Earlier today standing in front of the wonderful altar frieze in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin Joanna asked if the ambition to find an analogue to the kind of integrated aesthetic, moral and political qualities expressed in the altar had even been achieved in German culture. The traditional response to this is to look at Nietszche's Birth of Tragedy so we ended up chatting about that. Just today my own thinking about this book was framed by the debates on the previous day at the really great conference that Mark Somos had organised on secularisation and particularly on a remark made by Pascalis Kitromilides that one of the tragedies of modern politics was the manner in which the nation had, in some cases, become an object of religious energy in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Monotheistic nationalism has been one of the curses of the modern world. The idea that the nation offers a means of saving the individual, giving him or her a cast-iron set of values which meet all the exigencies of modern life, while guaranteeing justice and welfare for the community and the individual, has been a disasterous notion. As the nation has not fulfilled this set of expectations some national communities have taken flight into a fantasy that the problem has been pollution of the nation by heresy and heretics which could and should be eliminated, rather than a recognition that redemption cannot be a political event.
That thought in that place led me to have a better understanding of how poor Nietszche could have been so misunderstood, but also a suggestion for why his project, a this-worldly sufficient worldview, simply could not succeed. A man who was trying to move experience beyond what he saw as the wreckage left behind by the death of God suffered complete misunderstanding by monotheistic nationalists as yet another religious thinker. My suspicion though is that this fate, though unfortunate, was no accident and that such a thorough-going secularisation is impossible. Without religion to offer a rational locus for the hope of redemption of the broken world, that hope finds much less rational places to attach itself to.
To a mind or a community that can conceive of justice, it is intolerable that justice not be done. The village Hampdens cannot be unrecognised, the sparrow that falls must be accounted for. However, such a regime of totality would be unbearable, and the liberal demand that the individual confrontation with their own resolution of these impossible problems be absolutely respected is the core inheritance we take from the Enlightenment. This is the engine that drives secularisation of experience, but this resolution is insufficient. Everyday life without a framing idea of justice is impossible.
This is why my view is that the response to the problem of nationalism, even fundamentalist nationalisms that use religious dogmas as their content, cannot be secularism or total secularisation. The intuition that all is redeemed is fundamentally a religious intuition, and when expressed in that register enables a liberal politics and does not compete with it. Not everyone has to live in the two cities, but both have to be inhabited; we can never feel completely at home in the world and reconciled to it.
Machines and tools
2 days ago
