By FLÁVIO R. KOTHE*
There is not exactly an end to metaphysics, because for the majority, even academics, it didn't even have a beginning, it never became a problem.
It has been fashionable to talk about the “end of metaphysics”, as if it were about to end, without seeing the finish (in the double sense of liquidating and perfecting) that it brings to our lives: the most important thing would be to see its purpose, what is its practical dimension. There is not exactly an end to metaphysics, because for the majority, even academics, it didn't even have a beginning, it never became a problem.
In schools, it is not about her, as she belongs to so many areas that seem private because they are problematic, which does not prevent indoctrination. It is no longer easy to maintain the principle of freedom of belief: it is even more difficult to maintain freedom of disbelief, as this suggests that every belief is an abdication of freedom: one gives up on continuing to think, on questioning what one has no answer and then an “explanation” is accepted that does not hold water.
Questions of belief or sexual choice are a private and private problem, within the intimate sphere of each person. Nobody should get involved in this, not even the State. The choice a young person makes in terms of profession or life partnership, not even parents should get involved in: they can only advise if they are consulted. Children will have to live with the mistakes and successes of their decisions.
This particular option, however, affects collective life. As it involves general concepts, it can be reflected in a theoretical way. Reflection does not interfere in anyone's life, but it interferes in what involves everyone's life, even if it is to say that life should no longer be its central concept. The university has become a factory of specialized technicians, who want their diploma as soon as possible, so they can “make a living”. Metaphysical questions are, however, deeply practical, they determine what is done and what is not done, what is worth and what is not worth, reasons to smile and to cry.
In German philosophy it has been discussed for more than half a century that we are in a world abandoned by the gods (Hölderlin lamented in 1800 that people no longer believed in the ancient Greek gods, instead of being happy that he was not dominated by such beliefs) and that (since Nietzsche, so marked by the conflict between Lutheranism and classical education) we are waiting for the last god. Now, what god would it be that didn't want to appear?
If we adhere to the discourse of the films that Americans spread throughout their empire, we will soon have lots of gods, not just one: Batman, Batwoman, Wonder Woman, Blue Beetle, Green Hornet, etc. Everyone wants to save the world, punish the bad guys, show that everything can be decided in a fight and that the Yankees sacrifice themselves for justice.
When we look at a starry night, we are lifted to the infinitely great and we see how insignificant we are, and then, perhaps, we have the consolation of experiencing the sublime, of being able to harbor something of that greatness within ourselves. Pascal expressed this: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me” (the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me). This mathematician pulled back the blanket of Catholic belief, in a then heretical variant, and became a monk, dying too soon in the warm bed of a convent. He did not wait for the technique to develop devices to listen to the sounds that travel through outer spaces. There is no silence: there is only our deafness. In other words, it is as if there was no such thing as what does not exist for us. Everything is as we think it is.
Charles Baudelaire did in the sonnet “The Gulf” an ironic comment: “Je ne vois qu'infini par toutes les fenêtres” (I see nothing but infinity through all the windows). In other words, there is no need to go out at night, through the countryside and look up, as there is infinity in everything (which is not the same as seeing the presence of the Creator in finite beings, as this “is an entity”). Saying he was overcome with vertigo, he notes, in the last verse, the great contradiction: “Oh! never ever sort des Nombres et des Etres!” (Ah! never leave numbers and beings!) Spaces can be infinite, we use finite names and numbers to designate them, reducing everything to finite entities, so that they fit (?) into our perception. When they “fit”, they are falsified, finitizing infinity, even in the sign ∞. Looking out the window means theorizing, perceiving in entities the presence of being, of what unites them to other entities by similarity or contrast.
Immanuel Kant looked at the same starry sky and sighed: “Das Erhabene!” We have the erroneous tradition of translating the term “sublime”. The mistake is not by chance and does not betray the Lutheran Kant, who did not want to compromise the family religion in his work. The term sublime comes from “sub-limes”, which is below the threshold, while das Erhabene comes from always the, get up and the erheb, which is to elevate, raise, elevate, that is, place on a level beyond what we see, the millions of stars that we can imagine, much more than the perhaps two thousand points of clear lights that we see scattered at the top (and which are only banks due to the weakness of our eyes, as the stars should be blue or red depending on whether they are moving away or approaching us.
Vincent van Gogh painted “The Starry Night”, as if making outer space a finite thing, a canvas, but he placed such an energetic vibration in the stars that infinity vibrated in all of them. The finite being vibrates infinite energy. This pulsation in things and things gives a notion of transcendence.
Pascal believed that the experience of a starry night gives us, first, the notion that we are very small, insignificant, and then, in a second moment, we feel lifted to the greatness of infinity, we feel that there is something great in us that allows us to have at least a notion of infinity. This is not the case, however, for those who believe in God: although he is a representation of infinity in space, time, power and knowledge, he is an entity determined exactly by these “qualities”, by these categories of human understanding. Thus it becomes finite.
For the Christian, the important thing is that celestial bodies are testimonies of divine greatness, which created everything and governs everything. So it is necessary to pray to such a powerful being, build temples, participate in cults, pay tithes, with the hope that he will answer the prayers. If something seems attended to, we say “thank God”; if not, God must know better what should be done. You don't curse a god.
The god who is supposed to represent infinity in space, time, power and knowledge becomes the essence of everything, as everything would have derived from what he had imagined himself, when he was alone and – tired of loneliness – had decided to invent everything, even man. And, having become man and dwelt among us, he allows us to imagine him as an extension and enlargement of the human. He is a humanoid, anthropomorphic god, onto whom desires, desires, desires, loves and so on can be projected.
No entity can contain and be the being of everything. An entity is only an entity because it is not another entity. The Christian thinks, however, that a certain being, God, can contain the essence of everything. That's why he needs ideas to be abstract, because if they were concrete they wouldn't all fit in Him and he would be the duplication of everything. Being the duplication of everything, He is no longer necessary, as He is replaced by Nature. Taking care of the environment becomes a kind of religious cult, a mass celebrated every day.
The infinite term and the sign ∞ are ways of finitizing the infinite, that is, the signifier itself is denied in the signifier. They are like a refusal to continue counting, a way of suggesting what remains beyond understanding. The two telescopes launched into outer space are sending back images of galaxies never seen before. These distances are counted in light years, a name for something a subject cannot count. None of us or our eventual descendants will reach them, but they reach us saying that we will never reach there in the flesh.
We are alone as a species, lonely in outer space. Going to the Moon or Mars doesn't make any difference in the endless immensities. If there was a magic button – as in Star Wars – which allows the ship to jump to a speed greater than light, no one would survive the sudden increase in pressure, they would not be able to realize that distances that seem infinite unfold into finitudes. Kant observed that the human mind can only capture and think finitudes. Even infinity is finite.
Aristotle unintentionally prepared a big trap for thought when trying to explain the notion of space. The distance between bodies, which is marked by the movement of bodies, generates the notion of distance, but it is the distance that allows the distances. To understand this, he uses the image of pouring liquid into a jar. We then have the wine or water inside the jar, the jar inside a room, the room inside a house, which is in a neighborhood, which is in a city, which is in a region (and, we can add, it is on a planet , which is in a star system, etc.).
Each body is surrounded by another larger body. Thus, when you reach the last body (we could take the “cosmos” as a body here), you will need a next body, even larger, that would give limits to this body. Thus, the last one would become penultimate, which would require another body even bigger than this supposed last one, which would need one more, even bigger one, and this would continue infinitely.
Christianity “resolved” this with the miracle of the invention of a god who, being an “being”, would be able to see the entire universe from the outside, making the universe a “universe”, something that turns on itself and closes in on itself. yes. Hence man still proclaims himself to be the center of the universe and the Church tries to torture and kill in public anyone who doubts this.
It is easier to applaud the execution of heretics than to think about what heresy did not even think about. The human mind is not capable of thinking this: there is no “cosmos” (an organized and harmonious whole), there is no universe (uni-verse), there is not even “infinity” if it is made of finites. Suárez invented that the universe would have the shape of a parabola, which is a geometric figure made from two centers (while the circle starts from just one center), but assuming that the centers could be anywhere and the edges at infinity. Every geometric figure is finite. Being a heretic in relation to the center of the universe in man, he invented a figure made from two places, to have a geometric figure, which is, by nature, a finitization.
Metaphysics was divided into general metaphysics, ontology, and three special metaphysics: theology, psychology, cosmology. The philosophical theme of the “last of the gods” is heir to this tradition. He does not break with metaphysics, he does not take a step outside of it. So Nietzsche and Heidegger continue within it. Western thought is trapped in these prostheses in which it has placed itself.
It is absurd to place man and cosmos on the same level. This contains a hypertrophy of man and an atrophy of the “cosmos” that wants to equal what is incomparable. The “god” that appears there in “theology” is a mediator between the finite and the infinite, something that for Christianity is crowned in the thesis that Christ would be the god who became man and “dwelt among us”.
When the most advanced philosophy speaks of the “last of the gods”, it remains stuck in the old parameter of making equivalent what is so unequal that it should not be raised to the same parameter. But we don't know how to get out of this, we don't have the language or logic for it. The expression “last of the gods” already sabotages what it would like to profile. What appears to the eyes of space telescopes is something so immense that it cannot even be called “gigantic”, as a giant would still be a big man.
Kant's mathematical sublime was a proportion – say of a 15 meter tree facing a 5.000 meter mountain – that allowed us to discover the great difference between the small and the large. Even if the tree was 50 meters tall and seemed huge to men, it would almost disappear in front of the mountain. The difference in size, however, between the human and the spaces that the constellations, discovered by the new extraterrestrial telescopes, occupy in outer space is such that it would not fit into the concept of mathematical sublime.
Let’s say that these sidereal constellations and their beyond – something we can’t even think about – were to represent “the last god”, wouldn’t that even be a “Atheos absconditus”, since the term non-god presupposes a god, which in turn presupposes a man who imagines him. Assuming that it is “hidden” is also something human, as if these constellations even more distant from Earth were prudishly “hiding” before men. They don't have to worry about hiding. They were already there, long before life appeared on Earth, and they will continue to exist after there is no more life on the little blue planet.
There is no proportion to suppose that they constitute a “god”, an “ultimate god”. No matter how far away these “new constellations” are, there must be something even beyond, something of which we have no perception or notion. We are not capable of thinking about something that does not have some kind of finitude for us. We cannot understand “outer spaces” that never end. By instinct we think that we are the center of everything and that, therefore, everything revolves around us, everything watched over by our god.
This in addition to a “Atheos absconditus” would not be an entity, it could not have any figure or configuration. It would be like the “nod” of the existence of “something”, of everything that would not just be a certain entity although formed by “entities”. The names given make everything a reduction to man's finiteness. One could not call “being” something that one has no idea of what it is, because one does not even realize its existence.
The “last god” falls into the same fallacy that Aristotle arrived at when thinking about space through a human action, pouring a liquid into a jar. We do not and will not have terms and images to designate this “Seer” or “Seer", that "Sein” which echoes “Sein” and one cannot think that by speaking Dasein to a human being the problem has already been solved. What is pointed out here is a certain capacity that some humans have to perceive transcendence without projecting into it a projection of deified anthropomorphic figures.
There we have the index of something that is marked by absence: its being is not being. If no being can contain the being of all beings, be in some way everything, its substitute, the last god, cannot have the characteristics of what it claims to be overcoming. It cannot be omnipotent or omnipresent because our power is always limited and we are only in one place. Assuming that man was created “in the image and likeness of God” allows us to reverse the thesis and postulate that the gods were all made in the image and likeness of man.
You can pray to them as if asking a friend for help, but this serves to reduce the anguish of the person praying, it does not mean that there is an action on the other side responding to the supplications. What would this “beyond the last of the gods” be? There would be no point in praying, as it would not be anthropomorphic. Terms like negation or absence would not define it either. We still do not have a language capable of thinking about transcendence.
* Flavio R. Kothe is a retired full professor of aesthetics at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Allegory, aura and fetish (Cajuína Publisher). [https://amzn.to/4bw2sGc]
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