Slavoj Žižek, Leszek Kołakowski, and the Ontological Gap

“I would argue that we must vigilantly guard against viewing ourselves as gods or otherwise infusing and inflating our fallible natures and politics with a divine authority.”

I was very appreciative to have Matt McManus indulge my pretenses at engaging in political and religious philosophy through publishing his excellent reply to my comment on his work. McManus made some very salient points, and I appreciated the clarification of his argument and targets of his critique. His comments on the Protestant roots of some of the figures whom I ascribe to Gnosticism are especially worth further comment and research some time in the future. Perhaps appropriately, considering the topic, I would like to beg for more indulgences and extend the conversation away from the book The Monstrosity of Christ to comment more generally on the question of ontological incompleteness. This is perhaps the area that I feel is most interesting about our dialogue and most relevant to my own work and research.

Whose Ontological Incompleteness Is It, Anyway?

First of all, I should say that McManus is correct in drawing attention to the difference between some more orthodox readings of Marx and Hegel as theorists of the absolute, and Žižek’s own reading. Žižek (drawing heavily on Lacan), within his more theoretical works such as Less Than Nothing and The Sublime Object of Ideology, stresses the ontological gap within every conceptual framework that the individual is able to arrive at regarding the world and his place within it. As McManus points out, Žižek sees this incompleteness as being a product of the material world itself and has—in more recent works—started to explore quantum physics, seemingly in support of this. A form of ontological incompleteness is also, however, a position which a number of perennial, broadly conservative, and religiously influenced theorists also hold, some of whom I mentioned in my previous essay.

Voegelin also professes ontological incompleteness yet identifies the ontological “gap” between the self and the absolute as emerging from a different origin point than Žižek’s materialistic view. Voegelin, instead, stresses the interrogating effect on the individual that the existence of the transcendent (or absolute) necessitates by our attempts to conceive of it. He sees this effect of the transcendent as being the actual source of the psychological experience of ontological incompleteness (rather than it being constituted within the material world itself). Therefore, we are aware of our relative incompleteness owing to our encounter with this transcendent completeness extrinsic to us. He states that there is always an “extra” question that this transcendence raises against the sedimented ideological positions (psychological, political, or otherwise) adopted by the ego of the individual subject. Voegelin also states that the existence or non-existence of this transcendent question, which disturbs the psychological complacency of the subject, constitutes the difference between the authentic philosopher and the ideologist. For Voegelin, those who resist the question and, therefore, resist both transcendence and their own relative incompleteness become reduced to mere ideologists: dogmatic and self-enclosed worshippers of theoretical idols, rather than true thinkers.