The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  Safranski puts these eccentrics down as “aberrations” of the revolutionary excitement of those days in post–First World War Germany, “decisionists of the renewal of the world, raving metaphysicians, and profiteers in the vanity fair of ideologies and surrogate religions.”4

  UNDISCLOSED EVERYDAY ABUNDANCE

  Amid this miasma of views and doctrines, one man (apart from Weber himself) stood out: Martin Heidegger, one of the most important, and controversial, philosophers of the modern period—and this would be true even without his Nazi affiliation. Born a Catholic in Messkirch in Baden-Württemberg, Heidegger was originally destined for the church; but he converted to Protestantism before losing his faith entirely, then returned to Catholicism near the end of his life.

  Heidegger is not an easy writer to paraphrase, as any number of scholars will confirm, and this has to do partly with his style, which is often turgid and opaque; but in fairness it has as much—if not more—to do with the fact that he was trying to put into words phenomena that he believed had not been put into words before in quite the way he had in mind. He was not a poet, but in effect he was trying to do what poets do—naming, identifying aspects of experience not identified before, in language appropriate to the new circumstances. In one of his writings he noted: “Thoughts come to us; we do not think them up. . . . Thinking is a gift, or grace, an event that overtakes us.”5 This links him with Rilke and his idea that poems “came” to him (see p. 229). Heidegger asks: “How do we experience reality before we arrange it for ourselves in a scientific, or value-judging, or worldview approach?”6

  For our purposes, Heidegger’s main ideas, as set out in his most important publications, Being and Time (1927), What Is Metaphysics? (1929), The Origin of the Work of Art and Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry (both 1936), The Question of Technology (1953) and Gelassenheit (Composure, 1955), fall under the following headings: “Being,” “Death,” “Caring” and “Authenticity.”

  According to Heidegger, we are “thrown” into the world, in circumstances not of our own choosing, a world which is already well under way, and we must adjust as best we can, learn the rules, the implicit ones as well as the explicit ones, while also acknowledging that the world is full of an “undisclosed abundance” that we will never conquer totally. There is no inherent human nature, no essence to man, and as we confront this lack of essence, and are learning the rules—so far as they go—we also realize that we shall one day die. This set of circumstances means that one of the most important principles of life is decisiveness, that we are the product of our decisions and actions as much as (if not more than) our thoughts. Much of Heidegger’s philosophy was given over to the idea of intensification, that to live life intensely—more intensely than we did, as intensely as possible—is as close to meaning as we will/can get.

  This is where Heidegger’s concept of Being comes in. This word is generally written with an initial capital in English, to draw attention to it (because in written German all nouns take a capital). The corresponding German word, Dasein (composed of da, “there,” and sein, “to be” [“being”]), is now routinely used by English-language philosophers, mainly to emphasize that what Heidegger originally meant to stress was that Being is actually Being-there—that is, in some particular place and therefore at some particular time. Heidegger followed Husserl, to whom he was an assistant at the University of Freiburg between 1918 and 1923, in arguing against a theoretical approach to phenomena, stating that theory (a mainstay of science) involves abstractions that remove us from the everyday abundance of life.

  THE GIFT OF SURRENDER

  Heidegger thought there were different forms of Being, different levels, of which some were much better than others. He thought that modern life, with its noise and bustle and speed, created an “everydayness” in which there was no time for reflection and little opportunity for initiative or considered decision-making; that the science-led existence becomes the manipulation and control of the world rather than its enjoyment. This is what he meant by an “inauthentic” life.

  In contrast, he thought we should aim for an authentic life which accepted, with composure (the concept of Gelassenheit), our own finitude in the face of the insurmountable superabundant plurality of the world. Our stance toward the world, our heightened sense of Being, is to be achieved by “dwelling” in the world, this world here and now, and by “dwelling” he meant “being at home” with our surroundings and our neighbors; the rapidly moving anonymous nature of modern city life was not Being in the fullest sense.

  Heidegger thought that we should “care” for the world—another aspect of Gelassenheit; that instead of trying to control and manipulate and exploit the environment we should “let things be.” Here, he invoked poetry. He loved Hölderlin above all others, and believed that when we confront a poem (or “board a poem,” as Seamus Heaney once said), we have to “surrender” to it; we cannot fight it, we cannot control it, we cannot exploit it. A poem is in some ways a gift to the world and we must receive it as such. Obviously we will enjoy some gifts more than others, but the world is full of such gifts—poems and a superabundance of other things.7

  WHAT WE KNOW IN OUR BONES

  More than this, Heidegger said he was trying only to bring into the light what we “already know in our bones”; that there is an implicitness to life that is not the (Freudian or Jungian) unconscious but is shared by us all as a result of history, what has gone before and how people have evolved ways to live. His philosophy was to make what is implicit and important explicit.

  For Heidegger, then, “the meaning of Being” could not be, by definition, an abstraction. It was the practice of Gelassenheit, of caring for the world, submitting to its abundance, letting it be, “willing not to will,” while at the same time acknowledging that there is no such thing as an “I,” if by that we mean an unchanging entity that meets each new day in the same manner. For Heidegger, “to be” in 1927, when he wrote Being and Time, was not at all the same thing as “to be” in 1933, when he joined the Nazi Party and made propaganda appearances in Leipzig, Heidelberg and Tübingen. Nor the same thing in 1936–40, when, in several lectures on Nietzsche, he criticized the “power-thinking” of National Socialism and was put under surveillance by the Gestapo.

  Heidegger, following on from Freud and Nietzsche and Weber, set this particular ball rolling. In particular he drew attention to what he called “average everydayness” in which, he insisted, the self is not so much an object as an unfolding event or happening, a manifestation, the “movement of a life course stretched out between life and death.” He also had a concept of the “they,” the backdrop of everydayness, what he called a primordial phenomenon of existence, not just other people but other people “co-happening.” These manifestations bring with them two other aspects of being: first, “being-toward,” turning our face to the future, knowing it will be different, always changing; and that we must be ready for change, anticipate it, above all enjoy it. And second, “being-toward-the-end” or “being-toward-death,” “the realization of a final configuration of possibilities for . . . life overall.”

  This brings to mind Rilke’s idea of the “good death,” the “individual death” (see p. 232), but Heidegger was also saying that, in order to feel fulfilled, to feel a sense of wholeness, we need to take on board very firmly the idea that death is the end, there is no afterlife; and we must develop some notion of what we would like our life-event, our life-manifestation, to look like, and then act on that decision, always realizing that we are finite individuals and that not all things are possible.

  RADICAL PASTORALISM

  Heidegger also had the idea of “marginal practices,” what he called the “saving power of insignificant things—practices such as friendship, backpacking in the wilderness, and drinking the local wine with friends.” This was his idea of “radical pastoralism.”8 All these things remain marginal, he maintained, “precisely because they resist efficie
ncy [italics added].” They remain outside—beyond—the reach of the modern attitude. This is not quite true, of course—backpacking can be harnessed to our concern with health and training, making us more efficient in that way. But Heidegger meant “marginal practices” to be refuges from modern life, and used them as metaphors for his approach.

  If we can sum up Heidegger’s paradigm, it would be to experience the world as poetry, and through poetry. Poetry takes as its subject the inexhaustible abundance and plurality of the world; it does not reduce things to a single dimension (as science or the monotheisms attempt to do). The world comprises horizons that always recede before us as we approach; there is no “regime of meaning.” To every poetic word, Heidegger claimed, belongs “an inexhaustible range of complex spaces of [semantic] resonance.” This, for him, is the only transcendental phenomenon in the world. “In poetic experience or in poetry-mediated experience, therefore, we ‘grasp’ our lives as lived ‘in the face of the ungraspable,’ come face to face with the ‘mystery’ of Being, with its ‘awesomeness.’”9 This is how to “dwell” in the world, how to be “at home” in it. Being at home in the world is the point of life.

  Heidegger’s poor writing style, his involvement with the Nazis, his disgraceful treatment of Edmund Husserl and Hannah Arendt, all make it difficult to judge him dispassionately. Part of the intellectual climate in the wake of “the death of God” has been a parallel concern, a dissatisfaction with the explanations offered by science as somehow irrelevant to the concerns many have regarding how to live their lives, what values and moral attitudes to embrace, how to behave. Heidegger stands firmly in that strong strand of thought running through the twentieth century—the idea of phenomenology—leading from Husserl to the existentialists to the counterculture and to pragmatic philosophy (which we shall be exploring later). His ideas of Gelassenheit, of caring for the world—letting it be, submitting to its abundance, experiencing it poetically, breaking out of the everyday, being content to “dwell” in the world, to be at home in it—have proved ever more prescient as the decades have passed.

  THE CENTRAL SANE HUMAN ACTIVITY

  Heidegger loved the poetry of Rilke, but it was also the way in which Rilke was a poet that mattered to the philosopher.

  “Rilke was perhaps more exclusively a poet than anyone before him or since. . . . No other German author, Goethe included, began writing as trivially and ended writing as superbly as Rilke did.” This is Wolfgang Leppmann in his biography of Rilke, and it is no small thing to say. True as these remarks may be, and as appealing as Rilke’s qualities were to Heidegger, we cannot nonetheless overlook the interesting and pertinent fact that Rilke was a much-traveled man (about Europe, at least) who knew and befriended many contemporary luminaries: Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan George, Paul Valéry, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Sergei Diaghilev. He visited Russia several times, where he met Leo Tolstoy; he spent several months in Paris, where he met and wrote about the same saltimbanques (traveling acrobats) that Picasso painted, and visited Auguste Rodin before writing his biography.

  And then there was his affair with Lou Andreas-Salomé, a beautiful Russian-born German writer and psychoanalyst, who had famously refused Nietzsche’s proposal of marriage (Nietzsche said Wagner was the “fullest” person he ever knew, but that Lou was the “smartest”). She was the author of two novels, wrote the first biography of Nietzsche and, though married to Friedrich Carl Andreas, a lecturer in the Oriental Department at the University of Berlin, she refused to sleep with him, even on their wedding night; thereafter she took a series of lovers, always younger than herself, including Frank Wedekind, who may have used her as the prototype for Lulu, the insatiable seductress in his Earth-Spirit.

  In his biography of the poet, Leppmann chronicles Rilke’s restless movements, year by year, showing that, from his early twenties on, he moved residence two or three times a year, sometimes more, sometimes much more. In saying that Rilke was exclusively a poet, Leppmann was using license—or using the word in a very particular way. Rilke was a great letter-writer and always interested in the great issues of his day. He had many women friends and was popular among them—he was hardly a monk. Or at least, not to begin with. One of the notable transformations of Rilke’s life was that he went from being a young man-about-town, who loved the company of beautiful women, the chatter of coffeehouses and the informed busyness of newspaper editorial offices, to someone who came to appreciate solitude and remote landscapes for their own sake.

  But yes, he was an exceptional poet. He had a religious upbringing, and remained slightly mystical all his life, though he lost his faith under the influence of Hegel and Nietzsche, and wanted religious instruction removed from schools. He was, says Leppmann, a “melancholy atheist, a nonbeliever with a guilty conscience.”10 On his early trips to Russia he was impressed by the peasants (more so than Tolstoy was, who knew them better), in particular their concept of God, which he felt was much vaguer and less pretentious than the Western concept, “in everything as yet unafflicted by the schism of consciousness.”

  And original observation was Rilke’s developed aim, as he matured, in both a poetic and a spiritual sense, which for him were much the same. “What lends sense to life [i.e., the poet’s life] is not transitory happiness but the acts of ‘saying,’” Rilke stated, “of internalizing and transforming into language all that is in danger of being made superfluous by a functional, machine-run civilization: ‘What is it you urgently ask for if not transformation? Earth, my love, I will do it.’”11 Rilke saw it as his self-imposed task in life to remove that schism between humans and nature that for him was the major crime of Christianity, because Jesus had created a kind of consciousness that has stopped us from experiencing the earth as fully as we might, and it is the recovery of this experience that gives “sense to life.” This was the idea of “surrender” to nature, which Heidegger echoed in Being and Time.

  Rilke’s attempts to do this, his “religion of aesthetic contemplation,” as Michael Hamburger puts it, are revealed most clearly and most successfully in his major later works, in particular the Sonnets to Orpheus (1922) and the Duino Elegies (1923).12 In a sense, what he was trying to do in poetry was not dissimilar to what Cézanne had sought to do in his painting, to approach nature in an unmediated way, trying to dispense with the accumulated practices of the past that hinder a true appreciation of what the earth—which is all there is—has to offer. As part of this Rilke saw himself as a “receiver” of his poems, rather than as their creator.

  All prose talk of incandescent poetry such as Rilke’s is bound to interfere with the experience, but we have to try. His most successful lines play with images of the earth—the natural world—sewn seamlessly into our psychology, as when in the sonnet “The Passing” he speaks of “the boundless inner sky,” or when, improbably but ambitiously, he brings the latest hard science to bear on intimate life:

  From star to star—such distances; and yet

  Those encountered here are harder reckoned.

  Someone—a child, say, and then a second . . .

  What dark matter holds them separate?

  As that last line shows, Rilke could ask the most amazing questions, using them to locate all his spiritual wonder in the life we lead now. As Don Paterson argues in his examination of the sonnet sequence, Rilke refutes the two principal religious errors. “The first is to think of truth as being in the possession of an inscrutable third party, whose knowledge and intentions can only be divined.” In fact, he says, the only thinking being done “in this part of the universe” is by us; which means that “truth” is not determined, but provisionally decided, in the manner of science. “The Sonnets insist on sheer wondering enquiry as the central sane human activity, a way of configuring our most honest prepositional stance towards the universe.”13

  O happy Earth, O Earth on holiday,

  play with your children! Let us try

  t
o catch you . . .

  “The second error is to think of any afterlife or any reincarnation we are bound for as more extraordinary than finding ourselves here in the first place.” By projecting ourselves into some future state, beyond our death, Rilke believed that we warp our behavior in this life, and weaken our responsibility to the here and now, as well as our negotiations with those with whom we share the planet. Religion, Rilke thought, acted as though it held a copyright on the miraculous. But being here, he said,

  is a source

  with a thousand well

  heads; a net of pure force

  that no one can touch and not kneel down in awe.

  He argued that “we shouldn’t know what to do with the consolation offered by a God”; for the most divine consolation “inheres” in the human itself: “our eye would have to grow just a little more seeing, our ear more receptive, the flavor of fruit would have to come home to us more completely, we should be able to bear more smell, and have more presence of mind” so as to derive more convincing consolations from our most immediate experiences.

  Rilke thought that humans were probably unique among mammals in that they have conscious foreknowledge of their own death. And it is this end that imposes on us the idea of a narrative to a life, a narrative that has or will have meaning, a meaning that—because it comes to an end (and we know it, in advance)—has an overall shape: death drives the plot of life. It is this predicament that has to be overcome. It is a recognition that consciousness is, as some philosophers have described it, “a crime against nature.”