Giotto di Bondone, detail from Predella of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata
Heidegger’s abrupt statement in the 1976 “Spiegel” interview: “Only a God can save us” has always been perplexing. To understand it, we must first put it into context. Heidegger had just spoken of the planetary domination of technology, which nothing seems able to govern. Philosophy and other spiritual powers – poetry, religion, the arts, politics – have lost their ability to shake up or guide the lives of Western peoples. Hence the bitter diagnosis that they “cannot produce any immediate change in the present state of the world” and the inevitable consequence that “only a God can save us”.
The fact that this is not a millennial prophecy is confirmed immediately afterwards by the clarification that we must prepare ourselves not only “for the appearance of a God”, but also and rather “for the absence of a God in his decline, for the fact that we fall before the absent God”.
It goes without saying that Heidegger’s diagnosis has lost none of its timeliness; if anything, it is even more irrefutable and true. Humanity has renounced the decisive status of spiritual problems and created a special sphere in which to enclose them: culture. Art, poetry, philosophy and other spiritual forces, when they are not simply extinguished and exhausted, are confined to museums and cultural institutions of all kinds, where they survive as more or less interesting amusements and distractions from the tedium of existence (and often no less tedious).
So how are we to understand the philosopher’s bitter diagnosis? In what sense “only a god can save us”? For nearly two centuries – since Hegel and Nietzsche announced its death – the West has lost its god. But what we have lost is only a god to whom we can give a name and an identity. The death of God is, in truth, the loss of divine names (“divine names are missing”, lamented Hölderlin). Beyond the names, the essential remains: the divine. As long as we are capable of perceiving a flower, a face, a bird, a gesture or a blade of grass as divine, we can do without a nameable God. The divine is enough for us; the adjective is more important than the noun. Not “a God”, but “only the divine can save us”.
Giorgio Agamben: Only a god can save us now
Heidegger’s abrupt statement in the 1976 “Spiegel” interview: “Only a God can save us” has always been perplexing. To understand it, we must first put it into context. Heidegger had just spoken of the planetary domination of technology, which nothing seems able to govern. Philosophy and other spiritual powers – poetry, religion, the arts, politics – have lost their ability to shake up or guide the lives of Western peoples. Hence the bitter diagnosis that they “cannot produce any immediate change in the present state of the world” and the inevitable consequence that “only a God can save us”.
The fact that this is not a millennial prophecy is confirmed immediately afterwards by the clarification that we must prepare ourselves not only “for the appearance of a God”, but also and rather “for the absence of a God in his decline, for the fact that we fall before the absent God”.
It goes without saying that Heidegger’s diagnosis has lost none of its timeliness; if anything, it is even more irrefutable and true. Humanity has renounced the decisive status of spiritual problems and created a special sphere in which to enclose them: culture. Art, poetry, philosophy and other spiritual forces, when they are not simply extinguished and exhausted, are confined to museums and cultural institutions of all kinds, where they survive as more or less interesting amusements and distractions from the tedium of existence (and often no less tedious).
So how are we to understand the philosopher’s bitter diagnosis? In what sense “only a god can save us”? For nearly two centuries – since Hegel and Nietzsche announced its death – the West has lost its god. But what we have lost is only a god to whom we can give a name and an identity. The death of God is, in truth, the loss of divine names (“divine names are missing”, lamented Hölderlin). Beyond the names, the essential remains: the divine. As long as we are capable of perceiving a flower, a face, a bird, a gesture or a blade of grass as divine, we can do without a nameable God. The divine is enough for us; the adjective is more important than the noun. Not “a God”, but “only the divine can save us”.
March 21, 2025
From Quodlibet