A comprehensive analysis of specific passages of the unfinished Arcades Project with particular attention to the architectural aspects of Paris.
Extended Talking Points:
God is dead – Friedrich Nietzsche
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deicide
The widely quoted statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, it first appears in Nietzsche’s 1882 collection The Gay Science (AKA “The Science of Joy”)
However, It is most famously associated with Nietzsche’s classic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is most responsible for popularizing the phrase. The idea is stated in “The Madman” as follows:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann
But the best known passage is at the end of part 2 of Zarathustra’s Prolog, where after beginning his allegorical journey Zarathustra encounters an aged ascetic who expresses misanthropy (dislike of makind) and love of God:
When Zarathustra heard these words, he saluted the saint and said ‘What should I have to give you! But let me go quickly that I take nothing from you! And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing as two boys laugh.
But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: ‘Could it be possible! This old saint has not heard in his forest that God is dead!’
— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. R.J. Hollingdale
Although the statement and its meaning is attributed to Nietzsche it is important to note that this was not a unique position as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel pondered the death of God, first in his Phenomenology of Spirit where he considers the death of God to ‘not [be] seen as anything but an easily recognized part of the usual Christian cycle of redemption’. Later on Hegel writes about the great pain of knowing that God is dead
‘The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the feeling that God Himself is dead, (the feeling which was uttered by Pascal, though only empirically, in his saying: Nature is such that it marks everywhere, both in and outside of man, a lost God), purely as a phase, but also as no more than just a phase, of the highest idea.’
Of course the spirit in which it is intended is a verily Nietzsche manifestation, however it is important to consider the material that gave rise to this idea.
Explanation
The phrase “God is dead” does not mean that Nietzsche believed in an actual God who first existed and then died in a literal sense. Rather, it conveys his view that the Christian God is no longer a credible source of absolute moral principles. Nietzsche recognizes the crisis that the death of God represents for existing moral assumptions:
“When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.”
This is why in “The Madman”, a passage which primarily addresses nontheists (especially atheists), the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order.
The death of God is a way of saying that humans are no longer able to believe in any such cosmic order since they themselves no longer recognize it. The death of God will lead, Nietzsche says, not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of absolute values themselves — to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law, binding upon all individuals. In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism (the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.). This nihilism is that for which Nietzsche worked to find a solution by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. This meant, to Nietzsche, looking for foundations that went deeper than Christian values. He would find a basis in the “will to power” that he described as “the essence of reality.” Nietzsche believed that the majority of people did not recognize this death out of the deepest-seated fear or angst. Therefore, when the death did begin to become widely acknowledged, people would despair and nihilism would become rampant. This is partly why Nietzsche saw Christianity as nihilistic.
Misunderstandings of the death of God
When first being introduced to Nietzsche, a person can infer the “death of God” as literal. To Nietzsche, the concept of God only exists in the minds of his followers; therefore, the believers would ultimately be accountable for his life and death. Holub goes on to state that “God has been the victim of murder, and we, as human beings, are the murderers”.
Another purpose of Nietzsche’s death of God is to “unmask the hypocrisies and illusion of outworn value systems”. People do not fully comprehend that they killed God through their hypocrisy and lack of morality. Due to hypocrisy “God has lost whatever function he once had because of the actions taken by those who believe in him”. A god is merely a mirrored reflection of its people and the:
“Christian God is so ridiculous a God that even were he to have existed, he would have no right to exist” .
Religious people start going against their beliefs and start coinciding with the beliefs of mainstream society. “[Moral thinking] is debased and poisoned by the influence of society’s weakest and most ignoble elements, the herd” .
Humanity depreciates traditional ethics and beliefs and this leads to another misunderstanding of the death of God. During the era of Nietzsche, traditional beliefs within Christianity became almost nonexistent due to the vast expansion of education and the rise of modern science.
“Belief in God is no longer possible due to such nineteenth-century factors as the dominance of the historical-critical method of reading Scripture, the rise of incredulity toward anything miraculous … and the idea that God is the creation of wish projection (Benson 31). Nietzsche believed that man was useless without a God and “no longer possesses ideals and absolute goals toward which to strive. He has lost all direction and purpose”.
Nietzsche believes that in order to overcome our current state of depreciated values that a “strong classic pessimism” like that of the Greeks is “needed to overcome the dilemmas and anxieties of modern man”.
“Either we died because of our religion or our religion dies because of us”.
This quote summarizes what Nietzsche was trying to say in his concept of the death of God- that the God of Christianity has died off because of its people and their beliefs. Far too often do people translate the death of God into a literal sense, and depreciate the value of traditional Christian beliefs – all leading to the misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s philosophy of God’s death. Now in a world where God is dead we can only hope that technology and science does not take control and “be treated as the new religion, serving as a basis for retaining the same damaging psychological habit that the Christian religion developed”.
New possibilities
Nietzsche believed there could be positive possibilities for humans without God. Relinquishing the belief in God opens the way for human creative abilities to fully develop. The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way, so human beings might stop turning their eyes toward a supernatural realm and begin to acknowledge the value of this world. Nietzsche uses the metaphor of an open sea, which can be both exhilarating and terrifying. The people who eventually learn to create their lives anew will represent a new stage in human existence, the Übermensch — i.e. the personal archetype who, through the conquest of their own nihilism, themselves become a sort of mythical hero. The ‘death of God’ is the motivation for Nietzsche’s last (uncompleted) philosophical project, the ‘revaluation of all values’.
Reading:
Precursors to ‘Death of God’ theology
- Benson, Bruce E. Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008.
- Holub, Robert C. Friedrich Nietzsche. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.
- Magnus, Bernd, and Kathleen Higgins. The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
- Pfeffer, Rose. Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus. Canbury: Associated University Presses, 1972.
- Welshon, Rex. The Philosophy of Nietzsche. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004.
Death of God’ theology
- Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966).
- Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
- Bernard Murchland, ed., The Meaning of the Death of God (New York: Random House, 1967).
- Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God (New York: George Braziller, 1961).
- John D. Caputo, Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
- Hamilton, William, “A Quest for the Post-Historical Jesus,” (London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1994).
The Ghost of Material Things – Walter Benjamin
Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”, also known as “Theses on History” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, deals with the question of social transformation. This insightful short work is one of Benjamin’s best-known and most cited works. Of all his works, it develops Benjamin’s messianic ideas most completely.
Thesis 4: The ‘spiritual’ is present in class struggle – even when it is about material things – as the drive towards redemption.
http://www.no-w-here.org.uk/the%20language%20of%20things.pdf
…First, there is the thesis that the word is a `creative’ force that does not communicate the meaning of nature, but rather does nature. Second, there is the thesis that in the name matter communicates itself, not something other than itself. The name is the `community’ of material things Ð and therefore `magical’. To account for this magic is also the reviewer’s task.
Whether it is deliberate is uncertain, but in his `Antitheses’ Benjamin reverses the definition of the linguistic sign advanced by Saussure in Part One of the Course in General Linguistics, published in the same year as Benjamin’s `On language as such and on the language of man’: 1916. `A linguistic sign’, argues Saussure, `is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern’ 1983: 66). Though the sound pattern is not, strictly speaking, a `material’ thing, it is nevertheless more material than a concept, just as a concept is `more abstract’ than a sound pattern:
The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical. A sound pattern is the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of his senses. This sound pattern may be called a `material’ element only in that it is the representation of our sensory impression. The sound pattern may thus be distinguished from the other element associated with it in a linguistic sign. This other element is generally of a more abstract kind: the concept. Saussure 1983: 66)
(occult – mystical, supernatural, or magical powers, practices, or phenomena)
Benjamin’s thesis on the revolutionary deployment of divinity within spectral powers inverts Marx’s canonical thesis on the fetishism of commodities: if, for Benjamin, the social is a form assumed by occult powers, for Marx, the powers invested in the commodity are an occulted form of the social. When commodities arrive on the market, they appear to have value in themselves, as if value were a spirit embodied in material things. Marx argues, however, that the value of a commodity measures the duration of abstract labor-power that the working class, which owns only its own labor, sells on the open market to the capitalist class, which owns the means of production, in return for the means of subsistence paid in wages:
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity rejects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves [in which one class owns the means of work and another group sets them in motion but is paid only a fraction of the value created by labor] which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to and an analogy we must take light into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the product of man’s hands.1977: 164±165)
For Benjamin, however, the objectification of labor-power in the comodity is a sub-category of a much broader production process that leaves behind a residue of divine power in the silent language of things. Commodities are nevertheless reservoirs of the labor-power that produced them, and this power is the avenue of their material communication. What is more, the critic who learns to speak the language of commodities participates in a force that can be mobilized `in the service’ of transforming reality.
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin cites a passage from Karl Korsch’s book Karl Marx, where Korsch traces the similarity between Marx’s theory of fetishism and his earlier theory of alienation. `What Marx terms the “fetishism of the world of commodities”, writes Benjamin, citing Korsch, “is only a scientific expression for the same thing that he had described earlier as ‘human self-alienation'”, 1999: 662. According to Marx’s classic statement of his theory of alienation, in the first of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, alienation occurs when labor confronts itself as a power embodied in the object it has produced:
the object that labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object, it is the objectification of labour. The realisation of labour is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy this realization of labour appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation [EntaÈusserung]. 1975: 324)
Albatros Poem:
L’Albatros
Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.
À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.
Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!
L’un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L’autre mime, en boitant, l’infirme qui volait!
Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.
The Albatross, By Charles Baudelaire – Translation by Eli Siegel
Often, to amuse themselves the men of the crew
Lay hold of the albatross, vast birds of the seas-
Who follow, sluggish companions of the voyage,
The ship gliding on the bitter gulfs.
Hardly have they placed them on the planks,
Than these kings of the azure, clumsy and shameful,
Let, piteously, their great wings in white,
Like oars, drag at their sides.
This winged traveler, how he is awkward and weak!
He, lately so handsome, how comic he is and uncomely!
Someone bothers his beak with a short pipe,
Another imitates, limping, the ill thing that flew!
The poet resembles the prince of the clouds
Who is friendly to the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
Banished to ground in the midst of hootings,
His wings, those of a giant, hinder him from walking.