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International Studies in Philosophy 38.1

THE SECRET RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
Amy Newman

Modern philosophy presents us with amalgams which testify to

its vigour and vitality, but which also have their dangers for the
spirit. A strange mixture of ontology and anthropology, of athe-
ism and theology. A little Christian spiritualism, a little Hegelian
dialectic, a little phenomenology (our modern scholasticism) and
a little Nietzschean fulguration oddly combined in varying pro-
portions. We see Marx and the Pre-Socratics, Hegel and Nietzsche,
dancing hand in hand in a round in celebration of the surpassing
of metaphysics and even the death of philosophy properly speak-
ing. (Deleuze, NP, 195)

If one were to attempt to identify the central themes of twentieth-

century philosophy, one of the most prominent would have to be a
renewed concern, represented in the line of thought running from
Nietzsche through Heidegger to Derrida, with overcoming meta-
physics. The idea that there remains a metaphysical or ontotheolog-
ical core at the heart of philosophy is, of course, not uncontrovers-
ial. While some contemporary philosophers pursue the seemingly
endless task of rooting out and eliminating residual metaphysical
elements within philosophical discourse, others assume that the
demise of metaphysics as a concern for philosophers is a fait accom-
pli , an event in the distant philosophical past.
Both conceptions of the nature and status of philosophy as a
discipline, however, rely on what might be called the “standard
history of modern philosophy,” according to which the discipline
of philosophy as it is practiced today came into existence out of its
opposition to metaphysics. According to this narrative, philosophy
as an autonomous academic discipline was born of a heroic strug-
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gle between modern scientific consciousness and religious dogma

during the early modern period that culminated in the period of
rapid intellectual progress known as the Enlightenment. The figures
we think of today as early modern philosophers, it is often pointed
out, were really scientists and mathematicians who engaged in
philosophical activity in order to develop effective arguments to
the effect that scientific inquiry should be able to proceed without
ecclesiastical interference.
The Modern period in philosophy, which roughly spans the years
1600–1800, is traditionally seen as encompassing profound changes
in European thinking about the universe and humanity’s place in
it. These changes were vital to the development of contemporary
Western culture and science, and hence, twentieth-century life.
Despite their dramatic nature, these changes were in fact part of
a long process that involved freeing people from the authoritari-
an tradition of the Church. (Thomson, BK, 1)
Philosophy as we know it today, according to this narrative,
was born of intellectual activity inspired by what Bertrand Russell
describes as the “long fight between science and dogma” that was
ongoing in European academic culture between the seventeenth and
nineteenth centuries (Russell, HWP, 493). From this standpoint,
contemporary Western academic philosophy is not so much the
legacy of the ancient Greeks as it is the legacy of modern scientific
consciousness. This is why Russell can say that “until the seven-
teenth century, there was nothing of importance in philosophy.”
Similarly, Richard Rorty incorporates this traditional narrative
into his influential version of the story of the birth of modern phi-
losophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The birth of modern
philosophy, Rorty contends, with Russell, was a direct consequence
of “the warfare between science and theology,” a conflict won by
heroic secular intellectuals who sought to liberate intellectual life
from religious domination (Rorty, PMN, 131).1 Philosophers sought
liberation not only from the political authority of the institutional
Church, but also from religion itself, understood as the universal
human tendency to imagine the existence of some sort of superna-
tural metaphysical reality. “Until the power of the churches over
science and scholarship was broken, the energies of the men we
now think of as ‘philosophers’ were directed toward demarcating
their activities from religion. It was only after that battle had been
won that the question of separation from the sciences could arise”
(Rorty, PMN, 131–132). Thus, according to Rorty, “the idea of ‘phi-
losophy’ itself, in the sense in which it has been understood since
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the subject became standardized as an academic subject in the nine-

teenth century, was not yet at hand” prior to the seventeenth cen-
tury (Rorty, PMN, 131–132). But by the nineteenth century, Rorty
contends, “metaphysics had been displaced by physics,” and phi-
losophy had differentiated itself from science and established a
place for itself in modern academe by making epistemology its
central focus (Rorty, PMN, 132, 136).
Such optimistic assessments of the status of the war on met-
aphysics are called into question, of course, by the fact that the
metaphysical elements within philosophy continue to rear their
thorny little heads. It is well-known that even some of the most profound-
ly anti-metaphysical thinkers of past centuries have turned out to be, in
retrospect, up to their necks in unacknowledged metaphysical as-
sumptions. Although it has become almost mandatory for contem-
porary philosophers to display a kind of professional disinterest in
the metaphysical, if not to disavow it outright, what seems like an
almost irrepressible impulse to engage in metaphysical specula-
tion continues to lurk not far beneath the surface of much of Euro-
pean and American philosophical discourse.
A complexity of issues arises at this juncture. First, there is the
question of whether the standard account of contemporary philos-
ophy’s origin continues to be useful as a way of justifying either
what philosophy has become or its continued existence. There is
little doubt that many a philosopher has been inspired to pursue
the discipline because of this rousing tale in which philosophia, en-
slaved to theology by the medieval Church, gains her independ-
ence and embarks on a life of her own: the downtrodden handmaid-
en of theology rises out of her lowly status to become (once again)
queen of the sciences. It is less than clear that this story continues
to provide a helpful way of defining the proper reach and scope of
philosophy as a discipline in the twenty-first century.
A related issue is that of the extent to which the Christian ele-
ments of the Western philosophical tradition have become so en-
grained in this tradition that even philosophers who oppose them-
selves to religion still deploy them continuously, albeit seemingly
unconsciously. The question of the nature of the Christian pres-
ence in contemporary philosophical discourse seems to have be-
come, to a great extent—like metaphysics more generally—a forbid-
den subject in the mainstream American academic philosophical
community. As Jean-Luc Nancy has observed, the question of “in
what way and exactly how” philosophers remain “Christians” is
“no longer the sort of question that is being asked” (Nancy, “DC,”
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112). The “massive Christian frame of reference,” he suggests, has

been “systematically eclipsed as an explicit frame of reference by and
within philosophy,” despite the fact that philosophy as a disci-
pline has been “axially constituted” around this tradition, whether
by subordination or opposition to it (“DC,” 112).
Still another important issue for contemporary philosophers is
the question of what this Christian frame of reference means for
the future of philosophy. Both those philosophers who have de-
spaired of ridding modern Western philosophy of its metaphysical
elements and those who see philosophy as having completed this
task have called for the end of philosophy. Heidegger is, of course,
the paradigmatic example of such a response. Both points of view
are found in the Heideggerian text, i.e., the belief that philosophy
has already expelled metaphysics from its domain and the belief
that this is an ongoing and perhaps impossible (and perhaps even
unnecessary) task. In Heidegger’s view, investigation of the realm
of what is empirically verifiable had, by the early twentieth cen-
tury, been taken over by the various scientific disciplines, and the
abstract universe that remained, structured according to the re-
quirements of Western onto-theo-logic, should eventually achieve
universal acceptance. The technological innovations born of West-
ern science would facilitate this process, Heidegger believed, bring-
ing about a new world order by transforming forms of life in every
culture so that they would become structurally similar to the Eu-
ropean—or more specifically, early twentieth century German—
way of life. This is the viewpoint expressed by Heidegger when he
claims that philosophy will soon realize its purpose and complete
its task: “the end of philosophy means the beginning of the world
civilization based upon Western European thinking” (Heidegger,
BW, 377).
The fact that Heidegger could still harbor this fantasy of uni-
versal European intellectual domination at the end of his career,
especially after the horrors that had unfolded on the Western Eu-
ropean landscape during his lifetime, approaches incomprehensi-
bility. At the very least, this aspect of Heidegger’s system reveals
clearly the extent to which his own thinking was riddled with met-
aphysical assumptions. In fact, we find in Heidegger’s thinking an
interesting convergence that provides an opening into the central
issue with which I am concerned in this paper. To put this issue in
the form of a question: What is the significance of the fact that con-
ceiving of philosophy’s primary task as “overcoming metaphysics”
can be construed by one of the most brilliant philosophers of the
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past century as logically consistent with a desire for the universal

domination of European Christian ontotheological reality? This is
the latent agenda in Heidegger’s thought that has found its way
even into contemporary critical theory, via the kind of habitual,
unreflective, anti-metaphysical rhetoric that pervades current phil-
osophical discourse, often especially that conceived as the most
radical or progressive.
Consider, for example, the significance of the fact that Ameri-
can and European philosophical activists often continue to frame
their critiques of the discipline of philosophy, either explicitly or
implicitly, as a continuation of the Enlightenment project of over-
coming metaphysics. It is as if the project of overcoming meta-
physics remains the one facet of the modern conception of philoso-
phy with which even the most devoted critics of contemporary
philosophy cannot bear to part, despite the fact that pursuing this
so single-mindedly is exactly what keeps them trapped within the
system they seek to disrupt. It is important to understand why this
is the case.
In order to comprehend what is going on here, it may be helpful
to begin with an historical counternarrative constructed by French
classicist Pierre Hadot, in What is Ancient Philosophy? Hadot main-
tains that when philosophy was first invented, it was understood
and practiced as adherence to a chosen set of ethical, social, or po-
litical values. During the Hellenistic period, for instance, one could
choose among a virtual smorgasbord of philosophical schools—Pla-
tonism, Stoicism, Sophism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, Skepticism,
and so forth—each of which represented a way of life. The most
radical break with this ancient conception of philosophy, in Ha-
dot’s narrative—which so far follows the standard account—oc-
curred during the medieval period, when the Church achieved he-
gemony in Europe and enslaved philosophy to Christian theology.
Philosophy, as a result, became “above all a discourse, which may
be theoretical and systematic, or critical, but in any case lacks a
direct relationship to the philosopher’s way of life” (Hadot, WAP,
252).2 Or as Julia Annas has put it, “With Christianity a single in-
tellectual view of the world was imposed, and philosophy was
mostly unable to continue its task of questioning and reasoning
about our beliefs” (Annas, AP, 114).
It is at this juncture that Hadot’s counternarrative departs sig-
nificantly from the standard account of the history of modern phi-
losophy. By the time of the Enlightenment, according to Hadot, the
Christian reduction of philosophy to technê had become norma-
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tive, and it was this mere shell of what philosophy once was—or
at least the parts of it that were compatible with Christian doctrine
—that formed the core of the discipline as we know it today. De-
spite the often virulent attacks upon religion for which Enlighten-
ment philosophers came to be known, philosophy continued to
operate within a universe the fundamental features of which were
determined by the Christian worldview. While the metaphysical
assumptions embedded in this worldview were attacked and re-
jected on the surface, the dynamic logical structure of the Chris-
tian universe continued to be determinative for the discipline of phi-
losophy—for its self-conception and for the problems with which it
concerned itself.
Hadot’s image of modern philosophy as the eviscerated re-
mains of medieval Christian theology is in agreement with more
conventional histories of philosophy to the extent that it leaves un-
criticized the notion of a dramatic rupture in the history of West-
ern Christian intellectual culture, such that the name “philosophy”
came to be attached to a novel discipline bearing little resemblance to
what philosophy used to be. Where Hadot’s narrative differs from
the standard account is in his revaluation of this reconstituted dis-
cipline and his reluctance to accept it as normative, not to mention
necessary and inevitable. In effect, Hadot transvalues modern phi-
losophy in the Nietzschean sense, so that what is taken by the stan-
dard account as a progressive development is recast as degenerative.
It is precisely here that Derrida’s contribution to this overall
discussion—and especially the question of the nature of the task of
overcoming metaphysics and what this means for the future of
philosophy as a discipline—can best be understood. Derrida revi-
talized this entire field of inquiry by arguing convincingly that even
many of the most vehemently anti-metaphysical Western thinkers
of the past three hundred years not only did not overcome meta-
physics, but in most cases inadvertently perpetuated conventional
metaphysical thinking. Derrida’s work opened up new vistas of
inquiry and invigorated the discipline as a whole in the late twen-
tieth century. One might say that Derrida was able to step back
from the project of surpassing metaphysics as it had taken shape
from Nietzsche to Heidegger, and show, for example, how both
Nietzsche and Heidegger might be added to the list of those phi-
losophers who have helped to sustain a very conventional view of
philosophy as a discipline.
The basic structural elements of the European Christian world-
view have been fairly well dissected in recent decades: it is or-
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ganized according to a binary oppositional logic which continually

generates new, higher-level oppositions, proceeding according to
what Derrida calls a “ternary rhythm (Oedipus, Trinity, Dialectics)”
that is itself deeply rooted in the medieval synthesis of trinitarian
theology and Aristotelian syllogistic logic (Derrida, D, 25, 352). In
accordance with this logic, certain elements of human experience
were identified, isolated and categorized as “religious,” while oth-
er elements were excluded, producing the religious/nonreligious
(or antireligious) opposition that has come to define modern West-
ern philosophy. As Daniel Dubuisson explains:
This opposition runs through the intellectual history of the Chris-
tian West and, synchronically, if we so wish to view it, most of
its domains of knowledge. It engenders and fuses with an im-
mense paradigm, composed of two symmetrical but opposed cur-
rents. . . . Assembled on one side are all those who associate the
world “religion” with the recognition of a transcendence, what-
ever its exact nature and attributes. And in the opposite camp
are the countless heirs of Epicurus and Lucretius (freethinkers,
materialists, atheists, rationalists, scientists) who recognize in re-
ligion nothing more than a human creation. . . . (Dubuisson, WCR,
15–16)
This paradigm produced the formula, in turn, according to which
“reality, true reality, serious reality, the reality science likes to spec-
ulate about, could issue from a simple subtraction: global reality
minus fantastic reality equals objective reality” (Dubuisson, WCR,
20).
Derrida provides a helpful critique of some of the most popu-
lar strategies that have been used by critical, anti-metaphysical
philosophers in their efforts to undermine this fantastic structure,
such as reversal and transvaluation. While he maintains that critical
inquiry “involves an indispensable phase of reversal,” Derrida at
the same time warns that to “remain content with reversal is of
course to operate within the immanence of the system to be de-
stroyed” (D, 6). Examples of reversal as critique would be Marx’s
effort to turn Hegelianism on its head, Nietzsche’s portrayal of
Christianity as Judaism universalized, or mid-twentieth-century
American feminist theories that hinged on the idea of a simple
transposition of the power relations that exist between women and
men but that lacked an adequate analysis of the structure of domi-
nation itself.
The second strategic option that Derrida identifies is “to sit
back, in order to go further, in order to be more radical or more dar-
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ing, and take an attitude of neutralizing indifference,” so as to

“give free rein to the existing forces that effectively and historical-
ly dominate the field” (D, 6). This was the approach advocated by
the early twentieth-century lebensphilosophen, and this is the junc-
ture at which Derrida broke ranks with figures like Dilthey and
Heidegger most definitively. Heidegger’s involvement with the
social and political realities of his time revealed clearly the extent
to which, when push came to shove, his apparent philosophical rad-
icalism continued to be rooted in a staunch conservatism, a kind of
blind reverence for what is (or what appeared to him to be).
One curious post-Derridean trend that merits further analysis
in this context is the extent to which Derrida’s work has revived
interest in and even admiration for Heidegger. One never gets the
sense, reading Derrida, that Derrida has been lulled into compla-
cency in regard to the true nature of Heidegger’s slippery philo-
sophical “radicalism.” But one often gets this sense when reading
contemporary disciples of Derrida, who seem not to fully grasp
the extent to which the whole of Derrida’s work may be seen as a
challenge to the revolutionary potential of Heideggerian logic. Hei-
degger remains a charismatic figure for many who have adopted
deconstruction as their primary mode of criticism, and who are of-
ten willing to overlook both his early and late theological commit-
ments, especially his understanding of philosophy itself as rooted
in Christian ontotheology.
The purely methodological character of Heidegger’s atheism
exemplifies this tendency in his thought. As Laurence Paul Hem-
ming argues, Heidegger’s atheism was “an explicitly Christian af-
fair” (much as the death of God was in Nietzsche’s system, or the
critique of Judaism in Marx’s) (Hemming, HA, 18). Atheism in Hei-
degger’s thought, indeed the whole range of his thought in regard
to the nature of the metaphysical elements in philosophy, was,
according to Hemming, merely an expression of the long-standing
“systematic concern” in modern European philosophy with “the
way in which philosophy has become entwined with Christianity”
(HA, 18). Even deconstruction finds itself entangled in this web,
being derived as it is from Heidegger’s Destruktion of metaphysics.
Derrida himself warns: “Let us never forget the Christian, in fact,
Lutheran, memory of Heideggerian deconstruction (Destrucktion
was first destructio by Luther, anxious to reactivate the originary
sense of the Gospels by deconstructing theological sediments)”
(Derrida, OT, 60).3 Heidegger, Derrida contends, “is never done
with Luther” and one should “never forget this Christian (Luther-
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an, Pascalian, Hegelian, Kierkegaardian, Marxian, and so forth)

memory when one reads Heidegger.” Similarly, Nancy maintains
that deconstruction “is itself shot through with Christianity” and
“is only possible from within Christianity” (Nancy, “DC,” 121–122).
Heidegger’s thought is but one example of the stubborn per-
sistence of an unacknowledged Christian metaphysical presence in
Western philosophy—though often posed, through reversal or sub-
lation, as an anti-metaphysical impulse. What has resulted from this
is the accumulation of layer upon layer of rhetorical convention
which serves to deeply disguise the religious origins of the struc-
tural metaphysics that continues to undergird much of contempo-
rary philosophical discourse.
This problematic issue is addressed with an unusual degree of
precision by Dubuisson, who asserts that Western atheism and
skepticism “define themselves only by reference to religion and its
claims.”
An atheist who denies the existence of the soul and of God, and
who believes in so doing that he or she possesses sovereign inde-
pendence of judgment, accepts, often unknowingly, the spirit
and terms of a debate (the soul/body dichotomy; a universe gov-
erned, or not, by divine providence) that religion has chosen.
(Dubuisson, WCR, 12)
Dubuisson argues, in effect, that the understanding of “religion”
that was determinative for the birth of philosophy as an independ-
ent academic discipline “retains a particular, synthetic symbolic
function” in European and American academic discourse, consti-
tuting “the locus in which the identity or figure of the West has in
principle been constituted and defined” (WCR, 29, 37).
Academic philosophers as much as theologians continue to as-
sume, for the most part, the most fundamental premises upon
which this definition of religion has been constructed, whether
they are themselves religious or not, and even when they are anti-
religious (and whether or not they have ever given any of this
much thought). As a result, philosophers often remain, according
to Dubuisson, much more than they realize, “bearers of a Christian
ideology,” because they continue to perpetuate a way of thinking
“organized around the word ‘religion’ and all that it represents and
presupposes” in the European Christian tradition (WCR, 30). “Instead
of believing in God,” Dubuisson asserts, “Western science and philosophy
. . . still believes in religion” (WCR, 193). 4
The concept of religion that has been determinative for the
construction of academic philosophy in Western cultures and that
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continues to pervade Western academic discourse is, as Dubuisson

explains, “the exclusive creation of the West” and “does not pos-
sess any equivalent in other cultures” (WCR, 15, 27). Religion, “the
word, the idea . . . represents an entirely original creation that the
West alone conceived and developed after having converted to
Christianity” (WCR, 190). Or as Jonathan Z. Smith has argued, the
concept of religion taken for granted in much of mainstream Euro-
pean and American scholarship has “no independent existence
apart from the academy,” having been created solely for analytic,
rhetorical, and polemical purposes by “imaginative acts of com-
parison and generalization” (Smith, IR, xi).5
“Religion” conceived in this way, Dubuisson continues, is a sim-
ple, obvious, universal phenomenon, a “timeless category” inhab-
iting a “distinct domain, autonomous and separated from others
. . . an original structure offering a unique set of stable elements and
relations” (Dubuisson, WCR, 167, 189). This conception of religion
became and remains “the West’s fundamental creation and central
reference point” and “ever appears as the essential locus, that on
which all others with very rare exception depend” (WCR, 11–12).
“In the West,” Dubuisson asserts, “the idea of religion is not and
never has been an idea like other ideas, but the one that condi-
tioned the form and content of the others, as well as the general
tenor of the debates or controversies in which it found itself en-
meshed” (WCR, 197).
The question must be asked: Does the seemingly indefatigable
Christian metaphysical presence within American and European
philosophy constitute an obstacle to be overcome or a fact of life?
There are those, Derrida among them, who seem to have despaired
of escaping this field. Derrida asserts at one point that this “con-
flictual, hierarchically structured field . . . can be neither reduced to
unity, nor derived from a primary simplicity, nor dialectically sub-
lated or internalized into a third term” and he concludes that “no
concept, no name, no signifier can escape this structure” (Derrida,
D, 25, 4). In a similar vein, Nancy asserts that “Christianity is co-
extensive with the West,” that “all our thinking, our very being, is
Christian through and through,” and that “the only way we could
escape this state of affairs is through a resource that would com-
pletely replace the Christian one without being either its impover-
ished reduction or its dialectical recuperation” (Nancy, “DC,” 115,
116).
Even the most vigorous and sustained efforts to disrupt this
logic—such as by turning it on its head or revaluing its terms—
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seem to have merely extended and broadened its reach. Post-Heg-

elian and post-Heideggerian assaults against this machine, from
Marx and the Left Hegelians to Nietzsche, and from poststructur-
alism and feminism to deconstruction and postcolonialism, seem to
have had little effect, at least “on the ground,” in practical terms.
Both inside and outside academe, most people still believe in re-
ligion, whether to embrace or oppose it. This state of affairs makes
it appear that the project of overcoming metaphysics is itself
metaphysical in nature, inasmuch as it remains a purely specu-
lative, idealistic (or nihilistic) proposal that doesn’t coincide with
reality. Or to look at it another way, supposing that metaphysical
thinking is an obstacle to be overcome seems itself to require met-
aphysical thinking, the hallmark of which is that it does not corre-
spond in any verifiable (or falsifiable) way to how things actually
are (or even appear to be). Imagining a world without metaphysi-
cal thinking is to imagine a world that does not exist and never
has. Not only this, but to spurn all metaphysical thinking would
seem to require that one be content with what is, which becomes
problematic when what is is characterized by a great deal of un-
necessary human suffering that could—at least in theory—be alle-
viated. From this standpoint, anti-metaphysical thinking seems to
be merely another way of living in a dream world.
The problem here is a very deep one for contemporary philos-
ophy, and particularly for those who believe that unless the disci-
pline of philosophy can expel every vestige of the metaphysical, it
will (or should) cease to exist, but who simultaneously wish to pur-
sue some kind of progressive social or political agenda. Some of
those who anticipate the demise of philosophy continue the work
of identifying, uncovering, and expelling metaphysical elements
from within philosophy, on the assumption that this will benefit
either philosophy as a discipline or society as whole. The paradox
here is that speculative thought would appear to be indispensable
to effective social criticism and the development of any effective
transformative ethical, social, or political agenda. The alternative
is to end up like Heidegger, so that one nihilistically accepts the
world as it is and the powers that be, regardless of the body count.
Or as Dilthey says at one point: “We accept what is evil, frightful,
and ugly, as having a place in the world, as containing some real-
ity that must be justified in the world system” (Dilthey, SW, 310).
The realization that the concept of religion to which academic
philosophy has opposed itself since its inception is a figment of
the Western imagination does not mean that philosophy should
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cease to exist, but it does imply that some widely accepted concep-
tions about what philosophy is, including some common assump-
tions about the boundaries of philosophy, are no longer viable. As
Hadot has reminded us in regard to the discipline of philosophy,
and as Dubuisson suggests in regard to the concept of religion—
there is no necessity about the way in which we have come to con-
ceive of either philosophy or religion: it could certainly have been
otherwise, or not at all. Perhaps many contemporary philosophers
have simply lost historical perspective, not fully grasping the im-
plications of the fact that the Heideggerian dilemma in which they
find themselves is of relatively recent origin, depending as it does
on a construction of the history of modern philosophy that was in-
vented as recently as the nineteenth century and which is itself by
no means logically necessary. Just as the Christian elements of the
Western philosophical tradition seem to have become so obvious
that many contemporary philosophers are simply no longer con-
scious of them, so have anti-metaphysical references within con-
temporary philosophical discourse become so habitual that most
professional philosophers no longer question them.
It is not hard to imagine a starting point for philosophy that
would not give priority to engagement with Christian metaphysics
or take for granted the Western construction of religion. Surely this
has been the case all along in non-Christian cultural traditions! Sus-
pension of belief as a way of life, and not just in regard to a partic-
ular set of culture-specific metaphysical assumptions, is modeled in
Socratic ignorance, Indian logic, and Buddhist meditation. Plenty of
non-Christian individuals in Western cultures live with an acute
and often uncomfortable awareness of the pervasiveness of Chris-
tian beliefs and values, and many people grow up in non-Western
cultures with little interest in or awareness of the content of Chris-
tian doctrine. Derrida’s perspicacity, for instance, was to a large
extent a direct result of his status, at least in the beginning, as an
“outsider” in relation to European Christian culture. The stand-
points of multiple outsiders, borderland dwellers, and poorly as-
similated “others” provide plenty of readily accessible alternatives
to traditional Western metaphysical and religious constructions.
One possible future direction for contemporary philosophy
might to be to engage more deliberately in comparative studies—
comparative metaphysics, for example, or comparative epistemol-
ogies—as a way of loosening the hold of the Western model of re-
ligion on philosophical inquiry. What most often causes academic
philosophers to be averse to this approach is a dread of having to
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grapple with alternative metaphysical systems, coupled with a ten-

dency to dismiss these systems out of hand as “religious” systems
on the Western model. Rejection of religion as it has been con-
structed in Western philosophical discourse is often conceived as a
rejection of “religion” universally, a position that merely recapitu-
lates the Western construction of religion and allows this notion to
continue to determine the structure of Western philosophy and to
interfere with developing an understanding of other structural
models, familiarity with which might serve to decenter the Western
construction of philosophy.
The contemporary tendency of American philosophers in par-
ticular either to ignore religion altogether or to engage in a kind of
routine, predictable, rhetorical disparagement of metaphysics or
“religion” serves to drive many important issues underground and
at the same time to energize the unacknowledged metaphysical
presence that pervades much of contemporary philosophical dis-
course—and ironically, particularly the discourse of many of those
who sincerely believe that metaphysics died in the seventeenth
century.
Dubuisson makes the interesting suggestion that a new field or
discipline be invented—within or alongside the conventional dis-
cipline of philosophy—that would focus on the rather odd class of
ideas constituted by different forms of the belief that reality is else-
where or different than it appears (Dubuisson, WCR, 204). This field
or discipline would involve the study of what he terms “cosmo-
graphic formations” and would overlap with not only metaethics,
critical social theory, and criticism of philosophy, but also critical
theories of religion and the comparative study of religions. One of
the most interesting recent developments in the field of religious
studies is the growing consensus among scholars in that field that
perhaps the most fascinating thing about religion is not religion It-
self, whatever that is, but rather the fact that people continue to
believe in a wide range of differently constituted immaterial reali-
ties, despite everything: the development of sophisticated scientif-
ic explanations of reality, the findings of the historical-critical study
of religion, the articulation of highly developed logical arguments
for skepticism, atheism, and agnosticism.
The new field of study recommended by Dubuisson would not
be concerned with the traditional philosophical preoccupation with
the distinction between what is and what is not, or with continuing
the warfare between philosophy and metaphysics, but rather with
the analysis of the class of ideas asserting that reality is not what or
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where it seems to be. Such an approach might also include a meta-

analysis of the formation of social and political theories that advo-
cate the construction of as yet nonexistent but possibly more hu-
mane forms of social and political organization.
The metaphysical worlds that human beings construct are in
fact, as Dubuisson maintains, “bizarre, unexpected, ephemeral con-
structions,” although they are rarely recognized as such by the
majority of persons who create, perpetuate, and sustain them, in-
cluding philosophers (WCR, 206). What humanity as a whole or in
particular communities—including the academic community—has
not yet achieved is the ability to consistently see their own imagin-
ative creations as such. It seems imperative to find more effective
ways to facilitate this process of discovery.

NOTES

1 Rorty attributes this phrase to the Irish historian W. E. H. Lecky, author

of History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865), but
the phrase was a common one. See also, for example, Andrew H. White’s A
History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom (1896).

2 See also Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socra-
tes to Foucault, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995).

3 See also Iain Thomson, “Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger’s De-

struktion of Metaphysics,” in International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8, no. 3
(October 2000): 297–327.

4 Emphasis mine.

5 The idea that the Western concept of “religion” is strictly a European

Christian invention, while largely ignored in the field of philosophy, is fairly
commonplace in the field of religious studies, where a tremendous body of re-
search exists questioning the definition of the term “religion” and the class of
ideas that have been categorized as “religious” by Western scholarship during
the past three centuries. Over forty years ago, Wilfred Cantwell Smith pub-
lished a groundbreaking work, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York:
Macmillan, 1963), in which he interrogated the common assumption that relig-
ion as defined in Western scholarship was a universal phenomenon.
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