In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Carl Schmitt found a new and unexpected audience for his ideas, as the former jurist of the Third Reich became a popular theorist among the European New Left and student movements. Schmitt was celebrated for his critique of liberalism, which seemed to offer a powerful tool for analyzing the depoliticized bourgeois political culture of postwar Europe. The feeling was apparently mutual: as Jan-Werner Müller has pointed out, Schmitt saw in the New Left perhaps the last best hope for resistance against the hegemony of liberal democracy in the postwar West.Footnote 1 One prominent fixture of the West German intellectual scene from this period who has recently achieved a new, posthumous stature as a paradigmatic leftist counterpart to Schmitt is the German Jewish philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes (1923–1987), who taught religion and Jewish studies at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia from 1953 to 1966 and then at the Free University of Berlin, where he was an important intellectual supporter of the German student movement.Footnote 2 Both Taubes and Schmitt wrote extensively on questions of political theology and secularization, though for opposing political projects: while Schmitt saw in the application of religious thought to politics a means of legitimating authoritarian governance,Footnote 3 Taubes envisioned a “negative” political theology as a tool for delegitimating political authority and for harnessing eschatological energy towards revolutionary ends.Footnote 4 Taubes did much to fashion an image of his love–hate relationship with Schmitt during the last years of his life: in an oft-quoted passage from a popular series of lectures on St Paul that he delivered in Heidelberg in 1987, Taubes described the diametric opposition of his and Schmitt's political–theological ideals:
Schmitt's interest was in only one thing: that the party, that the chaos not rise to the top, that the state remain . . . This is what he later calls the katechon: The retainer [der Aufhalter] that holds down the chaos that pushes up from below. That isn't my world view . . . I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.Footnote 5
In another account of their elective antagonism, Taubes wrote, “Carl Schmitt can be read and understood both as jurist and as apocalypticist of the counterrevolution . . . As apocalypticist I knew myself to be related to him. For us the themes are shared, even though we draw opposing conclusions.”Footnote 6
Nearly all of the commentary on Taubes in recent years has given primacy to this apparently neat mirror image of his and Schmitt's concepts of political theology.Footnote 7 It frequently goes unmentioned, however, that until the 1980s Schmitt featured sparingly in his writings.Footnote 8 Schmitt made no appearance in the argument or bibliography of the one monographic study that Taubes published during his lifetime, Abendländische Eschatologie (Occidental Eschatology) (1947), and merited mention in only one of the twenty-two essays collected in Taubes's posthumously published Vom Kult zur Kultur (From Cult to Culture) (1996). While it is true that Taubes and Schmitt enjoyed a lively correspondence in the later years of Taubes's life, Taubes initiated this correspondence only in 1977, after years of avoiding personal contact with Schmitt.Footnote 9 There are important comparisons to be made between their views: both saw the concepts of modern political thought as secularized variants of theological commitments and both criticized liberalism for neglecting the fact that “there are no ‘immanent’ categories to which a political order could appeal for its legitimacy.”Footnote 10 But excessive attention to the Schmitt–Taubes debates, which occurred relatively late in the lives of both, has obscured other, more fundamental intellectual contexts for understanding Taubes and his place in the intellectual history of postwar Europe.
In what follows, this essay shifts the focus away from Taubes's self-styled rivalry with Schmitt towards his earlier works and his intellectual relationships with other twentieth-century thinkers—above all, Hans Blumenberg, whose 1966 Legitimität der Neuzeit—The Legitimacy of the Modern Age) Taubes regarded as one of the most sophisticated philosophical challenges to his views.Footnote 11 While Taubes's thought is difficult to pin down—he was a willfully anti-systematic, at times even self-contradictory, thinker—there were certain themes and ideas that frequently appeared in his writings, and that merit further engagement. In particular, one primary concern for Taubes throughout his career was the distinction between the mythological and the Jewish and Christian temporal imaginations: the former envisioned a closed, static cosmos, in which destiny and temporal cyclicality ruled human life on earth; the latter, a progressively changing, transient cosmos, whose fundamental structures could be radically overturned at any moment in the apocalypse. For the mythological imagination, humans were inescapably bound to nature and its cycles; for the Jewish and Christian, nature's unfreedom could be escaped through meaningful human activity in history. These competing modes of temporality—which remained locked in struggle in the modern, secular West—implied for Taubes divergent political world views: the eschatological inheritance of Christianity and some forms of Judaism was what breathed life into revolutionary political thought, while the mythological consciousness saw the structures of the world as necessary, unchanging, and, thus, incapable of being overturned in history. The latter was the temporality appropriate to what Taubes saw as the depoliticized liberal orders of the postwar West.
This essay will analyze Taubes's distinction between mythology and eschatology, and between nature and history, by first looking at his earliest—and, arguably, most important—work, Occidental Eschatology. It will then examine Taubes's account in his later writings of the decline of political eschatology in the twentieth century and, in particular, after the conclusion of the Second World War. By putting Taubes into conversation with those thinkers he saw as legitimating the static, quasi-mythological temporal world view of the post-Christian and liberal era—among whom the most exemplary was Blumenberg—this essay attempts to shed new light on the broader debates about historical time and political liberalism in which Taubes found himself centrally involved.
THE POLITICAL ESCHATOLOGY OF TAUBES
Taubes laid out his political and philosophical views most clearly in the dissertation he wrote as a student of philosophy in Zurich, where he and his family had moved from Vienna in 1937, after his father had been appointed Zurich's chief rabbi. The title of the work, “Occidental Eschatology,” reflected the breadth of its theme: how eschatology, from its origins in ancient Israel to its modern culmination in the thought of Marx and Kierkegaard, shaped the contours of Western theological and political thought. As Samuel Moyn has pointed out, Occidental Eschatology was the first in a series of works to appear in the early postwar years that explored the theological sources of historical consciousness, a trend that also included Karl Löwith's 1949 Meaning in History, Leo Strauss's 1950 Natural Right and History, and Eric Voegelin's 1952 The New Science of Politics: An Introduction.Footnote 12 Drawing heavily on Martin Heidegger, the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and contemporary literature on Jewish and Christian Gnosticism, Taubes's book traced eschatological motifs from the book of Ezekiel to The Phenomenology of Spirit, while making a sustained philosophical argument about the this-worldly implications of imagining the finitude of the world and of time. It contained nearly all of the ideas to which Taubes would return throughout his career.
The motivating question of Occidental Eschatology was historical: what had made possible the transition from the ancient ideal of temporal and cosmic cyclicality to a unidirectional conception of time? According to Taubes, this shift became possible only after time was oriented towards an end, the Eschaton, in the revealed religion of the Jews. Historical thought was born as a means of charting this irreversible march of time towards its conclusion. Until then, humankind was bound to nature and its law-like cycles—or in Nietzschean terms, “the eternal return of the same”Footnote 13 —as represented to it in mythological forms of consciousness. For Taubes, mythological thought was a “preconscious” stage of human consciousness: the individual ego at this time did not yet exist, and humans lived in undifferentiated collectivities held in thrall to the powers of nature—a world in which everything occurred with the “strange impersonality and indifference of the dream.”Footnote 14 Humans were freed from these fetters when historical thinking made the future appear indeterminate, allowing them to forge their own path through time, no longer enslaved to fate and to the laws of a predetermined, cyclical cosmos. It was in Israel, Taubes wrote, “the restless element in world history,”Footnote 15 that the bonds of mythology—of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece—were first broken.
Taubes described ancient humankind's bondage to nature in explicitly Heideggerian terms: “Mankind shares the condition of being thrown into existence with nature and its cycle of necessity. But we confront this condition of being thrown with the pro-ject [Entwurf] of the spirit . . . History is the project of the spirit; it surpasses the bounds of nature.”Footnote 16 With the birth of eschatological monotheism, history became the arena in which humankind could realize its freedom as the active agent of God's will on Earth, entrusted by God with the power to act upon and negate creation. Taubes explained Israel's now irreversible path from creation to redemption in Hegelian terminology: the thesis of God's unity with the world was displaced in monotheism by the antithesis of their separation—a process he would call elsewhere the “de-divinization [Entgötterung] of the world.”Footnote 17 These two were to be rejoined in synthesis through human activity in history.
This notion of the “antithesis” of God and the world was a late antique innovation in monotheism, when the prophets took on the language and concepts of Gnosticism—the “kindred spirit” of apocalypticism.Footnote 18 Taubes developed his early ideas about Gnosticism, the theme that was to dominate his entire scholarly career, from the influence of Adolf von Harnack's 1921 Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott and, in particular, from Hans Jonas's 1934 Gnosis und spätantiker Geist.Footnote 19 On Jonas's reading, Gnosticism was a widely prevalent late antique form of religious dualism, which held that the world existed in absolute division from a wholly transcendent and transmundane God. The world of human life was a realm of darkness, created not by the God of salvation but rather by an evil spirit or demiurge. This transcendent God was unavailable to human knowledge except in moments of revelation, when the divine spirit (pneuma) within the human soul could achieve knowledge (gnosis) of the divinity and thus partial emancipation from the dungeon of the cosmos. Knowledge of the corrupted nature of creation freed the gnostic from any obligation to its rules, leading, according to Jonas, to either ascetic world-denial or to libertine antinomianism. The Gnostic heresy, he wrote in a later work, represented a “split between self and world, man's alienation from nature, the metaphysical devaluation of nature, the cosmic solitude of the spirit and the nihilism of mundane norms, and in general extremist style it shows what radicalism really is.”Footnote 20
Unlike Jonas, who saw in the Gnostic world view dangerous world-denying and nihilistic tendencies,Footnote 21 Taubes was fascinated by what he saw as its radical political implications. The arrival of the Gnostic–apocalyptic God into the world as an “unknown stranger” was to be anticipated for the destruction he would visit upon the cosmos. Anticipating this arrival, wrote Taubes, called for a new, revolutionary stance towards worldly power. For Taubes, the political consequences of Gnostic–apocalyptic thinking first played out on the stage of the late antique Mediterranean: the Apocalypse of Daniel was the theological script for the Maccabean uprising of 167 BCE in Judea and Jewish eschatology the inspiration for the Zealot revolt against Roman imperial rule in 66 CE—a conflict that quickly took on the dimensions of a “world revolution of the oppressed” against the global rule of the Romans.Footnote 22 This tradition of Jewish political-apocalypticism was carried forward with the prophetic career of Jesus, whose news of the advent of the Kingdom of God implied the end of the rule of the worldly kingdom of Rome. And, finally, it was Paul who universalized the political implications of this apocalyptic tradition, calling for the creation of a nonhierarchical community of believers—consisting of Jew, Greek, freeman, and slave—in which “the true god-king becomes a protest against this world, against the world of the empire and its emperor-saviors.”Footnote 23 Taubes would later refer to the demand of the apocalyptic imagination as “time as respite” (Zeit als Frist), and would describe it as a social version of the Being-toward-death of the individual, Heideggerian Dasein.Footnote 24 According to Taubes, imagining the finitude of the world made the seemingly eternal and necessary fetters of this world appear for what they really were: contingent and temporal.
In addition to its account of the political implications of apocalypticism, Occidental Eschatology also included a historical narrative of its transposition into secular forms of thought—a narrative that would influence subsequent debates about secularization in the West.Footnote 25 As did Karl Löwith, for example, in his better known Meaning in History (1949), Taubes here described modern philosophy of history and the modern revolutionary consciousness as the secular heirs of Western eschatology.Footnote 26 According to Taubes, this process of secularization was set into motion by the twelfth-century mystic Joachim of Fiore, who described the advent of ultimate human fulfillment occurring not at the end of the world and of time, but rather at a future moment in worldly history. In place of the Parousia, Joachim had envisioned a worldly reign of divine peace and concord set to commence in the year 1200, in which humans would be freed from the hierarchical institutions of the Church; here Heilsgeschichte and Weltgeschichte, sundered by Augustine, were reunited. For both Taubes and Löwith, Joachim's vision of fulfillment as occurring within the processes of worldly history ultimately found its way into the philosophies of history of Hegel and his heirs. Hegel's ideal of the realization of Spirit's essence on Earth through historical development was a secularized appropriation of Joachim's vision of the historical appearance of “God's Kingdom on earth.”Footnote 27 Both Joachim and Hegel saw the “process of world history as a progressive movement, and consequently, as a permanent negation of the existing order.”Footnote 28
The similarities between Taubes's and Löwith's accounts of this process of secularization are not coincidental: Taubes was an avid reader of Löwith during this time and remarked, much later, that the “scales fell from [his] eyes” when he first read Löwith's From Hegel to Nietzsche (Von Hegel bis Nietzsche).Footnote 29 And as Löwith apparently reported when asked by Hans Jonas for his opinion of Occidental Eschatology, “Oh, it's a very good book. And that's no accident—half of it's by you, and the other half's by me.”Footnote 30 Löwith's somewhat uncharitable characterization of Taubes's intellectual indebtedness obscures the fact that what Löwith called Taubes's “penetrating study” itself shaped Löwith's thesis in Meaning in History: Löwith cited Occidental Eschatology as a source for his chapter on Augustine and for his argument about the secularization of Joachim's eschatology in Hegel.Footnote 31 Whatever the vector of influence, one thing is clear: Taubes and Löwith, while firmly in agreement that modern philosophy of history was a secularization of Judeo-Christian apocalypticism, were divided on their evaluations of this phenomenon. Löwith believed that the indebtedness of Geschichtsphilosophie to Geschichtstheologie was the source of the illusory idea, still active in secular modernity, of purposefulness in history. For Taubes, however, it was precisely that which Löwith derided—the indebtedness of the secular to the theological—that he thought the “most positive” aspect of the philosophy of history.Footnote 32
For Taubes, it was crucial that philosophy of history not lose its eschatological inheritance, as it was only by imagining the finitude of the world and of time that philosophy could dedicate itself to the “constant negation of any system.”Footnote 33 Following Löwith's story of the intellectual affinities between Marx and Kierkegaard in his From Hegel to Nietzsche,Footnote 34 Taubes described these two as the heirs of Hegel who did the most to transform his reconciliation of rationality and actuality into a critical philosophy. What united their seemingly disparate philosophical projects was a shared opposition to the current dispensation in Europe—a state of oppression, alienation, and corruption—which reflected a Gnostic–apocalyptic image of the disunity of the divine and the world. Where they differed was in their solutions to the problem of the present: Marx imagined a “socioeconomic apocalypse,”Footnote 35 a “leap from the ‘realm of necessity’ into the ‘realm of freedom’” in the proletarian revolution against capital,Footnote 36 and Kierkegaard an “acosmic and antiworldly” turn inwards to repentance and spiritual renewal.Footnote 37 This distinction between Marx's “outward” opposition to bourgeois Europe in revolution and Kierkegaard's “inward” rejection of it in spiritual renewal reflected the distinction that Taubes made between apocalypticism and Gnosticism: the former focused on the external signs of the coming destruction of the world, while the latter turned inward to focus on the reconciliation of the human soul with the distant divinity. As two sides of the same eschatological coin, however, both apocalypticism and Gnosticism called for the same thing: a complete rejection of the order of the present.
This crisis of the bourgeois order was one that continued to shake Europe in the twentieth century. But as Christianity lost its power to inspire, eschatological energy that had, until then, vitalized the Western theological and philosophical imagination was being lost. And with this loss of eschatology, according to Taubes, humans would forget the fragility and contingency of the world of their making. Borrowing again from Heidegger, Taubes described his day's turning from ek-sistence to in-sistence, from openness to divinity to a shallow, instrumental understanding of the world:
By making himself as subject the measure of all things, man conceals the true correspondence of things and constructs fabrications; he fills the world with purposes and safeguards, fashions it into a protective shell, and walls himself in . . . Thereby, the interconnection of things becomes a mystery, even more as it is forced through manipulation and human technology into a new, false measure.Footnote 38
During this technological, post-Christian order of the present, humans could only hope to recognize the “protective shells” they had built as “mirages,” and wait with expectation for the moment when the order of things would “turn upside down.”Footnote 39
THE RETURN OF THE ETERNAL RETURN
While Taubes did not write another monographic study after Occidental Eschatology, he published over sixty scholarly articles and reviews before his death in 1987, the majority of which rearticulated the views of Occidental Eschatology on the political implications of apocalypticism and on its secularization in modern philosophy of history. After the publication of Occidental Eschatology, as Reinhard Mehring has written, “it seemed to [Taubes] that all had been said.”Footnote 40 In particular, he revisited many times in these later writings the ideas he had presented rather cryptically at the conclusion of Occidental Eschatology: that the contemporary West had entered a “post-Christian” era in which the eschatological energy that had fueled the Western imagination for centuries was in decline. As this apocalyptic tradition weakened, humans were in danger of returning to a state akin to that which had existed before the advent of monotheism: bound to conditions that appeared natural and unshakeable, like those of antiquity, when humankind lived according to the predetermined rules of a static cosmos. A modern form of mythological consciousness had rushed to fill the vacuum left by the weakening of Christian eschatology, which, like its ancient analogue, lacked the power of negativity of Judeo-Christian apocalypticism and its secular forms. Without a goal towards which its history could point, the world would witness the same, meaningless events without cease, incapable of emerging into anything truly new: “At the end of Europe's history, when the Christian, apocalyptic reserves have been exhausted,” Taubes wrote ruefully, “the symbol of the eternal recurrence of the same comes up again.”Footnote 41
Nietzsche's symbol of “eternal recurrence” featured centrally in Taubes's writings, as it had been Nietzsche, on his view, who had definitively rung the death knell of Christianity in the West. Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God and his attempts to reinstate antique notions of cyclical cosmology had inaugurated a new era of modern mythological thought, in which the temporal unidirectionality of religious thought was to be replaced by explanations of the world that stressed the timelessness and necessity of human nature and the world in which humans lived.Footnote 42 Taubes saw this ideological tendency at work everywhere in the twentieth century. In a 1957 essay, he described psychoanalysis as one such instance of modernist mythology, inspired by Nietzsche, that filled the void left by the exit of theology from the scene. Freud's insistence on the historical return of the collective repressed mirrored antique cosmological cyclicality. And his idea that childhood traumas left inerasable traces on the psyche could be deployed against millennial demands for the “transformation of men through the transformation of the societal structure.”Footnote 43 In the wake of the “collapse of socialist messianism in the West,”Footnote 44 wrote Taubes, the mythological claims of psychoanalytic theory had conservative implications. In Freud, “there is no hope for redemption from the powers of necessity, from the claws of death. History is caught in an eternal cycle of constructing and destroying. It is illusory to hope for man ever to break the cycle.”Footnote 45 The tragic world views of Freud and Nietzsche exposed humankind's hope for social transformation as illusory. But, Taubes wrote, “if the eschatological hope is illusory, then the future itself turns out to be an illusion.”Footnote 46
In the 1950s and 1960s, Taubes took on the language and concepts of the Frankfurt school to describe the ideological predicament of the post-Christian era, although he still framed it in terms of the theory of eschatology he had developed much earlier. Now, Taubes saw a world evacuated of divinity and of chiliastic expectation in terms of Weber's “shell as hard as steel” (stahlhartes Gehäuse). He ruthlessly criticized Weber, though, for depicting the grim present reality of capitalist modernity as inescapably binding and as the foreordained outcome of the processes of occidental rationalization. In a 1969 essay, “Kultur und Ideologie,” published in the proceedings of the sixteenth Deutsche Soziologentag, a volume that was edited by Adorno, Taubes described Weber and his intellectual heir Arnold Gehlen as having reified the contingent history of the rise of modern industrial society into the unavoidable “destiny” of the West. In so doing, Weber and Gehlen had succumbed to mythological thinking: in their sociologies, the cosmos was depicted as a closed sphere in which man was hopelessly trapped and which dictated to him his future according to the iron laws of fate: as Weber saw it, Taubes wrote, “industrial society . . . ‘is busy fabricating the shell of bondage which men will perhaps be forced to inhabit some day, as powerless as the farm hands of ancient Egypt.’”Footnote 47
While the apocalypticism inherited by Hegel and Marx saw all worldly conditions as capable of being overturned in history, modern sociology, according to Taubes, described a world over which humans today had as little control as their ancient counterparts. It was thus the job of philosophy to reenvision, as had thinkers like Walter Benjamin, another heir of the apocalyptic tradition, the “overcoming of nature and emancipation from the horror of violence that eternally recurs in a circle.”Footnote 48 Apocalyptic–Gnostic thought, according to Taubes, provided one such way of breaking through the mythological idea that man was stuck in a fixed, closed cosmos—the “iron cage” of industrial modernity—without any hope of emancipation from it. It held open the possibility that this world was not necessary, and its binds not binding, so that humans could imagine a completely new one.
THE THREAT OF LEGITIMACY
The greatest philosophical challenge to Taubes's eschatological imagination was not that presented by the work of Freud or Weber. It came instead from his contemporary, the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, whose The Legitimacy of the Modern Age represented the most sophisticated philosophical attempt to seal the coffin, for good, of the Gnostic tradition in the West. During the 1960s, Taubes and Blumenberg became frequent correspondents and lively sparring partners. Taubes had first initiated contact with Blumenberg in 1961 after stumbling upon Blumenberg's 1960 work Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Paradigms for a Metaphorology) in the library of the philosopher Dieter Henrich.Footnote 49 Their relationship deepened after Taubes joined the influential interdisciplinary scholarly workgroup Poetik und Hermeneutik, founded by Blumenberg, Clemens Haselhaus, and Hans Robert Jauß in 1963.Footnote 50 Taubes and Blumenberg frequently clashed during the meetings of the Poetik und Hermeneutik group over philosophical, historical, and aesthetic problems, and over the claims of Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. For Taubes, the publication of Blumenberg's magnum opus was an event of major significance. He saw it as representing a direct challenge to his and Voegelin's shared thesis about the Gnostic character of modernity, and invited Voegelin to publicly debate Blumenberg about their divergent conclusions, an event to which Alexandre Kojève was to be invited as well.Footnote 51 While Blumenberg was apparently too exhausted by the completion of Legitimacy for a formal discussion of its thesis, he assured Taubes that “there are many pages in this book during the writing of which the partner Jacob Taubes was present to me.”Footnote 52 As Taubes approached the end of his life, he referred to Blumenberg as the only living philosopher in Germany of any interest to him, and maintained that Blumenberg's works were among the only exceptions to his conviction that academic philosophy in Europe was all but dead.Footnote 53 By putting Taubes into conversation with Blumenberg, certain fundamental aspects of Taubes's political-theological beliefs can be cast into sharp relief, as it was Blumenberg who had provided the most powerful philosophical justification for overcoming the worldly alienation that Taubes thought necessary for a truly progressive politics.
Taubes felt particularly threatened by Blumenberg's conclusion in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age that the birth of modernity spelled the second, and decisive, overcoming of Gnosticism. Blumenberg argued that the character of Augustine's polemic against Gnostic heresy during late antiquity had made possible its reemergence during the high Middle Ages, necessitating its second overcoming with the advent of the modern scientific world view. Augustine had attempted to refute Marcion's vision of the world as fallen, which had shattered the “trust in the world that could have been sanctioned by the biblical conception of creation,”Footnote 54 by linking the presence of evil in the world to man's freedom to sin, and not to the designs of an evil, demiurgic creator. But this responsibility for the evilness of the world became a heavy burden on humans, and God's complete sovereignty to choose the elect and the damned made the individual's salvation dependent “on a faith that he can no longer choose to have.”Footnote 55 The voluntarist God of the Middle Ages, who withheld “from man's knowledge the range over which He chooses to be dependable,”Footnote 56 began thus to appear like the deus absconditus of Gnosticism.Footnote 57 Human alienation in this cosmos ruled by an absolutist divinity was to be overcome by a new orientation towards reality in early modern scientific thought that emphasized its availability to human purposes and activity. Providence was to be replaced by human self-assertion, and the unreliable cosmos of the Middle Ages by one that, while not predisposed towards human purposes, was completely available to their manipulation. Humans were no longer to seek redemption from the world from “outside,” but were to act in this world to shape it according to their needs and their designs.Footnote 58
For Blumenberg, this was an undeniably positive development: human self-assertion was what guaranteed modern humans their freedom in a non-teleological universe. It was, he wrote, “an existential program, according to which man posits his existence in a historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him and what use he will make of the possibilities that are open to him.”Footnote 59 For Taubes, however, being at home in a world that was completely open to human manipulation meant losing the feeling of alienation that motivated humans’ unceasing effort to overturn the earthly conditions to which they were bound.
Taubes directly engaged Blumenberg on the problem of modern Gnosticism at a 1966 Poetik und Hermeneutik colloquium. Here, he presented a paper that argued that modern surrealist aesthetics shared many features in with Gnostic world-denial. The surrealists, like the Gnostics, sought to escape from the laws of an oppressive cosmos, which was now understood according to the modern scientific–technological world view:
The Gnostic doctrine of redemption is a protest against a world ruled by fatum or by nomos. This fatum presents itself in the mythological style of Gnosticism as personified powers: astrological determinism. That world as it is represented by the interpretation of modern science and technology and against which modern poetry turned in varying phases since romanticism, regains a mythical coherence as unified whole: scientific determinism.Footnote 60
Taubes's interlocutors at the colloquium—Wolfgang Iser, Siegfried Kracauer, Manfred Fuhrmann, and others—strongly criticized his equation of the late antique revolt against the “closed Greek cosmos” and modern surrealist poetry.Footnote 61 But none more so than Blumenberg, who rejected Taubes's suggestion that Gnostic acosmism could translate into any kind of meaningful political engagement in the world. To Blumenberg's critique, Taubes did not offer a well-developed response: he merely pointed out that Gnosticism represented a “declaration of war against all established principles,” without explaining how exactly this rejectionism would translate into concrete political activity.Footnote 62 Taubes never offered a thorough explanation in his work of why Gnostic world-denial led to any kind of real engagement in the world, rather than just withdrawal from it. He was more drawn to its antinomian than to its ascetic implications.
Blumenberg also took issue with what he seemed to interpret as Taubes's thinly veiled critique of the claims of Legitimacy: “It would be difficult to verify that the legal valuation of nature,” he remarked to Taubes, “stabilized by modernity against the God of salvation and of arbitrariness in nominalism, would have been consciously experienced as oppressive, constricting, or otherwise negatively.”Footnote 63 Gnosticism, for Blumenberg, did not provide a means of escape from the unfreedom of the law-like regularity of the universe; instead, these laws were to be understood as themselves making possible human freedom, by showing nature to be an “inexhaustible and disposable potentiality” and by guaranteeing liberation from an unpredictable and, thus, unreliable cosmic order.Footnote 64 Modern scientific law could not be compared with fate or with the laws of the closed cosmos of the ancients, as it had been born as a revolt against the arbitrary rule of a hidden and tyrannical deity. For Taubes, on the other hand, the modern scientific world view, which underpinned the technological order of the present, was akin to a form of mythology.Footnote 65 It had helped to drain the eschatological reserves of Western thought by depicting the world as operating according to a set of unshakeable laws. It locked humans into an order in which they could expect to see the same events occur ad infinitum according to the dictates of these laws: “the legality of nature ultimately makes the new appear as something predetermined,” Taubes responded to Blumenberg, “thereby in truth reiterating the old.”Footnote 66 Belief in the transcendent being, and its ability to intervene at any moment to dissolve the lawful bonds of the present order, meant that one never felt trapped within it. Blumenberg, according to Taubes, had attempted to deprive us of this transcendent escape hatch: “In the cosmo atheos” of Blumenberg's modern age, he wrote later, “there is no point of escape ‘beyond’ the world. Therefore, neither can there be any Gnostic exodus from the world in the modern age.”Footnote 67 In Taubes's mind, the mythology of the Blumenbergian world view guaranteed that the iron cage of scientific and technological modernity—a world in which events happened but nothing changed—was all we would ever know.
This was the crux of Taubes's disagreement with Blumenberg: he saw Blumenberg as having provided a strong philosophical justification for precisely the kind of philosophy of immanence whose implications for human life Taubes so dreaded. But they were divided on another question as well: that regarding the nature of Western secularization and the political implications of this process. For Taubes, as for Löwith, there was a relatively straightforward story to tell about the transmission of Judeo-Christian eschatological ideas into modern, secular historical and political thought, particularly that of the nineteenth-century heirs of Hegel: religious expectations of the advent of the Kingdom of God at the end of time had engendered a temporal and historical imagination in the West that, even when shorn of its religious commitments, still expected some ultimate form of human fulfillment at a specific moment in the future. Blumenberg attempted to raze the foundations of this theory of secularization, which had become, as one commentator has put it, “‘conventional wisdom’ in German scholarship” by the 1950s.Footnote 68 He argued that this theory of secularization assumed that there were substances in history that metamorphose from religious to secular form—the idea of progress, for instance—with the identity of the original substances remaining intact throughout this transformation.Footnote 69 But this assumption faltered on the false idea that there could be primary and authentic ownership of concepts, and that these concepts could be alienated from their original context through the processes of historical change.Footnote 70 Instead, it made more sense to understand this development as occurring through a process of “reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated.”Footnote 71 On this reading, secular notions of progress, for example, were not alienated, and thus illegitimate, forms of earlier religious ideas. Rather, they were non-religious answers to questions that had been “carried-over” from earlier, religious contexts, in which they had been answered according to the religious concepts appropriate to these contexts.Footnote 72 Taubes disagreed. He thought that Blumenberg's idea that religious thought had been transmitted into the secular implied that the modern Western imagination was nonautonomous and, thus, illegitimate. And it was to this accusation of illegitimacy, Taubes wrote, that The Legitimacy of the Modern Age had responded. For Taubes, however, it was precisely this transposition of chiliasm from the religious realm to the secular—a movement that freed eschatological energy for revolutionary political movements while foreclosing the possibility of reestablishing premodern theocracy—that was the promise of modernity.Footnote 73
Taubes also argued that Blumenberg's narrative of secularization relied on a faulty understanding of the nature and history of Jewish and Christian theology. He claimed that Blumenberg's image of secular modernity only made sense when posited against a fictional past: Blumenberg explained the emergence of the modern ideal of human self-assertion as the outcome of a successful rebellion against an absolutist God—a God whose omnipotence obviated any need for alliance with human beings or for meaningful engagement in human history. But Blumenberg's vision of God's omnipotence, Taubes argued, did not correspond to any recognizable Christian or Jewish doctrine: the God of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament forged bonds with humans and intervened purposefully in human history—in the Covenant, for example, and in the Incarnation. Blumenberg had posited a God “with whom one cannot speak or rely upon” for the sake of his argument that secularization had occurred as a rejection of this tyrannical and unreliable deity. In a Poetik und Hermeneutik colloquium in 1968, Taubes charged Blumenberg in this way with having allowed the moral of the story of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age to determine how its narrative would be told: out of the negation of this powerful and arbitrary God, Taubes wrote, “Blumenberg achieves the legitimacy of atheistic modernity both historically and systematically.”Footnote 74
POSTWAR OR POSTHISTOIRE?
While highly skeptical of Blumenberg's secularization thesis, Taubes had his own mournful story to tell about the loss of religion in modernity: in the post-Christian era of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the apocalypticism that had until then provided the futurist and hopeful aspects of modern thought was now in decline. Taubes saw this tendency at work in nearly all of the intellectual heirs of Nietzsche—whom he referred to as “Nietzsche-lings”—who preached strength to survive in a fully immanent world, beyond the bounds of which there was nothing to be hoped for.Footnote 75 Nietzsche's symbol of the eternal recurrence of the same, the idea that we must affirm life on this Earth at every moment as if it were to repeat forever, was, for Taubes, the guiding mantra of this new, post-Christian world view.
The waning of occidental eschatology had only accelerated since the conclusion of the Second World War. Taubes referred to this era, his own, as “the Biedermeier days of our posthistoire . . . in which a lot happens but nothing takes place anymore.”Footnote 76 As Lutz Niethammer has pointed out, it was the circle around Taubes in Berlin in the 1980s who were most dedicated, among many others, to exploring this concept of posthistoire and the question whether history had, in fact, come to an end.Footnote 77 The apocalyptic promise that had managed to survive in the thought of Taubes's Weimar heroes (Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Karl Barth) seemed to have been lost, as the great philosophers of the contemporary era (Blumenberg, Löwith, Odo Marquard, and the entire so-called “skeptical generation” in Germany) now regarded philosophy of history with deep distrust.Footnote 78 Like many of his contemporaries, on both the left and the right, Taubes saw the postwar era as characterized by a process of depoliticization. The only event since 1945 of any significance to Taubes seemed to have been the German student revolt, which represented “the first event of German Spirit after the downfall [Untergang],” he wrote, which also ultimately collapsed.Footnote 79 There were now powerful institutional and political forces dedicated to preventing the reemergence of political eschatology. The global ideological struggle against communism had guaranteed that all future-oriented philosophy of history would remain tainted by association with Marxism: when describing to an interviewer who was “crying bloody murder” (Zeter und Mordio schreien) about philosophical eschatology, Taubes remarked, “I am speaking of . . . the foundations and the American Hoover Institutions, of the popular Cold Warriors of an anti-philosophy of history.”Footnote 80 Taubes was a philosophical generation out of step: a Weimar-style messianic utopian living in the liberal and anti-utopian postwar world. For Taubes, it was only futurist philosophy of history that guaranteed that humans would not become indifferent towards the conditions of the present. And it was this constant demand for restlessness, for ceaseless striving towards a future completely different from the present, that formed a crucial part of his critique of liberalism: the world of the “liberal juste milieu” was one in which energy directed towards the negation of the present had been eclipsed by the ceaseless adjudication of society's competing claims.Footnote 81 The liberal imagination was, for Taubes, mythogenic:Footnote 82 look as far into the future as you like, the liberal seemed to announce, and all you will see is the ongoing stasis of pluralist negotiation. For this reason, Taubes loathed the “Cold Warriors”—although he did teach Torah to several of the thinkers who would later become leading neoconservatives in the US, including Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Daniel Bell.Footnote 83 He was much more attracted to the far right—“a rare species,” he once wrote, “that should remain so that we would not be bored in the world of the posthistoire.”Footnote 84
It is not entirely clear whether what Taubes desired was simply “permanent revolution” for its own sake or whether he imagined any world within which he would be content to live.Footnote 85 What is certainly clear is that it was not the world of the present: for Taubes, life in the postwar liberal West was like life before the emergence of history. Here, there was nothing to be hoped for besides mere animal existence, no future available that did not look like the present: “The eternal present of the US-American style coincides with the final phase of communism,” Taubes quoted Kojève, “with this, man is re-submerged into animality.”Footnote 86 It is true that, at times, Taubes seemed to suggest that the logical political outcome of his political eschatology was the kind of universalist, egalitarian, and nonhierarchical communities, or ecclesia, of the early Christians.Footnote 87 But he never adequately explained why the proto-communitarianism of Paul was the most likely outcome of the political-eschatological imagination or why this imagination would not more likely find its home in less salutary political movements. It was precisely this nexus of secular eschatology and political extremism that caused several twentieth-century thinkers, such as Löwith and Voegelin, to regard the former with such suspicion. For Löwith, the extremist political movements of the twentieth century must be understood as having inherited Joachim's dream of realizing the Kingdom of God on Earth: “The third dispensation of the Joachites reappeared as a third International and a Third Reich,” he wrote, “inaugurated by a dux or a Führer who was acclaimed as a savior and greeted by millions with Heil!”Footnote 88 Voegelin agreed: the National Socialist belief in the advent of a final, utopian “Third Realm” on Earth was the logical result of a “fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton.”Footnote 89 When pressed on the possibility of this nexus between secular eschatology and Nazi ideology, however, Taubes punted: the National Socialist experiment, he remarked, had had nothing to do with eschatology—it had been a pagan, not a Christian, phenomenon. And despite its responsibility for fifty million deaths, he considered it “in the end, an irrelevant episode.”Footnote 90 Taubes had only one solution to the possible problem of the authoritarian appropriation of eschatological thought: the apocalyptic should never seek to establish God's Kingdom on Earth, but only to negate the conditions of the present. Chiliasm was corrupted, he wrote, when it forgot that the “final kingdom is not the goal but the finale of all history.”Footnote 91
Taubes did not consider at length the problems to which this solution gave rise: What was to come after the complete negation of the present? And what if the power of negation rested in the wrong hands? His hesitancy to answer questions such as these perhaps suggests that this completely open-ended political project, dedicated only to the negation of present conditions, could not, by virtue of its very nature, plan for the moment after this negation: doing so would limit the possible shapes the future could take. The indeterminacy of this open-ended negation, however, leaves Taubes open to the charge that his political eschatology might be as well suited to the mass extremist movements of the twentieth century as to the peaceful communitarianism of early Christianity. Nevertheless, he seems to have been wholly unwilling to consider alternatives to eschatological temporality, such as Löwith's Stoic resignation to a world in which progress was illusory, or Blumenberg's celebration of the ceaseless task of harnessing reality for human ends.Footnote 92 For Taubes, there could be no secular and non-utopian temporal imagination, such as that he saw embodied in liberal ideology of the postwar West, that did not condemn us to repeat forever the same events over and over—condemn us, perhaps, simply to boredom. He never fully explained why liberalism had shrunk our temporal horizons to the extent that he imagined it had. Nor did he consider that the decline of revolutionary ideology, and the slackening of belief in ineluctable progress, may have made the future appear more open-ended now than it did to the revolutionary or the mystic. The future anticipated by the apocalypticist, on this view—one of crisis and final resolution of the contradictions of the present—has been replaced by the unnameable and unpredictable future imagined by the secular and non-utopian mind. The future whose endpoint was foreordained in the Eschaton or the revolution has given way to one without directionality, which is always appearing as different to that which has been imagined and planned for. An alternative temporality might imagine political life as not being enslaved to the infinite return of the same—nor restless for ceaseless and sudden transformation—but rather open to a future that is yet without shape.
