A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life

But the struggle against Plato, or to express it more plainly and for “the masses,” the struggle against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia—for Christianity is Platonism for “the masses”—has created in Europe a magnificent tension of spirit such as has never existed on earth before: with so tense a bow one can now shoot for the most distant targets.

The fact that this materialism of the encounter has been repressed by the philosophical tradition does not mean that it has been neglected by it: it was too dangerous for that. Thus it was very early on interpreted, repressed and perverted into an idealism of freedom. If Epicurus’ atoms, raining down parallel to each other in the void, encounter one another, it is in order to bring out, in the guise of the swerve caused by the clinamen, the existence of human freedom even in the world of necessity. Obviously, producing this misreading, which is not innocent, suffices to preclude any other reading of the repressed tradition that I am calling the materialism of the encounter: whenever one sets out from this misreading, idealist interpretations carry the day, whether what is in question is just the clinamen or all of Lucretius, as well as Machiavelli, Spinoza and Hobbes, the Rousseau of the second Discourse, Marx and even Heidegger (to the extent that Heidegger touched on this theme). What triumphs in these interpretations is a certain conception of philosophy and the history that we can, with Heidegger, call Western, because it has presided over our destiny since the Greeks; and also logocentric, because it identifies philosophy with a function of Logos charged with thinking the priority of Meaning over all reality. To free the materialism of the encounter from this repression; to discover, if possible, its implications for both philosophy and materialism; and to ascertain its hidden effects wherever they are silently at work—such is the task that I have set myself here.