SOPHIA DOI 10.1007/s11841-015-0510-0

Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God? Sonia Sikka 1

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Keywords Heidegger . God . Being . Holy Even posed as a question, the title of this article will likely strike readers familiar with Heidegger’s thought as bizarre. Surely, Heidegger produced no ‘argument for the existence of God’? He is, after all, known for his critique of metaphysics and ontotheology, which would seem to rule out the methodology that traditional arguments for the existence of God have followed. He is also known for his pejorative remarks on the ‘God of the philosophers’, a lifeless abstraction that he distinguishes from the ‘God of faith’. As a result of these aspects of his thought, most scholars using Heidegger as a positive resource for philosophy of religion (and there have been many over the years) have focused on non-metaphysical approaches to the question of God, highlighting Heidegger’s phenomenological and historical reflections on the character of being-inthe-world, the loss of a sense of the holy, the flight of the gods and so forth.1 I contend in this article, however, that Heidegger advanced views that (a) should be counted as arguments; (b) have consequences for both the existence and the conception of God; and (c) do connect with the traditional concerns and methodology of natural theology. I begin by examining critically Heidegger’s own claims about the relation between religion and philosophy. These would seem to rule out any form of natural theology from the start, but Heidegger’s stated position on this point is, I maintain, both normatively and descriptively flawed. Furthermore, as I demonstrate in the second part of the article, Heidegger’s own critique of subjectivism provides reasons for taking experiences of the holy seriously as evidence of a true dimension of being, thereby offering a counterpoint to reductive explanations. Finally, while Heidegger’s account of the holy is oriented towards ‘God’ and ‘gods’ understood as certain kinds of entities, I question his claim that God is necessarily a being, as well as his insistence that being 1

Examples include Gall 1987; Kovacs 1990; Wrathall 2003, 69-86; Vedder 2007.

* Sonia Sikka [email protected]

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Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, 55 Laurier Ave, 8th Floor, Ottawa, ON K1S 2W2, Canada

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itself is not God. Heidegger’s thought has been described as ‘panentheist’ (Macquarrie 1984; Cooper 2006) and compared with theological and metaphysical positions in which God is decidedly not an entity, such as those of Meister Eckhart (Caputo 1978; Sikka 1997) and Sankara (Mehta 1987). In light of these analyses, I revisit the question of the relation between ‘God’ and ‘being’, asking what understanding of being could warrant an equation between the two terms so as to constitute an affirmative theological position and where Heidegger’s reflections on being stand in relation to this position. I conclude that while Heidegger does not offer a proof for the existence of God, understood as an actually existing perfect being, he not only challenges the premises and inferences on which a good deal of modern atheism is grounded but points to the possibility, albeit not certainty, that the human relation to such a perfect being genuinely indicates something about the character of being itself and is not merely the result of an anthropomorphic projection.

Religion and Philosophy In the winter semester of 1920/21, Heidegger delivered a lecture course called ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion’, whose content has since been reconstructed from his own notes and those of his students. In line with Heidegger’s version of phenomenological method, the course takes ‘factical life’ as its ‘point of departure’ (GA 60, 8/PRL, 7). It seeks to describe the structures—the experiences, objects, ways of being—of that life, while reflecting the lived experience of religiosity against philosophical conceptualizations and abstruse theological speculations. ‘No real religion’, Heidegger says in these lectures, ‘allows itself to be captured philosophically’ (GA 60, 323/PRL, 244). While this statement implicitly refers to a multiplicity of religions, the account Heidegger gives in these lectures is exclusively focused on ‘primordial Christian facticity’ (GA60, 116/PRL, 83), based on an interpretation of early Christian documents. As such, it is a phenomenological description of the life of Christian faith, where the primal phenomenon of religion in general is supposed to be ‘faith in the existence of God’ (GA60, 29/PRL, 20). The selection of early Christianity as the exemplary form of religion lies at the basis of the radical distinction Heidegger draws between faith and philosophy in subsequent works. He draws this distinction not, as he sees it, in order to denigrate one or the other but to protect the integrity and worth of each in what he considers to be separate and incommensurable spheres. In ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, first delivered as a lecture in 1927, Heidegger says that ‘faith (Glaube), as a specific possibility of existence, is in its innermost core the mortal enemy of the form of existence that is an essential part of philosophy and that is factically ever-changing’ (GA 9, 66/P, 53). Consequently, ‘there is no such thing as a Christian philosophy; that is an absolute Bsquare circle^’, and, ‘on the other hand, there is likewise no such thing as a . . . phenomenological theology, just as there is no phenomenological mathematics’ (GA 9, 66/P, 53). The ‘form of existence’ proper to philosophy involves constant questioning; philosophizing as a way of being intrinsically involves a readiness to change position. Phenomenology, as a form of philosophy, requires suspending inherited theories and prejudgements in order to pay close attention to the phenomenal facts of experience, including what we experience and the acts and comportments through which we

Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

experience it. By contrast, faith, on Heidegger’s reading of it, remains devotedly constant to the revealed answers in which it has faith. There can be no phenomenological theology on this account because theology deals with the contents of faith, and the form of existence intrinsic to faith, which includes commitment to a particular set of beliefs, is alien to philosophy, whether as phenomenology or metaphysics.2 An Introduction to Metaphysics, first given as lecture course in 1935, is emphatic on this point. Philosophy as metaphysics asks, most fundamentally, ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ (Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?) (GA 40, IM, 1), whereas for faith, this question is foolishness. That is because Heidegger writes: Anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth has the answer to the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ even before it is asked: everything that is, except God himself, has been created by Him. God himself, the increate creator, ‘is.’ One who holds to such faith can in a way participate in the asking of our question, but he cannot really question without ceasing to be a believer and taking all the consequences of such a step.^ (GA 40, 8-9/ IM, 6-7). Heidegger does add: ‘a faith that does not perpetually expose itself to the possibility of unfaith (Unglauben) is no faith but merely a convenience’ (GA 40, 9/IM, 7). Faith tested through doubt, however, is still fundamentally different from the spirit of open questioning that defines philosophy. Thus, Heidegger reiterates: ‘a BChristian philosophy^ is a round square and a misunderstanding. There is, to be sure, a thinking and questioning elaboration of the world of Christian experience, i.e. of faith . . . That is theology’ (GA 40, 9/IM, 7). This attempt to separate faith from philosophy is partly motivated, as I have suggested, by a desire to protect religion, not necessarily from critique but from a kind of philosophizing that fails to be true to its experience and is therefore phenomenologically inapt. One might sympathize here with Heidegger’s worries about the danger of misrepresenting the phenomenal content of religious life through the wrong kind of philosophizing. Yet there are also serious difficulties with the sharp separation he posits between faith and philosophy, along with its wholesale dismissal of philosophical or natural theology. One of these stems from the exclusive focus on Christianity, which limits the generalizability of Heidegger’s observations. It is striking that Heidegger’s lectures on the phenomenology of religion barely mention any religion other than Christianity, in spite of the fact that considerable information about other religious I do not read Heidegger’s phenomenology of faith as claiming that ‘faith is nothing other than an existential modality’ (Russell 2011, 649) so that questions of the content of belief are irrelevant. While Heidegger objects to the understanding of faith as merely cognitive assent to a set of propositions, stressing that ‘the genesis of dogma can only be understood from out of the enactment of Christian life experience’ (GA60, 112/PRL, 79), this only means that ‘questions of content may not be understood detachedly’ (GA60, 115/PRL, 82). It does not follow, for instance, that Heidegger eliminates Paul’s belief that Christ will actually return on some tomorrow, as Merold Westphal alleges in criticism of Heidegger (Westphal 2001, 42). It means only that to understand Paul’s faith, one needs to understand the experience of living towards this anticipated end, in a condition of heightened anguish and total responsibility for oneself. Cf. Zoller 2011, 116.

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traditions would have been available to him.3 Robert Bernasconi proposes that, in view of his phenomenological aims which require a close study of factical life, Heidegger likely saw no alternative for himself and his students but to ‘begin where we are’ (Bernasconi 2009, 211). The result, though, is that the very idea of religion that Heidegger is assuming is culturally specific, and the shape of the phenomena addressed in Heidegger’s articulation of the relation between phenomenology, theology and the lived experience of faith is likewise culturally specific. It is an especially poor fit with non-Abrahamic traditions. As John Hick points out in the context of an argument for religious pluralism, the idea of faith is ‘more at home in the Semitic than in [e.g.] the Indian family of traditions’ (Hick 1985, 29). On Heidegger’s understanding of the concept, religious faith necessarily involves acceptance of a revealed creed, even if it also means more than that.4 Conceived in this way, faith is not central to what have come to be distinguished as the major religions of India and is even explicitly rejected by some—for instance, Buddhism.5 In fact, the understanding of religion that Heidegger employs, where it stands in a necessary tension with philosophy as open questioning, is specific to Western history and does not properly capture the nature of Asian traditions. Certainly, the reflective and analytic thought of ancient and medieval India cannot be comprehended through such a divide between ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ nor can much of Confucian, Taoist and East Asian Buddhist thought. It may nonetheless be true that some or all of these traditions valorize forms of experience, practice and insight that cannot be captured in concepts. But a distinction between conceptual and other forms of understanding or wisdom is not equivalent to a distinction between religion and philosophy or between faith and reason. It might be argued that none of this truly counts as an objection to Heidegger’s procedure, for in beginning with factical life, he fully recognizes the historicity of his investigations. In that case, the exclusion of Asian traditions in Heidegger’s account of religion might seem better warranted than a too hasty assimilation of non-Western ideas and ways of life to these historically Western categories, especially given that Heidegger does engage in dialogue with East Asian thought later in his career, without describing it as either philosophy or religion. However, Heidegger also does name Buddhism as a ‘positive religion’ in The Phenomenology of Religious Life (GA 60, /PRL, 17). In any case, however one judges the reasons for Heidegger’s exclusion of non-Western traditions in his analysis of religion, the outcome is that what he has to say only applies properly to Christianity. Even leaving this point aside, the objection has been raised against Heidegger’s position that there is a danger in separating faith and reason so completely in the case of any religion, including Christianity. Heidegger argues, in accord with the principles of phenomenology, that the object of faith is presented only to the attitude of faith. In that case, it cannot be scrutinized, or even properly understood, by those who do not relate to it in the manner of faith. Ben Vedder justifiably complains that ‘one ends up here in a 3

That certainly includes Asian philosophical and religious traditions, given the substantial history of engagement with these by German orientalists. See Marchand 2009. 4 See note 2. 5 The closest concept to ‘faith’ within Indian religious traditions is the idea of sraddha, but even in Vedic contexts, including the orthodox schools that accept the authority of the Vedas, it does not mean quite mean creedal belief. And in the contexts of Jainism, Buddhism and bhakti traditions, it does not connote acceptance of divinely authorized texts at all. See Rao 1971; Sawai 1987; Sharma 1987; Davis 2006.

Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

kind of subjectivist swamp . . . Reason as a kind of general authority of control seems to disappear’ (Vedder 2007, 92). In addition, while Heidegger’s rejection of the kind of theology and philosophy that entirely volatilizes the content of religious experience may be fair, the reduction of theology to an explication of such experience seems untrue to the way in which religious people, or at least many religious people, actually relate to their beliefs. As John Williams observes: ‘It is evident both historically and logically that faith needs theology . . . Religious people have always sought reasons for their beliefs, since the acceptance of a belief without sufficient reason is not faith but credulity . . .’ (Williams 1977, 157). It is a matter of fact that sometimes people do not find such reasons or are struck by contrary evidence. Heidegger speaks of the necessity for faith to expose itself to the possibility of unfaith, but he does not acknowledge the role of reasoning in this exposure. People do sometimes change their religious beliefs as a result of reasoning and evidence, in which arguments for and against the existence of God may play a role. Heidegger’s analysis provides little basis for understanding how people lose their faith, which we know they sometimes do, or what to make of such a shift. A phenomenology that treats faith as if it were a self-contained and self-justifying sphere of experience, wholly separate from the kind of reasoning that is the hallmark of philosophy, is therefore mistaken even by its own criteria of validity: descriptive adequacy to the lived experience of faith. Does this mean that Heidegger’s validation of religious life and critique of common evaluative approaches is fatally flawed and that one must return to classic philosophical theology to provide a justification for belief? Benjamin Crowe reaches this conclusion in Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion: Realism and Cultural Criticism (Crowe 2008). However, his argument follows a peculiar course. Crowe claims that Heidegger is actually a ‘realist’ about religion, but that his realism ‘is semantic rather than metaphysical’ (13). This is based on Crowe’s understanding of Heidegger as a cultural critic who does not advance a philosophical position of his own. ‘Rather than making a contribution to what he called the Bbusiness^ of philosophy’, Crowe argues, ‘[Heidegger’s] only real aspiration was to shake up the dominant cultural paradigms of the twentieth century’ which ‘are all expressions of one fundamental perspective: subjectivism’ (10). ‘Subjectivism’ is Heidegger’s name for the modern view that human beings are the ground and source of all meaning. In the sphere of religion, ‘God’ then becomes—is reduced to being—‘the highest value’, where values are human projections. But, in Crowe’s words, ‘the meaning of religious practices like prayer, worship, social action, and theological reflection all depend upon a basic response to an independent realm of meaning’ so that ‘the sense of religious life embodies the fact that religious meaning is imparted or discovered, rather than created’ (59). It is the virtue of Heidegger’s account to have recognized this, Crowe thinks, and this recognition is what makes Heidegger a ‘semantic’ realist. There is something skewed in this analysis, though, and it emerges in Crowe’s criticism of Heidegger, expressed in the following passage: Religious meaning and value transcends subjectivity because it actually derives from a personal deity that exists independently of the conditions of human understanding. If this explanation is to be convincing, however, there must be some positive apologetic. That is, there must be a case made for the plausibility of

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the religious hypothesis . . . Heidegger’s debunking of the anti-realist fruits of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ can play an important role in the overall case for theism. But, beyond that, Heidegger’s suspicions of rational apologetic impede his ability to mount a rational case for theism. (Crowe 2008, 141-42). Apart from the fact that not all religion involves belief in a ‘personal deity’, this criticism reduces the preceding account of Heidegger on religious ‘meaning’ to triviality. For it amounts to saying that religious believers believe that there is a transcendent source of meaning, and non-believers who give subjectivist accounts of religion do not. Heidegger provides a good description of what religious life is like for those who believe, but ‘rational apologetic’ is required to justify the beliefs themselves. In that case, though, what is the point of engaging with Heidegger on this issue? After all, surely, we already knew that people who believe in God do in fact believe in God. Those who argue instead that God is a projection—e.g. of a given community’s highest values—are not mistaken in their understanding of religious belief. They are simply offering an alternative view, which they know full well contradicts the selfunderstanding of believers. If Heidegger’s ‘critique’ of subjectivism amounts to saying no more than that religious believers do not view God as a subjective projection or as a human value, it has little merit. I think, however, that Crowe underestimates the force of this critique, which involves more than merely unearthing the presuppositions of our age. He also fails to consider some of the implications of Heidegger’s phenomenological commitments, as they apply to phenomenology of religion. I want next to explore these issues by examining the argumentative content of Heidegger’s reflections on the holy, in connection with the question about the relation between faith and philosophy.

The Holy and Reason Heidegger had at one point read with interest Rudolf Otto’s work, Das Heilige, The Holy, first published in 1917. The work was subtitled: On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. That Heidegger found this subtitle problematic is apparent from the following remark in his lecture course, Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion (Winter Semester 1920-21): It is . . . customary today to work with the categorical opposition of rational and irrational. Today’s philosophy of religion is proud of its category of the irrational and, with it, considers the access to religiosity secured. But with these two concepts nothing is said, as long as one does not know the meaning of rational. (GA 60, 79/PRL, 54). And the meaning of ‘rational’, Heidegger points out, is far from clear. At the same time, in some sketches for a lecture course called The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism, which was to have been given in 1918–1919 but was never held, Heidegger engages positively with the idea of the holy, saying: ‘the holy may not be made into a problem as theoretical—also not an irrational theoretical—noema, but rather as correlate of the act-character of Bfaith,^ which itself is to be interpreted only

Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

from out of the fundamentally essential experiential context of historical consciousness’ (GA 60, 333/PRL, 252). The primary religion determining Heidegger’s idea of the holy here is once more Christianity. The ‘holy’ is given to ‘faith’, and the emphasis on ‘historical consciousness’ both recognizes the culturally embedded character of ‘faith’ and makes awareness of historicality central to it in a way that it is not in some other religious traditions. There is nonetheless a continuity with Otto, consisting in the recognition that the holy is a unique category of experience, uncovered through a certain act-character—or, to use the language of Being and Time, a certain ‘way of being towards’—on the part of the one who uncovers. In a sense, then, Heidegger is making a move common among defenders of faith, drawing a contrast between faith and reason and claiming that faith has its own integrity as a means of grasping some dimension of truth. At the same time, he problematizes the association of faith, whose object-correlate is the holy, with irrationality, as this judgement requires an analysis of what we mean by ‘rational’. Heidegger does not provide such an analysis in his early lectures, but a great deal of his later oeuvre is concerned with precisely this theme. His reflections on the various historical incarnations of reason—as logos, ratio, Vernunft—in these later writings suggest that what we call ‘reason’ is not some easily definable freestanding universal capacity. The term ‘reason’ has its own historical lineage and cultural specificity, so that one should be not be too quick to draw facile oppositions between the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’. In that case, before judging that the noesis discovering the holy is ‘irrational’, we need to consider what is being defined as ‘rational’ when this judgement is made, and that question is a historical one. According to Heidegger’s historical analyses of the Western destiny of ‘reason’, the term comes to mean the calculating representation of objects, expressed paradigmatically in the language of mathematics, of a sort that yields certainty and control over the field of knowledge. The way of being that discovers the holy neither seeks nor obtains such certainty and control, and what it experiences cannot be made into an object. In that specific historicized sense, it can be described as ‘irrational’, and from the perspective of modern reason will appear to be unscientific and subjective. But how do these criteria get established, and what justifies their priority in determining truth? In ¶69 of Being and Time, Heidegger provides a phenomenological description of the way in which the objects of science come to be constituted. This is, on Heidegger’s account, a process whereby the world we encounter through our everyday concerns and projects is emptied of significance, flattened out, as it were, to become a collection of mere things, objects present at hand. These, ‘the aggregate of the present-at-hand’, are then divided into various regions, which are in turn investigated by the different sciences, employing concepts appropriate to the kind of being that these entities manifest. In scientific investigation, we do not understand things on the basis of a projection of practical ends, as tools suitable to accomplish this or that goal. Rather, science involves projection of a different kind. In the case of the natural sciences, the condition for the possibility of the emergence of the kinds of objects they study is the mathematical projection of nature. ‘Only Bin the light^ of a Nature which has been projected in this fashion can anything like a Bfact^ be found and set up for an experiment regulated and delimited in terms of this projection’ (BT, 362). Entities are always discovered only through a prior projection of their being, through some set of concepts or some

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understanding that anticipates what is to be encountered. Science projects, ‘frees’ or illumines the being or character of what-is in a particular manner. Natural science (the model is clearly physics) does so by projecting in advance a particular conception of ‘nature’, a mathematical one, involving one among many possible ways of revealing the ‘being of beings’, the nature, in a broader sense, of things, in the broadest sense of whatever is in any way. After Being and Time, Heidegger increasingly focuses on the historical construction of this projection and comes to see modern science as involving not only mathematization, which was known to the Greeks as well, but a specific conception of the field of nature, inaugurated by Newton and Galileo. Galileo, he points out in a 1933/34 lecture course, ‘first laid down what should belong to the essence of nature, in that he approached it as the spatiotemporal totality of the motion of mass-points’ (GA 36/37, 162/BTr, 126). This is a ‘reaching ahead into actuality’ prior to experimentation and mathematics (GA 36/37, 162/BTr, 126). In What is a Thing?, Heidegger traces the shift from the Aristotelian conception of nature to the modern one projected by Galileo and Newton and describes the latter as follows: All bodies are alike. No motion is special. Every place is like every other, each moment like any other. Every force becomes determinable only by the change of motion which it causes – this change in motion being understood as a change of place. All determinations of bodies have one basic blueprint (Grundriss), according to which the natural process is nothing but the space-time determination of the motion of points of mass. (GA41, 92/WT, 91). On Heidegger’s analysis, this projection of nature, which is grounded in a thematization of present-at-hand objects and their motions, is not suited to capture every dimension of being. It cannot, for instance, properly describe the spatiality and temporality of our own being-in-the-world. There is no implication that this way of constituting the being of beings is per se a falsification; only, it should not be overextended to cover regions of being to which it is inappropriate. While Heidegger’s analysis of projection is indebted to Kant, he does not take over Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena.6 Consequently, Heidegger’s account does not assume that the projections on the basis of which entities are understood in one way or another are merely ‘subjective’ nor does he relegate the entities thereby constituted to the realm of phenomena, bearing we know not what relation to things in themselves. Rather, Being and Time consistently uses, in relation to various forms of human understanding (including scientific understanding), language suggesting illumination, uncovering, discovering and revealing. The implicit critique in Being and Time of the projection of the being of beings proper to physics in particular does not seek to undermine the legitimacy and the claims to truth within this province of knowledge but only to provide an analysis that sets those claims within what Heidegger believes are their proper limits. The mathematical projection of nature, in its specifically modern variation, involves a particular way of disclosing what things The analysis of ‘The Concept of Phenomenon’ in BT, ¶7 (pp. 28–31) calls into question the phenomenological basis for this distinction.

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are. There is no warrant for the supposition that the projection of nature that forms the foundation of modern science is privileged in capturing the whole truth about what-is, such that every other interpretation must either be reducible to its terms or be considered, at best, merely ‘subjective’, where that means not really real. Heidegger’s point, then, concerns the metaphysics of modern natural science, not the truth, in an ordinary sense, of well-founded scientific claims, which Heidegger does not dispute. This point, first raised in Being and Time, forms the main theme of later essays like ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ and ‘Science and Reflection’, which argue that modern science is based on a certain decision about the being of beings. That decision determines in advance what will count as real on the basis of specific criteria, embedded in the idea of nature as a ‘calculable coherence of forces’ (TK, 21/QCT, 21). What is real is taken to be what can be mathematically described in terms of this model. In ‘Science and Reflection’, Heidegger writes: An oft-cited statement of Max Planck reads: ‘That is real which can be measured.’ This means that the decision about what may pass in science, in this case in physics, for assured knowledge rests with the measurability supplied in the objectness of nature and, in keeping with that measurability, in the possibilities inherent in the measuring procedure. (VA, 51-52/QCT, 169). While Heidegger does not explicitly pose the question, his analysis leads one to ask whether any non-circular argument can be given for the claim that the real is only what can be measured or that being is exclusively what can be represented as object. Heidegger does not deny we can obtain a certain kind of understanding, what we have come to think of purely as ‘knowledge’, only through such representation and through the methodology of science. But this is virtually a tautological claim. Only through the method and concepts of science, can we, for instance, perform repeatable experiments under controlled conditions of the sort that are proper to science and obtain precise mathematical results that sometimes enable us to re-order and re-organize the objective world through technology. Heidegger denies, however, that forms of disclosure, ways in which we experience the world, that do not enable us to do precisely this, or do not enable us to represent as an object what we have experienced, are necessarily false or merely subjective, where the latter judgement involves the view that the subjective is merely apparent as opposed to true. Again, his analysis raises the question of what argument can be given in favour of this view that does not already presuppose what it needs to demonstrate. Heidegger’s analysis also suggests that there is no good reason, and in fact, it is unreasonable, to suppose that humanity is transposed into the midst of things so as to impose upon the world ‘ideas’ that are foreign to it, as if we were dropped into being as a whole from somewhere else (where could that be?), rather than arising among entities as an entity of special kind: namely, one through which the truth of what-is comes to light. On Heidegger’s account, what is special about Dasein, the entity that I myself am, is that it has a relation to being (BT, 12), an ability to distance itself from itself and from what is within the world so as to apprehend the being of what-is, of itself and

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of the things that surround it. 7 Why should one think otherwise? To put the matter in non-Heideggerian language, what justifies the conclusion that human beings are cut off from reality to begin with, rather than being products of the same nature that courses through everything else, but that becomes selfreflexive at this site? If we are such products, though, we do not have good grounds to dismiss a priori the possibility that the experience of the holy genuinely discloses a dimension of being and so constitutes a form of access to truth. To claim that this form of access is not ‘scientific’, and that its objects are not quantitatively measurable, is to beg the question entirely. For this objection assumes what needs to demonstrated: namely, that quantitative measurability is the one and only valid criterion for discriminating what counts as true being, a premise for which, again, no non-circular argument can be given. There is also a pragmatic dimension to Heidegger’s reflections on the modern condition, which suggest that the sense of the holy is absent in the modern age due to a way of being on our part that does not allow it to appear. This way of being on our part, however, is in turn linked to a set of presuppositions about being and humanity that have come to predominate in the modern West but now inform the modern age as a global one. These are indeed the presuppositions that constitute subjectivism, and Crowe is right to say that ‘the understanding of being as Bholy^ is meant to constitute an alternative to modern subjectivism, for which meaning is a Bproduct^ of human subjectivity’ (Crowe 2008, 117). But Heidegger is not merely ‘exposing’ these presuppositions (Crowe 2008, 29); he is also challenging this constellation of metaphysical and epistemological assumptions about the nature of human understanding in its relation to what-is. Heidegger challenges, for instance, the assumption that we are ‘subjects’ standing over against a reality which we know only as an object through the security and clarity of conceptual representation. He challenges also the assumption that such representation constitutes the only valid means of grasping what is true and that the really real is exclusively what can be calculated with certainty and captured, ideally, in the language of mathematics. Thus, one point Heidegger makes, as Crowe and other scholars have noted, is indeed that the approach to reality whereby we set ourselves up as calculating subjects seeking to capture truth through representational frameworks, or to order the objective world to fit our wants and needs, blocks the experience of the holy. But another point, which rests on an epistemological argument, is that we need to question the supposition that this approach constitutes the only means of right knowing. Or, to put the matter differently, if this is what constitutes ‘knowing’,8 there may nonetheless be other modes of revealing the truth of being, ones that, for instance, apprehend aspects that elude calculating representation. The experience of the holy could be one such mode. At least, this possibility should not be ruled out merely on the basis of a set of epistemological and metaphysical assumptions (those that constitute ‘subjectivism’) which are themselves open to question, where these assumptions are fundamental to the meaning of ‘reason’ at a particular historical juncture. 7

On this point, I argue elsewhere that there is a strong similarity between Heidegger’s view of the basis of human understanding, which in turn enables the distinctively human capacity for language, and Herder’s notion of Besonnenheit, or ‘reflectivity’. See Sikka 2011, 185-89. 8 Being and Time describes ‘knowing’ as ‘a founded mode of being-in’, interpreting it as a specific form of understanding rather than as understanding in general (BT, 59).

Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God

We should notice, too, that in the later works where modern subjectivism becomes an issue, Heidegger no longer describes the holy as the correlate of faith, as he had in his early lectures on the phenomenology of religion. The earlier account, with its exclusive orientation towards Christianity, left no room for ideas of the holy within religious traditions not centred on the concept of faith, let alone for a sense of the holy that might not be situated within any particular religious tradition. In works like ‘What are Poets for?’, by contrast, the question is not that of Christian faith and its object but of the holy as the track towards the godhead, where staying on this track is one of the tasks of the poet ‘in a destitute time’ (Hw, 266–68/PLT, 92–94). In this time: Not only have the gods and god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default. (Hw, 265/PLT, 91). One is reminded here of Max Weber’s claims about the disenchantment of the world, and some might hear in such remarks a nostalgia for childhood fantasies we have outgrown with the progress of knowledge. Heidegger’s point, however, is not that due to science we have ceased to believe in God and need to return to such belief. It is rather that, due to the predominance of the modern world-view I have been describing, which involves at the same time a certain conception of ourselves, we have lost the sense of the holy. Heidegger sees that sense as forming the basis, the phenomenological ground, for ideas of God and gods, whether we interpret these as literally true, or as symbols and metaphors, or as imaginative stories. Thus, what remains away now is the disclosure of that dimension of being which in the ‘Letter on Humanism’ Heidegger had described as determining the signification of ‘God’: Only from the truth of being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word ‘God’ is to signify. (GA 9, 351/BW, 253). The question of God can be posed only within the dimension of the holy, and that dimension remains closed in the modern epoch with its distorted relation to being (GA 9, 351/BW, 253). The need of this destitute time, then, in which the gods have fled and only traces of the holy remain, is to prepare for a reversal of the subjectivist paradigm within which the holy cannot appear. The poet’s role here is ‘to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods’, to utter the holy in the time of the world’s night (Hw, 266/ PLT, 92). Poetry may register what is distressing and awry in the present age, pointing to what has been lost but might somehow be retrieved. This task requires a creative struggle with language, the provenance of poetry, because only what accords with the predominant worldview of the age is easy to say and easy to understand, finding a ready language of utterance. It is easy to say, for instance, that through modern science and technology, we are gaining greater and greater mastery over nature, thereby securing the knowledge and resources required to satisfy our preferences, and that surely the greater our capacity to do this, the happier we will be. It is also easy to say

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that ‘mystical’ experiences, like the experience of the holy, are merely subjective, and do not tell us anything about the objective world. The philosopher’s neighbouring but distinct task is to think critically about the basic presuppositions that make such statements easy, a matter of common sense, and alternatives difficult to imagine. Heidegger engages in this task through analyses of metaphysical concepts within philosophical texts, interpreting these as sites where a cultural epoch’s fundamental view of being—its assumptions about reality, knowledge and truth—get articulated. As Iain Thompson points out: Heidegger’s deconstruction presupposes that metaphysics is not simply the esoteric concern of philosophers isolated in their ivory towers, but that, on the contrary, ‘Metaphysics grounds an age’ . . . Heidegger’s claim is that by giving shape to our historical understanding of ‘what is’, metaphysics determines the most basic presuppositions of what anything is, including ourselves. (Thomson 2000, 298) Heidegger also reflects on poetic utterances that speak in their own way about the character of the present in relation to the past, gesturing towards possibilities for change. The hope is that these efforts can once again clear space for the holy, which in turn would allow a questioning appraisal of what we might mean by ‘God’. I have argued so far that Heidegger provides an argument against epistemological and ontological positions which would rule out the possible veridicality of experiences like the ones Otto describes in The Idea of the Holy, on the grounds that such experiences are merely subjective and tell us nothing about reality. At the same time, though, there also seem to be direct parallels between the language Heidegger applies to being and language applied to God by certain thinkers whose works he knew, such as Aquinas and Meister Eckhart. This observation forms the starting point for analyses like those of Caputo and Macquarrie. While Caputo concludes that there is only a structural analogy between theological terms and Heidegger’s phenomenological ones, rather than any relation of identity between the terms themselves (Caputo 1978, 143– 44), Macquarrie suggests a deeper relation (Macquarrie 1984, 163–67). In the last part of my analysis, I revisit this vexed question of the relation between what Heidegger calls ‘being’ and the possible meanings of ‘God’, proposing that there is a more than merely analogical relation between these terms. Consequently, there is a sense in which Heidegger produces not only a negative argument against subjectivism and its exclusion of the holy as a sign of ‘God’ but also a positive argument for the existence of God.

Being and God Heidegger’s explicit statements about the relation between being (in his usage of the term) and God are clear enough. He emphatically rules out any attempt to equate the two, writing, in the ‘Letter on Humanism’: ‘Yet Being—what is Being? It is It itself. The thinking that is to come must learn to experience that and to say it. BBeing^—that is not God and not a cosmic ground’ (GA 9, 331/BW, 234). We could start by considering in what respects, for Heidegger, being is decidedly not God. For one thing,

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God is typically conceived as an entity, the highest entity, a personal being responsible for the creation of whatever there is in the world. Alternatively, in some other theologies, God is, if not personal and not exactly an entity, at least a kind of ‘cosmic ground’, as Heidegger puts it, an ever-present constant source from which particular beings emerge and into which they eventually submerge themselves. What Heidegger refers to as ‘being’, on the other hand, is not any sort of entity, not a thing or person, nor is it an underlying ever-present ground, an unchanging substratum of reality. It is not, for instance, analogous to a formless clay out of which clay vessels are made, as proposed in the Chandogya Upanishad.9 We are tempted to imagine something like this, Heidegger suggests. We are tempted to think, everything ‘has’ being, so being is like the stuff out of which all these things are made, mental and material things alike. But this is a bad picture. It takes its orientation from an examination of a particular facet of objects as they present themselves to us in our experience. It then applies categories and a way of schematizing abstracted from our observation of objects to being as such, imagining the latter as a sort of universal substance. That is not what Heidegger means by ‘being’. So what does he mean? ‘Being’ is that which is named—and therefore interpreted—within the history of Western metaphysics as essence, existence, reality, substance, subjectivity, spirit and will to power. It is what Aristotle interpreted as physis, nature, and described using terms like kinesis, dynamis, energeia, telos (‘end’) and aitia (‘causes’ or ‘explanations’). That cannot be ‘God’, obviously, understood as a person or entity. It is, rather, the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of things. On one common approach within philosophy of religion, the question of God is the question of whether there exists a being who is responsible for this ‘how’ and ‘what’. This would also mean a being who governs the becoming of the whole of being, its movement, change and development, including the way it takes shape with our participation, through our knowing and making and cultivating. That is an essential component of the ‘rational apologetics’ that Crowe has in mind as necessary for establishing the reality of God, which he takes to mean ‘a personal deity that exists independently of the conditions of human understanding’ (Crowe 2008, 141).

‘Just as through one lump of clay everything made of clay is known, so difference of shape is just name, dependent on speech: Bclay^ is the only reality’ (vi.1, Upanishads 2003, 170). To be sure, this is only presented as an analogy, and Sankara writes, ‘just because the gross earth and other things are cited by way of example, it does not follow . . . that the source of all things, that is exemplified, is postulated to be gross’ (Brahma-sutra-bhasya, I.ii.21; Sankara 1965, 142). But Heidegger’s point is that such pictures of true being are problematic. In fact, given the analysis of Zeug, equipment or tools, in Being and Time (BT, ¶14-15) he would not even accept the literal claim on which the analogy is based, i.e. that ‘difference of shape is just a name’ and that in the case of artifacts formed out of a given material, the material is the ‘only reality’. See, for example, BT, 101, where he says of tools: 9

The kind of being which belongs to these entities is readiness-to-hand. But this characteristic is not to be understood as merely a way of taking them, as if we were talking such ‘aspects’ into the ‘entities which we proximally encounter, or as if some world-stuff which is proximally present-at-hand in itself were ‘given subjective colouring’ in this way . . . Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are defined ontologico-categorially.^

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Heidegger deliberately avoids such apologetics, for a number of reasons. One is that such an apologetic lies outside the proper province of philosophy as he conceives of it. ‘Thinking’, he writes, ‘can be theistic as little as atheistic . . . Not, however, because of an indifferent attitude, but out of respect for the boundaries that have been set for thinking as such’ (GA9, 352/BW, 254). The stricture applies especially to phenomenology, which involves rigorous reflection on what appears, how it appears and to whom it appears, seeking to analyse the essential structures of these elements through a gaze that is constantly struggling to free itself from the biases of inherited theories and presuppositions. Heidegger’s historical deconstructions of basic philosophical concepts seem like a methodological switch to genealogy, but they are actually part of this phenomenological project. He comes to see that one cannot in practice bracket ‘theories’ and ‘assumptions’ through a mental act, thereby leaping into an unmediated beholding of the thing itself. Rather, phenomenology has to make visible the experiential roots of the basic concepts that inevitably shape the investigator’s orientation, priorities and ways of understanding the subject matter he or she is approaching, and that requires historical analysis. What philosophy as phenomenology never does, however, is tell stories (BT, 26). Heidegger’s account suggests that Western philosophy has been led astray by repeatedly telling one such story, and a poor one at that: the ontotheological story which interprets real being as constant presence, and then posits a being who is the highest and most real, i.e. God, who somehow imparts being to the remainder of what-is. On this story, God is the highest and most real being and at the same time precisely a cosmic ground. Heidegger explicitly tries to free both God and being from their entanglement in this story. There are many fine and detailed analyses of Heidegger on ontotheology (e.g. Thomson 2000; 2005), and I will not repeat their findings here. Most scholars addressing this theme have accepted Heidegger’s critique of the ontotheological picture, which he takes to be foundational for Western metaphysics and metaphysical theology, as well as his insistence on the radical separateness of the concepts of being and God. Acknowledging that there are problems with ontotheology, however, I want to press a little further into this question of the relation between God and being, without immediately granting Heidegger’s own assessment of what the relation between these terms has been and should be. It is a historical fact that the terms ‘God’ and ‘being’ have at times been identified by certain philosophers and theologians. In the West, these are mainly thinkers who, under the inspiration of Neoplatonism, developed a monistic metaphysics and an accompanying theology in which ‘God’ is the immanent source of the world rather than being an individual entity separate from the world. John Macquarrie’s In Search of Deity: An Essay in Dialectical Theism, the published version of the Gifford Lectures Macquarrie delivered in 1983–84, traces this line of thought in developing its own conception of God as simultaneously immanent and transcendent, proposed as an alternative to the God of classical theism. On Macquarrie’s analysis, the past representatives of this alternative tradition include Plotinus, John Scotus Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa, Hegel, Whitehead—and Heidegger. In relation to Heidegger, Macquarrie argues that what Heidegger calls ‘being’ is indeed a candidate for ‘God’, understood not as ‘a supreme being in the onto-theological or metaphysical sense’ (Macquarrie 1984, 163) but as the ‘event’ which ‘gives’ being, and gives itself to humanity in the process of its own disclosure (Macquarrie 1984, 167). This ‘original event of donation’, Macquarrie claims, is not ‘beyond’ being in every sense of the term ‘being’. It is beyond the things

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that are, but if being is itself understood verbally, as ‘an event rather than a substance’, as being, the event is being itself (Macquarrie 1984, 167). Within this philosophical theology, being is not an underlying substance, nor is God an entity. Rather, both are understood in terms of the process whereby entities come to be and to be disclosed, where disclosure (human understanding) is also an event ‘within’ being. Macquarrie suggests that such a conception brings Heidegger close to Paul Tillich, ‘who probably derived his concept of being from Heidegger in the first place’ (Macquarrie 1984, 163). Such positions in turn have parallels within Asian philosophy, for instance in the writings of the Indian non-dualist philosopher, Sankara. Rudolf Otto drew comparisons between Eckhart and Sankara, in work of which Heidegger was very likely aware (see May 1996, 97), favouring Eckhart for having a ‘dynamic’ conception of God, as opposed to the ‘static’ conception that he sees in Sankara’s thought and in the Indian world generally (Otto 1925, 330). Given the apparent similarities between Heidegger and Eckhart, and between Eckhart and Sankara, it is unsurprising that scholars have also spotted correspondences between Heidegger and the kind of position Sankara develops (Mehta 1987; Correya 2003; Grimes 2007). The guiding intuition here is that there might be affinities between the Advaita Vedanta notion of absolute reality as Brahman, which Sankara does sometimes understand as ‘God’ (Isvar) but which does not have the form of an entity, and what Heidegger understands as ‘being’ or the ‘event’. This is plausible, for while Heidegger’s understanding of being is indeed dynamic, it is actually not so clear that Sankara’s understanding of Brahman is as static as Otto, for one, supposed. It should also be noted in this context that Sankara hardly exemplifies Indian philosophy as a whole, and that even within the ‘school’ of Vedanta, there are competing positions. Some of these strongly affirm the real becoming of the world as an emanation of Brahman, while nonetheless maintaining a relation of qualified identity between these two dimensions of reality.10 There are, I think, elements in Heidegger’s thought that warrant describing it as also endorsing a form of monism. By this, I do not mean that Heidegger thinks there is in truth only one thing. He would surely raise suspicious questions about the criteria for what it means to be on which such a metaphysical thesis could be based. However, to put the matter crudely for a moment, it is tempting to understand what Heidegger calls ‘being’ as a ‘one’ of some sort that differentiates itself into many, and thus as like the ‘one’ of Plotinus or the Brahman of Sankara or the ‘being’ (aka God) of Eckhart, though in Heidegger’s case without denying or attributing any ‘lesser’ being to the many. It is not that being is a ‘stuff’ out of which things are made. This is for Heidegger a bad picture, as already noted. But in many of Heidegger’s reflections—on things, on nature, on ancient Greek philosophers, on the sacred—being is, to use Heidegger’s own terminology, what comes to presence in all that is.11 ‘Being’ names, for Heidegger, the 10

See Nicholson 2010 for a historical account of different positions on this issue among individual Indian thinkers. 11 John Cooper therefore labels Heidegger a ‘dynamic panentheist’, offering a brief survey of similar interpretations stressing Heidegger’s debt to Neoplatonism, such as that of John Macquarrie (Cooper 2006, 215-217). At the same time, with reference to the work of Caputo, Cooper notes that Heidegger speaks of the holy as the sphere of religion ‘but he says little more because he believes the task of philosophy is to ponder Being, not to judge the claims of religion or the reality of God’ (Cooper 2006, 216). Without some clarification of the relation between God and being, however, terms like ‘panentheism’ remain obscure and debatable, presupposing an equation between ‘God’ and what Heidegger calls ‘being’ that Caputo’s interpretation, for one, does not endorse (see Caputo 1978, 1982).

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process of coming to presence, of coming into being and passing away. It is, at the same time, the order governing this coming to be and passing away. This process ‘includes’ all that is, all natural things like blades of grass and trees and deer and brooks. It includes humanity too, as an entity whose distinctiveness consists in being able to apprehend being and thus bring entities to appearance through naming and work, language and artifacts, where this is our ‘destiny’ as the kind of entity we are. This is why Heidegger describes man as ‘the shepherd of being’, ‘whose dignity consists in being called by being itself into the preservation of being’s truth’ (GA9, 342/BW, 245). Modern subjectivism understands our grasp of reality as a function of human projection, whereas Heidegger writes: ‘What throws in projection is not man but being itself, which sends man into the ek-sistence of Da-sein that is his essence’ [Das Werfende im Entwerfen ist nicht der Mensch, sondern das Sein selbst, das den Menschen in die eksistenz des Da-seins als sein Wesen schickt (GA9, 337/BW, 241). One might also be reminded in this context of Spinoza’s equation of being, nature and God, drawn within a monistic metaphysics positing one ‘substance’ that we apprehend under two attributes, mind and matter. Individual entities are, for Spinoza, modes of this substance. We are a special kind of mode in that we are capable of a selfreflexive understanding of being or nature or substance or God. Yet there is, prima facie, an important disanalogy between that picture and Heidegger’s understanding of being. Spinoza stands within Heidegger’s ‘history of being’ insofar as he, as a metaphysician, imagines being/nature/God as something ‘standing underneath’—the literal meaning of the term ‘substance’.12 The representation of being as an underlying constantly present actuality is precisely what Heidegger criticizes as ontotheology. 13 Heidegger’s analysis of Aristotle, which is critical but also appreciative, is helpful in making clear the nature of his claims on this point. In an essay on Aristotle’s concept of physis, usually translated into English as ‘nature’, Heidegger notes that for Aristotle kinesis, movement, is decisive for the essence of physis (GA9, 243/P, 187). He observes also that Aristotle sees physis as ‘arche, i.e. the origin and ordering of movedness and rest’ (GA9, 247/P, 189) for those things that have the principle of their motion (meaning all change of any sort) within themselves. Furthermore, ‘for the Greeks movement as a mode of being has the character of emerging into presencing’ (GA9, 250/P, 191). In other words, all that is by nature is for Aristotle in motion—changing, developing, passing away—and is governed by a principle that belongs to physis. Physis, therefore, ‘is the origin and ordering (arche) of the movedness of something that moves of itself’ (GA9, 226/P, 203). Heidegger goes on in this essay to relate human making or craft to the activity of physis, but I will not follow him in that analysis here. Instead, I want to consider Heidegger’s critique of Aristotle as a member of the ontotheological tradition, in relation to some further philosophical moves made by Aristotle. These are moves that take Aristotle towards the idea of the unmoved mover, in an argument later picked up by Aquinas in his formulation of three of the five ways I assume this would be Heidegger’s position, in response to the question Bernasconi poses: ‘did Spinoza fail to find a place in the history of Being simply because his philosophy was an unimportant variation on Cartesianism or because there was something in his thought that resisted a Heideggerian reading?’ (Bernasconi 1995, 336) 13 Lorenz Puntel completely misses this point when he claims that Heidegger ignored Aquinas’ conception of God as ipsum esse per se subsistens (Puntel 2011, 93). In fact, this conception is a perfect illustration of the target of Heidegger’s critique, to which Puntel is largely tone deaf. 12

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of demonstrating the existence of God, which collectively become known as versions of the cosmological argument. Aristotle argues both in the Physics and in the Metaphysics that the becoming we observe in nature (physis) has to have an ultimate source, a fundamental moving principle that imparts motion (change, growth, development) to the things that move, but is not itself moved (Physics 8 [Aristotle 1970]; Metaphysics 12 [Aristotle 1980]). This is the final explanation for the order and becoming of things, and it is what Aristotle calls the prime mover. The latter is therefore the ultimate arche and aition of being as essentially characterized by kinesis. But—and this is the part Heidegger finds most problematic—with respect to the modalities of being, Aristotle conceives of energeia, commonly translated as ‘actuality’, as both higher than and prior to dynamis, commonly translated as ‘potentiality’ (Metaphysics 9.8 [Aristotle 1980]). Within Aristotle’s metaphysics, natural becoming involves an actualization of potentiality, but the potentiality can only be given in the first place by something already actual. Semen and seeds become men and plants, but actual men and plants are necessarily prior to semen and seeds and impart to them the potentiality they contain to develop in the way that they do (Metaphysics 9.8, 1049b–1050c [Aristotle 1980]). This thought is then applied to the whole of being by Aristotle, so that all motion, all perfecting of things, has to be brought about by that which is already actual and perfect, thoroughly done, as it were, or complete. This leads Aristotle to claim that the prime mover of physis as a whole is perfect ‘actuality’ (Metaphysics 12.6 [Aristotle 1980]), a being whose essence is energeia, an idea picked up by Aquinas in his arguments from motion, change and contingency. Heidegger, on the other hand, says in the introduction to Being and Time that ‘higher than actuality stands possibility’ (BT, 38). He is speaking in this sentence of the possibilities of phenomenology, but the statement articulates a fundamental principle with much broader implications for the work that follows, in which Dasein, the entity that I myself am, is defined as a ‘potentiality-for-being’. While as ‘a modal category of presence-at-hand’, possibility is on an ontologically lower level than actuality and necessity, Heidegger writes, it is ‘the most primordial and ultimate positive way in which Dasein is characterized ontologically’ (BT 183). This claim is connected with the phenomenon of human freedom. Dasein is disclosed to itself as an ability to be this or that; it projects possibilities of its own being and chooses between them. Who it comes to be is up to it in this respect, for the content of its actual life is a function of its choosing some possibilities over others and deciding to realize them, to the extent of its capability and within the confines of the situation into which it is thrown. Possibility is higher than actuality in this context because the projection of possibility grounds actualization, preceding and enabling it. Given Heidegger’s analysis of possibility here and in later works, Richard Kearney connects this theme with the idea of God, proposing that ‘some rapport might exist between the Bpossibilizing power of Being^’ and the idea of God as possibility formulated by theologians like Nicholas of Cusa (Kearney 2004, 137). Kearney also draws on Heidegger and other modern philosophers to develop the idea of ‘the God who may be’, where this is ‘a God who possibilizes our world from out of the future, from the hoped-for eschaton which several religious traditions have promised will one day come’ (Kearney 2001, 1). If, however, this God is not a substance, not an entity that is and gives rise to all things, then how is this possibility or potentiality to be understood in relation to the question of the existence of God? It is all very well to say that God is a hoped for end, but why should anyone believe this end is anything

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more than a projected fiction, and what is its relation to the actuality it is said to enable? Is it just that we posit God as a kind of ideal towards which we strive?14 One way of approaching this question is to consider the implications of Heidegger’s analysis of possibility in relation to Aristotle’s argument for the prime mover, who also, we might note, ‘possibilizes from out of the future’ in the form of a ‘final cause’. Catriona Hanley takes up this question in Being and God in Aristotle and Heidegger: The Role of Method in Thinking the Infinite (2000). She notes that, for Heidegger, Dasein is essentially finite, always lacking in one way or another and aware of this lack. That very awareness demonstrates a relation to the idea of perfection, the idea of the infinite, which would not be lacking in any respect. On the basis of this phenomenological observation, Hanley concludes: ‘I suggest that there are phenomenological grounds to suppose that finitude and human mortality are not final phenomena . . . There is a prior infinite givenness which precedes and follows upon Dasein’s being in the world, and which is a precondition for Dasein’s experience of gratitude . . .’ (Hanley 2000, 191). In formulating her argument, Hanley isolates some points that I also want to highlight, but to develop in a different direction. First, there is the question of the difference between Heidegger and Aristotle in their views on the relation between actuality and potentiality, with its implications for the finite and the infinite. It is essential to note that in his 1939 lecture course on the Aristotle’s concept of physis, from which I cited above, Heidegger takes issue with the translation of energeia as actualitas, and with the interpretation of Aristotle as having stated that ‘actuality is prior to potentiality’ (GA9, 286/P, 218). On Heidegger’s reading, what Aristotle means in the sentence commonly translated in this manner, rather, is that ‘energeia more originally fulfills what pure presencing is insofar as it means a having-itself-in-thework-and-within-the-end that has left behind the entire Bnot yet^ of appropriateness for (Eignung zu). . ., or better, has precisely brought forth along with it into the realization of the finite, fulfilled (voll-‘endenten’) appearance’ (GA9, 287/P, 219). This admittedly rather cryptic rendering is glossed by J.L. Mehta in the following way: Energeia in Aristotle means, according to Heidegger, coming or being brought into unhiddenness and presence and enduring so in an accomplished piece of work, a meaning which was totally lost with the Latin translation of this term into actualitas and its eventual transformation into Reality and Objectivity. (Mehta 1971,152). Vis à vis the idea of God in form of the prime unmoved mover, moreover, the question concerns the being, in the sense of both existence and essence, of the power that enables the movement to completion of individual entities and what is as a whole. One may debate what Aristotle himself meant and whether Heidegger’s interpretation of him on the relation between terms like energeia and dynamis is right. 15 What is clear, 14

In God and Being, George Pattison talks about potentiality and actuality with reference to Heidegger (Pattison 2011, 280–281), but he does not answer this question or even raise it. Yet it seems to me the central question if we are debating the existence of God philosophically, where that means, to my mind, from a standpoint that is not already a confessional one. 15 See Gonzalez 2006.

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however, is that Heidegger refuses to posit, because there are no phenomenological grounds to posit, an actually perfect form of being that is supposed to be responsible for the limited process of perfecting that we observe among the entities we encounter in the world, including ourselves. He also stresses the essential finitude of Dasein and, correlatively, the finitude of what comes to light for it. In its appearing to us, ‘being’ will always be finite, because we are finite. Yes, we have a relation to the infinite or perfect as an idea towards which we strive and before which we are lacking. But it does not follow that there exists a being who embodies this perfection, an infinite being that could be called God and is both the origin and end of what is. Even if we reject the conception of God as a being, we cannot likewise reject the connection of God with goodness and intentionality. Monism is not on its own a theological position, after all. If it posits only a ‘nature’ governed by blind necessity or randomness, in no way tending towards a good end, there is no reason to apply to it the term ‘God’. Thus, if what Heidegger says of ‘being’ provides no grounds for believing in anything other than such a nature, it provides no grounds for believing in the existence of God in any meaningful sense. And yet, at this juncture, I want to go back to the interpretation of Heidegger as a kind of monist, particularly to the claim, repeated in many of his later works, that we belong to the self-disclosure of being, participating in a process of unconcealing which we do not initiate or govern. As we have seen, humanity, for Heidegger is the project of being, not the other way around. We stand ‘within’ physis—within nature, one might say, using one traditional term for being—but in a different manner from entities that do not project possibilities of their being and make decisions between them. Whatever faculties we possess, our perceptions, our capacity to project possibilities, our understanding of our own existence and of the character of the things around us, arise from ‘being’, which we sometimes interpret as ‘nature’ but which contemporary naturalism defines too narrowly. What then should we conclude about the ultimate source of the possibilities we project? Or the power of the possible itself? Or the perception of lack that drives us forward towards perfection and the relation to the infinite that this entails? Or the sense of the holy as an aspect of being, which we encounter sometimes in letting go of ourselves in a certain manner? Heidegger stops short of providing precise answers to these questions, perhaps necessarily so as they exceed what phenomenology can reasonably be expected to accomplish. There are, though, a couple of sentences near the end of the ‘Postscript’ to ‘What is Metaphysics?’ that may provide a clue. They run, in one translation: The nothing, as other than beings, is the veil of being. Every destiny of beings has already in its origins come to its completion in being.^ (P, 238) (Das Nichts als das Andere zum Seienden is der Schleier des Seins. Im Sein hat sich anfänglich jedes Geschick des Seienden schon vollendet.) (GA 9, 312) The second sentence could also be translated: ‘In being the destiny of every entity has been perfected from the beginning’. This seems, on the face of it, a very odd thing for Heidegger to say. The principle of charity rules out an

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interpretation of ‘being’ as a cosmic ground in which the perfection of all entities is already contained in ideal form. That could be ‘God’, but such a reading is discordant with Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as ontotheology, which centrally involves a critique of the interpretation of being as permanent presence. Is there nonetheless some sense, one might ask, in which potentiality also ‘is’? And in which this reaching for perfection on the part of an entity that has a relation to perfection, and that itself belongs to the self-unfolding of being, reveals something about being itself, even if we do not know and cannot know exactly what that is? The question here has to do, most fundamentally, with our relation to being, to what we sometimes call ‘reality’. Heidegger’s analyses suggest that we moderns tend, on the one hand, to overlook the fact that the mathematical and naturalistic interpretations of reality involve projection, where that does not make them merely subjective, and at the same time, we are too quick to label as subjective projection experiences and ideas that do not fit these modern epistemological paradigms. Consider, for example, Ludwig Feuerbach’s analysis of God as a human projection. For Feuerbach, ideas of God across the world’s cultures are expressions of humanity’s highest values and wishes. God is ‘an unutterable sigh, lying in the depths of the heart’, as he put it once (Feuerbach 1854, 121). These ideas of God, Feuerbach claims, actually tell us about ourselves and only ourselves. God is made in the image of man, not the other way around, and ideas of God are projections of the essence of humanity, made complete and perfect (Feuerbach 1854, 14). In relation to accounts like this, Heidegger’s analysis raises the question, but who are we, this humanity that ‘projects’? How do we stand in relation to that governing source which gives rise to us as to all other things? What might it indicate about that source that it gives rise to a being who ‘projects’ perfection? This is the ontological question for which Heidegger’s analysis clears space and which he tentatively explores. He does not provide a definite answer, and perhaps no such answer can be given. However, he does offer reasons to think that, since we are ourselves part of the unfolding of being, enabled by the same power that presents itself in all that is (but also loves to hide), the ‘how’ of our being may indicate something about being itself. If that ‘how’ includes a creative relation to the good that lies beyond what is actual, the attribution of this way of being to the movement of the moving world may not simply constitute an anthropomorphizing fiction. As Heidegger writes in his lectures on Schelling: Does man not exist in such a way that the more primordially he is himself, he is precisely not only and not primarily himself? If man, as the being who is not only itself, becomes the criterion, then what does humanizing (Vermenschlichung) mean? Does it not mean the precise opposite of what the objection takes it for? (GA42, 284/STF, 163-64) Applied to Heidegger’s own analysis in Being and Time, this thought suggests that the ‘existence’ of Dasein, which is not the constant sameness of a ‘substance’ but a reaching for the good through which successive possibilities of its own being are realized, offers an indication of the nature of being itself, in which Dasein participates and which is its source. In that case, the ‘perfection’ of every being could be described as already there in the beginning in a certain sense, as dynamis, which unfolds itself as energeia stretching

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towards entelecheia. If identified with ‘God’, such being would have to include becoming, as is the case, Heidegger notes, for Schelling’s understanding of God.16 To be sure, the ‘source’ being indicated through these philosophical reflections, the source of our projections of the infinite towards which they gesture, is not the God of faith, whom Heidegger tries to separate from philosophizing. But one might well wonder if the so-called God of faith is really suited to the need of the times. Commenting on Heidegger, Owen Prudhomme writes: ‘The name BGod^ has its origins in the precritical religious relation itself, yet we live in an age that is essentially determined by critical reflection and its ability to call all that is into question, including foremost any appearing deity’ (Prudhomme 1997, 38). Furthermore, as I pointed out earlier, the relation between faith and philosophy that Heidegger’s account presupposes, along with the definition of faith as the approach to ‘God’, is specific to only a subset of religions and arguably fully appropriate only to a particular version of Protestant Christianity. It is not appropriate to Indian traditions dealing with divinity and God, which did not take shape through a distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’, or focus on belief as a requisite for approaching God. It certainly should not be allowed to define what may be said about God or how the question is to be approached.17 I would question also Heidegger’s often-quoted remark about the God of metaphysics, the ontotheological God who, in some theological arguments, like those of Aquinas borrowing from Aristotle, is described as a ‘self-caused cause’. That is just the right term for such a God, Heidegger writes, for ‘man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this God . . . Before the causa sui man can neither fall to this knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this God’ (GA11, 77/ID, 72). Granted that Heidegger may be right to criticize the abstractness of some theological arguments and the God they end up positing, I would nonetheless raise two objections. First, are people looking for prayers and sacrifice in contexts where the so-called God of faith, with whom this God of metaphysics is being contrasted, has become doubtful?18 In such contexts, moreover, ‘Schelling . . . wants to accomplish precisely this: to bring to a conceptual formulation how God comes to himself, how God—not as a concept thought, but as the life of life—comes to himself. Thus a becoming God! . . . If God is the being that is most in being, then the most difficult and greatest becoming must be in him and this becoming must have the most extreme scope between his whence (Woher) and his whither (Wohin). But at the same time, it is true that this whence of God, and also the whither, can again only be in God and as God himself: being (Sein)! But the determination of beings in the sense of the presence of something objectively present (Anwesenheit eines Vorhandenen) is no longer adequate at all to conceive this being (Seyn). Thus, Bexistence^ is understood beforehand as Bemergence-from-self^ revealing oneself and in becoming revealed to oneself coming to oneself, and because of this occurrence Bbeing^ with itself and thus in itself, Bbeing^ itself. God as existence, i.e. the existing God, is this in himself historical God.’ (GA42, 190-91/STF, 109; translation modified). 17 Cf. Macquarrie: ‘I think one has to say very firmly that Heidegger must not be allowed to lay down what it is permissible for theologians to say, or to decide unilaterally where the boundary between theology and philosophy is to be drawn’ (Macquarrie 1984, 162). 18 My assessment of this point is limited to the meaning of ‘faith’ assumed by Heidegger, when he writes that for faith the question of ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ has already been answered in the form of a specific doctrine. I am not addressing alternative interpretations of the concept and certainly not possible postmodern revisions. Rico Gutschmidt, for instance, sees Heidegger as making a move similar to Kant’s, demonstrating the limits of reason (in this case, as producing ontotheological explanations) to make room for faith (Gutschmidt 2012, 194, 200). However, he interprets faith not as belief in a supernatural entity, but a certain lived comportment one might adopt in the face of the unknowability of being, the ultimate unknowability of why there is anything at all, especially captured in Heidegger’s later idea of the ‘event’ (Ereignis) (200–203). Gutschmidt’s analysis is intriguing, but one has to wonder what the content of this ‘faith’ is, if not belief in a transcendent power to which the name ‘God’ (or Brahman or something like that) rightly applies. 16

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noting that a particular idea of God is more lively and appealing does nothing to dispel doubt. Second, if this God of metaphysics that Heidegger describes is supposed to be the only alternative to the God of faith, it is a caricature. Even some of the seemingly abstract ideas of God within Western philosophy are not so lifeless as that.19 This is true of classical Indian philosophy as well, which, for better or worse, is actually not as different from ancient and medieval Western philosophy as Heidegger seems to have thought. For instance, surely Aristotle’s prime mover, the origin and governing principle of the motion of all that moves, is awe-inspiring, and could easily inspire music and dance and be a fit recipient of the attitude of piety. The same is true of the brahman of the Upanishads, who is said to pervade and ‘perfume’ ‘everything that moves in this moving world’ (Isa Upanishad, first line; Upanishads 2003, 7). Such conceptions indeed have little do with ‘faith’, but they connect with Heidegger’s reflections on being. Do they all involve a questionable conception of the divine or absolute reality as a purely actual and perfect constantly present substance? That seems implausible, though it is hardly easy to determine what, precisely, is meant by Brahman in the Upanishads and in the commentaries of its reverent followers, or by ‘God’ in the writings of Eckhart. It is equally possible that these works are on the same track as Heidegger or are at least tracking the same ‘something’.

Conclusion I have been arguing that Heidegger’s analysis offers a promising, if not conclusive, argument for believing that ‘God’, understood as an infinite power which both gives rise to the world and moves it towards itself as a good end, ‘exists’, in the sense that being governed by this power is truly the way of being. In addition, Heidegger’s writings contain arguments for the validity of religious, or if you prefer ‘spiritual’, beliefs that arise from experiences of the holy, and reasons not to dismiss these as ‘subjective’ in opposition to the allegedly ‘objective’ findings of science. Or one could say that Heidegger actually validates ‘subjective’ sources of religiosity, if by ‘subjective’ we mean experiences of the world and at the same time of what seems to lie strangely both within and beyond it, that do not get captured within what we currently think of as ‘objective’ systems of knowledge. He does so by suggesting that the socalled ‘subject’, with all of its powers and perceptions, arises from an encompassing source whose nature it reveals, where only a partial and circumscribed aspect of that source is appropriately captured in the concept of ‘nature’ that forms the basis for the modern natural sciences.20 Admittedly, the experience of the holy, and what it might indicate about the character of this source, cannot be comprehended and articulated with anything close Stating the point differently, Macquarrie asks: ‘Have those who have used metaphysical language about God really been talking about some other God from the God of faith, so that one cannot kneel in awe before such a God?’ (Macquarrie 1984, 160) 20 Equally questionable are reductive accounts of religion within the social sciences that assume a ‘naturalistic’ explanation of experiences of the holy as the default position, rejecting the idea of religion as sui generis on this (unexamined) basis. Examples are Wiebe 1984; Fitzgerald 2000; McKinnon 2003. Kenneth Rose rightly criticizes such ‘methodological materialism’ about religion on the grounds that ‘materialism is an underdetermined metaphysical view that cannot be made true by fiat’ (Rose 2013, 15). 19

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to the precision, clarity and certainty that characterizes the bodies of knowledge within these sciences. What is said here can only take the form of symbols, but these are symbols that open up levels of reality, as Paul Tillich claimed in his account of religious language (Tillich 1987). They can genuinely do so, Heidegger’s analysis implies, because we are ourselves symbols, signs of the x (not a being) that presents itself in us, and presents the nature of things through us. It is not clear whether this x should or will be called ‘God’, though in the past it has sometimes been called God, or whether history will decide otherwise. Heidegger himself writes, in ‘The Thinker as Poet’, that ‘we are too late for the gods and too early for being’ (AED, 7/PLT, 4). One might also caution, however, that in an age of uncertainty and experiment, it might be especially important for philosophy to preserve its traditional sobriety of thinking against the temptations of poetry and prophecy. Abbreviations for Heidegger’s texts

AED BT BTr BW GA Hw ID IM P PRL PLT QCT STF TK VA WT

Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Heidegger 1954b) Being and Time (Heidegger 1962) Being and Truth (Heidegger 2010) Basic Writings (Heidegger 1993) Gesamtausgabe (Heidegger 1975-) Holzwege (Heidegger 1980) Identity and Difference (Heidegger 1969) Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger 1987) Pathmarks (Heidegger 1998) The Phenomenology of Religious Life (Heidegger 2004) Poetry, Language, Thought (Heidegger 1971) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Heidegger 1977) Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (Heidegger 1985) Die Technik und die Kehre (Heidegger 1988) Vorträge und Aufsätze. (Heidegger 1954a) What is a Thing? Heidegger (1967)

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Heidegger’s Argument for the Existence of God Prudhomme, J. O. (1997). God and being: Heidegger’s relation to theology. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Puntel, L.B. (2011). Being and God: A systematic approach in confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion (trans: White, A.). Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Rao, K. L. S. (1971). The concept of sraddha (in the Brahmanas, Upanisads and the Gita). Patiala: Roy. Rose, K. (2013). Pluralism: The future of religion. New York: Bloomsbury. Russell, M. (2011). Phenomenology and theology: Situating Heidegger’s philosophy of religion. Sophia, 50, 641–55. Sankara. (1965). Brahma-sutra-bhasya of Sri Sankaracarya (trans: Swami Gambhirananda). Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama (Publication Department). Sawai, Y. (1987). The nature of faith in the Sankaran Vedanta tradition. Numen, 34, 18–44. Sharma, K. (1987). Bhakti and the bhakti movement—a new perspective. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. Sikka, S. (1997). Forms of transcendence: Heidegger and medieval mystical theology. Albany: SUNY Press. Sikka, S. (2011). Herder on humanity and cultural difference: Enlightened relativism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomson, I. (2000). Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger’s Destruktion of metaphysics. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 8(3), 297–327. Thomson, I. (2005). Heidegger on ontotheology: Technology and the politics of education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tillich, P. (1987). The nature of religious language. Chapter 5 of The Essential Tillich, ed. E. Forrester Church. New York: Macmillian. Upanishads. (2003). (trans: Roebuck, V.). New York: Penguin. Vedder, B. (2007). Heidegger’s philosophy of religion: From God to the gods. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Westphal, M. (2001). Overcoming onto-theology: Toward a postmodern Christian faith. New York: Fordham University Press. Wiebe, D. (1984). The failure of nerve in the academic study of religion. Science Religeuses/Religious Studies, 13(4), 401–22. Williams, J. R. (1977). Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of religion. Toronto: Canadian Corp. for Studies in Religion. Wrathall, M. (2003). Religion after metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zoller, D. J. (2012). Realism and belief attribution in Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion. Continental Philosophy Review, 45, 101–120.