After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy

The Maker Mind and Its Shade

The Maker Mind and Its Shade J E A N G R E I S C H I. Richard Kearney and I have a common interest in Heidegger’s existential and ontological understanding of the ‘‘possible,’’ which moves far beyond the classical and modern logic of modalities and Nicolai Hartmann’s modal ontology. Heidegger’s statement that ‘‘the possible is more real than the real’’ (Being and Time, §31) could be augmented by Paul Celan’s beautiful verse, ‘‘Alles ist weniger als es ist, alles ist mehr’’ (Everything is less than it is, everything is more). If I understand Kearney correctly, this statement must not be restricted to Dasein’s being-in-the-world and its finite self-understanding, but is also true of God’s divinity. In Hegel’s understanding of philosophy, the owls of Minerva start their flight at dusk, when a historical world has come to its end and demands to be understood. In Kearney’s work, we meet with a new breed of owls, which start their flight at dawn, looking ahead toward an as yet undiscovered future. His The God Who May Be is the last volume of a trilogy, which includes On Stories (2001) and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (2002). I will focus on the last volume, which presents an exciting attempt at a new itinerarium mentis in Deum, which Kearney claims to be both ‘‘phenomenological’’ and ‘‘hermeneutical.’’1 222 Having just finished a trilogy in which I deal with the main expressions of hermeneutical phenomenology in contemporary thinking (Heidegger: The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, The Wounded Cogito, and Ricoeur: The Wanderings of Meaning), I have good reasons to be interested in Kearney’s work in the field of contemporary hermeneutical phenomenology. These reasons have become even stronger since I am now engaged in working out a hermeneutical philosophy of religion, The Burning Bush and the Enlightments of Reason. My general aim is to show under which conditions the modern concept of critical reason, inherited from the Enlightment, helps us to understand what is at stake in the biblical episode of the burning bush, which Kearney discusses in the second chapter of his book. Kearney’s The God Who May Be begins with its main thesis: ‘‘God neither is nor is not but may be’’ (GMB, 1). Someone familiar with the classical features of philosophical theology will be taken aback by this statement, which abandons from the start the traditional paths of the questions regarding God’s existence (an sit?), his attributes (quid sit?), the possibility of knowing and naming Him, and so on, without forgetting the frightful question of theodicy: Is God responsible for all the evil existing in the world? However important all these questions are, they leave out other possibilities, for instance, Nietzsche’s question: ‘‘Wohin ist Gott?’’ (Where is God? or, rather, Where has he gone?). Kearney’s ‘‘God who may be,’’ as well as Marion’s ‘‘God without Being’’ and Levinas’s ‘‘God who is not contaminated by Being,’’ must submit themselves to the test of Nietzsche’s question. This is surely an unavoidable question in our present time, where nihilism, ‘‘the most disquieting of hosts,’’ is knocking at our doors. To put it bluntly, does the ‘‘God Who May Be’’ put an end to Nietzsche ’s ‘‘Requiem aeternam Deo,’’ which the madman, who proclaims the ‘‘Death of God’’ in the famous passage of the Fröhliche Wissenschaft, starts singing? Strangely enough, Nietzsche or, to quote the title of a recent book, Nietzsche’s struggling with ‘‘the shade of God’’2 is never mentioned in Kearney’s book. At the same time, Kearney’s ‘‘God of the possible’’ must confront the question ‘‘Who is God?’’—the question of divine selfhood. This question is already at stake in the theophany of the burning bush, as Kearney shows in the second chapter of The God Who May Be through his reading of the ehye asher ehye as ‘‘I Am Who May Be.’’ What, finally , of the ‘‘who’’? (GMB, 36). This question is crucial in a time where the question ‘‘Who am I?’’ is no longer purely rhetorical. The Maker Mind and Its Shade 223 II. Before discussing further topics of the five chapters of the book, I will raise some questions regarding the introduction and the conclusion . In the introduction, Kearney claims to develop a ‘‘new hermeneutics of religion,’’ which is also my own claim...