After God. Peter Sloterdijk

up with the fact that the old gods have become metaphysically worn out. Seen from a cultural perspective, even Brünnhilde’s sublime suicide is no more valuable than Emma Bovary’s. A certain anarchic vandalism has the last word. There is no talk of a new cycle of creation. The “estrus of downfall”¹⁴ seizes everything. The reasons for this cannot be found in the work of art itself.

III

We can invoke Richard Wagner’s contribution to the portrayal of the agony of the gods as evidence of the fact that the freedom of the will migrated to the domain of art some time ago. In today’s turbulent world, the human being can experience a trace of freedom, that is, an openness toward what is to come, only by drawing on his “own” creative potential – and on that of his companions who share in the same fate. There is an epochal significance in the immigration of creativity to the realms of art and technology. Without this immigration, the word “modernity” would be mere sound and fury. The first thinker of Europe, Giambattista Vico, conceptualized this movement by distinguishing the age of the gods from the epoch of heroes and from that of human beings. This sequence can be rewritten as a progressive incarnation. Where there were gods, human beings should come to be. Where there are human beings, artificiality increases.

      Wagner’s work is so philosophically remarkable because it brings these three spheres very close to one another. It evokes a demanding near simultaneity of gods, heroes, and human beings. Wagner’s meditation on the power of time can be seen in how he presents the heroes after the gods and the human beings after the heroes – without offering any further justification for this sequence. Wagner’s new mythology is a hermeneutics of fate. It purports to make us understand by means of pure presentation. Matters of fate can only be shown, not explained. Fate refers to what happens without allowing any questions as to why.

      From the perspective of philosophy, Wagner is not just chronologically situated between Hegel and Heidegger. As a reader of Feuerbach, he knows that human beings have an innate god-making ability. As a reader of Schopenhauer, he understands that action incurs debt from blind will. As a reader of Bakunin, it is clear to him that whoever wants something new must lay his torch on what is flammable, that is, on what the critical spirits call the “existent.” No purification without passing through the fire. No phoenix without ashes.

The Götterdämmerung constitutes evidence of Wagner’s insight that the old set of gods has become obsolete. They “are able only to watch this ending approach and do nothing to prevent it.”¹⁵ At the same time, Wagner’s speculations only provide an indirect contribution to our understanding of the process that, with regard to ontology, can be called translatio creativitatis [transfer of creativity]. This expression refers to the fact that it is not only God who is a creator; nature and human beings have creative qualities too. There are obviously a multiplicity of creativities and a multiplicity of reflexivities in the world that a divine authority cannot reclaim, let alone monopolize. The earth is a place of polyvalent intelligence. It forms the only known point in the universe where one can really say: there is thinking, in manifold ways.

      From a philosophical perspective, what mythological discourse called the “twilight of the gods” amounts to nothing but the symbolic condensation of the consequences that result from the thesis that there is thinking. Precise thinking establishes a new reality. Descartes’s fallacy consisted in reclaiming thinking for his ego. Yet the ego is nothing but the place in which we first take note of the discovery that there is thinking. The fact that an ego ascribes its thinking and what is thought to itself is secondary. Descartes’ primary thought that, when I think, I thereby certainly am, turns out to be sterile from the beginning. The cogito builds an unshakable foundation without any structure on top of it. Every substantially fruitful thought belongs to the sphere of the “there is thinking” – or in any case to the sphere of the “there is thinking in me.” (Parenthetically: Fichte’s greatness comes from the fact that in his late work he emphasized the “there is” in the ego. If we are to think, we do need an ego first, but behind the ego that I immediately know – because I am the one who posited it – there is another ego rearing up; I do not know this latter ego, which uses me as its eye, as it were. This unknown ego that looks through me is called God. God is the will to substance, the will to non-sterility, the will to non-exhaustion in empty self-relation, in short, the will to world.)

      Mythological aids are not sufficient for grasping the phenomenon of the “twilight of the gods.” Yet the word “twilight” does correctly indicate that God and gods don’t die, but instead fade away. This happens whether a brighter light consumes their own light or whether obfuscation makes them invisible. Lessing’s parable of the ring in Nathan the Wise (1779) – which he borrowed from Boccaccio’s Decameron (1356) – marks one stage in the process of their fading away. After it an aura of amiable undecidability surrounds the god of the once sharply contoured monotheisms.

      Fading away as such need not be fatal.¹⁶ As the present shows, a god can recover from pallor when the times are favorable, even if the color he or she regains is for the most part questionable. Fading away is essentially irreversible because modern civilization has produced so much artificial light with its art, its science, its technology, and its medicine that God’s light seems faint in comparison. One can only let it shine on Sundays and holidays by turning off the machines of artificial light.

This last point can best be explained by turning back to the thanatology of classical metaphysics. According to old Europe’s authoritative story of creation, it was divine breath that lent human beings their feeling and reflecting soul. As long as the soul preserves its community with the body, the human being is still alive – or, as the German language puts it so profoundly, the human being is still am Leben. In the universe of Genesis, the pinnacle of reflection is located in divine intelligence, which can do what it wills and wills what it knows. (This is the case in most creation myths that are acquainted with a demiurge, a maker,¹⁷ a first author.) Individual human intelligences are loans that have been portioned out from the stock of the total intelligence. These gifts are repaid to the creator upon the death of the creature. The myth of the Last Judgment suggests the logic of a loan agreement: when the soul that has been borrowed is taken back, there is an examination of whether the refund is whole and sound. If it is not, the lender enacts his revenge on the dead ones who bring their souls back damaged, defaced, and darkened.

      It is obvious that the classical model of transactions between God, the soul, and the world does not allow any other intelligent being to enter the world. Nor does this seem necessary to allow it, since God has drawn from his unsurpassable abundance and given to creation or nature as much order as they need for their existence. Not even the intelligently animated human being can arrange the world any more cleverly than it is as he finds it to be according to its primordial arrangement. For this reason, it is not uncommon for him to feel that the world is an “external world.” He is its guest, not one who should change it. Within this metaphysical model, the reflexive communication plays out only between God and the human being. The one who bestows intelligence brings souls into being and grants them enough revelation to lead them to believe in him; for the rest, human beings live “in their time,” after which they give back their animated intelligence, at death’s door. Once again we recall the subtle turn of phrase in French: rendre l’âme. The Protestant hymn knows this too, in its own way: the world is not my “proper home.”¹⁸

The suggestiveness of these ideas may remain unaffected. Yet one cannot fail to recognize that they, too, breathe the spirit of a sublime sterility. This spirit gives the events of the world and creation the form of a zero-sum game. In this respect God gains nothing in the end. Human beings, by contrast, risk damnation if they have lived in a problematic fashion. An influx of intelligence into the world is unthinkable on the classical model of communication between God and souls. Under these circumstances, Post-Babylonian humanity, which has been dispersed into different cultures, can do no more than produce sufficiently similar offspring.

      At this point modernity raises its objection to classical metaphysics. Owing to the matter under discussion, this objection must take the form of an alternative interpretation of death. One cannot rule out the possibility