God is dead (German: Gott ist tot (help·info); also known as the death of God) is a widely quoted statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, though the phrase appears several times in the works of G. W. F. Hegel. FriedRich Kneetchee Holy Spirit bypass Ascension VIP penthouse suites, Jesus limbo purgatory, Bait&SWitch forgery indy sacred livestock clubs power never turns on, party machines pretend to be God while unable to control so destroy system for chop shop reallocation, frats, clubs, mob factions wanted to supersize their marathon buffet by playing sides party machine swarms seized control and buried Church bootleggers hierarchy transforming to commune meat market, out of their league whorehouse circus maximus, free hooch and drug lab. Racist patriots USA Church decided to destroy World boy worshipping party machines rather than build bridges abroad, forcing the issue. God is dead (German: Gott ist tot (help·info); also known as the death of God) is a widely quoted statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, though the phrase appears several times in the works of G. W. F. Hegel.[1] It first appears in 1882 in The Gay Science (German: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), in sections 108 (New Struggles), 125 (The Madman), and for a third time in section 343 (The Meaning of our Cheerfulness). It is also found in Nietzsches 1883 work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also sprach Zarathustra), which is most responsible for popularizing the phrase. The idea is stated in The Madman as follows: God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? —Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann This phrase was first put forwards by Nietzsche and he put the words into the mouth of a character in a play. The cover of the April 8, 1966 edition of Time magazine asked the question Is God Dead? and the accompanying article addressed growing atheism in America at the time.[2] At the time, a movement called death of God was arising in American theology.[3] The death of God movement is sometimes technically referred to as theothanatology, deriving from the Greek words theos (God) and thanatos (death). The main proponents of this theology in its original incarnation included the Christian theologians Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton, John A.T. Robinson, Thomas J. J. Altizer, and the rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein. Today, thinkers self-consciously indebted to the death-of-God movement of the 1960s include John D. Caputo, Slavoj Žižek, Charles Winquist, Mark C. Taylor, Robert P. Scharlemann and Peter Rollins. In 1961, Vahanians book The Death of God was published. Vahanian argued that modern secular culture had lost all sense of the sacred, lacking any sacramental meaning, no transcendental purpose, or sense of providence. He concluded that for the modern mind God is dead. In Vahanians vision a transformed post-Christian and post-modern culture was needed to create a renewed experience of deity. Both Van Buren and Hamilton agreed that the concept of transcendence had lost any meaningful place in modern thought. According to the norms of contemporary modern thought, God is dead. In responding to this collapse in transcendence Van Buren and Hamilton offered secular people the option of Jesus as the model human who acted in love. The encounter with the Christ of faith would be open in a church-community. Altizer offered a radical theology of the death of God that drew upon William Blake, Hegelian thought, and Nietzschean ideas. He conceived of theology as a form of poetry in which the immanence (presence) of God could be encountered in faith communities. However, he no longer accepted the possibility of affirming belief in a transcendent God. Altizer concluded that God had incarnated in Christ and imparted his immanent spirit which remained in the world even though Jesus was dead. Unlike Nietzsche, Altizer believed that God truly died. He is considered to be the leading exponent of the Death of God movement. Rubenstein represented that radical edge of Jewish thought working through the impact of the Holocaust. In a technical sense he maintained, based on the Kabbalah, that God had died in creating the world. However, for modern Jewish culture he argued that the death of God occurred in Auschwitz. Although the literal death of God did not occur at this point, this was the moment in time in which humanity was awakened to the idea that a theistic god may not exist. In Rubensteins work, it was no longer possible to believe in an orthodox/traditional theistic god of the Abrahamic covenant. Rather, God is a historical process. Deconstruction, a method developed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, to religion. Those who take a deconstructive approach to religion identify closely with the work of Derrida, especially his work later in life. According to Slavoj Žižek, in the mid-to-late 1980s Derridas work shifted from constituting a radical negative theology to being a form of Kantian idealism.[1] Similarly, theologian John D. Caputo describes Derridas work in the 1970s as a Nietzschean free play of signifiers while he describes Derridas work in the 1990s as a religion without religion.[2] However, Martin Hagglund argues against claims that deconstruction is a religious discourse seeking transcendence, and shows that the mortal and the transient is the source of value.[3] Justice by Luca Giordano A vital feature of Derridas work later in life is the notion of undeconstructibility. In Derridas thought, deconstruction exists in the interval between constructions and undeconstructibility. The primary exemplar of this relationship is the relationship between the law, deconstruction, and justice. Derrida summarizes the relationship by saying that justice is the undeconstructible condition that makes deconstruction possible.[4] However, the justice referred to by Derrida is indeterminate and not a transcendent ideal. The law is made up of necessary human constructions while justice is the undeconstructible call to make laws. The law belongs to the realm of the present, possible, and calculable, while justice belongs to the realm of the absent, impossible, and incalculable. Deconstruction bridges the gap between the law and justice as the experience of applying the law in a just manner. Justice demands that a singular occurrence be responded to with a new, uniquely tailored application of the law. Thus, a deconstructive reading of the law is a leap from calculability towards incalculability. In deconstruction, justice takes on the structure of a promise that absence and impossibility can be made present and possible. Insofar as deconstruction is motivated by such a promise, it escapes the traditional presence/absence binary because a promise is neither present nor absent. Therefore, a deconstructive reading will never definitively achieve justice. Justice is always deferred. Further reading[edit] Derrida works out his idea of justice in Specters of Marx and in his essay Force of Law in Acts of Religion; he works out his idea of hospitality in Of Hospitality; Similarly for democracy see Rogues: Two Essays on Reason; friendship see The Politics of Friendship; the other see The Gift of Death; the future see Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. God and deconstruction[edit] Deconstruction-and-religion understands religion in terms of what is shared among the Abrahamic faiths. In Derridas work, there is a suggestive notion of a quasi-religion locatable in the cluster of concepts surrounding the affirmation of that which is experienced as undeconstructible. Derridas acts of affirmation go by names such as the unconditional without sovereignty, the weak force of the undeconstructible, and the possibility of the impossible. Derrida sometimes suggested that such acts of affirmation can be used to describe God.[citation needed] Différance and negative theology[edit] Derrida saw the God of negative theology as a crude precursor to deconstructions central concept of différance. However, the God of negative theology is qualitatively different than the idea of différance because the God of negative theology functions as an ultimate, higher reality where différance does not. Derrida in the middle-phase of his career re-visits negative theology in his Comment ne pas parler - Dénégations (1987), English trans.- How to Avoid Speaking - Denials (1989). Robert Magliola explains at length[5] the several ways--most of them adapted from Talmudic Wisdom-games--that Dénégations uses to disrupt or confound possible structural solidarity with negative theology (Derrida was a Sephardi Jew very appreciative of his ancestry). Via many examples from Derridas text, Magliola demonstrates how these Derridean tactics work. A partial list of these tactics: (1) Ambiguous narrative modes, voices, and citations, so the voice of any utterance may conceal another that it may or may not be quoting; (2) Subversive footnotes that destabilize rather than reinforce the texts body; (3) Double binds, so assertions in parts of the essay are designed to contradict other parts; (4) Aberrant reinscription, so double binds proliferate in the text, implying a symploké (GK-crossing) that precedes the binds themselves: thus Derridas often-cited différance originaire is itself a double bind; (5) Trace-words such as sceau, filtre, prétend, etc., that neither mean nor do not mean what they meant in his earlier oeuvres. Différance is not God[edit] See also: Différance Central to deconstruction is the idea of différance. Différance is an anarchic nonconcept that makes a conception of language-as-a-play-of-signifiers possible. This French neologism means both differing and deferring, describing in its name its own operation in setting deconstructive language in motion. Prior to différance, all Western conceptual schemes relied on one form or another of a transcendental signifier. A transcendental signifier is any metaphysical, hierarchical principle that presumes to determine which constructions of signifiers are natural or proper. Examples of transcendental signifiers include Truth, God, Allah, Reason, Being, and various political ideologies. Différance is an alternative to and escape from the logic of the transcendental signifier. Because employing the idea of différance precludes the possibility of positing a transcendental signifier, no historical conception of God can survive a deconstructive framework; even the God of negative theology falls short of différance. John D. Caputo has indicated that différance is not God[6] and that the God of negative theology is a transcendental ulteriority while différance is a quasi-transcendental anteriority.[7] However, negative theology and différance are kindred spirits insofar as they both desire what is absent, impossible, and incalculable. Jean-Luc Nancy on self-deconstructed Christianity[edit] Following Derridas criticisms of the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism, Jean-Luc Nancy understands Christianity to be act-based and focused on an undeconstructible understanding of hope. Nancy thinks of Christianity as the religion that provided the exit from religion, and posits that it consists in the announcement of the second coming of Christ, known as parousia. For Nancy, because Christ is central to the formation of value and meaning in Christianity; because parousia is an announcement of a Christ to come; and because the promised return of Christ involves the return of a person who lived in the past, then Christianity as a framework of thought supports the notion that traces of the non-present (i.e. past and future) are constitutive of the present. As a result, the Christian concept of parousia poses ontological questions about the conditions of possibility of concepts like identity, subjectivity, consciousness, and experience, among many others. In Nancys thought, the concept of parousia reveals that we humans are no longer mortals who are saved by faith in an immortal being. Rather, the concept reveals that we are beings who are capable of accepting or rejecting non-self-presence. The acceptance of non-self-presence is what Nancy understands to be the heart of Christian faith. [F]aith, in any case, is not about compliance without proof or the leap above proof. It is the act of the faithful person, an act which, as such, is the attestation of an intimate consciousness of the fact that it exposes itself and allows itself to be exposed to the absence of attestation, to the absence of parousia. ... Christian faith is distinguished precisely and absolutely from all belief. — Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity[10] The concept of the metaphysics of presence is an important consideration within the area of deconstruction. The deconstructive interpretation holds that the entire history of Western philosophy and its language and traditions has emphasized the desire for immediate access to meaning, and thus built a metaphysics or ontotheology around the privileging of presence over absence. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger argues that the concept of time prevalent in all Western thought has largely remained unchanged since the definition offered by Aristotle in the Physics. He says Aristotles essay on time is the first detailed Interpretation of this phenomenon [time] which has come down to us. Every subsequent account of time, including Bergsons, has been essentially determined by it.[1] Aristotle defined time as the number of movement in respect of before and after.[2] By defining time in this way Aristotle is privileging what is present-at-hand, namely the presence of time. Heidegger argues in response that Entities are grasped in their Being as presence; this means that they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time - the Present.[3] Central to Heideggers own philosophical project is the attempt to gain a more authentic understanding of time. Heidegger considers time to be the unity of three ecstases, the past, the present and the future. Deconstructive thinkers, like Jacques Derrida, describe their task as the questioning or deconstruction of this metaphysical tendency in philosophy. This argument is largely based on the earlier work of Martin Heidegger, who in Being and Time claimed the parasitic nature of the theoretical attitude of pure presence upon a more originary involvement with the world in concepts such as the ready-to-hand and being-with. Friedrich Nietzsche is a more distant, but clear, influence as well. The presence to which Heidegger refers is both a presence as in a now and also a presence as in an eternal, always present, as one might associate with god or the eternal laws of science. This hypostatized (underlying) belief in presence is undermined by novel phenomenological ideas — such that presence itself does not subsist, but comes about primordially through the action of our futural projection, our realization of finitude and the reception or rejection of the traditions of our time.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 16:00:34 +0000
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