The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (30 page)

The League of Militant Atheists claimed that its membership grew from 100,000 in 1926 to 5.5 million in 1932, impressive if true (some scholars have argued that its records were falsified). And here we encounter a genuine problem of interpretation. For Stalin’s purges intensified during the 1930s, and by about 1937, when a census of religious faith was taken, it showed that “religious belief and activity were still quite pervasive throughout the Soviet empire.” This was so unwelcome that “religious persistence became the scapegoat of the Soviet ideological machine” and brutality was rained down on the offenders as never before. The latest investigations show that thousands of individuals were executed for religious crimes and hundreds of thousands were imprisoned in labor camps or psychiatric hospitals.
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It was only on the eve of the Second World War that the killing of religious believers was halted, as the Soviet regime itself faced death from a foreign invader. For the duration of the war, atheist conversion was put on hold and the League was disbanded.

But it was not all over. After the war a new organization, the Knowledge Society, was created to carry on the work, and the greatest campaign in history to kill off God was resumed.

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The Implicitness of Life and the Rules of Existence

E
arly in 1919, the German sociologist Max Weber gave a lecture in Munich on “the inner calling to science” (often translated into English as “Science as a Vocation”). At the time, Munich, like many other large cities in Germany, was in a state of revolutionary upheaval; in fact, civil war was not far off and in Bavaria a Soviet Republic would be established as a result of which it was hoped to found a “realm of light, beauty and reason.” Weber dismissed such ideas as “irresponsible,” on the grounds that “politics is overtaxed when it is expected to establish sense and happiness.” But sense and happiness were his concern in his lecture.

The philosopher Karl Löwith, who had been injured in the war, had experienced its destructive power and had been captured by the Italians, was in the audience in Munich that day. He wrote later that Weber, who had only a year to live, “strode through the overcrowded hall to the lectern, looking pale and tired. [His] face, surrounded by an unkempt beard, reminded me of the somber glow of the prophetic figures of Bamberg Cathedral. The impact was stunning. . . . After the innumerable revolutionary speeches by the liberal activists, Weber’s words were like a salvation.”

WEBER’S UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

This speech, says the German historian Rüdiger Safranski, provoked a violent public controversy. “On the surface it deals with the ethos of the sciences, but basically Weber addresses the question of how the yearnings for a meaningful life can still be fulfilled within the steel capsule of modern ‘rationalized’ civilization.”
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Weber argued that science can make a contribution to self-awareness but cannot relieve us of the decision on how to live our lives. Our civilization, he said, “has so thoroughly and comprehensively moved into a belief in rationality that it undermines the individual’s confidence in his own ability to make decisions.” Moreover, the certainty on technical matters that the sciences bring with them leads us to demand/expect the same certitude and objectivity in the life of values and ethics, and in the search for meaning. “The result is a boom in ideologies wooing our trust by donning scientific garb.” This sees the emergence of what he called “academic prophets” (
Kathederpropheten
), who “react to the lost mystery of a world disenchanted by rationalism by wrongly rationalizing the last magic that is left to it—the individual’s personality and its freedom. . . . Instead of leaving mystery where it still exists—in the soul of the individual—the ‘academic prophets’ submerge the disenchanted world into the twilight of deliberate re-enchantment.”
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Against this, Max Weber pleads for unmixing.

Weber was in no doubt that in the world created by science and technology, God was dead. Either we must accept this, he insisted, or become what he termed “religious virtuosi,” modeled on artistic virtuosi, sacrificing the intellect to living with faith in the way that artistic virtuosi live with their faith in their own abilities. The “transcendental realm of the mystical life” can never be explained in scientific terms, he said, and we should never seek to amalgamate the two. Nor could there ever be the kind of certainty about mystical life that was available in science, but we might draw comfort from the “brotherhood” of believers and the relationships available within that brotherhood.
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Safranski tells us that nearly every major town in Weimar Germany had at that time what he called the “saints of inflation,” eager to save Germany
in its turmoil. “In Karlsruhe there was one who called himself ‘Primal Vortex’ and promised his followers a share in cosmic energy; in Stuttgart a ‘Son of Man’ invited his followers to a redeeming vegetarian Last Supper; in Düsseldorf a new Christ preached the imminent end of the world and called for withdrawal into the Eifel Mountains. In Berlin the great halls were filled by the ‘spiritual monarch,’ Ludwig Haeusser, who demanded ‘the most consistent Jesus ethics’ in the sense of original communism, propagated free love and offered himself as a ‘führer,’ as ‘the only hope of a higher development of the nation, the Reich, and mankind.’”

Safranski puts these eccentrics down as “aberrations” of the revolutionary excitement of those days in post–First World War Germany, “decisionists of the renewal of the world, raving metaphysicians, and profiteers in the vanity fair of ideologies and surrogate religions.”
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UNDISCLOSED EVERYDAY ABUNDANCE

Amid this miasma of views and doctrines, one man (apart from Weber himself) stood out: Martin Heidegger, one of the most important, and controversial, philosophers of the modern period—and this would be true even without his Nazi affiliation. Born a Catholic in Messkirch in Baden-Württemberg, Heidegger was originally destined for the church; but he converted to Protestantism before losing his faith entirely, then returned to Catholicism near the end of his life.

Heidegger is not an easy writer to paraphrase, as any number of scholars will confirm, and this has to do partly with his style, which is often turgid and opaque; but in fairness it has as much—if not more—to do with the fact that he was trying to put into words phenomena that he believed had not been put into words before in quite the way he had in mind. He was not a poet, but in effect he was trying to do what poets do—naming, identifying aspects of experience not identified before, in language appropriate to the new circumstances. In one of his writings he noted: “Thoughts come to us; we do not think them up. . . . Thinking is a gift, or grace, an event that overtakes us.”
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This links him with Rilke and his idea that poems “came” to him (see p. 229). Heidegger asks: “How do we
experience reality before we arrange it for ourselves in a scientific, or value-judging, or worldview approach?”
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For our purposes, Heidegger’s main ideas, as set out in his most important publications,
Being and Time
(1927),
What Is Metaphysics?
(1929),
The Origin of the Work of Art
and
Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry
(both 1936),
The Question of Technology
(1953) and
Gelassenheit
(Composure, 1955), fall under the following headings: “Being,” “Death,” “Caring” and “Authenticity.”

According to Heidegger, we are “thrown” into the world, in circumstances not of our own choosing, a world which is already well under way, and we must adjust as best we can, learn the rules, the implicit ones as well as the explicit ones, while also acknowledging that the world is full of an “undisclosed abundance” that we will never conquer totally. There is no inherent human nature, no essence to man, and as we confront this lack of essence, and are learning the rules—so far as they go—we also realize that we shall one day die. This set of circumstances means that one of the most important principles of life is decisiveness, that we are the product of our decisions and actions as much as (if not more than) our thoughts. Much of Heidegger’s philosophy was given over to the idea of
intensification
, that to live life intensely—more intensely than we did, as intensely as possible—is as close to meaning as we will/can get.

This is where Heidegger’s concept of Being comes in. This word is generally written with an initial capital in English, to draw attention to it (because in written German all nouns take a capital). The corresponding German word,
Dasein
(composed of
da
, “there,” and
sein
, “to be” [“being”]), is now routinely used by English-language philosophers, mainly to emphasize that what Heidegger originally meant to stress was that Being is actually
Being-there
—that is, in some particular place and therefore at some particular time. Heidegger followed Husserl, to whom he was an assistant at the University of Freiburg between 1918 and 1923, in arguing against a theoretical approach to phenomena, stating that theory (a mainstay of science) involves abstractions that remove us from the everyday abundance of life.

THE GIFT OF SURRENDER

Heidegger thought there were different forms of Being, different levels, of which some were much better than others. He thought that modern life, with its noise and bustle and speed, created an “everydayness” in which there was no time for reflection and little opportunity for initiative or considered decision-making; that the science-led existence becomes the manipulation and control of the world rather than its enjoyment. This is what he meant by an “inauthentic” life.

In contrast, he thought we should aim for an authentic life which accepted, with composure (the concept of
Gelassenheit
), our own finitude in the face of the insurmountable superabundant plurality of the world. Our stance toward the world, our heightened sense of Being, is to be achieved by “dwelling” in the world, this world here and now, and by “dwelling” he meant “being at home” with our surroundings and our neighbors; the rapidly moving anonymous nature of modern city life was not Being in the fullest sense.

Heidegger thought that we should “care” for the world—another aspect of
Gelassenheit
; that instead of trying to control and manipulate and exploit the environment we should “let things be.” Here, he invoked poetry. He loved Hölderlin above all others, and believed that when we confront a poem (or “board a poem,” as Seamus Heaney once said), we have to “surrender” to it; we cannot fight it, we cannot control it, we cannot exploit it. A poem is in some ways a gift to the world and we must receive it as such. Obviously we will enjoy some gifts more than others, but the world is full of such gifts—poems and a superabundance of other things.
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WHAT WE KNOW IN OUR BONES

More than this, Heidegger said he was trying only to bring into the light what we “already know in our bones”; that there is an implicitness to life that is not the (Freudian or Jungian) unconscious but is shared by us all as a result of history, what has gone before and how people have evolved
ways to live. His philosophy was to make what is implicit and important explicit.

For Heidegger, then, “the meaning of Being” could not be, by definition, an abstraction. It was the practice of
Gelassenheit
, of caring for the world, submitting to its abundance, letting it be, “willing not to will,” while at the same time acknowledging that there is no such thing as an “I,” if by that we mean an unchanging entity that meets each new day in the same manner. For Heidegger, “to be” in 1927, when he wrote
Being and Time
, was not at all the same thing as “to be” in 1933, when he joined the Nazi Party and made propaganda appearances in Leipzig, Heidelberg and Tübingen. Nor the same thing in 1936–40, when, in several lectures on Nietzsche, he criticized the “power-thinking” of National Socialism and was put under surveillance by the Gestapo.

Heidegger, following on from Freud and Nietzsche and Weber, set this particular ball rolling. In particular he drew attention to what he called “average everydayness” in which, he insisted, the self is not so much an object as an
unfolding event or happening
, a manifestation, the “movement of a life course stretched out between life and death.” He also had a concept of the “they,” the backdrop of everydayness, what he called a primordial phenomenon of existence, not just other people but other people “co-happening.” These manifestations bring with them two other aspects of being: first, “being-toward,” turning our face to the future, knowing it will be different, always changing; and that we must be
ready
for change, anticipate it, above all enjoy it. And second, “being-toward-the-end” or “being-toward-death,” “the realization of a final configuration of possibilities for . . . life overall.”

This brings to mind Rilke’s idea of the “good death,” the “individual death” (see p. 232), but Heidegger was also saying that, in order to feel fulfilled, to feel a sense of wholeness, we need to take on board very firmly the idea that death
is
the end, there is no afterlife; and we must develop some notion of what we would like our life-event, our life-manifestation, to look like, and then act on that decision, always realizing that we are finite individuals and that not all things are possible.

RADICAL PASTORALISM

Heidegger also had the idea of “marginal practices,” what he called the “saving power of insignificant things—practices such as friendship, backpacking in the wilderness, and drinking the local wine with friends.” This was his idea of “radical pastoralism.”
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All these things remain marginal, he maintained, “precisely because they
resist efficiency
[italics added].” They remain outside—beyond—the reach of the modern attitude. This is not quite true, of course—backpacking can be harnessed to our concern with health and training, making us more efficient in that way. But Heidegger meant “marginal practices” to be refuges from modern life, and used them as metaphors for his approach.

If we can sum up Heidegger’s paradigm, it would be to experience the world
as
poetry, and
through
poetry. Poetry takes as its subject the inexhaustible abundance and plurality of the world; it does not reduce things to a single dimension (as science or the monotheisms attempt to do). The world comprises horizons that always recede before us as we approach; there is no “regime of meaning.” To every poetic word, Heidegger claimed, belongs “an inexhaustible range of complex spaces of [semantic] resonance.” This, for him, is the only transcendental phenomenon in the world. “In poetic experience or in poetry-mediated experience, therefore, we ‘grasp’ our lives as lived ‘in the face of the ungraspable,’ come face to face with the ‘mystery’ of Being, with its ‘awesomeness.’”
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This is how to “dwell” in the world, how to be “at home” in it. Being at home in the world is the point of life.

Heidegger’s poor writing style, his involvement with the Nazis, his disgraceful treatment of Edmund Husserl and Hannah Arendt, all make it difficult to judge him dispassionately. Part of the intellectual climate in the wake of “the death of God” has been a parallel concern, a dissatisfaction with the explanations offered by science as somehow irrelevant to the concerns many have regarding how to live their lives, what values and moral attitudes to embrace, how to behave. Heidegger stands firmly in that strong strand of thought running through the twentieth century—the idea of phenomenology—leading from Husserl to the existentialists to the counterculture and to pragmatic philosophy (which we shall be exploring
later). His ideas of
Gelassenheit
, of caring for the world—letting it be, submitting to its abundance, experiencing it poetically, breaking out of the everyday, being content to “dwell” in the world, to be at home in it—have proved ever more prescient as the decades have passed.