Michael Rosen, The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History

Excerpt

God, says Nietzsche, is dead. But like the shadow of the Buddha that was displayed for centuries in a cave, his shadow lives on. “And we,” he continues, “still have to vanquish his shadow.” Michael Rosen disagrees. Human beings, he argues in his difficult but enjoyable book, need, and will always need, an account of things that will “reconcile” them to the “evils” of the world: to suffering and death, and, Kant would emphasize, to the world’s injustice. We need, in Leibniz’s word, a “theodicy.” In what Rosen calls the “narrow” sense, a theodicy seeks to reconcile the evils of the world with the Christian doctrine that the world was created by an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God—the “omniGod.” But even if we do not believe in the omniGod, we still need a theodicy in the “broad” sense: a worldview—a doxa (p. 17)—a foundational belief that “makes sense of things,” enables us to carry on in the face of the ubiquity and inevitability of pain and death. …