Can There Be a Theology of Disenchantment? Speculative Realism, Correlationism, and Unbinding the nihil in Tillich

Abstract

Contemporary philosophy seems to be showing signs of dissatisfaction with an agnostic orthodoxy that has been, according to some, all too comfortable for religion. Beginning with what Quentin Meillassoux ironically calls the “Ptolemaic” counterrevolution of Immanuel Kant, and continuing in both continental and Anglo-American contexts in the forms of phenomenology, linguistic analysis, and pragmatism, philosophy in the modern period has in one way or another disavowed knowledge of the “thing-in-itself.”¹ New realists, such as Meillassoux, charge that in so doing it has carved out a philosophical niche to shelter some of its most prized notions (God, freedom, and immortality, to recall Kant’s own program) from the withering impact of the properly revolutionary turn in cosmological thinking inaugurated by Copernicus. Meillassoux labels this long-standing philosophical tradition “correlationism,” because it maintains that access to objects as they are in themselves is barred—we have access to objects only as correlates of particular perspectives held by knowing subjects.