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No Spiritual Investment in the World
Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy
Willem Styfhals
A Signale Book
Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca and London
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Crisis: Gnostic Dualism in Late Modernity 2. Eschaton: Gnostic Evil in History 3. Subversion: Heresy and Its Modern Afterlives 4. Nothingness: Dialectics of Religious Nihilism 5. Epoch: The Gnostic Age 6. Theodicy: Overcoming Gnosticism, Embracing the World Conclusion Bibliography Index
Acknowledgments
Although the cover of this book mentions only my name, I have not written this book alone. The words may be mine, but the book’s content reflects the countless conversations I had with friends, family, and colleagues. And even the words could not have been where they are right now without their support and confidence. The cover is too small anyway to list all the people who directly or indirectly contributed to this book. Therefore, I gladly take the opportunity to name those people here.
Before naming names, however, I owe thanks to many institutions and organizations for their material support as well: first and foremost, the Institute of Philosophy and KULeuven, but also the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO) and the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF). I would also like to thank several universities where I was able to present work in progress or spend time as a visiting scholar. I am pleased to thank the University of Antwerp for the stimulating collaborations; Columbia University, the University of Iceland, and Loyola University Chicago for welcoming me as a visiting scholar; the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin for inviting me to present my work and do research in Jacob Taubes’s archives, and finally Yale University for giving me the opportunity to finish this book during my stay as a postdoctoral fellow.
This book is based on research I conducted at KULeuven (Belgium). Studying Gnosticism at an institute with roots in neo-Scholasticism, and reading less canonical German philosophers like Odo Marquard, Jacob Taubes, and Hans Blumenberg in a department with a long tradition in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, made me feel like some kind of a modern heretic. Admittedly, I liked this status. This is probably what attracted me, like Jacob Taubes, to the topic of Gnosticism in the first place. But even for a self-professed heretic the intellectual environment at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven could not have been more open and more stimulating. I owe special thanks to my colleagues and my lifelong friends from Leuven: Gerbert Faure, Simon Truwant, Wolter Hartog, Vincent Caudron, Dries Simons, and Laurens Dhaenens. Without their intellectual support and friendship this book would simply not have been possible. More than just conversation partners or readers of my manuscript, they are the reason I could write this book in the first place. I also want to thank some of my professors from Leuven for their advice and for their comments on earlier drafts of the chapters in this book: Karin de Boer, Toon Breackman, Paul Cortois, Roland Breeur, Paul Moyaert, Nicolas de Warren, and Guy Vanheeswijck. The latter has the dubious honor of having read almost every word I have ever written. I would like to thank him for his generosity and his continuing interest in my work.
André Cloots and Stéphane Symons deserve to be thanked here separately. Not only did they support my writing this book from the very beginning to the end, but they have also been my two mentors over the past few years. André Cloots introduced me to philosophy when was I was eighteen years old, and supported me until I obtained my doctoral degree almost ten years later. I cannot even begin to express how much I owe to him both personally and academically. The same is true of Stéphane Symons. If André Cloots was my Doktorvater, Stéphane Symons was my older Doktorbruder. He helped me with the most annoying practical problems of this book as well as the most difficult philosophical issues (often concerning Walter Benjamin whose work he knows like few others). But, most importantly, he became one of my closest friends along the way.
Obviously, this book was not written in Leuven alone. In many ways, I have followed the journeys of the main figures I studied. With the exception of Hans Blumenberg and Odo Marquard, none of the thinkers discussed in this book stayed in Germany for long periods of time. Jacob Taubes, in particular, traveled his entire life between Berlin, New York, Paris, and Jerusalem, never finding a real home in any of these cities. In my attempt to follow Taubes, I have studied like him at Columbia University in New York and done research in Berlin for several months, stopping along the way in Paris, Jerusalem, Chicago, New Haven, and even Reykjavik. Among all the people I have met, two deserve special thanks. Martin Treml invited me to Berlin and gave me access to Taubes’s letters. I am thankful for his feedback and generous support. More importantly, he is one of the warmest, funniest, and most sympathetic academicians I have ever met. Kirk Wetters invited me to join the German Department at Yale for a year as a visiting scholar. It was there that I finished this book, and it is mainly thanks to his intellectual, personal, and material support that I was able to achieve that. In addition to these people, I warmly thank friends and colleagues from all over the world for their advice and for the fascinating discussions about my research: Stijn Latré, Herbert De Vriese, Jonathan Sozek, Samuel Moyn, Mark Lilla, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Hannes Bajohr, Jerry Muller, Benjamin Lazier, Felix Steilen, Jeffrey Barash, Michaël Foessel, Agata Bielik-Robson, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, Daniel Weidner, Nitzan Lebovic, Sigrid Weigel, Adam Stern, Björn Thorsteinsson, Colby Dickinson, Egon Bauwelinck, Thomas Meyer, Peter Gordon, Jonathon Catlin, Paul North, Noreen Khawaja, Katharina Kreuzpaintner, Terrence Renaud, Rüdiger Campe, Marcel Schmidt, and Asaf Angermann.
Parts of the book and specific arguments I develop in the chapters have already been published elsewhere. An earlier and shorter version of chapter 2 was published as “Evil in History: Karl Löwith and Jacob Taubes on Modern Eschatology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 2 (2015). The discussion of Jacob Taubes and Gershom Scholem in chapter 3 was published as “Deconstructing Orthodoxy: A Failed Dialogue between Gershom Scholem and Jacob Taubes,” New German Critique 45, no. 1 (2018). Some fragments of chapter 6 were published in “Modernity as Theodicy: Odo Marquard Reads Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age ,” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 1 (2019). I thank the editors of both journals for permission to reprint the material here.
Thanks is also due to Marian Rogers, who helped me prepare the manuscript, to Kizer Walker, the managing editor of the Signale series, and to the series editor, Peter Hohendahl, for patiently guiding me through the complex process of publishing a first book.
I am also very grateful to those who helped me find and access the sources I needed to write this book and to the many libraries and archives where I pursued my research. In particular, I would like to thank Steven Spileers and the staff of the Philosophy Library at KULeuven for their help and advice. I also want to thank the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin for giving me access to Jacob Taubes’s letter archive (Martin Treml and Herbert Kopp-Oberstrebrink, in particular) and the Deutsche Literatur Archiv in Marbach for allowing me to do research in Hans Blumenberg’s Nachlass. I thank Bettina Blumenberg for her permission to quote from her father’s unpublished writings.
I would like to thank my family too: my parents, Marijke and Jan; my sister, Margot; and my wife, Mariske. Because their contribution to this book is perhaps the least tangible, it is all the more profound. Without their encouragement, I would not even have undertaken the project of writing a book. Finally, I could not be more thankful to Mariske for joining me on my intellectual and physical journeys to follow these weird German philosophers.
Introduction
Jacob Taubes and the German Gnosticism Debates
“ I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is ,” claimed Jacob Taubes, a Jewish philosopher of religion, in a short note on Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. 1 The message this statement tried to convey initially remains enigmatic, even ambiguous. Did Taubes claim to be a modern atheistic materialist, a nihilist perhaps, who denied the world any spiritual value? Or was this actually a deeply religious statement from someone who rejected his attachment to this world in favor of another world to come? Paradoxically, both can be the case.
On the one hand, this claim epitomized the religious worldview of Apocalypticism and Gnosticism. Taubes made this very explicit: “I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it all go down.” 2 Someone who believes that the end of time is imminent does not care for the world and certainly does not want to invest in it or legitimate it as it is. Such an apocalyptic worldview can even entail the radical degradation of the meaning of the world that was characteristic of the ancient Christian heresy of Gnosticism. Indeed, the Gnostics considered the world to be an evil, fallen, godless, demonic, meaningless, or inferior place in comparison to the fullness of a radically transcendent divine meaning. In this view, reality appeared as a world prison that humanity had to be redeemed from rather than as a positive life-world that we can become spiritually attached to. Indeed, it would be plainly absurd to have any investment in such a Gnostic world at all.
On the other hand, Taubes’s claim to have no spiritual investment in the world could also be a decidedly modern or secular one. More is at stake here than a