No More Learning

This would involve not only the apocalypse of guilty souls, but also a final judgement of the guilty religions. Although Lessing's first referee speaks discreetly of a future colleague who would have to know much more than he does – which seems to point to a human – it is absolutely clear that the figure of the second judge is intended to be equated with God. What God is he then referring to? Can the second judge in the ring parable really be the God of Abraham, who was supposedly also the God of Moses, the duo of Jesus and Paul, and the prophet Mohammed? It must be permissible to doubt these identities in both directions – retrospectively, because equating Abraham's El with the YHWH of the Mosaic religion, the father of the Christian trinity and Mohammed's Allah cannot be more than a pious convention, or rather an echo effect that appears beneath the resonating domes of religious semantics – and prospectively, because the entire history of religion proves that, even within
monotheistic traditions, the later God retains only a very slight resemblance to the God of the early days.
This makes it uncertain whether God the judge can still be the ally of his earliest zealots at the moment of the final trial. Has he himself remained the zealous and jealous God? In the end, his benevolence towards his earlier partisans can no longer be unquestioningly assumed, as he has clearly moved beyond an immaturely wrathful phase. At the most, he would acknowledge extenuating circumstances – for his followers, and via this detour also for himself – by pardoning their zealotry as a transitional neurosis that served an evolutionary purpose. The first exponents of zealous mono-truth may genuinely have had legitimate motives for snubbing their fellow humans and burdening them with a fundamental opposition in the name of the totally other. For the cultural historian, it is certainly understandable why primitive monotheism had to attack both the natural and the cultural thusness of humans. Its task was to destroy their overly self-assured rooting in lineage, their trust in the world and love of images, and their life in a state of moral approximation, in order to confront them directly with the steep wall of the law. It is at this wall that the worldling nature fails – and it is supposed to, for the holy warriors firmly believe that worldly self-satisfaction as a whole must be destroyed. For any true zealot it is evident that humans can only be heathens at first, and forever if one leaves them alone – anima naturaliter pagana. Without a collision with the ‘true God’ and his demanding messenger, the most they will ever achieve are splendid vices. Hence one must never leave them alone, and should interrupt their habits whenever possible. As pre-monotheistic habits somehow always happen to be bad ones, the re-education of the human race became the order of the day after the monotheistic caesura. Then the following dictum applies: ‘The Lord disciplines those he loves’ (Proverbs 3:12 and Hebrews 12:6). Hegel still referred to this as ‘the higher standpoint that man is evil by nature, and evil
9
because he is natural’.
known in other contexts as the ‘symbolic order’, humans cannot, in the view of their monotheistic disciplinarians, become what they are supposed to. Robespierre's trend-setting dictum ‘whoever trembles is guilty’ is still very much in the spirit of this sublime pedagogy, where punishment is considered the honour of the blasphemer. In a related
Without the punitive resistance of the law,
sense, Kierkegaard would later instruct his readers that whoever wishes humans well must place obstacles in their path.
Everything else transpires from the duty of scandal. One has to admit that the followers of the One God have not made things easy for themselves in this respect. The offending peoples, the chosen, the baptized, the militant and, last but not least, the analysed, carried the burden of their task along with them and undertook the daring, but thankless, business of advancing spiritualization by unpopular methods. In their eyes, humans are creatures to whom one can only do justice by overtaxing them. They are creatures that only come to their senses when one demands more of them than simply what is customary among speaking apes.
Then, however, something happened that no old-style zealot could have reckoned with: once provoked, people suddenly began to learn more quickly than their provocateurs had believed possible. The European Renaissance marked the start of a cycle of new examinations of God and the world that points beyond the historical monotheisms. The thinkers of the century after the Reformation discovered the general of which monotheism was the particular. What we call the Enlightenment was, from a religion-historical perspective, no more or less than a rupture of the symbolic shells that had imprisoned the historical style of zealous universalisms. To put it as paradoxically as it appears: with its growing self-assurance, the Enlightenment not only broke away from the historically developed monotheisms; it in fact produced a higher-level monotheism in which various universal articles of faith attained dogmatic validity. These include the a-priori unity of the species, the indispensability of the state under the rule of law, the destiny of humans to control nature, solidarity with the disadvantaged and the disabling of natural selection for Homo sapiens. ‘Enlightenment’ is simply the popular name for the perpetual literary council in which these articles are discussed, fixed and defended against heretics.
Anyone looking for the prototype of the resulting fundamentalism will find it in Rousseau's sketch of a religion civile as expounded in his text on the social contract from 1758. It provided the most rigorous neo-monotheism with form and content – and its consequences were much more far-reaching than any of the first
Enlightenment thinkers could have foreseen. Its formulation constituted an admission that even post-Christian ‘society’ must be rooted in certain human moral intuitions. Whoever uses the world ‘society’ is implicitly also saying ‘social religion’. When Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Catholicism as the French state religion following the anti-Catholic excesses of the revolution, he de facto declared it the new civil religion, thus subjecting the ‘substantial truth of faith’ to an incurable functional irony. Since then, Christianity itself has been the substitute religion for Christianity.
But that was not all. In keeping with its highly active nature, the Enlightenment prepared its transition to post-monotheistic positions. It was inevitable that it would strike the item ‘God’ from its budget and fill the resulting vacancy with the ‘human being’. Even when it pushed ahead to atheism, however, its structure initially remained a copy of the monotheistic projects. Consequently it released an immanent zealotry that – because it was incapable of grace – even surpassed the religious variety in strictness, anger and violence. This escalation of fury for the greatest of human causes is what is meant when people refer to the historical sequence extending from Jacobin rule to the frenzy of Maoism as the age of ideologies. Ideologies in the strong sense of the word are movements that ape the form of zealous monotheism with atheistic world projects.
This enlightened para-monotheism set itself apart critically from the historical religions by revealing the general quality present in all concepts of God that conformed to the personal-supremacist type: the new movement undoubtedly argued most convincingly when it pointed to the fact that every one of the historical monotheisms was based on projections, and thus still constituted a cult of images: they invite people to enter into an imaginarily determined relationship with the Highest – even, and in fact especially, in cases where the absence of images in dealings with the supreme being had been of the utmost importance. In this sense Marx was right to claim that all critique is based on the critique of religion. The projective quality of the concept of God in the sphere of the subjectivist supremacisms is evident in the elementary observation that God, in spite of all bans on representation, is consistently understood as a person and addressed as the Lord. It is precisely the aniconic religions based on an avoidance of images, namely Judaism and Islam, that seem like
bastions of the most tenacious idolatry from this perspective. Just as Malevich's Black Square remains a picture even as a non-picture, the Black Person of monotheistic theologies is still a portrait as a non- portrait, and an idol even as a non-idol.
It is more important now than ever to beware of psychology, which tends to attribute even the greatest projects to small mechanisms in those carrying out the projection. In its view, the smaller element reveals the truth about the greater one. Monotheistic projects, on the other hand, express the fact that people, whether they like it or not, are inevitably always in a state of vertical tension. They not only want to elevate themselves to something greater, even the greatest; they are also enlisted, through spiritual experiences and evolutionary challenges, to assist events taking place on a higher level. Thus projects of this type exert an upward pull on humans, which is why they are damned to be superior to themselves (as Socrates explains in Plato's Republic) – even if they often do not know how to deal with this superiority.
The statement ‘man infinitely transcends man’ was already a product of the crisis that revealed the general aspect of the historical monotheisms. As soon as its principle was formulated with sufficient clarity, it could be detached from its traditional forms. From that point, further modification of the monotheistic programmes became the business of extra-religious agencies: one half of the formulating work was taken over by great politics, the other by great art. Now it was possible for people to come along and declare that politics is destiny – while others claimed the same for art. Since the dawn of Romanticism, great art has meant a transferral of the provoca-tion of humans to the eminent work by means of the law. Since the American Revolution, great politics has meant the entrance of monotheism into the age of its artificial stageability.
In its deep structure, Lessing's tale of indistinguishable copies is speaking about these very transitions. The story of the two duplicate rings does not simply contain the message that even wonderful things are artificially produced; it also communicates in a fairly blunt fashion that the question of authenticity is rendered trivial by the interest in effects. Only incorrigible fetishists are still interested in
originals and proofs of origin. In the world of currentness, however, effects are all that matter.
I now feel compelled to present a third version of the ring parable, despite having just returned to the original, where everyday human judgement is one of the decisive factors in the evaluation of the religions. This additional correction will now give the zealous party another chance to be heard. This time the people in question are zealots who fight against humanity for the sake of humanity – or to put it more precisely: in the name of the true human being of the future against the historically developed, misguided human being.
In this latest revision of the parable we hear of the production of a fourth ring, symbolizing a political atheism that will stop at nothing. This atheism claims it is fulfilling the truth of the three monotheisms by transferring them back to earth from heaven. It appears under the name of Communism, whose root communio evokes the synthesis of past peoples of God – Israel, the church and the ummah. The term itself implicitly expresses the new political universalism's objection to the historical folk traditions, which, from the perspective of avant- garde morality, merit only contempt: only people who are too stupid to become general producers, i. e. true human beings, carry their communal membership around with them like the flag of an organization. Similar ideas had been anticipated by Christianity and Islam. The new faith went further, propagating the thesis that it had shown the valid basis for every membership in God's community that was still possible among humans, with the international industrial proletariat at its centre as its miserable and creative elite. Consistently enough, Communism could – for a while – claim the advantage of being the ring that was far more than simply an identical replica of earlier rings. Its production could only be undertaken once interest in the older rings had begun to diminish due to new insights and the accompanying new hopes.
This brings us to Communism's strongest argument, which, when explicitly laid out, leads to the fiery centre of modern thought. Whoever acknowledges the possibility of fundamentally new insights is admitting something that older historical metaphysics would not have accepted at any price: that truth itself is subject to evolution, and that the succession of events is more than simply a random
sequence. It is in the nature of truth itself that it cannot be fully revealed from the start, but rather comes to light consecutively, bit by bit, as a cumulatively developed result of investigations that may never reach an end.
This reflection leads to a new definition of the sense of the revealed religions: holy scriptures of this type can only be legitimated as catastrophic interruptions or extreme accelerations of human research history. By supporting its case with the claim of a divine intervention in the investigations of humans, each becomes an organ of holy impatience. They express the sentiment that the truth is too important to wait for the research to be completed. As time- honoured as these religions may seem to us today, they are all early comers by nature; they set faith the tasks that the science of the time could not handle by itself.
The term ‘revelation’ itself makes this prematurity clear, as it contains a statement about the condition of human spirituality: it must show an adequate level of development to be receptive to a revelation of the monotheistic variety, but should still be in a sufficiently undeveloped state to require help from above. Indeed, all revelations would be superfluous if they did not convey something that the human spirit could not access on its own strength in the respective status quo. It is in this ‘not yet’ quality that the whole significance of the revealed religions lies. What they have in common is their quasi-putschist determination to break out of the openness of a life full of experimentation in order to jump ahead to the end of all attempts and errors. In terms of their status in the world process, the historical monotheisms can be understood as petrified interjections in the continuing sequence of experiences where experiment and apocalypse coincide. They draw their authority from the certainty with which they claim to be speaking from the perspective of the true end. They embody the attempt to anticipate, in the middle of the world experiment, the result of everything that can ever be achieved in a learning life – at least, in moral and eschatological terms. Their existence stands or falls with this risk; it is their sole source of legitimacy.
Thus the revealed religions tend not only towards a devaluation of everything so far understood and achieved to a more or less useless
prelude – this is the purpose of their sometimes fanatical anti-Pagan polemic (whose exaggerations later have to be corrected through retroactive retrievals of something supposedly devalued, but in fact often superior and indispensable – one need only think of Greek philosophy and the results of the pre-Christian and pre-Islamic sciences) – but additionally deny the possibility and inevitability of finding new truths, if these happen to produce results leading to revisions in the text of the holy scriptures. Such religions, as noted above, can therefore only be understood as vehicles of hastiness; and their evaluation hangs by the thread of how far it can be shown that there are anticipations which resist all attempts at revision – and that such anticipations form their substance. If there is a convincing justification for the theological profession in all religions, it is presumably only through an explanation of their true activity: it is their job to prevent the revelations from being rendered obsolete through later, newer events by constantly showing anew the undiminished currentness of aspects that are seemingly outdated. Only if the religious scholars can show plausibly how the holy texts in fact contain leaps into the realm of the absolutely final that one can partially catch up with, but never overtake, will they be able to assert their claims to truth.
This reflection leads to a slightly more technical reinterpretation of the concept of revelation. A reformulated notion of revelation provides an explicit basis for the relationship between what is revealed and the ongoing learning period of intelligent collectives. In process-logical terms, revelation means the elevation of a prejudgement to a final judgement. It combines a symbol from the relative sphere with the level of the absolute. Such an operation makes it necessary to replace the classical concept of eternity with that of absolute velocity. The term ‘revelation’ hence implies an acceleration of insight to absolute velocity. It postulates the synchronization of human insight with the transrapid intelligence of God. Only through this can prejudgements and final judgements coincide. A holy scripture would then simply be a vessel for conclusive and trustworthy statements through which all insights taking place at relative velocities would be overtaken. Even in so eminent a text, however, the few unovertakeable statements will inevitably be surrounded by numerous others that can potentially be
overtaken or have in fact been overtaken. The margin of difference between the strong and weak statements in a sacred body of text makes room for ways of adapting faith to the respective day and age.
Against this background, we can explain the philosophical meaning of the project known as Communism once again. In accordance with its dogmatic quality, it consisted in an abrogation of all earlier prophetic statements and their reformulation in a language of realism, where the latter was conceived in a dual sense – both as economic production, a metabolic exchange between humans and nature, and as political practice, as an appropriation of the humanly possible by real human beings. The expressions ‘real human being’ and ‘revolutionary’ now become synonymous. That would mean the baton of prophetism was handed from Moses to Jesus, from Jesus to Mohammed, and from Mohammed to Marx. Marx would have rejected the religious narrowness of his predecessors and sought to put an end to all mystified forms of revelation. He would have placed the truths of the religions on trial before the worldly sciences and proletarian passions. He would, like any fair judge, have allowed them to act as the ‘soul of a heartless world’, but nonetheless rejected the majority of their statements in order to replace them with a political practice that acted in favour of real human beings.
The fourth ring, then, can only indirectly be compared to the older ones. At most, one could say that the other three were melted down for its fabrication in order to take the best qualities from the moral substance of each. Its claim to superior validity is based on the thesis that its production no longer takes place under the law of religious projection, but rather due to an insight into the productive nature of humans. The prophet of the fourth ring postulated a world in which all people would become free producers of their own destiny, both as individuals and collectively.
It was precisely this expectation that had to remain essentially unfulfilled in the spheres of activity of the religions that have existed so far, as they always involved classes of people, the ones known as rulers, who prevented the vast majority of others, those known as the oppressed and exploited, from freely producing and appropriating their own selves. Ironically enough, the clerics of the three-ring religions, especially the extremely feudalized high clergy in
Christianity, were also among the oppressed classes, which meant that one could not expect any direct help from them in reaching the goal of general emancipation. Is that not why the Protestant Reformation revolted against the arrogance of the ruling Roman church? Did the theologian Martin Dibelius not see valid reasons, even in the middle of the twentieth century, to refer to the church as the ‘bodyguard of despotism and capitalism’? Understandably, depriving the exploitative clergy of its power must be declared a fundamental prerequisite for the realization of those prophecies through which the wearers of the fourth ring sought to make themselves agreeable to their fellow humans. In order to establish this ‘religion of man’ (to apply a phrase of Rousseau's reference to Communism), however, it became inevitable that the pleasant would be preceded by the terrible. Only one thing was certain for the zealots of humanity: as long as the lords of the older rings exercised their power over people's souls, human beings would not infinitely transcend the human, but rather fall infinitely short of themselves.
The Communists worked consistently on the development of an
anthropological supremacism of a resolutely anti-religious character.
In this undertaking it was allowed – in fact necessary – to blaspheme
the imaginary Highest in the name of the real highest. Each effective
blasphemy meant an overstepping of the ‘existing’ towards liberating
excess. This is the meaning of the ‘passion for the real’ (passion du
réel), which, according to a shrewd observation by Alain Badiou, was
10
the hallmark of the twentieth century.
of humanity, the movement through which human beings with a low standing could potentially attain the level of the highest human being was known as ‘revolution’. Because revolution constituted a translation of revelation into political practice, however, it shared its risk of excessive haste. It too, while still caught up in the experiment of creating wealth, ignored the question of whether the conditions were right and the means sufficiently tested and sought to force results that would be impossible to overtake at later stages of the world's development.
The rest of the story is well known. Within a few generations, after some successful conversions at the start, the fourth ring made its wearer the object of almost unconditional disgust without giving him any chance to make himself agreeable to God as a compensation. The
In the parlance of the zealots
hatefulness of what was done in the name of Communism was demonstrated to the extreme for judgement by all normal humans – and if one still occasionally encounters the opinion that the atrocities committed on the other side surpassed those of Communism, it is primarily because those in the corresponding circles refuse to accept the facts: with over 100 million lost lives, the degree of human extermination achieved in Communist systems is several times higher than that of Hitler's regime, which has – understandably – been given the title of absolute evil. The question arises whether a co- absolute evil should not have been added to the collective consciousness long ago.
For the majority of people at that time, it remained unclear to what extent the Soviet and Chinese dramas constituted a parody of religious history since the caesura on Mount Sinai. Moses' command ‘let every man kill his brother, his friend and his neighbour’ was obviously only followed on a grand scale by the ideologues of humanity in the twentieth century; one had to wait until the advent of monohumanism to witness the hubristic seeds of monotheism bloom. The lesson of this unprecedented episode would prove difficult to forget: if it is already precarious to make people feel enthusiasm for a God who demands too much of them, even if it is to their own advantage, then it is completely impossible to turn people into zealots of humanity beyond brief moments of hysteria – least of all by the methods with which the Russian and Chinese Communists sought to achieve their goals.
This brings us back to the original version of the ring parable a second time, and this time – if we are not very much mistaken – we shall stick to it once and for all. In the post-Communist situation, people began to understand that they could not avoid participating as jurors in the evaluation of the general religions and their political derivations. In the light of the catastrophe of Communism, it became necessary to pronounce judgement in the middle of the process, and the assessment of the zealots of humanity – like those of revelation and revolution – will inevitably run the risk of prematurity. The jury's verdict leaves no room for doubt: it abrogates the revolution, which was a step backwards, and chooses the lesser evils, namely the liberal state under the rule of law, democracy and capitalism. It is clear that this does not necessarily constitute any final, binding
result; but this intermediate status is significant in itself. As soon as
one accepts its validity, the process that will pave the way for any
possible inhabitable future can, in the shadow of past excesses, begin
once more: that of civilizatory learning towards an existence of all
human beings characterized by the universally imposed necessity of
11
As the rejection of the principles, methods and results of Communism reached a high level of general validity – aside from isolated cases of malign incorrigibility – the jurors could once more turn their attention to the project of civilizing humanity, which had lost momentum through the various instances of totalitarian haste. At the same time, it becomes evident to what extent the relative slowness and apparent triviality of the secular world design increase the general dissatisfaction within civilization. This provides the conventional religions with new recruits. More than a few of yesterday's protagonists who are now on the rise once again are noting with satisfaction that the days are past when it was thought that a critique of religion was the precondition for all critique. They relish the atmosphere in which the cessation of a critique of religion seems to be paving the way for the end of all critique.
This necessitates a sensitive distinction. If the historical religions have been improving their reputations again in certain respects, there are two completely different reasons for this, and their respective legitimacy runs very deep, even though they are mutually exclusive – I do not wish to say whether temporarily or permanently so. For the first group of interested parties, both traditional and synthesized religion are now once more – and will continue to be – what they have always been: a medium of self-care and a participation in a more general or higher life (functionally speaking: a programme for stabilizing the personal and regional-collective immune system by symbolic means). For the second circle, religion remains the guardian of unresolved moral provocations designed to develop each ordinary member of the species into the ‘general human being’ – though one should bear in mind that such classifications as Jew, Christian, Muslim, Communist or Übermensch offer partly problematic and partly false names for the ‘general human being’ (I shall leave aside the question of whether the
sharing a single planet.
‘general human being’ is itself a problematic or false name for the existential form of the competent individual in ‘world society’).
The post-Communist situation holds opportunities for both sides: for the members of the first group, because they can attend once more – undisturbed by the total influence of other collectives – to their personal integration, or, in more technical words: the regulation of their psychosemantic constitution; and for the members of the second group, because they are now free to pursue, under different conditions, the question of whether there might be a less hasty way to generalize forces of human freedom. One could also frame the riddle in the following terms: has Communism left behind a secret last will that still remains to be found and opened by subsequent
generations? 12 In fact, the problem associated here with the fourth ring continues to be the great mystery of our time. The production of the ‘general human being’ through the politics of haste undoubtedly failed; but this does not in any way make its opposite, namely a merely vital existence shrunken down to its bare minimum among people in the despiritualized zones of prosperity, acceptable. The new interest in the great religions can be attributed primarily to the fact that, since the self-renunciation of Communist and Socialist humanity politics, the traditional religious codes have been all that is available when people look for more comprehensive forms of communal consciousness – at least, for as long as there are no transculturally convincing formulations of a general theory of culture on offer.
We should note: the jury deciding on the success of the zealous religions is forced to accept in the course of its work that there is a grave lack of criteria for evaluating the exclusive universalisms, whether religious or worldly in their coding. In this way a programme of making all content explicit becomes the order of the day, enlisting the services of philosophy, theology, religious science and, above all, cultural theory. If it applies that people in the current phase of civilization are faced with the difficulty of having to reach temporarily final judgements on temporarily final results of historical learning, including the shortcuts to eternity that exist in the form of the revealed religions, one should at least facilitate the task through aids to judgement that correspond to the current state of art.
Owing to a malicious dialectic, these facilitating factors seem like hindrances. One can at least hold onto the ini-tial assumption that intellectual and spiritual tools such as Euclidean geometry, Aristotelian logic, the Ten Commandments and fasting in the month of Ramadan, which have endured millennia, contain something that, for better or for worse, can be considered final. As modules of truth for simple logical and moral situations, these norms cannot be overtaken. In a different sense, however, they have been constantly overtaken for some time – certainly not through simple disablement, but rather in the mode of integrating elementary aspects into more complex patterns. The development of non-Euclidean geometries, non-Aristotelian systems of logic and non-decalogical moralities shows clearly in what ways the world can still learn. Another item on this list would be non-Ramadanic dietary science, a discipline through which Muslim women in Turkey and elsewhere learn how to avoid the almost inescapable gain in weight resulting from the opulent feasts after sunset during the fasting month.
Notes
1
2 3
4
5
G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus’ [The Oldest System Programme of German Idealism] in Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. I: Frühe Schriften [Early Writings] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), p. 236.
Ibid.
Cf. Niklas Luhmann, ‘Grundwerte als Zivilreligion’ [Basic Values as Civil Religion] in Religion des Bürgers. Zivilreligion in Amerika und Europa [The Religion of the Middle Class. Civil Religion in America and Europe], ed. Heinz Kleger and Alois Müller (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2004), pp. 175–95.
Cf. Jan Assmann, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder Der Preis des Monotheismus [The Mosaic Distinction or The Price of Monotheism] (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 2003).
Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity or The Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion.
6
7
8
9
10 Alain Badiou, Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007 [original edition published in 2005]). The author weakens his case through grotesque errors of judgement, however, for example when he adopts the attitude of an unrepentant revolutionary priest and defends the mass killings instigated by Stalin and Mao. For a partial response to Badiou's book, cf. Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Was geschah im 20. Jahrhundert? Unterwegs zu einer Kritik der extremistischen Vernunft’ [What Happened in the Twentieth Century? Towards a Critique of Extremist Reason], lecture given in Strasbourg on 3 March 2005.
11 Cf. Bruno Latour, ‘La Terre est enfin ronde’ [In the End, the Earth is Round] in Libération, 1 February 2007, p. 28, where the author takes up a word I have suggested, ‘monogëism’, and uses it to formulate a principle of reality for the global age. ‘Monogëism’ is a semi-satirical expression intended to point to both the premise and the result of terrestrial globalization, the nautical occupation
The civil religion of the French Revolution also sought to secure control of the hearts and minds of future generations. In his plans for republican institutions, Saint-Just wrote: ‘Children belong to their mother until the fifth year of their lives, and from then until death they belong to the Republic.
’ Quoted in Friedrich Sieburg, Robespierre the Incorruptible (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1938).
Hegel, ‘Entwürfe über Religion und Liebe’ [Sketches on Religion and Love] (1797/8) in Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. I, p. 243.
Elements of a similar historical compromise form the basis for the entente cordiale between Habermas and Ratzinger, which is only surprising to those who fail to see that present Catholicism and the civil-religiously committed second incarnation of Critical Theory cultivate the same bogeymen.
Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion II. Vorlesungen über die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes [Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion II. Lectures on the Proofs of God's Existence] in Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. XVII, section entitled ‘Die Bestimmung des Menschen’ [The Destiny of Man], p. 253.
of the earth by the Europeans. (Cf. [Sloterdijk] Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals, p. 252. ) Without the seafarers' faith in a navigable earth, the world in its modern system could not have been established. The expression states that the mere fact of the number one is absolutely binding with reference to the earth, while remaining problematic with reference to God – whose numerical value fluctuates between zero and one, even extending to three and the symbol for many. This means that, compared to monotheism, monogëism constitutes a more stable cognitive object.
12 Boris Groys, Das kommunistische Postskriptum (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).
8 After-zeal1
Following the collapse of Communism, the question of monotheism remained unresolved. Instead of leaving it behind, forgotten, the implosion of the movement treated here as the fourth manifestation of militant universalism in fact redirected attention to the historical monotheisms – which, more or less discreetly, used the situation to their advantage. At the same time, it laid the foundations for a new series of religion-critical investigations whose significance has gone largely unnoticed by the wider audience. These provide a contrast to the ubiquitous theories about the ‘return of religion’. They also address once more (following the interrupted attempts at a critique of fanaticism in the eighteenth century) the polemogenic effects of monotheistic zealotry, the intolerance and hatred of otherness as such, with a suitably fundamental and comprehensive approach. The gravity of the debate stems from the now widely justified suspicion that the acts of violence carried out by the followers of Christianity and Islam were not mere distortions, falsifications of the true nature of essentially benign religious doctrines, but rather manifestations of a polemogenic potential that is inseparable from their existence.
In this situation, the cultural sciences are attracting attention once again. With his sensational books Moses der Ägypter and Die
mosaische Unterscheidung,2 the Egyptologist Jan Assmann not only initiated a vigorous world-wide debate on the psychohistorical costs of monopolistic claims to truth in post-Mosaic religious developments, but also provided general religious and cultural science with a new, hermeneutically powerful concept in the form of his idea of ‘counter-religion’. But it seems that Assmann, in keeping with the idiosyncratic nature of his themes, only connected a part of his term's possible semantic content to the present. First he presents the monotheistic Aten cult, founded in the fourteenth century BC by the Pharaoh Akhenaten, as the first example of an explicit counter- religion; then he advances and supports the fascinating argument that this episodic prototype was followed, in the form of Mosaic
monotheism, by the first model of a counter-religion that stood the test of time – at a high price for its carrier people, as we know. It is in the elusive nature of the subject that the connections between the Akhenatic prelude and the act of Moses cannot be disentangled entirely. In order to shed more light on them, cultural science must show its worth as the art of indirect proof and operate in a twilight zone between histories of effect, motive and memory. Particular complications arise from the chronological circumstances, which now make it difficult to endorse wholeheartedly Sigmund Freud's speculative identification of Moses with a priest of the Aten religion. The virtuosity with which Assmann carried out his task made no small contribution to sensitizing contemporary reflections on the stability of different cultures anew to the questions raised by political theology.
The high level of argumentation and the variety of perspectives evident in the answers provoked by Assmann's venture convey a clear message. They prove no less than the fact that the disciplines of ancient history are in the process of regaining the culture-political pathos lost since the decline of the humanist educational paradigm and the marginalization of classical studies after 1945. While the European battle of cultures known as the Renaissance, however, which lasted from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, was fought mainly on the front between returning Greek culture and fading Christian culture, it is an older, more radical and more complicated front between Egyptian and Jewish culture that is becoming visible once more today.
Assmann's intervention describes and supports a paradigm shift that led to a change of emphasis from a Hellenocentric to an Egyptocentric renaissance. As a renaissance constitutes a polemical form of cultural comparison that takes place not only in the fields of philology, epistemology and art, but also, and especially, as a competition between the old and new schools of theology, it is quite understandable if such a declared ‘rebirth’ creates a very strong critical tension. A phenomenon of this kind can only ever assert its own value at the expense of the host cultures. The idea of something old being reborn implies a demand for a right of return for exiled and forgotten ideas, arts and virtues – a right that can only be asserted and granted if the later culture's claim to being more complete in
every respect can be challenged with convincing arguments. This occurred in exemplary fashion in fourteenth-century Europe, when philologists, artists, engineers and scientists of the burgeoning Modern Age united to defend the right of the Greek scientific cultures and arts to be renewed against the inadequacies of Christian world knowledge and artistic skill. The partisanship of innumerable scholars and artists for the ancient ideas' right of return resulted in the civilization of modern Europe, which owes its wealth primarily to its bipolar disposition as a dual culture based on Judeo-Christian and Hellenic-humanist sources.
In analogy to the events beginning in fourteenth-century Europe, we must ask today whether the conditions are given for an import of ideas from an even more remote antiquity, and, if so, what these are. One would have to establish to what extent Egyptian motifs would be considered significant – as Assmann suggests with his liberal ethical flair and comprehensive erudition. In order to answer this question, we must examine the concept of counter-religion and its still only partly explored consequences. Even in Assmann's argumentation, it does not simply serve as an ad hoc characterization of the caesura that suddenly imposed itself on the world of ancient polytheisms – first through the Akhenaten disaster, then through Mosaic Judaism. Rather, it identifies a historically influential type of polemically zealotic religions whose effects are still making their partly beneficial, partly destructive virulence felt today. An evaluation of these is indispensable if one wishes to investigate whether an authentic Renaissance motif actually supports the older religious formations abolished by the counter-religions.
In this context we shall now shift our attention from the anti- Egyptian, anti-Canaanite and anti-Babylonian counter-religion of the Jews to the multiple counter-religion of the Christians, which combined anti-Roman, anti-Hellenic, anti-Jewish and anti-Pagan qualities. It will also be directed at the counter-religion of the Muslims, which primarily unified anti-polytheistic, but also partly anti-Christian and anti-Jewish motifs of protest. In addition, the bourgeois Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, specifically in the zealotic strands of the French Revolution with their totalitarian cult of reason and virtue, displayed unmistakably counter-religious traits, in some cases with a fanatical, anti-Catholic and anti-feudal
direction. Nor is there any doubt that the militant atheism of the Communist movement showed all the hallmarks of a zealotic counter-religion based on a rejection of most previous cultural traditions. It was above all the ‘bourgeoisie’ that now became the heathendom of Communism. Even the fascist movements episodically presented themselves as nationalist-apocalyptic counter- religions, with an anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-capitalist zealotry setting the tone. This means that substantial parts of occidental religious and intellectual history were commensurate with the campaigns of the counter-religions, whose cross-party banner is always found in that combination of combativeness and claim to truth which naturally stimulates intolerance.
I think that the problem I am, following Assmann's suggestions, hinting at here, with the catchword of a renaissance under the sign of Egypt, is sufficiently clearly defined for a provisional understanding. It implies a cultural comparison in which the cultures of intolerance in the Middle East and Europe would have to deal with the right of return of a forgotten and suppressed culture of tolerance of an Egyptian (potentially also a Mediterranean or Indian) type – not only in ethical terms, but also at the level of ontology and cosmology. Assmann has suggested the expression ‘cosmotheism’ for this complex that is capable of a virtual renaissance (or at least needs to be remembered). It denotes a religious world design that, owing to its internal qualities, especially the principle of multiple representations of the Highest, prevents the inception of one-sided zealotic reductions.
Naturally it would be unfounded to speak of a rebirth of the Egyptian gods today, either literally or metaphorically – in any case, the necessary conditions for the conceptual and experiential form of world-godliness are no longer given. On the whole, a serious return to polytheistic standards in the ancient style is not on anyone's agenda. What could develop under the heading of ‘Egypt’, however, is an active remembrance of a lighter religious climate in which the poison of declarations of enmity towards alternative cults, in particular the image-worshipping religions, had not yet filtered through to the rest of society.
One could very reasonably voice the objection that what I have here described as an Egyptocentric renaissance has, in fact, long since taken place. And indeed, the rebirth of antiquity among Europeans has not stopped at the revival of Greek and Roman patterns. Almost from the start, Egyptian paradigms also attracted the attention of European scholars, who had wanted to learn a second language to meet their metaphysical needs since the end of the Middle Ages. Their fascination with the Nile culture reached such a high level that no cultural history of the Modern Age was considered complete without an appropriately detailed consideration of the universe of hieroglyphophiles, Egyptosophers and Pharaonomaniacs. The Masonic Enlightenment in particular often fell back on Egyptian motifs to satisfy its need for symbols, which it used to flesh out a
3
Ironically enough, the pinnacle of the liberal and cosmophile renaissance manifested itself in neither the language of Egypticism nor that of Hellenism. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who, with his didactic poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5), drew the religion- philosophical conclusions from the modern critique of intolerance. In this work – which he himself described as a sort of ‘fifth “Gospel”
’4 – he not only summed up a movement in the European history of ideas that has long been referred to as the ‘renaissance of
Zoroaster’;5 he also provided the first pattern for a fully formulated counter-counter-religion. This marked the beginning of the era of enlightened counter-zeal best characterized as after-zeal. Its central article of faith is the overcoming of binary or dualistic schematicism, which, as described above, holds the logical premise for all monotheistically inclined zealotry. The choice of the figure of Zarathustra as the mouthpiece of a post-monotheistic culture of wisdom expresses Nietzsche's idea that the first dualist is more qualified than anyone else to present the post-dualistic position – the one who errs first has the longest time to correct himself.
post-Christian religion of reason and tolerance.
of these re-animations was not their exotic decor, but rather the prospect of an old-new paradigm of wisdom that would destroy the foundations for religious fanaticism of an exclusive monotheistic variety.
The decisive aspect
This is why Nietzsche was thinking less of the Mosaic than the Zarathustrian distinction – otherwise he would have had to entitle his counter-counter-religious manifesto of emancipation Thus Spoke Moses. The new Zarathustra was also meant to speak for a new Moses. Using the voice of the great Persian – who was once considered a contemporary of the Jewish leader – Nietzsche conceived a culture-therapeutic programme intended to put an end to the metaphysical misuse of the numbers one and two. In a fully developed form, Nietzsche's intervention in classical metaphysics and the ideology of the one ruler would have led to a pluralistically intended critique of perspectival reason – a few chapters have survived under the title Der Wille zur Macht, but these are barely more than sketches. In Nietzsche's case, the logical clarification of fundamentals is accompanied by a strong psychohygienic project devoted to the erosion of the resentment that leads to metaphysics. This includes the deconstruction of the obsession with the beyond, as well as every kind of Hinterweltlerdom, i. e. insistence on a world behind our own, whose price is the betrayal of real worldly life. The author invested his best civilization-critical energies in this project, seeking to prove the statement that the philosopher is the doctor of culture.
Nietzsche's critique of resentment is based on an argument that draws on the psychological Enlightenment via the notion of affective displacement. In his diagnosis, the author sees in all forms of metaphysical-religious zealotry a crypto-suicidal urge towards a world beyond in which, understandably enough, all those who failed to cope with the facts of their earthly lives hope to be granted success. Viewed from its vital and energetic side, then, zealotry is defined as a pathological symptom. When the upward glance turns into a malign fixation on the beyond, it is nihilism that lies behind the mask of religious idealism – that is to say, the compulsion to pass devaluation on to others. The name of God is then revealed as the pretext for a desire for extermination that is transferred from the inside to the outside. In its attempt to be rid of itself, the afflicted soul also seeks to prevent the world around it from continuing to exist.
Against this background, it is necessary to make a diagnostically important distinction: it makes a great difference whether one is
dealing with the conventional, mild and chronic forms of world- sickness, which are embodied in convivial people's churches and can be reconciled with the joys of longevity, even a certain secularism – as has always been evident in traditional Italian Catholicism –, or rather its acute manifestations, whose followers wish to force a final decision for the good and the otherworldly. One example of the latter would be the highly active Protestant ‘Doomsday sects’ in the USA and their partners in the pop-culturally inflamed areas of Islamic apocalyptic thought. In such cases, the comfortable metaphysics of remembrance becomes a draft call to the holy war. Uplifting meditation is replaced by bitter activism, and religious patience with one's own imperfections and those of others gives way to zealotry in a messianic and apocalyptic setting.
For Nietzsche, such dramatizations are no more than high-flown pretexts spawned by the morbid impatience to break with reality as soon as possible; they act to fuel the suicidal fires. The apocalyptic scripts for the last days of humanity show quite clearly how suicidal and globalicidal dynamics overlap: they constitute a theatrical
6
development of the secundum non datur.
the apocalyptic tunnel, the horizon is lost, and with it at once the feeling of sharing in an environment that can be shaped. At such high levels of estrangement, any trace of responsibility for the existing world disappears. From that point on, all that counts is the hypnosis through which the activists prepare themselves for the end in holy black. With reference to these monomythical reductions, Zarathustra's approach is as current as ever. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a time stirred up by new religious turbulence, his warning to remain faithful to the earth and send the tellers of otherworldly fairy tales to a doctor is even more relevant than it was at the end of the nineteenth.
If one applies Nietzsche's observations to today's danger zones, however, it also becomes apparent that his diagnostic instruments, as valuable as they may be for purposes of historical analysis, only reach a small part of the total phenomena. Certainly the fury of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim apocalyptic zealots of our times conceals a religiously veiled weariness of the world and life. Just as there is an endgame schema known as ‘suicide by cop’ among desperate criminals, one would surely find the pattern ‘suicide by
Once one has driven into
antichrist’ among more than a few apocalyptic warriors. The vast majority of the many millions standing in line at the entrance to the final tunnel do not show any symptoms of pre-suicidal morbidity, however, but rather those of a faux-religiously channelled build-up of anger. For the time being, the much-vaunted dialogue of religions can hardly exert any influence on such energies. Inter-religious dialogues would only show results if they induced each organized religion to keep its own apocalyptic house in order. Moderates will observe that their respective zealots and apocalyptic warriors are usually activists with only a brief training whose anger, resentment, ambition and search for reasons to be outraged precede actual faith. The religious code exclusively serves the textualization of a socially conditioned, existential rage that demands to be let out. Only very rarely will it be possible to restrain it through religious exhortations.
What seems to be a new religious question is in fact the return of the social question on a global biopolitical level. Neither a better religion nor the best intentions can achieve anything here – as those Europeans who recall the often messianically dressed-up political troubles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should
know. The tools of the moment are demographic enlightenment7 – as a critique of both the naïve and the strategic overproduction of humans – and an updated politics of development that also exports the secrets of the production and distribution of wealth to those countries previously inaccessible as a result of poverty, resentment and the machinations of perverse elites. The monotheisms know nothing about either of these – on the contrary, they are suspected of being counterproductive on all fronts.
In such a situation it is the duty of the reasonable religions, those that have passed into their respective post-zealotic phases, to seek an alliance with secular civilization and its theoretical collections in the cultural sciences. Only this alliance can provide the forces that must be established and clarified in order to neutralize the apocalyptic directors. This requires the creation of symbolic terminals that give all parties in the monotheistic campaigns a feeling of victory. Only non-losers can pass through the arrival hall of history and subsequently find a role for themselves in the synchronized world. They alone will be prepared to take responsibility for tasks that can only be managed by grand coalitions.
Globalization means that cultures civilize one another. The Day of Judgement leads into everyday work; the revelation becomes an environmental report and an assessment of the state of human rights. This brings us back to the leitmotif of these reflections, which is grounded in the ethos of general cultural science. I shall repeat it like a credo, and wish it the power to spread with tongues of fire: the path of civilization is the only one that is still open.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6 7
Translator's note: the original title ‘Nach-Eifer’ suggests a play on words. While the hyphenation sets it apart from the verb nacheifern, meaning ‘to emulate’, the choice of words implies that both a post-zealotic state and certain examples of emulation are meant here.
Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1997), as well as Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder Der Preis des Monotheismus.
Jan Assmann, Die Zauberflöte. Oper und Mysterium (Munich: Hanser, 2005).
Peter Sloterdijk, Über die Verbesserung der guten Nachricht. Nietzsches fünftes ‘Evangelium’ [On the Improvement of the Good News. Nietzsche's Fifth ‘Gospel’] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).
Michael Stausberg, Faszination Zarathustra. Zoroaster und die Europäische Religionsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit [The Fascination of Zarathustra. Zoroaster and European Religious History in the Early Modern Age], 2 volumes (Berlin and NewYork: de Gruyter, 1998), vol. I, pp. 35–579.
Cf. p. 96 above.
Heinsohn, Söhne und Weltmacht. Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen.
Index
Abraham
absolutism
Abu Mus'ab al Zarkawi
activism
Adam
admission ceremonies
after-life
Allah
alphabetization
apocalyse
Aquinas, Thomas
Arendt, Hannah
Aristotle
Assman, Jan
atheism
Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus)
Babylon
Badiou, Alain
Baeck, Leo
being
belief
Ben-Chorin, Schalom blasphemy
Bloom, Harold
Brock, Bazon Byzantine Empire
Camus, Albert
Canaanites
Celan, Paul
Chateaubriand, François-René de Christianity
expansionism
and Greek culture
internal schisms and counter-religion
and Islam
and Judaism
and militancy
and monolingualism
and monotheism
persecution
popularity
and ritual
state religion
and supremacy
and universalism
and violence
and zealotry
see also Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus); Reformation; Roman Catholicism
civilization colour
Communism compromise cosmotheism counter-religion cultural religion
damnation
Dante
Dávila, Nicolás Gómez Dawkins, Richard
death
Debray, Régis Delacampagne, Christian depersonalization Derrida, Jacques Dibelius, Martin Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
ego
Egypt and Egyptians Enlightenment
and Christianity and monotheism and zeal
ethnocentrism evolution expansionism
faith
and belief
and zealotry falsehood
Flasch, Kurt French Revolution Freud, Sigmund Fried, Erich
God
Old Testament
see also Allah; Trinity; Yahweh goodness
Greeks Grunberger, Béla
haste
hatred
Hegel, Georg Heidegger, Martin hermeneutics hierarchies
high culture
Holy Scriptures human rights humanism
Hume, David humour, monotheistic hysteria
Idealism, German idolatry/imagery Illich, Ivan immunity inaccessibility inhumanity inlibration intelligence
Islam
and Christianity
and compromise
as counter-religion and enemies/hatred expansionism influences
and Judaism militancy
and monolingualism and monotheism population growth and ritual
schisms and sects and supremacy
and universalism urbanism
and zealotry
Israel
Jacobins Jerusalem Jesus jihad Judaism
and Christianity
and compromise
and conflict
as counter-religion and idolatry/imagery and Islam
and monolingualism
and monotheism
and personal supremacism and ritual
schisms and sects
and zealotry
judgement Judgement Day
Kierkegaard, Søren Kissinger, Henry Kluge, Alexander
language
Latin
law
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim
Lewis, Bernard logic
McLuhan, Marshall Mann, Thomas Marx, Karl
mass culture mathematics meditative religions memoactivity messianism militancy missionary work
see also expansionism modernity
Mohammed monogëism monolatry monotheism
and Christianity and Enlightenment humour
and Islam
and Judaism
and supremacism and zeal
monovalence Mosebach, Martin
Moses
movements, slow Mühlmann, Heiner murder, mass
Nazism
negative theology Nietzsche, Friedrich nous
obedience
objectivity
Old Testament (Tanach) onto-theology
Otto, Rudolf
Paganism para-monotheism passivity
Paul of Tarsus (St Paul)
letters perfectionism
persecution
Plato
plurivalent thinking politics
polytheism polyvalent thinking positivism
power
prayer
predestination prophets and prophecy Protestantism purgatory
Puritans
Qur'an Qutb, Sayyid
Ratzinger, Joseph reality
reason Reformation revelation revolution
Rilke, Rainer Maria ritual
admission ceremonies and Christianity
and Islam
and Judaism
Robespierre, Maximilien Roman Catholicism
and compromise and expansionism and state religion
Romans
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Sacks, Oliver Sa'id Ayyub salvation
sects
secularism self-denial self-preservation servitude sovereignty spiritualization state religion stress
suicide summotheistic affect supremacism
and Christianity and Islam
and Judaism and monotheism noetic onto-theology personal
and zeal
Ten Commandments
terrorism theocentrism thymós tolerance totalitarianism transcendence Trinity
truth
universalism
and Christianity
and Islam
vehemence violence
see also militancy war
Whitehead, Alfred N.