The Theological Significance Of Heidegger`s Later Philosophy

THE THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HEIDEGGER`S LATER PHILOSOPHY I I believe that Heidegger`s critical analysis of the western metaphysical tradition from Plato to Nietzsche is his most significant contribution to an understanding of religion, but since this is inextricably bound up with his wider, ontological aims, as forged on the way into a more `primordial` thinking of Being, my assessment of its religious significance will involve a critique of this overarching project from a religious perspective.

Heidegger`s philosophy has greatly influenced the thought of twentieth century theologians, (for example, that of John Macquarrie [`03:184-195]), but I feel that such appropriation of Heideggerian conceptuality and concerns is insensitive to, and works against, Heidegger`s own philosophical approach to an understanding of the meaning of Being. Moreover, I would submit that Heidegger`s own approach to Being, while claiming theological neutrality, in fact obstructs the possibility of a genuinely non-idolatrous religious thinking.

II

For Heidegger, the pre-Socratic experience of the unconcealment of being, the literal and essential significance of a-lethea or `truth`, was a gathering into unity (legein) of what emerges from itself (phusis) in its emerging, or appearing (phainesthai). Such unconcealment is a disclosive setting forth of the dynamic source or Be-ing of beings [Heidegger,trans.Fried/Polt,2000:64-6107], `letting beings be`[Heidegger,ed.Farrell-Krell,`93:125]. But the primordial meaning of truth is covered over early on in the metaphysical tradition. Logos and Phusis, primordially belonging together as the gathering of Being`s unconcealing, are disjoined [Heidegger,trans. Fried/Polt,2000:191].

Platonic episteme establishes the priority of nominal over verbal (dynamic) language in the saying of Being [60-1] by identifying the truth of a being, its Being, with the correctness of an evaluating regard, with an aspect occurring for/from a particular viewpoint. This aspect is taken as the essence of a being, its formal idea, or paradigmatic, true Being. The extent of a being`s participation (methixis) in Being is accounted for from the standpoint of a look, its truth interpreted as the correctness with which it corresponds to a projected hypostatised quality dialectically defined and lifted to the status of a transcendent a priori. [191-198]

Though not yet a full Cartesian re-presentation, the Platonic imposition of a look passes over Being`s emerging into presence as the dynamic Be-ing of beings, and pre-understands the Being of beings in terms of evaluative estimation. The dynamic becoming of a being is obscured as it is re-presented in the evaluative look, re-interpreted according to an understanding of becoming as that which is not fully real on account of participation in material non-being (me-on) [ 196-7]. For Heidegger `the self-giving into the open, along with the open region, is Being itself` [Heidegger,ed.Farrell-Krell,`93:237-8]. The Being of beings, giving itself over in the event (Ereignis/`es gibt`) of ec-static unconcealment [`93:238 Heidegger trans. Macquarrie/Robinson,`62:255], is missed by Plato, as he tries to grasp `true Being` as judged according to a being`s conformity with a transcendent idea. Rather than gratefully gathered in its dynamic emerging, what confronts one`s regard is to be evaluated according to its degree of correspondence to the reality by which it is (its ideal form), or in terms of its distance from such reality as merely apparent and deceptive seeming [Heidegger,trans.Fired/Polt,2000:196-7]. For Heidegger all knowledge, as linguistic, is interpretative, and thus aspectival. The linguistic event of Being`s self-unconcealing is therefore limited, so whatever is revealed necessarily also conceals Being [109-12], which for Heidegger is the import of Heracleitus` `phusis kruptesthai philei`: being likes to hide itself [121]. For Heidegger the seeming that conceals Being is also part of Being, not merely or primarily `human error` as inadequately conceived by a philosophical or common sense thinking that sees Dasein as separable from Being [104-5]. Language as the house and gift of Being [Heidegger,ed.Farell-Krell,`93:217,236-7] is therefore ambiguous: as Ricouer notes, it can enclose and isolate a Dasein which comes to see itself in separation from beings as the subjective possessor of language as a medium through which beings can be manipulated and calculated: In forming a name, we have both disclosure of Being and enclosure in the finitude of language, which Heidegger implies in the terms to `preserve` and `maintain`. By preserving, man contains, does violence, and also begins to conceal. We are here at a point where man`s domination of being by reasoning - in the science of logic for example - is made possible.[Ricouer,`04:228] Such ambiguity sets up the conditions from which modern technological enframing can arise in the destining of metaphysics, the historical mode of the forgetfulness of Being [Heidegger,trans.Fried/Polt,2000:206-8]. The anthropocentric trend of Platonic thought is intensified through the course of the metaphysical tradition. Aristotle relocated paradigmatic form within beings, but his categorical logic transformed the idea of logos, which in essence is the disclosive gathering of the unconcealed, into the correctness of a definition: the apprehension of a being as re-presented in a correctly corresponding formulation [198-201]. In Mediaeval scholasticism, this distancing relation of correspondence is termed `adequation`. The correctness of relation between proposition and thing is metaphysically grounded in a doctrine of Creation, a thing`s intrinsic intelligibility being guaranteed by a primary relation to its uncreated conception existing in the mind of God [Heidegger,ed.Farrell-Krell,`93:118]. Through Descartes, for whom the self-representation of the thinking subject becomes the true hupokeimenon or grounding source of truth, the restriction of a-lethea to truth-as-correctness is now determined in terms of certainty in thinking [Heidegger,trans.Stambaugh,`85:30-1]. Epistemological certainty becomes an ontological criterion pre-determining what can be at all. The ens philosophicum, (the independent being of anything in its own right), becomes an ignored irrelevance [Marion,ed.Blond`98:67-73]. With the Cartesian turn to the subject, Platonic transcendence is transformed into an immanent subjective ground, on the basis of which the Being of beings is determined in terms of certainty in knowing. A thing is allowed to be what it can be known as according to criteria of mathematical certainty, the essence of the mathematical being not number for Heidegger, but the projective interpretation of beings as grasped in terms of what one already has, in terms of what one is pre-prepared to receive them as [Heidegger,ed.Farrell-Krell,`93:275-8]. The independent being of the object becomes no more than a vanishing-point for the mind [Marion,ed.Blond,`98:71-2]. Descartes envisions founded knowledge as a chain of continuous reasoning, moving out from a self-certainty that illuminates the darkness of uncertainty like a beacon . In order to ensure itself against its own finite fallibility, the ego invokes God (on Heidegger`s interpretation, a conceptual idol, and thus `god`) as the necessary and infinite guarantor of knowledge. In a variant of Anselm`s ontological argument, Descartes posits `god` as an insurance policy: the representational ego posits its own ground, allowing `god` to function in the interests of the human project of controlling knowledge, according to an evaluation of the certainty with which `god` can be represented to the mind [Descartes, trans.Clarke,`98:30-4450-7Heidegger,ed.Farrell-Krell,`93:251]. The Cartesian Causa Sui is thus a metaphysical or onto-theological idol. Metaphysics is blind to Being, and explains the totality of beings by projecting a being to ground all the rest: this `god` is an object of the calculative thinking that is fulfilled in technological enframing [Heidegger,trans.Mcneill/Walker,`95:41-44Westphal,`01:232]. Heidegger writes: To this god man can neither pray nor offer sacrifice. Before the Causa Sui man can neither fall to his knees nor sing and dance. Therefore, the god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as Causa Sui, is perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this only means that it is freer for him than onto-theo-logy would like to admit.[from Identität und Differenz, quoted in Williams,`77:102] This `god` is only a confirmatory echo of the finite self, reverence before whom might even be conceived as self-congratulation, a subtle form of narcissism in which one projects one`s own pre-conceptions and predilections as `perfection`. Heidegger attacks `Christianity` as a metaphysical worldview, concurring with Nietzsche that it is a `Platonism for the masses` inasmuch as it holds to a two-world doctrine imposing a super-sensible reality on the sensible world, the latter meaningful only as a derivative shadow of the former. He carefully distinguishes this secular-political `Christendom` from a salvific faith in the revelation of Christ [Heidegger,trans.Young/Haynes,`02:162-5]. In the Letter on Humanism Heidegger suggests that it is `not only rash but also an error to maintain that the interpretation of the essence of man from the relation of his essence to the truth of Being [the project of Being and Time] is atheism`[ed.Farrell-Krell:253]. Heidegger notes that Sartre`s reversal of the order of precedence of essentia and existentia in the case of humanity maintains the metaphysical import of the terms, and is thus unable to navigate the passage from the Nietzschian experience of the void to the Nothing of Being in a transformation of vision through a radical reorientation of perspective [228-32,236-8]. Heidegger states that `with the existential determination of the essence of man, nothing is decided about the `existence of God or his `non-being`[253]. I will go on to suggest, below, that while it is true that Heidegger leaves room for the God of Faith, the manner or how of this `leaving room` is deeply problematic. However I think that Westphal rightly argues that Heidegger`s onto-theological critique in itself is a powerful tool to be appropriated in the interests of non-idolatrous religious thinking against what he terms `onto-theologies of the "right", more popularly known as fundamentalisms`: While the latter may not speak the language of sufficient reason and Causa Sui, they do treat God as being at their disposal conceptually (its scary how much they know about what God is up to) and convert this quickly into a project of having the world at their disposal practically as well. Theocracy legitimises itself onto-theologically.[Westphal,`01:23] Heidegger believes that an unholy wedding of Athens to Jerusalem contributed significantly to the mathematical project of `enframing`, God being idolatrously reduced to a calculable object serving the interests of explanation in terms of instrumental causality [ed.Farrell-Krell,93:331]. Similarly, since beings are interpreted as created by a god whose `mind` is conceived in the light of Plato`s paradigmatic forms as the uncreated truth of created beings, their intelligibility is grounded in God [ed.Farrell-Krell,`93:118-9]. Human truth and its objects can meet one another only on the basis of their conformity to a divine mind, insofar as beings are re-presented in the light of a pre-conceived divine plan . For Heidegger, the Christian faith has contaminated itself, and its historic, official theology is intrinsically ideological [Heidegger, trans. Young/ Haynes,`02:164]. Heidegger sees the Cartesian turn to the subject as heralding the technological representation of objects as calculable utilities to be `set upon` and `challenged forth` as a `standing reserve` [ed.Farrell-Krell,`93:325]. Nature, to the pre-Socratics the `emerging sway`, has become a resource to be exploited with ever-increasing efficiency. Heidegger contends that from the perspective of this refusal to let beings be, this forgetfulness of Being, the difference between beings and Being can only be experienced negatively: the not of beings will appear as a void, since not a being to be apprehended with a certainty that is the imposing of a calculative framework upon beings [Heidegger,ed.McNeill,`98:232-5281-2]. Beings are commandeered, re-identified and conscri pted into the projected aims of a humanity similarly re-presenting itself to itself as a `standing reserve`: as the `workforce` or `human resources`[Pattison,2000:60-1]. The calculating subject is thus in the same way alienated from his own true being [Heidegger,ed.Farrell-Krell,`93:333], which is to be disclosive of Being as it grants him a world of meaning in which to abide and thrive, fulfilled as de-centred [Heidegger,ed.McNeill,`98:236] in guardianship of Being`s unconcealment [Heidegger,ed.Farrell-Krell,`93:234]. Human being can come to fulfilment only in awareness that even such fuller unconcealment is at the same time a withholding of Being`s plenitude that it might continue to grant itself in beings through time. To be disclosive of Being`s temporality, of the cycle of its presencing and withholding through the transience of beings, is for human being to accept its own transience as a gift. One no longer grasps at selfhood as some entity possessed [Heidegger,trans.Aylesworth,`93:103-6]. To Dasein caught up in enframing, seeking substantial support either in a highest being or an entified ego, and blind to ontological difference in forgetfulness of Being [Heidegger, ed. McNeill,`98:97], the ontological attunenment of anxiety [Heidegger, trans. Macquarrie/ Robinson,`62:172228-35 Heidegger, ed.McNeill,`98:233] unveils the essence of metaphysics as a void [Heidegger,trans.Young/Haynes,`02:197]: `In its essence, metaphysics is nihilism` [198]. There is literally no-thing undergirding dasein, no solid ground that it can grasp. Historical Being makes manifest its own covertness, its own turning away, in the increasing meaninglessness of everything that necessarily obtains [167] when the supersensory conceptual idols, the `divine` entities (Platonic forms/Aristotelian unmoved-mover/Scholastic Summum Ens/both Cartesian Ego and its obliging echo, Causa Sui) posited by Dasein to under-gird its project of controlling knowledge, are recognised as being what they are: posited projections of the will [176]. In his essay Nietzsche`s Word: `God is Dead` [157-99], Heidegger asserts that Nietzsche`s `will to power` has nothing to do with psychology [176], but is a metaphysical ultimate, and the ultimate `ultimate` to be posited metaphysically, since it represents the disclosure of the essence of metaphysics [198]. As an epochal destining of Being, metaphysics reveals itself as the forgetfulness of Being. Nietzsche does not himself overturn metaphysics, but fulfils its inmost, nihilistic essence, as the will to will knowing itself as essentially a projector of values [183-4], a position from which Heidegger`s post-metaphysical `thinking` of Being can begin to feel its way, seeking a more primordial level than that of representative, evaluative thought. Heidegger seeks to engage in an attentive thinking which, as an awakened and alert listening, is both active and receptive: thinking is a reverent thanking for its own possibility through language, which is regarded as the gift of Being, and not a human attribute [Heidegger,ed.McNeill,`98:235-8]. Heidegger`s essay What is Metaphysics? (together with its Postscri pt of 1943 and Introduction of 1949) [Heidegger,ed.McNeill,`98:82-97231-9277-91], thus marks a re-orientation in thinking - a change of perspective away from beings towards Being by which they are [231] - which sees through metaphysical nihilism to its essence, aware that it is not confronting simply a void of meaning, but the Nothing of beings, which is the obverse face of Being, and thus moves beyond Nietzsche`s position, as Heidegger reads it. Such thinking stands, ec-statically, `out there` (Da-sein). It leaves behind both the isolating and idolatrous illusion of self-sufficiency of a debunked Cartesian self-possession and the Nietzschian revelation of that emptiness as a masking over of unbridled willing [trans.Young/Haynes,`02:176-7] to step out into the Nothingness of beings, waiting for Being to turn towards us in and as a more primordial enacting of the event of self-giving (ereignis) [236]. III

For Macquarrie [`03:185], Heidegger stands alongside Eckhart as a mystic in the neoplatonic tradition. Macquarrie focuses on Heidegger`s What Is Metaphysics? [`93:107-8], drawing attention to the experience, in anxiety, of the Nothing that is the very possibility of anything, and to Heidegger`s reflection on the Christian understanding of Creation: Christian orthodoxy correctly denies the validity of the logical proposition ex nihil, nihil fit, holding that from nothing comes created being: ex nihil fit ens creatum. The mistake for Heidegger, is to posit a being as summum ens. Heidegger suggests a correction: all beings are finite, and only Dasein, as the being which constitutes a clearing of Being can encounter the Nothing from which all beings come, since, as the clearing of Being, it is held out over the Nothing. Macquarrie suggests that Heidegger equates Being with God, as the creative Nothing of beings.

However, it is made abundantly clear by Heidegger that to equate Being with God is to misunderstand its significance for him. When asked in 1951 whether it was `possible to posit Being and God as identical`, Heidegger gave an emphatic `no`, suggesting that if he were to write a theology, `the word `Being` would not occur in it`[Marion,trans.Carlson,`91:61-2]. He went on to say that faith surrenders itself if it attempts to think itself in terms of Being. The divorce of human thinking and divine revelation is complete, and one might think quite Barthian (as Heinrich Ott in fact did think ). The idea of a Christian philosophy is a `square circle` [Heidegger, ed .McNeill,`98:53]. But Heidegger went on: I believe that Being can never be thought as the ground and essence of God, but that nevertheless, the experience of God and of his manifested-ness, to the extent that the latter can indeed reach Man, flashes in the dimension of Being. [Marion,trans.Carlson,`91:61]

In Phenomenology and Theology, Heidegger suggested that, in spite of their independence of one another, theology, seen as an ontic science, might have recourse to philosophy as the formally indicative ontological corrective of the ontic and, in particular, of the pre-Christian content of basic theological concepts.[ed.McNeill,`98:52] By this, Heidegger means that the ontological make-up of pre-conversion Dasein constitutes the pos