Heidegger Essay, Part Ii

By this, Heidegger means that the ontological make-up of pre-conversion Dasein constitutes the possibility for its modification in faithful reception of a revelation of Christ's saving power. Traditional theological conceptions (e.g.) 'Sin' [52] are only possible as existentiell determinations founded upon ontological categories such as (e.g.) 'Guilt', as developed in Being and Time. Heidegger claims that the guidance of such ontological analyses in no way effects the theological content, (which is highly disputable ), but as a formal corrective, allows the theologian to critically assess and amend older theological treatments of basic Christian concepts that are based on an inadequate ontological foundation.

Jean-Luc Marion [trans.Carlson,'91:62-5] suggests that this division of labour works to put Christian theology 'in its place'. From Being and Time onwards, says Marion, Heidegger has distinguished two distinct realms of discourse, Greek philosophy, which he dubs theiology or the conceptualisation of the Divine (?? ?????) [ed.Young/Haynes,'02:146] which speaks of the divine in terms of Being itself (albeit ambiguously in the metaphysical tradition, since Heidegger notes that Aristotle cannot think the divinity of '"being" itself' except in terms of a highest being [146]), and Christian theology, which speaks from faith, and which Heidegger views in the light of St. Paul's anti-philosophical teaching that Christ makes the wisdom of the wise to be foolishness [Heidegger,trans.Fried/Polt,2000:8].

Heidegger condemns traditional 'theiology' as onto-theology, and relegates Christian theology to a study of man in the state of faith or in his being-towards-God [Heidegger, trans.Macquarrie/Robinson,'62:30; ed.McNeill,'98:46-7]. Theology may only offer a 'conceptual self-interpretation of believing existence'[Marion,trans.Carlson,'91:65-6], it can speak neither of humanity or God in their Being, per se. Heidegger's work is geared to a destruktion of traditional, metaphysical theiology, but, just as his philosophy reserves to itself the task of a phenomenological analytic of Dasein, correcting the 'anthropology of Christianity and the ancient world' [trans.Macquarrie/Robinson,'62:74], so, as a reformed, properly phenomenological theiology, he reserves for philosophy the right to think a more divine - as more Being-full - god than the onto-theological Causa Sui: .the god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as Causa Sui, is perhaps closer to the divine God. [Identität und Differenz, quoted in Williams,'77:102] Marion suggests that Heidegger sees 'this quest' as 'still and always' belonging to a meditation of Being, whose theiology touches beings - without relation to the theology touched by faith. [Marion,trans.Carlson,'91:64] Christian theology is categorically banned from speaking of God, and may only speak of dasein under the impact of Christian belief. Marion writes that for Heidegger, every non-metaphysical possibility of God finds itself governed from the start by the thesis of Being that will accommodate it only as a being. [70] Thus having rightly challenged the onto-theological and idolatrous ideology of a 'highest' entity or Causa Sui Heidegger sets up a second, higher idolatry of Being itself [45-6].

This is illustrated by Heidegger's conception of the unfolding through Ereignis of the fourfold, categorical structure of Being as a 'Quadrant' of . 'Sky', symbolising Being as a luminous dynamic source; . 'Earth', Being's self-concealing; . 'Gods' as bearers of holy meaning, and . 'Mortals', the broken finitude of Dasein's openness to Being's abiding. [Pattison,2000:183] Heidegger sees the poet (Hölderlin especially) as a mediator between mortals and the divinities: through the gift of a disclosive Word of Being, the poet can open up a world of meaningful wholeness in which mortals can dwell: The mortals dwell insofar as they await the divinities as the divinities.[ed.Farrell'Krell,'93:352]

In a time of the gods' absence, Holderlin was able to recognise their 'trace' as the Holiness of Being, the 'place' from which the gods have departed, in meditation upon which the thinker, as the poet's kinsman, patiently awaits a new theophany [Heidegger,trans.Young/Haynes,'02:200-3]. For Heidegger, (writes J. R. Williams), the gods are '"heralds of deity", according to which Being is revealed in its very concealment.'['77:123] The holy is revealed through the mediation of poets, and thus through the fourfold structure of Ereignis, the linguistic event in which 'man and Being attain one another in their essence' [124]. Further confirmation of the fact that Heidegger subordinates the divine to Being is offered in his Letter on Humanism:

.The homeland of this historical dwelling is nearness to Being. In such nearness, if at all, a decision may be made as to whether the gods withhold their presence and the night remains, whether and how the day of the holy dawns, whether and how in the upsurgence of the holy an epiphany of God and the gods can begin anew. But the holy, which alone is the essential sphere of divinity, which in turn alone affords a dimension for the gods and for God, comes to radiate only when Being itself beforehand and after extensive preparation has been illuminated and is experienced in its truth.[ed.Farrell-Krell'93:242]

Heidegger here describes the primordial event of appropriation: Ereignis as the fruitful relation of Dasein and Being. Being enables a more primordial thinking as it fulfils its own need for unconcealment through language, the essence of disclosive Dasein: through language, the gift of Being that is a disclosive thinking of Being 'carries out man's nature' [Robinson,'63:43]. For Heidegger, human being only fully comes into its own essence in the granting by Being of a word that lets beings be [ed.Farrell-Krell,'93:124-8], setting beings forth in their own Being. The essence of human being as ek-sistent is to disclose Being, 'standing out into the truth [as ??????] of Being' [230]. Ereignis, as the happening of the appropriation of Being by human being in which human being is appropriated and brought to its own essence by Being, in answer to the call of Being, is a relation prioritised over its constitutive relata. As Stambaugh writes on Ereignis:

Here we have Heidegger's fundamental insight, pervading all of his later writings, often expressed as the fourfold of sky, earth, mortals, and divinity, that the relation between man and Being is what is most primordial of all, more fundamental than either of the constituents of that relation. And if, on the basis of Heidegger's thought, anything is to be said about God, it would have to take this idea of the priority of relation into account.[Stambaugh,'91:98]

I believe that this relation acts as a pre-set, homogenising framework, foreclosing the possibility of any genuine in-breaking of divine otherness, or (as Marion entitles his book), of a Love 'beyond Being'. Such thinking remains within the limits of its own possible 'aim', [Marion,trans.Carlson,'91:48]. I would like to suggest that, through locking the Being of thinking and the thinking of Being into an ultimate and aprioristic conception of truth as a-lethea conceived in terms of Ereignis, Heidegger appears unable to recognise and heed the full implications of his own, religiously important, critique of the Western, 'onto-theological' relation to Being, whose modern manifestation is the 'enframing', that 'sets upon' nature and humanity as resources to control [ed.Farrell-Krell,'93:325].

In light of this suggestion, it is interesting to note that Adorno (The Jargon of Authenticity, 1964) wrote of an urge to totalitarian control in Heidegger's philosophy which is regarded as almost a fundamentalism of Being: admittedly referring to Sein und Zeit, Adorno suggests that the earlier Heidegger lifts language out of any sphere in which a counter-argument could establish contact with it [93].

Adorno casts a critical eye on the sort of social situation in which Heideggerian-style language becomes possible. The manipulation and de-contextualisation of words such as 'Being', 'authentic', or 'encounter' lifts them from the real situations from which they derive their meaning. These terms form a jargon, lifted above any actual 'matter at hand': 'Language, as once in major philosophy, no longer flows out of the necessity of its subject matter'. [87] The philosophical jargon Adorno attacks is seen as ironically akin to the language of red-tape and political sound-bites, reminiscent of the calculated 'double-speak' of some Orwellian propaganda machine [17].

Interesting results occur when one applies Adorno's insights to the later Heidegger's concept of language as the house and gift of Being (Letter on Humanism). On Heidegger's account, Being manifests itself in language for an attentive thinking, as seen above. Adorno suggests that the philosophical jargon he attacks is supposed to be able to enact its own, self-authenticating meaning [Adorno,'64:15]. Heidegger's words, seen in terms of Adorno's 'jargon', lose their social import to become 'Word', capitalising on a pervading contemporary sense of meaninglessness, and leant authority by a residue of religious awe [16-17]. But such 'revelations' lack any explicit theological content that could be subjected to critical scrutiny, since Heidegger elevates his discourse above the 'merely' logical: The fittingness of the saying of Being, as of the destiny of truth, is the first law of thinking - not the rules of logic, which can become rules only on the basis of the Law of Being.[ed.Farrell-Krell,'93:264] Adorno writes: The jargon obliterates the difference between the more, for which language gropes, and the in-itself of this more. ['64:12] Such language, suggests Adorno, though contentless, [94] is actually very functional, working like something 'taped to be played when needed' [17] in order to tranquillise and control. Like the synthesised vibrato of a cinema organ, this jargon mechanically simulates what once was a vehicle for genuine subjective expression. The jargon supplies men with ready-made 'patterns for being human'[17], its terms acting as instant ersatz pacifiers. Heidegger's language ironically finds a home in 'that same exchange-society anonymity against which Sein und Zeit rebelled'[18]. In short, seen from the viewpoint of Hegelian-Marxist critique, Heidegger's language of Being looks suspiciously like an ideological by-product of what Heidegger himself might term technological 'enframing'. This might possibly account for the note of dissatisfied impatience sensed by Peacocke [ed.Blond,'98:177-94] in Heidegger's assertion that 'only a God could save us now' in his 1966 interview with Der Spiegel. Peacocke suggests that the meditative, post-metaphysical 'thinking' advocated by Heidegger 'remains open to the possibility of God in a non-theistic [non-objectifying] manner, but that is all'[194], and that the cause of such open-ended meditation, appears to be betrayed by the Der Spiegel statement, which suggests that Heidegger is beset by an urge to seek God, when read in the light of a passage from his essay Nietzsche's Word: 'God is Dead'.

Interpreting the difference between the madman of Nietzsche's The Gay Science and the crowd he addresses, Heidegger suggests that we must not forget that Nietzsche introduces the former as one who 'cried out ceaselessly "I'm looking for God! I'm looking for God"', whereas the crowd have 'abandoned the possibility of faith because they are no longer able to seek God'. For Heidegger, this is because 'they are no longer able to think', whereas it is even clearer.that the madman, by contrast, is seeking God by crying out after God. Perhaps a thinking man has here really cried out De Profundis? And the ear of our thinking, does it still not hear the cry? It will refuse to hear it so long as it does not begin to think. Thinking does not begin until we have come to know that the reason that has been extolled for centuries is the most stubborn adversary of thinking. [ed.Young/Haynes,'02:199]

Heidegger, is thus inconsistently equating a thinking identified elsewhere and often as an attentive and meditative stance with an impassioned reaching out for God. Peacocke claims that in his Der Spiegel remarks Heidegger seems 'unhappy with the stance of one who must wait with piety, receptiveness, and thankfulness': has [Heidegger] become dissatisfied with listening for the call of Being? [ed.Blond,'98:191] According to Heidegger's own account, a quest for God could not be construed as meditative thinking, which, in Heidegger's sense, remains meditative so long as it is open-endedly receptive, and does not actively seek the divine. But if it is no longer meditation, neither can this active tendency in Heidegger's thinking be theology according to his own understanding of the term, since he rigorously separates the task of thinking from theology, conceiving the latter as the ontic science of faith as an existentiell possibility for Dasein (Phenomenology & Theology).

I suggest that the inconsistent tendency noted by Peacocke may be connected with the conception of 'theiology' interpreted by Marion as an idolatry of Being, as discussed above. Peacocke suggests that any active seeking of God by Heidegger would be a self-contradictory surrendering of the task of primal thinking and a return to the arena of onto-theological speculation [192]. On one interpretation, Heidegger falls back inconsistently into onto-theology, on the other, he is guilty of a higher idolatry of Being. Whichever interpretation one chooses to follow, Heidegger's thinking of Being will not, I submit, be religiously adequate.

However, this does not detract from the religious, anti-idolatrous merit of Heidegger's onto-theological critique, which I feel is the most important Heideggerian insight for any thinking about God which does not seek to replace God with a conceptual idol serving to underpin our own desires for certainty and control. Any adequate religious thinking should accept its own corrigibility and incompleteness, in openness to encounter with a God who can both challenge and renew.

Heidegger paves the way for such non-idolatrous thinking, alerting us to the need for it through his onto-theological critique, but I would argue that his conceptualising of the independence of a genuinely Christian faith from the alien onto-theological doctrines which seek to hi-jack it, as historically serving the secular-political project of 'Christendom'[ed.Young/Haynes,'02:164], is over-simplistic. The real purpose served by Heidegger's neat categorical separation in Phenomenology and Theology is to effect the subordination of any merely 'ontic' faith-claims and their genuinely theological expression to Heidegger's own project of ontological 'thinking' [Marion, trans.Carlson,'91:67]. By this move, Heidegger sets the horizon of the possible in advance. Only in terms of the horizon of Being will revelation be able to gain access and be counted as such, which is to say that any divine encounter will be acknowledged as such only as presentable in Heideggerian terms. I believe that in reality, genuine religious faith and a self-serving, divisively idolatrous 'ecclesial tribalism' [Williams,2000:102], underpinned and empowered by an onto-theological claim to possess exclusive rights to the truth in certainty and totality, are inextricably entangled, and that therefore any religious thinking ought to recognise its own questionability, and the ambiguity of all systematized schemes of religious meaning, all attempts at finished religious ontologies[102].

Any adequate thinking of God will refuse Heidegger's attempts to dictate the terms of divine approach, but will heed his repeated entreaty that we stop grasping at conceptual control, and start listening in de-centred awareness of our own openness and vulnerability.

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