In Praise of Polytheism

In Praise of Polytheism (On Monomythical and Polymythical Thinking) (German: Lob des Polytheismus. Über Monomythie und Polymythie) is an essay by the German philosopher Odo Marquard, held as a lecture at the Technical University of Berlin in 1978 and published in 1979. It posits that monotheism and the Enlightenment are based on "monomythical thinking",[1] meaning that they only allow one story, that the separation of powers and the individual have their origin in polytheism, and that people should embrace what it calls "enlightened polymythical thinking",[2] which is the recognition of several stories in the modern world. Marquard, a professor of philosophy and proponent of scepticism and pluralism, belonged to a tendency in German philosophy which viewed the issues of modernity through the concept of political theology, stating that modern political concepts can be understood through their affinity with theological concepts. Some of the points in the essay have precursors in the writings of Max Weber, Erik Peterson and Friedrich Nietzsche.

"In Praise of Polytheism" has provoked discussion and controversy in Germany. Among its critics have been the scholars Jacob Taubes and Richard Faber, who associated its views with far-right politics and oligarchy. The Catholic theologian Alois Halbmayr wrote a doctoral dissertation as a response to Marquard, arguing that the Christian Trinity provides everything requested in the essay.

Background

There was a current of German-speaking philosophers in the 20th century who addressed concerns about meaning in the contemporary world by discussing modernity in religious terms.[3] This tendency was inspired by the secularisation theorem associated with Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith, which posits that there is a continuity between theology and secular politics and science. Schmitt had discussed this under the label of political theology, which he summarised by saying that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts".[4] Jacob Taubes was instrumental in starting a discussion about modernity and Gnosticism with the publication of his dissertation Abendländischer Eschatologie [Western eschatology] in 1947.[5] The philosophers engaged in these discussions varied in their approaches and solutions. Taubes and Gershom Scholem identified as a modern Gnostics; Taubes in particular considered the world to be illegitimate and wished to see it go down in apocalyptic destruction.[6] Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg and Odo Marquard, on the other hand, wanted to legitimise the world as it is, and thereby overcome the Gnostic rejection of the world.[7]

Marquard (1928 – 2015) was a professor of philosophy at the University of Giessen.[8] He thought it was crucial to recognise human finitude, promoted philosophical scepticism and pluralism, and opposed the absolutism found in German idealism.[9] For him, the solution to the issues of meaning in modernity was to rediscover systems from the ancient world.[10] His intellectual combination of modernity and polytheism had a precursor in the sociologist Max Weber, who in the 1910s had written that the lived modern world, with its different choices and ultimate subordination to fate, could be understood as a form of disenchanted polytheism. This situation, wrote Weber, made ancient Greece a suitable place to look for models for a modern way of life.[11] Another precursor was the Christian theologian Erik Peterson, who had discussed the possibility of polytheism as a political theology in his essay "Monotheism as a Political Problem" (1935).[12] From Friedrich Nietzsche, Marquard adopted the view that the end of religious monotheism marked the beginning of modernity.[12]

Summary

Marquard argues that human consciousness never has undergone a process of demythologisation. He fundamentally agrees with Claude Lévi-Strauss', Blumenberg's and Leszek Kołakowski's positions on myths, and writes that the story of demythologisation is itself a myth. Myths are stories, and are not primitive precursors to knowledge; knowledge is about finding truths, and storytelling is how humans engage with known truths in their lifeworld. New knowledge will therefore only lead to new myths. Marquard compares the changing of myths to the changing of clothes and writes that the Enlightenment was not a "striptease"; "mythonudism" is not possible.[13]

According to Marquard, F. W. J. Schelling coined the term "new mythology" in "The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism", but showed an uneasiness with the myth of progress in his late works.[14]

Myths can be harmful or wholesome. Monomythical thinking—allowing only one story—is harmful, because it causes narrative atrophy. Conversely, polymythical thinking is a separation of powers, where different stories keep each other in check and the manifoldness of the individual can exist. The chief example of a monomyth is that of world history as progress toward emancipation. This myth emerged in the philosophy of history of the mid-18th century, and turned "histories" into the singular "history".[15] Marquard calls it the second end of polymythical thinking. The first was the end of religious polytheism; the Christian Trinity may be polytheistic, but the salvation story is not, and ends in nominalistic "storylessness".[16]

Marquard describes the emancipation story as a failed attempt to secularise the salvation story. Like its precursor, it is a story about the termination of myth, but nonetheless, it became a new mythology. After the new mythology emerged, an uneasiness about the monomyth began to show. It expressed itself as an increased interest in the exotic, which came to include classical antiquity, orientalism and the Germanic mythology in Richard Wagner's works. In his contemporary West, Marquard sees Maoism, tourism and structural ethnology as examples of the same "mythological orientalism".[17] This countermovement will never offer a solution, because it merely submits exotic mythology to the monomyth of progress and thereby confirms its domination.

The real solution for Marquard is "enlightened polymythical thinking".[2] The modern world began when monotheism was disenchanted, but this also led to the "disenchanted return of polytheism",[18] in the form of political separation of powers. The individual re-emerged; it had existed under polytheism's separation of powers, before it was formulated under the threat from monotheism. When people recognise that myths are stories, it becomes possible to identify modern polymythical thinking, which for example exists in the scientific study of history and in novels. For philosophy to break with the monomyth, it must allow dissent and tell stories again, defying charges of relativism and scepticism.

Publication history

Marquard gave "In Praise of Polytheism" as a lecture at the Technical University of Berlin on 31 January 1978. It was published as an essay the year after by Walter de Gruyter in the anthology Philosophie und Mythos. Ein Kolloquium.[19] It was included in Marquard's essay collection Farewell to Matters of Principle (German: Abschied vom Prinzipiellen), published in German by Reclam in 1981 and in Robert M. Wallace's English translation by Oxford University Press in 1989.[20]

Marquard continued his arguments in the text "Aufgeklärter Polytheismus—auch eine politische Theologie?" ["Enlightened polytheism—also a political theology?"] which was published in a 1983 anthology about the legacy of Schmitt, edited by Taubes.[21] He also discusses his view of polytheism as a requisite for freedom and individuality in the 1988 essay "Sola divisione individuum—Betrachtung über Individuum und Gewaltenteilung" ["Individual by separation alone—considerations on the individual and separation of powers"], presented at the 13th colloquium of the research group Poetik und Hermeneutik.[22][lower-alpha 1]

Reception

"In Praise of Polytheism" has been at the centre of discussion and controversy in Germany.[23] According to the religious studies scholar Burkhard Gladigow, the opposition it faced became so sharp because Marquard proposed polytheism specifically as a political solution.[12] Gladigow also wrote that the strong reaction to the subject resulted from a eurocentric and academic perspective, because among the world's population, only a minority adhers to nominally monotheistic religions, and even within those religions, monotheism is only one of several elements that inform the religious practice.[24]

Jacob Taubes likened the views in the essay to those of the Kosmiker group (depicted: Karl Wolfskehl, Alfred Schuler, Ludwig Klages, Stefan George and Albert Verwey).

In 1983, Taubes published a response to "In Praise of Polytheism" where he wrote that Marquard should ask himself if he had not outlined a "philosophical choreography" for present-day "Kosmiker",[12][lower-alpha 2] referring to a group of mystics and neopagans with blood and soil tendencies in turn-of-the-century Munich.[25] Taubes wrote that rather than describing a "mythical state of mind", the essay produces one,[12][lower-alpha 3] and that "recourses to myth post Christum are really just repetitions of Julian's apostasy".[26][lower-alpha 4] He connected Marquard's project to Alain de Benoist's book On Being a Pagan (1981) and thereby associated it with the neopaganism of the far-right Nouvelle Droite movement in France.[27] In 2007, the sociologist Richard Faber compared "In Praise of Polytheism" to Blumenberg's book Work on Myth (1979), and wrote that Marquard "explicates what Blumenberg only implies" by embracing polytheism as political pluralism.[28] Taubes and Faber rejected the idea that polytheism is the seed to the individual and the separation of powers. Taubes pointed to the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, who argued that the ego or soul originated with a development away from the "mythico-tragic view", something that can be seen in Ezekiel 18.[29] Faber described the polytheism of ancient Greece as a self-destructive "oligotheism" destined to fail, and wrote that "pluralism has long become integralism (or rather: corporatism)", something that "political mono-theologians" like Schmitt and Rüdiger Altmann are able to recognise.[30] In her 2016 book on Germanic neopaganism, the literary scholar Stefanie von Schnurbein grouped Marquard's essay with texts written by Botho Strauß and Martin Walser in the 1990s.[31][lower-alpha 5] She wrote that the three authors share a "post-modern, post-structuralist and post-colonial impulse, which posits a logic of difference against a unifying, colonializing logic of sameness".[32] Due to the nationalist implications of Strauß' and Walser's texts, Schnurbein wrote that "Taubes' early critique of Marquard is not as far-fetched or one-sided as it might have seemed at the moment of its publication in 1983".[32]

From a Christian perspective, the Roman Catholic theologian Alois Halbmayr wrote his doctoral dissertation as a response to Marquard's writings about polytheism and monotheism.[33][lower-alpha 6] Halbmayr argued that the separation of powers that Marquard requests can be found in the Christian concept of the Trinity,[34] and that Marquard engages in wishful thinking when he presents polytheism as a guarantee for freedom.[35] With that in mind, Halbmayr called for resumed critical discussions about hope and ethics within the theology and philosophy of history.[34] The Lutheran theologian Klaus Koch wrote that Marquard has written "In Praise of Polytheism" with a "noble-philosophical diction" which has the effect that "you don't know to what extent the matter is meant as serious or conceived in his cups".[36][lower-alpha 7]

See also

• Religious pluralism
• Secular paganism

Notes

1. "Sola divisione individuum" was published in Frank, Manfred; Haverkamp, Anselm, eds. (1988). Individualität (in German). Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. pp. 21–34. ISBN 978-3-7705-2474-7. It also appears in Marquard, Odo (2004). Individuum und Gewaltenteilung (in German). Stuttgart: Reclam. pp. 68–90. ISBN 978-3-15-018306-9.
2. Original quotation: "Odo Marquard wird sich fragen [lassen] müssen, ob sein spätes 'Lob des Polytheismus' die philosophische Choreographie skizziert, nach der jene akademisierten 'Kosmiker' in der Bundesrepublik und in Frankreich sich in Szene setzen können."
3. Original quotation: "...nicht nur eine mythische Geisteslage indiziert, sondern produziert [wird]..."
4. Original quotation: "Die Rekurse auf Mythos post Christum sind in Wahrheit nur Wiederholungen der Apostasie Julians."
5. The texts in question are Strauß' 1993 essay "Anschwellender Bocksgesang" and Walser's contributions to the public polemic which followed after that essay was published.
6. The dissertation was defended in 1998 and published as a book in 2000.
7. Original quotation: "...in vornehm-philosophischer Diktion wie etwa bei Odo Marquard, bei der man nicht weiß, inwieweit die Sache ernst gemeint oder einer Weinlaune entsprungen ist."

References

Citations

1. Marquard 1989, p. 93.
2. Marquard 1989, p. 100.
3. Styfhals 2019, p. 264.
4. Styfhals 2019, p. 20.
5. Faber 2018, p. 115.
6. Styfhals 2019, pp. 1–2, 264.
7. Styfhals 2019, pp. 4, 264–265.
8. University of Giessen 2015.
9. Styfhals 2019, p. 240.
10. Styfhals 2019, p. 4.
11. Gladigow 2001, p. 144.
12. Gladigow 2001, p. 145.
13. Marquard 1989, p. 91.
14. Marquard 1989, pp. 97–98.
15. Marquard 1989, p. 94.
16. Marquard 1989, p. 96.
17. Marquard 1989, p. 99.
18. Marquard 1989, p. 101.
19. Marquard 1989, pp. 138–139.
20. Marquard 1989, edition notice.
21. Marquard 1983.
22. Leonhardt 2003, pp. 110, 117.
23. Gladigow 2001, pp. 144–145.
24. Gladigow 1998, p. 329.
25. Schnurbein 2016, pp. 173, 191.
26. Taubes 1983, p. 464, quoted in Gladigow (2001, p. 146)
27. Gladigow 2001, p. 146.
28. Faber 2018, pp. 112–113.
29. Nicholls 2015, p. 217.
30. Faber 2018, p. 113.
31. Schnurbein 2016, pp. 160–162.
32. Schnurbein 2016, p. 162.
33. Halbmayr 2000.
34. Hailer 2006, p. 194.
35. Leonhardt 2003, p. 116.
36. Koch 1999, p. 873.

Sources

Faber, Richard (2018) [2007]. Political Demonology: On Modern Marcionism. Translated by Feiler, Therese; Mayo, Michael. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books. ISBN 978-1-4982-0129-2.

Gladigow, Burkhard (1998). "Polytheismus" [Polytheism]. In Cancik, Hubert; Gladigow, Burkhard; Kohl, Karl-Heinz (eds.). Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe [Handbook of fundamental concepts in religious studies]. 4: Kultbild–Rolle. Stuttgart, Berlin and Cologne: Kohlhammer. pp. 321–330. ISBN 3-17-009556-0.

Gladigow, Burkhard (2001). "Polytheismus" [Polytheism]. In Kippenberg, Hans G.; Riesenbrodt, Martin (eds.). Max Webers 'Religionssystematik' [Max Weber's 'religious systematics'] (in German). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. pp. 131–150. ISBN 3-16-147501-1.

Hailer, Martin (2006). Gott und die Götzen. Über Gottes Macht angesichts der lebensbestimmenden Mächte [God and the idols. On God's power in the face of the life determining powers] (in German). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ISBN 3-525-56336-1.

Halbmayr, Alois (2000). Lob der Vielheit. Zur Kritik Odo Marquards am Monotheismus [In praise of multitude. On Odo Marquard's criticism of monotheism]. Salzburger Theologische Studien (in German). 13. Innsbruck: Tyrolia Verlag. ISBN 3-7022-2255-3.

Koch, Klaus (1999). "Monotheismus als Sündenbock?" [Monotheism as scapegoat?]. Theologische Literaturzeitung (in German). 124 (9): 873–884. ISSN 0040-5671.

Leonhardt, Rochus (2003). Skeptizismus und Protestantismus. Der philosophische Ansatz Odo Marquards als Herausforderung an die evangelische Theologie [Scepticism and Protestantism. Odo Marquard's philosophical effort as a challenge to evangelical theology]. Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Theologie (in German). 44. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ISBN 3-16-147864-9.

Marquard, Odo (1983). "Aufgeklärter Polytheismus—auch eine politische Theologie?" [Enlightened polytheism—also a political theology?]. In Taubes, Jacob (ed.). Der Fürst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen [The ruler of this world. Carl Schmitt and what follows]. Religionstheorie und politische Theologie (in German). 1. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. pp. 77–84. ISBN 3506771612.

Marquard, Odo (1989). "In Praise of Polytheism (On Monomythical and Polymythical Thinking)". Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies. Translated by Wallace, Robert M. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 87–110. ISBN 0-19-505114-9.

Nicholls, Angus (2015). Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg's Theory of Myth. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-88549-2.

Schnurbein, Stefanie von (2016). Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. ISBN 978-90-04-30951-7.

Styfhals, Willem (2019). No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-1501730993.

Taubes, Jacob (1983). "Zur Konjunktur des Polytheismus" [On the current situation of polytheism]. In Bohrer, Karl Heinz (ed.). Mythos und Moderne. Begriff und Bild einer Rekonstruktion [Myth and modern. Concept and image of a reconstruction] (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. pp. 457–470.

University of Giessen (11 May 2015). "Universität Gießen trauert um Prof. Odo Marquard" [University of Giessen mourns the loss of Prof. Odo Marquard]. uni-giessen.de (in German). Archived from the original on 14 May 2015. Retrieved 1 July 2020.

Further reading

Blumenberg, Hans (1985) [1979]. Work on Myth. Translated by Wallace, Robert M. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-52133-8.

Poser, Hans, ed. (1979). Philosophie und Mythos. Ein Kolloquium [Philosophy and myth. A colloquium] (in German). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-007601-2.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Schmitt, Carl (1986) [1922]. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by Schwab, George D. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262192446.