8,000 words
23 pages
Subheadings:
Paul Tillich's Critique of Hegelian Idealism
Paul Tillich on the Ambiguity of Cognitive Abstraction
Feuerbach's Critique of Hegelian Absolute Idealism
Marx's Feuerbachian Critique of Hegelian Absolute Idealism
Theologian Paul Tillich on Ontological Realism
A New Realism
Historical Realism
The Ontologies of Theism, Non-theism, and Atheism
Paul
Tillich's Critique of Hegelian Idealism: the demonry of
abstraction
“...so
the question arises whether there is another relation in which the
wholeness of the truth can be
reached and the 'demonry of abstraction' overcome.”
--Paul
Tillich,(Systematic Theology; vol. III, p. 255)(pdf.)
Every
once in a while I come across a book passage, or lecture that spark a
host of unresolved philosophical problems, unclear concepts, and
schools of thought that connect and reinforce one another forming a
coherent themantic direction which must be written down. This essay
on idealist
abstraction
was set in motion by an inspiring lecture by philosopher Chad A. Haag
on the questions of what truth is, the limits of language, and human
alienation is addressed by John Edward Zerzan (born August 10, 1943)
an American anarchist and primitivist author of “The
Culture of Nihilism.”
Zerzan's writing criticizes agricultural civilization as inherently
oppressive, and advocates drawing upon the ways of life of
hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should
look like. Subjects of his criticism include domestication
and symbolic
thought (such
as language, number, art and the concept of time). Zerzan writes
about the source of nihilism, and alienation in the following passage
and re-affirms my argument that the post-modern meme as presented by
some political apologists is really the old philosophical problems of
the relations between reality and symbols. Mistaking the symbol for
the symbolized is
the original sin of language and thought. Philosopher Chad A. Haag
summarizes Zeran's thesis that I took time to transcribe below (bold
added to text; all transcription errors are mine):
26:57:
"....Zerzan finds to be inherently problematic which is
that post-modernity
is just the most extreme form of something which has been going on
for thousands of years and that is the fall into symbolic thought
itself which actually is a historical anomaly for
Zerzan language itself is something which humans have only used for a
tiny fraction of their total existence he claims maybe 30,000 years
ago maybe 35,000 years ago you start to see language
appear....the memological shift
from egalitarianism to domination we have to be careful to note
that one
of Zerzan's insights about language is that it's inherently, rather
than accidentally, a structure of domination because even to be able
to use language to speak what appear to be your own thoughts requires
a certain kind of alienation if I'm speaking a language like say
American English....so even to be able to use language to try to
express myself, I actually have to negate myself in a certain sense
by allowing myself to submit to these structures beyond myself as so
many rules that I have to follow...so there's a kind of domination
inherent within language. It's not just that I use language to
dominate others in order to even use language. I have to myself
already be dominated by it and this is not a coincidence, or an
accident of language as symbolic thought really only arises once the
kind of domination of agriculture becomes a hardwired factor within
consciousness through shifting to the deep meme of domination away
from the deep meme of Hunter gather egalitarianism."
This existentialist theme of alienation from the tyranny of language which Zerzan speaks can also be found in the philosophical thought of Paul Tillich, Feuerbach, and Marx, but in the sometimes obscure vocabulary of a critique of Hegelian absolute idealism. The term “alienation” has an interesting history and is applied by Marx to describe wage laborers in capitalist production, although, the German term “entfremden,” is interpreted by translators metaphorically as “to estrange” and appears in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts text about one hundred and fifty times. Professor Micheal Pelias noted in his seminar lecture 6 that a closely related term “entaussern” means “to alienate in a legal, commercial sense, to transfer property [or divest].” In other words, “alienate” is a term also used to describe distressed real estate properties. Tillich writes some form of the term “estrangement” three hundred and fifty times in his published nine-hundred paged, three volume systematic theology. In his book, The Essence of Christianity (1841)(pdf.), Feuerbach is translated by George Eliot using the word “estrange” twice to describe man's relationship to God; however, “alienate” is used four times describing people's relationship to themselves, to Nature, and God. However, there is one common key term that is used extensively in the philosophical thought of philosophers Zerzan, Tillich, Feuerbach, and Marx: ”abstraction” in languages and in thought.
Paul Tillich on the Ambiguity of Cognitive Abstraction
“Language
is a public tool to interpret the private life.”
Wittgenstein's
Private Language Argument
Tillich
uses the theological-existential term “ambiguity”
extensively
in all three volumes of his Systematic Theology. An ambiguous life
is estranged meaningless
finite human existence (ST, vol. I p. 4). One fourth of the third
volume of Systematic Theology addresses those questions of human
existence implied by the ambiguities of all structures
of life (ST,
vol. III, p. 11), but also ambiguity of language itself
(ST, vol. III, p. 69), in realm of the
holy (ST,
vol. III, p. 102), of organized
religion (ST,
vol. III, p. 98 ), of essential
and existential being (ST,
vol. I, p. 202), of moral law (ST,
vol. III, p. 44), and of culture (ST,
vol. III, p. 245).
This
word, “ambiguity”
is
a Latin term that literally means “double
meaning” and
is how Tillich most often applies this concept addressing the aporetic problem
of multiple interpretations of life's contingent events and human
beings seeking an unambiguous life with certain determinate meaning.
In the phenomenology of human existence, Being
and Time (1927),
Martin Heidegger defines ambiguity (Zwerdeutigkeit)
as a mode of existential being of Das
Man,
(The
Man),
or the ordinary everyday comportment toward one's own existence by a
fallen unauthentic existing human subject. An authentic subject,
or Dasein (being-there)
self-consciously owns itself, and takes responsibility for itself.
Professor Ronald Grimsley (1915-2003) of Oxford University wrote of
Heidegger's phenomenological definition of existential ambiguity and
is, in my opinion, really the deeper Heideggerian concept Tillich is
striving to implement in his own existentialist systematic
theology:
“Ambiguity
appears as the inability to distinguish between the authentic and the
unauthentic, between what is genuinely disclosed and what is
inessential covering. It is an attitude which involves other people
and the world as well as our own selves. ‘Ambiguous’ knowledge,
for example, whether of things or people, is the outcome of an
attitude of mind which moves in the world of ‘hearsay’ and is
preoccupied with being ‘in the know’ and listening to what ‘they’
say instead of to the call of ‘abandoned Existence’. Such
knowledge is in fact ignorance, for it stands in no relation to what
really is (Existentialist
Thought, 1960,
p. 57)(pdf.).”
Tillich
develops a specialized vocabulary signifying the important concepts
of human existence such as ambiguity, estrangement,
and abstraction, but
also integrates these into the traditional philosophical language
of subject-object
representational epistemology.
He accepts the cognitive dichotomies between subject (observer), and
object (observed); thought and being; objective-subjective realms;
essence and existence. Tillich warns that ideological “patterns
of conceptualization”
are
paradigmatically restrictive only to the realm of “beings,”
“objects,” or “things.” For Tillich, the “demonry
of abstraction,”
means
the loss of spiritual experience. Tillich's critique is presented as
directed against Hegelian absolute idealism, but his insights apply
to all idealistic frames of reference:
“To
overcome the ambiguities of cognition the divine Spirit must conquer
the cleavage between subject and object even more drastically than in
the case of language. The cleavage appears, for example, in the
circumstances that every cognitive act must use abstract concepts,
thus disregarding the concreteness of the situation; that it must
give a partial answer, although 'the truth is the whole' (Hegel); and
that it must use patterns of conceptualization and argumentation
which fit only the realm of objects and their relation to each other.
This necessity cannot be dismissed on the level of finite relations;
and so the question arises whether there is another relation in which
the wholeness of the truth can be reached and the 'demonry of
abstraction' overcome. This cannot be done in the dialectical manner
of Hegel, who claimed to have the whole by combining all parts in a
consistent system. In doing so he became, in a conspicuous way, the
victim of the ambiguities of abstraction (without reaching the
totality to which he aspired). The divine Spirit embraces both the
totality and the concrete, not by avoiding universals--without which
no cognitive act would be possible--but by using them only as
vehicles for the elevation of the partial and concrete to the
eternal, in which totality as well as uniqueness are rooted.
Religious knowledge is knowledge of something particular in the light
of the eternal and of the eternal in the light of something
particular. In this kind of knowledge the ambiguities of subjectivity
as well as objectivity are overcome; it is a self-transcending
cognition which comes out of the center of the totality and leads
back to it (Systematic
Theology, Paul
Tillich; Vol. III, p. 255)(pdf.).”
Feuerbach's
Critique of Hegelian Absolute Idealism
“What
the subject is lies only in the predicate; the predicate is
the truth of
the subject—the subject only the personified, existing
predicate,the
predicate conceived as existing. Subject and predicate are
distinguished only as existence and essence. The negation of the
predicates is therefore the negation of the subject. What remains of
the human subject when abstracted from the human attributes?”
–The
Essence of Christianity,
Ludwig Feuerbach,1841, trans. by G. Eliot, p. 19 (pdf.).
Ludwig
Feuerbach (1804
to 1872) studied theology at Heidelberg University and is most famous
for his book, The
Essence of Christianity (1845)
while also authoring many other published critical theological
studies of
Christianity. Feuerbach is considered a member of the loosely defined
philosophical school known as the Young
Hegelians who
were left-wing politically and highly critical toward Hegel's
theological speculative idealist philosophy. The Young Hegelians
included atheists, pantheists, and naturalists. Karl Marx, Friedrich
Engels, along with David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) who authored his
historical study of the Life
of Jesus (1835)
that questioned the existence of the historical Jesus are classified
by scholars as Young Hegelian. On the other hand, the conservative
right-wing Old Hegelians believed that Hegel's philosophical system
was sound, and completely compatible with Christian theistic
theology. Professors Karl Friedrich
Goschel (1784-1861)
and Karl
Ludwig Michelet (1801-93)
are two examples of Old Hegelians.
*For greater detailed study
of the Young and Old Hegelians see Frederick Copleston's, S.J., A
History of Philosophy, Modern Philosophy;
vol. 7, part II; p. 226) The entire eleven volumes--over four
thousand pages--available for free download in three different
formats with no membership! (pdf.).
Feuerbach
thought religion is a necessary stage in the development of human
consciousness, as Hegel described in his phenomenology of history.
Marx referred to Hegel's system as a “dead
dog”
that needed to be dug-up and turned “right-side up.” In other
words, the Old Hegelian teleological dialectic emanates from heaven
descending to earth,
whereas the Young Hegelians instead believed the world historical
dialectic emerged from
the material base of earth and mind (Geist)
ascents to heaven (Freedom). In reaction to Hegel's abstract
idealistic philosophy, the Young Hegelians' critical philosophy
embraced a much more empirical, dynamic, materialist, and dialectical
approach to historical analysis—and even to religion. For
Hegel, essence precedes existence,
but for a Young Hegelian Feuerbachian materialist such as
Marx, existence precedes essence.
“It's
only because of the death of God we can really be religious
again.”
--Gianni
Vattimo quoted in “God and French Phenomenology,” J. Aaron
Simmons' video lecture @ 3:10
min.
Feuerbach's
criticism of Hegelian idealism is based on the concept of
“abstraction”
using the term one hundred and thirty- one times within the three
hundred and thirty-one pages of The
Essence of Christianity (EC).
He writes, “Religion abstracts from man, from the world; but it can
only abstract from the limitations, from the phenomena; in short,
from the negative, not from the essence, the positive, of the world
and humanity: hence, in the very abstraction and negation it must
recover that from which it abstracts, or believes itself to abstract
(EC, p. 27).” Feuerbach thinks all theology is anthropology. The
concept of the divine is a distorted anthropological projection of
abstract human attributes amplified to infinity, but without the
imperfections of actual human finite existence.
One note of clarification is needed for the definitions of “negative”
and “positive.”
Critical theorists, (such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno)
use the term “positive”
to mean “empirical,”
and “negative”
to mean “possibility,”
or “non-empirical.”
Feuerbach is using these terms in a different sense: as
an ideal concept
of humanity (positive),
opposed to a limited humanity(negative).
Feuerbach
writes about language, abstraction,
and imagination,
saying:
“A word is an abstract image, the imaginary thing,
or, in so far as everything is ultimately an object of the thinking
power, it is the imagined thought: hence men, when they know the
word, the name for a thing, fancy that they know the thing also.
Words are a result of the imagination.... Thought expresses itself
only by images; the power by which thought expresses itself is the
imagination; the imagination expressing itself is speech. He who
speaks, lays under a spell, fascinates those to whom he speaks; but
the power of words is the power of the imagination (EC, p.
77)(pdf.).”
In
another passage, Feuerbach describes what is being abstracted
from and projected
out as
the negative condition of human existence rather than humanity's
positive essence and fullest potentialities:
“All religions,
however positive they may be, rest on abstraction; they are
distinguished only in that from which the abstraction is made. Even
the Homeric gods, with all their living strength and likeness to man,
are abstract forms; they have bodies, like men, but bodies from which
the limitations and difficulties of the human body are eliminated.
The idea of a divine being is essentially an abstracted, distilled
idea. It is obvious that this abstraction is no arbitrary one but is
determined by the essential standpoint of man. As he is, as he
thinks, so does he make his abstraction (EC, p. 97)(pdf.).”
Yes,
a lot of projection is going on these days.
However, religion
is not the only escapist projection Feuerbach identifies in his
critical theology: reason,
or logic in
the same way are abstractions from
space and time and replaced by imagining life as pure reason:
“Thus
in conceiving God, man first conceives reason as it truly is, though
by means of the imagination he conceives this divine nature as
distinct from reason, because as a being affected by external things
he is accustomed always to distinguish the object from the conception
of it. And here he applies the same process to the conception of the
reason, thus for an existence in reason, in thought, substituting an
existence in space and time, from which he had, nevertheless,
previously abstracted it (The
Essence of Christianity,
Ludwig Feuerbach,1841, trans. by G. Eliot, p. 37)(pdf.).”
Later,
Adorno develops in his thought the Feuerbachian theme of
epistemological conceptual classification in experience
as represented
or expressed within
philosophy itself. Roger Foster cautions in his book, Adorno:
The Recovery of Experience (2007)
that Adorno is not arguing for a “reductivist sociology of
knowledge,” but is making a fine distinction that
philosophical “Concepts are not causally constituted
by a particular structure of historical experience. Rather, Adorno's
claim is that they express that experience (Foster, p.
21).”
Feuerbach is not the first to describe Christian
theism as escapist projection by human consciousness. The Christian
theologian Friedrich Hegel wrote in 1795, at least twenty-three
years before Marx
was even born, describing the emergence of primitive Christianity
under the brutal oppressive government of the Roman Empire:
"Thus
the despotism of the Roman emperors had chased the human spirit from
the earth and spread a misery which compelled men to seek and expect
happiness in heaven; robbed of freedom, their spirit, their eternal
and absolute element, was forced to take flight to the deity. [The
doctrine of] God's objectivity is a counterpart to the corruption and
slavery of man, and it is strictly only a revelation, only a (228 )
manifestation of the spirit of the age (On
Christianity: Early theological Writings, Friedrich Hegel,
(1795-1800), p. 162-3)(pdf.).
“...for
Bloch a sort of quantum mechanics of hope is at work in religion in
that it exists and moves as both particle and wave....The
figure of Christ as such is thus a particle of hope...the
Christ-impulse...is the wave.”
--Peter
Thompson, Introduction of Atheism In Christianity (2009)
From
abstraction comes illusion, but it would be a mistake to stop our
critique here, writing-off religion as merely utopian false
consciousness. Ernest Bloch reads utopian projection as a deep desire
for liberation anticipating a non-teleological fulfillment of new
possibilities for freedom. “U-topia”
means “no-place”
in the present, active, indicative (i.e. actuality), but utopia also
can mean “possibility”
in an ontology of becoming. In Feuerbachian language, Bloch's utopian
promise can be paraphrased as “the
S [subject] has not yet become its P [predicate] because of current
social conditions.”
Dr. Thompson describes Bloch's understanding of Christian theistic
projectionism as an un-actualized promise, even as a Nazarite
“Christ-impulse.”
“Utopia
in Bloch is also concrete precisely because it doesn’t yet exist at
all, but will be the concrete result of the autopoiesis of
its own becoming. It is merely a tendency and Iatency of its own
existence of which we only know of because we glimpse its promise in
the here and now. In Bloch’s materialist process philosophy, the
dialectic of ontology and the ontic [factual],
of quantity into quality and the general and particular, the small
glimpses of a future utopia which we find in the everyday, thus start
to add up to a transformative desire to change the world married to
the objective possibility of doing so. It is the merging of
Aristotle’s dynamei
on—
or what might be possible in the future— with kata
to dynaton—
or what is possible at the moment—in which all things, including
both the human species and matter itself, will be changed into
something which cannot yet be determined (Atheism
In Christianity,
Ernst Block, Intro. By P. Thompson, 1972 Verso, p. XVIII; brackets
added)(pdf.)."
Marx's
Feuerbachian Critique of Hegelian Absolute Idealism
“Feuerbach is
the only one who has a serious, critical attitude
to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in
this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy.
The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity
with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking
contrast to the opposite attitude [of the others].
--1844
Manuscripts, Marx, p. 135 (pdf.)
Marx's
view of religion is that of Feuerbach, but critics would rather
select Marx as the target for slander to perpetuate Cold War
propaganda. Like Feuerbach, Marx uses the term “abstract”
and
its other forms at least one hundred and sixty-seven times in
the 1844
Paris Manuscripts,
and at least ninety-seven times in the single chapter
titled, "Critique
of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” (Struik
edition, pp. 170-193). Struik defines Marx's critical definition of
“abstract”
in
the following way:
“To
abstract means to place the essence of nature outside of nature, the
essence of man outside of man, the essence of thought outside of the
art of thinking. Hegel's philosophy has alienated
man from himself,
since his total system is based on these acts of abstraction. True,
it identifies again what it separates but only in a manner which
itself is again separable, mediate. Hegel's philosophy lack in
immediate unity, immediate certainty, immediate truth19 (The
Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
Marx, Introduction by Dirk J. Struik, International Publishers, 1964,
p. 39; quoting Feuerbach in Vorläufige
Thesen, Werke,
F. Jodl, ed. II, 1904).”
Marx's
understanding of religion characterized abstraction as
a strategy sensuous human
beings use as a defense against suffering. He is not the
foaming-at-the-mouth hater of all spiritual traditions that academic
brainwashing propagates.
“But
it is equally clear that a self-consciousness by
its alienation can posit only thinghood,
i.e., only an abstract thing, a thing of abstraction and not
a real thing.
It is || XXVI |50 clear, further, that thinghood is therefore utterly
without any independence,
any essentiality vis-a-vis
self-consciousness; that on the contrary it is a mere
creature—something posited by self-consciousness. And what is
posited, instead of confirming itself, is but confirmation of the act
of positing which for a moment fixes its energy as the product and
gives it the semblance—but
only for a moment—of an independent, real substance....As soon as I
have an object, this object has me for an object. But
a non-objective being
is an unreal, non-sensuous thing—a product of mere thought (i.e.,
of mere imagination)—an abstraction. To be sensuous,
that is, to be really existing, means to be an object of sense, to be
a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous objects outside
oneself—objects of one’s sensuousness. To be sensuous is
to suffer 24 (1844
Manuscripts, Marx, p. 146)(pdf.).”
Interestingly,
Marx was surrounded by persons with deep religious backgrounds who
were also his close friends such as theologian Bruno
Bauer (1809-82)
who cost him dearly for writing in academic periodicals the gospels
were not historical, but a mixture of Greek, Jewish, and Roman
theological folk-stories. Consequently, Bauer was fired from the
university of Bonn where Marx had hoped to join him as a
professor. Friedrich
Engels (1820-1895)
was strictly raised as a Pietist Protestant and trained in biblical
scholarship, once writing that modern communism was not unlike
primitive Christianity. Socialist Moses
Hess (1812-75)
had some influence on Marx and Engels while working on a radical
liberal newspaper. Hess, Marx, and Engels all lived on the same
street in Brussels, Belgium. Please inform your professors that Marx
did not just fall out of the sky from some place between the earth
and moon. (For greater details see Struik's introduction, pp.
14-17).
Not
only religion,
but also logic mirrors
alienated thinking by reductionist abstraction of nature and society;
“Logic—mind’s coin
of the realm,
the speculative or mental value of man and nature—its essence which
has grown totally indifferent to all real determinateness, and hence
unreal—is alienated
thinking,
and therefore thinking [p. 137] which abstracts from nature and from
real man: abstract thinking
(1844
Manuscripts,
Marx, p. 137-8 )(pdf.).” Χωρισμός is
the ancient Greek term for “separation,”
“abstraction,”
and
is used to describe the “secretion
of sap.”
Speculative
reductionist abstractions gathers the sap, but discards the tree
source.
I
further discuss abstract
objects and contradiction in
the essay, “Bertrand
Russell's Critique of Fregean Logico-Mathematical Objects”
and
in the subheading near the end of the essay, “Marcusean Dialectics
on the Ontology of a False Condition,” see, “The
Metalogic of Contradiction.”
Marx
knows Hegel is obscure and attempts to clarify his point that
thinking produces its own tautologous circular paradigms: “...to
talk in human language, the abstract thinker learns in his intuition
of nature that the entities which he thought to create from nothing,
from pure abstraction—the entities he believed he was producing in
the divine dialectic as pure products of the labour of thought,
forever shuttling back and forth in itself and never looking outward
into reality—are nothing else but abstractions from characteristics
of nature.
To him, therefore, the whole of nature merely repeats the logical
abstractions in a sensuous, external form. He once more resolves
nature into these abstractions (1844
Manuscripts,
Marx, p. 156)(pdf.).”
Marx is identifying the same alienating consequences of abstraction
that Zerzan described as the inherent dominating effects of using
abstract symbolic language.
"When
atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they
deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain
places... if they were not in the habit of swerving, nature would
never have produced anything."
--Lucretius (died 270
BC)
I
have one last meme to grind that claims Marx embraces a nihilistic
materialist ontology that is responsible for the post-Modernist
crisis of existential meaning and ethics, including God. This is a
popular right-wing Cold War meme. First, Marx focused on the
materialist base of history in reaction to old Hegelian Idealism
which was the dominate ideology during his era so that materialism
was a theoretically corrective counter-position.
Secondly, Marx never used the term “dialectical
materialism”
in
any of his writings. Thirdly, Marx named his theory “historical
materialism”
which
is not a
reductionist “crude
mechanical materialism,”
but a dialectical feedback-loop developing
from a material base that also shapes human
consciousness and the institutions it creates in a teleological
historical process. Engels writes about crude materialism in a letter
to J. Bloch during 1890:
“According
to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in
the last instance decisive
in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More
than this neither Marx nor myself ever claimed. If now someone has
distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is
the only decisive
one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract,
absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base,
but the different parts of the structure--the political forms of the
class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the
victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the
reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the
participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious
opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems--all
this exercises also its influence on the development of the
historical struggles and in cases determines their form... That the
young people give to the economic factor more importance than belongs
to it is in part the fault of Marx and myself. Facing our adversaries
we had to lay especial stress on the essential principle denied by
them, and, besides, we had not always the time, place, or occasion to
assign to the other factors which participate in producing the
reciprocal effect, the part which belongs to them. But scarcely has
one come to the representation of a particular historical period,
that is, to a practical application of the theory, when things
changed their aspect, and such an error was no longer permissible. It
happens too often that one believes he has perfectly understood a new
theory, and is able to manage it without any aid, when he has
scarcely learned the first principles, and not even those correctly.
This reproof I cannot spare to some of our new Marxists; and in truth
it has been written by the wearer of the marvellous robe himself.
[That is, by Marx. – Editor.] (Engels'
Letter to J. Bloch in Konigsberg,
London, September 21 [-22], 1890).”
Theologian Paul Tillich on Ontological Realism
“The polarity of individualization and participation solves the problem of nominalism and realism which has shaken and almost disrupted Western civilization.”
Ontological realism is the study of the “really real.” Tillich is critical of ψευδές (pseudo: false, untrue, or deceptive) θεωρία (theoria: a looking at, viewing, beholding) of abstractions that conceal, or distort rationality. And Tillich has a method for critiquing ontologies such as positivism, pragmatism, empiricism, idealism, technological realism, nominalist ontology, subjectivism, romanticism, existentialism, mystical realism, supra-naturalism, biblical realism, and atheism.* The first two syllables of “Ontology” (ὄντος: ontos) is the singular present active neuter genitive participle of εἰμί (I am) meaning “to be, exist, appearing to be--of things.” Ontology is the study of being. He groups these schools of thought into categories describing their similarities, contrasts, and changes of meanings between them during different historical eras such as the Middle Ages, and the 19th century. He writes about these same ontologies scattered in other books and articles he authored. Tillich is a dialectical realist choosing the dialectical method for its ability to “...move through 'yes' and 'no' and 'yes' again. It is always a dialogue, whether this proceeds between different subjects or in one subject. But the dialectical method goes beyond this. It presupposes that reality itself moves through 'yes' and 'no,' through positive, negative, and positive again. The dialectical method attempts to mirror the movement of reality (ST, Vol. I; p. 234).” He identifies some ontologies as false, but oftentimes his analysis concludes that a particular ontology, positivism for example, is too epistemologically strict, or applied inappropriately to things, or a dimension of existence. Tillich described himself as in a human boundary-situation wherein we reach our limit, when threatened, or in existential despair and this is where he attempts to find balance using the dialectical method--on the boundaries (“The Protestant Era,” Tillich, 1948; p. 195) (pdf.) (abbreviated, PE). Equipoise is a noun or verb that means a state of balance or counterbalance. One pole of a dialectical opposition can be religion with the opposing element, or antipole, being society. Other dialectical oppositions Tillich investigates are theology and philosophy, idealism and Marxism, and religion opposed to secular culture.
+Pole <– Equipoise –> -Antipole
By employing dialectical analysis Tillich builds a coherent vocabulary to systematically think, speak, or understand these difficult philosophical issues because without words one cannot reflect and evaluate. “Language is the house of being” as Heidegger wrote in “Letter on Humanism,” (1947).
*(For short summaries of some of these “isms” see my essay, “Bertrand Russell's Critique of Fregean Logico-Mathematical Objects” under the subheading, "Part I: Paradigms of Truth and Logic").
“Grammarization is a war waged on spirits.”
Volume one of “Systematic Theology” (University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957 & 1963; abbreviated, “ST”) concludes these ontologies whether religious or secular as lacking individual participation that in the end reduces ontologies to labels, or ideologies which alienates the knower (subject) from the known (object):
“According to nominalism, only the individual has ontological reality; universals are verbal signs point to similarities between individual things. Knowledge, therefore, is not participation. It is an external act of grasping and controlling things. Controlling knowledge is the epistemological expression of a nominalistic ontology; empiricism and positivism are its logical consequences. But pure nominalism is untenable....And this structure includes by definition a mutual participation of the knower and the known. Radical nominalism is unable to make the process of knowledge understandable....The word indicates that the universals, the essential structures of things, are the really real in them.2 'Mystical realism' emphasizes participation over individualization, the participation of the individual in the universal and the participation of the knower in the known. In this respect realism is correct and able to make knowledge understandable. But it is wrong if it establishes a second reality behind empirical reality and makes of the structure of participation a level of being in which individuality and personality disappear....*[Footnote 2] The word 'realism' means today almost what “nominalism” meant in the Middle Ages, while the 'realism' of the Middle Ages expresses almost exactly what we call 'idealism' today. It might be suggested that, wherever one speaks of classical realism, one should call it 'mystical realism' (ST, Vol. I; p. 177-8 ).“
"Karl Marx called every theory which is not based on the will to transform reality an ‘ideology,’ that is,an attempt to preserve existing evils by a theoretical construction which justifies them.”
Dr. John Vervaeke has lectured on the four types of knowing: 1.) Participatory agent arena, deep knowing 2.) Perspectival relevance of a salience landscape 3.) Procedural controlling instrumental skills 4.) Propositional semantics/syntactical verbal signs (logic). Self-deception can exist at each level of knowing. On controlling instrumental knowledge such as nominalist ontology, empiricism, and logical positivism, both critiques of philosophers Tillich and Marcuse completely agree. Marcuse's critique of instrumental reason encompasses both the “soul and spirit of inner-man”:
“Reason repels transcendence. At the later stage in contemporary positivism, it is no longer scientific and technical progress which motivates the repulsion; however, the contraction of thought is no less severe because it is self-imposed—philosophy’s own method. The contemporary effort to reduce the scope and the truth of philosophy is tremendous, and the philosophers themselves proclaim the modesty and inefficacy of philosophy. It leaves the established reality untouched; it abhors transgression (“One-Dimensional Man,” Marcuse, 1964, p. 177).”(pdf.)
I witnessed this effort in analytic philosophy departments. Tillich is not exaggerating about this nihilistic reductionist push in academia, nor am I exaggerating stating once analytic philosophers join a philosophy department, they are antagonistic and militantly take over the department. English speaking university philosophy departments tend to indoctrinate logical positivism even though has been a dead philosophy as a school of thought since the collapse of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivism. Analytic philosophy is like a venereal disease. It is not a philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) that concerns existentialist questions of purpose and values.
Tillich describes exiguous instrumental reasoning as “One concedes to things only so much power as they should have in order to be useful. Reason becomes the means of controlling the world. The really real (ousia) of things is their calculable element, that which is determined by natural laws. Anything beyond this level is without interest and not an object of knowledge (PE; link added, p. 69-70).”
Consequently, the disciplines of Science, Technological Engineering, and Mathematics dominate university curriculums leaving the humanistic fields of study stigmatized as nonobjective and unverifiable arenas of scholarship.
Also notice that Tillich draws subtle distinctions within ontologies such as between nominalism, and pure nominalism; between naturalistic pantheism and non-naturalistic pantheism (ST, Vol. I; p. 233) where his understanding is more consistent with Karl Krause's non-theistic concept of pan-en-theism. Tillich argues that “Pantheism does not mean, never has meant, and never should mean that everything that is, is God. If God is identified with nature (deus sive natura), it is not the totality of natural objects which is called God but rather the creative power and unity of nature, the absolute substance which is present in everything (ST, Vol. I; p. 232).” In another example of fine differentiations. Dr. Vervaeke makes the distinction between the romanticism of Johann Goethe and decadent romanticism such as—this is my example, the immoral libertine writer Marques DeSade. Making these fine dialectical distinctions by comparisons with different theories of being is what makes the study of ontology so difficult.
A New Realism
“Self-transcending realism is a universal attitude toward reality. It is neither a merely theoretical view of the world nor a practical discipline for life; it lies underneath the cleavage between theory and practice. Nor is it a special religion or a special philosophy. But it is a basic attitude in every realm of life, expressing itself in the shaping of every realm.”
Comparison of ontologies using descriptive names such as “realism” can be hazardous since every individual may have a slightly different concept of what the really real actually means. Tillich embraces a new realism he classifies as, “self-transcending realism,” a concept that he admittedly borrowed and revised from French philosopher Henri Bergson who combines Élan vital or the universal tendency toward transcendence, and Time (ST, Vol. I; p. 181). Tillich occasionally refers to his new realism as Belief-ful realism described in James Luther Adam's words as “...a turning toward reality, a questioning of reality, a penetrating into existence, a driving to the level where reality points beyond itself to its ground and ultimate meaning. Belief-ful realism does not look 'above' reality to a transcendentalized spiritual world; it looks down into the depths of reality to its inner infinity (PE, p. 296).” Self-transcending realism is for Tillich “realism and faith in tension with one another.” Realism without transcendence is self-limiting realism such as positivism, pragmatism, and empiricism. Self-transcendence that is not realistic (utopian) but idealistic which Tillich only thinks idealizes the real instead of transcending it. Tillich's self-transcending realism also takes inspiration from Marx's famous remark, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Tillich adds that none of the above realisms are necessarily irreligious (PE, p. 67). Tillich rejects two-world ontologies saying “...spatial symbols of above and below should not be taken literally in any respect (ST, Vol. I; p. 277).” Tillich does not use the term “self-transcending realism” in his Systematic Theology, but instead writes “self-transcendence” 155 times collectively in all three volumes of ST. For Tillich, transcendence is re-interpreted as depth borrowing a concept from the field of Depth Psychology.
“The fate of our culture is, in the long run, bound up with this conflict and with our ability to go forward to a new kind of realism.”
But are all these distinctions Tillich is making themselves highly abstract? And if language is corrupting how could one think without words? We must use images and signs to communicate so that our reasoning is necessarily impure. Dr. D.C. Schindler's book helped me to better understand this problem in his well-researched and insightful book "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic," (2008 ). For Plato, "Pure reason," is knowledge of the forms; on the other hand, "impure reason" is the logic of the cave--of appearances. This distinction between the pure reason (Logos) and impure reason (Mythos, or picture-thinking) explains Socrates' ambivalence toward appearances and images (sights and sounds, or εἰκών, image). The higher levels of knowledge, Plato thinks, include mathematics (μαθηματικά, method) and the highest level of knowledge is of the Forms (ἀρχή, archetype). Only in the state of mind of Noesis (νόησις) meaning “understanding, concept, or notion” is there intelligibility of the invisible (Forms) as opposed to opinion Doxia (δόξα) “belief” as in ortho-doxy, and belief based on empirical images.
At first Socrates banishes the poets (creators of images, or propaganda) from the polis, but then allows them to return because dialogue requires images, signs, and words. The ancient Greeks had no word for language. The very first sentence of Plato's dialogue “The Republic” begins by Socrates saying, “I went down [κατέβην, aorist2 past tense] yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon...” Schindler writes, "The banishment and return is an image of the ascent and reversal (Schindler, p. 316)” or returning to the cave of images because the absolute needs the relative in order to "save the appearances," giving a whole new meaning to the shadows within the Cave. When Tillich, Feuerbach, and Marx critique abstractions they are really criticizing the reification of abstractions—to make into a thing. The Platonic ideal forms only exist in the realm of language so there is a tiny grain of truth even for radical nominalism.
Historical Realism
“...self-transcendence on the subhuman level is limited by a constellation of conditions, while self-transcendence on the human level is limited only by the structure which makes man what he is---a complete self which has a world.
Tillich embraces dialectical realism, a new self-transcending realism, and historical realism. Historical realism is described as “consciousness of the 'here and now' that allows the real structures of the historical process to appear.” For Tillich history can only be interpreted through “active participation.” Technological realism of the positivistic sciences view its object only for “calculation and control” sacrificing active participation for “detached observation.” Self-transcending realism, says Tillich, is the “religious depth” of historical realism that allows us to see the really real through a new paradigm of realism just, “...as in a thunderstorm at night, when the lightning throws a blinding clarity over all things, leaving them in complete darkness the next moment. When reality is seen in this way with the eye of a self-transcending realism, it has become something new (PE, p. 78 ).”
Tillich is highly critical of mysticism if it creates a reified two-world ontology, but also views mystical self-transcendence as essential to faith. He writes, “ 'Mystical realism' emphasizes participation over against individualization, the participation of the individual in the universal and the participation of the knower in the known. In this respect realism is correct and able to make knowledge understandable. But it is wrong if it establishes a second reality behind empirical reality and makes of the structure of participation a level of being in which individuality and personality disappear (ST, Vol. I; p. 178 ).” He is always relevant to his time and this may have been his critique also of many mystical cults of the1960s in America. (see, Bertrand Russell's essay, “Mysticism and Logic”).
The Ontologies of Theism, Non-theism, and Atheism
“Not he who rejects the gods of the crowd is impious, but
Tillich does not want to de-mythologize Christian theology for these myths contain powerful religious symbols purchased by the suffering of a billion human lifetimes. I would categorize Tillich's view of divinity as “non-theistic” that is not personal, but encompasses the personal. He deliberately wrote his systematic theology to deliteralize Christian categories (to remove literalistic distortions of symbols and myths) by translation into an existential hermeneutical phenomenology motivated by his belief that “...existentialism is a natural ally of Christianity. Immanuel Kant once said that mathematics is the good luck of human reason. In the same way, one could say that existentialism is the good luck of Christian Theology (ST, vol. 1, p. 27).” Take for example, Tillich’s rejection of biblical literalism that defends the cosmological argument’s conclusion that God is the Creator, and First Cause because rationalistic theism is based on the category of causality: "...the category of causality cannot 'fill the bill’...In order to disengage the divine cause from the series of causes and effects, it is called the first cause, the absolute beginning. What this means is that the category of causality is being denied while it is being used. In other words, causality is being used not as a category but as a symbol (ST, vol. I, p. 238; italics added).” Tillich’s polemic in opposition to biblical literalism is based on his notion of the unconditional: “…the gods are not objects within the context of the universe…Ultimacy stands against everything which can be derived from mere subjectivity, nor can the unconditional be found within the entire catalogue of finite objects which are conditioned by each other (ST, vol. 1, p. 214).”
“Anything that claims to be sacred and that does not recognize the demand of the Unconditional is demonic.”
Tillich draws the distinction between ontological and technical concepts of reason. In summary, he argues the conceptions of ontological reason are represented by philosophers from Parmenides to Hegel including Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas. Classical Reason is that of the logos of being, which includes cognitive, aesthetic, practical, and technical functions of the human mind. The technical concept of reason is the capacity of reason reduced to the capacity to calculate. (Tillich’s distinction parallels Heidegger’s calculative vs. meditative thinking). The “depth of reason” is not another field of reason, but rather is the structure preceding (metaphorically speaking) all rational thought which is manifested in the creative logos of being (see, ST, vol. I, p. 79). Logos determines the ends, while technical reason determines the means. Tillich warns if these two capacities of reasoning become separated and technical calculative reason overshadows the logos as it has since the middle of the nineteenth century, "The consequence is that the ends are provided by nonrational forces, either by positive tradition or by arbitrary decision serving the will to power (ST, vol. I, p. 72-3)." Logical positivism is given particular criticism of its refusal to recognize as relevant anything that is not empirically verifiable (irrelevant subjectivity) in the object-realm of technical reason. Tillich directs the reader to Max Horkheimer’s famous book, “The Eclipse of Reason (1947)(pdf.).”
The unconditional transcends the distinction between subject and object. To forget this is to make atheism inevitable. Atheism is thoroughly justified in protesting against the extrapolation of a transcendent world behind the existing world.
Tillich specifically warns of the objectification of Dasein (human sense of being-ness) as dangerous to self-identity and human existence. Another existential hazard is falling into a mode of alienated being having lost a sense of noumenality, the unconditional, or the infinite—in short, the loss of existential meaning:
"The basic structure of being and all its elements and the conditions of existence lose their meaning and their truth if they are seen as objects among objects. If the self is considered to be a thing among things, its existence is questionable; if freedom is thought to be a thing among things, its existence is questionable; if freedom is thought to be a quality of will, it loses out to necessity; if finitude is understood in terms of measurement, it has no relation to the infinite. The truth of all ontological concepts is their power of expressing that which makes the subject-object structure possible. They constitute this structure; they are not controlled by it (ST, vol. I, p. 168; italics added)."
Tillich believed Hegel “deified reason” which later opened the way for the domination of cognitive-technical-instrumentalist reason of the modern era forgetting Kant’s greater sense of ontological reason that “…grasps the cognitive, aesthetic, practical, and technical functions of the human mind (ST, vol. I, p. 72).”
Religious and theological words lose their genuine meaning if they are used as terms to designate finite objects under the control of the categories which
Tillich is a Neo-Kantian epistemologically. Kant makes the distinction between the negative sense of noumenality which is Apophatic (ἀπόφασις; meaning ‘denial,’ or ‘negation’) and the positive meaning that speculates on the possibility of an intellectual intuition that would make transcendental “objects” intelligible in some way, or Cataphatic (κατάφασις: meaning ‘affirmative proposition’). Surprisingly, Wittgenstein could be placed with those who favor the positive meaning of noumenality since he has a loophole through the Kantian block (according to Bertrand Russell). We can include Heidegger with Wittgenstein on this point since both also viewed poetry as a loophole through which one can think the mystery of Being. Even Kant himself has a loophole to the noumenal realm by commitment to pure practical reason (or the Second Critique of the necessary conditions for the possibility of ethics). Maybe we can identify those in the positive cataphatic camp such as Wittgenstein as “quasi-negative noumenalists,” or “quasi-positive noumenalists” depending on the philosopher’s viewpoint. Adorno, and Benjamin explored the notion of authoring constellations of meanings as a way to say the unsayable. Tillich and Adorno refer to the unconditional and the nonconceptual respectively in their writings describing the loss of experience and a possible recovery of experience.
"...I am indebted to Kantian criticism, which showed me that the question of the possibility of scientific knowledge cannot be answered by pointing to
And Then So Clear
And
then so clear to wonder
To
wake with open eyes
As
the snow across the tundra
And
the rain across the skies
And
the rain across the skies
So
much again and weightless
In
the motherworld of space
We
fail to form to come to
And
the razor mountains fade
And
the day is cursed in shame
In
these the world we open
So
much to lose to save
To
light the highest beacons
And
the rose of love will bleed
And
the rose of love will bleed
In
these the world we open
So
much to lose and save
To
light the brightest beacon
And
the rose of love will bleed
And
the razor mountains fade
And
the day is cursed in shame
