Heidegger's Philosophy of Religion: From God to the Gods

FIVE The Ideal of a Causa Sui

FIVE The Ideal of a Causa Sui eidegger’s criticism of the metaphysical concept of god is especially directed toward the concept of god as cause.1 In the wake of Aristotle, being is understood as actualitas. The highest representation of actualitas is an entity, which has this actualitas in the purest way as a determining characteristic. This means that it is actus purus.2 Being in the first and the purest way is proper to god.3 Such a metaphysics does not transcend the level of entities, because it does not understand the ontological difference. On one hand, it speaks about being as a characteristic of entities and is only understood as this characteristic (actualitas as determination of the dominant understanding of an entity). On the other hand, it sets as the ground of entities another entity, which possesses the criterion for being an entity in the most perfect way. In a certain sense, god is an exemplary instance of being as actualitas, of something that actualizes completely. This idea of actualization is also present in the modern ideal of the self-actualization of the human being. Classical metaphysics is ontotheological. In Aristotle it is still both ontological and theological insofar as it understands H 113 114 Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion the whole of being from the perspective of a ground. The unthought unity of metaphysics lies in this idea, because the question into the ground of entities gives rise both to the question into being as such and into the highest entity. In this way, Thomas Aquinas presents the unifying moment of god and the separate entities in being, understood as actuality. The relationship between god and the separate entities lies at the level of the formal similarity of characteristics between two entities.4 Being itself is identical to god’s goodness.5 Aquinas explicates the metaphysical concept of creation in accordance with Aristotle’s concept of the causa efficiens.6 The transcendence presented here is between entities, and does not touch the problem of the ontological difference . He understands it as an emanation of the whole being from a universal cause, which is god, and it is this emanation which we indicate with the word ‘creation.’7 This concept of creation remains within the domain of causality. “The real appears now in the light of the causality of the causa efficiens. Even God is represented in theology — not in faith — as causa prima, as the first cause.”8 Heidegger wants to transcend this with his understanding of being. Aquinas distinguishes several forms of causality, but does not question causality as such. He interprets god within this paradigm as causa universalis. “The causal character of Being as reality shows itself in all purity in that being which fulfills the essence of Being in the highest sense, since it is that being which can never not be.”9 It always refers back to “the question of God’s existence in the sense of the summum ens qua ens realissimum.”10 Because Christian theology works with this metaphysics, it has to reinterpret all entities. The being of entities means in this case being created .11 Therefore, Heidegger’s specific understanding of the divine, about which he later speaks, cannot be explicated with this kind of characterization of being. The ontotheological structure of Western philosophy takes on a specific form in modernity: it no longer refers to god as the highest entity, but to human being. Especially in his interpretation of Nietzsche, Heidegger shows how ontotheology leads to radical subjectivism in modern thinking. Anthropology is the starting point for understanding reality in modernity. The paragon of this is Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). In 1486, at the beginning of modernity, he writes a text that is typical of the modern Western ideal of humanity. In his Oratio de dignitate hominis, God speaks as follows: “We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift pecularly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by us. In conformity with thy free judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou are confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself...