No More Learning

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. It is probably the second notion that takes us along the right path. In referring to the numerous militant appropriations of Jerusalem, the founder of deconstruction, which produces a critique of the manic element of violence in ‘texts’, was thinking less of the physical occupation of that territory than an access to the exemplary transmitting station for universalist missions. ‘Appropriating Jerusalem’: under late monotheistic conditions, that can only mean seeking to take hold of certain symbolic potentials that authorize their bearers to embark on campaigns of the global kind described above. If one chooses the city of the Wailing Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock as the historical capital of messianic complexes, one can immediately see why there is more than one party that wants to seize, under the code word ‘Jerusalem’, the privilege of splitting mankind into those who are For Us and those who are Against Us. The world was, and still is, full of minorities that claim to constitute humanity and are anticipating the kingdom. It is teeming with chosen peoples, including more than a few who contest the declared chosen people's prerogative. There is also no shortage of messianisms that see the Lord coming from this direction or that. The fact that Derrida thought first of the liberal messianism of certain American ideologues, who had concluded from the recent implosion of the Soviet Union that the ‘Western way of life’ had triumphed, lends his critical-explosive reverie concrete geopolitical content. What he considered dangerous and repulsive was the confiscation of messianic rhetoric by representatives of a saturated imperialism, as if politicians and their speechwriters were now claiming the right to stammer about the Kingdom come like drunken Adventists. Next to the positive philosophers and embedded journalists, who marched both verbally and physically into the countries of the disbanded Second World with the liberal troop, Derrida was naturally also thinking of the Middle Eastern scene, where anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish confessions led by old and new Arab zealots have become rampant – in their case, the ‘appropriation of Jerusalem’ would not occur without a corresponding dispossession. One should not rule out the possibility that Derrida was also referring to the Christian Right in the USA, in which the
apocalyptic sects and their obligatory ‘battle for Jerusalem’ rants are
2
In the current competition of manic propulsive systems, it is only useful to cite the name ‘Jerusalem’ to the extent that it refers to a certain amount of that supremacist potential which transforms the world into the scene of religious and ethical campaigns. It is not sufficient in this field to name only one symbolic address, as a considerable number of enthusiastic projects and revivals to force an overarching meaning are currently underway. On the global scale, there are probably several hundred, maybe even several thousand of them (a significant proportion of these are Christian-evangelical, neo-Gnostic, para-Hinduist, apocalyptic-Islamist, neo-Communist and syncretistic sects, which all share the same high, manic drive), though only a few attain the status of world-famous spiritual brands. Together with Rome, Mecca, Wittenberg and names of a similar quality, Jerusalem represents the quintessence of personal supremacism. It is from such centres that the ecstasies of the will to serve are sent out into the world. From a positive point of view, some of these toponyms indicate a widening of empathetic circles: they testify to the increasing ability of religiously and idealistically motivated people to take an interest in the fates of strangers as if they were relatives.
In the following I intend to show why the battle over the ‘appropriation of Jerusalem’ will not take the form of an inter- monotheistic war. Certainly we are witnesses of, and to a degree also combatants in, a conflict on a ‘spiritual front’, yet the gravity and inevitability of the current collisions do not result from what has been referred to in the debates of recent years as the ‘clash of monotheisms’. The battle is concerned far more with how to ensure control of the extremist potentials within each of the zealotically disposed religions – and the raging ideologies that came after the universalist religions. I say control, not elimination, as such tensions cannot be made to disappear, only diverted into less harmful expressions. In so far as the aforementioned extremisms regularly arise from the applications of personal supremacism to the lives and environments of the zealots, diverting in practice means: working to dampen the extremism of service at the centre of those movements that desire to plunge into the extreme. This demands a decoupling of
increasingly setting the tone.
affect and religious code; the risk of becoming a zealot oneself in the fight against zealotry is an occupational hazard here. Whoever participates with sufficient expertise in the de-supremacization of the supremacisms must get close to their burning centres.
The first step in this process is to show that the concept of the Highest is only useful as an upper limit – and therefore cannot belong to anyone or be appropriated by any ‘representative’ or ‘successor’, any custodian of faith, in an exclusive manner. One would think this an easy hurdle to clear, as it hardly seems conceivable that anyone could believe themselves in a position to put their own stamp on the supreme power. And one must even maintain this objection when the greatest good is ‘evident’ as the revealed word of God. Such things, it would seem, are part of the ABC of any theology and should be assertable everywhere without any great effort. A brief glance around, however, shows how little the mindset of the actors on the current zealotic stages confirms these assumptions.
The reflections on the intertwinement of logic and ontology in the monotheisms developed above show that the task to which I have referred as de-supremacization does not lie in the jurisdiction of psychologists. Rather, it must begin with a logical clarification – at least in the first round. This is the only way to obtain the pharmaka that will help combat supremacist fury. The long-term goal is admittedly more challenging: it must lie in dissolving the time- honoured matrix in which monovalently conceived being is necessarily and compulsively joined with the positive value of the bivalently conceivable statement. This system, as we have seen, was responsible for the numerous historically documented attempts to impose monovalent information from without and above by eliminating the negative value. One need hardly point out that the terror of our own times still functions according to this scheme.
The familiar methods developed in advanced civilizations for reaching authoritative, monovalent theses – whether through an oracle, mathematics or the theory of forms, through prophecy, illumination, informative trance or finally through such doctrines as the incarnation of the word or the inlibration of God – were all characterized by a striving to break out of the sphere of fallible
knowledge, to anchor human existence eccentrically in the absolute. Its aim was always an inconcussum that would be reached not through the introspective self-confirmation of the subject, but rather by ecstatically overwhelming it. A foundation is considered unshakeable once it makes the breakthrough to an absolute anchor point.
In order to force access to this, absolutists use a sleight of hand that, though always the same in formal terms, allows material executions in many directions: they choose the exaggeration of passivity as the ideal path of being. The word ‘being’ here refers to the totality of connections that encompasses, reaches through and validates us mortals. If one is to find some point of orientation from without, passive ecstasy is indispensable. How else should one attain such a state than through the postulation that, when playing with God or being, there are throws where humans catch something they have not thrown themselves – not even as ricochets of their own
throws? 3 At the decisive moment, the person who catches the ball is supposed to be a pure recipient and nothing but a recipient. If he goes about it correctly, he is no longer himself in the instant of catching, but rather the medium of a transcendental sender. What he receives is then supposed to determine everything else – even the profane states following the ecstasy, in which it is once more his turn to serve the ball.
One can state, in the most cordial possible tone, that every one of the aforementioned figures used to force such a pure reception has become problematic. This becomes clearest whenever there is an attempt to reinstate them. Either one tries to find substitute forms of plausibility, usually taken from anthropology, sociology or psychoanalysis, or one supports one's defence using means that go subversively beyond the horizon of what is actually being defended. But even if conservative thinking has always chosen refinement in order to preserve the simple, that simplicity is damaged by its conservation. That applies equally to the need to cling to the myth of passivity. If one is to recognize the role of the radical monotheisms in moral and cognitive evolution, it is only fair to meet them on the field of their own strengths – their greatest, however, the apparent predication on the foundations of religious and ontological authority, consists (as noted above) in precarious methods of forcibly obtaining transcendent information. If one follows these procedures all the way
back to their tangible origins, the strengths turn into weakness. The authorities regularly transpire as borrowers who are unconcerned with paying their debts as long as they have the power to intimidate the trusting lenders. However good one's intentions may be, the results of an examination are unequivocal. After a comprehensive acknowledgement of all the evidence, after listening patiently to the witnesses and advocates, the conclusion is inescapable: the matrix of traditional religious and philosophical metaphysical systems has been exhausted. On the one hand, ‘exhausted’ means fully developed and realized, while on the other it means entirely used up and seen through in its fundamentally limited and erroneous nature.
In this situation, the path of polyvalent thinking is the only viable one. It is hardly necessary to explain the meaning of polyvalence to interested parties as if it were a complete novelty; any non-pedantic form of intelligence practises it implicitly from childhood, with reference to both things and ideas. While traditional logic stands or falls with the dictum tertium non datur (there is no third option between yes and no), everyday thinking has always found ways to
4
colour-blind’5 – the result will be a visually trivalent universe in which a halfway world of graded shades of grey mediates between the extremes of white and black. This may seem trivial, and yet it is informative in the present context. Grey here means a release from the obligation to choose between black and white. It embodies the reality of thirdness. In a world characterized by shades of grey, furthermore, one can predict the appearance of extremists who, weary of intermediate values, fight for a pure black or white world. If a party of radicals comes to power, the grey option will be declared counter-revolutionary propaganda. Generations may pass before a change in the wind once more permits an open espousal of the grey world's merits.
The terrain of the zealotic monotheisms also contains occasions for a transition to polyvalent thinking. Islam in particular, normally
reach precisely such a tertium datur.
this field is the de-radicalization of alternatives: if one confronts someone with an either/or they consider unwelcome, one will observe how they remodel it into a both-and sooner or later. If one removes all colours from the world – an assumption that, as Oliver Sacks has shown, does apply for some people on the ‘island of the
The universal procedure in
known for its pathos of strict monovalence, achieved an exemplary breakthrough in the creation of a third value. This took place when it was decreed that people of the book no longer had to choose between the Qur'an and death. The creation of dhimmi status, which effectively constitutes subjugation without conversion, established a third option between a yes or no to the Muslim cult. This has occasionally been misunderstood as a form of tolerance – a fairly un- Islamic concept, as well as a fairly un-Catholic one – whereas it should sooner be understood as a primitive manifestation of polyvalent thinking. For the subjugated it was tantamount to survival, while for the subjugators it meant the discovery of a way to circumvent the duty of mass murder. If the Islamic leaders had applied the alternative specifically prescribed by their laws – conversion or liquidation – to the many millions of Christians and the Jewish minorities that became subjects of Arab rulers in the seventh and eighth centuries (when the Byzantine Empire, as noted above, lost half of its population to expanding Islam), this would have led to the greatest bloodbath in the history of mankind. The realization that God, the merciful one, could not have wanted this, and that the elimination of useful subjects would also have weakened Arab power interests, would not have been especially problematic for the Islamic scholars of the time. So they made use of the classic tool by which intellectuals solve an unwelcome dilemma: they de- radicalized the alternative by inventing a middle option. Accordingly they introduced a poll tax (jizya, which would have been roughly the same as the tithe) for Jews, Christians and followers of Zoroaster; hence these groups were set apart from Muslims, who had a duty to give alms (zakat), but made equal to them in other respects – like scholars, treasuries are quick to learn the ways of polyvalence.
One can observe something formally comparable centuries later in medieval Europe, when Christian theologians had to grapple with the task of toning down the terror factor in the alternative of salvation or eternal damnation that had been in force since Augustine. The theme was dictated by a change in the ‘zeitgeist’ – if it is permissible to transfer a concept from the early nineteenth century to circumstances in the twelfth and thirteenth. From that era on, it became clear that the inhabitants of the reforming European towns were no longer prepared to accept the psycho-politics of holy terror
that had gone unchallenged until then. The change of consciousness was a harbinger of the Reformation, in the broader sense of the word – if one takes it to mean the restructuring of the Christian church according to the demands of an urban clientele that had gained literacy and self-confidence, and was no longer a priori subservient or susceptible to intimidation. Such people are able to plan, calculate and give orders; they have a sense of proportion and possess a clear idea of business on a reciprocal basis. They do not trade with half the world and lead moderate, active lives full of sacrifices in the proud restrictions of guild structures to have some gloomy cathedral preachers threaten them with the horrors of everlasting damnation.
Faced with the discrepancy between supply and demand, the theologians of the High Middle Ages realized how unbearably crude their eschatological teachings were. Finally they resorted to the method that becomes necessary in such situations: they de- radicalized the alternative and created a third value by expanding the realm beyond this life to include a purifying hell, better known as purgatory. By inventing this third place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the designers of the Christian doctrine of last things managed to remodel the system of religious intimidation in such a way that there would still be sufficient terror to maintain control of the spiritual lives of believers, yet without completely snubbing their increased expectations of moderation, coherence and respect for their achievements. Part of the dangerous secret of Augustinism that lay hidden in the doctrine of grace from 397 could now be aired: now one could, in most cases, replace eternal hell with the purifying hell, a place open to all sinners – except for the irretrievable candidates for Lucifer's kingdom. Only those who had been transfigured during their lifetimes – if anyone – would be exempted from this post- mortal follow-up treatment in the new regime; in their cases, even heaven itself could not turn down the call of paradiso subito. The decisive fact was that the creation of purgatory marked the establishment of a third option between the inferno and paradise that assumed characteristics of both places: the grisly décor and gruesome punishments of hell, but also the confidence and the certainty of a favourable conclusion found in heaven. At the same time, the notion of purgatory lent weight to the highly influential idea that, after death, souls entered a transitional period between the
first and second lives – assuming they belonged to the main group of middling sinners with a realistic chance in the hereafter. This marked the first religious appearance of the motif of a ‘second life’. It was only a matter of time before someone would ask: why should there not be a similar intermediate period before death as well? One only need to have believed in purgatory long enough to believe in history one day – that second goddess in the post-Christian world of ideas who conquered the European stage towards the end of the eighteenth century (the first goddess had borne the promising name of Fortuna and, since the Renaissance, has been present whenever humans raise their standards for a life before death). To live in ‘history’ can only occur to people who are convinced they are existing in a third time: a necessarily uncomfortable phase of transition between hereditary misery and a promised era of happiness and fulfilment.
The practice of de-supremacization can be traced back to the early phases of the expanding monotheisms, when extremism was still viewed as arrogance and any attempts to reach directly for the highest seemed to be the devil's work. Interest in controlling religious excesses was an automatic result of the force applied in the institutionalization of the exclusive monotheisms. Such religions discovered early on that it was necessary to suppress the same prophetic fire from which they had come, but without extinguishing it. The secret of their survival lay in their ability to curb their inherent immoderation by methods that were in their own repertoire. They had to become Classical in order to ritually absorb the Romanticism from which they had sprung – assuming one can typologically assign their initial apocalyptic upheavals, without which both Christianity and Islam would be inconceivable, to the Romantic end of the spectrum. From this perspective, those religions that subjected themselves to thorough dogmatic reflection provide the best antidotes to their own endogenous excesses – as well as their secularized versions and political parodies. This is the source of the hope that Islam will one day deal with the political metastases so rampant today in the same way earlier Christianity dealt with its Anabaptist and evangelical excesses, the Jacobin cult of the highest being, and finally also with the atheist church of Communism. What is here referred to as monotheistic Classicism has always included –
alongside the ubiquitous reminders of the humbling duties of believers – a series of spiritual exercises that contributed implicitly to overcoming the dangerous rigidity of the founding matrix. Among the most notable preparatory disciplines in formal plurivalent thinking are the principles of hierarchical steps and negative theology, then hermeneutics as the art of reading from a variety of perspectives, and last but not least the development of monotheistic humour.
Thinking in steps, which had already combined the doctrine of being
with spirit-metaphysical supremacism in antiquity, caused a
beneficial increase in the difficulty of ascending to the highest
through its attention to tests, ranks and bullying. It convinced people
that the step they were on could not be a very high one, let alone the
highest – through the mere fact that they were on it. In addition, the
divine hierarchies offer considerable scope for ranks beyond human
comprehension, which is why humans always have a motive to look
upwards. They flourish only in the uncertainty of their admission to
higher circles. Let us not forget that this mentality still informed
Nietzsche's thinking when he sought to show his friends ‘all the steps
6
of the blossoming godhead, joints of light, hallways, stairs, thrones’. It was only when the ‘God-seeker gangs’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries burst into this universe, built entirely on discretions, that the pathos of graded distance disappeared. The efforts of a world consisting of ranks, scales and ascents have since become incomprehensible to most people. Deregulated desire wants a ‘flat hierarchy’ – or even completely level ground. It no longer accepts any reason why it should not have everything on its own level immediately. Status and stasis evaporate here too – not, however, to force individuals to view their relationships with others through
sober eyes,8 but rather to leave them behind in a previously unknown state of defencelessness. In this condition they succumb first to the temptations of the extreme, then to those of a vulgarity without limits.
One could make similar observations in the case of prestige-laden negative theology. Its origins among the Greek church fathers,
Rainer Maria Rilke also showed his familiarity
of the Übermensch’.
with the traditions of the upward glance when he invoked the ‘pollen
7
specifically the Cappadocians and Dionysius Pseudo-Areopagita, support the assumption that it was intended to mitigate the obsession with ascension in a spirit-metaphysically aroused monastic community of a Hellenistic-Christian variety. Though the educated among today's religion-lovers almost treat it like God's last intellectual chance, it actually served in its heyday as the ascetic's last chance to prevent spiritual infiltration by the frenzied masses. Its method was the slow pondering of lists consisting of concrete negations of the properties assigned to the Highest, whose constant repetition was meant to give meditators an awareness of their own distance from the pinnacle. Negative theology can only be productive as an intellectual litany that makes humans aware of the immeasurable distance between the unrecognizable God and his recognizable attributes. It cannot really be studied, only recited like a logical rosary. The exercise has the dual purpose of ensuring the transcendence of the super-objective object and coaxing the meditator away from the target area of deificatory frenzy. This satisfies the interest in polyvalence, as the faithful subject situates itself in a third position between a complete exclusion from God and a complete inclusion in him. As far as the modern use of this form of thinking is concerned, I shall restrict myself to observing that – as usual – the intention of those interested in it today is the opposite of the original exercise, as the highest can never be immanent and ego- near enough for them.
The various hermeneutical approaches stemming from an engagement with the Holy Scriptures can equally be considered schools of polyvalent thought behaviour. This is due primarily to the fact that professional scriptural exegetes are confronted with a dangerous alternative. The business of interpretation naturally calls for third options, as it is almost immediately faced with an unacceptable decision: either an excessively good or an excessively bad understanding of the divine message. Both options would have disastrous consequences. If one were to understand the scriptures as well as only their own author could, it would seem as if one wanted to clap God on the back and declare agreement with him – a claim that would hardly appeal to the guardians of holy traditions. If one's interpretation goes against the consensus, however, and in fact considers them completely opaque or nonsensical, it could be a case
of demonic obstinacy. In both cases the recipient falls short of his duty, incurring the wrath of the orthodox establishment – which, as we know, was never squeamish when it came to laying down the law for heretics. Religious hermeneutics is thus located a priori in the space between two blasphemies and has to remain in limbo there. No situation could provide a better motive for committing oneself to a third option. If one cannot become one with the author's intentions as if one understood him better than he did himself at the moment of dictation, but is equally forbidden to miss his message as if he were some stranger with nothing to tell us, an escape to some middle ground is almost inevitable. The striving for a truthful understanding of the holy symbols is at home in the intermediate realm of interpretation, and its fundamental imperfection is its opportunity, its element. There is no need for any long-winded explanations of why such work, which takes place in the twilight of a meaning that is only ever partially revealed, has the strongest anti-extremist qualities – it can take its practitioners to the threshold between religious text
9
rather exposes itself.
sometimes admitted that he no longer knew what he had meant in some line of his poetry, Alexander Kluge observed: ‘You switch off your ears and pronounce verses. ’ This surely means that there is more sense in the world than the authors themselves can understand. The possibility of relaxing the hold of the absolute text in multiple readings has been most significant in the Jewish culture of commentary, whose richness stems from the proliferation of perspectives. Hence the profound jest: two Talmudic scholars, three opinions.
These effects are rounded off by the humour that develops in the shadow of the monotheisms. It shows a number of similarities with humour under dictatorships, as all totalizing systems, religious and political alike, provoke a popular backlash against the supposedly sublime that is forced on them. Humour can almost be considered the school for polyvalence, as it trains its apprentices to view every possible situation, in particular the more unpleasant ones, from a third perspective. This third view comes neither purely from below – from anxiety – nor purely from above – from indifference – but
Paul Celan refers to the word's abstinence from
and literature.
oppressive authority when he states that poetry does not impose, but
10
In a conversation with Heiner Müller, who
rather combines the upper and lower views in such a way that it has a liberating effect on the observer. Thus the subject can share in a more confident attitude towards its own situation. While philosophers have mostly used the motif of being superior to oneself in praise of self-control, humorists emphasize the aspect of self- therapy. In the context of cognitive theory, one would describe the practice of the third view as the reframing of a data mass in order to prevent consciousness from being overwhelmed by a paralyzing point of view. It is no coincidence that typical zealots instinctively recognize humour as the enemy that spoils business for the forces of militant one-sidedness. Wiser fighters compensate for their lack of humour with the assurance that laughter will be reserved for times of peace – just as Lenin considered it advisable to postpone listening to Beethoven's music until the fulfilment of Communism, as it seduces us into embracing our neighbour, even if he is a capitalist, instead of cracking his skull for the sake of a better future.
If one takes the effects of these disciplines as a whole, one can speak of civilization through institutionalization. For the participants of mature religious cultures, the good manners of informal polyvalence become second nature to such a degree that many passages from their own sacred texts which voice holy fury seem like embarrassing archaisms to them. In this predicament they resort to the discreetly heretical method of citing only those passages that are compatible with dominant sensibilities. A similarly selective approach to the whole text is also necessary among contemporary Catholics: it is not without reason that the controversial psalms of vengeance were recently removed from the Roman church's liturgy of the hours. The time will come when Muslims also decide to overlook the more sinister passages of the Qur'an. The civilizing process of the monotheisms will be complete once people are ashamed of certain statements made by their respective god and unfortunately documented, like the public appearances of a generally very amiable, but also irascible, grandfather who has not been allowed to mix with people without an escort for a long time.
Notes
1 2
3
Cf. above, p. 2.
Cf. Victor and Victoria Trimondi, Krieg der Religionen. Politik, Glaube und Terror im Zeichen der Apokalypse [The War of Religions. Politics, Faith and Terror Under the Sign of the Apocalypse] (Munich: Fink [Wilhelm], 2006).
4
Cf. Klaus Heinrich, Tertium datur: eine religionsphilosophische Einführung in die Logik [A Religion-Philosophical Introduction to Logic] (Basle: Stroemfeld, 1981). In addition to the non-technical arguments for polyvalence hinted at here, one should also point out the technical analysis of polyvalent logical structures in the work of Lukasiewisc and the Polish school, as well as in recent computer science. Gotthard Günther has taken a path of his own to establish a non-Aristotelian logic, though so far his work has been read more by systems theorists than philosophers.
5
6
7 8
Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Colour-blind (London: Picador, 1997).
Translator's note: this is a reference to a poem written by Rainer Maria Rilke in 1922. It begins ‘Solange du Selbstgeworfenes fängst, ist alles Schicklichkeit und lässlicher gewinn’, and the published translation of the full poem reads as follows – ‘As long as you catch self-thrown things / it's all dexterity and venial gain – ; / only when you've suddenly caught that ball / which she, one of the eternal players, / has tossed toward you, your center, with / a throw precisely judged, one of those arches / that exist in God's great bridge-system: / only then is catching a proficiency, – / not yours, a world's’: Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems, trans. Edward Snow (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1996).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra I, Zarathustra's Prologue, part 9.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Elegy 2.
‘All that is based on status and stasis evaporates, all that is holy is profaned, and humans are finally compelled to view their position
in life and their relationships with others through sober eyes’: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, part I.
9
10 Paul Celan, ‘The Meridian. Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Georg Büchner Prize’ in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001), pp. 401–13.
The most resolute equation of holy text and poetry can be found in the writings of the American literary critic Harold Bloom, who has no qualms about comparing the God of the Yahwist with King Lear and Jesus with Hamlet. Cf. also Odo Marquard, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen. Philosophische Studien [Farewell to the Fundamental. Philosophical Studies] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), pp. 127–32.
7
The parables of the ring
Nowhere is the programme of a domestication of the monotheisms in the spirit of the good society evident more suggestively than in the parable of the ring from Lessing's 1779 dramatic poem Nathan the Wise. It tells the story of a father in the distant past who bequeathed a precious ring to his son. The ring possessed the magical ability to make its wearer agreeable to God and men, thus proving his identity as the legitimate heir. Following the model of this first handing- down, the ring wandered for a long time from each successive father to his son, regularly displaying its pleasing effects. In one generation, however, the owner of the ring had three sons who were all equally obedient and thus equally beloved, so that he promised the ring to each of them. The loving patriarch's virtuous weakness could only be balanced out by a virtuous deception: the old man had two imitations produced ‘by an artist’ that were of such perfection that not even he could tell the original apart from the two new rings. He then gave one to each of his sons with the appropriate blessings and promises.
After the father's death the inevitable happened: the sons began to quarrel, for each now staked his claim as the sole legitimate heir. The conflict was inescapable, but also irresolvable, for all three parties had equally valid reasons for their demands. A wise judge was called in to settle the matter. He found a solution by decreeing that all three should be put to the test. For this it was necessary to shift the focus from the level of religious claims and their proofs to the level of concrete effects. If ‘the right ring can no longer be found’ – and eo ipso the right faith, as Nathan emphatically adds – both the ring owners and their observers would have no choice but to submit to the pragmatic criterion. The power of the ring to ‘make its wearer agreeable to God and men’ would one day be the decisive factor. The candidates were left only with the advice to assist the inner virtues of the ring with their own efforts and ‘sincere warmth’. Assessing the results would naturally have to wait until the distant future, when a further judge would summon the warring parties once again – an unmistakable allusion to an Enlightenment version of Judgement
Day, on which not only individual believers, but the monotheistic religions as a whole would have to take responsibility for their actions.
From today's perspective, this parable, rightfully celebrated as the Enlightenment's equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, shows its complete postmodernity: it combines primary pluralism, the positivization of simulation, the practical suspension of the question of truth, civilizatory scepticism, the shift from reasons to effects, and the priority of external approval over internal claims. Even the most hard-boiled reader cannot help admiring the wisdom of Lessing's solution: by postponing the final verdict until the end of time, it prevents the candidates for the truth from being sure of their selection. Thus Lessing's pious scepticism takes the religions seriously by giving them the hint not to take themselves too seriously.
It should not impair the venerability of the document if I note a few
difficulties that complicate its seemingly straightforward meaning.
What Lessing is suggesting amounts to a reception-aesthetic
transformation of religion. This heralds the rise of mass culture in
religious matters. In this context, ‘Enlightenment’ is no less than a
codeword for the belief that the elite and the masses will one day,
after overcoming their historically grown estrangement, come
together in shared perceptions and value judgements. It was
precisely this convergence that the young heroes of German Idealism
invoked as a civilizatory opportunity on the way to their goal of doing
away with ‘the blind trembling of the people before its wise men and
1
‘And so the enlightened and the unenlightened must join
priests’.
hands, mythology must become philosophical and the people must
become reasonable . . . ’2 If, however, the potential for popularity becomes a criterion for truth – and the mouthpiece of the elite clings to this demand expressis verbis – one can expect a shift of the competition between the religions to the humanitarian field: it is not for nothing that the religious taste of the masses has always been gratified by the spectacle of charity, assuming it does not make an excursion to the theatre of cruelty in the middle.
If one looks at the matter in the cold light of day, then, Lessing could have dispensed with the figure of the second arbiter who passes
judgement in the distant future, for, since the Enlightenment, the
trial of the religions has occurred not at the end of days, but rather as
a daily plebiscite. This is expressed in the fluctuations of sympathy
that have, since the early twentieth century, been ascertained
through surveys. The prerequisite for this was that civil society itself,
3
discreetly or indiscreetly, was declared a deity on earth.
enough, none of the monotheistic religions fares particularly well before the court of popular taste, as the criterion of effect does not usually act in their favour – it no longer requires great acumen, after all, to realize that there is a significant correlation between monotheism and unrest (or discomfort) in the world – and the possible popular forms of the monotheistic religions, as we shall see in a moment, are also a precarious affair. The meditative religions of the East, on the other hand, most prominently Buddhism, enjoy great popularity and respect – which does not, admittedly, tell us whether the sympathizers have any desire to become practising members of their preferred cults.
Thus Lessing and his source Boccaccio, from whose Decameron the story is taken (as the third tale of the first day), must face the question of whether they are on the right track in their interpretation of symbols. Could it not be that both have succumbed to an illusion in their depiction of the ring's effects? Let us recall: Lessing has his judge state that only the ring with the power to makes its wearer agreeable to God and men can be the genuine ring. Nathan himself emphasizes that if all three ring-owners were to prove agreeable only to themselves, they would all be ‘deceived deceivers’ – the liberality of the eighteenth century already permitted such things to be said. Only the one who gained the approval of his fellow humans would have plausible evidence of truly being on the right path. In fact, the duty of altruism has been inseparable from the classical religions ever since the surrender of the ego and the devotion to a great or small Other came to be considered the sign of true faith. That would mean that God alone could decide whether a believer is agreeable to him. Lessing, however, takes a risk – albeit one strongly supported by the zeitgeist – and expands the jury deciding the success of religion by including people in it. But who can guarantee that the quality of being agreeable to God is the same as that of garnering approval among humans?
Ironically
In reality, no aspect expresses the essence of monotheism more
succinctly than the willingness of the zealots to be hated by their
fellow humans if that is how they can please God more. With his
carefree equation of ‘agreeable to God’ and ‘popular among people’,
Lessing was perhaps misled by early Enlightenment optimism, which
took the convergence of elite and mass interests for granted as a
natural result of progress. The actual development of modernity
paints a completely different picture: it deepens the divide between
high culture and mass culture with each new generation, making the
hatred of high culture, or at least the majority's suspicion towards it,
reveal itself ever more openly as a fundamental characteristic of
recent events in civilization. If one draws the logical conclusions
from this, one will understand why monotheism will one day be
forced to lay its high-cultural cards on the table – and if it does not
admit to its elitist streak, and indirectly also its polemogenic nature,
4
The religion of the exclusive One must then admit, as if at the last minute, what it was never supposed to say openly: that it would go against its very nature to be popular. Any kind of popularity it enjoys stems from sentimental misunderstandings – the most famous example is Chateaubriand's rousing promotion of the ‘genius of Christianity’. To him, the Romantic poet, even the strictest Catholic
sacraments seemed like ‘paintings full of poetry’,5 and he read the life stories of the saints as if they were the most fascinating novels. To balance out this idealized view, one should call to mind certain culture-historical principles: a monotheistic religion that defends the extent of its claims can only come to power and remain in power by forcing the masses implacably to yield to its norms – which is impossible without a clerical dictatorship (usually under the patronage of a sacred or semi-sacred monarchy). In such an order of things, gentle and less gentle methods are equally in evidence. A regime of this kind was firmly established in Europe from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century – and it took long, extremely hard battles from the start of the Modern Age on to break the ubiquitous power of the church. Since then, the only way for both religious and aesthetic ‘high culture’ to reach the emancipated masses has been to switch to the mode of inner mission and dream of the golden age of mediaeval dominion.
it risks having others do so for it.