Atheology

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The term atheology denotes atheistic or religion-critical positions which reject the validity claims of religions and theology as a whole, for example in a book by Michel Onfray . Different uses refer only to a bracketing of the validity claim of theology or other weaker theses, for example in Walter Benjamin , Jacques Derrida and other authors of the more recent French philosophy or in related secondary literature .

On the etymology and conceptual history

The word in the A-theology as a prefix of negation previous alpha privative "a" refers to semantically the opposition to theology : A-theology is the antagonist , the antonym of theology.

The Greek-Latin original term appears in the work of Esdras Edzardus Collegii theologici in alma Universitate Rostochiensi Decanus, Doctores & Professores ad solennem panegyrin inauguralis disputationis Judaeorum et Socinianorum atheologiae oppositae, clarissimi (1656). Even Christoph Sonntag used the term in his book O kartēsios antigraphos, tutesi ta tu kartēriu Lemmata pente atheologa kai aphilosopha (1712).

The French philosopher and sociologist Georges Bataille titled his 1943 to 1945 appeared critical of religion trilogy with Somme athéologique in an ironic allusion to Thomas Aquinas's theological writing Summa Theologica .

The term only became widely known with Michel Onfray's book Traité d'athéologie, which became a bestseller in France in 2005 with 200,000 copies sold and also a success in several translations.

Definition of terms

Theology is based on belief in the real existence of God or other spiritual beings, belief in a world outside the visible world, belief in a hereafter . The theological faith appeals to divine revelation and dogmatic doctrines, which cannot be doubted.

The Atheologie as radical religion critical antagonist of theology based contingent mainly on rational-scientific and / or empirically verifiable knowledge. It regards the appeal to divine revelation and the formulation of dogmatic theories as "self-fabricated certainties of knowledge", as strategies of self-immunization against criticism and rejects its claim to truth because it is incompatible with the scientific methodology of critical examination :

"All certainties in knowledge are self-fabricated and thus worthless for the understanding of reality". (If this sentence has a claim to truth / certainty, it is self-contradicting.)

From an atheological point of view, gods, good or bad spirits, God and the devil are nothing more than constructions of human imagination without real existence: fictional characters, literary figures.

Historical overview of atheological approaches since the Enlightenment

As a counter-position to theology, atheology stands in the tradition of the Enlightenment and in the succession of radical critics of religion, such as Ludwig Feuerbach , Max Stirner , Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud .

This is how the Old Testament sentence becomes in atheology with Ludwig Feuerbach :

"So God created man in his own image." ( Genesis 1 , 27; cf. the image of God )

reverse to:

"Man created God in his own image."

God is understood as a personified concept, hypostatization , as an anthropomorphic projection of illusory wish fulfillment, for example in the wishful imagination of reconciliation with death, with regard to a comprehensive human need for protection, but also as a guarantor and source of morality.

So Feuerbach initially removes God as a subject, but leaves the theological predicates in place and assigns them to the human species. The essence of man is determined by him as divine:

"By degrading theology to anthropology, I rather elevate anthropology to theology, just as Christianity, in that it degraded God to man, made man into God".

With Feuerbach, atheistic ethics preserves the element of Christian charity :

“Homo homini Deus.”
- man is the god of man.

The highest moral principle is therefore:

"Man's love for man."

With the death of the idea of ​​God, the death of the “beyond outside of us”, God as the guarantor of morality, of the “beyond in us”, died at the same time. Max Stirner recognizes this and, in his book The Single and His Property (1845), meets Feuerbach's criticism of religion and Christian moral teaching with the mocking reproach:

"Our atheists are pious people!"

Stirner's more radical criticism culminates in ethical nihilism , the fundamental negation of morality, in individual anarchism , in ethical egoism :

"I have put 'Mein Sach' on nothing."
"Nothing beats me!"
"Away with every thing that is not entirely mine!"

In Stirner's view, Feuerbach wrongly said that with the death of God and the deification of man's being, he had already brought the Enlightenment project to an end. Feuerbach stopped halfway because:

"They are rid of the good ones, the good remains."

The second step is missing: the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment according to Immanuel Kant is only fully completed with the “liberation from morality” , namely with the self-liberation of the individual from all shackles. Kant had written:

“Enlightenment is the way people come out of their self-inflicted immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's mind without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-inflicted if the cause of it is not a lack of understanding but a lack of resolution and courage to use it without guidance from someone else. Sapere aude ! Have the courage to use your own understanding!"

Friedrich Nietzsche later modified Stirner's position, and from around 1900 Nietzsche's work achieved a wide impact with aphoristic formulas such as “devaluation of the highest values” and “ revaluation of all values ”. All values ​​are  understood - without recourse to metaphysics - as mere postulations of the human being:

“And even criticize morality, take morality as a problem, as problematic: how? wasn't that - isn't that immoral? - Morality has always proven itself, as long as there has been talk and persuasion on earth, as the greatest master of seduction - and, as far as we philosophers are concerned, as the real circle of philosophers ... We immoralists, we wicked of today ... In If you want a formula, it takes place for us - the self-abolition of morality . "

Fields of activity of atheology in the 21st century

Karl Marx wrote in 1844:

"For Germany the criticism of religion is essentially over."

Friedrich Nietzsche exclaimed in 1882:

" God is dead !"

Western philosophers have dealt primarily with criticism of the Bible and Christianity since the Age of Enlightenment . As a result of the Muslim immigration to Europe - on a larger scale beginning in the 1950s - criticism of the Koran using the historical-critical method is increasingly becoming the interest of Western theologians and Islamic scholars .

Atheology, which, following the Enlightenment, does not regard religions as phenomena of unearthly origin, but as products of human imagination, as myth-forming narratives ( narrative exegesis ), is faced with new challenges. According to Michel Onfray , she has five main tasks critical of religion:

Reconstruction of the history of philosophy of atheism

The Enlightenment criticism of religion has so far mainly dealt with Christianity and Judaism. Enlightenment criticism of Islam has only recently become topical. But not only the three monotheistic world religions are the subject of criticism, but religion in general, including the so-called political religions of recent history. Michel Onfray , who mainly attacked the great world religions in his Traité d'athéologie in 2005 , has therefore followed this book, which surprisingly became a bestseller in several countries, with a 6-volume Contre-histoire de la philosophie , a "counter-history of philosophy", in which he represents the hitherto neglected strand of atheistic and hedonistic philosophical thought from antiquity to our time.

Deconstruction of theology and metaphysics

The second task after Michel Onfray is the deconstruction of theology and metaphysics , in particular the deconstruction of the monotheisms Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Baha'i . The Atheologie tried first by linguistic criticism to develop its own terminology, to disengage from the Befangensein in theological terminology. In this context there is a connection to Jacques Derrida's deconstruction program, to Bultmann's demythologizing program and to God-is-dead theology .

De-theocratization of religions

With de- theocratization is meant the investigation of fundamentalist , theocratic instrumentalization of religions for political purposes. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann describes the connection between the “language of violence” in “holy texts” such as the Bible or the Koran and the willingness to use violence of theocratic fundamentalists in a Vienna lecture given in 2004 as follows:

“The semantic dynamite that is in the sacred texts of the monotheistic religions ignites in the hands not of the believers, but of the fundamentalists, who are concerned with political power and who use the motives of religious violence to bring the masses behind them ... Hence it is important to historicize these motifs by tracing them back to their original situation. It is important to uncover their genesis in order to limit their validity. "

“Self-immunization against criticism” in religions and salvation teachings

The philosophical term self-immunization against criticism has its origin in the criticism of religion by the critical rationalist Hans Albert . What is meant by this is the phenomenon that ideological systems and religions in particular try to erect ideological protective barriers in order to seal themselves off against rational objections and thus changeability. They create their "secure foundation", "their certainty" themselves by dogmatizing, that is, by taking recourse to a dogma. They set up final principles which cannot be doubted and which no criticism will be tolerated. Hans Albert's plea for critical reason, for the occidental tradition of critical discussion, for the procedure of critical examination stands against such reasoning , which calls for a return to "certain and indubitable reasons" and thus freezes in dogmatism :

“The rejection of conventionalist strategies for the protection of theories advocated by Popper can therefore be expanded to a general rejection of immunization procedures for problem solving of all kinds, because dogmatization is not only a phenomenon of the sphere of knowledge, but a possibility of human practice in general, and it is in view of the principle Fallibility of reason nowhere justifiable. "

From Albert's point of view, the ability to uncover tendencies towards criticism immunization in ideological systems, i.e. the accusation of self-immunization (dogmatism accusation), is an instrument of enlightenment criticism.

Deconstruction of metaphysically based moral teachings and the foundation of atheistic ethics

Atheistic ethics are ethics without metaphysics . The spectrum of the history of moral philosophy is broad and ranges from nihilism, skepticism , relativism , contract ethics , interest ethics , noncognitivism , utilitarianism , hedonism to an understanding of ethics as an answer to the question: “How do I make my life meaningful?” Ethics can best be Art of living can be described.

The religious and moral critic Michael Schmidt-Salomon , who wrote a manifesto of evolutionary humanism for the atheistic Giordano Bruno Foundation , writes programmatically:

"We are not given ethical values ​​- neither by 'God' nor by 'nature'."

In this humanistic manifesto, ethics without God means fairness ethics: the conflicts of interest that inevitably arise among people must be resolved in such a way that all those concerned consider this solution as fair as possible. In a reform-open society, the ethical rules of the game of togetherness, fairness, have to be negotiated again and again.

For the construction of metaphysics-free ethics, another is consequentialist direction of the moral philosophy of great importance in the German-speaking countries due to the dominating duty ethical Kantian tradition embossed long time hardly attracted attention: Ethics as a philosophy of life art.

The ancient model of such a teleological ethics without metaphysics is Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics with its principle of eudaimonia , which describes the art of shaping a happy life. It is the moral-philosophical strand that leads from Aristotle , Epicurus , Seneca , Montaigne , Nietzsche to Michel Foucault and Fernando Savater . Philosophy provides guidance here for shaping a meaningful life. Philosophical practice takes the place of religious morals as an individual way of life. Contemporary advocates of this therapeutic direction include the philosophers Lou Marinoff, Gerd B. Achenbach and Wilhelm Schmid .

literature

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Michel Onfray: Traité d'athéologie. Physique de la métaphysique. Grasset Publishing House , Paris 2005; German edition: We don't need a god. Why you have to be an atheist now. Piper, Munich, 2006 - limited preview in the Google book search
  2. ↑ Christoph Sonntag: O kartēsios antigraphos, tutesi ta tu kartēriu lēmmata pente atheologa kai aphilosopha , Kōlerios 1712
  3. ↑ Self-immunization against criticism . Study guide (Hans Albert) on Wikibooks
  4. ↑ Hans Albert: Treatise on practical reason. Tübingen 1991, ISBN 3-16-145710-2 , p. 36
  5. ↑ “For God did not create man in his own image, as it is in the Bible, but man, as I showed in the essence of Christianity, created God in his image. “Ludwig Feuerbach: Lectures on the essence of religion. Otto Wigand, Leipzig 1851, 20th lecture, p. 241
  6. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach: The essence of Christianity. 1843 (preface to the second edition).
  7. ↑ a b Ludwig Feuerbach: The essence of Christianity. 1841, Chapter 28.
  8. ↑ Max Stirner: The only one and his property. 1845, Second Section (Reclam, 1981, p. 170); Full text online. After the elimination of the “beyond outside of us”, in order to really create the much-invoked exit from “immaturity”, it is also important to eliminate the “beyond within us”. At various points Stirner tries to describe what he means by the "beyond in us": roughly what Freud later referred to as the super-ego , i.e. a psychological authority that is largely unconsciously formed in the course of the educational process and later as a conscience , as a complex of values ​​and morals, (cultural) identity etc. regulates human behavior. Stirner uses the concept of the sacred to determine the superego.
  9. ↑ a b Max Stirner: The only one and his property
  10. ^ Winfried Schröder : Moral nihilism: radical moral criticism from the sophists to Nietzsche ; Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005, p. 161
  11. ↑ cf. Max Stirner: The only one and his property. 1845, passim; Max Stirner: Stirner's reviewers. 1845. In: Max Stirner: Parerga, reviews, replicas. Edited by Bernd A. Laska. Nuremberg 1986; Pp. 147-205, especially pp. 157ff
  12. ↑ Immanuel Kant: Answering the question: What is Enlightenment? 1784
  13. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche: Dawn. Thoughts on the moral prejudice. 1887², p. 3f. (Preface)
  14. ↑ Karl Marx: On the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right . Introduction. 1844. MEW Vol. 1, p. 378
  15. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche: The happy science . la gaya scienza. New edition, Leipzig 1887, third book, aphorism 125: The great person
  16. ↑ Inârah Institute for Research into the Early History of Islam and the Koran, for the establishment of the historical-critical method in Islamic studies; "Inârah" (Arabic for 'Enlightenment')
  17. ↑ Michel Onfray: Contre-histoire de la philosophie. Parts 1-4. Grasset, Paris 2006/07
  18. ↑ Ernst Topitsch : From the origin and end of metaphysics. A study on Weltanschauung criticism. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-423-04105-6
  19. ↑ See also God is dead #Death of God theological movement in the English language Wikipedia
    Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer : The Gospel of christian atheism. 1966
    William Hamilton: Radical Theology and the Death of God. 1966
    John AT Robinson : Honest to God. John Knox Press, 1963; reprint edition: ISBN 0-664-24465-3 ; 40th anniv. edition 2003, ISBN 0-664-22422-9 ; German: God is different. Ch. Kaiser, Munich 1963
    Gabriel Vahanian: The Death of God: The Culture of our Post-Christian Era. George Braziller, New York 1961
  20. ↑ Jan Assmann: Monotheism and the language of violence. Picus, 2007, ISBN 978-3-85452-516-5 , p. 57
  21. ^ Plea for critical reason. The philosopher and social scientist Hans Albert in an interview with Michael Schmidt-Salomon . In: Materials and Information on Time (MIZ). 3/2001
  22. ↑ Hans Albert : The idea of ​​critical reason. On the problem of rational justification and dogmatism . In: Enlightenment and Criticism . 2/1994, p. 16 ff.
  23. ↑ Hans Albert: Autobiographical Introduction. In: Critical Reason and Human Practice. Reclam, 1977
  24. ↑ Michael Schmidt-Salomon: Manifesto of evolutionary humanism. Alibri, Aschaffenburg 2005
  25. ↑ Lou Marinoff in the English language Wikipedia