From the “Death of God” to the “Death of Man”

In order to destroy God, and after having destroyed him, the European mind destroyed every thing that could oppose man; having accomplished its attempt, it finds only death. — André Malraux La Tentation de l’Occident, p. 158


. . . although human beings are finite, the desire for freedom is infinite and unlimited. Human beings as limited beings can not be free (can not have unlimited powers) but they can desire freedom (desire to become infinite). However this desire is incompatible with the real position (maq┐m) of human beings in this universe: the fact that they are not God but creatures of God with limited powers.

Historically speaking, in the West the “death of God” signifies the rejection of Christianity as the ultimate guarantor of truth and meaning. The positive repercussion of this belief was the replacement of God by “man” as the ultimate guarantor of truth and meaning. The divinity of man was claimed on the basis of his capacity to reason. With the disintegration of belief in reason the status of man built on this belief has naturally eclipsed. The “death of man” has followed the “death of God”.

The act of the killing of God was a double murder, of both “God” and “man”. The “death of man” has not given birth to a new “God”; it can not do this since “God is dead”. The West, after this double murder, finds itself rudderless, without any guarantee of truth and meaning. Truth, meaning, morality and value become mere conventions without any ultimate significance. The West has lost faith in the divinity of man but it has not shunned the desire to freedom. In fact freedom now becomes less an inspiration and more a compulsion.

Human beings are seen as condemned to freedom in the sense that in a universe, which has been deserted by “God” and His “murderer” alike, the “new humanity” is forced to face the world without any pre-defined rules, meanings, values and truth. Thus while on the negative side “übermensch” replaces belief in “man” in the positive sense it does not provide any basis for new certainties. Humanity is now being told to learn to live without certainties, to accept precariousness and volatility as the permanent condition of human existence: “Exposed to (übermensch), we begin to think of appearance without reality, openness without closure, falsehood without truth, form without content, and finally hope without hope. We take pains to affirm nothing but our disavowals, and keep disavowing this very affirmation”. (Henry S. Kariel, “Beginning at the End of Democratic Theory” in Democratic Theory and Practice, p. 255).

All utopias and apocalypses are being shunned as hindrance to the performance and practice of freedom: “We commit ourselves to a distant Kingdom of Ends and are led (temporarily, it is always said) to accept the exclusion of interest. We are led to esteem achievements rather than process. And we accordingly legitimate not only experts in violence trained to move us toward utopia but also licensing agencies, accreditation boards, and professionals skilled in telling us how far we can go." (Ibid., 258. Emphasis added.).

It is being hoped that the immense energy liberated in the wake of the shunning of these utopias will be utilised for the revival of action and practice for the sake of action and practice. What Foucault calls “perilous action”(The Order of Things, 238.), action without pre-defined rules, any immanent telos, in sum meaningless action, action without end: “In the end we may even wonder why we should ever settle for anything less than the world at large as self expressive spectacle, a universal play signifying nothing, an undirected performance open to forms of action which allow us to confront the knowledge of our insignificance . . . We would then treat all forms of behaviour as play and recognise what we now call theatre to be human life in a concentrated, stylised, self-conscious form — in a form easier to denounce than the compulsive routines of undramatised existence. We would then surrender our deadly emblems of authenticity and merely pretend to be authentic, truthful, sincere, honest, scholarly, and truly in touch with ourselves. We would then not mind knowing that nature defined no centre for society and no self for us” (Democratic Theory and Practice, p. 260, emphasis in the original).

It is hoped, however, that mere intensification of this action, what Foucault terms “hyperactivisim” (Michel Foucault, “On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress”, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 231), shall produce a semblance of meaningfulness (Democratic Theory and Practice, p. 257).

The failure to create utopias is supposed not to lead to despair, it is rather to converge into a new kind of hysterical fatalism which revels in the impossibility of utopias and in the energy liberated in the wake of emancipation from utopias. This energy will “keep” things going in the absence of all moorings and utopias “on this ‘Holzweg der Holzweg’, on this ‘path of the paths that leads nowhere’ that nevertheless we insist on following without a programme, ‘catching the train while it is moving’, always setting out on the territory of unknown being” (Antonio Negri “Notes on the Evolution of Thought of the Later Althusser” in Post Modern Materialism and the Future of the Marxist Theory, p. 58.).

Apocalypse itself is now being redefined from its original Greek sense of uncovering or disclosing (Jonathan Ree, “Apocalypse Unbound” in New Left Review, 4 (July-August 2000), 164.) to what Malcolm Bull terms as “coming into hiding” (Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality, p. 31.).

This is effectively abandoning the search for truth that has been the defining characteristic of Western philosophy and thinking since the Greeks: “ . . . ‘seeing things hidden’ . . . mean(s) a sceptical reconciliation with our own ignorance — an acknowledgement that some things are hidden from us, and perhaps will always be. When hiddenness is brought to light, what we see is not the whole world as it really is, but rather the fact that ultimate truth will always elude us” (Jonathan Ree, “Apocalypse Unbound”, 165).

Apocalypse according to this redefinition dawns “when hiddenness at last comes into its own; to use (Bull’s) teasing phrase, it is a time of coming into hiding”(ibid.). This is another way to say that the West has overcome its “futile” penchant for truth, for uncovering and disclosedness and has at last realised that it is condemned to darkness forever.

Moreover, the darkness should not be abhorred as something unwarranted but as a way out of the illusion of truth beyond what human beings have the capability to ascend to. More than that, truth and “objectivity” now become “a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings, not of accurate representation of something nonhuman” (Achieving Our Country: leftist thought in the twentieth-century America , p. 35).

Foucault’s remarks in this context are naturally classic: “. . . the great question, according to Heidegger, was to know what was the ground of truth; according to Wittgenstein, it was to know what one was saying when one spoke the truth; but in my opinion . . . the question is: how is it that there is so little truth in truth” (Paul Veyne, “The Final Foucault and his Ethics”Foucault and His Interlocutors., p. 231, n. 1.).

One outcome of the abandonment of the search for truth, more precisely abandonment of the very idea of truth in its traditional sense, is the abandonment of the idea of justification. The West no longer deems it necessary to provide justification of its ideas and way of life on the basis of its claims of the uniqueness of its rationality. Justification now takes the form of fatalism, the “values” are not defended on the ground that they are based on a superior rationality but on the ground that “they are our flesh and blood, as long as they are our present” (Ibid., 226). One can refer to Richard Rorty to know what this means in practice, acceptance of naked ferocity and brutality of the only rogue* superpower of today’s world: “. . . we (Americans) are the first thoroughgoing experiment in national self-creation: the first nation state with no body but itself to please — not even God. We are the greatest poem because we put ourselves in the place of God; our essence is our existence, and our existence is in the future. Other nations thought of themselves as hymns to the glory of God. We redefine God as our future selves” (Achieving Our Country: leftist thought in the twentieth-century America , p. 22).

While talk of postmodern “openness”, plurality, fragility has multiplied, American barbarism, cruelty and ferociousness has not subsided. The image of new Western leaders such as Bill Clinton** , and “junior partner” Tony Blair has been portrayed as new “emphatic” leaders of the postmodern era although their cruelty can not be disguised by the rhetorical ploys of “ethical” foreign policy and dawn of the era of consensus and partnership, orchestrated by their postmodern advisors.

George Bush is not even bothered to wear the cloak of postmodernity and compassion. His recent State of the union address echoes Rorty’s brags about the power and might of America: “Even seven thousand miles away, across oceans and continents, on mountain tops and in caves, you will not escape the justice of this nation . . . Steadfast in our purpose, we now press on. We have known freedom’s price. We have shown freedom’s power. And in this great conflict, my fellow Americans, we will see freedom’s victory” (BBC News Wednesday, 30 January 2002).

The voyage from the “death of God” to the “death of man” has been seen as the dawn of a new “subjectivity” of a new humanity, a humanity that can live without any moorings, a humanity that realises that “they somehow bear up without secure foundations” (Henry S. Kariel, “Beginning at the End of Democratic Theory” in Democratic Theory and Practice, p. 260).

This has been seen as the dawn of an era when human beings become completely mature. However in our opinion the current state of Western discursive and non-discursive practices should be seen rather as the intensification in the gradual epistemological, moral and factual disintegration of Western civilisation.

More than two hundred years after the West’s announcement of the “death of God”, the “death of man” — the purported emergence of übermensch — demonstrates the futility and cruelty of the desire for freedom. Man is not God and cannot become God.

The desire for and belief in freedom both in its modern and postmodern forms is the desire for divinity. The quest for freedom, whether it is the quest of a “man” who is deluded by hallucinations of grandiose or of an “übermensch” who has realised his finitude, is mere futile vanity.

The desire for freedom is incompatible with man’s real status in this universe, his status as a creature of God. All great religions have emphasised the futility of and vanity of the desire for freedom. Even the pagan Greeks knew the futility of the fight against their gods.

The West is dying under the weight of the gravest of all sins it has committed, the sin of transgression. The West’s decay is evident in its inability to articulate any “good” for itself. Its moral and social decay, environmental depletion, menaces like AIDS that are threatening to wipe out the population of whole continents reflect this inability.

The West is committing suicide in the sense that the population espousing Western values is shrinking as an average of the world population quite alarmingly. The West’s share of world population is expected to fall as low as 9 percent in 2050 (Gray Dawn: The Global Aging Crisis, pp. 42-55).

The West is dying for one simple reason — sexual immorality and defeminisation have made love and motherhood impossible. There is no biological explanation of the decline in fertility rates. It is only the diabolical worship of freedom, which induces women to sacrifice children to the demon of pleasure.

Abandoning God is abandoning life — for the “dead heart is incapable of receiving life”(What is Sufism? p. 36). as Sheikh Abubakr Lings teaches . The West pretends that it has forgotten death — but as Heidegger saw, it is death alone, which you can choose when you choose to worship freedom. If the West desires to reverse this process it must abandon the desire for freedom. To be connected to the fountains of life again the West must surrender to its Lord, the Lord of heavens and earth:

Say O People of the Book! Come now to a word that is common between us and you: that we worship none but Allah, and that we associate naught with Him, and let not some of us take others as Lords, apart from Allah. And if they turn their backs, say: Bear witness that we are those who have submitted [to Allah]. (Qur’┐n 3: 64).

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*“The US is the only country condemned by the World Court for international terrorism” (Noam Chomsky, “Chomsky compendium: Interviews from Greek, Spanish, and French Press”).

**Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked about the death of ½ million Iraqi children on National TV. She replied that “it was hard choice” for the administration but ‘we think the price is worth it” (quoted in Noam Chomsky, “Chomsky compendium: Interviews From Greek, Spanish, and French Press).