#animism #aesthetics #CasparDavidFriedrich #Kant #theology #art #romanticism

Yesterday, I watched a video by the Danish scholar Rune Rasmussen, an independent scholar who makes online teaching material (and other things) under the Nordic Animist moniker. His work is fascinating and thought-provoking, and I recommend looking into his work if you're interested in topics like environmentalism, land-connectedness, animism, traditional Nordic wisdom, or similar topics. And he does it all while critiquing white supremacy, so he's a much-needed voice within the Norse spheres of online intelligentsia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuyV4g490OU

In the above video, Rune discusses how the era of Romanticism (roughly speaking, the 1800s) was permeated with a nostalgia for the beauty of the natural world and pre-Christian history, such as the Viking age and its relics. However, these Romanticists did not allow their nostalgia to move them into a deeper sense of connection to the beauty of the natural world. Instead, they viewed nature with an almost cold, disconnected gaze, looking at a forest or mountain no different than one would look at a painting in a museum. Rasmussen uses Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting “Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog” as a prime example.

Rasmussen claims that in contrast to the disconnected, disinterested gaze of Romanticism, we need to instead cultivate practices and ways of being that deeply connect us back to the natural world, rather than viewing ourselves as separate from it. Of course, one of the problems with doing that is how so much of our modern world is, through its architecture and geography, anthropocentric and designed to keep us separated from nature.

It's a great video, and I encourage you to check it out. One reason why I thought it was so intriguing is because the Romantic era is fascinating to me. 19-20th-century theology, philosophy, and art are kind of like my intellectual comfort food (though I don't claim to be an expert). Thus, I wanted to jump on the opportunity to make some additional comments about what Rasmussen said because I think it's a very important topic.

Regarding the context of Romanticist art, I think it's important to acknowledge the influence of Immanuel Kant's theory of aesthetics. To give a very rough summary, Kant based his theory of aesthetics on the idea that beauty is a subjective experience, arising from a harmony between our cognitive and sensory faculties. According to Kant, our perception of beauty depends on our ability to recognize order and harmony in the natural world and in artistic creations. Kant argues that beauty is not a property of objects themselves, but rather a product of our own cognitive faculties, and therefore cannot be objectively measured.

Now here's where things get interesting. One of the central components of Kant's aesthetics is the notion of disinterestedness. According to Kant, in order to have an aesthetic experience of something, we must approach it with a disinterested attitude. This means that we must focus on the object's form, rather than its function or practical use. We must also approach the object without any personal biases, desires, or interests that might interfere with our ability to appreciate it for its own sake. Kant argues that the disinterested attitude is necessary for aesthetic judgment because it allows us to appreciate the object's beauty in a pure and unadulterated way.

Sound familiar? That's basically what Rasmussen was critiquing in the video about Romanticism. My understanding is that such a theme within some of Romanticism is a result of Kant's influence, particularly his notion of disinterestedness. It's no wonder then that almost every copy of Kant's “Critique of Pure Judgment” actually has Friedrich's “Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog” on the cover!

So how do we move forward? Shockingly, I think that Romanticism — and Caspar David Friedrich in particular — might point us in the right direction. Like Virgil in Dante's Inferno, they cannot take us the full way to Paradise, but I do think they offer some form of guidance toward our goal, especially in the case of those who would normally put up their guard against anything animist, which is quite prevalent in the Christian circles I often interact with.

I won't contest Rune's critique of Friedrich's “Wanderer” painting in the video. However, if one engages with the rest of Friedrich's paintings, I think there's a case to be made that Friedrich is something of a quasi-animist within the Protestant Christian tradition of that era. In fact, many of his paintings push against Kant's theory of aesthetics.

To lay the groundwork, it's useful to point out that around the time of Friedrich, there were more intellectual influences and movements than simply Kantianism. That era also saw the rise of the theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher as well as the post-Hegelians. Schleiermachian theology seems to be an influence on Caspar Friedrich's paintings. Schleiermacher believed that religious experience is primarily characterized by a feeling of absolute dependence — the moment of recognizing one's own finitude in contrast to the Infinite beauty and majesty of God. It's something of a theological notion of the sublime — an experience so awe-inspiring, beautiful, and magnificent that it becomes terrifying, such as standing on the edge of a cliff (again, back to Caspar Friedrich's painting). However, for Schleiermacher and for Caspar Friedrich, the sublime is something that ought to inspire a sense of worship, rather than disinterestedness. The feeling of finitude when faced with a mountain or forest ought to make us think about how much greater God's Infinite majesty must be, and thus be compelled with a sense of worship and recognition that we must place our total dependence on the One Above All.

Now, if the story stopped there, we could still be left with the problem of disinterestedness. After all, we might still be only looking at nature rather than connecting to it. However, I think it's also important to mention the post-Hegelians and Friedrich's own way of relating to nature.

To give a very rough summary, many of the post-Hegelians, talked about God using many phrases, such as “the Absolute,” which were influenced by, you guessed it, Hegel's philosophy. One of the perspectives used to describe God was God as the animating principle of all reality. Thus, in contrast to a Cartesian dead, machinic matter, the world is radiating with life because it is animated by its Creator. Nature, creation, and the material of the world are given a supramundane sacredness through the life-giving, animating power of God, who is the Absolute Ground of all being.

Such a perspective fits the Romanticist's love of nature. But it seems to me that the implication of this perspective is that, to be truly religious, one must be connected to nature. To love the Creator, one must love the Creation. I actually believe that, in many of Friedrich's paintings, we see this post-Hegelian, Schleiermachian Christian quasi-animism in operation.

For example, Friedrich painted an image of a wooden crucifix standing in the middle of some evergreen trees in the depths of winter. In the background, there is a large cathedral clouded by fog. If one looks closely, we can see footsteps and hiking sticks in the snow leading up to the crucifix. According to my understanding, Friedrich meant this as a statement about how true religious devotion requires one to venture out into nature, even in its harsh conditions. It is by connecting to Creation that one will encounter Christ. In fact, for this painting, enduring the harsher aspects of nature, such as the frigid winter, draws us into a deeper understanding of the love of God displayed in Christ's passion. The humble crucifix contrasts with the giant cathedral in the background obscured by fog which, though beautiful in its own way, can lead to a disconnection from nature if one were to reside only in the cathedral. Instead, it is a connection to Creation that prompts the endurance of faith, which is symbolized in the evergreen trees, which are a common symbol in Friedrich's paintings for the endurance of faith because evergreen trees remain green regardless of the season.

Another example in Friedrich's work depicts two men joyously gazing at the moon during a night walk in a forest. I'm not sure to what extent Friedrich was concretely influenced by St. Francis, but it seems to me that Friedrich has captured a Franciscan attitude toward Christianity. As the Canticle of St. Francis says, “Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars, / In the heavens you have made them bright, precious and fair.”

I say that Friedrich was a quasi-animist not only because he thought nature was important for religious experience, but also because he believed that nature is animated by the presence of God, and learning how to “read” creation around us will direct us into a deeper worship and love of God. I say 'quasi'-animist because I don't know what Friedrich would think about the flows of non-human subjectivity or consciousness that might inhabit the natural world. However, he certainly believed that God's divine subjectivity and personhood flow through nature. From a Christian perspective, one might say that God is the ontological foundation of the flows of non-human subjectivity attested to by animism, similarly to how God is the ontological foundation of human subjectivity and being.

Out of this belief that God operates through God's Creation, Friedrich developed an uncanny and quite impressive ability to “read” natural landscapes theologically and religiously. He would spend hours hiking through forests and mountains and would see everything around him as permeated with religious symbolism. The Kimbell Art Museum's description of “Mountain Peak with Drifting Clouds” gives a very useful example:

“While the rendition of the drifting clouds suggests a naturalist’s awareness of meteorology, Friedrich almost certainly saw in them a symbolic meaning; veiling the distance and casting shadows across the landscape, they are an image of the shifting, imperfect conditions that nature provides for the illumination of the spirit. In the foreground a toppled tree is portrayed in matter-of-fact detail. It may symbolize mortality as a barrier to spiritual progress: according to some interpretations of Scripture, nature only became subject to death when the Fall of humankind corrupted the originally blissful landscape of Eden. Even the leafless evergreens in the middle distance (trees often understood as premonitions of eternity, given their relative immunity to seasonal change) bear witness to death. Finally, far off in the distance, as if in a separate realm all but inaccessible to human striving, Friedrich includes a fortresslike mountain peak––a revelation, perhaps, of the possibility of salvation.” https://kimbellart.org/collection/ap-198408

It seems that, for Caspar Friedrich, if one is truly connected and embedded within nature — not just disinterestedly, but truly willing to pilgrimage through the snow — then one will be directed to worship. As I interpret Friedrich, his landscape paintings become quasi-iconographic, a window through which heaven breaks into our world. Friedrich is trying to show us how heaven is breaking through into the Creation that exists all around us, but we need to go out into nature in order to experience it. And if the landscape paintings are iconographic, then perhaps it teaches that one of the avenues back to land-connectedness is through liturgy and ritual. Within the Christian tradition, there is actually a fascinating illustration of this in the Ethiopian Orthodox forest churches. Their worship practices and worship spaces cannot be separated from the forest around them.

Of course, this might not be the most satisfactory answer for those working within a pagan animist tradition. Nonetheless, I think it's a very important question for Christians to consider how our liturgical practices and sacred spaces might move us back toward connecting with the land.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fGe-CPWZlE

#JohnMilbank #Kant #Schelling #Modernity #RadicalOrthodoxy #evil #ontology #review

Intro

In this article, I will attempt to work through and summarize chapter 1 of John Milbank's book “Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon.” Milbank is a notoriously difficult scholar to understand, in part because his writing style lacks clarity and is prone to circle around topics. He'll talk about one subject for a while, move on to something else, and then only finish his thoughts about the original subject three pages later. Nonetheless, he is a brilliant individual who is bringing up vital questions for theology in our time. Because he's been so influential in recent decades, I want to understand more of his thinking, and I'm sure others do too. So I've spent the last several weeks mapping out his critique of the “Radical Evil” theory and why he believes that we should not move away from the classical Privation Theory of evil.

What is the Privation Theory of Evil?

Let's set the context by giving a brief definition of the Privation Theory: The Privation Theory of evil is the idea that evil is the absence or lack of good. According to this theory, evil is not a positive thing in itself, but rather the absence or privation of something that is good. For example, darkness is not a positive thing, but rather the absence of light. Similarly, a hole is not a positive thing in itself, but the lack of presence of something else, like having a cheese wedge with holes in it. These are analogies that illustrate something called an 'ontological lack.' Likewise, the Privation Theory maintains that evil is not a positive thing in itself, but rather the absence or 'privation' of good. From Augustine through Thomas Aquinas and others, this is often taken to be the classical theological view regarding the nature of evil.

One can understand why theologians would want to hold onto such a view when we consider the following syllogism:

(1) Everything that exists is created and sustained by God. (2) Evil exists. (3) Therefore, evil is created and sustained by God.

Because, classically speaking, most theists maintain that God is all-good and all-loving (indeed, Love and Goodness itself), the position that God would create and sustain Evil (with a capital E) seems contradictory. Thus, most theologians throughout history have denied premise 2 and said that evil is instead a privation of being the way darkness is a privation of light.

There are actually different options beyond the Privation Theory for solving the above syllogism. For example, philosopher Alexander Pruss has proposed a “mismatch” theory in which we say that evil is the result of improperly ordered good things. Bleach is good (or at least neutral) in itself. Soup is good or neutral in itself. But when you combine the two and give it to someone to drink, then it is a “mismatch” and thus should be labeled evil. https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2015/08/do-theists-have-to-believe-privation.html

However, since the time of Immanuel Kant and the influence of the German Idealist movement (including Schelling, Martin Heidegger, and Slavoj Zizek), a different theory of evil has gained prominence, which John Milbank labeled the “Radical Evil” theory.

What is the Radical Evil Theory?

Starting with Kant and then picking up steam after the horrors of events like the Holocaust, Radical Evil theory holds these evils to be so atrocious that they cannot be a privation of the good, but something else more sinister. An instance of radical evil is a positive (i.e., not privative) evil for its own sake (Milbank, 1), seeing “evil as a viable exercise of power” (Milbank, 6). It is an action of evil for its own sake and a “willed denial of the good” in favor of destruction, such as the Nazis' attempting to destroy of the Jewish people. As a result, Radical Evil proposes moving the conversation from being/ontology to the finite human will (Milbank, 1).

Why Would Theorists of Radical Evil Want to Reject the Classical Privation Theory of Evil?

The following is my best attempt to summarize Milbank's assessment of Radical Evil theory:

First, according to the Radical Evil theorists, the Privation Theory of evil tends toward justifying evil (Milbank, 6), even paradoxically grounding evil within ontology, which is exactly what the Privation view wants to avoid. According to the Privation Theory, the human will itself is good; the problem is human finitude in which we exercise our will toward lesser goods or will toward the good but through the wrong means (Milbank, 6). The good human will ultimately falls short because it is attached to a finite human being. This state of finitude combined with sin clouds our moral perception, making it difficult to will as we ought (i.e., will the truly good, beautiful, and perfect in accordance to the infinite beatific vision of God).

As Milbank summarizes: “Thus while it might seem that privation theory, by defining evil as lack of being, prevents any rooting of evil in the ontological, in fact it does affirm such rooting. For since evil is rooted in finitude, and the finite is caused by the infinite, the infinite is the real ultimate source of lack […].” (Milbank, 7)

In other words, if Infinite Being (God, in a classical sense) creates finitude, then wouldn’t Being be responsible for evil?

In contrast to Privation, Radical Evil theorists say that evil should be ‘placed’ within the human will rather than finitude (Milbank, 7). If one places evil somewhere outside the human will, then it diminishes the responsibility of freedom (Milbank, 17).

In contrast to the classical view of the human will espoused by the Privation Theory, Radical Evil proposes an alternative picture of the will, which maintains that the will is not bound by incapacity or misperception (Milbank, 12). This new perspective is where we come under the influence of Immanuel Kant. Milbank states it as follows:

“In no sense could radical evil for [Kant] connote loss of vision of the infinite, since the bounds between the finite and the infinite are permanently fixed and permit no participatory mediation. For Kant, we will, adequately, as finite creatures, with reference only to our finitude; at the same time, we do invoke a noumenal infinitude in which our spirits are truly at home – yet this infinitude only impinges on the finite as the empty and incomprehensible formality of freedom which is inexplicably able to interrupt the fatedness of phenomenal causality.” (Milbank, 12)

Thus, for Immanuel Kant, we do not lose our vision of the infinite because we could never have such a vision. In Kantian theory, the infinite is noumenal because it lies outside of what we can claim with any certainty to know in itself. For those without a background in philosophy, that might be confusing, so let's summarize Kant's philosophy real quick:

Immanuel Kant's distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal refers to the distinction between the way things appear to us (phenomenal) and the way things are in themselves (noumenal). The phenomenal world is the world as it appears to us through our senses and the way our mind processes that information. This includes our experiences, perceptions, and sensations. It is the world of appearances, and it is the only world that we can know through our senses and reason. The noumenal world is the world as it is in itself, independent of our perception and understanding of it. It is the world of things-in-themselves, and it cannot be known through our senses or reason alone. According to Kant, the noumenal world is unknowable and can only be inferred through our experiences in the phenomenal world. Kant believed that our understanding of the world is limited to the phenomenal world, and that the noumenal world can only be known by pure reason. He also argued that our knowledge of the world is shaped by the innate structures of our mind, such as the categories of understanding and the forms of intuition.

For Kant, we are free qua transcendental, which is grounded in a priori reason, not based upon any experience. Thus, freedom is not corrupted by external factors as in the case of the Privation Theory of finitude. (Milbank, 13). For Kant, nothing within the causal order can affect the realm of freedom (Milbank, 15). Basically, Kant is using his unique theory of freedom to critique the Privation Theory's view of the will.

Immanuel Kant's theory of freedom, as outlined in his Critique of Practical Reason and other works, holds that individuals have an innate capacity for rationality and autonomy, and that the exercise of this capacity is necessary for an individual to be truly free. Since human beings possess the capacity for rational agency, it means that we are capable of making choices based on reason and moral principles, rather than being determined by outside forces or natural laws. For Kant, the ability to make autonomous choices is what sets human beings apart from other creatures and is necessary for moral responsibility. In his works, he argued that free will is a precondition for morality and that moral responsibility is only possible if individuals have the freedom to make choices.

Thus, in contrast to the Privation Theory, freedom is not a gift of grace given to humanity by God, but rather an “inert give,” something existing within the a priori, transcendental structure of human cognition (Milbank, 20). Human will is thus capable of choosing either Good or Evil. But if this is the case, then radical evil is just as much an inert given (Milbank, 20).

Regarding evil, instead of maintaining that we have a good will that is corrupted by finitude (i.e., seeking lesser goods when we ought to seek higher goods or seeking higher goods in the wrong way), Kant believed we are caught in a situation in which the will is willing against itself — “an innate failure of the will itself to will freedom” (Milbank, 13). For example, we tend to adopt and live by non-moral maxims. Thus, instead of following a universal categorical imperative (treat no one as merely a means to an end but always also as an end in themselves), we often follow more self-centered habits. Instead of telling the truth, we lie. Instead of sharing necessary resources with the community, we hoard them for ourselves.

According to the new perspective of Radical Evil, Good and Evil are pre-ontological terms, existing before the Infinite/finite distinction (Milbank, 7). Milbank uses the term “dark indifferent ground of the infinite”(7) to talk about the transcendental, noumenal good/evil distinction. Because Good and Evil are pre-ontological, the finite is able to manifest extreme goodness or evil (Milbank, 7), implying perhaps that the finite will would be able to manifest infinite goodness, given that there is no ontological constraint on doing so. The following point is not mentioned by Milbank, but I think that, if such a theory is correct, it would behold potentially interesting implications for how we talk about Christology, as one could say that Jesus’ human nature was capable of manifesting the infinite good. But I digress...

If Good and Evil are pre-ontological, then it would also imply that the Infinite (God) could also manifest extreme evil because Goodness would no longer be equated with the Being Itself of God (Milbank, 7). Milbank notes that, in his estimate, Friedrich Schelling has the most compelling theological reason for ascribing to the Radical Evil theory. According to Schelling, God’s good will comes in the “dark indifferent ground of the infinite” in which God freely and lovingly chooses to be infinitely good, and likewise chooses to bestow this loving goodness to Creation. According to Schelling, this decision of God to choose love and goodness is what makes God worthy of worship and gratitude (Milbank, 7). In other words, why bother worshiping if God's love and goodness are inevitable?

Milbank Strikes Back

Milbank begins his counterattack by rejecting the univocity of being theory proposed by Duns Scotus and which seems to be presupposed by Radical Evil theorists. Duns Scotus was a medieval philosopher who developed the doctrine of the univocity of being, which holds that the term “being” has a single, uniform meaning when applied to all things. In other words, according to the doctrine of univocity, being has the same meaning when applied to God, humans, animals, and all other entities. According to Duns Scotus, this uniform meaning of being is grounded in the concept of existence itself, which he believed was common to all things. He argued that the concept of existence is a simple, undivided whole that cannot be further analyzed or broken down into smaller parts. This means that being, as a concept, cannot be divided into different categories or levels, as some philosophers had suggested.

According to Milbank, such a flat ontology would imply that the lack of evil exists as much as the infinite (Milbank, 18). If the finite exists equally as much as the infinite, then “the lack of evil exists as much as the infinite (Milbank, 18). This then causes people to justify evil according to providential design (Milbank, 18). It’s as if post-Scotus scholars have accepted the problematic syllogism at the beginning of this article and insisted that evil exists but it is justified because it is providentially ordered (or even orchestrated) by God.

After distancing himself from the univocity of being, Milbank notes that Radical Evil seems to make suffering in nature providential (Milbank, 18). We can see this in the thought of Immanuel Kant. For Kant, possessing a good will is only evidenced through resistance to suffering (Milbank, 18). As Milbank says, “The passage to moral virtue via the sublime also traverses the exercise of radical evil, just as the path to civilized peace lies dialectically through warfare” (Milbank, 18-19). However, if this is the case, then the “purportedly moral self-overcoming will might still be the natural heroic will — at once sublime and radically evil,” such as Milton’s depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost or in a sadist who is willing to sacrifice comfort, security, and survival in order to exercise its own freedom (Milbank, 19). In other words, there are plenty of examples of people enduring suffering for their own cause, but going about it in a morally reprehensible manner. Likewise, even if one did resist suffering in accordance to, for Kant, the categorical imperative, it seems as if an environment of suffering is necessary in order to have something to resist. In any case, it's no guarantee that our resistance to such suffering will be truly moral.

In order to get around this problem, Kant must invoke a concept of Divine Grace that works on the will (Milbank, 19-20), but this then defeats the purpose of placing evil within human limits. Or, at the very least, it is a concept of freedom that is “far more positivistically and pietistically irruptive than Augustinian Thomist grace” (Milbank, 20). For the Augustine-Thomist view, God gives us the power to will the good in the proper orientation and manner. But for Kant, “the will to the good has reduced to the mere will to have a good will in hope that God, by grace, will impute to us a good will” (Milbank 20). Thus, in constrast to what is sometimes thought, the theory of Radical Evil is not a secular theory of evil but rather an alternative theology (Milbank, 20).

Milbank also critiques the claim that Radical Evil proposes a pre-ontological theory of evil, maintaining that the “dark indifferent ground of the infinite” is still ontological (Milbank, 17). His arguments in this section, at least to me, were the most confusing, but let's give it a stab anyways. Let's start with this quote:

“(…) the decision for evil is referred to a prior possibility for such freedom — to a freedom prior to freedom and indifferent to good and evil, which alone establishes freedom as freedom.” (Milbank, 17)

Essentially, this boils down to the following problem: How could we then say that radical evil is an inert given in the same manner as infinite good? Radical Evil maintains that evil is “instigated by will alone” (Milbank, 17). Additionally, evil is not caused by freedom, since “freedom, as free, causes only the Good” (Milbank, 17).

But if this is the case, then how can the dark ground of noumenal freedom (”freedom prior to freedom”) possibly exert a will toward evil if freedom only wills the good? (Milbank, 17). It would seem that the bad will cannot “blame a possibility lodged within the order of causality” (Milbank, 17). Presumably, this is because causality belongs to the phenomenal realm whereas the pre-ontological good/evil distinction — as well as freedom itself — belongs to the noumenal realm.

Thus, we end up with a “breaking in” of a “radical pre-personal freedom which is prior to decision” (Milbank, 17). However, under this picture, how could an individual will be held responsible for a pre-personal decision? It seems like such a picture is actually an ontological or para-ontological excuse, grounding evil in a dark noumenal transcendental. Thus, whereas Radical Evil theory wants to chide the privation theory for making an ontological excuse for evil, it seems that Radical Evil itself makes a similar move.

Defense of Privation: Privation Does Not Excuse Evil

Milbank believes that, “For evil to be at all, it must still deploy some good,” (Milbank, 22) because evil is not lodged in any reality whatsoever (Milbank, 17). If this is the case, then evil is without cause, which means we cannot talk about its origins and it cannot have an explanation (Milbank, 17-18). As he says,

“But when evil possesses us, not only are we responsible for this possession, it is also the case that this possession delivers the very phenomenon of autonomous responsibility. Evil is just that for which alone we are solely responsible. Evil is self-governing autonomy — evil is the Kantian good, the modern good.” (Milbank, 18)

This is perhaps a moot point, but I think Milbank could have made this point more powerful by using a word like “corrupts” instead of “possesses” because possession language makes evil sound ontological whereas corruption sounds privative.

In contrast to the Radical Evil's perspective, Milbank notes that much of what we call radical evil is actually the product of petty and banal economic and social decisions (Milbank, 21). Saying something like “the holocaust reveals a new metaphysical dimension of evil” ignores the concrete political and ideological forces that produced the holocaust (Milbank, 21) and can even glamorize atrocities, absolutizing them as something almost divine and outside of comprehension (Milbank, 54).

Related to this point, Milbank provides an intriguing argument about how the Nazis themselves seemed to be following a broken Kantian morality. According to Kant (or, at least, according to Milbank's understanding of Kant), the categorical imperative must be schematized according to lesser imperatives (Milbank, 23). Not everyone has grasped that he or she is an autonomous free agent self-giving the universal law. Or, it might be the case that people are willing evil rather than the categorical imperative. Many of us need something like moral baby steps or more general principles of law to keep us in check. Because one needs lesser imperatives, the state issuing laws is similar to the transcendental law of freedom for the individual (Milbank, 23). Kant even ontologizes this law-giving morality by describing the Holy Trinity in such terms (Milbank, 23).

However, according to Milbank, by making such a move, one collapses the categorical and the contingent by conflating the lesser imperative of the laws issued by a sovereign state with the universal categorical imperative (Milbank, 24). Under Kant’s schematization, how can one distinguish a good will from a bad will? How could one justify resistance to a morally corrupt leader or a decadent state like the Nazis? We end up reaching the problematic conclusion that, if Kant is correct, then “to oppose political sovereignty is to oppose moral sovereignty” (Milbank, 24). In other words, if one is going to follow the higher moral duty, one must absolutely follow the law of the state. Milbank notes that when on trial, Nazi officials like Eichmann seemed to display a broken Kantian morality along these lines (Milbank, 22). Instead of the sovereign free will of the autonomous individual (Kant’s moral ideal), the Nazi officials adopted the sovereign will of the Führer. But according to the moral schematism laid out above, such a replacement makes sense within a Kantian system (Milbank, 23). To follow the higher moral duty, one must absolutely follow the law of the state. If one refused to commit genocide against the Jewish people, one was not following the law of the state. Therefore, if one failed to execute Jewish people, one failed to follow the higher moral duty. But surely, that's wrong.

Ongoing Impact of Kant's Proposal

And now, we finally reach our concluding remarks. If Radical Evil and Kant's proposal is true, then where does that leave us? First, “free will,” conceived as an abstract free autonomy, becomes equated with the Good (Milbank, 25). This is different than the view espoused by Milbank and other theologians in church history, which states that free will is a gift given to us by the grace of God. According to Milbank, the separation of free will from the grace of God, grounding it rather within the notion of the individual autonomous will, has created disastrous results. As he says,

“Moral liberalism tends to engender an uneasy oscillation between absolute promotion of one's own freedom for any goal whatsoever, and absolute sacrifice to the freedom of the other, again without any conditions as to the goals that others should pursue. Writ large at the level of the State, this produces a giant-scale oscillation between a present collective identity as an end in itself, and the endless self-sacrifice of individuals for the sake of a better future.” (Milbank, 25)

In other words, we are driven for endless self-sacrifice for the sake of a better future, but this leads to massive amounts of exploitation and sacrifice of others in order to reach our vague and undefined goals of progress (Milbank, 25).

Hopefully, this exploration of Milbank has been beneficial. At the very least, this has been a useful personal exercise for me to try to wrap my head around what he is saying.

All quotations are from “Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon” by John Milbank, Routledge Publishing, UK. 2003.

#postmodernism #aesthetics #capitalism #atmosphere #NickLand #Kant #Lovecraft #liminal #space

The Backrooms is a popular short story that went viral on the Internet with endless adaptations, memes, games, and short films. I think it's an ingenious bit of short horror fiction that sounds like something from the Twilight Zone. The story postulates that, at certain points in our world, one can make a wrong step and accidentally “no clip” out of reality. This language of no clip or clipping out is borrowed from video games in which there are certain points within a map where the game developers forgot to add barriers. If the player reaches those points, he or she “no clips” out of the map and into undeveloped digital landscapes (or perhaps falls into an infinite void).

The original post that created the basic lore is as follows: “If you're not careful and noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it (...) has heard you.”

Creepy, right? Most people think so, which is one reason why it went viral online. The basic structure allows for a lot of creative reimagining, and the liminal aesthetics allows for plenty of interesting artwork. But I also think the story's popularity rests in its ability to capture something about our postmodern condition. I'm not the first to point this out. In fact, there's a great video essay by Clark Eleison that talks about how the Backrooms captures our fear of loneliness and isolation (especially when considering how the story took off during the pandemic).

[Link] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fonsUaFURPI)

But I also think the story presents a fascinating illustration of the postmodern and capitalist material environments, landscapes, atmospheres, and architectures that we now inhabit. It shows the horrifying artificiality of these material environments, revealing how our spaces are constructed for the flourishing of capitalism itself rather than God's Creation.

The Backrooms represent a terrifying “outsideness.” What if, behind the borders of your house, workplace, and city, lies an infinite expanse of burning fluorescent lights, musky carpet, and ugly office hallways? It's like being trapped in the waiting room for a doctor's office from hell.

When I think about this outsideness, I'm reminded first of Immanuel Kant and his distinction between how we perceive the world and what lies beyond that perception. According to Kant, when we perceive the world, we do so according to internal categories and schematisms of the psyche, which arrange the raw sense data of experience into categories of understanding. When I look at a desk, I do not see the individual particles and atoms, but instead, I experience the desk according to how my brain is wired to recreate the input of visual stimuli. An entirely different creature, like a bat, might have an entirely different mental representation of the desk. Kant called this sort of stuff “phenomenal” experiences.

But what about the stuff that lies beyond, behind, or “outside” of the phenomenal? This stuff would be the thing-in-itself, and Kant called this the noumenal or noumenous. Our brains, rationality, and cognitive capacities are wired for decyphering phenomenal categories, but we cannot speak with any certainty about the noumenal realm other than to say it's out there. I can talk about, for example, my desk — its design, colors, and object parts — but I cannot talk about what the desk is like, in-itself, outside of my experience—according to Kant; of course, this is philosophy, so that has been subject to much debate. And even if we talk about the atomic structure of the desk, that is still talking about how the atoms appear to us, not necessarily the atoms in themselves.

In recent times, the professionally insane philosopher Nick Land has coined the term “fanged noumena.” Working under the influence of Kant, Deleuze, and Guatarri (and methamphetamines), Land used “fanged noumena” to refer to that “outsideness” which breaks into our world and rearranges things—sometimes in catastrophic ways.

Fanged, here, is to be taken in a Marxist-Lovecraftian sense. For Marx, capitalism is vampiric: “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” In the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, cosmic, extra-dimensional monsters exist in a manner that is beyond the comprehension of humans, leading to madness, destruction, or both. Land combines these notions and thus theorizes capitalism as a type of Lovecraftian monster rearranging our world in order to be devoured; it is fanged noumena.

In my previous post, I talked about something similar to this fanged noumena in the work of Deleuze and Guatarri in their conception of time. Here is what I said:

To give an over-generalized summary: in a more classic theological understanding, there is a distinction between Eternity (the realm of God) and time (the temporality of creation). Eternity is transcendent to time. However, for Deleuze and Guatarri, there is no transcendent Eternity. Instead, they speak of an “Aeon,” which is a concept inspired by Kantian philosophy. In Kant's philosophy, there is a distinction between how we experience the world (phenomenal) and how the world is in-itself (the noumenal). Deleuze and Guatarri place Aeonic time into a type of material, noumenal reality that is on the same ontological status as our experience of time, “but it does not manifest itself in time. Though it is itself composed of singular events – which can be precisely dated and named – these events compose a virtual plane of intensity that positively avoids climactic actualization. Deleuze and Guattari call these Aeonic occurrences plateaus and show how they constitute an exteriority that haunts the successive order of extensive temporality” (Anna Greenspan, “Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine,” page 17).

Notice how this Aeonic time is like a ghost (or even a Lovecraftian monster) sitting just outside our periphery, occasionally breaking into our world and leaving haunting traces of itself. The Backrooms seem to have a similar function. It is a realm of pure liminal space that is outside of our periphery or perception, and yet something about this reality conditions our world — or at least what the Backrooms represent conditions us.

The Backrooms are the pure form of a capitalist atmosphere that is devoid of subjectivity, existing neither from humans nor for humans. Indeed, it doesn't really exist for anything so far as we can tell. It is a material environment devoid of telos. It is artificial and yet not generated solely by human effort. This aspect of an artificial material environment without a telos or sole human origin is similar to Nick Land's famous description of capitalism in his famous essay “Meltdown”:

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.”

The Backrooms spatially represent this noumenal or transcendental quality of capitalism as an alien force conditioning our world and vampirically sucking Creation's lifeforce to empower itself— a type of spiritual warfare if you will. And we see quite well in the Backrooms meme how this noumenal capitalism manifests itself in space: through the desubjectivizing atmospheres of postmodernity, such as office spaces, shopping malls, Time Square, and suburban sprawl. In a sense, all of reality is now suburban sprawl, and the Backrooms are the horrific psychogeography of that labyrinth that pushes us toward alienating individualism rather than communal flourishing.

Of course, much of what I've written in this post is imaginative speculation and intellectual experimentation. I'm not exactly convinced that this is the best way to understand the ontology of capitalism. But at the very least, I think the Lovecraftian lens of Land is an intriguing perspective because it would potentially allow for Christians to view capitalism as a “principality and power” (Ephesians 6:12) and thus under the category of spiritual warfare.