Capitalism and Religion

The Price of Piety

Philip Goodchild

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134459513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Historia económica

Our global ecological crisis demands that we question the rationality of the culture that has caused it: western modernity's free market capitalism. Philip Goodchild develops arguments from Nietzsche, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marx, to suggest that our love of Western modernity is an expression of a piety in which capitalism becomes a global religion, in practice, if not always in belief. This book presents a philosophical alternative that demands attention from philosophers, critical theorists, philosophers of religion, theologians, and those in ecological politics.

Part I: The problem of reason

1: The murder of God

Nietzsche’s critique of reason

Life, nature and history

The case for the prosecution against religion, morality and reason in the European tradition has been made pre-eminently by Nietzsche. His decision already taken, Nietzsche paid little attention to arguments against the existence of God. As is often remarked, the concern of Nietzsche’s madman, who, like Diogenes the Cynic in search of man, runs into the market-place with a lit lantern in the bright morning hours crying, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ is not to announce the death of God, for this has already been accepted. It is to announce the murder of God, and the very magnitude of this deed:

God is dead. And we have killed him—you and I. How did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?¹

The madman’s atheist listeners have no comprehension of the implications of their deed: the event is too tremendous to reach the ears of men. In Book Five of The Gay Science—a later addition,—Nietzsche begins to unpack the first shadows of this event. Although the initial consequence of the deed is a new daybreak, the cheerfulness expressed in this book, ‘a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn,’ the prospect of venturing out on an open sea,² Nietzsche also prophesies a coming ‘monstrous logic of terror…an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth.’³ This apocalyptic event is the collapse of all that has been supported by faith in the existence of God, including the whole of European morality. For God may be identified with the perspective of the judge who assesses whether existence conforms to morality.⁴ The death of God results in the replacement of this perspective with the perspectives of existence itself: life as nature and history. ‘Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”?’⁵

Nietzsche took Darwinian evolution to imply that distinctively human qualities, such as consciousness, moral obligation and piety, are historical and derivative phenomena, the products of non-conscious, non-moral, natural processes, and none of their claims to escape historical relativity can be legitimated. It is precisely such piety that has been murdered in the Nietzschean questioning of the value of values—his investigation of the role and function of morality. If morality can be taken as having its origins in non-moral phenomena of nature and history, then it loses all claim to authority, leaving only life, nature and history as the sources that construct values for their own ends.

The murder of God means that all human beliefs, values and thoughts may be explained by their production within the processes of life, nature and history. More radical consequences result when the preconditions for science are examined in this way: faith in science, an unconditional ‘will to truth,’ or ‘truth at any price’, may yield dangerous consequences, as we now know all too well: its existence therefore cannot be justified by a calculus of utility, or explained by evolutionary advantage. The will to truth, therefore, is not motivated by the utility of avoiding deception, for truths are sought even when they are dangerous. By contrast, the will to truth expresses a moral sentiment: ‘I will not deceive, not even myself.’ The will to truth expresses a metaphysical faith that truth resides in ‘being itself’, the truth of the real world as such, which is entirely independent of the procedures for attaining it;⁶ the ultimate value of this truth stands apart from life, nature and history:

No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and in so far as they affirm this ‘other world’,—look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?—But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.⁷

‘Honest and intransigent atheism’, for Nietzsche, thus results from the Christian ascetic ethic of truthfulness—the will not to deceive oneself, even when such deceptions are in one’s own interests.⁸ The atheistic critique of religion from the perspective of a ‘secular’ reason, in the name of its own ontology grounded variously in the material, the political, the moral, or the technological, expresses a metaphysical piety in relation to its own ontology.⁹ This piety has itself been learned from Christianity.¹⁰ Ultimately, this ascetic will to truth must call itself into question by asking, ‘What does the will to truth signify?’¹¹

Nietzsche, while attempting to draw the fullest consequences from the critique of religion, points out the extent to which the critical unmasking of religion by science ‘is still pious’¹²—so that its fate will be bound up with that of religion. In relation to its value for life, the will to truth of the Enlightenment unmasking of dogma as superstition expresses another form of asceticism, a life that cuts into itself. Atheism results from the refutation of the moral, Christian God, as if there could be no other kinds of god.¹³ Nietzsche himself remained pious,¹⁴ as evidenced by the way in which reverence is at the heart of his transvalued thinking—the revaluation of all values does not mean the end of evaluation. For example, in portraying the magnitude of the murder of God, Nietzsche attributes a value to this event. Similarly, the symbolism of height and depth that structures Thus Spoke Zarathustra expresses the dimension of evaluation and respect.

Just as there is no end to evaluation, there is also no end to critical enquiry: it would be a mistake to think that Nietzsche remains caught within the conscious self-contradiction of a will to truth which wishes to deny the existence of truth. Instead, he abandons the metaphysical will to truth in favour of a ‘will to power’. One may grasp what this means by observing how this produces a change in the element of thought, the way thought images and orients itself. Nietzsche’s character Zarathustra indicates a complete shift in paradigm with regard to the thinking of transcendence, value and truth. This triple metamorphosis is described in symbolism by Zarathustra as a metamorphosis of the spirit from the load-bearing camel, who responds to the injunctions of morality, ‘Thou shalt,’ such as ‘to feed upon the acorns and grass of knowledge and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger of the soul,’ through the lion who says, ‘I will,’ to the child who is ‘innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.’¹⁵ This is no simple glorification of the will or of power.¹⁶ The transvaluing question of the value of values, of what is worth thinking about, may paralyse thought for a moment, in a nihilistic circle of self-questioning, which will continue as long as completion of the enquiry is postponed. Alternatively, a conclusion of blessed ignorance will bring such questioning to a merciful release, liberated from the teleological plans of a moral consciousness, and thought will continue on a path of its own devising.¹⁷ Each thought, each moment, then becomes a creation of values, a first-motion, a self-propelling wheel, a ‘will to power’.

Thinking itself becomes an event: one encounters the life, nature and history of thought in its arising in the passage of time. In the act of beginning to think, we evaluate what is most worth spending time thinking about by spending that time. Both what is questioned and our questioning are brought into question, and thrown into a state of flux. The earth has become unchained from the sun; the shore has disappeared and the philosopher is completely at sea. Being is replaced by becoming because there is no longer any holding fast. The question of philosophy overthrows the autonomy of a thought which is able to legislate its own values at the same time as it undermines the dependence of a thought which is grounded in supreme values. The first aspect of the metamorphosis, then, is that static ontologies, axiologies or divinities, as represented in consciousness, are replaced by temporal existence as a flux of becoming.

Thought becomes driven by life: life determines thought through the evaluations or emotions it enacts in us. Nietzsche contrasted his own thought with that of the moral and impersonal ‘will to truth’ of science and philosophy:

All great problems demand great love, and of that only strong, round, secure spirits who have a firm grip on themselves are capable. It makes the most telling difference whether a thinker has a personal relationship to his problems and finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness, or an “impersonal” one, meaning that he can do no better than to touch them and grasp them with the antennae of cold, curious thought.¹⁸

The second aspect of thought in this metamorphosis is that it is affectively driven, and gains an existential import. ‘Personal relationship’ may be understood here as involving destiny, distress or greatest happiness: these are limiting parameters that individuate a personal life as a coherent episode. The person does not choose his or her problems; instead, the reverence for such problems is given as that which determines the individual.¹⁹ Destiny, therefore, should not be understood in the static terms of hindsight as the path of a completed life, but in dynamic terms as that which determines the path of a life—the giving rather than the given, the living rather than the lived. The key feature of this ‘personal relationship’ to one’s problems is that the course of their solution may change everything; nothing is held in reserve. A life is considered in terms of the events that compose it as an episode, and not in terms of its results as a solution to its problems. Thought wagers life entirely upon becoming.

If Nietzsche speaks in the name of a host of impulses that is too heterogeneous to be comprehended within a single concept, or in the name of a creative power of thought that cannot be represented by the concepts it produces,²⁰ this is not motivated by some dogmatic love of heterogeneity or difference for its own sake. Instead, he affirms a spiritual way of thinking that will not allow itself to be reduced to the model of knowledge as recognition, for it expresses its own life. Affirming itself apart from all artificial certainties of science, it remains content with ambiguity:²¹

Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and all wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses.²²

There is no way for such a spirit to express itself in simple propositions. Only in one proposition did Nietzsche come close to revealing the identity of his spirit: ‘woe is me! I am a nuance’.²³ The source of thought can no longer be thought in terms of the Parmenidean model of the One or Being, where thinking unites with the being that is thought. The circularity of thought and being that grounds certainty in truth is undone in favour of an unconscious, unthinkable source of thought: an abyss that undermines all grounds, a chaos that escapes all fixed determinations, a chance that precludes all reason and order. The third aspect of this metamorphosis of thought is a faith that embraces uncertainty, indetermination, and an abyss of chaos. This faith is itself transvalued from an adherence to grounds to a taking leave of all grounds.

One may therefore tentatively propose that Nietzsche replaces an ontology of being and a logic of identity with an ontology of becoming and a logic of difference. It is, however, important to free such concepts of becoming and difference from the abstract and generalizing roles that they bear in conventional thought. Difference as such or in general holds no value; instead, difference is only affirmed in three figures that escape conceptual representation: as becoming, as affect, and as the unthinkable. These figures of difference remain unthought within conventional uses of representational and scientific language, leading to suspicions of the metaphysical and illusory status of much of our ‘knowledge’.

Nietzsche’s critique of religion

Imaginary causes

An affective drive for thinking may be contrasted with a moral disciplining of reason. According to Nietzsche, a moral person uses big moral words, such as justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue, to ‘give himself the appearance of superiority over more spiritual people,’ and accomplish revenge against the spirit.²⁴ For words are limited for describing inner processes and drives. Those words with which morality attempts to discipline the spirit, such as anger, hatred, love, pity, desire, knowledge, joy and pain, are all names for extreme states,²⁵ lacking the subtlety to communicate the ways of the spirit. From an evolutionary perspective, consciousness is merely a net of communication between human beings, evolved for the purpose of protecting a solitary human being within a herd. One can therefore only succeed in becoming conscious of what is common, not what is individual—and words name only crude extremes.²⁶ Knowledge, even philosophical knowledge, is really only the reduction of something strange to something familiar:²⁷ wherever a word is set up, a problem is identified but a solution is not given. A subordination of all existence to the power of words, as if they constituted solutions in themselves, is a means of closing oneself off from the problems that generate thought.²⁸ All knowledge is moral, therefore, in so far as it trains the individual to be a function of the herd,²⁹ to think according to common custom. Note that this is less a historical or psychological comment than a transcendental comment on the exclusion of change, affect and uncertainty from knowledge. Since language functions to supp...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Capitalism and religion
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The problem of reason
• Part II: The problem of ethics
• Part III: The problem of piety