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Materialism and religion essay (Baltimore Version) draft, please dont cite
understand its dialectical constitution. In short, theism and atheism are boring
answers to bad questions.
Second, if we can reach an understanding of religion that moves beyond the
intuitive notion of this concept, it might become a site for the contestation of the
processes by which this category is constructed and maintained. As Gil Anidjar puts
it, religion is a polemical concept.1 The political force of this polemic, both material
and ideological, works by obscuring the constitution of the concept. Expanding the
concept of religion through revealing its historical and material basis is thus the
starting point for developing an adequate critical perspective on religion.
Ill begin be reviewing pertinent points from Hegels philosophy of religion (while
transcendental materialism interprets Hegel in terms of ontology and subjectivity,
relatively little has been done on Hegels understanding of religion), then explain how
recent work in the study of religion allows us to expand that philosophy of religion in
ways which resonate with transcendental materialism and conclude with some
reflections on the politics of this philosophy of religion.
There are three elements to Hegels account of religion that deserve particular
attention. First, he understands religion as a mode of cognition that is a moment in a
wider movement from consciousness to absolute knowing. Second, this mode of
cognition is the apex of what Hegel calls representation. Third, religion is defined in a
triadic relationship to the state and philosophy. I cant develop each of these points in
any detail. Besides, this is a conference on contemporary materialism, so I dont
want to spend too much time on Hegel, though Im happy to come back to this in the
discussion.
1 Gil Anidjar, The Idea of an Anthropology of Christianity, Interventions 11, no. 3 (November 1,
2009): 3678 , doi:10.1080/13698010903255718.
Materialism and religion essay (Baltimore Version) draft, please dont cite
Materialism and religion essay (Baltimore Version) draft, please dont cite
While the Here and Beyond is erased, the externality remains. Understanding the
self-emptying of substances generation of a mode of cognition in which the subject
relates to its own truth as external is to grasp the religious moment of subjectivity.
What transcendental materialism allows us to see, not only at the level of subject, but
at the level of culture, is that this truth is external. It is transcending, rather than
transcendent, but is not beyond.
We might put this in Lacanian terms: subjectivity is symbolically mediated. The
Symbolic precedes the subject and is constitutive of the subjectivity that comes to
know it. This knowledge is never complete and does not undo the fundamental
alienation experienced by the subject. This knowledge allows the subject to put the
Symbolic to a different kind of work. Transcendental materialism adds to this
Lacanian framing the additional insight that this mediation includes biological
processes.
Understanding religion as a distinct mode of cognition, however is only one side
of the reality of the concept of religion.6 The other side is the cultus. Religion must
be conceived in terms of both subjective and objective spirit. The cultus is the
practical relationship which facilitates the immediate relation to mediation constitutive
of subjective spirit. So, religion is not only a matter of the immediate relation to
mediation, it is also a matter of the historical, cultural and material conditions of that
mediation.
So, religion should be understood as a mode of cognition which occupies a
particular place in the movement from consciousness to absolute knowing. This
mode is distinctive in its immediate relation to its mediation and this relation occurs in
the context of the cultus.
Before I turn to the topic of recent materialist theories of religion, I should point
out that while Hegels subjective account of religion is oriented towards absolute
6 LPR1: 335.
4
Materialism and religion essay (Baltimore Version) draft, please dont cite
knowing, the objective account is oriented towards the state. As he writes in the 1831
lecture on The Relationship of Religion to the State:
in what we refer to as the people the ultimate truth does not have the form of
thoughts and principles, for what is to count as right for the people can only be so
esteemed to the extent that it is something determinate and particular. 7
Materialism and religion essay (Baltimore Version) draft, please dont cite
Materialism and religion essay (Baltimore Version) draft, please dont cite
relationship to biological processes, especially the plasticity of the brain, and the
ways in which religion exerts downward causation on the materiality of the subject creating the possibility of its own experience. (So for example, some people are born
with neurological structures prone to what many cultures categorise as religious
experience. But, with enough time and the appropriate material conditions, we can
also learn to have religious experiences).
Johnstons transcendental materialism moves us beyond Vasquez in a few key
ways. First, while Vasquez offers a fairly detailed treatment of the sociology and
anthropology, his treatment of philosophy is less precise. Second, Vasquezs
materialist theory of religion is almost purely descriptive (or at least presents as
such). He is not concerned with the political implications of a materialist account of
religion. Even while he acknowledges that religion, understood in a wider sense, both
reproduces and contests a whole set of configurations of race, gender and class, he
is not interested in making the connections between religion and these other issues.
Materialism and religion essay (Baltimore Version) draft, please dont cite
subjectivity, that critique will remain ineffective (if the goal of critique is to achieve
some change in the world). There are thus two questions for a transcendental
materialist philosophy of religion: first, how can the conditions of belief be altered
(and what new forms of belief might result from changes); second, what kinds of
changes to beliefs could short-circuit the material impacts of those beliefs?
These questions do not assume the elimination of religion as a real possibility. If
we are working with Hegels definition of religion, in both its subjective and objective
senses, then religion is part of absolute knowing. That says little, however, about the
status of any particular (or to use Hegels term determinate) religion. A politics
predicated on the elimination of the immediate relation to mediation errs in refusing
to confront that this relation will persist. Focus on the task of elimination is a
distraction from the more important task of investigating the material conditions of
beliefs. (I was thinking about this in terms of some of the papers yesterday and I
think the Hegelian position might be something like a demystification or a
disenchantment that is not a demythologisation).
The anthroplogist Phillipe Descola, in his work arguing against the hard
distinction often drawn between nature and culture, argues our world is composed of
convergences of judgments and actions the effect of cognitive and sensory-motor
templates orienting the expression of distinctive behaviors, schemes of practice that,
in order to be effective, must remain implicit and shielded from collective
speculation.13 It is this last point which is key - these templates, as Descola says,
must remain implicit and shielded from collective speculation. Or, to return to a
Hegelian formulation, if religion is the immediate relation to mediation, the task of
contemporary materialist critiques of religion is to illuminate that process of
mediation. Transcendental materialism offers one perspective from which these
templates can be made explicit and vulnerable. Revealing these implicit structures
13 Philippe Descola, The Ecology of Others: Anthropology and the Question of Nature (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2013), 7576.
Materialism and religion essay (Baltimore Version) draft, please dont cite
and processes allows for them to become experimental fields - in revealing their
construction, we reveal their contingency.
As a kind of final word I was struck by some of the parallels between what Im
trying to argue and the discussion of habit and plasticity provoked by Thomas paper
yesterday. In discussions of plasticity, I think there is sometimes a rush to the
explosive Im guilty of this in work Ive done on plasticity and apocalypiticism. While
we need to preserve that element, I think there needs to be a greater emphasis on
something like a materialist understanding of how habits provide the basis for the
possibility of political change. In many ways that work is less exciting, but is
nonetheless essential. Religion as Ive been discussing it here would be concerned
with the habits needed to enter into different kinds arrangements of the immediate
relation to mediation.