Technology and god
Now we turn to two topics that form the gist of Heidegger’s diagnosis of the present age. Technology is one of his names for our current understanding of being—for the distinctively modern way of having a world. It is the aspect under which he principally objects to the modern age. Our technological understanding or stance (not our technological stuff) is “the great danger” to humanity in its essential aspect. And a key part of his recommended response to this threat is that we learn to feel the absence of gods, and our need for them. We should hope and prepare for a new arrival of gods (or of a god), as most famously expressed in the title of his late Der Spiegel interview, “Only a God Can Save Us” [DS]. Gods will save us once we receive them back into our world, in a way that overcomes the technological stance that now stifles us. So although thinking is principally about being, and thereby goes deeper than poetry (as we’ve just seen), it still also thinks about gods, especially today.
The heightened religious element in Heidegger’s later philosophy is one of its most important features. We’ve seen that he has always preached the need for a new kind of understanding, as far more vital than adding to the stock of what we understand. After Being and Time this new condition of insight—the event of illumination he sometimes calls Ereignis—acquires many affinities with mystical experience, reviving and building on this interest from his twenties.1 By embedding relation to divinity within his mature idea of Ereignis as the truth of being, he makes a quite distinctive theology.
Heidegger thinks out his stance on these topics in relation to Nietzsche, and in particular to Nietzsche’s account of the “nihilism” Western society is entering, as advancing knowledge destroys faith in the religious and other myths that had supported our values. Nietzsche’s “way out” of nihilism is, very roughly, to put man where god was—or rather to put the overman there. We must give ourselves the new ideal of advancing beyond what humans have been so far. Knowledge, in particular by genealogy, will clear the ground of values that have inhibited us, and let us achieve a new freedom and power.
Heidegger argues that Nietzsche’s way out of nihilism shows that he hasn’t diagnosed the problem deeply enough: his solution is really another symptom of it. It is precisely the dominance in us of a will to power and control, a will that attempts to set in place and “enframe,” above all by the twin routes of technology and science, that is responsible for our nihilistic loss of values. The solution isn’t more self-assertion, but rather a humbling to higher power. We must “take gods back” by ceding to them the ultimate say as to the meaning of things.
This is the simple gist of Heidegger’s position, but the interest lies in how he tries to persuade us to it. Although he often derides argument, he still gives us reasons or grounds of a sort in favor of his diagnosis and prescription. He tries to lead us, in each of his essays, on a “path of thinking” all along which we have grounds, of the appropriate sort, to proceed as we do. We saw in Chapter 8 how such reasons distinguish thinking from poetry. His principal grounds will lie in special experiences he helps us to induce in ourselves; in them we inhabit technology “down to the bottom,” which exposes its limits, and lifts us in a way out of it. As always our most difficult challenge will be to make clear this new kind of insight, since it goes so strongly against the grain, he insists, of our whole outlook. He thinks we will see his ultimate reason if we can find our way to this experience, which he tries to point us towards.
1. The critique of technology
We must be clear from the start that this is not a critique of particular items of technology, nor of the physical dangers these might present (for example from nuclear war or global warming). It’s a critique of our current overall outlook and stance, our modern “mode of revealing.” This is expressed most characteristically in our ever-advancing technology, but is also at work in our science, philosophy, and indeed in all our endeavors.2
The problem lies not in our employing a complex system of tools, but in the “spiritual” stance that compels us into this use. So Heidegger’s critique has an extremely abstract and spiritual character. It remains an open question whether shifting that stance would change the specific technologies we employ in our lives. It is even an open question whether we couldn’t have much the same array of equipment, yet not detrimentally, due to some different relation or stance towards it. So Tu (QTE 38): “If a change in being—i.e. now, in the essence of en-framing—eventuates [sich ereignet], then this in no way means that technology, whose essence lies in en-framing, will be eliminated.”
Heidegger thinks he has noticed something pervasive and decisive about our current intentionality (how we have a world, how entities “are there” for us)—something that reaches out into all of our doing, thinking, and feeling, even when we’re not using or devising anything technological. It is so pervasive that it is hard to notice: we struggle to get a sense of any alternatives to it, for our guesses at these are still inflected by this deep-rooted attitude. It is the general way being is given us, and so at once the very closest but the hardest to see.
Heidegger’s principal term for this pervasive stance is “enframing” [Gestell]. Intuitively, first, this alludes to a “frame” or framework, both practical and theoretical, within which we place or set everything we encounter. As enframing, we think of entities as having each its proper and precise place within this frame, and feel ourselves challenged to set them there. In our epoch of being, entities show up for us as “to be enframed.” They are what they really or most are as or when they’re enframed, for it is then that they are most fully “presences” before us. Enframing is the upshot of our long historical understanding of being as presencing: it best accomplishes the destiny set in motion by the culture’s beginning, in Plato, and ultimately in the pre-Socratics. Let’s start with Heidegger’s description of this enframing stance, before considering his objections to it. (It will be hard, predictably, to present this description without valuative overtones.)
Gestell or enframing is the stance that culminates the ancient effort to “presence” entities—to consider them entities to the extent and as they are brought to presence before us. Enframing is the most refined and perfected ability to presence things; it does so by settling them precisely within the scientific and technological schemata. We take for granted that everything is what it is just as it is determined by science’s considered account of it, and by its functional role in our organization of things. Each of us defers to those larger, social schemata, and through them participates in their ultimate presencing of things.
There are two key ways we go about enframing entities. First, we set them to work within our framework of equipment—we discover the specific uses a thing can have, and bind it into a network of processes that extract this value from it. A famous passage in “The Question about Technology” describes how the Rhine is turned into a “water power supplier” by the power plant built on it, and how it also serves “as an orderable object for viewing by a travel group, which the vacation industry has ordered there” [QT (BW 321)]; these of course are only two of the myriad uses made of it. We set it more and more intricately and fully “in place” in the world organized around us in this technological spirit. Heidegger thinks this is something quite different from the kind of tool-use that has characterized humans all along.
The second way we enframe entities is by explaining them—setting them in place within the framework of science (which includes the scientifically practiced humanities). We demand that nature be “orderable as a system of information” [QT (BW 328)]. So we bind and control the thing not (now) by putting it to use, but in a way that prepares for that use, and which Heidegger thinks is the same in spirit. And he insists that modern science’s enframing of what it studies makes it different in kind from the theories about their surroundings that humans formed in earlier ages. “When today we use the word science, it means something essentially different” from medieval or Greek science, for (he eventually says), today nature and history are “set in place [angesetzt] as that upon which man directs himself” [AWP (W 58, 66)].
We might wonder how this enframing is different from the imposition of a “world” or “referential totality,” which Being and Time attributes to all Dasein, not just those in the modern age. Every Dasein (we saw in Chapter 4 on that book’s pragmatism) encounters entities within some pre-established world as a system of ends (for-whiches) and equipmental roles, i.e. within a system of “references.” How do enframing and technology go beyond this? How is a framework different from a (being-and-timely) world?
A first point to remark is that Being and Time does still stand too much within enframing, and draws its picture of how Dasein opens a world in enframing’s terms.3 So I think there are large parts of the book’s existential analysis that Heidegger would later deny are essential—they describe only modern intentionality. In particular, its notion of world leaves out the aesthetic and religious aspects that are indeed deficient in our own, but can be found in the past, and hoped to come. And the book’s ideal of authenticity does not correct this defect, since it only subordinates one’s pragmatic will to control the world to a deeper project to choose—and control—oneself (who one is).
Nevertheless technology or Gestell is something more than just having a world in Being and Time’s way. It is, we might say, that pragmatic stance intensified or perfected a certain way, a way that turns it nightmarish. The web of references has been enhanced so that it closes tight over things; everything we can notice has been taken account of, and fixed with great efficiency for theoretical and practical purposes. All blank spaces on our map of things have been filled. The accumulated results of methodical and disciplinary study have rendered enormously elaborate and precise the framework we bring to things’ experience—into which we constantly force both things and experience. Heidegger’s claim is that this is our ultimate commitment: we are settled on pursuing just such control. Each of us experiences this control as achieved not individually, but through the organized group; by participating in it, the individual shares in that control.
Let’s look more closely at how modern science, even in its beginnings and before any practical application, already expresses enframing. We might have thought that technology is “applied natural science” [QT (BW 328); cf. FC 3], but this gets it backwards, Heidegger thinks. Gestell, the essence of technology, is not an outgrowth of science, but is already present in it. So Gestell “already holds sway in physics. But it doesn’t yet itself come to appearance in it. Modern physics is the herald of Ge-stell, still unrecognized in its source” [QT (BW 327); cf. FC 116]. The distinctive effort to enframe already shows in early modern science, though only to an eye that looks back from technology, where enframing has completed itself. Indeed, because enframing is a kind of completion of presence, it is already implicit at the very beginning, among the Greeks.
In “The Age of the World Picture” Heidegger distinguishes three features of modern science by which it enframes. First, early modern physics takes the lead in making science “mathematical.” This sounds like a familiar point, but Heidegger uses the term in a very special sense (drawn from the Greek): it refers not to the use of numbers, but to the way physics sets up its researches by first projecting a rigorous ground-plan [Grundriss] that circumscribes the entities it treats.4 This framework of definitions and laws is what’s “known in advance” (ta mathêmata, in Heidegger’s etymology) before research begins. Sciences have one by one become rigorous by following physics’ lead in projecting such a ground-plan.
This prior plan is a precondition for the distinctive method of modern science, its second key feature. By this method, some candidate to join the framework as a “law” is laid down as hypothesis, and then examined by experiments set up to confirm or disconfirm it [AWP (W 61–62)]. So there is, besides the framework, this settled procedure for adjusting and expanding it, so that it can accommodate ever more entities ever more precisely and completely. This procedure persistently improves and extends the framework.
This method is in turn the precondition for a third crucial feature of modern science, its industry [Betrieb]. This is the way, within a shared practice and discipline, those experimental results are constantly applied back to the projected laws to modify them, thus setting up a new round of experiments, and so on. “This having-to-align-itself to its own results as the ways and means of a progressing procedure is the essence of research’s character as industry” [AWP (W 63–64)]. As this industry spreads through academic disciplines the scholar is replaced by the researcher, participating in an institutionalized and communal enterprise.
The ground-plan built by method and industry is a cultural-historical product, the cumulative result of many generations of research. No individual possesses all of this structure “in mind.” Instead we defer to a framework held in place by the understandings of scientists and others. But we feel that we share in this framework, and have rights in it: every part of it is there for us to understand too, if we take the appropriate steps. This world-plan is constantly improving in both its scope and its detail; this improvement indeed accelerates. And the framework is also increasingly accessible to individuals, through scientific education, and such technical advances as the web.
In identifying everything by reference to the framework, we live in the “age of the world picture,” in which for the first time the world becomes a picture, such that “it first and only is an entity [seiend ist] insofar as it is enframed [gestellt] by representing-producing man” [AWP (W 67–68)]. So it is anachronistic to suppose that we have one world-picture and the ancient Greeks (for example) had another. “The basic event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture” [71]. Entities only are as they find place in the ground-plan we bring to them.
But what, let’s ask, is the aim that makes science treat the world as picture and things as objects? The aim is said to be truth—that’s what science says it wants. But Heidegger argues that it’s something else, that comes to light only once early modern science has become technology. Not visible previously was what we now see was crucial to that science from the start: it is a way of controlling, it aims at control, by setting-in-place. IP 53: “from its beginning modern natural science is in its essence the technological assault on nature and its conquest.” It’s for this the ground-plan is built by method and industry. Technology is simply an extension of this ongoing effort, so that it is “the same” as science.
Placing things into science’s framework confines them in a theory, a step to the full systematic and totalized mastery that now shows itself as the aim all along. Heidegger over and again stresses this aim behind science, e.g. in SR (QTE 167–68): “Science sets [stellt] the real. It sets it so that the real shows itself … in the surveyable results of posited causes. The real thus becomes pursuable and surveyable in its results. The real is set secure [sichergestellt] in its objectness.”5
This ur-aim at control is more overt in technology, where we adopt the imposing, demanding, intrusive relation to things that Heidegger calls “challenging” [Herausfordern]: “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging which sets on nature the demand that it supply energy which as such can be extracted and stored” [QT (BW 320)]. And technology turns the “object” into “stand-by” [Bestand—which others have translated “standingreserve” or “resource”], set there in place for use as needed: “Everywhere it is ordered [bestellt] to stand at order in place [auf der Stelle zur Stelle zu stehen], and indeed to stand itself orderable for a further ordering. What has been ordered so has its own standing. We call it the stand-by” [322]. Just as science sets everything within a theoretical framework in which it has a precisely defined place and relation to other things, so in technology everything has a role in the intricate network of equipment set in place for our purposes.
Heidegger illustrates this with the example of the Rhine already mentioned. He points out how the hydroelectric plant built on the river sets it into a network that reaches out through power cables and stations and into the electrical appliances in homes. Simultaneously the river is made to stand by for diverse other uses, in each case connected into a similar web laid out deliberately and calculatingly for human advantage. This includes, we must not forget, its use as a “scenic resource.” Thus the hydroelectric plant serves as an emblem of our age’s “mode of revealing,” somewhat as the temple was of the Greeks’, yet not thus as an artwork for a reason we’ll see.
Although this frame is social—it is the way things are made to stand by for the whole society—each of us shares in it. I know that a thing would be fully usable by me too, if I were to step into the place the framework prepares. So I participate, if indirectly, in the control the framework subjects things to. More fundamentally, I share in the deep expectation that the world is there to be set in order and harnessed in this way. And this attitude infiltrates, necessarily, my relation to myself. My own life, my time and span, are there as resources to be put to maximal use—to be used wisely and well.
Now, as always, Heidegger thinks it is easy enough to say these things, but extremely hard to bring them into adequate view. We may notice this about ourselves, yet do so only at third hand, as it were: in the wake of our behavior, stepping back from it, we might agree that it has this character and purpose. But this isn’t the way we need to “see” this, because it doesn’t bring us down to the level in which we indeed project being this way. We don’t experience where or how this insistence on enframing occurs in us, and so we have no inkling how we could not so insist. Even our assent to Heidegger’s claim about enframing is just one more way of enframing our experience.
All of this is Heidegger’s description-diagnosis of technology and Gestell. It has been obvious throughout that he has a negative view of them—but just what are his arguments? It may appear that his attack amounts only to depicting technology in various negative lights: as an “assault,” as “controlling,” and so on. Does he offer any clear reasons why technology’s way of having a world is bad? Since many of the things he attributes to enframing may well seem to us to be good things—including individualism, humanism, the ideal of freedom, and rationality [e.g. AWP (W 70)]—we will need his reasons to be strong ones.
We’ve seen that his criticism is not what we might expect: that technology will lead to disasters such as by nuclear war or accident. “The threat to man does not come firstly from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The authentic threat has already attacked man in his essence” [QT (BW 333)]. The worst is already happening to us, unawares. It happens to us not just as we use cars or computers or other such technological gear, but down at the bottom of our thinking all the time. It is our deepest “mindset” or project, and it’s here that it does its crucial damage, Heidegger thinks, not out in its peripheral workings.
Gestell or enframing—the aim to “presence” things in theory and practice—is our guiding stance. It gives character to all our more particular projects and pursuits—settles how they’ll be carried out, and what will count as success in them. So I think of my life as to-be-organized in just such a way: of my days and hours as resources to be carefully deployed in service of personal or social ends. And I pursue each project from this same stance: when I garden I view the plants out of the developed sciences of biology, botany, and horticulture; deferring to this settled knowledge of their needs and uses, I see each as to-be-set in its best place in my garden-plan.
Heidegger’s ultimate complaint against this basic stance is that it misrelates us to being; secondarily, it also misrelates us to things or entities. And it does so both epistemically and “functionally” (with respect to our own essence): enframing hides being from us, and also prevents us from standing in our proper (essential) relation to it.
Enframing hides being from us even though it brings all of science’s accumulated knowledge into its view—and science now advanced by long exercise of those mathematical, methodical, and industrious traits. It hides being by preventing us from getting “beneath” its own enframing stance, to experience as an open question, how being shall be. It prevents this by its own seeming comprehensiveness, its full confidence in its claim to give the only right answers, which effectively cuts off the possibility of any alternative: I can’t imagine any other way of letting those plants be for me. Enframing “drives out every other possibility of revealing” [QT (BW 332)]; it “blocks the shining and prevailing of truth” [333].
Enframing is particularly unable to step down to the level of being because its own aggressive “presencing” of entities is antithetical to the receptive attitude most conducive to that step. As we organize our lives and world with this calculating rationality, we bar experiences of any aspects other than those it licenses. We insist on bringing to things the whole framework of science and technology; we let them appear to us only in that light. “The ordering [Bestellen] belonging to en-framing sets [stellt] itself above the thing, leaves it, as thing, unsafeguarded, truthless” [Tu (QTE 46)]. So science makes “an attack [Angriff] on the actual, insofar as this is challenged to show itself within the perspective of the representing grip [Griffes]” [QB (P 304)]. But this aggressive slotting of each thing into this schema precludes its “showing itself from itself”—an experience of it we can only have by somehow stilling that deep enframing stance.
Due to the way I “enframe” the plants I garden with, I cut myself off from experiencing “earth”—i.e. the unavoidably hidden source from which they come to appearance for me. “Earth itself can only still show itself as the object of the attack arranged in the willing of man as unconditioned objectifying” [NW (W 191)]. By contrast the proper relation to earth has a religious aspect for Heidegger, though the gods themselves are distinct from it, as we’ll shortly see.
Enframing’s epistemic failure extends further: it involves a deep self-misunderstanding, which interprets us as at once too little and too much. On the one hand we interpret ourselves as the kind of thing enframing reveals to us: we interpret ourselves as stand-by—as one more resource available in the great framework set out by our science and control. (As we’ve seen, we even interpret our own life-time in this way.) But on the other hand we also interpret ourselves as accomplishing enframing. And in this regard we take ourselves as “lord[s] of the earth” [QT (BW 332)], since we project the framework that makes everything what it is. I have access to that framework’s grasp and control; I feel I share in its authority over what is (which is more than I am, as given being).
These are the realist and idealist sides to Gestell’s confidence in its ability to say being. On the one hand it has the sense of itself as penetrating fully into the thing itself, to lay bare its real character. But on the other hand it takes a responsibility for that theoretical and practical framework, which lets that real character “presence” for us. (Kant of course distinguished these aspects of the modern view, as an empirical realism set within a transcendental idealism.) But both of these, we’ve seen, mistake the true character of our relation to being.
Paradoxically, although technology has the point of control, it is not itself in our control. That is, this way of revealing, Gestell, is not chosen by us: “over unconcealment itself … man does not have control” [QT (BW 323)]. We do not choose to have our world as a framework—and no founding thinker chose it to be so either. “Modern technology, as a revealing that orders, is thus no mere human doing” [324]. Technology arrives as the “destiny” of Western history, and its founding thinkers such as Nietzsche are not creative, but responsive to what that history is working towards.
Here we pass from the epistemic to the “functional” side of Heidegger’s argument against enframing: Gestell not only conceals being and things, it also misrelates us to our own essence; indeed “the essence of the human is annihilated” [FC 13]. What is truly ours is to stand in a protecting and preserving stance towards being and towards things. We are “not ourselves” when we stand wrong emotively towards them, by our challenging and assaultive view of them.6
Heidegger interprets “nihilism” as the drift into Gestell: “Nihilism is the world-historical movement of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn into the power realm of the modern age” [NW (W 163–64)]. It is because Western history culminates in technology, as giving ultimate presence, that its age is “decisive and probably the most capable of enduring” [AWP (W 71)]. The danger is that “the racing of technology might install itself everywhere” [QT (BW 340)]. The assumption that everything is really and just as it is in the latest, most potent science-technology may solidify its own grip on us, as our own grip on the world is better and better. Nor is this just a threat to the West, since “Western history … stands in view of broadening out into world history” [NW (W 193)].
What should be our response to this threat? What are the concrete lessons of the critique of Gestell and technology? We must find, we’ll see, a “saving power” within technology itself. We do so not by turning our backs on technology, but by finding our way through it to the truth of being, hidden within it. So “the essence of technology will be gotten over into its still concealed truth. This getting over is similar to what happens when, in the human realm, one gets over a pain” [Tu (QTE 39)].
2. The withdrawal and absence of gods
This critique of technology can be stated to a considerable extent in secular terms, but it also has a religious aspect that is crucial for Heidegger. One way to put what’s wrong with our modern world of technological framing is that “the gods are absent.” Indeed this may even be technology’s ultimate ill. As we develop Heidegger’s religious point now and in section 4, we’ll see how it explains and clarifies so many other features of his later viewpoint as to have good claim to be its crux—the true pivot-point of his turning.
Gods’ presence or absence in a world is crucial to how, in having this world, we stand towards being. We can only be in proper relation to being by giving place in our world to the divine. And we can only regain the divine, by healing our relation to being. LH (P 258): “But the holy [Heilige], which alone is the essential space of divinity [Gottheit] … comes to shine only when being itself beforehand and after long preparation has been lighted and is experienced in its truth.”
This religious element is absent in Being and Time. I say this despite Heidegger’s rejection, in his 1947 “Letter on ‘Humanism’,” of Sartre’s interpretation of Being and Time as an atheistic existentialism. He further denies there that the book was “indifferent” regarding “the holy” or “the divine.” Nevertheless, it remains true that God or gods simply don’t figure in the program of Being and Time, even in the book’s larger plan, and this, together with the book’s huge ambitiousness, suggests that the religious was not then philosophically important to him.
Heidegger’s turn from Being and Time returns him to religion, but as necessary for an adequate relation to being, which remains primary for him. So religion—a relation to god or gods—is itself for the sake of that more basic relation, to being. This is a striking feature of Heidegger’s later “theology,” and it will have some surprising results. Because he does not identify the divine (or gods or god) with this being, the latter displaces divinity “at the top”—and not just at the top of his “ontology” but in his notion what we humans need most to mind. Divinity is not a first principle for Heidegger, and not what our ultimate insight-experience will be of. Nevertheless it is intimately related to that ultimate experience of being itself.
By this distinction Heidegger claims to leave behind metaphysics, since the latter is always an “ontotheology,” in that it always interprets being in terms of a preeminent entity, God. In doing so metaphysics misses the “ontological difference”—it tries (hopelessly) to explain or understand being in terms of entities. So ND (N v4 209): “Because metaphysics, thinking entities as such, remains struck by being but thinks it towards and from entities, so must metaphysics as such say (legein) the theion in the sense of the highest entitive [seiendes] ground.”7
The gods’ status as secondary to being is the distinctive and indeed peculiar feature of Heidegger’s “philosophy of religion.” It recalls the Greek notion of the gods as subject to Fate. CP 287: “The utmost god needs be-ing.”8 Indeed the very divinity of gods is owing to a more ultimate “holiness” belonging to being. “The holy is not holy because it is divine; rather the divine is divine because in its way it is ‘holy’” [AWH (EHP 82)]. And “neither humans nor gods by themselves can ever achieve an immediate relation to the holy” [90].
The crucial problem for Heidegger—and for our reading of him—concerns the precise nature of the relation of gods to being. We must settle in particular whether he is a realist or an idealist regarding the gods: does gods’ dependence on being mean that they depend on our understanding of being? But I will defer this question until section 4, when we turn to Heidegger’s idea how the gods might “return.” We can say a lot about his conception of their absence, while leaving that basic question open.
This idea that gods are “away” from the world was important to Hölderlin, who powerfully influences Heidegger here. This is perhaps even what he most takes from Hölderlin: the view of modernity as an age of (properly) regretting the absence of gods. Many of Heidegger’s treatments of “the gods” are couched within readings of Hölderlin.
We have some concrete questions for Heidegger here. Who are these absent gods? Are they all the gods that have been believed in, including the Judeo-Christian God? Then his reference would be retrospective—as Nietzsche’s seems to be when he speaks of God as dead. Or is his notion instead prospective, so that the absent gods are new ones who will or might arrive? And is it significant that he usually (but not always) speaks of gods rather than God?
For now let’s leave the notion of gods generic, as Heidegger himself very often does, speaking so often of “divinity” [Gottheit]. Again I’ll see whether it can be specified further in section 4, regarding the “new gods.” But it may be a feature of our age of absence that the gods remain indeterminate and obscure, and those questions unanswerable about them. So CP 308: “talk of ‘gods’ does not here mean the decided assertion on the being-at-hand of a plurality over against a singular, but rather means to point to the undecidability of the being of gods, whether one or many.”
Even in this generic sense we can say some things about divinity: it has a certain abstract content—must have it, to play the role Heidegger assigns it. So first, the divine is something human-like to the extent of being intentional: it is something that means—and values. And as always for Heidegger I think this intentionality is crucially something that aims. But its intentionality is greater than our own, in kind not just degree, such that our appropriate stance towards its meanings (and aims) is submission and reception. In particular, divinity’s meanings are such that we can’t hope to grasp and master them by our own.
What matters most in our relation to gods is that we recognize such supra-human meanings. This is “the holy”: how things have not just meaning but purposes higher than through us. But enframing, we’ve seen, precludes such meanings, since it requires that entities be precisely what they are when enframed within our science and technic. Gods are absent for us by our inability to recognize such meanings.
Moreover—of course—we need to “recognize” the holy in the right way, in the right kind of stance, and this is where we most fail. More important than the identity of these gods is—as always for Heidegger—our stance or attitude towards them. In particular, it’s not enough to believe in gods, nor to value them; we need to “mean” them in some different way that really suits them.
Nietzsche saw this only partly in his idea that “God is dead.” He sees that this is not just “a formula of unbelief” [NW (W 164)]. It’s not—as he is commonly read—due to the scientific “will to truth” overturning all theological justifications for belief in God, and offering alternative, naturalistic explanations for that belief. “Unbelief in the sense of apostasy from the Christian doctrine of faith is … never the essence or the ground of nihilism; rather it is always only a consequence of nihilism” [165].
If atheism is a belief [no gods] set in a system of beliefs by which we frame and control our world, then gods really are absent to it, but not in the way the atheist thinks. They would not be any the more present if that belief [no gods] were converted to the belief [gods]—not even if this new belief then ramified (worked its consequences) through all the rest of this new theist’s beliefs. The real godlessness lies deeper, in how the world is projected by just such a “system of beliefs.” It’s not a matter of revising this framework, but of finding a religious dimension of experience lying quite apart from belief.
Rather than a matter of belief, Nietzsche thinks the death of God lies in a loss of values. But this still doesn’t go deep enough, since the schema of “values” is one more expression of enframing. Real religiousness is a matter neither of believing in God, nor of giving God the very highest value. “The hardest blow against God is not that God is held to be unknowable, not that God’s existence is proved to be unprovable, but rather that the God held to be actual is elevated to the highest value”; this blow comes from “believers and theologians” whose thinking and talking “is sheer blasphemy if it meddles in the theology of faith” [NW (W 194)].9
Godlessness is a feature of our very “framing” of the world by beliefs and values. We may think that the divine is most present in a theology that defines and proves it, and in the services and observances by which we make it part of our lives. But within Gestell these theoretical and practical dealings both push towards a control that is incompatible with true religiousness. They are efforts to enframe divinity, which is essentially not susceptible to such control.
The absence of the gods lies in our inability to allow and find meanings higher than our own. Our deep commitment to enframe—to take things to be (truly) what they are in the frames of our beliefs and values—precludes such meanings. And it takes them away from other things in our world besides gods. When I garden in that way, with a will to enframe, the plants can have no “mystery”: no meaning more than what we give them, in our scientific and horticultural slottings.
What we most need today is to notice—in the right way—this absence of the gods. We need to notice, that is, how our enframing stance precludes recognizing a certain kind of meaning. And this brings home to us that enframing stance, itself: this way we insist that everything takes its place in our scientific and technical frameworks. Living with gods’ absence means living with a sense of the limits of Gestell—not simply of all that hasn’t yet been brought into hand, but of what can never be gripped. Our hope lies in living more and more with a lack—which is a kind of descendent of Being and Time’s insistence on guilt.
So we push more deeply into the absence of gods, into nihilism, by becoming more aware of enframing itself, and the demands—and limits—it imposes on us. We plunge more deeply into Gestell, as it were. Since enframing is our understanding of being, we thereby come down to the level of being itself. And there, by this recognition of Gestell, we find the “saving power” within enframing or technology itself. Here Heidegger often quotes Hölderlin: “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also” [QT (BW 333)]. “It is precisely in enframing, … in this utmost danger that the innermost indestructible belongingness of man within the granting may come to appear, provided that we, for our part, begin to attend to the essence of technology” [337].
3. Beyond Nietzsche
Before proceeding to look at Heidegger’s hopes for a return of divinity to our world, I want to turn aside to pull together some of the links to Nietzsche that I’ve been making all along. I focus on Heidegger’s account of this relationship, and forgo developing my doubts about his reading of Nietzsche.
Heidegger shapes his later viewpoint in pointed contrast with Nietzsche, whom he considers of unique philosophical and cultural importance.10 Nietzsche articulates the modern opening of being, which is the culmination of metaphysics, as it issues from the pre-Socratic start. So Nietzsche is the last in the line of great thinkers since that first beginning—as Heidegger aspires to be first in the line stemming from a new beginning.
Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche is especially relevant in this chapter, because their divergence has a crucial religious aspect. Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche leaves no room in the world for gods, as we need to have them. This is not just a matter of his doctrinal atheism, nor of his attack on Christianity. Nor does it reflect an absence of religious feeling: Heidegger sees Nietzsche’s strong religious temperament.11 But despite Nietzsche’s poetic positings of gods—Dionysus in particular—his metaphysical stance projects a world lacking divinity.
Heidegger takes Nietzsche to give emblematic expression to the modern technological way of having a world. Thus he is a crucial aid to understanding modernity. “In Nietzsche’s thought-route to the will to power, not only modern metaphysics but Western metaphysics as a whole is completed” [WPK (N v3 155); cf. M 341, NW (W 189)]. Heidegger supports this with readings of what he counts Nietzsche’s most important ideas, especially “will to power,” “overman,” and “eternal return”: together these give the metaphysical statement of enframing, technology’s distinctive way of letting entities be. We can learn what lies beneath or behind technology by examining these ideas. “To think through Nietzsche’s metaphysics becomes a matter of reflecting on the situation and place of contemporary man” [NW (W 158)].
Heidegger is of course highly critical of this enframing he takes Nietzsche to state. But he credits Nietzsche himself with some resistance to it: although he expresses technology’s stance, he also experiences something badly and generally wrong with it. Nietzsche proclaims the desolateness of modernity, warning that we are devolving inexorably towards nihilism. Heidegger takes over much of this attitude of alarm and horror over the modern age—this is where he most gets the stance of prophet crying against it, noted before. But he claims to be a truer prophet than Nietzsche, with a truer diagnosis: Nietzsche’s analysis of the problem is just an ultimate manifestation of it, and “the intended overcoming is but the completion of nihilism” [NW (W 193)].12
So Nietzsche is not as free as he supposes, because he’s not as psychologically astute: he hasn’t brought his diagnosis down to the bottom of us and our nihilism. Nor indeed has he “created” his position through the special independence of will he seems to claim for himself. Technology has been destined as the culmination of the long metaphysics of presence, and Nietzsche is its mouthpiece not its inventor. “Nietzsche neither made nor chose his way himself, no more than any other thinker. He is sent on his way” [WCT 46].
Nietzsche’s failure is his inability to get out of metaphysics. His strategy to escape it is to negate or reverse it—but this leaves him still within metaphysics. “As a mere countermovement it necessarily remains trapped, like everything anti-, in the essence of what it is attacking” [NW (W 162)].13 Indeed, his reversal is really the most fully accomplished form of metaphysics, in which it best shows—because it best achieves—its underlying aim and character. Nietzsche’s thought brings to ultimate fruition the project set in motion among the pre-Socratics, to bring the world to complete “presence.” So he speaks “at the peak of the completion of Western philosophy” [AS (W 250)].
(a) Let’s fill out this account by looking in turn at Heidegger’s readings of “will to power,” “overman,” and “eternal return,” beginning with the first. His claim that will to power is Nietzsche’s metaphysics is well known, and in some quarters infamous.14 Many have dismissed it out of hand on the ground that Nietzsche is a strong critic of metaphysics and constantly sets himself apart from it. But Heidegger is well aware of Nietzsche’s dismissals of metaphysics; he thinks that Nietzsche doesn’t see well enough just what metaphysics is. Heidegger tries to outdo him at his own game: he copies Nietzsche’s use of “metaphysics” to label a traditional kind of philosophy that must be overcome—and argues that Nietzsche hasn’t escaped it as he thought.
We must bear in mind here Heidegger’s quite specific idea of metaphysics. Every metaphysics expresses a particular understanding of being, but misstates it as a claim about what entities universally are. So we can learn from it how being “shows itself” in the metaphysician’s epoch, but we have to grasp this through and despite the metaphysician’s own constant slippage back into points about entities. Metaphysics offers a theory of the whatness of entities, but in doing so it also gives—without quite seeing that it does so—a view of the stance or attitude to which entities appear as they are. It gives, indeed, the task to take this stance and to experience things through it.
This holds for Nietzsche too: he presents will to power as a broadest genus or kind to which all entities belong, and by which they are entities. He offers it as the essence of things—of animals and plants and even physical forces. But behind this is another idea that Nietzsche himself recognizes only partly and fleetingly. This is of will to power not as the genus of entities, but as the attitude or stance that lets them be—that lets them be what they really and most fully are. This is the way will to power really is about being: it states how that basic world-constituting works today, what its basic project now is. Will to power is our basic way of revealing, which underlies and guides all the ways things can appear. Nietzsche half sees that this is what he means about will to power, but within the grip of metaphysics he frames it as a thought about things.15
So Nietzsche articulates, with his idea of will to power, our current basic project of enframing or Gestell—of controlling entities by setting and fixing them in place within the frameworks perfected by our science and technology. When we “know” a thing so, both theoretically and practically, then it most fully is, by our modern way of having a world. Things are, by our achievement of such power over them. Nietzsche’s idea also brings out well the dynamic and expanding character of this project. “Power is power only if and as long as it is enhancement of power and commands the increase in power” [NM (N v3 195)]. Our deep aim is continually to tighten our grip upon things, by refining the grid of our frameworks and fixing things into ever-narrower slots.
Despite our presumption that we’re realists in our science and technology, the deep stance of enframing involves a subjectivist idealism. We claim for ourselves—in our scientific and technical frameworks—the right to let entities be: they are just as we so enframe them. And this is the prideful place that Nietzsche famously claims for humans, after the death of God: the only meaning there is in the world is what we ourselves put there.
Nietzsche’s term for these meanings we impose on the world is “values.” He thinks that all humans, as will to power, orient and steer themselves by values. Heidegger argues that this is really a narrower insight about just our modern way of steering, enframing. For Nietzsche thinks (according to Heidegger) that values involve a “reckoning” what to do, and so are not only representational but also quantitative [NW (W 170)]. Will to power posits its ends, and posits also a degree of value for each of these ends, allowing it to calculate how to maximize the value it achieves. But such calculating disposal of a field of posited values expresses enframing’s effort to control the running of one’s life—to make its pursuit scientific or technical.
Nietzsche holds that our task is to “revalue values,” i.e. to formulate new values, and to do so on the basis of the adequate understanding we finally have of ourselves, as will to power. So will to power is “the principle of a new positing of value. It is new, because it is for the first time achieved knowingly out of the knowledge of its principle” [NW (W 173)]. But once again Heidegger objects that the diagnosis hasn’t gone deep enough: we need to see that “having values,” as an expression of enframing, is part of what’s wrong.16 In a better future, Heidegger suggests, we will not live by values. We will forgo the effort to so posit and quantify our aims.
(b) Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s “overman” as the individual who values on the basis of that finally adequate self-understanding. The human becomes overman by grasping himself as will to power, and putting this insight into effect in making new values for himself. “The human going out above the human-so-far takes the will to power, as the basic trait of entities, into his own willing and wills himself in the sense of the will to power” [NW (W 189)].
This advance has ontological implications: the overman is the one who most authoritatively says “what is.” He plays the world-constituting role to the highest degree. “All entities are as what is posited [gesetzte] in this will” [NW (W 189)]. In positing entities—and especially their values—in the light of the self-understanding as will to power, the overman realizes to the fullest degree the aspiration to constitute being by our human subjectivity, which typifies the modern age. And more deeply still, he realizes the age-old project to understand being as presence.
A familiar way to think of Nietzsche’s overman is that it’s how he “puts man in place of God.” But Heidegger labels this “crude,” because it understates the nature of divinity. Nietzsche doesn’t mean us to direct upon the overman the reverence felt towards gods. Instead he leaves the place for God empty, and opens up a new place for the overman, “another realm of another grounding of entities in their other being” [NW (W 190)]. Nevertheless, in the overman humanity claims an authority over being and entities, which it can’t really have, and shouldn’t properly seek. “The human is not the lord [Herr] of entities. The human is the shepherd [Hirt] of being” [LH (P 260)].
(c) Heidegger reads the idea of “eternal return” as the seat of Nietzsche’s theology—or as what this becomes, in the absence of gods. We’ve already noticed Heidegger’s claim that all metaphysics is ontotheology, and he holds this for Nietzsche too, despite the latter’s insistence on the “death of God.”
Heidegger offers several ways of distinguishing the ontological and theological aspects of metaphysics; it’s not always clear just how he connects them.17 Perhaps the guiding idea is that metaphysics’ ontology is its account of the most general property of entities, what makes them all entities, whereas its theology is its account of the complete or perfect case of this property, in the entity that most fully is. Metaphysics includes a theology because it treats the being of entities—that essential property—as occurring in degrees. And it does this with a view to laying down ends—an end lodged in ontology itself that will serve as the proper judge of all our other aims. Our ultimate end is to more fully “be.”
It has been the “destiny” of metaphysics to progressively drive god out of theology, and Nietzsche most fully achieves this. This does not eliminate, however, the theological arm to his metaphysics: he still has not only a theory about the being of entities generally, but a theory of the entity that is to the fullest degree, in a way that lets everything else be. This ultimate entity is not—as we might have expected—the overman, but rather what’s expressed by “eternal return.” This is the ultimately godless way, found by Nietzsche, of saying what most is.
Why is the overman not the perfection of being—not an entity that is, completely? Very quickly, it is because he is becoming, and not being. But “becoming” here does not mean simply “changing,” since why would something changing not fully be? Rather, it means that these entities-that-become are ontologically incomplete, that they depend (to be what they are) on their relations to past and future, as well as to other entities.18 The overman, at any moment, is always “en route,” and what he is is dependent on what came to be him-at-this-moment, and on what he is becoming. Moreover, the overman is what he is only in relation to the context of other entities—widening out to the whole world—in which he occurs. So the overman falls short of the full “presence” required for full being.
Eternal return is the crux of Nietzsche’s theology, because it gives this completeness; it gives what there still can be, in this godless world, of full presence, of full self-sufficiency. What it is that can be fully, is only the whole world, as it recurs. For as long as this whole world is itself “en route,” it too has that same incompleteness. It is only as coming back to itself in a circle that the whole worldcourse can have ontological self-sufficiency, can be complete. This, I think, is the key point that lies behind the way the eternal return “permanentizes” the world of becoming: “Nietzsche’s thought thinks the constant constancy [ständige Beständigung] of the becoming of what becomes in the one presence of the self-repeating of the identical” [ERW (N v3 165)]. This is the ultimate “how” of will to power.19
It would be out of place here to evaluate this account of Nietzsche and his “theology.” It might be doubted that Heidegger says enough about Nietzsche’s moves to introduce “new gods” himself, after Christianity—in particular, of course, his Dionysus. But whatever weight Nietzsche means to put on such a new god, it seems Heidegger’s point would still hold, that he does so not to deny or temper the project of power and enframing, but to aid and abet it. These new gods, as also the idea of eternal return, are models for how we, as will to power, can best realize ourselves.
Let me sum up Heidegger’s view of his difference from Nietzsche. They agree, he holds, that our age is the one in which will to power—the aim at control, Gestell—realizes itself, and makes values accordingly. But Nietzsche thinks this is all to the good: once we see that we are will to power, we discover how the prevailing values have hindered us, and experiment with new values that will advance us in this essence. So our insight into what we are can be a tool to freedom, diagnosing and giving us power over the social values that shaped us.
Heidegger draws a different lesson. He thinks he sees a sterility in will to power, exposed by the technological age—and kind of person—it has turned out to involve. We need to dig deeper to find the essence in us that can save us. It’s not will to power, which is indeed an historical stage of the understanding of being. Rather it’s the ability to understand and thereby “open” being at all—an ability that the technological understanding tends to conceal. So Heidegger makes, in this regard, a more radical diagnosis even than Nietzsche’s (yet one whose lessons are, in another regard, quite conservative).
4. Gods’ return
We’ve seen that Heidegger spends much more time telling us how to live with absent gods than what it might be like to have them with us again. He dwells much more on how we must recognize their absence than on how human life would be, lived in proper relation to them. Perhaps this is usual in the millenarianism he here echoes: the divine coming will change everything in ways we can only dimly anticipate. But it also belongs to his more general tendency to dwell in preliminaries.
This stress on a relation to absent gods has led some readers to think that this awaiting is the culmination to Heidegger’s theology—the best relation to divinity he envisions. Yet I think he clearly views this “living with absence” as worthwhile especially for how it prepares for gods’ return. Properly to recognize their absence from our lives we need to have some sense of what their presence would be. Moreover, Heidegger does sometimes describe the return. In Contributions the “last god” is a god to come: “The last god is not the end but the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history. … Preparation for the appearing of the last god is the utmost venture of the truth of be-ing, by virtue of which alone man succeeds in restoring entities” [CP 289].
Let’s distinguish two questions: (1) What is the better relation to gods we are to aim at and prepare for? (2) How do we go about that preparing? I will start by pulling together some things we already know about (1), then discuss a puzzle that arises about (2), and then return to try to say more about (1).
Recall what has already emerged—and also some of the points we’ve left unresolved. Divinity is, by definition as it were, a source of meanings and ends greater than our own; it is a “higher intentionality.” When we allow divinity in our world we recognize a domain of higher ends, the holy. Heidegger proposes that we need (ought) to have a world that includes such intentionality, and meanings, including ends, to which our own must defer.
Divinity is “higher” in a way that makes its meanings immune to enframing: they can’t be ordered into our scientific and technical frameworks. Divinity’s meanings can’t be explained or controlled, and in order to allow them we must suspend the stance in which we insist on such control. So just as the arrival of enframing as our age’s mode of being erased the possibility of such meanings, and expelled the holy from our world, so their return must involve a change in that mode of being—even though it is the deepest way we “let entities be.”
Hence it is not enough, we’ve seen, to come to believe in gods. Belief is on the one hand too thin a relation, when what we need is a deep change in stance. Our world must be thoroughly charged and polarized by those higher meanings. But on the other hand belief is also too thick, inasmuch as it (now, typically) expresses the very stance of enframing we need to get out of. So we have to do both more and less than believe in gods. For both reasons Heidegger doesn’t want to set up a new theology, a new theory about god, but rather to help reestablish a religious aspect in all our experience and practice.
Turning now to (2): given that “the goal” is this new stance different from Gestell, a certain dilemma, a catch-22, arises as to how we are to attain it. Heidegger is partly in the grip of this dilemma, and partly he notices it. The problem is that the attitude in which we would most naturally pursue this goal—that in which we pursue all our goals—expresses the very stance we need to overcome. The problem is, roughly, the old mystic’s dilemma: can we really will our way out of willing?20 Heidegger spoke just now of “preparing” for the god to appear, but he is persistently divided on the question whether we can do anything positive to bring it about. Any attempt or effort we make seems to pre-tune us to miss the divine.
We should notice how this issue—whether we can do anything to bring back the gods—depends strongly on a problem that we put off before (in section 2), and must now face: whether (and how) Heidegger is a realist or idealist regarding the gods. Are they, apart from our meaning or intending them? Or do they come to be only by our meaning them—including them in our world? If Heidegger is a realist regarding gods, then our positive effort would be insuf-ficient this further way: initiative must come from a real source outside us. If he is instead an idealist, that positive effort faces the peculiar challenge to revere entities that only are by our own reverence.
Sometimes Heidegger seems to speak in that realist vein: the gods themselves must transmit the light of being to us. They do so, in particular, by giving poets the words for the new opening of being. Poets must wait for them to do so: “Only a ray of light that emanates again from the holy itself is strong enough. … Therefore a higher one, who is nearer the holy and yet still remains beneath it, a god, must throw the kindling lightning into the poet’s soul” [AWH (EHP 90)].
Also in this realist vein is a famous passage from the Der Spiegel interview [DS 107]: “Philosophy will be able to effect no immediate change in the state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. I see the only possibility of a saving in thinking and poeming that prepares a readiness for the appearance of the god.” Then: “We can not think them here, we can at best prepare the readiness to wait.’
However, I think we must read these realist passages to mean only an internal or empirical realism, set within a more ultimate idealism. Gods are, only in and for the opening of being to us. So “the god also is, when he is, an entity and stands as an entity within be-ing and its essence, which eventuates [sich ereignet] out of the worlding of world” [Tu (QTE 47)]. I think this deep idealism is a consequence of that most distinctive feature of Heidegger’s “ontotheology,” the way being replaces god at the center: his claim that being—being that only is by us—lies deeper than the gods. It lies deeper ontologically, as a “condition of their possibility.”21 In making gods secondary to being, he makes them secondary as well to our understanding of being, i.e. the world we open up by our meaning. “How few know that god awaits the grounding of the truth of be-ing and thus awaits man’s leaping-into Da-sein. Instead it seems as if man must and would await god” [CP 293].22
This is the key starting-point from which we can resolve other puzzles, and generally clarify Heidegger’s idea of the gods. Being is more ultimate than god, such that our ultimate (best) experience is not with god but with being. And indeed, this is the principal value in our experience of gods: that it helps us to experience being. It is to serve in just this way that Heidegger specifies the kind of gods, and experience of gods, we need. He models the gods so that our stance towards them will prepare us to encounter being.
A question arises here: why does Heidegger need both being and gods? He attacks the identification of being with god: such ontotheology elides (violates) the ontological difference by interpreting being as an entity. He gives being the ultimacy once assigned to god; it takes over much of the latter’s role. Why does Heidegger not then give us a religion of being rather than of gods?
He needs gods for very roughly the reason religions have needed angels or saints—to mediate with the main thing, the principal divine. We need this reverence for gods because only so can we come into proper relation to being. Recognizing those higher meanings somehow fits us to live “in the truth of being,” lets us realize our essence as “shepherds of being.” And this is due to the strong similarity the gods bear to being. The gods are entities that are somehow congruent with being in a way that helps us into better relation to it ourselves.
So the gods are needed as models or stand-ins for being. They are entities towards which we stand in (roughly) the way we need to stand towards being. When we “have” gods as we should, we stand in an intentional attitude like the one that experiences being itself, in Ereignis. The gods stand in for being this way, by instantiating abstract traits of being; they are ontical concretions of the ontological. So they can be reminders of being, and can orient our life-stance on the vector that suits it to remember being as well.23
The principal point here is that a world with gods is a world whose meanings and ends we take to be set not by us but for us. We don’t claim or aspire to create these meanings ourselves. Nor do we suppose that things’ meanings would be set by the full scientific and technical grasp of them; they are not, in this way either, under our control. (We can’t, by method and procedure, lay these meanings bare.) We take ourselves to be receiving these ends. And this angle of receptiveness is what we most need in order to notice being. By the stance we take towards gods—as entities in our world that also transcend and structure it—we model (or train ourselves for) the stance we are to take towards being.
Thus when Heidegger speaks of waiting for gods, he means waiting for a new understanding of being, opening a world in which gods “are there.” However this god-idealism poses the challenge just mentioned: how can we acquire the attitude—call it reverence—needed to let gods be as we need them to be, when we realize that it’s only this reverence that lets them be? (How can we make gods out of nothing?) This intensifies that earlier problem with “willing gods,” that willing is enframing, which cuts us off from experience of gods. For both reasons, any effort to “come to revere” seems hopeless.
Certainly we cannot create or invent new gods. “Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. … They do not make their gods for themselves and do not do service to idols” [BDT (BW 352)].24 How could god be something we know we make for ourselves? If we know we make it, it can’t be a meaning greater than our own. Hence our dilemma: we want to have a kind of gods to whom we can stand in this proper relation, yet we can’t have them by designing them, because by that we would have power over them.25 (Compare with the old God’s dilemma: he wants us to be good but doesn’t want to make us good.)
Heidegger runs into this dilemma over and again. He wants to be doing something to help, he wants to show us what to do, but he is repeatedly brought up short by the thought that this very activity of planning and devising a strategy expresses the attitude of Gestell—is an effort to frame and control. And he is further stymied by the self-frustrating logic in the project to find gods for the sake of being. Once thinking reaches the (idealist) insight of the truth of being, how can it go back and devise gods to facilitate that insight? How can such strategized gods carry any conviction?
Heidegger’s response to these problems is to delegate the work of making the new gods to poets. But the latter can’t properly function with any such explicit purpose. Poets need to speak in an experience of being spoken through: they need to feel their words as emanating from a divine source that gives higher meanings to all the entities they name. They can’t mean to make their gods. So their role, which the thinker sees, can’t be transparent to poets themselves. They must proceed in a kind of “madness” which lies far apart from any planning or devising.26
However, there is a certain reason and insight behind this madness, working in poets themselves. When they “hear gods” they are not inventing out of nothing. Poets’ words don’t really come from gods, but they do come from something real, which the poets are especially receptive to. They come out of the “destiny of being”—out of the very large-scale and long-run logic of the history of being-as-presence. Poets are responsive to current developments broadly at work in the culture, and “hear” gods that suit their age’s large-scale need, though of course they don’t recognize this real source of their words.
It is this destiny that is ultimately responsible for new gods: “Whether the god lives or remains dead is not decided by the religiosity of men and even less by the theological aspirations of philosophy and natural science. Whether god is god eventuates [sich ereignet] from out of and within the constellation of be-ing” [Tu (QTE 49)]. Being, in its fatedness, determines our changing understanding of being, and whether this will make room for gods. And it determines, I think, just how poets will feel themselves as spoken through by gods.
The thinker, as we’ve seen, goes deeper than the poet, by seeing how that experience of the gods issues out of the destiny of being, as well as how it can lead to what is more important, an experience of the truth of being, in Ereignis. But this larger insight still leaves the thinker less to do than philosophers have usually claimed for themselves. He can improve understanding of our current technological opening of being—can show how this is the culmination of the original grasp of being as presence. He can show how this makes gods absent and so leaves us “not at home” in the world, despite our fullest scientific and technical control. But he can’t show “the way out” because this very insight bars him from “making” the gods we need.
Indeed, it seems this insight might also prevent the thinker from genuinely revering these gods. For by it he sees through them, going deeper to their ground, in our understanding of being. It seems this god-idealism must preclude full faith or reverence for these gods—the whole-hearted relation to them Heidegger thinks we need. I think this is indeed his view: he himself can only stand in that relation (of faith or reverence) by giving up the stance of thinking, and becoming, for a time, a poet. These two attitudes don’t fuse, but alternate. The thinker becomes poet to experience the world as divine, then returns to the stance by which he pushes past this divine aspect, to see the world’s ground in being.
But now isn’t it, on this story, intellectually irresponsible to believe in gods? Isn’t this, according to my Heidegger, a matter of embracing lies? A first answer is that our relation to gods is not to be that of belief, insofar as the latter is a stance we take up within our enframing project. But more importantly, I think Heidegger holds that in revering gods we witness to a deeper truth. For it’s important to him that although the gods (must be taken to) deliver the words that express higher-than-human meanings, they are not their ultimate source. They are “messengers” who bring these meanings from “the holy,” i.e. from being. “The divinities [Göttlichen] are the beckoning messengers of the godhead [Gottheit]” [BDT (BW 351)].
And this, I think, is the real truth that lies beneath these ideal gods—the truth that makes faith in them not a through-andthrough lie. These meanings do come from “something” greater outside us, albeit not an entity, nor personal or human-like. They come from being—or more precisely from the “destiny” of being, which is a kind of logic in the development of human clearings or openings of being. There are higher meanings, and we do need to receive and defer to them; the gods are helpful personifications of their real source.
So much for the question how we can “prepare” for new gods. Now let’s turn back to (1) and try to bring this goal—the relation to gods we (should) want, the way we are to have them in our world—into (a very little) sharper focus. The key point, we’ve seen, is that we need gods so that we can live closer to the “truth of being,” in contrast with the way enframing closes being off. So we must hope for a kind of gods, and a relation to gods, that will facilitate this Ereignis. We can read back from it the features of the gods Heidegger hopes there will be poets for.
First, some features of the Christian god will be dispensed with, because they express the enframing attitude inconsistent with true reverence. For example, Heidegger rejects this god’s role of creating the world, since it models god on the human crafter, and so expresses the pragmatic, incipiently technological world-view. It also expresses a metaphysical emphasis on causality, as the key for scientific explanation. But this reduces gods and being to the “ordinary and familiar,” as Heidegger says Christian dogma does: “[t]he cause–effect relationship is the most common, most crude, and closest [to us], which all human calculation and lostness to entities employs in order to clarify something, i.e. to shift into the clarity of the common and familiar” [CP 77].27
More broadly, Heidegger rejects the Christian god insofar as it has been identified and determined by metaphysics and theology. The god grasped by these enframing projects is not a god we can stand towards as we properly should:
[Causa sui is] the suitable name for the god in philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god. / The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine god.
[ID 72]
For the most part Heidegger seems to favor new divinity that is more a pagan pluralism than a Christian monotheism. He shares Hölderlin’s and Nietzsche’s nostalgia for the Greek gods.28 Part of their appeal is precisely that they precede and are not affected by the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, in the way Heidegger thinks the Christian god has been; because of that metaphysical infusion, “it could be that Christianity itself represents a consequence and a form of nihilism” [NW (W 165)].29
Whereas the one God of monotheism rules all, and so epitomizes the maximal control sought by enframing, a plurality of gods can exemplify different ideals than such control. Their variety gives options to us—manifold ideal stances or attitudes to model ourselves after. So multiple gods project a value pluralism like Nietzsche’s. But Heidegger doesn’t want us to “choose” among these options by an act of calculating intelligence, nor by existentialism’s “groundless choice,” but rather by following a thread to being: we discover which of the available ideals gives us the alignment—reverence—that carries us towards being, i.e. that lets us find the holy in the world.
The pagan character of the new religion also shows in the roles of “earth” and “nature” in it. Briefly, these introduce a second field of non-human meanings into the world. We’ve seen how Heidegger uses “earth” to refer to the layer of meaning artworks have by virtue of their materials: the particular stoniness of a sculpture, timbre of a clarinet, or sound of a poem. So there are meanings in the world not projected by intelligence. Heidegger also revives the Greek notion of “nature” as phusis, a pre-cognitive aiming and intending such as is found even in plants. The world we need has not just gods, but this deeper and pervasive directedness within things themselves. We could only be fully “at home” in a world in which the things around us have inner point or meaning, and not just a meaning conferred on them “from outside” by ourselves or gods.
The new gods’ principal role, we’ve seen, is to deliver meanings and ends to our world that are “higher” than those it has from us. Heidegger sometimes says that these will take the form of “laws,” which will need to be integrated with a different set of laws devised by us for social cohesion and functioning. The higher laws sent by the gods lack these social purposes. Instead they build into our everyday experience reminders of the attitude that will attune us to being—reminders that align us towards the special experience of Ereignis. The divine laws enable our world to “stand open to being,” i.e. to be livable in a proper relation to being.
Summary
Heidegger treats technology as emblematic of the modern age; it reflects the stance of Gestell (enframing), which is the crux to our current understanding of being. This stance involves (has as its other side) that “gods are absent” for us. Heidegger’s critique of the modern age, and his prescription of a way out, center here: he wants a route from technology back to gods.
His analysis and critique of technology are among his most influential views. The target is not our technological stuff itself, but that underlying stance that compels us to “enframe” all we encounter. We take everything to be just what it is (or will be) in its place in our framework, and strive, under all, to place things there. This framework is both our scientific system, and our technologically organized environment; these intermesh. By locating entities—theoretically or practically—within this framework, we fit them into the narrow place where we secure and control them. So we make them maximally “presences” to us, and culminate the great cultural project at presence initiated by the pre-Socratics.
But this consummation comes at a cost, which is the loss of a religious aspect to our world. Heidegger adopts Hölderlin’s image of the gods as “absent” (not dead), and his attitude of hoping and waiting for their return. Our immediate challenge is to notice what we’re missing: any independent and “higher” meaning in our world than what things have in our framework. This isn’t just a matter of belief (that God doesn’t exist) but of the kind of meaning things generally have: nothing means anything beyond that framework.
Heidegger thinks Nietzsche saw much of this in his account of nihilism, but fell short because he kept within enframing; indeed his idea of will to power is the prime metaphysical statement of enframing. So Nietzsche’s offered way out of nihilism is for humans to make values for themselves, and to make their own enhancement (into the overman) their guiding value. Heidegger thinks this answer still belongs to the problem. We can’t give ourselves the kind of values we really need, and indeed even the schema of “values” reflects the calculative enterprise of enframing.
Heidegger says little about what a “return” of gods would involve. Nor would it help, perhaps, to be told, because of the peculiar logic of this hope. We cannot engineer in ourselves the attitude in which there are gods for us again; we need to get away from “engineering” our projects this way. We need instead a more receptive stance, a kind of “releasement” that opens us to things. Heidegger verges here on a kind of quietism, while insisting that he doesn’t mean a passivity. This receptivity prepares us both for gods’ return, and for the unconcealment of being itself—though our attitude itself is still not sufficient. As he famously puts it, “only a god can save us.”
Further reading
J. Young: Heidegger’s Later Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [An engaging survey of themes in later Heidegger, especially technology and the gods.]
J. Caputo: The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978. [An influential treatment of Heidegger’s religious thinking.]