Kojève on the Deep Affinity Betwen Theism and Atheism

‘We are also disturbed that mystics, such as [Meister] Eckhart and [John Scotus] Eriugena, i.e., undoubtedly Christians, called God “nothing;” and we would not be willing to consider them atheists.’

The following lengthy passage, from Alexandre Kojève’s Atheism, pp.22-28, is taken from a still lengthier and more extensive inquiry into the relationship between atheism and what Kojève calls a non-fetishistic theism—essentially a theism that does not take any identifiable object-in-the-world to be God. This is a theism that Kojève takes very seriously, and appears to be quite disturbed and enchanted by it, even as he considers it to be ultimately absurd. Yet in his probe of its apparent absurdities, he touches on issues central to the very essence of “apophatic theology” as I have discussed it on this blog. What really comes to the fore is just how close and alike are theism and atheism, if theism is pushed to the limits of its unqualified assertions about God. I post this long excerpt now without any further commentary. Some commentary will follow on subsequent installments.

Here is the passage:

The commonality between the human being (= me)" and the world (= not-me) reveals itself above all in that I am always given other something(s), even if the difference from me is in the way they are given to me and not identical (or at the least analogous) with me in terms of their qualitative content (if it is not in all the modifications of this content, then in its fundamental tonus). These something(s) are other people. Seeing other people outside myself, I stop perceiving the world as something that is completely strange, as something other, fundamentally [u korne] distinct from that something which I myself am. I may fear the "empty" world, i.e., it may appear to me to be "strange," but fear passes (or becomes something completely different from terror; not having an object, it becomes the concrete fear before an enemy, etc.) as soon as I meet another human being: I immediately see that fear is vain, that the world is not as strange as it seemed. And it is easy to see that the world is not so strange to me not only because there are other people in it. On the contrary, there can only be people in it because it is not strange. If I am in terror and I see a human being, the terror passes not because I saw an oasis of the familiar in the depths of a strange desert that is strange and remains so (otherwise we would be afraid together). No, having seen something undoubtedly familiar outside myself, I understand that this outside cannot be completely strange to me: I see not an oasis in the desert, but, seeing the oasis, I stop perceiving the world as a desert that is strange to me. From whence it is evident that if the commonality of the world with me is immediate (not always, of course), emerging due to encountering people, it does not exhaust itself in my commonality with them: due to the commonality with them I perceive a commonality with everything. And I can perceive this commonality outside of the mediation of a meeting with those like me. I am not in terror (or less) if I am with my dog, if I encountered a cow, if I am at home, etc. I do not fear all that is close, related to me in some way or another. But it is easy to see that everything in the world is more or less close to me; I am not in terror when I see stones, fields, clouds, and the like—in a word, I am not in terror during the day. The plenitude of the qualified content of the world is not strange to me and I do not fear it; I am in terror when there is none of this content; I am afraid at night when the world threatens to dissolve in the gloom of nonbeing and when it seems at times that it (especially where I do not even see that I see nothing, do not see the gloom which is nonetheless something or other--behind my back) loses the last bit of commonality with me—its somethingness.4

Seeing another human being, I perceive that, notwithstanding all different forms of givenness to me of her and myself, the commonality with her is based on the analogy of qualified content (and Seinsart [manner of being, another term used in phenomenology]). But in our relations to the nonhuman world, differences of qualified content are joined to the difference in forms of the given, and sometimes even in the modi of being itself (Seinsart; indeed, not only are the bird and the stone present in the world but also the centaur and the logarithm, etc.) And nonetheless I perceive commonality and, generally speaking, I am not in terror as long as I perceive commonality. In what is this commonality given, if the forms of the given and qualified content and the way of being are different? From the very beginning, the world is given to me not as something independent that stands across from me but as influencing me and sustaining influence from me. More than that, I perceive myself only in this interaction with the world, and what I find myself with in the interaction cannot be completely strange to me, although it can (more correctly, must) be other. I am not in terror (or less so) at night if I am occupied with some matter or other, and not only because I, for example, am touching what I cannot see but, above all, because the log that I want to lift rises up while a falling pinecone hurts me. This interaction of the human being with the world is not exhausted by physical interaction: in the latter is given only her commonality with the physical world and the human being of physical labor (the savage) experiences "mystical fear" before the word and the letter, i.e., he is not conscious of his interaction with them. Interaction has to be understood in the broadest meaning of the word. The world is close to me not only because it is for me (Heidegger's die Welt des Zuhandenen) but also because it is beautiful, interesting, I love it, etc., because, in the end, it lets itself be known by me. And this is why not only the world of birds and stones is close to me but also the world of centaurs, logarithms, squared circles, etc. True, all these forms of interaction are not given to every human being or, more correctly, not every human being perceives them as such, and this is why, for example, the moon--which is beautiful, interesting, and knowable but (immediately at least) does not yield to my physical action--might seem to be something strange and terrible. But in principle the whole world finds itself, if only in the form of cognition, in interaction with me, and this interaction will give me a consciousness of my commonality with it and allows us to join the human being and the world into a whole, in some sense homogeneous, the "human being in the world." What follows from all that has been said regarding our problem of atheism and theism? We saw that the world is not frightening to us, not strange, and this is above all because we are in an interaction with it. On the other hand, we saw that God is outside the world in the sense that he is and is given in a completely other way than the human being and the world. Now, we can say that if the world is close to us, then God is strange to us, that if it is not frightening for us in the world then it is terrible to be in front of him, and that between me and him there is none of that interaction that there is between me and the world. But there can already be no interaction if God acts on me and I will be unable to act on him. In this way, the theist will be the one to whom is given such a terrible, strange something that finds itself outside the sphere of her influence, while the atheist is the one for whom there is no such thing.

The result would seem acceptable. For the atheist, there is only she and the world, for her everything is in some sense homogeneous, and this homogeneity reveals itself in principle in the possibility of having an equal interaction among all things. For the theist, however, there is something excluded from her sphere of activity. The character of the divinity will change depending on what she considers her activity (physical only or of other kinds) and what she excludes from the sphere of application of this activity. This will be the moon or wind or, if insufficient, something nonspatial, nonreal, finally, unknowable. In this way, we obtain various forms of theism, beginning with "fetishism" and ending with the pure theism that especially emphasizes the absence of the most general form of interaction (which it grasps as such in distinction from fetishism) denying the knowability of God. The atheist does not always deny the qualified something that the given form of theism considers God (for example, she does not deny the moon) but only the strangeness of this something. But the pure theist has the same point of view as well: her world coincides with the world of the atheist. The difference is only that, for her, outside of this world there is something strange and not yielding to her influence, while for the atheist there is nothing.

All of this is so, undoubtedly so, but what has been said is nonetheless inadequate. This will become clear from the following two considerations:

(1) For the pure theist, God is only something, but this something is an "other" something, not something of the "human being in the world." But if it is "other" only because it is not something of the "human being in the world," and if all totality of qualified content is contained in the "human being in the world,” this “something” (subjectively, at least) threatens to turn into nothing. Cognitively, something deprived of all attributes, positive as well as negative, does not distinguish itself in any way from nothing; only in relation to nothing is one unable neither to affirm nor to deny attributes because nothing is and cannot be substance, the subject of affirmation or denial. True, there may be other forms (that are not cognitive, like love, for example) of the givenness of the divine something, but if extreme theism denies every interaction of the human being and God, the Divine something will be nothing for her. And it is in fact so that several mystics call God "nothing." Is this atheism? Let it be so—it does not disturb us that the atheist [is] undoubtedly a homo religiosus. But it does disturb us that between theism and atheism there is nothing like a sharp border, that theism continually passes from "fetishism" to atheism. We are also disturbed that mystics, such as [Meister] Eckhart and [John Scotus] Eriugena, i.e., undoubtedly Christians, called God “nothing;” and we would not be willing to consider them atheists. In general, atheism and theism are too different, have always been perceived as opposed, and the continuous transition from one to the other seems impossible.

If we consider that every positive or negative attribute can be only an attribute taken from what is given of the "human being in the world," and if we understand God as the absolutely "other" in relation to the "human being in the world," then we should not avoid saying that God is nothing and arrive in this way at atheism. This means that the negative definitions given by us so far are inadequate to define the God of the theists. God is not I, God is not the world, God is "other"—this is without doubt, but in order to save God from dissolving into nothing, we have to show somehow in what this "other" consists, somehow give it, somehow define it positively. We may say that God is not nothing because he is something. But, in fact, I am something and the world is something, and since God is something, he is not strange to me and the world. Let him be even an unqualified something, but if he is nonetheless something in the sense that I and the world are in that something, he may be joined with the "human being in the world," and if not included in the world, then form, however, a homogeneous whole in some respect: "the human being, the world and God," i.e., outside this whole there will be nothing, i.e., there will be nothing. But how does this point of view differ from atheism?! This will be merely a special theory of the world, distributing homogeneity, in the sense of a somethingness that is not-I, into two spheres (the qualified and unqualified), one of which is called God. But the issue is in fact not in the name. Indeed, we may say quickly that this name is not right since God precisely is God because he does not form a homogeneous whole with me and the world but stands against them so that in relation to him I and the world become homogeneous.

God is "other," but he is not God because he is "other," for he is also a "nothing" that is other (but to call God nothing is absurd since he is not nothing). God is something, but he is God not because he is something, for something as something is not "other." That is, God is God only because he is both something and "other," i.e., he is an "other something." But what is this other "something;" how is it given to us? We saw that positive characteristics, just as much as negative ones, originating in the "human being in the world," will lead us to nothing and to atheism. And nonetheless God must be given to us in some way so that we might say, at the least, that we are or are not atheists, that there is or is not a God. How, then, can he be given to me?

God is "other" than the world, and he cannot be given to me in the world, neither positively nor negatively. Besides the world, only I myself am given to me. But can God be given to me in myself or as I or, at the least, is it impossible for me to find in my givenness a path to God? If there is such a path (and there is one), then it seems to be the unique path. But we did in fact say that I from the very beginning am given to myself in the world, but from the "human being in the world" there is no way to God. That is, if there is this way, I must not be given to myself as a "human being in the world." Am I given to myself thus, and, if so, how am I given to myself?