Genealogy’s End

Last updated on: June 22, 2020 at 10:54 am by John Ehrett

Genealogy’s End 2020-06-22T10:54:33-05:00 John Ehrett

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

After Nietzsche, where does (secular) philosophy go?

Or, put a different way, given the ubiquity of “criticism” as an approach to philosophical inquiry—that is, the process of ascertaining and challenging the presuppositions underlying truth-claims, as opposed to setting forth a cohesive affirmative project—it’s not unreasonable to ask where the deconstructive process ends. With everything seemingly up for grabs, is there any intellectual destination in mind? Continental philosopher Patricia MacCormack certainly thinks so—and in her recent book The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene, she invites her audience to agree. It isn’t clear, though, that anyone will be inclined to take her up on the offer.

MacCormack, a professor at Anglia Ruskin University and longtime advocate for animal rights, isn’t satisfied with vegetarianism, or even veganism, as an ethical model of human engagement with the world. Rather, for MacCormack, given the depredations wrought by humankind on the domain of nonhuman creatures, the only ethical course of action for human beings is voluntary extinction—a total cessation of reproduction and an embrace of inevitable death. Antinatalism, in short, is the only permitted future.

But MacCormack refuses to treat this deconstructionist destiny as joyless or despondent. Specifically, MacCormack redefines the concept of grace in order to deploy it as the ethical linchpin for her system. MacCormack’s “grace” is not forgiveness, or a mode of creative perfecting; it is strictly a leaving-be, a refusal to interfere or act that is indistinguishable from brute indifference. That “grace,” in turn, is mediated through practices and rites that deny transcendence and destabilize the frameworks of traditional sacramentology: “occulture,” or forms of spiritual revolt against the established socio-religious order, which might include the Satanism of Anton LaVey or the Thelema of Aleister Crowley. At every turn, the orientation-toward-annihilation imperative is foregrounded. So too, MacCormack proposes a far greater engagement with the possibilities of the human corpse, which she freely admits include cannibalism—the only ethical form of meat consumption, according to MacCormack—and necrophilia.

As should be clear, it’s hard to think of a more disordered—in the theological sense—stance. The classical Augustinian definition of evil, after all, is privatio boni, the sheer absence of the good. And MacCormack’s book reflects a profound turn away from the goodness of being and a kind of exultation in the process of decreation and destruction. This isn’t standard village-atheist stuff; even a critic of religion as strident as Richard Dawkins clearly possesses a profound sense of wonder at the beauty of the natural world and an abiding desire to investigate that world—which makes one think that for Dawkins, the real barrier to belief is a defective concept of God, rather than God as such. Rather, MacCormack’s is a full-bore, reasoned-through repudiation of the classical theological-philosophical tradition at every step.

But it isn’t a logically sound repudiation, because there is a critical flaw underpinning MacCormack’s analysis: the a priori exclusion of the possibility that the nonhuman world may take as much joy in usas we do in them. As I was in the middle of writing this, my cat bounded down the basement stairs and settled herself on my lap, purring all the while. It’s frankly impossible for me to believe that she’d be happier living and dying as an alley cat in the streets of Guyana (where she was born). For a book that decries anthropocentrism on virtually every page, MacCormack’s volume excels at projecting a very human sense of self-centeredness and existential angst into the nonhuman sphere; in seeking to flee anthropocentrism, she simply inscribes it all the more.

Most people of a normal cast of mind will have no interest in wading into MacCormack’s dark waters. But The Ahuman Manifesto is, if nothing else, a sobering look at the destination of any philosophy that has no goal but annihilation. If the creed of Satan is indeed, as John Milton put it, “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” and some measure of self-love is (as classical thought would hold) integral to the rational life, in her unadulterated extinctionism MacCormack may offer a philosophy worse than hell itself. And that, in a twisted sort of way, is no easy feat.

Political Theory

Previous Post

June 18, 2020

The Old Gods or the New? A Review of Tara Isabella Burton’s “Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World”

Next Post

June 29, 2020 Homer and the Human Experience

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Culture Ecclesiology Education Imagination Movies Political Theory Scripture Uncategorized Worship

Select a Month December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 June 2019 April 2019 January 2019 December 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which book in the New Testament is the shortest?

Select your answer to see how you score.

2 John 3 John Jude Philemon