Radical Materialism

Yesterday you looked down at some dirt and thought, is this all that I am? Is this all that I will ever be? It was an idea you had in your mind but you convinced yourself ideas are only complicated, fictitious byproducts emanating from highly advanced other-dirt-stuff circulating by way of fanciful dance in your brain. It is an amazing coincidence, indeed.

But, you say, ideas are nothing, there is only dirt.

The Greatest Deconstructionist — Dr. Manhattan of the Watchmen

The prevailing thought in the western modern world is materialism, which a vulgar understanding would identify pure matter as the simple, primary foundation of all reality and there is nothing more. All that actually exists are bits of stuff (or now more technically, fields of energy/information) and anything that may appear as “extra” such as consciousness, self-awareness, love, concepts such as mathematical sets, logic, morality, or especially religious notions of spirituality and the soul are all either emergent properties, useful fictions, or some combination of the two. Materials determine the realm of ideas, and that’s it.

On the other hand, an older system of thought known as idealism promoted much the opposite. Again, assuming a vulgar understanding, idealism would posit that something like “mind” is what is primary in the universe, and matter derivative of whatever that mind is. There are various forms of this kind of idealism but to narrow our focus, think Plato’s Cave as an overly simplistic, misattributed kernel for what vulgar idealists might hold to. Inside the cave, the shadows licking off the rocky walls are mere … well … shadows of where true reality lies. Either consciousness itself or some capital-g God is the true foundation of reality radiating outside the cave. And if this is so, one ultimately must commit themselves to some form of pantheism since the illusory matter of this world is in some sense a connective tissue to the source; again being ultimate mind. Or said provocatively another way, matter is pantheistically derivative of some “Idea.”

Western Christians tend to find themselves stuck somewhere between the naïve materialist and naïve idealist camps, probably inadvertently, but stuck all the same. They are materialist in the sense that the physical is no longer sacred. The crackers and grape juice are just that, material food only plainly symbolizing a remembrance of some reality that has long ago past. Yet they are also idealist, ready to escape this garbage fire of a cave for a disembodied heaven emanating from the Mind of God for which nothing on earth has any material relation to. My contention is that while I often find myself unintentionally participating in this cultural conformity, the truth is found elsewhere.

It would be too easy to simply state that leaning down the middle is the correct answer, or even to grab aspects of what might work from both ideologies. Neither does justice to good theology. I instead (and as will be clear quite unoriginally) propose that a proper Christian metaphysics is one of radical materialism.

The Materiality of the Spirit/Soul

Radical materialism, as I’m going to interpret through a Christian lens, would suggest that the material, and also the spiritual, are all substance: that of finite embodied stuff, and this is all that exists. (Although it should be noted that this view may be considered “radical” only in the face of modernity’s onset).

To be clear, material substance and spiritual substance are distinct, but both are substance nonetheless. Here the term substance takes on a somewhat Aristotelian/Thomistic meaning. In which substance is merely an existent: anything that endures and exists.¹ For St. Thomas Aquinas, however, existents could be material or immaterial, the immaterial being a more excellent existent which does not depend on matter and motion. Immaterial existents may cause the material by utilizing matter and the form, for instance as the angels may engage. However, their essence is immaterial in nature.²

But does this medieval, Aristotelian notion cohere with ancient Christian thought? For example, what did Paul mean when he spoke apart from “flesh” by highlighting the “soul” or even the “spirit?” Were these also immaterial existents?

Consider 1 Corinthians 15:40–44 NRSV translation:

There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another …

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.

And then verses 50–53:

What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

Paul here is of course speaking of the coming resurrection. In these verses he clarifies to the church in Corinth that the spiritual is not some immaterial being but rather itself a physical substance that will compose the risen body. We can interpret his words this way because, for one, he would not be speaking of bodies at all unless he were meaning something that literally takes up space and time. But it’s also crucial to note that the translation for physical in “If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body” is not entirely adequate. Without a deeper understanding of its syntax, we might conclude that Paul is juxtaposing our mortal, fleshly physical bodies with something vaguely spiritual, or ghostly, which would be in some sense immaterial. However the term for what is translated as physical body — sōma psychikon — means a body that is “literally ‘ensouled,’ ‘animated,’ or ‘animal,’ given life by psyche, the ‘soul’ or organic ‘life-principle” (pg 351).³ It does not mean simply a physical, material body.

To see this as a juxtaposition between this body, which is composed of physical stuff, and another “spiritual body” as one existing non-materially, would be to misunderstand the point. The sōma psychikon is an animal body animated by an organic life-principle and, yes, it is physical, but this is in all likelihood a given for both types of bodies. The contrast in no way implies a difference between the material and immaterial. His conditional statement is better understood as, ‘if there is a mortal, ensouled body, then there is also an immortal, non-organic spiritual body,’ but no assumption needs to be made that the latter is not physical (or material) at some level operating outside of our current knowledge. Verse 50 clarifies that the spiritual body takes the mortal flesh and blood of the animal body and has it “changed” — not given up — into one of immortality.

This is most certainly what Paul means by “spirit” everywhere else as well. In the interest of brevity we won’t commit to a full study of intertestamental period developments or first century Hellenistic vocabulary, philosophy, and medical terminology. The matrix of linguistic nuances and thought systems built into the corporeal nature of spirit, which are completely other from Cartesian or Thomistic notions, is historically backloaded into the term, and was the world Paul was immersed in. David Bentley Hart, author and theologian, gives a brief explanation elsewhere of the historical developments and the widely accepted belief that spirit was a corporeal, although “stronger” substance than the corruptible worldly elements, and ultimately lands with: “It was widely believed in late antiquity that, in human beings, flesh and soul and spirit were all present in some degree; “spirit” was merely the element that was imperishable by nature and constitution” (emphasis added).⁴

Therefore we can safely recapitulate in saying that flesh is to be taken as literally flesh (or on the symbolic level a representation of this decaying, mortal world). And Spirit means an imperishable substance, but a physical substance nonetheless (or again symbolically a representation of the immortal life to come which we can partake in now). Either way both of them are rooted in physical materiality.

But what about soul? How does soul fit into the material-immaterial debate? Consider the section we skipped over in 1 Corinthians 15, reading verses 45–46 this time using the KJV translation:

And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.

In a blog post from Dr. J. Richard Middleton, Professor of Biblical Worldview and Exegesis at Northeastern Seminary, he explains the usage of soul in saying, “Drawing on Genesis 2 … Adam was created a living soul … So Adam is a psyche/soul. He does not have a soul. The point is he is a mortal organism … But my main point in referencing 1 Corinthians 15 is that Paul contrasts not soul and body, but soul (mortality) and (God’s) Spirit (the power of new life). These are not two realms or two parts of the person, but our original human status (which is now corrupted by sin) and the transformation we can expect from the resurrection.”⁵

Again the modern notion of duality — body and soul — must be expunged. Soul is simply Paul’s term for the mortal person, and spirit a reference to the immortal person. A New Testament Christian worldview does not make a distinction for ordinary earthy materials and an ethereal realm of non-material existence. Instead the spiritual realm contains radically different material than the dull perishable bits of matter comprising this mortal realm. One might even say as Hart suggests, “the spiritual is more substantial,” but it is a material realm nonetheless.⁴

The Materiality of the Immaterial

Yet still, there must be some things that are non-material, such as consciousness. What about our thoughts? Except here a rebuttal will be offered. Yes there seemingly is immaterial phenomena that cannot be reduced into, or explained by brutal tiny objects. However, paradoxically, it is only through radical materialism that all matter disappears anyway, allocating such truths of supposed immaterial phenomena as inscribed forms of the positive non-being of reality, as we shall soon see.

“The limited resolution of our simulated world, i.e., as the sign of the ontological incompleteness of (what we experience as) reality itself” — Slavoj Zizek

This bizarre perspective is precisely what is posited in the writings/interviews of philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, scholar, researcher, and author of works focused on philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, as well as many others with the notable inclusion here of theology. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Zizek works toward a materialist theology by using dialectics as a method of analysis to examine the big three monotheisms, atheism, and the nature of reality itself.⁶

Zizek’s dialectical method is to present a known thesis, for example the notion that “material objects are all that there is,” and then its contradiction: “material objects are not all that there is.” Being influenced philosophically by G.W.F. Hegel, he then asks in the speculative moment what about the sublation of this overall negation between thesis and contradiction, or what conclusion both cancels and preserves to a higher grade the initial two opposing determinations?

In a rather strange but ultimately lucid move (if one does the work to understand), he then borrows from psychoanalysis, specifically theory of Jacques Lacan, and negates the above contradiction itself with the conclusion that material reality is “non-All.”

What does this mean?

To comprehend the concept of “non-All” one must first have a rather robust understanding of Lacan’s logic of sexuation. But to perversely simplify and distill such an undertaking, the key here is to recognize that human subjectivity, and therefore sexuality and drive, is an inescapable aspect of speaking about ontological reality. We must acknowledge that the position — all reality universally exists as brute material objects — is a masculine assertion caught up in the phallic function (in the psychoanalytic sense).⁷ Again grossly oversimplifying, the phallic function here being the signifier of desire which is always lacking, i.e. the desire for completeness: physical representations of a negative object. That is, the universality of the vulgar materialist claim itself is a façade, just as the symbolic phallus is a façade. A king wears a crown and brandishes a sword (a literally phallic object) to symbolize his inherent power and glory over the nation. But objectively speaking the crown and sword give the man power only insofar as it is accepted by all others. These are phallic signifiers (again with the phallus indicating a symbolic signifier, not actually meaning the penis). Below the crown is just another man, in essence no more powerful or significant, comprised of all the same organs and tissues as any other man. Or seen in another way, below the crown is actually nothing, a void. The feminine acceptance, on the other hand, is that behind the universality of “all,” is actually a similar kind of “nothing,” devoid of the phallus.⁸ The Lacanian not-All.

When reading Zizek, this is often what he means when he says that all that is is appearance. Like the man beneath the crown, he is the appearance of a king, possessing the Name-of-The-Father (or Big Other) in symbolic order terminology, but this appearance is all that there really is. There is no “extra” power beneath. Below is the “non-All” of reality, the acceptance that the order of appearance is an illusion which we all subjectively buy into. Or as Zizek says, “it is the ‘totality’ of rational causal order itself which is inconsistent, ‘irrational,’ non-All” (pg 88).⁶ If you really think about it, all of our rationality and reason put forward in explaining every causal detail of the universe only feels rational and reasonable because we all blindly accept the (masculine) universal totality of this “causal system” in the first place. The (feminine) irrationality of this blind acceptance is the true grounding of our experience, but something few have the humility to entertain.

Slavoj’s reliance on quantum physics plays a significant analogical role in this understanding. When we think about computer games or virtual worlds, we know intuitively that behind every door of the decorative houses your avatar strolls past is not actually anything. If there was never an intention for the protagonist to enter these boring homes, then the programmer has no need to fill them with coded stuff. And even if it is possible to enter, the interior is only ever “loaded” until our avatar actually enters. Beforehand it remains free to exist only in externalities, or appearance. Zizek says, “The truly interesting idea here is that the quantum indeterminacy which we encounter when we inquire into the tiniest components of our universe can read in exactly the same way, as a feature of the limited resolution of our simulated world, i.e., as the sign of the ontological incompleteness of (what we experience as) reality itself. That is to say: let us imagine a God who is creating the world for us, its human inhabitants, to dwell in — his task” (pg 88–89).⁶

We know from quantum mechanics that at the smallest level an individual particle seems to “disappear” into a superposition of probabilities in terms of its position and time, rather than simply existing as just another smaller divisible object. All particles become part of a sea of fuzzy “maybe’s” unable to host a definite location in spacetime until a measurement is made. It’s here that Zizek then makes the move to apply Alain Badiou’s political theory of the Event to his metaphysical reasoning.

The encounter of the Multiplicity in Revolution

Badiou maintained “that reality is grounded on a ‘void’ of ‘inconsistent multiplicity’, which is at once void and excess.”⁹ The basic idea here is that the political state exists as a One, a coherent unified entity of society, which covers up the underlying foundation, which is a “fuzzier” multiplicity, indivisible beyond itself. The “One” existing at the higher level excludes this inconsistent multiplicity, rendering it invisible. “An Event happens when the excluded part appears on the social scene, suddenly and drastically.”⁹ In essence the Event is a rupture in the appearances of the natural order. It might be the revelation that the king beneath the crown can bleed, he is in fact nothing. In which case the multiplicity of common society becomes apparent through their subsequent revolution, and if a new order is established, collapses into another One. For this same reasoning but extrapolated onto metaphysical terms Zizek is comfortable in proclaiming, “We should thus get rid of the fear that, once we ascertain that reality is the infinitely divisible, substanceless void within a void, ‘matter will disappear’” (pg 91).⁶

He challenges the notion put forward by vulgar materialists who ultimately — or too practically — assume matter, or again even fields, is or are inert dense material/information at its lowest level in spite of quantum realities. Their need for our embodiment to have weight constricts their ability to accept a thorough materialism: “If reality ‘really exists out there,’ it has to be complete ‘all the way down,’ otherwise we are dealing with a fiction which just ‘hangs in the air,’ like appearances which are not appearances of a substantial Something. Here, precisely quantum physics comes in, offering a model of how to think (or imagine, at least) such ‘open’ ontology. Alain Badiou formulated this same idea in his notion of pure multiplicity as the ultimate ontological category: reality is the multiplicity of multiplicities which cannot be generated or constituted from (or reduced to) some form of Ones as its elementary (‘atomic’) constituents. Multiplicities are not multiplications of One, they are irreducible multiplicities, which is why their opposite is not One, but Zero, the ontological void: no matter how far we progress in our analysis of multiplicities, we never reach the zero level of its simple constituents — the only ‘background’ of multiplicities is thus Zero, the void” (pg 90).⁶

The true weirdness of this ontology is that what we see as actually existing coincides with our subjective psychological and political experiences. Or in another more provocative, blanket statement which dangers on the edge of idealism: objective material reality coincides with our human experience. For example individual atoms — the building blocks of all bodies — are the crowns and swords we must buy into to make sense of functional reality. But true reality— or if we may in a technical, but overly simplified manner: the Lacanian Real — is this strange irreducible “substanceless void within a void” where all experienced phenomena — material or supposedly immaterial — has its grounding, yet is inaccessible by any mind only because it is not a thing to be accessed. It is nothing, or again more technically, the positive nonbeing of reality.

Why is it necessary to accept this counterintuitive notion of reality? In essence vulgar materialism, by reducing any and all human “transcendental” experiences of Truth, attempts to posture itself in a privileged position. All art is merely psychological procedures extricated from the human animal as a result of pleasure-seeking evolutionary adaptation. Thus the historical experiences of art as accessing divine sensibilities are handwaved away from this new, higher position of superior knowledge. It’s for this very reason that Zizek calls any such materialism a “support for gnostic spiritualist obscurantism” (pg 92).⁶ Knowledge suddenly has become a triumphant overseer above and beyond material mysteries such as art or beauty.

Is this not actually idealism at its worst? The evolutionist reductionist boldly proclaims, “We have arrived,” as they sit atop their throne jeweled in the crown of Science and brandishing the sword of Reason. But what power does this crown and this sword truly have?

Zizek affirms the vulgarity of the reductionist approach in saying, “This makes clear the true stakes of Badiou’s gesture: in order for materialism to truly win over idealism, it is not enough to succeed in the ‘reductionist’ approach and demonstrate how mind, consciousness, etc., can nonetheless somehow be accounted for within the evolutionary-positivist frame of materialism. On the contrary, the materialist claim should be much stronger: it is only [radical] materialism that can accurately explain the very phenomena of mind, consciousness, etc.; and, conversely, it is idealism [or vulgar materialism] that is ‘vulgar,’ that always-already ‘reifies’ these phenomena” (pg 93).⁶

The trick here is that to be fully committed to materialism you must give up what sounds like Rationality and Reason for, paradoxically, a mysticism which at first appears as a “proto-idealist gesture of asserting that material reality is not all that there is, that there is also another level of incorporeal truths” (pg 92).⁶ But instead of reifying such supposed immaterial phenomena in scientific, reductionist, evolutionist, discursive terms, we should accept that they are always-already their own substrate of the ontological fuzziness (incompleteness) of reality. This is the acceptance of the feminine non-All. It is then through the Event — or the rupture from the invisible void beneath what we see as Ones — that the Real inscribes itself into brute, material objects and, moreover, additionally the human animal: derailing it from its own animality until it has transformed completely into a subject. And yet at the same time, paradoxically, for us this Real is nothing, it does not exist in accessibility from our own plane of existence.

In Lacanian psychoanalytic terms the Real is the default state of all animals, including humans, delineated by pure need. This would be the stage of an early infant, when there is no concept of self-awareness, and its action is only toward survival. There is no coherency or unity in this stage. The person is a multiplicity of moving parts essentially acting on instinct.

The later stages develop into the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The Imaginary is when the child first develops a sense of self, or the ego, by recognizing the image of itself (a la the Mirror Stage). It is a state we all still have connection to. The Imaginary is what causes us to see others and possessions as objects of our desire, which we attempt to become or fulfill by attainment. The Symbolic is the state of a person coexisting with the existence of others. It is the recognition of language and law, and is driven by how the person perceives they are being seen by others within this order of intelligible symbols. This perception of how we are seen by others gets extrapolated into a higher order, which Lacan calls the Big Other. This is the overarching narrative driven by the collective of subjects and transposes onto the psyche as some sort of higher Law we desire to be seen desirous by. For instance the attainment of God’s favor, honored by one’s nation, etc. For this reason in a sense the Symbolic is the Big Other.

Both the Imaginary and the Symbolic are what constitutes together our Reality, but both feed back to the bedrock, which is the Real. However, it is an absurd contradiction to even talk about the Real because the Real is a negation of any and all images or symbols. It is the state that sets the stage for pure lack, which gets articulated as our endless cycle of desire in the Imaginary and Symbolic (Reality). The Real is a primordial impossibility which for the human subject does not actually exist, yet causes all that we know in Reality.

Image from “Lacan — The Real” by Plastic Pills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UPhrQjHi_s

An analogy might be to imagine the Real as a black hole. Meanwhile the Imaginary and Symbolic are together the complex constellation of appearances which comprise the galaxy orbiting the black hole at its center. The Real is not something we can ever get to, or would even want to get to for that matter, but it holds the entirety of our galaxy together. We owe the balance of our orbit (the cycle of desire and lack) to the non-image/symbol at the center of everything. And yet in a sense, this black hole is a nothingness. It is not a thing at all, but a vacuum defined by its nothingness.

So as we contemplate the notion “material reality is all there is” (idealist for the gnostic reasons discussed above) we must acknowledge its exception “material reality isn’t all there is” (idealist because there is another higher power). But if we perform the Hegelian/Lacanian trick and negate the above contemplation by not providing a predicate then there is no exception and we are left with “material reality is non-All.” We are then free to accept the ultimate void of reality, or again the Real: a constellation of positive non-being which Ones only emerge out of as mere appearance. For this reason Zizek is free to ask, “What about linking consciousness to the very finitude, ontological incompleteness, of the human being, its being originally out-of-joint, thrown-into, exposed to, an overwhelming constellation?” (pg 100).⁶

In an ironic twist so as to actually retain mystery, can we can have our idealist cake and (materialistically) eat it too? We can agree with the idealist philosopher/theologian in recognizing that no amount of complexity of the physical brain can materially (in the naïve sense) account for the categorically separate phenomenon of actual conscious thought. Adding a greater and greater number of sophisticated biological algorithmic computations does not automatically permit the explanation of a magically emergent property — the mind — once a threshold of complexity is reached. But if consciousness is already an aspect, although an aspect operating on a different layer, of the strange radical materialist substrate of the non-All constellation analogically subsisting below all appearances, then idealism is avoided without giving the material over to “spiritualist obscurantism.” Consciousness, and therefore subjectivity, is inscribed into the foundational void of being, but how it surfaces in the subject, or more accurately, how we as subjects surface in reality is a mystery to be allowed.

To be quite clear, this is precisely not entertaining the panpsychist view popularized by philosophers such as David Chalmers, which posits that consciousness is at its base level a fundamental additional element or force in the physical world, such as photons, gravity, or electromagnetism. Again, such a view reifies the immateriality of subjective experience until it is illusory. And yet somehow the panpsychist philosopher magically has the high ground in declaring it so in spite of the false demotion he gives the human by his supposed humility that we can never know the-thing-in-itself of what true conscious experience is. Chalmers theorizes, here mysteriously as an object outside of himself, that even if we knew every last detail of the physical universe, that knowledge would not lead us to postulate the existence of consciousness. To which Zizek replies, “He makes the standard Kantian mistake: such a total knowledge is strictly nonsensical, both epistemologically and ontologically (pg 100).”⁶ Kant’s greatest flaw stemming from his premise of transcendental idealism is that if all that can be perceived are appearances, then how is it epistemically warranted to make any substantive claim about existence (the-thing-in-itself)? There is an inconsistency in presuming the humility (we know nothing about things in themselves) of the human knower, and the assumptive knowledge proposed by the philosopher of the unknowable existing thing in itself.

Ironically in an interview on this very subject of correlationism with the leftist subsidiary, Zer0 Books publishing, Zizek is asked, Would Kant have called Hegel a charlatan? To which Zizek replies (paraphrased): “Absolutely. He basically already did it, not with Hegel but with Fichte.”¹⁰ American philosopher Tom Rockmore, and known critic of representational epistemology, says this about the dilemma: “Through the shift from the a priori to the a posteriori plane, Fichte is bound by the limits of finite human being. Fichte thinks the concept of a ‘thing in itself’ as a mind-independent, external ‘cause’ of sensations is indefensible on critical grounds (22).”¹¹

Like Johann Fichte (a contemporary German philosopher to Kant), the common theme in Zizek’s materialist argument is this one: if we are to make sense of transcendental phenomena such as consciousness, truth, beauty, love, identity, self-awareness and so on of subjective experience, then why are we trying to undermine it by claiming nonsensical positions of privilege?

• In Kant’s trancendental idealism, the mind-independent thing-in-itself existing outside of time and space is assumed to be beyond appearances. But Kant somehow knows that this objective thing is outside appearances through his commitment to empirical realism — that we can have certain knowledge of the existence of objects in space merely by self introspection. But on what grounds does introspection truly give the philosopher to reach outside what could be the appearances of appearances? When we see a rainbow in the sky its appearance to us is as a band of colors hovering above the ground. However the experienced scientist can tell us that the rainbow is actually only a collection of water droplets of certain shapes and sizes in a spatial region reflecting light at particular wavelengths, hence the differing colors. But does this discovery indicate that there is a “rainbow in itself?” Or is it only that we have revealed more appearances of the appearance? What are the things-in-themselves of the water droplets and the light? How can Kant claim from his privileged position of introspection that there is an unknowable thing-in-itself outside (or at the root) of these appearances?
• In Chalmers’ panpsychism, consciousness becomes an unknowable thing-in-itself where the mystery of the hard problem of consciousness is accepted, but then it is reified as some concrete force in nature that the panpsychist somehow concludes must exist. As a result, in essence, the subject becomes an illusion. Zizek says it this way: “This line of reasoning — consciousness as an excess, a surplus, over the physical totality — is misleading, since it has to evoke a meaningless hyperbole: when we imagine the Whole of reality, there is no longer any place for consciousness (and subjectivity) (pg 100).”⁶
• In popular evolutionist scientism (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens) the Kantian mistake appears in being unbound by the finite human to step outside experience and reduce all objects and phenomena to stupid things-in-themselves without any room left for subjectivity to survive.

Interestingly, in Zizek’s interview with Zero Books he clarifies Hegel’s stance on the correlationist dilemma. Paraphrasing again, Zizek explains that Hegel accepts the Kantian “impossibility,” that we cannot know the thing-in-itself. But for Hegel, the enigma is reversed. The problem is not that there are things in themselves that we cannot know. Zizek summarizes Hegel’s position in saying, “Things are! So what?! They stupidly exist out there. The big enigma is not can we step out of our phenomenal experience and see how things are in themselves. The big problem is, why do things appear? How can in the middle of positive being — reality — something like appearance arise?”¹⁰

The dialectical trick Hegel performs is in insisting that this entire human construction of not being able to identify the thing-in-itself — this precise subjective enterprise is inscribed into reality itself. Of course, being a German Idealist Hegel goes on to interpret the technical aspects of the correlationist dilemma in a capital-s Spiritual sense according to his own vocabulary, driving his project toward a, shall we say, more pantheistic conclusion. But such a digression is unnecessary here.

The Materiality of God

Now at the beginning of the entire above diatribe I said, “paradoxically, it is only through radical materialism that all matter disappears anyway, allocating such truths as immaterial phenomena as inscribed forms of the positive non-being of reality.” It is upon here that we can elucidate this claim. The postulation is not that in reality there is in fact no material, as hopefully this has been obvious since the onset. It is only to suggest that the “things-in-themselves” assumed by weaker materialisms (scientific, evolutionist, discursive, etc.) quite literally do not exist at all. That in some mysterious way there is a binary distinction encountered from beyond the veil. On the one side are Ones, which are all only appearances. On the other is the incomplete multiplicity of the Real, which is in fact nothing. This “nothing” has the inscription of the transcendental horizons of self-awareness, truth, love, self-consciousness, and so on marked into its own ontological incompleteness. And as appearances (Ones) emerge from behind the veil so does, if we may dare, this Logos, which enables subjectivity. Or as Zizek says in his interview with Zer0 Books, the enigma is not how or what are the things “out there?” The true enigma is how are we a part of reality?¹⁰

The consequences of this is that there are no privileged (idealist) positions left to stand on, even for God. A classical view of theism commits the same sin when God becomes just another thing-in-Himself only the philosopher/theologian can reason to, but to which he says none of us can know what He truly is in Himself. The God of classical theism also advances this position for himself in silencing man with, “My ways are not your ways.” This is why Zizek also boldly proclaims his own “Christian atheism” as the truest form of Christianity. Because only in Christianity does God forsake his own position as a higher, privileged power. If reading in G.K. Chesterton we see this in the book of Job, where Yahweh himself cannot fathom his own creation, and of course, we see it on the cross.

In a separate interview with Third Way Zizek says:

“I take seriously those words Christ says at the end: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? It’s something really tremendous that happens. G K Chesterton (whom I admire) puts it in a wonderful way: Only in Christianity does God himself, for a moment, become atheist.

And I think — this is my reading — that this moment of the death of God, when you are totally abandoned and you have only your ‘collectivity’, called the ‘Holy Spirit’, is the authentic moment of freedom.”¹²

And in his (in)famous debate with Jordan Peterson he says:

“That is something absolutely unique. It means you are not simply separated from God. Your separation from God is a part of divinity itself.”¹²

However the deviation from Zizek for the Christian, of course, appears (no pun intended) in the resurrection. Where in Christianity proper the resurrection is quite literal and in Zizek it is symbolically performed by his reading of ‘Holy Spirit.’

Additionally, in The Monstrosity of Christ he says a true materialist should, “refuse to accept ‘objective reality’ in order to undermine consistent subjectivity” (pg 100).⁶ But here again the Christian would rebut that consistent subjectivity can be found in the resurrection.

Can the Christian both agree and disagree with Zizek? Can the Christian be truly materialist and uphold the resurrection without falling into idealism? I contend that it is possible, wherein we move from a dialectical analysis into a deeper mystery of paradox, but one that is nonetheless an ultimate descriptor of reality.

It is in only in Christ where the king who wears the crown does so only to show that he is in fact nothing but appearance. In its pivotal moment Jesus forsakes actual kingship and godhood to reveal that he is only a man, in a way a void within a void (a mere human in the world). He reverses the phallic function of the crown, using it to display — not obfuscate — the void underneath. Yet simultaneously in the resurrection he retroactively proves that he literally was/is the god-in-Himself — more than just appearance — below the crown, eternally. And paradoxically it is by this initial subversion of the masculine universality of the objectivity of God that Christ becomes the true consistency of subjectivity for all. The eastern notion of theosis, where as St. Athanasius said, “For the Son of God became man so that man might become God,” has extreme relevance here.¹³

In Christianity the teleological “end of humanity” is an ontological transformation through the infinite union with God while still remaining distinct as human. Recall 1 Cor 15 when Paul says, “the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” — not given up as man. A true Christian materialism, contrary to Zizek, refuses to accept ‘objective reality’ in order to establish consistent subjectivity in the one, truly human one: Christ. But it is a consistency that is only attained here now when participating in Him, but also not yet fully until the eschaton. It is then that the material substance of the current universe will have completed its transformation into the spiritual substance of the “heavens,” or divinized as in the doctrine of theosis, through full union with God.

I contend that these proclamations are not meaningless hyperboles or empty theological platitudes. Christology plays not only a significant, but primary role in defending the metaphysics of radical materialism. St. Maximus the Confessor, who some might say was the redeemer of the Chalcedonian controversy and primary influencer in restoring to Christology the correct doctrine of Christ’s divine and human will, would perhaps agree. In a dissertation on Maximus’s logic of creation as the divine Word’s historical Incarnation, Jordan Daniel Wood states, “Participation — basically the ancient problem of the One and the Many … is the philosophical locus classicus of the God-world relation” (pg 4).¹⁴ Interestingly we can draw parallels between the ancients and the Zizekian problem, noting a kind of reversal. For Zizek the Many has its ontological basis in Multiplicity: the substanceless backdrop, or source, of the “creation” of emergent Ones (appearances). For the ancients it was the One (God) who was the substanceless source of the Many, which was the meaning-infused creation.

Maximus in a way subverts both Zizek and the philosophy of antiquity through his devotion to the primacy of Christ in creation, as later articulated and expounded upon by John Duns Scotus. Indeed, any reader of Maximus “recognizes that his ontology and cosmology are extensions of his Christology, in that the synthesis of Christ’s concrete person is not only God’s final thought for the world, but also his original plan” (pg 8).¹⁴ However, Maximus, according to Wood, goes beyond participation in saying something much more radical about the God-world relation because of the Incarnation. In fact, Wood boldly states that Maximus’s claim is that by virtue of the hypostatic union, divine creation is quite literally the divine Incarnation in both protological and eschatological terms.

In avoidance of pantheism, Maximus is carefully explicit in that “there is absolutely no natural relation between created and uncreated natures qua natures” (pg 113).¹⁴ Here we must employ the terms “substance” and “spirit” in a different sense than how it has been used prior in this survey. The substance of God is pure Spirit in the sense that his being is one essence with himself, and this is the nature of the uncreated. The substance of World on the other hand is comprised of matter and spirit (here shifting back to the imperishable material substance of existing things mentioned above) and this is the nature of the created. Therefore, in terms of natures, God and world share no relation whatsoever. We created beings are completely other than God — the uncreated.

However in identity, or hypostasis, Maximus asserts that the Christo-logic of the Incarnation links the two in both beginning and end (protology and eschatology). This is explicated crucially through Maximus’s understanding of the logoi. “The logoi or metaphysical ‘principles’ of all things define, generate, and sustain every conceivable difference and identity in creation, from the integral identity and proper difference of an individual subject (or hypostasis) to the arboreal network of generic and specific unities and differentiae (or natures)” (pg 91).¹⁴ This is another monumental subject for which there isn’t sufficient space here. But again to perversely oversimplify a grand undertaking the logoi are how many thinkers of antiquity following in the platonic tradition were to explain the processional difference from One to Many. In neoplatonic terms whatever the One is, there must be cascading iterations of more determinate or qualified essences in the Many which participate in the eternal Ideas or Forms internal to the One. These preexistent “forms” or “ideas” in the mind of God, which are the fundamental creative principles of all creatures are, to some, the logoi.

John of Scythopolis (sedit 536-c.548), the first commentator of the Dionysian corpus (the neo-platonic Christian writings from Pseudo-Dionysius in the late 5th to early 6th century), held such a view. For John, a Dionysian logos was in a sense a “thought of God” eternally complete and internal to God but not the same essence as Him. However, because these “ideas” are internal to God they are not quite creatures either, but in fact are nothing other than God (pg 116–117).¹⁴ In this way the logos is much like the biblical understanding of God’s Name or Wisdom, which are to be identified as Him, yet are not the same essence as Him and therefore should not be worshipped as Him. “So for John the logoi are the preexistent ideas that result from God’s simple act of thinking himself, the Forms participated variously by creatures” (pg 117).¹⁴ This is to explain how creation can consist of materially based creatures if God “is all there is” as the transcendent uncreated other. For since from nothing, nothing comes then creaturely “ideas” must have preexisted eternally in the mind of God. In Plato the One is the ultimate source of all Forms, where, for example, individual species of trees or horses all participate in the ideal Form of the one-true Tree or the one-true Horse outside of corporeal space and time and internal to the One. The nature of any particular tree or horse participates in the nature of the eternal (universal) Tree/Horse.

In John of Scythopolis following Pseudo-Dionysius, the principles behind which generate the various particular species of trees and horses, yet are aligned with the preexistent “form” or “idea” of Treeness and Horseness, are the logoi. In this case there is a participation by nature from the Many to the One. With that said, let us be clear: this is not Maximus’s interpretation of logoi.

For Maximus the logoi are hypostatically identified with the Logos. Consider Wood’s conclusion that “Maximus identifies God the Logos (not the Father, not the Spirit) with the creaturely logoi, so this must mean that the Word is somehow both one and many in such a way that it transcends the logic of Neoplatonic procession (which is the logic of participation from above, as it were)” (pg 120).¹⁴ The key here is recognizing that “the Creation” for Maximus is not confined to its protology. He insists that we must look at the Creation in its entirety, meaning not only creaturely existence as materially caused, but its beginning (efficient), present (formal), and end (final: its other Aristotelian causes). For this reason is the doctrine of theosis so essential, as the divinization of all creatures through the Logos is the ultimate end for creation.

St. Maximus the Confessor and the materiality of human flesh on a wooden cross.

“Of each being and the whole cosmos, then, the logoi disclose the beginning and end of God’s creative act. So we can approach the logoi from two distinct (though inseparable) vantages: protologically, they describe God’s creation of the world from nothing; eschatologically, God’s perfection of the world — its deification” (pg 91).¹⁴ Because the Logos is eternal not just in forward progression but through his preexistence, so the logoi have eternal identification with the Logos. But as the Incarnation is historical so also is Creation. “The very event of the historical Incarnation is in some sense the event that grounds (not just perfects) creation itself” (pg 98).¹⁴

If Maximus is right, what this means is that the entire Creation has its identity in the concrete human person of Jesus Christ … eternally. If the logoi are the Logos and the Logos is the logoi as Maximus claims, then the logic of Creation’s historical beginning from out of nothing and its end in perfect union with the Word is all dependent on the Incarnation as the ultimate basis of material reality. “And yet there is a procession from one to many, but it’s specifically the Logos who makes himself hypostatically identical to the logoi of the created world and so generates it. Thus the activity of the essentially imparticipable God becomes participable through the only possible medium: the Word’s person” (pg 142).¹⁴ The Logos, by virtue of his eternal nature of possessing both the divine and human will, serves as the bridge, the medium, for creaturely participation. The very nature of the trinitarian God has its identity creatively rooted in humanity through the Logos both eternally and historically, but most lucidly in the Incarnation.

In the beginning was the Word, except the Word is not an ideal, but a man, made of flesh and bone.

As has been argued from the onset, all creatures — both the ensouled, animated physical and the higher-ordered, angelic spiritual — are made up of the material. So for the logoi undergirding creaturely beings to be one and the same with the Logos, the material universe is quite literally dependent on the Incarnation. Previously I claimed that human subjectivity is an inescapable aspect with respect to ontological reality. We can now fully appreciate the gravity of this claim in the person of Jesus, who as the preexistent Logos grounds creation itself. And remembering that Creation proper should really only be understood in its totality (beginning and end), we should be better prepared to accept the Radical Materialist doctrine: that in the fallenness of creation is the weird ontology of its own incompleteness. The non-All material reality — the substanceless void “beneath” appearances — is incomplete because the human project is incomplete. Christ in the Incarnation and through his death commits the great reversal. Unlike all prior appearances before him who veil the void with their crowns, Jesus reveals it by admitting only appearance in his humility and human fragility. But as the Logos it is this act that negates “pure appearance” to further reveal his completeness as the “finally caused” human one, which culminates in the ultimate revelation by way of resurrection. Therefore, if the Creation is in fact Incarnation, then resurrection is not a privileged marker of idealism, but a pointer to the completeness of not just human ontology, but the being of creation itself, which will be achieved in the eschaton.

The black Celtic trinitarian knot represents “by nature.” The white knot represents “by hypostatic identity.” The orange arrows represent “procession.”

The Christian, then, must live a fractured life, both abandoned by the transcendent God in our daily death: bearing the cross, and simultaneously in communion with Him through participation in resurrection life. Yet they must acknowledge that this transcendent Other cannot be appealed to as an existing higher power, a la idealism. For in the strict sense, God does not exist. God is existence itself (or to state more accurately we can lose the predicate altogether and advance simply, God Is). Only Christ serves as the medium from which creatures can relate to the Otherness of Creator. The Incarnate Word is the material reality which generates identity in Creation back to him.

The Materiality of Freedom

In similar terms this is how Zizek, reading through Hegel, makes his reference to Christ as the monster. It is not enough for man to be reconciled back to God purely by his spiritual activity as the “Holy Community.” Without mediation the transcendent God always serves as a Big Other: a virtual order which is only kept alive by the community of subjects believing in it. However, if the subject stops believing they lose their reality: their very own subjectivity itself.¹⁵ As stated earlier, on a more basic level the Big Other is the Symbolic order itself, the final order of human existence following the Real and the Imaginary. To remain a subject, there must always be a Big Other, this symbolic fiction we are always alienated from and yet gives us allowance for irresponsibility as it relates to “Law,” an outside force which provides judgment for us and on our behalf. It is how we think others (or an Other) see(s) us, the outward gaze we are always trying to please.

There is a kind of servitude to this idealistic Big Other in the sense that we are not free to act for or as ourselves in the shadow of our desire for it. ‘It is not my responsibility to empathize with my neighbor in her destructive, self-abusive state. God has willed that self-mutilation is the sin of pagans, and so I will obey and she shall be ostracized.’ The same unfreedom and lack of responsibility can also apply to “non-spiritual” notions of Big Other such as My Nation or Communism. And yet we can also realize through self-awareness that what constitutes subjects — as beings always desiring to please (be) the other — is nothing more than grasps for crowns or swords which give no actual power except in appearance. Thus on the highest level we should also admit at the same time that the Big Other does not actually exist. (Recall even in the paragraph above this admission in God’s lack of “existing”). So the Christian gesture to escape this deadlock is to position the feedback loop of human subjectivity so that it is located in God himself as man.

Zizek states, “This is why the difference between Substance [reality] and Subject [consciousness] has to reflect/inscribe itself into subjectivity itself as the irreducible gap that separates human subjects from Christ, the ‘more than human’ monstrous subject” (pg 75).⁶ Or put another way, the difference between the material and the transcendent is inscribed into subjectivity itself, as procession from the Incarnate Word. The double kenosis of Christ: “man’s alienation from/in God is simultaneously God’s alienation from himself,” is the monstrosity that bridges the gap between material reality and the Otherness of transcendence, but does so in a way that places the human in a terrifying position of freedom (pg 75).⁶

Instead of being imprisoned by the Law of the collective Big Other — whatever that may be for persons — Christ’s mediation frees us from the order’s hold. However, this means we cannot rely on its comforting power which keeps our needs in check and, therefore, we must bear the burden of caring for each other ourselves.

In Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, an ongoing motif dialogued between characters is, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” At first this seems like a straightforward assertion of moral superiority but upon a closer look actually has multiple ambiguous interpretations within the novel. On the one hand and in the more obvious sense it can be interpreted as the transcendent authority keeping lawful citizens in obedience. If they were to stop believing in him, then they would be free to hedonistically sin as desired. But on the other hand it could be seen as a sort of societal Big Other constraining freedom (along with most forms of responsibility), and therefore prohibiting people from acting with any sense of self. This gets articulated by Ivan in his parable of the Grand Inquisitor as he describes a society controlled by the God of the Inquisition.

Contrarily Christ appears to contradict the claim, thereby altering it into Lacan’s reversal, “If there is no God, then everything is prohibited.” Because only in Christ as God-Man, which here is not any kind of Big Other God, is true freedom realized. “The Christian God is not a transcendent God of limitations, but the God of immanent love: God, after all, is love; he is present when there is love between his followers.”¹⁶ Therefore the Christian message is also, “If there is a God, then everything is permitted.”

Again returning to the parable of The Grand Inquisitor, we see Jesus arriving back on earth in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition. After performing miracles he is recognized and the Church immediately arrests him and sentences him to be burnt to death the next day. But before his execution he is questioned, or rather chastised, by the Inquisitor. He tells him that his mistake on earth the first time was to deny the temptations of the devil. When he rejected the bread in saying, “Man cannot live on bread alone,” he forgot the deeper wisdom which tells us: “Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!”¹⁶ The Church in this society has taken away the burden of choice among the proletariat, and placed that burden on the grand officials. As self martyrs only they can read the mouth of God and impose His Will on the world so that none may go hungry, or bear the responsibility for their neighbors. The message of Christ is quite the opposite as only we by living in community as Holy Spirit can assume “a radically egalitarian responsibility of each for all and for each.”¹⁶ The Law, no longer available as a higher order to defer to, has transubstantiated into a person — a neighbor — for which we have the freedom to abide in or not.

Almost immediately following the parable of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky pivots to the last moments of Father Zosima’s life, which is perhaps his answer to Ivan’s conundrum. Zosima on his deathbed taught that true freedom is found in his concept of “active love,” which is a labor and perseverance. Only by facing our weakness in the face of the weakness of others can we sacrificially acknowledge our own sin and guilt. By this, and through the introspection of our interconnectedness with “neighbor” do we see that no sin is isolated and therefore all of us are responsible for our neighbor’s sins.¹⁶ Contemplating these meditations Zizek imagines that true belief is one that isn’t supported by any presupposed figure of Big Other. And rather than believing in God or not believing in God there is a more subtle notion simply called “unbelief,” which is still a form of belief, but much like the human in his hope for the coming Christ is undead: who as the living dead, remain dead (pg 101).⁶

So, the Materialist Christian against Zizek can, in a sort of melancholic joy, rely on Zizek as he says, “Is this not Dostoyevsky’s version of ‘If there is no God, then everything is prohibited?’ If the gift of Christ is to make us radically free, then this freedom also brings the heavy burden of total responsibility.”¹⁶

Sources:

1. Robinson, Howard, (2018, Nov 16). Substance. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Retrieved February 19, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/substance/ (2004, Oct 4)
2. Kerr, G. (n.d.). Aquinas: Metaphysics. Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved February 19, 2022, from https://iep.utm.edu/aq-meta/
3. Hart, D. B. (2018). The New Testament: A Translation. Yale University Press.
4. Hart, D. B. (2018, July 26). The Spiritual was More Substantial than the Material for the Ancients. Church Life Journal. Retrieved February 19, 2022, from https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/
5. Middleton, J. R. (2021, December 29). Paul on the “soul”-not what you might think. CREATION to ESCHATON. Retrieved February 19, 2022, from https://jrichardmiddleton.com/2014/10/23/paul-on-the-soul-not-what-you-might-think/
6. Žižek Slavoj, Milbank, J., & Davis, C. (2011). The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or dialectic? MIT Press.
7. Vanier, A. (n.d.). Sexuation, Formulas Of. Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved February 21, 2022, from https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/sexuation-formulas
8. Newman, K. (2014, March 18). The not-all, revisited (Chingo Bling and the politics of interruption, part III) [web log]. Society for US Intellectual History. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://s-usih.org/2014/03/the-not-all-revisited-chingo-bling-and-the-politics-of-interruption-part-iii/
9. McLaverty-Robinson, A. (2014, December 15). An A to Z of Theory | Alain Badiou: The Event. Ceasefire. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/alain-badiou-event/
10. Lain, D. (2019, December 3). Slavoj Zizek Interview on his book “Sex and the Failed Absolute”. YouTube. other. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiwTFkcFGv0
11. Rockmore, T. (2016, December 8). Fichte, Kant, the Cognitive Subject, and Epistemic Constructivism. Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://journals.openedition.org/ref/675#:~:text=Fichte
12. Replogle , C. (n.d.). Žižek, Peterson, and the Christian Atheist [web log]. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://pastorwriter.com/zizek-peterson-and-the-christian-atheist/
13. Athanasius, & Behr, J. (2011). 54:3. In On the Incarnation. essay, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
14. Wood, J. D. (2018). That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus Confessor [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Boston College. Morissey College of Arts and Sciences.
15. Hickman, S. C. (Ed.). (2018, April 13). The Big Other: Positing the Presuppositions. Dr. Rinaldi’s Horror Cabinet. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/the-big-other-positing-the-presuppositions/
16. Zizek, S. (2012, April 16). If there is a god, then anything is permitted. ABC Religion & Ethics. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://www.abc.net.au/religion/if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/10100616

Additional Resources

1. Hewitson , O. (2010, June 20). What does Lacan say about… the signifier? LACANONLINE.COM. Retrieved February 21, 2022, from https://www.lacanonline.com/2010/06/what-does-lacan-say-about-the-signifier/
2. Maybe, T. D. (2020, July 22). Lacan’s Concept of the Phallus [web log]. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/lacans-concept-of-the-phallus-498743c95270.
3. Maybee, J. E. (2020, October 2). Hegel’s Dialectics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/
4. Skirry, J. (n.d.). René Descartes: The Mind-Body Distinction. Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://iep.utm.edu/descmind/
5. Stang, N. F. (2016, March 4). Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/
6. Vallicella, B. (2016, October 28). Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo? Maverick Philosopher. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2016/10/creation-ex-nihilo-or-ex-deo.html
7. Zizek, S. (1995, October). Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or How Not to Misread Lacan’s Formulas of Sexuation. lacanian ink. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://www.lacan.com/zizwoman.htm
8. MacLean, D. (2002, January 25). Hegel, Zizek & Substance as subject. ETHICALPOLITICS.COM. Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/davie1.htm#:~:text=For%20Zizek%20it%20is%20Hegel's,their%20ultimate%20reconciliation%20in%20Spirit