Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics

6. Immanent Transcendence as Way to ‘‘God’’: Between Heidegger and Marion

106 six Immanent Transcendence as Way to ‘‘God’’ Between Heidegger and Marion Ignace Verhack After Nietzsche and Heidegger, philosophy seems to have written off the metaphysical theme of an ascending desire (eros) for God or the divine. There are no more worlds ‘‘beyond’’ or ‘‘above’’ this one for that desire to aim at. Through the collapse of the classical responses, the human capacity for transcendence has become a riddle. And with this, so too has our human being-inmotion also become a riddle. In Being and Time, Heidegger takes the view that Dasein is ‘‘invested’’ with transcendence through its inner relation to death. The superiority of freedom is achieved at the moment when Dasein gains admission, through death, over this Dasein. And it is from here that the movement of Dasein must be understood. What Heidegger takes over from Nietzsche is the will to self-overcoming that in the Nietzschean man becomes both an undergoing and a transition. Heidegger, however, lets the perspective of newness found in Nietzsche fall away. What motivates us to move toward selfful fillment in the free space of the ‘‘nothingness’’ of our transcendence? The ‘‘nothingness’’ of transcendence cannot be absolute emptiness. Later, Heidegger came to think of it as the ‘‘veil of being.’’ It is a not-something that is, yes, trusted by our understanding so long as we understand the meaning of our Immanent Transcendence as Way to ‘‘God’’ 107 own freedom. What must we have already understood in order to understand our own freedom and movement? It strikes me that the classical theistic worldview such as it has been elaborated above all by the modern ‘‘natural religion of reason’’ has, at this moment, become one of the greatest obstacles to coming to a sense of the deeper, motivating source of human movement. This worldview tries (using reason) to present us with a ‘‘final,’’ ‘‘supernatural,’’ but also and above all moral explanation of the ‘‘meaning of life’’—before the question could ever be posed in hermeneutic terms. Modern theism is really, in turn, the historical offspring of western ‘‘onto-theology.’’ It is ‘‘onto-theology’’ that has become religion. The contemporary implausibility of modern theism is in this sense an exponent of the crisis of ‘‘onto-theology’’ as such. Does this mean that ‘‘after the death of God,’’ ultimately, one can think and talk about God only in a ‘‘dogmatic’’ and/or fideistic manner? The following investigation wishes to trace a few lines in this comprehensive field of problems. I will begin with a few marginal remarks on the contemporary critique of metaphysics as ‘‘ontotheology .’’ I. The Critique of Onto-theology Statement of the Problem Is it still possible, in the wake of the Heideggerian deconstruction of metaphysics as onto-theology, to make ‘‘God’’ a theme for philosophical thought? After Heidegger, a critique of ‘‘[the] western metaphysics’’ as onto-theology is not seldom conceived and understood as a fundamental ban of the godquestion from the ontological thinking of philosophy, as a radical division of property between the theme of being such as Heidegger has taken to be the central theme of philosophical thinking, and the thinking of God that would then be remanded as a theological theme to the particular sphere of faith and religion. Furthermore, this latter proposal would mean as a consequence that thinking about God could no longer be correlated with a legitimate intellectual question of thought, since ‘‘after Heidegger’’ it would be an established insight that philosophical thought about God can be nothing other than one of the ‘‘manners’’ of forgetting being and of misunderstanding the epochal character of the comprehension of being by which this thinking of God has come into existence. Every re-introduction of the metaphysical thought of God into the thinking of being could thus be reduced to a non-recognition of the Differenz between being and beings. Still, all of this leads one to easily forget that Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as onto-theology remains, in the final account, marked by a search for a more divine god. For, so it goes, to the god of the causa sui that is found in metaphysics, ‘‘One can neither pray nor sacrifice . . . Before the causa sui one can neither fall to one’s knees in awe, nor can one play music and dance before Ignace Verhack 108 this god. This godless thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is...