copyright: overend@cf.ac.uk
On the “Death
of God”
and rise of post-onto-theology
In this paper I want to do just two apparently small things, which, of
course, are not so small as they may initially seem. (Isn’t that always the
case!)
The first is to consider what we mean by “atheism”, and show that the
notion of God that was rejected by Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Freud and Marx was
that of the Western theological tradition that was defined by Greek ontological
philosophy. I will argue that they all mark the passing of an era that
Heidegger characterises with the neologism onto-theology,[1]
which is an era that has been co-extensive with the Christian tradition. This
part, then, is explanatory.
The second thing I aim to do, alongside this, is argue that in spite of
the apparent atheistic intentions of Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Freud and Marx,
there is a lack of ‘closure’ regarding the question about theology within their
critiques. Indeed, just where they define their closure of one tradition, they
create an opening for post-modern re-considerations of the question of theology
according to new criteria of what constitutes theology.
To do this I’m going to divide them into two convenient lines of
thinking: which are explorations of philosophical and psychological
openings, respectively. The first “philosophical” genealogy goes back to
Nietzsche, is developed by Heidegger and Derrida. This genealogy considers the
relationship between theology and ontology, which are identified together in
Heidegger’s neologism ‘onto-theology’. The other genealogy that I’m calling
“psychological” goes back to Feuerbach, as developed through Marx and Freud, an
opening that is explored by Jacques Lacan, and after him, by Irigaray and
Kristeva. This looks at projection and illusion, and relates the myths to
affects and desires.
I have called the result ‘post-onto-theology’. But just as
post-modernism is an advance on the modern using the critical method that was
made possible by modernity, I intend the prefix ‘post-’ in post-onto-theology
to be understood not just to mean ‘after’, but in some way a continuation and
advance of former ontological theology, without the ontology. It isn’t then a
reversion to the mythical traditions from which monotheism developed but a continuation
of reflection on what it is to be human.
I hope by doing this to show that that post-modern philosophy and
post-onto-theology are no longer the divided opponents of reality and
appearance, or truth and myth, as was characterised by modernity. Indeed, I’d
like to suggest that an appreciation of philosophy today requires one to
reconsider the genre of theology, as theology puts into question the very genre
that we call philosophy, puts into question its attempts at conceptual
“closure”.
In order to consider how this term “atheism” is used, so that we can
understand what it might mean, let me begin further back than Nietzsche; for
the charge of “atheism” has a long history. You’ll remember that Melitus
charged Socrates with not believing in the gods of the city-state ‘in the
slightest degree’; nor—when Melitus is pressed—in some other gods either. But,
according to Plato’s Apology, Socrates argues from the divine
things in the world about which he teaches, to the existence divine beings, but
his pursuit of wisdom is demanded by what he calls the God.[2]
This single God is imagined as beyond all lesser deities. This God is
associated with the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, and not the lusts of
deities of the mythical world of the Illiad and so on, to which the
whims of the human world could be ascribed.[3]
So Socrates’ apparent atheism actually advances a new idea of theology, from
the many to the One, a more real or true God. Of course, it also forms part of
Plato’s presentation of Socrates as one who is not attracted by the deceptive
appearances of the world, but in pursuit of ‘the real’ (to Ôn). But the philosophical idea is associated by
Plato and his followers with the Pythagorean ‘monad’[4]
and Parmenides’ ‘that which truly is’ (to ¢lhqhwj Ôn),
which is an identification of “divine-being” with “truth” that is transmitted
by Middle- and Neo-Platonism. Socrates’ defence will eventually mark the death
of the Greek deities, but only with the formation of this philosophical monotheism
with a new religion, Christianity, which Constantine both adopted and
transforms by making it the imperial religion after 312 c.e. This ‘atheism’, then, marks the begining of a revaluing
of theology that takes some 700 years or more to gain general acceptance.
This Greek ontological thinking defines Christian theology, although
there are significant differences between Christianity and Platonism. Aside
from the sotereological and sacrificial models of Christianity, which draw on
the Jewish idea of atonement, even Christian doctrine is not
straightforward Platonism. So, (for example) while Plato describes men as ‘the created image of the eternal gods’,[5] St Paul makes the distinction that man is
‘the image [e„kèn] of the glory of God’ while only Christ
is ‘the image (e„kèn) of
the invisible God’;[6] and John’s gospel, written later, develops
the idea of emanations, but
says this lÒgos
that came from God is equal with God and is God.[7]
But although Christian theology is reinterpretation of philosophical
models for its own purposes, it nevertheless largely adopted the philosophical
models of Greek thought. These models not only influence matters of belief or
doctrine, but underlie ethics and spirituality. For example, the ascetic ideals
of Christianity in detachment from the world in the monastic contemplative
tradition follows from Plotinus reading of Plato’s model of contemplation, which is to
‘attain’ [to] the contemplated, the deification of qeoria. Plato seeks
detachment from the corrupting nature of the world, where he says this ‘flight
is a likening to God as far as possible,’[8]
which for Plotinus is a monastic or solitary flight ‘from the alone to the
alone.’[9] Such
models enable Christian spirituality, its contemplative and monastic life,
which bares little resemblance to its Jewish origins. What I want you to note here though is that the models that Christianity
come to adopt and live by stem from Socrates’ form of atheism, that is,
his willingness to question the former gods. It is such an atheist move to a
new theology that I believe we are witnessing today, this time away from
ontology.
Now, let us consider our moderns (Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Freud and Marx)
and their ideas of God. I’ll separate my genealogies and first consider the metaphysical
ontological tradition of Nietzsche as taken up by Heidegger, before considering
what I’ve called the psychological tradition with it’s theories of illusions
and projections, as is taken up by Lacan. Of course, I should add, the
divisions are not that neat: for example, Nietzsche’s objections to
Christianity are in a major part because of the psychology of resentiment,
and Freud has undoubtedly read Nietzsche, as is apparent from his ideas of
Guilt.[10]
But bear with me, as the traditions develop into different approaches,
(approaches that my PhD is attempting to evaluate in ethical implications of
Levinas and Kristeva).
Nietzsche tells us a story of the death of God in his Gay Science. The
madman rushes into the market place crying 'I am looking for God! I am looking
for God I’ He is mocked by those there, but he ‘pierces them with his glances’
and says “Where has God gone?” he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him
- you and I. We are all his murderers. … God is Dead. God remains Dead. And we
have killed him.’[11]
This proclamation announces both the end of the Christian moral order and the
metaphysics on which it was founded.[12]
For Nietzsche, Christianity and Platonic ontology are identical. He says that
‘The Christian faith, which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is
divine’:[13] indeed he
calls Christianity ‘Platonism for the people’.[14]
Nietzsche, you
may recall, believed that Plato’s understanding of knowledge interpreted and
organized the changeable ‘becoming’ of life in terms of an intelligible and
static reality of ‘being’, but says this is the ‘introduction of
meaning, not “explanation”.’[15]
Logic was ‘the attempt…to understand the actual world according to a scheme of Being
devised by ourselves.’[16]
He said Plato ‘twisted the concept “reality” round and said: ‘What ye regard as
real is an error, and the nearer we get to the “Idea” the nearer we are to
“truth”. …It was the greatest of rechristenings’.[17]
In contrast, Nietzsche’s understood truth quite
differently from this scheme of being. He presents truth as metaphors that have
lost their metaphorical currency,
Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are
illusions, metaphors which have become worn and have lost their sensible force,
coins which have lost the imprint and which are therefore no longer regarded as
coins but as metal.[18]
I’ll leave aside the problems that a literal
reading of this by post-modernists raises, but let it be understood as
Nietzsche’s contrast with the ontological tradition of Platonism.
Yet Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, are
also moral. If truth is a construct, so too is morality, and so even is the
concept of self or ‘ego’,[19]
which he says is a creation of the structure of grammar. The self, and the
morality to which the individual is subject, are therefore cultural creations
just like our ideas of ‘being’. From this insight he question the values of
society, such as self-denial, which Nietzsche of course sees as involving a
negative psychology of ressentiment. His denial of Platonic metaphysics, then, is
fundamentally moral, because it created the life-denying asceticism of the
contemplative ‘woman’, as he puts it.[20]
It is a rejection of a metaphysical theoria
that ordered human praxis. It
follows for Nietzsche that the revaluation of moral values must overthrow this
Christian God, for this ontological God is high and great only in so far as the
subject lacking God is low and small. It is an attack on ontological ideas of
God, but Nietzsche says that ‘it is only the moral God that has been overcome.’[21]
Although Nietzsche seems to affirm atheism, a
closer examination shows that the notion of God that he rejects is one of
language and platonic thought. You see, according to Nietzsche, atheism also
fixes the non-existence of God as truth, a truth it rejects, but it lives under
the reign of the concept.[22]
Ultimately, the struggle is with language, as Nietzsche admits. ‘I fear we are
not getting rid of God because we still believe in
grammar’.[23]
But if Nietzsche’s claim for the Death of God
was an attempt to affirm atheism and close the issue of theology, as some
philosophers and theologians have interpreted,[24]
then it lacked closure. Heidegger recalls that Nietzsche’s ‘madman’ comes
‘crying incessantly “I seek God! I seek God!”’ and points out that he ‘has
nothing to do with the kind of men standing in the market place “who do not
believe in God”.’[25]
He does not consider this to be a ‘formula for unbelief.’[26]
Rather, Heidegger says, it is ‘the countermovement to’ or the ‘overturning of
metaphysics’.[27]
Heidegger shared Nietzsche’s view that
‘Philosophy is metaphysics’ and that ‘Metaphysics is Platonism’,[28] and agreed
that ‘Greek ontology and its history, …still determine the conceptual character
of philosophy today’.[29]
He says that ‘Nietzsche was right in saying that Christianity is Platonism for the people’.[30]
But that tradition of philosophy is what Nietzsche’s attack was addressed at,
not theology. Heidegger says,
‘The pronouncement “God is dead” means: The supersensory world is without effective power.
It bestows no life. Metaphysics, i.e., for Nietzsche, Western Philosophy
understood as Platonism, is at an end. Nietzsche
understands his own philosophy as the countermovement to metaphysics, and this
means for him a movement in opposition to Platonism.’ [31]
He reads
Nietzsche’s philosophy as an inversion of the metaphysical preference of the
intelligible over the sensible: ‘the countermovement to’ or the ‘overturning of
metaphysics’,[32] and this is a
project he wishes to advance in various phases of his wok, by the Destruktion of metaphysics,[33]
the ‘destructuring of the history of ontology’,[34]
or eventually simply by awaiting its overcoming and passing away.[35]
He agrees that ‘Western metaphysics…since its beginning with the Greeks has
eminently been both ontology and theology’[36]
and coins a neologism “onto-theo-logy” to show how theology and ontology have
been inseparable. Nietzsche’s ‘Death of God’ had simply meant the end of this
onto-theological tradition.[37]
In his later years Heidegger admitted to being ‘inclined’ to write theology,
(and may have attempted this in a paper called ‘Enowning’, translated in 1999,
though I haven’t been able to get hold of it.[38])
Such a theology would not be an onto-theo-logy. In
spite of appropriations of his thinking by philosophical theologians such as
John Macquarrie;[39] George
Steiner;[40] and John
Caputo,[41]
Heidegger denies that his Sein is
God.[42]
He states, ‘If I were to write a theology—to which I sometimes feel
inclined—then the word Being would
not occur in it. Faith does not need the thought of Being.’[43]
He considers faith to be about existential commitment, not Greek metaphysics.
He therefore seeks to speak religiously without the philosophical idea of
“God”, and says, ‘The godless thinking which must abandon the god of
philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine God.
Here this means only: godless-thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-logic
would like to admit.’[44]
His later interests in (or so called ‘turn’ to)
linguistic concerns considered language as po…hsij, creating a clearing (Lichtung); a
lightening for the dis-closing or unconcealment of Being and the unveiling of
truth[45]
to order human destining.[46]
In what Hölderlin called ‘a destitute time’?’[47],
Heidegger has recourse to the poetry of Trakl’s fourfold to name the “holy”,
which Heidegger believes is necessary for ‘only a god can save us’.[48]
But such poetic divinities are not the God of onto-theology. It may be that
Nietzsche’s use of the God Dionysus and prophet Zarathustra was already such
poetic theology, as it called to a new way of being.[49]
This opening provided by Heidegger leads to a change of interest in
theology, by philosophical theologians. John Caputo,[50]
an interpreter of Heidegger, considers his thinking to be a negative theology.
There is difficulty with this idea of negative theology as traditionally
negative theology has drawn on Neo-Platonism. Indeed, Derrida identifies the
two arguing that negative theology always posits ‘a
“superessentiality”; beyond the categories of meaning, a supreme being and an
indestructible meaning’. [51]
Derrida’s approach, you may know is to deny that presence behind the text. But
Heidegger’s Enowning speaks negatively, like apophatic mystics, saying,
‘God is neither “a being” nor a “not-being” - and also not commensurate with
be-ing’. This is not a superessential theology like the neoplatonic
model of negative theology. And in Writing
and Difference Derrida suggests we
open the text as ‘a fabric of traces marking the disappearance of an exceeded
God or of an erased man’.[52]
This provides theologians with another styles of negative theology, and so
Derrida too has been read as a new negative theologian by philosophers like
John Caputo,[53]
Kevin Hart,[54]
and Mark C Taylor.[55]
They seek to define theological language as the ‘trace’ of an exceeded God. In
fact, Caputo and Taylor seeks to think religiously without theology at all,
doing so through culture[56]
and art.[57] Even
conservative theologians since [such as John Milbank[58]
and Jean-Luc Marion[59]]
have thought of faith and God without “being”. So we see, theology has moved on
since the God that died with Nietzsche, with the birth of a new
post-ontological theology.
But let us return to those other moderns in the other genealogy that I
suggest begins with Feuerbach.
Psychology: Feuerbach, Marx and Freud.
The other tradition is one in which theology has been considered not in
terms of a more from ontology, but as projections and illusions, by which
humankind identifies its aspirations. I’ll try to be briefer in bringing their
ideas together, which is not too difficult as Marx and Freud can best be
understood in light of the German Idealist, Feuerbach.
Feuerbach famously said that ‘the secret of theology is anthropology’.[60]
Defining man in terms of what God is not, theology enabled man to consider what
he presently is, via negativa,[61]
while objectifying human ideals. He says, ‘Man, this is the mystery of
religion, projects his being into objectivity’.[62]
‘God as a morally perfect being is nothing else than the realised idea…the
moral nature of man posited as the absolute being’.[63]
Feuerbach believed that by decoding and reinterpreting theological statements
atheistically, society would be both emancipated from religion and come to
greater personal and social self-knowledge. Yet Feuerbach’s approach recognises
an important function of religious language in that is has been a means to
self-consciousness and has articulated human aspirations. Rather than close the
question of theology as “untrue”, he appears to suggest that to understand
society we could do to learn to read theology.
In part, Marx shares Feuerbach’s projectionist view: he says that ‘Man makes
religion, religion does not make man’.[64]
He develops this into areas of social taboo aswell, such as incest. But of course, he understood society in terms of class conflict, and within
this conflict-model of society viewed religion as the illusory happiness of a
palliative for the oppressed masses:
Religion is the
sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is
the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the
people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the
illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which
needs illusions. [65]
The point he was making made is that religion was a heart within
a heartless world, it did give release from the real pain. But religion was ‘a
false consciousness’ in that it misconstrued that real social need, providing
the wrong release from pain.[66]
By alienated people from their real needs and struggles it prevented the poor
from facing up to the inequality of their social position.[67]
Marx’s interest was in facing and changing the real social situation, and he
wants people to let go of religion, but Denys Turner notes that once again,
though he judges religion to be a false consciousness, there is nevertheless a
recognition that religion interprets the world, expresses real need and helps
social agents relate to the world. Religion is an ideological engagement with
the lived-world, by Marx, and is not just or merely a set of false
propositions. So although Marx is an atheist, Denys Turner notes that ‘the one
thing he was not was a simple atheist’: he judges that ‘Marx atheism is not
anti- but posttheistic. It is therefore postatheistic’.[68]
Or again, my final example is Freud. He also rejected religion, which he
is understood to have considered being an obsessional neurosis that arose out
of the Oedipus complex,[69]
and as a reaction of infantile helplessness.[70]
Like Marx, Freud compares religion with a
‘mass-delusion’ that ‘distorts the picture of the real world’[71]
and compares the consolations of religion with a narcotic.[72]
But apart from judging religion to be a “delusion”, Freud also calls
religious beliefs an “illusion” in recognition that they are derived from human
wishes, which for psychology is the essential character of an illusion.[73]
But if religious beliefs are derived from human wishes they might therefore be
analysed to consider those wishes and an aid to understanding people’s desires
that are articulated in religious beliefs and expressions. Freud even says that
religious beliefs have not only ‘arisen from the same need as have all other
achievements of civilization’, but have also sought to ‘rectify the
shortcomings of civilization’.[74]
Furthermore, Freud says in another place that illusions are ‘perhaps the most
important item in psychical inventory of a civilization’,[75]
and referring to the satisfaction and comfort of religious belief-illusions and
rituals he says: ‘We can only regret that certain experiences of life
and observations in the world make it impossible for us to accept the premise
of the existence of such a Supreme Being’.[76]
DiCenso, who notes some of these points,[77]
shows that there is a lack of consistency in Freud’s approach to religion.
While respecting the atheistic intention of Freud’s empirical critique and
positivist approach to religion, DiCenso’s reading of Freud shows that things
are not as Freud might have intended. In a Derridean-like move, he shows that
some of Freud’s key concepts are derived from religious discourse, and so are
themselves indebted to religion. He also shows the importance of psychical
reality (psychische Realität), for Freud, which Freud says has ‘a
particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality’.[78]
Psychical reality ‘plays a very large part in determining the form of our
external world’ as it is projected, says Freud, ‘for the building up of the
external world, though they [the projections] should by rights remain part of the
internal world.’[79] DiCenso
argues that although Freud intends to dismiss religion as an illusion, by
joining the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ in such ways, his apparently closed system
is left open to be later explored as a narcissistic and world-building imaginary
register, as it is by Lacan, Irigaray and Kristeva. Indeed, far from dismissing
illusion, Kristeva stresses the important function of illusion, saying that
‘the function of the psychoanalyst is to reawaken the imagination and to permit
illusions to exist’.[80]
Nietzsche’s rejection of truth as an ‘illusion’, Feurbach’s idea of a
theology as an imaginary projection, Freud’s rejection of religion as an
‘illusion’. But what are illusions and projection? The are imaginary ideas or
images, that are according to Freud, derived from human wishes. But if we take
an intentional approach, as with Husserl from whom consciousness is considered
as consciousness of, then as Sartre recognised, the Imaginary in some
way exists for us.[81]
It has an existence which is not being, but which informs our existence.
Religious ideas exist as story and desire, but we are moving to a
post-theistic, post-onto-theological imaginary ‘reality’.
I don’t want to attempt explaining Lacan’s gloss on this tradition,
except to identify that he develops an idea that between the inexpressible
Real, which is this reality that we are, and the social Symbolic, which the
structures of language and other such symbolic systems, there is something that
he calls the Imaginary.[82] This Imaginary domain has a vital function in Lacan’s thinking as it is
this Imaginary that helps a child move towards language. It is inevitably an
image that in some degree misrecognises the real, but is closer to it than the
symbolic, closer, that is, than rational language.
Many who enjoyed Lacan’s famous seminars take up this idea. Irigaray,
fully aware of Heidegger’s idea of poetry that destines, seeks to enable
women’s divining by a new poetic theology. This seeks to replace the
“phallogocentric” discourse of male theology and its rational economy of guilt
and sacrifice[83] for a woman’s theology with it’s own libidinal economy.[84]
She does this by uniting immanence and transcendence model of incarnate person,
in the self-realization of women’s becoming divine, which she says is ‘short of
or beyond all ontotheology’.[85]
For this, she argues, a new feminine theological
imagery is necessary. Kristeva takes this further, showing how each person’s
illusions express inner desires, the dynamics of the psyche. These writers,
along with Deleuze are brought together with the post-ontological tradition, by
such theological writers as Edith Wyschogrod. She wants to create a moral
paradigm of following ‘ideal’ characters, she calls ‘saints’.[86]
I’m not convinced by her moral models theory, but clearly it shows there is an
area of work to be continued.
I hope I’ve shown then that there is a lack of atheistic closure in each
of the modern philosophers that enables a return of interest in matters of
religion and theology within both ontological and psychological genealogies.
None of these returns is a return to the “onto-theological” metaphysical
tradition of Platonic Christianity or an acceptance of the truth claims of
proclaimed religious dogma. In Turner’s term, they are ‘posttheistic’.
In this post-theistic idea of religion, religious beliefs are not simply
wrong beliefs, according to some impossible idea of verification, they are
lived illusions and vitalising illusions, creative myths that continue to
evolve – even if the current phase of evolution is largely a reactionary
fundamentalism (that are seen in suicide bombings and other forms of religious
terrorism) that thereby adopts a modern and scientific paradigm for it’s claims
and centralised organizational structures, so revealing its indebtedness to
modernity and lack of mythological consciousness.
At the moment, there is now a large divide between the theology of
academia and the theology of the church (I live in that tension). In Judaism,
Reconstructionist Judaism, founded by Mordecai Kaplan continues to practice
religion as a myth for perpetuating cultural idenity, while Humanistic Judaism,
founded by Rabbi Sherwin Wine, removed all references to God from its prayer
book, and continues in an atheistic Judaism. Emmanuel Levinas is an Orthodox
atheist Jew, who is becoming well known to philosophers. Christianity has found
this transition to be more difficult, as its creeds were defined within that
ontological history. But ordained theologians, such as Don Cupitt (the former
Dean of Emmanuel Colleg, but not a practicing clergyman), and others like,
Bishop John Shelby Spong in the States, Rev Professor Lloyd Geering in New
Zealand and Bishop Richard Holloway, the former Anglican primate (or
archbishop) of Scotland, who all were members of practising religious
communities (at least until their retirement), have all made this transition.
There is a global network of such clergy and people, which called the Sea of
Faith network.
It is such a post-onto-theology, post-theistic theology or post-theology that I believe is of interest to philosophers. Philosophy needs to reconsider this new theology because it puts a question against the attempts at philosophical closure of modernity. “God” escapes such totalization, because theology is lived and never finally and conclusively thought. It therefore needs to be considered—not as a referential system having external reality or being,—but as a language game (in Wittgenstein’s vocabulary), as a house of being, dwelling and destining (in Heidegger’s), as a discourse of desire and imagination (in Lacan and Kristeva’s terminology), in all - as the impossibility of philosophical closure that questions the very enterprise that is philosophy, and which therefore makes theology a necessary part of our reflections on the nature of our philosophical genre. Theology talks about life in some way, and so any philosophy that deals with the lived-world or with ethics, from Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger onwards, needs to consider what is being said in theology, and indeed in the rituals and practices of the world religions.
However, as a final thought, we might remember that with Socrates’
atheism we saw a move beyond a former mythology to a new theology. It
eventually led to the decline of appreciation of mythology. Only in the 20th
century have cultures been appreciated for thinking in a mythological
framework. As we move beyond onto-theology, I think we need to avoid the
mistake that dismisses its system of thinking, even if we think it differently.
Rather, we might learn that mythology, ontology and post-ontology are all ways
of interpreting how we might live – and philosophy lives with the same
questions.
This paper was presented by Paul Overend
to a Postgraduate Seminar at Cardiff University, October 2002
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[1] Heidegger, ‘The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics’ in Identity and Difference
[2] Plato, Apology, §27-28, in J Ferguson Socrates: A source book,
[3] Neptune: ‘See now, how men lay blame upon us gods for what is after all nothing but their own folly.’ Homer Odyssey, Book 1 [Tr. by Samuel Butler] This shows a later reflection.
[4] According to Alexander Polyhistor’s history of Pythagoreanism, preserved in an extract of Diogenes Laertius’ Successions of Philosophers, cited F. M. Cornford’s Plato & Parmenides p.3.
[5] (Tim 37c). The falling short is exemplified in Diotima’s search for the Beautiful, (Symposium 209-10) Notably this is also a way of life, a practical philosophy: to have it in eternal possession and to live by it (Sym. 205/6).
[6] Paul describes Jesus, as ‘an image [eikon] of the invisible God,’ (e„kën toà Qeoà toà ¢or£tou) Colossians 1:15 and “man” as ‘the image [eikon] of the glory of God’ (e„kën kaˆ dÒxa Qeoà) 1 Corinthinans 11:7
[7] John 1.1 Using the Stoic term that had been adopted by Middle Platonism
[8] (homoiosis theoi) Plato, Theætetus, 176a
[9] Plotinus, The Enneads,VI.9 (Penguin, p.549)
[10] Compare Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay 2, and Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Chapter VII-VIII
[11] Nietzshe, Gay Science, aphorism 343
[12] These two
accounts or aspects of the death of God are found in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, but they are clearly connected. Nietzsche calls Christianity.
[13] Nietzsche, Gay Science, Aphorism 334
[14] Beyond Good and Evil 14,
[15] Will to Power, 604; he says that knowledge is ‘not “to know” but to schematise - to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as suffices for our practical requirements.’ Nietzsche, Will to Power, 515
[16] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 516
[17] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 572
[18] Le Livre du philosophie p.181-2 [Nietzsche’s Werke (Leipzig 1911) III.ii 374-5, On truth and falsity in the ultra-moral sense 180] cited in J. Llewelyn Derrida on the Threshold of Sense, p.67 and in part by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ‘Introduction’, in Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. xxii
[19] Language ‘sees everywhere a deed and a doer…believes in the “ego”, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and…projects its belief in the ego-substance on to all things - only thus does it create the concept “thing”… Being is everywhere thought in, foisted on, as cause; it is only from the concept “ego” that there follows, derivatively, the concept “being” Nietzche, Twilight of the Idols, III.5)
[20] When Platonic metaphysics becomes Christianity Nietzsche says ‘the idea…becomes a woman’ hence ‘the contemplative character consists of male mothers’ (Gay Science 129, Nietzsche Werke V.ii.106)
[21] Nietzsche, Will to Power, 55 Im grunde is ja nur der moralische Gott überwindung. (Werke VIII/1, 217, fgt 5 [71])
[22] Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals III.27
[23] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, III.5
[24] e.g., T. J. J. Altizer & W. Hamilton, A Radical Theology of Christian Atheism
[25] from Nietzsche The Gay Science, aphorism 343, [A Nietzsche Reader, p.202] in Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche’, The Question Concerning Technology, p.63 - Heidegger continues: ‘For these men are not unbelievers because God as God has to them become unworthy of belief, but rather because they themselves have given up the possibility of belief inasmuch as they are no longer able to seek God. They can no longer seek because they no longer think.’ (My italics) (op cit p.111)
[26] Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche’, The Question Concerning Technology, p.59
[27] Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche’, in The Question Concerning Technology, p.53ff.
[28] Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, Basic Writings, p.432 & p.344
[29] Heidegger, Being and Time p.43 (h.22) [alternative in Basic Writings p.65]
[30] Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p.111 [Einführung in die Metaphysik, p.81] and in Nietzsche volume 1, ‘Christianity in Nietzsche’s eyes is nothing other than Platonism for the people. As Platonism, however, it is nihilism’.
[31] Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche,’ Questions Concerning Technology, p.61
[32] Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche,’ Questions Concerning Technology, p.53ff.
[33] Destruktion (not violently ‘destroying’ Zerstörung), see Heidegger, Being and Time, Int. II.6 p.41 (h20) [Basic Writings, p.63]
[34] Abbau, taking apart - Heidegger, Being and Time, p.44 (h23) [Basic Writings, p.67]
[35] Überwindung der Metaphysik in The End of Metaphysics, but Derrida later proposed the title ‘Die Vergangenheit der Metaphysik’ (The gone-by-ness of metaphysics). J. Hodge’s Heidegger & Ethics p.11
[36] Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p.54; cf. ‘Greek ontology and its history…still determine the conceptual character of philosophy.’ Heidegger, Being and Time p.43 (h.22) [Basic Writings, p.65]
[37] Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche’, The Question Concerning Technology, p.61
[38] in a posthumous paper ‘Enowning’ in Heidegger, Contributions To Philosophy: From Enowning [Tr K. Maly and P Emad], Indiana University Press, 1999
[39] Macquarrie says that ‘for Heidegger, Being has something of a holy, divine character. Certainly, Heidegger does not identify Being with God, and yet I think it would be true to say that in his thought Being has taken the place of God.’ John Macquarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought, S.C.M., London, 1963, p.57
[40] Steiner says ‘Heidegger is determined to think outside theology. He insists that his fundamental ontology is extra theological… It is, however, my own experience that Heidegger’s paradigm and expression of Being, of the ontological cut between Being and beings, adapts at almost every point to the substitution of “God” for the term Sein’, Steiner’s Heidegger, (2nd ed.) Fontana, Harper & Collins, 1978/92, p.155-6
[41] Caputo considers Heidegger in terms of Eckhart, including his ‘esse est deus’ and gives, e.g., the equation “Being : Thought (Dasein) :: God : the soul” Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s thought, Villanova University, Oberlin Printing Co. America, 1978, p.141
[42] Heidegger is adamant ‘Yet Being—what is Being? It is itself. …“Being”—that is not God nor a cosmic ground’. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, Basic Writings, p.234
[43] Heidegger, cited (without reference.) by Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, p.vi
[44] Heidegger, ‘The Thinker as Poet’, Poetry, Language, Thought, chapter 1
[45] Heidegger derives £l»qeia from lanq£nein (to remain concealed) after Heraclitus’ contrast of lanq£nein with ™pilanq£nesqai (to forget); Being and Time, p.250-251 (h219). c.f. ¢l»qeia as ‘un-concealdness’ The Origin of the Work of Art Basic Writings, p.176; t¢lhqh & ta ¢lhqh ‘the unconcealed’, On the Essence of Truth, Basic Writings, p.125. [German prefixes Ent-bergung (un-covering, dis-covering, un-veiling – all revealing) and Ver-berbung (concealment)].
[46] Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ Basic Writings p.340 - Again, ‘all art is in essence poetry… Poetry is the unconcealment of beings.’ in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Basic Writings p.198.
[47] Und wozu Dichter in düftiger (lean/destitute) Zeit? From Holderlin, ‘Bread and Wine’ [part 7], Friedrich Hölderlin – Poems and Fragments, p.242f.
[48] The title of a
posthumously published commemorative article in Der Spiegel, no. 23, 1976, pp.193 ff. quoting an earlier interview with Heidegger.
[49] Suggested by Michael Haar ‘Nietzsche and the Metamorphosen of the Divine’, in Blond, Post Secular Philosophy, p.157f.
[50] Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, Vilna University, Oberlin Printing Co America, 1978
[51] Derrida, Writing and Difference, p.271 He also says, ‘This negative form is not neutral. It does not oscillate between the ni ceci—ni cela (the neither/nor). It first of all obeys a logic of the sur, of the hyper, over and beyond, which heralds the hyper-essentialism of Christian apophases…’ Derrida, ‘Denials’, in Derrida and Negative Theology, p.102)
[52] Derrida, Writing and Difference p.294 f.
[53] Caputo, Mysticism and Transgression: Derrida and Meister Eckhart, in Silverman’s Derrida and Deconstruction pp. 24-39
[54] Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy, (ToS)
[55] Mark C. Taylor, ‘Erring: A postmodern A/theology’, University of Chicago Press, 1984 (The four chapters of section one are ‘Death of God, Dissapearence of the Self, End of History, Closure of the Book’)
[56] Caputo, On Religion, Routledge, 2001
[57] Mark C Taylor, Tears, SUNY Press, 2990
[58] John Milbank [ed.], Radical Orthodoxy, Rutledge/Taylor & Francis, 1998
[59] Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, [Dieu sans l’être: Hors-texte] 1995
[60] Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity p.270 ‘
[61] Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, Part 1.2, p.33-43
[62] Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity p.29 i.e., ‘the divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective.’ Op cit, p.14
[63] Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity p.46
[64] Karl Marx Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1844 Marx, Early Writings, p.244
[65] Op cit
[66] Denys Turner, ‘Religion: Illusion and Liberation’ in T. Carver [ed.] The Cambridge Companion to Marx, p.324
[67] Marx, Early Writings, p.244
[68] Denys Turner, ‘Religion: Illusion and Liberation’ in T. Carver [ed.] The Cambridge Companion to Marx, p.336-337
[69] in Freud, Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
[70] in Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927) and The Question of a Weltanschauung (1931)
[71] Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in Standard Edition, Vol. 21, pp. 85-86
[72] Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey [Hereafter abbreviated to Standard Edition] Vol. 21, p.49
[73] ‘An illusion is not the same thing as an error’, he says, ‘we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation’ Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, Vol. 21, p.30, p.31
[74] Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, Vol. 21, p.21, cf. p.18
[75] Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, Vol. 21, p.14&34
[76] Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in Standard Edition, Vol. 21, p.123 (James J. DiCenso, The Other Freud, p.13)
[77] DiCenso, The Other Freud, p.32
[78] In the Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, in Standard Edition, Vol. 5, p.260 also referred to in Totem and Taboo, (DiCenso, The Other Freud, p.18). DiCenso argues that while Freud is arguing against religion in Moses and Monotheism, his use of Seele, Seelenleben, and Geistigkeit (which are usually translated mind, metal life and intellectuality, but also meaning soul, inner life and spirituality) shows his indebtedness to the conceptual world of religion. DiCenso, The Other Freud, p.4
[79] Freud, Totem and Taboo, Standard Edition, Vol. 13, p.64 (DiCenso, The Other Freud, p.59-61)
[80] Kristeva, In the Beginning was Love, p.18
[81] Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination
[82] These
occurred over time in his work, but in his later work her considered them to be linked together in a
‘Borromean knot’. Lacan had first developed a different idea of the Imaginary
identification of the ‘mirror stage’ prior to 1950, which related to Freud’s
idea of Narcissistic identification, in Écrits pp.1-7. On the
development of these concepts, see Madan Sarup, Jaques Lacan, Ch.7,
pp.101-119
[83] Irigaray, ‘Women, the Sacred, Money’ Sexes and Genealogies, pp.77-78 she suggests that ‘this seems like an accident rather than an essential part of Christianity.’.
[84] Irigaray, Speculum
of the Other Woman, subsection ‘An economy of primal desire that cannot be
represented’, p.42-44
[85] Irigaray, Marine Lover, p.186
[86] Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernsm