Over the Ashes

Abstract

Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida—these names can be made to evoke a certain history of thought, one that tells the rise and fall of foundationalist modernity. It is a history written as obituary: the death of God and the death of Man. The condition of the postmodern person is then like one living among a heap of rubble and ashes, wondering what ‘comes after’. But on looking up, such a postmodern may yet see hovering spirits.A couple of years ago, in the summer of 1990, the themes of such a history and its aftermath were given an all too rare British voice at King’s College, Cambridge, which was host to an important conference on the postmodern. It was a conference on contemporary Western culture and its religious subtexts. Entitled The Shadow of Spirit, the conference, at least in its plenary sessions, increasingly turned to the unavoidability of the ethical; to the irreducibility of spirit This turning found a particular focus in the discussion—one might even say, the confrontation, the differend—between George Steiner and Don Cupitt. It is possible to gain some idea of the tension it produced by reading against one another, the artificed interrogations of Steiner’s Real Presences (1989) and the manifestos that are Cupitt’s most recent works. For Steiner, the pleasures and freedoms of the ‘market’ (so naively championed by Cupitt in Keynes’ Hall) are no defence against the darkness of the ‘final solution’; the darkness of a culture that thinks itself only human, conceiver of an absolute and arbitrary power.