Death of God Thought

God died centuries before Nietzsche's madman exclaimed that "you and I have killed him": This colossal event was dramatized when artists started to focus on the moment of the death of the Lord and his dead body after the crucifixion and before his burial. The crying over his passing away never stopped. Depicted through silence or expressed in lamentation, could we view these moments as subversive manifestations against institutional religion or even faith? And how would present day audiences differ from their original historical addressees in approaching these works? Through comparative reading of such moments, in painting (Carpaccio), music (J. S. Bach), and poetry (Else Lasker-Schüler), across three confessional frameworks (Catholicism, Lutheranism and Judaism, respectively), I trace in the article transfigurations of a basic anxiety in modern Western culture, whose reverberations persist in our post-secular world.

A partir de la obra de Terry Eagleton "Cultura y muerte de Dios", el artículo se adentra en cuestiones como la relación entre religión y modernidad, cultura y fenómeno religioso o secularización, para concluir con Eagleton que no solo la religión no ha desaparecido, sino que aún contiene un fermento creativo capaz de generar una nueva cultura.

This paper is primarily focused on William Lane Craig's article The Absurdity of Life without God. The main focus is on challenging Craig on the grounds that 1) his assumption that moral relativism necessarily entails nihilism simply does not follow and 2) that the conditions he advances as necessary for `objective meaning' are in fact both counter-intuitive and too strict. I offer an alternative conception of `objective meaning' that draws on Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument and on MacDowell's well known essay Values as Secondary Qualities.

Draft of my PhD research project on Eliot's adoption of Dionysius the Areopagite's mystical theology via Dante as a poetic reply to God's death.

Abstract

Reading TS Eliot’s poetry as an instance of Dionysius the Areopagite’s hermeneutical circle, we may see in Eliot’s poetry an understanding of the death of God which allow us “in spite of that”, to “call this Friday good” (Eliot, FQ, EC, IV, 1963: 188): a type of religious turn which is not exempt of a serious philosophical exam, but which found its way out of the dark night of the soul of Modernity by turning its dead-ends into stepping stones to admit the possibility of mystic experience. Paradoxically, the peculiar brand of Western disbelief of Ontotheology may be specially fit, perhaps, for a philosophical turn leading to the re-discovery of reality as a cosmic liturgy.

This paper covers the theme of the death of God, considered from an Hegelian This paper covers the theme of the death of God considered from a Hegelian
standpoint. For Aristotle, the image of God as ‘thought thinking itself’ was an
image of the knowledge aspired to in philosophy. With the notion of God becoming
man and his insistence on the icon of the Cross, Hegel challenged the
Aristotelian goal of philosophy as immutable knowledge of an ‘ultimate’ reality.
Hegel viewed the crisis of normativity (the death of the Cartesian divine guarantor)
as strictly linked to the conception of the self. It is Nietzsche who is best
known for alluding to the full significance of this image for modern life, but
Hegel’s thought on the complex relations of philosophy and religion in the modern
world can be regarded as an attempt to think through this same historical
phenomenon. In this paper, I focus on the philosophical relevance of Hegel’s
notion of the death of God. I argue that unpacking the significance of the ‘truths’
presented symbolically in modern Christianity is crucial in understanding the
requirements that an idealistic philosophy must meet.

John T. Robinson will make use of Tillich and Bonhoeffer to make the faith tradition sensible to the modern mind with his book, Honest to God—in which he rejects theism for Tillich’s notion of God as the “ground of Being” and adopts Bonhoeffer’s notion of transcendence as “the beyond in the midst” for a theism-less kind of Christianity.  Other scholars like William Hamilton and Thomas Altizer would jump on the notion that the God of theism is dead to proclaim “God is Dead” in which transcendence becomes radical immanence.

Paul Tillich is best known today as a theologian of mediation. Many have come to view him as an out-of-date thinker—a safe exemplar of a mid-twentieth-century theological liberalism. The way he has come to be viewed contrasts sharply with the current theological landscape—one dominated by the notion of radicality.

In this collection, Russell Re Manning breaks with the widespread opinion of Tillich as 'safe' and dated. Retrieving the Radical Tillich depicts the thinker as a radical theologian, strongly marked but never fully determined by the urgent critical demands of his time. From the crisis of a German cultural and religious life after the First World War, to the new realities of religious pluralism, Tillich's theological responses were always profoundly ambivalent, impure and disruptive, asserts Re Manning. The Tillich that is outlined and analyzed by this collection is never merely correlative. Far from the dominant image of the theologian as a liberal accommodationist, Re Manning reintroduces the troubled and troubling figure of the radical Tillich.

xviii + 416 pp. ISBN 0226791696 hese recent titles by a few seasoned cultural critics analyzing what the death of God continues to mean for theology, religion, faith, culture, and life in general, are significant for the common ground they share and for the criticisms that crisscross between them, sometimes identifying each other by name. In his latest book, After God, Mark C. Taylor alludes to a "looming disaster" and "peril" before which "it is difficult not to despair," as he postulates that the most pressing dangers we currently face result from the conflict of competing absolutisms that divide the world between oppositions that can never be mediated. i Nothing is more dangerous, in his view, than the growing devotion to dualistic either/or ideologies in a neither/nor world (AG, 349). Thomas J. J. Altizer's most recent book, a theological memoir titled Living the Death of God, understands the deepest challenge of our time as a fathoming of the depths of darkness enveloping us in the form of nihilism, a nihilism brought on by the death of God and the end of our historical world. ii As compared with Taylor, Altizer pursues a more intimate and interior struggle-his effort is to generate a light of active understanding in the darkness, a movement of life that would transfigure the satanic subjection that is the apocalypse of our world into an actively sustainable Ereignis, to borrow Heidegger's term. iii

In this talk I explore a possible a/theological response to what Nietzsche called the “death of God”—or Hölderlin’s and Heidegger’s “flight of the gods”—through a juxtaposition of the Christian-Pauline concept of kenōsis and the ancient Greek-Platonic notion of chōra, and by taking Nishida’s appropriations of these concepts as a clue and starting point.  Nishida refers to chōra in 1926 to initiate his philosophy of place (basho) and then makes reference to kenōsis in 1945 in his final work that culminates his oeuvre.  What he had thereby accomplished is an inversion of Platonism resulting in the collapse of the transcendent-immanent—idea-genesis and by implication the Heaven-Earth—dichotomy.  I then unpack the ethical implication of this kenotic chōra Nishida has left us with.  It suggests from us a certain response to the desacralization or secularization of the world.  I shall build upon this suggestion and unfold its implications by drawing up a variety of sources, starting with Nishida but including others, such as Meister Eckhart, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gianni Vattimo, Reiner Schürmann, Mark Taylor.

In this essay, Logsdon discusses John Logan's _Penny Dreadful_ as a "codification" of the overwhelming anxiety of living in an age characterized by mass-shootings, generally perpetrated by deranged young white adults; by jihadists' acts of violence that target the Western World;  by senseless be-headings, used by ISIS and other terrorist groups to terrify the Western world; by the continued existence of a sub-culture of serial killers; and by the rise of atheism and Satanism as a response to the fading of the JudeoChristian paradigm. In this essay, Logsdon pays special attention to the series' spiritually-conflicted protagonist Vanessa Ives (brilliantly played by Eva Green), whose decision to cast her crucifix into the fire at the end of season two may be the most significant action of the entire series (so far).

In this talk I explore a possible a/theological response to what Nietzsche called the “death of God”—or Hölderlin’s and Heidegger’s “flight of the gods”—through a juxtaposition of the Christian-Pauline concept of kenōsis and the ancient Greek-Platonic notion of chōra, and by taking Nishida’s appropriations of these concepts as a clue and starting point.  Nishida refers to chōra in 1926 to initiate his philosophy of place (basho) and then makes reference to kenōsis in 1945 in his final work that culminates his oeuvre.  What he had thereby accomplished is an inversion of Platonism resulting in the collapse of the transcendent-immanent—idea-genesis and by implication the Heaven-Earth—dichotomy.  I then unpack the ethical implication of this kenotic chōra Nishida has left us with.  It suggests from us a certain response to the desacralization or secularization of the world.  I shall build upon this suggestion and unfold its implications by drawing up a variety of sources, starting with Nishida but including others, such as Meister Eckhart, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gianni Vattimo, Reiner Schürmann, Mark Taylor.

Of the Maternym & the intricate deaths of God
Within the confines of a four month "stretch" we see enter upon the scene four presiding figures (four pillars forming a fourum composed, or decomposed, of "the bishop," "the aristocrat," "the judge," and "the banker") and, following on, an extensive supporting cast (s'envoyer) playing out, in this section, or in this wing, on the floor or upon the stage of a well-timed visit to the supposedly sacred space of "the chapel," they continue on in their 120 day campaign, their strangely twisted narrative journeying to "where," we do, not know.

Herein we explore the concept of the maternym and the perveformative. This explores some ideas in an experimental shape that will be explored in a more elaborated and traditional fashion, later, elsewhere.

Gianni Vattimo, the Italian Postmodern philosopher, has an understanding of the ‘Death of God’ that has drawn
comparisons with the ‘death of God’ theological movement from the 1960s, particularly the work of Thomas J.
J. Altizer on the subject. The influence of Nietzsche on both authors and their use of the Christian term ‘kenosis’
(the self-emptying of God in the incarnation) invite such a comparison. However, this article draws all the points
of comparison between the two authors on this subject together before showing how and in what ways Vattimo
differs from Altizer’s thoughts on the death of God. I will argue that Altizer’s reliance on Hegelian thought
marks him out as different to Vattimo, particularly due to the latter’s Heideggerian influence. I will then show
why it is wrong to think, as some commentators have done, that Vattimo is also a Hegelian.

After the death of God, the hermeneutical nihilist Gianni Vattimo thinks we are living in an age where it is no longer possible to believe in ‘violent’ metaphysical notions such as ‘objectivity’ and ‘universality’. However, we still cannot shake off the traces of the past that have been passed down through linguistic traditions. Kantian ethics is a case in point, situated in the midst of what Vattimo, following Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, regards as the history of Being as a weakening without a termination point. Kant’s Categorical Imperative is a secularised form of Christian caritas mixed with its evangelical universalising mission. In turn, Kant’s emphasis on reason built on the key Christian insight of binding people together by turning inwards through faith. For Vattimo, if one turns inwards then one should listen to others like you, i.e., those who are fellow weak thinkers who want to engage in dialogue. By introducing this condition implicitly, Vattimo weakens the categorical imperative by revealing it in weakened form to be a hypothetical imperative at the cost not only of excluding ‘strong’ thinkers, but also revealing a stronger conception of the subject in his philosophy that borders on the metaphysical.

‘Is there a renunciation when truth seizes me? Certainly not, since this seizure manifests itself by unequalled intensities of existence. We can name them: in love, there is happiness; in science, there is joy (in Spinoza’s sense: intellectual beatitude); in politics, there is enthusiasm; and in art, there is pleasure.’ Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2001), p. 53.

Is the affirmation or intensification of life a value in itself? What role does it play in a philosophy concerned in some sense with rationality, with truth? Can life itself be thought?

Badiou’s acknowledgement of the ‘affects of truth’ signals a complex revival of what might be called the philosophy of life. The reference he makes to Spinoza indicates a philosophical heritage stretching back through Deleuze and Guattari, Foucauldian biopolitics, vitalism, phenomenology, existentialism, Nietszchean affirmation and all the tangled attempts to comprehend life in the concept which go under the name of idealism.

The value of life has become a theme in itself: not the imposition of values upon life’s pliable surface, but life itself as an evaluative upsurge, a multiplication of differences, desires or singular truths. This is not limited to the disciples of Deleuze: the rethinking of agency and selfhood via capability for living in Ricoeur and Nussbaum demonstrates a tenacity of life unconfined by philosophical tribalism.

This collection will examine the roots and relevance of such thinking, the critical contribution which might be made by an affirmation, a politics, even a religion – of life. Life conceived as natality will be brought into conversation with questions of suffering, flesh and the resistance of life to thought. Is life more than survival? Can a thinking of life escape the temptation to domesticate its energies in the service of abstraction? Is materialism the only valid form of a philosophy of life?

Badiou himself does not admit that intensity is the only word. The subject faithful to a truth is riven, their natural state both denied and transformed. This collection will be similarly wary of naïve or one-dimensional thinking of life. The critical question of interpretation, the old question of the ‘meaning’ of life, here takes on a new incisive force. Can philosophy become, perhaps in a new way, a spiritual exercise? Can philosophy ‘live’?

The book is organised in four sections to explore the various dimensions of this question. ‘Life, Death and Natality’ examines the potential of philosophical tropes of birth and dying to impel the thinker into a fruitful engagement with life. ‘Life at the Limits of Thinking’ re-opens the difficult issue of how thought might respect what in life resists conceptualisation and calls for a different response: embodiment, boredom, aesthetics. ‘The Politics of Life’ takes up the way in which the definition and deployment of the category of life plays a key role on questions of political power. The final section, ‘Life and Spirituality,’ attempts to reclaim a philosophical thinking of spirituality, and a spiritualising of philosophy as a style of living, not merely a theoretical exercise.

Among the deeper strata of Rorty's philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative violence is recognizing that cultural politics has priority over ontology. I trace this Rortyan idea to its origins in Nietzsche and Sellars. Rorty's contribution is to combine Nietzsche on the death of God and Sellars on the Myth of the Given. However, I conclude with a suggestion that Rorty ultimately goes too far in thinking that avoiding normative violence requires abstaining from metaphysics and epistemology as such. Keywords Nietzsche – Sellars – Rorty – cultural politics – the Myth of the Given

Resumo: O presente artigo pretende discutir o significado filosófico do conceito nietzschiano da morte de Deus como um acontecimento histórico incontornável. Para tanto, parte da análise do conhecido aforismo 125 de A Gaia Ciência, discutindo detidamente diversas formulações que explicitam o papel ocupado por "Deus" na filosofia nietzschiana e, para além disso, o significado sua morte. Nessa descrição vem à tona a relação da morte de Deus e da experiência do niilismo, enquanto desvalorização de todos os valores e supressão da própria possibilidade da verdade. Nesse sentido, discute-se ainda, a essência niilista da metafísica, na medida em que a mesma surge da necessidade da vontade de verdade de postular um mundo verdadeiro para além do mundo fenomênico.

At one time or another, most Contemporary Continental philosophers of religion make reference to Nietzsche’s announcement that“God is dead.”  However, their interpretation and treatment of that announcement owes nothing to Nietzsche. Instead, they see the death of God as Hegel did, as a moment in a transition to a new way of talking and thinking about God or the Absolute. Their faith in God or the Absolute is not in doubt in the end.We argue that if one hears and thinks Nietzsche’s word “God is dead”—along with Heidegger’s critique of onto-theo-logy--then faith in the end is in doubt. Any affirmation or profession of faith is questionable; there is no promise that all conflicts will be resolved and that all will be saved and forgiven. Nietzsche’s saying that “God is dead” calls for thinking and questioning; it calls not for faith, but faith in doubt.

Hermann Broch und Jacques Lacan teilen – unabhängig voneinander – ein Interesse an einer neuen, ‚lyrischen‘ bzw. ‚kreativen‘ Logik. Broch skizziert sie in seinen theoretischen Schriften und Briefen und setzt sie im 'Tod des Vergil' ins Werk. Das vom deutschen Psychiater E. v. Domarus formulierte ‚paralogische Denken‘ in der schizophrenen Psychose hilft dabei, Brochs und Lacans logische Theoreme zu defi-nieren. Um seine ‚lyrische Logik‘ weltanschaulich zu verankern, wählt Broch ein christliches Paradigma, anders als Lacan, der Freuds Ablehnung religiöser Mythen folgt.

Independently from each other, both Broch and Lacan share an interest in developing a new kind of ‚lyrical‘ resp. ‚creative‘ logic. Broch drafts his new logic in his theoretical writings and his letters and realizes it in his The death of Virgil. The so-called von Domarus principle of ‚paralogical thought‘ in schizophrenic psychosis can help to define Broch’s as well as Lacan’s ideas  about  logic.  To  frame  his  ‚lyrical  logic‘,  Broch  makes  use  of  a  Christian  paradigm,  whereas Lacan follows Freud in rejecting religious myths.