The Theme of God, Buenos Aires, October 29, 1995

The Theme of God: Seminar on Philosophical-Religious Dialogue
Trade-Union of Light and Electrical Power, Buenos Aires, Argentina, October 29, 1995

I will try, in the twenty minutes I’ve been given, to communicate my point of view on the first of the topics suggested by the organizers of this event, which is “the theme of God.”

The theme of God can be addressed in various ways. I will choose the historical and cultural ambit, not because of any personal affinity, but out of consideration for the implicit framework established for this seminar. This framing includes other topics such as “the religious sentiment in the contemporary world” and “overcoming personal and social violence.” The object of my presentation will be, accordingly, “the theme of God,” and not “God.”

Why should we be concerned with the theme of God? What interest can this subject hold for us, men and women almost of the twenty-first century? Did not Nietzsche’s pronouncement “God is dead” put an end to the matter once and for all? Clearly, this question was not put to rest by that simple philosophical decree. And it has not been put to rest for two important reasons: first, because the significance of this theme has not been fully understood and, second, because placed in historical perspective we see that this issue, until only recently considered passé, is once again inspiring new questions. And this questioning echoes, not in the ivory towers of philosophers and specialists, but in the street and deep in the hearts of ordinary men and women. Some might say that what we are observing today is simply a growth of superstition or a cultural expression in peoples who, in defending their identities, return fanatically to their sacred books and spiritual leaders. Some might also say, pessimistically, in keeping with certain historical interpretations, that all of this signifies a return to the Dark Ages. However one prefers to view it, the theme of God remains with us, and that’s what counts.

I believe that Nietzsche’s pronouncement that God is dead marks a decisive moment in the long history of the theme of God, at least from the point of view of a negative or “radical” theology, as some defenders of this position wish to call it.

It is clear that Nietzsche did not locate himself in the space of the dueling ground habitually marked out for their debates by theists and atheists, by spiritualists and materialists. Instead, Nietzsche asked himself: Is it that people still believe in God, or is it that a process has begun that will do away with belief in God? In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he says: “And thus the old man and the young man went their separate ways, laughing like children. . . . But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke in this way to his heart: ‘Can it be possible? This old saint in his forest has heard nothing of the death of God!’” And in the fourth part of that same book, Zarathustra asks, “‘What does everyone know today? Perhaps that the old God in whom everyone once believed is alive no longer.’ ‘You’ve said it,’ replied the saddened old man. ‘And I have served that God to his last hour.’” In addition, in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, there appears the parable of the madman seeking God in the public square, who says, “I will tell you where God is . . . God has died! And he’s still dead!” But his listeners do not understand, and the madman explains that he has arrived prematurely, that the death of God is still happening.

It is clear from the passages I’ve cited that Nietzsche was referring to a cultural process, to the displacement of a belief, and leaving aside any exact determination of the existence or non-existence of God per se. The implications of the displacement of that belief are of enormous consequence, because that belief carries along with it a whole system of values, at least in the West and in the time that Nietzsche wrote. And that “high-water mark of nihilism” Nietzsche predicted for the times that were to come has as a backdrop his announcement of the death of God.

Within this conception, one might think that if the values of an age are based on God, and God disappears, then a new system of ideas must of necessity arise, a system that accounts for the totality of existence and justifies a new morality. Such a system of ideas must give an account of the world, of history, of the human being and the meaning of the human being, of society, of coexisting with others, of good and bad, of what one should and should not do. Now, ideas of that sort had begun to appear long before their culmination in the great constructions of critical idealism and absolute idealism. And, in that case it made no difference whether a system of thought was applied in an idealist or materialist direction, because its framework, its methodology of knowledge and action, was strictly rational, and in any case it could not account for the totality, the entirety, of life. But in the Nietzschean interpretation, things happened in just the opposite way: Ideologies arose out of life itself in order to give justification and meaning to that life. We should recall that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, both engaged in struggle against the rationalism and idealism of their time, became the forerunners of existentialism. However, the description and comprehension of the structure of human life had still not appeared on the philosophical horizon of those authors, as this would occur only later. It was as though in the background there was still at work the definition of man as the “rational animal,” as nature endowed with reason, and this reason could be understood in terms of animal evolution, or “reflection,” or other such ideas. At that time one might still legitimately think that “reason” was the most important thing or, conversely, that instincts and the dark forces of life governed reason. This latter belief was the case for Nietzsche and the vitalists in general. But following the “discovery” of “human life” things have changed . . . And here I should apologize for not developing this point further, but there is simply not sufficient time to do this today. I would, however, like to relieve a little the sense of strangeness or uneasiness that we may experience when we hear that “human life” is a recent discovery that only recently has begun to be understood.

In two words: Since the first human beings we have all known that we live and that we are human; we have all experienced our life. And yet in the field of ideas, the understanding of human life with its own particular structure and its own particular characteristics is very recent. This is like saying: We humans have always had DNA and RNA in our cells, but it was only recently that those molecules were discovered and their function understood. In this state of affairs, concepts such as intentionality, opening, the historicity of consciousness, intersubjectivity, the horizon of consciousness, and so on have only recently been defined in the field of ideas, and with this we have begun to see not the structure of life in general, but the structure of “human life,” and this has resulted in a definition of the human phenomenon radically different from that of the human being as “rational animal.” Thus, for example, animal life, natural life, begins at the moment of conception, but when does human life begin, if it is by definition “being-in-the-world,” which is opening and social environment? Or consider, is consciousness simply a reflection of natural and “objective” conditions, or is it rather intentionality, which configures and modifies the given conditions? Or, for example, is the human being “completed,” finished once and for all, or instead a being capable of modifying itself and constructing itself not only in the social and historical sense but biologically as well? Thus, with endless such examples of the new problems raised by the discovery of the structure of human life, we may well have to move beyond the ambit of the questions that were asked within the historical horizon in which the definition of the human being as “rational animal” was still the prevailing one—the epoch of “God is dead.”

To return to our subject. If with the death of God no replacement appeared that could give a foundation to the world and human activity, or if a rational system was forcibly imposed in which the fundamental thing—life itself—escaped, then chaos and the collapse of values would ensue, dragging down all of civilization along with it. Nietzsche called this “the high-water mark of nihilism” and on occasion “the Abyss.” It is clear that neither his studies in On the Genealogy of Morals nor his ideas in Beyond Good and Evil managed to produce the “transmutation of values” he so earnestly sought. Instead, seeking something that could surpass his nineteenth-century “last man,” he constructed a Superman who, as in the most recent versions of the Golem legend, came to life and began to walk around out of control, destroying everything in its path. Irrationalism was on the rise, and the “will to power” came to stand as the highest value, constituting the ideological underpinning of one of the greatest monstrosities history has ever recorded.

There was no new, positive foundation of values able to resolve or overcome the pronouncement “God is dead,” and the great philosophical constructions found themselves now, in the early part of this century, at an impasse, unable to accomplish this task. Today, we still find ourselves immobilized in the face of these questions: Why should we exercise solidarity toward others? For what cause should we risk our future? Why should we struggle against injustice? Simply out of necessity, or for some historical reason, or because of some natural order? Is the old morality based on God, yet today without God, perhaps felt as a need? None of this is sufficient!

And if today we find ourselves with the historical impossibility of new all-encompassing systems arising that could serve as a foundation, the situation seems to grow even more complicated. Remember that the last great philosophical vision appeared in Husserl’s Logical Investigations in 1900, the same year as a complete vision of the human psyche was proposed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. The view of the universe in physics was shaped in 1905 and 1916 in Einstein’s theories of relativity; the systematization of logic was given by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica in 1910 and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921. And then in 1927 Heidegger’s Being and Time, an unfinished work that proposed to lay the foundations of a new phenomenological ontology, marked the beginning of the period of rupture in great systems of thought.

Here, we must stress, we are not talking about an interruption in thinking itself, but rather the impossibility of continuing the creation of grand systems capable of giving foundation to everything. The same impulse of that earlier period was also felt in the grandiosity of works in the field of aesthetics: Consider the examples of Stravinsky, Bartok, and Sibelius; Picasso and the muralists Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros; writers like Joyce, who tried to fully capture the on-rushing steam-of-consciousness; epic film-makers such as Eisenstein; the Bauhaus architects led by Gropius; the urbanists and monumental architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. And has artistic production lagged in the years since then? Of course not, but it occurs under a different sign: It is modular, it deconstructs, it is adapted to its surroundings, it is carried out by teams and specialists—it has become technical in the extreme.

The soulless political regimes that came to power in those days, and in their moment gave the illusion of monolithic completeness, might well be understood as factive throwbacks to delirious romanticisms, titanisms of the transformation of the world at any price. They inaugurated the era of high-tech barbarism, the suppression of human beings by the millions, nuclear terror, chemical and biological weapons, and large-scale environmental pollution and destruction. This is the high-water mark of nihilism that, in Zarathustra, heralded the destruction of all values and the death of God!

What do people believe in today? Perhaps in new alternatives for life? Or do people simply let themselves be swept along by a current that now seems to them irresistible and completely independent of their intentionality? The predominance of technology over science, the exclusively analytical vision of the world, and the dictatorship of abstract money over the concrete realities of production—all these are now firmly entrenched. In that swirling magma, the ethnic and cultural differences believed overcome in the process of history are once again being revived. Systems of any kind are rejected by deconstructionism, postmodernism, and structuralist currents. The frustration of thinking has become a commonplace among the “philosophers of weak intelligence.” The hodgepodge of styles that swiftly supplant one another, the destructuring of human relationships, and the perpetration of all manner of fraud and deceit recall the eras of imperial expansion in ancient Persia, Greece, or Rome . . .

I do not mean by any of this to propose a kind of historical morphology, a spiral model of a process that is fed by analogies. I am simply trying to point out certain aspects of today’s world that we find not in the least surprising or difficult to believe, because they have flourished at other times in history, though not in the present context of globalization and material progress. Nor do I wish to transmit a sense of inexorable mechanical sequence in which human intention counts for nothing. Indeed, I believe the opposite—I believe that with reflection, inspired by humanity’s experience down through history, we are today in a position to begin a new civilization, the first truly planetary civilization. But the conditions for that leap are extremely difficult. Think of how the gap between the postindustrial information societies and the societies of hunger is widening. Think of the growth of marginalization and poverty even within the wealthy societies, and the yawning generation gap that appears to be bringing to a halt the historical march in which the new surpasses the old. Think of the dangerous concentration of international financial capital, mass terrorism, sudden secessions, ethnic and cultural conflicts, increasing environmental imbalances, and population explosion with megalopolises teetering on the verge of collapse. In thinking about all this, even without becoming apocalyptic, you will have to agree that the current picture presents many difficulties.

In my view, the problem lies in the difficult transition between the world we have known until now and the world that is coming. And as at the end of any civilization and the beginning of another, we will have be alert to possible financial collapse, possible administrative destructuring and breakdown, possible replacement of nation states by para-states or even gangs, the possibility of widespread injustice, disheartenment, the diminishing of the human being, the dissolving of bonds between people, loneliness, growing violence, and emergent irrationalism—and all of this in an ever-accelerating, ever more global setting. Above all, we have to consider what new image of the world to propose. What kind of society do we want, what kind of economy, what values, what kind of interpersonal relationships, what kind of dialogue between each human being and his or her neighbor, each human being and his or her soul?

Nevertheless, for each new proposal that could be made, there are at least two impossibilities: first, that no complete system of thought will remain standing in a time of destructuring, and second, that no rational articulation of discourse can be carried on beyond immediate matters of practical life or matters of technology. These two difficulties impede the possibility of laying the foundation for any far-reaching new values.

If God has not died, then religions have responsibilities to humanity that they must fulfill. Today they have a duty to create a new psychosocial atmosphere, to address themselves as teachers to their faithful, and to eradicate all vestiges of fanaticism and fundamentalism. They cannot turn away and remain indifferent to the hunger, ignorance, bad faith, and violence in today’s world. They must contribute vigorously to tolerance and foster dialogue with other beliefs and every person who feels a sense of responsibility for the destiny of humankind. They must open themselves—and I hope this won’t be taken as irreverence—to manifestations of God in the many cultures. We are waiting for them and expecting them to make this contribution to the common cause in this exceedingly difficult moment.

If, on the other hand, God has died in the heart of religions, we can be sure that God will return to life in a new dwelling, as we learn from the history of the origins of every civilization, and that new dwelling will be in the heart of the human being, far removed from every institution and all power.

Thank you very much.

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