The abrupt statement Heidegger made in his 1976 Der Spiegel interview—“Only a God can save us”—has always caused a stir. To understand it properly, we must first place it back in its context. Heidegger had just been speaking of the planetary dominance of technology, which nothing and no one seems capable of governing. Philosophy and the other spiritual powers—poetry, religion, the arts, politics—have lost the ability to jolt or guide the life of Western peoples. From here comes the bitter diagnosis that they “cannot bring about any immediate change to the current state of the world,” and the inevitable conclusion that “only a God can save us.” Immediately afterward, Heidegger clarifies that this is anything but a millenarian prophecy; we must, he says, prepare ourselves not only “for the appearance of a God” but also—and perhaps especially—“for the absence of a God in his decline, for the fact that we may go under before an absent God.”

It goes without saying that Heidegger’s diagnosis has lost none of its relevance today; on the contrary, if anything, it has become even more irrefutable and true. Humanity has given up on the decisive rank of spiritual questions and has created a special sphere in which to confine them: culture. Art, poetry, philosophy, and the other spiritual powers—when they are not simply extinguished and worn out—are confined to museums and cultural institutions of every kind, where they survive as entertainments or diversions from the boredom of existence (and often no less boring in themselves).

How, then, are we to understand the philosopher’s bitter verdict? In what sense is it that “only a God can save us”? For nearly two centuries—since Hegel and Nietzsche declared His death—the West has lost its God. But what we have lost is only a god to whom we can give a name and an identity. The death of God is, in truth, the loss of the divine names (“the divine names are missing,” Hölderlin lamented). Beyond names lies the most important thing: the divine itself. As long as we are capable of perceiving a flower, a face, a bird, a gesture, or a blade of grass as divine, we can do without a God we are able to name. The divine is enough for us; the adjective matters more than the noun. Not “a God,” but rather “only the divine can save us.”

21 March 2025

Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-solo-un-dio-ci-pu-lvare