Ben Vedder
If one wants to understand Heidegger’s criticism of “ontotheology” and his thinking about God and the gods, it is important to begin by going back to the young Heidegger and the Christian environment from which he came. An ongoing relationship with theology, faith, the Church and Christianity runs like a thread through Heidegger’s life (see Chapter 17). Heidegger was born, so to speak, in the Church. His father was a sexton, living in a house situated next to the church. When he was a young child and schoolboy, the church was always the backdrop for his play. As a young student, Heidegger’s intellectual pursuits were inspired by his interest in theology. The relationship that Heidegger maintained with faith, theology and the Church throughout the whole of his work can surely be traced back to this early influence. Heidegger later provided a sketch of this world of his youth in the essay “Vom Geheimnis des Glockenturms” (GA 13: 113–16). Throughout his life, he states, the peal of the clock tower of St Martin’s Church in Messkirch resounded, a ringing that bears witness to the divine rhythm in which holy days interweave with the course of the hours of the day and year. It is the eternal rhythm that orders daily life.
Despite having giving up his studies in theology in 1911, Heidegger continued to attend the lecture course of one of his professors (Carl Braig) on dogmatic theology (TB 74= ZSD 81). As a high school student, Heidegger had already read Braig’s book, Vom Sein: Abri× der Ontologie. In this book, Braig quotes a passage from St Bonaventure, which states that just as the eye does not see light itself when it is directed towards a manifold of colour, the mind’s eye does not see being itself when directed to entities singly or as a whole. And yet it is only by means of being that we can encounter entities in the first place. The mind’s eye receives, as it were, an objectless impression, much in the way that one who only sees light sees nothing per se. What later emerges in Heidegger’s work as the “ontological difference” has its roots in this connection between transcendental philosophy and ontology.
Yet Heidegger’s thoughts on religion as such increasingly led away from systematic Catholic theology. In a letter to Engelbert Krebs (a former professor and confidant) in early 1919, he addresses his own development over the previous two years, beginning with his study of Schleiermacher’s second address “On the Essence of Religion” (see PRL 241–4). It is precisely here that we can discern a significant tie between his thoughts on historicity and religion. Indeed, in his notes on Schleiermacher’s essay Heidegger writes: “History in its most authentic sense is the highest object of religion, religion begins and ends in it” (PRL 244). In his letter to Krebs, Heidegger confesses that epistemological insights concerning historical knowledge made “the system of Catholicism” untenable for him (Ott 1988: 106). This letter bears witness to a decisive religious and philosophical turning point for Heidegger, who was then twenty-nine. Yet most importantly, it marks the end of his career as an aspiring Catholic philosopher, the course he had set for himself since his dissertation in 1913. At this point, Heidegger found himself struggling to develop his own perspective and to free himself from his earlier influences (ibid.: 107).
It was not, however, in his efforts to abandon Catholic dogma that Heidegger turned to Schleiermacher, but in his effort to engender a philosophical understanding of religion. The nature of religious experience takes the place of the question of God as the centre of Schleiermacher’s thought. What he offers Heidegger, therefore, is a means of overcoming the theological dogmas and metaphysical framework within which he operated as a young student (PRL 242).
In order to resist theoretical theology and a theoretical approach in general, Heidegger grounds his thinking in a more personal stance. And in this stance, he finds the means for overcoming the timeless metaphysical framework that governed religious terminology as it had been passed down to him. Such a theoretical treatment was the result of the influence of Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy, which had been taken up into Christianity by Augustine, Aquinas and their successors. Heidegger wants to think out of his own facticity (see Chapter 1). Describing this facticity in an almost confessional manner to Karl Löwith in 1921, Heidegger claimed that it belonged to his facticity that he is a Christian “ theologian”, and that he is this in the context of the “university” (Papenfuß & Pöggeler 1990: 29). Heidegger therefore seeks to take up an existential relation to himself and a phenomenological approach to religion from the standpoint of this facticity.
In 1922 Heidegger writes that “the very idea of philosophy of religion [is] pure nonsense, particularly if it does not take the facticity of the human being into account” (IHS 480). Such nonsense evolves out of a merely theoretical approach that fails to attune itself to the facticity of life. Heidegger maintains this precisely because, for him, philosophy must direct itself towards the facticity of human being. The early Heidegger sought in phenomenology a kind of philosophizing that could remain true to life in its factical concreteness, and thus to “primordial Christianity”, which “is in factical life experience”, or, indeed, which “is such experience itself” (PRL 57).
Heidegger’s early philosophy of religion then took shape in his lecture courses “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” and “Augustine and Neo-Platonism”, which where held in 1920–21, and in his notes from 1918–19 for a lecture that was never given on “The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism”. His approach in these courses and notes was determined by his adaptations of Husserl’s phenomenological method, which he geared towards understanding the facticity of historical life not just in its “content” and “relational” senses, but especially in the sense in which it is “enacted”.
As the Winter Semester approached in 1920, Heidegger announced his upcoming lecture course on the phenomenology of religion (Shee-han 1986: 45). In this lecture course, Heidegger presented an explication of the fundamental event of the Christian experience of life as it appears in the letters of Paul. In particular, Heidegger paid special attention to a decisive moment wherein the Christian experience of life becomes manifest in and through the question of the coming of Christ. This coming is described by Paul as a sudden occurrence, like a thief in the night. The suddenness and unpredictability of this moment for which one must solemnly wait was a point of fascination for Heidegger. In order to grasp how “Christian religiosity lives temporality” (PRL 55, 73), he focused on Paul’s notion of kairos, which signifies one’s delivery to a moment of decision, a moment that cannot be reached through a calculation. The kairos does not represent a mastery of time, but rather the uncertainty inherent in the future. This defining characteristic of the kairos involves the historicity of life’s enactment, which rejects any attempt at objectification. In the moment of kairos one’s life itself is at stake, not a theoretical grasp of it. Attempts at theoretical mastery or practical control of this moment simply express the wrong attitude for encountering it (PRL 4).
The question remains, however, how Heidegger, as a philosopher, understood this kairos within his phenomenological account of the facticity of life. His response is that, by seeking to give only a “formal indication” (see Chapter 1) of the fundamental Christian experience of life, the philosopher as phenomenologist does not choose a position with respect to the particular content of this experience, but rather limits himself to investigating the sustaining conditions of its possibility.
This led Heidegger to later claim, in “Phenomenology and Theology” (1927), that theological concepts are to be examined by the philosopher only with regard to their ontological presuppositions, not to their specific content (PM 52). For Heidegger, this has to do with their underlying ontology of temporality. However, the possibility of this specific understanding of being is connected with a certain faith: the expectation of the coming or arrival is connected to the concrete possibility of the coming of Christ. Thus Heidegger uncovers essential structures of Dasein from certain religious phenomena and contexts. The world of the believer offers an expression of fundamental existential structures. In themselves, such structures have nothing to do with religion. This point legitimates Heidegger’s entire project. He does not, however, answer the question of whether the ontological implications of these religious phenomena are meaningful for the validity of faith. It is true that Heidegger’s philosophy of guilt and future-oriented temporality is essentially developed from out of his interpretation of Christianity, but it is his explicit intention to analyse the philosophical presuppositions of Christian life. His project is not about theology, nor Christian faith, nor religion in general; his references to the religious are always oriented towards, and for the sake of, ontological analysis.
For Heidegger, philosophical concepts can function as a corrective for the understanding of theological concepts. And faith, in its turn, can give direction to empty philosophical concepts. This indicates the specificity of theology with regard to ontology: “that is to say, the ontological concept of guilt as such is never a theme of theology” (PM 52). The ontological concept of guilt determines the space in which sin can move in order to be ontologically understandable. For its part, ontological understanding is neutral and atheistic.
Heidegger thus distances himself from religious philosophical approaches in which a religious a priori is supposed. He distances himself as well from a reconciliation of faith and reason that would reduce faith to reason, as is the case in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. Nor does he assume the harmony of faith and reason at which Thomistic philosophy aims.
Heidegger understands faith as the natural enemy, as it were, of philosophy: “This peculiar relationship does not exclude but rather includes the fact that faith, as a specific possibility of existence, is in its innermost core the mortal enemy of the form of existence that is an essential part of philosophy and that is factically ever-changing” (PM 53). What we see here is the fundamental opposition of two possibilities of existence, which cannot be realized by one person in one and the same moment. Faith as a possibility of existence implies death to philosophy as another possibility of existence. Heidegger remained resistant to the fusion of theoretical philosophy and theology. As he states in 1935, “A ‘Christian philosophy’ is a round square and a misunderstanding” (IM 8).
This does not mean that philosophers and theologians must behave like enemies; neither position excludes a factical and existentiell attitude of taking the other seriously and of mutual respect. Yet the existentiell opposition between faith, on the one hand, and philosophical self-understanding, on the other, does need to be clearly worked out so that one sees the different points of departure more sharply. Hence, while a “Christian philosophy” may well be a round square and a misunderstanding, theology can have an important role to play in thoughtfully questioning and explicating the world of Christian experience and faith. Nevertheless, in the end Heidegger sees in theology’s dependence on philosophy a certain lack of greatness in theology itself (IM 8).
Turning to his later thought, we find that Heidegger develops a critical conception of “theology” as essentially a form of metaphysics. Heidegger sees the continuity of Western philosophy as metaphysics in terms of what he calls its “ontotheological” structure. This structure can be found already in Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, Aristotle not only sees in philosophy a place for theology as well as one for ontology; he also calls the whole project of first philosophy itself a theology. What does this mean? For Heidegger, it means that the question of the divine (theos) as a philosophical question is not a religious question to begin with; and yet such a philosophical theology was used as a paradigm for the construction of the theological dogmas of the Middle Ages. This ambiguous connection of the question of God and the question of being was facilitated by Aristotle, who, in the sixth book of the Metaphysics, divides first philosophy into two fundamental orientations of questioning – towards the being of beings (ontology) and towards the highest being (theology) – without making their unity itself into a problem (FCM 42–3). Heidegger asks about the original unity of both disciplines (FCM 34), and he increasingly sees this unity as paradigmatic for the entire tradition of Western philosophy.
The connection between ontology and theology, which determines philosophy as ontotheology, becomes explicit once again in German idealism. Heidegger finds a clear expression of this in Hegel: “For philosophy, too, has no other object than God – and thus is essentially rational theology – and service to God in its continual service to truth” (Hegel 1975: 101; HPS 98). In Hegel, according to Heidegger, ontology becomes the speculatively grounded i nterpretation of being, in such a way that the actual entity (Seiendes) is the absolute theos. It is from the being (Sein) of the absolute that all entities are determined. Heidegger emphasizes the connectedness and unity of ontology and theology especially in his 1936 lecture course on Schelling:
Theo-logy means here questioning beings as a whole. This question of beings as a whole, the theological question, cannot be asked without the question about beings as such, about the essence of being in general. That is the question about the on hëi on, “ontology.” Philosophy’s questioning is always and in itself both onto-logical and theo-logical in the very broad sense. Philosophy is Ontotheology.
(ST 51)
Hence, for the later Heidegger, to say that philosophy should not be ontotheological is tantamount to saying that philosophy should not be philosophy. Indeed, in the end (1966) Heidegger announces “the end of philosophy [as metaphysics or ontotheology] and the task of thinking” (BW 431–49).
In the “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics?’” (1949), metaphysics is characterized as “twofold and yet unitary” on the basis of its ontotheological structure.
Because it represents beings as beings, metaphysics is, in a twofold and yet unitary manner, the truth of beings in their universality and in the highest being. According to its essence, metaphysics is at the same time both ontology in the narrower sense, and theology.
(PM 287)
Understanding being as a whole presupposes a normative concept of being, in which an understanding of a highest entity is implied (PM 287–8).
By the time Heidegger writes “The Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics” (1959), the insight into this structure is completely settled. In this essay, he definitely decides that the ambivalent relationship and ambiguous interconnection of ontology and theology are characteristic of first philosophy. Heidegger refers back to his inaugural lecture at Freiburg University, “What is Metaphysics?” (1929), which defined metaphysics as the question about beings as such and as a whole (see PM 93). The wholeness of this whole is the unity of all beings that unifies as the generative ground. “To those who can read, this means: metaphysics is onto-theo-logy” (IDS 54).
The question, “How does the deity enter into philosophy?” is not to be answered with the idea of a god that comes from outside. The god is always already in metaphysics. It belongs to the question of being, which is characteristic of philosophy as such. While generally the question about the gods and the godhead is either intentionally or unintentionally understood within an ontotheological paradigm, by thinking through the question of how the godhead enters into philosophy, Heidegger makes it possible to isolate the philosophical question of god from religious speaking and thinking. Hence Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology at the same time enables a reawakening of the question of god. Indeed he goes so far as to say that the “god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy”, that is, the god of ontotheology, “is thus perhaps closer to the divine god” (IDS 72 = GA 11: 77).
On the other hand, the question whether there can be an ontology without a theology is no longer a question within the domain of philosophy as metaphysics. Rather, with this question we move into what he calls the domain of “thinking”. The original motive of philosophy, strictly speaking, has disappeared from philosophy as ontotheology; but it is preserved in the thinking of being. This domain of thinking is, in a sense, a counterparadigm to philosophy in which the question of being is not answered with an entity that represents the highest way of being, the whole of being and the cause of being. In the 1955–6 lecture course, “The Principle of Reason”, Heidegger refers to the mystical words of Angelus Silesius: “The rose is without why: it blooms because it blooms, it pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen” (PR 35). This “without why” or “without ground” (ohne Grund) indicates for Heidegger an a-theological thinking of being as a counterparadigm to metaphysics and its seeking after ontotheological grounds.
The notion of “the last god” (der letzte Gott) runs like a thread through Contributions to Philosophy (CP = GA 65), and it may be the most fascinating theme in this pivotal text from 1936–8. The question, “What or who is the last god?” engenders many negative answers, for it is not the “last” in the sense of the “most recent”, as one speaks of the latest fashion or the last item in a countable series. Nor can the last god, who is unique, be conceived according to the calculations of monotheism, pantheism or atheism (CP 289 = GA 65: 411).
The last god is connected to the experience of being as an event of enowning (Ereignis), that is, to the unfolding of the truth of being (see Chapter 10). This bears on the finitude of being, which Heidegger thematized in Being and Time in the existential analysis of being-toward-death. Analogous to the manner in which we become aware of the finitude of all possibilities for being in decisive moments of an anticipatory experience of mortality, the radical finitude of being manifests itself in the hint (Wink) of the last god, who is only in “passing by”. With this, Heidegger continues his polemic against the Christian idea of God, who is seen as infinite in contrast to the finitude of his creation. Indeed the last god is said to be “totally other than gods who have been, especially other than the Christian God” (CP 283 =GA 65: 403). To the question of what or who god is, Heidegger answers, in the context of understanding being as an event of enowning, that god is a hint, and nothing but a hint. The last god essentially is as passing by, and thus even the question of its or their number remains essentially undecided (CP 308 = GA 65: 437). The last god is not an end but rather a beginning, and this marks its temporal significance. This god is only as the decisive moment of its future passing-by (GA 39: 111). For this reason the last god does not manifest itself as something present, but is there only as a hint (CP 289 =GA 65: 410).
Thus, in talking about the l ast god, we do not mean the last of a series of gods or a final synthesis. The notion of the last god refers to a moment of decision (kairos or Augenblick )in which the experience of the last god’s passing by makes room for other possibilities of being. Out of this experience, human beings could learn to be open and to look forward to another beginning. However, people do not know what this means, and they are not able to know as long as they are imprisoned – like those held captive by the shadows in Plato’s Cave – in a method of calculative knowing through which they understand things, circumstances and themselves.
The word “last” here has no ontic meaning. It indicates something that anticipates very far into the future towards the deepest origin, something that reaches out the furthest and cannot be outstripped. The last god therefore withdraws from every calculation and has to bear the burden of the loudest and most frequent misinterpretations (CP 285 =GA 65: 405). The hint of the last god springs from a moment that is beyond calculative thinking, and this moment is even more difficult to reach than is the experience of mortality: “Given that as yet we barely grasp ‘death’ in its utmost, how are we then ever going to be primed for the rare hint of the last god?” (CP 285 =GA 65: 405). But just as in Being and Time death opens the appearance of being as possibility (BT §53), so would the passing by of the last god open up the possibility of another beginning for the history of being. Unlike the metaphysics of the first beginning, which understood being in terms of actuality, in this other beginning it would be understood that: “Being is possibility, what is never extant and yet through en-ownment is always what grants and refuses in not-granting” (CP 335 = GA 65: 475). In this sense, being, as a gathering or “enowning” place for the godhead and humans, is an inexhaustible wealth of possibilities.
For Heidegger the question of the “holy” would be: is an experience of the holy possible within the technological world? It seems that in such a world, the experience of something that shows itself with the quality of the holy is impossible in so far as it is an experience that is only given to acts of worship, and acts of worship are radically other than acts of technological domination, manufacture and consumption. Religious experience as an experience of the holy has become a mere object of anthropological study. Its proper place is, as it were, on a reservation: a private, protected area away from the cultural mainstream. But, in Heidegger’s view, the holy is not only a domain of certain protected subjects and objects. As the dimension that makes it possible to worship the divine (PM 267), the holy is a dimension that is prior to subject and object, earlier than I and Thou. In this sense, the holy indicates a condition of the possibility for the appearing of the divine.
An understanding of religions always depends first of all on an understanding of the experience of the holy as a fundamental mood. Whether their message will be received by new generations depends on whether this mood is conveyed. If there is no experience of the holy as a whole, the message of the gods in religion will not be understood. Religions have a history because the way the holy appears (hierophany) is rooted in the historical situation in which it appears.
Religions are historical because the understanding of being as holy is historical. This cannot be understood ontotheologically, because in that case religious manifestations would be manifestations of an ahistorical highest being that transcends all other beings. Religions and their gods must be understood historically, not as variations of what is eternally the same. As long as there is a forgottenness of the temporality of being in ontotheology, there is also a forgottenness of the historicality of the gods. Ontotheology is an understanding of being in which there is no place for the historical arrival of the god or gods. Such a time needs the poets to regain an entry to the holy as the mood wherein the god(s) can first appear (EHP 64).
The holy has to appear as that in which human beings can find their wholeness. The holy is not God or the godhead, much less the highest entity of metaphysics. It is an ontological phenomenon that is expressed in the thinking of being. Nevertheless, the religious human being would not understand himself or herself without the holy. It is precisely where the understanding of the holy has withdrawn that the central place of sacrifice is once again attributed to arbitrariness and barbarian cruelty. Only the holy as an ontological phenomenon can provide an entrance to the religious. Without understanding the holy, we behave with respect to it like tourists or visitors of a museum. Therefore, an understanding of it from the perspective of the historicality of being is an entry to understanding religion and the religions, God and the gods. The gods are in a certain sense on the other side of the holy. This does not mean that they are totally other; but they are other with regard to the modern paradigm of thinking. Modernity is not able to experience the holy in so far as it is not able to experience the wholeness of being.
After breaking with Catholic theology by way of a phenomenological attentiveness to the facticity and historicity of religious life, and then by way of pursuing an “atheistic piety” of philosophy, and after later recovering a sense of the holy by way of a radical critique of ontotheology, the final chapter of the question of God(s) in Heidegger’s thought locates the divine in the “fourfold” of earth and heaven (or sky), divinities and mortals (see Chapter 15). The four of the fourfold are in a certain sense equal to each other. There is no subordination of higher and lower. Although there might seem to be more kinship between heaven and the divinities, on the one hand, and the earth and mortals on the other, these are not two couples that stand against one other and each of the four becomes itself in the coming together of the four. In this way they are connected to each other. “Each of the four mirrors in its own way the presence of the others. Each therewith reflects itself in its own way into its own, within the simpleness of the four” (PLT 177).
Sometimes it seems that the divine has a special position. It seems as if the godhead ducks out of the fundamental interdependence of the fourfold, exempting itself from destiny by being the element that rules it. This is suggested, not only in the Der Spiegel interview, where Heidegger enigmatically suggests that “only a god can save us” (HC 107), but also where Heidegger writes: “the divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead. Out of the holy sway of the godhead, the god appears in his presence or withdraws into his concealment” (PLT 147–8). Here the divinities, the godhead and the god are spoken of without any explanation of their relations in the fourfold. Yet a certain order is discernible. The godhead seems to be the first by its holy sway. Its beckoning messengers are the divinities, and the god who appears and withdraws, appears only out of the holy sway of the godhead. It seems as though the godhead steps out of the whole of the fourfold, and is not to be found in it, but in the holy. However, the holy does not inhere in the fourfold, nor in the divinities or the mortals. Rather, the holy is the whole relation that comes to be as the fourfold (EHP 94ff.). Only in the lightning of the holy can the whole be present. “The holy primordially decides in advance concerning men and gods, whether they are, and who they are, and how they are, and when they are” (EHP 97–8). The holy is not holy because it is divine; rather, the divine is divine because it is holy in its way (EHP 82). The divine is holy because it participates in the holy, which is the whole of the fourfold.
From the perspective of the notion of the fourfold, it is thus strictly speaking inconsequential to say that the god is nearer to the holy. What is said here is that the god is placed under the holy and that the relation to the holy can only be held in common with human being (EHP 90). With this, the mortals as well as the divinities are placed in the fourfold under the holy. The holy indicates the whole of this relation.
The fourfold, as a counterparadigm to the technological world, no longer implies a subjectivistic relation to the divine and the holy. Human beings dwell in so far as they await the divinities as divinities. “They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols.” In misfortune they wait for the salvation that has been withdrawn (PLT 148). Under certain conditions one can speak here of theology, but only in a non-ontotheological way. It is impossible to define the holy here ontotheologically, since all ontotheology presupposes a theos, or god, as an entity. It does this so certainly that wherever ontotheology arises, the god has already fled (GA 52: 132).
Hegel, G. W F. 1975.Aesthetics, T. Knox (trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ochwadt, C. & E. Tecklenborg (eds) 1981. Das Maß des Verborgenen. Heinrich Ochsner (1891–1970) zum Gedächtnis. Hannover: Charis.
Ott, H. 1988. Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie. Frankfurt: Campus.
Papenfuß, D. & O. Pöggeler (eds) 1990. Zur philosophische Aktualität Heideggers, vol. 2. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann.
Sheehan, T. 1986. “Heidegger’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, 1920–21”. In A Companion to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, J. Kockelmans (ed.), 40–62.Washington, DC: University Press of America.
See Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking”, in Poetry, Language, Thought; Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), pt VII; Identity and Difference; “Letter on Humanism”, in Pathmarks, 239–76, esp. 258; “Phenomenology and Theology”, in Pathmarks, 39–62; and The Phenomenology of Religious Life.
See Caputo (1982, 1990), Crowe (2008), Kovacs (1990), Thomson (2005) and Vedder (2007).