God's Zeal E-Book

Peter Sloterdijk

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 267

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The conflicts between the three great monotheistic religions Christianity, Judaism and Islam are shaping our world more than ever before. In this important new book Peter Sloterdijk returns to the origins of monotheism in order to shed new light on the conflict of the faiths today. Following the polytheism of the ancient civilizations of the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians, Jewish monotheism was born as a theology of protest, as a religion of triumph within defeat. While the religion of the Jews remained limited to their own people, Christianity unfolded its message with proclamations of universal truth. Islam raised this universalism to a new level through a military and political mode of expansion. Sloterdijk examines the forms of conflict that arise between the three monotheisms by analyzing the basic possibilities stemming from anti-Paganism, anti-Judaism, anti-Islamism and anti-Christianism. These possibilities were augmented by internal rifts: a defining influence within Judaism was a separatism with defensive aspects, in Christianity the project of expansion through mission, and in Islam the Holy War.

Leseprobe

First published in German as Gottes Eifer. Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2007

This English edition © Polity Press, 2009

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4506-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4507-0(paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9465-8(epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9372-9(mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Bazon Brock – for several reasons. Firstly because, thanks to his reflections on a normative concept of civilization, he provided one of the polar reference points for the thoughts presented here. Secondly, because his seventieth birthday, despite having taken place some months ago, offered an occasion of almost challenging quality. Finally, it was he who provoked the present study through his own personal initiative. The following text is based on a lecture I was asked to give by Bazon Brock and Yael Katz Ben Shalom on the occasion of the opening of the Artneuland gallery in Berlin on 28 November 2006, a venue that thematicizes, among other things, the development of the trialogue between the monotheistic religions in the medium of the arts – but also supports the secular exchange between Israelis, Arabs and Europeans. The mixed response to my roughly sketched, rushed oral presentation gave me something of an idea of the difficulties involved in such a project. That experience formed one of the motivations for the slightly slower, more complete exposition of my thoughts I have attempted here.

There is a further reason for my decision to dedicate this text to Bazon Brock. In the summer of 2006, on the occasion of the aforementioned birthday, I had the honour of being invited by Chris Derkon, with the patronage of Hubert Burda, to give a eulogy in the Haus der Kunst in Munich for the artist, art critic, civilization theorist, pedagogue of provocation and performance philosopher Brock. In my speech, I attempted to hold a mirror up to him in order to characterize him through similarities and contrasts with four figures from recent art and cultural history: Marcel Duchamps, Salvador Dalí, Joseph Beuys and Friedrich Nietzsche. I took the latter's concept of intellectual honesty in order to ascribe it to the jubilarian in a highly personal sense. In that context, which invited thinking in superlatives, I could take the liberty of making the following statement: ‘My dear Bazon Brock, you will have to put up with my saying that you are the most honest person of our time.’ On that occasion, I spoke those words in front of an audience that was at the same time a circle of friends. Now I would like to repeat them to a readership that constitutes no more or less than a public.

1The premises

When studying the writings of philosophical authors that demand a thorough inspection of one's own discourse, one occasionally stumbles upon paragraphs that are conspicuous because they are obviously not necessitated by the course of a particular idea, but rather stem from a sudden associative urge that interrupts the development of an argument. In Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, for example, in the section dealing with the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, the author includes that now famous reference to ‘life's Sundays’ – meaning those exceptional states of existence relished with such demonstrative sensual enjoyment by the people he depicts. Obviously it is not Hegel the dialectician speaking here, the thinker who knows most of what he knows systematically, rather than simply having ‘picked it up’ somewhere. In this passage, he is bypassing his logical apparatus and speaking as a descendant of Swabian Protestantism encountering a welcome echo of his youthful impressions in the relaxed indecency of Dutch everyday life. So even if these boisterous philistines from the damp North are anything but saints, they surely cannot be entirely bad people with such good cheer – and, when the occasion arises, he will tell the reader this in the manner of a declaration of faith. If one so desired, one could see a hidden doctrine in Hegel's formulation: as highly as we cherish what is wonderful, it is the duty of art to let the commonplace have the last word. Does the value of that trivial Sunday feeling not increase to the same degree that we grow tired of the cult of exceptional states, these continuations of the wonderful by the most extreme means?