Remarks about the Nietzschean dancing God

Nietzsche and (or beyond) Christianity: a worn-out and almost banal problem? In this article I argue that this topic goes far beyond a mere opposition between Christians and Nietzscheans. I want to show that the actual issue concerns Nietzsche's attempt to overcome the moral hegemony within Christianity. In this context, Nietzsche's project is not to eradicate religion but to define a new religious space. I have organised this discussion by conceiving the present article around a sentence extracted from Thus spoke Zarathustra. I first analyse the text in its syntactic and rhetorical composition. Nietzsche's very strategy (or trick?) resides in undermining the Christian discourse from the inside: he argues that Christian morality is not inspired by a cheerful affirmation of life but by its vindictive negation. I further show that Nietzsche puts at stake the Christian striving for a justification of life and consequently its incapacity of accepting the question-mark of existence. Within his radical critique, Nietzsche points to an authentic attitude towards life, an attitude which I have designated with the metaphor of the dancing God.     

The Relation between Sovereignty and Guilt in Nietzsche's Genealogy

This paper interprets the relation between sovereignty and guilt in Nietzsche's Genealogy. I argue that, contrary to received opinion, Nietzsche was not opposed to the moral concept of guilt. I analyse Nietzsche's account of the emergence of the guilty conscience out of a pre‐moral bad conscience. Drawing attention to Nietzsche's references to many different forms of conscience and analogizing to his account of punishment, I propose that we distinguish between the enduring and the fluid elements of a ‘conscience’, defining the enduring element as the practice of forming self‐conceptions. I show that for Nietzsche, the moralization of the bad conscience results from mixing it with the material concepts of guilt and duty, a process effected by prehistoric religious institutions by way of the concept of god. This moralization furnishes a new conception of oneself as a responsible agent and holds the promise of sovereignty by giving us a freedom unknown to other creatures, but at the price of our becoming subject to moral guilt. According to Nietzsche, however, the very forces that made it possible have spoiled this promise and, under the pressures of the ascetic ideal, a harmful notion of responsibility understood in terms of sin now dominates our lives. Thus, to fully realize our sovereignty, we must liberate ourselves from this sinful conscience.     

IS ALTRUISM GOOD? EVOLUTION,ETHICS, AND THE HUNGER FOR THEOLOGY

This essay pushes the discussion of biology and altruism in radical directions by highlighting the moral ambiguity of biology itself. The extent to which we draw positive moral implications from animal behavior, and even the extent to which we see positive traits in animals, is shaped by the preconceptions and the purposes one brings to the study. These preconceptions, when examined, involve worldview issues that are all related in one way or another to either a theological position or some nontheistic substitute for an account of ultimate reality. It is arguable that Darwin's own perceptions of nature were colored by the theological and social‐ethical context in which he worked. William Paley's natural theology, together with Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, led many theologians of Darwin's day to conclude that struggle, inequality, suffering, and death are basic features of the natural world and are the result of divine providence. No wonder, then, that Darwin was able to see competition as the major key to natural selection. The moral ambiguity of biology can be pressed further by contrasting contemporary attempts to find altruism in animal behavior with the conclusions reached by Friedrich Nietzsche, partly in response to his reading of Darwin. Nietzsche concluded that the standard, more or less Christian, morality of his day is best labeled “slave morality.” It is created by the weak in order to coerce the strong to provide for them. In this essay I contend that competing views of morality can be adjudicated only by turning to an account of ultimate reality. Whether Nietzsche is right in arguing against the morality of altruism depends on whether God is indeed dead.     

God and givenness: towards a phenomenology of mysticism

This essay addresses the questions of whether the givenness of God is something possible, intelligible—and, if so, what such givenness might involve. In the interest of situating these questions in historical context, I first summarize Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Habermas’s respective accounts of the relationship between belief in God and philosophical knowledge. I then further situate critical philosophy’s appropriation of God by way of a discussion of how some of this appropriation’s fiercest critics—existentialists such as Sartre, Shestov, and Kierkegaard—object to its gambit of using God to serve moral and cultural goals even as it denies God’s actual existence. Though this objection is a salient one, it leaves something to be desired. For although the existentialists may demonstrate what is misguided about the philosophers’ God, they do not have anything especially compelling to say about whether or how God can be given experientially. I address this aporia by exploiting what I take to be a happy intersection between the phenomenological conception of the saturated phenomenon and two moods—agape love and ecstatic joy—the mystical tradition frequently attributes to the nature of divine givenness. I argue that, when mystical experience is situated within the framework of saturated phenomena rather than within the Kantian enclosures of phenomenality, two intriguing possibilities emerge. First, it seems plausible that the religious experience of the mystic can, in principle, involve the very givenness of God that Kant and his heirs denied to be possible. Second, though phenomenology has yet to provide a complete positive portrait of the religious life, the mystical tradition emerges as a legitimate, invaluable source with which such a phenomenological portrait might begin.     

The Beauty of the Ugly: Balthasar, the Crucifixion, Analogy and God

Abstract:  In the first volume of The Glory of the Lord , Hans Urs von Balthasar asks how the crucified Christ can be considered an icon of a beautiful God. Because the crucifixion initially confronts us as morally and aesthetically ugly, no authentic analogy between worldly beauty and the beauty of divine revelation seems to obtain. In arguing to the contrary, Balthasar presents us with an original interpretation of Thomas Aquinas that yields fresh insights into the Christian doctrine of God. By placing the cross at the center of intramundane aesthetics, Balthasar forces us to rethink, not only the meaning of the divine simplicity, but the relation in God among being, beauty and love.     

‘Pain Always Asks for a Cause’: Nietzsche and Explanation

Those who have emphasised Nietzsche's naturalism have often claimed that he emulates natural scientific methods by offering causal explanations of psychological, social, and moral phenomena. In order to render Nietzsche's method consistent with his methodology, such readers of Nietzsche have also claimed that his objections to the use of causal explanations are based on a limited scepticism concerning the veracity of causal explanations. My contention is that proponents of this reading are wrong about both Nietzsche's methodology and his method. I argue for this by: first, showing that Nietzsche was suspicious of causal explanations not only on sceptical grounds but also for reasons provided by his psychological analysis of our tendency to look for causes; and second, arguing for a non‐causal interpretation of Nietzsche's approach to psychological explanation.     

Be ye perfect? Religious ideals in education

This article explores the meaning of ‘religious ideals’ and their possible role in education. ‘Religious ideals’ are defined as ideals that acquire meaning due to a belief in transcendence or a divine being. Two kinds of religious ideals are being distinguished, namely ideals that are constituted by a belief in a transcendent being and ideals that are being determined by this belief. These types of ideals are illustrated by means of the Christian tradition. An example of the first is devotion to God and to the second belong the four cardinal virtues. The second part deals with two issues that are particular to the education of religious ideals. First, I counter the critique that people who have religious ideals are fanatics who pursue the realization of their ideals relentlessly. Secondly, I show that educating children with religious ideals may have positive effects, namely the influence on their development towards autonomy and moral commitment.     

ANTIVOLUNTARISM AND THE BIRTH OF AUTONOMY

Traditionalist and radical orthodox critiques of the Enlightenment assert that the modern discourse on moral self‐government constitutes a radical break with the theocentric model of morality which preceded it. Against this view, this paper argues that the conceptions of autonomy emerged from the effort to reconcile commitments within the Christian tradition. Through an analysis of the moral thought of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, this paper contends that distinctively Christian theological concerns concerning moral accountability to God and the character of divine‐human moral relationships produced a theory of moral autonomy which anticipates that of Kant. This paper highlights the role of anti‐voluntarism in the creation of this moral standpoint, and argues that the resultant moral view is an “internalization” of the voluntarist model of sovereignty.     

Nietzsche on guilt: Dependency,debt, and imperfection

In this paper, I offer a new way of reading Nietzsche's second essay in On the Genealogy of Morality. At the heart of my account is the claim that Nietzsche is primarily interested in a persistent or existential form of guilt in this essay and only concerned with locally reactive cases of guilt as a function of this deeper phenomenon. I argue that, for Nietzsche, this persistent form of guilt develops out of a deep feeling of indebtedness or owing that accompanies a fearful sense of dependency on the gods. When this sense of dependent indebtedness mixes with bad conscience, which arises through the shift from prehistoric tribes to state‐like communities, it becomes a moral problem; vast numbers of “slaves and serfs” (GM II.20) start to feel like they are not sufficiently honoring their dependent relationship with the gods. It is this feeling of persistent guilt that Nietzsche thinks metastasizes into Christian guilt.     

What Is ‘The Meaning of Our Cheerfulness’? Philosophy as a Way of Life in Nietzsche and Montaigne

Robert Pippin has recently raised what he calls ‘the Montaigne problem’ for Nietzsche's philosophy: although Nietzsche advocates a ‘cheerful’ mode of philosophizing for which Montaigne is an exemplar, he signally fails to write with the obvious cheerfulness attained by Montaigne. We explore the moral psychological structure of the cheerfulness Nietzsche values, revealing unexpected complexity in his conception of the attitude. For him, the right kind of cheerfulness is radically non‐naïve; it expresses the overcoming of justified revulsion at calamitous aspects of life through a reflective, higher‐order affirmative attitude. This complex notion of cheerfulness turns out to have roots in Montaigne himself, and it must (according to both philosophers) be thought of as a kind of second nature cultivated through practice, as a kind of second nature. Understanding the meaning of cheerfulness thereby sheds light on the conception of philosophy as a way of life in both Nietzsche and Montaigne.     

God,Mixed Modes,and Natural Law: An Intellectualist Interpretation of Locke's Moral Philosophy

The goal of this paper is to explicate the theological and epistemological elements of John Locke's moral philosophy as presented in the ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ and ‘The Reasonableness of Christianity’. Many detractors hold that Locke's moral philosophy is internally inconsistent due to his seeming commitment to both the intellectualist position that divinely instituted morality admits of pure rational demonstration and the competing voluntarist claim that we must rely for our moral knowledge upon divine revelation. In this paper I argue that Locke is guilty of no such contradiction. In doing so, I attempt to accommodate Locke's position in the ‘Essay’ that moral principles are demonstrable a priori with his views on the sanctity of Christian revelation. I then consider Locke's conception of moral ideas as a species of mixed modes, or arbitrarily constructed complex ideas, and attempt to navigate the mechanism whereby human understanding can recognize these ideas as conforming to, or straying from, divinely appointed natural law. I conclude that despite Locke's failure to actually provide a full-fledged moral theory, he lays a rationally coherent groundwork for the fulfilment of such a project that accommodates a-priori rational reflection and divine revelation as complementary paths to moral understanding.     

‘Foolishness to Greeks’: Plantinga and the Epistemology of Christian Belief

A central theme in the Christian contemplative tradition is that knowing God is much more like ‘unknowing’ than it is like possessing rationally acceptable beliefs. Knowledge of God is expressed, in this tradition, in metaphors of woundedness, darkness, silence, suffering, and desire. Philosophers of religion, on the other hand, tend to explore the possibilities of knowing God in terms of rational acceptability, epistemic rights, cognitive responsibility, and propositional belief. These languages seem to point to very different accounts of how it is that we come to know God, and a very different range of critical concepts by which the truth of such knowledge can be assessed. In this paper, I begin to explore what might be at stake in these different languages of knowing God, drawing particularly on Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of Christian belief. I will argue that his is a distorted account of the epistemology of Christian belief, and that this has implications for his project of demonstrating the rational acceptability of Christian faith for the 21st century.

D. Z. Phillips’ problems with evil and with God

It is widely held that the logical problem of evil, which alleges an inconsistency between the existence of evil and that of an omnipotent and morally perfect God, has been solved. D. Z. Phillips thinks this is a mistake. In The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, he argues that, within the generally assumed framework, “neither the proposition ’God is omnipotent’ nor the proposition ‘God is perfectly good’ can get off the ground.” Thus, the problem of evil leads to the problem of God. Phillips goes on to provide an alternative response to the problem of evil, expounded by means of his Wittgensteinian analyses of various concepts drawn from the Christian tradition. I argue that his criticisms of the traditional conception of God either fail outright or are at best inconclusive. I also point out that the religious concepts analyzed by Phillips are not and cannot be the same concepts as those employed in the Christian tradition from which they are supposedly drawn. For the concepts as traditionally employed presuppose the actual existence and activity of precisely the sort of being that, according to Phillips, “God cannot be.”     

Eschatological Images of Prophet and Priest in Edward Schillebeeckx's Theology of suffering for Others

Eschatological images of Jesus as found in Jewish and Christian texts constitute the foundation of Edward Schillebeeckx’s positive orientation to suffering for others. Jewish prototypes provided the early Christians with an understanding of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection as the advent of the eschaton. The pre‐existing biblical figures, which early Jewish Christians appropriated in the aftermath of the devastating crucifixion, provided traditional categories through which the life and death of Jesus could be meaningfully interpreted. Jesus as the eschatological prophet‐martyr and Jesus as the suffering, eschatological high priest of the Epistle to the Hebrews are the most prominent and complex of the ancient figures. In Schillebeeckx’s analysis, each of the two composite titles ascribed to Jesus is an amplification of a prophetic or priestly prototype. The use of both models is predicted on Jesus’ compassionate and redemptive response to suffering – healing the sick, comforting the bereaved, giving hope to the oppressed, and proclaiming eschatological salvation. Schillebeeckx’s historical‐critical investigation of Jesus’ perception of his anticipated death, as revealed in the Last supper narrative, and his analysis of the meaning ascribed to the crucifixion in primitive Christianity establish the basis for a theology of redemptive suffering in the early church. Schillebeeckx has critically examined three pre‐New Testament interpretations applied to Jesus’ crucifixion: (1) the death of the eschatological prophet‐martyr in the Deuteronomic tradition of the prophets whose proclamations were typically misjudged by Israel; (2) the fulfilment of the divine scheme of salvation through the suffering of the ‘righteous one’, who is ultimately exonerated by God; and (3) a vicarious, atoning sacrifice (the Jewish prototype that later influenced Anselm’s substitution theory). The interpretative categories examined by Schillebeeckx with respect to the crucifixion are closely related to the biblical images upon which his theology of suffering is based.     

Classical Christian Theism and the Criterion of Particularity

This article acknowledges the importance of doing theology proper under the guidance of special revelation and its particular conception of God and argues, against a common contemporary outlook, that the classical Christian theism of Aquinas and the Reformed tradition resonates with the criterion of particularity. To make this case, three features of classical Christian theism (the inference from creatio ex nihilo to the actuality of God, God's freedom from being in a genus and the tendency to treat the divine essence and attributes largely before the treatment of the Trinity) are examined and found to comport formally and materially with the rule of Christian particularity.     

JOHN LOCKE AND THE PROBLEMS OF MORAL KNOWLEDGE

Abstract:  In this paper, I argue that John Locke's account of knowledge coupled with his commitments to moral ideas being voluntary constructions of our own minds and to divine voluntarism (moral rules are given by God according to his will) leads to a seriously flawed view of moral knowledge. After explicating Locke's view of moral knowledge, highlighting the specific problems that seem to arise from it, and suggesting some possible Lockean responses, I conclude that the best Locke can do is give us a trivial account of moral knowledge which cannot avoid problems with subjectivity and relativism.     

The ‘Divine Names’ and the ‘Attributes of Deity’: On the (Infinite) Analogical Interval in Forty-Six Aphorisms

For the modern tradition of analytic philosophy of religion (that this article rejects), goodness, beauty, wisdom, and so on are divine attributes, whereas, for the classical tradition of Christian theology, they are divine names. This crucial distinction between attributes and names helps to explain why feminist philosopher Grace Jantzen’s charge of an identification of the male self with the divine self in Anglo-American philosophy of religion leads on, directly, to a critique of the ‘doctrine’ of analogy. Jantzen’s critique of ‘classical theism’ is directed against the (largely modern) reduction of God to a (male) superbeing. Here, God’s ‘attributes’ are merely human ones, even if extended to a superlative degree. I distinguish the analogical reflections of Aquinas (following Dionysius) and his heirs from the anthropomorphic dissolutions of the divine in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Theology’s analogical speech, I argue, has the potential to answer – at least partially – the feminist critique of God as a ‘pure projection’ of ‘man’. For Aquinas, God’s perfections must be qualitatively different and not merely quantitative maximisations of our own. I contend that feminist philosophy of religion cannot afford to dismiss the potential of the way of analogy, especially in its negative or apophatic dimensions.     

THE ESCHATOLOGICAL THEOGONY OF THE GOD WHO MAY BE: EXPLORING THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE PRESENCE IN KEARNEY, HEGEL, AND HEIDEGGER

Abstract: While heightening the nihilistic tension underlying the discourse of Richard Kearney, I highlight the positive contribution his book The God Who May Be makes to the debate concerning the need for a postmodern revitalization of religious symbolism. I argue for three qualifications of Kearney's argument, suggesting, in response to Kearney's exclusionary approach to the God who "neither is nor is not but may be," a God whose possibility for meaningfulness arises as an "eschatological theogony" from out of the chaos (confusion and openness) of contemporary religious symbolism. Arguing that such a radical reenvisioning of God must be tempered and given meaning through reentering and reaffirming onto-theology in a qualified (hermeneutical) sense, I sketch a possible renewal of meaning for the traditional Christian parousia -concept as a hermeneutical circle between Hegel's systematic closure of Western metaphysics and Heidegger's deconstructive appropriation of the hidden possibilities of presence within the onto-theological tradition.