Seeing Through God: A Geophenomenology

8. SEEING THROUGH GOD

127 SEEING THROUGH GOD only a god Let us return to an occasion reported at the beginning of our second chapter. If we say adieu to the God or god of whom Heidegger says to the interviewer for Der Spiegel in 1966, ‘‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,’’ will that be the last goodbye? Quite apart from whether that god might return and so be in a position to be bidden a second goodbye, the god to whom Heidegger refers may be a second god, one of a plurality of immortals. The most common English translation of Heidegger’s statement is ‘‘Only a God can save us.’’ But the colloquial South German way of saying ‘‘only’’ or ‘‘just’’ in this context is nur mehr, and it would not have been uncharacteristic of Heidegger to use that expression if what he meant was what is said in the usual translation or in the variation that says ‘‘Only a God can still save us.’’ In both of the translations considered so far Heidegger’s word ‘‘Gott’’ becomes ‘‘God’’ with a capital ‘‘G.’’ Although ‘‘god’’ with a lower-case initial might seem to fit better the indefinite article that precedes it, this would not fit all the contexts in which Heidegger touches upon theological questions to do with the gods of the poets or of revelation or both. Those contexts 128 seeing through god range over atheism, polytheism, and monotheism. And there is more than one monotheism. I therefore write the word ‘‘God’’ with an upper- or lowercase initial according to what in my judgment the different contexts in which Heidegger uses it demand. Two further interpretations of the pronouncement in Der Spiegel deserve mention. It is not impossible for nur noch to mean ‘‘hardly,’’ ‘‘only just,’’ ‘‘barely,’’ or ‘‘scarcely.’’ If any of these translates what Heidegger intended, the implication would be that the plight was even more dire than the usual translation implies. But perhaps what he said was ‘‘Only another god can save us.’’ That interpretation would fit in with his appeal in so many other texts to a pantheon of immortals along the lines of the old and new gods of the Greeks, and to a plurality of immortals incorporated into a partnership of quasi-categories the other members of which are mortals, earth, and sky. The idea would be that where other gods have failed we can only wait for another divinity to rescue us. Rescue us? Of what sort of soteriology does Heidegger here speak? From and for what are we saved? In what does the se cura or nos cura of securitas consist? Who is meant by ‘‘us’’? And—and this is the question to which the first part of this chapter will be largely confined, before I conclude with paragraphs relating more directly to Levinas and Derrida—does Heidegger mean that our salvation depends on the reappearance of a god? From the context of the interview in Der Spiegel and from descriptions of the darkness of this age such as one reads in ‘‘The Overcoming of Metaphysics ’’ dating from twenty to thirty years earlier than the interview, the ‘‘us’’ can be taken to refer to those who, whether or not they be inhabitants of the geographical West, are beset by the ‘‘planetarism’’ and mania for planning and planing down of the age of Western technology. According to the interview, Heidegger conceived the danger of planetarist technology differently at the beginning of these three decades. Then he took the main need to be need of the political movement called for by modern man and planetarily determined technology. Communism was a god that failed in that task. National Socialism was then the most hopeful recourse. Still in 1966 he is not convinced that any known form of democracy is up to that task. It is not obvious that the task was understood in the early 1930s as one of devising a political technology. It is already a political philosophy that is thought to be required. But that philosophy was not one, he says, that saw its task to be that of thinking the essence of technology as Gestell. Only later, presumably when he began to read Hölderlin more closely, did he come to see that it was the task, the Aufgabe, of the thinker, supported by the poet, to think the essence of what he refers to as pragmatism and Americanism. Rilke too speaks of the poet’s Aufgabe, but when he also speaks...