Simply to assert, as Hart very much seems to, that the truth of a religious tradition is utterly severable from every particular element of that tradition, that it is essentially irrelevant to the inquiry into religion what the mass of believers believe or say they believe or are asked to believe, is, for the atheist, bad faith: a mere changing of the subject if not a deception.
As for Heidegger, Schmitt, their defenders, and all those suspected of actual or parallel “sympathies,” they will, of course, be denied the protection we extend to the last great and very German, very Jewish philosopher-theologians of the pre-Zionist or Diasporetic Age. The thought of identifying oneself with the Nazis and fellow travelers will be the thought of leaving normal life in liberal-democratic societies behind. We remain defined morally – to ourselves, concretely – by the justice of the physical and ideological destruction of the perverted culture-state that Heidegger and Schmitt literally stood up for in public, and that privately they supported more in spirit than post-war apologetic exercises led some to hope.
1. Intro by way of a response to Mr. Halasz at the Crooked Timber thread: @239: The Wikipedia entry on Kahn is a good capsule summary. I often wonder why, given that he’s a distinguished professor at Yale (not some…
“…the odd paradox whereby Bakunin, the greatest anarchist of the nineteenth century, had to become in theory the theologian of the anti-theological and in practice the dictator of an anti-dictatorship.”
antichristattwilightadmittedinconsequentlyasalwaysfearfullyasrarelythatwemightnoteverberidofGodaswemaintainourfaithingrammariftomeanistoconfessthentherearenotrueadvocatesofunbeliefandtheonlyauthenticatheismisinthesilenceunitingthebelieverandherdoubleinthenonexistentlydivinesubjectobjectofprayerclaimaintsofthenothingrevealthemselvesonlyastraitorstotheirowncausetheirownmostimplacableadversariesintheendasfromthebeginningourfellowfetishistsoftheword
The notion of a non-existence of theological fact is the opposite of the atheist thought, which originates in, constitutes, and upholds a position on its own absolute theological facticity. The doubt as to the existence of theological fact at all would be the beginning of the agnostic or possibly the anismic, not the atheist, inquiry.
Nothing prevents those with a conservative outlook or temperament from remaining aware of dire and whole wide world-encompassing possibilities, even the possibility or perhaps the certainty of their own, or their community’s, or nation’s, or culture’s, or civilization’s eventual impossibilization, but any sensibly conservative regard for language, or any conservative understanding of the idea of a conservative understanding, does or ought to prevent its advocacy, with or without the yelling.
The inquiry into what we mean when we invoke the name of the deity would both determine and be determined by the result of the inquiry into what we mean when we refer to ourselves. They are nearly the same inquiry, or two different aspects of a single inquiry, which is at the same time an inquiry into inquiry – the possibility of inquiry at all and the point of inquiry at all.
The new identity replaces the old one, and, where it does not appear as an amalgam of contradictions and imitations, it puts dimly grasped and highly uncertain possibilities next to moral deprivation: self-realization as self-annihilation in the current epoch, which also cannot be understood except as a product – result as well as aftermath – of another equation in a parallel format.
