Читать книгу After God - Peter Sloterdijk - Страница 9

We can invoke Richard Wagner’s contribution to the portrayal of the agony of the gods as evidence of the fact that the freedom of the will migrated to the domain of art some time ago. In today’s turbulent world, the human being can experience a trace of freedom, that is, an openness toward what is to come, only by drawing on his “own” creative potential – and on that of his companions who share in the same fate. There is an epochal significance in the immigration of creativity to the realms of art and technology. Without this immigration, the word “modernity” would be mere sound and fury. The first thinker of Europe, Giambattista Vico, conceptualized this movement by distinguishing the age of the gods from the epoch of heroes and from that of human beings. This sequence can be rewritten as a progressive incarnation. Where there were gods, human beings should come to be. Where there are human beings, artificiality increases.

Wagner’s work is so philosophically remarkable because it brings these three spheres very close to one another. It evokes a demanding near simultaneity of gods, heroes, and human beings. Wagner’s meditation on the power of time can be seen in how he presents the heroes after the gods and the human beings after the heroes – without offering any further justification for this sequence. Wagner’s new mythology is a hermeneutics of fate. It purports to make us understand by means of pure presentation. Matters of fate can only be shown, not explained. Fate refers to what happens without allowing any questions as to why.

From the perspective of philosophy, Wagner is not just chronologically situated between Hegel and Heidegger. As a reader of Feuerbach, he knows that human beings have an innate god-making ability. As a reader of Schopenhauer, he understands that action incurs debt from blind will. As a reader of Bakunin, it is clear to him that whoever wants something new must lay his torch on what is flammable, that is, on what the critical spirits call the “existent.” No purification without passing through the fire. No phoenix without ashes.

The Götterdämmerung constitutes evidence of Wagner’s insight that the old set of gods has become obsolete. They “are able only to watch this ending approach and do nothing to prevent it.”¹⁵ At the same time, Wagner’s speculations only provide an indirect contribution to our understanding of the process that, with regard to ontology, can be called translatio creativitatis [transfer of creativity]. This expression refers to the fact that it is not only God who is a creator; nature and human beings have creative qualities too. There are obviously a multiplicity of creativities and a multiplicity of reflexivities in the world that a divine authority cannot reclaim, let alone monopolize. The earth is a place of polyvalent intelligence. It forms the only known point in the universe where one can really say: there is thinking, in manifold ways.

From a philosophical perspective, what mythological discourse called the “twilight of the gods” amounts to nothing but the symbolic condensation of the consequences that result from the thesis that there is thinking. Precise thinking establishes a new reality. Descartes’s fallacy consisted in reclaiming thinking for his ego. Yet the ego is nothing but the place in which we first take note of the discovery that there is thinking. The fact that an ego ascribes its thinking and what is thought to itself is secondary. Descartes’ primary thought that, when I think, I thereby certainly am, turns out to be sterile from the beginning. The cogito builds an unshakable foundation without any structure on top of it. Every substantially fruitful thought belongs to the sphere of the “there is thinking” – or in any case to the sphere of the “there is thinking in me.” (Parenthetically: Fichte’s greatness comes from the fact that in his late work he emphasized the “there is” in the ego. If we are to think, we do need an ego first, but behind the ego that I immediately know – because I am the one who posited it – there is another ego rearing up; I do not know this latter ego, which uses me as its eye, as it were. This unknown ego that looks through me is called God. God is the will to substance, the will to non-sterility, the will to non-exhaustion in empty self-relation, in short, the will to world.)

Mythological aids are not sufficient for grasping the phenomenon of the “twilight of the gods.” Yet the word “twilight” does correctly indicate that God and gods don’t die, but instead fade away. This happens whether a brighter light consumes their own light or whether obfuscation makes them invisible. Lessing’s parable of the ring in Nathan the Wise (1779) – which he borrowed from Boccaccio’s Decameron (1356) – marks one stage in the process of their fading away. After it an aura of amiable undecidability surrounds the god of the once sharply contoured monotheisms.

Fading away as such need not be fatal.¹⁶ As the present shows, a god can recover from pallor when the times are favorable, even if the color he or she regains is for the most part questionable. Fading away is essentially irreversible because modern civilization has produced so much artificial light with its art, its science, its technology, and its medicine that God’s light seems faint in comparison. One can only let it shine on Sundays and holidays by turning off the machines of artificial light.

This last point can best be explained by turning back to the thanatology of classical metaphysics. According to old Europe’s authoritative story of creation, it was divine breath that lent human beings their feeling and reflecting soul. As long as the soul preserves its community with the body, the human being is still alive – or, as the German language puts it so profoundly, the human being is still am Leben. In the universe of Genesis, the pinnacle of reflection is located in divine intelligence, which can do what it wills and wills what it knows. (This is the case in most creation myths that are acquainted with a demiurge, a maker,¹⁷ a first author.) Individual human intelligences are loans that have been portioned out from the stock of the total intelligence. These gifts are repaid to the creator upon the death of the creature. The myth of the Last Judgment suggests the logic of a loan agreement: when the soul that has been borrowed is taken back, there is an examination of whether the refund is whole and sound. If it is not, the lender enacts his revenge on the dead ones who bring their souls back damaged, defaced, and darkened.

It is obvious that the classical model of transactions between God, the soul, and the world does not allow any other intelligent being to enter the world. Nor does this seem necessary to allow it, since God has drawn from his unsurpassable abundance and given to creation or nature as much order as they need for their existence. Not even the intelligently animated human being can arrange the world any more cleverly than it is as he finds it to be according to its primordial arrangement. For this reason, it is not uncommon for him to feel that the world is an “external world.” He is its guest, not one who should change it. Within this metaphysical model, the reflexive communication plays out only between God and the human being. The one who bestows intelligence brings souls into being and grants them enough revelation to lead them to believe in him; for the rest, human beings live “in their time,” after which they give back their animated intelligence, at death’s door. Once again we recall the subtle turn of phrase in French: rendre l’âme. The Protestant hymn knows this too, in its own way: the world is not my “proper home.”¹⁸

The suggestiveness of these ideas may remain unaffected. Yet one cannot fail to recognize that they, too, breathe the spirit of a sublime sterility. This spirit gives the events of the world and creation the form of a zero-sum game. In this respect God gains nothing in the end. Human beings, by contrast, risk damnation if they have lived in a problematic fashion. An influx of intelligence into the world is unthinkable on the classical model of communication between God and souls. Under these circumstances, Post-Babylonian humanity, which has been dispersed into different cultures, can do no more than produce sufficiently similar offspring.

At this point modernity raises its objection to classical metaphysics. Owing to the matter under discussion, this objection must take the form of an alternative interpretation of death. One cannot rule out the possibility that the human being “gives the soul back” upon death. Yet it no longer corresponds to the experience of symbolically and technologically active human beings in higher civilizations to assume that the world remains unaffected by the departure of an intelligent soul from it.

Indeed, wherever one looks, one sees that human beings have been active as god-making animals. Yet as soon as they invested in their god creations, their god-making frenzy revealed them to be the sort of animal that raises monuments. In high cultures, they act as producers who fill the “hall of memory” with material. They operate as collectors of sacred and profane memorabilia. They function as administrators of “cultural heritage” and as wardens of patrimonies. These observations can in no way be aligned with the basic idea of classical thanatology, namely that in death human beings give their soul back to God without any deductions. Rather it seems that, to the extent that they have become “creative,” humans have gained the ability to leave behind, in the world, something of their intelligent soul. They do, admittedly, give “themselves” back in death. Yet they also frequently create a “work” that is preserved in the world and can become the point of departure for further creations and for renewable legacies.

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The phenomenon of the “twilight of the gods” thus has practically nothing to do with transcendent fatalities at the divine level. Rather it concerns only the relation between creative intelligences and the world. If we want to keep making use of the concept of fate, we could say that this concept pertains to the fact that higher cultures become beholden to the backlash of their creativity. The more they advance in accumulating artificial effects – and the more these effects succumb to the law of self-intensification (or, in cybernetic terminology, to positive feedback) – the more intensely can we notice culture’s overshadowing of nature, and the more relentlessly does the fading away of the divine side take place.

It is no accident that the pious have always suspected that large cities were hotbeds of atheism. And they were right to do so, for city dwellers have always been surrounded by proofs of the mind and of the power of purely human environment formations. Since the days of the Tanakh (in Christian language, the Old Testament) the name “Babylon” has stood for the funfair of artificialities. This inevitably turns people’s attention away from the one thing that is necessary. The artificial environment of the city directs its inhabitants more toward themselves and toward the architectonic ambitions of their predecessors than toward the work of the gods or of God. The fact that metropolises such as Jerusalem, Rome, and Benares survived as holy cities proves only that certain priestly elites were able to mystify their cities as theaters of constructed proofs of God. In Chicago, Singapore, and Berlin, as well as in other urban agglomerations around the earth, such a maneuver would have failed beforehand.

If we wish to use terms from philosophy and cultural studies to interpret what is going on with the dynamic of the twilight of the gods, it will be necessary to revise the classic metaphysical image of giving back one’s soul. We need not infringe on the noble idea of the soul’s returning home to a transcendent source. However, it will be essential for us to rethink the figure of the testament or of the “legacy,” from the ground up. In the civilization of modernity, which is animated by creativism and where artificiality is raised to ever higher powers, we can no longer ignore the fact that human intelligence flows out into “works” or artifacts. And this is so even if, today as always, their creators succumb to mortality. (The secondary outflowing of mass culture into trash is another theme.)

In this respect, the necrologist is the key figure when it comes to understanding the process of civilization. When a creative type passes away, the agitated world pauses for a second and meditates on the conveyance of a work in progress¹⁹ into the global archive. During this meditative second we are closer to the phenomenon of the twilight of the gods than we would otherwise be.

It was Hegel who, with his concept of “objective spirit,” first took note of the outflowing of intelligence into informed structures with relative stability. His concept was too laden with metaphysical presuppositions to be integrated into the vocabulary of the human sciences without suffering compromises. It was discreetly replaced by the noncommittal term “culture.” Yet, even in the often unbearably vague concept of culture, there is an unmistakable echo of the basic phenomenon: what is invariably at issue is the entrance of living reflexivity into objectivized and materialized structures, whether they be signs, rituals, institutions, or machines. As soon as they stand the test of time, they all take on the quality of a legacy or bequest that no longer presupposes the presence of the living origin­ator. The thanatological significance of books, houses, artworks, administrative bodies, and machines can be seen in the fact that their “functioning” – as readability, as inhabitability, as usability, as sustainability – has become detached from their originators and emancipated for a sort of independent life. The durable artifact often outlives its creator’s lifespan many times over. In time, the light of the legacies, taken together, outshines the idea of a transcendent originator and plunges beings as a whole into the artificial light of civilization. It was with good reason that Gotthard Günther spoke of the “historical frenzy of high cultures.”²⁰ It arises from evolutionary acceleration due to the combined effects of writing, schooling, technology, art, empire building, archives, and askesis.

Historians of ideas have designated the seventeenth century as the key period of burgeoning modernity, because ever since then it has not been just individual, unconnected inventions that have caught sight of the light of the world. This period was epoch-making because it was in this period that invention was invented as the universal method of innovation. The engineer is an invention of the seventeenth century – even if his name already appeared two centuries earlier, at the same time as that of the virtuoso. It was at that time that the evening twilight of God stirred the morning twilight of human creativity. In the following three centuries, this changed the world more starkly than millions of years of natural evolution could have done.

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In order to understand the present as a time of growing complexities and intricacies, we must gain insight into the proliferation of twilights. At issue now is no longer merely this or that twilight of the gods, which gave mythologists, theologians, and artists pause. If twilights of the gods follow from the very dynamics of cultures of invention, it stands to reason that future twilights won’t stop at the mysteries of the human power of invention either.

Since the early twentieth century we have been able to recognize how an earthly twilight of souls has overlain the metaphysical twilight of the gods. There is a certain consistency here, insofar as God and the soul formed a pair in classical metaphysics. The fading away of one authority cannot be easily conceived without the fading away of the other. The arrival of depth psychologies around 1800, of Viennese psychoanalysis around 1900, and the sublation of both in the neuro-cognitive sciences around the year 2000 are unmistakable signs of this occurrence.

Consistent with this twilight of souls is a concomitant twilight of intelligence. In the course of the latter, numerous accomplishments of the human mind are increasingly transferred to the “second machine” – to use a term that Gotthard Günther coined in 1952 (in a commentary on Isaac Asimov’s novel I, Robot). In the processual universe of the second machines, the remainder of the old Indo-European concepts of the soul become secularized.

In view of this evidently inexorable event, the question arises, what remains of the eternal light of the soul once the artificial lights have been turned on? What remains of it after the soul has ceded a good part of its former luminosity to the more and more clever artifacts of the world, to computerized objects? The first machine empowered the soul; the second forces it to question itself.

Must we really entertain the suggestion that the inventors of artificial intelligence had thrust themselves into the vacant position of God the maker? But then shouldn’t they have followed God’s lead and banked on the resistance of their creatures? Is there an original sin for machines? Should machines believe in their humans, or will we have an ahumanism of robots?

What should we say to the antimodernist hysteria that has been blazing for centuries, now that it alleges that the human being would like to “become like God”? And if the answer were that, according to basic Christian doctrine, God wanted to become human, should anyone be surprised then that humans’ certainty of their distinguished provenance from a maker leads them to want to become a second machine?

We cannot foresee the consequences of this ever faster emptying out of human reflections into machine reflections. Countermovements make their stand against it. Dams are built to resist the floods of externalized intelligence. To speak in traditionalist terminology: we no longer live merely in the midst of the first analogia entis, between God and human being, but also with the second one, between human being and higher machine. Being is intrinsically constituted as a scale of powers and intelligences. Not a few of the shrewdest among our intellectually virulent contemporaries – here I will name Hawking and Harari, but many more are worth mentioning – express their spiritual worries by envisioning humans as taken over by their digital golems.

Perhaps the distinction between God and idols will soon reemerge here for the citizens of modernity – but this time in a technological and political register. For them, theological enlightenment – which is completely different from an instinctive rejection of religion – will be a fateful task.

For the time being, let me leave the last word to the thinker who reflected on the phenomenon of artificial intelligence earlier and more incisively than all of our contemporaries. At the end of his 1956 essay Seele und Maschine [Soul and Machine] (1956), Gotthard Günther writes:

The critics who lament that the machine “robs” us of our soul are mistaken. There is a more intensive interiority that lights up on a deeper level. With a sovereign gesture, this interiority thrusts away its forms of reflection that have become indifferent and reduced to mere mechanisms, in order to affirm itself in a more profound spirituality. And the doctrine of this historical process? However much of its reflection the subject cedes to mechanism, it only becomes richer. For it thereby acquires ever-new powers of reflection from an inexhaustible and bottomless interiority.²¹