God's Zeal

by Peter Sloterdijk

  The position of human beings in an ontologically and cosmologically supremacized world context therefore can not be interpreted as bondage or willingness to serve. Rather, true being-in-the-world demands an awareness of one's participation in universal systems of order. Now it is a matter of understanding in an advanced sense: an adaptation of the understander to the superior exigencies of being. The ascent takes place on the ladder of general concepts. Therefore God can bear conceptual names such as the unum, the verum, the bonum, the maximum, the simplicissimum or the actualissimum. Even such titles are sufficient to inspire believers – Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling still swore on the hen kai pan [One and All] in their youthful ardour, like revolutionaries on their watchword.

  Like the first supremacism, the second also draws believers towards extremes – not in the form of blazing servility, nor a yearning for death in flames as mentioned by Goethe in the subtlest of his Islamically inclined poems, but rather as the willingness to push oneself back to the objective level in order to let things glow of their own accord. This presupposes that the reproduction of these things in the clouded mirror of subjectivity, the interested will and biased sensuality is replaced by an objective, desensualized thinking cleansed of all wilfulness. The ontological supremacism that characterizes Greek – and, even more, Indian – metaphysics releases a passion for depersonalization that can grow into the ambition to merge the human subject with the anonymous origin of the world. While the striving for the personal highest follows the super-you in order to be absorbed fully by its will, the First Philosophy seeks to lose itself in the super-id. Objective supremacism – which, since Heidegger, is often labelled as onto-theology and viewed with suspicion like a subtle form of idolatry – is ultimately concerned with dissolving the subject into a substance.

  In order to complete the picture, we should speak of a third supremacism in the old European culture of reason whose point of departure lies in the experience of thought and inner speech – and later also of writing. Here we become acquainted with a second face of philosophy, in so far as the latter can begin with the self-exploration of thinking instead of taking the world as its focus. Since Heraclitus' discovery of the logos and the introduction of the concept of nous by Anaxagoras, logical or noetic supremacism has been working towards an alternative ascent that leads, in its own way, to the god of the philosophers; but this time not through the north face of substance, but rather along the fine line of spiritual articulations. This line also leads to the One and Ultimate – this time, however, the supreme being is not interpreted from the perspective of substantiality, let alone in terms of majesty and omnipotence. Here it is the all-pervading intelligibility and constructive force of the spiritual principle that lies at the centre. One must be careful to avoid the mistake of equating this non-theologically highest power too readily with the divine attribute of omniscience found in religion. For in terms of its dynamist origin, God's knowledge within the system of personal supremacism possesses, as well as the quality of creation wisdom, the more significant quasi-political function of universal supervision and total bookkeeping of all deeds done and undone by believers and non-believers alike – its decisive application will therefore be on Judgement Day, when God himself opens the files for public viewing. The ascent to the highest, on the other hand, in accordance with noetic supremacism, leads to theoretical perceptions that accompany the divine intellect on its innermost folding into itself and its unfolding into the world. It is not uncommon for mathematics to be brought into play in this sublime endoscopy, as it depicts structures as they are before any sensuality and hence before any subjectively determined ambiguity.

  The theory of the highest intellect, like that of being, strives to present itself as strictly supra-personal and beyond the profane human sphere. The extremism that lies in the nature of this matter too manifests itself in a striving for the final formula. It does not let up until the human spirit is granted a connection to the higher intellects, and ultimately even a knowledge of God's procedures in the creation of the world. Even Hegel's seemingly hubristic statement that his logic contained the thoughts God entertained before the creation does not go any further than what is customary in the supremacism of the spirit. Furthermore, Hegel's programme of developing substance as subject perfectly expressed the aim of noetic supremacism. It is part of the long history of Christian receptions of Yahweh's self-assertion: ‘I am that I am’ (Exodus 3:14). With this, theologians add a divine ego character to the being of the ontologists and allow the human ego to take part in it epicentrically9 – an operation in which the German Idealists attained mastery. A part of the image of the corresponding extremism is the radicality of the will to a logical penetration of all circumstances that has always characterized pneumatic thinkers. It has often been interpreted as arrogance – though one could equally view it as a higher form of irony. For the partisans of the spirit, most of what issues from the mouths of humans is nothing but inane air movement in any case – just as they almost always consider everyday life a mere rolling around in gravity. To them, the ordinary descendants of Adam are no more than upright worms. What is a human being before it is transformed by the spirit? A decorated intestine with God knows what delusions about its own substance. Little wonder that the advocates of such views rarely lack a tendency to logical flights of fancy.

  When supremacists of this kind explain themselves, one hears the postulation that where matter was, spirit shall be – or that a planned order of reason must replace the chaos that has grown over time. The third disappearance of humans (following their eradication in the service of the Lord and their dissolution into the anonymous substance) is supposed to be achieved by their spiritual evaporation on the way to the divine omega point. The fact that noetic supremacism has occasionally resembled its substance-ontological partner does not negate its autonomy. In effect it formed a community of tradition with it in which it risked misunderstanding itself substantialistically. This was only brought to a halt by the transcendental shift following Descartes and Kant, that is to say through the depotentization of the theory of intellect to the critique of reason. This approach, as Kurt Flasch has shown in critical interventions, reached one of its most sublime manifestations in the intellect-theoretical speculations of Dietrich von Freiberg and Meister Eckhart, who were inspired by Arab Aristotelianism – in particular Averroes – and are often misinterpreted by the life-philosophically stimulated public in their own country as ‘German mystics’.10 Naturally, the secularization of the intellect inevitably changed the premises of the third supremacism in the wake of the Enlightenment; but the fate of such ideas as the dialectical thinking made current by Hegel has shown that the battle over the interpretation of the cognitively highest still continues in modern times. The tensions between the three leading noetic supremacisms of the twentieth century – the dialectical, the phenomenological and the grammatological – would require an examination of their own.

  In the light of what has been said so far, the matrix of logical operations that result in zealotic monotheisms can be shown without much additional effort. I have already hinted that the three supremacisms correspond to three extremisms that should be understood as three ways of overcoming resistance to a union with the One and Only. The methods, praised as ‘realizations’, of eliminating the human will in service, substance and spiritualization share a positivization of death, in so far as death offers the most direct route to the Lord, to being and to the spirit. The question of whether an affirmation of death should be assigned symbolic or literal meaning may remain unanswered. None of the resolute have ever contradicted the statement that some form of self-elimination is a prerequisite for reaching higher regions. Albert Camus's thesis that suicide is the central philosophical problem shows that its originator was one of the dying breed of metaphysically talented authors in the twentieth century, and the sneering of some philosophically unmusical thinkers only served to underline this.

  The extremisms, for their part, ar
e especially consistent applications of high cultural grammar, which was based on the rigid combination of a monovalent ontology and a bivalent logic. Monovalence of speech about that which is means: the things of which it is said that they are actually are, and are not not; nor are they anything other than what they are. Hence they share in being, both in the fact that and the fact of what and how. Hence they can best be expressed in tautologies. In this area one cannot aspire to originality, and if one is asked what being is, one should – referring to Heidegger – simply answer that it is itself. In the realm of monovalence a rose is a rose, and it lies in its nature that it flowers without any reason or consideration for its observer. The only other things that meet such strict standards of identity are the choirs of angels when they exalt the Highest in a monovalent language. This language forms a medium that neither requires nor permits contradictions, nor does it show any weak spots that could allow an infiltration by error, false statements or unstable structures. Thus the angels can speak eternal truth about eternal being. Unlike human ontologists, they never risk missing the point when they praise God.

  Terrestrial speakers dream in vain of such achievements, as our languages are destined to be bivalent in their constitution. It is not inconceivable that, before the expulsion from Eden, Adam's language also consisted purely of adequate names and well-formed affirmations, so that everything he uttered in paradise became a natural hymn to that which is. The expulsion introduced a second value, however; indeed, logicians view the myth of the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden of identity as no less than a poetic attempt to narrate the growth of human reflection as a tragedy. This is not implausible, for whoever eats their daily bread in the sweat of their brow will separate the true from the false even as they frown – a burden that can be compared to the curse of farming. Let us note, then, that the first negation came not from the human spirit, but rather from God's command not to eat from the tree.

  The introduction of this second value made the human capacity for true statements unstable, as these – being a reflection in the other of that which is – were now accompanied by the fatal possibility of being false. The fact that the capacity for untruth clings to the act of statement is one of freedom's dowries – if freedom means being exposed, in a postlapsarian state, to the inclination to speak falsely, whether due to an honest mistake, for strategic reasons or simply out of an enjoyment of untruth for its own sake. Even if one takes pains to present things in – as far as we can establish it – the way their own state dictates, one should fundamentally expect some gap through which falsehood can enter. Metaphorically expressed, the true sentence does not grow on the branch of real conditions – it is no growth at all, no continuation of what naturally is in what naturally is. Rather, sentences are always, in a way that is specific to humans, artificial, daring and unnatural – in fact, they are always potentially perverse. According to the majority tradition of the classical logicians, they constitute a reflection of nature in a more or less murky medium, that is to say mirrorings that lack any substantial weight of their own, and are thus in constant danger of multiplying the host of phantoms. How else could one interpret the fact that for every true statement, there are an infinite number of possible false ones? What does a sentence mean in the cosmos anyway? It seems like a necessary, but fundamentally hazardous, supplement that, with an artificial effort and an inevitable delay, joins the collection of things that truly are. A sentence is always so remote from that which is that its formulation inevitably risks missing the mark. One can turn it on its head and back again, one can stretch, twist and squash it, and nothing seems simpler than making it express the opposite of its actual intention. In the best case, the double negation leads back to the original sentence, though even this may itself also have been false. Under such circumstances, how is it that one occasionally has the impression certain statements are nonetheless true and correct? Probably only because particular speakers manage to evade the danger and temptation to present falsehoods, clinging instead to those aspects on the side of being that seem to be in a state of simple identity with themselves, as if there were no mistaken, deceitful or self-contradictory people – or, in the jargon of philosophers: as if the identical could be represented undistorted in the non-identical, or as if being could be transformed into corresponding signs without any loss of substance.

  Now we can clarify what the zealotic monotheisms and their universalist missions mean from a logical perspective. They rest on the intention of eliminating the risk of failure introduced by the second value at all costs – even if that implies removing the errant along with the error. In fact the errant himself, viewed in terms of the ideal of monovalent being and its reflection in the true sentence, is merely a form of real nothingness whose liquidation is no great loss – just as the massif of being continues to exist unharmed, as it was and will be, whenever an incorrect statement about one of its details is annulled.

  This disposition is, as we have seen, given through the combination of classical ontology and classical logic. If the second value is only a reflexive one, a value that enables a surplus of potentially untenable statements and superfluous negations beyond the number of real facts counted out by being or by God himself (but also serves to verify these, as Plato's dialogues show), it should suffice to eliminate the parasitic sentences, the lies, the errors, the ideological and the fictitious, and if need be also the accompanying speakers, in order to bring human speech back to the core content of legitimate statements – legitimate, as we have seen, because they are supported by being and spawned by the spirit in the spirit. Essentially, all supremacist zealots have only one concern: the mission of expelling the insolent traders from the temple of monovalence. Does Dante Alighieri not tell us that everything superfluous displeases God and nature?11 The necessity of such an intervention becomes evident as soon as, owing to various requirements of the evolution of ideas (warning: axial age!), a strictly monovalent ontology is systematically bound together with a strictly bivalent logic.

  This configuration permits the first appearance of the phenomenon of strictness. When strictness coincides with lack of complexity, zealotry is in its element. Thinking becomes strict as soon as it insists that only one of two options can be right for us. Then it guards its cause jealously to make sure that the side of being is taken, not of nothingness; of the essential, not of the inessential; of the Lord, not of the lordless and lawless. The logical origin of zealotry lies in bringing everything down to the number one, which tolerates no one and nothing beside itself. This number one is the mother of intolerance. It demands the radical either in which the or is ruled out. Whoever says ‘two’ is saying one too many. Secundum non datur.

  These reflections take us into the deep structure of the iconoclastic syndrome. If the rigid monotheisms frown upon the use of images, this is not simply because they embody the danger of idolatry. More importantly, the unacceptable nature of images stems from the observation that they never serve purely to reproduce that which is represented, but always assert their own significance in addition. The autonomous value of the second aspect as such becomes visible in them – and the iconoclasts will go to any lengths to destroy this. They empathize with a God who has regretted his creation ever since his creatures began to have minds of their own. They come to his aid by exterminating whatever distracts the creatures from an exclusive bond to the One. As humans ‘misuse’ their freedom to craft images, the iconoclasts wish to put an end to this misuse by restricting the creatures' freedom by force. This is supposedly done to show humans the way back to the true God. In reality, however, iconoclasm seeks to attack the autonomy of the world, in so far as ‘world’ represents the epitome of the emancipated second aspect. In iconoclasm, which is actually a cosmoclasm, one finds the articulation of a resentment of any human freedom that is not prepared to accept immediate self-denial and obedience.

  The zealotic monotheisms (like the zealotic Enlightenment and zealotic scientism in later times) draw their
momentum from the fantastic notion that they could succeed, in the face of all the delusions and confusions of our controversially lingualized and multiply pictorialized reality, in ‘reinstating’ a monovalent primal language. They want to make audible the monologue of things as they are, and reproduce the unconcealed facts, the first structures, the purest instructions of being, without having to address the intermediate world of languages, images and projections with its independent logic. The followers of the revelational religions even seek to make the monologue of God himself reverberate in the human ear, the listener being a mere recipient who does not involve his own ego – and hence does not acquire any share in the author's rights.

  Now one can also understand why there need to be several varieties of zealotry. Depending on the type of supremacization they tend towards, their agents choose typical procedures for returning from ambiguity to certainty, from the fallibility of idle talk to the infallibility of the original text. At any rate, the aim of this motto of ‘back to a time before reflection!’ is to block out human language as it was spoken after the Fall. Its replacement is a code still untarnished by the negations, contradictions and capacity for error inherent in bivalent speech. Hence the interest of logical, moral and religious extremists in a language beyond human speech. In striving for the extrahuman and superhuman, the religious zealots join hands with the mathematical rigorists, and the advocates of self-dissolution within being also follow along.