Creating the imaginary terrain where moral judgment is suspended was a move of enormous significance: only there could novelistic characters develop- that is, individuals conceived not as a function of some preexistent truth, as examples of good or evil, or as representations of objective laws in conflict, but as autonomous beings grounded in their own morality, in their own laws. Western society habitually presents itself as the society of the rights of man; but before a man could have rights, he had to constitute himself as an individual, to consider himself such and to be considered such; that could not happen without the long experience of the European arts and particularly of the art of the novel, which teaches the reader to be curious about others and to try to comprehend truths that differ from his own. In this sense E. M. Cioran is right to call European society "the society of the novel" and to speak of Europeans as "the children of the novel."
Profanation
The removal of gods from the world is one of the phenomena that characterize the Modern Era. The removal of gods does not mean atheism, it denotes the situation in which the individual, the thinking ego, supplants God as the basis for all things; man may continue to keep his faith, to kneel in church, to pray at his bed, but his piety shall henceforward pertain only to his subjective universe. Having described this situation, Heidegger concludes: "And thus the gods eventually departed. The resulting void is filled by the historical and psychological exploration of myths."
The historical and psychological exploration of myths, of sacred texts, means: rendering them profane, profaning them. "Profane" comes from the Latin pro-fanum: the place in front of the temple, outside the temple. Profanation is thus the removal of the sacred out of the temple, to a sphere outside religion. Insofar as laughter invisibly pervades the air of the novel, profanation by novel is the worst there is. For religion and humor are incompatible.