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

Conclusion

Conclusion n deriving philosophical insights related to religion from Heidegger’s work, I am myself working in the sphere of a philosophy of religion. However, one tendency of a philosophical understanding of religion is to make religion itself into a part of philosophy. This is particularly apparent where all forms of religion get absorbed into an ontotheological philosophy . In such cases religion is understood from a concept of god, which is, as a philosophical idea, the beginning and the end of philosophical rationality. Hegel’s philosophy is perhaps the clearest example of this tendency. When ontotheology is taken up in this way, however, certain possibilities for understanding religion are foreclosed. Heidegger, too, speaks as a philosopher about god and the gods. Yet what is the status of his speaking? It is not, as I showed, a description of religion. Nor is it a poetry of religion or a metaphorization of religion. Nevertheless, it is a philosopher that proclaims: “Only a god can save us!” It is my view that Heidegger’s thinking on religion occupies a place between the forms of poetic and philosophical speaking . To understand the poetic aspect of Heidegger’s language, one must turn to his interpretations of Hölderlin. And to give his philosophical expression its proper context one must refer I 265 266 Conclusion his “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” wherein religion is located in the neighborhood of the thinking of being. Yet religion maintains its own tension with regard to both sides: if we grasp religion completely from a (ontotheological) philosophical point of view we tend to neutralize it; on the other hand, if we conceive it simply as poetic expression, we tend to be philosophically indifferent to it. These tensions urge us to take up the question of Heidegger’s position. It turns out that Heidegger’s thinking is, in the end, a theological thinking of a specific kind. It is a theology in which he avoids every connection to an ontotheological concept of god. His thinking of being tends toward a poetic theology of naming the gods, which is both a praising and an invocation of them. According to Heidegger the thinking of being is a movement no longer in accordance with the thinking of faith or of divinity (Gottheit). Each of these is heterogeneous in relation to the other. The experience of the thinking of being manifests itself rather as a topological disposition , that is, as an indication of a place characterized by availability. It is a topological disposition for waiting for, though not expecting, the reception of being, as a place for the happening of being. Therefore Heidegger states that he does not know god; he can only describe god’s absence. His atheistic philosophy (in the sense of an ontotheology) maintains an openness toward the possible reception of religious gods. In the first chapter I looked for the roots of Heidegger’s thought. I discussed the way in which Heidegger first attempted to conceptualise an ahistorical Catholicism, and how he later came to the historicity of religion through Friedrich Schleiermacher. Moreover , I discussed Heidegger’s rejection of a theoretical approach to religion while nevertheless endeavouring to preserve the piety of philosophy — including the piety of the philosophy of religion. I called this the pre-historical Heidegger. The term pre-historical refers to the timeless character of scholastic and neoscholastic Catholicism, the intellectual environment out of which Heidegger emerged, and the period prior to his adoption of a historical perspective. Heidegger’s persistent questioning towards the ontological and temporal as the ‘earlier’ and ‘prior’ is to be understood as piety (Frömmigkeit). Heidegger’s language with respect to the phenomenon of religion, however, finds itself mired in a pious atheism: where the object of phenomenology is concerned, he attempts to remain radically atheistic, yet on the other hand, he seeks to be pious and devoted when it comes to this same object. The pious person here is the devoted ascetic who understands his object as it demands to be understood, i.e., from out of its factical character. Only when philosophy has become fundamentally atheistic can it decisively choose life in its very facticity, and thereby make this an object for itself. Because philosophy is concerned with the facticity of life, the philosophy of religion must be understood from that same perspective. For Heidegger the very idea of philosophy of religion (especially if it makes no reference to the...