After God. Peter Sloterdijk

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:

The critics who lament that the machine “robs” us of our soul are mistaken. There is a more intensive interiority that lights up on a deeper level. With a sovereign gesture, this interiority thrusts away its forms of reflection that have become indifferent and reduced to mere mechanisms, in order to affirm itself in a more profound spirituality. And the doctrine of this historical process? However much of its reflection the subject cedes to mechanism, it only becomes richer. For it thereby acquires ever-new powers of reflection from an inexhaustible and bottomless interiority.²¹

      Note

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

Notes

1 Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles. [. . .] Et nous voyons maintenant que l’abîme de l’histoire est assez grand pour tout le monde [“We others, civilizations, we now know that we are mortal. […] And we now see that the abyss of history is big enough for the whole world”]. Paul Valéry, La Crise de l’Esprit (Paris 1919), reedited in Variété I (Paris: Gallimard 1924), now in Œuvres I (Paris: Éditions de la Pléïade), p. 988. 2 See Raffaele Pettazzoni, Der allwissende Gott: Zur Geschichte der Gottesidee (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bücherei, 1960). 3 Peter Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, translated by Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), pp. 140–2. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), here p. 261. 5 See Jan Assmann, Totale Religion: Ursprünge und Formen puritanischer Verschärfung (Vienna: Pincus Verlag, 2016), pp. 58–9. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), here p. 155. 7 See Lexikon der katholischen Dogmatik, edited by Wolfgang Beiner, 3rd edn. (Freiburg: Herder, 1991), pp. 106–9, where the sixteen most distinctive attributes, from Allgegenwart [omnipresence] to Zorn [wrath] are enumerated under the entry “Eigenschaften Gottes” [“God’s Attributes”], although the author – Wilhelm Breuning from Bonn – does not raise the issue of how to examine their compatibility. 8 On the Jewish side, the attribute of omnipotence has recently been revoked expressis verbis: see Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” in Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, edited by Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp. 131–43. 9 See Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, edited by Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).10 Max Bense, Technische Existenz (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1949).11 See pp. 10 and 67–8.12 Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher in 3 Bänden (Berlin: 2006), entry dated August 3, 1872.13 It is possible that Wagner took the expression not only from German translations of Nordic mythology, but also from the poem in Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder (1827) that bears the same name.14 Peter Wapnewski, Der Ring des Nibelungen: Wagners Weltendrama (Munich: Piper, 2013; first published in 1995 under the title “Weisst du wie das wird…?”), here p. 304, in reference to Hans Mayer’s analysis in Richard Wagner in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959), pp. 147–8.15 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, edited by Daniel Breazeale, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 11, here p. 253.16 What is really fatal is the extinction of the gods as a result of the worldwide death of languages. Experts in this field contend that over a thousand minor languages will be made to disappear over the course of the twenty-first century. With every language that dies out, we also lose a mythology, a system of ritual, and a vocabulary of names for gods.17 [TN: “Maker” in English in the original.]18 See Paul Gerhardt’s song “Ich bin ein Gast auf Erden” [“A Pilgrim and a Stranger”] (1667).19 [TN: “Work in progress” in English in the original.]20 Gotthard Günther, Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976), p. 217.21 Gotthard Günther, “Seele und Maschine,” in Günther, Beiträge, p. 90.

2 IS THE WORLD AFFIRMABLE? On the Transformation of the Basic Mood in the Religiosity of Modernity, with Special Reference to Martin Luther

      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.

Schikaneder’s childish, folksy Enlightenment did not do a bad job of striking the critical nerve in the psycho-political construction of the ancien régime. Since time immemorial, a problem of constitutional hypocrisy has indeed accompanied the alliance between throne and altar in the monarchies of old Europe, supported as they were by clerical power. Its reflections entered into the popular image of the medieval church; they are just as inseparable from it as is the old, tacit conviction of humbler people that hardly one of the greats of the world can be trusted. From the late Middle Ages on, the hypocritical priest and the dissolute monk functioned as standard figures of popular realism. Starting in the sixteenth century, the consultant to the prince, the trickster who teaches deception in order to prevent his listeners from falling prey to it themselves, was added to their number. In the literature of the baroque period, worldly wisdom and masked existence closed ranks to the point where they could no longer be distinguished. Indeed, wasn’t it a time-honored necessity to view the entirety of the world as the epitome of falsehood, guile, and dissimulation? Wasn’t Lady World considered to be the hypocrite par excellence – at the front, the voluptuous harlot who promises happiness, but at the back the gruesome skeleton? Since the advent of the bourgeoisie, the hypocrite, alongside the bastard and the actor, was portrayed as a key figure in the emerging sciences of humankind. As long as you failed to take the omnipresence of Tartuffe into account, you did not know enough about how the human being was among her own kind. Whenever you encounter idealists making pleas, plaster saints won’t be far away. The French moralists had set the tone: as soon as altruism dolls itself up, the petticoat of egoism peeks through.

      The