No More Learning

2050, observing the chronic convulsions of Islamic ‘societies’, will occasionally be reminded of the battles of the reformation age – but even more strongly of Catholicism's anti-modern phase of defiance, which lasted from 1789 until the Second Vatican Council and which, one is still amazed to recall, ended to the advantage of all concerned with a reconciliation of theocentrism and democracy.
Perhaps educated Europeans living around the year
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10 This passage contains what is considered the earliest appearance (c. AD 115) of the word christianismós, which was formed in analogy to the older term judaismós.
11 Alfred N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), p. 74. This statement echoes Rousseau's claim (The Social Contract, book 4, ch. 8) that ‘Christianity preaches nothing but servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that tyranny always profits from it. ’
François-René de Chateaubriand, Le génie du christianisme (Paris, 1802). English translation: The Genius of Christianity or The Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion, trans. Charles I. White (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975).
See Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York: Anchor, 2005), ch. 10, ‘The DNA of the Jews’.
Ibid.
Leo, Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, 10th edition (Wiesbaden, 1991), p. 290.
Ibid. , p. 279.
Ibid. , pp. 294f.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Das Leben ist die Guillotine der Wahrheiten. Ausgewählte Sprengsätze [Life Is a Guillotine of Truths. Selected Explosives], ed. Martin Mosebach (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), p. 28.
Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, p. 264.
Schalom Ben-Chorin, Paulus: der Völkerapostel in jüdischer Sicht [Paul: the People's Apostle From a Jewish Perspective] (Munich, 1997).
12 Logik des Schreckens [The Logic of Terror]. Augustinus von Hippo: De diversis quaestiones ad Simplicianum I, 2. Die Gnadenlehre von 397 [The Doctrine of Grace from 397], trans. Walter Schäfer, and edited with notes and an afterword by Kurt Flasch (Mainz: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1990), Latin–German.
13 Peter Sloterdijk, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung [In the World Interior of Capital. For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).
14 Horst Gründer, Welteroberung und Christentum. Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der Neuzeit [World Conquest and Christianity. A Handbook for the History of the Modern Age] (Gütersloh, 1992).
15 Ernst Benz, Beschreibung des Christentums. Eine historische Phänomenologie [Description of Christianity. A Historical Phenomenology] (Munich, 1975), pp. 29 and 302.
16 Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, p. 266. Also ibid. , p. 261: ‘The true history of the world is the history of good. ’
17 Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 184.
18 Cf. Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: Fundamentalism, De- territorialisation and the Search for a New Ummah (London: C. Hurst & Co. , 2004), p. 331: ‘Fundamentalism is a means of re- universalising religions (whether it be Islam or Christianity) that has ended up being closely identified with a given culture. ’
19 Annemarie Schimmel, Die Religion des Islam. Eine Einführung [The Religion of Islam: An Introduction] (Stuttgart: Reclaim, 1990), pp. 14f.
20 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘The Spiritual Significance of Jihad’ in Traditional Islam in the Modern World, ed. Nasr (London: Kegan Paul, 1987).
21 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vols. I-III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
22 Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 178.
24 A later symbol of triumphant bigotry is the destruction of the observatory in Istanbul, built in 1577 on the initiative of the mathematician and astronomer Taküyiddin Efendi, by the sultan's naval artillery in 1580.
25 Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 159. Lewis attributes Turkey's path towards modernity to Atatürk's constructive answers to the second question.
26 Quoted from David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p. 210.
27 Sayyid Abdul A'la Mawdudi, The Islamic Way of Life (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1986).
28 Gunnar Heinsohn, Söhne und Weltmacht. Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen [Sons and World Power. Terror in the Rise and Fall of Nations], 4th edition (Zurich, 2006).
29 Cf. Roy, Globalised Islam: Fundamentalism, De- territorialisation and the Search for a New Ummah.
30 Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press, 2006).
5
The matrix
What has so far been said about the formations, fronts and campaigns of the three monotheisms demands integration within an overview of the logical patterns of the faith in one god and the blueprints for zealous universalisms. It would be misleading to assume that monotheistic zeal is a matter determined first and foremost by emotional laws and therefore calls primarily for a psychological analysis. Naturally the affect-dynamic aspects of zealotry are open to psychosemantic probing. It would be reckless to ignore the depth-psychological insights into religio-neurotic and clericopathic phenomena gathered in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – to name only the well-studied examples of God's helper syndrome and spiritual masochism. Psychoanalysis also specialized in revealing the parallels between individual people's images of God and their images of their parents. Furthermore, such authors as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger and others showed that what is generally presented as faith is often a form of hysteria – an act whose protagonists muster their entire existences in the hope of gaining desired roles at the religious vanity fair. Where there is zeal, there is competitive zeal, and what initially seems to be an intimate affair between God and the soul is not infrequently also fuelled by the jealousy of ambitious souls regarding the real and imagined advantages of their rivals in the battle for the best seats. On the other hand, more recent religio-psychological research – supported by new hybrid subjects like neuro-theology and
neuro-rhetoric1 – has given indications of the ‘biopositive’ effects of religious affects that, if one is to avoid a one-sided view, cannot be ignored.
With all due respect for the findings in the fields of psychological and biological research, the monotheism of the exclusive and totalitarian type under debate here contains one primary logical problem for us to decipher, and this problem follows its own strictly internally conditioned grammar. One of the points of departure in gaining an
understanding of the laws that determine the construction of the exclusive monotheisms has already been touched on in the references to Abraham's quest for a god worthy of his adoration. The typical summotheistic climb to the final, the highest and the utmost contains the logical implication that one must move from the plural to the singular, from the many gods to the one God. A deity that was the Highest but not the One would be inconceivable at this level of reflection. Religious supremacism, the ascent to the Highest and the Only, is necessarily tied to ontological monarchism – the principle that a single being can and should rule over everyone and
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everything.
ensures that nothing can resist the overlord, in keeping with the theorem omnia apud deum facilia – ‘naturally everything is easy for God’. From this dynamism follows optimism (or perfectionism, to put it more precisely in idea-historical terms), which states that the dominant one is the perfect and the best, and always acts in accordance with his perfect nature. The best is the one who is better than everything good – or more than that: better than everything that is merely better than good.
This monarchism is joined by a dynamism which
This supremacist thought climbs numerous steps to reach the peak of the hyper-best, which ultimately subjugates all things and beings both de facto and de jure. It culminates in a figure known in the language of faith as God, the eternal and almighty. It is to him and only to him that the rule applies: the elevation to the Highest must consistently follow the trail of a personal transcendence. In this scheme, God alone can be placed as a person above all other persons, as the author, the creator, the lawmaker, the ruler and the director of the world's theatre, the one without whose command not a single hair falls from a human head – and without whose support no
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As long as we are dealing with Abrahamites, then, we are operating within the sphere of the subjective highest, whose condensate
household appliance works.
strong preponderance of you qualities – accompanied by underdeveloped id elements. His invitation is more to a relationship than to insight. Once the believer, like Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin, has become wholly childlike and wholly idiotic in relation to the almighty other, the last traces of God's cognitive determinacy dissolve.
A conspicuous feature of this God is a
appears in the idea of a transcendent kingship. This is expressed as
much in the Jewish idea of the theocracy of Yahweh as in the
doctrine of Christ's royal reign (see the encyclical Quas primas
published by Pius XI in 1925) and the idea, ubiquitous in Islam, of
Allah's omnipotence, which is supposed to apply in both the political
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It is easy to understand now why the relationship between humans and a highest being of the personal type is subject to completely different laws from those in the case of an impersonal supreme power. It is part and parcel of this form of personal supremacism that those who think and believe cannot be any more than mere vassals or employees of the divine sovereign – the only other option being the despicable role of infidels and disobedients. Whether they like it or not, the supremacization of the personal God inevitably assigns humans an inferior status. The most important asymmetry between servant and master manifests itself in the fact that God remains unfathomable to humans, even once he is revealed, whereas humans cannot keep any secrets from him. The cosmological and moral asymmetries are equally overwhelming: God's dominion encompasses the entire universe, while humans are often not even able to keep their own lives in order. Islamic preachers still like to invoke the following edifying image: before the throne of God, the seventh heaven is no larger than a grain of sand; compared to the seventh, the sixth heaven is only as large as a ring in the desert; compared to the sixth, the fifth is also no larger than a ring in the desert and so on, until the first heaven, which the earthlings believe to be all-encompassing when they look up at it – in these humbling sermons for Muslims, the Aristotelian worldview is kept alive poetically and therapeutically. Then one normally asks the individual believer: so how big are you compared to all those things? The correct answer can only be one like the exclamation of Lessing's
Saladin: ‘I, dust? I, nothing? O God! ’5 Nonetheless, the exegetes do not tire of insisting that God is profoundly close to us and cares for each human being like his own child; and he carries most of the load for the members of his flock, whom he looks after with love and
and everyday pragmatic spheres.
supremacism is not only the creator, ruler and preserver of the world, but also its archivist, saviour, judge and – in extremis – its avenger and destroyer.
The monarch of personal
compassion. For the willing, all that is left in this scenario is the role of the servant who, trembling with requited love, places himself at his lord's disposal. This kind of relationship has been referred to in Christian contexts as a ‘patriarchy of love’, but this expression is more or less applicable to all situations that bear the hallmarks of patriarchy.
The more the believer is taken over by this supremacization of the lord, the more radically he will be inclined to make his own will subject to instructions from above. An intense form of personal supremacism leads to an extremism of the will to obedience that is typical of zealotic movements. The obedience that embraces this intensification extends so far that a servant prepared to go to any lengths will prefer the most rigid laws and the most unpleasant commands, these offering the necessary material to carry out the work of radical subordination. One still finds traces of this servant syndrome everywhere in the world of today: in malign forms, as exemplified most currently by the suicide attack; in intermediate manifestations as observed in worthy zealous systems such as Opus Dei; and in curious variations, for example the rumour among Vaticanists that, under Pope Paul VI, some Vatican City employees even knelt during telephone conversations with their highest
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One should note that the disposition referred to does initially make room for non-neurotic intensifications of the idea of service, though
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superior.
the pathological escalations are usually not long in waiting. A product of this type of supremacization that is initially psychologically inconspicuous is an affinity for majesty and splendour, in both moral-political and aesthetic areas. But the irrationalist tendency is also part of the structure: for if God demands sacrifices, why not sacrifice reason too? This is manifest in the willingness to believe that even the deepest darkness contains holy meaning and to obey the instructions from above against all doubts, even – and especially – when the command remains unfathomable, as it was for Abraham when God demanded the sacrifice of his son Isaac. In the realm of the personal supreme power, everything hinges on trust in the integrity of the commander. No one is granted the right to obstinacy. In such a universe, it must
sound like an incitement to anarchy when Hannah Arendt, following on from Kant, states: ‘No one has the right to obey. ’
The history of resorting to the highest also displays an impersonal
variant that I will refer to as objective or ontological supremacism.
Here, ascent to the pinnacle – as Plato described in his reflections on
the stages of rapture, from a single beautiful body to disembodied
beauty and goodness ‘itself’ – brings the believer to a supreme power
that does not have the properties of a personal being, but rather
those of a principle or an idea. This supremacy, which culminates in
a nameless highest being, can only be spoken about in terms of first
and final justifications of an object-like, suprapersonal and structural
nature. Concisely put: the ascent to the objective highest leads to the
god of the philosophers. Even its crudest portraits show that it has
little or nothing in common with the Abrahamic versions of God (El,
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The position of human beings in an ontologically and cosmologically supremacized world context therefore can not be interpreted as bondage or willingness to serve. Rather, true being-in-the-world demands an awareness of one's participation in universal systems of order. Now it is a matter of understanding in an advanced sense: an adaptation of the understander to the superior exigencies of being. The ascent takes place on the ladder of general concepts. Therefore God can bear conceptual names such as the unum, the verum, the bonum, the maximum, the simplicissimum or the actualissimum. Even such titles are sufficient to inspire believers – Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling still swore on the hen kai pan [One and All] in their youthful ardour, like revolutionaries on their watchword.
Like the first supremacism, the second also draws believers towards extremes – not in the form of blazing servility, nor a yearning for death in flames as mentioned by Goethe in the subtlest of his Islamically inclined poems, but rather as the willingness to push oneself back to the objective level in order to let things glow of their
Yahweh, God the Father, Allah).
nor judge; it is a source of that which is, and from its unsurpassable bestness radiates a derived best, the cosmos. It does not have the power to command; it has the power of self-revelation through superabundance. Its creative potency realizes itself according to the scheme of a causality through goodness.
It is neither creator nor monarch
own accord. This presupposes that the reproduction of these things in the clouded mirror of subjectivity, the interested will and biased sensuality is replaced by an objective, desensualized thinking cleansed of all wilfulness. The ontological supremacism that characterizes Greek – and, even more, Indian – metaphysics releases a passion for depersonalization that can grow into the ambition to merge the human subject with the anonymous origin of the world. While the striving for the personal highest follows the super-you in order to be absorbed fully by its will, the First Philosophy seeks to lose itself in the super-id. Objective supremacism – which, since Heidegger, is often labelled as onto-theology and viewed with suspicion like a subtle form of idolatry – is ultimately concerned with dissolving the subject into a substance.
In order to complete the picture, we should speak of a third supremacism in the old European culture of reason whose point of departure lies in the experience of thought and inner speech – and later also of writing. Here we become acquainted with a second face of philosophy, in so far as the latter can begin with the self- exploration of thinking instead of taking the world as its focus. Since Heraclitus' discovery of the logos and the introduction of the concept of nous by Anaxagoras, logical or noetic supremacism has been working towards an alternative ascent that leads, in its own way, to the god of the philosophers; but this time not through the north face of substance, but rather along the fine line of spiritual articulations. This line also leads to the One and Ultimate – this time, however, the supreme being is not interpreted from the perspective of substantiality, let alone in terms of majesty and omnipotence. Here it is the all-pervading intelligibility and constructive force of the spiritual principle that lies at the centre. One must be careful to avoid the mistake of equating this non-theologically highest power too readily with the divine attribute of omniscience found in religion. For in terms of its dynamist origin, God's knowledge within the system of personal supremacism possesses, as well as the quality of creation wisdom, the more significant quasi-political function of universal supervision and total bookkeeping of all deeds done and undone by believers and non-believers alike – its decisive application will therefore be on Judgement Day, when God himself opens the files for public viewing. The ascent to the highest, on the other hand,
in accordance with noetic supremacism, leads to theoretical perceptions that accompany the divine intellect on its innermost folding into itself and its unfolding into the world. It is not uncommon for mathematics to be brought into play in this sublime endoscopy, as it depicts structures as they are before any sensuality and hence before any subjectively determined ambiguity.
The theory of the highest intellect, like that of being, strives to present itself as strictly supra-personal and beyond the profane human sphere. The extremism that lies in the nature of this matter too manifests itself in a striving for the final formula. It does not let up until the human spirit is granted a connection to the higher intellects, and ultimately even a knowledge of God's procedures in the creation of the world. Even Hegel's seemingly hubristic statement that his logic contained the thoughts God entertained before the creation does not go any further than what is customary in the supremacism of the spirit. Furthermore, Hegel's programme of developing substance as subject perfectly expressed the aim of noetic supremacism. It is part of the long history of Christian receptions of Yahweh's self-assertion: ‘I am that I am’ (Exodus 3:14). With this, theologians add a divine ego character to the being of the ontologists
and allow the human ego to take part in it epicentrically9 – an operation in which the German Idealists attained mastery. A part of the image of the corresponding extremism is the radicality of the will to a logical penetration of all circumstances that has always characterized pneumatic thinkers. It has often been interpreted as arrogance – though one could equally view it as a higher form of irony. For the partisans of the spirit, most of what issues from the mouths of humans is nothing but inane air movement in any case – just as they almost always consider everyday life a mere rolling around in gravity. To them, the ordinary descendants of Adam are no more than upright worms. What is a human being before it is transformed by the spirit? A decorated intestine with God knows what delusions about its own substance. Little wonder that the advocates of such views rarely lack a tendency to logical flights of fancy.
When supremacists of this kind explain themselves, one hears the postulation that where matter was, spirit shall be – or that a planned order of reason must replace the chaos that has grown over time. The
third disappearance of humans (following their eradication in the
service of the Lord and their dissolution into the anonymous
substance) is supposed to be achieved by their spiritual evaporation
on the way to the divine omega point. The fact that noetic
supremacism has occasionally resembled its substance-ontological
partner does not negate its autonomy. In effect it formed a
community of tradition with it in which it risked misunderstanding
itself substantialistically. This was only brought to a halt by the
transcendental shift following Descartes and Kant, that is to say
through the depotentization of the theory of intellect to the critique
of reason. This approach, as Kurt Flasch has shown in critical
interventions, reached one of its most sublime manifestations in the
intellect-theoretical speculations of Dietrich von Freiberg and
Meister Eckhart, who were inspired by Arab Aristotelianism – in
particular Averroes – and are often misinterpreted by the life-
philosophically stimulated public in their own country as ‘German
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mystics’.
changed the premises of the third supremacism in the wake of the Enlightenment; but the fate of such ideas as the dialectical thinking made current by Hegel has shown that the battle over the interpretation of the cognitively highest still continues in modern times. The tensions between the three leading noetic supremacisms of the twentieth century – the dialectical, the phenomenological and the grammatological – would require an examination of their own.
Naturally, the secularization of the intellect inevitably
In the light of what has been said so far, the matrix of logical operations that result in zealotic monotheisms can be shown without much additional effort. I have already hinted that the three supremacisms correspond to three extremisms that should be understood as three ways of overcoming resistance to a union with the One and Only. The methods, praised as ‘realizations’, of eliminating the human will in service, substance and spiritualization share a positivization of death, in so far as death offers the most direct route to the Lord, to being and to the spirit. The question of whether an affirmation of death should be assigned symbolic or literal meaning may remain unanswered. None of the resolute have ever contradicted the statement that some form of self-elimination is a prerequisite for reaching higher regions. Albert Camus's thesis that suicide is the central philosophical problem shows that its originator
was one of the dying breed of metaphysically talented authors in the twentieth century, and the sneering of some philosophically unmusical thinkers only served to underline this.
The extremisms, for their part, are especially consistent applications of high cultural grammar, which was based on the rigid combination of a monovalent ontology and a bivalent logic. Monovalence of speech about that which is means: the things of which it is said that they are actually are, and are not not; nor are they anything other than what they are. Hence they share in being, both in the fact that and the fact of what and how. Hence they can best be expressed in tautologies. In this area one cannot aspire to originality, and if one is asked what being is, one should – referring to Heidegger – simply answer that it is itself. In the realm of monovalence a rose is a rose, and it lies in its nature that it flowers without any reason or consideration for its observer.
The only other things that meet such strict standards of identity are the choirs of angels when they exalt the Highest in a monovalent language. This language forms a medium that neither requires nor permits contradictions, nor does it show any weak spots that could allow an infiltration by error, false statements or unstable structures. Thus the angels can speak eternal truth about eternal being. Unlike human ontologists, they never risk missing the point when they praise God.
Terrestrial speakers dream in vain of such achievements, as our languages are destined to be bivalent in their constitution. It is not inconceivable that, before the expulsion from Eden, Adam's language also consisted purely of adequate names and well-formed affirmations, so that everything he uttered in paradise became a natural hymn to that which is. The expulsion introduced a second value, however; indeed, logicians view the myth of the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden of identity as no less than a poetic attempt to narrate the growth of human reflection as a tragedy. This is not implausible, for whoever eats their daily bread in the sweat of their brow will separate the true from the false even as they frown – a burden that can be compared to the curse of farming. Let us note, then, that the first negation came not from the human spirit, but rather from God's command not to eat from the tree.
The introduction of this second value made the human capacity for true statements unstable, as these – being a reflection in the other of that which is – were now accompanied by the fatal possibility of being false. The fact that the capacity for untruth clings to the act of statement is one of freedom's dowries – if freedom means being exposed, in a postlapsarian state, to the inclination to speak falsely, whether due to an honest mistake, for strategic reasons or simply out of an enjoyment of untruth for its own sake. Even if one takes pains to present things in – as far as we can establish it – the way their own state dictates, one should fundamentally expect some gap through which falsehood can enter. Metaphorically expressed, the true sentence does not grow on the branch of real conditions – it is no growth at all, no continuation of what naturally is in what naturally is. Rather, sentences are always, in a way that is specific to humans, artificial, daring and unnatural – in fact, they are always potentially perverse. According to the majority tradition of the classical logicians, they constitute a reflection of nature in a more or less murky medium, that is to say mirrorings that lack any substantial weight of their own, and are thus in constant danger of multiplying the host of phantoms. How else could one interpret the fact that for every true statement, there are an infinite number of possible false ones? What does a sentence mean in the cosmos anyway? It seems like a necessary, but fundamentally hazardous, supplement that, with an artificial effort and an inevitable delay, joins the collection of things that truly are. A sentence is always so remote from that which is that its formulation inevitably risks missing the mark. One can turn it on its head and back again, one can stretch, twist and squash it, and nothing seems simpler than making it express the opposite of its actual intention. In the best case, the double negation leads back to the original sentence, though even this may itself also have been false. Under such circumstances, how is it that one occasionally has the impression certain statements are nonetheless true and correct? Probably only because particular speakers manage to evade the danger and temptation to present falsehoods, clinging instead to those aspects on the side of being that seem to be in a state of simple identity with themselves, as if there were no mistaken, deceitful or self-contradictory people – or, in the jargon of philosophers: as if the identical could be represented
undistorted in the non-identical, or as if being could be transformed into corresponding signs without any loss of substance.
Now we can clarify what the zealotic monotheisms and their universalist missions mean from a logical perspective. They rest on the intention of eliminating the risk of failure introduced by the second value at all costs – even if that implies removing the errant along with the error. In fact the errant himself, viewed in terms of the ideal of monovalent being and its reflection in the true sentence, is merely a form of real nothingness whose liquidation is no great loss – just as the massif of being continues to exist unharmed, as it was and will be, whenever an incorrect statement about one of its details is annulled.
This disposition is, as we have seen, given through the combination of classical ontology and classical logic. If the second value is only a reflexive one, a value that enables a surplus of potentially untenable statements and superfluous negations beyond the number of real facts counted out by being or by God himself (but also serves to verify these, as Plato's dialogues show), it should suffice to eliminate the parasitic sentences, the lies, the errors, the ideological and the fictitious, and if need be also the accompanying speakers, in order to bring human speech back to the core content of legitimate statements – legitimate, as we have seen, because they are supported by being and spawned by the spirit in the spirit. Essentially, all supremacist zealots have only one concern: the mission of expelling the insolent traders from the temple of monovalence. Does Dante Alighieri not tell us that everything superfluous displeases God and
nature? 11 The necessity of such an intervention becomes evident as soon as, owing to various requirements of the evolution of ideas (warning: axial age! ), a strictly monovalent ontology is systematically bound together with a strictly bivalent logic.
This configuration permits the first appearance of the phenomenon of strictness. When strictness coincides with lack of complexity, zealotry is in its element. Thinking becomes strict as soon as it insists that only one of two options can be right for us. Then it guards its cause jealously to make sure that the side of being is taken, not of nothingness; of the essential, not of the inessential; of the Lord, not of the lordless and lawless. The logical origin of zealotry lies in
bringing everything down to the number one, which tolerates no one and nothing beside itself. This number one is the mother of intolerance. It demands the radical either in which the or is ruled out. Whoever says ‘two’ is saying one too many. Secundum non datur.
These reflections take us into the deep structure of the iconoclastic syndrome. If the rigid monotheisms frown upon the use of images, this is not simply because they embody the danger of idolatry. More importantly, the unacceptable nature of images stems from the observation that they never serve purely to reproduce that which is represented, but always assert their own significance in addition. The autonomous value of the second aspect as such becomes visible in them – and the iconoclasts will go to any lengths to destroy this. They empathize with a God who has regretted his creation ever since his creatures began to have minds of their own. They come to his aid by exterminating whatever distracts the creatures from an exclusive bond to the One. As humans ‘misuse’ their freedom to craft images, the iconoclasts wish to put an end to this misuse by restricting the creatures' freedom by force. This is supposedly done to show humans the way back to the true God. In reality, however, iconoclasm seeks to attack the autonomy of the world, in so far as ‘world’ represents the epitome of the emancipated second aspect. In iconoclasm, which is actually a cosmoclasm, one finds the articulation of a resentment of any human freedom that is not prepared to accept immediate self- denial and obedience.
The zealotic monotheisms (like the zealotic Enlightenment and zealotic scientism in later times) draw their momentum from the fantastic notion that they could succeed, in the face of all the delusions and confusions of our controversially lingualized and multiply pictorialized reality, in ‘reinstating’ a monovalent primal language. They want to make audible the monologue of things as they are, and reproduce the unconcealed facts, the first structures, the purest instructions of being, without having to address the intermediate world of languages, images and projections with its independent logic. The followers of the revelational religions even seek to make the monologue of God himself reverberate in the human ear, the listener being a mere recipient who does not involve
his own ego – and hence does not acquire any share in the author's rights.
Now one can also understand why there need to be several varieties of zealotry. Depending on the type of supremacization they tend towards, their agents choose typical procedures for returning from ambiguity to certainty, from the fallibility of idle talk to the infallibility of the original text. At any rate, the aim of this motto of ‘back to a time before reflection! ’ is to block out human language as it was spoken after the Fall. Its replacement is a code still untarnished by the negations, contradictions and capacity for error inherent in bivalent speech. Hence the interest of logical, moral and religious extremists in a language beyond human speech. In striving for the extrahuman and superhuman, the religious zealots join hands with the mathematical rigorists, and the advocates of self-dissolution within being also follow along.
The oldest and most enduring examples of how to return from the post-Adamite position to the humanly impossible monovalent language can be found in early monotheistic prophethood. This is no surprise, as the prophets claimed to express nothing more than God's view of the world, not their own personal opinions. The prophetic word begins interventionistically and ends absolutistically: it contradicts what specific people do or say in specific situations – yet it cannot be contradicted by anything, as it claims to come from a sphere devoid of reflection or second opinions. The word borrowed from the Highest, then conveyed by the speaker to the unjust prince or the misguided people, is no mere village gossip. It brings every debate to an end by saying what is and what should be. It appears to be critique – some modern theologians like to exalt prophecy as the source of social critique – but, as monovalence does not allow the critical word, any egalitarian debate or expression of opinion, it becomes the last word on the matter – not dramaturgically, before an audience, but rather eschatologically, before the Highest.
Alphabetization takes care of the rest. The founding of great religions takes place, as has often been observed, on the boundary between medial galaxies. The classical prophets, from Moses to Mohammed, are located on the thresholds between regimes of cultural memory. Medially musical, they play upon two instruments while allowing
themselves to be played upon from both sides. They look back into the universe of orality and make its legends and trances sound (‘speaking means playing with the other's body’, according to Alfred Tomatis); at the same time, they look ahead to scriptural culture and bring forth its hidden relationships between literality and truth. They testify to the pressure of coherence that increases through scripturality, and to everything else that accompanies the ‘advances in spirituality’ caused by alphabetization. The central concern, however, is that the great mediators themselves want to be viewed as living texts. What is a prophet if not a registered letter to humanity? He embodies a piece of writing whose receipt is often refused and which, once accepted, can usually not be read correctly by its first recipients. Not reading correctly: that means treating the undeniable text as if it were a debatable one, a text on which salvation depends like an everyday document. If a prophet is without honour in his own country, it is because nobody can believe that ‘one of us’ can change over to the realm of monovalence overnight.
Describing Judaism, Christianity and Islam as prophetic religions
means observing that they constitute three stages of God's inlibration
– and if the book seemed for an aeon to have been assigned a
metaphysical surplus value, this was not least because it could be
seen as a vehicle for the absolute. One can consider the monotheisms
pure religions of faith if faith refers to the internal operations
through which believers act in relation to the inlibrated God. They
are usually acts of inner collection to prepare one for the encounter
with the overwhelming – and why not also with the disarmingly
simple? Through faith, the infinite regress of doubt and a drifting in
unbelief is stopped. It helps to secure a foundation from which all
12
The paths of the believers diverge when it becomes time to decide whether the word of God is not only monovalent, but also monolingual, as Islam states in its doctrine of divine Qur'anic Arabic (and as, slightly further in the background, the Cabbalists also claim in their accounts of God experimenting with Hebrew letters during the creation), or whether monovalence and multilinguality can coexist, as Christians believe. In fact, the tale of Pentecost provides the latter with the paradigm of a multilingual and monovalent spiritual outpouring – which could justify an initial suspicion of
other thoughts and actions can ‘emanate’.
intellectual and communicative superiority. They diverge even
further faced with the question of how close God and humans, or the
book and humans, are allowed to get to each other: while Jews and
Muslims remove God to the realm of the incomparable and carefully
allow humans to approach the book, Christianity created a transitive
ménage à trois. Here the inlibration of God is replaced by his
incarnation. Hence further transitions are pre-programmed, and
13
In terms of its history and its subject, prophetism belongs to the category of personal supremacism. It calls upon its participants to submit completely to the word of the Lord; in the best case, this submission takes place in the mode of comprehending conformation. In Islam, God has the sole rights to the holy text, being its author (Mohammed acts as a radiant model of the pure medium); in Christianity they are transferred to Christ as the co-author (‘the eternal word of the father’); while Jewish scriptural scholars sometimes act as if the prophets had given notable interviews to which the rights, if they cannot be completely in the hands of the interviewer, should at least be divided equally among the partners. All variations show a clear hierarchical difference between the sender and the recipient. The pronouncements from above are received as revelations and preserved in sacredly guarded copies. They are read in a cultic context, and exegetes carry out their interpretations on their knees in constant fear of blasphemy. It was only with the reformers of the sixteenth century that laypersons were permitted to read the scriptures; the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries went further, making it possible to profane them with impunity by securing the freedom to engage in non-cultic, even critical, interpretation.
Objective or ontological supremacism, on the other hand, cannot possess any holy scriptures for internal reasons. It points quietly to the library of classics, whose statements remain within the sphere of the debatable, even when dealing with first and last things. If one were to give individual authors, for example Plato, such epithets as ‘the divine’, this would display a mixture of effusiveness and calculation. When it comes to philosophers, one tends to be closer friends with the truth than with the author who formulated it. Pure being is certainly nothing that can be blasphemed – which is why
their unfolding is only a matter of time and conjuncture.
someone who desires to mock it need not fear any reprisals: to those in the know, it is obvious that ignorance is its own punishment. A double penalty would be beneath philosophy (to say nothing of the infamy of asymmetrical punishment in the zealotic religions, which like to repay finite offences with infinite penitential suffering). The ascent to monovalence occurs here with the calmness that is native
to positivism as a whole. Its mantra: ‘it is what it is’14 – for, may Erich Fried forgive us, it is not love that says this, but rather a wisdom undistorted by a desire for anything different. It views things as it finds them, and lets them be what they are for the meantime – the question of how they are altered will arise soon enough. Ontological positivism moves effortlessly from each corner of what is into silence. The highest, to which this silence refers, is the whole, as it is for itself when there are no subjective, negative or reflexive impulses to distort it. The substance is always what it is – the good, which presents itself in sublime neutrality, or the perfect, which we encounter in the guise of the ordinary. Not forgetting that even a grain of sand is what it is, because, on its own level and in its own way, it participates in the convergence of being and being good.
Above all else, however, substance is discreet. It does not demand the christening of children and advises against book burnings. It would send pilgrims home, as Santiago, Lourdes or Mecca cannot be any closer to it than any other point in space. There is, as mentioned above, no known bible of objective supremacism. If there were such a thing, it would be substance itself in written form; but how can one conceive of writing, this supplement to a supplement to a supplement, in such an essential role – this near-nothing of ink, which fixes a near-nothing of sound, which is turn articulates a near- nothing made from aspects of consciousness through modulations of the air? The answers to these questions are to be found primarily among the Hegelians, who, for their project of developing substance as subject, can use anything that helps to dissolve the block of being into subtler relationships.
In the thinking of being, it is this last thought that is the most dangerous. The substance of the philosophers does not become a curse for those who dissect or ignore it; it only sucks in those who have understood enough about it to seek absolute immersion in it. Ontological extremism becomes attractive for the spirited, the
nervous, whose constitution reduces their chances of finding peace in being. It is the most pathos-laden and contemplative searchers who espouse an apathetic, unreflexive substance most ardently. They have the loftiest ideas about the block of silence, which they want to resemble yet are so unlike. In their reflexivity and agitation, they take themselves for the blemish that taints being. Finally, they seek to combat the disturbance of the substance's peace within them by eliminating the subject that is in the way – namely themselves. These martyrs of ontology want to pull off the trick of dissolving the non- idiocy of the human condition in the idiocy of pure being. If philosophy has its own form of piety, it is found in such sacrifices. Heidegger's well-known statement against the god of the philosophers – namely that, being the fetish of the self-spawning substance, it is a god to whom one cannot pray – omits the
15
It is telling that India has not only provided a home for the most radical holy fools, but also been a fertile environment for the most extreme ontologies since time immemorial. The ones found in Greece were only ever the shallower varieties, as the Greeks – like Mediterraneans in general, if such blanket statements are permitted – have little talent for extremism. Only Empedocles, the yogi among the Hellenes, strove for an enlightened suicide – not without making sure, in an act of effect-aesthetic alertness, that his sandal, left behind in the crater of Mount Etna, would provide evidence of the all-signifying leap into being. The European sceptics did not fail to note that piece of footwear left behind at the moment of the holy marriage of subject and substance – and this doubt was still alive centuries later, when Brecht glossed the account of the sandal trick with suspicion; even later, Bazon Brock suggested re-enacting it by means of a disclosive performance. What is being if it leaves such a blatant remainder? It would take aeons to find an adequate answer – it can be calculated by adding the remainder to the whole. This operation deprives being of its supposed simplicity – it now transpires as the non-one, cleft by nothingness, a more-than-whole and simultaneously less-than-whole. From this moment on, its
possibility of dissolving oneself in this very god.
with all due respect, an objection of limited wisdom, for the feeling of belonging to a great whole and the anticipation of returning to it are the natural prayer of contemplative intelligence.
It is furthermore,
primitive monovalence is a thing of the past. Such concepts were to be reserved for late periods, however – times in which people would say of God that he was not even one with himself, and had thus given up his transcendental reserve and opted for finitude and the capacity for suffering. It was only with the Christologists of the twentieth century that such thoughts could be uttered – by scholars who made no secret of their conviction that God, being entirely of the world beyond, could only profit from becoming human. From the fifth century BC, however, the philosophers in the Hellenic hemisphere pursued careers as educators, orators and moral trainers in the name of the well-ordered essential cosmos. Despite Plato's melancholy and Aristotle's sourness, none were ever allowed to question their status as worldlings.
The Indian ontologies, by contrast, branched out early on into highly divergent schools, each of which produced its own self-effacement artists. It became apparent that Greek thinking too was not without extremist potential when non-Greeks intervened – such as the African Plotinus and his followers. These were followed by the post- Greek zealots, especially Christian theologians and Arab metaphysicians, whose reception of the supremacism of being and spirit served its fusion with the religiously established supremacism of service to a personal god. This constellation has been referred to as the encounter of Athens and Jerusalem or the gradual Hellenization of Christianity – often without taking into account that, for centuries, the encounter of Athens and Mecca, or, more generally speaking, an urbanization of Islam through Greek theory, had been no less of an issue. Combining different procedures of effacement was the order of the day for the cultivated zealots of the time – they searched for ways to co-ordinate self-dissolution in being or spirit with self-consumption in service to the Lord. It should be noted that these dialogues between cities are among the most influential in earlier intellectual history. The summit meetings of the self-effacers spawned hybrid extremists who combined several supreme authorities. They led to waves of new recruits – first for the monastic orders of Egypt, Syria and Old Europe, then for the crusaders who renounced their selves for Jerusalem, and finally for the early modern partisans of the imitatio Christi, who have been described as mystics. Their contemporary descendants have been
satirized by Bazon Brock as ‘God-seeker gangs’ in his critique of art religion. They embody the organized form of an unwillingness to count to three.
Notes
1
2
3 4
5 6
7
For critical positions, cf. Detlev B. Linke, Religion als Risiko. Geist, Glaube und Gehirn [Religion As Risk. Spirit, Faith and the Brain] (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2003); Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes; Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili and Vince Rause, Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001); Mühlmann, Jesus überlistet Darwin.
Erik Peterson, Theologische Traktate [Theological Treatises] (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1951).
Cf. Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft, p. 160.
A late example of monotheistic symbolism was provided in December 2006 by the forty-six ‘conservative’ members of the Polish parliament who applied for Christ to be declared King of Poland.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise, Act III, scene 7.
Karlheinz Deschner, Opus Diaboli. Fünfzehn unversöhnliche Essays über die Arbeit im Weinberg des Herrn [Fifteen Inconciliatory Essays on Work in the Lord's Vineyard] (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2001), p. 173.
As already stated, however, one should not attribute the zeal for God's cause primarily to psychodynamic sources – for example the compulsion to gain the attention of a busy father, a common phenomenon among the over-abundant sons of families with many children. The zealotic disposition can ultimately only be understood with reference to the matrix of personal supremacism, which encourages the intensification of service to its extreme of its own accord.
8
9
10 Cf. Kurt Flasch, ‘Meister Eckhart – Versuch, ihn aus dem mystischen Strom zu retten’ [An Attempt to Save Him from the Mystical Maelstrom] in Gnosis und Mystik in der Geschichte der Philosophie [Gnosis and Mysticism in the History of Philosophy], ed. Peter Koslowski (Darmstadt, 1988), pp. 94ff. ; also Flasch, Meister Eckhart. Die Geburt der ‘Deutschen Mystik’ aus dem Geist der arabischen Philosophie [The Birth of ‘German Mysticism’ from the Spirit of Arab Philosophy] (Munich, 2006).
11 Dante, Monarchia, I, 14.
12 Translator's note: there is an ambiguity in the original – encouraged by the quotation marks – through the use of the word ausgehen, which can mean both ‘to emanate’ and ‘to (pre)suppose’.
13 In this matrix there are six possible messages: rejoice, for God has become man; God has become the book; man has become God; man has become the book; the book has become God; the book has become man. The use of this field for alternative gospels is to be expected, especially if one takes into account that ‘book’ can be replaced with ‘machine’.
14 From Erich Fried's poem ‘Was es ist’: ‘Es ist Unsinn / sagt die Vernunft / Es ist, was es ist / sagt die Liebe' [It is nonsense / says reason / It is what it is / says love’]: Erich Fried, ‘Es ist was es ist. ’
This observation contrasts starkly with the attempts among Catholic theologians and philosophers to prove – against Pascal – that the god of the philosophers was identical to that of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Cf. Robert Spaemann, Das unsterbliche Gerücht. Die Frage nach Gott und die Täuschung der Moderne [The Immortal Rumour. The Question of God and the Deception of Modernity] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007), pp. 13f.
Hence the obsession among theologians from Philo to Augustine with Exodus 3:14, whereas early rabbinical literature shows a complete lack of interest in the ehyeh asher ehyeh. Cf. Bloom, Jesus and Jahweh, pp. 73f.
Liebesgedichte, Angstgedichte, Zorngedichte [Love Poems, Fear Poems, Anger Poems] (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1996).
15 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
6
The pharmaka
If we glance back from this point in our reflections to the alarm signal provided at the start by Derrida's sudden thesis (‘The war over the “appropriation of Jerusalem” is today's world war. It is taking
place everywhere . . . ’1), it becomes apparent that the warning sign and the danger spot do not go together. The phrase ‘world war’ evokes misleading associations – as if three monotheistic army columns were marching towards Jerusalem, each determined to conquer the city for one flag, one book and one credo. But the fact that Christians are no longer interested in possessing Jerusalem already invalidates this notion – even Catholics now side with Hegel in his statement that an empty grave holds nothing in store for Christians except inevitable disappointment. The religious power with the most followers does not come into the equation, then, in the supposed battle over Jerusalem (the presence in the holy city of the monotheisms of a few Christian Zionists who want to be in the front row when Christ returns is of purely anecdotal value), and it is questionable whether a world war without Christians is worthy of such a bombastic title. Profanely speaking, the reality is that Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over the capital city of a real and a virtual state. Religiously speaking, Jews and Muslims are fighting over control of various holy sites: roughly million people on one side and by now a similar number on the other, together amounting to barely more than half the population of Tokyo or Mexico City. One could only speak of a ‘world war’ with a large dose of metaphorical freedom – or if one wished to propose that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a façade concealing an all-consuming intra-Arab and intra- Islamic civil war that, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world, has so far claimed some 10 million lives and may possibly cost several times as many before it is over, if the dark predictions of Middle East military experts and demographers prove accurate. But that is a matter for a different discussion.
One must therefore assume that Derrida either went astray or was referring to something else.