Brague

To be sure, Nietzsche said many powerful things. But his writings contain a fully worked-out version of the hydraulic image: “There is a lake which one day refused to flow off and erected a dam where it had hitherto flowed off: ever since, this lake has been rising higher and higher. Perhaps that very renunciation will also lend us the strength to bear the renunciation itself; perhaps man will rise ever higher when he once ceases toflow out into a god.” This image already appears, discreetly, in the young Hegel, and emphatically in Feuerbach. Today even more mediocre minds wallow in the idea: man must demand his good, supposedly projected in God, and so on.

I would love to have someone explain to me the verb “to project,” which everyone seems to understand.

[…]

In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), John Locke preached in favor of a gentlemen’s agreement among the English Protestant churches. He excluded the Catholics as agents of a foreign prince, the pope. He also excluded atheists. His reason might seem odd, but it is profound: atheists are incapable of swearing an oath, foron what could they swear? “Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, although but even in thought, dissolves all.” We may smile at this, but when we do, we are like the “unbelievers” who laugh when Nietzsche’s Madman announces the death of God to “those who do not believe in God.”

In fact, though, behind the somewhat anecdotic question of oaths there lies the entire question of meaning.

[…]

Let me recall that the Constitution of the French Republic (the fifth of that name, the one in vigor since 1958) cites the whole of theDéclaration des droits de l’homme of 1789, which states that the French people do all sorts of things “in presence of and under the auspices of the Supreme Being.” The expression is not restricted to the anemic clock-maker God of the Enlightenment, but also designates the Christian God, as in Fénelon, for example. And no one finds that mention of God unacceptable. This means that the rights that are asserted are not fabricated, but acknowledged.

The problem that arises for modern democracies is that what someone does can also be undone. What is merely conceded by men—“rights,” a “dignity,” and so on—can one day be taken back by those same men.

Ici.

Se puede releer la entrevista que le hicieron Enrique G de la G y Manfred Svensson, aquí.