The Ethical Condition of Born Man
If Born Man cannot return to religion without falsification, the ethical question becomes unavoidable: what, if anything, obligates him? The disappearance of transcendence does not abolish ethical demand; it abolishes only the forms by which obligation was once justified. What replaces religion ethically within our current situation is therefore neither belief nor nihilistic freedom, neither moralism nor instrumental calculation, but a form of immanent obligation—an obligation that binds without promise, without redemption, and without metaphysical guarantee.
Crucially, this obligation does not arise despite the completion of transcendence, but because of it.
Ethics is often assumed to depend upon religion, as though obligation requires a transcendent source in order to bind. Historically, however, obligation predates doctrinal belief and outlasts it. Religion provided a ground for ethics, not its origin. When that ground collapses, obligation does not disappear; it becomes groundless. What vanishes is not ethical demand itself, but the metaphysical architecture that once justified it.
Born Man inhabits precisely this condition. He lives after the metaphysical labor of Christianity has been completed—after God has been internalized, historicized, and ultimately relocated into the operational totality of technological civilization. As Hegel recognized, Christianity is the absolute religion because it dissolves transcendence into history. But once history absorbs the Absolute, nothing remains “above” it to command. Obligation must therefore arise from within historical reality itself. Ethics can no longer be grounded in divine command, cosmic order, or eschatological promise. Yet the ethical demand persists, now stripped of consolation.
Modernity has repeatedly attempted to replace religion with substitute ethical frameworks, none of which can sustain obligation. Moralism reduces ethics to rule-following, binding externally without existential authority; it is experienced as arbitrary or coercive. Humanism appeals to dignity or universal values, but cannot explain why such values should command sacrifice when they conflict with survival, interest, or power. Utilitarianism converts ethics into calculation, collapsing responsibility into outcome while eliminating obligation precisely where obligation is most demanded. Nihilism, finally, denies obligation altogether, mistaking the collapse of transcendence for the collapse of demand itself.
Each of these substitutes fails because each either attempts to replace transcendence under another name or to deny obligation entirely. Born Man can do neither without falsification.
What emerges instead is obligation without ground—obligation without why. This form of obligation does not arise from divine command, rational moral law, or communal tradition. It arises from exposure. Born Man is exposed to reality without symbolic mediation, without metaphysical shelter, and without redemptive horizon. This exposure itself obligates, not because it promises meaning, but because it demands endurance, longsuffering.
Kant becomes relevant here not for his moral system, but for his recognition that obligation binds even when happiness does not follow. The categorical imperative already gestures toward an ethics without reward. Yet Kant still grounds obligation in rational universality. Born Man goes further. Obligation persists even without rational justification. The ethical demand binds not because it can be explained, but because it cannot be escaped.
This is where Wolfgang Giegerich’s contribution becomes decisive. Giegerich rejects both religious consolation and therapeutic reassurance. For him, the modern soul has relocated into objective reality—into systems, technologies, and historical necessity. Ethics can no longer consist in inner virtue, belief, or moral sentiment. It consists in remaining faithful to reality as it is, not as one wishes it to be. Obligation after transcendence therefore takes the form of a refusal of falsification: a refusal to regress into belief, to aestheticize suffering, to convert ethics into therapy, or to evade reality through intoxication or violence.
This obligation is negative in form but absolute in force. It does not promise salvation. It demands presence.
What replaces religion ethically is therefore not faith, but endurance. Endurance is not passive resignation. It is an active refusal to collapse consciousness chemically, as in addiction; an active refusal to collapse consciousness explosively, as in violence; and an active refusal to replace truth with consolation. Endurance binds because reality binds. The world does not ask whether We consent to its conditions. It demands response nonetheless.
In this sense, obligation after transcendence resembles tragic ethics more than moral systems. It recalls the ancient demand to stand within fate—but without myth, gods, or catharsis. What remains is responsibility without transcendence.
This position must not be confused with nihilism. Nihilism claims that nothing matters. Born Man’s ethics claims something far more severe: something matters without reason. Obligation persists not because the world is meaningful, but because evasion is destructive. Addiction and violence testify to this destructiveness. They are not sins against God; they are refusals of endurance. Ethics therefore no longer consists in goodness, virtue, or salvation, but in staying—in remaining present to a world that offers no justification for doing so.
This is why obligation after transcendence is heavier than religious ethics. Religion could promise forgiveness, redemption, or reward. Born Man receives none of these. He is obligated nonetheless.
What replaces religion ethically for Born Man is therefore neither belief nor nihilism, but obligation without transcendence—an obligation that binds without ground, without promise, and without consolation. It arises from historical completion itself, from the fact that transcendence has done its work and withdrawn.
Born Man is not commanded by God.
He is commanded by reality.
This command does not save.
It obligates.
Brenton L Delp
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