Page 123 - Eclipse of God

96 Chapter 6

which remind one in some points of the formulations of a So-
1
phistical text of the fifth century b.c. Its decisive development,
however, takes place in the nineteenth century through an at-
titude of mind that one might call a philosophy of reduction
or detection. He who consummated it, Nietzsche, called it “the
art of mistrust.”
This philosophy, which, like that of the Sophists, connects
the biological perspective with the historical and the psycho-
logical, seeks to unmask the spiritual world as a system of de-
ceptions and self- deceptions, of “ideologies” and “sublimations.”
It finds its actual beginning in Feuerbach’s critique of re-
ligion, which developed Protagoras’ saying that man is the
measure of all things in a seemingly inverse way. It is summed
up in the sentence: “What man is not, but what he wills to be
or wishes to be, just that and only that, nothing else, is God.” A
direct path leads from Feuerbach to Marx, except that for Marx
a statement of this sort, being metaphysical and unhistorical,
would have no real meaning. For Marx, following Vico, there
is no knowledge but the historical. He transforms Feuerbach’s
thesis, broadening it on the one hand to include all religious,
moral, political, and philosophical ideas but inserting all these
on the other hand into the historical process. This process, in
turn, is to be understood only through the changes in the con-
ditions of production and the conflicts that arise out of it. In
every morality, he argues, the conditions of the existence of the
ruling class are ideally expressed. As long as the class struggle
exists, all distinction between good and evil is merely a func-
tion of it, all life- norms either expressions of power or weapons
for its enforcement. This holds true essentially not only for the
changing moral contents, but also for moral valuing as such.

1 Anonymus Jamblichi.