Well burrowed, old mole!

    It is remarkable that so many postmodernists seem to mourn the death of God.  The fact that the totality is no longer total, that there is no ultimate mystical reality behind the world seems to disappoint these people.  Their writings show a pathetic nostalgia for the total even as they proclaim its opposite. 

Their actions are a part of the tradition which they place themselves over against.  We can begin with Plato and Socrates, in their confrontation with the sophists. The problem with the sophists was that their art was nomadic; it had to be domesticated.  The sophists did not teach a transcendent term that should govern all discourse, their way of teaching was foundationless.  It seems that Plato was a brilliant sophist, who appropriated many sophistic techniques in order to compose his works, but then turned around and attempted to declare himself the last prophet.  His theory of the forms is a theory of the beyond, one which falsifies the life-world and subordinates it to external concepts.  The bottom line, the most essential characteristic of Plato is his insistence on the universality of values.      

     The death of God is the eclipse of all of the phantoms of Stirner, the countless code names for that which demands submission without argument, that which subordinates concrete desire and concrete need to an abstract plane of universality: those myriad concept-words that would compel me to devote my life energy to their service.  Some mistake the death of God for the death of the meta-narrative as such.  This is not exactly the case.  What we have on our hands is the death of the reconciliatory or apologetic meta-narrative.  This is the death of the metanarrative which provides the ontology to which we must subordinate our ethical impulses; the ontology, the image of being, which serves to legitimize the master as master is dying.  People are much less willing to subordinate their immediate experience of becoming to any God-term that is not coherent with their material interests.  It seems that only one sector of society has a material interest in the master remaining master. 

     What these theorists mourn, the breakdown of supposedly universal valuations, they use to attack the work of Marx.  However, Marx could have discussed this very problem with them as he lived.  It is a direct consequence of the acceptance of materialism that valuations are not universal.  He would not have had us obey passively some kind of universal valuation; he would have us intervene actively in the interests of those who must bear the burdens of privilege.  Valuations derive from material political reality; they do not have access to anything beyond that.  What these theorists do not mention, what they are not looking for, is the fact that all valuations that claim to be universal are idealist by necessity.  The death of God is the death of idealistic transcendence.  God or a God-term is the center of the systems of idealistic philosophy, concrete existence, material reality is derived from the all powerful God-term. In other words, the idea gives birth to matter, matter derives from the idea.   Marx set this on its feet, and said that ideas derive from matter.  If the material is that which we should focus on, then we should pay more attention to the distribution of resources in this world, rather than the status of our souls in the next.  Universal valuations are impossible because material conditions differ from place to place geographically, ecologically and culturally, as do the conditions of production in those areas.  Even in a single political entity such as a country, the means by which production takes place often creates 2 groups, those who produce and those who enjoy the fruits of production.  In a feudal country this is the serf and the lord, in a capitalist country it is the capitalist and the worker.  Those who claim to be the masters of production put forward their values as universal, those who are the producers are not given this opportunity.  These ‘universal’ values function to reconcile the producers as well as the masters to the present relations of production in the society. 

     It is in this sense that universal values are dying.  This sort of apologetic universality is becoming entirely unconvincing.