God, Politics, Economy

Social Theory and the Paradoxes of Religion

Bulent Diken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317745150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The book intervenes into the contemporary debate on religion, politics, and economy, focusing on the field of formation which emerges as these seemingly autonomous spheres encounter one another.

Empirically, it concentrates on examples from literature, theatre, and cinema as well as a case study of the recent revolts in Turkey where a 'moderate' Islamic government is in power. Theoretically, its focus is on the contemporary 'return' of religion in the horizon of the critique of religion, seeking to articulate an affirmative politics that can re-evaluate the value of dominant values in religious governance and governance of religion.

1 Religion as superstition

Is there any more dangerous seduction that might tempt one to renounce one’s faith in the gods of Epicurus who have no care and are unknown, and to believe instead in some petty deity who is full of care and personally knows every hair on our head and finds nothing nauseous in the most miserable small service?

(Nietzsche 1974: 224)

Not all belief is reducible to superstition but what is considered to be ‘religion’ is often sheer superstition, the origin of which is our irrational, imaginary fears and unrealistic hopes. If people did not need to hope or fear, they would not become superstitious. But most people are neither so powerful nor so fortunate, and they often believe what they hope for and have difficulty to believe what they fear, often misjudging the real reasons that cause hope or fear in them.

(Spinoza 1993a: 3, 115)

Superstition is grounded in what Spinoza calls ‘imagination’, in treating non-existing things as if they exist (Ibid. 55). Since imagination proceeds from emotions, not from reason, superstition arises as a consequence of being subjected to one’s passions. This subjection consists in inadequate, inconsistent, and vague ideas acquired on the basis of the perception of phenomena through chance encounters, without being able to see the causal network behind them (Ibid. 54–61). Concomitantly, within Spinoza’s hierarchy, imagination is considered to be the lowest kind of knowledge in relation to the other two kinds, reason and intuition.

But superstition is not only an epistemological matter. There is an intrinsic relation between superstition and despotism. The church and the state invest religion with ‘pomp and ceremony’, ruling the multitude by superstitious fantasies which lead it to glorifying its ‘kings as gods’ or debasing them equally irrationally (Spinoza 1951a: 5, 7). The elementary mystification of superstition in this context consists in imagining God through human attributes, as a willing God in charge of judging what is happening in a passive nature (Spinoza 1993a: 81). But God is not a personal power; he does not respond to human needs and prayers, rewarding and punishing humans for their deeds. Since the judgments of God surpass our comprehension, mankind ‘cannot imagine God’ (Ibid. 74).

Superstition is an attempt at imagining what is unimaginable. In this pursuit it mystifies not only the existing world (by juxtaposing it to an imaginary world) but also religion itself. Thus Spinoza initially distinguishes between superstition and what he calls ‘universal faith’. The ‘universal faith’ is ‘common to all’ and consists in seven fundamental dogmas that are ‘absolutely required in order to attain obedience to God’ (Spinoza 1951a: 186). Its first dogma is that there exists a Supreme Being, a sovereign and omnipresent God, who loves justice and charity. Second, this God is One, for the love of God emanates from his superiority over all else. Third, God is also omnipresent; nothing is concealed from him and everything is directed by his judgment. Fourth, God has supreme dominion over all things and must be obeyed by all while he himself does nothing under compulsion but directs everything by his absolute fiat and grace. Fifth, the worship of this God consists only in the practice of justice and love towards one’s neighbor, that is, by one’s way of life. Sixth, only those who worship and obey God in practice are saved. And finally, God expiates the sins of those who repent (Ibid. 187).

Crucially, if faith is defined in this way, questions such as what God really is (spirit, fire, light, thought … ), in which way he is omnipresent (potentially or essentially … ), how he sets forth laws (in the manner of a sovereign or in the form of eternal truths), or whether paradise and hell are natural or supernatural constructions, cease to be relevant – such questions have ‘nothing to do with faith’ and everybody may think about them as they like (Ibid. 187). Every person adapts the seven dogmas of faith to her way of thinking, to her ‘opinions’ (Ibid. 188). This adaptation does not need reasoning because faith does not require truth or reason. For faith, the piousness of the dogmas is more important than their truthfulness (Ibid. 185). Hence the ‘best faith is not necessarily possessed by him who displays the best reasons, but by him who displays the best fruits of justice and charity’ (Ibid. 188). One is faithful through obedience alone:

the Word of God has not been revealed as a certain number of books, but was displayed to the prophets as a simple idea of the mind, namely, obedience to God in singleness of heart, and in the practice of justice and charity.

(Ibid. 9)

The ‘universal faith’ demands worship, but this worship consists only in love, in loving God above all things and in loving one’s neighbor as oneself (Ibid. 187). Since the core of religion in this sense is love, ‘obedience’ is obedience to the law of love. Otherwise there is no demand in the universal faith for public or private ‘ceremonies’ which institutionalize religion as a means of salvation (Ibid. 9, 61). In fact, the Divine Law ‘excludes ceremonies’ (Ibid. 70). Ceremonial practices only refer to ‘temporal bodily happiness’, to the establishment, preservation and confirmation of the society, and in this sense they are necessary; they function as the medium through which the universal faith is ‘accommodated’ or ‘adapted’ to existing opinions (Ibid. 9, 78). But they are not part of the Divine Law (Ibid. 69, 71, 73). According to Spinoza, the Christian rites such as baptism, festivals, public prayers were instituted only as ‘external signs’ of universal faith, without any sacredness in themselves and anything to do with blessedness. Such ceremonies

were ordained for the preservation of a society, and accordingly he who lives alone is not bound by them: nay, those who live in a country where the Christian religion is forbidden, are bound to abstain from such rites, and can none the less live in a state of blessedness.

(Spinoza 1951a: 76)

But from where did the prophets receive the Divine Law? They received the revelations through imagination, that is, ‘beyond the boundary of the intellect’ (Ibid. 25). Imagination is more successful than reason in constructing ideas through words and figures. Yet, it is also ‘fleeting and inconstant’; thus the power of prophecy is rare and exceptional (Ibid. 25–26). Further, imagination, in contrast to clear and distinct ideas, cannot provide any certainty of truth but needs some extrinsic sign ‘as we may see from Abraham, who, when he had heard the promise of God, demanded a sign, not because he did not believe in God, but because he wished to be sure that it was God Who made the promise’ (Ibid. 28). In this sense imagination, or prophetic knowledge, is inferior to natural knowledge, which does not need signs (Ibid. 28). When one thinks with signs, one sees mysteries beneath every event, even beneath natural phenomena. As such, prophecy is grounded in the lack of knowledge, in images (Ibid. 33, 40). An image is an inadequate idea, that is, ‘an idea that cannot express its cause’ (Deleuze 1992: 148). Inadequate ideas merely indicate, as ‘signs’, impressions or passive affections that make things known to us only through their effects, without revealing their causes. We perceive or imagine something without understanding what lies beneath. Thus imagination is not really knowledge; ‘it is at best recognition’ (Ibid. 147). ‘Truth’, on the other hand, ‘needs no sign’ (Spinoza 1993b: 233).

Objectification, appropriation, reversal

Following Spinoza, Feuerbach conceptualizes the ‘illusion’ at the heart of superstition as that which mystifies the essence of religion (Feuerbach 1989: xvii). All religion is a testimony to the fact that human beings are emotional and sensuous beings, that they are ‘governed and made happy only by images, by sensible representations’ (Ibid. 75). Divinity itself is imagination made objective: mankind creates an image of God from its own thinking power and recognizes this subjective image as if it were an objective reality. The notion of ‘God’ is therefore necessarily anthropomorphic for whenever we talk about God we basically transfer some human characteristics (love, will, reason) to an abstract being.

God consists in ‘objectification’, the projection of human qualities, which are infinite in principle, onto a divine being, the ‘object’ of religion that appears as a Person, as the Lawgiver, the Good, the Just, the Merciful, and so on. Since God is created in the image of man, and since all the characteristics of God are in reality human characteristics, Feuerbach claims that in reality there can be no opposition between man and God – for knowledge of God is nothing else than humanity’s self-knowledge. Through the notion of God we only externalize, give objectivity to our own knowledge of ourselves, our own essence; we should therefore recognize in God ourselves. In this sense atheism is ‘the secret of religion’ (Ibid. xvi).

All divine predicates are abstracted from mankind and the essence of religion is this abstraction, that is, sacralization or appropriation of the world of humans. Crucially, however, this truth, that which we call divinity, is in fact the divinity of the human nature, hidden to religion itself. Religion is necessarily blind to its own principle, imagination. Thus the humans who have given objectivity to themselves do not recognize the ‘object’, God, as their own nature (Ibid. 13).

But here it is also essential to observe, and this phenomenon is an extremely remarkable one, characterising the very core of religion, that in proportion as the divine subject is in reality human, the greater is the apparent difference between God and man; that is, the more, by reflection on religion, by theology, is the identity of the divine and human denied, and the human, considered as such, is depreciated. The reason of this is, that as what is positive in the conception of the divine being can only be human, the conception of man, as an object of consciousness can only be negative. To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing. But he desires to be nothing in himself, because what he takes from himself is not lost to him, since it is preserved in God. Man has his being in God; why then should he have it in himself? Where is the necessity of positing the same thing twice, of having it twice? What man withdraws from himself, what he renounces in himself, he only enjoys in an incomparably higher and fuller measure in God.

(Feuerbach 1989: 25–26)

What we have here is a reversal: no longer recognizing themselves in divinity, the believers are trapped in the illusion that the human is created in the image of God. And the more this reversal is ascertained the more it seems that we are indebted, that we owe our best qualities, everything, to God. As if everything emanates from God. This illusory process, in which God and mankind are increasingly isolated from and juxtaposed to each other, is what Feuerbach calls religious alienation.

Vis-à-vis this alienation, it is necessary openly to admit that the only essence the human being can imagine, believe, desire or think is ‘the essence of human nature itself ’ (Ibid. 270). This is the only affirmative critique one can direct towards religion. What is depicted in religion as the first (God) is in fact second (to human). It is life itself that is divine; what is considered ‘sacred’ by religion – friendship, love, human togetherness … – are all parts of life, while religion regards them as commandments of a distinct, transcendent being, God. Religion ‘consecrates’ life, what is common to humans (Ibid. 271). And by making us forget this process, in which it appropriates and sacralizes common notions such as friendship, love, solidarity, reason, and so on, religious alienation makes human togetherness more difficult, not easier, for it deprives human beings of the power of real life, the genuine sense of truth and love, as if they are merely appearances and would only ever come to them for God’s sake. Paradoxically, therefore,

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. [ … ] To place anything in God, or to derive anything from God, is nothing more than to withdraw it from the test of reason, to institute it as indubitable, unassailable, sacred, without rendering an account why. Hence self-delusion, if not wicked, insidious design, is at the root of all efforts to establish morality, right, on theology.

(Feuerbach 1989: 274)

Insofar as religion consists in sacralization of the commons, critique consists in demystifying the illusion which enables this process. The task of critique is ‘simply to destroy an illusion’ (Ibid. 278) by inverting the religious relations – elevating what religion subordinates to the level of a means to the level of the primary. This task was to be joined by two significant figures inspired by Feuerbach: Marx and Nietzsche, who both sought to destroy the religious illusion, the illusion that we are indebted to God, by focusing on economy, albeit in different ways.

Debt, error, and the necessity of illusion

‘Metaphysical need of man’ – this is what Schopenhauer claims in The World as Will and Representation: religion provides for human beings explanations of their existence and supports for their morality (1957: 361). Nietzsche strongly rejects this idea. The origin of religion is not metaphysical need: ‘what first led to the positing of “another world” in primeval times was not some impulse or need but an error in the interpretation of certain natural events, a failure of the intellect’ (Nietzsche 1974: 196). This error is based, first, on the ‘corruption’ of reason: mistaking causes for consequences. When religious imperatives dictate certain things in order to attain happiness (‘do this and this … and you will be happy!’), they merely perform a reversal, that is, they depict happiness as a consequence of some dictated virtues whereas those virtues are in reality consequences of happiness (see Nietzsche 1969: 47–48). Second, religion is characterized by ‘false causality’ in the sense that it seeks the causes of things and actions in the consciousness, in the motives of ‘free’ subjects, denying material causalities (Ibid. 48). Third, religion explains what is hostile to us through ‘imaginary causes’ (like ‘evil spirits’). And finally, religion’s error is based on the notion of ‘free will’, a notion ‘fabricated’ by monotheistic religions to make humanity ‘accountable’ to a transcendent God and to subject its guilt to God’s judgment and punishment (Ibid. 53).

The consequence of these errors is nihilism: religion produces an ‘anti-natural’ illusion which is in conflict with life. By contrasting it to another ‘true’ world, religion judges this world as value-less and treats it ‘as a mistake … which one should rectify’ (Nietzsche 1996: 96). But what is the value of religion’s ‘highest values’ in terms of life? Feuerbach had said that it is not God that has created the human beings; rather, the human beings have created God in their own image. Nietzsche adds that it is a certain kind of human beings who have achieved that (see Hass 1982: 150). Two concepts, ressentiment and bad conscience are crucial here.

Ressentiment builds upon a fiction, the fiction of a force that can be separated from what it can do. The illusion at work here is that a force can refrain from causing effects, from exerting itself (e.g. a bird of prey that does not prey on lambs). Coupled with the notion of ‘free subject’ this illusion maintains the belief that ‘the strong may freely choose to be weak, and the bird of prey to be lamb – and so they win the right to blame the bird of prey for simply being a bird of prey’ (Nietzsche 1996: 30). And finally, in a moment of moralizing, ressentiment reverses the values and derives a morality in which the weak is depicted as superior: the lamb is good because it is eaten. Because the forces are projected onto subjects, the subjects take the blame. Thus the weak can also seem as if he has a force which he does not use, because he is ‘good’ (see Deleuze 1983: 122–24). Thanks to this self-deception of powerlessness, the weakness of the weak can appear as ‘a free achievement, something willed, chosen, a deed, a merit’ (Nietzsche 1996: 30). Herein lies, too, the creativity of ressentiment, a creativity that consists in translating impotence into ‘goodness’, fear into ‘humility’, submission into ‘obedience’ (Ibid. 14).

But if ressentiment is a passive emotion, how can any action result from it? How can the subject of ressentiment attain a will? In this context the figure of the priest, one of the main protagonists in Nietzsche’s genealogy of religion, is crucial. According to Nietzsche, the ‘noble’ class is not monolithic, that is, it contains competing subgroups, the most important of which are the ‘warriors’ and the ‘priests’. The ‘priests’ are those defeated by the powerful ‘warriors’, thus developing a sense of impotence (see Ibid. 16–22). However, this impotence is repressed and is turned into ressentiment. Concomitantly, their hatred, lust for power and feelings of revenge become ‘more dangerous’ (Ibid. 18). The recognition of his weakness in realizing his values does not result in the priest’s reconciliation with his situation but, on the contrary, feeds his will to power (see Reginster 2006: 253–54). And in the crowd he finds what he needs: the reactive forces. The priest finds in the ressentiment of the masses the means by which he can negate the existing, sensual world in the name of a true, other wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: profanation versus sacralization
• 1. Religion as superstition
• Excursus I: Voltaire’s Mahomet as despot
• 2. Love, love of God, intellectual love of God
• Excursus II: The Devils, possession, and truth-telling
• 3. From political theology to politics
• Excursus III: the emancipated city: notes on the Gezi revolts
• 4. Capitalism as religion, religion as capitalism
• Excursus IV: the map, the territory, and the impossibility of painting a priest
• Instead of conclusion: from four religions to four truth procedures
• References
• Index