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

EIGHT Subjectivism or Humanism

EIGHT Subjectivism or Humanism he “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (1947) plays a crucial role with regard to Heidegger’s position toward the gods and the holy. The Gesamtausgabe edition of the essay includes a marginal comment by Heidegger which explains that the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” was first conceived long before it was written. It is based on a path of thinking whose course Heidegger began in 1936, in the moment of an attempt to say the truth of being in a simple manner.1 In the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Heidegger asks how the thinking of being makes possible the thinking of the divine. It is important to follow this because it may be that in Heidegger ’s philosophy something like an ontotheological structure appears. It is no accident that Heidegger rejects the reproach of atheism with regard to his thinking: “With the existential determination of the essence of the human being, therefore, nothing is decided about the ‘existence of God’ or his ‘non-being’ no more than about the possibility or impossibility of gods.”2 Heidegger rejects the charge of atheism because it is not a reproach in which he recognizes himself. He does not speak out about the existence of a god or godhead, but this is because he thinks T 189 190 Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion about the possibility and framework within which something like a god has to be thought. To stress this, Heidegger refers expressly to an earlier footnote in “On the Essence of Ground.” Philosophy as the analysis of Dasein and facticity does not speak to the human relationship with god. “Through the ontological interpretation of Dasein as being-in-the-world no decision, whether positive or negative, is made concerning a possible being toward God. It is, however, the case that through an illumination of transcendence we first achieve an adequate concept of Dasein, with respect to which it can now be asked how the relationship of Dasein to God is ontologically ordered.”3 This is not a plea for a kind of indifference. He wants to keep the question of Dasein’s relation to god undecided. It is important not to make a decision, because the gods themselves are a domain of decision. Heidegger does not show himself to be an atheist or an agnostic. He wants to avoid every prematurity with regard to the divine. Before one decides about god or the gods, one has to think of being. We do not know what we ask for as long as we do not know what being is, and how the divine is related to being. Does this imply that every thinking about and of being is also a thinking of the divine? In what way does this relationship have to be thought? If it has to be thought as ontotheology, Heidegger will not see the divine in it. Because being is normally understood as an objective thing, this is all the more reason not to see the divine in it. The dominant understanding of being is blamed for the fact that in Western philosophy something like the divine cannot be thought. God is understood as the highest being, the highest thing. The highest and first thing in ontotheology is seen as the foundation and explanation for all that is. In the chapter on the idea of causa sui we saw this kind of thinking in the overwhelmingly technological approach to the world. The hypertrophy of causal thinking rules the whole world. Heidegger sees the highest moment of nihilism in the total dominance of technology. He finds a kinship between Nietzsche’s philosophy, technology, and nihilism. Everything that exists is taken up by a process of progress, in which it is understood as material for production. And this production, understood as progress, is a goal in itself. Against this background the question arises to what extent a relation to god can be thought in Heidegger’s thinking. Where metaphysics as philosophical theology traditionally thinks the philosophical relation to god, nowadays it has become a nihilism , in which one cannot, according to Heidegger, be related to a god. In the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” he expressly speaks out about this. A god cannot be thought in its own terms, because thinking is not able to dispose of the ontotheological framework; therefore it does not succeed in thinking the divine. This situation recalls Nietzsche’s preaching that god is dead. In particular, the cry...