But where does that get us? In his recent book Anatheism (meaning “the return to God”), Richard Kearney states that, after the disasters of the twentieth century, traditional ideas of God can no longer be entertained. He discusses the work of such figures as Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva and their views about what form religious belief can take now. But the opacity of both his own and their prose, the density of the lockjaw syntax, the difficulty they all experience in trying to name what Kearney concedes is the unnamable, makes his book the very opposite of poetry—rather than being a stay against confusion, his words at times are that confusion.13 He appears to be saying that some people just like being in a “faith-state,” prefer having faith to not having faith, and so will always be on the lookout for something to have faith in. Is this evidence for whatever is the object of their faith? No, but then faith doesn’t require evidence, and we are back where we started.
By this account, then, the latest developments in religion cannot give us meaning, or sensible purpose, by definition, because they define God as unnamable; they have no part to play in the ever expanding, forward-looking naming of the world. The lines from Wordsworth that grace the heading of this section have his unmistakable—and magnificent—stamp. But if one criticism may be leveled, they imply that what is left behind is static, whereas the world has moved on, in so many ways; and as the French philosopher and theologian Nicolas Malebranche said more than three hundred years ago, “The world is unfinished.”
So let us end by repeating the wise words of that great lover of poetic chestnuts, the philosopher Richard Rorty, referring to those who have named more of the world: “Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones.”
* * *
I. Although many people find the concept of the “other” new, St. Augustine, sixteen hundred years ago, defined God as a phenomenon that couldn’t be known.
II. The Bolsheviks made the same mistake in Russia, thinking that once the errors of religion were explained to the people, faith would drain away.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank those colleagues and friends who have helped me with The Age of Atheists, making suggestions for improvements, offering helpful criticisms, correcting errors, providing hospitality, loaning (and in some cases giving) books, reading parts or all of the text.
Pride of place goes to Alan Samson, publisher of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, with whom the original idea was worked out and who has offered invaluable guidance on the book’s shape and structure, and has been a support throughout. I am also grateful to the following: David Ambrose, Robert Arnold, Richard Ellis, Ian Gordon, Judith Hancock, David Henn, Charles Hill, Nicola Hodgkinson, James Joll, William Kistler, Thomas LeBien, Gerard Leroux, George Loudon, Constance Lowenthal, Sarah Macalpine, Brian MacArthur, Leighton Macarthy, Carolyn Mavroleon, Guislaine Vincent Morland, Bryan Moynahan, Andrew Nurnberg, Kathrine Palmer, Nicholas Pearson, Rüdiger Safranski, Alan Scott, Michael Stürmer, Mark Tompkins, Donna Ward, Anthony Wigram, David Wilkinson.
The literature on this subject keeps growing exponentially, beyond the grasp of any one individual: I come across a relevant new publication almost every week. I accept sole responsibility for the text as published, knowing only too well how much pertinent material has been left out.
About the Author
Peter Watson is an intellectual historian, journalist, and the author of thirteen books, including The German Genius, The Medici Conspiracy, and The Great Divide. He has written for The Sunday Times, The New York Times, the Observer, and the Spectator. He lives in London.
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Notes and References
INTRODUCTION: IS THERE SOMETHING MISSING IN OUR LIVES? IS NIETZSCHE TO BLAME?
1.Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton, London: Jonathan Cape, 2012, pp. 236–37.
2.Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 8–9.
3.Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Ronald Dworkin, “Religion without God,” The New York Review of Books, April 4, 2013. See also the three Einstein lectures Dworkin delivered at the University of Bern on December 12–14, 2011, at http://www.law.nyu,edu/news: Ronald Dworkin. And see, for example, Mary Jo Nye, Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. 289–94.
4.Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 20, 44.
5.Taylor, op. cit.
6.Richard Kearney, Anatheism (Returning to God after God), New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
7.London Times, January 5, 2011, p. 1. For the Lee Enfield motorcycle worshipped in India, see Francis Elliot, “Travellers Flock to Find Roadside Comfort at the Shrine Where Royal Enfield Is God,” London Times, February 5, 2011.
8.Peter L. Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the World, Resurgent Religion and World Politics, Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center/William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1999, p. 2.
9.Berger, op. cit.
10.Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurologist’s Journey to the Afterlife, New York: Piatkus, 2012, passim.
11.Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 3.
12.Norris and Inglehart, op. cit., p. 13.
13.Ibid., p. 14.
14.Ibid., p. 221.
15.Ibid., p. 16.
16.Ibid., p. 23.
17.John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World, London: Allen Lane, 2009. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith, Los Angeles, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 4, 79. London Times, May 2, 2009, pp. 58–59.
18.Micklethwait and Wooldridge, op. cit., p. 58, and quoted in the London Times, May 2, 2009.
19.Norris and Inglehart, op. cit., p. 231. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, New York and London: Pantheon, 2013, pp. 311–13.
20.Norris and Inglehart, op. cit.
21.Nigel Biggar, “Wh
at’s It All For?” Financial Times, December 24, 2008, p. 13.
22.Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. “God Eclipsed by Ghost Believers,” Daily Mail, November 24, 2008.
23.Michael Foley, The Age of Absurdity, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Ben Okri, “Our False Oracles Have Failed,” London Times, October 30, 2009. Jeanette Winterson, “In a Crisis, Art Still Asks Simply that We Rename What Is Important,” London Times, November 1, 2008.
24.London Times, September 4, 2009, p. 15. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” American Economic Journal 1, no. 2, pp. 190–225, August 2009.
25.New York Times, January 20, 2013, p. A3.
26.Curtis Cate, Friedrich Nietzsche, London: Hutchinson, 2002, p. 395.
27.Cate, op. cit., p. 395.
28.Luc Ferry, L’Homme-Dieu ou le sens de la vie, Paris: Grasset, 1996. Man Made God: The Meaning of Life, trans. David Pellauer, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. See also Ferry, What Is the Good Life?, Chicago University Press, 2009.
29.Ferry, Man Made God, p. 153.
30.Ibid., p. 180.
31.Ibid., p. 183.
32.Ibid., pp. 167, 181.
33.Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt as History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation, from Socrates and Jesus to Jefferson and Emily Dickinson, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004, p. 371.
34.Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 89 and passim. See also James Thrower, The Alternative Tradition: Religion and the Rejection of Religion in the Ancient World, The Hague and New York: Mouton, 1980.
35.Larry Witham, The Measure of God: History’s Greatest Minds Wrestle with Reconciling Science and Religion, San Francisco: Harper, 2005, passim.
36.Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000, 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2009; see especially ch. 6. And Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, trans. Roy Schwartz, London: Hurst, 2010; especially chs. 4, 7.
37.Chadwick, op. cit., p. 133.
CHAPTER 1: THE NIETZSCHE GENERATION: ECSTASY, EROS, EXCESS
1.Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1992, p. 17.
2.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 19.
3.Ibid., p. 20.
4.Ibid., p. 22.
5.Ibid., p. 25.
6.Seth Taylor, Left-wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990. Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy and Morality: Essays in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994, p. 460.
7.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 31.
8.Ibid., p. 33.
9.Ibid., p. 39.
10.Ibid.
11.For an idiosyncratic view see Bernard Shaw, The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists Being Degenerate, London: New Age Press, 1908.
12.Joachim Köhler, Nietzsche and Wagner: A Study in Subjugation, trans. Ronald Taylor, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998, chapters 4 and 9.
13.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 40.
14.Ibid., p. 43.
15.Ibid., p. 45.
16.Ibid., p. 49.
17.Paul Bishop (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche: Life and Works, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012, pp. 51–57.
18.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 51.
19.Ibid., p. 52.
20.Ibid., p. 57.
21.Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins; Ascona, 1900–1920, Hanover and London: Tufts University Press, New England, 1986, p. 185.
22.Green, op. cit., p. 186.
23.Ibid., p. 56.
24.Ibid., p. 68.
25.Ibid., p. 71.
26.Joachim Köhler, Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Ronald Taylor, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002, especially ch. 10.
27.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 221.
28.Ibid., p. 70.
29.Ibid., p. 102.
30.Eugene L. Stelzig, Hermann Hesse’s Fictions of the Self: Autobiography and the Confessional Imagination, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 117–18.
31.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 64.
32.Ibid., p. 60.
33.Green, op. cit., p. 95.
34.Ibid., p. 96.
35.Ibid., pp. 99–100.
36.Susan A. Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Los Angeles, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993, p. 127.
37.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 102.
38.Ibid., p. 103.
39.Ibid., p. 106.
40.Ibid., p. 107.
41.Rudolf Laban, The Mastery of Movement, Plymouth: Northcote House, 1988. John Hodgson, Mastering Movement: The Life and Work of Rudolf Laban, London: Methuen, 2001, pp. 72, 82–83.
42.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 143.
43.Ibid., pp. 143–44.
44.Tom Sandqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, pp. 87, 188.
45.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 61.
46.Ibid., pp. 62–63.
47.Manning, op. cit., pp. 160–61.
48.Ibid., p. 115.
49.Neil Donohue (ed.), A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005, pp. 175–76.
50.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 65.
51.J. M. Ritchie, Gottfried Benn: The Unreconstructed Expressionist, London: Wolff, 1972.
52.Aschheim, op. cit., p. 68.
53.Ibid., p. 112.
54.Ibid., p. 117.
55.Ibid., p. 124.
56.Adrian Del Caro, Nietzsche contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
CHAPTER 2: NO ONE WAY THAT LIFE MUST BE
1.Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. x–xii.
2.Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud, New York: HarperCollins, 2005, p. 936.
3.Ibid., p. 935.
4.Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960, pp. 346–47.
5.Watson, op. cit., p. 944.
6.Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, London: Penguin, 1999, p. 77.
7.Menand, op. cit., pp. 357–58.
8.Rorty, op. cit., p. xviii.
9.Ibid., p. 30.
10.Ibid., p. 31.
11.Ibid., p. 33.
12.Ibid., p. 34.
13.Ibid., p. 36.
14.Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen, Darwin’s Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2010, pp. 229–32.
15.Ibid., p. 50.
16.John J. Stuhr, 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, chapters 1 and 10.
17.Rorty, op. cit., p. 57.
18.Ibid., p. 77.
19.Ibid., p. 78.
20.Martin Jay, The Education of John Dewey: A Biography, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 439ff and 502.
21.Rorty, op. cit., p. 83.
22.Ibid., p. 87.
23.Henry Samuel Levinson, Santayana, Pragmatism and the Spiritual Life, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992, p. 174.
24.Le
vinson, op. cit., p. 155.
25.Ibid., p. 148.
26.Ibid., p. 90.
27.Ibid., p. 248.
28.Marianne S. Wokeck and Martin A. Coleman (eds.), The Life of Reason, or, The Phases of Human Progress, by George Santayana, Introduction by James Gouinlock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011, pp. 81, 118–19, 183–84.
29.Rorty, op. cit., p. 178.
30.Ibid., pp. 124, 131.
31.Ibid., p. 51.
32.Ibid., p. 138.
33.Ibid., p. 36.
34.Ibid., p. 234.
35.Wokeck and Coleman, op. cit., pp. 150–51, 188.
36.Rorty, op. cit., p. 177.
CHAPTER 3: THE VOLUPTUOUSNESS OF OBJECTS
1.Everett W. Knight, Literature Considered as Philosophy: The French Example, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957, p. 19.
2.Knight, op. cit., pp. 21–24.
3.Ibid., p. 36.
4.Ibid., p. 43.
5.Ibid., p. 45.
6.Ibid., p. 54.
7.Ibid., p. 77.
8.Michael Roberts, T. E. Hulme, London: Faber, 1938, p. 83.
9.Roberts, op. cit., p. 248.
10.Karen Csengeri (ed.), The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, p. 140.
11.Tom Regan, Bloomsbury’s Prophet: G. E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986, p. 35.
12.Regan, op. cit., p. 8.
13.Ibid., p. 23.
14.Ibid., p. 28.
15.Ibid., p. 169.
16.Thomas Baldwin, G. E. Moore, London: Routledge, 1990, Part III. See also Paul Levy, G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979.
17.Regan, op. cit., p. 202.
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God Page 66