(mis)Reading Nietzsche HERE is a brand new collection of essays, by M. Saverio Clemente, from cutting edge thinkers. It does not disappoint. Here I share some fascinating excerpts from there intro by John Panteleimon Manoussakis :
"Though much of ideology’s dangers for religion have been the subject of recent scholarly discussion, ranging from religion’s ontological commitments to its self- captivity in the land of conceptual idolatry, far less noticed has remained, to the scholarly eye in any case, the counter risk of philosophy’s aspirations to usurp the salvific role of religion. Lofty aspirations which, although never quite admitted as such, are kept hidden under what philosophy has always, or almost always, considered as its principal duty: namely, the supersession (read, incorporation or substitution) of religion by one or the other speculative systems.
“All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable idolaters of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship (TI, “Reason in Philosophy,”
It is important to pay attention to Nietzsche’s language. He speaks of a worship to which philosophers have dedicated themselves “for thousands of years”; but this is not the worship of the living God, “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob,” to use Pascal’s terms, but, as one might indeed expect, the “God of the philosophers.” Nietzsche is more accurate in his description: it is an idol, that is, a dead or counterfeit god.
But how could a god die, as the madman of Nietzsche’s Gay Science in so powerful a way declares (GS, 3, 125)? Religion, pagan and Abrahamic alike, has taught us that if man were to see god, man would die. “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live,” Yahweh says to Moses (Exodus 33:20). In philosophy this principle becomes reversed: when man sees god, god dies. And he dies by means of this very “seeing,” by means, in other words, of what we know in Greek as the idea, and in German as Begriff. It is, at once, the crime and the means of that crime that Nietzsche identified by calling the philosopher an “idolater of concepts.” Far from being merely a criticism of a religion not credible any more, as it is often assumed, Nietzsche’s proclamation of “the death of God” is a powerful condemnation of philosophy and the risk of philosophy’s aspirations to name (and, by means of naming, to understand, to know) the unnamable, unknowable God.
How can we speak of God by avoiding the inevitable conceptual idolatry about which the madman has issued that stern warning? In his famous essay “How to Avoid Speaking,” Jacques Derrida’s sustained reading of Dionysian apophaticism reaches the same aporia:
Thus, at the moment when the question “How to avoid speaking?” arises, it is already too late. There was no longer any question of not speaking. Language has started without us, in us and before us. This is what theology calls God, and it is necessary, it will have been necessary, to speak.2
Dionysius’ brilliant solution to this problem was in a sense Dionysian: for he avoids the limitations and restrictions of language by substituting theology with hymnology. Thus Derrida, quoting Marion who in turn cites von Balthasar, writes, “No doubt, as Urs von Balthasar rightly says, ‘Where God and the divine are concerned, the word ὑμνείν almost re- places the word ‘to say.’’”
As any attempt to speak of God is inevitably inadequate—for theology is not spoken but rather celebrated through the rites and rituals sung in the Church—so too, to read Nietzsche’s Dionysian theology is to misread it. I would like to suggest that Nietzsche’s aphoristic language is analogous to Dionysius’ apophatic language and that as Dionysius admonishes us not to read but rather to sing his theology…”
In another essay, The Philosopher-Priest and the Mythology of Reason, found HERE John Panteleimon Manoussakis continues in a similar vein :
“Hegel’s demand, which is at the same time nothing less than a programmatic declaration, that the pure concept “re-establish for philosophy . . . the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic Good Friday” is well known. It is with such a prophetic tenor that he closes his early essay on “Faith and Knowledge”—the title of which is not fully understood unless seen under the prism of this very demand. The new philosophy, the only one worthy to be called a philosophy, that is, speculative philosophy, is precisely a philosophy which would encompass all three of the concepts in the title of that essay, namely, “knowledge,” to which the reflective philosophy of Kant, Jacobi and even Fichte had limited itself to; “faith” which of course here doesn’t quite mean historical religion but rather the metaphysical claims which the “Copernican revolution” of Kant had abdicated; and, above all, the synthetic conjunction “and,” of which we could say is here, for the first time, elevated to the dignity of a concept.
The accomplishment of religion’s complete appropriation by philosophy, which constitutes at the same time its highest moment and its highest form, coincides with, or rather emerges from, the depths of the grief of the proclamation that “God is dead.” Hegel sees the death of God—the death of the historical specificity of this God out of which the spiritual God emerges, that is, God as Spirit: Geist, but also Begriff—in counterpoint to “the death of the philosophy” which was, in his eyes, brought about by the perpetuation and the solidification of the distinction (epistemological, methodological) between faith and knowledge, revelation and reason.
It was as if God had to die for philosophy to live, and for God to live (undisturbed by philosophy’s claims?), philosophy would have to die the death that turned her into mere reason, that is, understanding (der Verstand). ….
Thus, this story of replacement and substitution, which, more or less, overlaps with what we know as the history of philosophy, comes to be summarized by the “economy of a sacrifice that keeps what it gives up.” A sacrifice in the literal sense of sacer facere, of making sacred what has been desacralized, consecrating it again, but this time in the name of a new good, in the service of a different deity;
How philosophy itself becomes a “new mythology,” having first turned itself against the old mythology and replaced it—even if that means only the “subordination of one mystery by another, the conversion from one secret to another”—is explained by the mechanism of incorporation which, like that of digestion, the original and literal form of incorporation, seeks to turn what is outside to inside, interiorize the exterior, and assimilate the heterogeneous.
The attempt to found a new religion, or better yet, philosophy’s attempt to establish itself as a religion in place of religion—always, of course, as a “religion without religion”—is always the same, even if at one time it emerges “among the Greeks” and another among the Germans. Yet, each time one can easily foresee Nietzsche’s unheeded prophesy coming to pass. One such notorious effort was the ambitious program voiced in a particularly epic tone by the Oldest System Program of German Idealism:
At the same time we so often hear that the great masses must have a sensuous religion. Not only the great masses, but the philosopher needs it too. Monotheism of reason and heart, polytheism of the imagination and of art—this is what we need.50
The two terms, polytheism and monotheism, should not confuse us. They have nothing to do with any form of theism, except, perhaps, with atheism.51 Indeed, between these two positions, which are artificially posed here as antithetical only so that they can later be declared as unified, there is no room for God, nor indeed for any kind of real transcendence, since, as the same text had made explicit, we “cannot seek either God or immortality outside” ourselves. Intellectual monotheism and aesthetic polytheism are, at bottom, two sides of the same coin of atheism. They are juxtaposed, rather cunningly, as two polarities which the philosophy of the new epoch to dawn must unite.
Accordingly, metaphysics is not any less orgiastic than the orgiastic itself, metaphysics is not any less blind than the blindfolded initiate to the mysteries—no: its blindness is its presupposition, yet, a presupposition that goes unacknowledged. Such duplicity within the philosophical endeavor tears philosophy between the denied, yet all-too-alive, orgiastic, and its allegiance to the Apollonian sun. Philosophy, thus, becomes the unhappy consciousness itself, yet nothing could reconcile it to itself, as the only thing that could, namely, religion, has been appropriated by that suffering philosophy herself.”
"Though much of ideology’s dangers for religion have been the subject of recent scholarly discussion, ranging from religion’s ontological commitments to its self- captivity in the land of conceptual idolatry, far less noticed has remained, to the scholarly eye in any case, the counter risk of philosophy’s aspirations to usurp the salvific role of religion. Lofty aspirations which, although never quite admitted as such, are kept hidden under what philosophy has always, or almost always, considered as its principal duty: namely, the supersession (read, incorporation or substitution) of religion by one or the other speculative systems.
“All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable idolaters of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship (TI, “Reason in Philosophy,”
It is important to pay attention to Nietzsche’s language. He speaks of a worship to which philosophers have dedicated themselves “for thousands of years”; but this is not the worship of the living God, “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob,” to use Pascal’s terms, but, as one might indeed expect, the “God of the philosophers.” Nietzsche is more accurate in his description: it is an idol, that is, a dead or counterfeit god.
But how could a god die, as the madman of Nietzsche’s Gay Science in so powerful a way declares (GS, 3, 125)? Religion, pagan and Abrahamic alike, has taught us that if man were to see god, man would die. “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live,” Yahweh says to Moses (Exodus 33:20). In philosophy this principle becomes reversed: when man sees god, god dies. And he dies by means of this very “seeing,” by means, in other words, of what we know in Greek as the idea, and in German as Begriff. It is, at once, the crime and the means of that crime that Nietzsche identified by calling the philosopher an “idolater of concepts.” Far from being merely a criticism of a religion not credible any more, as it is often assumed, Nietzsche’s proclamation of “the death of God” is a powerful condemnation of philosophy and the risk of philosophy’s aspirations to name (and, by means of naming, to understand, to know) the unnamable, unknowable God.
How can we speak of God by avoiding the inevitable conceptual idolatry about which the madman has issued that stern warning? In his famous essay “How to Avoid Speaking,” Jacques Derrida’s sustained reading of Dionysian apophaticism reaches the same aporia:
Thus, at the moment when the question “How to avoid speaking?” arises, it is already too late. There was no longer any question of not speaking. Language has started without us, in us and before us. This is what theology calls God, and it is necessary, it will have been necessary, to speak.2
Dionysius’ brilliant solution to this problem was in a sense Dionysian: for he avoids the limitations and restrictions of language by substituting theology with hymnology. Thus Derrida, quoting Marion who in turn cites von Balthasar, writes, “No doubt, as Urs von Balthasar rightly says, ‘Where God and the divine are concerned, the word ὑμνείν almost re- places the word ‘to say.’’”
As any attempt to speak of God is inevitably inadequate—for theology is not spoken but rather celebrated through the rites and rituals sung in the Church—so too, to read Nietzsche’s Dionysian theology is to misread it. I would like to suggest that Nietzsche’s aphoristic language is analogous to Dionysius’ apophatic language and that as Dionysius admonishes us not to read but rather to sing his theology…”
In another essay, The Philosopher-Priest and the Mythology of Reason, found HERE John Panteleimon Manoussakis continues in a similar vein :
“Hegel’s demand, which is at the same time nothing less than a programmatic declaration, that the pure concept “re-establish for philosophy . . . the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic Good Friday” is well known. It is with such a prophetic tenor that he closes his early essay on “Faith and Knowledge”—the title of which is not fully understood unless seen under the prism of this very demand. The new philosophy, the only one worthy to be called a philosophy, that is, speculative philosophy, is precisely a philosophy which would encompass all three of the concepts in the title of that essay, namely, “knowledge,” to which the reflective philosophy of Kant, Jacobi and even Fichte had limited itself to; “faith” which of course here doesn’t quite mean historical religion but rather the metaphysical claims which the “Copernican revolution” of Kant had abdicated; and, above all, the synthetic conjunction “and,” of which we could say is here, for the first time, elevated to the dignity of a concept.
The accomplishment of religion’s complete appropriation by philosophy, which constitutes at the same time its highest moment and its highest form, coincides with, or rather emerges from, the depths of the grief of the proclamation that “God is dead.” Hegel sees the death of God—the death of the historical specificity of this God out of which the spiritual God emerges, that is, God as Spirit: Geist, but also Begriff—in counterpoint to “the death of the philosophy” which was, in his eyes, brought about by the perpetuation and the solidification of the distinction (epistemological, methodological) between faith and knowledge, revelation and reason.
It was as if God had to die for philosophy to live, and for God to live (undisturbed by philosophy’s claims?), philosophy would have to die the death that turned her into mere reason, that is, understanding (der Verstand). ….
Thus, this story of replacement and substitution, which, more or less, overlaps with what we know as the history of philosophy, comes to be summarized by the “economy of a sacrifice that keeps what it gives up.” A sacrifice in the literal sense of sacer facere, of making sacred what has been desacralized, consecrating it again, but this time in the name of a new good, in the service of a different deity;
How philosophy itself becomes a “new mythology,” having first turned itself against the old mythology and replaced it—even if that means only the “subordination of one mystery by another, the conversion from one secret to another”—is explained by the mechanism of incorporation which, like that of digestion, the original and literal form of incorporation, seeks to turn what is outside to inside, interiorize the exterior, and assimilate the heterogeneous.
The attempt to found a new religion, or better yet, philosophy’s attempt to establish itself as a religion in place of religion—always, of course, as a “religion without religion”—is always the same, even if at one time it emerges “among the Greeks” and another among the Germans. Yet, each time one can easily foresee Nietzsche’s unheeded prophesy coming to pass. One such notorious effort was the ambitious program voiced in a particularly epic tone by the Oldest System Program of German Idealism:
At the same time we so often hear that the great masses must have a sensuous religion. Not only the great masses, but the philosopher needs it too. Monotheism of reason and heart, polytheism of the imagination and of art—this is what we need.50
The two terms, polytheism and monotheism, should not confuse us. They have nothing to do with any form of theism, except, perhaps, with atheism.51 Indeed, between these two positions, which are artificially posed here as antithetical only so that they can later be declared as unified, there is no room for God, nor indeed for any kind of real transcendence, since, as the same text had made explicit, we “cannot seek either God or immortality outside” ourselves. Intellectual monotheism and aesthetic polytheism are, at bottom, two sides of the same coin of atheism. They are juxtaposed, rather cunningly, as two polarities which the philosophy of the new epoch to dawn must unite.
Accordingly, metaphysics is not any less orgiastic than the orgiastic itself, metaphysics is not any less blind than the blindfolded initiate to the mysteries—no: its blindness is its presupposition, yet, a presupposition that goes unacknowledged. Such duplicity within the philosophical endeavor tears philosophy between the denied, yet all-too-alive, orgiastic, and its allegiance to the Apollonian sun. Philosophy, thus, becomes the unhappy consciousness itself, yet nothing could reconcile it to itself, as the only thing that could, namely, religion, has been appropriated by that suffering philosophy herself.”
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