After God. Peter Sloterdijk

that surrounded art in the nineteenth century. Even Shakespeare – who flourished barely two generations after Martin Luther and eight generations before Nietzsche – only touched in passing on the real origins of the pull toward an eccentric positionality, even if his dictum was destined to be remembered. The entire world is a stage and men and women together mere players: with this thesis he proclaims what will be interpreted philosophically three centuries later – that being and being seen converge. The element of discontent in civilization cannot be attributed solely to the compulsory renunciation of the drives; it stems even more from the feeling of being burdened by the gaze of the unfriendly other. The human being cannot become what and who she is so long as she does not produce herself before the eyes of observers. Existence implies a permanent test of whether one can let oneself be seen.

      Regardless of whether this thesis was presented around 1600 or after 1900, we must derive the excentering of the human being, his removal from the center, from much more remote events. Shakespeare and Plessner make some essential points, but both come millennia too late to bear witness to the real beginnings. In a nutshell, the impetus to establish and solidify the “eccentric positionality” that Plessner would have wanted to interpret as a supratemporal constant was due to the emergence of higher powers, typically called gods, which had already driven the human being out of his animal centering early on. The gods of the first hour are entities that are interested in the existence of human beings in an uncanny, ambivalent, and for the most part interventionist fashion. In the beginning, gods appeared to be beings that had to settle an outstanding balance with humans. Even Dante still speaks of God’s vendetta (Inferno 16, 16–18; Inferno 24, 119). The resentment of those who no longer exist against those who do is condensed in these beings. At the same time, they hold all the power, because their chapters have been closed, while the living still flounder about in incompleteness.

      Accordingly, Nietzsche’s sentence “God is dead” contains an element of perspectival deception: whatever truth it may express, that truth pertains less to the end of the history of the human being’s relation to what lies beyond the world (for this has largely faded today)⁴ than to its beginning. Dead is the god who looked over the shoulders of the living with an eye of ontological envy – but also the one who looked through the lenses of compassion for those who still had to exist. From the fact of his own deadness, the early god staked out claims against the living. Debt wove the cord that connected the here and the beyond.⁵ Indifferent gods formed a very late chapter in the history of transcendence: with an everlasting smile, they prefigure the mysteries of a releasing being, which does not insist on getting revenge in the present or in the future. Not without reason does Aristotle emphasize God’s lack of envy; he is not jealous of the human being’s knowledge. The loving god was a later addition, although, admittedly, his love was often a sort of compulsory contract filled with threats. For the time being, we must continue to wait for gods who are loving beyond ambivalence, and until they arrive human beings would do well to look after the shape of their own relationships.

The morning twilight of the gods takes place in a half-archaic period, when the heavenly ones don’t yet know the virtues of indifference and equanimity. Human beings of the twilight period had to grapple with such invisible and not indifferent gods, who hovered over the collective like embittered ancestors in a vengeful mood. Human beings learned from these gods to fall outside themselves. Already in very remote times, human beings hit on the idea that their fates depended on powers that were incomprehensible for sacred reasons, terrifying, and occasionally benevolent. They did so independently of one another, in the most diverse cultures, owing to the similarity of their situation.⁶ These powers, whether they bore names that could be appealed to or not, allowed themselves not only to be moved by petitions, but to be bound by means of cleverly negotiated contracts. The most radical form of a binding petition is blood sacrifice on the altar of a beyond that is not too remote. Les dieux ont soif [The gods are thirsty]. In a universe pervaded by the law of reciprocity, fascination-generating sacrifice, whether in the form of human or animal life, compels the otherworldly addressee to answer with a rich return gift of existential goods. The first macroeconomy develops in the system of sacrifice.

      What we call today the “pressure to succeed” formed the first article in the system of terms of trade⁷ between the executors and the recipients of sacrifice. Ever since these terms have been established, the gods have shared the business risks with the cultures that worship them. They represent transcendence in the state of manipulability. The gods are dependent on human beings who believe that they are dependent on gods. The Latin term religio points to this schema of reciprocal neediness: initially it signifies nothing less than the anxious care to safeguard the protocol when dealing with the higher powers.

      We have thus introduced a first phase of excentering. It implies the tendency to take on a certain role; here the human partner puts herself in the position of surrendering to the expectations of a strong superworld. Entrance into the eccentric position came about for the first time only when ethnic groups became willing to respond to adversity by jointly taking the path that leads from anxiety to ecstasy. At the beginning of cultural evolution, it is of course not the individual who ends up in a position beside himself. It is rather the collective that consolidates itself: as a group sacrificing together in the common experience of horror, it takes responsibility for the death of a living being – whose equality as a bearer of life is deeply felt.⁸

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We give the name “high cultures” to what was at first a very small number of civilizations. These civilizations sublimate archaic transcendence by keeping the burden of blood sacrifice at bay. Indeed, they elevate the superworld into higher spheres by removing it entirely from the effective domain of human manipulations. “High culture” is a code name for three inseparable movements. First it designates the hypostatization of an unmanipulable superworld, whose incorruptibility is condensed into pathos concepts such as “truth,” kosmos, universum, brahman, and tao. Second it signifies the civil war that selected individuals launched against all-too-humanness – and eo ipso against every form of trivial religiosity, which now gets called “superstition.” Lastly it refers to the liberation of death and the progressive easing of the burdens of threats, debt collection, and revenge.

      Karl Jaspers used the phrase “cultures of the axial age” to refer to the groups that instigated these campaigns against the rest of the world.⁹ The campaigns were begun by enlightened individuals; but, once begun, they could not be stopped. Among these cultures Jaspers counted the Chinese of the Confucian and Taoist age, the Indians from the time of the Upanishads, the Persians of the Avesta, the Jews of the high period of the prophets, and the Greeks of the tragic theater and the first philosophy. At that time – around 2,500 years ago, give or take a few centuries – a “breakthrough” occurred worldwide; note the military metaphor, which this time has been employed correctly. Worldviews that were more abstract and tended toward universality came into being, as did ethical doctrines that pertained to everything. All of a sudden, the gateway to the age of excessive demands was pushed open. Here begins the world history of an exclusivity that paints universal inclusions on the wall. The superworld began to code itself in concepts of truth that one could no longer live up to through externalized rituals. From then on, communication with higher powers and with the Highest was much more likely to take place in thinking souls and in literacy-demanding schools than on sacrificial stones and in sacral slaughterhouses. What later gets called “culture” designated, already at this time, work toward devulgarizing the superpowerful.

      Among rare and circumspect individual human beings, as they were to begin with, the sublimating tendency led to the (premature) insight that the absolute owes them not even the slightest of things; rather they owe everything to it. The emergent spiritual elite launched a subtle, unattainable, and thus unending civil war against the uncircumspect, as they arise everywhere from everyday life. This was a civil war that could be fixed as a permanent mission.

Right from the beginning, four almost invincible groups stand against the few who have knowledge: the haughty, whose pride prevents them from gaining insight (given that insight cannot be gained without humiliation); those with entitlement, who want to persist in their received religio (given that knowledge is not possible