“The invention of an afterlife would not matter so much were it not purchased at so high a price: disregard of the real, hence willful neglect of the only world there is. While religion is often at variance with immanence, with man’s inherent nature, atheism is in harmony with the earth — life’s other name.”

– Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto

Even if I am diametrically opposed to the theological and non-theological trend within nonphilosophy, I thought it worth exploring, and allowing for a review of Anthony Paul Smith’s essay from After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion. That I am an atheist goes without statement, but I have never allowed it to color my judgments toward other forms of philosophical speculation. To close one’s thinking off from every aspect of philosophical speculation contrary to one’s belief system is to tyrannize thought itself. One must be open even to the oppositional trends in philosophical speculation. Most of all one’s integrity requires an honest appraisal of that thought, not its distortion.

Philosophers of late seem to be moving into nonphilosophical territory seeking out both orthodox and heretical philosophies, opening dialogues between opposing worlds to experiential practices rather than the abstract worlds of thought. It looks like Laruelle is presenting a modified form of some of those ancient practices within a secularized form that is offers religious and materialist scholars a new path forward. In a few posts now I’ve seen Laruelle as a key figure within many of those who are within or on the fringe of what was once termed Speculative realism. Whether this term and its key figures is worthy of its appellation is not my concern. What is of concern is this return to the hermetic and the neo-platonic One with its attendant resurgence of all those heretical counter-currents within the history of Christianity.

Much of this same turn to religion can as well be used by neo-materialists projects as part of a speculation on dissidence, political struggle, and the shaping of those lost ideas and practices that emerged in the utopian communal worlds of those very heretical historical groups, and of their very material experiential practices (theory in action) that have been at odds with all orthodoxies everywhere. For this reason I do think Laruelle’s thought is of value and might be turned to other more materialist confrontation with the Real-that-has-been-excluded from our very material world. Now for Anthony Paul Smith’s essay What can be done with Religion?

Anthony Paul Smith in an essay on Non-philosophy and the future of Philosophy of Religion describes a central insight into Francois Laruelle’s experiential turn toward religious theory and practice:

For the operation of non-philosophy upon religion does not aim to merely describe religion anymore than it aims to eliminate or protect it in the name of either a liberated philosophy or an enslaved philosophy. Instead, nonphilosophy aims at appropriating religion: “Axioms and theorems, these are our methods, us men-without-philosophy, so that we can appropriate religion and adapt the divine mysteries to our humanity rather than to our understanding” (291).

This appropriation of religion to nonphilosophy as a return to the ‘divine mysteries’ as an experiential (“adapt the divine mysteries to our humanity” ) practice rather than as an abstraction to theory and philosophy is central to Laruelle’s gnosis. Smith offers a reading of Laurelle’s radical immanence as a “struggle in-immanence” with and for the World. This performative move allows him to use a new double form of thought, the dualysis, in which the historical dimension of a counter-current within Christianity is use to “alter the practice of philosophy by introducing the experience of heresy into philosophy, and then to perform a nonphilosophical operation on religion to put it to human use”(291). It is in this dualysis between religious authority and its heretical limits(Minority) that nonphilosophy discovers that “heresy becomes the organon of radical immanence determining in-the-last-instance the human identity of religion” (292).

Smith tells us that Laruelle’s interest in the unorthodox heretical counter-religions of Gnosticism are do to its resistance as a minority within most philosophical theory. Most of these philosophers deal with the orthodox material, ignoring the heretical material. Laruelle seeks to bring back this underbelly of the orthodox thought that has been eliminated and repressed within its own thought as a form of the excluded Other. Ultimately this is a strategy for Laruelle to allow non-philosophy a unilateral thinking that takes into account the subject-in-struggle against readings that account for them as victims of orthodoxy.

Even the conception of a gnosis that is coming to us from the future becomes a part of this project of a radical immanence. Against the orthodox who see everything within a grand narratology of beginnings and ends, genesis to apocalypse, Laruelle offers a non-philosophical gnosis of this radical immanent project (of which Smith sees three sources):

“The first is the properly Gnostic experience of the definition of man by the primacy of knowledge over faith, an untaught or unlearned knowledge that we must radicalise as Man-in-person, Lived-without-life or even as the Real. The second is the more general heretical aspect, of the separation with the World, here extended and universalized beyond its Christian and even Gnostic aspects. The third is the specifically Christian aspect of universal salvation, for the World and for every man, that works through the person of Christ, which we must also radicalize in a Christ-subject” (293).

This form of thinking awakens Smith as it leads to an agon with the orthodoxy and presents a ‘heretical freedom’ that brings with it a resurgence in the neo-platonic or hermetic One rather than from the “philosophical history of Being or Alterity” (293). So this radical project of immanence that situates itself before the emergence of Being or Void, that in fact is the One that is and brings about the dual formation of both Being and Void is worked out through Laruelle’s nonphilosophical ‘democracy of thought’. As Smith states it:

Non-philosophy has this generic ability because it aims to think equivalently as both science and philosophy, theology and philosophy, art and philosophy, erotics and philosophy and it calls these equivalencies “unified theories” that perform a real democracy (of) thought. This is the task before any philosophy of religion separated from its authoritarian form, a philosophy of religion that is non-philosophical, to consider both generic religion (rather than religion subsumed into a universal category) and occasional particulars (like Christ and the Qur’an) from within the radical immanence of Man determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real” (293-94).

Toward the resurgence in the Religious Turn that seems apparent within Continental forms of thought lately Smith in his conclusion works toward a definition of what he terms “non-theology”: “a thinking of religious material under the aspect of Man in his radical immanence as minority, an “inversion of the philosophies of transcendence and of the divine call”, the construction of a future against and for the World, etc.” (294). The first point he makes is such a non-theology must start with the basic set of axioms within non-philosophy as presented within Laruelle’s philosophy. To do this Smith follows the path Laruelle took in taking a “heretical stance towards, the principle of sufficient philosophy” (295). Know one can discover this principle within philosophy itself, it took Laruelle and his non-philosophy to struggle against this very principle within the saeculum of its discourse which “brings it into vision” (295). What is this principal of sufficient philosophy? It nothing more nor less than the recognition that “everything is philosophisable” (295).

Smith reiterates that Laruelle’s non-philosophy does not aim to overcome or destroy philosophy, but instead uses the principle of sufficient philosophy as an explanatory tool to “explain its many failures and that, once identified and turned into material, may be used in other ways as well. It is, as such, simple material for future human use” (295). Smith then waxes religious about non-philosophy’s vision of the One of its approach to the Real, the quasi-divine mystery that is revealed only through nonphilosophical axioms that provide a system that ‘works’:

“…this axiomatic approach is the only way to actually refuse the philosophical decision as it makes the decision relative to the Real. This method decides nothing, rendering everything equivalent before the Real, finally escaping from the principle of sufficient philosophy as it throws itself prostrate before the Real—nonphilosophy has and recognizes its limits” (295).

This non-philosophy tempts religious scholars to seek a path beyond the curtain of the Real, what Smith terms the “temptation to theology”: these axioms formulate a form of unlearned knowledge. As he states it:

“Unlearned knowledge is not mystical obfuscation, but the unlearned knowledge of the Real that is radically immanent in Man-in-person and from which one necessarily proceeds” (296).

Moving from the learned ignorance of the Theologians to the unlearned knowledge of the Non-Theology of the Future Christ: the figure of the savior as heretic, as bearer of the nonphilosophical nontheology of this gnosis of Man-in-the-person. This positing of a radical gnosis of Man-in-person subjects this gnosis of the “real-One to the nontheological ultimatum that non-philosophy remain generic” (296). This very unification of nonphilosophy with nontheology produces a secular stream of thought that helps further mutate the very axiomatic thought that gives us the Future Christ. Smith sums this up, saying, “for non-philosophy to transform the practice of philosophy of religion, Laruelle must become as if a Church Father, but within a discursive field where there are only Church Fathers and where anyone may be a Future Christ” (296).

What can I say to all the above? I can only agree with Michel Onfray when he described his travels among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in many lands, that in:

“…none of those places did I feel superior to those who believed in spirits, in the immortal soul, in the breath of the gods, the presence of angels, the power of prayer, the effectiveness of ritual, the validity of incantations, communion with voodoo spirits, hemoglobin-based miracles, the Virgin’s tears, the resurrection of a crucified man, the magical properties of cowrie shells, the value of animal sacrifices, the transcendent effects of Egyptian saltpeter, or prayer wheels. Never. But everywhere I saw how readily men construct fables in order to avoid looking reality in the face. The invention of an afterlife would not matter so much were it not purchased at so high a price: disregard of the real, hence willful neglect of the only world there is. While religion is often at variance with immanence, with man’s inherent nature, atheism is in harmony with the earth — life’s other name.”2

1. After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Author), Daniel Whistler Daniel Whistler (Editor). (Cambridge Scholars Publishing (March 1, 2011))

2. Onfray, Michel (2011-04-01). Atheist Manifesto (Kindle Locations 131-137). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.