After God. Peter Sloterdijk

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Название After God
Автор произведения Peter Sloterdijk
Жанр Религия: прочее
Серия
Издательство Религия: прочее
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509533534



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cannot foresee the consequences of this ever faster emptying out of human reflections into machine reflections. Countermovements make their stand against it. Dams are built to resist the floods of externalized intelligence. To speak in traditionalist terminology: we no longer live merely in the midst of the first analogia entis, between God and human being, but also with the second one, between human being and higher machine. Being is intrinsically constituted as a scale of powers and intelligences. Not a few of the shrewdest among our intellectually virulent contemporaries – here I will name Hawking and Harari, but many more are worth mentioning – express their spiritual worries by envisioning humans as taken over by their digital golems.

      Perhaps the distinction between God and idols will soon reemerge here for the citizens of modernity – but this time in a technological and political register. For them, theological enlightenment – which is completely different from an instinctive rejection of religion – will be a fateful task.

      For the time being, let me leave the last word to the thinker who reflected on the phenomenon of artificial intelligence earlier and more incisively than all of our contemporaries. At the end of his 1956 essay Seele und Maschine [Soul and Machine] (1956), Gotthard Günther writes:

      Note

      * Gotthard Günther, “Seele und Maschine,” in Gotthard Günther, Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976), p. 79.

      2.1 The eccentric accentuation

      “The rays of the sun drive out the night, / The surreptitious power of hypocrites annihilate.” This celebratory, incontestable declaration by the priest-king Zarastro, with which Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (first performed in September 1791) ends, condenses the two primary motifs of the theological and political Enlightenment into a compact threat. Whenever the Enlightenment takes the stage, whether it is inspired in a rational–religious fashion or filled with the pathos of a movement of liberation, it undertakes to expel the despotism that is allied with “the night” and to unmask the systems of established hypocrisy. The protagonist in this drama can be none other than the sun itself.

      The