The Intuition of Ietsism (Somethingism): Nothingness as Our Safe Haven by Theo van de Kerkhof

As I have recently noted, I have I’ve tried to use my recovery time constructively to work up an English translation of Klaas Hendrikse’s (to my mind) wonderful book, God does not exist and Jesus is his son (2011). Because he speaks a great deal about Ietsism (Somethingism) in the third part of the book, naturally, I did some reseach into the term to find out how it was/is being used in the Netherlands. One of the most helpful pieces I found was the following short essay written by the theologian, journalist, editor, Theo van de Kerkhof. I have reached out to him to ask permission to publish an English translation of the piece but, alas, I’ve not been able to contact him. Naturally, if at a later date, I’m asked to take this post down, I will do so immediately. 

This piece also served to introduce me to an excellent essay by Patricia de Martelaere (1957-2009), What Remains (Wat blijft).

—o0o—

 

The Intuition of Ietsism (Somethingism):
Nothingness as Our Safe Haven
by Theo van de Kerkhof, theologian, journalist, editor
 
 The Dutch original can be read at the following link: 
<http://theovandekerkhof.nl/de-intuitie-van-het-ietsme/>
Originally posted on 17th July 2009

Ietsists are often dismissed as lukewarm believers who want nothing to do with a personal God. But considered closely, a culture-critical force lies hidden within ietsism: a resistance against the modern inability to radically think through the meaning of life.

Ietsists take a beating from both sides. To the atheist, they are cowards, part-time believers, who dare not live with the empty heaven of unbelief above their heads. And the full-time believers? They see little else in ietsism but indolence and spiritual laziness. ‘Heathen leaven’, ‘ietsism suffocates’, sneer the critics.

Yet a great many Dutch people appear to subscribe to this detestable variant of faith. What does that mean, what does the ietsist actually believe? Whoever wishes to uncover the meaning of a word must consider that word within its own environment of use. A bishop acquires meaning for those who play chess and know the rules of the game. Meaning is use. If we look at the contemporary spiritual playing field in this way, it is striking that the basic statement of the ietsist is not primarily an assertion, but a sigh: “There must surely be something.” With this, the ietsist does not primarily turn against the idea of God as a person, against which he would wish to defend an impersonal, or thing-like God. The ietsist is not in a debate with the believer. After all, the latter does not need to be convinced of the existence of ‘something’. The context of ietsism is the dialogue with atheism, or rather, nihilism. The atheist Ronald Plasterk, who brought the concept into circulation, used the term to denote his opponents, whom he suspected of not being up to the task of facing the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. Ietsism, Plasterk says, stems from a need for meaning based on the fear of death. “When you stand at a grave, even if it is of someone you did not know well, you briefly feel the draught of empty eternity, the oppression of nothingness. That leaves virtually no one unmoved. The hope that there will be something more, after all, drives people to a belief in ‘something’.”

Purposeless Universe

Whether Plasterk is right or not, to understand the ‘something’ of the ietsist, we must look at the meaning of the nothingness of nihilism, because either way: the sigh of the ietsist forms a response to that nothingness. What does the nihilist believe? The basic thought of nihilism is that there is nothing of lasting significance. There is no eternal value, no eternal ground that brings us forth, bears us, and catches us. There is no God. Reality is an everlasting play of blind natural forces that have no meaning or value in and of themselves, an everlasting fluctuation of states of affairs, without beginning or end, accidental, useless, without meaning. Whether we like it or not: we live in a purposeless universe. It is what it is. All meaning, significance, and value that we find in life is — according to the nihilist — a meaning that we humans, in all our provisionality, grant ourselves to that which inherently brings no meaning or value with it. The only meaningful attitude is the heroic one: despite the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence, we humans must give meaning to our lives ourselves. That humans are capable of this, therein precisely lies their greatness. Be Glad That Life Has No Meaning is the title of a book by the philosopher Jaap van Heerden. That was also the attitude to life of the atheistic existentialists in the mid-twentieth century. But this attitude does not actually differ all that much from that of many a contemporary liberal believer for whom faith is creative imagination, who surrenders to a faithful ‘make-believe’ in order to endure life and make it liveable. The ietsist knows the temptation of this nihilism, but ultimately contrasts it with a different experience of existence: “There must surely be something.” ‘Something’ that gives life its lustre, posits reality into being, makes values into actual values, is the source of creativity. Reality, which inherently brings no values with it, nevertheless at least brings forth a humanity capable of creating values. But does nihilism not then live off a contradiction? In any case, the ietsist ultimately cannot cope with the spontaneous nihilistic belief that so dominantly defines modern Western culture. The faith of the ietsist thus revolves not so much around a something-god who absolutely must not be a person. The context of his declaration of faith reveals precisely that the ‘something’ of which the ietsist has a vague suspicion represents for him a ‘higher power’ that is more than the thing-like, more than the blind, cold forces to which modern Western rationality limits itself in its interpretation of reality.

The paradox is that the nihilist confines his reality to the category of things. For the nihilist, only that which is directly present is positive reality, whereas the ietsist testifies to the belief in ‘something’ that transcends the category of the directly present, visible, tangible, measurable. Consequently, it is precisely the ietsist who affirms the positivity of the not-something.

A New Spark of Hope

The insight that there is ‘something’ that is precisely not something, but also not nothing, is the vague, unarticulated suspicion that the ietsist brings to the contemporary debate on religion. “And that is what our Good Lord has to make do with,” Cardinal Simonis once said in a TV portrait. Yet it would behoove church leaders to speak of this intuition of faith with less disdain; in terms of its movement of thought, the ietsist displays more kinship with orthodoxy than with liberalism.

Viewed schematically, ietsism is, in fact, an entirely different variant of faith from liberalism. The ietsist does not stipulate what minimum he wishes to retain from the once so richly adorned Christian conceptual world. He does not leave a world of faith with a final remnant of belief. On the contrary, he moves towards a world of faith with a new glimmer of hope. The sigh of the ietsist is a cri de cœur against the oppression of his own — continually culturally reinforced — unbelief. The liberal, by contrast, comes from orthodoxy, historically speaking, and shows all the things he can no longer go along with. The liberal makes a secularising movement away from orthodoxy. The ietsist already stands on the position of the secularist and indicates what, in spite of himself, he actually does believe. The shore of unbelief has forced the ship to turn. In that sense, the ietsist moves rather towards an orthodoxy. The liberal is the originally orthodox believer who has abandoned pre-modernity. The ietsist is the originally modern unbeliever who places question marks over the godlessness of modernity. The liberal crosses out the excess of the believing past. The ietsist wins back a deficit from the unbelieving present. ‘Retaining’ is the emotion of liberalism; ‘winning back’ that of the ietsist. Perhaps the two meet halfway, but their point of departure and direction of movement are different. Liberalism is orthodoxy-minus, ietsism is atheism-plus.

Light

Heidegger has characterised the human mode of existence as a Hineingehaltenheit in das Nichts (being-held-out into the nothing). Whoever considers ietsism as a resistance against the nihilism of modern culture, and not merely as a dilution of the Christian faith, can hear Heidegger’s Nichts resonating within the ‘something’ of the ietsist — and that Nichts we must understand as something positive. At least, that was the conviction of the recently deceased Flemish writer and philosopher Patricia de Martelaere. In her essay What Remains (Querido, 2007), she uses the image of light to make somewhat tangible the direction in which we must think when it comes to that positive not-something. Things become visible in the light, but the light itself turns out not to be visible. “It is a remarkable thought to consider that the pitch-black firmament in which the stars twinkle is actually criss-crossed in all directions by travelling rays of light.” The light that provides sight is itself invisible.

Something similar applies to consciousness. Consciousness is always conscious of something, but consciousness itself is not an object of consciousness. Within consciousness, consciousness itself does not appear. Thus, consciousness too seems to be nothing rather than something. If our identity is grounded in our consciousness, our identity is better described with words like openness, space, and freedom, than with substantive definitions. De Martelaere: “our deepest identity is not that of the images that fill our consciousness, but that of the emptiness or nothingness that lies between these images.” It is rather the empty space between the images that forms the primordial ground of the person we are. For De Martelaere, this insight has a practical side: “To become ‘whole’ and to form a unity with ourselves, it is not necessary to fill this ‘nothingness’ — which is, moreover, impossible — but, on the contrary, to expand it and to recognise it as our ‘true nature’”. She refers to meditation as the spiritual practice in which one applies oneself to a self-experience different from what we usually call our psychological ego. This meditative application to the empty space, the not-something at the centre of our being, acts as a counterweight to the prevailing mental state in which we continually, as if conditioned, allow ourselves to be swept along by the stream of images, thoughts and emotions; impressions, memories, desires, and feelings.

Our Safe Haven and Our Soul

The ground on which we stand, our primordial ground, we cannot see. To see our ground, we would have to be able to distance ourselves from our ground. But we cannot do that, because without ground we are nowhere. Our ground precedes us. In that sense, it remains a riddle to us. But at the same time, our ground is most intimately near to us, because as a condition of possibility it permeates everything and is thus present in all that we are. We cannot know our ground, and at the same time we ‘know’ it in everything we are; we represent it without coinciding with it. Thus our ground is present and absent at the same time; it is nowhere and everywhere; it lies at our origin, makes our present possible, and keeps our future open. And yet it cannot be found in the past, you cannot put a finger on it anywhere in the present, and no single discovery in the future will be able to reveal it. De Martelaere puts it like this: there is an absolute foothold, but it is not something. “Our great mistake, which is the cause of our great bewilderment, is therefore that we consider ourselves as ‘something’ amidst the inhospitable and threatening nothingness. In reality, it is exactly the other way around: nothingness is our safe haven and our soul, while it is precisely the ‘something’ that lures us away from it and holds us captive in its veils.” For De Martelaere, that elusive but essential ‘nothingness’ is the true guise of the ‘I’ and the primordial ground of the entirety of reality. Paradoxically enough, that ‘nothingness’ nowadays finds expression, among other things, in the guise of ietsism. What ietsism expresses is that all that is, is a manifestation of an indeterminate presence. “A Nothingness that does not annihilate, but on the contrary ceaselessly creates, bears, and sustains.