According to Christianity, the "Antichrist" is to pretend to be the Christian Bible, to deceive in the world, to pretend to be the Messiah without authorization, and to be said to be the enemy of Christ. Beyond that, there is Nietzsche's claim. In Nietzsche, "the Antichrist" means "God is dead."
Nietzsche's statement seems to be different from what is said in the Bible, but if you think about it, as Feuerbach said, where is there any God in the world? It is human beings who create a perfect God in their own image. But God cannot be empty of content! Nor does God exist only in the Bible, but also in churches and various religious rituals. There must also be agents. Who can speak for God? Can there really be someone who speaks in God's place? It's impossible! Because people who have no flaws, people who don't make mistakes, are no longer human beings. Human beings are in a dilemma where it is impossible to find an agent and in fact it is impossible to have such a person. But such agents have always called themselves "orthodox," speaking on behalf of God's will, and moreover, representing the will of the people. This age, belonging to the old times, the people have awakened, the people no longer believe, the people no longer pin their hopes on the Messiah who descended from heaven.
On January 30, 2022, the opera Antikrist was staged in Berlin, which is both a religious and a philosophical drama. What I found on the Internet was the 2013 opera of the same name, and there was only one scene in the whole opera, and there was no change of venue. There is a singing voice, but there is not a single line, except for singing, all rely on body language to express the meaning. Here's what I searched for introductory text about the show:
The people have begun to change – "This is the last moment, the Antichrist is coming, about to take the stage of history, and at this very moment there are thousands of Antichrist, and we know that this is the final struggle." History is no longer repeated, time is running out, there is no time. We can't kill our own time with our own hands. We are going to run away from home, we don't belong to you, from the beginning, we don't belong to you, we are not with you. Now we're going to go, go far and high, go where we haven't been, to meet people we haven't seen. People keep joining us, and it's huge. ”
The people have begun to change — "The time has begun, we no longer put up with tedious preaching, we turn a deaf ear." You are a bunch of deaf people, and you can't hear anything. You are blind, you are blind to the truth. You just believe those stupid fables. ”
The people have begun to change—"We, unwillingly, keep the God you know." The time for liberation has arrived. We want those who are more happy than we love Christ. ”
What interests me is that The Antichrist is a philosophical play (of course it can be not only an opera, but also a play). It came into contact with the concept of "philosophical theater" that I read from Deleuze's Differences and Repetitions. A play can stage ideas, the boundaries of philosophy are disappearing, and the boundaries of art are also disappearing, and from this point of view, there can be philosophical poetry, not only the history of philosophy, and so on.
As far as modern continental Philosophy is concerned, although the term "philosophical theater" was born recently, it has long been done in the writings of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who turned philosophy into a philosophical scene, marked not by the creation of new philosophical concepts, but by the appearance of a character or a plot. In Kierkegaard, it is the biblical story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his own son, and Abraham's decision to kill his own son with his own hands is a ridiculous test of God for him. In Nietzsche,there is Zarathustra, a superhuman character. In Nietzsche's philosophical theater, there is the iconic slogan: God is dead, man is to be transcended. Strong will, eternal reincarnation.
What is the difference between Nietzsche and Kant-Hegel? Nietzsche's philosophy can be made into a film or written into a play and staged in the theater, while Kant's philosophy is in the bookstore, and one reader complains to Kant: "I read your book, one finger presses a clause, my 10 fingers are used up, but your sentence is not over." This is an exaggeration, complaining about Kant's pedantry.
Then we have two philosophies, one is the German classical philosophy, which was really founded by Kant and finally completed by Hegel, which has a brilliant dullness, and becomes the standard model of philosophy and philosophers within the system, it is teleological, connected with the original intention, from simple to complex, but from its simplest thought cell (the transition from nothing and being, non-existence to existence), it already contains the basic elements of the later philosophical edifice, with negation and dialectics as a transition. Marx openly admitted himself as a student of Hegel, then materialist dialectics and historical materialism belong to the last remnants of German classical philosophy in the 19th century, which inherited the spiritual achievements of the French Revolution and its ideological Enlightenment in the 18th century.
Kant and Hegel inherited in the study, while Marx developed into a class struggle. As for their relationship with Christianity, it is rather confusing, because on the surface their thinking is questionable and even anti-Christ, but God or the Messiah, like the light of enlightenment and the light of revelation, did not come in one way, and their common feature is that they promised mankind a certain utopia. In Christianity, it is heaven. In Marx's case, it was communism. But communism is a paradise in disguise. But unlike the Promise of Christianity, "Internacional" will certainly be fulfilled. In other words, it is a paradise on earth. It's just like the philosophical theater of "Waiting for Godot", although Godot has not yet come, but it will definitely come.
But in Nietzsche's case, it was a different story. The difference between Nietzsche and Marx is that nietzsche saw people as individuals, and he believed that the so-called "people" in Marx's eyes were nothing more than a ragtag bunch. The problem is not that Nietzsche has a spiritual aristocratic temperament, but also that Nietzsche emphasizes: 1, the value of personal life, it is physical, artistic, physiological. His so-called "strong will" actually refers to the differences between different individuals. The difference itself is strong. 2, Nietzsche inherited Schopenhauer and discovered the concept of the "unconscious". 3 Nietzsche's philosophy is not a teleological philosophy. In short, Nietzsche was the founder of modern European philosophy.
Continuing with the philosophical theater, he continued with Nietzsche, who returned to the dionysian spirit of ancient Greek mythology, similar to obsession and intoxication, the physiology of art, the allegorical statement of philosophical thought, short sentences, and the use of 10 sentences to refine the ideas that others had to complete with a book. Nietzsche's thought is the idea of the hammer, with power.
Returning to the philosophical drama The Antichrist, it is of course also a drama related to religion. Since traditional Chinese thought does not have a Western-style religious tradition, Chinese scholars will have a certain natural ideological background weakness when studying Western philosophy. Of course, this weakness is definitely not in the field of intelligence, but in religion. Philosophical and religious questions, almost as inseparable as the relationship between the narcissistic figure Narcissus of Greek mythology and his own shadow. We should not even take Nietzsche's literal meaning of "God is dead" and Marx's "religion is the opium of the anesthetized people", otherwise it is impossible to explain why, from a contemporary philosophical point of view, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are actually one and the same, but the latter firmly defend the image of God.
As for Marx, as mentioned earlier, communism is also messianic. For philosophy, religion or Christianity is not a demon, and religion even breeds innovations in philosophical thought. In other words, philosophers need something that is both a spiritual sustenance and a source of suffering to enlighten and inspire new ideas. This thing is religion. Religion is an inseparable frame of reference for philosophical thinking and plays an irreplaceable and important role in the coordinate system of thought. But we Chinese scholars usually lack religious feelings (as mentioned above, even if the atheists like Nietzsche and Marx still have Christian feelings), then our research work will focus mainly on intellectual factors and explanatory texts.
What negative impact does the lack of religious sentiment have on philosophical research work? Lack of "love" in "love wisdom" (= philosophy) (not love for someone, love for the motherland, love for the people, etc.) in the narrow sense). Love, it belongs to feelings, it belongs to morality, it belongs to honesty, it belongs to innocence, and so on. There is also a point that is easy for us to overlook, religious feelings, but also related to artistic taste, related to science.
In short, the reason why philosophy belongs to metaphysics and is related to religious issues is a very important factor. Kant once wanted to separate the religious element from the field of philosophy, to leave only the philosophy of intelligence and reason. However, judging from the development of modern European philosophy, Kant's separation was not successful. The relationship between modern continental philosophy and religion is neither pure atheism nor the religious philosophy of the Middle Ages, but the inclusion of reflection on religious questions as part of philosophy, which is no longer Kant's philosophy. In general, modern Continental philosophy is not as fractured as the Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which is always referred to in the dimension of religion, and the Western philosophical tradition born in ancient Greece.
A few stills from the opera The Antichrist were filmed:
This photo is part of the plot itself, not the actors moving props before the official performance. In other words, the plot and some kind of scene of daily life are exactly the same, and life is part of the drama itself. We can look at our daily lives with an artistic eye. Acting in this way is very economical, as long as the scene is seen as a stage (think Duchamp casually wrote a "spring" on the urinal and sent it to the exhibition hall to exhibit, it became a work of art). Another advantage is that the actor does not need any professional background, such as the doctoral defense, you can act in this way, let the audience sit under the stage, the band is the student's own, the defense committee and the doctor who accepts the defense, can be real, Peking University can try it first (the stage should be arranged like a real doctoral defense, symbolically demonstrating the whole process, and the monitor should be clearly placed in the four corners of the stage to see clearly).
In this photo, the actors on the stage are all dressed in black, a row of simple tables and chairs, and candles are lit on the table to set off the religious atmosphere. But in the back center of the stage, there is a large screen, which reveals time, that is, the retro religious ceremony dressed in the present, making the whole stage appear discordant, as if it is a spliced effect, which may be a kind of meaning of "Antichrist".
The large screen placed in the back center of the stage will show the real scene of the stage being performed, which has another effect: if we compare the scene being performed on the stage to a movie, then the large screen placed in the back center of the stage is equivalent to playing a movie in the movie, or playing in the play, a mirror in the mirror.
In this photo, the standing singer should be a cleric, a believer who at first sits in a chair and silently reads the Bible, and as the plot develops, at different times, they all stand up and walk to different corners of the stage, as if in repentance. When these people stood up, they were either named by the priest or ashamed of themselves.
This photograph is of a sudden higher level of divine voice appearing upstairs (which reminds us of "Big Brother" in Orwell's political allegorical novel "1984"), which makes the priest who was still on his toes in the audience also become respectful.
This still exposes the theme of the opera, The Antichrist— because the real Christ, the crucified Christ, has now been abandoned to a corner of the stage, and no one wants to look at him more, while the actors on the stage sing loudly and praise Christ, in fact, they are not only actors, they are playing ordinary people who are just playing life in real life. Philosophically, it is a "replacement" of real life, increasingly far removed from the truth of the human heart.
There is also a detail that the actresses on the stage wear exactly the same as the garlands they wear, which means, or is it a hint at a thousand people?
After that, the lens is quickly put down:
This still shows the scene of Christianity's repression of human nature and overwhelmed.
The death of man...