The Second God

God is not a being. This is your beginning point. If this is so, then atheism rather than the opposite of theism, would be its highest expression. Or perhaps we need to speak of two kinds of atheism. One is an ontological atheism that is repeated in an age when God is dead. But the God that dies here is the God of being, a God that is no longer required by science and philosophy, and whose death, therefore, is only the end of a certain way of doing science and philosophy that famously no longer requires this hypothesis (a God that died in the pages of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and certainly did not need Dawkins et al. to kill it off). What would the other atheism be? It would be a moral atheism, atheism redoubled and intensified. It would be more than the assertion that we do not need God for science and philosophy, but that we do not need God for our values either. It is this God that is murdered for the second time by Nietzsche, and this murder is far more frightening and unsettling than the rather tame euthanasia of the God of science and philosophy. What happens when the second God dies? Do we know what this means?

Nietzsche

God as a being is transcendent and exterior. Its fundamental metaphysical avatar is substance, and it has a long history from Aristotle to Descartes. The God of the idea is immanent and transcendental. Its avatar is the idea, and it has its beginnings in Kant. Both these Gods are declared dead by Nietzsche. The transcendent God, because being is becoming, and the transcendental one, because morality is Will to Power.  

Atheism

Atheism and theism are not opposed to one another but belong together. Each theism has its own atheism, and every atheism its own theism.

Atheism of the Word

There are three ways I can see of speaking about God: as a being, an idea or a word. That there are very important distinctions and differences within and not just between these ways of speaking goes without saying. Think of what Aquinas does with Aristotle's proofs of the existence of God, for example, where he speaks of God in terms of existence rather than essence, even though He is still a being.  Moreover, there are always minor writers within them  (all the mystical traditions within the religions, to name but one type of minor writing)  that cut across these traditions both conceptually and historically. What I am particularly interested in is the third way of speaking about God, because it is closest to my problem. What if God were only a word and neither a being nor an idea? In one sense one would say that this is the sign of the disappearance of God, but in an other,  perhaps not. Hasn't religious belief, or a least a certain kind, only every related to God as a word (a mysterious magical one), and not as a being or an idea? It is only philosophy that has entertained the latter definitions and its atheism has been maintained by their destruction. Is there an atheism of the word? My supposition is maybe not.

My Own Stupidity

It is about my mistake that I want to write to you about today, but don't let that fool you. Don't think that I now have the answer I lacked previously. When it comes to God, I keep feeling that I come to a point and I can't go any further. It just drops away from me. Not because I think there is some mysterious mystical meaning I can't fathom or am unwilling to make the leap for, but quite the contrary. There is something I cannot think here, something I cannot see, and this is all because of my own personal stupidity.

Religion and Philosophy

This is a particular problem for me, because my own entry into philosophy (entirely fortuitous, as anyone's), rather than just knowing about the history of philosophy, is Levinas. I believe it is completely impossible (though some think you can, and maybe even he did at one stage of his work) to separate his philosophical from his religious writings. When I had given this up, I thought about it negatively and naively, and their inseparability meant that he was susceptible to the same Nietzschean critique as Kant, but now I think that I am entirely wrong about that, because it puts the meaning of God in Levinas in completely the wrong place conceptually and historically.