We have been looking at various attempts to deal with the problem of realism and idealism. First, we looked at Heidegger, why he was not an idealist, and how his account of dasein steps over both realism and idealism. Then, we saw how contemporary continental philosophy has been shifting towards a new materialism, taking the side of realism against the traditionally favored idealism. Although we here at Scattered Roses are students of Heidegger and agree with Badiou and Meillassioux that looking at material conditions matters a great deal (note here that the very phrase “matters” shows the preference for materiality), especially when it comes to political concerns, we do profess to be traditional and, in light of that, we would be remiss to not end this reflection on a Christian note.
If you have not been following the discussion thus far, and I know a number of you gremlins joined the family after reading my most recent response to Curtis Yarvin, I would recommend reading the pieces on Heidegger and the New Materialism. However, we can do a little bit of recap, can’t we folks?
Realism and idealism are the two most common responses to the question of appearance versus reality, the question of phenomena and noumena. We come across an object, and we ask, “what is this thing?” Object A might appear to be one way, but appearances can be deceiving and there might be something underneath, or behind, its appearance. If you think there is something underneath or behind appearances, if there is a something that makes Object A what it is and not something else, if this something exists independent of the human subject, then you are a realist. However, there is also the idealist alternative. The idealist will point out that whatever you observe in Object A, anything you could possibly describe about it, is a description of your subjectivity. Color, taste, smell, and measurement (Object A is one foot tall, one foot wide), do not describe the thing-in-itself (the noumenon), but, instead, describes the workings of your subjectivity (your mind). This is not to say that if you close your eyes Object A disappears, this is not peak-a-boo, but it is to say that Object A only exists as it relates to human subjectivity. You cannot, the idealist will insist, imagine Object A existing independent from the human subject, because to do so would entail a description of what Object A is like independent of human subjectivity, but a description of Object A requires a human subject; someone has to be describing it.
Both positions have political implications. A realist will recognize realities independent of the human subject that, and the end of the day, need to be respected. Idealists, on the other hand, do not recognize anything existing independent of the human subject and, thus, reality is socially constructed (to use a buzzword), and anything that is socially constructed can be socially un-constructed, and re-constructed. It is no coincidence that revolutionaries like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse based their radicalism on Hegel, with Marcuse even writing Reason and Revolution, in which he explains how Hegel (German Idealism) is a force for radical revolution. Philosophy, even the most abstract, has political implications. While I care about the matter from a purely speculative standpoint, I genuinely care what the world is like, those less inclined to think about these matters might take interest on account of its political relevance.
In the past two articles we saw how Heidegger and 21st century continental philosophers defended realism, but now we want to ask how a Christian might go about this. Any defense of realism, or rejection thereof, is not simply the affirmation or rejection of a proposition (there exists an in-itself that can be known), but a statement of how the world is. Heidegger, in tackling the question, affirmed a radically environmental view of the world, whereas Badiou affirmed a post-human philosophy, and Meillassioux a fundamentally contingent ontology. A Christian affirmation of realism, then, should entail a view of the world that is inseparable from Christ. Because of this, I am not looking at a pretty standard Aristotelian answer, which would describe all beings as a compound between form and matter. Many great Christian thinkers have taken this route, such as Thomas Aquinas, and every student of Rene Guenon, from Julius Evola to contemporary thinkers like Wolfgang Smith. While I find this account convincing, or at least more convincing than most modern and contemporary answers, it can be separated from Christianity. Now, it can, and is, argued, that Aristotle’s physics is made complete in Christ, you can still have, and did for many years, have hylomorphism (that beings are a compound of form and matter) before Christianity and it can give a sufficient account to what a sculpture is, for example. If I am looking at a statue of Julius Ceasar, let us say, I can tell you that what that statue is, apart from my perception of it, is a mix of form (the shape of the statue) and its material (the marble). There are other considerations to, such as who made the statue and what the purpose of the statue is, but knowing the form and the matter of the statue allows me to know what the statue of Julius Ceasar is in-itself. While I agree that Thomas, or Saint Gregory Palamas, improves upon Aristotle, I do not see why it is necessary to bring in Christ to give an account of what the statue of Julius Ceasar is in-itself. This is my only complaint, and why I am turning to John of Damascus for an account of the noumena. So, then, let us look at John’ account of the noumena (recognizing that this is utilizing terminology that came after him), and then see how it fares against both German Idealism and the critiques leveled against dogmatism by Quentin Meillassioux.
Saint John of Damascus
Let us begin with a block quote from Vladimir Lossky’s Dogmatic Theolgy, and then explicate it in the language of realism vs idealism.
“In his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Saint John of Damascus speaks of creation in terms of idea-wills, or rather will-thoughts. As he states: “By thinking he creates, and, with the Word fulfilling and the Spirit perfecting, the object of this thought subsists.” Thus, according to the scriptures, it is Wisdom that positions the seven pillars of the house. Here, the ideal world of Plato is turned around: it is an instrument of creation, not a world beyond it. To create, God thinks the creation, and this thought gives reality to the beings of things. The ideas are the wisdom in the divine work, or, rather, are wisdom at work: examplarism, if one wishes, but dynamic, that of a will-thought, of a will-word, in which the logoi (reasons) for things are rooted: through the divine word, the world is suspended over its own nothingness; there is a word for everything, a word in everything, a word that represents its norm of existence and its way to transformation. The saint, whose created will cooperates freely with the will-idea of God who at the same time founds and solicits it, perceives the world like a “musical arrangement,” through a detached contemplation of nature…”1
What the noumenon of an object is, what “give reality to the beings of things”, what “represents its norm of existence”, is the logoi. God the Word calls things into being and what He wills it to be is “its norm of existence.” What human nature is, in-itself and not just as it appears, is what the Word wills it to be. In asking what a thing is in-itself, I can, and should, appeal to Him who made that thing what it is, as I would ask an artist what her sculpture is. Yet, John uses the phrase “norm of existence”, which implies that a thing can be what it is not. This is most clear when it comes to humans, as we often find ourselves to be other than what we are, and this is called sin. So, the logoi are not an essence hidden within a thing that never changes, but is the norm of a thing’s existence, it is how a thing normally is. Ethics, it can be extrapolated, is to adhere to our logoi, as the logoi in us was given by an All-Good God and if we are what Goodness Himself wills us to be then we are in the right. Our logoi are both the logoi of human nature, and also our vocation, what I, Rose, and you, dear reader, are specifically called to be and do with our life.
Unlike most realists, John of Damascus cares about a thing’s “way to transformation.” This means, he cares about how a think will be glorified in the Kingdom of Heaven. A being’s noumena is not only what its norm of existence is, but what a being will be like in the age to come. As an acorn has within it what it will one day be, so within all of us there is a potential that will be actualized one day, God willing, when we are made citizens, once again, of Paradise.
Already said above, it is only possible to classify the saint as a realist, because it is possible to view a being other than how God wills that being to be. I can view a woman as a mere tool for my enjoyment, but this would be wrong because Christ did not will for man and woman to use each other as objects. That I can see something wrong, that my perception, or even that a thing can appear as it is not, means that the noumena is distinct from the phenomena. The task for the philosopher, in the broad sense of a lover of wisdom, is to learn to see beings how God sees them. How we do that requires a look at Saint Maximus the Confessor.
Throughout Maximus’ works, the Confessor emphasizes the need for prayer and fasting to accompany contemplation, for without spiritual discipline, Maximus argues, the mind will go astray. An intelligent mind that is not in the habit of prayer, fasting, and reading the scriptures daily, is a great danger to itself, as evidenced by the fact that most of the great heretics throughout history (Arius, Nestorius, Mani, etc.) have been incredibly smart men who devised doctrines contrary to the Faith. If John of Damascus is right, that to see a being as it is, to see the noumenon of a being, requires us to see that being how God sees it, then Maximus’ emphasis on prayer is even more relevant, because we become closer to God in prayer. So, then, let us look at some quotes from the Confessor.
“So long as the intellect continuously remembers God, it seeks the Lord through contemplation, not superficially but in the fear of the Lord, that is, by practicing the commandments. For he who seeks Him through contemplation without practicing the commandments does not find Him: he has not sought Him in the fear of the Lord and so the Lord does not guide him to sucess. The Lord guides to sucess all who combine the practice of the virtues with spiritual knowledge: He teaches them the qualities of the commandments and reveals to them the true inner essences of created beings.”2
“Only a soul which has been delivered from the passions can without error contemplate created beings. Because its virtue is perfect, and because its knowledge is spiritual and free from materiality, such a soul is called ‘Jerusalem’. This state is attained through exclusion not only of the passions but also of sensible images.”3
“Until you have been completely purified from the passions you should not engage in natual contemplation through the images of sensible things; for until then such images are able to mold your intellect so that it conforms to passion. An intellect which, fed by the senses, dwells in imagination on visible aspects of sensible things becomes the creator of impure passions, for it is not able to advance through contemplation to those intelligible realities cognate with it.”4
We need to clear away the passions before engaging in contemplation, but what are these passions? Colloquially, the word “passion” means something you like quite a bit. I have a passion for philosophy, for example. For the ancients and until very recently the word “passion” meant something that made you act without reason, something that made you “passive” in light of that something. Anger, lust, and pride are all passions in this sense, as all three can grip us, make us passive, and cause us to act without thinking. To be free of passion does not mean to be free of emotion, but for the intellect to rule over all emotions and to act reasonably in response to these. I might still get angry, but, if I am dispassionate, I do not give into anger, I do not let it cloud my judgement, and I do not act rashly on it. When Maximus tells us that we need to be free of the passions before we can engage in contemplation, he is saying that our intellect needs to be steering the ship. If I am not free of lust, I might see a woman as a tool rather than a person made in the image of God, and if I do then I am not seeing her as she really is, I am not seeing her noumenon. If I am engulfed in pride, and I am reading a friend’s substack, I might be able to read my friend’s article clearly, and I might only see the mistakes he made (which I then use to reassure myself that I am the better writer).
John of Damascus and Maximus the Confessor are very different from the realists that proceed them, as seeing the noumena is not simply a question of intellect, it is not simply a matter of having the right conceptual framework, but it is also, and most importantly, a question of whether or not we have purged the passions and are engaging in prayer and fasting. The failure to see the nature of a being might very well be my own failure, a failure that is as moral as it is spiritual. Seeing a thing how Christ intended it to be requires us to be close to Christ.
Now that we have laid out Saint John of Damascus’ account of the logoi and having turned to Saint Maximus the Confessor and what he says about the prerequisites for contemplation, let us now turn to the Idealist objection and Meillassioux ‘s criticism of dogmatism.
German Idealism
“Very well”, the idealist will object, “this is a description of what the Fathers thought, but it is no more. What John and Maximus did not realize is that the logoi, and even the Word, are dependent upon the human subject because they cannot be thought independently of human consciousness. Any attempt to describe either will inevitably be descriptions of human subjectivity, and not a description of either the logoi or the Word.”
I am not sure how either of the saints would respond, but I would not be surprised if they called the idealist position prelest, spiritual delusion. You cannot see anything physical without the use of your eyes, one of the saints might say, so, according to your logic, physical reality is dependent upon the human eye. To conceive of the world is to conceive of it spatially, and although the blind are able to navigate the world, for most of us it is impossible to think the world without reference to vision, without refence to our eyes. There is confusion here between the way in which the human subject interacts with the world, John or Maximus would likely argue, and the world itself, and to equate the world with how the human subject interacts with the world is to make Man God. Since we are human, we can only see the world as humans do. To describe what a guitar is like, to use an example, I will talk about the sound it makes, how many strings it has, whether it is modern or classical, acoustic or electric, etc. Naturally, since I am human, I will use human categories, and to ask me to talk about the guitar barring human subjectivity, you are asking the impossible. Both of the saints would, I imagine, be comfortable with this, but where they would strongly object is the leap from that statement (humans can only interact with the world in a human matter) to the idealist position that reality as such is dependent upon human subjectivity. There is a gap between those statements, and it can only be closed by assuming that which we cannot describe does not exist.
Understanding that neither of these saints encountered German Idealism, and that this hypothetical response is just that, hypothetical, I would not suggest it if I thought it teetered on the edge of putting words in their mouths. If I crossed that line, forgive me. That being said, while this hypothetical response is not a refutation of Idealism by any means, it does force us to ask, “is there anything more to the world than human subjectivity?” Maybe there is nothing more, but it is important to realize the implication of that stance: reality is dependent upon Man. If there is a God, then we have good reasons for rejecting the idealist position, as God provides an alternate viewpoint to the human. However, you cannot try and prove the existence of God to an idealist, because any attempted proof would, according to the logic of idealism, prove that “God exists for us.”
Quentin Meillassioux
Two posts ago we looked at The New Materialism, which included an overview of Quentin Meillassioux’s book After Finitude. In his book, Meillassioux argues that a revival of dogmatism, which refers to the belief that we can know the noumena (the saints would be dogmatists), cannot be a viable option as it opens the door to ideology,
“…a refusal of dogmatism furnishes the minimal condition for every critique of ideology, insofar as an ideology cannot be identified with just any variety of deceptive representation, but is rather any form of pseudo-rationality whose aim is to establish that what exists as a matter of fact exists necessarily. The critique of ideologies, which ultimately always consists in demonstrating that a social situation which is presented as inevitable is actually contingent, is essentially indissociable from the critique of metaphysics.”5
Since John of Damascus and Maximus the Confessor give us an account of the noumena, they make it reasonable to claim access to the noumena, it becomes reasonable to claim to know how the world really is, and if you know how the world really is then, unlike a pragmatist vision of the world which only seeks to solve discrete problems, you are justified in reforming the world according to how the world “really is.” A Marxist, a Christian, and a fascist all claim to have access to the noumena, even the noumenon of history, and all three have warred to make the world conform to their metaphysical vision. Having a familiarity with the horrors of the 20th century, the horrors of the Romanian Prison Experiments, should be enough to make someone queasy about ideology.
Yet, the dissolution of metaphysics and ideology gave rise to non-metaphysical forms of religion and an emergence of fundamentalist pietist religion in the late 20th century and early 21st century. Philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion effected “the religious turn” in continental philosophy, and the 2000s saw the rise of an Evangelical conservative base that pushed Bush and Trump to victory, all the meanwhile Wahhabism made ground in the Middle East, culminating, most recently, in the Islamic State. Meillassioux is aware of this and tried to combat it by asserting that the one thing necessary is contingency. Whatever we may think of Meillassioux’s argument for contingency, story moves people more than argument. Even if Meillassioux is right, there are interesting stories out there that will attract more people than those who will sit down and read, let alone agree, with Meillassioux. Man needs a story, hence the need for religion and, in its absence, ideology. There are better stories than others, such as stories that have the force of reason in addition to the force of the heart, but we are still dealing with stories. A portion of history might always be the war between stories, a war that is sometimes fought with the nous (the Platonic Dialogues and the Ecumenical Councils are two such examples), other times it is fought with the sword (such as the Crusades or the Spanish Civil War). Meillassioux might be trying to put a genie back in the bottle, which, however praiseworthy, cannot be done.
Conclusion
We have been looking at German Idealism the past few posts, and how thinkers as different as Heidegger, Badiou, and Meillassioux have moved beyond it. The reason we are looking at Idealism, besides it being interesting to me and many of you, is that our ontology (what we believe the world is like) and our epistemology (how we think we know things) effects our ethics and our politics. German Idealism is, fundamentally, a radical philosophy that is suited for revolutionarily overhauling society, whereas realism is inherently reactionary because it posits something which Man must bend to, be it class dynamics, nature, or God. The tagline for this blog is “for all things traditional and reactionary”, so we were bound to tackle idealism eventually.
To conclude we looked at Saint John of Damascus and his doctrine of the logoi, which, assuming the truth of Christianity, gives a coherent explanation for what the noumena are and how to access them. Turning to Saint Maximus the Confessor we saw more detailed praxis for accessing the noumena, which involves becoming free of one’s passions. Their account may not be convincing to you, but it is an alternative account to both Idealism and the competing realisms that we looked at so far. Although not a proof for its validity, there is a good reason for Christians to accept the Damascene’s position, which is that it gives an account of realism that is inseparable from Christ and a relationship with Him. If Christian philosophy is to mean something, it presumably means making it impossible to separate Christ from any answer to a philosophical problem, rather than simply a Christian giving an answer to a problem that could be given by a non-Christian.
Lossky, Vladimir. Translated by Anthony P. Gythiel Dogmatic Theology: Creaton, God’s Image in Man & the Redeeming Work of the Trinity. Saint Vladimir’ Seminary Press. Yonkers, New York. 2017. 71
Compiled and edited by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, translated by G.E.G Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. The Philokalia, Volume Two. Faber and Faber Limited. 1984. 200
Philokalia, 201
Philokalia, 203
Meillassioux, Quentin. Translated by Ray Brassier. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Continuum Publishing. 2010. 57
This is amazing. Great work my friend!