Every so often a book is published that demands serious and sustained engagement. Adkins and Hinlicky's 2013 Rehinking Philosopher and Theology with Deleuze raises a number of important issues that I shall address in a series of posts.
A major question of the book concerns the relationship between the exploration of being as such versus the investigation of the highest being. Philosophy has traditionally dealt with the first and theology with the second. But what is the relationship between these two explorations? The tradition has assumed a discontinuity between philosophy's reasoned exploration of being as such, and theology's religious response to that which reveals itself as highest. However, must this be the case? What ought this relationship be, given the contemporary intellectual and cultural context in which we find ourselves?
Adkins and Hinlicky ask us to reconsider regnant discontinuity assumptions about theology and Philosophy. Instead of the disciplines being concerned with different types of things, might one better understand them as poles on a continuum? Adkins and Hinlicky suggest that we might better regard them as assemblages, as constructions out of heterogeneous components. Were we to regard them so, might we make progress on a set of vexing questions that appear to us now as insolvable?
But what is an assemblage? The authors write: "An assemblage is a singular and temporary coagulation of heterogeneous forces that achieves consistency"(2). Importantly, 'consistency' here does mean either unity or identity. An assemblage is assembled out of disparate components, and that these disparate components are assembled out of disparate components. It was Deleuze and Guattari who introduced the metaphysics of assemblage in their books, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?.
The properties of assemblages are dependent on the properties of their component parts as they sustain relations with each other. Assemblages generate limits -- one towards dissolution and the other towards constriction. The first limit functions as the boundary of the assemblage beyond which the assemblage transitions into another. Deleuze and Guattari use terms like 'immanence', 'deterritorialization', 'molecular', 'smooth space', and 'chaos' in naming the dissolution limit. Alternately, 'transcendence', 'territorialization', 'molar', 'striated space', and 'opinion' apply to the constriction limit.
In the history of philosophy, say Delueze and Guittari, the notion of a thing gets confused with the assemblage reaching its limit of constriction. When one asks what something is, one is treating the assemblage as a thing. The very question lifts that which looks stable and eternal out of the context of its ever-changing existence.
However, this question of the what is, for Deleuze and Guattari, clearly secondary to the question of "which one?" This latter question concerns singular, concrete sets of capabilities within the process of being, the behavior of concrete assemblages (3).
The book aims to explore theology as an assemblage, particularly in its relationship to the assemblages of both religion and philosophy. Unfortunately, according to Adkins and Hinlicky, "assemblages that have been created have impoverished rather than enriched our lives" (3). But why have the assemblages of philosophy, religion and theology impoverished our lives?
Our authors tell us that the problem has been that we continually opt for discontinuity over continuity. It is Kant who bequeathed to modernity the current form of the discontinuity thesis. It was he who sharply distinguished concepts from intuitions (percepts) and the supersensible from the sensible. It was he who pointed out and corrected Leibniz's confusion that "perception is just confused conception."
Adkins and Hinlicky discuss the ontological dualisms to which Kant and much of western philosophy is committed. Such dualisms exist alongside the basic grammatical distinction between subject and verb. Accordingly, we traditionally have distinguished being and doing, cause and effect, and the conditioned and the conditions. These dualistic differences are difference in kinds, not degrees. Moreover, these kind differences presuppose hylomorphism's form/content schema and the analogy of being.
Adkins and Hinlicky muse about what philosophy and theology might look like if we were to consider lightning as inseparable from its flash, being from inseparable from doing, and the doer inseparable from the deed (5). Maybe hylomorphism could be replaced by hylozoism, by the notion of the self-organization of matter. Accordingly, we might replace the analogy of being with the univocity of being.
The authors are bold, for prima facie it seems that God/universe presents an ontological dualism if ever there were one. Traditionally, God has so far exceeded the perfection of His creation that one might speak of God only analogously. While the infinite God is literally not good in the way that finite being Mother Threasa is good, nonetheless God is more like Mother Threasa than He is like Joseph Stalin. God is that which none greater can be thought; God is the one activity of being in and throughout all activities of being. Clearly, the tradition has tended to blend the onto with the theo, in forming and committing itself to onto-the-logy. But must Christian theology be committed to a rejection of ontological continuity between God and His creation?
Thinking beyond discontinuities in theology means to think beyond immanence and transcendence. Every assemblage is a continuum from which we might abstract two poles. Philosophy tends toward the immanent and religion towards the transcendent. Now we reach the important point: transcendence need not entail a transcendent entity. All that is required for transcendence is "the organization of a field by something that is discontinuous with the field" (5). Because Kant's transcendental categories are discontinuous with the manifold of sensation, they are discontinuous with that manifold. But must this transcendence entail a difference in ontological kind?
Christian theology, we are told, differs from both religion and philosophy because it attempts to think immanence and transcendence within a single assemblage. Accordingly, theology is a "fragile, paradoxical assemblage," and can easily become bad religion or bad philosophy (6). Christian theology must eschew simile in favor of metaphor, apophatic theology in favor of kataphatic theology, and negative dialectic in favor of positive dialectic. Were we to assume a basic continuity between God and other beings, we might be able to conceive God as a "fully giving self-relation . . . commonly referred to as the Trinity" (7).
The continuity thesis shall require a rich cartography because maps must be continually drawn and redrawn since assemblages are always in the process of becoming. Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze explores how theology, philosophy and religion might map on the assumption of the continuity thesis.
Kant has been most influential in the drawing of boundaries over the last 250 years. These boundaries have had real staying power. Much of the tradition has simply followed Kant's lead in establishing boundaries for what things (and their disciplines) are and what they are not. Thus it is that phenomenology, the new ontology, existentialism and even deconstruction remain wedded to the drawing of boundaries on the assumption of discontinuity. Adkins and Hinlicky ask what the rejection of discontinuity might mean to the refiguring of philosophy, theology and religion generally.
Clearly, Adkins and Hinlicky are asking an interesting question, and this is why I shall spend some time unpacking their text. Ultimately, the success of their argument rests not in the broad strokes in which it can be stated, but in the answers they can provide to the many related mostly philosophical questions that arise on the assumption of these broad strokes.
In reading the Adkins and Hinlicky's text, I was reminded of the process metaphysics that process theology appropriated from Whitehead's Process and Reality. Prima facie for Whitehead and followers, neither the antecedent and consequent natures of God nor God and the universe are ontologically discontinuous from each other. Accordingly, in discussing later chapters of the book I shall be interested in whether dialogue with the promise and perils of process thought is at all fruitful in understanding the authors own move from hylomorphism to hylozoism. My questions throughout are explorations shall be these: Is is true that transcendence need not entail a transcendent entity, and is Christian theology conceptually possible without a transcendent entity?
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