Reflection on Kearney’s Anatheism: An Arrow of Longing

Socrates starts philosophy by you know nothing. Faith begins, Dostoyevsky says, out of crucible of doubt. Keats says the poetic faith is being in the condition of negative capability. Mystery, uncertainty, and doubt without the irritable reaching out after fact and reason. Then you are faced with an impossible situation. How do we get peace from violence? …. By having faith in the impossible. God is a name for the advent of impossible that it can happen. (Kearney)

In the contact the human soul in the world has with the beyond, nothing is discovered but the existence of God. Everything beyond this belongs to the realm of analogical-speculative deduction and mythic symbolization. (Voegelin)

Thanks to Cassie for sending me these two wonderful resources for Kearney’s Anatheism: an interview with Kearney by Robert Harrison: http://podbay.fm/show/81415836/e/1398240061?autostart=1

And a dense but informative article: https://richardmkearney.files.wordpress.com/.../phenomeno...

I had a brief exchange with Kearney a while ago, when I was teaching a course on “Understanding Love”. I asked my students to read his short article on “Losing Touch”[1], which is align with his general aesthetic theory that touch (following Aristotle) is more important than sight (Plato) or hearing (Heidegger). Even if I agree that the sense of touch is so important, I can’t understand these totalizing claims (pendulum swings). I emailed him a love anniversary poem[2] and asked for a word about it. He emailed back: moving.

After listening to the interview and reading the article, I woke up at 4am this morning, excited to think and write about this invaluable inspiration and aspiration. However, I had to read the last chapter of Eric Voegelin’s “Science, Politics, and Gnosticism” first, for reasons that you will see. And I had to do the right thing: students were waiting for the weekly planner for the next week and I am impatient to sit and write about Kearney, but I had to take care of my students first, and then tend to my wife and son, and reminding him to feed the fish. I had to pray and ask God to set me on the right track, help me not to fall, calm my restless heart, erase the delusion of power, and let me step into its path without the temptation of achievement and Gnosticism. I had to go for my meditation walk, and again conversing with God, losing myself in the ocean-- body and soul, not only by seeing or hearing, but by feeling it on my skin, and by breathing it into my lungs and body, and giving, emanating, exhaling back by my soul, feeling trees and earthworms, and sending my praise to life. Why do I say these things? Because it is related to the topic of this reflection and also I know that we have to step out of “Cartesian moment”, as Foucault puts it, that as if “thinking” just happens in our mind or in isolation, or we can achieve anything just by thinking, regardless of how we live ethically, regardless of spiritual thirst and longing, and regardless of prayer and meditation. No wonder we now think we are “information processing” machines or minds, and our technology is heading towards the destructive forces of will to power (libido dominandi), hedonism, and a desire for immortality.

Kearney’s arguments for Anatheism (God after God) can be organized along three lines:

1. Western Enlightenment (the domination of reason as self-sufficient to itself), Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche’s questioning of religions and so-called “death of God” is an essential step to get rid of a dominant and authoritarian god, what he calls Alpha God or OmniGod.

2. Values of love and justice are significant for human beings. We need to replace violence with peace and address social calamities and disparities with love. In his words, we have to move from hostility to hospitality. But this is turning the impossible into possible, which is beyond human capabilities.

3. We are unable by ourselves to bring about this historical change. For human being it is an “impossibility” to end wars and discrimination. We need to resort to a higher Power. And this higher power is Anatheism, the God of service and compassion.

I think it is illuminating that we have a comparative discussion of Voegelin’s critique of secularism, which on some parts, is diametrically opposite to Kearney and on some other parts overlaps with his views. Voegelin’s arguments can be organized along three axes:

1. Western Enlightenment (the domination of reason as self-sufficient to itself), Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche’s questioning of religions and so-called “death of God” is a continuation of ancient Gnosticism to substitute a version of ‘immanentization’ (secularization, matter and nature are sufficient to themselves) and renouncing of ‘vertical’ or other-worldly transcendence and its proclamation of a ‘horizontal’ transcendence or futuristic Parousia [being-present] of Being—that is, intramundane (being or occurring within the material world —opposed to extramundane) or worldly salvific doctrines—as ultimate truth.

2. The nature of human conscience is divine. “The border experience of the examination of conscience can be elaborated meditatively and expanded to the experience of standing in Judgment.” So pragmatism, secularism, positivism, and historicism cannot substitute this divine conscience. At the same time because of fragility of this border experience we are prone to fall into the dream of Gnosticism to see ourselves self-sufficient and so venture to become Superman (Übermensch) and strive to make heaven on the earth by our own secular powers, without the grace of God. An inevitable and dangerous failure.

3. “The order of being remains something that is given, that is not under man’s control. In order, therefore, that the attempt to create a new world may seem to make sense, (according to Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Comte, National Socialism, and generally secularism) the givenness of the order of being must be obliterated; the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being, further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being—the murder of God.” For Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud the order of being as the given reality is defective and unjust and human being in itself is capable of bringing harmony and justice to the world.

And these are my theses:

1. We experience historical oscillations to extremes in each step. Western Enlightenment is as essential and as important as Eastern Enlightenment. Western Enlightenment is a response to the excesses of religious dogmas, where we displaced the nexus of ethical practices, love and justice, as the major bridge to the divine source and God with: a) metaphysical speculation about the nature of God and universe; b) we lost the ethical sense by playing the role of a false and aggressive god, and became aggressive and violent in our righteous indignation (against Mohammad and Jesus’s message). Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx fell off the cliff of excessive reaction to the false conscience and consciousness about God and consequently rejected the divine self, separated the ethical from spirituality and a sense of harmony with God and universe, and followed the Gnosticism of secularization, hedonism, and humanism.

2. The so called Alpha God, the Abrahamic God, is a dynamic God within its own message (clearing away aberrations through Jesus and Muhammad, with further clearing under way). The message from the outset had expressed clearly that our body and soul, our conscience, in its divine nexus and our ethical practices (love and justice) establish our inner worth. And our very own soul and body will judge us by the law of karma in this world and the world to come. However, religious zealotry and excess turned the message of the Day of Judgement, inherent effect of our actions on our body and soul, into righteous indignation—hence turning us into judgmental souls who forgot the message of Mohammad and Jesus: love your enemy and repel evil with what is better. [3]

3. I agree with Kearney and Voegelin that we are unable to have ultimate Gnosis about our condition and conscience; we are unable to make the impossible possible and we have to accept our hopelessness and appeal to a higher power.

4. I disagree with Voegelin that Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche were utterly misleading.  By focusing on the condition of our existence, they taught us precious lessons about our lives. But I disagree also with Kearney who endorses and believes that indeed Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche were capable of murdering omnipotent God. Historically, it is obvious now that their claims failed because of their totalizing and extravagant belief that as if they know how things work, whether through Nietzsche’s will to power, Marx’s historical materialism, or Freud’s libido psychoanalysis. I disagree with Kearney that there is a complete breach between the so called Alpha God, or Omnigod, and the compassionate and serving God. We can’t and shouldn’t completely reject and say adieu to one and say a welcoming a-dieu to the other, but to discern the wheat from the chaff, the right course of action from blind righteousness or reaction, and stop swinging violently from one extreme to another.

In his interview, Kearney states:

“It is true that the critique of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche and Western Enlightenment is a critique of an illusory father God, a god of power and theodicy. Alpha God, or OminGod. The God of omnipotence, omniscient, and omnipresence, the god of the first cause of Aristotle, the supreme being in Plato and others. This notion of a god beyond the world, beyond life, beyond time, beyond the body came to prevail and mixing with Judeo-Christian monotheism in our Western world, that we ended up with a split, that God is out there, we are here. And God is out there to create us, guide us, determine our lives, and ultimately punish and reward us. That notion of God, which is called the God of theodicy, that everything is part of the will of God, that person died, an innocent child is being tortured, take Dostoyevsky’s example, they are all part of the will of God. We don’t understand “how” or “why”. Ours is not to ask “why” but they are all part of a secret providence. That notion of God, to me died, on the day of massacre of Jews and ..., why did God not come to save the massacre of innocent, the tortured child, Dostoevsky says? So true faith comes out of the crucible of doubt. We must doubt in that God, we must get rid of that God, in order to open up, in Dostoevsky sense, the God of compassion. But there has to be letting go of the old, the first Dei of abandonment, and coming back to the God of advent, of service, not of sovereignty.”

These words sound so pleasing to our ears and are partially true in terms of excesses of religions; however, one can see the pendulum swing of questioning the excessive interpretations and speculations about a transcendental God, and going all the way to the other extreme: to an immanent God. Why can we not stop this swing? Why can we not bring the seemingly opposites together, to hold the transcendental (outside) and the immanent (inside) God together? The omnipotent and the compassionate God together? Moreover, he complains that Alpha God is responsible for holocaust. Why should we question God about the consequences of our own actions? Was holocaust not part of our “secular” Gnosticism? Didn’t we declare that we didn’t need God as a refuge and protection in our Western Enlightenment? Didn’t we say that we were sufficient to ourselves? Well, one may argue that God let us be for a few centuries, during the whole twentieth century, during the holocaust and cold war, our communism and capitalism, our excessive religious behavior and forgetting the original message of Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammad, to see it for ourselves that we are deficient. Didn’t we say that we were mature and our reason was sufficient in bringing heaven on the earth? Why should we complain now? Quran says: “God does not change the condition of a people unless they change what is in themselves” (Quran, 13:11).

Kearney continues:

“In Levinas, there is a radical overturning of theodicy and omnipotence. And he went through the holocaust, he lost most of his family in Dachau. However, the separation that he celebrates is that two is better than one. That God created the world, in the story, it is better to have two people, our speech, language, relations, and what he calls hospitality, the host, that can receive the guest. It is better to be with a stranger than to be alone talking to yourself. The metaphysical notion of God that Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche got rid of, was a self-thinking God, the God of Aristotle, what is the divine? It is a being who has no need of the other. It is purely self-sufficient, that then becomes a self-causing cause, scholasticism, the self-loving loved of the God. It is a self-regarding, self-referential, self-sufficient God.”

It seems Kearney, as well as Levinas, are rightfully taking a turn to the ethical rather than to the metaphysical questions about the nature of God. This is the lesson we learned from Axial Age sages[4]. We don’t know what God is and we won’t know, as long as knowledge goes, but we can feel God in love, in helping others, in a stranger. True, but then why should we now say God is not this thing (self-sufficient) but is that thing (it needs a company, that two is better than one)? Is it not again giving a metaphysical definition of what God is? How do you know? These are the oscillations and generalizations and pretensions of knowledge. I don’t understand why we are so much inclined to contradict ourselves and make such extravagant claims about the metaphysics of God.

Kearney continues:

“Levinas moves from the lonely creative God to the God of hospitality to the widow, the orphan, and to the stranger, which is straightforward from the Torah. For Levinas, God is in the moment of the gesture of “after you” (ana), saying the other person first, opening the door to the guest, the important moment of Abrahamic tradition is when Abraham and Sarah are in their tents and they are looking out and see three strangers walking to them from the desert. And there is a choice: what should I do with these strangers? . . . Should I kill them or welcome them into the tent? So the hostility becomes hospitality. And the word “hostis” etymologically means “guest, stranger, and enemy [as in hostility]” as the over-moment of all the great religions of transforming “hostility” into “hospitality”. And in welcoming the strangers by Abraham, those three men become God and one, going down through Christianity and Islam.”

Yes, but I don’t see any contradiction between the loving God who turns hostility into hospitality (as I quoted the Quran before: Repel evil with good) and the omnipotent God. Why can God not be both?

When we look at scriptures and history of religions, what we find first and foremost is a mixture of messages. Some are fundamental to those religions and some marginal. Fundamental to all religions of the book as well as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucius is Golden Rule, the right conduct, to be ethical, to do justice and to care. Fundamental to religions of the book is the notion that God is already within us. Judaism says we are the image (in Hebrew “cut off” from) of God. Jesus declares the same thing and insists it is “love” not the “law” that has priority in God and the kingdom of God is within us. Islam repeatedly declares that our “fitrat” (essence) is divine. Human beings, according to these religions, are endowed with a divine gift which is not to be “omnipotent” but to love and to care. We have the same theme in Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucius which are religions, not secular traditions, and believe that there is a divine (Buddha nature, Dao) essence in us, without calling it God, but surely they see it heavenly or ultimate inter-beings of all beings. Now you can call it anything you wish.

But then the question is: Are “punishment” and “reward” not the internal working of this divine essence within us? Depending on the degrees that one is capable to do justice, to approximate its Source or God, and keep the integrity of its conscience, one moves on the scale of defection to perfection. And against nihilism and moral relativism, this is a meaningful direction of the soul, i.e., to the degree that we distance ourselves from our divine nature, we fall into hedonism and nihilism, and harm ourselves.

Even Kantian Western Enlightenment of the sovereignty of reason has an interesting and strange ethical theory, which is a heroic attempt to show that our wired in and innate (a priori) law of reason defies inconsistency in ethical issues and falls into cognitive dissonance and contradiction if it can’t universalize its own moral actions, i.e., I shouldn’t find myself in cognitive dissonance if everyone does the same thing that I morally do. This Kantian theory can’t explain why this inconsistency should be avoided. Kant appeals to a sense of “reverence” for the law of reason within. We all understand the kind of shame and guilt we feel, when we realize we are inconsistence. Maturity of divine conscience is a movement from the shame we experience under the dictum of social norms only to the shame we experience if we violate our own divine nature and lose the integrity of our own conscience. Is it not strange that religions hold us accountable to our sense of shame and guilt and this is also exactly where pendulum swings of excess occur? Now, if we want to go to the extreme of getting rid of so called punishing God, we should say: as religious fanaticism and patriarchy abuse our sense of shame and guilt, we should have no sense of shame and guilt, so viva cognitive dissonance, suffering conscience, and immorality. Is this not utter falling?

Harrison asks Kearney, “do we need God for understanding hospitality? Is human solidarity, the love and justice, not sufficient to itself?” In other words, one may ask: is Nietzsche, Marx, and Foucault’s historicism (historical ontology) NOT sufficient for establishing values in our own life, which makes us able to turn the impossibility into possibility, hostility to hospitality? Kearney responds “no, because it is impossible for the human to make the impossible into possible” and elaborates by bringing the example of Alcohol Anonymous twelve steps meetings:

“Take AA in ANA in Anatheism and Addiction Anonymous, letting go of those idols and addictions and in the case of AA movement which is 12 steps program which is developed and disseminated to all kinds of healing programs. It begins with very important sentence “I am helpless, I am abandoned, I am helpless about my addiction. Without the first adiou of abandonment the second adiou will not come. That I can’t cure myself, that I ego cogito self-willing will cannot do this. It is beyond my power. So, what do I do? I hand myself over to a higher power.” This sounds monotheistic if you will. Something bigger than you. That can be the story of other people, that they did the impossible. They gave up their addiction, I can do it too. That is what the higher power mean, it doesn’t mean some big being with a beard upon a Platonic heaven, waiting to punish or reward us when we die. Actually it is very simple thing, it is the disposition of openness and receptivity to something coming to us that will heal.”

I, Voegelin, and Kearney agree on one point: without the grace of God, our wisdom, passion, reason, will to power, and Gnosticism cannot save us or make the world a better place. I reiterate Voegelin’s thesis:

The nature of human conscience is divine. “The border experience of the examination of conscience can be elaborated meditatively and expanded to the experience of standing in Judgment.” So pragmatism, secularism, positivism, and historicism cannot substitute this divine conscience. At the same time because of fragility of this border experience we are prone to fall into the dream of Gnosticism to see ourselves self-sufficient and so venture to become Superman (Übermensch) and strive to make heaven on the earth by our own secular powers, without the grace of God. An inevitable and dangerous failure.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Losing Our Touch

By Richard Kearney

AUGUST 30, 2014 11:30 AM,

Are we losing our senses? In our increasingly virtual world, are we losing touch with the sense of touch itself? And if so, so what?

I recently had occasion to pose these questions to students in a college class I teach on eros — “from Plato to today.” Not surprisingly, the topic of physical contact and sex came up, and the conversation turned very much to “today.” A number of the students said that they regularly messaged online before having “real contact” with partners, perhaps using online dating and mating services like Match.com, OkCupid, SpeedDate.com and Tinder. They shared messaging acronyms that signaled their level of willingness to have sex, and under what conditions. They admitted to enjoying the relative anonymity of the one-off “hook up,” whose consummation required no preliminary close-quarters courtship rites or flirtation ceremonies, no culinary seduction, no caress, nothing — apart from the eventual “blind rut,” as James Joyce put it — requiring the presence of a functioning, sensitive body.

We noted the rather obvious paradox: The ostensible immediacy of sexual contact was in fact mediated digitally. And it was also noted that what is often thought of as a “materialist” culture was arguably the most “immaterialist” culture imaginable — vicarious, by proxy, and often voyeuristic.

Is today’s virtual dater and mater something like an updated version of Plato’s Gyges, who could see everything at a distance but was touched by nothing? Are we perhaps entering an age of “excarnation,” where we obsess about the body in increasingly disembodied ways? For if incarnation is the image become flesh, excarnation is flesh become image. Incarnation invests flesh; excarnation divests it.

In perhaps the first great works of human psychology, the “De Anima,” Aristotle pronounced touch the most universal of the senses. Even when we are asleep we are susceptible to changes in temperature and noise. Our bodies are always “on.” And touch is the most intelligent sense, Aristotle explained, because it is the most sensitive. When we touch someone or something we are exposed to what we touch. We are responsive to others because we are constantly in touch with them.

“Touch knows differences,” Aristotle insisted. It is the source of our most basic power to discriminate. The thin-skinned person is sensitive and intelligent; the thick-skinned, coarse and ignorant. Think of Odysseus and the Cyclops, Jacob and Esau. The power of touch. Even the Buddha, when challenged by Mara to reveal his authority, simply touches the ground. Our first intelligence is sensory refinement. And this primal sensibility is also what places us at risk in the world, exposing us to adventure and discovery.

Aristotle was challenging the dominant prejudice of his time, one he himself embraced in earlier works. The Platonic doctrine of the Academy held that sight was the highest sense, because it is the most distant and mediated; hence most theoretical, holding things at bay, mastering meaning from above. Touch, by contrast, was deemed the lowest sense because it is ostensibly immediate and thus subject to intrusions and pressures from the material world. Against this, Aristotle made his radical counterclaim that touch did indeed have a medium, namely “flesh.” And he insisted that flesh was not just some material organ but a complex mediating membrane that accounts for our primary sensings and evaluations.

Tactility is not blind immediacy — not merely sensorial but cognitive, too. Savoring is wisdom; in Latin, wisdom is “sapientia,” from “sapere,” to taste. These carnal senses make us human by keeping us in touch with things, by responding to people’s pain — as when the disguised Odysseus (whose name can be translated as “bearer of pain,”), returning to Ithaca, is recognized by his nursemaid, Eurycleia, at the touch of his childhood scar.

But Aristotle did not win this battle of ideas. The Platonists prevailed and the Western universe became a system governed by “the soul’s eye.” Sight came to dominate the hierarchy of the senses, and was quickly deemed the appropriate ally of theoretical ideas. Western philosophy thus sprang from a dualism between the intellectual senses, crowned by sight, and the lower “animal” senses, stigmatized by touch. And Western theology — though heralding the Christian message of Incarnation (“word made flesh”) — all too often confirmed the injurious dichotomy with its anti-carnal doctrines; prompting Nietzsche’s verdict that Christianity was “Platonism for the people” and “gave Eros poison to drink.” Thus opto-centrism prevailed for over 2,000 years, culminating in our contemporary culture of digital simulation and spectacle. The eye continues to rule in what Roland Barthes once called our “civilization of the image.” The world is no longer our oyster, but our screen.

For all the fascination with bodies, our current technology is arguably exacerbating our carnal alienation. While offering us enormous freedoms of fantasy and encounter, digital eros may also be removing us further from the flesh.

Pornography, for example, is now an industry worth tens of billions of dollars worldwide. Seen by some as a progressive sign of post-60s sexual liberation, pornography is, paradoxically, a twin of Puritanism. Both display an alienation from flesh — one replacing it with the virtuous, the other with the virtual. Each is out of touch with the body.

THIS movement toward privatization and virtuality is explored in Spike Jonze’s recent movie “Her,” where a man falls in love with his operating system, which names itself Samantha. He can think of nothing else and becomes insanely jealous when he discovers that his virtual lover, Samantha, is also flirting with thousands of other subscribers. Eventually, Samantha feels so bad for him that she decides to supplement her digital persona with a real body by sending a surrogate lover. But the plan fails miserably — while the man touches the embodied lover he hears the virtual signals of Samantha in his ears and cannot bridge the gap. The split between digital absence and carnal presence is unbearable. Something is missing: love in the flesh.

The move toward excarnation is apparent in what is becoming more and more a fleshless society. In medicine, “bedside manner” and hand on pulse has ceded to the anonymous technologies of imaging in diagnosis and treatment. In war, hand-to-hand combat has been replaced by “targeted killing” via remote-controlled drones. If contemporary warfare renders us invulnerable to those who cannot touch us, can we make peace without a hand to shake? (Think of Mandela-de Klerk or Begin-Sadat).

Moreover, certain cyber engineers now envisage implanting transmission codes in brains so that we will not have to move a finger — or come into contact with another human being — to get what we want. The touch screen replaces touch itself. The cosmos shrinks to a private monitor; each viewer a disembodied self unto itself.

Full humanity requires the ability to sense and be sensed in turn: the power, as Shakespeare said, to “feel what wretches feel” — or, one might also add, what artists, cooks, musicians and lovers feel. We need to find our way in a tactile world again. We need to return from head to foot, from brain to fingertip, from iCloud to earth. To close the distance, so that eros is more about proximity than proxy. So that soul becomes flesh, where it belongs. Such a move, I submit, would radically alter our “sense” of sex in our digital civilization. It would enhance the role of empathy, vulnerability and sensitivity in the art of carnal love, and ideally, in all of human relations. Because to love or be loved truly is to be able to say, “I have been touched.”

Richard Kearney is a philosophy professor at Boston College whose books include “The Wake of Imagination” and the forthcoming “Carnal Hermeneutics.”

[2] A poem: Spiral of Love

Justus’s first day of school with Mongoli,

His Harvey’s púca, and our anniversary of love tomorrow!

A backpack of love to carry separation and to join many,

With the trace of love behind and its rejuvenation flowering,

The anniversary of growth and the miracle of depth,

A journey of silent contentment in fading out into space,

With natalité of love engrained in each breath.

Viva growth! Viva change!

Your love sat deeply inside my wrinkles and my eyes flight of light.

You changed and my gray hair.

I changed and your transformation into a bronze and ivory Diotima stay-of-life,

Eternity of now, profundity of eyes, and your magical touch.

We float in deep waves of discovering anew feelings and desires.

Turning the ladder of love into Mobius strip,

Enjoining sensational desire and blinding light of eternity,

We superimpose the beginning and end.

Then drown in your wisdom, I drink your ivory legs,

Spiraling in holistic circles of existence, I kiss your domes,

Embracing the impetus of growth and death, I fade into your bosom,

We emerged in dependent differentiation of love,

Travelled into abyss of new births,

And disappeared into integration in the universe.

[3] Surah Fussilat (Made Distinct), 41:19: “On the Day when God’s enemies are gathered up for the Fire and driven onward, their ears, eyes, and skins will, when they reach it, testify against them for their misdeeds. 21: They will say to their skins, ‘Why did you testify against us?’ and their skins will reply, ‘God who gave speech to everything, has given us speech—it was It who created you the first time and to It you have been returned.” In the same Surah God says: “Good and evil cannot be equal, repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend, but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness.” (The Quran 41:33)

[4] When we look at Axial Age sages (Socrates, Euripides, Upanishad’s mystics, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekeil, Buddha and Confucius). Ethical practices have intrinsic values; that is, we don’t want them for their result but for their spiritual cultivation. Is it not strange that in terms of ethics, unlike Mill, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, all Axial Age sages, are non-consequentialist? They held that morality has to be practiced for the cultivation of the soul at the disposal of and harmonized with the way of heaven or achieving a meaningful spiritual growth.

04/23/16