Friday, December 6, 2019


452. From God to the other.



After Nietzsche declared the death of God, does God still have meaning in the modern world, other than as the ‘prime mover’, the cause of the world?  Why do we need God?



According to Kierkegaard there are three stadia in life: aestheticism, ethics and religion. Here, aestheticism is hedonism, pleasure, feeling and diversion. That is what causes acceleration, from filling finite life as much as possible with things and events as discussed in item 449 in this blog. Ethics is about the good life. There are two forms: public and private. Public ethic consists of shared morality: rules and customs of conduct, part of culture, mostly specific to a community. The private form concerns the conduct of individual life, making one’s own choices, taking responsibility, in developing oneself, possibly against the public, shared rules.



Also, Kierkegaard noted that in the face of God, in our categories of thought we are imperfect, never completely right, in our knowledge and judgement. As I said before, we cannot look in all directions at the same time. And how we look is likely to be biased (the Kant problem). Then God is attractive as the absolute, the knowing all, and judgement untainted by self-interest, ulterior motives, which the human being cannot attain. This yields Buber’s notion of God as the ‘eternal You’[i], I would say ‘Ideal Other’.



Levinas and Derrida also replaced God with the other human being, who is also unique and inscrutable, exerts an absolute, unconditional, and hence divine appeal on you.[ii] This rhymes with a root meaning of religion, in religare , making connection with something outside and bigger than yourself, in transcendence that can be vertical (God) or horizontal ( the other human being), or life. It applies to all, without discrimination, and is like the old, Christian notion of agape.     



That also rhymes with the notion of ‘resonance’, openness to another, mutual influence, discussed before in this blog, in item 449, as introduced by Hartmut Rosa. As noted several times, in this blog, to correct our prejudice and blindness, the other is the best we can get, as a source of opposition, I cannot accept the absoluteness of dedication, complete surrender to the other. If it goes together with care for the self, as the advocates claim, it is no longer absolute. As Buber indicated, He is the ideal, not the real other. The other as absolute also yields the problem, acknowledged by Levinas himself, and Derrida, hat absolute dedication to one other can harm a third other, and more others, while the principle of dedication applies to all. It may even harm the other, in taking away his/her responsibility.



 So,  dedication to God in my view is to be replaced by dedication to the ideal of life, including animals and inanimate nature, and it is to be subject to Aristotelian phronesis, taking into account conditions and intentions, and the imperfections of Man, including one’s responsibility for oneself..

     





[i] Buber, Martin, I and Thou, Scribner, 1970.
[ii] Jan Keij, Kierkegaard, seen differently, (In Dutch), Klement, 2015.

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