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Transcendence and the Problem of Otherworldly Nihilism: Taylor, Heidegger, Nietzsche*

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0020174x.2011.559050

1502-3923

Iain Thomson,

Theology and Philosophy of Evil

Abstract This paper examines Charles Taylor's case against complete secularization in A Secular Age in the light of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's critiques of the potential for nihilism inherent in different kinds of philosophical appeals to “transcendence”. The Heideggerian critique of metaphysics as ontotheology suggests that the theoretical pluralism Taylor rightly embraces is more consistently thought of as following from a robust ontological pluralism, and that Taylor's own commitment to ontological monism seems to follow from his own desire to leave room in his theoretical account for an ontotheological creator God who stands outside the world and ultimately unifies its meaning. The Nietzschean critique contends that any such appeal to something that transcends the limits of human finitude remains nihilistic, insofar as such valorizations of the otherworldly undermine our capacity to appreciate and experience the genuine meaningfulness of human existence in its this-worldly finitude. The paper explores Taylor's response to this Nietzschean critique, showing that Taylor “deconstructs” the crucial distinction between immanence and transcendence that any “exclusively humanist” worldview must presuppose. Taylor's response only partly resolves the problem, however, because the Nietzschean can still draw a defensible distinction between legitimate and meaningful appeals to transcendence and illegitimate and nihilistic ones. The paper concludes by suggesting that traditional appeals to a transcendent creator God, a heavenly afterlife, and so on, continue to run afoul of Nietzsche's critique of the nihilism of otherworldliness, and that we would do better to explicitly abjure such otherworldly appeals. Notes * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Saving the Sacred in a Secular Age” conference at UC Riverside, 26 February 2010. For helpful comments and criticisms, I would like to thank Dana Belu, Albert Borgmann, Craig Calhoun, Hubert Dreyfus, Peter Gordon, Pierre Keller, Sean Kelly, Charles Taylor, Mark Wrathall, and several members of the audience (whose names I did not catch). My thanks also to the other participants in a lively reading group at UNM on A Secular Age: John Bussanich, Russell Goodman, Brent Kalar, Paul Katsafanas, and Phil Williamson. 1. This quotation is from a televised interview with Heidegger from 1964 (the segment is titled “Über Religion”). See “Inventer la télévision”, interview with Pierre Tchernia, Claude Santelli, and Michèle Cotta”, in: Bourdon et al. (Eds.), La grande adventure du petit écran, p. 20; quoted in part by Chaplin, Tamara (2007), Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), pp. 214–15. I explain this quotation below. 2. See Taylor, Charles (2007) A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 55–59, pp. 583–89; the quotations are from pp. 585–86. (All subsequent unprefixed references in the text are to this work.) On the face of it, the fact that an eminent Catholic philosopher like Taylor should prove so enlightening about Saint Augustine will probably seem less surprising than that he demonstrates such sympathetic insight into Camus. Yet, because I count myself a member of Taylor's secular audience, for me the opposite is the case: It seems at least as remarkable that Taylor should be able to convey the appeal of Augustine's religious view as successfully as he does Camus's heroic atheism. Of course, Taylor might be less happy to hear that I found myself thinking that much of what was so appealing about Augustine's view could be secularized (by replacing “eternity” with a second-order perspective available in the here and now—such as Heidegger's understanding of authenticity in Being and Time), and that to do so would constitute a significant improvement to the view. But I imagine, conversely, that Taylor's own fondness for Camus might have something to do with the ironic fact that Camus’ heroic embrace of the endless uphill struggle now possesses a certain suggestiveness for an intellectual Christian laboring in today's largely secular academy, who can thus draw religious inspiration from Camus’ originally atheistic idea that: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.” (That, of course, is the penultimate line of the [1991] title essay of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays [New York: Vintage], p. 123.) Many of us are indeed “cross-pressured”, as Taylor likes to say (Taylor suggests that we all are and will continue to be, but that seems more doubtful to me), and, depending on a reader's own position along the complex continua of religious belief, Taylor's book will prove edifying and challenging in different ways and degrees (especially to those who dogmatically occupy the extreme poles of belief and unbelief), a striking rhetorical fact that I take to be another sign of the work's success. 3. We might even say: some understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”, as Sellars famously evoked the purportedly systematic aims of the philosophical desire to understand. See Sellars, Wilfrid (1963) Science, Perception and Reality (New York: Routledge), p. 37. 4. On Western humanity's historical succession of “ontotheological” attempts to ground the intelligible order from the inside-out and the outside-in simultaneously, see my (2005) Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (New York: Cambridge University Press), Ch. 1. 5. Even Taylor's hasty critique of Lyotard as a self-refuting grand-narrativist of the end of grand narratives (p. 573) is based on a widespread misreading of Lyotard's actual view. Although there are incautious sentences in Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition that his opponents have taken out of context to caricature his ideas, Lyotard's considered view is that the two metanarratives originally meant to justify the meaning and purpose of the modern University are no longer credible. Lyotard argues that we should relinquish the metanarratives of “unity” and “emancipation”—i.e., the ideas that the new integration of active research that formed the modern university would lead us to uncover the organic interconnectedness of all knowledge, or else would contribute to the progressive emancipation of all human beings—because neither result obtained historically. Lyotard quite self-consciously proposes his own alternative metanarrative to justify the university today (in terms of “paralogy” rather than unity or freedom), and there is nothing self-contradictory in his so doing. Because Lyotard does not reject all metanarratives as incredible, he cannot simply be refuted by pointing out that such position would be a metanarrative and thus would be incredible itself. On this common but superficial dismissal of Lyotard as a self-undermining relativist, see my (2011 forthcoming) Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press) Ch. 4. 6. (Hence Heidegger's Hegel-inspired pursuit of a “transcendence” or “sublation” of unity: In the later Heidegger's terms of art, we should learn to understand the being of entities in terms of being as such, that is, as always partly expressible but never fully exhaustible.) Heidegger does not remain agnostic about the ultimate nature of reality as Kant does but, instead, phenomenologizes the Kantian noumenal. Nor does the fact that in some subdomains of being, such as those studied by mathematics and physics, the goal has long been the precise exactitude of an ontological monism, show that being itself has or even could have only one meaning. Rather, Heidegger clearly thinks that the mathematical understanding of being is just one understanding: It is a particularly useful one, but the danger of its powerful usefulness is the temptation of the scientistic illusion that all being could be understood in terms of such monosemic exactitude. Heidegger, following Aristotle, consistently maintains that it is a sign of a lack of education to try to impose the standards from one region of entities on another, or to think that “rigor” can simply be equated with precision when in fact, e.g., an interpretation of a poem that insists it mean one and only one thing would clearly rest on inappropriate standards and a failure to appreciate the essential polysemy of poetry (from which the later Heidegger learns some central lessons). 7. On this point, see my Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Ch. 3. 8. This seems to be the main point of the later Heidegger's appropriation of Parmenides’ notoriously recondite saying, “For thinking and being are the same.” For Heidegger, “sameness” is not “identity”; see my Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education. Heidegger's suggestion is not that being is ultimately one rather than many, but, instead, that we cannot fully pry being apart from our thinking of it, and vice versa. (In Heidegger's terms, being “needs” Dasein to take place; and conversely, without being, Dasein would have no intelligible world.) If this is right, however, then we are not entitled to the Parmenidean intuition that ultimately all is one, and that only our confused beliefs lead us to pluralize this oneness. (Borgmann forcefully suggested that our contemporary rejection of any ontological “dualism” should lead us to reject ontological pluralism as well, but that rejection seems to me to derive from an overly reductive eliminative materialism, a totalizing monism which would ultimately undermine theoretical as well as ontological pluralism. Nevertheless, I shall go on to suggest that the very distinction between theoretical and ontological levels breaks down, and thus that the most coherent pluralist position is simply to be a pluralist across the board.) 9. Taylor expresses his mixed, theoretically pluralist and ontologically monist view when he writes: “None of us could ever grasp alone everything that is involved in our alienation from God and his action to bring us back. But there are a great many of us, scattered through history, who have had some powerful sense of some facet of this drama. Together we can live it more fully than any one of us could alone. Instead of reaching immediately for the weapons of polemic, we might better listen for a voice which we could never have assumed ourselves, whose tone would have been forever unknown to us if we hadn't strained to understand it” (p. 754). Perhaps Taylor's basic difference from the later Heidegger-inspired position could thus be put this way: Taylor seems to believe in an ontotheological creator God who stands as least partly outside of space and time and who ultimately unifies the meaning of creation. This belief—that the meaning of being is ultimately unified—seems to underwrite the impressive ecumenicalism that has encouraged Taylor to engage in dialogue with diverse religious groups in order to work toward building a shared consensus about universal human rights and other politically important matters. Yet, despite Taylor's remarkable success in such political projects, it is not clear to me that Taylor's view—which looks to build mutual respect on the basis of an overlapping consensus that progressively seeks to establish agreement on such matters as the universality of human rights—is in fact as robust a pluralism, or as firm a basis for respecting radically different groups, as a later Heidegger-inspired view. For the Heideggerian view suggests that our differences stem from the genuinely different (and even irreconcilable) ways in which being shows itself to us, and so not just from our different paths toward what is ultimately the same destination, the final act in the Hegel-inspired drama of alienation and reconciliation. On the Heidegger-inspired view, by contrast, we should not believe that we could ever discover an ultimate unity underlying our differences (or even that we will be able to agree about substantive questions of the good). Nonetheless, this ontological pluralism might still be the best possible basis for a fully robust political pluralism—one which grounds our differences in real difference, rather than in different approaches to sameness (and so suggests that we should respect these differences as such and thus renounce “the arrogant title of tolerance,” as Kant nicely put it)—as well as for a universality on important formal political questions (such as the universal establishment of political rights that protect us from the imposition of a single substantive understanding of the good), as Gianni Vattimo (among others) has argued. See e.g, Vattimo (2004) Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law, Santiago Zabala (Ed.), trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press). See also Kant (1983) Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett), p. 45. 10. Heidegger's works circa 1929 suggest that our presupposition that the meaning of existence must be unified derives from the way intelligibility is grounded in temporality, specifically, from the fact that the present underlies all experience, implicitly leading us to believe, falsely, that there must be some ultimate unity beneath experience. (See Heidegger's 1929 works, “On the essence of ground” [P, p. 132 / GA 9, p. 171] and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and, on the latter, my Heidegger on Ontotheology, p. 54 note 15.) But the later Heidegger soon abandons this view along with his earlier faith in fundamental ontology. More compelling, in my view, is the remaining question of whether Taylor is right to suggest that the meaning of a single human life can and should take the shape of some delineable “unity” or “wholeness”. Drawing on the Christian tradition, Kierkegaard thinks that we need a single unconditional commitment in order to make our lives meaningful (that “purity of the heart is to will one thing”, and thus to choose to be either a religious writer or a husband, e.g.). The early Heidegger partly takes over Kierkegaard's explicitly “religious” view in Being and Time, where Heidegger too supposes that there should be some “ultimate for-the-sake-of-which” that unifies our lives, some project we place before all others (apparently on pain of the kind of reductio ad absurdum of life's meaning that Aristotle first argued for in the Nicomachean Ethics), or which we would abandon last (and the loss of which would lead all our other projects to collapse into meaninglessness). Kierkegaard thought that our commitment to such a project must be absolute, such that we can never abandon it (even if its collapse should lead our lives into the manifest meaninglessness that such a wholehearted embrace of a single life-project was meant to avoid), because Kierkegaard maintained his faith in the miraculous possibility that things would work out, come what may, somehow. Secularizing Kierkegaard (and so eliminating this Christian faith in a miraculous salvation), the early Heidegger concludes that there had to be a point at which we should give up even the projects dearest to us, that we should resolutely “stick with them [but] without getting stuck with them”, in John Haugeland's famously pithy formulation. 11. Taylor's account of the rise of the secular age seeks to replace the standard “subtraction story” which treats the rise of unbelief as the natural result of removing the heavy chains of ignorance and superstition from the human mind, thereby helping human understanding to emerge progressively from that prolonged state of mental immaturity for which we ourselves are responsible (p. 574–75). Rejecting this enlightenment view, Taylor instead traces secularization back to a series of movements of “reform” that took place within the Christian tradition, painstakingly showing how unbelief develops through a series of historical struggles that continue to shape Western humanity's fundamental sense of ourselves and our relation to the world. The rise of unbelief is accomplished creatively, in an ongoing struggle over the meaning of life; unbelief is not the “natural” state that stands revealed when all the illusions are stripped away. Of course, Protestants might initially be suspicious of a Catholic who blames unbelief on reform, but in fact Taylor's nuanced view traces reform back to currents internal to Catholicism and is also appreciative of reform's achievements (even if he remains more sensitive to its costs), and I for one found his central attempt to provide an alternative explanation of secularization highly persuasive. 12. What postmodernists believe that the borders of any knowledge domain can be secured in a way that will rigorously exclude the covert appeal to something transcending this domain? In fact, the major “postmodern” philosophers all seem committed (like Taylor himself) to the impossibility of any theoretical system's rigorous self-closure. Unfortunately, despite occasional remarks on Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault (and a single mention of Deleuze), Taylor's massive tome never engages in a serious way with any of these postmodern philosophers. The strange result is that Martha Nussbaum becomes Taylor's main representative of the post-Nietzschean position (p. 625–34), singled out for her espousal of the view that humanity's misguided quest for transcendence results from our failure to accept our essential finitude. But Nussbaum's view is drawn from ancient tragedy rather than postmodern theory (although, interestingly, such a reading of Sophocles is already anticipated in Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, as I show in Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Ch. 4; on Heidegger's critique of “subjectivism”, see Ch. 3). In fact, despite their crucial difference over the possibility and desirability of renouncing the quest for the unattainable, I would submit that the disagreement between Taylor and the “postmodernists” remains something of a family feud, since they both share at least four more major theses: both 1) reject “scientism” and other anti-pluralist, monopolistic, or “totalizing” accounts of the human condition (unlike some those narrowly “naturalistic” contemporary Nietzscheans) and, instead, 2) “recognize that they are offering one interpretation of the human condition among many” (p. 837, note 67). Taylor also advances the typically postmodern views that 3) “the pure love of truth, uncoloured by any passionately held beliefs, is a reality of some other universe, not ours” (p. 332), and that 4) “the modern, liberal identity … [is only] one, historically constructed understanding of human agency among others” (p. 571, see also p. 119). One can, of course, contest these views in various ways, but—in the face of Taylor's remarkable proximity to these four paradigmatically “postmodern” ideas (or five, if we count their shared rejection of systematic self-closure)—I shall be more interested here in exploring their most important difference, namely, Taylor's challenge to the postmodern (and neo-Nietzschean) rejection of any appeals to a wholly transcendent realm as meaningless, obsolete, childish, cowardly, and so on. 13. See “Heidegger speaks”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_vYz4nQUcs (accessed 12 February 2010). 14. In another clip from these televised interviews, Heidegger provides the following example: “Today, everyone is able to operate a radio or television without knowing which laws of physics stand behind them, without knowing which methods were needed to discover these laws, methods which, in the foundations of their genuine content, are understood today only by five or six physicists” (Ibid.). Heidegger goes on to draw an analogy between these few physicists who have personally experienced the disclosure of the basic laws of physics, on the one hand, and the few phenomenological ontologists who are capable of understanding the meaning of being which most people more or less thoughtlessly presuppose, on the other. (I think this analogy would be worth exploring, but cannot do so here.) 15. See Heidegger, M. (1998) Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press), hereafter “P”. See also Heidegger, M. (1976) Gesantausgabe, vol. 9, Wegmarken, ed. F. -W. von Herranann (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann), hereafter “GA”. For Heidegger in 1930, “transcendence” also entails that our existential projecting into projects always exceeds (i.e., is more than) these projects in terms of which we make sense of ourselves. Hence: “the human being, existing as a transcendence that exceeds in the direction of possibilities, is a being of distance” (P, p. 135 / GA 9, p. 175). Sartre clearly appropriated these views in Being and Nothingness. 16. Heidegger also unsettles the rectitude of moral dogmatism: Unlike the Kantian model of autonomy (in which contrary inclinations much be disciplined so that they learn to conform to the dictates of reason, a seemingly sadomasochistic logic, as Horkheimer and Adorno famously point out in Dialectic of Enlightenment), and the Platonic–Freudian model of sublimation (in which the aims of originally contrary inclinations at work in the self get redirected and so harnessed into the service of reason), Heidegger adopts a more Nietzschean model (at least in this middle period), according to which the highest form of self-development comes from nurturing the productive tension between the different forces at work in the self. This sheds a new light on those oft-quoted lines from “The self-assertion of the German university”: “All leadership must allow its following to have its own strength. All following carries resistance within it. This essential opposition between leading and following must be neither covered over nor obliterated altogether.” See, Figal G. (Ed.), trans. J. Veith, (2009) (The Heidegger Reader, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), p. 115 / GA 16, p. 116. 17. Taylor mentions Sagan, Dennett, and Dawkins. For an argument that Dawkins’ view is starkly contradictory in just the way Taylor suggests, see my Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Ch. 1. 18. Here we might contrast the known unknowns of the background and social imaginary that Dreyfus and Taylor rightly recognize. The relevant difference between these “known unknowns” and the known unknowable is between beliefs that trail off or transcend into something not yet known (but which nevertheless stands in certain complex but discernible relations to those known beliefs) and belief in that which is declared to be in principle beyond any such relations not only to human knowledge but to any kind of experience by living beings. I develop this crucial contrast below. 19. It is the fact that we modern human beings seem to be perpetually dissatisfied that neo-conservatives from Bloom to Fukuyama appeal to in order to argue (against one of the theses that Taylor shares with many postmodernists) that Western liberal democracy is not merely one possible political arrangement among others (see note 12 above) but, instead, that our capitalist–liberal-democratic system thrives precisely because (for all its problems) it has taken shape as the system best attuned to our apparently unquenchable thirst for something more. See e.g., Bloom, A. (1987) The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster); Fukuyama, F. (2002) Our Posthuman Condition (New York: Picador). It is not clear to me how Taylor would respond to such arguments. Certainly he would agree that there is a perennial human longing for “something more,” but would he also suggest that this longing remains insatiable only so long as it is mistaken for a desire for material commodities rather than for spiritual insights and experiences? Perhaps not, since Taylor does not seem to believe in spiritual satisfaction as a permanent rather than as a temporary achievement. (Material and spiritual satisfaction are thus both transitory, whatever other reasons we might have for preferring the latter to the former.) Either way, does Taylor think that another political organization would better serve our spiritual aspirations for transcendence? Taylor clearly recognizes the needless suffering capitalism imposes, but does this recognition do more than suggest that capitalism needs a more finely-attuned welfare state? Does Taylor believe that a non-democratic or non-liberal political union would do better at eliminating unnecessary suffering? (On this question, A Secular Age remains silent, as far as I can tell.) 20. What I find most provocative about Taylor's account of secularization is his subtle challenge to contemporary unbelievers to provide a satisfying, wholly secular account of the highest aspirations of human beings, to explain our continuing pursuit of such existential goods as “wholeness”, “fullness”, “joy”, and “fulfillment” (p. 5), as well as the testimony of many of our most sensitive thinkers that something profound seems to have gone missing with the rise of the secular age. Indeed, that is the challenge I try to meet in Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. To the many poets and thinkers Taylor quotes in support of the idea that there is a God-shaped hole in the fabric of human experience, I might add the following lyrics from the band Built to Spill: “Words for fighting, words for fun / They've all melted into one; / On the tip of every tongue, / Like a new name for the sun. / I'm alarmed and I can't recover from / Crashing onto this Island we've become.” (“Alarmed”, from the album Ancient Melodies of the Future.) 21. One need only think, e.g., of the “extropians”—a group of Nietzschean cyber-utopians who call for humanity to abandon the body and find ways to download our consciousnesses onto the internet and live on as information—whom Dreyfus critiques in On the Internet, second edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). 22. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in: W. Kaufmann, ed. and trans., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin), pp. 124–30; quotation from p. 125. 23. Ibid., p. 125. See also p. 188: “Remain faithful to the earth, … serve the meaning of the earth … Do not let your gift-giving love and knowledge fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls … Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.” 24. In what has been dubbed “Avatar blues” and “the Avatar effect”, viewers “say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora”. As one widely-quoted viewer, Ivar Hill, reports: “When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so … meaningless” (ellipses in the original). Another viewer (“Mike”) said: “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora.” Dr. Stephan Quentzel, a psychiatrist at Beth Israel Medical Centre interviewed by CNN, nicely brought out the nihilism of otherworldliness at the heart of this phenomenon when he pointed out that “real life will never be as utopian as it seems onscreen. It makes real life seem more imperfect.” See Joe Piazza, “Audiences experience ‘Avatar’ blues,” CNN.com, 11 January 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/11/avatar.movie.blues/index.html (accessed 13 February 2010). On the nihilism of “Second Life,” see Dreyfus's On the Internet, second edition. 25. I have argued that, ironically, Nietzsche's own conception of amor fati falls victim to his critique of otherworldly nihilism because of the way it relies on eternal recurrence; see Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Ch. 1. I have also elaborated a non-literal way to interpret the Christian understanding of death and rebirth (i.e., a way to secularize the conversion narrative so as to preserve the phenomenological insight at its core) in such essays as my (2004) “Heidegger's perfectionist philosophy of education in Being and Time”, Continental Philosophy Review, 37(4), pp. 439–67; and “Death and demise in Being and Time”, in: Mark A. Wrathall (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Being and Time (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2011). 26. This is a difference that Levinas seeks to split, not very successfully, with his paradoxical notion of “non-phenomenal revelation,” or so I have tried to suggest in “Rethinking Levinas on Heidegger on death”, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, Vol. XVI (Fall 2009), pp. 23–43; see esp. p. 41 note 35. The contrast between Heideggerian and Levinasian perfectionisms elaborated there reinforces Taylor's view that the central difference between secular and religious views “is that the believer or devout person is called on to make a profound inner break with the goals of flourishing in their own case” (p. 17), except that for Levinas the self's “eccentric” passage beyond itself turns out to be the highest form of its own flourishing. Yet, Taylor's view of exclusive humanism as “accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing” seems too narrow to encompass the later Heidegger's view, as I have suggested in “Ontology and ethics at the intersection of phenomenology and environmental philosophy”, Inquiry, 47(4), pp. 380–412. Such considerations leave me unhappy with the narrowness of Taylor's definitional claim that “a secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable” (p. 19). 27. See Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, pp. 50–2; The Gay Science, (#125), p. 181. Nietzsche saw Kant as a Raskolnikov figure who set out to kill (indeed, to “kill god,” that is, to make reason rather than divine authority the foundation of morality), but subsequently felt he had to steal (adopting the Judeo–Christian value system) in order to rationalize this murder (and escape its guilt). For Nietzsche, Kant thereby avoided facing up to the true radicalism of his act, the fact that “the death of god” demanded a “revaluation of values,” i.e., a new, non-nihilistic value-system which would not de-value this world by comparing it to an “otherworldly” beyond, forever out of the cognitive reach of mortal beings like us. See Nietzsche, “On the pale criminal”, in: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 149–52; my Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Ch. 6; and, on Nietzsche's still underappreciated debt to Kant: Hill, R. Kevin (2003) Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 28. In this I think Nietzsche's critique of otherworldly nihilism finds a perhaps surprising ally in the later Heidegger's critique of ontotheology, which suggests that the now widespread tendency to believe in a creator God standing outside history is an unfortunate distortion of religious experience by the metaphysical tradition. On this last point, see my “On the use and abuse of ontotheology for religion”, in: Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Ch. 1; and see also Peter Gordon's insightful (2008) essay, “The place of the sacred in the absence of God: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69(4), pp. 670–73; and see Dreyfus, Hubert & Kelly, Sean Dorrance (2011) All Things Sharing: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press).