Translator: P Hakenberg Reviewer: Hélène Vernet
So why do I think that we need religion,
that we need religious faith in the globalized world?
I believe that we need to ask afresh
the most important question of our lives.
And the most important question of our lives
is not how do we succeed in this or that endeavor
in the course of our lives.
The most important question of our lives is:
"How do we succeed as human beings?"
"How do we succeed in the task of being human?"
I believe that the great world religions
are the repositories of the most enduring
and most compelling ways to answer that question,
not always compatible answers but nonetheless most compelling.
Now, I will give you an answer to the question "why we need religion?"
from the standpoint of my own experience
and the faith in which I share, which is Christian faith.
I bring to it two fundamental experiences.
One of them was:
I was giving a talk at UN
at the moment when the first airplane hit one of the towers.
My topic was reconciliation.
And my topic was: why it is that faith can bring people together?
And there, in front of the eyes of the entire world,
the proof to the contrary was delivered
namely that faith -
other things were in play as well but certainly also faith -
can have these extraordinary devastating effects.
The faith turned homicidal.
My other experience is a few years after that.
I was in Dubai and I was member
of one of the Global Agenda Councils of the World Economic Forum.
And this was established in the wake of the great financial crisis,
one of the greatest financial crisis in the entire human history.
Many of us descended upon Dubai
and discussed from various angles,
participated in what Klaus Schwab has described
as a "global redesign project."
And I've heard a lot about financial regulation, about economic growth,
about variety of threats to our economic and political systems, and so on.
I was part of the Global Agenda Councils on value and on religion,
I've heard also about inequality, many, many things needed for solidarity.
But one thing I heard virtually nothing about,
and this is about kind of the dark force,
what some later called "the dark force of passion"
that often runs our soul, that pulse our soul.
Arguably, it is desire gone awry
that was the cause, the immediate cause
that occasions that entire crisis:
desire gone awry of the lenders
who wanted to replace their BMWs
with really sparkling Bentley's or Aston Martin's ;
maybe also desire of our people
who wanted to replace their rusty Corollas with their a little bit nicer Camrys.
But desire played a very significant role in this entire collapse.
And yet, it was not thematized.
We never thought about:
What place the things that we produce and services that we offer,
what place do they have in the entire ecology of the good life?
What does it mean in today's world,
to live well as human beings with everything else that we do?
Two experiences:
One is failure,
the inability of some of our major institutions
to answer a very simple question about human desire and human flourishing,
but truly conduces to human flourishing.
The other question is religion itself - gone experience -
religion itself which was supposed to answer the question of the good life,
gone awry and turned homicidal.
Now, these are my two experiences that I bring to the question,
and one way to look at these experiences
is with the help of a...
... reputably most a-religious of philosophers, who ever lived.
And that is Friedrich Nietzsche,
and what Friedrich Nietzsche says about nihilism.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a son and a grandson of Lutheran ministers,
studied theology for one semester and promptly lost his faith.
(Laughter)
Maybe just for that reason,
he has something to teach us,
both about the faith but also about societies in which we find ourselves.
And one of the ideas that he has
was organized around the question of nihilism.
I'll give my own spin to what he was saying,
so don't blame Nietzsche for what I say right now.
But let's divide this nihilism into two types:
religious nihilism and a-religious nihilism.
Religious nihilism might be something of an ascetic sort of nihilism,
where the human beings flee from the entanglement in ordinary life
into the spheres of transcendence,
leave behind everything in order to unify their souls with God.
This might be something like an ascetic form of nihilism
or of the type that's closer to Nietzsche's critique of religion,
where he said, religions come to the world
with preset sets of laws and regulations
and impose them upon life.
It's almost like giving a chokehold to life itself
because it doesn't honor, it doesn't respect
the very nature of the pulsating energies of life.
Its nihilistic because it denies this kind of life.
But in terms relatively violent,
it can do so with crushing force,
as we see in many places in the world.
That's a kind of religious nihilism.
There's this other kind of nihilism which is not so much religious
but which is a-religious.
Nietzsche thought of that kind of nihilism under the rubric of last men.
It's a bit of sexist term for it: "last humans" you can translate it.
And last humans, what are they like?
They're like a kind of...
... placid creatures oriented toward their own pleasure.
They dream their little dreams, they have their little pleasure,
no great assertion for any great kind of a cause,
an entire life organized around
a "couch potato" kind of existence.
I'm not sure if that's the word but you get my point.
Now, there's this other version of an also a-religious nihilism.
And this has nothing to do with a kind of search for comfort.
It has to do something with aggression in the world in which we find ourselves.
It has to do with people who, in different spheres of life,
want to bend the course of the entire world
to serve their own purposes:
wolves of Wall Street, House Of Cards politicians, folks of this sort.
There's also nihilism at work here.
In the first case, you have a religious case.
You have people who impose the structures of meaning upon the world,
and that structure of meaning does not allow life itself to breath.
It crushes life itself.
In the second case, you have somebody who affirms life with a full force
and yet, just by affirming life, does so in arbitrary ways.
When we give meaning to individual things,
what we give meaning to, we can take the meaning away,
and the meaning itself cannot carry our weight.
So, in a sense, we become plagued
by the meaninglessness of the existence in which we find ourselves.
You recall Milan Kundera who wrote the book "Unbearable lightness of being."
Everything that we do does not bear weight,
and we suffer from this plague of nihilism.
Now, these two nihilisms, you can almost think
that they are struggling for our soul, individual soul,
but you can almost say
that they are waging their war
at the world stage.
On one side, you have fundamentalists
who with clutched hands hold on to transcendent meaning.
On the other hand, you have libertarians,
who want to lead the way of life that they want to lead
and therefore in struggle with the fundamentalists.
Fundamentalism and pleasure oriented libertarianism:
these struggles in some ways conditioned one another,
and they go almost in a circle.
So you might have a fundamentalist
who find himself or herself squeezed
by the rigid structure of meaning imposed upon them
and wanting to escape that,
going toward becoming a libertarian,
living in the house of libertarians
and suddenly the weight has been lifted away,
but the meaning has been lost at the same time.
Pleasure is possibly there, but the meaning has been lost.
Then, you have libertarians turning into fundamentalists again.
You have a circle going on like this.
Nietzsche has a very interesting metaphor for this.
For those of you who've read "Thus spoke Zarathustra",
he spoke of a camel,
of a lion, and of a child.
The camel is the animal which bears everything.
The weight of meaning of laws is upon the camel.
And Nietzsche said, a camel morphs into a lion.
The lion is the one who roars,
frees himself from the burden, the crushing burden of rules.
But the lion doesn't stay simply a lion, he said, a lion turns into a child.
A child is the one who wills his own will
and who exists just in the play of the moment.
So his idea was: How does the camel become a child?
But Nietzsche didn't figure out
that sometimes a child would want to become a lion.
And so you've got this circle that's going on.
I believe that this recursive struggle
of these two types of nihilism
is one of the deep problems of the time in which we find ourselves.
From pleasure-oriented libertarianism
into fundamentalism and back.
So my question is: How do we find a way out of this?
I want to suggest that we've to find a way
which will unite the meaning and pleasure,
because meaning without pleasure is crushing.
Pleasure without meaning is vapid, empty.
We need the unity of the two.
I want to propose you that the unity of meaning and pleasure
is to be found in God who is conceived as Love.
Let me try to explain this a little bit.
And again, I speak as a Christian theologian.
Why God?
I believe that human beings are created for the relationship with God.
In all the longings that we long for,
in all the things that we pursue,
we also always already pursue God.
We need not be aware of this.
When we realize that we pursue God,
only then can we find meaning in our pursuits.
Now we do try to find meaning in ordinary finite things of our lives,
in muscle tone of our bodies,
in steamy sex, in fame, in family, you name it.
Varieties of things serve us to give meaning to our live
and yet we always remain partly dissatisfied,
because ultimately we have been created to be in contact with infinity.
God, I believe, is the only proper foundation
of the meaning of human life.
I say "God is the meaning of human life" and now, you immediately might ask:
"But why is it that when God gives meaning,
why doesn't then God take away the pleasure?"
"Where does the pleasure come
if you affirm the existence and the importance of God in human life?"
I think that relationship to God, in fact,
can enhance the pleasure in ordinary things of life.
I have a colleague at Yale. His name is Paul Bloom.
He has written a book called "How pleasure works."
In that book, he argues that actually,
we don't get pleasure from things so much,
as we get pleasure of, what he calls, "essences" that are attached to things,
or what one might say, relationship that attend to things.
So for instance, somebody will pay for John F. Kennedy's tape measure
48,875 dollars
just because the tape measure is John F. Kennedy's,
even though it is worth only three bucks, right?
So, in many ways, this is how we derive our pleasure.
My father gave me a gold nib Pelikan fountain pen.
I love this pen. I can find a better pen than that.
I can buy myself a better pen than this, but the pleasure of the pen
is precisely the relationship of the father that attaches to it.
Now think of it this way:
To believe in God means to believe that the world is a creation of God.
To believe in God means that the world is a gift of God to us.
God is the giver. World is the gift. And you are the recipient.
Now think about this also this way:
The gift is not just the thing that you see.
The gift is also the relationship.
It's only when something is in relationship to me
that it becomes a gift.
Now, imagine that you really love God.
Imagine that you are a good Christian, Jew or Muslim.
And imagine that you then see the world as a gift,
suddenly, everything in the world becomes alive.
It's a sacrament of the relationship between God and you.
Everything becomes like that Pelikan gold nib pen
that my father has given to me,
important not just in the sheer facticity of it,
but important in the fact that it comes as a gift to me from the outside.
Every gentle touch,
every whiff of a fresh plowed earth,
every distant star,
everything that you can imagine
is not just itself, but more than itself,
and it is that because it is a gift of the divine giver.
Unity of meaning and pleasure
is to be found in the God who is Love.
That I believe is the reason why religion matters in the world today.
And that's why I believe that religion, properly understood religious faith,
can overcome this recursive battle
between two kinds of nihilisms:
fundamentalist and a-religious liberty nihilism
that plague our world today.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)