Yet religious heteronomy fights against such an idea of this, regarding it as worldliness and realism, gross humanism and relativism—so clearly, one sooner or later has to choose on his or her own either for heteronomy or autonomy. The irony is that heteronomous indoctrination very subtly corrupts the quest for autonomy. One can feel radically self-directed while being unconsciously manipulated by a cultural ideology that surreptitiously encroaches on one’s mind and life, even virtually takes over. This exacerbates the natural difficulty of one’s becoming autonomous, since, Kohlberg noted that most adults do not consistently reach the stage of rational autonomous abstractions in making moral decisions. Fears of disapproval and punishment, the specter of the earlier parental years of heteronomy, continue for many. Rather, as Hoffer said, they seek “to belong” more than anything else, to find security if not also freedom from freedom’s responsibility in belonging. 52
The real danger is not even that of “belonging” to a group. I acknowledge that the better life discovered within most religions is that of intensified, constructive human relations. It is in a sense of “belonging,” potentially rich as a support system. The problem comes only when the group’s Absolute dogma is expected to dominate if not absolutely dictate norms to each member. It was interesting that when Harvey Cox undertook to investigate in depth the new interest college students had in Eastern religions, so became a part of certain groups in various places, his conclusion was not that these university students were simply right or wrong in this spiritual exploration, but rather that their hope to escape authority, heteronomy, or rigidity of traditional religions in these new Eastern pursuits actually revealed eventually similar structures of authority and rigidity.53
On the other hand, the call to autonomy radiates from many possible sources, as Richard Rorty noticed; sometimes from abstract or impersonal sources but more often in narratives or stories such as writings or enactments through the theater, movies or videos that express cultures which present a contradictory element or a radically different ideology or basic position that exposes the areas in which one has not yet thought on one’s own. I believe, this awakening usually comes in its most potent form in very personal relations, that is, in an actual encounter with and befriending of other people whose ideas or basic orientation is so different that they appear almost threatening to one’s preconceptions—something most people have experienced.
The difference between crude clubs and stones of our ancient ancestors and the nuclear, germ, and cyber warfare available today, however, increases the intensity of the focus of such interaction with the “other” or “different,” and multiplies the need for mutual trust and respectful mutual autonomy. There is no longer another distant geographical area to which one can easily take one’s relatives and friends in order to escape the presence of this other who is now cybernetically ubiquitous.54 And war, even global warming, or complete pollution of earth can easily put an end not simply to a handful of people but to a whole nation, even to the whole species of homo sapiens, and any or all other species that might eventually replace homo sapiens. Finite limits of and the demand for long-term beneficial use of resources, spaces, and options expose the necessity of real trust of each other, of genuine social solidarity, of civil discourse, and responsible reverence for life of mutual interdependent autonomous selves. Most of these pressing crises of the twenty-first century were totally inconceivable to ancient religions. If they were not existential or ethical problems for them, they naturally supplied no answers, no ethics addressed to the problems. Theirs was a radically different world, which we would not even recognize if we were transplanted in time.
The Burdens of the “Camel” Stage: The Question and Arrangement of the Inquiry
In Western cultures, two of the most famous cases of a radical rejection of the heteronomous religious life in which one was raised were Jesus of Nazareth and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Jesus was born into the tension between an absolutized political system of the Pax Romana and the absolutized deity of Judaism and its Torah. More than 1,900 years later, Nietzsche was born into the tension between a growing nationalism, which was being absolutized by Hegelian thought, and a Protestant form of Christianity, which itself was absolutized. Does it seem shocking to pair them up? It shouldn’t. It does so only because the Christian culture has passed down images or caricatures of each that pits them against each other as the starkest of opposites, mortal enemies, caricatures from lack of close reading or a misunderstanding of their skillful and disconcerting hyperbole.
It is no wonder if Nietzsche admired Jesus. But he had no use for Christianity, which had simply restored a slightly novel and eventually more absolutistic version of the very same inflexible idealism against which Jesus had stood. Few Christians have detected this irony; even fewer have acknowledged it. Thomas J. J. Altizer was one of those few, as his book, The Contemporary Jesus, shows. Altizer understood and accepted the apocalyptic nature of Jesus’ message and person.55 The early church’s reversal of Jesus’ own reversal of values will be no better understood than was Altizer’s discovery of the “death of God” through his familiarity with Nietzsche, which he announced in the 1960s. Why? Because the same religious heteronomy against which both Jesus and Nietzsche ranted prevails still today. It is not limited to fundamentalist sects of the Christian religion. It never has been. All religions thrive off authoritarianism and heteronomy. It is simply more obvious and extreme in the most fundamentalist branches in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and so forth.
Autonomy and realism are usually opposed by idealized social structures and rigid moral systems that help preserve the religious communities themselves. Only a handful of religious groups in history have ever espoused a conscious and consistent inclusivism or universalism, while the great majority have been exclusivistic. Very few Christian theologians have supported a consistent autonomy, which is almost a total novelty.56 It is as if most theologians just do not want to give up on the ideas contained in heteronomy; they simply slip categories to keep the personal God who has been so radically discredited in the past three centuries, and label it as “faithfulness” to God.
In his most important work, as he judged it, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche,57 in his hyperbolic imagery to encourage autonomy, enumerated “three metamorphoses of the [human] spirit”: it first becomes a camel, then a lion, and finally a child. Nietzsche was convinced that only through such metamorphoses is one able finally to realize oneself and think for oneself, to become autonomous and unashamed of one’s own ideas and willing, without which the fullest human life is unattainable (137–40). There is no “the way” possessed and fed to the masses by the few elite gurus; there is only “my way” for each person, which he or she must realize and articulate (307). Zarathustra, despite his life-mission of teaching others, realizes finally in the “Ass Festival” that he is not flattered but insulted to find his followers tending to worship or venerate his teachings (425–39). So he drives them off and resorts to a cave with his animals, though finally emerging from it to continue his work.
By “spirit,” Nietzsche meant the animating and intentionally constructive power of life, not simply Hegel’s “Reason,” much less his “Absolute Reason.” Walter Kaufmann noted that Nietzsche’s use of the German word “Geist” could be translated into English either as “spirit,” “mind,” “intellect,” “wit,” or, depending on the context, ultimately should also include esprit.58 Sometimes Nietzsche used it with an obvious religious meaning, yet at other times with an anti-religious meaning,59 and often it was simply neutral regarding religion. It was