Predestination (Slavoj Žižek)

We can debate about everything, [but] one thing I don’t concede: this obscenity that our salvation depends on our good acts. I think this is an obscenity. An obscenity in the sense that this then introduces an irreducible aspect of […] “oh god, OK, if I [do] this, will it be OK…” that of kind of economic exchange […]. [No, i]t has to be predestination![…]

[…] Predestination is an extremely refined dialectical notion. It’s not simply “it’s written up there.” It’s: “it’s written up there but you don’t know what is written” and we should make […] a step further even and say: “it is written up there, but it’s written backwards.” What do I mean by this? There is a very refined paradox which even some theorists of rational action articulated, of how: something may happen or not, but if it happens, retroactively it appears that it had to happen from the beginning. [L]ike T. S. Elliott, that famous phrase/proposition of how every great work of art, retroactively changes its entire past. Or, […] Borges said something similar in his wonderful text on Kafka, that about a modest writer you can say by whom he/she was influenced, [but] a truly great writer creates his/her own precursors. His idea is that, of course we can say that Kafka was influenced by Dostoyevski, Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake… but it’s not as simple as that, because, to perceive that dimension in Dostoyevski, Kafka already had to be here! This doesn’t simply mean we retroactively project it. I think that this retroactive constitution of necessity is the key to pre-destination.

[However,] predestination doesn’t mean that we are not free. Predestination means that we are, at a much more radical level, free to constitute our very predestination. Because that’s the paradox of freedom. Freedom — and here I agree with the deepest insights of protestants — true freedom is not “oh, do I want a strawberry cake or a chocolate cake or…”. True freedom is, in a way, to choose your necessity. True freedom is something much more difficult. For example, let’s take the ultimate free act: love. Of course, love has to be free. If somebody tells me you have to love this, that — it doesn’t work. But, it’s a strange kind of freedom because at the same time […t]he whole point of love is that it is free — maybe the freest act of all — but how do you experience it? All of a sudden you experience it as: I cannot do otherwise but [love]. That’s my necessity, I have to do it. And it’s the same with all great acts of freedom. Not “choose chocolate cake or strawberry cake” but: you’re in a difficult predicament, there is war or let’s say in Europe the Nazi occupation, to decide to fight it, to engage in fighting… it’s probably the utmost free decision. But, when you decide for it, in a way… […i]t’s obscene to say, oh, I was free to decide and I decided. You decided because in some way you sense that you would be ashamed of yourself and you cannot do otherwise. So this is the deepest sense, […] in which the highest freedom is assuming inner necessity. […]

Now I am writing a book on Hegel and Christianity where I try to develop this. […] First we have eastern (Russian) orthodoxy, which for me is very uneasy. I think they secretly change Christ into a kind of idol. A mere ideal to be imitated and then in the long term we can all become Christ. This idea of Man becoming God. Gradually we will all become God. This, connected with another problem, which I find very problematic in the orthodox christian church: the notion of this distinction between what they call economy and what they call God in itself. As if you can distinguish in God the inner mystery, the trinity of God himself, and economy which is — to be cynical — basically public relations, how God deals with humanity. I think what gets lost here is simply the deepest christian insight, which you find at its purest only in protestantism and some of those mystics like Meister Eckhart, who got it. What is the deepest insight of them? It’s that we are part of God’s history. It’s not God up there. So I claim in Catholicism you have more this symbolic exchange, you deal with God and the institution and so on… I quite naively believe that — again to use this nice Hegelian dialectical formulation — only with Protestantism did Christianity become what it always truly was. I have many friends who are these sort of half closet materialists half closet believers, and they even don’t know in which closet they really are. I ask them (I like this brutal question): do you believe or not? And the usual answer I get is: really not — “I don’t like institutions, but there is something deep in me, maybe some force, blah blah blah…” I have no mercy for this. To me, what is much more sympathetic, what interests me is precisely church as an institution. Which is why what interests me is protestantism. It’s not this “me and God”, no, it’s Gemeinde, the community. That’s absolutely crucial for me. For example I totally agree with that basic protestant insight: what does it mean, read the Bible alone? It doesn’t mean a kind of inner orgasm or meditation blah blah… it means God’s word for me. Read the Bible means precisely: you cannot bypass Logos.

This is the limitation also for me of all those mystics. Like, great as he is, but Meister Eckhart cannot really deal with incarnation, with Christ. Did you notice how, the whole operation of Meister Eckhart, his mystical re-reading of Christianity is based on this “cheating with words.” [I]n latin [there is] this ambiguity: mundum-mundus which can mean “pure” and “world.” So here it’s God sends his son into mundus… not as “into the world” but into the “purity of our virgin soul.” I think you loose everything in this way. But what I’m especially opposed to is this secular, humanist notion of this Feuerbach version: it doesn’t matter what you believe, Christianity is more of an ideal, we just project into it our highest human desires, what is most noble in us, etc. etc. No! I think it’s absolutely crucial to insist […], that man is not enough. You must have a dimension that is more radical than only a man in man. […] No! Man has to be dis-centred. What I do like in, […] Meister Eckhart [is this] gap between Gott (God) and Gottheit (Divinity). This truly shattering insight of Meister Eckhart can be put in one sentence I think: “Not only is man dis-centred with regard to God” in the sense that our centre is not ourselves but out there in God, but in order to account for man, you must accept that “God is dis-centred in himself with regard to himself.”

[via youtube]