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

SEVEN The Provisionality of a Passing Last God

SEVEN The Provisionality of a Passing Last God have already mentioned the notion of the last god at the end of the previous chapter. In this chapter, I will investigate more explicitly what Heidegger means by this. This phrase is particularly important in Heidegger’s so-called ‘second magnum opus’, namely: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), translated as Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).1 This work, published in 1989 in commemoration of Heidegger ’s hundredth birthday, was written between 1936 and 1938. It is a private text in which Heidegger introduces, among others, the notion of ‘the last god.’ This book does not present a systematic and clearly developed theme, but is, rather, a compilation of fragments and contains a great deal of repetition. Even by Heidegger’s standards it is a difficult book.2 This seems to have been intentional on Heidegger’s part, for he writes: “Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”3 Intelligibility seems for Heidegger to be connected to an ontic approach to being. Using entities where being is supposed to I 157 158 Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion be thought is like confirming philosophy with facts. Those who idolize facts never notice that their idols shine is borrowed. We find in the Beiträge that the notion of the last god is tied to understanding being as the event of enowning (Ereignis). The word Ereignis is, according to Heidegger, a polysemy with eight different meanings: “Enowning always means enowning as en-ownment, de-cision, countering, setting-free, withdrawal, simpleness, uniqueness, aloneness.”4 At this point it should be fairly obvious that this polysemy does not render the notion of the last god clearer. Because the notion of a last god appears in a private text, one could ask whether it was ready for publication. In that case the danger of the text not being understood is obvious . The thinker who is in danger of not being understood and, even worse, of being misunderstood, is lonely, as he writes to Jaspers on June 22, 1949.5 Heidegger describes the structure (Gefüge) of the Beiträge as a fugue consisting of six sections (Fügungen).6 These six sections are framed by a further two sections, namely, section I, Preview (Vorblick) and section VIII, Being (das Seyn). The theme of the last god is present from the beginning in the Beiträge. The fragments that are gathered in the first section of the book function as a preface, and are a look forward (Vorblick). There is no foreword per se, but rather a look taken at, or into, something by which one gets an impression of what is offered. Heidegger summarizes the content and the plan of the book in the following words: “And here this inceptual thinking can only say little ‘from enowning’ (Vom Ereignis). What is said is inquired after and thought in the ‘playing-forth’ (Zuspiel) unto each other of the first and the other beginning, accordingly to the ‘echo’ (Anklang) of be-ing in the distress of being’s abandonment, for the ‘leap’ (Sprung) into be-ing, in order to ‘ground’ (Gründung) its truth, as a preparation for the ‘ones to come’ (Zukünftigen) and for ‘the last god’ (der Letzte Gott).7 Although the notion of the last god is present in all six sections, Heidegger gives it particular attention in the last. As its name indicates, the “Vorblick” is a preview of the issues Heidegger wants to address in the Beiträge. The second section, “der Anklang,” is concerned with the first beginning, which is Heidegger’s term for Western philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche. The first beginning of Western philosophy has been dominated by what Heidegger calls the “Leitfrage,” the ‘leading’or ‘guiding question,’namely, what are entities? Heidegger holds that Western metaphysics arrives at a conception of being by searching for a common substance underlying all individual entities. Western metaphysics is the metaphysics of presence, that is, an understanding of being as a suprahistorical and enduring presence, undergirding all that is. For Heidegger, this concern with the underlying, enduring substance of entities means that Western philosophy has been concerned, not — as it has erroneously supposed — with being, but with an abstract form of entities. The consequence of this identification of being with entities is that Western thought has now forgotten being. Nevertheless, there remains a dim resonance, an “Anklang” or...