Dialogues between Faith and Reason: The Death and Return of God in Modern German Thought

7. Being after the Death of God: Heidegger from Theo- to Onto- logos

175  Chapter 7 Being after the Death of God Heidegger from Theo- to Onto-logos The question of God hovers from the very beginning over Heidegger’s intellectual development. —Rudolf Bultmann, “Reflexionen zum Denkweg Martin Heideggers” We are standing at a methodological crossroads that will decide the life and death of philosophy as such, we are standing before an abyss: we either leap into nothingness, that is, into absolute objectification, or we achieve the leap into an other world, or more precisely : into the world as such. —Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie Philosophy cannot effect any direct change in the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human thought and action. Only a God can save us (Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten). The sole possibility remains open to us, in our thinking and creative work, to prepare for the appearance of God or for the absence of God in the final catastrophe. —Heidegger, Spiegel interview, 23 September 1966 So God is dead, the study of God and religion reduced to sociology, psychology, economics. Where do we go from here? Is there any way to “save” theology or the philosophy of religion or religion itself from being anything other than “historical” disciplines/phenomena that consider the past and since superseded beliefs? And what role could philosophy play? One option,we saw,was taken by the anti-Hegelians of the early to mid-nineteenth century:the radical withdrawal of belief into subjectivity and a critique of rationality. This represents a return to a pure Lutheranism , a rejection of both the historico-rational-critical direction started by Erasmus and the intervening institutional formalization of Protestantism. But the other option we must now explore is the possibility of passing through 176 DIALOGUES BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON the very development that has lead to the death of God to discover, within this very insistence on finitude, a moment that transcends it, or, at least, where it becomes aware of its limitation. For Heidegger,this involves in large part a methodological issue, the possibility of a phenomenological analysis that tries to get at the “foundational” lifeworld (Lebenswelt) that other “reductive” and scientistic approaches cannot even ask about. It will involve a different approach to history itself, for to view God and other theological concepts in a “historical” context—what Heidegger will call the “history of Being” (Seinsgeschichte)—will mean something other than relegating them to the past in the way Nietzsche hoped to with his “genealogy” (Entstehungsgeschichte). For Heidegger,the entire metaphysical tradition of the West (including God) has become “frag-würdig,”questionable in a double sense:it now lacks its former significance and has become worthy of a new questioning that has the power to reshape our relation to the world. Heidegger arrives at his rethinking of Being itself (ontology) through a long trajectory that begins with a reevaluation of the very status of theology—and that original questioning of theo-logos accompanies his thought throughout his life. Stated differently: if Marx saw that the way to all general critique had to pass through Religionskritik, for Heidegger, the way to his own unique ontological phenomenology was to pass through the Phänomenologie der Religion. In fact, the young professor in his first years at the University of Marburg was preoccupied with a project, and held numerous lectures, on the phenomenology of religious life. Religion and religious experiences become the first “test cases” of his adoption and adaptation of Husserl’s powerful phenomenological method. As a result, religion gets absorbed and transformed ,aufgehoben, into his philosophy at an early stage,even if in a different way than we saw in Hegel. Moreover, his particular conception of religion will allow for a certain divine survival even after the death of God. This will become especially clear/relevant after Heidegger’s later encounter with Nietzsche. In fact, I will read that encounter and the resulting “turn” (the so-called Kehre) in his philosophy nonetheless as a kind of “phenomenological project”—however, rather than “bracketing out” (epoche) religious terms from the analysis of human existence (Dasein), as he had done in his earlier philosophy, the late Heidegger hopes (via Nietzsche) to “bracket out” the entire epoch of metaphysics that he saw as responsible for a certain conception of God, Technik, and philosophizing that can only lead to nihilism. In this project,he attempts to “out-Nietzsche” Nietzsche:if Nietzsche had seen the need to place a limit...