by Simon Smith
What Things May Come: the Future of a Dialectic
Well I did say, approximately three parts.
The deconstruction of speculative
philosophy and theology marks the end of Feuerbach’s journey, or at least our
version of it. It does not, of course, mark the end of his radical critique. Oh
no, indeed it does not. We still have one more step we can take and beyond that,
who knows?
Faced with the
choice between theology’s fever-dream of
Being-just-being-itself-in-plenitude-and-necessity and the ever-more narrow
horizons of radical and contingent subjectivity, philosophy chose the latter
course. So much is clear from philosophy’s transformation into the modern
sciences.
Consciousness strives. Anyone for
String Theory?
Step 3: Science
The abstraction of being-concepts
from all relation and experience continues unabated. For the dialogue that
births the dialectic of religious consciousness, there is no room at the
philosophical inn.
Stumbling to a
halt on the threshold of pure reason, philosophy finds its conceptual pockets
empty. Empiricism and its younger, smarter brother, Logical Positivism, open
the door only to bar the way to metaphysical myth and speculative fantasy.
Lacking any experiential content, the absolutes and ultimates of onto-theology
make no experiencable difference to human knowledge or human action. For “that
which has no predicates or qualities has no effect upon me; that which has no
effect upon me has no existence for me. To deny all the qualities of a being is
equivalent to denying the being himself.”[1] Having
no effect, absolute being, sheer noesis, are dismissed as empty abstractions.
All that remains is the product of rigorous empirical, i.e. scientific,
investigation. Reality as it really is: causally determinate, objective,
scrubbed clean of every vestige of subjectivity, stripped of every trace of
human consciousness and personality, a universe so utterly unlike us that it
is, at base, not even made of stuff or substance, but of rhythmic patterns of
energy.
With the
detailed mapping of the physical universe well underway, and neither hide nor
hair of humanity to be found, one might suppose that the dialectic of
consciousness must now finally grind to a halt.
Indeed one might, but one would
be wrong. Oh yes indeed.
For Feuerbach, the self-same
projects are quite as busily at work in these new modes of thought as ever they
were in the old. In some cases, the anthropic content is as poorly disguised as
it was in the original religious projection; the moral of Neo-Darwinist
dog-eat-dog dogma, for example, is particularly hard to miss. It may well be
that “selfish” genes shape the evolution of our species; to Feuerbachian eyes,
however, they also represent, metaphorically or mythologically, the development
of consciousness and culture in the
modern era.
A depressing
enough conception of consciousness as a function of biological forces; it is
not the only idea or ideal embodied by the modern sciences, however. Even by
the 19th Century, when Feuerbach was writing, the physical sciences
had made their bid for infinity and omniscience. Through telescope and
microscope, he observed, scientists had begun to count “the stars in the sky,
the ova in the spawn of fish and butterflies, and the colour spots on the wings
of insects.” And while one scientist may fix his gaze upon Venus or Mars,
someone somewhere is bound to be looking at Uranus.[2]
And that, dear friends, is the
best joke in philosophy.
These “objective” conceptions
reflect that other, more primal, more personal one we have already encountered:
that participation in the other, which constitutes my own self-construction. In
plain Feuerbachian speech, limitation lies in isolation; collectively, as
members of a community of knowledge, for example, we may strive for the
infinite.
More
interesting still, a new kind of speculative cosmology has emerged during the last
hundred years or so, one that reflects an older and far healthier image than
did its theological ancestor. In scientific cosmology, we find a universe in
which human beings play an integral part. Our universe is the universe it is,
only because it is the concatenation
of interpenetrating forces, which actually does
constitute it. That must, in some way, include the very consciousness that
explores and explains it; unless we plan to retreat into an untenable
Cartesianism, that is. In the words of the great Carl Sagan, “[t]he cosmos is…
within us,” in every sense; “we are made of star-stuff.” If religion gives us
the social self writ large, scientific cosmology has redone it in a big
glittery pen with lots of heavy underlining. How else should the Evolutionary
Biologist, Julian Huxley, conclude that “[a]s a result of a thousand million
years of evolution the universe is becoming conscious of itself?” Why else
might Einstein endow astrophysics with an anthropo-theological flourish by
remarking that “the one issue of true religion” is that “optical delusion of…
consciousness,” the strange but persistent belief that “our thoughts and
feelings are somehow separate from all the rest [of the universe].”
Conclusion: Don’t Panic, There is
a Happy Ending
Refined and rarefied it may be, but the social self, our
species being, remains at the heart of these cosmic conceptions, transforming
the cosmos into a mirror for developing self-consciousness. No “merely
theoretical or inert conception,” no literal projection, that is. Presenting
the primal connections in which we become, these anthropic images continue to
“call us to action, to imitation.” Projections of “perfectibility” reflect
actual aspirations: modes of relation worthy of replication: they reflect both
what we were and what we yet might
be: consciousness engaged in its own cosmological extensions.
No longer a personification of
the cosmos; this is a cosmologising of consciousness. And in it we may begin to
see the psychodynamic possibilities such evocative constructs hold for human
development and for the universe of which it is a part. Images of cosmic
consciousness reveal the universe as it is known and the mind that knows it. Echoing Huxley, Sagan reminds us of the
real import of Delphi’s Oracle: “[w]e are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
So we come to the crux of
Feuerbach’s radical critique, his negation of philosophy. The point here is
not, of course, to reduce the sciences to anthropomorphic projection. It is to
reveal the dialectic that is and always has been at work within all our
explorations and explanations, so initiate the anthropological reconstruction
of our cosmological projects. That is the ‘anthropotheistic’ drive of
consciousness which philosophy embodies. In other words, it reminds us of the
role these conceptual constructs, these maps of reality, play in our own self
construction, in the development of consciousness. And in reminding us,
Feuerbach’s radical critique awakens us to the transformative potential of
these ideas and ideals, allowing us to re-enter them and participate
consciously, self-consciously, in our own becoming.
And this is where the story
really starts!
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