Abstract
In this article, the thesis that moral education is best served through education for irreligious thinking will be put forward. At stake here is the acknowledgment of a disquieting kernel at the deepest level of thinking that is usually glossed over or sedated. I will attempt to confront and articulate this kernel and discuss its repercussions for moral education in reference to the contemporary French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s groundbreaking philosophical project articulated in his debut book After Finitude. Stated briefly, the kernel I am referring to concerns the groundlessness of being and the radical ethical attitude it embodies. Two contrasting orientations when confronted with the notion of such an understanding of being can be identified. I will refer to these, simply, as religious and irreligious thinking. My wager is that religious thinking evades the kernel and needs to be overcome by irreligious thinking, which should constitute the aim of moral education.
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Notes
In this paper, occasional references made to Buddhism are only meant to indicate, on a purely ontological level, the affinities of the Buddhist śūnyatā ontologies with that of the Meillassouxian notion of contingency. Śūnyatā basically refers to emptiness of permanent essence of things. It is “the Buddhist technical term for the lack of independent existence, inherent existence, or essence in things” (Garfield 1994). Here, Buddhism is seen within a general philosophical framework (Faure 2009). Buddhism as a religious practice or Buddhist morality in general are not the focus of the ensuing analysis. It will be assumed that śūnyatā ontologies, though couched in religious, esp. eschatological, terms, can and have been thought independently of such terms. The value of highlighting the affinities between śūnyatā ontologies and Meillassoux will become evident in providing a rejoinder to Meillassoux in the concluding part of the essay.
In the logic of the absurd expounded by Camus, for instance, wherein neither the world nor human existence are themselves absurd but rather the absurd lies in the confrontation between the two, the irrationality or unintelligibility of the world (its meaninglessness) lies in the conflict between our desire to make sense of it all and the thwarting of this desire. As Camus says in Myth of the Sisyphus (Camus quoted in Foley 2014):
At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
Unlike Camus, Meillassoux defends a rational access to being in its groundlessness. We do not seek meaning in a meaningless world. We know that there is no meaning but we do not despair this fact. Rather, it is embraced since it is the most essential positive knowledge we have of the world. The knowledge of lack of reason at the heart of being is the positive knowledge we can attain through rational means. In that sense, it is not a matter of the absurd but rational thinking that is the focus of Meillassoux’s analysis.
I subscribe to the contention Ray Brassier articulates in his Nihil Unbound, where he asserts that:
the disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the ‘great chain of being’ and defaced the ‘book of the world’ is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment… The disenchantment of the world deserves to be celebrated as an achievement of intellectual maturity, not bewailed as a debilitating impoverishment. (p. xi)
In line with his defense of the Enlightenment disenchantment, Brassier endorses nihilism as
the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home’, nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem (ibid.)
The disenchantment of the world is about acknowledging the ineliminable discord between human existence and nature. This, however, should not derive us to despair. Rather, it signals intellectual maturity for humanity and needs to be cultivated, hence the need for education. Naturally, the Western Enlightenment project of disenchantment of the world—purportedly unabashedly Eurocentric—cannot be affirmed without any qualification. There are many different levels to this process all entwined together and a lot has been said about its perversions, which I acknowledge. Nevertheless, from an ethico-political perspective at least, I’m with Žižek when he answers in the affirmative the polemical question he poses at the beginning of his “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism’”:
When one says Eurocentrism, every self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture—to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of protofascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, is it possible to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy?
With Žižek, I think it is not only possible but essential that we “insist on the potential of democratic politicization as the true European legacy from ancient Greece onwards” (Žižek 1998). Regardless of its legion of critics and all the things that have gone wrong in the last three hundred years or so (colonization, environmental degradation, scientific imperialism, alienation, and so on), on the whole, the dignity of the Western Enlightenment project of disenchantment of the world outweighs its disasters. It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into an extended argument for the latter claim.
I will not dwell on possible pedagogical interventions on this occasion. My goal is a more modest one of offering an alternative theoretical position supporting the possibility of expounding the aim of moral education in a non-religious register.
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Oral, S.B. The Question Concerning the Aims of Moral Education: Meillassoux’s Ethic of Immortality. Interchange 48, 39–54 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-016-9284-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-016-9284-8