The Critique of Onto-theology and Heidegger

HEGEL AND HEIDEGGER IN AUS-EIN-ANDER ON GOD-TALK IN PHILOSOPHY Gancis Jude Theddeus (written on 26-02-2014) ‘What is philosophy ‘without’ the cognition of God …?’ asks Hegel in his Foreword to Hinrichs’s Religion.1 In “The Onto-Theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics”2 Heidegger calls for a disposition of ‘silence about God … in the realm of thinking’. He upholds and advocates that the philosophical thinking ‘must abandon (preisgeben muss) philosophers’ god and decide for a ‘god-less thinking’ (gott-lose Denken). Both these contrasting stances have their respective historical and cultural grounds. Hegel challenges the epistemic skepticism of his times and ventures to re-examine the stance of philosophical thinking on God-talk by showing that task of philosophy is to offer the cognitive knowledge of God. Heidegger through his critical project of the ‘destruction of metaphysics’ in Being and Time or the step of ‘step back’ (Schritt zurük) in his text on onto-theology in Identity and Difference sets the tradition of Western metaphysical thinking as a whole on the one side and his own philosophical project on the other ‘to retrieve the forgotten or the un-thought’ phenomenologically. The specific ground to engage with these two thinkers rests on my attempt to formulate ‘a first word’ on the possibility to think philosophically the subject-matter (Sache des denkens) of God, which forms the passion of my heart and a necessity that is historical and cultural of the current days. To accomplish this leitmotif, this is divided into two specific parts. The first part constitutes an attempt to set forth some of the important trends and contributive factors of the current scenario of philosophical discussions on the God-question; their specific relatedness to Heidegger’s critical incrimination of the ontotheo-logical constitution of metaphysics, and the main tenets and goal of the critique. The second part explicates Hegel’s arguments on ‘how’ God has the claim of being the center of the system of philosophy and ‘how’ the ‘being of God’ can be speculatively re-construed. Hegel, “Foreword to Hinrichs’s Religion”, in G.W.F. Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit, ed., Peter C. Hodgson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), pp. 155-171. According to Hodgson, this text contains the most succinct and lucid statements of Hegel’s mature position on faith, knowledge, and the need of speculative reconciliation. It is a helpful introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of religion. Besides, this is an important published statement of Hegel’s Berlin years. Eric von der Luft offers a new critical translated edition of Hegel’s Foreword with paragraph-byparagraph commentary and presents the systematic place of this text in Hegel’s works. Luft throws light into the ‘true face value’ of Hegel, his times and his philosophical concerns against the background of his contemporaries and predecessors by specifying Hegel’s systematic stance on issues like feeling vs., thought; faith vs., reason; and religion vs., philosophy. Cf., Hegel, Hinrichs, and Schleiermacher on Feeling and Reason in Religion, ed., and trans., Eric von der Luft (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987), pp. 242-268. 2 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans., Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: Harper &Row, 1969), pp. 55, 72. 1 2 1. 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, 3 4 George J. Seidel, Being, Nothing and God: A Philosophy of Appearance (Assen: Van Gorcum & Comp. N. V, 1970), pp. 93 ff., notes that God-question is ‘not new’ but takes different forms at different era and alleges that in modern era the issue was rather aggravated by the thinkers life Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel by linking one or other metaphysical or epistemological function on the idea of God. Martin Heidegger, “What are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans., Albert Hifstadter (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1975), p. 91. 3 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 Heyde6 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: 121) 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 Ludwig Heyde, The Weight of Finitude: On the Philosophical Question of God, trans., Alexander Harmsen and William Desmond (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. xvii. In this work Heyde takes an optimistic stance to enter into the thought world of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger and attempts to elicit the possible ways from them. 7 Ignace Verhack, Wat Bedoelen Wij Wanneer Wij God Zeggen? (Kalmthout: Uitgeverij Pelckmans, 2011), pp. 80ff, 123. 8 Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans., Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. xix, italics mine. 4 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 9 John D. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 1, emphasis added. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), p. xi, brackets mine. 11 Merold Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p.15. 10 5 communities and individuals as well.”12 The determination of such and other considerations without any doubt necessitate a closer reading and elucidation of the understanding specific to Heidegger. Heidegger’s text: The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics13 inter-links various themes that are so central to his philosophical pursuit. Further, this text explicates Heidegger’s standpoint, the way of his philosophical engagements, especially, in relation to Hegel, who in this text stands as the paradigmatic ‘onto-theologian’ in the whole history of western metaphysical tradition. Heidegger’s standpoint with respect to the question of God that comes up from this text can in short be said as in invitation ‘to be silent’ about God in the realm of philosophical thinking and abandon the god of the philosophers. To understand ‘why’ one has to do this, we have to look into his question: ‘How does the deity enter into philosophy?’ By this question, he takes a ‘step back’ to behold or to have an overview to shows that in the history of metaphysical tradition God entered into the realm of thinking as the absolute ground, as the rational governing providential principle. That is, the metaphysical concept of God re-presents God in the form of first ground, “the Causa Prima that corresponds to the reason-giving path back to the ultima ratio, the final accounting” (ID 60) and Causa sui, which is the metaphysical name of the god of the philosophers. Heidegger’s critique implies that this way (the ‘howness’) of God’s entry as problematic. For, the onto-theo-logical God can enter the scene “only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and by its own nature requires and determines how the deity enters into it” (ID 56). In other words, the metaphysical way of construal makes God to wait for the dictates of the logic of philosophical thinking to enter in and is made to serve the purpose of philosophy. Heidegger contents that this God of metaphysics, the causa sui, is not the one before whom man can pray, sing, and dance. At the same time, Heidegger’s critical clarifications can Joeri Schrijvers, “Ontotheological Turning? Marion, Lacoste and Levinas on the Decentering of Modern Subjectivity,” Modern Theology 22, 2 (April 2006), 221. 13 The significance and place of this text is already hinted at the general introduction. Some other texts that discusses this theme directly are: Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics); Nietzsche (Nietzsche in four volumes and reprinted in 1991 as two volumes); The essays of 1936-1953 in Vortrage und Aufsätze: “Metaphysics as History of Being”; “Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics”; “Recollection in Metaphysics”; and Overcoming Metaphysics” in Stambaugh translated The End of Philosophy; Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik in Ausgang von Leibniz, translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic; Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit, translated as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude; Sein und Wahrheit, translated as Being and Truth; and “Phenomenology and Theology”; “Kant’s Thesis about Being”. To this list is to be added also his texts on Hegel, namely, Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit; “Hegel’s Concept of Experience”; “Hegel and Greeks”, and Hegel (GA 68) . 12 6 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) him— you and I”, we find in Heidegger a similar manner of explication of the event of Entgötterung14 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. 2. The God-question and Hegel-Heidegger Encounter The proposal of ‘Hegel-Heidegger encounter’ is enshrined in Heidegger’s text on the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics. He begins the text by clarifying and setting up his goal as ‘an attempt’ (versuchte) to begin a ‘conversation’ (ein Gespräch) with Hegel (ID 42/107). The proposal of ‘ein ‘Gespräch mit Hegel,’ is an ambitious project, but evokes at the same time apprehensions than enthusiasm especially with respect to the question of God. The question is on the ‘possibility’ of such a conversation, given the fact of divergences of standpoints between them on Being, time, history, truth, way of thinking and philosophy itself. My claim here rest on the way—‘that’ locus/sphere, and the ‘Sache of ‘untersuchung’—whereby Heidegger sets out his proposal of conversation. By initiating the path of conversation with Hegel, Heidegger does not envision a mere ‘textual’ interpretation although a ‘re-reading of them is needed to ensure the dynamics of the process of mediation. His stress is on re-orienting the setzung of ‘dort und hier’ whereby the way of thinking towards thinking the un-spoken or the un-thought, which is inherent within the idea of conversation itself. The mode of ‘dort und hier’ (ID 112) sets forth the manner of placing each other face to face wherein the standpoints are set 14 The literal meaning of the term ‘Entgötterung’—removal of gods—indicates the act of removal from, say for instance, the banishing of gods from Olympus. In William Lovitt’s opinion the translation of ‘Entgötterung’ as ‘loss of gods’ is inadequate and does not convey the real sense Heidegger intends. In his opinion by the employment of the term Entgötterung Heidegger indicates something more like ‘degodization,’ the determinative removal of God rather than natural loss in the process of bringing out the essence of modernity. When seen from the perspective of the general spirit of the text, Lovitt’s rendering reflects Heidegger’s signification. For Lovitt’s observation: Martin Heidegger, The question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans., William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977), translator’s footnote no.5, p. 116. 7 in contrast (aus-ein-ander). This setzung of conversation with Hegel offers a possible frame of explication and a way of ‘positioning along the road of thinking’ from which Hegel’s the speculative endeavour gains the claim of significance. While Heidegger steps back from Hegel in whom he finds the beginning of the completion of metaphysics the ‘otherness’ of Hegel and system is brought to the lime light as a speculative way that ventures to bring out the ‘speculative cognition of Truth’, viz., God, an ob-ject that philosophy co-shares with religion since both have ‘die Wahrheit’ in its highest sense as their object and hold God alone as the Truth (En§ 1). Following Heidegger’s proposal of conversation that has the setting of Auseinandersetzung the question consists of choosing either of the sides, since what is involved is an encountering of two philosophical positions. Hegel explains in his Preface to Philosophy of Right that the task of philosophy is the ‘comprehension of what is’, which is ‘a rational insight’ reached through the ‘reconciliation (Versöhnung)’ of the self-conscious mind to the ‘actual’ (PR, 12). The way of ‘blossoming’ lays out the dynamics of the process of ‘Versöhnung’ that involves mind’s mediation of absolute ‘turning back’ upon its own extreme form of negativity and ‘rising out’ by grasping its ‘inward’ character of infinite positivity. That is, the mind in the process of dialectical mediation “… grasps the principle of the unity of the divine nature and the human, the reconciliation of objective truth and freedom as the truth and freedom appearing within self-consciousness and subjectivity” (PR §358). The important the mission for philosophy is to demonstrate the process of the actualization of this principle through the self-sublating path of Versöhnung wherein the individual-self or the subjective mind sublates its individual autonomy15 and re-integrates into 15 Hegel’s talk of ‘reconciliation’ (Versöhnung), here, has setting of Kant on ‘individual autonomy’. For Kant the self-actualization of individual autonomy become manifests in the deliberative exercise of the will, as a free ‘person’ and as a ‘moral agent’ that marks the essence—the dignity of humanity as rational. ‘Autonomy of the will is the property of will by which it is a law to itself. Cf., Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans., and ed., Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4:439; 4:441. The formal, transcendental aspect on which is based the practical constitutes ‘the independence of the power of determination, the faculty of ‘beginning’ or ‘determining’ inherent within the humans to determine “oneself from oneself, independently of necessitation by sensible impulses’ ( CPR A533-4/ B561-2). Hegel agrees on the inherent capability of rational will (PR §§ 20-24), but criticizes the duality of universal form and the particular content since in accordance with his theory of self-realization of the subject, the speculative grasp of the truth is ‘to see how free subjectivity overcomes its opposition to nature, society, God and fate.’ Cf., Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 16, 76-7. On philosophical reconciliation in political sphere Taylor explains further that it consists of the ‘freedom of the individual who knows himself as universal rationality with a restored Sittlichkeit, the mediatory development in which both, the individual (his Bildung) and the institutions embodying Sittlichkeit, the two can eventually rendezvous in the rational state’ ( Ibid., pp, 100, ff). 8 the ‘principle’ of the State. As he concludes his Philosophy of Right, the Versöhnung is not only a task, but philosophy itself is a Versöhnung of State and Religion. He writes: In the state, self-consciousness finds in an organic development the actuality of the substantive knowing and will; in religion, it finds the feeling and the representation of this its own truth as an ideal essentiality; while in philosophical science, it finds that free comprehension and knowledge of this truth as one and the same in its mutually complementary manifestations, i.e., in the state, in nature, and in the ideal world (PR§ 360; [the world of art, religion and philosophy in En §§ 55377]). Within the setting of aus-einander-setzung Hegel’s concern of bringing philosophy to the status of the System of Science in which God has the ‘uncontested right’ of beginning and the concomitant transformation. To explicate this intimate relatedness God and philosophy that Hegel explains speculatively I take his idea of Gottesdienst. The term ‘Gottesdienst’ is a common German word, which conveys a whole of lot of religious significations. Mostly, it is used to designate various forms of religious services, more specifically, the Christian Eucharistic celebration in the church, because of which it has come to mean church-service, divine service or any form of religious service. In general, Gottesdienst points to the concept and its practical application of the forms of worship. When Hegel’s whole philosophical project of ‘bringing’ philosophy to the status of Science and his scheme of speculative transformation are looked at from the point of his claim: Philosophy is Gottesdienst, it gains a ‘religious en-fleshing’. For ‘dienst’ is the way Idea or Truth realizes itself as the whole (Das Ganze), i.e., Idea’s selfdetermination of itself and the wholeness of the Whole constitutes the completion of Idea’s ‘showing’ of itself, the self-comprehension of the unity of form and content that constitutes itself to be the true form, the System. This term is a compound noun formed by combining ‘Gott’ and ‘dienst’ with the genitive ‘es’, as ‘Gott-es-dienst’. This formulation thus yields the possibility of eliciting the further sense of ‘dienst von Gott’—God’s dienst, which would explain in the sphere of Christian religion the theological doctrine of revelation, the mystery of the Trinity, and the history of salvation, which Kolb too has a similar observation in The Critique of Pure Modernity, p.99, that ‘for Hegel, the needed rationality must be founded in the mediations of universal, particular, and individual through which any self exits. These are to provide a more concrete rationality that overcomes the separations characteristic of Kantian and utilitarian reason. For an exposition of autonomous individual, his indebtedness and mutual obligation to the external world, Kim Treiger-Bar-Am, “In Defence of Autonomy: An Ethic of Care”, NYU Journal of Law & Liberty 3 (2008), 548-98). The author brings out that the Kantian and Hegelian roots of current conception of autonomy and argues that autonomy is a norm of civility. 9 involves the fall of man, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ and also the formation of the Christian community. Thus the term ‘Gott-es-dienst’ conveys a double-directional sense of dienst, from God and from man. Man’s dienst für Gott designates the customary sense of priests/community’s service or worship that takes place in the Church. This double signification of ‘Gott-es-dienst’ comes to the fore in Hegel’s Lecture Manuscript while he introduces the ‘subject matter’ of his lecture. It runs thus: God is the one and only object of philosophy. [Its concern is] to occupy itself with God, to apprehend everything in him, to lead everything back to him, as well as derive everything back to him, as well as derive everything particular from God and to justify everything only insofar as it stems from God, is sustained through its relationship with him, lives by his radiance and has [within itself] the mind of God. Thus philosophy is theology, and [one’s] occupation with philosophy—or rather in philosophy—is of itself the service of God”16 (LPR l: 84). The use of ‘is’ and ‘in’ indicates the twofold senses. The former bespeaks of Hegel’s own understanding of what philosophy in itself is and its self-explication that is identified with God’s self-revelatory nature of God as Gottes-dienst. The later speaks of the subjective dwelling within philosophy as dienst—die dienst für Gott, which in general is envisioned in his proposal of the need of a Philosophy of Religion. At this score, Heidegger’s critical incrimination of onto-theological constitution is a characterization, an instance of acknowledging Hegel as a ‘comrade in thinking conversation’ and his System as the form of interpretation that claims the speculative completion of the tradition of metaphysical thinking. 16 In his lecture material of 1827 Hegel slightly modifies his stance from what is given in the manuscript. In the 1827 version religion as well as philosophy is seen as coinciding in one, namely, in the idea of ‘Gottesdienst” and both of them are Gottesdienst in their own unique way. Such a differentiated presenting obviously enables him to underline his personal goal of cognitive re-interpretation of both religion as well as philosophy.