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152  Chapter 6 Nietzsche Logos against Itself and the Death of God Historia in nuce. The most serious parody that I have ever heard: “In the beginning was nonsense, and nonsense was, by God! and the nonsense was God (divine).” (Historia in nuce. Die ernsthafteste Parodie, die ich je hörte, ist diese: “im Anfang war der Unsinn, und der Unsinn war, bei Gott!, und Gott (göttlich) war der Unsinn.”) —Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human) Rationality ex post facto. Whatever lives long is gradually so saturated with reason that its irrational origins become improbable. Does not almost every accurate history of the origin of something sound paradoxical and sacrilegious to our feelings? Doesn’t the good historian contradict all the time? —Nietzsche, Morgenröte (Dawn) What is the whole of modern philosophy doing at bottom ? Since Descartes—actually more despite him than because of his precedent—all the philosophers seek to assassinate the old soul concept, under the guise of a critique of the subject-and-predicate concept—which means an attempt on the life of the basic presupposition of the Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, being an epistemological skepticism, is, covertly or overtly, anti-Christian—although, to say this for the benefit of more refined ears, by no means anti-religious. —Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) This is how Nietzsche sees himself: his thought has grown out of Christianity through Christian motivations . His struggle against Christianity in no way intends to simply abandon Christianity or remove it from history or return to a time prior to it; rather, he wants to overcome it, surpass it, with forces that Christianity and only Christianity has developed. —Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche und das Christentum (Nietzsche and Christianity) NIETZSCHE 153 Near the opening of his essay on religion, Derrida offers an initial definition of, or approach to, the singularity of religion: “Before even envisaging the semantic history of testimony, of oaths, of the given word (a genealogy and interpretation that are indispensable to whomever hopes to think religion under its proper or secularized forms), before even recalling that some sort of ‘I promise the truth’ is always at work, and some sort of ‘I make this commitment before the other from the moment I address him,’. . . we must formally take note of the fact that we are already speaking Latin” (Religion, 26–27; my emphasis). While Derrida will go on to make a major point of the concept of mondialatinisation (“this strange alliance of Christianity,as the experience of the death of God,and tele-technoscientific capitalism” [Religion, 13]), the unspoken reference that I wish to point out here is to Nietzsche, for whom the ultimate critique of religion comes from a genealogy of morals, at the beginning of which is nature’s “primary task” for mankind, namely, “to cultivate a creature with the right to make promises” (Genealogy of Morals, 2,§ 1).1 Indeed, Derrida did mention Nietzsche explicitly in his introductory comments,where he raised the provocative question of whether Kant’s thesis was, “at the core of its content, Nietzsche’s thesis at the same time that he is conducting an inexpiable war against Kant”(Religion, 11). What connects the two is that they both discover and think through “a certain internalizing movement within Christianity” (ibid.). While, according to Derrida, for Nietzsche this movement “was his primary enemy and that bore for him the gravest responsibility”(ibid.),the key point for us is the way Nietzsche lays bare an inherent logic or logos (“internalizing movement”) within the history of Christianity. Nietzsche, Derrida continues, thereby “tells us something about the history of the world.” I present the argument that Nietzsche’s genealogical argument about the history of Western thought returns to the “beginnings” in order to show how the logos of Christianity turns against itself. The trajectory has been mapped out in the previous chapters. We recall that according to Kant there were three major proofs for the existence of God: the ontological, the cosmological, and the physicotheological. Having dismissed them, he avoids atheism by introducing one more, the only firm one,namely,moral theology. As in a game of musical chairs,all the places for God to sit firmly have been removed one by one until Kant left but a single remaining seat: ethics, the moral law we as rational and autonomous beings give to ourselves. The anthropological turn of the critiques of religion in the 1. References to the Genealogy of Morals...

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