Only a God can save us
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 21, 2025
Heidegger’s abrupt assertion in his 1976 interview with Der Spiegel: “Only a God can save us” has always aroused perplexity. To understand it, one must first to return it to its context. Heidegger has just spoken of the planetary dominion of technology which nothing seems capable of governing. Philosophy and other spiritual powers — poetry, religion, arts, politcs — have lost the ability to shake, or at least to orient, the life of the peoples of the West. Hence the bitter diagnosis that they “are unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world” and the inevitable consequence according to which “only a God can save us”. That what is at issue here is anything but a millenarian prophecy is confirmed immediately afterwards by the clarification that we must prepare ourselves not only “for the appearance of a God”, but also, and rather, “for the absence of a God in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline”.
It goes without saying that up to now, Heidegger’s diagnosis has lost none of its topicality; indeed, if possible, it is even more irrefutable and true. Humanity has renounced the decisive rank of spiritual problems and has created a special sphere in which to confine them: culture. Art, poetry, philosophy and other spiritual powers, when they are not simply extinguished and exhausted, are confined to museums and cultural institutions of any kind, where they survive as more or less interesting leisures and distractions from the boredom of existence (and often no less boring).
How then should we get on with the philosopher’s bitter diagnosis? In what sense “only a God can save us”? For almost two centuries — since Hegel and Nietzsche declared its death, the West has lost its god. But what we have lost is only a god to whom it is possible to give a name and an identity. The death of God is, in truth, the loss of the divine names (“holy names are lacking”, Hölderlin lamented). Beyond the names, the most important thing remains: the divine. As long as we are able to sense a flower, a face, a bird, a gesture or a thread of grass as divine, we can do without a God that can be named. The divine is enough for us; we care more for the adjective than the noun. Not “a God” — rather: “only divine can save us”.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 21, 2025
Heidegger’s abrupt assertion in his 1976 interview with Der Spiegel: “Only a God can save us” has always aroused perplexity. To understand it, one must first to return it to its context. Heidegger has just spoken of the planetary dominion of technology which nothing seems capable of governing. Philosophy and other spiritual powers — poetry, religion, arts, politcs — have lost the ability to shake, or at least to orient, the life of the peoples of the West. Hence the bitter diagnosis that they “are unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world” and the inevitable consequence according to which “only a God can save us”. That what is at issue here is anything but a millenarian prophecy is confirmed immediately afterwards by the clarification that we must prepare ourselves not only “for the appearance of a God”, but also, and rather, “for the absence of a God in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline”.
It goes without saying that up to now, Heidegger’s diagnosis has lost none of its topicality; indeed, if possible, it is even more irrefutable and true. Humanity has renounced the decisive rank of spiritual problems and has created a special sphere in which to confine them: culture. Art, poetry, philosophy and other spiritual powers, when they are not simply extinguished and exhausted, are confined to museums and cultural institutions of any kind, where they survive as more or less interesting leisures and distractions from the boredom of existence (and often no less boring).
How then should we get on with the philosopher’s bitter diagnosis? In what sense “only a God can save us”? For almost two centuries — since Hegel and Nietzsche declared its death, the West has lost its god. But what we have lost is only a god to whom it is possible to give a name and an identity. The death of God is, in truth, the loss of the divine names (“holy names are lacking”, Hölderlin lamented). Beyond the names, the most important thing remains: the divine. As long as we are able to sense a flower, a face, a bird, a gesture or a thread of grass as divine, we can do without a God that can be named. The divine is enough for us; we care more for the adjective than the noun. Not “a God” — rather: “only divine can save us”.
(Emglish translation by I, Robot)
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