Monotheism revisited in contemporary philosophy

A spectre is visiting the western world – the spectre of monotheism. It is fashionable nowadays, when referring to this spectre, to speak of a ‘return of religion’ in our times, but in fact, what is returning, what is revisiting the world, is not religion in general, but its threefold western varieties: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The spectre is visiting us, and we have to ‘revisit’ it – in philosophy and science, in politics, in our daily existence. However, what does ‘revisiting’ mean? Does it simply address the return of something that had temporarily disappeared (or at least one hoped so)? Or does it have to face the possibility that the spectre had never been away? That the western world, that ‘we’ are in a way the spectre, so that one has to conclude that, when we take on the task of a revisiting of monotheism, we are actually revisiting ourselves?

It is this second possibility that forms the emphatic focal point of a new development within contemporary philosophy, in which the works of Peter Sloterdijk take an active part. One need not be surprized, therefore, that the opening phrase of this chapter is a slight, specifying variation of the way Sloterdijk opens his recent book Du musst dein Leben ändern (You Will Have to Change your Life, 2009): “A spectre is haunting the western world – the spectre of religion.” Needless to say, Sloterdijk in turn varies the famous opening statement of Marx's and Engels's Communist Manifesto. However, whereas the latter alludes to a completely new, revolutionary event in Europe, the inevitable rise of communism through and within the political economy of capitalism, Sloterdijk aims at exactly the opposite: the spectre of religion is an old, all too old spectre, that has formed andmade the complex configuration we call the ‘West’, or ‘Europe’. Nothing new, nothing even returning …