Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Atheismus, Postmoderne (post-modern age); der Gottlose des Theaters (Bacon); Reduktion auf die bloße Existenz (ex-sist)

Kurzinhalt: ... man has no nature; man is not an essence. Man is only a presence, a sort of process ... an actual "being-there-in-the-moment" in action and in freedom; His project is simply to "exist" the godless world

Textausschnitt: The Godless Man of the Post-Modern Age

101a Two types of the godless man have appeared. Both are new. Their appearance is, in fact, the main reason why our own day needs a new name. "Post-modern" is not fully descriptive; but perhaps it sufficiently suggests the idea of continuity amid difference. (Fs)
101b First, there is the godless man of the communist world revolution. He is not an individual, but a collectivity, a class, or better, a party, the creator of a people who will exhibit in finished form the biblical reality of "the people who do not know God." The dynamic of his atheism is not that of his modern predecessor-the will to understand and explain, without God, the given world that man immediately encounters distinct from himself. The new Marxist man wills to transform the world. By "world" he means all that Marx meant by "nature," that is, the total system of material production and human relationships that the labor of man has brought into being throughout history. The world is the industrial world, the world wrought by man's industry. Nature in this sense is man's "inorganic body," in Marx' phrase. With it man makes a unity; he is not wholly distinct from it, since it is his own work. Thus, it represents him or, better, it presents him to himself, and to that extent it is himself. In the course of its elaboration, man's inherent powers come to his view. Through this nature, which is his own work, man comes to concrete existence. The Marxist will is to transform the nature of man in this complex sense. And the transformation is to be effected not only without God but in his despite. In a word, which is Marx' own blunt word, the Marxist will is the "suppression of God." (Fs) (notabene)

102ba Second, there is the godless man of the Theater. I call him such, using the word "theater" in much the same sense that it had for Bacon when he listed as his fourth set of human idols -more abstractly, prejudices-the "idols of the theater." I understand Theater, as he substantially did, to be the world of the public imagination, common impressions, generally shared feelings about things. It is essentially a world of dramatic fantasy and emotion which serve, however, as vehicles of ideas. Our new godless man inhabits the Theater in this sense after having himself created it. Its creation is his project, which he carries out largely through the media of art-the novel, preferably the play (in what already has its name, the "theater of absurdity"), painting, sculpture, and, even, the performing arts. He is not a philosopher in the high classic sense or even in the diminished modern sense. He cares nothing for metaphysics or epistemology, the quondam ally but modern enemy of metaphysics. His profession is phenomenology, the work of describing the "situation" of man. He would like to go on to ethics, but he has so far been unsuccessful in constructing an ethic other than an "ethic of the situation," which is not an ethic at all. In any case, he will not go on to anthropology if by this term is meant the science that deals with the nature of man. His postulate is that man has no nature; man is not an essence. Man is only a presence, a sort of process, or, if you give the word something of its primitive Hebraic sense, an existence, a continual "standing forth," an actual "being-there-in-the-moment" in action and in freedom. (Fs)

Kommentar (10/04/07): Wiederum: die Debatte des Marktplatzes und Theaters heute über Sexualität ist nichts anders als ein Wollen dessen, dass der Mensche keine "Natur" hat, sondern nur in einem Hier-und-Jetzt besteht.

103a The will of the godless man of the Theater is not that of his predecessor of the Academy-the will to understand and explain the world without God. For him the world is absurd. Still less does he will to change the world; for it would still be absurd no matter what the change. His project is simply to "exist" the godless world (I should spell the word "ex-sist" in order to bring out its transitive sense). Even more exactly, his project is to "exist" himself, the man who wills to be godless in a world that he sees to be godless through his intention that it should be godless like himself. He wills the absence of God. (Fs) (notabene)