historical civilisational becoming, where we find that a too totalising reason can become its own virus.
Part 4: Dialectical Historicity of New Atheism: Negative
We should not move too quickly into dialectical materialism itself. We should first emphasise the dialectic that has appeared historically internal to the “Four Horsemen” of the “New Atheist” movement, comprising Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. Here I do not seek to do a full treatment of the entire movement, but rather highlight the inner tension between its two living members: Dawkins and Harris. To be specific, Sam Harris broke ranks in the idea that “spirituality and religion” could be replaced with “reason and science”, in affirming a role for “spirituality without religion”. Harris does this as a major career move, most notably in his book, podcast, and app, Waking Up,25 which forms the basis for his current Buddhist-centric or Mindfulness-centric worldview.26
The Harris break with conventional New Atheism seems to emphasise and center the dimension of inner subjectivity on the level of meditative practice, psychedelic exploration and the importance of reflection generally. He often points out that these dimensions are often neglected or perceived to be outside of reductive and scientific materialism:27
“I should address the animosity that many readers feel towards the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referencing to meditation as a “spiritual practice”, I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error [...] and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support.”
This break not only affirms the spiritual, but equally so, also seems to emphasise a negation of the institutional frameworks, dogmas or doctrines characteristic of religious worship. Here again from Harris:28
“The claim [...] “spiritual but not religious” [...] seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, [yet] separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert [the] important truth [that our] world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn[.]”
Harris continues by emphasising that affirming spirituality as a domain outside or beyond science and secular culture, while at the same time not being reducible to traditional religious doctrines, is necessary because there are profound dimensions of human experience that point towards a deeper unifying principle beyond denominations:29
“Spirituality must be distinguished from religion — because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience — self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light — constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work.”
The first thing to note here, in relation to the previous section, is a characteristic tendency of the rationalist impasse. While we get an attempt to go beyond a rationalistic reduction characteristic of Enlightenment ideals, we do not “progress” into the “Night” of the consequences of the Enlightenment (processes of differentiation leading into madness and war), but rather we “regress” back into an all-encompassing mystical “inner light” as a type of pre-subjective undifferentiated refuge. It is of course not that madness and war did not exist before the Enlightenment, but again, that they were not conceived of as immanent negativities, but rather covered over with a generic spiritual principle.
Consequently, while Harris attempts an escape from rationalism in introducing a non-denominational spiritual principle as a way to go beyond secular and religious culture, it may just be an empty and non-historical pathway that avoids the truly difficult consequences of Enlightenment. This becomes evident in the fact that the general excess to the New Atheist project, namely the question of denominational religion, still lingers like a virtual spectre over the Western world. Here, while it is unclear whether Dawkins would embrace or support Harris’ spiritual project (and I suspect he would not), what remains shared in this tension, is the same general negativity towards traditional religion. Here we must emphasise that there is a specific negative emphasis on Christianity and Islam as “terrifying” and “debasing” fictions, for example:30
“I am often asked what will replace organised religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines — such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defence of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions.”
However, the unity between Harris and Dawkins goes deeper, in that, between Christianity and Islam, their hostility seems higher for Islam when compared to Christianity. In other words, both would seem to settle, if left with no other option, for some form of Christianity as a historical defence or immunisation against Islam. This belief rests on the distinction that some “viruses” qua “relusions” cause a more damaging “infection” than others:31
“The esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the same insights. Nor are they equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don’t always point to the same underlying reality — and when they do, they don’t do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings equally suited for export beyond the cultures that first conceived them.”
Thus, for Harris and Dawkins, there is a hierarchy of better and worse viruses or relusions. Something like Buddhism is presumably the best (at least for Harris), and something like Islam seems to be the worst (seemingly for both Harris and Dawkins). Beyond the fact that they both agree about a certain hierarchy of better and worse religions, the ideal key for both is that the “pure rational science” and the “pure spiritual principle” would not have to really tarry with, or transgress, the level of religion, but rather have it deconstructed entirely, as a civilisational process.
In this specific context, of the distinction between spirituality and religious structures like Islam and Christianity, I don’t think we should under-estimate the degree to which the New Atheist intellectual movement was in reaction to, and motivated by, the events of 9/11. The events of 9/11 were a world historical rupture and negativity (madness and war) that shaped the general intellectual and spiritual zeitgeist of the 21st century. In particular, the general shock of this event forced the liberal secular order to recognise its abstract universality was far from the end of history, something which had been implicitly or explicitly assumed since the end of the Cold War. Here we found an idea taking root that the irrationality of fundamentalist religious belief in the context of modern technological society, posed a global humanist threat to the rationality of liberal secular plurality. Secular plurality could not rationally exist if there were alternative pre-Enlightenment ideologies attempting to define the background of globality in a way that contradicted secular plurality as such.
While this belief still seems to represent a reasonable hypothesis, there are deep complications at work here which now make themselves present on the level of the mainstream intellectual discussion. Namely we are presented with the contradiction that the Dawkins and Harris dream of either a “rational science” or a “spirit science” that deconstructs rather than tarries with or transgresses the level of religion, is impossible. Could it be that religious structures are methods for containing and processing the inherent confrontation with madness and war at the core of subjectivity itself? Could it be that without such religious structures madness and war explode in a multiplicity of psychological and social symptoms?
While I leave these questions open, here we have to take into consideration that, not only did the New Atheist movement not lead to the widespread acceptance of reason and science as a movement towards unity with the cosmos at its most extreme (Dawkins’ dream), it also did not succeed in establishing a unified spiritual principle that transcends both secular culture and religious fundamentalism (Harris’s dream). Consequently, we might start to entertain the post-Enlightenment idea of the German Idealists, that Enlightenment reason reaches the limits of its own imaginary totalisations on the level of the real of historical subjectivity, and the real of world historical human conflict. Here spirituality principles can help but they are ultimately not solutions on the level of world history, which needs to contend with the real of the total body of humanity. What would it mean to think of a relation to religion that functioned as a transcendental horizon for the mediation of the limits of rationality?
Part 5: Dialectical Historicity of New Atheism: Concrete
This impossibility of the New Atheist project is perhaps best represented by the appearance onto the world historical stage of clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson. In line with our on-going analysis of the historical dialectic of New Atheism, Peterson interestingly began to represent a central antagonism on the question of truth with Sam Harris, almost as soon as he rose to international fame.32 While Harris represents the break from reason to spirit, Peterson breaks from spirit to religion itself. We can understand Peterson most charitably if we see him as someone who is genuinely “wrestling” with religious mythological traditions and specifically Christianity, in the context of a secular void. Thus, he is opposed to deconstructing religious mythology, and specifically Christianity, in the aftermath of the rise of the evolutionary sciences.
However, Peterson does not reduce religion to evolution, but rather sees in religion a response to evolutionary processes that is representing the transcendental function of the unconscious human mind. This is why he conducted a Biblical lecture series which focuses on the “psychological significance” of Biblical stories (myths):33 the Bible and its mythology is here being situated as something worth tarrying with in order to process unconscious negativity that cannot be reduced to a liberal notion of conscious rationality. Consequently, Peterson has from the beginning of his intellectual journey been searching for the ways in which we might consider religious mythological belief as unconsciously expressed in our actions, irrespective of whether or not we cognitively identify with religion rationally on the basis of empirical evidence:34
“When I grew up, after all, most people still attended church; furthermore, all the rules and expectations that made up middle-class society were Judeo-Christian in nature. Even the increasing number of those who could not tolerate formal ritual and belief still implicitly accepted — still acted out — the rules that made up the Christian game.”
Thus, for Peterson, Dawkins' project of atheists “coming out” and expressing their doubts about the probability of God misses the point, since people who consciously express such doubt in logical propositions may still be unconsciously acting as if they believe. In other words, the entire logical game set up by the New Atheists, that of debating the logical propositions of evolutionary science and theology, obfuscates the dimension of unconscious action, where we may find out what a society actually believes without knowing it.
In this context, it is interesting to note that Peterson himself rose to international fame, not specifically for his unique intellectual views on Christianity, but rather for his antagonism with an emergent unconscious belief in society related to “woke” politically correct ideology. While the New Atheists had been deconstructing religion on the level of logical propositions, it could be that, without such a transcendental horizon of identification, the unconscious of social action was manifesting a new set of beliefs with a seemingly theological dimension. Woke's politically correct ideology not only emphasised the history of oppression, but attempted to frame a movement to political emancipation under a matrix of race, gender, and sex which established an inverse identity hierarchy to the perceived hegemony of the white Christian male. In this inversion not only was Christianity under yet another attack, but Islam as a religion received an unexpected Western support as representing yet another subaltern marginalised identity in the intersectional constellation of oppressions.
The phenomenon of woke politically correct ideology is at best a confused affirmation of a new structuralist constellation of rights against perceived oppressions of European or Western dominance and colonial expansion. However, at its worst, woke sensibility is a total negation of rational discourse and scientific investigation in an expression of totalitarian madness and censorship exposing us to all new oppressions and conflicts. Peterson’s public persona, for better or worse, often operates in this tension, forwarding the hypothesis that without a Christian moral layer for action, where we actually wrestle or tarry with Christianity as a transcendental horizon, our mind becomes susceptible to various victim and grievance narratives that function as an even worse virus or relusion. Moreover, if we are looking for unity between figures like Dawkins, Harris, and Peterson, we do not find it in their views on traditional religion (where they have explicitly disagreed with each other), but in their stance against woke as a type of secular pseudo-religiosity (where they have explicitly agreed with each other).
However, let us centre for the moment this difference between Dawkins, Harris, and Peterson: whereas Dawkins and Harris see Christianity as a virus to be combated with rational science or spiritual principle, Peterson sees Christianity as the anti-virus to the enemies that they all share (e.g. both Islam and Woke). The consequence of this difference is that Peterson sees in Christianity a “true myth”, which is to say a myth with “psychological significance” whether you explicitly believe in it or not. As mentioned, this psychological significance is not for the truth value of its logical propositions when measured against the logical structure of the evolutionary worldview, but rather for the processing of unconscious dimensions of our mind that escape models of conscious rationality. This is why Peterson’s core book attempts to uncover the necessity of unconscious mythological meaning implicit in an undeconstructible belief architecture:35
“I discovered that beliefs make the world, in a very real way — that beliefs are the world, in a more than metaphysical sense. [...] I have become convinced that the world-that-is-belief is orderly: that there are universal moral absolutes[.] I believe that individuals and societies who flout these absolutes — in ignorance or in willful opposition — are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution.
I learned that the meanings of the most profound substrata of belief systems can be rendered explicitly comprehensible, even to the sceptical rational thinker — and that, so rendered, can be experienced as fascinating, profound and necessary.”
Thus, for Peterson, his crusade against woke belief and the consequences of its action, must be situated in his belief that it opens our world to social self-destruction by undermining the belief structures that actually built the Western world. Consequently, Peterson’s work aims to contribute to the reassertion of the true belief of the Western world, while at the same time not losing its more recent scientific and rationalist layers. In this way, there is the idea that not only is Christianity not the enemy of science and reason, as Dawkins suggests, but is rather its necessary precondition. Here Peterson proposes a dualist philosophy, divided between the “world of things”, which is reducible to rational empirical scientific analysis, and the “world of actions”, which is not reducible to such an analysis, but must be engaged and expressed through myth, literature and drama, like the Christian story:36
“The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however — myth, literature, and drama — portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains.”
Now we can situate Peterson’s dualistic philosophy historically in the context of Enlightenment, and specifically its end with Kant. Whereas Kant is famous for introducing the dualism of phenomena, which is knowable as appearance, and noumena, which is fundamentally unknowable; we may suggest that Peterson’s dualism of things and actions situates phenomena in the former and noumena in the latter. Thus, Peterson’s limit opens us to the unknown in our actions which must be supplemented with a constant (and seemingly tortured) mythological wrestling between different relusions (e.g. Christian, Islam, Woke) that introduce order to deal with the chaotic unknown:37
“The known, our current story, protects us from the unknown, from chaos — which is to say, provides our experience with determinate and predictable structure. The unknown, chaos — from which we are protected — has a nature all of its own.”
In Kantian terminology, we have a phenomenal story which protects us from an unknowable noumenal dimensions, which will forever escape our knowledge. However, for Kant, this dualism does not point towards the necessity of mythological stories as metaphysical defence, but rather points towards working with the antinomies of our reason, a critical disposition, as opposed to striving for a total all-encompassing knowing in religious structure.
From here we may start to think of Peterson as representing an awkward attempt to break out of the Enlightenment edifice itself which actually leads to a type of regression in an endless tarrying with mythology.38 However, the core issue that motivates Peterson’s attempt to break out of the Enlightenment edifice, actually points us in the right direction, namely, the madness and war that is found in the process and result of the Enlightenment, which Peterson identifies not just in woke phenomenon, but also in the insanity of 20th century geopolitics:39
“Why were the forces of NATO and the Soviet Union continually at each other’s throats? How was it possible for people to act the way the Nazis had, during World War Two? Underlying these specific considerations was a broader, but at the time ill-conceptualised question: how did evil — particularly group-fostered evil — come to play its role in the world? [...]
My concern with the general social and political insanity and evil of the world [...] returned with a vengeance. The mysterious fact of the cold war increasingly occupied the forefront of my consciousness. How could things have come to such a point? [...]
I couldn’t understand the nuclear race: what could possibly be worth risking annihilation — not merely of the present, but of the past and the future? What could possibly justify the threat of total destruction?
Bereft of solutions, I had at least been granted the gift of a problem.”
In this way, we can say that Peterson, unlike Dawkins and Harris, confronts the “absolute negativity” opened by the process of Enlightenment idealisation, but admittedly, fails to think of its solution outside of a turn to mythology, that is, outside of a turn to religion. Admittedly, Peterson is aware that the alternative secular solution has tended towards socialist political-economy, but he had rejected thinking this possibility, reducing such thinking to ideology:40
“Socialist ideology served to mask resentment and hatred, bred by failure.”
Of course, in reality, thinking socialist political-economy was a move that ultimately results from, and is grounded in, the Kantian critical philosophy which avoids regression back into endless mythological tarrying. In critical philosophy, we stay with the rational antinomies of history, like we find in liberal capitalism and soviet communism, or in woke politically correct culture and traditional Chrsitian culture. Moreover, we tarry with these rational antinomies, not to remain in such oppositions eternally, but to derive from the antinomy a new positive result that would not have been possible otherwise. In Peterson’s thinking, which tends towards a mythological regression, there is a tendency to avoid such dialectics for a one-sided positionality: capitalism over communism, traditional Christian culture over woke politically correct culture. In the real, we might say there is an antagonistic unity in both dualities that point towards a higher order necessity.
Now at the end of the dialectic of New Atheism, we can hopefully see from a new perspective the challenge and the necessity of thinking religion as both a general transcendental horizon which is sometimes expressed in forms understood to be non-religion, while also thinking of its beyond at the same time. To hold this unity seems to be the most difficult task for the process of cognition because it involves really wrestling with the religious domain so that it can be transcended. We gain a lot of insight about our own cognition from the wrestling itself, so it cannot simply be reduced to a deconstructive or an evolutionary paradigm, but must be thought of as the horizon of unconscious identifications opening us to a deeper knowing of our own thinking processes. Thus, whereas Harris breaks from Dawkins from reason to spirit, and whereas Peterson breaks from Harris from spirit to religion, ultimately, what is missing in this dialectic is absolute knowing, or the stance that opens up when we start with Kant (post-Enlightenment), as opposed to ending with Kant (Enlightenment).
On the level of absolute knowledge, we must think of reason, spirit, and religion as a type of fractal structure unfolding in every individual and in every society historically, and so long as humans exist, we might say “eternally”. Here the position of absolute knowing overlaps with, not a position of totalising positive knowledge, but rather the position of the crack in knowledge where things are incomplete, where action is abyssal, and thus reason and myth alike, must serve a truth that escapes both. Our social world beyond the absolute certainties of the pre-modern world is so fragile — always on the precipice of madness and war — precisely because without the capacity to embody the cognition of the position of absolute knowing, this fractal starts to fall apart into an antagonism with itself. Reason deconstructs religious myth. Religion denounces reason’s limitations. But the drive and the motion of history continues, and it is absolute knowing that operates in the crack of this truth’s incompleteness and abyss. Whether this incomplete and abyssal truth leads to a form of madness and war that rips society apart, or whether we internally mediate it towards a new form of social objectivity, is up to us.
Part 6: Enter Real Speculations
My work aims towards the level of absolute knowing. Since completing my doctoral thesis and in creating Philosophy Portal my allegiance has been to the philosophical work of Slavoj Žižek. Žižek as a philosopher operates in a key position in relation to the problems generated by post-Enlightenment. As already stated, his work starts with Kant as opposed to ends with Kant. But more than that, in following the consequences, the processes and results of Kant, he finds the level of Hegelian cognition, as well as the Hegelian excess that has been labouring unconsciously in his shadow. This includes an entire tradition of continental thought that is left totally untouched by the New Atheists, as well as Singultarians like Kurzweil, and figures like Peterson. In order to bring out this unconscious labouring, Žižek frames our situation as requiring a return to the proverbial drawing board in regards to the standard linear teleological reading of the relation between Hegel and Marx. Moreover, he frames this with a general philosophical tool that can be exploited beyond this specific philosophical dimension:41
“Perhaps the most productive way to deal with an “official” history of philosophy is to consider how a philosopher who was “overcome” by his successor (according to this “official” line) reacted (or would have reacted) to his successor. How would Plato react to Aristotle, or Wagner to Nietzsche, or Husserl to Heidegger, or Hegel to Marx?”
Consequently, whereas most interpretations attempt to understand the way in which Marxist materialism inverted Hegelian idealism for the communist project of political economy; Žižek enacts a “materialist reversal” in asking the counter-intuitive retroactive question of what would Hegel say to Marx on questions of both religion and political-economy?42 Moreover, considering that Žižek himself lives in the 21st century he can apply the “Hegelian gaze” to the conceptual results of Marxist materialism and ask questions about what went wrong in this standard inversion of Hegel to Marx. Perhaps the most notable “wrong turn” identified by Žižek is the idea that a “communist revolutionary” can know “historical necessity” and become an “instrument of its implementation”, which is arguably structurally identical to misguided religiosity.43
Žižek can also apply that same gaze to post-communist or post-Cold War global society and ask questions about the nature of international capital, the way it functions as an unconscious ideology, and the way it overdetermines our political realities and possibilities today in the link between dreams and commodities.44 This is in fact the core to understanding Žižek’s own historicity: he rose to international notoriety after the end of the Cold War in dispelling the illusion that we had reached the “end of history” via the actualisation of the neoliberal state.45 His philosophical reputation only grew in the world historical contexts of both the events of 9/11, which demonstrated a rupture on the level of religious universality,46 as well as the global financial crisis of 2008, which demonstrated a rupture in the stability of the neoliberal state itself.47 Here Žižek’s work often functions as the opposite of the “Fukuyama consensus”, suggesting an “end of history” that is the decline of the neoliberal form in the face of impossible “commons problems”, as opposed to its universalisation.48
What all of these issues internal to the post-communist global society governed by international capital point towards, is this impossible task of thinking of the necessity of a religious mythological layer, while also not obfuscating the realities of unconscious ideology and international capital with such a layer. In other words, we cannot simply deconstruct or reduce religion to evolutionary processes, but we also cannot see in it the solution to problems of the nation state governed by international capital. This is one of the keys to Žižek’s resuscitation of the concept of “Christian Atheism” as of potential value for emancipatory political efforts.49 In this seemingly contradictory concept we find both the capacity to affirm grounding in the Western theological historical layer as a non-relativistic truth (i.e. something like “Christianity is the truth of religion”), while at the same time confront the post-religious dimension of history where God has taken on a form quite other to conventional theological understanding (i.e. something like “Atheism is the truth of Christianity”):50
“What I refer to as Christian atheism can save the Western legacy from its self-destruction while maintaining its self-critical edge.”
In this way, Žižek effectively “sublates” the Petersonian moment, on the one side affirming the Christian fight against woke,51 while on the other side preparing us philosophically for the real fight on the level of political-economy.
Here Hegel’s thinking proves indispensable because, from the Žižekian point of view, we are still living in the “materialist shadow” of Hegel’s dialectical machinery. This shadow is not necessarily Hegel’s own thought but rather the fact that capitalism is reaching the “level of its notion” as a “spectre of self-propelling speculation”.52 The irony in all its madness should not be missed: not only did the Marxist project fail, but it failed in such a way as to reveal a universal process that functions like Hegel’s logic, a monstrous form of creative-destruction that only gets stronger when it fails, and overdetermines all “material social processes”.53 In Žižek’s own words:54
“Capital can effectively appear as a new embodiment of the Hegelian Spirit, an abstract monster which moves and mediates itself, parasitising the activity of actual, really existing individuals.”
It is in this context that Žižek, following figures like postmodern literary critic Fredric Jameson, suggests that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Not only did we not get a communist utopia in exchange for abandoning religious mythology, but the force of capital itself seems to be autonomously preparing a type of eschatological ground which threatens what we have conceived as a basic human life world.
Moreover, Dawkins project of a “rational science”, Harris’s project of a “spiritual science”, both of which deconstruct religion, as well as Peterson’s project of a restoration of religious meaning in an evolutionary world, really never rise to the level at which we must recognise and tarry with this monstrosity. Paradoxically, it could be that this monstrosity is God, not the God of traditional religion, but the undead God, a spectral apparition that is no longer alive, but also no longer dead. Here we encounter a real historical contradiction of God where we can juxtapose Hegel’s idea that “The state is the march of God in the world”,55 with the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s idea “God didn’t die, he was turned into money”.56 In other words, if we are to follow Hegel’s idea of a fully historical absolute, we may at once recognise that his time was a moment of absolute transition from the pre-Enlightenment world of absolute monarchies and religions towards the Enlightenment state; and that its result has prepared the ground of the absolutisation of capital mobility.
Thus, the undead God must not only be thought beyond religion but also potentially moving beyond the state.57 Considering that this beyond is not positivized by a communist layer of social organisation we can understand that it is a real that is too much to bear. And yet it must be thought, it must be cognised philosophically and engaged practically. Here we might as well take the best resources from the truth of religion and the truth of the state, in taking with us the gaze of Christ and the gaze of Hegel, while at the same time recognising that neither figure can ultimately save us from our responsibility to think our moment. And yet both can help in the sense that a positive form can result from tarrying with the negative, which is in principle open to anyone. To embody the logic of a movement that rises in unity with its own negation is not to fix or resolve any crisis of meaning with a mythological map, but to resist the temptation of meaning in a deeper mythological reality. Here we must see the incompleteness of reality, and the resulting real of the abyssal drive, inclusive of all its cracks, gaps, and lacks, as the dimension of our real work as historical singularities.
To resist the temptation of meaning in a deeper mythological reality, and instead engage an abyssal drive with the real cracks, gaps, and lacks of life, is precisely the mode of cognition within which I have tried to construct and cultivate Philosophy Portal. What Philosophy Portal is committed to is actually doing the conceptual work necessary to become the form of subjectivity capable of addressing the problematics of reason, spirit, religion, its speculative beyond, as well as their dialectical interconnections. In this way Philosophy Portal has always tried to operate above the culture war dynamics and operate at the site of the real with the gaze of the greatest modern thinkers philosophy and psychoanalysis have produced. Oftentimes or as a rule these thinkers and movements have been overlooked by the scientific materialist tradition producing both New Atheism and the Technological Singularity. Moreover, these thinkers and movements have often been overlooked by modernists searching for a way to reclaim mythological understanding.
Both modern philosophy and psychoanalysis are necessary for this project. In modern philosophy we are working at the level of post-Enlightenment, where the antinomies of reason explode into problems of madness and war as the condition of possibility for real human freedom. In psychoanalysis we are working with a model of the human mind as not just consciously rational, but also as expressing an unconscious truth opening us to forms of trans-subjective social dynamics which struggle with the irreducibility of sexuality and death. Scientific materialists and mythological modernists alike tend to shy away from the real of these dimensions. Thus, thinking with both of these dimensions will be indispensable to deal with the problems that have been opened by Enlightenment without regression to a pre-modern religious layer of mythology.
Throughout this book you will be offered some foundational thinking that has inspired the path of Philosophy Portal. These are resources for anyone who is intrigued and moved by the popular discourse on reason, spirituality, religion and its beyond, and yet feels like this discourse is missing the philosophical depths and psychoanalytic insight required to really think about our moment. The book contains three sections organised by three major thinkers that have structured work at Philosophy Portal: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Lacan. Hegel represents the starting point of post-Enlightenment thought, which is necessary for rethinking contemporary politics (the inevitability of madness and war); Nietzsche represents the conjoining moment between philosophy and psychoanalysis, which is necessary to think spiritual becoming and a living education (the difficulty of learning processes inclusive of the unconscious mind); and Lacan represents the moment that psychoanalysis finds an expression with immanent social, theological, and political implications exploding outside of the clinic. All of these sections are tied together in a type of triad that will bring us towards a conclusion struggling with contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s most recent work on Christian Atheism, which as stated, ultimately holds a potential resolution to the history of Western belief, as well as its capacity to affirm a scientific and rational future, in truth.
Finally, this book contains many references to internal dialogues, relationships, and events that have been directly led by Philosophy Portal, or have in some way been associated with Philosophy Portal. In this way this book also represents an attempt to capture and represent a moment in the larger historical dialectical process where the very culture that may be needed to give birth to a new politics for our time, was in its own process of coming-to-be.
Dawkins, R. 2006. The God Delusion. Bantam Press.
Ibid. p. 113.
Ibid. p. 4-5.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 374.
Kurzweil, R. 2005. Chapter One: The Six Epochs. In: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Penguin.
Žižek, S. 2020. Chapter 4: Singularity – The Gnostic Turn. In: Hegel in a Wired Brain. Bloomsbury.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 9-10.
This journey culminated in my doctoral thesis, see: Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer.
Here my doctoral colleague, Clément Vidal, and specifically the work in his doctoral thesis, were important connection points for me, see: Vidal, C. 2014. The Beginning and the End: The meaning of life in a cosmological perspective. Vol. 10. New York: Springer.
“The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am not in the picture.” Lacan, J. 1998. The Line and Light. In: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 96-7.
Žižek, S. 2011. Introduction: Eppur Si Muove. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 9.
Ibid. p. 8.
Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press. p. 192.
I analyse the evolutionary historicity of this tension, here: Last, C. 2020. Chapter 8: Biocultural Theory of Human Reproduction. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 151-164.
Ibid. p. 192-3.
Kant, I. 1999 (1784). Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment? New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 54.
Žižek, S. 2011. Chapter 3: Fichte’s Choice. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 166.
See: Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 2.
For a particularly helpful theoretical introduction, see: Cutrone, C. 2024. Marxism and Politics: Essays on Political Theory and the Party 2006-2024. Sublation Press.
For a core paper on the topic, see: Lacan, J. 2005. Presentation on Psychical Causality. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 123-158.
For an important historical reflection, see: Freud, S. 1915. Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. In: Freud — The Complete Works. p. 3065-3080.
See: Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 264.
Lacan, J. 2005. Beyond the “Reality Principle”. In: Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 71.
Harris, S. 2014. Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion. Simon & Schuster Export.
Throughout Harris’ writings, but especially in Waking Up, we can see a distinctive preference for “Eastern spiritualities” over “Western religions” (i.e. Abrahamic).
Ibid. p. 6.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 8-9.
Ibid. p. 9.
Ibid. p. 19.
Sam Harris vs. Jordan Peterson l God, Atheism, The Bible, Jesus – Part 1 – Presented by Pangburn. 2018. Pangburn. https://youtu.be/jey_CzIOfYE?si=cXumk-qvjKxnSxsG (accessed: July 9 2024).
The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories: Genesis. 2017. Jordan B. Peterson. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I3lUrrFTzkpat (accessed: July 9 2024).
Peterson, J.B. 2002. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Routledge. p. 7.
Ibid. p. 13.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 27.
Peterson, J. 2024. We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine. Portfolio.
Peterson, J.B. 2002. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Routledge. p. 7-9.
Ibid. p. 8.
Žižek, S. 2011. Chapter 3: Fichte’s Choice. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 137.
Žižek, S. 2011. Interlude 1: Is It Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today? In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 207.
Ibid. p. 217.
Žižek, S. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso.
Here often referencing the work of Francis Fukuyama, see: Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press.
Žižek, S. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11. Verso Books.
Žižek, S. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Verso Books.
Žižek, S. 2010. Living in the End Times. Verso Books.
Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury. p. 3.
Ibid. p. 11.
Ibid.
Žižek, S. 2011. Interlude 1: Is It Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today? In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 245.
Ibid. p. 244.
Ibid. p. 258.
Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 197.
Savà, P. 2014. “God didn’t die, he was transformed into money”, – An interview with Giorgio Agamben. libcom. https://libcom.org/article/god-didnt-die-he-was-transformed-money-interview-giorgio-agamben-peppe-sava (accessed: June 26th 2024).
Žižek often frames the situation as the democratic state and capital as going through a “divorce”.
Invaluable for thinking today: I've been orbiting this Introduction ever since I read it. Excellent work, Cadell.
Much of New Atheism presents itself as clarity, but often it’s just another creed. A dialectic approach might reveal not destruction, but conversation. Curious where the thesis/antithesis ends.