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176 Ontotheological Turnings? this sum, and who or what is going to determine it? In any case, that such a sum of responses is possible shows that the overcoming of the metaphysical adequation may not have succeeded. Indeed, simply the fact stating that such a sum could be envisaged seems to imply the recurrence of a God’s-eye point of view, that is, the thought that someone or something can oversee the totality of my responses. One could agree that this sum of my responses is obtained at the occasion of my death. However, since it is considered to be an endless hermeneutics, the responses of those that respond to my death would have to be included in the sum of my responses. This sum of responses is, therefore, in this world, always to be deferred and postponed. Therefore, one can surmise whether an instance ‘not of this world,’ distant from the world, could oversee the sum of my responses. A God’s-eye point of view indeed! The Consequences of Overcoming Metaphysics     We have seen that Heidegger, although keen to keep our openness to being open, has recourse to the concept of ‘adequation’ to define this ‘proper’ openness: there are moments when that which is disclosed is the same as that which is disclosing itself. Levinas responds that this openness toward being is already filled in by the other and that it is this other that coincides with him- or her-self, for that which is spoken is the same as the one speaking. And, if it is not the same, the being that speaks can at least correct itself, thus, pointing to a ‘possible’ adequation. Marion, in turn, responds to Levinas that this filling-in is too much of a filling in and that, therefore, there is no reason to prefer the other, instead of something without name. It is well known that Heidegger had a somewhat peculiar relation to Christianity and that he, more often than not, claimed philosophy to be thoroughly atheistic. In The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, for instance, Heidegger deals with the accusation in a way that is at least ambiguous: on the hand he concedes the atheistic character of his thinking insofar it concerns the ontic involvement of his fundamental ontology, but on the other hand, he asks, “[M]ight not [. . .] the presumably ontic faith in God be at bottom godlessness? And might not the genuine metaphysician be more religious than the usual faithful, than the members of a ‘church’ or even the ‘theologians’ of every confession?”55 This conclusion hopes therefore to show that, ‘after’ metaphysics, the link between faith and 177 “And There Shall Be No More Boredom” atheism in all three thinkers is tightened to such an extent that one might even ask whether atheism does not genuinely belong to faith of any kind. In the later Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger develops a similar mode of procedure towards the question of faith: “Anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth has the answer to the question ‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’ before it is even asked.”56 However, even here Heidegger kept open the possibility of an authentic questioning, even in matters of faith. For faith, of course, has no answers, only faith. For faith to be a mode of questioning, it must, according to Heidegger, rid itself not only of the answer that God as Creator answers for the existence of beings, not only of the agreement to adhere to a doctrine somehow handed down, but, most important, “continually expose itself to the possibility of unfaith.”57 Surprisingly, we find Levinas saying something similar. For instance, in his Entre nous, he writes: “The ambiguity of transcendence—and thus the interplay of the soul going from atheism to faith and from faith to atheism—[is] the original mode of God’s presence.”58 One might even surmise in Marion’s phenomenology a similar critical stance toward dogmatics. It is indeed difficult to see how the emphasis on God’s incomprehensibility can be reconciled with the church as the guarantee of truth. The overcoming of metaphysics thus not only means that we cannot consider faith to be an object that is freely at our disposal, or as Marion would put it, an “idiotic prolepsis of a blunt certitude” (GWB, 71). It is worth noting that this supposed overcoming of metaphysics also entails not only the end of rational theology, as explained above, but also...

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