I will be introducing
Professor Mark Edwards, who
is the Associate Dean at
the Divinity School, who
will be speaking about the Paul
Tillich lectures as a series.
And after that, I will then
be introducing my colleague
in the philosophy department,
Professor Christine Korsgaard,
who will be introducing
our speaker today,
Professor Richard Schacht.
So Professor Edwards.
I wanted to welcome you to this
cosponsored event on behalf
of the Divinity School.
The Tillich lectures
began in 1990.
They occur twice a year.
There's a description on
the back of your program.
A number of very
distinguished people
have spoken in this series.
And we are proud now to be
associated with the Tillich
series.
University Professor
Paul Tillich
was appointed at Harvard
in 1954, but began,
as is often true--
he had a year's leave
before he started
and began in 1955.
And my understanding is he
taught in this very room
or something very close to this
very room his various lectures.
As a university professor, he
was allowed to roam around.
He taught in the
Divinity School.
He taught in the
Department of Philosophy.
He taught in the
general education.
And I think that his final
term, spring 1962, he
taught a course in the
philosophy of religion.
So this was a renaissance man
at a time when the Divinity
School was being revived.
There was interchange between
the [? yard ?] and the Divinity
School.
And it's a very happy
time in our history.
And I hope it's a time--
although, without Professor
Tillich, it's now being revived
through the Tillich lectures.
I particularly want to thank
Bill Crout, who's responsible.
His diligence, his hard
work, his enthusiasm
have made these
lectures possible.
So thank you very much.
Well, it's a great pleasure
to have Professor Richard
Schacht back here
in Emerson Hall
after some years of absence.
And happily here to
introduce him today
is a former student
of his, former chair
of this department, Professor
Christine Korsgaard.
Thank you, Dick.
It's a great
pleasure to introduce
Richard Schacht to you.
Dick was an undergraduate
philosophy concentrator here
at Harvard, as
you've just heard,
where, among other things,
he studied with Paul Tillich
and with John Rawls.
He did his graduate
work at Princeton
working with Walter Kaufmann.
He joined the
Department of Philosophy
at the University of Illinois
at Urbana Champaign in 1967.
And he is currently
Professor of Philosophy
and Jubilee Professor of
Liberal Arts and Sciences there.
On top of being a superb teacher
and a productive scholar,
he has tirelessly served
the University of Illinois
into long stints as chair of
the philosophy department,
as chair of the University
Senate, as an interim dean,
and in many other capacities.
Dick has worked in
a wide-ranging way--
on European philosophy, mostly
of the 19th and 20th centuries,
but some earlier modern
philosophy as well,
on philosophical
anthropology, social theory,
and the theory of value.
One focus of his work
has been Nietzsche, whom
he's going to talk about today.
Besides numerous essays,
Dick has written two books
about Nietzsche, one entitled
Nietzsche in 1983 and another,
Making Sense of Nietzsche,
an examination and response
to recent debates about the
interpretation of Nietzsche
in 1995.
He's played a constant leading
role in the North American
Nietzsche Society and edited
a number of collections
dealing with Nietzsche's work.
He's also written on
Hegelian and Marxist themes
and alienation
and, more recently,
in the future of
alienation and has
published a series of clear
and interesting studies
of modern philosophers
in his two books,
Classical Modern Philosophers--
Descartes to Kant and Hegel
and After-- Studies in
Continental Philosophy
Between Kant and Sartre.
Just last year, Dick
and Philip Kitcher
published Finding an
Ending, a co-authored study
of philosophical themes in
Wagner's Ring [? circle. ?]
Among other projects, Dick is
currently the general editor
of the projected
five-volume Norton Anthology
of Western Philosophy.
I myself met Dick a
little over 30 years ago
when I transferred to the
University of Illinois
from Eastern Illinois
University in search
of a more sophisticated and
challenging philosophy program.
I certainly found it.
Among the many
excellent opportunities
the program provided
me was the chance
to study European philosophy
and philosophical anthropology
with Dick Schacht.
Dick is a model teacher both
in his meticulous course
preparation and in
the attention he's
willing to bestow
on his students.
And it's largely
through his influence
that I have a sense of what sort
of a difference a teacher can
make in an undergraduate's life.
He played a large
role in encouraging
me to try for a
career in philosophy
and has been a continuous
supporter ever since.
And it's a pleasure to
have the opportunity
to thank him publicly for that
and to learn from him again
this afternoon as I have
so often in the past.
Dick's lecture for
today is entitled
"After the Death of God--
Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul
Tillich."
Join me in welcoming him.
[APPLAUSE]
Have to remember to
turn on the lavalier.
Thank you very much,
Chris and Dick and all.
I would like to begin by
expressing my gratitude to Bill
Crout for the invitation
to deliver this here's
Tillich lecture and to
the University Marshal's
Office, the Divinity School,
and the Department of Philosophy
for their sponsorship
of this event.
This occasion, as
you might imagine,
is a very meaningful one
for me for many reasons.
I took quite a few
courses in this very room.
And that includes the
course that Paul Tillich
taught in his last year here,
the philosophy of religion
course that was just mentioned.
And it was my
relationship with Tillich
that makes this an especially
meaningful opportunity
and occasion.
He was only here for two of
my years as an undergraduate.
He was not here
my freshman year.
But he was here my sophomore
and junior year, after which
he left to go to Chicago.
And in the two years in
which I had him as a teacher
and as an educator,
he profoundly
influenced the direction
of my philosophical life.
I took his philosophy
of religion course.
But I also took the
four-semester course
in the self
interpretation of man
in Western thought, which
was an incredible educational
experience.
It began in the beginning
of my sophomore year
and concluded at the
end of my junior year
and was the centerpiece of
my undergraduate education.
It begin with the
pre-Socratics and ended
with the existentialists.
And it didn't skip
anything in between.
So many philosophers,
so little time.
And yet, even though there
were only two lectures a week
and we were moving
at a great pace,
Tillich managed
to make all of us
feel that we actually
understood all of that,
which is a great illusion.
But nonetheless, it
was a great feeling.
It was in the last part of the
fourth semester of that course,
after dealing with
classical modern philosophy
from Descartes to Kant,
that Tillich introduced me
to Hegel, Marx,
Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.
No one in the philosophy
department here in those days
would've touched any of
them with a 10-foot pole.
So I never would have
found out about them
if it hadn't been for Tillich.
Or if I had, it
couldn't possibly
have been from anyone who
would have made them come
alive for me the way he did.
He turned me on to them.
And I've been turned
on to them ever since,
Hegel and Nietzsche
in particular.
I can't resist adding a footnote
for the amusement of any of you
who may have known
Walter Kaufmann
or known about him,
who I went to study
with after my undergraduate
years at Princeton.
I went to Princeton mainly
because Kaufmann was there,
less because Princeton
was one of the best
departments in the
country and a hot bed
of analytical philosophy.
But it was in those
latter respects
that Princeton did
me the most good.
But I did benefit
from my association
there with Kaufmann, as well.
And so some years
later, I decided
to try to express my gratitude
to both Kaufmann and Tillich
by dedicating my second
book that Chris mentioned,
Hegel and After, as follows--
"To the memory of Paul
Tillich, who showed
me where to look,
and to Walter Kaufmann,
who taught me how to see."
Well, I thought that
was kind of nice,
to sort of finessing things.
But Kaufmann was not
happy about it at all.
He was miffed at having to share
the dedication with anybody,
let alone Tillich, for whom
we had really no great esteem.
I figured that he would
react in that way.
But I really wanted
to do it anyhow.
And I wanted to say it in print.
Because in his way, Tillich
was as important to me
as Kaufmann was.
And without Tillich-- Tillich
was something like my sine qua
non for the trajectory that my
philosophical career ultimately
took.
Tillich died nearly
40 years ago.
Like Nietzsche, about whom
I'll also be talking today,
he is now history.
Yet Tillich and Nietzsche both
remain spiritually contemporary
to me and remain of
contemporary significance
to anyone who seeks to grapple
with the kinds of issues
they did.
One of those large
issues is that
of whether there is some
sort of conception of God
and some kind of
religiousness that
is deserving of a human future
beyond what Nietzsche called
"the death of God."
That is to be my topic today.
But before I get into it,
there are a few things
about the two of them
that are worth mentioning
to set the stage a bit.
Nietzsche and Tillich were
cut from similar cloth.
Both were born
and raised in what
is now the eastern part of
Germany in small and quite
provincial communities.
They were not that
far apart in age.
Only 42 years
separated their births.
Both of their fathers
were Lutheran ministers.
They both outgrew the
conservative faith
of their fathers.
Tillich continued to
embrace the name and essence
of Christianity as
he reinterpreted it,
while Nietzsche came to despise
what he called by that name.
But the reinterpreted
version of Christianity
that Tillich developed
bears little resemblance
to the Christianity that
so appalled Nietzsche.
And anti-Christian, though
he proclaimed himself to be,
Nietzsche was one
of Tillich's heroes,
as Tillich made clear of
his 2,500-year epic saga
of the history of philosophy
as told in [INAUDIBLE] 141.
Tillich's high
regard for Nietzsche
is reflected in the fact
that he mentions Nietzsche
more often than almost
any other philosopher
in his various writings, either
making common cause with him
or using him to set up a
point in a way that takes him
very seriously.
Tillich considered
existentialism
to be the dominant philosophical
sensibility of our time--
that is back in the
'50s, '60s, '70s.
I guess just '60s.
And he regarded Nietzsche as
one of its great inspirations,
whose importance also
transcended existentialism.
He sought to develop
a theology that
would give contemporary
expression to what he took
to be the truth of Christianity
and that also would
be compelling as a response
to the challenge posed
by existentialism's
seemingly radically
anti-religious sensibility.
It was also intended to be
a response to Nietzsche,
who gave vivid expression
to that challenge
and whom Tillich
considered actually
to be far from anti-religious.
Tillich sought to give both
Nietzsche and existentialism
their due, and yet to maintain
that there is something
important in Christianity
that does not stand and fall
with the god proclaimed
by Nietzsche to be dead.
Existentialism has
long since ceased
to be a literary and
philosophical expression
of the zeitgeist.
The zeitgeist, for better
or for worse, has moved on.
But Nietzsche remains an
intellectual and philosophical
force to be reckoned
with, far more
so in fact than
the Anglo-American
philosophical community than was
the case in the '60s and '70s,
when he was not
even taken seriously
as a philosopher except
as an insidious influence
and corruptor of youth.
Tillich knew better and cared.
Because he knew that
Nietzsche was on to something
important both critically and
constructively on many matters,
some of which had to do with
religion, religiousness,
and the idea of God.
Tillich saw Nietzsche as
a thinker who was rightly
forcing these
issues in a way that
was fundamentally constructive,
not only philosophically,
but also religiously, even as
he also considered Nietzsche's
own position to be deficient.
And that deficiency was
not Nietzsche's rejection
of what might be called
"the god hypothesis."
On that score, they
both are basically
on the same page, for Tillich
is as dismissive of theism,
or belief in the existence
of a divine super being,
as is Nietzsche.
They are both, so to
speak, post-theistic.
The god whose death
Nietzsche proclaimed
is not the one Tillich affirms.
Whether Tillich is
affirming anything
that Nietzsche
would want to deny
is a more difficult and
interesting question,
as is the question
of what distinguishes
Nietzsche's own sort
of religiousness
from that which Tillich
ultimately favors and calls
absolute faith.
I will be considering
both of these questions.
The epigraph for
my lecture, which
I'm about to begin-- although
you may have thought that I've
already begun-- is
something Nietzsche
wrote in one of
his late notebooks
toward the end of
his productive life.
Here it is.
Now, remember,
this is Nietzsche.
"And how many new gods
are still possible!
As for myself, in whom the
religious, that is to say
god-forming,
instinct occasionally
becomes active at
impossible times--
how differently, how
variously the divine has
revealed itself
to me each time!"
End of the quotation.
If you know anything
at all about Nietzsche,
you know that he rejects the
idea of a transcendent deity
existing before and above and
beyond this life and world.
The idea of such a god is
an idea whose time, he says,
has come and gone, having become
unbelievable, as he puts it
in The Gay Science, an
explanation of his proclamation
that God is dead.
Nietzsche knew full well that
there are a great many people
for whom that idea is
still alive and well
and who could not
bear to give it up.
But that, for him,
did not have anything
to do with the
credibility of the idea
and did not render
it any less urgent
to get on with the task of
a de-deified interpretation
and revaluation of ourselves
and morality and everything
else about this
life and this world.
To fail to pursue that
task, he believed,
would render us all
the more vulnerable
to a debilitating and
disastrous nihilistic reaction
when the death of God sinks
in, for we have been taught
to think that, where meaning
and value and morality
and authority and human
worth and everything
else of importance are
concerned, it is God or bust.
If God does not exist, goes
the refrain, nothing matters.
But that, for Nietzsche, is
the greatest of mistakes.
So he champions the
enhancement and affirmation
of this life and this world and
the idea of a new, stronger,
healthier, and more mature
type of human being,
"a creative spirit,"
he writes, "who
will redeem us not only from the
hitherto reigning ideal-- that
is, otherworldly
God-centered religiousness--
but also from that which
was bound to grow out of it,
the great nausea, the will
to nothingness, nihilism."
That's from
"Genealogy of Morals,"
second essay, section 24.
This is not Tillich's form of
rhetorical style and appeal.
But Tillich, too, was
convinced of the necessity
of dispensing with
the idea of God
as a kind of supreme
being, which he believes
misrepresents the fundamental
reality of the divine
and only serves to hinder
any true sense of it.
Tillich strove to give the idea
of God a new lease on life.
But for him, if that
new lease is to hold up,
it requires the reinterpretation
of the idea of God,
transforming it into the idea
of what he called "the God
above God."
And this God above God is
nothing like a supreme being.
That idea of God, for
Tillich, as for Nietzsche,
is a misunderstanding
as a conceptualization
of the divine.
So Tillich writes
in his discussion
of the reality of God in the
first volume of Systematic
Theology, quoting,
"Ordinary theism has
made God a heavenly,
completely perfect person
who resides above the
world and mankind.
The protest of atheism against
such a person is correct.
There is no evidence
for his existence,
nor is he a matter of
ultimate concern," unquote.
Tillich's God above God is no
being of any sort and cannot be
said to exist at all.
To talk about the existence
of God, for Tillich,
is a kind of category
mistake akin to talking
about the gender
of God, only worse.
"The question of the existence
of God," Tillich writes,
"can neither be
asked nor answered."
He continues, "It
is as atheistic
to affirm the existence of
God as it is to deny it.
God is 'being itself,'
not a being," unquote.
In short, Tillich is
saying the reality of God
should not be conceived as the
existence of a being, however
great and perfect, even though
that is precisely how God has
been and continues
to be conceived
by most people who think of
themselves as believing in God.
Tillich disparages the same
commonplace idea of God
in The Courage to Be.
And there he writes,
quote, "God is
seen as a self which has
a world, as an ego which
is related to a vow, as a
cause which is separated
from its effect, as
having a definite space
and an endless time.
He is conceived as a being,
not, as he should be,
as 'being itself.'"
Here, too, in the place
of this idea of God,
Tillich champions
the idea of "the God
above the God of theism,"
as he puts it there.
It is God conceived
as 'being itself'
that is said to be the content
of absolute faith, as well as,
quoting again, "the ultimate
source of the courage to be."
In this way, Tillich is able to
take Nietzsche's proclamation
of the death of God
in stride, and even
to endorse it as a prelude to
a religiousness that does not
involve and revolve around
belief in the existence of God
as any sort of being at all.
Tillich rightly takes
Nietzsche's conception
of the death of God to convey
more than what he calls-- he,
Tillich-- the atheistic
or naturalistic criticism
of the theistic idea of God.
He grants that Nietzsche
does accept that criticism.
He sees nature as having further
meant that, as Tillich writes,
"God is dead as far as
man's consciousness of him
is concerned."
Or as he also puts
it, that, "in man,
the consciousness
of an ultimate,
in the traditional
sense, has died."
"And further, Nietzsche also
meant," quoting Tillich again,
"that when the traditional
idea of God falls,
something else must
fall along with it,
namely the system
of ethical values
on which such
society is based that
is associated with that belief."
But the crux of the
matter for Nietzsche
is the bankruptcy
of the idea of God
in what Tillich here calls the
"traditional sense," existing
somewhere on high
and playing a variety
of active roles affecting us
in this world and the next.
Tillich agrees with Nietzsche
that this idea is untenable.
He does remark in the same
discussion of Nietzsche
that, quoting Tillich, "The
idea that God in himself is dead
would be absurd."
What makes it absurd,
however, is the fact
that, if taken literally,
it would imply that God once
was actually alive and
then actually died,
which would be equally
absurd for the simple reason
that God, for Tillich, is
not the name of a being that
could be literally
either alive or dead.
The historical Jesus, of
course, is a different matter.
Tillich does want to
maintain that there
is an important sense
in which, as he puts it,
"The God of the
tradition is still alive
if this claim is given a proper
symbolic interpretation,"
as he likes to say.
And he contends that
the symbolic point
relates to what distinguishes
his own conception of the God
above God from Nietzsche's
and his Christianity from what
he calls Nietzsche's
"ecstatic naturalism."
But how do they differ, since
the difference cannot be
expressed in terms of anything
like the existence of God
and belief in God conceived
in the traditional sense?
The difference may not be as
great as one might suppose.
Let us take a
closer look at what
Tillich has to say
about this God above God
and see what we can find.
"The word 'God',"
Tillich states,
"is the name for that which
concerns man ultimately."
Or rather, it is
the name of that
which is worthy and deserving
of our ultimate concern,
its proper and appropriate
focus, as it were.
But what is that?
Tillich never tires of telling
us it is "being itself,"
un-hyphenated, or
"being-itself," hyphenated.
Quoting him, "The being of
God cannot be understood
as the existence of a being
alongside others or above
others," he writes.
"The being of God is 'being
itself.'" But what is
'being itself' if it is neither
the existence of a being nor
the existence of the
totality of all beings?
Tillich offers a hint when he
goes on to give a kind of gloss
on this notion.
He writes, "Many confusions
in the doctrine of God
could be avoided if
God were understood,
first of all, as 'being itself'
or as the ground of being."
But what is "the
ground of being"
if it is not itself a
being of a special sort,
as the God who supposedly
created the world is usually
conceived to be.
Tillich offers the
following answer
to this question, "The
power of being," he writes,
"is another way of
expressing the same thing
in a circumscribing phrase.
In other words," he continues,
"God conceived as the ground
of being," quoting again,
"is the 'power of being' in
everything and above
everything, the infinite
'power of being,'" unquote.
If this is what
Tillich means by God,
then it makes
perfect sense for him
to deny that God is to be
conceived as a being that
either does or does not exist.
Because something conceived
as "the 'power of being' in
everything," cannot
itself be a being.
There is more, even
[? if ?] also less,
to the reality of such
a power than there
is to existing as any particular
being or sort of being.
And it is precisely this
"more," for Tillich,
in which the transcendence
of the God whose reality he
is discussing consists.
So he goes on to say, quoting,
"As the 'power of being,' God
transcends every being, and
also the totality of beings
the world.
Being itself infinitely
transcends every finite being,"
not as another being, but
as the 'power of being.'
This is so, however, not
because 'being itself'
exists as an
almighty super being
above and beyond all
particular existing beings,
but rather because
it is something
like their ultimate principle.
So one might assert
with equally good reason
that living itself or
the power of living
also transcends every
particular living creature.
And if the power of
living transcends
every living creature
and also the totality
of living creatures.
There's parallel constructions
with the ones that he uses with
respect to 'being itself'
and the 'power of being.'
Yet Tillich does have something
further in mind that sets him
apart from Nietzsche
and the notion
of 'being itself' as the
ground and 'power of being,' as
intended by Tillich
to suggest it.
Here is Tillich on
Nietzsche, "If you
want to find out about his
idea of God," Tillich writes,
"do not look first to his
statement that God is dead.
Read instead the last
fragments of The Will to Power.
The last fragment describes
the divine demonic character
of life in
formulations which show
the ambiguity of the greatness
and the destructiveness
of life.
He then asks us to affirm this
life in its great ambiguity.
Out of this, he then
has another kind
of god, a god in which
the demonic underground,
the Dionysian underground
is clearly visible.
The victory of the element
of rationality or of meaning
is not as clear as
in other philosophers
like Kant or Hegel.
But there is an
opening up of vitality
and its half-creative,
half-destructive power,"
end of the quotation.
The key to getting God
right that Nietzsche misses,
Tillich seems to be
saying, has to do something
with this idea of the victory
of the element of rationality
or meaning.
It is worth noting, however,
that Tillich does not
assert that Nietzsche is
oblivious to the importance
of the element of
rationality or meaning.
He merely says that
Nietzsche is less clearly
committed to the idea of
their victory than others are.
And then he himself-- he,
Tillich himself-- presumably
is.
I'll come back to these points.
That's true enough.
But it's not a
world of difference
between Tillich and Nietzsche.
In any event, here is
the fragment in question
that Tillich is referring to
which you ought to have in mind
with Tillich having said
that and as we go forward.
Tillich chose well.
It is a quite remarkable
and eloquent statement,
even if Nietzsche didn't
actually publish it.
It's from his notebooks.
"And do you know what
'the world' is to me?
Shall I show it to
you in my mirror?
This world-- a monster of
energy without beginning,
without end, a fixed
and firm quantity
of energy that becomes
neither larger nor smaller,
that is not consumed, but
rather only transformed,
a sea of forces raging
and surging within itself,
eternally changing,
eternally running back again,
with tremendous
years of recurrence,
with an ebb and a
flow of its forms,
out of the simplest,
surging into the most
complex, out of the
stillest, stiffest, coldest
into the hottest, wildest,
most self-contradictory,
and then homewardly
returning to the simple again
out of this fullness, out of
the play of contradictions
back to the pleasure of Concord,
affirming itself as that which
must return eternally,
as a becoming that knows
no satiety, no disgust,
no weariness-- this,
my Dionysian world
of the eternally self-creating
and eternally self-destroying,
this mystery world of
the twofold ecstasy,
this, my Beyond Good and
Evil, without a goal,
unless the joy of the circle
is itself a goal, without will,
unless a ring has
goodwill toward itself--
do you want a name
for this world?
A solution for
all its mysteries?
A light for you,
too, you best-hidden,
strongest, most-dauntless,
most-midnightly ones?
This world is the will to
power-- and nothing besides!
And you yourselves are also
this will to power-- and nothing
besides!"
That's the end of the passage.
And it's Will to
Power, fragment 1067.
And I'm going to refer to
it subsequently as 1067.
So when I say 1067,
it's not the year
after William landed in Britain.
It's this fragment
that I'm talking about.
Tillich is right.
This is a vision that deserves
to be called religious.
In this note,
Nietzsche powerfully
articulates his
version of what Tillich
calls "the power of
being" and of the manner
of its eternal expression.
And it presents this
reality as something divine,
even if it is a conception
of the divine that
includes within itself
an element that Tillich
deems demonic.
If Nietzsche has something
like a god in Tillich's God
above God sense, this is it.
Tillich seeks to differentiate
his version from Nietzsche's
by drawing attention
to the prominence
Nietzsche gives to the
demonic destructive character
of the power he is describing.
But this may be a distinction
without all that much
of a difference, since
Nietzsche is only
claiming that we
are confronted here
with two very deep sides of
the same fundamental coin,
and since Tillich himself
takes the very same position.
For the 'power of
being,' for Tillich,
is both the creative ground,
"grund," and the abyss,
"abgrund," of all finite
beings, ourselves included.
Tillich puts these notions
all together as follows.
Now, this is
Tillich, "In calling
'being itself' creative,
we point to the fact that
everything participates in the
'power of being.' In calling it
'abysmal,' we point to the fact
that everything participates
in the 'power of being'
in a finite way, that is,
must perish, that all beings
are infinitely transcended
by their creative ground."
Nietzsche can and
does say pretty much
the same thing in language
that is not all that different.
Like Tillich's 'being
itself' and 'power of being,'
Nietzsche's notions of
'becoming' and 'will to power'
are not to be reified and
conceived as beings or entities
that exist, in the manner of
particular beings, at all.
Rather, they, too, have to
do with what it purportedly
means "to be," and so
with a basic character
of the all-encompassing
reality in which all finite
forms of existence come
to be, have their being,
and cease to be.
In that sense, moreover, and
it would seem to be precisely
Tillich's sense, Nietzsche,
too, could, if he wished,
speak here of the transcendence
of becoming as the ceaseless
play of 'will to power,'
precisely because it is
the name of the game itself
rather than of anything
or everything that plays it.
Nietzsche might be
thought of as deifying
'becoming itself,' as
elaborated in 1067.
And that may appear to
contrast strikingly with
Tillich's conception of God as
'being itself.' But does it?
Nietzsche speaks of becoming
rather than of being, precisely
because, like Tillich, he, too,
wants to get away from the idea
that the ground of all that
is and goes on in the world
has the character of a being,
an ultimate or absolute thing
or entity or object or
subject of some sort.
Reality for Nietzsche is
rather to be conceived
most fundamentally in
terms of what goes on
and how it goes on, as
1067 makes vividly clear.
And something very
much like that would
seem to be the case
for Tillich, as well.
It is revealing
that, like Nietzsche,
Tillich makes much
of the idea of power
and of the 'power of being,'
for what he is talking about
at this level of discourse is
not power as something various
people and creatures happen
to have and to exert,
but rather as something about
the fundamental nature of what
it is and means 'to be.'
Quoting Tillich,
"Being must be thought
as the negation of the
negation of being," he writes.
Continuing, "That is why
we describe 'being' best
by the metaphor 'power.' Power
is the possibility a being has
to actualize itself against the
resistance of other beings."
Now, this may not be
straight Nietzsche.
But it is at least in
the same neighborhood.
Power, for Tillich,
as for Nietzsche,
is at least partially definitive
of all reality, vitality,
humanity, creativity,
spirituality, and indeed
of divinity as their
animating "ground,"
to use Tillich's word, even
if it is also their "abyss,"
to use another, and admits
of "demonically destructive
expressions," to use a third.
Tillich would seem at last to be
moving clearly beyond Nietzsche
when he sounds the Christian
themes of personalism and love,
for there certainly is nothing
personal about the picture
Nietzsche describes in 1067,
and nothing loving about it,
either, toward us as
particular individuals.
But the same would
seem to be true
of Tillich's 'being itself,'
which is no "heavenly,
perfect person," as
Tillich explicitly states.
In The Courage to
Be, Tillich says
that "personalism
with respect to God
is balanced by a transpersonal
presence of the divine."
But it turns out that he
really means "superseded by."
Because in Systematic Theology,
he flatly states, quote,
"Personal God does not mean
that God is a person," unquote.
What then does it mean?
Only this, quoting again, "It
means that God--" that is,
'being itself,' "is the
ground of everything personal,
and so carries the ontological
power of personality," unquote.
But this is just to
say that 'being itself'
makes personality possible.
That is, it allows for the
possibility of personality
under the right conditions.
And that is nothing that
Nietzsche would deny,
since he makes much of the
possibility of personality
himself, even if he does so in
the more naturalistic language
of what he calls genealogy.
The situation is essentially
the same with respect to love.
"God is love," Tillich
writes, pointedly
not saying that God loves
each and every one of us,
for to be able to
do that, God would
have to be a kind of heavenly
person, which he is not.
What Tillich does go on
to say is this, quote,
"Since God is 'being
itself,' one might say that
'being itself' is love and that
the process of the divine life
has the character of love."
Tillich thus is making two
points about God and love.
First, that 'being itself'
is such as to allow
for the possibility of love,
as well as of personality--
which is another very fine thing
indeed about 'being itself'.
And second, that something like
love is a pervasive feature
of the way in which 'being
itself,' as the creative ground
of being elaborates itself.
That's what Tillich
calls the divine life.
But Nietzsche thinks so, too.
In fact, he makes
as much of love
as anyone in the
history of philosophy
not only in its
rudimentary forms,
but also in its
various cultivated
and intensified sublimations
and transformations.
If Tillich and
Nietzsche part company
in their conceptions
of the divine,
therefore, it is
not here, either.
Yet Tillich contends
that they do part.
He maintains that
Nietzsche, quote,
"has a different God than the
God of the religious tradition,
especially of the
Christian tradition."
This is certainly true.
But the same could
be said of Tillich.
So that by itself does
not establish either that
or how the two of them differ.
"Nietzsche's God,"
Tillich goes on to say,
"unlike that of the
Christian tradition, is--"
from the passage I read
a few moments ago--
"the divine demonic being which
he called 'life.'" But that is
not quite right in
a crucial respect.
What Nietzsche is evoking
in 1067 is not simply
'a being' which he called
'life,' even though what he
calls the 'affirmation of life'
is the fundamental expression
of his kind of religiousness.
Rather, Nietzsche is talking
about the basic character
of all of reality,
life included,
just as Tillich is attempting
to do in talking about
'being itself.' The difference
between the two of them,
such as it may be, must have
to do with something about what
they take that basic
character to be.
Tillich suggests at
least one problem
with deifying what he
describes as "vitality
and its half-creative,
half-destructive power," as he
takes Nietzsche to be
doing, in that it does not
give due prominence
to what Tillich
calls "the element of
rationality or meaning."
This element of
coherent meaningfulness
is the key to Tillich's
rather Hegelian interpretation
of the idea of
spirit, and so also
of what it means to talk
about God as spirit.
Tillich writes, "Life as
spirit is the inclusive symbol
for the divine life.
Spirit," again
quoting, "is the power
through which meaning lives
and is the meaning which
gives direction the power."
This, for Tillich, is how
the symbolically expressed
ideas of God as spirit
and of the living
God are to be understood.
"In contrast to Nietzsche," he
writes, "for whom God is life,
we must say that
God is the living
God because he is spirit."
This makes an important point.
But the point is not that God
is a spiritual being for Tillich
after all.
Rather, it makes the idea
of God the supreme symbol
of the kind of meaning
and power conjoining
and elaborating phenomenon that
Tillich calls spirituality.
So he goes on to
say, "God as spirit
is the ultimate unity
of power and meaning."
If spirit is so
conceived, however, this
is not in contrast
to Nietzsche at all.
It actually very nicely
expresses an important part
of Nietzsche's own conception
of the divine which
his kind of
religiousness celebrates.
The transformation of mere life
into spirituality involving
the generation of meaning by
way of what Nietzsche calls
sublimation and value
creation is something
that Nietzsche considers to
be of the utmost significance.
And they both agree
that this phenomenon
is to be understood as a
transfiguration of the natural
rather than as an injection
into the natural of something
supernatural.
But Tillich does more than
emphasize the significance
of the element of
rationality or of meaning.
He further stresses
the point that there
is something about 'being
itself' or the 'power of being'
that warrants the
idea of their victory.
It is this that he
thinks Nietzsche misses.
And here at last
we may be getting
to the heart of the matter,
for Nietzsche insists
that both sides of the
coin of power, creation
and destruction, must
be affirmed precisely
because it is a
single coin, which
must be affirmed in
its fundamental unity
if it is to be affirmed at all.
The fundamental unity
and inseparability
of these two sides, both
creative and destructive,
is what the later Nietzsche
used the notion of the Dionysian
to symbolize.
He would regard Tillich's idea
of-- this is Tillich's phrase,
'the victory of the element of
rationality or of meaning over
their opposites,' as a piece of
wishful thinking that we must
learn to live without.
On the other hand,
Nietzsche does not simply
reject the associated
underlying sensibility, which
cherishes this element of order
establishment and significance
endowment.
He seizes, instead, upon
the thought of structure
and meaning as eternally
recurring possibilities
in this life and this world
and incorporates this thought
and its celebration into his
kind of religiousness right
along with the recognition
of their contingency
and transience, which
we must likewise learn
to be able to love and affirm.
Neither creation
nor destruction has
the last word for Nietzsche.
Rather, he takes the last
word to belong to the idea
that both will recur eternally.
Tillich rightly recognizes that
the key to Nietzsche's kind
of religiousness is thus,
as he says, "the famous idea
of the eternal return."
Tillich cites the
hyperbolic version
of this idea that
Nietzsche does at times
employ according to
which, as Tillich puts it,
"everything that happens happens
an infinite number of times."
The version that we find
in 1067 and often elsewhere
is much looser than that.
But the general point
for present purposes
is that, for Nietzsche,
eternal recurrence
is the only sort of
eternity there is.
What hallows each moment for
him is nothing more or less
than its significance as a
moment of such recurrence,
its ephemerality
not withstanding.
For Tillich, on the other
hand, this is not enough.
He wants to be able to say-- he
does say-- that the moment is
eternal by virtue
of what he describes
as "the presence of
eternal life in it."
The problem Tillich
faces is to be
able to explicate the
difference meaningfully
without having to help himself
to a more robust conception
of eternal life than
his reinterpretation
of the idea of God as
'being itself' will permit.
Be that as it may, it is clear
that both Tillich and Nietzsche
envision a post-theistic future
not only for the idea of God,
but also for a conjoined
future of religiousness,
even if not the same sorts of
religiousness that have long
been associated with commonplace
belief in that sort of god.
Indeed they consider it not only
to be possible, but important,
that religiousness
of the right sort
survive or arise
subsequent to the death
of God theistically conceived.
Nietzsche's approach
was revolutionary,
while Tillich's
was evolutionary.
But both sought to
midwife the transition
in a manner that would
not leave humanity
bereft of all
religious sensibility
after the death of
God finally sinks in.
But what kind or
kinds of religiousness
do they have in mind?
It's with that question
that the rest of my talk
will be concerned.
"Religion," Tillich tells
us in The Courage to Be,
"is the state of being grasped
by the 'power of being' itself.
And faith," he writes, "is
the existential acceptance
of something transcending
ordinary experience.
But what is that?
Well, what faith means,"
Tillich explains,
"must be understood through
the 'courage to be.' And,"
he continues, "the 'courage
to be' is the self affirmation
of being in spite of nonbeing.
Faith is the experience
of this power."
It is in this way
that Tillich is
to be understood when he talks
about absolute faith, which
he says, "transcends"
the theistic idea of God
and has nothing to do with
belief in such a god."
Tillich's post-theistic
religiousness,
like Nietzsche's, thus focuses
upon the transformation
and enhancement of life.
It revolves around the
power and self affirmation
of what it means or can
mean to be in this world
rather than around
something beyond it.
This kind of
religiousness does involve
connecting with a
kind of power that
transcends our own particular
individual existence.
Tillich calls that power 'the
power of being itself.' His
kind of religiousness has as
its main focus and content
the fostering and cultivation
of our sense of that power
and the living of life in
a manner imbued with it
and sustained by it.
So he writes near the
end of The Courage to Be,
"If the self participates in
'the power of being itself,' it
receives itself back, for the
power of being acts through
the power of the individual
selves," unquote.
The animation, illumination,
and intensification
of our lives and
relationships, both mundane
and in moments of crisis, is
what this power and action
are all about and is the true
and proper focus of Tillich's
kind of religiousness.
Nietzsche hints at his
preferred type of religiousness
in a late note in which
he writes that there
is one type of religious person,
which he calls "the pagan," not
conceived as primitive and
barbaric, but rather as--
and this is what
Nietzsche's definition is--
"the type of a well turned-out
and ecstatic overflowing spirit
whose religiousness is
a form of Thanksgiving
and affirmation of life."
Nietzsche continues, "It
is here that I locate
the Dionysus of the Greeks."
I can't help but think of
Tillich saying, (GERMAN ACCENT)
"The universe." "The
religious affirmation of life,
life as a whole, not
divided or denied."
It is Nietzsche's affinity
for this type of religiousness
that leads Tillich to speak
of his ecstatic naturalism.
It finds striking expression
in the last two sections
of part 3 of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra with their two
great life-affirming
love songs to eternity.
Both-- that is, Tillich's
and Nietzsche's versions--
differ greatly from
what we usually
think of as religiousness.
But that, it seems to
me, is all to the good.
Some will see no point in
any sort of religiousness
if there is no god whose
wrath is to be feared
and whose favor may be curried.
And if there is no possibility
of real pie in the sky when
you die by and by, Nietzsche
and Tillich are not for them.
For those who get past
this way of thinking,
however, Nietzsche and
Tillich are ready and waiting.
Perhaps I should
say a little more
about the kind of
post-theistic religiousness
toward which I take Nietzsche
to have been moving,
since it is not obvious
what I am talking about.
I believe it to have
real possibilities.
I shall then bring Tillich
back into the discussion,
but shall leave it
an open question
whether this may be or may not
be where Tillich's path may
ultimately lead.
The basic issue, I suggest,
to which religiousness
is a response is
that of the relation
of human beings to the reality
of which we are a part.
How we understand
this relation and how
we feel about it makes a
great deal of difference
to creatures like
ourselves who must live
with the burden of
self consciousness
and the capacity for
reflection and who are
aware of their own mortality.
Religions minister to
our need for assistance
and understanding this relation
and coming to terms with what
befalls us.
They might be said to be in the
consciousness transformation
business, fostering forms of
identity and identification,
providing interpretations,
and cultivating sensibilities
so they may also be said to
be in the value generation
and revaluation business.
They are more than interpretive.
They also specialize in the
expression, affirmation,
elaboration, and promotion
of values of various sorts,
thereby transforming human life
and helping to endow and infuse
it with value and values it
would not otherwise have.
But it seems to Nietzsche
that religions have often
done this in ways
that have been more
detrimental than
beneficial to human life.
He looks to a form
of religiousness
that would contribute
powerfully to the enhancement
of human life.
The affirmation of
life is no less crucial
to the possibility of its
enhancement for Nietzsche
than the prospect
of its enhancement
is crucial to its affirmation.
From The Birth of
Tragedy onward-- that's
Nietzsche's first book--
Nietzsche takes the key
to its affirmation
to be learning
to experience it as valuable,
not by virtue of its relation
to anything beyond
this world or owing
to its satisfaction of some
independently specifiable value
standard, but rather on its own
terms, either for what it is
or for what it is
capable of becoming.
The development of
this sensibility
is the great
achievement and power
of the various forms of art,
as Nietzsche distinguishes
and discusses them
in that first book--
Apollonian,
Dionysian, and tragic.
And that, I believe,
he also understood
is what religiousness
likewise can and should
be fundamentally about.
A religious sensibility of
any of these three sorts
must be acquired and cultivated.
It is only for the properly
transformed and attuned
consciousness that things
not only exist, but matter,
and bear aspects that
enable us to cherish them.
To come to experience
them in this way as
valuable, estimable,
admirable enables
one to affirm and
celebrate them,
and with them, the life and
world of which they are a part.
And such celebration in
turn reinforces and promotes
the experience of
them as valuable.
This, I believe,
is the vital core
of the kind of religiousness
I am talking about.
Nietzsche takes it to have
been a pre-theistic reality
and believes it to be a
post-theistic possibility.
A crucial piece of the
puzzle of how this can work
has to do with the
phenomenon of identification.
As long as one experiences
something as alien to one's
own identity and existence,
the affirmation and celebration
of it will be difficult,
if not impossible.
If life and the world are to
be affirmed and celebrated,
one must learn to
understand and experience
both them and oneself under
some persuasive description that
facilitates identification in
a sustaining, satisfying, and
even exhilarating
manner with something
fundamental about them that is
felt to matter more than any
and all of their
distressing aspects.
That is a tall order.
But Nietzsche and Tillich
share the conviction
that it can be filled if
the right thing about them
is selected and the right
sensibility is attained.
The problem is to
come up with something
other than any
particular existing
being or kind of being.
It needs to be something worthy
of being made the focus of what
Tillich called
"ultimate concern,"
worthy of unconditional
affirmation, identification,
and celebration, and
capable of sustaining such
an embrace without corruption
ensuing on the part
either of their subjects
or their object.
And that rules us out, as
individuals and as a species.
We cannot be that object of
our own ultimate concern.
True religiousness
happens when something
is experienced as divine.
Religious mythologies occur when
this experience is misplaced
and takes as its
object something
incapable of sustaining
so high an evaluation.
The right choice for Tillich is
'the power of being,' conceived
as it's supposed to express
itself creatively in a manner
conducive to the development
and triumph of coherent
meaningfulness.
For Nietzsche, instead of
'the power being,' it might be
described as "the becoming of
power," understood, however,
not as any particular
instance of power,
but rather as the name of
the creative-destructive game
the world eternally
plays with itself.
"God, the supreme
power," Nietzsche
wrote in a late note discussing
various concepts of God,
"that suffices.
Everything follows from it.
The world follows from it."
End of that short quotation.
But I'm going to read it again.
"God, the supreme
power, that suffices.
Everything follows from it.
The world follows from it."
Nietzsche's choice
makes Tillich nervous.
Power unconstrained by
some sort of principle
of rationality and meaning
is, for Tillich, more demonic
than divine.
But Tillich's choice
would strike Nietzsche
as being at once too thin
and too wishful, for,
to his way of thinking,
there is no such constraint
of rationality and
meaningfulness,
either in the world's
fundamental nature
or beyond it.
And so we had best come to
terms with that circumstance
and cultivate our
sensibility accordingly.
Doing so, however,
need not for Nietzsche
mean fixing upon the most
simplistic version of what it
means to exist in such a world.
How might one think about
the reality of which we
are a part in such a way that
it can be seen and experienced
as divine no less than as
demonic with a Nietzschean
sensibility.
What might one fix
upon that admits
of being experienced
without illusion as making
it all worthwhile?
The two most obvious
general alternatives
would appear to be either
something elemental about life
in the world or something
developmental about them.
The former sort
of religiousness,
modelled on Nietzsche's early
conception of the Dionysian,
may be thought of as
centering upon the affirmation
and celebration of vitality
itself, as Tillich observes,
and of the associated basic
forces and phenomena associated
with it, such as sexuality,
birth, and death.
The latter, on the other hand,
the developmental option,
modelled on Nietzsche's
alternate conception
of the Apollonian,
may be conceived
as focusing more upon that which
they have it in them to become
and upon the realization
of that potentiality,
valorising and
celebrating things
like Tillich's rationality
and meaning in particular.
But Nietzsche does not
stop with these two types
alone in his analysis of
the arts of the Greeks.
He goes on to discern a third,
the tragic, which he considers
to transcend them both.
And I take him
likewise to envision
a third sort of
post-theistic religiousness
that is at once deeply tragic
and profoundly affirmative.
Tragedy, as conceived by
Nietzsche and the Greeks,
transcends pessimism
no less than optimism
and represents one of
the greatest achievements
of the human spirit, finding a
way to a powerful affirmation
of life even in the
face of the worst that
can befall us, their
transfiguration,
the contingency and
vulnerability and ephemerality,
and even self-destructiveness of
all such transfigured existence
not withstanding, and
indeed as a part of what
makes that existence so
admirable and sublime.
It is this sensibility
that the later Nietzsche
calls Dionysian.
There is an entry in one of
Nietzsche's late notebooks
from the last year of
his productive life that
bears the heading,
"The two types--
Dionysus and the crucified."
I have already cited
a part of this note.
Here's some more of it.
"Dionysus versus the crucified,"
Nietzsche writes, "there you
have the antithesis.
It is not a difference
with respect to martyrdom.
Rather, the same thing
has a different meaning."
Stopping the quote
for the moment.
Dionysian religiousness,
Nietzsche explains,
revolves around the idea
that, quoting again,
"Life itself, its eternal
fruitfulness and recurrence
give rise to
torment, destruction,
the will to annihilation.
Whereas in the other
case, suffering,
the crucified of the
innocent is taken
to be an objection
against life as a formula
for its condemnation."
Now consider what
Nietzsche says next.
"The problem is
that of the meaning
of life, whether a Christian
meaning or a tragic meaning.
In the first case--" the
Christian case, as Nietzsche's
understanding of
Christianity, "it
is supposed to be the way
to a blessed state of being.
Ultimately, that
state of being is
taken to be blessed enough
to be able to justify
a monstrous amount of suffering.
In the second case,
however, by virtue
of the attainment of a
genuine tragic sensibility,"
Nietzsche writes, "the
tragic human being affirms
even the harshest suffering.
He is strong, full,
deifying enough to do so.
Dionysus cut in pieces
is a promise of life.
It will ever be born again and
come back from destruction."
End of quote.
This may seem to be a
far cry from Tillich's
kind of religiousness.
And yet one must
have a tin year not
to hear an overtone of the
note Nietzsche sounds here
when Tillich proclaims that,
as he puts it in Systematic
Theology, "God is the power of
being resisting and conquering
non-being."
And in The Courage
to Be, "Being must
be thought as the negation
of the negation of being.
That is why we describe
being best by the metaphor
'power of being.'
Indeed Tillich even
goes so far as to say,
"Being includes non-being.
And through non-being,
it reveals itself."
But what is this if not
essentially the same idea
that Nietzsche seeks to
express through his insistence
upon the fundamental
interconnectedness
and inseparability of creation
and destruction, both of which
are manifestations of the power
that makes the world go round?
Tillich undoubtedly
would want to disavow
the kind of Christianity to
which Nietzsche here contrasts
his Dionysianism, a
Christianity which disvalues
this life and this world,
except as a rite of passage
to a purportedly available
and infinitely preferable
radical alternative state
of being beyond them.
The new being Tillich's
kind of religiousness
is intended to
foster and celebrate
is very much a way of being in
this life and in this world.
And the kind of eternity
in which it participates
is the eternity of
the transfigured
here and now, imbued
with the courage
to be that is the self
affirmation of being
in spite of non-being.
That seems to me
to be not so very
different from the religiousness
that Nietzsche calls Dionysian.
It is small wonder, therefore,
that Tillich is much more
comfortable with
Nietzsche than he
is with so many other thinkers.
He knew Nietzsche to be, at
bottom, a kindred spirit,
religiously as well
as intellectually.
And I believe they both
understood something
that could well turn out
to be of great importance,
humanly as well as
religiously speaking.
The death of God,
theistically conceived,
far from closing the
book on religiousness,
may merely mark
the ending of one
of its chapters
and the beginning
of another in which it is
the things they both seek
to articulate out
of their senses
of the de-reified divine that
takes stage front and center,
displacing disputes and
fantasies about God,
the soul, and immortality.
Nietzsche and Nietzsche
did their best
to help us turn that page and
to see how we might get on
with the next chapter.
We live in a time in
which most people would
seem to prefer otherwise.
But getting on with
the next chapter
is important, for sooner or
later it is going to be needed.
They both knew that.
And that is one of the reasons
why we still need them.
I could leave it at that.
And maybe I should.
But I'm not going to.
I would like to conclude as
I began-- on a personal note.
Tillich's departure for Chicago
at the end of my junior year
was traumatic for all
of us who considered
him to be our master educator.
But even his
departure turned out
to be memorable and
meaningful to me.
As a member of the inner
group of Tillich groupies,
I had the honor of helping him
pack up his books and papers
in his office in Widener when
he was getting ready to leave.
And to commemorate
the occasion, he
inscribed in my copy of The
Courage to Be as follows,
"Paul Tillich, gratefully, for
help in moving the spirit June
8, 1962."
Well, I would like to
think that, in a sense
and in my own way, that is
what I have been doing ever
since-- trying to help in moving
the spirit, which sometimes
means, as it did then,
helping it to move on.
My way has diverged from his,
at least in some respects.
But it is the way he
enabled me to find.
And if I am right about him and
what I have been saying today,
I may not have
diverged all that far.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[INAUDIBLE] take
a few questions?
If we have time for it, sure.
I think we have time for it.
There's time for
a few questions.
We'll start right here.
And if you do ask a
question, please do speak up.
[? Do you ?] want
that microphone down
in the audience? [INAUDIBLE]
And if you need to go,
don't hesitate to do so.
It's quite all right.
Yes.
I have several questions,
one of which in some ways
you've answered,
and yet not quite.
The first one in terms of his--
Which his?
Being--
Ah, Tillich, OK.
It's a question about Tillich.
It's, where does it
stand as compared
to [INAUDIBLE] [? similar ?]
God is equivalent to nature.
And in some ways, I'm not
clear to what extent [? this ?]
is saying the same thing.
The second question, if I may?
OK.
It has to do
[INAUDIBLE] as enemies
where he makes very
clear-- I think,
at least he tells us-- that you
can neither prove nor disprove
the existence of God.
And in his famous statement
in his redaction, [INAUDIBLE]
says, I criticize reason
to make way for [? pain. ?]
And therefore, basically
it looks like [INAUDIBLE]
with that part of faith.
That was the
meaning [? of it. ?]
So now it is beyond.
[INAUDIBLE] question is this, is
Tillich more than a theologian?
A very important
one. [? What said ?]
is the philosophy?
OK, first about Spinoza, I
could give a whole lecture
on this one.
Spinoza was one of
Tillich's heroes.
And interestingly, Spinoza
was also one of Hegel's heroes
and one of Nietzsche's heroes.
And you could tell
a different story
about the history
of modern philosophy
if you told it with Spinoza as
the starting point rather than
Descartes and with
Hegel and Nietzsche
as latter-day
followers of Spinoza.
But there is a
significant difference.
And what Tillich said
about that was that,
although Spinoza was
trying for the right sort
of all encompassing
conception of being
in the ground of being,
he couldn't get away
from the idea of
being as substance.
And that was a fundamental
conceptual barrier to his-- I'm
making the transition to a
non-substantial conception
of being.
And so you have Spinoza
maintaining not just
that God is a being, but
he is the ultimate being.
He is the being that
includes everything.
And Tillich wants to say, no,
no, he's not a being at all.
We need a conception
of reality that
encompasses all of reality,
but does not turn it
into attributes of a being.
So he thought that Spinoza's
conception needed to be,
as it were, translated
into a different idiom.
But Spinoza was definitely
on the right track.
And I don't know
if you know this.
Perhaps you do.
He's so respected
and admired Spinoza
that he thought for
some time of trying
to do Systematic
Theology in the way
that Spinoza wrote his Ethics--
with axioms and theorems
and proofs and the
whole rest of it.
Thank goodness he
didn't do that.
But the admiration for
Spinoza went that far.
In the case of Kant,
there's more distance there.
Kant's mistake,
Tillich thought, was
to think that, even
though it is still
meaningful to talk about
proving and disproving
the existence of God, Kant
should have understood
that the whole issue is bogus
not because you can't prove it
and you can't disprove it,
but because you shouldn't even
think about God as existing
beyond the ability to prove it,
so that Kant still
had the thought
of the existence of God.
And it was a very important
thought for Kant indeed.
Kant still, at least as
Tillich understood him,
holds on to the idea
of God as a being
who's got a very powerful role
indeed to play beyond this life
and in this world in terms
of the sort of prospects
that different ones
of us may face.
So his rational faith is very
different from what Tillich
means by faith, which
completely gets away
from the idea of belief
in a being of any sort.
And he thinks that
Kant's faith still
did involve belief in a being,
in fact, a variety of kinds
of beings, things
themselves of various kinds,
including our souls
things of themselves.
Should have just gotten
that whole terminology out
and thought about
ourselves differently.
So I don't say that Tillich
was a superior philosopher
to either one of them.
But he had a line
on both of them.
And you wanted to
know what it was.
And so that's what it was.
Yes.
How would you characterize
Heidegger's view
as being characterized
[INAUDIBLE] of religiousness
in the same way
that Tillich's is?
And how would you
compare the two?
Well, if you think
Tillich is bad on being,
Heidegger is a
lot worse in terms
of trying to figure out
what he means and his never
being willing to even come
close to making it clear.
Heidegger actually makes
a big issue about 'being'
being so obscured
and so beclouded
by the history of Western
philosophy and by language
and so forth that we don't even
have a chance of understanding
what it is.
So it's true that Tillich's
notion of 'being itself' has
a kind of affinity with the
use that Heidegger makes
of the notion of 'being.'
Both of them say that,
whatever being it is, it
is not a being, that is,
being with a big B or something
like that is not a being
and that it is to be understood
dynamically rather than
substantially, like "be-ing."
But Heidegger is not
willing to go even
as far as Tillich is in trying
to supply us with metaphors
and symbols, talk of power,
ground, things of that nature
to try to give us a handle
on the sort of characteristic
of the reality of which we're
a part to which attention
is to be directed.
It may be that, if it
hadn't been for Heidegger,
that Tillich would have talked
about something other than
'being itself.' I'm quite sure
that he used that language
because he was attempting to
use something like the language
of the philosophy of our time.
And Heidegger was
the greatest exponent
of what he thought was the
philosophy of our time, namely
existenz philosophy.
And he thought
that what Heidegger
was trying to do by trying
to get us to stop thinking
about the nature of reality in
terms of a collection of kinds
of particular entities,
that was a good idea,
and that being is
something-- there
is an important sense
of being in which
you can't use that model, that
substance or entity paradigm
for it.
So I think he tried
to do something
more intelligible
than Heidegger did
with the notion of 'being'
that would incorporate whatever
might be important in the shift
that Heidegger's trying to get
us to make, but will
do so in a way that
enables us to
understand something
about the kind of answer to
which his sort of religiousness
gives to the Heideggerian
question of the meaning
of 'being' and of the meaning
of our own existence, as well.
That's about the best I can do.
Yes, first.
This should be
our last question.
OK, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I was thinking,
[INAUDIBLE] to your ending
of the spirit
[INAUDIBLE] divinity,
do you think that the full
structure is [INAUDIBLE]
a complication to that?
Do you think Tillich
or Heidegger [? were ?]
taking about [INAUDIBLE]
Well, it may be that
they have contributed
to the de-reification of
our thinking about things.
But I do not think
that-- and I don't
think Tillich would
think that they've
done so in a very helpful way.
At least I'll speak
in a Tillichian way.
But I think I'll speak
also in a Nietzschean way.
Both Tillich and
Nietzsche thought
that it is important to be as
clear, as precise, as rational
as it is possible to be in
our discussion of things
as difficult as those
we're talking about here.
And the post-structuralists
seem to delight
in the kind of
irresponsibility when
it comes to rationality and
clarity in their discussion.
It's as though they wish to
deconstruct the very idea
of rational discourse.
And that's taking
de-reification too far.
And so I think that, if you're
going to locate thinkers
like Tillich and Nietzsche,
you should put them
on the side of
analytical philosophy
rather than
post-structuralist philosophy.
Doing our best to get
as clear as we can
about things that are very
difficult to talk about
is what they were doing.
And that's analytical rather
than deconstructionist
in intention.
Well, again, thank
you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
