The Experience of Atheism: Phenomenology, Metaphysics and Religion

Claude Romano, Robyn Horner, Claude Romano, Robyn Horner

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350245570
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350167650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Religious and atheistic belief are presented anew in a volume of essays from leading phenomenologists in both France and the UK. Atheism, often presented as the negation of religious belief, is here engaged with from a phenomenologically informed notion of experience. The focus on experience, sparks new debates in readings of belief, faith and atheism as they relate to and complicate each other. What unites the contributors is their relationship to phenomenology as it has developed in France in the wake of Heidegger and Husserl. Leading French intellectuals from this context, Jean-Luc Nancy, Quentin Meillassoux, and Catherine Malabou, amongst others, contribute arresting ideas on atheistic faith, the death of God, and anarchic faith, opening up new areas of understanding in a field whose parameters and core concepts are ever shifting.

Revealing the extent to which religious and atheistic belief must be seen to influence, and on a fundamental level, to co-create one another, the pluralistic society in which religious belief is counted as one option amongst many is given primacy. The fact that religious faith has become not only optional but also, in many contexts, strangely alienated from society, deeply modifies the experience of the believer as much as that of the non-believer. A focus on 'experience', over and above 'belief', moves us towards a mode of experiential knowledge which refuses to privilege the atheistic believer and deride the reality of religious belief.

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Atheism, Faith, and Experience

Claude Romano and Robyn Horner

I. Atheism and the irreducible

The present volume has come about because of the conviction that it is timely to look anew at the question of atheism. Of course, there are already many fine books that have been written about atheism, but very often, they come down to an argument about whether or not one can reasonably believe in “God”—or in what one substitutes for God.¹ Such a polarization of views leads only to a stalemate, so that in the end there is nothing very interesting left to say. In late 2016, a group of scholars from Australia, Europe, and North America met in Rome to discuss the possibility that one can approach atheism otherwise, and very quickly it became evident that for many of us, it was not even clear what we meant when we used the term. There are many atheisms: some of these atheisms actually inhabit theism or are even seen to live out theism’s ends. Between 2017 and 2019, three further meetings were hosted by Australian Catholic University at the campus in Rome to extend the work of that first group. This book arises in large part from the final seminar in 2019, where we pursued the question of the relationship atheism bears to experience. Why experience? Because in our view, as editors, while there are plenty of intellectual arguments to be made about atheism, atheism is not first a question of conceptual knowledge. People rarely argue themselves entirely to belief or unbelief in God; more commonly, they have already crossed a particular threshold before they begin to make such arguments—or at least, before they have reached their conclusion. We ventured to begin the conversation with the idea that atheism (or theism) is a way of finding oneself in the world, a characteristic of experience that is perhaps first affective rather than thetic. So, with this in mind, we asked our interlocutors to reflect on what the experience of atheism might look like.

This volume is characterized by conversations that have largely had their genesis in France, conversations that relate to the French reception and development of phenomenology. All the contributors to the book are readers of French philosophy and, more often than not, in phenomenology as it has developed in a particular trajectory from Husserl, whose thought was introduced to France in the early twentieth century and which, together with the work of Heidegger, has had a profound effect in that context and beyond. There is a certain way in which phenomenology shapes the present constellation of authors—even beyond their expressed concerns here—so that questions about the status, scope and limits of experience are frequently to the fore. In particular, while not all the contributors have an interest in the question of God, the question of the irreducible figures prominently in their work, and the irreducible is sometimes understood to mark experience prior to any division into concepts of theism and atheism. This is nowhere more the case than in the work of the two authors who have been chosen to “bookend” this collection: Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Luc Marion.

II. Atheism and alienation

It is well-known that atheism is a modern phenomenon, and that it is a phenomenon intrinsically related to our modernity. In the West, during a period that extends from early Christianity to the Renaissance, Patristic and Medieval apologetics had to engage in discussion only with other religions: Judaism, Paganism, Islam. The figure of the atheist makes its appearance in the course of the Renaissance period, with the renewal of Paganism and the resistance to the authority of the Church which accompanies it.² Giordano Bruno, Machiavelli, Aretino, and Vanini—and, soon after them, those who are called “the Libertines”—do not yet openly claim that God does not exist; instead, they reject the tutelage of the ecclesial institutions and oppose to them a free exercise of reason. It is only when Spinoza applies exegetical rules to the Scriptures which are comparable to those governing the reading of profane texts, and when he underscores the contradictions and inconsistencies of the Bible that betray, in his view, its human provenance, that an utterly new attitude toward monotheist revelation starts to take shape. And even then, Spinoza is far from considering himself an atheist: it is only in the view of his detractors that he personifies atheism for the seventeenth century.

The appearance of atheism is thus inseparable from the tide of secularization on which Western societies from the fifteenth century onwards have been carried. The word “secularization” is not only a political and institutional fact, an ever-sharpening separation between Church and State, but is often understood to reflect a privatization of religion or especially a decline of religious belief and institutional participation in our societies. It is a commonplace that this last view of secularization, which suggests that religion is simply no longer relevant or is dying out, has been largely set aside by the sociologists, many of whom recognize the fact of pluralization.³ Secularization—in the sense in which it accompanies the very possibility of atheism—should instead be understood according to the definition given by Charles Taylor, as the change “which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is just one human possibility among others.”⁴ Secularization defines our present situation in so far as faith or belonging to a religious community only represents for us today one option among others, and certainly not a norm that should apply to everyone.

Nevertheless, this prima facie choice is complicated by the unfolding of a concomitant phenomenon that is sometimes known as detraditionalization, which refers to the manner in which the conditions for tradition-transmission in Western societies have changed.⁵ This affects the ways in which individuals shape their identities, so that it seems not only that there are many possible options for religious belief but that the very conditions for religious believing are now different to what they might once have been. French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger draws from the work of Maurice Halbwachs when she speaks of a radical forgetting that seems to have affected Western societies with respect to tradition, a forgetting that breaks lineages of belief.⁶ Communities that were once bound together by strong frameworks of tradition have been fractured by the many elements which culminate in pluralization and globalization: ease of international communications, rapid transport and travel, mass migration, the explosion of media of all kinds, economic development, advances in education, increased individualization, and so on. In particular, the mass distribution of symbols weakens their particularity and capacity to speak. The recognition of the role of social memory in the continuity of religious and other traditions transposes the question of atheism into an entirely different key. In short, the secular age of the West seems to be accompanied by a haze of disorientation, in which it is sometimes hard to remember why the question matters in the first place.

The situation where adherence to a religious tradition becomes not only optional but also often strangely alienating deeply modifies the experience of the believer as much as that of the non-believer. For the believer, the possibility of atheism in the society to which he or she belongs should not, perhaps, be considered only as something regrettable. The possibility of atheism obliges that person to relate to faith in a different manner, possibly even with more depth and intensity, since it is no longer a commonly shared, obvious or uncontroversial attitude, but instead, a stance that is existentially lived-through and which potentially makes room for different forms of uncertainty. Such uncertainty includes doubt, of course, but it must also include challenges to particular forms of naivety.⁷ This does not mean that believers never experienced uncertainty prior to the secular age: the experience of the “dark night of the soul” is a basic, inescapable experience reported by all the mystics. But even for the one who does not reach the peaks of mysticism, the possibility of atheism inevitably upends the very experience of faith or may even become indispensable to the living of that faith.

Moreover, as much as the theist, the atheist can perfectly acknowledge the dimension of mystery inherent to our lives, and so be open to dimensions of the religious phenomenon. Mystery does not only amount to the “problematic” of the meaning of all human life; it is, instead, something stronger which seizes us and in which we are always already engaged. Gabriel Marcel famously distinguished between a mystery and a problem: “It seems, indeed,” he writes, “that between a problem and a mystery there is this essential difference: that a problem is something I encounter, that I find entirely displayed in front of me, and thus, that I can circumscribe and reduce—while a mystery is something in which I am myself engaged, which is therefore conceivable only as a domain in which the distinction of the ‘in me’ and the ‘in front of me’ loses its meaning and its initial value.”⁸ It is thus far from certain that the attitude of the atheist can only be defined as a stepping backward in the face of mystery or as a rejection of mystery, as it is also at play in faith, and one could even propose to broaden the meaning of the “religious” in order to understand it otherwise than as the belonging to a religious community defined by dogmas or beliefs. As Thomas Mann suggests: “We live and die in mystery, and one can eventually call ‘religious’ the awareness that one has of this fact.”⁹

Neither of the two terms of the disjunction believer/atheist is, therefore, a simple one. Our living in societies including believers and atheists implies, first of all, the necessity of sharing different, but probably not incommensurable experiences. First, it should not be forgotten that the Christian was defined, at the beginning, as a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Atheism, Faith, and Experience
• Part One The Experience of Atheism
• 2 Atheistic Experience
• 3 Desire and Inertia
• 4 No Gods, No Masters—Anarchism and Religious Experience
• 5 Nothingness against the Death of God—Mallarmé’s Poetics after 1866
• 6 There Is No Experience of Pure Atheism—Michel Serres and the Schema of Unbelief
• Part Two The Atheisms of Faith
• 7 Theism, Atheism, Anatheism
• 8 Apocalypse or Revelation?
• 9 Atheism and Critique
• Part Three The Phenomenality of the Religious
• 10 The Death of God—Sartre against Heidegger
• 11 Materialism, Social Construction, and Radical Empiricism—Debating the Status of “Experience” in the Study of Religion
• 12 Atheism, Religion, Experience (and Metaphysics?)
• 13 On Seeing Nothing—A Critique of Marion’s Account of Religious Phenomenality
• 14 Doubling Metaphysics
• Index
• Copyright