
After God
Description
Alles über E-Books | Antworten auf Fragen rund um E-Books, Kopierschutz und Dateiformate finden Sie in unserem Info- & Hilfebereich.
Since the early 20th century we have seen how the metaphysical twilight of the gods, which has preoccupied philosophers and theologians, has been accompanied by an earthly twilight of the souls. The emergence of psychoanalysis, and more recently the development of the neuro-cognitive sciences, have secularized the old Indo-European concept of the soul and transferred many accomplishments of the human mind to computerized machines. What remains of the eternal light of the soul after the artificial lights have been turned on? Have the inventors of AI thrust themselves into the position vacated by the death of god? Perhaps the distinction between God and idols will soon re-emerge here for the citizens of modernity, only this time in a technological and political register. For them, theological enlightenment - which is completely different from an instinctive rejection of religion - will be a fateful task.
This new work by one of the most original thinkers today will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in religion, philosophy and critical theory today.
More details
Other editions
Persons
Peter Sloterdijk is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Karlsruhe School of Design. He is one of the most influential philosophers writing today and is the author of many books including The Critique of Cynical Reason, In the World Interior of Capital, Spheres, You Must Change Your Life and What Happened in the 20th Century?
Content
Chapter Two: Is The World Affirmable? On the Transformation of the Basic Mood in the Religiosity of Modernity, with Regard Primarily to Martin Luther
1. The Eccentric Accentuation
2. And They Saw That It Was Not Good
3. The Derivation of the Reformation from the Spirit of Tempered Despair
4. Protestant Entropy
Chapter Three: The True Heresy: Gnosticism; On the World-Religion of Worldlessness
1. Where Nag Hammadi Is Located
2. How the Real World Finally Became an Error
3. A Short History of Authentic Time
4. Gnosticism as Negative Psychology
5. Demiurgical Humanism - On the Gnosticism of Modern Art
Chapter Four: Closer to Me Than I Am Myself: A Theological Preparation for the Theory of the Shared Inside
Chapter Five: God's Bastard: The Caesura of Jesus
Chapter Six: Improving the Human Being: Philosophical Notes on the Problem of Anthropological Difference
Chapter Seven: Epochs of Ensoulment: Suggestions for a Philosophy of the History of Neurosis
Chapter Eight: Latency: On Concealment
1. Emergence of the Crypta
2. Maximally Invasive Operation
3. Boxing-in as Latency-Production
4. Wadding up and Unfolding
5. Intuitive Integral Calculus
Chapter Nine: The Mystical Imperative: Remarks on Changing Shape of Religion in the Modern Age
1. Martin Buber's Ecstatic Confessions as an Epochal Symptom
2. Religion in the Age of the Experiment
3. World Arena and Unmarked Space
Chapter Ten: Absolute and Categorical Imperative
Chapter Eleven: News about the Will to Believe: A Note on Desecularization
Chapter Twelve: Chances in the Monstrous: A Note on the Metamorphosis of the Religious
Domain in the Modern World, with Reference to a Few Motifs in William James
Editorial Note
1
TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
"Every world of gods is followed by a twilight of the gods"*
Rest now, rest, you god!
Richard Wagner, Die Götterdämmerung
I
The intelligentsia of our culturally forgetful days still remembers, partially, that the Greeks of the classical era used the term "mortals" to refer to human beings. Human beings bore this name because they were conceived of as earthly counterparts of the gods, who were called immortals. Immortality was in fact the only eminent feature of the Greek gods. Their behavior hardly differed from that of humans, with their all-too-humanness.
A century ago, amid the convulsions of World War I, Paul Valéry extended the attribute of mortality to high cultures. We should now know, he assured us, that even the great collective constructs (nous autres, civilisations), those integrated by language, law, and the division of labor, are mortal. We should regard it as a happy accident if this immense statement has left behind a trace here and there, in the memory of a culture that bears the old European stamp. "We civilizations" are indeed mortal and, after everything that had happened, we should have taken note of this. No longer should mortality be predicated only of Socrates and his ilk. The term leaves the domain of syllogistic exercises and inundates a continent that does not grasp its Great War. Mortality acquires this new valence not only from the fact that, within four years, more than nine million men were sent to their deaths. What is decisive is that the countless fallen soldiers and civilian casualties seemed to result from the internal tensions of the cultural events themselves. What are cultural nations, and what do civilizations amount to, if they allow such an excess of casualties and self-sacrifices, indeed not only allow it but provoke it from their ownmost [eigensten] impulses? What does this mass consumption of life say about the spirit of the industrial age? What could this unparalleled recklessness toward individual existence possibly mean? When applied to civilizations, the word "mortality" also hints at the possibility of suicide.
The shock to which Valéry's note bore witness reached deeper than his contemporaries could have known. For once, our insight that civilizations could fall was not relegated to distant worlds such as Nineveh, Babylon, or Carthage. It now applied to great civilizations close at hand: France, England, Russia . These were names that, until yesterday, still resonated with us. They were spoken of as though they were metaphysical universals in the form of peoples. They stood for the supertemporal stability that used to be attributed to clans and to their associations into peoples. Since time immemorial, clans were ruled by the law of ancestry. They embodied the duration that flows through the generations, no matter how much individuals come and go. Valéry: "And now we see that the abyss of history is big enough for all."1
The twilight of civilization begins at the moment when the inhabitants of the great cultural enclosures suspect that even the most established human systems of the present have not been built for all eternity. They are subject to a fragility that also goes by the name "historicity." Historicity means for civilizations what mortality means for individuals. In the philosophy of the twentieth century, this idea was applied to individuals under the description of "being toward death." When related to cultures, it is called historical consciousness.
As a rule, members of the historically affected nations have ignored the idea that their historians are at the same time their thanatologists. Ex officio, thanatologists make the better theologians. Relying on a local point of departure, they leap ahead and assume God's standpoint at the end of the world and at the end of life. As a rule, historians don't realize that they are indirectly practicing the perspective of the end when they recall early beginnings.
From a divine perspective, history means nothing but the process of converting what has not yet been into what has been. Only when all being has entered into a state of having been has the "omnipotent god"2 of classical metaphysics reached its goal. Only when it is certain that nothing new will happen any more may God discard the initially intoxicating, but later on compromising attribute of "omnipotence"; this attribute had indeed become increasingly embarrassing and superfluous. At the actual end of history there is neither anything to create nor anything to preserve. Everything that is is there for the sake of what ultimately will be. The dossier of creation is closed. The end God drapes himself in the robe of omnipotence. As soon as knowledge that has become complete is no longer confronted with new tasks on behalf of creativity (or of the "event"), God surveys the universe in its totality. He serenely looks straight through everything that was the case.
In the old European tradition, "apocalypse" designates this moment of looking through things in a comprehensive retrospection. In the strict sense, this means: uncovering all things from the perspective of the end. If everything is complete, everything becomes transparent. The so-called revelations that were available to mortal observers in certain high cultures in the guise of "holy texts" are like vistas into the static beyond that have been fixed at the halfway point. They testify to the fact that higher religions don't work without rushing things.3 Such pre-haste [Vor-Eile] is subject to the temporal schema of impatient faith: already now, but then all the more! Yet, as a rule, religious apocalypses do not deal with real "ultimate concerns." They wallow in the depiction of tumults before the advent of the great tranquility.
Whoever accepts such messages as truths is able to imagine leaping ahead and partaking of the total view from the end of time. The spheres of such representations are called "worlds of faith." They are created in order to bridge the gap between nowness [Jetztzeit] and eternity. The believer nevertheless remains subject to the law of being on her way, in the realm of the temporary [im Vorläufigen]. She knows she can catch up with God only by attaining the same ontological rank in death. This is the case for the ancient Indians as well as for old Europe, and for the domains of Islam no less.
There was a name for those groups of believers who were convinced they could achieve the apparently impossible task of catching up with God media in vita [in the midst of life]. They were called mystics. Thanks to their efforts, transcendence has not remained a completely empty word. These virtuosi of self-renunciation attempted to eschew every sort of separate life outside of God. In this way they devoted themselves to the idea that they had already entered into the beyond here, in this life. Indeed, to die means to give back one's soul - as the French idiom rendre l'âme expresses it in such a metaphysically fitting way. Yet only when everything has in fact died - whether in advance, or whether at the proper or improper time - will everything that was destined to exist be freed from the compulsion of becoming and of innovation. If we had to say in one sentence what classical metaphysics had in mind, it would be this: it wanted to convert the "world" into participants in the stasis of God's omniscience. This end was served, among others, by the Stoic and Christian doctrines of providence (Greek pronoia, Latin providentia), which were supposed to secure for the future God's exposed flanks.
*
The modern world exists because this attempt at conversion failed. Included in modernity is anyone who rejects the idea of a complete emptying of the future into the past and votes for the inexhaustibility of the future, even if this vote excludes the possibility of an omniscient god who, "after all time," bends back, in a comprehensive retrospective on creation.
The "world" - a word that, as Nietzsche knew better than anyone, was for a long time a "Christian insult"4 - resisted the invitation to empty the future into total pastness, because it renounced the ontological precedence of the past. It offered resistance because, in its struggle with itself and through an autodidactic exertion of remarkable coherence, it had learned to give time its due. Ironically, this new attempt at a deeper understanding of time was carried out on European soil, of all things, the homeland of resolute stasis metaphysics and convulsive apocalypticism. In the philosophical thought of modernity, the fundamental openness of the future was appropriately grasped for the first time. At the intersection of will and representation, the world assumed the form of a project and undertaking. It is not the merchants and seafarers who are responsible for reforming the world into an ensemble of projects, but rather the thinkers who undid the metaphysical paralysis of the future. Thus figures such as Schelling, Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger, Bloch, and Günther, perhaps even Cusa, too, all assume prominent positions in the pantheon of "contemporary" philosophy. Above all others, it was these authors who put an end to the...
System requirements
File format: ePUB
Copy protection: Adobe-DRM (Digital Rights Management)
System requirements:
- Computer (Windows; MacOS X; Linux): Install the free reader Adobe Digital Editions prior to download (see eBook Help).
- Tablet/smartphone (Android; iOS): Install the free app Adobe Digital Editions or the app PocketBook before downloading (see eBook Help).
- E-reader: Bookeen, Kobo, Pocketbook, Sony, Tolino and many more (not Kindle).
The file format ePub works well for novels and non-fiction books – i.e., „flowing” text without complex layout. On an e-reader or smartphone, line and page breaks automatically adjust to fit the small displays.
This eBook uses Adobe-DRM, a „hard” copy protection. If the necessary requirements are not met, unfortunately you will not be able to open the eBook. You will therefore need to prepare your reading hardware before downloading.
Please note: We strongly recommend that you authorise using your personal Adobe ID after installation of any reading software.
For more information, see our ebook Help page.

