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The Birth, Death, and Afterlife of the God of the Philosophers

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The Birth, Death, and Afterlife of the God of the Philosophers THE BIRTH, DEATH, AND AFTERLIFE OF THE GOD OF THE PHILOSOPHERS Illustration: Trym Rødder By Melvin Chen 4 he God of the philosophers, ostensibly the object detriment of its sister fields, psychology and cosmology. Tof my discussion, is nothing other than God as an Thinking about the identity of God fosters what Adorno abstract, universal concept (mediated), often reducible to has termed ”identitarian philosophy”, wherein the logic the attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscien- of consistency (to which the philosopher is formally obli- ce, and omnibenevolence, as opposed to God as a being ged) and the logic of synthesis in dialectics make identity who may be directly intuited (immediate), in such anthro- ”positive and desirable” (Adorno 1973:148). The will to pomorphic guises as Zeus seducing Leda in the form of a identity is itself further lodged in the nature of thought, swan in the Greek mythos, or the monstrous Demiurge since ”we cannot think without identifying”, and all defi- being wrapped in a cloud by his mother Sophia and iso- nition is identification (Adorno 1973:149.). The God of lated from the Pleromatic realm in the Gnostic mythos. the philosophers existed within an ontotheology functio- The God of the mythographers, governed by the literary ning as an identitarian philosophy, a veritable metaphysics trope of prosopopoeia, is assigned human characteristics, of presence bound by the transcendental categories of goal bearing out Xenophanes’ observation that if horses or oxen (bonum), unity (unum), and truth (verum). That this God could depict their Gods, they would depict them in the was a metaphysical God is borne out by the central ques- image of horses or oxen. However, as this is a philosophical tion occupying philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to essay, we will consider only the God of the philosophers, Leibniz and Hegel: ”Why is there something rather than leaving the anthropomorphic God of the mythographers nothing?” (Kosky 1996:235). God was posited as the ulti- for the anthropologist to dissect. mate ground of being, which Heidegger was later to term The God of the philosophers first came into being the forgetfulness of the ontological difference between through the maieutic labours of Xenophanes of Colophon, Being and beings. With being rendered as the highest uni- a universal and abstract entity as opposed to the anthropo- versal, the medieval doctrine of divine simplicity, cham- morphic deities of Greek antiquity. Drawing on the photo- pioned by Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, established logic metaphor of the all-seeing eye of Zeus, Xenophanes the identity of God: God as Being is identical with His held the essence of this God to be ”an essence that is not- nature (e.g. omnipotence, omniscience). God being infi- hing other than an omnipresent and pure seeing” (Picht nitely simple, He is not distinct from His nature, whence 1980:72). Xenophanes’ concept of an omniscient God, the impetus for identitarian philosophy. God not being troping on the all-seeing eye of Zeus, confirms Derrida’s distinct from His nature further entails that His attributes, claim that ”the entire history of our philosophy is a pho- considered singly, are not distinct from each other, whence tology”, making metaphysics a heliocentrism based on the Vico’s explication that ”in God, to know and to do is the metaphor of light and darkness and the ”naiveté of the same thing” (Habermas 1973:243). Being (appearance or glance” (Derrida 1978:85). The God of the philosophers physis) leads to truth, since truth must first be before it can then periodically resurfaced in various guises: the Platonic become truth, and for Hegel true being is simply another Form of the Good, the Aristotelian Nous (which Aristotle name for God. In Descartes’ Fourth Meditation, God is called the ”divine element in our composite nature” in his posited as the ultimate ground of truth for the Cartesian Nicomachean Ethics), the Kantian Transcendental Ideal, cogito: it is impossible that God should deceive, since he and the Hegelian Absolute Spirit. is perfect and has no need for dissimulation, the modus operandi of the weak. The basic forms of any proposition, Metaphysics as Ontotheology otherwise known to philosophers as the Aristotelian ca- Ontotheology, properly understood, is the speculative in- tegories, are drawn from the being of an entity (e.g. sub- terpretation of being, and for Hegel (in Heidegger’s re- stance, quantity, place). Logicians sought to explain God daction of his German Idealist predecessor), philosophy as a causa sui with the highest degree of independence: is ontotheology, since it has no other object than God necessarily, for any x and y, if x is God, and x ≠ y, x in no (Thomson 2005). Metaphysics, properly understood, has way really depends on y for its existence or for any attri- four major branches: ontology (the study of the nature bute essential to being God (Leftow 1990:586) of being), cosmology (the study of the nature of the uni- The confirmation of God as the ground of being and verse), psychology (the study of the nature of the mind), truth in a God-ordained universe led Kant to pen his ef- and theology (the study of the nature of God). The me- fusive conclusion to his Critique of Practical Reason : ”Two taphysical agenda, with the birth of the God of the phi- things fill the heart with ever new and increasing admira- losophers, came to be determined as ontotheology, to the tion and respect ... the starry heavens above us, and the MELVIN CHEN 5 moral law within us”. Adorno refers to this as the Kantian Through this forgetfulness, philosophers sought to explain motif of ”Muss ein ewiger Vater wohnen - [there] must live Being itself in terms of beings. With the death of metap- an eternal father” (Adorno 1973:385). Identitarian thin- hysics entailing the death of the metaphysical God of the king, privileging identity, unity, and presence, led to con- philosophers, theists were faced with the new challenge flation via analogy: men admired God in the order of his of thinking about God ”in a non-ontotheological way, cosmos (Ordered God ≈ Ordered Cosmos), and saw in without reference to being or beings” (Min 2006:101). the structure of human reason an echo of God’s nature God as a trope for the ground or foundation of being (Human Reason ≈ Divine Reason), the Leibnizian God, founders once the ontological difference is recognized. after all, being a rational God who created this world as Rethinking God in a Post-Metaphysical World – the best of all possible Anaphases and Levinasian Ethics Indeed, Levinasian ethics offers worlds. Leibniz even at- In an existentialist world, the infinite cannot be affir- a way out of ontotheology, by tempted to surmount the med in a finite language, as cataphatic (affirmative) theo- apophatically acknowledging Cartesian mind-body du- logy attempts to do, but can only be gestured at through a that God resists thematization. alism by positing monads negation of the finite, as in the apophases of negative theo- as simple units constitu- logy. Some knowledge of Greek may help us grasping the ting the universe, and the soul-like substance constituting cataphatic-anaphatic dichotomy: ”ana-” is a Greek pre- the true unity. In Leibnizian monadology, harmony in fix meaning ”against”, whereas ”cata-” means ”down” or God’s creation is the supreme unity of elegance and va- ”through”, and the ”-phatic” suffix derives from the Greek riety, with each soul-like substance mirroring all the rest, ”phatos” meaning ”spoken”. Thus, whereas cataphasis ex- each monad mirroring the universe, each substance mir- presses the nature of God through speech (affirmation), roring the essence of God from its own perspective (Jolley anaphasis rejects cataphatic affirmation through speech 1995). For the Enlightenment philosophers like Leibniz (negation). The ”ineffability of the tetragrammaton”, a and Kant, thinking about God leads to a photologic iden- Joycean phrase alluding to the vowel-suppressed YHWH titarian philosophy, premised on the Derridean naiveté of through which the Israelites kept the name of Yahweh a the glance, be it Kant gazing at the starry heavens or the secret from their enemies, problematizes the act of naming mirror trope in Leibnizian monadology. an unnameable God. Vis-à-vis Min’s critique that negative theology still ”affirms some hyperessential reality” (Min The Nietzschean Death of God and Heidegger’s 2006:103), thereby remaining ”a metaphysics of presence Critique of Metaphysics as Ontotheology in a more refined form” (Min 2006:103), one might offer The death of this God of the philosophers may be preci- that this is a violent misreading of the nature of a gesture: sely dated as post-Enlightenment and proto-existentialist, a gesture only shows, and it can never tell. occurring as it does in aphorism 125 of Nietzsche’s The The Levinasian God is ”transcendent to the point Gay Science : ”‘Where has God gone?’ he shouted. ‘I’ll tell of absence” and exists as a Good beyond Being (Levinas you. We have killed him - you and I!’”. While the source 1982:115). The Levinasian emphasis on absence is ostensi- of Nietzsche’s polemic appears to have been the Christian bly in response to Derrida’s deconstruction of the history of God, evinced in his ”requiem aeternam deo” (Latin for metaphysics as ”the determination of Being as presence”, ‘Grant God eternal rest’), a sacrilegious appropriation of a with God rendered as one ”invariable presence” among line from the service for the dead, with Christianity repre- others (Derrida 1978:279). Indeed, Levinasian ethics of- senting, in his eyes, a victory of the weak over the strong. fers a way out of ontotheology, by apophatically acknow- I will argue that it was rather the God of the philosop- ledging that God resists thematization.
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