The Critique of Onto-theology and Heidegger

The God-question and the 'How' of God's Entry into Philosophy

The God-question and philosophy's general openness to it claim a history that extends to the very beginnings of philosophy, although the mode of its treatment and the stress it received vary from time to time and from thinker to thinker. Despite the fact of the limits of language and of knowing, the issues that are specific to this perplexing question are 'by no means solved' in their entirety, but remain 'rather aggravated.' 3 The witness of the tradition testifies not just to an assumed silence or a resolve of a determinate bracketing, but a commitment of the thinkers, say, from Plato and Aristotle to Anselm and Thomas Aquinas, and from Descartes to Hegel to findways to think and speak about God, not in just one way, but in different ways, such as natural, rational, scientific, and so forth by employing the categories available to them. In relation to the current scientific and atomic scenario of 'www-age', the question is: does the God-question still continue to be registered as the 'favorite' to speak philosophically as the ultimate question?

Heidegger's explication of Hölderlin's characterization of the 'era' to which 'we still belong' as 'a destitute time' carries the specification that this era is marked with "god's failure to arrive by the 'default of God'"; that it is an era wherein "no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself…. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but divine radiance has become extinguished in the world's history." 4 The prime characteristic feature of the current philosophical disposition is its marked 'openness' to the 'wholly other' (toute autre) after Levinas and his predilection for ethical priority in terms of responsibility. Does this ethos of the 'wholly other' speak of God? In relation to the general disposition of the current era we can say that it is double-sided. On the one side, the tendency is one of a self-conscious intellectual caution that eventually ends up in downplaying or being indifferent on various grounds. On the other side, we also find initiatives and attempts to 'find possible ways' to address this God-question. Various authors bring out this transformed disposition of current philosophical setting. For instance, Joseph Ratzinger, the Pope emeritus, in his recent work, Jesus of Nazareth, writes: "God is the issue: Is he real, reality itself, or isn't he? Is he good, or do we have to invent the good ourselves? The god question is the fundamental question, and it sets us down right at the crossroads of human existence." 5 In the opinion of Ludwig Heyde 6 the thought of writing about God is "a perilous undertaking" since "what we write can only lag behind the wealth and depth of a long philosophical tradition". Still he considers writing about God at the face of a strange motivating force: the "wondering about God's relative absence in contemporary philosophy, as well as the puzzling lack of interest in God displayed by our culture." The ethos of silence and 'wakeful openness' gains a significant place in Ignace Verhack's philosophical pursuit as he titles his recent work as Wat Bedoelen Wij Wanneer Wij God Zeggen? 7 He asks: 'Heeft het word 'God' nog een zin?' While attempting to formulate his answer he recommends a disposition for philosophical inquiry, namely, 'ontwakenvoor' that will enable one to respond 'hier ben ik', which echo Samuel's response of (1Sam 3: 1-21) to the God of the Fathers. Marion, in his preface to the English edition of God Without Being unveils the setting of 'a spiritual and cultural crisis' in which his thought took shape. Explaining the crisis-setting that is shared by an entire generation, he writes that this crisis "had a time and a stake. A time: the test of nihilism…. A stake: the obscuring of God in the indistinct haze of the 'human sciences'." In his observation the fundamental issue is that of "a confrontation between the philosophical prohibitions of nihilism and the demanding openings of Christian revelation in a debate so close that it sometimes brought the antagonists together on a common course." 8 Caputo remarks that "any book entitled On Religion must begin by breaking the bad news to the 5 Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J.

Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 29, (emphasis mine). The context in which Ratzinger makes this observation is his interpretation of Jesus' temptation in the Desert. He finds that the temptation-narratives in the Gospels expose the tendency of 'pushing God aside' and relying completely on our own rational capability. This turn tends to perceive him as secondary, if not superfluous and annoying, in comparison with various other apparent matters, say, like that of humanitarian causes, which present themselves far more urgent than God. According to him, "a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundations; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion-that is the temptation that threatens us many varied forms." I think the resolve to be silent about God or being indifferent to this question in the sphere of philosophy is a form of temptation that is to be faced rather than yielded. 6 reader that its subject matter does not exist. "Religion," in the singular, as just one thing, is nowhere to be found; it is too maddeningly polyvalent and too uncontainably diverse. Taylor in his attempt to advocate of a philosophy of religion at the face of the challenges of secularization analyzes the constitutional structures of the world and observes that "… say five hundred years ago in our Western civilization, non-belief in God was close to unthinkable for the vast majority;

whereas today this is not at all the case. One might be tempted to say that in a certain milieux, the reverse has become the case that belief is unthinkable." 9 Westphal, who engages to re-think the divine-transcendence by mediating between Heidegger and Hegel, evaluates the writings of some of the prominent postmodern thinkers and observes that "most are overtly atheistic, and even when this is not the case, 'God is conspicuously absent' from the world as they present it to us. The atheistic or at least nontheistic character of their thought is not modified by the religious motifs that emerge in the later [phase of their] thought." 10 These observations of the thinkers of this current thinkers and Heidegger's interpretation of Hölderlin's characterization of the 'era' as 'a destitute time' wherein the 'radiance of the divine' is 'being extinguished' find their ground in Heidegger's critical incrimination of the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics. The basic tenets of this critique are at play in the ventures of the contemporary thinkers to overcome the ways of onto-theological thinking so as to safeguard the questions that are profoundly religious.

According to Westphal, "the overcoming of onto-theology is necessary for the recovery divine transcendence and of the corresponding human self-transcendence." 11 In short, the ethos of the current philosophical engagements involve an assumption that any genuine philosophical interest that ventures to think philosophically of the Otherness of the other, of Being, and of beings must take into account and have a clear understanding of Heidegger's critique of the onto-theo-logical constitution of the Western metaphysical thinking. For, as Joeri Schrijvers insists and argues that

Heidegger's orientation is to the 'existential' than the essential and hence, onto-theology is "to be considered as an existential problem …, as a reality that finds its way into the life and faith of well be seen as re-intoning the invocation or the wagering-voice of Pascal. Another possibility that I find to be truer to Heidegger, is to consider his critique as reiterating Nietzsche's proclamation in The Gay Science regarding the 'death of God'. As Nietzsche's madman screams of his 'seeking' of God, but announces God's death by stating: "We have killed (getödtet) himyou and I", we find in Heidegger a similar manner of explication of the event of Entgötterung 14 that cannot be identified with any form of mere elimination or any crude form of atheism but a process or the ways of updating that contributes to the fleeing of God/gods, viz., the ways of Christianizing the world picture (das Weltbild sich verchristlicht); and Christianity reinterpreting its essence as a Christian worldview-der christilichen Weltanschauung.