Notes on the Introduction to Gabriel Catren’s Pleromatica

I’m intending to carefully read Gabriel Catren’s new book, which was just published by Urbanomic/Sequence, and share my thoughts as I go. My interest in the book, to be completely candid, is that I sense its publication pushes theory’s Overton window in the direction of my own project, but its orientation is different enough from mine that engaging it can provide chiaroscuro for both, helping me clarify and refine my own ideas in contrast to his, and shine some light in what’s at stake in what he seems to be attempting.

The book is presented as offering a renovation of the ideals of truth, goodness, beauty and justice along with certain principles of Christianity as mediated by German Idealism in a context where all of this is counterintuitive, the para-academic sphere of radical materialisms at the intersection of continental theory and the sciences, supported by publishers like the aforementioned as well as Zero/Repeater, Verso, Continuum etc, where classical ideas of metaphysics and religion are as a rule not considered worthy of serious discussion. According to the press release, the book is “an ambitious programme for the renewal of transcendental philosophy” which “argues that the projects oriented by the infinite ideas of reason (Truth, Beauty, Justice, Love) need not be abandoned in the face of the ‘exquisite crisis’ of modernity.”

But there are gestures towards even larger ambitions. Towards the end of the introductory text on Sequence’s website, which I’m about to go through at length, Catren seems to call for “the project of conceiving the possibility of an absolutely modern religion.” This idea of an “absolutely modern religion” which avoids the Scilla of nihilism and the Charybdis of reaction is of course the essence of my Ark Work project. We are in the middle of a technological phase shift, and just as the printing press gave us Protestantism, our new eon calls out for a new religious awareness. Seeing this at all is admirable. But of course the details of how this is carried out are important, so I’m curious to know what he means by a modern religion, and how seriously he means it. Given his focus on German Idealism, I assume this is partly a reference to a similar idea stated in the famous Oldest Systematic Program fragment, penned by either Hegel, Schelling or Holderlin and published by Rosenzweig, another reference. I pretty much consider myself to be completely on board with what this fragment says, though of course it’s brevity renders it open to interpretation.

I’m also curious to learn more about what Catren means by a neologism laid out in the press release, “phenoumenodelic pleroma,” which is “an atonal milieu ringing with unheard-of possibilities”. This is surely similar to Deleuze and Guartari’s universal schizophrenia; it seems to convey a hybrid of ‘phenomenology’, noumenon’ and ‘psychedelic’, so maybe it’s supposed to be a sort of Absolute at the intersection of the scientific real, givenness, affect, history, x. ‘Pleroma’, of course, is the gnostic term for divine unity.

At first glance, though, my sense so far is that his work isn’t really adequate to the present moment, even if it’s a rhetorical step in the right direction, because in his effort to demarcate a place for philosophy in contemporary society he is guilty of falling back into a pre-critical conception of it, despite his invocation of German Idealism. Much like Badiou and Whitehead, both of whom he mentions admiringly, Catren so far seemingly ends up conceiving philosophy as a unitary practice with an eternal essence. And he leans too much on ocular metaphors to describe it. Also, and I’m more certain of this critique, his attitude towards Christianity is too circumspect. We’ll see if I retain this sense as I actually dig in.

How should philosophy be done? What is philosophy’s role in world history? What is (it’s relation to) science? What is (it’s relation to) religion? These are difficult and interconnected questions, and in my view they can only be clarified, not answered.

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

Here I’ll summarize and respond to the introductory text posted to the Sequence IG the other day, which includes that phrase about “absolutely modern religion” I quoted before. It has three parts: a critique of Speculative Realism, a defense of Kant and the 19th century post-Kantians, and a consideration of the use of certain Christian ideas.

I haven’t seen anyone mention Speculative Realism in a long time. I first learned about it around the time I delivered my Transcendental Black Metal text at a black metal theory conference back in 2009; most of the other presenters at the conference were involved in or interested in it. SR was the first-ever widespread online philosophy movement, though by 2015 or so it had imploded during takeoff. Nevertheless the basic possibility of its orientation - addressing the concerns of continental philosophy while leaning towards, rather than away from, hard-core science - remains open and ever more pressing. I devoured the work of Meillassioux, Brassier and Wolfendale back in the day, before my encounter with Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot pushed my Deleuzean orientation more towards dogmatic theology.¹

After identifying as someone who loves philosophy and science equally and noting that philosophy has been in an identity crisis since the scientific revolution really took off in the 19th century, Catren critiques what he identifies as two opposed ways the relationship between philosophy and science was misconceived by speculative realism. The French version, which he identifies with Meillassoux, goes too far in subordinating science to philosophy, amplifying a general tendency of continental philosophy to arrogate to itself a kind of impotent supremacy by claiming it has unique access to the ever-shrinking sphere that the disenchanting light of scientific reason will surely never touch. He dismisses Meillassioux’s transcendental deduction of hyperchaos/supercontingency as an especially decadent instance of this tendency. Catren is certain that philosophical reflection is absolutely incapable of arriving at the deduction of a real (non-)principle ‘out there’ like necessity of contingency, calling it ‘theory-fiction.’

Then he turns his attention to the Anglophone version, which in his view amplifies the tendency of analytic philosophy towards subordinating philosophy to science. Strangely, he associates this direction, in opposition to Meillassioux, whom he calls by name, with a deliberately un-named blurring of early Brassier and Land, instead using their respective catch phrases “the subject of philosophy is already dead” and “the thirst for annihilation”. Here he identifies a nihilist pathos in the unraveling of human meaning and the dismantling of the (human) subject of philosophy itself by the cold claws of scientific reason. Catren must know how vehemently Brassier rejected Land even in the early days, so it’s curious he would group them together like this. Though it isn’t untrue that they both privilege scientific truth over the human phenomenological horizon and both write in a bleakly poetic style, and that they were in dialogue, their views couldn’t be more opposite - I sense that there’s a symptom here that will be useful to the critique of Catren I develop.

He then declares that Kant has been treated unfairly by both sides, since both paint Kant’s project of transcendental critique as overly fearful towards the Sublimity of the modern real, its infinite and infinitesimal scale, its gargantuan power and its coldness towards human meaning. He argues back that without Kant, without some delineation of transcendental categories, akin to the limitations of the eye which make seeing possible, philosophy is blind to the reality of the world and becomes a flight of fancy, unable to act as a real compass for anything. “Whether by dismissing finitude or by seeing death everywhere, these trends of ‘speculative realism’ were surreptitiously endorsing the most reactive otherworldly contempt for this finite life, a kind of neo-gnostic refusal of this living world. ”

As an alternative, Catren says he prefers to completely unlink philosophy and science from any kind of relationship of subordination, “to maximize the distance between them, to radicalize their heterogeneity, to guarantee their independence.” And then he sings the praises of the original generation of post-Kantians like Schelling and Fichte who he says achieved this by fusing Kantian transcendentalism with Spinozist immanentism, maintaining critical circumspection while at the same time engaging in ecstatic reveries of speculation.

Finally he suggests that Christianity as understood by German Idealism can also provide two categories useful to philosophy, especially for the imperative to stay in touch with reality: the idea of the givenness of the phenomenological as something we can cherish in ever alternately losing and refinding, and the idea of crucifixion and failure as something precious to affirm. She goes unnamed, but to me this seems identical to the orientation of Simone Weil. It also reminds me of Henry, Marion and the tradition of Christian-adjacent French phenomenology in general. (I’ve never heard of Goddard, whom he mentions).

The resulting vision of philosophy’s task is something like that it’s to correctly catalogue and engage the various regions of thought culture and life accurately or usefully, which are all co-equal modes of “experience”. This part reminds me of Badiou, whom he mentions affirmingly, along with Whitehead. Indeed, Badiou’s four ‘truth procedures’, Art, Love, Science and Politics reiterate the medieval transcendentals in the way German Idealism, in a strangely closeted way. But what exactly is Catren adding here, besides an open invocation of metaphysical ideas that contemporary philosophy was using in a veiled way during the Heideggerian era? He defines his approach thus:

Experience is said in many abstract senses, as theoretical experience, as affective experience, as sensorial experience, as interpersonal experience and—we could say with Spinoza—according to other infinite ‘attributes’. Whereas sciences, arts, politics, religion, etc. explore the field of experience along these abstract ‘attributes’, the proper task of philosophy is to sublate the transcendental limits of the corresponding phenomenological horizons by addressing experience in its full concreteness (in its philosophical stonedness), that is, without performing a prismatic decomposition into abstract attributes. Philosophy can then be understood as a kind of democratic concertation of speculative practices to which science certainly belongs, but in which science does not have any privilege whatsoever; as an organon of an expanded reason that cannot be reduced to scientific rationality and that holds space for other important dimensions of human experience including emotional life, aesthetic experience, political practice, ethical values and norms, the varieties of religious experience, etc.

Philosophy addresses the Absolute, contemplates God, which is the full concreteness of experience apart from and in all its various interrelated varieties, each with its own transcendental horizon. Science is one of these modes, but from philosophy’s perspective it has no privilege above the others.

MY CRITIQUE

The issue I have with this approach, at least as it’s being presented so far, is that it “begs the question”, as analytic philosophers like to say, of the distinction between philosophy and science. In seeking to grant them this separate-but equal status, he seems to propose that these two terms refer to noetic practices with distinct and singular essences (from which are derived their “proper tasks”). And in absolutely distinguishing them in this way, he implicitly posits another absolute distinction, this one between knowledge and being. The German Idealists knew that laying down boundaries between disciplines like this, and between the metaphysical and the epistemological generally, was not so simple.

The fact that he uses an eye metaphor to defend the transcendental subject is telling - he seems to imagine it as a pair of glasses or a periscope peering at things, maybe its parameters can evolve, but its task is to discern and delineate. The invocation of psychedelia in the aesthetics of the work is similarly telling, conveying the joy of an acid trip which, while possibly enlivening, is ultimately an interior experience. But I wonder how methodologically self-aware he is in choosing this ‘image of thought’ without comment. I’m reminded of Brassier’s critique of Badiou in Nihil Unbound, which my memory of is a little cloudy. But in essence it identifies the use of unjustified philosophical ideas, using a kind of slight of hand: “this is just my philosophical decision, my own contingent necessity” and obscuring or suturing the resulting theoretical gap with reference to metaphorically similar figures from math like axioms or Dedekind cuts. But in Catren’s case the decision is presented at face value, which perhaps is more honest, but still leaves the issue unresolved. He’s made the “ungrounded decision” to “do my best to serve science only to the extent that science serves life.” But if he’s referring to Schelling’s Ungrund he’s at risk of reifying it as whim, foreclosing the question of its possible relation to capital as the agent of ungrounding.

If we are to really be faithful to German idealism, we have to first of all accept the zone of indistinction between science and philosophy, as well as that between discourse on method (logic) and metaphilosopy. We can’t seal off the question of how to pursue philosophy from the question of what philosophy is doing. We also have to accept the imperative of immanence in thought, refusing to accept any unexamined presuppositions.

Also, in my view Catren mischaracterizes the post-Kantians by claiming that they were faithful to Kant - they were not, and they actually had none of his caution. Kant was a transcendental skeptic who believed in real, eternal transcendental limits to knowledge. The next generation completely betrayed him - they invoked his transcendental schemata but turned them into the engine of a noumenal process even more wild and Swedenborgean than anything that had ever been conceived before his critical turn. I don’t condemn them for it, but I think the only faithful way to relate Kant to Hegel et al is to emphasize their differences and amplify each side, which is actually where Christianity comes in, as we’ll see.

In my view it’s more faithful to both Kant and to the post-Kantians to preserve a space for full-on transcendental skepticism while also positing provisionally that philosophy itself is the evolution of the world spirit, but to do this from several disjunctive directions. I propose that there are currently four modes of philosophy, each with its own history and method, each of which is fundamentally irreducible to the other three in important ways, and each of which can be conceived in different metaphilosophical terms: thought as a periscope, or as a hammer, or as a message from the future, or as access to the angels. We don’t yet understand what these four modes of philosophy share, but perhaps it will come together at a higher cognitive horizon in the future. This is much closer to the views of Hegel and Schelling that what Catren seems to be proposing, though - not to be too Byzantine, but - I’d actually argue it is actually also more faithful to Kant than Hegel and Schelling were. Hegel and Schelling both committed to a single decision about the nature of metaphysics-as-world history, betraying Kant, as I mentioned. Positing four co-equal provisional conceptions of philosophy rather than a single one re-opens a space for transcendental skepticism even as it allows for ecstatic speculation. Maybe the antinomies between these modes will be resolved at a higher level, or maybe not: we don’t know, because the answer lies in the noumenon, which we can’t access, at least not yet.

I have a similar concern about his attitude towards Christianity; he finds it all to obvious that Christianity is merely one mode of religion among others, just a tool for social organization. He writes: “of course I am well aware of the fact that Christianity is just one variety of religious experience among many others, a variety that is historically, geographically, and culturally situated”. But how is he so sure about that? Of course Christianity is geographically and culturally situated, but so is philosophy, and so is science. In assuming the theory-dogma of a postmodern stance towards religion, ironically he again essentializes - posting that ‘religious experience’ is an essence with different varieties. But this is too tidy, and also contains the implicit secularist prejudice that none of them are true. For one, there’s a real distinction within ‘religion in general’ between the messianic-apocalyptic religions of the Abrahamic lineage and the meditative Sino-Vedic ones. Further, the line between religion and other forms like, say, a music scene, or academia, or secular liberalism in general, is not clear.

He goes on: “the project of conceiving a modern religion that does not condescend to obscurantist superstitions about an afterlife or to any other Promethean project intended to foreclose castration and achieve some form of painless immortality or eternal nirvana.” Again, I think it is more faithful to Kant (more faithful than either Catren, or the speculative post-Kantians, or, it should be added, than the analytic anti-metaphysical Kantians like Jay Rosenberg who use Kant to justify metaphysical pronouncements about atheism) to affirm that since philosophy and science can’t say anything about the noumenon, they can’t deny an afterlife. To do so would be a category mistake. “Castration” is just as much of an ungrounded religious orientation as “nirvana”, and it’s an open question which of the two “serves life” better. What if Jesus really walked the earth, and really was God, and was raised from the dead, and the Holy Spirit really has worked through various churches and social movements, and still lives on today as what actually drives the art-theory-psychoanalysis nexus in the way Zizek suggests? Or maybe it just turned into capitalism, which would be a different perspective, and will discard that too when the time is right, which is maybe now. Or maybe it still has a special relationship to institutions churches and their sacraments. Neither philosophy nor science has any jurisdiction over these questions, and the real problem with modern philosophy is the abuse of the Kantian imperative to not point at the sky and twist it into a positive claim that either the sky is empty, or it’s filled with transcendental logic itself.

Basically I’m saying that if he really wants to respect the Kantian noumenon, he needs to remain open to the possible truth of religious dogma, and if he really wants to respect Hegelian suspension/transcendence, he can’t essentialize philosophy or seal it off from science, capital and history.

I’ll pause for now and post the rest of the critique as a paid post later

1. A flawed but notable book from this time which I felt was close to my own orientation was Noah Horwitz’s Reality in the Name of God, which was introduced to me by Nicola Masciandaro. I remember trying to convince Meillassioux to read it at the after party for his talk on Mallarme at Miguel Abreu many years ago.